The thinkable is a very narrow band in the spectrum of politics. Revolutions invert the thinkable, or at least shove it far into the land of the previously infrared or ultraviolet, if you follow my metaphor here. Within each little spectrum, each little bubble, everything else is so unimaginable it might as well be invisible. Sometimes, along comes something, let’s call it an insect, which can see the colors we can’t, and this leads to completely unexplainable stuff: the insect finds the way where we are blind. Rather than admit our own deficiencies, we rationalize them away. We are not insects. Our eyes evolved to solve a whole different set of problems. Of course insects will be different. Their eyes could never replace ours, or vice versa. Which is true, but also kind of misses the point: sometimes it would be really useful for us to see infrared. That’s why we build devices to help us see.
When I follow international news, that’s how I feel. Other countries’ issues seem totally alien to me. Now, some of this is because I’m privileged to live in one of the richest countries in the world, the best country to live in, in fact, if you’ll take the UN’s word for it. But part of it, I’m convinced, is that we live in non-overlapping bubbles where basically none of the major policies that are thinkable in Norway are thinkable in, say, Egypt, and vice versa.
I live in a robust social democracy. It’s a little funny to me that Socialist is such a dirty word in America, since I come from a country where everyone is Socialist. Of course, what we call socialism here is not what you call Socialism. This is because the entire political spectrum in Norway is squeezed into a tiny band that would, in America, be called Socialism. I wouldn’t call myself a Socialist, since I align with the right in Norway, but the Norwegian far right is in fact far to the left of the mainstream leftie party in America, the Democrats. Not a single party that wants to tear down the welfare state and end social democracy manages to get 0.1 percent of the vote in general elections in Norway. All the mainstream parties represented in our parliament do is disagree about certain specifics within that social democracy.
Of course, America is just as narrow. The political spectrum in the United States is a tiny band, too, it just happens to be far off to the right of Europe, and especially Scandinavia. Not a single party that wants to build a welfare state and create a social democracy—or even to enact policies to curb what in my little corner of the world would be termed “ultracapitalism”—manages to get even 0.1 percent of the vote in general elections in the US.
The difference, here, is that if Norways fails, Norway fails. But if the US fails, Norway also fails. And so does the rest of the world. Fucking over the world economy is not the same as fucking over a local economy. That gives me a stake in American politics that Americans don’t have in Norwegian politics.
I don’t have any hope that Occupy Wall Street or anyone else is going to do anything to stop corporatocracy and irresponsible hypercapitalism unless they succeed in actually widening the narrow band of what is thinkable in American politics.
It goes both ways. We will not learn what we could have learned from America, and America will not learn what it could learn from us, because neither is willing or able to expand its horizons and admit that, although the very narrow band of what is thinkable and doable in practical politics evolved in order to solve our unique set of problems, to use our unique set of assets, there is still utility to be found outside this spectrum. We can improve on what natural selection has given us, just like we do in the fields of medicine, science and technology.
Around here, accusing someone of advocating for “American conditions” is an insult on par with calling a mainstream politican “Socialist” in America. It’s fucking ridiculous, is what it is. But it’s the result of having a very narrow space of possibilities. Although there are a few Marxists and a few Libertarians, nobody actually believes that those policies could ever be implemented in practice. I’m not saying social democracy is literally unthinkable in America, or American-style capitalism in Norway, only that it is far, far outside what anyone sees as even remotely possible in practice.
I would bet a lot of money, if I had a lot of money, on the idea that the Arab Spring will not bring about anything that resembles liberal Western democracies. Why? Because the narrow band of thinkable politics in the Arab Spring countries was so far from liberal democracy that even a full-blown revolution can only create partial overlap between the two spectra.
I rarely write directly about politics, because I don’t really have coherent politics, or the only coherence I can muster is held within the narrow spectrum of my home country, and I can’t explain or talk about that in a way that is relevant to an audience that exists largely outside that spectrum. But this, anyway, is my view, comfortably (and probably too smugly) overlooking the world from Godless Liberal Socialist Utopia.
Oct 19, 2011