Cargo politics

A cargo cult mistakes an effect for a cause. The original Melanesian cargo cultists watched cargo arrive after their colonial occupiers had built airports, and concluded that the cargo had arrived because the airports had been built. This reasoning seems naive to us, since we already know that the correct chain of reasoning is the reverse: the wharves and airstrips were built because ships and airplanes were going to be arriving. However, as we have seen in the earlier articles in this series, we frequently fall into this type of error ourselves.

Anthropologists might object that I have oversimplified cargo cults, by the way. For example, the Melanesian cargo cultists often believed that their gods had already prepared cargo for them, and they just needed to supply places for the gods to deliver it. Whether my definition oversimplifies cargo cults or not, the cargo cultists still had the chain of reasoning backwards. Whether or not you thought cargo already exists, building an airport doesn’t cause cargo to be delivered. Even if you build a real airport rather than an imitation of one, building an airport still doesn’t cause cargo to be delivered. The Soviet Union had many airports, but it didn’t receive much cargo.

These days we have a lot of politicians, but they're not delivering much politics. Even in the broadest sense of the word, in which politics means simply the exercise of authority, contemporary politicians seem remarkably apolitical. Consider their agonizing and posturing about climate change, and then consider the few, trivial decisions in which that agonizing has resulted. The government of Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocols, and then promptly started ignoring them. Politics is no longer the art of the possible, but rather the art of avoiding the possible.

Political philosophy has followed the slide rule, restaurant counter service, and the dodo into oblivion. There was a time when conservative principles were based on the interests of the landed classes, liberal principles on the interests of the business class, and socialist principles on the interests of the workers. In Canada these days the national party with the closest thing to a political philosophy is the Conservatives, and judging by that philosophy they seem to represent the interest of pension funds. Everything is evaluated by the colour of the ink on the bottom line in the account books.

The New Democrats are now above all the party of proportional representation; the issue over-rides all others for them, and they drag it into the discussion of the most inappropriate issues (parliamentary ethics, for example). With a history of getting 20% of the vote and 10% of the seats, they're fierce about getting a system under which their 20% of the vote will get them 12% of the seats. They are losing the support of organized labour, but prefer to concern themselves with tinkering with the way votes are counted.

Both the Conservatives and the NDP have adopted the view that politics is a form of management. The Conservatives follow the managerial philosophy that all operations should turn a profit, while the New Democrats follow the managerial philosophy that all stakeholders should be persuaded to believe that they have a fair say in decision-making. As for the Liberals, they follow an approach known in the managerial literature as hill-climbing. That is, they believe in dealing with issues as they crop up, rather than in ways that are consistent with a political philosophy. They long ago abandoned their representation of business (as a class), and as for liberalism in the sense of promotion of individual liberty, they're the ones who, with the notwithstanding clause, decided the Charter of Rights should be perforated for easy removal.

Then there is the Bloc Québécois. It actually has the appearance of a political party. Its fundamental principle of sovereignty for Quebec is not well defined, if it is defined at all, but its decisions on parliamentary issues unrelated to sovereignty seem to be guided by consistent political principles. The Bloc also has a clear idea of the people whose interests they represent. There is a simple reason that the Bloc is more like an old-fashioned political party than the national parties are.

National sovereignty has been declining as international organizations and international agreements limit it, and as transnational corporations grow to ever more enormous sizes. Canada signed away much of its sovereignty, for example, to get free trade with the United States. In a world of declining national sovereignty, political principles and serious decision-making can get politicians in trouble with the people who really run the world. The Bloc can operate like an old-style party because for the moment the real decision-makers don't care what it does. Let Quebec become sovereign, though, and then someone new is going to be calling the tune.

The tune the rest of us are already dancing to, that is.

Cargo Politics © John FitzGerald, 2008