Public ideas
History, unfortunately, grinds on
The rise of strongmen such as Putin, Erdoğan, Orbán, Netanyahu, and Xi, the success of far-right theocratic regimes in Afghanistan and Iran, and the deterioration of democracy in America, can lead one to the conclusion that Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 idea of the end of history was naïve idealism.
The world in 2022 looks very different from the world in 1992, when the Soviet Union had collapsed, the eastern European countries were on the road to democracy, and military dictatorships were giving way to democracies in South America.
In an article in Open Forum – The end of the end of history – Chris Fleming of Western Sydney University comes to the defence of Fukuyama, and puts his work into a broader philosophical and historical context. The liberal democratic state with a predominantly market economy still stands as an ideal. The liberal state ise likely to prevail over other systems that may enjoy periods of strength, but authoritarian regimes are fragile.
In putting Fukuyama’s work into context he also puts Hegel – who originally wrote of the end of history – into context. Just as neoliberals appropriated Fukuyama’s ideas to justify neoliberalism, so did Marxists appropriate Hegel’s ideas to justify communism.
But can we wait for the long term? There is an apocryphal story that when Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the influence of the French Revolution he replied that it was too early to tell. The trouble with political futurology is that by the time it can be confirmed or disproven, its proponents are dead.
The moral duties of public servants
The inquiry into Robodebt has raised questions about whether public servants knew that the scheme was illegal, whether they even took the effort to check its legality, and whether they should have refused to carry out the government’s orders. These questions are about the moral responsibilities of people on the public payroll, particularly when they are employed by a government that’s corrupt or indifferent to the law.
Peter Christoff of the University of Melbourne, writing in The Conversation, reminds us of Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem, about the guilt of the dutiful Beamter who carried out his superiors’ orders to deport Jews to Auschwitz: The book that changed me: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and the problem of terrifying moral complacency. He writes:
At the heart of the “Eichmann problem” are larger questions about the nature of wilful blindness, and the sources of compromise, complicity, and collaboration with forms of evil in complex bureaucratic societies.
The article is Christoff’s personal account of his confrontation with moral complacency. Perhaps Eichmann in Jerusalem should be compulsory reading for all public servants with any degree of administrative responsibility.
On a closely-related matter, there is to be reform of our whistleblowing laws. A J Brown of Griffith University provides an outline of our current situation that gives little protection to whistleblowers, links to reports, and the case for stronger protection: How and why Australian whistleblowing laws need an overhaul in The Conversation.
Are we running out of ideas?
In 1900, as people looked back on the wonderful technical achievements of the past century – electricity, telegraph, internal combustion engines – some believed that science and technology had come about as far as they could go. What remained would be incremental technological improvements and applications to spread these benefits to the masses in the new century. Such was the celebration at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.
We know that the twentieth century turned out somewhat differently.
Joseph Walker, in his Jolly Swagman site, draws our attention to hard-headed research suggesting that now, 120 years later, scientific research is delivering diminishing returns. He refers to a journal article Are ‘Flow of Ideas’ and ‘Research Productivity’ in secular decline?published by the Swiss Finance Institute, demonstrating that the peak flow of ideas was around 1950 to 1970 and has been in decline ever since. (Could this have anything to do with the “small government” fad and neoliberals’ contempt for learning?).
That does not mean the Dark Ages are inevitably making a return, however. They find that neither science nor technological innovation are steady linear processes. They write that their findings “support the Kuhnian theory of knowledge creation through scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts and falsify the primary assumptions of the economic paradigm of endogenous growth”. In other words expect disruptions and paradigm shifts in the original sense that Kuhn expressed the idea.
Their findings support the proposition that in the long term the greatest gains to society may come from publicly-funded “blue skies” research, without any immediate commercial applications.