I've been listening to the debates in the Australian Senate on immigration and mandatory detention of refugees.
Conservative politicians in Australia say that every nation state has an unrestricted right to determine whom it shall admit within its borders.
They do not say anything about the duty of the state to admit refugees; or rather not to send them back to the countries from which they have fled to face terror, imprisonment or death.
Do states have responsibilities or duties to individuals (eg., refugees) seeking to enter the land over which it rules?
You don't hear this question asked. You mostly hear about the rights of refugees.
If states have moral duties to other states then what would these be?
Well, Australia has a moral duty not to invade Indonesia save under great provocation. Australia also has a duty to help Indonesia if and when a great disaster befell it---eg., a famine, flood, earthquake or volcanic eruption.
These moral duties are recognized. Australia intervened to prevent the terror killing people in East Timor under the flag of the UN when the Timorese voted for self-independence from Indonesia.
Hence Australia accepted that there are principles governing a state's conduct to those living beyond its borders.
This review of Zbigniew Brzezinski's, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership, looks to be a good article.
I do not read the New York Review of Books much these days. I used to. From where I sit in Australia I sense that something has happened to US liberal culture, though I'm not sure what it is. It appears to have gone defensive. The liberal culture is concerned to repel the radical foreign culture of Europe and has turned inward.
Here is a different suggestion.
The above review starts well enough. It acknowledges the reality that the US foreign policy is currently conducted in tems of a background of anxiety about the growing hostility of the Islamic states toward the US. This is expressed in terms of Samuel Huntington's 'war between civilizations'; with Islamic militants taken as representative of much of Islam and the United States as champion of the West. Australia follows dutifully behind.
The Bush reponse means that we have TERROR --a metaphysical entity--- that disconnects fundamnetal Islam from its history and regional roots.
What I have been trying to do with the previous quotes of Don Watson's Recollections of a Bleeding Heart is to suggest that buried within politics lies a different kind of reason to an instrumental technical one.
What the Watson quotes show is the chaotic life of Parliament and the emotional dimension of reason. It is not unreason. Political reason is a different kind of reason. Watson does not explore this even though hsi book about the conflict between the pointy economic heads and the bleeding hearts within the PM's office.
We can see this different kind of reason at work with the critical ethical responses to immigration and refugee policy that has been classified under border protection by the national security state.
It would go like this. Nation states have duties to other nation-states: eg, Australia has a duty not to invade Indonesia except under extreme circumstances; or to come to their aid when disaster befalls them--eg. the Bali bombings.
So political reason has an ethical dimension. That ethical dimension used to be articulated by social liberalism in its concern for the welfare state as a way to counter the destructive social consequences of the market. With the marginalization of social liberalism in contemporary political life by a hard core free market economics the ethical dimension of political reason is concealed.
So we have books such as these being written. The ethical state (a state committed to the common good and equal opportunity), which was a central tenet of the social-liberal theory that emerged in Britain in the late nineteenth century, has been consigned to the historical dustbin. The ethical state was a central tenet of the social-liberal theory that emerged in Britain in the late nineteenth century and it was embraced by the new nation of Australia in the early twentieth century.
The ethics of social liberalism was re-interpreted in Australia as the 'fair go', and gave rise to the distinctively Australian institution of wage arbitration, public education, parks and pensions, as well as equality of women and men.
The narrative says that a century later, the idea of the fair go still resonates in political rhetoric; but the ethical state of social liberalism has become a tarnished ideal. The dream of the ethical state lies in tatters, eroded by economic rationalism and user-pays ideology, and degraded by political machination and corruption. The social-liberal vision of the state as a vehicle for social justice is seen to have run its course?
The ethical dimesion of political reason resurfaces in the critical response to the mandatory detention of refugees by the national security state.
Within this call of a more humane treatment of refugees can be heard the echoes of the ethical state of social liberalism.
In an interesting post called Literature's Gift, which is about finding the culture of the Times Literary Supplement arid and dry (I too am repelled by that literary culture), Lars makes a passing comment. He says " Perhaps I should admit that I am not up to writing on politics." In reading that sentence I thought it is very hard for philosophy to engage with the actuality of politics. Politics is so different to reason.
How so?
In his Recollections of a Bleeding of a HeartDon Watson captures a crucial aspect of politics that is often overlooked. Watson talks of politics in terms of animals capturing, killing and devouring another. The line between triumph and despair is narrow. What propels you one minute blows back in your face the next. It is a life of intense emotional ups and downs.
He then offers a description of Paul Keating, the former Australian PM. Keating, Watson says, was governed by an instinct or calculation that not all human action derives from, or responds to, reason. Watson says this means that:
"...there is an impulse to war and self-destruction, a need for faith in things that are not rational, and a tendency to chaos--perhaps because chaos has cleansing or redemptive qualities."
How can that be expressed in terms of philosophy? It is difficult. Another word that is often used is rat cunning of the politician as a street fighter. They have the smarts to make it up as they go along in a world of Heraclitean flux.
When you think about it Thomas Hobbes got it right. It's all about frightening people in need of security. Frightening them into accepting that protection from the fear (of terrorism) requires obedience.
When I taught Hobbes in an undergraduate course at university I tried to make sense of Hobbes in Marxist terms. Hobbe's insights I opined could be viewed as being a political philosophy based on free competion of the newly emerging capitalist market. That is one way to interpret his state of nature and his view of humanity.
My experience in working in the heart of the political machinery of federal parliament is that Hobbes expresses a fundamental presupposition of politics and politicla philosophy.
The state of nature is the expression of the unreason of politics. It is what is concealed by normal political realities. It is a world of evil (treachery and savagery), dynamic chaos and destruction.
Here is a good description of a day in Parliament from Don Watson's Recollections of a Bleeding Heart of working for the Keatign Government just after the 1990's recession.
"The government bounced along from a set of encouraging economic figures to a set of bad ones; from an exhilerating spurt to a depressing stumble; from good poll to bad; from good news to gruesome. You would read the press clippings at 9.am and feel confident then read the press clippings at 10 and felt it was hopeless. A kind of progress had made but satisfactory and reliable traction was never achieved. So much emotional turmoil is at least as addictive as it is destructive. Sometimes there was nothing, as if a frame had been cut from the film: everything stopped in mid-stride, instant doldrums, as if one had walked into a black hole in a familar corridor, and a few strides latter the depression---if that's what it is---would lift and the drama would start up again."
Notice how the description is all about emotion not reason. Inside the Prime Minister's Office is run on chaos as well and making it up as you go along. A world of unreason.
It is interesting the way myth still grips so strongly in modernity shaped by Enlightenment rationality. Myth is not some wild exuberance of a fervid imagination. It is integrated into economic rationality.
An example?
The belief, nay the faith, in the markets being self-correcting and tending towards equilibrium.
The hubris of the economic reason was its failure to admit that the market had failed in the recession of the 1990s and that the government was obliged to mop up the mess that had been created.
Nope. The recession was a process of cleansing: Australia would come out of leaner and meaner and more efficient. The recession was de-spiving the economy; a cleansing of the nation's arteries.
I want to try and describe in Australian history that captures the hubris of economic reason by drawing on Don Watson's Recollections of A Bleeding Heart.
If we return to the recession of the 1990s we find that the economic reformers reckoned they had done their great works. The revolution was all but complete. A bit more work was required in mircro-reform ---eg., deregulation and enterprise bargainining on the waterfront and the labour market-- but they had got things to the point where market forces would pull the economy up. That day of sunshine was just around the corner.
That was the one truth. Everything else was a sideshow--history, philosophy, sociology human suffering. These were follies. The one big truth was that markets were self-correcting and tended towards equilibrium. Any state intervention to help the hundreds of thousands thrown out of work was counterproductive.
Schmitt is putting forth a stark thesis about economic rationality in modernity.
He is saying that an economic/technical rationality promises salvation---a heaven on earth--- but such an enlightening reason actually delivers destruction and despair, which may not be recognized as such.
A good example of this in Australia is the clear felling of Tasmania's old growth forests. The promise is that this will deliver heaven on earth by way of economic growth, jobs and rising incomes. It results in ecological devastation. This is not recognized as such by the politicians.
This overlaps with the key thesis of Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. This thesis is stated thus:
"In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant. "
As we have seen in Roman Catholicism and Political Form Schmitt counterposes Catholicism to the valueless rationality of economic technical reason. Political form refers to a particular Catholic conception of Europe that is counterposed to a Europe ruled by, or under the sway of, an economic-technical rationality. It is a conception of Europe that asserts and represents substantive human valuies.
Schmitt's reason for making the turn to Catholicism is that Catholicism is concerned with human beings as such and with the normative guidance of life.
In Roman Catholicism and Political Form Schmitt writes:
"Catholic argumentation is based on a particular mode of thinking whose method of proof is a specific juridical logic and whose substantive interest is the normative guidance of human life."
It is a different kind of rationality to that of economic/technological reason; one that is disturbed by the valuations of the market. This instrumental reason favours numbers over human life; cannot make, or is unable to make a distinction between a silk blouse, poison gas and old growth forests. These are just commodities to be bought and sold. What matters is profit, jobs and economic growth.
Hence an instrumental economic reason that governs public policy arouses fear and loathing.
The disposal of romanticism as an irrational subjective aestheticism clears the pathway for Schmitt to introduce Roman Catholicism as a way out of the form/content dualism of modernity.
Roman Catholicism addresses the meaningless of a secular (Protestant) liberalism by providing normative guidance for human life. Hence it is a thinking otherwise to the value neutrality of a economic/technical thinking that is normatively contentless.
This move would be seen as very attactive in Australia. Many Catholics of my acquaintance remain with Catholicism because ot its substantive ethics. It provides them with an ethical framewok from which they can judge everyday life in a secular world. They tacitly accept that an economics, which that shapes policy and action in the public sphere, is a positivist science. Hence it is weak in terms of ethics.
What ethics there is an individual one that based on human emotions or desires. The ethical language is seen to be emptied out of substantive content, and it offers little by way of guidance to live one's life or make judgements about the goodness or badness of public policies.
The ethics of Roman Catholicism are consistently rejected by those who shape public policy in our political institutions---the church should not interfer in public life. Often the Catholic values are collapsed into "traditional values"; and are roughly dismissed by liberals within our political institutions as irrelevant and dangerous. They question the liberal way of way which is assumed to be good.
What is not questioned in such knee-jerk responses is the ethical vacuity within liberalism in its current form as an economic/technical reason.
The argument so far is that Schmitt, along with a host of others--eg., the Georg Lukacs of History and Class Consciousness,-- found Weber's ethical responsibility standing in resolute opposition to an abstract reason untenable. Both make a Hegelian turn to concrete being against Weber's neo-Kantian duality of value-free reason and value.
In making this turn Schmitt does not see the concrete and the qualitative as something that is pre-modern and counterposed to a formal and quantitative instrumental reason. Or as needing to be willed into the modern present. He holds that modernity produces its own form of the concrete and qualitiative.
So Schmitt understands modernity in dualistic terms that are interrelated. Thus an unrestrained, irrational subjectivity is interrelated with a hyper objectivity of abstract reason.
What then is the modern form the concrete and the qualititative? Schmitt identifies the modern form of subjectivity as romanticism---by which is meant subjective expression that aesthetizices objects. Romantics seek out objects and situations as occassions for the expression of their subjective feelings. This romanticism has a latent irrationality. Romanticism both celebrates the concrete and particularity and infuses the technologically disenchanted world of modernity with meaning and value.
This is not a historical argument. It has relevance today in two ways.
We find the dichotomy of abstract reason and a private romantic subjectivity within the contmporary liberalism; whether this be the economic or political variety. I have mentioned the duality of economic instrument reason and irrationality before. But political liberalism also works in terms of public reason's formally public bounds of liberal politics that are maintained against expressly individual romantic sensibilities.
Secondly, aestheticism is alive and well. Aestheticism has come to be the:
'....spiritual link between the individuals of the industrialized world, the shape of our ethical life. We now equate a meaningful life to the pursuit of unique experiences. We speak of an ideal life that is rich in encounters with the world: one should travel, one should develop one's tastes in art and music and food, one should have variety, one should be open to new experiences, one should "experience" love, one should even "experience" God. '
In Political Romanticism Schmitt tackles romanticism. He analysis and criticizes the romantic movement for performing a dangerous form of poetization and aesthetization. He argues that there is nothing wrong with aesthetics qua aesthetics, provided it remains within its own sphere. What romanticism does is to aestheticize everything.
What then is political romanticism? It is left wing revolutionary action that views history as the univeralsing of Enlightenment values. It is intervention into, and control over history, through revolution, It is also the counter-revolutionary notion of history as the organic development of a people to block a leftist revolution.
One would expect the universities to stand in resolute opposition to rationalization, instrumental reason and quantitative-technical thinking. Since they stood for older and different values then they could do the job that Weber's responsible individual could not do. They stood individual subjectivity or experience, knowledge for its own sake, truth, scholarship, critical thinking, non-vocational education, local particularity and so on.
In the last chapter of Death Sentence Don Watson turns to the universities and their resposnse to the decay of public language and the public sphere. He asks: 'Did they stand firm against manageralism and international corporate speak?' Watson says it was not to be. The universities embraced the world of business and public relations with enthusiasm. Watson writes:
"In institutions where we might expect the most resistance capitulation was complete. Managerialism came to the universities as the German army came to Poland. .....Those who insist that words should mean something can take the redundancy package and motor off in their Wolseleys. They can sit out their lives reading Plato and drinking cask claret while the real academics get on with teaching customers and strategising at retreats...What is truth? Bah! Socrates or Plato? Kant or Nietzsche? Does it really matter? The debates at the centre of Western civilization are now truely academic because they cannot be conducted in the language of managerialism or taught under managerial criteria in universities."
Now Watson acknolwedges the implicit nostalgia about he good old days. He says:
"It is possible to acknoweldge, as this refugee from academia does, that universities were barely half what they claimed to be and badly needed dragging towards the realities of the late-twenetieth century life, yet see no reason why they should give the language of an institution of learning and take up international management speak."
So what do we do? Mock them, says Watson. Never stop mocking them for using this impoverished language. Challenge the use of this language. Well, the universities did and they defended the older values. But the state used the market as a solution to its imposed financial squeeze to turn the universities into corporations.
The process of rationalization continued apace. it has been quickened with globalization. So we have justification to look at how Schmitt responded to this process and assess his attempts to use Hegel to find a way to think otherwise.
We can ask: What did the Catholic turn open up on the pathway of concrete being and local particularity?
Let us accept Weber's account of modernity as reasonable.
Modernity, for Weber, is the culmination of a rationalization process that is driven forward by modern capitalism, and which results in the hegemony of the abstract quantitative thinking, instrumental reason and the domination of nature by the natural-technical sciences.
It is reasonable because we are living through a new form of the process of rationalization at the moment. The neo-liberal process of globalization, which is being driven and shaped by global corporations, is a continautiono f the process of rationalisation.
My time in Canberra in the last two weeks was spend dealing with the abstract quantitative thinking of the number crunchers who dealt with costs generated by computer that modelled the behaviour of a nation. It was was all about numbers--ever changing numbers; numbers that never stood still.
My response to this? Concrete particularity. This person in this particular place engaged in these particular tasks in this particular practice.
Webers' idea of the responsible, ethical individual standing firm with his hand on the wheel of history and then acting resolutelyin reaction to the process of rationalization looks very shaky. It is not plausible as a critical-historical standpoint, since it implies that such an individual stands outside the process of rationalization. Something more convincing is required, than this kind of Nietzschean romanticism about the sovereign individual. Weber's romanticism can be caricatured as 'life verses the machines'. It opens the door to, and can lead to, irrationality.
Schmitt responds to this Weberian romanticism by scorning and repudiating aesthetic romanticism as irrational. He picks up on Hegel's working through the duality of duality of the abstract positivist thinking of the mechanistic world view (Descartes, Hobbes and Kant) and concrete being. Hegel's working this duality is based on the insight that individual subjectivity is a part of the objective order.
Schmitt re-deploys this in terms of a Catholicism that is sensitive to local particularity, and this provides the basis for a conservative critique of economic-technical rationality.
Weber counterposed ethics to the iron cage effects of both the hegemony of instrumental reason and the process of rationalization wherein life becomes no more serious than sport and death loses its resonance.
The ethicsof responsbility was linked to a call to politics. By this Weber meant leadership, charisma, elites and responsibility. The responsible political individual must act ethically to seize the wheel of history: 'Here I stand; I can do no other.'
Is there not a latent irrationality here, since the normative content of this political romanticism remains unspecified in this call for the subjective stand of the practitioners of responsibility.?
Is there is not a Ceasarism implied here with this conception of political responsibility. For instance, a parliamentary leader whose conviction, charisma and popular authority can hold the technocrats, bureaucrats and the party hacks without conviction and ingenuity at bay and accountable.
The leader runs the show. The leaders political show can be based on untruths or a cynical pact with the electorat--eg. George Bush and John Howard on the need to invade Iraq.
In making the return to Carl Schmitt we are really returning to the territory mapped out by Max Weber, with his idea of modern rationalization, formal rationality and irrationality. Weber--like many neo-liberal economists today--- saw irrationality as confronting the system (and language) of rationalty of modernity.
Weber saw irrationality as something external or prior to a formal Enlightenment rationality--the "warring gods"; as a reaction to the ongoing process of rationalization or as a deviaton from rationality. In other words irirationality is either a modern remnant of an irrational past or a contemporary flight from an overly rationalised present--the iron cage of modernity.
The flight account is what many contemporary liberal economists hold when they give an account of the negative reaction within nation states to the process of globalization. What is taken for granted here is instrumental rationality and so the the blind domination of nature is not questioned; nor the functional means towards senseless purpose.
But why cannot a formal instrumental rationality foster irrationality? Why not think in terms of there being an intrinsic link between an abstract Enlightenment rationality and irrationality?
That is what Schmitt proposes along with the Frankfurt School. It is a more dialectical account, which mediates between the oppositions of instrumental rationality and irrationality.
Here is one account. The economic stance noted above is Weberian, in that it values a model of scientific reason that is itself value neutral. The problem is that this model of instrumental reason as a means without a given end requires the supplement of the very values it denies. But since these values by definition elude rational evaluation, this requirement inevitably places reason in the service of the irrational.
The last posts, which have quoted Don Watson's Death Sentence, at length, have given a number of examples of the poverty of public language. This poverty or decay has arisen from the impact of the corporate world on parliamentary politics. Politicians now talk in business speak.
That is how Don Watson understands the decay of public language in Australia.
I would now like to contextualise Watson's argument in a broader philosophical context.
One way to do this is to link back to an earlier post on Carl Schmitt's understanding of liberal modernity and the way that economic-technical discourse eradicts particularity. This formal mode of thinking reduces all qualitiative difference to quantitative difference in that it makes no difference between a silk blouse and poison gas. Both are simply commodities to be bought and sold in the marketplace.
Schmitt understands this economic/technological rationality as sapping all social relationships of any humanity through its abstract impersonality. This instrumental rationality is concerned with the quanities its calculates, not the qualities it affects.
What is gained by this return to Schmitt? A critical way of thinking otherwise that does not have much public presence in Australia. This way of thinking that sees technology as a way of thinking (economic/technological rationality) that is concerned primarily with the manipulation of matter;. saps the world of meaning; and establishes the possibility for novel and harsher modes of domination. So Schmitt has a lot in common---affinities---with Weber and the Critical Theoriests of the Frankfurt School.
What is common ground here is that the view that bureaucratic liberalism, legal positivism, the political primacy of the economic, and machine technology itself are all epiphenomena of instrumental reason, or modern metaphysical technology.
Schmitt counterposes a political Roman Catholicism to the abstractly formal economic rationality in technological modernity; a quite different response to say Bataille, who turns to the body, romanticism (surrealism) and inner experience.
Cliches are everywhere in public language. An example? The word 'customer.' It's a market or business world meaning purchasers who exchange money for commodities.
Fair enough. It makes sense does it not?
But it becomes a cliche when universities have customers and bureaucracies have customers. And when does the CIA have customers.
Very odd.
Does the national security state have customers? Hardly. It has internal and external enemies.
In Death Sentence Don Wilson writes:
"There is an argument that goes, as the public realm declines so must the public language. An empty public realm means an empty public language in proportion."
Rarely do you hear a contemporary politician say now is the time to speak the truth, frankly and boldly. That is not what the media want to hear when they construct an election as a race to the line between two personalities.
And I'm sympathetic to what Watson says next:
"Politics is an argument; it engages the intellect as well as the emotions. When only the emotions (or the prejudices, or the fantasies, or myths and ideology) are engaged, we smell deceit. We think the chances are we're being fooled or short-changed; and if we don't think it, chances are we have been."
In Death Sentence Don Watson says that in a democracy it pays to listen carefully to the ways words twist and conceal reality in a way that incites contempt and fear. He provides an instance----moral clarity:
"Moral clarity is not so much an idea as a buzz word: a you're in/you're out word...It's an intellectual way of saying , 'Just do it!' and watching to see who jumps. The enemies of moral clarity are waverers and bleeding hearts, who are, the argument goes, moral relativists. Moral relativists are, if not friends of terrorists and rogues, less patriotic and American than Americans possessed of moral clarity. Moral relativists are closely related to cultural relativists and it is cultural relativists, of course, who tie the country in knots pleading multiculturalismand the rights fo non-English-speakers."
I'm due to catch a plane in an hour or so. So I'll make a note here and try to come back to it sometime tomorrow. The text I want to introduce is by Stephen Granville from the Lowy Institute for International Policy. It is called 'Globalism: an unfinished business' and it was published in the Review section of the Australian Financial Review (subscription required, 5 March 04, p. 9).
Granville's article (see link on right side of webpage ) responds to the John Ralston Saul article, 'The end of globalism'.
What we can infer from the Saul article is the imbalance between global market forces and the capacity of national governments to control them. Granville targets what he claims is Saul's nostalgia for the nation-state.
A lot of the article is devoted to an argument that states Saul is confuses globalism (a neo-liberal ideology) with globalization (the process of integration): he makes a category mistake that is very common in the debates over and around globalization.
I will try to find the time to explore the Granville article in more depth tomorrow.
Update
I'm too busy to probe the Granville article. It has been long hours of work in Canberra. I've been contracted to do a job in the theatre of democratic political life. It's a 7am to 11pm day with little time for play.
Some days latter
I've finally found a spare moment.
Granville basically clears away the exaggerated conceptions of globalization (ie., different forms of globalism) of th starry eyed globalisers to uncover the core of the globalization process. The core is described thus: technology links nations; the efficiency gains from technology; poverty comes from disconnection from the global economy; individual national culture is the outcome of people's choices.
That core indicates that we should reject the option of turning away from globalization and concentrated on analysing the deficiencies of globalization and making a concerted effort to address them. He then gives some indication of what this would mean: more international rules to regulate the global economy; addressing the democratic deficit in global institutions; and recognizing the imperfection of the free market and restraining it's international flows.
All of that is perfectly acceptable.
Granville then argues that Saul confuses a process --globalization as increasing international integration--with an ideology. That is claimed rather than argued for. Granville quickly moves on to target Saul's focus on the rebalanciing of the binding rules for both the public good and self interest with the nation-state.
Why? It should be done from with the global world and no the narrow confines of nation state.
Why the preference for cosmopolitianism?
We Australians should step forward eagerly to embrace the global world, turn benefits to our advantage and get into the global rule making business. That implies working within citizenship of a nation state is turning ones back on the global world. It's an either or that Granville presents.
What hogwash. There is a lot of middle ground inside the duality. Granville's text is an illustration of what Don Watson has been saying about the decay of public language.
I'm back home for a day or so. I'm exhausted. I fell asleep as I started on a yesterday's post.
In his 'The end of globalism' John Ralston Saul writes:
"Ideology, like theatre, is dependent on the willing suspension of disbelief. At the core of every ideology lies the worship of a bright new future, with only failure in the immediate past. But once the suspension goes, willingness converts into suspicion - the suspicion of the betrayed. Our brilliant leaders abruptly appear naive, even ridiculous.And so, in the late 1990s, our disbelief came back, and with it our memory. The years between 1945 and 1973 no longer seemed such a failure. In fact, it had been one of the most successful eras in history for both social reform and economic growth. It was something to build on, to reform; not something to dismiss."
Suddenly, it was no longer a Malaysia or a Brazil defending the nation state against international flows of people and capital. The old world of the conflict of national self-interest in an anarchic world returned, as the US attacked Iraq in trhe name of preventive war.
What also returned was the old language of nationalism, empire and imperium. The 21st century starts with the borderless world of globalization giving way to American empire.
Saul says that:
"What this [the return of the nation-state] might mean remains painfully unclear. Here we are, rushing around one of those sharp corners with no idea of where we are going. Perhaps back to the worst of old-style negative nationalism. Or perhaps on towards a more complex and interesting form of positive nationalism, based on the public good....The world turns, shifts, takes a new tack, or retries an old one. Civilisation rushes around one of those blind corners filled with uncertainties.Then, abruptly, the opportunities present themselves to those who move with skill and commitment."
In Death Sentence Don Watson writes:
"We citizens have intuition, natural scepticism and powers of analysis to go on, but we still rely on facts and in the end have to trust our leaders to tell us what is actually the case. Whether it's a lie, a half-truth, a weasel word, a banality, a buzz word or a cliche, if we are misled by it our rights are reduced in proportion. Words are bullets. They are also good for smothering, strangling and poisoning, and for hiding murderous intentions from our victims (and sometimes from yourself)."
An example? How about the loss of jobs that has been happening for the past two decades. First, it was the loss of jobs in manufacturing in the 1980s due to the effect of globalization in reducing tariff walls. Though the lost jobs were replaced by new part time jobs, one gained the impression that we were witnessing the begining of the end of the era of mass factory labour.
Now it is the loss of jobs in the services industry: in banking, insurance, and the wholesale and retail. The introduction of smart technologies into every aspect of the business operations is eliminating support personnel in the process. The decline in white-collar jobs is shadowing the decline in manufacturing jobs as companies and whole industries become connected in a global neural network. Hence the outsourcing of telecommunication and computing jobs to India.
These themes run through the American presidential election, as John Kerry talks in terms of the treason ('Benedict Arnold') of the corporate chiefs in outsourcing jobs to India and other low-wage markets. Others talk in terms of the trade threat posed by China.
The economists say that although technological gains and advances in productivity destroyed old jobs, they also create as many new ones. The argument is that though technological innovations throw some people out of work in the short term, the productivity gains allow firms to produce more goods and services at cheaper costs. This results in an increase in demand for the cheaper products and services, which will assure additional hiring down the line to meet expanded production runs.
Textiles or manufacturing go only to be replaced by information technology and biotech.
Is this happening? Are there new nascent industries forming that will mop up the surplus workers?
We seem to be living through a situation of both productivity increases and increasing unemployment. More workers seem to be let go from the workforce that there are new ones entering the workforce. The language of politicians disguises this situation and covers it up when they talk about economic growth creating jobs.
Still on the road.
Don Watson in Death Sentence writes
"Democracy depends upon plain language. It depends upon common understanding. We need to feel safe in the assumption that words mean whatt they are commonly understood to mean. Deliberate ambiguity, slides of meaning, obscure, incomprehensible or meaningless words poison the democratic process. They erode trust. Depleted language always comes with a depleted democracy."
I'm on the road again.
In the political world of parlaimentary politics people do not trust politicians. They see their gestures (bodily and verbal) as unnatural and rehearsed. They wear a public mas,
Don Watson, writing in Death Sentence, puts it this way:
"...people notice something unnatural in their gestures and something distracted in their expression because the politician can't hide the fact that he's waiting for the chance to say what he has been primed to say, and when he gets that chance he jumps at it with unantural haste."
They speak to the commonplace without expressing the ambiguities or contradictions of a situation. They indicate that the politicians are more interested in marketing their message, than saying what they mean is a clear enough way so that the electorate can understand.
The tacit assumption of this kind of discourse is that the electorate is dumb and stupid. They are not really acknowledged as citizens.