…and when it becomes hip to encourage a youth culture aspiring after role models like Corey Worthington, 50 Cent, and the big brother inmates, then I think logically speaking that is a culture reverting too much into the private and the social symptoms no doubt become evident.

There’s a well known notion of cultural fluctuation which presents three stages - the primitive, the classical and the decadent. The latter usually overlaps the first. That is when one ethos has run aground there’s another fresh ethos somewhere emerging to replace it.
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The whole gangsta rap, fame for fame type shit that Wothington and Fiddy represent is the result of the liberation from stifling values first emerging in the 50s with youth culture. This phenomena is inherently materialistic and hedonistic. Nothing wrong with that inherently. However when you overthrow a set of mores you’ll tend to need to replace it with something. This replacement process takes time. In the meantime you get venality.
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It’s becoming increasingly obvious to people that, for example, there’s a widespread lack of manners in society today. When there is such a lack the need to fill it becomes acute. And the result is that it gets filled.
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In terms of community I think you have to understand that communities are changing drastically. This blog is a community of sorts yes? One that would’ve been impossible, inconceivable just 20 years ago. On the other hand the traditional notion of community involving people who live and work in the same place is mostly a thing of the past. Many of us live in apartment buildings, most of us don’t know our neighbours. And don’t want to.
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I tend to think that community service is a good thing but that it won’t be well served by insistence. How do you effectively insist that children be raised in a two parent home? What morals do you teach at school? Some parents might insist on Judeao-Christian lore, some may strenuously object to that? See the problem? How do you insist on community service?
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There is a political philosophy that addresses these concerns. Unfortunately it’s not much in vogue these days.

If, for example, it slowly becomes politically incorrect and old fashioned to encourage some *insistence* on fairly low level obligations like … raising children in a two parent home [and] marriage … then I think logically speaking that is a culture reverting too much into the private and the social symptoms no doubt become evident.

I think you’re simply wrong about two parent homes and marriage. Your point about two parent homes is simply farcical - how, exactly, does one insist on a two parent home when one parent dies, or the parents separate? We know the damage that can be caused for children when parents who should divorce stay together (often, ironically, ‘for the sake of the children’). As for marriage, firstly it’s not open to everyone, and secondly I remain unconvinced that my living arrangements are any of your business, or anyone else’s.

I don’t disagree with the parts of your comment I excised, except that I don’t think that parents and teachers ignore ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

Securing our future beyond the resources boom? We must have heard that about a million times.

Ah yes indeed. I guess I stand corrected. Must confess it sounded like a cool soundbyte more than anything. It didn’t even register that that what he was talking about.

Mark -

I don’t think I agree about the history in your comment, or your representation of the present.

What history Mark, what representation? I merely point out a malaise amongst Australian intellectuals. The Republic debate seems to ride on an assumption that changing our constitution is gonna make us fantastic. Again and again in this country there’s the assumption that if we want to advance Australia we need the government to write a law. Why?
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Hudson’s article was interesting. The pertinent argument is that one can envisage a much better political system and over time see it realized provided you don’t indulge too much in an optimistic view of humanity or fall prey to the illusion that we are perfectable. Thus far in the Republic debate I don’t even see a solid answer to the question of alternative governability - the central question of the switch. We’re a long way off coming up with something better no matter what intellectuals dream of. In fact the practical answer to the question - why should we switch is missing. It’s always we should because it makes me feel good.
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Not good enough.
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The thing about our getting past riding on the sheep’s back is that it takes something besides government assistance (if indeed such assistance is necessary). It takes invention. We’re not totally lacking in creative power but there are certain vicissitudes of our economy and culture that stand in the way. One such is that if you think differently you’ll have the usual confederacy lining up to tell you why it can’t be done.
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With all due respect to 19th century aspirations dreams count for nothing if they remain dreams.

Adrien, to be fair to Wayne, he’s quite an original thinker

Indeed. And he gives great lectures.

So Australians, not satsified with destroying their own continent, have moved on to become the world’s largest coal exporter, so we can destroy the world!

Makes you proud … but hey, we sure punched above our weight in Beijing eh?

Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!

At least the wool industry wasn’t the main contributor to the destruction of the biosphere!

C’mon carbonsink If I’d travelled from ‘Melbourne’ to ‘Sydney’ via the Hume Freeway route 200 years ago, it wouldn’t have been uninterrupted paddocks/plains to the horizon the entire journey. Staggering amounts of deforestation (proceeded by overstocking to further compound the effects of drought) literally contributed to the destruction of the biosphere.

Australia is diverse. With our current immigration intake of around 200,000 we’re going through another major stage in our history in which we are becoming even more diverse. ‘Australians’ are not going to agree on an ‘extensive’ ethical project. The interesting think, however, is that a true realisation of the logic behind unrestrained liberalism involves turning our noses up even on limited joint ethical projects.

If it becomes Politically incorrect to defend fairly low level ethical conceptions or ‘obligations’ in the home, in the school, in society, and in government, then I think even the basis for your systems of life which ‘lives and let lives’ is compromised. If your concerned with ‘freedom’ then you should be concerned with the obligations needed to sustain freedom. This sounds like a contradiction in light of an ultra liberal climate.

If, for example, it slowly becomes politically incorrect and old fashioned to encourage some *insistence* on fairly low level obligations like some public/community service, public debate, raising children in a two parent home, marriage, teaching a fairly primitive and basic conception of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in schools, ministerial accountability, etc etc, and when it becomes hip to encourage a youth culture aspiring after role models like Corey Worthington, 50 Cent, and the big brother inmates, then I think logically speaking that is a culture reverting too much into the private and the social symptoms no doubt become evident. We should not be scared of encouraging standards that sustain free and open communities simply because we are scared as individuals of being judged according to a set of, relatively, limited standards.

Perhaps if the situation arose where we’re being taxed so much it’s simply ridiculous and when government bureaucracies invade every part of our lives because we ‘want the private life, man’ we would re-evaluate our priorities in the name what we initially set out to ensure: free and meaningful societies?

But let’s really throw round some ideas, ey? Why not encourage more localisation, i.e. the construction of communities around higher levels of shared consensus? The banker can live with the bankers and the musicians with the musicians, to borrow from your example, and then each can enjoy their own meaningful and more significant versions of the good rather than a mass, watered down, lowest common denominator alternative.

Interestingly enough, one can only chose their personal conception of the ‘good life’, true to liberal aspirations, if the institutions are there (and are encouraged, insisted upon, if you will) which allow one to exercise his or her free will, foster his or her reasoning capabilities and also his or her objectivity: things which themselves require public safety, a good upbringing, good role models, etc: all products of joint ethical projects between people with a shared goal.

I don’t think I agree about the history in your comment, or your representation of the present. If you read anything of Australian nineteenth century history, you’d be struck by the degree to which we tried to distinguish ourselves from European models, and to build something better. It’s a very similar dynamic to that found in America. The interesting question, perhaps, is when and why this sense of purpose (and it was certainly contested) ran out of steam.

I don’t remember him doing any such thing.

Securing our future beyond the resources boom? We must have heard that about a million times.

The whole theme of the education revolution too…

However I would think that ‘ethical project’ involves more some kind of consensus in the hearts and minds of a population

the aformentioned Hudson piece casts doubts on such a consensus in a modern complex technological society. A certain pluralism is inevitable and the old style civic pride of city-states simply won’t be applicable. For reasons that you illustrated:

the individualism and materialism that results from a mass of people battling it out over their competing ego’s in the market place, and the state ‘planning’ that simply navigates the way for this un-captained beast, is called an ethical project

Naturally I wouldn’t put it this way entirely.
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But people in a modern economy will seek to ‘do their own thing’ and this can vary subculturally: musicians, bankers, grocerers, cleaners, librarians may live in the same neighbourhood and lead completely different lives. Each may be reluctant to accept an ethical project that’s extensive. What the musician finds ethical, the banker might not. The best we can hope for is a simple live and let live consensus.

Certainly the idea that we’re coasting on our luck, riding on the back of another resources boom, is both enough to set in train a comparison between the Australia of 1964 and the nation of 2008 and to recognise a powerful structure of feeling which Kevin07 articulated all the way to the Lodge.

Did he? I don’t remember him doing any such thing. Whilst it’s true that the ‘lucky country’ critique is ALP territory and whilst its likewise true that the argument was and still is valid I don’t remember Rudd going there at all.

A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts or forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world - would it deserve to exist?

I was looking thru Wayne Hudson’s piece in his collection of essays viz the Republic (published in the 90s). One of the things that struck me about his polemic which is a defense of ‘realistic utopianism’ is that it had that underlying feeling of intellectual disappointment at being Australian. Disappointment that one did not live in a ‘great’ country and the desire to have the country be ‘great’ - better, nobler, fitter, stronger, faster….
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It appears to me that intellectuals in this country make the mistake of proscribing ‘greatness’ rather than simply doing great things. A lot of the Republican movement seemed to thrive on the assumption that constitutional change would make us important somehow. It won’t and that’s not a reason to change the constitution.
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Davis’ Palmer quote belongs in the realm of this sentiment. A nation deserves to exist properly speaking because there are people on it capable of defending it - that’s it. Most nations don’t discover new thoughts or forms at least significantly enough to splash the world stage. And come to think of it nations don’t do those things at all. People do. The State only helps in that it provides some security whilst they’re doing it.
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It remind me of people I know in the art/film world who have all sorts of ideas about great art, great cinema. Do they go out and do it? No. They moan about restructuring the funding.
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This country started as a prison. We’re stilled plagued by the mentality that comes of needing permission to do everything.

However I would think that ‘ethical project’ involves more some kind of consensus in the hearts and minds of a population, which represents the complete antithesis of the social philosophy we are supposedly ‘proud to be Australian’ in supporting: Liberalism.

Don’t think that either the left or right are the torchbearers of a possible Australia as a joint project.

The left all too often reduce every social issue to politics and government and by doing so replace community involvement with impersonal bureaucracies, social interaction with government checks, and a sense of personal responsibility to one’s society with ‘entitlements’. The neo-con right reduce society to the above mentioned atomised interplay of the rat race while the traditionalist/conservative right are usually more interested in simply hoisting their own highly personal and biased conceptions of ‘ethics’ or ‘common goods’ onto the rest of us: religion and what not.

Of course we should look to ourselves for a sense of common virtue, meaning and belonging as Australians once more, but not simply as opposed to looking to government to do everything for us: as opposed, also, to looking to ourselves and thinking that we as individuals are the be all and end all, that life and society exist to serve the individual when in reality it’s a healthy balance of that and the converse that sustains meaningful social bonds and meaningful personal lives.

If liberals (which means most of us, unfortunately) are “highly suspicious of the idea that politics is about meanings, seeing this as the first step on the road to serfdom”, I would ask them to consider the future for a society which possesses completely no meaning or sens of virtue for its so called ‘citizens’. More family breakdowns? More crime? More street violence? More Corey Worthingtons? More depression? More suicide? More taxes and government intervention to clean up the mess left by a mass of people living together but who possess no attachments to each other.

In the 1960s it was the sheep’s back, and today it’s the coal digger’s back.

At least the wool industry wasn’t the main contributor to the destruction of the biosphere!

Face facts people, we’re not only lazy and smug, we’re profiting from the destruction of the planet. Your most recent tax cut, or last round of funding, or shiny new piece of infrastructure in your city/town/suburb … would have been impossible without coal money.

We’ve definitely gone backwards since 1964.

I agree, good one Fmark and David.

Nobody does ‘earnest’ like Gerard and the circular argument both clockwise and anti. On Insiders, recently, he claimed it was dangerous for Rudd to travel in his first few years of government…. because “John Howard didn’t do much”.Jesus wept.

My wife and I both cracked up spontaneously but it drew absolutely no reaction from fellow inslyders.

The pre-WWII Right tended to weave the Australian story into the British Imperial story. (One of Menzies’ great achievements was to perform an elegant dismount from the British imperium while appearing to do the opposite.) But by the end of the 1960s the Menzian consensus conceded much of the cultural initiative to the Left.

But beginning in the late 1960s the New Left invented itself and parted company with the Old Left. The New Left did have an ethical vision but mostly this vision rejected the credibility of many old collectivities, both leftist and rightist, including organised religion, expressions of Australian identity such as the ANZAC myth and the Labor Party. This was an ethos of sceptical self-actualisation that was anathema to both Old Left and Old Right. However, the New Left and neo-liberals, though very different in temperament did agree with some of each other’s social principles.

If you look at the politics of genocide denialism in Australia, there is a sense that denialists argue that because Australian is an ethical place, we can’t have committed genocide. … [Henderson] argues in a circular manner that genocide didn’t happen because Australians don’t think what happened was genocide.

This spurious denialist circle of argument is also a common phenomenon at the individual and (smaller) group levels, where it applies to a number of other behaviours, but I’ve never seen it put so clearly before. Thanks for articulating this so brilliantly, Fmark — you’ve given me a way into a discussion of something different at my own blog that I was having a lot of trouble with until now.