Where are the bright ideas about how to get out of the economic mess? Where is the dynamic discussion about where we should go from here? It's in the US . . . not Ireland, writes ANDREAS HESS
A NUMBER of prominent Irish academics will gather under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy on Friday, November 27th, to discuss the role of public intellectuals. They will also, presumably, refer to the role of new ideas in light of the Republic’s dearth of them.
While such deliberations are not entirely unheard of and while some of Ireland’s best writers – ranging from Fintan O’Toole to Colm Tóibín – have participated in similar discussions, what is new and what makes the planned Royal Irish Academy symposium so interesting is the context of the crisis.
Enjoying being rich and riding on top of an economic wave, society hardly deliberates about its purpose and ends, including the type of social bonds that are holding it together. In times of conspicuous consumption, the logic of a free-for-all usually stifles such deliberations. This changes when the system can no longer deliver and when old ties and networks no longer work.
Ireland is in such a situation. But Ireland is not only in an economic and social crisis, it is also experiencing an intellectual crisis. While the majority of economists and the right – the current political caste hardly knows the distinction – still lecture us and are trying to squeeze the last goodwill and surplus out of us, the left is still looking for the revolutionary subject that they hope will emerge from the crisis.
In the meantime, the supposed-to-be republicans, to be found across the political spectrum, are preparing themselves from potential voter fall-outs and changing alliances – yet without any clear vision of where the ship is heading.
Social scientists have known for a long time that ideas and cultures are much more sluggish in adjusting to new circumstances than economic structures. We should not expect this to change immediately. Yet, as we take a closer look across the Atlantic where this crisis originated, we can already see some encouraging signs of radical change.
As Ireland seems to be fascinated by the question of who is to blame for past failures, the Americans are already debating the new direction political society should take.
To be sure, the debate and the battle for new ideas started before Barack Obama arrived on the scene and became president. It began mainly as an east coast universities initiative, with Harvard as its spearhead. However, the discussion is by no means limited to the east and to elite universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Columbia.
What distinguishes this new attempt of discussing and promoting ideas from older debates is that it is not limited to academia, neither in terms of how the message is communicated (namely via public television and the internet), nor in terms of its content (the message can actually be understood by the general citizenry and appeals to common notions of citizenship).
Even the New York Timespointed out that there is obviously a hunger for new ideas. That demand can be satisfied, as the prominent example of Michael Sandel demonstrates. The Harvard-based political philosopher has enticed his academic audience over the last few months with an entire lecture course about justice, subtitled What's the Right Thing to Do?(The lectures have just been published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; the UK edition is coming out soon with Penguin).
Sandel, who wears the public philosophy label with pride, argues that the crisis stems not only from market-driven forces but also from what he calls “market-mimicry governance” that has penetrated all realms of social life. Markets seem to be the all-powerful imperialist machine setting all citizen-customers free.
What the market-driven philosophy tends to forget, however, is that there are many things in life that are not marketable and that have no price. For example, education – and especially higher education – is a sphere that can’t be conceived of merely in terms of instrumental cost-benefit calculations.
While being at college or at university, most students also want to find out about meaning in life, they want to experiment, enjoy social life and determine their role in it, and not just learn about how to make a career or how to get rich quickly. Take health. We are not just consumers of health but understand it as a part of living a good life.
But what exactly constitutes a good life? What exactly is its purpose? If we only expect answers from economists, we’ll surely be let down; they can conceive of such value-loaded questions only dismissingly and by referring to solutions such as promoting the greatest benefit for the greatest number (at best) or promoting health as an individual right, ie, the “customer” pays for the best available “service”, thereby ignoring other deserving patient-“customers” (the individualist-egotistic customer scenario).
So what’s so fresh about the new ideas and what would a new politics look like according to Sandel? First of all, the philosopher reminds us of the role that values, purpose and meaning have in life.
Most liberal arguments forget about the formative experiences and only argue strictly along an instrumental means-ends logic. They ask: “What do I have to do to achieve X?” instead of trying to find an answer to the ends-centred question “What is our purpose as a society, what holds it together and why should we care?”
Thus, Sandel points towards meaningful citizenship and what it should be all about. We are not just a loose assembly of individuals in which everything is mediated through or determined by market forces. Sandel’s argument forces us to think anew about the common values we are striving for even as we dispute some finer aspects of how we should live. He shows that deliberation about the ends is important in itself since it helps to constitute the republic we are citizens of.
This is indeed the deeper meaning of discussing justice as a res publica. What is the right thing to do if we are in this together? Treated as equal citizens at the ballot box, is it indeed helpful for a republic to have huge disparities when it comes to income levels and wealth distribution?
Furthermore, once we agree that the market is not the all-pervasive instrument to determine distributive justice once and for all, how exactly do we conceive of loyalty and obligations? And finally, what exactly are the virtues we want to promote as a society? Or have we already completely given in to the individualist notion of "each on his, or her, own" and sauve qui peutas the ship begins to sink?
The United States has often been blamed for having caused the current global crisis. Now we have the opportunity of importing an argument from North America that might help us to get out of the intellectual crisis and to avoid the repetitive tighten-the-belt mantra we usually get from our public representatives.
What if Ireland finally reflected about the deeper meanings of citizenship and also embarked on an introspective journey, so that at the end republican rhetoric could actually become meaningful again? And just to provoke the soon-to-take-place deliberations at the Royal Irish Academy, isn’t it time to internationalise the debate, to hear more in the Irish media from some of our fellow non-Irish residents?
Without their inclusion, an exercise that purports to discuss the role of public intellectuals but which remains apparently national-only in terms of representation and argument, is in real danger of advocating plus ça change, plus c'est pareil– freely translated, the perpetuation of intellectual incest.
Andreas Hess teaches sociology at University College Dublin. He is a Research Fellow at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Further information on the RIA symposium may be had from the academy’s website, www.ria.ie; click on events
