Thursday, July 2, 2009

A new politics of the common good - Reith Lectures 2009

BBC's Reith Lectures 2009 have come to an end with the last lecture and it has been a wonderful ride. Except for the second lecture, that had wee too many examples to support the point, it was pretty persistently an outstanding series. The returning point, to be rounded off in the last lecture (transcript), was that we have been giving too much freedom to the market, resulting in a situation where real policies and real debates are no longer part of the public discourse, but rather left to be decided by market forces. Sandel's plea to let fundamental issues to be decided politically and publicly is therefore a plea for firm democracy and involved citizenship.

He even calls it a new citizenship, though I think it has always been there and needs, as he rightfully points out, be reinforced. To this point, in the last lecture, he looks at policy making itself and shows how the reduction of decision making to cost-benefit analyses, leads to absurd consequences. Some issues have value beyond the monetary and therefore, making a real decision demands of policy makers and the public debate to go beyond cost benefit considerations. He gives a couple of examples, that triggered my own example: noone has suggested we should kill off all citizens beyond the age of 75, even though it almost surely means a huge benefit in cut costs of health and welfare spendings. It is just immoral as everybody knows.

The real problem is to accept that this means we must be ready and be able to hold political and public debate over real issues, over values, over morality. We have developed a sense that values and morality are totally subjective, or part of beliefs and therefore are not open for debate. But in reality we have simple been evading real issues by allowing market forces to decide or rely on cost benefit analyses. To reverse that culture and bring values back into the realm of debatable issues, require a new citizenship and Sandel goes into describing this citizenship. I feel that he does a very good job, but am nagged by the thought we have maybe lost the language and logic to talk about these. As I see it, Sandel makes a point against the consequentialism, the utilitarialism, that have come to dominate our thinking and have monopolized public debate. We need to steer away from that logic and I hope we can.

More Reith:
The bioethics concern,
Morality in Politics,
Morality and the Market,
Michael Sandel - Philosophy Bites.

The experts love Ersatz TV

A regular reader of this blog is Ronald van den Boogaard, a Dutch radio maker of the much admired VPRO. On the basis of my reviews he discovered Ersatz TV and wrote an enthusiastic piece on its maker Annik Rubens or Larissa Vassilian as Van den Boogaard reveals in his blog is Annik's real name.

It is all nice and charming that I love Ersatz TV and many of the other podcasts I review at this blog, but I am basically an amateur. The fact that Ronald van den Boogaard agrees with me on this particular point is most of all the achievement of Annik Rubens, but I am willing to admit I feel flattered myself no small amount.

In the mean time Ersatz TV has a new video out, which I love to embed here.



More Ersatz TV:
Deja-vu on Ersatz-TV,
The science of Ersatz TV,
Erzatz TV - German Vodcast.

More Ronald van den Boogaard:
Interview Ward Ruyslinck,
Interview G.A. Wagner,
NRC FM podcast,
Interview Ina Muller-Van Ast,
Ronald van den Boogaard geeft plug,
Interview Jan Wolkers. (Excellent!)

Maarten Ducrot - Voor 1 Nacht

De Tour de France zit er weer aan te komen en dus is het voor de gemiddelde media (en ook dit blog) interessant om weer eens wat aandacht aan het wielrennen te besteden. Daartoe had KRO's Voor 1 nacht oud-coureur en wielerjournalist Maarten Ducrot in de studio.

Ducrot vertelt openhartig over het lijden in de sport en hoe de toprenner verschilt van de recreant en de amateur in de mate waarin hij pijn kan lijden. Aan de hand van zijn eigen ontmoeting met de pijn komt dit aspect heel levendig uit de verf. Het onderscheid met de absolute winnaars in de wielersport is dan weer hierin gelegen dat dezen niet alleen heel erg veel pijn kunnen lijden, maar ook over lijken gaan.

Als de vraag zich toch al niet opdrong, wordt het hierdoor wel noodzakelijk om over doping te spreken. Aan het begin van de uitzending maakt Ducrot het zonneklaar dat hij graag wil praten over doping en toch wacht presentator Marc Stakenburg tot het eind om erover te beginnen en in plaats van vragen te stellen, laat hij Ducrot maar praten. En die loopt hoofdzakelijk vast in zijn eigen, wat warrige monoloog. Dat is jammer, want hij lijkt een frisse kijk op de problematiek te hebben en een originele oplossing voor te stellen.

Ten slotte de vraag wie er dit jaar gaat winnen. Dat zou haast Contador moeten zijn, maar daar ziet Ducrot een paar heel interessante haken en ogen aan. Onze nationale hoop is gevestigd op Robert Gesink die hieronder op Eurosport aan het woord komt.



Meer KRO's voor 1 nacht:
Candy Dulfer,
Olga Zuiderhoek en Paul Rosenmoller,
Gijs Wanders en Adjiedj Bakas,
Arnon Grunberg.