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POLITICS and SURVIVAL Gary Shapcott POLITICS AND SURVIVAL Gary Shapcott Copyright © Gary Shapcott 2016 Suggested citation: Shapcott, G 2016, ‘Politics and survival’, unpublished paper, available at <www.independent.academia.edu/ShapcottGary> Contents Preface........................................................................................................................................1 Introduction................................................................................................................................1 FREEDOM AND NECESSITY ................................................................................................8 SURVIVAL .............................................................................................................................12 The country and the city ......................................................................................................13 The survival trap ..................................................................................................................17 Redefining necessity: the cost of living...............................................................................20 Redefining necessity: models from the cooperative movement ..........................................27 POLITICS................................................................................................................................30 The idea of progress.............................................................................................................31 Decline of the public sphere ................................................................................................34 Crisis and authoritarianism ..................................................................................................37 Redefining freedom: republican models of freedom ...........................................................42 REMAKING THE PUBLIC SPHERE: CONCEPTS AND ISSUES .....................................47 What is reasoning, argumentation, discussion and debate?.................................................50 Defining ‘the public’............................................................................................................51 Consensus ............................................................................................................................53 Social inclusiveness and autonomy .....................................................................................61 Finding and defining ‘public spaces’...................................................................................65 The imperative mandate.......................................................................................................70 Historical agents...................................................................................................................71 Blueprints.............................................................................................................................73 REMAKING THE PUBLIC SPHERE: CASE STUDIES ......................................................76 The Conversation.................................................................................................................76 Science and democracy........................................................................................................78 Citizen-led public policy?....................................................................................................80 A RUNAWAY WORLD? .......................................................................................................83 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................92 Note on the author....................................................................................................................97 Politics and survival 1 Gary Shapcott Preface Most of the writing of this essay was undertaken in 2013-15. The outcomes of the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Paris in December 2015 do not diminish the relevance of the issues raised here. By no means is this a completed work; rather, it maps out a terrain of issues for further study. It’s a mud map, in other words, a sketch done with a broad brush. In an age of specialists, this is a risky undertaking. The devil is in the detail, as we all know. Yet the subject, politics and survival, demands nothing less than a multidisciplinary approach. The human world that has emerged in the last two and a half centuries, what we call ‘the modern world’, has transformed every aspect of human life. Now that many of us are worried about where the modern world is taking us, a myopic or narrow vision won’t do. We have to grasp that trajectory, in all its aspects, to know how to stop it, if that’s what we want to do. This is an unpublished paper and has not been subjected to peer review. My aim in presenting it here is to show readers of my published papers a bit more about ‘where I am coming from’. Introduction Homo sapiens can no longer, we are warned, take it for granted that it lives on a planet that will support living things, including human beings, for many more centuries, or perhaps even many more decades. The doomsayers who warn us of this are scientists and people who reflect on the findings of science, on its implications for humanity. They say that in these early years of the twenty-first century we are at the beginning of our ‘last century’, the beginning of a ‘long emergency’, and at the dawn of a ‘coming famine’ or an ‘age of consequences’ ranging from ‘severe to catastrophic’. War, disease and famine, those old companions of humankind, are returning to our side once more, or so we are told. It is strange to hear such prophecies from people who played a large part in bringing us the modern world, with its machines and technologies, medicines and food, organisations and governments and, for a long time, its belief in the possibility of endless progress towards a better life for all humanity. So strange, perhaps, that few people seem to believe them. It has been a quarter of a century since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first assessment report on climate change in 1990. Little has been done to address the issue or other environmental issues. Global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Cars continue to dominate transport in the cities of the world, natural resources are depleted at ever faster rates, the rubbish tips of the world continue to grow. Soils, water, the air and the oceans continue to be polluted and degraded. In the suburbs of Australian cities, one still hears the sound of lawnmowers and other gardening tools running on fossil fuels and people think that composting food scraps is ‘dirty’. Dog- and cat-lovers abound. Schools are forced to teach children about ‘ecological sustainability’, while the parents of these children drop them off at school in four-wheel drives. And that ain’t half of it, as the saying goes. Nowhere does there seem to be a sense of alarm, of emergency, of impending calamity; it’s Politics and survival 2 Gary Shapcott business as usual, the political agenda remaining as ‘jobs, investment, growth’. The ship sails on. This essay does not attempt to assess the findings of science—like most people, I am not qualified to do so; we simply have to accept what the scientists say—or to reiterate its warnings in a more convincing manner. Instead, it asks and tries to answer a number of questions: What if the doomwatch scientists are correct but our way of life diminishes our ability to communicate to one another that they are and, even if general awareness was raised, diminishes our ability to act to avert the oncoming catastrophe? Are we collectively on a train to hell but unable either to see the dangers ahead or to apply the brakes? Are we living in a way that allows us to detect and respond adequately to possible threats to our very survival; any threats, not just climate change? If the worst comes to the worst, will new forms of authoritarianism be the only way to manage the ensuing crises or will democracy, perhaps in some new or extended forms, offer the best tools for survival? Is there anything that ‘ordinary people’ can or should do? It is particularly pertinent to ask such questions in a country like Australia which has per capita greenhouse gas emissions among the highest in the world (Garnaut 2008, p. 153) and ‘has experienced the largest documented decline in biodiversity of any continent over the past 200 years’ (ABS 2010, p. 7). There are many ways to approach such questions, all with something of value to contribute to the answers. One could focus on the climate science deniers, the big money behind them, and their influence on governments. One could look at the mass media and their role, actual and potential, in communication in contemporary societies. One could examine issues of governance in the local, national and global arenas, exploring why governments to date have been largely impervious to the ruckus emanating from the scientific community. One could look at science itself and the bad name it has acquired for itself in the course of the twentieth century. Science has become highly specialised, militarised, bureaucratised, commercialised, mediatised. There are people who refuse to vaccinate their children because they do not trust scientists. There are historians and theorists who see science as ‘socially constructed’ and, in an extreme view, as having no more capacity
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