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Raymond Gaita: truth in politics#1 « Previous | |Next »
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.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:50 PM | | Comments (8)
Comments

Comments

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!

CS,
I gave reasons on your post for my criticisms and so was engaging with your post.

To recap, you are being dishonest because you love Bryon Bay as a place but you think the idea of love of country is cracked.

the cultural cringe criticism was posed as a question because you could make some sense of love of country as belonging with respect to Italy and not Australia.

In contrast you adopt a polemic tone that dismisses rather than engages. It is polemical because you give no reasons for your claim that my "fawning attitude exhibits feeble-minded apologia".

If you had read the 3 three posts more carefully you would have find 3 lines of criticism opened up against Gaita:
...needing to move beyond love of country to the conception of the good life.
---a questioning of the dismissal of romanticism when he makes use of love of country as spirt of a people
--a failure to link love of country to the environment and a dwelling ethic.

Your polemical tome of "its a wank" dismisses the republican political tradition that has its roots in Aristotle and Cicero. It is a noble tradition that has been lost but needs to be recovered.

So I take your dismissal to be a rejection of political philosophy. Do I detect good old positivism in that dismissal.


What you detect is someone who often reacts sharply to being insulted, instead of being engaged on the merits of the issues. If you don't wish to be called feeble-minded and a wanker, don't accuse me of being dishonest, cringing and gathered up within your presumed political categories. I was replying in line with the annoying standards set by your comments, not the polite terms of my post.

'Love' is a problematic concept (where do I start?), and so is 'country' (surely you are not talking about love of dirt?) So we're dealing with two abstractions, which I'll take my own counsel on, not defer to your republican tradition. If it makes sense to you, good luck, as I happily opened up to in the conclusion of my post. I'm afraid I find the notion meaningless at best (and possibly a sign of sickness, or a fetish, at worst) and, yes, a supercilious wank.

On the other hand, in my own terms, I do feel a sense of 'love' (romantically, humourously, sensuously, which relate to my idea of 'love', not philosophically) for both my ideas of Byron and Italy. What's your problem? You can have your love of country if you like, and I hope the two of you have a great and fulfilling future together. I'll stick with what I love in my terms, thank you very much, if you don't mind, with your permission, sir.

CS
I felt that you insulted Gaita, as you did not engage your concept of belonging with his latter paragraph where love of country is spelt out in terms of attachment to a locality and institutions. I quote:

"...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."

The romantic idea of attachment seems to me to be a reasonable spelling out of love of country.Most people can understand that without much effort-- I gave a link to a recent post over at junk for code.

I would suggest that it is enough of a spelling out for you to engage with re Bryon and Italy. However, I note the continued silence about your "attachment" to Bryon Bay.

The republician political tradition was introduced to support/illustrate Gaita's argument about the loss of political concepts (what I call, following Don Watson, the decay of political language.This was the thread in Gaita's essay that you ignored.

The argument is not about imprisoning your romantic feeling for Bryon and Italy in my presumed political categories.

Surely it is more a case about finding the political categories that allow us to make sense of what many people experience in their every day lives within the bounds of the nation state--attachment to place.

After all Gaita is talking about political life of citizens at a time when neo-liberalism is hegemonic in public discourse.

So I do find your recoil puzzling.


The recoil strikes me as obvious, so obvious I can't see you as being anything but boring and obtuse. I'd say 'dishonest' but I'm not as rude as you seem to feel freely able to be. I did what I consider a fair reading, and reasonably left it open for others to explain or pick up what I missed or what has meaning for them ... and you had the conceit to call me dishonest. So I'm not a happy camper. What you have said I haven't addressed reflects your lack of close attention.

CS,
Okay, I will take back dishonest.

How about a contradiction in what you say between your dismissal of love of country (as in attachment to place) as a wank and you attachment to Bryon Bay.

Aren't you also being rude in going on about 'wank'?

Thanks for the withdrawal Gary. I don't know how you can feel I insulted Gaita by either not understanding or not agreeing with him. If I'd called him 'dishonest' I might agree with you that I had insulted him, but I didn't.

If you go back to the original post, you'll see that I actually wrote: "I love parts of Australia", insert Byron as one example - it's been there all the time, Byron isn't a country, and so I have been unable to follow you. But even here I'm using the term 'love' very loosely, in an attempt to reach out to whatever the hell he's talking about. I don't know what you mean by 'country'. I take it as an abstraction, a political configuration, historical, constitutional, accidental, cultural, whatever ... it is not something I can relate to in terms of 'love' (and which I think people who can must have watched too many beer adverts on tv or something). To my mind it is preposterous.

I think in general positing the extraordinarily problematic idea of 'love' in an intellectual essay is a mistake, without a great deal of definition work. A major further flaw in Gaita's essay is his slide between the act implied in 'love of [an abstract] country' and the recognition and acceptance of a sense of 'belonging', which just happens regardless. One can 'love' parts of the world, whatever the 'country' it may be located in (or however truthful or not the temporal superstructure is), just as you (or at least I) have a sense of belonging to countries (or parts of countries) for which I don't feel something I could reasonably describe as 'love'. Moreover, I feel sure that the specific sense of belonging that I feel about Australia would remain, regardless of the whatever levels of political truthfulness might be, as it is a much more deeply coded and inescapable phenomenon.

I 'love' my romantic, sensuous, duplicitous idea of Italy, as it is virtually a metaphor for real love, but have no sense of belonging to the place; just as I feel I belong in Australia (because that's where I live, work and grew up and where my friends are, etc etc) but don't have a sense of 'loving' Australia. Gaita has made category errors, or at least slides, or at least has not explained himself in any watertight way.

If you wish to read what I regard as a good essay on truth and politics, read Arendt's. Gaita, on this evidence, is in some sort of emotional voluntarist kindy by comparison. But I'm not fussed. Whatever gets you off. It doesn't work for me.

CS,
well you didn't take back 'wank' explicitly, but you have done so implicitly by engaging with issue. And d rightly so because these concerns circulate around citizenship

Let me try and spell out what is going on with this political argument that starts to unpack what is meant by citizenship.

Gaita does interpret his understanding of love as attachment to a place. I happy to work with attachment given the way love has been corrupted by romantic individualism, reduced to loving a particular person and is bounded by the personal.

It is our attachment to a place (or to an institution eg a university) that informs our sense of belonging to (being a part of) that place eg. Bryon. Attachment enables us to talk in the sense of a public or shared emotion.

On some accounts belonging to a place means that our identity is tied up to it, in the sense that a part of our sense of self is connected to that place.

eg. Miy attachment is to the river country because of the importance of River Murray to Adelaide. So I would outline that in terms of an ecological self.

Because our public language has decayed we often express our sentiments by gesturing to the way indigeneous people talk about country(meaning the land where they belong). It is home.When they are disconnected from their country they are homeless and unhappy. They want to return home.

A good expression of this was Rabbit Proof Fence. That part of the film is about more than getting off on what turns you own.

Patriotism as love of country expresses this as nationality--a people belong to a nation-state as they have tried to make it their home. It is their home where they, as citizens, belong.

This is what Australian citizens have tried to do with their country. As a people try to make it something special through nation building.

We do not defend what we have built --from the neo-liberal attacks or foreign invaders ---because of truth. We defend our heritage because it affirms who we are as a people and citizens, and because these institutions and practices facilitate the good life. They express what we are as a people and our loyalty to other members of a political community.

They are what we citizens would lay our life down for if we were invaded.That is what is meant by patriotism.

My point was that our public language has decayed because we have lost the language to make sense of these public emotions. I indicate this that the republican political tradition was very comfortable with this public way of talking about love of country. That tradition, which informed the writing of the Australian Constitution, has been broken backed in Australia. Only scholars talk about it.

Your take on this illustrates my point.You talk about these issues in romantic terms that highlight the individual's response. What is lost is the understanding of individual being part of a people (a nation).

It is now expressed by conservatives. They have captured this way of talking whilst dropping all mention of citizens Much of the left now talks being citizens of the world, not the nation state.