Ego
and Soul: The Modern West in Search of Meaning
by John
Carroll
HarperCollins, Sydney,
1998, 280pp, $19.95
ISBN 0-7322-5990-8
Pauline Hanson has
been described by some commentators as Australia’s
own anti-politician. Hanson’s appeal lies in her advocacy
of the traditional prejudices of ordinary Australians, denied
a voice for so long by the ‘rancorous liberalism’
of the intellectual and social elites, who dominate the
media and the academy. This counter-attack against the elites
has, however, been reflected in the work of one Australian
academic, Dr John Carroll, Reader in Sociology at LaTrobe
University in Melbourne. In books such as Humanism: The
Wreck of Western Culture, and his latest work, Ego
and Soul, Carroll has directed his keen intelligence towards
a radical critique of the liberal humanism that dominates
Western high culture. Instead, he defends the popular culture
of ordinary people as both more healthy psychologically
and sustaining a more fulfilling human existence. He could
be described as Australia’s own anti-intellectual.
According to Carroll
the chief culprit in the decline of the West is humanism,
which came to prominence during the Italian Renaissance.
Humanism placed human Reason at the centre of creation,
thus displacing the Christian God as the new meaning of
human existence. This has led, particularly amongst the
cultural and artistic elites, to an overly rationalistic
and nihilistic philosophy which, unable to provide a meaning
for human existence or explain death, has resorted instead
to ridiculing and deconstructing whatever is good and noble
in traditional culture.
Carroll places himself
in the Reformation tradition of Lutheran Protestantism,
with its anti-rational, anti-humanist emphasis upon the
individual’s relationship with God. His arguments,
however, seem to me to be closer in spirit to the German
Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Indeed, Carroll’s whole critique of humanism and
rationalism bears
a striking resemblance to the anti-Enlightenment philosophy
of the Lutheran pietist J.G. Hamann, whose anti-scientific
and highly individualistic religious beliefs greatly influenced
the German Romantics, and later the thought of Kierkegaard,
one of Carroll’s intellectual heroes.
While Carroll’s
book Humanism argued that Western man has been corrupted
almost completely by perfidious humanism, liberalism and
the belief in free will, Ego and Soul argues that things
are not quite as bad as they seemed at first. It seems that
the good old spirit of Protestantism is still with us in
the form of dedication to work (‘work as prayer’)
and in the supremacy of individual conscience, and this,
according to Carroll, is a good thing. Carroll thinks this
will see us through the troubled times ahead.
He also sees the
Princess Diana phenomenon as an example of the rebirth of
the sacred, in neo-pagan form. Silly me, I just thought
it was a lot of hysteria over a none-too-bright princess,
who managed to market herself well to the media. But according
to Carroll she is the image of aristocratic virtue (she
was not of noble birth), wedded to a post-Christian saintly
compassion (the Queen and other members of the royal family
do more charitable work than she did). Mother Theresa is
irrelevant, according to Carroll: she means nothing to worldly
Western people. Diana represents the new ideal: worldly,
but saintly at the same time. Carroll argues, quite correctly,
that this is a neo-pagan ideal of the sacred.
As always with Carroll,
the myth is more important than the reality. What people
believe is more important than the reality of the situation.
It doesn’t matter that Diana was probably no more extraordinary
than you or me, what matters is that people believe she
is more extraordinary than themselves. Carroll argues quite
bluntly that traditional Christianity is dead. There is
no hope of revival in the Western world. He argues that
our future is neo-pagan, where the ideal is an earthly one,
combined with what is best in the compassionate morality
of Christianity. Though, how (small-c) christian morality
is supposed to survive without its traditional religious
or theological underpinnings, Carroll does not say.
I always feel after
reading Carroll that it is better to give up any intellectual
pretensions one might have, become a footy fan, drink lots
of VB beer, watch soapies on the TV, and read the car manual
instead of Aris-totle. It really makes you wonder why he
bothers with intellectual matters himself. I read somewhere
once that Wittgenstein used to advise his students at Cambridge
to give up philosophy, which he believed to be a waste of
time, and ‘go out and get a real life,’ to put
it in modern parlance. Ultimately this is what Carroll is
telling us as well: give up the intellect and go and get
a life.
The silliness of
all this is that if you have an intellectual inclination
you can’t just deny it and go away and become a peasant.
One of my favourite thinkers, Julien Benda, described this
as ‘the treason of the intellectuals.’ This occurs
when intellectuals give up their calling as social critics
(‘practitioners of critique,’ as Frank Knopfelmacher
put it) and become defenders of whatever the masses want,
no matter how frivolous (like mythologising Princess Diana)
or dangerous (like supporting Adolf Hitler).
The book is written
in a superior and dogmatic tone, which begins to irritate
as one reads on. This tone we have come to expect from John
Carroll: little attempt is made to substantiate most of
what is said, and we are meant to accept his analysis on
faith, as Reason is not to be trusted. At the time of writing
Humanism Carroll described himself as a ‘non-denominational
Christian.’ This latest book represents his attempt
to move away from that image, towards a more pagan position.
It remains to be seen whether he can reinvent himself as
a pagan, escaping what he sees as the crumbling edifice
of Western Christianity.
Review
by Allaine Cerwonka
University of California
Humanities Research Institute.
The
Packaging of Australia: Politics and Culture Wars
by Gregory
Melleuish
University of New
South Wales Press, Sydney, 1998, 152
pp, $19.95.
ISBN 0 86840 584
1
The Packaging
of Australia
is yet another attempt to make sense of the dynamic and
conflict-riddled landscape of Australian national identity.
In his latest book, Gregory Melleuish offers us a clear
and well-argued analysis of the crisis of national identity
and belonging in contemporary Australia. He has produced
an intellectual history which skilfully unravels economic
history, cultural protest, and the rhetoric of politicians.
He does so as a means of understanding how the country has
moved from Colonial Australia (colonial period - 1892),
characterised by ‘energy, conflict and achievement’,
into Contemporary Australia (1960s - present), the era when
Australians now struggle to find meaning after the breakdown
of ‘old certainties about nation, race, empire and
the Australian way of life’ (p. 13).
The book breaks
into two sections; the first analyses the historical development
of the loss of confidence that Australians presently face.
Melleuish describes Colonial Australia as an era characterised
by a sense of infinite possibility as European colonial
powers developed institutions and policies which revolved
around ‘freedom and the rule of law’ (10). He
does acknowledge that European expansion was premised on
the subjugation of indigenous peoples and that during this
era women were beginning to protest their inequality. However,
on the whole, Melleuish paints a picture of a country with
the potential to develop strong democratic institutions
and a healthy sense of national community. Apparently for
Melleuish, the fact that colonial law and membership in
the political community were premised on white supremacy
(terra nullius) and sexism does not disqualify colonial
Australia from being considered the foundation of a democratic
and healthy
society.
The confidence of
the colonial era was shaken by the depression of the 1890s.
Modern Australia (1890s - 1960s) was notable for its insularity
and rigidity when Australians sought to provide structure
and certainty following economic crisis. Additionally, Australian
faith in free-trade and internationalism was replaced by
a wide-spread demand for greater isolationism and self-reliance
(Chapter 2). This discussion is one of the strengths of
the study. The Packaging of Australia is refreshing
in its study of national identity because it considers how
developments in the international sphere such as the world-wide
depression of 1892 have been highly influential in the construction
of national mythologies and priorities. Additionally, Melleuish
examines how domestic influences, such as the intellectuals
of this era like Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson, helped
produce a collective identity of self-reliance, which (unintentionally
perhaps) supported proponents in the economic sphere who
campaigned for economic protectionism for Australia.
After the national
retreat from the possibilities of Colonial Australia, a
national community emerged which was unified by contradictory
values. Melleuish writes,
At one level the
cultural order of Modern Australia was characterised by
an emphasis on the positive worth of the common man as
the rock on which the political and social order was built...
At the same time Australians sought this positive goal
via the route of exclusion. White Australia, protection
of Australian industry, and arbitration were designed
to keep out undesirable elements of the larger world,
to protect Australians from the chaos and disorder which
existed beyond their control (21).
He argues that Modern
Australia did succeed in firmly entrenching democratic values
and institutions in Australia (125); nevertheless, it also
imposed a false homogeneity and unity onto the population.
The contradictions
of Modern Australia came to the surface beginning in the
1960s. The 1960s introduced a new form of individualism
and a changing international order, marked in particular
by the dismantling of the British empire and the rise of
new regional alliances. This ushered in the current era
of anxiety and self-doubt. Yet, Melleuish also insists that
this crisis of confidence also opens up new possibilities
when he writes, ‘in the cracks between the disciplinary
state of Modern Australia and the not yet established discipline
of Contemporary Australia a “moment of possibility”
exists during which a genuinely free social order may emerge’
(52).
The second half
of the book is devoted to describing various solutions that
have been offered to the Australian public to ensure a brighter
future. Melleuish labels these competing political visions
‘packages’, acknowledging that each contains an
element of insight into Australia’s present political
upheaval. Yet, more forcefully, he argues that the packages
are problematic: each over-simplifies a complex set of issues;
depends on government to solve social problems; exists only
at the level of rhetoric but insists that it can impact
the material world; and lastly, represents one particular
group’s agenda masqueraded as a panacea for society
as a whole. These packages include economic rationalism,
the ‘clever country’, republicanism, and multiculturalism.
Anyone who has lived in or even visited Australia in the
last ten years will have a pretty good sense from the package
titles what each promotes as its vision for the country.
I was interested
to read Melleuish’s assertion that these packages,
in functioning at the level of ideas, do not have a considerable
effect on the real world, even if their proponents would
like the public to believe that they will. He continues
on to say that the packages are in some ways an admission
that we cannot control the real world (77). This point seemed
to overlook the ways in which at least some of these packages
had corresponding policy in immigration and in the arts
(e.g. Keating’s Creative Nation). These packages are
more than ideas, but rather affect the material world by
making certain things legitimate or thinkable. Although
Melleuish comes to a different conclusion, the evidence
he provides suggests that these packages are ideological
frameworks that set the stage for the changes and implementations
various groups will enact if they can garner enough support.
What is particularly
useful in Melleuish’s analysis is that he traces the
political interests and intellectual history that comprise
the ‘packages’ which purport to solve Australia’s
steering crisis. By tracing the genealogy of each package,
he identifies the particular political and social context
of each vision of reform. He also maps out the alliances
between various camps, such as the clever country mob and
the multiculturalists and explains how and why various groups
have rejected other packages.
Given Melleuish’s
careful analysis of the history of these ideological packages
and of the political responses to them, I am particularly
surprised by his category of ‘the ordinary Australian’
which appears in the last two chapters of the book. In arguing
why these packages are inadequate, he asserts such things
as, ‘Many ordinary Australians have perceived these
packages as an attack on their sense of self-worth’
(122). Or, ‘what most Australians will be looking for
in the immediate future is not extravagant government schemes
designed to create some grand New Australia’ (130).
The ‘ordinary Australians’ sensible response to
these packages seems to be meant to highlight the self-serving
nature of those who promote packages, the inappropriateness
of government trying to resolve issues in civil society,
and the need for ‘sensible policies that provide the
space and security they need to live their lives’ (130).
I find Melleuish’s
invocation of this ‘ordinary Australian’ disappointing.
To begin with, it is analytically imprecise: is there really
such a thing as the ordinary Australian? Of course, in this
ordinary Australia category are women, elderly people, homosexuals,
shop assistants, barristers, conservatives, lefties, Aborigines,
Asian-Australians, Greek Australians, Anglo-Celtic Australians,
etc. who most likely have very different takes (from other
groups and from each other) on these important political
questions of the day. Are all of these ordinary Australians
unified in the need for security, space and sensible policies;
and do they all define these things in the same way?
After tracing the
particular political interests of so many groups in their
struggle to define the terms of Australian identity, Melleuish
then asks us to believe that there are some people in Australia
who have no political agenda or loyalties, but just have
an honest (and more authentic) response to the political
questions of the day. In this way, Melleuish seems to be
using a romanticised image of some authentic voice in Australia
as a way to support the call he makes to reject all of these
visions and to reject strong governmental involvement in
civil society. Certainly, groups of people have rejected
some or all of these packages. However, just as he traced
the terms and politics of the rejection of these packages
in his discussion of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation constituency,
Melleuish might have traced out the genealogy of other significant
responses to these packages. Instead he invokes the image
of the ordinary Australian and uses it as a moral voice
(akin to the chorus in Greek tragedies) which will ultimately
guide the country to health if it is not seduced by the
siren song of one of these ideological packages. In other
words, I don’t think we can so easily speak of ordinary
Australians in contrast to the people who comprise interest
groups and political parties (ch. 5). When we start to analyse
the ordinary Australian category, we necessarily find particular
interests and social perspectives which often conflict with
those of other segments of the population. This complexity
makes it difficult to believe that there is a more unified
voice or spirit of the Australian population by which we
could or should be guided.
Melleuish should
be applauded for creating a book that tries to sketch new
directions for how to redefine the bonds of national community.
However, in the process, he packages his own political ideas
into the ‘neutral’ will of an imaginary category
of ordinary Australians, an analytical device that is less
than satisfactory.
Review by Julie
Novak
On
Voting: A Public Choice Approach
by Gordon
Tullock
Edward Elgar for
the John Locke Institute, Cheltenham UK, 1998, 208pp,
£Stg.49.95.
ISBN 1-85898-666-4
One of the fundamental
lessons of economics is that there exists a select range
of goods – public goods – which, by their characteristics
(i.e. non-excludability of potential consumers, non-rivalry
in consumption, production indivisibility), cannot be optimally
provided in a competitive market economy. As Adam Smith
noted, although public goods ‘may be in the highest
degree advantageous to a great society, [they] are however
of such a nature, that the profit could never repay the
expense of any individual or small number of individuals’
(Smith 1776: 325). Accordingly, to avoid the incidence of
free-riding it is asserted that government, as an agent
of coercion, should tax individuals in order to finance
the provision of public goods.
However, having
said this, the free-riding problem necessitates a method
to be found by which individuals are induced to reveal to
the government their honest preferences for these goods.
This is where the voting mechanism steps in. Gordon Tullock,
one of the leading exponents of public choice theory, sets
out to examine the effectiveness of the voting mechanism
in On Voting.
Tullock briefly
introduces the reader to a world of direct democracy where
all voters are well-informed, they neatly order their preferences
in terms of rank (including indifference), and their preference
orderings are consistent (transitive). In this world, the
voting options (in this case, various public programs) are
put to the test and the option preferred by the majority
of voters wins. In a special case as identified by Duncan
Black in 1948, if individual preferences are single-peaked,
and the number of voters is odd, then the majority decision
will yield transitive social preference at the median of
the distribution of voter preferences. In other words, the
rational-actor voting model achieves a unique and stable
equilibrium resembling that of the general equilibrium result
under perfectly competitive market conditions.
If we assume that
all voters are equally distributed in terms of intensity
of their preference, then this result is safe. However,
what if a spending program or political candidate scrapes
in with 51% majority support, although the losing 49% of
the population who opposed the winner actually possess a
greater intensity of opposition than the support felt by
the winning constituency? If preference intensities are
unequal, then it appears that some preferences are ignored
in favour of others. This issue is not insignificant given
that the supposed purpose of voting is to allow the population
to accurately record political preferences.
So, where to from
here? Tullock suggests a number of alternatives to majority
voting, which may succeed in registering the strength of
preferences across the voting population. These range from
‘log-rolling’ procedures where legislators can
trade votes (presumably on behalf of their constituents)
if preference intensities on various issues are unequal,
to the introduction of ‘demand-revealing’ voting
mechanisms where voters are allocated 100 points (or another
appropriate bundle of points) in order to register their
strength of preference across all options on the ballot
paper. While the proponents of such schemes assert that
their implementation can deliver Pareto-superior political
outcomes, subsequent writings have indicated that even these
proposals are far from perfect.
On Voting bravely also goes much further than asking
‘what voting system should apply?’ by airing possible
restrictions on the voting franchise itself. For example,
‘… people who are dependent upon the government
for their livelihood should not be permitted to vote because
they will have the strongest possible motive to vote almost
entirely in terms of their own personal income’ (p.
103). This is an interesting suggestion indeed, given the
entrenchment of the welfare state amongst Western democracies,
and the associated drain on public finances. However, no
matter what voting system is in place, it is difficult to
see how politicians would be willing to freeze out potential
supporters from exercising the right to vote, let alone
risk any social chaos that may be unleashed by the newly
disenfranchised mobs.
The standard public
choice line is that individuals who participate in the political
sphere do so for reasons of rational self-interest. However,
some recent research into the vote motive indicates that
citizens may not necessarily engage in the act of voting
for these reasons alone (Brennan and Lomasky 1993, Eichenberger
and Oberholzer-Gee 1998). Emotional sentiments such as moral
feeling could come into play as often as financial or economic
self-interest, if other political agents to play a key role
in influencing electoral outcomes through their ability
to influence public perceptions of moral judgements and
political values. This raises the question once again as
to whether the preferences as revealed by the electoral
process are a true and reliable reflection of the voters’
demands for political goods.
Public choice theory
tends to portray a rather gloomy story of voting as a highly
suspect, perhaps counter-productive, mechanism to reveal
public goods preferences, not to mention a rather ineffective
constraint on the political process. Tullock seems well
aware of the dilemmas implicit in this type of conclusion,
and has therefore played a key role in attempting to find
a voting system that balances the need for democratic expression
in a free society against the need to properly assess the
demand for public goods. In a reflection of Tullock’s
long-time devotion to research on voting systems, On
Voting: A Public Choice Approach serves as a high-quality,
panoramic introduction to a subject which, paradoxically,
is widely discussed in the public arena yet remains poorly
appreciated in terms of its underlying technicalities.
References
Brennan, Geoff and
Loren Lomasky 1993, Democracy and Decision: The Pure
Theory of Electoral Preference, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Eichenberger, Reiner
and Felix Oberholzer-Gee 1998, ‘Rational Moralists:
The role of fairness in democratic economic politics,’
Public Choice 94: 191-210.
Smith, Adam 1776,
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations, Adam and Charles Black, Edinburgh.
- Review
by Charles Richardson
Rewriting
the Sexual Contract
edited
by Geoff Dench
Institute of Community
Studies, London, 1997, 294pp.,
£Stg.12.50.
ISBN 0-9523355-8-1
Ten years ago, Carole
Pateman used the term ‘sexual contract’ to express
the idea that the classical liberal idea of the ‘social
contract’ was hiding something important – that
indeed it presupposed a radical inequality between men and
women. Only men were admitted into the public sphere of
government and civil society; women’s rights had already
been surrendered at an earlier stage of the process –
the sexual contract.
As a historical
account of social contract theory, it seems to me that this
model has some serious problems. Nonetheless, there is no
doubt that Pateman was onto something. The question of sex
discrimination and the sexual division of power today is
as significant as ever. In this British collection, Pateman
and 25 others offer their contrasting thoughts on the subject,
giving us a good opportunity to see the current state of
the debate.
One problem with
this debate is that the opponents of patriarchy tend to
come from the Left, and they have an awkward habit of assuming
– in flat contradiction of the evidence – that
the market is their enemy and government is their friend.
Pateman herself is passionate about equality, but she is
preoccupied with the state and its activities. Although
she cannot help recognising that globalisation has helped
undermine the sexual division of labor, she still attacks
moves to wind back the welfare state and to introduce flexibility
into labor markets.
In a similar vein,
Ruth Lister in ‘Promoting Women’s Economic Independence’
concludes that
It is time that
politicians looked beyond their preoccupation with public
dependence on the state, which for some women, in fact,
spells independence, and addressed this issue of private
dependence within the family (p. 191).
There is a valid
point to be made there, but it is buried under the cavalier
unconcern for the difference between government and private
action and the danger of giving more power to governments.
The problem on the
Right is even more serious. Geoff Dench at least raises
the question of increased state power, but he still wants
its assistance to prop up traditional families. He is convinced
that ‘The wheel of sexual revolution is turning’
(51), despite all the evidence showing a huge and continuing
generational change in attitudes to sex roles. Even the
moderate voices on the Right, such as Patricia Morgan and
Angela Rumbold, seem unable to escape from a ‘difference’
paradigm; they cannot envisage men taking on traditionally
‘female’ roles, or vice versa.
A comparison here
with racism is instructive. A few decades ago, racism was
a deceptively simple issue. On one side were those who argued
that certain races were inferior to others and therefore
could not expect equal treatment. Sometimes they hid behind
euphemisms like ‘separate development’, but few
were taken in. On the other side were those who wanted to
abolish segregation and discrimination in the name of racial
equality.
The good guys won
that round. The debate moved on, and as some frustrated
elements on the Left came to advocate ‘reverse discrimination’
and even theories of racial difference, those on the Right
were able to recast themselves (whether sincerely or not)
as defenders of equal treatment and non-discrimination.
But the debate on sex discrimination lags behind. There,
the majority on the Right are still pushing the sort of
‘identity politics’ that they condemn in the case
of race.
One thing this volume
shows is that, as far as sex roles are concerned, the Right
have not even adopted the rhetoric (much less the reality)
of non-discrimination. David Phillips, in ‘Trading
Sex for Security,’ argues for a full-scale return to
sex stereotyping and biological determinism: ‘a young
woman’s initial gift of sex requires a lifetime of
loyalty to repay’ (13). Roger Scruton, in ‘Sex
in the Commodity Culture,’ is simply overflowing with
hatred of democracy, capitalism and the whole Enlightenment
project: ‘sex education helps to neutralise …
one of the greatest sources of privilege and inequality’
(60). And Barbara Cartland descends from polemic to self-parody
with complaints that ‘on television women read out
the sports’ news and results, which are much better
read by men’ (259). This is scary stuff.
There are good reasons,
though, to read this book other than to be scared. There
are real gems to be found. There is Ros Coward (‘Was
Feminism Wrong about the Family?’), who pleads for
the acknowledgement of real problems with child rearing
and socialisation, ‘not prejudiced by nostalgia for
partriarchal values, nor insensitive to the difficulties
which might be arising from shifts in family values’
(69). There is Sebastian Kraemer, on ‘The Fragility
of Fatherhood,’ who, although he still seems to assume
that parental leave is a government responsibility, understands
that ‘while women have begun to be liberated from their
traditional roles, men are still predominantly trapped in
theirs’ (102). And there is John O’Sullivan, who
presents ‘A Manifesto for Men,’ pointing out that
men ‘have failed to understand the opportunities of
this century’s greatest and most enduring social movement,
the collapse of the sexual division of
labour’ (226).
Overall, this is
a highly stimulating book, readable and well-produced, with
a comprehensive bibliography (unfortunately there is no
index), and with something to suit (or to outrage) every
point of view. Many of its contributors suffer from the
ideological blinkers I have identified, but they present
their views clearly and fairly for the reader’s judgement.
Others are more specialised (there is some good statistical
material on distribution of household work from Jonathan
Gershuny, and on changing sex attitudes by nationality from
Catherine Hakim), while some are merely strange. But if
you enjoy diversity of opinions, this book is for you.
I had picked my
two favorite essays before I checked the notes to see where
their authors hailed from. One is by Clive Soley, a remarkably
sensible (Labour) MP, who recognises that governments have
to admit their limitations, and in particular should not
try to prescribe family structures. He gently chides nostalgia:
‘the fact that we no longer enjoy “the crispy
bacon we had before the war” may have more to do with
our ageing taste buds than with real change’ (214).
The other, ‘The Androgynous Generation,’ is by
Helen Wilkinson, from the think-tank Demos. She delivers
an eloquent and optimistic plea for genuine equality and
freedom of choice. If the Blair government is listening
to voices like these, there may be hope for Britain yet.
Review by
Jason Soon
