Apathy – the most rational response to politics and politicians

Last week, as every so often, I glimpsed in passing a couple of newspaper headlines about some survey or other telling us that we are becoming increasingly apathetic and ignorant about politics. Two-thirds of us, or something (I couldn't be bothered reading it), don't know the difference between the Oireachtas and the Government; a shocking number think politicians do a good job but haven't a clue what they actually do; nine out of ten voters under 30 don't know the name of the Ceann Comhairle – that sort of thing. As always, media reports presented this information in a tone halfway between disbelief and admonishment. The implication was that we should be gravely concerned on account of our democracy. But why? Does it really matter that nowadays only a minority of us can be bothered about the nitty-gritty of politics? The same newspapers that accuse us of political ignorance have themselves, over the past couple of decades, drastically reduced their own coverage of day-to-day politics. Thirty years ago, national newspapers carried several pages of Dáil reports, but nowadays parliamentary coverage is confined to a few paragraphs about vaguely colourful exchanges between the more flamboyant public representatives. This reduced coverage, of course, reflects the reducing public appetite, but this appetite itself reflects more than boredom or frivolity. The public has largely become uninterested in the detailed content of politics not merely because of lack of seriousness or a decreasing attention span, but because the grist of politics no longer suggests itself as relevant or engaging.

Without necessarily being able to pinpoint why or when it happened, people have a sense that politics ceased to have the kind of significance it once had. Partly, it is because people have a developing sense that the important decisions are being made elsewhere – in Brussels, perhaps, or in the boardroom of a transnational corporation in Houston, Texas. People now in middleage and beyond probably grew up with an idea that politics was, for all its faults, the process by which our collective life was organised and administered. Politics was, in a sense, the brain of our society, the repository of the thought process by which, as we understood it, the "country" was, as we used to say, "run". But this idea, which persists in political and media circles, is misleading as to the nature of our society now. The major issues concerning our economic and social condition have, of course, long since been handed over to multinational capital and a range of supra-national forms of governance, and the broad strokes of our collective life are effected not by the occupiers of Government Buildings, but the movements of global capital, free trade, international jurisprudence and US foreign policy.

But, perhaps more importantly, the "brain" of our society is no longer to be located in any single domain, but is a diffuse and highly intricate public organism which governs our collective life in an infinitely more complex manner than was the case a generation ago. The public thought-process is no longer dictated, as in the past, by a small number of men looking into their own hearts, but by a tremendous tumult of conflicting voices. Political energy expresses itself not in the windbag speeches of those clamouring for public office but in the everyday actions of people who, by going about their lives, occupations and activities, themselves dictate the shifts and progressions of society much more effectively than any of the pointless bills trundling through the Oireachtas. Lobby groups, residents' associations, special interest campaigns, sporting organisations, media -- all these, separately and together, represent the true transmission system of whatever indigenous democratic power survives. In the age of clientelism, media commentators used to taunt politicians with being mere messenger boys, but politicians were in those days far more powerful and significant than they are now. Back then, voters actually believed a politician was capable of delivering something. What most citizens nowadays feel about politics is based not on cynicism but on a very rational impression of the impotence of politicians. All around, we perceive problems and shortcomings which, though not necessarily capable of being fixed without difficulty, are certainly capable of being fixed. And yet, year after year, the same problems persist, while, election after election, politicians arrive at our front doors promising that, as a matter of priority, they intend fixing these problems. Most citizens consequently believe that what happens in the public domain happens despite rather than because of the efforts of politicians. Politicians, for all they may blather about change, are the last to realise how much the world has actually changed. The world of 2006 is vastly different to that of even 1996, but politicians act as if nothing has changed since 1916, behaving and speaking as though politics is self-evidently a heroic calling, a repository of idealism, a force for progress and change. Most of the rest of us have a sense that the transmission system of power in the public domain has altered radically, and that real change now happens because of a complex interaction of factors that have nothing at all to do with those jokers grinning down at us from electricity poles. It is not simply that politicians have given away all their power, or that they are incapable of responding to the impulses of true democratic energy from the people, but that they either do not know, or do not realise that everyone else has realised, or both know and realise and are determined to ignore, that politics is now just an empty ritual, aping what it was like when it made a difference. Politicians, uniquely, don't get the joke, seeming not to realise that most people now are more knowing than they are, that everything they say is deconstructed in terms of its emptiness, cynicism or prevarication the moment it leaves their lips.

Politics is a profession for the irony-deficient, the humourless, the pretentious and the insincere. The wonder is not that many of us are turning off, but that some of us still bother thinking and talking about politics at all.