Tom Soutphommasane in his 'Grounding Multicultural Citizenship: From Minority Rights to Civic Pluralism' in the Journal of Intercultural Studies, (Vol. 26, No. 4 Nov 2005) says that whereas theoretical discussions of multicultural citizenship have predominantly focused on notions of minority rights, policies of multicultural citizenship in Australia have emphasized multiculturalism as part of the universal rights and obligations of citizenship.
Multicultural citizenship in Australia have always been couched in the language of universalism and integration. There has always been a concern within Australia that multicultural claims be interpreted as demands for greater inclusion as citizens and not for the fragmentation of the polity into a set of strong and possibly mutually antipathetic communities. Hence the emphasis on multiculturalism as enhancing social cohesion and as set within a framework of shared fundamental values.
Multiculturalism has been understood as both conferring the right to cultural identity and obligations by all Australians to accept the basis structures and principles of Australian society such as the Constitution and the rule of law, toleranceand equality, parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech and religion, English as a national language and equality of the sexes.
Soutphommasane advocates a civic pluralist model of multiculturalism linked to deliberative democracy. He asks: 'Can multicultural citizenship be grounded in a common civic culture?' He responds thus:
This question needs to be answered at two levels...multicultural citizenship must not only recognize cultural difference, but must also provide the basis for a new sense of political identity. I argue in this paper it is indeed possible for a civic pluralist model of multicultural citizenship to meet these tests. However, such a model must diverge from existing multicultural citizenship regimes in practice in two important respects. First, it must allow for an open civic culture, in which the institutions and practices in a particular political community are exposed to scrutiny and re-interpretation. In addition, it must frame political unity and belonging in terms of shared civic competence in negotiating difference, rather than in terms of shared political values. Notions of political unity and belonging relate, in this sense, to the common membership of public debate within a ‘deliberative democracy’.
Soutphommasane argues that:
Multicultural citizenship is not possible if political institutions uphold a ‘core’ public culture that places pressure on diverse cultural groups to assimilate to dominant norms. It instead demands that multicultural societies be prepared to entertain shifts in their political institutions and identities. In this sense, a common civic culture might need to be understood less in terms of an allegiance to shared political values, and more in terms of the character of the public debate within a particular political community. Multicultural citizenship offers a new basis of political belonging based on citizens’ shared experience in negotiating difference. Citizens within a civic pluralist model of multicultural citizenship are thus united by a shared commitment to dialogue within the polity---to the ‘national conversation’, with all its unique and distinctive features.
In Entangled Giant in the New York Review of Books Garry Wills, in describing the emergence of the National Security State, says that:
the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the "war on terror"—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.
In New ideas of socialism Luke Martell says that:
The liberal theory of liberty is a negative one which sees liberty as the absence of external coercion. The role of the state is to provide the conditions for minimizing coercion, not to impose an externally defined social good on individuals. Socialists, like Hattersley and Plant, go this far but go one step further. They argue also for a positive concept of liberty. That everyone might have negative liberty - freedom from external coercion - does not mean that they all have the resources and capacities to express or realize their freedom in their actions. They may not be able to pursue their intentions freely for lack of the relevant enabling assets. Thus an absence of the resources necessary to act freely is itself a restriction on liberty. In particular an inegalitarian distribution of those resources means that some will have a greater capacity to act freely han others. A condition, therefore, for positive liberty is that resources should be distributed equally so that liberty may be so distributed also
However, Individual liberty is not always the most desirable priority in every situation. Sometimes it needs to be restricted in pursuit of another important value. For instance, it is very difficult to justify the continued freedom of motorists to clog up the atmosphere and jam the roads at great environmental, social and economic cost in the name of their freedom to do so. People are free to move about by whatever means they choose.
But in certain situations their freedom to do so needs to be overridden in preference for other priorities which take on a greater significance - environmental considerations or its consequences for the public good, for instance. Defining the doctrine of socialism as the pursuit of individual liberty does not allow socialists to subordinate individual liberty every so often to such other priorities.
Neo-classical economics is premised on a specific conception of freedom: namely, the extent to which economic agents (investors, entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers) are free from interference or constraint from government regulations, taxes, collective bargaining, or other intrusions. This conception is a nominally neutral conception of “negative liberty”: that is, it measures the extent to which individual agents are not interfered with.
This conception reaches back to Hobbes and Locke, who both agree that a line must be drawn and a space sharply delineated where each individual can act unhindered according to their tastes, desires, and inclinations. This zone defines the sacrosanct space of personal liberty. But, they believe no society is possible without some authority, where the intended purpose of authority is to prevent collisions among the different ends and, thereby, to demarcate the boundaries where each person's zone of liberty begins and ends. Where Hobbes and Locke differ is the extent of the zone.
One problem with negative liberty is that it captures no positive rights which individuals may claim in the economic sphere – such as the right to employment, the right to a basic standard of living, or the right to organize a union and bargain collectively. Poverty, for instance, is not a violation of negative freedom but rather of positive freedom because a person in extreme poverty is not free to do many things.
The libertarian tendency within neoclassical economics place a high priority on freedoms, insofar as they advocate that a person has the right to pursue anything he likes provided he does not violate the constraints that restrain him from interfering in the legitimate activities of another. Such libertarian arguments place too much stress on processes and not enough stress on actual results or consequences in that giving such a priority to liberty may still lead to “the violation of substantive freedoms of individuals to achieve those things to which they have reason to attach great importance” such as avoidable mortality, being well nourished, healthy and educated. No one´s rights may be violated in a famine, for example, but people still suffer severe deprivations.
In emphasising the freedom to be able to do stipulated things, as against freedom from external restraint, libertarian theory is indifferent to the “substantive freedoms” people may or may not be able to exercise.Hence it has no real interest in happiness since individual freedom (to do whatsoever) is the chief desideratum.
Regina Kreide in Power and Powerlessness of Human Rights in Krisis (Issue 3 2008) says that:
Despite the theoretical shortcomings of the natural law approach which has been predominant for a long time, there is some continuity between this approach and today’s predominant idea of human rights. Human rights are still described as being characterized by three elements: they are universally valid (or at least that is what they claim to be); they address the individual and not a specific group; and their content is very general. It is be-cause of these elements that human rights claim to be valid independent of future historical developments and cultural diversity
Secondly, the reason claim is challenged on two grounds. First, though reason stands for the inclusion of all those endowed with reason, it has always disguised the exclusion of parts of the population, and worse, it has at times facilitated colonization and oppression in the name of alleged civilization. Secondly, reason is abstract, and it ‘forgets’ its own local context of emergence by claiming universal validity, thereby ignoring that every historical or cultural context has its own ideas of what makes an action right or wrong.
This critique is important because once one recognizes that the claim of ‘reasons are necessary’ is situated, that there is a fundamental core of irrationality. The human rights framing is one of liberal thought and rational deliberation solidly in the middle of these two extremes of irrationality on the right and the left. Liberals refer to liberal thinking as reason. Anything that is extreme is non-liberal and so non-rational.
We were we were promised liberal democracy but we got capitalism and nationalistic violence instead. With the neo-liberal capitalist formation of the economy we have a hollowing out of civil society, which becomes the market, a technocratic, administrative approach to governance and a partisan divide in politics as formations of power/knowledge.
Bruce Buchan's recent Empire of Political Thought investigates how European colonists in Australia represented the indigenous peoples they found there, and how they governed them using Western political thought. Buchan argues that an ideological framework drawn from Western traditions rendered indigenous peoples familiar to Europeans.
In this review of the book Tim Rowse says that:
Since the High Court of Australia rejected the legal doctrine terra nullius in its judgment in Mabo vs the State of Queensland in 1992, it has been tempting to treat terra nullius as the central and defining concept in the British colonisation of Australia. As David Ritter... pointed out, even if no British authority explicitly enunciated terra nullius while taking possession of the continent, the view that Aborigines had neither property nor government was implicit in the conduct of British authority. In particular, by neglecting to sign treaties with Aborigines and by ruling that Aborigines were individual subjects of the Crown’s undivided jurisdiction (an evolving doctrine of the New South Wales Supreme Court in the 1830s), the British departed from their North American practice of making agreements of various kinds and recognising in various ways collective Indigenous entities.
The exceptional character of the British approach to sovereignty in Australia was further underlined when the Crown made a treaty with Maori tribes in 1840. In short, it seems to many historians that Australia was an exception within the story of British colonisation in the extent to which the native presence here was denied, dismissed and, subsequently, degraded. As a doctrinal summation of that distinctly shameful history, terra nullius has come to signify Australian exceptionalism.
The Britons who colonised Australia, Buchan argues, applied the conceptual pair ‘civilisation’/’savagery’ that they had used in North America. The Indigenous inhabitants of Australia were almost uniformly portrayed by the colonists as “savages” whose status in the new colony was at best uncertain’ ‘too uncivilised for a treaty to be made’. Savagery’ meant that Aborigines were people without any law. The Indigenous peoples of Australia were seen as ‘primitive’, lacking their own government, or identity as ‘nations’. The nation as a self-governing community was not applied in Australia. All Indigenous laws were merely “barbarous customs”.
This notion of Indigenous tribes as lacking‘government’ and bound by immemorial custom and lacking government isdeeply entrenched. Rowe says that Buchan:
acknowledges that the central idea ‘civilization’/’savagery’ was losing coherence as it acquired new significance. As he explains, the formation of settler-colonial liberalism in Australia included the reception of racial theories of human difference that challenged historical or ‘stadial’ theories. While ‘stadial’ theory had assumed all humans to be on the same developmental path, with some peoples more advanced than others, [passing from primitive savagery (hunting and gathering), to barbarism (pastoralism), agriculture (as in feudal Europe), andfinally civilised commerce and foreign trade] racial thought postulated that some peoples were inherently unable to develop. The apparently refractory quality of Aborigines helped to make racial thought more plausible, and the two paradigms co-existed in the absence of a clear scientific criterion or practical necessity for making a decisive choice between them.
Paul Krugman has has interesting article in the New York Times entitled How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? He says that last year, everything came apart and that:
Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy...As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth...the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.
Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.
Krugman says that economists will now have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets and accept that an elegant economic “theory of everything” is a long way off. In practical terms, this will translate into more cautious policy advice — and a reduced willingness to dismantle economic safeguards in the faith that markets will solve all problems.
There are two basic traditions in modern philosophy about the subject: one in which human subjectivity is imagined as essentially disembodied (mind, soul, consciousness) as in Descates the other in which self, agency, memory and intersubjectivity are embodied as in Merleau Ponty. Merleau-Ponty rejects the Cartesian model of the self as a centred and autonomous consciousness (for which the body serves as a container or instrument). The mind is anchored in the body--hence the idea of the lived body.
Merleau-Ponty framed his philosophy as a reactions against the intellectual heritage of classical modern science and philosophy, Galilean-Cartesian physics, and Cartesian mind-body dualisms. This heritage, passing through Newton and Laplace, Comte and 19th-century positivism generally, had a reach long and powerful enough to be a hegemonic in the 20th-century. Merleau-Ponty rejected the "simple location" of allegedly discrete quanta of matter existing only in external relations with each other in favor of overlapping, encroaching, non-serial relations between instances of process. He held that nature is not a machine and that there is internal activity in nature.
Vision, finally, is relational for Merleau-Ponty because it reveals the intertwining of perceiver and perceived: on the one hand, the act of seeing seems to take us outside our bodies into the world; yet on the other hand, what we see is inside us, somewhere ‘behind’ our eyes. ‘My vision is at the thing itself ’, but it is also ‘my own or “in me”’.
In his last unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau Ponty gives us a phenomenological account of embodied sight and a carnal presence (flesh) insinuates itself into the relations between bodies, between things and thoughts, self and world. Sight lends the flesh an intersubjective dimension; it literally carries carnality outside the viewer’s corporeal envelope and into the world. The fundamental il y a, the "there is," for Merleau-Ponty, is flesh: that of my body and that of the world.
Every interaction between myself and my environment, every idea, sensation, movement or act of communication is a ‘carnal relation’ Flesh is not a fact or collection of facts, a mental representation, or the locus of an intersection of body and mind. It is, rather, "the formative medium of the object and the subject" .
This weeks Counterpoint on the ABC had a discussion on Australian conservatism. Given the revival of conservatism in Australia this programme is a chance to distinguish conservatism from classical liberals and conservative liberals I thought; and an opportunity to identify the conservative critics of modernity and their philosophical roots.
The question that was posed was: just what does conservatism stand for these days. The initial answer by Greg Melleuish was along the lines of conservatism was a disposition and a way of looking at the world: it is one of not being all that keen on change, wanting to preserve the traditions of the past, but quite happy to make reforms so long as those reforms are in line with those traditions. Ray Evans then took too this further:
In my view, conservatism in the English-speaking world was defined by Edmund Burke back at the end of the 18th century. I don't think anybody since him has done any better to tease out what it means to be a conservative. And, as Greg has pointed out, Burke was very keen on history, on custom, he was very much opposed to the concentration of power, he was very much in favour of the small platoons as opposed to the big battalions, and he opposed change for the sake of change. And above all he was strongly opposed to schemes of moral salvation imposed by political means... if you want to know what a conservative is you have to understand what Burke wrote, and it seems to me that if you look at the history of Australian conservatives, which is part of the English-speaking world of course, you'll find that it is in the federation debates and in the debates in the high court in the first half of the last century where you find these things being debated most effectively.
Evan's argument about the significance of Burke resonates with Russell Kirk's claim in The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (1953) that the American conservative tradition was fundamentally Burkean. Kirk's six “canons” of conservatism are:
A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;
An affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence;
A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions;
A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
A faith in custom, convention, and prescription, and
A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.
Kirk's text is considered the cornerstone of the modern conservative movement and is the classic synthesis of the American conservative tradition (eg.,John Adams, John C. Calhoun and George Santayana) and its English roots. Inthe text Kirk also lists five of the major opponents of conservatives:the rationalism of the philosophes;the romantic emancipation of Rousseau and his allies; the utilitarianism of the Benthamites; the positivism of Comte's school; the collective materialism of Marx and other socialists.
Australia does not have an equivalent text and its conservative tradition is largely unknown.Surrprisingly,no mention was of Michael Oakeshott, the 20th century Engish political theorist and philosopher. He critiqued “rationalism in politics”, by which he meant any ideology that proposes the wholesale reconstruction of traditional social institutions, customs, and morals on the basis of some theoretician’s fantasy. Such an effort will never succeed because abstract principles cannot by themselves generate a concrete practice. However, attempts to force a society to fit some abstract mold are likely to do significant damage to traditions grounded in centuries of practical experience.
Ray Evan's attempt to make a synthesis of the Australian conservative tradition and its English roots is based on his argument that being opposed to the big battalions means federalism in Australia. Federalism, he says, has been a bedrock plank of the Liberal Party ever since its formation in 1944, and is what the constitution is based on. This means diminishing the power of the central government in a federation. However, as Greg Melleuish points out:
I'm not too sure that if we're using the word 'conservative' that it necessarily means the diminishing of power. There have been conservatives who have been centralisers and, again, one way I would see it, there's different traditions of what it means to be a conservative, and some conservatives are advocates of accumulating power, and other conservatives, particularly in the American tradition, are in favour of the splitting of power, splitting it up. So Margaret Thatcher, for example, could be described as a conservative of sorts but she was in the mould of someone who, again, like Howard, was quite keen on perhaps centralising more on the basis that you can only get change if you get centralisation. To many conservatives that would seem to be a mistake, that that's the wrong way to go, that in fact if you try to centralise power all you'll end up doing is eventually handing, as Ray says, that power over to another group who will happily use that power for policies that you don't approve of.
Conservatism, as it is understood in Australia, has gone through a transformation, with the religious dimension becoming more explicit. If the Australian constitution is a “permanent thing,” a rock of stability onto which people can fasten themselves as whirlwinds of change blow about them, then religion is another permanent thing. Religion here means Christianity but there is a reluctance to talk about the body of natural law or what it means in Australia.