But examples like this cannot be taken too seriously in their own right, for there is a distinctly larger picture that demands our attention. Within its terms such failure is only one aspect of an unravelling process focused on the Rudd government. How can this be, after the spellbinding hold of Kevin Rudd over the Australian people for the past two years? No doubt a souring of sentiment caused by the GFC is taking its toll, as it has in the United States and the West more generally. Politics usually loses its gloss when economic boom goes to bust, easy money runs out and people suffer. Rudd’s stimulus packages have been widely supported by the broad community, but a souring note can’t help but creep in. People’s confidence has been undermined; their futures are much less likely to be clear. While things could have been much worse, life has been made more difficult for many and, fair or not, this was not what electors hoped for when Rudd offered change from eleven years of John Howard.

This souring of sentiment has in fact come to permeate the four main planks of Rudd’s campaign success. The demise of WorkChoices has not restored the work conditions people can still remember. The whole environment of work is more stressful and unpredictable for many workers compared to twenty years ago, and WorkChoices symbolised this transformation. It is now clearer to people that WorkChoices was a symptom rather than the cause. The revolution in education has largely been a fizzer and bears no resemblance to the opening up of hope and possibility (however romantic some of that feeling may have been) associated with the expanded educational strategies that began with Bob Menzies and were enhanced by Gough Whitlam. Now a consumer mentality and a managerial meanness towards others sits at the centre of educational institutions, reflected in education being sold as a commodity on the world market. This has set a generalised pattern that has its equivalent in school education and Julia Gillard’s competitive grading of schools. The health revolution has amounted to little. And then there is the central promise of the 2007 campaign: that Rudd would take climate change seriously.

While many people are concerned deeply by the prospect of climate change, they manage that concern to a significant degree by compartmentalising it from other aspects of their lives. Yes, we will have to change the way we live, by using a lot more renewable energy, say, or as per that illusory proposal, by making coal clean. Somehow the change can be made without significant cost to or transformation of how we live. The idea is, the economists tell us, that while there will be a slight fall-off in growth and the standard of living we have experienced in recent years, in the main life will go on as before. This view is widespread among both environmentalists and policy makers. It is also the formula adopted by Rudd and is the framework for his Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which seeks to integrate climate change strategy into a further elaboration of the market economy.

If the wheels have dropped off Rudd’s policy agenda, it is more true of climate change than any other policy area. One does not have to take a sceptical position on climate change to acknowledge that the ETS generated a valid fear of unnecessary complexity. If some have turned against Rudd because they are no longer convinced of the validity of scientific claims about climate change, others may have taken a more positive turn that looks to wider possibilities in the long run. The slow realisation that any attempt to address climate change and environmental challenges generally will have deep repercussions for how we live is not a negative outcome. It is a gain. While at the moment there is a degree of uncertainty about where to turn, this hesitation may well become an opening to a more realistic and necessary phase culminating in a more serious practical approach. In the short term, while the collapse of Rudd’s strategy for climate change may deeply trouble many people, whatever else, the simplistic solutions of his initial response have lost their credibility.

While these particular elements of public mood and the reassessment of policy are having a significant effect in unravelling the Rudd political ascendancy, there is also a more profound level of change at work. Why is it that politics is increasingly composed of policies and strategies that seem convincing only for relatively short periods of time, where ‘certainties’ last no longer than a few years? This is not a problem merely for the Rudd government; it also characterised some of the problems faced by John Howard, who suddenly saw the certainties of his political world melt before his eyes.

Politics is often described as the art of the possible. Politicians typically address the social issues and conflicts that confront them and move the electorate, while assuming that the underlying social relations that produce conflicts remain largely unchanged. Political immediacy is hardly a new phenomenon. But the world that attitude takes for granted is now a much more complex and dangerous place, as social conflicts no longer arise out of well-known social patterns. In a recent interview in the New Left Review (no. 61) Eric Hobsbawm commented: ‘Historically, communities and social systems have aimed at stabilisation and reproduction, creating mechanisms to keep at bay disturbing leaps into the unknown … How is it, then, that humans and societies structured to resist dynamic development came to terms with a mode of production whose essence is endless and unpredictable dynamic development?’ In this observation Hobsbawm has in mind the restlessness of capitalism as the root cause of this dynamic. But the truth is that the extraordinary nature of our times arises out of a combination of capitalism and a new social principle that drives the dynamic at a frenzied pace and takes hold not only of the mode of production but also our life-ways.

Behind the ‘permanent revolution’ that life in the contemporary world has become lies the high-tech revolution. The intellectual agents of this revolution have been drawn into the ambit of capitalism and rapid changes to many fundamental aspects of human existence have become a fait accompli. Supported by the media on the one hand, including the increasingly popular possibility of living via the internet, and developments in techno-production, the post-human calls to us. We change the balance of our lives by putting aside the substantial presence of others in favour of abstract associations. While resistance to change is still a deep reality, it is nevertheless muted, as people are drawn into processes that place fleeting mobility at the centre of their lives. And this composes that restless reference point of contemporary politics.

These are the processes that provide much of the backdrop and material for the populism of a John Howard to exploit. Populist politics is made possible when broader social changes disturb people, threaten their jobs, alter their sense of selfhood, and are constantly mutating into new social conflicts that may or may not be manageable for the politicians of the day. So the very same society that made it possible for John Howard to exploit a fear of ‘border crossers’ and terrorists supplied Kevin Rudd with the electoral lever of climate change, which helped bring Howard down. The society that gave support to Kevin Rudd in this goal continues at the same time to pursue consumption and growth—of economy and population—with such vigour that climate change and environmental catastrophe more generally seem unavoidable. It may be possible to ride this unpredictable monster in the short term through superficial policy adjustments, but the shelf life of any government is likely to be short.

Every challenger believes they can perform differently. Now Tony Abbott is staking his claim and there are some signs that the electorate is ready to grab even that possibility, at least for the moment. But all such choices avoid coming to terms with the fundamental question of our time. What is to be done about the emergence of a high-tech capitalism that never ceases to provide evidence that such a society is unsustainable?

The overall narrative to which Pusey, and then others, referred was first and foremost about recovering the Australia nation.  This would have to be the shell for any appeal to Australians, but now turned away from Howards ‘paranoid’ version to a softer nationalism, which could be grown naturally enough upon the bedrock of who we Australians really are.  Pusey’s descriptors included ‘secular’, ‘sharing’, ‘national’ and ‘practical’.  We are at heart, he said, Benthamites – utilitarians, not taken with theoretical or spiritual claims or absolute values, a common sense people with, it would seem, a modest self-interest that had been perverted by neo-liberalism.  In relation to climate change, a cornerstone issue for this future politics, the message must not be overwhleming.  The ‘urgent present’ of current campaigning must be re-narrativised in ‘lived time’ drawing on our ‘historical past’.  Constructing recognisable stories about ourselves that draw on those distinctive traits, we will be able to see ourselves as agents with a collective story at stake.

Overall the conference, over two days, was stimulating.  Not every paper-giver was as upbeat about the possibilties, with Green activists of different organisational alleigances more or less depressed by the hugeness, if not impossibility, of the task ahead.  But the obvious fact of people being engaged, and so many of them being young, was testimony to sense abroad that politics is again on the agenda.  Indeed, it is everywhere being discussed how we might reform our democracies, re-orientate markets, change values.  The emerging ferment is evident in the pages of this issue of Arena Magazine, living by its brief as an arena of a broad Left.  On the one hand, Tom Nairn positively assesses Rudd’s new social democracy from the vantage point of a dismal showing by British Labour, while Guy Rundle, on the other, sees Rudd as a ‘far from emancipatory’ micromanager of comtemporary life.  Andrew Thackrah discusses an influential new British book on climate change strategies and new possibilities for the citizen, as opposed to the consumer, while Russell Marks, countering the ‘racist’ accusation in relation to Indian student attacks, draws on some of the ‘new nationalism’ arguments put at the Deakin conference.  Alternatively, in a virtual how-to build your own, Race Mathews argues for a different tradition of worker co-operatives, while Ted Trainer and John Martin posit a ‘simpler way’ with a rural or close-to-nature orientation, as a kind of lived transitional practice.

The Deakin conference wasn’t nearly so broad a church.  There was a strong sense of an already forming policy orientation, and this has been evident since in The Australian‘s series ‘What’s Left?’.  Also led off by David Mcknight, it has had contributions from a range of writer activists, unionists, and politicians, with Robert Manne providing a broad politico-philosophical framework, also championing the new social democracy idea, as already clear in his writings in The Monthly since Rudd’s essay in that publication in March this year.  No new party is being suggested by this loosely associated group, so it would seem that the task may be to create a think tank or develop a forum that will provide tapped-in ideas and create a culture of new thinking to bolster Labor’s efforts, especially in relation to climate change.

But the rush to policy around a notion of ‘values’ is only partly reassuring, while the rush to confirm the said national trait of utilitarian (no theory, optional spirit and plain practical common sense) is not at all.  While Pusey’s observations may be empirically based, one couldn’t help wondering about both the religion that was once – not so long ago – a common feature of Anglo-Celtic Australian life (when spirit and moral absolute matched), and the many faith-based communities that have come to reside in Australia since the Anglo-Celt’s great secularisation.  And quite apart from this, given that the values and ideals evinced in the long period of neo-liberal ascendancy appeared to have their own transcendent quality, and given that utilitarianism may be a key undergirding of neo-liberal common sense, references back to some typical Benthamite Australian, rather than a break into something actually new, seems likely to be a hollow echo of a need rather than a meaning-laden call to change.

Robert Manne’s framing piece in the ‘What’s Left?’ series provides a larger canvas for this discussion of value and of theory, where some seem to think values can be egged into reality and theory dispenses with because all good people already know the answers.  Manne commences with the French Revolution and the values of liberty and equality (he neglects fraternity) which, he says, set the whole liberal ball rolling and around which the dominant perversions of 20th-century politics were played out: communism in its pursuit of equality denying liberty, and Nazism in its communalist fantasy denying equality on the basis of racialist ideology.  As the century proceeds, the two men left standing – social democracy and neo-liberalism – remain committed essentially to liberty, though of different ilks, with very different outcomes for the question of equality.  All the same, rejecting extremes of earlier communalist fantasies, and now in the death throes of neo-liberalism, those two values, liberty and equality, remain the pole stars of true democracy, indeed ‘social democracy’.

Social democracy in this view is social liberalism, not democratic socialism, and capitalism is simply not a target.  Neo-liberalism certainly is, but the competitive basis of capitalism itself, the forms of utilitarianism it has spawned, its fundamental counter to substantive equality, and indeed its denial of freedom of many peoples in many parts of the world, is simply left out of the equation.  In fact in this key article in a series called ‘What’s Left?’, which is an historical survey, albeit brief, of the key moments of Western political history, and now the key issues of the day, no mention whatsoever is made of ‘capitalism’.

This is intriguing.  The first thing to observe is that Manne is a political theorist, not in any way a social theorist.  The form of society, the means by which people are integrated into the collective life of a social form, the way culture constitutes us historically as significantly different different types of people over time – picket fence individualists (normalised subjects) in modernity, transgressive boundary-crossers (autononous actors) in postmodernity – is not on his radar.  And so any understanding of how these culturqal forms, embedded in deep structures of social and individual experience, underpin and play out in relation tot he valeus of the time and questions of the day is mightily restricted.

Those people with left histories now hopping on board this social democratic train may be deeply contrite about the role played by communism in the radical denial of both liberty and equality in actually existing socialism, and desperate for action in the face of climate change, but they may also be indulging others in writing a very partial history of the modern period.  The values of liberty and equality in Manne’s piece are themselves disconnected from their roots in the rise of modern capitalism and the form of life and power it implied; just as left struggles for 100 years are given no mooring in the depredations of extreme class conditions under domestic capitalism or colonial oppression; just as contemporary assumption about what individuals desire and feel they deserve seem to be denied specific analysis, perhaps for fear, ironically, of our utilitarian bent being upset by ‘too much theory’ and the expectation that good people will simply respond to good values.

There’s no doubting that politically a break into new consciousness has to be made, and that it will be in part arbitrary.  Fear, logic or intuition: a break has to be made from the claims and chains on consciousness that the form of society has over our being (which is never total).  But we must not shy away from a deep account  of the nature of that being, which is always historically re-constituted, and which can help to account for the difficulties in carrying through good programs on the basis of good values that others don’t share, or not yet.  Narratives are one thing, but structural accounts of the specific nature of contemporary social forms offer the more solid ground for working those narratives out.  In this case, while a certain practical attitude may define something about Australian life and national culture, the idea that some past good Australianness can be dug up and appealed to, as if our goodness was simply perverted by ‘neo-liberalism’, is likely to miss the constitutional commitment both of Rudd and the population to a utilitarianism now fed by the expectations of a post-modern market and high-tech solutions to our myriad problems.  If Manne could not name capitalism in his short history, resting entirely on a notion of neo-liberalism to do his work, this must be because it is seen primarily as a political philosophy, which has engineered a system, rather than an efflorescence of deep trends in the meshing of intellectual technique and capitalist development over centuries.

There was trouble everywhere with words in this terrible experience. The existential terror, such awe-struck horror: they are visceral and bodied; description failed many a correspondent, while their wavering, or panicked voices conveyed the truth of it.

But ‘mother nature’ especially seemed all wrong, even in the mouths of those who used the idea. The usage carried a fatalistic sense of the force involved — like the capriciousness of older gods — and yet the old chaps who referred to her on TV or radio seemed really to want to embrace her too, to feel the love of the bush that had been reciprocated to them as they had lived in it and experienced her benevolence.

‘Mother nature’ for us today just doesn’t seem to sit well with the ‘fiery chariot’ image. Overall, if the term is used at all, she seems to be softer and giving: the font of life rather than the screaming fury. It seemed the reference points and contrasts were all at sixes and sevens. Many people did not want to believe that the bush they loved could have done what it did, even if some level of dangerousness was accepted by most. It was disbelief that the world could transform ‘just like that’, ‘before their very eyes’, into total, unforgiving, inhuman chaos where none of one’s dearest assumptions might hold.

Various essais at common sense have been made by commentators, and almost everything coming from the mouths of politicians and people on the ground seems to be pressing in the direction of a full recovery of it. That is, where the language used can assume a community of meaning; where the dreadful is shared in communal mourning, and yet is set aside for the common good; where gutsy determination kicks in to rebuild, to recommit, to move on, but not move out. It does indeed fit with everything we have ever been taught about determination, will and spirit.

But there is something that is also disturbing about this emerging push. Not only does this kind of practical common sense appear as an essential prop to some kind of recovery for individuals, families and communities, the language of blame and responsibility too builds on recognisable ‘figures’ around which positions and action, a mighty salve, can be taken. Premier Brumby has right from the start offered an open, broad-ranging Royal Commission that will leave no stone unturned, and his statement of a non-political interest in this pursuit of the truth is wholly appropriate to the nature of the disaster. And yet one fears that not only will immediately practical questions like burning off, building materials and warning systems fulfill much the same function as the Australian will to get up off the ground and start again, but that a blame game around systems of command, the rooting out of arsonists (ideal for pre-emptive profiling), and the demonising of ‘environmentalists’ around prescribed burning could take centre stage.

The last is highly ironical, on several counts. First, the contrast of farmers and ‘ordinary folk’, many of them the suburban dwellers in country areas, with ‘environmentalists’ cannot do the work some wish it to. On the question of prescribed burning, the really hot issue here, there seems to be widely differing points of view among environmentalists themselves. Some do seem to have held back the hand of government in undertaking to prescribe burn to the government’s own recommended levels; others argue for it vehemently as a reproduction of the form of ‘land management’ practised by Aborigines over forty thousand years. In any case, many who argue against it are not just romanticising the bush, as some would have it (not least Miranda Devine, who thinks they should all be lynched), but give (non-aesthetic) reasons related to real underlying land degradation and future burn potential for not doing so.

Second, it is hard to believe that Australians’ popular love affair with the bush, which has seen not only the building of isolated eyries in remote, bush-surrounded locations but also the building of suburbia on the edge of state forests in recent years, has not been at least in part inspired by the trickling down of an environmental consciousness, even if some whose lives have been shaped by it effect to despise it. Environmentalism has, after all (for good or for ill is not readily answered when fires like these hit), reformed and broadened White Australia’s historical attitude to the perception of its home as ‘alien’.

Third, while all this practical talk goes on about a world in which we can control the impact of fire, where we call on tried and true values to do with spirit and will and ingenuity to ‘rebuild’, it is deeply ironical that much broader, deeper issues of climate change in all likelihood fuelled the fires, and their provenance is only known through a form of knowledge and related political consciousness that sees the world in its vast interconnections. We were warned. We have been thoroughly warned, and it wasn’t our practically oriented governments, farmers or suburbanite tree-changers who told us. In the best and the dumbest of Australianisms, commentators and victims who have been telling government not to ‘buggerise around’ with issues like climate change (alas, Germaine Greer did just this) and to ‘put people first’ (overwhelmingly the attitude of every newspaper and media outlet in the immediate aftermath of the fires) have conveyed a willingness to tarry with outmoded outlooks on our connection to Earth, which essentially wish to remain blind to what is happening.

How will climate change be built into the Brumby government’s Royal Commission? This is a crucial question, and surely it must be part of the Commission’s remit. The Greens must push for this aspect of the investigation to be fully considered; to be taken seriously as the real backdrop to any more practical or immediate solutions to the mere phenomenon of fire.

Of course, not even the best of broad-ranging Royal Commissions is likely to take the further step recommended in this issue of Arena Magazine by John Hinkson and Del Weston. Writing on climate change and responses to it — the Rudd government’s hopelessly inadequate carbon trading scheme and recent interventions in the public arena by environmental writers — they argue for a reconsideration of the deepest kind of our way of life and the structures that support it. Without a reconsideration of our assumptions of what makes for the good life, a moral life vis-à-vis human and non-human others, quite apart from the question of planetary survival, we are doomed to remain in the grip of an immoral system: an amoral system of production and distribution, and a structured system of assumptions that understands itself as virtuous, but which has long ceased to examine its sources and its limitations.

Of course I am talking about the neo-liberal market and the consumption values that keep it afloat. But even the ideas of ‘will’ and ‘spirit’, and the comforting notion that ‘ingenuity’ or the practical attitude will get us out of any mess, seem false and shaky at present. Are they really ideals, or are they a mirage? Are they perhaps no more than the deep constructs of our own sense of self-esteem, the last defence of a way of life against furies none wish to face up to? So what if there is ‘human spirit’, a comforting term used massively in recent weeks, if it is blind?

When ‘Nature’ first made its appearance in the cultural history of the West, it was an idea set apart from ‘Culture’. It had connotations of female capriciousness that carried on earlier notions of a female nature, but it had a still stronger derogatory and destructive implication, as historians of science know well. It was conceived as a great passive resource to be mined and plumbed in the service of a rationality devoted to transparent knowledge and practical control. Strangely, today, even ‘nature’, let alone ‘mother nature’, is an archaic idea. As nature has been de-sexed over the recent centuries of Western development, the whole paradigm of control has moved towards a different paradigm of scientific rationality, which as John Hinkson points out in the article mentioned above, has made neo-liberalism what it is: a supercharged growth machine that not only eats up Earth but poisons her as well. Today, she is not only conquered but, as a mere object for the transformational consciousness of the high sciences, it is on the verge of becoming unrecognisable to us all, if only we could see.

These may seem like big leaps — between markets and fires, Western consciousness and a desire just to get on with life. But they are rich seams for exploring where we come from as a people and a culture, and while Royal Commissions must focus on many practical questions, we can always hope that a philosophical restatement of who we are in relation to the bush, and the larger systems of life that offer it to us, may be considered as a crucial guide for real change.

Alison Caddick

‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’, Prince Tancredi, in Il Gattopardo (1958),

Giuseppe T. di Lampedusa.

‘Empires everywhere, it seems, are on the move again’, writes Alison Caddick in Arena Magazine 96. That ‘big old world’ is still at it, and still guided by ‘hubristic notions of progress and supremacist nationalism’. Globalisation and global warming provide a new theatre for the old brutes, who continue to hog the centre stage as of right, shouting the old slogans louder than those quieter, smaller actors who have increasingly come out from the wings to occupy United Nations space: minorities, dwarf-nations and states like Singapore and East Timor, no-hope out-backs like Tibet, edge-lands like West Papua, reanimated fossils like Scotland and the Basque country.

For God’s sake — what can such pip-squeaks expect, in a globality so evidently configured by and for the big lads? As Caddick puts it, the reborn superpowers naturally seek to maintain ‘a way of life built on unsustainable economic and environmental assumptions … [and] cultural mores associated with the spread of a contagious form of high-tech capitalism’. When it suits them they are entitled to ‘put the clock back’, as Umberto Eco puts it in his new book of that title, with votes where possible (as in India), or by authoritarian means if not (as in China). What they really count on, she suggests, is popular feeling: ‘an exercise of power over actions and desire’, furnished of course by what Eco describes so accurately as ‘media populism’. The proverbial ‘small guy’ (and small nation-state) has no real option but to tag along and make the best of it. Tiddle-pots may sometimes choose sides, but are not allowed a side of their own.

Nor should they have that option, on one influential interpretation of events. The matter has been debated recently in Foreign Affairs, following Jerry Muller’s article in their March–April 2008 issue ‘Us and Them’. In the current issue the question is summed up by none other than Condoleeza Rice. Entitled (yep) ‘The New American Realism’, George Dubya’s Secretary of State is kind enough to add an explanatory subtitle: ‘Rethinking the National Interest’. In years to come (whoever wins in November) the latter must go on being guided by ‘this uniquely American realism’. Unique? It looks awfully like the Great-Chinese and Great-Russian realism that recent events have disclosed. After Iraq and Afghanistan have come Tibet and Georgia. ‘Responsibility’ accompanies ‘stability’ in all these national-interest justifications. Globalisation is fine, but cannot be allowed to upset things.

An academic team has been assembled to back Rice up. Their aim is reinforcement of centre-stage, loud-voice nationalism: ‘responsible’ big-lad politics, in fact. The vanguard is a Harvard–UCLA Sturmabteilung captained by Richard Rosecrance and Arthur Stein, co-authors of No More States? Globalization, National Self-determination and Terrorism (2006). Their message is that ‘apostles of national-self-determination would do well to consider a still more important trend: the return to bigness in the international system’ (Foreign Affairs, vol. 87 no. 4). Some idea of what this implies can be glimpsed in another astonishing essay from the same issue: C. Fred Bergsten’s ‘A Partnership of Equals’, which entreats Chinese leaders to stop being so modest, and turn into international Big Lads with whom Condoleeza can make deals, even alliances. Hey, Beijing, stoke up all that hubris and supremacism, time you joined the club: didn’t you know that economic power entitles you to being a bigness-bully?

Not so long ago, I doubt if Foreign Affairs could have published such rantings. But now there’s something in the air, as Caddick recognises. In the mill-race of globalisation, the previously unthinkable now gets tossed up like this almost every day, casually claiming normality: back-room fantasies, foregrounded as ‘speculation’. The deeper moving impulse behind the No More States? team is simply Great-American nationalism, more often glimpsed in weekend drag these days, as ‘neoconservatism’. However, McCain and Palin are working on a full dress musical revival for the coming Presidential elections.

Naturally, returning to bigness can be seen as favoring the old baton-wielder, the United States of America. But the point is, the latter is also favored by the new conjuncture. As Caddick puts it: ‘The strongest element in this depressing scenario is a common interest shared by these competing empires’. It’s what they jointly perceive as stability and continuity, and holding the clock hands firmly back. Condoleeza Rice’s ‘realism’ is simply an acknowledgement that, good as it was being the superpower, this couldn’t go on for ever. However, much may yet be saved via formal or tacit understandings among suitable ‘equals’. The resultant common interest leaves enough space (for example) to Barack Obama’s notion of the United States returning to ‘inspire’ the globe and renew the leadership beacon. ‘Hegemony’ is the new buzzword here: a fuzzy concoction counting on small fry to colonise themselves, by seeking guidance, collegiate support, orientation conferences and so on.

But surely Caddick’s analysis may be interpreted as pointing also to something more significant, way beyond such compromises. A growing number of people and states in the new global times have no wish to hegemonise themselves, do not long for an eventide beacon, or thirst for inspiration from the City on the Hill. ‘For God’s sake, leave us alone!’ may convey their attitude more accurately. I think quite a few of them resent having been made to feel, six months in advance, that an election where they have no say is, none the less, important enough to make them take sides. This isn’t internationalism. It’s more like unilateralism off its hinges, still pretending to be the only show in town. That there’s more than one unilateralist around — a unilateralist gang, as it were — is no consolation: the streets are even less safe than before.

So what’s the answer? In the decorous language of international relations it’s called ‘multilateralism’ — coined in French, not by chance, as le multilatéralisme. Small guys can defend themselves only by sticking together, and working out their own common interests as a kind of trade union. In the appropriate wider sense, democracy and equality are on their side, not with the City-on-the-Hill kids. The latter want protection money and obeisance (for which of course neoliberalism was the ideal missionary church). Multilateralism calls for something different: initially more modest but ultimately stronger, and more durable.

As for the big-lad populations, I quoted the most famous elegy for a dying culture above, from Colquhoun’s 1960 translation of The Leopard. But the original was slightly more eloquent: what Tancredi said was ‘bisogna che tutto cambi’ — everything, every single thing, has to change. I doubt if Count Lampedusa was looking ahead to globalisation, in 1958, but that’s how it has turned out: like it or not, ‘everything’ and everyone has got involved. And for that very reason, more breathing-space is urgently needed to make the global deal more tolerable. No doubt this is true for big-shot masses as well — but then, that’s the real point: it’s their problem, not ours. They are just nation-states like the rest us, if somewhat weighed down by their ridiculous scale. Would a short cure of ‘isolationism’ really be all that bad?

‘Globalisation’, by contrast, has to mean more differentiation, and substantial rather than formal respect for diversity. This is why Kevin Rudd’s theme of ‘middle-range’ policy and ambition could be so important. He has returned to the idea often enough, since his Lowy Institute address in 2007, and it must be hoped he really means it. David McKnight commented on the trend, pointing out how it represents a rejection not just of neoliberal mania but of the latter’s intellectual basis in the earlier work of Friedrich von Hayek. We may be entering an ideal, and rather prolonged, moment for movement in that direction. Having been disabused of state-led, short-cut socialism in 1989, electorates have now been even more thoroughly disenchanted by the collapse of its contrary, the weird right-wing ‘historical materialism’ of marketolatry and deregulated enterprise. Hayek always urged the Right to imitate the Left in seizing and publicising power, and was rewarded with disastrous success in the 1990s. However, part of that mimesis has continued on into its latter days: the ideological foundering of the Right has now followed (and may well exceed) that of the Cold War Left.

We don’t know how long this disarray will last. In his history of the 1929 Great Crash, J. K. Galbraith points out that about five years passed after the worst moment in 1931–32. Not until 1938 can one find ‘the leaders of the original shock troops (of the New Deal) polishing up speeches on the virtues of the free enterprise system’, satisfied that all that was possible on the public side had been done. George Soros thinks we are not yet at the worst point of system failure. But whoever is right on this, it seems reasonable to hope that, this time round, the disorientation is more fertile.

Rudd’s government had the good fortune to take office in its early phases — the contrary of Brown’s faltering Labour Party regime in Britain, originally set up all too close to the ’90s high tide of neo-liberal exaggeration and optimism. Carried forward on the latter, Blair and Brown felt compelled to focus on the futile business of remaining ‘Great’: the tradition of a once major state that finds it very hard to embrace middle-range identity and aspirations. Instead, it has clung to a Special Relationship that was in truth concealed prostration and camp-following. In other words, the United Kingdom. has consistently chosen the opposite of Rudd’s proposed modesty and co-operative initiatives.

And yet — ‘Never has there been a better opportunity to strike a new social contract between private capital and the people’, wrote Scottish commentator Iain Macwhirter in the Sunday Herald recently (21 September). British Labour seems incapable of making the case. Is there any hope that Australian Labor can do better? ‘Looking at the wreckage wrought by unrestrained greed during the boom years (Macwhirter continues) this should be a great time for a social democratic party like Labour — an opportunity to reaffirm its fundamental values. The people who should be on the defensive are the free-market Conservatives and their friends in the City who have brought us to this state thanks to their bonus culture and predatory lending. All those neo-liberal nostrums about the evils of government intervention have been swept aside as financiers fall over themselves to get state subsidies … ’ Socialism for the banks, as it were, in the service of saving face — Britain’s ‘world role’ — and keeping up with Caddick’s empires on the rebound.

Isn’t this also a new context for the argument on republicanism? Now that a convinced republican has become leader of the Liberals, the case is bound to be re-opened anyway. But the wider republican tradition has always been about more than doing away with monarchy: it embodies a positive drive as well — the reconstitution of collective will and ambition, a reformation of identity and belonging. As Caddick put it, in ordinary (‘middle-range’) states, ‘for ordinary people the struggle and strategy will have to take a different form …’ one that no longer denies ‘more subterranean channels of cultural identity and social meaning’. Wasn’t that a part of Rudd’s great apology to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, and of the extraordinary emotion it generated? She’s right: the well-springs are there, and calling for more than exploded formulae and time-worn rules.

Tom Nairn is research professor at the Globalism Institute at RMIT University.

This may seem unfair in relation to climate change. Rudd has set in place a developmental process focusing on significant goals for the reduction of greenhouse gases and processes of emission control. But even in relation to climate change it has developed a policy that amounts to nothing more than an administrative tool. Formed in the campaign to defeat Howard, and influenced by opinion polls that in no way reflect the reality of the on-the-ground costs of responding to climate change, it attends to the global threat as merely an aspect of normal governance.

The political effort is to normalise climate change: both in terms of policy and in the minds of voters. Whether our way of life might contribute to climate change, and what might count as a serious response at this level of thinking and action is marginalised because administration looks after an assumed way of life. The Garnaut Report is already being placed in cotton wool. Garnaut has made it clear that his investigations require responses more radical than ever before contemplated. Rudd now responds that Garnaut will merely be one of the sources government will consider.

The Limits of the Administered State

But what if the responses required go far beyond normal administration? The current debate on oil pricing is perhaps a guide as to how this will be handled.

All of the main elements of the oil price crisis have been coming to the surface for years. The four elements are: background problems associated with producing a finite resource (recent reports argue that in 2007 oil exports actually fell); destabilisation of states and regions that produce oil, usually caused by Western pressures and assumptions; the rise of developing states and their rapidly expanding consumption needs; and profligate consumption by the West to satisfy grossly excessive ways of living and producing. The only new aspect – a fifth element affecting prices – is speculation; but rather than march speculators around in handcuffs we should ask what else could be expected given the first four fundamentals of this volatile situation. Rather than begin a process of debate and education that addresses these elements forthrightly as fundamental questions about life expectations, the Rudd government settles for an utterly limp set of childish proposals: a fair market price scheme; a threat to pull OPEC into line by means of the blow-torch, and contradictory appeals to OPEC to consider our car drivers.

Administrative strategies that suggest all is well, except for a few hiccups, are matched in other areas of government. The neo-assimilationist assumptions of the Northern Territory intervention into Aboriginal communities, instigated by John Howard, retain a surprising degree of appeal for the Rudd administration. It seems to fit its general approach to political affairs. In this view sexual abuse, the distribution of pornography and drugs, individual health and problems of everyday life are matters calling for good administration. They certainly call out a ‘moral’ reaction, often populist and lazy, but administration remains the answer – an attempt to go beyond Left and Right, in the limited sense of bi-partisan strategy. The intervention appears to be gaining momentum and may even be generalised outside of Indigenous issues, once again encouraged by newspaper campaigns. If children are not being properly cared for or, more generally, if there appears to be a moral hazard (as the market economists would call it), government must intervene. Will this prove the claim that the Northern Territory intervention is not racist?

At first glance these new interventions seem similar to previous forms of welfare (the Leviathan state concerned for its citizens), but there is a new momentum at work, one certainly not uncovered by any newspaper campaign.

The administrative approach to climate change, to the politics of oil and to interventions in the remnants of communal life have two things in common: they all are ‘beyond Left and Right’; they all take contemporary society and its way of life for granted. We don’t have to refer to the ‘good old times’ of a familiar capitalism to recognise that economy and society have been fundamentally transformed. The old adage that capitalism always changes allows us to avoid the reality that neo-liberal globalisation is not simply ‘capitalism’; and that this emergent form brings with it problems never before faced by human communities. In particular, the high technologies amplify and transform aspects of life once protected from the market. Today, inflated expectations of the self, even the denial that there is a self, the new role of the university, the assault upon nature, the market in its global form, the possibilities of techno-embodiment, the infinite wants of the consumer, all appear to confirm that the possibilities are limitless. High-tech processes amplify our world and draw us away from any notion that it might be finite.

In respect of families, and what Rudd has begun to call ‘little children’, we can see the effects of high-technologies in the thinning out of the social fabric. The multi-faceted media that accompany the globalisation of social life radically undermine community-based and generation-based settings. Relatively rich face-to-face local and neighbourhood social relations are thinned out and displaced by technological mediums, putting in their place conditions that underpin both moral panics and interventions. These moral panics do not simply arise out of media campaigns. They have a basis in the new social order now administered in the name of a politics beyond Left and Right.

Ignoring these processes of social transformation allows the question of how we should live also to be avoided. Gradually new circumstances of life have been set in place that undermine community settings. Problems of community and family can then be taken up simply as empirical realities needing an administrative response. The same can be said for the problem of oil prices as well as climate change. But taken simply as an empirical fact, the anger in the community about oil pricing can have only one ‘rational’ outcome: growing conflict potentially leading to neo-imperial ‘adventures’. Indeed new sites of international conflict could be said to be the only likely outcome unless the fundamental issues can be properly addressed.

To treat oil pricing as an empirical or technical problem ignores how neo-liberal globalisation affects the felt needs of individuals. As it breaks apart the social world of local communities and sets them in motion as global social connections without limit, excessive consumption demands are naturalised. Crucially, finite oil symbolises to us how neo-liberal globalisation demands a world of infinite need and striving, one embodied in global trade and ever-expanding demands on global transport, a world that will never be satisfied. And what can be said about oil can be multiplied many times over in relation to climate change. Market-based emission schemes seek to protect and conceal the society they implicitly support. They seek to shift production into more acceptable directions while preserving the world of economic growth and global free trade, the very world that will eternally call into being excessive demand and must itself be restructured.

Neo-liberal globalisation is now encountering a world that it believes should not exist: the finite world. The strategy of turning all problems into administrative problems conceals from view the need to reconstruct societies across the board by re-invigorating regionalised production and distribution, as well as regional communities. Rudd is fond of claiming that we must face the costs of emission controls now rather than later. But it is the many questions implicit in this more basic restructuring that has to be addressed, now.

John Hinkson is an Arena publications editor.

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.