Any number of media pundits, including David Marr and John Birmingham—and many others not directly in the pay of the Titan Murdoch—responded immediately to this apologia pro vitasua, by opinion piece, by letter, by blog, by Crikey! As these commentators pointed out, Bolt precisely hadn’t been gagged. Quite to the contrary, he was left free by the judgement to continue his opinionating. In other words, the HUN’s claims were simply and patently untrue. If Bolt indeed had been gagged, how was it that he couldn’t seem to shut up? Was this not an emblematic performative contradiction, a gagged man continuing to speak, volubly and at length? Moreover, wasn’t Bolt preaching hypocrisy, insofar as much of his career has been dedicated to denying the rights of free speech to others, such as to the photographer Bill Henson in 2008? Or, indeed, in demanding that Ben Naparstek, editor of The Monthly, pulp an issue in which he, Bolt, was the subject of an exposé by Anne Summers? Particular scorn was cast on Bolt’s much-repeated statement, broached on the steps of the court itself: ‘I argued then and I argue now that we should not insist on the differences between us but focus instead on what unites us as human beings’. If this is indeed true—which it might well be—then what Bolt shows we all share is a hateful narcissistic divisiveness. This divisiveness presents itself as its opposite, as courage and openness, through its dissembling routines of aggressive servility. ‘Suck up, bully down!’ is its categorical imperative. As one twitterer put it, ‘Bolt doesn’t open a space for debate, he designs a space for sympathetic opinion down to the smallest details’.

It was therefore a surprise that Julian Assange, who is, to put it mildly, also continuing to experience his own difficulties with the issue of free speech, defended Bolt in an opinion piece co-written with his lawyer Jennifer Robinson, and published in the Fairfax media, ‘Play ball, not Bolt, in free speech debate.’ Drawing on perhaps the most banal and widespread opinions about the goods of ‘free speech’—and I do not use ‘banal’ or ‘widespread’ here as dismissive terms, merely descriptors—Assange quotes Fredrick Siebert: ‘The true and sound will survive. The false and unsound will be vanquished. Government should keep out of the battle and not weigh the odds in favor of one side or the other’. Americanised spelling aside, this is horseshit.

What’s stupefying about Assange’s intervention is not simply its beigely innocuous character. One might be tempted to speculate as to the weird unconscious identifications unleashed when angry male narcissists find themselves threatened by governmental legal action. Certainly, one of these personages incarnates a very familiar type of reactionary propagandist, being a man who has invented not a single new rhetorical technique; the other is perhaps so radical that he, like anybody else, cannot yet quite recognise himself. Yet the becoming-indiscernible of the utterances of these antithetical characters is surely notable, as is the becoming-personal of all and any issue. That the pair agree—or at least pay lip service to the same ‘principles’—that is, absolute freedom of speech, open and vigorous debate, and the quest for truth, probably shows that these are now essentially theological terms from which no one is permitted publicly to demur.

Assange’s statement was possibly made to show that he’s a bigger man than Bolt (that is, he can reach out a hand, while the other cannot); that he, Assange, has real principles that overcome any ideological divisions; or it was perhaps just part of a global PR campaign to render him a good democrat like everyone else. But even taking such possibilities into account, it is still amazing that Assange’s statement ignores the problematic of the media—the technical means of transmission—which he, of all people, should surely be more attentive to. After all, both Assange and Bolt are now essentially post-convergent multimedia characters, existing simultaneously across an enormous number of media:

print, blogs, TV, radio, Twitter and so on, and they would have no meaning whatsoever outside of this media situation. For what’s at stake is not simply the content or form of ‘free speech,’ but the means of its delivery. The real questions are, as ever, the most obvious: above all, whose interests are being served? Who really stands to gain, and in which ways, from such opinions? How is the structure of the media itself instrumentalised to serve established interests?

It is possibly because of his attentiveness to every aspect of this media snarl—its personnel, its structure, its interests—that Robert Manne stands out from the swarms of commentators. Twice voted the ‘most influential public intellectual’ in Australia, Manne has become an indefatigable critic of denialists of all kinds, whether of climate change or of the evils of colonialism. He has also had a long-standing interest in the role of the media, from his editorship of the conservative journal Quadrant to his journalistic and academic studies. Part of Manne’s authority is surely due to his long-term reliability: despite the title of one of his collections of essays being Left, Right, Left, it seems to me that he has never really deviated from what’s essentially a classical liberal position, constitutively hostile to mass ideologies of all kinds. Like Malcolm Fraser, another uncompromising moral voice in the Australian 21st century, Manne remains a Burkean conservative for whom established governmental and non-governmental institutions, the division of powers, the rule of law, free debate and moral discussion remain paramount.

It is then no wonder that Manne is incensed by the practices of the Murdoch media empire which, as he conclusively demonstrates in his Quarterly Essay ‘Bad News: Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation’, means that ‘Australia has not one Murdoch problem but two’ (112). The first problem is that News Limited owns 70 per cent of Australia’s newspapers; the second is The Australian under Chris Mitchell’s editorship. As Manne concludes of the latter, ‘The Australian has played the role not so much of reporter or interpreter but rather of national enforcer of those values that lie at the heart of the Murdoch empire: market fundamentalism and the beneficence of American global hegemony’ (113). It is primarily this ideological capture of The Australian that Manne tracks across a number of zones: from Indigenous issues and the

Iraq invasion, through its relentless assaults on the ABC program Media Watch, the Rudd Labor government and the Greens Party, to The Australian’s fundamentally anti-scientific position on climate change.

In a sequence of clear, careful, carefully targeted vignettes—in line with his own professed schoolboy ideal of ‘clear thinking’ (37) and his well-known admiration for George Orwell—Manne argues that The Australian slewed debate on Indigenous issues in its rampant ideological support of Keith Windschuttle (and much else), promoted the Iraq invasion by shamelessly skewing the facts, consistently proposes that there is really no such thing as climate change, and went so far as to announce in a breathtaking editorial of 9 September 2010: ‘We believe [Senator Bob Brown] and his Green colleagues are hypocrites; that they are bad for the nation; and that they should be destroyed at the ballot box’. Such propagandistic militancy didn’t develop overnight, but it did develop. Thanks, according to Manne, to one man in particular: he proposes that the perverse imp hovering over this ideological morass is The Australian’s much-feared editor Chris Mitchell, accompanied by a swarm of lesser ideologues, from Janet Albrechtsen to Gerard Henderson to Greg Sheridan.

But let me underline, too, Manne’s attentiveness to the proliferation of media, their interconnectedness, their propensity for feeding on themselves, and the Murdoch drive to dominate all of the above by any means available: ‘Tweet tweet’ as one section heading reads, opens onto an account of the uses of the threat of suing for defamation against individuals who dissent from The Australian’s line, as well as the newspaper’s penchant for ferocious character assassination. Speaking of its treatment of the Indigenous activist and scholar Larissa Behrendt, Manne tracks the fate of Behrendt’s ill-advised tweet about Bess Price—which becomes the basis of a front-page Australian story—and is promulgated by what Manne incisively denominates ‘the Australian’s familiar false-inference, disguised-assumption, report-as-accusation house style’ (87). We’re back to the personalisation of every issue, along with the licensing of extreme affect-opinions that, at the very least, undermine any reasonable debate.

What perhaps couldn’t have been predicted from reading Manne’s essay is the utterly staggering nature of the response: Roget’s Thesaurus would flounder for adjectives to describe it. Although I spoke to many readers of Manne’s piece, who professed finding it a less-powerful piece of reportage than the inaugural Quarterly Essay, In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right (April 2001), it seems my sample set was unrepresentative. In The Weekend Australian 17–18 September 2011, an unheard-of battery of staff writers, including Chris Mitchell, Editor-In-Chief; Graham Lloyd, Environment Editor; Michael Stutchbury, Economics Editor; Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor; as well as Chris Kenny and Nicholas Rothwell, presided over articles with headlines such as ‘On the receiving end of some nasty and wilful misrepresentation,’ ‘In denial of his own set of rules,’ ‘A critic untroubled by facts who seeks to silence dissent’. The articles themselves were apoplectic with self-righteousness: Manne manipulates the Holocaust for his own political purposes, notably around Indigenous issues; Manne has a one-eyed view of climate change, which, despite his protestations, he seeks to impose upon everyone; Manne turns reality upside down, in accusing journalists of being, say, anti-Rudd; Manne reduces the generous range of the paper and insults the public, etc., etc., etc.. Emitting an impervious, overwhelming drone, the wasps set about swarming the intruder.

The very excessiveness of the claims made by The Australian journalists—both in terms of quantity and quality—betray their real truth. Sigmund Freud once pointed out that the proliferation of phalloi was incontrovertible evidence of castration, and the former were certainly flourishing here. Manne had, so to speak, touched on their lack—and those found lacking proved to be very touchy about it. One of the key rhetorical operations was clearly this: accuse Manne of shutting down whatever debate he was purporting to foster. In doing this, Manne would hopefully appear a narrow-minded anti-democratic hypocrite and the journalists courageous defenders of our freedoms. That such claims are absolutely fabulous should go without saying—although it is still noteworthy that what Manne and The Australian journalists share is, just as I noted above in regards to Assange and Bolt (aside from the fact they are all middle-aged middle-class metropolitan white males), is a noisy assertion of their commitment to free speech, open debate and the quest for truth.

Yet what are the ways in which politics is not—and should not—be about truth? Under despotisms of all kinds, the fundamental principle of ‘do as I tell you to do’ also means: say what I tell you to say. In such conditions, truth itself cannot be anything other than a pure function of power—including when that power is contested in the name of the truth. Whether it’s a matter of distinguishing ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’ sciences, or of Aryan and non-Aryan beliefs, or all the other obscene distinctions that have prevailed between orthodoxy and its heretics, truth itself is explicitly subordinated to power and defined by it.

What makes democracy unique in the historical catalogue of real and imagined polities is that it overturns the proper places and processes of despotism. For democracy renders every individual personage subordinate to ‘the will of the people’, however that ‘will’ and that ‘people’ are pragmatically conceived. If power resides with the people, and those people are constantly discussing what the people are and should do, then it’s not that truth isn’t at stake—it’s just that truth has changed its status. Truth retains authority, but that authority must now be divided against itself, and there are many other factors in play. A democratic people must discuss and rediscuss what it wants as an essential part of its democratic process and, in doing so, the people continually make themselves other than they are. If truth is a factor in democracy, truth must also be a casualty—and not the inevitable outcome of democratic process. This is, for a true democrat, less dire an outcome than perhaps it sounds.

Yet the essential mutability of the people and the concomitant occlusion of truth naturally has consequences for governance, apparent from the start. At the alleged beginning of so-called Western Thought, Plato spent an inordinate amount of effort analysing the vicissitudes of democracy. As everybody knows, Plato pitches the philosopher, represented by the low-born ugly Socrates, against the suave and sophisticated sophists, represented by a rattle-bag of professional politicians, lawyers and pedagogues, whose epitomes are figures such as Protagoras and Gorgias. A sophist treats debate as a kind of sporting event, in which all other concerns—truth, justice, logic—are sacrificed on the altar of victory. Everybody loves a winner, after all, and public victory has great economic and symbolic benefits, which sweep all along in their wake. Truth, by contrast, has little to recommend it, especially since those who pursue it not only gain neither prestige nor power, but risk, à la Socrates, state-sanctioned execution. So, some oppositions: Socrates versus sophistry; impersonal truth versus self-aggrandising propaganda; rigorous argument versus socio-political advancement; losers versus winners.

Although Karl Popper denominated Plato one of the primary enemies of ‘The Open Society’—that is, any society founded on freedom of association and freedom of speech—this does injustice to Plato’s insights. To see Plato as himself a totalitarian thinker whose animus still pulses through, say, the Stalinist communist state, is a falsehood promulgated by allegedly liberal technocrats. Rather, the centre of the Platonic project is to restructure life according to the idea, a true rationalism. Such rationalism is strictly speaking non-tyrannical insofar as that idea is, at least in theory, impersonal, rationally established, objectively accessible, and thus, according to these processes of equality, just. But this is clearly not democratic in the sense of permitting free speech. On the contrary, ‘free speech’ for Plato is only truly free if it is constrained by truth.

But this conclusion is anathema to democracy. Democracies are essentially opposed to tyranny qua single ruling body, on the one hand, and rationalism qua regulation by truth, on the other. More important than truth is discussion itself, and the opening of that discussion in principle to as many persons as possible. In other words, to think that politics should simply be normed according to truth is itself an anti-democratic idea. From the point of view of democracy, Plato simply inverts and doubles despotism, insofar as he simply replaces the personage of the tyrant with the abstract figure of truth itself—and isn’t truth itself a matter of contestation? Yet, for Plato, it’s precisely because democracy fails the test of truth, succumbing as if a matter of course to the most outrageous, base and self-damaging drives, that it is a deleterious system.

For Plato, democracy is servitude to the tyranny of opinion, that is, to the media. Notoriously, Plato believes that the logic of media is given by the poets. Poetry essentially works by inspiration, mysterious utterance, the swaying of the passions, and elite competition—all things that are antagonistic to the egalitarian openness of reasoned argument. Fundamentally, the threat of free speech is that an excess of speech ultimately jams (or spams) its own channels, thereby corrupting itself. This is why poets are banished from Plato’s Republic: they are media goons, who seek to dominate the means of representation at the expense of justice. Hence we come to the most pressing aspect of the matter: since democracy essentially requires ‘variety’ and ‘criticism’ as E.M. Forster puts it in his classic Two Cheers for Democracy, it—unlike other forms of political organisation—necessarily places an impassioned media war at the very centre of its political enterprise. This is precisely the problem again today: democracy relies upon media that undermine it.

Yet the new media undermine democracy today in ways that go far beyond anything Plato could have envisaged. If ancient democracy certainly had to deal with a variety of media, from public heckling to graffiti, these are small fry compared to the contemporary globalised post-convergent online media environment. Even as I write these lines, an email notification pings in, spruiking an upcoming lecture by Malcolm Turnbull at the Centre for Advanced Journalism on ‘Politics, Journalism and the 24/7 News Cycle’.The blurb promises a discussion of such questions as ‘What role do Facebook, Twitter and social media in general play in policy debates and election campaigns?’ Such an environment is clearly no longer able to be satisfactorily allegorised by Plato’s Cave.

For contemporary post-convergent media simultaneously:

1) transform all forms of interaction into ‘information’ due to their technological conditions,

2) massively proliferate the modes of dissemination of information,

3) massively proliferate the quantities of information,

4) massively accelerate the speed of transmission of information,

5)necessitate that everybody purchase or at least have access to the technological devices for interacting with such information,

6) condition an unprecedented centralisation and control of the ownership of the means of representation.

This list is meant to bring out something that, for some reason, political commentators hardly seem able to mention: the very interactivity of the new media, their uptake of user-generated content, their operational requirements for sociality, are by no means new opportunities for democratic mobilisation. On the contrary, they enable not only an unprecedented exploitation of immaterial labour, a tracking of every incontrovertible keystroke, an immutable archiving of every missive, but the corporations that run the sites are extra-territorial economic giants who are essentially immune to any form of local criticism that can be elaborated on their sites and networks. Criticise as much as you like—it’s just more fodder for the fibres. New media no longer inform, but confirm: they are global, real-time, online, high-tech filtering devices that reduce all complexity to intense polarisation (good/evil, true/false, wrong/right, etc.), and all discussion to the immediacy of enraged blog posts.

This is why one can only celebrate the heroic democratic attempts of Robert Manne to hold back the ungovernable tide of centralisation. The unhinged ferocity of The Australian’s response is prima facie evidence that Manne has described—calmly, clearly, magisterially—the topology of a fetid crevice that normally hides in plain sight. Manne has targeted precisely the right phenomena too, including the opinions of the key henchmen, their ideological tropes and commitments, and their money trail. Above all, the fact of systemic concentration of media ownership is in itself a wrong in a democracy, perhaps one of the worst of all possible wrongs. For under such conditions, even if every single person seemed to be discussing public events with enthusiasm and energy, democracy has been neutered—for control of the means of discussion themselves have now literally been taken from their hands and mouths. The media war required by democracy will have morphed into a media monopology (if you’ll pardon the neologism).1

So not the accuracy, pertinence and power of Manne’s description, nor the swarming fury of the reaction, nor the ongoing governmental investigations and civil suits, are enough to reassure me that ‘our democracies’ are still viable as democracies. On the contrary, we now live in a world that is the bastard lovechild of 1984 and Brave New World: prolefeed and doublespeak for the lumpen masses, social snobbery and psychopharmacology for the touristic Betas, absolute deterritorialised mastery for the Alphas. As I finish this essay, in Melbourne, Australia in mid-November 2011, scientists connected with the Iranian nuclear program are being mysteriously assassinated, unmanned killer drones are being deployed by the US government, Rupert Murdoch remains under pressure due to further allegations regarding spying at News of the World, the ‘Occupy’ movement is still sweeping the globe from Iceland to Idaho, and it looks more and more likely that Julian Assange will indeed be extradited to Sweden. Not a single one of these ‘security issues’ can be properly understood under traditional headings of national public discussion and critique.

It is Assange who, despite the fatuousness of his public remarks noted above, provides us with an emblem and a key. His method is not, despite appearances, one of democratic debate, of revelations of embarrassing secrets, of truth against corruption. Rather, it involves a systematic flooding of the system itself. It seems to me that Assange has understood the political conditions of the network society better than anybody: to use the torrents of classified information to exacerbate the same routines of classification to the point of breakdown. Recursive escalation, not revelation, is the key to Assange’s program, or what could be called, using a botanical metaphor, ‘dieback’.

Dieback occurs when a part of a plant is affected by disease, parasites or other environmental factors, and the branches or shoots begin to die from the tip inward. In certain cases, although the infection may only be minor, the plant expends so many resources on expunging the infection that it essentially kills itself. Accelerate the barrage of information, accelerate the resources needed to deal with it—dieback as a non-linear informational tactic in the current war of humanity against the corporate state. The odds are that Manne’s classical model of critical debate won’t prove determining for our world, but Assange’s informational practice of dieback will.

This is the post-convergent media dilemma of democracy today: caught between killer drones and information dieback.

Justin Clemens teaches at the University of Melbourne. His most recent books are Minimal Domination (Surpllus, 2011) and Me ‘n’ me trumpet (Vagabond, 2011).

1 Manne says this, if with a slightly different emphasis: ‘The issue is not the absence of alternative sources of information for politically engaged citizens. In the age of the internet there are hundreds of easily accessible sources of information. The issue is rather the capacity of News Limited to influence the opinions of the vast majority of less engaged citizens whose political understanding is shaped directly by the popular newspapers and indirectly through the commercial radio and television programs which rely on the daily papers for the content of their programs and, more deeply, for the way they interpret the world,’ p. 112.

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.

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.

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.

Concluding In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right, Robert Manne situates the ‘debate’ over the stolen generations as part of what he calls ‘a larger culture war — over the meaning of Aboriginal dispossession’. His incisive analytical work in the essay is bound together by military metaphor: the ‘campaign’ to undermine Bringing Them Home; the ‘troops’ drawn from the Institute of Public Affairs and Quadrant; and at the core, ‘General’ P.P. McGuinness. Manne points to the way this Right-company pictured its key battle as that for ‘the moral balance of power’ in Australia.

As they see it, a ‘sorry industry’ set up by white intellectuals lives off indigenous suffering, exploits guilt and deprives the bulk of non-elite white Australia of their own national history. Aside from sniping at those ‘black arm-band intellectuals’, the lines were drawn for the public denigration of the stolen generations, specious denial of frontier massacres and racist circumscriptions of Aboriginal culture in general. This tilt at the moral balance pushed toward the kind of arrogance of the ‘civilising mission’ — something we heard echoed by the Minister for Reconciliation in his comments about the invention of the wheel. It seems that when Australia federated it did not supersede all its colonial ways. It is from exactly this colonial mode of thinking that some have been attempting, for the last thirty years, to extricate Australia.

In his account of the stolen generations and its deniers, Manne has targetted two strands of Australian colonialism. One is the history of a state-practised assimilation and the other is its current ideological defence. If the transformation of government activity in Aboriginal communities came in the 1970s with policies of self-determination, then the broader social shift was certainly not complete. Today, persistent assimilationism re-emerges and presents itself as the answer to social problems in Aboriginal communities. The continuing suffering of those who were separated from their families and land is not the only colonial manifestation in the present. There is a broader cultural attack going on against every aspect of Aboriginal life, and we can find it in the daily papers.

Take recent reports in the Australian on social problems such as domestic violence in Aboriginal society. Nicolas Rothwell has proudly announced that a series of articles heralds ‘the demise of a generation’s worth of presuppositions and certainties’ in regard to the relations between indigenous and settler Australia. The project was initiated with a pair of articles in the Weekend Australian (14–15 April, 2001). One, by Paul Toohey, was about violence against Aboriginal women in the Northern Territory; the other, by Rothwell himself, outlined a new book by Roger Sandall, The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays. Rothwell, in a manoeuvre perfected by those commentators who complain of being stifled by ‘political correctness’ (usually from within their column in some major daily paper), declares: ‘Once, almost nothing in this area could be easily discussed; suddenly almost everything seems to be on the table’. This new dawn and its sudden freedom of expression, sadly, revealed some quite old ideas. In regard to Toohey’s article, Marcia Langton’s critique is probably sufficient. Langton points to the limitations of narrowly racialised representations, indicating that there are a variety of ways of being an Aboriginal woman. She provides the example of herself, or Cathy Freeman, or any number of others. Without denying the existence of problems within communities, Langton points to the way Toohey, under the guise of an unflinching reportage, calls up images from as long ago as the frontier days: Aboriginal society is bound within victimhood and violence. But there does seem to be a new camouflage spread over this ageing position. Toohey writes: ‘Genuine culture is doing battle with a culture of convenience, whereby tribal law and alcohol have become ugly friends’. There is no parallel analysis of white communities with similar levels of alcohol problems or unemployment. Such an investigation might have established the degree to which these problems visit all communities of the excluded, regardless of colour. Instead, there is a jump to the unsubstantiated conclusion that attempts to preserve aspects of traditional life are to blame. Race becomes the only explanatory category, prior to gender or class or even history. This suggests a philosophical debt to, among others, Roger Sandall.

Sandall’s book appears to be an intellectual supply-line for assimilation’s rear-guard action. The main point is Sandall’s critique of what he has termed the ‘culture cult’. This is what he sees as the valorisation of indigenous cultural authenticity and autonomy at the cost of material infrastructural development. This debilitating delusion is apparently the prevailing legacy of Nugget Coombs and the cause of all social problems in Aboriginal communities. This blinkered glorification of tribal life is a convenient straw-target for Sandall — a product of his imagination, rather than Coombs’. But with it in place, Sandall is able to offer his own solution: policy makers and the general public should shake off this bad case of noble savage fixation and settle back into a pre-1970s assimilationism governed by the ‘law of historical advance’ or ‘creative destruction’.

The envisaged disappearance of Aboriginal people, or at least of their culture, is another story as old as Australia. It was wished into being with the legal fiction of terra nullius. Now a version of this strand of thinking is again being rehearsed in Sandall’s claims about the rigidity of Aboriginal culture and its likely surrender to ‘historical advance’. Happily, colonial dreams don’t always come true, even if they do continue to weigh on the brain of the nation.

There is a need to dismantle Sandall’s argument piece-by-piece, to resist this new claim on ‘the moral balance of power’. One key point can be addressed here: the false dichotomy between ‘the tribal world’ and ‘modernity’. Sandall maintains that there is a ‘Big Ditch’ between these two social categories — a gulf that the tradition-fetish obscures. He claims that this ‘romantic primitivism’ leaves Aboriginality stranded on the wrong side of the development gap. For Sandall, Aboriginal communities are fixed in a passive pre-modernity any way you look at it. They are either artificially preserved by being locked into ‘ethnographic zoos’ or they are swallowed by the modernising tide.What presents itself as a critique of the policy of self-determination is, in fact, a position that strips Aboriginal people of any individual agency, any cultural resources, any political will. Sandall’s vision allows no negotiation across the ‘ditch’ from the Aboriginal side, only volleys of ‘creative destruction’ launched from the citadel of a white modernity. Is this Australia today? What of the massed movement of Reconciliation? What of examples of co-operation in land usage within Native Title? If his critique of self-determination targets its perceived romanticism, Sandall’s alternative is no way out, it is in the thrall of his own illusory picture of the docile native.

This version of Australian modernity seems more intimately and necessarily linked to its pre-modern Other than Sandall is prepared, or perhaps able, to admit. It might well be time to debate what self-determination actually means. However, a way through to a nation that is truly beyond its colonial past will only be cleared when ‘the meaning of Aboriginal dispossession’ is no longer a terrain for the continued re-enactment of an old culture war.