The Rise of the Relativists
CONFERENCE EXCERPT
by Valerie Braithwaite
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 62
Spring/Summer 1998/1999

Part 2

For about ten years now I have been studying the care of elderly people at home. When I started out, one of the most important sources of support were community nurses. (Continued on page 20) (Continued from page 17) They would come in to meet the security needs of the patients, fix up the medication, the bandages, give the elderly person a bath to prevent falls and help with lifting. But at the same time the community nurses would sit and have a cup of tea with the person and they would talk about all sorts of things. It is amazing how much harmony gets going when you give someone a bath, and this was a very important way of recognising and meeting those harmony needs in the institution of care giving. But what happened was community nurses had their budgets cut and they were told that they had to be more accountable. They had to get through so many visits per day. Consequently, the cup of tea went out the window and then so did the meeting of the harmony needs.

The ACT, I believe, is now trying to get social workers and other health professionals out of the hospital and back into the community. Though this is being done to be cost-efficient, there is a great opportunity here to start meeting the harmony needs of that community. I'm telling this story to show that harmony and security are not necessarily fighting each other all of the time. Very often you can jump on the bandwagon of delivering services more efficiently by getting them out of the hospital and actually adding a big whack of harmony values (if you are in a position to influence that policy and influence the way in which those social workers do their work).

Another example involves the problem of bullying in our schools. One response has been expelling the kids who are consistent bullies (in the ACT we have the phenomenon of 'bullies' simply moving from one school to the next). It's an understandable 'security value' response but it's terrible for the expelled kids' education and it certainly does nothing for their social development. What is needed, however, is the injection of 'harmony values', which is something I am trying at the moment. We are aiming to do something along the lines of restorative justice, to try to get in there before the kids are expelled. We are not going to fight that 'security' system, but we are going boosting a 'harmony value' system in schools by getting kids who are bullying others to actually face their victim's parents, to look at the consequences of their actions and to find out why they do it. Then we can try to set in place social controls in the school that will help those kids manage their problems better.

Finally, let me me mention the area of tax. As someone involved in the Cash Economy Task Force, strangely, I have heard no mention of tax as a way of promoting harmony values, of making our society fairer. It has all been about how we can beat this person who is cheating the system in that way-an elaborate game of accountant and bureaucrat and citizen all trying to outsmart each other and reduce costs.

Now in that situation it is no point saying, 'Well, I think you should give all your money to the tax department and not worry about trying to reduce your tax.' But what I could do is sit there and ask, 'Is it really worth cheating the government so that some kid is gets bashed-up in the playground in western Sydney because there are not enough teachers? Or someone in a nursing home gets terrible bed-sores because you are too mean to pay that extra $100?' Now when I started doing that in the Australian Tax Office they certainly thought I was strange because they had never thought of it in that way. The whole issue of taxation had been captured by the 'security value' system, that competitive 'how-do-we-farm-out-the-resources?' value system.

So this comes back to my original point: it's not that people don't cherish their 'harmony values'. They do. It's that institutions are precluding them from acting on those harmony values. I don't see our problem as one of people who are high on 'security values' versus people who are high on 'harmony values'. In fact, most people are high on both. But we do have a group of people whom I call the moral relativists. These are people who don't actually believe in 'security values' or 'harmony values'. They have always been there-it's not that we have more of these people than before-but I wonder whether today they have a legitimate voice that they didn't have in the past.
Now I want to draw a distinction between the conservatives who are strong on security values-and very often those who are strong on these values say we have to have these to actually have harmony-but I want to draw a distinction between conservatives who have been a very visible force in our community and this other group of moral relativists who actually don't seem to believe in any principles at all, who decide what is good policy in terms of what appeals purely to self-interest. These people are consequentialists of the most extreme kind and the reason for so much despondency at the moment is that the moral relativists have really captured the discourse, have captured the language in the form of economic rationalism. Now, it is certainly true that many conservative people will support economic rationalist principles, but I suspect that they come from a different base and I suspect that there are issues where these two groups really come apart which we can't see at the moment.

So someone like Pauline Hanson comes along and recognises the need for the articulation of these values. Now she did it in an uninformed way. But who could blame her for being uninformed when politicians from the Labor and Liberal Parties won't address either the conservative or the liberal values in a true and sincere way?

To: Perspectives Issue 62

Valerie Braithwaite Valerie Braithwaite is a researcher at the Research School of Social Science at the Australian National University. This is an edited version of her response to Veronica Brady's address, "Australian Spirituality: the role of values and faith in the body politic", given at Zadok's 1998 Biennial Conference..