The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy and the New Fundamentalism
by Dick Taverne
Oxford University Press, 2005
310pp, £18.99
ISBN 0-19-280485-5
Reviewed by David Robertson
A worrying trend in modern society is the rejection of reason in dealing with technical and social problems, and its displacement by instinctive responses. When people reject rational analysis, for whatever reason, democracy is threatened. In this book, Lord Taverne confronts these forces of unreason and asserts the importance of an evidence-based approach to decision-making in a democracy. He ventures that NGOs in collusion with the media promote unscientific and emotional responses to social problems. The March of Unreason is a provocative assessment of new uncertainties being created in modern society.
Several anti-intellectual developments in modern society are identified and analysed:
Choosing complementary medicines and quack treatments (homeopathy, aromatherapy, etc.) when huge advances in medical research have eradicated many life-threatening diseases and malignancies, and increased life expectancy; rejection of genetic modification of seeds despite centuries of slow progress to develop new varieties using hybridisation, and in the absence of convincing evidence that GM crops affect consumers or the environment; support for ‘organic’ farming, with its low yields, high prices and increased health risks, seems to have become a ‘fashion item’ in wealthy Western countries; ‘eco-fundamentalism’ refers to environmentalists who refuse to be influenced by evidence or rational argument, and who regard science and technology as tools of big business and enemies of the environment; it approximates to a religion with trappings of uncritical belief, sacrifice and Armageddon.
In a chapter on ‘Reason and Democracy’, the author assesses evidence of conflicts between science and religion, including the US confrontation between ‘Darwinism’ and ‘creationism’. Political doctrines are also examined because, it is argued, authoritarian systems are not consistent with social and economic development. Eco-fundamentalists and alternative life-style groups reject rational thought and scientific method, which brings their interests into conflict with democracy.
Taverne makes a careful and objective assessment of these worrying and divisive views. He is perplexed why so many people reject the scientific method propagated by Newton and the liberal democracy fathered by Locke, which together began the social and economic development of the past two centuries. (Strangely, Taverne ignores the writings of Hume and Adam Smith whose economic reasoning was as important.) He examines the basis of present pessimism and scepticism. Most people, he argues, have little understanding of science, and many associate it with magic or witchcraft. With social and political controversies surrounding recent scientific advances (genetics, nuclear physics, contraception, climate change, etc), this ignorance allows malicious groups to exploit hypothetical catastrophes to generate opposition to scientific research. (Post-modernists, mostly sociologists, add to this confusion by declaring there can be no ‘objective’ [value-free] science, because science cannot be independent of cultural and ideological content!)
Taverne becomes especially penetrating when he investigates the role of NGOs in modern society. Eco-fundamentalist organizations, such as Greenpeace, ActionAid and WWF, among others, are accused of exploiting popular fears by claiming that the environment is threatened by commercial agriculture, genetically modified plants, industrialisation and globalisation. Their principal target is multinational enterprises (MNEs), which are regarded as exploiting environment and labour. No mention is made of developing countries’ need for private investment to generate economic development. In the EU, NGOs’ lobbying has proved especially effective. It ensured the adoption of ‘the precautionary principle’, which is spreading to other international agencies.
Risk and uncertainty is a neglected area in Taverne’s assessment. Risk analysis is a mystery to most people and results in many wrong judgments. For example, the European Commission communication announcing the precautionary principle (February 2000) began, ‘public opinion is becoming increasingly aware of potential risks to which the population or their environment are potentially exposed.’ In fact, the public shows little understanding of risk. That is the problem. Food and drug testing has never been more exacting, while modern communication and identification technologies ensure rapid responses to any risk identified. Similarly, laboratory testing of products is better than ever before. Yet, we are told the European public perceives high risks and supports ‘an approach to risk management that is applied in circumstances of scientific uncertainty, reflecting the need to take action in the face of potentially serious risks, without awaiting the results of scientific research.’ This authorises governments to take action even without cause, which reverses the conventional scientific approach. Europeans have been terrified by BSE and ‘foot and mouth’ outbreaks and these fears are exploited by NGOs. The recent approval of REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals) will impose costs on the community as well as chemical companies. The precautionary principle and ignorance about risk play into the hands of eco-fundamentalists.
This book contains a thoughtful and valuable assessment of the dangers faced by a society that rejects a reasoned and evidence-based approach to democratic decision-making. It explains how single-minded propagandists can exploit such societies. In many western countries, governments have chosen not to confront NGOs. This submissive posture has increased the influence of NGOs in the community, made the promotion of government policies more difficult and encouraged NGOs to adopt international agendas and operate freely across borders. They most resemble multinational enterprises —except the market disciplines MNEs! Taverne acknowledges all this. But he does not consider making NGOs answerable to democratically elected governments. In most countries, NGOs operate as registered charities, without requirements to report their income or their expenditure, or to pay taxes. These agencies are multi-million dollar enterprises, raising money in many ways, shifting funds around the world and exerting influence on national economies and international agencies. Many NGOs support ‘corporate social responsibility’ and monitoring of MNEs’ behaviour. Yet NGOs are not subject to any regulations or transparency requirements. Why should NGOs not be made subject to public scrutiny by amending regulations applied to charities?
Taverne’s book fills a yawning gap on the bookshelf. He mounts an effective and informed attack on the anti-globalisation coalition, identifying and revealing dangerous forces that could undermine democratic governments. He examines each source of unreason in turn and exposes NGOs’ strategies to public scrutiny in ways they may not appreciate. Their apparently socially sensitive activities are exposed as subversive in ways that undermine the democratic system. This calm and comprehensive analysis of the malign forces eating away at the democratic system is long overdue. What is needed now is a strategy to counter-attack anti-globalisation forces and to restore faith in democracy.
Australian Social Attitudes: The First Report
Edited by S. Wilson, G. Meagher, R. Gibson, D. Denemark and M. Western
UNSW Press, 2005
ISBN 0-86840-671-6 281pp $59.95
Reviewed by Richard Grant
Australian Social Attitudes: The First Report is a welcome analysis of Australians’ attitudes on a range of public policy, lifestyle and values-based issues. Very little Australian research has been done on this subject. The main reason is the paucity of reliable public opinion data. America’s ‘General Social Survey’ has been a useful source since the 1960s, while Britain’s ‘Social Attitudes Survey’ has produced a substantial annual publication since the 1980s. In contrast, Australian research has tended to rely on commercial polling (with very little longitudinal research on policy issues), the National Social Science Survey (NSSS) and the Australian Election Studies (AES). Both beginning in the 1980s and based at the Australian National University (ANU), the NSSS and the AES formed rival polling research organisations. The NSSS, formed as a member of the International Social Science Survey, conducted major attitudinal surveys in 1984, 1986–87, 1987–88, 1989–90 and 1993. The AES have been conducted following each federal election since 1987.
In 2003, the ACSPRI Centre for Social Research (ACSR) in the Research School of Social Sciences, ANU, conducted the first Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA). The survey was designed by a 17-member AuSSA Advisory Team, with another five international advisers. It takes the form of ‘a mail questionnaire sent to more than 10, 000 Australian citizens every two years’ (p.6). Australian Social Attitudes is an edited volume based largely on the 2003 AuSSA data, with contributions from several members of the Advisory Team.
The book’s 13 chapters (excluding the introduction) present survey findings on a wide range of policy issues and social attitudes. It would help if the policy-based chapter on welfare (7), economic reform (10), immigration (11), genetics (12) and globalisation (14) were presented separately from those on lifestyle and values voluntary associations and political participation (5), post-materialism (6) and trust (8). The 2003 AuSSA survey results make for interesting reading:
• Sixty-two percent of respondents believe that 'management and employees have good relations in my workplace' (p.44). 88% think it 'not too likely' or 'not at all likely' that they will lose their job or be retrenched in the next 12 months.
• Forty-five percent of respondents disagree that 'my hours of work interfere with my family and personal life', while 52% agree that 'most people who work long hours choose to do so' (p. 52). Fifty-nine percent of single parents believe their standard of living is better compared to their parents: 42% believe their children's standard of living is better compared to their own (p.39). Seventy-six percent of all respondents believe that their standard of living is better compared to their parents at the same age (p. 173).
• There is strong support for both the award system and enterprise bargaining. Sixty-six percent of respondents agree that ‘award wages are the best way of paying workers and setting conditions’: 64% believe that ‘employers and employees should negotiate pay directly’ (p. 171).
• 'Australia is a nation of joiners', with 86% of respondents belonging to at least one voluntary association and little variation by age, gender or location (p. 66). Members of associations are more likely than non-members to have engaged in political activity (p. 72).
• Seventy-four percent of respondents list their family or marital status as one of the three groups most important to who they are (p. 31). Fifty-five percent of respondents choose work as one of their three responses. As for what constitutes a family, 74% agree that a single-parent family is a household while only 34% agree that the law should recognise same-sex couples (pp. 17–19).
• Seventy-three percent of respondents believe that 'people who receive welfare benefits should be under more obligation to find work' (p. 112). The survey found a continuation—since the early 1990s—of public preference for more spending on services (48%) over less tax (28%), and particularly strong support for tax increases to fund 'health and Medicare' and 'primary and secondary schools' (pgs. 105, 109).
• Forty percent of respondents agree that 'the federal government is run for the benefit of all', up from 35% in 1995. Forty-eight percent of respondents identifying themselves as 'middle class' agree with this statement (pp. 128–29). A large majority believe the federal government should either have more power (24%) or the same amount of power (56%) (p. 133).
• Seventy percent of respondents believed that crime had increased over the past two years (2001–2003), a perception at odds with official statistics which show decreasing crime (p. 143). Thirty-one percent of respondents either agree or strongly agree that immigrants increase crime rates; 42% disagree or strongly disagree (p. 145).
• Twenty-six percent of respondents believe 'the number of immigrants allowed into Australia nowadays should be increased', 31% believe it should stay the same, and 38% favour a decrease (p. 184). Nearly 70% of respondents believe that 'immigrants are generally good for Australia's economy'. Only 25% believe that 'immigrants take jobs away from people who were born in Australia' (p.186).
• Roughly 90% of respondents believe that to be 'truly Australian', one must 'speak English', 'feel Australian', 'have Australian citizenship' and 'respect Australia's political institutions and law'. Only 58% believe it is important to be born in Australia to be considered 'truly Australian' (p.188). Murray Goot and Ian Watson conclude that the view that the events surrounding Tampa made the public more wary of immigration ‘turns out to be mistaken’ (p. 199). On the contrary, ‘The Howard years have seen not just diminishing opposition to immigration, but the longest period of majority support for the program since the heyday of immigration between the late 1950s and the early 1970s’.
• Forty-seven percent of respondents prefer a mix of private and public ownership of major services (for example: Telstra, electricity, public transport, Australia Post) compared with 39% preferring 'only public' ownership and 13% 'only private' (p. 167).
• Fifty-eight percent of respondents believe that 'Australia should continue to use tariffs to protect its industry' (p.169).
• Eighty-one percent of respondents believe that media ownership is too concentrated: 70% agree that the media should have less power (p. 233).
• 66% of respondents believe that genetic testing 'should be allowed because it gives new hope in detecting, treating and even reversing serious medical conditions' (p.209); 75% of respondents either disagree or strongly disagree that employers should be able to genetically test employees (p.214); 77% either disagree or strongly disagree that insurance companies should genetically test applicants to determine health risks (p.212).
For all the interest in the chapters' findings, the book would benefit from a more sustained initial and concluding focus on the issue of policy–opinion congruence. There is an important international literature on this issue which, among other things, identifies various forms of policy-opinion concordance. For example: governments may implement a policy knowing it already has the support of majority opinion (for example: welfare reform, immigration policy); public support may build or weaken after the policy has been implemented (for example: Iraq War); public opinion may consistently reject, or partially reject, a policy (for example: tariff policy, Telstra privatisation); or a hybrid policy may garner public support for its different elements (for example: health insurance, industrial relations policy).Discussing these possibilities in the introduction would enable a final chapter that systematically assesses ‘the connections, tensions and feedback’ between policy and opinion (p.8). This chapter might also review the evidence across all surveyed issues that age, gender, education, region of residence, income, class and party identification are influential in the shape of public opinion in Australia. Further AuSSA surveys will aid these tasks, aligning the shifts in opinion and policy over time.These changes will mainly benefit public opinion and ‘pure’ academic research. Ultimately, as Ian McAllister points out, ‘AuSSA’s success will depend on the extent to which it comes to influence the policy discourse’ (p.viii).
Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2005
Productivity Commission Canberra, 2005
ISSN 14489805
$25 or www.pc.gov.au
Reviewed by Gaurav Sodhi
For a reader interested in finding out how many Indigenous people went to prison last year, how many Indigenous children had tooth decay, what the size of the average Indigenous home loan was or how much internet time was surfed up by Indigenous computer users, the Productivity Commission’s Report Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2005 is a useful resource.
For those more interested in the causes of and solutions to the squalor experienced in remote and rural Aboriginal communities, however, this particular report is not only underwhelming, it also dangerously under-represents Indigenous disadvantage.
The Productivity Commission’s (PC) report was commissioned by the Council Of Australian Governments (COAG) for two reasons: firstly, as a compilation of data to present an overall picture of the social and economic living conditions of Indigenous Australians, and secondly to assess the success of government policy and programmes.
The report utilises a three-tiered structure to identify areas of indigenous disadvantage and to suggest focus areas for future policy direction.
The first part of the report deals with ‘headline indicators’, the major social and economic measures that are used to compare Indigenous outcomes with mainstream Australia. These include life expectancy, post-secondary education, year 10 and 12 schooling retention rates, unemployment, household income and home ownership.
The next tier, ‘strategic areas of action’, describes where government and community action can improve headline indicators. These include substance use and misuse, effective environmental health systems, and economic participation and development. Improvements in the second tier, ‘strategic areas of action’, can be sought by ‘strategic change indicators’, which represent the third tier. These include governance arrangements, infant mortality and alcohol and tobacco consumption. While the report does not directly specify policies that improve outcomes, it does suggest which indicators need urgent addressing—and the list is long, with every conceivable indicator suggesting that Indigenous Australians are worse off than those in the mainstream. From rates of tooth decay to reading and writing benchmarks, Aboriginal disadvantage is evident in each of the report’s many pages.
If this sounds bad enough, the real story is even worse. By aggregating the Indigenous population into a single group to provide a picture of Aboriginal living conditions, the report fails to distinguish between the living conditions of Aborigines living in remote and regional areas and those integrated into the mainstream; in doing so, the report misrepresents the living conditions of both these groups. A recent analysis by the Centre for Independent Studies (1) suggests that the 50% of the 400,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population live in remote and rural areas exposed to the worst of Indigenous disadvantage, while the other half, in urban areas, are largely integrated into the mainstream.
A crucial piece of data absent from the report is the distribution of income for Indigenous people, which was published by the CIS and shows that the Indigenous population concentrates around two peaks. One peak reflects a concentration of Indigenous people who depend on welfare for the bulk of their income—those living mostly in remote and very remote communities. The second peak reflects the other 200, 000 Aborigines with mainstream levels of income. This latter group enjoys a standard of living similar to most Australians with jobs. By aggregating the Indigenous population into a single group, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage under-reports the disadvantage of the 200,000 people who live in remote and very remote communities and misrepresents the living standards of those integrated into the mainstream. The value of the report’s data is limited by this aggregation error.
The report is more than a mere compilation of statistics. It is also intended as a measure of the success of government policy and as an indication of where future policy attention should be directed. As such, it is of particular importance. The implication drawn from the aggregated Indigenous population is that while the lot of Indigenous people has not improved much, this can be corrected by more attention being paid to specific problems. In other words, we need to do more of the same, just better.
This is entirely the wrong conclusion.
Had the report disaggregated data, it would have shown that the policies of the last 30 years share much of the blame for current circumstances.
The PC report wants ‘a society where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should enjoy a similar standard of living to that of other Australians, without losing their cultural identity’. This implies that Aboriginal culture is static, and must be protected from modernity. However one does not have to be poor in order to preserve culture. In fact, culture can be more effectively pursued given sufficient economic resources and therefore the ability to choose a desired amount of cultural participation.
Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage not only under-reports the extreme deprivation of those living in rural and remote communities, it also fails to acknowledge the success of those who identify in the census as Aborigine and Torres Strait Islander within mainstream Australian life. The divergence between the two groups is a more powerful indictment on the previous 30 years of Indigenous policy than the report suggests.
Endnote
(1) H. Hughes, ‘The Economics of Indigenous Deprivation and Proposals for Reform’, Issue Analysis No. 63, 23 September 2005
The Intelligent Australian Investor
By Chris Leithner
Wrightbooks,
246pp. ISBN 0 7314 0303 7, 2005, $29.95
Reviewed by Chris Prunty
A mere investment book is not usually the type of work that would be fortunate enough to grace the review pages of Policy. In fact, when pushing for its inclusion, I was warned that I’d have to make a case for The Intelligent Australian Investor, by occasional CIS contributor Chris Leithner, on ‘intellectual grounds as well as a piece of investment advice’. Fortunately, the book makes this task undemanding.
The idea that investment, or more correctly, the speculation that takes place on the Australian stock market on a day-to-day basis, is not ‘intellectual’ is hardly uncommon. An alarming number of people, many of them finance professionals, treat the market as nothing more than a large sophisticated casino. But Leithner’s book is not aimed at these people.
The Intelligent Australian Investor is not so much a piece of ‘investment advice’ as it is an exploration of many of the fallacies surrounding investment in the Australian stock market. It is unlikely Leithner would be fond of the term ‘mental framework’, and he must forgive me for taking a linguistic mace to his otherwise eloquent investment philosophy, but the point is Leithner’s approach is no get-rich-quick scheme—it is in his own words ‘a how not to lose money book’.
Leithner is an advocate of the Ben Graham school of value investing. Graham, regarded as the father of value investing, is renowned for pioneering modern share analysis. Graham’s success centred on his acknowledgement that price and value are not synonymous, and that only rigorous and sceptical assessment of company accounts and operations would yield the intrinsic value of a company. Graham’s goal was to identify through research, and invest in, companies trading at a sizable discount to their intrinsic worth. This difference between the price of a stock and his assessment of value allowed what Graham called a ‘margin of safety’ in case his analysis was incomplete or faulty.
It is this conservative and considered investment legacy that Leithner follows and expands upon. Having escaped life as an academic, Dr Leithner is not only an advocate of the Graham school, but also a practitioner and has, for the past five years, run his own private investment company. So it is with academic and empirical experience that Leithner explores how one might approach investing in the Australian market.
In order to do this, Leithner draws from a number of disciplines, most notably economics, political philosophy, and psychology, to create a mental framework by which intelligent investors might assess the market and avoid the kind of obstacles that prevent successful investment decisions.
Leithner’s willingness to draw from non-investment fields to illustrate a point may leave those looking for a strict step-by-step guide to stock selection disappointed. Regardless, those with an enquiring mind and interests broader than pure finance will find Leithner’s treatises on Austrian economics (good), business education (bad), free enterprise (admirable), business media (terrible) and politics and politicians (despicable) entertaining and thought provoking.
Not afraid to apply the blow torch, Leithner devotes several chapters to exploding the myths of modern financial theory, and haranguing the business schools which propagate such nonsense. Schools which, essentially, are devoted to turning out investment professionals who have been taught it is not worth their while to think. Similarly, Leithner has little time for market forecasters and economists, and reassures the reader that ‘If you have never studied the dismal science [economics], rejoice — this means it is less likely you will have to unlearn the myths and nonsense that pervade the contemporary mainstream.’
Leithner’s thinking on finance and other subjects his book touches upon is rigorous and the expression of his ideas forthright. Details that market participants gloss over, such as the erroneous use of the term ‘value’ for ‘price’ or ‘investment’ for ‘speculation’ receive precise and revealing dissection. Fortunately, with his clarity of thought comes an exacting use of language and merciful brevity. It seems, despite his background, Dr Leithner has unlearned the nonsense of language that passes for written discourse among the academic mainstream.
Leithner is of the opinion, and shows, that individuals are better placed than institutions to avoid the kinds of self-destructive behaviours that pervade many financial institutions. Leithner demonstrates that much of the market is driven by fear, greed, and speculation, and not rational and considered assessment of fact. A key, then, becomes mastering one’s emotions to take advantage of such conditions and basing one’s assessments on disciplined and conservative analysis.
Ben Graham once said ‘There are two requirements for success in Wall Street. One, you have to think correctly; and secondly, you have to think independently’. Leithner’s book is the best Australian text to allow investors to start to do this.
The Ethics of Identity
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
Princeton University Press
2005, 358pp, US$29.95,
ISBN 0 691 12036 6
Reviewed by John Heard
When reading the epistemic knots liberal scholars tie themselves into whenever they approach human rights, I’m mindful of the ethical banality of the tradition which has for the most part been shy of metaphysics. Great as political theory and often engaging as airplane reading, liberalism has no coherent foundation and therefore nothing that ultimately stretches beyond high-end pamphleteering.
Clearly, Kwame Anthony Appiah is in the same boat, or perhaps it’s his convoluted prose. Either way The Ethics of Identity is a long, undisciplined but probably immediately important read.
For a reviewer schooled in the certainties of the natural law tradition, Appiah the philosopher reminds one of a terribly learned, but increasingly baggy professor, lost between two or thirty very meaningful ideas but seemingly unable to articulate many of them in a solid, careful manner. You know, however, that by the end of the semester you will have learned something valuable, or perhaps many things, even if you struggle to identify them later. They would be almost certain to make you sound clever during a Presidential debate, if such a thing were still desirable.
Perhaps this quality derives from that fact that liberalism, as Appiah acknowledges, ‘is not so much a body of doctrine as a set of debates’ and indeed ‘what we now call the liberal tradition’ if viewed from its inception ‘would look less like a body of ideas that developed through time and more like a collection of sources and interpretations of sources…’.
Appiah’s monograph certainly has this tone and structure, a great grab-bag of insights, debates and reflections on the familiar elements of the liberal system that ends with a novelty, a peculiar attempt to prognosticate on themes of globalisation and what Appiah has lately called ‘contamination’ and ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’.*
Can he succeed? Indeed, what does it mean to succeed as a liberal? If, as Appiah would have it, the history of liberalism is one of ‘yet another instance of the Owl of Minerva’s taking wing as the light fades’, then this wide-ranging and immediately contemporary text has succeeded. It carries on the liberal debate, it speaks to liberals and what’s more, it speaks liberal, that curious pseudo-philosophical nomenclature made up of what are—ostensibly—merely practical ideas that have—for the most part—dominated political, philosophical and legal discourse in the Anglo-sphere.
A man who adopted the African name ‘Kwame’ late in life is obviously serious about race and identity politics generally and Appiah’s text maps out his concern to conserve something of the local in the wide, white noise of the global context. A prima facie improbability is the key image shadowing this book and Appiah’s attendant writings: an African villager yammering on a cell-phone. This is the awkward synecdoche of Appiah’s ‘cosmopolitanism’.
Like the baggy professor’s lectures, I skipped the least original sections of Appiah’s text: those dealing with liberal history (why read what Appiah thinks Locke said, read Locke) and what might be termed ‘Ivy League water cooler chatter’ demonstrated by a detached curiosity for technology generally and the internet long after such things became quotidian tools, rather than conceptual conundrums, for the rest of us. You can too.
One must, however, take seriously his attempted revival of cosmopolitanism, not least because he has lived the contemporary history of African development and the post-colonial reverse-diaspora cum diaspora (born in London, raised in Ghana, a student in the UK, and now a US citizen). Peeking out from the posturing inherent in any such work is Appiah’s earnest desire to carve out a space for difference in the apparently homogenising machine of contemporary culture. That space is tech-savvy, but culturally diverse, there’s no good reason why Locke’s individual in 2006 need jettison traditional signifiers to join the global conversation.
Rather, one can speak the language of the Asante over a Nokia cell phone and in the process perform a new kind of identity politics. In this manner, one ‘contaminates’ liberalism and enriches political debate.
But how precisely is this good? The text is called The Ethics of Identity after all. Unfortunately, Appiah skirts the issue. He must, like all liberal scholars, retreat into relativism or what he novelly terms ‘metaphysical ecumenism’ (p. 267):
Human rights as they actually exist are, above all, creatures of something like law...agreements promulgated by states...the major disadvantage is that without some grounding—metaphysical or not—it is hard to see why they should have any power or effect. (p. 259–260).
Surely a problem, but not it seems for the common sense-driven liberal.
Appiah appeals to Michael Ignatieff who has said, ‘human rights has gone global by going local’ and sets out an achingly liberal justification for the groundless norm: human rights have proven useful to many people in many places and so must be good. In other words, we’re back to Mill and utilitarianism.
Appiah claims his ‘pragmatism’ is not the blunt rule of the mob applied to fundamental freedoms but still claims that ‘all of these (fundamental human rights) are things that are wanted by most people everywhere’ (p. 266). He is correct, some of our most cherished rights (the separation of powers for instance) specifically restrain the mob, but on a wider, meta-analysis he’s still talking about ‘the consent of a majority of our species’. If he’s not, he describes something else related, which might be called Imperialism, hinted at in this passage:
We needn’t be unduly troubled by the fact that metaphysical debate is unlikely to yield consensus, because human rights can, and therefore should, be sustained without metaphysical consensus. (p.267).
The leap from can to should speaks to might is right. Such a thing is the death of human freedom.
Still, Appiah is not unrestrained. He repeatedly attempts to ‘root’ his theories in individual identity which he claims ‘is at the heart of human life’ something that liberalism apparently ‘takes...seriously’. (p. 268). His ‘cosmopolitanism’ ‘values human variety’ but not insofar as diversity might ‘constrain more than...enable’ ‘meaningful human life’. (p. 268) This is—perhaps because of Appiah’s personal experiences in Ghana and post-Colonial Britain—a terribly colonial view of ethical discourse: who really minds what the natives are burbling, as long as we’re all sitting down to tea at the same table?
Of course such a thing is eminently do-able, it might even work wonderfully in the fraught world of international diplomacy, but such an immediately sensible theory is not going to spark a French or American Revolution. By jettisoning metaphysics, stability is served, but something mighty about the human person and his fight for fundamental freedoms is lost, namely any appeal to the universalising transcendent. Rights lose their immediacy and any connection with justice as an absolute and therefore, an imperative.
Towards the close of The Ethics of Identity Appiah claims, ‘...I say, we do not go wrong if we resist designating everything we should devoutly hope for a fundamental human right’ (p. 266). But by failing, as all liberals must, to speak of the universal imperative behind human rights as anything other than the findings of a peculiar empiricism, albeit a nuanced empiricism, blessed by utilitarianism; Appiah’s ethics are hollow.
His rights are indeed an often-benevolent tangle of obligations and desires that happily made it into international law, but to survive another imperial project on the scale that birthed the cosmopolitanism he borrows from Rome and Westminster, such rights need the metaphysical grundnorm Appiah’s liberalism cannot provide.
Endnote
* ‘The Case for Contamination’, Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Times Magazine, January 1, 2006.
Promises, Performance, and Prospects: Essays on Political Economy 1980-1998
By Antonio Martino
Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 2005
ISBN 0-86597-563-9
Reviewed by Barry Maley
This collection of articles and essays by the Italian political economist and practising politician Antonio Martino deals with the Italian economic and political scene in the 1980s and 1990s. The essays are best appreciated by seeing them against the background of the resurgence of free-market thinking in the West in the immediately preceding years.
The 1970s and early 1980s in the United States, Britain, Australia, and parts of Western Europe, saw the rebirth of classical liberalism and a species of conservatism powerfully influenced by progress in microeconomics and criticism of the prevailing Keynesian orthodoxy. It was the advent of what came to be known (pejoratively in some circles) as ‘economic rationalism’. Like many socio-political movements, this represented the coming together of a number of lines of development. On the political side, there was dawning disenchantment with democratic socialism, the extending reach of the state into civil society and private enterprise, and ‘stagflation’. This was reinforced by the rediscovery of the liberal tradition in political economy, led by Friedrich Hayek in a series of publications extending from the 1930s to the 1960s and beyond, and built upon the insights of his predecessors in the Austrian school of economists, especially Ludwig von Mises. To this must be added the work of the Chicago School of economists in the United States and the contributions of Milton Friedman, James Buchanan and others who identified the facts, framed the ideas, and polished the arguments that laid the foundations for such neo-classical and neo-conservative reforms as we have so far experienced. This was the intellectual milieu within which Martino found his voice.
After graduating from the University of Messina Law School in 1964, Martino became an instructor in economics at the University of Rome and, on leave from that university, spent 1966–68 pursuing graduate studies under Milton Friedman and George Stigler at the University of Chicago. Returning to the University of Rome, he subsequently became professor of economics until 1994 when he began a distinguished political career, including periods as Italy’s foreign minister and minister for defence.
Although Italy did not experience the same economic and political re-assessments that presaged the coming of the Thatcher and Reagan years, Martino became a leading protagonist in his own country, and more widely, of the momentous developments in political economy. He was well prepared and well placed to play a part in observing the intersection between the theory of political economy and practical politics. This is especially true when he illustrates, through Italian experience and developments and his comments upon them, some of the central themes of modern liberalism and its reformist recommendations. Italy, in these essays, becomes a stage upon which the drama of ideas and practice is played out. They have the power to instruct beyond Italy.
The articles and essays (preceded by an excellent foreword by Dwight Lee) are divided into six parts. The first part details the growing nexus in Italy (as in other Western countries in the same period) between the state’s growing absorption of a greater proportion of national GDP through taxation, and deficit spending, that leads inexorably to the emergence of Leviathan and inflation. But it is an incompetent Leviathan, incapable of efficiently carrying out its promises and leaving behind not only a ravaged economy and exploited citizens, but also citizens generally ill-informed about the causes of their woes. In his reflections on such things, Martino discusses the possible role of a fiscal constitution.
Parts Two and Three—’Hopes Betrayed’—explore the ramifications, in Italian public policy of the period, of the themes introduced in Part One. In discussing statism and taxation, he echoes issues currently under debate in Australia in the form of resistance to taxation reform, the difficulty of cutting government expenditure—especially welfare expenditure—and the connection between illiberalism and high taxation. He says, for example (p. 53): ‘Quite independently from considerations of efficiency and progress, statism is to be criticized on moral grounds, for a high degree of statist exploitation gives bureaucrats and politicians a property right on the average citizen’s time that is incompatible with the moral basis of a free society’. The words ‘high degree’ here are to be noted, for Martino concedes that every society ‘must suffer some degree of statist exploitation’.
Part Two also includes a discussion of state and private education, and the idea of compulsory education, that is highly relevant to our present concerns in Australia.
Martino’s well-known Heritage Lecture ‘Was Keynes a Keynesian?’ is reproduced in Part Four. This essay has become a minor classic, yet is not readily accessible. As an eloquent statement of much that underlies the intellectual and moral case for free-market liberalism, it is well worth re-reading.
Parts Four and Five deal mainly with monetary policy and the prospects of the Euro. This section is interesting from an historical perspective in raising issues which we now believe have been solved, or substantially solved, by the independence of central reserve banks governed by monetary and price rules.
This is not so, however, with the Euro and the role of the Euro in wider European Community economic policies, and here Martino discusses still-unanswered questions.
For the general reader unfamiliar with recent Italian economic and policy issues, there are several essays here that will inform and illuminate. For the reader more interested in the interplay between economics and liberalism, there are essays that richly reward their reading. Whatever the focus or interest, all of the essays are written lucidly and accessibly.
