Ethics and Politics – Conference in Heraklion, Crete, 24 – 28 May, 2006

By: Hatto Fischer, Athens

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under the chair of the Mayor of Heraklion, Giannis Kourakis, with main speaker Noam Chomsky, but also other speakers such as Agnes Heller, Martin Jay, Clauss Offe, and many others. As indicated by a rich program lasting from Wednesday until Sunday, they will all address the tension field between ethics and politics.

A mayor as chairman of a philosophical conference

It could not come at a better time for the mayor of Heraklion, Giannis Kourakis. Municipal elections shall be held not only in Heraklion, Crete, but all over Greece in November, so a big event like this with huge publicity can give a boast to a politician’s reputation. This is especially guaranteed if you have a speaker like Noam Chomsky opening the conference for this critical intellect of American politics has a huge following in Greece. There is something like ‘spiritual affinity’ when morality and politics become a single stance as expressed in sentiments amongst Greece running high when speaking out against the bombardment of the Serbs in the Kosovo war of 1999 and now with regards to what America is doing in Iraq.

Even more so, given especially the topic of the conference, it becomes a highly interesting question on how the mayor will deal in the aftermaths of such a conference with the ethical questions that are expected to be articulated when bringing together so many gifted philosophers, intellectuals and thinkers from all over the world. What can and should be directed then at local politicians especially when it comes, for instance, to safeguarding the environment rather than letting one building speculation after another ruin both the city and the countryside? Heraklion as biggest city of Crete poses here more than a challenge when it comes to one sided development ruining almost everything else in its wake. Nevertheless it speaks for itself that Mayor Giannis Kourakis acts as chairman of such a conference as it is said that he enjoys a high reputation and counts as someone who has done a great deal to alter the conditions of urbanity in Heraklion.

The city of Heraklion, Crete

Heraklion as the biggest city of Crete is at one and the same time a focal point of much speculative fever which has broken out once EU money started to come into Greece. A lot of money has been pouring into the island since then, in particular foreign investors seeking opportunities primarily in real estate and tourism business enterprises. Observers say this has all but destroyed the physical beauty of the island and with it many Cretan qualities, including hospitality.

The Cretans are famous for their hospitality once they open up their hearts. They give then everything. They will not let the visitors pay for anything while inviting them to join the Cretan way of life. This means till late into the night letting the Cretan music move the dancers faster and faster over the floor until one of the musicians would pull out a gun and fire off a shot into the night air. Intensity of life! There is a strong desire to express such compulsions. It leaves its mark on the people. Heraklion greets one from the port. There can be seen when walking from the port to the city centre along the coastline the Venetian castle but it seems to limb badly through the changing times as if such cultural heritage does not matter. Neglect is one message. Another is what counts, namely new investments even if it means new constructions besides old flagrant ones.

Such money has brought with it a night life scene with one bar next to the other as if life is to be spent in these places on the basis of 24 hours a day. Like fish in shallow waters no one seems to realize how such transformation of the city centre serves but one purpose and therefore looses out in so many other ways. As one man who lives in Heraklion would put it, everything has become so expensive here that it is more economical to go to Athens to do the shopping there. An expensive city has, therefore, to deal with other problems than one which savours a different way of life, away from the usual consumption of life.

Heraklion shows what transformations in a relative short time can bring about. The city has grown so quickly with still more investment pouring in, but it has lead to such an over commercialization that a new kind of ugliness is spreading like wild fire while in its wake there are left behind many incomplete stories of stranded existences. Walking through the city it shows how the partly modernised urban grid twists itself like bent metal around the historical veins and locations but without any regard for physical constraints nor a sense as to where things are heading towards. There seems to be no authentic answer to this contrast between luxury prone divulging shops or bars and in misery stricken urban poverty. Even casualness has here a high prize. It starts with not finding a parking place while the not caring for how things shall work out receives a determined thrust or fake belief that things will work out in the end because there is a solution for everything.

This means the city reflects such haphazard guesses when it comes to planning and lets things develop not how it should be but how it works. That it strangles at times the traffic flow while at other times everything goes at even higher speed does not seem to bother the people. They mind only if they cannot see a way out to the eternal quest for money. It is a tough fight since everyone knows everyone else and by a long shot it is not to anybody’s advantage that the other knows too much. Intimacy can turn here easily into violent and explosive argumentations. It puts a definite strain upon local politics and with it goes the peculiar rhythm between sleepy bureaucrats, hectic life on the streets outside and then the larger, even concentric circles drawn by those wielding and reeling in power.

No wonder then that Crete and with it Heraklion is called the ‘green’ island, and not so much for its rich vegetation but for staying as only part in Greece loyal to the PASOK party especially when everyone else voted for Nea Democratia in March 2004 after nearly twenty years of power by PASOK. Crete is and always has been special. At the fore front is Heraklion as striving industrial and economic power house with plenty of energy but also loads of problems.

Sustainable development in Crete

Of interest is that the helplessness of those seeking an alternative way of life to such over consumption called otherwise waste of time resounds in derelict side streets where poverty mixes with neglect and cheap solutions which turn quickly if not old, then ugly especially when the sun is not shining. There are hotels which have outstayed their guests and only curtains flap wildly in the wind coming in over the harbour walls to oxidize these tiny and windy streets with a breeze of fresh air. The dark side of all that money pouring into the island is that it creates more problems than can be handled by the political authorities. Everywhere can be seen the social, cultural and environmental impact of such one sided development. Hence the illusions of quick solutions as based on an economy of money become quickly blisters breaking open on those walls of hotels shut down. Nearby, in streets whose pavement reveals hasty construction, cars are parked everywhere. It makes walking on foot sometimes impossible. More so the negativity shuts out any friendly atmosphere. The same goes for the coastline below the city and on its outskirts. Everything has been ruined by a wild urban sprawl attempting to imitate perhaps the toughness of nature but not modest enough to realize that such solutions without regard for long term impacts shall not work.

Above all such a development sidelines and even silences all the questions citizens have. They see no longer how the quality of life can still be safeguarded. Obviously the choices are limited as to what they can do. This is especially the case if resources are squandered in a fictitious race to make not only money fast but equally without pain. There are clear signs everywhere of many things started but never really completed. Everything lacks the endurance for what it takes to bring about workable solutions in the long run. Indeed the long term perspective is missing in modern Crete. There is a lack of critical reflection as to how it has become a haphazard life under the influx of so much money. At the end of the day things are reduced simply to what they are: haphazard guesses as to what the future shall contain.

Unfortunately the current solutions are more improvised attempts at modernization than really expressions of thought through solutions. There is a lack of a basic philosophical reflection on how to bring about a development that inspires and gives to the people the freedom and momentum to live in tune with the rich nature Crete can and does offer.

These then are but hints as to some of the deeper ethical questions existing at the location where this philosophical conference is being held. When poets and planners discussed already in 1995 during the conference ‘Myth of the City’ these developments at Forthnet campus located in the midst of agricultural fields but an entirely newly out of the ground stamped building site outside of Heraklion, the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly spoke about the ‘rururb’ land – the land which is neither rural nor urban. It seems that in 2006 these in-between living conditions are really the contradictions leaving life at the mercy of haphazard guesses as to what purpose there is to such a life. If philosophers have any answers to that while discussing the tension span between ethics and politics, they would contribute a lot to making this life on this globe a bit more understandable and not just a nothingness, but possible to alter things both abroad and in Crete.

Theme of the conference

On the official website of the conference is stated that key figures will reflect upon current research dealing with the ‘transformations of ethics and politics’ as they have come under extreme pressure by recent and current world affairs. The conference promises to touch upon

“the most pressing moral and political dilemmas that penetrate contemporary public life, including culture clashes, cross-cultural and intergenerational concerns, complex geopolitical and global issues, such as war and terrorism, world poverty and inequality, disease and environmental risks.”

and declares that the main objectives of the conference are:

· To promote the philosophical and cross-disciplinary investigation of fundamental issues underpinning the relation between ethics and politics

· To facilitate an interdisciplinary critical exploration of major ethical and political dilemmas and controversies of present times

· To bring philosophical argument and theoretical critique to bear on public discourse, to raise citizens` awareness in relation to seminal ethnic-political questions of our day and shed light on contemporary public life

The conference has the possibility of becoming a unique event since ‘ethics and politics’ can be linked to the root of Western civilization, namely Greek philosophy of Ancient Times.

In that sense, and given the fact that all abstracts of every speaker’s address were made available prior to the start of the conference on Wednesday, May 24, the paper to be given by Gisela Striker from Harvard University may be taken as representative of not only the overall theme but also how it shall be and is interpreted by current philosophers and academics around the world at this juncture in time:

ETHICS AND POLITICS - ONE SUBJECT OR TWO?

Gisela Striker, Professor of Philosophy and Classics, Harvard University, USA

“The words "ethics" and "politics" go back to the time of Plato and Aristotle and are still used in much the same sense they had then. But the ancient philosophers' conception of the relation between the respective fields of these two branches of philosophy was very different from the modern one. Plato notoriously saw ethics and politics as one and the same subject. Aristotle wrote separate treatises on ethics and politics, but he considered ethics as a subfield of the science of politics, i.e. the knowledge that rulers would need to govern a state. Nowadays the general tendency is, I suppose, to think of ethics and politics as separate though overlapping fields. What lies behind this difference in perspective? A relatively trivial answer might be that the classical Greek philosophers did not clearly distinguish between legal and moral rules.

A more interesting explanation is that those philosophers held the view that the aim of politicians - legislators as well as rulers - must be to create the conditions for the best possible life of their citizens. They maintained this in opposition to those who claimed that the state and its legal system were based on an agreement to refrain from mutual harm and to cooperate for mutual benefit. The debate between these two positions continued in the Hellenistic era, with the Stoics actually subordinating politics to ethics, while the Epicureans defended the old contract theory, and the dispute is still going on today.”

The thought comes that the dispute continues because confusion can never be clarified by yet another attempt at definitions of concepts. As a matter of fact, Cornelius Castoriadis showed that two conditions have altered man’s ethical disposition. One is that knowledge has ever since King Minos built the labyrinth become a symbol of growing bewilderment as more and more people loose themselves in the maze of thoughts leading to but dead ends with little hope of getting out of there any younger than when going into that labyrinth. Cornelius Castoriadis attributes this to dialectical thinking having been replaced by the binary logic and thereby forcing thinking into an iterative process dominated by ‘yes-no’ alternatives. This will bear down on any outcome while it might already explain why people feel that they have no real choices, or alternatives. In what politicians and more so political parties promise in their programs, they never find themselves again in such programs. Other thoughts, ideas and concepts have entered these programs being discussed inside of institutions to which they have no access. It leaves politicians without a true public opinion by which they could obtain orientation for their policy making decisions. All this has become standard of any computer based information system and by which the European Union strives to achieve a ‘knowledge based society’ through pilot projects aiming to bring forward ‘e-democracy’ as part of the Information Society.

Dialectical thinking would still allow the perception as to where the contradiction exists: in the concept, in reality or in the relationship between concept and reality as for example the concept of the ‘just society’ would imply. Moreover, it is well known that interpretation is one thing, resolving contradiction quite another. What then is politically wrong but morally right is but a way of saying if contradictions are no longer a measure of something being wrong, the condition for practical politics based on human morality is no longer given.

If so then the case is that no political, no moral argument exists by which one could convince the other as to what is right, what wrong. It would mean the distinction between ethics and politics is as wrong as nothing can be clarified either from a political or moral position since they tend to negate, or in Adorno’s terms of a negative culture, to neutralize one another.

That is reflected at practical level when people claim that they have nothing to do with politics but they resent equally anyone trying to impose his or her values upon them. Consequently the neutral system of making money is deemed to be above both morality and politics and taken if not for granted then as the only system that works. That leaves any moral reasoning unrealistic while any argument in favour of conscious political reasoning at best naïve.

In such a world ‘Ethics and politics’ find themselves separated like a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with no chance of getting together. It means a world without beauty excludes everything having to do with a true synthesis. If the case, it explains the very absence of any convincing philosophical position on this matter. Its very absence leaves people in a very weak position to clarify anything having to do with political morality as being very different from ‘moral politics’ as practiced, for example, by Christian Fundamentalists when campaigning against abortion while upholding the death penalty for capital crimes. Indeed the modern world finds itself trapped in such a dilemma but it results out of the insight that power can be maintained as long as that, what belongs together, is kept separated.

Nowadays it is impossible to bring forth such political arguments so that the public could hear the truth of the matter. As if it is intended that moral judgments of people should not count, business in coalition with politics relies on a different strategy to convince what is possible, what not. Here enters the global media. It serves then the interests of politics when combined with world business, but despite all the resources and money put into such an argumentative strategy (as replacement of the practical discourse as Michel Foucault would define it), it no longer convinces anyone. Rather it is resignation and more so structural violence within the very institutions which should serve public debate as the European Parliament or the United Nations which silence not only the people but also their political representatives. As shown in the run-up to the Iraq war none of these institutions facilitated opposition to the decision to invade Iraq although so obviously wrong from especially one standpoint, but which no one has ever used so far: the moral argument for democracy as basis of critical thought. Democracy is all about a non violent form of governance. This includes above all a non violent change of government, something upheld by the Western societies during the Cold War in their criticism of Communist regimes as the latter did not allow elections or a peaceful transition from one leader to another. Therefore, it came as a complete surprise that politicians, in particular Bush and Blair should suddenly advocate as official doctrine of the West ‘regime change’ and if necessary by military force from outside.

War can never be justified. It is deeply morally wrong especially if it leaves on top of everything else in its wake countless innocent civilians dead as now the case in Iraq. But why no one has criticized ever Blair or Bush for such contradictory action especially if they claim to be doing this in the name of democracy, remains a puzzle. It can only be explained that Western Democracies themselves have given up the value premise of peaceful transitions of power as connected with not only free, but honest elections. This value premise has already been corroded by manipulated elections based on changes in election constituencies as done systematically by the Republicans in their favour in the United States. Moreover the Presidential elections of Bush both in 2000 and in 2004 have cast more than doubts on a voting system skewed in favour of certain results while disadvantaging other key voting groups from ever exercising their universal Right. Unfortunately that has history in the United States which allowed immediately after its founding the Southern States to count everyone on their territory to claim seats in Congress while leaving out conveniently the fact that slaves although included in the count to establish the size of the population had never the Right to vote.

It seems that the democratic value principle has been replaced after 9/11 by another value premise, namely that any leader or government not willing to cooperate fully and comply with the United States and Great Britain in its tail, shall be removed if necessary by force. Morality of the more powerful is like the skin heads beating up a foreigner in some dark alley; it is neither politics nor moral law being implemented but the rule of lawlessness despite all claims to be in the land where the ‘rule of the law’ applies. Unfortunately war situations sanction illegal and therefore criminal behaviour which would otherwise be reprimanded by society if based not merely on the morality of democracy, but more so on peace and therefore on the value of non violence.

The second point made by Cornelius Castoriadis is that the epistemological shift in knowledge can be explained by everything having become a labyrinth from which there is no escape. It has left people confused as to what is still a sound political argument. This is all the more the case once nothing can be validated in moral terms as still thought by Kant (‘act in such a way that the premise for your action can be a general law’). The spin doctors have made it impossible for people to know in a convincing manner what are still truthful arguments and a sound presentation of facts. Everything is skewed to make it appear as desired by the policy makers so that they can affect the outcome accordingly. It includes the manipulation of accounting books as recently reported by the BBC about the World Bank one year after Wolfowitz has taken over. Apparently the bank as governing body can undertake decisions on the basis of reports which have been knowingly manipulated by its own staff in order to allow for net gains in capital investments.

Interestingly enough the writer Robert Musil wrote in ‘Man without Attribute’, a book he never completed by the time the Second World War broke out and he died, that a society without knowing the truth will have only probabilities at the end of which is ‘terrorism’. Such an answer to amoral politics, namely terrorism as pseudo-moral stance justifying arbitrary use of violence, if only to make some oblivious statement no one can understand, has been anticipated by Cornelius Castoriadis. For he said ‘the moment someone attempts to impose his values upon others, this will lead to permanent conflict, if not violence and war.’ Therefore the realization about the futility of any moral and political debate has to be based fore mostly on the self critical reflection, that ‘values are not discussed, they are set’ and consequently value premises no one else is allowed to touch for otherwise…

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