Larvatus Prodeo » social justice

What We Didn’t Blog Lately

tigtog — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 22:35:07 +0000

There are many interesting issues/events that LP doesn’t manage to blog about. Here’s a selection of topics we didn’t cover recently, but others did:

Aboriginal DNA dates Australian arrival

– “DNA sequencing of a 100-year-old lock of hair has established Aboriginal Australians have had a longer continuous association with the land than any other race of people…Sequencing of a West Australian Aboriginal man’s hair shows he was directly descended from a migration out of Africa into Asia that took place about 70,000 years ago.”

Dear Facebook: Rape Is No Joke

– “According to Facebook’s terms of service, users are not permitted to post content that is hateful, threatening or incites violence. But it appears that, in the minds of the Facebook powers-that-be, pages that encourage rape don’t violate that rule.”

CLITORIS CLITORIS CLITORIS

– “all about the tragedy of a father discovering his son had been taught about … the clitoris. Why, the class went so far as to insinuate that playing with a person’s clitoris can be a fun thing for both parties!”

Energy for Men, Dieting for Women

– and how different exactly are those ingredients, do you think?

“Oh my god. You’re that nurse from Casualty!”, and other things that should never be said during a smear test

– srsly

Above reproach: why do we never question fidelity?

– “Needless to say, I understand the need to establish paternity and inheritance rights and how much these are bound by fidelity but still, we have questioned almost every aspect of the foundations of traditional family ties, but we seem to take the idea of fidelity for granted.”

Challenged Book: Nickel and Dimed

– “Many people in the United States have very set, specific ideas about poverty and what it is like to be poor. This book turns those ideas on their head and forces people to confront some of their own attitudes about poverty.”

We Should Talk About This

– “To point out what I think is obvious, the disinterest society shows towards these crimes is both a cause and symptom of the violence.”

Making them conform

– “I have long known that schools are sites for reproducing conformity, but it’s rare to have it stated so explicitly.”

Ten years on, the non-reality-based kabuki continues

– “Paul Krugman published a brief column decrying the shameful way 9/11 was hijacked and exploited. That the tragedy was, indeed, hijacked to serve a prior agenda is simply a fact, which all reasonable people understand.”

Why PR metrics are as much use as a chocolate Karl Stefanovic

– “the fact that a well established PR agency is happy to go public with this methodology demonstrates just how much of a problem the whole industry has.”

Marie Claire’s Rich tells you how to keep a guy’s attention.

– “There’s no subtle game of psychological warfare that you can use to trick someone into paying more attention to you than they want to. I realize that all women’s magazines live or die on the fallacy that there IS a way to control this if you just (bought stuff)(became thinner than you are now, no matter what you weigh now, you must be THINNER)(bought more stuff), but there isn’t a guaranteed way to fascinate.”

Readers: what posts/articles have you read lately that you found particularly interesting?

n.b. some of the posts above refer to highly contentious stoush-storms in the blogosphere, and those comment threads may be full of content that would not be approved for publication here. While I expect that various commentors are likely to find themselves in oppositional viewpoints on some issues, those stoushes should not be replayed blow by blow on LP, and comments that rely solely on rehashed arguments from elsewhere are likely to be deleted.

What We Didn’t Blog Lately

tigtog — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 07:14:30 +0000

There are many interesting issues/events that LP doesn’t manage to blog about. Here’s a selection of topics we didn’t cover recently, but others did:

Readers: what posts/articles have you read lately that you found particularly interesting?

What We Didn’t Blog Lately

tigtog — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 00:48:50 +0000

There are many interesting issues/events that LP doesn’t manage to blog about. Here’s a selection of topics we didn’t cover recently, but others did:

Readers: what posts/articles have you read lately that you found particularly interesting?

What we didn’t blog lately

tigtog — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 23:50:04 +0000

There are many interesting issues/events that LP doesn’t manage to blog about. Here’s a selection of topics we didn’t cover recently, but others did:

Readers: what posts/articles have you read lately that you found particularly interesting?

Egypt unrest/revolt

tigtog — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 04:25:48 +0000

There’s been some discussion of the demonstrations, civil resistance and deaths on the latest open thread. I don’t know enough about what’s happening to provide insightful commentary, but here’s a thread for discussion.

I find it hard not to flashback to Tiananmen Square right now. Although China didn’t have the complication of a religious authoritarian movement waiting in the wings. I just hope it ends better for the Egyptians.

Both atheist ‘rationalism’ and Catholic triumphalism betray Mary MacKillop’s legacy

Mark Bahnisch — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 02:39:06 +0000

I had mixed feelings last night about whether to watch the canonisation ceremony for Blessed Mary MacKillop on ABC News 24. In part, but not exclusively, those feelings related to the way the ceremonies would be covered, and I’m afraid my worst fears were realised to great extent. In a sign, perhaps, of the inability of the media to allow events to unfold, large amounts of the coverage were completely obliterated by the desire to comment on everything. Not necessarily to explain, which would have served a valid purpose.

But when central elements of the Mass – such as the chanting of the Gospel – were overlaid with asinine journalist interviewing journalist moments, we really did have a parable of the idiocy of the postmodern media, and maybe an answer to Saint Luke’s question too. Similarly, the Mass was obliterated by ceasing the coverage at its most meaningful moment – the Eucharistic Prayer – and ironically Pope Benedict’s communion was seen only on a screen behind a babbling journalist at the MacKillop Shrine in North Sydney later on during the news.

The commentary itself – particularly from ABC Religion and Ethics Editor Scott Stephens – was sometimes worthwhile, and later on ABC1, Compass did a much better job. But most of the coverage was indicative only of the sole frames the media appeared to find handy – celebritisation and nationalist hooha. Journos didn’t appear to be able to reach for the right cliches, though most of their comment was cliched. Claims that “naturally irreverent” Australians in Saint Peter’s Square would have cheered as if they were at a sporting event had they not been cautioned otherwise are incomprehensible when one considers that most of those present were presumably Catholic and would have been well aware of the difference, and the different dispositions appropriate, between the Commonwealth Games and a solemn liturgical celebration. Yet such claims were closely articulated to the prevalent mythos that the canonisation was an event for “all Australians”.

The ceremony itself, to the degree it was visible through the coverage, resisted this theme, inscribing Mary in a communion both synchronous and diachronic in time, and universal in global space.

That nationalistic motif may be, in part, a defensive political projection, seeking to ward off claims that the state is breaching its public secularity by giving aid and comfort to the rites of a particular faith. There is some legitimate debate to be had on Julia Gillard’s perceived about face, and the degree to which legislative fiat (protecting the “brand” of “our Mary”) and the attendance of Kevin Rudd and Julie Bishop at the Vatican is warranted. But, largely, the state’s role has been one of recognition, of integrating those of Catholic faith into the national story and Australian imaginary. The flipside of this process of inscription and narrativisation is the triumphalism of some elements in the Church. Some prelates still appear to be compelled to worship the idol of political power.

However, those concerns are no doubt going to be occluded by a false debate – an encounter that never really takes place – over such sideshows as miracles. The diktats of the atheist rationalists, or rather of those who are actively and prominently anti-faith, reinscribe a narrow range of tropes little changed from Reformation polemics. Anyone who doubts that many of the ‘atheist’ talking points have a direct lineage with English Protestantism need only read the more crazed sections of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, the anti-Roman bits they don’t teach these days in political theory school. If a reading list were to be compiled for the disciples of Hitchens and Dawkins, the spectral mouthpieces of Calvinist rationalism, it ought also to include John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration. Perhaps then they’d realise that secularism is something quite distinct from anti-religious abuse, something which Scott Bridges observes is the stock in trade of too many alleged rationalists.

Much of this vitriol is directed, unsurprisingly, at the Catholic Church. Some of it, in the works of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, also reflects a hatred of Islam. Neither, as Jeff Sparrow wrote in his piece for Meanjin earlier this year on the “New Atheism”, is a necessary implication of a rationalist rejection of faith, but neither is really contingent either. Both anti-Catholicism and anti-Islam, in this discursive register, have their origins in a particular conjunction of English Imperialism and the construction of its knowledges and its enemies, a tradition which profoundly influenced the social dissensus between Protestant and Catholic, British and Irish, in Australian history. It’s no surprise to see it resurface at this moment, and attempts to contain and meliorate it through social re-integration – the real purpose of the political and media insistence that Mary MacKillop, or rather, Saint Mary of the Cross, is a saint, or an exemplar, for all of us.

But, to what degree is this true?

The proclamation of Saint Mary as true blue has accreted to itself a range of contemporary pre-occupations – authority in the Church, pedophile clerics, the role of women in religion and in community. All of this is potentially divisive, so there’s something of an attempt by her auto-authorised hagiographers, both Churchly and Stately, to appropriate her for something that can be represented as a common denominator of Australian “values” – so Mary started her own Education Revolution, and stood for “fairness”. No doubt, had Tony Abbott been in power, she’d have been something of a different saint.

It’s hard to be a saint without attracting hagiography.

Almost impossible, by definition.

What we don’t really have a sense of, in all the “celebration”, is the challenge Mary makes to us on two levels. First, the empty rhetoric of “fairness” dissolves next to the much more confronting notion of a radical preferential option for the poor. Secondly, the idea that one’s life must be subservient to divine will and to an overarching thirst for justice sits uneasily with the idea of her as a precursor to the palliative care our neo-liberal society deems right and just for the deserving poor. In truth, it’s in her strangeness to us in the Australia of 2010, that St Mary of the Cross speaks to us most clearly.

Tony Abbott and the God question

Mark Bahnisch — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 04:06:05 +0000

The first few days of Tony Abbott’s leadership have seen a concerted effort by the conservative commentariat to decry any criticism of his reactionary policies on women’s rights and social issues as ‘anti-Catholic’.

A number of points need making about this trope:

(a) Abbott is, of course, not the first federal leader of the Liberal party to be a Catholic. Sectarianism was definitely a factor in the largely Protestant and bourgeois parties of the centre right in the past, and there may be residual effects within the Liberal party itself. It’s worth remembering that Malcolm Turnbull is a Catholic, and this issue (as far as I can recall) was never highlighted during his leadership.

However, Tony Abbott is the first leader to be associated with a particular style of political Catholicism – one which, some decades ago, would have been much more closely associated with the DLP (and indeed still has influence within various ALP right factions and unions). Outside the circles around Cardinal George Pell this sort of neo-grouper politics has little influence in Australian Catholicism itself. Australian Catholics are less unified politically than in the days of sharper religious and political cleavages, and while social justice Catholicism is also a living tradition, my own view is that the post Vatican II Catholic Church is much less politicised with respect to the broader community. That holds less for those who are identified with Pope Benedict’s ‘reform of the reform’, but here, there is often a significant disjunction between Papal social teaching in some areas and an ensemble of conservative social and political positions held by the Pontiff’s Antipodean warriors.

In short, the interface of religion and politics has itself been affected by a secularisation within Australian culture, which is powerfully related to a dissolution of modernist political battle lines.

(b) This fracturing of a largely unitary theological and political constellation is reflected in, and in turn, influenced by a different way of seeing the imperatives of religion for acting within culture. Guy Rundle has summed it up thus:

There are three dominant ideas of God in Christianity at the moment. Leaving aside literal protestant fundamentalists, the division between the other two runs right through the middle of the Roman Catholic church. On the one side are those who believe that God may be a real entity, but cannot be expressed in human terms?—?and consequently the idea that God might have firm views on homosexuality, condoms, evolution, traditional aboriginal culture etc is a category error. On the other is the idea that God has a more knowable form with whom a dialogue of sorts is possible?—?if not exactly a Grandpa in the Sky, God can be thought of in terms sufficiently assimilable to humanity to make the pronoun “He” a meaningful one.

The division is not around the unique divinity of Jesus Christ, but around whether the creation of a specific moral and political order is a business of humans left to do it by themselves, or one in which God’s will and law can be interpreted and acted on.

Our society and politics is overwhelmingly of the first belief. It is a widespread belief that underlies the Australian polity as a humanist one. Tony Abbott is part of the second formation, and it is perfectly legitimate to pin him to the wall on it.

Writing as a Catholic committed to a left wing politics, I would want to complicate that a little – for instance, the question of the Divine and personhood is more complex – but it’s an accurate social diagnosis. I’d also observe in passing that the more universalist perspective on the Divine is also one that Joe Hockey made his own (in a recent speech which is better thought through than most of its detractors grant). However, I’d agree with Rundle’s conclusion – and add to it the point that targeting Abbott as if he were solely representative of Catholicism or God is both wrong and politically counter-productive. It’s, in fact, the mirror image of his own self-conception.

(c) Rundle also raises the spectre of right wing ressentiment and victimology in an interesting discussion of the populist politics of the right. Again, it’s worth remembering that Tony Abbott and the conservative commentariat are not the ‘representatives’ of Catholics in the pews (or the much greater number who kneel in pews only very occasionally, if at all); and that the much taunted Liberal ‘base’ is in one sense correct in assuming the rhetorical position of victimised minority – the minority bit.

Quadrant piles on

Mark Bahnisch — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:11:48 +0000

Not to be outdone by The Australian, Quadrant has launched its own series on the left. This time with non-leftists writing it… And writing about the Australian‘s articles. Jason Soon, for instance, along the way to arguing that social justice is a “category mistake” and the basis of “the left’s form of creationism”, takes a swipe at LP as “postmodernist”. News to me. The mis-en-abyme of Quadrant’s deconstruction of putative lefties writing for a right wing op/ed page strikes me as much more properly po/mo. Or maybe it’s a piece of pure Dada-ist modernist absurdism.

It’s hard to conclude otherwise when the now compulsory comparisons of Julia Gillard et al with the North Korean regime are wheeled out once more, coupled with crazed elisions of a bunch of rather mild social democrats with Stalin and Mao, and paeans to the millions of dead, etc, etc. There’s a certain irony in one of the contributors accusing critics of writing conspiracy theory. Not to mention the argument, if that’s the word for it, that concern with narratives is evidence of postmodernism (evil!) sitting uneasily next to attacks on social democrats for not having a narrative. Anyone remember when the teaching of narrative history was supposed to be a touchstone of John Howard era approved political correctness? Contradiction piled on contradiction…

There’s lots more. Should you not wish to read all of the series, Gary Sauer-Thompson has devoted some time to analysing the introductory piece by Mervyn Bendle. Bendle contributes another article, damning Julia Gillard among others, complete with another clever pun in the title. I thought that was the sort of Derridean wordplay he despised. But anyway…

Related LP posts: Here, here and here.

Elsewhere: Catallaxy.

Update: Skepticlawyer.

Tim Soutphommasane, ideology and narratives

Mark Bahnisch — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 12:28:31 +0000

The Australian is running a series on defining the left (!), kicking off with a contribution today by Tim Soutphommasane. Soutphommasane is apparently the go to person at the moment for all things social democratic, having written a book arguing that we should reclaim patriotism for the left.

Posing the question of “what’s left” begs the question of who the left are. Soutphommasane’s piece today appears to equate the left with Kevin Rudd, which is, to me, quite bizarre. There’s a broader question in his writing which goes quite unanswered – that of agency and constituency.

In an op/ed for The Age, he wrote:

Preferring the comfortable terrain of moral righteousness, the Australian left surrendered national values to reactionaries and racists in the culture wars.

I don’t know quite what “moral righteousness” means in this context, though I could hazard a guess. But let’s leave that aside. I’m more concerned, for the moment, about who this “Australian left” actually comprises.

We take our attachment to egalitarianism, mateship and the fair go seriously. Most of us have a warm affection for our country and its qualities.

No doubt we do, but what are those “qualities”? And who’s that “we”? And why should such an identification be central to political identity, or indeed constitutive of such an identity?

Egalitarianism has a sociological and cultural history, but it’s also one marked by exclusions – as is “mateship”. If Soutphommasane’s argument is that the Australian Labor Party needed to counter John Howard’s embrace of so-called national values for electoral reasons, no doubt he has a point. Governing parties are by necessity oriented to the state, and since we have nation states, must necessarily articulate some sort of discourse of the nation. But the ALP and electoral politics are not co-extensive with the left. I haven’t read his book, but in the newspaper commentary he’s authored, it doesn’t seem to me that the very good reasons why left wing movements have been suspicious of nationalist particularisms and in favour of cosmopolitanism and internationalism have been addressed.

Similarly, the argument about Kevin Rudd and social democracy makes two elisions. The first is the unjustified claim that Rudd himself is “the left”, and that – in the manner of New Labour – he needs some sort of array of philosopher kings (thinktankers and op/edders and other ideologists) to articulate and/or interpret an ideological narrative – of the left – for him. Well, maybe. Perhaps Rudd does feel that every PM should have some sort of ideological narrative. I’m not so sure he’d be all that happy to see himself as ‘the left’. In any case, whatever Paul Kelly might think, whether or not he has an ideological narrative (or indeed a coherent one) is probably electorally irrelevant.

Soutphommasane is probably right that a sort of generalised statism is the substance of what Rudd actually believes in. But I’m not at all sure that he needs to foster a debate on Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach or whatever. Such a debate may well be useful, and interesting, but most of this stuff is just court theorising, as it were, and won’t make all that much difference to the Rudd government’s actual practice – composed of an amalgam of managerialism, “tough love” social policy combined with vague dicta about “social inclusion”, regulatory urges existing in an uneasy partnership with deregulatory ones, dreams of nation building, and so on. It’s too much to expect that all this will form a coherent ideational whole, though it can be woven together to form a political narrative that is electorally useful; and useful as an ideological justification.

As I’ve argued tons of times before, ideology is often just what politicians do – that is a social practice of governing – not the fantasy of a neat little Enlightenment style encyclopedia, or a mythical universal. It can be more or less coherent, dependent on the degree to which it represents a genuinely transformational project. And there’s little of that about Australian Labor.

That’s the second elision – between the political-theoretic fantasy of a master narrative and the pragmatics of politics.

Another elision, which is what produces the blind spots in Soutphommasane’s thought, is his own speaking position. I think, and this is not intended to be a personal criticism, it’s effectively that of the court philosopher. Demos style. That’s fine as far as it goes, though it would be helfpul, I think, if he were to clarify in what sense, and to what degree, he actually sees himself as speaking on behalf of ‘social democracy’ or ‘the left’. Where I find his thinking problematic is that it’s relatively disconnected from any actually existing social movement, or indeed social base. That’s a huge part of what’s wrong with most Anglo-American style political philosophy. To the degree that it has an effect – a political effect, that is, rather than the hermeneutic exegesis of books written by dead white men – it’s addressed to power, and it speaks the murmurings of dusty books and canonical texts.

If there’s a left left, we might do better to criticise the Rudd government’s actual practice in the realm of social justice, rather than engage in an abstract debate about how Kevin Rudd should understand social justice. Ruthless criticism of all that exists, and all that.

Incidentally, if anyone is serious about eliciting exactly what the Rudd ideology is, I’d suggest looking at the now seemingly unfashionable concept of labourism, and reflecting on the phrase “socialism without doctrines”.

The stimulus package and fairness

Mark Bahnisch — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 01:03:50 +0000

Just before last year’s federal election, I read Neal Blewett’s Cabinet Diaries. The book is a good read, but I was also interested in reminding myself – in the dying days of the Howard Era – what a Labor government felt like. One of the things that really jumped out at me was regular discussions around the Cabinet table about assistance for the unemployed, and several of Keating’s measures to stimulate the economy were targeted to people on the dole, among others. Those with longer memories might recall Labor’s opposition to Malcolm Fraser’s “fight inflation first” austerity regime in the late 70s. Mike Steketee has a very good column today which shows just how much things have changed in the era of the deserving poor (and not so poor) and the undeserving poor. He rightly points out that some of the pensioners receiving payments will have substantial assets and incomes of up to $66000, and self-funded retirees with incomes up to $50000 for singles and $80000 for couples will also receive the one off payments. It would be very hard to argue that they are the folks in the community doing it toughest, and as Steketee suggests, there’s no guarantee the money will be spent rather than saved.

What we’re seeing here, I think, is a combination of Kevin Rudd’s very conservative personal values and political calculation.

Ps: Incidentally, Julie Bishop’s point on Lateline about the contrast in the degree of information given in Keating’s economic statements compared to Rudd’s announcement might have some validity in terms of transparency, but it ignores the fact that the Keating government’s interventions occurred after recession was well and truly entrenched (and arguably thus too late) and were prepared over a time scale of months rather than a weekend in response to an emergency. The opposition appears to be playing a complicated game – trying to weave together a message of holding the government to account, blaming the government partially for what’s occurred, and suggesting that Malcolm Turnbull is a bright spark who thought of it all first. I’d have thought all this – combined with the whining about briefings – puts them at the centre of their message rather than the economic situation itself, and risks looking petulant. I think they’d have done better to stick to their initial reaction – nobly supporting the government’s endeavours in the public interest at a time of crisis, blah blah.

NB: Previous post and thread discussion on the stimulus package here.