At one stage, having read a lecture by Mark Davis in Overland, I thought his new book was going to be an update of Gangland. I’ve just started reading The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s (expect a full review in due course), but it appears very much as if at some point in the course of writing, it turned into an update of the late Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. Certainly the idea that we’re coasting on our luck, riding on the back of another resources boom, is both enough to set in train a comparison between the Australia of 1964 and the nation of 2008 and to recognise a powerful structure of feeling which Kevin07 articulated all the way to the Lodge.
One of the more interesting arguments Davis makes in the opening chapter is that “being Australian is an ethical project”. He quotes Nettie Palmer, writing in Meanjin in 1944:
A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts or forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world - would it deserve to exist?
In a way, the dislocations and the sense of insecurity Davis seeks to trace over the past three decades reflect a disjunction between the nation and the state - a disjunction embodied in the casual bipartisanship of the major parties, even if some of the wellsprings of everyday doubt and pain were harnessed by Kevin Rudd and Labor in 2007. If one were to compare political ideologies, both conservatism and social democracy - in quite different ways - want to see the state as a vehicle for creating meanings and symbols, for fostering a shared and collective culture. One looks back, the other forward, but it’s characteristic of both to regard governance as something like steering a ship - while one may tack often, there’s an intention of heading in a determined direction.
Liberalisms of almost all stripes are quite hostile to the idea of a collective vision realised through the state. Partly, it’s as Davis says, a different time sense where one lives in “the eternal present of the market”, seeing the future as something amenable to both unpredictability and calculation. Partly it’s a belief that meaning is an individual affair, and that progress is the result of the aggregation of individual decisions through the mechanism of the market. Liberals are often highly suspicious of the idea that politics is about meanings, seeing this as the first step on the road to serfdom.
In actually existing Australian politics, of course, we’ve been beset by culture wars for a decade or more, where those taking up the sword in the “battle of ideas” have - despite some protestations to the contrary - been far more conservative than liberal. But, and here’s the rub for conservatism, with the decay of institutional authority and moral certainties of all kinds, all this results more and more in an articulation of a narrow sense of national belonging with the individual. Secular ceremonies such as Anzac Day aside, we’re supposed to be patriots only in the privacy of our own castle, as it were. Not too dissimilar to George W. Bush’s “beat the terrorists through spending money” thing.
So all the sound and fury of the “battle of ideas” aside, what’s left of the sense that “being Australian is an ethical project”? Our cultural history, Davis argues, is replete with a particular privilege given to fairness and egalitarianism (at least among those within the symbolic pale of Australianness), and what really is a social as much as a political democracy - a set of habits and attitudes as much as the institutional and policy architecture which sustained and gave voice to them. Is much left of this tradition? Should we be looking to ourselves rather than to the state or the Labor party or whoever to sustain them? These are questions if not raised then implied by his book which I think are well worth posing.
Good post!
I’m liking the recent book review focus.
I sense a great deal of complacency in the way much of politics and business are conducted in Australia. ‘Complacency’ is the kind word for it. I could call it smugness or self-satisfaction, but I won’t.
In the 1960s it was the sheep’s back, and today it’s the coal digger’s back.
Meanwhile our rivers dry up, places like Bangkok leapfrog our technology industries, and countries like the USA are set to achieve more highly in areas such as foreign language learning than we do. (Yes, that’s right, the “insular”, “isolationist”, “paranoid” USA, where the average high school graduate has completed two full years of foreign language learning, and 35% have completed 3 years including advanced placement courses - compare that to Oz!)
We can’t expect to be the graydestguntry’nnawuuurldmate just by repeating the mantra at regular intervals.
I think the “battle of ideas” is actually intimately intertwined with the idea of “being Australian.. an ethical project.” If you look at the politics of genocide denialism in Australia, there is a sense that denialists argue that because Australian is an ethical place, we can’t have committed genocide. Gerard Henderson’s recent article is a great example. He argues in a circular manner that genocide didn’t happen because Australians don’t think what happened was genocide. Therefore, whatever happened, it cannot have been genocide. This is just one example of how the culture wars are intimately entwined with the notion of being Australian as an ethical project.
This spurious denialist circle of argument is also a common phenomenon at the individual and (smaller) group levels, where it applies to a number of other behaviours, but I’ve never seen it put so clearly before. Thanks for articulating this so brilliantly, Fmark — you’ve given me a way into a discussion of something different at my own blog that I was having a lot of trouble with until now.
Actually, Fmark, I think you’ve nailed the form of argument Gerard always uses. I recall him making the same kind of circular justification for everything Howard did whilst in government.
Nettie Palmer’s “being Australian is an ethical project” was very much a left wing project from the beginning of Australian nationalism at the end of the 1880s. Indeed, Vance Palmer pioneered that view of Australian history and described it with reasonable accuracy.
The pre-WWII Right tended to weave the Australian story into the British Imperial story. (One of Menzies’ great achievements was to perform an elegant dismount from the British imperium while appearing to do the opposite.) But by the end of the 1960s the Menzian consensus conceded much of the cultural initiative to the Left.
But beginning in the late 1960s the New Left invented itself and parted company with the Old Left. The New Left did have an ethical vision but mostly this vision rejected the credibility of many old collectivities, both leftist and rightist, including organised religion, expressions of Australian identity such as the ANZAC myth and the Labor Party. This was an ethos of sceptical self-actualisation that was anathema to both Old Left and Old Right. However, the New Left and neo-liberals, though very different in temperament did agree with some of each other’s social principles.
“Actually, Fmark, I think you’ve nailed the form of argument Gerard always uses. I recall him making the same kind of circular justification for everything Howard did whilst in government.”
I agree, good one Fmark and David.
Nobody does ‘earnest’ like Gerard and the circular argument both clockwise and anti. On Insiders, recently, he claimed it was dangerous for Rudd to travel in his first few years of government…. because “John Howard didn’t do much”.Jesus wept.
My wife and I both cracked up spontaneously but it drew absolutely no reaction from fellow inslyders.
At least the wool industry wasn’t the main contributor to the destruction of the biosphere!
Face facts people, we’re not only lazy and smug, we’re profiting from the destruction of the planet. Your most recent tax cut, or last round of funding, or shiny new piece of infrastructure in your city/town/suburb … would have been impossible without coal money.
We’ve definitely gone backwards since 1964.
Bugger the state. Any ethical defense of Australia means a rejection of the current religious based Governor-Generalate. And ethical Aussies have fought invasion from Europeans, Japanese militarists and US militarists. Hopefully todays ethical Aussie resistance fighters have learned several lessons from Spain 36, Vietnam and South Africa so we won’t lose as often in the future and if this means being slightly less Aussie and slightly more stateless and cosmopolitan then that’s good - the range of take-away foods gets better too.
Being Australian: an ethical project? If the individualism and materialism that results from a mass of people battling it out over their competing ego’s in the market place, and the state ‘planning’ that simply navigates the way for this un-captained beast, is called an ethical project, fine.
However I would think that ‘ethical project’ involves more some kind of consensus in the hearts and minds of a population, which represents the complete antithesis of the social philosophy we are supposedly ‘proud to be Australian’ in supporting: Liberalism.
Don’t think that either the left or right are the torchbearers of a possible Australia as a joint project.
The left all too often reduce every social issue to politics and government and by doing so replace community involvement with impersonal bureaucracies, social interaction with government checks, and a sense of personal responsibility to one’s society with ‘entitlements’. The neo-con right reduce society to the above mentioned atomised interplay of the rat race while the traditionalist/conservative right are usually more interested in simply hoisting their own highly personal and biased conceptions of ‘ethics’ or ‘common goods’ onto the rest of us: religion and what not.
Of course we should look to ourselves for a sense of common virtue, meaning and belonging as Australians once more, but not simply as opposed to looking to government to do everything for us: as opposed, also, to looking to ourselves and thinking that we as individuals are the be all and end all, that life and society exist to serve the individual when in reality it’s a healthy balance of that and the converse that sustains meaningful social bonds and meaningful personal lives.
If liberals (which means most of us, unfortunately) are “highly suspicious of the idea that politics is about meanings, seeing this as the first step on the road to serfdom”, I would ask them to consider the future for a society which possesses completely no meaning or sens of virtue for its so called ‘citizens’. More family breakdowns? More crime? More street violence? More Corey Worthingtons? More depression? More suicide? More taxes and government intervention to clean up the mess left by a mass of people living together but who possess no attachments to each other.
Mark -
Did he? I don’t remember him doing any such thing. Whilst it’s true that the ‘lucky country’ critique is ALP territory and whilst its likewise true that the argument was and still is valid I don’t remember Rudd going there at all.
I was looking thru Wayne Hudson’s piece in his collection of essays viz the Republic (published in the 90s). One of the things that struck me about his polemic which is a defense of ‘realistic utopianism’ is that it had that underlying feeling of intellectual disappointment at being Australian. Disappointment that one did not live in a ‘great’ country and the desire to have the country be ‘great’ - better, nobler, fitter, stronger, faster….
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It appears to me that intellectuals in this country make the mistake of proscribing ‘greatness’ rather than simply doing great things. A lot of the Republican movement seemed to thrive on the assumption that constitutional change would make us important somehow. It won’t and that’s not a reason to change the constitution.
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Davis’ Palmer quote belongs in the realm of this sentiment. A nation deserves to exist properly speaking because there are people on it capable of defending it - that’s it. Most nations don’t discover new thoughts or forms at least significantly enough to splash the world stage. And come to think of it nations don’t do those things at all. People do. The State only helps in that it provides some security whilst they’re doing it.
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It remind me of people I know in the art/film world who have all sorts of ideas about great art, great cinema. Do they go out and do it? No. They moan about restructuring the funding.
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This country started as a prison. We’re stilled plagued by the mentality that comes of needing permission to do everything.
Postglobalism -
the aformentioned Hudson piece casts doubts on such a consensus in a modern complex technological society. A certain pluralism is inevitable and the old style civic pride of city-states simply won’t be applicable. For reasons that you illustrated:
Naturally I wouldn’t put it this way entirely.
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But people in a modern economy will seek to ‘do their own thing’ and this can vary subculturally: musicians, bankers, grocerers, cleaners, librarians may live in the same neighbourhood and lead completely different lives. Each may be reluctant to accept an ethical project that’s extensive. What the musician finds ethical, the banker might not. The best we can hope for is a simple live and let live consensus.
Securing our future beyond the resources boom? We must have heard that about a million times.
The whole theme of the education revolution too…
Adrien, to be fair to Wayne, he’s quite an original thinker (and quite an original person!) … but he might have a somewhat higher regard for what he calls “German things” from his time over there than perhaps is warranted.
I don’t think I agree about the history in your comment, or your representation of the present. If you read anything of Australian nineteenth century history, you’d be struck by the degree to which we tried to distinguish ourselves from European models, and to build something better. It’s a very similar dynamic to that found in America. The interesting question, perhaps, is when and why this sense of purpose (and it was certainly contested) ran out of steam.
Andrien,
Australia is diverse. With our current immigration intake of around 200,000 we’re going through another major stage in our history in which we are becoming even more diverse. ‘Australians’ are not going to agree on an ‘extensive’ ethical project. The interesting think, however, is that a true realisation of the logic behind unrestrained liberalism involves turning our noses up even on limited joint ethical projects.
If it becomes Politically incorrect to defend fairly low level ethical conceptions or ‘obligations’ in the home, in the school, in society, and in government, then I think even the basis for your systems of life which ‘lives and let lives’ is compromised. If your concerned with ‘freedom’ then you should be concerned with the obligations needed to sustain freedom. This sounds like a contradiction in light of an ultra liberal climate.
If, for example, it slowly becomes politically incorrect and old fashioned to encourage some *insistence* on fairly low level obligations like some public/community service, public debate, raising children in a two parent home, marriage, teaching a fairly primitive and basic conception of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in schools, ministerial accountability, etc etc, and when it becomes hip to encourage a youth culture aspiring after role models like Corey Worthington, 50 Cent, and the big brother inmates, then I think logically speaking that is a culture reverting too much into the private and the social symptoms no doubt become evident. We should not be scared of encouraging standards that sustain free and open communities simply because we are scared as individuals of being judged according to a set of, relatively, limited standards.
Perhaps if the situation arose where we’re being taxed so much it’s simply ridiculous and when government bureaucracies invade every part of our lives because we ‘want the private life, man’ we would re-evaluate our priorities in the name what we initially set out to ensure: free and meaningful societies?
But let’s really throw round some ideas, ey? Why not encourage more localisation, i.e. the construction of communities around higher levels of shared consensus? The banker can live with the bankers and the musicians with the musicians, to borrow from your example, and then each can enjoy their own meaningful and more significant versions of the good rather than a mass, watered down, lowest common denominator alternative.
Interestingly enough, one can only chose their personal conception of the ‘good life’, true to liberal aspirations, if the institutions are there (and are encouraged, insisted upon, if you will) which allow one to exercise his or her free will, foster his or her reasoning capabilities and also his or her objectivity: things which themselves require public safety, a good upbringing, good role models, etc: all products of joint ethical projects between people with a shared goal.
Off topic slightly but please bear with me while I go through these strange connections: Nettie Palmer was Henry Higgin’s niece - Higgins was the judge who made the Harvester judgement in 1908, embedding the principle of the Living Wage at the Arbitration Court which would have to be central to the ethos of the fair go, albeit centred on the White Male.
The anti-Arbitration association, the HR Nicholls Society, was formed in 1986, named after the editor of the Hobart Mercury whose succesful defence of a defamation case against Higgins inspired Western Mining Corp.’s Ray Evans who set up the society with Hugh Morgan,John Stone, Barrie Purvis and Peter Costello, who currently holds the seat that was named after Palmer’s uncle.
C’mon carbonsink
If I’d travelled from ‘Melbourne’ to ‘Sydney’ via the Hume Freeway route 200 years ago, it wouldn’t have been uninterrupted paddocks/plains to the horizon the entire journey. Staggering amounts of deforestation (proceeded by overstocking to further compound the effects of drought) literally contributed to the destruction of the biosphere.
Nick @ 17: Fair point.
So Australians, not satsified with destroying their own continent, have moved on to become the world’s largest coal exporter, so we can destroy the world!
Makes you proud … but hey, we sure punched above our weight in Beijing eh?
Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!
That’s the problem wanting to punch above your weight all the time - you have to over-expend to do it…and you don’t always come out looking pretty
Mark I’ll reply tomorrow have to go but…
Indeed. And he gives great lectures.
Kim -
Ah yes indeed. I guess I stand corrected. Must confess it sounded like a cool soundbyte more than anything. It didn’t even register that that what he was talking about.
Mark -
What history Mark, what representation? I merely point out a malaise amongst Australian intellectuals. The Republic debate seems to ride on an assumption that changing our constitution is gonna make us fantastic. Again and again in this country there’s the assumption that if we want to advance Australia we need the government to write a law. Why?
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Hudson’s article was interesting. The pertinent argument is that one can envisage a much better political system and over time see it realized provided you don’t indulge too much in an optimistic view of humanity or fall prey to the illusion that we are perfectable. Thus far in the Republic debate I don’t even see a solid answer to the question of alternative governability - the central question of the switch. We’re a long way off coming up with something better no matter what intellectuals dream of. In fact the practical answer to the question - why should we switch is missing. It’s always we should because it makes me feel good.
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Not good enough.
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The thing about our getting past riding on the sheep’s back is that it takes something besides government assistance (if indeed such assistance is necessary). It takes invention. We’re not totally lacking in creative power but there are certain vicissitudes of our economy and culture that stand in the way. One such is that if you think differently you’ll have the usual confederacy lining up to tell you why it can’t be done.
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With all due respect to 19th century aspirations dreams count for nothing if they remain dreams.
Postglobalism reckons:
I think you’re simply wrong about two parent homes and marriage. Your point about two parent homes is simply farcical - how, exactly, does one insist on a two parent home when one parent dies, or the parents separate? We know the damage that can be caused for children when parents who should divorce stay together (often, ironically, ‘for the sake of the children’). As for marriage, firstly it’s not open to everyone, and secondly I remain unconvinced that my living arrangements are any of your business, or anyone else’s.
I don’t disagree with the parts of your comment I excised, except that I don’t think that parents and teachers ignore ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
Postglobalism -
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You seem to be assuming that I’m somehow waving the neoliberal banner. I’m not. As far as I can see the political machine comes along and accepts as gospel any economic guruism that works, until it doesn’t. Keynes was the guru then that ran aground and the neoliberals took over. They’ll snuff it soon enough. Both seem to over-simplify economic data and rewrite history to suit their own theories.
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My admonition that Australians rely too much on the government to solve problems isn’t part of neoliberal discourse altho’ I s’pose one could be forgiven for thinking so.
There’s a well known notion of cultural fluctuation which presents three stages - the primitive, the classical and the decadent. The latter usually overlaps the first. That is when one ethos has run aground there’s another fresh ethos somewhere emerging to replace it.
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The whole gangsta rap, fame for fame type shit that Wothington and Fiddy represent is the result of the liberation from stifling values first emerging in the 50s with youth culture. This phenomena is inherently materialistic and hedonistic. Nothing wrong with that inherently. However when you overthrow a set of mores you’ll tend to need to replace it with something. This replacement process takes time. In the meantime you get venality.
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It’s becoming increasingly obvious to people that, for example, there’s a widespread lack of manners in society today. When there is such a lack the need to fill it becomes acute. And the result is that it gets filled.
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In terms of community I think you have to understand that communities are changing drastically. This blog is a community of sorts yes? One that would’ve been impossible, inconceivable just 20 years ago. On the other hand the traditional notion of community involving people who live and work in the same place is mostly a thing of the past. Many of us live in apartment buildings, most of us don’t know our neighbours. And don’t want to.
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I tend to think that community service is a good thing but that it won’t be well served by insistence. How do you effectively insist that children be raised in a two parent home? What morals do you teach at school? Some parents might insist on Judeao-Christian lore, some may strenuously object to that? See the problem? How do you insist on community service?
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There is a political philosophy that addresses these concerns. Unfortunately it’s not much in vogue these days.