Welcome back! It’s a new year, and here’s a note for regular readers…
I’d like to thank two readers (Doug and Karen) who kindly pledged to pay a $5 monthly subscription in future. As mentioned at the end of 2023, I don’t think I have enough subscribers yet to justify turning on paid subscriptions. If in future I do, non-paying subscribers will still get some free content. Paid subscribers would be motivating me to do the research for you, write more, and post more frequently.
2024 is the big ‘year of elections’: the US, the UK, India, South Africa, Taiwan, Russia to name a few important ones. Prediction: Putin will get re-elected. But what about Trump and Modi? Will AI-generated disinformation harm electoral integrity? What will the Taiwanese election (13 January) tell us about the likelihood of war?
The Luxon government’s first 100 days end on 8 March (depending on when you pressed Go). What will their scorecard look like? Do they have any plans after that, or will they just smile and wave? Anyway, who invented the idea of ‘first hundred days’?
And what about the Treaty?
Farewell to academia
I’m kicking off 2024 with a look back over my academic career – which ended last year unceremoniously, and yet voluntarily, due to institutionalised stupidity. What follows are notes towards the farewell lecture that I might have given, if asked. It may be a bit long and, well, academic. But I wanted to put this out there, and I promise to get back to the real world in the next newsletter!
(Plagiarism scandals are newsworthy at the moment, so, if anyone has time to scour through my work, they’re welcome.)
Why pain is political
An enduring theme in my 30-year career was pain. On Google Scholar, my most cited article is:
Duncan, G. 2000. Mind-Body Dualism and the Biopsychosocial Model of Pain: What Did Descartes Really Say?, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine, Vol 25, 4, pp. 485–513, free to download here.
Poor old René Descartes is the straw man – or whipping boy – for cases against so-called ‘western’ science and medicine, in favour of supposedly holistic models of (for example) pain management. Not often do writers show much understanding of what Descartes actually said, so this article sets that straight, and it points out how the contemporary biopsychosocial model of pain is, in an unexamined way, about as dualistic as Descartes’ discredited theory of distinct substances (mind and body) that somehow interconnect. No one supports Cartesian dualism, but no one can convincingly answer his question: how do events in the body cause what we feel consciously?
Medical experts, by the way, agree that pain is subjective. But people get annoyed if they take that to mean ‘it’s all my head’. But what has this to do with politics and public policy? That’s partly explained in this article:
Duncan, G. 2003. Workers’ compensation and the governance of pain. Economy and Society Vol 32, 3, pp. 449–477, free to download here.
It looks at pain, insurance and governmentality (à la Foucault) and came from my curiosity about why public institutions are concerned with what we feel.
Later on, I refined and expanded my thoughts about the political meanings and uses of pain. Unlike Romance languages, English adopted pain (rather than dolour), and pain has the same Latin roots as penalty and punishment. What could be more political than punishment?
Duncan, G. 2017. The Meanings of ‘Pain’ in Historical, Social, and Political Context, The Monist, Vol 100, 4, pp. 514–531, https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onx026 (still pay-walled but I can email it to you).
I summed this up in a chapter (‘On Saying It Hurts: Performativity and Politics of Pain’) in an edited volume called The Meanings of Pain. This discussion ranges from the closest intimacy, everyday chatter, the clinic, to public policy and human rights. It addresses our verbal expressions of pain, their lived contexts and effects, within relationships and among social groups, altering mutual obligations, eliciting actions and reactions, and so creating moral, legal and political norms. It considers the social and political implications of ordinary performative pain-talk, in particular regarding the relationship between pain and justice. Pain is productive, in other words, and far from meaningless.
And so how is happiness political?
Half-way through this journey, I decided to contrast pain with happiness. So, my second most frequently cited article is:
Duncan, G. 2010. Should Happiness-Maximization be the Goal of Government?. Journal of Happiness Studies Vol. 11, 2, pp. 163–178. (You can download the pre-publication manuscript here.)
This critiques the assumption that evidence about the conditions under which people report feeling the most happy should directly prescribe what governments do. I found no empirical evidence or compelling ethical reason to convince us that governments should set happiness-related goals – although this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t either. Researchers are often naive about politics and public policy, as they assume there’s a self-evident step from ‘what is the case’ to ‘what ought to be done’. Publishing such a critique in the canonical academic journal of happiness research was challenging, but the editors saw fit to republish it in an edited volume of ‘best articles’.
My approach to happiness studies was expanded in a chapter in:
Hill, N., Brinkmann, S., & Petersen, A. (eds.). 2019. Critical Happiness Studies. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203730119. You can download my chapter here.
This argued that happiness research is pseudo-science. It traced a whole history (in politics, economics and psychology) of efforts to ignore subjective states like happiness, and counter-movements to reinsert them and then to use them as a basis for political action. So, if you’d wanted to know why the over-hyped Wellbeing Budget of the Ardern government would be a fizzer, I could have explained.
How and why does government seek to act on how we feel – not just on what we do? Why do people insist on it? In this, you could include depression, anxiety, loneliness, etc., as well as pain and happiness, or the whole wellbeing agenda. Why do taxpayers fund anti-depressants that are prescribed on a hit-and-miss basis, and are no better than placebos in possibly as much as 80% of cases?
Paradoxically, this doesn’t mean that political leaders and public servants should profess not to care at all about your wellbeing – or not if they want to be trusted.
Political trust
In the literature, trust is defined normally as an attitude or opinion, or even a wager, about others acting in our interests. I found this was misguided: we can and do develop conscious feelings or opinions about others’ trustworthiness, but trust is originally unspoken and interpersonal. It’s an inter-subjective quality of relationships, which may be one-to-one or generalised socially. We first trust others implicitly, in an unspoken or unthinking way, well before we form opinions about their trustworthiness, and this is formed by what we do – including performative utterances such as promises – and how our actions affect our obligations to one another. That’s why trust is political: it’s about who owes what to whom, and it restrains what we do. Trusting a person gives them power; we trust them not to misuse their advantage. But sometimes people don’t get much choice: trust the ruler or be killed. Case in point: Stalin.
The state we grow up in sets our expectations about the conditions of political trust. People are better off in high-trust societies, but that doesn’t mean that they blindly and unconditionally trust their leaders. A degree of distrust is rational, and so we hedge politicians in with transparency requirements and elections, because we trust no one with political power. To take a cue from Derrida: trust trusts only the untrustworthy. If we can safely bet that a person will act in our interests, then we’re not really trusting them. It’s when we can’t make such a calculation that trust is called for.
It makes sense to talk about a general or abstract political trust, as we assume a kind of deal or reciprocity between those who rule and those who are ruled, and we notice – painfully – when that trust gets breached. I wrote a book about this:
Duncan, G. 2019. The Problem of Political Trust: A Conceptual Reformulation. Routledge available online.
(I found that writing books would achieve more than fiddling around with peer-reviewed journals, trying to second-guess and pander to the random opinions of anonymous colleagues. As I wasn’t in engineering or medicine, no lives depended on what I wrote, but you’d think they did, given the nit-picking. Sayre’s law: ‘Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.’)
Trust in government and in leaders is, of course, a big issue, especially nowadays. But constitutions are founded on distust: that is, we’ve learned to trust no one with ill-defined or unlimited powers, and so we limit and separate powers, and we hold periodic elections. We notice it when governments fail to uphold promises, while we take successes for granted. We hardly think about the organised effort it takes to keep traffic lights functioning, for example, and it’s remarkable how frequently drivers obey them. Even anti-vax protestors would have stopped at red lights on their way home, for their own and others’ safety. There’s a curious and paradoxical mix of implicit trust and distrust.
The problem of government
All communities are governed in a general sense: they have enforceable prohibitions and obligations that affect what people do. Major contemporary problems, like poverty and climate change, need government, but we haven’t seen enough effective solutions so far. The trouble is that government itself is a problem that’s never been solved. This puzzle set me on a wild journey through history, beginning in ancient China, to try to understand the enduring problem of government:
Duncan, G. 2021. How to Rule? The Arts of Government from Antiquity to the Present. Routledge available online.
Spoiler: there’s no solution, but the problem is inescapable.
There may be no compelling reason why governments should aim to maximise our happiness, but there are compelling reasons for governing and for being governed. Aristotle wrote about it. Two and a half thousand years or more of debates about why we need government, about how much is too much, and about what’s the best way to do it, and yet… why haven’t we solved it?
Political and ethical know-how don’t advance exponentially in the manner of natural sciences and technology. Many of today’s political leaders are much less skilled at what they’re doing than Thucydides and Aristotle were, but hardly anyone pays attention to Aristotle’s physics now. And new technologies create new problems as well as solutions.
This led me to ask what we could do about this problem of government now – in a general sense, without presuming democracy or any other kind. The rise of authoritarianism is far from a good thing, but, based on recent experiments, ‘just add democracy’ hasn’t always worked well. If you let ‘the people’ decide, they may regret it later. Case in point: Brexit. Or notice the failure of democracy in Tunisia since the Arab Spring. There may be no universally applicable solution, but I’ve outlined the dimensions of the problem in the next book:
Duncan, G. 2024. Government and Political Trust: The Quest for Positive Public Administration. Routledge, available online.
It concludes with some positive ideas about what can be done better. But I’m not holding my breath awaiting calls from world leaders!
What about New Zealand politics?
Yes, I did write about politics and public policy in Aotearoa NZ, and I’ve referred to some of that from time to time in these newsletters, if only to say I’d covered things elsewhere.
Six years of a Labour government oversaw the ruination of our universities and polytechs – and of my academic career. If you worked in tertiary education, Hipkins wasn’t ‘in it for you’. The National-led government will be equally harmful. The university I worked in showed no interest in the work that I’ve summarised above – but most of us experienced that.
If you paid taxes in New Zealand, then you helped to fund my career, so this column is, in part, intended for public accountability.
I can claim to have influenced some international academic discourses, especially the pain and happiness stuff, given ongoing citations. And I’ve shown that we can do government better, if we try. I’m not one of those authors who whine about the end of democracy as we knew it; instead I’ve tried to say something constructive about how to govern. And I’ve contributed to public dialogue about New Zealand politics and elections.
All political careers end in failure
Enoch Powell (1912-98), classics scholar and notorious UK Conservative and (later) Ulster Unionist MP, once wrote: ‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’
Do all academic careers end in futility?