Why do we measure everything and value nothing?

Glyn Davis
G'day, I'm Glyn Davis and welcome to The Policy Shop.

Now we've had former US presidential advisers, Nobel Prize winners, UN undersecretaries on The Policy Shop podcast, but never before a president. Well that changes in this episode and I'm delighted to be joined by the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins.

President, welcome to The Policy Shop.

President Higgins
Well I'm delighted to be here and to be visiting.

Glyn Davis
Our listeners might notice a change in the sound quality. We're recording this in the heart of the City of Melbourne at the Grand Hyatt Hotel as the President is in the middle of a state visit to Australia and last night he gave a wonderful address at the University of Melbourne which made the case for the reintroduction of moral and ethical considerations in economic decision making.

President, you began life as a factory worker and a clerk, before becoming the first in your family to access higher education and when you did become an academic, you were passionate about extending access to third-level education beyond the walls of established universities. The world's never been so well educated, yet never felt so divided. Why has education not been the transformation that so many hoped?

President Higgins
Let me say first about my own circumstances. I think I was very fortunate that, despite some early poverty in our background, that is, at the level of my family, my father's health had deteriorated, there always had been an emphasis on books. My mother was particularly interested in reading, as was my father, but then as our family split up and my mother and father reared my two sisters, I was reared by an aunt and uncle and both of them were very interested in reading, in particular my aunt.

There was always an emphasis as well, is that no matter how bad circumstances were, we read the paper, we knew what was happening in the world, even in a remote rural area and in the local village, people knew names like Dunkirk and Belgrade and what was happening in the war and all of that.

I think all through my life I have seen the importance that attached to understanding, having a map as it were, over the decisions of where you were and how things came to be, a kind of curiosity if you like. I think from very early on I was interested in writing and reading. I remember the mobile library coming to the very small school; that was very important. That is one of the reasons why I really put such importance on the concept of literacy and effective literacy.

This is something when later, as an academic sociologist, I would perhaps quite frequently mention Raymond Williams and that great tradition in Britain of going out from the trade union movement and the different working movements to education, to extend education. I also remember the very last paper that Raymond Williams gave, which was called Be the Arrow not the Target which was a plea for active involvement in culture, as a participant and citizen, rather than being a passive consumer of homogenised entertainment. Really, we had that, I think, debate even right up to the time when much later I would become a minister with responsibility for broadcasting.

Glyn Davis
So can I ask you, what drew you first to university education and secondly to sociology?

President Higgins
I think I started really with English literature because my first degree is on English literature and language and sociology and politics and I would have also studied Spanish. I was interested in the poets of [Loch and Majaro] and Rosalia de Castro and all of those and also history. But I think I went into sociology, I think, because it was the opportunity of going to the United States to do postgraduate work. I went – I know it had to be very early - people who went to work in Indiana University.

Later on I would keep moving across subjects because when I came back to - I wrote a book on, study, on the lives of dockers and then I went to Manchester and Manchester had moved into social anthropology and I was interested particularly in the sociology of migration, the sociology of the city. So I was having access to books, but why with universities, I loved books all my life, I still do. But really what I suppose when I came here and spoke last night, you should correctly note a sense of great concern in where I am now in relation to thinking.

The critical function of the universities has to be re-emphasised. I don't want to open up a whole other discussion which is what is the weight of the neo-utilitarian demand of the universities and what has been its consequences, but I'm in favour of critical scholarship. When I was Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht of Ireland from '93 to '97, I became minister for - the President of the Council of Culture Ministers in 1996 of the European Union. There was then a big debate about the role of culture and it was then I read for the first time Professor Volkerling and Michael Volkerling's debate with David Throsby, both Australian writers of the first class.

Glyn Davis
That's right.

President Higgins
Michael Volkerling, as I said, is in the International Journal of Cultural Policy in 2000. Sadly he's no longer with us.

Glyn Davis
No.

President Higgins
But it is a brilliant article and for the first time, it asks really a question, how did economics spin away into being the mechanistic abstraction, taken as defining reality, taken often as the sole reality, the governing, if you like, implement of governments and parliaments and so on, how did this come to be? So therefore when I was giving a lecture really, this was celebrating a life of a great, great intellectual who had associated with the University of Melbourne, William Hearn…

Glyn Davis
Yes.

President Higgins
…it was appropriate that I would go through, if you like, the thinking, how has economic thinking changed from the 19th century when you had thinkers of the first rank who were justifying a famine in Ireland, where a million people would die, two million would emigrate, the country would practically be dumped into poverty. How can people, if you like – does it not raise a question, you know, for those who believe in Descartes and the others, how rational was that? What claim was made for that?

I remember some writer suggested that the Irish were dying because they didn’t understand economics. Then you take the great long sweep and you ask questions. You take Adam Smith, let's take his first great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and it speaks about, for example, sentiments, just that and the tendency to association and take responsibilities from association. Much later, about seven or eight years later, you get The Wealth of Nations.

But you take Keynes, Keynes' interest in culture and so for the balance of day and night, how in fact future satisfactions might be deferred. Take Alfred Marshall, any one of them; they're all people, if you like, offering their intellectual skills within a context of some moral concern and certainly within a cultural context.

You then come to the position of how, for example, has it spun away to the point at which something that was an abstraction, somehow or another, becomes that which is presented as the reality. Maybe it would be extreme to say you've had discussions on public media which ask about whether the people are up to it, that is, meeting the requirements of fiscal imperatives, adjusting the population, I've spoken I think, to fit the theoretical model.

One then has to ask too, you see, if we have had paradigm shifts in physics, even in my lifetime, a couple of times, how did this paradigm shift occur? To what extent did people accommodate it? Was it laziness and what is confusion? It's very interesting that Frederick von Hayek, for example, one of the very, very early authors of neoliberal theory, suggested that this new version, which he referred to as utopian…

Glyn Davis
He did.

President Higgins
…would be something that could only be understood by the few. You would later have a similar view from Milton Friedman. So therefore it was appropriate, if you like, that as I'm coming to a university to receive an honorary doctorate and an invitation to offer a discourse, I decided to do it on that for that reason. But the truth of it is, I think we're in a very, very difficult time, where if we do not relocate economic work within a proper framework of it being part of a cultural debate, we are now at a point where it's threatening democracy itself. I think it's going to create great, great, great - it is already creating great deep fissures in our society. I spoke about we're losing social cohesion, we're losing the conversation with the street, we're losing our capacity to improve humanity.

Glyn Davis
You argued last night, very powerfully, that neoliberalism has its base in a view about the individual as primary and therefore has no room or often provides no room for other forms of communal and social life, community life and the arts in particular, so that these are cut out of the public discussion because they don't fit into the model.

President Higgins
Just think of what has happened to language in our time. For example, the distinction between the self and the individual, it is one of the defining differences between the contemporary version of what people call economics. You know, Johan Galtung has said that it is so constrained now that it should be called capitalistics.

But you certainly have arrived at a position where, if you like, governments can say that they're in fact being responsible for the economy. Well now let us take a question about what is the moral significance of being responsible for the people and being responsible for the economy? These issues arise all the time.

I'm very much in favour of what I call the courtesies of discourse and that is people are being able to discuss these things but put in their assumptions about on the table, one, let's take, you asked me about individualism.

Glyn Davis
Yes.

President Higgins
If you take the defining characteristic of, let us say, the neoliberal position, it is that the principal actor is an atomised individual who is seeking to maximise utility in the decisions they are taking in relation to the best possible for this one person. You have people like, for example, Professor Becker…

Glyn Davis
Yes.

President Higgins
…who has argued that this should extend not just to the economy, it should extend to love and to relationships and to how you conduct your household. That's the extreme version. The big difference between that and let us say when I use the concept of self, it is that as we live and perceive the world, we don't invent it entirely new as atomised persons or one unit. We in fact carry with us grains of culture, we carry with us the expectations of intimates, we are influenced by setting. This is why a responsible economics, even after a significant paradigm shift, in my view, would reflect forms of symmetry between ethics economy and ecology.

It is interesting that rather like it haunts many people, like in Australia too, where people reach back 65,000 years and they speak about conscious, they perhaps had a relationship of symmetry with nature. This not to say that that was frozen in time, but at least that you tried to read patterns beyond the self, through community. How do we construct the space we're in, how we approach time and whether we see ourselves as citizens or consumers. Bauman concentrated very much on what he called ending in a point where we were consumed in our consumption.

Glyn Davis
Liquid Modernity.

President Higgins
Yes. It's my view that in the same way as literacy was important to the evolution of parliamentary democracy, forms of economic and fiscal understanding are important now, a new literacy if you like, if we are to find ourselves in such circumstances where people will understand options that are presented to them, with different kinds of consequences.

Glyn Davis
So President Higgins, if I may, can I take you to another strand of autobiography…

President Higgins
Yes.

Glyn Davis
…that will take us back into this question about community and that's your engagement with the arts and although many remember you of course fondly as the Minister for Arts and you came to this not just as someone passionately interested, but yourself a former journalist, you'd written about music for the magazine Hot Press and then of course you are a poet and a published poet. In our audience last night was a very eminent Australian poet, Chris Wallace-Crabbe…

President Higgins
Yes.

Glyn Davis
…who was close to Seamus Heany…

President Higgins
Yes.

Glyn Davis
….and who visited the university and of course just brought so much with him in his public lectures, you two have published volumes of poetry and the language that you care about is clearly infused by someone who's not only very specific in how they speak, but also across two languages, both in Gaelic and in English.

President Higgins
Yeah.

Glyn Davis
How important is language to your practice both as an academic and now as a political leader?

President Higgins
Well language and words are very important. Remember the great, great speech of the late [Vasil of Harville] to receiving a prize in Germany and remember saying that words can kill, words can liberate, words can enslave and words can offer freedom. The ones that would have influenced myself very much were the 19th century poets and even only recently on holiday this year, I went to see the Statue to Shelley in Viareggio and so on and you think of Shelley and Byron and others, there is a powerful instinct for humanity. Does this mean, therefore, that you can say that that can be left to the cultural people whereas real people get on with running the world? That's the problem, you see?

Glyn Davis
Yeah.

President Higgins
The fact of the matter is that if you are to get good economics and let's look at it this way, yes I was a minister and I was President of the Council of Cultural Ministers, I argued very strongly again and again that culture was not a residuum, I said, in the same way as you put in public lighting, as you put in clean water, as you put in other things. You must, in fact, make provision for the cultural sphere, the public world and so on. In that way, I saw it as something that wasn't, if you like, a residual amount of a surplus in relation to the economy, that old argument we can't afford that kind of thing at the moment and we'll have to have cutbacks.

Glyn Davis
Yeah.

President Higgins
I saw it as an essential part of living and may I say, while I'm at that, is that I think it's one of the great strengths maybe that Australians don't sufficiently see, maybe, or governments sufficiently argue, is that the balance of life between actual work and leisure, what is called leisure, really how you handle the day and the time and space in Australia is a really powerful one. These are life balances and in a way, as one moves into the new science digital impact on the world of work, what you have to try and do if you're really having a holistic economics tour of this, is to look at mechanisms of distribution of income that enable people to have balances in their life.

May I give you another example which arises not just in Australia but in Ireland, this is one that's quite difficult because in relation to feminist literature and I am a feminist is that is it appropriate to just simply keep at her until every woman has to work? Well what about looking at it the other way, why not recognise different forms of important activity as work and then be equally to say, one of the issues, let us say in Ireland we have is that girls are performing better than boys in the secondary schools in relation to science, there are some of the greatest advances have been made by women who interrupt their lives and we have a real issue as to how they are to get back into the professional cycle again and have they lost pecking order in relation to what is either a patriarchal system or an authoritarian system and very, very much a hierarchical system. These are issues we're looking at now.

What are the significances, for example, it isn't important unless it can be measured and that which can't be measured which includes all of the morally significance, social significance and consequences of action, what's the significance of that, I think, morally, ethically and every other way? Surely that is a problem.

Then I think as well, just when I was coming to the end of my own lectures on sociological theory, I would regularly point to Max Weber. I would point to Weber's incredible darkness when he used to write about "it is not the promise of spring that beckons to us, but the icy cold fingers of winter". He was speaking about a rationality that it becomes so contradictory that it was now threatening irrationality.

Well is that not a description of current economics in many, many ways? Where it is so many people, where the fissure of the inequality is growing, our 4.5 billion-year-old planet is in danger of gross misrepresentation, remember the founding statements of people, of that very, very, very famous one, I think one which is "I lead to you Nature and her children in bondage for your use, to gouge out her secrets".

In fairness to the neoliberal lobby in many, many ways, they have succeeded by consistently repeating the version that they have. They have, I think, as well, they've claimed to be a self-sustaining entity with its own culture system, its own language.

For example, what is an entrepreneur? You regularly colonise other bits of language like innovation, creativity and so forth and you find them certainly being incorporated into this new colony of the soul.

Glyn Davis
Yeah, which is why words matter.

President Higgins
Sure.

Glyn Davis
Can I take you to this question? The Australian novelist, Richard Flanagan…

President Higgins
Yes.

Glyn Davis
…delivered the inaugural Boisbouvier lecture in Melbourne and he put forward the question that you touched on last night as well which is does writing matter?

President Higgins
Yes.

Glyn Davis
Can we perhaps listen to a brief clip from his lecture and then I'd like to ask you about it.

Richard Flanagan
One of the end consequences of neoliberalism is a contempt for anything that can't be measured by money and status. What if there is no interest in any culture, no matter what country it comes from, when art and words exist solely as power's ornament, complement and cover?

For in our post-fact, post-truth, post-reason world, words seem to ever less correspond with the world as we experience it, as if the world itself is not what we experience, but what power tells us we must accept as reality.

Glyn Davis
President Higgins…

President Higgins
Yes.

Glyn Davis
…that seems very close in sentiment to the arguments that you presented last night.

President Higgins
As I listen to that now, you just think about how powerfully true it is in some ways if you take the great literatures in the different languages in the different periods. There were ones that spoke about the capacity for great emotion and great passion and thus you could get the narratives expressed and certainly the language would change as you moved through different periods of time.

But then you come to the social media, when in fact you can say anything about anybody without taking any responsibility for the consequences of where your words fall or what damage they may do. This isn't an argument for censorship, it's an argument about consciousness, of those who are doing this and of the extraordinarily aggressive nature of language and of words.

When I was introducing an ethics initiative in my presidency just a couple of years ago and it drew what only can be regarded as a most bad-tempered response, suggested that the neoliberal was just a term of left wing abuse. You can study it…

Glyn Davis
Yes.

President Higgins
…and you can - there's nobody who doesn't - nobody needs to accept my views at all. All I'm really arguing for is a pluralism of scholarship. I'll tell you why I mentioned economics 101, for example, which is the name of the introductory course for economics in the United States, it is something that is incredibly important. You are offered this as an introduction to the subject. My question is only one of adequacy. I would have been, when I was a young student, I would have thought it perfectly reasonable that I would be prepared to have access to the major theories of the day. It is simply the case that this is no longer so.

Now, where we are as publics, in many cases, we have to regularly ask ourselves the question, not about whether we won or lost in relation to electoral contest, but in relation to what the consequences of what we said and did are and what we choose to know. But remember, you have a wonderful man, not exactly a roaring leftie, Pope Francis, who has spoken about indifference and I agree entirely with him. It is because we are indifferent to the connection between our intellectual systems, our theoretical world, our policies and how government approaches both of them.

For example, can you imagine the number of political leaders who in my term have said, I'm looking after the economy, the economy is sound and so forth?

Glyn Davis
Yeah.

President Higgins
People haven't just, well what about the people? We have to be careful not to be trapped into seeing the function of writing in relation to revealing a wrong that is being ignored is immensely powerful. But then from whence you have done that, in many cases, it isn't sufficient to keep repeating the rage. The repetition of the rage, as it were, to my mind, you are in fact almost at that stage consuming the rage yourself to a point.

You've mentioned in introducing me about my work and my starting to work in a factory called Progress, curiously, in Shannon Airport and then working as a clerk and the rest of it. Really there isn't much - what I say about it was, what a privilege it was to be able to have given time to read, time to have access to a university, what an even further privilege it was to be allowed to do research and to be able to become a university teacher and all to have access to colleagues and to people to discuss matters. This is just so important; it's a great privilege that carries enormous responsibilities with it.

It means, really therefore, that if you, say, ask the question really, what is the point, if the way that the word is constituted as a planet, if physics can change several times within the lifetime of one generation, why is it that we are to be told that this is different in relation to something that claims to be a truth system, more important than any revelation that is claimed by others, but is something simply that isn't open to critique. Now what you're finding in Cambridge and you're finding it in Paris and you're finding it in a number of universities, students in first year are saying we want pluralist teaching and we will make up our own minds. And I think that they're perfectly entitled to do that, that's good and that offers hope.

Remember, since my time, monopoly has increased in relation to the media. I was one of the people who was an opponent of cross-ownership in the media because of its dangers to plurality of editorial choice and so forth. Our world has in fact concentrated power, it has concentrated wealth. Some of the most well-funded think tanks in the world are in fact ploughing out distortions of statistics. For example, if the world's population is to increase and you therefore say there are lesser number of people poor because you're counting them differently.

Glyn Davis
Yeah.

President Higgins
Well here is the challenge of why I do this now, is what is facing us in mid-century, let me just make this point. It is that by 2050, 40 per cent of the young people under 21 will be in the continent of Africa; 24 per cent of the population of the planet will be on that continent.

Can we say, this is the significance of important documents like sustainable development and climate change, can we say that what we've been discussing, these existing models of economics, as sufficient to address that demographic expansion? The proportion of the planet's population in Europe will have decreased and the United States will have decreased. What are we to say? Are we to say that the old failed instruments of a dying paradigm, must be defended at any cost?

That gives an importance to what I'm saying, really, to what we're saying, is that we really need to think in terms of when, if you like, our United Nations came together, after incredibly difficult and so forth, are we not in a similar moment in relation to demographic expansion which is not a problem but rather should be seen as in fact positive, full of opportunities?

For example, should we allow science and technology to leap over boundaries so as to be able to start afresh and do new things with ecological balances in these areas or are we to say we are to wait until some other shareholders' meeting on the fringes of a multinational that decides that Africa is a good thing? You see these are not any longer vague questions, they're fundamentally moral questions.

Glyn Davis
They are moral questions. You've given us so much to think about, you've been so generous with your time. President Michael D Higgins, it's been a joy to speak with you.

President Higgins
Oh it's been a pleasure, thank you.

Glyn Davis
Thank you for joining us on The Policy Shop.

President Higgins
Well may I wish such intellectual curiosity and great pleasure to all of your students and staff.

Glyn Davis
Thank you.

Voiceover:
The Policy Shop is produced by Eoin Hahessy with audio engineering by Gavin Nebauer. On the next episode, we'll be speaking with Nobel Laureate, Dr Harold Varmus on why the world continues to struggle with cancer.

This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons, copyright the University of Melbourne 2017.