What I have been trying to do with the previous quotes of Don Watson's Recollections of a Bleeding Heart is to suggest that buried within politics lies a different kind of reason to an instrumental technical one.
What the Watson quotes show is the chaotic life of Parliament and the emotional dimension of reason. It is not unreason. Political reason is a different kind of reason. Watson does not explore this even though hsi book about the conflict between the pointy economic heads and the bleeding hearts within the PM's office.
We can see this different kind of reason at work with the critical ethical responses to immigration and refugee policy that has been classified under border protection by the national security state.
It would go like this. Nation states have duties to other nation-states: eg, Australia has a duty not to invade Indonesia except under extreme circumstances; or to come to their aid when disaster befalls them--eg. the Bali bombings.
So political reason has an ethical dimension. That ethical dimension used to be articulated by social liberalism in its concern for the welfare state as a way to counter the destructive social consequences of the market. With the marginalization of social liberalism in contemporary political life by a hard core free market economics the ethical dimension of political reason is concealed.
So we have books such as these being written. The ethical state (a state committed to the common good and equal opportunity), which was a central tenet of the social-liberal theory that emerged in Britain in the late nineteenth century, has been consigned to the historical dustbin. The ethical state was a central tenet of the social-liberal theory that emerged in Britain in the late nineteenth century and it was embraced by the new nation of Australia in the early twentieth century.
The ethics of social liberalism was re-interpreted in Australia as the 'fair go', and gave rise to the distinctively Australian institution of wage arbitration, public education, parks and pensions, as well as equality of women and men.
The narrative says that a century later, the idea of the fair go still resonates in political rhetoric; but the ethical state of social liberalism has become a tarnished ideal. The dream of the ethical state lies in tatters, eroded by economic rationalism and user-pays ideology, and degraded by political machination and corruption. The social-liberal vision of the state as a vehicle for social justice is seen to have run its course?
The ethical dimesion of political reason resurfaces in the critical response to the mandatory detention of refugees by the national security state.
Within this call of a more humane treatment of refugees can be heard the echoes of the ethical state of social liberalism.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 26, 2004 11:48 PM | TrackBack