Public ideas
On a conspiracy of decency
The norms and institutions of social democracy have been undermined by neoliberalism but as neoliberalism runs its course people need to come together to shape an order based on moral values.
We can see the economic and social development of countries such as Australia as a tension between two powerful public ideas – social democracy and neoliberalism.
Up to around 1970 the ideas of social democracy were ascendant, as societies adopted the eight-hour day, votes for women, public education, progressive taxation, and universal health care. But from then neoliberalism, with its emphasis on “small government” was ascendant.
Neoliberalism had some early successes, but it has run its course, leaving behind the wreckage of weakened state capacity and extreme inequality. Into this vacated space far-right populism is making inroads through the politics of grievance.
In the third BBC Reith Lecture – A conspiracy of decency – re-broadcast through the ABC’s Big Ideas program, Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman describes these developments. They didn’t come about through happenstance, the influence of individuals, or the inevitable progress of history – although he does not dismiss these theories. Rather, they were fashioned by groups of people with ideas – “conspiracies” in fact.
He describes the influence of the Fabian Society and its offshoots, in shaping social democracy, and the influence of the Mont Pèlerin Society in shaping neoliberalism. Although their objectives were fundamentally different, their methods were similar, including their patience in realizing that achieving lasting change takes a very long time.
Like the Fabians, we can have another “conspiracy of decency”:
We can have prosperity and fairness, efficiency and dignity. We can have our cake and eat it. In short, the contours of our true radical program are beginning to take shape. But like the Fabians and the neoliberals, we should remember that dreams and desires, plans and programs are not enough. Ideas only matter if they are organised, institutionalised, and carried through the storms of history.
(The first Reith Lecture was linked in the roundup of 14 February. The series of all four lectures are on the Big Ideas website, and with a little hunting transcripts can be found on BBC websites.)
On collective action
Fourteen short videoclips on the logic of collective action – how to ensure survival of the friendliest.
Nicholas Gruen has put together a sequence of 14 short (3 to 5 minutes) videoclips: The shared centre: awakening our better angels.
They start with Gruen’s ideas on collective action – the problem of finding and developing forms of social cooperation in which private and shared purposes align. Nothing radical – it’s a presentation of the established work of Robert Axelrod, Thomas Schelling and Elinor Ostrom in bite-sized pieces, richly illustrated with examples. The world is an ecology of private and shared purposes Gruen says: we need ways to bring those purposes together.
His presentations move on to the ideas of contract and convention and the theory of public goods – again all standard but refreshingly presented. From there he moves on to his own ideas about forms of democratic governance, including his idea of “bottom up meritocracy”. His last three clips are about social media, which come back to the problem of the closure of commons: there are strong forces doing all they can to privatize the social media commons.
At some points he conflates the ideas of leadership and authority: if he were to separate those two concepts his insights would be better directed, for some belong to leadership, others to authority – two very necessary and different functions for social cooperation.
Those 14 clips are listed below. For each there is also a longer free-ranging discussion with Irish writer Colm O’Regan.
1 Why are our leaders so self-serving?
3 How insiders are sabotaging our institutions
4 We can’t talk it through any nore: why?
5 Shouldn’t truth drive our legal system – not winning?
6 The lie hiding in every expert opinion
7 Why democracy is failing – and can we fight back?
9 The dark secret behind democracy
10 What honest people hate about politics
11 What is bottom- up meritocracy?
12 How social media broke democracy
13 Why Wikipedia works and social media fails
14 The middleware of democracy: what it is and how we get it
For good measure he throws in a 45-minute clip with British academic, broadcaster, writer and former diplomat Rory Stewart: The mysterious eclipse of intrinsic beauty and merit. It’s in two parts. The first is about beauty in our built environment with some strong comments on Australian public architecture. The second part is about governance, organization behaviour, and organization theory, with insights on the curse of managerialism.
On immigration
Migration policy is intrinsically complicated: ignore those who reduce it to simple nostrums
So far this year 606 people have drowned or gone missing as they try to cross the Mediterranean in search of refuge, or simply a better life, in Europe.
By comparison our problems relating to refugees are minor: it pays to be girt by a large sea.
Writing in Inside Story – Rough justice – Peter Mares describes the general immigration policy issues faced by governments in prosperous countries. The basic and inescapable problem is that wealthy countries are magnets for people trying to live a better life.
The complicating factors are that those same countries want migrants to provide professional and technical services, they want migrants to do things such as working in slaughterhouses that natives eschew, they see migrants as a means to save their countries from population decline and worsening dependency, and people have compassion for refugees fleeing war and brutal regimes. All these wants pull in different directions.
Mares’ article is a review of a book by British economist Alan Manning Why immigration is hard: and how to make it better, with frequent references back to Australia’s situation. It’s advice to anyone who believes there are simple solutions to the complex problem of immigration – such as a politician who claims that “shut the door” and a slogan like “standards too low, numbers too high” can form the basis of a policy. Mares points out that even a simple distinction between “good” and “bad” migrants is not helpful: it depends on context.
It’s also a reminder that immigration cannot be reduced to a simple equation or a single target number. Writing on the SBS site Eva Staszewska helps take us through the complexity of our numbers, in five explanatory charts.
Both Mares and Staszewska touch on the political complexities of immigration policy. One political issue that gets little attention is the manipulation of impressions. The current fog of immigration misinformation is that Labor is lax on immigration, while the Coalition can be guaranteed to keep tight controls. In a post about the Howard government’s economic misadministration, Crispin Hull writes that to make his high immigration palatable “Howard had to be seen to be harsh on refugees to politically counter the Hanson slogan of Australian ‘being swamped by Asians’”: the policy and the impression were headed in opposite directions.
Fashioning an immigration policy becomes so much harder when politicians, unfettered by considerations of morality or evidence, are seeking electoral support from white supremacists and others seeking a return to the despicable policy of “white Australia”. And it is not helped when a government and right-wing populists compete with each other to appear tough, ignoring their duty to citizens, particularly innocent children exposed to the toxic danger of a refugee camp where they are growing up surrounded by ISIS sympathisers.
On terrorism
Martyn Goddard provides a disciplined account of terrorism – what it is, where it is of concern, where it actually happens, and who commits it.
At a time when there are so many partisan views leading to lies and misinformation, it’s welcome to find some clarification about terrorism – what it is, where people are worried about it, where it is prevalent, and who commits acts of terrorism.
Martyn Goddard does this in his post: How the west mishandles terrorism (and makes it worse). Of one thing he is reasonably certain:
All significant terrorist incidents result in massive and alarmist media coverage. Politicians, chasing short-term advantage, compete with each other over who has the toughest response. After almost every significant incident, new laws are passed which inevitably restrict freedoms. Some of these new laws may have been of use; most have not.
He takes us through its definition as used by our authorities, pointing out “if a political group commits widespread violence, that’s terrorism. But if that group succeeds in its aims and becomes the government – and goes right on killing – that’s no longer terrorism.” That would seem to cover the Jacobins, Lenin’s revolutionaries and the Stern Gang.
As to where it occurs: concern may be heightened in rich countries, but the greatest occurrence of terrorism is in poor countries, particularly in Africa, and closer to home, in the Philippines.
For policymakers seeking to nip terrorism in the bud, the most relevant aspect of Goddard’s work is his section “who are these people?”. The bad news is that there is no standard profile from central casting, and the lone operators (sometimes in language offensive to intelligent canines called “lone wolves”) are different from those whose extremism is reinforced in a group setting. One factor in common, however, is strong and unwavering belief in a religious or political cause.
A 2017 paper published on the Australian Institute of Criminology website – Violent extremism in Australia – by Shandon Harris-Hogan gives an overview of terrorism in Australia, including some data on perpetrators. Those holding Jihadist beliefs are disproportionately represented, but that’s on a small number of incidents.
It appears from that study that the perpetrators of terrorism are overwhelmingly on the extreme right. That is, if ISIS and followers of similar movements are properly classified on the basis of their uncompromising authoritarianism, their brutal misogyny, and their extreme religiosity. It’s also important to note that ISIS directs its murderous brutality against all infidels, which is why the vast majority of its victims are Muslims. There is too much political misinformation in Australia spreading the idea that Islam extremism is specifically directed at Jews.