Sometimes, the technology simply doesn't work. Whilst Never Trust a Hippy kindly linked to my post on anti-politics the other day, and the backlink in question initially showed up here at 21stCenturyFix.org, it has - for some reason - now dropped off the foot of the article. The blog is set to show backlinks, so I don't know what's happened there. In parallel, Technorati hasn't pinged any of my blogs for weeks now - and even refuses to do so when I try manually.
Just occasionally, you get the feeling that no one wants to know.
Even when you know that the technologies are so complicated you'd be a fool to believe an intentionality.
(I do, however, note that if you look up "anti-politics" on Google, the article currently appears on the first page.)
Meanwhile, Paul has the first part of his version of "War and Peace" here. His underlying thesis is that the Labour Party still matters. I am inclined to agree, but as I'm really not absolutely sure in what sense, I do look forward to reading the rest of his discourse. At the same time, I find it fascinating that within the same political grouping we can find texts such as Paul's alongside texts such as Alex Smith's recent ones on factionalism (here, here and here). Theory and practice. Belief and government.
Experience rubs off and erodes one. But an erosion can also be a beautiful object, an object we may choose to contemplate and treasure. The natural world has many such objects. We are part of the natural world.
Perhaps what most dogs the British left, what may sometimes serve most to hold it back, is its blessed need to be coherent and downright. In the face of an ambiguous world, an essentially ambiguous and contradictory set of experiences we often fail to understand (not out of a lack of perspicacity but rather, simply, because the universe is sullen and unwilling to supply us easily with its secrets), the British left wishes to be entirely unambiguous. The British left wishes clarity above all - wishes the kind of clarity that does not allow for beauty; for the essence of beauty sometimes lies in its very absence of clarity.
If the personal was political and the technological has become so, how much more necessary is it for us to invent a politics of the ambiguous. We need tools to measure ambiguity, to track it, to understand it and to define it. We need to learn how to encompass it without destroying or misrepresenting it. We need to delineate ambiguity with accuracy and precision. We need to incorporate it into our ways of thinking and seeing.
We need, once and for all, to understand it and learn how to let it be, learn how to let it thrive, learn how to allow the fuzzy intelligence of intuition - and yes, even what we might term the poetry of politics - to infuse our political thought.
That is to say, we need to allow humanity to once more inform politics - to once more inform how as well as what we think.
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