In March 2014, the Pew Research Center released a study entitled, "Millennials in Adulthood: Detached from Institutions, Networked with Friends." The study found that millennials "are at or near the highest levels of political and religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation" in the last quarter century. In a different study, published by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, only 33 percent of millennials in the United Kingdom said they are even "fairly interested" in religion, and only 54 percent said the same for politics. In that same study, "taking an interest in politics" ranked 17th on the list of interests proclaimed by British millennials. The amorphous "taking an interest in society in general" ranked nine places higher. The polls from various other European countries reveal a similar trend: millennials care little for politics, religion, and marriage, even as they do care for friends, various types of local association, and social media. In short, millennials eschew institutions.
Some undoubtedly see in this a triumph, but it is nevertheless appropriate to ask: What is lost when we turn away from the political dimension of human life, that is, when we cease to enter into political institutions? Can political institutions effectively be reduced to a "social" dimension? Or do political institutions add something to human life that cannot be captured elsewhere?
Pierre Manent, professor emeritus at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, finds the sloughing off of political institutions to be a huge problem and a characteristically modern one. In his remarkable and wide-ranging new book, Seeing Things Politically, which contains interviews between him and Benedicte Delorme-Montini, Manent addresses, among many other topics, the role of politics in human life. "Looking at things politically allows us to see what is proper to humanity because it allows us to see how man deploys his humanity in the city and how he puts his humanity to work and makes it visible." It is the political dimension that orders human life and gives it form.
This role of politics runs counter to conventional wisdom in the contemporary West. Does not political life—the very political institutions earlier mentioned—mediate between human beings and therefore restrict the full expression of our human nature? Wouldn’t we therefore be better off without those institutions?
Such concerns about political institutions are commonplace. According to a standard view, the history of political institutions is a history of giving short shrift to the underprivileged: women, those of untraditional sexual orientation, and any who are not of European ancestry. Political institutions are therefore evil. The important thing is to see humanity directly, without mediating institutions. We must therefore do away with churches and governments or at least minimize their impact.
While this "religion of humanity" appears to glorify the unification of human beings, it in fact excludes and shuts down a realm of human life, the political dimension, by basing its foundation on what qualities constitute each separate member of society: what sex, what ethnic origin, and what sexual orientation. This is not true human unity but rather a politics of identity. In order for this politics of identity to work, human beings must have compassion for each other; that is, they must recognize that they are equal to others whose identities may be different. But there is also a dark side to this politics of identity. Each individual strives to be as unequal as possible with his fellow man because he tries to show that his "competence, success, and contribution" add to the value of the society. Modern Western man is thus caught between this double imperative and contradiction: compassion for and competition with his fellow man. This confusion ultimately isolates him from those around him.
Compassionate recognition is not the same thing as seeing things in common. For there to be common objects between men, the construction of those objects must be undertaken in common. Ultimately, people take up the task of making public objects and their joint project becomes what is common between them. What is most fundamentally common is not an object but rather a purpose. Politics is this task of actively putting objects in common. The so-called politics of identity is, then, not even really "political" because it is based on pre-political individual qualities rather than common purpose.
Political institutions have acted as the spaces wherein man takes up a common purpose. To sacrifice our membership in such institutions is to run the risk of losing the ability to put things in common. This ability, once gone, is not easy to rediscover. Indeed, the potential to put things in common may always be present in us, but its activation and refinement has taken all of human history from the founding of Greek cities all the way to America’s post-World War II attempt to make the world safe for democracy by combatting the insidious ideologies of communism, fascism, and terrorism. To abandon political institutions is therefore to abandon an activity of the soul—an activity that has given human life its form throughout history.
Manent’s book invites us to reconsider the role politics plays in human life—specifically, the relationship between political institutions and the activation of our human capacities. It may be that not only the vitality of our institutions, but—more important—the vitality of our souls depends on our engagement in politics.