I remember reading somewhere that grandmaster chess players have a hard time articulating why they make the moves that they do in competitive, tournament play. They make brilliant moves, obviously, so it’s not like they’re just shuffling pieces across the board at random. Nevertheless, if you asked them, as a virtuoso of their craft, to chart up a “If X happens, then do Y” protocol for their world-class play, they couldn’t do it. No matter how many branches you granted them for their flowchart. No matter how many pages or illustrations you allotted for their how-to manual.
I tried to locate my source for that little tidbit, but I’m a notoriously bad Googler. It makes sense, though. Improvement at a complex task like chess is, well, a complicated process. It doesn’t boil down to a simple, linear accruement of hard-and-fast rules or even heuristics that tell you what to do in a growing repertoire of situations, a collection that you could, in principle at least, transfer via writing to someone else. Such an accruement of conscious strategies is, admittedly, part of achieving expertise in a demanding discipline like chess. But there are other components as well, ones that can’t be spelled out to the uninitiated. Intuition, judgment, awareness—these and capacities like them are certainly improved and developed, but only through experience and not so much on the conscious plane. Thus expertise doesn’t consist of knowledge alone, but a certain developed faculty of mind as well.
This insight applies in the political sphere as well. One point where I part company with folks like the bright, young neoreactionaries who let me post on their website is that I’m not opposed to democracy (with a few important qualifications). On the contrary, I’ve got a populist streak a mile wide. But I do think a particularly subtle and pernicious effect of the universally-suffraged democratic regime we currently languish under is that it obscures the status of statecraft as a discipline. It obscures the fact that ironing out problems in your polity or resolving sudden crises that threaten it is many ways analogous to world-class chess. It’s a tremendously challenging “game.” And you can be good at that game, or you can be bad at it because there’s an art to the whole thing.
Instead of recognizing such a basic state of affairs, though, we have a facile faith that democracy will inevitably tend towards the good. We subscribe to the notion that we ought to guide our ship of state through what is essentially popular opinion. Everyone comes together, we poll the audience, and our duly elected representatives draft up legislation based on those polls, which then serve as a protocol for managing the nation (of course the reality is much messier than that, but I don’t think anyone would accuse the contemporary homo Americanus of nuance in his conception of the political process). What that view elides (and increasingly so, as our insistence on uniform moral consensus reaches new heights of shrillness) is the role of the politician as, not just an amanuensis to a beatific public, but as a player in his own right, ideally a skilled and sober one. It papers over the fact that you need men with developed faculties of judgment, with good political intuitions and a keen eye for trends both domestic and geopolitical. You need men playing the game of governance.
Of course, I’m not trying to suggest that there is no role for policy in the task of proper governance. I’m not even trying to suggest (like I alluded to earlier) that there is no room for input from the governed on the rules that will circumscribe their civic lives. I just want to suggest that slavish adherence to set-down and agreed-upon policies will never make someone an expert at governance. There are strict upper limits to the amount of guidance that such guidelines—whether legal, economic, or social—can provide. Even clever policies. Heck, even genius policies. You’re not going to engineer a set of perfect rules, this beautiful phonebook-thick tome of protocols and procedures, that suddenly makes human judgment irrelevant. So the question isn’t (or at least isn’t exclusively), “How do we produce more effective policies?” It’s, “How do we produce men of judgment who will be wise stewards of those policies?” It’s, “How do we produce good statesmen?” The first question is the central preoccupation of the centrally managed state that we live under. The second two are versions of quandaries about the future of the polis that stretch all the way back to ancient Greece, all but forgotten in our latter day perversion of the democracy the classical world bequeathed us.
I suppose, though, that now would be as good a time as any for this confession: my short answer to those two questions is, “Beats me.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t make for very compelling reading. So I’ll try to at least outline some of the ways in which the status quo in America inhibits the production of such men. I figure if I can’t come up with a better answer, at least I can clarify the parameters of the question. (And then you viewers at home can divine the solution yourselves and mail it triumphantly down to the studio.)
We’ll just cover one of these ways today and save the others for next week. And we’ll go with the low-hanging fruit, practically argued already. One way that we actively squander potential political talent is that we maintain a rosy and utopian view of progress, which casts the history of our country as the march of abstract ideals like “equality” and “personal freedom” rather than the work of human beings trying to navigate human problems. Blame it on liberal eschatology if you want. Or blame it on some of the more specific narratives thereof: the idea, for instance, that if we stop treating women as “second class citizens,” we will enter into a new age of peace and understanding. Or the idea that “education” is a panacea for the crime, poverty, the drug use, the teen pregnancies, and the sexually transmitted diseases that our inner cities generate. It’s drilled into our heads right now that, listen up, it’s 2014! And if we could only root out those last bits of 19th century backwardness from the laws and ideals of our land, we would finally achieve that utopia we’ve been yearning for all these years. It doesn’t matter at all who’s holding the pen when we cross out the remaining evil bit. So not only does the status quo hide from us the reality of politics as a messy human endeavor that requires a masterful hand, it encourages us to keep looking for our final victory-by-policy any day now. We’re perpetually on the edge of our seats, awaiting the impending resolution of all our ills. We’re not training our next generation of leaders.
I don’t want to go too long here, and I don’t want to retread old ground. But needless to say there are more treacherous straits to navigate than just our pious old progressive illusions. I’ll see if I can start mapping out the rest of them next Wednesday.
I too am a populist… which is why I find demotic systems so intolerable.