Waking from the dream

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Brendan Gleeson

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Fire in the heavens, and fire along the hills,
and fire made solid in the flinty stone,
thick-mass'd or scatter'd pebble, fire that fills
the breathless hour that lives in fire alone ...

– Christopher Brennan, Poems 1913

It's been a bad couple of decades for dreamers. So many collective dreams shattered into ugly shards. The devastation was democratic. Almost
every political and social constituency suffered the agonies of disillusion. The mass dream of home ownership has been broken apart by property markets left wild and directionless by policy neglect.  The Baby Boomer surge in housing wealth is a feast of the elders, leaving the following generations to the wolves of insecurity and penury.  The neo-liberal dream of the boundless economy (‘Go for Growth') is drowning in frightful waves of ecological feedback and, even worse, popular doubt. In Australia, the rise of neo-liberalism and the collapse of the previously settled order moved Paul Kelly to declare the ‘end of certainty' in 1992. Not exactly the end of history, but not far off. The compact that had restrained class conflict in the twentieth century was a system that emphasised political certainty over ambiguity and contest, at the cost of flexibility. The deliberate dismantling of this by successive federal governments from the 1970s unleashed market forces on previously shielded areas in the public sector and domestic life. Market settings were the new ‘fundamentals' upon which economic and social endeavour was to be based.

But that was then and this is now. Decades after its rise to ascendancy, neo-liberalism is revealing its inadequacy. The relentlessly rationalising and simplifying logic of the market is increasingly at odds with the great plurality of values and lifestyles that replaced social conformism: the drive to laissez faire fundamentals has passed cultural change, going in the other direction. Economists and political simplifiers sense growing irrelevance in public conversations enriched and complicated by social change. They have less to say about the new social concerns: collapsing eco-systems and environmental degradation; cultural enrichment and tension; new wealth and work-life balance; religious decline and spiritual yearning; probity in politics; morality in public life; the cult of pleasure; the epidemic of sadness, and so forth.

None of this can be dismissed as peripheral or less important than the bottom line. The age of the individual is being quietly supplanted by a re-emerging collectivism.

If dreams project our hopes (and fears), does this fracturing endanger hope? If so, who can carry on? As our feudal forebears knew, ‘without hope our hearts would break', but Australians have not put much faith in hope since nineteenth century settlers considered it ‘vanity'. Perhaps they were right, and the audacity of hope that has inspired Barack Obama's campaign is just rhetorical delusion. As Kafka observed in another era of fallen dreams: ‘Oh yes, there is hope – infinite hope. But not for us.'

I suspect that what we witness and feel as a collective turmoil of disillusion is the reawakening of arguments thought resolved, not the wholesale annihilation of dreams. It may be the age-old struggle between individual and collective ambitions, between us and Nature. It is sharpened by the constant intrusion of new ‘realities' – climate change, water shortages, petrol price inflation, overcrowding, unaffordable housing to name a few – but remains nonetheless a long-run contest of some surprisingly old propositions.

Homes for (war) heroes, later homes for all, but now new shortages and stresses have produced the growth in Australia of homelessness and a growing inter-generational divide in housing chances. Not everyone thought the dream of mass home ownership was sensible, but for years it worked for many people, with a large dollop of public investment in the infrastructure and regulations that made it possible. An old debate is re-emerging. In 1983, Jim Kemeny described the relentless pursuit of home ownership as The Great Australian Nightmare, an ideological delusion that locked us into house price inflation and limited real housing choice. Kemeny might have had a point, and he wasn't the first to make it. In many countries, there has long been deep scepticism about the value and the practicality of universal home ownership. Some dreamed of mass social housing, with money diverted away from the real estate and home finance industries into social projects. The new calls for a revival of social housing for the increasing numbers of Australians unable to mount the mortgage treadmill, draw on this tradition. They do so in new ways, recognising that some of the national wealth diverted into the private realm during the boom will have to be lured back to social housing through tax incentives that guarantee returns to investors in new public and community stock.

An economy of growth and endless expanding abundance eventually reaches its limits, and now the entire material system is threatened with natural default. An old contest is re-emerging between ‘Promethean' and ‘bounded' views of Nature. In 1883, Frederick Engels warned: ‘Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over Nature. For each such victory Nature takes its revenge on us.' Climate change, you'd have to say, is a pretty spectacular form of revenge. The old criticism of economic growth which neo-liberals declared heresy seems to have the angels on its side.

So it's not the end of history, the death notice for thought signed by the ‘neo-cons', but the rude intrusion of unruly Nature into contests that seemed to be closing off. Just as one dream seems to have vanquished its competitors, and history seems poised to hang up its hat, these new intrusions reinstate a new contest of ideas. Both Labor and the Coalition appear shocked and awed by the calamities pressing down on dreams of peace and security: global terrorism, climate change, housing affordability, water shortages and sclerotic cities. As Steve Dovers from the Australian National University put it recently, after two centuries we still seem to be struggling to settle Australia. We haven't resolved the first vexing questions presented to us by a unique continent – the original owners, the fragile land, the scarce resources, the capricious climate, remoteness and the insecurities this generates. These first challenges to the settlement project just keep coming back, some of them in ever more frightening forms.

Inevitably, some dreams fall away. Not even rude Nature can reawaken them: a bunyip aristocracy for Australia; a green interior watered by dammed and redirected rivers; a nation of hardy bush folk rejecting the ruinous urbanism of the old world. The noisy nineteenth century argument between the city and the bush gave way in the twentieth century to a quieter kind of compromise – a continued fascination with the bush myth in cinema and literature and a long sleepy disavowal of our deeply urban nature.