Politics means controversy. Hardly anything (except maybe sex) gets more people more riled 
up. The nineteenth century military strategist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) called “war…politics by other means” and, logically then, the reverse also holds—politics must be war by other means.
But the real reason that politics is so controversial is not that it is inherently conflictual as Clausewitz’s famous quote suggests; rather, it is conflictual and controversial because it is so important. And its importance goes way beyond the power- games and allocation of spoils to which, in some people’s minds, it cynically gets reduced.
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The reason that politics is important goes to our nature as human beings. First, we are social beings. No one becomes human all by themselves, as an isolated, autonomous creature. We live with and relate to each other in organized societies. Politics is how we consciously craft in what ways the particular society we live in will be organized.
That brings me to the second dimension of human nature: namely, culture. Many other creatures—maybe in some sense all creatures—are social beings. But only humans are cultural beings. And in the same way that no one becomes human without society, so no one becomes human without being brought up as a member of a particular culture, assimilating its language and learning its customs, beliefs, and practices.
The thing about culture is that it is almost infinitely variable. The culture you happen to be born into does not exactly determine, but it certainly at least deeply shapes, who you become as a person. Think about it. Who you are as a 21st century North American person is very different from who you would be if you were born into 17th century Japanese culture, say, or into a band of European hunter-gatherers seventeen thousand years ago.
Human nature is cultural, and thus is variable within the limits of cultural possibilities—which as I said are very, very broad limits indeed.
So…. If culture is that flexible, and yet so powerfully shapes who we are, how do we decide what kind of culture we want? Well, until recently, we didn’t decide—at least not consciously. We just took it as it came. We didn’t look critically at our culture and contemplate and debate what we want our culture to be. We didn’t have a clear enough notion of culture to bring it into focus as something that we could think about and consciously shape. We looked at the world, and ourselves, through the particular cultural “lens” we inherited without “seeing” that lens itself (see my earlier post, Seeing Culture).
All that is changing now that we have discovered culture and developed a theory about it. Now that we consciously recognize culture, it too becomes a subject for political decision-making—as loosely indicated by the term “cultural politics.” In fact, though, that term as commonly used is way too narrow. Actually, a great deal of what we now do in the name of politics in general might rightly be termed cultural politics.
I have a little aphorism that sums up a great deal of what we know about our cultures and their dialectical relationship to ourselves, individually and collectively: “We humans make our cultures, and our cultures make us human.” In our own time as we become culturally conscious, we have the ability and the conceptual means to more consciously shape our cultures that shape us. Today our (cultural) politics intimately shapes who are and who we become.
Politics is the means by which we make collective, conscious decisions about what kind of society/culture we will have, and thus what kinds of humans we are. That’s why politics is important.