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Corrupt Australia presents an alternative to the politically correct channels of debate to reveal and scrutinize the skewed structure/design of modern Australian society. We also seek to encourage autonomous Australian culture which is free from the standardizing and overly materialistic clutches of globalisation and which encourages citizens to go further than simply contributing to a quantity over quality mindset and the banal and unsustainable conditions under which we may increase our love for and attainment of material mass. |
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Reason Does Not Equal VirtueIt can be traced back to Europe's Age of Reason, or Age of Enlightenment, as it is variously referred to. During this time, people like Voltaire, Rousseau, Newton, Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith and many more used their own faculties for perceiving structure, for perceiving causes and their effects, and also the universal laws of logic, (in other words their faculties of reason) to explain the workings of the world in a way that reflected truth rather than in the ways in which the then established monoliths of church and absolute monarchy explained the world - for the church and monarchy would inevitably include in their explanations of reality the necessity of the servitude of the people through the use of concepts such as 'original sin' or original and chaotic 'states of nature' among men that can only be managed by a king with the absolute power to ensure we don't continue squabbling but get on with things. Men, primarily, but also women of the enlightenment aimed to use their powers of reason to construct views of the world which did not falsely elevate one section of society, like kings or members of the clergy, to un-proportionally high positions of power over all other sections of society. They thought that an entire collective based on reason would as a result produce a society based on virtue, or the widespread practice of social goodness. We still think this today. Rationality = virtue, automatically and necessarily so, in the minds of most Westerners. However, while rationality can be used to come to an understanding of 'virtue' in the sense of acting in a extra-individual and holistic culture, it can also be used, as indeed it tends to be nowadays, for other - more self-serving - purposes. For reason is simply the ability to perceive and manipulate structure, and nothing else. The laws of physics and logic, for example, are the products of reason - and these laws reveal the workings, or structure, of reality. The men and women of the enlightenment used reason to perceive the structure of their society - or more specifically what was being done to it and its people by un-proportionally despotic rulers and institutions - and to identify and overturn the so-called 'facts' that these rulers and institutions advanced to give credibility to their entire positions of power. It was simply lucky, an accident no less, that many of the people of the enlightenment used the human tools of reason and rationality for holistic purposes - i.e. to battle against a false, because increasingly self-serving, regime of power that was stemming from church and monarchy in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds. Unfortunately for us, this concurrence of reason and virtue, or power to manipulate structure, and virtue, is not taking place in the public sphere nowadays. Our modern elites, the managerial or governmental technocrats with knowledge only of systems and structure and the most effective way of manipulating structure (efficiency), are not instilled with the virtue that must act hand-in-hand with this rationality to produce an admirable society. By modern elites we mean politicians, bureaucrats, managers, economists and other social 'scientists'. For example, politicians are taught the most effective ways to steer interviews in their direction and to avoid answering certain questions, they are proficient at coming up with statistics, graphs and flowcharts to suit any and every need, and the electoral system has been made more efficient over the years while the involvement the average 'citizen' has in his or her public affairs as dropped dramatically. Social 'scientists' such as economists employ impenetrably rational vocabularies which are so abstract that they cannot be understood by someone without years of training in the specific jargon - and thus an average intelligent person, while not possessing the specific jargon but possibly a sound and intelligent reasoning capacity coupled with some common sense - has to spend so much time wading through abstract concepts to work out that the concepts have been rationalised so much and abstracted from reality so much that they miss the particulars of reality and lead those in the discipline around in wide circles for years on end, often back to the same starting point, while the original problems such concepts were supposed to address go largely un-changed in bare and un-abstracted reality. All the while the rational elites pat themselves on the back. As our society has become more rational it has also become increasingly fractured into smaller and smaller and increasingly insulated professional groups. This can and has had at least two consequences. Firstly, those in each professional group hide behind their walls of specialisation and expertise, making their recommendations and decrees, without actually doing much good for the society they purport to serve. Many such people scorn a general and broad education as 'unemployable' to keep this culture going. Secondly, but also because of the first consequence, while the rise in professionalism has paralleled the rise of individualism in the modern epoch the result has been, ironically to the dismay of individuals, less autonomy and self-determination. Abstract and 'efficient' answers to real world issues taught by proponents of the same systems of thought dominate the globe and are in the process of standardising it beyond belief. In summary: the basic point of this article is to highlight the simple, but often unobserved fact, that reason does not necessarily equal virtue, or goodness. We must encourage the cultivation and use of reason/rationality in schools and universities while also encouraging the cultivation and real-world-use of non abstracted thinking (common sense) and, most importantly, holistic values. It comes as no surprise that the teaching of values in our education system, when it is proposed from time to time, is scorned in our overly pluralistic and thus directionless society. For these days reason and power are not in the habbit of being harnessed for any common good but rather for the various whims of those who use them at any particular time. By David 
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Think of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes! - Henry Lawson |
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(c)2008 Corrupt AU |
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