Effectiveness vs rationality

This post by David Wearing raises an awkward trade-off. He says, reasonably I suspect, that successful political activism requires huge and sustained effort:

To defeat whatever form of injustice we face requires us to exert ourselves in a sustained way over a substantial period of time. Notwithstanding the demands of our professional and personal commitments, activism cannot be somewhere to visit for an occasional holiday.

This, though means there’s (sometimes? often?) a trade-off between successful political activism and rationality. I mean this in two senses:
1. The costs of protesting for a week - to take Brian Haw’s example cited by David - are high; the inconvenience and loss of wages. But the gains from changing policy - even if this happens - are spread over everyone. Narrow instrumental rationality will only very rarely tell us to be a sustained activist.
2. To undertake such a sacrifice, one must have a huge belief not only in the rightness of one’s cause, and in the chances of its success, but also in its importance. Such beliefs will very often owe more to over-confidence and fanaticism than to pure rationality. Whether Brian Haw was right or wrong, he was not an exemplar of conventional standards of rationality.
If David is right, then, many of the political campaigns that succeed will be motivated to a great extent by irrationality*. In this sense, there’s a trade-off between effective political action on the one hand and rational belief on the other; if it weren‘t such a horrible cliché I‘d cite Yeats**.
Whether this tells us something about the limits of rationality or the nature of politics, I’m not sure.
Such a trade-off, however, is not confined to politics. A similar thing is true in business. If entrepreneurs knew the risks of failure and the effort required for success, we’d probably have fewer of them; it is only because overconfidence triumphs over objectivity that we have as many entrepreneurs as we do.
Although politics and entrepreneurship share the trade-off between effectiveness and rationality, there is a difference between them. To the entrepreneur, the costs of irrationality - if they are incurred at all - are private. In politics, however, the costs are externalized; the noise of fanatics (and, remember, professional politicians can be fanatics too) can drown out more sober voices.
* I say “many” rather than “all” because the Arab spring seems an exception. But this is because the regimes were so repressive - and youth unemployment so high - that point (1) did not hold.
** No mention of Yeats should pass without reference to this astounding brilliance.

Comments

[Mr WH]

Isn't this missing a point though? The underlying assumption seems to be that there's a choice between a) living a good life or b) striving for some future goal that may or may not succeed (and, rationally speaking, probably won't). But how do you live a good life? Perhaps people -- perhaps not everyone, but regardless -- require a sense of purpose to be happy: b) is how one gets a).

[ph]

Oscar Wilde and socialism taking up too many evenings springs to mind.

[Shuggy]

Hmmm, I've made something like this point to some people who have pointed out that I'm missing the social gains involved in political activism. There's the whole social networking gains, which also spill into professional lives. Count how many journos have begun as activists spending their energies pursuing the impossible. There's quite a few - and you're one of these, are you not?

[chris]

@Shuggy - I suspect that only a minority of activists get career advancement as a result ("Many ys were xs" does not imply "many xs become ys"). I certainly was not one of them: my political views and my work have always been entirely separate - though I'm not sure how far there's been a conflict between them.

[Rich]

Another way to look at this is that we should make small amounts of political activism spread across many people more effective.

For a short while the Number 10 petition site sort of looked like it might do that, before the last government stopped even pretending to take notice. Some sort of technology to allow people to discuss and register their views on a wide range of topics, perhaps backed with individually small amounts of money, might work.