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By Matthew Flinders

One of the critical skills of any student of politics — professors, journalists, public servants, writers, politicians and interested members of the public included — is to somehow look beyond or beneath the bigger headlines and instead focus on those peripheral stories that may in fact tell us far more about the changing nature of society. It was in exactly this sense that I was drawn recently not to the ‘War in Whitehall’ or Cameron’s speech on the UK’s future relationship with the European Union but to a story about the launch of a ‘smart fork’. The ‘smart’ feature being the existence of a shrill alarm which would inform its user if they were eating too quickly. This, I have quickly realized, is just the latest in a long stream of innovations that seek to nudge individuals towards making better choices about the way they lead their lives (eat less, save more, drive more slowly, etc.). And so it turns out that the ‘smart fork’ is just one of a great series of new innovations that seeks to deliver a form of liberal-paternalism by somehow reconciling individual freedom and choice with an emphasis on collective responsibility and well-being. My favorite amongst these innovations was the ‘smart trolley’: a supermarket trolley with sensors that beeped (and flashed) at the errant shopper who succumbed to the temptation to place a high-fat product in their trolley.

There was something about the idea of a smart fork, however, that I found particularly disturbing (or should I say ‘hard to swallow’, ‘stuck in my gullet’, ‘left a bad taste in my mouth’, etc.?). My mind jumped back to Michael Sandel’s argument that ‘the problem with our politics is not too much moral argument but too little…Our politics is over-heated because it is mostly vacant’. My concern with the launch of the ‘smart fork’ is that it arguably reflects an unwillingness to deal with the moral arguments that underlie the obesity endemic in large parts of the developed world. If Sandel’s concern about the imposition of market values is that it could ‘crowd out of virtue’ then my own concern is that behavioral economics revolution risks ‘crowding out thought’ in the sense that new technologies may provide little more than an excuse or displacement activity for not accepting responsibility for one’s actions. In the twenty-first century do we really need a computerized fork or shopping trolley in order to tell us to eat less food more slowly, or to buy less high-fat food and exercise more?

The smart fork therefore forms little more than a metaphor for a society that appears to have lost a sense of self-control and personal responsibility. This, in turn, pushes us back to broader arguments concerning the emptiness of modern political debate and to the relative value of the public and private sectors. As Alain de Botton argued in Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis, we could ask whether individual freedom has really served us so well as the leitmotif of modern life. ‘In the chaos of the liberal free market we tend to lack not so much freedom [but] the chance to use it well’ de Botton writes; ‘We lack guidance, self-understanding, self-control….being left alone to ruin our lives as we please is not a liberty worth revering’. Slavoj Žižek paints a similar argument across a broader canvas in his provocative work Living in the End Times . ‘The people wanted to have their cake and eat it’, Žižek argues; ‘they wanted capitalist democratic freedom and material abundance but without paying the full price’. He uses an advert on American TV for a chocolate laxative—‘Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate’—to mock the modern public’s constant demand for results without ever having to suffer unpleasant side effects.

Although hidden far beneath the front-page headlines, the story of the launch of the smart fork (in Las Vegas — need I say more) highlights the existence of an underlying problem in the sense that most politicians appear either unwilling or unable (possibly both) to tackle the issue head-on. Between 1980 and 2000 obesity rates doubled in the United States to the extent that one in three adults (around sixty million people) are now clinically obese, with levels growing particularly amongst children and adolescents. In this context it may well be that individuals require — even want — not a nudge but a shove or a push towards a healthier lifestyle? If this is true, it is possible that we need to revisit certain baseline assumptions about the market and the state and not simply define the role of the latter as an inherently illegitimate, intrusive, and undesirable one. To make this point is not to trump the heavy hand of the state or to seek to promote some modern version of the enlightened dictator, but it is to inject a little balance into the debate about the individual and society. Is it possible that we ‘hate’ politics simply because, unlike those unfeasibly self-contained, sane, and reasonable grown-ups that we are assumed to be by liberal politicians, most of us still behave like disturbed children (or political infants) who simply don’t want to take responsibility for our actions or how they impact on the world around us? Or — to put the same point slightly differently — if the best response we have to the obesity crisis is an electric fork then in the long term we’re all forked.

Matthew Flinders is Professor of Parliamentary Government & Governance at the University of Sheffield. He was awarded the Political Communicator of the Year Award in 2012. Author of Defending Politics (2012), he is also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of British Politics and author of Multi-Level Governance and Democratic Drift. Read more of Matthew Flinders’s blog posts and find him on Twitter @PoliticalSpike.

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In recognition of the US midterm elections, I decided to have a browse through Lend Me Your Ears: The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations and share with you a few entries that have come from the American political world. Enjoy…

“I will seek the presidency with nothing to fall back on but the judgment of the people and with nowhere to go but the White House or home.”
Robert Dole 1923-, American Republican politician, announcing his decision to relinquish his Senate seat and step down as majority leader.

“One of the uses of history is to free us of a falsely imagined past. The less we know of how ideas actually took root and grew, the more apt we are to accept them unquestioningly, as inevitable features of the world in which we move.”
Robert H. Bork 1927-, American judge and educationalist, from The Antitrust Paradox (1978)

“The American people have spoken – but it’s going to take a little while to determine exactly what they said.”
Bill Clinton 1946-, 42nd President of the United States 1993-2001, on the US presidential election of 2000.

“We are a nation of communities, of tens and tens of thousands of ethnic, religious, social, business, labour union, neighbourhood, regional and other organizations, all of them varied, voluntary, and unique… a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.”
George Bush Sr. 1924-, 41st President of the United States, acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, 18 August 1988.

“No sane local official who has hung up an empty stocking over the municipal fireplace, is going to shoot Santa Claus just before a hard Christmas.”
Alfred Emanuel Smith 1873-1944, American politician, comment on the New Deal in New Outlook, Dec 1933

“I suggested [in 1966] that we use the panther as our symbol and call our political vehicle the Black Panther Party. The panther is a fierce animal, but he will not attack until he is backed into a corner; then he will strike out.”
Huey Newton 1942-1989, American political activist, from Revolutionary Suicide (1973)

“Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it has about 18 million cracks in it.”
Hillary Rodham Clinton 1947-, American lawyer and Democratic politician, speech to her supporters, conceding the Democratic party presidential nomination to Barack Obama, 7 June 2008.

“The oldest, wisest politician grows not more human so, but is merely a grey wharf-rat at last.”
Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862, American writer, from Journal (1853)

“On my arrival in the United States I was struck by the degree of ability among the governed and the lack of it among the governing.”
Alexis de Tocqueville 1805-1859, French historian and politician, from Democracy in America (1835-40) vol. 1

'Mr President', done for Baltimore magazine. He's holding a crab and a fish because of his ecological pledge to the Bay area!

Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, has been published by Perigee, so go check it out in your local bookstore. In the post below Ammon looks at the connotations of the word “politician”.

I like to revel in my own ignorance. This is admittedly not a very difficult thing to do – I am constantly discovering things that I don’t know. These previously unfound things are interesting, and I am glad to learn of them, but the real joy comes in discovering not just something new, but rather something old that I’ve been wrong about for years.

I was given a chance to find out how wrong I was about something recently when a woman with the splendidly improbable name of Kiwi Carlisle wrote to me about one of her pet peeves: “politicians who feel it’s appropriate to insult one another by using the word “politician“.” In wondering why they would so describe their opponent she asks “Are they stupid, deluded by their advisers, or simply hypocritical?” In the hopes of finding out which of the three it was I began looking though some dictionaries.

My assumption, based on absolutely nothing aside of the vague yet powerful feeling I often have that tells me that I am right about something, was that politician is a word that formerly described a noble, patrician sort of fellow, and that this word has recently been actively debased by people who are intentionally misusing it as a description. I may not disagree with the notion that politicians are inherently worthy of contempt, but I was fairly sure that this particular insult was a recent addition to the definition. I was, of course, completely wrong in my assumption.

According to the OED, the earliest use of politician is defined as: “1. a. A schemer or plotter; a shrewd, sagacious, or crafty person. In later use also (esp. U.S. derogatory, influenced by sense A. 2b): a self-interested manipulator, whose behaviour is likened to that of a professional politician.” The first citation is from George Whetstone’s 1586 The English Myrror.

The OED does provide a number of other senses for the word, and when we arrive at 2b we find the one that I think most people commonly draw to mind when asked what a politician is: “A person who is keenly interested in practical politics, or who engages in party politics or political strife; now spec. one who is professionally involved in politics as the holder of or a candidate for an elected office.” But even under this definition there is a note that states “In the 17th and 18th centuries, usually with opprobrious overtones.”

Given that the OED stated that this word was derogatory especially in the U.S. I thought to look in some of the dictionaries and reference works that deal specifically with American usage. I turned first to Mitford Mathews’ grand and magisterial A Dictionary of Americanisms, one of the greatest works on that subject. It was no help at all, providing no definition for politician other than “the white-eyed vireo” (which is a type of bird). However, the other American dictionaries I looked at (The Century, Worcester’s, and a few 19th century Webster’s) all seemed to list the word with some pejorative connotation.

I then reasoned that this word was initially considered derogatory, but had gone through some magic amelioration and come to now usually describe a well-respected member of our country’s elite. After all, don’t we often hear of children wanting to grow up to be the nation’s president? And isn’t the president just another politician? A quick glance at Mencken’s American Language set me straight on that: “From Shakespeare onward, to be sure, there have been Englishmen who have sneered at the politician, but the term is still used across the water in a perfectly respectful manner to indicate a more or less dignified statesman. In this country it means only a party manipulator, a member of a professionally dishonest and dishonorable class.”

Every current dictionary that I looked in makes mention of the word politician having negative meaning, although it seems to no longer be the primary meaning in any of them. Based on this I’m now of the opinion that it has always been a somewhat dirty word, but is less so now than before; and furthermore is, as are so many words, in a state of flux.

I love watching words change meaning like this, and I find endless enjoyment in the immutable mutability of language. I was talking about the shifts in the meaning of politician with my girlfriend Alix, and she wondered aloud what terms of opprobrium we use now might in a hundred years time have changed to mean something less offensive than they do now. I remarked that I found it odd that children would want to grow up to occupy the position at the pinnacle of Mencken’s professionally dishonest and dishonorable class and Alix responded “Just think, maybe one day our great-grandchildren will aspire to grow up to be the Jackass of the United States of America.”

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