You may not be much interested in politics, but politics
– to borrow from Trotsky’s famous dictum
on war – is certainly interested in you. With
Indigenous land acknowledgements to sit through, rainbow-coloured
sidewalks to tiptoe over and approved slogans to recite
on cue, political preoccupation has colonized nearly
all thinking. Entertainment, education, sport, business
and even private conscience now arrive freighted with
ideological significance. Everything must justify
itself politically before it can simply exist.
Yet no
civilization has ever depended upon politics alone.
All have always relied on men and women whose lives
far exceeded politics: people rooted in and building
upon culture, memory, religion, learning, local attachment
and what Johan Huizinga called the “play-concept”
at the heart of civilization itself. This is what
I have come to denote as the “apolitical man”.
He or she is not someone who is indifferent to politics,
but someone who understands that politics is only
one component of a flourishing life, society and civilization.
I learned
this many years ago while living on a small Greek
island, where I eventually became known as o xénos
mas – “our foreigner”. I sailed
on caïques with fishermen during their trolling
expeditions and spent long evenings listening to chanties
and rebetiko refrains during periods of sea calm.
I accompanied shepherds into the mountains and discovered
among them not “primitive” men but sophisticated
minds steeped in the mythology and history of their
civilization.
One mountain
man was a chess prodigy whom the government would
occasionally pick up by helicopter to fly him to tournaments
on the mainland. Another followed the debate over
the then-theoretical Higgs particle and explained
to me the concept of mass as a form of inertia, “like
the resistance of a sheep refusing to be pushed.”
Another carried the traditional tsampouna fashioned
from goatskin and reeds and played folk melodies during
breaks in the day’s labour. Still another traced
the Greek phrase “It is what it is” back
to the philosopher Parmenides’ “Whatever
is, is.”
These
men were certainly political in that they cared for
the good order and prosperity of their country. But
they were also much more than that. Their worldview
was culture-centred rather than ideology-centred.
They understood instinctively the distinction between
legality and morality, between administrative systems
and civilization itself.
This older
understanding of life runs deep through Western history.
The Roman poet Virgil in his Eclogues and
Georgics extolled “Arcadia”, a festal
paradise of shepherds, wanderers and pipe players.
He envisioned this not as a literal political program
but a reminder that human beings require spaces beyond
power and administration. Inspired by the Greek poet
Theocritus, Virgil expressed what has proved an unquenchable
eternal yearning for leisure, imagination, fellowship
and moral innocence amid the turbulence of political
life.
The classical
writers were not anti-civilizational or delusional
romantics. They understood that politics could never
be abolished. But they also recognized that civilization
withers and eventually fails when politics is made
total, when the state absorbs every human impulse
into its machinery and leaves no room for the independent
life of culture.
This is
why the aforementioned Huizinga’s Homo Ludens
remains such an important book. Huizinga argued that
the non-political – which he encapsulated in
the deceptively simple word “play” –
is not peripheral to civilization but essential to
it. Art, music, poetry, sport, science, architecture
and even politics itself emerge from what he called
the imaginative and purposive play of individuals
and self-formed groups within society. A flourishing
civilization depends upon activities freely undertaken
for their own sake, enlarging both self-mastery and
the full prism of the developed human personality.
Today,
however, politics progressively sucks the joy out
of everything. Comedy becomes ideological instruction.
Art becomes activism. Even humour feels pinched, supervised
and reactionary. The instincts for spontaneity and
imaginative freedom are steadily replaced by a drab
ethos of administrative conformity.
The late
English political philosopher Sir Roger Scruton understood
this clearly. Perhaps the greatest conservative thinker
of our time, Scruton recognized that the basis of
our civilization lies in the expansion of both mind
and imagination. Politics matters, certainly, but
civilization depends equally upon literature, worship,
music, philosophy, architecture, science, history
and playfulness – the entire spectrum of human
possibility for the good.
The apolitical
man, then, is better understood as the plus-political
man. He has not eliminated politics from his perspective
but supplemented and enlarged it with the floral and
vintage aspects of the greatest civilization the world
has ever known. A civilization survives not merely
through laws, elections and bureaucracies, but through
the preservation of culture, memory, imagination and
play. The apolitical man remains the West’s
last best hope.
