A Truely Civil Society, Eva Cox Page 1

A Truly Civil Society

Eva Cox
Broadcast: Tuesday, 7th November, Radio National.

Let me put my values on the table: I believe we are responsible for each other, as well as ourselves. I act for others so I can live with myself. This position runs counter to some of the prattling on about the politics of difference by postmodernists who seem to deny that we can identify injustice, or that we can act to prevent it. I believe it is up to us, all of us, to make up our minds about the world we want and to take some responsibility to make this world happen.

The makers of current political agendas focus on markets which exclude the social. This omission leaves space for the peddlers of social snake oil, like Newt Gingrich's 'Contract with America', who offer easy solutions to the emerging social problems .

Neither the communist push for central control nor the laissez-faire of market forces, can work on their own. Both these models fail because they are dramatically incomplete, one-eyed, and do not recognise that society is more than the public sphere and economics. We cannot do without some forms of collectivity. Nor can we run an entire society by use of the collective will, but competing marketeers in head-on battle actually destroy society.

The limits of most grand theories is they leave out most of the social and private aspects because these are deemed to be women's spheres.

There are relatively few grand theories by women. But one woman to whom I often return, is Hannah Arendt, a German Jewish philosopher who also fled Hitler. Her dissenting views, including those on the human condition were often ignored because they were different from the prevalent male writings of that time.

Hannah Arendt's version of being fully human involves three types of human action. She sees family life and paid work as only two of three parts of the Human Condition. Part three is the vita activa, public life, in which we collectively create civil spheres. This makes us uniquely human as only human beings have the capacity for thought and collective debate and action. Loss of any of the three parts of the human condition or the overemphasis on any one, creates problems.

Do we live to work, or work to live? How do we allocate our time and other resources? If we take on board Arendt's three aspects of the human condition, including the vita activa, then we need to find time.

If we need time for public life, as well as family and work, then we need to look at public policies, social commitments and personal choices. Time relates to hours of work and the values we place on paid and unpaid work. This raises the issue of whether the present pressures on work and family militate against an active civil society.

Civil societies are also civic societies, that is, we as citizens must take some responsibility for changing what we do not like. There is a wide debate about citizenship underway. Much of what is written involves claims about the rights of individuals and even groups. But what happens when those rights conflict? Have we forgotten the inevitable tensions between rights and responsibilities and the search for individual freedoms? Can we retain social cohesion and the possibility of individual autonomy? These questions can only be answered by all of us as active participants in a civil society.

Starting with the proposition that our society is becoming increasingly uncivil, these lectures will trace the often forgotten but powerful forces that connect us as social beings. These forces - trust, reciprocity and mutuality - survive in our everyday lives but are not reflected in public policy and therefore are losing ground.

There are too many of us who feel pessimistic about the future, who feel society, is gradually coming apart. The idea of the social is losing ground to the concepts of competition, and the money markets are replacing governments. The social aspects of humanity have somehow disappeared and we are left with a more atomised image of individuals competing in an endless process of distrust.

Trust is essential for our social wellbeing. Without trusting the goodwill of others, we retreat into bureaucracy, rules and demands for more law and order. Trust is based on positive experiences with other people and it grows with use. We need to trust that others are going to be basically reasonable human beings.

Distrust starts from the top as well as the bottom. I have collected some survey results which show that trust in government and big business is low and probably reducing. A compilation of academic surveys from the ANU, showed half the population trusted governement to do the right thing in 1969, but the proportion had dropped to one third by 1993.

The AMR Quantum Social Monitor's 1993 poll showed three quarters agreed that business is too concerned with profits; and over 90% agreed that without Governement regulation, business would take advantage of consumers.

In another survey, two economists, Glen Withers and David Throsby, find that we may even be prepared to pay more taxes to pay for the more civilised society.

While Australians have always had a long tradition of larrikin responses to authority, now the framework has changed. Now it is governments themselves who seem to be cynical about their ability to merit our trust. Some seem actively hell-bent on confirming our levels of distrust and suggesting business can offer better services than can the public sector.

The rhetoric of distrusting government spending is common to all our current political parties, but some parties really mean it. Those politicians who believe in imported theories of market forces want us to trust business more and government less. If part of our sense of wellbeing is our faith in governments, the denigration of public services by governments themselves reduces our sense of comfort and trust. And the polls show that people do not trust business either.

Australia's social development has, from our convict beginnings, been closely linked with governments. Collective action created the working man's paradise, and our belief in egalitarian structures. So telling us not to trust government, spills into not trusting our neighbours or even not trusting ourselves.

We lose trust when we enter parliament house and most of our public institutions through security entrances, and we see private guards protecting public places. We lose trust when we are too scared to use public transport, to walk the streets, or talk to strangers.

We need to build a store of trust and goodwill as part of our social capital - a collective term for the ties that bind us. Distrust can stress and fracture our bonding. An accumulation of social capital enhances our quality to life and provides the base for the development of financial and human capital. With an adequate level of social capital we can enjoy the benefits of a truly civil society.

Eva Cox is a prominent commentator on social policy who lectures in Social Science at the University of Technology, Sydney. This is am extract from the Boyer Lectures for 1995 broadcast in November on Radio National Reprinted with permission.