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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

reason and emotion in history « Previous | |Next »
August 18, 2003

There is a review of John Gascoigne's The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2002) by Gregory Melleuish in the CIS's publication Policy Magazine (Summer 2003). This is a history text that demonstrates that the moderate Enlightenment of lowland Scotland and England, and its values of reason and progress, were a significant factor in the formative period of Australian history.

What struck me about this text and the review was the downplaying of, and the negative attitude towards, Romanticism. Melleuish says that:

"This Enlightenment moulded the way the early European settlers in Australia saw themselves and their world. Gascoigne argues, correctly I think, that they had a minimal sense of their environment in Australia as being imbued with any sense of the sacred. For them it was a ‘terra nullius’ waiting to be made through their efforts. Hence Gascoigne identifies ‘improvement’ as one of the key words in their vocabulary: the new Australian world was there to be understood and improved. It was to be classified, analysed and then made bountiful."

Hence we have an instrumental reason of science, law and economics that shapes nature for human benefit in the public sphere. Nothing is said here the way this Enlightenment tradition evolved whereby achieving progress through the use instrumental reason was conceptualized within utilitarianism as a public philosophy. Progress is the key category here, since it unites the different tensions and contradictions of modernity under the banner of development, which is seen as harmonious and continuous and as bringing betterment to everyone.

What is then rejected is the view that modernity is characteristed by deep contradictions, divisions and fragmentation; the collapse of an integrated experience of life; and the irreversible emergence of autonomy as a central value. It was this that fueled the criticism of modernity both those who celebrated being modern.

So what of the reaction to the Enlightenment in this historical account?

According to Melleuish, Gascoigne says that that the Enlightenment is only one part of the cultural inheritance of Australia. Nineteenth century Catholicism, for example, took an entirely different view of the Enlightenment. And there was Romanticism, the reaction against the rationality of the Enlightenment that emphasised feeling. Melleuish says that Gascoigne rightly argues that Romanticism had a hard time in Australia because of the lack of both a sacred landscape and an organic past with which the present could be contrasted.

This is misleading. Romanticism may have had a hard time becoming domesticated in Australia. But it was a reaction to a particular conception of science; an technologically powerful applied positivist science that stood apart from, and above nature, manipulating it to maximise utility. It was also a reaction to industralization as well as a defence of cultural nationalism against the cosmopolitan values of the Enlightenment. (read British Empire).

On the philosophical interpretation we have a crisis of reason. The Enlightenment reason into technology project is put into question. This is not just because of the social role of science, the confidence in the technological fix or the institutional structure of science. It is also because the particular conception of instrumental rationality presupposes mind/body, reason/feeling, fact/value, human/nonhuman dualities.

The ecological impulse runs strong in Romanticism, and it resurfaces in, and is reworked by, todays environmental movement, which, in Australia, started from ethical concerns to protect wilderness in Tasmania. It challenges the Enlightenment's assumptions that moral standing is strictly a human quality; that issues of right action are exclusively questions of human relations; and that it is right on utilitarian grounds to exploit wilderness (Australia's rivers and old growth native forest in Tasmania) for human use. This exploitation for wood chip is deemed to be wrong.

So romanticism in this sense is now an integral part of an Australian national culture. Melleuish acknowledges this domestication in the following way:

"There is a division between rationality and feeling within Australian culture: on the one side there is science, law and economics and on the other the arts, moral self-righteousness and emotion. This division that has become greater in recent years as areas that previously favoured rationality, such as history, have increasingly succumbed to basing their approach on feelings of moral outrage."

That division between rationality and emotion is the inheritance of the different currents of the Enlightenment and Romanticism in modernity. Now Melleuish's statement, that rationality is being displaced by "feelings of moral outrage" implies that ethics is feeling. Those who act to put a moratorium on any logging and clearing of native vegetation in areas of high conservation value have no reason.

In that phrase of moral outrage you can sense the contempt and condescension to Romanticism; to the hermeneutical ways of writing Australian history; and to non-scientific forms of rationality. Criticism of Whig narrative of the progress of modernity is dismissed as moral outrage that is grounded on nothing more than feeling.

The inference is that such criticism is dismissed as irrational. By default, what is rational is the instrumental reason of science, law and economics that shapes nature for human benefit in the public sphere. And so we have the standard duality that structures public debates in Australia. We have closure; a defensive closure around a frontier that rejects what it finds threatening. In philosophy, for instance, we do not get an engagement between 'argument' and 'text ' (or 'writing'); and so we have a grotesque simplification of the differences between and within each side.

Melleuish does not consider whether the diverse oppositions to the technocratic Enlightenment tradition geared into big industry are also forms of rationality rather than simple feelings of moral outrage. If these oppositions are a form of rationality, then what kind of rationality are they.

This is important, even if we are dealing with a book review. First, environmental issues are here to stay, given the degradation of our landscapes. Secondly, the claim that no such environmental crisis exists in Australia------its all green delusions derived from a gloom and doom scenario --- cannot be taken seriously, given the current politics of water. Thirdly, the different strands of ecological thinking have become the main opposition to business-as-usual, despite all the attempts to close environmentalism out. Fourthly it is a political opposition that now has its roots in the reworking of social democracy.

This is more lines and tracks in this alternative space (field) than Melleuish's simple "feelings of moral outrage." To think with Melleuish here is to continue with banal and cliched defence of what is deemed to be normal, and so presupposes what is being placed into question or is being disrupted. The normal ignores that the critical responses are diverse ways of thinking differently that respond to problems arising from the way we have approached the world. Thus the normal functions to block environmentalism in the name of gloom and doom, and it rejects the various currents of postmodernism because of its relativism, lack of objectivity, lack of realism (there is nothing outside the text) and irrationality.

Yet no attempt is made to engage with those romantic currents within postmodernism, such as that pushes reason, utility, law and language to the limit through pain filled with jouissance. No attempt is made to understand the texts of a Georges Bataille or to argue with Derrida. Instead we have a war; a polemically driven war between two philosophical fronts (analytic and continental philosophy) in which strategic means are adopted to defeat the enemy. Such a war is based on the rejection of the philosophy of the other side.

That exchange bnetween different ways of doing and writing philosophy as 'hostilities between two different warring sides' is not very helpful at all.

An example of this thinking differently is to displace feelings of moral outrage for 'ecological rationality'; an ecological rationality that responds to the pressing need to make our cities more sustainable. Thus Adelaide, because of its current dependence on a dying River Murray, could use its current situation as a downstream state to become a Green city. It could live up its spin as a place where innovation is a way of life to become a sustainable city: to become an ecological innovator through devising fresh initiatives for sustainable solutions and fostering green industries.

These are quite different tracks and trails in the field to the one marked by 'feelings of moral outrage.'

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:04 AM | | Comments (0)
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