Given the history of Australia, indigenous Australians have few reasons to trust Governments and their agents rocking up to announce trust us, we are here to help you.
Beyond that there are philosophical and theological reasons why there might be an intractable problem in assuming that there will be an easy transition for indigenous communities engaging with agents of modernity such as public servants.
The following quote from Stanley Hauerwas in The State of the University (p.37) gets us close to the heart of the matter.
Hauerwas points out that according to Charles Taylor ... the social imaginary that has shaped the world in which we now find ourselves "starts with individuals and conceives society as established for their sake. Political society is seen as an instrument for something pre-political." Political society is understood to be the instrument to help individuals serve each other for mutual benefit by providing security and by fostering exchange and prosperity. Such societies emphasize the importance of rights which "reflects the holders sense of their own agency and of the situation that agency normatively demands in the world, namely freedom."
Taylor, however suggests that the individual that enjoys such freedom is "disembodied." ... requiring that they choose to be who they want to be. ...modernity names the time when a people are produced that believe they should have no story except the story they choose when they had no story.
But if you do believe that you have a story that is not exhausted by the "disembodied" storyless individual of modernity, what then?
Showing posts with label Charles Taylor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charles Taylor. Show all posts
Wednesday, 16 April 2008
Tuesday, 4 March 2008
Policymaking with the indigenous community
While working my way through Charles Taylor's wonderful volume A Secular Age, I came across the following observations that rang bells as to what lies in the background of so much difficulty that policy makers have had in engaging with the indigenous community.
In providing an account of the development of at the cultural power and prestige of disengaged thinking that is developed powerfully by Descartes, Taylor observes:
The argument has to be made again and again, that "experience-far" methods based on the natural sciences risk distorting and missing the point when applied to the phenomena of psychology, politics, language, historical interpretation and so on.
Not that it isn't evident in ordinary life that disengagement may be quite the wrong way to go about increasing understanding. When we want to understand what someone is trying to tell us in a conversation; or to grasp what motivates some person or group, how they see the world, and what kinds of thngs are important to them, disengagement will almost certainly be a self-stultifying strategy. We have to be open to the person or event, allowing our responses to meaning full reign, which generally means our fellings, which reflect these responses. Of course, our feelings, or understanding of human meanings, may also be wht is blocking us in these cases. We fail to grasp how different they are from us.
...the remedy for this is not to jump out of the range of human meanings altogether, and try to take things in through a bleached neutralized language of "social science'.That just bolts the door against new insight. It is by allowing ourselves to be challenged by the ways they fail to fit into our recognized range of meanings, that we can begin to discern how this range has to be broken open and transformed if we are to understand them. (pp.285-6)
In providing an account of the development of at the cultural power and prestige of disengaged thinking that is developed powerfully by Descartes, Taylor observes:
The argument has to be made again and again, that "experience-far" methods based on the natural sciences risk distorting and missing the point when applied to the phenomena of psychology, politics, language, historical interpretation and so on.
Not that it isn't evident in ordinary life that disengagement may be quite the wrong way to go about increasing understanding. When we want to understand what someone is trying to tell us in a conversation; or to grasp what motivates some person or group, how they see the world, and what kinds of thngs are important to them, disengagement will almost certainly be a self-stultifying strategy. We have to be open to the person or event, allowing our responses to meaning full reign, which generally means our fellings, which reflect these responses. Of course, our feelings, or understanding of human meanings, may also be wht is blocking us in these cases. We fail to grasp how different they are from us.
...the remedy for this is not to jump out of the range of human meanings altogether, and try to take things in through a bleached neutralized language of "social science'.That just bolts the door against new insight. It is by allowing ourselves to be challenged by the ways they fail to fit into our recognized range of meanings, that we can begin to discern how this range has to be broken open and transformed if we are to understand them. (pp.285-6)
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