The paper below was delivered at the October 2002 annual conference of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia: Blurred Boundaries: Australians and Globalisation: Negotiating Our Way, at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, and published in the Conference Proceedings, 2003.

Abstract

The social imagining is still anchored in a real territory to which we, as a group, belong. The territory connects us in unseen ways and our experience of this connectedness is more visceral than rational. Globalisation can be seen to loosen the territorial hold and produce multiple forms of belonging centred on the individual. The power of the brand-name (whether commercial or political) represents a cultural shift—the isolation of the individual cut off from the imagining of group meanings and identity. Meanwhile, the underlying cultural-survival programming for belonging to a group remains active though ignored. This pattern can be identified from cultural evidence as having cropped up regularly as an issue to be paid attention at times of radical change in Western history. Its three dimensions that shape the ethical space of individual belonging and the institutions of society are: authorisation for occupation of territory (or role), the way shared knowledge is used and the legitimation of limits. An obvious challenge to the thought-numbing brand-name, in politics as elsewhere, is to use the ethical space of our territorial belonging to debate the nature of authorisations, individual and group responsibilities, and limits imposed by the global context. This paper is drawn from a book in preparation on globalisation as a cultural phenomenon about which we have extensive cross-disciplinary knowledge that can be applied in practical ways to hold society together.

From belonging to brand name: globalisation and the redefining of shared territories

Globalisation means change and quick social response times. My argument here is that, with boundaries blurred, the moment has come to discuss our social programming for belonging so that we can negotiate a way forward during globalisation. The challenge now is to turn knowledge into know-how.

I am dealing here with globalisation as a social phenomenon. The current rate of globalisation is so fast that the natural process of social evolution cannot keep up. The social imagining of who we are is still anchored in real territory, even though globalisation, as a social process, has been going on since the beginning of human society because, as a species, we cannot resist the 3Ts of trade, technology and travel.

I began this work thirty years ago by puzzling over the repetition of a pattern in 17th-18th century English literature. I came across it again about seven years ago when I was asked to analyse a cultural problem in nursing. In both cases I found three criteria for a sense of security in belonging during cultural upheaval: they are authorisation for occupying a territory or role, appropriate knowledge of it, and familiarity with its limits. The recurring question of how to find meaning in life under new conditions and changing expectations surfaces again and again in cultural history. It can be traced back to the dawn of Western literature (7th century BCE). In every case, there is an imagined return to the agrarian certainties of belonging. As a post-graduate I had latched onto a cultural phenomenon brought to the surface by a critical change in modern Western societies. It was the social moment when commodification of land and labour in the new market society meant that territorial belonging was not an inevitable part of life. It had raised the possibility of multiple sites and new ways, of belonging. In the light of subsequent events and the organisational problems of the eighties and nineties, this turns out to have been a practical area for research.

Belonging as ethical space

The ethos or social imagining of a group defines its sense of belonging. This is who we are. Belonging is the ethical space of the community to which we belong. It is the space where we negotiate the meaning of community. As soon as societies become more complex, it is necessary to factor in variations in ways of belonging. Each stage of human settlement therefore demands more of our programming for belonging, because each stage increases the pressure for tangible expressions of the ethical space being produced by the new combination of people. In the period since the late 17th century, science and market society have driven increasingly rapid changes, including a devaluing of symbolic expression. Neuroscientists have identified our species’ dependence on symbolic exchange and that we are diminished as individuals and our social units are disabled if we ignore our basic enabling mechanism, symbolic activity (Young, 1978; Dissanayake, 1992).

Ethical space has shrunk as brand-names drain complexity of meaning and substitute labels. In fact, ‘the characteristic thought-condition of our age is spacelessness: pressure’ (Poole, 1972, p. 142; Gerard, 2002). We see how this works in contemporary events, as when governments in electoral trouble discover an external threat. The call to defence of territory triggers emotional alarm at a threat to the integrity of the cultural group, that is, to people who think and act like us. Only those people who think critically will analyse the validity this call; they are then likely to be dealt with at an emotional level by tagging them as ‘fellow-travellers’ of the identified threat, just as McCarthy did in mid 20th century America.

Belonging, there is good reason to believe, is one of several fundamental brain programs for survival as a cultural group. The best metaphor for how each group comes to have a social imagining is software—social software (e.g., Rozin, 1976; Young, 1978; Dennett, 1993). In evolutionary terms, communication between minds by use of symbols is thought to be quite modern and distinct from physical survival programs, which are ‘hardwired’, because they evolved long ago from our animal ancestors. Social software programs, on the other hand, take advantage of the uniquely human capacity for using symbols to communicate complex notions to each other. This paper argues for us to face up to the mind’s history—revealed in inter-disciplinary evidence—and for us all to put effort into working out how to apply our knowledge and undoubted mental capacity to using what we know of the way the mind’s social software works. It is based on the theory and application of our vast accumulation of knowledge, particularly during the past century, to dealing with the problems produced by that capability. I am scratching the surface here of an area of research with huge potential for future activity.

Belonging is still loaded with symbolism because, whatever we call them to suit the times, authorisation, knowledge and limits trace our social evolution. Those three dimensions of belonging that I began to isolate thirty years ago produce a strange resonance wherever there is a sense of change and risk. Modern brains probably make precognitive responses just like the stirrings of belonging in presubjective groups. The presence of flight or fight reactions suggests that earliest groups were held together by mana, totem and taboo. Authorisation, it turns out, is heavy with mana: blood, sacrifice, monarchy, sovereignty, the founding myth, the culture hero, the spirit of the land. Knowledge is now more secular because its basis is distinguishing difference and developing practice. It has, however, not entirely lost its totemic links to the knowledge of land and sky, flora and fauna, all of which could be safely accessed by using the ‘right’ rituals which helped the presubjective mind attend to reality. Limits can obviously still put us into a panic about taboos: they are linked with the Other, the Outsider, the ‘unnatural’ and the temptation to overstep boundaries.

Globalisation as brand name

In modern terms, belonging functions as ethical space. The pressing issues of authorisation, knowledge and limits should be engaging us at the conceptual level, not at the non-cognitive level of knee-jerk reactions. This needs to be kept in mind, because globalisation can crowd this communal space with false multiple belongings churned out by the mass media to meet popular demand for personal meaning, where celebrities, lifestyle icons, or narrow identity groups fill the empty space. People who are missing the comfort of belonging and the unspoken assumptions shared with fellow members of an ethical space will, if necessary, ‘identify’ with brand-names as a substitute for their lost sense of being us.

Our politicians are chosen for a role in the ethical space called being Australian. It is our task to keep them aware of what this means and to keep it in context. At present they are opting out by using globalisation as a brand-name. The symbol economy operates outside the sphere of belonging. But, the real people who serve the symbol economy, live in a real economy; they cannot exist without exchange of goods and services. People in the real economy belong. Communities have an ethos. Ethos is shared in ethical space. I think we can as a nation work through to solutions if we keep our eye on the real economy, which operates in real territory, at a local government, state and national level and is intimately connected to people.

In fact, globalisation has been a gift for lazy politicians and policy-makers. First of all they brand globalisation as though it were a monolith. Yet it is, for all practical purposes, a two-level system: the symbol economy and the real economy. As I see it, the task of politicians and policy-makers is to work with that manageable reality. Instead, politicians put up a screen of brand-names from behind which they can snipe at their opponents or avoid issues, and depend on labels like change, privatisation, productivity, unAustralian. They are caught up in the reductionist habit of misusing labels like Left and Right to close up the ethical space needed to perform their roles as legislators.

The flip-side of the brand-name is political correctness. The brand-name is one-dimensional and, if not exposed to critical analysis, becomes a catchcry that replaces the rich symbolic associations and shared meanings of belonging. In the process, it makes words a stumbling-block: words stop resonating with a network of images and become specific; we get a modern, adult form of Piaget’s absolute realism, which formerly characterised the preliterate (whether in individual or cultural development). One outcome is the kind of dumbing-down that got an American manager sacked and then reinstated—but only after his bosses and colleagues found out that niggardly is not a pejorative reference to African-Americans.

The more we rely on brand-names, the closer we get to ‘Newspeak’. Orwell used Newspeak to exemplify social cohesion being destroyed. The brand-name is sufficiently limiting in itself but, used divisively, labels take up the ethical space for public debate. There is more than enough evidence to support ethologist, Nick Humphrey’s statement that the ‘creative intellect … hold[s] society together’ (1976, p. 307). Working as it does with symbols, the mind is flexible in interpreting and creating new ways of maintaining the social bond (Dennett, 1993). I think we should be working actively on the assumption that ethical space is the reflective capacity of community and the terms in which we express belonging determine the nature of ethical space. It is the essential quality for liberal democracies. In the political context, it is the forum produced by community of interest, in which concerned citizens can freely exchange views. They can lay out their arguments and debate points. In ideal practice, the tensions produced by the differences between political groups who respect the others’ right to debate, should themselves create the ethical space in the market-place of ideas.

The neglect of ethical space is systemic in modern government and organisational practice. Policy rhetoric is itself a series of catchy brand-names: for instance, inclusiveness, participation, non-discriminatory employment policies come as packages with a socially-approved name. Unfortunately, since high ideals are based on logic, not symbolic associations, they often turn into their opposite once put into practice (Musil, 1995; Bohn 1981 ): their outcomes are often not as intended and their processes can be rigid or tortuous. We should be looking at belonging as a mind program that holds groups together. We need to know how it functions as ethical space, and what this means about the symbol-rich social imagining of community. We need to be building on what cultural history and modern practice already suggest: that there are three sets of imagery that structure thinking within the ethical space; and that they are our authorisation for being there, the knowledge necessary to belong together there, and the definition of its boundaries.

Today, the big question to be faced by everyone, from the individual to the multinational is: how do you define your territory?

Authorisation, knowledge, limits

We have a vast reservoir of knowledge to draw on, and we cannot afford to waste it. If we were to build on our understanding of the symbolic material that clusters powerfully—and disturbingly—around belonging, we would be able to use it to define public debate on community issues and could shape more informed, and less emotionally subverted discussion. Failure to acknowledge the symbolic importance of knowing who we are and how our borders are to be used, has meant losing momentum in maintaining the cultural integrity of Australia as the world faces the new wave of displaced peoples.

Understanding authorisation would have saved time, money and wasted emotion in the debate on the republic. The situation could have been managed in a way that enriched our sense of belonging together if there had been open discussion of the symbolic basis of authorisation in the paradoxical link between monarchy and republic. Public discussion actually homed in on this connection when it became bogged in the practical expression of authority. Would the source of the President’s authority be derived from direct election, or via a Prime Minister acting on parliamentary advice? If, in far distant times, it was the gods who authorised occupation of territory, there was always a leader—the monarch—through whom that authority was filtered. This is why the replacement for the anointed monarch, even a constitutional one, was such a huge issue. It would still have been big but, I am sure, not as big a problem, had that connection been open to analysis. In an ironical corollary to the history of that botched debate, the Prime Minister has now taken on the role the public representative of the people in many situations formerly undertaken by the Queen’s representative, the Governor-General.

We are said to live in a knowledge and information society. In terms of belonging, knowledge raises the question of what we need to know to keep our own territory yielding, both now and for our descendants. Working for family and group survival has always been the cornerstone of social meaning and has become more of an individual site of belonging for the individual since the industrial revolution. Loss of job security therefore threatens exclusion from the benefits of belonging to the many who see themselves as victims of globalisation. Twenty-five years ago Christopher Lasch wrote about the deskilling of the professions and other occupations. This has been a public policy espoused by government ministers who have down-graded the independent and expert Public Service in the name of efficiency and competitiveness. Politicisation of senior appointments appears to have diminished the ethical space where public servants—who are guardians of the public interest—can deal with specialist issues on our behalf. Now we seem to be reduced to a situation where the use of labels for brand-names can be used to obscure genuine debate on the floor of Parliament. With the ethical space of parliament reduced to a cipher, some journalists are asking whether the discussion that belongs to community needs a new forum, perhaps in the form taken by the public hearings of Congressional committees in the United States.

Repelling boarders makes for light relief from the real problem of hanging on to a job, belonging amongst the employed. When it boils down to the lifeboat question of them or us, altruism goes overboard. Survival overrides the ethical space of belonging when the experience of thinking critically about community has been limited by brand-politics. Scare tactics that revived a genuine and long-standing anxiety in this country about blurred boundaries lit a tinder-box of instinctive responses about uncontrolled immigration when desperate people were labelled as illegal immigrants. It engaged the unwitting emotional responses of a significant majority. The Government’s move, although electorally effective, caused long-term damage by defining our belonging as Australians in terms of a competitive exclusion to which many Australians already feel exposed by job insecurity.

On the other hand, the testing of ethical limits can be an example of good parliamentary practice. Stem cell research has recently been a contentious but essentially benign example of politicians at work in the interests of present and future, although it has highlighted their lack of scientific knowledge.

Part of our contemporary malaise comes from denial. Denial, not so much of our past and our present situation as a small developed population, as of our basis for belonging. In Australia we are well placed to pioneer understanding of the importance of belonging as a pattern of programming that shapes cultures and the group response to all the changes in its environment. We should take careful note of several facts. Australia was settled on the authority of a foreign king. Europeans brought foreign knowledge to this land and are only now discovering how the land can be managed. We are uniquely placed in having natural boundaries that are also long and unprotected. Of all peoples, we should be concerning ourselves with the role of belonging in providing the ethical space to negotiate a way forward during the challenges of globalisation.

Growing up as Australians, we had two territories. We had the Europe of our derivative culture, which we imbibed from infancy as an intrinsic part of our mind-food, and the reality of our Australian environment and heritage. But although things have changed since the late fifties, we are running out of time to face the nature of ethical space as the place where belonging together in community comes alive in new ways. Our greatest danger is from doing nothing and failing to analyse the complex potential of belonging. If we deny belonging we deny our capacity to make positive use of the multiple sites—the ethical spaces of the individual and their network of interests. If we allow brand-names to take the place of multiple belongings, we put pressure on ethical space and deny the social potential of globalisation.

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