tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89490012116732149882023-07-17T22:12:09.669-07:00Critical ScholarshipMac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-14242347651085225972010-05-09T16:31:00.000-07:002010-05-09T16:31:20.634-07:00My Life from HereI’ve spent almost twenty years formulating recommendations about the hardest civic problem, which is: <br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
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How best should governments ration entitlements, given changed circumstances, given plural values and attitudes, plural meaning systems, plural beliefs about the nature of reality and what is the good life? <br />
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My recommendations derive entirely from what has worked in past and present civilizations, including ours. They aren’t new, I didn’t create them. I selected and analysed them in a new way, with a new analysis of capitalism, and of the problems all civilizations now face given the changes brought by mass jet travel and computerised communications. <br />
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The work is pretty much finished, the recommendations are ready to be used. <br />
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Now I think the work has the potential to improve millions of people’s lives in the future, especially people who lack a voice. <br />
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I don't want my recommendations to end up gathering dust. My young friend Laurence Brown who helped me with the research has come to see some of the worth of my work, to see how I begin with deep and radical analysis, and build my recommendations brick by brick. He has come to believe as I do that my work ought to be used, and so I intend to appoint him my literary executor. <br />
I don’t know whether I have another twenty years in me, but it makes sense for me to spend the time I’ve got left in publishing and otherwise promulgating my analyses and recommendations, attempting to maximise the chance that my analyses might be understood, and that my recommendations might become policies at some time in the future.Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-82123727542573521372010-05-09T15:59:00.000-07:002010-05-09T15:59:01.896-07:00Unsustainability, Entitlements and Governance<strong>Regulation is necessary for survival.</strong> The survival of any society, even animal societies, depends on the presence of regulatory arrangements necessary for social control and prosperity.<br />
<a name='more'></a> These arrangements work by imputation, compulsion, and constraint, or in the case of animal societies, by genetic and learned programming. <strong>In the case of human societies, these arrangements are both institutional and cultural</strong>, by which I mean they are both formally enforced and embedded in customary practices. For example you either comply with the meaning of a handshake, or you pay a social penalty. Assault incurs an institutional sanction. Robert Putnam is mistaken in defining social capital as altruism. Social capital is <strong>civic compliance</strong>. <br />
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<strong>The following examples demonstrate that all market value depends on regulation.</strong> Although civic regulations are all too open to the influence of market forces, all markets are produced, enabled, and shaped, by regulatory practices. Markets depend completely on compliance. Civic regulation includes all of the activities of legislature, executive and judiciary. Even schools are instruments of regulation, since before anything else they produce compliance. <br />
<strong>Personal values, eg. safety and flourishing </strong><br />
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<strong>Regulation against murder, assault, infanticide, cannibalism. Regulation of foods quality, of drugs of abuse, alcohol, gambling</strong><br />
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<strong>Regulation of health practitioners, poisons, drugs, explosives. Regulation of OH&S. Regulation of schools and education Regulation of standards and licences for professions and trades</strong><br />
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<strong>Property values</strong><br />
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<strong>Regulation against theft, trespass, embezzlement, torts </strong><br />
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<strong>Regulation of title deeds </strong><br />
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<strong>Regulation of intellectual property </strong><br />
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<strong>Transport values</strong><br />
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<strong>Regulation of railways and roads, airspace </strong><br />
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<strong>Regulation of commercial and private transport</strong><br />
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<strong>Commercial Values</strong><br />
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<strong>Regulation of banking and interest rates, regulation of trade and competition, regulation of companies, regulation of contracts</strong><br />
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<strong>Communications Values</strong><br />
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</strong><br />
<strong>Regulation of radio and television licences</strong><br />
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<strong>Regulation of internet (gambling sites, snuff and paedophilia sites, etc).</strong><br />
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<strong>Environmental values </strong><br />
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<strong>Regulation of national parks, forests, inter-tidal zones, rivers, lakes, seas and reefs. </strong><br />
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<strong>Regulation of agriculture, mines and energy. Regulation of pollution and waste management</strong><br />
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Q. Why do we take it for granted that no-one can buy human body parts from the local butcher for any money? <br />
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A. Because it’s regulated. We take for granted compulsion and compliance. <br />
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Q. Why do we take for granted the free purchase and use of materials in quantities which will destroy the ecological foundations of prosperity and social order for our children? <br />
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A. Because it is not regulated. There’s almost no compulsion, no constraint on doing and handling unsustainable stuff.<br />
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<strong>Issues for regulators:</strong><br />
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1 What are we like at our best?<br />
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2 For whom is regulation? Corporations or people? <br />
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3 If people, does that mean; people now or people twenty years hence?<br />
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4 When are changes to regulations justified? Ecological chaos is beginning. Must we wait for social chaos?<br />
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5 What are the pressures right now on policy? <br />
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<strong>Regulation of Unsustainable Practices</strong><br />
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The use of certain materials threatens the stability of the biosphere. That planetary emergency has begun. Future civic prosperity and social order will be possible as now, only by regulation, compulsion, constraint, and compliance. Regulators are responsible to act in emergencies to ensure civic survival and prosperity. Regulators share with us the opportunity to hear the interests of children who beg a share of remnant ecological equilibrium. Therefore if unsustainable practices are to be controlled, we must help regulators to hear the voices of children. <br />
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Children’s interests must become more compelling than the voices of corporate financial interests. Only then will regulators control the stuff being handled and used, the stuff that’s begun this planetary emergency we’re in. Unsustainable production and the mad use of stuff is the last form of rampant child abuse still unprevented. <br />
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The British Factory Reform Bill of 1832, achieved by a loose and unruly coalition of vastly different and fragmented groups, groups which had different meaning systems but who agreed on one thing, saved future generations of children from enslavement in factories. This unsteady alliance, later called a humanitarian movement, regarded The Factory Act as merely a partial success, since the overriding principle of freedom of contract prevented adults from being helped. We with the benefit of hindsight, see that the benefit to children was immeasurable. <br />
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Our task of saving children from this planetary emergency requires similar effort to help regulators to achieve the necessary and reasonable compulsion and compliance without which this lonely planet is unsafe at any price.Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-43917598137252756522010-05-09T15:44:00.000-07:002010-05-09T15:46:58.667-07:00Engagement, Negotiation, AccommodationDon’t ask, “Should indigenous citizens have entitlements unavailable to others?” as though it were a matter of principle. Marxists challenge inheritance, free marketeers challenge safety nets. Theorists apply principles to matters of entitlement, and that’s a problem. <br />
<a name='more'></a>I don’t object to the application of principle, I don’t deny the authenticity and cogency of a rational conclusion, but the reality that I insist that we deal with <em>first,</em> is the reality that rational principled conclusions are nested within meaning systems which are in turn nested in adaptive historically emergent cultures, of which we have not one but a plurality side by side. These tend to have incommensurate logics, since rationality and principle are not fixed parts of the universe, but tools for solving problems differently framed in different cultures. <br />
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I don’t embrace relativism or any other sort of denial of one’s own meaning system. I enjoy the thrust and parry of principled discourse, but it’s a game, like Monopoly, radically separate from cosmopolitan reality.<br />
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Given our circumstances, where do we go from here? So I’m on about adaptation to circumstances given that we have inherited both a mess of adaptive arrangements and some serious differences in values and attitudes, serious differences in meaning systems, serious differences about the nature of reality and the good life. <br />
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My concern is “Given those differences, how can we generate appropriate procedures to maximise social equilibrium and prosperity? To maximise the compliance and self-restraint necessary to survival we need to foreground these procedural questions. <br />
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I think that turning our forums into polarised ideological battle-grounds is part of the problem. We need to find ways ahead [adaptation, hyphenation] that honour and accommodate difference as far as possible given constantly changing circumstances. We need to change our forums into arenas for engagement of difference, arenas of negotiation and accommodation.Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-2043335282626934652009-03-09T00:29:00.000-07:002009-03-09T00:39:38.632-07:00Mac Campbell, on being wrongOne of my greatest thrills is to find I've been wrong, so I welcome every chance. <br /><br />The first prize for a successful attack on my thinking, is making me happy to be wrong; the second prize is to force me think more clearly.Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-50560430153967234962009-03-08T16:09:00.000-07:002009-03-09T01:52:42.590-07:00Why I write'Enough, if something from our hands have power<br />To live, and act, and serve the future hour'<br /><br />(William Wordsworth, in<em> </em>a sonnet written to his friend and muse Coleridge, entitled <em>Afterthought</em>, the last in his sonnet series on the River Duddon.)Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-62240865495051830082009-02-17T04:36:00.000-08:002010-02-28T02:03:54.988-08:00Homogeneity and exclusion<div align="justify">The tasks of reproduction of meaning systems may be differently layered from one society to the next, but where pressures develop within a society to enforce homogeneity by means of state instrumentalities, it is the task of administrators to do so by means of the redesign of procedures. Pressures to force homogeneity may originate in interest groups, but will usually have an ideological component, an enforced orthodoxy. </div><div align="justify"><br />
</div><div align="justify">Ancient prescriptive texts illustrate exclusory imperatives, for example in Hebrew, “You shall annihilate them – <br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites – as the Lord your God commanded you, so that they may not teach you to imitate all the abominable things that they have done for their gods and so cause you to sin”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title="">[1]</a> </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">In the fifth century CE, Augustine the Bishop of Hippo declared that choice in matters of religion was a threat to the Roman Empire. He famously wrote, “let them not find fault with being compelled.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title="">[2]</a> History abounds with examples of administrative procedures aimed at homogeneity. During the Crusades, when Christians invaded Moslem Jerusalem, Raymond of Aguilers reported:</div><div align="justify"><br />
Wonderful things were to be seen. Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded... Others were shot with arrows, or forced to jump from towers; others were tortured for several days, then burned with flames. In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet. One rode about everywhere and amid the corpses of men and horses. In the Temple of Solomon, the horses waded in blood up to their knees, nay, up to their bridle. It was a just and marvellous judgement of God, that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title="">[3]</a> </div><div align="justify"><br />
More recently, Joseph Goebbels declared at a mass book-burning in Berlin:<br />
German men and women! The age of arrogant Jewish intellectualism is now at an end! . . You are doing the right thing at this midnight hour—to consign to the flames the unclean spirit of the past. This is a great, powerful, and symbolic act. . . . Out of these ashes the phoenix of a new age will arise. . . . Oh Century! Oh Science! It is a joy to be alive!<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title="">[4]</a></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">Exclusion is one possible manifestation of the principle of expressivism, whereby all state imputation, compulsion and constraint must express a universalizing principle. Exclusory procedures, whether manifest as military, criminal, or other methods of annihilating difference, are so widespread in the historical records that their ubiquity is a byword amongst historians, and exceptions sufficiently notable to warrant investigation. </div><div align="justify"><br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title="">[1]</a> Deuteronomy 20:17-18, The New English Bible with Apocrypha (Great Britain: Oxford University Press & Cambridge University Press, 1961 [1970]).<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title="">[2]</a> E. H. Broadbent, The Pilgrim Church (London: Pickering and Inglis, 1974) p. 27.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title="">[3]</a> J. A. Haught, Holy Horrors (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1990) p. 25-6.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title="">[4]</a> Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, speaking at the Berlin book burning, May 10, 1933.</div>Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-25742097822625032302009-02-17T04:27:00.000-08:002010-05-09T15:07:40.711-07:00Moral contradiction and the world of administrators<div align="justify">The following is an excerpt from the transcript: ‘Behind the scenes: animal experimentation ethics committees’ <em>All In the Mind</em> (Australia: Australian Broadcasting Commission Radio National, 19 January 2008). </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">Natasha Mitchell: Carole Webb, can I come to you, you are a vet and you're an animal welfarist as well, and you've been on numerous committees at the national and also the local levels, animal ethics committees. What motivated you <br />
<a name='more'></a>to take on that role? It's not an easy one.</div><div align="justify"><br />
Carole Webb: No, and I think as Mike says there is an inherent conflict in what we call a category C member which is the animal welfare member in that our platform is quite clearly that we oppose the use of live animals in experimentation. But we acknowledge that the community at this point in time understands the value of research, they are OK with it being conducted as long as it's being done humanely. And so that's our role, to actually refine the protocols to make sure that the numbers of animals that are being used are justified, that the protocol will have benefit to the community -- the cure perhaps for cancer, for diabetes -- and it weighs that against the impact that the experiment or the protocol will actually have on the animal itself. And whilst we don't approve of experimentation, I think the end result is a protocol that I suppose we agree to. </div><div align="justify"><br />
Natasha Mitchell: Well I guess you don't approve of experimentation on animals but you are approving experiments on animals? </div><div align="justify"><br />
Carole Webb: Yes, and that's the conflict for us.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title="">[1]</a></div><div align="justify"><br />
The payoff for the animal welfarists whom Dr Webb represents on the Animal Welfare Committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council is that the committee has been influenced towards replacement of animal experimentation with other methods, reduction in the numbers of animals used, and refinement of methods to minimise animal suffering. The payoff for scientists includes doing better science. For example, neuroscientists studying brain augmentation in mice were helped by the animal rights representative to realize that laboratory mice considered normal in the past, had underdeveloped brains due to under-stimulation, and so were unsuitable as a control group. It was therefore better science to improve the environments in which laboratory mice were kept. The contradiction that a group which cannot approve of experiments on animals approves experiments on animals, would not arise for Australian animal welfarists like Dr Webb if, like their English counterparts, they were kept from the conflicted world of administration. The world as experienced by administrators is a world of moral contradiction.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title="">[2]</a></div><div align="justify"><br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title="">[1]</a> Transcript: ‘Behind the scenes: animal experimentation ethics committees’ All In the Mind (Australia: Australian Broadcasting Commission Radio National, 19 January 2008). Dr Carole Webb, Executive Officer, Cat Protection Society of Victoria, Member, Animal Welfare Committee, National Health and Medical Research Council, (amongst other ethics committees).<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title="">[2]</a> G. Priest and R. Routley, ‘First historical introduction: a preliminary history of paraconsistent and diathelic approaches’ in Graham Priest, et. al. (eds.), Paraconsistent Logic: Essays on the Inconsistent (Munich, Philosophia, 1989) p. 3. “Admission, or insistence, that some statement is both true and false, in a context where not everything is accepted or some things are rejected, is a sure sign of a paraconsistent approach…recognition…that that is how things are, that, in effect, the world is inconsistent.” </div>Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-63746093262479908282009-02-17T04:21:00.000-08:002010-05-09T15:10:41.740-07:00On the purposes of governance<div align="justify">Institutions which deliver and reproduce entitlements can fail under certain conditions. Such a state of affairs is often described as a “failed state”<br />
<a name='more'></a>, and when such polities fail in respect of entitlements, safety becomes a question of what degree of habitual restraint remains residually, pending new emergent arrangements.<br />
From earliest times the emergence of institutions to create entitlements has been attended necessarily by the emergence of castes, elites of persons entrusted and delegated to the task. These persons are entrusted, if we may use such a word to include the self-appointed, with the tasks of designing and redesigning the mechanisms of entitlement, of adapting arrangements to changes in circumstances and customs, in order to preserve and reproduce entitlements, and where necessary to add to them. These persons include those responsible for the running of the daily arrangements, the procedures of governance which protect entitlements. These elites have, in addition to the daily details of governance, to anticipate and prevent larger threats, threats to the polity itself, the fall of which would dissolve all entitlement. Thus these castes of persons conduct foreign and defence policy, disaster response, drought relief, famine prevention, trade and monetary policy, police and social control, those arrangements which can prevent threats to the polity itself. For the purposes of this project I propose to call such persons “administrators”, whether their work involves the redesign of systems and procedures or not, that is to say in modern parlance, whether their jobs are legislative, judicial, or executive. Therefore administration is the redesign and application of instruments of official imputation, official compulsion, and official constraint. Work done in this arena is administrative work, and work done outside it is not. They are administrators whether they redesign state procedures, or carry them out.<br />
Economic historian Paul Ivory generalised usefully that there are only three problems that polities must manage as a condition of survival.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title="">[1]</a> Polities must manage meaning systems, social order and scarcity. I dare to contribute another generalisation; that there are only three tools that polities can use to address those three problems. Polities can use imputation, compulsion and constraint. Polities, even despotic states, are not people, they are institutions and groups of institutions, and the methods of polities are produced institutionally by means of procedures under conditions of audit for public record. Polities do not have sinews and bones, polities have institutions and procedures.<br />
Polities do not have minds, but they have interests and purposes, in the way that a railway system can be said to have interests and purposes. Failure to attend to the system’s interests and purposes will bring about the failure of the railway system itself, and then history will pave over the railway tracks. So it is with polities. Not having minds, polities cannot think for themselves. Some-one or ones, an administrator, or administrators, must design a state’s procedures on its behalf, and the histories of polities are the histories of the design and redesign of state procedures. If polities are to be helped to survive, then state procedures must reflect state interests, and carry out the strategies of state for the purposes of state.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title="">[1]</a> Paul Ivory, Personal Correspondence, 23 April, 2007.</div>Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-22493795642081325412009-02-17T02:47:00.000-08:002010-05-09T15:11:56.320-07:00Science has permanently supplanted religious sources of intellectual authority in the realm of public discourse, and there’s no going back.<div align="left">I’ve had a look at both </div><div align="left"><a href="http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/6237/" title="blocked::http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/6237/">http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/6237/</a> and <a href="http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/431" title="blocked::http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/431">http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/431</a><br />
The (young earth creationist) article by Jonathan Sarfati is well-nigh unreadable. It’s full of discourteous and belligerent acrimony. I found myself unable to cope with an attempt to unravel the actual arguments, because it frothed like the mouth of a rabid animal, dangerously and unpredictably. <br />
<a name='more'></a>Predictably unpredictable. Consistent only in its apparent appeal to fundamentalism, which is the conviction that there’s ultimately only one way to read a ‘holy’ text, and that those who have that way should take the high ground by storm. Sad, and a reversal not only of Jesus’ values and attitudes, but of the textual liberty with which Jesus is attributed in the texts.<br />
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Now Carl Wieland, he’s not rabid or discourteous at all. I first met Carl in the early 80s, nearly 30 years ago. He was a GP about to move from Adelaide to Cairns with his family. On the way he had a terrible car accident and took years to recover. His wife Vicky endured unbelievable pain, hardly controlled by morphine. They had two lovely teenage daughters. One of them became a doctor in Cape York, a brilliant advocate for indigenous health. Carl is a softly spoken and gentle bloke who is no stranger to life’s difficulties, a man of great integrity and wisdom, who holds the gospel dear.<br />
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Two problems arose in my rather superficial non-scientist’s reading of Carl’s argument.<br />
The first is minor. He frames his argument around a conversation he overheard in the 1970s, and then makes his argument about DNA, an argument not then available, since the science of DNA was in its infancy. He couldn’t then, (perhaps I’m mistaken here), have discerned from the evidence he now appeals to, the direction of the train as he now describes it.<br />
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The second is more important. The problem with his genetic loss argument is that his conclusion is not clearly forced by his premise. That is, even if everything he says in its support is true, his conclusion may still be false. If the world’s toddlers ate all the red lego blocks, it would not prevent the world’s lego nuts from building models of Margaret Thatcher. This is not a defence of evolutionary thinking, just a non-scientist’s critique of Carl’s argument, which is clearly pitched to non-scientists. If Carl were to attempt to make his argument about genetic information loss into a sound one, he would need to engage genetic scientists at a level which would lose his audience.<br />
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If the lego thing is simplistic, try this: Both sides of the debate must begin at the level of the non-rational. Each must begin with assumptions about the nature of reality, particularly about entities and relationships, wholes and parts. Only one side pretends to welcome the possibility of being mistaken.<br />
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The evolutionist has this going, that all theories and hypothises are openly provisional, and may become obsolete, or revised by the community of inquiry in the light of new evidence or a new hypothesis with greater explanatory power and coherence. All evidence must be therefore suspect, all data only as good as the hypothesis by which it was constructed. There is no such thing as a theory-free fact. That’s the weakness and the glory of the scientific project. It’s permanently supplanted religious sources of intellectual authority in the realm of public discourse, and there’s no going back.<br />
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The creationists might appear to appeal to evidence, but their ultimate appeal is to authority, the pre-rational pre-scientific method of knowledge which was general in the middle ages and now has its home in places like the Ayatolla’s Iran and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. There’s plenty of the dark-age stuff on the other side too. It’s no good pretending that an audience of science teachers are scientists, they’re mostly evolutionary fundamentalists.<br />
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Both sides are dogged by the radical limitations of scientific method concerning the past, which is a fertile arena for points-scoring on both sides. What doesn’t work is the pretense that they belong to the same community of inquiry. That means that the categories, words and names they use are differently constructed and theorized, and therefore they talk past each other constantly. To engage with either you must use their vocab, their categories, their definitions, all theory-laden, and there’s the rub.<br />
A pox on both their houses. </div>Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-77162237782237489942009-02-12T02:23:00.000-08:002010-05-09T15:15:02.402-07:00When a child dies<div align="justify">Jared Diamond, in <em>Guns, Germs and Steel </em>tells us that the Australian continent is like no other. Damn right. These recent awfulnesses, the deaths by bushfire, suggest that we haven't yet learned from Burke and Wills. They died, as you and I would too, in country where indigenous people thrived.<br />
<a name='more'></a>They died in their cultural cocoon, because they could not think that the illiterate folk who tried to help them, had an intellectual heritage worthy of investigation. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">It's not about bush survival skills. It's not even about techniques of adaptation to the most unreliable climate imaginable. It's about institutional arrangements in which country is not treated as a blank canvas waiting for paint, but an active agent capable of both generosity and ferocity. It's about setting up conventions of governance, which acknowledge belonging and dependency on active country which does active economic (that is, human) services and disservices.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">We still ignore indigenous intellectual heritage to our peril. From first settlement, the British colonisers superimposed an institutional relationship of entitlement and control of vast amounts of the non-human 'resource'. Entitlement to surveyed 'land' (conceived as an unexploited resource awaiting 'development') was institutionally imputed to faceless overseas shareholders who never even came here. Aboriginal groups were like fauna, ineligible for the imputation of equity value in 'land.'</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">This institutional repudiation of direct dependency on an active country still prevails. Our civilization is still one of domination and appropriation. Imputed entitlement is so important to us that we can't afford to admit that this continent we expropriated is not like the others. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">There's no future in abandoning our civilized adaptive strategies, or wishing to undo the past. Nobody needs to idealize indigenous heritage or pretend that it will translate cleanly. It's just that we ignore it at our peril. Our indigenous fellow-citizens are now mostly as dependent as we are on our civilization. But they carry amongst them understandings from their pasts, understandings which may yet be needed if our civilization is to be helped. Entitlement to 'land' in this country is in need of a rethink. Our civilization has tweaked entitlement before, and we can do it again, if there's time to do it slowly. Change in entitlement is very difficult in a world market where 'land' is a commodity, a store of equity value. But it's not all gloom. All equity value is created and sustained by state instruments of imputation and compulsion, which is to say, regulators, legislators, executive, judiciary. They change slowly, but they do change.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">Those who hope for a future in which their entitlements are safe, have a choice. Either they opt out and hoard weapons in fire-proof bunkers, or opt for adjustments to the institutional arrangements that keep us all safe (i.e., our entitlements), in anticipation of unplanned vulnerabilities, or 'tipping points', as they say.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">Now I've written this, I wonder whether I shouldn't just delete it because it's too soon, too soon to speculate even on the deepest causes of the shrieking emptiness. Vast wounds which can never heal over, never never never. Dead children, dead, dead. Weep for yourselves, for when a child dies we are all made small.</div>Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-31273766480710422572009-02-11T03:25:00.000-08:002010-05-09T15:16:24.553-07:00On Entitlement<div align="justify">I am looking for a publisher for my new book,<br />
<em></em><br />
<em>On Governance</em><br />
<em></em><br />
In the first two chapters I re-theorize governance and the history of capitalism, particularly as it effects indigenous peoples.<br />
<em></em><br />
Here is a brief excerpt from the introduction:<br />
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“The purpose of government is to stop us killing one another.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title="">[1]</a><br />
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“In traditional New Guinea society, if a New Guinean happened to encounter another New Guinean while both were away from their respective villages, the two engaged in a long discussion of their relatives, in an attempt to establish some relationship and hence some reason why the two should not attempt to kill each other.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title="">[2]</a><br />
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An obligation to kill each other was triggered by failure to find a common relative, and if one was found, the obligation became one of constraint. Governance has no monopoly on entitlement, even a handshake gives rise to some entitlements which are socially enforced, but this project deals with those entitlements which are imputed and enforced by formal institutions. Governance is entitlement, and entitlement is governance...<br />
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We, like others from earliest times, prefer to sleep safe in our beds. We are grateful if institutions work to protect our entitlements. Those institutions did not invent themselves. They emerged historically as a result of demand, especially the demand for social order. They emerged historically from the social production of entitlements, as I propose to explain shortly. One of my central arguments is that (a) all market value consists in entitlements, (b) entitlements are institutional products, therefore (c) all market value is produced by institutions, for example, states.<br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title="">[1]</a> David Mamet, Audience Q&A with David Mamet, following The Alistair Cooke Memorial Lecture<br />
18 November, 2008, BBC Radio 4, www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/alistair_cooke_lecture.shtml Accessed: 11 February 2009.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8949001211673214988#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title="">[2]</a> Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, W. W. Norton &Company, 1997), pp. 271-2.</div>Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-48383229316162409542009-02-11T01:16:00.000-08:002010-05-09T15:17:01.680-07:00Pastor Danny Nalliah, of 'Catch the Fire' ministries is quoted as saying that the Victorian bushfires are a punishment from 'God.'<div align="justify">It’s just another piece of evidence that the Christianity Industry is dead.<br />
<a name='more'></a> Two hundred years ago, Wilberforce made exactly the same argument that Danny made. Danny's can be seen at <a href="http://catchthefire.com.au/blog/2009/02/10/media-release-abortion-laws-to-blame-for-bush-fires/">http://catchthefire.com.au/blog/2009/02/10/media-release-abortion-laws-to-blame-for-bush-fires/</a> Wilberforce made it in a speech for abolition of slavery, a speech to the House of Commons in London. He was in touch with the national mood, the national sense of identity. Therefore he had, by an large, a good hearing, unlike Danny, who has seriously misjudged his audience. But think, perhaps Danny already knows that his real audience is backs-to-the-wall die-hards who will throw money at any ‘ministry’ that rehearses insults, because they think like the Pharisees thought (who also loved the bible and evangelism), that sincerity plus loud disapproval equals faithfulness. Well, sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.<br />
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Wilberforce’s hearers (and those who read reports of it) had a sense of national identity which had yet to have religion removed. This removal happened via the crisis of intellectual authority kick-started by the rise of science, particularly the Darwinian storm concerning origins, which destroyed permanently the confidence that Christianity could offer reliable knowledge on which a civilization could be built. The job of secularization was finished by the professionalization of charity, and to top it off, the voluntary euthanasia of the established churches. They bored themselves to death by committees, buildings, and microphones. Pedophilia is the last sexual rictus of a suicidal ecclesiastical organism. Now that the Christianity Industry is dead, let’s not forget why.<br />
<br />
People are both better informed and much stupider than they were 200 years ago, so God help Danny if anyone suspects he has been giving his ‘God’, a hand.<br />
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We all, Danny, need to pull our heads in just now. Me too.</div>Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-22764070731781861322009-02-10T20:03:00.000-08:002010-05-09T15:17:43.811-07:00Moral Parsing<div align="justify">In a published letter about sexual harrassment to Marilyn vos Savant, Barbara DeBaere Poppy wrote, "I consider any woman who has the combined (typically female) traits of being submissive, tender minded, and security-motivated, as inadequate for a job in business. Top it off with naivete', and you have an individual who is easily manipulated, takes everything personally, and refuses to accept responsibility..."<br />
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Moral parsing works like this: a submissive bloke gets called a team player, if he's tender minded he's done a course in emotional intelligence, and if he's security-minded he's responsible. If he's easily manipulated they'll call him workplace-compliant, if he takes everything personally, they'll say he's passionate about his work, and if he refuses to take responsibility he's assertive.<br />
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I got the term, 'moral parsing' from my late friend Ian Hinckfuss. Moral parsing inhabits the unconscious, and emerges in a category of learned conventional practices variously described by sociologists like Mary Douglas and Pierre Bordieu , who calls them 'habitus'.</div>Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-44518678729898152012009-02-07T23:55:00.000-08:002010-05-09T15:18:39.724-07:00The Orpheus Society: a modest proposal, perhaps.<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 130%;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Proposal to form a Society:</span> </span><br />
<div align="center"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 130%;"></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 130%;">'The Orpheus Society'</span><br />
<div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">'You speed. You crash. You kill your girlfriend. You live. But it's not really living. It's a living nightmare. Forever.' </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="center">(Queensland Gov't road safety TV ad.) </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">Orpheus went to hell and back, and came back with nothing but self-disappointment.<br />
<a name='more'></a>You could read Conrad's Lord Jim, but it won't help. Hemingway's supposed to have said, 'afterward some get strong in the broken places'. Yes, and some don't. Ever. Even those who've broken some deep code, social or personal, in doing some overwhelmingly right and necessary thing can be plunged, quite rightly and understandably, into self-disappointment. Those who have run out of a core emotional resource at the end of a long period of depletion come to mind. The causes are awful and many, and it's my guess that many of us survive in secret pockets of hell everywhere.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">I therefore ask for some design ideas for the formation of an Orphic Society or Orpheus Society, which might provide some limited help and affirmation to its members, who might be called 'Orpheans'. Perhaps the whole thing is a bad idea. Help me think this through.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">The help and affirmation which I imagine might be do-able, derives from my own experience of wishing to be understood. There are those Orpheans, I imagine, who are going to value being understood above all fancy talk of forgiveness and other such matters which are quite beyond the strict scope which I imagine would be appropriate to such a society as I propose.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">I imagine that a member might qualify by means of a meeting with someone, perhaps an extended interview, under strict conditions designed for two people each to learn from listening to the story of the other. These conditions should, in my thinking, be well designed, and the subject of a great deal of consultation and debate before they could be accepted as useful. The conditions would be at the heart of the effectiveness of the meeting.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">The matters with which Orpheans are burdened are of the greatest imaginable seriousness, and therefore I propose that the help and affirmation offered to members be strictly limited by conventions of realism, decency, and confidentiality.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">By realism I propose that we accept that many of life's burdens derive from the sad fact that many situations are the focus of competing obligations, not all of which can be satisfied. There are other sad facts about human limitations, that call for realism. I imagine that realism translated into practice would mandate an unshockable, non-judgemental listening ear, and give shape to what I mean by decency.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">By decency I mean a respectful empathetic insight, an awareness that others are shaped by differing moral programmes.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">And now to confidentiality. Were such a society as I propose to be agreed on, problems arise concerning confidentiality, problems which might be insurmountable, problems so great that it would be best to forget all about it, and to proceed informally or not at all. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">If a suicide bomber were disgusted with herself for a failure of courage at the last minute, what then? If a pedophile kindergarten teacher confesses moral failure, no-one who knows except a priest or a spouse, perhaps, is exempt as a citizen, from acting on the knowledge. Perhaps more widespread is the case where medicos and families induce palliative unconsciousness which is perfectly legal, but which differs from the crime of assisted suicide only in how long it takes for the patient to die. What about a warning such as "If you tell me that you have committed some crime against the state, or if you convince me that you are a danger to the community, then I cannot protect you by confidentiality"? Would that blow the whole thing to smithereens, or might something be still achievable? What do you think? I am pretty ignorant of the ethical problems that might arise. Anyway, the last thing I would want to do is to set up a counselling service in competition with others who could do it properly.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">Maybe it would be better to dump the whole interview thing, let people sign up on their own say-so, perhaps set up some way to enable Orpheans to contact one another, perhaps write their stories, and take their own initiatives.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">I would sooner drop the whole idea than let loose another monster in the world, there are enough already. What do you think?</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div></div>Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8949001211673214988.post-50244445331590095862009-02-07T06:17:00.000-08:002010-05-09T15:21:58.378-07:00Somebody's got to do it.It's appalling that my first entry here is a book proposal in theology of all things, the most nasty of all fields of writing. I'm an awful writer, hard to read. Give up now. Still here?<br />
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<div align="justify"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center">Working Title: <em>Jesus for Doubters:<br />
Values, beliefs, attitudes, decisions.</em></div><div align="center">Or: <em>Intimacy with Jesus</em></div><div align="center">Or: <em>Your Jesus is too small</em></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">My friend Karl announced in January 08 that he wanted 'intimacy with Jesus'. As you do with friends, I wrote it off at the time as a raving lunacy, something a woman might say in a fit of sentiment. Karl was off to India to set up industries for ex-prostitutes, so clearly stark and raving. That year I began to wonder how and when Karl's Jesus arrived at his values, his beliefs, his attitudes, his decisions, and began to think how difficult it is to get answers from the source texts available. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">It's easier, of course, to declare that as the Son of God He could download that stuff as He wanted it from an eternal database, or to treat His attitudes and values as just another miraculous power, as you would expect from a comic book superhero. But the texts make that approach difficult too. </div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">No, I wanted to think that the sparkling values and attitudes which have influenced so much subsequent jurisprudence, and given rise to so many of our most magnificent humanitarian impulses, were not conceived mindlessly, but thought through in very human ways. I wanted to think that, because it has implications for who we are and what we can become. Hence this book idea.</div><div align="justify">This book as proposed speculates on a fictional Jesus, a Jesus who is at best a mere projection of the wish-dreams of his followers. I'd like to write for those whose doubts about all ancient documents arise from high standards. I'd ask, “How did this fictional Jesus arrive his values, beliefs, attitudes? How did he make up his mind to do what his followers want us to think he did? This project will no doubt draw scorn and disapproval from believers who will perhaps construe it as a pit of unbelief, rather than an honest and fruitful speculation. My defence is that the opposite of something is not nothing. Although I grew up without a dad, the gates of hell did not prevail against my parenting. There’s nothing wrong with working backwards from the most enlightened attitudes and values we know, in the direction of their origins. What’s crazy is the pretence that documents more than a couple of hundred years old have the reliability of a parliamentary transcript.<br />
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I’m dismayed by the attitudes of believers certain about the ‘historical’ Jesus, whose curiosity stops when their needs are met, and who spend their lives grovelling in gratitude and obedience when (on their own reckoning) they are entitled to a mature give-and-take adult experience. A make-believe Jesus shaped by an uncertain but curious community of inquiry is going to help those with high standards of evidence more than the fundamentalist construct of Christian fascists who think there’s ultimately only one way to read ‘holy’ text.</div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify"></div><div align="justify">In subsequent 'posts', I'll put up some of the thinking I've done so far. Some of that thinking has been in letters to friends, from whom I'll need permission before I post it. I'm not in a hurry, and I'd value feed-back from those who'd like to encourage/support the project.</div>Mac Campbell (mackangbai@gmail.com)http://www.blogger.com/profile/09235537553054361597noreply@blogger.com1