A while back I wrote – in rather skeptical vein – about Tim Soutphommasane’s claim that progressives should be reclaiming patriotism. Guy Rundle has now reviewed Soutphommasane’s book, Reclaiming Patriotism: nation building for Australian progressives, for Crikey (of which more later). I’m largely in agreement with Rundle’s thoughts, and I think he adds another piece to the puzzle of what’s missing in this sort of ‘progressive’ discourse.
And there’s another one in an article Soutphommasane published in The Australian the other day.
While I would agree, on aesthetic grounds, that Movember is a bit worrying, I’m not at all sure that it’s some sort of sign of ‘conspicuous compassion’ (something I remember all the crusty old columnists loudly denouncing about five years ago – these things, like facial hair, must go in cycles):
At first glance it all seems commendable enough: people are doing their part for a worthy charity while having a bit of fun. Yet I suspect I am not alone in feeling some fatigue and distaste about public awareness campaigns. It seems that every day, week and month of the calendar is dedicated to raising awareness about some social concern.
Support women’s health? Sport a pink ribbon. Support action on climate change? Turn off your lights at home for an hour. Support recycling? You were in luck last week, which just happened to be National Recycling Week.
It is a worrying sign of our declining civic life that public engagement has become reduced to hollow symbolism. Civic virtue has become synonymous with ethical one-upmanship: it’s all about winning plaudits for altruism or moral goodness.
Well, no, it’s not all about that.
Later in the piece, Soutphommasane invokes Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch, a now deceased crusty old sociologist, worried about the rise of the “narcissistic personality” (and the concept has some similar methodological problems as its predecessor, the Frankfurt School’s “authoritarian personality“). We’re all self-absorbed, etc, etc. (Follow the link for the longer version, and the book is actually better than it might have been.) One might think, observing American culture, that Lasch was onto something. But one might then reflect that Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is actually a thesis constructed on a very doubtful reading of the stats, and that America continues to display a culture of voluntarism and free association much more robust than a diagnosis of narcissism might predict.
What Soutphommasane doesn’t seem to realise is that his imagined community – presumably another one of those past Golden Ages – of civic virtue, was not – in its actuality – without its element of status claims. I’m completely unclear from reading his op/ed what would exactly be entailed by a real civic virtue, right now and not in an imagined past (and all Soutphommasane has done is to posit something unspecified against what he disses, not a particularly good analytical move, even if a common rhetorical one). But, in the age when the bourgeois patriarchs of the world joined civic associations for good community causes, or whatever, what they were up to – among other things – was reinforcing a very rigid status hierarchy. The sexual division of labour which saw women, and particularly unmarried women, voluntarily taking up the frontline of working with the objects of all this concern was also part of a cultural hierarchy which resolutely reduced those who were deserving of civic aid to the status of object, and maintained class and gender divisions. It wasn’t all about doing good by stealth, or not letting the left hand know, etc. It was about social distinction, among other things.
It seems to me that the identification with causes demonstrated by wearing a ribbon, growing a mo, or whatever, is actually a democratisation of care and concern. Sure, it comes along with a bit of display, but so what? That also has the positive social effect of publicising the action. It’s too simple to see it just as narcissistic, or as symbolic rather than ‘real’ (“good citizenship”) – whatever that distinction might mean in this context.
So, now onto patriotism. I think I might actually just reproduce Rundle’s piece below the fold (with the kind permission of Crikey). I think Rundle is right that there’s an affectual dimension to patriotism (which, ironically, is the sort of dimension Soutphommasane doesn’t like about moustaches and ribbons), and that arid civics lessons won’t do too much to foster a left version. There’s also a context to the sorts of work which underlie Soutphommasane’s thought – such as Habermas’ notion of ‘constitutional cosmopolitan patriotism’, whose German and European origins in a set of particular historical and cultural concerns are much less universalisable than our philosophers may think. And therein lies the rub; as with the public meeting that replaces Movember, it’s unclear why anyone would get very excited about Soutphommasane’s progressive patriotism. You can’t, as Rundle says, legislate for it. And it doesn’t represent a viable political strategy for the left, for a whole range of reasons, including the basic failure whereby a project which transforms the social and the cultural cannot be substituted for by a fairly empty civics. At the end of the day, as Rundle implies, any strong nationalism will be a double edged sword – difficult to disarticulate from white nativism and lacking affectual power if it’s some sort of pub trivia recitation of what the Eureka stockade was all about, and who the first Labor Prime Minister was, or whatever. On the left, we would do much better to spend more time thinking about a transformed future than trying to retrospectively invent social democracy in one country.
Rundle’s Friday book review: Reclaiming Patriotism
When I was a kid we used to holiday down the Mornington Peninsula, a habit that many Victorians will have memories of from their own childhood. Childhood flows like eternity for several reasons, one of which is that new things disclose themselves to you for the first time, in all their transcendent, unrepresentable being. The first time you plunge into the water on a surf beach, the first game of French cricket, later the first time surfing alone, the first drink, first night out at a pub, the sharp taste of VB, Chisel on the juke box, girls in Rip Curl tops.
Those memories are the form by which my love of country, of place, presents itself — universal experiences in a unique and particular form to be harked back to and relived, as necessary to country love as is the host to the sacrament.
For Tim Soutphommasane they’re something else — “sentimental mush”, along with barbeques and the beach, etc, naive attachments which distract us from the real task of building a new form of patriotism in postmodern Australia — one entirely evacuated of nationalism, and sentiment, in favour of an abstract attachment to a set of ideas.
This strange book — an exile’s idea of attachment, by turns idealistic, cynical and envious in its proposals for a progressive patriotism — has met with great support and interest from several left-liberal intellectuals, many of whom should know better. Soutphommasane has done a PhD at Oxford, and worked briefly in Kevin Rudd’s office. A Laotian-Chinese by birth, he spent some of his childhood in France, before his family came to Australia. Growing up in a rural area and attending an agricultural high school, he thus finds himself in a strange situation — part of a large refugee movement, yet growing up apart from the neighbourhoods they established, while finding himself among a bunch of people whose national feeling would have a fair deal of white nativism about it.
For Soutphommasane, that naive form of nationalism has caused a total rejection of patriotism as a value by a loose group of writers, activists and commentators lumped together as “progressives” is a political and philosophical error. In the Howard era, such people identified patriotism with the worst aspects of Australian Anglo-Celtic chauvinism and rejected it utterly. Our apparent identification of much of Howard’s policy and statements on refugees, multiculturalism etc, as “dog whistle politics”, using coded language to pay lip-service to universal values while secretly communicating a message of racist chauvinism and xenophobia. Infected with a cosmopolitanism developed since the 1960s, progressives have entirely cut themselves off from local loyalties, and fallen into alienation and despair.
Patriotism is something they should develop not because it is a good in itself, but to rejoin the national conversation:
“to be politically active, to be successive advocates for change and reform, you have to engage the minds of other citizens … to deny patriotism is a sure path to political impotence … In the face of rapid and far-reaching economic change … the nation remains the last remaining source of stability and security,” he writes.
Though Soutphommasane occasionally gestures to an absolute value to patriotism — “it is no different to other forms of loyalty or love, and a necessary condition of collective self-improvement” — the understanding of it is overwhelmingly instrumental. A sense of patriotism is what holds a multicultural society together, and the global pressures towards dispersion must be countered by a “liberal patriotism” manufactured by state and cultural apparatuses — explicit talk of “Australian values”, a cultural literacy curriculum, an explicit yoking of infrastructure development to the task of building a “stronger nation”, a compulsory “citizenship knowledge” test as a prerequisite to the right to vote, an explicit spruiking of “ecstatic myths” such as Gallipoli, and a ban on dual citizenship, among others. If an abstract “liberal patriotism” is not engineered, the reservoir of national feeling will flow into Cronulla-style riots, or into said VB/barbie/FJ Holden “mush”.
There is some truth to the charge that Australian activists sometimes single out Australia as having a uniquely maligned history, an over-reaction to the self-congratulatory kitsch of the past decade — and a false analysis of what is just one settler-capitalist society amongst a number. But Soutphommasane’s analysis of the actual politics of the Howard period strikes me as quite wrong.
Thus the concrete expressions of national life — the taste of a local beer, the shared interest in a seasonal sport — are rejected as “mush”, while great attention is given to arid experiments in building a patriotism based on celebrations, either of moments in progressive history, of little interest to many people — Australia’s alleged role as the world’s first universally franchised democratic nation (a role that would have comes as news to the Aborigines, or “fauna”), for example — or more sinisterly, to a conscious surrender by intellectuals to the “ecstatic myth” of Gallipoli, followed by its propagation among the wider populace, as a progressive patriotic moment.
This is curious — like many progressive patriots, Soutphommasane quotes Orwell on the nefariousness of the left, yet does not take Orwell’s point that a genuine love of country is expressed through concrete experiences, girls walking in clogs over the cobbles, warm bitter, the Guardian etc etc. In the Australian context, he seems simply unaware of many of the progressive left traditions that did attempt to ground a universalist politics in local expression. “There was a decline in progressive nationalism from the 1960s on” he argues. In fact, the 1960s and 1970s saw its greatest efflorescence when the localist themes of the radical left — the revival of the bush ballads, connection with Aboriginal Australia, the self-publishing of local serious novels etc — fed a general wave of radical and critical nationalism, from the new theatre, local music to the Australian independence movement, a genuine republican movement, in contrast to the top-down ARM of the 1990s.
Whether Soutphommasane is even aware of this movement or not is unknowable, but it certainly does not fit his account of nation-building, which is a process of state and market bringing a “liberal patriotism” into being as its cultural adjunct (“nations follow states” says Gellner, erroneously, quoted here approvingly). The Australian Independence Movement could sometimes be silly in its attempts to elevate bush culture (The Bushwhackers, the Kalkadoon bookshop etc), but their sense of place was at least concrete, and created a democratic political-cultural program that yielded results.
Soutphommasane has his own complex history, which suggests various reason why such a curiously contentless and lifeless alternative to real countrylove and social solidarity might appeal to him — the aspiring dreamer amid the dreaming spires of Oxford has simply reprised the act of Petrarch and the first nationalists — the Renaissance thinkers who invented nationalism from their student clubs (“the nations”) and then projected them back onto the regions they came from.
People on the left know this, so why have they gone gaga for this new, rather bloodless attempt, to manufacture consensus in a postmodern patriotism? One answer is that most intellectuals, academics, etc, who do not reflect on their own process — do not think about how their ideas come to be — will always tend to come up with elitist schemes that they represent as the bodying forth a greater truth. In Australia recently 2020 has been an expression of this, and Soutphommasane’s elitist manufactured patriotism dovetails with that conference — and its obsession with social control — quite exactly.
Patriotism if you want it — and I would prefer to talk about separate things like countrylove, a sense of place, social solidarity — can’t be built off the plans. You have to work with what you have. That is a problem not only for intellectuals, who live in the inherently cosmopolitan global world of travel and ideas, but also for the born exile, whose existential challenge is simply that they are thrown into situations where they may find themselves unaccepted, excluded, defined against.
My memories of growing up, the beach, cricket, taste of a Sunnyboy, etc, are what make me Australian, but by that definition they exclude Tim, his childhood carried on the winds of war. That’s tough, but pretending you can legislate against the complex network of chauvinism and cultural privilege that makes up much of patriotism, through generally applied improving schemes is foolish indeed. Most importantly, the political formula is wrong. Progressives didn’t lose — we won. Not everything we want, but the refugee issue is framed differently, the question of foreign war, trade union rights, etc. Ultimately who was more “patriotic” — the Oxford exile, or the Brunswick Trot, wearily grabbing a placard and going to another demonstration of behalf of David Hicks, an Australian abandoned by his government? Thanks, but I’ll take the latter. Your shout. Someone put Khe Sanh on.
Update: The debate between Rundle and Soutphommasane continues.
I think there a few interesting talking-points in Soutphommasane’s book, but I’m not sure it embodies a particularly cohesive call to action. I did agree with his point on conspicuous compassion to some degree. I don’t think its causal, but I think there is in the very least, an interesting parallel between the modern fixation on conspicuous compassion campaigns and the decline in participation in our democracy.
In speaking with my partner, who is an Australian citizen but was born overseas, she reckons that there is a sense of egalitarianism (whether imagined or otherwise) in Australia that she just hasn’t got in the other countries she has lived in. This sense seems to me to be a worthwhile rallying point for a centre-left form of patriotism – in essence – a celebration of relative classlessness (compare, say, to the UK or some of the Asian countries) and the “fair go”.
I loved that piece of Guy’s this morning. Usually people are either funny and moving, or they nail it, but both at the same time is unusual.
Re Movember, a diagnosis of narcissism isn’t to be trusted unless there’s some evidence that the diagnostician has actually read her/his Freud and Greek mythology; the word has a more precise meaning than most people think. And ‘hollow symbolism’, like ‘empty rhetoric’, is an oxymoron as well as a cliché. If your trade is in words, it’s very bad karma to be disdainful about their power.
It reminds me of the fatuous disdain contained in the phrase ‘do-gooders’. What would you prefer me to do, bad?
Grow your mo’s gentlemen. There’s no harm to it and it may (shock, horror) do some good.
I think there is a place for reconciling both Soutphommasane and Rundle’s views on nationalism/patriotism. (Tho I haven’t actually read his book, and I’m going on reviews to form my impressions. But they ring true. And seem very limited at the same time, like both versions are poorly developed understandings of patriotism that could complement each other better of they matured a bit.)
The article’s another story tho.
Neither of them seem to touch on indigenous ideas of patriotism. Probably cos they don’t feel they are relevent…
Ultimately patriotism/nationalism/countrylove – whatever you call it is an aspect of peoples identities that they can’t really seperate from. (Those things are different, but they seem to come from the same place within people, they are different expressions of how people relate to where they come from.)
Everyone has feelings about where they live, and they are very strong.
Blackfellas are patriotic too. Tho that view of patriotism seems very different to a whitefella view, especially today, and it addresses some things in a way we may need to come to terms with.
“My memories of growing up, the beach, cricket, taste of a Sunnyboy, etc, are what make me Australian,”
I’d think there was more to that in reality, physically. The food you eat, the water you drink, the air you breathe. The shelter you get. All these things make your body what it is and thats where those feeling Rundle refers to can reside.
And thats a real part of where these feelings come from (imo) a recognition of what gives you life and supports your life. Its a very similar thing to family.
(And its interesting that indigenous cultures both here and overseas seem to associate nation and family with each other, and include the physical presence of the actual land within their definition of family.)
Failing to include that an understanding of why you are alive and what keeps you that way in our definition of how we identify as Australians probably has a lot to do with the mess the country finds itself in.
Its got to do with actually feeling connected to the place you inhabit.
There’s a “mystical” side to this as well tho most people are denialist about it, which is unhealthy cos it is a real phenom whatever some rationalists think. Young men anmd women getting southern cross tattoos, thats got nothing to do with initiatory ordeals that connect you to something does it…
failing to recognise that, and ultimately to make sure its grounded in compassion leads to some pretty nasty places. I was hoping to avoid invoking Godwins wrath, but I don’t think I will be able to at this point.
I might try leaving it unsaid and hope people can grasp what I’m referring to.
There, I disagree, Guy, at least with what would normally be interpreted as the said parallel.
I sort of agree that some of this is a displacement of politics (in that there’s no systemic alternative which would – at least potentially – put right all the woes of the world – and we should probably distinguish activist based campaigns from more marketing type ones). But I don’t think a good dose of bourgeois civics and attendance at tedious public meetings is the answer, and I’m sure you agree with me. In Tim S’s writing, there’s some nostalgia for a bourgeois politics not for an anti-systemic politics. The whole thrust of how he couches the dichotomy points away from, say, union activism and towards proper middle class concern. I doubt, for instance, he has the Seamen’s Union circa 1970s/1980s in mind.
It’s the lack of mobilisation around a unifying anti-systemic politics which is far more telling than any stats about declines in civic concern (which, as I’ve suggested, are often wrongly interpreted or plain dodgy anyway).
Hence what I’m arguing – rather than wringing our hands about some putative end of liberal democratic patterns of behaviour, we’d do much better to look to a transformational future.
There’s also a bit of the online/offline (“it’s not a protest unless it’s in the streets”) stuff lurking in the background of Tim S’s piece. Tell that to the Teachers’ Union, the Don’t Sell Off Public Assets, Bligh campaign and all the other stuff that’s keeping us folks in Queensland motivated – yes, on Facebook.
It’s a dichotomy I attacked in my 06 Griffith Review article, and I haven’t changed my view.
Also – what Dr Cat said about the power of words.
Last refuge of scoundrels, that Patriotism gig.
I contend we are living in, for the last 30 years or so, various strands of transnational habitus, including that of the News LTD habitus.
You might be, I’m living on a farm in Northern NSW.
Forget to mention last time this book came up – twas your ‘umble correspondent here that reviewed Tim S’s book proposal for Cambridge Uni Press. Wish I could find my report on it, but I cant. In any case, I strongly rec’d publication, and got this excellent book for my time: http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?ISBN=0521441951
I think that this wearing of things does represent a democratisation of concern, but as the recent poppy-wearing binge in England shows, it also can act in a white-feather kind of way: you’re not wearing the poppy so you must hate our troops. These campaigns also seem to attach a particular cultural discourse to the symbol: concerned patriotic war-glorification in the case of the poppies (isn’t war terrible! we support our lads though we know they’re doing wrong…); an insipient masculinist clawback in the case of movember (their’s plenty of govt funding for breast cancer! we have to privatise the concern for men’s health).
I also don’t like these campaigns because they aid and abet a failure of govt. The poppy one is particularly amusing. If these concerned patriotic war glorifiers are so concerned about the welfare of their lads when the war is over, where is their outrage that they have to sell poppies to support the families of the war dead? Why are they selling poppies and not marching on the govt? (I know, the people selling poppies are often soldiers and can’t march on the parliament – it’s a rhetorical question).
Also, finally, I’m very distrustful of prostate cancer public awareness campaigns, which can be bad for old mens’ health and wellbeing and are often astroturfed. A consequence of the democratisation of concern is that FUD groups (like the Urologists’ organisations and various big Pharma) can bankroll effective PR movements under the guise of public fund-raising – which is what I suspect this is.
sorry, insipient should be insidious…
I’m sorry but I’m not growing a mo, no matter how good the cause is.
Well, insipient, or even incipient, would also work for your apparent take on Movember, with which I disagree in any case.
Men not seeking help for their mental and other health problems is a long-acknowledged issue. Untreated depression in men is likely a contributor to mistreatment of women and children too.
Brent – pity beardos like myself. Do I go Abe Lincoln for the start of the month? Ewwww…
Also, can you all shut your eyes and imagine the bolding ends after one letter in the above.
Never go the Abe Lincoln, FDB. There’s something very creepy about it.
@9 – these things need to be distinguished, sg. There’s a difference between a campaign about violence against women and a campaign about “supporting our troops”. There are ambiguities in both, but there are ambiguities in politics as well. Incidentally, the white ribbon day campaign had its Brisbane launch tonight – and I saw a number of blokey looking blokes wearing t shirts. Now, it won’t actually end violence against women overnight, but I still regard that as a good. A lot of this stuff actually provokes some degree of discussion and reflection about the issues – more so, again, than attendance at some worthy public meeting or signing up for the Rotary Club, which seems to me, as I said, to be what Tim S has in mind.
You do have a point about the state outsourcing some of its responsibilities to us – but again that’s only part of the coin. Aside from the campaigns I mentioned which seek to get the state to do or not to do something – and which are organised by collective movements rather than some advertising agency or pr firm, there are also issues highlighted which are only tangential to state action – that may encourage the sort of autonomous citizenship I think I’d like to see.
So I want to complicate things, rather than come to the conclusion “it’s all bad” – or for that matter, “it’s all good”.
I’d also circle around to the point I made in the post – in a real way this does represent a democratisation of concern and care, which to my mind is positively better than a sort of bourgeois Protestant world of worthy works – that, perhaps more so than these sort of campaigns, truly infantilises the objects of the ‘concern’.
Yep, Fine. And it would bring back bad memories for me of my crazy grade 11 Maths I teacher.
What FDB said.
“Never go the Abe Lincoln, FDB. There’s something very creepy about it.”
You betcha!
– What, you thought I had a hangup about the Republic, and stuff? Naah, man, it was the facial hair — it was the beating of his hideous hair!!11!!
Maybe I should have clarified there Mark, I agree that the democratisation of concern is a good thing, and I certainly agree that a model in which our charitable betters do these good works for us is very infantilising. These campaigns indicate a greater degree of engagement of ordinary people with the civic works which they want done, and that’s good.
They also provide a good opportunity for consciousness-raising of one sort or another. I was involved in the white ribbon campaigns many many years ago and, aside from a few guys yelling “faggot” at me, I got a pretty good response from passing men and women. All these things are good.
But the flipside of this democratisation is that the movements can become an excellent way for powerful interests to insert their message insidiously. I don’t think commenters would be so happy with white ribbon campaigns, for example, if they were heavily (and secretly) sponsored by beer companies, and carried with them a campaign to cast domestic violence in terms of moral failings by individuals.
A good example of this is the Rare Disease Movement in the UK. Many of these organisations are very slick and they are up to 80% or more funded by drug companies. This is because the treatments are often denied funding by organisations like the PBS and NICE, and it’s a lot easier for a drug company to get those decisions revoked through a “civic” campaign of moral outrage than through their own lobbying. And if you point out that you’re distrustful of the campaign, social pressure of a very powerful kind gets brought to bear. Witness The Sun’s campaign against football clubs who didn’t want their players to wear poppy-embroidered uniforms. Campaigns run at civic level can be very powerful forces for peer pressure.
FDB, I hope that serves to show I don’t think men’s health is an unimportant problem, just that I’m distrustful of the actors driving it, and the ultimate consequences of their success for men’s health and wellbeing. Successful implementation of a prostate cancer screening campaign would most likely lead to an increase in worried well old men, high cost to the health system, and limited or even decreased prostate cancer survival.
I don’t disagree about the potential for astroturf, sg, and thanks for the clarification.
I won’t comment on the prostate cancer issue due to my lamentable ignorance of it.
To be honest, despite being aware of the campaign for years, I’ve never had the foggiest idea what Movember is about – maybe its just me, but its doesnt seem like very good issue marketing, and the medium might have overwhelmed the message.
Plus mos are just plain dodgy. I always think of constable Dave (icky Quincleand reference)
Who’s for Beardtember instead?
Beardgust might be better, Lefty E! I grew a beard once in December – don’t recommend, at least in Brisbane. Itchy!
Beardgust would be more seasonally appropriate. Sideburnuary?
This year is the first year I’ve actually been aware of what Movember was about lefty E. It seems they may have realised the message was not getting through.
Beardernity for me BTW.
I think they need to reach out to Gen Y with Landing Striptober.
I presume the results of that would be verifiable on the men’s health website, Left E? Perhaps sponsored by FHM?
Boom boom!
Ok, serious now, folks, or I’ll share with you the insights my students developed on the origin and meaning of the Brazilian last year when doing a qual methods course focused on body image!
(That was seriously fun to teach, btw…)
sg, my friend and fellow-blogger Stephanie Trigg wrote an excellent piece for the Age on pink-ribbon consumerism in 2007.
Late Friday night brings on a pedantic mood. Should the : in that passage not be a semi-colon? I’d have thought so.
Thanks Pavlov’s Cat, I’ll read it when I get back to Amsterdam. i have to rush to soak up some of my carbon credits now…
I found Guy Rundle’s article very patronising in tone – he spends most of the article in (inevitably graceful and well-written) ad hominem mode, explaining the theory through the life of the author, rather than arguing the theory itself. I’m pretty sure that Tim Soutphommasane’s childhood still had some relationship to Sunnyboys, cricket and the beach, even if he also had other experiences.
“And it doesn’t represent a viable political strategy for the left, for a whole range of reasons, including the basic failure whereby a project which transforms the social and the cultural cannot be substituted for by a fairly empty civics.” This is the nub of the argument, so it’s a bit disappointing that most of the words weren’t focusing on this. And I’m not so sure of this. Certainly the US – a multicultural place in a way that Australia will become more like, I suspect – has a prominent discourse about patriotism based in the Constitution, which Americans seem quite fond of, despite it having no mention of the American equivalents of Sunnyboys, cricket, or Khe Sanh (Reese’s Pieces, baseball and Freebird?).
Tim, Guy can speak for himself. But I do get puzzled that any discussion of an author’s background is labeled ‘ad hominem’. It’s not – that’s not what the term means. The argument is that patriotism is a distillation of experience, and so the author’s life story is relevant – Rundle tells his own, and with a bit of obvious self-deprecation.
Secondly, as I argued in my post, patriotism – constitutional or otherwise, cannot be a universal – and hence the distinction Rundle makes between ‘countrylove’ and patriotism as a political category – the first is probably very widespread, but not universally felt, and the second must have a particular reference and content to have any meaning – because it is related to a political state or nation (which is a political construct) as well as to a place. So what works in the US is most unlikely to work here. And a lot of what people in this country – on the left, too wrt folks like Obama – find unattractive about American nationalism is its hokey assumption of uniqueness, among other things.
But this is also Rundle’s argument – a left patriotism (and I would not like to see one, for reasons I’ve explained – that’s not to say that I don’t think we should love our land and its peoples or that there cannot be a distinctly Australian – but inclusive – left politics) must rest on something which is genuinely popular – not some dryasdust narrrative about political events. Rundle is quite right to say most Australians don’t give a toss about that – whether it’s John Howard’s right wing version (the greatness of Menzies, blah blah) or Soutphommasane’s progressive version (early advances in widening the suffrage, blah blah). Of course, political history is important, but it does *not* have deep roots in the Australian culture of the early 21st century, and thus is not a viable basis for a political strategy.
Of course, I question what Soutphommasane thinks is the content of the ideological signifier social democracy, but that was a topic I discussed in earlier posts.
And just on American patriotism and its putative lack of reference to an equivalent of Khe Sanh, the more I think about that, the more I think it’s questionable.
Music – since the French revolution – has often been associated with nationalism and revolution and war (see Tim Blanning’s recent The Triumph of Music for an excellent discussion).
So, the Marseillaise for the French, and the Star Spangled Banner for the Americans, have real power. Both are, in effect, revolutionary and warlike anthems. They recall the foundation of the state and the coming to being of the nation.
Advance Australia Fair is absolutely no comparison. Hence, I think, the allusion to Khe Sanh – it’s a song about war, but from a rather disillusioned popular perspective. It might be the basis for some sort of progressive cultural nationalism, while the official symbols of the political apparatus in this country aren’t.
I don’t think the reference to that song, or to Cold Chisel, was random!
Khe Sahn is a song about a bloke who dislikes Australia to the point that he’s thinking of permanently moving back to Vietnam. It’s hardly that patriotic, it’s just a really cool song that people like to sing. The American version of it is “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey, which is similarly the song that 50% of drunk Karaoke attendees want to sing.
The entire point of Movember is to raise general community awareness. A moustache is a pretty obvious signal, and if it didn’t have some degree of visibility it would be a failure. Every participant gets a spiel to repeat regarding why they are participating when soliciting funds, and I’m sure if you asked most of them they’d be able to tell you more.
Saying that this reflects a failure on the part of government seems odd to me. Most of us here on the left side of the aisle still think there’s a role for the no-for-profit sector in healthccare, don’t we? Or are we just to put 100% trust in government allocating our taxes for all health issues? That is the reductio of what I read above.
Anyway, Mark’s central point is unarguable – has there ever, will there ever be a society that doesn’t use participation in certain civic activities as a social marker? And what’s so very wrong with that?
My one – and very strong – objection to Movember is that it actively prevents women from participating in what is a very worthwhile cause.
Women are just as concerned about men’s health as men are, so why did the campaign decide to use facial hair as its theme when it is patently obvious that it would not be as effective on 2 levels: 1) men grow facial hair all the time anyway, so how do you distinguish between those supporting Movember and those who just have a mo and 2) (most) women can’t grow facial hair, so how are they able to show their support?
One of the reasons ribbon and bracelet campaigns work so well is that EVERYONE can participate and conspicuously show their support for the cause.
If the campaign had – from day one – actively encouraged the participation of both men and women by having one thing everyone can do, or one specific thing for men and one for women (if they really wanted to go down the mo road), then I would have a lot more positive feelings about this campaign.
As it stands, it tends to provoke a bit of a “sod you, you sexist bastards” response from me and many other women I know.
Mark at #28, since nobody else is willing to approach this thorny question, allow me. My understanding is that your sentence one of those instances where either a colon or a semicolon is appropriate.
A colon means that one is about to deliver on a premise, or a promise, made in the first half of the sentence, as in ‘Okay, I’ve said that thing there, and it implies three things : X, Y and Z.’ A semicolon means ‘This sentence could work as two grammatically whole sentences, each with a subject and an active verb, and a full stop would do ; in this case, they are so closely related to each other that I am going use a semicolon to join them up, which implies some sort of causal or other close connection.’
Obvs, those two meanings aren’t mutually exclusive, as per your sentence.
*Slinks back to the Rare Books section*
Not where I work. One of my fellow workers has committed to not shaving her legs over the month in support of Movember. Her choice is respected and her cause is supported.
And speaking of rare books, I think there is a PhD thesis in ‘Khe Sanh’ and its social history. A lot of the boys who love to hear and sing it are just responding to that memory/aura of flannies and tinnies and Jimmeh, others more generally, as per Guy’s last paragraph, to its whole system-bucking ethos — and its sense of having been alienated, not embraced, by your country’s laws and wars. Appropriating this as (of all things) a national anthem is only possible because it’s an incredibly complex song. Don Walker’s not Don Walker for nothing. The nature of its popularity reminds me a bit of the way ‘Born in the USA’ got appropriated as a populist national anthem, to means something quite different from what Bruce had in mind.
I think my favourite thing about ‘Khe Sanh’ as some sort of signifier of Australian national pride is that the original and best version is sung by a man with a Scottish accent.
chinda63@43,
One of the big problems with men’s health and why Movember is primarily directed at men, is that men do not go to doctors the way they should. The point of the Movember month is A) to persuade men to go and have their prostates checked B) be aware of male tendencies toward depression.
These are things men do not generally do and the whole point of Movember is to get men to do something about it by going to the doctor in the first place.
As some-one who has prostate cancer, I can tell you it is UTTERLY INAPPROPRIATE to talk about the purpose of the month with phrases like “sod you, you sexist bastards”.
Wow, how petty and all about MEEEE. A bloke does some small thing about raising consciousness about male health, and now he’s a sexist bastard.
I dimly recall some maiden great-aunts whose facial hirsuteness put Lord Kitchener’s camouflaged upper lip to shame.
‘Ultimately who was more “patriotic” — the Oxford exile, or the Brunswick Trot, wearily grabbing a placard and going to another demonstration of behalf of David Hicks, an Australian abandoned by his government?’
I think this last point of Rundle’s is quite important. Our definition of ‘patriotic acts’ is extremely elastic. People going on adventure holidays to Kokoda or Gallipoli is somehow coded as more patriotic than going on a political demonstration.
I’ve only read Tim Soutphommasane’s articles in the Australian rather than the book itself – but he does seem to embody a patronising attitude that: those little ordinary folk like patriotism – so we (progressives) should grit our teeth and like it too. Because we all know those little people won’t be swayed by our sophisticated arguments …
Possum’s post on the ANU’s poll of attitudes to rural Australia might be relevant here as an example of how incoherent our views can be. Rural people are coded as more self sufficient, hard-working than City/suburban types – yet they overwhelmingly want government to solve their problems for them.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2009/11/20/anu-poll-–-public-perceptions-of-rural-issues/
I n my workplace it was a woman who cajoled/ego-stroked/browbeat the mo-less into participation. Oddly or not, it is the porn-star handlebar (rather than a Kitchener or an Orwell or an errol) that has dominated. Is there something latent going on or is the idea to take the piss?
I haven’t read the book properly, so perhaps someone can explain how the thesis even makes sense, given that the default position for the Left throughout most of the twentieth century was explicitly, avowedly, patriotic, so much so that a great chunk of the mythos of contemporary Australian nationalism was developed by intellectuals on the Left. If, when Soutphommasane refers to ‘progressives’, he means those to the Left of the ALP, well, from about 1935 on the Communist Party (the single most important organisation of the Left) explicitly promoted nationalism, a position reinforced by its support for WWII, and later by the various fronts it operated during the Cold War. The Legend of the Nineties, Ned Kelly, social realism, the Australasian Book Society, Overland, Reedy River, the New Theatre, Bill Wannan, the Frank Hardy of Billy Borker and so on and so forth: that was the origin of all the stuff about the laconic Aussie who lived and breathed mateship. Then, of course, there’s the Maoism of the seventies, which, with its campaigns for Blinky Bill and its bush bands and the rest of it, was surely as ferociously jingoistic as any good patriot could want.
How can you write a book urging the Left to reclaim patriotism without acknowledging that, actually, the hegemonic forces on the Left overwhelmingly did see themselves as patriotic? The only Left I know that’s explicitly and consciously anti-nationalism is that influenced by various forms of Trotskyism, and it’s never been a major force in Australian political life.
So who exactly is he polemicising against? If by the Left, he means Labor, well that’s even weirder. Curtin during WW2, Whitlam and his cultural policies, Hawke and the America’s Cup: none of that was patriotism?
Of course, there’s a whole other argument about the disastrous consequences of the Left’s nationalism. On the cultural front, Australian Left nationalism played a major part in Left intellectuals’ polemics against ‘decadent’ modernism. Politically, it’s surely of some significance that Howard could adopt, almost without alteration, a rhetoric of mateship identical to that developed by radicals like Vance Palmer and Wannan and the rest of the CP’s intellectual hangers-on. But you can’t even have that debate until you honestly represent the history.
Soutphommasane’s op ed pieces read almost as if they’re written by the old DLP: ‘look, I’m a man of the Left and I’m here to tell you that the rest of the progressive movement is made up of traitors.’ Which, I guess, is why the Oz likes them so much.
But maybe the book has an actual argument about the history of the Left. Perhaps someone who has read it properly might comment.
Apparently the Amish don’t sport moustaches because for them it represents militarism. Bugger the limp-wristed Sgt Pepper’s mo, when is the full walrus coming back? Blokes can sort out their place in the pecking order by preening and displaying their Lord Kitchener.
You make a good point about left-wing patriotism in the ’70s, Mark – we really can’t understand the Whitlam years without it. There were lots of books with titles like “Going It Alone”. After the dismissal there was an explosion of this kind of stuff.
But why can’t a progressive’s love of country be rooted in politics, too? Lots to be impressed by – one of the first to give women the vote, secret ballots, first Labor governments in the world, radical innovations like arbitration. Australia and NZ were seen as among the most advanced democracies in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century – in much the same way progressives now envy the “Nordic model”.
Who doesn’t feel a little smugness that we have compulsory voting? Or, looking at the trouble Obama has had passing very mild health care reforms, thankful that we live in a country with universal health care?
Mark @ 32 and Pav @ 37.
i have CD here put together by Rob Hirst I think, called “Shouting from the Streets: Songs of Protest.”
Khe Sahn is on it.
I don’t think people get the importance of Cold Chisel to Vietnem Vets after that song came out. I think it was the first time they were acknowledged as people by the “zeitgeist” (that word is so binnable these days) at the time.
It wasn’t the only time they wrote for vets either.
I know a few who talk about “When the War is over” in reverent terms, cos it helped finally end it for them.
In that sense those songs are almost the definition of real patriotism (at least to me) compassion and concern for the people that share where you live…
nationalism makes it ugly when you deny other people that compassion cos they don’t share where you live.
@37 – Thanks, Punctuation Pav. I’ll go back to my debate on Facebook about the ellipsis presently! But on Khe Sanh, I think you’re right – there would be a very interesting study in it, and yep, jules @ 45. I’ve got some mates (all female, btw) who are launching on some interesting work on popular music and the translation of drug cultures/scenes/attitudes between Britain and Australia in the 60s and 70s. It’s promising stuff, and I’m really pleased to see some sociologists looking into it – a different sort of methodological and theoretical approach from cultural studies (not that… etc.)
@41 -
That’s my impression too, Tim. Though I haven’t read the book either. But I think it brings together jeff’s comment @ 43 and ginja’s @ 44: There’s no earthly reason why progressives can’t give themselves a pat on the back if they want to feel all Aussie (and I remain convinced that countering the Howardian history wars is and was important) but it’s only going to work, politically, if real connections with popular culture are made – not in the sort of way Tim S seems to envisage, which reminds me of Keating era commissions with Melbourne Uni profs working out what we *should* know about Australian political history.
“Secondly, as I argued in my post, patriotism – constitutional or otherwise, cannot be a universal – and hence the distinction Rundle makes between ‘countrylove’ and patriotism as a political category – the first is probably very widespread, but not universally felt, and the second must have a particular reference and content to have any meaning – because it is related to a political state or nation (which is a political construct) as well as to a place.” Mark @ 31
I completely disagree actually.
Most definitions define patriotism as “love of country”. Thats it. I don’t see a difference between Countrylove and Patriotism. And Nationalism isn’t much different either. They are two emotional responses, one focuses on place and another on symbolic structures that replace the actual place. Usually people get them confused.
Because most people are unable to distinguish between the state, the nation and the country. But any association with “the state” changes patriotism to nationalism.
We may be quibbling about words, but I think its an important distinction, cos the state is a dangerous entity. Nietzsche nailed in “Thus Spake Z.” – the state is a liar and cold monster that eats its citizens. Its an entity that is entirely concerned with the regulation and control of power in over a geographic area.
Thats why its always sus when people start waving flags and singing anthems. They are usually symbols for the state not the people. And why songs like Waltzing Matilda, or (I come from a land) Down Under or even Khe Sahn may have more meaning to a populace, but they aren’t official anthems.
And all this is in the context of a need to form a “mystical” relationship with the place (not the state) where you live.
Well, I kinda don’t disagree, jules, but the terms are used somewhat interchangeably in practice, including, I think, by Soutphommasane, which is why I imagine Rundle’s invented “countrylove” to make the distinction clearer.
Actually on reflection countrylove is a far better term.
I lost a post yesterday, but it referred to a rather tedious fire brigade meeting I attemded on Wedesday night…. to me volunteering to protect my community is practical “countrylove” and I think perhaps thats what Soutphommasane was referring to. but I tend to agree with the points jeff (and others) raised @ 43 as well, so perhaps he (TS) doesn’t really get what he is talking about, and is approaching the idea from that classic “elitist leftist” position.
Which is odd cos I would never have thought there was a classic “elitist lefty” position really. (In some ways elitism is a position on its own and has nothing to do with Left Right politics anyway.)
There’s a sort of elite left in the guise of the court philosopher – the op/edder, the thintanker, the ‘public intellectual’, as I wrote in my first post on Soutphommasane:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/19/tim-soutphommasane-ideology-and-narratives/
Mark @ 51 Yeah I spose…
The traditional left right dichotomy is such a problem I find. Its a false duality in many ways, and doesn’t acknowledge many differences on both sides. (EG Ron paul’s criticism of neo con politics was strong during the bush regime, as was Paul Craig Roberts’, yet both sides of that argument belong to right wing fucktards imo.) Its a one dimensional model of things that are more than one dimensional.
Have you seen those political compasses that find their way around the net?
They provide 2 dimensional political models. the left right divide on the x axis and the authoritarian libertarian one on the y axis.
Your comment has me thinking about the ‘elitist left’ in those terms.
It certainly seems that those “court philosopher’ opinions are coming from the authoritarian side of politics (right or left wing) and there is something about the way a position is defined that points to that libertarian/authoritarian continuum.
Left or Right, there is something about the way some people try to define issues that points to their level of authoritrianism. Its got something to do with how the debate is framed, and so I think in the cases where that “elitist” critism is applied to either side its more a reflection of the authoritarian/libertarian dynamic than the left/right one. The way public commentators frame their thoughts might be worth looking at in those terms, and perhaps a starting point would be whether their statements tend toward asking questions and offering different options, or providing simple answers and not acknowledging the benefits in opposing viewpoints.
I’d also tend to see the country love/patriotism vs nationalism dynamic in those terms too, more a reflection of power and control for its own sake than any particular ideology.
I reckon that 2 dimensional model of political thought could offer a lot to the political conversation/shouting match that takes place in Australia, and its to our detriment that we don’t use it.
Rundle:
“In fact, the 1960s and 1970s saw its greatest efflorescence when the localist themes of the radical left — the revival of the bush ballads, connection with Aboriginal Australia, the self-publishing of local serious novels etc — fed a general wave of radical and critical nationalism, from the new theatre, local music to the Australian independence movement, a genuine republican movement, in contrast to the top-down ARM of the 1990s.”
Exactly my experience of the period. Well said.
As for Movember. I refuse on two grounds because i) it makes me look like a relo of Chopper and ii) ‘men’s health’ is a reactionary anti-feminist backlash for which see ‘Boutique Health’ monograph by T. Schofield.
I read on a liberal blog a month or two ago that there were no great social democratic thinkers – like Burke or Hayek. That’s not true (I have my list of impressive social democratic thinkers), but what do others think? Who are your favourite social democratic thinkers? Remember “social democracy” is a broad church, spanning the mildest of centrists to radical. And it’s not a synonym for ALP supporter (though that helps).
In any event, I hope Soutphommasane sticks at it – it would be good if he could link up with Robert Manne and The Monthly group and really make it a social democratic mag. All the infrastructure exists for a thriving group of social democratic thinkers – The Monthly, Dissent Magazine, Fabian Society, Per Capita (and other think tanks), blogs like LP – things just need to be brought together.
Guy@1: “In speaking with my partner, who is an Australian citizen but was born overseas, she reckons that there is a sense of egalitarianism (whether imagined or otherwise) in Australia that she just hasn’t got in the other countries she has lived in.”
Yep, and the best place to see this Australian “sense of egalitarianism” is overseas, because then its clear, absent all the bullshit. Wherever Australians congregate in foreign lands, parlticularly in seriously dangerous situations, you see it, and so do others. It’s natural, its worthy of celebration, and its us.
One too many G&Ts I think.
Update: The debate between Rundle and Soutphommasane continues.
The right never learns from the select past they worship and the left think their chosen future is for everyone.
Aquamarine. Now that’s a nice colour in any spectrum, political or otherwise.
Hmm. That last aphorism probably rolls better off the tongue like this.
“The right never learns from the select past they worship and the left think their chosen future will work for everyone.”
Guy Rundle makes a pretty low dig about Soutphommasane living overseas. That’s the kind of tired cheap shot you’d expect from Sunday lift-out froth about Germaine Greer, Clive James, Robert Hughes – 25 years ago!
There’s still a nastiness from those who think themselves superior and to the left of social democrats. Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and they still can’t figure out if the likes of Soutphommasane are comrades in the Popular Front or Social Fascists.
Tattoo lovers perceive their body as a canvas whereby the tattoo art form is to be engraved. Normally, women like tiny tattoo photographs and designs with lucid colors.