Philosophy.Com

on holidays

I'm going on holidays to Wilsons Promontory, in the south eastern of Australia.I will be posting some photographs and commentary on junk for code and trying to follow the news as best I can on public opinion. I need a break.

It's not likely that I will be able to access the internet much on the road or at he Prom, and I'm not taking any philosophy books with me.

the growth of surveillance

The growth of surveillance (the proliferation in its forms, the refinement in its technologies, and the expansion in its use) clearly finds its correlate in popular cultural representation. The sinister character of such monitoring--- the “rise of surveillance society”--- has been a recurrent feature in cinematic representation and street art.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, surveillance, Hindley Street, Adelaide CBD

In Foucault’s schema the effectiveness of the Panopticon is linked to a whole host of disciplinary interventions, including drills that train the body, regimesthat closely regulate schedules of activity, and swift interventions that punish deviations from the prescribed norm. Such a panoply of regulatory, instructive andcorrective techniques of “normalisation” are simply not present in the surveillance and management of free populations in extra-carceral settings.

Do these apply to the surveillance of CCTV?

Skinner on Hobbes + the state

In this extract from a transcript of Quentin Skinner interviewed by Nigel Warburton for the podcast on Philosophy Bites on Hobbes and the state Skinner says that Hobbes’ Leviathan, is essentially a theory of the state:

Leviathan is the state and the question really is, what is the state? And it’s important that Hobbes is writing in the context in which the concept of the state was very widely employed in political argument: but it tended to be associated with a view of popular sovereignty. So the state is simply the name of the body of the people organized for political power. So you can talk about the whole body of the state. What’s crucial in Hobbes’ political theory is that he thinks that the idea that the people is a body is itself an illusion; there’s no such thing as the body of the people. There are only individuals. So the question, ‘how does the state arise and what is the state?’ is a question that Hobbes asks anew. Because he repudiates the fundamental assumption that generates the idea of the state as the body of the people.

what Hobbes is doing is to reverse the idea that the body politic creates the state and saying it’s only through having a sovereign that you gain a body of the people - otherwise it’s just a mass, a multitude of individuals. Hobbes is vehemently opposed to popular sovereignty.

Skinner says:
A

nd when we appoint a sovereign we say keep the peace. We’re not scrupulous about how you do that. We can’t do it, we’re at war. But if we give you all power, you can keep the peace. So Hobbes’ point is that is representative government. So he upends the whole tradition of how we used to think about representative government. And in a way his is the tradition that we’ve inherited because what we do is we appoint our representatives for 5 years. There’s nothing much we can do about them, because we’ve given them sovereign power to make the decisions about what they think is in our interests. And Hobbes’ is saying that’s what we must do. And if they go to war in Iraq and you think that’s the biggest disaster in recent times, it’s really not for you to say that according to Hobbes. Because what you did was give them power to make that decision. And what you also did was to agree that you would not question that. What we find difficult is that latter point.

from welfare to opportunity society

In the Weekend Australian David Burchell turns to Hegel's remarks on wisdom in the Philosophy of Right to gain a perspective on Australian politics. He quotes Hegel's remark:

"The owl of Minerva flies at nightfall." This sounds suitably mysterious, but Hegel's meaning was simple enough. We acquire wisdom only when it's too late, was his drift. Or, if you prefer: the wise become wise only when their wisdom is of no earthly use.Hegel was thinking of his fellow philosophers. But his words also hold true for politics, where prophets and seers are in equally short supply and where their absence is more keenly felt. Indeed, they may serve as an epitaph for the end-career wisdom of John Winston Howard.

The interpretation of Hegel is a bit off as it has little to do with wisdom having no earthly use or the lack of prophets in politics. So what insight does this give us? The Howard government has run out of puff. Burchell says:

During its first three terms the Government did indeed broach important new directions beyond the specific brief of monetary and fiscal policy. Think of work for the dole and mutual obligation measures, the Job Network, family and marriage policies, and the "practical reconciliation" approach in indigenous policy. You could like these policies or hate them. But even critics had to admit that they were innovative and they were clearly aimed at pressing social problems: the disengagement of the unemployed from the workaday world, the incapacity of the old commonwealth employment service to create job-ready citizens, the epidemic of marital break-ups, the crisis in remote Aboriginal communities. Even today Job Network is being studied overseas as a new experiment in job placement. You couldn't say the same about anything the Government has done since the 2004 election.

We do need to acknowledge that Howard's Government has done a good job, economically. We've had a resources boom unmatched perhaps since the gold rushes of the 1850s and the wool boom of the 1950s. The Howard era as a period of economic growth, high employment, low inflation and low interest rates. But its humanitarian and civil rights record--- the incarceration of David Hicks, the lengthy detention of asylum seekers increased surveillance counter terrorism powers--- has been terrible.

So how does the past inform the future, which is what Hegel was arguing?

Howard has offered a vision of the future with his from a welfare to an opportunity society riff taken from Tony Blair. The welfare state was the past, the opportunity society is the future. Howard had a glimpse of new philosophy in welfare and social policy in the last days of the election campaign. Burchell says that:

Howard may just have offered up, wrapped in ribbons and all, the kernel of a new welfare policy theme for a Rudd government. A dramatic reform of the welfare system that aims at giving all Australians the opportunity for personal independence, autonomy and security, on the model foreshadowed, if never actually completed, by Blair .... since 2004 the Blair-Brown Government has [experimented] with what it describes as personalised social services and shifting health policy away from dealing with disease and towards creating individual wellness.

Will a Rudd ALP put the individual at the centre of social services and shifting health away from dealing with disease and towards enabling indivdual wellbeing?

Australian Republicanism and Public Health/Education

The 19thC Australian Republican philosophy, best represented by Dan Deniehy and Charles Harpur, was an evolutionary step from the American Republicanism of the 18thC. Australian Republicanism was also partially influenced by the American transcendentalists who were their social peers of the time, however, Deniehy and Harpur did not embrace the socialistic and communistic components of the American transcendentalists.

Australian Republicanism owed much of its political philosophy to the clash of the conservative strictures of the Old World [Europe] with the optimism and opportunity of the New World [Australia]. Additionally it was a time of constitutional activity in New South Wales and Victoria who came to constitutional self-government during the period. We know Dan Deniehy as the great orator through his Bunyip Aristocracy speech opposing a constitution containing a New South Wales House of Lords.

Sadly, Australian Republicanism has been largely forgotten in Australian history and politics. Which is a massive oversight as the 19thC republicans added not only to the philosophy of Australian Republicanism but to Republicanism itself as a political philosophy and science. The challenge for 21stC Australian Republicans is to explore the 19thC republican philosophy in the modern context and determine where it can still inform social organisation, liberty and public policy; and where it requires an evolution from its basic principles to apply to the modern world. This includes areas of public policy such as the economy, education and health.

To start, some modern context in public demand from an article by Peter Martin:

Their conclusion is that shoppers mean what they say in surveys [about a willingness to pay more for fair trade products]. They are prepared to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to fair trade. At least in New York. Its a business opportunity going missing.

I have a feeling that its the same with Australian voters and spending on hospitals and schools. We mean what we say. And we are prepared to give up tax cuts to get it. Can anyone see a political opportunity going missing?

This is consistent with Harpurian Republicanism where maximum liberty allows for greater individual moral expression. In this case the moral choice is a fair trade product over a sweatshop one despite the fair trade product being more expensive.

The liberty inherent in economic liberalism/rationalism and the capability for producers to bring a greater array of products to the marketplace and increasing consumer choice, allows consumers to balance economic and moral aspects of the commercial exchange. Liberty becomes a vector for individual moral expression.

So how does a public health and education system reconcile itself with Harpurian Republicanism and Deniehyian Democratism. Wouldn't a state run system limit individual moral expression in health and education?

Deniehy was opposed to the mingling of church and state, to the point that his clashes with the NSW Clergy while he was a NSW Assembly representative left him ex-communicated from the Catholic church. This separation of church and state extended to religous schools:

My own belief is that the greatest amount of freedom from the shackle of the state would be the best security for the Church obtaining its widest sphere of influence for good.

Deniehy would not be impressed with the Australian national government funding private religious schools. So Deniehyian Democratism does not include the public funding of religious schools. However in an article, "Our Country's Opportunity" Deniehy writes of the role of government in public works:

The subject of public works is one that will come before the Legislature, recommended by the Government; and we are of the opinion that this matter; joined with the questions of education and immigration, is paramount to all others, and will conduce more immediately to the prosperity of the colony than anything else that can be devised by the most fertile imagination.

Prosperity becomes the point at which state support for large capital works and services can be considered. This must still be compatible with maximum liberty for it to come under the description of Australian Republicanism.

By public works Deniehy meant road and rail to connect the colony economically and its lines of communication so that the "entire population ... [be able to] bring themselves into direct intercourse with each other". He was in Goulburn at the time when he wrote this so was probably very sensitive to the tyranny of distance from Sydney.

Deniehy wanted immigration to match the labor demands of the economy. Which is a very modern view of the state's influence on the economy and its management, as well as the role of an immigration policy. Australia currently has a testing regime for its immigration that effectively matches the skills of an immigrant to the demands of the Australian economy.

Deniehy does not elaborate what he sees public education being in that article but in another titled, "Legislative Advancement of Knowledge", Deniehy writes about Democracy being incomplete and subject to tyranny and mob rule unless there was universal education. Education becomes an obligation a democracy must bear to be described as the 'state'.

Note however that the goal is a universally knowledgable, informed and educated population for republicanism and democracy to be sustained. If universal education can be achieved privately then it is compatible with Harpurian Republicanism or Deniehyian Democratism.

Deniehy writes:

One of the prime duties of a government in any country is the education of its subjects. When it has provided schools for the young, its responsibility has by no means ceased. It has merely taken initial and rudimentary proceedings. It has merely trained the infantile and youthful mind as far as these can be trained.

It has only put intellectual tools and implements into the hands of its pupils, the due use of which in after years very considerably depends on further provision which this said government is bound to make.

The education of a man is never at end: it goes on always in this world - goes on, too, perhaps for ever in this context.

He continues:

The State is bound to provide, as far as its means will allow, institutions which may carry on the education of the man long after his nonage. This done - then with the individual who has neither tastes nor inclination for pursuits which alone impart to him power and individual happiness, the fault of wanting both alone lies - the State has done its part.

Deniehy's idea of education included the public funding of libraries, art galleries as well as schools and universities. Australia was an impoverished literary nation in the mid-19thC. Deniehy owned one of the biggest private libraries in Sydney at the time. Books are much cheaper now and the internet is almost ubiquitous which has changed that landscape.

His view on universal education is that Democracy is incomplete without it and that it is an important component for an individual to make moral choices; socially, economically and politically. Knowledge becomes the path to moral expression.

Deniehy does not dictate a curriculum or a christian view of morality, knowledge becomes an intrinsic individual and public good where moral decisions become inherent from that education. Morality is not taught, rather knowledge leads directly to good moral choices. This includes the morality of liberty and the morality of democracy.

Deniehy died in a Lithgow street. He collapsed, vomiting blood from his mouth and nose. His body had been wracked by the alcoholism of his later years. Public health is mainly a modern policy from the 20thC. Deniehy would still have died if he been alive today, alcoholism does that, but at the first sign of collapse he would have been whisked away by a Lithgow Ambulance.

Can we extrapolate what Harpur or Deniehy's position on public health would be if they were around today? Harpur and Deniehy were technologists who saw Republicanism as an organisational technology which maximised liberty, minimised tyranny and enabled the greatest individual moral expression.

They recognise the limits of a technology and its imperfectability, just as they recognise the moral imperfectability of an individual in humankind's current moral growth.

The economic technology used for health is insurance. This is a technology that handles economic risk for catastrophic and one-off events. As a technology to handle recurring catastrophes it is a complete failure. As an example home insurance which covers a cyclone hitting once every one hundred years is acceptable risk. Insurance to cover hurricane hits every second year is where the technology fails. This is why insurers won't cover people in Florida for this recurring catastrophe.

Insurance is incompatible with recurring health issues. It is great for the one off event, like a heart attack, but inappropriate for preventative medicine. Until we discover new economic technologies or completely commoditise the health industry, as we have done with junk food and cell phones, there will be a role for the state in health care. State involvement in health care is a technological issue, not an ideological one.

Ranciere: disagreement

‘disagreement’ is the political concept par excellence. According to Rancière in his Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1998), a disagreement is:

a determined kind of speech situation: one in which one of the interlocutors at once understands and does not understand what the other is saying. Disagreement is not the conflict between one who says white and another who says black. It is the conflict between one who says white and another who also says white but does not understand the same thing by it or does not understand that the other is saying the same thing in the name of whiteness. (Rancière 1998: x)

Rancière’s notion of disagreement refers to an internal periphery, a site of antagonism around a word or concept. For Rancière, that word is equality.

The text is a critique of what he called the “police”—that is, the way in which a society assigns roles, places, and identities to its members. Much of this critique is directed at proponents of consensus democracy, to which Rancière has two main objections: first, that these societies relentlessly produce individuals and groups that take no part in the system of politics by consensus; and second, that democracies produce communities that are configured in such a way that individuals are counted according to ethnic or national identities rather than political potential.

According to Rancière, disagreement is what happens when the consensus is broken, when nonparticipating individuals demand their part in society and assert, through their speech, their equality.

Mark Latham on modern politics

Mark Latham, the former leader of the ALP, has an article in the Review section of the AFR called 'Merging into Nothing' (subscription required) on modern politics, federal elections, public policy and governance. It's an interesting argument and as the article is not online, I will spell out the argument.

The political class and the media hate Latham with a vengeance because he exposed their under the table workings in his insightful Latham Diaries with this truth telling about the dark heart of Australian public life. He had argued that our political culture is ‘broken’ and he exposed the claustrophobic, unhealthy and curiously apolitical relationship between journalists and politicians. The political/media response was to create an image of a wild, howling monstrosity who should be laughed at, ridiculed and despised.

They ignored Latham's argument that the conditions that sustained the old social democratic ‘project’ of the earlier twentieth century no longer applied, and that we needed different, more dispersed, solutions. So the political/media crowd will, more than likely, dismiss rather than engage with yet more truth to power, which steps behind the veil of the ongoing economic twitter and political chatter. You can find comments at John Quiggin.

Latham starts innocently enough, when he says that:

...the two trends, the rise of globalism and self-reliant individualism, have hollowed out the role and effectiveness of the nation state. It has less work to do. And with less work, there is less to argue about across the party political divide. In large part, this explains why the great ideological struggles of the postwar decades have disappeared, replaced by the modern pattern of policy convergence and manageralism.

Who could disagree with that pattern? its why we find this election campaign so boring and tedious. Nothing much happens at a policy level. The differences are blurred and muddied so much that we are unsure of who holds to what policies.

Latham then says that the policy convergence on a neo-liberal mode of economic governance--- balancing budgets, corporatising services, privatising assets and mimicking the methods of the private sector-- has transformed the nature of politics. He adds that the major parties at election times spend large amounts of money on telephone polling and focus groups to find out what the public are thinking. A core message comes out of this group: money.

He's pretty right on that too. The dollars are being tossed everywhere by everybody with promises of lots more. It's around $50 billion of them so far, with another $20 billion or so to come.

It is money and how to put more of it into the pockets of middle class voters in marginal seats. Latham says:

Hence the emphasis on campaign issues such as tax cuts, interest rates and penalty rates--the so-called financial pressures facing working families. Social democratic concerns such as community building, public participation, poverty alleviation and the redistribution of income and opportunity have fallen off the political agenda. Indeed they are perceived as an obstacle to winning power...Consequently, in this campaign, neither party has been willing to embrace social justice or redistributive strategies

A period of policy convergence poses new challenges for the political system. The major parties need to develop new arguments to convince their supporters that differences still remain between them and their opponents; the media need to create new issues and controversies to maintain their commercial viability as it is difficult to fill the news bulletins each night withe same old story about policy consensus.

This regime of truth means that:

The nation state has less work to do , but the political class needs to keep itself in work. When no issues exist politicians have an interest in manufacturing them, creating an artificial sense of crisis.All political representatives and candidates do it. I certainly did it. It is the nature of the system. The media, with its propensity for exaggeration and hysteria, is happy to play along. It is worth asking , however, are we really a nation in crisis or does the political system have a vested interest in spinning misinformation to this effect?

He addresses this question by looking at several current crises---housing affordability, hospitals, skills, climate change that currently circulate through the political system. These are seen as spinning misinformation camp, then he introduces a real crisis:

The greatest threat to the corporate world is from the culture of consumerism and its corrosive impact on nature. Capitalism is eating itself alive. And no truly global institution or policy tool has been developed in response. The nation state, the dominant political institution of the past two centuries, is ill-equipped to deal with the problem. My judgement is that global warming will worsen considerably before decisive action is taken. By necessity this will involve rethinking the West's materialistic values and developing a new economic and social order.

Latham then comes back to the current election and makes some critical comments about a Rudd Labor government would mean in actuality. These comments will be picked up by the media to create controversy, and then seized upon, and twisted, by Coalition politicians to attack the Rudd ALP as a duplicitous entity that we should be scared of. Latham says:

Undoubtedly, many people in the Labor movement are expecting Labor in power to be far more progressive than its stated election promises....I think that the reverse is true. I expect a Labor administration to be even more timid, more conservative. This has certainly been the pattern at a state level...this is precisely what a new labor ministry will do: pandering to the conservative interest groups, enjoying the comforts of office, and, over the long term, trying to establish itself as the natural party of government. Any attachment to radicalism and progressive reform in the ALP ended a long time ago.

So if people vote for a change in government in this election they will be replacing one conservative administration with another. No matter which party wins Australia will still have:

a conservative economic policy and a decentralised productivity-based industrial relations system...a conservative foreign policy dominated by the United States and its mis-management of the so-called"war on terror"....still have conservative social policies: overfunded elite private schools, huge subsidies for private health insurance and bucket loads of middle-class welfare.

Latham finishes by saying that we have reached the zenith of of policy convergence in Australian public life. Everything else is just play-acting, a bit of media melodrama to keep the public entertained. Australia, he concludes, is having a Seinfeld election, a show about nothing. This is the bit the media picks up on.

market follies

Bruno Gullì in The Folly of Utopia in Situations says that some theorists hold that it is a sheer folly to imagine a radically different world to the present one. Utopia, in other words, cannot be imagined.

Amartya Senin his book, Development as Freedom, says that “we have to avoid resurrecting yesterday’s follies that refused to see the merits of – indeed even the inescapable need for – markets”. Coupled to this is Friedrich Hayek’s “chastising description of the communist economies as ‘the road to serfdom’, which has played a key role in the ‘revolutionary’, neoliberal policies of Thatcher, Reagan and Howard.

One of these ‘follies’ is contained in Karl Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation, where it is shown that the problem is not the market per se, that is, the practical institution whereby useful things are exchanged, but an economy “controlled by markets”, which Polanyi calls a “self-regulating system of markets. The latter is no longer simply a practical reality, but one which has a formal and political set of institutional moments and apparatuses; we are tempted to say: an institutional institution. This is the neo-liberal critique of the social democratic critique of the market economy institution that ensures the capitalist economy is geared toward profit, and profit only.

Sen’s book is a defense of capitalism on the basis of a shift from the emphasis on human capital and economic growth
to a new emphasis on human capability and freedom where the former modality is not replaced but only supplemented by the latter. It t is difficult to see how this capability can become actual in a system, which, in order to function, needs to reduce or annihilate it in the first place.

Ranciere: "philosophy" and the "political"

In Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy Jacques Ranciere explores the relationship between "philosophy" and the "political" in the context of age-old attempts in philosophy to answer Plato's devaluing of politics as a "democratic egalitarian" process.

Today politics is subsumed either under some idea of proper governance (capitalist liberal democracy), religion ("the clash of civilizations"), or morality (the nebulous humanitarian care for the distant other). It is mostly performed as deciding over the destiny of the people removed from the domain of the people themselves; making decisions on the people, for the people, instead of the people. Rancière opposes against this an understanding of politics where politics is nothing but the appearance of the people, the construction of a scene on which the people occur as a political subjectivity.

Foucault: the police

The notion of police in Foucault’s work is an important concept in Foucault’s major writings, and appears in numerous places in his lectures and shorter pieces. Foucault, of course, is using police here in the broader sense – an almost Hegelian sense– rather than a uniformed force for the prevention and detection of crime. Like Hegel’s sense of police, Foucault understands the concept as concerned with regulations in a more general sense for the smooth running of society, for good government. It is the politics of maintaining order.In this sense police is concerned with the general set of rules and regulations for the government of a society, a rationality, a way of thinking.

overconsumption

The over-consumption story dominates every discussion of the financial condition of America’s families, but when all the changes in family spending over the past generation are added up, a very different picture emerges. Families are spending less on luxuries and more on the basics of being middle-class. Even with two people in the work force, today’s families trail those of a generation ago in the struggle to make ends meet—to pay for their homes, health insurance, transportation, and child care.