The limits of moralising critique

A good piece from Nicholas Gruen in On Line Opinion on the limits of moralising critique with dealing with the climate change question and the global financial crisis. It had struck me that there was more to the Rudd government's 5 per cent plan for reducing carbon emissions than many were giving them credit for, and that they were to some extent ambushed by The Greens, who had been waiting for a clear opportunity to reclaim moral high ground.

The question about the extent to which you can apply moral critique of your own government, but studiously avoid it for other governments - such as China's - is also a vitally important issue.

This piece first appeared in The Australian Financial Review on January 13, but due to its archaic policy on online access, I've only just come across it.

Since the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, we’ve tended to moralise disasters - to see them as the just deserts for our natural sinfulness. Even in today’s secular age, debate on how to handle two crucial issues - the financial crisis and climate change - remains heavily (and unfortunately) moralised.

It’s true that both crises will test our moral qualities. In particular both call for the intellectual courage that’s necessary to see new problems afresh. And we need the moral courage, particularly among those aspiring to lead us, to forge new social consensuses around solutions which embody those insights.

Unfortunately the moralisers usually want us to take intellectual (and moral) shortcuts. They might give some of us a self righteous inner glow. But they’ll only hold us back. In fact they could make things worse.

Activists make climate change politically compelling by moralising it and making it All About Us. They were scathing about the Government’s commitment to reduce its claim on emissions entitlements to 95 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020. That represents a per capita reduction of 25 per cent which seems pretty challenging to me - but there’s no accounting for (moral) tastes.

But here’s the thing. Arresting climate change isn’t all about us. As Garnaut has insisted, what really matters is building a truly global and binding agreement. And for nearly 20 years the major developing countries have resisted binding commitments insisting “you created the problem, you take the lead in fixing it”. Twenty years!

That underlines a further problem with moralism. The moralisers in rich countries feel queasy about forcing poor countries into binding commitments. Their real enthusiasm is the way the looming crisis might make rich societies mend our profligate ways.

But with China soon to be the largest global emitter that’s absurd. Imagine people being excused from water restrictions because they were poor. That’s effectively where moralism has got us in climate change negotiations. (None of this means we should be unprepared to offer compensation or to allow developing countries to temporarily increase their emissions - taking a heavier load ourselves - as we gradually decarbonise production.)

But what really matters is not how heavily we beat our breast in self denial, but how we maximise the chances of engaging the major developing countries. That’s why Garnaut’s most important recommendation was that we commit ourselves to unilaterally reducing our entitlements to emit whilst undertaking to dramatically intensify our efforts if a truly global agreement were reached.

Though Australian policy now embodies this conditional generosity in a diluted fashion, if the idea catches on with other developed countries, we might have made the game-changing difference that enables a truly global system to evolve.

Moralism also threatens to befuddle our response to the financial crisis.

Right back to Adam Smith economists have preached the virtues of prudence and thrift which are the building blocks of investment for the future. That message has, if anything grown in relevance in the last generation as household savings have steadily declined and foreign debt has grown to fund consumption and mining investment.

And at a time like this it would be nice to have less foreign debt so we are less beholden to investor sentiment. But alas, that’s for the medium to long term. Saint Augustine’s prayer - Lord make me chaste, but not yet - may be comical, but this is one situation in which it’s the right prayer. Now is no time to increase our savings.

And yet, appealing to moral notions of thrift, neither the Government nor the Opposition has had the moral backbone to come clean and unreservedly endorse deficit financing as an appropriate response to the crisis. We should be prepared to run substantial deficits and it may be appropriate to run them for some time. It all depends on how things develop - in the international economy and our own.

But that’s not all that should happen. Because we can’t know when it should occur, we should begin now building institutions - for instance independent advisory bodies like the Productivity Commission - to impose disciplines on politicians to move from fiscal accelerator to brake and to increase savings as recovery takes hold.

Doing something like that would make all the difference - between genuinely learning from the mistakes of the past, as opposed to engaging in a bit more empty moralising about them.

First published in the Australian Financial Review on January 13, 2009.

Nuttiness on the Left, Nuttiness on the Right

The question of whether the Internet can help to develop a more deliberative public sphere, or whether it promotes greater polarisation between people and groups, is a recurring one. In contrast to the optimism of many, University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has wondered whether the Internet worsens what he term the 'law of group polarisation' and the 'echo-chamber effect', where people with right-wing views only listen and discuss issues with others with right-wing views, and people with left-wing views do the same with their own kind.

There is certainly no shortage of nuttiness on the Internet. In the US, someone like Larry Sinclair can get a gig at the National Press Club by continually posting tendentious claims about Barack Obama. Similarly, if you think that 30 years as a ZANU-PF functionary trains you to be a productive Zimbabwean farmer, and that Robert Mugabe's basically a misunderstood anti-colonialist whose policies for the country are on the right track, then the Net is the place where you have the right to say it, and keep saying it regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

But there is nuttiness that doesn't matter, and nuttiness that might. And I've come across two cases this week where nuttiness on the Net seemed to be worth commenting upon.

Clive Hamilton's recent public denunciation of 'climate change denialism' on On Line Opinion strikes me as having elements of nuttiness on the left. Like Clive, and like OLO editor Graham Young, I am not a scientist or an expert on climatology.

I may be a good citizen and download and read the Garnaut Report on Climate Change this weekend, or I may be a lazy citizen and read what everyone else says on the Net. I think there's a real issue, and I understand the 'precautionary principle', although I worry about how every instance of abnormal weather is attributed to climate change.

For example, there were a lot of storms and tornadoes when I was in the US mid-west recently, and every CNN anchor would ask whether it was evidence of climate change, even though they would be reminded that the US land-mass lends itself to wild weather in the mid-west, as there is a cold Northeast and a hot Southwest and the two fronts often collide in the middle.

But it was how Clive Hamilton announced his refusal to write for OLO that struck me as tending towards nuttiness. First of all, there is the need to noisily announce that you are no longer going to write for a publication, rather than just not publishing with them. Its like all those op-ed writers in The Australian furiously and continuously writing about how they are being silenced by the left wing chattering classes.

Second, Hamilton equates 'climate change denialists' - the word "denialist" is used in an interesting way here - with conspiracy theorists more generally:

According to the line of argument about balance, it would be perfectly acceptable for On Line Opinion to carry a series of articles repudiating the link between AIDS and the HIV virus. (Try googling AIDS denialism.)

The AIDS denialists have to account for the fact that the overwhelming weight of medical and epidemiological evidence is against them, so they must invent fanciful theories about colonialist plots and gay capture of science to compensate for the lack of hard evidence to support their beliefs.

This is exactly what the climate change denialists do, and each time On Line Opinion runs one of their pieces it is, inter alia, endorsing their view that Australia's most eminent climate scientists are frauds and liars.

Would Graham Young argue that the interests of balance demand that On Line Opinion give space to the claims of creation science? Would it give space to the conspiracy theories about 9-11 being a CIA plot, or the Larouche delusions about the Royal Family being in cahoots with global Jewry to run drugs? Balanced, yes, but loopy and deceptive too.

There is a technique being used here to delegitimise contrary voices by equating their positions with the loony fringes of conspiracy theory. People on the left would be familiar with the technique of calling someone a communist in order to devalue their argument. I suspect the same is happening here.

It is worth noting that Graham Young does something similar in his reply to Hamilton, suggesting that people who disagree with him are "postmodernists", and therefore out of step with the Enlightenment tradition of rational thought:

The idea that truth is relative has taken over some areas of the humanities through postmodernism, theory and forms of Marxist analysis. That's the school that Clive's argument on global warming comes from. Reading his article, and the comments on the article thread, they really don't cut it in the outside world. We instinctively know that things do have objective reality and are not power constructs. That it doesn't matter how many people say it is true if it isn't. It's in that place in the intellectual debate that On Line Opinion fits. We're not in demise or denial. We're just starting to come into our own.

The final point to be made is that, for Clive Hamilton, the intellectual debate on climate change is over, and anyone who claims otherwise is simply proffering an excuse for inaction, or action as a shill for corporate vested interests.

The denialists have conspicuously failed to generate contrary evidence that can be published in refereed journals and instead devote themselves to creating doubt by exaggerating, exploiting and twisting the various uncertainties and unexplained phenomena that naturally characterise a body of science as complex and emergent as climate change science.

There is enough material in the history of ideas, and the sociology of knowledge, to suggest that evidence of a consensus on an issue is not the same as its being established as irrefutable fact. C. Wright Mills could barely get his argument heard about The Power Elite in 1960 when he wrote the book. Ten years later, it had become an orthodoxy of sociological thought. Milton Friedman was completely on the margins of economics in 1962 when he wrote Capitalism and Freedom. By 1976 the situation had changed dramatically. And there are many other examples of how the weight of orthodox thought in a discipline changes over time.

Given that professional journalists and journalism educators routinely claim that their profession is differentiated by what happens on line by the lack of ethics on the Internet, the Hamilton-Young debate could be a good case study in media and journalism courses on how differences of opinion play themselves out in the online environment. I think it points to what has been called the "noisy" public sphere, but this may prove Sunstein's point about the impossibility of getting consensus on the Net in light of so many conflicting opinions.

The question then is one of how do we conduct conversation in the absence of consensus. I don't think that noisily denouncing an online publication for not toeing a preferred 'party line' is the way to do it, but if that's Clive Hamilton's call, then so be it.

A more concerning example of nuttiness on the right involves the Young Liberals' "Make Education Fair" campaign. This one could be dismissed as nutty, if slightly aggressive, student politicking until:

1. A Senate Enquiry into the matter was set up in the last days of Liberal-National Party control of the Senate;
2. You go to the section of the Web site under 'Research' marked 'Academic Watch'.
   

In relation to the Senate enquiry, it would be hard to go past the observations of Andrew Norton - hardly an enemy of liberalism or the Liberal Party - on his blog that indicate why this will almost certainly generate a lot of heat but very little light. It is very hard for governments to legislate the content of university courses, and for a liberal, moving in this direction would point towards a slippery slope of government control of intellectual life. Moreover, given that the nature of the teacher-student relationship presumes that even the dumbest teacher knows more about their subject matter than the brightest student, the idea that course content is given over to a student plebiscite has a fell about it akin to Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution circa 1967, particularly when it is proposed that this be extended beyond universities to secondary schools.

It is the 'Academic Watch' page that I find particularly sinister. Norton's fears that the exercise could turn into "a witch-hunt for leftist academics" is confirmed when you go to this page. The site 'outs' 18 academics as 'radical leftists', even though they would appear to have little in common with one another except that they are at odds with whoever put together this page. My real worry here is that, one you go down this path, providing email addresses and phone numbers so that disgrunted students or whoever else can harass academics (or worse) is on the cards.

Given that the Liberal Party of Australia is not a minority Trotskyist sect, but rather seeks to govern on behalf of all Australians, such pogromic and quasi-McCathyist behaviour would seem to me to be very much at odds with the 'academic freedom' they ostensibly seek to champion. I would imagine that quite a few Liberals would be deeply embarrassed by the behaviour they see happening in their name on the 'Make Education Fair' Web site.

How not to go green

Seven months into Kevin Rudd's Prime Ministership in Australia, and it looks like sections of the op-ed commentariat are jumping ship. Elizabeth Farrelly fires a pretty heavy spray against the Federal Labour government in today's Sydney Morning Herald.

Farrelly finds it hard to contain her impatience, not only with Rudd, but with the electorate. Lurking here is a funny understanding of strong leadership, which Farrelly wants as long as, and only if, it is to implement the policies she wants.

This leads to the following intriguing statement on citizenship:

And maybe that's just human nature. But human behaviour can change, and be changed by tax. So we must reject the bad parenting our leaders pathetically offer, demanding instead the tough love we need. Demand, for our own sake, the increased fuel prices that can make change smooth, not catastrophic. That's moral courage. That's citizenship.

I thought that citizenship was about people voting for their political representatives, and having a say on how they are taxed, and how their taxes are used. No taxation without representation, and all that.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not a climate change denier, I think that cutting fuel taxes at the moment is a dumb idea, and I think we need to be moving towards smaller cars, better public transport, better designed cities etc.

But the idea that citizenship is about leaders forcing policies on voters is precisely the way not to build an awareness of these issues, in my humble opinion.