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November 14, 2007
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?
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Gary,
talk of an opportunity society is merely rhetoric if it is approached with a neo-liberal, individualistic famework. As you will know Hegel himself was deeply suspicious of unrestrained liberatrianism and absolute autonomy as an ethical basis for a society or polity. His definition of freedom (in another of your blogs) attests to that. I tend to to agree – how can you not when the man who speaks of “a world in love”??
Sure, individuals need to take responsibility for themselves... but what if their upbringing and socio-economic circumstances have failed to furnish them with the requisite apparatus to do so? (What Amartya Sen calls the “ability to desire” in his critique of individualism and utilitarian economic theory).
We need to relax our myopic focus on individuals and acknowledge that we are collectively responsible for each other. Reducing the inequity that exists in our education and health care systems would be a good place to start. It would also help to water down the rationalist, neo-liberal assumptions that underpin our models for human behavior, preferences and actions and form the basis of our economy. Instead, an ethic of solidarity and social cohesion should be used as a platform. There is fairly consistent empirical evidence that shows the nations with the least economic inequity and social stratification to be the healthiest (in terms of proxies such as life expectancy, morbidity etc.). I think that this is the way to tackle public health problems. Approaching 'welfare' the other way (individualistically) perpetuates the 'blaming culture' and inevitably leads to isolation and disenfranchisement, and therefore welfare dependence. Seems a bit self-defeatingly circular to me.