Category Archives: Philosophy

The revolt against the elites

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Spectator Australia

It’s always been hard to pin down who ‘the elites’ are why we are supposed reject them as un-Australian. A new book review by Tony Abbott offers some clues. It also hints at why attacks on ‘the elites’ are likely to backfire for conservatives.

In the Spectator Australia, Abbott reviews Nick Cater’s The Lucky Culture and the Rise of an Australian Ruling Class. He writes:

As Cater sees it, there’s a powerful new commentariat, dominant in the media, academia and public administration, that is every bit as condescending as the aristocracy he left behind in Britain. In contemporary Australia, the worst snobbery is not directed towards people of lower status, he says, but towards people of different opinions. He thinks that this ‘my opinion must be better than yours’ conceit is putting at risk the egalitarianism that’s at the heart of Australians’ sense of self.

What distinguishes this group from every other influential sector of society is its unshakeable conviction in its moral superiority. Everyone who disputes its thinking is not just wrong, but inferior. Critics of the politically correct consensus are not just bad thinkers but verge on being bad people, as those who are cautious about gay marriage are starting to discover.

Comparing the new commentariat to the British aristocracy makes it sound as if this is a problem of status. Like a bunch of obnoxious Old Etonians, the elites are snobs who consider their manners and way of life to be superior to those of ordinary people. But what made the snobbery of Britain’s upper class oppressive rather than ridiculous was that it was the snobbery of a ruling class. Without power, the snobbery of our elites would be no more threatening than the snobbery of a bunch of undergraduate hipsters.

Continue reading →

A fable of Eunuchs, Praetorians, and University funding cuts.

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Imagine yourself to be in the mythical Land of Beyond where you need minions to do a dirty job that men with honour would refuse to do. A classic trick in this situation is to pick people despised by the rest of society who are thus dependent on protection and will simply do what is asked for.

The Chinese emperors hit upon this truth when they started to surround themselves with eunuchs, despised by the rest of Chinese society and thus fiercely loyal to their protector, the Emperor. The roman emperors, similarly, made a habit of surrounding themselves with freed slaved who were despised by other Romans, as well as by a dedicated palace guard (the Praetorians) who were the only militia allowed in the vicinity of Rome.

The European colonialists too used this basic ‘dirty dozen’ technique when it came to keeping a large population in check with minimal own presence, particularly in Africa, by elevating some small despised group (ethnic or religious minorities) as the preferred club from whom the senior administrators came. This small favoured group would get personal benefits (riches and influence) but in return they would do whatever the colonizers wanted.

To see the relevance of this for university cuts in the Land of Beyond, you first need to step back a level and imagine yourself to be the Vice Chancellor of a second-rate university that brings in, say, a billion ‘Beyond’ dollars a year out of which some 300 million is money you dont really need to generate that 1 billion. It is ‘potential profit’ if you like. Continue reading →

Guest Post by Mike Pepperday: Doing social science like natural science

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On a previous thread, my counter-intuitive claim that verbal definitions are superfluous to science survived objections. I have been wondering if some further unconventional notions would survive a Troppodile attack.

Because natural science is effective, I suggested that we should do social science the same way. For example science does not define things but works out relationships between two or more objects (or concepts). That is, the only way we know if a concept (mass, time, heat, pulse, blood group…) exists is if we know its relationship to something else. Science also measures rather than counts and of course—of course!—scientific knowledge is falsifiable.

Social science is very far from this. Mel complained, with reference to the concept of power: “nothing like a consensus on anything ever emerges and … abstract and incomprehensible theory [increases].”

That sums up the position throughout social science (except economics). In addition, almost nothing has ever been shown to be false—or could be. After a century (or two and a half millennia) of such failure would it not make sense to adopt the methods that have proved so efficacious in natural science? Here is an illustration of that efficacy. Continue reading →

Dennis Glover on Labor’s Bonfire of the Inanities

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Here’s Dennis Glover’s go at articulating his dismay at the kinds of things I expressed dismay about here.  I’ve always been amazed at the extent of antagonism that Labor holds towards the Greens. It seems so obvious that the right relationship between them is as occasionally uncomfortable fellow travellers. It’s a monument to the small-mindedness of all players that they can’t manage this except in extremis. And a stark contrast with the right which has precisely the uncomfortable relationship with those of broadly like mind, which has managed a coalition for decades.

In addition to the childishness of the ALP’s discomfort with its Green fellow travellers which reminds one of nothing more than student politics, comes its spin-doctor driven approach to eating its own ideology and intellectual framework. To speak very broadly the left’s role in the political and ideological eco-system is to speak on behalf of collective values and of the value of collective institutions (which is not necessarily government) against the right’s championing of self-interest (along with a kind of insistence that collective institutions other than government – like the family, and the institutions of civil society – have a kind of unproblematic organic existence). Of course a healthy society, any healthy human institution, comprehends a balance of these perspectives. Of course neither side is ‘right’.

If it had any conception of its own role in this scheme of things, it might at least have considered whether to build the NBN as a public good (in which case it would proudly subsidise the establishment of the national network with economics textbooks to back up its decision) rather than a private good.  It might have named MySchools and MyHospitals websites OurSchools and OurHospitals. It might have jumped on the HALE index which reveals that its efforts in education are not just good for equity but, at least according to our methodology which wasn’t developed to put it in a good light, worth a couple of decades of micro-economic reform. And so on.

The irony in all this is that ultimately this doesn’t just lead to badly designed right of centre policy, it has been an integral part of Labor’s disastrous inability to politically connect with anyone much – including laughably enough the traditional working class base of the party.

Anyway, enjoy Dennis’s piece:

Two stories in 10 days caused me to double-take. The first was the Prime Minister’s widely reported speech to the Australian Workers’ Union national conference in which she rhetorically riffed off the fact that the party she leads isn’t called the social democratic party or the progressive party or the moderate party, but the Labor Party. The second was the less-reported but just as dispiriting revelation that after Greens leader Christine Milne officially broke the alliance with Labor, high-fives were shared in the PM’s office.

In a literal sense of course the PM’s speech was right – her party is called the Australian Labor Party, and it can be social democratic and progressive without changing its name. And it was the Greens who formally broke the alliance. But why does this still sadden me?

It’s because of the implicit message. Perhaps her speechwriters just got carried away with their schemes and tropes, constructing a rousing concluding sound bite for the brothers, and perhaps one of the office grey-beards told the high-fiving woodchucks to chill; but there seems to be a lack of deep thought over the wider implication: for now at least the big left project seems over.

Think about it. Today unionism covers about 18 per cent of the workforce, while 37 per cent of Australians have university degrees. The global financial crisis makes social-democratic state intervention in the economy more needed than ever. Global warming is the emerging issue of the new progressive generation. And yet Labor’s leader picks now to narrow the party’s potential appeal.

Taken alone, neither organised labour nor believers in the social-democratic state nor educated progressives can deliver the left the majority it needs to influence the direction of the country.

But together they can. Three out of three of these constituencies means potential government. Two out of three means certain opposition. One out of three means existential crisis. Continue reading →

“Values based management”

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Herewith today’s column in the Age and SMH.

George Orwell was a stickler for plain and simple English in public discourse. He argued that one could escape some of “the worst follies of orthodoxy” by simplifying one’s language.

“When you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies
sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Last week the OECD felt it was time for a bit of pure wind. It headed a media release “Structural reforms more important than ever for a strong and balanced economic recovery”. Really? Let’s invert the rhetorical body language and leave the literal meaning in tact. The OECD thinks that structural reforms have always been less important than they are today. Less important in addressing the economic ailments of the 1970s? Less important in the industrial revolution? Enough said.

This kind of verbal flatulence is everywhere. And it matters. Continue reading →