Whenever a commentator declares that "politics is the art of the possible", I'm on my guard. I suspect that I'll soon be told to accept apparent present conditions as immutable facts of life, and to trim my goals accordingly. I'll be told to let injustices stand.
Like all banalities, the familiar dictum contains an obvious truth. To be politically effective, you have to be able to distinguish between desire and reality, between aspirations and resources.
But like most banalities, it raises more questions than it answers. How is "the possible" defined? Where are its limits drawn? Who draws them? Theoretically, the possible is an elastic and speculative category. But the dictum draws no distinctions between the immediately unlikely and the ultimately impossible; it takes no notice of the gradations between them, or of the impact of human agency in shifting an outcome from one category to another.
What's usually meant when politics is pronounced "the art of the possible" is that politics is a calculation of the probable: an exercise in the pragmatic, the expedient or the opportune. The adage implies forcefully that minimal improvements or lesser evils are the only realistic aim – and any demand for more is self-indulgence. It's an injunction not only to compromise, but to get your compromise in first, to placate hostile forces in advance, as Obama tried to do (unsuccessfully) with healthcare reform.
When Francis Bacon was told that his plan for The Advancement of Learning could never be realised, he answered: "Touching impossibility, I take it those things are to be held possible which may be done by some person, though not by every one; and which may be done by many, though not by any one; and which may be done in succession of ages, though not within the hourglass of one man's life; and which may be done by public designation, though not by private endeavour."
William Blake regarded Bacon as the epitome of rationalist arrogance. But even more than Bacon, he protested against the shrivelled, static nature of the "possible" of his day. "Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known," he wrote, "is not the same that it shall be when we know more."
Usually, when people speak of politics as "the art of the possible", they imply a world of unexamined assumptions about the limits of the possible – a world which embodies only the limits of their own experience or imagination. In its unreflective way, the dictum treats the superficial conditions of the moment as unchangeable realities. In effect, it serves as a denial of possibility, a closing of the aperture into the future.
It also urges us not to feel the urgency of injustice. The dictum is cold comfort to the oppressed, the victims of poverty, discrimination and violence, who are asked to continue suffering while distant arbiters decide what is or is not "possible" in their case. It sacrifices the poor, the hungry, the vulnerable, the desperate on the altar of self-serving pragmatism. Impatience is, in fact, a necessary political virtue. Without it, even the most gradual change is inconceivable. And a politician who is not impatient with injustice, with needless death and destruction, is worse than useless.
Those who dispute the dictum are accused of utopianism, which is condemned as an intellectual and emotional error, not just a mistake but a danger. Of course utopias are no substitute for the practice of politics, and they can serve as an evasion of present responsibilities. But a practical politics stripped of serious ideas about what would constitute a just human society is a greater and more common menace.
Utopias can be powerful motivators and thus a real influence on human destinies. For evidence one only has to look at the Indian independence movement or the African-American civil rights movement, at Gandhi and King, who defied assumed limitations to build great mass movements. By word and deed, they alerted people to the greater range of possibilities that lay within their grasp
Utopias provide a perspective from which the assumed limitations of the present can be examined, from which familiar social arrangements can be revealed as unjust, irrational or unnecessary. You can't chart the surface of the earth or compute distances without a point of elevation – a mountain top, star or satellite. You can't chart the possible in society without an angle of vision, a mental mountain top that permits the widest sweep. The pundits championing the art of the possible are the flat-earthers of today, afraid to venture too far from shore lest they fall off the planet's edge.
This is very much the vice of the centre-left. The right are bolder, more confident, more reckless and strongly driven by their own utopian visions (which would be dystopias for the rest of us). In contrast, liberals advise each other to trim their ambitions, to sacrifice their goals in order to remain "politically viable".
Of course, if your politics is about personal aggrandisement, then it will be "the art of the possible" in the narrowest sense. But for those who seek in politics a means of changing society for the better, it must be the art of redefining the possible. The art-science-craft of coaxing from the present, with its complex mix of possibilities and limitations, a just and sustainable human future.