Q&A: Mark Kingwell

By Jared Bland • March 17, 2009 • No Comments

(Detail of photograph by Larry Towell, appearing in our April issue.)

When we asked Mark Kingwell to write an essay about leadership related to Obama, we weren’t entirely sure what we’d get, but none of us expected the brave, challenging, and completely original piece of writing that resulted. It’s not that we didn’t expect Mark’s writing to be those things—it characteristically is—but that we didn’t expect it to be so in the form in which it exists, an unusual, second-person monologue that allows him, as he tells me below, to be both about Obama not about Obama. I asked Mark a few questions about the new essay, the new president, and the idea of self-awareness.

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I imagine that in writing the piece, you had to do a lot of anticipating, imagining how Obama would conceive of certain things, react to certain phenomena. Now that we’ve been able to observe him in action for a few months, have you rethought your understanding of him?

I wanted the essay to be both about Obama and not about him—readers may notice that his name appears nowhere in the piece, even its headline. In that sense, the cover sell is a bit misleading, though I’m always happy to be on a magazine cover! My idea was to use the change of administration, and the election-victory and inauguration speeches as opportunities for reflection about the very idea of democratic politics. The second-person conceit is a way of doing this, imagining an interior dialogue that might be the counterpoint to all the official rhetoric being uttered by the official man in his official voice. So: back and forth thoughts, doubts, little surges of optimism, and so on. I did of course draw on some real Obama material, his stated views on taxation for example, even while putting other material—stuff from Ian McEwan, David Foster Wallace—into this ‘you’ person’s head.

What about the way you conceived of him while writing holds true? And what has been challenged by the events of the last few months?

Again, the issue for me is not Obama as such, but the pressures and realities of democratic governance. I think we’ve seen what, for better or worse, was most likely and hence predictable: the tempering of vision by structural limitations. The earmarks on the stimulus package are the visible legislative signs of that. In fact, the idea of vision in a politician is an outmoded property, given the largely technocratic approach that keeps the current arrangement in place. The narrative of elections is thus an elaborate ideological shadow play; it allows us to float the fictions of political agency, accountability, and choice. On the cusp of realizing that, what does a man of conscience think about? That’s the real issue, the same issue—as I suggested in the essay—runs through Plato’s Republic.

The problems facing the American leadership—and the leadership of much of the world—are daunting: crumbling economy, two wars, infrastructure needs, an ineffective health care system, etc. In your opinion, what are the qualities necessary in a leader facing these crises today?

Oh, good luck mostly. The ideological narrative likes to focus on personal qualities as though they make all the difference in political outcomes. But they rarely have much of an effect. They’re more about presenting the public face of the political business. In that sense, presidents function like the graphic user interface of your computer—they’re the smiley icons and pretty colours that allow you to be dominated by all the binary code in the actual chip.

To what extent does Obama line up with that model?

Pretty well—he’s a good sell. I don’t say this in any way to deride him. In many ways he’s an admirable man. My point that it doesn’t matter all that much that he is.

In developing this essay, I know you thought a lot about the idea of self-awareness. Can you offer a sort of philosophical précis on the history of that idea, and what it means for leaders today?

As I mentioned, Plato sets the agenda early on the question of what happens to people of reflective cast when they try to enter politics. His personal experiences with the Thirty Tyrants of Athens had made him cynical about this, but he was still fetched by the idea that there might be a ‘right answer’ when it comes to ordering human affairs. So were lots of other people. The history of civilization could be written as a long series of failed attempts to articulate, and implement, that right answer. We find ourselves at an interesting moment, since democracy has emerged pretty clearly as the good-as-it-gets winner; at the same time we know that it, too, is constantly compromised by its ideological limits.

Individual self-awareness, meanwhile, is as baffling as ever. Philosophers have been preoccupied with consciousness for centuries and we still have no definitive account of it. That doesn’t worry me—definitive accounts are overvalued. How fascinating, really, to think about the sheer fact of being conscious, this roiling mass of half-formed words, pictures, shapes, ideas, sounds, and leaps of imagination that each one of us entertains on a daily basis! What a strange and wonderful gift it is. But also, what a terrible and inescapable burden.

Q&A: Mark Kingwell

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