There’s been a bit of word play on another thread about John Quiggin‘s discussion of the coinage of the term ‘Agnatology’ to describe “the study of the manufacture of ignorance”. There are resonances between his diagnosis of the political right and Geoffrey Barker’s take on “bogan politics”, discussed on LP early in the week. What hasn’t attracted so much comment is Quiggin’s view on ideology.
The long struggle of left and centre-left parties to maintain their relevance in the face of the resurgent market liberalism of the late 20th century gradually eroded any belief in the possibility of a fundamental transformation of capitalism, to the point where such ideas no longer receive even lip-service, let alone serious and sustained attention. Instead, these parties have found themselves lumbered with the task of managing the mixture of social democratic and market institutions that emerged from the conflicts of the 20th century, tweaking them sometimes with market-oriented reforms and sometimes with marginal new interventions. This is broadly consistent with the ‘end of ideology’ story.
[Incidentally, I think there's an interesting story to be told about the right's turn to the manufacture of ignorance, and its new-found populism - having to do with, among other things, profound social changes - but that's a tale for another time.]
I recently read Donald Sassoon’s magisterial One Hundred Years of Socialism. Sassoon tracks the history of the European left, and while there’s much to take away from his discussion, one conclusion to be drawn is that the project of social democracy lost its transformative edge because of its reluctance to make institutional changes – both in governance and in the broad field of political economy. Where such changes were made, and where there was a hegemonic cultural space for social democracy, as in some of the Nordic democracies, social democracy, even at the height of neo-liberal reaction, retained a strategic capacity to think long term about the shift to a different form of society.
It’s sometimes argued that the left won on the terrain of culture, and lost on the terrain of economics. There’s some truth to this, but not much comfort can be taken from it, because the social shifts towards a greater liberty to choose one’s style of life largely bubbled up from below, rather than being intended by left parties (in which there’s always been an authoritarian stream matching that of conservatives). And the post-materialist politics of liberation has shown a remarkable capacity for co-optation into consumerist capitalism, mistaking civic for collective action, as Nina Power has recently remarked.
It’s also somewhat questionable that Australian Labor has ever really had a strategic and transformative dimension. There’s good reason for the ideological distinction between labourism and social democracy.
Quiggin concludes his post:
But, in the meantime, their abandonment of reality-based politics has left managerialists like Rudd and Obama wrong-footed. Their whole approach to politics assumes that the other side shares a broadly consistent view of reality. But in John Cole’s acid metaphor, dealing with the agnotological right is like going on a dinner date where you suggest Italian and your date prefers a meal of tire rims and anthrax.
The big political problem is that while competent management commands widespread approval it does not mobilise much enthusiasm. What is needed here is a return to ideology, and a project to move beyond day-to-day management and offer the ‘light on the hill’ of a positive social transformation, based on justice and equality.
I couldn’t agree more.
It’s actually possible to construct a transformational narrative (albeit in minor key) around some of the initiatives of the ALP. But it’s not done. Too much of what Labor has done in office is represented as being about ‘restoring balance’, and tends to default back to the defensive posture characteristic of centre-left parties in the face of neo-liberalism.
For myself, I’d also diagnose the failures of the social democratic project as resulting from a too heavy dose of statism and a lack of concentration on the possibilities of autonomy and mutualism, but that’s perhaps a story for another post.
But the experience of UK Labour is instructive.
A government at the end of its life needs to contain the seeds of renewal within it. While there is some talk of a progressive revival through shifts to the voting system and coalescence with elements of the Liberal Democrats, and there’s no lack of interesting thinking about the relations between state and civil society, values and the economy, in the Labour Party itself, all passion is spent.
That’s the inevitable result of a process which hollowed out the party and tacked towards an illusory centre of gravity, with the best that could be achieved being minor adjustments to the prevailing policy consensus.
It may very well be possible to lay the foundations for a lengthy-ish period of government by prudent electoralism. But, in the absence of a broader strategic and ideological vision, it may also be futile in the medium term. Quiggin’s call for a return to ideology deserves much discussion.
The long struggle of left and centre-left parties to maintain their relevance in the face of the resurgent market liberalism of the late 20th century
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As in socialism lost.
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This is broadly consistent with the ‘end of ideology’ story.
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As in what do we believe in now?
I got in a bit late for the discussion in that thread, but I would just like to observe that it’s a very dualistic view of the world, and the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ shouldn’t be separated so strongly. There are a variety of anti-rational positions held within the left to extreme left, and the majority of those on the right of politics in Australia, if you believe the opinion polls, accept climate change science. So I think that the divisions and distinctions are quite overstated, it’s a media bubble that’s not really relavant to how most peopel think.
You say you couldn’t agree more with Quiggin’s sentiments, Mark.
I’d like to show how some disagreement is possible.
Quiggin’s description to right-wing politics may be accurate in terms of the right’s approach to electoral politics but in Australia at least the right has shown little inclination to govern in an agnotological way.
In other words there is a mismatch between populism-driven political claims and promises and the nitty-gritty task of public administration.
Agnatology is just another word for lies told to win office.
The best antidote to agnatology is to ask the electorate whether they would actually like their country to be run along agnatological lines.
An example of the manufacture of ignorance.
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1391908
I would just like to observe that it’s a very dualistic view of the world
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The dichotomy persists and has done for centuries: oligarchs/democrats; monarchists/republicans; Catholics/protestants; Tory/Whig; Democrat/Republican; Republican/ Democrat.
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It’ll go on. The party of tradition, the party of reform. Just gotta find a new fight to fight.
Mark said:
What, you mean “Grocery Choice”?
Rudd is the most conservative PM in Australia’s living memory. I predicted this before he took office.
I also correctly predicted the size of his winning margin and the absence of recession for Australia. Sorry, but I just have to brag about this at every available opportunity.
Perhaps so. This would mean that we shouldn’t use such a term as “agnotology,” because it just confuses people even more.
If agnatology is “the study of the manufacture of ignorance,” then what is the “agnotological right”? Studying the manufacture of ignorance sounds like something the Left would do. Very confusing.
Speaking of confusing, what is “the post-materialist politics of liberation”?
Yes, I would chime in with my own disagreement here, too. Surely, if the ‘left’ has lost the war, the ‘right’ is equally at sea?
As ‘leftist’ governments must recognise the democratic (and sometimes not so democratic) mandate to operate within a “free-ish” market, so to much “rightist” government recognise that they cannot operate within some kind of Ayn Rand wet dream, nor a Saudi-styled dictatorship.
I certainly recognise the utility of remembering ‘it ain’t necessarily so’ but to lay the reasons why at the feet of any one political ideology is a trifle too bold in my estimation.
The language of politics is often one of war – of battles fought and won or lost, sweet victory or dastardly defeat, but in our democracies I think the reality is largely – as Katz alludes – somewhat more pedestrian.
This doesn’t invalidate the need or purpose of ‘vision’, but equally it shouldn’t presuppose the failure of it, either.
Liberation movements such as feminism, and more broadly the move since the 1960s (at least) for a much less rigid range of choices for how one lives one’s life.
@8 – but patrickg, this is to go back to what Quiggin is criticising. That is to say; ameliorative managerialism only goes so far – it doesn’t inspire passion precisely because its goals are relatively short term and small scale. It’s the same thing that plagues discussions of climate change or population in 20 or 30 years time – by default, there’s a linear projection of what is because there’s no real vision of what can be. And then there’s the point in the post I made about the exhaustion of optimism and ideas when a party reaches the end of the electoral cycle.
It *is* true that ‘left’ and ‘right’ are to some degree constructs, and fail to map onto most of the field of public opinion. In this society, right now. It’s not the case in others (cf. the very enduring polarisation in French politics and culture). That’s because of the absence of ideology in our social formation, and a rather anodyne conception of democracy which lacks much sense of purpose into the future.
I would strongly contest the claim that ‘left’ and ‘right’ are meaningless, though. Much of what we take for granted – the welfare state, civil rights, public education, and so on, is in fact the result of struggles waged by forces which regarded themselves as being on the left.
If we cannot work out how to take those struggles further, we have defaulted back to a position which is essentially conservative. There is still enormous stratification among life chances in Australian society, and to fail to articulate a vision of social transformation (and a strategic direction) is to accept it.
I guess I would then question how many governments have used that vision as anything other than cant? I would argue that the vision is lacking in politicians because it is, largely, lacking in populace.
I deride the prevalence of short term, day-to-day thinking from our supposed leaders as much as anyone, and yet how many of us are really so different? I feel like part of this is blaming the symptoms (politicians), rather than the disease. You could make the case that politicians are obliged to take us *beyond* this, but it doesn’t really hold up for me; they are representative and meant to be so. Attempts to move beyond that have typically resulted in horrific electoral spanking.
I just feel that Quiggin’s (and to a lesser degree yours – and mine, and everyone’s) despair about this is not unwarranted so much as unfair. We hold these politicians to a higher standard than we do ourselves. It’s our luxury to to consider these things between picking up kids, doing our day-jobs, scheduling that meeting. It’s not our jobs and our egos on the line; our conscience living with the consequences good or bad; our own (in some ways) fairly dramatic expansion of what is supposed to be our jobs.
Thus I would imagine it is for politicians as it is for us. The immediate priorities of not getting fired, keeping your boss/family/partner happy, not defaulting on the mortgage etc. take up the bulk of your attention. Vision is opportunistic and random: seized when courage, personalities and circumstance align; quietly left to simmer for most of the time, and certainly not exercised when the risks of doing so are stark and bordered by nothing worse than accusation of “managerialism”.
I honestly don’t think this is the worst thing.
An interesting theoretical take on social democratic politics and how Blairism morphed it into the dominant social technocracy that we have now.
In the meantime have a squiz at what is happening in Spain, Greece and Portugal and then tell me that unions and socialism are dead letters. The point being that it is the social and economic relations of capitalism that constantly demand the renewal of an authentically socialist response.
patrickg, to answer the question posed in your first para, the answer would be, as the reference to Sassoon’s work suggests, contained in history.
But I think there’s something of a false dichotomy in the way you’re writing about this. I’m not trying to talk about wild visionaries who soar above the everyday and the quotidian. Perhaps ‘vision’ is a misleading term. People with long term political goals have immediate priorities too! What it comes down to is whether action is effectively tactical, or tactical and stategic – that is to say, focused on a social end, or at least at the horizon of what can be achieved through transformation. Max Weber was right to characterise politics as ‘boaring through hard boards’, and it’s not a romantic vocation (cf. the whole Obama/disappointment thing), but Weber also saw the necessity for a broader purpose (other than ‘the administration of things’) to continue to motivate political activity.
I should also point out, as should be clear from the post, that I’m equally interested in what activists have to think and what they say and do as political leaders. Again, KRudds and Tony Blairs do not arise in a social and cultural vacuum.
As Marx put it, people “make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please”.
“It’s also somewhat questionable that Australian Labor has ever really had a strategic and transformative dimension.”
Those old enough to remember the Whitlam government can remember a Labor Party with quite a transformative dimension.
@14 – Russell, but it was something of a brief effloresence. Part of Whitlam’s problem as leader (and therefore also as PM) was the lack of grounding of a lot of what he wanted to do in labour movement history.
Ah, I get you now, Mark. In that respect, I agree, but would still argue it’s a problem shared by both left and right, and one largely in response to public sentiment and media environment.
I will say, as participant not observer, it’s certainly something I hate about Rudd: his talk of the future is so broad and vague as to be totally meaningless (‘big australia’ excepted), and he seems almost pathologically afraid being ‘caught’ believing in something.
Abbott, of course, – Walt Whitman-like – contains so many multitudes his problem is believing in too many things at once.
You don’t think it’s as simple as the impossibility of creating a grand narrative in a short-termist media-constructed world? There’s a very lazy cynicism at work in the media about politicians that the public picks up on. The politicians, in turn, feed this by dancing to the media’s 3-minute tunes.
There is simply a reluctance among politicians in Australia and elsewhere to talk big picture and to reach beyond the everyday noise. Obama tried it, but is now accused of being long on rhetoric and short on practical follow-through and of lacking the political smarts to get real change through Congress.
In Australia, I still think we’re suffering from vacuum created by the Labor Party running away from the shadow of Keating’s grand vision. Frightened of being seen as a poncy idealist, Rudd has picked up and run with Howard’s “the-people-aren’t-interested-in-lights-on-the-hill” schtick.
The only strain of old-fashioned ideology is the reactionary kind exemplified by Joyce’s aggressive populism.
Perhaps all it will take is for the emergence of a politician on the progressive side who can communicate a message that resonates with people’s more generous spirits, but he/she is going to have find a way of cutting through the depressing and irrelevant cacophony generated by our friends in the press gallery.
I agree with you to some extent Mr Denmore, but at the same time, I think it’s very easy to blame the media for their audience’s shortcomings, or otherwise.
Study after study of media influence has highlighted that people tend to smoke, but not inhale, so to speak. And – non-intuitive as it sounds – I think their influence on political discourse is somewhat over-stated.
Or to use the full quote from the 18th Brumaire, which I have always liked:
I predicted this before he took office…I also correctly predicted the size of his winning margin and the absence of recession for Australia.
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Can I be your High Priest O Zarathustra II?
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a much less rigid range of choices for how one lives one’s life
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We already have it. Hungry Jacks/McDonalds, Labor/Liberal, Coke/Pepsi. Whatsamatter with that?
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We can actually get food elsewhere, drink elsewhere etc. We just don;t ’cause we have no imagination. There’s not rigidity so much, just stupidity.
#17 Most politicians should not evoke or conjure or court Grand Schemes. Most of the time it’s not a good idea. As for Grand Narratives, it’s easy to make one, just get a pen and sonme paper.
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Trouble is everyone else can too.
Russell @ 14, I thought I’d seen a comment here, but it must have been elsehwere (as I can’t find it now) to the effect that visionary governments get an electoral spanking.
I’ve always thought it was a pity Whitlam didn’t get a bit longer in office.
Mr Denmore@17: “…the emergence of a politician on the progressive side who can communicate a message that resonates with people’s more generous spirits..”
That’s the idea..
That was me! That was me David! Comment 11. Much as I would have love to have seen Whitlam’s wider agenda, I remember that for every Medicare, there is a Workchoices, and I’m glad for all the checks and balances.
I’m seeing Combet in the medium to long term in the role of intellectual/political leader of the party. Seems to be a grounded type of person.
anthony @ 25, I’d see Combet as a better manager of the middle ground, but not one to conceptualise and lead us towards “a fundamental transformation of capitalism” to use Quiggin’s phrase.
Mark sent me an article recently that made a good case that we are not going to get out of the pickle we are in unless there is some serious utopian thinking. Otherwise we will “become ourselves complicit in a de facto triage of humanity.”
It seems to me self evident that greed can no longer be unbridled, that individualism needs to flourish within a more collective identity and solidarity, that we need to take the corporation’s influence out of the political process and somehow civilise it in the service of the public interest.
In short, rather than just thinking about more green jobs and tweaking the system here and there we’ll need a new kind of socialist political economy (I’m not afraid of the “S” word) or face the alternative, which is barbarism.
Seriously what are we going to do with 40 million Bangladeshis displaced by sea level rise and all the other tens of millions similarly displaced?
Have a look at Brendan Gleeson’s slides on Urban form and energy use.
Slides 5-8 show what would hjappen to the Nile with one metre sea level rise.
Slide 12 is an interesting graph on private transport energy use vs urban density in a range of cities.
Slide 28 is the really scary one:
The right are smelling the fear that it’s BAU or their privileged place is threatened. Unless we can find the elixir of unlimited green energy and work out how to produce twice as much food with less productive land, plus a few other improbabilities, they are right to be fearful. But unless things change radically, odds on they’ll be prepared to jettison the poor.
Mark said:
Mark seems to have swallowed the whole “Left = party of initiative: Right = party of resistance” thesis hook, line and sinker. This is ahistorical and ideologically self-serving.
Many progressive social reforms have been imposed from the top-down by higher-status establishing Right-wingers rather than insurged from the bottom-up by lower-status empowering Left-wingers. Progressive establishments understood that good works would elevate the position of their high-status clients in the world. An Alpha-male can be more globally dominant leading an Alpha-team.
Japan is the most striking example of this. The Meji Restoration was basically rammed through by superannuated Samurai who did not want to have to go through the US rubbing their noses in it again.
The Right played a leading role in the establishment of the the world’s first welfare state. This reform was executed by Chancellor Bismark who called it “practical Christianity”. The Left at that time was agitating for revolutionary nationalisation of the means of production, rather than social insurance. Seeing how that worked out in Soviet Russia I am sure the workers were grateful for their beloved Chancellor’s foresight and wisdom.
Likewise in Australia, low-cost education for the masses was originally, and still is, provided by churches, not exactly Left wing hotbeds. The political pressure to pass the late 19thC “free, compulsory and secular” state education Acts was largely top-down, initiated by Liberal and Tory politicians and executed by colonial officials. Management wanted to civilize the convicts and develop a skilled work force.
I suppose you could argue that civil rights stemmed from the Left. The English Barons who agitated for the Magna Carta were certainly lower-status than the King.
More generally, the higher-status seeking Right tends to take lead in the provision of private goods, you know the good stuff which we all “take for granted”.
I can’t think how I missed it, patrickg @ 24 – I though I’d reread it, but must’ve just been skimming.
I always liked Manning Clarkes “Levellers vs Straighteners” as a far better analogy in regards to personal political leanings. It seems that we all have levelling or straightening tendencies across our spectrum of social and economic views of the world, and it’s quite possible to be a “social leveller” but an “economic straightener” by insisting that everybody be free but the buggers ought to grow some bootstraps.
The manufacture of ignorance I don’t believe to be anything new. The only new thing is the realisation via new communications mechanisms that none of us are as plastic in our attitudes as we’d like to think. Twenty years of arguing on the internet (nascent and modern) and I’ve only learned one thing: everybody is stupid except me. It isn’t so much that we’ve come to manufacture ignorance, we have come to manufacture easier mechanisms for our ignorance to flourish by never needing to intellectually wander beyond our own prejudices.
Not much of a lesson is it?
Ute Man, I’ve deleted John D’s comment and your comment in response. No it wasn’t your brain fart that set him off, he simply had the wrong thread open, because the same comment appears here.