Quarterly Essay 16 Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics
()
About this ebook
Gaita argues for a conception of politics in which morality is not an optional extra. He discusses why successful politicians must at times be economical with the truth, but shows a way beyond cynicism on the one hand and moralising on the other. Politics, he says, is conceivably a noble vocation, as well as potentially a tragic one. He looks closely at patriotism and its distortions, and the temptation to betray our deepest values in the act of protecting ourselves. Combining gentle evocation with gloves-off argument, Breach of Trust is a clarion call from one of Australia's leading thinkers.
"I have never met anyone who believes that politicians should never lie ... But of course there are limits. They are not set in the heavens, but in culture." —Raimond Gaita, Breach Of Trust
Read more from Raimond Gaita
Justice and Hope: Essays, Lectures and Other Writings Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Quarterly Essay 16 Breach of Trust
Titles in the series (93)
Quarterly Essay 7 Paradise Betrayed: West Papua's Struggle for Independence Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 15 Latham's World: The New Politics of the Outsiders Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 9 Beautiful Lies: Population and Environment in Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 2 Appeasing Jakarta: Australia's Complicity in the East Timor Tragedy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 1 In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quarterly Essay 12 Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 8 Groundswell: The Rise of the Greens Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 37 What's Right?: The Future of Conservatism in Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 3 The Opportunist: John Howard and the Triumph of Reaction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 4 Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 5 Girt By Sea: Australia, the Refugees and the Politics of Fear Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 11 Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 10 Bad Company: The Cult of the CEO Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 14 Mission Impossible: The Sheikhs, the U.S. and the Future of Iraq Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 6 Beyond Belief: What Future for Labor? Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 19 Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party's Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 13 Sending Them Home: Refugees and the New Politics of Indifference Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 21 What's Left?: The Death of Social Democracy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 30 Last Drinks: The Impact of the Northern Territory Intervention Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 17: ‘Kangaroo Court’: Family Law in Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 39 Power Shift: Australia's Future Between Washington and Beijing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 52 Found in Translation: In Praise of a Plural World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 29 Love and Money: The Family and the Free Market Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 18 Worried Well: The Depression Epidemic and the Medicalisation of Our Sorrows Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 20 A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 38 Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 36 Australian Story: Kevin Rudd and the Lucky Country Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 42 Fair Share: Country and City in Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 32 American Revolution: The Fall of Wall Street and the Rise of Barack Obama Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 33 Quarry Vision: Coal, Climate Change and the End of the Resources Boom Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related ebooks
Quarterly Essay 6 Beyond Belief: What Future for Labor? Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 49 Not Dead Yet: Labor's Post-Left Future Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAgainst Miserabilism: Writings 1968-1992 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMay Day Manifesto 1968 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBrexit and the Divided United Kingdom: Journal for the Study of British Cultures, Vol. 26, No. 1/2019 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBrexLit: The Problem of Englishness in Pre- and Post- Brexit Referendum Literature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsModernizing Solitude: The Networked Individual in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 43 Bad News: Murdoch's Australian and the Shaping of the Nation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 2 Appeasing Jakarta: Australia's Complicity in the East Timor Tragedy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 73 Australia Fair: Listening to the Nation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPhilosophical Myths of the Fall Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWest Island: Five twentieth-century New Zealanders in Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNon Stop Inertia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5TO THE LIGHTHOUSE Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Pig City: 10th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Women and Men of 1926: A Gender and Social History of the General Strike and Miners' Lockout in South Wales Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLeft Populism in Europe: Lessons from Jeremy Corbyn to Podemos Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 45 Us and Them: On the Importance of Animals Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One Dimensional Woman Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Yes: The Radical Case for Scottish Independence Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Localising Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asia Perspective Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 38 Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Five Health Frontiers: A New Radical Blueprint Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDon't Mention the War: Northern Ireland, Propaganda and the Media Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhat about Me?: the struggle for identity in a market-based society Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Migrant Nation: Australian Culture, Society and Identity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 65 The White Queen: One Nation and the Politics of Race Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 36 Australian Story: Kevin Rudd and the Lucky Country Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuarterly Essay 50 Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Philosophy For You
Sun Tzu's The Art of War: Bilingual Edition Complete Chinese and English Text Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar...: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Loving Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Four Loves Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Complete Papyrus of Ani Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Republic by Plato Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Good and Evil Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Denial of Death Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Courage to Be Happy: Discover the Power of Positive Psychology and Choose Happiness Every Day Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Human Condition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Meditations: Complete and Unabridged Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5History of Western Philosophy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Experiencing God (2021 Edition): Knowing and Doing the Will of God Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lessons of History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Be Here Now Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bhagavad Gita - The Song of God Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Allegory of the Cave Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bhagavad Gita (in English): The Authentic English Translation for Accurate and Unbiased Understanding Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Course in Miracles: Text, Workbook for Students, Manual for Teachers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Lying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Quarterly Essay 16 Breach of Trust
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Quarterly Essay 16 Breach of Trust - Raimond Gaita
Quarterly Essay
Quarterly Essay is published four times a year by Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd
Publisher: Morry Schwartz
ISBN 186 395 2292
ISSN 1832-0953
Subscriptions (4 issues): $49 a year within Australia incl. GST (Institutional subs. $59). Outside Australia $79. Payment may be made by Mastercard,Visa or Bankcard, or by cheque made out to Schwartz Publishing. Payment includes postage and handling.
To subscribe, fill out and post the subscription form on the last page of this essay, or subscribe online at:
www.quarterlyessay.com
Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to the Editor at:
Black Inc.
Level 5, 289 Flinders Lane
Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia
Phone: 61 3 9654 2000
Fax: 61 3 9654 2290
Email: quarterlyessay@blackincbooks.com
http://www.quarterlyessay.com
Editor: Chris Feik
Management: Sophy Williams
Editorial Co-ordinator: Caitlin Yates
Publicity: Meredith Kelly
Design: Guy Mirabella
Printer: Griffin Press
CONTENTS
BREACH OF TRUST
Truth, Morality and Politics
Raimond Gaita
CORRESPONDENCE
John Button, Dennis Glover, David Burchell, Annabel Crabb,
Irving Saulwick, Margaret Simons
Contributors
BREACH
OF TRUST
Truth, Morality
and Politics
Raimond Gaita
George W. Bush has been re-elected decisively and we are still enlisted in his war on terror. He asked the American voters to trust him. Tony Blair has asked the same of British voters. John Howard did it first, I believe. To him, it appears, the world owes the novel idea that, in politics at least, one might distract attention from mounting evidence that one has been systematically mendacious, perhaps even a liar, by laying claim to the people’s trust.
I suspect that few of the people were fooled. It looks as though many believed him when he said that he would manage the economy better than Mark Latham would, but they believed him because they thought there was good reason to predict that things would turn out more or less as Howard said they would.You could do that and also believe that he is pervasively mendacious, even a crook. To trust someone, you must do more than believe him.You must believe in him.You must believe that he is essentially truthful.
Imagine if Howard had said, I’ve been accused of pervasive mendacity, even of lying. Don’t let that distract your attention from what is important. You must now judge whether you can justifiably predict that the Coalition will manage the economy better than Labor.
That would not have sounded good. But that, I assume, is what the electorate took him to be saying. From the moral core of trust, it subtracted predictability, or reliability, if one takes that without its moral connotations. And that, I suspect, is what Howard hoped it would do. I imagine that he also hoped that in the confusion of claims that engulfed the election some of the people some of the time would see him as truly trustworthy.
Two days after the American elections I was at a conference at Dartmouth College, an Ivy League liberal studies college in New Hampshire. Some of the most distinguished academics from Harvard, Princeton, MIT and elsewhere attended. The topic was the future of liberal education. It was perhaps not surprising, therefore, that many of the people who attended the conference said that Bush’s victory had sent them into shock
, disheartened
and bewildered
them, and made them unsure about what to make of their country
.
As far as I could tell, that mood afflicted nearly everyone who attended the conference. On the last afternoon, a man commented on the claim that a liberal education was intended to make people think. If that is true, he asked, why are the beneficiaries of such an education so unanimous in their political opinions? His voice trembled and because I sat directly behind him, I could see that he was shaking, not with anger or indignation, but with anxiety about what he had said and what he was about to say. Did anyone here vote for Bush?
he asked.Would that have been inconsistent with having learned the deepest lessons of a liberal education?
It was a fair point and it took some courage to make it to that gathering. Later someone else in the audience suggested that it was perhaps condescending to assume that all religious fundamentalists were superstitious. To assume that, he pointed out, was not to practise what the conference was so often preaching – namely, that a liberal education would better enable one to understand humanity in all its complexity. That too was an important point. Both rebels were responding to an unmistakable complacency in the ways people expressed their dismay that Bush had been re-elected with an increased majority.
In America, as in Australia, such complacency provoked an understandable backlash. Few things are as irksome as urbane condescension. Nonetheless I believe that the majority at the conference were right to be incredulous that a president who was incapable of presenting a coherent account of the reasons why he invaded Iraq and how this was linked to the war on terror could be re-elected, especially now that over 1000 American troops and (apparently) around 100,000 Iraqis have been killed. They were right to be dismayed that Bush’s majority was in part secured by people, like Bush himself, who preach the sanctity of life, who apply the concept with ferocity to abortion and stem cell research, but who seem untroubled by the fact that the country went to war in a cloud-cuckoo land of conflicting justifications led by a government that cares so little for the people its soldiers have killed that it refuses to estimate their number. They were right to feel estranged from people who think that to be in favour of gay marriage is not just to advance a moral opinion with which one could disagree, but to have placed oneself altogether outside the sphere of morality. What else, after all, could be implied by the claim that the vote for Bush was a vote for morality? And they were right to feel anxious about the nature of democracy in a country where 40 per cent of the population believe that Saddam was in cahoots with the terrorists who bombed the twin towers and that the invasion of Iraq was a justifiable response to that atrocity. Or in which many people despised John Kerry because he had acknowledged that American soldiers had committed war crimes in Vietnam.
Australians are fortunate that they are not so deeply divided. Australia is not a country where large numbers of people are politically and morally incomprehensible to one another. So at any rate it appears in America, where I am finishing this essay. To many people in Australia, though, it doesn’t appear that way. Howard’s supporters and his detractors seem agreed that his renewed majority shows how decisively most ordinary
Australians rejected the political values of the liberal middle class, especially its concerns about truth in politics, the treatment of refugees, reconciliation and the war in Iraq. The right is triumphant, the liberal left despondent and bewildered. It seems that they don’t care about morality,
a friend wrote to me in London (where I spend half of each year) when the election results were announced.
I confess to have thought much the same, and for that reason expected the Liberal–National Coalition to be returned to government. In an essay that was a precursor to this one (published in Griffith Review and in the Financial Review), I said that Australians seem to believe that their feet are planted firmly on the ground, that they know how to take the measure of their politicians and that they don’t care much whether they lie (expecting them to anyhow) provided those lies don’t affect their economic interests and their security. I contrasted this with Britons who, under the influence of many years of sophisticated spin, seemed no longer to know where the ground was onto which to plant their feet. Australians, it seemed to me, were not afflicted by an anxiety that they had lost contact with political reality.
The British disorientation had something to recommend it, I thought. When Lord Hutton released his report, into the death of David Kelly and on whether Tony Blair’s government had sexed up
the dossier on Saddam’s (alleged) weapons of mass destruction, there was an explosion of incredulity, which cleared the fog so the ground could again be seen. From left to right, from tabloid to broadsheet newspapers, from Channel Five to BBC 2, one heard almost unanimous expression of disbelief that a man could be so foolish as Hutton was to think that the worst that the government could be accused of was putting the most favourable interpretation on the facts available to it. (When I returned to Australia, I noticed how often commentators who supported Howard said that Hutton had proved
or established
that Blair had been innocent of any attempt to deceive the British public.)
Another example: when I first went to England in 1972, I was struck by the fact that it mattered as much who won the argument in parliament as who won the votes. Sometimes it mattered more. When in 1986 Mrs Thatcher and her minister Leon Brittan were accused of misleading parliament, and suspected by many of actually lying, about the sale of helicopters, the matter (it came to be called the Westland Affair
) occupied parliament for months. Most Australians I met at the time were bemused that concern about whether politicians had been truthful over a relatively minor matter could preoccupy parliament for so long and take up so much media time and space. Such differences, which continue to exist (though perhaps not so markedly as then), partly explain why Howard has not been held to account over Iraq, whereas Blair has been seriously damaged by widespread belief that his accounts of what he knew before Britain went to war and why he took her to war are not to be trusted.
It is true that Australians are cynical about politics, more so than Britons.Yet now I am inclined to think that the contrast is not so simple. It is probably true that most people who voted for Howard did so for economic reasons, but economic reasons
is a phrase that covers everything from naked greed to the desire to build a good home and to care properly for one’s children. Even in a country as wealthy as Australia, much that is rightly cherished can be threatened by bad economic management. Economic and moral reasons should not therefore automatically be opposed. And while it is obvious that many voters did not think that truth in politics, reconciliation and the invasion and occupation of Iraq were matters that should drive them away from the Coalition, it is not obvious what that shows. Perhaps many of them thought the difference between Labor and the Coalition on these matters would not be sufficient for them to risk the consequences of bad economic management.
In regard to all those matters, Howard and his supporters, particularly those in the media, have been remarkably effective over the years in muddying the waters to the Coalition’s advantage. They have done so by entangling what is controversial about them with what should not be controversial in a decent and moderately politically literate community.
What our immigration policy should be is properly a controversial matter. It should not be controversial that it is evil to incarcerate children behind razor wire as part of a strategy to deter asylum seekers from landing on our shores. Nor should it be