Do Values Matter in Public
Life?
It has been a trend in OECD
nations for some time to see politics as a largely a-political exercise in
budget management and fiscal policy settings. The only real policy debates are
about Keynesianism versus free market, and how to divide up the goods delivered
by the market. The rest is the nuance of social policy. This week’s budget blew
that out of the water. Stripped back to bones it is a statement about the sort
of society the corporate right want – essentially a first step in the march
back to the social conditions and class relations of the nineteenth century. Values
are back on the agenda.
How significant is this?
Consider the following photograph. It is perhaps the most extreme example of
what the values held by a ruling elite can do to a country. Taken by a NASA
satellite at night, it shows the bright lights of South Korea and the bright
lights of China. The dark gap in the middle isn’t water, it’s North Korea.
Photo sourced from
Huffington Post
North Korea is one of only
two remaining Communist monarchies, the other being Cuba. South Korea is a
thriving industrial democracy in which approximately a third of the population
identify as being born again Christians. China is a State directed capitalist
economy with a unitary government. North Korea is, well, North Korea. There are
an estimated 80,000 -100,000 Christians in concentration camps there who refuse
to worship the revered leader. Go figure. In short, values determine policy,
and policy determines whether the lights stay on or the lights go out. In many
more ways than one, North Korea is in darkness.
In Australia we like to
elect governments we think will give us the most consumer goods – Christmas
goodies if you will. In all the marketing hype it is easy to forget that we
give presents at Christmas to celebrate God giving his son so that we could be
forgiven. The message of Christmas, apart from chocolate, is that it is better
to love unconditionally, walk in forgiveness and live a generous life. Folk
with a religious or (Western) traditional bent will be familiar with the
nativity.
However there is another
side to the Christmas story that is never publicly acknowledged and seldom
referred to even in church; and that is the massacre of innocents. After the Eastern
Maggi (they are the dudes on the camels with the frankincense and gold) visited
the local provincial Roman dictator and told him they were seeking the Jewish
boy king in response to the celestial signs and Jewish prophesies, things got a
bit messy. Herod didn’t want prophetic Jewish kings rising up on his watch so
he ordered the massacre of all boys three years and under in Israel. History
relates the event but not the death toll because no one was counting. What we
can reasonably infer is that Roman soldiers kicked down everyone’s door, tore
toddlers from their mother’s arms, and murdered them. This atrocity failed in
its object. Jesus and his family were already refugees in Egypt. The Bible
records “A voice is heard in Ramah,
Rachael weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted because her
children are no more.”
Herod continued to live into
old age. This massacre could happen without censure because the Roman Empire
didn’t exist to benefit its people. After-all, the majority of people were
slaves. Only citizens had any rights at all, and only a very small percentage
of people were citizens. In the later Roman Empire it was possible to buy
citizenship, but it was prohibitively expensive. Rights and freedoms were
things you bought with money or inherited based on your social class. The
Empire existed for the fame, wealth and dignity, of probably less than one per
cent of the population. Is any of this sounding familiar?
This budget has taken a step
away from the message of Christmas. If goods are not shared, if opportunity is
not shared, if freedom is not universal, if a society stops being about
benefiting its members and starts being about the fame, wealth and dignity of
the elite, bad things happen.
Some social systems are
demonstrably worse than others. North Korea probably takes the prize for
general lunacy. It really doesn’t matter though whether a country is a communist
dictatorship, a fascist dictatorship, or a democracy in which the elite own the
media, the education system, the health system, the phone system, the
electricity system, the water supply, and dictate social policy. If society is
about those at the top, that society will be in darkness.
Let’s remember Christmas and
shed some more light.
