The Work Plan

When I renamed my blog "Anything Goes" before my sudden abandonment of it I wrote a short piece explaining why I chose the title. I did it because too many people in discussion argue from a position of the correctness of their own theoretical position, which is OK so long as both parties adopt the same theory. But increasingly in the area of public discourse this isn't so. There are different theories and they are often "incommensurable" - the same word does not have the same meaning in different theories.

So the adoption of the "Anything Goes" title was meant to mean that there would be blogs about theories rather than just the application of theories. I'm also concious of the fact that "Anything Goes" was the title of a book by the late David Stove that was attacking the "irrationalist" approach to science. I've had the book for a while but have only nibbled at it. I have decided it needs a far more robust response - but not today.

One of the things Stove does in that book is construct his own "strawman" of the general thesis being propounded by his rivals - and this strawman he then attacks. This is a technique that really is the only way of engaging in discussion about theories, but it is not always valid. For example, Stove starts by criticising the irrationalists because they. he claims. do not accept that there is a growth of knowledge, and he attempts to suggest this must be absurd because anyone looking at the last 400 years of science would see more knowledge now than before. I think perhaps Stove has missed a major point here that the "irrationalists" do not dispute this point but do say that the curve of Amount of Knowledge as a function of time is not monotonically increasing everywhere and there are times where it can go down.

But enough of that for now. The purpose of this post is to say I have three projects that I wish to explore here over coming weeks. The first is an assault on what I call "economic libertarianism" - a thesis that the collective action of self-interest cannot be improved upon. The second is a short contribution to what has become known as the History Wars - in which I will try to discuss "What is History" and in the process will rely heavily on a book by that name by E.H.Carr. And finally I wish to launch an assault on what I will call the Quadrant Realist Tradition - a troika of belifs that embraces realism, a correspondence theory of truth and a designation theory of meaning; this belief set is the core of a set of derisory criticisms of a notional left consisting of postmodernists who are painted as describing truth as relative and operating through a collective of manipulative "elites".

So hold on for the ride.

Is it just me or has anyone else noted how the escalating hysteria about (a) the "black armband theory of history" and (b) "border protection" just continues to highlight the inconsistency between the two positions. And it is a particularly fun debate because you get to put it in the context of that most favoured of economic concepts - property rights. How come if it is so important that "we chose who should come here" should we assume previous generations' decision to invade was okay?

And does the absence of a concept of individual property in that early period justify the position? Not really, because the justification of the current position is about communal property - the overall thing called Australia (including those islands currently proscribed by regulation). So previous inhabitants had just as much right to chose who should come.

Perhaps it just reveals the simple corollary of the institutional underpinning of capitalist economies, that posession is nine-tenths of the law. But more importantly it reveals the uselessness of trying to decide these questions on the basis of absolutes. These are both relative questions and need to be discussed within a context. And as that context changes - either with time or frame of reference - the conclusions may be different. How firmly I should believe in my conclusions can be tested by some simple "sensitivity" analysis - how much do my conclusions vary if I change the context.

Our internal debate about our relationship with indigenes and our debate about people whose home lands are such that they will risk much to seek to relocate both draw us to current questions of economic development. And to discuss that we go to the really big questions of defining progress. That's for another conversation - but I'll declare my bias - I'm happy that I and my children live in 2003 and would prefer to live in this year now than in any preceeding year. And I think that the institutional (and associated cultural) developments that have accompanied this have been generally good. So these changes are clearly worth imposing on others - it is the altruistic thing to do - far more than "preserving cultures".

But just as the development of capitalism varied depending on the fine detail of the fuedalism it replaced in different parts of Europe, there is no one "model" of liberal democracy. And certainly the success of developing liberal democracies will need to be sensitive to the initial conditions experienced.

But equally our own institutions must essentially be continually questioned. Constitutional debate in general is therefore of far greater significance than usually recognised. And it is not merely about republics versus monarchies, or federalism versus centralism. It includes the relationships between the much vaunted three wings of government. It includes the way the citizens select their representatives and their relationships with them. "Judicial activism" is of itself not wrong - without judicial activism in eras past there would be no contract law.

This is so self-evident (to me at least) I wonder why more of the national discourse is not engaged in these debates I suspect it is because of the false distinction between the absolutists and the relativists - and one camp is so certain in truth that it must at all times defend what we have, and the other so entranced by a misunderstood extrapolation of "anything goes" that debate is not properly joined. The right is conservative not by dint of reason, but as justification, the left dispersed, disorganised and confused or - at its worst - merely oppositional, defining itself merely as what it is not rather than what it is.