The classic image of politics is that of the [city] state as a ship sailing the seas with the government equivalent to the captain and crew with their special skills and knowledge. The city, like the ship, is an instrument, has been built by humans to subjugate chance, contingency, nature and external danger. The ship needs to be in good shape if citizens are to live flourishing lives. Those on board the ship believe that their technological/scientific resourcefulness that subdues an uncontrolled nature, coupled to an enlightened, utilitarian reason that devises lots of management plans, will overcome any threat, contingency or ungoverned chance.
And yet tragedy can be sense below the surface.
They are optimists. The power of luck to impact negatively on human lives (eg. drought) can be minimized through subduing and dominating nature (building the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electricity Scheme). Human lives can flourish( by making the deserts bloom).
This requires consensus in the city and conflict to be minimised. That was the message that came out of the River Murray Forum in Adelaide this week. Order and harmony must prevail. People are see as material or tools for exploitating nature 9the river and land) to ensure ongoing wealth creation.
Insoluable conflicts do not arise on the ship of state because all values are commensurate with those of the market and wealth creation. You can only the environmental damage if you have the money to do so. You only get the money through wealth creation. Those who create conflict because of their different principles (greenies) are seen as obstacles to be overcome or tamed. The utilitarians who run their ruler and calculus over everything engage in a ruthless simplification of the world of value because they effectively eliminate conflicting obligations. There is no tragic conflict in their world between wealth creation and the health of the river. We all pull together to ensure a healthy working river.
And yet we sense the tradgey beneath the modern surface of political life. It is a tragedy that finds its clearest expression in letters to the editor--these letters are almost playing the role in contemporary life that the Greek Chorus played in a Greek tragedy such as Antigone.
The tragedy is the conflict between between wealth creation and the free market and the ecological health of the river as a commons. These are in deep conflict.
The former is morally defective because it is so narrowly focused on money that it is unwilling to accept the long-term consequences of irrigated agriculture. The neo-liberal economists and politicians draw a line through farmers and greenies; and roughly say that what falls to one side of the line (the greens) is a foe, bad and irrational; and what falls to the other side is friend, good and rational.
The greens are equally onesided and narrow. They claim that they are pure and are all for therestoring the river for its own sake. They talk about river red gums, birds, fish, wetlands, greenhouse, revegetation and environmental flows. They draw on ethics, imagination, and green groups in civil society. If one listened to the greens on would not know that a global market existed and that Australian agriculture has adapt to the competitive pressures of the market to survive.
Is this not a conflict between different ways of envisioning the world with their different values and rank ordering of priorities? The concerns of each and their picture of what matters is radically different. Each emphasises the important values that the other has refused to take into account. (I am structuring this conflict in Hegelian terms of opposition). Each sphere of value strives to negate the other in terms of political conflict.
Those who run the ship of state (ie., the SA government politicians at the River Murray Forum) were most concerned to annul the contradictions in the city; reconcile the different forces (wealth and ecological) of human action. They wanted to achieve consensus through cooperation. So what was required in the communique was conflict-free harmony in the drafting session. The SA Government desired to develop a civic order that incoporates and respects both ecological obligation and private property right.
The politicians are not just saying that they respect the different principles, claims and concerns; they are saying that the very possibility of conflict between the different spheres of values can be overcome or eliminated. This overcoming is done in terms of the accepted public policy talk about healthy working rivers. 'Healthy working rivers' is harmonious synthesis.
Creating harmony through synthesis. It is pastiche Hegel. Dialectics on roller skates. It is a refusal of the discordant elements of reality by those who believe in happy stories about triumphant progress. The politicians are driven by an ambition to eliminate conflict. They only see the light of constraint. It promises salvation/redemption.
The dense and compressed letters written to newspapers---the open eye of public opinion-- would point out that ships travelling over the waves are often wrecked in storms. This image highlights the vulnerability of human enterprise to external happenings. Technological progress through the domination of nature has lead to salinised landscapes and rivers that no longer flow. The human triumphs achieved through the controlling power of instrumental reason (making deserts bloom) turn out to be a compressed document of reason's limitations, transgressions and conflicts. What started out as a civilizing instrument ends up being uncivlized.
The vision of the letter writers---as a modern day Greek chorus--- is one of human beings being ensnarred in the prison of unbearable political conflict. Their dark vision is one of tragedy and it is driven by the terrible side of life.
The power of the negative (ie., Hegel with passion) is what the harmonious synthesis of 'healthy working rivers' has to deny---the negative that highlights living on the razor edge of luck. A harmonizing political reason can only achieve the desired consensus through tacitly denying the terrible power of continency, political conflict based on different and competing values and the sickness of instrumental reason that insists its single way is the correct way.
And philosophy? What does it say about living on the razor edge of luck? What therapy does it propose for the sickness of civilization? A conservative philosophy would say 'stick close to human conventions that have been built up, and established over time. They, the city's convention ---as tradition---offer us a good guide to what is important and worthy of our attention. They are a form of healingthat can counter an instrumental utilitarian reason that thinks in numbers, counting weighing, measurement, calculas and and equations.
And an eco-philosophy in the city? What does the crippled fool in the world of public policy say? It speaks in the name of practical reason that responds more openly to the shape and powers (ecology) of the natural world, is more flexible about the vulnerability of human beings, more accepting of strife and the disrupting power of the passions and more concerned to build a mode of life based on 'a caring for'. The new sustainable mode of life breaks with, or transgresses, the established conventions of the city that have been built up around the use of water in urban life and its hinterlands.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at February 28, 2003 11:10 AM | TrackBackGary
I suppose that is the modernist tragedy - tragedy lost and no attempt to find tragedy regained at all...
of course I do not entertain the idea that goats, even in goat song, will help the Murray Darling basin...
especialy if we look at the land of the two rivers in its present predicament,
Posted by: meika on February 28, 2003 03:56 PMHi Meika,
I was going to try and get a tragedy going. Find a way around the modernist bit and make contact with the ancient Greeks sense of tragedy. Thats what I was going to do but time ran out and I had to do work on the renovations. I will have another crack tomorrow.