Participation Society

From Griffith REVIEW Discussion
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

» Read Edition 24: Participation Society

1 May, 2009
John Montgomery
Via internet

Dear Madam,

In the latest issue of Marxism Today – sorry, Griffith REVIEW – clearly now a left journal written by Marxists and fellow travellers, Hugh Mackay (‘Real communities’, Griffith REVIEW 24: Participation Society) laments the collapse of neighbourliness. He blames this on divorce and the break up of extended families. However, his solution – following the UK left think-tank Demos – is to program organised community events to foster ‘social inclusion’. Demos risibly recommended organised car-washing days and ‘community arts events’ or finger-painting.

Mackay says: ‘Our moral sense is a social sense. It is only by learning how to live in a community that we gradually acquire our sense of right and wrong.’ This is generally the approach favoured by Democrats in the US^[1], where civil society is redefined as ‘just a term social scientists use to describe the way we work together for common purposes’.

Well, no. My moral sense was taught to me by my mother, the Kirk and teachers at school, not the so-called community. An awful lot of people in the ‘community’ where I grew up were feral and almost completely immoral. But the irony is that it is the Left who have attacked the Church, marriage and ‘bourgeois’ manners since the 1960s, and because of this many people simply do not know how to behave properly in public. The solution is not to have forced community singalongs – a sort of Volksgemeinschaft – but to teach manners and respect again.

I argued this in an article on ‘Urban Sociability’ published in Town and Country Planning (October 2007). I highlighted the role of small businesses and everyday transactions in binding societies through a process of ongoing enlightened self-interest. Mine is a more liberal view of how people come to interrelateout of mutual benefit. I rather like going to the pub, pottering about in second-hand bookstores, buying from local shopkeepers, going to concerts and galleries, chatting to people I meet and reading the writings of others – not for any ‘greater common purpose’, but because that is what I like doing. Having the choice to do all of these things is what I take to be civil society. I can do all this without having to live in a commune.

The idea that the common good is to be pursued in communities under the watchful and benevolent eye of the state could readily be expressed in shorthand as ‘Community, Identity, Stability’, except the phrase was already coined by Aldous Huxley in 1932^[2]. Long a good-natured joke, the Nanny State is the future of left politics writ large.

I’m afraid this is just another example of collectivist philosophy at work in Academe, where radical politics is falsely presented as knowledge.

Alea iacta est.

Yours faithfully,

John Montgomery

[1] Clinton, H. R.  It Takes a Village, New York, Simon and Schuster 1996

[2] Huxley, A. Brave New World, Chattis and Windus, London, 1932