“You Don’t Know What You Are Saying”: The Damage that “Local” Politicians Do…

“…[to] spearhead a twenty-first century relevant intellectual revolution, university educational system needs to underscore the essentiality of critical thinking in the training of its students.”

Ibuot, E. J., Ibuot, C. J., & Ibia, I. E. (2018). Education, Ideology, and Social Transformation, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 27, 24. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48561674

The local politicians are unaware of the damage they do in their decision making because they refuse to learn, and listen to the educator-critics. For the most part, Australian education product remains grossly inferior for a comparison on the global stage, and this is due to the fact that local politicians have been so concerned in the last three decades to see budgetary savings from what they personally do not value: course offerings in the humanities and social sciences, axed.

The global, social justice, philosophy, community speaks to the damage done (Mukandi 2021). This country once had boldly-speaking liberal and labour intellectuals to show to the politicians the modes, traditions, generations, transformations of thinking (Irving, T., & Scalmer 2005). Now, such persons are impoverished and unable to afford their dose of blood pressure medication. Local politicians know nothing (or too little) about Education, Ideology, and Social Transformation, (Ibuot & Ibia 2018). The population is caught between Promise and Skepticism in The Global South, while Engaged Intellectuals are ignored (Schneider 2017).

The interdisciplinary research evidence is there. This country has been affected, for good and bad, by an American Utopia and we are still “Looking Backward”. (Guarneri 2008). We are still ignorantly living in Nineteenth-Century Racial Thought and hoping for Whitman’s “Democratic Ethnology of the Future” (Phillips 1994). Meanwhile, government bureaucrats live out their ‘colonial’ fantasies and attempting to legitimise, unsuccessfully, on the “Statistical Imaginary” (Rowse & Shellam 2013).

Reading Wilson (2011)’s article, “Gilbert Murray and International Relations: Hellenism, liberalism, and international intellectual cooperation as a path to peace”, it is obvious that most local politicians do not know the first thing about the translation of political theory into practice. From voluminous reading of Hannah Arendt, we see the political decision-makers who think externalities have nothing to do with a person’s problem. So effectively they, each, are in the art of political dismissal. For Arendt, “the supreme value of politics is freedom, and freedom in Arendt’s sense depends on plurality, spontaneity, and the open-ended, unpredictable character of interaction through speech and deed.” (Donald 2000).

REFERENCES

Frederick Donald (2000). Arendt on philosophy and politics, in Dana Villa (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 261–276 (2000)p. 271.

Guarneri, C. J. (2008). An American Utopia and Its Global Audiences: Transnational Perspectives on Looking Backward. Utopian Studies, 19(2), 147–187. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719898

Ibuot, E. J., Ibuot, C. J., & Ibia, I. E. (2018). Education, Ideology, and Social Transformation, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 27, 24–47. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48561674

Irving, T., & Scalmer, S. (2005). Labour Intellectuals in Australia: Modes, Traditions, Generations, Transformations. International Review of Social History, 50(1), 1–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44582870

Mukandi, B. (2021). For Us, By Us: Towards a More Just Philosophical Community. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, 68(3 (168)), 86–110. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48770599

Phillips, D. (1994). Nineteenth-Century Racial Thought and Whitman’s “Democratic Ethnology of the Future.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 49(3), 289–320. https://doi.org/10.2307/2933818

Rowse, T., & Shellam, T. (2013). The Colonial Emergence of a Statistical Imaginary. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 55(4), 922–954. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23526038

Schneider, Nina. (2017). Between Promise and Skepticism: The Global South and Our Role as Engaged Intellectuals. The Global South, 11(2), 18–38. https://doi.org/10.2979/globalsouth.11.2.02

Wilson, P. (2011). Gilbert Murray and International Relations: Hellenism, liberalism, and international intellectual cooperation as a path to peace. Review of International Studies, 37(2), 881–909. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23024624

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Neville Buch

Professional Historian at Professional Historians Association (Queensland) Inc.

Neville Buch (Pronounced Book) Ph.D. is a certified member of the Professional Historians Association (Queensland). Since 2010 he has operated a sole trade business in history consultancy. He was a Q ANZAC 100 Fellow 2014-2015 at the State Library of Queensland. Dr Buch was the PHA (Qld) e-Bulletin, the monthly state association’s electronic publication, and was a member of its Management Committee. He is the Managing Director of the Brisbane Southside History Network.

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