In the last section of the book, entitled ‘Climate Change: The Urgent Challenge’, essays by Ian Lowe and Guy Pearse do begin to address growth, limits to growth or the particular modes of consumption and production of energy resources that lead to atmospheric and climate degradation. Yet even there, the particular sources of today’s unprecedented reconstitution of production together with its vast expansion of globalising processes are not directly related to climate change. The way of living that produces climate change is still taken to be another variant of the capitalist process. The possibility that this way of living may only be one aspect of a far more deep-seated transformation is not entertained.

Is the absence of a sufficiently developed theoretical framework that can begin to address the actual sources of the new found conjunction of the more abstracted technosciences with capital a source of this failure?

Is the challenge this presents to what we take to be the foundations of our being the actual source of the denial and passivity of our response to the prospect of environmental disaster?

The actual response to changing circumstances among the remaining contributors to this volume is a slewing away from any line of enquiry which considers more basic issues. Instead they offer a focus on the global financial crisis and the way in which the discrediting of ‘market fundamentalism’ and the excessive greed and individualism integral with the neo-liberal ideology opens the way for a return to a social democratic polity. Even given that redirection to the active regulation of capital, there is an astonishing absence of any explicit discussion of just how more favourable conditions for tackling climate change might prevail within a social democratic order. Perhaps one should assume that Manne, McKnight, Rudd or Quiggin simply take this for granted. As if in backhanded confirmation of his own ethical assumptions, Robert Manne deplores ‘the destructive role played by neo-liberalism in inhibiting an effective response to climate change’.

While the new post-capitalist conjunctionof capitalism with the technosciencesmay be seen as radically deepening a climate crisis, there is little reason to believe that a simple renewal of social democratic concern for the common good can provide an effective answer. This is by no means to dismiss the genuine significance of that concern. Rather it is to suggest that a social democratic polity is not, by itself, a likely source of the necessary level of resolve.

One main reason for that conclusion is that the history of the ethical resolve to democratically regulate capitalism ‘from within’ is one of failure. As a system it both out-produced and made its own limited ideological contribution to the self-destruction of the revolutionary socialist alternative. Social democracy, at least in its beginnings, was the parliamentary path to much the same concern for the common good as revolutionaries pursued: that of ending capitalism. Following the Great Depression of the 1930s, social democracy retained its name but changed its objective. The Keynesian answer to the capitalist cycle of growth and collapse was not to reject capitalism but to regulate it. Finally, the neo-liberal period of unprecedented growth produced the certitude that no further crisis could eventuate  open-ended growth and the prescriptions of supply-side economics were held to provide a final solution. Nevertheless the crash occurred and any effective answer must surely move beyond ‘more of the same’: a return to social democracy.

A democratic answer now may be slow in the making, but first and foremost it must generate a practical response that begins to move beyond the far too limited response of regulating capital. That practical engagement depends first of all upon renewed movement among those same intellectually related groupings who have been drawn into a conjunction with capital. Would anyone deny that their engagement and support has been a necessary condition for the surge of productivity and the individualist enchantments that have defined the recent period of neo-liberal ascendancy?

The practical movement to which I am referring is grounded in a relatively basic, as if spontaneously given, form of social interchange. It expresses a sensibility which begins to become more explicit in many contexts: in politics most readily seen in the Green movement. It is practical first of all in the sense that seemingly spontaneous acts are often experienced as if they do not have conscious intent. They appear to be grounded in a taken-for-granted sense of the relative permanence of our being in its relation to the natural world. That sense of permanence can readily feed into a rejection of changes that undermine our basic sense of being. It can begin to prompt an alternative to the mainstream impetus to half-blindly enter a process of transformation that introduces a break in the continuity of the human condition.

Given its intellectually related formation, the challenge to continuity presented by the technosciences can more readily ground a reflective awareness among those who more actively enter the practice of reconstitution: those same intellectually related groupings which, for the present, are in thrall to capitalist ‘growth’. Among them some begin to articulate a response that recognises that the significance of growth, of progress as well, if pursued blindly in the name of individualised freedom, begins to pass beyond the limits of what most people still take to be the relative permanence of the human condition. Set now within the conjunction of a capitalism and a relation to reality which breaks with these still prevailing assumptions of relative permanence, a reconstitutive practice can work towards a different order of being.

That particular sense of the natural order of being has been ‘contained’, as it were, even for millennia. Throughout the history of class societies the more abstracted powers of the intellectually related practices have elaborated interpretations of ultimate meanings which often legitimated domination by those whose privileges depend upon the labour of others.

Interpretation has been the primary activity of intellectuals; that is, until the intellectually related practices also began to play a major role in the reconstruction of labour as such. First, that is, in its rationalised mechanisation under industrial capitalism and then in the actuality of the transformational break mediated by the reconstitutive practices of the technosciences.

* * *

There is no space in this short comment to cover ground already traversed in earlier articles in Arena Magazine concerning the distinctive form of life of the intellectually related grouping. However, it is of some interest to note that, in some implicit register, the project of social democratic renewal may itself be displaying hints of a break from the limitations of its own commitment to capitalist continuity.

In their introduction to this volume, editors Manne and McKnight join Rudd and several other contributors in their over-endorsement of the role of ideas, of political ideologies especially, in the formation of social realities. The reconstitutive transformation we are facing now cuts deeper than ‘ideas’ alone can encompass. At least at the level of apprehension, Rudd himself suggests a certain discomfort with the strictures of the continuity which his own ideology imposes. Listen to the portentous ring of his opening passage as reprinted here, following its first publication in the recently declared social democratic organ The Monthly!

From time to time in human history there occur events of truly seismic significance, events that mark a turning point between one epoch and the next, when one orthodoxy is overthrown and another takes its place.

This is the language of discontinuity, not that of regulating yet one more convulsion within capitalism, or even one more reversion to well-intentioned attempts to reform or regulate it in the name of the common good.

So, by way of an endnote, are we actually saying Goodbye to All That?
The history of this title hardly encourages optimism.

Only a few among the present generation would recognise that these words previously served as the title chosen by the English poet Robert Graves as he worked towards personal regeneration following the immersion of his own generation in the slaughterhouse of World War I. At least in an historical sense it was a distinctly temporary departure. It was no more than an au revoir to All That. Maynard Keynes recognised that the Treaty of Versailles, which marked the end of the war, also sowed the seeds for the renewal of conflict in the conflagration which commenced in 1939.

That war ended in 1945 at Hiroshima in an event which, as mediated by intellectual practices, reconstituted war making. It replaced the mechanised conflict of armed men by deploying the product of a physics laboratory. Was it also of truly seismic significance—a ‘turning point between one epoch and the next’, of far more general significance than even this particular event of nuclear war could encompass? Was it a portent of a shift towards the possibility of a reconstituted reality? That is, a reality in which nuclear power is only conceivable as integral with that more abstracted mode of engagement typifying the intellectually practices.

The front cover of Goodbye to All That? symbolises the great financial crash of neo-liberal capitalism by depicting a jet aircraft standing on its nose while displaying only the slightest denting. It certainly looks as if it could fly again!

At least in the immediate sense nothing said about the limitations of this collection of essays should deflect recognition of the reality that no sudden break from post-capitalism is possible. The post-capitalist process has now so worked its way through every institution that even the institutions of intellectual formation have lost much of their once quasi-independent status. Drawn into the role of direct support to the powers, their instrumentally rational expression in the technosciences becomes the main source of a post-human trajectory. Within that trajectory climate change may be seen again as only one among its potential consequences for the human condition.

If ‘some rough beast now slouches towards Bethlehem’ its present course can be redirected. In a major degree that prospect depends on an enhanced understanding among the intellectually related groupings. Their distinctive and more abstracted mode of engagement with reality co-exists with their openness to that same spontaneous sense of erosion of their own basic humanity that affects their peers. For them, most radically, it also allows a critical reflection upon the present dominant trajectory. That power of reflection above all requires them to form a new and far more active constituency within a ‘social democracy’ which helps to draw its now shortsighted forerunner into the practice of actually constituting a more viable way of living. In their distinctiveness they must stand up more vigorously than ever before; in the name of an enlarged sense of the common good, they must break the bonds of dedicated service to the existing powers.

Pearson’s support — even given his reservations about the military intervention into Indigenous ways of living — was of crucial importance for John Howard’s last throw: the Intervention as a final desperate effort to gain yet another term in office. In that context Pearson repeated the ‘little children are sacred’ theme in the manner of a mantra. On that quite basic moral issue he was so clearly on protected ground that few were prepared to argue that concentrating on the wellbeing of children too exclusively was diverting attention from the overall situation.

In fact a major policy shift was underway. Any attempt to link back the way it was presented to the previous election when ‘they were throwing children overboard’ tended to fall upon deaf ears. Most people accepted that ‘something had to be done’ and, if a military type of intervention was ‘over-the-top’, any opposition to such extreme measures faced difficulties in proposing alternatives.

Justifiably and profoundly disturbed as they were by the evidence of violence and alcohol abuse in many communities, most people were in no position to pursue the issue of why evidence, which had so long been available, had been persistently brushed aside by the Coalition. They were in no position to demand answers as to why other forms of intervention into these disastrous circumstances had been so long deferred. The shock effect of military intervention and the focus on the wellbeing of children effectively diverted attention from the Coalition’s accompanying agenda of forcing Indigenous people towards ‘real jobs’ (as defined by the mainstream labour market), the winding down of outstations and linking of welfare payments to meeting particular standards of child care and education.

Even if the Coalition’s account of the sources of the breakdown should turn out to be both shallow and excessively concerned with the limitations of an approach that Peter Sutton, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide, has stereotyped ‘the liberal consensus’, a marked change in policy is already being set in place. A turn towards a new wave of assimilation advocacy is underway and support from Indigenous and academic figures will ensure that it makes a significant impact; it will surely take in a re-evaluation of recent policies and some of their assumptions. Some people are certain to conclude that the ‘good intentions’ of the liberal consensus have led to a vast overestimate of the capacity of Indigenous people to use welfare support in maintaining any integrity for their own cultures. From a distinctly different standpoint, others may suggest that Noel Pearson, perhaps understandably, and Peter Sutton, far less justifiably, demonstrate an almost total failure to inquire into whether other policies might have better contributed to Indigenous continuity. Beyond that, their failure to probe the issue of whether ‘real jobs’ within the mainstream of Australian life can actually offer better long-term prospects for Indigenous people is a striking omission. It leads one to ask whether the neo-assimilationist answer may not also be affected by major blind spots.

The mainstream politics of most settler-colonial nations are affected now by deep-seated divisions as to the policies which could steer a way into the future for Indigenous peoples. Peter Sutton acknowledges ‘that the kind of deep cultural changes that may assist a real move out of profound disadvantage are not well understood’. Good point, and scholars themselves may have a special responsibility to stand apart for a spell, and to look before they leap. Within the mainstream, the issue of climate change as a consequence of ‘the way we live now’ presses home the relatively short-term prospect of fundamental change. Surely that prospect alone calls for searching consideration of just what assimilation has to offer as an answer to ‘disadvantage’.

Unintended Consequences

Before returning to such questions I should first acknowledge — as a long standing, even if relatively passive, mainstream supporter of the liberal consensus — that Noel Pearson, and especially Peter Sutton, do present undeniable evidence of a downward spiral in the conditions of Indigenous life in a number of locations. Those who might have been inclined to deny the need for far-reaching policy change in the past are scarcely in a position to do so now.

Given insufficient attention at times as to how policy changes might have led to different outcomes, what conclusions do Pearson and Sutton draw from that? Few indeed, it would seem, which might contribute to a measure of continuity for Indigenous ways of living. Neither Pearson nor Sutton considers the conditions for continuity of Indigenous social forms. While Pearson does have hopes for the continuity of Indigenous values, Sutton has hopes for the prospects of soft and individually personalised assimilation, achieved by way of one-to-one contact, ‘atomically, not en masse’ and, one might add, entailing the further dissolution of Indigenous institutions. Nothing is said in Sutton’s book about the prospects for the actual economic and social arrangements of the mainstream. The hopes and the values of the hyper-individualised mode of life are at the forefront and nothing emerges concerning the modes of social interchange which might sustain some continuity for Indigenous ways. Can one still detect the footprint in Sutton’s approach of that same ‘liberal consensus’, as it adapts once again to changing circumstances?

Assimilation: An Unintended Consequence?

‘Where goes the money there goes the man’ (Pearson, Up from the Mission)

For Noel Pearson the military intervention created a brilliant context for the publication of his book Up from the Mission (Black Inc, 2009). It is a forceful and eloquent record of his changing hopes in response to changing circumstances. The book is marked by two main features in the way it frames the author’s unrelenting struggle to further the interests of his people. The first is the thesis that the reciprocal norms of Indigenous culture actually contribute to a spiral of communal degeneration. The welfare incomes, Pearson argues, that became available after the granting of citizenship, both installed the dispiriting effects of dependency and provided the means for the purchase of alcohol. Three key conditions — the cultural obligations of sharing, the dispiriting effects of dependency and the availability of alcohol — combined to feed a cycle of social breakdown.

Noel Pearson had first set out this thesis in 1986. For ten years, until the defeat of the Keating government, it remained in the shadow of his commitments to what Peter Sutton, in his just released book The Politics of Suffering, now disparages as the liberal consensus.

With the election of the Coalition, Pearson sought other means to advance the wellbeing of those with whom he passionately identifies. Gradually the radical centre, as the second feature of the way he frames his endeavours, emerged. He took it to provide new possibilities for advancing Indigenous interests within the existing democratic structure, and outlining its emergence is the major theoretical undertaking of his book.

Pearson presents it in a long essay entitled ‘White Guilt, Victimhood and the Quest for a Radical Centre’. In more everyday terms, the author is speaking of wedge politics, and along with that the need to intervene to restore a proper sense of an order in many Indigenous settings. One particular theme — ‘little children are sacred’ — provided a strikingly fertile point of entry into the field of political wedging.

Wedging occurs when any political party cuts into what had been taken to be the more or less solid constituency of its opposition, by urging action upon and appealing to values that its opponent cannot oppose. The appeal to ‘the battlers’ of the Labor constituency as a Coalition ‘wedge’ is one familiar example. Border protection supplemented by child protection also springs to mind. There, two wedges contributing to the same campaign operate: the child protection issue widened the split opened by border crossing in the case of the Tampa issue in 2001.

Noel Pearson’s search for a ‘radical centre’ had probably first been stirred in the early 1990s by Ron Castan (leading counsel in the Mabo case). As the Coalition moved into government Pearson felt forced to the conclusion ‘that Indigenous people couldn’t rely on one side of politics alone’. He actively sought out circumstances where, for instance as in land claims, the interests of different parties might be reconciled sufficiently to achieve a working agreement. In the new circumstances of Coalition government, especially after the winding back of access to native title following the Coalition’s passage of the Native Title Amendment Act, Pearson’s political orientation turned away from the Left, and indeed from the whole liberal consensus. Citizenship, native title: these rights had been achieved and for Noel Pearson the abiding concerns associated with that fatal cluster — alcohol, dependency and reciprocal obligations — again came to the fore. In the blazing statement ‘Our Right to take Responsibility’, he reasserted in 2000 his denunciation of ‘welfare poison’ as the source of dependency and sought the answer in ‘real jobs’ in the real economy of the mainstream. A passionate sense of loyalty to his people remained as a constant but, seemingly unaware of the hazards of his new course, the earlier meaning of ‘the radical centre’ had apparently drained away. It now entailed accommodations with the mining corporations. If these were a bridge it was no longer one of drawing on the common ground shared by the mainstream parties but upon the prospect of ‘real jobs’ for Indigenous people by seeking common ground with the big miners.

Sutton and Pearson: Unquestioned Assumptions

Indigenous culture, any culture, if it is to maintain a measure of continuity must hold firm to certain conditions of viability. The basic flaw in Pearson’s argument is that in seeking an accommodation now with the big miners he does not ask whether ‘real jobs’, in the mining industry especially, can provide the continuity that he has so ardently pursued. Within a far wider perspective than Noel Pearson presents in Up From the Mission, Peter Sutton actually throws doubt on that approach in The Politics of Suffering.

These two books both lend legitimacy to the military intervention; they both contribute to a massive shift in public opinion towards a neo-assimilationist trajectory. In the broadest terms both of them do so by far too readily jumping to conclusions about the policy failures of recent decades. Their reasons for moving towards the same assimilationist outcome differ, but both could find themselves alighting on the same platform. The immediate circumstance that steers them towards the same destination is that neither asks questions about the way the social forms of the mainstream society might affect the prospects for their markedly different expectations for cultural continuity. This omission stretches credulity in Sutton’s case. One imagines that as an anthropologist he will at least touch first base by way of an analysis of the mainstream society.

As I shall note later, this staring lacuna in his work and his reflections is not to be tied to any question of good faith. Rather, it would seem that unquestioned and individually centred assumptions about the relation of ideals to outcomes have eventually led to a profound disenchantment. He turns to assimilationist conclusions that he would have fervently rejected at an earlier time. Even given his rejection of the outcomes of the ‘fantasies’ of the ‘liberal consensus’, Sutton has a second coming within the terms of an even more individually centred commitment to humanist idealism. That is, to yet another twist in the history of a colonising process directed by ‘liberal’ practices, in the broadest sense of that word.

A general philosophical predisposition both blinds these authors to the limited prospects for any form of assimilation to the mainstream and appears to limit their grasp of Indigenous culture as well. Understandably in Pearson’s case, as one who grew up under conditions where threads of continuity of Indigenous ways were still present at Hope Vale Mission, he simply appears to take for granted that ‘identifications’ with those ways is sufficient guarantee of their continuity. For him ‘welfare poison’, as a source of income support for alcohol abuse and dependency, is the disastrously negative aspect of that same ‘liberal consensus’ which also combined with rising Indigenous activism to install citizenship and native title.

Sutton, however, works within a more searching and wider perspective. Shocked to the core by what he takes to be the eventual consequences of the liberal consensus in community breakdown, he far more explicitly endorses assimilation to the mainstream society than does Noel Pearson. Certainly there are ‘provisos’: citizens of Indigenous background will be able to look back to their heritage, just as others may look back to the roots of Western-style civilisations in Rome and Greece or in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Despite these secondary differences, Pearson and Sutton nevertheless contribute to the same broad shift towards assimilation evident in contemporary opinion. For each of them the negative aspects of the liberal consensus feed directly into community breakdown. For each of them, land rights was the high water mark. It was as if the two writers assume an essence of Aboriginality so that the social circumstances of the formation of values can be bypassed. For Pearson the ideal hope of the practical continuity of his people’s distinctive values persists. For Sutton that hope has turned into the blindness of fantasy: the last gasp of a discredited liberal consensus. The only ideal hope that remains is to look back to a lost heritage and perhaps even to cherish it within the limits of an assimilated mode of being.

Right at the centre of a methodological blindness shared by these authors is the failure to relate the central forms of interchange of both classical Indigenous culture and the new, rapidly changing mainstream to the values they would like to sustain. That is, sustain in practice for Pearson, in memory alone for Sutton. One might anticipate that both Noel Pearson and Peter Sutton could endorse the proposition of an integral association of values with circumstance, yet in practice each of them brushes it aside. Values, it would seem, can derive from ‘roots’ which are wholly subjective, grounded in individual choice.

Pearson’s political and cultural outlook is quite explicitly cast within mainstream identity theory. He identifies a range of groupings with which he identifies: his people, his Lutheran heritage and, a little more ambiguously, with his sense of belonging to all of the Australian people. In short the identifications of Noel Pearson as active agent are far more prominent in his account of his formation than are the distinctly fuzzy references to the institutional framework of his Indigenous heritage. He is quite forthright on the issue of identity. ‘I, and the members of my community, possess layers of identity, some of which are shared with each other, some of which are distinct.’ And he is equally plain spoken as to its derivation. ‘Amartya Sen has supplied us with a theory of what I have called layered identities in his most recent book, Identity and Violence.’ In sum it is to Noel Pearson’s aspirations as an individual that one should look for an understanding of his journey ‘up from the mission’.

It is vitally important to be clear about this. I am not saying that we do not have identifications. The issue is how we ground them in the practical relations of our daily lives. Pearson bypasses that question. He gives the impression of being confused by the way the expression of the values of sharing, integral with reciprocity, feed into a fatal combination with dependency and alcohol. He finds his answer by identifying with Indigenous values, making no more than fleeting reference to the forms of social interchange of classical Indigenous culture. It is an idealism that allows him to seek practical solutions to his dilemmas within the social relations and values of the mainstream without any full recognition that these same practical engagements increasingly dispense with the institutional structures of kinship and reciprocity. Like Peter Sutton, he encounters a structural problem through his total failure to consider the social forms of the mainstream; his identifications blind him to its presence.

Real Questions and Blind Responses

This of course is to touch upon the radical expansion within the mainstream of the market economy. As it quite directly permeates institutions of community and kinship, which once stood at arms length from it, a sense of enhanced individuation increasingly bears in to exaggerate every citizen’s sense of agency.

Even while expressing strong reservations concerning the way Noel Pearson’s approach diverts attention from the classical mooring points of his own culture, even while stressing how that approach blinds him to the dead ends into which embracing the mainstream might lead him, it is important to re-emphasise the often disastrous situation to which he is responding.

Pearson has played a major role in bringing to public notice the way the fatal association of welfare dependence has fed into one particular and tragically flawed track of the liberal consensus. As Peter Sutton notes, ‘it was Noel Pearson who did the most to break the log jam … about dysfunctional Indigenous communities’. The military intervention in the Northern Territory carried consequences for mainstream perceptions of all Indigenous people. Its undifferentiated engagement, across the board as it were, with the diverse circumstances in the north tends to damp down the need to revise the policy expressions of that same liberal consensus in other places.

Few now question Indigenous citizenship, land rights are again becoming more ambiguous, but if a spiral of breakdown affected many Indigenous communities did it affect them all? If it is conceded that some are stable, even developing, what makes the difference? Why does Sutton suggest that the revenues from taxation should no longer be directed towards Indigenous outstations? It would be reasonable to anticipate that he might enquire into these issues as a scholar and anthropologist, as distinct from his despairing turn, across the board, to assimilationist propaganda.

In The Politics of Suffering Sutton mounts a powerful argument for the widespread breakdown in Indigenous modes of life. He records his own disillusionment with the self-serving ‘fantasy’ that the liberal consensus could any longer contribute to positive outcomes. Moreover he convincingly cites evidence of a far greater level of violence in the classical period in the lives of Indigenous people than is commonly acknowledged. The implication is that the roots of the current downward spiral are very complex, not solely to be ascribed to policy failures of the liberal consensus.

Beyond that Sutton notes that Indigenous people are marrying out, as it were, at a rate that in recent years has skyrocketed to above 70 per cent. In effect they are walking away from more community-related ways of living and diluting Indigenous practices by joining the mainstream: assimilation in fact, whatever the intention.

Sutton and Pearson, along with Wild and Anderson, the authors of the Little Children are Sacred report, join with those many others before them (even Peter Howson who back in the Howard years was Minister for Indigenous Affairs) who all acknowledged that a serious breakdown had emerged in the course of the prosecution of policies grounded in the liberal consensus. Those policies were themselves an expression of a different and more humane liberal intervention in Indigenous affairs. It was the continuing expression in terms of policy of that turn towards a more liberal consensus that espoused citizenship in 1967. If, forty years on, those policies were leading to negative outcomes, what might have been the possible responses?

One answer, as we have already seen, was given: assimilation. The shock of a military intervention can deflect attention from longstanding failure to respond to situations well-known in circles of government. An intervention in that mode can declare people to be incompetent by action without consultation (except for a word with Noel Pearson fifteen minutes before the hour struck). Moreover, even with manifest despair among many long-time supporters of Indigenous causes, it can turn back onto the path of wholesale assimilation by way of policy changes, changes half-displaced from public discussion by the shock of the intervention and the bipartisan wedge of the protection of children.

Another approach might have been to look to the blind spots in the neo-liberal perspective. What assumptions does it make about human nature and the way it is profoundly constrained — even constituted — by the institutional arrangements in which human nature finds expression? And, above all perhaps, if the liberal consensus was half blind to the later consequences of its policies, does an ongoing myopia now carry over to affect the policy agenda of a neo-liberal assimilation?

Inside and Outside: Ruling Assumptions

These are difficult questions. For those who wish to question the present turn towards assimilation, a first response might be to ask whether it might not be more appropriate to first pay attention to the vast diversity of Indigenous circumstances. That would question any blanket approach whether in the mode of military intervention or otherwise. For many of those who, as Indigenous people, have taken or who may wish to pursue what I am terming an assimilationist trajectory — including many who as Peter Sutton notes are marrying out — what policy, what practical steps could assist them? Would those steps include helping them to renew their Indigenous roots if they so wished? For those who sought to further develop community-related ways of living very different policies to those prevailing now might well be essential. The question of a quite fundamental blindness within the liberal consensus, as well as within any neo-liberal turn, is crucial. The integrity of future policies depends upon this issue being addressed.

In his book, Peter Sutton gestures towards one of these blind spots. He records a Hawaiian’s perhaps only half serious response to an anthropologist who had been chatting about cultural matters: ‘Hey, we didn’t know we had a culture until the White Man came and told us!’ There is no way of knowing whether this particular Hawaiian was fully serious or not, but it is both astonishing and significant that, as an anthropologist, Peter Sutton should refer to this issue just in passing.

It has been well known, for at least the best part of a century, that while, prior to colonisation, the members of Indigenous cultures may readily recount their beliefs they seldom find a place to stand outside them. Their institutional framework does not include more abstracted social combinations of scholars, or disciplines like anthropology, which are ‘lifted out’, as it were, from the society with which they are integral. Eighty years ago, when speaking of the Melanesian cultures, Marcel Mauss noted ‘an incapacity to abstract and analyse concepts’. This way of putting the issue would be controversial now but what Mauss was getting at in the circumstances to which he was referring was that a self-conscious capacity to stand apart is often unnecessary. In effect a course of action is directed in ways that are profoundly taken for granted rather than consciously abstracted and evaluated. Mauss was not suggesting that these capacities could not immediately be taken on board. He presents evidence that they could. The basic point is that the rationality of the cultures he was representing is more directly embedded, or typically attached to more immediately apprehended environmental points. If it is more likely to operate in a taken-for-granted mode than is ours, that does not exclude recognition of the reality that when, at one level, a whole way of life becomes more abstracted, the way a course of action is governed may also be ‘taken for granted’.*

At least at the level of empirical observation, as Peter Sutton is likely to recognise, to be radically ‘lifted out’ of the limits of one’s familiar and routinised mode of life in our culture, one must enter into a sphere of social interchange which is separated, differentiated from that setting, while also being integral with it. Along with Noel Pearson, he stresses education and points to the way the boarding school was the abstracted setting which ‘lifted’ Pearson, the Dodsons and others out of the immediacy of an Indigenous setting (which was already far removed from classical Indigenous ways). Within a very different realm of social interchange, the foundations were laid for them becoming Indigenous intellectuals. In becoming such they were drawn into the social forms of the settler-colonial culture, including an exposure to the liberal consensus. In Sutton’s case especially one might anticipate that he was able to recognise that abstract forms of intellectual interchange provide the conditions of possibility for the emergence of any particular scheme of policy proposals. Those of which he speaks as the liberal consensus are one such outcome. If that scheme now calls for basic revision, the liberal consensus as such must be interrogated. Peter Sutton backs away from that profound challenge. He ends his book in mystical vein with the mainstream culture as the taken-for-granted context.

To speak of the more abstracted ideas of intellectuals as integral with their forms says nothing about actual insight into that conjunction. Even as an anthropologist, the person inducted into such abstracted schemes may be as little aware of their integral connection with a distinctive form of interchange as typically prevails within the pre-colonial Indigenous settings of reciprocal interchange to which I have briefly referred. Within the ways we constitute abstracted modes of interchange it is typically their scholarly expression that can promote that insight. The unfortunate feature of Sutton’s work is that he leaves aside the consideration of the various ways abstracted schemes of interchange may be related to the process of bridging between two cultures.

That bridging is typically fraught with the misunderstandings associated with different frames of integrity, as Inga Clendinnen so vividly portrays when she depicts the culture gap that led to the ‘just/unjust’ spearing of Governor Arthur in her Dancing with Strangers. Where distance between cultures is great and members of one are profoundly gripped by the certitudes of economic growth, they may readily conclude, with Noel Pearson, that ‘To secure Aboriginal economic development, it might be necessary for us to make far reaching concessions to the dominant culture’. Those concessions might include sending the children away to the boarding schools of the dominant culture, where English is first language, and distantly located jobs in big mining as the means of escape from the ravages of welfare dependency. As one might anticipate for Noel Pearson, all of that would stop far short of seeking a treaty as a framework for interchange between cultures.

What might be a different way? A first step would be to find a productive place to stand within the diverse forms of contemporary social interchange to look back upon the way the dominant values of the culture are integral with its dominant mode of social interchange. If there are structured possibilities for transformation inherent within the social forms through which the peoples of a culture carry on their lives, could a focus upon them lead to policy guidelines? That is, policies that do not lead either to Pearson’s apparently unintended consequence of de facto assimilation or to Sutton’s endorsement of personalised recruitment towards the same result.

Neither of these routes, as they converge towards the same precipice that mainstream culture is building, examines their own assumptions. While both Pearson and Sutton are ‘lifted out’ of, abstracted from, full immersion in the practicalities of the daily lives of their fellow citizens, they do not critically examine the assumptions and values they share with most mainstream people. In short, while they do enter into an intellectual form of interchange, which allows them to make explicit and to generalise about dominant values, they do not critically examine the way they are driven by them.

Were they to do so the conclusions they might reach about the mainstream culture might coincide with those reached by a growing minority who question its current trajectory. Its dominant value of growth, while integral with the practicalities of the expanding market, may well be incompatible with the survival of the human species. Why blindly induct others? In some contrast to that, as long as values of reciprocity and sharing are paid only lip service within Indigenous culture — by their being ‘valued’, as a distinct form enacted — they are open to co-option.

Erosion by exposure to the ‘welfare poison’ supplied courtesy of the welfare consensus is not necessarily the end for intentionalist planning. Before jumping to that conclusion an analysis of the assumptions of the liberal consensus and the prospects for their revision is a necessary condition of any serious approach to policy formation.

For the present the ideas, the intentionality of many Indigenous people, who have yet to break out of essentialist ideas about their nature as supplied by the liberal consensus, still maintain the hope that cultural values may be sustained without on the ground practical arrangements compatible with them. The suggestion here is they cannot, that support must be limited to just that. Pearson is right to insist that when it replaces a self-active mode of subsistence ‘support’ turns into its opposite. Yet to be right about recognising a problem and selecting a dead end as its solution clearly presents a basic dilemma.

If the first intervention was colonialist settlement and the destruction of Indigenous cultures its widespread result, it is important to acknowledge that colonialism had another side. It expressed moral as distinct from acquisitive imperatives. Mainly Christian at first, then more actively humanist as well, these imperatives found early expression in the missions. They were soon followed by a second stage in colonisation, an ‘intervention’, under the aegis of the liberal consensus. Now as land rights are eroded and reciprocal values are defined as part of the problem a third stage of colonisation, launched by military intervention, has begun. This time around it is driven by the assumption that mainstream culture can provide the answers to ‘disadvantage’ — by assimilation. So go back to GO.

The underlying problem is the deep-set incapacity within mainstream culture to examine how ‘growthmania’ is now driving it blindly towards the precipice. If the liberal consensus is now in crisis it is important to remember that, as a creation of the better intentions of the mainstream, it built up a powerful momentum in the course of the best part of half a century. Any capacity to adequately conceive and follow a different course will call for persistent and drawn out effort. But it is certainly possible to begin to suggest what some of its foci might be.

For some people it may seem presumptuous for a relative outsider, as I fully acknowledge that I am, to enter that field at all. After all, Indigenous people have special rights while those who presume to speak for the mainstream have varying degrees of on-the-ground knowledge that far exceeds mine. Nevertheless there are mainstream policies, they are in crisis, and every citizen should seek to respond.

The first question I would raise relates to the outstations, which, Sutton asserts, are typically disaster sites no longer deserving taxpayers’ support. For my part, while recognising the vitality of many outstations, I would like to see far greater public reporting of whether, with adequate water and power supplied to them, outstations could approach a far higher level of internal sustainability. That is, production of the means of life that are integrally connected with social processes of exchange. I would like to know whether a transition from the specific obligation of kinship to the looser bonds of family naming (see chapter 8 of Sutton, Native Title in Australia) is compatible with the renewal of values of reciprocity.

I do not imagine that this process of renewal could be set in place ‘just like that’, and that it would not entail significant shifts from classical prescriptions of obligations and rights. If it were to be stable at all — and quite apart from its external linkages — it presumably would include figures who could stand outside often profoundly taken for granted values. That is, individuals able to recognise the integral connection of values with the practicalities of the maintenance of a quasi-autonomous process of daily life.

That process itself could scarcely emerge without a relatively autonomous community of reflective individuals able to bridge between outposts. In other words, a reflective community able to value their own ways of living while recognising that other ways might be equally viable. The emergence of an Indigenous mode of reflective interchange of that order is of course a big ask. It would be in the mainstream interest to see if it could be developed. If its reciprocal co-existing roots could be revitalised, we might learn from, rather than simply intervene in, the lives of Indigenous people.

Is it not possible that we have simply forgotten one main root of the institutional basis of our own morality in reciprocity? Didn’t Marcel Mauss assert a basic truth when he observed for his time that ‘Much of our everyday morality is concerned with obligation and spontaneously in the gift. It is our good fortune that all is not yet couched in terms of purchase and sale’?

Mining Indigenous Hope

Noel Pearson positions a despairing article he wrote as late as 2006, which appears quite early in his book, at the opening of a group of chapters entitled ‘Challenging Old Friends’. It is called ‘Hope Vale Lost’. He grew up there; his mother still lives there. Earlier, way back before citizenship, the people earned their own means of subsistence and were also abstracted from, yet lifted out of, the daily practicalities of work by their engagement in a superordinate social body, one which, understandably, they took to exist primarily as a Lutheran community of common faith. They achieved a certain stability by the superimposition of what they took to be ‘ideas’ alone that lent a period of viability to their daily lives. At least these ideas were taken to do so until another set of policy prescriptions worked their way through the bodies and minds of the participants.

By 2006 a second invasion at Hope Vale, this time of ‘welfare poison’, has consolidated its hold, and in a final paragraph Pearson sums up. As he drives away to a different place he reflects on the same symbol of a community that has lost hope that presented itself on his arrival:

As I drove through my hometown on the Sunday evening on my way back to Cairns, I saw the dead puppy still in the street. I thought about the distance between being inured to the fate of a puppy that didn’t see a car coming, and being inured to the fate of our own children.

Yet hope is resilient and by 2008, for Pearson, it has found its reward:

Enter Andrew Forrest. One of the country’s most successful industrialists, Forrest has initiated an idea without parallel. The extraordinary feature of the Australian Employment Covenant is that Forrest and his private sector colleagues are setting the goal of guaranteeing jobs for 50,000 Indigenous Australians. It cannot be overstated how fundamentally this opportunity changes the landscape.

Early in 2008 Forrest was still the richest man in Australia ($9.4 billion). After the meltdown his investments in Fortescue Mining had lost more than 70 per cent of that value. Forrest appears to be an individual of genuine philanthropic intent but he cannot operate without lasting agreements on land rights, nor can Rio Tinto or BHP Billerton, both of which are just next door. For the big miners access to land rights becomes the condition for ‘real jobs’.

One way into the future could be Peter Sutton’s. Aboriginal culture could find a mode of continuity at least in the short term in the process of its dissolution into the ‘remembrance of things past’. But for the longer term? Perhaps first turn back to ‘Reflections on the Current Condition’ in Arena Magazine no. 100 before going on to ask more searching questions of the present limits of reflective scholarship. Such an inquiry might allow Sutton and Pearson, along with a host of others, to more actively consider whether reciprocity might be seen again as being at the root of our humanity. That could be one key aspect of a way into the future for both Indigenous and mainstream institutions and modes of individual formation with which these institutions are integral.

Endnote:

* While this issue is of fundamental importance I cannot pursue it here. Clearly, as for instance Bill Stanner recognised, a capacity to stand apart is present within Indigenous culture; that is, the ability to transcend oneself, to make acts of imagination so that one can stand ‘outside’ or ‘away from’ oneself and turn the universe, oneself and one’s fellows into objects of contemplation (W. E. H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays, R. Manne (ed.), Black Inc, 2009). For what Sutton might conceivably recognise as a ‘half-way house’ between relativism and realism, see Geoff Sharp, ‘The Idea of the Intellectual and After’, in S. Cooper, J. Hinkson and G. Sharp (eds), Scholars and Entrepreneurs, 2002.

Geoff Sharp is General Editor of Arena Publications.

For the present, only a few seriously entertain the second possibility, even though their numbers are steadily increasing. Many more only sense the emergence of a period of farreaching change. While this sense of a future is typically expressed through a wide range of activities within the green range of possibilities, they are frequently given more focus today by the prospect of climate change. For the most part they are framed by the notion of sustainability — the maintenance of basically normal expectations but by different means. Again, there is a small minority who, as they sense the emergence of changes, which could be overwhelming, respond in a geo-political register.

The recent public statement by Malcolm Fraser, Generals Gration and Sanderson, Barry Jones too — figures with different political and professional histories — fall into the latter category. Along with a wider group of prominent Australians, they have responded to the mortal danger of nuclear proliferation. Aware that nuclear weapons have been in the forefront of fundamental changes in relations between nation-states, they recognise that the further proliferation of nuclear weapons now is set within changing circumstances. The conjunction of climate change and the latent conflicts stirred or amplified by extreme economic stress might precipitate scarcely imaginable devastation.

It is by no means evident that Fraser and co-authors of the statement see nuclear energy itself as inherently problematical. Even if they were to agree that it is one more example of a profound shift in the way we conduct our interchange with the natural world, it is probable that most of this group would still view it as contributing to economic growth, with the added qualification that it calls for rigorous control.

Nevertheless, this public statement on this particular issue is significant — a small sign of a growing awareness that the scope and reconstititive power of the technosciences now strike at the heart of the prospects of living beings on planet earth.

It is of special interest that this group of prominent Australians was responding to Obama’s turnaround, not only on proliferation but also on the need to eliminate the vast stockpiles of nuclear weaponry. Could it beings then that he is aware, as the end of the short American century approaches, that a global redistribution of levels of consumption is likely to gather pace? Quite apart from climate change and economic crisis, that shift alone is likely to alter the lines of political and cultural division that we have too readily come to take for granted.

When, close in the wake of Prime Minister Rudd’s call for a ban on all nuclear weapons, Obama’s initiative became the context in which Malcolm Fraser and others issued their statement, we can assume that one of their objectives was to emphasise that this issue should be seen as beyond any narrowness of party politics. But that did not ensure that their words gained any lasting public attention. Indeed, as the issue of climate change so clearly illustrates, even when the public is far ahead of government in their willingness to act upon fundamental ethical issues, that by no means guarantees that their voices can prevail in circles of government. Increasingly, our forms of government, our mainstream media as well, stand in the way of effective representation.

Unlike climate change the issue of nuclear proliferation is far from the centre of contemporary public awareness. Forty years ago, when the memory of Hiroshima was still vivid and the confrontation of rival systems raised the prospect of mutually assured destruction, the situation was very different. At that time just one single expression of the new-found engagement of the technosciences with the natural world could raise the spectre of what E. P. Thompson termed ‘exterminism’, the process of the self-destruction of a species.

There is no reason to believe that Fraser and others were raising the more general issue of the technoscientific reconstitution of the world when they spoke out on the particular issue of nuclear proliferation. It is unlikely that more than one or two among their number had given any sustained attention to the obvious reality that a whole series of technosciences now deliver the power to terminate the distinctive form of life of our species.

The basic issue cannot be represented by nuclear weapons alone. It entails technoscientific powers more generally, as they proliferate within political systems, which offer no effective representation of how their significance should be interpreted. If we are to speak of a transition to a different epoch it is this issue — the process of reconstituting our mode of interchange with the natural world — which should be the main focus of attention.

Nuclear technology offers powers of reconstituting the physical world; genetic technology offers the same in relation to living beings; digital technology offers to dissolve knowledge in data or information. All of these powers might well be celebrated if their significance could be more effectively interpreted, but for the present they are instruments. They feed into an orientation towards growth and, with that, contribute to a pervasive myopia: a conviction that assumes that we are still engaged in the conquest of nature and progressively casting aside limitations to our freedom. Is it possible that this is an illusion and that for the present the technosciences facilitate our being overwhelmed by markets which, rather than contributing to these ends, carry us towards the dissolution of life-settings.

Certainly a historical movement is gradually emerging that senses and moves towards a different order of living. But sensing is not comprehending. Nevertheless, for the present and in spite of that limitation, the movements at the grassroots are ahead of any mass public stand by the intellectual and professional groupings.

Half a Step with Kevin Rudd
Perhaps Kevin Rudd was sensing, rather than seriously entertaining, a more far-reaching transformation than even an unprecedented, but ‘merely economic’, crisis could convey when he opened his recent essay in The Monthly in a portentous vein.

From time to time in human history there occur events of truly seismic significance, events that mark a turning point between one epoch and the next, when one orthodoxy is overthrown and another takes its place.

It was as if, in invoking the language of the passage of epochs, Rudd the politician was about to reposition himself as the philosopher statesman and was actually contemplating the prospect of historical transformation. Instead, he came up with a damp squib. An epoch in Rudd’s dictionary is a period of thirty years or so, and in any case it does not relate to comprehensive change but just to a major economic hiccup: one, this time around, building up into a full-bodied neoliberal belch.

Basically Rudd’s answer is more of the same, a return to rapid growth only, under Labor, with more active regulation of the economy. Of course, within the limits of contemporary politics, Kevin Rudd does impress his public as morally serious to an unusual degree, as wishing to be a man of his word. The issue we are raising relates far less to his character than it does to his understanding. And given the pressures and expediencies of political life that includes any honesty of purpose, as at the time of his election, being undermined by the logic of events (one thinks not only of climate change, but also of guarantees apparently given to unions on their right to protect working conditions).

No Way for a Third Way?
In the mainstream media, understanding the meltdown is ceasing to be a contentious issue. Certainly a hard core of resistance is maintained within the Murdoch regime, but otherwise the doctrine of minimal government and ‘let the market rule’ is off the agenda. Social democracy and the ‘third way’ is back, but with a difference. Now the boundaries have closed in. There is no longer a middle way as if between capitalism and socialism, rather only within the terms of two versions of capitalist dominance: between ‘let the market rule’ with minimum regulation and the recognition that regulation is indispensable. Within the mainstream it is clear that the latter has prevailed.

The picture is different among the more searching print periodicals (still mainly based in Victoria), as it is among their online counterparts, with the exception of The Monthly which, even if its editorial inclination included major reservations, has at the time of writing temporally gagged itself by editorial board chairman Robert Manne’s surprisingly supportive endorsement of most of the basic positions of Kevin Rudd’s manifesto. Latterly, it should be added, a series of international figures have commented on the Prime Minister’s article. Without exception they respond within the general frame of economic regulation and recovery.

Otherwise the print periodicals — we have in mind mainly Overland, Dissent and their editors — while actively critical of Rudd’s inertness on basic issues relating to climate change, give few hints that we may be passing into a period of genuinely epochal transformation. While key contributions to these publications are especially critical of the Rudd government’s inertness on climate change, it is as if they lack access to any critical standpoint that might frame a perspective that actually breaks out of the limits of the ‘third way’. Their contributions do not discuss the way the neo-liberal surge of growth was empowered by a radically newfound conjunction: the historically new level of technological capability feeding into the continuing commitment to economic growth. Unlike Malcolm Fraser and co-authors, they do not even tiptoe towards the prospect that unprecedented technological changes may have far more to do with the future of our species than the recent oscillations of the capitalist market.

Hence, while the contributors to these periodicals respond to public dissatisfaction across a whole range of particular issues, they present no effective demand for a basic policy shift. The sense of a future is still shuttered within both old and new ‘third way’ prescriptions. That is, prescriptions that seek to combine a moral concern for the public good — expressed especially in dedication to public control of basic infrastructure — but these same objectives are short-circuited by an inability to confront the privatising impulse of open-ended growth.

Kenneth Davidson, as well as being a long-standing senior writer with The Age is also an editor of the quarterly Dissent. As a long-standing Keynesian, Davidson has maintained a critique of the excesses of neo-liberal privatisation for many years. In more recent years, far from simply accepting the social democratic compromises within official Labor, he has maintained an energetic critique. It has focused on Victorian State Government policies, especially on transport and climate change. In the latter context water policy has been a specialty. In creative and well-informed articles he has frequently had the state government ‘on the back foot’. Nevertheless, the general import of his arguments is to make capitalism sustainable. As an independent thinker and activist he is a maverick of the ‘third way’, one who has done much to draw public attention to the prospect that in Victoria ‘third way’ ‘commitment’ to the common good may include the full privatisation of water supplies! As the co-editor of Dissent, Davidson is not one who sees the contemporary meltdown as the harbinger of an historical transformation reaching far beyond the limits of any economic crisis of capitalism. Before that could occur Davidson, like so many others, would need to move beyond the limitations imposed by the philosophical orientations of both classical and neo-classical economics: an undertaking of quite pivotal importance for the politics of an emerging crisis of existence, as distinct from the more limited crises of conventional politics or economics.

Much the same general picture holds for the long-standing quarterly Overland, which, for more than half a century has been a distinctive voice of the independent cultural Left in Australia. The current issue carries two major articles responding to the economic crisis: a lead article by Bob Ellis — a speech writer for Bob Hawke and many others — followed by a more generally framed contribution by Raewyn Connell that moves toward the general observation that in Australia no group or force ‘has worked out how to gain a major purchase in the neo-liberal state or the neo-liberal economy’. Connell goes on to ask how in the unique situation of this particular crisis ‘we can compose a strategy of social change that is workable, can find popular support and that has the prospect of changing institutional structures’. Unfortunately, Connell’s far more searching article is in the shadow of the Bob Ellis piece, which, while vigorously muscular in tone, is decidedly timid in its resort to the ‘third way’ of the 1970s. While Ellis is an engaging writer with an ear remarkably sensitive to public disappointment and able to stir readers again on issues such as the ‘unstoppable anorexia of the universities’, he does not engage with the underlying issues of the present. As is so often the case, he concentrates on critique of neo-liberal policy. Given that straightjacket, welcome and urgent as this critique may be, he fills the gap by vigorously beating the drum on climate change.

Connell is far closer to the underlying preoccupations of this essay when, in concluding remarks, she notes: ‘the crisis behind the crisis, the issues that surround the meltdown, are as dire as those faced by the generation that met depression, fascism and global war’. A totally acceptable general conclusion, but what more, specifically, is that more basic crisis behind the economic meltdown? While seeking a new vision Connell is acutely aware of the difficulties facing that undertaking.

Many readers will recall that in his book Beyond Right and Left another active contributor to ‘third way’ political discussion, David McKnight, seeks to provide just the vision that might respond to such a crisis. Yet far from acknowledging the emergence of an historical transformation, which will break the continuity of the traditions of the capitalist era, McKnight seeks to combine the perspectives grounded in liberalism, socialism and conservatism with the impetus of new social movements. In a broad sense of a ‘third way’ (which distances his standpoint from any glib identification with Blairite policies) McKnight regards the capitalist market as an inescapable attribute of any contemporary economy. Locked into that attitude he too sees climate change as the rallying point around which the new-liberal recommitment to ‘let the market rule’ may be regulated by a state which has moved ‘beyond Right and Left’.

Beyond the Limits of Economic Crisis
McKnight is relatively accommodating to Rudd’s version of the ‘third way’ and that attitude has become more fixed following government responses to the meltdown. His attitude of market inevitability guarantees that his hopes of moving ‘beyond Right and Left’ remain within ‘third way’ perspectives. This pacifying phrase indeed is a distinct misnomer since the capitalist dynamic, which it purports to regulate, is by far the more important influence upon any middle way. Nevertheless our purpose here is not to simply dismiss a regulated capitalism. The key issue is to ask whether the objective of that regulation is to direct the capitalist impulse so that it contributes to the emergence of a different order of social life. It is our belief that any re-direction for regulation so that it contributes to a basic transition is inconceivable unless the framework of discussion and practical effort moves out beyond any exclusive concern with the current economic crisis. It needs to answer questions about how the surge of the last thirty years or so radically accelerated the more modest growth process that prevailed in the decades prior to the leap towards full-blooded globalisation. Complementing that, it needs to ask questions about just how this surge gripped imagination and aspiration. If masses of people willingly locked on to market-imposed shackles, just how did what was taken to be open-ended development become a given fact of social reality that tended to exclude serious consideration of alternatives? In past issues of this magazine we have suggested that answers to questions such as these will not be found by any too narrow a focus on the economy. On the contrary, the key is the historical transformation of our relation to that world so that open-ended growth no longer points towards the end of our species.

Climate change is widely taken to be the general underlying cause of our present dilemmas. It is not. While crucially significant, it is nevertheless one particular consequence of our radically altered mode of interchange with the natural world, and too narrow a focus on it alone can mask the more basic shift in the conditions of our relation to that world.

As a looming consequence of a more general historical transformation, of which both the surge in growth and the widespread neo-liberal delusions integral with it are symptoms, climate change is only the first among a series of crises likely to emerge if we cannot bring ourselves to change our present way of taking hold. Most importantly, just as climate directly impinges on our bodies and our senses, it also directly affects the elementary means of life. Quite inescapably, it stirs recognition of the way the uninhibited growth of the market can reach a point where it ceases to contribute to public well-being. Whatever its status as a consequence of more basic processes, the experience of climate change is the most significant current point of entry to passage beyond the ‘third way’. And clearly the more enquiring branches of the ‘third way’ approaches can bring pressure to bear on governments. They can begin to press them to direct market impulses towards institutional reconstruction.

How then, in the most general terms, should we characterise the shift that, with its radically different possible outcomes, is drawing us into the process of transformation? Beyond that, how in an equally general way might we illustrate it in terms that, once stated, can scarcely be denied? And finally, what might be the broad contours of an approach that begins to chart and to practise the work of transition?

Reconstituting the World?
Half of the evidence of this shift is all about us: the facts. The technological revolution, the knowledge society, the age of information. The other half — their critical interpretation — is nowhere to be seen. It is excluded from mainstream consideration by the momentum of change and the short-term exclusion of alternatives that it promotes. Yet that momentum too relates to another fact: the shifting of the ground upon which all of the just mentioned ‘undeniable facts’ operate.

All of the undeniable facts — and it is important to recognise the comprehensiveness of their claims — operate within a profoundly taken-for-granted relation to the natural world. It is a relation that assumes its utility for us and is often picked up in the catch phrase ‘the conquest of nature’. Utility, use for, conquest: all these terms now demand reassessment.

Prior to a gradual movement to reinterpret our relation to the natural world, which began to take definite shape in the scientific revolution of the 16th century, we dwelt in a given world of Nature, which, in its eternal cycles, sustained our being. The scientific revolution of the 16th century, as it fed into a more general sense of enlightenment, began to change all that. By way of the rational interpretation of what was devoutly seen as the imprint of the Hand of God in nature, Galileo de-centred the earth as the eternal setting of our being. While he gained home imprisonment as his reward, from those who were so secure in their faith that they already knew the truth, Isaac Newton, who explained the given tendency of things to move downwards by the law of gravity, became Master of the Royal Mint.

A prophetic appointment, one might say, as the rational power to know the world differently joined with the practical movement to relate to it differently. Interpretive rationality, mainly in the form of a religious expression of the impulse to place humankind in an intelligible reality, was crossing over; rationality, which had once fired the questionings of Galileo and Newton, was crossing over to constitute the fixed end of human activity. It was no longer enough to acknowledge the bounties and perils of the natural world as the frame of our being. The point now was to acknowledge a different truth: to exploit and conquer the earth as a resource. A different truth: the object now for instrumental rationality was expressed by trade, by mercantile activity, by enclosures in the name of profit and productivity, by colonisation.

But does this series include globalisation as well, is there an ambiguity emerging so that the answer is both yes and no?

Whatever the answer to that final question, we may readily assert that in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, emergent capitalism took hold of our changing relations to the natural world. Rational reconstruction of the division of labour and tools of labour fed into the encompassing expectation of a progress being integrally associated with growth. Up until now.

Trajectories of Transformation
In all the foregoing we have sought to lead up to the gradual disclosure, within the flux of contemporary reality, of a fundamental issue. The financial meltdown is an actuality, so too is the more basic process of economic crisis, yet both of them are symptomatic.

They are consequences, from the standpoint of this statement, of an ongoing transformation wherein the primacy of direct labour (including its mechanised modes) in our interchange with the natural world is being superseded by the primacy of technoscientifically mediated processes. Just because this is an epochal transformation it is not readily comprehended by governments. Indeed, its initial effect is radically to supercharge the conquest of the natural world. From that there follows on consumerist euphoria wherein conquest can appear as open ended and the pursuit of individual interest the consummation of freedom.

That is, until this overall process encounters a natural limit, as well as a limit of our species type — a biosocial limit. Gradually then a contradiction emerges, not between Right and Left, but even as that distinction changes, across a more fundamental division between those who are hell-bent to maintain the trajectory of the conquest of nature and those who recognise that via a whole series of potential crises that trajectory, unless it is radically qualified, points toward the end of human being.

A contradiction of this scope reaches into the roots of our culture. It is not a class contradiction, although it is integrally related to class interests: it is better described as a cultural contradiction or, for those who prefer a different terminology, as an ontological contradiction. It is not one that calls for a revolution but rather for a revolutionary transformation conducted across a protracted period by way of a transitional practice. That is a practice of deeds, complemented by an ethic of the common good, rather than by the fixations of growth. It is a practice, inseparable from an ethic, which now, within the contradictory social framework emerging from modernity, is increasingly aware of its multiple roots in the social forms of successive modes of engagement with the natural world. To implement and to state that emergent ethic now entails a bridging between two modes of practical life in their constitutive engagement with the natural world. To forge a unity between the quasi-spontaneous response of a whole spectrum of green movements with a more abstracted intellectual culture cannot be other than a difficult and protracted process. Especially among the intellectually related groupings, it calls for a reorientation. That is, a reversal that restores the priority of interpretation: a break out from its present subjection within the takenfor- granted perspectives directing the technosciences.

Conclusion
Deeds, practices, commitment to the common good. This conjunction, pursued with the unswerving certainty of those who know the truth, led directly to the moral ignominy of ‘actually existing socialism’. Ideals grounded within the limitations of existing theories of life and society were not enough. Now, certainty lives on but within a different order of deeds as the institutional order of the market sustains the certitudes of growth and consumption. The forgoing pages, couched as they are in general terms, are both a statement of future policy and a resolution. They seek to spell out some of the parameters within which, in future publications the editors hope to explore and contribute to the emergence of a transitional practice. That is, a practice of social life which, moving beyond the fetishes of growth and consumption, seeks to build an institutional frame work that sustains human life within an ethic of equality and the common good.

arena publications editors Geoff Sharp, Nonie Sharp, John Hinkson, Paul James, Alison Caddick, Simon Cooper

While some of the contributors to Dear Mr Rudd attended the Canberra meeting this was no guarantee that the prime ministerial ear was turned in their direction. When the publication of these essays was announced the Prime Minister was quick to say that if this group, in particular, now thought they might have special access, ‘they had elected the wrong guy’. That reservation is less likely to relate to the Chairman of the G8. As this article will argue, higher education is now quite central to a bipartisan understanding of the future prospects of the Australian economy. How its role should enter public discussion, however, is itself a debatable issue, one which has not been canvassed in the lead-up to this event.

The Arena editors have long argued that while scholars should contribute to democratic debate, the university, as an institution, should stand at arm’s length from particular political alignments. This is particularly the case when party policies appear to converge. If Australians are not to march half blindly into their future, there must be a basic questioning of open-ended growth as a central plank of the current convergence of policies. The unintended consequences of ignoring that issue could have devastating implications for the future of Australian democracy.

The first sections of this article outline the way the unintended effects of neo-liberal economic assumptions could contribute to that outcome. The later sections discuss the problematic engagement of universities with government policies.

Just how open to democratic process the Canberra meeting was, remains full of ambiguity. While at least in the short term one should welcome such initiatives, the populist hoopla which announced this one was in some tension with the top-down control of the selection process. Even so, the whole event may well have helped to consolidate the step back from the creeping authoritarianism of the Coalition’s version of neo-liberalism. Among a minority it may even stimulate the reflection that, while Rudd is espousing a softer approach to the neo-liberal endorsement of open-ended growth, his basic economic policies are continuous with those of the Coalition. In short, unless Labor can dig far deeper into the particular conjunction of circumstances that produced the neo-liberal infatuation with ‘market rules’, no reform of particular policies can guarantee Australia’s future.

This underlying issue had no clear place on the agenda of the recent meeting in Canberra. To have placed it there would have been to question the growth and development fixations of the new government. Nevertheless, any move towards stirring up the public realm, even to the degree meetings such as this might achieve, just could lead to unintended consequences.

Unintended Consequences

Unintended consequences. No, we don’t know half of what we are often ready to think we do and the consequences of our actions can cut both ways. Friedrich Hayek, as patriarch of neo-liberalism, was within a tradition that made that a central theme. But the way he did so distinguished between two sources of unintended consequences. For him the effects of participation in the market can turn out to be more satisfying than was anticipated even if they were in no sense intended. On the other hand, as he also affirmed, if we seek to plan for public well-being, unintended consequences can be devastating.

In Hayek’s neo-liberal philosophy the doctrine of unintended consequences is first turned towards the economy. Let the self-interest of those engaged in the market — as entrepreneurs or those selling their labour power — run free, and over time the unplanned consequence of the interplay of individual interests will be an overall increase in common well-being. So runs the central doctrine of ‘let the market rule’. None of the self-interested participants actually planned a contribution to the common good but a ‘hidden hand’ ensured that it happened anyway — it was an unintended consequence. On the other hand, so Hayek argued, if well-intentioned people seek to moderate the often harsh consequences of market activity the results are not likely to be an enduring welfare state. Quite the contrary. A second unintended consequence is likely to ensue: the intervention is likely to introduce a devastating loss of freedom. The planning of welfare can be the thin end of the wedge in the transition to a totalitarian social order.

The policies Howard pursued on work choices were a recent example of policies stemming from Hayek’s doctrine, but there is little to suggest that the ex-prime minister actually grasped the way Hayek’s particular view of freedom might come to contribute to neo-authoritarian outcomes. Hayek’s contributions to economic theory were integral with a tradition with deep roots. It builds on Adam Smith’s earlier doctrine of the ‘hidden hand’ of the market (its unintended contribution to the common good), and Hayek goes out of his way to emphasise the ties of his own approach to Adam Smith’s precursor Bernard de Mandeville. As a defence of private greed de Mandeville’s early eighteenth-century work, Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices; Publick Benefits, created a scandal, an odd response, it would seem now, when greed has become even more deeply ingrained.

Hayek’s foundation text, The Road to Serfdom, is marked by a pervasive totalitarian anxiety. Nominally he was expressing his dismay at the surge towards welfarist democracy in the United Kingdom in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, but just a little in the background of his ruminations on welfarist planning was the massive figure of the Soviet Union. Its exemplary defeat of Nazi Germany contributed to the continuing credibility of the hopes for the common good stirred by that purportedly socialist but profoundly ambiguous regime.

As the conflict between the two systems triggered the Cold War, Hayek played a significant role in elaborating the economic philosophy that eventually sidelined Keynesian welfarism as it framed the neo-liberal surge of recent decades. It is now well known that in due course a series of national leaders — Thatcher and Reagan, John Howard too, had become devotees of Hayek’s particular definition of freedom.

That is, of freedom with a special twist — negative freedom — the freedom of the interplay of self-interested individuals negated only by the role of the law as guarantor of that free play. The implication is that public policy should be ‘negative’ as well — non-interventionist. The broad spectrum of institutions should be constituted so that the market provides the guiding principle for the conduct of their affairs. Clearly this is in some contrast to non-Hayekian and more ethically purposive conceptions of institutional arrangements conceived as outside the direct reach of the market. Obviously, within a morally purposive approach every institution had to take account of the costs of its activities but objectives that were relatively independent of market principles guided what they were about. The shift associated with the market reaching out to far more directly encompass other spheres of life has meant that the market principle moves to the forefront of institutional concerns while cost accountability becomes the criterion for their more detailed operations.

Framing this shift, as it gradually pervades every institution, is the neo-liberal imperative of growth and the widespread belief that growth is the condition for expanded freedom and the self-development of individuals. The profound appeal of this belief depends upon that same assumption of the centrality of self-interest that grounds the whole neo-liberal project. As it expands in its reach to encompass more general norms of conduct, it screens out the deeper reality that individual interests are always constrained by the need to consider the well-being of others. While arguments about the ‘hidden hand’ may readily obscure that underlying reality in periods of growth, they are even more likely to do so when a deep sense of the realisation of new freedoms turns public attention away from the possibilities of unintended consequences.

Conquest or Reconstitution?

Even as expanding productivity continues to sustain the public enchantment with growth as a condition of freedom, a contrary reality begins to intrude. Are we reaching the limits of that conquest of nature of which capitalism has been seen as the most active expression? While the conditions of that end point reach back into the earlier history of capitalism, I am suggesting that the special surge in productivity of recent decades is not primarily grounded in capitalist enterprise at all. That impulse now works in conjunction with the constitutive and reconstitutive power of the technosciences as these tap into the more deeply grounded hopes of individual and social well-being. Hence, continuing to speak as if ‘capitalism’ and a global, as well as the institutional expansion of its market, is the main agent of change, may become highly questionable. What once was obvious may turn into a misrepresentation.

When left unrevised, the notion of ‘capitalist’ agency for the hopes of expanded freedom obscures the reality that the institutional framework which served as a prominent carrier of those hopes is itself being transformed. It, along with the particular imprint it contributed to the notion of human nature, is being reconstituted within the current trajectory of the technosciences. This issue was broached in an earlier essay (‘From Here to Eternity’,  Arena Magazine 88 and 89) which noted that the conjunction of the technosciences with capital is not only expressed in a surge of productivity.  New technologies, whether supporting information processing or by contributing to new modes of social interchange, have profound effects. They remake the social world so as to enhance the individual’s sense of creative agency and extended freedom.

Of central importance within this unprecedented break in social continuity, is the way the market extends its reach so as to reconstruct a whole range of institutions. Market criteria become the measure both of the overall role of an institution and the peformance of its participants. Economic performance begins to supersede purposes which previously had maintained their own integrity at arm’s length from the market. This shift may be readily observed, whether one turns to the care of children, the support of the aged, the redirection of sporting organisations or even to the role universities as centres of research and the elaboration of meanings.

The comprehensiveness of this shift and the rhetoric of individual freedom which helps to sustain it both contribute to the deferral of any sustained consideration of whether what is taken to be an open-ended process of growth is in fact producing its own limit. How would that limit be recognised: by climate change, by unrestrained consumption of the earth’s resources, by unsustainable population growth or even through the transformation of the biological conditions of human nature? Such questions invite a return to Hayek’s own central precept. Is the neo-liberal prospect to which he contributed also the carrier of an unintended consequence, one seldom envisaged by those gripped by the spirit of the Enlightenment?

Negative Freedom and Higher Education

Although this new reality has been slow to come into focus, a basic impetus for the neo-liberal project is now provided by higher education institutions. They deserve special attention as an example of the penetration of market principles into a sphere which was once only indirectly influenced by them. Even though ‘the idea of the university’ as a quasi-independent institution never established more than a tenuous hold, in Australia, it nevertheless contributed to the humanist ideal of the disinterested pursuit of the common good. That ethic was reinforced by way of the professions while, in a broader perspective, the quasi-autonomous relation of the universities to the policies of the state allowed a significant, even if restricted scope, for the discussion of different conceptions of public well-being and the role of government.

The scope for discussion of alternative philosophies and policies was underpinned by the differences among a wide range of groupings — especially those of religion and politics — within the broader community.

The argument I propose to mention here is that while scope for such interchange still retains elements of its vigour and relevance, its longer term prospects are seriously in question. In effect the norms of public life are being increasingly dominated by the self-interested individualism propagated by the extended reach of the market. Moreover, this is abundantly clear within the terms of higher education policy as it now takes in the convergence between political programs as a guide.

A convergence between the policies of right and left trends in Australian politics was first illustrated as the Cold War drew to a close. It was as if the generations of struggle in the name of the political freedoms of the liberal tradition within capitalism had been suppressing awareness that a more extended freedom, grounded in a surge of prosperity, was now available.

While long in preparation at least in Australia, the conditions of this new perspective were publicly declared by John Dawkins as Minister for Education, Training and Employment. As Prime Minister Hawke was moving towards a convergence between Right and Left in political life, he launched the Accord between the interests of working people and capital. Dawkins in turn was gripped by a closely related awareness: that the new energies of the technological revolution foreshadowed profound changes.

In 1987 the Minister asserted that:

More clearly than at any time in our history Australia is now an integral part of the international community. The barriers to contact, communication and trade generated in the past by our remoteness have been removed over the last quarter of a century as cultural, technological and economic revolutions have swept the globe (Higher Education: a Policy Discussion Paper, 1987, p. iii).

Dawkins went on to emphasise that while all sectors and levels of the Australian community would be affected, ‘The education sector in our higher education system in particular must play a leading role in promoting these changes’.

Twenty years on the Rudd Government has picked up the ball and a conjunction of a vice-chancellor and a prime minister in chairing the Canberra consultation could well be taken as confirmation of Dawkins’ affirmation that the higher education system ‘must play a leading role’. But twenty years on one might ask whether its leading figures have reflected sufficiently upon the direction of that leadership. The available evidence suggests they have not.

The New Paradigm

When addressing the National Press Club in June 2007, Glyn Davis based his remarks upon Seizing the Opportunities, a document subtitled as ‘A Group of Eight Policy Discussion Paper’. With a confident awareness of the pivotal role of the higher education system its first line introduces its sweeping scope. ‘This paper concerns Australia’s future and the well-being of the Australian Community.’ In its Foreword the paper seeks to move on from the Dawkins agenda. Its reworking of the higher education system ‘can no longer underpin an internationally competitive Australia’. Yet the difference is one of tactics rather than strategy. When the Hawke government sought to move on beyond the class antagonisms of classical capitalism by launching the Accord, there was no full grasp of the implications of the revolution that had inspired Dawkins. There was no developed sense of the way increasing prosperity would allow the market principle to permeate institutions that previously had stood at arm’s length from the economy. The revolution that had inspired Dawkins had yet to manifest its scope.

The eight vice-chancellors comprising the G8 are faced with a less challenging situation. They do not see their task as launching a Dawkins-style revolution. Rather it is one of continuing the turn towards ‘market rules’ in different circumstances. Moving on from the Dawkins era they recognise an extended accord as displayed in the ‘renewed bipartisan interest in higher education’ (Seizing the Opportunities, p. 1). The G8 vice-chancellors in fact recognise five bipartisan convergences defining the new situation. Outstanding within this list is the statement that: ‘Both sides are looking more to market mechanisms to shape a responsive and diverse system of high-quality and high standards’.

These references to the G8’s policy discussion paper cannot be extended in this context to a consideration of the seventy pages in which they elaborate the perspective, but the basic standpoint is clear enough. It provides the perspective for future policy. In the present context one illustration of the basic framing of the diversity the new policies are intended to introduce will have to suffice.

Knowledge in the Melbourne Model

It would be interesting to know whether any of the members of G8 question the proposition that throughout the history of our civilisation interpretation has been a primary aspect of knowledge. Clearly interpretations have always had their practical uses. Their ‘instrumental’ potential, whether in defining government policies or in ethical framing, could also help to close down the elaboration of alternatives. While the Melbourne Model as one example of projected reforms of higher education does suggest that broadly conceived undergraduate courses will frame postgraduate specialisations, there are noticeable omissions in its overall conception. No doubt it is still a model that will undergo further development, but at least at this stage there have been no clear signs of a collegial framework wherein the overall significance of open-ended growth is to be discussed. That absence is confirmed by the way the contribution of the technosciences to that growth process is envisaged. As the accompanying boxed digest of the approach to ‘knowledge transfer’ conveys them, the assumptions that underpin the Melbourne Model tend to foreclose the consideration of alternatives.

One clear sign of that effect was the recent appointment of a philosopher as inaugural Knowledge Transfer Fellow. That after the briefest span of time he then became Philosopher-in-Residence in the School of Business may appear to speak for itself. Nevertheless circumstances do change and with that, meanings — in schools of business as well as elsewhere. Perhaps there is some reason to be gratified that those who initiated these moves recognised that basic issues of philosophical import could be associated with knowledge transfer. Nevertheless, that response must be qualified. Given the declared micro-economic orientation of the G8, one may readily anticipate that only the narrowest conception of a philosophical approach could lead to it being placed within the administrative context of knowledge transfer. The absence of any more broadly conceived public account suggests that the market-directed perspectives of the ‘higher educational’ institutions have imprinted the meaning of the knowledge to be transferred in an excessively techno-instrumental mode.

The underlying problem is that current developments in the technosciences, and to a degree in the humanities as well, still go forward within the humanist perspective of the ‘conquest of nature’. A deeply ingrained assumption still persists that this project can continue to open up freedom from the limitations of the biological and social conditions of our lives. Yet there is abundant evidence that, while these same conditions can no longer be simply taken for granted, there is intense resistance to accepting the implications of that shift.

If indeed the prospect has emerged of passing beyond the conquest of nature and towards its reconstitution, the perennial questions of philosophy are placed in doubt. The place of the philosopher in ‘higher education’ and the way philosophy itself is conceived can no longer be simply left in abeyance. The need is more pressing for an institutional setting which frames its activities within the traditional ‘idea of the university’. If that initiative is not to be expected from the G8 in the immediate future, any lethargy is likely to relate to an inability to recognise that their definition of knowledge as such is constructed with a distinct bias.

As indicated earlier, there is a resistance to any adequate recognition of the increasing import of that bias. In effect, as a resistance it is also a denial of the transcendental quality of a faith that the ‘conquest of nature’ can best contribute to the dilemmas of human existence. As many have suggested, it may be that only a practical confrontation with the consequences of current policies can shake the convictions of that order.

Climate change is obviously at the forefront of those encroaching consequences but, as noted in a previous article (‘Climate Change is Not the Basic Issue’, Arena Magazine 93), this is only the most prominent among a whole cluster of consequences associated with the present way of living.

From a philosophical perspective, any shift in ontology occasioned by reconstitution must have consequences for epistemology, as the theory of the knowledge of the meaning of human life.  While this is highbrow terminology, it should not conceal the fact that the ‘meaning of our lives’ refers to the lives of the common people. In direct experience they too encounter ‘philosophical problems’. Within the ‘idea of the university’ the scholars have the responsibility and the privilege of contributing to liveable answers for us all.

The convergence of political policies is certainly unmistakeable. The argument I have set out in this essay is not intended to question the import of the technosciences as such, but it does question many of the consequences of their orientation. One cannot rule out the possibility that, as the overall meaning of these consequences work their way into fuller public awareness, the assumption of ‘market rules’ will be far more actively questioned — even increasingly within business circles. Such a development would be integral with the growth of a new political division in relation to which the current convergence would lose its power to direct policy. Key figures within the G8 might consider how that prospect should figure in their next discussion paper.

In present circumstances the issue of why both the general public, as well as many leading figures, are so slow to respond to the consequences of our way of living is a problem in its own right. Could it be that the resistance lies in confronting a paradox which for the present is ‘beyond imagination’? That, too, is a philosophically relevant question which has yet to come into focus among those directing the Melbourne Model. If that situation is to change then the primary orientation of knowledge to the economy will need to undergo a step-by-step revision. Whether that is likely to occur within a higher educational institution must remain an open question. At least it would be a sign of return of the relation to society carried by the ‘idea of the university’ if the vice-chancellor stood one step back from direct involvement in a politics of convergence resting upon foundations of open-ended growth.

Geoff Sharp is General Editor of Arena publications.

Knowledge Transfer

Knowledge transfer at the University of Melbourne calls for some explanation. As a key element of a revised conception of what the university is about it is important to recognise that the current approach — summarised by the initials KT — redefines knowledge as such. With a strong bias towards the role of the technosciences, it tends to screen out any active place for knowledge as interpretation of the meaning of our lives and how we might conduct them. For the present, KT simply assumes that an acceptable way of living depends upon economic growth and that technosciences must now serve that end. The possibility that they might assist the exploration of a different way of living in which the economic primacy of growth is intentionally limited.

The vice-chancellors of the eight leading universities — the G8 — assert with good reason, that received approaches to university policy have become redundant. A different situation calls for ‘a new policy paradigm’ (Seizing the Opportunities,  p. 1).

At the University of Melbourne, a more active response to the demands of the market was in preparation long before the present vice-chancellor was appointed. Under his leadership it gathered momentum within the Growing Esteem Strategy. Teaching and learning, research as well, were to be coordinated, with KT as the lynch pin. The university’s publicity is not backward on this. Try looking up ‘knowledge transfer’ on its website and you will get the picture. It notes that ‘The most recognisable form is the transfer of technology’ for commercial purposes but goes on to add that ‘there are numerous other examples which are not directly commercial’. True enough, but the framing conception is economic growth. The presentation of ‘knowledge transfer’ is saturated with the language of commerce, with ‘intellectual capital’ its underlying motif.

This particular view of the quest for ‘growing esteem’ falls within the administrative scope of a deputy vice-chancellor with considerable experience in ‘brand positioning and knowledge transfer’. With a background in nanotechnology and the holder of twenty patents, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor is no doubt a well-intentioned person of outstanding ability. That is not in question. It is the blinkered focus of university policy that calls for more public discussion.

Knowledge transfer can have various orientations, to economic growth, or to developing a way of living that recognises that ‘the question concerning technology’ need not necessarily be tied to growth. It might equally be tied to viability in a time when growth is threatening to undermine the conditions of human existence. Readers of the G8 policy paper will look in vain for even-handed attention to knowledge transfer in that domain.

This move to open power in the aftermath of the terrorist attack marks a new stage in a process of global extension of its explicit power and of the institutions — overwhelmingly the semi-open market — upon which they are based. The Gulf War was an intervention into a dispute wholly contained within the Arab world for the purposes of guaranteeing a compliant oil producer — that ‘Nintendo’ war, whose casualties John Pilger reminds us of, spawned the Iraq sanctions and the immense sufferings of the Iraqi population. The signing of the GATT and the establishment of the WTO exposed the South to Northern economic power in a way that spawned the Zapatista uprising and the new global movement that sprang from it. Prior to that the Carter government — as former advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski now admits — established and funded the mujhadeen before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and was intended to provoke just such a move (Nouvel Observateur 15.01.98). That act not only destroyed what had been a modernising society and launched upon the seas the asylum seekers our Navy is now firing upon, it created much of the extra capacity for the renewed global heroin trade — a crop the US encouraged the muj’ to develop as a funding base. Militant Islam was selectively encouraged by the US, but also served as a conduit for and expression of the rage felt by the Arab world and central Asia at the endless manipulations to which it had been subject by the West. With the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and the attack, it all came together in a double fireball. Such a movement — combining ‘national’ rage with a religious calling out and networks of money and power — has expanded far beyond the root causes which gave it a start. Militant religion has become a mode of production for suicide warriors. Initial grievances about international relations, Palestine and Iraq have given way to the pure desire to land a blow on the enemy, to take revenge for being no more than a target in the Nintendo conflict. As has been noted, the attack on the Twin Towers was a very late skirmish in the Gulf War. That such a movement began as a reaction to the same global racket which also spawned the new global movement (sometimes called anti-globalisation movement) has been used by the Right to portray the opponents of the US as a single entity. The reverse is the case — expanding US power is a single entity which attracts the resistance of groups with totally opposed worldviews.

That the Twin Towers and Pentagon attack was evil and ruthless goes without saying. Yet the political uses to which it has been put are manifold. The Right, both in the US and here, has sought to label the very act of reflecting upon global power as an act of ‘blaming the victim’ and US culture — as Ray Nichols notes — has slipped over into an unabashed triumphalism, endorsed by the President. The attack on civil liberties is occurring on multiple fronts. As Damien Lawson and Nehal Bhuta note, much of it over here was prepared for by the mockery the government made of separation of powers and rights during the Tampa affair. The process of extending executive power into every sphere of life can now continue. Since the overall cultural and political effect of an expanding market is to make executive power into the only type of state power that is real (the strong leader, the no-nonsense government) crises such as war-scares cut with the grain of the age.

Parallel to the attack on such civil liberties as exist is an attempt to conscript the public emotions in the interests of foreign policy. For many, such sympathy as one had for the victims of the attack and their relatives became increasingly tinged by bitterness that the lives of those living in New York came to be valued more highly de facto than the nameless, numberless dead of the South. But as with the death of Princess Diana — which acted as a dress rehearsal for this sort of thing — reason and emotion came to be deemed mutually exclusive, and cleaving to the former an act of disloyalty. The implicit proposition — that the degree of one’s sympathy should be influenced by the spectacular character of the event or the number of cable channels covering it — is truly immoral. Nevertheless, it has become the official attitude. As Douglas McQueen-Thomson notes this is a war as constituted in language as any war that ever occurred, yet to ask the question of what a ‘war on terrorism’ really means is to invite the charge of ‘appeaser’. The idea is meaningless and the fact that various government and military figures talking about it being a ten, thirty or hundred years’ war indicates its true character. It is a blank cheque that the US and its closest allies — our government included — are writing themselves to give US power an unlimited pretext to abuse the sovereignty of other peoples in the name of protecting its own. It is a unilateral abolition of other people’s borders at the same time as one’s own are made into fortress walls. Our government is also dipping its toe in this water with the manufactured refugee ‘crisis’. Fortress Australia is being sandbagged with places such as Nauru whose independence has been de facto abolished using the leverage of their bankruptcy. The US has now abandoned any distinction between private terror organisations and the states within which they are located, yet this too will be selective. Pakistan continues to host Kashmiri terrorists, autonomous Kosovo, Albanian ones. Both may go quiet for a while, but only as a tactical maneouvre. The ruling as to who is in and out of the war will be as capricious and partial as the old freedom fighter–terrorist distinction.

The shocking nature of the Twin Towers attack has given the exercise of American power a new domestic strength. A peace movement has begun, but many middle of the road liberals who would support, say, an end to sanctions against Iraq, will find themselves lining up with the US government. As Kimberley Serca notes, the most high profile ‘left’ figure to line up with US power has been Christopher Hitchens who has figured the Taliban–bin Laden nexus as ‘Islamic fascists’ in a conscious recall of the popular front of the 1930s, but he is only the most eloquent of many who would have a similar disposition. Nor can one retreat into any easy blanket pacifism on this issue. Mohammed Atta and his cohorts were clearly acting as a self-contained group who had planned the attack over several years. Yet it also seems likely that they were partially funded and mentored by bin Laden’s Al-Qaida group — and it is clear that Al-Qaida is thoroughly intertwined with the Taliban — one of bin Laden’s wives is the daughter of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Now that bin Laden has replied to US actions with the promise of new attacks on the US mainland and a call to the Muslim world to launch war on the US, there is clearly scope for some legitimised US action. One could put it another way — the US now has the sovereign enemy it needed for a war. It may soon have many others.

The moral impossibility of supporting the war as it is being conducted is clear, even for those of us who are not pacifists. The bombing of civilian populations is unacceptable in any circumstances other than as defence against total attack by a whole sovereign power and this has clearly not occurred in the case of desperate Afghanistan. The Taliban’s hosting of bin Laden would have given the US the right to call on a UN force to bring him to an international court of justice — had, as Andy Butfoy notes, the US not embarked on an unprecedented effort to destroy international authority in recent months and years — but it no more sanctions an attack on the whole society than would Cuban exile raids on Havana give Castro an excuse to strike at the United States.

The issues of ‘host’, ‘sponsorship’ and ‘territory’ are far more complex than it would be convenient for the US government to admit. Yet looking at the still smoking hole in Manhattan and a city whose communal life has become dominated by funerals the question comes back at the nascent peace movement: what is to be done about terror?

The question cannot be ducked but that does not mean it needs to be accepted in those terms, either in principle or in practice. Principle first. The current and ongoing role of the US in the global South makes it morally impossible to line up with. Palestine and Iraq are the two causes which serve as the pretext for bin Laden’s activities, yet the more serious crime has been the US government’s active and zealous enforcement of the IMF/World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs and the WTO provisions which allow for the transfer of wealth from South to North. The human cost of this process in unnecessary suffering and cultural destruction over the last twenty years dwarfs anything thrown up by the fascism, Nazism, Stalinism or first-wave colonialism in the rest of the twentieth century. It is done by bankers and bureaucrats who are explicitly aware of its human cost. It is presented as an inevitable consequence of development and globalisation, but there are humane alternatives available, even within the development paradigm — most notably a global protection of labour rights to organise and global support of convivial technology and financing (small-scale banking) — so the moral–political choice is real. The dead are not shot or exploded, they die — as did most of those in the Gulag — through overwork, malnutrition and preventable disease. The universality of the neoliberal market gulag — it will take anyone as raw material — obscures the common roots it has with the more explicit tyrannies. The horror of the Twin Towers attack and the fact that its agents were devoted believers in a premodern form of religion that had nothing to say about this dimension of America’s global role has led many commentators to call criticism of the US hackneyed or irrelevant — as if it were a fashion for less volatile times. The role of the US does not in any way justify the Twin Towers attack or anything like it by any organisation, but that is not at issue. The issue is whether the Left can morally line up with the state, as the British Left could in September 1939. The answer here is that, unequivocally, it cannot.

The dilemma of the American Left in these circumstances is similar to the dilemma of an anti-Nazi German in WW2. In retrospect resistance to one’s own government was the only moral course of action — at ground zero, facing the British, French and Soviets without illusion of their magnanimity would have made this course of action somewhat less shiningly clear. As the US gets deeper into the war and the possibility of uprising in Pakistan or elsewhere, or the use of chemical or biological weapons, or a dozen other scenarios become more plausible, the dilemma for the American peace movement will deepen. But here the practical buttresses the principle. There is no path to security for the US public through the war on terrorism.

The degree to which the American attack on central Asia will destabilise various Arab regimes is unknowable. At the end of WW2 Orwell argued that a third world war would be preferable to a nuclear stalemate, as the latter would cement a power system that could last indefinitely. The prospect of Arab uprising in a number of states is looked upon by many with a similar uneasy ambivalence, since the alternative is virtually uncontested US power with the tang of easy victory in its nostrils. Yet the record of the sort of groups that could make such an uprising, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, are blood-chilling (as it should be noted is the virulent anti-semitism and Hitler-worship which disfigures some of the Arab press). But such groups will be rubbing their hands with delight as the US pushes increasing numbers of Arab and central Asian peoples to a fundamental solidarity.

For Australians the call to solidarity with the US comes on several grounds — that the states of the world have to defend themselves against free-floating terror; that bin Laden and his organisation want to dominate the world and impose a particular form of shar’ia; that solidarity should be based on cultural and historical connection. The last of these has no validity whatsoever — since there is no sign that the US would come unequivocally to our aid in the face of threats to us from any other powers. One week after the Howard Government signed a blank cheque of support to the US government, Congress signed its own blank cheque — in the form of an unprecedentedly huge amount of subsidies to American farmers. This further example of free trade globally/protect locally is a measure of our special relationship.

Nor has the second of these propositions been established. Bin Laden has expressed a desire to destroy America, but mainly because America is — as he sees it — actively humiliating and oppressing the Muslim world. His concerns are overwhelmingly with the ‘purity’ of that world. Those who align themselves unquestioningly with the US will unnecessarily make themselves a target. Australia’s relative insignificance should, in this respect, be a source of security, not talked away.

But it is the first of these propositions — lining up with the state (or a coalition of states) against free-floating terror — that is the skein from which power and positions are currently unravelling. The ‘war on terror’ has thematised the big T, the twentieth century’s shadow, as its enduring enemy yet it is, as always, unlicensed terror that is subject to eradication. Alluding to some of the themes explored here by Angela Mitropoulos we can say that it is not violence itself but legitimacy, sovereignty that is in question.

Terror — not merely violence — is central to the question of the state and power. Violence is graded and allocated to citizens to varying degrees from sport to self-defence to private security. Civil life is contoured with different degrees of violence. Terror is held to be the preserve of the state alone. Private use of it tears a hole in the fabric of power and the rip can extend indefinitely. Though bound up with warfare from the earliest times, modern terror begins when the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations — the scorched earth policy of Roman, Tartar, Inca and Conquistador alike — shifts to the killing of randomly chosen representatives of a social group. The technique comes to fruition in the European empires (Captain Arthur Phillip’s capture and execution of six Aborigines, rather than an entire group, as punishment for raids for example). Terror installs death and power at the heart of life, rather than simply killing. The terrifying Other is then permanently at home in the psyche of the terrorised, and autonomously polices them. What came to be called terrorism in the nineteenth century — especially as practised by Russian radicals — we now know as assassination, since the principal target was the Tsar. He was targetted not merely as the symbolic personification of the state, but as its actual keystone, whose shattering would cause a collapse of the whole structure.

The intertwining of unlicensed terror and technology pushed the activity into the centre of Western political life and fears — as measured by two classics of turn of the century literature, Conrad’s Secret Agent and Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men. (The use of dynamite to dispatch one Tsar and US President McKinley so shocked its inventor Alfred Nobel that he invented the peace prize to make amends.) Terror thus haunted the imagination of civil society as the other side of technology — even though the actual risk it presented was vanishingly small. Three innovations transformed it into a weapon of unparalleled effectiveness. In 1916 IRA leader Michael Collins moved from a guerrilla strategy to one of urban terror in which enemy figures targetted were not the leaders — whose identity and sense of self was bound up with enforcing British rule — but the small-fry. British informers, sycophants and camp followers were killed for no reason other than being who they were — for precisely the fact that their particular death would make little real difference. Terror was thus pushed towards a general condition. Anyone pro-British was a combatant. Collins’s strategy was the template for modern terror and of such success that one of the next innovators took the names of the IRA leader as a codename — Michael for Yitzak Shamir. Shamir, with Menachim Begin, developed a strategy of outrage with the Irgun and the Lehi groups during the fight to establish Israel in 1948, employing not only ethnic cleansing (the massacre of the Palestinian village of Dair Yassen) but also excluded middle — the assassination of Folke Bernadotte, UN negotiator for the mandate — the extension of the definition of combatants (the dead in the blown-up King David Hotel included numerous non-military stenographers and office staff) and the pornography of death (the execution/murder of two British sergeants was filmed and the film delivered to Mandate authorities). The tactics outraged the mainstream Zionist armed group the Haganah, and they exterminated most such groups. To little effect — the British quit the mandate before a two-state solution could be negotiated, which had been the Irgun’s aim. Begin’s insight was that terror could live off the horror of its friends as much as its enemies — that it relentlessly and irresistably shifts the ground of politics, that anyone ruthless and desperate enough to use it will be rewarded — in Ireland and Israel’s case with statehood. When George Habash and Wadi Hadid of the PFLP defined all Israelis as combatants by virtue of their nationhood and the Japanese Red Army put this into practice at Lod Airport they effectively completed terror’s universalisation.

A grisly history, yet mild compared with the history of state terror — whether Red or White in 1917, the Nazis at Guernica, or the bombing of Cambodia. Non-state terror looms large on the social psychological horizon because it is purely rogue — not only is it unattached to any form of other power, it is resorted to when that power seems most absent, when the enemy seems all powerful. The attack on the Twin Towers took terror further into the territory of everyday life by its use of spectacle and icons. The venerable avant-guardist Karl-Heinze Stockhausen called it the ultimate piece of performance art. He was saying honestly what media outlets were acknowledging through their acts. Three days after the event, the US government had to ask the networks to stop playing the multiply angled footage of the event.

People can’t look at terror, but they can’t look away from it. It achieves the total presence in an enemy society, that the enemy assumes in the society of the terrorist. It turns everyday life against itself and reminds people that they are, at the bottom of it all, pure carbon to be blown apart at the will of the Other. The state’s great propaganda victory of this century has been to convince people that terror in uniform is not terror at all.

For the most part, this judgement has hinged upon the bombing of civilian populations. Prior to the 1930s this act was seen as the ultimate barbarity of the burgeoning doctrine of ‘total war’. Hitler’s use of it in Spain and Mussolini’s in Ethiopia deepened that identification, but it was also used by the British in Afghanistan, of all places. Churchill, who had been an enthusiastic proponent of both civilian bombing and the use of gas was the prime mover behind Britain’s WW2 practice of carpet bombing whole cities. At the time it was a major moral issue, with many Americans arguing that the practice rendered the UK morally equivalent to the Nazis, and obliged people of conscience to become conscientious objectors. Dozens of war movies have normalised the strategy as part of a general reinterpretation of the war as a crusade against the Holocaust —falsely of course. About the only part of the Nazi empire the Allies didn’t bomb was the rail lines to the camps. The WW2 model has served as the ground for the moral division between state and non-state terror ever since. The victims of terror fade to invisibility beneath the shadow of the bombers. I suspect I am not the only one who has had dismaying conversations with good-hearted friends willing to see ordinary Afghan people blown to pieces in their name — in order to make the world a place where civilians are not exposed to random airborne death.

The terror unleashed on 11 September has been as effective as any in history because of the unprecedented degree to which people’s lives are dependent on the technologies which have been turned against them. Whatever governments may say people know that hypermodernity is inherently indefensible. The current anthrax scare in the US is an indication of the widespread awareness that a further attack may produce casualties of five rather than four figures. Echoing a theme picked up by Paul James, it is the new willingness of people to achieve such destruction with their own bodies that makes most vulnerable the uniquely disembodied power structures of contemporary globalisation. And any attempt to lock down global society in the manner in which Israel is locked down would slow the velocity of global capitalism to a degree disastrous to its smooth working. As John Hinkson notes, the current set up is balanced precariously on hitherto unimaginable systemic risk, as expressed in contemporary insurance and banking funds. Confidence is as much a target as buildings.

The people of the United States wonder if life will ever be normal again. Yet for many across the world the presence of sudden death — albeit in a less spectacular form — is normality, and it was surely a part of the terrorists’ intention to bring this fact home to the American people.

The people they purport to avenge — the Palestinians and Iraqis — face a more mundane but no less lethal annihilation. When a globalising power has the capacity to visit such annihilation on people, such totalitarian destruction, it produces total opposition — those who believe they have no choice but to die fighting in order to live. Thirty years ago Arab resistance was expressed through the movements of nationalism and Marxism. Both these have been supplanted by a militant form of Islam which offers a transcendental, a spiritual, grounding for struggle that those other movements could only partially achieve. Thirty years ago suicide bombers were a rarity — now there are hundreds. Push hard enough and there will be suicide societies whose resistance is total. A form of Islam may steel such people for certain death, but that is not so different from the many people who have faced virtually certain death because they felt that they had no alternative that would still allow them to be a human being. The Vietcong are one example; the British crews of WW2 bomber command — the first suicide bombers, with virtually no chance of surviving a tour of duty — are another. Refusing to endorse someone’s ruthless disdain for the innocent is one thing; to believe, as many conservative pundits believe, that analysing the motives and contexts from which such people work is tantamount to dishonouring the dead is foolishness distilled. As Geoff Sharp notes, the fundamentalism of the terrorists has been called out by a fundamentalism inherent in the US version of globalisation itself — the relentless manner in which it seeks to make over all existing ways of life in its own image under the brand of ‘choice’.

The need to guard the security of hi-tech globalisation has made it inevitable that the liberal political sphere would come under pressure sooner or later. Attempts to extinguish it altogether will be a feature of the years to come, especially if the conflicts now occurring slide towards a more comprehensive global war. The peace movement that has now begun across the world has sprung in part from the global social movement that has rocked the cities of the world from Seattle to Melbourne to Genoa. In Australia it has also had confluence from the refugee action movement, to create a broad campaign based on expanding the principle that recent events have been only the most visible aspect of a rising global conflict. Such a conflict will only be resolved through genuine global justice, which will only come from a global movement above and beyond the official national and international bodies. Whatever is to come will be determined in part by our resolute actions, and anything is possible. We cannot know whether the best or the worst, reconciliation or destruction, will occur, but we can say for certain that whatever it is, it will be mutual.

Guy Rundle is co-editor of Arena Magazine.

In the US capital a national cathedral, technically Episcopalian, sits close by the heart of the secular state. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the twin towers it was the site of a cultural mobilisation.

Everyone was there. In the very early morning, Australian time, the service was relayed by the BBC. It commenced by those present joining in a deeply resonant hymn:

O God our help in ages past
Our hope for years to come
Our shelter from the stormy blast
And our eternal home.

In the first half of the service there were readings by Jewish, Muslim and Christian figures. The cultural diversity of the United States was being actively recognised as mourning was grafted to combative resolution. All that was set within the generous spirit of the universal ideals which those great religions can invoke.

In this context these human ideals spoke to self-recognition. That is, to the self-understanding of a people who, believing that they live by these values, were now reaching out for a sense of common purpose which could sustain them in a protracted struggle. They were people who, taking for granted that this was a simple matter of the violation of their way of life, cried out for justice.

As the service ended and religious devotion receded before a return to the mundane world, those present joined again, this time in a hymn whose role was predominantly secular. With the same fervour as they appealed to the God of their ‘eternal home’, they now intoned ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. It was penned in 1861, during the American civil war, its author being inspired by the sight of soldiers at drill.

So much for a certain fusion of religious commitment, cultural diversity and state policies directed towards the mobilisation of the will and conscience of the nation.

In the more mundane world of imperial power, its complement is the rhetoric of freedom. This rhetoric taps back into the notion of freedom of conscience, which is so central to a universalising ethic. But in the Bush version, freedom of choice is the main accent. The choices, moreover, are material ones: choices in the market, consumption choices, all set within a crudely materialist vision of life and ratified by the rhetoric of democracy. But about that, there is no real choice on offer. The issue of how we are to be governed, to what ends, and with what consequences for the other peoples of the world, is yet to move to the centre of public conscience. Ideal values sanctify a wider culture of crude materialism and self-gratification which ignores its consequences in the wider world.

After the break-up of colonialism, after fifty years of Cold War, the nations which see themselves as developed, along with transnational corporations and global networks of high-tech and financial personnel, have consolidated a new inequality. More significantly, that inequality carries with it a deeper impoverishment of ways of living among both rich and poor.

It calls us to an order of life which has nothing in common with the framing values of the great religions or the generous humanism of certain secular currents in modernity. It proclaims their values, yet via the freedom of conscience, free choice in the market place and thimble illusion, it actually undermines them.

In the developed heartlands, masses of people are deeply confused and increasingly desperate. Many turn to the needle, a few to the bomb. Among the ‘less developed’ societies the situation is more urgently tragic. It is not merely that many millions are in dire want or ravaged by epidemics for which the only remedies are at ruling market prices. Whole economies, with their traditional ways of life, are being sucked dry by the exploitative ravages of one particular version of globalisation. That is to say, this present version of globalisation is structured to the advantage of the new rich, set within the new economy.

Equally important is the way in which life is conducted within newly ascendant social forms; these, by lending a distant and abstract quality to the fate of others, reinforce the certitudes that bind the new elites to their own primarily secular version of fundamentalism.

George Bush is probably only half right. A ‘war’ could go on for many years. But what kind of war will this be? When the small numbers he seeks to exterminate merge with whole populations, just where is the enemy? What will be the target? If a high-tech onslaught is directed against a whole population which cannot hit back in the same mode, would that be an act of war? Wouldn’t massacre be a more apt description? And would others, fearing the same fate, be likely to hit back by every possible means?

The problem with descriptions like ‘war’ and ‘terrorism’ is that they focus attention only on the surface phenomena of world politics and global change. They obscure the vast transition taking place in the ways of life of peoples all over the world. The world of intellectually grounded high tech, and of image-mediated sociality at a distance is reaching out to absorb and undermine an older world of labour, community and mutual presence. Within this epochal transformation the forms of conflict also change. War begins to transmute into massacre; the sense of outraged oppression can readily move on towards cataclysmic acts of terror against civilian populations.

The crucial issue is to begin to clarify and act within a perspective which challenges both fundamentalisms. We need an approach that challenges the dominance of the universal market as it now reaches out to transform every sphere of life. Similarly, it is an approach which challenges its counterpart: the bitterly outraged way of understanding which, because it invests itself in a just God, can act with a total self-righteousness which excludes any deeper reflection. It is this response which feeds the epithets ‘terrorist’ and ‘fanactic’, so that the labels help to obscure the underlying social transformation and the new roots of ignorance and oppression.

This transformation cannot be reduced to the interplay of economic interests. These interests should be seen as secondary, in spite of their enormous pull and pressure, both in the reconstruction of work and in extending the reach of the global market.

While this whole process of the re-ordering of social life is widely understood as the triumph of capitalism, it is also a shift in the priority of different forms of social life: of different ways of being present to and absent from others. It is a shift in the social bond, mediated in the first instance by the given powers of our species — to touch, to see and to speak with others in the flesh; in the second instance, as mediated by abstract technologies, the remaking of our very being, whether by the chip, the gene or the technological reconstruction of life more generally, we pass over into a world of mere interconnection.

These are issues which go far beyond conventional notions of class, status and power as the elements of social structures. They point to the ways in which the power of the intellect, expressed in abstract ways of addressing both the material and social world, are displacing the work of the hand and our immediate presence to each other, in the flesh.

In the short run this accelerating shift in the mode of human existence is often outside the realm of the public imagination. Within the corporate world, among the intellectually trained personnel, and within the realm of government, it is as if the basic arrangements of modernity have remained unchanged. They appear merely to have been supercharged so that the world of capital has now directly encompassed the work of the intellect. It is even as if a universalised mode of being is in prospect. The promise is that limitations of consumption, of gender, even of mortality can be overcome, if not quite today then by way of a treadmill of tomorrows.

This basic transition could not proceed without a radical shift in the social role of intellectual work. The predominance of the technosciences and their direct incorporation by commodity exchange is the central feature in the universalising outreach market. Throughout the modern period it expanded within and was limited to a degree by encompassing values. At first by Christian values; later they were joined by the humanist currents which branched out from Christian orthodoxies. Yet now, as the market reframes every sphere of life, previous boundaries are erased. Embedded as life is in the assumptions of a universal market, there is no ready place for a different perspective to stand.

Instead, perhaps for a whole generation to come, a new fetishism is set in place. It is a fundamentalism that carries a transcendental attitude and practice both secular and radically imperative. It presents itself to its carriers everywhere as inevitable, yet increasingly it stirs an inarticulate malaise. Just what does the future hold for our children and for us?

This sense of foreboding arises from the new reality in which, far more than ever before, life is carried on at two levels. On the one hand there is the world of the intellectually related practice, carried on at a distance. It is a world which celebrates its own ascendancy and has only the most limited insight into that other ‘less developed’ world with which it co-exists and from which it seeks to take its departure.

How long will it take to bring these issues into the realm of active public discussion? Is it conceivable that one generation will be sufficient time for the public conscience to respond to the challenge which now faces us as a species? The United States may have been the specific target of this attack, but the whole way of living that the market spawns is at issue.

After modernity the role of religion is a far more residual aspect of such a way of life. While it speaks with the voice of a universal ethic, it does not actively address the root cause, in our times, of the violation of that ethic — the greed, the individualism, the proclivity to treat our fellow beings as objects integral with the structure and mode of operation of a market. The recent gathering at the national cathedral in Washington was a case in point. Its essence was to join the precepts of a universal ethic to the battle hymn of the republic of greed. Yet the citizens of the United States, even some of its leaders, are far from seeing or intending this conjunction. Within their immediate circles of life they are insulated from the broader consequences of their way of life. They have yet to pause and ask themselves whether, in some way, they may have contributed to the onslaught which has wounded them so deeply. When that time comes, recognition of the harsh reality of the republic of greed will be the real test of their deeper values.

The over-riding impulse to now wage war should not, however, obscure the fact that for millennia,the great religions have been a primary source of efforts to interpret our being and to generalise ethical norms which might guide common life. Although compromised through history by their conjunction with the powers, in general terms they signify the need for institutions which can stand back from the pressures of everyday life and call people to an interpretive overview.

They are an expression of the role of the interpretive, as distinct from the technoscientific intellectual in his or her relation to the pulse of everyday life. For the present the latter is captive to a market-driven fundamentalism.

The humanities, meanwhile, are both under intense pressure within their institutions and characteristically driven by the narrowing impulse of the career, rather than by ‘the calling’ to contribute to an overview.

Yet the resources to call for a different way forward than the strike and counter-strike of fundamentalism, remain strong. Given a build-up of demand from an insistent public, yes, a ‘peace movement’ in the immediate circumstances is an urgent first step. But more than that is required. The United Nations as currently corralled by the United States will not do. What is needed is a movement with roots in every country among the many millions of people ready to stand up and act for truth and reconciliation. This will require exceptional dedication and prolonged endeavour. The interchange which embraced the elementally opposed groupings in post-apartheid South Africa is something of a model. Any passage to a shared truth, then on to reconciliation and even to justice as well would be long and difficult. Yet the minimum demand must be that the two fundamentalisms sit down among the growing number of responsible people. That is to say, citizens of every country who see that for the common good, the wider understanding of the roots of the new inequality is the urgent problem.

The world of extended interchange and interconnection has been an indispensable feature of every civilisation, just as the parochial worlds of direct presence in which people conduct much of their daily lives have been. When the relation between these forms of life is undergoing a basic change, public awareness is slow to respond to the need for radically new perspectives. Now, when the tragedy and the suddenness of the twin towers has awakened people to what could become their common fate, the time remains to think and to act differently.

Geoff Sharp is Arena Publications General Editor.