Conference Excerpt
by McKenzie Wark
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 62
Spring/Summer 1998/1999

Part 2

Frank Brennan argues that non-believers "in the public domain refrain from gratuitous aspersions such as the description of the Roman Catholic Church as an ossified institution. Unless church people abuse their public trust, they are as entitled as anyone else in the public domain to civic courtesy." That's a vain hope, I'm afraid. But more to the point, not defensible as a matter of ethical principle. It is an honestly held proposition to many secularists that the churches are ossified institutions and impediments to reason. We must be as free to talk believers out of their loyalty to their churches as the churches are free to talk people into belonging to them.

Everyone wants terms of debate in the republic that suit them, but the republic is all about difference. There can be no agreement in advance about the rules of debate any more than there can be agreement in advance about the outcome of the debate. The rules themselves are always up for debate as well, and not always politely.

What matters, I think, is that people who have strongly held ethical beliefs about the desirability of a particular outcome need to coordinate their approach to public debate. A good example, I think, was the problem of justice for Aboriginal people on the native title issue. Many people agree in broad terms on a desired outcome who have very different reasons for arriving at a shared conclusion. People who, on other matters, may disagree very strongly.

Native Title strikes me as an issue that bears out the postmodern approach to ethical thinking, in that it is not only the outcomes sought by the parties that are incompatible, so too are the criteria each side proposes for judging the merits of the case.

Environmental protection also has this incommensurable quality. It's a classic example of what Jean François Lyotard calls a difference. The terms proposed by the rival parties are such that they exclude the possibility of the other's case being heard. Argued in ecological terms, there is no argument for development that reduces biodiversity. Argued in economic terms, the quantification of the environment is not only arbitrary, it puts it on a par with other quantified resources, and permits trade-offs between that which destroys the very value of what ecologists seek to preserve.
One could go on multiplying cases, but it seems to me that this is how the res publica usually works. Incompatible aims, argued in incompatible terms confront each other and seek a public adjudication on a case by case basis, whether it's what secularists may say about believers or what pastoralists may do on land subject to native title or what ecologists may preserve of resources others want to develop.

Not all differences, however, have to lead to division. Difference can be the very principle that connects us together. This might appear at the moment as a fashionably postmodern idea, but in my book The Virtual Republic (Allen & Unwin, 1997) I made some effort to trace it back through Hannah Arendt, David Hume and Machiavelli to classical sources.

To approach it just from Hume's point of view-he argued that we belong neither to a unifying spiritual community nor to an atomised war of all against all; rather, we experience the world from the point of view of the immediate pack, clan or family grouping to which we most immediately belong. We are bound, he says, to our fellow gang or family members by sympathy.

The point of the institutions of civility, among which Hume counted public conversation, is to extend our sympathy, by artificial means, to people even more different to us than our immediate associates. The institutions of civility extend sympathy to wider and wider circles, always incompletely. What's important about this idea, I think, is that it doesn't require the suspension of difference in the process of extending sympathy. Sympathy is the extension of feeling to what is different, not the rendering of it as the same.

To: Part 3

McKenzie Wark McKenzie Wark is lecturer in Media Studies at Macquarie University and author of Virtual Geography (Indiana University Press, 1994) and The Virtual Republic (Allen & Unwin, 1997). This is an edited version of his address, "Justice and Entitlement in the Republic of God", given at Zadok's 1998 Biennial Conference.