4 LEAD GRAPHIC • • • • • Climate • Justice ? • Cam Walker • ...... • • • The developed world must lead in 1992. Awareness that climate change was posing • a serious threat to humanity and our ecosystems • the charge in combating climate led to commitment to develop a global response— AGAINST • in 1997 the Kyoto Protocol became the implement- THE CURRENT • change. • ing mechanism for taking action. This was a As climate change bears down on us, the public historic moment because the Protocol accepted • debate about this most pressing question has • the rich world had caused most of the world’s perhaps never been so confusing and muddied. At • environmental problems and hence expected the • the national level we have had the grinding debate Climate Justice rich would go first in accepting binding green- • over the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), and house gas emissions. Shameful lobbying by the • the very public civil war within the Coalition Howard government resulted in Australia getting • about whether climate change is even caused by permission to actually increase its emissions, Cam Walker • human action. We have the mad suggestion that despite the glaring reality of our carbon debt to • Victoria could develop its own export industry the rest of the planet, especially the developing • for our dirty brown coal, and vigorous argument • world where per capita emissions are so low. Cam Walker is the about whether so-called clean coal technology • campaigns co- Industry lobbyists will be at Copenhagen in their • will ever actually be viable. And there is, of ordinator for • course, huge debate about the climate change thousands, and will find common cause with Friends of the Earth • negotiations about to be held in Copenhagen. countries that rely on fossil fuels, and the laggard in Melbourne. • nations not prepared to step up to the challenge The overall goal for the COP15 United Nations • of global warming. As the Australian national • Climate Change Conference is to establish an debate shows, leaders in the debate run the risk of • ambitious global climate agreement for the period being bullied back into line, so there is little • from 2012, when the first commitment period incentive for any political party to announce deep • under the Kyoto Protocol expires. Key leaders, and unilateral emissions reductions targets before • like Barack Obama and Kevin Rudd, have been the meeting. Australia’s paltry 5 per cent • warning the global community for months not to ‘unconditional’ reductions target is indicative of • expect much from these talks. They believe an • the lack of leadership we are seeing from agreement on how to set reduction targets is still • developed nations generally. • too hard, although the gathered leaders can at • least move forward on developing a framework. After the most recent preparatory talks in Barcelona, it was clear that a significant number • The UN Framework Convention on Climate • of developed nations were not only being Change grew from the Earth Summit held in Rio • cautious in their commitments, they were • • • •

• ...... effectively undermining the chances of getting to • agreement on developing a binding global • agreement. In its assessment of these talks, • A fair and effective Friends of the Earth International said: • • climate solution We have seen rich countries continually • seeking to ditch emissions targets under the • requires, at a minimum, Kyoto Protocol. They are tearing down an • existing, legally binding international • that developed countries framework, which has taken years of • negotiation to establish, in an attempt to • repay their adaptation wriggle out of their responsibility to cut their • emissions first and fastest. • debt to the developing • The several preparatory meetings held during • countries, providing 2009 only became more frustrating as • momentum was continually checked, and an • finance and technology increasingly bitter divide between rich and poor • • countries emerged. After the last two meetings, • to ensure full negotiations were deadlocked. Some environment • NGOs have seen the deadlock as potentially • compensation for losses ‘catastrophic’. The Alliance of Small Island • already suffered and the Nations has been increasingly vocal on the need • for deep emissions reductions, while a growing 12 2009–1 2010 • number of African nations have challenged the • means to avoid or Nº 103 slow pace of negotiations, but there simply has • • minimise future impacts. not been sufficient momentum to push the 5 world’s leaders to the point of accepting the inevitable: and effective climate solution requires, at a minimum, that deep cuts in greenhouse pollution now while enshrining developed countries repay their adaptation debt to the the right of all nations to fair, sustainable development. developing countries, providing finance and technology to ensure full compensation for losses already suffered and the So, should we ‘adjust our sets’ and just expect less from means to avoid or minimise future impacts. World Bank the Copenhagen meeting? Even some environmental figures suggest the absolute minimum figure allowing for groups have suggested as much. Or do we accept what fair adaptation is US$50 billion a year. This could be climate science is telling us: that to have any hope of allocated according to a nation’s historical emissions and avoiding dangerous climate change, we must reduce ability to pay. emissions now? Globally, our ecological footprint exceeds the Earth’s capacity to regenerate by about 30 Australia is already being hit by climate change. Bushfires, per cent. If present trends continue, by the mid-2030s floods and droughts are going to get worse unless we take we will require the equivalent of two planets to meet our strong global action. Our Pacific neighbours?already needs. The fact remains that global warming is a global threatened by sea level rise?have been joined by over fifty issue and therefore requires a co-ordinated global countries in setting a benchmark for how much carbon response, and this must take the form of a new global pollution can be in the atmosphere. Australia should join agreement. This agreement should recognise that rich them at Copenhagen and set a global target well below 350 countries have done the most damage to our climate and ppm; our present target of 450 ppm would devastate the that they should take action first. In addition, it should: planet if adopted globally. Australia can show it is serious • commit wealthy industrialised countries (listed in about climate change by declaring a national moratorium on Annex I of the Protocol) to at least 40 per cent cuts coal power and coal mining and implementing a just in emissions domestically by 2020, by using green transition for workers in the coal industry. energy, sustainable transport and farming, and by A wealthy minority of the world’s countries and cutting energy demand corporations are the principal cause of climate change; its • refuse to sanction reductions through the buying of adverse effects fall first and foremost on the poor majority. carbon credits from developing countries or buying This basic and undeniable truth forms the foundation of forest in developing countries to ‘offset’ ongoing the global climate justice movement. Climate change emissions in the industrialised world threatens the balance of life on Earth and with it human • require rich countries to provide additional monies communities everywhere, so addressing climate change for developing countries to grow in clean, green ways requires urgent action by all people, rich and poor, in all and to cope with the floods, droughts and famines countries, developed and developing. But to be both just caused by climate change and effective the response must be fair. Developing • ensure that such monies are distributed fairly and countries and communities are unlikely to ignore the transparently. historical responsibility of the developed world for the The wealthy industrialised world should take causes and consequences of climate change. responsibility for repaying the full measure of its Friends of the Earth campaigners will be writing throughout the climate debt. Doing so is not merely right—it also Copenhagen meeting. Go to . provides the basis of an effective climate solution. A fair

National School Curriculum Rob Durbridge ......

The politics of curriculum Education Minister Julia Gillard gets areas include classroom teachers, media praise for pushing on with the but the exclusion from the board of in Gillard’s ‘Education national curriculum and cites it as an any representatives of 250,000 Revolution’. early gain in the ‘Education Revolution’. public and private teacher unionists The reform is being implemented by a is deliberate. News Ltd outlets in The introduction of a national new national body, Australian particular advocate the removal of curriculum for schools was a goal of the Curriculum and Reporting Authority union influence from education Howard government that was adopted (ACARA), under the leadership of policy. ACARA’s proposals for the by the ALP and is strongly promoted by education consultants and entrepreneurs national senior secondary the media and employers. In the name Barry McGaw and Tony McKay. The curriculum have caused concern due of this logical goal, right-wing new body is responsible for the K-12 to a failure to engage the profession, educational interests push for an curriculum, national assessment, data a lack of funds for teachers’ instrumentalist curriculum and collection and reporting on all schools. professional development and an competitive national testing. It is seen unrealistic implementation schedule. The ACARA Board is largely composed by them as a corrective to leftist A particular early failure to recognise of state and private education content and methods and a vehicle for the need to engage Indigenous further school privatisation. Federal employers. Specific panels in learning 6 AGAINST • educators in ACARA was highlighted by an open Australian unions are being warned by colleagues THE CURRENT • letter from Indigenous academics and teachers. in the United Kingdom and the United States not • Education ministers have since agreed to establish to go down the road of competitive testing as a • an Indigenous Education Action Plan, but its terms focus for education policy. The danger of this • • have been seen as narrow and remedial in focus. approach is that only things which can be measured are valued—the econometric mantra. It • Part of ACARA’s role is to oversee the Climate Justice is easy to compare test scores from the NAPLAN • development of national testing, accountability • tests of all year three, five, seven and nine kids in and reporting—the ‘transparency agenda’. It is the • May each year. It is easy to then create league intersection of this role with the curriculum Cam Walker • tables, despite the fact that NAPLAN was never proper which causes most concern. The former • designed for that purpose. Gillard’s unveiling of • Curriculum Corporation, owned by state and the My School website feeds fears of precisely • federal governments, did not have such a role. that development. Teachers in the United • The emphasis on competitive measurement Kingdom in particular warn of the damage these • reflects the influence of US programs such as ‘No policies do to teaching and learning. • Child Left Behind’ and the punitive approach to • poor-performing schools by Joel Klein in New All Australian media outlets regard any • • York. Echoes of the Blair government’s policies of restriction on the media’s ‘right’ to publish • testing, inspection and closure abound. comparative school test information as unacceptable—without legislative protection, • The superficial appeal of this approach is • league tables will be next. When asked by a apparent, and the right-wing media’s influence is • Canberra principal how the growth of creativity, clear. But it is hard to understand why US • personal well-being or spiritual development policies are to be applied to Australian schools, • would be measured, Gillard’s reply was • which generally perform well by international illuminating. ‘If we could absolutely measure • standards, particularly given the low level of everything then I would say that we should, but • funds allocated to public schools by OECD there are some things that are beyond • standards. In the internationally recognised PISA measurement. Whether a person is a good person • and TIMSS literacy and maths/science tests, • or not a good person ends up being a matter of Australia performs well above the United States • opinion, not a matter of statistical measurement.’ • and the United Kingdom. • • • •

• The federal and Victorian In October Gillard attended a ...... • governments have even gone so Washington conference to ‘Hear • • far as to link student test scores foreign experts and the world’s NPAs are the • with teacher performance pay in most innovative practitioners • a pilot scheme devised by Boston share cutting-edge catalysts for vehicle for a range of • Consulting and funded under a dramatically improving student federal government- • so-called ‘National Partnership learning’, where she joined a • Agreement’ (NPA) under the panel—hosted by George’s brother initiated reforms • auspices of COAG. Terry Moran, and former Florida Governor Jeb • head of the Prime Minister’s Bush—entitled ‘Allies in the that involve the National School • Department and previously of International Education Arms Curriculum • agreement of states • the Victorian Premier’s Race’. The rest of the panel • Department, has previously included British Professor James and territories • engaged Boston Consulting, a Tooley, an expert on private Rob Durbridge • firm that promotes the education and ‘the role of the before teachers, • integration of public and private state in education, and on private parents or unions • schooling in Australia. education, privatisation and Rob Durbridge is • public-private partnerships in are consulted. This • NPAs are the vehicle for a range President of the developing countries and SEARCH Foundation • of federal government-initiated transition economies’, and Peje is a bureaucratic, not and works for the • reforms that involve the Emilson, a key figure in Australian • agreement of states and an educational, • establishing voucher funding of Education Union as territories before teachers, an industrial • for-profit schools and CEO of a process with none of parents or unions are consulted. officer. • €45 million per year corporation This is a bureaucratic, not an • operating twenty-two private the involvement that educational, process with none • schools in Sweden. We can hope • of the involvement that previous previous Labor this line-up is not a portent for • Labor governments the forthcoming review of governments • demonstrated with public bodies Australian schools’ funding • of respected experts, such as the post-2013, which has always demonstrated with • Schools Commission. An • been the biggest education policy unprecedented degree of public bodies of • question facing the Rudd bureaucratic centralism is being • government. respected experts, • driven by Canberra taking 12 2009–1 2010 • strategic control of educational For the audit culture behind such as the Schools Nº 103 • programs from fund-starved Gillard’s ‘Education Revolution’ • state and territory governments. see Cooper’s Last in this issue. Commission. • 7 Parallel Importations John Hinkson ......

The decision to retain consumers who will have to pay more for books, not giving ‘a fig’ about the tax on underprivileged kids, throwing out the education revolution, and not parallel importation rules caring for ‘social inclusion’. As these are all social agendas that Stutchbury in the publishing industry and The Australian are not known for championing in their own right, we might need to dig a little deeper to understand the source of the concern. is likely to be a Trojan It is not too hard to find the answer. It is a concern about maintenance of horse. the competition agenda first put in place by Hawke and Keating, an agenda It would be hard to find a more that opened the door to the market orientation of the last thirty years. And emotional response from the Right to it is the market that will achieve the social revolution if it is given the the decision by the Rudd government chance. Stutchbury and The Australian are no fans of Labor and they are to maintain the import rules that have worried about what the Rudd response to the GFC means for the given some protection to the publishing commitment of Canberra to global markets. and printing industry in Australia. That global markets (supported by the internet) may be distorting our way Michael Stutchbury, economics editor of life is hardly a preoccupation of The Australian and the issue barely been at The Australian, led the reaction. touched on by the political debate over the book import laws. Yet the Under the heading ‘Decision Betrays a possible change to the laws does bring to the fore important questions: to Lack of Spine’, he accuses the Rudd what degree should the economy and culture of the nation be made-over by government of not caring for global markets in the pursuit of global imports and exports and a global way

of life? Rather than being a matter of how books will be priced, the issues used to call the ‘level playing field’ around parallel importation laws potentially raise far more basic represented by the transformed market. questions of how we are to live over the coming decades. There are not many voices inclined to While there are, no doubt, shades of difference between what The challenge this material force. It is ‘reality’, Australian would champion in this area and what the Rudd government is ‘common sense’,‘development’,‘the only pursuing, these shades don’t amount to much. What all parties share— way to go’. Any other suggestions are the Productivity Commission, The Australian, many commentators, the regarded as unhinged. In this absolutely government and even many industry defenders of the parallel dominant view, the best the publishing importation policy—is a complete lack of questioning of a global market industry and Australian authors can hope enhanced by the high-tech force of ‘new’ media and the internet. When for is a special deal that, predictably, is the government says, in the defence of its decision, that it is concerned always under threat. This is a timid about the pressure of online sales on the publishing industry this is defence of our cultural institutions, one really a round-about way of saying, ‘Don’t worry about changing the with little future while it restricts its rules in the short term, the market and the internet will do the job for us arguments to sectional interests, ignoring soon enough’. In other words, give things a year or two and it will be a the problem of cultural production as an fait accompli. There may be shades of policy difference between the aspect of the larger, historic crisis that various parties but all of them are working within an overall view of marks our time. support for the global market to work things out. Those who advocate the global market and This attitude of fait accompli towards the market—it will ultimately the efficient market thesis think of the win—is not all that obvious given Rudd’s public criticism of neo- market as a simple, unchanged institution. liberalism and so-called ‘extreme capitalism’,leading some to think of him But today’s market is an aspect of a more as standing outside a commitment to global markets. It provides him with general institutional change arising out of a point of ideological differentiation and legitimation, and the decision the conjunction of capitalism with those to retain parallel importation laws seems to reinforce this view. But it is revolutionary practices of the academic not a legitimation he deserves. Rudd assumes the continuation of the institutions—the technosciences. The neo-liberal market in its predominant aspect, even the ‘efficient market computer and the silicon chip: these are thesis’, wishing to shape it only minimally to prevent the kind of two of a range of technologies with social disruption the GFC has represented. If this does not seem to be a very outcomes that not only set in place a major difference, all the more reason to make a lot of noise about it so revolution in the structure of the market Labor is legitimised in the eyes of a public demoralised by the direction but also a unique way of life. It is one their lives have taken under twenty years of ‘market rules’ ideology. In increasingly composed of social relations reality, the ‘special deal’ for the publishing and printing industry is no that work at a distance, ideal for global more than a temporary fix holding back the inevitable of what Paul Keating interchange but destructive of social

8 AGAINST • institutions grounded in local face-to-face relations and structured by ...... THE CURRENT • relations across the generations. If the internet allows us to make endless • connections with others, these are typically fast moving and lacking the To what degree • warmth, empathy and depth of association that is historically signified • should the • by family, community and knowing others in place and over time. economy and • Parallel This emerging revolution in the way we live, produce and distribute is • culture of the Importations inseparable from the global market. It has affected our relationships and • • feeling for others. And crucially from the standpoint of our relation to nation be made- John Hinkson • the world of nature, it has enhanced the principle of expansion, put in over by global • place by historical capitalism, of resource, land and water use, and of • population and economic growth. Not only has it exhausted the markets in the John Hinkson is an • availability of natural resources but also the viability of the planet taken pursuit of global Arena Publications • for granted by Homo sapiens for 10,000 years. editor. • imports and • The weak defence of the publishing and printing industries has no future • while these expansive forms of social development are taken for granted, exports and a global • as Labor well knows. It was not all that long ago that the community way of life? Rather • came out in support of the Maritime Union of Australia and ‘won’ the than being a matter • battle against dismantling long-established conditions on the wharfs • only to see this ‘victory’ dissolve as technology decimated the workforce. of how books will • Any real defence needs to be put as part of a larger perspective, where • be priced, the • the full implications of a combination of new global technologies and • capitalism are assessed. issues around • Opposition to the material force of the global market is beginning to parallel importation • • emerge, grounded in a view of the material consequences of a way of life laws potentially • now visibly unsustainable. Such opposition needs to include a substantial raise far more basic • defence of the social circumstances of writers and intellectuals, publishers • and printers, as an aspect of constructing a way forward for Australia and questions of how • the Australian people. For a generation our intellectual culture has been we are to live over • overly slanted towards global economy and culture. Can it broaden its • perspectives in the defence of a social world of reading, writing and the coming • publishing based in the renewal of local and regional cultures? • decades. • • • • • Norway’s • Sámi Parliament • • Norway’s Jane Robbins • • • • Jane Robbins is a • senior lecturer in • Sámi Parliament the School of • Political and • Jane Robbins International • ...... Studies, Flinders • University. • importance of the status of the Sámi representative body • A model for Indigenous within the political system. • representation? • The Sámediggi has been in existence since 1989 and since • On September 14th two elections were that time its responsibilities have increased considerably. • held in Norway. One was for the Today it administers a budget of over $50 million (NOK 250 • national government and the other was million), which is roughly half the amount spent on Sámi • for the Sámediggi, or Sámi Parliament, • programs by the Norwegian government. While its original the representative body for Norway’s • powers were modest, they have gradually expanded. The • Indigenous minority, the Sámi. In due Sámediggi manages the Sámi Development Fund, which • course the King of Norway, Harald V, allocates funding to Sámi organisations; it has responsibility • will open the next session of the for language and cultural heritage preservation, protection of • Storting or Parliament. Shortly after, heritage sites and for the development of teaching aids to • wearing the same regalia and with support education. In 2000 a NOK 70 million fund was • much the same pomp and circumstance, • established by the government as compensation for former he will open the Sámediggi in its assimilation policies; the Sámediggi allocates grants for • impressive building in the town of • cultural and linguistic activities from the interest generated. • Karasjok (Kárásjohka) in the Arctic In 2005 the Finnmark Act acknowledged the traditional • Circle and the heart of Sámi territory. rights of the Sámi to land and water in Finnmark County in 12 2009–1 2010 • The symbolism of this parallel the north of Norway. Nº 103 • ceremony is just one of many ways in • which the Norwegians acknowledge the There are many parallels between the role and function of • 9 the Sámediggi and the former Indigenous representative body was Fennoscandia. The consolidation of Australian Aboriginal and Torres conditional on it not being ‘another contemporary national borders left Strait Islander Commission ATSIC’. This has been understood to Sámi territory divided between (ATSIC). However, the positive mean that the new body should not Norway, Sweden, Finland and approach of the Norwegian be popularly elected nor should it Russia. No one is sure how many government to a popularly elected have any direct control over Sámi there are, but it is estimated Indigenous representative body is in expenditure. It is interesting in this that there are between 50,000 and contrast to the experience in context to consider why the 70,000, with the majority— Australia, where ATSIC was Norwegians appear to be happy with probably around 40,000—in frequently at loggerheads with their arrangements which embrace Norway. They are commonly known government, especially in the last these roles and indeed wish to as nomadic reindeer herders of the few years of its existence. The endorse the independent status of arctic north, but in fact Sámi Howard government’s verdict that their Indigenous representative communities historically pursued a ATSIC was a failure has become body. variety of lifestyles including fishing popular wisdom. Interestingly, the and hunting and trapping as well as The Sámi and Australia’s Indigenous lack of a separation of powers (that reindeer husbandry. As in Australia, peoples share a common legal is, ATSIC’s ability both to make Norwegian Sámi suffered from difficulty in achieving recognition of policy and approve expenditure) is discriminatory government policy in their political claims within the now commonly believed to be at the the first part of the 20th century— modern nation. Historically, neither heart of its shortcomings. It was education was only provided in were offered treaties by the also widely seen as unaccountable Norwegian language and many colonising powers that assumed both to government and to its children were placed in boarding their territories. In the case of the Indigenous constituents. These schools in an active attempt to Sámi (or Lapps as they have been assumptions have been perpetuated ‘Norwegianise’ their culture. The called), this occupation took place by the current Labor government, government supported settlers to over many centuries as people from which made it clear that its move onto Sámi lands, especially in the south and east moved into Sámi endorsement of the current process the north, where this policy had territory in the northern regions of to establish a new Australian defence implications. As non-

...... Norwegians, Sámi also experienced restrictions in purchasing land. The positive Sámi relations with the Norwegian began to change immediately after World War II. Retreating German troops applied a ‘scorched earth policy’ in northern Finnmark and Troms regions, with dire approach of the consequences for the Sámi. In a short period of time three quarters of the Sámi population in Norway lost their homes, boats Norwegian and other material possessions. Government aid and reconstruction followed and this, for many Sámi families, was the government to a first positive interaction with the Norwegian state. The extension of welfare benefits and other social services to Sámi communities popularly elected also occurred during this period, although this was not accompanied by any recognition of cultural rights. Interestingly, Indigenous the most important turning point in Sámi/Norwegian relations occurred in the 1980s as the result of a dam project. The Alta- representative body Kautokeino dam was approved by the Norwegian parliament in 1978 to provide hydro-electricity. The proposed site would flood is in contrast to the important reindeer grazing areas and harm traditional salmon fisheries. As in Australia’s Franklin Dam case, Indigenous activists joined with environmentalists to protest against the dam, experience in resulting in some of the most dramatic civil unrest ever witnessed in Norway. In 1981, 600 police in riot gear forcibly removed Australia, where protesters who had chained themselves together. In the capital, in scenes reminiscent of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Sámi erected a ATSIC was traditional lavvu, or tent, in front of the Storting and began a series of hunger strikes. Such scenes are rarely seen in the frequently at peaceable Norwegian society. The case went to the Supreme Court, which over-ruled objections, but an important step had been loggerheads with taken—the Sámi had become politically visible, perhaps for the first time, and the Norwegian national conscience had been government, pricked. As a result several official committees were established to consider Sámi cultural and legal rights and these led to the Sámi especially in the last Act of 1987, the recognition of Sámi in the Norwegian Constitution and the establishment of the Sámediggi in 1989. few years of its An interesting contrast to Australian experience of Indigenous representation is the involvement of political parties in Norwegian existence. Sámi elections. This practice has been ecouraged by the fact that the Executive Council and Prsident are chosen, Westminster style,

10 AGAINST • on the basis of majority support. Sámi. In the 2005 election, voter the Sámi settler communities in THE CURRENT • Party ‘lists’ form the basis of turnout was 73 per cent and inner Finnmark. Àrja campaigned • political campaigns, together women won a majority of seats. for hunting rights and • with loose groupings of liberalisation of the use of • In the recent election the individuals. Mainstream parties snowmobiles and quad bikes—a • campaigns of two previously such as the Labour Party have a hot environmental issue in the • unrepresented parties attracted Norway’s Sámi counterpart while others north. The September elections Sámi Parliament • considerable interest. The • are based on Sámi organisations saw both of these parties win 3 Progress Party (FrP) is a major • such as the Norwegian Sámi seats each at the expense of the Jane Robbins right-wing force in the • Association (NSR) and regional major parties. Negotiations Norwegian Parliament and has • Reindeer Herders’ Associations. resulted in a majority coalition • been outspoken in its opposition The NSR has been the dominant of Labour, Arja and 3 single-seat • to the Sámi Parliament, labelling party in the Sámediggi, parties forming a government, • it discriminatory and governing with either a majority with Egil Olli of the Sámi Labour • undemocratic and portraying in its own right, or in association Party continuing his presidency • Sámediggi funding activities as • with minor parties. Two years and Àrja’s tertiary educated racially based ‘privileges’. The • after the 2005 election its young female leader, Laila FrP campaign for the Sámi • coalition with minor parties Susanne Vars, becoming the elections was highly publicised • broke down allowing the Labour vice-president. Under this and controversial, with • Party, led by Egil Olli, to form a Coalition it is predicted that • speculation that it reflected the governing alliance with minor opportunities for economic or • views of conservative Sámi who parties for the first time. resource development in Sámi • are uncomfortable with the Registration for voting is regions will be considered more • language of rights and • voluntary and is open to anyone favourably than in past regimes, separatism. At the other extreme • who identifies as a Sámi and which prioritised reindeer was another newcomer, Àrja, a • either speaks the Sámi language herders’ interests. The reduced party which promotes Sámi self- • or has a parent, grandparent or support for the major parties in determination with a focus on • great-grand-parent who spoke favour of the smaller parties has • • • • • • been seen as voter protest against the lack of well as the Council of Europe’s Framework • differentiation between Labour and NSR platforms and Convention forth the Protection of • dissatisfaction with past policy decisions. National Minorities. However, article 27 of • the International Covenant on Civil and The dynamic of party politics in the Sámediggi offers an • Political Rights has perhaps been the most interesting contrast to the experience of ATSIC. The • influential determinant of Norwegian Sámi ATSIC commissioners were chosen through a process in • policy, a document to which Australia is which began with voters electing local representatives • also a signatory. Article 27 states: • for Regional Councils. The Regional Councils were then In those states in which ethnic, religious • grouped into zones for the purpose of electing a or linguistic minorities exist, persons • commissioner to the national board, rather than an belonging to such minorities shall not • executive being chosen on the basis of majority support be denied the right, in community with • by elected representatives. This was done to create a • the other members of their group, to strong model of regionalism, but such a system also • enjoy their own culture, to profess and emphasised geographical equality of representation at • practice their own religion, or use their national level, as opposed to the development of ‘issues’ • own language. • based platforms, and produced a national board of • commissioners who shared no intrinsic strategic It also contains protections against • outlook. It is not surprising that ATSIC election discrimination for these groups. Norway • campaigns were conducted almost exclusively on a has embraced these articles and is • personal leadership basis rather than on policy issues. It developing a genuine partnership with the • might be hard to accept that ATSIC could have benefited Sámi in the governance of cultural and • • from the development of parties as there is a common heritage matters. It is now beginning to • perception that it was already ‘too political’. While we expand its partnership with the Sami to • know from mainstream politics how frustrating parties economic and resource management. • can be, they do at least offer a rudimentary tool for While there has been some evidence of • communication between the voters and their dissent within Norwegian society regarding • representatives and provide a basis for a policy debate to these developments, in comparison to the • emerge. Sámi voters have used their election native title debate in Australia there seems • opportunity to send a message to their representatives to be relatively little controversy. Norway • • in the Sámediggi that a change is required. has also embedded recognition of the Sámi in its Constitution. It will be interesting to • It is interesting to speculate why the Norwegian observe whether the current Australian • government has encouraged the expansion of the • debate on the adoption of a Human Rights responsibilities and the independence of the Sámi • Act will encourage the development of Parliament. This is probably because it has come to • similar perspective on Indigenous rights in interpret Sámi rights within the framework of • this country. 12 2009–1 2010 • international treaty obligations, as a matter of human Nº 103 • rights. Unlike Australia it has signed ILO Convention • No 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, as • 11 On the Fluctuating Value of Lives Aurélien Mondon ......

Why are some conflicts more visible than form: both are human beings and are as such equal. For this point to hold, equality has to be others, some deaths more significant? understood as an axiom. That is, it cannot be Recent events have taken me back to almost a year ago. Time flies, understood as a goal but as a starting point, as a suffering and indifference remains. What I found confirmed state that requires enactment through through these events and their reception in Australia is that we prescriptions. The Palestinians and the Israelis need to acknowledge equality ever more urgently. are obviously not, in practice, equal in terms of justice, food and liberty, just as Palestinians are Within two weeks last year, over 750 Palestinians lost their lives individually different from one another. However, in what became known as the war on Gaza. Thousands more were as mentioned earlier, they are all human beings wounded. While some were admittedly soldiers from Hamas, and this makes them, I believe, undeniably equal. many, if not most, were civilians. A third were children. On 6 From this point, it becomes impossible to justify January 2009, The Australian reported that in an online poll on unfair or discriminatory conduct. Still, it is the their website 53 per cent believed the invasion to be justified. Even denial of this axiom of equality, which can be if The Australian’s readers do not adequately represent the witnessed on an everyday basis in the news, that I Australian population as a whole, this led me to wonder why so believe is one of the most important many people, in a country which has in fact no direct link to the impediments to radical change. conflict, could decide to support such an invasion. What argument could justify the death of hundreds and the further starvation and During the war on Gaza, on Christmas day 271 impoverishment of thousands? Can the deaths of a few Israeli people were killed in the Democratic Republic of justify such a massacre? It is a strange reminiscence of colonial the Congo. Only a few lines appeared in the times, when the slaughter of many more colonised was adequate French news. A week later, a short article in The punishment for the murder of a coloniser. Age mentioned the killing of 500 villagers in a single day. Needless to say this did not make the This is of course not to say that Israeli civilian deaths should not front page. On the other hand, the Palestinian be deplored or condemned, and should be forgotten or forgiven crisis was, over several days, front page material because they do not compare in number to Palestinian deaths. for most newspapers across the world. However, I found the fact of these deaths hardly sufficient to support an invasion which was bloodier than any rocket launched The conflict in the Democratic Republic of the from Gaza ever was, and quite possibly could ever be. Congo has killed more than 5.4 million people in ten years, but maybe because it does not seem to Acknowledging the equal value of Palestinian and Israeli lives be about to end, we can probably wait before could therefore be a start. What kind of equality? The most basic

...... taking interest in it. During last’s year’s same number of people have died Christmas festivities, Australia’s every two days with a response of Why were the cricket team not doing so well and the complete indifference? Why is the Palestinian conflict were enough to Palestinian conflict so much more American lives lost during satisfy our right to freedom of mediatised than the Congolese, the the 9/11 attacks so information. Far be it for me to judge Sudanese, the Haitian? Have we all from a self-righteous perspective—I finally given up the idea that all important, while over ten admit I knew very little about the DRC human beings should be allowed to years in the Congo the conflict before the publication of an live a decent life, or even just live? same number of people article on Rue89.com highlighting the Does the number of conflicts disparity of treatment between the happening around the world force us have died every two days deaths of people depending on their to make a choice between those we with a response of nationality, skin colour, background or should care about and those we have whatever is, or could be, used to to leave aside? Is this decision complete indifference? differentiate and alienate them. linked to a wish to ignore the effects of colonisation, past and present, on Why is the Palestinian Many questions (re)surfaced after some parts of the globe? conflict so much more reading this article. Why do we care mediatised than the more about some lives than others? Things have not changed in the last Why were the American lives lost nine months, and recent events have Congolese, the Sudanese, during the 9/11 attacks so important, brought me back to this topic. On 3 the Haitian? while over ten years in the Congo the October, the earthquake and 12 REFLECTION • tsunami in Sumatra made the front page of of his palaces on the French Riviera was sold for a • The Age, and probably most newspapers in the record US$895 million. After the independence of • country. To my surprise (I may be naive) I the 1960s, neo-colonialist forces were not yet ready • could not find the number of victims on this to let the Congo go its own way and benefit from its • • page, while the number of Australians missing own resources (coltan, diamonds, gold). After the On the Fluctuating • was written three times. If I remember well, CIA ‘got rid of’ Lumumba, the only elected leader of Value of Lives • the total number of victims did not appear the Congo, who had pledged to overcome the Congo’s • before page seven. 1300 perished. Some might ethnic divisions, Mobutu, whom many Congolese Aurélien Mondon • say it is normal to care more for one’s dissidents call the ‘puppet’, was put in place to keep • neighbour or for one’s family. Jean-Marie Le business going as usual. Exploitation continued, and • Pen, the leader of the extreme-right Front Mobutu’s wealth soon grew to over US$5 billion. In • Aurélien Mondon is National party in France, said so himself. Still, 1996, Mobutu was overthrown and from then on, the a PhD Candidate at • I could understand, if not condone, such a First and Second Congo Wars raged, between the La Trobe University. • His research is • sentiment that leads someone to want to Congolese themselves, but also involving seven focused on • know how many people from one’s homeland neighbouring countries who were keeping their eye populism, racism • might have died in such a catastrophe. What on the Congo’s resources. Over 5 million people died and nationalism. He • shocks me is the disdain with which the alien within a decade and 1.8 million were displaced; many is also part of the • victims are treated. Is it because they are women were raped and mutilated; thousands of Melbourne Free • poor? From a different culture? Overseas? This children were enrolled in militias, often after having University project, • probably links back to the irrational creation been forced to kill their own parents; thousands which should start • that is nationalism. Why should one consider more children were enslaved to work in mines. in 2010. • themself more closely related to the • Nowadays, coltan has replaced rubber and diamonds. sportsman who earns millions and lives on the • The DRC holds around 80 per cent of the world’s • other side of the country (or overseas) than to reserves in its soil. I assume that many, until recently • their foreign neighbour with whom they share myself included, do not even know what coltan is • their daily life? Of this, I’m not sure. • and yet could not live without it. Coltan is a crucial • Still, it gets worse. The day after the Age mineral in the construction of many electronic • ‘incident’, it happened that an information objects, from mobile phones to computers and game • session was organised by the Congolese consoles. It was for coltan that Rwanda and other • community. This event reminded me that on neighbouring countries invaded the Congo, under the • average more than a thousand people die each false pretence of looking for those guilty of genocide. • and every day in the Congo because of war, As a UN report uncovered, they headed straight • • and that except on some very rare occasions towards the mines. At the same time, facilitating the • these people do not even make it to page invasion, the price of coltan (illegal to mine in the • seven of our newspapers. On that day, most of Congo) soared because of the necessity to build more • what I had learned since last January was and more PlayStations. Australian companies, such • confirmed by witnesses of the bloodiest war as Talison Minerals and Sons of Gwalia, have played • since World War II. Why is this war taking an important part in this bloody trade. In 2001, • place? For the same reason the Congo has Australia produced around 80 per cent of the coltan • been exploited and millions of its people illegally mined in the DRC and bought from the • killed since the 19th century: its vast natural Rwandese. • resources. First it was rubber, exploited by the • All this has been tolerated because of our denial of Belgians and King Leopold II, and resulting in • equality in the face of the all-powerful laws of the the deaths of around 10 million people. The • market. All these deaths because we have decided to • King made an immense fortune—recently, one • • • • • accept that life can be given a on this planet are subjected to This is our opinion, and we • • fluctuating value that can be every day (lack of drinking water, are trying, with those who • weighed against other goods. food shortages, death from believe as we do, to verify it. • The deaths of millions of black curable diseases). What is But we know that this might • people seems, therefore, if not happening in the Congo or in is exactly what makes a • tolerable, at least acceptable, in Gaza is not just one special and society of humans possible. • the face of the incredible out of the ordinary thing—it is What is to be done? Relying • benefits we can draw from it. In what is happening in many other solely on our governments and • the end, it comes down to this: places in the world every day. • NGOs, or finally emancipating How much blood is my Acknowledging this equality is • ourselves and accepting our PlayStation worth? the first step towards taking our • responsibilities? As Rancière own responsibilities away from • There is an optimistic point noted, ‘the government does not those who judge us incapable, • here. There is a solution and it is owe the people its education for • and who have made us in our own hands. Only equality the simple reason that one does • responsible for cruelty most as a starting point can be this not owe the people what it can • would never have tolerated. • solution, not only for particular acquire on its own’. In fact, • conflicts such as those taking It is with Jacques Rancière’s education is like liberty: one • place in the Middle East or in the words that I conclude: does not receive it, one 12 2009–1 2010 • Congo, but for most of the It is true that we do not know acquires it. Nº 103 • inhuman treatment a huge that humans are equal. We are • proportion of the people living saying that they might be. • 13 debaten Big Polluters and Small Steps Gill Freeman ......

Arena Magazine nos 100 and 101 have subsidies available for solar panel polluters, and not letting them off carried an interesting discussion on installations in remote Aboriginal the hook, as Chris James suggests in what we are to do in the face of the stations and agricultural enterprises issue 101. Rob Hopkins points out unfolding environmental catastrophe. have also been abandoned. So these that this involves local energy and Nonie Sharp has interpreted The larger steps, which seemed to confront water self sufficiency, personal and Transition Handbook (Rob Hudson, the big polluters through promotion of community mobility, appropriate 2008) as representing by no means locally produced clean energy, are no housing, access to food, new forms ‘naive, small steps’, whereas in her reply longer being taken. The main thrust of of recreation and leisure, new forms Chris James claims that this book lets calls the public receives from of exchange, how health is maintained ‘the big polluters off the hook’. government to act on climate change and how the community deals with are directed towards personal and/or emergencies. The changes envisaged The messages from our political leaders household behaviour. allow the possibility of progress are contradictory. Some sectors of towards self reliance and resilience government say we must maintain The Transition Town movement, on the in the face of future shocks. growth irrespective of the environmental other hand, is about a community consequences. There is the suggestion deliberately setting about a long-term As Nonie Sharp says, ‘transitioning from the Victorian state government, and rigorous examination of its use of sprang from a realisation that the for example, that an export market be fossil-fuel based energy and how it can problem is vast and that, morally developed for our brown coal. However, plan for the end of cheap oil. A speaking, doing nothing is not an others in government urge individuals secondary consideration is how the option’. These conversations are and households to adopt a conserving community deals with climate change. gearing up across Australia in the and energy-efficient way of life. They We have ‘enjoyed’ the benefits of the country as well as in cities, and are a are exhorted to take action, mostly in long period when oil was cheap and its manifestation of the frustration felt the form of small and fairly palatable use was escalating, and established by people who feel that government steps. The main climate change patterns of life assume that this will is not treating the big issues with message of late, through the use of the continue. The Transition Town the urgency required. Will transition black balloon ads, suggests that community sets about challenging this towns change the world? Who individuals and households should assumption and planning an ‘energy knows? They do have some hope of consider the efficiency of electrical descent pathway’. changing the local community. A appliances and adopt more conservative participant in the Foster-based This is by no means an easy task as uses of these appliances. Corner Inlet transition town there are many forces arrayed against initiative says in her blog: There is no challenge to the ‘big these conversations ever being ‘Transition towns, sustainability, polluters’ in either of these messages. seriously undertaken. There are good environmental practices, At one stage, at the federal government sceptics who can throw the community minimising footprints, being fit, level there were some larger steps being processes off course. There are those healthy and connected to others, taken, albeit tentatively. The immensely with a vested interest in maintaining saving money, consuming less—to popular solar-panels subsidy meant the status quo. To engage with me it's all the same thing pretty more and more PV systems were being neighbours in the community in this much when viewed from a practical, installed in households. Recently, conversation is to challenge everyone to hands-on position. however, the per-household rebate has take the very large step of reconsidering been withdrawn, and as a result the every aspect of our reliance on cheap I know that this Transition thing growth in this form of household-based oil. In their own way these has re-kindled my energy in these energy production has stalled. The communities are confronting the big directions’. debaten Transition and the Revitalised Middle Class Chris James ......

In Arena Magazine no. 102, Ted Trainer, author of the Conserver for example solar power. Running alongside these Society Alternatives for Sustainability, enters the debate on the advances is the other important notion, localisation Transition Towns movement with the question ‘Transitioning and/or small communities. Notably in this respect, to Where?’ He notes the potential of the Transition Towns Trainer advocates the same kind of smallness put movement but believes there is a good chance the ‘present forward by Transition Towns. It may be that small is movement will come to nothing of lasting significance’. He inevitable but if so, we need to be very clear about the acknowledges that the way of life we now have is ‘unjust and implications of this move. unsustainable’ but claims we cannot overcome the ‘overshoot’ Trainer quite rightly suggests there needs to be a just in material consumption simply by using technical advances. global economy. We must level the fields between the Many Transition Towns ideas are based on technical advances,

14 DEBATE • ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. This withdraw from the market forces, culture in which they find their • is no simple matter. We need to or a least some areas of it. existence. Start a Transition • take care that we don’t just Various international companies Towns group in an area that is • bundle up the poor and put them have had their products notoriously racist and the • • in some remote local with no boycotted for morally unjust and conversation will soon swing to Big Polluters and • communication and no services, unethical reasons. However, how we stop all the boat people Small Steps • as was the case with single most long term acts in this entering Australia. Or, to quote a • mothers and ministry housing respect fizzle out and within a different example, ‘We don’t Gil Freeman • estates some years ago, and has year or so it is business as usual. want all these people coming • been the case with a number of In contrast, many socialist based from the city and lobbing on our • minority groups. This kind of alternatives quickly take on the farms’. Indeed, Transition Towns • Gil Freeman and his separatism is an easy option and capitalist formula when people are, for the most part, culturally partner Meredith • is already built into the find themselves undervalued and bound and can be a means of are engaged in • farming on a small • Transition Towns model but it unrewarded. A solid history of sustaining localised forms of South Gippsland • doesn’t mean it cannot be this lies in the commune cultural relativism. In which case mixed farm. Gil is a • changed. A question here movement. is ‘energy’ the real topic of the member of the • underwrites the willingness of debate? The idea that we can build a new Energy Innovation • Australians to be truly inclusive society around energy and the The Transition Towns energy Co-operative, based • and to clearly identify what coming scarcity of it is an decent plan is based upon in West Gippsland. • demarcates diversity and • interesting concept but are decentralisation. Transition inclusiveness from cultural • people truly willing to forego Towns answer to most aspects of relativism. • their luxuries? More to the non-sustainability is • The Transition Towns’ answer to point, will the world really run localisation, believing it will • the consumption problem is if out of energy? Or is it more an make for a more sustainable and • • we withdraw from the current issue of what type of energy are just world. It might be more • economy en masse it will simply we talking about? At what cost? sustainable but sustainable for • fail. Easier said than done. And who suffers to make sure whom? And what is actually • Emotionally and habitually most the elites do not go without? In being sustained? Autarky? • Western people enjoy some terms of community-based Isolationism? Neo-feudalism? A • aspects of the current Transition Towns movements new green economy? The re- • consumerism. Moreover, it is not the answer to these questions invention of capitalism? In much • that the thinking sectors of lies in the contexts. Transition of rural Australia we have not • • society have not tried to Towns tend to take on the moved far from these regimes • • • • • • anyway. Rural people hate any kind of outside authority; it is about sustaining the middle class, whose • they like to make up their own rules even if they do roots have been severely shaken by the crises Transition and the • oppress fifty percent of the population—women. I make in capitalism. This is not new territory. The Revitalised Middle • this point because if, as a society, we are ever going to class war is simply dressed in a new guise— Class • address the pitfalls of patriarchy, it is never going to aestheticism. Because ‘small’ produces this • happen in small communities because of the necessity kind of aestheticism it can only be viewed Chris James • that women do all the domestic work; and, just by from a distance. This makes it easy to hide the • chance, Transition Towns (in rural communities) are abuses (the detail). We understand this in art • • visibly gender differentiated. In addition, small but have not fully comprehended the fluidity, Chris James is • communities are fraught with people in self- appointed or discursiveness, of this kind of postmodern currently • positions of power. This was challenged at a recent politics. Instead we have called its discourses researching • Transition Towns meeting when a senior shire employee ‘depoliticised’. Transition Towns at • Deakin University. was heard to say, ‘There has to be a gatekeeper’. Is this a • Trainer suggests we build aspects of a new She can be reached projection of how small communities are to be • system—‘basically an Anarchist vision’— at or state, in other words. This is the very • metaphorically speaking, gun towers? . Trainer suggests that Transition Towns is focused on supremacy in previous decades because all the • energy and he argues that renewable energy cannot gains are too easily turned around. It brings us • sustain society. Also there is no indication that the back to the real purpose of the Transition • • world’s governments are seriously committed to going Towns movement—bourgeois community • down the path of renewable energy. The carbon lobby is resilience. We need to ask: is ‘resilience’, a • too strong, governments are too weak and too wrapped pathway to real social change or is it a bulwark • up in self-interest. Moreover, the ‘ordinary’ people are against it? Is Transition Towns a means of • kept too busy trying to earn a living and surviving the letting the middle classes off the social justice • rising costs and market failures to think too far outside hook? Further, is it a means of allowing • the proverbial square. Environment concerns are really middle class dependent governments to • for those who have time for them. It has often been said abrogate their responsibilities to citizens in • • that the environment movement is made up of the favour of a civil society where anything goes 12 2009–1 2010 • (leisured) middle class. Now the middle class is in as long as it is good for business? If this is so decline. I would contend then that Transition Towns is then Transition Towns has not shifted from Nº 103 • • not really about environment sustainability as much as mainstream neo-liberalism. • 15 debatenA Spiritual Alternative to Consumerism David Long ......

As I have recently seen Arena concerns itself with cultural issues— and aural brainwashing I get in Melbourne is how we are living today, under consumerism—I would like to approximately fifty times any sloganeering I make a few points from my own experience. Rather than saw in Eastern Europe. I know I am free but I intellectualise, I prefer to assert from striking observations and spend a huge amount of time and energy intuitions. Many things I see hit me like a ton of bricks, living in a filtering and cancelling unwanted peripheral big consumer city like Melbourne much of the last twenty years. messages. This is not what I call ‘quality of My background probably enhanced this: thirty years of yoga life’. As consumerism grinds on, we see daily practice; a few years living in Asia; times of rural living in how it goes against human nature and our Australia, often with idealistic, somewhat self-sufficient people; a lovelier and sweeter side. few months in communist Eastern Europe in the seventies; and, in But what of a positive vision? We can’t just be Australia, always living decades behind the times, with few gadgets, anti. What are we for? Until we embrace the few distractions and entertainments, and often with no TV. joys of simplicity, quietness, the sanctity of But would not anyone who has lived in an Australian city for people’s headspaces, we will remain suckers twenty or thirty years notice huge changes in how we live? It’s for all-action, vibrant cosmopolitanism, been twenty years since the Berlin Wall came down and the exciting, all spruiking, all-music and all- collapse of communism. In that time, much of the Left has lost its dancing public areas. We need to give the focus—the negative focus on ‘the enemy’ and the positive focus on people back their mindspace; we need to ‘the vision’. This enemy has morphed from capitalism into (hyper- promote ‘Sane Spaces’ as necessary and )consumerism. Consumerism, as we see it operating, involves the beautiful public places; we need to and reduce minds, desires and fears; it involves invasion and inundating the amount of advertising by two-thirds. sacred space—the hearts and minds of people. It involves dumbing The Left needs to embrace spirituality fully, as down and destracting with entertainment and novelty and showing the way to the fulfillment that spectacle, and tranforming passers-by into resources to be materialism cannot give and as a personal impacted with a promotional message. discipline to counter the saturation of The intensity and density of consumerist advertising is of course consumerism. If Marx and Engels were living very different from the control techniquies I saw in Easern Europe, in Melbourne now, they would not be writing where communism was presented as a fait accompli. The visual about the exploitation of the workers, they

would be writing psychology—how your own memories or experiences much or motivate the consumption- our minds have been seduced and from that years, not from theory. In afflicted to simplify. Appalling stuffed with rubbish; how our hearts developing countries and some upheaval and dislocation would, of have been hardened in many ways; others, the important issues may be course. But before doomsday how nervous, jumpy and contracted exploitation and justice, but in happens, sampler experiences of we have become. How many enjoy a Australia I think the issue is how to simplicity peace and serenity need state of contentment, spaciousness un-wreck our psychology. to be available to show people what and benign feelings all round, which, they are missing. Yoga and However, in every country, planetary as far as I can see, is actually the mindfulness education/meditation survival is before everything else. purpose of life? should be taught in schools. There Do we, in Australia, have the time should be ad-free zones, background An interesting exercise is to draw a and scope to adopt a gradual music-free zones, designated quiet line in the sand by picking any year approach, of forty years or twenty spots marked on maps like public before 1970, or even between 1970 years, of weaning ourselves away toilets! The ‘Life. Be in it’ campaign and 1985 (when consumerism began from consumerism and towards went on for years and was probably to kick in). Compare it to now in simplicity and sustainability? Sure, successful. But now we have ‘hyper- respect to how people were. Were a gradual approach might protect life’. We now badly need a four-year they nice to be around? Were they some jobs and some living standards or more ‘Peace. Be in it’ campaign. kind? Were they honest? Were they on the way there, but what are we, Answers will come from silence and fun? Were they trusting? Were they the people, like now as material to beauty more than from gabfest and open or closed? Were they grounded work on and what would we be like commissions. in the unrealistic and fantasising? at the end of it? Were they humble or egoistic? Were We can have any number of they content or wanting? Work from gabfests, but they won’t change ...... Arena Magazine Appeal?

...... 16 DEBATE • • • • • • A Spiritual • Alternative to • Consumerism • The Dirt • David Long Jake Lynch • ...... • • David Long is a • Seattle’s jaded generations find hope in the March; by July, where before there practising Buddhist • was just soil and seeds, there grew who lives in • new city farms leaves and vines and products of the • Melbourne. I love how Australians call a campfire a ‘bush telly’. It just makes earth. People would come out to dump • their rubbish, have a look at what • so much sense: the magnetism of the thing, the endless variety Brandon was doing, and pretty soon • you can see in a frame that from a distance appears unchanging. • The way it draws people to it is almost spiritual, beyond any there would be four or five neighbours, • considerations of warmth or light, and perhaps clasps the end of who had never given each other the • that thread in us that leads back to a more ancient man, when the time of day previously, standing • fire was about survival. around having a chinwag, ‘kicking THE RAW AND • the tyre’ as they say, making note of THE COOKED • It seems that vegie gardens are like that too. A young bloke who the changes and talking about the • lives in our apartment block here in Seattle put together a little seasons. I would stand out there • patch around the side of our building a few months ago. That was with them, thinking about the ‘bush • • The Dirt • • • • telly’, the magnetism of the thing, the endless Since the departure of former President Bush much Jake Lynch • variety that you can see in a frame that from a political and cultural agony has subsided, but there are • distance appears unchanging. And, like the new troubles to replace the old. People are questioning • fire, perhaps the patch clasps the end of that the corporations that in many ways usurp actual democratic Jake Lynch is an • thread in us that leads back to a more ancient governance. Crime is up, obesity is up, unemployment is Australian • man, when the garden was about survival. up. The gap between the rich and the poor is greater • journalist and now than at any time before, exacerbated by a social • As my first American winter gave way to my newspaper editor services system that groups the United States more with • first spring and I started to explore my new currently living in the developing nations than with the world’s leaders. To • neighbourhood, I saw vegie patches sprouting Seattle, say the natives are restless is true, but it doesn’t fully Washington. • up all over the place. In backyards but also on • express the social and economic dissatisfaction that is the strip in front of houses, in planter boxes • rumbling, through America’s cities especially. • on concrete pathways; the local middle school • even built a garden out front where people Against this backdrop, Community Gardens programs • were free to take whatever produce grew there. are currently the hot topic in urban planning and social • The proliferation of patches reminded me of services. They are hailed by its champions as not only a • some of the poorer cities in Asia I had visited, way to preserve and enhance green space in the city, but • where people there grew food for their own also as a resource of human capital; a way to facilitate • survival. But here in the Seattle suburb of the interaction of people with their communities, while • Queen Anne, there is plenty of disposable at the same time fostering an interest in outdoor • • income to spend on organic produce at one of recreation and healthy eating. Community Gardens • the many stores nearby where it is available. It programs are seeing a huge increase in people wanting to • was standing around with Brandon one get involved, and waiting lists for plots are hundreds • Sunday afternoon, watering the patch and long. The Seattle City Council’s P Patch program, • pondering the cornucopia, that I started administered by the Department of Neighbourhoods, • thinking. What is motivating people to get provides organic community garden space for residents • down into the dirt for the sake of a few fresh of seventy neighbourhoods. Though Seattle doesn’t have • lettuces? Why the sudden urge to grow? So I the urban slum crises of many other cities in the United • • asked Brandon. For him it wasn’t an economic States, 12 per cent of its residents live below the poverty • necessity, but a way of connecting with a way line. Fifty-five per cent of P Patch gardeners are low • of life that to him felt more meaningful. income, and between April and October 36 per cent of • gardeners get more than half of their produce needs As it turns out that desire to connect to a life • from their P Patch. • that felt more meaningful is a common one • these days. For someone who grew up in an The act of growing your own food in the backyard vegie • Australia of relative prosperity and social garden or the suburban plot has always been something • stability, America of 2009 seems to be a place of a social statement, and today this is true more than • on the precipice. Since 9/11, many of the ever. As a response to the obesity epidemic, corporate • people here feel besieged. The current influence over the industrial food economy, carbon • financial situation and the state of many of emissions, social discontent, unemployment, and even 12 2009–1 2010 • the big cities has not helped placate the the breakdown of the family structure, more and more Nº 103 • • American people, plenty of whom are people are picking up trowels and shovels, and finding • dissatisfied with their immediate environments. satisfying answers in the soil of urban gardens. 17 • ESSAY • • • Dauntless • • • Dauntless Reveries • • Ian Bedford • • Reveries • Ian Bedford is Iam Bedford • Senior Research ...... • Fellow in • Anthropology at • Macquarie does not cease with sleep or revive on waking. Yet to call Reflecting on reveries of • University, Sydney, this persistence ‘dreaming’ is another matter. • and he has worked imperial power, ‘life is • Of course this persistence is not the only enigmatic thing in Pakistan, India, • Iran and South normal’ and escape from about the being of an animal. As one who at times • Central Asia. His suffering through violence. encounters funnel-web spiders, I always wonder—at the • third novel, The very moment of the encounter—what they are ‘doing there’; • Resemblance, was 1. that is, why they have come, since no place seems to me to • published in ‘Bin Laden has only made things worse.’ be the right place for them. ‘If it’s a male, he’s looking for a • November 2008 by It was November 2007. I was in mate’, I’m told. I suppose I know what this means. • Rain Bazaar Press. • Pakistan. The speaker and his circle of Magnified by my fear and distaste, the funnel-web is to me • so alien a creature that I am unable to supply any really friends were all old acquaintances. They • were not madrasa students, Taliban, or convincing analogy for what is to be one. It would be • sympathisers in any way with the goals impertinent to wonder if such a creature ‘dreams’. Its • and premises of fundamentalist Islam. function is to populate dreams. • • Their feeling against America was not With moths and moles, beneficent creatures, something • an abstract and uninformed detestation goes on, but it seems ‘dreaming’ is not the word. To dream of ‘the Great Satan’ but resembled the • entails a contrast with waking life. Not even the human • animus of the Irish against the English; infant, an evolving person, ‘dreams’. In Colin McGinn’s • of the Tibetans and Uyghur against the terms (Mindsight, 2004), he or she cannot yet distinguish • Chinese; or (more intimately) of ‘image’ from ‘percept’. Until she matures, and the capacity • Palestinians against the Israelis, whose for this distinction swims into her grasp, the baby will be • relentless expansion of settlements on unaware that some of her sensory contents ‘can be • • the West Bank of Jordan, in defiance of manipulated at will’, that she can wish, and in fact often • UN resolutions, was, to them, a wishes, for what appears—that she makes things appear. trespass sanctioned by the Americans. • In the Pakistan context, they were all The baby does not know she wishes, while with moths and • moles the word ‘wish’ seems not premature but wholly • democrats. Why, then, that ‘only’? How • inappropriate. In both these cases, the human and the non- could they lament, as peaceable persons • fired with sentiments of justice, that human, however, we may say of the sentient being that it is • bin Laden had ‘only’ made matters lapped without knowing it by the stuff of an experiential • worse? Had they ever believed that the world from which it does not emerge but which furnishes it • destruction of the Twin Towers, or any with an image of its activity, incommunicable to other • such large-scale, murderous action, beings. This sense of its life accompanies it awake or asleep. • might conceivably have made the world But it cannot appear or matter to this creature that it is • • a better place? dreaming. • In the sociohistorical vision of Giambattista Vico • 2. (1688–1744), aspects of this condition are identified for • ‘We are not alone in dreaming at night’, human communities. Vico’s ‘first men’—his own heuristic • wrote W. G. Sebald in Austerlitz (2001), invention, beings who have become men through their • • soon before his untimely death. ‘The discovery of language and of such human institutions as • smaller mammals such as mice and marriage and burial—are themselves wholly enclosed moles also live in a world that exists • within a world which seems self-evident to them, which • only in their minds when they are fills them with wonder and from which they are unable to • asleep ... and who knows ... perhaps emerge because they are locked within their immediate • moths [the topic of his discourse at experience of the world. They have no distancing concepts. • this point in his story] dream as well, Their concepts as these evolve will be ‘imaginative’, not • perhaps a lettuce in the garden dreams ‘intelligible’. Vico says of his first men—a category which in • • as it looks up at the moon by night.’ his day subsumed women—that the fables that shaped their • There is reason to suppose that diverse understanding belonged to ‘myth’: a Greek word which in • creatures, while inactive, may in a way Latin became mutus, ‘mute’, since the first language, asserts • imagine themselves still to be active; or Vico, was not a spoken language. • • perhaps, while active, they imagine There will be no space to enquire here why Vico thought • themselves to be at rest. The life of the first language was mute. The assumption is not as images, of that which is present to the • 12 2009–1 2010 unpromising as it sounds. Vico, and Rousseau after him, • mind or to what doubles for the mind, Nº 103 were among the first to recognise that language is a • • 18 conceptual structure, which does not need sound. He did not mean that no ...... vocal sounds at all accompanied this first language, but that they did not signify. A time came when sounds began to signify. Yet for Vico the American power is, emergence of human ‘voices’, le voci—sounds that signify—did not yet mark the transformation of language into something conformable to our present of course, a reality. It notion of human language. For us, language works ‘by convention’. Words and their meanings are appointed. The first men, however, assigned words to is also a dream. objects by a process that owed little or nothing to social convention. This process for them was natural, as natural as fear, as breathing. It was also Distant peoples may mistaken. Their use of language misled men about the nature of the world. be captivated, or Such ‘mistakes’ are still made—it is the burden of what I will argue—so we will look at one of them in Vico. Men’s first notion of God, of the divine, bruised, by that was of a being of surpassing power who resembled themselves in that he was all body; emotion, for him, was paramount, and was extremely volatile. He dream. It would be an expressed his awe-inspiring intentions in thunder and lightning. Men obeyed these intentions, which they took for words. So they entered—as enormous calamity men—into the sphere of language and of the ideas language first conveyed: ‘imaginative universals’. They obeyed what they took to be God’s intentions, for the Americans in uttered in words. These words they imagined they discovered, as the utterance of God. In fact—and this is one of the subtleties of Vico’s particular if they were theory—they invented them, for thunder and lightning are not really words. ever to waken from it Such was the creation of men ‘wholly different from that of God’. It rested, from the beginning, on misunderstanding (fraintendimento), on mistake- but there seems no making. Vico’s was a teleological perspective and he would maintain that men came in time to correct some of their mistakes, guided as they were by immediate likelihood God’s providence. When a commentator on Vico wants to make him appear like Marx, for example, he or she stresses this aspect of ‘providence’, the of that happening.

workings of which do indeed sustain some very Marx-like passages, penned was not at all clear that they had replaced over a century before Marx. But should one turn to the Bible for the or outworn the ascendancy in their own reported actions of the Judaeo-Christian God, who was Vico’s, one finds a hearts of their ‘imaginative universals’. being who does not in fact strike one as very wise or ‘providential’, or as Man, creative man, problem-proposing much of a guide. The wholly anthropomorphic being in the prophetic man and problem-solving man, continues scriptures explored by Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit (Idolatry,1992) to think in ‘imaginative universals’, loves conceived of his people Israel as a whore and of himself as a betrayed rhetoric, is buffeted by his emotions, and husband, ranted and raved, and specialised in dire threats and the cosiest of sentenced to the body. He is never very reconciliations. We do not seem far at all from the passionate, thundering far from nature, though he imagines God imagined by the first men. To Vico, however (who for methodological himself to be. reasons excepted the Jews, but not the Christians, from the ambit of his theory), his God was wise and God’s providence secure. If we today are 3. capable of reason, it is thanks to God’s providence, to the staging of a We return to the question of dreaming, of gradual process, and not at all to the spontaneous acumen of these first what it is to dream. Most people know, men. usually without reflection, what it is to wake, or to have wakened, from a dream. Yet their ‘imaginative universals’ are with us still. They were not altogether This is commonsense. But, like those quiet banished by the evolution of a spoken language. Though there is some doubt reaches of water, sometimes marked by a about Vico’s own attitude to the succession of ‘stages’ in his evolutionary dark coloration, or tacit ruffling of the typology (he often contradicted himself) it would appear that for him surface, from which—locals say—no diver elements of the first ‘stage’ (of language, and also of logic, institutions and ever emerges, there are spaces, figments of understanding in general) survived through the entire process (Gianfranco the body and mind which resemble dreams, Cantelli, Mente Corpo Linguaggio, Firenze 1986). Before leaving it, I will take or are called by that name. From these, it a last look at the circumstances of consciousness and communication among may be hard to wake. Spaces of this kind these hypothetical first men. Because of their bodily nature and enormous include the so-called ‘reveries’ of fame, physical strength, to be taken, so Vico surmised, with the want of love or conquest,* which may be prolonged abstractions in their language and their inability to reflect on themselves forever without ruinous consequences to objectively, from without, their creative power, their power to move the dreamer, if so he be called. Such is the themselves and persuade others, and so to found institutions and to harness reverie of American power, the worldwide the potentialities of human action, was extraordinary, and has never been American way of life. American power is, exceeded. Contemporary man, by contrast, rich as he is in concepts, refined of course, a reality. It is also a dream. in taste, able to discriminate between modes of reality and courses of moral Distant peoples may be captivated, or action, does not invent, is not creative in the sense in which these first men bruised, by that dream. It would be an and their early successors were creative. enormous calamity for the Americans in Vico was himself a product of the Enlightenment: hence his ‘New Science’. particular if they were ever to waken from But he was not filled with the enthusiastic optimism of the Enlightenment. it but there seems no immediate likelihood Reason, to him, was a real but slight power. Men of his own day were no of that happening. It is not that kind of longer so comprehensively ‘mistaken’ as men once were: they could now dream. It is the reverie of an imperial hope to understand themselves and the natural world, up to a point, but it people.

19 A more precarious example is the dream it. Why did they awaken from it? The question must be put • ESSAY or reverie of ‘life as normal’, entertained because, as with other such dreams—the reverie of imperial • to the full in the certain and immediate power; the all-but-universal reverie, the most seductive and • • prospect of global warming. Having dangerous of the lot, of ‘life as normal’—there are so many • noted this—once—I avert my mind, who do not awaken, and this is not merely a reflection of • like most people. I know global the benightedness of ‘some people’. It may be, as Vico’s • Dauntless Reveries warming is real, is catastrophic, and is thought suggests, invincibly human, and not merely a • largely manmade: but I avert my mind. I reminiscence of our ‘first’ condition, to persist in such • Ian Bedford avert my mind, not, as I should, from dreams. • the reverie of life as normal, which • Those who awakened from the dream in this case—I am hastens to re-envelop and sustain me, • referring to one case, and to only a few people—did so, I • but from my brief glimpse of an think, because their faith was imperfect and they had never • indecency, the real state of affairs. I quite consented to dream in the first place. Retributive • don’t think I have ever quite visualised justice, after all, is a tall order, and in very short supply—as • this imminent calamity across its full against mere retribution, without the justice. These friends • range, even when reading a scientific • in Pakistan had themselves participated, without high research article on the topic. Rather, it • expectations, in a brief political struggle, the Movement for is always some finite aspect, reflecting • the Restoration of Democracy in 1982, which sought to my habitual train of thoughts, that • force parliamentary elections on the military dictator, perturbs me—the loss of Bangladesh, • General Zia ul-Haq, who was buttressed in power by the • for example, or the fate of the rivers of Americans. They lost, as they expected to lose. Their • Asia from the Mekong to the Indus scepticism had hardened—though one can be a sceptic and • should China, enlarged with Tibet, still fight. • intensify its raid on world resources by • damming or diverting the headwaters. I They were thrilled, all the same, by 9/11. It is hard to pass • grieve over small particulars—as even judgment on their elation. The simpler the emotion, the • these are, in the immense and more it excludes: perhaps compassion, at the loss of so • stupefying balance of things. I do not many innocent lives. But who is to say their emotion was • • know what to do, and retreat to my simple? They beheld bodies in free fall. There was, at least, • rapture of a liberal and humane future no fear of sense deprivation in front of the TV sets, as • for the human race. There ought to be a endured by American audiences throughout the coverage of • passage in Vico which would anatomise the first Gulf War, when the charts and diagrams and • this rapture and wilful blindness, to be discourses on military hardware persuaded many that the • placed along with his anatomy of the death-dealing was in some way imaginary and that smart • ‘conceit of nations’ and ‘conceit of bombs spared lives. There were no images then of the • scholars’ (boria de’ dotti). rubble in Baghdad, or of the rain of bombs from aircraft on • • a retreating army. In a statement broadcast on al-Jazeera • (Oct 29, 2004) bin Laden—I think for We are still searching for a word, other than ‘dream’, to refer • the first time—claimed full to the condition of those (ourselves not excluded—for how • responsibility for the Twin Tower can we be sure we, or our kind, or our age, are not • • attacks. ‘We decided to destroy towers confronted by some all too visible reality to which we are • in America so that they may taste what blind?) who are prevented from ‘awakening’ in time to • we have tasted.’Whether or not he perceive what should be self-evident in the world around • believed his own words, bin Laden, or them. Those in this condition, like McGinn’s baby, are • his persona, spoke directly to the unable to distinguish their wishes from reality, or to qualify • elation, the immense yearning for percepts with concepts. But the human baby, to his or her • outcome which the destruction of 9/11 advantage, is genetically equipped to evolve away from this • had generated the world over among condition early in her lifetime. Vico’s first men, too, evolve, • • sympathisers of diverse kinds. Few of but the measure here far exceeds one lifetime. ‘Providence’ • these sympathisers were activists, fewer aside, there is no guarantee of the outcome; and there may • still were committed to routines of not be time. • violence, and not all of them were In a world whose penetration by media, controlled at the • confined to the Muslim world. But for • source, has done little to relieve enormous inequalities of every witness of the television images • power, access and insight into causes but has only of that grandiose event who, • intensified them, despised, displaced and forgotten confounded by the slaughter, saw only • populations all over the world, those who brood on their terror and disproportion, there were • plight, and those who would exploit their plight, have come • others—quite differently placed in the to share in a reverie brimming with aspiration and vital • world—who noted no disproportion, force, leading nowhere. They have rallied to the idea of a • glimpsed nothing novel or reassertion of their worth and presence in the world • unprecedented in an act of terror, but • through violent resistance to overwhelming power. Bin found themselves caught up in a dream • Laden’s deed has provided a symbol. There may be more which was familiar to many of them, • symbols—symbol after symbol. This misunderstanding— but had never been urged on them with • which may be compared with the peasant jacqueries of such sublime force: a dream, not of • medieval Europe, or the fulfilment of the protocols of the • terror, but of retributive justice. Resurrection (qiyamat) in the castle of Alamut in Persia by a • ‘Bin Laden has only made things worse.’ sect of the Ismai’lis in the Muslim 7th century—has • My friends in Pakistan spoke as they destructive potential, yet is steeped in pathos. It has fateful • 12 2009–1 2010 did because they had shared in this wrongness, and breaks the heart because the injustices it • Nº 103 • dream, and were now awakening from perceives are only too real. • 20 ...... ‘We decided to destroy towers in America so that they may taste what we have tasted.’Yet, leaving aside the impudence of that second ‘we’—for bin Laden, born to riches, perhaps came up with this identification only as an In a world whose afterthought—there was, and can have been, no question of the Americans ‘tasting what we have tasted’. The palate of the lion requires fresh meat. penetration by media, When Bush marvelled, soon after 9/11, that an act of terror could have been controlled at the source, committed on such a peace-loving people as the Americans, who had not done anyone any harm, his wonderment—perhaps not his wonderment, but has done little to relieve that of the nation for whom he spoke—was genuine, and filled, too, with a poignancy all its own. It would be useless to rehearse the long litany of enormous inequalities of American violations of national and popular sovereignty the world over— power, despised, beginning, perhaps, since one has to begin somewhere, with the overthrow of the elected leader Mossadeq in Iran in 1953, and not excepting the various displaced and forgotten panicky attacks on Afghan wedding parties, or the shooting down of a passenger airliner in Iranian air space in July 1988—in revenge for a misdeed populations all over the of the Iraqis. The one-sided body counts—so many American or Israeli world, those who brood dead, taken to far outweigh the much greater number of Vietnamese, or Guatemalan, or Palestinian dead—are the kind of statistics which, outside on their plight, and the Anglo-American world, fan the perception of a recklessly brutal power, quite incapable of acknowledging the effects of its actions. This image is those who would exploit not, of course, the whole truth, but it is a part of the truth. American self- their plight, have come perception is so relentlessly magnified by the most seductive and technologically proficient of the world’s media that, for those who attend to to share in a reverie no other source, it may be that hostile perceptions of American actions will always come as a surprise. When bin Laden fantasises about Americans brimming with being brought to taste what has been tasted by the wretched of the earth, he aspiration and vital has launched a preposterous myth, quite without reality on this scale in even the most regulated and urbane civil society. In a Jane Austen novel, Emma force, leading nowhere.

Woodhouse will at last see the error of her ways. This happens, often for the better, in interpersonal relations, on their modest scale, but not in international relations, and least of all when the wrongs are enormous. Imperial Rome finds nothing to weep about in the ruins of Carthage. Bin Laden has indeed made things worse. The reverie of unleashing one’s puny force, through violence, on overwhelming power, can lead only, through self-deception and all the byways of despair and demoralisation, to a redoubled suffering on the part of the victimised, a suffering in which the heaven-blessed adversary does not participate in the least. This reverie, it should be recalled, is by no means the same as the strategy, or resource, of continued resistance, of the reassertion of non-compliance, as by some Buddhist monks in Burma. That is realism: to understand that a prized value may not triumph in the world, but to cleave to it, to continue to urge it because nothing else is worth having. It may be hard to translate this outlook into a political program but it is often done—all the time, in fact, by those survivors of persecution who are privileged to fight for, and retain their humanity. Trade unions and other collectives cherish a history of hard- won objectives that are not readily to be lost. Primo Levi has written (in far from triumphal terms) of such a victory at Auschwitz. The fear is that people, all of us, not perhaps in our intimate dealings, where there may be the time and the goodwill to recover from error, but wherever we are grouped into giant entities—such as the nation—which are not wholly of our own making, but appear to be, are by that very means enrolled in vast, dreamlike undertakings from which we are powerless to ‘awake’. I have referred, in the spirit of Vico, to three of these mythic undertakings: the reverie of imperial power, the reverie of ‘life as normal’ and the reverie of the escape from suffering through the employment of reciprocal violence. There are others. The one I, personally, find the hardest to combat and identify is the second. I am not sure what use there would be in prolonging the catalogue of such sedative structures of delusion. The point, rather, is to awaken from them. * Here we have all three, in one tremendous proposition: To seeke new worlds, for golde, for prayse, for glory, To try desire, to try love severed farr, When I was gonn shee sent her memory, More stronge than were ten thousand shipps of war. Sir Walter Raleigh, The eleventh and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia, 1592.

21 • FEATURES • • Re-evolution of • • • • Re-evolution of • Social Democracy • Social Democracy Tom Nairn • Tom Nairn • ...... • • Tom Nairn is • Professor of is conjured up to avoid future cave-ins. Yet, • Nationalism and Comments on Guy Rundle’s Crikey • such return to business as usual has become Cultural Diversity in • the Globalism series on the Left insupportable to the great majority, even for • Institute at RMIT. The most welcome aspect of Guy Rundle’s three part The Australian readers. The latter’s columnar • series on the Left, recently published in Crikey,was zombies seem to have lost their appeal. Hence • its historical range and perspective. Rundle sees the the anxiety for some alternative, for a • question of present-day strategy for the Left as presentable centre-left, a novel totem-pole of • determined and inherited from a darkling plain upon regroupment and organisation. As Rundle puts • it, the ‘green left’ looks like the current best • which a fundamental war was fought out across • bet, but regrettably too negative: ‘less decades, to end with results bitter for all concerned. • The armies involved were not modestly ignorant but consumption, less waste, less destruction’—a • all too knowing, over-confident and given to more determined regulation of capitalism, • drunken swaggering. Today we find them clutching rather than a replacement. Marxists may still • their heads and groaning in assorted ditches. The be glimpsed on street corners, their message • mutual exhaustion of the contending parties has now suspiciously ossified into ‘something • brought the greatest hangover of modern times. from the 3rd century church fathers’. Amid the • ruins of the great 20th century cathedrals, • Rundle’s thoughts were occasioned by The they too have had to resort to origins, • Australian’s series entitled ‘What’s Left?’, most likely • shouting into the winds of consumption and • intended, he suggests, to make everyone look to a privatisation. renascent Right for new signposts. But over there, • Some may indict Rundle for exaggeration or • as he explains, we find that neo-conservatism has • pessimism. But there may be a case for ended up as just another post-night-out sufferer— • indeed, stuck in a peculiarly deep self-dug millennial thinking his deconstruction, though in the • ditch, amid the wreckage of neo-liberal lunacy and right direction, hasn’t gone far enough. The • disappointment. So far, the Great Financial Crisis vast 20th century temples of socialism rested • has led mainly to calls for digging deeper in the themselves on dubious foundations. Leninism • proverbial sense, while some indefinable regulation was not betrayed by Stalin and social • • • • • • democrats. It was from the start with their train of ancient and only one available. On the one- • a form of compensatory or venerable prejudices and time Left as on the all-time • catching up development: in opinions, are swept away, all Right, ‘all that is solid melts into • effect, a short cut to new-formed ones become air, all that is holy is profaned, • industrialisation, employing antiquated before they can and man is at last compelled to • rhetoric and promissory notes to ossify ... face with sober senses his real • • render the strains of the forced condition of life and his relations This truth of Rundle’s day was • march more bearable. Such with his kind’. published 160 years ago—not so • mobilisation needed an ‘-ism’ long in the appropriate macro- • (social or communist), which in Forced New Evolution? developmental timeframe. It only • turn counted on symbolic In that real condition, Rundle • feels longer because the exaggeration of the system-foe, observes, ‘There is no left’. And • trajectory of bourgeois advance capitalism. Rundle takes the with the GFC, counter-Leninism • has been so broken up by argument back to post-World has followed Leninism through • conflict and warfare, the latter War II and its left-wing history’s exit door into the • concluding only twenty years ago • aftershocks; it should perhaps be irretrievable. However, nobody with the end of the Cold War. • taken back to 1848 and the world can yet stand an ‘-ism’-less Since then, the advance has • of The Communist Manifesto: world—the permanent sobriety resumed in a form unimaginable • Constant revolutionizing of of life after ideology, plus • by Marx, Engels or Lenin: the production, uninterrupted recovery in 21st century ditches • communist vanguard of the disturbance of all social and recovery wards. Not so long • globe’s biggest nation conditions, everlasting ago, intellectuals could at least • deliberately building up uncertainty and agitation switch orchestras, from blowing • capitalist development as the • distinguish the bourgeois in the pipe band to booming in only possible mode of • 12 2009–1 2010 epoch from all earlier ones. All capitalism’s brass band, or vice- industrialisation—not another • fixed, fast frozen relations, versa. Today the latter is futile Nº 103 new economic policy, but the • • 22 cacophony and the former seems to have no wind ...... left. There’s no music in the air; we are all forced to dream up new sounds and melodies. No Left left? ‘So why is this man smiling?’ Rundle Some may indict continues. Because the era of second-rate short cuts may be finished, though democracy is not: Rundle for exaggeration What does make radical change possible, sudden and likely ... is that processes of self-management are immanent, there beneath the surface, within or pessimism. But there hypermodernity, in a way they haven’t been previously ...That’s a result of better education, intellectual labour—but also of the fact that we all may be a case for spend so much time thinking about how systems work ... thinking his With all their inherent problems, he insists, ‘these debates will emerge again, there is no choice but to deconstruction, though have them’. At which point, it’s worth indicating one oddity in Rundle’s contribution: after smiling to the reader, he remarks that the required shifts of outlook in the right direction, are ‘harder to see from Australia than just about everywhere else’. Really? I doubt if many attentive hasn’t gone far enough. readers from other stranded boat-crews will agree. These are Australian reflections from out front, not the outback. That is, from a society (as I noted in The vast 20th century The Age, the same day as I read Rundle) ranking ‘Second in the world for quality of life’ in the latest UN Human Development Report for 2009. It’s also a temples of socialism country conscious of good fortune and possibility, illustrated in a recent Economist table (11 October rested themselves on 2009) as more confident than most of its luck—no. 1 in fact, just ahead of Canada, Finland and Austria. dubious foundations. Rundle’s reticence here recalls something else, about one of the systems that wound up in 1989. The 1848 Manifesto went on from its dizzying vision of global Leninism was not bourgeois triumph to make a great mistake we still live with. The authors thought that the -ism of capital would soon efface old-fashioned nationality betrayed by Stalin and politics, frontiers, patriotism and so on. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of social democrats.

the world market, given a cosmo- The famous words are often quoted that nation more meaningful—more politan character to production today as a direct anticipation of distinguishable from what would and consumption in every globalisation. However, we also otherwise be uncomfortably like all- country. To the great chagrin of know that the ‘national ground’ the-sameism, the more reactionaries, it has drawn from became a lot more important after homogeneous common fate under the feet of industry the 1848, not less. Nor did it concern preached from innumerable pulpits national ground on which it only annoyed reactionaries. From ever since 1989. As Mark Pluciennik stood. All old-established their respective standpoints as has observed, ‘social evolution’ is national industries have been Rhinelander and Jew, the authors also ‘a shorthand for other concepts’ destroyed or are daily being hugely underestimated the factor of that encompasses as a proxy for destroyed. In place of the old national identity. Refusal or ‘existing hierarchies’, including ‘race’ local and national seclusion and qualification of the ‘cosmopolitan and mounting (or falling) great- self-sufficiency, we have character of production’ was power domination (Social Evolution, intercourse in every direction, mounted, in a process of grossly 2005). universal inter-dependence of uneven development that led to Rundle is both decided and amusing nations. And as in material, so imperialism and warfare, rather than on Australia’s distinctive route. ‘The also in intellectual production. the ascendancy of their chosen single greatest failed movement in The intellectual creations of vehicle of response, class.We must Australian political history is individual nations become be wary of analogous mistakes classical liberalism’, he states, common property. National one- today. because the ‘paradoxical fact’ in sidedness and narrow- ‘Intercourse in every direction’ recent times has been Labor victory: mindedness become more and makes choice in any particular the defeat of John Howard’s more impossible, and from the direction more positive and missionary resurrection of numerous national and local important, not less. ‘Universal inter- liberalism between 1996 and 2007. literatures, there arises a world dependence of nations’ renders the Not only have Labor’s core literature. independent trajectory of this or principles survived, the 2007

23 election results suggest they have been somehow source in ethno-linguistic diversity. From such • FEATURES ‘cemented into the culture’, and reaffirmed via Kevin variety the general or universal is born— • Rudd’s victory. Neo-liberalism arrived too late in ‘species-being’,in Feuerbach’s original sense. • • Australia, and could not resist a crassly ideological Logic alone tells us there can’t be a universal • style—making up for lost ground and time by public without particulars; however, less obviously, • relations loudness, a practically ‘revolutionary’ the latter never cease determining the former, • Re-evolution of fervour. However, this style proved self-defeating in in the process of history. • Social Democracy quite a short time. It led to correspondingly loud • It’s true that once constituted, the general Tom Nairn collapse and discontent, and the movement that • then itself becomes a cause, and is awarded carried Rudd into office (and generated the current • undue prominence by intellectuals and debate). • politicians. The ‘cosmopolitan character of • Rundle is scathing about the limitations of Rudd’s production’ (and everything else) becomes • Labor victory, and its ‘stunningly unambitious itself a trend influencing the determinate (for • political programme’. Yet his own position suggests example, Australian) realities on which it is • there must be more to it than such failings. In the founded. ‘A vague depressive sense of • • concluding part 3 of ‘The Left’, he says one should be nothingness becomes the psychological • ‘wary of expounding abstract alternatives’ unrelated common cold of hypermodernity’, Rundle says, • to real movements, and then turns immediately to an atomised society of ‘ungrounded people • Latin America: where ‘there is an enormous amount ‘where identity gets nowhere in a ’world of • going on’, and not only in the case of Hugo Chavez’s shadows’. The 1848 prophets were misguided • Venezuela. ‘New modes of distribution, co-operative enough to conjecture that the answer to the • production, intersection between intellectual life and sense of nothingness might be the advancing • and everyday existence are being developed.’ cohesiveness of class. Proletarian union and • • common cause should cure atomisation and However, it is worth stepping back a little here, and • disintegration: development along healthier, remembering another diagnosis: that of Benedict • more human lines—social and communal Anderson in Imagined Communities. Anderson • principles embodied (in the first instance) by underlines there the importance of Latin America in • vanguards of mobilising souls alerted to the • formulating what one might call the ‘classical theory’ immanent higher ground. • of nation-statehood and nationalism—what was to • become the principal cohesive force of 19th and early However, such mobilisation was taken over • 20th century development. Among the newer states from below by pressures of ethnos and • of a sub-continent, newer forces and trends were language, the pre-existent varieties of societal • enabled, in a revealing way that showed meanings formation. In the concluding part of his • previously obscured in European overlaps and Nations and Nationalism (1983), Ernest Gellner • contests. Perhaps an even deeper causation is surely supplied a more realistic assessment of • • involved here: both when and where arising future trends. The nationalism that had • tendencies reach fruition can be of crucial unavoidably informed actual industrialisation • importance. Accident partly determines all actual was most unlikely to simply evaporate in its • trajectories—the course of societies as well as their subsequent later stages. He followed the • • • • • • prediction made by Jean- ‘universal high culture’. The more probably be, in Gellner’s • François Revel: ‘By and large ... pluralism of the latter will be phrase, ‘somewhere in the • the nationalist imperative of the nourished, rather then flouted or middle’, altered yet entirely • congruence of political unit and denied, a higher stage of recognisable, and devoted to • of culture will continue to apply particularism and ancient maintaining or even somewhat • [even though] the sharpness of diversity, not an impossible (and accentuating the inherent • • nationalist conflict may be dangerous) ironing-out or variety—the ‘wild cultures’ that • expected to diminish’. Hence reduction of species inheritance. end up in the ‘garden’ of a more • under globalising circumstances Most science-fiction depiction global modernity. Rundle • ‘late industrial society ... can be of earth invaders has shown concludes that The Australian’s • expected to be one in which them as all the same: lizards ambition for a reaffirmed neo- • nationalism persists, but in a oppressively at one, whether as liberalism is vain: ‘Whatever the • muted, less virulent form’. destroyers or redeemers. But all case, it’s clear that some of us • this really expresses is the limits are going to have to be more • Muted but (by implication) still of sci-fi and its inability to break vocal and explicit about possible • positive, and potentially • with the customs of Homo futures’. All the more so since (as effective. So we may not have to • sapiens’ imperialism and he doesn’t need to add) the make Rundle’s choice between an • colonisation. Australian neo-liberal Coalition over-abstract greenery and the • parties have collapsed into utter • 3rd century church fathers. Historical Re-selection? confusion since losing power in • Democracy on the real terrain of The same point could be made 2007. His reflections here point • later industrial society should be another way: globalisation is to something else special to • sufficient—more prominent and unlikely to be the title of some Australia: the republican • assertive, certainly, but also more • mass conversion or convulsion— dilemma. possible within the context of • 12 2009–1 2010 a quasi-religious mutation of cyber-culture, enhanced In Australia the sense of • humanity into a novel and Nº 103 accessibility and Gellner’s uncertain nothingness and • homogeneous condition. It will • 24 ...... atomisation seems in truth less pronounced, as Australians have a rallying point denied most comparable countries, in the shape of the republican movement and principle—the decision to make a From Turkey to break from having the UK monarch as the nominal head of state. It’s true a referendum in 1999 decided to keep Queen Elizabeth II in place, although this Indonesia, military refusal was customarily put down to the absence of any popular vote for the proposed president. He or statehood has shown the she was supposed to be selected and voted for in the federal parliament alone; that is, via the British two- way. The essence of party system also inherited, and consecrated by the 2001 federation of ex-colonial states. The republican spirit may be strong in Australia, as Rundle’s democracy is not just argument makes clear, but confidence in the Canberra system and cadres of government is not. voting—all too Too many voters must have felt the new institution would be merely an extension, even a reinforcement, of the old. The republican spirit called for a new arrangeable by start but the proposed reality looked like being sucked down into tradition, a symbol rather than a management, notably by substantial shift in outlook. However, a symbol can manifest real shifts, and the armed and be- following the GFC we surely have a little more insight into what may be involved. What Leninism medalled. No, it’s more and counter-Leninism had in common was a gross over-emphasis upon the economic factors of general development. Post-1848 historical materialism put it like ‘Get the scoundrels up front, as a truth occluded by ancient superstition and proprietorial interest; a century later, the post- out!’; that is, guaranteed 60s capitalist renaissance glorified it as anti- socialism, the victorious ideology of 1989. The fall of both contending parties suggests the fallibility of means of extrusion, bred economic ideologies as such. Old-time religions have of course smartly occupied the void; but are these into the societal the only conceivable settlers in this 21st century land? equivalent of bones and Rundle suggests the contrary. In part 3 of the ‘The Left’ he says that ‘a post-capitalist system reverses sinews.

the current relationship between military statehood has shown the republicanism will also persist in a culture/society and market/economy way. The essence of democracy is muted yet still essential form. It can so that the former determines the not just voting—all too arrangeable remain the guarantee of tolerable latter and not, as currently happens, by management, notably by the wider homogeneity, by impeding the economy dictating to society and armed and be-medalled. No, it’s de facto dominance of commercial- culture ... Protestant capitalism more like ‘Get the scoundrels out!’; industrial imperiums and their cannot be re-established after that is, guaranteed means of accomplices. Globally conditioned consumer capitalism ... An extrusion, bred into the societal societal evolution will be the same economic-cultural crisis is in the equivalent of bones and sinews. and different. works’. Is this forecast so very Command-democracy can learn to Kevin Rudd’s insistence on the G20 different from that made by Kevin ape electoral republican government, as a key international grouping has Rudd in his celebrated ‘Social but not this republican spirit. It is, been both important and effective Democracy’ essay in The Monthly? surely, the latter alone that will in here. His accompanying plea for The latter suggested that the GFC the longer run make globalisation stronger Australian presence within left us with social democracy as the supportable. The republics of the body has also been in tune with sole plausible contender in the ancient and early modern times deeper trends. And this in turn is, globalisation stakes. But surely arose in opposition to dictatorships surely, the reason why Australian Rundle’s line of argument takes us and divine-right monarchy. Present- republicanism is in no way further: the only plausible form day republicanism is arising via a anachronistic. In the 19th century anything like social democracy can degree of opposition to great- Latin American countries helped take under the emerging power-dominated globalisation— formulate a nation-state condition circumstances is that of a republic. not refusal of globality ‘as such’, but in opposition to European (and later recognition that the ‘as such’ can all ‘Democratic nationalism’ isn’t North American) hegemony. In the too easily be made a stage show. sufficient: votes are too easily 21st, a formula will be needed to What it then really entails is great- contrived and, in effect, falsified to qualify and alter the spread of North power dominance in a new garb. order. From Turkey to Indonesia, Atlantic (and later Chinese or However, like Gellner’s nationalism, 25 Indian) hegemony. The democratic-republican spirit ...... • FEATURES and status will continue to be a vital ingredient of • that opposition. The re-evolution of societies in a • • more globalised condition will increasingly embody Standard-issue • that moral spirit and vision. Like South America, • Australasian societies benefit from lighter burdens nationalism was • Re-evolution of and accretions, customs less indurate and persistent. • Social Democracy from 1789 to 1989 • ‘An economic-cultural crisis is in the works’, muses • Tom Nairn Rundle in his part 3. And it ought to bring with it • emancipation from ‘commodification’ and trust in principally • market forces—‘a positive insistence that some • things need to be outside of the market for there to determined by • be a culture, for the market to sit within the polis, • and not vice versa’. What this means is a much • PHOTO ESSAY bigger turning point and initiative than most warfare—diversities • • arguments about the refurbishment of left-wing • movements and ideas have thus far contemplated. inherited rather • ‘Will that future be anything like the communism • envisaged in the early Marx, or Lenin’s utopian State than elective, and • and Revolution? Emphatically not.’I agree—but • doesn’t this imply the border being crossed is • historical rather than a matter of regroupment, conserved for all • salvation, re-training courses and detection of new • • messages between the lines of classical texts? It may time coming in the • be something more like the transition from • traditions of foraging and hunting to the neolithic or, name of sacred • later, from the feudal to the urban, or from the early- • . modern to conurbation-defined, standard-issue • modernity—a crossing that’s at the same time an genesis and societal • inevitably unknown cross-roads, towards new • territory where everything, including Left and Right, rights. Future-issue • will have to seek and establish new definitions. • • Evolution itself has to find new parameters in the nationality requires • circumstances of growing globalisation. Standard- • issue nationalism was from 1789 to 1989 principally a different -ism, • determined by warfare—not only actual wars but the • underlying climate of conflict-preparation, • compulsive community and a cohesion at once over- transcendence • supportive and repressive—diversities inherited • rather than elective, and conserved for all time • rather than oblivion. • • • • • coming in the name of sacred Human Nature (1979), and further winning votes and short-range • genesis and societal rights. defined by the later Evolution as policies—more like changing basic • Future-issue nationality requires a Religion (1985), with its assumptions and outlooks. We • a different -ism, transcendence appropriate sub-title ‘Strange need not just some public intellec- • rather than oblivion. Hopes and Stranger Fears’. tuals but also public sociology • and other disciplines, the matrix • Certain grounds for such The day I finished reading • of future arguments and decisions. transcendence had already been Rundle’s comments, The Age • Or, as Professor Dryzek laid down. Perhaps the most published an article by Gail • amusingly put it, the point is striking example is Nancy Collins of The New York Times • more like shifting onwards the Fraser’s reflections on the headed: ‘Sorry, folks, it appears • standing attitudes of public, • evolution of second-wave the end of the world is here including international, • feminism and its relationship to again’ (Tuesday 17 November), hypocrisy, the taken-for-granted • the era of neo-liberal folly and where she points out how 2009 presuppositions of what simply • downfall. In the New Left Review is easily surpassing the alarms of has and had not to be said, in • no. 56 (Mar/Apr 2009), she millennium year 2000. In a very • order to have any hope of argued that the affinity between recent address to the Australian • impact. The Cold War epoch had feminism and neo-liberalism lay Social Sciences Academy, John • its own range of tongues in ‘in the critique of traditional Dryzek argued in less dramatic • cheek, and globalisation is now • authority’, a levelling provoked style that this is the moment for evolving a successor bundle: by • by narrowly economic motives, what he defined as ‘deliberative what they fail to say will they be • but with much deeper and democracy’, a conclusion close to known and go down in • longer-lasting societal effects. Rundle’s concluding suggestion (redesigned) history, thus • The latter carry us forward into that ‘some of us are going to have • constituting the public opinion, the terrain provisionally to be more vocal and explicit • 12 2009–1 2010 even the world opinion, of an age sketched out by Mary Midgley’s about possible futures’. The • still in formation. Nº 103 Beast and Man: the Roots of point of such deliberation isn’t • • 26 27 • PHOTO ESSAY • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 12 2009–1 2010 • Nº 103 • • 28 29 • APHOTO ESSAY • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • FEATURES • • • • • On Peter Sutton’s • Pietism • • Roland Boer • • • • Apart from taking • voyages by ship and • cycling as far and • as often as he can, • Roland Boer is a • writer and a critic • based at the • University of • Newcastle. His • intellectual • background is in • theology, political • philosophy and • Marxism and he is • finishing a five • volume series • called The Criticism • of Heaven and Earth • (Brill and • Haymarket). • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 12 2009–1 2010 • Nº 103 • • 30 On Peter Sutton’s Pietism Roland Boer ......

The meaning of pietism and collective and ceremonial act. Pietistic ones are those of the individual in quiet communion with the divine. sacrimentalism in Sutton’s critique Pietists stress a one-to-one relationship with the deity, of reconciliation unmediated by priestcraft or the collective witnessing of Is theology the answer to the intractable problems of a symbolic sacrifice. Pietism is in some ways much more Indigenous and non-Indigenous reconciliation? Peter at home in an age of individualism than in ages of greater Sutton seems to think so, especially in his troubling and corporatism and communalism. arresting work The Politics of Suffering. Or rather, one The sacramental-sacrificial approach represents the type of theological approach is the cause of the failure of reverse. It also goes back deep into Old World prehistory, reconciliation: sacramentalism. The other, pietism, to a time when animals and humans, not symbols, were offers a solution. What are religious, or rather sacrificed in human rituals. theological, terms doing in the midst of a work by a fairly traditional anthropologist on the politics of That is about it, except for a few passing comments that do reconciliation? Sutton introduces them only the last not add to this basic description. For Sutton, ‘sacramental’ chapter, but they actually frame the discussion of the is really a code for government-sponsored public programs whole book. Yet he is tantalisingly succinct in paid for out of tax dollars, endless reports and posturing by describing these two positions: politicians, all of which have failed dismally. In the second There are two basic ways of framing a resolution of quotation above he has deviously added ‘sacrificial’, which relationships between Indigenous and non- is another category altogether and largely left alone. By Indigenous Australians. I will call them the contrast, ‘pietism’ acts as a catchword for private and ‘sacramental’ and the ‘pietistic’. In religious talk, personal ways of working in the world, outside the sacramental paths to spiritual grace require a programs that seem to have failed. Why choose the terms

sacramental and pietistic when collective and theology, fine distinctions bedevil any simple overview. But individual would have done perfectly well? Are they some patience is needed, since Sutton uses the term loosely, so merely camouflage for criticisms of social democratic much so that he badly misrepresents theology and confuses his approaches and a championing of liberalism? Why do own analysis (and his readers). Sutton claims that his criticisms of collective, government-sponsored sacramentalism is collective and ceremonial, sacrificial and projects sound like commentary by Miranda Devine pre-historic. or Andrew Bolt? Is not the ideology of the individual He is mostly mistaken, for the word actually has two senses, one of the worse aspects of colonialism itself? And neither of which suits his purpose. First, the word may refer to what is the role of theology in debates over a ‘sacrament’, such as baptism or communion. The problem is reconciliation? that—strange as it may sound—the church has nothing to do In what follows I will try to answer these questions, with the effectiveness of a sacrament. Technically, a sacrament although in the end I argue that Sutton has confused works through the act itself (ex opera operato). God transfers matters. What really is at issue is at best obscures by grace through the act and does not rely on any person, these terms: agency. Sacramentalism acts as a cover institution, state of mind or whatever. The act is sufficient; it for one-directional agency, coming from the non- is an objective act on God’s part. It is a little like the story of Indigenous and directed towards Indigenous people. the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, and the horseshoe. Bohr lay By contrast, pietism conceals a pattern of mutual ill out on his farm; a friend called and noticed the horseshoe agency, consultation and joint decision-making. Yet above the door to his room. ‘I thought you didn’t believe Sutton has unwittingly raised another issue: the horseshoes made you well’, said the friend. Bohr replied, ‘I’m implicitly theological nature of many of the key ideas told it works even if you don’t believe in it’. Clearly Sutton used in debates over reconciliation. Before I get to does not mean this sense of sacramentalism, since that would those matters, a few words on sacramentalism and mean the objective, disinterested act of, say, adequate pietism are in order. healthcare, an apology or a treaty, would be enough. Out of the four ways Sutton describes sacramentalism—ceremonial, Sacramentalism collective, sacrificial and pre-historical. Is the sacrament First, the evil term: sacramentalism, which is a ceremonial? Yes. Is it collective, sacrificial and pre-historic? deeply Roman Catholic term. As one might expect in No.

31 Perhaps Sutton means the ‘sacramentals’ (to be religious scenery at the time. It is hardly useful to • FEATURES distinguished from the ‘sacrament’). These are resort to those differences once again. • acts that convey God’s grace only through the • Further, a pernicious subtext also appears with • intercession of the church (ex opere operantis Sutton’s description of sacramentalism as sacrificial • ecclesiae). What kind of acts? Grace at meals, a and pre-historic. He hints that it is pre-Christian, • blessing, a ring at marriage, a simply act of On Peter Sutton’s but there is a dangerous slippage to an image of • kindness and so on. There is no definitive list, Pietism Indigenous life before Europeans arrived. Does he • for a sacramental is the process through which • want to suggest that before the arrival of Christianity Roland Boer human activities are made holy, mediated by • and its theological terms, Indigenous people too were the church. Now we have a collective • prehistoric, given to animal and human sacrifice? On dimension, since a sacramental relies on the • the surface, of course not, but beneath the text the • church. But it is not necessarily ceremonial (it hint is there. • may be, but is not necessarily so), sacrificial • or pre-historic. Pietism • So the theological terms don’t actually fit The favoured term is pietism, which Sutton • • Sutton’s definition of ‘sacramentalism’. Or describes as a one-to-one relation with God, one • rather, they have a partial fit, depending upon undertaken by an individual in quiet communion, • what element one chooses. What is really more suited to an age of individualism (our own?). • going on with Sutton’s use of the term? I No mediators here, no priests or church or state, just • would suggest that sacramentalism for Sutton individuals doing the best they can. For Sutton this • is quite bad camouflage for social-democratic, is the way forward for reconciliation, although he • hand-wringing, lefty approaches to Indigenous does need to replace God with another human being. • and non-Indigenous reconciliation. But then All that is needed is a ‘personal moral adjustment’ (p. • • he includes in this collective mix state- 203) to interpersonal and collaborative reconciliation • sponsored programs, reports and legislation. All between two persons. Sutton uses the examples of • of which comes under the umbrella of a individual acts of private reconciliation, in which • theological term that is less than useful. people get on in their day-to-day lives, and in which • the non-Indigenous person becomes a vocal critic of • Two final observations: Sutton plays into an racist state policies: Lancelot Threlkeld and Biraban • old Protestant polemic with his use of in the 1820s–1840s, Ursula McConnel and Billy • sacramentalism, for the word is usually Mammus in the 1920–1930s, and Lloyd Warner and • connected with Roman Catholic theology. A Mahkarolla in the 1920s. • strange move this, since it harks back to the • major issue of religious conflict in Australia Is pietism up to task? At one level it is. Pietism has a • back in the 1950s and earlier, namely the distinct history with complex threads, but it is • Protestant–Roman Catholic divide. Riots, clearly a very Germanic, Protestant (especially • • debates, political allegiances, mutual Lutheran) and relatively recent development dating • suspicions, bans on marrying across the from the late 17th century. Its central concern was a • divide—these were part of the social and life of deep religious commitment, rooted in inner • • • • •

...... experience and manifested in outward acts or • the ‘practice of piety’. • • Why choose the So far, so good, at least for Sutton’s purposes. • The catch is that pietism was ultimately a • terms sacramental and collective movement with strong political • • overtones. It sought to revive the church from • pietistic when collective within rather than break away from it. Indeed, • the main stream of pietism was warmly • and individual would welcomed by pastors and theologians in the • German Lutheran Church in the 18th and 19th • have done perfectly well? centuries and quickly became seen as a way to • Are they merely renew religious life. It soon spread to other • parts of the world whether Lutheran • Protestantism was strong, especially • camouflage for criticisms • Scandinavia, Greenland and North America. • of social democratic For Sutton’s argument pietism is useful in • some senses but not in others. Inner • • approaches and a experience, the place of God in one’s heart, • championing of lives lived in quiet faithfulness, and the • impetus for individual philanthropic • liberalism? And what is activity—all these elements work quite well • for Sutton’s purposes. But he ignores the • the role of theology in other elements of pietism, such as the • collective and institutional nature of • debates over mainstream pietism, its desire for reform • 12 2009–1 2010 within the institution and its tendency • Nº 103 • reconciliation? towards conservatism. • 32 Once again, I suggest that Sutton’s dip into theology is ...... less useful than he might think. Pietism doesn’t simply mean individual relations, for it is also a deeply collective theological practice. In this respect, the word I suggest that becomes in Sutton’s hands a cover for the sort of liberalism championed by Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, or their lesser followers in Australia Sutton’s dip into like Andrew Bolt or Miranda Devine. Individual enterprise is the key, not collective approaches (which theology is less useful become totalitarian) or state intervention (the evil of ‘big government’). than he might think. Agency and Theology Pietism doesn’t simply Sutton’s use of the opposition between sacramentalism and pietism is in the end a caricature. By picking certain mean individual features and making them definitions of the whole, he has distorted both traditions, using them as poor camouflage for state-sponsored and individual relations, for it is also a solutions. However, I suggest that what lies behind Sutton’s argument is really the issue of agency. With deeply collective sacramentalism he seems to mean agency from one quarter and moving in one direction: from non- theological practice. In Indigenous governments to Indigenous people. The former decides what is appropriate, depending more on this respect, the word the vagaries of electoral cycles, ideological positions, the power of lobby groups, and individual political careers. And then it acts, assuming it can fix all the problems becomes in Sutton’s with the latest program—the NT Intervention is the obvious recent example of this one-sided approach. hands a cover for the However, by pietism Sutton is pointing towards mutual agency, one that involves two or more people (I would sort of liberalism add groups) who realise their own needs, shortcomings and limits, but above all the need to come to an championed by understanding of one another and the need to act on that understanding. It takes little imagination to Friedrich von Hayek determine which approach is more desirable. The catch is that Sutton seems to think that this process is and Milton Friedman. primarily an individual one, an argument that is

ideological (in the bad sense) and hardly However, before we rush in to claim theological ideas for resolving progressive. the relations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, we need to investigate those terms carefully, especially since Christian My final question picks up another issue: the theology came with European invasion, embodied in the person of theological tenor of the reconciliation debate as a Samuel Marsden who filled the role in the early colony of both whole. Of course, a good of discussion has taken clergyman and judge. The problem is that all of these key terms place on these matters within the progressive assume an unequal relationship, God on the one side and human wings of the Christian churches, where debates beings on the other. Guilt is what one feels towards God for and resolutions concerning reconciliation have having disobeyed and sinned; reconciliation is for human beings been cast in explicitly theological senses. alone, since we need to be reconciled to God; a covenant is made However Sutton, as a leading anthropologist, has between unequal partners, one more powerful and the other less done what the churches have not been able to do, so. This imbalance often carries through to the secular uses of since they so often remain closed circles: such terms. somewhat unwittingly, he has brought out and made public the underlying theological nature of So I would suggest that in the current debates we would do well to the debate by invoking explicitly theological investigate the implicit theological assumptions of the key terms. terms, even if he misses the mark in the specific Who is the more powerful one in the process of negotiating a terms he has chosen. In short, I would suggest treaty? Who is the guilty party? The NT Intervention shifts the that much of the terminology and mindset of guilt squarely onto Indigenous people, who then need to be reconciliation uses what may be called secularised ‘punished’ for their ‘sins’. But then those who oppose the theological ideas. Emptied of their theological intervention argue for the guilt of the colonisers, who then need content and refilled with political and social to make amends. And is it possible to produce a process of content, they still trail many theological reconciliation that either recognises the thereby seeks to negate assumptions behind them. For example, the imbalance of power, or is it possible to come up with a reconciliation itself is one such term (between reconciliation that removes such imbalance? God and human beings), as is the idea of guilt (collective or individual—an issue in the Howard years), and even covenant or treaty.

33 • FEATURES • Reconstituting • • • • • Reconstituting • ‘The Social’ • ‘The Social’ • Mark Furlong Mark Furlong • ...... • • Mark Furlong • lectures in Social Is the vocabulary of abstract concern, as key moments this received design. Indeed, a • Work at La Trobe in social work practice—such as case for a progressive re- • University.. health colonising how • community development and the constitution of the narrow • ‘the social’ is agitation for more responsive boundaries in which health care • public policy, or active client has been envisaged is gaining • understood? advocacy and collective social momentum. Perhaps best • In the Australian university action—cannot be totalised illustrated in Richard Wilkinson • context, social work education within the configuration that and Kate Pickett’s flag-flying The • has traditionally been based in structures current health care Spirit Level: Why More Equal • provision. Societies Almost Always Do Better • social science faculties or, less • (2009), a social model of health frequently, arts faculties. Over That is, in the received model of • and well-being that is the last decade or so, an health care the expert • establishing a profile, not just increasing number of these professional—the clinician— • with left-leaning academics but programs have been relocated to uses the objective knowledge and • also with governments. This • faculties of health and/or technical competencies of their work puts forward a diverging • medicine. For example, the social specialist discipline to act upon work programs of Victoria’s paradigm to the received, expert- • an inanimate site—the • Deakin, La Trobe, Melbourne and centred template for health care. immobile, ignorant patient (the • Monash universities are now ‘case’). This design is based on a Using an analysis of comparative • embedded within very large, private, rather than a public, international data as a • health-centred aggregations. model of modernist professional conceptual axis, Wilkinson and • practice, and its claim to Pickett’s findings undermine the • Such a relocation can be • practitioner legitimacy (that it is expectation that greater health expected to have consequences. • For example, within this auspice scientific, evidence-based, and expenditure leads to better • it is apparently natural to frame so on) is at least at some tension overall health outcomes. For • the compulsory field practicum with, if not antagonistic to, the example they point to the fact • each student must complete a basis of a politicised conception that health outcomes in Cuba • ‘clinical placement’, a description of social service action. and United States (life • that contradicts the expectation expectancy, infant mortality) are • Yet, the above overly simplifies • that the parameters of social about the same, yet the United the current situation, as • States spends in the order of ten work extend far beyond the practices in the health field are • times what Cuba spends. Even health sector. This is not an not always synonymous with • • • • • more interestingly, these authors do not confine This work is provocative at several levels, not • • their focus to the traditional indicators of health least of which is that it aligns with deepening • status, concerned with morbidity and death. Rather, concerns about health expenditure across the • they investigate an astonishingly broad suite of what Western world. This alignment can be seen in the • they refer to as ‘health and social problems’— attention government is giving to, and to an • homicides, imprisonment rates, literacy levels, extent the funding now being directed into • mental health problems, obesity, teenage pregnancy programs concerned with, health promotion, • and so forth—and argue that their prevalence social inclusion and the management of chronic • correlates very closely to the steepness of the ‘social disease. It seems ‘the social’, that wondrously • • gradient’ in any given society. bountiful community we’d all like to believe is • there for all of us, is being viewed with a gimlet In their analysis, the greater the gradient (the top • eye. four being the United States, Portugal, the United • Kingdom and Australia), the greater the rate of In the following, I want to examine these • • problems. The lesser the gradient (Japan, the developments and to examine the possible • Scandinavian countries), the less these problems are relationships that might exist between three • present. Not only does the rate of health and social propositions: that ‘the social is at risk of being • problems not correlate with a nation’s health removed from social work’; that the institutions • expenditure, Wilkinson and Pickett argue, within the of, and a discourse centred upon, ‘health’ is taking • bracket of the twenty most affluent countries it has dominion over how the social is envisaged and • 12 2009–1 2010 little or nothing to do with differences in the average practised; and that traditional conceptual and • Nº 103 income between these nations. practice formations that have rationalised the • • 34 ...... organisation of health care have become as the weight of this colonisation unstable. I will argue that ‘the social’, settles into an apparently timeless especially at the interpersonal level, is dominion, something of the pattern being re-constituted in an instrumental language associated with the powerful Health is manner, while at the same time being has leached into ordinary speech and colonising other de-natured, possibly demolished, in adjacent fields of human service and terms of its older, more reciprocal community practice: randomised, government sectors understandings. double blind trials have become the gold standard for all research (despite under the flag that The Positive Valence of Health their inapplicability in many areas); the ‘health is, and ought Unlike services offered in welfare, language of clinical intervention—the disability or income security settings, image of interactionless, determinate to be, a whole-of health services tend to evoke positive practice where a neutral expert fires community meanings. Health services, magic bullets into inanimate sites—has government like the terms ‘health’ and ‘well-being’ become the norm. themselves, accrue approbation, as long approach’.Of course, This trend is observable in everyday as they are deemed to be functioning at ways. For example, it is now there are socio- least moderately well. This is in stark commonplace for a broad range of contrast to services with negative technical, discursive practitioners to be in the business of associations, such as those that are said ‘delivering’ what are termed therapeutic to foster dependence, or those that and ‘politically and clinical services across a range of create alarm: think of child protection community-based and residential economic’ services which, by the devil’s only settings. This is in contrast to a decade definition, can never get it right. ago when the description of a service as dimensions to this That health services have a positive therapeutic or clinical was almost colonisation, perception is due to a mix of factors. always associated with specialist, Not least of these is the wonder apparently more exotic service especially the latter ordinary citizens experience at the providers, and tended to be dismissed opera of science and regression that is as precious and irrelevant by those who as whatever is said evoked: on the one hand, we are ‘did the real work’. to support health mystified by and are in awe of the So, a tight alignment between the precinct—life and death—in which the and well-being is language of medicine and the prospects high priests of this sector officiate. On for effectiveness has taken root beyond the other, we are mystified by and are thought to have its historical location in dedicated in awe of the high-tech that is so health settings. This alignment is now positive budgetary shamelessly shown off. well leveraged into the policies and The latter is aided by a strategic priorities of health and community implications. But identification of health services with settings. But there is an even broader from where did this health science. Particularly using the crossover taking place: the positive badge ‘evidence-based practice’ as a valence of the language of health, interest in health phalanx, a claim for certainty, particularly in its broader guise of muscularity and status has been ‘health and well-being’, is being and well-being advanced by and accepted by the public dispersed into the still larger sphere of spring? on behalf of the well credentialled. And public policy and administration

generally. In South Australia, government policies are whatever is said to support health and well-being is being ‘audited’ to ensure they meet the ‘health and well- thought to have positive budgetary implications. But from being’ test. And, whether it is literal or apocryphal, it where did this interest in health and well-being spring, and has been said that current federal Health Minister to what extent is this interest halal—or is it some kind of Nicola Roxon has operationalised the same criteria as corrupt co-option? key performance indicators for her departmental staff and for those with which her department does business. The Social Determinants of Health When we talk of ‘health’ there is a complex, interconnecting The current Commonwealth Green Paper suggests the set of contexts invoked. Mindful that health is where the federal government is considering taking greater, if not money is, as it is where the action is from a policy overall, responsibility for the funding of primary health. perspective, it is important to be clear that there is a To state governments this indicates that health is where diverse set of fronts on which the health motif is being the money is. In response, for example, the Victorian iterated. Firstly, there is the domain of health in colloquial government has proactively split its Department of speech (‘Are you well?’) and everyday experience. Personally, Human Services into two (the departments of Health ‘health’/ ‘well-being’ exists as an attribute, as illness exists and Human Services), with the funding advantages this as a travail (‘I’ve gone down with a bug’/’He is suffering split was designed for to gather to the fore. Further, from an illness’). health is colonising other government sectors under the flag that ‘health is, and ought to be, a whole-of Institutionally, there are distinct categories of health government approach’. Of course, there are socio- service. At one pole there is ‘health promotion’, a preventive technical, discursive and ‘politically economic’ enterprise that seeks to modify behaviours, for example, dimensions to this colonisation, especially the latter as public education about the dangers of smoking and, at the

35 other, those familiar ‘primary ‘Social factors’, it should be will ameliorate the severity of • FEATURES health’ providers, particularly noted, is a notoriously unstable the condition. This finding has • general practitioners (although and highly contested notion. been replicated in many studies • • another meaning concerns basic, Depending on one’s definition, it and its fullest, most socially • as opposed to professional, includes an extensive number of ambitious expression is set out • health services). There is also the dimensions: from structural in Wilkinson and Pickett’s The • Reconstituting suite of high-tech ‘tertiary/ categories, such as class, gender Spirit Level. (Additional texts • ‘The Social’ specialist health’ services and, and employment, to more developing this broad argument • Mark Furlong more recently, also a developing traditional public health include Ryff and Singer’s • set of programs for ‘chronic concerns, such as sanitation and Emotion, Social Relationships and • illness and its management’. diet. What is particularly Health and Cacioppo and • • Finally, there is aged care, a innovative in recent formulations Patrick’s Loneliness: Human • troublesome service network is an active regard for ‘the locally Nature and the Need for Social • ambiguously located within, and social’, such as the presence and Connection. The latter reports • yet also extending beyond, the quality of personal relationships. that ‘loneliness [is] on the list of • health sector. It is anticipated by Reputable research centres like risk factors for ill-health and • government and policy makers as the Harvard Centre for Public early death right alongside • that it is in these latter three Health are now reporting that a smoking, obesity and lack of • sub-fields that financial liability person with significant relational exercise’.) • will lie. As this century unfolds support is less likely to be ill, • This recent research testifying to • it is expected that health not by a few percentage points the importance of social factors • expenditures will continue to but by a factor or two or more in physical health complements • increase, far and away beyond times those who do not have material available since the mid • CPI increases, a trajectory such levels of affection and • 1980s on mental health. A considered financially support. Conversely, a hostile • number of high-profile reports unsustainable. local social setting amplifies • have supported the case for risk. No longer able to be • Given this context, it is not decades that a social model of summarily dismissed as leftie- • surprising that the emerging health is highly salient to • hippie bias, the importance of data on the ‘social determinants understanding prevalence and • ‘the locally social’—of having of health’ have attracted a ready recovery issues. (Warner’s • and giving affection, of being audience amongst politicians and Recovery from Schizophrenia: • respected for making a senior administrators. (Left- Psychiatry and Political Economy • contribution to one’s significant • leaning and communitarian and Brown and Harris’ The Social others—has recently received • researchers have had a longer term Origins of Depression particularly epidemiological, and to some • interest.) This data has many come to mind.) Recent research extent, empirical validation. • provocative facets, not least the around anxiety and depression, • finding that social variables, Social epidemiologists are for example, has only deepened • such as a person being a member reporting that the prevalence of a this interest. Of course there • of an at-risk group (for example, broad range of serious health continue to be vociferous, high- • one subject to racism), or the problems—diabetes, strokes, profile advocates for a strictly • • quality of a person’s interpersonal heart attacks, even cancer— bio-chemical, illness-based • connections, powerfully conforms to this idea. Further, as conception of mental health. • mediates the incidence and epidemiologists report, if a These professional and public • severity of a range of health and person happens to become ill, a bodies have a strong grip on • mental health problems. positive interpersonal network public attention and agitate for a • • • • •

...... • radically clinical approach, for example, Beyond • Blue’s approach to depression. • In the specific For those who believe that there are important • social determinants to health it has become clear • • that illness and recovery, vulnerability and educational site where social • resilience cannot be well understood, nor • work finds itself, is it attempts to respond appropriately conceptualised, • without acknowledging the importance of the • possible that being embedded immediate, as well as larger, social context. Such • within a health/medical acknowledgement will necessarily, at least to a • degree, de-centre the traditional, clinical • setting will, over time, approach to health care: the received image of the • expert acting upon the supine patient is being or • • significantly shape the way will need to be significantly re-modelled. Making • this more difficult is the fact there is no stable • social work is allowed to conceptual vocabulary for articulating the social • context at the macro or micro level, or for • perform, which, in turn, will theorising the connection between these levels. • tend to shape how it For example, there is no common language across • 12 2009–1 2010 the disciplines for denoting ‘the socially • Nº 103 relational’: terms like network, families, • understands itself? • 36 supportive relationships, social and, if one does happen to contract a important as the public messages attachment, bridging capital, even the bug or disease or suffer a mental health coming out of health promotion are, ‘locally social’, can be found to denote problem, supportive relationships will the idea that positive relationships the dimension of person-to-person help you recover quickly or not are a ‘personal resource’, a kind of interaction. succumb as deeply. Just as Tom opaque ‘goods and service’, Hodgkinson recently argued that instrumentalises, and even to a Mindful that these conceptual Facebook understands a person’s degree commodifies, the uncertainties will persist, from a friends and personal networks as interpersonal. In the first instance, government policy perspective, if there assets—connections that can be this can be understood as naive: to is empirical evidence that social opportunistically taken advantage of propose that supportive determinants have an impact on health, when the ‘user’ wishes—in health relationships could ever be then they are a potential site for promotion discourse personal impersonally delivered is as useful intervention. That is, if the set of relationships are also an asset: a kind of as distributing menu cards in a factors implicated can be identified, it prophylactic medicine. famine (to re-purpose one of Freud’s might be positively manipulated to delightful lines). Such an reduce the incidence, and perhaps the This thinking is evident in health understanding of relationships could severity, of ill-health, which will in turn promotion’s public declarations: also be seen as counter-productive have a positive budgetary outcome. advertisements pasted in men’s in that it seeks to repudiate the This interest in the importance of the lavatories exhort the reader to check premise that relationships are, and ‘social determinants of health’ is whether a friend might be depressed ought to be, in the main, reciprocal logically animated by concern for the and if so set about supporting them; and non-linear, accountable and cost of ‘carrying’ those with chronic posters in rural settings tell you ‘Times mysterious. conditions, allied with cost concerns are tough. If you haven’t heard from deriving from an ageing population. It your mates for a while, give them a call. More worryingly, where it is said is also possible that the reliance on Keep talking’. In the ‘Together we do that positive personal relationships expensive, high-tech medicine might be better’ campaign, advertisements in concern a person’s prospects for lowered, a development that also newspapers describe a group of young maintaining the integrity of their potentially de-centres the hegemony of men sitting around yarning as ‘master individual autonomy, this view of the interests vested in the traditional therapists’. the interpersonal actively perverts clinical model of care. With costs, at understanding of the most local of Yet, supportive relationships cannot this point, at the centre of policy social contexts towards a simply be delivered, cannot simply be concerns, the ‘social determinants of description of distinctly post- called up as a unilateral demand: they health’ are likely to be realised within human relationships. Put another cannot be, as the language of the health an instrumental agenda (as will the idea way, if it is never ethical to treat the promotion authorities sets out, of ‘preventative health’). other as a means (Kant’s categorical ‘accessed’. One may ‘access’ a parking imperative), following the same space or have a right to a ticket to the Re-formulating ‘the Social’ in logic it can never be ethical to football, but does this same kind of Health Promotion instrumentalise the intimately logic apply in the realm of In the social model of health it is personal. relationships? Should we even try to conventional to understand a person’s make it apply? This criticism cues a number of ‘family and friends’ as a resource — an important questions. If it is not asset there to buttress the prospects for Unlike commodities or legal rights, appropriate to instrumentalise the individual. As we have seen, supportive relationships have a relationships, how might the ‘locally supportive relationships have been particular character and can only be, in social’—the realm of the reported to ward off physical and psycho- a powerful sense, learned and earned interpersonal—be understood? If it social threats to health and well-being, rather than guaranteed or stipulated. As

is not right to be interested in positive personal interpersonal relationships. Within these ensembles are relationships because they will save the state money, conducted: what is the proper ‘business’ of the intimately • intimate/affectionate reciprocities relational? And, from the full cluster of social • formal and informal interpellations determinants of health and well-being, what is the • highly charged symbolic ceremonies particular contribution of the distinct sub-realms of ‘the • everyday lived experiences of materiality. social’, particularly the dimension that includes It is within such local exchanges that the sources of interactions with ‘strangers’, or the more traditional personhood that forge and re-cast selfhood and well-being, network of ‘family and friends’? or personal dis-ease, go about their everyday business. That is, it is within these exchanges that ‘what I say I am’ is The Interpersonal Social checked by, complemented or juxtaposed to the ‘The social’, as noted earlier, is a complex, indivisible descriptions of what those who are most proximal or matrix. Mindful then that seeking to construct an important to me ‘tell me I am’. It is this sense of ‘the locally inclusive, conceptually coherent description is social’, this place where formalities and informalities jostle something of a quixotic project, it is possible to initiate and interpenetrate, where calibrations around key social a limited engagement with ‘the social’ from a modest appraisals—judgements around respect, status, level of starting point: humans are inherently social beings and contribution, degree of inclusion, reputation and so on— interpersonal contact is an irreducible expression of this tend to support or agitate private evaluations concerned sociality. That is, a project to articulate ‘the locally with self-appraisal. social’ can begin from the idea that this arena is first and foremost, but is not restricted to, local ensembles of Within all social ensembles emergent characteristics are

37 ...... generated, patterns that then patterns of interaction are the • FEATURES tend to persist over extended more obviously significant; in a • periods. These characteristics material sense, each meeting, • Despite the • can be glimpsed in the protocols even if fleeting, impersonal or • that an outside observer can, to a barely noticed, can be considered instructions • degree, note: the specifics of a variation on the category • Reconstituting etiquette and manners; the ‘relationship’. In established given to us in • ‘The Social’ repetitive patterns found in connections with others, in these • Mark Furlong . interpersonal sequences that spontaneous, evanescent the modernist, • take place in all established relationships important • social groupings, like the non- transactions can occur, implicit • neo-liberal • random ordering of speakers; the performances concerned with • allocation of respective roles and identity and reality construction. narrative, • responsibilities embedded in With (at least) a million years • every ongoing relationships. training in being sensitive to the humans are • Over time, such empirical detail nuances of group dynamics we • tends to determine the prospects can be affected by a moment in a not discrete • for the relational: how crowd, a gesture when you are • interactions are experienced, standing in a queue, an instant agents that • understood, imagined and when you unexpectedly catch the • • conducted. eye of or are meaningfully exist inside • ignored by the driver in the lane For current purposes, my • next to you when your cars are interest is in the spectrum of their skins. • gridlocked together at an • social exchanges that take place ‘intimate’ distance. • between people in dyads and The new • small groups where these This theatre may be reciprocal in • interactions may be familiar or its enactment of status and health • incidental. Historically, they have concern—it may be ‘civil’—or it • tended to have an embodied may be asymmetrical, promotion • character—a ‘presence’ that is iniquitously distributing socio- • immediate—while more recently personal costs and rewards. It narrative goes • they have tended to become may maintain the participant’s • some way • mediated by information identity and self-esteem, or it • technologies. Inclusive then, of a might endanger, even disturb, • changing mix of relational types, these categories. In their towards • what might be said of the day- cumulative effects, or their • to-day encounters we have with potential to have a particular, acknowledging, • strangers, intimates and albeit occasional psycho- • associates, the suite of contacts dramatic power, under certain and potentially • and relationships that take place conditions chance encounters • • across the wide spectrum of our have traction, heft, which is now valorising, • affinities? understood to have important • effects. The effects of these this social Mindful exchanges embedded in • impersonal, yet personal, a common history and recurrent • transactions might be harder to being-ness. • • • • • register, harder to fathom and make sense of, than groups and passing ensembles within which we • • those that those that occur, for example, between a all participate, do we know what is passing • priest and a parishioner or a grandmother and a between us? • grandchild. Yet, as Wilkinson and Pickett so We have been acculturated to think in terms of • powerfully argue, being ‘dissed’ by those who don’t • the binary of ‘self’ and ‘society’. Living within this know you in the street, an act of dehumanising • binary tends to have the evanescent realm of the disregard that is cued by the perception you are • relational pass by unnoticed. Geoff Sharp (in ‘To unsightly or a loser, can trigger shame and ostracism. • market, to market’, Arena Magazine no. 100) has Such experiences can lead to a lower self-appraisal, • one view of what is happening to the locally • higher cortical levels, diminished immune social: that the process of market thinking has • function—a whole progression spiralling downwards undermined, if not colonised, the informal mores • that, over time, involves serious negative health that have long been associated with ‘direct • consequences. presence’: those codes of conduct traditionally • • Micro-transactions and, even more so, their found in families, friendships and communities. • importance are difficult to track. And, exactly Another view is Anthony Giddens’ opposite idea: • because the locally social is opaque, it is timely to that ‘pure’, equitable relationships have never • ask: what is going on with how we are getting on? been more possible. • What is happening in shops and in cars, at sporting • How is sociality being experienced, understood and artistic venues, on public transport and in • 12 2009–1 2010 and performed now? Is it in good shape, flexible homes, schools and workplaces? In the small • yet resilient, as some would have us think? Nº 103 domains of interpersonal practice, in the ongoing • • 38 Perhaps it is entirely fungible, a vestige ‘thick description’ is a requirement, dyads and ensembles, spontaneous or trace that can take any number of even if this aim can only be and formal groupings, has the forms without losing its essential approximated. Participation in the potential to be a countervailing qualities. Or is it currently being above dyads and small groups, as well moment to an abiding concern for stressed and pressured, being bent, as in the chance happenings of locally individual subjectivity, identity and thinned and made fractious in new and civil sociality (whether the mode of selfhood and the allied interest in dangerous ways, as Zygmunt Bauman address is proximal or mediated) can individual consciousness, autonomy, and Ulrich Beck argue? Is it being de- never be simply a ‘functional’, let alone self-determination, rights and so natured, or just going on getting on an instrumental, matter. Rather, a forth that so early characterises the with its timeless purposes? These are spectrum of interactions, the many and discourse of a culture where large questions that an open lens varied examples of participation that individualisation has taken root. offered by a radical interest in the take place, are the condition within social determinants of health and well- which humanness is realised and health ‘The Social’ and the Value of being could capture. and well-being supported or eroded, Relationships honoured or poisoned. In Bernard Wolf’s dystopian classic In an examination of each example of Limbo (1952), the narrator says: ‘The local, small-scaled sociality it is While it is acknowledged that the human skin is an artificial necessary to pursue the ideal of what meanings transacted in such local boundary: the world wonders into it, Clifford Geertz called ‘thick exchanges are likely to, but will not and the self wanders out of it. description’. That is, what is of interest necessarily, derive their particular Traffic is two way and constant’. are the phenomenological and attributions from the specifications Despite the instructions given to us behavioural details of what is being than have been authorised in relevant, in the modernist, neo-liberal transacted: what exactly can be said of larger socio-structural formations— narrative, humans are not discrete the manners that are characteristic of ideology, religion, law and so on—this agents that exist inside their skins. the encounter; what is their empirical is not to say the local is totally The new health promotion narrative configuration, dynamic and trajectory? suborned by the socio-structural. That goes some way towards Even more immanent, what are the is, as the locally social is being acknowledging, and potentially respective roles and responsibilities considered, a decision can be made to valorising, this social being-ness. that have been allocated between the privilege immediate personal On the other hand, like Facebook, participants, the (more often than not) relationships mindful of the and the cultural logic of the market implicit ‘dance parts’ that structure significance of top-down moments of more generally, in the hands of actions and meanings enacted in these influence. policy makers focused on cost and encounters? Such a division is, at best, of course, a social management, ‘social Further, are these allocations equitable, kind of ‘regulatory fiction’ (to re- determinants of health’ tend contested or assumed, and do the purpose a phrase from psychoanalysis): towards an instrumental espoused ethics and accountabilities representatives of ‘relevant, larger understanding of relationships. that are declared by the participants socio-structural formations’, such as In the first instance, the contrast of align with what actually takes place? As locally based clerics, pass across the a ‘social determinants of health’ Gilbert Ryle observed of the difficulty local/socio-structural divide. Although model to the traditional clinical distinguishing a purposive wink from it is to reify a rupture between the response to illness is a progressive involuntary tic, there is an intense ‘larger’ and ‘smaller’ realms, it is a moment. This is seen in the interpretative complexity involved in welcome development that the locally movement in health policy and making social judgements. When it social is being given a profile within the practice towards health promotion comes to examining the locally social, emerging interest in ‘social and the importance of social this condition means an aspiration to determinants of health’. This interest in inclusion. All this, of course, is

music to the ears of social workers: ‘That’s all good gear. the tiger’s back or, if you prefer, to shake hands with a That’s what we’ve been on about for ages!’ In this context, gorilla, as there is likely to be an unstable relationship acceding to or complying with social work’s relocation between advantages and disadvantages, between the within a health faculty presents as a positive, even if progressive and the regressive, in the kinds of alliance ambiguous, prospect. politics that will be involved. Everyone wants to get on the high table of policy, to revel in the positive status Compared to the institutional status and positive discursive that health currently enjoys. Yet, you can’t engage in valence of health, it is clear that the ‘welfare’ badge is a parallel play if you are in bed with a gorilla. goner. Yet, in the specific educational site where social work finds itself, is it possible that being embedded within At broader level, it is certain ‘the social’ is currently a health/medical setting will, over time, significantly shape being bent, even re-constituted, by forces endemic to the way social work is allowed to perform, which, in turn, late capitalism and that it is within this context that the will tend to shape how it understands itself? Faculties of ‘social determinants of health’ model will take shape. health science have institutional interests, strategic Here the struggle will be to resist the invitation to re- directions, expectations of professional privilege and so on, cast understandings of ‘the social’ to align it with a that are not consonant with an emancipatory or contesting purpose that is both task-focused and naive. Rather vision. than commodifying personal relationships as a useful a resource in the job of realising a healthy, autonomous Schools of social work, like everyone from the university to citizenship, a contesting version locates the federal Cabinet, currently wants to ride on the health interdependence and fairness, personal accountability express, to go where the action is—and that is in the health and social inclusion, as orientations to be valued in sector and/or to use the health metaphor. Yet, this is to ride their own right.

39 • FEATURES • • • Is, Ought, • Ends? • Matthew Sharpe • Is, Ought, Ends? ...... • • Matthew Sharpe • The life of academics in the new classes. These classes will be taught • by teachers with larger teaching • Matthew Sharpe university loads than those of her predecessors • teaches political even a decade ago. Staff members on • philosophy and • Is fixed term or sessional contracts psychoanalytic • studies at Deakin Let me begin answering the question ‘What is a university will take the tutorials or give the for?’ by collapsing one distinction that this question means • University. His lectures. More of her • to open, between what is and what ought to be. The present research contemporaries will be full fee- • interests include universities of today have several functions: paying students. Some will probably • the history of • individual self-development of students be international full fee-paying • different • the inculcation of socially useful skills in students students. There will be less class • conceptions of the • the pursuit of pure research, of knowledge for its own sake time than for previous generations • university, • • the conduct of applied, commercial and military research of students, since semesters (or education, critical • • the education of ruling commercial, political, and cultural trimesters) are shorter. More of the thought, and their elites • relations to the content will be ‘delivered’ on-line. • • and critical reflection upon society. good society. This, positively, allows her more • There was perhaps never a time, at least in the post-war freedom in study patterns. • modern period of expanded higher education, when Negatively, it provides another • Australian universities did not fulfil all of these six disincentive for going to campus, • and becoming involved with the • functions. Yet this continuity belies significant changes. • social, group and political activities The Australian university sector has undergone massive • changes in the two decades since 1988. the place hosts. Her teacher may or • may not be suffering from fatigue • We can give an impressionistic or (as philosophers would because of increased workloads, and • say) a phenomenological sense of this by change conveying a growing sense of alienation from • ourselves into the shoes of a student commencing higher workplace and management. This • education in Australia. This student will be in larger • • • • • teacher will more than likely belong to a students per institution was under 5 and 1/2 • school, cluster, institute or silo fitted with thousand, by 1998 this average was just under • an acronym and less than five years old, 17000. • with its own, short- to medium-term • Whereas in 1987 there were 17248 registered • • budget constraints, rather than to a international fee paying students, this figure had • disciplinary department. Certainly, the quadrupled to over 72 thousand in 1998; in the • teacher will be confronted, as part of her same time period, the numbers of graduate • job, with demands to produce minimum students had grown at a comparable rate from • research quotas as well as to teach, and under 28,000 to nearly 88,000. • ideally to attract grant or private income to • These statistics need to be balanced against how, the university. Our student, meanwhile, • between 1987 and 1998, will be accumulating a HECS debt of • • the proportion of funds from the government • thousands of dollars to be paid off when dropped from 85 per cent to 55 per cent, a trend • she attains lasting employment. She will which the Bradley reforms aim to somewhat • be more likely than her predecessors to redress • have to divide her social and study time • the proportion of funds from fees and charges • with casual or part-time work, usually in • jumped from 2 per cent to 15 per cent the retail or hospitality sector. • • the number of vice chancellors and deputy vice • These changes can also be stated in the chancellors in the twelve ‘sandstone’,‘redbrick’ • language of Australian public policy— and ‘gumtree’ universities grew from nineteen to • namely statistically: fifty-one. • • Whereas between 1975 and 1985 • These changes have been rapid, if generally student:staff ratios in Australian • incremental. They have taken place at different paces universities were under 12:1, by 1996 • and in different ways. They have largely failed to • this figure had changed to 16:1. In 2006, meet any systematic union, academic or student • this had increased to 20.5. opposition. However, they reflect clear, very marked • • Whereas in 1987, there were under 400 changes in government policy, and a larger, • thousand tertiary students in Australia, reflexively chosen re-conception of the place of the • by 1998, there was some 672 thousand; • 12 2009–1 2010 university in relation to state, economy and society. by 2006, 957 thousand. • They also reflect a marked homogenisation in Nº 103 • While in 1987 the average number of • • 40 university governance, as a formalistic universities by upgrading TAFEs to university status, and merging managerialism (‘agency theory’,‘transaction colleges of advanced education (CAEs) with existing universities. cost theory’,‘public choice theory’) has The Dawkins reforms were advertised in terms of the need for trumped Indigenous, traditional or local forms Australia to become the ‘clever country’, with something for both of self-government and has imported the ‘econocrats’ and ‘bleeding hearts’, in then treasurer Paul Keating’s same language everywhere: accountability, phrase. Youth unemployment was combated by massively performance plans, stakeholders, consumers, increasing enrolment in tertiary education, including in graduate clients, deliverables, outcomes, targets, places. The language and reality of ‘user-pays’ was introduced into moving forward, networks, clusters and so on. tertiary sector policy, alongside HECS, the deferred ‘user-pays charge’. Students were to become consumers or clients, a source of The change in Australian university policy is funding or EFTSLs. Fee-paying international students were to be in turn part of a much larger revolution, the courted as a new market, with tertiary education transcending systematic dismantling of social democracy nation-building and boundaries, to become for the first time a according to neo-liberal or economic leading economic export (now Australia’s third largest). Finally, rationalist ideas. The key idea is that the new forms of managerial practice from the private sector were to public sector, far from playing a benevolent be introduced, to ‘get more for less’ (Keating again), all this being role in nation-building, inefficiently allocates now more closely monitored by the Commonwealth. hard-earned tax-payers’ dollars to rent- seeking bureaucrats and other idle, tax-funded Secondly, in 1996, the newly elected conservative Howard ‘elites’. These elites cynically hide behind government commissioned the West report ‘Learning for Life’. noble-sounding appeals to the common good While not all of its recommendations were accepted—for example, in order cultivate their own more or less base that students should have education vouchers to take to self-interest, just like everybody else. In universities of their choice, which is revisited under Bradley—the particular, the changes in the tertiary sector West report became the basis for the next wave of tertiary date from the second microeconomic phase of education reform. This wave of reforms was implemented from neo-liberal reform under the Hawke–Keating 1998. Direct government grants were cut and full fee-paying, government, post-1985. In Australia, there two including international student intakes, was thereby further escapable markers in the remarkable neo- ‘grown’ or necessitated. The central principle was that, in order to liberal changing of University policy so far. generate microeconomic efficiencies, universities should have to compete for scarce government resources in quasi-markets, for Firstly, there were the 1987–88 Dawkins reforms, example, the annual Australian Research Council grants, or the under the aegis of the new Commonwealth present ERA device for measuring and comparing research outputs (super-)Department of Employment, between individuals, disciplines, schools and universities as a way Education and Training, and with advice from of efficiently allocating public monies. Rather than relying the so-called Purple Circle of select university primarily on governmental oversight, as the Dawkins Labor advisors. These reforms created sixteen new reforms had done, the Coalition preferred the ‘steering at a

...... distance’ approach. This involved cutting direct funding and making universities The change in Australian compete with one another for increasingly scarce financial support. The new external, university policy is part of a economic environment accordingly ‘incentivated’ (to use the jargon) remarkable much larger revolution, the growth in advertising budgets, even as teaching staff was cut, and staff productivity (raised student:teacher ratios) continued to grow. The systematic dismantling of Howard/West reforms also further incentivated the proliferation of new soft budget research social democracy according and other administrative clusters, institutes or groups, within universities to compete for to neo-liberal or economic sources of funding. In order to generate managerial efficiencies, there has been rationalist ideas. The public widespread devolution of budget and decision-making powers away from collegial, sector, far from playing a discipline-based forums and academic boards to schools and higher-level management benevolent role in nation- across the sector. Increasingly, managerial staff do not come from an academic building, inefficiently background, and often have little under- standing or sympathy for the work of teaching allocates hard-earned tax- or pure research. Finally, new budgetary efficiencies have been found by increasingly payers’ dollars to rent- relying on fixed term and casualised staff to teach courses, freeing research time for seeking bureaucrats and tenured academics to attract research funding through publications, grants, and cultivating ‘knowledge transfer’, which means research other idle, tax-funded ‘elites’. capable of attracting commercial funding.

41 Ought little else, to the lived sense of • FEATURES The rapidity of these changes, coupled with the outgrowth alienation and disempowerment of • of managerial language that has accompanied it, has many contemporary academics, • • particularly in the humanities, shocked and disillusioned academics. It has been the clash • of two worlds, or rather the complete whitewash of the whose life-world has truly been • older ways of organising and experiencing academic work. shattered and whose opinions have • Is, Ought, Ends? Academics have gone from being, as teachers, a large part of been rendered irrelevant in their • the raison d’etre of the university and, as colleagues, privy own workplaces. I still recall the • Matthew Sharpe to the decision-making processes affecting their ways and words of a person, widely admired • priorities of working, to finding themselves increasingly in her intellectual field, who had • excluded from decision-making and its supporting worked at Melbourne for over two • • rationales. Teaching has been consciously and decades and successfully supervised • systematically devalued before the rent-seeking work of dozens of research students to • research and ‘grantsmanship’ increasingly necessary to keep completion, who hardly hesitated to • budgets in the black. What from the perspective of higher- retire when the voluntary • level management appears as an efficiency, like the greater redundancies were offered, saying • ‘productivity’ of teachers forced to teach and to assess that she no longer felt she • larger student workloads, is experienced by teachers as a understood the place, who ran it and • source of declining time, increasing burn-out, and a why, or felt she should owe it • • despairing sense that they can no longer educate students anything more than contempt. • as they had even two decades ago—especially now they are But the despair of academics, for all • being forced to put their publications where their mouths its legitimacy, is also an uncanny • were, on top of increased teaching loads. Then in many mirror to the spontaneous, pseudo- • universities there have been continuing rounds of • Nietzschean or Anne-Randian redundancies, sweetened always by the invariable claim that • rhetoric of managerial staff. These they can be ‘voluntary’. • invariably point to the inscrutable • It is small wonder that, around the turn of the millennium, ressentiment of academics, and the • probably the most pessimistic, and empirically overblown, ageless or Thatcherite mantra of • theoretical narratives imaginable have achieved wide TINA (‘there is no alternative’) to • currency in parts of the academy (I am thinking in passing justify the reshaping of the • of Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben’s recently fashionable university as an ‘enterprise’ or • • claim that the concentration camp is the ‘nomos’— ‘corporation’. In their 1997 study, • principle and space—of the new world order, and that all of Meek and Wood found that 42 per • us are now as effectively powerless as camp inmates or cent of Australian senior tertiary • muselmann). Such a nightmarish ambit claim answers, if executives saw academic collegiality • • • • • as ‘an impediment to effective management’, of the chain, accountable for meeting budgetary and • and that only 19 per cent of those teaching targets which are often delivered down to • interviewed supported collegial them with all the fatality (and obscurity of language) • governance. One consequence of the post- of the most ancient oracles. • • Dawkins reforms, and the pressure that To state two timeless pragmatic political data: • universities have been put under by deliberation and democratic governance—in this at • funding cuts, external performance targets, least like scholarship itself—take time. They • and competition in the newly created • therefore push against the imperative for efficiency, quasi-markets, is that the gap between • directed towards whatever end. Second, many management and academic staff is greater • changes can only be achieved efficiently if those than ever before. The ‘organisational • affected by them are not privy to their discussion economics’ of the new managerialism that • and rationale, not to mention being too busy with • has come with microeconomic reform into larger burdens and responsibilities of their own. If • the academy aims at creating rapid change alone is the desired goal, the loyalty of • organisational structures where decision- people affected is desirable but their indifference, • making prerogatives are centralised and the alienation and confusion is sufficient to minimise • burdens and risks of implementing • resistance. Efficient managers of many different decisions are devolved to middle managers • political stripes have known this. and service providers (teachers). The • executive must answer to government and So if we are to critically address the questions ‘What • • to the economic bottom line in a are universities for?’ it is also worth stressing that • competitive and uncertain environment. the managerial (even the executive) staff who have • The performance settings and budgetary implemented and forced these changes have not been • bottom lines the middle managers wholly sovereign in their decision-making capacity. • (typically deans and heads) face for their Each of them, we can also assume, has acted with the • part leave them little room for manoeuvre. level of good will and sense of contributing to a • They also divide the time and loyalties of perceived greater good that is a necessary condition • deans and school heads, as they make the for motivating anyone at all. Each also, even the vice • type of consultative and collegial forms of chancellors and deputy vice chancellors, has acted in • • 12 2009–1 2010 decision-making of yesteryear increasingly circumstances not wholly, or even largely, of their • Nº 103 unfeasible. The teachers are at the bottom own choice or creation, however they may have • • 42 warmed to the role out of pride, ideology, will to at has become the butt elsewhere of jokes, pity and plans to power, guilt or any other motive. poach disappointed students. Put simply, management is not the enemy. What is, alas, does not mean what ought to be. Academic staffs’ demonising of management may be as understandable as management’s inability Ends to understand academics’ desire to preserve the Whatever each of our self-perceptions—and I stress again that practices, privileges and prerogatives of their I don’t think that most people who have been implementing generations-old status group. But it is also the new managerialism in universities have bad or anti-cultural politically unhelpful. And it misses the wider intentions—the questions the new university raises respond question of why the reforms to which we are all directly to the predominant language of public policy, and the subject were initiated. Management is not tasked external motives for reforming the tertiary sector here and to answer the question of what universities are around the developed nations. That this is so is a case of what for, in principle if no longer in fact. Their task is critical theorist Jurgen Habermas calls the colonisation of the to manage. They aim to manage efficiently, and lifeworld (people’s lived experience and self-perceptions) by for this reason they manage now more heteronomous systems-imperatives: the demands of a reified prescriptively than they have ever done in this media-steered system or, if you like, a ‘spontaneous order’ (the sector before. But efficiency is a relative value, no economy) which, having attained a certain size, takes on a life matter how hard we try to fetishise it. The and quasi-natural regularities of its own. Beneath that, I would question is: efficiency for what? Or if we want add, the changes in the Australian tertiary sector are the more for less, more of what? outcome of the political struggle and ascendency of the new Right following the 1970s economic crises. If the ends or goals we are efficiently pursuing are not good or appropriate ends, or are ends which Whatever our own senses of what we do, managers or are imposed upon us beyond our control and academics need only consult the opinion pages of any Murdoch comprehension, then we will have become the paper most days of the week, let alone the papers regularly well-meaning but efficient servants of many submitted to government by the leagues of interconnected new mistakes, broken institutions and a diminished Right think tanks in this country, to see that the universities national culture. To merely cite the need for are seen by influential parts of our governing elites as hotbeds someone to take responsibility does not exclude of elitist, anti-social opinion, and as consistently inefficient or that what we take responsibility for should be irrelevant forms of rent-seeking. capable of critical scrutiny. History has known As for the claim that no one could seriously believe that many bad leaders, and false paths paved with education does not involve shaping young characters, and not good intentions and efficient expedition. It gives just making them job-ready, let me (to be less parochial or me no joy to report that, as a teacher at a confrontational) cite the British Minister (yes) for ‘Lifelong ‘competing institution’, that the very place I teach Learning, Further and Higher Education’, Minister Rammell,

...... who greeted declining enrolments in pure humanities subjects in the United Kingdom in 2005 with the approving remark that this was Academics have gone no problem: evidently ‘students are choosing subjects they think will be vocationally from being, as teachers, a beneficial’. large part of the raison Evidently enough. But surely no one can believe that the aim of the whole exercise is to subordinate entire Universities to the d’etre of the university imperatives of the new post-Fordist capitalism, wherein (for one thing) increased and, as colleagues, privy to investment in R&D is required for firms to compete internationally, but wherein these the decision-making firms cannot individually be tasked to privately fund such research, given the costs processes affecting their involved and the difficulty of internalising benefits such as preventing competitors from ways and priorities of benefiting from said R&D? Here again, to be politic, let me cite the working, to finding Gordon Brown Treasury in the United Kingdom, whose rhetoric of a ‘knowledge economy’ and (yes) ‘knowledge transfer’ is themselves increasingly however not foreign to the colonies. What is required, the UK Treasury explained in a 2004 excluded from decision- policy statement, is ‘greater responsiveness of the research base of the economy’,‘better making and its supporting integration of the research base with the evolving needs of the economy’ or even ‘better rationales. progress in harnessing knowledge to wealth creation’. This is because, according to

43 ...... Callinacos ‘if we were to turn our backs on the global • FEATURES economy we would also have to leave behind the huge • creative power of the knowledge economy’ which ‘reaches The debate about • • deep into our lives and implicates all of us as consumers what universities are • and workers’.‘The Economic Benefits of Increased • Participation in Education and Training’, which is the for is the debate about • Is, Ought, Ends? Access Economics Report cited as the highest authority by • the 2008 Bradley Review, does not even wonder about such what a society should • Matthew Sharpe an economistic agenda. • be for, beyond its own • But surely then the new higher education still aims at • shaping young Australians’ culture and values, and material reproduction, • therefore contributing to Australian nation-building? To and in what its • POSTCARD answer, let us cite ‘Australian higher education in the era of • mass customisation’. This was a background paper flourishing should • underlying the 1998 West Review. Yet, like the Access • • Report, it was written not by academics, students, consist. It also • Indigenous managers or even VCs, but by ‘Global Alliance Limited’. GAL touches on the • is a Tokyo-based investment bank which aimed to bring the Soveriegnty in the • Northwest Passage good news of its ‘context-free’ managerial science to bear ancient question, at • on the Australian universities. The goal of Australian least as old for us as • Peter Jull tertiary reform should be to produce ‘winners in the • international [education] marketplace’. These new Socrates, of what • universities should be economically rather than • • Peter Jull is Adjuct educationally directed, and the government should ‘open knowledge and • Associate Professor the floodgates to new domestic and international interests’ wisdom is for, given • at the Australian to vamp up competition to produce efficiencies. As • Centre for Peace Considine and Marginson observe, although it had a that the search for the • and Conflict significant real-world impact on the Howard regimes’ 1998 • Studies (ACPACS), reforms, truth must reserve the • University of ‘Global Alliance’ says little about the long-term policy right to question what • Queensland. objectives of nation-building and the creation of • equitable opportunities via education, or the effects on society presents as • • teaching quality or the striving for research excellence, or being ‘the only • nothing about the fate of different academic disciplines • in its imagined new world. alternative. • • • • • This telling oversight does not detract new way in liberal modern societies like our own. • from the claim that there was never a This is because political liberalism is founded on the • golden age, and that we should cease view that we cannot publicly reason or rationally • pining for it. Education until the 1970s was decide about final ends—since that should properly • • a marker and instrument of privilege. The be people’s private business, with the pun not wholly • collegial, status-group based forms of unintended. But neo-liberalism was—and let’s be • university self-government bred vices as frank, will continue to be for some time, in the • well as virtues: complacency, narcissism, absence of any competing philosophy and unified • arrogance, sometimes obscurantism. But social movement—the most radically sceptical form • then we should, I think, balance such of liberalism yet, one which assumes self-interest • considerations by asking whether there are and the need to audit, survey or submit everyone to • not some human goods that can only be market pressures to insure that we are not all so • • produced from leisure, and which do not many rent-seeking free-riders. • immediately meet mass market demand, To reason about universities and what they are for is • like art, philosophy, theology, literature— to re-raise some very necessary but very difficult • things people widely agree are among questions about how we conceive our society, the • those that make life most worth living. • moment we reject the postmodern and neo-liberal • In the largest possible frame, the debate idea that no such thing exists. What should we do • about what universities are for is the with the social surplus? Should we continue • debate about what a society should be for, collectively deferring this question by reinvesting it • beyond its own material reproduction, and to generate further growth, wagged by the global • in what its flourishing should consist. It economy which the leading policy statements of the • also touches on the ancient question, at day agree has the ancient face of fate, until it seems • least as old for us as Socrates, of what that our geophysical and natural environment can no • • knowledge and wisdom is for, given that longer sustain us? Or is there a place for non- • the search for the truth must reserve the economic, non-utilitarian ends to orient our hopes • right to question what society presents as and public policy? • being ‘the only alternative. • • 12 2009–1 2010 In a slightly sharpened lens, the ends of • Nº 103 the university become problematic in a • • 44 Indigenous Sovereignty in the Northwest Passage Peter Jull ......

Nunavut and federal marine protection (Lancaster Sound and the Northwest Passage) or even across the open Arctic Ocean near the North Pole. The for Canada’s far north-east Northeast Passage, around Norway and across the top of Like north-eastern Australia’s Torres Strait, Canada’s far Russia to the Far East, is also in play, as the Russians north-east features a legendary and luring waterway, the have much more experience in Arctic shipping. Northwest Passage. Until recent years it has been mischievous The Canadian federal and Nunavut governments, and to consider it a real passage, and it has drawn unknown the Eastern Nunavut Inuit birth-right corporation for numbers of ships and navigators to their doom since the Dark claims and resource management, are ready to sign an Ages. But now, with climate change, the eastern entry of agreement for a national marine conservation area. One Lancaster Sound faces a new era. advantage to governments is the continuous use of sea- Wikipedia tells us the region is uninhabited, but it is precisely ice by Inuit for travel, camping and hunting, dating from the regional population of Inuit in High Arctic villages north, the time before Europeans ‘discovered’ Canada. This Inuit south and west of the Sound, acting both directly and through reality is important for Canada’s protection of Arctic politically effective, policy sophisticated and research-loaded waters in an era when more than occasional shipping is political associations, who have fought for its protection. The looming. Long-time research and legal experts who have richness of the Sound’s biology and its pivotal role in the well- worked with Inuit are particularly excited by and being of Canada’s entire Eastern Arctic, together with hopes or optimistic about this new format for practical co- whispers of rich oil, gas and mineral resources, have ensured operation in the most sensitive of environments. that the region has held the attention of non-Inuit interests, In the 1970s and 1980s the Inuit embarrassed Southern officials and outsiders of many stripes. experts with the depth of Greenland and Nunavut The Canadian Encyclopedia tells us: hunters’ knowledge of marine life and its likely response As a result of the interaction of currents, the sound is rich to shipping, ice-breaking, offshore drilling and the like. in nutrients and supports a biologically varied community of While this is true of most of Canada, it is particularly so birds, mammals and fish. At Bylot Island, which lies at its of the Arctic that the Indigenous people taught other eastern end, it provides breeding grounds for some 3 million Canadians first to understand, then to value, and finally seabirds alone. The area has provided sustenance for Inuit to manage and conserve intelligently the natural gift cultures for thousands of years: ringed seals, walrus and which is North America. polar bears, and narwhals, belugas, killer and bowhead Some Northwest Passage issues are already well whales. Arctic fox is trapped in almost every inlet, and arctic accepted. Canadians need no reminding by international char is taken at the mouths of rivers. NGOs or the United Nations that the cultures, Now the dramatic climate changes, which even faraway communities, livelihoods and regional resources of Australia hears about daily—affecting Arctic sea ice, Greenland indigenous Inuit must be maintained. Inuit fought that glaciers, as well as polar bear and walrus needs and numbers— battle from the end of the 1960s and in 1999 have spawned an explosion of interest and activity relating to inaugurated their own Nunavut Territory in which most Arctic shipping, whether through the High Arctic islands of the Northwest Passage is situated. The accompanying

land and sea claims settlement provides many powers and cultures and languages already were in good shape, guarantees so that against all comers they can ‘care for vision-wise, if only they would turn off the bulldozers country’, to use the Australian phrase. These Inuit-specific and listen to them. Eventually they did. Greenland also rights are written into the Canadian Constitution. cares about shipping in the Passage past its coastal towns and hamlets with their marine livelihoods. A full- This is helpful because the current, very conservative, Canadian blown Inuit country, it is self-governing in most ways, Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is given to northern visions, already respected and especially able in international extending to often quoting the trite and clumsy words of the marine and environment matters. national anthem about ‘the true North strong and free’. As national Inuit leader Mary Simon pointed out during Harper’s This reminds us of the Torres Strait and remote latest northern trip, after half a dozen visits he is finding that Australia today. Since the Intervention we have been the Arctic is about people, not merely space for military especially busy telling Indigenous people what is wrong manoeuvres. Indeed, the Harper view often seems peculiarly with them—largely in social, health, educational and anachronistic, typical of the early post-war period when the employment terms—implying we know the answers. North was a fuzzy vision of a future to be dominated by the These are not always founded in cultural autonomy and revving of large and loud machines, ripping up rocks and tundra. continuity, which are minimum requirements. If we join our governments’ might and main with Indigenous The Inuit and sub-Arctic peoples resisted this approach and its knowledge and aspirations, we could do better than underlying socio-economic assumptions, and over time simply setting off another cycle of alienation. persuaded Canadians and their governments that a tapestry of

45 Everlasting Children Peter Jull ......

A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s this sounds familiar, it’s because it is: it is the stuff of much of children’s fiction, fantastic as well as realist, from the late 19th century to the middle of Book and J. K. Rowling the 20th. ‘Children in these families, at the end What a world, that had such creatures in it. Well, it is perhaps comforting to of the nineteenth century, were know that similar children can be found in the fiction of J. K. Rowling, whose different from children before or after.’ characters exist in a world very like that conjured by the imaginations of earlier So writes A. S. Byatt in The Children’s writers. Harry and his friends may ride broomsticks instead of ponies, and open Book, her long 2009 novel spanning the locked doors with a swish of a wand rather than struggling with a key cut from years that saw the 19th century turn, an impression made in a bar of soap, but both Rowling’s children and their and the Great War begin and end. The forerunners encounter similar, settled and comfortingly confirming hierarchical children she writes about come from a worlds even if enemies are sometimes included. And whatever their sex or age, particular section of the British upper enemies represent what is bad, while the children, existing in a neatly middle class, the Fabians and their dichotomous moral world of good and evil, dark and light, oppose them. friends. ‘Neither dolls nor miniature adults’, these children joined their In 2003, six years before her own novel about children was published, Byatt parents at meals, had their characters wrote about Rowling’s books for children. The distinction between ‘for’ children considered in the light of new social and ‘about’ children is an important one, and is at the heart of what Byatt has to and psychological ideas, and inhabited say, both in her discussion of Rowling, and in her own recent novel. Rowling their own ‘separate, largely writes for children, yet adults are among her ardent admirers. About this fact independent, lives as children’. This Byatt has two things to say. Reading books written for children is a pleasant happy breed roamed free in fields and diversion, a reversion to ‘the reading child’ that gives comfort to the adult, woodlands, rode ponies and bicycles particularly those who haven’t, in adulthood, managed to recapture the level of and developed lasting friendships. And enchantment they once found in reading. The second is that the adult who sometimes they had adventures. If all reads Rowling’s work with the same enthusiasm as the child is one who ‘hasn’t

known, and doesn’t care about’ mystery. Such adults are inhabitants of ‘urban her sister, Violet Grimwith, ran away; jungles, not of the real wild’. Violet, unmarried, still lives in Olive’s household. Olive met her husband, a Her article produced an avalanche of rebuttal, creating headlines which claimed Fabian, in London, and was transported that she had called adult readers of Rowling ‘childish’, a misreading which only by him to Kent, and into the middle goes to show the childishness of some of those responding to it. But more class. In Kent writers and artists, importantly, the dismissal of her claims about Rowling’s books meant that her freethinkers and specialists in early central point, which is that Rowling’s imaginary world fails to provide education surround her: Olive’s Kent is significance, didn’t get the analysis it deserved. The recent publication of a maelstrom of late Victorian ingenuity Byatt’s novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, makes what and striving. Her writing helps support Byatt had to say about Rowling all the more interesting. the large household she shares with her The Children’s Book opens in the South Kensington museum, that ‘schoolroom husband, five children and her sister. In for everyone’, as its first director, Henry Cole, put it. Two boys look down at a fact two of the five children are gallery containing porcelain and see a third boy drawing. He is copying the Violet’s, fathered by Olive’s husband, design on one of the masterpieces of the collection, an extraordinary candlestick. and raised as Olive’s own. This truth is The year is 1895; the Prince Consort, as Byatt reminds her reader, died in 1861, not revealed until very late in the book, and the museum is already in the process of the changes that will lead to its when some of the stories ‘for’ the renaming as the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899. The boys meet, and children, and ‘about’ the children, begin discover that Philip, the boy drawing, is living rough in the basement of the to make their effects felt. Aside from museum, having come there from Burslem in the Staffordshire Potteries. He her commercial work, Olive writes a wants to be a potter, but knows that he must leave the industrial processes of manuscript book for each of her own the Potteries behind if he is to become an artist in clay and glazes. Olive children, providing them an imagined Wellwood, a writer for children, is at the museum. One of the boys who found alternative life, a possible world. These Philip is her beloved son Tom. Philip is borne away to Kent and apprenticed to a stories extend and elaborate as the difficult, but brilliant, potter whose work is avidly collected by the South children grow, creating a perpetual Kensington Museum. fantasy for them and of them. For all the children they are consequent, but The book’s many narratives intertweave several families’ stories, and cross class for the best beloved, Tom, fatal. lines. Olive Wellwood is also a child of the Potteries. As a young adult she and

46 ARTS AND • Stories told to children, and books written for them (mostly by crowd fairy and folktale, saga and CULTURE • adults) are serious business. Like any other cultural form song, Voldemort, the evil genius of • children’s books play a role in the production of the subject. In Rowling’s world, is an envious and • them childhood and its other, adulthood, are given discursive malicious boy who, grown up, uses • • form. Discourses, as Foucault taught us, are material; they produce his gifts to get at Harry Potter and Everlasting • effect. Childhood is set about with discourses shaping what it can, anyone who tries to help him. Children • must and should be, and children’s books, wonderful as they are, Motivated by childhood jealousy of • are as much part of the shaping of childhood as are ideas about Harry’s father, which is deadly Valerie Krips • psychology, education, sociality and so on. Children’s books are enough, his malice, even when it is • product of adults who are representing a childhood which is not parsed as evil, can only be thought • theirs, nor yet that of the children for whom they write; children’s of as a world event from the • books are ‘for’ children, not ‘by’ them. Neither child nor adult fully perspective of an infant ego. The Valerie Krips is • an editor of • enters the space between, as Jacqueline Rose reminded her readers magic that results is equally infantile: Arena Magazine. • in The Case of Peter Pan, more than thirty years ago. That is the a series of nasty little tricks about • space of becoming, of what is not yet. And that is a space that, in nothing much, nothing significant. • Olive Wellwood’s writing for her children, is as dangerous as any It must be admitted that several • adventure writer would care to imagine. members of Rowling’s cast die, but • only because they got caught up in Rowling’s work, it is to be hoped, has not had fatal consequences • the melee, when actually nothing for any of its readers. But such extremes are, fortunately, not • much was at stake. Harry was, after • essential, and the fact that readers long survive reading them does all, under a permanent spell of • not mean that the Harry Potter books fail to play their part in the protection, called mother-love. All • fertile space between the adult’s writing and the child’s reception. the same, malice is, of course, bad • It is because Byatt knows that books written for children are • enough, but it is nothing compared important cultural forms, bearing their own constitutive apparatus, • to the undying and unmotivated that she is concerned about the failure of significance in them. • malevolence of the Wild Hunt. And • Take magic, an essential feature in Rowling’s work. It is controlled, that, according to Byatt, is real magic: • with clearly defined boundaries: for example, under-age wizards unstoppable, inexplicable, and a • must not undertake magic when they are in the ordinary world of potent source of necessary wonder. • Muggles. The magic they can do is equally controlled: the children • The period in which Byatt’s novel is are at Hogwarts to learn to bring their remarkable gifts into a • set was also that in which the cult disciplined form. Where, in this, is Herne the Hunter in the night • of the child reached its height. The • sky, on whose heels run the unstoppable and everlasting Wild slow development of the ideal of • Hunt? Where are the spells that cannot be broken, and which will childhood, achieved in the decades • turn a human woman into a mermaid perpetual? And where is the of which she writes, transformed • werewolf who was never a man, but who, like the Pangolin, lives • the family in many ways, not least between the earth and the sky, and will always do so, belonging • turning it from an economic unit in • fully to neither? Compared to these figures, and all the others who • • • • • which the child was a productive on what it is to be like this, like that, and respond to the novel’s • member to one in which the child ideas about good and evil, dark and light. It would be as well, she • became totally dependent. At the argues, both in her novel, and in her article about J. K. Rowling, if • same time the child was cast into books for children didn’t substitute wild magic and wonder for • the terrible paradox of the wholly mere technological wizardry, as Rowling does, even though she • innocent yet dangerously latent gives it archaic form. If we are to have mystery, let it not be the • • sexual subject. The era about which kind that lies in wondering how a trick was done; let it be as • she writes is also that in which J. M. serious as the child reader deserves; let it have significance. Barrie’s Peter Pan appeared, a play • Although Byatt’s topic is children and their books, her target is the • and later a book about a boy who adult who reads children’s books and, by extension, those who write • would never grow up. Everlasting them and write about them. Veering uncomfortably close towards • children like Peter played a significant elitism in her article about Rowling, she overplays her hand, en- • role in children’s literature until the • couraging an easy dismissal of what she has to say. The fact is that first few decades of the 20th • books written for children are very good calibrators of cultural century, when denial of adulthood • change, and Rowling’s are no exception. All too apt for their inevitable finally became impossible. Byatt’s • franchising, they are also exciting page-turners, recyclers of motifs character Olive, innocent of this • and structures from many precedent forms—and no worse for that. • inevitability, writes a play in which Whether their popularity should be understood as another breaking • she and her collaborator hope to down (or coming together) of adult and child taste, about which • copy Barrie’s success. She bases it Neil Postman wrote despairingly in The Disappearance of Childhood • on the story she wrote for her son in 1982; and whether that is a precursor to a new kind of • Tom. The play, called Tom • childhood, a new kind of literacy, or to a decay of cultural forms Underground, the title she gave to • that is to be resisted at all cost, is a question worthy of thought. his own story, horrifies Tom and • Indications such as Byatt’s are abroad, and it is wise to take note literally finishes him. • of them. In the meantime, it should be remembered with gratitude • That, Byatt makes clear, is how that the much-maligned Enid Blyton encouraged many non- 12 2009–1 2010 • powerful children’s books can be. readers to read; so too does J. K. Rowling. And that is not to damn Nº 103 • • They are places in which the child with faint praise. • can imagine him or herself, can try 47 micals, in dissolved in curios, things. useless of patience, an icon It makes of possibility— tricks not as ships in bottles—rigged be forfeit experience but that scene, this illuminated to alike making and unmaking its palaces— uninhabitable and Guide to its Use in Forecasting Weather its Use in Forecasting and Guide to in pin-scale ...... Lisa Gorton Triumphs A Description of the Storm Glass alcohol and water, the crystalline forms in it vary with electric and water,alcohol in it vary forms the crystalline in the air. changes The Storm Glass,The Storm Glass, a Camphor called sometimes weather. foretells that instrument che containing glass is an outdated sealed A diorama— and armour,trophies where mechanism succeeds key-wound chariot by Caesar’s itself upon the scene—is in this,framed crystals where is making, which upon wreckage the wreckage by remake weather of rooms, as a succession is unassailable what logic prove such recessive and by IV. The ambition of a miniaturist, Mantegna’s fashions which

48 POETRY • • • A Dangerous Nationalism • book • A Description of the • review by Guy Rundle Storm Glass and • ...... Guide to its Use in • Forecasting • cosmopolitanism developed since the 1960s, Weather • Tim Soutphommasane, Reclaiming • progressives have entirely cut themselves off from Lisa Gorton • Patriotism (Cambridge University local loyalties, and have fallen into alienation and • Press, 2009) despair. • • ‘They’re still wearing Australian flags’, a friend Patriotism is something they should develop not Lisa Gorton’s • remarked in horror at the Big Day Out, the one-day because it is a good idea in itself, but to rejoin the poetry collection, • music festival started around a decade ago as national conversation, Press Release, was • something to do around the time of that most hollow to be politically active, to be successive shortlisted for the • of hallowed days, January 26. The pleasantly formless advocates for change and reform, you have to Melbourne Prize • Best Writing Award day of music and youth was being turned into an engage the minds of other citizens ... to deny • patriotism is a sure path to political impotence and won the • explicit expression of Australianness. For those who .... In the face of rapid and far-reaching Victorian Premier’s • value such days as simply expressions of joyful human Prize for poetry. • being, not pressed into service, the display of a economic change ... the nation remains the last She is also the • national flag seemed to be the ultimate negation. remaining source of stability and security. author of a novel • Everyone was condemning the aggressive manner in for children, Though Soutphommasane occasionally gestures • which a few Anglo kids were parading around Cloudland. • to an absolute value to patriotism—‘it is no asserting white Australianness. But the very display different to other forms of loyalty or love, and a • of flags at all struck my friend as a betrayal of the • necessary condition of collective self- • day’s spirit. improvement’—the understanding of it is • For Tim Soutphommasane, this latter reaction is as overwhelmingly instrumental. A sense of • wrong as the rejection of white Anglo Australianness patriotism is what holds a multicultural society • is correct. The total rejection of patriotism as a value together, and the global pressures towards • dispersion must be countered by a ‘liberal • by a loose group of writers, activists and patriotism’ manufactured by state and cultural • commentators lumped together as ‘progressives’ is apparatuses—explicit talk of ‘Australian values’, a REVIEW • both a political and philosophical error. In the • Howard era, such people identified patriotism with cultural literacy curriculum, an explicit yoking of • the worst aspects of Australian Anglo-Celtic infrastructure development to the task of • chauvinism and rejected it utterly. Infected with a building a ‘stronger nation’, a compulsory • • A Dangerous • Nationalism • • Guy Rundle ‘citizenship knowledge’ test as a quite wrong; there’s insufficient overwhelmingly a production of • • pre-requisite to the right to vote, space to go into detail here, and intellectuals using the raw material • an explicit spruiking of ‘ecstatic I’ve given an account of it in of local traditions, and Guy Rundle is a • myths’ such as Gallipoli, and a Crikey. More pertinent for Arena transformed through the consulting editor • ban on dual citizenship, among readers is a description of the intellectuals’ distinctive practice for Arena Magazine. • others. If an abstract ‘liberal author’s misconstruction of of producing abstractions and • patriotism’ is not engineered, the patriotism, nationalism and their essences. • reservoir of national feeling will creation, through the interaction Seemingly unaware of this, • flow into Cronulla-style riots, or of the intellectually trained and • Soutphommasane gives a naive into ‘mush’—sentiment for ‘the the mainstream. • version of Australian taste of VB, barbeques, going to • Though most of the book is nationalism and the bush myth the beach or following the • dedicated to enumerating a as arising from, well, the bush. • cricket’. Liberal patriotism must series of techniques by which But of course it didn’t. The • be engineered without allowing liberal patriotism can be country was more urban than • the sneaking-back in of Anglo- engineered, Soutphommasane rural by 1910, and the bush myth • Celtic nationalism, the means by rejects, or simply is not aware of, was constructed by the drunks, • which said mush becomes • theories that nationalism and obsessives, and dissolute weaponised. • patriotism arise from the intellectuals of the Melbourne • There is some truth to the cultural activities of and Sydney literary world. The • charge that Australian activists intellectuals, often those in exile, bush myth offered a rapidly • sometimes single out Australia projected back onto multi- suburbanising country an • • as having a uniquely maligned layered and more complexly idealised form of values of • history, an over-reaction to the affiliated communities. The work simplicity and hardihood lost • self-congratulatory kitsch of the of Hobsbawm and Trevor-Roper almost before they had begun. • past decade, and a false analysis on the invention of tradition, ‘Mateship’ was the precursor of • of what is just one settler- Benedict Anderson on imaginary the pointless sacrifice at • capitalist society amongst a communities, and many others Gallipoli, one way by which 12 2009–1 2010 • number. Soutphommasane’s in these pages, including Paul active questioning of it could be Nº 103 • analysis of the actual politics of James, has laid bare the process deferred. Soutphommasane’s • the Howard period strikes me as by which nationalism is account of how we, as • 49 progressives, should treat this material is quite telling: the Kalkadoon bookshop etc), but their sense of place There is, admittedly, an element of myth in Anzac, as there was at least concrete, and created a democratic political- is in all traditions, not least national ones. We suspend our cultural programme which yielded results. By contrast, judgement in submitting ourselves to the legend. We Soutphommasane’s attempt to fill out a notion of liberal substitute for literal truth a more ecstatic truth; literal patriotism as expressed above all through policy quickly accuracy gives way to something more visceral, more leads him into absurdity. Irresolvably contentious issues emotional and ultimately more moral ... sacrifice does not such as a Bill of Rights, or an apology and treaty just earn a nation’s stripes; it also demands that we pay our between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are gratitude by giving the benefit of the doubt. given a ‘patriotic’ swoosh even though opponents of such measures could, with equal consistency, call them For those familiar with the history of myth presented as truth unpatriotic. In one absurd moment, Soutphommasane in the service of unity, the above passage should be troubling, asks how the issue of climate change can be drawn into a to say the least. And everything is wrong with patriotic narrative. When the fate of the atmosphere Soutphommasane’s account of how we should relate to our cannot be recognised as the first unquestionably global homeland. The ‘ecstatic myth’ routine is combined with an humanist challenge in history, then the motif of uncritical endorsement of German kulturkampf nationalism patriotism has become both fetish and symptom of from Fichte onwards, and an envoi quote from Herder—but something else. Soutphommasane also chooses as valuable exactly what is most deadened in national attachment, and rejects its living Soutphommasane is a young writer, eager to make a expressions. policy mark. That has led him to create an unreflexive book which simply reprises the invention and projection Thus the concrete expressions of national life—the taste of a of nationalism in the Renaissance—an aspiring dreamer local beer, the shared interest in a seasonal sport—are rejected amid the dreaming spires of Oxford, inventing an ideal as ‘mush’, while great attention is given to arid experiments in Australia. That happens, but why has the book been building a patriotism based on celebrations of Australia’s welcomed by many on the Left, especially those from alleged role as the world’s first universally franchised one-time internationalist traditions? The question is all democratic nation (a role that would have comes as news to the the more pertinent given that Soutphommasane’s Aborigines, or ‘fauna’). This is curious. Like many progressive formula appears to be quite wrong. The book appears to patriots, Soutphommasane quotes Orwell on the nefariousness have been conceived in the worst days of Howardism, of the Left, yet does not take Orwell’s point that a genuine love before more universalist and progressive strands did of country is expressed through concrete experiences, girls reappear in Australian politics, even if in a kitschified walking in clogs over the cobbles, warm bitter, The Guardian form. In the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown’s and so forth. In the Australian context, he seems simply experiments in ‘Britishness’ have been an abject failure. unaware of many of the progressive left traditions that did Contemporary societies are more complex than these attempt to ground a universalist politics in local expression. simple formulas can reduce them to, beloved of ‘There was a decline in progressive nationalism from the 1960s academics not bound by the strictures they set others. on’, he argues. In fact, the 1960s and 1970s saw its greatest efflorescence when the localist themes of the radical Left—the One strives to find something positive in this book. But revival of the bush ballads, connection with Indigenous there is something hard to like in it. None of the real Australia, the self-publishing of local serious novels—fed a expressions of countrylove and social solidarity—from general wave of radical and critical nationalism, from the new surf lifesaving to the CFA, from the David Hicks theatre and local music to the Australian independence campaign to, yes, the taste of a VB, make much of a movement, a genuine republican movement, in contrast to the positive appearance. It has more than a mild feel of a top-down ARM of the 1990s. revenge against situatedness, a scheme to replace the inchoate and various manifestations of countrylove and The Australian Independence Movement could sometimes be a sense of place, with a series of abstract schema in silly in its attempts to elevate bush culture (The Bushwhackers, which no-one feels at home save the intellectual. book A Distributist Way review by Johann Rossouw ......

Race Mathews, Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stakeholder materialism’s political arm—liberal democracy—the GFC did the same Society: Alternatives to the Market and the State (The for secular materialism’s economic Distributist Review Press, Irving, 2009) arm, market capitalism. Secular materialism’s crisis of political faith In the twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall it seems increasingly as if famously and ironically led to a that event didn’t so much represent the victory of liberal democracy and change in missionary strategy, capitalism over autocratic communism, as the beginning of the end of the epoch particularly in the United States: less of which both these systems are variants, namely secular materialism. Since emphasis on the ‘soft power’ of 1989, the unraveling of secular materialism has since been embodied by two culture and commerce and more on other significant historical events, namely the terror attacks against the United the ‘hard power’ of war and States on 11 September 2001, and the on-going global financial crisis (GFC) unilateralism. brought on by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September. If the terror attacks led to profound doubt about the global saving grace of secular So far it would seem that the crisis

50 REVIEW • of economic faith is causing a similar ironic timely book Jobs of Our Own: Building a • reaction, perhaps more evangelical than Stakeholder Society: Alternatives to the Market and • missionary: an emotional closing of ranks by the the State. As was hinted above, secular • faithful around the dogma of salvation through materialism is itself a theology. Thinking beyond • economic growth. Just how irrational this faith the confines of the theology in which one was A Dangerous • has become, and just how deeply it is held, is raised does require boldness and an ecumenical Nationalism • • shown by how the precondition of any type of spirit. Mathews displays this in the introduction Guy Rundle • economy—the ecology—is still sacrificed on the when he makes it clear that while his ‘concerns • alter of economic growth, and by the anxious are secular’, a lot can be learned from social • appropriation of anything resembling ‘restored Catholic thought, particularly as it has • economic growth’. manifested since the last quarter of the 19th • century in distributism, to which this book is • It’s no wonder that so many Western countries dedicated. • suffer from political apathy, cynicism about the • political and economic elites and a growing fear What is distributism? • for the future. As long as secular materialism Distributism favours a ‘society of owners’ • continues to be the theological mainstream these where property belongs to the many rather • • illnesses are bound to worsen, for the people than the few, and correspondingly opposes the • know all too well that things can’t be business as concentration of property in the hands either • usual, while the apparent lack of alternatives of the rich, as under capitalism, or of the state, • weigh heavily on them. as advocated by some socialists. In particular, • ownership of the means of production, Finding a way out of the current impasse requires • distribution and exchange must be widespread new ways of thinking and doing, many of them • (my emphasis). • acts of rediscovery and reconstruction. One such • act is the updated edition of Race Mathews’ In order to understand why distributism is an • • • • • • alternative to both a market- or a thought and practice, this was done with an eye on the • state-based approach, it is useful to industrial future and not the agrarian past. • bear in mind some of the Mathews spends six of the eleven chapters on an historical • philosophical differences between overview of the founding decades of distributism in Britain, • these approaches and distributism. roughly between the last quarter of the 19th century and the • Where the state and the market • 1930’s. These were of course years of massive social tension often, if not usually, aim for a direct • and great ideological energy in industrialised Britain. In more relationship with the individual, • or less chronological order the founding figures and events in distributism sees the individual’s • the development of British distributist thought were: a relationship to the economy and • growing consciousness of the massive skewing of the • politics as mediated by the ownership of production and property in an industrialising • community and its institutions. Europe and a concomitant mass poverty; the publication of the • Where the state and the market, great papal encyclical, Rerum Novarum, by Pope Leo XIII in • especially since abandoning its 1891, following on the work of the great British Catholic • pretensions to the elevation of • cardinals Newman and Manning; and the rise to prominence of citizens and consumers since World • the three well-known British distributist thinkers, Hillaire War II, these days see the economy • Belloc, G. K. Chesterton and his younger brother, Cecil. • and the good life as one and the • same, distributism sees the Mathews shows how all three, after an initial dalliance with • economy as but one of the means to socialism, sooner or later became disillusioned with its • the good life and the good life is centralist and materialist tendencies. Of course, they were also A Distributist Way • more than economical. all Catholics, and therefore schooled in a body of thought • focusing on social justice, community agency and the promise Johann Rossouw • In assessing the promise of real and of a better social order. To his credit Mathews also pays a lot of • lasting social change through the attention—perhaps too much—to the fervent debates the • adoption of distributism it is distributists had with the leading socialists of the day, Johann Rossouw is • important to have a good historical including figures such as George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice a PhD candidate in • overview of its origins and • and Sidney Webb. The utility of this focus is that it allows the the Department of achievements so far. This historical Politics, Monash • reader to understand how vital the exchanges between the overview cannot be developed University. • socialists and the distributists were for the latter’s without reference to its other two • development of their views—and that the contemporary reader • great secular materialist contenders, disillusioned with socialism does not have to re-invent the • namely socialism and (market) wheel when exploring or applying distributism. • capitalism. For a start, all three of • these approaches developed in Mathews goes to great lengths to analyse the reasons why • reaction to, and perhaps even as an distributism never really was practically adopted by ordinary • extension of, the Industrial citizens, including the abhorrent anti-Semitism of which • • Revolution between 1800 and 1850 Belloc and the Chestertons were guilty until thankfully • in Britain. It is important to bear reversing their position in the 1930s. Another reason is also 12 2009–1 2010 • this in mind when assessing the old academic problem: great at talk, less at action. In Nº 103 • distributism, for although its chapters six and seven Mathews tells the happy but ultimately • founders did draw on medieval doomed adoption of distributism in Nova Scotia, Canada’s • 51 Antigonish movement, led by the Catholic priests ‘Jimmy’ Mathews comphrehensively explain the functions Tompkins and Moses Coady. Their insight was to combine and structure of Mondragon, but they are usefully economic action and adult education, beginning with a poor summed up in the collective’s ten basic principles: fishing community. Tompkins and Coady understood all too open admission, democratic organisation, sovereignty well that real change depends on popular participation, on- of labour, the instrumental and subordinate character going education and new or reformed institutions. Finding a of capital, participatory management, payment number of co-operatives, evening study groups and credit solidarity, interco-operation, social transformation, unions—that is, ownership of production and capital—was universality and education. Mondragon’s success has their answer. It worked well until the movement failed to been helped, as Mathews points out, by the historical ensure on-going popular participation and the vitality of its experience and identity of the Basques, but that founding ideals. shouldn’t distract one from its major achievement as embodying the best of modernity without Which brings Mathews to the greatest distributist story so far, succumbing to its pathologies. Possibly the main that of the Basque Jesuit priest José Maria Arizmendiarrieta reason for Mondragon’s success is that it took the (1915–1976), and the Mondragon co-operative in the Basque community rather than the state as its point of region of Spain. By 2008 Mondragon’s sales stood at around departure, which has ensured that the market is an $US20 billion; it employed more than 103,000 people and it extension of the community, rather than the inverse. was Spain’s seventh biggest industrial group. Arizmendiarrieta had fought on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil Race Mathews’ Jobs of Our Own is required reading War, nearly died in prison and was driven by a strong for all those yearning for the popular politics of the commitment to the Basque people and social justice. Like his 1960’s, as well as for all those dreaming about a Antigonish predecessors he combined on-going education, co- popular politics of the future—and real change. operative production and co-operative ownership of capital, Jobs of Our Own is available through Amazon.com or but he had the foresight with his co-founders to develop an directly from the publishers, The Distributist Press, evolutionary structure for Mondragon, ensuring its longevity at . and growth. film Hollywood and the Holocaust review by Kate Harper ......

Inglorious Basterds (dir. Quentin violent as the real-life perpetrators? By re-writing history does Tarantino insensitively trivialise a horrific Tarantino, 2009) episode in the not-so-distant past? Or does his status With the anticipation of a new Quentin Tarantino film as a daring Auteur give him licence to do whatever he comes the fervent expectation that this one will be wackier, wants, especially since in the postmodern context bloodier and more self-referential—that is to say, more history and its subsequent representations are all ‘up for Tarantino—than the last. In fact, Tarantino and his works grabs’ anyway? are revered by his most loyal of fans with the sort of wide- These are important questions to consider. What is eyed frothing at the mouth usually reserved for evangelical especially interesting, however, is that Tarantino’s preachers or cult leaders promising various salvations. For irreverent film points to the reverential way the film these most ardent of followers, he has become a kind of industry has consistently capitalised on the atrocities of postmodern-antichrist-Christ and, whether you like his the Holocaust, so much so that it would be fair to define films or not, it is easy to see why. His works encapsulate a the Holocaust film as a distinct sub-genre of the war sort of violent intertextuality and hyper-awareness of filmic film proper. The cinematic portrayal of terrible contexts that derives from the director’s own obsessive atrocities is surely necessary for cultural awareness and cinephilia: they demonstrate how a postmodern aesthetic healing; however, it would be naive to assume that the can work, what it sounds like and how it can affect our bodies. only reason Hollywood has so consistently backed and Tarantino’s latest film, Inglorious Basterds, begins with a rewarded productions that deal with World War II is for tongue-in-cheek reference to the film as a twisted fairytale of the educative function of such stories. As Kate of sorts. The first inter-titles read: ‘Chapter 1. Once upon a Winslet, playing herself in an episode of BBC’s The time ... In Nazi occupied France’, as if this might be a story Extras, satirically acknowledges, ‘do a film about the told to children to, surely, give them nightmares. From this Holocaust and you’re guaranteed an Oscar’. Undeniably, initial allusion to the fairytale, Tarantino sets up a ‘what if?’ this is an exceptionally popular genre that makes narrative, an imagined history of World War II. In this studios and production companies lots of money. (In imagined history he gives the Jews a brutal and effective retrospect, Winslet’s comments seem hilariously agency they never had. The ‘basterds’ in the film are a group portentous as, in a case of life imitating art, she had of Jewish American soldiers, led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine been nominated for Oscars on four previous occasions (Brad Pitt), who not only kill their enemy with an efficiency and finally won earlier this year for her role in the that has Hitler and his SS cronies quaking, but also take Holocaust film The Reader. trophies from their kill, namely Nazi scalps. Tarantino employed some of the designers and locations It is this element of the film—Jews as murderers—that has that have been previously used with such Oscar-winning divided critical responses: what are the implications of success in the making of the most lucrative and ‘serious’ turning real-life victims into characters as methodically Holocaust films of recent years. Notably, he enlisted

52 REVIEW • Anna B. Sheppard, who was the the film’s narrative is split into Tarantino film. The opening • costume designer for Schindler’s five chapters, reflecting an scene demonstrates how this • List, The Pianist and the HBO appreciation for the episode works specifically in terms of the • mini-series Band of Brothers,to structure of novels and theatre, use of sound. The scene begins • • help with the wardrobe of and each unfolds, as Tarantino on the French countryside as A Distributist Way • Basterds. In addition, four of the notes, with ‘a vaguely different farmer Perrier LaPadite chops • major interior locations for the look, and a different feel, and the wood while his daughter hangs Johann Rossouw • film were constructed at Studio tone is different in all of them. out the washing, before Colonel • Babelsberg in Berlin, which has The opening feels like a Hans Landa, the Jew Hunter • been the setting for The Pianist, spaghetti western, but with (Christoph Waltz), arrives at the • Die Fälscher and The Reader.And WWII iconography’. The first doorstep to question LaPadite • what distinguishes these films, and second chapters are about the whereabouts of • • aside from obvious thematic especially imbued with elements neighbouring Jewish families. As • concerns, is that they have of the western in terms of sound soon as we see the Nazi cars in • enough Oscars between them to and action. In particular, as we the distance the sound shifts • fill a rather grand poolroom. By witness the basterds’ first Nazi from the quiet natural noises of • using some of the most kill and scalping, the soundscape the landscape and characters to • renowned people and places from becomes Morricone-esque, an eruption of off-screen strings • recent Holocaust films to whilst the staging of a key and orchestral melodrama. So • construct the mise en scene, moment is drawn out like a sensational is the use of sound • • Tarantino gives his film a sense Sergio Leone shoot-out, so that here that it conjures up the way • of historical realism—perhaps the tension becomes almost off-screen music is too often • the genre’s most recognisable unbearable. Basterds’ episodic used in Holocaust films to affect • formal feature—so as to fracture narrative structure and the us in highly sentimental ways • it time and time again. In fact, differing shade of each chapter— (think Schindler’s List). Its use • the film elicits a sense of the pulsating with intertextuality here in Basterds is stripped of • uncanny: the mise en scene is and allusion—is in stark contrast sentimentality, as the intensity • predominantly grounded in to the way in which Holocaust of the score actually wakes us • realism, yet the way in which films are usually treated; where out of the narrative to laugh at • Hollywood and this world unfurls is unreal and few formal devices exist that how obviously we are being the Holcaust • • defamiliarising. might take us outside of the manipulated. This highly self- historical world that is being conscious use of sound disrupts Kate Harper • With Hollywood’s earnest • created for us. the realism of the film’s world, profiting from the Holocaust in • for it seems to (loudly and mind, Tarantino’s Basterds Despite occurring in what • hilariously) refer to the entire appears to both play on and work realistically appears to be 1940s Kate Harper • gamut of war films’ deliberate completed a BA • against established notions of France or Germany, Basterds and manipulative use of sound with Honours (1st • how a film that deals with this disrupts the realism it for sentimentality. class) in Cinema • subject typically organises its establishes because stylistic and Studies at the • narrative and style. Its obvious narrative elements constantly Basterds’ rampant play with University of • fictionalising of history aside, announce: this as a film, a genre—moving from western to Melbourne and is • now working as a • freelance writer. • • • • melodrama in a matter of seconds—and their adoration for the propagandistic effects of • postmodern approach to story and sound resists cinema—that alters history in favour of the Jews. • the reverential Hollywood style of making a Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds rewrites history in • Holocaust film right through to the ending itself. a frenzy of postmodern genre-bending and self- • The film’s last chapter brings together three referentiality that has the very idea of film’s • closely interwoven storylines in a black comedy • influential possibilities at its thematic core. In of errors that offers us a Tarantino-style happy • doing so Basterds is unique as a Holocaust film. ending. Since we are, of course, rooting for an • The way in which this entirely fictional narrative imagined Jewish victory, Basterds provides the • unfolds through a hyper-aware use of style most satisfying ending we can hope for: the Axis • conjures up the very real way that the Holocaust • of Nazi Evil—Hitler, Goebbels and Göring—are has been largely depicted by Hollywood: through • all burned to death in a cinema while watching the a highly deliberate use of realism that elicits • fictional Nazi propaganda film Nation’s Pride. enormous profits. In a stroke of irony that seems • This mise en abîme was shot by Eli Roth, who to further confirm Winslet’s comments in The • plays one of the basterds. As Roth said, Tarantino, • Extras, Christoph Waltz is expected to be ‘got the Jewish director to make the Nazi propa- • nominated at next year’s Oscars for his portrayal ganda’. Even more cerebrally testing is that what • of the Jew Hunter. Playing a Nazi who is as Tarantino has actually done is had the Jewish • quirkily charming and childlike as he is ruthlessly • director to make a Nazi propaganda film that efficient and self-serving, his nomination?and • results in killing all the Nazis and ending the war: probable win?seems to prove that, in Hollywood, • the Jews win. That is to say it is the Nazis’ love of even a completely fictional film that parodies the • cinema that effectively allows for the end of the Holocaust style of filmmaking cannot escape the • war. This notion of the power of cinema to effect • earnest eyes of the Academy. The irony of this, great change is perhaps the most self-consciously 12 2009–1 2010 • I’m sure, will not be lost on the director or the romantic theme that runs through Basterds: it is • film’s cast: parody Hollywood well enough and it Nº 103 the Nazi’s love of cinema—and, in particular, • misses the joke completely. • 53 Cooper’s Last Antisocial Education Simon Cooper ......

Gillard’s ‘Education Revolution’: ‘revolution in transparency’ as Julia Gillard remarked. Influenced by UK policy as well as by controversial transparently antisocial figures such as Joel Klein in New York, her ‘hardline’ If Bob Hawke regrets the ‘no child living in poverty’ remark, approach to education funding involves the gathering Paul Keating the ‘recession we had to have’, Kevin Rudd may and disclosure of information about individual school eventually bemoan the Monthly essay where he staunchly performance. This information will be posted on a new declared the limits of neo-liberalism. It becomes harder My School website so parents can make choices about each day to spot the distance between the Rudd government where to send children to school. Here one cannot help and the neo-liberal project. From stimulus packages to but think of Grocery Watch, the other stumbling emissions trading schemes, the market is posited as the website initiative of the government. Just as Grocery only possible mechanism for solving problems. Yet, neo- Watch left untouched the structural imbalances between liberalism is more than simply an economic arrangement; it producers, markets and consumers, Gillard has had little is a cultural form that reshapes everything we do in terms to say on the discrepancies between the funding of of the market. If the government funds public institutions government and non-government schools. Indeed her but reconstitutes their internal culture along market lines department is committed to an extra 32 per cent ($26.2 then this is in essence neo-liberalism. Nowhere is this billion) to private schools in the next four years. So in clearer in the government’s approach to education, once the one sense, like Grocery Watch, My School will do little rallying point for Labor. Here the Rudd government’s to alter funding arrangements. However, it may commitment to the audit culture—the process of gathering substantially alter the culture of schools, realigning data, setting performance targets, benchmarking and public them towards a market model. reporting—reveals its complicity with the neo-liberal Schoolteachers, parents and principals have expressed project. concern with the ‘transparency’ component of Gillard’s The much touted ‘Education Revolution’ is in actuality a education policy. Recently 150 school principals

confronted the Education Minister in there was no guarantee that public deeper concerns about auditing. In Canberra, arguing that the data would service quality improved as a result of the last two decades auditing has not accurately reflect the activities of auditing procedures, and that outcomes moved from being a mere tool of individual schools and would lead to from such procedures were accounting to a comprehensive form unfair comparisons between schools unpredictable, often distorting the of legitimisation, especially in (‘naming and shaming’) once the media behaviour of public service providers. relation to schools, universities, got hold of the website’s data. Gillard’s The report also found that data hospitals and other public faith in the auditing process allows her generated through auditing procedures institutions. The aim of auditing is to deflect such criticism. For her, was unreliable and did not lead to the to end wasteful practices and restore transparency equates to the extension capacity for meaningful choice between public confidence in institutions of democracy—parents have the right services. Ironically, the report also and services. By embracing auditing to know and to choose. Emphasising found that the United Kingdom was practices, however, governments are accountability makes a nice sound bite. ranked lowest of all European countries adopting market models for Before embracing the ‘common sense’ of on the trust its citizens had in efficiency that enact cultural shifts auditing, however, two things should be government statistics. These effects— as much as they target ‘waste’. noted. Firstly, it is extremely difficult inaccuracy, distortion and distrust— Critics of the audit culture note how to make complex institutions such as were also combined with the massive auditing colonises the workplace, schools ‘transparent’. Secondly, the cost of the auditing process. For transforming it so as to make it process of transparency transforms the example, the annual cost of running ‘auditable’. As individuals measure culture of organisations, making them Ofsted (the system used to measure themselves against external over so that they make sense in terms schools) was equivalent to that of indicators, they often suppress the of market models, but not as public almost 5000 teachers. Back in impulses that led them to their institutions. Australia, respected education vocation. Teachers may narrow their statistician Margaret Wu argues that The critics of auditing measures are classroom practice so as to improve the data being relied upon by Gillard to many and their examples too numerous scores, de-emphasising learning measure school performance contains to document here. Worth noting, processes outside that of the ‘test’. too large a margin for error to be however, is a recent policy briefing Responding to the pressure of meaningful. The data, used to link published by the Economic and Social benchmarking, many schools in the student performance and school Research Council in the United United Kingdom began to only focus performance, is according to Wu ‘at Kingdom. The report reviewed the use on the top 40–50 per cent of pupils, best a conjecture’. of performance indicators in the United marginalising the rest, even Kingdom over the past decade. It found Beyond these documented problems lie

54 ...... COOPER’S LAST • discouraging students from sitting exams where they • might receive a low grade. Ultimately the audit • process transforms what it claims to measure. In Subscription Offer • assuming only what can be measured is of • I want to subscribe • significance, the way in which public institutions are Antisocial I would like to purchase a gift subscription • understood can be distorted. Education My name is ...... • Julia Gillard comes from a long line of politicians • Recipient is ...... Simon Cooper • claiming that auditing processes make education I want to purchase books (see over) • more accountable, thus restoring public confidence. • However, all too often the auditing process fosters SUBSCRIPTION RATES Simon Cooper is an • the very mistrust it is meant to restore. 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