I am at an academic conference on ‘Political Science’. Question: Is there an appetite for honest debate in academia, or just a replica of the endless dance of position-taking that is politics itself?

Congregated here are the measurers and conclusion-drawers on everything in our lives from ‘good citizen behaviour’ to the 'shifting deckchairs of politics’ - a reference to the Titanic perhaps? Strange the tiny number of ethnic minority present - is an insatiable appetite for managing the world a disease confined to Caucasians?

Setting the agenda was recognised as the most important political activity in democratic Athens, and so it is in academe. Here will be discussed everything that it is politically correct to discuss, and here will be assumed everything that it is politically correct to assume. There are literally hundreds of talks being given in two days to small panels, so one can sample nothing but the titles of most of them.

My first panel discussion is a Round Table on ‘think-tanks’. The ideas they generate, we are told, must be designed to ‘generate policy agenda’ and their recommendations must be realistic; think-tanks seem to be like courtiers to elected monarchs, with all the bad habits of flattery and saying-what-the-boss-wants-to-hear. Their bosses – i.e. their paymasters - are either political parties or big businesses, so there is little chance of any idea surfacing that threatens the established powers. What’s more, because political parties now look to think-tanks for ideas, grass-roots political thinking no longer has any influence on party agendas; another blow to democracy. It seems the huge need of graduates, for paid jobs in social management, has made the rest of us irrelevant.

Oh well, at least we are in caring hands? More from this hotbed of political science - whatever that is - tomorrow.

2.

The idea that there is a general decline in ‘democracy’ is on many people’s minds, so I search for a panel on ways of arresting the decline. In a remote room, down many corridors, I find eight people willing to contemplate that popular participation may be the way forward. Gordon Heggie describes his attempts to hold the Scottish Parliament true to their promises of encouraging popular participation in government. To the elected representatives this means being available for a chat, but Heggie was hoping for citizens’ forums to discuss issues, and for the results to be fed into the political process. His attempts to institute these met with failure. The representatives treat civic forums as competition; electoral representation and participatory democracy, it seems, are oil and water. For representatives to encourage popular participation would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.

Next, Keith Sutherland outlines a way of returning to the original idea of democracy - votes in the legislature by ordinary citizens (selected by lot as juries are selected today) after listening to argument by informed and interested advocates. Even in this tiny and specialized audience, his suggestions are greeted with blank stares; it is obviously not on the academic agenda to get rid of the circus of party politics. Again, a case of turkeys not voting for Christmas, for academia is heavily involved in the transformation of politics from decisions on law and foreign affairs into the micromanagement of all our lives.

Back to the Imprint Academic stall, where I find we have sold three books; a reminder that these conferences are more about career opportunities than about solving the conundrum of why we humans find the management of our common affairs so difficult.

Finally, a keynote address: Andrew Gamble on ‘The Western Ideology’. His topic: the Neo-Liberal Ascendancy, History of. The promise of the Enlightenment to ‘strangle the last king with the entrails of the last priest’, has been more-or-less made good; but the sinful individualisms of priests and kings have been replaced by the corporatist sins of government and big business. Elections every few years prove no safeguard for the vulnerable and weak; the pretense that neo-liberalism operates on anyone’s behalf outside of the elite is a fiction.

Andrew Gamble used none of these emotive words in his historical outline, but he did ask the question, ‘How long will the Western hegemony last?’ Will the Chinese, or the Indians, come up with new political models? Perhaps, but it might be better to make the effort ourselves to heal the gulf between the ‘democracy and freedom’ we have promised and the mendacious and de-cultured kleptocracy we have actually delivered.

Next, off to what I hope might be light relief - the weaponisation of space. It turns out to be not funny at all. Europe is putting weapons up in space without any public discussion; the U.S. is dependent on its space weaponry for self-protection that China and Russia are populating space with missiles. Apparently the ‘inevitability thesis’ has won - it’s going to happen anyway, so let’s all get stuck in.

3.

Spending two days in academe has stimulated me to some reflections. There is no doubt that, with funding now dependent upon government, academia has been suborned as an intellectual regiment in the army of Western hegemony. This can seem puzzling. Specifically, how does the dominant culture in academia, political correctness, serve Western domination?

Political correctness is among other things the doctrine that we are all born genetically equal in the struggle for resources. It bears the same functional relation to globalised kleptocracy as the missionary movement did to colonialism: it acts as a cover and an excuse. The cover is that no one will notice the West’s grand larceny, because in theory we all are equally empowered to join in too. The excuse is that we all want the same thing, and with Western help, the ‘underdeveloped’ nations will get some too. In addition, there is the liberal justification of interference and military assault in countries who do not value ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ as we do. The reality beyond the fiction is: wealth flows to the West, while chaos, serfdom and eco-destruction go mostly the other way.

Having invented the tools by which world domination has been achieved - technology, the business corporation and electoral representation - we find ourselves outperformed now in the use of these tools by other groups, particularly the Chinese. I wonder how political correctness will fare in these changed circumstances.

The project of the West was revealed brazenly in one of the talks, when we were shown on a screen two pictures: one, of brand shiny-new Peugeot people-carrier, the other of a man on a donkey by a ramshackle shed and some trees, smoking a cigarette. The message was: it is desperately unfair that the man on the donkey cannot afford the shiny new car and all the lifestyle trappings that go with it. My own reaction to this - sitting in a room made entirely of plastic with the roar of modern life pouring in through the windows - was an intense desire to be the man on the donkey. A vision of peace glimpsed from strife; of a simple Eden, glimpsed from quite a different place.