hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.
Consensus
While attempting to watch some of the athletics in the Olympics games a couple of weeks ago in amongst the swarm of advertisements and crassly sentimental pre-packaged drivel, I groaned as yet another Quantas add geared up. A large chorus of beaming children carefully selected from a large variety of ethnicities piped up for the 8th time to insist that 'we are one but we are many', that 'we are Australian'.What exactly could they mean by this I wondered as I began looking for the remote control that had vanished down the side of the couch. I guess they meant to impart the sentiment that while the collection of people living on the landmass that is Australia are characterised by a diverse range of, not just places of origin, but also religions, secular values, and other ideologies, they, we, all share a special bond, or a 'common good' that binds us together as one. Sounds nice doesn't it?
But is this in effect saying we can all have nothing in common and by doing so, have something in common? Now I was becoming confused!
Australia is diverse. With our current annual net-immigration intake of just below 200,000 we're going through another major 'diversifying' stage in our history. Apparently, we are not all going to agree on an 'extensive' ethical project, or on any significant set of values by which we should live our lives, without experiencing inter-ideological conflict: so we agree to disagree, and make values a strictly private, rather than a joint, shared or social matter.
We are under absolutely no obligation to society beyond obeying some very basic laws and we are free to pursue our purely personal self interests and our person comfort. No social consensus, or 'common good', required: just do what you will. This is knows as Liberal Pluralism. Its basic justification is that it delivers freedom and choice: freedom from the ideological impositions of others and choice to choose one's own conception of 'the good life'.
But hang on. This is starting to sound too good to be true. For starters don't we need some sort of 'common good', some sort of social consensus or set of standards, and some personal obligation towards a set of goals, in order for there to exist, in the very first place, a society which enables the existence of 'free' individuals who are capable of thinking and forming particular conceptions of 'the good life' in a Liberal manner? Bear with me here. I'm thinking of such things which actually set the stage for a Liberal society.
No one can deliberate over, pursue, rationally debate, or change their conception of what makes up the good life if institutions like the family, schools & universities, religions, philosophical societies, politics are not upheld through social virtue, i.e., obligation. If homes are broken because parents become too self-interested to commit, if schools are havens of undiscipline and universities simply degree factories rather than places of wide deliberation, if politics is restricted by 'politically correct' dialogue and ministers pursue simply their own career advancement rather than the greater good, then 'Liberal' freedom is logically impossible.
Crime, obtuseness, a focus on industry instead of creativity in learning, and corrupt leadership are not conducive to the type of society in which people objectively deliberate over what values they will follow and accept others who hold different ones to their own.
This leads us to the conclusion that even a pluralistic 'liberal' mass and diverse society, like modern Australia, cannot do away with obligation or consensus. Such a society requires some illiberal manifestations in order to realise the freedom, choice and diversity it purports to exist for. This leads us to a further and more interesting question.
Why, in all our diversity, do we all feel as though we have to associate under one mass society, which by its very nature (namely the co-existence of different backgrounds, ethnicities, and ideologies) calls for a lowest common denominator compromise between all the competing conceptions of the good life? Why do we feel we have to live in a mass society which subsumes all the different conceptions of the good life relative to the different backgrounds, ethnicities, and ideologies into one big melting pot?
This simply leaves us with less social harmony and consensus that might otherwise exist if we lived in smaller, more localised social or political entities where we actually agreed upon values, customs, and laws. Now, less social harmony leads to many 'illiberal' things such as more of governments impeding on our lives to (1) prop up communities who's constituents do not work together and to (2) clean up after minor or major conflicts. It also leads to more alienation, depression and anxiety among a group of atomised and unconnected individuals who enjoy no more meaningful social interactions than those that surround the buying and selling of products, and who derive no sense of meaning from their employment, day in-day out, in a society they don't have any attachment to.
Unfortunately we innately view more homogenous and localised (organic) societies with suspicion. Why? Well, largely because of the very fact that they naturally revolve around a higher level of consensus between their members. Thus they involve the individual being subjected to the goals and standards of the community to larger degree than in a mass plural society.
It is this sort of fear of being judged that will result in us as 'Australian's' partaking in a life increasingly characterised by a lowest common denominator mass culture that citizens care nothing about and derive no meaning from, and in which government will be increasingly sticking its nose to make up for the absence of non-abstract, grass roots human consensus.
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