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.
This quote shows the entrenched scientific style in academic philosophy. It is by Iris Murdoch, a women who writes novels and it shows just how far professional academc (analytic ) philosophy has lot contact with, and has repudiated, its rhetorical roots.
"Of course philosophers vary and some are more 'literary' than others, but I am tempted to say that there is an ideal philosophical style which has a special unambiguous plainness and hardness about it, an austere unselfish candid style. A philosopher must try to explain exactly what he means and avoid rhetoric and idle decoration. Of course this not need exclude wit and occassional interludes; but when the philosopher is as it were in the front line in relation to his problem I think he speaks with a certain cold clear recognizable voice."
I. Murdoch, 'Philosophy and Literature: dialogue with Iris Murdoch ' in B. Magee, (ed.), Men of Ideas, (NY, 1978, pp. 264-84).
Oh yeah? Philosophers as human beings are all mind no emotion. Only men write philosophy. There are no women philosophers? What can you say to that? That many academic philosophers go through life in a condition of delusion and denial?
Is philosophy only concerned with solving problems? Does philosophy have nothing to do with interpreting texts? Nothing to do with public debate and the conversation of civil society about public issues? Is philosophy disconnected from, and not a part of or within different traditions? Does philosophy have nothing to do with trying to live a good human life well?
Murdoch is an advocate for the hard style of the voice of a disembodied reason that is cleansed of passion. It is the voice of an academic philosophy that considers itself to be abstract, neutral and scientific---a theoretical reason; the voice of contemplation by a spectator; or the voice of mastery and control-- a form of calculating reason that seeks to seize, hold, regulate and control objects. It is the voice of the philosopher as hunter or master of the universe. It is the voice of the human being as a machine.
This is a deficient view because it is so narrow. There is a major blind spot to a form of knowing based on the experience of human suffering in difficult and tragic circumstances. This is a form of knowing that cannot be gained by the intellect alone--it is a form of practical knowing that is built around desire, responsiveness, caring, passion and imagination.
It is not the voice of vulnerable humans aware of their dependence on the luck of nature; the voice of those living in a drought waiting for the rains to come; a voice of those who have lived through a major bushfire; or the voice of those who are living downstream at the mouth of the River Murray and are dependent on the water of a salinised river that no longer flows.
Now that would be a different and more vulnerable philosophical voice. It would be one that has seen through the illusions of a complete mastery over nature, has a greater sense of human fragility and a greater openness to humans being a part of nature. It would be a more tragic voice, one that has become of being caught in a situation that is not solely of one's own making. A voice of grief, because nothing is actually being done to save the River Murray. A voice that remembers that this situation of the river and the environment has got worse over the last 30 thirty years.
It is a voice that expresses the rationality of the passions that wants to hold those in power ethically accountable for their lack of action.
Ever wondered what journalism would be like when it is written by a philosopher?
Hadn't crossed your mind?
Well then, have a look at The French lesson by Regis DeBray.
Time for a treat.
Ever wondered what the standard US reaction would be to philosophical journalism written by a radical Frenchman ?
You haven't?
If you are interested have look at this.
Another treat eh?
I really enjoyed this post by Kieran Healy Dealing with Philosophers. Lots of fun. Witty comments.
Analytic male philosophers are a strange species. Many think that they are the master thinkers whose concepts mirror the fundamental structure of the universe in such a way that Absolute Truth is just around the corner. Just needs a little bit more reduction and a bit more theoretical scaffolding.
They are low on people skills, strong on clarity and rigor, and exemplars of balck and white thinking (science non-science etc). They were doing grunge before it became a style statement. And they are still doing grunge.
I do remember my supervisor refusing to read more than the first five words in my draft thesis. We had a raging argument about 'being'. We went our separate ways. Mine led to Nietzsche.
Doing a thesis in the liberal academy was an exercise in learning to cope with humilation and living in a world of intellectual thuggery.
Do read Kieran's post. Its great. And while there read this called close reading about the high powered discussion in an academic seminar.
You know, academics often think that public debate in our political institutions should be modelled on the academic seminar.
God, what can you say to that as a philosopher? That there is very little self-reflection on their own academic practices?
Now this makes a lot of sense. It is Daniel Mahoney's War of words: a diversion from true battle on the conflict between the US and France. It critically addresses the common view of "many Americans (and Australians) that French policy is fundamentally irrational, and that it is guided by nothing more than a reckless desire to obstruct US efforts to deal with terrorist threats in a post 9/11 world."
Daniel says:
"It is no doubt a good deal of fun for stand-up comedians, syndicated columnists and internet bloggers to mock French cowardice and to exaggerate the extent to which anti-Americanism underscores French foreign policy.
But these popular expressions of anti-French sentiment overlook some crucial distinctions. In my view, French foreign policy is guided by considerations of national interest that are not reducible to crude anti-Americanism, no matter what the talking heads say. And French intellectual life long ago ceased to be dominated by the crass anti-Americanism and leftism that Revel rightly continues to excoriate."
The minimium that we should do is make a distinction between anti-Americanism in Europe ( and Australia) and being critical of the conduct of the US on the world stage. The long journalist essay by Eric Alterman, called' Red, white and blues, which can be found in Australian Financial Review(22 Feb. 2003, p. 41ff. archived, payment required) does just that. In this piece Alterman Alterman usefully explores the distinction between anti-Americanism and critically taking issue with the neo-con policies of the Bush Administration. It is hardly anti-American to take issue with the Bush administration's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming; its opposition to further restrictions on nuclear weapons tests or land mines, or its antagonism to other existing and projected international accords.
If anti-Americanism is not the key to understanding French foreign policy, then what is? Scott Wickstein acknowledges this. He says:
"Hostility to American policy is clearly part of [current French actions], but that isn't really a sufficient explaination- such levels of hostility to American policy are evident in Australia, yet the Australian government has been one of the US government's strongest supporters. Nor the Muslim minority, which is also present in the UK. I have no idea what is driving the French government on such a reckless course, but it's quite potent, whatever it is."
Daniel gives us a clue, when he says:
"The people around Chirac, such as Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, are a sober lot and are generally immune to ideological anti-Americanism of the Left and the Right. They have genuine concerns about American imperial overreach, concerns that should not be dismissed out of hand without further consideration. "
The phrase that is of interest is 'American imperial overreach'. John Quiggin uses 'world hegemon' in his 'Pick your hegemon' post , by which he means "one country with unquestioned military superiority over all others and the right to use it as and when it sees fit."
The classic word for hegemon is empire or imperial power. This means that after 9/11 the national security state under the Bush administration considers that the best way protect the US is to achieve national security through the strategy of empire. This means that the US will shape, coerce or structure the international system of nation states under its enlightened hegemony that furthers its national interest.
'Overreach', refers to both the strategy of empire going beyond the resources of the US economy and the backlash that it would create amongst other nation-states and people. They would then seek an insurance policy to protect themselves from American military power.
I have taken a bit of flack in the past for suggesting that the US has taken the path to empire as a way to bring order into a chaotic world of nation-states. American patriots dislike the word empire. Their objection has been that this means the US is enslaving/colonizing other nation-states--'determined efforts on our part to subjugate and dominate the people' says William A Whittle that amounts to imperialism. yet the historical record since 1945 shows otherwise (Europe, Japan, Korea and Iraq in 1991. As Whittle says:
"For the first time in history, a nation powerful enough to rule world has simply refused to do so. It is a moral and ethical choice we make as a people. More than that; it is data. It is evidence...There is no American Empire."
The objection is true. But things cannot be left standing there. Not all Americans think that way. See here But what if empire here is not meant in the bad sense of conquering or pacifying dangerous corners of the world inhabited by terrorists and rogue states and ocupying, their lands and incoporating them into the nation state? The key word is enlightened, as this refers to the civilising mission of the US in world affairs. That means that the US establishes it hegemony through liberal democracy, liberal markets and free trade and brings other nation states under its sphere of influence.
William Whittle in his great essay on empireacknowledges this when he says that:
"We are an empire of the mind, a place whose dreams and ideals have colonized the world. We are a black hole of desire upon which billions place their unfocused hopes. And yet, to them it seems as if we turn them away. We dangle freedom and hope and comfort in front of them with a glimpse into our everyday lives though television and movies."
Now America is not just another nation-state equal amongst others. It is a superpower able to shape the course of events in a way that Australia never could. Is it not then a hegemonic state? William Whittle acknowledges this possibility in the sense of having “authority over others”; only he goes to reject this in terms of cultural imperialism of US pop culture over elitist Europen culture. He says that that American culture is an expression of American myths, fantasies and dreams that "come from our common heritage and our common beliefs'.
He adds, linking Stephen de Beste that these are attractive to Europeans and the Arab street. They are attracted by the American ethos of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which is and deep and strong foundation upon which the edifice of prosperity and success is built. It is what they---we ---do not have.
This is a patriotic celebration of the American way of life. But it does not addess the issue of American military power in the world of nations; nor acknowledge the mechanisms used by the national security state to protect its national interestby shaping the conduct of other nation-states. Basically the US has shrugged off its traditional isolationism, and under the Bush administration it now seeks security through empire. Security through empire is the ethos of the US as a national security state.
The US aims to achieve stability in a disordered world through bothopening up the protective walls of other nation-states to liberal democracy and markets, and using its military power to assimilating them into an over-reaching order. It is able to establish this order because it is a global power. Such a state has military power which it is willing to use to further its interests. This is an imperial state as has a strategic design to shape the conduct of the world of nations as well. That global strategy used to be one of deterrence and containment (close to 50 years), which was deployed against the Soviet Union when it too was a superpower.
That global strategy has been rejected by the neo-con hawks in the Bush administration in favour of an aggressive unilateralism centred around a pre-emptive strike against those nation states, such as Iraq, who challenge US interests. Its antagonism to the UN indicates that the US wants as little constraiint on its potential military actions as possible---it desires absolute freedom.
It is strategy that is resulting in an American occupation of Iraq, a military presence in Afghanistan, central Asia, the Gulf and Turkey to ensure that political shifts in the rest of the region facilitate US interests.
And Europe? On this empire model the US would act to hinder, forestall or prevent an autonomous federated Europe that has sufficient economic, political and military muscle to challenge US hegemony. Europe's autonomous action would destablise the way a hegemonic US orders the world of nation-states. In 'The crisis in NATO: A geopolitical earthquake?' Gabriel Kolko argues this in relation to NATO"
"When the Soviet Union capsized over a decade ago, NATO's nominal rationale for existence died with it. But the principal reason for its creation - to forestall European autonomy - remains...Long before September 11, 2001, Washington was determined to avoid the serious constraints [on its smilitary operations]that NATO could impose. The only question was of timing and how the United States would escape NATO's clear obligations while maintaining its hegemony over its members. It wanted to preserve NATO for the very reason it had created it; to keep Europe from developing an independent political as well as military organisation."
Kolko says that:
"Coordinating NATO's command structure with that of any all-European military organization that may be created impinges directly on America's power over Europe's actions and reflects its deep ambiguity....Washington has decided that its allies must now accept its objectives and work solely on its terms, and it has no intention whatsoever of discussing the merits of its actions in NATO conferences. "
On this account the resistance to US strategic design comes from France and Germany. Unlike Australia, which accept US objectives and work solely on US terms, a united Germany and France are asserting their independence and acting in terms of their national interests. They are hostile to the attempts by the US to regain the mastery over Europe it had during the peak of the Cold War and deeply critical of determined of the Bush administration not to be bound by European concerns and interests.
As Kolko says:
"Washington cannot have it both ways. Its commitment to aggressive unilateralism is the antithesis of an alliance system that involves real consultation. France and Germany are now far too powerful to be treated as obsequious dependents. They also believe in sovereignty, as does every nation which is strong enough to exercise it."
This then is the answer to the question that Scott Wickstein raised about what drives the French government to take on the US over Iraq. Australia may be content to be a dependent on the US---but not France or Germany. Why should they? Chutney at MyIrony puts it so well. She uses Simone Weil to suggest that oppressive power gets too big for its britches. Sums up what France and Germany would be thinking rather well, don't you think. rather neatly, don't you think?
Kolko concludes his article with this judgement and warning for the neo-con hawks in the Bush administration:
"The reality is that the world is increasingly multipolar, economically and technologically, and that the US' desire to maintain absolute military superiority over the world is a chimera."
It is a chimera because of both the overreach of empire and the impossibility of absolute freedom in a world of nation-states. See Chutney's Empire strikes back for some good insights on this overreach from an American perspective.
I have always thought that this statement by Adorno on the philosophical significance of the essay made a lot of good sense. It is a tough read but it is worth working through slowly.
Adorno says:
"The essay does not play by the rules of organized science and theory, according to which, in Spinoza's formulation, the order of things is the same as the order of ideas. Because the unbroken order of concepts is not equivalent to what exists, the essay does not aim at a closed deductive or inductive structure. In particular, it rebels agains the doctrine, deeply rooted since Plato, that what is transient and ephemeral is unworthy of philosophy---the old injustice done to the transitory, whereby it is condemned again in the concept. The essay recoils from the violence in the dogma according to which the result of the process of abstraction, the concept, which, in contrast to the individual it grasps, is temporally invariant, should be granted ontological dignity."
Adorno, 'The essay as Form' in Notes on Literature, (vol. 1, p. 10).
Hurrah for the transitory and the ephemeral. Focusing on the fragmentary and the contingent is a step away from the royal road to science.
Three cheers for weblogging.
There is a good post at this Public Address about Foucault's understanding of how we situate a culture in the present. This is based on a re-reading of Kant's essay on the Enlightenment.
I find this material very interesting because understanding how we situate ourselves in our modern culture was what I was trying to do with the previous 'Water and Enlightenment' dreaming blog. I was, to use Foucualt's language, interrogating the present or writing a critical history of our own time from the perspective of the way we have historically used water to make the deserts bloom.
What Foucault does, and this theme is picked up and highlighted by This Public Address, is to suggest that we interpret the Enlightnment as a part of modernity and envisage this as "a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. " What we get from this interpretation is 'a permanent critique of our historical era'.
This emphasis on critique is very useful for philosophy which has seen better days. The ethos of critique transgresses the old modernist view of philosophy as a self-sufficient tightly enclosed realm of its own, that is still so deeply embedded in the academic philosophy institution. There it is a sort of modernist monad, where each philosophical work "represents" the universe, but it has no windows; and it represents the universal within its own walls. In other words, philosophy's own structure (of mechanistic materialism) is objectively the same as that of the universal.
Foucault's intervention is useful because it provides a pathway for philosophy to continue its autonomous thinking in the historical present when it has been rendered harmless and impotent. Philosophy is being downsized in the corporate university; it is often distorted into a series of slogans in the conflict with postmodernism; it has a public existence as a high cultural good that is no longer taken seriously by anybody any more; and is often identified with religion by neo-liberals in public debates over green issues in civil society.
Foucault gives the ethos of 'a permanent critique of our historical era' an aesthetic twist through the use of Baudelaire. It concentrates on doing the critique of history as an ontology of self --reinventing the self---as well as a concern for freedom. This has largely re-geared in the liberal academy to identity politics, gender and gay subjectivity. This pathway makes philosophy as a mode of autonomous thinking sexy and alive in the present.
But we can give it another twst if we cast an eye on one of the key pre-suppositions of the Enlightenment: its universal tendency towards the progressive domination of nature for human benefit through a calculative, instrumental reason that uses technoscience as an instrument. It is this pathway that was explored by my Water & Enlightenment dreaming post.
In a response to my post Richard Kahn at Vegan Blog comments in his Water Philosophy (WED. Feb.19 2003)
"The guiding call for a critical theory of the present moment that can apply the historical insights of how humans and the wasting of natural resources co-construct one another runs throughout the piece [on philososphy.com.] Vegan Blog approves, but would insist that the notion of "our liberal Enlightenment" project be further decentered and displaced by a more radical reconstructive vision."
I wholeheartedly agree. A different way of regarding nature is required and more ecological sustainable practices need to be developed if our rivers are to be restored to health. But this involves working within the world of public policy, and hence raises the question of how can philosophy operate in political life.
Foucault is of use here. He suggests that we undertake the ethos of a permanent critique of the liberal mode of life from where we are institutionally situated, and then endeavour to transgress its limits. If we work within the institutions of politics and public policy rather than academia, then saving our rivers for their own sake--- through clawing back water from the irrigators--- transgresses the old notion of rivers being used as irrigation channels and drains. So philosophy in political life work on the limits.
It is a rather unsatisfactory place to be as philosophy appears as the fool in the court of the powerful. An eco-philosophy in public life is so often dismissed out of hand as an irrationalism or a religion by the defenders of the economic liberal Enlightenment. They are deeply hostile to economic growth through the free market being shaped for the ends of ecological sustainablity. because it means that politics shapes economic life for ethical/poltical ends in the name of the common good. They see red.
Can we defend the idea of a water commons in the face of the ongoing privatisation of water by those who think that the free market is the one true path to water reform? Can the idea of a water commons be divorced from the old idea of state ownership of water? Can we connect a water commons to community ownership? Is this a possible way to manage our rivers?
Answering these questions indicates one way that philosophy, which has ruthlessly criticized itself, reinvented itself and returned to the common life, can be critically involved in public life. This opens up a way that philosophy can begin to critically engage with public policy. It shows that the classic Roman idea of philosophy in political life (as advocated by Cicero and Quintallan) is still relevant and worthwhile.
The above questions arise for us in Adelaide because South Australia has recently woken up from its water development dreaming to discover that it is a water-stressed state. It is now released that water is a key to how we live on this land, and all the indications are that we are not doing too well in living sustainably in the river country. All this comes as a bit of shock. But it is shock that other people ---eg., those in southern California----are also experiencing.
This shock gives rise to a premonition all is not well with our current mode of life; that we cannot continue with business-as-usual; and that big changes to our current practices are needed. There symptoms of this shock in South Australia are many and varuous. Here are a few of the common ones.
South Australia has realized that its geographical dependence on River Murray water has meant declining water quality from dryland salinity. Downstream Adelaide faces such a salt load in the Murray River that we won't have safe drinking water two days out of five within 20 years unless something is done.
It is in this state that the new in-situ leaching uranium mines have been approved. These mining operations at Honeymoon and Beverley mines discharge a cocktail of sulphuric acid and radio-active slurry back into the underground water aquifers. Many in South Australia still think of the Murray as a river even though no water has flowed over the Goolwa barrages since November 2001, nor is it likely too for the rest of 2002.
Adelaide is also spending millions to stop its coastline washing away because of rising sea levels and land subsidence. It has been estimated (by Dr Graeme Pearman, the head of CSIRO climate and atmosphere sector) that sea levels around Adelaide have risen twice as fast as in the rest of the country. Because Adelaide has pumped out quite a lot of its ground water, it has subsided by about 15 centimetres whilst sea levels have risen by 15 centimetres over the past 100 years. The result is a 30cm rise in sea levels, leading to severe beach erosion, coastal destabilisation, added infrastructure expenses and a suite of building codes and regulations designed to anticipate the impacts of future global warming and subsidence.
Parts of South Australia, namely the Eyre Peninsula, are facing a water crisis since the health and development of the region is constrained by the lack of water. In other parts of SA streams and creeks run dry because of the mining of aquifers for irrigated development. In other areas, such as the Upper South East, the deeply salinised ground water is drained away to the sea, into wetlands and into the Coorong through an extensive drainage system. The latter is having devastating consequences for the ecology of the Ramsar–listed wetlands.
As the southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin, South Australia is currently involved in political conflict with the other basin states of Victoria, NSW and Queensland. The environmental disaster of dryland salinity, dying wetlands, water scarcity, and declining habitats and biodiversity has given rise to intense interstate conflicts. These are conflicts over how we have historically perceived and experienced water from a shared river system. These conflicts seem to be intractable and beyond our capacity to resolve them.
The diagnosis we get from these symptons of stress is that our current mode of life is a wrong way to live. It is unsustainable. What shocks us is that this unsustainable mode of life is the end point of the liberal, utilitarian Enlightenment. Unreason was built into the very core of the Enlightenment project and many of us did not see it until it was too late. How come we were fooled we ask ourselves. How come we did not listen to those philosophers who talked about the dialectic of enlightenment?
In his Negative Dialectics (p.364) Adorno says that shock is what compels us to philosophize and to throw light on truth. We can begin this process by recovering our history of water development in Australia in order to get a handle on the way that water politics in modernity has impacted on our political life. The key to that history is Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme of the 1940s and the process of self-reflection on that history unlocks a doorway onto another kind of history--an ecological one.
The philosophy underpinning the euphoric dam building of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme was one of nation building through the domination of nature. Governments in the 1940s viewed nature in general, and our rivers in particular, as in need of taming and regulation. Rivers flowing to the sea were viewed as a waste of resources by instrumental reason. The technology existed to tame nature and make the deserts bloom through water development. This justified the construction of massive dams whilst the weirs that were originally built in the 1920s and 1930s for river navigation were refunctioned to operate as irrigation pools. Dams became the temples of Australia that signified a modern Australia and irrigation became a key chapter in the pioneering Australian Legend. With water on tap and irrigation unlimited paradise beckoned. The utiliarian enlighteners said that nation-building through big water development was going to be all benefit with little or no cost. Everyboy bought the dream. It was part of the identity of being modern in Australia.
In looking back on this history we see that the control over water did not turn out to be all benefit and no cost. The large dam partnership between the Commonwealth and corporations historically excluded local government and communities. It gave rise to the displacement of the local community of Adaminaby as people were forced out of their homes and lost their livelihood. The large-scale water diversion also took water from the communities on the eastern seaboard and gave it to those on the western plains; and it took water from the Snowy River ecosystem and introduced it into the ecosystem of the River Murray. The expansion of irrigated agriculture in the arid west was at the expense of farming in the east. Regulation of the flow of the River Murray reduced the natural winter-spring flow peak, decreased the variability of mid range flows and reduced the flow through the (now closed) Murray Mouth to around 21-25% of pre-regulated average.
And now? This is where the horrors of premonition surface and we begin to feel the historical shudders coming on. We have to now think against our own categories, our taken-for-granted ways of seeing nature, and the values embodied in our current way of life. We have to learn think dialectically within our liberal enlightenment tradition and to understand that parts of it are posionous.
parts of it
Today, irrigated water development is now seen as buying national prosperity and security at the cost of ruinous ecological damage. One effect of the modern river regulation has been the isolation of the floodplain wetlands (such as Chowilla) from the river for long period, the reduced flooding of the ecology of the wetlands, and less opportunity for the floodplain to replenish. We are learning to see that we have created a nature–eating monster that has cleared the land, reduced biodiversity and left us with rivers stressed from pollution from nutrients, inadequate environmental flows and huge loads of salt.
The technological euphoria of dam building financed by public money has evaporated to the point where many consider that it would be a good thing to decommission some of the locks, weirs and barrages to help a dying River Murray river flow freely again. We have slowly come to accept that excessive regulation of the river for human use is the fundamental cause of the ecological damage we see all around us.
The stark conflict between the widely different views of water and nature informs the public debate over the water politics we are currently living. Some say that we are battling the geographical fundamentals of an arid landscape, low rainfall, accumulated salt in the soil and a large drainage basin with a small plug. The fundamentals of the landscape are against us and it doesn’t really matter what we do to tame and shape nature since we are all doomed in the long-term. The more hopeful ones in the marketplace would say that the irrigators have successfully fashioned a profitable industry out of an arid landscape, and that with the new improved technology irrigated agriculture can be made a sustainable industry that will have little impact on the hydrology of our semi-arid landscape. New capital investment by irrigators, for instance, will see them introduce efficient practices (eg., converting from spray to drippers to dispense water to plants), and this will reduce further damage to the ecology of the landscape. So it is all too simplistic to identify the irrigators as the evil ones bringing down civilization, as we know it. All that is needed is a little tidying up of irrigation practices and politicians introducing market instruments to enable irrigators achieve greater levels of efficiency in their use of water diversions.
The Australian Government reinfoirces this position when it says that one of its success stories is the Council of Australian Governments’ National Agenda for Water Reform. It says that this reform process institutionalised a whole of government and inter-governmental co-operation to promote sustainable development objectives in land and water management. This reform process addressed the way that, prior to the 1980s, much water infrastructure and use was heavily subsidised as it was publicly funded with no charge to the ultimate users. Hence there was overuse and inefficient allocation led to significant problems. The market can be used to solve these problems.
In 1994-95, the Council of Australian Governments (CoAG) adopted the National Agenda for Water Reform, whereby all states in the federation committed themselves to a range of market based measures as part of a general policy framework. Pricing practices were reformed to reflect the full economic cost of resources; cross-subsidies were removed; other subsidies made transparent; transferability of water rights to address inefficient allocation was introduced; and a water market for the trading of water entitlements was created. Under these reforms water service providers were required to operate on a commercial basis, whilst the new investment in rural water supplies is limited to ecologically sustainable and economically viable projects. Specific provision was made to ensure adequate water for the environment.
As a result of this reform process most States are reforming their water legislation to ensure that the environment has enough water to protect bio-diversity and river ecosystems before any other allocations are made. The National Competition Council was made responsible for assessing water reform progress in the various States and this regulatory body has exercised its power to recommend suspension of competition payments by the Federal Government if commitments are not met.
This use of market instruments to drive water reform has been judged a success in policy-making circles. They see themselves as beginning to address the key problem of a culture in an arid landscape that wastes water in a prodigious fashion rather than conserves it. The policy makers deem that it is only a question of time before the pricing reform for rural water will achieve full cost recovery and water conservation is achieved. It is then acknowledged that, in the short-term, care must be taken in removing the system of subsidies, given the major structural and social change that is currently occurring in rural Australia.
Is this argument reasonable? Is this the right pathway for water reform? What do we see if we think dialectically?
What we discern is a philosophical conflict that is buried in this market mode of governing the conduct of a population. South Australians see the Murray-Darling River as a commons with the river’s waters being a common good that requires some form of community ownership in the basin. This position conflicts with the market economy’s view of water, which holds that water is a private good that can be extracted and traded freely. So the Queensland cowboys call for the removal of all limits on the use of water, the establishment of water markets, and full property rights. The market economists deem private property rights to water to be a rational alternative to state ownership, and they hold that the free market is the only substitute to the bureaucratic regulation of the Basin’s water resources.
One problem with market view is that since those downstream (often graziers) are denied access to water so we have regimes of unequal and non-sustainable water use and water-wasteful agriculture (rice and cotton) established in the Basin. More importantly, since the market view is founded on private ownership, it disregards the ecological function of water for a floodplain river. Because the private property rights of the self-regulating market denies the common good of ecological functioning, rivers can be drained and polluted by cotton farmers for their wealth creation. Their appeal to private rights means they can remain indifferent to the ecological hazards of intensive irrigation, and can see no reason to pay the hidden costs of their intensive projects
Now this representation of the conflict over water between private and public good is too black and white. South Australians, for instance, have adopted water trading and they have fostered it because it works in their interest. Their high value-adding viti-culture industry buys water from the low value adding upstream dairy farmers. Hence they support the privatisation of water fostered by the reforms of National Competition Policy because it provides a way to continue irrigated development.
However, there is also an important principle here that South Australians are tacitly defending against the advocates of the free market. We are saying that it is important to defend water as a commons, or as a shared public good, since water is the ecological basis of all life in the Murray Darling Basin. It is only by viewing water as a commons, ie., from the ecological perspective of water, that we are able to identify the hidden costs of irrigated agriculture. When the free market irrigators say they can improve their current practices to reduce further damage, they tacitly overlook the ecological perspective that exposes the past damage. What is hidden by the market’s private property perspective is that so much of the damage to the landscape has already been done, that this damage will continue to develop for the next 50 years and that it will cost the public billions to restore the landscape and reverse the damage.
The ecological perspective also proposes an alternative principle for resource allocation to the market’s efficiency principle. This alternative is sustainability and equitable allocation, and its application depends on the federal cooperation among the members of the Basin community. Hence South Australians have been willing to engage in conflicts within a political framework of a cooperative federalism of the Murray-Darling Commission to protect the water as a commons. They have done so in the name of equitable distribution of water, in which the states are entitled to a reasonable and equitable share in the beneficial use of water in the Murray-Darling Basin drainage system. We realise that equitable use is a compromise between conflicting political forces. We accept that those in the Basin community will continue to argue over what reasonable and equitable mean, and that this will give rise to intense interstate conflict about combining ecology with equity and economics, and sustainability with justice. So we endeavour to craft rules, guidelines and operational principles for how we divide the Basin’s rivers to ensure the equitable sharing of water in the Murray-Darling Basin. We then find ourselves arguing about the science behind the rules at a time of ecological constraint only to discover that the scientific knowledge of the Basins’ ecological processes is provisional and fragmentary.
As things currently stand the sustainable use of natural resources works within the framework of the assured continuation of existing use: ie. an extensive network of dams, locks and weirs; the view that water is being wasted if it is not dammed; water viewed as a natural resource to be used for human benefit; and ongoing development for the sake of wealth creation. What existing use means is that the role of irrigated agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin is going to increase and the area under cultivation is going to increase rather than decrease. Existing use means that the public is left with trying to fix up the massive negative effects caused by irrigated agriculture and that no government is going to put up $60 billion over a decade to repair the damage to the landscape that has already been done. Existing use means that increased efficiency in the use of regulated water by irrigators will not return water to the environment. Existing use means government policy is decided in terms of cost benefit analysis and so some areas of the Basin where the salinised water table is a metre or so below the surface (eg., Kerang in northern Victoria) will be left as being beyond repair. So might large tracts of the South Australian region of the Basin.
Now South Australia’s future depends on the cooperation of the basin states and the commonwealth to work towards the common good. This means an entitlement flow for the river: ie. the allocation of water to the environment is given priority over water allocated to irrigation. Yet this historical reversal will be difficult to achieve, since community control over water has all but disappeared. The policies of water privatisation are shifting control of water from governments to water corporations. In arid Adelaide the politicians have acted to ensure that the supply of water is in the hands of foreign-owned corporations in the name of public–private partnerships. This amounts to public assets and goods being privatised.
Water scarcity has become a market opportunity for water corporations to make money by selling more water, and these corporations see water to be a lucrative market. A possible future scenario is that the price of water will go up; the water corporations will insist on a level of profit; water quality will go down; employment in water services will go down; those who cannot pay their water bills will be disconnected; and water-borne diseases will impact on public health. This is a scenario where citizens march against water corporations and governments to repeal water privatisation legislation.
We should not dismiss this version of the water wars as a fanciful scenario constructed by philosophers, or as one that could only take place in Bolivia. We should remember that the current water scarcity in the Murray-Darling Basin is the result of human action. What the scenario does highlight is that control over water implies control over people, and that water privatisation is the preferred instrument of control by governments. If bringing the River Murray back to life means creating equitable and ecologically sustainable water systems, then this may very well require community control over their water resources and democratic collective decision–making. Such a fight for democratic community control over water is currently taking place on Eyre Peninsula in opposition to water authorities that are secretive, closed and elitist.
So when we read about the conflicts and wars that divide states and communities, which range from the Condamine–Balonne in Queensland and the Namoi Valley in New South Wales to the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia, we need to think about who controls the water and how to connect democracy to water. These water conflicts are intensifying, and the destruction of our water resources, forest catchments and aquifers pose intense political challenges for democracy.
We have entered the new world of water politics. Welcome to the 21st century.
If philosophy takes leave of the world of high scientific theory in academia and returns to the common life, then it is generally seen as returning to a world of ignorance, prejudice or bigotry and superstition. It is commonly argued by academic (analytic) philosophers that it has turned away from the sunny world of the enlightenment to the dark world of Plato's cave, where it has become ensnarred in darkness.
That account from the timeservers in the academy unnerves many who would like philosophy to be different and more in touch with things. This Enlightenment blackmail frightens them, and so they quickly retreat back into the safety of a nookdwelling within philosophy as science in the university. There they try and make do as best they can in a ruined institution. Others with more courage make the shift away fom scientific philosophy and go over to the literary institution, where they commonly practice a form of cultural criticism that has its roots in aesthetics and romanticism.
What if we ex-scholars, wanted to, and did, return to our common life ----as suggested by Hume, Burke, Nietzsche, Wittengstein----and that we also wanted to continue to practice philosophy within athe common life. Is that an option? A possibility? How could it be done? Can it be done?
For this pathway to be a possiblity it is necessary that academic philosophy is reinvented or transformed Philosophy would need to displace its old modernist identity of being the theoretical part of big science (its metaphysics) and become a critical interpretive philosophy within our common life. Let us grant that this can be done for the sake of the argument. (It can be done if philosophy recovers the long forgotten rhetorical tradition of the classical Romans).
If so, can we then do philosophy within our political institutions? Many say no firmly. They say that it is not possible because you have to give up the critical aspect of philosophy in politics. Criticism is the lifeblood of philosophy and criticism is what is blocked or denied in political life. By stepping into political life you sell out philosophy and become a cheap skate carpet-bagger.
I reckon that objection is far too quick. It is widely acknowledged there has been a deep current of criticism based in our common life, which has resisted and challenged the neo-liberal policies embraced by governments over the last two decades. This popular political criticism has become known as populism and it has a very negative image.
The neo-liberal ruling policy elite and politicians have mocked, scorned and abused it as a nationalism that closes the borders of the nation-state and rejects the global market in the name of protectionism. Left liberals have denounced this subversive populism as a form of right wing racism with fascist tendencies. Academics say populists are full of emotion, vomit up their prejudices in public, won't listen to criticism and do not argue. Populism is a world of unreason.
If philosophy is to be able to operate in public life, then it must be able to prove its case on the terrain populism. It is a good test to see whether this be done? With this in mind I have gone back to a post I did on my old Public opinion weblog over Xmas. Few would have read it then, and I introduce it now to show that philosophy can critically work within the common life. It does so by redescribing populism as being against liberalism, and then unpacking what this 'contra liberalism' can mean. Here is the old post.
Populism Contra Liberalism
I see that the ace OZ weblogger John Quiggin has just started a dictionary of modern thought. What an excellent idea to help foster public debate, counter the depoliticization of public discussion and contest the showbizzing of politics.
The fool would like to contribute some big thoughts that have been tucked in his back pocket for some time. As the fool in the world of public policy I am putting in a plug for 'populism' to be an entry in the dictionary.
Here are some musings to mull over during the holiday break. These musings are written from the perspective of a philosophy in political life that contests the way that the enterprise of philosophy is no longer taken very seriously in the corporate university nor accorded much recognition in the broader public culture. This philosophy contests its marginalisation in the culture of liberal democracies by recovering, then defending, a sense of the democratic res publica through engaging with unsettling questions. Putting populism on the table raises some troubling questions about liberalism.
Populism in Australia is usually seen in negative terms---as a backlash by the people at a regional level to the neo-liberal economic restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s. It takes the form of those who lost out from, or been disadvantaged by the opening to a global market being critical of the politicians who have imposed these reforms on them in the name of economic necessity. This protest says that the politicians and the elites have not listened to what the people want, need and say, and it works from the lifestyle, beliefs and values of the common life of the liberal nation-state. Hence populists feel alienated from our liberal political institutions and the major political parties---Liberal, National and Labor.
Pauline Hanson's One Nation Movement in the 1990s is a classic Australian example of this populist protest. Pat Buchanan is the US example and Le Pen is the French one. It was dismissed as an irrational, resentful expression of grievance, blame and protest with conspiratorial overtones to economic reform and change to reshape Australia in terms of the neo-classical model of a competitive market economy. This populism had a cultural dimension---and opposition to multiculturalism, Asian immigration, affirmative action for Aborigines, job snobs and welfare bums and cosmopolitanism---and an affirmation of ethnic, religions and local/regional traditions.
This rightwing populism was roughly dismissed by the liberal mass media as short-sighted, right wing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic and irrational. Liberals saw in this regional populism the resurgence of traditional prejudice; and even the face of fascist racism on the march from the countryside to take out the enlightened elites living in the cities.
There things currently stand in Australia. Hansonism as a political movement died in the late 1990s after John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, successfully incorporated populism into his populist conservatism. Roughly speaking we are left with Australian liberalism's understanding of populism----it is stereotyped as an inarticulate and useless theoretical mishmash. It has no place in a dictionary of modern thought because, in being raw violent emotion directed at Canberra bashing, it is not a systematic thinking or reasoning.
This is where we can unsettle or loosen things up. True, populism does not have a rich theoretical political tradition, but something more is going on underneath the surface than the liberal interpretation of populism as a hostile right-wing reaction to modernity. This 'something more' is more than a reactionary defence of pre-modern superstition, prejudice, ignorance and dogma. It is a recognition that the two decade long defence of the competitive market has more to do with protecting the profitability of capital and providing high paid jobs for New Class technocrats than safeguarding the interests of ordinary Australians. This 'something more' highlights the narrowness of the liberal interpretation of populism.
Hence my plug for populism. It deserves an entry in because of the political impact it has had in liberal democracies. From my perspective of philosophy in political life---a public reason--populism has the following features:
---populism reaffirms and vindicates existing community norms and really existing regional cultures, traditions and customs. Hence it can take different forms---eg., the SA movement to 'Save the River Murray' is an eco-populism. This re-surfacing of populism indicates the unraveling of the national consensus that once underpinned the massive nation building projects of the late twenieth century (eg., the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electricity Scheme in Australia or the New Deal in the US) and its replacement by consumerism, property rights and self-seeking, upwardly-mobile, aspirational indivdualism.
----populism is a grass roots rejection of the technocratic centralized state developed by a statist liberalism after WW2 and its elitist and managerial ideology, eg., the 'New Deal' in the US.
---populism is a political expression of the popular dissatisfaction with economic progress and unlimited economic development advocated by both statist and free market liberalism;
---populism places liberalism into question by articulating a deep tension or contradiction between a deep-seated contradiction of political modernity—between the liberal ideal of universal rights, freedom and equality and the collective self-determination of specific national groups. Populism articulates the way that collective aspirations to national self-determination through the liberal state (eg, economic reform to ensure the wealth of nations) can led to discrimination against regional minorities and even their political and economic disenfranchisement;
----populism's ethos of popular sovereignty shows up the failure of liberalism to deliver on its democratic promise and highlights the democratic deficit of liberal democracy. Populsoim addresses this deficit through a particpatory democracy based on the federalisation of the nation-state into more autonomous regions/states.
So philosophy is not so breathtakingly irrelevant after all. In contesting the liberal stereotype of populism it discloses the significance of populism to be in its challenge to liberalism and its highlighting the limits of liberalism. By calling a self-congratulatory liberalism into question, populism has put its finger on what can be called the identity crisis of liberalism. This crisis is currently expressed in the conflict between social and market liberalism.
Liberalism is in crisis because of the gap between the human needs for a flourishing life and official policies, and between our everyday lived values and a utilitarian, economic rationality centred in Canberra. When liberalism relies exclusively on the state and market as steering mechanisms---as it has done over the previous two decades---then the inherited social norms and beliefs of our everyday living traditions are eroded. There is an undermining of the very cultural preconditions for the functioning of a liberal social order and the unitary culture of a liberal social order that existed during the Cold War disintegrates.
Liberalism cannot provide the national consensus or values (trust, compassion, care, belonging) that are sufficiently strong and binding to anchor any viable project of reconstruction---eg., repairing an ecologically devastated Murray-Darling Basin. All the conservative political talk about moral and mutual obligation deployed by the Howard Government---or the compassionate conservatism of the Bush Administration won't do the trick.
Since the crisis of liberalism is barely acknowledged in Australia, the fool has to state it. And the fool adds: many Australians are no longer seduced by the sirens of liberalism. So the political significance of populism is that it gives voice to the growing public unease with a triumphal liberalism and the disintegration of Australia as a unitary nation-state.
That was the Xmas post. It indicates enough to make my case that philosophy can critically operate within our common life and offer something useful through its process of disclosing what has been hidden from view. It gives us a way of standing outside liberalism; gives us a critical perspective on liberalism which constitutes the universe of policy makers; and undercuts the science verus irrationality claim of the economic "enlighteners."
Now that the war with Iraq is almost us---its the endgame say those politicians twitching for war----does anybody still believe Hegel's big thesis about history. You know the one:
'That the Enlightenment abolishes itself by realizing itself.'
Does anybody believe that?
No? Not really?
Then what about Hegel's other big claim:
'That the sole work and deed of universal freedom therefore is death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling.' (The Phenomenology of Spirit)
Yes? No?
Can we take that insight into our history on board as the cruise missiles make their way through the streets of Bhagdad and the smart bombs take out the country's infrastructure?
Bring on the shock and awe I hear people say. Its time.
The media are gearing up for the carnival to begin.
Many seem to be under the spell of the war machine and just want to hear imitations of that good old rock and roll.
What will shock us awake now?
What is going to create a nature morte for us in the 21st century?
I have refrained from commenting on Keith Windschuttle's comments on the writing of Australian history because I wanted the dust to settle a bit. I wanted to see whether the dialogue was getting anywhere or whether it was going around in circles. I also wanted to see whether positions were becoming entrenched, issues were being sidelined and prejudices were being expressed rather than reflected upon.
In his most recent intervention Why I'm a bad historian Windshuttle makes two claims. He says:
"The debate over my thesis suggests something is seriously wrong with academic history in this country. A small group of university teachers with overt left-wing political commitments believe they can decide among themselves what happened in this country's past. When challenged, they resort not to debating the substantive issues but to demonising their critic and mocking his concern for facts."
I am willing to grant Windschuttle this with suitable redescription in terms of the rhetorical traditon. 'Demonising their critic' is the standard way for debating issues publicly in Australia, and sadly it is how Australians understand rhetoric. See a previous post on the intervention by Dick Moses More on Windshuttle/Ryan dispute re writing Australian history. Demonising is not conducting a dialogue or conversation in deliberative writing as it is more concerned to achieve victory in the cultural wars. See Nor is demonising a good way to persuade an audience to adopt their point of view through the use of figurative language.
'Mocking' is one technique to amplify the force of writing and arouse the emotions of the audience. It is designed to provoke laughter and scorn, undermine one's enemies and divert attention from the weak points of the argument. Laughing is laughing at someone--speaking derisively--- and it involves a glorifying or triumphing over others.
Windshuttle deploys this rhetorical tradition himself with his amplification or magnification of the argument. which is designed to intensify the passions --eg., fabrication, invention, concocted----which presents the facts in a maner more favourable to his side that they are in strict truth. These emotional appeals are then picked and circulated by the neo-con journalists with great ornamention. The case Windshuttle is arguing is then presented with great exaggeration born of indignation, as seen in Interpretation or Fakery. These are standard rhetorical techniques.
If we are going to have a dialogue on the writing of Australian history then it should be acknowledged that all parties in this debate are working within the rhetorical tradition, and that they doing so with great gusto.
The second issue Windshuttle raises is his claim that the writing of Australian history should be an empirical history. He says in response to Alan Atkinson's piece in the February edition of the Australian Book Review that described an article of Winshuttle's in The Australian (December 9) as "heart-sinking" that:
"I had provided a list of examples of the abuse of scholarship in Aboriginal history, showing that interpretations of frontier warfare and genocide were based on invented incidents, concocted footnotes, altered documents and gross exaggeration of the Aboriginal death toll in colonial Tasmania.
What made Atkinson's heart sink, however, was not this catalogue of misconduct. Instead, he was dismayed that my critique was based on such an outdated concern as getting the facts right. "Windschuttle aims to take the discipline of history back to some golden age," he lamented, "when it was all about facts."
Windshuttle's response? It is that:
"...historians should report the facts accurately and cite their sources honestly. To pretend these things don't matter and that acceptable interpretations can be drawn from false or non-existent evidence is to abandon the pursuit of historical truth altogether."
So there are two different issues here: the use of rhetoric and the way to write Australian history. What is disappointing is that there is very little engagement by historians with Windshuttle's claim that the only way to write Australian history is to do empirical history. They do not engage with this claim even though it is pretty clear that they have rejected this way of writing history and are writing it in different ways. I have suggested in previous posts Windshuttle, Fabrication & writing Australian history and Windshuttle, empirical history, language that one of these ways is a hermeneutcal one; ie one involving an interpretative way of writing based on an understanding of primary sources as texts.
What happens in the public debate is that John Quiggin and Ken Parish have agreed that Windschuttle has landed some very telling blows on Lyndall Ryan's academic reputation. I previously questioned that claim in Multiple interpretations of history. In Another shot in the Cultural Wars Ken Parish says:
"Ryan has apparently known of these allegations for over a year, she has had well over 2 months since publication of Windschuttle's book to hotfoot it down to Tasmania and drag out her old notes and photocopied documents. If it was me whose reputation had been attacked in this way, I'd have been on the first plane down there. The fact that we still haven't heard a substantive defence from Ryan or any of her sympathisers rather suggests that she's simply been caught red-handed, and is hoping the controversy will somehow just die away."
I have argued that Ryan has indeed responded by indicating that she has moved away from an empiricist history at The writing of Australian history revisited with her conception of history involving different and multiple truths and interprrtations. The attacks on Ryan do not engage with her alternative conception of writing Australian history.
There is only one kind of writing history, say the empiricists. That is ours. If interpretation exists---even Windshuttle uses the words--- it is built up piece by piece from the facts (primary sources) not from other texts. All the time of course Parish and Quiggin are spinning their interpretations from other texts---in the media or online. They are practising what they theoretically deny without the slightest embarrassment---giving interpretations of a particular text. So they are enforcing their empiricist dogmas onto Ryans text thereby constructing false interpretations of Ryan's texts.
It is about time there is some acknowledgement of the rhetorical and hermeneutical traditions that are being deployed here in this public debate about the writing of Australian history.
Since writing the previous post I have come across other responses to the Scruton article and reflections on conservatism in the blogsphere which I was unaware of at the time of witing.
A comment on the biographical part of Scruton 's article can be found at Chris Bertram's The moaning of conservatism These remarks are countered by Matthew Yglesias.
A more extended commentary can be found at Volokh Conspiracy by Jacob Levy (10.09 am). Jacob makes several good points.
He confirms my argument in the previous post that Scruton argues that conservatism is innately opposed to system-building and that it has historically being expressed as an extended argument with competing traditions, rather than as a habit of mind. The habit of mind theseis is very popular in Australia.
Jacob says Anglo-American conservatism has always been thin on the ground, because the British and American "traditions" have typically been understood as liberal. If the key figures in the conservative tradition are Burke and Oakeshott, then there's simply not much very conservative conservatism to go around. There is Adams, Calhoun, the southern conservatives, and Russell Kirk in the traditional canon of American political thought. Britain has Stephens, Carlyle, Ruskin. He says that these are all worth teaching, and reading, in some specialized contexts. But-- compared with a Continental tradition that includes de Maistre, Hegel, Fichte, Vico, Schmitt, Heidegger, etc--these just aren't dominant figures in the course of Anglo-American thought.
As always Leo Strauss gets forgotten despite his long critical argument about the crisis of modernity and the need to return to the Greeks. And where's the explosive Nietzsche?
The last point Jacob makes is that there are lots of conservative journals today and he lists them off the top of his head.
What we can infer from this is that Australian conservatives---and they do exist (eg. Australian Tory)--- haven't really done all that much to establish the importance or significance of conservatism to contemporary public issues. Thats what they should be doing. There are enough resources around for them to begin to do that. For an example see Eve Tushnet.
Eve also has a good post on the above discussion under CAN CONSERVATIVES THINK (Feb 6th). She emakes lots of good points.
She has two points that I concur with. First, Nietzsche has basically blown up the entire framework of the modern rationalist project... if you follow the premises of modern liberal (& marxist) thought to their conclusions the Enlightenment project begins to dissolve. We are then left with a dialectic of enlightenment-- that was response from the Marxist tradition by Adorno and Horkheimer to Nietzsche's explosion.
The other point Eve makes is introduce Madison's thesis that the US is "partly national, partly federal." ("Federal" = a confederation of strong states.) A more general version of this federalism based on separation of powers with its conflict between the states and the commonwealth would take us beyond the knee jerk state rights and the old, cliched ALP response that being modern requires us to dump the states and federalism. Federalism needs rethinking in a globalised world.
We have certainly transgressed the conservatism is a habit of mind understanding that is so prevalent in Australia. And Eve's many questions take us a lot furthe down the pathway of conservatism speaking sensibly about contemporary issues.
Do read her post. It is very good. It should be required reading for all those who are Australian conservatives. The address again is Eve Tushnet.
I came across this article on Australian conservatism. Its called, 'Conservatism is not evil, stupid nor ignorant - it's just misunderstood', by Stephen Barton who has taught politics at several universities and is currently a staffer for the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, the Hon Jackie Kelly MP.
Good oh, I thought. It looks promising. I concurred with his main thesis that conservatism is misunderstood in Australia. And Stephen has good creditionals to help us in figure out what Australian conservatism is about. How is Australian conservatism different from Anerican conservatism, which is primarily a Locken liberalism; or an English Burkean-Humean conservatism?
Well, Stephen doesn't really say. He mentions the poor quality of the public debate in Australia (we all do); fires some arrows at the left for their moral high ground stance (fair enough); and describes the uncomfortable experience of being a conservative in a left-liberal world. When he does turn to that conservative tradition that we misunderstand in Australia, he is a bit light on the content about what it is.
Stephen does say that conservatism's philosophical roots extensive, subtle and nuanced (agreed) and that it can vary so much between nations and cultures (agreed). So British conservatism is different to American conservatism, whilst English Speaking conservatism, with its bedrock of liberalism, is different to European conservatism. And Australian conservatism? Stephen says:
"Given the shallowness of Australia's intellectual pool, Australian conservatives draw heavily on either British or American conservatism or a combination of both."
That's reasonable enough. If the bedrock of conservatism in Australia is liberalism. then what sort of liberalism would that be? A rights-based liberalism?; utilitarian liberalism?; or a social liberalism? Stephen doesn't say.Is it important? Yes, because they have different views about the state and freedom and, since nearly all debates in Australia take place within liberalism, its sort of like a family quarrel. Stephen needs to tell us very much here.
What interests Stephen is the conservative mindset (mentality? form of consciousness, political unconscious? discourse?) He says that perhaps the best description of the conservative mindset comes from Michael Oakeshott. He then quotes the English political philosopher:
"... men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting point nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to be kept afloat on an even keel; the sea is both enemy and friend; and seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion."
I love the quote. I always have. Now I'm on the left side of politics yet I can accept the quote with ease. Maybe 'traditional' would need to be teased out a bit, but I accept a lot of the tacit, practical knowledge embodied in everyday life in contrast to big modern scientific theory. That knowledge is embodied in various historical traditions. And as a good citizens who loves his country I am quite willing and happy to defend Australian customs and institutions without embarrasment. I am also conscious of the value of historical memory and the bringing to consciousness of long forgotten things.
This indicates that conservatism is more than a habit of mind. It is a political tradition that has historically engaged with the competing traditions of liberalism and socialism. So what would be a conservative gloss on this Oakshott passage? Stephen gives one when he says;
'Conservatism is keeping "your head when all about you are losing theirs", especially when half the crew thinks they have spotted Shangri-La to port. The conservative knows there is no Utopia or temporal heaven, and wishing for it won't make it so. The only solution for a quiet life is to rely on the tried and tested, to promote evolution not revolution. This is not to say conservatives can't be radical or reforming; when the safety of the ship is at risk conservatives can and do implement drastic changes and reforms. Above all, keeping the ship afloat involves sober reflection and a continued rearguard action against some of the crew's more crazy ideas, which left unchecked would sink the ship in shark-infested waters."
Again, as a lefty I have no problem with this. I reckon those who continued to defend social democracy kept their head whilst the politicians and economists lost theirs as they rushed to embrace the free market. I would identify the crazy ideas as neo-liberalism whilst the Shangri-La to port some of the crew thinks they have spotted is the temporal heaven of the competitive free market.
We really do need a bit more content at this point than a rejection of utopian politics or what Oakeshott called rationalism in politics. Maybe it is the lack of content in Australian conservatisms that causes so much misunderstanding? I will be provocative here and introduce some strands from British conservatism, which has dropped out of Stephen's picture.
This has more of the content missing from Stephen's article. (Thanks to Scott Wickstein for the link). An American equivalent would be Russell Kirk.
Scruton's reading of Burke takes us beyond the anti-utopian politics that Stephen uses to characterise conservatism. Scruton finds four characteristics in his reading of Burke that forms the basis for his understanding of conservatism:
1. the defense of authority and obedience;
2. the subtle defense of tradition, prejudice and custom, against the enlightened plans of the reformers;
3.the reworking of theory of the social contract. Though society can be seen as a contract, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. Rightly understood society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn. Without what Burke, called the “hereditary principle,” according to which rights could be inherited as well as acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized.
Scruton also mentions Burke's deep negative thesis, the glimpse into Hell contained in his vision of the French Revolution.That glimpse had shaken Burke to the depths of his being. I have introduced this theme under the absolute freedom and terror posting.
Scruton says that the positive aspect of Burke’s philosophy (1-3) can be seen as a response to that vision of hell. It overs us something that human beings can hope for, and as the sole and sufficient vindication of our life on earth.
How about that for a bit of content? It gives conservatism a bit of ooomph at a time when there is notable lack of academic discussion of contemporary conservative philosophy. That ooomph is better than moaning about how how liberals have all the power, that people think conservatism sucks, and that a small left-wing professoriat leads to a narrower scope of debate on politics. Why don't the Australian conservatives get on with and start elaborating some content.
There is a recent posting at public opinion entitled, 'Once the war is over, what then?' The post gently suggests that we to need to begin to think about what would happen to Iraq after the war is won by the US and its allies. If war is inevitable as many now say, what then the future of Iraq and the Middle East?
The post suggests that Afghanistan may be a model of post Iraq; a model that is a variation on Vietnam. The US wins the war quickly, installs a client regime and both are then subject to counterattacks from hostile forces dispersed in the mountains. Is that too pessimistic?
Is not that Afghanistan now?
What the above post on public opinion gestured to, in its attempt to write a history of the present, continues to trouble me. It is not the fear that may drive us some of stir crazy.
One aspect of my concern is the indifference of the Bush Administration to nation building after the regime change. The McGill Report says it very well:
"The early signs are discouraging. The U.S. military blew into Afghanistan, did its urgent business and vowed eternal support of the long-oppressed Afghan people, but now has basically flown the coop. Why should we believe that our government will do any more to support a stable democratic government in a post-Saddam Iraq? Where are the Bush government’s efforts right now to build a national consensus around the need to rebuild postwar Iraq into a democracy, just as we helped Germany and Japan to become democracies after World War II?"
My concerns go further than this though this. They circle around the unreason of the political reason of the national security state; but I have no words to express the dread that comes upon me. I fear the consequences of the unreason of reason (historical examples of the unreason of reason are Auschwitz or the destruction of aboriginal society).
Last night I re-read Walter Benjamin's, Theses on the Philosophy of History, and his insights once again struck me as dialectical signposts to the future.
Consider this:
"And all rulers are the heirs of those who have conquered before them ... Whoever has emerged victorious particpates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying protrate ...There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another."
These fragments of Benjamin's text capture my fears and anxieties about the future in the Middle East after the war with Iraq is finished. There is no straight, progressive course to history, ie., bringing democracy and freedom to a people oppressed by a totalitarian regime. Oh, I know, we are supposed to marching to Baghdad to liberate the people of Iraq; and to foster the emergence of liberal democracy in the Middle East. But I hear the satanic laughter echoing in the distance and realise that world history is indeed a slaughter bench of the innocents and the vulnerable.
This cuts against the liberal philosophy of many Americans who firmly accept, the words of The McGill Report, that progress is more than a hollowed-out catchphrase that has becoem a mythology.
"So are we making progress after all? Without a doubt. The United States is itself the greatest example of that progress, because here all people are owed government protection of their basic human rights regardless of race, religion, color, sex, age, caste, or station of birth. Persecuted refugees from the world over have flocked to the United States for decades because of this. "
In such a situation Benjamin suggests that a critical philosophy in public life brushes history against the grain; it strips the future of its magic by uncoupling progress and humanity. We need to blast open that continuum of history; to blast our specific era out of that homogenous, liberal course of history that is ultimately structured on redemption from evil---a movement towards a blessed state.
How can we brush history against the grain? Benjamin says that if we turn our faces to the past we can see the wreckage upon wreckage that is being hurled at our feet from the storm blowing from Paradise. This storm blows us irresistbly into the future to which our backs are turned, while the pile of debris before us grows every skyward. The storm is what we call progress.
A storm is going to blow through the Middle East, and it will a big one, if the past history of modernity is any guide. To put in George Bush's language, evil has continued undiminshed and redemption has failed to appear. All we have is the aura of redemption of a progressing humanity as we lurch towards an abyss of an unredeemed world wracked by violence and terror.
Sorry, I just cannot picture George Bush delivering on redemption in a world besieged by the evil of pure terror. I see the long shadows cast by a newly-forming empire, remember the historical setbacks of the past and cannot shake off the sense of shock at seeing once again the mutilated, twisted carcasses in the desert.
I was too tired last night to do any work on my post on 'America as empire'. However, I did come across a website that I found extremely interesting ---- Eject! Eject! Eject! run by William A Whittle.
He is an armed liberal US style --a war blogger. He believes in the manifest destiny of America. So he maintains that the US has fact, history, logic and reason on our side and that it will use its great power, great wealth, great ingenuity and great courage to achieve a huge gain in freedom and happiness for the countries it invades.
Bill would quickly toss the postings on Iraq at Public opinion into the Australian 'leftist rabidly anti-American defeatist nitwits' basket. According to him all I have left is the ruins of Marxism in an ever-more free and prosperous world. And with the little sanity that I have left,I am only capable of chanting the line that the US war with Iraq 'HAS to be about oil, money, revenge and whatever other base motivations I can hurl at' patriotic Americans.
So there will be no engagement on that issue. It is too black and white and excludes how the majority of Australians see the war with Iraq. Thats war blogging.
But we can easily put these differences to one because thre is another side to this weblog. Bill writes weblog essays. They are good ones that are self-reflective, considered and honest. This is philosophy in the public domain based on thinking issues through.
The essay on war, for instance, does set the pro-war position clearly and it gives a good insight into the broad US neocon mentality or discourse. If you can put the "liberals are suckholes" stuff to one side and read it in terms of its ethical/political structure, then you can discern the geopolitical strategy and tactics.
In the essay on celebrities the ethical perspective is more clearly evident---the politics is more in the background and more woven through the text. The essay on empire is the one that interests me. It accepts that the US is an empire and sets out to defend it (as I said the guy is honest). So I will engage with it when I can find a bit more time.
In the meantime, if you have a moment, take some time to read Bill's essays.
This morning I started to re-read my very battered paperback copy of Hegel's well-known but little read Phenomenology of Spirit in the light of my recent exposure to some American neo-conservative material.
The reason for doing so is due to the writings of Anne Coulter, the author of Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right and an upcoming book, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War To The War On Terrorism. The texts I have read---some of the newspaper articles---have been preying on me. I cannot forget what I saw buried there. It has shaken me.
What struck me about the more extreme of Coulter's writings is the neo-con political unconscious. Coulter's writing open up the blind fury of the politics and the willingness to attack all opponents---whether they are nation-states like France or the US Democrats---in the name of freedom. Attack is given an extreme form since attack means fighting a campaign in a war.
What I discern in Coulter's writings---what these texts bring to the light of day---is a freedom that is hostile to any constraint or restriction on its action, and which celebrates its intolerance with an in-your-face style.
Such a freedom is what Hegel calls an absolute or universal freedom.
Here are some quotes taken from The Phenomenology of Spirit (Ch.6, para. 589ff) to indicate the character of absolute freedom. Hegel is referring to the absolute freedom of the French Revolution.
"Universal freedom, therefore, can produce neither a positive work nor a deed; there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the fury of destruction."
"And, moreover, by virtue of its own abstraction, it divides itelf into extremes equally abstract, into a simple, inflexible, cold universality and into the discrete, absloute hard rigidity and self-willed atomism of actual self-consciousness. Now that it has completed the destruction of the actual organization of the world and exists just for itself, this is its sole object, an object that no longer has any content, possession, existence or outer extension; but is merely this knowledge of itself as an absolutely pure and free individual self."
"The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of of the abolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting of a head of a cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water."
"What is called government is merely the victorious faction and in the very fact of its being a faction lies the direct necessity of its overthrow..."
"....the terror of death is the vision of this negative nature of itself."
I have turned back to Hegel to begin to make sense of the neo-conservative conception of politics as blind fury that is willing to destroy what stands in its way. What it constructs as its opposite----that which has to be fought and destroyed ----is a negative, which is called terror. A war has to be unleashed on terror. Terror must be destroyed. What this gives birth to is a self-destroying reality.
So we have a dialectic of absolute freedom and terror.and this makes for dark times. That seems to me to capture what is happening with the war on Iraq.
That is the best I can do. Its not much help I know. But it is something, especially when there is little public evidence that Iraq poses a threat to the US; little public evidence that there is a direct link between the Iraqi government and the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, or little public evidence that there are links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. For the latter see Sunday's postings by Mark at pineappletown.
The irony is that this political unconscious of absolute freedom is surfacing in a nation-state whose ethical liberal culture is deeply structured around universal individual rights. These rights---a right to free speech, a right to a free trial, a right to freedom of assembly etc ---are almost venerated in the US nation, whilst the liberal state is deeply committed to these rights.
The politicians are asking us to trust them at a time when we are about to go to war with Iraq. Yet we know from bitter experience that one of the first casualities of war is truth. Our governments will lie, dissemble and spin in order to persuade us that going to war with Iraq is a good thing. And they will do this by fair means and foul. Thats what war does---standard operating procedure.
Do we trust the politicians? Not really. Politics has been marked by a loss of trust the commentators say. Mistrust is the norm. We expect the politicians to be untrustworthy. Lets face it, they have blood on their hands, they have an intimate relationship with rat cunning, treachery is a dear friend and they live in world woven by webs of deceit. Mistrust and betrayal is the norm in political life.
Is that not the moral of the Tampa incident and the children overboard affair in the last federal election? That governments don't come clean about their dirty hands.
The politicians, being good professionals who realize they need to have a few spin doctors (journalists) to advise them, tackle the mistrust by endeavouring to reduce the level of suspicion. They work away at the edges, smoothing the sharp distinction between trust and distrust, so they sort of blend through painting their grey on grey.
Does it work?--is the image of the Australian Prime Minister as honest John a successful one in reducing the mistrust? Who knows for sure. He looked good on gun control but he is offside with public opinion on the war with the Iraq issue. Many citizens reckon that Howard committed to the war with Bush many months ago and is unwilling to come clean. So he is playing us for mugs and is seen to be untrustwothy on the war issue.
Journalists and publicists are probably even more mistrusted and despised than politicians are. Very few of us place trust in the stories we read in the media these days. The everyday practices of the media probably heightens the distrust, and creates an overall public mood of suspicion.
Yet trust is there in the background holding things together at a deep level. Consider the war with Iraq again.
The Australian Government has gone along with the fiction that if Iraq presents such a threat to the security of a superpower that the latter requires a defensive shield from incoming ballistic missiles. Little evidence has been presented. Or alternatively, if Iraq is not disarmed then its weapons of mass destruction (biological and nuclear weapons) might fall into the hands of terrorists and Australia's national security is threatened. Again little evidence has been presented.
What is said over and over again is that there will be no stability and no security for the US , Britain or Australia---nay the international community--- until Iraq is disarmed of its weapons of mass destruction, totally and permanently.
The argument? It goes like this. The war politician points to Iraq's history of training and supporting terrorist groups and its use of weapons of mass destruction (biological weapons) against Iran and its own Kurdish people. Then a nightmare scenario is outlined: the ultimate nightmare for us all must be that weapons of mass destruction fall into the hands of terrorist organizations. Why is that so? Because these are rogues states, part of the axis of evil. So we cannot stand idly by and allow the possession of such weapons of mass destruction by rogue states because it is more than more likely that these rogue states will help the terrorists to acquire and ultimately use the weapons of mass destruction.
The argument has a certain logic that a lot of people find convincing. But many citizens in the US, Britain and Australia are not convinced. But it doesn't matter because there is an emotional undertow that glues it together and gives it weight. It is fear and trust. Fear of the terror. Trust in politicians to provide the national security to ease the fear. Democracy is ultimately founded on trust; and though we know that there is no one to protect us from the politician/guardians, at some point we accept that trust is required to ensure the liberal polity keeps working. We know at some point that we have bit the bullet and stare the terror down.
We trust the politicians even though they have let us down so many times in the past, and they have breached our trust by breaking so many promises. Oh we remember the clever distinction between core and non-core promises. And we remember the hands in the till, the shady deal, the kickbacks, the conflicts of interest and the hand out for the cash. And we remember that many of them get away with it with a bit of help from their powerful friends with bending the rules and regulations of accountability whilst they talk about governing the country in the public interest.
Yet we continue to trust. We will go to war with Iraq soon, even though the politicians are dealing from a crooked deck. The majority of Australian citizens will place our trust in our liberal political institutions provided they get a mandate from the United Nations. The United Nations is the litmus test---for all its many flaws. The majority of Australian citizens will put their trust in the United Nations to make the right call (judgement) about going to war with Iraq.
Are we wrong to do that? To rely on trust rather than the simple power politics and muscle of a great power to get the problem presented by the current Iraqi regime sorted. Well, the hawks certainly think so. The trust stuff is for girls, the chicken hearted and the sissies. They are all for handing the job of getting things sorted over to the military and their smart technology.
But the gungho hawks trust the military to sort out the Iraqi's fast and with a minimum of fuss and resistance. This allows them to present their distorted version of why we want to bomb a people back to the stone age--its good versus evil folks.
A liberal polity works on trust. Even in the gun culture of the US that works on fear and violence. The politicians know this: they paint a picture of pure terror and then promise to protect us and our democratic rights from anthrax. Terror can only be averted through trust is the message they want to convey to us. Then they say that we citizens have a duty to be alert---not alarmed--- and to be active by keeping an eye out for terrorists and the various acts treason. The politicians say they have good grounds to believe that we are in danger. And we have to trust them on that one. It is our duty to do so.
Of course the Americans take it much further. They know that they have God on the side and in God they trust. He guides them in their manifest destiny. They trust that world history is moving towards that destiny.
That is a big trust in dark times. It deals with absolutes in a world of terror. So it requires lots of bulletins and briefings from the White House and mind-numbing slogans and half truths about evil and absolute freedom delivered in a folksy style for the cameras in highly staged settings. The big metaphysical trust is counter the destruction of everyday trust by a terror unleashed on the world.
The terror unleashed recalls the historical memory of the terror of the French Revolution. Today's is a different kind of terror to that earlier modern one ---it is international rather than national, and it uses weapons of mass destruction rather than the guillotine. Both forms of terror strike at the very heart of the social order, work to split it violently asunder and so create a crisis of trust in the political institutions.
Then as of now we citizens ask: can we trust our politicians? How can we call them to account? How do we recreate a culture of public service and ensure that the professional politicians are free to serve the public weal of citizens?
We can suggest one answer: only when the politicians and the senior public servants freely serve we citizens can we begin to replace our mistrust with trust.