What Is To Be Done by Barry Jones.
SOCIETY
What Is To Be Done: Political Engagement and Saving the Planet
Barry Jones
Scribe, $35
With hope swelling in my breast I opened What Is To Be Done: Political Engagement and Saving the Planet in the final weeks of 2020. In troubled times I sought the prescience of a polymath and former minister for science, Barry Jones. He is known for his accurate predictions: he anticipated the post-industrial economy when most of working Australia wore blue collars and he foresaw the threat of climate change decades before other politicians avoided discussing it.
Perhaps it is justifiable that the author spends the first 30 pages of What Is To Be Done explaining how his peers in the Hawke government failed to appreciate the foresight of his first book, Sleepers, Wake! while leaders abroad from Gore to Gorbachev courted his wisdom.
The author has a point, although it’s not a new one, and Jones is happy to cite Donald Horne in making it: our nation’s leaders are second rate. If there is a unified vision of What Is To Be Done, then it is this: if our leaders insist on being second rate, how then can we respond to a growing roster of challenges that are decidedly first rate?
As the book progresses, a reader will realise that much more is devoted to the “what is” than to the “to be done”. The chapter on technology includes the evolution of the personal computer. Jones is still amazed smartphones are many times more powerful than the moon landing’s mission control. Also included are brief histories of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Wikipedia that read like the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article.
Such bloat blunts what could have either been a razor-edged polemic or a bold utopian vision. It is not clear whether Jones realises his book shares a title with Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel that inspired a generation of pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks. Chapters on climate change, the rise of Trump and the erosion of political discourse promise synthesis. But breadth comes at the cost of depth and anyone skimming and occasionally clicking the headlines that throb in their daily news feeds will be familiar with most of it. Sadly, Jones’ solutions are relegated to bullet points at the end of each long chapter.
There are also issues with who is the target reader. For one, who, of reading age, does not know the story of Trump, Facebook or Brexit? Jones strays into these big international news tickets without ever unearthing their relevance to Australian politics. Yes, we share a language and our democracies are threatened by a borderless war on truth, but Jones, a wise and worldly Australian politician, could compare the mechanics of populism within the anglophone world. Instead, this is left to the reader.
It is certainly not for a lack of courage on Jones’ behalf. He identifies population size and lifestyle as proportional to environmental damage, a taboo of modern Australian politics that runs against the right’s platform of middle-class aspirations and the left’s reluctance to consider Australia’s natural carrying capacity as finite.
In the final chapters we discover Jones’ argument boiled down to its fundamentals: the major political parties have strayed from representing the people, not from any cultural drift but because they are too weak. Low membership numbers have them held hostage to careerist politicians and vested interests. The solution? Australians need to renew their interest in politics, join or start parties and reclaim the national discourse. What is not clear is how we pry those damn smartphones from the kids’ hands and get them signed up.
Also left unsaid is that over the past few years political engagement is strong and growing. Marches for the same-sex marriage referendum, the climate strikes and our national response to Black Lives Matter reveal a segment at least is concerned enough to get off the couch. Engagement is not low but the credibility of major parties is, as is a popular sense of agency in political decision-making. Many across the political spectrum would agree that these problems Jones has identified are undermining our ability to respond in this moment of high catastrophe – we would just like to know more from Jones about what is to be done.
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"discourse" - Google News
February 12, 2021 at 12:00PM
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Reclaim the national discourse, urges Labor veteran Barry Jones. But how? - Sydney Morning Herald
"discourse" - Google News
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