June 30, 2008

Amateurism, Ignorance, Politics, Life

By: James Poulos

Amateurism is not ignorance. And politics is not life. But consider Matt Yglesias:

I’m a very “bad” tourist in terms of looking things up in advance and planning. But I always enjoy doing things this way — seeing something cool is twice as cool when unexpected. George Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is one of my favorite paintings, well-liked enough that I swiftly made it the wallpaper on my iPhone when I get it. And then yesterday I was ambling around the Art Institute of Chicago and, unexpectedly, there it was! Naturally I then took a photo with the iPhone and set that to be my wallpaper. But wallpaper aside, the point is that not knowing what the collection’s highlights are until you get a chance to look around preserves a certain element of the thrill of discovery even though obviously it’s already a super-famous painting.

I read this and thought, “That’s right.” Not that I think people who plan out every step of their vacations are defective or awful. But it’s neither my style nor Matt’s and I think we can tell a pretty solid story about the goods of doing things our way. Actually, on a second read, we could tell two different stories — one focusing on the ‘positive’ experience of discovering the unexpected, and one on the ‘negative’ experience of leaving oneself unsupervised. To get only a little silly, one could say Matt’s story is the liberal story about the goods of ignorance in life (pro-creativity), while mine is the conservative story (anti-management).

But on my first read of Matt’s story, my dominant reaction was, “There’s no way this set of observations should get translated, as if by some kind of mandatory machine, into politics. How gross and unattractive it would be if going on vacation — like everything else — had to be ‘branded’ by ideology, drawn into competing lifestyle niches. Conservative Tourism — there’s a book I don’t want to read.”

Obviously, a dilemma. In an effort to escape it, this is a great opportunity to distinguish between superficial bipartisanship and a more nuanced quest to find common political philosophical ground. It strikes me that an ethic of political amateurism is a promising representation of that kind of ground. Matt’s story is useful because it shows how the way we do politics should probably always burble up from the way we live our practical lives from day to day. And I want to underscore the difference between amateurism and dilettantism, between lives and politics created together in an improvisational way and those dabbled in as Marx would have it — fishing in the morning, tending the pot garden in the afternoon, writing for The New Yorker in the evening. In addition to an ethic of creativity, amateurism carries an ethic of restraint — a suspicion that too much passion in the creativity department will lead either to the systematization of new-experience thrill-seeking or to chaos. Too much suspicion, however, traps an amateur in a procedural rut of his or her own: the inclination is to deny that anything, really, is a singular event, a non-negotiable experience that commands a certain reaction (like being thrilled — or awed). This kind of asceticism defeats amateurism as well.

File under adventures in postmodern conservatism.