Gary at philosophy.com will be on a well earned holiday in Mallacoota on the eastern seaboard near the NSW and Victoria border from today until May 6th.
A talk to the Southern Fleurieu Marine Conservation Society (17 April 2003)
In this talk I want to address the need to shift the policy compass to sustainability in the Murray-Darling Basin by arguing in terms of the closure of the Murray Mouth. That is how the River Murray impacts on us in this part of the river country known as the Murray-Darling Basin.
The closure of the Murray Mouth indicates that something has gone badly wrong with the River over and above the impact of the drought. So we ask: what has gone wrong in the Murray Darling Basin? How did the river stop flowing? What happened? How can we put things right?
We sense that a tragedy has happened and we guess that it will be difficult to put things right. The tragedy? We are poisoning ourselves. To put it another way we are fouling our own nest.
It is difficult to accept that we are poisoning ourselves. Why would we do anything so silly? Yet poisoning ourselves, I will argue is a good diagnosis, for why our way of life is sick.
The way I am approaching this is in terms of a therapeutic concern to remove those poisonous beliefs and values that make our way of life sick. The task is just like the medical doctor, namely, to identify what makes us sick, offer a diagnosis and suggest a remedy that will cure the sickness.
The medical conception of philosophy is not an uncommon way of looking at things. Thus the drought indicates that the land is suffering, something bad has happened; there is a diagnosis about farmers living with the risk of drought and a remedy is found to prevent further damage and suffering in the form of better management of risk.
So what we are doing with this philosophical therapy is looking at our cultural beliefs, including our way of looking at nature, is to see how they contribute to our bad practices in the Basin. It is the beliefs and practices of developmentalism that have contributed to the ill-health of the Basin’s ecology. A philosophical therapy implies that we can change this way of governing ourselves.
1. A Fable
One way that we can try to make sense of what has happened to us is to frame it in a story or narrative. Look, we say, this is how we got to where we are now. This narrative gives us a historical knowing.
Joe and Jane are family farmers in a country where public policy is rule by the debt truck that magically appears during elections. They are worried because ABC Radio has just mentioned that the river’s mouth down south has closed.
Joe remarks, “The drought must be bad upstream. We should use the money from the rice to pay off the debt on the place.”
Jane nods. “It’s the sensible thing to do”, she says.
A few months latter after inspecting some of the property, Jane says to Joe, “Salinity is getting worse. Nearly 50% of the land is now affected. Maybe we should plant trees.”
“Let’s get some advice”, Joe says. Aren’t the salinity scientists preparing a report for the catchment management board?”
“Oh, those environmental scientists were all downsized a few months back, due to budget cutbacks”, Jane said.
A few days latter Joe said, “I’ve spoken to the bank. They said it was a good time to pay off the debt with the world economy in recession”.
A few weeks later Janes tells Joe that the wetlands have dried upon and the trees are showing signs of stress.
“I thought there was an allocation of water for the wetlands in the catchment board’s water allocation plan”, said Joe.
“Oh that duck water was sold off by the Water Authority”, said Jane. “They borrowed it and never paid it back. We need some good rains.”
“Oh well”, says Joe, “the country will bounce back once the rains come. It always does. We have to get that debt paid off.”
A month or so later Jane tells Joe that the river has dried up. “It’s no longer flowing”, she says. “I reckon it’s all the cotton development upstream. The dams the cotton and rice farmers have built upstream have taken all the run off from the rains.
A few months go by. Things become pretty grim on the farm with no water.
A few months later Joe says, “Honey, we are all right. I sold our water licences to the upstream cotton growers and paid off the net debt on the farm. The market value was $80 million, the debt was $20 million and we are $60 million better off. We are debt free. Isn’t freedom such a wonderful feeling?
Jane is angry. “What sort of logic is that? The country is ruined and you sell the water licence for the sole reason to pay off the net debt? How we are supposed to be better off? What use is the land without a water licence? You are only concerned about the debt on the farm and not the country. Yet is the ill health of the catchment that has caused the farm to fail.
Joe looks stunned. He was looking to be affirmed as a marketplace hero by his beloved.
He says, “But we can use the money to buy property investment units on the Gold Coast and live off the rental stream. Maybe we could even become property developers”
Jane looks at him and says, “Shouldn’t we be thinking about the catchment? Do we not belong to the land? Are we not part of the local community? We should be caring for the land”.
She pauses for a moment, then she says, “Do not these things count too? Why is making money is everything?”
So what is the point of the fable, apart from Joe being concerned about money and being shaped by the ethos of the market, and Jane’s concern about the environment that goes beyond a duty of care to a catchment care? The fable suggests that we gain our understanding of the big changes that shape our individual lives when they have already happened. Historical knowing is a retrospective knowing, a looking back on what’s already happened, say what has happened since the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme was built after WW2. We then interpret what has happened to the river country in the Murray-Darling Basin to make sense of this history.
2. How did we get here?
The historical narrative suggested, or implied by, by the fable indicates a situation where the European agricultural footprint has been too heavy on the landscape. Hence we devastated salinised landscapes, unhealthy rivers, declining biodiversity etc. Admittedly, this is big picture stuff, but we apply it to the local area of the river country where we belong. We can ask: how did the Ramsar-listed Coorong wetlands get to be in such a bad way? The question arises from the current dredging of the Murray Mouth inlet to let the sea flow into the Coorong’s lagoons.
The following practices have helped to explain why the Coorong is in such a bad way:
●the Upper South East Drainage System. This deals with the rising saline groundwater in farmland caused by bad farming practices, eg., clearing too much of the landscape, by taking it off farm;
●too great an extraction of the groundwater aquifer, eg., in the Angas/Bremer Region, by the viticulture industry;
● the lack of flow of our local rivers in the Eastern Mt. Lofty Ranges due to farm dams storing the run off in the upper catchment and direct pumping;
●treating our wetlands as cheap agricultural drainage systems (eg., the Southern lagoon of the Coorong); or treating the river as water storage basins for irrigators, eg., Lake Alexandrina;
·too much water has been taken out of the River Murray upstream by irrigators.
This narrative gives us a form of historical knowledge, which enables us to look back on our history, reflect on it, and become aware of it. It gives another way of reading the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electricity Scheme to the standard one of the triumph over nature, masculine toughness shaping nature, science and technology as instruments producing a better world. This historical knowledge gives us an environmental history that questions the whole enlightenment ethos of progress and gives us an insight into the ecological wreckage caused by the storm we call progress.
This environmental knowing suggests that current agricultural productions systems are ecologically unsustainable. It is not simply that there is not enough water in the river as suggested by the fable. There is not water in the river due to the way we produce food in the Basin. It implies that we need to do more than tinkering around the edges by increasing efficiency in the use of water---maybe our European-style agriculture is not suitable for the landscape.
3. What is the poison causing the damage to our way of life?
The medical conception of philosophy leads us to interpret the above as symptoms that signify the ill-health or sickness of our way of life. Something is wrong with our current mode of life. So what is sick about our way of life?
The basic diagnosis suggested by a therapeutic philosophy is that the sickness has been caused by an ongoing commitment to development, a commitment to economic growth through the wine and horticulture industry. This is development in the form of water for growth. It is part of the big dream is associated with the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electricity Scheme was to divert water from the Snowy westward to make the deserts bloom. And the economic growth of the wine and horticulture industry indicates that the dream is a reality.
So why is our way of sick? It is a sick way of life because we are not treating our rivers as rivers, or our wetlands as wetlands. Thus we cannot raise and lower Lake Alexandrina because it conflicts with the requirements of the wine industry. Our rivers are drained of environmental flows because of the need for water by irrigators.
True, many people dispute this kind of diagnosis. They say that it is just bad management by the state governments in the past. The states should have been more sensible in allocating water licences. Too many licences were issued. What is needed now is better management through sustainable reform. This is best done through the market and it x can be achieved through proper property rights, water trading etc.
This is right. But it does not go far enough. We need to ask what drives the bad management practices? Why do they continue given our knowledge about the River Murray’s ill-health?
The answer is that the state’s concern for regional development and wealth creation caused them to use water to drive economic growth and ensure flourishing regional communities. It is the policy goal of wealth creation that has lead to the over-allocation of water in the Murray-Darling Basin and our rivers becoming salty.
Developmentalism means increasing the economic pie so that everyone is better off in terms of their standard of living. It has lead to
● no water being allocated for the environment
●when water is allocated it is borrowed for development
●when open irrigation channels are piped to lessen leakage and evaporation the water saved is used for further development rather than returned to the river.
We need to wake up from this dream because developmentalism now threatens the very foundations of the human life that has been built in the Murray-Darling Basin as well as the future of Adelaide.
This will not be easy because we are ensnared in the dream of development or progress. What this means is that we enframe the world of nature through the ethos of developmentalism. We see resources not rivers. We see agricultural land not fragile ecosystems. We see ourselves as developers and money makers not as custodians or caretakers. So we work inside the enframing. Questioning this enframing, and treating it as a poison, gives us the beginnings of an environmental history that focuses on our relation to nature.
4. What can we do?
Few people dispute the diagnosis that our current mode of life is unsustainable. Everyone realizes that we cannot continue with business as usual, and that something has to be done to repair the damage, even if they find developmentalism as a poison hard to accept. Repairing the damage is where we begin to get into disputes and enter into the realm of politics. Many different remedies are on offer to deal with the poison.
Take the Rann Government. It addresses the closure of the Murray Mouth by saying said that dredging the mouth to keep it open is only a bandaid. The real cause is not enough water coming down the river. We need more water by way of environmental flows for the River Murray—at least 1600 gigalitres. This has to come from the Eastern states. That is the political message it sends back to the eastern states. And it keeps on sending that message.
It’s not a good remedy. It implies that SA needs to do nothing to improve the health of the River Murray. The problem is that SA can act within it is own borders. What the eastern states see is that SA needs to act to ensure that the water saved is returned to the river, and is not used for further development, as is happening with Clare.
●It can do something to ensure healthy local rivers that flow into the River Murray and Lake Alexandrina; it can cut Adelaide’s dependence on River Murray water by moving it towards a sustainable city; the same can be done for Whyalla through solar–powered desalination;
●it can act to ensure that the Upper South farmers become responsible for their salinised landscapes by changing their practices;
●it can control development in the Barossa the Clare Valley and Angas Bremer areas and regulate and provide incentives to facilitate the wineries greening their production processes to ensure a more efficient use of water;
●it can prescribe water resources in the Eastern Mt Lofty Ranges to control unregulated development.
But SA doesn’t do these things, even though it needs to recover around 160 gigalitres of water from within its own boundaries as its share of clawing back for environmental flows under the Living Murray Project.
5. What is the remedy?
Why is there a lack of government intervention? Why do we not change the way we are governing ourselves? We know that we are fouling our own nest. So why is there a lack of action by SA to do something substantial to claw back water for environmental flows for the River Murray?
Well this way of looking at things is rejected by policy makers. The answer the the senior bureaucrats and policy advisors – the policy elite - give is that they reckon they have found the one true medicine to cure us from the poisons. Economics, they say, is the only way of analysing the issues and devising the remedies. The poison they identify is big government intervention: state government’s have over-allocated the f ground and surface water by dishing out water licences to fuel economic growth. The diagnosis is that there has been too much government involvement. The remedy is a healthy dose of market medicine. If we set up a water market with property rights, allowed interstate trading then this will increase the efficiency in the use of water and improve sustainability. Governments should row not steer. The market will steer through its logic of encouraging the efficient use of water resources.
This diagnosis is too simple. The market will increase efficiency in water usage and prosperity to some communities, but it will not restore damaged landscapes or repair our badly stressed rivers by itself. Government intervention is required to ensure that water reform actually results in increased environmental flows for the River Murray. More medicine is required. But the politicians are not listening; or if they are, then they are more engaged in media stunts and appearing to look good rather than doing anything substantive.
The gap between rhetoric and reality is so great that we citizens begin to suspect that the politicains have something to hide.
6. Another story?
What we have realized is that we are not getting is government action to create a new sustainable mode of living. Politics, many say, is actually putting the break on the shift to sustainability. To make sense of this blockage we need another story to get our bearings on our political history.
During the 1990s a gap opened up between the neo-liberal market policies favoured by the policy elite and ordinary people who were fed up from two decades of market reform. During the 1990s people were in a bitter mood about losing their communities and finding their way of life eroding. They were frustrated and felt powerless because they weren’t being listened to. Hence, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party was used by the regional populists in the 1990s to give Canberra a good kick, to wake it up from its neo-liberal dream, and to ensure that the politicians heard what the people saying about how they were suffering from economic reform.
What this indicates is that politics is where the policies and people’s concerns collide and politicians have been forced to bridge the gap between the two. The solution has been to continue with economic reform as a way to engage with global, economy and a caring eye to those suffering through the transition. This caring is articulated by the social liberalism (Paul Keating) and the social conservatism (John Howard); and it aims to minimise the impact of market outcomes, cushion the hardest hit and least able to cope, and provide alternatives.
On this story it is held that basically the policy elite are right and a battered public just didn’t understand that the economic reforms were for their own good. On this story we get a policy drift, a policy vacuum, arising from the clash between economic reform and the social consequences. Hence all the talk about lack of policy agenda a searching around for a new policies and a new vision. We then hear the cries for good leadership.
We have a similar policy paralysis around water reform to ensure more sustainable practices and higher environmental standards for landscape conservation. The socio-economic consequences of the reforms are big and the politicians are running for cover.
But what the ecological crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin indicates that we are involved in a debate about value; s about what sort of society we want Australia to be. Those who live downstream near the Murray Mouth are clear. It has to be a sustainable Australia. Only a sustainable Australia will ensure that the Murray’s Mouth remains open. This reform needs to be driven by local action based on local knowledge.
Bibliography
Lindy Edwards, How to Argue with an Economist, (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2002).
This is a good review of Richard Rorty by an English analytic philsopher. Simon Blackburn is concerned with truth and takes exception to some of the things that Rorty says about truth.
Like Rorty I have to admit that I'm bored with the problem of truth. Oh,I know truth is important for those with a scientific bent, since discovering truth is what science is supposed to do.
However, Blackburn, like most analytic philosophers, overlooks or ignores the way that Rorty has opened up the question of the transformation of philosophy and his signposting the ways that philosophy can be something more than a scientific philosophy. What Blackburn is concerned to do is defend the analytic philosophical tradition and the idol of science. But why not give up on science, the whole epistemological project of modernity and an epistemological centered philosophy? Why not embrace an interpretive conception of philosophy or start reading novels by people like Nabokov and Orwell, Dickens and Proust?
Why not follow those pathways that lead to a different kind of philosophy? If you want to avoid the lit crit scence why not a conception of philosophy as a kind of social or culture critic as an alternative to the bankrupt conception of modern philosophy's traditional claim to "knowledge"?
The Oz collective libertarian blog Libertarian.org is going great guns. New writers, lots of attitude, substance and style. Good on you guys. Keep it.
Here is an easter challenge from a lefty schooled by ye ole Marxist philosophers at Flinders University of South Australia.
The Austrian School argument was successful against the central planning of the old Soviet-style socialism. But in 2003 the thesis that socialism is the embodiment of a boot stamping on a human face in the mud is wearing a bit thin, especially with the formation of the environmental state within liberal capitalism. What has been bequeathed to us by Hayek is the duality of socialism and capitalism as opposites.
But history did not end in 1991 with the defeat of socialism and the triumph of liberal capitalism.
You guys do not have much in the way of a good reason to show why we should escape the environemental state. From what I can see you offer property rights, competitive markets and a spontaneous liberal order as a way to meet the ecological crisis (eg., the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia). Negatively, its cheapshots at knee jerk environmental populists.
Is not the newly forming environmental state fundamentally at odds with the ethos of egalitarian individualism?
Do you have a good reason to show why we should escape the environmental state as the new form of the iron cage of liberty?
Without a good reason it seems to me that you guys face political defeat.
I have noticed that the Americans are engaged in a discussion of patriotism and cosmopolitanism that I briefly considered in Going postnational and Patriotism. The debate is centred around Martha Nussbaum's essay called Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism. Thanks to the links provided by Dave over at Stoic News to the responses by Lee Harris--called---The Cosmopolitan Illusion and by Don Carmichael called World Citizenship: A Critique of Martha Nussbaum
Nussbaum argued that a cosmopolitanism opposed patriotism which is morally dangerous because patriotism is very close to jingoism. The role of a liberal education in the American university should strive for 'the very old ideal of the cosmopolitan, the person whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world.' These are citizens of the world. Nussbaum makes explicit what Deidre Macken implied in her , 'Identity shifts marks new work view', in the Weekend Financial Review (subscription required, p. 28), said inthat she was part Australian and part Sydneysider (globetrotter)----that we are to understand ourselves as world citizens first and as Australians second.
A defence of cosmpolitianism can be found here.
There is a great post over at Invisible Adjunct on academic labour. The description fits what is happening to the humanities in our corporate universities in Australia.
"A humanities Ph.D. takes many, many years to complete. The pursuit of this degree involves an enormous investment: not just financial (e.g., salary foregone) but mental, psychological and emotional. And entry and/or attempted entry into the profession places you in a peculiar situation, wherein you experience a strange combination of the conditions of both alienated and unalienated labour. The conditions of alienation are bleak enough, and they are real: low wages, unemployment, under- or sub-employment, genteel poverty, exploitatation, and ramen noodles."
All this is spot on. I did it this number. All up, I did it the best part of a decade making dam sure that I got the trade certificate. It was all or nothing. Break through or bust. It was back-breaking (soul destroying) torture though. Nearly broke my spirit. But it toughens you. Its all about character building.
So why do it? It is not rational activity in terms of the marketplace to deny yourself a modest middle class life. Who wants to live a life of genteel poverty? Why choose a path that leads to a dead need---no decent job?
Well, one reason is the promise of jobs that are never there--in the philosophy discipline in Australia just as much as in history discipline in Canada. But the jobs are not that great. Lots of teaching, poor work conditions, grumpy colleagues, a bit of research, low salaries, not much glamour and living in a ghetto. So it was not the job per se. A middle level bureaucrat is better off.
Another reason is the attraction of the life of the mind and being a scholar. Not its not wisdom. None ever talked about that. Its very seductive life the scholar who stands outside the sordid world of the market and politics. The universities spin it big time because that is, or was, their core business. You have the image in your mind of the independent thinker and explorer of ideas who lightens up the path for others.
What you actually get at the end of the process is a trade certificate. The Ph.D says you have certain skills and capacities associated with being able to think critically. The long process of training and education means that you have developed a certain sort of comportment, or certian way of being in the world.
Invisible Adjunct puts it this way:
"...if you have the passion and the interest to stick it out and finish the degree, you will probably also experience a kind of unalienated labour. You're not punching a time clock and putting in X number of hours to earn X number of dollars. No, no, you have your "work," and your work becomes an important part of who you are. You will develop and deeply internalize an identity as someone who does/as someone who is this work. You are your work, and your work is who you are."
You become a professional who thinks critically all the time, rather than just being a 9-5 teacher. It is a way of being in the world that is so much a part of who you are that it can no longer be shrugged off. You cannot back to the pre-philosophical life, as it were. The critical gaze is turned onto your love life, relationships and other aspects of everyday life.
If you leave the academy and work in politics then you are still continuing thinking critically about the world around it. You have to adapt it---into strategic political thinking about public issues---but its the same critical virtues at work. You are thinking about public issues rather than texts. When yopu read the texts --newspapers, electronic media government reports, media releases---you are deconstructing within a strategic political context.
The problem with the academy is that it has gone corporate and so it meets increased demand for its services through cheap, casual deskilled labor. Invisible Adjunct puts it this way:
"The use of adjunct faculty in higher education continues to grow as the number of people looking to further their education increases." This suggests an inevitable causal link: more students leads to increased reliance on adjunct faculty. But this leaves out an important part of the equation: more students plus lack of funding and decreased support for education leads to increased reliance on adjunct faculty."
And adjunct faculty means casual labor on a hourly basis. Its a bit like working in a ban or in a pub. Its all long way from the 'life of the mind' stuff. The life of the mind these days is more like the artist in the garrett holding down shit jobs to keep the writing going.
Of course the universities never say this. Nor do the various disciplines. But its true. Unless you take the other option of being a teacher getting the student numbers through. The life of the mind in the humanities is a road to poverty for all but the few who can catch the wave.
In her Relativities column in the Weekend Financial Review (subscription required), p. 28, called, 'Identity shifts marks new work view', Deidre Macken, adopts a cosmopolitan perspective that dislocates her social being from national identity and interests. She adopts the global city perspective of the world market to argue that the market forces of globalization have:
"...allowed regions and cities to establish their own relationships with the world, so that being a Sydneysider is something different to being an Australian."
Clearly Sydney as a global city has become disconnected from the rest of the country in a way that a provincal city such as Adelaide is not. But what does disconnected mean? Macken explains this in the following way:
"Demographically my home town is very different to my country. Its younger, more multicultural, better paid, better educated, more travelled and more disrespectful of traditions such as the monarch and flag."
Wll, some parts of Sydeny. There are other parts that are less educated, poorer, less well paid, less travelled and more moncultural than parts of Adelaide. But Sydney is a global city and Adelaide is a provincal one.
What are the implications of Sydney as a global city disconnecting from the country? According to Macken the charms of patriotism and nationalism have little appeal to her. They are something to be embarrased about. For a global being such as herself they are relics of history to be discarded. Macken says:
"I feel part Sydneysider and part Australian but less likely than ever to be stirred by the sight of an Australian flag on foreign soil. "
I interpret this as being against nationalism (whether civic or ethnic) and in favour of individuals who are 'citizens' of the world. Thats what being a Sydneysider in Macken's sense implies. She is announcing the end of the nation-state in favour of the global marketplace. Unlike her fellow citizens who reside in the rest of the country, Macken is post national and proudly so. According to Macken, those of us who live in the country and are bounded by the horizons of the country are stirred by the sight of the old national tradition of the Australian flag evoking patriotic emotions.
Being a Sydneysider, a global being, is living against historical tradition, the authority of long-standing national practices that have outlived their time, such as the monarchy. So we have tradition within closed boundaries versus the openendedness of cosmopolitanism or universalism. A national culture is a tradition in the sense that involves, change, diversity, conflict and not simply something fixed or static that is based on a core national character.
Macken's cosmopolitanism ignores the conflict within the country; ie, whether tradition in the form of local communities is opposed to the nationalism of the centre (Canberra), which is unresponsive to local traditions and practices that underpin Australian federalism. This opens up possibilities for a cultural pluralism within a sovereign state.
Secondly, the embrace of cosmpolitianism and dismissing tradition acts to displace the sense of the nation as a form of cultural belonging; as a way of belonging to a political community with its shared beliefs, common language and mutual commitment. Instead of belonging to a sovereign nation-state we have a free floating nomadic existence. My identity as an Australian forms my fundamental perspective on the world, provides me with a set of memories and aspirations, gives me a past and a future, and gives me a place in the world that I recognize as home.
Thirdly, being a global trotting Sydneysider on this account means asserting the global market over the nation-state with the identity of the Sydneysider one of being a producer or consumer in the global markeplace. This is a global identity that disconnects from being a citizen concerned with public issues and the public good within the boundaries of the self-determining, nation state. The state's legimacy depends upon its claim to represent a community defined by its culture.
So why disconnect? From what I can make out Macken's global perspective implies that the nation-state as a particular sort of political entity is more homogenous as a cultural group whereas Sydney is more multicultural. This implies that the nation contains minority migrant groups in such a way that it does not allow for the proper existence of cultural diversity of poly-ethnicity or culturally defined communities.
Is this so?
It seems to be an idealised account of Sydeny. It conveniently overlooks that a lot of what passes for multiculturalism in Sydeny is migrant sitting around in a ghetto and saying I'm not an Aussie; I see no reason why should I contribute, or fully participate in this society; and I am not part of the country. It is not my homeland.
What Macken's global perspective does not acknowledge is that cultural diversity is a problem for the nation-state. The state as a particular sort of political entity needs to address the homogeneity of the nation so that the dominant culture of the nation becomes more multicultural. Rather than the nation "containing" minority groups--as if one was the host and the other the guest---it should redefine the nation so that the nation involves cultural diversity.
Being a member of the nation involves both being Australian or Greek. My sense of self or identity as an Australian involves both and without either I will experience a sense of loss; a deep sense of dislocation and alienation. There is both a sense of belonging to this country and a valuing of the Greek cultural heritage of the migrant community. The problem is where a liberal state do this? Though it is meant to be neutal between different cultures or ways of life, the liberal state actually functions to protect and perpetuate one culture--the Anglo-Australian one.
Gerard Henderson's recent piece on patriotism in the Sydney Morning Herarld is called Rallying around the flag is no jingoism.. In it he recycles George Orwell, who, in his Notes on Nationalism, praised patriotism and rejected nationalism. The former was good the latter was bad. Henderson says that Orwell
"...defined patriotism as involving "devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people". In this sense, the concept was essentially defensive. Not so, however, nationalism which, Orwell maintained, was "inseparable from the desire for power". The abiding purpose of every nationalist was to achieve more power for a nation."
Henderson uses this distinction to say that:
"Australia is a patriotic nation. Always has been. But it is not nationalistic - in that Australians have never attempted to impose power as a nation. Australia is essentially a pragmatic and empirical society....Patriotism looks like being around for quite some time. Moreover, most scoundrels find nationalism much more attractive."
I have dealt with patriotism here.
I take exception to this understanding of nationalism because Australia is a deeply nationalist nation, even though it does not want to incorporate Papua New Guinea into a little empire. Why so? Because the Orwell understanding of nationalism is an odd one.
One conception of nationalism is the romantic one based on language, culture and tradition. It has its roots in Herder and it gives us a cultural nationalism concerned with developing an Australian culture in opposition to an English colonial culture and an American mass culture. Another conception of nationalism is a civic or liberal one in which individuals give themselves a state and the state is what binds together the nation. On this acount a nation is viewed as a purely legal and political entity and the emphasis is placed on the sovereignty of the people.
What Henderson is not doing is questioning Orwell's identifying nationalism with Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union) or a movement (political Catholicism, Zionism, anti-Semitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism). What Henderson seems to assume is the equation of nationalism with ethnic nationalism which is concerned with ensuring that each nation (a people bound by ethnic ties) should have its own sovereign state. So they promote the nation-state model, whiich means that all ethnic groups should have their own state. This then gives rise to incessant conflicts and wars betwen nations.
Henderson is quite right to reject this for Australia, which by and large has become a multicultural society. That leaves us with the civic conception based on Ausatralia as a liberal nation-state and which has been underwritten its self-determination and autonomy or independence.
But Australian history shows that the Australian people has been composed of a dominant Anglo-Australian class who controlled the state and who shaped a certain (ie., English) culture, language, history and set of traditions. These shaped the hand of the state which acted to minmize the existence of minority and immigrant groups so as to create the conditions for assimialtion. The aim of assimilation as a mode of governing a population was to make the Australian people linguistically and culturally homogenous so as to ensure national cohesion.
This is what Henderson ignores.
It is often argued that public opinion is very elusive. We are never sure what public opinion is at any moment, and that its formation all depends upon accident and chance. For something so elusive public opinion is extremely important in public policy making, since it is the link between civil society and the political institutions of the state.
Philosophy.com holds that public opinion is, and should be, formed through public debate by citizens on matter so concern to them. The process of formation through dialogue is the core of a public reason in liberal societies and it requires a lot of energy, battling and defending to ensure that public reason survives and broadens beyond our formal parliamentary institutions. We need a lot more sentries for a deliberative democracy. Political decisions are only legitimate if they have been defended on the basis of reason that all citizens can accept.
The Tampa episode in the last federal election in Australia, which was used by the Howard Government, to shape, stir up and manipulate public opinion around refugees, defending national borders, resisting terrorism and protecting national security. And the Howard Government toned down its early bellicose war rhetoric because the consensus of majority public opinion in Australia was in favor of war with Iraq only if it was down under the auspices of the United Nations. The UN was the forum where the reasons for war would be evaluated and judgements made. As is well known the Anglo-Americans spurned the liberal conventions of public reason in favour of might is right when their case was found wanting.
We need institutions in civil society to foster the practices of critical public reason. As the party political organizations into machine politics decline as mediating institutions between civil soceity and the state, due to the control of political elites and number crunching factional heavies, the media has come to play an extremely important role in government attempts to persuade or confront public opinion. Though the media does set policy on certain issues--eg. law and order--it mostly amplifies the policy agenda set by the government of the day and contribute to the various options. The media sees itself as the watchdog of democracy--exposing corruption, spin, dirty dealings and cover ups in the name of the truth. Citizens need to be informed on public issues and the media enables or faciliates the 'process of becoming informed' through deliverying the truth.
What the war with Iraq has highlighted is only do the media have their own political agenda but that sections of it (eg. Fox Television or the Daily Telegraph) see themselves as the spin factory for war machine. The culture industry, the military, and the technocratic Enlightenment have fused. Most of corporate media are biased in that they support the Anglo-American view of the war with Iraq; or if they are critical or have reservations (the liberal media ) they still obtain most of their information from the Anglo-American side of the conflict. Censorship is standard operating procedure: the media downplay or cut out the extent of civilian deaths and the horror images of twisted, burnt bodies of ordinary Iraqi's. Rarely do we hear or have access to the diverse perspectives of Arab voices in the Middle East. These are beyond the horizon, part of what lies outside the everyday discourse. As the liberal media becomes a lap dog citizens increasingly turn to the internet to become informed aND gain public knowledge.
In this selling the war a number of conservative journalists have redefined the role of their profession. They are no longer watchdogs or even lap dogs. They are war dogs:-warriors fighting a battle with the left forces that need to be destroyed to ensure victory. For them the real war is here at home and it's has to be waged against the anti-American leftists who are full of hate and envy.
Their commentary is provocative and abusive; they have little concern for the liberal conventions of public debate; they distort the views of their opponents; and they seek blood. They--- Anne Coulter in the USA, Miranda Devine in Australia are among the many---are flagwavers or exemplars for the new dogs of war. The dogs of war love the taste of the kill. Hunting the left down is what they do whilst killing the prey is what turns them on.
One role for a critical public reason in these times is to fight the dogs of war to protect the liberal values upon which liberal political institutions depend. An example of this, with repect to the war on Iraq, is here Once correcting the misconceptions and challenging the opinions of the media was usually done in terms of Letters to the Editor. to the limitations imposed by the coporate media on citizen participation in public debate, the watchdog role of challenging manipulative political rhetoric is increasingly done by bloggers. In Australia it is standard pratice for rightwing bloggers to regularly take on the biased views of the liberal media, with Tim Blair as the standard bearer. On the lefty side -- Tim Dunlop and Gummo Trotsky and Public Opinion take on the polemical rightwing commentators.
An example of the genre is this piece by Glen Condell. Unsuprisingly it was rejected as a letter to the editor. It tackles the Australiaan commentator Miranda Devine, and it shows a critical public reason at work in civil society. This is what Glenn has written.
Miranda Devine's establishment cheerleading is fairly harmless when she's patrolling her local turf - bushfires, 4 wheel drives, women's apparel - but it simply isn't good enough when the subject is war ('Bush's tough stance is the steel in UN jelly', Sun-Herald, 29 September). Ms Devine's readers deserve the same kind of 'dispassionate argument' she credits US Ambassador Schieffer with, not simply a lazy rehash of the pro-hawk position that he, 'an old Texas friend and business partner of President Bush', so dutifully put. Apparently, his 'logic' was 'compelling'. He must have felt like Joh Bjelke feeding the chooks. Where is the cost/benefit analysis for Australia? The discussion of the long-term consequences of pre-emption? The investigation of who benefits from a war? (Answer in no particular order - Republican Party, Israel, US economy - especially oil, arms and infrastructure) Is the asking of such questions 'leftist' and therefore beyond the pale?
The contrast between the suspicion and contempt that laces her every mention of progressives and the fawning obsequiousness she reserves for fellow travellers such as Sheiffer is revealing. She has an acute bullshit detector but it is unfortunately pointed over the fence so that the stench from behind her goes unremarked. A good pundit is a sceptic, not a mouthpiece. At a time like this, you have to feel sorry for reactionary commentators, for whom most issues du jour helpfully divide the community along predictable lines. Money for jam. All of a sudden, venerable old conservatives have joined the usual suspects in condeming US actions and intentions and strident souls like Ms Devine find themselves increasingly isolated and sounding a bit shrill. This is an inevitable consequence of playing the man and not the ball; concentrating on the provenance of arguments rather than their intrinsic merits. Which is why an otherwise intelligent woman finds herself trying to defend the nonsensical while studiously avoiding the bleeding obvious.
Thus she acknowledges caution from 'conservatives such as Owen Harries', whose 'counsel comes from the lessons of 400 years of history'. (The lessons of those years, and many more, are also available to Ms Devine; her deference to experts, especially conservative ones, reveals a curious lack of confidence in her own instincts) Even Daniel Pipes, Israeli uber-hawk, feels Iraq is 'tangential'. But Ms Devine feels the 'overwhelming' evidence (from 'credible' sources) of Saddam's arsenal is 'an imminent threat to the peace of the world', a line that could have been lifted from a Cheney or Rumsfeld press release. In fact, the 'evidence' so far is distinctly underwhelming and resembles nothing so much as the fabricated material, since discredited, that was used as part of the casus belli for the Gulf War. Or the trumped up Gulf of Tonkin 'crisis' that led to Vietnam. Some of us are feeling a chilly sort of deja-vu that Ms Devine, like Mr Bush, lacks either through temperament or education.
Many old proverbs don't hold much water nowadays, but 'those that don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it' has never been truer. History informs the letter signed by emeritus Australian PMs, but the most important focus is the future. Every year we move further in time from the great upheavals of the last century and there is a danger that recognition of the benefits of the co-operative international system that arose after WW2 is being eroded by people who have never known war; indeed, by people who managed through connections to secure exemption from combat in Vietnam. This includes the man whose 'tough stance is putting steel in the UN jelly'; a man who was more jelly than steel in the 1960s. Will any young Bushes fight in this war?
Another proverb, 'you don't know what you've got til it's gone', comes to mind if you try to imagine what the future holds if things don't go according to script, or even if they do, perhaps especially if they do. The baby and the bathwater apply here too. The UN may not be perfect, but the former PMs and most Australians know that it is preferable to the domination of any single nation. Ms Devine's crack about 'men so politically seasoned' exhibiting 'a faith in the infallibility of the UN' was meant I suppose to infer a sort of oldster naivety but to jeer at this sentiment while herself exhibiting faith in the infallibility of the US speaks volumes for her own callowness and lack of perspective. I'm sure the signatories also recognise that much of the blame for the UN's ineffectiveness over the years lies squarely at the feet of the US, which makes criticism of it from Mr Bush (and media flacks like Ms Devine) especially galling. To bellow about Saddam's flouting of UN resolutions while Israel and the US grow their own arsenals and refuse inspections is such daring hypocrisy you can almost admire it. Almost.
'It is tempting not to argue against such national self-interest', Ms Devine admits. There's nearly an outbreak of common sense, but balance is restored by a rather desperate argument that it is 'neither smart nor courageous' for us to try and minimise the harm that may come to these shores by 'going out of our way not to attract the attention of terrorist fanatics'. Better all round to lead with our chin as Mr Howard so memorably did when promising an armoured division at the merest whiff of war. 'It is hard to dismiss the elder statesmen' she says, so she doesn't. She simply berates 'others' who 'don't do their cause any favours by portraying Mr Bush as an ignorant cowboy'. Mr Bush doesn't need to be 'portrayed' this way; it is obvious. This comment, by the way, does not make me anti-American, just anti-Bush. There are quite a few of us now; an apolitical but socially conservative aunt in her late 70's told me last week 'he's such a DILL!' This week he's 'as mad as a meataxe'. No-one told her to think these things (take it from me, no-one can tell her to think anything) and she tells me such thoughts are widespread at church and in the historical society where she helps out. As I said, Mr Bush's ignorance is that obvious, but it's his dishonesty, bad faith and the danger he poses that lie at the root of this disgust.
Perhaps some of us are too hard on him, the poor bloke, but Ms Devine more than makes up for us with her breathless summary of Mr Bush's glittering achievements, crowned by a 'proven business record'! It's as if she just tunes out anything that doesn't square with her rosy view of our hero. Mr Bush's business career is an embarrassing catologue of near failures rescued by people who were either friendly with his father or wished to be. Ms Devine's colleague Alan Ramsey's piece on 21 September makes it clear that CIA material relating to several US companies who did business with Iraq related to weapons of mass destruction is still classified. Is the 'why' of classification related to the 'who' of the companies' boards? Ms Devine doesn't ask, is unlikely to know and even less likely to care. Now if the President's name was Clinton...
Like her lapdog counterparts in the US media, Ms Devine can't resist a dig at his predecessor while praising Mr Bush's 'tremendous self-discipline: a non-drinker and runner with the physique of an elite athlete', as if these were qualifications for office. She seems to think it his his personal manliness that forced Saddam to back down, rather than US military capability. (There is a psychological link here with Ms Devine's fatuous comparison of the UN to 'the worst sort of indulgent mother' who 'turns on Daddy when he finally steps in'. No prizes for guessing who Daddy is. Power is male and it carries a big stick. There is scope here for speculation which I'm afraid would be off-topic) She fails to mention that Mr Bush has had more vacation days than any previous president which, given the circumstances, is telling. She also fails to record the Stalin-esque White House cleanups of the Presidential prose. He is like a royal personage surrounded by jesters and court intriguers who defer to him publicly but have the final say. Many of us hope that it is Colin Powell, rather than Mssrs Cheney or Rumsfeld, who has the last word so that there may be a reason, however flimsy, for invasion, rather than simply a pretext.
Ms Devine's reactionary boilerplate rarely hits a nerve, dealing as it so often does with ephemera. But to read that 'as distasteful as war is, and as desperately as we may all wish to avoid it, past inaction against Iraq doesn't justify inaction now' was like a red rag to a bull. 'Distasteful'?? Like the tummy rolls of young women that so annoy her? Distasteful? Like the photo of a dead Middle-Eastern child that spoils your breakfast croissant? Distasteful? If there is war, we'll be lucky if the worst we can say is that it's distasteful. My guess is that Ms Devine will be among those so blessed. And I don't see her 'desperately wishing to avoid it' either; she is running with a pack led by the Kristols and the Krauthammers and and they are presently drooling with anticipation for the blood of other people, preferably nameless brown Muslim people who can, with a rueful shake of the head, be labelled 'collateral damage'. And if 'past inaction' then doesn't justify 'inaction now', how exactly does it justify action now? Who knows, but it sounded good, didn't it?
The other day I watched a group of schoolchildren file into the Opera House. They were about my daughter's age, the girls all busy hugging each other and holding hands, the boys skylarking about. And I thought, is this where they'd hit us? What if she was there? I had to stop for a moment, the nausea of imagining was so strong. Last year affected all of us, not just Americans. For me, as I'm sure it is with many, the single most important thing is to minimise the possibility of such a thing. Not prevent, mind, as there can be no 'final solution' to a problem like this. I think to myself; in which scenario is my daughter more likely to be at risk: Australia opts out of invasion force citing lack of public support, or Australia alone joins invasion force with Anglophone friends? There is room for respectable disagreement about this, but support for the former view requires more intellectual and moral grunt than you'll find in Ms Devine's work. More broadly, the whole tenor of US reaction since 9/11 seems to me to have made terrorism more, rather than less likely in the long term. I wonder, in the future, if we are targeted by disgruntled Islamists who remember the role our troops played in the conquest of their country for US interests, whether warmongers like Ms Devine will apologise for their irresponsibility.
Though one of her favourite tactics is to characterise her opponents as weak, it is Ms Devine who lacks steel in this matter and her targets, the 'elder statesmen' who display it. Mr Keating's presumably pique-driven refusal aside, the letter is an index of the strength and essential unity of our polity and it's recognition that our security relies on far more than one relationship, no matter how powerful the friend and that sometimes principle must take precedence over fear. Yet another proverb and one possibly known in Iraq: it's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. When an apparent majority even of Americans can't say 'my country right or wrong' it doesn't behove us to try and do so for them. Such a stance is more jelly than steel.
Ms Devine has a thousand analogues in the US and many throughout the West; a diaspora of Bush-boosters, an echo chamber of second hand thought which loves nothing more than to characterise what they call the left as 'knee-jerk anti-Americans'. Ms Devine and co. daily prove the existence of the 'knee-jerk pro-American right'. Still, it's a free country (much freer than the US is right now) and she's entitled to her opinion, however silly, craven and derivative it may be.
I see that the ethnic Italian voice of Wogblog (Friday, April 4) has had another go at Public Opinion along with Gianna. Wogblog, who proudly looks at the world from a ethnic perspective, rejects the view that Public Opinion is keeping the public discussion going in favour of Public Opinion simply defending the left from all criticism. The defence of the left is so extreme that all the crazy views of the left have to be defended even though Public Opinion accepts nationalism and patriotism and rejects pacifism. As Wogblog says Public Opinion's position is, "Defend them all! Even the Jackasses! Never never never just admit they are appalling!"
On wogblog's account Public Opinion defends all the crazy views of the left including that of de Genova, who publicly called for for American defeat - "a million Mogadishus". It welcomed American deaths to teach them a lession about military interventions in sovereign countries. So Public Opinion, in defending Mogadishu was welcoming American bodies being dragged through the streets by the troops of one of the local war lords.
This was attributed to Public Opinion even though the weblog introduced the voice of Invisible Adjunct that said De Genova's view was a moral idiocy, and an explict denial was made in comments box that Genova's position was being defended. Such an attribution meant that Public Opinion is defending all the customs and habits of third world groups: eg; the Koran-and-Kalashnikov regime of the anti-modernist Taliban in Afghanistan. So Public Opinion is defending the Taliban blowing up the statutes of Buddha in Bamiyan because they were pagan idols; their desire to recreate a contemporary verision of the 15th century society of the prophet Mohammed; running a modern soceity on the kneejerk findings of guilt based on a sharia legal code and punishment by stoning, flogging, amputation and execution.
So what is the significance of this claim by Wogblog? On my interpretation Wogblog is saying that the left is morally bankrupt because of its moral relativism; and that this means an 'anything goes' embrace of cultural diversity. This moral idiocy or bankruptcy has arisen because the left has fled the universalism of the Enlightenment and gone over to the Counter Enlightenment. Consequently the [postmodern] left have become anti-liberal, have an enthusiasm for pre-modern political forms and turned a blind eye to the abuses and inequities of totalitarian regimes.
Of course, this charge is never argued for by Wogblog through addressing the arguments of Public Opinion. The latter's weblog said that it was responding to the way de Genova's remarks had been used in an Australian context by Tony Parkinson from The Age to attack the broad left in the culture wars. It went on to say, in response to Parkinson, that Mogadishu could be redescribed as the brutality of urban warfare that may offer an indication of what could happen in Baghdad. We can spell this out in terms of Beruit . Here in the 1982 invasion, the Israeli Army managed to reach Beirut in a few days and laid siege to it for three months without managing to enter the city. So it is not clear what will happen in Baghdad.
The weblog said that the left had traditionally operated with the principle of self-determination of the Iraqi people ---eg; from foreign invasion as in Vietnam. So it was not necesarily true that the left is morally bankrupt. To spell this charge out Wogblog needs to show how the principle self-determination of the Iraqi people necessarily leads to morally idiocy. I have scanned Wogblog but I have not seen such an argument about self-determining freedom.
This response was dismissed by a Wogblog as going off in another direction to cover up the moral bankruptcy. In the language of Wogblog the strategy is one of "defending an indefensible statement by one of your own - a leftie - muddy the waters (of the charge that you are defending the indefensible) by introducing an unattainable motherhood-type desire. This gymnastic debating style should win you enough time to turn and run."
Is this the case? Is the charge true? Has anthropology been embraced at the expense of ethics? Has Wogblog put an ethnic Italian finger on something? Is it a case of covering your tracks whilst turning and running?
So let us stay with the tacit cultural relativism charge for a moment by addressing it directly, rather than running away from it.
The ethics of Public Opinion are based on a conception of the good life as a flourishing human life. So it would say that it is better to be dead than alive; it is better to healthy than ill; it is better to have food than be hungry; it is better to be free than a slave; it is better to have access to clean drinking than salinised, polluted water. There are some conditions and goods that enable a flourishing human life and there are some conditions and goods that stunt such a life. The former is better than the latter.
That is a cross cultural claim; a universal claim. It presupposes that we humans are the sort of creatures with certain interests/needs which have to be met to enable, and ensure, our healthy functioning.When it is put it in philosophical terms---within the western philosophical tradition that the academic left has supposedly dumped into the garbage can of history---it is a conception of a flourishing life based on good old Aristotlean essentialism that also recognizes cultural difference. What is important to one culture for a flourishing life (eg.,religion) may not be important to another.
So much for the 'anything goes' charge, or for embracing the Counter- Enlightenment of the reactionary right. To put it in Hegelian terms, the abstract univeralism of the Enlightenment has been replaced by a concrete universal.
What we have here with Wogblog is an unwillingness to engage with content of an argument. This claim is reinforced by two considerations. First, Wogblog claimed that Public Opinion was opposed to the Anglo-American intervention because of the negative long-term consequences in the Middle East. Thus:
"Gary is against the coalition because he is afraid the outcome of their efforts will not be some perfect self-determined democracy and honeydripped chocolate fantasy life for Iraqis after the military action formally comes to a close. Or something."
Well, it is more of the 'something.' Wogblog did not address Public Opinion's stated reasons that going to war with Iraq was not in Australia's interest; or that the case for Australian military intervention had not been made by the Howard government; or that UN approval was necessary for military intervention.
Secondly, Wogblog ended with the claim that Public Opinion as a defender of the Australian Left did not care about migrant ethnic communities. All of the mothehood stuff is:
"...cloaked in a great concern for Iraqi people. But this is a person who does not give a shit about actual change for wogs."
This cloaking claim was made in reference to hoping to avoid a Grozny with battle for Baghdad and self-determination of the Iraqi people. Not caring a shit about actual change for wogs is made by Wogblog even though the Australian left has advocated and defended multiculturalism, defended the exploitation of migrants because their working class location in industrial capitalism; defended them from the institutionalied white racism of Anglo-Australians; defended the group rights to their own minority migrant culture and granting recognition to their different communal ways of life in a multicultural Australia.
Wogblog goes on at great length about racist Anglo-Americans, or "really stupid nasty skippies, calling all Italians 'wogs' and meaning 'filthy, garlic munching wierdos with wierdo music' etc etc. Or not giving them jobs. Not crediting their education undertaken in Italy." But no mention of the left fighting the stupid nasty skippies.
Hence, there is no engagement with arguments advanced in public discourse. Rather, it is an attempt to discredit, and so Wogblog is doing a similar job to a Miranda Devine and Piers Ackerman--it is a conservative smearing of critical public intellectuals. A critical intellectual public discourse is one of the cornestones of a liberal society that should be preserved if Australia is going to be able to justify its claim that it is a civilised country fighting totalitarian regimes like Iraq and fundamentalist Islamic groups to bring democracy to the Middle East.