My goal in the 2021 A2Z Challenge was to complete a novel I started a few years ago but which has languished for lack of love (writing!). Each Post, daily in April (Sundays excepted), was to consist of some aspect of the novel plus a chapter from it. I hope that the Alphabetical items will give a bit of extra background, muse on the writing process, but most of all, help me develop certain ideas to improve the novel. I had 12 chapters already written at the beginning of the month but my day job has taken too much time and I have only completed another two. So although I hope to complete some more chapters before the end of April, I will continue with these posts for sure. If you have been following the novel and would like to receive the balance of the book then please leave an email in the comments…
Political party, politician, playing politics, isn’t politic -we all use the word and its adjuncts frequently, but when I came to consider the politics of Hawaii 2 in my book “Train Wreck” – I realised that I didn’t know what the real definition or etymology of the word was. Of course, Wikipedia was there, itself a form of political example since anybody may edit a definition and this has famously led to tussles with some items being repeatedly re-edited. Here then, is the definition from their very excellent article:-
“Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, ‘affairs of the cities’) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status…”
The article goes on to refine the understanding of the word “politics” usage – “limited” referring only to the process of governance whilst “extensive” meaning a total view of life as it is lived, as in a feminist view of the power relationships between the sexes as in the statement “The personal is political!”
Another dichotomy over the meaning of Politics is the Moral/Realist schism. Aristotle believed that every societal dispute could be settled by discussion and never by recourse to war – an ethical approach which is strongly exemplified in Utopian ideas. Political Realists like Machiavelli and Hobbes, thought that might is right, although Bernard Crick argues that “politics is the way in which free societies are governed. Politics is politics and other forms of rule are something else.” (My emphasis).
The way I think of politics is this, there are essentially only two positions, those who believe that everyone is born with equal rights (even if differences between people sometimes mean offering them different things to fulfil that equality) and those who believe that some people are intrinsically better than others. For example, the belief of Native Americans that the land could not be owned and the view of immigrant settlers that it could, represents a conflict which was solved by political realists – the settlers ran the Native Americans off the land, and confined their non-ownership of land to small reservations. It is hard to see what kind of alternative, politically equitable settlement could have been reached between two such different peoples with their totally different political philosophies and that would have allowed a peaceful disposition of the land – in any event, power won.
In most societies, where differences in wealth, power and equality exist, my two political positions can be called Left and Right respectively, but in a utopian society, set up to avoid just such differences, there would be no need for Left and Right and true equality should prevail – Hawaii 2 is just such a utopian society.
In Ursula le Guin’s masterpiece, “The Dispossessed” – there is a similarly utopian society but what emerges is that even within a system of political equality, there can emerge a tyranny of the majority. Convention becomes oppressive and gossip, (charitably defined as a force for social cohesion) its enforcer. We do use politics with a small p to describe the machinations and manipulations, pleas and accommodations that occur between individuals and their immediate neighbours and no amount of utopian philosophy can totally eliminate certain aspects of human nature, envy, pettiness, jealousy.
The canton system of local government that exists on Hawaii 2 is described in Chapter 10 and representatives are sent to a planetwide government body and they in turn send representatives to the Pan Human Federation that is a forum, but not a government of the three worlds which humans have colonised Hawaii 1, Arctane, and Hawaii 2. But at the canton level, every member of the locality must attend at least three out of every six meetings and so the people govern themselves rather than being governed by elected representatives – something which can give rise to a class of self-interested politicians whose motives can diverge from those who they represent…
Without giving too much of a spoiler, I may hint that the solution to the mystery of “Train Wreck”, involves politics, but whether with a capital P or a small p remains to be seen…