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The drift to neo-authoritarianism: we are currently seeing a new form of government marked by the militarisation of social life, limits on parliamentary oversight and the neutering of the media.

Article Excerpt
Introduction

This short essay focuses upon the way so many Australians have lost confidence in the ability of their elected representatives to provide answers to the problems troubling them. It emphasises that in Australia we have only a limited democracy. Nevertheless, most people still assume that it will continue to go some way towards providing for their wellbeing. Holding to this faith, they have yet to face up to the fact that it is unlikely to continue to do so in the longer term.

In the place of a limited democracy which, via representative government, has been in some degree responsive to the will of the people, we are at present moving towards a neo-authoritarian political culture. As we sense this shift, it troubles many people profoundly. But because, in the aftermath of a history of widespread insecurity and want, our social system provides much that we deeply value, we are reluctant to recognise the imminent ending of a period of material prosperity. Along with that, we draw back from any full engagement with the prospect that the limited democracy which was the complement of prosperity might be radically undermined and replaced by a neo-authoritarian regime. One main reason for the failure to recognise the neo-authoritarian drift transforming our political culture lies in the unprecedented and comprehensive nature of the transformation now affecting our whole way of life. In issue 82 of Arena Magazine, John Hinkson outlined social changes in which this shift is grounded. A core issue is the way the technosciences are displacing the labour of the hand in which an earlier stage of capitalism was grounded. In this complex process, labour and craft are by no means simply replaced. Rather, they are downgraded and marginalised while at the same time being merged and fused with technologically innovative adaptations. By re-making both the manner and the context of our interchange with the natural world and its resources, the newfound prominence of the technosciences is also affecting our engagement in, and overall sense of, social reality.

Because the sciences--from which of course the technosciences derive--have been outside the direct experience of most people, the fundamental significance of this shift is only slowly comprehended. In the short run, its ameliorating consequences for public health and material well-being deflect attention from what, in the longer term, may be far less welcome processes of reconstruction of our life in common.

In his earlier outline of the role of intellectual enquiry and its practical expression in the re-making of the social, John Hinkson drew special attention to what he termed 'distance relations'. This refers to the way in which mediating technologies--technologies such as the long familiar print, or those associated with the Internet--reconstruct and transform our more direct or face-to-face relations with one another. Furthermore, such relations, via telecommunications, undermine our taken for granted assumptions about the operation of representative democracy. This radical discontinuity affecting the way in which contemporary life is conducted is nevertheless masked, pushed from the foreground of understanding. Overall, a rising standard of living for the great majority, set within an ongoing capitalist framework, diverts attention from the quite basic transformation of social life and, at least for the present, obscures the neo-authoritarian drift that is one key aspect of that process.

The surge in productivity, from which the intellectually grounded technosciences are now so inseparable, does not only ground the consumerism within which neo-liberal capitalism draws upon public consent. Within the long shadow of the Enlightenment, that semblance of continuity is itself one crucial aspect of a more embracing aspiration. That is the hope that an overall sense of fulfilment may be gained by way of the material conquest of human limitation. It is vitally important to remember that our limited democracy is one expression of that hope. Capitalism for its part--as were those states within the orbit of the USSR--is a vehicle that promises its realisation. Both systems are/were drawn towards authoritarianism as public confidence in the hopes they engender breaks down.

For the most part, Australians are unaware of the larger historical context of the emergence of capitalism. Nor have they any strong sense that the current framework of representative democracy is a relative newcomer as a way of ordering state authority and the rule of law. For more than a century now we have conducted our lives within that rule. People take it for granted as...

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