I’m tired of politics. Spectacle chases spectacle, laws fall further behind, and the next election comes like a new threat. The answer just keeps blowing in the wind.
But that sadness is over because I am also tired of myself. It is easy to blame the culprit, but it is difficult to admit that you are part of the culprit. We don’t get involved in politics after being ourselves. Politics is part of who we become.
Each of us is a committee of ourselves: parents, partners, friends, workers, believers and doubters. We are caught between duty and desire, work and leisure, autonomy and dependence. Diversity is easier when it is not our own.
Politics does not begin with political parties or governments. It begins with this everyday tension of maintaining peace between our different positions, and then reappears in families, communities, and nations.
Aristotle’s “political animals” could not be reduced to national politics. It belongs to who we are and not just what we do – our nature, our mere actions.
We are born from others, are supported by others, are formed together with others, and form ourselves in a world that we did not create alone. Politics is what happens when we consider this communal life. It is the hard human task of building a world out of differences, heavy memories, open conflicts, and stubborn hopes.
Hannah Arendt called this natality. Every birth creates a newcomer, but natality becomes political only when the newcomer begins to act. Politics exists because our worlds are similar enough that we share them and different enough that something new can happen. In doing so, we can make room for the future.
Arendt heard this truth in the Gospel’s announcement that “a child is born to us,” and treated it not as a doctrine, but as a fundamental faith in the ability of the world to begin again. For her, we are not born to die, but to start anew. This is the human rebellion against probability, which she called “the infinite impossibilities that occur on a regular basis.”
But there are no innocent beginnings. Genesis places the first city east of Eden, founded by Cain, the first murderer. Politics begins with living together after innocence is lost. Every political order inherits damage.
The Bible begins another form in Abraham. God’s command to leave one’s homeland and one’s father’s house is a call to depart without knowing where it will lead, valuing promises over possessions.
It’s hard to trust that much. An easier alternative is to retreat into walls that shrink the world until you, your tribe, or your numbers are few.
Political thinkers call the workings of democracy “agonism,” which turns enemies into opponents and conflicts into arguments. Agony does not end disagreements. It changes hostilities, prevents battles from becoming wars, and prevents dissent from becoming crimes.
Nietzsche understood how moral struggle can harden into resentment, usurp its purpose from the power of condemnation, and transform revenge into virtue. You cannot defeat your enemy with anger alone. It allows the enemy to determine who we become.
Soccer is better than soccer because players have to play in both attacking and defensive ways. They don’t decide the time of the game, they let the time of the game be decided. You can’t finish the game by having the ball to kill time.
Soccer breeds one-sided experts, and because of their expertise, it breeds resentment. Democracies require citizens who can both score and defend, who can speak and listen. It requires a field of competition rather than a battlefield, competition rather than conquest.
The end of polarization is not necessarily a victory, but may simply end in eviction. Whether the door is closed by a powerful man or by a righteous reformer, the result is the same. Both are turning the key.
The enemy must be defeated, but the enemy must be sustained. Because power doesn’t just seduce. It transforms. He who grasps it in the name of God must first secure it, make the God he evokes unrecognizable, and create a God that always coincides with coincidence.
Saul began as the Lord’s anointed. He stopped consulting witches. When power is left unchecked, it turns the highest ideals into a deal with the devil and continues to overstep the body.
This delusion of absolute control extends to our personal lives as well. We flatter ourselves that independence is the truth and dependence is an illusion. But the self-made man is a myth. No one builds their own roads, purifies their own water, or buries themselves. Worshiping self-sufficiency creates the loneliness it is supposed to cure.
Reflecting pools will become stagnant and the monuments we built for independence will eventually crumble.
The test of a political community is how it treats those who are not yet members: strangers, refugees, children too young to speak. A community that circles itself too tightly hides behind safety and calls it justice.
Membership is a primary political benefit, and inclusion means power, not just permission to participate. At its best, politics gives us a second birth into a common form of life: speech, action, and responsibility.
But you can refuse the second birth. We can run away from our differences, as if returning to a womb where we never shared space. But political life begins only when that illusion is broken.
We don’t just fear strangers. We fear our neighbors. Close enough to be important and different enough to be disturbing. Good neighbors build boundaries together. A border becomes a wall when only one side sets it. Just as tolerance becomes a trap when only one side practices it.
Attorney General Lawrence saw the danger in Walt Whitman’s complete embrace of humanity. It swallows difference instead of encountering it. “The universe in one word: it adds up to ONE. ONE. ONE. That’s Walt.” That’s not fellowship. It’s “Empty Everything. Added Eggs.”
The real difference is more difficult. Other people don’t exist to meet my needs. My need is to meet them. They are not here to complete our unity, but to interrupt it and in some cases extend it.
It is an invitation not to agree, not to like each other, but to stay. Staying in the discussion in a shared and difficult world. If you act without conviction, knowing just one act or word can change the order. We cannot speak into the void. When others answer, the world begins.
notes and reading
Wendell Berry talks about interdependence—“A Native Hill” house with long legs (1969), 196. Berry’s reversal of priorities serves as an ethical backbone for overcoming political exhaustion. Change by asking what is good us what is good for world We need to abandon the myth of self-sufficiency. It requires rigorous and localized attention to our shared environment and to the neighbors we do not choose but have to live with.
Aristotle, politicsI.2, 1253a1–18.
hannah arendt human condition2nd edition. (1998), Part V, “Action”.
The Second Birth: On the Political Beginning of Human Existence—Thilo Chabert (2015). Writing in the philosophical tradition of Eric Voegelin, Chabert builds a political anthropology around the concepts of human beginnings and cosmic order.
The beginning of politics: Power in the Bible’s Book of SamuelMoshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes (2017). The author analyzes sovereignty through the stories of Saul, David, Uriah, Tamar, and Absalom.
Deputy Secretary Lawrence talks about Walt Whitman—Study of American Classical Literature (1923), Chapter XII, “Whitman.” Lawrence criticizes Whitman’s democratic expansionism as ego consuming others in the name of love. For Lawrence, true communion requires radical separation. It is possible only if both sides stubbornly maintain themselves and “strong resistance and unity of our personalities.” (Thoughts on the death of a porcupine).
difficult glory
politics of jesus
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
