Does anyone get Leunig?

One of the hardest things traditionalist conservatives have to do is to figure out the mindset of liberals.

Although I understand better now than I used to, it’s still difficult at times to grasp the logic at work in the way some liberals think about things. A recent article by Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig is a case in point.

Leunig begins on a note of despair. It seems that his own older generation of lefty intellectuals are feeling their traditional world falling away. Leunig writes:

But older folk become disillusioned, too - by matters that emerge in later life. Civil matters, for instance. What now of their sadness and disgust, as they watch their culture being methodically poisoned - not by the so-called barbarians beyond the city gates but by the gatekeepers and the Prime Minister who has appointed them?

So common and resonant in our land is this peculiar, appalled new feeling that there must surely be a special name for it - this late-life, close-to-the-heart dismay about the apparent destructiveness and bitter perversity of the prevailing political order.

So deeply does Leunig lament the loss of his left-wing culture that he writes almost like a conservative in defence of it:

Citizens, regardless of their political inclinations, carry a devout sense of their shared culture and its temperament - and, having contributed to it all their lives, hold decent and reasonable hopes for it's continued integrity. It's a gentle and complex sensibility, which comes from forebears, from the uniqueness of the land, from relationships, work, history, art and the many ordinary tales and folk legends of the society - a vital yet almost intangible ecosystem - of which governments are expected to be the respectful custodians, not brash redevelopers.

When a government imagines it will renovate the national culture according to its ideology and exclusive ambitions, as if culture is just a mechanistic matter of knobs and levers and suckholes in powerful positions (a government that has piously denounced the idea of social engineering and proclaimed the wisdom of the free market and, presumably, free culture) then it begins to feel for many as if their country has been somehow invaded and is under occupation - that they are being marshalled and callously divided into two categories: "you're in, you're out".

Now, it’s not impossible to understand part of Leunig’s viewpoint here. The left-liberal intelligentsia were so dominant in Australia in the 1970s and 80s that they really did create and inhabit a distinct and recognisable culture.

Since the mid-90s, though, a right-wing liberalism has grown in strength, particularly in Canberra, so that the comfy, unexamined left-wing culture no longer dominates as it once did.

So there’s some objective basis to Leunig’s feeling that the older Anglo left-liberal culture is slipping away.

Still, Leunig’s viewpoint seems odd overall – and not only because he exaggerates the differences between his own politics and those of the Howard Government.

Leunig expects the Government to be a respectful custodian of a left-liberal culture which is itself self-destructive. The left-liberals want to continue to preach the awfulness of their own society, and to open the borders of their society, without restriction, to the unassimilable Other. They don’t appear to realise that there is no Government measure which could allow a comfortable, traditional Anglo left-liberalism to continue on this basis – that they are preaching a politics which can only end in their own displacement.

The difficulty of reconciling Leunig’s outlook – of preserving a left-liberal cultural ascendancy based on national guilt and open borders – is suggested in the following paragraphs, written in a strangely mixed vein:

In one's own beloved native land - which, in spite of its many failures, has historically welcomed and provided some measure of hope and unconditional friendliness for exiles from desperate situations in other lands, it is a peculiar paradoxical sadness to sense such a growing mood of alienation, national dispossession and lost identity among a significant proportion of its intelligent citizens resulting from an abusive government impulse that nobody much had foreseen or thought possible.

How odd and lamentable that a nation that was the consoler of outcasts could also be the creator of outcasts. Yet how unsurprising also, for regardless of whatever infantile denials are made in ivory towers and newspaper offices, ours is a nation built knowingly or unwittingly on a moral foundation of occupation, repression and exclusion - still formally unacknowledged. Abuse is written into our moral constitution and practised as a nationalistic compulsion, whether it be in the waging of war against defenceless peoples abroad, or against the environment and the remnant innocence in our own land.

These thoughts are known as the black armband view. Even the redeeming and humanising values of remorse and sorrow are held in contempt by the perverse new gatekeepers - those creepy cultural stalkers and warmongers ... Time will have to pass before gravity and spirit of country reassert what is true.

This kind of writing is so difficult to disentangle. One moment Leunig is telling us that our country historically welcomed exiles with unconditional friendliness, but a few sentences later the exact opposite is asserted with equal force, that our nation was built on a moral foundation of exclusion.

It’s not a politics with a long shelf-life. Leunig can already see the writing on the wall: that the kind of middle-class, Anglo, left-liberal culture he inhabited and identifies with won’t survive modernity. In some ways it was too successful for its own good – it could only have survived if there had been some counter-force strong enough to restrain its self-destructive tendencies.

The humanist as mad scientist

Where is political modernism taking us? There is an unsettling answer laid out for us in a recent issue of Dissent, a prominent Australian left-liberal magazine. In an article titled “It’s the IQ, stupid” (Dissent, Number 20, Autumn/Winter 2006), retired scientist Stanley Schaetzel takes “the logical next step” for political modernism, a step which has momentous consequences.

Positivism

Schaetzel’s article is a striking example of positivism, a philosophy which has been around since the early 1800s, which claims that science alone can determine the truth about the world and reality.

Schaetzel believes that religion should be replaced completely with a scientific world view. He bridles at the commonly held attitude that science has worked out best in certain spheres only, such as the development of technology. For him, there is a scientific method which can be applied everywhere:

Scientific methods either work everywhere and present a valid view of reality across all aspects of life – or they don’t. There is no alternative.

Two objections to this kind of positivism spring immediately to mind. First, the attempt to apply a “scientific method” outside of the natural sciences has usually produced a negative result. One clear example of this fault of “scientism” was the effort to make motherhood more scientific in the 1920s and 30s.

For instance, in 1928 a Dr Watson wrote a book on childcare in which he declared that,

No one today knows enough to raise a child. The world would be considerably better off if we were to stop having children for twenty years (except those reared for experimental purposes) and were then to start again with enough facts to do the job with some degree of skill and accuracy. Parenthood, instead of being an instinctive art, is a science, the details of which must be worked out by patient laboratory methods.

And what kind of results did such “patient laboratory methods” yield? Dr Watson informed mothers that they should not show affection toward their children:

Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinary good job of the difficult task.

Dr Watson did not even like children to see their mothers, except for the necessary tasks of feeding or changing nappies. For the kind of mother whose heart was “too tender” and who needed to see her child, Dr Watson gave this advice:

make yourself a peephole so that you can see it without being seen, or use a periscope.

Modern mothers should not show emotion, but should instead,

handle the situation as a trained nurse or a doctor would and, finally, learn not to talk in endearing and coddling terms.

Nor is it an accident that Dr Watson should give this advice. If you want to apply a “scientific method” to all things, then you will be biased toward what is more tangible and easily measured, rather than the unpredictable and subjective realm of emotions.

The second objection to Schaetzel’s positivism is as follows. Schaetzel believes that religion ought to be replaced by science. However, he is confronted by the fact that most Westerners continue to have religious beliefs.

Schaetzel chooses to explain this setback to positivism by claiming that most people are too stupid and uneducated to understand a scientific world view. It is Schaetzel’s view that only people with an IQ over 115, and who have the right kind of education and sufficient time can belong to a scientific elite who understand the systems which control human society.

But, alas, it is not the scientific elite who have the power to run things. Schaetzel laments that,

You need a high IQ to push science forward, but you don’t need great intelligence to make money, to be a media star or a famous athlete or – even – to get elected to the Presidency of the USA. Politics is the only profession without any educational criteria … This seems to be the biggest problem of the current period. It’s the IQ, stupid.

For Schaetzel this is tragic because the scientific elite now have everything figured out and could run the globe smoothly and scientifically:

We are being led by people most of whom are not able to see – and do not comprehend – the Big Scene ... We have now the means of knowing what is going on everywhere, of classifying this information and of exerting control at a distance.

These are big claims. It makes you think that Schaetzel has an original and insightful view of world problems not available to the rest of us. But here is his analysis of the terrorist situation:

The presently advocated cure for the world’s problems – free trade and the market economy – is in reality a return to the Darwinian system of survival of the fittest. Currently the strong and the big are getting bigger and the weak are getting weaker – and some of the weak have only terrorism as an answer.

This is just standard left-liberalism. It is a traditional left-liberal opposition to a free market ideology and to an inequality of condition. There are dolphin loving hippy women who could have granted us the same “insight”.

And note too the contradiction in Schaetzel’s politics here. He accepts the leftist view that it is inequality which causes social problems. But at the same time he is radically elitist: he believes that power belongs properly to a small group of people like himself – scientific experts who alone have acquired knowledge of “the big scene”.

Humanism

It is not, though, the positivism of Schaetzel’s argument which is the main cause for concern. It is his perfectly logical effort to upgrade traditional humanism.

At the time of the Renaissance, thinkers like Pico della Mirandola argued that what made man special was his capacity to self-determine who he is. Man did not occupy a fixed position in a chain of being, but could choose to be as low as an animal or as high as God.

This humanist philosophy made man a magnificent, heroic being to be idolised. Here is Pico himself, extolling the virtues of man:

Imagine! The great generosity of God! The happiness of man! To man it is allowed to be whatever he chooses to be! ... Who could not help but admire this great shape-shifter? In fact, how could one admire anything else? ... Who would not admire man ... because he fashions and transforms himself into any fleshly form and assumes the character of any creature whatsoever ... For this reason, Euanthes the Persian … writes that man has no inborn, proper form ...

... let us not even yield place to them, the highest of the angelic orders … If we choose to, we will not be second to them in anything.

This view, or at least a secularised version of it, ultimately succeeded in shaping the modern Western world. The liberal orthodoxy of today continues to insist that our humanity depends on our freedom to choose who we are and what we do according to our own individual will and reason.

The liberal humanist view has, though, a fatal flaw. It depends on the assumption that, as Pico puts it, man has “no inborn, proper form”. This means that liberals usually adopt the idea that individuals are blank slates.

Conservatives have disagreed with liberals on this point. We believe that there is a human nature, which is not just produced by education or social influences, but is inborn: that we have a nature which is hardwired into us.

And this is where traditional humanism has come unstuck. Stanley Schaetzel’s beloved science has progressed to a stage where it has confirmed not the liberal but the conservative view.

Take the example of gender. Liberals believe that we are human when we self-define who we are. This means that liberals don’t like the idea that being a man or a woman should influence our identity or our social roles, as being male or female is not something we get to choose.

Liberals have therefore explained traditional gender identity and roles as being a product of socialisation only, from which men and women are to be “liberated”.

Science, though, has confounded these liberal claims. It is now clear that there is a biological basis for gender differences – that men and women are influenced by differences in hormones and brain structure.

We are not, therefore, the blank slates liberals took us to be.

So, are we then not special in the way that Pico claimed? Do we not have the freedom to choose to be whatever we will?

This is where Stanley Schaetzel attempts to tidy things up, but with dangerous consequences. He admits that humans are not entirely born as blank slates, but are influenced by genetics:

At birth the human brain is partially plastic (by this I mean not completely tabula rasa) and partially genetically programmed (in computer parlance hardwired) ... Quasi-hardwired programs are subsequently developed during the formative years (1 to about 16) of children and adolescents.

Having ceded this, Schaetzel then accepts that humans are not so special after all, that we are simply a big-brained animal:

We are one of the results of evolution: an animal classified as Homo Sapiens, which has 98.4% of its genes identical with the chimpanzee ... Its main difference from the rest of the primates is an evolved brain ...

At this point, Schaetzel seems to be rejecting the liberal humanist philosophy. But he then pulls out his trump card. We might have been animals up to now, suggests Schaetzel, but we are about to become something more, because we are about to truly self-determine who we are.

How? By taking control over our own hardwiring, over our own genetic structure. He writes,

What if we agree that, at the beginning of the third millennium, we ceased to be an animal? Not because we have in us some immaterial agent – but because our brains have created the digital age and now understand and control our genome and thus evolution.

Schaetzel follows up this thought, of man raised again above the level of animals, with a renewed idolisation of man:

And if, as I think, we still need to worship something why not worship the idea of the latent man – of everything man has achieved and is capable of achieving, of all his good intentions and noble aspirations? The temples of this faith would be various museums, great universities and research institutes.

The irony is that Schaetzel, the arch enemy of religion and tradition, has not strayed far from the outlines of a theology laid down by Pico more than 500 years ago.

Summers & sex differences

Genetic technology is with us for good. Most people, I expect, would prefer that any tinkering with the human genome be done with extreme caution. Such caution, though, is unlikely to be preferred when the tinkering itself is seen as the very thing which gives us a special status as humans.

What’s worse is that the tinkering is likely to be done to fulfil the liberal project. Let me give just one example of the kind of attitude which some modern intellectuals are likely to take.

In January 2005 the President of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, gave a “controversial” speech. He suggested that one possible reason for men outnumbering women in top engineering and science jobs was that men may have more “intrinsic” (ie hardwired) ability for high-level science than women.

Predictably, Summers was attacked for his comment. Liberals don’t like the idea that we might be influenced in a significant way by our sex. It upsets their belief that we are free to choose to become whatever we will.

Summers made a grovelling apology, committed Harvard to spend $50 million on the recruitment of female staff and resigned.

In March 2005, Time magazine ran an eight page feature on the Summers’ controversy. Time is an establishment liberal magazine, and the purpose of the feature was to attack Summers’ suggestion that men might be, on average, intrinsically better at high-level science.

The problem for the Time writers is that by 2005 there was a lot of evidence that men’s brains were, in fact, demonstrably different to those of women. So they could not simply argue that men and women were mentally just the same.

Instead, the feature writers conceded that the male and female brain were different. They argued, though, that the differences could be made not to matter. How? First, by “training” the female brain to overcome any intrinsic disadvantage in high-level science and second by physically manipulating the female brain through modern science.

One of the Time reporters wrote cheerfully,

Now that scientists are finally starting to map the brain with some accuracy, the challenge is figuring out what to do with that knowledge. The possibilities for applying it to the classroom, workplace and doctor’s office are tantalizing. “If something is genetic, it means it must be biological. If we can figure out the biology, then we should be able to tweak the biology,” says Richard Haier, a psychology professor who studies intelligence at the University of California at Irvine. Maybe Summers’ failure was not one of sensitivity but one of imagination.

So, according to the Time journalist Lawrence Summers ought to have exercised more imagination and considered the “Frankenstein” option: that the female brain could be made less different to the male brain by human tampering.

This “tweaking” of genetics to overcome gender difference is what appears as the “optimistic” scenario to a liberal, but to a conservative it points to the likely abuse by liberals of a powerful new technology.

Conclusion

So what’s to be done? As noted earlier, the technology is likely to become a fact of life, so it’s the political ideology we need to change.

There are two key things to be asserted against the prevailing liberalism. First, that our humanity is not contingent. We don’t need to “prove” our human status by demonstrating our ability to manipulate the genome. For religious traditionalists, our human status is something guaranteed in virtue of our possession of a human soul (the “immaterial agent” referred to by Schaetzel). But even without this traditionalist view, it’s possible to think of humans as having a distinct status, based on a “sum total” of our qualities.

We need to challenge liberalism, also, in what it claims about human freedom. There is a truer sense of freedom when we succeed in recognising and living through what is best in our nature, rather than pretending our own nature to be limitless.

Science is not as important in the effort to acquire this kind of freedom as positivists like Schaetzel would have us believe. We can be grateful for the improvements science makes in our lives, for instance through medical technology or modern communications. But working our way toward what is most significant in our natures is not something done in a laboratory by technocratic experts. It is something available to all of us, requiring us to draw on personal qualities such as wisdom, self-discipline, depth of experience, and intuition.

We can be helped also by the depth of culture existing in the society we inhabit – a depth which is unlikely to extend far if we limit ourselves to a dry, technocratic scientism.

France & the third dynamic

What drives multiculturalism and mass immigration?

I believe the underlying reason, the “first” dynamic, is the logic of the liberalism which has dominated Western politics.

In short, liberals believe that individuals fulfil their humanity when they are free to author their own lives according to their individual will and reason.

This sounds nice, but has some unforeseen consequences. It means, for instance, that a traditional ethnic nationalism, a national identity based on a shared ancestry, language, culture and religion, becomes illegitimate. Such an identity is inherited, rather than chosen by individual will, so it is thought of by liberals as an oppressive impediment to individual freedom.

However, once the political class arrives at this conclusion, there are a number of other flow on effects which also encourage multiculturalism and open borders.

The “second dynamic” I would explain as follows. In the liberal view, a society is a collection of millions of competing individual wills, each trying to enact their own desires. For liberals, therefore, an important question has to be answered. How is such a society based on competing wills to hold together?

The answer given by right-wing liberals is that the hidden hand of the free market will regulate any number of profit-seeking individuals for the benefit of the whole society.

So an entire wing of liberalism very firmly believes in the free market, not just on economic grounds, but as a basic part of their social philosophy.

For many liberals, therefore, the market must be kept free, including the movement of both labour and capital. They support open borders, in other words, because it goes against their free market beliefs to restrict the movement of workers.

And then there is the “third dynamic”. Politicians are people who are interested in the wielding of power. Ever since the early twentieth century there has emerged the growing possibility of global power – of some form of world government.

If you are a politician in a traditional country, with an identity based on a common ethnicity, you might seek to participate in global power arrangements through the old-fashioned method of alliances.

If, though, there is no longer an attachment to a common ethnicity, there are other ways to try to be at the centre of an emerging world order. You might try, for instance, to combine your nation into larger regional blocs.

There are many examples in the West of politicians wanting to open their borders in the pursuit of “diplomatic greatness”. It’s certainly a reason given by some Australian politicians from the 1950s onwards of wanting to merge more closely with Asia.

However, one of the clearest examples is that of France. The French have not only been at the forefront of building the European Union, but they have also, it seems, wanted to build greatness by fostering a bringing together of Europe and the Arab world to create a “Eurabia”.

But is this really a path to national greatness? In the case of France, the answer would seem to be no. If anything the Eurabia project has only exposed and extended French weakness.

The problem is this. The French welcomed millions of Arabs and Africans into their country, which fits well with the Eurabia project. However, the merging process hasn’t gone so smoothly. In 2005 the immigrants rioted in over 270 French towns, torching about 9000 cars.

Just recently there was a further riot in Montfermeil, a suburb in the north of Paris. Here is a newspaper account of the circumstances leading up to the riot:

It all began with an administrative decision by the mayor. A few months ago, he outlawed gatherings of more than four youths in the downtown area. Since January, the number of thefts and robberies had skyrocketed by 600 percent, and the dynamic mayor was seeking solutions that could increase his citizens' sense of security.

On investigating the problem, he discovered that most of the crimes had been committed by gangs numbering more than four members. His decision enraged the city's youths. Very few French suburbs have this small town's variegated ethnic mosaic: More than 30 percent of its inhabitants are foreigners from 40 different countries and 80 percent of them are Muslim. Satellite dishes on the balconies and in the windows receive transmissions from Al Jazeera and hundreds of television stations in Arab states.

In the town's immigrant neighborhood, 50 percent of the residents are under the age of 20. At midday, hundreds of young people can be seen leaning indolently against the railings of homes and shops. Last week, the mayor was again in the headlines after he faced off with a group of youths who had attacked a passenger on a bus. The police arrived and the mayor, who had witnessed the attack, identified the assailants. News of the incident spread like wildfire through the immigrant neighborhood and that same night hundreds of youths gathered in front of City Hall and began hurling Molotov cocktails.

They then proceeded to the mayor's residence at which they threw stones. By morning, seven people had been wounded. Since then, the mayor's home is under constant surveillance and police officers are posted at the entrance to City Hall throughout the day. Nonetheless, despite the security measures, the mayor's wife and sons have been physically attacked and have suffered injuries.

So it is not so much a case of the French widening their sphere of influence in Arabia, but of Muslim North Africa extending its influence into France. The North African immigrant communities in France are young, growing and have kept their connection to their home region via satellite TV. They are asserting themselves with considerable force.

So what is to be done? It’s difficult for a liberal politician to recognise the problem: that the ethnic differences between the native population and the immigrants are too great for an easy integration. A liberal would see this as a “pessimistic” view, and would prefer to think that all people would readily adapt to what a liberal French society has to offer.

If they aren’t doing so, thinks the liberal, it must be because of “exclusion of the other” by the host population. Therefore, the instinctive liberal solution is to further berate the host population for their historic faults of oppression and discrimination and to try to make their country even more open and yielding to the Arab immigrants.

The Mayor of Montfermeil is no longer in the liberal camp. He says:

I am pained by the thought that my country is ashamed of its culture and values. When France denies its own history and incessantly apologizes for slavery, for its conquests and for colonialism, is it any wonder that the immigrants are rising up against it and are showing no respect for it?

The third dynamic, of pursuing diplomatic greatness through regional mergers, has failed France. It has not placed France at the centre of world power, but has weakened France through the creation of serious internal divisions.

Other Western nations should take heed.

Scandalous art

It’s not difficult to mock modern art. The empty pretence at the heart of modern art is revealed all too frequently.

The latest scandal involves one of Britain’s most renowned art galleries, the Royal Academy. It seems that an artist sent in a sculpture of a human head to be exhibited, and in a separate box also included a chunk of stone and a small piece of wood to prop up the head for display. The Academy mistakenly thought the props were meant to be the art and proudly displayed them in a summer exhibition – minus the actual artwork.

How did high culture fall this far? I’d suggest two reasons. Traditionally high art was supposed to either represent or evoke some higher truth about existence or some higher state of human experience.

It’s difficult for high art in a liberal culture to aim for this. In a liberal culture there is not supposed to be anything to limit an individual freedom to choose. This means that liberalism does not like to recognise the “transcendent” – the real existence of goods existing outside of or independent of individual will.

In an advanced liberalism, therefore, the “good” is made radically subjective: it is the individual who invests art with meaning or value. There is no transcendent good existing outside of individual will for the quality of the art to be referenced to.

The art critic Professor John Carey concluded his recent book, What Good Are the Arts?, with a ringing endorsement of this modernist view by claiming that “anything can be a work of art. What makes it a work of art is that someone thinks of it as a work of art.”

The second reason for the decline of modern high art is that liberalism encourages not so much the development of tradition but its deconstruction. It is thought to be liberating to break down the existing forms of art, as limitations, rather than to work within them.

To be an “artist”, in the modern sense, is therefore to be someone who challenges the inherited forms of art. John Cage, the American music composer, is therefore thought of as a great modern artist because he broke down the forms of music entirely by composing completely silent pieces of music. Others have won fame as modern artists by exhibiting their own unmade beds as art, or urinals, or a pile of bricks.

This aspect of modern art is revealed in the efforts of Mark Lawson, the art critic for the Guardian newspaper, to defend the Royal Academy’s gaffe. He compared leaving out the sculpture and exhibiting the props to the following printer’s error:

Or imagine that the last chapter of a crime novel were accidentally omitted in a mix-up at the printers. Readers and critics who admired the ambiguity of the ending - and welcomed the author's departure from the convention that every loose end must be tied - are not wrong or stupid. They simply responded honestly to what they were shown and expressed a preference for work that was willing to ignore traditions.

The assumption here is that a departure from convention or a willingness to ignore tradition are such artistic virtues that they compensate for an artwork being accidentally shown in part.

Gay marriage - what is at stake?

Why should we resist the push toward gay marriage? The answer is set out best by Andrea Burns, in an article for the Melbourne Herald Sun ("Why do we fear love?" 11/06/06 - not online).

Andrea actually writes stridently in favour of gay marriage. But she does so in a way which betrays the destructive nature of progressive thinking on the issue.

Andrea follows the liberal line that what matters is that we are unimpeded in choosing who we are and what we do. Therefore, she advocates the idea that sexuality and gender are not fixed and unchosen, but fluid and individual. She writes:

The fluidity of sexuality is more relevant to this young generation than ever before. Gay, straight and bisexual are all labels that have become less applicable in a young society where roles are changing and gender ideals are being questioned.

What sort of message does the Government’s stance send to so many young Australians?

It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that Mr Howard is saying it is not acceptable to follow an individual path and you will be disadvantaged if you question the norm.

Similarly, for Andrea Burns the traditional family is the oppressive fixed impediment which ought to make way for more open, freely chosen living arrangements:

Young people are growing up in all kinds of family environments these days. Mr Howard is our Prime Minister and yet he seems unaware that the days of the white bread, nuclear family are over. There are many ways to commune, love and create a home.

All young people want is a loving and supportive environment in which to grow up. It does not matter who that love and support comes from, as long as it is there.

It’s inconsequential who makes up that circle of love, whether it’s one widowed old lady and her Jack Russell, or a lesbian couple and their gay male friend expecting their first child together.

What matters is that there is a loving home, a stable environment and a legal contract that protects that commitment.

The first thing to note about this liberal way of justifying gay marriage is that it confirms the slippery slope objection. It is not only gay marriage which Andrea Burns wants to institute. The logic by which she accepts gay marriage also leads her to accept any kind of living arrangement in which there is a “loving and supportive environment”.

Andrea has argued herself into a position in which there is no principled way to object to polygamy. On what basis can she discriminate against a man who wants legal recognition for his relationship with two women, if all that matters is that the three of them make up a “circle of love.”

Note the examples that Andrea herself gives of possible “circles of love” forming a family: a lady and her dog, and two women and a man.

However, it’s not only the slippery slope which reveals the inadequacy of Andrea’s argument for gay marriage. There’s an even deeper problem.

Andrea’s liberal ideal is that we should not be impeded in determining who we are according to our own individual will. This leads her to assert that the nuclear family is redundant; that ideals of gender should be overturned; that there are no certain forms of sexuality; and that it is not especially useful for a child to be raised by both a mother and father.

These assertions, though, are a frontal assault on heterosexual culture. The heterosexual norm is to be attracted to the opposite gender in a relatively fixed and uncomplicated way; to have an innate sense of what is masculine and feminine; to find traditional gender qualities sexually and romantically attractive in the opposite sex; and to understand fathers and mothers as having distinct and necessary roles within a family.

So the liberal position outlined by Andrea Burns is incompatible with a society in which heterosexual norms dominate culturally. It is actually more in line with homosexual norms, in which gender identity, sexuality and family arrangements are relatively uncertain.

Ultimately a society has to choose which culture is to be “normative”. It’s not possible to reconcile both, one must dominate. For instance, is a child generally advantaged if it lives with its biological mother and father? A heterosexual culture will answer in the affirmative.

But what if the state accepts a homosexual union as an equal basis for family life? This means that the state has consented to the idea that children don’t do best with both a father and mother. The state has accepted that a father is redundant in the life of a child or that a mother is redundant in the life of a child.

It is right for the heterosexual majority to resist the state accepting such notions. First, because of a conviction that it is untrue that fathers or mothers can be considered merely optional. Second, because a 97% majority forms such a basis of a society that it is both reasonable and necessary that the culture it operates by be accepted as normative.

You cannot abolish discrimination on this issue. Someone is going to be discriminated against. Heterosexuals will find their own lives best fulfilled when their own understanding of family, gender, sexuality and morality is allowed to form the social norm.

The only way you can not discriminate against gays is by discriminating against heterosexuals: by forcing heterosexuals to abandon their own norms, and substituting other norms in their place. There is no "justice" to this and it would be foolish for heterosexuals to accept this process, whether it is driven by liberals like Andrea Burns or by homosexuals themselves.

A conservative laureate?

If Australia has a poet laureate it is Les Murray. I bought his newly released Collected Poems today and was interested to find how openly conservative some of his work is.

For instance, there is a poem titled "A Brief History" from the volume he published in 1996, Subhuman Redneck Poems. In it Murray actually defends the maligned majority population of Australia against the attacks launched against it by the political class.

For instance, the fourth stanza sums up the state of the nation in which Aboriginal culture, with its dreamings, is treated favourably as "our one culture", whilst the white majority is blamed for whatever goes wrong, with another group, the "Ethnics", being excused from the blame.

Our one culture paints Dreamings, each a beautiful claim.
Far more numerous are the unspeakable Whites,
the only cause of all earthly plights,
immigrant natives without immigrant rights.
Unmixed with these are Ethnics, absolved of all blame.

(Think about the fourth line. It catches the strange, no-win position the Anglo majority is placed in by the political class.)

In the next stanza, Murray writes of the failure of the political class to take its own tradition seriously, even to the point of declaring Australia to be an Asian nation.

All of people's Australia, its churches and lore
are gang-raped by satire self-righteous as war
and, from trawling fresh victims to set on the poor,
our mandarins now, in one more evasion
of love and themselves, declare us Asian.

The lines "in one more evasion/of love and themselves" get to the heart of what's wrong with a political class which is willing to declare null their own nation's historic identity.

Finally, Murray sympathises with Australians turning away from high culture, given that it has already turned against them in the name of empty ideology.

Australians are like most who won't read this poem
or any, since literature turned on them
and bodiless jargons without reverie
scorn their loves as illusion and biology,
compared with bloody History, the opposite of home.

I like especially the part of the stanza I've highlighted. Murray perhaps is identifying the tendency for a liberal politics, as a "bodiless jargon," to consider illegitimate the real, embodied forms of identity and connectedness felt by most people.

What does the last line mean? I think it's a reference to the political class also running down the things valued by most Australians because they are "ordinary" - they aren't associated with the glamour of the great conflicts of history, with "bloody History", which Australians might shy away from as "the opposite of home".

Murray has been a prolific writer, so it will take me a while to read through the entire volume of his work. When I've done so, I'll write another item and try to provide more of an overview of his poetry.

Kalb on modernity

Jim Kalb is back posting more regularly at Turnabout, having spent time preparing a book. If you haven't seen it already I recommend reading this article, which puts in condensed form a Kalbian overview of the current situation.

The shadow side of political modernism

It's rare to hear self-doubt from political moderns. Therefore, appreciate while you can the confessions of Rev. Alan Taylor.

Rev. Taylor preaches at a Chicago temple of the Unitarian Universalist church. The Unitarians are one of the most liberal churches you're likely to find. They describe themselves as "a living example of, and a powerful voice for, liberal religion in America."

In a sermon in 2004, Rev. Taylor spoke about a book he had read by a fellow liberal, David Brooks, called Bobos in Paradise. Brooks' basic idea is that in the 1990s a new elite emerged who combined wealth with free-spirited creativity. He calls this new elite "bourgeois bohemians" or, more simply, "Bobos".

Brooks self-identifies as one of these "Bobos", as does the Rev. Taylor who admitted:

Rarely do I read a book like Bobos in Paradise and say, they're talking about me, about so many religious liberals, and about most of the folks with whom I graduated from college in 1990.

Which brings us to the self-doubt.

The Bobos are political moderns. The basic idea of such modernism is that we are made human when we are free to create ourselves through our own individual choices. This means that the aim of politics is to achieve an individual "freedom" in which there are no impediments to "individual choice."

I have pointed out many times that this way of looking at things, as good as it sounds, doesn't work out as it's supposed to.

One reason for this is the following problem. If the aim is to allow me to create who I am by my own choices, then anything which influences me in an important way, but which I don't choose, must be rejected.

But this means that it is exactly the deeper things which must be rejected, as it is these which are most likely to be part of an inherited tradition or a biological nature, placing them outside the realm of individual choice.

For instance, my masculine nature as a man is something that I didn't choose, but was born into. Therefore, political moderns think it ought to be made not to matter. Political moderns admire men who act outside of, or contrary to, such an inherited nature.

As a result of considering things this way, modernism leaves us with an abundance of choices, but only of a shallow nature (such as consumer choices). The deeper, really important things are rejected as being a "biological destiny" or a "traditional role" and so on.

What do political moderns think about the shallow range of lifestyle choices they have limited themselves to? Usually, the topic isn't raised. But Rev. Taylor, and David Brooks, aren't entirely comfortable living so lightly. Hence the self-doubt.

The Rev. says:

Here in Oak Park it is challenging. We live in a community that caters to the upper middle-class. The value of maximizing freedom reigns supreme, but there are forces that undermine sustained connections...

I have lived a quintessentially Bobo life ... If these trends continue ... my life will be a series of light, ultimately inconsequential and therefore meaningless connections. But I will have a lot of them! And that's just it, when we Bobos maximize our freedom, depth and meaning elude us.

And so what we get in Bobo life, Brooks says, is "a world of many options, but not a life of solid commitments, and maybe not a life that ever offers access to the profoundest truths, deepest emotions, or highest aspirations. Maybe in the end the problem with this attempt to reconcile freedom with commitment, virtue with affluence, autonomy with community is not that it leads to some catastrophic crack-up or some picturesque slide into immorality and decadence, but rather that it leads to too many compromises and spiritual fudges. Maybe people who try to have endless choices end up with semi-commitments and semi-freedoms. Maybe we will end up leading a life that is moderate but flat, our souls being colored with shades of gray, as we find nothing heroic, nothing inspiring, nothing that brings our lives to a point. Some days I look around and I think we have been able to achieve these reconciliations only by making ourselves more superficial, by simply ignoring the deeper thoughts and highest ideals that would torture us if we actually stopped to measure ourselves according to them.

The Rev. Taylor believes that the following quote from Brooks also captures this "shadow side" of political modernism,

Bobos pay lip-service to the virtues of tradition, roots, community. However, when push comes to shove, they tend to choose personal choice over other commitments ... And this is self-defeating, because at the end of all this movement and freedom and self-exploration, they find that they have nothing deep and lasting to hold on to.

Surprisingly for a Unitarian, the Rev. Taylor even looks back to the following lost religious tradition to underline his point:

The monk in the monastery does not lead an experimental life, but perhaps he is able to lead a profound one.

And isn't this a worthier aim? To live profoundly, within a world and a nature we did not create, rather than skittling life down to those things we can choose freely as autonomous individuals, but which don't count for much.

Some political moderns might object that they would lose their "individuality" in a world where individual autonomy was not the overriding principle. But their fear is unfounded in my opinion.

A man who is connected to the more profound aspects of his own nature will almost inevitably express a stronger and more confident individuality, than someone whose existence revolves around mere lifestyle choices.

In any event, we should be grateful that the Rev. Taylor and David Brooks are willing to admit the self-doubt they feel about the superficiality and rootlessness in the lives of political moderns.

It helps our case as conservatives when even insiders are willing to acknowledge this fault within liberal societies.

Anti-liberalism not enough?

Earlier this month I reviewed the first half of a biography of James McAuley, a leading figure on the anti-communist right in Australia in the 1950s and 60s.

I noted that McAuley, as a younger independent leftist in the 1940s, had given up on a traditional nationalism, like other intellectuals of that era.

McAuley actually advocated adding Papua New Guinea to Australia, and complained that the scheme was unlikely to go ahead because of the “narrow ethnocentrism” of Australian nationalism.

A reader, Shane, asked in the comments if McAuley retained this view when his politics moved rightward after WWII. As it happens, the answer to this question does appear later in the biography.

Anti-liberalism

The first thing to note, though, is that McAuley did recognise liberalism as a problem besetting Western societies.

The second half of the biography has many quotes from McAuley which clearly identify liberalism as a weakness in Western cultural life. Consider the following summaries or direct quotes of McAuley’s views:

the heirs of the Englightenment – liberal-progressive humanists – were ... unable “to distinguish between right and wrong, truth and lies, sense and nonsense, honour and dishonour.”

he felt that liberal intellectuals were so readily deceived about communism because of “the ideological complicities, the wavering rootlessness, the superficiality and inexperience, the personal vanity and the secret tendency to worship power which are the ordinary marks of the Western intellectual.”

Since the thirties, he wrote, liberal intellectuals had become no more than “camp followers” of socialism … Liberal intellectuals were wrong-headed in their view that man was perfectible by some rearrangement of circumstances.

Papua New Guinea

So McAuley was a rare voice criticising liberalism. However, being anti-liberal did not necessarily translate into a consistent conservatism. Even as late as 1960, long after his shift rightward, he was no conservative nationalist.

The biography states that at this time he had only reluctantly abandoned his view that Papua and New Guinea could become an Australian state. He now supported John Kerr’s proposal that the best option was a Melanesian Federation.

The Melanesian option is the conservative one. It would have meant bringing together the territories sharing at least some aspects of a common ethnicity into a united nation. John Kerr also sensibly advocated fostering an intellectual and cultural elite in Papua and New Guinea.

McAuley’s views were not so sensible. In an essay titled “My New Guinea” he suggested that white women were to blame for the failure of Australian efforts in colonial New Guinea. Why?

Well, if white women had stayed home, and only men had gone to New Guinea, then the men would have interacted socially and sexually with the natives and it would have become a mulatto society,

“a slatternly, but more colourful and easy-going society, with the minor vices of concubinage and sloth, rather than the major respectable vices of cold-heartedness and hypocrisy.”

Brazil

McAuley’s advocacy of a colourful mulatto New Guinea reminds me of those who admire Brazil today. I’ve written previously, for example, about Ryan Heath who admires “crazy and colourful” and “non-white” cities like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

Why would intellectuals like McAuley and Heath advocate creating such melting-pots, even when they recognise the negative traits associated with them (such as being more slothful, or slatternly, or out of control)?

Perhaps it’s for the following reason (though I’m speculating). If you’re a white person, and you’re confronted with an inequality of condition between your own society and a third world country, how do you react?

Is it possible that some whites, brought up on ideas of social justice, wish to solve this problem of unequal condition through dissolution? That they want to merge the white population into the “other” population, blending them together, and thereby equalising them? And that they wish to “dissolve” the qualities which bring advantage to their own society – namely, habits of being law-abiding, hard-working, sober and self-disciplined – to bring social levels closer together?

This last point would explain why seemingly negative qualities of being slothful, or slatternly or out of control would be presented so positively – they are positive, for a social justice egalitarian, in the sense of cutting away at one’s own advantage.

The human person

I don’t want to be too hard on McAuley. He recognised intellectually the failings of liberal modernism, which is further than most other intellectuals of his time ever got.

But he didn’t quite get far enough. The American traditionalist, Jim Kalb, wrote recently that the problem of liberalism goes very deep, into the very way we conceive the nature of the individual.

Kalb suggests that the liberal individual is the same as the Cartesian ego, “a disembodied subject with no qualities at all other than the free-floating ability to have experiences and make choices.” One consequence of understanding the individual this way is that,

The Cartesian ego isn’t really part of the world of experience. How, after all, could something with no qualities be embodied? So perhaps there’s a feeling that it’s more legitimate for Third World types, who don’t seem to be free floating Cartesian egos, to be embodied and thus part of the world of experience.

As it happens, McAuley outlines his own view of the individual in his essay on New Guinea. It is certainly not a radical leftist view, as it makes mention of moral responsibility, dignity, obligations and order. However, it still seems to be liberal in the terms set out by Jim Kalb: it presents what seems to me to be a disembodied view of the individual.

McAuley was “tormented” by the following question:

How were the New Guinea people going to step out of a decayed primitive culture, and embrace and make their own, in knowledge and habit, in inward acceptance and institutional result, those things that seem to be essential: for example, the acceptance of the notion of the human “person” with its structure of intellect and free will and moral responsibility, its intrinsic and inalienable dignity and obligations and rights, its need to find the freedom of self-fulfilment through order and love? … What wisdom would build this house, and furnish and decorate it, and maintain it?

This is McAuley writing in a more credible vein. Even so, his human “person” remains too much the Cartesian ego of intellect and free will, with the proviso of “moral responsibility” and an abstracted dignity, order and love added on.

I don’t think a liberal modernist would blink at this way of presenting the nature of the individual. But what if we “embodied” this individual, placing him in the world, with his natural loyalties and identities and with his more particular social responsibilities and obligations?

McAuley might, for instance, have written about men and women, rather than about “persons”. He might have written about paternal responsibilities, about marital love or maternal love, about ethnic loyalties or about masculine pride and dignity.

As an orthodox Catholic, he might also have written about the structure of the individual not only in terms of intellect and free will, but of the human soul.

It is in conceiving the nature of individuals in this way, in a way unacceptable to the free floating Cartesian ego, that we break most decisively with liberalism.

That’s why I don’t think an intellectual anti-liberalism will necessarily produce a consistent conservatism. We have inherited a liberal understanding of the individual which, as Jim Kalb puts it, is a ‘fundamental conceptual thing’ and “invisible to people’.

As long as we operate within this concept of the individual, we will tend to think in some ways in liberal terms, even if we have begun to recognise the failings of liberal modernity.

More Hollywood lies

Glory Road has just been released in Australia. It’s a film which claims to be the true story of the Texan Western Miners basketball team, an all-black team, which unexpectedly won the 1966 championship.

The film vilifies white America. It contends that black players weren’t accepted on university basketball teams and that the all-black team was met with racial violence and intimidation. As the American film critic William Arnold describes it,

In the middle of the film, there’s a devastating sequence of events that begins when one of the traveling Texas Western Miners is brutally assaulted in the restroom of a Southern restaurant by “crackers,” beaten bloody and then shoved head-first into a toilet in which we have just seen a man urinating.

Frightened by the incident, their confidence shaken, the Miners thereafter find, in an even more shocking scene, their motel rooms trashed, their personal belongings violated and the slogans “Niggers Die” and “Coons go home” scrawled all over the walls in what looks like either red paint or blood.

From here, the battered team takes a long, solemn bus ride to Seattle for its next game. When they arrive, the mood is so grim that Haskins’ assistant wants to give up. But Haskins can’t, because it’s become a moral crusade for him. “Just THINK of how these boys have been degraded and humiliated just because they’re black.”

Cut to the Seattle University game, where the fans are booing just like all the rest of the rednecks we have seen. And as a consequence of this abuse – the restaurant, the motel, the Seattle U fans – the Miners lose the game: the only loss of their magical season.

The Melbourne Herald Sun reviewer, Leigh Paatsch, fell for this portrayal of events. He came away from the film with the following belief about the Miners’ season,

Incredibly, until that time the very presence of non-white players was barely tolerated by schools, coaches or spectators.

Indeed, for much of the season chronicled by Glory Road, the Miners’ star players … are subjected to treatment seemingly lifted wholesale from a Ku Klux Klan guide to social etiquette.

Paatsch ought to have been more sceptical. The maltreatment of the black basketball players depicted in the film did not, in fact, occur. If we return to William Arnold’s review we finally get to the truth,

First, neither the restaurant nor the motel scenes actually happened to the Western Miners. This was divulged to me by the film’s producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, when I interviewed him a month before the film was released, Those incidents were made up, he said, “for dramatic purposes.”

Second, the racist reaction of the Seattle U fans is a fantasy. When I questioned the scene in my review of the film, a number of readers wrote to confirm my suspicion. “I was at the game,” one writes, “I was 12 years old at the time … It was a great game but there was no racial booing toward Texas that I remember.”

Another writes: “I am black. I was 16 when I listened to that game on the radio, and I don’t remember hearing any racially motivated booing, or any comment on such a response. I’m certain it never happened …”

Moreover, the ’66 Seattle University Chieftains were hardly the lily-white foe the movie depicts. As former player Mike Acres testifies in a recent issue of the Seattle University newspaper … they were “a predominantly black team. Four of our six top players were black.”

So the key scenes are made up. Why? Jerry Bruckheimer claims that it is for “dramatic purposes”. The problem is, though, that the film is being advertised as a true story, rather than dramatic fiction.

Jerry Bruckheimer must know that most people will respond like Leigh Paatsch, and accept the “dramatic” scenes in the film as historic fact, and draw negative conclusions about white Americans, their history and culture. In other words, Bruckheimer must know that the fabrications will have wider consequences than just adding cinematic drama.

It is another case of Hollywood manipulating public feeling. There’s not much we can do about it right now, except, of course, to distrust any Hollywood film dealing with such issues.

I can’t finish without one final quote from William Arnold. He too doesn’t accept that the fabrications in Glory Road are justified on dramatic grounds. He ends his review with this forthright comment:

When the movie untruth slaps you in the face, it’s not artistic licence: It’s a lie.

Failing skills

Some people in Australia seem to believe that skills shortages can be filled through migration from developing countries. Not all employer groups, though, are so keen.

There is, for instance, the case of the Victorian Automobile Chamber of Commerce (VACC), which represents 5000 employers. Last year the VACC made a submission to a Government migration committee. The submission revealed the problems experienced by employers in bringing in workers from non-Western countries.

One of these problems is the difficulty in verifying the qualifications and experience claimed by such applicants. According to the VACC,

A reliable method of verification and practical assessment is not possible from Australia.

However, travelling outside Australia to verify an applicant’s qualifications is also impractical:

This process ... Is a costly one which for most employers is not possible.

The issue of qualifications is not as difficult with applicants from Western countries as,

… the capacity to assess the skills and training of individuals trained in the UK, US and Western Europe is significantly easier due to the similarity of qualifications, educational structures and educational/training guidelines

whereas,

The experience with underdeveloped countries is a difficult process as educational and social structures are most often unlike those in Australia.

There is also a problem of adequate levels of English:

For many trade occupations, employers have also commented that a comprehension of English is required … tradespeople are often required to be competent in researching technical details in manuals or to communicate with manufacturers.

What all this means is that some “skilled” migrants from developing countries have only been able to perform unskilled tasks:

Some experiences of dealerships that have recruited recent immigrants with mechanical trade qualifications from underdeveloped countries have found that their level of diagnostic competence in current vehicles is insufficient. As a result, these individuals have been relegated to work of a process nature; this has been an unsatisfactory outcome for the dealership and the immigrant.

Of course, migrants should not be selected on economic grounds alone anyway. For traditionalist conservatives, the issue of maintaining an existing national identity is of more importance. However, what the VACC submission shows is that even the economic benefits are questionable, as the selection of workers from developing countries has created a number of difficulties for employers.

A great artist

There was a short item in last Saturday’s Age on one of my favourite painters, Hans Heysen (1877-1968).

Heysen did not view his role as an artist in the modernist way as being to provoke, shock, break down or unsettle. He succeeded in what I consider to be the true role of an artist, namely to literally “inspire” – to communicate to an audience a higher, spiritual experience.

He did so through what might seem to be unpromising material: paintings of cows in gum forests bathed in early morning light. When you see these paintings, though, you are drawn into the heightened response to nature which Heysen wanted to convey.

I admire Heysen also for his success in family life and for establishing a fine home, The Cedars, which is now a popular tourist destination close to Adelaide.

What I hadn’t been aware of until I read the Age story were the difficult circumstances in which Heysen began his career.

Heysen originally worked selling eggs and butter on his father’s cart, and had to wait for Sundays and holidays to sketch and paint. Then in 1899 an Adelaide pawnbroker recognised his talent and agreed to buy a number of paintings each week.

This allowed Heysen to paint full-time, but there were still financial hardships: Heysen was reduced to living off boiled rice and sleeping on a bare floor.

When I read this, I thought of the feminists who argue that male artists got where they did through patriarchal privilege. In so many cases, including that of Heysen, this is patently untrue. Male artists often had to take great risks and endure considerable poverty to develop their talents.

Taking the road to Sao Paulo

Remember Ryan Heath? He's the young Australian lefty who wrote earlier this year:

The truth is that Australia doesn't really have a world city - and it's too deluded to realise what it needs to do to create one.

Reading the morning papers in the aftermath of the 2005 London bombings, I was struck by the faces of London. Thirty-two of the 39 photos of victims that stared at us that next morning were under 35 and looked like the United Nations.

That's when I realised what a real "world city" is. It's not easy; it's not white; it's not old. It's crazy and colourful and out of control in a way I don't recognise in Australia.

Heath then compared Sydney unfavourably with certain places overseas,

it takes no great leap of the imagination to put Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro or Johannesburg on the same footing as Sydney. But it's a real challenge for white chauvinists to think that a Portuguese-speaking city might be more interesting.

To sum up, Ryan would like us to have even more immigration, to create even higher levels of globalisation, so that we can enjoy the benefits of living in a real, non-white, out of control, interesting world city like Sao Paulo in Brazil. Those who object to this vision of earthly paradise are dismissed as white chauvinists.

Well, I wonder if Ryan Heath read the newspapers today. This is how the Melbourne Age described the current situation in Sao Paulo:

The Brazilian Government offered today to send troops to the business capital Sao Paulo to help combat a wave of gang attacks in which 81 people, many of them police, have died in four days.

The gangsters set buses ablaze and blasted banks yesterday after hitting police posts and vehicles across the city and state at the weekend.

Heavily armed police manned checkpoints on main roads as fear gripped the city over the worst wave of crime-related violence in recent memory. Inmates also rioted in about 45 prisons in Sao Paulo state, holding about 200 people hostage, mostly guards.

The bloodshed was unleashed on Friday night by a powerful criminal gang ...

So, Sao Paulo is interesting alright - for all the wrong reasons. It is a city subject to extraordinary levels of crime and violence.

It is not a multicultural, world city success story, but a place and a future to be avoided.

Timing

I've been reading a biography of James McAuley, one of the leading figures on the Australian right after WWII.

The first half of the book deals with the 1940s, when McAuley was part of a group of young progressive intellectuals.

As I expected, the book provides further evidence that the political class had moved away from a traditional nationalism by the 1940s.

Part of the problem was the influence of Marxism: McAuley himself said of the Melbourne intelligentsia of the 1940s that they were good people to drink with, but frozen in the attitudes of the 1930s and "completely subjugated by a quite infantile Stalinism".

But the problem went deeper than a flirtation by intellectuals with the Communist Party. McAuley himself, who was quite independent in his views, was no more a traditional nationalist than the Marxists.

In 1947 he advocated adding Papua New Guinea to Australia. He wrote,

One is tempted to think the old French dream, never capable of fulfilment under the conditions of the French Empire, of a united polity and economy shared equally by French citizens of any colour or origin, is a conception most suitable for application to New Guinea. Consciously to develop the islands so as to add to the Commonwealth of Australia, one, two or three million citizens ... would be the most fruitful and gigantic defence work Australia could undertake.

McCauley did not believe his proposal would be implemented because it conflicted with the "narrow ethnocentrism" of Australian nationalism.

So, even someone like McCauley had already reached the view by 1947 that white ethnocentrism was a negative quality.

This was not the commonly held view at Federation in 1901. At Federation it was positively asserted that the states could form a successful nation because of the bond of common ethnicity - language, ancestry, history etc - shared between them.

So between the early to mid-1900s there occurred one of those shifts in thinking amongst the political class in Australia, in which the intellectual reflex was to consider white ethnocentrism as illegitimate or unprogressive, rather than as a foundation stone of national identity.

A sentimental victory

I found a book showcasing my home town, Melbourne, in a second-hand bookshop on the weekend.

Published in 1968 it is full of glorious photos of the Victorian era architecture of the inner suburbs, with Carlton featuring strongly.

So I was taken aback when I read the text accompanying the photos. The authors described the inner suburbs as follows,

In districts eventually destined for rebuilding the great majority of present-day residents still live in time-expired houses made habitable and, indeed, often presentable by renovation.

The argument that inner suburban areas must be rebuilt to provide residential accommodation for a much greater proportion of the population is patently true. The metropolitan sprawl cannot go on much longer ...

Central Melbourne - the city of the first hundred years is vanishing. It had much that was quaint and charming, but it was uneconomic and therefore an anachronism. Sentiment may yet preserve some of its buildings as curiosities, but they will never again much influence its atmosphere.

Such a dry economic rationalism! The love of place and heritage and gracious architecture is recognised only as sentimentality. The future belongs, it is claimed, to the more impersonal, objective requirements of scientific planning.

And initially history seemed to prove the authors right. A small part of Carlton was, indeed, demolished and replaced with modern, high-rise Housing Commission towers.

But "sentiment" was not so easily vanquished. Today, the Housing Commission area is considered a blot on the landscape, and the old Victorian terraces of the inner suburbs have soared in value. There are still many sections of the inner suburbs where the historic atmosphere has been largely preserved.

Ironically, it is the extraordinarily dry and technocratic views of the authors which now seem quaintly anachronistic rather than the Victorian terraces.

It's good to reflect that something relating more to the soul has proved stronger than an empty rationalism. I have often walked such inner suburban streets and felt connected to the historic character, and felt pride in what my own ancestors created, and enjoyed the pre-modern architectural design, with its emphasis on elegance and charm.

It seems I was not alone in valuing such things.