Are post-traditional societies really radically individualist? One continually hears that post-traditional societies are defined by the rise of individualism. You know the story. Son no longer follows in father’s footsteps; highly mobile Gen Yers who have no sense of physical place, no soil; resident never meets his neighbours; she pops the remote on the garage door, drives to the shopping centre and back, as if quarantined from the neighbourhood. Old woman dies alone, found days later. With the links to traditional community gone we wake up in the morning and think, “What do I want today?”

But love seems to disprove the thesis. When two people are in love there arises in the one the anticipation of, and desire for, the satisfaction of the other. What makes her happy? How will this decision of mine impact on her? Would she agree with it? Am I performing as a partner? These are all the concerns that one partner has for the other when in love.

These concerns for the other indicate that the individual redefines her or himself when in love. He may very well have considered others before falling in love. But now we know that he considers the impact on, or feelings of, this particular other.

What occurs, then, when one falls in love is an ontological redefinition. Love is a shift in ontology. Before falling in love I defined myself thus and considered so-and-so when making my decisions. Now, when in love, I consider the impact of my decisions on my partner. This may not be my sole consideration but it is high on the list of considerations. Not considering one’s partner when making decisions is almost synonymous with not being in love.

But it is important to remember that this redefinition is not complete. No matter how one tries, a psychological symbiosis, pairing or partnering is not matched by a physical partnering. No matter how hard we try, we remain physically individual. As physical entities partners retain their independent existence. When one dies, the other does not necessarily. This may explain the trauma following the death of a partner. Someone who I am so close to psychologically is now absent physically. And in their physical absence I have necessarily lost their psychological presence.

This seems to show that the classic idea of partnership as a coming together of two as one is fraught with difficulty. On one level, yes, the two partners come together as one. I consider the impact on the loved other when making decisions. She therefore forms part of my existence; many if not all of my decisions are now made with her in mind. But at the physical level the partnership is confronted with the reality of my physical ontology—my existence as an individual unit, an enclosed living organism. Indivisible and individual: these are the limits that book-end my physical existence.

When it comes to our physical existence, therefore, a relationship is the coming of one into a two. One becomes two. There was me; now there is me and you. We cannot get any closer than this physically (apart from the temporary reprieve of sexual intercourse, but that is never complete and only ever temporary).

But despite the limitation imposed on love and the relationship by the physical world, we nonetheless form a new entity through the ontological transformation that occurs from before to during love. And the existence of this entity alone is proof that radical individualism is not pervasive. Love defies individualism?

One should always beware the rhetorical value of music; but sometimes rhetoric clarifies substance.

It’s common for current Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) Governor Glenn Stevens (pictured right) to appear on television and radio around the time when the RBA announces coming interest rates. Stevens’ media engagements were different this time around, however. He made an appearance on television revealing his fondness for James Bond films and Jazz music. He also addressed an Easter breakfast for the Wesley Church in Sydney declaring his Christian faith and how he views his governorship as a vocation in God’s service.

What is going on here?

We’ve come to expect that politicians will milk their faith, rarely missing an opportunity to give a doorstop address after a Sunday service. But why would Glenn Stevens find it necessary to publicly profess his Christianity when acting in his capacity as the RBA Governor? Albeit a public role, the RBA governorship is not an elected position. There’s no need for Stevens to show the voting public that he’s a man of God and a good Christian.

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Still from the US Apache helicopter

WikiLeaks, a website for whistle blowers, has released video evidence of US forces killing two Iraqi Reuters employees: Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. The footage is taken from an Apache helicopter gun sight on July 12, 2007. The helicopter (one of two) circles above a town in Iraq as those on board try to identify who the people are on the street and what they are carrying.

The transcript of communication between ground forces (GF), the helicopter from which the footage is taken (H1), a second Apache helicopter (H2) and ground command (GC), although difficult to decipher, sufficiently reveals how events unfold:

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Have you ever heard a public healthcare system story like this: Aunty Jane needs an operation on her knee. She’s been on the public system waiting list for two years. Her surgery is booked for next week. She checks into hospital on the day of her surgery. She’s prepped and ready to go, but at the last minute her surgery is cancelled. The theatre that was to be used for her knee operation is required for emergency surgery. Aunty Jane still waits for her knee operation.

I hear many stories like this one, cases where the public healthcare system lets someone down. What I am struck by, however, is what usually follows. The person recounting the story laments the state of the public healthcare system. But what they usually see as the answer to Aunty Jane’s predicament is private health insurance. So the story goes, ‘If only Aunty Jane had private health insurance, then she wouldn’t have waited the two years; she would have gone in for surgery immediately; she’d be back tripping the light fantastic down at the local dance hall on Thursday nights’.

There are two problems with this response to Aunty Jane’s predicament, however.

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The Australian Bureau of Statistics today released projections on the space required for South Australian cemeteries. It states:

The SA Births Deaths and Marriages Registry Office estimates that there were about 4,300 burials in South Australia in 2009. By 2056 it is projected that about 5,000-7,000 burials will be performed annually resulting in a requirement each year of at least 2 hectares of land.

So, let’s do some calculations. SA’s population was estimated to be 1,629,500 at 30 September 2009. Australia’s population at the same time was estimated to be 22,065,700. In 2009, SA buried 4,300 people. We can then estimate that in 2009 there were 58,226 people buried Australia wide (SA pop. = 7.385% of Aus. pop.; so Aus. pop. is 13.541 x SA pop.; SA burials x 13.541 = est. Aus. burials).

In 2056 SA is expecting to have 5,000-7,000 people to bury. Conservatively, that’s an increase of 16.280%; or, 0.346% per year (non-compounded). Using these figures to estimate Aus-wide burials, we’re looking at 67,705 in 2056.

Now, if in 2056 SA requires 2ha per year to bury 5,000 stiffs then Aus-wide we’re going to need 27ha. Given that Australia is 7,702,468.2km² or 770,246,820ha in total, that means we’ll run out of space in 4,970 years at best, or in about the year 6980 (accounting for compounding in the growth of burial rates based on 2009-2056 average growth of 0.346%pa).

Lucky, given that the average life expectancy for an Australian male is 79 years, I’ll get a plot. Then again, I might opt for a cremation and save a little space for the up and comers.

If you listed John Howard’s political virtues they would have to include political savvy. Political savvy (or, more disparagingly, guile, cunning, wiliness or chicanery) is a peculiar virtue indeed. On advice from sixteenth-century political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli no longer do politicians defend The Good or higher ideals and virtues like justice. Now, the best we can hope for is a political leader whose primary aim is defending the state — and not just defending the state, but defending it by whatever means possible. Once our Prime Minister is charged with this task, emotive language, appeals to self-interest and lying become praiseworthy. Defending the state by any means possible implies retaining power by any means possible. Hence, political savvy becomes a virtue.

Howard’s ability to tap into the desires of what he defined as the aspirational class was an instance of his political savvy at work. But the aspirational class was more than a rhetorical category. An Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) report released yesterday shows that when the children of the nineties became the students of the noughties their parents enrolled them in private schools.

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In the process of shifting my research from political philosophy to hermeneutics, as I will be over the next few weeks, I thought I’d publish a post on Jürgen Habermas’s objections to Gadamer’s conclusions in Truth and Method, particularly as they apply to politics. One should never transition too quickly.

Gadamer (1997)

The title of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s magnum opus, Truth and Method, captures the essence of his project. This title discloses Gadamer’s central contention that truth and method are not equivalent. For Gadamer, the modern view that only by adopting and using an appropriate method may one reach truth in both the natural and social sciences is mistaken. It is this (what others would call ‘scientistic’) view of truth-as-method that Gadamer sets out to describe and attack in Truth and Method. In place of emphasis on a method for reaching truth, in Truth and Method Gadamer sets out a program for a hermeneutics or ‘method’ of interpretative understanding of the ‘other’ — be that other a tradition, cultural group, a text, what have you.

Although Habermas and Gadamer share a loathing for instrumental reason — that form of reasoning associated with modernity, technology and science (including the ‘dismal science’ of economics) — Habermas objects to Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Gadamer defends the role of prejudice or pre-judgement in interpretive understanding, as will be clarified in what follows. Habermas argues, however, that Gadamer’s defence of prejudgements goes beyond recognising that prejudgements are vital for understanding the other to further conclude that prejudgements are based on knowledge. For Habermas, from the fact that understanding the other requires understanding that other’s and one’s own history and traditions — that other’s and one’s own prejudgements — it does not follow that those prejudgements qualify as knowledge.

Habermas argues that to hold that prejudgements are a form of knowledge is to hold that authority or tradition is a source of knowledge. What Habermas aims to demonstrate through his own work, however, is that traditions can contain what he calls ‘systematically distorted communication’, a type of communication that falls short of an ideal of how communication should function and produces a response that is somehow tainted. This less-than-ideal type of communication can reinforce relations of domination. Accordingly, Habermas argues that systematically distorted communication precludes any necessary relationship between the prejudgements inherited from a tradition and knowledge, and that insofar as a tradition reproduces relations of domination the prejudgements upon which it depends are illegitimate.

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Kojève (2000)

As a student of political theory I find myself asking why the left so often aligns itself with the philosopher GWF Hegel. Reading Hegel’s Philosophy of Right I am repeatedly struck by how his political conclusions seem to be the converse of those I thought a good leftist should espouse. Monarchy as the ideal regime; war warranted for the sake domestic peace; these are not ideas that I thought sat comfortably with the left. In the post that follows I look to Hegel’s work via a comparison with the more recent philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, who, at minimum, uses Hegel as a mouthpiece (if you want to argue that he doesn’t represent Hegel’s ideas with fidelity).

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On November 14, 2009 The Australian Government Department of Climate Change released a report on the risks from climate change facing coastal communities. I receive about 2-4 media releases per day from Penny Wong’s office announcing the Government’s latest policy position on climate change or heralding the publication of the associated White Papers, Green Papers and studies. However, as a resident of the coastal and low-lying town of Geelong I took particular interest in this policy document.

A couple of days after I received this media release Peter Farago of the Geelong Advertiser published an article on the report entitled ‘Drowntown Geelong’. Farago opened the article with the line, ‘Up to 6600 Geelong homes will be under water if a frightening climate change forecast comes true … and there’s nothing you can do about it’. While Farago is correct that there is nothing we can do about the climate change that will cause the estimated 1.1m sea level rise (because sea level rise has a lag time, so the earliest future sea level rise is the result of past climate warming), he is just plain wrong that there is nothing you can do about it. The whole purpose of the Government’s report is to propose adaptations that communities can make to avoid the flooding or inundation of low-lying areas when sea levels do rise. As Penny Wong states in the aforementioned media release, the report ‘shows that Australia must plan to adapt to the climate change we can’t avoid’. So although there is nothing you can do to mitigate the climate change that will cause the estimated seal level rise referred to in the report, there is plenty you can do to adapt to that rise in sea level.

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