In Support Of The Creative Society

We are in the middle of the biggest economic crisis in living memory. The challenge in responding, for leglislators and citizens alike, is to be part of a process that will allow us to find the right way forward, rather than merely the expedient one.

What is crucial to begin with is to understand that the future form of the economy should not be born of the politics of fear. Indeed, if the history of economic crises tells us anything, it is how to avoid turning a recession into a depression. Savage cuts will only make matters worse.
It is necessary now to remake the world. This represents a challenge that should be embraced not just by self-proclaimed progressives, but rather by all citizens, including those who value the best of tradition, who value local and practical wisdom, and who respect the power of the imagination.
The central task, I believe, is to rebuild peaceful, responsible, inclusive lives from the ruins of market extremism and the cultural legacy of an individualism that eschewed any socially based morality of solidarity or of inter-generational justice.

PROPHET OF FUTURE MISERY
In his seminal Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes To Improve The Human Condition Have Failed, James C Scott writes of the rejection of indigenous wisdom, and the destructive consequences set in motion by those who seek to impose what is superficially modern, or apparently more productive, in the short term, without sufficient care for inherited wisdom and knowledge systems.
What Ireland now faces cannot be seen as merely a set of technical or managerial issues. No simple incremental adjustments can deal with the implications of the collapsed market extremism, the barren individualism, the destruction of the public world, and the retreat from inter-dependency that has characterised the politics of the last decade here. Providing a political vision for an alternative to this devalued currency is the most serious challenge of all.
It is not only speculative property values that are toxic. The silence of intellectuals has allowed bogus assumptions to remain in place, masquerading as inevitabilities. As a result, what might be described as False Expertise constitutes the most toxic populism of our time. We are almost drowning in it.
When one reviews the media and the work published in Ireland since the foundation of the State – allowing for that which was excluded by State and institutional censorship, ignorance, and bigotry for so long – there have been few serious engagements with the dark predictions of that great prophet of future misery based on bureaucracy, Max Weber.
Weber envisaged an iron cage, of rationality taken to excess through bureaucracy. He wrote, prophetically: “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally.” That warning has not been heeded.
Such neglect of the tyranny of bureaucratic rules explains, perhaps, why, in responding to our present public finance difficulties, proposals focussing on reducing social transfers to the poor have taken precedence over challenging the irrationality of bureaucracy.
That the debate about cutting social welfare was initiated by a speculative banker, in the person of Sean Fitzpatrick, the former Chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, who has done incredible damage to the reputation abroad of this and future Irish generations, says much in itself.
Yet, despite Max Weber’s prognosis of how rationality would become, in its ill-defined excess, a tyrannical irrationality, such policies masked in the chimerical cloak of pure rationality are still being peddled by some out-of-date economic theorists at the heart of development studies.
The great opportunity we now have, in responding to our own and the global crisis, is of breaking away, in an original manner, in terms of scholarship in Ireland. We have the challenge and opportunity of creating a new, open system of knowledge, a place where theory and intellect can flourish. To do this effectively, we must draw on the practical: on manipulative excellence, the inherited and anticipated wisdoms of a highly educated generation whom the old economic models have failed. We must forge a new way that I want to define as The Creative Society.

HOLY GRAIL OF INCLUSION
The creative society is the essential basis of an innovative economy. The creative society, furthermore, has the advantage of being a powerful tool for inclusive citizenship – for example by not excluding the unemployed from full participation, because of the fact that this economy has failed them.
We must recognise that the cultural space is wider than the economic space; that its rights are far more extensive; and that they define the democratic essence of the public space in a society that claims to cherish all of its citizens equally.
The provision for culture in our budgetary projections, therefore, is a basic provision, not an optional and expendable one. It is from this cultural space too that the vibrant and innovative cultural industries emerge – film, music, dance, visual art, poetry, drama, television.
The potential for employment in the cultural domain is immense. Already many in our shared planet know of Irish writers, actors, artists, poets and performers, from James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, from Count John McCormack to Sinéad O’Connor and U2. Now that they also know about the excesses of those gambler/banker insatiates, that the reputation of Irish artists – built on and drawn from talent and genius, and hard sacrifices too – still stands is a proud shield against being dismissed as a bunch of fakes and chancers.
Knowing this, it would be an act of philistine homage to what has failed, to cut public spending in the arena of arts and culture. It simply makes no economic sense in either the medium or long-term. Such cuts, would, of course, make a mockery of citizenship itself.
On the contrary, now is the time for investment in creativity, for harnessing the best of imagination and tradition. The proof is there of the value of activity that is life-affirming, ecologically sustainable, easily regionalised, and that has an established economic multiplier effect that is far greater than any other source of income.
None of this is a proposal for elitism. By its very definition, a democratic cultural policy has the holy grail of inclusion at its heart. We need to build up our neglected areas of social protection, not submit social welfare provision to a slash and burn response to pay for the calamitous actions of a small elite.
And in relation to that small elite, we must now be given the full facts as to how our economy has come to this position. In one of the banks requiring assistance from the State, the top 50 debtors owe an average of €380 million per client. In another, the top 15 clients account for €500 million each in borrowing. In a former mutual society, the top 30 clients owe €167 million each.
All told, this comes to over €31 billion. Is it not in the public interest to know on what basis these loans were made, what assumptions were operated on, for example, to support the vast inflation of property values, irrespective of the social consequences?
A right-of-centre government took its share of the yield from the revenues of an artificial economy. ‘Individualism is best’. ‘Inequality is a useful incentive’. You will recall how the leader of the now happily defunct PD party crowed. ‘Party on!’ advised their more vulgar acolyte in Fianna Fail, before his departure to give lectures against equality in Europe from the safety of his gifted Commissionership.
The public rightly asks if we heard the last of all this, or are we now being asked to make sacrifices so as to have it happen all over again? They are entitled to answers.
Beyond it, however, something totally new must be initiated. A new vision of economy and society is needed, based on a better, more open scholarship, and a richer and a more inclusive discourse that has as its basis the liberating promise of creativity.
We should embrace the new challenges and not be mired in the politics of fear, or, worst of all, slyly lured into a war among the poorest, intimidated into fighting among ourselves by the slash and burn proposals of those who cling to what has failed us, at home and abroad.

Michael D Higgins is Labour Party President and TD for Galway West, former Statutory Lecturer in Political Science and Sociology at NUIG, and is currently Adjunct Professor at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, NUIG