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GREENPEACE
3/2/90
Lindy Stacker.
Dear Lindy,
Some months ago I wrote to you because of my concern that Greenpeace policy, with respect to kangaroo management and soil conservation, is to some extent, misguided and counter-productive. I had all but given up hope of receiving a reply and was beginning to conclude that constructive criticism was not welcome from rank and file supporters. However, last week I did receive a reply, on your behalf, from an individual called Powell Strong.
I had been hoping for a closely reasoned justification of Greenpeace policy which would either convince me that my concerns were unfounded or, at the very least, allow me to give the current policy makers the benefit of the doubt. Instead, I found myself wading through a morass of fatuous, patronising drivel. I am not sure what to conclude from it all. Does this letter accurately reflect the attitudes and abilities of Greenpeace? Or was Mr/Ms. Strong simply conveying his/her own quaint perceptions of life the universe and everything? In either case, I feel compelled to address the more obvious deficiencies in the argument against kangaroo farming. Personally, I am not convinced by arguments for or against roo farming. However, the more Greenpeace literature I read, the more I lean towards the arguments in favour.
My purpose in pursuing this matter is that I do not think it a bad thing that organizations such as Greenpeace should be asked to justify their policies to the people who ultimately pay the bills. My personal input to such groups is largely restricted to financial support as, living in the country, I find it difficult to justify the fuel consumed to attend endless committee meetings.
And so, to Mr/Ms. Strong's letter. The opening paragraph was innocuous enough -- simply a statement of Greenpeace concerns re. land degradation. However, the remainder of this treatise was at best trite, at worst apocryphal. For example, the statement, "Increasing the economic value of (a) species, historically, has not, to my knowledge, protected or preserved that species." Considering that the context of the discussion was animal husbandry, rather than hunting and gathering, this seems a rather extraordinary assertion. For Ms/Mr Strong's edification, let me list the following:- sheep, cattle of various persuasions, pigs, goats, deer, geese, ducks, pigeons, chickens, turkeys, ostrich, lamas, carp, tilapia, catfish, trout, silkworms, earthworms, leaches, white mice, and even of late, the humble yabby; to mention but a few of the species, the survival of which has been virtually guarantied for as long as homosapiens aspires to feed and clothe his/herself with the bodies of his/her fellow creatures. The often catastrophic damage wreaked upon other, less favoured species, in the process of husbanding the select few, is another matter of course.
As P.S. develops his/her argument, it seems that two quite distinct, although related issues get confused. First, it is acknowledged that hard hoofed animals are "enormously destructive" and then it is stated that land degradation in semi-arid areas is the result of land mismanagement by graziers. Whilst both these assertions are undoubtedly correct, they are distinctly separate issues. The solution to land degradation as suggested by P.S. is to stop grazing in semi-arid areas and fill in the water holes. In other words create vast conservation parks. Great idea, the more the better. However, given that approximately 90% of Australia's pastoral land lies beyond Goyder's line and is therefore classed as semi-arid, I am not convinced of the reality of such a solution. Currently the total area of land set aside for national parks is about 30 million hectares, as compared with almost 450 million hectares used for grazing. Is Green Peace seriously attempting to increase the area of national parks by some 1500%? Even though someone of such unimpeachable integrity as Senator Richardson has talked of removing "certain areas" from pastoral activity, the national park solution is obviously utopian.
If it is accepted that the vast majority of semi-arid Australia will not become national park in the foreseeable future, and, if we are serious about reducing land degradation, then surely a compromise position is the most realistic alternative. If it is also acknowledged that hard hoofed animals are destructive in the extreme, then surely it makes sense to encourage a viable economic alternative based on native animals. P.S. argues, illogically, that this is not acceptable, because greedy graziers would still overstock. But surely, that is a different issue. If they are going to overstock the land, it is still better for it to be overstocked by native animals than by sheep and cattle. Also, I suspect that politically, it is much more realistic to attempt to impose some sort of land management control over graziers, than to compulsorily acquire about half the total land area of the country for the purpose of taking it out of production completely.
It is at this point that P.S.'s earlier assertion that increasing the economic value of a species has never protected or preserved that species, rears its ugly head. It is obviously completely inconsistent with the assertion that farming kangaroos would inevitably lead to unnaturally high populations of that species: i.e. overstocking.
P.S. would have done better to simply send me a copy of the article in vol.13 no5 of the" Greenpeace" magazine which contained some far more cogent, but by no means decisive arguments against roo farming; (although at the time of course, they were called "facts"). However, for the most part the assertions in the article were as logically incomprehensible as P.S.'s letter. For example: "No one can claim such a scheme [ie roo farming]....will not jeopardise the long-term survival of the species in the wild. In fact, as the meat will have to increase in price by 4-6 times to compete with sheep/cattle prices, poaching, over-shooting and illegal shooting will be more than likely to increase." This statement is not a fact, it is an assertion, illogically based on a "fact" which happens to be wrong. I know it is wrong because our local butcher sells kangaroo meat for about 75% of the price of first quality beef. The assertion is illogical because, if it were so, then poaching and illegal shooting would have eliminated sheep and cattle long ago. On the contrary, if the status of kangaroos was clearly defined as being the property of the landowner, it is at least arguable that the general public would be less likely to regard the animals as public property, as is the case at the moment, and the landowner would have more incentive to husband a valuable resource.
The article then states another "fact" by asking whether the tax-payer "...will again be subsidising a private enterprise?..." by way of regulating the pastoral activities of kangaroo farmers. I would have thought that all private enterprise that was connected in any way with the use of public resources was subsidised by the tax-payer. Greenpeace, or at least P.S., is advocating the conversion of almost 50% of the land area of Australia into national park, presumably with fair compensation to anyone with a proprietary interest in such land, as is guarantied under the C/w Constitution. Such parks will presumably require adequate management by government agencies. How much will that cost the tax-payer?
Kangaroo meat has the same, if not more economic potential than venison and if that potential were allowed to develop, it could be the most powerful impetus for changing the currently insane land use practices in Australia's arid and semi-arid pastoral areas.
That Greenpeace chooses instead to actively sabotage this potential, by way of an hysterical and emotive campaign, based on half truths and doubtful logic, (thereby helping to maintain the level of environmental debate at its current appalling standard), greatly disappoints me, and I am forced to speculate on whether there are other less apparent agendas behind such policies.
Quite apart from the substantive issues contained in P.S's letter there are a number of questions that, I suppose, may best be described as attitudinal, and which I feel compelled to address. I am aware that at this point I may be doing P.S. an injustice, by ascribing attitudes from a reading between the lines of a hastily written letter. If so, I apologise in advance. However, the observations which follow are, I think, of general application to the environmental debate.
I am often asked what the farming community thinks about various environmental issues, to which I can only reply that, with some exceptions, it is impossible to generalize, as the range of opinion is as wide as it is in the urban areas. Not exactly an inspired answer, but a very instructive question; because it demonstrates a mistaken and rather one dimensional view of the rural community. The image of the redneck farmer, hell-bent on butchering the environment for the sake of greed or some perverse pleasure, is about as accurate as the reverse image of the environmental movement consisting of a mob of long-haired, bleeding heart dole bludgers and communists from the city, intent only on destroying civilization as we know it. Such divisive mythology is, I feel, a real problem in improving the current poor quality of debate about environmental issues. Furthermore, it obscures from both sides, the otherwise obvious fact that farmers and environmentalists are natural allies. One of the most heartening events in recent environmental history was the (admittedly largely symbolic) alliance between Rick Farley and Phillip Toyne. It is my fervent hope that the potential goodwill promised by this recognition of common interests, is not squandered on emotional confrontations over matters that are peripheral to the central issues of the environmental debate.
It is apparent from P.S.’s letter that graziers are seen as the enemy in the battle to reverse the trend towards ever worsening land degradation. Of course, it is true that past and present management practices are the immediate symptom of the disease, but if we are serious about rectifying the problem we must look a little deeper and attempt to see it in a broader perspective.
The vast majority of farming properties in Australia are still family owned concerns and as such may be distinguished from corporate owned enterprises, which are controlled by boards of directors, who have only one legally defined duty: to maximize profits for their shareholders. Family farms are usually run on a very different value system that has little to do with venality. Considering that if a farming family can make 4 to 5% return on capital investment, after throwing in the labour of a seven day week, it can consider the venture to be successful, then greed is unlikely to be the motivation behind the enterprise. More likely, it will be the result of a bond with the land as strong as with any peasant farmer anywhere in the world.
Although farmers seem to be intensely conservative and slow to accept changing values and ideas, often this is because they have been burned before, by new government policies, new crop varieties, new chemicals etc. etc. which they are encouraged or even compelled to adopt only to be vilified at some later date for doing so. A prime example of this is the fact that many soldier-settler properties were leased to farmers on the condition that they be cleared. If this obligation was not met, the farmer was legally liable. More recently, farmers have been pushed and pushed by governments to become ever more "efficient" which, they were told, meant becoming bigger. Banks encouraged expansion and threw money at farmers to do so, in exactly the same way as they did with Third World governments, and with exactly the same results. The difference is that often the same people who see these poor countries as victims, see our own farmers as villains. The poverty may be relative, but the mechanism is the same and as often as not, that makes Australian farmers as much the victims as the land they abuse. So, if the farmers and the land are the losers to our economic system, are there any winners? The answer to that is easy: the 16 million Australians who pay absurdly low prices for the food they consume, indeed, for everything they consume.
Over the past twenty years the price of basic food commodities has increased by an approximate factor of 7 and average individual incomes have increased by about 7.4; (although because of the dramatic increase in two income families, average family incomes have increased much more in real terms). Despite this, the value of primary produce at the farm gate in many cases remains much the same in dollar terms as it did twenty or even thirty years ago. For example: in the mid 1950's a kilo of wool was worth about $4.00. Today it is worth between $5 & $6.00 per kilo. In other words, farmers receive, in real terms, only a tiny fraction of what they did a couple decades ago for their produce. So, how come they aren't all broke? Answer: although farm incomes have steadily declined, it is also true that farmers have become more and more "efficient" at producing their products. Unfortunately it is many of these efficient techniques, which are causing the environmental damage. In other cases it is desperation farming, the only alternative to bankruptcy, which is turning farms into dust-bowls.
And so, one reason why farmers are wary of "greenies", is that they know better than most what environmentalism really means. They know that it means paying much much much more for everything; but at the same time they are the people confronted most directly with the tangible results of our collective greed and stupidity. It is they who will be the ones who will bear the brunt of attempting to rectify the problems. Furthermore, once they are engaged on that task they will not, I suspect, be as fickle as a large percentage of the urban based environmental movement will be, once the penny drops that conservation is very expensive. It is easy being green when someone else is footing the bill.
What all this is getting around to is an attempt to convey my belief that whilst Greenpeace generally does a valuable job of keeping environmental matters prominently in the public view, through its emotive and populist methods, there is a down side to its activities. That is, the promotion of the perception that environmental issues happen somewhere else and are someone else's fault; or, put another way, that environmental vandalism is in some way anomalous or at least peripheral to our society, rather than intrinsic to its definition. Until this reality is firmly etched into our collective psyche, attempting the fundamental economic and social restructuring necessary for our continued survival has no hope of success in anything resembling a democratic society.
Ultimately, I am sure that Greenpeace will achieve more by being less simplistic and emotional in its propaganda and less smug in its assumptions of moral superiority.
I hope that this letter is constructive and that poor old P.S. is not too offended by my perhaps over enthusiastic style of debate. I trust that we are, ultimately, on the same side in the battles to come.
With kind regards,
Tony Dickson.
COUNTERPOINT
August 2005
Dear Mr. Duffy,
I am an enthusiastic, if spasmodic listener to Radio National - spasmodic because of my work patterns. Fast moving, noisy machinery is not the best companion for radio. I have in fact noticed a correlation between the amount of noise an agricultural machine makes and its potential for removing unattended bits of one’s anatomy.
I am enthusiastic because of the variety and quality of RN programmes. I prefer this medium to newspapers because it gives direct and substantial access to primary sources of data and informed opinion, unfiltered by the editorial and intellectual constraints of journalists.
Thus, I am disproportionately subject to the infamous ABC Leftwing bias.
The ABC biased?
It is an interesting notion, this bias of the ABC. The news and current affairs departments are minutely scrutinised for biased reporting. However, even during an event as controversial as the invasion of Iraq, only a small handful of heat of the moment reports were found to be unbalanced.
Compare this to the avalanche of pro war propaganda and jingoism in the commercial media. I heard little criticism about this, because as John Clark has a fictitious Senator Alston say, “There is no problem with bias in the commercial media; they’re conservative.”
However, I would have to agree that there is an ABC bias. It is a bias towards considered, informed and non-sensationalised debate. It is a bias towards a broader debate than economics and an obsession with its growth. It is a bias towards the values of a liberal democracy, as prescribed by its charter and is therefore, intrinsically Leftwing. As such, the ABC is the counterpoint to an almost universally Rightwing media industry.
The above statement raises some issues about which I am confident we disagree. Specifically, I am sure that we would differ over the meanings of “liberal”, “Leftwing” and “Rightwing”. You have made the definition of these words a recurrent theme on Counterpoint and it is my opinion that you have been both deliberate and disingenuous in your manner of doing so.
Your Raison D’etre seems to be to assume the role of a Rightwing iconoclast in a Left dominated world. In reality, the demoralisation of the Left would seem to be almost complete and the voice of liberal values barely audible above the feeding frenzy of our conspicuously consuming society. Your fantasy about the pervasiveness of the Left has led you into a quixotic enterprise to subvert your audience to Right thinking. To this end you indulge in constant editorial denigration of those on the Left in a way that I believe, lacks both intellectual and professional integrity.
In particular, you like to sneer at environmentalists and their concerns.
It is the intention of this essay to contest some of the more specious agendas that you pursue on air. Specifically, I will argue that not only are commonly accepted definitions of the Left facile, but that our very survival may well depend upon the Left once again creating an Age of Enlightenment.
I’ll show you my liberal if you show me yours A recurring theme of your programme is that of your simplistic and distorted presentation of “liberalism”.
My Oxford Dictionary defines liberal as, “favourable to democratic reform and individual liberty, progressive…open-minded, candid, unprejudiced.” It does not mention free trade or government intervention in the economy. You designate this country’s drunken lurch to the Right as a long overdue move towards liberalism. It is nothing of the kind. Our American cousins are more candid in their designations. They know a liberal when they see one and Boy, he aint no Republican, no Sirree Baarb! You, on the other hand, reject Malcolm Fraser’s credentials as a liberal because he is not sufficiently “dry”, for your tastes.
Your contrived narrowing of “liberalism” to the context of free market economics and the rights of private property, together with your misrepresentation of the ideas of people like Adam Smith, is spurious if not dishonest. Liberalism is not synonymous with capitalism (cf. free enterprise), in fact, in many ways, they are antipathetic.
The Right is rather confused about the concept of freedom. The Religious Right is certainly not interested in a whole raft of freedoms that the Left advocate: gender rights, gay rights, religious freedoms, freedom from censorship and a range of lifestyle choices. Economic libertarians on the other hand are only concerned about the rights of property and the freedom to do business as they wish. They are troubled little by the fact that poverty, (absolute or relative), corporate power and environmental degradation are profoundly corrosive to individual freedoms as well as social cohesion. Sorry I forgot, there is no such thing as society, is there?
I am perfectly aware that economic liberalism was an important part of the Scottish Enlightenment. This singular intellectual movement spawned so much of what we take for granted as the foundations for liberal democratic societies. Adam Smith in particular saw the benefits of unleashing the potential of individual ambition and creativity in a market place free from the heavy hand of political orchestration. However, Smith was not primarily interested in economics. He saw himself as a philosopher concerned broadly with human society and its pursuit of happiness (i.e. the greatest happiness for the greatest number).
His economic theories were part only of his work and his advocacy of a free market, a means to an end. He was primarily advocating his vision of a free enterprise culture as the most effective means of creating the wealth necessary to create a civil society. This vision was necessarily a product of his experience.
Consider the world of Adam Smith. Scotland was reinventing itself. An astounding transformation was in train, from desperately poor agrarian and in part, semi feudal subsistence economy, to a vibrant mercantile centre and an intellectual hub of The Enlightenment. The poverty of much of the Highlands was not just relative but absolute. Disease and famine were constant spectres. By contrast, the enterprise of the Glasgow tobacco entrepreneurs and the consequent cultural sophistication could not but help inspire Smith’s economic and social visions. His concept of capitalism however, predated the full force of the Industrial Revolution, of Darwin and the awareness of our total dependence on a global ecology to sustain us.
That intimate, pre-industrial society, largely comprised of family businesses and personal relationships, provided the perfect environment for Smith’s theories to take root.
The Scottish Enlightenment was predicated on a dedication to the ideals of universal education, enthusiastic open-minded enquiry, tolerance, social refinement and yes, a rough egalitarianism. However, two and a half centuries later, I am certain Smith would be horrified by the extent to which myopic flunkies to a pointless materialism have reduced his wisdom to self-serving dogma. The East India Companies notwithstanding, he could never have envisaged a world so dominated by behemoth corporations, which are not only anti-democratic, but which so profoundly separate beneficial ownership, governance, moral responsibility and social allegiance.
That is not to say that Smith did not perceive the dangers and disadvantages of his proposed economic system and offered a range of caveats to his vision. He was as much concerned with the corrupting effects of the concentration of power by business as he was by big government. Indeed, he considered a government dominated by mercantile interests as “the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever”.
Adam Smith pre-empted the Marxist notion of alienation and worried that an ignorant and culturally degraded citizenry could be easily manipulated by anti democratic forces to the detriment of the longer-term interests of society.
His seemingly low opinion of the mercantile culture supports the contention that Smith thought capitalism was not only a means to an end, but a necessary evil, the dangers of which must be considered very carefully. In particular, he was concerned about the effects of commercialism on that very cornerstone of the Scottish Enlightenment, liberal education.
“In all commercial countries the division of labour is infinite, and everyone’s thoughts are employed about one particular thing….The minds of men are contracted, and rendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and heroic spirit is utterly extinguished.”
Karl Marx? No, Adam Smith. (Lectures on Jurisprudence.)
From the same series of lectures Smith articulated a prejudice against the social consequences of industrialisation:
“There are some inconveniences, however, arising from a commercial spirit. The first we shall mention is that it confines the views of men. Where the division of labour is brought to perfection, every man has only a simple operation to perform. To this his whole attention is confined, and few ideas pass in his mind but what have an immediate connection with it. When the mind is employed about a variety of objects it is some how expanded and enlarged, and on this account a country artist is generally acknowledged to have a range of thoughts much above a city one. The former is perhaps a joiner, a house carpenter, and a cabinet maker all in one, and his attention must of course be employed about a number of objects of very different kinds. | The latter is perhaps only a cabinet maker. That particular kind of work employs all his thoughts, and as he had not an opportunity of comparing a number of objects, his views of things beyond his own trade are by no means so extensive as those of the former. This must be much more the case when a person’s whole attention is bestowed on the 17th part of a pin or the 80th part of a button, so far divided are these manufactures. It is remarkable that in every commercial nation the low people are exceedingly stupid. The Dutch vulgar are eminently so, and the English are more so than the Scotch. The rule is general, in towns they are not so intelligent as in the country, nor in a rich country as in a poor one.
Adam Smith Lectures on Jurisprudence 1762
Today, in this country, where “intellectual” has become a pejorative term and fewer and fewer people seem able to distinguish between education and training, I wonder whether Adam Smith would agree with your definition of liberalism.
[The High School that my son attends has dropped history from its senior school curriculum in favour of photography. Insufficient interest. You can’t make a buck out of history, so what is the point of it.]
In a country where educational resources are increasingly allocated on the basis of ability to pay rather than ability to learn (and so we enthusiastically subsidise intellectual mediocrity), are we really following the liberal ideals of Smith and his colleagues?
There are also small matters like the suspension of habeas corpus and privately run “detention centres” where damaged and desperate people are imprisoned indefinitely; not because they have committed a crime, but as a deterrence to others (i.e. for political reasons). My Oxford tells me these are concentration camps. Just how much of this “liberalism” can you stomach Mr. Duffy?
In a two-party political system where both sides are held hostage to the same outdated and unsustainable assumptions and where the interests of a commercial and therefore populist media dictate the political agenda, Adam Smith’s concerns for good government and the long-term interests of society seem very valid.
Counterpoint delights in disassociating liberal values from the Left while appropriating them to the Right.
This type of disingenuous double-speak would have warmed the cockles of Joseph Goebbels heart. The “Big Lie” is alive and well in this wide brown land.
It is obviously correct that the Right, after some initial resistance, has been most enthusiastic in its adoption of what you style “economic liberalism”, which is derived from liberal philosophers like Smith, Hume and later Mill. However, to take only those fragments of their work that speak to economic freedoms and the rights of property and ignore the full scope of their vision, is a travesty.
Liberal democracy and ironically, free enterprise, is a creation of the Left.
The liberalism of the Scottish Enlightenment is a paradigm of Leftwing politics. How could Smith and Hume’s radicalism be anything else than Leftwing? They were not motivated by the desire to entrench the privileges of an elite. Just the opposite is true. They envisaged an open society of broad opportunity. They were not attempting to justify the status quo, but proposed dramatic watersheds in assumptions and thinking.
The Left has certainly challenged, at times, the property rights of overbearing establishments. Such challenges have been surprisingly rare considering the misery the common people have been subjected to throughout history, by self-serving and corrupt regimes. It is true that as the industrial revolution built up a head of steam, the Left grew to become less committed to the more laissez faire aspects of Smith’s theories. Perhaps this was because he was ultimately a little optimistic about the market place’s potential for creating a civil society, without a little help from its friends.
It is also true that socialism represented a definite rejection of Smith’s vision of economic freedom, as an inevitable consequence of the ruthlessly exploitative behaviour of the new capitalist elites during the nineteenth century. Well-led troops rarely mutiny.
No matter how misguided, who would question the basic integrity of the socialist ideal of a more humane, fairer, educated society, motivated by the intention of providing the greatest happiness and opportunity for the greatest number?
Until the rise of Socialism the Left was not so concerned with economic dogma as with economic outcomes. The means of achieving those outcomes invariably revolved around seeking greater freedoms for disadvantaged or repressed people. Reform of existing systems had always been the dominant goal. The Left’s credo could well have been, we will reform you if we can, but usurp you if we must.
There is no doubt that socialism and its bastard offspring, communism, caused huge embarrassment and confusion for the Left, and it would seem, still does. This is a mystery.
Socialism, or at least “democratic socialism”, was an honourable experiment in the best traditions of the Enlightenment and like all experiments, produced valuable insight and understanding, whatever one’s assessment of its efficacy.
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It is fatuous to define the Left forever in terms of socialism, and it is bizarre that in recent times the Left has not only allowed the Right to set the political agenda, but to actually define the Left’s identity. This supine acquiescence of the Left is as infuriating as it is inexplicable.
By contrast, the Right has had no difficulty shrugging off its dalliance with fascism. Indeed, whilst any serious form of socialism seems anachronistic, an inclination towards fascism (by way of corporatism) still has a strong resonance on the Right side of politics.
To define the Left in terms of communism is even more perverse. Like virtually all popular revolutions, the Russian Revolution was, by definition, Leftwing.*
However, after the Bolshevik coup and certainly by the time Joe Stalin stole the show, it is hard to fit the USSR into that definition of “Leftwing”. The revolution had gone the way of many before: autocratic tyranny. Such regimes are invariably characterised by fear and suspicion, of and by the dictator(s), who must exert centralised control. This fear and suspicion infects the entire culture of the state and serves to paralyse incentive and innovation. Such regimes tend to be intensely conservative.
The Soviet Union differed from the standard totalitarianism that litters human history, in that it was wrapped, not just in mystery and enigma, but also in the dogma of a secular religion. Heresy was usually fatal. It was, to all intents and purposes, a theocracy, probably the most conservative form of government yet devised. That is the very type of government that led, via the Reformation and Renaissance, to the theories of Adam Smith. In this regard, the USSR (and subsequently other communist states) had more in common with the Holy Roman Empire than any contemporary state, with the obvious exception of Nazi Germany.
Whilst the USSR, through huge sacrifice by its people, did achieve some astounding collective enterprises and innovations, by most measures, it was a very conservative society.
Leftwing politics did not start with Marx.
It did not start with that most successful of Leftwing revolutions, the American War of Independence.# Nor did it start with the French Revolution or even the Enlightenment. It predated its name by thousands of years. It existed in the minds of every slave who, like Sparticus, had a vision of a better future. How many times have repressed people attempted to throw off their shackles. How many uprisings have thrown their destinies to hazard with the cry of, “Freedom or death”? Through these millennia of struggle, is there really any doubt about which side was of the Left and which side the Right.
Do you seriously assert that the liberal reformers of nineteenth century Britain were Rightwing and that their reactionary opponents were of the Left? Were the apologists for slavery really defenders of liberal democratic values? Such a position owes more to “Alice in Wonderland” than serious political analysis.
You enthusiastically align yourself with the Right, which is the same side of the political spectrum that has consistently opposed liberal reforms throughout human history.
As a conservative, over the last couple of hundred years you would have:
Transported trade unionists
Shot and hung Luddites
Supported child labour
Opposed any sort of occupational health and safety regulation
Opposed universal suffrage
Opposed freedom of speech and association
Opposed women’s rights
Opposed setting minimum wages
Opposed Florence Nightingale’s housing and public health reforms
Opposed the introduction of old age and disability pensions
Opposed unemployment relief
Opposed anti trust legislation (US)
Opposed free education
Opposed free health care
Opposed consumer protection laws
Opposed anti-discrimination laws
Opposed environmental protection Laws
In fact, you would have opposed almost every reform, including many of those promoting free enterprise, which we now take for granted as being essential attributes of a civilised liberal democracy.
I am sure you would not advocate that we send children down mines or into factories, but you would have, a century and a half ago, and you would have used the same arguments against the liberal reformers that economic rationalists/liberals use today:
“It will slow economic growth”
“It will cost jobs”
“It will discourage investment”
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Scotland was the technological centre of the British Empire. The Clyde shipyards and Glasgow’s tool shops were hives of industry. Economic activity had been prodigious and vast wealth had been generated as a consequence. Free market economic theories proved beyond doubt their ability to generate economic growth, just as Adam Smith envisaged.
However, something was wrong. The predicted trickle down effect did not appear to be occurring. The population of Glasgow in particular, exploded with economic refugees from Ireland and the Highlands, seeking escape from famine and crushing poverty. They crowded into increasingly grim slums where their competition for work kept wages at rock bottom. Education, health, housing and dignity declined while crime, disease and degradation flourished. A civil society seemed a very whimsical notion indeed. The partnership between intellectual and capitalist that had overcome the post feudal, landed oligarchy, turned sour. The Scottish Enlightenment ran out of puff and the liberal baton was handed to a new generation of reformers in England. New battle lines were drawn, as the increasingly powerful free market capitalists became conservatives, defending their recently acquired wealth and power against middle class reformers and worker’s militancy. The days of Darwin and Marx were dawning.
The Green Evolution Advocates for laissez faire capitalism have a penchant for distorting the work of Darwin as well as Smith. The “law of the jungle” model for competition policy is still not short of disciples. It is a very attractive rationalisation for economic ruthlessness because of its simplicity and pseudo scientific appearance. It is of course, complete nonsense. How can the activities of animals be any sort of model for capitalism, when the only capital individual animals can accumulate is body fat and experience? The jungle is arguably the ultimate level playing field, but capitalists do not actually like level playing fields, which tend to negate the whole point of accumulating capital: i.e. the reduction of competition (Cf. the history of US Anti Trust legislation).
In the jungle, the survival of the fittest means just that. The losers do not survive long enough to reproduce. The analogy with human economics only works if poverty is made a capital offence, (which health statistics indicate it often is). Of course, such draconian measures would not be an option in a tolerant, relaxed country like Australia. We would need to become considerably more economically liberal before we could finally countenance such a solution. Perhaps sterilisation would be more appropriate for underachievers.
It is instructive that the Social Darwinists are drawn to such a primitive economic model. Whilst there is much to be learnt about ourselves from considering our hunting and gathering ancestors, who populate all but a tiny fraction of our history as homo sapiens, surely inspiration for 21st century civilisation could be found somewhere this side of the agricultural revolution. I suggest that instead of constructing a society to reflect the savagery of the jungle, that we borrow from our collective agrarian wisdom, which was after all, the means by which we created the whole idea of civilisation in the first place. We could adopt, as an economic metaphor, the farming paradigm that the most cost efficient use of fertiliser is to put it on your poorest land.
This is not socialism, merely good husbandry.
The most important point the Social Darwinists and other “economic liberals” seem to miss are the evolutionary imperatives of biodiversity and inter-species symbiosis. In other words:
IT’S THE ENVIRONMENT STUPID!
I have been a “greenie,” man and boy, for some thirty-five years. At school, my best subjects were geography and economics. It occurred to me that there was an apparent conflict between these disciplines. On the one hand I was taught that we live on a small, blue-green planet supporting an incredibly diverse biosphere, which is in-turn dependant on a set of finely calibrated interrelationships of even greater complexity. At the same time I was asked to accept that our society, past, present and future, was absolutely identified with the economic philosophy of perpetual growth. Now I am only a simple farmer and maths was never my long suit, which may explain why I could never quite grasp how an economic system based on the equation: finite resources divided by infinite demand could equal anything but ultimate disappointment. It is simply a matter of carrying capacity.
Of course, being green I am pretty used to being denigrated. A common insult is that I am having it off with the tooth fairy because I question the religion of economic growth. I admit to committing this heresy, but in thirty-five years, I have never been blessed with a cogent answer to the apparent paradox of endless growth in a finite world.
One memorable conversation I had a few years ago, with a senior economics lecturer at Adelaide University, is notable. He was glib and patronising when I asked him whether, given the impact of ever increasing human activity, was anyone working on an alternative economic model. He replied that the laws of supply and demand would solve such problems because eventually, when resources became sufficiently valuable, or technology sufficiently sophisticated, it would become viable to extract them from the seabed, or the Moon or Mars. When I asked him whether this analysis included arable land, biodiversity, stable climate, clean air and water, or indeed standing room, he hung up. He probably remembered an appointment with Father Christmas.
While our economic philosophy remains hostage to this over-arching assumption, that the Earth is a magic pudding, it is not and never can be sustainable. Even if we totally embrace best environmental practice in every facet of our culture; even if we rely totally on renewable energy and recycle 100 % of our resources, we must reach a limit to the Earth’s ability to cope with our economic expansion. This is closely related to population growth, but by no means synonymous with it.
If this assertion is accepted and an end to growth is inevitable, then the question arises as to when enough is enough. Given that we are so far short of best practise, and that we are facing an imminent ecological crisis, at what point do we start to consider the limits to growth.
Unfortunately, economic growth is an idea of religious immutability, less subject to subversion than dedication to any mere deity. This is an idea to which not just deluded individuals are prepared to martyr themselves, but an entire culture, if not a species.
The green perspective is by no means a homogenous one and it certainly has its lunatic fringe, as does any political grouping. When you offer your apologias for the “Right” you don’t lump free traders in with the Christian Right. [You know, those amiable folks with guns in their houses and inclinations towards terrorism (the KKK, exploding abortion clinics etc) and Armageddon.]
Why then, do you dismiss legions of reputable scientists along with the emotional responses of people who no longer believe a political and commercial culture that assures them that they can have their cake and still eat it?
This tendency is exemplified in your programmes about global warming
Economic Growth and the Precautionary Principle Your interview with Harlan Watson was one that caught my ear. Here is a political advocate for the White House, arguing that we should not be concerned about Green House emissions because we cannot exactly quantify the component caused by human activity. This may be true and the science might be inconclusive because, as he would have it, those wicked European Greens have captured the vast majority of the world’s scientists. It may all be true. I fervently hope it is true. I really hope that every word Harlen Watson and your other greenhouse sceptics say, is true. I am reduced to hope because I am in no position to judge the veracity of their assertions of “fact”.
However, I can make a judgement about their reasoning, which runs something like this: the exact relationship between human activity and global warming is uncertain, therefore we should do nothing which might reduce (US) economic growth. Why must we maintain economic growth at all costs? The answer to this, I admit, did surprise me. Apparently, we have a moral obligation to stop spending money on research into climate because that money could be better spent on relieving the suffering of the poorest peoples in the world. Really?
Given that the USA gives the smallest percentage of GDP in aid (non military i.e.) of the OECD nations, and that the Europeans spend more per capita on both climate change and aid, and that the poorest people would be the first to bear the brunt of climate change, old Harlan lost a little bit of credibility at this point.
However, his disingenuous cant aside, the salient point here is economic growth. Harlan is correct in asserting that the Europeans are sacrificing economic growth as a consequence of invoking the precautionary principle. Given the catastrophe that in all probability awaits this planet because of our greed and stupidity, the foregoing of some of the surfeit of affluence that is actually making us physically and spiritually sick, seems a rather sensible option. The Europeans are simply dismissed by Watson as being “risk averse”.
By the way, are you one of those snivelling risk averse people who carry insurance? How very un-American of you.
The sloppiness of this reasoning is also demonstrated in the programme in which you discuss with author, Gregg Easterbrook, his new book The Progress Paradox. This book obviously attracted you because it appears to give support to your view that environmentalists are hysterical doomsayers, and gave you an opportunity to indulge your habit of making snide remarks about them. Easterbrook certainly makes some very dubious assertions that support your cause, but then goes on to present a thesis that could not be more reflective of Green philosophy.
Easterbrook’s general contention that things have never been so good for the vast majority of citizens of western industrialised democracies, is one that I completely endorse. His assertion that the environment should be included among his good time indicators is one I cannot. It is undoubtedly correct that tough, mandatory regulation in these countries (opposed all the way by the Right, sorry, I mean economic liberals) has dramatically reduced many point sources of pollution with a consequent improvement in the immediate health of air and water. However, his argument is so qualified and at least as far as Australia is concerned, so inaccurate, that it is quite counterproductive to his argument, and to your cause. Certainly, if you exclude global warming and the vast majority of the populations and ecosystems of the world from your analysis, as Easterbrook does, and you only look at a few of the more egregious environmental indicators, then you may well subscribe to his optimistic view of the biosphere.
However, if one considers the base line indicators of global ecological health, like biodiversity, rates of extinction, fishery collapse, forest destruction, degradation of river systems, desertification, salination, coral reef decline, soil erosion, feral plant and animal invasion, loss of local food plant genetic material, then things look a little different.
[I am surprised that you did not point out to your guest that he was being either disingenuous or hysterical for considering green house emissions a serious problem.]
Easterbrook’s book questions why, if things are so much better for most people of the developed world, is depression, anxiety and spiritual malaise rampant? One theory, he suggests is that natural selection has favoured those of us who, no matter how good the times, remain alert (but presumably not alarmed) to potential dangers before they become manifest. It seems that scepticism and a certain amount of pessimism (realism?) and anxiety is a factor enhancing survival. In other words, Easterbrook is providing an evolutionary testimonial for the precautionary principle.
Cost Benefit Analysis The argument in favour of adopting the precautionary principle is really a simple cost benefit analysis. If you are living in a state of absolute poverty, a very modest improvement in your standard of living is likely to pay huge dividends in terms of happiness, whereas insurance policies will not. Having a full stomach and a roof over your head may seem like utopia. Seeing your children survive infancy because they have clean drinking water and perhaps going to school will undoubtedly make your spirits soar with thanksgiving. Having a sense of making economic progress and attaining some buffer against the inevitable hard times, makes you sanguine and inclined to benevolence. However, the wealthier you become the less cost efficient is the acquisition of happiness.
The best analogy is that of addictive behaviour, which of course, is exactly what excessive materialism is. There is even a name for this pathological syndrome: affluenza. Eventually, wealth is not about increasing happiness, but about warding off the unhappiness that attends the prospect of a decline in prosperity, or any of the other forms of malaise abroad in our increasingly fey society. A variation of afluenza is what might be called Murdochulosis, where the sufferer becomes obsessed with wealth, not for its promised pleasures, but for the power it gives over those people who are less ill.
If we were to take out some insurance against climate change, even though it cost us a significant amount of economic growth, would it really matter very much if we never had to make a claim? After all, the opportunity cost of the premiums is only making us sick and the unused resources are not going anywhere. Perhaps buying some peace of mind would bring us more happiness than that plasma TV. I am sure we could still afford to help the poor, … if we really wanted to.
The global economy spent many billions of dollars attempting to forestall the possible consequences of the millennium bug, which proved to be largely illusory. Why was the precautionary principle appropriate to invoke to keep our computers alive, but not appropriate to potentially save a sizeable percentage of the earth’s species, including possibly, our own.
The cost of dealing with Y2K would have been nominal had we not adopted the same approach as we have with global warming, that is, the ostrich strategy. It is worth noting that research has repeatedly indicated that our society wastes in the order of sixty percent of the energy that we consume. By an odd coincidence that is the same percentage, it is estimated, that we need to reduce green house emissions.
A New Enlightenment Counterpoint did a programme earlier this year in which it purported to explore the question of why our universities are full of Lefties. You looked behind whiteboards and under library trolleys but could not quite find the answer. If my memory serves, the best you could do was a variation on the old sheltered workshop gag.
This really was one of your more pathetic articles and I would not bother to mention it were it not useful to draw this argument together. The one explanation that you did not canvas is that universities are meant to be full of Lefties. Their Raison D’etre is to explore new ideas, to innovate, to push the intellectual envelope. This is hardly a job for conservatives, now is it? God gave us conservatives to oppose change and maintain the status quo. That is what they do best.
The reason that Glasgow and Edinburgh became the intellectual centres of excellence of Britain during the Enlightenment was that they were full of the best and brightest, not the wealthiest and most complacent. It was no accident that so many of the astounding number of brilliant minds of the age, came from humble Scottish origins. They were the beneficiaries of a national commitment to universal education that was so pervasive that it has defined the perception of Scottish character ever since. While the Enlightenment beamed from the radical faculties of the north, conservative Oxbridge reflected a relative mediocrity. The astounding consequence of all these brilliant, “bolshie”, Presbyterian dons was that in a somewhat uneasy partnership with the rising merchants and nascent industrialists, they swept away the remnants of feudalism. In the process, and in the face of much conservative opposition, they propelled Britain and much of the world, into modernity.
It is my suspicion that the Right in this country understands this history very well, which is why they are fundamentally opposed to education. Their policies of school funding, HECS loans, the bizarre campaign against student unions and the slow starvation of universities, all indicate a fear of social and philosophical innovation. The Right seems to view education spending as a cost to be minimised in the interests of efficient economic management, rather than a vital investment in the future of our collective enterprise.
If we are to avert the truly terrifying scenarios that are the likely consequences of current trends in resource management and biosphere impact, we must dig a little deeper, intellectually, than relying with devout assurance on technological fixes. We simply must change our relationship with this planet. This is not some romantic, post hippy notion; it is an inevitable conclusion, consequent to another great attribute of the Scottish Enlightenment, common sense. Common sense informed by science.
In 1992, some hundreds of senior biological scientists from around the world, including many Nobel Prize winners, published an open letter warning that unless we profoundly changed the way we did business with the Earth’s biosphere, within ten years, we could be in big trouble. They did not mean that this would be apparent in ten years, but that the damage might be irreversible.
Of course, that warning was completely ignored. Instead the media has given coverage to a handful of contrarians who tell us what we want to hear, that things are not that bad, that we should relax and get on with what we do best: consuming stuff. This message merely compliments the irresistible tide of social engineering that is commercial advertising. “Keep them stupid, keep them scared and keep them spending”.
Those C18th Scottish dons devised a new way to view the world, and reinvented our culture. The time has come, to at least attempt to do something similar, because if we do not, God help us. Instead, we are turning our universities into intellectually moribund, global sausage factories for corporate employers. If you think our academics are not up to scratch; too tired, comfortable or mediocre, it is because they are not Leftwing enough. The students I meet seem so placid and so constrained by their material ambitions and debt burden, it is hard to imagine them taking many intellectual risks, let alone changing the world.
Let me conclude by modifying an old 1970s countercultural aphorism:
A healthy environment will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of ecological disaster.
Have a nice day,
Tony Dickson.
* That is, again from my Oxford Dictionary, “progressive, radical”… and “more advanced or innovative section of any group”. The “Right”, is simply defined as “conservative”.
# The revolution of the American colonies was in so many ways a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as the salons of Paris. Its catalyst was an instinctive revolt against the corrupt corporate power of the British East India Company that resulted in the clear distinction between corporate and natural citizens in the US Constitutional. This distinction lasted for almost a hundred years before finally succumbing to the growing power of the railway companies after the Civil War.
August 2005
Dear Mr. Duffy,
I am an enthusiastic, if spasmodic listener to Radio National - spasmodic because of my work patterns. Fast moving, noisy machinery is not the best companion for radio. I have in fact noticed a correlation between the amount of noise an agricultural machine makes and its potential for removing unattended bits of one’s anatomy.
I am enthusiastic because of the variety and quality of RN programmes. I prefer this medium to newspapers because it gives direct and substantial access to primary sources of data and informed opinion, unfiltered by the editorial and intellectual constraints of journalists.
Thus, I am disproportionately subject to the infamous ABC Leftwing bias.
The ABC biased?
It is an interesting notion, this bias of the ABC. The news and current affairs departments are minutely scrutinised for biased reporting. However, even during an event as controversial as the invasion of Iraq, only a small handful of heat of the moment reports were found to be unbalanced.
Compare this to the avalanche of pro war propaganda and jingoism in the commercial media. I heard little criticism about this, because as John Clark has a fictitious Senator Alston say, “There is no problem with bias in the commercial media; they’re conservative.”
However, I would have to agree that there is an ABC bias. It is a bias towards considered, informed and non-sensationalised debate. It is a bias towards a broader debate than economics and an obsession with its growth. It is a bias towards the values of a liberal democracy, as prescribed by its charter and is therefore, intrinsically Leftwing. As such, the ABC is the counterpoint to an almost universally Rightwing media industry.
The above statement raises some issues about which I am confident we disagree. Specifically, I am sure that we would differ over the meanings of “liberal”, “Leftwing” and “Rightwing”. You have made the definition of these words a recurrent theme on Counterpoint and it is my opinion that you have been both deliberate and disingenuous in your manner of doing so.
Your Raison D’etre seems to be to assume the role of a Rightwing iconoclast in a Left dominated world. In reality, the demoralisation of the Left would seem to be almost complete and the voice of liberal values barely audible above the feeding frenzy of our conspicuously consuming society. Your fantasy about the pervasiveness of the Left has led you into a quixotic enterprise to subvert your audience to Right thinking. To this end you indulge in constant editorial denigration of those on the Left in a way that I believe, lacks both intellectual and professional integrity.
In particular, you like to sneer at environmentalists and their concerns.
It is the intention of this essay to contest some of the more specious agendas that you pursue on air. Specifically, I will argue that not only are commonly accepted definitions of the Left facile, but that our very survival may well depend upon the Left once again creating an Age of Enlightenment.
I’ll show you my liberal if you show me yours A recurring theme of your programme is that of your simplistic and distorted presentation of “liberalism”.
My Oxford Dictionary defines liberal as, “favourable to democratic reform and individual liberty, progressive…open-minded, candid, unprejudiced.” It does not mention free trade or government intervention in the economy. You designate this country’s drunken lurch to the Right as a long overdue move towards liberalism. It is nothing of the kind. Our American cousins are more candid in their designations. They know a liberal when they see one and Boy, he aint no Republican, no Sirree Baarb! You, on the other hand, reject Malcolm Fraser’s credentials as a liberal because he is not sufficiently “dry”, for your tastes.
Your contrived narrowing of “liberalism” to the context of free market economics and the rights of private property, together with your misrepresentation of the ideas of people like Adam Smith, is spurious if not dishonest. Liberalism is not synonymous with capitalism (cf. free enterprise), in fact, in many ways, they are antipathetic.
The Right is rather confused about the concept of freedom. The Religious Right is certainly not interested in a whole raft of freedoms that the Left advocate: gender rights, gay rights, religious freedoms, freedom from censorship and a range of lifestyle choices. Economic libertarians on the other hand are only concerned about the rights of property and the freedom to do business as they wish. They are troubled little by the fact that poverty, (absolute or relative), corporate power and environmental degradation are profoundly corrosive to individual freedoms as well as social cohesion. Sorry I forgot, there is no such thing as society, is there?
I am perfectly aware that economic liberalism was an important part of the Scottish Enlightenment. This singular intellectual movement spawned so much of what we take for granted as the foundations for liberal democratic societies. Adam Smith in particular saw the benefits of unleashing the potential of individual ambition and creativity in a market place free from the heavy hand of political orchestration. However, Smith was not primarily interested in economics. He saw himself as a philosopher concerned broadly with human society and its pursuit of happiness (i.e. the greatest happiness for the greatest number).
His economic theories were part only of his work and his advocacy of a free market, a means to an end. He was primarily advocating his vision of a free enterprise culture as the most effective means of creating the wealth necessary to create a civil society. This vision was necessarily a product of his experience.
Consider the world of Adam Smith. Scotland was reinventing itself. An astounding transformation was in train, from desperately poor agrarian and in part, semi feudal subsistence economy, to a vibrant mercantile centre and an intellectual hub of The Enlightenment. The poverty of much of the Highlands was not just relative but absolute. Disease and famine were constant spectres. By contrast, the enterprise of the Glasgow tobacco entrepreneurs and the consequent cultural sophistication could not but help inspire Smith’s economic and social visions. His concept of capitalism however, predated the full force of the Industrial Revolution, of Darwin and the awareness of our total dependence on a global ecology to sustain us.
That intimate, pre-industrial society, largely comprised of family businesses and personal relationships, provided the perfect environment for Smith’s theories to take root.
The Scottish Enlightenment was predicated on a dedication to the ideals of universal education, enthusiastic open-minded enquiry, tolerance, social refinement and yes, a rough egalitarianism. However, two and a half centuries later, I am certain Smith would be horrified by the extent to which myopic flunkies to a pointless materialism have reduced his wisdom to self-serving dogma. The East India Companies notwithstanding, he could never have envisaged a world so dominated by behemoth corporations, which are not only anti-democratic, but which so profoundly separate beneficial ownership, governance, moral responsibility and social allegiance.
That is not to say that Smith did not perceive the dangers and disadvantages of his proposed economic system and offered a range of caveats to his vision. He was as much concerned with the corrupting effects of the concentration of power by business as he was by big government. Indeed, he considered a government dominated by mercantile interests as “the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever”.
Adam Smith pre-empted the Marxist notion of alienation and worried that an ignorant and culturally degraded citizenry could be easily manipulated by anti democratic forces to the detriment of the longer-term interests of society.
His seemingly low opinion of the mercantile culture supports the contention that Smith thought capitalism was not only a means to an end, but a necessary evil, the dangers of which must be considered very carefully. In particular, he was concerned about the effects of commercialism on that very cornerstone of the Scottish Enlightenment, liberal education.
“In all commercial countries the division of labour is infinite, and everyone’s thoughts are employed about one particular thing….The minds of men are contracted, and rendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and heroic spirit is utterly extinguished.”
Karl Marx? No, Adam Smith. (Lectures on Jurisprudence.)
From the same series of lectures Smith articulated a prejudice against the social consequences of industrialisation:
“There are some inconveniences, however, arising from a commercial spirit. The first we shall mention is that it confines the views of men. Where the division of labour is brought to perfection, every man has only a simple operation to perform. To this his whole attention is confined, and few ideas pass in his mind but what have an immediate connection with it. When the mind is employed about a variety of objects it is some how expanded and enlarged, and on this account a country artist is generally acknowledged to have a range of thoughts much above a city one. The former is perhaps a joiner, a house carpenter, and a cabinet maker all in one, and his attention must of course be employed about a number of objects of very different kinds. | The latter is perhaps only a cabinet maker. That particular kind of work employs all his thoughts, and as he had not an opportunity of comparing a number of objects, his views of things beyond his own trade are by no means so extensive as those of the former. This must be much more the case when a person’s whole attention is bestowed on the 17th part of a pin or the 80th part of a button, so far divided are these manufactures. It is remarkable that in every commercial nation the low people are exceedingly stupid. The Dutch vulgar are eminently so, and the English are more so than the Scotch. The rule is general, in towns they are not so intelligent as in the country, nor in a rich country as in a poor one.
Adam Smith Lectures on Jurisprudence 1762
Today, in this country, where “intellectual” has become a pejorative term and fewer and fewer people seem able to distinguish between education and training, I wonder whether Adam Smith would agree with your definition of liberalism.
[The High School that my son attends has dropped history from its senior school curriculum in favour of photography. Insufficient interest. You can’t make a buck out of history, so what is the point of it.]
In a country where educational resources are increasingly allocated on the basis of ability to pay rather than ability to learn (and so we enthusiastically subsidise intellectual mediocrity), are we really following the liberal ideals of Smith and his colleagues?
There are also small matters like the suspension of habeas corpus and privately run “detention centres” where damaged and desperate people are imprisoned indefinitely; not because they have committed a crime, but as a deterrence to others (i.e. for political reasons). My Oxford tells me these are concentration camps. Just how much of this “liberalism” can you stomach Mr. Duffy?
In a two-party political system where both sides are held hostage to the same outdated and unsustainable assumptions and where the interests of a commercial and therefore populist media dictate the political agenda, Adam Smith’s concerns for good government and the long-term interests of society seem very valid.
Counterpoint delights in disassociating liberal values from the Left while appropriating them to the Right.
This type of disingenuous double-speak would have warmed the cockles of Joseph Goebbels heart. The “Big Lie” is alive and well in this wide brown land.
It is obviously correct that the Right, after some initial resistance, has been most enthusiastic in its adoption of what you style “economic liberalism”, which is derived from liberal philosophers like Smith, Hume and later Mill. However, to take only those fragments of their work that speak to economic freedoms and the rights of property and ignore the full scope of their vision, is a travesty.
Liberal democracy and ironically, free enterprise, is a creation of the Left.
The liberalism of the Scottish Enlightenment is a paradigm of Leftwing politics. How could Smith and Hume’s radicalism be anything else than Leftwing? They were not motivated by the desire to entrench the privileges of an elite. Just the opposite is true. They envisaged an open society of broad opportunity. They were not attempting to justify the status quo, but proposed dramatic watersheds in assumptions and thinking.
The Left has certainly challenged, at times, the property rights of overbearing establishments. Such challenges have been surprisingly rare considering the misery the common people have been subjected to throughout history, by self-serving and corrupt regimes. It is true that as the industrial revolution built up a head of steam, the Left grew to become less committed to the more laissez faire aspects of Smith’s theories. Perhaps this was because he was ultimately a little optimistic about the market place’s potential for creating a civil society, without a little help from its friends.
It is also true that socialism represented a definite rejection of Smith’s vision of economic freedom, as an inevitable consequence of the ruthlessly exploitative behaviour of the new capitalist elites during the nineteenth century. Well-led troops rarely mutiny.
No matter how misguided, who would question the basic integrity of the socialist ideal of a more humane, fairer, educated society, motivated by the intention of providing the greatest happiness and opportunity for the greatest number?
Until the rise of Socialism the Left was not so concerned with economic dogma as with economic outcomes. The means of achieving those outcomes invariably revolved around seeking greater freedoms for disadvantaged or repressed people. Reform of existing systems had always been the dominant goal. The Left’s credo could well have been, we will reform you if we can, but usurp you if we must.
There is no doubt that socialism and its bastard offspring, communism, caused huge embarrassment and confusion for the Left, and it would seem, still does. This is a mystery.
Socialism, or at least “democratic socialism”, was an honourable experiment in the best traditions of the Enlightenment and like all experiments, produced valuable insight and understanding, whatever one’s assessment of its efficacy.
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It is fatuous to define the Left forever in terms of socialism, and it is bizarre that in recent times the Left has not only allowed the Right to set the political agenda, but to actually define the Left’s identity. This supine acquiescence of the Left is as infuriating as it is inexplicable.
By contrast, the Right has had no difficulty shrugging off its dalliance with fascism. Indeed, whilst any serious form of socialism seems anachronistic, an inclination towards fascism (by way of corporatism) still has a strong resonance on the Right side of politics.
To define the Left in terms of communism is even more perverse. Like virtually all popular revolutions, the Russian Revolution was, by definition, Leftwing.*
However, after the Bolshevik coup and certainly by the time Joe Stalin stole the show, it is hard to fit the USSR into that definition of “Leftwing”. The revolution had gone the way of many before: autocratic tyranny. Such regimes are invariably characterised by fear and suspicion, of and by the dictator(s), who must exert centralised control. This fear and suspicion infects the entire culture of the state and serves to paralyse incentive and innovation. Such regimes tend to be intensely conservative.
The Soviet Union differed from the standard totalitarianism that litters human history, in that it was wrapped, not just in mystery and enigma, but also in the dogma of a secular religion. Heresy was usually fatal. It was, to all intents and purposes, a theocracy, probably the most conservative form of government yet devised. That is the very type of government that led, via the Reformation and Renaissance, to the theories of Adam Smith. In this regard, the USSR (and subsequently other communist states) had more in common with the Holy Roman Empire than any contemporary state, with the obvious exception of Nazi Germany.
Whilst the USSR, through huge sacrifice by its people, did achieve some astounding collective enterprises and innovations, by most measures, it was a very conservative society.
Leftwing politics did not start with Marx.
It did not start with that most successful of Leftwing revolutions, the American War of Independence.# Nor did it start with the French Revolution or even the Enlightenment. It predated its name by thousands of years. It existed in the minds of every slave who, like Sparticus, had a vision of a better future. How many times have repressed people attempted to throw off their shackles. How many uprisings have thrown their destinies to hazard with the cry of, “Freedom or death”? Through these millennia of struggle, is there really any doubt about which side was of the Left and which side the Right.
Do you seriously assert that the liberal reformers of nineteenth century Britain were Rightwing and that their reactionary opponents were of the Left? Were the apologists for slavery really defenders of liberal democratic values? Such a position owes more to “Alice in Wonderland” than serious political analysis.
You enthusiastically align yourself with the Right, which is the same side of the political spectrum that has consistently opposed liberal reforms throughout human history.
As a conservative, over the last couple of hundred years you would have:
Transported trade unionists
Shot and hung Luddites
Supported child labour
Opposed any sort of occupational health and safety regulation
Opposed universal suffrage
Opposed freedom of speech and association
Opposed women’s rights
Opposed setting minimum wages
Opposed Florence Nightingale’s housing and public health reforms
Opposed the introduction of old age and disability pensions
Opposed unemployment relief
Opposed anti trust legislation (US)
Opposed free education
Opposed free health care
Opposed consumer protection laws
Opposed anti-discrimination laws
Opposed environmental protection Laws
In fact, you would have opposed almost every reform, including many of those promoting free enterprise, which we now take for granted as being essential attributes of a civilised liberal democracy.
I am sure you would not advocate that we send children down mines or into factories, but you would have, a century and a half ago, and you would have used the same arguments against the liberal reformers that economic rationalists/liberals use today:
“It will slow economic growth”
“It will cost jobs”
“It will discourage investment”
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Scotland was the technological centre of the British Empire. The Clyde shipyards and Glasgow’s tool shops were hives of industry. Economic activity had been prodigious and vast wealth had been generated as a consequence. Free market economic theories proved beyond doubt their ability to generate economic growth, just as Adam Smith envisaged.
However, something was wrong. The predicted trickle down effect did not appear to be occurring. The population of Glasgow in particular, exploded with economic refugees from Ireland and the Highlands, seeking escape from famine and crushing poverty. They crowded into increasingly grim slums where their competition for work kept wages at rock bottom. Education, health, housing and dignity declined while crime, disease and degradation flourished. A civil society seemed a very whimsical notion indeed. The partnership between intellectual and capitalist that had overcome the post feudal, landed oligarchy, turned sour. The Scottish Enlightenment ran out of puff and the liberal baton was handed to a new generation of reformers in England. New battle lines were drawn, as the increasingly powerful free market capitalists became conservatives, defending their recently acquired wealth and power against middle class reformers and worker’s militancy. The days of Darwin and Marx were dawning.
The Green Evolution Advocates for laissez faire capitalism have a penchant for distorting the work of Darwin as well as Smith. The “law of the jungle” model for competition policy is still not short of disciples. It is a very attractive rationalisation for economic ruthlessness because of its simplicity and pseudo scientific appearance. It is of course, complete nonsense. How can the activities of animals be any sort of model for capitalism, when the only capital individual animals can accumulate is body fat and experience? The jungle is arguably the ultimate level playing field, but capitalists do not actually like level playing fields, which tend to negate the whole point of accumulating capital: i.e. the reduction of competition (Cf. the history of US Anti Trust legislation).
In the jungle, the survival of the fittest means just that. The losers do not survive long enough to reproduce. The analogy with human economics only works if poverty is made a capital offence, (which health statistics indicate it often is). Of course, such draconian measures would not be an option in a tolerant, relaxed country like Australia. We would need to become considerably more economically liberal before we could finally countenance such a solution. Perhaps sterilisation would be more appropriate for underachievers.
It is instructive that the Social Darwinists are drawn to such a primitive economic model. Whilst there is much to be learnt about ourselves from considering our hunting and gathering ancestors, who populate all but a tiny fraction of our history as homo sapiens, surely inspiration for 21st century civilisation could be found somewhere this side of the agricultural revolution. I suggest that instead of constructing a society to reflect the savagery of the jungle, that we borrow from our collective agrarian wisdom, which was after all, the means by which we created the whole idea of civilisation in the first place. We could adopt, as an economic metaphor, the farming paradigm that the most cost efficient use of fertiliser is to put it on your poorest land.
This is not socialism, merely good husbandry.
The most important point the Social Darwinists and other “economic liberals” seem to miss are the evolutionary imperatives of biodiversity and inter-species symbiosis. In other words:
IT’S THE ENVIRONMENT STUPID!
I have been a “greenie,” man and boy, for some thirty-five years. At school, my best subjects were geography and economics. It occurred to me that there was an apparent conflict between these disciplines. On the one hand I was taught that we live on a small, blue-green planet supporting an incredibly diverse biosphere, which is in-turn dependant on a set of finely calibrated interrelationships of even greater complexity. At the same time I was asked to accept that our society, past, present and future, was absolutely identified with the economic philosophy of perpetual growth. Now I am only a simple farmer and maths was never my long suit, which may explain why I could never quite grasp how an economic system based on the equation: finite resources divided by infinite demand could equal anything but ultimate disappointment. It is simply a matter of carrying capacity.
Of course, being green I am pretty used to being denigrated. A common insult is that I am having it off with the tooth fairy because I question the religion of economic growth. I admit to committing this heresy, but in thirty-five years, I have never been blessed with a cogent answer to the apparent paradox of endless growth in a finite world.
One memorable conversation I had a few years ago, with a senior economics lecturer at Adelaide University, is notable. He was glib and patronising when I asked him whether, given the impact of ever increasing human activity, was anyone working on an alternative economic model. He replied that the laws of supply and demand would solve such problems because eventually, when resources became sufficiently valuable, or technology sufficiently sophisticated, it would become viable to extract them from the seabed, or the Moon or Mars. When I asked him whether this analysis included arable land, biodiversity, stable climate, clean air and water, or indeed standing room, he hung up. He probably remembered an appointment with Father Christmas.
While our economic philosophy remains hostage to this over-arching assumption, that the Earth is a magic pudding, it is not and never can be sustainable. Even if we totally embrace best environmental practice in every facet of our culture; even if we rely totally on renewable energy and recycle 100 % of our resources, we must reach a limit to the Earth’s ability to cope with our economic expansion. This is closely related to population growth, but by no means synonymous with it.
If this assertion is accepted and an end to growth is inevitable, then the question arises as to when enough is enough. Given that we are so far short of best practise, and that we are facing an imminent ecological crisis, at what point do we start to consider the limits to growth.
Unfortunately, economic growth is an idea of religious immutability, less subject to subversion than dedication to any mere deity. This is an idea to which not just deluded individuals are prepared to martyr themselves, but an entire culture, if not a species.
The green perspective is by no means a homogenous one and it certainly has its lunatic fringe, as does any political grouping. When you offer your apologias for the “Right” you don’t lump free traders in with the Christian Right. [You know, those amiable folks with guns in their houses and inclinations towards terrorism (the KKK, exploding abortion clinics etc) and Armageddon.]
Why then, do you dismiss legions of reputable scientists along with the emotional responses of people who no longer believe a political and commercial culture that assures them that they can have their cake and still eat it?
This tendency is exemplified in your programmes about global warming
Economic Growth and the Precautionary Principle Your interview with Harlan Watson was one that caught my ear. Here is a political advocate for the White House, arguing that we should not be concerned about Green House emissions because we cannot exactly quantify the component caused by human activity. This may be true and the science might be inconclusive because, as he would have it, those wicked European Greens have captured the vast majority of the world’s scientists. It may all be true. I fervently hope it is true. I really hope that every word Harlen Watson and your other greenhouse sceptics say, is true. I am reduced to hope because I am in no position to judge the veracity of their assertions of “fact”.
However, I can make a judgement about their reasoning, which runs something like this: the exact relationship between human activity and global warming is uncertain, therefore we should do nothing which might reduce (US) economic growth. Why must we maintain economic growth at all costs? The answer to this, I admit, did surprise me. Apparently, we have a moral obligation to stop spending money on research into climate because that money could be better spent on relieving the suffering of the poorest peoples in the world. Really?
Given that the USA gives the smallest percentage of GDP in aid (non military i.e.) of the OECD nations, and that the Europeans spend more per capita on both climate change and aid, and that the poorest people would be the first to bear the brunt of climate change, old Harlan lost a little bit of credibility at this point.
However, his disingenuous cant aside, the salient point here is economic growth. Harlan is correct in asserting that the Europeans are sacrificing economic growth as a consequence of invoking the precautionary principle. Given the catastrophe that in all probability awaits this planet because of our greed and stupidity, the foregoing of some of the surfeit of affluence that is actually making us physically and spiritually sick, seems a rather sensible option. The Europeans are simply dismissed by Watson as being “risk averse”.
By the way, are you one of those snivelling risk averse people who carry insurance? How very un-American of you.
The sloppiness of this reasoning is also demonstrated in the programme in which you discuss with author, Gregg Easterbrook, his new book The Progress Paradox. This book obviously attracted you because it appears to give support to your view that environmentalists are hysterical doomsayers, and gave you an opportunity to indulge your habit of making snide remarks about them. Easterbrook certainly makes some very dubious assertions that support your cause, but then goes on to present a thesis that could not be more reflective of Green philosophy.
Easterbrook’s general contention that things have never been so good for the vast majority of citizens of western industrialised democracies, is one that I completely endorse. His assertion that the environment should be included among his good time indicators is one I cannot. It is undoubtedly correct that tough, mandatory regulation in these countries (opposed all the way by the Right, sorry, I mean economic liberals) has dramatically reduced many point sources of pollution with a consequent improvement in the immediate health of air and water. However, his argument is so qualified and at least as far as Australia is concerned, so inaccurate, that it is quite counterproductive to his argument, and to your cause. Certainly, if you exclude global warming and the vast majority of the populations and ecosystems of the world from your analysis, as Easterbrook does, and you only look at a few of the more egregious environmental indicators, then you may well subscribe to his optimistic view of the biosphere.
However, if one considers the base line indicators of global ecological health, like biodiversity, rates of extinction, fishery collapse, forest destruction, degradation of river systems, desertification, salination, coral reef decline, soil erosion, feral plant and animal invasion, loss of local food plant genetic material, then things look a little different.
[I am surprised that you did not point out to your guest that he was being either disingenuous or hysterical for considering green house emissions a serious problem.]
Easterbrook’s book questions why, if things are so much better for most people of the developed world, is depression, anxiety and spiritual malaise rampant? One theory, he suggests is that natural selection has favoured those of us who, no matter how good the times, remain alert (but presumably not alarmed) to potential dangers before they become manifest. It seems that scepticism and a certain amount of pessimism (realism?) and anxiety is a factor enhancing survival. In other words, Easterbrook is providing an evolutionary testimonial for the precautionary principle.
Cost Benefit Analysis The argument in favour of adopting the precautionary principle is really a simple cost benefit analysis. If you are living in a state of absolute poverty, a very modest improvement in your standard of living is likely to pay huge dividends in terms of happiness, whereas insurance policies will not. Having a full stomach and a roof over your head may seem like utopia. Seeing your children survive infancy because they have clean drinking water and perhaps going to school will undoubtedly make your spirits soar with thanksgiving. Having a sense of making economic progress and attaining some buffer against the inevitable hard times, makes you sanguine and inclined to benevolence. However, the wealthier you become the less cost efficient is the acquisition of happiness.
The best analogy is that of addictive behaviour, which of course, is exactly what excessive materialism is. There is even a name for this pathological syndrome: affluenza. Eventually, wealth is not about increasing happiness, but about warding off the unhappiness that attends the prospect of a decline in prosperity, or any of the other forms of malaise abroad in our increasingly fey society. A variation of afluenza is what might be called Murdochulosis, where the sufferer becomes obsessed with wealth, not for its promised pleasures, but for the power it gives over those people who are less ill.
If we were to take out some insurance against climate change, even though it cost us a significant amount of economic growth, would it really matter very much if we never had to make a claim? After all, the opportunity cost of the premiums is only making us sick and the unused resources are not going anywhere. Perhaps buying some peace of mind would bring us more happiness than that plasma TV. I am sure we could still afford to help the poor, … if we really wanted to.
The global economy spent many billions of dollars attempting to forestall the possible consequences of the millennium bug, which proved to be largely illusory. Why was the precautionary principle appropriate to invoke to keep our computers alive, but not appropriate to potentially save a sizeable percentage of the earth’s species, including possibly, our own.
The cost of dealing with Y2K would have been nominal had we not adopted the same approach as we have with global warming, that is, the ostrich strategy. It is worth noting that research has repeatedly indicated that our society wastes in the order of sixty percent of the energy that we consume. By an odd coincidence that is the same percentage, it is estimated, that we need to reduce green house emissions.
A New Enlightenment Counterpoint did a programme earlier this year in which it purported to explore the question of why our universities are full of Lefties. You looked behind whiteboards and under library trolleys but could not quite find the answer. If my memory serves, the best you could do was a variation on the old sheltered workshop gag.
This really was one of your more pathetic articles and I would not bother to mention it were it not useful to draw this argument together. The one explanation that you did not canvas is that universities are meant to be full of Lefties. Their Raison D’etre is to explore new ideas, to innovate, to push the intellectual envelope. This is hardly a job for conservatives, now is it? God gave us conservatives to oppose change and maintain the status quo. That is what they do best.
The reason that Glasgow and Edinburgh became the intellectual centres of excellence of Britain during the Enlightenment was that they were full of the best and brightest, not the wealthiest and most complacent. It was no accident that so many of the astounding number of brilliant minds of the age, came from humble Scottish origins. They were the beneficiaries of a national commitment to universal education that was so pervasive that it has defined the perception of Scottish character ever since. While the Enlightenment beamed from the radical faculties of the north, conservative Oxbridge reflected a relative mediocrity. The astounding consequence of all these brilliant, “bolshie”, Presbyterian dons was that in a somewhat uneasy partnership with the rising merchants and nascent industrialists, they swept away the remnants of feudalism. In the process, and in the face of much conservative opposition, they propelled Britain and much of the world, into modernity.
It is my suspicion that the Right in this country understands this history very well, which is why they are fundamentally opposed to education. Their policies of school funding, HECS loans, the bizarre campaign against student unions and the slow starvation of universities, all indicate a fear of social and philosophical innovation. The Right seems to view education spending as a cost to be minimised in the interests of efficient economic management, rather than a vital investment in the future of our collective enterprise.
If we are to avert the truly terrifying scenarios that are the likely consequences of current trends in resource management and biosphere impact, we must dig a little deeper, intellectually, than relying with devout assurance on technological fixes. We simply must change our relationship with this planet. This is not some romantic, post hippy notion; it is an inevitable conclusion, consequent to another great attribute of the Scottish Enlightenment, common sense. Common sense informed by science.
In 1992, some hundreds of senior biological scientists from around the world, including many Nobel Prize winners, published an open letter warning that unless we profoundly changed the way we did business with the Earth’s biosphere, within ten years, we could be in big trouble. They did not mean that this would be apparent in ten years, but that the damage might be irreversible.
Of course, that warning was completely ignored. Instead the media has given coverage to a handful of contrarians who tell us what we want to hear, that things are not that bad, that we should relax and get on with what we do best: consuming stuff. This message merely compliments the irresistible tide of social engineering that is commercial advertising. “Keep them stupid, keep them scared and keep them spending”.
Those C18th Scottish dons devised a new way to view the world, and reinvented our culture. The time has come, to at least attempt to do something similar, because if we do not, God help us. Instead, we are turning our universities into intellectually moribund, global sausage factories for corporate employers. If you think our academics are not up to scratch; too tired, comfortable or mediocre, it is because they are not Leftwing enough. The students I meet seem so placid and so constrained by their material ambitions and debt burden, it is hard to imagine them taking many intellectual risks, let alone changing the world.
Let me conclude by modifying an old 1970s countercultural aphorism:
A healthy environment will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of ecological disaster.
Have a nice day,
Tony Dickson.
* That is, again from my Oxford Dictionary, “progressive, radical”… and “more advanced or innovative section of any group”. The “Right”, is simply defined as “conservative”.
# The revolution of the American colonies was in so many ways a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as the salons of Paris. Its catalyst was an instinctive revolt against the corrupt corporate power of the British East India Company that resulted in the clear distinction between corporate and natural citizens in the US Constitutional. This distinction lasted for almost a hundred years before finally succumbing to the growing power of the railway companies after the Civil War.
Stephen Matchet
August 2006
Dear Sir,
Your article entitled “No argument for evil” (Sunday Australian 5/8/06) caught my eye. At first glance, I thought it an unusual perspective for one of Rupert’s chaps to take, but then I arrived at your concluding paragraphs and realised that you were in fact sticking to the party line.
The banality of your conclusions compels me to offer a rebuttal.
The vehicle for your venture into the “Culture Wars” is a review of a book, which I understand, examines the relative and absolute moral standards to be observed by civilised societies during times of conflict.
The author’s argument, you conclude, “is a sophisticated intellectual exercise that makes the case for the immorality of using military force that is out of all proportion to what the task requires.” You then proceed to reject this altogether reasonable proposition in favour of what you consider “the obvious.” Unfortunately, the obvious is all too often, also the facile.
Not having read Grayling’s book I am in no position to champion his argument. My concern is the flawed assumptions and specious reasoning implicit in your critique.
A good deal of your discussion revolves around the moral distinctions between the actions of “democracies” and their enemies. The allied terror bombing of WWII and the events of “Sept 11th” are the main examples used for this analysis. In defending the allied bombings against allegations of immorality and potential legal culpability, you necessarily attempt to justify the violence they perpetrated against civilians.
Before I look more closely at some of the moral distinctions you draw in this process it is worth examining some of the broader implications of your argument.
* * *
I allow that I may be misinterpreting your intentions, but you seem to subscribe to the wisdom that democracies do not wage war on other democracies. Whilst I would agree that this is generally the case, (the War of 1812 being a rather dubious exception that presumably proves the rule) such an assertion begs a number of rather tricky questions. More specifically, this wisdom implies that democracies are the good guys and do not start wars, which is an altogether more difficult proposition to maintain in the face of even a little bit of history.
Perhaps the answer is that the more democratic the society, the less aggressive and warlike it is.
Democracy is a work in progress. Its evolution has followed a slow and uneven path. Britain’s constitutional history is widely regarded as providing a model for the modern development of democracy, but those characteristics that we consider indispensable for a democratic system today, took hundreds of years to evolve into their current forms. It is less than a century since women won the right to vote. Can we consider a polity that disenfranchises half its population, to be a democracy? Today we would have trouble doing so, but a hundred years ago, I doubt that it would have been seen as a problem (except of course by women).
I do not know when the idea that democracies do not start wars arose, but I expect it was relatively recently, otherwise Britain’s subjugation of a large percentage of the population of the world would be difficult to reconcile with her democratic pretensions. But then, the definition of “war” is just as flexible as that of democracy.
England’s colonisation of India undoubtedly involved acts of war, but I doubt that many British imperialists would have perceived such aggression in the same light as a war with another European power. Today, of course, we would certainly characterise such aggression as war; however, we may not regard such acts as having been done by a democracy.
What of the invasion of Australia? Was this an act of war? There was no declaration, none of the usual protocols or legal niceties, just an assumption of authority and the cruel displacement of a relatively defenceless people. There were few pitched battles, just sporadic confrontations that followed a depressingly standardised formula. The murder of isolated settlers, or sometimes just the killing of livestock, would result in disproportionate and often arbitrary retaliation. I suppose you would justify such actions on the basis that the Aborigines started the violence that was in effect, terrorism. Indigenous Australians, then and now, consider the invasion of their country as an act of war. It may not have been much of a war compared to the epic conflicts that periodically engulfed European powers, but the consequences for the vanquished were far more catastrophic. Was it not a virtual genocide, unintentional perhaps, but genocide nonetheless?
However, Britain was still not a democracy, as we would define it.#
What about the Opium Wars? Were they perpetrated by a democratic Britain? No? Well then what about the bombing and gassing of rebellious Kurdish villages in Iraq at the instigation of Churchill in the early 1920s? Was Britain a democracy in the 20s?
Your answer would presumably be that those Kurdish villagers were insurgents and terrorists and therefore were legitimate targets for democratic bombs. What’s more, they started it.*
What of that other great democracy, the USA? The land of the brave and home of the free. Surely, this pillar of political virtue would never use excessive violence. Certainly, the US has preferred to use proxies to do its dirty work, but there has been the odd little adventure like the Vietnam “War” in which two million Vietnamese people were killed in the name of “liberty”. Then there were the several thousand casualties resulting from the US bombing of Noriega’s presidential palace in Panama City when George Bush senior decided that the CIA stooge had outlived his usefulness.
The list of US perpetrated or sponsored acts of terrorism, employed to further its own interests, is a very long one indeed and I do not intend to canvas the items here. However, it is worth considering one of the US’s more egregious forays into the “real politic” of feeding its insatiable appetite for oil.
When the British and American “intelligence” organizations instigated the overthrow of the legitimate government of Iran and installed the Shar, they were very pleased with themselves. It was a masterful piece of skulduggery. Unfortunately, it set in train a series of events that, so far, has cost millions of lives and is still gathering momentum. The brutal reign of the Shar led directly to the equally violent theocracy of Khomeini and the saga of the US Embassy hostages. This, inturn, led the US to befriend Sadaam who decided, rather rashly, to invade Iran. Instead of the troops being home for Ramadan, the Iraqi’s discovered that they had bitten off more than they could chew and resorted to using weapons of mass destruction against the hordes of young martyrs of Islam. These weapons were provided, along with a good deal more, by the US.
I pose the question of America’s moral and legal culpability in these events. Aiding and abetting the use of poison gas on people defending themselves against the aggression of a vicious tyrant, because it suits your hegemonic aspirations, is a really tough one to justify.
It seems we have two choices: either we conclude that democracies are not necessarily the good guys, or that countries like the USA are not as democratic as they seem at first glance. Being an ardent supporter of democracy, albeit with Churchill’s sceptical qualification, that it is the least worst system of government, I would opt for the latter.
There is no question that the USA is a procedural democracy. Its government is elected by a universally enfranchised citizenry; it has a free press, freedom of association, and a largely independent judiciary. However, to achieve the status of being a substantive democracy, I would argue that a little more is required.
I suggest that a democracy is only as good as the quality of political debate within its institutions and among its citizens, which is in turn dependant upon the quality and quantity of information available to feed that debate.
The problem in ostensibly democratic societies like the US and Australia is that, for a variety of reasons, the media is dominated by large corporations whose clients are other large corporations and governments. This inevitably creates a confluence of interest that does nothing to nurture diversity of opinion and debate. Such a situation diminishes the contrasts with more autocratic societies. The potential for these powerful interests to control the flow of information and sway public opinion is immense.
You can see where I am going with this can’t you, so lets get back to your justifications of democratic terrorism.
* * *
You argue that the terror bombing of German cities was justified because, at the time, it was the only weapon that the Allies could bring to Germany. Perfectly true, but isn’t that exactly the reasoning al-Qa’ida would use to justify flying a plane into a building? If you are fighting a holy war against the only world super-power, what are your options? Hitting “soft targets” is morally indefensible, but for organizations like al-Qa’ida, strategically and tactically effective. Your utilitarian justification for Harris’s ruthlessness can only be differentiated from Sept. 11th by the righteousness of the motivating cause and the scale of the carnage. You argue that the allies could justify the intentional killing of innocents because we were the good guys and the Nazis were the bad guys. But what caused the Nazis to be perceived as being so evil that a civilian population that had no voice in deciding its Government’s actions was a legitimate target for bombers? # If you are arguing that the illegal invasion of another country was in itself justification for such terrorism, then you are providing a defence for the perpetrators of the recent outrages in London, which were almost certainly a direct consequence of Britain’s part in the illegal invasion of Iraq.
If, on the other hand, it was the other terrible things that the Nazis did, rather than simply their imperialism that made them so evil, then surely, if the allies indulged their own blood lust, the point of moral difference is still lost.
Your next justification is that later in the war, “the bombing continued because it is in the nature of armed forces to keep fighting until someone surrenders…”. In other words, war and violence have a momentum and destiny of their own. The German people did not foresee the terrible consequences that would result from picking a fight with some of their neighbours. The causal nexus between US policy in the Middle East and Sept 11 is irrefutable. Bin Ladin was a bomb just waiting for the US to prime and set. He happily killed Soviets for the Americans because they were Godless invaders of an Islamic nation. When the Americans failed to withdraw their military from Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War, he just as happily killed Americans. To him they are just another infidel imperialist power.
Resentment generated by seemingly endless betrayals by western powers (but mainly Britain, France and the US) of the peoples of Islam [the betrayal of the Arabs at Versailles; of the Kurds; of the Algerians; of the Iraqi Shiites; of Iran and most shamefully of all, the Palestinians], is widespread and in many communities has been fuelled to a white hot intensity. To argue that Islamic fundamentalists suddenly, for no apparent reason, have decided to wage a war of terror on the USA because they don’t like its values and ignore the havoc caused by so many decades of arrogant and clumsy US meddling throughout the region, is either perfidious or moronic.
The genie, once out of the bottle, is difficult to get back in. How do you know when a Jihad is won, or lost for that matter?
And so we come back to your central point; that not only are democracies the good guys, but that our evil enemies are unreasonable fanatics who must be defeated by what ever means are at our disposal; i.e. The ends justifies the means when dealing with fanatics. This is what you deem to be the obvious omission from Graylings thesis. However, I suggest that what is really obvious is the inherent contradiction in your own position. It is not enough simply to believe you are on the side of the angels, you have to prove it to yourself and others, by acting the part as well. This may at times be very difficult to do, but who said virtue was meant to be easy.
I spent my childhood, indeed the bulk of my life in a culture of fear engendered by the Cold War strategic policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, which was in itself underpinned by the philosophical position that it is better to be dead than red. To this end the western democracies were prepared, at last resort, to wipe out most, if not all life on this planet. Nothing fanatical or extreme about that, is there?
From an early age and certainly once I began to take an interest in history this seemed a rather short sighted perspective, given the ephemeral nature of political landscapes. I remember reading an account of a farewell conversation between an Australian diplomat, abandoning China in 1949 as the Communists took control and a Chinese academic. The Australian asked his friend how long he thought the communist regime might last. The Chinese was sanguine in his reply, ”Not long: one, maybe two hundred years.”
You attribute to our “enemies” the “proud point of treating everybody not with them as an enemy to be killed or conquered.” This seems a strange reference with which to differentiate “us” from “them”, as it is almost exactly the sentiment expressed by G.W. Bush soon after Sept. 11th 2001. Your inability to perceive the inconsistencies in your argument suggests that you subscribe to one of two very dubious beliefs:
Either: my country can do no wrong – which is idiotic
or my country right or wrong- which is iniquitous.
This sort of morally illiterate patriotism is only slightly less dangerous than the belief that the righteous can do no wrong because God is on their side.
Of course, the best rejoinder to your argument is that it is counterproductive for democracies to use excessive force. It may make strategic sense for political or religious extremists to use terror to disrupt an enemy society, but democracies must have different strategic goals. Goals that eventually involve seeking political solutions to confrontations. Having them by the balls is not really an alternative to winning hearts and minds because sooner or later you have to let go. The alternative is indefinite occupation and coercion, which is expensive and ultimately corrosive of the culture of the democratic state. Imperialism is not consistent with current definitions of democracy. Ghandi rather effectively demonstrated that.
History teaches us this lesson over and over again.
With regard to the question at hand, bombing has been shown repeatedly to be ineffective in achieving political goals. The Blitz failed in demoralising the British, the Allied firestorms failed to demoralise the Germans, the US bombing of Hanoi failed to convince the North Vietnamese of the benefits of democracy and capitalism; nor have the recent Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon turned that population into Zionists. Sooner or later, ground forces have to move in to reap the hatred that was sown from the skies. I acknowledge Japan’s capitulation after the atomic bombings, but suggest that as another doubtful example of an exception proving a rule.
Just as the Israelis have enormously enhanced the influence of the Hizballah, so the US and its acolytes have given huge impetus to the cause of radical Islam, by the invasion of Iraq. This was the culmination of eighty years of Western, (but mainly Anglo-American) foreign policy of incredible ineptitude.
The following assessment of the occupation of Iraq is illuminating:
“The people of England have been led in (Iraq) into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows…We are today not far from disaster.” – T.E.Lawrence published in the Sunday Times August 1920.
The aphorism, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”, has a somewhat doubtful provenance, but is often ascribed to Thomas Jefferson. This well-worn wisdom has commonly been appropriated by xenophobes and jingoists to engender fear in order to enhance their own power. However, Jefferson almost certainly was not thinking of external threats, but rather, of the far greater risk to a democracy posed by its own institutions.
If the Blitz could not subvert British democracy, then the odd terrorist attack is unlikely to. However, if Mr. Murdoch persists, with the help of minions like your good self, with his tireless campaign throughout his empire to: erode civil liberties with draconian legislation; undermine the legal system by attacking habeas corpus and the rules of evidence; and unravel social cohesion by promoting fear and loathing at every opportunity, he may well succeed where al-Qa’ida will certainly fail.
You undertake a grave responsibility when you sanction and thereby endorse terrorism, as you have done, in a national newspaper that has pretensions of gravitas. Terrorism is often an expression of ultimate frustration and despair. It is the weapon of last resort employed by the disenfranchised, disempowered and dispossessed.
It is also often the weapon of choice for messianic lunatics. Its most odious expression however, is when it is employed by powerful, wealthy democracies that have so many other options. This is the worst type of terrorism because it not only betrays the virtue and history of a democracy’s citizens; it betrays the whole raison d’etre of democracy itself.
In conclusion, I refer you to Robert Fisk’s fascinating book, The Great War for Civilisation, which is most instructive in matters pertaining to the West’s relationships with the Islamic world. The passage quoted below was written as a reflection on an incident that occurred soon after your employer purchased the London Times. Fisk had written an article detailing his investigations into the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US frigate. The story was censored because it shed an unflattering light on US policy and the competence with which that policy was executed.
“If we (journalists) cannot tell the truth ……… because this will harm ‘our’ side in a war or because it will cast one of our ‘hate’ countries in the role of victim or because it might upset the owner of our newspaper- then we contribute to the very prejudices that provoke wars in the first place.”
Yours sincerely,
Tony Dickson.
# However, Australia was certainly a democracy when punitive massacres were still occurring in the nineteen twenties and beyond.
*. This campaign was enthusiastically executed by Arthur (Bomber) Harris, subsequent mastermind of the firestorm bombing of German cities, which is a neat little bit of historical symmetry, don’t you think?
# We hear much about the freedoms of living in a democratic country, but less of the responsibilities. The more democratic a society the greater the responsibility to be an informed and active citizen and the greater the level of accountability we must bear for the actions of our Government. Thus, we must accept a higher duty of care than the cowered populations of more autocratic states. It is no answer to embrace Australians’ proud ethos of “don’t know-don’t care”.
The fact that GW Bush was elected, if elected he was, by about a quarter of the electorate, does not absolve the apathetic half of the population of responsibility for his actions; particularly after his re-election.
The greed and desire for revenge that the European powers displayed at Versailles had generally popular support. There is not much dispute that there lay the seeds of Nazism and WWII. To what extent were the populations of France and Britain responsible for the next act of the drama and how well were they counselled by the media of the time?
August 2006
Dear Sir,
Your article entitled “No argument for evil” (Sunday Australian 5/8/06) caught my eye. At first glance, I thought it an unusual perspective for one of Rupert’s chaps to take, but then I arrived at your concluding paragraphs and realised that you were in fact sticking to the party line.
The banality of your conclusions compels me to offer a rebuttal.
The vehicle for your venture into the “Culture Wars” is a review of a book, which I understand, examines the relative and absolute moral standards to be observed by civilised societies during times of conflict.
The author’s argument, you conclude, “is a sophisticated intellectual exercise that makes the case for the immorality of using military force that is out of all proportion to what the task requires.” You then proceed to reject this altogether reasonable proposition in favour of what you consider “the obvious.” Unfortunately, the obvious is all too often, also the facile.
Not having read Grayling’s book I am in no position to champion his argument. My concern is the flawed assumptions and specious reasoning implicit in your critique.
A good deal of your discussion revolves around the moral distinctions between the actions of “democracies” and their enemies. The allied terror bombing of WWII and the events of “Sept 11th” are the main examples used for this analysis. In defending the allied bombings against allegations of immorality and potential legal culpability, you necessarily attempt to justify the violence they perpetrated against civilians.
Before I look more closely at some of the moral distinctions you draw in this process it is worth examining some of the broader implications of your argument.
* * *
I allow that I may be misinterpreting your intentions, but you seem to subscribe to the wisdom that democracies do not wage war on other democracies. Whilst I would agree that this is generally the case, (the War of 1812 being a rather dubious exception that presumably proves the rule) such an assertion begs a number of rather tricky questions. More specifically, this wisdom implies that democracies are the good guys and do not start wars, which is an altogether more difficult proposition to maintain in the face of even a little bit of history.
Perhaps the answer is that the more democratic the society, the less aggressive and warlike it is.
Democracy is a work in progress. Its evolution has followed a slow and uneven path. Britain’s constitutional history is widely regarded as providing a model for the modern development of democracy, but those characteristics that we consider indispensable for a democratic system today, took hundreds of years to evolve into their current forms. It is less than a century since women won the right to vote. Can we consider a polity that disenfranchises half its population, to be a democracy? Today we would have trouble doing so, but a hundred years ago, I doubt that it would have been seen as a problem (except of course by women).
I do not know when the idea that democracies do not start wars arose, but I expect it was relatively recently, otherwise Britain’s subjugation of a large percentage of the population of the world would be difficult to reconcile with her democratic pretensions. But then, the definition of “war” is just as flexible as that of democracy.
England’s colonisation of India undoubtedly involved acts of war, but I doubt that many British imperialists would have perceived such aggression in the same light as a war with another European power. Today, of course, we would certainly characterise such aggression as war; however, we may not regard such acts as having been done by a democracy.
What of the invasion of Australia? Was this an act of war? There was no declaration, none of the usual protocols or legal niceties, just an assumption of authority and the cruel displacement of a relatively defenceless people. There were few pitched battles, just sporadic confrontations that followed a depressingly standardised formula. The murder of isolated settlers, or sometimes just the killing of livestock, would result in disproportionate and often arbitrary retaliation. I suppose you would justify such actions on the basis that the Aborigines started the violence that was in effect, terrorism. Indigenous Australians, then and now, consider the invasion of their country as an act of war. It may not have been much of a war compared to the epic conflicts that periodically engulfed European powers, but the consequences for the vanquished were far more catastrophic. Was it not a virtual genocide, unintentional perhaps, but genocide nonetheless?
However, Britain was still not a democracy, as we would define it.#
What about the Opium Wars? Were they perpetrated by a democratic Britain? No? Well then what about the bombing and gassing of rebellious Kurdish villages in Iraq at the instigation of Churchill in the early 1920s? Was Britain a democracy in the 20s?
Your answer would presumably be that those Kurdish villagers were insurgents and terrorists and therefore were legitimate targets for democratic bombs. What’s more, they started it.*
What of that other great democracy, the USA? The land of the brave and home of the free. Surely, this pillar of political virtue would never use excessive violence. Certainly, the US has preferred to use proxies to do its dirty work, but there has been the odd little adventure like the Vietnam “War” in which two million Vietnamese people were killed in the name of “liberty”. Then there were the several thousand casualties resulting from the US bombing of Noriega’s presidential palace in Panama City when George Bush senior decided that the CIA stooge had outlived his usefulness.
The list of US perpetrated or sponsored acts of terrorism, employed to further its own interests, is a very long one indeed and I do not intend to canvas the items here. However, it is worth considering one of the US’s more egregious forays into the “real politic” of feeding its insatiable appetite for oil.
When the British and American “intelligence” organizations instigated the overthrow of the legitimate government of Iran and installed the Shar, they were very pleased with themselves. It was a masterful piece of skulduggery. Unfortunately, it set in train a series of events that, so far, has cost millions of lives and is still gathering momentum. The brutal reign of the Shar led directly to the equally violent theocracy of Khomeini and the saga of the US Embassy hostages. This, inturn, led the US to befriend Sadaam who decided, rather rashly, to invade Iran. Instead of the troops being home for Ramadan, the Iraqi’s discovered that they had bitten off more than they could chew and resorted to using weapons of mass destruction against the hordes of young martyrs of Islam. These weapons were provided, along with a good deal more, by the US.
I pose the question of America’s moral and legal culpability in these events. Aiding and abetting the use of poison gas on people defending themselves against the aggression of a vicious tyrant, because it suits your hegemonic aspirations, is a really tough one to justify.
It seems we have two choices: either we conclude that democracies are not necessarily the good guys, or that countries like the USA are not as democratic as they seem at first glance. Being an ardent supporter of democracy, albeit with Churchill’s sceptical qualification, that it is the least worst system of government, I would opt for the latter.
There is no question that the USA is a procedural democracy. Its government is elected by a universally enfranchised citizenry; it has a free press, freedom of association, and a largely independent judiciary. However, to achieve the status of being a substantive democracy, I would argue that a little more is required.
I suggest that a democracy is only as good as the quality of political debate within its institutions and among its citizens, which is in turn dependant upon the quality and quantity of information available to feed that debate.
The problem in ostensibly democratic societies like the US and Australia is that, for a variety of reasons, the media is dominated by large corporations whose clients are other large corporations and governments. This inevitably creates a confluence of interest that does nothing to nurture diversity of opinion and debate. Such a situation diminishes the contrasts with more autocratic societies. The potential for these powerful interests to control the flow of information and sway public opinion is immense.
You can see where I am going with this can’t you, so lets get back to your justifications of democratic terrorism.
* * *
You argue that the terror bombing of German cities was justified because, at the time, it was the only weapon that the Allies could bring to Germany. Perfectly true, but isn’t that exactly the reasoning al-Qa’ida would use to justify flying a plane into a building? If you are fighting a holy war against the only world super-power, what are your options? Hitting “soft targets” is morally indefensible, but for organizations like al-Qa’ida, strategically and tactically effective. Your utilitarian justification for Harris’s ruthlessness can only be differentiated from Sept. 11th by the righteousness of the motivating cause and the scale of the carnage. You argue that the allies could justify the intentional killing of innocents because we were the good guys and the Nazis were the bad guys. But what caused the Nazis to be perceived as being so evil that a civilian population that had no voice in deciding its Government’s actions was a legitimate target for bombers? # If you are arguing that the illegal invasion of another country was in itself justification for such terrorism, then you are providing a defence for the perpetrators of the recent outrages in London, which were almost certainly a direct consequence of Britain’s part in the illegal invasion of Iraq.
If, on the other hand, it was the other terrible things that the Nazis did, rather than simply their imperialism that made them so evil, then surely, if the allies indulged their own blood lust, the point of moral difference is still lost.
Your next justification is that later in the war, “the bombing continued because it is in the nature of armed forces to keep fighting until someone surrenders…”. In other words, war and violence have a momentum and destiny of their own. The German people did not foresee the terrible consequences that would result from picking a fight with some of their neighbours. The causal nexus between US policy in the Middle East and Sept 11 is irrefutable. Bin Ladin was a bomb just waiting for the US to prime and set. He happily killed Soviets for the Americans because they were Godless invaders of an Islamic nation. When the Americans failed to withdraw their military from Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War, he just as happily killed Americans. To him they are just another infidel imperialist power.
Resentment generated by seemingly endless betrayals by western powers (but mainly Britain, France and the US) of the peoples of Islam [the betrayal of the Arabs at Versailles; of the Kurds; of the Algerians; of the Iraqi Shiites; of Iran and most shamefully of all, the Palestinians], is widespread and in many communities has been fuelled to a white hot intensity. To argue that Islamic fundamentalists suddenly, for no apparent reason, have decided to wage a war of terror on the USA because they don’t like its values and ignore the havoc caused by so many decades of arrogant and clumsy US meddling throughout the region, is either perfidious or moronic.
The genie, once out of the bottle, is difficult to get back in. How do you know when a Jihad is won, or lost for that matter?
And so we come back to your central point; that not only are democracies the good guys, but that our evil enemies are unreasonable fanatics who must be defeated by what ever means are at our disposal; i.e. The ends justifies the means when dealing with fanatics. This is what you deem to be the obvious omission from Graylings thesis. However, I suggest that what is really obvious is the inherent contradiction in your own position. It is not enough simply to believe you are on the side of the angels, you have to prove it to yourself and others, by acting the part as well. This may at times be very difficult to do, but who said virtue was meant to be easy.
I spent my childhood, indeed the bulk of my life in a culture of fear engendered by the Cold War strategic policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, which was in itself underpinned by the philosophical position that it is better to be dead than red. To this end the western democracies were prepared, at last resort, to wipe out most, if not all life on this planet. Nothing fanatical or extreme about that, is there?
From an early age and certainly once I began to take an interest in history this seemed a rather short sighted perspective, given the ephemeral nature of political landscapes. I remember reading an account of a farewell conversation between an Australian diplomat, abandoning China in 1949 as the Communists took control and a Chinese academic. The Australian asked his friend how long he thought the communist regime might last. The Chinese was sanguine in his reply, ”Not long: one, maybe two hundred years.”
You attribute to our “enemies” the “proud point of treating everybody not with them as an enemy to be killed or conquered.” This seems a strange reference with which to differentiate “us” from “them”, as it is almost exactly the sentiment expressed by G.W. Bush soon after Sept. 11th 2001. Your inability to perceive the inconsistencies in your argument suggests that you subscribe to one of two very dubious beliefs:
Either: my country can do no wrong – which is idiotic
or my country right or wrong- which is iniquitous.
This sort of morally illiterate patriotism is only slightly less dangerous than the belief that the righteous can do no wrong because God is on their side.
Of course, the best rejoinder to your argument is that it is counterproductive for democracies to use excessive force. It may make strategic sense for political or religious extremists to use terror to disrupt an enemy society, but democracies must have different strategic goals. Goals that eventually involve seeking political solutions to confrontations. Having them by the balls is not really an alternative to winning hearts and minds because sooner or later you have to let go. The alternative is indefinite occupation and coercion, which is expensive and ultimately corrosive of the culture of the democratic state. Imperialism is not consistent with current definitions of democracy. Ghandi rather effectively demonstrated that.
History teaches us this lesson over and over again.
With regard to the question at hand, bombing has been shown repeatedly to be ineffective in achieving political goals. The Blitz failed in demoralising the British, the Allied firestorms failed to demoralise the Germans, the US bombing of Hanoi failed to convince the North Vietnamese of the benefits of democracy and capitalism; nor have the recent Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon turned that population into Zionists. Sooner or later, ground forces have to move in to reap the hatred that was sown from the skies. I acknowledge Japan’s capitulation after the atomic bombings, but suggest that as another doubtful example of an exception proving a rule.
Just as the Israelis have enormously enhanced the influence of the Hizballah, so the US and its acolytes have given huge impetus to the cause of radical Islam, by the invasion of Iraq. This was the culmination of eighty years of Western, (but mainly Anglo-American) foreign policy of incredible ineptitude.
The following assessment of the occupation of Iraq is illuminating:
“The people of England have been led in (Iraq) into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows…We are today not far from disaster.” – T.E.Lawrence published in the Sunday Times August 1920.
The aphorism, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”, has a somewhat doubtful provenance, but is often ascribed to Thomas Jefferson. This well-worn wisdom has commonly been appropriated by xenophobes and jingoists to engender fear in order to enhance their own power. However, Jefferson almost certainly was not thinking of external threats, but rather, of the far greater risk to a democracy posed by its own institutions.
If the Blitz could not subvert British democracy, then the odd terrorist attack is unlikely to. However, if Mr. Murdoch persists, with the help of minions like your good self, with his tireless campaign throughout his empire to: erode civil liberties with draconian legislation; undermine the legal system by attacking habeas corpus and the rules of evidence; and unravel social cohesion by promoting fear and loathing at every opportunity, he may well succeed where al-Qa’ida will certainly fail.
You undertake a grave responsibility when you sanction and thereby endorse terrorism, as you have done, in a national newspaper that has pretensions of gravitas. Terrorism is often an expression of ultimate frustration and despair. It is the weapon of last resort employed by the disenfranchised, disempowered and dispossessed.
It is also often the weapon of choice for messianic lunatics. Its most odious expression however, is when it is employed by powerful, wealthy democracies that have so many other options. This is the worst type of terrorism because it not only betrays the virtue and history of a democracy’s citizens; it betrays the whole raison d’etre of democracy itself.
In conclusion, I refer you to Robert Fisk’s fascinating book, The Great War for Civilisation, which is most instructive in matters pertaining to the West’s relationships with the Islamic world. The passage quoted below was written as a reflection on an incident that occurred soon after your employer purchased the London Times. Fisk had written an article detailing his investigations into the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US frigate. The story was censored because it shed an unflattering light on US policy and the competence with which that policy was executed.
“If we (journalists) cannot tell the truth ……… because this will harm ‘our’ side in a war or because it will cast one of our ‘hate’ countries in the role of victim or because it might upset the owner of our newspaper- then we contribute to the very prejudices that provoke wars in the first place.”
Yours sincerely,
Tony Dickson.
# However, Australia was certainly a democracy when punitive massacres were still occurring in the nineteen twenties and beyond.
*. This campaign was enthusiastically executed by Arthur (Bomber) Harris, subsequent mastermind of the firestorm bombing of German cities, which is a neat little bit of historical symmetry, don’t you think?
# We hear much about the freedoms of living in a democratic country, but less of the responsibilities. The more democratic a society the greater the responsibility to be an informed and active citizen and the greater the level of accountability we must bear for the actions of our Government. Thus, we must accept a higher duty of care than the cowered populations of more autocratic states. It is no answer to embrace Australians’ proud ethos of “don’t know-don’t care”.
The fact that GW Bush was elected, if elected he was, by about a quarter of the electorate, does not absolve the apathetic half of the population of responsibility for his actions; particularly after his re-election.
The greed and desire for revenge that the European powers displayed at Versailles had generally popular support. There is not much dispute that there lay the seeds of Nazism and WWII. To what extent were the populations of France and Britain responsible for the next act of the drama and how well were they counselled by the media of the time?
Mr. Duffy
September 06
Dear Sir,
· A couple of weeks ago you were commenting on Tim Flannery’s book “The Weather Makers”. You conceded grudging approval because he was not wholly negative about nuclear energy. You then proceeded to say that in the past you had been sceptical about global warming because environmentalists are generally so opposed to this much maligned energy source.
Are we seeing here the initial contractions heralding the birth of a back flip on this issue? If so, the spin accompanying it is worthy of a politician, (which presumably and appropriately indicates a breach birth). How on earth does anyone’s opinion about nuclear energy have any relevance to the question of whether human induced or exacerbated global warming is a reality or, as you have maintained, nothing more than leftwing propaganda.
So, its the greenies who are to blame for your troglodyte position on global warming – yeah, right.
· In your programme of the 4th of September, you raised the apparent conundrum of the Howard Govt.’s record. That is, a conservative government bent on change and at the same time a “liberal” party that has expanded the role of government. Let’s take these in turn:
o Conservative innovation-
§ As you gave the impression that an explanation of this apparent paradox was beyond you, perhaps it might help if it were explained with an analogy. Our property was cleared in the early 1960’s. Prior to that, its SA blue gums had been logged by hand and milled on the site. We purchased the land in 1979 with the intention of developing a land use model that involved commercialising native species. *
The heart of this concept was reafforestation with native hardwood species, to gradually create a mixed forest for the sustainable harvest of forest products. Sounds good doesn’t it? Who could object to that?
As it turns out, almost everyone: the Department for the Environment, the CFS, the local council; they all wanted a look in. You see, what we wanted to do involved a change of land use (from grazing) and this meant we had to get planning approval and to get planning approval we had to satisfy a long list of conditions, many of which were completely inapplicable to our circumstances.
So you see, by wanting to turn back the clock, we were characterised as innovators. Of course, we were not intending to replicate the original vegetation cover, but a simplified version (for ease of management), with varieties selected for better economic returns. However, in broad structural terms, we wished to proceed to the past.
I find no conflict between the Howard Government’s record and its conservative credentials.
o Big Liberal Government
§ This is another apparent paradox that you claim to have trouble grasping. Your problem is two fold: firstly, the precise nature of liberalism still eludes you and second, you seem to be a little wobbly in your understanding of legal history, jurisprudence and the role of government.
Liberalism is NOT about small government; it is about maximising individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness (whatever that is). This goal may embrace minimising the intrusion of the state into the lives of individuals in some ways, or it might require the intervention of the state to provide a balance between competing interests within society.
Liberalism was the fruit borne of The Enlightenment and the role of government in the pursuit of a civil society has necessarily changed as our society has developed over the intervening centuries.
The philosophies and values of liberalism replaced the rigidity and confinement of a society still emerging from feudalism. A largely autocratic, caste bound world of very narrow horizons, where for most people state and church restrained or smothered every instinct of aspiration. Small wonder that a smaller role for the state was seen, initially, as a means of enhancing individual freedom.
Western societies then began to change profoundly. The industrial revolution and the gradual development of democratic government altered everything. The main source of power was no longer land, but rather a variety of resources and most importantly: ideas and knowledge. This made society more mobile, complex and volatile, creating new elites of wealth and power. The social contract too, became more complex in its execution and some participants, at times, reneged on its terms. In those societies where democracy was most developed, the state was able to hold things together by providing a balance of power between competing groups. Elsewhere, social conflict had unpredictable consequences, and only sometimes led to greater freedom.
The reason that the Howard government has not made a smaller role for the state is that it cannot. As our society grows in size and complexity, and as resources necessarily dwindle, the role of government must grow.*
It is, I agree, unfortunate. As I have indicated above, uncoordinated, unimaginative and usually politically expedient regulation is the bane of my life. I also agree that individual responsibility for collective, as well as individual problems, must be encouraged and that we would benefit from major constitutional and administrative reform and innovation. However, the reality is that big government is the price we pay for the affluent, complicated society we seem to desire. For all its frustrations, it is the least worst option.
If a longer historical perspective is taken of the evolutionary development of democratic government, I suggest that there is some cause for confidence in the continued innovation of legal and administrative instruments, to continue to provide us with a measure of freedom and happiness. At least, rather more confidence than leaving our society to the gentle ministrations of a global capital market which operates very much on the same level of metaphysical intelligence as a computer. Indeed, a computer is exactly what it is. Markets are fantastically subtle and efficient organisational tools, but they are value free and should therefore not be allowed to mould our cultural destiny, any more than a computer should be employed to adjudicate the Archibald Prize.
The problem is that our freedom must be divided by the number of people with whom we share our world. If I am the only person on an island, I have total freedom. If someone else washes up, that freedom is divided by two. By the time my freedom is divided by 6 billion, tensions are going to run a little high unless we are pretty clear about the rules of the game and have a bloody good umpire, in whose decisions we have confidence.
I for one, have a little more faith in the United Nations, as sadly deficient as it is, to improve global governance, than the USCIB (United States Council of International Business).
*Whilst it is pure idiocy to think that the market can do the job of government, a flexible and varied indirect taxation system is a brilliantly efficient tool by which the market can implement government policy. The GST did away with that option, and so we have the ironic situation that a Liberal Government has no choice but to use the expensive, blunt instrument of regulation. It’s a funny old world.
The Hamster
August 2007
I was listening to some people waiting at the checkout yesterday. They were waxing lyrical about the beautiful weather we have been having. I was tempted to suggest that their appreciation of the sunshine might be reconsidered in light of the fact that it was now near the end of August and we have had only one rain event since the middle of July, thus making the season a replica of last year – the worst drought year on record; that two such years, back-to-back, creates a potentially catastrophic situation. But I didn’t; they wouldn’t have thanked me for it. I definitely didn’t tell them that whilst the price of plasma TVs would continue to fall because the continuing resource boom would keep the dollar high for a little while longer, there was a very good chance that in a year or two they may well be bathing in a tea cup and selling their children to pay for the groceries.
I was also tempted to tell them about a strange dream I had sometime ago.
I was watching some mindless crap on the tele when I suddenly felt that I was not alone. I turned around to find this huge grey animal starring at me from its small intelligent eye. It had large ears and a very long prehensile nose. It would have been easy to jump to conclusions at this point, but remembering the sage advice of people like Mr. Howard and the editorial staff of The Australian, I took a deep breath and resisted the temptation.
Just because it looked like an elephant, smelled like an elephant, sounded like an elephant and was called an elephant by 98% of the world’s elephantologists, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t give a great deal of consideration to people who argue that the animal could still turn out to be a giraffe or, possibly even a hamster. There was just no way of knowing, until the elephant genome project was completed sometime around 2050.
Even though I was tempted to turn back to the tele, another thought occurred to me. How could I have not noticed this large anomalous herbivore in my living room? Judging by the huge pile of elephant shit behind the sofa it had been my companion for quite some time. What had I been doing? What had so distracted me?
At this point, I heard the intro music for my favourite advertisement for some mindless crap.
Aah, look at the shiny things.
LET’S SCRAP THE SUBSIDIES :–
THE COUNTRY FIRE SERVICE AND THE MARKET ECONOMY.
November 2009 (updated Oct. 2013)
I am a lucky man. I am a farmer and as such, of necessity, something of jack-of- all -trades. I enjoy the beauty of my environment and the intellectual and creative challenges that daily confront me. I work seven days a week with occasional breaks to join my neighbours on the fire truck; for training, or the real thing.
Most of the work I do is “overhead” (weed control, fuel reduction, fencing, machinery maintenance, book keeping, beaurocratic compliance etc). On those occasions that I do work directly related to producing saleable commodities, I can kid myself I am making wages. Not the $100.00/hour my 22 yr. old nephew makes as a tradesman in the city, but better than working in a call centre. Of course, if I take into account fuel, fertiliser, wear and tear on machinery, insurance, rates and taxes, transport, telecoms, commissions etc. it doesn’t look so good. In a reasonable year I can just about break-even. Fortunately, my wife works.
Yes, I am a lucky man. The people I feel sorry for are the overwhelming majority of Australians who live in urban areas and who are going to receive a nasty shock at some point in the not so distant future. The consumers who have become so detached from the real world and so used to cheap food (indeed, cheap everything) that they may well end up going hungry in a future where there are too few farmers and too little, or too much water.
There has been mention in the media recently about a significant increase in the price of food and the consequent economic and social implications.
The forty percent rise in food prices may be real (it hasn’t been clear whether that is raw data or adjusted for inflation and increases in real family incomes) and it may be in part the result of increased corporate greed, but the real reason is the nascent unravelling of the web of subsidies that have priced food at unrealistic levels for many years.
The Europeans and, to a lesser extent the North Americans, have kept food prices down by a formal system of subsidies that is paid for by the taxpayer. The Europeans do this because they understand the importance of maintaining a viable rural population, for reasons of food security and broad environmental and demographic imperatives. The policy factors in the US are complicated by the extent to which corporatisation of agriculture has corrupted the political process and detailed understanding continues to elude me.
In Australia, we have been more ideologically committed to the strictures of market economics and have abandoned formal agricultural subsidies. (It seems that subsidising Australian farmers is perceived as bad economic policy, but subsidising multinational corporations is good policy; understanding of this also continues to elude me.) However, our primary production continues to be heavily subsidised, essentially from two sources: the first is the natural environment; the second is the financial and physical health of farming families and the communities to which they are symbiotically bound. Ultimately however, our cut-price consumer society is subsidised by the future. This is because, as Malcolm Fraser would tell you, there is no such thing as a free lunch and these days he might also agree that removing less tangible liabilities from the balance sheet, to later become someone else’s problem, is not fiscally rewarding in the long run. Ecologically, as well as economically, we have been living beyond our means for a long time. Our ecological debt in particular, is rapidly growing beyond reasonable expectations of our ability to repay it. The GFC provides an elegant metaphor for the way our economic system cherry picks its costing of our rampant consumerism. It gives increasingly literal clarity to the concept of toxic debt.
Although uncosted environmental damage has contributed to the low price of commodities as a result of unsustainable agricultural practices, it is also true that the environment benefits from the unpaid labour of farmers, through their maintenance of our vast hinterlands. Labour that will only become more important as ecological cataclysm looms ever closer.
(Thirty percent of the world’s identified species are designated as threatened and Australia has the worst record for conservation among industrialised nations. Some of the more pessimistic forecasts warn of thirty percent extinction rates by the middle of the century. The current attrition rates are somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 times background levels; and this is before global heating builds a head of steam).
The largely urban environmental movement, let alone the average wilfully ignorant consumer, finds it difficult to grasp these realities, but must finally understand that the most essential factor in maintaining and enhancing our landscape values is an economically viable rural population. That population is as endangered as many of our native creatures and if these communities die, who is going to do the actual work of repairing the damage inflicted on our country? It is easy being green when someone else is footing the bill.
Regional Australia subsidises urban consumers in ways other than by providing cheap food and unpaid environmental management. Civil defence is another good example. As fire and flood become an ever-greater threat to our rural infrastructure, natural heritage, urban fringes and associated human populations, an increasing burden of responsibility and risk is being undertaken by an ageing “Dads Army” of civil defence volunteers. They are ageing because these volunteers are drawn disproportionately from a rural population that is steadily haemorrhaging its young people; enticed to less arduous lives.
I am never quite sure whether to laugh or cry with pride when I watch the gallant men and women of our brigade forcing their stiffening muscles to exertions that shouldn’t be asked of them, but is, because there is no one else.
That these sixty-somethings must continue to risk their lives in the defence of their homes and communities may appear to be unfortunate but inevitable. However, the reality is actually scandalous. This is because in the event of a major fire, the strategic plan is to deploy brigades like ours to defend nearby population centres; in our case, a coastal tourist town. The logic is compelling: deploy your resources to defend the greatest concentration of assets. The dispersed homes and livelihoods and even families of the rural volunteers are of less value.
If this story makes you feel uncomfortable, I trust the punch line will provoke you to the same anger that it does me. In the wake of the Victorian bushfire disaster, at least one insurance company has ceased to write policies in rural areas. This may well become a trend over the next few years, and will undoubtedly accelerate if we have another bad fire season, which seems inevitable. So, at some point in the near future it is conceivable that our brigade may be asked to leave our uninsured homes to burn, in order that the insured property of the town’s folk is protected. What could be fairer than that?
And with every injury comes a free insult.
In cities and large towns in South Australia, structure fires are dealt with by the MFS (Metropolitan Fire Service), while rural fires are dealt with by the CFS. The MFS is staffed by a mixture of professionals and paid “volunteers”. The latter are part-time/on call personnel who are paid for the time spent training or on deployment.
In smaller towns, structure fires are dealt with by the CFS. Our nearest town is one of the few smaller regional centres to boast an MFS station. It so happens that CFS and MFS may attend the same fires: we in support for structure fires, they in support for bush fires. They get paid - we do not. Indeed, as landowners we must pay a substantial emergency services levy for the privilege.
If a house fire cannot be extinguished, the drill is to simply pull back and stop it spreading. There is generally little danger to personnel. Broad front wildfire is another matter. The number of CFS people and their equivalents interstate, who have been killed since I first joined thirty years ago, is more than the number of military combat fatalities over the same period (as of date of writing). They get paid - we do not.
Indeed, whilst MFS personnel routinely use BA (breathing apparatus) to protect themselves against the toxic effects of smoke inhalation, CFS volunteers do not. This is despite the reality that whilst the majority of structure fires are contained relatively quickly, the standard CFS fire-ground shift is twelve hours, on a deployment that may last days. The South Australian Government recently introduced legislation reversing the burden of proof re the causal link between working conditions and certain types of cancer, for MFS personnel. They have refused to extend this reform to CFS volunteers on the grounds of fiscal constraints. It is always rewarding to be appreciated.
We often get sent on “strike teams” to other districts or even interstate, at great cost to our livelihoods. Recently, it became policy to boost our declining ability to mount strike teams by including MFS personnel in our crews. They will get paid for the time they are away – we do not. MFS people have no training in the very dangerous work of containing wild fire. That is our specialty. They needed to be trained before they could be deployed. The MFS students presumably got paid – our instructors did not.
Of course a significant percentage of CFS volunteers are not fulltime farmers. Currently, although the two percent of the population that make up the farming community create (with value adding) approximately twelve percent of GDP, about fifty percent of farming enterprises in Australia are not financially viable without off farm income.
Many volunteers are not farmers at all. They come from all walks of life. They may be tradespeople, shop assistants, or public servants. This diversity creates another anomalous injustice because, as the only remaining fulltime farmer active in our brigade, I might find myself on a truck with a local council worker, a bank teller or a teacher. On the fire-ground we are all equal in our commitment to our job and the shared risks we take. There is only one difference: if the deployment takes place during working hours, they still get paid by their employers. I and other self employed volunteers do not.
In rural areas a common and potentially dangerous occurrence is the obstruction of roads, consequent to falling branches or even whole trees. Such obstructions need to be cleared as a matter of urgency. However, trees can fall at any time, so where is such labour to be found twenty-four hours a day? One possibility would be to roster local council workers to be on standby to deal with such emergencies. They are after-all, well equipped to do such work. Unfortunately, this option would be expensive and unpopular with employees, who would no doubt resent the imposition on their leisure time.
There must be another solution. Of course! Why not put a chainsaw on CFS trucks and call the volunteers out of their beds to deal with such inconveniences? Brilliant! Farmers are used to working for nothing and they don’t have leisure time to interrupt; an excellent result for road users and rate payers as well.
Recently a concern has arisen among ambulance drivers in SA regarding occupational health and safety. They are limited by the weight they are allowed to lift. This creates a problem when confronted by the increasing numbers of obese people they encounter. Solution? Easy; just call the CFS volunteers out of their beds again, or away from their jobs. They can do the heavy lifting for free; not a problem mate.
This country spends billions of dollars every year defending itself against hypothetical enemies. Of the eight or nine wars (as distinct from peace-keeping deployments) that we have become embroiled in over the last 110 years, only one can reasonably be considered as self defence; the rest might best be designated as politically strategic adventurism. The time Australia’s military has spent fighting other people’s battles amounts to almost forty years of continuous conflict. By contrast, combating the most acute threat to the security of Australia is left to an army of ageing amateurs.
Our society is very reluctant to pay the full cost of anything. Our version of a market economy tends to value immediate desires more than less apparent needs and the doctrinaire advocates of the “free market” have their eyes wide shut to the obvious hypocrisies of their ideology.
Whilst subsidies are anathema to “neo-liberal” dogma and “user pays” is the glib, self serving slogan of privilege, the reality is that our society is habitually subsidised by the proceeds of exploitation. Whether of the disempowered, or of the benevolence of social activists (volunteers), such misuse represents a corruption of the principles of market economics, as envisaged by Adam Smith.
Recent research in Britain has found that while merchant bankers were paid extraordinary amounts of money for contributing very little, if anything, to society, hospital cleaners save thousands of lives and vast resources by minimising infection rates. For this they are paid a pittance. This is not what Adam Smith had in mind for the invisible hand.
Our society happily pays large amounts of money to individuals for playing with a ball for a few hours, while leaving the defence of the nation to a creaking band of grandparents whose numbers in SA have declined by almost thirty percent over recent years and continues to decline at a rate of approximately 700 pa.
The failure to value the contribution of the CFS (and other volunteers) is not only a moral travesty, but self defeating idiocy by policy makers of all political colours. Whilst the urban majority is, apparently, morally sanguine about its careless use of the goodwill of this dedicated community of exploited workers, the very least that Government can do is reward hard and dangerous work of immense value.
As the song laments, “Don't it always seem to go
that you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone.”
When our “Dad’s Army” is gone, and with it another of the rural subsidies to the cities, so will a great deal more - in a puff of smoke.
Set our volunteers free and let the market place determine the real value of security, without hidden subsidies. It may be expensive, but it won’t cost the earth.
Tony Dickson.
THE MARKET ECONOMY’S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET: Or how I learned to stop worrying and cook the books. An analogical polemic. May 2010
“If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compel them to it” John Stuart Mill "Principles of Political Economy" - Book IV, Chapter VI (1848)
To whom it may concern,
Our society is much given to regarding our technological and economic prowess with great complacency. We now live, so we are told, in a post-industrial age. An age where the primal concerns that engaged the attention of humanity throughout the millennia have been left far behind. We are after all, no longer hunters and gatherers, but economic sophisticates with mobile phones and central locking, who regard the few remaining primitives with implacable condescension. This perception is of course, both a monumental conceit and a profound delusion, because those primitive economies achieved something that quite eludes us: an approximation of stasis and thereby, sustainability. Economists tell us that if our economy does not grow it will…it will…well, they’re not sure…. perhaps hold its breath until it turns blue. There is simply no long-term model for a static industrial economy; although we may do well to consider the Japanese as potential canaries.
I have been a “greenie,” man and boy, for forty years. At school, my best subjects were geography and economics. It occurred to me that there was an apparent conflict between these disciplines. On the one hand I was taught that we live on a small, blue-green planet supporting an incredibly diverse biosphere, which is in-turn dependant on a set of finely calibrated interrelationships of even greater complexity. At the same time, I was asked to accept that our society, past, present and future, was absolutely identified with the economic philosophy of perpetual growth. Now, I am only a simple farmer and maths was never my long suit, which may explain why I could never quite grasp how an economic system based on the equation: finite resources divided by infinite demand could equal anything but ultimate disappointment. It would seem merely a question of carrying capacity.
Of course, being green, I am pretty much used to being denigrated. A common insult is that I am having it off with the tooth fairy because I question the religion of economic growth. I admit to committing this heresy, but in forty years I have never been blessed with a cogent answer to the apparent paradox of endless growth in a finite world.
One conversation I had many years ago with a senior economics lecturer at Adelaide University, is notable. He was glib and patronising when I asked him whether, given the impact of ever increasing human activity, was anyone working on an alternative economic model. He replied that the laws of supply and demand would solve such problems because eventually, when resources became sufficiently valuable and technology sufficiently sophisticated, it would become viable to extract them from the seabed, or the Moon, or Mars. When I asked him whether this analysis included arable land, biodiversity, stable climate, clean air and water, or for that matter standing room, he hung up. He probably remembered an appointment with Father Christmas.
While our economic philosophy remains hostage to this over-arching assumption: that the Earth is a magic pudding, it is not and never can be sustainable. Even if we totally embrace best environmental practice in every facet of our culture; even if we rely totally on renewable energy and recycle 100 % of our resources, we must reach a limit to the Earth’s ability to cope with our economic expansion. This is closely related to population growth, but is by no means synonymous with it.
If the logic of this assertion is accepted and an end to growth is inevitable, then the question arises as to when enough is enough. Given that we are a country mile short of best practise, and that we are facing an imminent ecological crisis, at what point do we start to consider the limits to growth. Do we attempt to change direction while (hopefully) there is still time, or do we maintain full steam ahead, in arrogant disregard of the warnings, until we hit the iceberg?
I am well aware of the economic and social implications of such a prospect; they would be difficult to overstate. I am suggesting no less, that we deny one of humanity’s most fundamental drives. We may not be capable of such a change of course, in which case it will eventually and dramatically, be made for us. What is obvious is that adapting to not only a much lower level of resource consumption, but of even greater difficulty, static or lower material expectations, would require a fundamental change of values and culture; particularly political culture. [i]
But what would we do if we no longer had the same material ambitions? What could we strive for? Hmm, let me see, … how about survival! Should not that be, ultimately, our highest ambition and crowning achievement? Else, all our other victories are at best pyrrhic ones.
Such a dramatic change in consciousness, if at all possible, can only be achieved slowly and incrementally. Currently, this society, far from embarking on this process, is actually exhorting its citizens to do just the opposite, through the relentless social engineering of the commercial media and the encouragement of government policies.
Unfortunately, it seems that economic growth is an idea of religious immutability, less subject to subversion than dedication to any mere deity. This is an idea to which not just deluded individuals are prepared to martyr themselves, but an entire culture, if not a species.
Whilst the definition of this economic conundrum is, I believe, axiomatic; like many seemingly simple issues it contains many strands of complexity, which are generally historical in origin and irrational by nature. The two strands that come most readily to mind are our use of technology and the convenient, but ultimately pathological assumptions underpinning accounting conventions.
The first of these needs little said about it in this essay. Quite clearly, we have failed to develop cultural tools of sufficient sophistication to manage the tsunami that is our technological inventiveness. We are like a teenage boy, barely in control of a hot car; intoxicated by power and freedom and a denial of all but the moment.
None of our social institutions can keep up with the current rate of technological change, which continues to accelerate; legal and regulatory frameworks, political institutions and culture, educational practises, cultural conventions, social relationships and economic theory; all struggle to accommodate the stresses of adaptation.
The dramatic increase in productivity spawned by new technologies creates a perceived imperative to promote economic growth through consumption, in order to absorb the otherwise unemployed. We have so far failed the challenge to culturally reinterpret the benefits of innovation in a manner compatible with our long term habitation of this planet, let alone our psychological and metaphysical health.
One of the most whimsical of fantasies is that we can solve our problems with technological magic bullets. In reality, our problems are primarily cultural. This is best illustrated by the dilemma posed by the promise of nuclear fusion and a plethora of renewable energy sources. These potential solutions to carbon dioxide emissions would give us limitless energy and thereby the potential to keep expanding our destructive hegemony over this planet, until we completely destroy its ecological integrity. Is that really how we define human progress? One thing is certain, once we have arrived at this destiny; there will be no going back.
The more accessible problem is that of book keeping.
It is my view that economics is not so much a dismal science, as a Clayton’s one, in that like the Law, it is an entirely human construct. Current economic theory and practise gives every appearance of being wholly preoccupied with human affairs, to the exclusion of the “real world”. By “real world” I mean the biosphere upon which we are totally dependent, but which does not need us at all.
This economic tunnel vision renders many assumptions and much analysis and modelling, quite arbitrary and subjective. Only by embracing the complex realities of the whole planet can economic methodology achieve a bona fide objectivity. This failure of process goes to the very core of our dissociation from the ecological systems that sustain us.[ii]
Many years ago this economic self possession inspired me to appropriate the term “homocentric”. The usual definition of this word borrows from the Greek “homo” to provide the meaning of a common centre. Substituting the Latin meaning of “homo” gives an entirely different, but very apt description of the disciplines of both economics and law. Indeed, our increasingly urban society has become almost entirely homocentric.
[It should be recognised however, that unlike economics, legal innovation has made significant contributions in environmental law, as well as the nascent conceptual development of animal rights.]
While on the subject of linguistics, it is worth considering another comparison between the Law and economics, the second part of which derives from the Greek nomos, meaning “law”. It is a tenet of legal wisdom that the essence of the Law is experience (i.e. custom) and not logic. Contrast this with the alternative to economics: ecology, the essence of which, as its name suggests, is the same as other “real” sciences. My point is metaphorical and admittedly somewhat laboured, but its main purpose is to introduce the idea of ecology as the new economics.
Those 18th C heroes of the Enlightenment, the vanguard exponents of our notions of reason and empiricism, the natural philosophers, spoke of the “economy” of the various species they observed and recorded. Whether this habit reflected a deep understanding of the workings of nature or was just a quaint turn of phrase, it remains an entirely appropriate perspective of the natural world.
Nature is the quintessential free market economy. The survival of the fittest is no metaphor. There are no distortions created by accumulated capital, no welfare safety net and certainly no Federal Reserve to rescue the inept and corrupt from their folly. Failure and even modest underperformance can have only one result. If Humanity Inc. continues to rely on the Enron / Lehman Bros. business model, there will be no bail-out. Nature does not subscribe to the “too big to fail” argument because its pure, objective, market economics (ecology) remains uncorrupted by either capitalism, politics, social justice, or indeed any of the concerns that occupy humanity.
Like its pale human imitations, the real-world market economy transacts its business with a variety of currencies.
Its universal gold standard is of course energy, as prescribed by the first Law of Thermodynamics, but other more terrestrial currencies are also vital for running a biospherical enterprise. Water, air in the right proportions, carbon and intellectual property (biodiversity, alias DNA) are all necessary components for successful management.
Nature is the ultimate economic rationalist. It is wholly unsentimental and ruthless in its rigorous execution of the principles of market economics. Unlike the human dilettantes who practice their pseudo science, nature does not cherry pick what it wants to include in its calculations of efficiency and cost benefit. Its algorithms are all embracing; its computational power virtually unlimited. Predicting the effect of the flap of an Amazonian butterfly wing on the futures market for Australasian sea-turtle eggs is nothing to Nature. It literally has a brain the size of a planet.
By contrast, human economists (with some laudable exceptions) have chosen to ignore the rather obvious fact that an economic system that cannot distinguish real-world capital from income, environmental overhead from current expenditure and ecological profit from loss, is badly in need of some training and development.
The prospect of global heating has at long last provoked a debate about pricing the environmental costs of green house gas emissions into the economic equation. It is a small first step towards an awareness that sooner or later we must account for the environmental costs of everything we consume and have consumed, these past several centuries. These costs are liabilities that industrial economies have habitually externalised and conveniently kept off balance sheet as SEPs, or someone else’s problem. The GFC provides an elegant metaphor for the way our economic system has been less than transparent in it’s costing of our rampant consumerism.
Ecologically as well as economically, we have been living beyond our means for a long time. Our ecological tab in particular, is rapidly growing beyond reasonable expectations of our ability to repay it, giving literal clarity to the notion of toxic debt.
High rates of growth since the industrial revolution has fuelled runaway inflation of the only currencies that truly matter and they have become so debased that they are in imminent danger of collapsing.
What can we do about this? The simplest solution is to do nothing and let nature’s economics run its course. After all, life on earth has seen plenty of booms and busts. Perhaps we should resign ourselves to the bio-business cycle and follow the dinosaurs to that great dole queue in the sky.
Alternatively, we could take on the role of a central bank or treasury and devise an interventionist approach. But what sort of economic policy would be most appropriate? Monetarism has never been much good at dealing with this sort of terminal stagflation, nor conventional fiscal policy, which tends to result in the difficult political process of picking winners and losers.
Maybe an economic philosophy totally predicated on the assumption of perpetual economic growth is just not the best muse for inspiring solutions to our problems. Perhaps we should look for inspiration to an economic system with a rather better track record; one with a computer the size of a planet at its disposal.
This is not a recommendation for a survival of the fittest competition policy, but rather a plea for ecological fiscal responsibility and the other, conveniently forgotten half of the law of the jungle: interspecies symbiosis. In other words, we need a genuine economic conservatism that would necessarily embrace the precautionary principle, which surely underpins the fiscal conservative’s instinctive horror of debt.[iii]
Nor is this essay a rejection of market economics.
Whilst the market is undoubtedly a valuable servant, it can also be a dangerous master and should not be allowed to usurp the role of democratic governance; as is increasingly the case as free enterprise succumbs to the power of global corporations. However, I also believe that the market is our best hope of ultimately resolving this singular problem of nihilistic growth and in the interim, encouraging more sustainable economic activity. Neither of these goals can be achieved unless the environment (as well as many cultural and social intangibles) is valued as an asset on the balance sheet and recognized as an input cost in the profit and loss statement. Only when this is done can the market apply its inventive genius to seeking better ways to do things and impose a more stringent regime of cost benefit analysis; a regime that would consign great swaths of our current economic activity to the receivers, deemed unviable.
One of the reasons ecological accounting has not been embraced of course, is that it is a task of mind boggling complexity. Thus it has ended up at the bottom of the too hard basket. We are left with the simple choice of making the effort, or to continue to just not bother. Did I mention icebergs and dinosaurs?
However, the market place will not spontaneously impose such a cost on itself because ultimately the market is merely an abacus. It does not have values, or a sense of destiny. Only governments can make collective value judgments about the sort of society we wish to leave to our children and ascribe aesthetic and moral value to the natural world.
Ecological catastrophe and its political ramifications are the biggest medium and long term security threats we face. This is the judgment of strategic planners in the Pentagon. The weight of evidence would indicate that climatic instability is the direst threat, but it remains only a symptom of the underlying problem: our escalating consumption of resources and its ecological consequences. The most persistent misapprehension under which policy makers labour, is that there is a clear distinction between economic and environmental priorities.
The only difference between an ecological problem and an economic one, is time; and time is rapidly becoming another very finite resource.
The original inhabitants of this continent had, arguably, evolved the most successful economic system in human history. It provided for the modest needs of its practitioners for tens of millennia. By contrast, our idea of economic management has brought the whole planet to the brink of disaster in just a few short centuries.
The degree of providence enjoyed by aboriginal society seems very meagre to our bloated appetites, but there was a sufficiency that supported a cultural and spiritual life of astounding richness and complexity. Whilst these people were undoubtedly subject to many vicissitudes, their cultural achievements indicate a bounty of leisure time that we may well be envious of.
They took their cultural life seriously. This was not trite entertainment, but the very fabric of their knowledge base and the glue for their social ecology. It bound them absolutely to the landscape, so that every nuance of their lives reflected the complexities of the very real- world economy they managed.
It is our challenge and probably our only chance of survival as a civilised society, to achieve an equivalent nexus with what is left of the natural world. Science may replace lore, (or Law) but it will not save us unless we rediscover a more empathic relationship with this very lonely planet.
The unresolved question remains why, to my knowledge, the issue of economic growth has not been part of any serious public conversation since Jerry Brown was elected Governor of California in 1975. The short answer would seem to be self interest, moral cowardice and severe myopia among those charged with the responsibility of developing public policy. The silence has been eloquent, deafening and unforgivable.
SEP?
NOTES
[i] I suppose that I should pre-empt one of the more spurious but predictable objections to the idea that we should make some attempt to curb our appetites. The reasoning runs as follows: it is all very well this chardonnay, sack cloth talk of limits to growth and self righteous frugality, but what about the aspirations of billions of people in the developing world?
Yes indeed, what about those billions of people who currently teeter on the crumbling edge of the precarious state of global food security, while we die of obesity. The answer is twofold. First, is the reality that the threat to climatic stability and a plethora of other ecological problems, affect the poor, first and foremost.
Secondly, because there is no possibility that another four or five (or ten) billion people can ever replicate our decadent and wasteful lifestyles, we must find a way to use our surfeit to provide the have nots with, at the very least, a modest sufficiency. This will require significant sacrifice of our own level of consumption. However, we need not be concerned lest this might be seen as benevolence; it can easily be rationalised as enlightened self interest.
[ii] It is my understanding that Malthus has been largely discredited for two reasons.
The first of these was his failure to perceive the extent to which technological advances would increase efficiencies in food production and distribution. These innovations not only dramatically increased production of tradable food, but created a global market which could mitigate or abolish localised shortages
The second problem with Malthus’ theory of population was that he mistakenly extrapolated directly from the behaviour of biological systems to human behaviour. Human intellect and collective experience allow for a degree of adaptability to environmental constraints that has put us beyond many of the determinants that govern other species; to a point. Malthus was even wrong in generalising about these other species, many of which regulate their fecundity according to food supply.
We now take as accepted wisdom that the key to reducing population growth in developing economies is to increase standards of living and education, particularly of women. In this respect Malthus could not have been more wrong. And yet; and yet, in essence, he was right. If we think in terms of ecological impact and resources rather than simply population, and globally rather than parochially, his basic insight is sound, technology notwithstanding.
However, for me, the real wisdom to be teased from the work of Malthus is the nature of its shortcomings. His basic error was applying the laws of nature directly to human society, which clearly plays by different rules. In other words, he was making the same mistake as contemporary economists, but in reverse. Today, economists don’t ensnare humanity in the laws of nature; they do not even acknowledge the existence of those laws.
Yes, we are different, but we share the same world as our fellow species and we need them infinitely more than they need us.
[iii] Cost Benefit Analysis The argument in favour of adopting the precautionary principle is really a simple cost benefit analysis. If you are living in a state of absolute poverty, a very modest improvement in your standard of living is likely to pay huge dividends in terms of happiness, whereas insurance policies will not. Having a full stomach and a roof over your head may seem like utopia. Seeing your children survive infancy because they have clean drinking water and perhaps going to school will undoubtedly make your spirits soar with thanksgiving. Having a sense of making economic progress and attaining some buffer against the inevitable hard times, makes you sanguine and inclined to benevolence. However, the wealthier you become, the less cost efficient is the acquisition of happiness.
The best analogy is that of addictive behaviour, which of course, is exactly what excessive materialism is. There is even a name for this pathological syndrome: affluenza. Eventually, wealth is not about increasing happiness, but about warding off the unhappiness that attends the prospect of a decline in prosperity, or any of the other forms of malaise abroad in our increasingly fey society. A variation of afluenza is what might be called Murdochulosis, where the sufferer becomes obsessed with wealth, not for its promised pleasures, but for the power it gives over those people who are less ill.
If we were to take out some insurance against climate change and the multitude of other pending ecological disasters, even though it cost us a significant amount of economic growth, would it really matter very much if we never had to make a claim? After all, the saved opportunity cost of the premiums is only making us sick and the unused resources are not going anywhere. Perhaps buying some peace of mind would bring us more happiness than that plasma TV.
The global economy spent many billions of dollars attempting to forestall the possible consequences of the millennium bug, which proved to be largely illusory. Why was the precautionary principle appropriate to invoke to keep our computers alive, but not appropriate to potentially save a sizeable percentage of the earth’s species, including possibly, our own?
The cost of dealing with Y2K would have been nominal had we not adopted the same approach as we have with global warming, that is, the ostrich strategy. It is worth noting that research has repeatedly indicated that our society wastes in the order of sixty percent of the energy that we consume. By an odd coincidence that is the same percentage, it is estimated, that we need to reduce green house emissions.
POSTSCRIPT
The calls for an enquiry into this country’s population policy recently inspired the federal treasurer to offer statements supporting the current extraordinary rate of Australia’s population growth, and the projection that it would grow to 35 million by 2050. The justification he gave was that the ageing of the population would, in the near future, become an impediment to the “sustainability” of our economic growth, due to an imbalance between the productive and dependant sectors of the population.
These statements, apart from providing a luminous illustration of the homocentric mindset, also highlight two other deficiencies in the reasoning underpinning our economic culture.
The first of these is the very short term thinking that would incline someone to conclude that growing the population will solve the problem of an aging demographic. The other insight into our economic perspective is the assumption that the employment of large numbers of people to look after the needs of tourists sitting around swimming pools is productive economic activity, whereas employing people to look after the needs of the frail and sick, is an economic burden.
It is a traditional measure of a mature and successful economy that it has progressed from a commodity base, through manufacturing, to be a provider of services. This transition is largely the consequence of the same technological progress and financial sophistication that creates unemployment. Surely an ageing population can just as easily be seen as mitigating the consequences of the technologically sponsored increases in productivity that fuels the churning imperatives of endless growth.
Senator Abetz 20/04/2011
Dear Sir,
thankyou for replying to my email. I very much appreciate your personal response, particularly as I am not one of your constituents. It is a courtesy I rarely encounter in my dealings with busy people.
It is not surprising that I disagree with many of your observations.
I would first take issue with your suggestion that my character is in some way impugned and my arguments concerning climate change compromised by my suggestion that political parties are capable of cynicism in their political strategies.
Leaving aside the dubious logic of this contention, the polls would suggest that my admittedly rather jaundiced perception, is one that is shared by the vast majority of Australians. This presumably reflects poorly on the national character rather than the political system that serves it.
Of course, I imagine that you would maintain that whilst political virtue is the prerogative of the Liberal party, such Machiavellian opportunism is commonplace in the simmering cauldrons of the Labour party and its horned, bastard offspring, the Greens.
However, I admit that you may be correct in ascribing my accusation of obstructionism to a damaged political psyche. I have spent a considerable percentage of my adult life as an active participant in my community and since I was a student I have been putting my hand up for one thing or another. Anti war movements, environment groups, civil defence service, industry bodies, LandCare and school councils have accounted for a significant slice of my life. Whilst this career as a community activist has been rewarding in many ways, it has also left me disillusioned with our political institutions and deeply cynical about those who administer them.
Wherever such community groups rub up against politicians or senior beaurocrats the experience is all too often an unsavoury display of condescending spin, obfuscation and, on occasion, blatant dishonesty. The most ubiquitous and humiliating aspect of such interactions is, I find, the compulsion of the political culture to dispense endless platitudes; like treats to small children.
I understand that platitude is the stock in trade of a politician in a democratic polity, but the inescapable irony is that few things are more corrosive of the inclination for broad participation in the democratic process. I am sick of seeing the goodwill of communities squandered as sacrifice on the alters of ego, ambition and ideology, to those in positions of power. These are generalisations and are not intended to embrace any person in particular. I am simply emphasising the obvious reality that our political system and a media dedicated to the lowest common denominator, does not reward candour, complexity, or bipartisanship.
Of course, one does not have to be a volunteer to become disillusioned with our political culture. All that is required is to suffer the daily humiliation of the news cycle where the media conspire with politicians to patronise the electorate with endlessly repeated slogans, contrived antagonism and “debate” of mind-numbing banality. If you treat children like idiots, they will eventually behave as such. Is this the intention?
Your observations regarding my email are a case in point. In response to my critique of some of the fundamental assumptions underpinning our economy viz a viz carbon emissions, you failed to address in any way the substance of my correspondence, instead choosing to trot out the same tired mantras that I might expect from a door stop interview.
Despite the lateness of the hour, I feel compelled to rebut your arguments; just for the record.
Your first justification for the Coalition’s opposition to a price on carbon is that Gillard lied to the electorate and must be held to account. I do have some sympathy for this perspective. However, even if you take the view that the Prime Minister made a grossly disingenuous and stupid statement prior to the last election and should be held to account, what has that got to do with the validity of the policy in question? If putting a price on carbon is sound policy, a view held by the Liberal Party until the “assassination” of Malcolm Turnbull, why deny it to the Australian people, simply because of Gillard’s stupidity. Perhaps Tony Abbot found biblical inspiration for his policy of obstruction, for he is a jealous leader, punishing the children for the sin of the mother to the third and forth generation. (cf. Exodus 20.5)
I entirely agree with you that “integrity is an issue which is of vital importance for the well-being of our democracy.” However, I suggest that your moral high ground is a little unstable under foot. I would remind you of some of the perfidy of past Coalition Governments: there was the never, ever GST, the no intention to privatise Telstra, there was the betrayal of the armed services during the “children overboard” debacle, the manipulated intelligence that took our children to Iraq, the dock-land conspiracies, the nonexistent letter from South Vietnam etc etc etc. But of course those deceptions were different, weren’t they? Oh, I almost forgot my favourite: Tony Abbot’s classic, “Oh, that bishop.”
Yes, I entirely agree that integrity is a vital ingredient in a democratic system.
Your next argument is slightly more cogent but largely irrelevant and rather hypercritical. I tend to agree that the tax as currently proposed is so insipid that it is unlikely to achieve its policy objectives, meager as they are. Of course its weakness is entirely due to the lack of support from the Opposition. Given the gravity of the situation, a bi-partisan policy to replace the GST with a broad based consumption tax, based on a price for carbon, could have started the ball rolling with a revenue neutral impost until a CTS could be implemented to compliment the removal of the carbon subsidies.
Your point about zinc smelting is quite bizarre. Even if we accept your figures regarding the relative emissions from Australian and Chinese smelters, there is no logic to your argument as stated. Australia smelts approx. half a million tonnes of zinc per year. You assert that our emissions are 2 tonnes of CO / tonne of zinc, thus yielding one million tonnes of CO2 per year. Given that the current price of zinc is approaching $A2400 /tonne ( up from $US1500 in 2009) the proposed carbon price of $20/ tonne is hardly likely to destroy our markets; particularly if taxes like payroll were proportionately reduced, as has been done by many European countries. I suggest that variables like the $A, extreme weather events, interest rates, labour costs, transport costs, infrastructure limitations and fluctuating demand are far more relevant to profitability.
There also remains the question as to what the price of zinc has to do with the effectiveness of a price on carbon with respect to Australia’s over-all carbon emissions, given that zinc smelting accounts for one million out of 400 million tonnes of emissions annually; a figure that places us 16th in the world in absolute terms, and the number one emitter per capita.
Oddly, you barely mentioned the only argument against a carbon price that potentially has some validity. The abject failure of Copenhagen to make significant progress towards a global price does raise a broader question about the wisdom of Australia taking a leadership role by unilaterally pricing carbon. On balance, my answer to this question is that we should indeed provide leadership.
My conclusion is informed by the following points:
· Whilst it is true that in absolute terms, Australia’s emission are small, the real value in our taking a leadership role is technological and symbolic. In fact we do not really run much of a risk of being courageous, because we are a long way behind many other countries in the mitigation of emissions, which always entails an initial cost burden.
· Australia is an affluent society; at least it gives every appearance of being so. In reality it may well be insolvent because our rather extravagant standard of living has been funded from capital rather than sustainable income. The obvious example of this is the exploitation of our mineral assets, which are clearly finite. Of more significance has been our consumption of our ecological assets, which we have done more ruthlessly than any other continent. Ecologically, we have been living beyond our means for a long time. Our ecological tab is rapidly growing beyond reasonable expectations of our ability to repay it. The sooner we begin the attempt to do so the better.
· Our conspicuous consumption has not only been subsidised by our own environment, but by that of the rest of the world as well. It is our economic activity, along with the rest of the western industrial nations that is responsible for emitting most of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere, not China or India. It is therefore entirely reasonable that we should take a lead in changing the way we do business. It is entirely unreasonable that we should decline to put a price on our extravagant emissions until countries attempting to claw their way out of poverty do so.
The financial incentives that result from the removal of the carbon subsidies may be expected to motivate the market to develop new technologies that can subsequently be used by developing countries to avoid the really dirty stage of their development, that characterised the “West’s” industrialisation over the last hundred and fifty years. As we share a common destiny with the rest of world, the environmental return on this investment is thus maximised. Should you be concerned lest this might be seen as benevolence; I suggest that it can easily be rationalised as enlightened self interest.
· If we continue to deny the problem and proceed with business as usual, we will fall further and further behind in the technology of the brave new world that is rapidly approaching, whether we like it or not.
· Australia was not afraid to take a leadership role in the deregulation of international trade in the 1980’s. We unilaterally dismantled subsidies and trade barriers at great initial cost to both primary and secondary industries and despite the recalcitrance of our competitors. We did this with largely bipartisan commitment in the face of strident opposition from many vested interests. If then, why not now, when so much more is at stake?
· So finally we come to the Coalition’s alternative policy. Can you explain why you have adopted a policy that is an implicit rejection of every principle of market economics that the Liberal Party has been extolling since its inception? Why would you abandon the market in favour of government spending taxpayer’s money to pick winners and losers in technological innovation; something that even the Labour Party would acknowledge governments do very poorly? Certainly throwing money at the CSIRO may pay some dividends, but that would put a lot of eggs in one basket. Surely you are not actually contemplating funding universities more generously.
The overwhelming balance of economic commentator opinion (for what that is worth), designates this ill defined policy as having very poor cost effectiveness compared with the market based options.
Are you sure that the main attraction of this rather nebulous and expensive policy is not simply that it is different from Labour’s and, more importantly, Malcolm Turnbull’s? But there I go, being cynical again.
Yours sincerely,
Tony Dickson.
Dear Ms Westacott
7/06/13
I have just listened to a pod cast of your Cranlana lecture on economic growth and despite the late hour feel compelled to convey my response.
I must say that I found very little in its reasoning to disagree with; but then it was largely a statement of the bleeding obvious, served with a generous drizzle of hubris and a side serving of motherhood statements, as you explicitly acknowledged.
You have crafted a polished policy statement that few could take exception to; unless of course one happened to disagree with the assumptions underpinning the entire edifice of your thesis.
Before I proceed, let me forestall the preconceptions that inevitably attach to someone expressing the views I am about to.
I am not a devotee of the Greens, nor a lefty academic, but a sixty year old farmer, business operator and advocate for the concept of a free enterprise economy (cf capitalism). I am an executive member of the Australian Forest Growers in SA and a delegate to their national policy forum. I have been an active participant in the LandCare movement and various industry bodies.
The point at which we parted company was when you supported the idea that the environment should be accounted for on the national balance sheet and in the cost of production. It is not that I disagree with this; indeed I have been proselytising this concept for over forty years. My problem is the glibness with which you mentioned this seminal notion and then moved on with your apologia for continuing economic growth. In reality, actually costing the damage inflicted on the biosphere by our economic activity would stop economic growth in its tracks.
It is your obvious genuine concern for environmental values that highlights the extent of the problems that the world faces. The reality, as articulated by the scientific community, is that we are facing an imminent ecological catastrophe. Whether economists remain wilfully ignorant of the data supporting this prospect or, like the vast majority of people, simply take refuge in the reassuring embrace of cognitive dissonance, their refusal to acknowledge the real world is indefensible.
Lord May, former chief scientist of the UK recently described contemporary economics as a “faith based discipline”.
I should add that as a student of the writings of Adam Smith, I understand the importance of economic growth in supporting the welfare of the broader population. Smith, in his analysis of labour, makes this clear. However, his understanding was informed by the background of an economic and political environment that profoundly disenfranchised the bulk of the population. Only where economic growth was reliably vigorous was the demand for labour sufficient to minimise cruel exploitation by those holding the economic and political strings. It remains to be seen whether we have actually evolved a genuine democratic society that is robust enough to support a different economic paradigm, or whether economic stasis would prompt a regression to the inequities of several centuries ago. We cannot avoid this test. Our only choice is whether we respond to it in a manageable way, or have it thrust upon us.
I also refer you to the work of Graham Turner and his team at the CSIRO in their re-evaluation of “The Limits to Growth”.
Kind regards,
Tony Dickson.
Dear Mr Dickson
Thank you for taking the time to listen to my Cranlana speech and for your comments and the other materials, which I will read with interest.
As I said in the speech, the Business Council of Australia is developing a long-term vision for achieving enduring prosperity for all Australians based on well-managed economic growth. We will recommend some of the policy settings needed to deliver it, and metrics that go to both the achievement of economic growth itself but also to the features of enduring prosperity we expect growth to deliver and on which the vision is founded.
Our members decided to develop the vision in the context of our 30th anniversary year in part because of community concerns that Australia is not sufficiently preparing for the future.
When I delivered the Cranlana speech back in October, the project was in its infancy and I tried to cover all of our early thinking in a short 20 minutes. As a consequence, I understand how it may appear that I glossed over serious challenges, including around the valuing of Australia’s environmental assets. This does not reflect my approach to what I recognise as complex issues.
As a member-based organisation, we come at these issues from a business perspective. But we will be consulting widely on the vision through the year and I value the input you have provided through this correspondence.
Thanks and regards
Jennifer A. Westacott
Chief Executive
Business Council of Australia
Level 42, 120 Collins Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
The Business Council of Australia works to achieve economic, social and environmental goals that will benefit Australians now and into the future. Our vision is to help make Australia the best place in the world in which to live, learn, work and do business.
Dear Ms. Westacott,
I was more than a little disappointed with your interview on Radio National this morning. As usual, your reasoning was unassailable. However, it proceeded on a set of assumptions that may be described as being, at best, highly contestable and at worst, absurd.
The topic under scrutiny was the BCA prescription for the provision of increasing living standards for Australians. In promoting this prescription, I was intrigued to note, you freely borrowed terminology from the environmental movement. Words like "environment" (economic) and "sustainable" were juxtaposed with "increasing economic growth" with unctuous ease - and presumably without a blush (this was radio after-all). No doubt, this was an artful use of language.
As six months have well passed since you undertook to read my polemic about economic growth, I must assume that you have actually read it. Proceeding on that assumption, I am sure you would agree that its core argument is a very simple one indeed; essentially one of basic arithmetic. The contention is so fundamental that the intellectual and ethical challenge really allows no obfuscation; either it is patently without merit, in which case it is a simple matter to refute it, or its implications must be accounted for. My challenge is not just that sustainable economic growth is an oxymoron, but that the question as to such a possibility be addressed in an open and honest public debate, which embraces data from real scientists rather than just economic theology. Your performance today demonstrated that the BCA is not prepared to meet that challenge and consequently lacks both intellectual and ethical credibility.
The ostensible rationale you propose for maximising economic growth is the need/desire for increasing the living standards of Australians. Given that you have elsewhere acknowledged the fragile ecological health of the biosphere and have explicitly called for environmental accounting, such a rationale demands reflection.
Why do Australians need to increase their already very high levels of affluence? Certainly, ever growing consumption is the orthodox cure for the unemployment created by greater productivity, but that is a means to an end. Why, philosophically, should increasing consumption be considered an end in itself.
I do not for a moment deny that there are pockets of real poverty in this country. There are growing numbers of people who fall through the cracks of our welfare system. The mentally ill, the victims of addiction, abuse and bad luck, all too often find themselves homeless and even hungry. However, such people are a small minority, disenfranchised from the economic system that you envisage. Their poverty is absolute, not relative. They will not benefit from the growth you seek.
Of more significance is the relative poverty which ensnares a much greater proportion of the population: the welfare recipients, under employed and under paid.
It is salient to consider the circumstances of such disadvantaged people in an historical context.
A welfare recipient living in modest public housing, by most measures of well being, has a higher standard of living than the most privileged aristocrat of three hundred years ago. The rental house is likely to be warmer in winter, cooler in summer, have better plumbing and more comfortable furniture. Its inhabitants will be healthier, live longer, be better educated, better entertained, eat better and more varied food, be more mobile and feel more secure.
The irony is that whilst the aristocrat no doubt felt sanguine in his superior position, the pensioner is very likely to resent being at the bottom of the economic heap. What is arguable is that in so many material ways, we have already achieved our Utopia; we are just too stupid and greedy and competitive to realise it. It is very likely that this same greed and stupidity will turn this Utopia to dust before our eyes - literally.
And then where will the children play.
I have been in business for thirty-five years. Perhaps it is the fact that my business is farming that I am more aware than most that the size of such an enterprise on a given bit of dirt is limited by its carrying capacity. I am also aware that the health of the biosphere predicates all other issues; particularly our narcissistic ambitions. This is called reality and we ignore it at our peril.
Regards,
Tony Dickson.
Privatising the ABC: A Very Dangerous Idea Indeed. 14/6/13
I am a farmer and small business operator; as was my father and his father. My great grandfather captained his own brigantine, chasing cargoes around the world. Thus it is not surprising that I am a staunch supporter of the philosophy of free enterprise. I am also a student and admirer of Adam Smith and those other Scottish dons who created an intellectual hub of the Enlightenment in Edinburgh and Glasgow. These brave souls challenged the orthodoxies of the time, taking on the conservative oligarchy of a remnant feudalism with ideas of empiricism and reason, representative government, individual freedom and ambition.
My battered old Oxford defines Left Wing as: “progressive, radical”… and “more advanced or innovative section of any group”. The “Right”, is simply defined as “conservative”. The broad definition of "conservative" remains, averse to change or innovation.
So I suppose that I would have to call myself a child of the Left.
The ABC is bound by its charter to reflect and promote the attributes and values of a liberal democratic society and consequently can hardly avoid a Leftwing bias.
Commercial media by contrast, is bound by economic imperatives to promote the interests and culture of global capitalism; a culture profoundly at odds with the philosophies of Smith, Hume and Mill, while disturbingly resonant of the narrow power structures of the past. [1]
The commercial media in this country may be free of government control, but it is, by definition, overtly political in every aspect of its hegemony over the lives, aspirations and values of its audience.
There is no question that Australia is a procedural democracy. Its government is elected by a universally enfranchised citizenry; it has a free press, freedom of association, and an independent judiciary. However, to achieve the status of being a substantive democracy, I would argue that a little more is required.
I suggest that a democracy is only as good as the quality of political debate within its institutions and among its citizens, which is in turn dependent upon the quality and quantity of information available to nourish that debate.
The problem in ostensibly democratic societies like Australia is that, for a variety of reasons, the media is dominated by large corporations whose clients are mostly, other large corporations. This inevitably creates a confluence of interest that does nothing to nurture diversity of opinion and debate. Such a situation diminishes the contrasts with more autocratic societies. The potential for these powerful interests to control the flow of information and sway public opinion is immense.
This influence may actively promote anxiety and prejudice or passively suppress important debate, but the reality is that there are strong commercial reasons for tailoring their offerings to the largest market; i.e. the lowest common denominator.
“Keep them scared. Keep them stupid. Keep them spending.” This has proved to be a very successful business plan for the media industry here and elsewhere.
Its lack of intellectual/conceptual framework, has made fascism notoriously difficult to define, but the relationship between government and business interests is a common factor to most attempts.
Adam Smith warned in the Wealth of Nations that a government dominated by mercantile interests was “the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever”.
A more contemporary and specific definition of fascism was articulated in a message to Congress by Franklin D. Roosevelt, on April 29th, 1938.
“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
Why do the words, “News Limited” spring to mind at this point?
The most important role for the ABC is to provide a counterpoint to an almost universally Rightwing commercial media. The best way to eliminate that counterpoint is to privatise our favourite Auntie.
Tony Dickson.
[1] The revolt of the American colonies was in so many ways a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, as much as it was of the salons of Paris. Its catalyst was an instinctive revolt against the corrupt corporate power of the British East India Company and resulted in the clear distinction made between corporate and natural citizens in the US Constitution. This distinction lasted for almost a hundred years before finally succumbing to the growing power of the railway companies after the Civil War; thus making the War of Independence, arguably, the most successful Leftwing revolution in history. That distinction has now largely been reversed, giving rise to a virulent corporate culture that threatens the very essence of US democracy. If only the “Tea Party’s” constituency understood their own history.
I am a farmer and small business operator; as was my father and his father. My great grandfather captained his own brigantine, chasing cargoes around the world. Thus it is not surprising that I am a staunch supporter of the philosophy of free enterprise. I am also a student and admirer of Adam Smith and those other Scottish dons who created an intellectual hub of the Enlightenment in Edinburgh and Glasgow. These brave souls challenged the orthodoxies of the time, taking on the conservative oligarchy of a remnant feudalism with ideas of empiricism and reason, representative government, individual freedom and ambition.
My battered old Oxford defines Left Wing as: “progressive, radical”… and “more advanced or innovative section of any group”. The “Right”, is simply defined as “conservative”. The broad definition of "conservative" remains, averse to change or innovation.
So I suppose that I would have to call myself a child of the Left.
The ABC is bound by its charter to reflect and promote the attributes and values of a liberal democratic society and consequently can hardly avoid a Leftwing bias.
Commercial media by contrast, is bound by economic imperatives to promote the interests and culture of global capitalism; a culture profoundly at odds with the philosophies of Smith, Hume and Mill, while disturbingly resonant of the narrow power structures of the past. [1]
The commercial media in this country may be free of government control, but it is, by definition, overtly political in every aspect of its hegemony over the lives, aspirations and values of its audience.
There is no question that Australia is a procedural democracy. Its government is elected by a universally enfranchised citizenry; it has a free press, freedom of association, and an independent judiciary. However, to achieve the status of being a substantive democracy, I would argue that a little more is required.
I suggest that a democracy is only as good as the quality of political debate within its institutions and among its citizens, which is in turn dependent upon the quality and quantity of information available to nourish that debate.
The problem in ostensibly democratic societies like Australia is that, for a variety of reasons, the media is dominated by large corporations whose clients are mostly, other large corporations. This inevitably creates a confluence of interest that does nothing to nurture diversity of opinion and debate. Such a situation diminishes the contrasts with more autocratic societies. The potential for these powerful interests to control the flow of information and sway public opinion is immense.
This influence may actively promote anxiety and prejudice or passively suppress important debate, but the reality is that there are strong commercial reasons for tailoring their offerings to the largest market; i.e. the lowest common denominator.
“Keep them scared. Keep them stupid. Keep them spending.” This has proved to be a very successful business plan for the media industry here and elsewhere.
Its lack of intellectual/conceptual framework, has made fascism notoriously difficult to define, but the relationship between government and business interests is a common factor to most attempts.
Adam Smith warned in the Wealth of Nations that a government dominated by mercantile interests was “the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever”.
A more contemporary and specific definition of fascism was articulated in a message to Congress by Franklin D. Roosevelt, on April 29th, 1938.
“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
Why do the words, “News Limited” spring to mind at this point?
The most important role for the ABC is to provide a counterpoint to an almost universally Rightwing commercial media. The best way to eliminate that counterpoint is to privatise our favourite Auntie.
Tony Dickson.
[1] The revolt of the American colonies was in so many ways a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, as much as it was of the salons of Paris. Its catalyst was an instinctive revolt against the corrupt corporate power of the British East India Company and resulted in the clear distinction made between corporate and natural citizens in the US Constitution. This distinction lasted for almost a hundred years before finally succumbing to the growing power of the railway companies after the Civil War; thus making the War of Independence, arguably, the most successful Leftwing revolution in history. That distinction has now largely been reversed, giving rise to a virulent corporate culture that threatens the very essence of US democracy. If only the “Tea Party’s” constituency understood their own history.
The Hon. Jamie Briggs.
August 2013
Dear Jamie,
I am a sixty year old farmer and retailer. I have been in business for most of my life and am a strong advocate for a free enterprise economic system. Consequently, I am a little confused by your election campaign newsletter which seems to contradict some of Tony Abbott's recent statements.
For example, you rightly call for the reduction of red tape which so constrains business operations. However, Tony is again criticising the first Rudd government for not sufficiently regulating the insulation industry in order to pre-empt the irresponsibility of some shonky operators and the subsequent unfortunate consequences. Sometimes I wonder if he is the right man for the job. We used to call people like him “wets”. I’m with you on this one. When I was working on building sites in my youth, it was accepted that they were dangerous places, so it was up to us to keep our wits about us. As Lang Hancock used to say, “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” and Gina’s dad certainly knew what he was about.
However, it is of concern that you are opposed to a market based mechanism for incentivising carbon emission reductions; but presumably embrace "direct action", an expensive and cumbersome regulatory system which requires Government to pick market winners among high tech widget manufacturers, USING TAX PAYERS MONEY! There is a huge amount of evidence that Governments are very poor at making such market based judgements. This smacks of socialism and is not what I expect of the party I grew up associating with business, hard work and self interest.
But why is the Coalition making such concessions to the lunatic greenies anyway? Taking climate change seriously is very risky. It is a tacit acknowledgement that the environment is an important public asset that should be accounted for like any other. This sets a dangerous precedent. I am concerned that if attributing economic value to such assets is accepted, then exploiting them may be seen as a subsidy to those business entities profiting from such exploitation. This would be difficult to justify, as it is central to conservative politics that subsidies represent a corruption of market economics. I seriously question the wisdom of such concessions, as I believe it will create real policy dilemmas for us going forward.
We must contest the nonsense of climate change at every opportunity. Whilst I acknowledge the good work done by the Coalition generally, with much help from the media, in confusing the issue for as long as they have, I believe that it is a mistake to start giving ground at this late stage. To do so puts us on a slippery slope to socialism. It is my firm conviction that to acknowledge the weight of scientific data would create grave ideological difficulties, not just for conservative politics, but for all those attributes of our culture that we hold dear. Consider the political implications of having to deny the accusations that global capitalism was not only responsible for a seemingly unavoidable ecological catastrophe, but that it was beyond effective regulation by sovereign states. These are the stakes we are playing for.
It is even worse when one considers what might happen if the lefties start manufacturing a perception that we have been complicit in suppressing the science by using the same tactics as were used by the tobacco and asbestos industries. That wasn't a good look, you must admit. We certainly don't want a repeat of that sort of debacle.
I can only reiterate that we must hold the line we have committed to. My heroes are the Koch brothers. They are indefatigable in their opposition to the threat to capital, posed by left-wing environmental concerns and will stop at nothing to defend the rights of those of us who have worked so hard to acquire what we have.
In closing, I would like to again endorse coalition policy on border protection. It has never been more important to protect ourselves from this insidious invasion of undesirables, who threaten our sovereignty, culture and decent Australian values. We must be prepared to do whatever it takes to seal our vulnerable coasts from these hordes. This is of particular and growing importance as the Pentagon has warned that, in the near future, resource scarcity, increasing natural disasters and threats to global food production are almost certain to create widespread conflict and displacement of many millions of people. We must be prepared to defend our shores against, not just thousands, but many hundreds of thousands of opportunistic economic refugees and we must be prepared to be much less squeamish about how we do so. It is fortunate that current policy trends are once again very nearly bipartisan. The demonising of these people, together with expressions of humanitarian concern, must be consistent and continue seamlessly upon a change of government. This is vital in a country like Australia, which prides itself on its generosity and long tradition of a fair go. The electorate expects nothing less.
If we are to remain a decent, democratic, Christian country, we must resist those who would sentimentalise the circumstances of these illegal invaders.
I wish you all the best in the forthcoming election and with your very promising career in a great and honourable party.
Regards,
Tony Dickson.
August 2013
Dear Jamie,
I am a sixty year old farmer and retailer. I have been in business for most of my life and am a strong advocate for a free enterprise economic system. Consequently, I am a little confused by your election campaign newsletter which seems to contradict some of Tony Abbott's recent statements.
For example, you rightly call for the reduction of red tape which so constrains business operations. However, Tony is again criticising the first Rudd government for not sufficiently regulating the insulation industry in order to pre-empt the irresponsibility of some shonky operators and the subsequent unfortunate consequences. Sometimes I wonder if he is the right man for the job. We used to call people like him “wets”. I’m with you on this one. When I was working on building sites in my youth, it was accepted that they were dangerous places, so it was up to us to keep our wits about us. As Lang Hancock used to say, “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” and Gina’s dad certainly knew what he was about.
However, it is of concern that you are opposed to a market based mechanism for incentivising carbon emission reductions; but presumably embrace "direct action", an expensive and cumbersome regulatory system which requires Government to pick market winners among high tech widget manufacturers, USING TAX PAYERS MONEY! There is a huge amount of evidence that Governments are very poor at making such market based judgements. This smacks of socialism and is not what I expect of the party I grew up associating with business, hard work and self interest.
But why is the Coalition making such concessions to the lunatic greenies anyway? Taking climate change seriously is very risky. It is a tacit acknowledgement that the environment is an important public asset that should be accounted for like any other. This sets a dangerous precedent. I am concerned that if attributing economic value to such assets is accepted, then exploiting them may be seen as a subsidy to those business entities profiting from such exploitation. This would be difficult to justify, as it is central to conservative politics that subsidies represent a corruption of market economics. I seriously question the wisdom of such concessions, as I believe it will create real policy dilemmas for us going forward.
We must contest the nonsense of climate change at every opportunity. Whilst I acknowledge the good work done by the Coalition generally, with much help from the media, in confusing the issue for as long as they have, I believe that it is a mistake to start giving ground at this late stage. To do so puts us on a slippery slope to socialism. It is my firm conviction that to acknowledge the weight of scientific data would create grave ideological difficulties, not just for conservative politics, but for all those attributes of our culture that we hold dear. Consider the political implications of having to deny the accusations that global capitalism was not only responsible for a seemingly unavoidable ecological catastrophe, but that it was beyond effective regulation by sovereign states. These are the stakes we are playing for.
It is even worse when one considers what might happen if the lefties start manufacturing a perception that we have been complicit in suppressing the science by using the same tactics as were used by the tobacco and asbestos industries. That wasn't a good look, you must admit. We certainly don't want a repeat of that sort of debacle.
I can only reiterate that we must hold the line we have committed to. My heroes are the Koch brothers. They are indefatigable in their opposition to the threat to capital, posed by left-wing environmental concerns and will stop at nothing to defend the rights of those of us who have worked so hard to acquire what we have.
In closing, I would like to again endorse coalition policy on border protection. It has never been more important to protect ourselves from this insidious invasion of undesirables, who threaten our sovereignty, culture and decent Australian values. We must be prepared to do whatever it takes to seal our vulnerable coasts from these hordes. This is of particular and growing importance as the Pentagon has warned that, in the near future, resource scarcity, increasing natural disasters and threats to global food production are almost certain to create widespread conflict and displacement of many millions of people. We must be prepared to defend our shores against, not just thousands, but many hundreds of thousands of opportunistic economic refugees and we must be prepared to be much less squeamish about how we do so. It is fortunate that current policy trends are once again very nearly bipartisan. The demonising of these people, together with expressions of humanitarian concern, must be consistent and continue seamlessly upon a change of government. This is vital in a country like Australia, which prides itself on its generosity and long tradition of a fair go. The electorate expects nothing less.
If we are to remain a decent, democratic, Christian country, we must resist those who would sentimentalise the circumstances of these illegal invaders.
I wish you all the best in the forthcoming election and with your very promising career in a great and honourable party.
Regards,
Tony Dickson.
The Oxford Dictionary
1/9/13
To whom it may concern,
I have been using my Concise Oxford for many years. Having been given a more recent edition, I noticed some changes which cause me some concern.
For many years I have been fighting a losing semantic battle with the forces of reaction, as the English speaking world staggers erratically to the Right side of the political spectrum.
My battle ground is nothing less than the identity of the Left. My battered old Oxford defines Left Wing as:“progressive, radical”… and “more advanced or innovative section of any group”. The “Right”, is simply defined as “conservative”. The broad definition of "conservative" remains, averse to change or innovation.
I have noticed that the current definition includes an association with socialism. Such a connection is indisputable because it is certainly correct that socialism was a concept created by the Left. However, I suggest that common misapprehensions notwithstanding, such an association should not be an intrinsic part of the Left's definition, unless such definition also embraces such cultural innovations as: empiricism, market economics, participatory democracy, the idea of universal human rights, education and health care and more recently, environmental accounting.
I suggest that history rather unambiguously supports the assertion that it is axiomatic that most, if not all innovations promoting liberal democratic societies, are creations of the Left.
The Left is both a cause and an effect of the Renaissance and subsequently the Enlightenment. The Anglophone world was particularly influenced by the singularly surprising phenomenon of the Scottish Enlightenment, the intellectual movement that spawned so much of what we take for granted as the foundations for liberal democratic societies. Adam Smith in particular saw the benefits of unleashing the potential of individual ambition and creativity in a market place free from the heavy hand of political orchestration.
The liberalism of the Scottish Enlightenment is a paradigm of Leftwing politics. How could Smith and Hume’s radicalism be anything else than Left Wing? They were not motivated by the desire to entrench the privileges of an elite. Just the opposite is true. They envisaged an open society of broad opportunity. They were not attempting to justify the status quo, but proposed dramatic watersheds in assumptions and thinking.
The creativity of the left has led to some disappointing results. Utopian socialist economic theories led, via Marxism, to totalitarian communism; and Smith's vision of a free market economy has led to the nascent threat of fascism via global capitalism.
Like virtually all popular revolutions, the Russian Revolution was, by definition, Left Wing.
However, after the Bolshevik coup and certainly by the time Joe Stalin stole the show, it is hard to fit the USSR into any definition of “Left Wing”. The revolution had gone the way of many before: autocratic tyranny. Such regimes are invariably characterised by fear and suspicion, of and by the dictator(s), who must exert centralised control. This fear and suspicion infects the entire culture of the state and serves to paralyse incentive and innovation. Such regimes tend to be intensely conservative.
The Soviet Union differed from the standard totalitarianism that litters human history, in that it was wrapped, not just in mystery and enigma, but also in the dogma of a secular religion. Heresy was usually fatal. It was, to all intents and purposes, a theocracy, probably the most conservative form of government yet devised. That is the very type of government that led, via the Reformation and Renaissance, to the theories of Adam Smith. In this regard, the USSR (and subsequently other communist states) had more in common with the Holy Roman Empire than any contemporary state, with the obvious exception of Nazi Germany.
Whilst the USSR, through huge sacrifice by its people, did achieve some astounding collective enterprises and innovations, by most measures, it was a very conservative and thus Right Wing society.
It is simply fatuous to define the Left only in terms of socialism.
History strongly supports the contention that new ideas and innovation are the defining feature of the Left and it is perverse to attribute to the Left, the negative consequences which result when those ideas have atrophied into ideology. The point at which an idea becomes an "ism", constrained by dogma and orthodoxy, is the point at which progressive becomes conservative and Left becomes Right.
I understand that language must always be a work in progress and adapt to common usage. However, I suggest that embracing vernacular changes to words like "cool" or "awesome" have few profound social or political consequences, compared to the corrupted history and meaning resulting from redefining concepts like Left Wing. To acquiesce to popular misconceptions about such important ideas is dangerous. I do not object to your inclusion of socialism in your definition; it is entirely appropriate. However, I recommend that in addition to the association with socialism, your definition be expanded to include a more representative sample of the Left's achievements. To do so would not only serve your presumed ambition to intellectual rigor, but also aid the preservation of our increasingly fragile notions of democracy.
Kind regards,
Tony Dickson.
1/9/13
To whom it may concern,
I have been using my Concise Oxford for many years. Having been given a more recent edition, I noticed some changes which cause me some concern.
For many years I have been fighting a losing semantic battle with the forces of reaction, as the English speaking world staggers erratically to the Right side of the political spectrum.
My battle ground is nothing less than the identity of the Left. My battered old Oxford defines Left Wing as:“progressive, radical”… and “more advanced or innovative section of any group”. The “Right”, is simply defined as “conservative”. The broad definition of "conservative" remains, averse to change or innovation.
I have noticed that the current definition includes an association with socialism. Such a connection is indisputable because it is certainly correct that socialism was a concept created by the Left. However, I suggest that common misapprehensions notwithstanding, such an association should not be an intrinsic part of the Left's definition, unless such definition also embraces such cultural innovations as: empiricism, market economics, participatory democracy, the idea of universal human rights, education and health care and more recently, environmental accounting.
I suggest that history rather unambiguously supports the assertion that it is axiomatic that most, if not all innovations promoting liberal democratic societies, are creations of the Left.
The Left is both a cause and an effect of the Renaissance and subsequently the Enlightenment. The Anglophone world was particularly influenced by the singularly surprising phenomenon of the Scottish Enlightenment, the intellectual movement that spawned so much of what we take for granted as the foundations for liberal democratic societies. Adam Smith in particular saw the benefits of unleashing the potential of individual ambition and creativity in a market place free from the heavy hand of political orchestration.
The liberalism of the Scottish Enlightenment is a paradigm of Leftwing politics. How could Smith and Hume’s radicalism be anything else than Left Wing? They were not motivated by the desire to entrench the privileges of an elite. Just the opposite is true. They envisaged an open society of broad opportunity. They were not attempting to justify the status quo, but proposed dramatic watersheds in assumptions and thinking.
The creativity of the left has led to some disappointing results. Utopian socialist economic theories led, via Marxism, to totalitarian communism; and Smith's vision of a free market economy has led to the nascent threat of fascism via global capitalism.
Like virtually all popular revolutions, the Russian Revolution was, by definition, Left Wing.
However, after the Bolshevik coup and certainly by the time Joe Stalin stole the show, it is hard to fit the USSR into any definition of “Left Wing”. The revolution had gone the way of many before: autocratic tyranny. Such regimes are invariably characterised by fear and suspicion, of and by the dictator(s), who must exert centralised control. This fear and suspicion infects the entire culture of the state and serves to paralyse incentive and innovation. Such regimes tend to be intensely conservative.
The Soviet Union differed from the standard totalitarianism that litters human history, in that it was wrapped, not just in mystery and enigma, but also in the dogma of a secular religion. Heresy was usually fatal. It was, to all intents and purposes, a theocracy, probably the most conservative form of government yet devised. That is the very type of government that led, via the Reformation and Renaissance, to the theories of Adam Smith. In this regard, the USSR (and subsequently other communist states) had more in common with the Holy Roman Empire than any contemporary state, with the obvious exception of Nazi Germany.
Whilst the USSR, through huge sacrifice by its people, did achieve some astounding collective enterprises and innovations, by most measures, it was a very conservative and thus Right Wing society.
It is simply fatuous to define the Left only in terms of socialism.
History strongly supports the contention that new ideas and innovation are the defining feature of the Left and it is perverse to attribute to the Left, the negative consequences which result when those ideas have atrophied into ideology. The point at which an idea becomes an "ism", constrained by dogma and orthodoxy, is the point at which progressive becomes conservative and Left becomes Right.
I understand that language must always be a work in progress and adapt to common usage. However, I suggest that embracing vernacular changes to words like "cool" or "awesome" have few profound social or political consequences, compared to the corrupted history and meaning resulting from redefining concepts like Left Wing. To acquiesce to popular misconceptions about such important ideas is dangerous. I do not object to your inclusion of socialism in your definition; it is entirely appropriate. However, I recommend that in addition to the association with socialism, your definition be expanded to include a more representative sample of the Left's achievements. To do so would not only serve your presumed ambition to intellectual rigor, but also aid the preservation of our increasingly fragile notions of democracy.
Kind regards,
Tony Dickson.