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

Part 3

This is a different approach also to the liberal call for tolerance. Tolerance is the exercise of indulgence towards difference at the margins by a powerful centre, which knows it can tolerate some difference because of its capacity to coerce acceptance of a good deal of sameness. I've never found tolerance a very advanced view of how the republic is supposed to work, and in any case the very word sounds to my ears as a left over from long and bitter centuries of religious sectarianism.

What I want to conclude with, then, is not a call for greater tolerance; rather, I want to persuade you of the value of an expansion of civic entitlement. The dark side of the conflict over political correctness was the way liberals and conservatives sometimes tried their best to deny entitlement to speak. I think it was a rather unevenly matched confrontation. The denial of an entitlement to speak that political correctness allegedly forced on white males seemed to me far less effective than the denial of the entitlement of minorities that followed from the ridicule of so-called politically correct practices of managing public speech. But either way, its a zero sum game. Everybody loses a little in the spiral of that debate. It played into the hands of populist demagogues. Thoughtful liberals and conservatives now find they have a common interest in heading off the closure of debate.

I have always taken a more libertarian view of public communication. To be offended by free speech is better than to be stupefied by its absence. But its not enough to support free speech merely within the status quo arrangements of public life. The question to ask is: Whose entitlement to speak is not even being recognised? An extraordinary and painful development in Australian public life, still going on, is the struggle by indigenous people to have their entitlements honoured. Their entitlements not just to land within the commonwealth, but their entitlement to speak within the virtual republic. And of course, such an entitlement will almost inevitably mean that differences will emerge within Aboriginal opinion.

I think there are many Christians and secularists who might share a common aspiration for the expansion of entitlement to participate in the conversation of the republic. There are many ways it can be argued for. We are all God's children, Christians might say. Or I might say that sympathy for one's immediate family can be extended by the artifice of civil institution to incorporate everybody, indeed, even beyond that. We are all God's creatures. Or as Bob Brown argues, entitlement can be extended beyond the human to the animal and natural worlds. It's possible to think of this in terms of an embracing unity, as the continuum of the kingdom of God. But it also possible to think of it, as that heretic Baruch Spinoza thought of it, as an endless, involuted proliferation of differences. But where differences meet for the purposes of struggling for a social justice, for the good life, is within the human republic.

To: Perspectives Issue 62

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.