Democracy And Daily Life.

Everybody Having A Say: Democracy commands us to look outward; it demands our trust; it tells us what is expected of our humanity; it elevates the collective above the self; it celebrates the things we have in common; it defines our morals and values; it calculates what we owe one another; it discovers life in solidarity; and it finds heaven in, and with, other people.

IS DEMOCRACY still the guiding political doctrine of New Zealand society? In how many institutions do democratic principles still inform decision-making? Do those who wield power in our society even believe in democracy anymore? What does it mean that, over the course of the last 40 years, democratic principles have largely ceased to inspire the conduct of public affairs? When even our political parties no longer take democracy seriously, can we really call ourselves a democratic nation state?

One approach to these questions is to ask ourselves to what extent we are invited to practice democracy in our daily lives. If we are workers, do we get to participate in the decisions of the organisations that employ us? If we are students, do we have any say in the content and structure of our courses? If we are unemployed, or beneficiaries, do we have any rights at all that we are able to enforce? And, if the answer to all these questions is an emphatic “No!”, then, once again, are we truly entitled to characterise the institutions in which we spend most of our waking hours, and/or upon which we rely for our daily bread – democratic?

These are very modern questions. True, participatory, democracy has not been a feature of human existence since the species ceased to operate in small groups of hunter-gatherers and allowed itself to be caught up in the hierarchies of “civilisation” – the city-based cultures made possible by the surpluses of the agricultural revolution.

Hunter-Gatherers - the first (and only true) democrats.

For most of the past 10,000 years the very idea of democracy – of everybody having a say in the running of things – would have been laughable. That was not the way the world worked. Slaves, peasant-farmers and women: the people who kept society going, had no say whatsoever. And even in those rare city-states where “freemen” managed to carve out a political role, democracy proved to be a fragile flower. For most of human history, tyrannies, monarchies and empires have been the norm.

The idea that all human-beings might have a role to play in the governing of a civilised society is only about 300 years old.

Ironically, democracy as a “modern” idea owes much to the encounters of European settlers with the indigenous hunter-gatherer and/or proto-agricultural peoples living in the lands they had “discovered”. The freedom enjoyed by the ordinary members of these societies contrasted sharply with the downtrodden condition of the ordinary people of Europe.

As the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) famously declared: “Man is born free, and everywhere [by which he meant Europe] he is in chains.” The Great Question was thus posed: Can human-beings be both “civilised” and “free”? Throughout the Nineteenth Century, the answer was a confident and optimistic “Yes.” The bloody Twentieth Century, however, vacillated crazily between “Yes” and “No”. So far, the Twenty-First Century’s response seems to be: “What do you mean by ‘civilised’?” and “What do you mean by ‘free’?”

We should not be deceived by this “post-modern” response to The Great Question. It is nothing more than ruling-class temporising. The infamous “One Percent” have already decided that freedom and civilisation are even less compatible today than in the past. They just don’t want to admit it to the Ninety-Nine Percent.

If you would see how free we are, go out into the streets and count the number of human-beings peering into tiny screens, ear-buds inserted, listening to their Master’s voice.

And what is their Master is saying? His message is a simple one: Look inwards for the truth. Trust only your own experience. Who you are cannot be defined by other people. Refuse to be distracted from the self you have made. There is nobody like you. Your morals and values are your own. You don’t owe anything to anyone. Solidarity is death. Hell is other people. (Hat-tip to Jean-Paul Sartre for that last one.)

Democracy contradicts every one of these propositions: it commands us to look outward; it demands our trust; it tells us what is expected of our humanity; it elevates the collective above the self; it celebrates the things we have in common; it defines our morals and values; it calculates what we owe one another; it discovers life in solidarity; and it finds heaven in, and with, other people.

Set forth in this fashion, the problems associated with democracy immediately become apparent. Who wants to be a democrat if it means giving up the self-absorbed existence which the material abundance of Twenty-First Century capitalism makes possible? And Leftists, don’t put too much faith in George Orwell’s plaintiff cry of: “If there is hope … it lies in the Proles”. They want the good life, too!

In a curious way, our self-centred, hyper-technologised, post-modern existence closes the circle on democracy. Originally, in our species’ hunter-gatherer mode, all discussion and debate was focused on the practicalities and purposes of survival. The business of being human was the business of staying alive for another day. Ten-thousand years later, it still is. The only difference, now, is that we believe we can do it on our own.

Democracy will flourish again only after we discover that we can’t.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 29 July 2022.

Controlling The Past.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” - William Faulkner

IT WAS NEARLY SIX YEARS AGO that I defended New Zealanders’ historical ignorance as a not altogether bad thing. In a column entitled “Let Sleeping Ghosts Lie”, I wrote:

There is a reason why so many of the signposts to old battle sites are weathered and overgrown; why lichen has been allowed to obliterate the names of those who fell. Sleeping ghosts, like sleeping dogs, should never be needlessly awakened.

Unsurprisingly, New Zealand history teachers were outraged. How can New Zealand’s peoples be reconciled, and past injustices put right, if its young people are kept in ignorance of their country’s past?

It was a battle-cry that carried the reformers to victory. Under the Labour-led government of Jacinda Ardern, the positive noises made by Bill English’s National-led government were translated into hard-and-fast policy. From 2023, New Zealand history will be a compulsory feature of the school curriculum for Years 1-10.

A cause for celebration? Well, that depends upon your point of view. History is as much about the present as it is about the past. What we choose to remember, to bring forward into the consciousness of people living today, is a profoundly political act, with frequently explosive political consequences.

Just how fraught with danger the emerging new curriculum promises to be was brought home to the viewers of an item broadcast on Monday night’s edition of One News.

A Māori mother was distressed because her son’s class had been asked to give a Yes or No answer to the question: ‘Should land be returned to Māori?’ She expressed her displeasure at what she described as the closed nature of the question and its lack of context.

There will be many New Zealanders, however, in whose judgement the question posed is entirely fair and reasonable. Any accurate account of the history of Māori-Pakeha relations since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi cannot fail to conclude that, as one history teacher interviewed for the news item declared:

“Their [Māori] ancestors were evicted, essentially, from their lands, which [were] taken from them”.

If justice and reconciliation is the goal of the new compulsory curriculum, then the question of who owns New Zealand can hardly be avoided.

The problem, of course, is that if the correct answer to the offending teacher’s question is: “Yes, the lands that were unjustly (illegally) taken from Māori should be restored to them”; then, immediately, a whole host of subsidiary questions arise. Supplying honest answers to these questions will likely prove beyond the resources of New Zealand’s teachers.

Herein lies the danger. Once the scale of injustice is exposed, how should students – Māori and Pakeha – respond? Being young, their answers are likely to echo the words of the New Zealand poet, James K. Baxter:

Anger is bread/To the poor, their guns more accurate than justice

Knowing New Zealand bureaucracy’s horror of passion and plain speaking, it seems a given that teachers will not only be expected to make sure that such sentiments are discouraged, but that they are also suppressed.

We are thus presented with a policy paradox. Our government is insisting that young New Zealanders be taught their country’s history: but not in a way that allows them to both perceive the truths of the past, and act upon them in the present. If you think this contradiction is bound to tie our history teachers up in all manner of pedagogical and cultural knots, then I think you’re right!

One more thing arises out of Monday’s One News item – and it bothers me.

How is the Ministry of Education proposing to deal with the cultural reality that most of the teachers, and most of the students, involved in the new history curriculum will be non-Māori? If Te Ao Māori drives the responses of tangata whenua, then is it not equally true that the cultural life-worlds of non-Māori will determine their responses? How, then, are we to avoid the new history curriculum generating in the here-and-now exactly the same conflicts that beset the past?

If the answer to that question involves a huge amount of prescriptive effort, centred around what teachers and students can think and say, then serious politico-cultural conflict is inevitable.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell wrote: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

Fasten your seat-belts.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 April 2022.

Sucking Up and Kicking Down: The NZ Media Covers the Queenstown Summit.

Steady-On, Cobber: After the vicious attack on New Zealand’s prime minister and foreign policy, broadcast on Channel Nine’s “60 Minutes” programme, during which this country was accused of selling its soul and abandoning its Australian “mate” for a mess of Chinese pottage, most Kiwis would have greeted the Aussie media pack with hackles raised and teeth bared. Not our journalists, or, at least, not where anyone could see them.

THE NEW ZEALAND NEWS MEDIA’S coverage of the regular get-together of the Australian and New Zealand prime ministers was appalling. Like their reporting of New Zealand politics generally, most of the journalists’ effort was devoted to seeking-out story-lines with which to embarrass the Labour Government of Jacinda Ardern. In many cases, this involved openly talking-up the Australians’ book at their own country’s expense. Confirmed, yet again, is the unhealthily large number of “suck-up, kick-down” personalities currently at large in New Zealand’s Fourth Estate.

So many contemporary journalists appear to be in the job for trophies. Not the sort of trophies one displays on the mantelpiece (although they like them too) but the sort of trophies big-game hunters hang on their walls. The current Press Gallery’s definition of a good political journalist would appear to be based on how many politician’s they have “bagged”. As if stuffing someone’s career is something to be proud of.

Never has the British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin’s (1867-1947) crushing condemnation of the news media been more apt: “What [it] is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.”

After the vicious attack on New Zealand’s foreign policy, broadcast on Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes programme, during which this country was accused of selling its soul and abandoning its Australian “mate” for a mess of Chinese pottage, most Kiwis would have greeted the Aussie media pack with hackles raised and teeth bared. Not our journalists, or, at least, not where anyone could see them.

Rather than respond in kind to the “60 Minutes” onslaught, with questions about the Australian Defence Minister courting Armageddon over Taiwan and the South China Sea, our scribes were more keen to know how fast Jacinda planned to skulk back, like a whipped puppy, to her kennel in Canberra’s back yard.

Certainly there was no one there in Queenstown with the wit to object, when Scott Morrison blathered on about not letting hostile forces divide the Anzac partners, that, since the man in charge of Channel Nine was his old mate and Liberal Party colleague, Peter Costello, he might like to pick up the phone and ask him to stop calling New Zealand a Chinese puppet.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it. The hacks and hackettes of the New Zealand Press Gallery just don’t know stuff like that. All they know is what the smooth operators at the Australian High Commission, the British High Commission and the American Embassy whisper in their shell-like ears at receptions and cocktail parties arranged for just such a purpose.

One is reminded of the famous scene in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when the “orator” on the platform is handed a note informing him that Oceania is no longer at war with Eurasia, it is now at war with Eastasia:

The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.

For nearly 40 years, New Zealand’s diplomatic stance has reflected its location in the Asia-Pacific region of the world. Its relationships with other nations are based on the indisputable reality of New Zealand being a small, economically vulnerable, trading nation situated in the south of the South Pacific. It’s a stance that has the merit of being both expedient and ethical. Other nations know exactly where we stand and what we want – which is, essentially, to be everybody’s friend and trading partner. For decades now, New Zealand diplomacy has possessed the added advantage of in no way contradicting the general strategic posture of the region’s major military actors – the USA and Australia. We were focused on the Asia-Pacific. They were focused on the Asia-Pacific.

Except, they’re not – not any longer. The USA’s and Australia’s strategic perspective has shifted abruptly from the Asia-Pacific theatre to the Indo-Pacific theatre. From an essentially defensive stance, aimed at preserving the regional status-quo, New Zealand’s former ANZUS allies (with Japan and India in tow) have adopted a clearly aggressive posture aimed at containing, weakening, and ultimately breaking, the Peoples Republic of China. (In exactly the same way the USA and Nato contained, weakened and ultimately broke the Soviet Union.) And New Zealand, like the orator in Orwell’s novel, is supposed to accept the change without missing a beat. “Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.”

Significantly, the Press Gallery – bless their hawkish little hearts – has fallen into line without a murmur. China is New Zealand’s enemy. China has always been New Zealand’s enemy. Canberra says so. Washington says so. Even London says so. (Although what business it is of theirs God alone knows!)

Never mind that, by putting our export earnings at risk, the demands of our “allies” pose a direct threat to our national security and wellbeing. Never mind that, like the Soviet Union, China is a nuclear power, which, if cornered, has the power to blow up the world. None of this matters. As far as this country’s senior political journalists are concerned, New Zealand is out of step with the big boys. Ergo, New Zealand must get in step with the big boys. Jacinda needs to hold hands with “ScoMo” and “Sleepy Joe”, and quickly – or run the risk of being “bagged” and having her head hung on the Press Gallery wall.

Unless, of course, our “friends” decide that Oceania is no longer at war with Eastasia. That Oceania has never been at war with Eastasia.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 3 June 2021.

Mastering Trumpian Arithmetic: Why, In The New Political Order, 2+2=5.

The Calculation Of Tyranny: "If Trump’s White House is willing to lie about something as obviously, unquestionably fake as [their estimates of Trump's Inauguration Day crowd] just imagine what else they'll lie about. In particular, things that the public cannot possibly verify the truth of. It's gonna get real bad." - The Washington Post

 

ONE OF THE MOST CHILLING ASPECTS of Donald Trump’s political style is its sheer, amoral audacity. Like all the truly great political manipulators, Trump understands that whether or not something is true is a question best left to the philosophers. What matters in politics is what people believe to be true. And, when it comes to persuading people to choose unreality over reality; “alternative facts” to the facts themselves; Trump is a virtuoso.

There are two great literary illustrations (at least) of the Trump Administrations brutal ontology. The first is to be found in the exchange between Alice and Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass:

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,’ Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

 

The other illustration is contained in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:

 

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five*, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

 

So, when the White House spokesperson, Sean Spicer, flatly declares the equivalent of 2+2=5 by asserting that Trump’s inauguration attracted more spectator’s than Barack Obama’s; and when Trump adviser, Kellyanne Conway, justifies Spicer’s behaviour by referencing his use of “alternative facts”; how should we respond?

 

The temptation is to question the sanity of Trump and his team. “Just look at the photographs!” you shout in exasperation. “Are you people completely nuts! Do you think we’re all blind!” But, of course, these are the wrong questions. Because Trump and his team, just like everybody else, can see that Obama’s crowd was way bigger than theirs. Yes, their actions may resemble the behaviour of a terrible two-year-old, but appearances can be deceptive. There is method to Trump’s madness.

The Washington Post has reproduced a memorandum, supposedly penned by a former White House official, which sets forth with chilling clarity what the Trump Administration hopes to achieve with its 2+2=5 strategy.

 

Apart from immediately lowering the expectations of the White House Press Corps (because after Spicer’s opening salvo relations can only improve, right?) the author of the memorandum further argues that the Administration may also be seeking to widen the gap between the one-third of the American electorate who are Trump’s supporters, and the remaining two-thirds who are not:

 

"By being told something that is obviously wrong – that there is no evidence for and all evidence against, that anybody with eyes can see is wrong – they are forced to pick whether they are going to believe Trump or their lying eyes. The gamble here – likely to pay off – is that they will believe Trump. This means that they will regard media outlets that report the truth as ‘fake news’ (because otherwise they’d be forced to confront their cognitive dissonance.)"

 

The Washington Post’s anonymous author then puts forward another, even more disturbing, explanation for the Trump team’s dysfunctional relationship with the truth. By convincing a large chunk of the American population that truth and falsehood are fundamentally unknowable, the Administration hopes to induce them to disengage from politics altogether.

 

“A third of the population will say ‘clearly the White House is lying,’ a third will say ‘if Trump says it, it must be true’ and the remaining third will say ‘gosh, I guess this is unknowable.’ The idea isn’t to convince these people of untrue things, it’s to fatigue them, so that they will stay out of the political process entirely, regarding the truth as just too difficult to determine.”

 

The memorandum’s chilling conclusion: “This is laying the groundwork for the months ahead. If Trump’s White House is willing to lie about something as obviously, unquestionably fake as this, just imagine what else they’ll lie about. In particular, things that the public cannot possibly verify the truth of. It’s gonna get real bad.”

 

Fighting this strategy will require the US news media to demonstrate a measure of tenacity and courage not seen by the American public since the darkest days of the Nixon Administration.

 

Such demonstrations are never easy. As Orwell noted of the Nazi regime in 1943:

 

“Nazi theory [ … ] specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. [ ... ] The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.”

 

But almost certainly not as much as the man currently in command of the United States’ nuclear codes frightens us.

 

* It is possible that Orwell was inspired to use the 2+2=5 metaphor after seeing a Communist Party poster exhorting Soviet workers to complete Stalin’s Five Year Plan in just four years.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 23 January 2017.

Carefully Constructed Lies: Moving In The Direction Of Neoliberalism

George Orwell Had Their Measure: In his dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he presented characters who are actually very thankful for the ability to behave as though the lies their political leaders tell them are true. After all, people convinced they’re being lied to might start demanding the truth – and that could lead to all kinds of trouble.

 

HOW ANGRY “CENTRISTS” GET when they’re referred to in anything less than the most congratulatory terms. As if their appalling ignorance of, and disdain for, politics is something to be proud of. And yet, proud they are – very proud – of their refusal to shoulder even the most basic responsibilities of citizenship. Day after day, these people are fed statements by their political leaders which cannot, in any way, be reconciled with the facts – but which, their obvious falsity notwithstanding, they accept as true.

 

George Orwell had their measure. In his dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he presented characters who are actually very thankful for the ability to behave as though the lies their political leaders tell them are true. After all, people convinced they’re being lied to might start demanding the truth – and that could lead to all kinds of trouble. Orwell even invented a name for this condition: doublethink.

 

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.

 

In short: “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

 

The all-pervasive ideological system which required the citizens of “Airstrip One” [Great Britain] to practice doublethink was “Ingsoc” [English Socialism]. Though no centrist would accept for a moment that New Zealand society is in any way comparable to Orwell’s dystopia, it is not at all difficult to see in the all-pervasive influence of neoliberalism a polity more than a little analogous to Big Brother’s totalitarian regime.

 

It is one of the most frightening features of totalitarian systems that their effectiveness relies less upon naked force than it does upon the ordinary person’s realisation that, in practical terms, going with the flow of the new system makes much more sense than attempting to stand against it. In Nazi Germany, this was called “moving in the direction of the Fuhrer”. Adolf Hitler’s beliefs being well known and understood, it was unnecessary for his ministers to issue precise instructions concerning the implementation of his new government’s policies. Bureaucrats and other authority figures simply acted as they believed the Fuhrer would wish them to act.

 

Is it not possible to see in the appalling treatment meted out to beneficiaries of all kinds by MSD and WINZ bureaucrats more than a little of this “moving in the direction of the Fuhrer” phenomenon? No detailed memos will have been sent out to MSD employees – indeed, it would’ve been most unwise to put such sentiments down in writing – but everyone in that bureaucracy knows exactly what is expected of them. Government ministers, editorial writers and talkback hosts have made it very clear what the appropriate demeanour towards their beneficiary “clients” should be. They all know how their bosses would wish them to act.

 

If any centrists are still reading this, their blood pressure will no doubt be rising rapidly. “I’m not like that! This isn’t Nazi Germany! You’re out of you mind!” The great problem, of course, for these outraged folk, is that between 1933 and 1938 Nazi Germany wasn’t like Nazi Germany. For most German citizens, and in the eyes of the rest of the world, Hitler was a hero, and his regime’s achievements – full-employment especially – the envy of all those nations still mired in economic depression.

 

No, we don’t have concentration camps filled with John Key’s opponents. But that is not, of itself, proof that our democracy survives unscathed. It might just as easily point to the extraordinary success of what is, indisputably, the most successful totalitarian ideology in human history. Neoliberalism is a brilliantly conceived edifice of lies which, in order to have a successful career, it is in the intelligent citizen’s interest to affirm as an unanswerable collection of self-evident truths.

 

If you can do this without demonstrating the slightest traces of amusement, stress or guilt, then there’s a better than even chance that you call yourself a centrist.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 24 August 2015.