Philosophy.Com

being sceptical about economics

Here is the reason why philosophy.com has a critical stance to neo-classical ecomomics as a social science. It is one Aristotlean used against Plato who favoured abstract mathmatical knowledge as the form of knowing. Modern neo-classical economics is Platonic and so the objection is a classic philosophical one directed at the assumptions.

The description of this Platonism is given by Jeffrey Friedman, the editor of Critical Review. I quote:

"In Feldstein’s quite standard “neoclassical” model of the economy, everyone is motivated by self-interest. Consumers self-interestedly pay the lowest price possible for whatever they buy, after comparing the various goods for sale against their own hierarchically ranked desires. Similarly, in the pursuit of profit, producers compete with each other to provide consumers with exactly what they want, and will thus pay for. Selfish competition among producers channels their self-interest toward serving selfish consumers’ desires. As Adam Smith put it in The Wealth of Nations, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Economists such as Feldstein take Smith’s generalization and run with it — too far."

What we get is a few axioms from which a theoretical edifice is constructed that is stated in terms of equations. So you can either criticise the initial assumptions upon which the edifice is built (the foundations) or the deductive inferences. Friedman continues:

"Although they are usually careful to note that their model is an abstraction from reality, in practice they treat the abstraction and reality as interchangeable. Only by assuming that in reality people are always selfishly motivated — and only by adding the further assumptions that self-interested entrepreneurs have perfect knowledge of what self-interested consumers want; and that self-interested consumers have perfect knowledge of what selfinterested entrepreneurs have to offer — can economists diagram, in the form of supply and demand curves, the Smithian transformation of self-serving behavior into behavior that serves others. These diagrams are required if calculus is to be applied to economics. And calculus is required if economics is to acquire the appearance of precision: at the intersection of its supply and demand curves is the perfect price for a product."

So what is being produced is an economics of the blackboard that is covered in equations; or if you prefer the first steps on the way to constructing a computer model of the economy. Friedman continues:

"The assumptions of universal self-interestedness and perfect knowledge, then, are needed in order to turn economics into mathematics. So, even after noting the ahistorical, unrealistic aspect of the assumptions necessary to generate supply and demand curves, economists continue to deploy those assumptions. And this practice justifies protests such as those launched at Harvard. For if the economists’ assumptions are unrealistic, the appearance of precision they produce is an illusion."

If you want to be blunt about it, what has been produced is a house of cards that is called Pareto Optimality with the whole production given the name of science. Under economic rationalism reality is shaped to fit with the model of the purely competitive economy.

Thats a bit unfair I know. Below the belt. But see here for the more scholarly account of the flight from reality. And you have to get rough and ready here---ie., suspend your belief in science--- to make some space in order to be able to introduce practical knowledge. The response by Aristotleans to this account of theoretical reason is to emphasis a concrete and particular ethical knowledge of a practical reason. And politics has its own form of practical knowledge such as state craft: shaping the conduct of a population to specific political ends.

bloggers as the new public intellectuals

Tim Dunlop has an article on bloggers as the new public intellectuals. It is listed at the Evatt Foundation. The article has been noted but not substantively commented on in Australia. A one liner can be found here and some comments on bloggers and punk rock by James Russell here

Tim's article deserves more than a cursory glance.

I will outline Tim's argument then move to introduce some quibbles. I support the argument for the democratic forum and the role Tim allocates to bloggers to support and foster that forum in civil society. My quibbles are designed to strengthen the argument--to get him to think more deeply about some bits and pieces that he skated over--and to open up the discussion about what bloggers are doing.

Tim's core argument is that bloggers are situated and biased public intellectuals who engage in intellectual practice. This practice he says is:

"...the practice of engaging in public debates about matters of social and political importance that is theoretically open to anyone. By doing this, we move beyond constructing the citizen as a passive recipient of vetted knowledge and recognise them as creators of such knowledge in their own right."

He then argues that this engaging in public debate as citizens involves making arguments, which he then connects to democracy. He uses the work of Christopher Lasch to make his case:

'Lash says "our search for reliable information is itself guided by the questions that arise during arguments about a given course of action. It is only by subjecting our preferences and projects to the test of debate that we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn. Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain opinions in Lippmann's pejorative sense - half-formed convictions based on random impressions and unexamined assumptions. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of 'opinions,' gives them shape and definition, and makes it possible for others to recognize them as a description of their own experience as well. In short, we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others."'

And further that:

"....democracy requires argument and that public argument involving ordinary citizens has been usurped by an elite, a group of insiders who either because of political connections, expertise or other institutional reasons have easier access to the media and are therefore able to dominate public discourse. Such debate then tends to happen within pre-defined parameters that reflect the education, specialisation and norms of that elite. Thus, not only do they dominate public argument by virtue of their elite access and knowledge, they also tend to define the topics, terms and presentation of such debate and are liable to judge any lay contribution as illegitimate."

So blogging is more than empty flag waving. It challenges the closure tendency in the public sphere, whereby alternative opinions are not really sought or welcomed and where open frank discussion is actively discouraged. Blogging has a democratic ethos and it challenges the anti-democratic tendencies whereby political power is used to manage public opinion through spin by publicity hacks.

Tim does acknowledge that bloggers engage in public argument in a rough and tumble way, which involves a lot of shouting and point scoring. But he says that that blogging also helps to create an environment [what Bernard Williams once called rational civility] where citizens can use arguments to increase their knowledge in a topic.

I'm quite happy with this line of argument. All I would add to it is to say that it gives us deliberative democracy.

So what sort of knowledge is achieved by allowing our opinions and assumptions to be tested by vigorous debates with other bloggers? Is knowledge reliable information as Christopher Lasch, and Tim following him, imply? Or is something else. That, I think, is the area Tim skates over. So what are my quibbles?

There are two.

The first quibble has to do with the truth bit in relation to knowledge and power. In no way does blogging resurrect the idea of capital-T truth. If bloggers are situated and biased public intellectuals (as they are), then you kiss that idea of truth (Truth) to one side, as it implies Absolute Truth or being on a sky hook or a God's-eye view. Debates amongst bloggers is more like the blowtorch-to-the-belly polemics in the House of Representatives and no one engaged in them reckon they are standing outside language to to find some test for truth. We are all operating within the concepts of language. (My interpretation of Tim's appeal to Kant. I exchange mind for langauge).

This blowtorch-to-the-belly polemics does not mean that there is no rational civility that increases our knowledge of events, or deepens our understanding of what is happening to us. A good example of the process of increasing our knowledge through argument is provided by Invisible Adjunct, which explores the impact of corporatisation on the liberal university, on academic labor and the humanities. Our knowledge is deepened by this weblog. And this particular post on unemployed PhD's is a great example of the rational civility of conversation in civil society, where by people sort out what is going on in the liberal university through a dialogic.

What I gained from this discussion was a deeper understanding of my history as an academic. I knew that things were bad in academia with the corporatisation of the university. I got out because there was no job market. But my understanding of the two labor system was deepened through reading and participating in Invisible Adjunct'sweblog. What the shocking way the senior faculty treated PhD students meant in terms of the university as an institution was disclosed.

If public reason is a dialogic reason then we need to rethink what is meant by truth in this dialogue. I would suggest that, since blogging is intertextual (the raw material is texts linked to other texts that are layered by multiple interpretations), so it is more a process of understanding and interpretation to make sense of, or grasp the significance, of an issue for us rather than uncovering facts or getting reliable information. Blogger is much more than the poor women's journalism.

So what is it that bloggers are doing? At this point we need to highlight the political nature of blogging. We can take this political turn by considering the issue regulation of the media. In the political forum of the Australian Senate we have a dialogical exchange between different groups of Senators that aims to change a bill with introducing, amending and correcting amendments. This is done within various conventions that say there is a right and wrong way to go about engaging in debate and changing legislation.

As the recent debate on cross media ownership indicates there is a lot of give and take in the Senate. This reweaving can, and does, result in agreement or an overlapping consensus on some amendments---a common ground---is established; whilst on other occasions there is an agreement to disagree on specific amendments. What has been agreed to in this social practice of reweaving and recontextualising? It is a process of reweaving the web of beliefs about media ownership.

Is this reweaving idea whacky? Well no one stood up in Parliament during this media debate and asked: "Are you representing accurately?" "Are you getting at the way the object really is"? And rightly so, because they understand that they were not doing realist physics or economics in Parliament. Theirs is a different kind of social practice; one in which they come to agreements that are reached through some sort of political consensus. No one claims that the agreement is objective truth given by the correspondence of theory of truth. It is a temporary compromise in an ongoing political struggle.

The senators understood that their social practice in the Senate was about re-desiging a regulatory regime for the media industry in changed conditions. In the words of Senator Harradine, one of the 4 independents in the Senate, it is designing a regulatory regime:

"...which would prevent further media concentration but allow the media industry to expand for the benefit of the general community...It is our job as elected legislators to ensure not only that there are reasonable parameters set for the running of successful media businesses but, much more importantly, that these parameters serve the Australian people."

In trying to achieve this goal they said things like:"the amendment does this job"; "you misrepresent what I said"; "you have not included this in your considerations"; or "the point you are making is not what the issue is about"; "we need to consider this"; "what is meant by localism" etc. No one said that "I reject this amendment on the grounds of the 'facts of the matter.'" In doing so they deployed various rhetorical devices to persuade one another to adopt a particular course of action---more market less regulation, more regulation less market.

My second quibble with Tim has to do with the kind of knowledge that is achieved by rhetorical debate in civil society. Tim seems to imply that using argument to increase our knowledge on a topic is a form of theoretical knowledge based on removing our prejudices and ignorance. I interpret the tacit conception of knowledge to be less the theoretical knowledge of the social sciences, such as economics, and more the knowledge provided by investigative journalism. It is one of chasing down the facts or correcting errors----as illustrated by Tim's Guardian example.

This scenario of knowledge as reliable information is misleading. True, what Tim is saying is partially right. Representational knowledge does happen, since many bloggers see themselves as proto-journalists or are journalists and they are very good at both kinds of writing. But that is not the fully story. The knowledge that is implied is an ethical knowledge, because we are making judgements about what is right and wrong based on our lived experience. This is quite different to knowledge as reliable information.

Let me illustrate through the great issue in Australian public life--the economic reforms (in the form of deregulation, privatisation, user pays etc), which opened up the Australian economy to the processes of the global market and which have radically transformed our everyday life. Though Positivist economists try to talk about reform in a neutral way (without expresssing their approval or disapproval), the reality is that citizen's understand these reforms in terms of the impact they have on their life. And they do so from their lived experience.

Citizens make their judgments from their experience of economic processes--unemployment for the industrial working class, declining living standards for the middle class). We understand the meaning of these reforms in terms of how they enable or hinder us in our attempts to fashion our lives so we can live well. In engaging in public debate we give voice to these experiences of being caught up in radical change that we understand is trying to establish a new market order for Australia.

It is a normative view based on our tacit knowledge that there are winners and losers from the radical change. It is a not neutral description because the judgement is saying that the income distribution from the economic reforms is unequal. It is unequal because the big corporations and top income earners have disproportionately increased their share of the national income. And that is wrong. It is unfair, even though Australia is living in a boom time.

That is an ethical judgement about the relations of power hidden in the invisible hand of the free market. And ethical judgements are made about the crude utilitarian economics that is deployed to justify the inequality in terms of a % increase in Australia's GDP. The market ethos is judged to be one of 'stuff you Joan, I'm doing okay, so get out my way.'

The theoretical knowledge of economics is then used to deflect these ethical judgements from the public sphere, or if that doesn't work, then to keep them at bay. It pushes quality of life issues to one side by turning its back on wellbeing of citizens as the goal of public policy, and making money (wealth creation) the central goal. For the utilitarian calculators the % increase in GDP from national competition policy is all that matters.

Those are my quibbles. What they signify is the distinctive voice of bloggers and differentiates them from the reportage journalists who rarely write their articles in an ethical language. That different language is scrubbed out by the corporate media. This why I have turned to the intellectual practices in the political institutions. You may not agree with the tight connection I have made between blogging and politics, but it does highlight the way that blogging is distinctive from journalism. That difference makes blogging even more significant for democracy.

next

after economic rationalism

This review of John Kekes, The Art of Life, (Cornell University Press, 2002) is via Lawrence Blum. This book is a step away from philosophy as abstract theorizing in academia towards the particular and concrete.

The Kekes book is a development of the idea of philosophy as a way of life. That idea of philosophy is one of a life of examination---both of one's own life and an examination of the culture in which one lives. The point of this self-reflection and the art of living well is to achieve a good life that enables human and non-human flourishing.

The Kekes book takes this further. In the first part of the book Kekes gives five types of concrete good lives of personal excellence: those of self-direction, decency, moral authority, depth and honour. Part two examines in four chapters the general conditions for practising the art of life and develops some of the ideas which emerged from the examination in part one. Part three, the final chapter, draws together the threads of the various arguments to provide 'one possible and reasonable approach to living a good life?.

Judging from the review, the limitation of this book is the absence of "the political" as well as "politics". If we talk about about living a good life and accept that there is a deep conflict about what constitutes the good life (eg., wealth creation versus sustainablity) then we step into the political. Often we get roadblocks to the need to turn to the political. We stay with economics in the public sphere and sideline living the good life to the private sphere.

The conception of philosophy as living well at philosophy.com is a more Aristotlean one, in which there is structuring a good life around a dominant end, with living well being that end. Living well involves, living with a specific tradition, shaping a certain character based on moral virtues, freedom as self-realization, and a sustainable mode of life. Living well, is bound up with being within a political community and using political power to establish the conditions for living well.

This gives us a different kind of rationality to the instrumental reason of the market place. phronesis and it involves an engagement with the rationality of ends. Recall the dead end John Quiggin had ended up with his account of rationality. In his first entry on rationality he avoided giving any content to rationality. Subsequently, he gave two accounts of economic rationality. The first referred to a form of critical and sceptical economic thinking:

"...'economically rational'[ was] used to describe the arguments of the group in the Labor Party, including Whitlam himself, who sought reductions in protective tariffs and agricultural price support schemes. By implication, opposing claims were regarded economically irrational. A little later, the term 'economic rationalists' was used to describe the supporters of free trade within the Labor government. [It meant] policy formulation on the basis of reasoned analysis, as opposed to tradition, emotion and self-interest."

John then gave some content to economic rationality by spelling out what is meant by the popular conception of economic rationalism. (This is what is usually called neo-liberalism). John's account of this form of economic rationalism in Australia states that it stood for:

"... a dogmatic, indeed, quasi-religious, faith in market forces and the private sector. More and more, economic analysis was based on deductions from supposedly self-evident truths, which were effectively immune from any form of empirical testing. Many of the beliefs that are now central to 'economic rationalism' would have been regarded as irrational prejudices by the first generation of economic rationalists.

By the 1980s, economic rationalists had largely adopted the microeconomic views of the Chicago school, rejecting ideas of market failure in favour of the belief that the simple neoclassical model of perfect competition was a good description of the economy, or would be in the absence of undesirable government intervention."

Christopher Shiels highlights the trick played by the economic rationalists in the public sphere. He says:

"A crucial role in our local history has been played by the rhetorical trick that John Q highlights, i.e. 'if you aren?t an economic rationalist, you must be an economic irrationalist'. Ok, it?s now a tired retort; relying on the truism that there are many ways of rationalising, but no camp will wish to hold to irrationalism. Yet, it has also been a neat sound bite for the policy advocates. In the age of marketing, most would trade on a catch like that, if it fell their way."

Shiels notes that 'economic rationalism's final resting home is as a dinky die swearword in public policy. True. It is no longer used by politicians. In the late 1990s they moved onto neo-conservatism. This leaves us with John's first account---- critical and sceptical economic thinking based on neo-classical economics as the rationality of the public sphere. It also leaves us with utilitarian egoism firmly in place.

What is of interest here is Quiggin's assumption that economics is rationality per se, and that anything else is not rational it is tradition, emotion and self-interest. It also leaves us with scientific knowledge as the only form of knowledge.

This is a standard ploy in an economics that has been seduced by the modernist dream of finding a set of "universal" principles that would unify the diverse practices of social inquiry. This universal colonizes rationality for itself and so scientific knowledge becomes the only form of knowledge. What it rejected as waste product----tradition and emotion---is considered by definition to be the opposite of rationality. And no attempt is made to engage with a rationality that is structured around emotion and tradition, eg. phronesis or a practical knowing.

No attempt is made to consider the "empirical-analytical" rationality of the social sciences and the "historico-hermeneutic" rationality of philosophy into a dialogue over rationality. This leaves the critics of economics in public policy embattled and besieged by a host of technical economic thinkers in a technocracy. We are thrown into, and confronted by a world in which there is a hegemony of technology based on science; a false idolatry of the professional expert; 'a scientific mystification of the modern society of specialization, and the domination of nature and a too easy acceptance that science is a substitute for lost cultural orientations of religion.

What is lost by a high modernist social science is the connection of the ethical and the political by the Romans and the Greeks.

In Rome, phronesis as practical judgement and knowledge developed into the vir bonus ideal of public life. Calvin McGee says that this ideal held that:

"...all Roman citizens should strive to be "good men" able to "speak well" when they were called upon to give advice in the public interest. In Greece, the impulse of practical philosophy developed into the vision of the phronimos, a person imbued with practical wisdom who is able to bridge the life of the mind and the life of the polis."

This is a different and alternative tradition to Quiggin's utilitarian one. What I am suggesting is we appropriate the 'truth' of what this through acknowledging that ourselves have been shaped by this effective history. So it isnot a nostalgic return to Greek/Roman r is advocating, but rather an appropriation of Aristotle's own insights to our concrete situation. . . . We come to understand what Aristotle is saying and at the same time come to a deeper understanding of our own situation

breaking the I/P mirror

It is easy to notice but it is hard to break out of. And it bothers me.

When watching the television news about the Middle East have you noticed the simplification, that reach for the easy cliche? The media represents the conflict between two sides, Israeli's and Palestinians? Its an eternal struggle between white and black; or even a bitter personal conflict between Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat. The complexities of geopolitics and the history do not matter here. And it is unclear where this discourse in media stand on the two state solution. (Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side in peace). It appears that this is tacitly rejected in the media because the Palestinians are assumed to not only want to reclaim the occupied territories but to destroy Israel.

Oh I know, that is the media. We all know that. The media has become infotainment. It (the commercial media) is ever heedful of the bottom line and the low attention span of the channel-jumping consumers. But the public media (the ABC in Australia) are no different. Their representations are black and white as well. They just give a different content to the black and white to the commercial media.

The ABC is more sympathetic to the Palestinians, whilst the commerical media are more sympathetc to the Israeli's. Each inverts the hierarchy of the duality. But generally, in Australia, the Israelis are good guys whilst the Palestinians are the bad guys. It is okay for the Israeli military forces under Prime Minister Sharon to counter terrorism by destroying the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority and the structure of a future Palestinan state.

I'm sure you have noticed the duality in the daily news as well. It bothers me, especially when I post on the subject at public opinion. And I search the Internet for media that would allow me to escape the rigid duality----to prise it open with some geopolitics and history. I don't suceed (for various reasons). I slip back into academic stance of the birds eye view, even though I know that I write from a situated perspective. ( My sympathies are with the Palestinian people because of their suffering from the occupation of their homeland.) But how do we begin to think differently on this?

I know that many Israelis and Palestinians do not agree with the policies and actions of Sharon and Arafat-----their voices are full of dissent and resistance and their strength comes from a love for their country. Recognizing this diversity or difference is a step out of the hierarchal duality onto some new terrain. But then I get lost.

To put in a philosophical way I am not able to put the categories of this discourse into question. In being self-reflexive I can see that I have reversed or reprivileged the hierarchy of the given Israel/Palestinian duality, and so naively passed to the other side of the discourse. But I have not been able to reinscribed the newly privileged term through extending its range and scope.

What I end up doing is puzzling about the straitjacket as I search for help out of the media flybottle. Well I have find something to help and just by chance. Its a little post on a weblog. It was right under my nose. Others had noticed and linked but I didn't see it.

The opening is here The 'Why Israel and Palestine are not morally equivalent' is
a great and courageous post.

I have some quibbles.

First, an ontological one. Consider this remark by Scott that "Jews are not a collective. They are just a collection."

Well no. Jews are not a bunch of stones lying on the ground. We are talking about the Jews as people, then they are a collective, made so by their social relations, culture and history. They are a people who located themselves in a particular to become a nation. They have constructed a state to enable them to do this. It is the relationships that are crucial not just the things.

This is important difference. Consider Scott's next remark:

"Now, this is the key point of this whole post: The Palestinians are a collection, and are therefore incapable of being responsible for terrorism. Hamas is a collective. Fatah is a collective. Al-Qaeda is a collective. They are capable of bearing collective responsibility for terrorism. The Palestinians are not."

Hamas is a collective but so are the Palestinan people, though they are a different kind of collective to military organization. The Palestinan people are bonded by their social relations, culture, and their historical experience of Israel's occupation of their territory. And they have some responsiblity for the terrorism since it is a weapon and tactic which they deploy as a people to defend themselves against an occupying army, the demolition of their houses and the settlements. They do not have tanks, an army, an airforce or a navy funded by an imperial power.

Same with the dissident Jewish people. As citizens they see themselves as having responsibility to fight the occupation and settlements. They see it as a form of colonialism with all its arrogance and inhumanity embodied in its methods of suppressing the local population, seizing land and giving settlers superior legal status. These voices of refusal fight for an other kind of Israel.

Now I agree with Scott's next remark:

"You need do little more than turn on the news to hear someone in the Arab world saying that "the Americans" and "the Israelis" are responsible for whatever injustices they feel aggrieved by. It's easy to get from there to concluding that you are justified in killing Americans and Israelis in response. If they said America and Israel were responsible,I wouldn't be nearly so bothered. Sometimes, I might even agree. It's a lot harder to go from America is doing something bad to Americans must die."

I accept the distinction being made here between a people--the Israeli's ---and the state--Israel. Some sections of the Israeli people are in opposition to the state's actions of occupation and those sections of the Israeli people (the settler movement and ultra-Orthodox communty) who support the state. The Palestinians, in contrast, do not have a state as Scott rightly points out. They have Hamas and Fatah but not a state. One day perhaps the Palestinian Authority might become a state of the Palestinian people.

So what is the point of difference between Scott and myself? One has to do with nationalism. My understanding of a people is that they are nation. Scott says that he hate nationalism because it:

"It makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a battle between two "nations" - two of the same sort of thing - instead of what it really is: a conflict between the Israeli state and a bunch of people called Palestinians."

Well not quite. It is a military conflict---a war--between the Israeli state and Hamas and Fatah etc.

Scott continues and introduces a bigger point. He says that nationalism:

"helps people to confuse collections with collectives. It encourages "us vs. them" sorts of thinking, preventing people from recognising how their conflicts are with collectives rather than with groups of individuals. The outcome of that sort of thinking is obvious enough: repression, collective punishment (which has to do with punishing collections for actions taken by collectives), ethnic cleansing and, in the most extreme cases, genocide."

Nationalism is equated with ethnicity here: an ethnic nationalism And this has given rise to proposals for ethnic cleansing in the form of planned explusions of the Arabs.It could be achieved through the Israeli state imprisoning Palestinians in enclaves surrounded by settlements stripping Arab Israeli's of their citizenship, then expelling all Palestinians from the country. Israel would then be ethnically pure. Beyond that strategy we have the right wing proposal to "transfer" all Palestinians out of Palestine.

But there are different forms of nationalism. For instance, You can fight colonialism (Indians against British rule) or imperialism to defend your country and people from suffering and oppression (Vietminese against the Americans) Dissident Israels can, and do, fight the settlement process and Israel dominion over the occupied territories in the name of the other Israel.

But Israeli nationalism could be a civic one anchored in western liberal values. It did develop a democratic government from the authoritarian David Ben-Gurion days. What can do is to develop a multiple ethnicity----one state two peoples. We can then redescribe ethnic nationalism as cultural nationalism However, integration in liberal democracies is not dependent upon cultural nationalist assimilation policies in the face of cultural heterogeneity. Given this cultural heterogeneity in Israel, a state-sponsored nationalist projects of cultural assimilation may be both ineffective and counterproductive to the goal of integration. One state two cultures may well be an option.

Scott's responsibility claim will have to wait.

philosophy in political life

This report supports the argument of this weblog that academic philosophy can be reinvented or transformed to become involved in political life. When I mention this to philosophical colleagues I am usually scoffed at (political life is about emotion not reason) and when I mention the classic Romans as examples of philosophy in political life (Cicero and Seneca) I get a polite smile (that's not philosophy).

The report says that David Blunkett at the Home Office in the UK is addressing the issue of civil renewal through providing a philosophical framework in which he can tackle specific Home Office problems: law and order, run-down inner cities, the accountability of judges and the role of the active citizen. The text of the Edith Kahn Memorial Lecture can be found here

These issues are current ones in Australia, as can be seen here.

There are a few politicians in Australia with a philosophical bent is Mark Latham or Carmen Lawrence. See Third Way and here. For some commentary, see here, and here and here.

I should emphasis that these two Labor Party politicans (Latham and Lawrence) are exceptions in a political party that is notable for its weak and derivative intellectual life; where party life is ruled by factions that narrow power into the hands of a small number of chieftains; that the factions are based on personal ambition and animosity rather than on genuine ideological divisions;and that even when this creaking political machinery forms policy, that policy is unlikely to be respected by pragmatic, number crunching politicians anxious to get their hands on the levers of power.

I highlight the Third Way in this philosophy in political life because this is the space David Blunkett is operating in. The themes are operating in the political space between the free market and traditional culture; the role of government is to help people cope with global change; the government as the enabling state helps us active citizens to do things for ourselves;the enabling state; law and order agenda, more accountable police forces and community panels.

In Australia this Third Way is generally rephrased in terms of social inclusion, social capital and civil society with social policies aiming to restore public trust by enhancing community relationships. The emphasis is placed on the formal and informal networks that enable people to mobilise resources and achieve common goals, and this turn to community is used to highlight the limitations of conventional economic approaches for understanding social and economic processes. What is foregrounded is the care, support and trust embodied in the volunteer sector in civil society. What is highlighted is a new mode of governance---a community one.

A new way of governing a population through a liberal rationality shaping their liberty is a good example of philosophy at work in political life. This mode of governance takes us to here to the ‘conduct of conduct in civil life, to the decentring of the state under liberalism and a shift away from the explicitly economic rationality of neo-liberalism. What is of concern here is the link the link between the technologies of the micro-powers of disciplining the body and the technologies of the general administration of social relations of a population of a nation state. Political power operates on individual bodies and on individuals as members of population that is being put to productive use. Thus Blunkett is spelling out the ways in which the manner in which, or the mechanisms by which, the conduct of a population of individuals is deeply implicated in the decentred exercise of sovereign power. Its the Third Way with its emphasis on community. This new mode of communal governance is a suitable issue for philosophy in political life to engage with.

That is an example. Many others can be found. Check this report about GMO's. It says that Australian scientific researchers will lodge a formal request for permission to conduct field trials of a genetically modified virus with the Gene Regulator.

"The modified herpes virus promises to make devastating mice plagues a thing of the past. If the trial goes ahead, it would be the first of its type in the world. But at least one scientist is publicly warning that the risks are too great to let this particular genie out of the bottle."

It leads us to here to GeneEthics

Weblogs: just a little stall in the market?

There is an entry at the UK libertarian Samizdata.net that says webblogs are more a part of the marketplace than the democratic polity. The post says:

"Blogs are therefore something which empowers the individual, the blogger, regardless of the wishes, and therefore the votes, of a collective who might wish to have a say in what a blogger writes. The correct analogy is therefore the market place... a blog is a open air stall in a marketplace for ideas called the blogosphere. If you find the ideas we are 'selling' interesting (even if you do not agree with them) you will come back for more. If we horrify you or even worse, bore the pants off you, you will probably not come back. But we will write what we will write. There is nothing democratic about that... and long may it be so."

It is true that blogs are part of the marketplace. We pays our money to set them up and to keep the micro-media going. In setting up our stalls in the market we webloggers are also acting as competition for the corporate media.The small guys versus the big guys. Classic Hayek and all that.

So why is the weblog as a little stall of ideas not a part of democratic politics? Democratic politics for these libertarians:

"...refers to systems by which the people who control those collective means of coercion are chosen and made accountable via one of several methods of popular voting. For something to be 'democratic' therefore, it must be amenable to 'politics'. Therefore for a blog to be 'democratic' that does not mean it is empowering or that it disintermediates the state. In fact it means the state, which is to say democratic politics is very much involved."

However, the readers of weblogs are not involved in producing a weblog. What the reader does get is to choose whether or not they decide to come back and read the weblog again. Hence it is about the market. So weblogs are akin to stalls in the marketplace.

Stephen Dawson over at Australian libertarians (11.06.2003) follow suit. He states that the idea that blogs are democratic is superfical and that blogs are rightly offerings in a marketplace.

Weblogs are not just stalls in the marketplace. They are also part of the fourth estate and so they are part of the circulation of information in a federal democracy. As such they are about increasing citizen participation, dialogue and deliberation. See here. the public affairs weblogs are produced by citizens who are concerned with the good of the country, not just choosingtwhich stall in the market to buy ones package of ideas. Weblogs are part of a dialogic public reason and so an integral part of deliberative democracy.

Is connecting weblogs to democracy superficial as Stephen Dawson claims? No. There is a widespread and deep disenchantment with both the failure of politicians to keep their promises and the failure of the political process in liberal democracy to consistently deliver evident and assessable outcomes. We get lots of spin, publicity and media management. And lots of disenchantment with this. It is the disenchantment by citizens that takes us away from the superficial.

This article,which is based on BBC research, addresses citizen disenchantment with the political process. It says that:

"This disaffection appears to stem from a fundamental shift from ‘old tribal politics’ defined by party political allegiances, to a ‘new consumer politics’. People now play an active part in securing their rights in corporate life, but feel powerless to do this in civic life. Our research suggests people are becoming more assertive about wanting more transparent political transaction – rather than apathetic. They want information which is not defined by party politics but by the issues that interest them; they want to be able to judge what a politician promises; and if they disagree, they want to register this more than once in every five years."

This underscores the importance of reinvigorating civic life between elections The BBC plans to facilitate this navigating thei ssues of civic life, by providing a ‘database of democracy’ which people can use to find out who they have to contact on any given issue. The BBC says:

"We want to provide people with the opportunity and means to participate in democracy at local and national levels, not simply to observe it. This will be a service designed for action, not talk or ‘chat’. We believe the BBC is well placed to become a key facilitator in this emerging e-democracy world, using its strong trusted brand combined with its ability to attract audiences through both its online and broadcast output."

If only the ABC in Australia did something similar.

beyond market rationality

Economists, it seems, have difficulty offering a plausible definition of rationality, or even wimp out. Gary over over at public opinion has suggested that market rationality is one of the maximisation of self-interest and implied that this has little connection to creating a better society.

Public opinion is a bit swift in this judgement. Neo-classical economics does have a criteria that links rationality to a better kind of society. It is based on Pareto optimality, in which optimality means that everyone's utility goes up (what politicians call win-win) or some-one's utility goes up and no-one's utility goes down (there are winners but no losers). This implies that efficiency in the allocation of scarce resouces is the critieria that links self-interested rationality to making society better. And economists imply that efficiency is an adequate condition for a good society-- a gurantee add the politicians.

Many pro-market politicians follow the experts welding efficiency like a sledgehammer. Competitive market mechanisms, they say, achieves efficiency. Hence, they argue, we should create a market for water in the Murray-Darling Basin with property rights for water and allow competitive pressures to shift water from low value to high value users.

In doing so the politicians overlook the distribution of utilities (and happiness and suffering) and they ignore, or are blind to other values besides utility-eg., freedom, rights, sustainability or a flourishing life. Pareto optimality is indifferent to sustainability even though it is sometimes claimed that efficiency will give rise to sustainability.

The Clare Valley viticulturalists are high value uses. They build pipelines to take the extra water through the market (hypothetically of course). But this increased efficiency in the use of water is not sustainable. Extra vineyards are planted; salty water is poured into valley where once it was dryland viticulture; there increased salt load in the valley; the grapes become more salty; many of the smaller growers end up losing their property. Using the competitive market mechanism does not get you sustainability or distributional equity.

Claims are made about the former today but not the latter.

to be continued.

He who is sovereign

Gary over at Public Opinion has drawn attention to what is sitting behind the recent proposals by John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, to reduce the powers of the Austalian Senate through constitutional reform. He writes:

"...underneath the gambit lurks the spectre of executive rule as a technical means to a functional end: shaping Australia to ensure that it fits the requirements of the global economic systems. You can hear the underground script in the background to Senator Ferris's words: emergency measures are required to preserve a liberal constitutional order in times of crisis. What is required is an all-powerful sovereign who must rescue our constitutional order from its constitutional mechanisms. "

It is a gesture to Carl Schmitt's thesis of an exceptional situation that calls for the emergence of a potentially all powerful sovereign who rescues the constitutional order from its own technical and formal procedures. In Australia there is no emergency situation or a dire crisis; but the Prime Minister is sending out messages that he seeking "emergency powers" to protect the national system of governance in a global world from gridlock. John Howard is wanting increased powers for an exceptional situation.

As Schmitt writes in Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Theory of Sovereignty, "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception."

Most of the political commentators that Gary links to support the thrust of reforms for an increase in the powers of the executive. They are in favour of executive dominance in a federal system. Webloggers, such as Tim Dunlop are against. Ken Parish talks in terms of the Dark Lord and Nazguls but he does not probe the idea of emergency powers to explore the development a new form of domination from within liberalism. The concentration of powers as a form of domination is explored by Margo Kingston, from the Sydney Morning Herald.

She writes:

"With one constitutional change, a Prime Minister with the numbers in a joint sitting could roll over Senate scrutiny without qualm, refuse to answer the hard questions, and roll over internal dissenters with the charge of disloyalty....And without the power to reject legislation, the media would take no interest in Senate debates. Why bother, when after a couple of debates a joint sitting would force through exactly what the government wanted? Thus, the structural trigger for detailed public debate on contentious matters would be gone.... Without a Senate with real power, it would be open season for any government to transform our democracy and our rights within it without our permission."

Margo rightly sees it as a power grab by the Howard Coalition Government to continuing imposing its agenda of neo-liberal reforms. And the media chorus chants: 'the nation is threatened from within. It has become ungovernable. The Senate wilfully obstructs. Something has to be done.Things cannot go on like this. ' The chorus is outlining the parameters of an emergency situation---what Schmitt called the exceptional---- that requires an increase in executive power to deal with. The exceptional was framed by Senator Ferris in terms of the Bali bombings and the war on terrorism.

What is going on here? Do we just have a political gambit? Or is something deeper happening underneath the surface of political life? We can probe it by turning to Carl Schmitt.

In Die Diktatur Schmitt explored this situation (his eye was on the Weimer Republic) in terms of a negation of parliamentary democracy through dictatorship. He went back to the Roman Republic where a dictator was often appointed in a time of a dire emergency (a foreign invasion, an insurrection, a plague or a famine) for a limited period of time. The laws is suspended for a short period of time then it is reinstated. The specifics of the crisis generates the specific means to be employed by the dictator.

Schmitt argues that liberalism does not understand dictatorship other than as a form of totalitarianism (eg., Soviet Russia) and so it leaves itself susceptible to emergencies. Liberalism, blinded by the technical scientific mode of thinking, excludes the exceptional from the normal operations of the political process, and so it does not consider the possibility of an exceptional situation.

Schmitt changes tack in Political Theology to consider the way the constitutional contraints--the checks and balances---both hampers the exercise of sovereign power and obscures who is sovereign. No branch of the separated powers has an independent claim on sovereignty. Schmitt aims to remove impediments for executive abolutism and to legitimate this abolutism.

Schmitt has been condemned for making the Reichsprasident sovereign, usurping the authority of Parliament and governing through charimatic and plebiscitarily elected authoritarian Chancellors to keep the destructive social forces at bay. This conservative attempt to supplant liberalism would appear to have similarities with the current conservative agenda underpinning the Bush administration---obedience for protection from terror. In the national security state fear is being used to restore order to a pluralistic society.

And Australia? Do we have a similar conservative supplanting of liberalism through a commandering of the liberal state machinery and a shift to non-liberal state rule? The state becomes efficient instrument that can be utilised or appropriated through executive dominance thereby allowing the knowing elites to guide and rule the people.

bias as pre-judgement

There has been a lot made of media bias in the political world of late in Australia; particularly the bias of the liberal media. By bias the conservative politicians pretty much mean liberal journalists imposing their pinko prejudices on the facts. Bias is bad because it is prejudice. Bias should not be there.

We should get rid of our prejudices. Or rather, the conservative politicians are saying that pinko journalists should dump their subjective prejudices whilst commenting about the news. And there things stand in the public debate---apart from left-liberals pointing out the prejudices of conservative politicians and journalists. Stalemate. Public reason is, and should be, factual.

This text by Martin Krygier opens things up around basis as prejudice. It takes us forward by rethinking the way we conceptualize prejudice by introducing Gadamer's idea of prejudice as pre-judgement.

Krygier puts it this way:

"Their thinking goes like this: existing values, cultures, traditions, institutions, practices, give us help. They embody pre-formed responses to recurrent problems and circumstances. They enable some things and disable others. They are embedded in everyday ways of thinking, behaving, valuing and, yes, prejudices. They are depositories of congealed knowledge, meaning, value and, on occasion, wisdom. They are familiar and, if we are lucky, they are good. Those who deny or ignore them are bound to get a lot of things wrong."

Why is this so? Because:

"We all begin our reasoning some time, some place. We are all situated beings, our understandings flowing from within the traditions and the prejudices of our time and place. Other times, other places, other prejudices - never no prejudice."

As Krygier says (good and bad) prejudices are a part of who we are as social beings:

"There is simply no way around it. Prejudices inform our every reasoning with latent knowledge and meaning, with the topics we are concerned with, the questions we ask, the answers we are likely to find satisfactory, the horizons within which we reason."

That means our interpretations of texts (eg., historical ones) are also prejudiced, even though we interpret these texts from within a tradition of interpretation. Hence there is little point in appealing to the good intentions and fine beliefs of the historical actors----as Keith Windshuttle does in relation to the white settlers, the Aborigines and frontier violence. There is no guarantee of objectivity in the settler's intentions because they are social beings situated in history and therefore their understanding of historical events is a prejudiced one. And the settler texts used by contemporary historians as evidence for their narratives are prejudiced.

So what can be done about it?

Krygier does get the ball rolling on this. He does so by distinguishes between being reflexive and non-reflective about our prejudices. He says:

"So are we all bigots? I don't think so. I think it is the way the bigot believes that matters. The person "blinded by prejudice" doesn't merely prejudge, as we all do; doesn't rely only on things other than reason, as we all do; doesn't even only think badly of people without sufficient evidence. Most of us do that, too. He does so in a way that is not reflexive about his prejudices. He has no wish, or no ability, to take any distance from them, to try to uncover them, to interrogate them, to confront them with experience, dialogue, criticism, and revision.

He is incapable of what I call "rooted reflexiveness". Such a posture acknowledges that we never start nowhere, but recommends that we always be open to finishing somewhere else."

And there he leaves it. But how do we go about interrogating our prejudices them, and confronting them with experience, dialogue, criticism, and revision?How do we learn to become reflexive?

The strength of Gadamer is that he provides an answer in terms of the dialogic structure of understanding. It is based on the Socratic conception of in which the participants (includingSocrates) come at the end of the conversation to a position that represents a significant advance over the position each maintained at the begining. Each of us begins with certain views, assumptions, prejudices but in confronting the opposing views, assumptions and prejudices of the other participants or opponents we have to reconsider and develop our own. The process of conversation is one of confrontation, integration and appropriation as we learn to take account of the opinions of others and attempt to show what is right or wrong with the opinions and arguments of our opponents.

A proper public conversation involves the transformation of the initial position of all the discussion participants, rather than achieving consensus through acquiescing with someone else's position/opinion or submitting to a traditional (political) authority.

a critic of liberal modernity

This article on Carl Schmitt, the German legal jurist and philosopher, by Paul Gottfried the American paleo conservative, is a good piece of work.

I read Schmitt a couple of years ago and found his criticisms of liberalism (the parliamentary version) in modernity to be on the mark. The public forum and public debate are undermined by the workings of closed committees and mass party politics; liberals trade principles for compromise and have a preference for legal form (legality) and offer no fundamental opposition to technological civilization.

Paul Gottfried takes Schmitt seriously: he forgets the smears and apologetics and engages with the ideas. He is right to do so. Schmitt is a tough nut. I read him as a critic of modernity. I interpreted his texts from the perspective of the Frankfurt School concern's with technology and instrumental reason and viewed Schmitt as putting his finger on the aporias of modernity and loosely working within a Hegelian dialectical tradition.

He nailed the deep opposition between positivism (the analytic formal elements of science and technology) and the romantic (concrete, content orientated, particularity).These dichotomies (dialectical oppositions for Hegelians) within modernity are with us today and they find a clear expression in the current conflict between a free market economics infused with techology and environmentalism.

So I basically read Schmitt as being concerned about the implications of economic-technical thought that manipulates matter, empties the human world of meaning and produces a technologically disenchanted world that establishes the possibilities for harsh modes of domination. Schmitt was able to see that an Enlightenment rationality had become technological and that it produced its own form of the concrete, subjective and qualitative----romanticism, which he characterized as subjective expression that aestheticizes everything.

scoring points' is routine practice

I can only agree with the descriptions here of the normal practices of seminar in academic philosophy. It was all about 'going for the jugular'. It is all about a combat.

It is not suprising. Academic philosophy is predominately a masculine culture. My own experience was that intellectual thuggery was normal everyday practice. Being 'outrageously hostile' about the work of others is standard. The aim is to destroy. And a philosophy education does produce many smart alecks who have no significant ability to listen.

The article offers little explantion for why there is there is this deeply embedded destructive tendency in academic philosophy. For me it was the extreme masculinity that produced the big cock who lorded it over the over cocks. The cocks fancied themselves as master thinkers.

writing history

Due to some of the previous postings I've done on the writing of Australian history (eg., here) I keep getting the odd email criticising my interpretative approach to contemporary disputes in history.

The criticisms mostly come from those who adhere to an empiricist model of history and they think that interpretation of texts opens the door to "anything goes". Because of my focus on primary historical sources as texts and not as facts I am a seen to be light on the truth. Somehow an interpretative approach is acceptable in responding to films but not to historical events.

According to the advocates of the empiricial method, history should be a mirror of past reality and the various distortions (eg., personal bias, prejudice and faulty use of sources) should be removed so that we can possess objective knowledge. On this conception of writing history texts for the present, history can, and should, correspond to the reality of the past. So the emphasis is on getting the story straight. Radicals never get the story straight because they let their political enthusiasms (passions) get in the way. Method and evidence are to the fore because they are the royal road to Truth.

In this post I will make a couple of quick remarks about an interpretative approach by highlighting what is repressed by the empirical method.

First, it sees the connection between writing history and literature. It places the emphasis on the composition, creation and construction of writing different situated histories. These histories are a form of knowledge based around narratives, they presuppose a philosophy of history, politics, judgements about right and wrong etc and this literary narrative creates meanings about the past for us now.

Secondly, a Hegelian point. The empirical method represses the historical conceptual apparatus that works up, or orders , the atomic facts into a complex structure of a narrative. Without this conceptual apparatus we would have a jumble of unrelated facts and not historical knowledge. Call this this historicism.

In bringing the repressed to the foreground we have a different way of writing history--- a discourse that gives the past various meanings through the creation of written texts. As a discourse (a lot of interelated texts) history is different from the past. If you like, the past is what has gone and history is what historians have made aand are making of it. History texts are their reading of the past. As historicans they read it differently to geographers, ecologists or economists: ie they select different things to write about, approach the writing differently and work with a dissimilar conceptual apparatuses.

The above are simple points. They are what historians know. But they want to hammer it back into the empirical way of doing history. Somehow the latter is seen as the only legitimate way in Australia.

Derrida: anything goes?

In comments made to an earlier post Derrida made relevant John Quiggin writes:

"The general tendency of Derrida's thought is clearly towards "anything goes", and the natural consequence is that what "goes" will be what is preferred by the rich and powerful."

My response is that Derrida works within the horizons of the philosophical tradition even though he pushes or stretches the boundaries---eg., by emphasizing philosophy's relationship to literature. But what tradition? Clearly the continental philosophical tradition rathe than the Anglo-American one. But which political tradition?

This provides an answer. It suggests the liberal Enlightenment tradition. I quote.

"In an essay written by Habermas, co-signed by Derrida and published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper on Saturday, the two philosophers called on the "avant-garde" core of European states to return to European enlightenment values.

Habermas identified five attributes he said Europeans share: the neutrality of authority, embodied in the separation of church and state, trust in politics rather than the capitalist market, an ethos of solidarity in the fight for social justice, high esteem for international law and the rights of the individual and support for the organizational and leading role of the state."

A summaryof the Habermas/Derrida paper can be found here . It says that Europeans must try to provide "balance" against the "hegemonic unilateralism of the U.S" through international bodies including the U.N; the guiding idea of the Europeans should be the creation of a Kantian "cosmopolitan (world) order on the basis of law." There is more but it is enough to put the crude 'anything goes' claim to one side.

Of course, US conservatives like Anne Coulter would up the ante.This is old Europe speaking. She would contend that these liberals of Old Europe stand with the enemies of American interests and actively cooperate with the forces of totalitarianism and terror. Liberals are against America. This religious conservatism is part of the counter enlightenment. Derrida would stand against that.

Update

A draft translation of the Derrida/Habermas letter can be found here. Some comments by Josh Cherniss can be found here

Are the universities an instrument?

It is now taken for granted in the policy making culture in Australia that our higher education institutions are, and should be, an instrument for wealth creation. The purpose of deploying the instrument, say the utilitarians, is to ensure comparative or competitive advantage so as to enhance the wealth of the nation vis-a-vis other nations.

Things are not so cut and dried in the UK. Whether the universities are an instrument or not is still being debated in Britain. Under the Blair Government the liberal state says universities are an instrument. Thus,
Charles Clarke, the UK Education Secretary, stated this position in a recent speech at University College Worcester. He says:

"The other day I heard a vice-chancellor argue that the purpose of a university was the unfettered pursuit of truth and excellence. Another distinguished academic wrote a paper in which she argued that we should get back to a medieval concept of the university as a community of scholars unfettered by difficulties and problems of the wider society. These are perfectly legitimate approaches and justifications that stand up in their own account as to what institutions do and how groups of scholars come together. They don't add up to a justification for how the state provides resources for universities in the modern world. I have to ask, as a guardian of these resources, why the state should fund universities and what is their value.

My central argument is that universities exist to enable the British economy and society to deal with the challenges posed by the increasingly rapid process of global change. I argue that what I described as the medieval concept of a community of scholars seeking truth is not in itself a justification for the state to put money into that. We might do it at, say, a level of one per cent of what we do now and have one university of medieval seekers after truth as an adornment to our society. But I don't think that we will have the level of funding that we do now for universities unless we can justify it on some kind of basis of the type I have described."

This puts the issue cleanly. One can only agree with the latter part about the justification for the state putting public money into higher education. Its the former that is the problem----the instrumental view of higher education. But at least Clarke talks about society as well as the economy. It's more than the Howard Government does in Australia. And by talking about enabling those in the economy and society to deal with the challenges posed by global change the gestures to something more than job training. Clarke has forgotten those in politics needing resources to cope with the impact of globalization:---but that is usually the case with politicians.

The conservative response to this instrumental view is equally predictable:

"The only view of higher education is to study and disseminate knowledge for its own sake."

Really. The only view? Hardly a way to engage in the formation of public policy. But then they do not want to. The conservative conception is an ivory tower unfettered by, and indifferent to, the difficulties and problems of the wider society. Both the universities and the community of scholars should not be accountable to the general public or the state. What you get is the accusation Philistines!, which is designed to evoke the barabarian hordes (vandals) destroying liberal civilization. This response has been very common in Australia by the senior tenured academics.

Conservative here can be misleading because liberals hold something similar. They dump the mediaeval bit and retain the opposition of the liberal university to the free market. Thus Invisible Adjunct in a post on tenure says:

"Once upon a time, when I was young and hopeful and naive, I would have dismissed any talk of "tenure as cartel" out of hand. That's the rhetoric of free marketeers, I would have thought, who want to impose a corporate logic on an institution that exists to serve a higher calling. The university does and must stand in opposition and as an alternative to the market."

To her credit Invisible Adjunct has doubts about the black and whiteness of this. She says:

"Now that I've been adjunctified, I'm not so sure. Seems to me the university has been pretty thoroughly, if not completely, corporatized in many areas. The increasing reliance on a part-time contingent workforce is of course one such key area."

Where to if the liberal university is being corporatized by the liberal state along the lines of being an instrument that Clarke suggests? What is wrong with the university being seen as an instrument to further the interests of the nation state. Is not the university system a part of the nation state? Is it not funded by the state? Has it not always been so since the early nineteenth century (eg., the University of Berlin). If the university is an instrument of the state what then?

Something is needed here than evoking the ideal of the community of scholars as vital and then not providing much in the way of argument. What we get from academics is that this ideal is crucial to them; but they find it difficult to explain why this ideal is important, so central is it to my life. You often get something along the lines articulated by Josh Cherniss. He says:

"Not religious myself, the life of the mind takes the place of a religious vocation for me -- and the university is therefore like my church. But I do think this goes beyond personal commitment and faith ....Without the existence of such an intellectual life -- such a community of scholars (including the students as well as the faculty -- for, indeed, in the community of scholars, everyone is a student), much of that which makes life worth living, and civilization sometimes worth fighting and dying for -- that which holds out the rare and fragile possibility of redemption and progress of some sort -- will be lost, swept aside by a thoughtless instrumentalism which will, because it is blind, ultimately wind up degenerating into souless and mindless mediocrity."

We return to the university standing for culture and civilization in opposition to the instrumental reason the market and the state. The reality, however is otherwise.

A popular and sensible suggestion is the view that a purpose of higher education is to educate (not train) students to think and to analyse so that they develop a questioning and sceptical mode of being.

But why do we want a questioning mode? What is the point of it? Not for its sake surely. We use a questioning mode of being to make our lives better than they already are. Why bother living a life if we do not desire a better kind of life than we already have?

That consequentionalism is what the utilitarians have got right. (My dispute with the utilitarians is about 'better.' I would write that a questioning mode of being is connected to enabling us to live more flourishing lives [the good life], so that 'better' no longer means getting a better job or higher wages.) Education is an instrument that we deploy to enable us to live the good life.

How does higher education do this? One way is provided by the classical virtue tradition.

If virtue is ‘the skill in living’, and this skill of living a life well is an end, then moral virtue is a practical shaping of our life. The way we live is seen as actively reflecting and expressing your character and hence your choices. This shaping for sculpturing of our life is a kind of practical knowledge about good conduct.

An academic education is more concerned with fostering intellectual virtue. This is theoretically orientated and directed at achieving achieving truth. Though intellectual virtue is distinct from moral virtue both are intertwined. We do not seek truth as an end in itself, but rather to help us live more flourishing lives. If the moral virtues are aimed at right conduct, then we cannot be indifferent to the truth of our beliefs about the matters that concern us. Our grasp of truth will help to broaden and deepen our understanding of practical knowledge, right conduct and what constitutes living a flourishing life.

If education is an instrument that we deploy to enable us to live the good life, then the university as an ethical institution in civil society enables us to acquire the virtues that help us to live flourishing lives. The purpose of the university as an ethical institution is to foster the good life. It is an instrument to further the good life. It is an instrument we use to ensure that we can critically deal with the challenges posed by the increasingly rapid process of global change so as to live more flourishing lives.

Philosophy & dogs

Two reviews of a book by Raymond Gaita's, The Philosopher's Dog. One here and the other is here. I have yet to read it. I plan to.

When I read it I will do so to see how far Gaita helps to break down the great divide between animals and human, deconstructs the view that dogs are mindless automatons and so their barking is just the sound of the cogs grinding; and recovers the view that they are organic beings with rationality and emotions.

These are not controversial views for someone who lives with dogs as part of the family (ours are standard poodles). Dogs are rational animals just like humans. But such a view is controversial for the discipline of philosophy. The problem is with the philosophy.

There is a big pathway here. It leads from the rationality of the emotions to the relationship between the emotions and morality and to animals as moral beings. The pathway has many important historical detours.

I suspect this pathway takes us away from Raymond Gaita. I cannot see him as an animal liberationist.

the disappearing public university

It is late. This is a 'stringing quotes together' post in the light of this response to Brendan Nelson's reforms to higher education.

These reforms addressed the deregulation of academic labor so that universities are able to provide every staff member with the right to negotiate their own individual employment contract. (The Howard Government linked $40