The Politics of life.

In a world where we identify our scarcity problems with overpopulation, the more humans the less of everything else for everybody, we’ve passed from asking, “how we should govern our societies?” To “who should die?”. We feel attracted by Necropolitics because we fail to see that “power continuously appeals to the exception, emergency, and a fictionalize notion of the enemy”(Mbembe, 2019, p. 70) in an attempt to solve the struggle. In order to try to bring peace justice is achieved through war means.

The “sick situation” we are in as it’s defined by Carol Gilligan it’s that, the mere way we are thinking about the struggles “leaves no room for an outcome that does not do violence” (Gilligan, 2003, p. 104). But seeing a problem as solvable without violence looks like wishful thinking to us, we have objectified our very existence, when we look outside it seems that there’s no place to go, but when we look closer to the experience of women, “it seems relatively easy to identify needs and negotiate among them in the context of families and small communities, but it is notoriously difficult in larger settings”(Noddings, 2010, p. 8). To introduce this view into politics has some problems: “The male evolutionary tendency to aggression and domination has been aggravated by a pattern of cultural evolution that has applauded aggression and identified the desire to dominate with manliness” (Noddings, 2010, p. 9). If we want a reduction of violence, we have to approach political problems differently.

A cult to exclusion

We constantly find ourselves drawing lines between us and the others, as a society, we are terrified by otherness to the point that, sometimes, we just need to find one terrible case of misfortune to unleash hysteria and feelings of insecurity into our whole community or country. What is found is that, we protect our boundaries, personal but also the ones with which we identify ourselves like countries or even football teams, in order to protect those boundaries, we draw a sovereignty criterion. Mbembe (2019) defines the problem with sovereignty as “not the struggle for autonomy, but the generalized instrumentation of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations”(p. 68), where we are willing to violently charge against others with the help of our companions, “the male inner voice often uses reason to justify anger and violence”(Noddings, 2010, p. 31).

To defend sovereignty, policy makers cry out for taller walls, more patrolled borders and better trade agreements. When in borders, policy makers use hostile architecture, gentrification and social stigmatization. In all of these processes they left more and more people behind those walls, as losers in trade agreements and nowhere to go for shelter, “a vast number of efforts, through nongovernmental organizations and state and international agencies, could do much to stablish the ties of care between actual persons within and across state boundaries that can enable the decrease of violence and exploitation”(Held, 2006, p. 167).

Exclusion is crystalized in political phenomena like Brexit or the Trump election, the more we encourage this behavior with our votes, the more we normalize it as a way to patch our struggles, leaving the problems for the generations to come and enabling violent groups to return in history once again, as result, we move backwards in the history of civil rights. For example, in the transition between Trump and Obama, some problems continued, but Trump brought back a discourse that emboldened hatred groups that echoed some of his demands.

Media always manage a way to blame the immigrant, the poor and the worker. They all suffer condemnation from things in which they don’t have any agency whatsoever. As an example of this we can take a look on the climate crisis: we encourage the mases to have less kids or not have any, although we know that the average consumer from the united states consumes ten times more than the average consumer from, let’s say, Honduras, if we really care about climate change, we must “imagine a connection between ourselves and those future people who will judge our responsibility”(Held, 2006, p. 41), if we are incapable of that, our best guess is that a miracle could arise from nowhere to save us.

Living in the upside down

The distance between those who make public policy and the citizen who pays their taxes makes it difficult to create empathy since “we would not ignore the face-to-face expression of need”(Noddings, 2010, p. 146). We are tendentiously persuaded to think that with economic growth we all win and nobody loses. But this is not the case, while numbers like GDP are growing, we increasingly sacrifice our time. We barely have vacations or we don’t have any, we barely have time at home, and even we barely have time to think in ourselves. All these things are currently not seen as tragedy: We all know that the world is awful, but, it is what it is! … May anyone say.

Those who are excluded and suffer the hostilities have no time to think but about their merely survivability on a day by day basis, and those who are in a position of doing something are being beneficiated with this struggles, as a result, we find no incentives to real change. One against other, the individual against the mass, us against they, “the contemporary era is, undeniably, one of separation, hate movements, hostility, and, above all, struggle against an enemy”(Mbembe, 2019, p. 42).

The actual regimes rewards war and violent behavior, “war connotes risk, bravery, recognition and belonging”(Noddings, 2010, p. 211) we see great politicians as brave, and often the people who succeeded in business is referred to as a great risk taker. This is where care politics can help us attack those problems in a relational way, care politics “clearly implies that the members of wealthy societies must recognize their responsibilities to alleviate the hunger and gross deprivation in care”(Held, 2006, p. 160). We should aim to find a minimum ceiling that enables both, prosperity and social stability by encouraging existing relations of care, to prosper and creating “an environment in which it is possible to be good” (Noddings, 2010, p. 230) not in the sense of submission, but in living life with dignity, to be good is to have a good decent life.

Care politics

You may notice that Noddings, Held and Gilligan don’t have a utopia on their minds, but they do identify some concepts as useful for political theory and as companions of justice. The term “relational” which Carol Gilligan uses to go further in their interviews and by recognizing the concerns of the women she interviewed (in the very first page of “In a Different voice”). Virginia Held goes further and tries to envision how Ethics of care may create a “care society” by addressing “the relations that connect actual persons and to deal with the moral issues involved, such as when trust is appropriate and when it is misplaced, and what is called for by mutual consideration”(Held, 2006, p. 129). And Noddings whom emphasizes the importance of education, she addresses that justice may be useful to discriminate among need by giving priority to the most urgent, but “caring precedes the identification of needs”(Noddings, 2010, p. 181).

The relational way of care politics, “requires empathic skills of the highest order, and it also encourages the caregiver to continue learning”(Noddings, 2010, p. 121). Exclusion could be attacked with policies that enforce the existing boundaries between communities which are already cooperating in an organic way, and favor an environment where new ones could be created. We already can count on institutions which take care of the homeless, but they are only for mere survival. Homeless people can only spend the night and have to leave by the morning, in contrasts “a home provides not only shelter and food, but also a place from which, and in which, one claims an identity”(Noddings, 2002, p. 249) allowing them to have some control of future decisions. Caregivers also could be better paid, with the inclusion of more and more men in care labor by the elimination of social stigma on care workers.

With more inclusion, we must face the existential burnout society. The burnout exists because workers don’t have enough time to rest, despite desiring it and hypothetically “being able to do it”, duty overcomes them. The efforts of building a healthy society may start with a re-appropriation of time. In doing so, universal health care will be desirable, seeing as wishful thinking, politics of care instigates us to think further, as I said earlier, there’s no utopia here either. Care as seeing for care ethicists, “aims to establish, maintain, extend, and enhance natural caring”(Noddings, 2010, p. 205), in releasing time from workers, we could see more participation of both parents in raising children, more community participation and more well related -cared- families and friends.

Creating healthy and good persons is a good goal as society, but only “We value caring persons in caring relations”(Held, 2006, p. 38), although, we all agree that justice is a value, caring doesn’t seems like it. We’ve got caring institutions seen as a form of justice, but we fail to see the improvements that a well-cared society can bring, mostly: More Healthy Human beings. We have some policies in discussion which aims to give a minimum dignity to our lives, Universal Basic Income, Degrowth as practical policies, and Hedonistic Imperative which sees death as a disease and aims to the end of suffering as a philosophical option.

Much work needs to be done, in re-thinking the ways we are trying to solve our struggles, things that were only a dream decades ago –good and bad- are now thinkable options. It is an abomination that before thinking about better ways of relating ourselves, our policy makers want to get rid of those we consider strangers, as Noddings (2010) would put it: A reevaluation of the entire field of human relations should be undertaken to infuse caregiving, diplomacy, global interaction, and family practices with an appreciation of the attitudes, skills, and understanding described in care ethics (p. 248).

Bibliography

Gilligan, C. (2003). In a Different voice. Harvard University Press.

Held, V. (2006). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford University Press.

Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.

Noddings, N. (2002). Starting at Home. University of California Press.

Noddings, N. (2010). The Maternal Factor. University of California Press.