[NetBehaviour] The Game's the Thing: Articulating Political Conscience During Antidemocracy

[Max Herman]

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The possibilities on this planet for right to make might are contingent on uncertain events.

They are not guaranteed, even after significant achievements in the past.  They are like a house or garage that continues to need upkeep and maintenance.  A bad windstorm and a tree might crash down on it, or normal wear and tear.  You have to stay involved.

One thing we can say however is that might is not right, and right is not might, strictly speaking.  Right is different than might, and this is why Lincoln said so in closing his address to the Cooper Union.  It's easy to drift into thinking that might makes right, but they are not the same, right and might.

What is the difference?  Well one is that right, in its competition with might, relies more on the imagination and its accordingly indirect processes aka learning, complex decision sequences (relatively speaking), network ethics, and of course most fundamentally conscience, because it has less brute mass quantity in some regard like sticks and stones.

Those are some basics, to which some may object who want to change the subject at the outset which is their choice, but we need not agree; and though they might well apply force to us to make us change the subject, as Lincoln said at Cooper Union, we need not necessarily comply.  Only if the topic of right is articulated and understood in some meaningful, practical way can actual politics ever hope for right to make might, or for any kind of right at all to form and endure in spite of entropy's indifference and the malevolent envy of might.

Where does this indirect complexity of imaginative conscience and right come from?  Well, it's basically play.  All mammals do it, apparently; birds definitely do, and based on the butterflies I've seen this spring they might even too.  Play is games, and Olympic games are those in which authority from the highest altitude is a patron or spectator like up on Mount Olympus.

How the games or plays are done is the key.

One must be prepared, of course, and have readiness, but there is no controlling the event in advance.  Too many variables, so you have to adapt and improvise.  Those who rely on might to cover up and defend unconscionable motives often, because they have chained themselves to force, lack agility of imagination.  Worst of all maybe, from their point of view, when they are tired, burdened by a guilty conscience and laboring under their endless machinery of force and fraud, is the blurted confession verbal or otherwise, the blunder or slip-up that changes their situation from might to parity or even weakness, even downfall.

It is often by use of imagination, imaginative prediction, that we conduct experiments and create aesthetic patterns, according to modern neuroscience (see A. Seth, F. Varela, O. Sporns, you name it).  Without enacted imaging we have no science or art able to counter fraud and force.  So it's been quite a few centuries now of difficult conflicts, and right has often used art, science, and culture to oppose might's weapons, armies, and jails.  Of course, might always tries to catch up with right and eagerly hijack its methods so it's not always cut and dry; and even color TV can broadcast subservience rather than liberation.  Perhaps most difficult of all is that what is wished is for right to make might, not for right to hope it can survive and prevail by its purity alone without any might at all, much less for plain might to rule devoid of right or only a self-serving pretense of right.

How can this year's Olympic Games, to be held in Paris France where the Louvre is, be a boon to constitutional democracy and a setback for ethno-nationalist populist kleptocratic authoritarian demagoguery?  Often such national competitions are right up autocrats' alley.  It could be in the small ways, the fine details, a question of tone and timbre but also nuance, color, and gesture that right images itself along the Seine.  Swimming is swimming, but maybe you can decorate your cap or smile a certain way.

In this light we may consider whether the popular, pro-democracy, pro-peace, pro-environment, and pro-human-rights hand gesture for the 2024 Olympic Games ought to be the ASL sign for the word "experience."

The word experience, or Esperienza in Italian (which means in that wondrous language both experience and experiment), ties in very closely to multi-cultural ideas like those of William Blake's first printed verbal and visual artwork "All Religions Are One," Hamilton's Federalist Papers 1 and 85 (written in 1788, the same year as the Blake), and John Dewey's several books about democracy and pragmatism with "experience" in their titles.  It is also very likely the allegorical subject of the famous Mona Lisa portrait in Paris, given that Leonardo wrote experience was "the common mother of all the sciences and arts," and moreover is something every person and culture has in their own special way no matter where they are from or going to.  (A.N. Whitehead's philosophy, based partly on Dewey, is focused on the concept of experience as a process and the defining attribute of all phenomena, allegorical or otherwise, with even electrons "experiencing" the events of time and space in their interwoven way; and Whitehead in turn influenced the famous network intellectuals Deleuze and Latour who each have many proponents in their own right, and what is more, are French.)

The new Ken Burns film, due out this November, is about Leonardo da Vinci, an artist prominently featured in Paris and likely to be visited often during the Olympic Games by people of every nation.  Leonardo understood censorship, might making right, and the superior value for the planet and all life of right making might.  He designed plays and even costumes, performed on guitar for the king, and even said that all art forms including music and math derive from line by way of the hand.  Maybe he even inspired some others to acquire such knowledge and skills.  He called himself a "disciple of experience" (discepolo della sperientia), and that phrase is the title of Part One of aforesaid film.

In any case, Ken Burns in the past has made films about games, improvisation, symbolism, and practical democracy, like jazz, baseball, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Benjamin Franklin.  Although Leonardo will be Burns' first film about a non-US-citizen the choice makes sense in a lot of ways and represents a kind of crossing back over the pond as it were, a good thing perhaps, a revisiting with a reason fit for the season.

No one can determine in advance what hand gesture if any will gain popularity during the Olympic Games, whether they be in Paris in 2024 or any other year.  You just express an idea, or someone does, and then whatever happens from there happens.  This is very much to the good.

Max Herman
ExperienceDemocracy2024.org


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https://www.pbs.org/about/about-pbs/blogs/news/leonardo-da-vinci-a-new-film-from-ken-burns-to-air-on-pbs-november-18-and-19-2024/

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