I usually don’t like to comment on the things politicians say on the hoof – it’d leave time for little else – but I found interesting the Treasurer’s use of the word “modern” in today’s press conference to deflect commentary that the RBA’s rate cut reflected weak fundamentals.
“Anybody”, meaning the Opposition, “who thinks that rates are at their levels now for the same reason they were at lows during the financial crisis,” said Mr Swan, didn’t understand “modern economic policy” and therefore, “couldn’t be taken seriously.”
Fair enough, but modernity has been used countless times as a rhetorical device to defend all sorts of things and to me it’s always been a weasel word.
From the banal “get with the program” to the profound “idea of progress”, the person who shirks from the new is, quite literally, a troglodyte. Modern people, on the other hand, are serious, and modern times are good, the logic goes.
Today, of course, it’s modern versions of economic theory that justify (or obscure) modern realities of economic truth, but ranging from the civilising mission of colonialism, to the positivism of the Enlightenment, to the liberalism of the industrial revolution, to the authoritarianism of Lenin, this very modern argument fits into a pattern as ancient as society itself.
As German sociologist Theodor Adorno said, “modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological category”, and there’s nothing surprising about Mr Swan’s use of a loaded term. The Opposition, after all, is to many the embodiment of anti-modern. Still, it’s an interesting one to reflect on and indeed reminded me of another quote, this time from the poet William Blake, who had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the modern age:
“When nations grow old, the Arts grow cold
And commerce settles on every tree.”