Governing Ideas 4 - politics and the political

so we talked a lot about the kind of buckets of politics at this point um let's get into some of the specifics of the what I mean we we've been talking about things that are political or concepts that are political bohammer have talked about the political um so you know there isn't again as I said in the introduction there isn't one way to view politics right so you know you you have to figure out what makes the most sense to you um and then you can develop there's broad theoretical traditions and all the different ways

that it makes sense to you what makes sense to me about politics isn't what makes sense to you about politics but we can talk about each other's visions of politics and very liberal but we can do it um and so we have all different Frameworks about what the political is but what Justice is but what representation is what fairness is and we can be sympathetic and we can be critical to all of them including mine right so we have to include and exclude everybody from this so you know the Lenin Vladimir Lenin right the famously

you know said who will dominate whom so his framework of politics was was about conflict right about this idea of hierarchy and control and power over and Power Authority and we'll get to the power dynamics after this um you know you can also frame it more in a kind of allocative sense so who gets what when and how so that's framing it in terms of like how are resources allocated so weirdly enough like out of those two last well sounds more communist than Lynn Lennon really enough um and the textbook makes this weird distinction too

which I don't really understand because one is about resource allocation and one is about conflict between classes right in different ways and Manheim has uncontrolled competition for scarce Resources by domination and forsh force this conflict over resources so again very similar this kind of the idea that there's conflict over resources rather than just resource allocation right resource allocation is kind of more policy conflict over resources says competition and builds in more kind of systems and structures for control um you know it Hanish these are in the text but Hannah thought I would do it personally

is politically kind of feminist understanding of no you have to understand that the ways in which we go about the world how if I have a lawn or not is is a personal decision that has political consequences right so it might not be environmentally viable for whatever it is I'm doing you know I've got ten thousand acres I make it all on I love my golf course right um whether or not that's ecologically sound is something that was a personal decision that has political consequences but in a more you know back to the real sense

do certain people have the right to be politically represented do they have the right to vote do they have the right of participation in our society right those types of personal political questions and then mine is just I draw this this is my own personal one you don't have to agree with it this is just how I like to think about it those who have nowhere to speak making themselves of account so this is from Jacques Rancier and what he's arguing there is that politics is actually kind of rare most of what we talk about

is just kind of policy organization the re-allocation of resources or you know some effort to reorganize who's in charge right back to the Lenin like no it shouldn't be them the dominating it should be them who's dominating it shouldn't be the conservatives in power it should be the Liberals it shouldn't be this and to be them right whereas this version is more about the idea back to the political animal stuff about maybe we should listen more and hear the voices that currently we can't even hear and there's all sorts of ways in which you do

that and it's really hard and it doesn't happen very often right um and so you know as meta then as thinking about politics really what we're doing is thinking about how we structure thought um I said feminism here because it doesn't this framework from the textbook doesn't really do the feminist way of doing politics personal political stuff um and so it it frames it largely as things concerning the polis which again okay those in structures of power and authority who gets what when how as we talked about research allegation processes have collected decision making listen

you can just be concerned that you just think politics is elections right it's the horse race so my my candidate is going to win horse racing let's be clear super unethical you're racing babies look it up two-year-olds uh anyways my wife's a horse uh writing um instructors so this is why I know this um so just the idea that processes of collective decision making um so how it is that that we come about Collective decisions right how did the Prime Minister come up with this policy and what does it mean for me write that episode

um advancement of individual and group interests so this can be pushing forward of Rights you know property rights landlord rights tenant rights whatever you want to do resolution of conflict so you can frame in terms of Peace how do we generate peace what makes peaceful Society who is peaceful how does peace come about competition for scarce that should be scarce public goods ah they made a typo that's not mine um scarce public goods scaring public goods would be like I don't know the most Halloween decorations we can give out for free but public goods are

just things that we share in common so you know I want to have a road built because it will be quicker for me to get to work I just happened to reflect certain types of hierarchy and Authority some white voice counts more so I get the road and you don't right because we only have so much we're only willing to pay for so much so those the allocation of those resources or you can see it as the unrelenting struggle for power advantage and dominance all of these are very much framed in a not personalized political

they're framed in a very kind of public political way that that what takes place is is out there and what happens in here doesn't have those consequences right so it's just an interesting way to frame these things I will say they're you know there is a weird I don't even I don't even know it's it's you know we're in the 2020s now I don't know about using that word for science um I think we're trying to get rid of that language but here I think it is instructive um because you know that's what Aristotle thinks

of this is the kind of overarching framework that explains all the other Frameworks maybe maybe that's what he argues use of here is very much in this kind of Plantation of scene mentality this the legacies of plantationism in the way that we frame both of those words together the exploitation colonialism inequality inequality um you know I just have questions about the science part right because this has been one of the fundamental problems famously you know he debates it now but Nate silver was the famous statistician who predicted Obama's uh election but was famously very wrong

on Trump everybody was very wrong on Trump um because they were using this scientific methodology that has this problem in it is that if you and this is why we close polling this is why even Facebook said we won't run political ads 24 hours before an election because if you statistically say that this happens 99 times out of 100 therefore because it happens 99 times out of 100 you shouldn't go vote for your candidate because there's a only a one percent chance they're going to win that actually makes people not go to the polls and

then it reinforces or creates the opposite where your science interferes with the outcome and so we don't have the ability to control variables in politics so we want to say we're doing science we want to come up with the idea that we're doing science but we don't have any systems that are closed and controllable our systems are open and complex and interact with each other right so advancements in feminism result in counter feminism right so then the premise of advancing like ideas of women's rights it was floated at certain points by certain people in the

U.S on the right that oh well maybe women's rights in voting well we went too far like this happened during the Trump presidency like that we can go back on Concepts and ideas that we thought were well settled right and so there's no such like there's a premise to you know even with what we did in the last section to say these are the three types of systems I'm not you know those are the three types of systems we have now but we're not sure they will always be that way and so there's a bias

in our science and that our science isn't very reliable in the kind of predictive analysis sense um I would also say that the Aristotle Western canonical view of political science has to omit the other experiences that exist in the world um I just use two there's many more I just used two as examples so I know this little link she just died I think last year a couple years ago um I met her several times but she had this framework and she gave one of her big last lectures at the London School of Economics on

worldism that basically this idea of framing everything in this kind of this conflict way or one against another we can actually use something she she looked at like kind of taoism as this idea it's not one versus the other but there's also a bit of each in each other and so it's this idea of a balanced or holistic views it doesn't see everything in terms of competition right it doesn't see everything as a set outcomes over scarce resources that doesn't seem everything this tiencia Sia my my Mandarin's terrible it's been years since I took it

um and that um the idea of all under heaven or all the people or these World institutions and this is China's kind of world view that they're propagating listen we can be critical like I've been critical everything we critical this but the idea here is that this is a Humane Authority strategy which is the idea that you know we're not going to reject those who've come to learn and but we're also not going to go out there and lecture others so this is a different view than liberalism liberalism everybody should be able to speak their

ideas and that we have this this kind of exchange of ideas and this open and that my criticism should be allowed of those ideas and those criticisms and my ideas should be allowed this is a different view um this idea of Harmony it's not sameness and there is a especially in the western Canon we treat The Sovereign Nation State as universal we say it's analytical but we treat it as universal you're either a modern nation state or you're not right and so everything is sameness whereas Harmony says no there can be different forms and structures

as long as everything gets along right it's not just cooperation it's Harmony and so this is a different way of viewing things and then we've got you know this idea as I spoke about earlier about the separation of the political from the religious doesn't have a lot of authority and that there's this this sure idea in both Arab and Muslim traditions of consultation that there's actually a democracy as a concept has Origins outside the Western canonical experience we just tend not to look there because of that white ignorant stuff I talked about earlier because we

make an assumption about how we should view things and that assumption trickles down in how we think about everything else right um and that there doesn't necessarily need to be a separation of religious and political Authority or order that we can have a consultative process so in this this world is this this this um non-western view of politics we can either have something like Harmony or consultation which is similar democracy you don't have to have agreed upon principles which just everybody has input and structures and institutions and histories are different and so there are different

analytical restrictions here and so I just thought I'd do a little bit of uh Lily link talking about this um this question so this is Professor Ling discussing her kind of Framing and we'll you know we'll talk about it by hegemony I mean a singular logic of violence in World politics both in what we do such as in Wars as well as in how we think such as definitions of knowledge what qualifies as knowledge this approach to World politics is called the westphalian approach because it comes from the Treaty of Westphalia that was uh signed

in 1648 and which has been spread throughout the globe through five centuries of colonialism and imperialism and the two main pillars of the Westphalia Interstate well three main pillars of the westphalian interstate system are that the International System is made up of states and secondly that sovereignty is a main principle by which states interact with one another and the third is that trade or Commerce is the legitimate venue for Interstate interaction this Westphalia interstate system I propose entrenches violence because it offers a singular logic of what to do and how to think consequently I propose

worldism as an alternative Paradigm for IR World politics worldism comes from the notion that we live in a world of multiple worlds and this world of multiple worlds is not a bubble of or framework that is established top down but emanates From Below through the multiple interactions among multiple worlds so immediately we see the difference of the top down bottom-up perspective right if thinking about politics from the top down is this long tradition of of machiavellianism speaking to leaders to princes about how they should be printy um whereas here we're talking about the idea well

no different ideas emerge from all over the place maybe we should listen to some of those ideas The Sovereign Nation State model isn't care about that it says are you a sovereign nation state or not your legitimate political Authority or not and you have the legitimate use of force that's why she's saying it's conflict oriented is that the use of force is the foundation of what makes you Sovereign right so then you are going to compete over who has the legitimate use of Thor Force that's going to happen consequently worldism is about negotiation how do

we negotiate across multiple Logics particularly if they conflict for this reason I draw on Taoist dialectics as an epistemology that was dialectics in particular as you see from the graph it is a a holistic organism composed of the black sphere the white sphere with the black dot in the white sphere and the white dot in the black sphere and what uh that was dialectics presents US is an alternative way to look at difference in how they interact into a complement a complementary whole from Taoist dialectics I developed a model of dialogics which is the dialectics

of dialogue which I call a worldless dialogic and it focuses specifically on Creative listening and speaking as a mechanism for implementing worldless dialogics because that's enough I mean it I wasn't going to go into detail you don't need to know the specifics of it but it's just the idea that maybe this vision of politics isn't the only vision of politics and that the vision of politics reflects like we see here power the the that power then is going to be historical and contingent not Universal even though we like to teach it as universal because we

want to be science I mean we want to have you come here and now you can be a political scientist and you can do political science experiments I advise you to never do political science experiments that sounds like a bad idea