Whether to Be Apolitical
In many ways I never liked politics. Certain discussions on how nations should be administered could be interesting, but as a whole the field was so ugly, so reminiscent of a poorly-made and outdated website: gray and unaesthetic, broken, inefficient, frustrating. What was worse, it always seemed to be usurping the place of supposedly nobler and more important subjects, like religion. According to the voices that shaped my understanding of life, the love of Jesus was the thing that would change the world. We were to “seek first the kingdom” and “all these things” would fall into place as we did. Politics, I knew, didn’t change hearts; changed hearts added up to cultural movements, which in turn led to political change, and the way to change hearts was to love the people around you, be real with them, listen to them, and be there for them. But despite this understanding, I often saw political allegiances clawing their way up to the level of religious importance and even supplanting what should have been indispensable religious principles: It looked as if many people thought about sticking to their political ideals or supporting their political party first and forgot to even ask themselves if they were upholding the tenets of the religion they claimed was foundational to their politics.
When I was Christian, I found myself asking Christian family to stop worrying that political issues were going to destroy the morality of the country and start focusing on connecting with people around them. The Bible didn’t instruct Christians to make Christian laws, but it did instruct them to be the representatives of Jesus to the people around them. If we focus on this, I would say, all these problems you’re worried about will be resolved in organic, holistic ways on long-term time scales, which will accomplish a lot more good than trying to force solutions from the top down right now.
When I first left Christianity, I completely ignored politics for a while. The political tendencies ingrained in me were mostly conservative, but if I had found first that I couldn’t trust what everyone around me said about science and then that I couldn’t trust what everyone around me said about religion, chances were any political ideas I had picked up from my surroundings were wrong too. I didn’t have any good support for liberal ideas, just a good reason to mistrust the conservative ones I was familiar with, so staying back from it all rather than blundering around uninformedly seemed like the best option. There are still a lot of issues I won’t take a side on until I have a much better understanding of the topics they concern.
When it comes to things I say publicly, I again feel a strong pull to simply avoid politics because the subjects I’m interested in talking about publicly tend to center on religion, science, and philosophy, fields that to me seem foundational to politics: What does it matter if someone agrees with my political ideas today? If they’re willing to listen to my philosophical ideas, they might come around to holding similar political views eventually. If they don’t, the chances they would have ever listened to my political views to begin with are extremely small. In contrast, it seems more likely that someone who might have been open to my philosophical ideas will be driven away if I’m overly political, which would stop them from opening their mind to the paths of thought that could have led them to listen to my political views.
Even for its own sake, I’m attracted to the idea of being an apolitical person and an apolitical source, someone dialed in on one particular area of life that doesn’t happen to be politics but that should, as far as I know, have a positive effect on people’s political ideas, someone who people will turn to even when they’re sick of politics.
In some ways, I’ve decided already to be apolitical. Even if I register with a party for practical reasons, I don’t see myself getting over my revulsion to saying, “I’m a __” and ending the statement with a party affiliation. I’m all for allying yourself with imperfect groups so that things can actually get done in the real world, but this isn’t an area where I can envision myself ever being proud or enthusiastic over the group that happens to be my ally at the time.
Any of these things could change; I suppose it’ll be interesting to see how they do. For now though I don’t anticipate politics being much of a public topic of discussion for me.
But at the same time, there are subjects that intersect with politics—that some people sometimes want to dismiss as just politics—that I can’t be quiet about. These are issues of human rights that become politicized either because people honestly disagree on what the right thing to do is or because some candidates or parties are willing to represent people who benefit from not doing the right thing.
When the discussion relates in a transparent way to human rights, when it comes down to questions of helping or hurting others without following a path you’d need a PhD to understand on its way, it’s a discussion I want to be part of regardless of the political baggage that’s been thrown on it. I want to keep the discussions I start as non-political as possible, but not to the extent that I act as if certain injustices weren’t happening just because people find ways to have political arguments about them.
There’s a lot going on right now that’s more political than it should be.
I don’t think it should be political to say that what happened to George Floyd was wrong; if you watch the disturbing footage it’s hard to base your conclusions on party ideologies instead of on facts of biology and the agreed upon social standard that says it’s not acceptable to suffocate someone for making your job a little difficult. It shouldn’t be political to listen instead of becoming defensive when one group of people say they’re being treated as if they mattered less than another group. It shouldn’t be political to want a police force whose conduct we can be proud of, or to want the good cops to be able to do their jobs unencumbered by chronically under-disciplined bad cops. It should be considered a matter of ethics, not politics, to say that black lives matter and a matter of logic to realize that saying black lives matter does not imply that any other lives matter less. When our neighbors grieve the loss of loved ones and earnestly share about patterns of experiences that suggest they are being undervalued and mistreated, it should be a matter of empathy, love, and decency to respond by affirming their worth and their cause by saying that black lives matter and not disrespect their pain by suggesting it wasn’t such an unreasonable thing that their loved one was killed given they had a couple minor offenses on their record. Political parties can disagree about how best to reach the goals of improving society for everyone and making sure indications of problems are heard rather than going overlooked, but I wish we were starting without any party division over whether it was still possible to make further improvements in some areas.
It should be a matter of scientific research, not of politics, to determine the severity of a disease and identify courses of action that slow its spread. Certainly, political discussions need to be had about the extent to which government can mandate certain behaviors in the interest of public health, but those discussions should start at the level of choosing policies, not at the level of discovering the facts that will inform the policies.
This is all a long way of saying that these are the sorts of issues that draw someone who prefers to be publicly apolitical into the realms of politics. These are the sorts of things I can’t talk about without having it sound like my comments are intended to support certain political parties and figures. And for all that the sentiment isn’t really worth much, I wish that it wasn’t that way. In some countries, the idea that everyone was going to work together to take precautions recommended by doctors until the rate of new covid-19 cases fell below a certain level had no political ring to it because everyone was basically on the same page about the idea. I wish that had been the case here and that it was also the case that saying we could do more to promote equality and improve our police force was as non-political a statement as saying that we could make DMV offices run more efficiently. Politicians can disagree as to how, but it would sure be nice to know we had the same goal in mind. It would be nice not to feel that people with chauffeurs were complicating things by dismissing the complaints of the average driver as hype and insisting that every time an improvement was made the issue had now been solved once and for all with no need for future efficiency check-ups.
When I was Christian, I found myself asking Christian family to stop worrying that political issues were going to destroy the morality of the country and start focusing on connecting with people around them. The Bible didn’t instruct Christians to make Christian laws, but it did instruct them to be the representatives of Jesus to the people around them. If we focus on this, I would say, all these problems you’re worried about will be resolved in organic, holistic ways on long-term time scales, which will accomplish a lot more good than trying to force solutions from the top down right now.
When I first left Christianity, I completely ignored politics for a while. The political tendencies ingrained in me were mostly conservative, but if I had found first that I couldn’t trust what everyone around me said about science and then that I couldn’t trust what everyone around me said about religion, chances were any political ideas I had picked up from my surroundings were wrong too. I didn’t have any good support for liberal ideas, just a good reason to mistrust the conservative ones I was familiar with, so staying back from it all rather than blundering around uninformedly seemed like the best option. There are still a lot of issues I won’t take a side on until I have a much better understanding of the topics they concern.
When it comes to things I say publicly, I again feel a strong pull to simply avoid politics because the subjects I’m interested in talking about publicly tend to center on religion, science, and philosophy, fields that to me seem foundational to politics: What does it matter if someone agrees with my political ideas today? If they’re willing to listen to my philosophical ideas, they might come around to holding similar political views eventually. If they don’t, the chances they would have ever listened to my political views to begin with are extremely small. In contrast, it seems more likely that someone who might have been open to my philosophical ideas will be driven away if I’m overly political, which would stop them from opening their mind to the paths of thought that could have led them to listen to my political views.
Even for its own sake, I’m attracted to the idea of being an apolitical person and an apolitical source, someone dialed in on one particular area of life that doesn’t happen to be politics but that should, as far as I know, have a positive effect on people’s political ideas, someone who people will turn to even when they’re sick of politics.
In some ways, I’ve decided already to be apolitical. Even if I register with a party for practical reasons, I don’t see myself getting over my revulsion to saying, “I’m a __” and ending the statement with a party affiliation. I’m all for allying yourself with imperfect groups so that things can actually get done in the real world, but this isn’t an area where I can envision myself ever being proud or enthusiastic over the group that happens to be my ally at the time.
Any of these things could change; I suppose it’ll be interesting to see how they do. For now though I don’t anticipate politics being much of a public topic of discussion for me.
But at the same time, there are subjects that intersect with politics—that some people sometimes want to dismiss as just politics—that I can’t be quiet about. These are issues of human rights that become politicized either because people honestly disagree on what the right thing to do is or because some candidates or parties are willing to represent people who benefit from not doing the right thing.
When the discussion relates in a transparent way to human rights, when it comes down to questions of helping or hurting others without following a path you’d need a PhD to understand on its way, it’s a discussion I want to be part of regardless of the political baggage that’s been thrown on it. I want to keep the discussions I start as non-political as possible, but not to the extent that I act as if certain injustices weren’t happening just because people find ways to have political arguments about them.
There’s a lot going on right now that’s more political than it should be.
I don’t think it should be political to say that what happened to George Floyd was wrong; if you watch the disturbing footage it’s hard to base your conclusions on party ideologies instead of on facts of biology and the agreed upon social standard that says it’s not acceptable to suffocate someone for making your job a little difficult. It shouldn’t be political to listen instead of becoming defensive when one group of people say they’re being treated as if they mattered less than another group. It shouldn’t be political to want a police force whose conduct we can be proud of, or to want the good cops to be able to do their jobs unencumbered by chronically under-disciplined bad cops. It should be considered a matter of ethics, not politics, to say that black lives matter and a matter of logic to realize that saying black lives matter does not imply that any other lives matter less. When our neighbors grieve the loss of loved ones and earnestly share about patterns of experiences that suggest they are being undervalued and mistreated, it should be a matter of empathy, love, and decency to respond by affirming their worth and their cause by saying that black lives matter and not disrespect their pain by suggesting it wasn’t such an unreasonable thing that their loved one was killed given they had a couple minor offenses on their record. Political parties can disagree about how best to reach the goals of improving society for everyone and making sure indications of problems are heard rather than going overlooked, but I wish we were starting without any party division over whether it was still possible to make further improvements in some areas.
It should be a matter of scientific research, not of politics, to determine the severity of a disease and identify courses of action that slow its spread. Certainly, political discussions need to be had about the extent to which government can mandate certain behaviors in the interest of public health, but those discussions should start at the level of choosing policies, not at the level of discovering the facts that will inform the policies.
This is all a long way of saying that these are the sorts of issues that draw someone who prefers to be publicly apolitical into the realms of politics. These are the sorts of things I can’t talk about without having it sound like my comments are intended to support certain political parties and figures. And for all that the sentiment isn’t really worth much, I wish that it wasn’t that way. In some countries, the idea that everyone was going to work together to take precautions recommended by doctors until the rate of new covid-19 cases fell below a certain level had no political ring to it because everyone was basically on the same page about the idea. I wish that had been the case here and that it was also the case that saying we could do more to promote equality and improve our police force was as non-political a statement as saying that we could make DMV offices run more efficiently. Politicians can disagree as to how, but it would sure be nice to know we had the same goal in mind. It would be nice not to feel that people with chauffeurs were complicating things by dismissing the complaints of the average driver as hype and insisting that every time an improvement was made the issue had now been solved once and for all with no need for future efficiency check-ups.
If I have a takeaway here other than “Wouldn’t it be nice,” it’s a challenge for everyone who has stronger political feelings than mine to make sure your politics are serving you and not the other way around. I encourage you, whoever you are, no matter what your politics are, to set aside time to think about the subjects that go deeper than politics for you. What matters most to you and why? Are your moral principles drawn from a religion, from a particular philosophy, from a picture of what an ideal world would be, from a goal you’ve always felt you needed to reach? What are these moral principles of yours anyway? Can you articulate them? Can you list them out? I strongly suggest writing down a list of bullet points that summarize what your principles are. (Things like “Keep looking for the truth even if you’re afraid of what you might find” or “Be the person who improves the attitude of a conversation” or “Family comes before self”—whatever defines your values and as few or as many bullet point statements as you need to feel like the picture of your values is complete.) Don’t expect to know exactly what you want to say all at once. You might have to talk it through with a friend or journal about whatever disorganized thoughts come up for a while before you put together a list you’re happy with. The point is to force yourself to think about what is most foundational and most important to you. Once you’re able to put your principles into words, evaluate political issues in light of them. This might not change anything about your political views, but there’s a chance you might discover a cause you’ve been swept up in not because it really fits in with the vision of the world you want to achieve but because someone you trusted promoted it or because it seemed like a necessary part of the package to get something else you wanted. If you do find anything of the sort, remember that you’re under no obligation to agree with any political group on all points, even if they’re usually right, even if they mostly represent your values. Don’t overlook those things that could be done better. Don’t change into the ideal party member; demand instead that the party change to better represent the value it’s missing. Everyone complains about how extreme and predictable everyone else is. Before you do the same, please give your political stances a rundown and make sure they are really you, really the political profile of an individual and really the practical outworkings of your own values and principles.
While I like the idea of being as apolitical as possible, I can’t be apolitical first. It can’t come before the importance of speaking up for people’s rights and safety. And my encouragement to everyone is to not be conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican, or any other political designation first. Know what foundation your political preferences were built on, and never ease up on your requirement that they conform to it.
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