Part 3 of 3 on Independent Australia.
In this final part of his three part series, Dr Geoff Davies surveys the current political scene, including the disarray of the Labor Party, from a longer perspective.
[Complementing my recent posts on the Radical Right, The Rise and Failure of the Radical Right and subsequent posts, here is US conservative commentator DAVID BROOKS making his own distinction between conservative and radical right.]
When I joined the staff of National Review as a lowly associate in 1984, the magazine, and the conservative movement itself, was a fusion of two different mentalities.
On the one side, there were the economic conservatives. These were people that anybody following contemporary Republican politics would be familiar with. They spent a lot of time worrying about the way government intrudes upon economic liberty. They upheld freedom as their highest political value. They admired risk-takers. They worried that excessive government would create a sclerotic nation with a dependent populace.
But there was another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar now.
[A shift of topic, of personal significance but also potentially of great significance to the state of our society.]
Midwife and Jessica Breese, a Certified Nurse Midwife from Colorado, pose with new mother Amy and her son Austin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There has been for some time a vigorous campaign to effectively ban home births in Australia, including crude scare-mongering based on extreme cases, such as a recent article by de Crespigny and Savulescu. However the ground from which these campaigners operate is shaky, because of a dramatic rise in hospital interventions in the birthing process, and because obstetricians have an obvious conflict of interest. Medical hostility to midwifery in general, not just to home birthing, seems to be driven by a spiral of fear, which is abetted by many obstetricians’ relative lack of the skills and experience of midwives.
[I’ve wanted to write about this for a long time, and the September issue of Scientific American finally provoked me. They talk about exceeding our evolutionary limits, living beyond 1oo, manipulating ourselves to be smarter (but no mention of wiser), and so on. So, another long essay.]
The term appropriate technology was popularised after E. F. Schumacher’s pivotal work Small is Beautiful. Schumacher argued against the modern economic pathology of endless physical growth, which of course cannot continue on our finite planet. He argued further that some technology only promotes endless growth, or it distracts us from more important things in life, and is therefore not beneficial. Technology that supports a fulfilling life and is compatible with a steady-state or slowly shrinking physical economy he called appropriate technology.
As for technology, so for science. A common assumption by scientists is that if a challenge is there then it is fair game to address it. In fact it is commonly presumed that freedom of enquiry, a central ingredient of an open democratic society, justifies such an attitude. However we need to recognise that such freedom comes with responsibility. This seems to be recognised regarding human cloning, for example, where strong legal and social restrictions have commonly been imposed.
One can write of the decline of the USA, and that has already been noted many times. One can write of the collapse of the USA, and that arguably is in process. But neither characterisation would capture what is now happening to the USA.
The USA is being destroyed before our eyes. The nation with the greatest military defences in history, by far, is being taken over and sacked. Like Singapore in World War II, it’s guns are pointing in the wrong direction. This time the destructive horde is not Japanese soldiers rattling overland on bicycle rims, it is people who claim to be patriotic Americans.
[In my previous post I noted how radical is our far-right compared with a few decades ago, and how savagely they enforce political correctness. Here is Richard Eskow at Campaign for America’s Future explaining the US equivalent. Of course it’s more virulent in the US, and of course we follow where they go.]
A well funded network of right-wing extremists wants to make it socially and politically impossible to express the ideals that made this country great. One of those extremists appeared on their billionaire-funded network this week to attack Elizabeth Warren, and anyone else who isn’t on the far right, as a Communist.
How retro, you may be saying to yourself. They haven’t pulled that trick since the Eisenhower era. That’s the strangest part of all this: They seem to think “Eisenhower era” is a euphemism for “Bolshevik control.”
[For some time I have been frustrated by the very limited perspective of mainstream political commentary in Australia, and by the difficulty of establishing a longer perspective in the standard 800-word commentary piece. So I decided just to write until the case was made. Hence this 6000-word essay. It refers to the Australian context, but there are parallel stories in other countries.]
The political spectrum is traditionally characterised in terms of Left and Right, but the way these terms are used has changed so much they have become quite misleading. Today they are more about tribal identification, and their use is more of an epithet than a description.
The main reason for these changes is that the Right has shifted to quite extreme positions, compared with a generation or two ago. The modern Right not only espouses free-market fundamentalism, it promotes an extreme individualism that overlooks or dismisses the importance of social relationships and even denies the existence of society. There seems to be no standard of factual basis, sense or consistency required for its claims, so any opinion, however uninformed or misinformed, apparently is to be accorded as much validity in the public domain as any other.
There has been a lively discussion of Eight Elementary Errors of Economics at Real World Economics Review Blog. Here are a couple of exchanges that raise good points. (If these commenters respond further I will post them here, in fairness to them.) There has also been discussion of history, science, love and other topics. You might like to have a look.
[This is my most recent attempt to encapsulate the deep flaws in mainstream economics, and the sensible alternative struggling for recognition. Posted 7 June at Real World Economics Review blog, with a lively discussion following.]
The Global Financial Crisis, the extreme inequality of wealth world-wide, the materialism of modern life and the dire state of the planet are not accidents, nor just unavoidable consequences of the nature of things. They are the result of the modern practice of economics, which makes elementary errors of accounting, evidence, perception and theory.
The Nature of the Beast: how economists mistook wild horses for a rocking chair.
Mainstream free-market economics fundamentally mis-identifies the nature of market economies. Its record is of retarded growth followed by disaster. It counts costs as positives instead of negatives. It is blind to how the present banking system destabilises the economy. It is relentlessly materialistic and adversarial. It ignores most of what we know about real people and the real world.
The result is pseudo-scientific gobbledygook, and the unstable, inequitable, undemocratic, destructive and unsustainable mess known as the global economy.
The Nature of the Beast draws out the real nature of market economies using modern knowledge of systems, human behaviour, ecology, biology and physics. It points the way to stable, prosperous, democratic market economies that can support people, societies and the living world into the indefinite future.
BetterNatureBooks 