IF there’s one consensus among internet users on our recently reconvened Parliament, it’s that politicians have made a fool of themselves.

I don’t intend to get into the politics here, but will instead try to tackle another question: how should politicians behave? What can we rightfully expect of them? On the surface, the answer seems easy enough. Surely, we want our representatives to behave with the utmost decorum.

But, there’s also a paradox. If our MPs are indeed representative of us, a quick check on social media (the comments section, especially) will show that what happened in Parliament is nothing out of the ordinary when Malaysians talk politics.

Nevertheless, some would say the question is moot if we think of politicians as Machiavellians (even a fictionalised version of Malaysian politics is centred around this figure). In this rendition, a politician’s conduct is always subservient to what serves their self-interest best, and not moral or ethical concerns.

In my opinion, there’s truth in all these interpretations, but each one oversimplifies the vocation of politics. Sure, politics should ideally represent the “best” of us, but the idea of what’s “best” is highly subjective and difficult to pinpoint (the “worst” of us is arguably easier to identify).

The idea that a politician’s job is to represent us isn’t entirely accurate, either. In most cases, politicians make decisions for us instead of serving as our proxies. We don’t make the decisions ourselves. Also, Brexit has shown that extra-parliamentary avenues aren’t clearly the best way to make political decisions.

Do politicians work for self-interest? Absolutely. But that self-interest is too often reduced to material interest. Banal, or even obnoxious, as some politicians may seem, we can’t discount the fact that many are driven by conviction (or ideology, as we conveniently call it). And in their minds, this conviction is bound to the idea of representing the people, or some higher ideals. When “reformists” work with a former autocrat, or when Islamists team up with people they once called “taghut” (idolatrous tyrants), I’ve no doubt that conviction (for reform/Islam/the people) plays a substantial role alongside self-interest.

Between conviction, responsibility

So, how do we clarify our thinking, given how complicated the vocation of politics is? One thinker who tackled the matter head-on was German sociologist Max Weber, whose writings on bureaucracy, religion and the economy remain highly influential today. He addressed the matter in a famous lecture that he (reluctantly) gave in Munich on January 28, 1919, titled “Politics as a vocation”.

What makes Weber’s thesis special is that he wasn’t interested in telling his audience (students, i.e. aspiring politicians) what to do despite the turmoil facing Germany then. Unlike the boisterous academics of today, he was adamant that scholars have no business telling politicians how to go about things.

Instead, he approaches the question of what to expect from the politician by first deconstructing the politician into two parts. In one part, it’s taken as a vocation, a job, in that being a politician is like being a doctor or an engineer. Weber makes the specialisation explicit by differentiating the politician from the bureaucrat, even arguing that the bureaucracy is utterly incapable of solving political problems. So yes, as much as Malaysians love Director-General of Health Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, he isn’t our model politician. His value lies in him not acting like one, but that’s also because he isn’t taking on that role.

In the other part, the German term used by Weber, “beruf”, which has been translated into “vocation”, means something more than a job; it refers to a calling. The politician is not holding a job with contractual rules like the average salaryman, nor is politics simply about marrying talent and position. Answering the calling of politics, a person is voluntarily committing to a kind of surrender and sacrifice. To some extent, this version of the politician is anti-Machiavellian. It isn’t power for power’s sake.

This two-faced nature of politics is why Weber refrained from prescribing a guidebook for politicians. In his mind, codes of conduct, no matter how noble they sound (such as Google’s “Don’t be evil”), are immaterial in the realm of politics. It’s not that he preferred amoral or immoral politicians, but he simply didn’t measure the politician through their virtue signalling.

To him, a politician’s maturity lies in their ability to balance the ethics of responsibility and conviction (and as if he had been speaking to the state of Malaysian politics, he made it clear that such maturity has nothing to do with age). So, what are these two types of ethics?

Under the ethics of responsibility, one’s actions matter only in the consequences they cause. It also means the politician accepts that they’re judged solely based on the said consequences, and not the intention behind their actions. Conversely, the ethics of conviction refers to the politician’s ideological or moral grounding. It forms the driving force behind their will to power, and is the “greater good” that they claim to serve, be it God, country or democracy.

Weber believes that a mature politician is hard to come by because the two kinds of ethics – one focused on means, the other on ends – are fundamentally incompatible. However, political maturity is about balancing both, even if there’s no magic formula that tells you which means justify what ends, and to what extent.

Politicians worldwide juggling Covid-19 containment with saving the economy will feel this keenly. This is because a human cost lies behind both priorities, but neither responsibility nor conviction provides a clear solution.

Without the ethics of responsibility, the politician won’t feel the gravity of their decisions, maintaining an unhealthy levity over them. Without the ethics of conviction, the politician has no inner compass to adjudicate the (at times, confusing) options presented to them by bureaucrats, advisers and experts.

Politics not for salvation-seekers

Weber’s main concern is the politician who mistakes conviction for responsibility, and in doing so, has no sense of the latter whatsoever. See his bleak assessment of the German political landscape in 1919:

“Now, in such an age, conviction politicians may well spring up in large numbers all of a sudden and run riot, declaring: ‘The world is stupid and nasty, not I. The responsibility for the consequences cannot be laid at my door, but must rest with those who employ me, and whose stupidity or nastiness I shall do away with.’ And if this happens, I shall say openly that I would begin by asking how much inner gravity lies behind this ethics of conviction; I suspect I should come to the conclusion that in nine cases out of 10, I was dealing with windbags who do not genuinely feel what they are taking on themselves, but who are making themselves drunk on romantic sensations.”

I find this passage highly prescient in describing Malaysian politics today, because our politicians, too, tend to excuse themselves (or get excused) in the “romantic sensations” of politics, whether race, religion or the nation. As Weber puts it, it’s almost as if salvation becomes both the means and ends of politics (in a climate of heightened ethno-religious nationalism, salvation can be both literal and metaphorical). This feeds the delusion that all that matters is for a politician to mean well and intends to do well, and that all we need of them are superficially discernible qualities, such as being pious, positive or patriotic.

However, this delusion is smashed by Weber, who insists that those who think “nothing but good can come from good, and nothing but evil from evil” are a “mere child in political matters”, because politics is fundamentally about the use of force. To him, entering politics is like dancing with the devil. Even if humour is necessary for someone who wants to join politics as a vocation, politics as a calling is no laughing matter.

After witnessing a gallery of politicians who seem to show no conviction for anything other than self-interest and conduct themselves in a way that indicates zero sense of responsibility in terms of the repercussions they cause, it’s no surprise that Malaysians today are disillusioned with politics.

But, it’s here that we must remind ourselves of Weber’s warning. We must refrain from thinking that a politician who displays more conviction is all we need (remember the magic words “political will”?). After all, 14 years following Weber’s lecture, a politician with sheer will would come to power. His name? Adolf Hitler. – July 28, 2020.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.