August 27, 2004
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."
Gaita says that the second reason why truthfulness matters in politics is the need for:
"....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.."
Gaita says that the third concern for why truthfulness matters in politics is:
"... 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."
Gaita then says that tying truthfulness in politics to love of country does not mean equating our need for truthfulness with the national interest:
"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."
So the guiding criteria for our need for truthfulness in politics is not truth as correspondence with a fundamental reality, truth as coherence of theory, or truth as a hermeneutical disclosure. It is a practical conception of truth based on our needs as a political beings who love for country they inhabit.
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? "
Gaita then answers as follows:
"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."
The implication Gaita draws from this argument is that ethical considerations are integral to a serious conception of politics. This makes contact with the classical Aristotlean tradition of political philosophy.
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.
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Whatever, I think the idea of 'love of country' is completely cracked. If you think I'm being 'dishonest and 'cringing', I'd reply in similar tone that your fawning attitude exhibits feeble-minded apologia. It's a wank!