Dissolving- myths of exclusive national sovereignty. Part Two - Australia.

While the latest acts of violence in Papau are becoming more visible in the mainstream media (despite all attempts of Javenese nationalist elites to prevent media coverage in Papua) there is a campaign under way regarding recognition of Australia’s First Peoples in the Anglo-Australian Constitution of 1901.

Some indigenous activists argue that they are not bound by this Constitution. Conceived of in keeping with the racist ideologies of the late 1880s – which excluded First Peoples -  it simply does not apply to them.

There is no treaty (or treaties) between First Peoples and the imperial British authorities and their neo-imperial heirs, and little prospect of Anglo-Australian authorities taken effective action to remedy this major flaw in Australia’s foundations.

A recent paper by Marcia Langton “Indigenous exceptionalism and the constitutional ‘race power’) rightly identifies the obsolete notion of ‘race’ as something which has reached its use-by date.

Whatever is meant by ‘race’ it usually imagines some form of biological component as part of a means of conceptualising relationships between groups of people.

Like the modern nation-state, it involves a ‘blocked’ form of energy.

Marcia Langton says:

“In the slowly building campaign for constitutional recognition of indigenous people, it is vital we broaden the understanding that the constitutional tradition of treating Aborigines as a ‘race’ must be replaced with the idea of ‘first peoples’. By this I mean simply what is proposed in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (sic – Peoples – BR): It recognises that ‘Indigenous peoples are equal to all other peoples, while recognizing the right of all peoples to be different, to consider themselves different, and to be respected as such.’…”

While I agree with the need to consign the obsolete concept of  ‘race’ to the dustbin, and while I agree that Anglo-Australia needs to find a means of recognising this country’s First Peoples, I doubt if there is much else I agree with in Marcia’s position.

On the one hand, she seems to seek to transcend the limits placed on our creative imagination of who we are by European master narratives, she also seems to accept too much of the conceptual prisonhouse which has be instituted in this former British penal settlement.

The present Australian Constitution is a document which is riddled with the racism of the late 1880s, and is a document which was designed to protect the vested interests in the former British colonies which became the Australian States. First Peoples were excluded from all consideration, except to be deemed of no account.

The problem I have with Marcia’s position is that seeks to incorporate First Peoples and their Ways into a Constitution which preserves a monolithic Anglo-Australian formation rather than seeking to reform the 1901 Constitution to provide First Peoples with the means by which they may live full lives in accordance with very different values to those imported with the Church of England, European farmers, and the suburban notions of domestic order of their subsequent Westernised middle class families.

For me, any position which does not begin with the acknowledgement – not just of country – but of the fact that Australia’s First Peoples are captive of a modern nation-state is a position which can never restore and maintain the full well-being of those First Peoples (and, by extension, of non-indigenous Australians).

That is, any analysis which excludes recognition of the 214 years of struggle of First Peoples to socialise Europeans into this country’s realities leaves out some very important dimensions. And inevitably reduces into another exercise in ethnocide as the imported status quo exerts its powerful influence in all that is reproduced from such narrowly conceived ‘origins’.

This is a systematically distorting influence – institutionalised racism is rife in ‘modern’ Australian life, and professional deformations of those conceptual craftworkers who are recruited by the state are the price of entry into the Anglo-Australian systems of patronage.

The ‘modern’ condition is one which automatically assigns a vast privilege to itself – and assumes that while other peoples “of course!” have to change their Ways to fit in with ‘modern’ cultural specifications, there is no counterbalancing expectation that ‘modern’ Western Ways must change to comply with the cultural specifications which are grounded in this country.

Well, welcome to post-modern conditions.

There is ample evidence this ‘modern’ privilege is long overdue for reform. The attempts to delay this reform take many forms – but these attempts to delay the process will increasingly require more resources than can be afforded. Change is happening.

Life will seek out the constrained ‘freedoms’ it needs in order to maximise its full potential. Life is a process of realisation, just as so much of life in this country has been ‘unrealised’ since 1788 (rendered unreal by the imposition of failing narratives from the other side of the planet).

Many would agree that Marcia’s position is that of a realist. Some small changes to the 1901 Constitution are the best than can be hoped for.

But there is also a saying that the idealist is the only realist – since the idealist contains within their form of representation the germ of better futures which, in the fullness of time, are (to some extent) realised.

Part of this struggle is a struggle for the creative imagination.

This requires crafting new forms of representation – on all levels. These need to be fashioned in a spirit of cultural partnership between First Peoples and non-indigenous peoples.

Rather than propping up the drooping 1901 Australian Constitution a la Dali, we need significantly more exercise of our collective creative imaginations and creative powers (working with known realities). Until there is a critical mass, as we saw with the broad-based  effort across the face of life  leading into the1992 Mabo decision, change will not come.

A METAPHYSICAL "SELF"

One area where work is required is that provided by what is known as Australian Dreamings. Instead of a debate about evolution versus Creationism, where do First Peoples cosmologies fit into Australian life?

Within surviving Ways of First Peoples in this country life has been subjected to forms of signification which relate particular people to particular aspects of life. These systems of signification are not based on European Western modern notions of biology or society as understood by modern anthropologists.

There is an Anglo-Australian norm which operates to insist that First Peoples – in urbanised places like Wollongong where I live – do not rediscover their Dreaming identities. The ethnological norm implies that – once you have been stripped of your cultural birthright – under no conditions are you allowed to rediscover it as a lived cultural reality. First Peoples cosmologies are treated as a threat by 'modern' Anglo-Australian interests.

“NO DREAMING ALLOWED” declares the neo-colonial powers. Yet all of our lives are informed by our creative imaginations and associated ‘fantasy’ structures.  This is our condition!

Freedom, in this context, means the freedom to signify life in keeping with life’s own scripts – not some fantasy invented by others and forcefully imposed on First Peoples.

The struggle for this kind of freedom – a freedom of Being – must have its local situations, its specific contexts in which real matters are worked through. By the same measure, an enduring solution requires a change to a global force-field.

Without a global shift any local successes are more than likely to be beaten ‘back into proper’ shape by an oppressive regime.

At this stage of the transformative process it is difficult to be able to provide an account of a future condition – which will, in all probability, be different to what we can imagine at this time.

However, in both the Papuan-Indonesian and the First Peoples-Australian cases, a good outcome would be one where relationships between the various parties are informed by key values on both sides rather than mere domination by one side as is presently the case – reintroduction of reciprocity, perhaps, into Indonesian life the case of Papua, and respect for the whole of life in ‘modern’ Australia, perhaps, in the case of Australia’s First Peoples.

We all need to rethink life – and leave behind the empty shell of identity as provided by the somewhat medieval notion of a modern nation-state.

A national Constitution is part of the modern nation-state formation. The present Australian Constitution is a culturally one-sided document. It claims an exclusive form of sovereignty which systematically benefits some at the expense of many others, including First Peoples.

Can we imagine life in which the present Constitution is replaced with two-sided forms of representation – in which sovereignty is shared with this country’s First Peoples?

Well, that is the magnitude of the challenge life presents us with.

We may well discover our own metaphysical 'selves' in the process.

----------------------------


More reading:

 Indigenous exceptionalism and the constitutional ‘race power’
Marcia Langton,
Melbourne Writers Festival
BMW Edge theatre, Federation Square, Melbourne
26 August, 2012

http://www.youmeunity.org.au/downloads/8f2d6396820886086f16.pdf

Dissolving - myths of an exclusive national sovereignty. Part One - Papua

 The acts of violence which have taken place in Papua over the last fifty years or so – in the name of an Indonesian nation possessing an exclusive sovereignty – may go unnoticed by many decent folk (as the intermational media are prevented from operating in Papua) but they are particularly painful to me. 

I studied New Guinean Ways as a student, and have gained some understanding and appreciation of them over the years. I do not subcribe to the fantasies of those of dismiss Papuans as a 'stone-age peoples'. They have finely tuned ways of Being of the highest order.

I also gained some understanding of how people who consider themselves ‘civilised’ and ‘superior’ to others cannot govern to ensure the well-being of those others. From many accounts, Javanese elites have such an attitude towards Papua’s First Peoples.

Just as it is painful to witness what is happening in Papua, so too is it painful to witness the ongoing acts of violence - now located on a much more subtle level – which have marked the 214 years of occupation of this place we know by its foreign name as “Australia”.

Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr – like others who have held that office – is always careful to couch his gentle querying of human rights abuses in Papua with explicit statements about recognising Indonesian sovereignty over Papua.

I suspect that underlying this is the knowledge that Anglo-Australia – lacking any form of Treaty or Treaties with this country’s First Peoples – instinctive knows not to invite scrutiny of its own claims to sovereignty. There is no Treaty of Waitangi, nor even the thin patina of ‘legitimacy’ for a hostile regime with the hasty "Act of Free Choice"  which took place in Papua in July 1969 (while world attention was on the moon landing).

When Bob Carr recently called for an inquiry into the role of Detachment 88 in treating Papuan independence activists as “terrorists” a high-level member of the Indonesian elite responded:

“ Mr Mahfudz is a member of the PKS party, which is strongly Islamic, and part of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's governing coalition.

“In an interview with The Age, the head of Indonesia's parliamentary commission for security, Mahfudz Siddiq, seemed to confirm that Detachment 88 was present in West Papua, partly because, he alleged, Mr Tabuni was ''one of the actors behind a series of violent actions'' there.

''That makes the presence of Detachment 88 and its involvement in some cases in West Papua as being very much about doing their job. Several cases in West Papua at that time were already seen as terror,'' Mr Mahfudz said.

Independence activists have denied that Mr Tabuni was involved in a series of killings in the lead-up to his death.

Mr Mahfudz also chided Mr Carr because he said he had never heard Australian politicians complaining about Detachment 88 killing Muslim terror suspects.

''In my opinion, it is too far for Bob Carr to mention human rights training to Detachment 88. Did Australia give any comment when Islamic activists got killed or injured by Detachment 88 while the anti-terror squad was raiding a house?'' Mr Mahfudz said.

''I think Australia must be careful about these statements because they could be seen as having double standards.''

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/indonesia-rebukes-carr-over-west-papua-call-20120829-250yb.html#ixzz2559P4F1s

GANGSTER THIEFDOMS

The notion of sovereignty of modern nation-states sets up a construct which separates one part of life from the rest of life. Within this artificial construct there is deemed to be some form of exclusive authority related to a myth of a monopoly on the "legitimate" use of violence.

This can be compared with gangsters who, in terrorising the locals,  agree with other neighbouring gangsters that they will not interfere in each other’s reigns of terror, and will turn a blind eye to any acts of violence directed by the local gangsters to people within the bounded area.

This way of manipulating the world’s people has enjoyed considerable success during the last few centuries. But its time has come, and now the cluster of beliefs necessary for such illusions are weakening, and the modern nation-state is dissolving before our eyes.

Those who benefit from the modern-nation state arrangement will use all in their power to resist this change – and they are extremely nasty people convinced of the rightness of their One Nation approach to life.

But life is much  greater than they are and new permutations are underway.

It is time for all of us who are dominated and manipulated by Nationalist gangsters, of one kind or another, to stop taking their claims seriously, and to insist that new and healing ways are  the only acceptable standards in the 21s century.

PAPUA

During the late 1960s, when in my twenties, I was drawn into modern anthropology by a Dutch Professor, Jan Pouwer, who had worked in what was then Dutch New Guinea.

To my knowledge (and in my memory) he never spoke directly of the tragedy which had befallen the people of the former Dutch part of New Guinea. Perhaps, in the late 60s and early 70s, it was still early days.

I did, however, learn much about the ways of life of the First Peoples of New Guinea. I learnt enough to know that they are very different from the ways of life of Javanese peoples (as complex as those ways are).

Jan Pouwer stressed the role of reciprocity as a total social fact for New Guinean ways.  This makes for very different kinds of cosmologies, social and ecological relationships and senses of identity to those which accompany the notion of the modern nation state.

After World War 2 a myth was created about a modern nation state called Indonesian which took its boundaries from the former Dutch empire in this side of the planet. Papua was included in this nationalist fantasy, even though the ways of life of Javenese nationalists and Papuan peoples bore little comparison.

The ongoing tragedy in Papau was made possible by the failure of international forces – forces which are themselves constituted by a myth of an exclusive national sovereignty – to insist that the new Indonesia did not automatically include all of the former Dutch colonial possessions.

The cold war played a part in all of this, with Javanese nationalists skilled at playing off competing imperialist powers on both sides to obtain a ‘home’ advantage – but for whose home?

Papua has clearly provided sources of wealth for the social complex represented by Indonesian nationalists – Freeport’s Grasberg mine being a case in point. Papau has also provided ‘living-space’ to non-Papuan Indonesians – the well-known ‘transmigration’ occupation -  as a means of resolving some difficulties for the Indonesian nation-state.

 

But the idea that Papuans fighting for survival of their ways of life – against Javanese forces of occupation – can be categorised as ‘terrorists’ is just too absurd to be taken seriously.

We have seen how such myths – the doctrine of terra nullis in Australia’s case – simply cannot be upheld as credible once they reach their use-by date. It takes more resources to promote the pretence than can be afforded.

As though obeying some kind of unstated law, life simply opts to move on to a new position. We are on the move now.

So too with the myth of an exclusive Indonesian sovereignty in Papua. Papua's First Peoples must be regarded has having a form of co-existing soveriegnty within a regional complex.

In saying this, however, I am not an advocate of independence in which one ‘superior’ group is displaced and replaced with another ‘superior’ group.

I see “independence” as belonging to the same cluster of ‘modern’ beliefs which have caused so much suffering on our planet. An Independent Papua will suffer from the same problems as all modern nation-states.

They all require ongoing acts of violence (physical and/or psychic) to sustain themselves since they are inherently unstable.

My preference is for networks of ‘interdependence’. This will require a global shift to become possible (and not, I hasten to add, the global shift of modern consumerist ‘globalisation’.)

Solving the problems in Papua and Australia needs a changing global context.

While I acknowledge that there is a process underway which involves the notion of ‘autonomy’ in Papua – and that this may be a realistic and achievable outcome if pursued in good faith – my fundamental belief is that the notion of an exclusive form of national sovereignty must be dissolved in order to provide for co-existing forms of sovereignty within new social formations.

Nationalism of the exclusive national soveriegnty type sets up a narrative by which all manner of obscene acts of violence can be justified by those commiting them. Those people who subscribe to these narratives are themselves trapped.

There is much work to be done on this front if we are to replace the destructive ways of the modern nation-state with truly healing solutions. And in both Papua and Australia we are faced with healing challenges of awesome dimensions.

Is there any room for healing movement in Papua by way of fully implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigneous Peoples in relation to the Indonesian modern nation-state (and Australia)?

------------------

 

Brief background reading.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Free_Choice

 PART TWO - AUSTRALIA to follow.

 

Assange and Interpol

Questioning the structures of authority which protect powerful figures who systematically misled us and pursue those who unmask them leads us to ask "Who, exactly, are Interpol?"

Wikipedia notes:

"In order to maintain as politically neutral a role as possible, Interpol's constitution forbids it to undertake any interventions or activities of a political, military, religious, or racial nature."

Interpol's Constitution says:

"Its aims are:


(1) To ensure and promote the widest possible mutual assistance between all criminal police authorities within the limits of the laws existing in the different countries and in the spirit of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights";

Then how come, at this moment when the whole world knows where Julian Assange is to be found, we get:

http://www.interpol.int/News-and-media/News-media-releases/2012/PR065

Embracing cosmos - yes - but not merely that of the god particle worldview

The Conversation
28 June 2012,

Challenge 15: Let’s get ethical; embracing the cosmos leads to better decision-making

Edward Spence
Senior Research Fellow at the ARC Special Research Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University

http://theconversation.edu.au/challenge-15-lets-get-ethical-embracing-the-cosmos-leads-to-better-decision-making-7460

My associated google docs contribution on the issue of monotheism and genocide (in connection with a new cosmopolitarianism and a single language.)

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B5L1WtKuhKjEZnZlcERqSlhQSWs


Bruce
July 2012

PS This may also be relevant - have not read it as yet.
:

1. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers
   http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13642520903091217

Some thoughts for Reconciliation Week, 2012.

MAY-JUNE 2012

While so many eyes will be trapped by the imperial sparkle of the Diamond Jubilee of the English Queen, and will be oblivious to the passing of 20 years since the High Court's Mabo decision on 3 June, 1992, the claims of a non-indigenous sovereign to control the resources and  lives of Australia's First Peoples is increasingly being questioned in Australia and overseas. 

Around Australia Aboriginal Tent Embassies are presently being established  - and the people in these embassies are safeguarding the sacred fire of indigenous sovereignty  which has never been extinguished in fact or in 'law'.

Life is on the move.

HOW TO IMAGINE COEXISTING SOVEREIGNTY

A challenge for conceptual craftspeople is how can we imaging forms of co-existing sovereignty which avoid such mistakes as ‘separate development’ and which allow for a spirit of cultural partnership to permeate life.

In place of enclave or ‘reservation’ models such as those which have bounded areas (e.g. the remnants of former ‘tribal  territories - dependent domestic nations) we need to consider deconstructing the features of the dominating Anglo-Australian formation to reduce the extent to which its norms apply.

That is, instead of allowing these norms to operate over an unlimited domain, to insist that they are limited to only part of life – and that the other parts of life are ‘governed’ by other means.

While this is unthinkable during the ascent and height of Western forms of power, as that form of power begins to weaken, new possibilities present themselves – from life itself.

That is, in order to accommodate the life needs of Australia's First Peoples we need to reconceptualise modern Anglo-Australian norms (and normas). 

  

MODERN NORMALITY

The problem with most discussions about the recognition of indigenous sovereignty is they tend to be heavily dominated by Western notions of sovereignty a la the modern nation-state.

That is, an exclusive notion of sovereignty of the “winner takes all” kind. The conceptual underpinnings for this, I suspect, is the formerly powerful notion (in some places) of a monotheistic god – an extremely jealous god who puts to the sword the rest of his kin in a polytheistic pantheon.

The uncritical acceptance of the European exclusive notion of sovereignty, by those who argue for the recognition of an unextinguished indigenous sovereignty in Australia, makes an extremely difficult challenge impossible.

They then have to seek to displace the whole of Anglo-Australian sovereignty in order to replace it with a similarly singular form of indigenous sovereignty. Fat chance of that.

And even the staunchest supporter of indigenous sovereignty needs to be wary of replacing one set of power-mad cultural masters with another.

The ‘modern’ form of sovereignty operates with a central cluster of norms which is used as a means to assess many other forms of practice. The Ways of other peoples are to be ‘normalised’ by an ethnocidal process and brought into apparent conformity with modern norms. Read the media releases of the relevant Federal government Ministers for a rich data base on this process.

There is no epistemological space in this modern system for Ways which challenge and seriously question modern normality. (But modern normality is, like so much else, a passing arrangement which enjoys no inherent privilege.)

Some leftwing activists, for example, appear to think that there is nothing wrong with the present form of domination. For them it is just a matter of replacing the existing elite with those who (like themselves) reproduce a leftwing worldview and ideology.

Let there be no mistake about the spirit which motivates these writings here – it is the form of existing power relations which is the problem, not merely those who are empowered to fill the key decision-making positions.

INDIGENOUS FORMS OF SOVEREIGNTY

A far better approach, in my opinion, in order to secure conditions under which First Peoples in Australia may be able to live – to a certain degree – in accordance with their Ways, is to look at the indigenous Australian Ways for a model of indigenous sovereignty.

First Peoples Ways, in Australia, are characterized by complementary opposition, by a unity made up of two halves, two ‘moieties’ as modern anthropologists call them. An easy way to think of this as ‘yin-yang’.

An Eastern logic is required.

Both sides of life are required to make life whole.

Neither side is complete without the other, and neither side can replace the other.

The emphasis in this system is for two sides to maintain their respective positions vis-à-vis the other, without putting one side in a dominating position ‘on top’.

This complementary-opposition form provides a model of co-existing sovereignty as opposed to the winner takes all approach.

There is a process of sharing and division of life’s responsibilities in these arrangements.

LIFE’S NORMAL MODE IS NOT MODERN

The modern nation state model is taken as self-evident, but life’s normal form is that as found with First Peoples

The modern model, which has an elite dominating the other parts of life, is not normal, but pathological.

It allows for gross distortions of the kind which systematically privileges the benefits to a special few and allows that privilege to greatly outweigh the need to ensure that the well-being of all life is placed first.

The modern notion of normal, with its one-sided forms of representation, is rejected here. It is malformed.

What is normal to life is that which is found in the Ways of Australia’s First Peoples – in which power and authority are never allowed to coalesce into the hands of one group of people.

We need to find a condition of Being which is becoming for the great planet we live on, and which – contra the crass ego-centric form of individualism which accompanies mindless consumerism – puts a thoroughgoing concern for the rest of life into all we do.

And that insight is to be found in the Ways of First Peoples – in the arrangements which they found, by hard-won lived experience, prevented the abuses which give rise to so many the present power-trip problems we face.

------------
Some Indigenous Voices and a seminar at the University of Wollongong preceding Reconciliation Week 2012:


Foundation Meeting of the Sovereign Union – National Unity Government

http://nationalunitygovernment.org/node/148 24 May 12


 University of Wollongong: Litigating the boundaries of sovereignty 

http://media.uow.edu.au/news/UOW124684.html 

Moving from dominating to relating - 21st century regional context

Treating other people as objects is part of the system of attitudes which makes up imperialism.

No doubt imperialism is only one instance of social formations in which one group – as a means of attaining and maintaining positions of power – treat other people as objects.

Pierre Clastres reminds us that genocide and ethnocide are extensions of practices first of all applied ‘at home’. The emergence of European kingdoms and modern nation-states are the results of bloody struggles. With the move to over-running life overseas, the system of attitudes transcends the ‘boundaries’ which otherwise demark ‘home’.

The treatment of other people as objects can be seen very clearly in the Anglo-Australian treatment of Australian First Peoples, from the earliest times of colonization and through to the present day with the continuation of the Northern Territory ‘intervention’.

A culturally one-sided imperial will is forcefully imposed on the lives of First Peoples by non-indigenous politicians who have no personal understanding of the Ways of First Peoples and no professional qualifications which would make good this deficit.

Governor Macquarie is a classic example from earlier times -  and  P.M. Howard, Minister Brough, P.M. Gillard and Minister Macklin serve as more recent examples from both sides of Anglo-Australian politics.

In the absence of any form of indigenous representation, non-indigenous politicians simply impose their own world-view and values upon the whole of Australian life  - as ‘one nation’- as though the introduced system of order is, somehow, preordained to apply in all cases and in all instances.

They are culturally blind when it comes to recognizing the realities of the original cultures of this country.

The ability of the Westminster system (as presently constituted) to call on experts to advise governments about such matters is a proven failure in Australia.

The old fashioned approach, belonging to European imperialism and colonialism, seeks to manipulate and dominate life.

It is the antithesis of relating.

My hope for the survival of First Peoples as First Peoples is that a future scholar, with an understanding of Foucault’s notion of an episteme, will be able to look back at Australian life and identify the period in which an epistemic shift occurred – when the old methods of non-indigenous Australians shifted from the attempts to dominate First Peoples and finally accepted the need to learn how to relate.

There is a profound difference between these two modes of Being. A shift from heavy to light – from life as something a drill sergeant would appreciate to life as a flowing dance.

What I wonder about, though, is how this change will come about since Anglo-Australians (at least, those who aspire to attain the apparent strategic heights) show little inclination in this direction. The present systems for ‘advancement’ and promotion in Australia reward those who subscribe to a particular world-view, and that world-view is not one which owes anything to the wisdom inscribed in the Ways of  First Peoples.

EASTERN ENGAGEMENTS?

There is a possibility that, as Anglo-Australia Inc seeks to engage more with Asian countries, the cultural arrogance which underwrites the prior and deep seated view of “Australia for the White Man” will run into serious problems.

In a changing regional context and a changing global economic context, the ability for a small number of Anglo-Australians to maintain their outdated worldview may be seriously challenged.

If Europe is facing major problems and there is a change of policy in the United States about how to best protect its interests, the need for Anglo-Australians to adapt to their real surroundings could see a rapid acceleration in changes in the selection process for key positions.

Those who have abilities for cross-cultural relating, especially with cultures which place great value on respect and the need for mutually acceptable processes, may find themselves in demand, while the managers of yore are retired to the backroom to sort out inanimate objects of one kind or another, provided these low level tasks have not been replaced by less-expensive-to-maintain automaton.

One possibly fly in the ointment for such a vision is just what kind of personality is going to be associated with the rise of significant Asian neighbours.  They too may be dominated by those who treat people as objects, rather than fully alive Being - by the view that the bottom line is not well-being for the whole of life by acts of balanced exchange but the means by which other people's surplus energies can be 'legally' stolen by unfair trade.

The struggles of the 21^st century to heal Australian life may well include forming alliances with those who, having initially embraced Western Ways without realizing the true costs of doing so, then seek to regain some degree of balance as a result of the workings of a living praxis.

A surprising cultural landscape in Australia's high country - Easter 2012

Discovering a surprising cultural landscape in Australia's high country - a personal account.
From one of my other blogs

Part 1. http://japaljari.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/messages-from-our-surroundings-mount-kosciuszko-easter-2012/

Part 2. http://japaljari.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/messages-from-our-surroundings-part-two/

Part 3. http://japaljari.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/messages-from-our-surroundings-mt-kosciuszko-trip-easter-2012-final/

cheers
Bruce Reyburn May 2012

The view from life's nadir

In his 2011 book “ Hiroshima Nagasaki” Paul Ham juxtaposes a point life arrived at in 1945, where United States President Harry Truman is part of a process which readies itself to drop the first atomic bomb on a human population. Ham writes:

“The remaining questions were: when, how and where (that is, which Japanese targets). Truman was expected not to meddle in or obstruct the process; rather to listen, understand and wave the juggernaut on, a role he performed as exactingly as the military-industrial complex expected of the man who had led the Truman Committee. ‘The final decision,’ the President later wrote in his memoirs , ‘of where and when to use the atomic bomb was up to me. Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt it should be used.’”

Ham continues:

“How mankind arrived at the creation of such a weapon is an epic scientific and industrial story, which began with a hypothesis about the constitution of matter, by an ancient Greek 2500 years ago. The philosopher Democritus coined the word atomos to describe solid, indivisible, unchanging particles that, he supposed, constituted the building blocks of matter.” (Ham 2011:88)

We too should pause at this juncture of life on this planet.

The question we must pose is “How on earth did life arrive at this point, where one man, the President of the United States, was in a position to decide the fate of 100,000 people going about their daily business (even though that business was embedded in a country at war)?”

Rather than looking at the origins of atomic theory, our inquiry must be directed at the social origins of systems of power which – as Ham makes clear in regard to the use of fire bombing of cities – eventually numb us to the next acts of mass homicide.

It is very telling that, when the scientific experts who were necessary to create the nuclear explosive device campaigned to invoke other social considerations in its use, and to share scientific knowledge to create a world based on trust, they were marginalised, ignored, told that they had no place in politics.

“Einstein’s reply to Truman naively presumed that the bomb might end wars of ‘nationalism’ and clearly misjudged the enduring power of the idea of the sovereign state. ‘The most important things we intellectuals can do’ Einstein wrote, ‘is to emphasize over and over again the establishment of a solidly built world-government and the abolition of war preparations (including all kind of military secrecy) by the single states.” (Ham 2011:493-494)

“In sum 155 Manhattan project scientists registered their moral opposition to dropping the bomb without warning a Japanese city. These dissenting voices – many of whom worked in the lab that had built the bomb – so irritated the White House that Truman issued a press statement about the merits of the weapon ‘because so many fake scientists were telling crazy tales about it.” (Ham 2011:314)

By allowing the masters of war to define the situation, the logic of the situation justifies more mass homicide. (Paul Ham makes reference to an essay - “The Construction of Conventional Wisdom” by Uday Mohan and Sanho Tree. An essay which may be worth tracking down.)

Those scientists (who accept the division of labour as defined by the modern nation-state) have failed to transcend their own conditioning and be part of a transformation of life which would re-integrate human cosmology with a well-tempered cosmos.

We need to achieve a form of planetary sense of Being so that when we consider destroying other forms of life we are checked by the understanding at all life is one – we are the horror life encounters when we are also cast in the position of victim.

But a planetary sense of Being may not be the single world government which Einstein invokes. Rather than concentrating power in few privileged places, we need new arrangements which re-centre Being everywhere.

Life in ‘paleolithic’ times seems to have been informed by a global wisdom of this kind. And it is also marked by means which prevent concentrated forms of power.

Moiety systems, based of forms of complementary opposition in which two halves are required for life to be whole, work to ensure that relative differences are not allowed to become absolute differences (as found on both side of modern wars where the enemy are demonised).

There can be no legitimate monopoly of coercive power (of the kind associated with the modern nation state) within such complementary opposite moiety systems.

When one moiety presumes that it is absolutely superior to the other part of life, all manner of destructive games come into play in order to attempt to coerce life to confirm to that unearthed vision.

Enter - an Anglo- Australian theme - One nation, one people etc

The present situation in Australia provides the perfect context for considering these matters if we are to avoid a purely abstract discussion of little immediate relevance.

Where better to start than an editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald after an event in Canberra on Australia Day (26 January) 2012:

The long struggle to end inequality
Sydney Morning Hearld
January 28, 2012

Opinion

EDITORIAL

TONY ABBOTT was right: it is time to move Australia's view of indigenous affairs on from the Aboriginal tent embassy. Certainly the tent embassy was a master stroke in its day. The title ''embassy'' encapsulated brilliantly the difficulties and desires of indigenous Australians in their relationship with non-indigenous Australia. The word summed up a deep fissure in Australia's nationhood, which most non-indigenous Australians had barely thought about - that the settlement of Australia from 1788 had involved an unacknowledged confrontation between two nations which had never formally concluded.

It implied not only the existence of a separate indigenous nation but a variety of demands, in particular a treaty to settle outstanding issues and claims, including land rights. It implied, too, a demand for policies to redress indigenous disadvantage.

What the Australia Day fracas outside the restaurant in Canberra, and its aftermath, have shown is the extent to which Australia has moved on from the simplistic confrontation symbolised by the tent embassy. The embassy's supporters, stuck in the us-versus-them mentality of four decades ago, had to misrepresent Abbott's words quite extensively to fire the crowd up to action. Abbott did not call for the tent embassy to be pulled down, as was claimed. Other indigenous leaders - wiser heads whose attitudes have been formed in the more constructive atmosphere that has grown up since 1972 - rightly condemned the violence. They are confident enough of indigenous Australia's position to be able to treat national political leaders with respect.
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They know that more is to be gained from working within, than from standing outside, as the tent embassy does. Indigenous issues, like indigenous culture, are mainstream in Australia in 2012.

We do not suggest, of course, that all problems have been solved, or that everything done since 1972 in Aboriginal affairs has worked. Attempts to advance the welfare of indigenous Australians have been marked in almost equal measure by their good intentions and their lack of success. Some progress has been made but the four decades since the tents went up have been littered with failure. Progress has tended to come less through government programs than other means. Native title has been recognised, and the insulting legal basis for the Crown's claim to Australian land, terra nullius - that it belonged to no one - has been annulled. The continent's Aboriginal past has entered more and more into the cultural consciousness of non-indigenous Australians through customs such as the acknowledgement of country. Kevin Rudd's apology to indigenous Australians for past ill treatment has been accepted as a significant gesture of reconciliation.

The latest step in this direction is the mooted amendment to the constitution to remove its racist provisions, to insert others that recognise Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders as Australia's original peoples, and to acknowledge the need to secure their advancement.

About the first of these measures there can be no argument. About the second there will be general agreement. About the third, though, there may well be significant opposition which the ugly scenes in Canberra on Australia Day will probably only reinforce. The problem with the proposed changes is that, though they may outlaw racial discrimination, they appear to retain race as the basis for some form of legal distinction. Many will ask, why should indigenous advancement be mentioned in the constitution specifically? How is it distinct from the advancement of the Australian population as a whole? It is a fair point - one around which opponents will rally.

The broader difficulty is that the changes appear to assume the constitution will always be a temporary document - one intended to address the transitory concerns of a particular age and, when these are no longer current, to be amended to suit the next set of concerns. Thus its racist provisions, now completely offensive to contemporary values, addressed the political concerns of the late 19th century. But the constitution is written in the language of absolutes and, as experience has taught, extremely difficult to amend. We believe it would be unwise to amend it in ways which - however justified they may seem now - would privilege indigenous Australians in ways that are not even clear. Indeed, the mere attempt to do so may be equally disastrous. What would it say about this country if a well-intentioned but half-baked attempt to right an injustice were to fail?

Progress is certainly slow - excruciatingly so, and with many setbacks. But its glacial pace should not deceive us into thinking that indigenous disadvantage is permanent, and that Australia's first people must always be outsiders, protesting outside the door of power. Least of all should Australians be diverted into enacting a constitution that assumes the various strands of Australia's population will never be one people.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/editorial/the-long-struggle-to-end-inequality-20120127-1qlre.html#ixzz1ktEIl8Gr

Two sides of story, not one.

“ A probably unilateral analysis of dual organisation has all too often propounded the principle of reciprocity as the main cause and result …. However, we should not forget that a moiety system can express not only a mechanism of reciprocity but also relations of subordination. However, the principle of reciprocity is at play even in these relations of subordination; this is because subordination itself is reciprocal: the moiety which wins the top spot in one plane concedes it to the opposing moiety in another.” (Claude Lévi-Strauss The Elementary Structures of Kinship 1969:268 - emphais added BR)

Cutting straight to the chase – our interest lies with the process by which the ‘horizontal’ arrangement between moieties (in which the top spot on one place for one moiety is balanced by a top spot on another plane to the other) is transformed into a ‘vertical’ arrangement with a supposedly upper and superior part of the life seeking to dominate the supposedly lower and inferior other parts of life.

The attempts to impose and maintain this arrangement provide go a long way to account for much of history – a history written largely from the Upper Moiety perspective.

Life’s history, however, must include a balanced account which removes such self-privileging and provides equal representation, on its own terms, to the acts of resistance to these ‘superior’ types.

Life is best represented by an approach which honours the role of complementary opposition, rather than solely that of vertical arrangements.

In order to tease some of this out, it may be useful to look at some of the issues raised in the debate between Levi-Strauss, Dutch Anthropologists of the Leiden orientation; David Maybury-Lewis; and – his most famous opponent - Jean-Paul Sartre.

That should take us some months into 2012.

A message from life's better parts

“The myths show that when the relative superiority of one value over the other gives way to an absolute superiority, this means the end of society.” (Jan Pouwer 1992)

This quote is a good place to start as it says it all. As is often the way, some of life’s most precious insights are to be found in myth-narratives (despite the attempts of others to rewrite life’s rules to comply with narrow ambitions).

How much of history - and of present day events - can be explained by the process the myths make clear?

While I am not a modern anthropologist I approach my work from an intellectual background which was informed, in part, by the findings of modern anthropology.

It is appropriate to begin with this comment by the late Jan Pouwer on Professor Josephus Platenkamp’s paper (in Moyer and Claessen (eds) 1988 “Time past, time present, time future: essays in honour of P.E. de Josselin de Jong. Pouwer’s comment in “Fizzy: Fuzzy: FAS? A review of Leiden labour” Canberra Anthropology 15(1) 1992:87-105.))

Basically, I read that comment about the shift from relative to absolute superiority in relation to a transformation of life s lived which moves from having two complementary opposite parts of life (in dynamic balance) to systems which have one part ‘on top’ and the other parts ‘under’. From ‘horizontal’ arrangements to ‘vertical’ arrangements. Or, we can say, from earthed to unearthed Ways of Being.

The former are typified as ‘moieties’ by anthropologists, and the later cover a wide range of social and power formations in which there is an “upper” class or elite of some sort.

Jan Pouwer was my anthropological mentor, and it was his work on complementary opposition which has influenced my views over the years. It is hard to find anything he published on this theme, but it was constantly present in his lectures in New Zealand 1968-1976.

The late Claude Levi-Strauss thought that the emphasis of the Leiden school on dual organisation was a result of the area of study (or FAS – Field of Anthropological Study) they had access to as a result of the former Dutch empire in what is presently Indonesia.

Levi-Strauss himself, as the pre-eminent representative of modern anthropology, does not appear to place the same importance dual organisation as either indigenous peoples or those with close working relationships with them.

(See Jarich Oosten “A privileged field of study” 2006:para 18. www.erudit.org/revue/etudinuit/2006/v30/n2/017565ar.pdf See also Levi-Strass vis-à-vis Mayberry Lewis in the final chapter of Levi-Strauss 1995 “The Story of Lynx.”)

Irrespective of academic debates, the ‘field of study’ in the modern nation-state of Indonesia (which mapped its self-image onto the former Dutch colony) requires attention to be paid to the position of indigenous people in Papua.

Pouwer, working in New Guinea when it was under Dutch administration, found that the principle of reciprocity was a key feature of their ways of life. There is a consistent message from Papuan peoples that this is missing in the relationship imposed upon them from those who operate in the name of the modern nation-state of Indonesia.

For those of us who see the challenge as being one of reforming life (and not one of having an academic career) we have to look for ways of returning some of life’s wisdom back into our thinking and into our practices – rather than following European master narratives.

My position is also informed by my understanding of the situation of Australia’s First Peoples as captives of the modern Anglo-Australian nation-state.

Quite clearly, in the present Australian situation one part of life (Anglo-Australia) believes it occupies a completely superior position over that of the original First Peoples.

Instead of balanced exchange relationships within the whole of life – as is the case with Australia’s First Peoples – with the arrival of dominating Europeans, believing they are born to rule in Australia, genuine social life has “ended” for the original Australians.

Absolutely superiority is presumed to be found only with introduced British cultural forms.

The 1901 Anglo-Australian Constitution (which began life as a British Act of Parliament) does not recognise Australia’s First Peoples as First Peoples, and does not acknowledge the place of their cultural practices in “Australian” social and ecological formations.

This is not past tense. In the 2012 report of Expert Panel on the recognition of indigenous Australians in the Constitution, for example, one of the recommendations is:

Executive summary
Recommendations
Recommendations for changes to the Constitution
The Panel recommends:

...

5 That a new ‘section 127A’ be inserted, along the following lines:
Section 127A Recognition of languages
(1) The national language of the Commonwealth of Australia is English.
(2) The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages are the original Australian languages, a part of our national heritage.

http://www.youmeunity.org.au/uploads/assets/Expert%20Panel%20report%20-%20Executive%20Summary%20and%20Recommendations.pdf

A long campaign for the recognition of Australia’s First Peoples in the Anglo-Australian Constitution has produced a recommendation English be the only national language enshrined in the Constitution! The voices of those who speak the original languages of this country are missing from this debate. Rebalancing life has a long way to go in Australia.

The experts also found that the question of indigenous sovereignty was not to be included:

“The question of sovereignty

At consultations and in submissions to the Panel, there were numerous calls for a reappraisal of currently accepted perceptions of the historical relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians from the time of European settlement. Chapter 9 discusses one of the significant issues to have emerged during the consultation process: the aspiration of some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for recognition of their sovereign status.

The Panel has concluded that any proposal relating to constitutional recognition of the sovereign status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be highly contested by many Australians, and likely to jeopardise broad public support for the Panel’s recommendations. Such a proposal would not therefore satisfy at least two of the Panel’s principles for assessment of proposals, namely ‘contribute to a more unified and reconciled nation’, and ‘be capable of being supported by an overwhelming majority of Australians from across the political and social spectrums’. While questions relating to sovereignty are likely to continue to be the subject of debate in the community, including among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the Panel does not consider that these questions can be resolved or advanced at this time by inclusion in a constitutional referendum proposal.”

There is a notion of 'the thief's script' which has been applied to Middle East affairs. The Expert Panel has pre-empted Consitutional debate about indigenous sovereignty in order to comply with the Australian version of this script - in which an entire continent has been expropriated from the original peoples.

The surviving sovereignty of First Peoples is to be sacrificed in order to uphold the notion of a single and superior Anglo-speaking modern nation-state. Ethnocide is considered ‘normal’ in modern Australia.

European notions of sovereignty draw heavily on a one-sided and jealous notion in which only one sovereign is possible. All power is at a king of supreme apex – absolute and dominant. However, in the 21st century we can take stock of the planetary havoc wrought on life by this temporary fashion, and look for healing solutions – such as co-existing forms of sovereighty.

By looking at other forms of reason – those which have guided life outside of Europe to better balanced outcomes – we can begin to conceive of power sharing relationships based on ‘horizontal’ complementary oppositions rather exclusive ‘vertical’ hierarchies.

Based on relating rather than manipulation and control. Such is our healing challenge.

Theme for 2012 - regaining our balance

My theme on this blog for 2012 will be to do some work on what i regard as a key issue - rediscovering the importance of complementary oppostion in thought and in practice.

Part of this involves looking at how the dynamic balance of 'moiety' forms of social organisation (two counterbalanced hemispheres of life) have been replaced with an 'upper' class seeking to dominate a 'lower' class.

While the many associated forms of spin from this arrangement would have us accept this situation as 'normal' we can move to a position where we can see it as not only abnormal but a gross deformation of life.

Regaining our full well-being requires than we move beyond modern one-sided forms of representation.

I will allow comments initially and see if the spam becomes too much to manage.

cheers

Bruce Reyburn