Ultra-processed politics fails to satisfy

No-hope manifestos, full of ugly policies, leave us craving something better.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is assistant priest at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London.

Three piles of ready-meals sit on a shelf. One stack is blue, the next yellow and the third red.

Party food.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai

There are now less than two weeks to go before polling day, and the nation appears to have simultaneously reached the highest fever pitch of emotion and the absolute nadir of political scruple. The Tory campaign has been comically, awfully inept - announcements in the rain, D-Day, gambling fraud. The Labour campaign has been an odd blend of quasi-Confucian aphorisms (‘Stability is Change’…what is that!?) and a blank refusal to give much detail on any future plans and actions - almost offensive from a party that seems guaranteed to win a majority that would give it little resistance. The Lib Dem campaign has resembled a Centre Parks holiday, and I’m here for it!

The recent Question Time of political leaders perfectly encapsulated the grim reality of this election campaign. The anger towards Rishi Sunak was palpable, and his pathological inability to not be defensive and snippy shone through. A total lack of any emotion was shown towards Kier Starmer (a void that again was filled with more anger towards Rishi Sunak), and his militantly practiced refusal to actually say anything of substance. Ed Davey was quite charming actually; but not enough to make the whole viewing process anything but depressing.

Yet…

This is our situation, and we must deal with it. This is OUR election, and WE MUST engage with it. Alastair Campbell - one half of the most listened to political podcast in the UK - regularly calls for compulsory voting. The ad campaign reminding people (especially young people) to register to vote has been incessant. Even the Archbishop of York has written an open letter in the Sunday Express encouraging everyone to register and to exercise their democratic duty. Why? What for? I find the entire cadre unappealing to the point of being odious. Reading the manifestos I was struck by two realisations: the space between so many of the policies was miniscule, and they were so bloody ‘ugly’.

I don’t mean ugly like the loveless, jingoistic, cruel ramblings of Reform. The two main parties have produced manifestos that inspire no hope. They equate the fullness and completeness of the human social condition to the subtle movements of financial resources from one area to another. They are each proposing a almost identical economic foundation, with a few nods to the fact that ‘society’ and ‘human relations’ exist, like a Potemkin village designed to impress the visiting dignitary, ‘the voter’. Not only do they read like they were written by someone who cannot think five, maybe ten, years ahead; they read like they were written by someone who has a cold indifference to the transcendental concepts of ‘TRUTH’, ‘BEAUTY’, ‘GOOD’. The whole tenor of our political culture and conversation is the same three riffs on post-modern liberalism, played with dexterity and enthusiasm of a corpse.

If you feel passionately about your community, and you know the issues, and you have a candidate you believe in, vote. If none of this applies, don’t worry, and don’t let anyone shame you.

And yet I MUST vote? What for? Why must I be shamed into preforming the perfunctory routine of soul-destroying civic duty? Why must I be bullied into giving the correct sacrifice to the great and terrible God of ‘DEMOCRACY’ in the vain hope that this vicious, nihilistic titan of bureaucratic ineptitude might yet again bless the polis with five more years of alienation and sublimated resentment.

The Christian message, the Gospel, is not antithetical to politics. The Gospel of Christ is about one’s whole life - body, spirit, soul, relationships, friends, family, enemies, strangers, work, play, sickness, death - and so it cannot be divorced from politics, because as people who live in a society we must encounter the ‘political’ every day. However, the Kingdom of God is a Kingdom and not a Republic. Jesus does not answer the devious questions of the Pharisees with a markedly uninformative screed on updating tax legislation, he says to ‘Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.’ He speaks to the people about radical charity, freedom from worry and stress about today, about a community of absolute loving relationship where everyone is a mother, and sister, and brother to everyone else.

I am called - just like I believe all people, as beloved creatures who’s end is being united with God in all eternity - to keep my eyes on the horizon of the absolute, the beautiful and peaceful Kingdom of Christ which is not for this world. This does not mean apathy towards politics or even to the current election. It does, however, mean that I cannot and will not be persuaded that finding this pathetic display of ineptitude, silence, exaggeration, and unpleasant divisiveness which we call a campaign, anything other than a waste of my time and energy. If you feel passionately about your community, and you know the issues, and you have a candidate you believe in, vote. If none of this applies, don’t worry, and don’t let anyone shame you. The Kingdom of God will not be built by the winner of the General Election. It will be built by Christ working through the love and relationships that form a community of charity and service…and you can’t legislate for that.

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Education

Leading

26 July 2024

5 min read

Why I teach over my students’ heads

Successful teaching is a work of empathy that stretches the mind.

James K.A. Smith

James is a philosopher, cultural critic and author.

A blackboard covered in chalk writing and highlights.

James's chalkboard.

I’ve been teaching college students for almost 30 years now. As much as I grumble during grading season, it is a pretty incredible way to make a living. I remain grateful.

I am not the most creative pedagogue. My preference is still chalk, but I can live with a whiteboard (multiple colors of chalk or markers are a must). Over the course of 100 minutes, various worlds emerge that I couldn’t have anticipated before I walked into class that morning. (I take photos of what emerges so I can remember how to examine the students later.) I think there is something important about students seeing ideas—and their connections—unfold in “real time,” so to speak.

I’ve never created a PowerPoint slide for a class. I put few things on Moodle, and only because my university requires it. I’ve heard people who use “clickers” in class and I have no idea what they mean. I find myself skeptical whenever administrators talk about “high impact” teaching practices (listening to lectures produced the likes of Hegel and Hannah Arendt; what have our bright shiny pedagogical tricks produced?). I am old and curmudgeonly about such “progress.”

But I care deeply about teaching and learning. I still get butterflies before every single class. I think (hope!) that’s because I have a sense of what’s at stake in this vocation.

I am probably most myself in a classroom. As much as I love research, and imagine myself a writer, the exploratory work of teaching is a crucial laboratory for both. I love making ideas come alive for students—especially when students are awakened by such reflection and grappling with challenging texts. You see the gears grinding. You see the brow furrowing. Every once in a while, you sense the reticence and resistance to an insight that unsettles prior biases or assumptions; but the resistance is a sign of getting it. And then you see the light dawn. I’m a sucker for that spectacle.

This is how the hunger sets in. If you can invite a student to care about the questions, to grasp their import, and experience the unique joy of joining the conversation that is philosophy.

Successful teaching is, fundamentally, a work of empathy. As a teacher, you have to try to remember your way back into not knowing what you now take for granted. You have to re-enter a student’s puzzlement, or even apathy, to try to catalyze questions and curiosity. Because I teach philosophy, my aim is nothing less than existential engagement. I’m not trying to teach them how to write code or design a bridge; I’m trying to get them to envision a different way to live. But, for me, it’s impossible to separate the philosophical project from the history of philosophy: to do philosophy is to join the long conversation that is the history of philosophy. So we are always wresting with challenging, unfamiliar texts that arrive from other times that might as well be other planets for students in the twenty-first century.

So successful teaching requires a beginner’s mindset on the part of the teacher, a charitable capacity to remember what ignorance (in the technical sense) feels like. To do so without condescension is absolutely crucial if teaching is going to be an art of invitation rather than an act of alienation. (The latter, I fear, is more common than we might guess.)

Such empathy means meeting students where they are. But successful teaching is also about stretching students’ minds and imaginations into new territory and unfamiliar habits of mind. This is where I find myself especially skeptical of pedagogical developments that, to my eyes, run the risk of infantilizing college students. (I remember a workshop in which a “pedagogical expert” explained that the short attention span of students required changing the PowerPoint slide every 8 seconds. This does not sound like a recipe for making students more human, I confess.)

That’s why I am unapologetic about trying to teach over my students’ heads. I don’t mean, of course, that I’m satisfied with spouting lectures that elude their comprehension. That would violate the fundamental rule of empathy. But such empathy—meeting students where they are—is not mutually exclusive with also inviting them into intellectual worlds and conversations where they won’t comprehend everything.

This is how the hunger sets in. If you can invite a student to care about the questions, to grasp their import, and experience the unique joy of joining the conversation that is philosophy, then part of the thrill, I think, is being admitted into a world where you don’t “get” everything.

This gambit—every once in a while, talking about ideas and thinkers as if students should know them—is, I maintain, still an act of empathy.

When I’m teaching, I think of this in a couple of ways. At the same time that I am trying to make core ideas and concepts accessible and understandable, I don’t regret talking about attendant ideas and concepts that will, to this point, still elude students. For the sharpest students, this registers as something to learn, something to be curious about. Or sometimes when we’re focused on, say, Pascal or Hegel, I’ll plant little verbal footnotes—tiny digressions about how Hannah Arendt engaged their work in the 20th century, or how O.K. Bouwsma’s reading of Anselm is akin to something we’re talking about. The vast majority of students won’t be familiar with either, but it’s another indicator of how big and rich and complicated the intellectual cosmos of philosophy is. For some of these students (not all, certainly), this becomes tantalizing: they want to become the kind of people for whom a vast constellation of ideas and thinkers are as familiar and present as their friends and cousins. This becomes a hunger to belong to such a world, to join such a conversation.

This gambit—every once in a while, talking about ideas and thinkers as if students should know them—is, I maintain, still an act of empathy. To both meet students where they are and, at the same time, teach “over their heads,” is an invitation to stretch into new terrain and thereby swell the soul into the fullness for which it was made. The things that skitter just over their heads won’t be on the exam, of course; but I’m hoping they’ll chase some of them for a lifetime to come.

This article was originally published on James K A Smith’s Substack Quid Amo.