Prophetic Politics

JAN HANSKA
CONCLUSION
114 Perspectives Vol. 17, No. 2 2009
And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
2. Timothy 4:4
In order to create a civil religion one does not have to re-invent the wheel. The narrative
building blocks are already in existence waiting to be reassembled anew with
elaborate storytelling as the cement to hold them together. Old common beliefs
exist in any society. They have to be resurrected and given a new shape with different
retellings of the old stories. Intertextuality plays a huge role in this process since
the ready-made beliefs only have to be conjured up from the collective memory of
the society. Every society has told and tells stories about its own existence and there
is a virtual library at the disposal of the prophetic politician. By no means is prophetic
politics merely confined to establishing a national identity or creating a civic religion.
In can be seen as a new narrative based form of political leadership which may
be able to interest the citizenry in politics again. At the same time the ability of
prophetic policymaking to arouse passions may lead to undesirable outcomes. The
penultimate type of outcome is war, such as those that occurred after the stories of
the ‘axis of evil’ and weapons of mass destruction.
The essence of a prophecy lies in the mixture of both the content and the form of
the narrative. However, the juxtaposition of a present full of problems and a future
full of promises is the core of a prophecy. A cynic sees the political world as full of
trouble and unfulfilled promises but even a hopeless pessimist acknowledges that
the aim of politics is to make choices for a better future. A narrative has more potential
in awakening passions and activating the imagination than statistics or cruel
facts and figures. Narrativizing the political process enables the citizenry to better
gain an interest in the events by involving them in the creation of the storyworld. Storytelling
is another means of political persuasion which bypasses the brain by refraining
from rational argumentation and aims at winning over the heart and the
base emotions.
The power of stories should not be undervalued in contemporary politics. In our
confusing world we seek guidance, simplifications of the complex world and parables
which enable us to understand at least to some degree our multifaceted identities
and surroundings. I argue that the role of stories told in politics needs to be
studied thoroughly if only in order to develop counter-stories for the prophetic politics
of zealots and dictators. To diminish the effects of leadership by narratives, one
must be able to formulate contesting narratives to be offered as plausible alternatives.
Prophetic politics can be beneficial to democracy in a pluralistic society but if
there are no other narratives on offer, they can be the gravest threat to democracy
by working as centres of gravity and distorting the free flow of ideas. Even the Endlösnung
that was the aim of Hitler’s politics could be considered a prophetic vision