Tag: cynicism

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Voting, Cynicism, and Irrational Optimism of Democracy

Act of voting requires us to overcome cynicism

   Andrew Fiala

Originally published Fresno Bee 2012-06-16

Most Californians elected not to vote last week. Statewide voter turnout was less than 30%. Fresno County turnout was around 20%.

It is rational not to vote — especially in an election like this one. There were a couple of referenda where your vote might have made a difference. But in other races, the incumbent had no viable opposition. Republicans already knew that Romney was the party’s choice; and Democrats had no choice at all. It is remarkable that anyone bothered to vote, given the inevitability of much of the ballot.

What is even more remarkable is that some voted for candidates who had no chance of winning, like Ron Paul, who got 10% of the Republican vote. This seems quite irrational. Why vote for a candidate who cannot win? Isn’t it easier to just stay home?

I talked about voting with professor David Schecter, the chair of the Political Science Department at Fresno State. Schecter maintained that democracy is not a spectator sport. We have the opportunity — maybe even an obligation — to get involved and to vote.

Schecter suggested that there are many reasons why people vote. Voting can be an expressive act. When we vote, we affirm solidarity with others who have fought and died to achieve the franchise. When we vote, we act as role models — showing our children what we value. Some may even view voting as a moral obligation or a duty of citizenship, along the same lines as military service or jury duty.

Schecter pointed out, however, that social scientists also explain voting behavior as a matter of habituation. If your parents vote, you are likely to vote. People who voted in previous elections are more likely to vote in the next election than people who have not voted. Political scientists also can predict electoral behavior based upon demographic data.

But we like to believe that there is more to our own decisions than mere habit or demography. Can mere habit explain why we continue to vote when we know our votes don’t matter much? Or why some people vote for candidates who have no chance of winning?

One explanation is hinted at by the American philosopher Josiah Royce and his analysis of “lost causes.”

Royce discusses the spiritual power that is generated by those who persevere in the face of loss. When we remain loyal to a lost cause, we grieve what we’ve lost while renewing our efforts toward the future.

In many cases, it is rational to give up and surrender. But for some people, the lost cause provokes even more effort.

Royce describes a kind of energy and joy that comes from idealistically serving a cause “of which the world, as it is, is not yet ready.”

Royce’s idea helps explain why people remain committed to religious faith. It even helps explain why people keep getting married despite the fact that many marriages end in divorce.

And it explains our irrational faith in electoral politics. We want to believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that our votes count.

Every election season, we somehow find the will to believe that this time things will be different. We set our cynicism aside and go to the polls. Even when we know our votes don’t count for much, we vote. Or we vote for candidates who have no chance of winning.

There is a kind of irrational optimism and idealism among those who vote. Voters express faith in the system when they vote for losing candidates, the lost causes of American politics.

Why bother? The lost-cause voter wants to somehow send a message to someone, hoping that someday the world will be ready for a change.

The act of voting requires us to overcome cynicism with enthusiasm.

Voters were right to conclude that their votes didn’t matter much last week. Chances are that the turnout will be greater in the fall — when there are more choices that really matter. But we might worry that we’ve lost our idealism and given in to cynicism.

The 70% to 80% of voters who stayed home last week may suspect that American politics really is a spectator sport. If that’s the conclusion, then democracy itself is on its way toward becoming a lost cause.

 

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Animal Freedom and Cosmopolitan Human Borders

Wildlife knows no man-made political boundaries

   Andrew Fiala

Originally published Fresno Bee 2012-05-05

Editor’s note: Andrew Fiala has just returned from sabbatical, which took him to Israel and Greece.

Birds and other migratory animals are cosmopolitan. They move across borders, following the seasons. Migratory animals remind us that no species owns the world or a particular place. We pass through the world. We don’t possess it. And we share the earth with other humans and species.

Before I returned to Fresno, I visited a Greek wildlife hospital, which treats and houses dozens of injured birds from a variety of species: storks, pelicans, eagles, including many endangered species. These birds fly through Greece from Europe to Africa and back. Even though Greece has many safe havens for such birds — isolated mountains and uninhabited islands — many birds are killed for sport by hunters or inadvertently poisoned. The wildlife refuge houses a sad population of once- beautiful animals who have been permanently disabled by human ignorance.

Healthy birds make amazingly long migrations that take them across heavily contested borders. Every season hundreds of millions of birds pass through Israel and the Palestinian territories. These birds cross borders, which the humans below them cannot cross.

Another important migratory flyway traverses the politically fragmented island of Cyprus, in the eastern Mediterranean. Millions of migratory birds pass over the border that divides Greek and Turkish parts of the island. Unfortunately, many of them are trapped and eaten in a yearly slaughter that appalls bird lovers.

I had a conversation with some Greeks about the conflict in Cyprus and remaining tensions with Turkey. One woman said that she hoped that the Greeks would eventually take back Constantinople — using the Greek name for the city that is now called Istanbul. People around the world continue to hold dangerous ideas about borders, possessions and national pride.

From the standpoint of the animals that roam the earth such things are irrelevant. The great animal migrations existed long before humans invented cities and nations. In fact, we were once migratory animals, following the herds out of Africa. It is only fairly recently, a few millennia, that we have created the borders that corral us into nation-states.

A number of philosophers have been trying to imagine a world without borders, arguing that such a world would be more natural, less violent and more just. The cosmopolitan vision wants justice to apply equally to all people across the globe. Cosmopolitans want to address global problems such as world hunger, poverty and inequality. A cosmopolitan world would be open to migration, allowing laborers to move across borders to find jobs. And it would be less inclined toward nationalism and war.

The cosmopolitan idea has roots in ancient Greek philosophy. The word “cosmopolitan” comes from the Greek. It can be literally translated as “citizen of the world.” Cosmopolitanism is focused on the common interests of the human species, instead of on narrow national and cultural identifications.

One source for this idea is the ancient philosopher Diogenes the Cynic. Diogenes maintained, “the only true commonwealth was one that was as wide as the universe.” Diogenes chose to live according to nature — renouncing the trappings of civilization. His critics said he lived like a dog (the word “cynic” is related to the ancient Greek name for dog). Diogenes claimed that our cultural, religious, and political ideas make us unhappy and unnecessarily confine us.

The Cynics were on to something. From the vantage point of nature, our political differences do not matter much. We often forget that all human beings are members of the same species. Just as we often forget that we share the earth with a variety of other species with whom we ought to learn to co-exist.

Human borders enclose temporary settlements. The ancient Greeks gave way to Romans, Christians and Turks. And now the Eurozone is teetering. Civilizations rise and fall. But the birds and butterflies continue their yearly journey. These migrations will persist long after our civilization is forgotten — unless we kill the animals first.

Human beings like to believe that we are smarter than the other critters roaming the earth. But are we? If we were really smart, we’d stop fighting about names and borders and learn to cooperate with the other citizens of the world. Truly rational animals would strive to live in harmony with all the animals — human and nonhuman — with whom we share this small, fragile planet.