Larvatus Prodeo

A while back I wrote – in rather skeptical vein – about Tim Soutphommasane’s claim that progressives should be reclaiming patriotism. Guy Rundle has now reviewed Soutphommasane’s book, Reclaiming Patriotism: nation building for Australian progressives, for Crikey (of which more later). I’m largely in agreement with Rundle’s thoughts, and I think he adds another piece to the puzzle of what’s missing in this sort of ‘progressive’ discourse.

And there’s another one in an article Soutphommasane published in The Australian the other day.

While I would agree, on aesthetic grounds, that Movember is a bit worrying, I’m not at all sure that it’s some sort of sign of ‘conspicuous compassion’ (something I remember all the crusty old columnists loudly denouncing about five years ago – these things, like facial hair, must go in cycles):

At first glance it all seems commendable enough: people are doing their part for a worthy charity while having a bit of fun. Yet I suspect I am not alone in feeling some fatigue and distaste about public awareness campaigns. It seems that every day, week and month of the calendar is dedicated to raising awareness about some social concern.

Support women’s health? Sport a pink ribbon. Support action on climate change? Turn off your lights at home for an hour. Support recycling? You were in luck last week, which just happened to be National Recycling Week.

It is a worrying sign of our declining civic life that public engagement has become reduced to hollow symbolism. Civic virtue has become synonymous with ethical one-upmanship: it’s all about winning plaudits for altruism or moral goodness.

Well, no, it’s not all about that.

Later in the piece, Soutphommasane invokes Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch, a now deceased crusty old sociologist, worried about the rise of the “narcissistic personality” (and the concept has some similar methodological problems as its predecessor, the Frankfurt School’s “authoritarian personality“). We’re all self-absorbed, etc, etc. (Follow the link for the longer version, and the book is actually better than it might have been.) One might think, observing American culture, that Lasch was onto something. But one might then reflect that Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is actually a thesis constructed on a very doubtful reading of the stats, and that America continues to display a culture of voluntarism and free association much more robust than a diagnosis of narcissism might predict.

What Soutphommasane doesn’t seem to realise is that his imagined community – presumably another one of those past Golden Ages – of civic virtue, was not – in its actuality – without its element of status claims. I’m completely unclear from reading his op/ed what would exactly be entailed by a real civic virtue, right now and not in an imagined past (and all Soutphommasane has done is to posit something unspecified against what he disses, not a particularly good analytical move, even if a common rhetorical one). But, in the age when the bourgeois patriarchs of the world joined civic associations for good community causes, or whatever, what they were up to – among other things – was reinforcing a very rigid status hierarchy. The sexual division of labour which saw women, and particularly unmarried women, voluntarily taking up the frontline of working with the objects of all this concern was also part of a cultural hierarchy which resolutely reduced those who were deserving of civic aid to the status of object, and maintained class and gender divisions. It wasn’t all about doing good by stealth, or not letting the left hand know, etc. It was about social distinction, among other things.

It seems to me that the identification with causes demonstrated by wearing a ribbon, growing a mo, or whatever, is actually a democratisation of care and concern. Sure, it comes along with a bit of display, but so what? That also has the positive social effect of publicising the action. It’s too simple to see it just as narcissistic, or as symbolic rather than ‘real’ (“good citizenship”) – whatever that distinction might mean in this context.

So, now onto patriotism. I think I might actually just reproduce Rundle’s piece below the fold (with the kind permission of Crikey). I think Rundle is right that there’s an affectual dimension to patriotism (which, ironically, is the sort of dimension Soutphommasane doesn’t like about moustaches and ribbons), and that arid civics lessons won’t do too much to foster a left version. There’s also a context to the sorts of work which underlie Soutphommasane’s thought – such as Habermas’ notion of ‘constitutional cosmopolitan patriotism’, whose German and European origins in a set of particular historical and cultural concerns are much less universalisable than our philosophers may think. And therein lies the rub; as with the public meeting that replaces Movember, it’s unclear why anyone would get very excited about Soutphommasane’s progressive patriotism. You can’t, as Rundle says, legislate for it. And it doesn’t represent a viable political strategy for the left, for a whole range of reasons, including the basic failure whereby a project which transforms the social and the cultural cannot be substituted for by a fairly empty civics. At the end of the day, as Rundle implies, any strong nationalism will be a double edged sword – difficult to disarticulate from white nativism and lacking affectual power if it’s some sort of pub trivia recitation of what the Eureka stockade was all about, and who the first Labor Prime Minister was, or whatever. On the left, we would do much better to spend more time thinking about a transformed future than trying to retrospectively invent social democracy in one country.

Continue reading ‘On Movember, Tim Soutphommasane and civics’