Wrong understanding of the struggling relationship of politics, power and ethics may lead to the justification of violence, oppression – and pave way for autocracy.
The widespread disregard for human rights and international law that seems to characterise contemporary politics may lead one to believe that politics is about power and not about ethics. This belief, however, is wrong and dangerous.
It is wrong because it reflects a wrong understanding of what politics, power and ethics are all about. It is dangerous because, this wrong understanding leads to the justification of violence and oppression and pave the ways to autocracy. Ultimately, this belief tells more of the personalities of those who hold it than of what politics is all about.
The ethics of power
The are at least two kinds of people that think politics is about power rather than ethics. First, there are those who think that ethics, and moral values play no role in politics, second there are those who think the role these play is only instrumental: an accessoire that makes the exercise of power less costly and more effective.
The best example of the former type is Stephen Miller, Senior advisor of US President, Donald Trump, who candidly enough declared to journalist Jack Tapper on CNN: “We live in a world (…) that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time…”.
“Other less candid (but smarter?) leaders refrain from voicing such radical opinions, but hold on to the belief, that role of ethics is only instrumental to the effective exercise of power. In politics and elsewhere, these leaders pay lip services to values such as sustainability, compassion, equality etc. as a practice of image management or “branding” for themselves and the institutions they represent. As German scholar Tomas Klikauer argued in his critique of management ethics, “Ethics is simply a somewhat distant add-on to management like milk in a coffee, if needed at all.”
To argue their case, the apologists of the instrumental role of ethics typically mobilise the “classics”, especially the all-time favourite among them: The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli. Despite his fame, this is an author that is read not as often and perhaps not as attentively, as it is quoted. In other words, there are reasons to believe that those who think of Machiavelli as a champion of the political ruthlessness, either haven’t read him or, if they did, they completely missed the point.
Machiavelli’s prescriptions do not deny the political relevance of virtue but quite the opposite. As Erica Benner argued in her book Machiavelli’s Prince: A New Reading: “At the Prince’s core is a biting critique of both ruthless realpolitik and amoral pragmatism, not a revolutionary new defence of these positions. Far from eroding ancient contrasts between good and evil, just and unjust, or tyranny and freedom, Machiavelli’s book shows readers the dire consequences that ensue when our language and practices fail clearly to distinguish them.”
Those who seek to justify ruthless behaviour in politics and elsewhere on grounds that only strength, deception and ultimately self-aggrandizement matter, know very little about power and how it works.
The instrumental (mis)use of ethics and the misinterpretation of as classic texts like Machiavelli’s Prince does not diminish the importance of ethics for the exercise of power, nor the important of these texts. It only tells of the quality of the leaders (mis)using them. These uses stand like a stain of filth on the fine clothes wore to compensate with appearances what is lacking in substance.
Those who seek to justify ruthless behaviour in politics and elsewhere on grounds that only strength, deception and ultimately self-aggrandizement matter, know very little about power and how it works. These people are not “realist”. They are just incompetent.
The instrumental use of ethics has entropic effects on the legitimacy of power and therefore on the effective exercise of power itself, because when the legitimacy of power declines, the roles of violence and fear increase. As history shows, there is always a point in which this equation delivers a negative result and people will choose to “fight” instead of “flight”.
Despite its falsity, this belief is appealing to leaders who lead without having neither the competences nor the integrity to do so. Still, those who believe ethics are only instrumental to the exercise of power, to the manipulation of consent, and ultimately to oppression, should be aware of the power of ethics and of people’s inclination to eventually rebel against abuses.
The power of ethics
The power of ethics – the influence of moral principles and considerations on society, its institutions, on people’s lives and ultimately on the competition for political power – should not be underestimated. To acknowledge this power is important, not primarily for moral reasons, but for pragmatic ones – or as Machiavelli argued, for the effective exercise of authority.
In democratic regimes, this acknowledgement is particularly important because truly democratic leaders should be inspired by an ethic of democratic accountability (and e.g. pursue the long term welfare of the community they lead), rather than by an instrumental ethic: the manipulative use of moral principle and standards for the pursue of particular interests and the preservation of their influence.
To argue my point here I will rely on three metaphors: the glue, the compass and a promise (or a threat).
First the power of ethics can be thought of as a glue that keeps people together through consensus rather than coercion and bring about compliance through active participation instead of fear. Truly ethical behaviour by the leaders increases trust which becomes an important resource especially when the particular interests of some have to be sacrificed for the common good.
Second, the power of ethics is the power of a compass that gives direction: it does not tell one where to go but it helps to get there rather than get lost. As Antti Kylliäinen recently argued in his book on ethics, Hyvänteossa, “values tell us what is good and worth thriving for” (“Arvot kertovat, mikä on hyvää ja tavoittelemisen arvoista”).
The power of ethics can be thought of as a glue that keeps people together through consensus rather than coercion and bring about compliance through active participation instead of fear.
If leaders neglect the influence of ethics and moral values, the individuals and communities that depends on them will get lost. When this happens, in politics and elsewhere, fragmentation, polarization and even violence increase because sacrifices are extolled for no other purpose than to preserve a leadership that has lost its direction and has no other purpose that preserving itself.
Third, the power of ethics can be described in relations to social functions similar to those performed by forms of speech like a promise (or a threat). It is perhaps an evolutionary fact that the constitution of society was originally inspired by the efforts of individual to increase their chances of survival by uniting or, as we would say today, hanging together so not to hang separately.
Whatever the reason, fundamental values and virtues participate to the human experience of life and its appeal depends on a promise about the possibility of a societal harmony: a reward for the effort of personal improvement with transformative effects on the relationship between the individual and society.
This promise, in other words, transforms the meaning of the social bond from a risk of subjugation and oppression to an opportunity for emancipation. The idea that “there is no such a thing as society” supports ideologies and policies that seek to isolate people: to break up collectives and let the individual stand alone and vulnerable against their rulers.
To “deny” society is to deny the “social contract” and pave the way to a social order based on fear. If the power of “ethics as a promise” is suppressed, the same will return as a threat – and once the Genie of fear is unleashed, however, the leaders that freed it are not immune from it.
These metaphors may perhaps also help to understand why the power of democratic ethics – a distinctive, post-feudal form that inspired and became politically relevant after the American and French revolutions – is what makes democratic regimes unique and uniquely resilient. In democracies, ethical leadership combines the power of ethics as a “glue”, as a “compass” and as “promise” transforming the people into the people that rule themselves or Demos: an indomitable community of individuals with the competences and the integrity necessary for self-rule.
Fundamental values and virtues participate to the human experience of life and its appeal depends on a promise about the possibility of a societal harmony.
The power of democratic ethics, in other word, is not an attribute of the leaders or the population. Rather it is an attribute of democratic politics: in essence, a relationship uniting the people and their leaders which establishes the Demos as a collective capable of deciding about own future and on the ways to bring that about.
In other words this is the power that establishes the actual rule of the people by the people as a practical possibility rather than a mere ideal. In this perspective, the resilience of democracies does not depend primarily on the qualities of their leaders but on the extent the importance of democratic ethics as the glue, the compass and the promise is acknowledged by both the people and their leaders.
When this acknowledgment collapses, because leaders deny or neglect the importance of democratic ethics and/or because the ethics of individualism and opportunism become influential, a democracy loses cohesion, direction and hope. The leaders that effectively manage to interpret their role in relation to the responsibilities associated to democratic ethics, rather than the privileges of authority, are the “martyrs” of Demos: the “witnesses” of its existence and its political power. The rest are merely demagogues that corrupt the ideal of democracy.
Thinking the power of ethics in the age of polycrisis
The subordination of ethics to power is nothing new. What is new is perhaps the combination of two tendencies. The first is the end of a useful fiction. In the years of the Cold War and its aftermath, the political support for democratic ethics in international politics was perhaps a fiction or facade – but a useful one, because it supported fundamental democratic principles, such as the rule of law and human rights, and the authority of institutions such as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice that actually worked for a better world.
As the power of political actors that in the past supported this “fiction” is currently used to undermine it, the result is not a better, more “honest” world but just the undermining of the values, the hopes and ultimately the “promise” these principles and institutions testified.
The other tendency, closely connected to the previous one, is the growing popularity of “transactional leadership” – a form of leadership in which authority is used to achieve more or less particular interests and short-term results – among political and corporate leaders, in domestic and international politics. The glorification of autocracy as “strong leadership” in both the state and the firm, by the likes of Stephen Miller, naturalizes the influence of toxic personalities in politics and in the working place. It inspires and justifies “organizational dehumanization”, the representation of people as “sacrificial citizens”, “extrajudicial killing” and abuses of the kind recently inflicted by ICE on the people in Minneapolis.
In the years of the Cold War and its aftermath, the political support for democratic ethics in international politics was perhaps a fiction or facade – but a useful one, because it supported fundamental democratic principles.
Independently from their declared ideological standpoints, too many political and corporate leaders around the world are uniting today in what philosopher Jacques Rancière called “the hatred for democracy”: a fundamental resentment for the very idea of the rule of the people by the people and for the ethics that supports it as a compass and as a promise.
For people of my generation and older – the Cold War & post WW2 generation respectively – the idea of ethics subordinated to power hurts because, at some point, in a not-so-distant past, we actually experienced the power of ethics. The world-wide consensus that created the UN and its Charter, the international law and human rights, was possible because our predecessors, having witnessed the horrors of the concentration camps and the nuclear effacement of innocent civilians, cared about the future of the generations to come, our present.
Those institutions were established as conceptual landmarks that, like monuments, are erected to testify of a past that must be remembered and its lessons heeded in order to avoid repeating tragic mistakes. That consensus expressed a union of ideals, directions and a promise that the leaders of today refuse to acknowledge.
I don’t think Machiavelli would consider this choice a wise one, nor the condition of a struggle for power deprived of meaning a desirable condition. And perhaps, he would join the character “V” of the movie V for Vendetta and remind them that: “People should not be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people”.
PhD Matteo Stocchetti is docent in political communication at Helsinki University and Åbo Akademi. matteo.stocchetti[at]proton.me
Article image: rawkkim / Unsplash
