Are we looking for an "ideal communication environment" for politics?

Today's discourse on democracy is largely under the ideological pressure of the visions of liberal democrats, visions that are now found overly optimistic in the face of lived reality. We say "ideological" because nowhere has a tangible, visibly applicable example of it emerged. Actual democratic practices never take place in the "deliberative" environment that liberal democrats envisage. Nevertheless, "deliberation" continues to exert serious pressure on democratic parties as an ideological construct or goal. Deliberative democracy envisages political practice as a "deliberation" that operates among the elements making up society in order to look after the good of society. For this deliberation to proceed ideally, the parties must agree to act together for a defined and accepted "common good." Yet it is quite clear that the political arena is not a field in which the participating parties show "good faith" toward one another.

The famous German sociologist Jürgen Habermas, with plentiful examples, says that these ill intentions from which we suffer stem from the fact that communication between the parties is not proceeding healthily, and therefore from people not understanding one another sufficiently. The solution is the establishment of an ideal communication environment, that is, an undistorted communication environment purified of ideologies, prejudices and political pressures.

Until such an environment is established, would it not be necessary to put all the members of society, one by one, through a different ideological refinery?

When the prejudices, ideologies and desires for power that distort the process of political communication are removed, does a human being remain? Moreover, by what process and by whom will all these elements be removed? Granted, I think not even Habermas himself fully held the hope that this approach, which also forms the basis of his theory of communicative action, would turn into a complete political program for the deliberative democracy he defends. John Rwls and Anthony Giddens have offered somewhat more practical proposals.

In short, to think of democracy as a process of deliberation in which rival parties debate for the good of society, far removed from every kind of social interest, is, first of all, very far from being an approach that describes the current practice of politics. Much as we may dislike it, Carl Schmitt's description of politics as friend-enemy is more realistic. On one condition: that such realism not instill a norm in the Muslim. As we have said before, the Muslim does not see politics as his rivals do; his concern is not to withhold from others a path, a pie, a blessing that makes him happy, but ultimately to extend it to all people: Tahsilu's-Saade (the attainment of happiness).

The reality being lived is that in politics people are in a ruthless struggle, in a bone-breaking rivalry. Whether the real motivation driving this rivalry is individual, organizational or group interest, or really certain values, there is of course room to ask, and it is precisely here that a Muslim must test what the motivation of his politics is. He must make an account every day of what kind of gain he is pursuing in politics, and what kind of gain, or loss, he ends up reaching in the end.

The point to which politics in Türkiye has come with insults today is, in this sense, in fact the best indicator that politics is being lived by some within a framework that makes enemies of rivals. In none of the criticisms of CHP officials directed at the President or the government is there the slightest trace of a better proposal for society. This is why the language of grudge and hatred immediately comes and attaches itself to the language of the opposition they make under this pretext. Their completing their criticisms of the children's Qur'an courses with the abuse of a "Middle Ages" mentality directed at the entire Muslim community is a clear language of grudge and hatred. The politics that issued in the past from this language of grudge and hatred was liquidation, destruction and slaughter with open enmity. In this approach you will not find the slightest thought or proposal about generations growing up healthier, equipped and prepared for the world of the future, and sound morally and spiritually.

The insults that Sedef Kabaş saw fit to direct at the President pass neither far from nor near a proposal for the good of society. What is expressed there is only feelings, and these feelings already give all the clues as to why one side does not like, why it hates, the other.

It was 2007. Again a woman journalist, to a foreign journalist who had come to meet her, said without needing to think, about the wife of Abdullah Gül, whom the foreign journalist said she would visit after her, "I hate her." In response to the foreign journalist's immediate astonishment she explained: she wore a headscarf and she wanted a lot from this system; studying with a headscarf was not enough, and she was also becoming more visible, as a politician's wife, together with her husband. This visibility was maddening enough, and it exposed that behind all the words poured on Turkish politics there were only feelings.

A small hand gesture Sedef Kabaş made while being taken into custody for expressing feelings of grudge and hatred toward the President so freely is enough to show with whom and in what kind of world we live. The police had not handcuffed her from behind, but she evidently wanted to be handcuffed that way and invest in the image that this would produce. The police had not handcuffed her like that, but Kabaş, with a specially devised movement, joined her hands behind her back and tried to dazzle eyes with an illusionist's skill.

Does not even this gesture alone show with whom, and in what kind of unsafe, distorted, endlessly tampered-with "communication environment," we find ourselves?

In such a communication environment, the only thing to be recommended is to seek refuge in God from the whisperings of the devils, and to pray to Him to grant us to see the truth as truth and follow it, and to see falsehood as falsehood and avoid it.