includes comments from Bruce Sandford

We have become accustomed to thinking of "the public" as a collective term for all of the people who make up a nation. Furthermore, as members of the public, we all belong equally to that collective entity.

Pinning down the various interpretations of publicness is not easy, however. The identity of the public can change over time, and may, implicitly if not explicitly, vary from one member of a society to another.

Who is the public that benefits from public policy? Citizens? State? Consumers? Each of these concepts can include all persons who together make a nation. The notion of consumers as the public is particularly problematic. While all of us may be consumers to some extent, clearly some of us (with high incomes) consume much more than others.

The implication is that the more we spend, the greater is our stake in "the public". Under this kind of worldview, the main task of government - the agent of public policy - is to protect the economic interests of the affluent. Thus, the term "consumer" is much more exclusive than it sounds when it glibly rolls off the tongues of the Ministers of Commerce, Finance and Consumer Affairs; or from the Opposition spokespersons for Commerce et.al .

The "State" and the citizenry are likewise ambiguous concepts. The welfare state can, for example, be presented, inclusively, as our friend (who supports us with social security, education and health care) and servant. Or the State can be an agency of bureaucratic power whose interest is diametrically opposed to ours; an agent who seeks to deny us benefits, to find any excuse to not provide or otherwise fund public services, and to charge us exorbitant taxes on the first dollars we earn. The state can be either an "us" or a "them"; inclusive or exclusive. The public interest is not our interest to a state that sees itself as apart from the people.

"Citizenship" can also be either an inclusive or an exclusive concept. It all depends on how we define "citizen". Historically, the citizenry has excluded women, persons without property, slaves, the foreign-born, persons who do not practice a nation's official faith, the incarcerated. In future, the term might exclude persons without officially recognised tertiary qualifications. The status of citizen is capable of acting as a euphemism for an elite to identify their interest as the public interest, leaving those excluded as simply private persons. Indeed we may already be experiencing a process of social change - of social exclusion - that is better thought of as the publicisation of privilege than as the privatisation of the public sphere.

Last night I watched a British movie, made in 1994, "The Advocate". (It was screened on TV3 in December.) It is a black comedy about a real-life lawyer in 15th century France who made his reputation defending animals in court. It focussed on the specific case that made his reputation; defending a pig that was charged with murdering a boy in Abbeville in 1452. (The real murderer was the seigneur's son, who, as it proved, was a serial killer.)

In the medieval worldview, the concept of "public" was hierarchical. At the top were the nobility - in France, the seigneurial class. The monarch identified with that class. At the same time, there was no distinction in law between people and animals, although some ordinary people were seen as lower than others. In cases of sodomy, both the person and the animal were hanged. Consenting heterosexual sex between a Christian and a Jew could be classed as sodomy, because a Jew was considered in law to be the exact equivalent of a dog.

In 15th century Europe, debate became quite contentious when actually figuring out who or what was superior to who or what. Apparently, it took three days of priestly debate to decide that flies were inferior in law to domestic animals. As the century progressed animals came to be seen in law much as children, the intellectually disabled, and the insane are today: as being unable to understand the consequences of their actions. In the opening sequences of the film, a man and a donkey were set to hang for sodomy. The donkey got off with a last-minute reprieve, on account of diminished responsibility.

The status gap between public (meaning privileged) and private (meaning unprivileged) was much bigger than that between private persons and animals. Both persons and animals were fully subject to the law, but the law was only for the benefit of the public; ie of the propertied consuming citizenry.

In such a hierarchical worldview, a crime only exists when a lower being harms an equal or a superior being. In such a case, the felony is a public matter, and the public is as much the victim as the harmed person. In the reverse case, where the victim is of inferior status, the harm is generally deemed to be a private matter, no different to mistreating an animal. (That attitude encapsulates apartheid South Africa, or the American south as it once was.)

This worldview equating privilege with publicness may be re-emerging. Indeed, the status of ordinary people as members of the public is falling today as the economic gap between them and the affluent widens. In a 20:80 society (as in Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work), "the public", for whom public policy is formulated, represents the 20% minority.

At the same time, certain factions of the green and anarchist movements do argue that animals have exactly the same rights (but presumably not the same responsibilities) as humans. Their arguments do not differentiate between consuming class and working class humans. Nevertheless, the combined effect of upgrading the status of animals and of downgrading 80% of the population makes ordinary people seem more like commodities, and less like members of the public.

I believe that the concept of Sovereignty can rescue us from the logic of increasingly exclusive interpretations of publicness. The Japanese had the right idea in 1868 when they restored the emperor and abolished the Samurai class. In relation to the emperor - who was deified to remove him from the economic realm altogether - every Japanese became constitutionally equal, and was accepted as equal under the Meiji sovereignty. (Under Bhuddist influences, the Japanese might have raised the status of animals as well, but their record on whaling suggests otherwise. Also, they have a poor record in giving equal status to foreign-born humans.)

To progress as a species, humanity needs a concept of publicness that works simultaneously on a national and an international level. I believe that Sovereignty represents such a concept. We are equal under some symbol of national sovereignty, such as a crown, flag, or liberty bell. We need a symbol for international sovereignty (Gaia?). Every person on the planet needs to be both a citizen of the world and a citizen of one (and only one) nation; either the nation they were born in or the nation they are contributing (or have contributed) economically to. [1]

(Animals are an economic resource of human beings, and they cannot be held legally accountable to humans for their actions, as they were in the 15th century. [2] So, they cannot be part of the sovereign public. But of course, they are entitled to be well treated individually and, given the limits created by domestication and the need for agricultural land, allowed to live in nature as sustainable populations.)

Sovereignty enables all human beings to have a public as well as a private identity; and to have a global public identity as well as a national public identity. [3]

© 1999  Keith Rankin

Comments from Bruce Sandford

1. There is much in the realm of thought, and of popular movements, that does not automatically accept the nation-state as the basic and inviolable political entity. Communitarian, libertarian and Gaian thought rejects it; corporations and associated national, trans-national, and supra-national bodies are loci of political power that, arguably, utilise the formal existence of the nation-state to facilitate the advance of their own agendas - the nation-State is, to these, a necessary evil, necessary because it still lays claim to a popular legitimacy, and because its capacity to manipulate the illusion that is 'acting in the public good'. These engines of our economic order do not, however, identify fundamentally with the nation-state - their foremost allegiance is to capital. Humanity needs to express its own 'concept of publicness', not have yet another imposed upon it by those who profess to 'know best' (have we not yet tired of the enlightenment of elites?). This progress can only occur if people own their sovereignty and are free to mobilise it as they see fit and for the ends that concern them. If this results in nations as we know them, well and good, but if it naturally leads (for example) to a confederation of sovereign communities spread across a geographical space, then some nostalgic or self-serving commitment of a minority to prior arrangements should not be allowed to impede the public's expression of its 'good'. Rankin avoids consideration of the collective sovereignty being a coming together of equal individual sovereignties for the purposes of resolving issues of collective concern. He uses 'sovereignty' as if its locus is settled at the national level, without questioning whether or not this is either legitimate, in the eyes of those subject to it, or most efficacious for the transaction of the business of the public domain.
2. Sadly, one view of animals, and equally sadly, the same view that is taken of human beings - an economic resource. Additionally, animals are frequently held to account, in law, for their actions - the pit bull bearing the punishment of death for biting a human, with little regard for the dysfunctional treatment, at the hands of humans, that has conditioned it to behave in this way.
3. True, but only if all human beings are sovereign as individuals, and have an equal share in the sovereignty of whatever collective they are part of.

Rankin File | 1999 titles