This post by Will Hutton is a good post on the political tragedy that Tony Blair finds himself caught up in, and pulled apart by, a conflict of between different sets of values. Blair wants to be, or have both sets. But the after 9/11 the world is organized in such a way that he cannot have both. He cannot side with the Bush administration on the war with Iraq and still be a good internationalist, support the UN and be a pro-European. His desires conflict, so he has to give up one or the other and he will regret what he gives up for a long time. Its a tragedy that is being played out.
Hutton also locates this tragedy within an account of US conservative neo-con style. The link is courtesy of Natasha over at The Watch
The choice is simpler in Australia. They did not see that they had to do one or another in a situation where the world is so arranged that cannot do both. The conservatives are in power and have been since 1996. So its all the way with LBJ mark 2.
The Australian conservatives are soul mates of the US neo-cons. They have a contempt for internationalism and are willing to aid and abet the break-up of the UN system. They have little concern for regional cooperation. They are willing to trigger the most acute divisions in the region with their talk about being of US deputy sheriff in the region and pre-emptive strikes in Indonesia. They give unflinching support for the projects of Washington's neo-conservatives, which use force to advance democracy and markets worldwide. And they view US as the exemplar of a civilisation that the rest of the world should copy and emulate.
What is most worrying is that they have no sense of tragedy. They have no sense of having lost anything with their wholehearted siding with the Bush administration. They do not see that a tragedy can also involve an ommission, or a failure to pursue a particular course of action. An example is the failure to assert enough independence to ensure regional co-operation; eg., in the form of giving Indonesia a helping hand to prevent Islamic fundamentalists destablizing the country and overthrowing a secular liberal democracy.
Is this not doing a big, if not irreparable, harm to the people of Indonesia through violating a precious commitment involving major values?
What would the conservative's inhouse philosopher say? They do not have one from what I can tell. So let us construct an argument for them. The fictitious RIP would say that there is no conflict. There is only one course of action the correct one. The correct one is all the way with President Bush. So the old fashioned notion of tragedy does not apply. Their moral views are in harmony with the way the world is.
What can we say to that? Well, intuitively we feel as if we have given up something of importance by siding with President Bush ---eg., a working through the UN, working within international rules, or through the values of regional cooperation. We also have sacrificed Australia's independent foreign policy.
What is more we have stepped into a situation where Australia is seen to engaged in a fight with Islam; it is morally indifferent to the conflict within Indonesia caused by the war; and has no emotional compassion for the suffering caused by the turmoil and conflict within Indoneisa. Australia is also seen to be willing to sacrifice some Indonesians through pre-emptive strike to ensure its national security. You can hear them crunching the numbers in Canberra to figure out how many Indonesian deaths will be required to ensure Australian national security.
None of this is seen as a tragedy in Australia. It is just hard-headed realism in the name of national security. But it is a tragedy that the Kurds' desire for ain independent homeland-- Kurdistan-- will be denied; or that the Kurdish people will not be recognized as a distinct society within an Iraqi federation, and on the strength of that be given extensive powers of home rule. It is more than likely that the Kurdish people will continue to be oppressed within Turkey and Iraq.
Is it a tragedy that their claims for cultural recognition and affirmation as a people will be denied? Is it a tradegy that these claims are denied by the Anglo-Americans occupying Iraq who claim that their liberal culture is superior to all others. Indeed, who go on to claim that there is one way to live and that this is their way. At this point we hear the American invocation of manifest destiny to defend their liberal universalism.
And so the Kurd's desire for self-determination will be dismissed as romantic nationalism that stands in opposition to the universal, liberal Enlightenment. It will be seen as advocating that each culture constitutes a self-contained moral universe; that each culture is of equal value; that different cultures are incommensurable; and that we cannot make comparative judgements about different cultures.So the way to arrange matters to avoid conflict is to have a state for each particular culture in the Iraq of Sadam Hussein.
If would be a tragedy if the Kurd's claim for the recognition of their culture and self-determination is dismissed as them merely whistling the old tune of the Counter Enlightenment.
I heard Gerard Henderson this morning on Radio National talking about the impact of the neo-cons on the Bush administration. I picked up my ears, as this word has filtered through the layers of media flows of late. I thought it would be interesting to see what he said, considering that he is marketed as having his finger on the political pulse of Australian political life. For those who don't know abou these things, Gerard has the inside running and he just a phone call away from the movers and shakers. We are meant to be impressed. So if anyone in Australia knew what the world looked from the eye of the US eagle it would be Gerard.
Gerard sold himself well in his few minutes on air. He mentioned names, background and personal encounters of the neo-con movement. It was impressive to someone like me whose lot in life is to live on the margins of academia and public life. He then discounted their influence on the Bush administration. There's no need to bother finding about them was the message that came across the airwaves. I went back to eating my breakfast.
Gerard made no mention of geopolitics, power strategies in the Middle East, or even the transfer of Palestinans by the Israeli state. Gerard also gave no indication of the theoretical strategic framework developed by the neo-cons within which the Bush adminstration is working. Gerard is good on assessing the political chit chat of the day but is poor on the concept. He has no idea about the movement of the concept that this weblog of public philosophy goes on about. From the perpective of some living on the margins and anxious to keep their criticsl distance from everything, Gerard sounded as if he was out of his depth on all the geo-political stuff. Then most commentators are. It is political philosophy, and few people in public life in Australia have much time for philosophy. Diehard empiricists one and all with no feeling for the conceptual structure of culture in my considered judgement.
The concerns of this article by Josh Marshall, who also works over at Talking Points Memo, is what Gerard should have addressed this morning, if he knew his stuff. Marshall addresses the possibility of future chaos in the Middle East, due to US neo-con geopolitical strategy in the region. This is what Josh Marshall says about the US neo-con Middle East strategy:
"In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints.
In short, the administration is trying to roll the table--to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative--Hezbollah for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria--while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks' broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments--or, failing that, U.S. troops--rule the entire Middle East."
This develops the view of Gary at his public opinion weblog. It provides the background to the thesis of blowback from the Iraqi war on the Indonesian region, and the impact this will have on Australia. Of course, blowback from the Iraqi war is what is denied by the Howard government; denied in the sense of a deception of the hawks in the Howard government deceiving the Australian citizens about pre-emptive strike, the destablizing of Indonesia, launching pre-emptive strikes in Indonesia, and making Islam the enemy. However, blowback is the reason why many foreign policy people, defence analysts, intelligence officers, including many in the Department of Foreign Affairs, view the Howard Government's foreign policy with alarm. And rightfully so.
Many reject the chaos scenario in the Middle East out of hand. They talk about bold American action in Iraq leading to the democratization of the Middle East. Theirs is an argument for hope. However, as Marshall says, it is the heady vision of the broad and radical neo-con initiative could also bring chaos and bloodshed on a massive scale. The Australian hawks have a quick response to this: a full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam is inevitable. So why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs?Of course you never hear it spoken in public by a member of the Howard Government.
What Gerard Henderson did on Radio National was gatekeeping. He cover all of the above up, with his 'no need to worry' script that said the US neo-cons don't amount to much. In saying this he was basically following Howard's script of deflect, deflect; cover, cover, cover; dissemble, dissemble. Keep the wraps on. Keep the covers there. Blowback from the neo-strategy in the Middle East would not play well with Australian public opinion.
The strategic intellectual framework is important because it gives us an insight into how the Australian hawks (eg., John Howard) think. They basically accept the US neo-con view or political ideology.
Joshua Marshall is very clear on what this stands for in the Middle East.
Marshall describes the neo-con ideology as follows:
"The Middle East today is like the Soviet Union 30 years ago. Politically warped fundamentalism is the contemporary equivalent of communism or fascism. Terrorists with potential access to weapons of mass destruction are like an arsenal pointed at the United States. The primary cause of all this danger is the Arab world's endemic despotism, corruption, poverty, and economic stagnation. Repressive regimes channel dissent into the mosques, where the hopeless and disenfranchised are taught a brand of Islam that combines anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and a worship of violence that borders on nihilism.
Unable to overthrow their own authoritarian rulers, the citizenry turns its fury against the foreign power that funds and supports these corrupt regimes to maintain stability and access to oil: the United States...Trying to "manage" this dysfunctional Islamic world, as Clinton attempted and Colin Powell counsels us to do, is as foolish, unproductive, and dangerous as détente was with the Soviets, the hawks believe. Nor is it necessary, given the unparalleled power of the American military. Using that power to confront Soviet communism led to the demise of that totalitarianism and the establishment of democratic (or at least non-threatening) regimes from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Why not use that same power to upend the entire corrupt Middle East edifice and bring liberty, democracy, and the rule of law to the Arab world?"
One can add that Australian hawks have rejected the Hawke/Keating view of an independent foreign policy within the US alliance, regional cooperation and dialogue and working through the UN. They are in favor of using power against potentially hostile states and doing so in a unilateral fashion and getting the Islamic militants in Indonesia before these terrorists get us.
Marshall then draws attention to what is wrong with the US. necocon strategy. He makes some good points.
1. "every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation of recruits. Why will it be any different this time?"
2. The cavalier call for regime change, however, runs into a rather obvious problem of the tyrannies in the Middle East being home grown, and the U.S. government has supported them, rightly or wrongly, for decades, even as we've ignored (in the eyes of Arabs) the plight of the Palestinians. Topple the pro-Western autocracies in these countries, in other words, and you won't get pro-Western democracies but anti-Western tyrannies.
3.Laying down the law and being a global cop will not be enough. Keeping order to prevent chaos in an anarchic requires the creation of a de facto American empire in the Middle East. This will create political resistance in which radical Arab political movements try to drive the US out.
4. Iran will not take the establsihment of US power in the region lying down, nor will the conservative in power in Iraq embrace the deepening of liberal democracy in that country without a fight.
5. creating a democratic, self-governing Iraq will not easy given the ethnic conflict within Iraq between Kurds, Shi'ite and Sunni Muslems?
Marshall's judgement is that the Anglo-Americans are stepping into a hornets nest with this neo-con strategy---- what Marshall calls
"giving a few good whacks to a hornets' nest because you want to get them out in the open and have it out with them once and for all. Ridding the world of Islamic terrorism by rooting out its ultimate sources---Muslim fundamentalism...."
He then mentions a central problem. Bush, Howard or Blair have not leveled with their citizens that The Anglo-Americans are engaged in is a clean-sweep approach to the Middle East, neo-con style. All that these politicians have presented to their citizens is a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. The eason for the deception? The Bush administration's grand neo-con geo-political strategy in the Middle East would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that.
Nor can John Howard sell it to Australian citizens. Tony Blair is in the same boat in Britain. So the Anglo-American leaders haven't really tried. Instead, they have focused on getting us into Iraq knowing that this action will set off a sequence of events with enormous conseqences, which they hope to be able to shape in line with their agenda. The problem for Australia is that the Indonesians and Malaysians know this. They've figured it out. And they are not happy.
I thought that this post on patriotism might be relevant in the light of the forthcoming attack on and defence of Baghdad. It is now realised that the Iraq war will not be a continuation of the lightly armed and highly mobile United States-led coalition racing across a largely empty desert to Baghdad. Nor will it be the Hollywood version of kisses, roses and joyous celebration for the liberators.
We have pockets of concerted, if outgunned resistance to the coalition forces in southern Iraq, and a mimimal number of Iraqi soldiers surrendering with welcome relief and open arms. The lack of any signs of a systematic collapse of the Iraqi armed forces from the shock and awe tactics has put the military machine's strategy of dashing to Baghdad and bypassing the key towns on hold. It is in the process of rethinking its strategy to the made in HOllwood version.
So much for everything being under control, all contingencies have been planned for and all scenarios taken into account. The bypassed towns are now centres of guerilla warfare, civil disorder, devastation and humanitarian crises. The US military machine lacks the troops to take Baghdad quickly without significant causalities. The war has suddenly got longer (six weeks -2 months-more?)with a messy, bitter urban battle in Baghdad looming. The politicians must be starting to bite their fingernails.
Why the resistance? As Robert Fisk observes here
"....the truth of the matter is that Iraq has a very, very strong political tradition of strong anti-colonial struggle. It doesn’t matter whether that’s carried out under the guise of kings or under the guise of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath party, or under the guise of a total dictator. There are many people in this country who would love to get rid of Saddam Hussein, I’m sure, but they don’t want to live under American occupation."
Why not? The text below offers on account. It is from my old Public Opinion. It is reproduced below in full with some additional comments.
Quote
I thought this remark on patriotism might be of interest in the light of 'the war on terrorism'. I have been using patriotism as love of country.
The remark is from Hegel's Philosophy of Right (para.268) in the section dealing with ethical life, which Hegel understands to be grounded in our social relationships and institutions. Hegel is commenting to his students on a difficult passage that is written in his technical language. He says:
'Patriotism is often understood to mean only a readiness for exceptional sacrifices and actions. Essentially, however, it is the sentiment which, in the relationships of our daily life and under ordinary conditions, habitually recognizes that the community is one's substantive groundwork and end. It is out of this consciousness, which during life's daily round stands the test in all circumstances, that there subsequently also rises the readiness for extraordinary exertions.'
This is quite different from John Howard's understanding of patriotism. This conservative understanding sees patriotism as being embodied in the Anzac tradition---and so patriotism is the readiness to make sacrifices for the sake of one's own country. In contrast, Hegel's conception is closely allied to trust (and educated insight) by which he means that my interest is contained and preserved in anothers. Patriotism is a part of the customs and habits of everyday life experience which we then reflect upon and reason about.
Additional Comments
Is this happening in Iraq today? Can this understanding of patriotism be used to understand Iraqi resistance to the US led military machine? Are the Iraqi people reflecting upon the customs and habits of their way of life and then making judgements to defend their country? Does looking at this open the play of Derridean difference in the Iraqi war and so take us beyond the spin and disinformation buried in the contemporary live feeds from the US cable networks?
Hegel's understanding of patriotism can be used to undercut one of the central myths of the militarized Enlightenment: that the terrified Iraqi's are only fighting/resisting the US because the Saddam hit squad has a gun to their head. Or, at a more sophisticated level, it is because the Sunni Muslem military are terrified that, with fall of the Iraqi regime, the Sunni minority will liquidated by the Shi'ite majority in southern Iraq. Its all about fear and terror.
What the Americans do not seem to understand that Iraqi's can make a clear distinction between the Saddam Hussein regime and their country. They may be glad to see the dictator go but they will fight to defend their country from foreign invaders who plan to occupy their country.
What Hegel shows is that it is not only Americans who are patriotic. His text points to the 'heart and mind' people stuff that the US militarized enlightenment machine has such difficulty understanding beyond psych-ops. As Guy Rundle observes here many people, including many Iraqi reservists:
"...may continue to lie low and avoid fighting, hoping the invasion will be quickly concluded. But others may be stirred to resistance, a resistance made not out of any love for Saddam but out of deeper loyalties - to home, to family, to community."
Patriotism is based on those loyalties. They go to the very heart of what it is to be human. Rundle then develops the distinction made above:
"When these things are being torn up by explosives, assurances of the good intentions by the bombers tend to be blown away with the smoke and fire, and the fact that one is ruled by a dictator or a parliament can come to matter less than that there is a fundamental threat from beyond."
This patriotic response to the destruction of friends home, family, community and nation means that the Iraqi people begin to see that Iraqi deaths are the deaths caused by an invading army. So this military machine will be resisted not merely by the professional Republican Guards defending the Iraqi regime but also by ordinary Iraqis defending the country they love. As Rundle rightly observes:
Rundle says:
"There is no great comfort to be taken in such killings and in such deaths - killings done of people in their own homes, on their own land, deaths suffered as an aggressor invades, for a cause that has shifted from day to day. These are bitter, comfortless deaths, and they will tend to weaken rather than strengthen the commitment to war."
And the following statement by Gazwan Al Muktar, a retired engineer and ordinary resident of Baghdad, expresses this argument that resistance to the US military machine coms from patriotism:
"Well ah—what I’m planning to do? I will pull up my rifle and I will shoot. And I will shoot at anybody who comes in. I’m a sixty year old man, but I am not going to let anybody, any foreigner tell me what to do or running my own country. This is a country I have spent all my life, trying to build something, to do something about improving the lot of the Iraqi people. Iraq is a wealthy country, Iraq has been, because of the sanctions, relegated to a third class country. You remember in 1961, that’s 42 years ago, the Iraqi government then, and it wasn’t the Ba’ath Party government, sent me to the States to study. I was a high school student. They sent me. Iraq has invested a lot of money in our education, a lot of time. The consecutive governments, all the governments of Iraq, and we are trying to build a country and you have ruined it. The US government is destroying everything. They destroyed it in ‘91 and we rebuilt it and they are destroying whatever we have rebuilt."
Simply put the Iraqi's are fighting for their country.
So the possibility that the battle for Baghdad will turn into a bloodbath---what Robert Fisk calls the quagmire of Baghdad---becomes ever more probable. The image is Stalingrad.
There is a lovely post over at Invisible Adjunct that goes to the heart of this weblog. Entitled 'Tradition versus Traditionalism'----and that distinction says a lot----the text addresses the decline of the humanites in academia from someone living on the academic margins.
This decline is what motivated this weblog. So a fellow spirit who understand's the damage that is done to those who delay and defer a good deal of early to mid adult life (establishment of a viable career, marriage, children, etc) in pursuit of a doctorate degree that turns out to lead to nowhere in terms of a job or career. This is what has happened to so many of my friends in academia here in Australia due to the massive redundancies in the humanities.
The text starts from:
"....the decline of said humanities? (I say "decline" rather than "crisis" because I think we are talking about a slow and gradual death rather than an acute and sudden convulsion). I suspect there must be a relationship between the two, though I can't claim to have figured it out....If we ourselves do not believe in what we do and if we ourselves either will not or cannot offer a convincing explanation of what we do and why it is we should be doing it, then we cannot expect the public to continue to lend its support to the work we do in the humanities."
Nicely said. Those in the humanities have lost their way about why they are writing history or philosophy over and above being what Nietzsche famously called nookdwellers. They really do have to reinvent themselves if they do not want entrepreneurship imposed on them as scholars by the state and the market.
Two responses are quickly and rightly rejected:
"Now, I am not advocating a cynical pandering to the public, ie., Let's pretend to enthusiastically endorse a series of traditions that we secretly despise in the hopes that the state legislature won't further slash our budgets...I am beyond weary of the kind of presumptive hostility[of the public?] that too often passes for critical thinking in today's academy. "
So where does that leave a humanities academic without tenure? In a tight corner. How to connect with the common life? Its a tricky situation since the knee-jerk reflex of academics is to scorn public life in the name of reason whilst living their everyday lives within it. The good old mind body split has deep roots.
A useful distinction is made:
"Let us distinguish carefully between tradition and traditionalism, and support the former while rejecting the latter. By "traditionalism," I understand a non-critical and even reverential celebration of texts/thinkers/canons that are supposed to be above and beyond the reach of criticism precisely because they have stood the test of time and are now to be elevated (or relegated) to a quasi-sacred space as a collection of quasi-sacred objects. As I see it, traditionalism does not support but rather undermines tradition. The texts we study should not be viewed as museum pieces or sacred relics to be carefully sealed off and placed behind glass, out of our reach and out of harm's way. Rather, the texts we study are ours to do with as we like, and we should feel free to handle them with our grubby hands and to muck around with them as much as we please. If they have stood the test of time, then they can surely bear the weight of our criticism. And they should be approached, I think, as something living and vital, to be passed on from one generation to the next, which is how I understand "tradition."
All of which is to say, there must be some middle ground between uncritical celebration and wholesale rejection. I think we need to work harder at finding this middle ground. To my mind, this middle ground involves an understanding of ourselves as working within a series of traditions into which we would introduce our students."
Fair enough. Its a good response to academic disciplinary texts. It gets some movement and diversity going in the humanities. But it remains discipline bound. Now we also live in traditions in our everyday life in civil society, the family and political life. What is the relationship of a rejuvented humanties to these? Do humanities academics speak to these? How do they do so? Or has the old idea of a liberal education for democratic citizenship been lost?
Invisible Adjunct's text wanders a bit at this point and then turns in on itself. The text says that:
"...life on the margins can force upon you a kind of critical distance that you might not have if you were more comfortably situated within. And so I find myself increasingly committed to a defense of the notion of tradition, for a number of reasons and on a number of grounds. But for now, I want to emphasize a very practical and pragmatic point: namely, that if we continue to undermine the humanities from inside the academy, then we really don't have much by way of a defense against attacks on the humanities from outside the academy."
Once again we come back to circling around the relationship between the public, the common life and the rejuvenated humanities in the academy. Faced with the poor earnings propects of an arts degree the text ends on a despairing note of decline:
"Perhaps the liberal arts are close to becoming completely irrelevant, and the humanities as we know [them] or as we once knew [them] will be consigned to the museum?"
The humanities as we once knew them in their old disciplinary form will be consigned to the musem, after a period of academic breakdown.
But this need not be the case for the humanities in the form of a interpretative mode of thinking concerned with meaning and understanding and critical of an instrumental rationality of the technosciences that is increasingly hegemonic in the high-tech corporate university, which now produces market values. As a result intellectual practice inside the university is changing as a result.
This transformation is not something that is just imposed on the university from outside by the state as many conservatives maintain; the transformation of the university from liberal to corporate is part of the wholesale transformation of the economy and society. It is not just the traditions of the humanities that are being pummelled; it is also everyday life and its traditions that is battered by this transformation of society/economy by an enlightened economic reason.
The distinction between traditionalism and tradition applies in everyday life as well but the humanities remain silent. They remain silent about which parts of the traditions of the common life vcan be used to resists and counter an economic rationality. In another post The Only Emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream Invisible Adjunct does ground herself in t family life:
"I look at my wee son who is truly the light of my life, and there is probably nothing I would not do for him (I resist the cult of domesticity that dies hard in America, sure, but would I give up my life to save the life of my son? I surely would...do so without hesitation). And Edmund Burke was right about our "little platoons," he surely was right about this. At some level, I have to care more about my own child: a child requires so much of time and energy and investment (physical, emotional, financial and so on) that none of us would be here, I am sure, if parents didn't care first and foremost for their own children."
Here we have the distinction between the traditionalism--the cult of domesticity--and the tradition of caring for another. But the humanities belong to the workplace--these intellectual practices are about work which is distinct from the private life. Would not one to way to defend the humanities from attacks from outside the university be to show the usefulness of the humanities ithrough an engagement with the issues of private life.
Could they not engage with the contemporary issues of Burkes 'little platoons' instead of leaving it to the culture industry or religion? Could they not engage with the issues thrown up the stresses and strains of balancing work and family? If the humanities are going to have an after life then they need to step outside the boundaries of the workplace and the academic traditions of the university.
This historical remembrance captures the history of the contradiction at the heart of hegemonic powers. It is one between being an enlightened bearer of liberal civilization and employing the ferocious methods of coercion in the pre-emptive strike.
The sounds of liberation and freedom are to heard amidst the cries of misery and vengeance. Historical remembrance is a way to counter the idealist allure of the positive utopia of liberal democracy flowering in the Middle East after the liberation of Iraq.
Dialectics is a counter to the smooth spin of the soothsayers hired by the powerful to say that the future shaping of the Middle East by the US is controllable and manipulable.
The subtitle of philosophy.com in its earlier form was a critical philosophy in public life. In philosophy.com Mark 2 I have worked on pulling out the philosophical implications of current events around water, universities, writing Australian history and war to show that philosophy is more a than just an academic discipline.
I have used Hegel to get philosophy to speak critically in public life because his text, the Phenomenology of Spirit, opened doors for philosophy to engage with human history. It is an innovative and influential text, but it is extremely difficult to read, let alone to understand.
It took me 5 years of hard intellectual slog to read it the first time. You can read a whole page and feel yourself lucky to get a glimmer of a sentence or so. But when you get a glimmer its transformation time. The effect of the text is that you become Hegelian of sorts---, that is, you see human history historically, developmentally and dialectically. Its transformation big time because the focus is on the concepts we employ not the empirical evidence.
This attempt to make philosophy speak publicly has to accept the reality that philosophy is not everyone's cup of tea, and so the readership is low by weblog standards. It is not a way to challenge the big name celebrity webloggers with their daily readerships in the hundreds of thousands. But it is my attempt to ensure that philosophy contributes to a ‘deliberative democracy’—a democracy in which public judgment means more than public opinion; a democracy in which informed citizens consider public matters of concern to them and act according to their careful deliberations.
Well, here is someone doing the same thing! And they are doing it at Techcentralstation of all places. Who would think that Hegel would appear from a century long banishment as junk on a weblog that is devoted to the meeting of freemarkets and technology; and does so in relation to the war on Iraq. Who indeed. Aah, the cunning of reason.
I am referring to a long but important essay by Lee Harris called, 'Our world historical gamble'. There were brief comments on the essay over at Seablogger
The core thesis of Harris is that:
"The war with Iraq will constitute one of those momentous turning points of history in which one nation under the guidance of a strong-willed, self-confident leader undertakes to alter the fundamental state of the world. It is, to use the language of Hegel, an event that is world-historical in its significance and scope. And it will be world-historical, no matter what the outcome may be. Such world-historical events, according to Hegel, are inherently sui generis - they break the mold and shatter tradition. "
An example of a world historical event is the French Revolution of 1789. The Russian Revolution of 1917 is another. Is the Iraqi War 2003 another one?
Bookmark the essay and read it in your own leisure. Harris understands Hegel, has a feel for world history and has an insight the significance of the war with Iraq. He uses Hegel to develop that insight and even gets the dialectics working.
On the surface it does not appear that war with Iraq is a world historical event like the Russian revolution. It is more akin to another minor war in the confrontation between western powers and Arab states that has marked the bloody history of the Middle East in the twentieth century. But Hegel meant something different: he meant a world historical event to refer to a possible pathway out of the kind of historical impasse or deadlock in which a culture or civilization presently finds itself.
This pathway emerges out of a situation that cannot simply stay put; something has to give. So what is going on here?
Harris captures it well when it says that a world-historical event breaks a historical deadlock; and that we understand this breakup as an unavoidable conflict arises between the old order caught up in its impasse and the new order erupting through it. He quotes Hegel:
"It is precisely at this point that we encounter those great collisions between established and acknowledged duties, laws, and right, on the one hand, and new possibilities which conflict with the existing system and violate it or even destroy its very foundations and continued existence, on the other…."
The key to Hegel is his focus on the changes to our historical concepts and categories that we use to understand and make sense of history. In a situation of world historical event our old concepts and categories are of little use in enabling us to understand a transformative event, because the essence of the world-historical is the disclosure of new and hitherto unsuspected historical possibilities.
That is Hegel outlined. We could go on about the dialectics of change through contradiction but there is no need. We have enough for the job to look at current events from the perspective of a possible pathway out of a historical impasse that involves confronting the historical categories of our thought.
The question to ask now is: Does this fit what is what is happening in Iraq. Harris says yes: the old concepts embedded in basic languague of international relations----"empire", "national self-interest", "multi-lateralism" or "sovereignty" no longer fit the new historical state of affairs that will emerge out of the crisis. He makes his case thus:
"...with few exceptions, each side in this debate is working with a set of ethical and political concepts and categories that have been derived from an early historical era. For example, those who oppose action against Iraq often justify their position by an appeal to the Iraqi people's right to self-determination. On the other hand, those who argue that America should try to contain Iraq, or to deter it by sanctions, or even many of those who argue for a limited military intervention, justify their position on the principles of classical Realpolitik.
All of these positions are fatally undercut by the fact that they appeal to the outmoded conceptual categories of an earlier epoch - an epoch in which all the relevant actors in an international conflict were playing by the same basic rules. They were all nation states, each deploying a foreign policy - in both war and peace - that was designed to advance their own interests, where these interests could be easily predicted by the other actors in the conflict."
He then adds:
"... if we in fact lived in a world where concepts like self-determination and Realpolitik could be applied, there would be no crisis, since there would be no Saddam Hussein in Iraq, nor terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda, nor conflicts like the Israeli-Palestine conflicts --- for in such a world the players would all be limited to making rational calculations and pursuing predictable policies: their undesirable actions could be deterred through the traditional methods of deterrence, and there would be no fear that a player might suddenly undertake risks that any realist would know to avoid. Everyone could be counted on to consult his self-interest in a way that was generally recognized, even by his most bitter opponents, as realistic."
This is no longer the case because the liberal world system has collapsed internally: there is no longer a set of rules that govern all the players. These rules, or maxims of prudence, are those regulatory principles that enforce a realistic code of conduct on all the participants in a well-ordered system, and which allows us to know for a near certainty what the other players will not even conceive of doing. Without the transcultural or universal rules of politically stable international system we have anarchy and that is the gateway to disaster.
Harris's case is that both the "liberal" concept of national self-determination and the "conservative" one of Realpolitik are no longer adequate to the historical actuality that is unfolding before our eyes. They are obsolete for the same reason: the epoch of history governed by the principle of classical sovereignty is in the process of dissolution.
There is something right about this. The anti-war case Public Opinion has been doggedly argued on the grounds of Australia's national interest---the Iraqi regime presents no threat to Australia's national interest. But the war is broader than this as can be seen by the melancholy cultural critic's military machine & individual experience. We sense that these perspectives are limited because it is the liberal ordering of international relations which has become a historical impasse and that the US Bush administration is breaking open the deadlock.
The way this has been officially expressed is that international terrorism has changed the terrain of classical sovereignty of the classical nation-state; warfare as the conflict between different classical nation-states under a centralized command to change the behavior of other classical nation-states in a desired direction. The 9/11, kind of attack on the US has no Clausewitzian justification because it was not launched by a nation-state. Though the US is fighting a Clausewitzian war with Iraq, it is not doing so in terms with the war on international terrorism and Al Qaeda.
Thats enough of the case argued by Harris. What it does is enable us to put a finger on what people sense is happening----that we are living through a world historical event. Now Harris wants to save the liberal world order from its own internal contradictions. He says that this can be done by limiting the principle of national self-determination by being prepared to dismantle and reconstruct another nation-state, if, like Iraq, its behavior poses a threat to the general international system.
A limited negation of the principle of national self-determination is required, he says, because rogue states armed with weapons of mass destruction "spell the end of the liberal world order as we now know it, and will mark a steep descent into a Hobbesian world of nightmarish proportions." This means that there is one state "who is permitted to use force against other agents who are not permitted to use force.... The only alternative to this is the frank and candid acceptance of anarchy, the state in which all recourse to violence is equally legitimate." But anarchy with nuclear weapons is a no go option since it means the end of liberal civilization.
This is why the US is not just engaged in an old fashioned war with Iraq. Iraq represents the first case of putting the new policy into action. And it gives an insight into the new world that is forming. First, Europe fades into the background as an area of strategic concern and the Middle East comes into the foreground. Secondly, though the official justification for the war never stacked up in a convincing way, but it did its job to provide a cover for the US shift to a global empire. The first step in this is the US conquering Iraq, and then creating a permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the nation states in the Middle East. This formation of the US empire is a new epoch of history.
Harris, along with many Americans, objects strongly to this account of the new order. He says that 'to invoke antiquated concepts like Empire to describe this new stage in world-history is sheer anachronism.' He says that this overlooks a number of critical distinctions. He says that:
"An empire acts to insure its own self-interest. But, in this case, the U.S. is rather acting as an agent for the interests of others at precisely the same time it is acting to insure its own national interests."
Agreed. Only some empires though, eg., the European colonial ones of the 18th and 19th centuries. The defenders of the classical Roman empire would have argued similarly, that in pursuing its selfish policy, Rome was also forced to increase the general level of security throughout the world. So in using pax American like Pax Roman we are not simply applying outmoded labels to the newly emergent possibilities: we are re-thinking the concept of empire in terms of a hegemonic superpower.
I have been wandering in cyberspace late at night and I came across an entry by Jim at Philosoblog on Hegel, which had been posted about a month ago. Jim says:
"Eddie and Aaron have Hegel on tap. I wouldn't go with Aaron's line that all of Hegel is gibberish; Philosophy of Right says something. But I've read The Phenomenology of Spirit twice, and it's mad. Yet, Eddie's batting for Hegel. He's right about one thing: Schopenhauer was just bitter. I heard that the poor bastard had to lecture to only one or two students while Hegel's lectures were standing room only."
Eddie has effectively dealt with Aaron's claim that Hegel is gibberish, the various remarks in the comment boxes and the post by Arthur Silber over at Cold Fury called The Importance of Understanding Hegel. Eddie did a good job in highlighting the standard cliched interpretations of Hegel's texts.
I will address Jim's claim that Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit mad since this was left to one side by Eddie?
The Phenomonology of Spirit is not mad---it is a very different way of writing philosophy to that of philosophy as a part of science. It is a hermeneutical, interpretive kind of philosophy that critically reflects on human history. Hegel's text traces the historical forms of consciousness and culture in terms of the movement of spirit.
The Phenomonology of Spirit is based on a rejection of the discredited transcendental universalism, a view from nowhere that enables reason to gain an objective knowledge which can then be used to inform rational social and political decisions.
Hegel's text replaces this with a historically-informed reason.
Hegel does so without embracing the other extreme of relativising of all views as mere expressions of a concrete cultural particularity: of a local place in a world of incommensurable, partial perspectives that do not have sufficient critical purchase to address the pressing problems of the day.
This, I take it, is what many dismiss as postmodernism in the Oz blog world.
Hegel's historical reason is a developing one that transforms itself through dialectial opposition. You may want to say that the dialectical bit is mad if you are enamoured of analytic reason; but surely not the historicity of reason?
Hegel then read history as the progress of freedom. This points to the open-ended movement of history and to future tasks of freedom for everyone. A dinky-die Bushie neo-con can't knock this one---after all its one of the reasons for going to war with Iraq: to bring freedom to a world that is unfree. Hence the utopian undercurrent.
The reflexive reaction to reason in history is to assert the primacy of the individual in order to displace Hegel's objective spirit or what we today would call culture. This both forms a historical background to what we currently do and moves in and through us---eg. consider the way that the US is such an individualist society. Their very understanding of what it is to be a person is informed by their historical culture of possessive (Lockean) individualism. that recoils from a dampening down of subjectivity. It is the way the individuals in this historical culture make themselves at home in the world.
Ironic, isn't it, the way the hard men of the neo-con Bush administration are the heirs of Hegel. Their actions are showing the way that Hegel is dead right---- human history is about the freedom for all.
Of course though they talk the talk of freedom, they won't walk the walk of freedom.
Dorothea over at Cavet Lector has said said that her anti-academic rantings of the previous week have been chopped to pieces in an email from T.V. She says it was a:
"Gorgeous job. Really spectacular.I replied asking T.V. to post the chop, but it wouldn’t hurt if you wrote too. Seriously. This is good, thoughtful stuff, and you shouldn’t be deprived of it."
That email has been published by Turbulent Velvet here Joseph at reading & writing reckons this "is the final word on the recent discussion regarding life inside & outside of the academy."
T.V affirms the view that academia today is a sick mode of life that damages people. See Ivory Towers Revisited (Tuesday March 4, 2003).
In commenting on the debate T.V.says that:
"...respondents gild the lily too much: the fact is that the academy is a soul-breaking place even for those with tenure-track and tenured jobs. I mean, look at me: three months ago I left academia permanently just one year from tenure because I couldn't stand it anymore. I stuck it out all the way to midlife, and when it got close to job security it just looked like prison doors closing."
If this is so, then why is academia a soul-destroying place? Dorothea did not do this. T.V. says:
"You claim that you're criticizing the "system," and not the people, but there's so little systemic analysis in your rant that your criticism falls by default back on the people in the system."
But T.V offers no account of what is wrong with the academic system either. All that is said is that '"systemic" critique has to take some responsibility for its tone and approach.' Contrary to Joseph, this is not the final word on the recent discussion regarding life inside & outside of the academy, for what is needed is an account of why academia is a soul-detroying place.
So what account can be given? Can we give an account? I suggest one in terms of the breakdown in the conventions of the liberal university as scholars become entrepreneurs.
What is offered is a tragic account of the break down of the academic conventions of the liberal university, due to it beccoming an educational corporation. Convention, or nomos, refers to the ethical agreements and practices of the liberal university. Academics are trained inside these conventions. These structure everything they do and it is difficult to depart from the world they constitute. They are a part of our subjectivity and they enable our character to remain stable against events within and without the univeristy as an ethical institution.
Conventions change a society changes. Those of the liberal university are breaking down due to economic reforms imposed by the state; the impact of the self-organizing market; and the actions of university administrators responding to market pressure. This change in convention is experienced as a betrayal of the conventions of the liberal university: trust has gone as the common understandings breakdown or are corrupted. There is a disintegration of the university as a moral community.
It is time of great social upheaval and dislocation; a rendering of the world of the liberal university. What made academic life in the liberal university habitable is no more. Market relations now increasingly govern the academic ways of living, talking and acting in the educational corporation. Violation and betrayal of the pre-market conventions are the norm.
What rises between disintegration of the old and the rise of the new market order is a sense of disorder, a lack of structure. This gives rise to suspicion, distrust and questioning; and a sense of despair from being contaminated by the cash nexus of market relations.
Maybe the conventiosn collegial trust and confidence never were? Maybe the most trustworthy academics were untrustworthy all along. They actually abused the conventions in their daily practice whilst saying that they upheld them, that cherished them and they acted to preserve them. They defiled the conventions in their everyday practice and their poisons worked to corrode our stable character.
When conventions break down so does communality, and we become self-contained, trusting no one and avoiding eye contact. We live a life on the defensive, keeping our dark thoughts and feelings private, always looking for the next betrayal. We live a life of non-relation as words become less expressions of trust, affirmation and recognition and more instruments to further self-interested ends.
It is a tragic account because revenge and power plays now take over the world of academic value. The death of academic nomos leaves nothing behind for a human life. Academia is experienced as a world of ruins even if the good do no die young, or blinded academics are not running on all fours wild for the blood of their attackers.
That then is my account the fact of why the academy is a soul-breaking place even for those with tenure-track and tenured jobs.
Try unravelling the complex interaction betwen reality and appearances in this little article from aljazeerah.
You need your wits about you.
Once I was a good Aristotlean who acepted the world as it appeared to be, as it is experienced by, observers and actors, who are members of human kind in opposition to those who adopted the scientific point of view that rejected perception and the conventions of shared language, value and belief as the barbaric mud of the human point of view.
What the heck do I do with the twisting of appearances referred to in the above article?
One way of gaining a perspective on current American actions in the Middle East is to look at it from through the strategic policy eyes of the past. Lets go back 20 years or so and revisit the Carter Doctrine. On 23 January 1980, in his State of the Union Address, President Jimmy Carter announced a new American policy that came to be called the Carter Doctrine. Referring to the recent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter warned that:
"An attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."
The then President of the US sought to persuade the world that American interests in and around the Persian Gulf were so vital that the United States would fight if necessary to protect them. What Carter was saying is saying is that oil resources of the Persian Gulf War were vital to U.S. security and so he pledged in his Carter Doctrine to defend U.S interests there 'by any means necessary including military force.'
This doctrine restates a central American policy since 1945 to ensure that the United States would always have unrestrained access to Persian Gulf oil. The instruments hae varied. The United States initially relied on Great Britain to protect American access to the Gulf. When Britain pulled out of the Middle East region in 1971, the US then chose to rely on the Shah of Iran. When, the Shah was overthrown by Islamic militants loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 Washington decided that it would have to assume responsibility on its own to protect the oil flow. Hence the Carter doctrine.
Fast forward to the present. Is not the current president of the US, George W. Bush carrying out this doctrine? Consider a speech given by Vice President Dick Cheney on August 26, 2002 before the Veterans of Foreign Wars. It is stated that:
"Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop ten percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail.
Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth."
Is this not the Carter Doctrine with a few more bells and whistles? The Iraqi regime threatens vital US interests in the region. Containment does not work. So it must be taken out. Is this saying that the regime must be removed because of the potential threat it poses to the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the US and its allies?
Some dicussion about the meaning of weblogging in the light of the possible impact of the market has been kicking around as a result of this post by Tom Coates and this post by the Happy Tutor.
I would like to connect this discussion to John Quiggin's article in last Fridays Australian Financial Review (subscription required, 7 03 2003, p. 4 Review) on various happenings in the blogosphere. This article is briefly mentioned on John's weblog Metablogging (Friday 7 March 2003).
Basically John's thesis says that weblogs have manged to recover the old promise of the internet before the commercial boom of the 1980s killed it off. The promise was:
"...a world of free information in which the hold of the mass media was broken by thousands of individuals and small groups, each publishing their thoughts to the world..the original vision of the internet has been revived in the form of the blog phenomenon....Until very recently, it seemed probable that weblogs, like Usenet and chatrooms before, would end up. in essence, as a hobby---of intense interest to participants, but largely irrelevant to those not directly involved."
John counters this sceptical view by the webloggers cutting the credibility of two Americans Trent Lott (US Senate majority leader) and John Lott (pro-gun academic) in the face of an almost silent mainstream media. The media eventually followed the trails cut by the US webloggers. Webloggers have influence and they are read by columnists in the media.
Where to now? What role do weblogs play in liberal democracy? Can they be a form of political expression in civil society? Can they be more than this? Can a cyberculture be contra the free market?--a question asked by the melancholy cultural critics at a heap of junk for code
John's tacit answer is that webloggers can act as watch dogs for democracy. They can and should seek out, and tell, the truth. The webloggers take over the old liberal idea of the media in democracy aas the fourth estate, and so are a bit like journalists. This view of weblogging is strong in the USA, and it has its proponents in Australia.
However, John rightly rejects the claim found amongst some US webloggers caught up in the revenge of the nurds that:
"...blogging will displace traditional media. Bloggers are dependent on the public record and that public record has been largely created by traditional media...it is unlikely that weblogs will displace traditional newspapers any time soon. "
So where does that leave weblogs? John's answer is to rework the original promise of the internet in terms of weblogging as protojournalism:
"Nonetheless, the dream that anyone who wants to should be able to publish their own newspaper is closer to reality at any time in history. The implications have yet to become fully apparent, but they are sure to be profound".
The broken promise is overcome with the weblogger as a journalist who is writing something like an opinion column with links.
Though attractive this conception of weblogging is too narrow. Weblogging is more than a part-time journalism, even if they are the new watchdogs criticising on the old media watchdogs for becoming the lapdogs of executive government. There is an excellent post on weblogs transgressing the limits of journalism by Chutney at myIrony.com
Though John does mention other forms of weblogging, notably the diary form, he fails to consider weblogging as diverse forms of creative writing....Many of these diverse forms of writing stand in opposition to the utility ethos of the self-organizing market. This form of writing, which I find significant, is one that overlaps with the literary institution as much as it overlaps with journalism.
As a part of a literary culture this creative writing lends a voice to suffering within a damaged life. It lends a voice suffering through interpreting the experience of suffering in a dissonant world. From this perspective one could say that it is better for weblogging to disappear altogether than to forget suffering or allowed the historical memory of acummulated suffering to be obliterated.
This signposts a different pathway to John Quiggin's conception of weblogging as a form of journalism. It is one few webloggers have travelled for the journalism option appears to be the most attractive. However, the alternative art or culture pathway takes us into a struggle around instrumental rationality, freedom and democracy.
With all the renovations going on I have only just got around to reading the weekend newspapers. In the Weeked Review of The Australian I encountered Nicolas Rothwell's, 'Fear and Loathing in Broken Hill', which is an extract from his Wings of the Kit-Hawke (Picador).
Nicolas is travelling the Outback with a photographer companion Johnson, tracing the steps of the pioneer explorers (Charles Sturt) looking for enlightenment and trying to give it. They come across Pauline Hanson campaigning in Broken Hill with her two advisors David Oldfield and David Etteridge. Being journalists from The Australian Nicolas and Johnson get to talking and hanging out with the politicians as they move around the town. They end up in the pub with a jukebox, put on Suicide Blonde and have a bit of conversation.
This fragment is interesting.
Pauline Hanson says:
"Its a genuine Outback scene, this, isn't it? Warm and soft, and nothing ever changing. The real Australia."
"If this is the real Australia", muttered Johnson ,in a state whisper, then we're all dead."
"Maybe we are," I ventured....Maybe we're all just drifting through an after-life and this world is dead ---and that explains the sense of emptiness the Outback gives."
"Its not dead in an interesting way" said Johnson. Its just dead. Devoid of culture----inactive.
"If its not cultural enough for you down here, chirped Hanson, "why don't you come up with the TV crews, both of you, and have a tea with Pro [Hart]?"
Two visions of the Outback. Hanson's image of an unchanging real Australia when politically she sees rural and regional Australia changing all around her due to the actions of the bureaucracies and markets that coexist to satisfy material gratification and ensure efficiency. The other image is that of the metropolitan Johnson: the Outback is the dead world, only emptimness exists, even though this individualist is surrounded by traditions and conventions of people living in Broken Hill.
There is a way of life there with a whole constellation of habits, attitudes, and beliefs supported by things like family arrangements, religious commitments, and standards of respectable conduct in civil society.
What is not seen by the characters is the way that tradition in regional and rural Australia is palced in opposition to the actions of the Weberian rationalist administrators. The latter are guided by material efficiency and they justify their economic reforms to open Australai up to the global market in the name of claims of scientific administration, control over society and social engineering.
What we ended up with is the jerry-built markets of national comeptition policy. What is not seen or understoodby Hanson and the journalists is that bureaucracies and markets can only function properly if they infused with certain attitudes and habits--- diligence, social restraint, trust, recognition and public-spiritedness.
These conventions, traditions and values about what is good and right are a part of the specific relations and historical context of Broken Hill and regional Australia. This ethos is socially anchored in a way of life structured around socisala and political authority and it functions as prejudices or habitual moral sentiments of a common life. Populism is contra economic liberalism.
The tragedy of the 1990s was that this populist tradition did not have the resources to resist the free market economic reforms of the neo-liberal administrators let along engage in some form of moral, social and political fightback. Populism was only able to throw a bit of sand in the political machinery before it was incorporated by the Howard Coalition and made safe. That is the tragedy of populism.
'Conservatives supposedly believe in natural human inequality, unless they are neocons who are not conservative in any sense.'
The discussions on academia have been kicked along by this post by Baraita. The comments to Naomi's post are high class and very informative. Those that blog on this post are polygut and Journey man Renee and Pem's post on 'academia' at Deep language
Those are the links to the American discussion for Australian readers. So what did Naomi Chana aka Baraita say? Well, she says things that very relevant to Australia:
"... like Dorothea, I am a professor's daughter, and I can tell hundreds of stories. I know people who have left (or were forced out of) academia and are thriving, just as I know people who left academia and are still suffering because of it. I know ex-academics who think they benefited from stints in grad school or the professoriate, and those who think it was a massive waste of time. I know current academics who hate their jobs, those who tolerate them, and those who love them. I just don't get why this is any different than any other profession!"
Very true. We can tell similar stories in Australia. But as Dorothea points out we need to step beyond the:
"...it’s-just-people approach As I said earlier today, I think there’s a system at work with a really truly nasty way of perpetuating itself through abuse among other things."
And that's the crucial point. We need to think in system terms here. So what can we say about that?
To her great credit Naomi spells some in detail the way the academic system works:
" We have unnecessarily long and harsh apprenticeships, problems with representation and unionization, a rigid caste system within the profession, several levels of underpaid and underexploited underclasses, widespread disregard for the physical and mental health of almost everyone, undue reliance on questionably relevant measures in assessing progress, endemic confusion over what our primary role in fact is, job-search protocols which are inefficient at best and ludicrous at worst, oodles of nepotism, not enough awareness about various types of harassment, assorted failures to appreciate free speech on both ends of the political spectrum, and continued dominance by our society's privileged (as regards culture, race, religion, age, class, and gender) and exclusion or co-optation of the underprivileged."
Yes yes yes. It is no different in Australia. Of course, none of this is to say that academia is any worse than a hospital or a state bureaucracy. It is to say that the social relations/structure of academia constitutes a way of life that makes people sick.(See Ivory Towers Revisited.) This flawed way of life has a history. Consider Nietzsche's remarks on scholars in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (p. 148)
"I have seen how carefully they prepare their poisons ; they always put on protective gloves... We are strangers to one another, and their virtues are even more opposed to my taste than their falsehoods and loaded dice."
Naomi reckons that "the best way to deal with this creaky and intermittently unsafe structure is not to bulldoze it and start over but to rehabilitate, renovate, and remodel. There is something worth saving and adapting here."
Yes for those who have a job. And that depends on the discipline and job market. Its really bad news for the Humanities in Australia. What has happened in Australia is that many who got their PhD in the Humanites have been forced to leave because there is no work--other than scraps of teaching gained through bootlicking. Its called structural adjustment and the fall out is unemployment, which more or less obliges PhD's to retrain--to become lawyers or enter political life. So a lot of luck is involved.
The weight does need to be given to the negative: to the human suffering from the effect of power relations in the academia, governance by the state and market forces. It is this that enables us to talk about the crisis of the universities.
I introduce the big movers (state and market) because these shape and govern the form of life in academia and the conduct within that form of life. And the old scholarship form of life has gone; replaced by the academic entrepreneur in the academic capitalism where the technosciences (biotechology in Australia) are the main suppliers of research and knowledge to the market. Hence we have a profound shift in knowledge: knowledge becomes commodity in an information soceity.
That's a Marxist account, for sure. But the economic analysis is also the perspective of the liberal state governing the conduct of a population within its own territory. The political elite and the senior academic mangers are seduced by, and besotted with, the creation of high-tech-value. That is the royal road to the wealth of nations. They have little concern for academic tradition and scholarship, celebrate the new academic entrepreneur, and are indifferent to the university as an ethical institution in civil society. Utility rules in public policy.
The consequence of the state shaping educational institutions through market instruments the universities of today are survivors of another era, that of modernity. The old liberal university is passed its use-by date and it is half-transformed into the corporate new. This is symbolized by this remark by Ken Parish
"The new NTU [Northern Territory University] facilities in Alice Springs (such as they are) are co-located with Centralian College, a senior secondary school and TAFE college. The office where I spent most of my time was immediately adjacent to the School of Hairdressing!!!!"
Those who work in the old humanities---eg., philosophers--- work in a world of ruins. Why? Because the old ethos or culture is hollowing out and the new information/technoscience revolution happening around us no longer bothers to pay homage to the old academic ethos built around scholarship, independence, disinterested inquiry etc.
Its bleak picture I admit, and it is quite at odds with the upbeat American writing about academia that is full of hope, celebrates liberal individualism and modernity, and quite at home with the logic of the information and techno-scientific revolution.
This talk should help those who always thought that neo-liberal or free market economics was built on sand, but lacked the firepower to argue their case.
And this interview with Joseph Steiglitz is for those who reckon that the IMF should be more widely recognized as a disaster. The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s certainly showed that.
Armed liberals defending freedom? Or One Nation Conservatives?
Here is an essay to help out with one fragment of the puzzle.
Liz Lawley's negative response to my off-the-cuff remarks made whilst viewing academia through the eyes of the political reminded me of the great divide between the academia and the state. It is difficult divide to cross and many don't.
Sure there are corporate and administrative bridges across the divide here and there, but the relationship is marked by distance, wariness and suspicion. This is especially the case in Australia, and especially since the economic reforms of the 1980s.
Why the wariness? Simply put reason and politics don't mix. The free exercise of a self-critical and self-legislating reason is the opposite of the passions, number crunching, toeing the party line, subservience etc. This is a loaded way of characterizing the relationship I know but thats how it is usually seen from the perspective of academia, even though the name of Kant is rarely mentioned. What we get is all the stuff about the autonomy of the university, the nobility of its civilizing mission, scholarship, individual creativity, pursuit of the truth, unworldliness and disinterestedness.
We can characterise the relationship differently though. If we look at it through the eyes of the state then reason is reinvented as national culture and the research university becomes pressed into the service of the state in a world of nations. The university becomes the institution in civil society that is charged with watching over (in a pastoral sort of way) the cultural life of a people. The university encultured national citizens.
You can sense the tension between state and university already. And the tensions increases as modernity unfolds.
The tension becomes an opposition when the state decides in the name of economic reason that to increase the wealth of the nation the university should be corporatized, and gear itself for producing technoscience and skilled workers for the developing knowledge economy. That opposition was classically expressed by C. P. Snow as the opposition between the two cultures of literature and science, and it was embodied in the architecture of many newly built universities. Whilst the debate raged off and down through the 20th century the university was increasingly managed by the state for national economic purposes.
Its a quick and dirty grand narrative I know. And many will take exception to it. But it is the Enlightenment tradition (nationalised of course) that many have been thrown into. It forms the background to the identity and understanding of many academics for what they are meant to be doing from 9-5. They negotiate this tradition to argue why the university is different from McDonalds, the students are not just customers and the teachers not just providing customer service. Academics, of course, understand the current restructuring of the university as the politicians pushing the customer/market relations/factory model on them.
But I've put it down like this to indicate that the great divide is alive and well with lots of arrows being fired across the divide. There is a lot of sullen hosility and bitterness to the restructuring ---and a lot of silence by demoralised academics in Australia.
If philosophy in the academy is undergoing an identity crisis then so is the university in an information society. Nobody is really sure what a university is, if it is not a MacDonalds (which it clearly isn't). But it is equally clear that open inquiry has been chained to the market. And it is equally clear that the university has been displaced from its traditional role as the source and generator of knowledge. Big identity problems take centre stage.
Christopher Robinson has made some remarks in passing on the move to post analytic philosophy in Anglo-American culture. These remarks are loosely connected to a previous post called Transgressing analytic philosophy
Chris says:
"... post-analytic philosophy did not come about as a result of a synthesis with continental philosophy. Rather, post-analytic philosophy is a consequence of a single book, Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The book was perceived to be an attack on analytic philosophy by an analytic insider. This is an overstatement. Nevertheless, the effect of this book and the essays Rorty published the following year as Consequences of Pragmatism was to create a huge crack in the foundation of analytic philosophy. Professionally, philosophy remains an analytic game in the US."
Good point. But more needs to be said.
Certainly Rorty's early work opened the doorway to hermeneutics and Gadamer, whilst his reworking of American pragmatism reunited philosophy with a literary culture. This opened up a space for philosophy to explore different kinds of writing that trangressed the Quinean view, that philosophy of natural science was philosophy period and the history of philosophy was junk. In the space opened up by Rorty in the Anglo-American philosophy institution, philosophy was no longer centred around philosophical method, perennial philosophical problems, philosophy having to find a secure path to science or a style based on clarity and rigor.
Of course, this turning away from scientific, analytic philosophy was seen to be little more than flakey wimps walking away from philosophy to embrace literary chit chat and become imprisoned by the forces of unreason. What it amounted to was a rejection of a particular disciplinary conception of what a professionalized philosophy should be as an academic speciality and culture. To put it in Wittgenstein's language, a 'picture held us captive.' That picture was a materialist metaphysics constructed by a unified natural science reduced to physics.
However, Rorty was not the only figure. Many toiled in the analytic vineyard in the noonday sun to show that we were only looking at a picture not absolute truth. Dewey, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Putnam, Charles Taylor come to mind. Their labors suceeded in breaking the stranglehold of a science-centred expert culture in the liberal university; a culture obsessed with its theory of everything written in a few equations, a hostility to the common life and a big contempt for a literary culture.
What was not mentioned by Chris was the poor job market for philosophers who had gained their PhD's. Many in Australia who had felt the winds of change, had a rough time doing their PhD's. See Farewell to a Hail of Dead Cats for my own. For a different but equally bad experience, see Jonathon Delacour's My brush with academia at an art school. Many similar stories can and should be told.
Many of us in the philosophy institution started reading the classic texts of continental philosophy, then working with these ideas prior to postmodernism but we found that we could not obtain tenured jobs. The analytic philosophers had a stranglehold on the small job market up to the 1980s and the old foggies hung on for dear life to get the super. Dorothea expresses this well here. She says:
"See, this is where the comparisons between academia and “industry” fall down for me. When people wipe out of industry, what happens? They have to find another job, more often than not in industry. This people-recycling effect as a matter of course creates pockets of incompetence and burnout.
Academia, on the other hand, is supremely competent at ignoring the people it maltreats and dumps. I mean, supremely. These guys are good. Out of sight, out of mind—after all, the only ones who wipe out are the ones who deserve to, right? Right?
And the dumpees don’t end up back in academia. They go to “industry,” because they have no other choice. And they typically do so silently; strident wipeouts like me are extremely rare."
Well said. 'Things would change the old guard said. You just hang on, do some research and part time teaching and a job will come your way when we all retire. Hope is the key." Then the liberal university went corporate and the new managers downsized the humanties because they were not good at bringing the money in. So a generation was was left hung out to dry. Little is publicly said about that though.
And the upshot of all this change? Philosophy then has to find its feet in the common life outside the academy. It returns to where it was in the nineteenth century, prior to the analytic movement in the 20th century. And thats how I read the big picture in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations----philosophy's heart and soul lies in the everyday language and conventions of our common life.
Now I find this proposal really interesting in the light of my comments about the web as another kind of writing.
What sort of writing? A writing that has its roots in classial rhetoric is the argument. Spot on I say. Well said. Thats it exactly.
I was groping my way towards it through Gadamer's hermeneutical conception of writing as interpretation of tests and an ongoing conversation; Ciciero's conception of philosophy in political life as an exercise in rhetoric and bloggin as a form of civic conversation in an emergent democracy.
Krista has a post Classical blogging. Do read it.
I notice that Jonathon Delacour in his post 'Welcome back to not blogging, Mike' makes a distinction between the traditional link+quote+comment weblog—and a thinking+feeling+writing weblog. I reckon its an important distinction, probably more so than the distinction between an up market sophisticated weblog, such as Jonathons, and the mass culture one exemplified by a heap of junk for code blogspot. For some reflections on the history of Jonathon's distinction, see Shelly's From the ashes came the reborn, born dying. There are interesting comments on this history and the geek weblogger's interest on the technical apparatus of running a weblog. There is also an essay on the history of weblogging as a form of writing at Rebecca's Pocket
When I stated up public opinion on Blogger l naively started from the thinking, feeling+ writing weblog; naively because I did not know much about what was happening in the weblog world. That style was a recoil from the academic writing that had pretty much wandered into irrelevance because it was so difficult to read.
I noticed the way I started weblog writing when I returned to the old public opinion weblog looking for an entry on different kinds of a humanities-orientated philosophy. (I could not find that post, due to Blogger screwing up the archives. But I will keep looking).
What I did come across was the first post of public opinion . I re-read it in the light of Jonathon's distinction and saw it through different eyes---as a way of weblog writing. Some reflections by Mike Saunders on writing weblogs---why blog?---can be found on his interesting Keep Trying blogspot.
I have reposted it below. I have done so in order to indicate the roots of philosophy.com in terms of a particular way of writing on a weblog.
What did I notice in my re-reading of this text? There has been a shift from working in isolation (my experience of academia) to writing within a virtual community. Against the Flow was written in isolation from other webloggers. Now philosophy.com is slowly becoming a part of a community of webloggers and so a part of a civic conversation across nations. It is that on-going conversation in civil society that is a crucial feature of the weblog.
If we want to put it in more academic terms this writing as a civic dialogue represents the reinvention of the old humanities in the knowledge economy.
Against the Flow
I was on an airplane the other day flying into Canberra from Adelaide. I was in a window seat, just down from business class where all the pollies were, factional heavies and high tech boosters included. I was to meet Bob for breakfast. He believed in the abstract economic flows of the global market, mathematics and the utilitarian calculus. Numbers spoke to him and he thought in terms of mathematical equations. It was a working breakfast as we were to talk about value, the water wars breaking out in NSW and compensation for the loss of water entitlements---what irrigators these days are prone to call property rights. I was to read a popular report on water in the Australian economy for the discussion.
It was an early morning flight, the sun was up and there was little cloud cover. We circled over the Murray Mouth, Coorong and Lower Lakes before setting off for the hustle and bustle, the enframing media flows and power plays of the policy capital of the nation. My nose was pressed to the window, as I was fascinated by the ecology of the vast estuary, the curving lines of the River and the human footprint in the river basin's landscape. What was noticeable about my reaction was not the aesthetics of the bird's eye view of the landscape, but my sense of belonging to this place. This was where I belonged. My roots were down there, I said to myself.
My companion saw things differently. She glanced through the window every now and again as she flicked through the morning paper. She was heading home via Canberra to her home in the northern part of the Basin: the Condamine-Balonne, one of the headwaters of the River Murray so to speak. North and South. Such different countries, yet part of the same basin. What we shared was that we both knew that the river was no longer flowing, and we understand that big changes in the agricultural practices of the Basin had to take place over the next decade.
Why do I mention this? Well, looking down at that human footprint I was reminded of a report I was reading about water in the Australian economy. It began by assuming that the water in the river country I was seeing below me was a scarce and finite resource to be utilised for economic development, and then it quickly moved on to consider opportunities for economic advancement. There was some stuff about methodology, simulation modelling, the MONASH model, spatial units and different macro-economic scenarios which I skipped. I was meant to write a one page, dot point summary of the report, but heck this was my own time. I had an hour or so to myself before I was expected to perform.
I have to admit that I just couldn't get past 'resource' and 'spatial unit' . That was economic speak for my 'ecology' and 'place'. The very word resource took the econocrats away from seeing the ecology of the river country as a life-support system for society. What their economic speak occluded was what we Adelaideans 'knew' in our bones: that we have to preserve the natural life-support system and processes of the river country if we were to sustain our own existence. The passionate water politics that has been coming out of Adelaide for the last couiple of years is driven by the acute recognition that it was vital to prevent the further degradation of these ecological support systems. Because they live downstream, people in Adelaide are intuitively aware that there is threshold point in the alteration and destruction of the ecological character or integrity of ecosystems when these will no longer be capable of providing the services to use (eg clean water). With the river gone Adelaide will become dependent on desalinisation plants for its drinking and irrigation water.
Resource' was too narrow to capture the value of ecosystems providing goods and services to human beings---the purifaction of water by wetlands, the detoxification and decompositon of wastes, the generation of soil and soil fertility, the role of trees in the hydrology of the basin, the maintenance of biodiversity and the provision of freshwater, fish and water for recreation etc. Did the econocrats actually understand that natural ecosystems help to support the economy and society?
Well, it was clear that those in Canberra who called themselves the decision makers did not. They had little idea that what they called 'the economy' was a part of the ecosystem, and onlya vague glimmer that the economy was dependent on the services provided by natural ecosystems. The 'economy' ruled Canberra. The Economy did this and that; and the politicians were always feeling its pulse to see how it was travelling. Their reputations depended on the 'economy' being in blooming health. For something so robust and magical---it ruled the world according to the decision-makers in Canberra---it always seemed to suffer from such a wide variety of ailments. How could something so divinely ordained be in need of constant massaging?
No one, just no one talked about the value of ecosystems. They did not recognize the high value of these ecosystems services to the economy.
In flickering through the report, it was clear that water was seen to be an input in the Australian economy, and the focus was on water's future role in an expanding economy. The report's argument was along the flowing lines. The greatest user of water in the Murray-Darling Basin was irrigated agriculture. This was concentrated in the southern part of the Basin, which only had a small faction of the resource. Water was fully allocated in the Basin, and if current growth trends in irrigated agriculture development continue, then water requirements would increase by 50%. This is clearly unsustainable. Water however, is not a limiting factor in economic growth, since the re-allocation of existing water entitlements can deliver increased wealth through shifting water to high value producers. Water trading is essential for re-allocation to high value users. Water trading will go part of the way toward the structural adjustment process of driving irrigators outof the industry. here is plenty of scope of new water development with increased efficiencies in the use of water by an irrigated agriculture using adaptive management systems. Water for environmental flows will come from improving the efficiency of the water distribution systems. Markets will deliver a bountiful future within enviromental constraints.
There was nothing here about ecology as a life-support system or ecosystems services. The report's message for Canberra is that policies need to be developed that ensure water is used to maximise its value to an expanding economy, with a bit on the side for the environment. The message of this market-driven politics was designed to appeal to the policy makers in Canberra. The market would do the trick in terms of water reform; and requiring water authorities to get a commercial rate of return on their assets was the right way to go.
The deeper hidden message that slips by without noticing was left unsaid. It is that public water services should become deeply, if not completely privatised, and that commercial imperatives should govern the supply of water. What is tacitly rejected is that water services should be returned to the government in order to protect the public interest. This is the dark shadow across our future.
The plane was landing. Canberra was covered in cloud. A short taxi ride and then it was time to perform.