The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
Credit must be given to Old Nik, perhaps the very first philosopher to give a devilish reading of politics, a grim understanding of the political and a truly dark description of politicians as dark individuals.
By nature, he observed, “human beings are either good or bad” but “for the purposes of politics” he warned “human beings must be treated as bad.” Distrust and suspicion are therefore, in the ruminations of Niccolo di Bernado di Machiavelli, the first article of political wisdom.
In Machiavellian political pragmatism to trust politics and politicians is the first step towards tragedy. Celebrating his own political wisdom that has over the generations earned him both admiration and condemnation, Machiavelli boasted of his rigorous study of ancient philosophers and observation of the political ways of the ancients.
The nickname Old Nik was actually a reference to Machiavelli as Lucifer himself and the Anti-Christ of history and politics.
Besides his formal studies in history, the arts and philosophy, Machiavelli founded in the outskirts of Florence a secret intellectual society that he called the Orti Oricellari, a philosophical underworld circle that was composed of devilish thinkers that studied politics and society at large as the devil’s domain and a theatre of evil.
Paradoxically, for reading politics devilishly Machiavelli gained the reputation of being the devil himself, he was, as it frequently happens in politics, accused of being what he was opposed to.
In justice and actuality Niccolo Machiavelli was a thorough going Republican who believed in humanity and did so, not with blind and excitable optimism, but hard-nosed pragmatism, knowing that there is a devil in each and every one of us. In politics as the life and death business of the world and our lives, the devil in all of us and in all politicians must be kept in check or else disaster befalls.
In the second half of the Seventeenth Century John Locke and Thomas Hobbes were the political philosophers that prominently advocated for a contract Government where rulers were to rule by legal and ethical consent of the ruled.
The political notion that leaders were God-given angels was getting exhausted and political leaders were being exposed by philosophers and historians as human actors and performers in the theatre of power in the world.
In the philosophical and political meditations of Locke and Hobbes, the State itself was exposed as, not a natural institution, but a man-made construct and artefact of power that can be as faulty and as fallible as man is.
Institutional measures and systemic structures were supposed to be put in place to keep the devil in all politicians and all peoples under the leash. Sad for Old Nik, when humanist and liberatory philosophers are counted he is mentioned as the opposite, all because of his dark classic, The Prince, which was not exactly a book but a job application letter that an unemployed Machiavelli wrote, and which he truly did not believe in.
In 1494, Girolamo Savonarola seized power in Florence and exiled the incumbent Medici family. Savonarola’s successor, Piero Soderini in 1498 promoted the then 29-year-old Machiavelli to a diplomat and his personal political advisor.
Before that Old Nik was a struggling dramatist and poet that during the nights studied history and political philosophy and had developed a keen sense of political observations and predictions.
Under Soderini, Florence fell under the spell of Old Nik who was seen not as just an advisor and a diplomat but the brains behind the throne, a scheming and cunning technician of power. He advised Soderini to militarise Florence and arm the City State, the soldiery took over the peaceable City and the strong arm became the foremost technology of rule.
Machiavelli hated political fragility and military weakness of Florence and had read of the perils of the “unarmed prophets.”
Misfortune befell the powerful Florentine diplomat when the Medici family regained their throne in 1512 and immediately arrested and tortured Machiavelli whom they knew to be a hand and brain of the previous regime, after giving him amnesty they banished him to exile in his rural farm where he survived on cutting wood for sale and trapping small birds for supper, and deep study.
Meditations of an Exiled Philosopher
After his imprisonment, torture and exile the humiliated Machiavelli on the 13th of March 1513 wrote, from his rural farm, a letter to his friend Francesco Vettori, a diplomat that was working with the new regime, he thanked him for influencing his release and begged the favour to be employed. On the 10th of December the same year, Machiavelli wrote to Vettori disclosing that he had written not a book or a letter but a “thing” that he hoped will convince the incumbent prince, Lorenzo the Magnificent de Medici, to employ him.
The Prince was therefore not only Machiavelli’s song for supper and breakfast combined, a plea to a regime that hated and distrusted him, but he did not believe in it himself. It was a “thing” written to polish the ego of Lorenzo, and display to him that his own throne would be fragile without Machiavellian brains behind it.
The trick did not work, the Medici feared and distrusted Old Nik far too much to take the risk. Machiavelli died “poor,” disappointed and angry in exile and was buried in a flower pot that hanged from below the window of his triple-story mansion. His death was the birth of Machiavellianism.
His political wisdom benefited from the Jesus effect, it became more powerful and spread world-wide after his death than it did during his lifetime.
What Machiavelli meant to be a secret document for the eyes of Lorenzo, because it was to be too embarrassing for him if were to be read in public, remained behind becoming the face of his philosophy.
Louis Althusser actually became famous for his essay where he convinced many that actually The Prince was a satiric document in which Old Nik was throwing jibes at the new regime in Florence.
Not so many students of politics and philosophy for instance, not even most historians, know it that Machiavelli actually wrote a short but influential essay condemning the colonisation and “Persecution of Africa” by vandals that were creeping into North Africa to pillage what he described as the “province of Africa.” Yes, Machiavelli opposed colonialism.
Against the Post-Political
The entire world is in this state of political and physical disrepair because of the trappings of post-politicalism. Post-politicalism is misguided, sometimes innocent and sometimes simply naïve, optimism about politics and politicians. A dangerous political naiveté and innocence that Niccolo Machiavelli rejected and chose to read and understand politics and the political as it is, dark and dangerous business, a game that is not for angels.
Of the politicians, George Orwell, himself a keen Machiavellian thinker and observer of political affairs said “whenever saints are announced” in politics discerning people must “doubt the saintliness and question the agenda of the saint makers.”
Orwell was cautioning against the making of easy heroes out of politicians. Robert Kaplan has asked for a “warrior politics” and a “pagan ethos” in dealing with politics and politicians, that is to assume that they will do wrong and that they are up to no good, so as to avoid disappointment when they go on to do wrong.
Kaplan correctly or mistakenly believes that America became an Empire because of its pagan ethos right from the Founding Fathers where rules of impeachment were set even before the leader was elected.
In his own belated disappointment with post-politics, Slavoj Zizek has adapted the present Italian equivalent of Machiavelli, Giorgio Agambeni whose wisdom is that the “courage of thought is hopelessness.”
In the political courage of hopelessness that Zizek is circulating, if we see light approaching at the end of the tunnel we must not celebrate the break of day but fear that a train is coming to crash us.
Political heroes and deliverers, in that sense are not simple messiahs and angels that have come to save us but monsters that will eat us.
Right up to Nelson Mandela himself, the global saint, Latin America and Africa have learnt that heroes are not easy sons of the soil and gallant deliverers.
They are not just good sons of the land that love humanity. They can be monsters that have come to eat history and all of us.
The heroes are not just those sons that are frequently eaten by the revolution as victims, but they also frequently eat revolutions and chew history to pieces. Post-politicalism is the promised land political thinking that mistakenly takes politics for a paradise and politicians for angels.
It is costly innocence and naivete. Politics and politicians, away from post-political naivete and innocence, must be looked in the eye as potential monsters and possible Lucifers that have come to eat us, measures beyond excitement and euphoria, should be put in place to ensure that we are not eaten.
-Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founding member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN). He writes from Manzini, in Swaziland: [email protected].
