Keith Hart on Sun, 5 Jun 2005 01:21:50 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> On the Dutch "No" Vote |
Bas, >The Dutch, however, live in their own moral, not political, universe and >increasingly so since the Pim Fortuyn murder and and neoconservatist rule >Balkenende-style. In this small little world, there is a general fear of >looking outwards. One way of expressing the alienation of most people is the perceived absence of morality from contemporary politics. It is true that moral purposes reduce the scale of effectiveness to a personal level in the first instance and this is often given as the reason why politicians can't be moral in that sense. The collective good that they allegedly pursue often leaves no room for decent human behaviour. But to be moral is not necessarily to be small in outlook. The great religions have always found ways of uniting personal morality with the widest social agendas. Surely the most powerful charge against Chirac is that no-one would ever suspect him of having a moral agenda. And so rejection of his government fits with a desire to bring the political process closer home than the EU could claim to be at present. These referenda on the EU constituion have given some people the chance to register a protest against 'politics as usual' and the moral energy they bring to that has quite broad implications, even if they start with what matters most to them in particular. I have tried to explore this issue of morality and politics through the metaphor of the gangster in The Hit Man's Dilemma: http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/publications/thmd Keith # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net