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The problem with "the art of the possible"
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Feb 10, 2010 02:17pm |
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| Category | Opinion |
| Author | Mike Marqusee |
| News Date | Wednesday, February 10, 2010 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | WHEN PEOPLE speak of politics as the art of the possible, they imply a world of unexamined assumptions about the limits of the possible--a world that embodies only the limits of their own experience or imagination. In its unreflective way, the dictum treats the superficial conditions of the moment as unchangeable realities. In effect, it serves as a denial of possibility, a closing of the aperture into the future.
It also urges us not to feel the urgency of injustice. The dictum is cold comfort to the oppressed, the victims of poverty, discrimination and violence, who are asked to continue suffering while distant arbiters decide what is or is not "possible" in their case. It sacrifices the poor, the hungry, the desperate on the altar of a self-serving pragmatism.
Impatience, in fact, is a necessary political virtue. Without it, even the most gradual change is inconceivable. And a politician who is not impatient with injustice, with needless death and destruction, is worse than useless.
Those who dispute the dictum are accused of utopianism, which is condemned as an intellectual and emotional error--not just a mistake, but a danger. Of course utopias are no substitute for the practice of politics, and can serve as an evasion of present responsibilities. But a practical politics stripped of serious ideas about what would constitute a just human society is a greater and more common menace. |
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