A quote from Ramond Gaita
"Cynicism, if it has not descended into nihilism, is often a species of thoughtlessness, and thoughtlessness as pervasive as the kind that shows itself in cynicism is not in the end a deficiency of intellectual skills, not at any rate, of the kind that can be taught in the way logic can be taught. We can teach people to reason better. Logic in schools would be a good idea. But we cannot teach them to use those logical abilities in the service of truth rather than to win arguments, or to refine capacities for self-deception."
I found so much of academia like that.
We can rework what Gaita is saying. Logic in schools may be a good idea, but criitcal thinking would be even better. But we can teach them to use those logical abilities to affirm life rather than to win arguments.
Truth needs to linked to, and placed in the service of, the values of the good life.
It is difficult to do since many of those people committed to reason (science) had such thin skins that they savaged one another at an attempt to debate issues seriously. They were often so emotional and outraged. Philosophical differences became personal and bitter.
They, in my experience, were usually the positivists or the Marxists who defended the ethos of the enlightnenment.
Gaita's argument now shifts away from the decay of political language to defending the idea of politics as a vocation based on love of country. He does so by mentioning an objection:
"The idea of politics as a realm sui generis - a realm whose distinctive concerns are not merely the satisfaction of our pre-political interests (security, economic wellbeing and so on and nor merely a combination of these and moral concerns) - has its dangers. Its potential slide into romanticism is obvious enough."
Gaita responds to the above objection by saying that idea of politics as a realm sui generis merely elaborates the:
"...implications of what it means to have that identity-forming attachment to a country that we call patriotism and distinguish it from its false semblance, jingoism."
"It is just a fact of human life that many, perhaps most people, develop identity-forming attachments to places and to institutions. Not all of them, it is true. Trees have roots whereas human beings have legs, author George Steiner reminded us. But most people don't like to wander all their lives, especially not at the beginning of their lives nor at the end. The human soul needs warmth, and for most people that comes from belonging, from being in surroundings that are familiar and to which they have affectionate attachments.For most people, their deepest attachments are local, to a particular part of a country, perhaps a farm or a town, sometimes a city."
Gaita says that often this love of country comes into awareness when we have lost our country in the sense that:
"....and live under foreign occupation, denied the right to speak their language, to honour their national institutions, to fully remember their past and to pass on its treasure to future generations. In such terrible circumstances people realise that responsible love of country will seek protection for what is loved and is owed to future generations. In modern times, the means of protection is almost always the nation state, for it alone has the necessary military power, of itself, or more commonly, in alliance with other nation states. Protection is sought not just for the institutions of citizenship - the rule of law, democracy and so on, as these might be relatively interchangeable between different countries - but also for those institutions as they are infused by the spirit of a particular people."
The above paragraph can be interpreted as a response to Chris Sheil's objection that he has no idea of what Gaita is talking about. Chris says:
"....the essay slips and slides its way along, completely discombobulating me about two-thirds of the way through by conflating 'love of country' and my own idea of 'belonging', which again presses on my reject button. All in all, as I can't really tell what he's talking about, or as I can't accept his emotional and personal premises, I've no idea if he makes his case."
What is the problem here? Love of country has been distinguished from jingoism and internationalism and identified with attachments to place (locality and region), to the country (both landscape and institutions) and to a responsible love (care and concern) that seeks to protect what is loved (valued) and owed to future generations (eg., healthy rivers and good universities). It is about both democratic institutions and the Australian development and understanding of these ---eg., the welfare state.
Do we citizens not want to use politics to protect our universal health care ssytem and our wilderness areas? Protect them because they enable us to live a flourishing life, well lived?
In the previous post Gaita had argued that the implication of the connection between truthfulness in politics and love for country is that ethical considerations are integral to a serious conception of politics. Gaita mentions the Aristotlean (and Marxist) dictum that the ethical requires completion by the political, without mentioning what that actually means.
He argues for a modification of this by considering a classical objection, that ethics and politics are in deep ways irreconcilable. He mentions Plato and Max Weber's 'Politics as Vocation' essay.
His argument modifies the Aristotlean dictum by acknowledging the need for politicians to have dirty hands. Gaita says that:
'Readiness to do evil when it is necessary to safeguard the conditions of political communality is, as Weber put it, the most salient aspect of the "ethic of responsibility" that defines a political vocation. But it defines it only when it is in genuine tension with what he called the "ethics of absolute ends."....Politicians must, as politicians, sometimes do what morally they must not do. That dilemma, soberly acknowledged, constitutes the misery and the dignity of a political vocation.'
"Politics that avoids or subverts that tension declines into moralism of a kind that threatens the conditions of political communality, into reckless adventurism or into the ruthless pursuit of economic or strategic interests justified by appeal to necessity when none exists."
He says that acknowledging the reality that politicians must sometimes lie if they are honourably to rise to the responsibilities of their calling "is a far cry from the cynical expectation that politicians will lie to protect their parties and even their careers."
That is fair enough. Then he makes a good point about our political language:
"Because our political language is now so debased, we think little of the difference between what belongs to the very nature of politics, and what, contingently if pervasively, politicians do. There is no good reason to think that our expectation that politicians will routinely lie to promote party and career is an insight into the nature of politics. It seems, to the contrary, to reveal incapacity to understand the possibilities in politics. Our cynicism is not so much a moral failing as it is the expression of how impoverished our life with the language of politics has become."
What this part of his argument is trying to do is to show that the flaw in someone who says that politics is always answerable to the ethical. His argument is that such a position :
"...is as dangerous to a sober sense of political responsibility as the belief that it is never answerable to the ethical. In their different ways, but just as surely, each undermines an understanding of the integrity of a politics that must rise to a lucid love of country. Most - perhaps all - loves stand in complex, sometimes tense, relations to ethics. Love of country is no exception."
"The essay gets off to an impossible start, imo, by standing on the notion of 'love of country'. Can you 'love a country', I immediately wonder? What is love? What do we mean by 'country'"?
"A sign of the conceptual loss that I have been pointing to can be seen in the fact that in the universities, serious talk of a vocation gave way to talk of a profession and that in politics, talk of a vocation moved quickly past talk of a profession onto talk of a career. Perhaps that is why so many people accept that there is nothing in the very nature of politics, as there is in professions like law or medicine, for example, that should make politicians ashamed to lie as often as they seem to - ashamed, not just as human beings but as politicians. Few people believe that politicians who lie regularly disgrace their profession. The ethical standards of a profession do not only regulate the conduct of its practitioners, they define what it is to be a professional of this or that kind. Were they merely regulative rules, like the rules of the road, observance of them could not be a deep source of pride and satisfaction, so deep as to be partly constitutive of a person's identify."
He adds that our failure to see politics as more than a career is more than the effect of longstanding disillusionment with the conduct of politicians.It is also about our historical memory that what were once standards constitutive of an honourable profession (and before that, a vocation) are now merely rules (considerably relaxed) that protect us from the low behaviour that we have come to expect of many politicians.
Hence the decay of our political language. Raymond Gaita says that he puts his point about the decay of political language (ie. a conceputal loss) because it would be misleading to say that we have ceased to believe in vocations. He says:
"We have not, for good or for bad reasons, come to believe that the concept of a profession is better suited to characterising the defining responsibilities (in both senses) of teaching, nursing, doctoring and so on. Rather, the concept has fallen away from us, or perhaps we from it. We see it only intermittently and dimly. Certain ways of speaking have gone dead on us."
What replaces this old way of speaking and acting (comporting) is the scripted and rehearsed language of political marketing.
There is an essay by Raymond Gaita, the Australian Catholic philosopher, on truth in politics in Friday's Review section of the Australian Financial Review. This is a topical issue given the Children overboard affair in Australia in 2001, the bad reasons advanced for the Iraq war, and the Swift Boat Veterans affair in the current US presidential race. Truth in politics is about trust in politics.
Basically Gaita ties a practical conception of truth in politics to patriotism (love of country,) and he sees the mendacity of the Howard era as polluting that love. He re-establishes the classical tradition between ethics and politics in which the ethical requires completion by the political and the political is answerable to the ethical.
I will spell out Gaita's argument because it is a complex one, and few people would argue for the truthfulness in politics from the perspective of a love of country. Christopher Sheil says that he cannot even understand what Gaita is talking about. Many would be, and are, sympathetic to this response.
Gaita starts argument by introducing Paul Keating's Redfern speech:
"Even if the lies of their politicians do not at all affect their material interests, pervasive mendacity can defile citizens' love of country, making it impossible for them to love clear-sightedly without pain. In one of the great speeches of our recent history, former prime minister Paul Keating expressed his pained love for Australia in the shame he felt because of past injustices and our refusal to acknowledge them adequately in full truthfulness. "We took the traditional lands, committed the murders, took the children," he said in his 1992 Redfern address."We need to tell the truth in politics because of our concerns about our countryin which we live. Gaita says that the 'we' in the above passage refers to:
"...a "we" of fellowship - the kind people mean when they suffer together or rejoice together, or the kind they mean when they speak of their common mortality and intend to refer to more than the fact that all human beings die."This fellowship (fraternity) is a political one of citizenship.
Gaita then goes onto link truth to a need for truth.Truth and truthfulness matter to us in politics for at least three reasons. He describes the first reason thus:
"Most obviously they matter because they bring practical benefits. We....want our bridges to stand, our doctors to cure us, our lawyers to defend us competently, and so on.....we even encourage people to seek truth for non-practical reasons - for its own sake - because we hope that it will increase the yield of groundbreaking work."
"....the truthfulness of the institutions that can give her the information she needs - most obviously, independent media. Those institutions are the instruments that are necessary to satisfy a need for truth that is not itself instrumental. It is consistent, however, with that kind of need for truthful institutions - political and others.."
"... Lovers of their country [needing] politicians to honour that love. Citizens who also love their country can hold their politicians to account when the mendacity of their politicians affects their material interest and when it undermines their capacity of be lucid about important events or aspects of their lives. They can also hold them to account when their mendacity defiles anything that counts as the serious love of country."
"An adequate conception of the national interest will include our interests as citizens but it will also include our interests as patriots. Inclusion of the latter is not consistent with a conception of politics in which truthfulness is needed only for the former - to satisfy the first two of the three concerns that I elaborated earlier. To put it simply: no one who believes that love of country matters can seriously believe it is in the national interest to undermine the conditions that make lucid forms of it possible."
Love of country is Gaita's touchstone. What does Gaita mean by that?
Gaita makes two points. He says that we can distinguish the real form of love from its many false semblences (eg., infatuation) and that the language of love works with distinctions between truth and mendacity. He then poses some rhetorical questions:
"Why then should we not conclude that those Australians who do not care about the mendacity of the Howard era cannot rightly describe whatever attachments they have to Australia - even if they are fierce - as love of country? Would we credit anyone with a serious conception of the love of country - a conception that is distinguished from jingoism - who denied that mendacity could pollute that love? And can anyone seriously deny that Howard's government has been deeply and pervasively mendacious? "
"Howard's cynical pact with the electorate - he insulates himself from the truth and much of the electorate lets it pass for so long as its material and security interests are satisfied - has undermined the possibility for Australians to celebrate lucidly the love of country that he so often professes to feel and to have promoted."
What is problematic with Gaita's argument is the way he makes fraternity and love of country the end point of truthfulness in political life. We need truth about political life, not to just to celebrate our love for country, but to help bring about or realize the good life. So we love our country because it has that political form of life which enables us to lead the good life----a flourishing life well lived.
Gaita has a truncated notion of the relationship between ethics and politics.
My emphasis on communitarian politics within a liberal society is designed to highlight the community activism component that is often premised on contesting the actions of the state to defend local communities.
The local example of community activism is one of a local community in the Riverland section of the Murray-Darling Basin protecting their old growth habitat from the salt interception schemes being built by the state to protect local irrigators. Here people are organizing themselves into a formation that stands between the state and the individual.
This community activism has three aspects. It forges civic bonds, brings politics down to its human level, and that is able to resist the various pressures bought to bear on the local region by state authorities.
What is not happening is tha the political structures are not changing to allow communities to be more self-regulating and self-governing. Nor is there much encouragement from local and state authorities to enable individuals to become citizens who participate in the decison making. That remains firmly centralized in the state.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a bit rough on communitarianism. It says:
" ....when the term community is employed by political communitarians, it seems to mean anything they want it to mean. Worse .... it has often been used to justify hierarchical arrangements and delegitimize areas of conflict and contestation in modern societies. Still, it is possible to make sense of the term community as a normative ideal."
On the other hand, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does recognize is the republican tradition within communitarianism, with its "vision of strong democracy supported by active, public-spirited citizens who participate in political decision-making and held shape the future direction of their society though political debate."
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on communitarianism says that:
"In retrospect, it seems obvious that communitarian critics of liberalism may have been motivated not so much by philosophical concerns as by certain pressing political concerns, namely, the negative social and psychological effects related to the atomistic tendencies of modern liberal societies. Whatever the soundness of liberal principles, in other words, the fact remains that many communitarians seems worried by a perception that traditional liberal institutions and practices have contributed to, or at least do not seem up to the task of dealing with, such modern phenomena as alienation from the political process, unbridled greed, loneliness, urban crime, and high divorce rates."
In many ways this eco-communitarianism is in opposition to the strident rights rhetoric that is beginning to colonized contemporary political discourse aroudn water. This assertion of entitlement to water as property rights leaves little room for reasoned discussion and compromise,and it justifies the neglect of social responsibilities to the river without which the local communities could not function or survive.
communitarianism is usually connected to place in Australia. Place is understood as a bounded region with a specific identity, such as the Riverland along the Murray River.
This need not imply a return to a to a social order in which individuals are relatively immobile members of communities centred on a definite locale. This generally means dwindling numbers of a rustbelt factory town, or a fishing industry, or a mining centre.
However, there can be a lot of flux and movement within the bounded region or place.
Henry Giroux says:
"We need a new language for politics, for analyzing where it can take place, and what it means to mobilize alliances of workers, intellectuals, academics, journalists, youth groups, and others to reclaim, as Cornel West has aptly put it, hope in dark times."
Henry Giroux sees that neo-liberalism is not just about the governing free markets with the light hand of regulation. He rightly sees it as a political philosophy. He says that neo-liberalism:
".... is also a political philosophy and ideology that effects every dimension of social life. Neoliberalism has heralded a radical economic, political, and experiential shift that now largely defines the citizen as a consumer, disbands the social contract in the interests of privatized considerations, and separates capital from the context of place. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism portends the death of politics as we know it, strips the social of its democratic values, and reconstructs agency in terms that are utterly privatized and provides the conditions for an emerging form of proto-fascism that must be resisted at all costs."
If democracy has no roots in community, then are the roots of democracy today? They used to be in the nation-state during modernity. Is it in the socal contract? Is that looking back to Locke?
What the neo-liberal focus on rights, markets and self-interest decision making of utilitarian individuals misses is the communitarian idea of attachments and sharing of civil society.
For the communitarians we enter a world of shared institutions that shape our social identity and desires. We find that our fate is tied up with that of the institution, that we are dependent on others and we share a world of common meanings.
This idea of community provides a basis to counter neo-liberalism.
Another quote from Henry Giroux:
"The liberal democratic vocabulary of rights, entitlements, social provisions, community, social responsibility, living wage, job security, equality, and justice seem oddly out of place in a country where the promise of democracy has been replaced by casino capitalism, a winner-take-all philosophy, suited to lotto players and day traders alike. As corporate culture extends even deeper into the basic institutions of civil and political society, buttressed daily by a culture industry largely in the hands of concentrated capital, it is reinforced even further by the pervasive fear and insecurity of the public that the future holds nothing beyond a watered down version of the present. As the prevailing discourse of neoliberalism seizes the public imagination, there is no vocabulary for progressive social change, democratically inspired visions, or critical notions of social agency to expand the meaning and purpose of democratic public life."
So we have the formal equality of human beings before a central state authority.
In contrast to the forgetting of the democratic tradition by Hardt & Negri in Empire Henry Giroux both highlights that tradition and says how it is being undermined by neo-liberalism. The title of his paper is Neo-liberalism and the demise of democracy.
Giroux says:
"In its capacity to dehistoricize and depoliticize society, as well as in its aggressive attempts to destroy all of the public spheres necessary for the defense of a genuine democracy, neoliberalism reproduces the conditions for unleashing the most brutalizing forces of capitalism. Social Darwinism has been resurrected from the ashes of the 19th century sweatshops and can now be seen in full bloom in most reality TV programs and in the unfettered self-interests that now drives popular culture. As narcissism is replaced by unadulterated materialism, public concerns collapse into utterly private considerations and where public space does exist it is mainly used as a confessional for private woes, a cut throat game of winner take all, or a advertisement for consumerism."
Henry Giroux does acknowledge social conservatism, but he does so in wholly negative terms. He says:
"As neoliberal ideology and corporate culture extend even deeper into the basic institutions of civil and political society, there is a simultaneous diminishing of non-commodified public spheres —those institutions such as public schools, independent bookstores, churches, noncommercial public broadcasting stations, libraries, trade unions and various voluntary institutions engaged in dialogue, education, and learning–that address the relationship of the individual to public life and foster social responsibility and provide a robust vehicle for public participation and democratic citizenship. In the vacuum left by diminishing democracy, religious zealotry, cultural chauvinism, xenophobia, and racism have become the dominant tropes of neoconservatives and other extremist groups eager to take advantage of the growing insecurity, fear, and anxiety that result from increased joblessness, the war on terror, and the unraveling of communities."
What has happened to community, tradition and heritage? Is not liberalism a tradition?
The constellation of community, tradition and heritage offers an alternative to the standard liberal individualism of neo-liberalism; a different way of configuring the relationship between individual and society. A philosophically informed communitarianism would hold that:
it is not the case that the social world is composed of individuals;
the locus of value is not just the individual: it is also the community or institutions of which the individual is a member;
the range of values that need to be considered are not just individual ones: the values of recipriocity, trust, solidarity and tradition are important
These considerations cannot be reduced to religious zealotry, cultural chauvinism, xenophobia and racism.
Another quote from an article. This time it is to an article on neo-liberalism written by Henry Giroux. He says:
"As the laws of the market take precedence over the laws of the state as guardians of the public good, the government increasingly offers little help in mediating the interface between the advance of capital and its rapacious commercial interests. Neither does it aid non-commodified interests and non-market spheres that create the political, economic, and social spaces and discursive conditions vital for critical citizenship and democratic public life. Within the discourse of neoliberalism, it becomes difficult for the average citizen to speak about political or social transformation, or to even challenge, outside of a grudging nod toward rampant corruption, the ruthless downsizing, the ongoing liquidation of job security, or the elimination of benefits for people now hired on part-time."
However, there has been political resistance to this decline of public life and neo-liberalism from One Nation nationalists and environmentalists. It was most evident in the resistance to the Free Trade Agreement with the US, which was seen as slicing off a piece of Australian sovereignty.
A quote from the neo-liberal articleby Henry Giroux:
"Central to both neoliberal ideology and its implementation by the Bush administration is the ongoing attempts by free-market fundamentalists and right wing politicians to view government as the enemy of freedom (except when it aids big business) and discount it as a guardian of the public interest. The call to eliminate big government is neoliberalism’s great unifying idea and has broad popular appeal in the United States because it is a principle deeply embedded in the country’s history and tangled up with its notion of political freedom. And yet, the right wing appropriation of this tradition is racked with contradictions in terms of neoliberal policies."
Another link. This time it is to an article on neo-liberalism by Henry Giroux. He says:
"Free market fundamentalism rather than democratic idealism is now the driving force of economics and politics in most of the world, and it is a market ideology driven not just by profits but by an ability to reproduce itself....Wedded to the belief that the market should be the organizing principle for all political, social, and economic decisions, neoliberalism wages an incessant attack on democracy, public goods, the welfare state, and non-commodified values."
A review of Carl Schmitt's Legality and Legitimacy, which was published one year before the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933.
I haven't read this text. I am currently reading Political Romanticism.
This is most disconcerting. The High Court, by a 4-3 majority, ruled that unsuccessful asylum seekers who could not be removed to another country, despite their wish to leave Australia, could continue to be held in immigration detention indefinitely.
In effect, stateless people are prisoners. Or more specifically, detention must continue until an unlawful non-citizen is either removed from Australia, deported or granted a visa.
Consider this case:
"The first case involved Ahmed Ali Al-Kateb, 28, a stateless Palestinian who was born and lived most of his life in Kuwait. He arrived in Australia in December 2000 and applied for a protection visa. That was in turn dismissed by the Immigration Department, the Refugee Review Tribunal, the Federal Court and the Full Court of the Federal Court. He then told the department he wished to leave Australia and be sent to either Kuwait or Gaza. In February last year he initiated Federal Court action claiming he was being unlawfully detained. The Federal Court held that he was not unlawfully detained although there was no likelihood of his removal in the reasonably foreseeable future."
This article by Karl E. Meyer in the World Policy Journal highlights the concern many Australians have with the imperial Bush presidency.
Meyer traces the imperial tendencies to the state paper, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, of September 2002. This states:
"The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single, sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise.”
“We will cooperate with other nations to deny, contain and curtail our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies. And as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed [because] the only path to peace and security is the path of action.”
What this gives us is the Bush offensive against any treaty, compact, protocol, or convention that in might in any way limit America’s freedom of action. Nothing must limit America's course of action.
Parliament is a strange place. It is currently ruled by a discourse of free market ideas about wealth creation being the end of public policy co-mingling with social conservatism.
Today the social conservatives--the religious right--were having their shindig in the Great Hall. They--anti gay groups and evangelical Christians-- were in Parliament to talk about traditional marriage between men and women. They--the Australian Christian Lobby were there for a forum on marriage.
So how does their brand of social conservatism fit with the free market economics that drives public policy?
The Coalition is going to reintroduce proposed changes to the Marriage Act to confirm that marriage was a union between a man and a woman, to the exclusion of all others. Here is the argument advanced by the Prime Minister:
"I support marriage because I believe it provides stability in relationships, because it is a public expression of commitment, but it is also the environment in which children are best raised and nurtured and brought to full adulthood and enjoyment of life's opportunities. Now, many marriages fail. We all know that. That doesn't of itself and should never of itself damn the institution or suggest that other relationships can have the same status as marriage."
"We all know from life's experience that longstanding institutions provide encouragement, they provide hope, they provide emotional support, and they also provide a practical way of helping people through life. I have often said that a stable, functioning, united home and marriage is not only the best emotional environment in which to raise children, but it is also the best and most efficient social welfare system that mankind has ever devised....There are many in the community who have no religious beliefs who believe very strongly in the core institution of marriage. There are many in the community who believe in its bedrock value. There are many in that category in the community who have the view that I hold, that all other things being equal, it is far better that children be raised in a married home with the benefit of both their mother and their father."
No justification is given for why same sex couples are worse parents than heterosexual couples. The implication is that children will suffer by being parented by same sex couple families.
A good example of downsizing democracy is the Free Trade Agreement with the US, even though serious concerns have been raised about the deal.
The negotiations for this agreement have taken place behind closed doors and will be legally binding on all levels of government with little amendments being made to the enabling legislation for the FTA, which is currently being passed in the Australian parliament. It is all been rushed through in due haste with little by way of due process
This agreement grants transnational corporations an investment agreement with a complaints mechanism which would enable foreign investors to challenge laws which harm their investments and to sue governments for damages. The model preferred by corporations is the infamous disputes process of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada and Mexico. Corporations have used this process to sue governments for millions of dollars on the grounds that environment or health and safety legislation has harmed their investments.
Most of the new environmental regulations in the Murray-Darling Basin are designed to claw back water for environmental flows and protect the regions biodiversity. These regulations harm the profits of agribusiness hence compensation needs to be paid for the restrictions on trade.
Australian citizens have no say in this even though it impacts on their attempts to repair the ecological damage wrought by past economic growth.
This is an interesting thesis. The reviewer of Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public by Matthew A. Crenson & Benjamin Ginsberg states it simply. He says that the authors state that:
"....for more than two centuries ordinary citizens have served as the “backbone of the western state” (p. x), but, they contend, emerging political relationships at the national level of U.S. government are rapidly bringing the era of the citizen to a close. Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, the authors assert, policy elites became disengaged from the political public because a mass base was no longer needed for influencing and manipulating public policy. By documenting the evolving disregard for citizen judgment and influence in national policy circles, this book confirms that the creeping sense of political impotence spreading across the United States is not without foundation."
Robert Heineman is the reviewer writing in Independnet Review. He elaborates the above thesis by saying that Americans have been transformed from citizens who are effective political participants into customers who are recipients of government services. Citizens have been marginalized as political actors. Their leaders no longer need concern themselves about collective mobilization of opinion because, intentionally or unintentionally, they have disaggregated the citizenry into a personalized democracy.
Similarly in Australia. Citizens have been marginalized as political actors and become consumers. What has developed is interest-group liberalism in which government becomes little more than a broker for competing interests, whilst the interest groups function without public support. These interest groups focus on the techniques of policy influence in Canberra and the state capitals rather than on broad political appeal. Consequently, the dynamic of insider-group politics has engendered a public policy bereft of publics.
It is difficult to gist of the rest of Downsizing Democracy. It would appear that non-elected public officials---meaning the federal bureaucracy?--- has become exceptionally adept at disaggregating the political public into personalized interests. These governmental forces--the bureaucracy?---seek greater distance from a democratic base.
In Australia it is not likely that a countervailing political power will develop in the form of political parties who move toward mobilization of wider publics, or act to support more institutionally responsible government. The political parties themselves have increasingly moved away from their democratic base. And they have little incentive to make the federal government more democratic. They find the corporate style of governance suitable and they are unwilling to embrace democratic reform
Another English review of Germaine Greer's recent Whitefella Jump Up. It says that the book is Germaine Greer's brilliant and original - but highly provocative - solution to Australia's problems. If we grant her account of something has gone terribly wrong with her Australia (native country): --the trashing the environment, being a racist settler culture and the white culture being spiritually desolate.
On this English interpretation Greer's suggestion white Australians adopt a "hunter-gatherer lifestyle means that Greer:
'...wants every Australian whitefella and whitesheila to sit down in front of a mirror and say, "I live in an Aboriginal country". She says that this simple declaration could change Australia and its relationship with the rest of the world. "All the trappings of fake Britishness could be ditched" and "with one bound [Australia] could free itself from its spurious identification with the WASP 'axis of evil'". [Greer says that] "If we followed the Aboriginal course, we could follow the Aboriginal precedent and simply absent ourselves from activities that we knew to be evil and pointless." Most important, accepting that Australia is an Aboriginal country could save the environment. "Whitefellas simply look away when I point to the devastation inflicted on the island continent," she writes. "The denial of the disaster continues; the devastation accelerates."'
Greer's idea of Australia as an Aboriginal republic is a counterpoint to running away from the ecological devastation. She says:
"Australia doesn't owe whitefellas (including me) a living. They should stop ripping its guts out for a pittance, and sit on the ground. Sit on the ground, damn you, and think, think about salination, desertification, dieback, deforestation, species extinction, erosion, suburbanisation, complacency, greed and stupidity. As if."
Why not engage with Australians are trying to do in caring for their country instead of just damming them?
From this perspective of Australians tryingto do something to restorethe ecological devastation Greer is not forcing Australians to think the unthinkable at all. Nor is her account one of using written English as a polemical weapon to provoke fresh thought on the issue of ecological devastation.