One of the things that I have noticed with the free market commentators is how often they give priority to the free market at the expense of democracy. These comments have been fairly consistent on public opinion so I am going to use this post to try and construct the public philosophy behind the comments. What I will explore is the tensions and contradictions between capitalism and democracy.
One response to the persistant left wing bias of a public broadcaster (the ABC in Australia) is to privatise it. This is a way of dealing with the dark forces ----evil that lurks in the heart of the national broadcaster says Frank Devine. It means that the ABC becomes a media company providing information services and entertainment for urban lefties (the ones with totalitarian tendencies) who claim a privileged place in the order of society. Alternatively, says Devine, the corporation could be cut free of the taxpayer and mutualised through a million Australians raising $500 a year each to keep it going.
The argument for cutting the public broadcaster free of the taxpayer is that paying for it out of general revenue is middle class welfare for the urban lefties--and that ultimately smacks of socialism. It is government telling us what to think. This undermines the liberal order, as it leads to enslaved minds, no sturdy individuals and stagnation and servitude. It is pretty much Hayek's old road to serfdom thesis. Underneath the serfdom thesis sits the view that the citadel of Anglo-America is under seige from the dark forces of German historicism.
Hence we have a liberal order that is onguard against socialism, is based on economic co-ordination through markets, and where politics is kept to a minimum. Presumably politics is organized so as to preserve the values of the liberal social order. It is an active government to ensure that the right institutions are created to release all the spontaneous energies and talents of entrepreneurial individuals. The right institution is one based on market exchange, as it facilitates the spontaneous energies of individual initiative in creating wealth, prosperity and innovation.
There is silence about the public broadcaster being a watchdog for democracy or the media being the fourth estate. The media are seen as commercial enterprises providing media services for consumers who have the freedom to choose what they want to receive or hear. Democracy is barely mentioned, or it is mentioned in passing that they do not care much for democracy. It is the competitive market they get excited about, and there is sense that political institutions are subordinated to the market. The polity is a sphere of coercion whilst the market is the sphere of freedom. Thus democracy and capitalsim are placed in opposition.
If there is a marked silence about democracy then the silence about citizenship is deafening. The topic is avoided. We are primarily consumers in the marketplace pursuing our own interests. Yet, as citizens we have civil rights that provide protection from the state (basic legal rights to property, personal liberty and the principle of equality before the law); political rights (the right to vote, to speak and to hold political office) that facilitate participation in a liberal democratic state; and social/welfare rights (entitlement to a universal redistribution of income in the form of unemployment benefit, superannuation, universal education and medical care). These social rights in social democracy established a safety net of resources from which those citizens who had fallen on hard times could collectively make claims to the state for income support, and so continue to be able to fully exercise their civil and political rights.
This political rights indicate that we have a liberal democracy in the form of parliamentary governance as well as a market order. If we presume that removing the restrictions/regulations on media organizations means that they will become ever more concentrated and powerful (Rupert Murdoch is a good example of this), then the democracy that is favoured is one that is compatible with the concentration of power in giant corporations. Democracy is trimmed to suit the concentration of power in the market. If parliamentary governance can be more or less democratic, then what is favored is a form of parliamentary governance that melds with plutocracy and the concentration of corporate power.
This limited democracy is one in which there are passive citizens who vote for different governing elites who offer themselves and their political packages up for election at periodic intervals. Between elections public opinion has little place or role to play. That means public opinion has little role to play in going to war with Iraq, which was inbetween elections. If you have problem with that democratic deficit as a citizen, and you don't like the Howard Government taking Australia to war, then you can vote them out in the next election.
There is nothing here about democracy reflecting citizens’ policy preferences and judgements based on citizens engaging an issue, considering it from all sides, understanding the choices that leads to, and accepting the full consequences of the choices they make. The democratic deficit is built in to the very design of liberal democracy and, as the justifications for the Iraqi war showed, we have attempts to persuade and manipulate domestic public opinion through publicity and spin that fabricate non-existent threats.
The dangers to a liberal order come through democracy, as it becomes the means for an assault on a liberal order and so endangers the market order. Democracy is seen as the doctrine of popular sovereignty (the mob) and there is a strong tendency towards demagoguery (populism). So democracy must be organized to ensure that it supports liberal principles. Liberal principles are the only true ones.
Thats the construction of the public philosophy. It is rough but it will do.
Now I want to turn to the way in which democracy is beign kept in place--the techniques deployed, if you like. You can this at work in this event, which involves Peter Costello, the federal Treasurer. The event is about Costello's proposed charities legislation that clamps down on critique.
Now Costello waxed lyrical about charities in his civil society speech a few weeks ago. (My comments on this speech here. The comments by John Quiggin can be found here,whilst those by Steve Edwards are here.)
Costello's positive remarks about civil society and voluntary organizations nurturing social capital need to be read in the context of the radical transformation of the Australian welfare state. This transformation the role of government from big to small has resulted in reduced social services, restricted and altered eligibility criteria for the remaining social programs, and the increased policing of unemployment benefits under the guise of mutual benefit.
The neo-liberal dismantling and re-ordering of the Australian welfare state means that the nation's most marginal citizens are rapidly losing their ability to participate in Canadian society. It means that the poor are not merely poorer under a neo-liberal regime (less services), they are also less deserving of basic social rights. The moral order of a market society does away with social justice and replaces it with charity. Since market outcomes in terms of liberty and prosperity are deemed just, the poor become second class citizens.
Costello takes a much dimmer view of charities in civil society this time round. He is addressing is the overlap between between civil society and democratic politics in the key disqualifying section from the draft charities Act. (Margo Kingston has the core bits of the Act here scroll down). What the draft Act establishes is that a charity is a not-for-profit body with a charitable purpose for the public benefit, and which 'does not have a disqualifying purpose'. If a charity does have a disqualifying purpose it is not a charity, and will be denied charitable tax benefits.
What is meant by disqualifying purposes? The draft Act is clear:
8. Disqualifying purposes
(1) The purpose of engaging in activities that are unlawful is a disqualifying purpose.
(2) Any of these purposes is a disqualifying purpose:
(a) the purpose of advocating a political party or cause;
(b) the purpose of supporting a candidate for political office;
(c) the purpose of attempting to change the law or government policy;
if it is, either on its own or when taken together with one or both of the other of these purposes, more than ancillary or incidental to the other purposes of the entity concerned.
Little ambiguity there. The intent is clear. It seeks to clamp down on those charities that also acting as advocates or criticise public policy. They cannot speak out about the failures to provide sevices for the increasing numbers of homeless people in our cities.
If we put Costello's civil soceity speech to Anglicare and his Charities legislation together, we get the following. Though charities in civil society do good by picking up the people falling through the holes in welfare society but they cannot speak out about what is going on. Margo Kingston is on the ball--see here and here.
So what does this legal instrument say about democracy? It puts a lid on the formation of public opinion through public debate. And this from a advocate of liberty and a free society. What we have is democracy as a method of choosing governments between competing poltical elites; but it is a democracy emptied of substantive content and divorced from the doctrine of popular sovereignty.
This article, from the Chronicle of Higher Education is a snap of the state of play in Anglo-American philosophy in the UK and the US. It is quite interesting. It suggests that U.S. philosophers are more open to interdisciplinary work than are philosophers in the U.K, and it identifies a resistance to the melding conceptual work with empirical work (by philosophers who think that philosophy is aligned with, and a part of, science rather than literature).
Now what catches my eye is different from what most academic philosophers would highlight from the text. My eye was caught by the article saying that what concerned the interviewed academics the most is academic philosophy's lack of engagement with the public issues. The article says:
'In a recent survey for The Philosophers' Magazine, a staggering 77 percent of academic philosophers from across the Anglophone world agreed with the statement, "Philosophers should do more to address the concerns of society." Of the 10 questions in the survey, that elicited the strongest response.'
The desire to reach out beyond the ivy covered walls of academe to the public world is not a new one. It has been there from the very beginning--with Greeks and the Romans. (Socrates, Plato, Seneca, Cicero etc) It was a modernist analytic philosophy that is the aberration: it self-consciously turned its back on that classical rhetorical tradition when it decided that philosophy needed to become professional and a part of natural science. You can trace the Anglo-American analytic concern with philosophy as a part of science back to Descartes and Hobbes.
Academic philosophy in Australia has been slow to re-engage with public affairs. It lags way behind what is happening in the US. Australian philosophy re-engages with public affairs under the label of applied philosophy, and it's most successful engagement with public issues is in the field of bioethics.
The Chronicle of Higher Education article then usefully suggests that ther have been two ways by which academic philosophy has re-engaged with public affairs:
"There are two broad models of how such engagement might best be achieved: what I call the participatory and the contributory. In the participatory model, academics engage in real-world problems by becoming members of the institutions that are directly involved with those problems. In the contributory model, academics remain in academe, but issue documents, books, and papers that are supposed to contribute to public life."
The contributory model is the one followed in Australia. The participatory one is still frowned on, eg., philosophy participating in public life on the model of the Romans such as Cicero or Seneca. Moreover, the work that is done in public life does not earn much in the way of academic kudos. It is seen as inferior.
This is still looking at the issue through the eyes of scholarship and academic. But why not look at it the other way? Instead of giving priority to the value of the work done by academics, why not think of the work on public affairs as a different kind of writing.
This weblog, for instance, has no pretensions to be academic. Its ecological concerns about water, and the governance of the landscape have little resonance in academia; water is an issue that has arisen from the world of public policy and enlightened citizens not academia. It aims to consider the public issues thrown up in greater depth than they are discussed in newspapers. Since it is more a participation in political life, and not a standing on the sidelines and offering expert advice from a disciplinary perspective, it involves a different way of writing philosophy to the more academic writing exeempliefed by Brian Weatherson.
This engagement in public issues implies a transformation in academia. one descpition is provided here. It refers to academia in America and it says:
"There has been a quiet revolution occurring in the academy over the last two decades. Civic concerns have achieved new visibility alongside the traditional academic mission of higher education.... Institutions have redefined themselves to be more responsible citizens in their communities."
A similar though more muted shift to civic engagement is happening in Australia. The implications of such a shift to educating for democratic citizenship is understood not simply as an extra-curricular option, but as a fundamental goal of a twenty-first century liberal education.
There has been other discussions of this article. They are concerned about different things and come from quite different perspectives to philosophy in political life perspective of philosophy.com
Update
There are brief discussions of the Chronicle of Higher Education article on the differences between Anglo-American philosophy in Britain and North America by Scott Martens over at Pendatry and at Crooked Timber by Brian Weatherson. Both are more concerned with the adequacy of the descriptions of academic philosophy in relation to the interdisciplinary work in the field of philosophy of mind.
Though Brian mentions the philosophy and public affairs issue, he does not explore it any depth. There is little discussion on the issue in the comments to the post, apart from references to "baby philosophy" done on committees concerned with medical ethics. What I detect here is the expert's voice of disdain about fumbling amateurs trying to do philosophy and not being as good at as the professionals.
Lawrence Solum over at Legal Theory Blog concentrates on the differences within Anglo-American philosophy in the different countries. He notes that:
---the philosophical community in the U.S. is much larger and more diverse than in other Anglophone countries.
---because the U.S. is just plain big, philosophers (even those working in the same field) tend not to know one another if they reside in different regions (excepting those who work in nationally prominent departments).
---there is nothing comparable in the United States to the role that Oxford plays in the United Kingdom. Oxford's faculty is huge by comparison to any other UK university. No place in the United States plays the same role.
So what? Differences are to be expected surely. After all we talking about different countries, and economics, society and culture would make an impact on an academic discipline such as philosophy. Oh, I know the counterargument, that philosophy is like mathematics and a universal language. National differences merely add a touch of local colouring.
Lawrence, to his credit has a stab at exploring the meaning the differences the above differences. He says that:
"All of these differences add up to subtle differences in the sociology of philosophy. I am very tentative about the following observation, but here goes: I think there is greater rigidity of opinion among philosophers in the U.K. that in the U.S."
Lawrence let me add here that Australia is much more rigid. Positively totalitarian in the way that disciplinary power is used to enforce conformity.
Lawrence, in true academic style, immediately qualifies his claim, but stands by it. He
"This is, I'm sure, untrue in many respects. There are, I am sure, lots of U.K. philosophers who are, as individuals, more flexible than most American philosophers. And it would not surprise me if there were particular issues or subfields upon which my generalization does not hold. But the antipathy to melding philosophy with empirical work that the Chronicle story notes might actually be some evidence for the phenomenon that I think I've detected."
I accept Lawrence's point about flexibility and this has nothing to do with the superiority of philosophy in the U.S.
A counter observation that plays around with Lawrence's difference. In a multicultural society Anglo-American means the hegemonic culture. It is to be contrasted with difference in the form of Continental (French or German) and Islamic philosophy. The significance of the observation? Anglo-American philosophy is encultured through and through. It is a part the national culture which has been traditionally Anglo-British. It is more like literature than mathematics.
I do like this quote from Edmund Burke from his Thoughts on the Present Discontents. This text was a political tract, published in 1770, mordantly critical of the ways of George III with Parliament. The quote is courtesy of Russell Kirk.
In the essay Kirk refers to, Burke defines the phrase "political party". He says:
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.... Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed. For my part, I find it impossible to conceive that anyone believes in his own politics, or thinks them of any weight, who refuses to adopt the means of having them reduced into practice. It is the business of the speculative philosopher to mark the proper ends of government. It is the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with effect."
That is a good account of philosophy in political life: the business of such a philosophy it is to mark the proper ends of government. What are these? Aristotle gives us a way of looking at this. Politics, he said, is a free people deliberating the question, How ought we to order our life together? The "ought" in that definition indicates that politics is essentially a moral enterprise.
And another insight from Burke about those party political people Burke called "placemen". Russell Kirk describes this as meaning:
"...seekers after the power and the emoluments of public office, not scrupulous as to the means by which advantages for themselves may be obtained. The demagogue seeks for himself a cozy place in the political sunshine."
Does that b not describe many of the politicians in our National, Liberal and Labor parties? The implication is the classical republic one: that these politicians are corrupt. They accept bribes, pocket public funds, and sell political influence. Behind the professional mask of political humanitarianism is the politician's lust for power and place.
The placemen and women have no idea that the enterprise of politics is moral in nature. That is a tragedy because political life deals with questions such as justice, equality, fairness, and the common good. These are inescapably ethical categories.
This is an interesting review of a book on political correctness in academia. If we accept that political correctness refers to incidents of coercive and intimidatory policies and practices that, undermine and constitute, a threat to academic freedom, then it exists in academia. This is Camile Pagalia's take on political correctness. Here is a psychoanalytic account of political correctness and a weblog calledp.c.watch
The US historian C. Vann Woodward offers an incisive definition of "political correctness":
"In the present crisis the attack on freedom comes from outside as well as inside and is led by minorities, that is, people who speak or claim to speak for groups of students and faculty.... In behalf of their cause and to protect feelings from offensive speech they have, as we shall see, proved themselves willing to silence speakers and professors, abuse standards of scholarship, curriculum, and admissions, and impose conformity or silent submission on the campus." (in Beyond P.C. p.31).
As the word has come to be used it is both the policies and an intolerance, a closing of debate, a pressure to conform to a particular program of change. Political correctness usually means the practices associated with the "progressive agenda" of the academic left in the 1970s and 1980s.
It is a charge levelled by conservatives to the pressure to conform to a radical left-liberal program, or risk being accused of a commonly reiterated trio of thought crimes: sexism, racism and homophobia. As part of the culture war the use of "Political correctness" can become a slogan used to stifle debate.
As things stand at the moment we have the hegemony of leftish opinion in the academy and the hegemony of conservative opinions in the public sphere. Many conservatives see the public universities as lost causes with some tossing around ideas to set up a counter cyber university.
The charge of political correctness has been used successfully to discredit a wide assortment of values, ideas, programs and attitudes embraced by the academic left. Hence conservatives speak on behalf of academic freedom and their practices and policies in suppressing the academic freedom of leftists and communists during the dark years of the cold war is conventiently forgotten. And we can go back further.
If we adopt this historical perspective, then we find that what is being demanded in the name of academic freedom to express conservative ideas is a classic liberalism: the freedom of free speech, open debate involving vigorous, even offensive discussion. Classical liberalism often means J.S. Mill.
Is it free speech or free expression.
A more interesting claim is that coercive and intimidatory policies and practices are standard operating procedure in university professing to embody the ethos of the Enlightenment. Whilst they proudly carry the unfurled banner of the Enlightenment, they are also totalitarian. What is clamped down time after time is the challenge to inherited or established ideas and thinking for oneself. So what is at issue the whole idea of liberal education that actively fosters and encourages students thinking for themselves.
The philosophical source of political correctness of the academic left is German philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School----Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. Or so argued Allan Bloom. Yet this German philosophy is very western as it upholds one of the key tenets of the western philosophical heritage:----the self-criticism of reason. What it signifies is modern Western civilization in criticism of itself.
This is a bit of the beaten track for philosophy.com but I find it interesting. Work blogs.
The Guardian article says:
"The vast majority of blogs are background static to all but the friends and family of their creators, but it is becoming increasingly possible to find blogs that give unique insights into the working life of the authors.
Many "bloggers" write openly about their work, sometimes with approval from their employer."
Background static/noise huh. That is the view of the established media. Or it is vanity publishing. More like disruptive innovation.
Well, there are many different kinds of works blogs. Academics run them, journalists them, those involved in public policy run them and often with approval of their employers. The blogs do not need to be about work--they can be on other issues and be informed by work.
Why raise it? Well it makes a welcome change from what Matt has called "the collective mastication of the on-going Left-Right bitch-fest that so poisons the Australian blogosphere."
The bitch fest bores me.
This post (and its antecedents) by John Quiggin, when juxtaposed to my visit to the Murray Mouth last weekend and watching Roman Polanski's Chinatown about the LA Basin, got me thinking.
Here is what I thought.
The current concerns to increase the environmental flows in the River Murray and the closure of its mouth due to lack of river flow, means that we stand at the end of an era of development without ecological limits.
That was what I thought when I stood at the mouth where sea, sky, water and land touch.
The lack of concern for, nay indifference to, the ecology of the Murray-Darling Basin in the 1940s Snowy Mountain Hydro-Electric Scheme has rebounded on us. Though water now water fuels the economy we now discover that there is not enough water, the irrigators need to have their entitlements reduced, and Adelaide has to go on water restrictions.
I then realized that we have not really come to grips with the land that we live in. Adelaide has a Mediterranean environment that is shaped by a dialectic of water and drought. In a fundamental sense the white pioneers inherited language and cultural inheritance failed the newcomers to this continent. Since English terminology is specific to a humid climate not a Mediterranean environment, its conception of river as water flowing inside two banks fails to grasp a river that consists of floodplains and wetlands.
In applying the English category to the River Murray the floodplains and wetlands were remaindered out and disappeared from sight. What the English category failed to grasp was the strangeness of this land. So the land (Murray-Darling Basin) had to be shaped to fit the concept. Hence the Snowy Mountain Hydro-Electric Scheme: it was a technological fix to turn a brown land green, droughtproof the Basin and keep the river flowing all year round for the irrigators.
A nature-defying mode of habitation never turned out that way it was all planned. An European-style agriculture based on water diverted from a working river has turned out to an ecological failure.
This failure of inherited categories to cut reality at the joints 200 year years ago points to a larger claim: that the Murray-Darling Basin remains opaque as a historico-natural phenomenon to Anglo-American paradigms of urbanism. Our cities, such as Adelaide, sit at odds to the land in an ecological sense. They are not a part of the ecology of the place.
So talking about increasing the price for water, converting water entitlements to property rights, cutting back allocations strikes me as tinkering. I fear that the technological fix of market levers embody more Anglo categories that will be imposed on an alien landscape. The category "Resource" is the foundation upon which the whole free market rests (eg., the efficient allocation of scarce resource), but it does not capture the ecology of the riverine environment. What is not captured by resource is going to remaindered.
The future is one of a stalemate over the limited water supply and ever-increasing demand between three main groups-- agricultural, urban and environmental. Water is for fighting over and cities, farmers and environmentalists will battle over who will control the Basin's water. South Australia's growth has been, and still is, closely tied to water development. The traditional way of closing the gap between supply and demand has been to increase supplies -- either by building new facilities such as dams or by tapping underground aquifers is not an option in South Australia. Recycling storm and sewerage water is but little is being done.
What needs to change fundamentally is the way we have designed our cities and agricultural systems. Instead we will go for the cheap and quick repair job--buying water on the open market to prop up environmental flows so the working river has a modicum of health.
If you want to push this thought a bit further then it puts into question the deployment of the modernist conception of the Baconian Enlightenment project by the liberal state to make Australia modern. This use of modernist science (reductionist and elimination of old ideas by new ones) involved an ahistorical, instrumental reason to improve the human condition coupled to an appeal to a tacit notion of progress. It has been thrown into question because its categories got things messed up-----to put it nicely, they failed to explain how the nature/society dialectic in the Murray-Darling Basin worked; failed by a long shot.
Want more? Well the analytic philosophers not only misunderstood the philosophical tradition; they also failed to understand how science worked because they were unaware of the actual history of science and the existence of technoscience. They were blinded by a pure science attaining Absolute Truth that transcended mundane human history.
I lost yesterday's posts due to the recent server changes at Movable Type----what their tech support crew say is the migrations of all ARTEMIS-based accounts to the new network operations. They went down old pathways.
I'm annoyed. I had spend hours on the net searching for material on philosophy in public life. So this post is a quick and dirty one; a cut and past job based on quotes in the light of these considerations about the fate of the humanities mentioned on public opinion. Greater depth and breadth on the humanities can be found here.
The first step is a link to this talk by Martha Nussabum, the American moral philosopher.
Given the current devastation of the humanities in Australia I find Nussbaum's remarks in defence of the humanities of interest. She says:
"I shall conclude with a more general fear: that the illumination and understanding that the humanities have given, and still give, to our undergraduates and our culture may gradually be lost. When administrators, parents, and students focus narrowly on the bottom line, it is difficult to see the relevance of literature and philosophy. These look like useless frills, distractions from the real business of education, which is all too often seen as preparation for a job."
This is certainly how the humanities are actually seen by the utilitarians in the government bureaucracies in Australia. Despite the lip service paid to their importance as trhe 'soul of the nation' the humanities are viewed as distractions from, or cultural ornamentations to, the business of real life which is making money and gaining power. Nussbaum's fear is a reality in Australia: the humanities' knowledge and understanding are being lost.
Nussbaum then questions the utilitarian approach. She says:
"The utilitarian approach to the humanities did enormous damage in Thatcher's Britain, where universities were asked to justify their humanities programs by showing that they contributed to economic growth. I recall an especially sad document in which the classics faculty at the University of Birmingham argued that they should not be cut because the department produced efficient managers for industry. Once one reaches this point, true though the instrumental claim may be, the game is usually lost."
One hears this kind of economic argument all the time in the humanities' disciplines in Australia. Doing various undergraduate courses give's graduates practical skills for jobs (reasoning/research) through mastering the course material. The game has been lost with that emphasis on technique as it implies that the humanities have no content. They are fluff and they cover their fluff by trying to be hard edged with a bit of technique, such as critical reasoning. Few are fooled by the move. It is commonly seen as desperation stuff.
Can we give a different account? Can we retrace our steps to escape this dead end of a wasteland? Nussbaum suggests so. What she sketches is worthy of consideration.
The first move Nussbaum makes is to displace the neo-liberal utilitarian conception of the humanities. This conception holds that the humanities are only viable if they are involved in, and contribute to, wealth creation. If they cannot contribute then they should be allowed to wither.
In response Nussbaum says that:
"American colleges and universities have never held a narrow, utilitarian conception of education. One thing we really can be proud of is that we (both left and right) have stuck to the idea that college education is a general preparation for citizenship and life. It is not difficult to see that the humanities provide essential ingredients for citizenship: clarity of mind, knowledge of the world, an expansive and subtle imagination. Many administrators and boards of trustees understand the importance of the humanities, and so far our institutions of higher education have not been eviscerated as have some in Europe. But we need to be vigilant."
We should add that the humanities have been eviscerated in Australia. They will only survive under a neo-liberal mode of governance if they transform themselves into creative industries.
The old idea of education for citizenship is not something that carries much weight in Australia. The old idea of the citizen has given way to the consumer with the freedom to choose in the global marketplace. Many are unable to go beyond the horizons of the market to make contact with citizenship and liberal democracy. The market has become the touchstone for everything. There is nothing else but the free market.
But it is possible to give 'education for citizenship' new content. Nussbaum's pathway is to do this by connecting the humanities to the world of public policy. She says:
"One thing my development work has shown me is that public policy made without the influence of the humanities is likely to be cramped and crude. The cultivation of the imagination that comes with the study of literature, the cultivation of ethical sensibility that comes with the study of philosophy and religion--these are essential equipment for citizens and policymakers in a world increasingly united and driven by the profit motive."
That connection between ethical sensibility and public policy is rarely made in Australia, despite all the recent talk about social capital, society and happiness. Presumably those who volunteer in civil society do so because they have ethical sensitivity to the plight and suffering of others; the volunteers want to make things better in some way. Hence their conduct embodies a practical philosophy of care and consideration.
Such a philosophy is what Nussbaum calls a practical and compassionate philosophy, one that is committed to the good of human beings and seeks that good through reasoning and argument. This is the Graeco-Roman conception of a life-transforming philosophy, or philosophy as a way of life that has been lost in the Australian academy.
Nussbaum illustrates this conception of philosophy with a couple of quotes. The following remark by Seneca is quoted by Nussbaum in another talk on philosophy and public life. In making these remarks Seneca is rejecting a conception of philosophy that has retreated the academy and has become little more than academic logic chopping:
"There is no time for playing around. You have been retained as counsel for the unhappy. You have promised to bring help to the shipwrecked, the imprisoned the sick, the needy, to those whose heads are under the poised axe. Where are you deflecting your attention? What are you doing?"(Ep. 48,8).
Nussbaum says that the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition holds, with remarkable unanimity, that philosophy has a practical task of ensuring flourishing human life. If it fails to perform this task, in its research and in its teaching, it will be rightly dismissed as "empty" and trivial. She then quotes Epicurus, who says:
"Empty is that philosophical argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in medicine, unless it casts out the illness of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out suffering from the soul."
Nussbaum notes that the major writers of the Stoic tradition––Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius––were both public philosophers and involved in political life. There is no memory of this conception of philosophy in the Australian academy. Moreover, Cicero, Seneca and Aurelius are never mentioned by the cultural conservatives who say that education is reading the great books of the western philosophical tradition. The conservatives offer a very selective reading of the philosophical canon.
Nussbaum then connects this Graeco-Roman philosophical tradition to contemporary life. She says that:
“One source of [these philosopher's] appeal for later audiences is the fact that these are people who are really enmeshed in practical politics, whose ruminations on human dignity, on anger and on the vicissitudes of life are not just academic, but also profoundly practical. Both Seneca and Cicero tell us that philosophy has something to offer our lives, and they bring philosophy into contact with the affairs of life.”
Now this is a long way from how we practice philosophy today in Australia. This conception of philosophy as a way of life that is enmeshed in practical politics is rarely mentioned by our philosophy academics. Yet it is a conception that involves education for Socratic citizenship. Socrates is remembered, of course, by the academics but te tradition of Socratic reasoning being linked to citizenship has been broken backed in a modernist philosophy.
Nussbaum recovers this Socratic political tradition. She says that Socratic citizenship means a person:
"... who can take charge of his or her own thought about the most important matters, conducting a critical scrutiny of received beliefs and becoming aware of how and whether they cohere, and how they may be defended."
What might that mean? Endless criticism of everything? Being a gadfly in liberal democracy by challenging the government's policy in immigration and its treatment of refugees or the war with Iraq? No, it is something much deeper. What we have from this reasoned criticism by a practical aand compassionate philssophy embodied in the volunteer groups in civil society is an ethical reason that is capable of a serious and deep scrutiny of the ends of human life. It questions the utilitarian assumption of the policy makers and their economic advisors that wealth creation is the goal of human life.
Nussbaum give this ethical reason depth by connecting it to public affairs. She makes the connection by turning to Aristotle and recovering one of his key arguments. She says that Aristotle held that:
"....a certain level of material well being -- while not an end in itself -- is nonetheless a necessary condition of the performance of those activities that are important as ends in a human life. One cannot think well if one is hungry. One cannot act justly if one is denied the rights and privileges of citizenship. One cannot be generous if one has nothing to give. One cannot maintain friendships if one is enslaved or imprisoned."
The implication that is drawn from this that a flourishing human life is the goal of human conduct. If the aim of politics is to provide all citizens with what they need in order to be capable of living a flourishing human life, then we citizens should design our institutions and public laws with this aim in mind. It is a flourishing life not wealth creation per se that our eyes should be on.
This then ties in with this;and it it connects with contemporary concerns about rethinking what we mean by development; It opens up into enabling broad civic involvement in economic and public policy making---opens up into democracy.
I see that Peter Costello has been wearing his public philosopher's hat again. He was speaking as the Federal Treasurer, and having another go at broadening his view on the issues of public life beyond the narrow paradigm of the discredited Washington consensus.
Last time it was a speech to Anglicare. (My comments on that speech can be found here.) This time the speech is given to the Sydney Institute. Different places and times but the same topic:---social capital.
Why is a federal Treasurer talking about social capital? Is he going soft? Is the Treasurer trying to undo his reputation as a hared and narrow economics man? Is he trying to soften his image as someone who has a rigid fixation on the big picture of the national economy, and who uses his legal skills to dogmatically defend his own narrow economic position? Is he using his reflections to introduce new policy ideas into public life? Is is he merely recycling the views of the IMF into Australia to develop new modes of global governance?
My interpretation is that Costello's reflections outline the public philosophy behind his politics+economics. On the upside Costello is saying that ideas matter, and that one of the purposes of public debate is to persuade others that good economics and good poiltics matter. This is to be welcomed because much public policy in Australia has been made by economists on the basis of ideology, bad economics, dogma and a hostility to alternative opinions.
On the down side, for all Costello's talk of social capital and civil society, he does not break with the narrow ends of economic development as wealth creation. His speech, for all its talk of social capital and civil society, indicates that weath creation is still accepted as the only end of development behind the closed doors of government.
My own view of Costello is that he is a 1990s IMF man; an economic fundamentalist who is into fiscal austerity, the liberalization of capital markets free trade and trickle down economics. He sings the IMF tune of the global triumph of capitalism and globalization in Australia. He thinks that markets work well and that governments work badly. Yet Costello is the head of a public institution----the federal Treasury. Nor does he have a coherent account of market failure that would justify the existence of his government. In contrast to the openness of a Joseph Stiglitz, there is a resistance to considering that development is something more than economic growth. The Washington consensus is still hegemonic in Treasury.
I do grant that people and institutions do change----even the IMF. The IMF may one day do more than use free market ideology to cover its furthering the interests of financial capital; whilst paying lip service to its old goals of enhancing global stability and ensuring that there are funds for those countries facing a threat of recession to pursue expansionary policies.
So Costello may well change and shed his IMF skin. Is the current speech a step in htis sdirection. It appears so as the speech is entitled Building social capital.
I will go through it slowly because in the discussion that I heard on Radio National this morning, a couple of journalists said that they didn't know what it was about. One of them, Matt Price, thought that the speech was a bit of muddle, even though he'd read it four times.
The speech opens with a remembering of a previous public concern about Australia being a tolerant country. Costello understand this to mean a society that will allow dissenting views and allow ethnic minorities to live in peace and security. "A tolerant society is one that respects differences and allows people to pursue their different aims and ambitions within an overall framework of order."
Such a liberal society is a good thing. A tolerant Australian is better than an intolerant one. So we---ie., those Australians who believe in tolerance--- should be concerned about the x factor that enables and nurtures tolerance in Australia.
Costello then asks:
"How do you promote such a society? Where does the notion of trust and tolerance come from?"
He answers indirectly by turning to Iraq today and the problems faced in rebuilding that country. If we abstract the argument from the examples, then Costello says:
"A prosperous economy takes root best in a society that has institutions and relationships that promote confidence and trust." [And you also] "would need to build a culture of tolerance between citizen and citizen which would allow expression and association within the context of trust. You would need to build trust between citizens and institutions."
How can this be done? Costello picks up the argument of his previous speech. He answers the question by making the turn to the associations and relations outside the state which are:
"... sometimes referred to as civil society. A country that has the experience of the voluntary associations is likely to have a higher level of trust between citizens which can be used to build confidence in public institutions."
And just in case you miss the argument of the first half of the speech Costello sums it up:
"Trust and tolerance, are sometimes described as social capital. In an IMF paper on Second Generation Reform, Francis Fukuyama argued: “Social capital is important to the efficient functioning of modern economies and is the sine qua non of stable liberal democracy.”
Let us accept Fukuyama's argument that trust and tolerance are necessary for both free markets to function efficiency, and for the functioning stability of liberal democracy. What then? If social capital is so important, then what does Costello do with social capital in the second half of the speech? This is a reasonable question to ask because we know that tolerance and trust are on the decline in western liberal societies including Australia.
Well, it has to be said, not very much happens. Presumbly, that is why Matt Price read it four times and still couldn't figure out what was being said. It sort of all falls away.
Costello begins the second part of the speech by doing a bit of social ontology---a clearing away of the rubbish lying on the ground. He situates himself in the middle between the individualists who say there is no society and the communitarians who only see cohesive groups not individuals. Gummo Troktsky has a good post on Costello and Howard on community.
Costello says:
"In reality, individuals have varying connections of varying intensity with others. In the first place there is the family, then maybe the street, the neighbourhood or a town. They might have a religious association through a church they attend and their relationships might extend to involvement in a voluntary association, a sporting club, or a political organisation.These are the networks and associations that give rise to trust between people."
Okay, so we have individuals and connections between them in the form of networks and associations (but no social relations of power). And this is a good thing because these networks and associations produce various voluntary groups. Why is that?
Costello argues that engagement in these voluntary groups produces a direct outcome (eg., the bushfire brigade attending to a fire) and also produces by-products. He says:
"By-products like friendship, belonging, tolerance and trust - and forms the basis for relationships which can be extended to other worthwhile causes."
So it is through voluntary groups that social capital is built. Voluntary groups in civil society are the foundation of an efficiently functioning market and a stable democracy.
However, Costello sees a downside. He notices that:
"...membership [in voluntary groups] is in decline and in that sense social capital is running down. Does it matter if this culture of engagement is running down? I think it does. I think the public laments the fact that engagement is running down...[But]...The majority of the public is not so worried about the issue that it makes them want to change their behaviour and reverse the trend of declining participation."
Fair enough. We all let our participation in civil society slip. But what has that got to do with government? Does it have anything to do with the state? If so, then how does it impact on public policy? As Costello puts it, if we recognise the importance of the non-government sector and the positive values arising from it, then what are the lessons for public policy?
It's a good question considering all the holes in the welfare safety net.
Costello answers this question by pulling out the old utilitarian harm principle of it being wrong to harm someone. He says:
'The first thing is the very important maxim for government, any government, on any issue: “Do no harm.” These social networks are neither established by, nor controlled by government. They are voluntary. That is their strength. So while the Government cannot establish these associations and should not force engagement it should be careful to do no harm. Secondly if Government has a choice between delivering services in a way that enhances engagement and one that does not, then, all other things being equal it should prefer the former. Thirdly Government should be alert to deal with any threats that arise to the voluntary sector.'
So the liberal state is committed to supporting civil society because the vlaues of trust and tolerance embnodied in voluntary practices underpin a liberal society. So how should the liberal state govern civil society?
"On the principle of do no harm, a Government should be careful not to usurp the voluntary sector. It should not take away those things which people can and want to do for themselves. But where it can support the voluntary sector, without smothering it, it should do so. And it must be alert to threats to the voluntary sector, (such as the public liability crisis.)"
In heightening the protection against liability for the voluntary sector the state is defending a very important part of our social infrastructure.
Alas, social capital is declining through decreasing engagement in voluntary activities in civil society. This is not good. So what can be done to increase engagement. Costello returns to an earlier speech----the 2001 Bolte Lecture where he argued that we "could revive the non-government organisations of Australia by spending one hour a week in a volunteer activity."
Costello then defends this from criticism on the grrounds that he merely suggested it to heighten engagement in civil society.
He then sums up his argument:
"The view I am putting is that there are non-monetary things that add to the wealth of a society. Civic engagement and the values which it promotes like trust and tolerance are some of those things. You can call them social capital if that is conceptually easier ...a society which has these things should be careful not to let them run down. Once they are gone it takes a lot of effort to get them back again."
Thats it. After all that work in working through the text it all comes down to that. There is a feeling of let down. Is that all that is being said?
Well, a little bit is given away in reduction in the last paragraph. It says that social capital is instrumental to the wealth of society so we need to protect and nurture them for the sale of wealth creation. Liberal democracy has been forgotten. The end of government policy is wealth creation.
As an IMF man Costello has forgotten about supporting civil society to nurture tolerance and trust to make liberal democracy more democratic. The figure of the citizen has gone. Underneath the rhetoric about ciivl society we have the Treasurer speaking about economic growth narrowly understood. Development is about wealth creation and it has little to do with the environment. Unlike Joseph Stiglitz Costello remains an IMF man.
Costello's speech gives no consideration to the impact of market failure ---slumps, recessions and depressions---on social capital, through leaving many workers unemployed, and then unable to find full time work with economic growth. There is little concern about the impact of poverty on social capital; or the relationship between social capital and social justice when many people have too few resources to do more than get by. There is nothing about the relationships between the limits and failures of markets and civil society; or civil society and the discontents with globalization.
What is even more troubling is that the talk about civil sociey and social capital does not lessen the economic mindset of Treasury. We still have the self-certain belief in institutional infallibility. There is little sense of a wavering of the conviction that its own policies are correct; little sense of understanding the distinction between the ideology and science;
In an earlier post Heart of the nation I argued that Australian conservatism, in recoiling from multiculturalism, was committed to assimilation as a mode of governing the nation. Assimilation here stands for the customs, habits, values and beliefs of an Anglo-Australia that sees itself as running the state. They govern the country. This is an ethnic conception of assimilation and it's mode of governance requires cultural homogeneity.
And liberals? Where do they stand on the nation? Where do they stand on national identity of immigrants? Should they---Arab Muslems--- take on Australian national identity as of a way of being loyal? Clearly they need to have a national identity as they are citizens of Australia and not stateless persons. But what sort of attachment to the country is required by liberals when Australia is threatened by international terrorism?
For instance, should Arab Muslems assimilate? Is there a liberal nationalism?
Liberals would say that the basic liberal principle of equal concern and respect for everybody is what is important here. Individual liberty is the touchstone. So those who want to assimilate to the culture of Anglo Australia should be allowed to; all public policies designed to frustrate these desires or preferences would be regarded as improper interference by the state.
But what about those Arab Muslems who do not want to assimilate; who desire to affirm their difference and to be both Arab and Muslem? Whould they not be seen as disloyal?Would they not be discriminated against for public office---joining ASIO or ONA----on the grounds that they cannot be trusted. They may have formal and informal conections to sleeper cells planted by international terrorists.
Would not this be an ethnically-based discrimination?
So what is required by liberal reason to ensure the governance of the population? One thing that is required to ensure that citizens have a sense of belonging to a polity. How is that done? What are the mechanisms to ensure this?
The short and quick answer is that liberals are also committed to assimilation. Arab Muslems immigrant are required, as citizens, to assimilate to the liberal values of the nation (equal treatment, separation of church and state, individual liberty etc). Though they see the conservative conception of assimilation as bad they hold that their conception of assimilation to liberal values is good. This civic nationality is required by the liberal state.
to be continued.
In a response to the recent post on demoralization of humanities' academics at Invisible Adjunct, the Happy Tutor says:
"The antihumanist left versus the humanist right. Surely, the solution is a postmodern humanist left? How? Well, read the following authors: Martial, Diogenes, Rabelais, Jesus the trickster hero of the Gospels, Swift, Gay, Pope, Wilde."
The Happy Tutor has struck the right note in making the turn away from an inward-looking academic politics that has run its course. You can only march on the conservatives in the various humanities department for so long. Eventually you need to look outside the horizons of academic politics to see what is happening in Washington or Canberra, to think about the nation and what is going on in the economy.
But I'm going to read Richard Rorty rather than the texts the Happy Tutror suggests. Why? It seem to me that he articulates American liberalism in a postmodern way and he does so by engaging with continental philosophy----the anti-humanist left.
I find Rorty's engagement appealing in contrast to the liberal humanist pointing the finger at the anti-humanist left in academia. This signifies that the latter are somehow responsible for nihilism. I find this upsetting because nihilism is much broader than what is happen in academia, and the practices of American poststructuralist theory are more an expression of nihilism that its cause. What is ignored in the finger pointing is the possibility that something may be wrong with liberal humanism;that its values and understandings may also have been hollowed out and so it stands in need of some restoration.
Reading Rorty enables me to understand the liberal humanists in the humanities; those in the middle between the conservative humanist right and the anti-humanist left; those without a base, who are not traditionalists but nonetheless have convictions about "what sustains people". He takes us beyond the cry of frustation and the expression of pain.
Rorty engages with specific texts and is explicit about the moves to render poststructuralist French theory palatable. This rendering palatable gives us an American Foucault in the American humanities that is quite different from the French Foucault. The former is the Foucault of disciplinary power with philosophical substance of Nietzsche and Heidegger strained out. Rorty blocks the French Foucault openly, and he is quite explicit in doing this in order to make things safe for American liberal democracy.
In doing so Rorty wears the hat of pragmatism and offers Americans a postmodern liberalism in which philosophy provides no foundation for politics. Philosophy is reserved for private life, where it can be ironic in terms of individual self-realization. This leaves political and moral traditions to govern public life. Rorty holds that tradition and convention are far more powerful forces than reason in the social construction of life and in ensuring social cohesion in the nation.
So how is the rendering safe for American social democracy done?
Rorty's gatekeeping for liberal democracy is done by suggesting that the two options for those who reject scientism or philosophy as a part of science (positivism) and its over evaluation of science. These are philosophy linked to poetics (Nietzsche or Heidegger) and philosophy linked to politics (Foucault). These pathways are different ways of reacting to the hegemony of scientism once the baggage of the inherited Platonic philosophical tradition (with its brood nest of entrenched dualisms) has been sloughed off----found our way out of the flybottle.
Rorty did take the aesthetic turn with Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. He linked philosophy to poetics because he holds that fictional literature can powerfully illuminate the conditions of our lives, often in more concrete and illuminating ways than theory.
Rorty also develops the pathway of philosophy linked to politics. This pathway is signified by the pragmatist John Dewey as redescribed by Rorty. It is a turning away from natural science to engineers and social workers and a Baconian conception of an instrumental reason having maximal control over nature. This implies an acceptance of a technologized pragmatic culture controlled by a social democratic community to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number or greater human freedom. For Rorty it is utilitarianism in the public domain and freedom in the private domain.
This is politics as social hope and the reformist social democratic politics of piecmeal nudges and cautions with respect to particular issues at particular times. It is social hope because the aim is to make us happier by enabling us to cope more successfully with the physical environment and each other.
This downhome Amercian conception of philosophy linked to politics is contrasted with a continental (ie., Nietzsche & Heidegger) conception of philosophy linked to politics, which Rorty actively repels. This is politics as a relentless critique of everything, with its mood of despair, deep pessimism and revolutionary fervor; a peudo-politics that involves "a sort of continual self-correction of theory, with no conceivable relation to practice" or social democratic politics. This was developed in Achieving Our Country (1997), where Rorty attacked academic theorists as impotent spectators distanced from the hurly-burly world of political reform.
This negative conception of philosophy's link to politics is that of the anti-humanist left or postmodern theory, and it is represented by Adorno and Foucault. Rorty rejects this politics as radical critique on political grounds: it has nothing to offer us in solving concrete problems. For "we liberals in the United States" says Rorty this politics is all rhetoric and posturing that tries to find a public political counterpart to a private search for autonomy as self over-coming.
Rorty's key blocking move against this political Romanticism is made with the private public distinction. By divorcing personal freedom from public responsibility he blocks the projection of private autonomy onto public politics and so turns everything into politics.
But he makes another blocking move, this time against the "politics of difference" crowd in the American academy. He terms them unpatriotic on the grounds that they refuse to rejoice in the country they inhabit; and they repudiate the idea of national identity and the emotion of national pride or patriotism.
In this way Rorty makes philosophy linked to politics safe for American liberal democracy. I am not suggesting that Rorty offers a satisfactory expression of what the Happy Tutor calls a postmodern humanist left---that is for others to say. But he does give a considered response to the cry of the liberal humanists in the academy.
I have been meaning to write about this article----The Flight from Knowing by Lisa Ruddick---ever since I came across it courtesy of Invisible Adjunct and Amanda at Household Opera.
Its taken a couple of days since real life has intervened.
Lisa Ruddick has raised an important issue. From my Nietzschean perspective she is describing nihilism in the everyday practices of academe in the corporate university. The values of the humanities----the human in the humanities as Invisible Adjunct puts it---- have been hollowed out. It links in with a previous post of mine.
Let me spell out the argument. Lisa starts her article by saying that after 9/11 a question presses in on her and her students. It is:
"...how to bridge the chasm between the syllabus--whatever it contains--and the students who are looking for help in figuring out how to sustain a humane connection to a world that’s overwhelming them....and I feel as if I'm in two different worlds. For years, scholarship in English has been refining the art of stepping away from humane connection.... Maybe some percentage of you will identify with the experience of a recent Ph.D. from my department... who told me that since the terrorist attacks she’s found less comfort than she expected in working on her book project, and confessed that right now she can't blame the people who look at our discipline and say, "What's the point? If you're not getting at anything that sustains people, what's the point?"
Well, academia has become divorced from everyday life. No news there. The whole point of the liberal (Kantian) university)-- was that was a retreat from the hurly burly of daily life to a haven, where you could reflect about things for 3-4 years on a scholarship. Nice work if you can get it, many would say. And it is. Or rather, was.
But you can draw the drawbridge up and cut yourself, as a scholar, off from everyday life. Academia then becomes a world unto its own. Then you do wonder about the point of writing articles and books that no else reads. I did. The old answer that you are doing it for its sake is not very satisfying. It left you, well unsatisfied. That gnaws away inside. It is deeply troubling.
Some conservatives are appalled at the topics of reflection in the humanities (ie., cultural studies) compared to solid business topics. Thus Miranda Devine ignores the attempts by the new humanities to return to everyday life. The conservatives basically mock and jeer at the fashionable thesis topics, and they use this to launch their attacks on the academic left as part of the culture wars.
Let's put the attack on postmodernism and poststructuralist theory in the academy to one side. Lisa is talking about something much more interesting: a deep disquiet in academia about the effects of nihilism. Lisa is referring to her experience of:
"People who feel unnourished by the intellectual life in English tend to feel isolated because the myriad individual expressions of protest that are confidentially exchanged all the time have not yet been built into a shared world. The tensions within our field have reached the [point of] a clear cleavage between a traditionally humanist right and an antihumanist left...In the middle, but without a base, are people like this woman who are not traditionalists but nonetheless have convictions about "what sustains people" that in the current environment would be discounted as conservative, humanist illusions."
Invisible Adjunct concurs. She identifies herself as occupying the uneasy middle ground of a liberal humanist in the humanities.
What Lisa then describes are the characteritistic of standard conduct in the corporate university: the violence of everyday practice in academia; the subtle insensitivities hardwired into theory; the subtle depreciation of whatever makes you a human being as opposed to an expert; the fear and defensiveness from attack; academic brainwashing into profressional norms and practices, the need to deprogramme and the threat of ostracism by the group.
Lisa says that the effect of what I would call the workings of knowledge/power is a:
"... kind of demoralization, because in their depletion of the meaning of such words as authenticity and humanity they eat away at a person's sense of having a vital interior life apart from his or her professional identity."
Rightly said. In the corporate university we do become teaching, research and writing machines on a career treadmill and workign under exploitative conditions. That career treadmill becomes the whole ethos of academic existence in the corporate university--it defiens our existence--- and it deeply impacts on our subjectivities. Lisa expresses this experience of being the "cog in the machine much more poetically. She says that academic life, in a depressed job market, has become:
"...a world with no experiential outside... The message we send to [our students] is: there's no real authenticity anywhere, there's no humanity you can count on, the moon outside your window is boring, so you might as well keep to your study and pray for a job."
It's a demoralizing treadmill behind the ivy clad walls. But we all know that and understand that it is widespread and not just limited to the humanities. As Lisa says the:
"...systematic demoralization is a hidden feature of professional training, maybe everywhere [in academia] though each field develops its own mechanisms for inducing this demoralization."
In commenting on this article Invisible Adjunct in her post addreses the ethical implications of nihilism. She writes:
"The demoralization of which [Lisa] speaks refers not only to a weakening of morale, but also to a depletion of the possibilities for creating and sustaining morally significant meaning."
Nihilism has well and truely taken hold. Nihilism is more than the humanist values and meaning being hollowed out by knowledge/power in the corporate university, and so creating that uncanny sense of a moral vacuum within academia. What is also being displaced, repressed and forgotten is ethical judgment----there is a withering of our capacity to judge that this particular kind of conduct is right or wrong.
I have described the argument at length because it is a good description of the workings of nihilism. It means that the 'scholar as vocation. ethos of the Kantian university has been hollowed out. Invisible Adjunct can see no reason to be optimistic about the process of nihilism currently being experienced in the academy. Nearly all her posts indicate the deepening of the process whereby the experience of "slowly dying inside" is the effect of the workings professional academia practices.
What we have is the description of the effects of the workings of what Foucault called the microphysics of power.
So where to next with nihilism? If the sickness has been diagnosed, then what is the cure. What suggestions have been made to recover a moral sense and the capacity to make ethical judgements?
What is suprising about the academic discussion around Lisa Ruddick's article is that those in the middle ground---the liberal humanists experiencing the hollowing out of liberal humanism---remains at the level of describing the process of hollowing out. What is not considered is the responses to what Invisible Adjunct calls the "depletion of the possibilities for creating and sustaining morally significant meaning."
Let's put Nietzsche to one side for the moment. What is not picked up, or considered, is the reworking of liberal humanism by philosophers such as Richard Rorty, even though a lot of the discussion around Invisible Adjunct's weblog is about the search for autonomy in academia.
Why Rorty? Well, Rorty took the anti-foundationalist and anti-representationist turn in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. iIn Contingency, Irony and Solidarity he used the liberal private/public distinction to say that concerns about our "vital interior life apart from our professional identity" belong to the private realm of self-realisation, fulfilment, and perfectionism and not the public domain of morality and justice. He says argues that this distinction allows a postmodern liberal society to limit its concerns to the balancing of freedom, wealth, and peace, whilst allowing its members the scope and opportunity to pursue their own ideas of how they ought to live.
Why this limit? Well, Rorty argues that any attempt at a fusion of the private and public tends to privilege the public over the private. It either redefines the private in terms of the public - and generally suppress many private practices - or it makes public the private practice of the strong or the majority.
Something to engage with don't you think? But these themes are not taken up in the discussion. There is a resounding silence about Rorty, even though he is America's most successful public philosopher.
What happens is that the finger is pointed at poststructuralist theory of the academic left. Timothy Burke expresses this eloquently and accurately. Yet, the rejection of the elitist poststructuralist academic practices is done without any consideration of the postmodern turn to ethics. A whole body of continental writing is rejected on the basis of academic habits and practices.
What is disturbing is that there is no consideration of Foucault's return to classical Greek philosophy, his exploration of the roots of the 'care for self', or his aesthetic refashioning of this care for self into shaping our subjectivities as if they were a work of art. If you want to put it the liberal humanist terms of Lisa Ruddick, it is learning to shape one's own inner character or subjectivity with the qualification that such shaping takes place within various forms of power-knowledge and involves a transgressions of its limits.
It is a form of Stoic ethics of working on the self to remove the poisons that make us sick. What the Stoic's address is the form of therapy for the elitist academic practices that Timothy Burke describes as poisons. It is self-government of the soul. The Stoics claim that there is a philosophical art of soul-healing; and that if these afflictions are not cured then, there will be no end to the sickess pointed to by Lisa, Invisible Adjunct and Timothy.
As Dave Kelly over at Stoic News writes:
"The practice of Stoicism requires a commitment to changing bad habits, or vices, into good habits, or virtues, and a discipline to make it happen."
The key Dave says is to make new habits of thought and action. In this tradition philosophy is a compassionate doctor ministering to human needs.
Focuacult gives this philosophy as a way of life his own twist. He writes in What is Enlightenment:
"The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered…[as] a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them."
We become our own doctors. As with the classical Stoic tradition of compassionate doctoring there is a commitment to reason powers of each person and a radical criticsm of conventional beliefs.
Since Foucault "fuses" public and private domains in a way that Rorty would oppose, we have a debate about the limits of liberalism and the reasons for transgressing them. We have an ongoing debate about political language, the humanites and ethics since the 1990s.
What suprises me is the way the academics have not turned to this literature in order to explicate the nihilism/ethics problem they are experiencing.
Why? Surely they know this literature. Surely they know Foucault and Rorty? Or the way Rorty has Americanized French theory? Or Rorty's rejection the unpalatable bits of the Nietzsche & Heidgger challenge to liberal democracy-American style.
So why no engagement with Rorty?
Let us return to Nietzsche. Is it a case of the academics not knowing Nietzsche, in spite of Allan Bloom's warnings in his The Closing of the American Mind about the terrors of German philosophy? And why we are on it why no Allan Bloom? Did he not a diagnosis of the intellectual and moral ills of contemporary American and the academy. Did he not make some suggestions for a cure? Did not Bloom argue that political philosophy was about life and death issues?
So why no engagement with Bloom?
Bloom is one American who did understand what Nietzsche was getting at with nihilism, understood the easy going ethical relativist response to nihilism amongst students, and grasped the decay of the modern university.
So why no Bloom.
It is this failure to intellectually engage that I find most disturbing. So here's a thought. The modern university always saw itself as the strong hold of culture and cvilization and deeply connected to the Republic of Letter. It stood like a beacon in the wasteland of society, resolutely protecting scholarly tradition, knowledge, learning from the barabarians, philstines and vandals.
Is this case? Is civilization and culture to be found in the "best" universities? Maybe it has moved on? Should we continue to respect the modern university as being something more than an educational corporation? Should we b not treat it as just another way of doing business and be sceptical about its claims to be the guardian of culture and civilization.
I have just come across this weblog----kind of bluegreen---via Rana at Frogs and Ravens. Susan has an interesting post here on academia and civil society which starts a dialogue with Invisible Adjunct.
Susan makes some excellent points in her post. She refers to the insularity of academia; the need for critical thinking in civil society; the need to rework academia's role in society; and a need to rework academic culture.
Unfortunately, she does not say what kind of reworking she has in mind. It is a blank.
Sad to say, but it is the market that is currently doing this transformation of academia. The reworking of academia that is being done by the state's use of the market is rapidly turning ethical institutions in civil society into business corporations. The power of the state is being used to gear the universities into ensuring wealth creation in the knowledge economy. From the liberal state's perspective it is right and proper that this happens since the wealth of the nation depends on it.
What is being lost, and forgotten, in this process is the old connection of the university to citizenship and liberal democracy and to fostering citizenship as participation, as an expression of human agency in the political arena.
That leaves us with Susan's need to foster critical thinking in civil society. Who fosters critical thinking in civil society? It does not come from academics, as they are just another voice in civil society and a minor one at that. Who has picked up the mantle?
Mark over at Pinappletown has something of interest to say here. His argument is that the blogosophere is an emerging sixth estate, rather than being an extension of the fourth estate - mass media. A fuller account can be found here. In doing so Mark develops a more positive account of this earlier post of mine.
Following Umberto Eco, Mark accepts the standard position that the media are the fourth estate and that it functions as the watch dog of democracy. (He fails to mention the judiciary as an estate) He sees the non-government organizations of (global) civil society as a fifth estate. Mark then argues that bloggers constitute the sixth estate. The bloggosphere is:
"... a medium that aids commentary, and which has a self-checking and balancing effect when discussing issues.... people spontaneously express themselves, comment on other people's postings and reveal their personal thoughts and opinions. In this self-organizing ecosystem, there are times when a blogosphere story gets up and running and within a few hours a story is borne that highlights a world issue, a national issue, or the concerns of an individual."
That makes bloggers like journalists, which is how Tim Dunlop and many US journalist bloggers understand blogging. But Mark also notices the differences:
"However, there is a huge difference between journalism and blogging. Journalists have a code, a focus, a method of orgniazing and disciplining its members. Bloggers are free to express themselves without the code journalists adhere to, without the governance of publishers and media owners."
He then links bloggers to the classic watchdog role:
"...the blogosphere is the sixth estate that keeps a check on and can criticize the other five estates..bloggers combined have a power to speak and make others listen through the blogosphere and thus have an ability to act as a check and balance to the other estates, upholding democracy and defending the public interest. We have a power to be critical of non-governmental organizations, we are separate and can be critical of mass media (as was exercised through the second Iraq war), we can be critical of and examine issues to do with national governments and also of economic powers."
That implies the mass media does not act as a watchdog for democracy and the mantle is being picked up by bloggers. Mark says that the bloggosphere is attuned to individuals----it is real individuals speaking. What he does not say
is that, if it is individuals speaking critically on public issues in the name of the publci interest, then it is individuals as republican citizens.
Citizens who deliberate are a break from individuals as political spectators---the passive citizens of representative democracy. As passive citizens we participate:
"...only in plebiscitary elections while the important business of governing takes place daily in our names but without our input. There is a significant cognitive disjunction between our lived political lives and the rhetoric of democracy in this country."
There is simmering unease about this. The link between Mark's idea of bloggers speaking critically and republican citizens gives us a Socratic citizenship Te emphasis here is on the conformity and docility that is so noticeable in the public sphere; the recycling of cliches based on an incapacity to think and judge in an autonomous manner. This closure often leads to a rejection of diversity and newcomers, and to an inability to thoughtfully participate in the public forum.
The practice of socratic citizenship in blogger commentary would consist in the public questioning of the way our fellow citizens apply various standards in making their moral and political judgments. The assumption underlying this practice is that citizens are inadequately reflective and self-critical about the criteria, idols and presuppositions they bring to bear in political decision-making. Without examination, these taken for granted concepts (eg., those of the market) may well often turn out to be derived from knowledge systems and ethical concepts inappropriate to the democratic public sphere.
This conception of citizenship opens up possibilities to broaden the model of classical civic republicanism, which confined political citizenship to the formal political sphere of government. This broad definition is more women friendly, as it would:
"...include both the process of negotiation with welfare institutions, frequently conducted by women, and the kinds of informal neighborhood politics in which women tend to take the lead, in contrast to their underrepresentation in the formal political system."
Following Hannah Arendt, what we citizens need to acquire in these dark times is the capacity to make judgements in a political world bereft of moral rules and legal strictures; judgements based on the capacity recognize to evil, and the courage to stand up and say "no" to political wrong doing. Such a political judgement is a capacity that connects what appears to the private senses and phronesis; and then fits what is thus united into a common world that both keep human beings distinct and related in a shared public world.
This gives us political judgment that enables us to weigh up, evaluate, interpret and assess the significence of political actions.
This looks to be a good book. River keepers are what we need in Australia today, especially for the Murray-Darling river system.
We do have the stirrings of a citizen perseverance to transform the Murray-Darling River catchments into a "critical legal battleground of the environmental movement". But we have yet to see litigations to force state governments, Adelaide city and other communities on the river, several commonwealth agencies, and various corporations to clean up their acts and comply with environmental law.
It is the white death of salt and the lack of environmental flows not PCB's that is the big concern in the Murray-Darling Basin; the dryland salinity threatens farmland and drinking water, whilst the lack of environmental flows caused by the overallocation of water threatens the life of the Murray-Darling river.
And we do have a third story that is playing itself out; namely the story of repeated neo-liberal political assaults against environmental regulations and their enforcement by water authorities/utilities to protect the irrigators. The battering ram is property rights. The aim of the assault is less to paralyze, and more to get around, the federal government's environmental policies in the Basin--eg., the cap on water diverted from Murray-Darling River----and their enforcement. The driving force behind the assualt is the twin assumption that the economic growth is the central aim of public policy and that markets must prevail.
For many politicians the answer to every problem is more economic growth, even though economic growth in the Murray-Darling Basin has degraded the basin's ecologyto the point where it now needs substantive repair.
No worries say the neo-liberal economists. More economic growth will provide the wealth that will enable us to address the environmental problems. What is important is to find the right techniques and instruments to manage the economy to ensure sustainable economic growth. Moreover technology will save the day---stop environmental decline and ease the increasing pressure on resource consumption and extraction by irrigators.
The economists are uncritical advocates of, and apologists for, economic growth and assume as self-evident that increased economic growth equals increased wellbeing. It is self-evident that increases in the GDP and more money in the pocket leaves people and the environment better off.
That neo-liberal assault wave on environmental protection of our rivers appears to have given rise to the beginnings of a counter-wave of aroused public opinion to save the river. The counter-wave challenges the neo-liberal transfer of political authority from the state to the deregulated market, where the interests of big corporations are hegemonic. Rarely does the state step in to block development.
An interesting paper on the humanities by Richard Rorty, the gadfly philosopher.
In the spirit of Rorty I will lightly redescribe Rorty's argument as I spell it out. I do so because I do not agree with his claim that the mission of the humanities is a private one; that it is one of reading lots of books to make me a better person.
This is a watered interpretation of 'aesthetic education' or Bildung or "cultivation," which sought to make aesthetic autonomy purposive by stressing the indirect relationship to moral self-determination. As a good ironist Rorty holds the high culture of liberalism as centering around literature (plays, poems and novels)> Rorty's 'becoming a better person through reading novels' gives us a literary and individual reading of aesthetic education and moral development that is divorced from the public sphere. It is a private project that happens in the home.
Rorty begins by saying that:
"...the real social function of the humanistic intellectuals is to instill doubts in the students about the students’ own self-images, and about the society to which they belong."
Critique---stirring things up---is the tougher word for this "instilling doubts." It is a better word because it can be more easily connected to democracy.
However, Rorty says that "when it comes to the rhetoric of public support for higher education, we do not talk much about this social function" of stirring things up. "Somewhere deep down, everybody—even the average taxpayer—knows that that is one of the things colleges and universities are for. But nobody can afford to make this fully explicit and public."
So what happens? Well humanities intellectuals adopt the Straussian strategy of talking a different language for public consumption. Their public rhetoric talks in terms 'of “objective criteria of excellence,” “fundamental moral and spiritual values,” “the enduring questions posed by the human condition,” and so on.' No one really believes this rhetoric anymore, given the lived reality of the politicization and commercialization of the humanities.
The tension between this public rhetoric and the critical stirring the kids up through critique leaves the the humanistic intellectuals vulnerable to heresy-hunters. Rorty says:
'In the current flap about the humanities, however, the heresy-hunters have a more vulnerable target than usual. This target is what Allan Bloom calls “the Nietzscheanized left."' (the postmodern left in Australia)
Rorty then adds that in the US:
"This over-philosophized and self-obsessed left is the mirror image of the over-philosophized and self-obsessed Straussians on the right. The contempt of both groups for contemporary American society is so great that both have rendered themselves impotent when it comes to national, state, or local politics. This means that they get to spend all their energy on academic politics.The two groups are currently staging a sham battle about how to construct reading lists."
But not to worry. Things will pan out. The idea says Rorty:
"...is to keep the humanities changing fast enough so that they remain indefinable and unmanageable. All we need to keep them changing that fast is good old-fashioned academic freedom. Given freedom to shrug off the heresy-hunters and their cries of “politicization!,” as well as freedom for each new batch of assistant professors to despise and repudiate the departmental Old Guard to whom they owe their jobs, the humanities will continue to be in good shape."
Of course Rorty, as a celebrity humanities intellectual, forgets to mention the unemployed PhD's, the casualization of the workforce; the lack of research money; the collapse of the humanities labor market. All the things that Invisible Adjunct talks about. And it makes no mention of the decline of the humanities because they are seen to be worthless in wealth creation, unless they reinvent themselves as creative industries.
Maybe humanities intellectuals should speak openly:---we are about stirring up the kids to make a better kind of life. What is wrong with speaking plainly. We are not going to get the research grants anyhow. Poverty and unemployment is our future.
What Rorty offers us is an postmodern, ironist literary culture premised on both an aestheticized ethics of personal self-enrichment and self-creation in the private sphere; and a liberal political morality as procedural justice and the desire to avoid giving pain to others. Liberalism enables each individual to pursue his or her private vision of perfection in peace. So the goal, value and aim of a liberal society is to let its citizens be as privatistic and aestheticist as they please, so long as they do it on their own time--causing no harm to others.
This post is interesting since it spells out why a former social democratic became a social and political conservative. The historian John Hirst gives a number of reasons for this shift, one of which is a recoil from multiculturalism. This confirms one of my arguments that Australian conservatism is structured around the old governance policy of assimilation. What we have is a shift from liberalism to conservatism---or so I will argue.
Hirst says:
"I was a critic of multiculturalism. Not because I was an opponent of immigration. I was opposed to multiculturalism when, as was often the case, it was presented as a program for the total reshaping of Australian society. Australia was to be remade by the contributions from all its ethnic groups. Old Australians were recast as one ethnic group among many, though the most despised and suspect, and they were certainly denied the status of the host culture."
John Hirst is doing more than preserving his cultural identity as a member of the host culture; just looking after his own kind in the face of cultural change from the flows of immigration that undermines their sense of place and home. It is more than a sense that their Australia is going in a globalised world. Hirst wants to defend Anglo-Australian culture as the host or hegemonic culture of the Australian nation state. John Hirst actually dislikes, or is hostile to, the substance of a strong multiculturalism as opposed to a life-style or salad bowl multiculturalism. The substance is the idea of cultural diversity, transforming Australia's legal and political structures around citizenship and seriously questioning the ethnic nationalism of Anglo-Australia.
But why the recoil from a substantive multiculturalism? Was it because the liberal state turned its back on core liberal values that made a continent a nation? Was it because multicultural, represented a big threat? Hirst is clear that there was no threat to his Anglo-Australia.
"Thankfully, the official statements on multiculturalism were free of this insult and danger [to old Australia]. They declared that there were core values, institutions and practices: the English language, the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, equality of men and women."
For the liberal state multiculturalism posed no threat to the national culture of the liberal state. Australia may be a nation of immigrants, but it had Anglo-culture, liberal institutions and practices. What happened with multiculturalism is this liberalism was civilized. There is a great post on the civilizing influence of multiculturalism on a difference-blind Australian liberalism by Tim Dunlop.
Civilizing here means awakening liberalism to its blindness to cultural difference. The uniform legal framework of equality before the law was blind to the exclusion of the indigenous peoples to citizenship; then blind to the way it homogenized difference, blind to the way that it gave support to, or maintained, a traditional Anglo-Australian culture whilst treating other cultures with contempt and disrespect. Civilizing means that minority cultures should be recognized and protected because the particular commitments and attachments are important for human wellbeing and development.
If Hirst acknowledges that multiculturalism posed no threat to the national culture of the liberal state, then why the recoil from multiculturalism? Why embrace conservatism? Why leave liberalism? It's a bit of a puzzle since a lot of the ethos of multiculturalism amounts to little more than being a fair go for different migrant cultures. So why the recoil?
Hirst is quite clear on why he recoiled from multiculturalism. Politics is the reason since the practices of multiculturalism represent a challenge to assimilation. Hirst writes:
"But such was the set against integration, let alone assimilation, that migrants were regularly told they could belong to Australia and maintain their own culture - even though there was much in the culture of migrants that was at odds with core practices and institutions."
There you have it. Hirst recoiled because in embracing Australia as a multicultural nation the liberal state struck at the heart of integration or assimilation. Assimilation is the touchstone of the paleoconservatism of old Anglo-Australia.
Those core practices and institutions are the heart of conservative Anglo Australia, the core of its national identity. Conservatives say that these core practices and values are seen to be the heart of the nation. They were forged at federation and are the soul of national sentiment that brought about the statecraft that produced the new Commonwealth in 1901. Old Australia forged the nation, and federation that gave birth to the liberal nationalist project of progress and harmony that would bind the divisions of the nation.
I take it that Hirst sees the radicals, the left, the multiculturalists as denigrating the nation. They highlight its seamy side, its exclusive character (eg., the exclusion of indigenous people) and racist foundations of White Australia that embodied racial purity as a national ideal. So the radicals want to tear assimilation out of the heart of the nation and replace it with the ideal of diversity. In doing so they undermine the harmony and cohesion of Anglo-Australian nationality and national cohesion.
In his defence of multiculturalism as civilizing Australian liberalism Tim Dunlop challenges this reading. He says that the practices of assimilation are different from a liberal multicultural Australia and that the core liberal values are tolerance, respect and recognition. The "left" are actually defending the core values of liberalism, whilst John Hirst has left liberalism and shifted to conservatism.
Hirst's conservatism demands that immigrants and their descendents assimilate to the core values of Anglo-Australia. Assimilate here means more than aculturation; it is to be absorbed or incorporated into the values and practices of the dominant political and social group. The migrant groups could not belong to Australia and maintain their own culture. This is more than some practices in the culture of migrants being at odds with core practices and institutions. It is a merging of cultural identity so that the migrants have the same cultural identity as Anglo-Australia, and they acquire the cultural practices belonging to the tradition of old Anglo-Australia.
Tim is right to seperate liberalism from assimilation as a mode of governance. There is a slide from the core values of old Anglo-Australia to the core values of the liberal state and nation. It is a slide because liberalism is based on a common framework of equal rights and opportunites to citizens in a liberal state. This does not require any commitment to assimilation. Liberals allow individual citizens in a liberal democratic state to observe different customs, emphasize different values, spend their leisure time differently and cluster in communal affinities and cultural life. If liberalism tolerates difference, then the only assimilation that liberals should countenance is the legal framework of just institutions that enables free choices.
Hence in requiring migrants to shed their cultural identity and assimilate to the culture of old Anglo-Australia John Hisrt has embraced conservatism. Conservatism deliberately seek to ensure that this assimilation happens and it does so in the name of established political authority. That authority should not be weakened. Multiculturalism threatens to do so and so it must be contained. Secondly, the inherited standards,values and social position of Anglo-Australia ought to be protected because they play a major part in public affairs run by a governing elite.
There is post here and here on development and the environment at public opinion. By development public opinion means wealth creation, increased GNP, and rising standards of living. Good development (economic growth), means a good performance in increasing wealth, GNP and standards of living.
But development has an international context and a wider economic interpretation; one associated with the Washington consensus (US Treasury, IMF, World Bank etc). Joseph Steiglitz says that the Washington consensus held that good economic performance can be achieved through liberalized trade, macro-economic stability( controlling inflation, reducing the budget deficit etc) and getting prices right. Once big government got out of the way, private markets would allocate resoruces efficiently and generate robust growth.
The Washington consensus, which has ben bought lock, stock and barrel by the Australian Treasury, is all about making markets work and to hell with everything else. The emphasis is on devising the instruments to make markets work, promoting efficient markets, and forgetting all about ecologically sustainable development and democratic development. The Washington consensus has a very narrow understanding of development.
It can be seen at work in the East Asian crisis. The root cause of the 1997 East Asian crisis, for instance, was seen as the active government intervention (crony capitalism); hence the solution was making markets work through the governing instruments of trade liberalization, deregulation and privatisation.
In the circulation of the Washington consensus in Australia, a competitive and efficient marketplace often became an end in itself. Its toolkit see any social problem (education) as a market waiting to be developed and perfected. All that was need was some hammering to get the market up and running, and the market would solve the problem. This is the approach currently being taken to water issues.
It downplayed unemployment through the structural adjustment to make markets work; and the devasting impacts of unemployment in terms of disrupted lives, increasing poverty, declining living standards and social turmoil. This social fallout was the concern of citizens; they had a broader conception of development that was at odds with development as economic growth (measured in terms of an increase in GDP). it was one that involved issues of distribution
What the Washington consensus talks about is wage rigidities and the need for labour market flexibility----meaning lowering wages, laying people off and asking workers to bear the costs of adjustment. It so gives lots of sermons on how globalization, opening up capital markets and free trade would bring enormous economic growth that would provide lots of new jobs. Utopia was always promised. It was always just around the corner.
We, those who had to bear the burden of economic change, had no say in the decisions that affected our lives. We had no voice, even though development involved the transformation of Australian society and culture and so our concerns were not addressed.
Here is an excerpt from an interview with Jonathan Miller of Beyond the Fringe fame (with Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore, and Peter Cook) and who went on to become of the most original and sought-after opera directors. Though of historical interest this historical view of philosophy still informs the present.
INTERVIEWER
Does your interest in philosophy influence your work as a director?
MILLER
It does. I think philosophically; I’m interested in how we think, in the theory of the mind. What it is to have representations of the world, how we structure it, how we organize it, and so forth.
INTERVIEWER
You belong to the Anglo-American, analytical philosophy; you are not interested in continental philosophers, are you?
MILLER
I hate them! I repudiate them! I think that the last important French philosopher was Descartes. Heidegger is ghastly—he is like an elephant’s fart. By contrast, in England we have Bertrand Russell, Peter Strawson, Stuart Hampshire . . . The job of philosophy is not to find out the meaning of life, or our relationship to the larger metaphysical principles of the universe; it is finding out the relationship of the mind to the world. How the world is represented in the mind; how do we come to have knowledge; what do we mean by certainty. These are the only things about which you can ask questions. I am interested in problems for which you can foresee a solution; questions to which there is possibly an answer.
INTERVIEWER
And if there isn’t?
MILLER
Then you keep your trap shut! There is no point wasting time asking questions for which there are no answers, or pondering problems that have no solution. First of all you have to ask yourself if something is really a question just because it has a question mark after it.
That English prejudice to continental philosophy is a historical---a part of the cultural history of a discpline in the liberal univeristy. It was deeply entrenched in Australian philosophy departments whose pracitioners were beholden to pure reason, absolute truth and had a hatred of historicism. The best that can be said for such a prejudice is that it is stated with clarity and rigour. We have no doubts.
It is still alive and well in some analytic philosophers. who still take it for granted that previous philosophers---eg., Hume, Frege in the analytic canon-- have isolated deep central problems that define the discipline. So there is no need for a history of philosophy. Physicists do not need a history of physics to do physics that aims at non-historical absolute truth. Neither do philosophers.
These kind of analytic philosophers regarded the continental tradition as an aestheticized and historicized form of idealism. Young PhD philosophers working in the continental tradition, after their recoil from a dogmatic scientific realism, were dismissed by the senior faculty on the grounds that they had an insufficiently robust sense of reality and its independence from any form of culture.
This is much better than the above dogmatism that is wielded like a sledge hammer. It is someone thinking. And doing it hard, because they are digging themselves out of a tradition. In doing so Williams shows that analytic philosophy is a particular kind of language, a cultural tradition that has been histotrically concerned with particular kinds of issues.
Thie tradition that Bernard Williams is digging philosophy out of is the flybottle of scientism. Scientism is characterised by Williams as the tendency to "assimilate philosophy to the aims, or at least the manners, of the sciences." This assimilation resulted in analytic philosophy becoming a scientific philosophy and embracing some substantive content.
In the words of Hilary Putnam, from his Renewing Philosophy:
"Analytic philosophy has become increasingly dominated by the idea that science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective. To be sure, there are within analytic philosophy important figures who combat this scientism … Nevertheless, the idea that science leaves no room for an independent philosophical enterprise has reached the point at which leading practitioners sometimes suggest that all that is left for philosophy is to try to anticipate what the presumed scientific solutions to all metaphysical problems will eventually look like."
This is philosophy hitching a ride with science. So how does Williams dig his way out of scientistic flybottle? Through history. He historicizes. We develop a narrative about we go to be where we are now. Thus Williams argument is that:
"I have argued that philosophy should get rid of scientistic illusions, that it should not try to behave like an extension of the natural sciences (except in the special cases where that is what it is), that it should think of itself as part of a wider humanistic enterprise of making sense of ourselves and of our activities, and that in order to answer many of its questions it needs to attend to other parts of that enterprise, in particular to history."
For Williams philosophy as a humanistic discipline should play an important part in making people think about what they are doing, and acknowledging its connections with other ways of understanding ourselves.
But he ends on a melancholy note. Such a broad reflective enterprise is now coming to seem unnecessary and archaic, and to be something that at best is preserved as part of the heritage industry.
What Williams does not say is that broad reflective enterprise in philosophy was kept alive in the continental philosophy tradition. That is why I find the reductionism of books and reviews like this so disconcerting. Gadamer made a significant contribution to recovering philosophy a humanist discipline. Even if he was a fascist it is ideas that are of interest.
This review of Colin McGinn's autiobiography, The Making of a Philosopher, is a good account of the experience of doing analytic philosophy. This is a philosophy so seduced by big natural science that it too wanted to be a science. A hopeless desire, forever thwarted. As the reviewer explains:
"...philosophy hoped to become a truly hardheaded discipline in which “real progress could be made, instead of being a swamp of obscurity and pointless wrangling.” Philosophy increasingly came to see itself as an immature or incipient science, a residue of pesky problems that would remain only until metaphysics became physics, philosophy of mind turned into neurology, and philosophy of language merged with linguistics."
Note the lack of interest in society, culture and politics.
As a lived activity analytic philosophy was not something that gave you a good reason to get out of bed in the morning. Far from it. It did not make meaningful sense of my human experience and need. It had little connection to a life of creativity, commitment, and independence of spirit.
In shsort it was a professional activity--a trade--- that caused me to die inside.
McGinn spent academic life in the discipline and was successful. Yet he too became disilluioned. He says:
"...the issues became purely technical, a mere matter of writing your axioms the right way to get out the theorems you were looking for. It was the ever–tempting hope of turning philosophy into a science—misguided, perhaps, but undeniably appealing (sexy, as some philosophers like to say).”
What we end up with is a flattened and tedious world constructed by a sterile rationalism. A prisonhouse. So many escaped from philosophy as science to continental philosophy, and they started writing about Nietzsche, Adorno, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze etc. This connected philosophy to contemporay social life and to literature.
Bu there is another conception of philosophy to philsophy as told here; one which is described by Pierre Hadot as:
“...the choice of a certain way of life and existential option which demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle, a conversion of one’s entire being, and ultimately a certain desire to be and to live in a certain way.”
This is one in which philosophy is not purely a theoretical endeavour, since the content comes from the lived life. It is a way of doing philosophy that was exemplified by Nietzsche among the moderns.
There is a bit of discussion happening around the bloggosphere about the political philosophy behind, and informing, the polices and practices of the neocons. It is Leo Strauss who has been identified as the philosopher in question, though some think otherwise. But the general line of criticism has been, as Josh Cherniss puts it, that "Strauss was the mastermind behind the ideology, and policies, of the American neo-cons currently having such a strong impact on US foreign policy."
Philosophy makes it appearance in the public life as a conspiracy on the side of imperial political power in the guise of conservatism. How ironic, given its Socratic heritage. But it is very Platonic-----philosophy speaks on behalf of an educated ruling class.
Australian conservatism has been intellectually thin, and it has been more a lived ethos than an articulated philosophy. I 've always thought that there is a real tension (if not a contradiction) in Australian conservatism between its commitment to traditional values, the free market, and limited but strong government. The pressures of the free-market economy put more and more strain on the traditional family behind the white picket fence and traditional values. For instance, the market and its consumerist ethos tends to be a morally disruptive force (eg. sexuality). The fostering or sustaining traditional morality, as it is interpreted by many Australian conservatives, often involves violating, or at least bending, limitations on government intervention (eg., using the Commonwealth to get rid of the euthanasia laws in the Northern Territory.) And the strong state (national security state) fighting an eternal war against world terrorism stomps all over individual liberty.
This is roughly the traditionalist/libertarian tradition of conservatism with its focus on the tension between order/authority and freedom. So where does Strauss fit in? There is no doubt that Strauss, as a conservative, accepted inequality, the rule of elites, keeping the subordinated clases firmly in their place, and allowing them an education appropriate to their station in the hierarchy. There is a very good post on the conservative Strauss by Curtiss over at Hector Rottweiller Jr's Weblog. Once again you see the Platonic underpinnings (Plato's Republic) of Strauss's conservatism. Curtiss spells out the aristocracy within democracy that is generally only implied by contemporary conservatives.
Now Strauss is a difficult guy to read in terms of getting at his ideas. Ted Hinchman over at Diachronic Agency captures the experience well:
"I did read more than a hundred pages of Strauss yesterday ("What Is Political Philosophy?" and the early chapters of Natural Right and History).... But it was enough to make it clear that I wasn't going to find an argument for his way of doing political philosophy apart from coming to appreciate the force of how he interprets its history. I was hoping for a more direct argument. And of course I now have a glimmer into why Strauss does not think he can give one. I confess I don't take well to this sort of indirection. When I said that I "do not love reading" Strauss, I meant that I do not like his tone of scholarly condescension."
I had always read Strauss as a conservative critic of modernity; as someone who rebelled against modernity. He questioned its amorality--personified for him by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche--and its promotion of individualism and materialism over communal and cultural responsibility. Modernity stood for a debilitating disorder and its fatal flaw of amoral individualism was concealed in the rationalistic optimism of the Enlightenment project. The ramifications of this flaw were made manifest by the twin scourges of National Socialism and Leninism.
A Straussian reading of Australia, for instance, would highlight its Benthamite utilitarianism. It would interpret Australian modernity as hedonism, atheism, and materialism, and deeply dedicated to the pursuit of comfortable self-preservation. However glorious the Federation may have been in 1901, or honourable the Anzac tradition the Australian nation was essentially organized on this founding utilitarian principle. Sooner or latter its would abandon its pre-modern baggage in favor of a descent into the life of self-interestedness. That was the lowest common denominator and so political life was organized on the ethos of a gang of robbers. (eg., a gang of John Elliots, Allan Bond and Chrsitopher Skase). If we put it in Nietzschean and Heideggerian terms the cancer in modernity is the terror of nothingness and meaninglessness of such a life.
Like Carl Schmitt, Strauss was an acute critic of liberalism. He set himself the task to diagnose the malady that lay incubating within liberal democracy itself, and to find the appropriate therapy. Consequently, this reading of Strauss and conservatism makes good sense to me.
The more standard American reading of Strauss is the anti-democratic one from democratic-egalitarian liberals who link Strauss to the American Right. But see here. Joseph Cherniss has a good round up, and guide, to the material on Strauss here.
What interests me as a disillusioned modernist, who accepts the intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary philosophy, is Strauss' understanding of what should be the practice of philosophy in the modern public forum. What role does Strauss envision for political philosophy in modernity. As Charles R. Kesler puts it we have two choices:
"Is political philosophy... a politic presentation of philosophy, basically a way of shielding philosophers' radical questioning from the disapproval of the many, of society? Or is political philosophy meant also and emphatically to offer philosophical guidance for political life?"
Which way do we go? What are the implications? Does posing this question offer insight into our current political practices?
We need to spell out the question asked by Kesler a bit more.
Should philosophy speak openly about the terror of nothingness and meaninglessness of such a life? Or speak openly about a utilitarian life that is lived according to the lowest common denominator of utility? One based on worshipping the golden calf as the Happy Tutor puts it? Should we have the courage to welcome this terrible truth of living a life in a legitimate regime that protects us from the worst excesses of a gang of robbers, and then to speak openly about it?
If we are to doctor the poisons within our culture that make us sick, should we then stand tough and strong against those in political life Australian modernity who delude themselves about our situation? If philosophy is to cure the sickness in our way of life, should we ruthlessly expose the way neo-liberal politicans and economists currently wrap themselves in the progressive myths of the free market and the utopian dreams of globalization.
An enlightened life is a naked life. It is difficult to live such a life since it does mean stripping the cobweb of illusions of woven by the enlighteners.
Or, instead of plain speaking, should we have concealment? Should we follow the pro-war politicians and bureaucrats in wearing masks, telling consoling lies and writing in a sort of code to disguise the real meaning of the text. An elitist practice that speaks to those who know, and who have the knowledge and the skill to be able to penetrate into the heart of the argument. Should philosophical writing be a sword in the stone, a childproof medicine bottle designed to keep out the unworthy and unenlightened----ie., the middle and working classes?
What the latter pathway implies is a championing of tradition against modernity. It also implies staying silent about the myths and illusions about the war on terrorism that are woven by the political spin doctors, to afford us security, a sense of purpose and national belonging within which decent lives in the free market can be constructed. It says that we should not undermine these (including the idols of the market place) because we would have a debilitating moral vacuum---a destructive nihilism. Undermining idols it is said leads to an emptiness that is then filled by peddlers of dogmas and illusions that are far more toxic than the national security and market myths a critical philosophy undermines.
As the Iraqi war indicated, it is the media that refuses to bring into question the conventions on which civil order and the morality of society depend. It is the media that tells consoling lies. It is the media that speaks in the name of "moral clarity"----an us and them scenario that identified the real enemies and struck at their centre of gravity. Whilst the media told lies to people about the nature of political reality the policy/political elite recognized the truth and kept it to itself.
As William Pfaff observes such a doctrine as currently practiced as sound political practice is on that accepts:
"Machiavelli was right. There is a natural hierarchy of humans, and rulers must restrict free inquiry and exploit the mediocrity and vice of ordinary people so as to keep society in order. This is obviously a bleak and anti-utopian philosophy that goes against practically everything Americans want to believe. It contradicts the conventional wisdom of modern democratic society."
However, this is a Humean/Burkean conservative view. It is one of resisting liberal and radical calls for "transparency" in social life precisely because they understand that society cannot withstand a too systematic or energetic analysis of its sometimes fragile foundations.
This Burkean/Humean stand of conservatism is not Strauss. He stood against relativism and historicism in the name of natural right:---ie the claim that certain moral truths are grounded in nature, such as the principle that "all men are created equal."