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‘Towards an Emancipatory Discourse …’ President welcomes publication of initial essays in TASC’s Flourishing Society Project

29th June 2012

I warmly welcome the publication of these essays from TASC under the title The Flourishing Society.

These essays by Robin Wilson, Sinéad Pentony, Philip Orr and the pseudonymous Slí Eile with an introduction by Fergus O’Ferrall are a real contribution to the discourse we need, and must not avoid, at Irish, European and at a global level.

In his introduction to these essays Fergus O’Ferrall draws on the work of Hannah Arendt for inspiration, and injunction too, as he writes:

“As we learn from the work of Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher whose seminal work reflects so profoundly on the human awfulness of the twentieth century, there is a fundamental relation between thinking and right-doing and, in the reverse, between thoughtlessness and wrong-doing.  The capacity to think is inherent in the human person but must be developed:  we need to develop opportunities for such fresh thinking by all citizens who wish to be free of received, unexamined beliefs.  In “dark times, thinking brings much needed light and clarity”.  Thinking becomes crucial in freeing ourselves from the scripts and standards that we too often take for granted or that may be regarded as immutable, even when they bring crisis and disaster in their train.    Thinking is vital not only in moments of crisis but will remain essential in times to come when we have brighter possibilities before us.  We are challenged, at this historical juncture, to think afresh in a very fundamental way and to think big for Ireland in these ‘dark times’.”                         (Fergus O’Ferrall  pg. 7)

TASC’s vision charts a route to social progress which recognises that it is neither possible nor desirable to replicate the consumption-led,  debt-fuelled economic growth of the later ‘Celtic Tiger’ years.  It paints a picture of a vibrant public realm, with a focus on the collective consumption of social goods – such as education, transport and healthcare.

When one reads the thought-provoking essays in this TASC publication, the enormity of the task ahead is clear. Irish society is being challenged to little less than to remould itself, as author Sinéad Pentony writes:

“The economy needs to be re-embedded within society, rather than being viewed as separate from the functioning of wider society.  This re-embedding will require a number of key issues to be addressed.”              (Sinéad Pentony  pg. 6)

“The International Labour Organisation research also points out that insecurity is generated by patterns of economic globalisation which produce endemic or structural insecurity in terms of employment, social welfare and income due to countries ‘racing to the bottom’ by lowering worker protection and welfare provision.  It describes how ‘footloose’ multinational capital and the demands of international economic competitiveness, by their very nature, undermine economic security as companies can always move in search of higher profits and lower wages.”                      (Sinéad Pentony  pg. 6)

“The second issue associated with embedding the economy back into society requires us to reconceptualise the types of work required for human flourishing and a flourishing society.  To do this, we need to move beyond the division between ‘paid’ and ‘unpaid’ work – a division which assumes the former is more valuable than the latter, by virtue of the fact that remuneration is attached.”  (Sinéad Pentony  pg. 7)

The Flourishing Society essayists’ expressed hope is to engage with others who have already made significant contributions to the debate about Ireland’s future, and also to encourage everyone in Ireland to participate in changing Ireland into a Flourishing Society.   This invitation is welcome, and it includes us all who believe in the transformative power of reflective scholarship.

In my inauguration speech, I said that:

“we must together build a new citizenship for which we need a new discourse.  We must seek to build together an active, inclusive citizenship: based on participation, equality, respect for all and the flowering of creativity in all its forms”.

TASC took up the challenge some time ago to develop a new discourse.  The Flourishing Society essays represent TASC’s latest contribution to the public debate on Ireland’s future, as a democracy and as a republic.  TASC’s vision is of an Irish society with equality and social justice for all, based on a sustainable economy, accountable government and strong public engagement.

I believe that TASC’s publication is timely.  We do indeed need to take stock and consider how we want to live, what it is we want for our society and what we need to do to realise these goals.  As we struggle in very difficult economic circumstances, it is even more important than ever that we are willing to envisage, and debate a future for Ireland.

TASC’s vision is of a ‘flourishing society’. What does that mean?   It evokes the idea of ‘human flourishing’, and of people developing their capabilities to live their lives to the full.

The Flourishing Society essayists believe that we flourish best when we have autonomy and when we exercise this autonomy in positive relationships with others; when we have scope to use our creative potential; and when we can help meet each other’s needs.

As Fergal O’Ferrall writes of the phrase itself – The Flourishing Society:

“This more accurate and rounded concept of the human person contrasts sharply with the merely self-interested maximiser of commodities propounded in neo-liberal ideology. It also generates a richer conceptualisation of what society as a whole can achieve.”

I would like to place alongside these TASC essays being launched to-day a paper by Professor Howard Stein of the University of Michigan to the Trinity International Development Initiative delivered on 16th April 2012, entitled  “The Neo-Liberal Policy Paradigm and the Great Recession” which made a valuable critique of the circumstances which led to the adoption of a single hegemonic model of economics in public policy – a model which delivered disastrous consequences in social and economic terms and which has not yet been discarded either as a principle tool of policy or as an introduction to economics at the level of the academy.

In responding to the TASC essays and that of Professor Stein I wish to initially express a concern at the limited space being made available in the media and even in the Academy for such a discussion as might lead to options for a better model of economic strategy, as connection to social policy or indeed a flourishing society, being critically debated or adopted.

In a recent valuable paper delivered to international educators in Stockholm Professor Sheila Drudy quoted from Europe:  The Faltering Project  Jurgen Habermas’ recent work:

“My hope is that the neoliberal agenda will no longer be accepted at face value but will be open to challenge.   The whole program of subordinating the lifeworld to the imperatives of the market must be subjected to scrutiny …
The Agenda which recklessly prioritises shareholder interests and is indifferent to increasing social inequality, to the emergence of an underclass, to child poverty, of a low wage sector, and so on has been discredited.  With its mania for privatization, this agenda hollows out the core functions of the state, it sells the remnants of a deliverative public sphere to profit-maximizing financial investors, and it subordinates culture and education to the interests and moods of sponsors who are dependent on market cycles.”  (pp. 185-186)

“The crisis has distracted the United States and much of the world from longer-run problems that will have to be addressed.  The list is familiar:  health care, energy and the environment, and especially climate change, education, the aging population, the decline in manufacturing, a dysfunctional financial sector, global imbalances, the U.S. trade and fiscal deficits.”  (Stiglitz, 2010, 184)

“First, the crisis of the Euro is killing the European dream.  The shared currency, which was supposed to bind nations together, has instead created an atmosphere of bitter acrimony.  Specifically, demands for ever-harsher austerity, with no off-setting effort to foster growth, have done double damage.  They have failed as economic policy, worsening unemployment without restoring confidence; a Europe-wide recession now looks likely even if the immediate threat of financial crisis is contained. “  (Krugman, 2011)

Let me say quite clearly that the adoption of the critical mindset suggested in the TASC essays requires the creation of a values discourse that would be emancipatory rather than any recovery of any values previously accepted or made general.  The challenge is immense.  We are not in a period where a destructive paradigm has been analyzed, not to speak of being abandoned.  The ‘habits of mind’ inculcated in support of that paradigm still prevail.

Neither are we discussing ‘any fall’ from a previously inclusive Republic that has ever existed.  At best we can point in our history to an envisioned democratic Republic, such as was delivered with the rhetorical force of the prophetic, in a document like The Democratic Programme of the First Dàil.

That document was used as a tool for legitimation at local level and abroad, but was deflected in its stated aims by the property ethos that had come to define post-Famine economic adjustment in Ireland.

The essays, representing as they do, such a welcome critically engaged scholarship, clearly establish that the issues which are to be resolved are beyond the frame of managerial thinking.  They clearly establish that a new consciousness on emancipatory scholarship is required.

There is thus the challenge of the replacing discourse, its delivery into the public debate at institutional level and a demand for space for discussion in the media of public consciousness is to encounter the full power and promise of democratic inclusion.

The context in which these essays appear is as challenging as the late nineteenth century’s experience of the emergence of a debate on the possibility of a deepened democracy, of competing visions of the nature of society from Durkheim, Weber or Marx and the connections between economy, State and society.

If the devolved policies of post-Independence contradicted the language we used in the case for freedom, the ideas of a utopian kind were made available again and again.

Philip Orr’s very fine essay on the neglected Francis Hutcheson brings us back even further to a time when moral philosophy, ethics and political economy, were not only not divided from each other, but rather drew on each other for sources of the good person, the good life, the good society.

As Philip Orr writes:

“One obvious consequence of belief in a web of instinctive human benevolence is support for a politics that acknowledges such benign proclivities and puts them to good use.  Thus for Hutcheson, a wise politician – perceiving that each individual is ‘a part of a great whole or system’ – would devise constant opportunities for the individual to ‘concern himself with the public good’.  Because humans have a nature that is ‘designed for the good of others’, a healthy society would be one where the capacity for ‘public love’, dedicated to the ‘public good’, is allowed free reign, with general benefit.”  (Philip Orr   pg. 5)

“In a time when Irish people have been forced to look back with shame and horror at the harm done to many children ever since the establishment of the modern Irish state, within soulless educational and social care environments, in a range of brutal ‘corrective’ establishments and under the abusive tutelage of some members of religious orders who were entirely unfitted for the task, it is refreshing and challenging to encounter Hutcheson’s advocacy of the innate worth and dignity of the child and to consider whether the writings of the 18th century moralist of Drumcondra Lane should have been on the curriculum of all Irish teacher-training colleges and Christian seminaries, rather than languishing on a shelf in Ireland’s philosophy departments, as irrelevant, dust-covered texts.”  (Philip Orr   pgs. 8 & 9)

Even if Adam Smith’s later work would be the material for a great and successful distortion, Philip Orr reminds us that  ‘In the Theory of Moral Sentiments’  he argued that:

“howsoever selfish man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.””  (Philip Orr   pg. 11)

“…the human desire to offer, receive and witness benevolence …”   (Philip Orr   pg. 11)

I have more than a difficulty with Ammartya Sen’s more recent position and his belief, reflected in these essays, that a ‘capability approach’ can flow into the new and or mostly required policy discourse without his recognizing, acknowledging, and rejecting, such that of ideology that enabled Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations to be distorted, at the cost of many of Smith’s core values such as were expressed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the new recent edition of which carries an introduction from Ammartya Sen.

It is not a case of ethics having been disconnected and as Johan Galtun would put it ‘capitalistics replacing economics’.  The neo-liberal policy paradigm associated with the Chicago School of Economics was, we must remember, a conscious creation, an exercise in policy formulation and manipulation.  Those who still defend it, Howard Stein describes as economists functioning as ‘ideological warriors’.

Let us reflect for just a moment or two on how it all came to be.  In the wake of the Great Depression extremists of the laissez faire tradition had fallen from favour.  Friedrich Von Hayek’s Road to Serfdom in 1944 represented a new departure in its use of concepts such as freedom.  Freedom was defined as an ‘economic freedom’ of the markets not constrained by any State regulation.

The career of ‘concepts’ within language does matter.

As we launch  ‘The Flourishing Society’ discourse one is reminded that a previous discourse about the future of the European Union that balanced ‘competitiveness’ and ‘cohesion’ has been systematically discarded with ‘cohesion’ rarely occurring in major statements from those who speak of the future of Europe.

The European Union of peace that was the legacy of war, the European Union that might lead the decades following the Rio Summit 20 years ago, the European Union that would, in a globally interdependent world economy, give a lead in establishing rights, including labour rights, has been given little room in a discourse that, I believe, has placed the future of the European Union of the peoples, of citizens, of ideals, at risk.  That is the price extracted by the strongest in defence of a trade advantage.

The future of Europe making an appropriate sustainable contribution to human welfare and an ethical, if globalized economic future, needs to be re-asserted in a time when the bleak prospect of a rescue to failed models as a mechanism to secure an advantage that has been achieved in contradiction to the principle of cohesion, no longer at the centre of European Union discourse, threatens our future.

“This was a characteristic feature of the post-1980 period dominated by neo-liberalism and the Washington Consensus; by the idea that the ‘market knew best’ and it was not appropriate for states to ‘interfere’ in the efficient functioning of the markets.  State intervention, far from being inherently inefficient, turned out to be essential to prevent system-wide collapse.  As a society, we cannot return to having blind faith in markets to deliver a future of endless, rapid and consumption-led growth.”             (Sinéad Pentony  pg. 8 )

“Therefore, the role of the state must also be transformed if it is going to facilitate the shift towards a different type of economy.  The experience of the Nordic countries provides ample evidence of how strong social democracies can create the conditions for regulated social market economies – economies that afford their citizens a high quality of life and place equality at the core of public policy making.” (Sinéad Pentony  pg. 8 )

Surely too, legitimacy is enhanced by seeing economic policy as instrumental towards a flourishing society rather than as a determining force of unaccountable and rarely transparent speculative forces.

These essays and the ongoing work of TASC are a valuable contribution to the restoration of trust – such a trust as we used to bond the aspirations of citizens, the State and the world of work.

Ammartya Sen, in my view, correctly reinstates an Aristotelian view of such freedom as would enable a human flourishing but he does not, I suggest, critique or sufficiently distance his new position from the abuse of freedom that is at the centre of the Von Hayek, Friedman Chicago School ideology.

The conclusions of the Stiglitz Report to which Fergus O’Ferrall refers are valuable.  However, a discourse issue is thrown up for me.    The scholarship that refuted the pernicious doctrine of self-regulating markets was available to the members of the Commission.  But an authoritarian academic orthodoxy prevailed such as would silence the practical alternative view.  Have conditions changed in the realm of economic discourse for example.  What of those assemblies that, far from being critically inclusive, require a statement of pragmatic affiliation before entry is allowed?

These are the questions which follow on from a reflection on the issues that have been illuminated by these very valuable essays with whose launch it is a pleasure to be associated.