Australia at the Crossroads, Reflections of an Outsider
by B.A. Santamaria
Melbourne University Press, 1987
Democracies have the failing of not valuing great individuals. People of rare and formidable character do not receive their due recognition, much to the cost of the society. So warned the two men who were arguably the most perceptive French and German social observers of the 19th century, Tocqueville and Nietzsche.
I should perhaps open my account here with an apology. What is ostensibly a book review will break the conventions of the genre. Through reading a book of essays, Australia at the Crossroads, I wish to focus rather on the man who wrote them. These essays tell us far more about him than does his own autobiography, published in 1981 under the title, Against the Tide. That man is, of course, Mr. B.A. Santamaria. Given the sectarian passions, with both political and religious strains, that his name has aroused in Australia for four decades I should at the outset declare my own past ties, or lack of them. In spite of carrying an Irish surname, I have negligible Irish blood, and grew up in an anti-Catholic, atheist, socialist-inclined family which held to a mild version of the "Santamaria as a sinister Machiavellian operator" school of belief.
As far as my own familiarity with Australian thought and letters allows me to judge, Mr. Santamaria is the only intellectual of near the first rank, outside of the natural sciences, that this country has produced. What is the basis for such an extraordinary claim? Mr. Santamaria has not given birth to an original theory that has or will influence the course of Western thought. There is no book to his name of particular distinction, apart from the collection of essays under review, which in the strict sense is a collection of essays rather than a book -- it was not written as a whole, working a set of arguments from beginning to end.
There are three virtues that give Mr. Santamaria's essays their peculiar quality. The first is judgment. The accuracy, range and consistency of his judgment has no equal in Australia, and one would have to look far to find it bettered in the Western world. There is the range, with subjects sf interest including international relations, strategy and defence; economics, finance, the unions and party politics; religion, both at the general level of the decline of Christianity in the West, and at the particular level of the parlous condition of Australian Catholicism; morals, with special reference to changes in the family, the law, and the science of fertility and reproduction. These are the key subjects of our time, and a part of Mr. Santamaria's judgment is that he has an uncanny sense of what is important.
Another part of his judgment is its consistency. His view of the world is pretty much what it was as a young man. It centres on the belief that religion is the indispensable basis of social obligation; that the main social institution is the stable family, which in turn depends on monogamous marriage and the woman at home -- here is the only human counter to the economically ruinous Welfare State; that with reference to work and organisation
'the law, economic forces and social convention shall at all costs protect the small and medium unit in production, distribution, exchange, in the size of government, business and administration.'
The main impact, however, of Mr. Santamaria's judgment is that it has proved almost always to be right. This is as true at the level of general principle as it -- is at the level of detail. Let me mention a few instances. He was right in the 1940s that the rapid take-over of trade unions by the Communist Party, which was well advanced, was the greatest threat to Australian democracy. He was right in the 1960s to see the future implications for Australia's strategic vulnerability were the Americans to lose the war in Vietnam. He was right in the 1970s to see radical changes in the universities preparing the ground for a massive assault on the traditional values on which Western societies have been predicated. He is right in the 1980s to see medical research on human embryos as having let a monstrous genie out of a bottle that will be near impossible to check. He is also right in the 1980s to spell out the social damage that has been done by the new view of the law, pioneered by Mr. Justice Lionel Murphy, as a weapon to reform the social conscience of the community, in contrast to its traditional role of reflecting that conscience.
The second virtue of Mr. Santamaria's intellectual work is the style of argument. There is a rigour and clarity about first principles, and as in good mathematics each particular problem is worked back to those principles, the constituent elements of the problem having been separated. A deductive analysis is then applied. There is through this a masterly command of both structure and detail. The overall effect is of the systematic analytical force of Euclidean geometry being brought to bear on social and moral issues.
The third virtue is one of tone. Mr. Santamaria's essays are never carping or strident. The author is a moralist, but one who does not sink to self-righteous indignation. The moralism is cool and sober; there is a balance of the dispassionate observer and the concerned citizen. The moral conscience that houses the concentrated intellect is never allowed to cry out.
The topics covered in Australia at the Crossroads are ones regularly covered in columns in the newspapers and in articles in journals such as Quadrant. They are familiar. In my own case they are topics that I have thought about, on and off, quite a lot. Yet Mr. Santamaria's essays unfailingly break through the familiarity, the sense that one knows it all and can skim through the stock arguments. They force one to rethink, to reassess, they force one back on one's assumptions, back on one's calculations. Moreover, these essays mount a persuasive case for the seriousness of a crisis facing Australia at present, on the economic, cultural and moral fronts. They address the separate dimensions of such a crisis with an authority that makes them essential reading for anyone concerned about the future of our country.
Australia at the Crossroads is subtitled "Reflections of an Outsider". I find this injudicious. A man who has stood in the Outer virtually every Saturday afternoon since the mid-1920s to watch his beloved Carlton Football Club can hardly be taken seriously as an "outsider". I don't even mention the fact of his singular role in the 20th century of influencing the face of Australian politics. The Santamaria justification of the subtitle is part in agreement with reviewers who have claimed that his mode of thought belongs to no Australian tradition, and in part because he regards himself as having been "rough on Australia". If he had been a citizen of any other Western country through this epoch he would have written very similar things -- so much for his second defence. On the first point, it is true that there is a remorseless analytical quality to his essays, a deductive precision, that might be likened to the French cartesian style. However, his work lacks the abstraction, the somewhat sterile formalism of that tradition. Alternatively, there is in the consistent return to first principles, the structured rigour deriving from essentials, something that might be linked to the Jesuit tradition. Perhaps. Whatever, these virtues are extremely rare in any intellectual tradition.
The one way in which Mr. Santamaria strikes me as an outsider involves his conservatism. It is not in the best Anglo-Saxon mould. Let us compare him with the finest example, Edmund Burke. Burke's work, whether in books, the letters or the political speeches, does not have this sort of analytical clarity and distinctness. It is not typified by cool reason operating within a formalised moral and religious framework. It does not have these strengths, but it does have other ones. There is a warmth to its feeling for England, for Englishmen and for their customs and prejudices, deeply and firmly rooted in ancient tradition. Burke at his best is a patriot by example, writing with a devoted and cherishing celebration of his people, their institutions and their past (although in his Irish background he was almost as much a genealogical outsider to England as the Italian Santamaria is to Australia). It is significant that the weakest essay in Australia at the Crossroads is the first, the one about the thing perhaps closest to Mr. Santamaria's heart (not his head or his spirit), Australian Rules Football. An Anglo-Saxon conservative would have written more movingly about his sense of loss, less from the citadel of reason, with more dirt on his hands and sentiment in his heart. Menzies, for instance, in his memoirs, evokes a more touching attachment to his own beloved sport, cricket, and its practitioners. And he was invited time and again to make the toasts and the speeches at the dinners of the cricketing greats. Nevertheless, there is more, ultimately speaking, to connect than to contrast here, in the fact that the two great political figures were both lovers of sport -- in the soundness that such attachment indicates,
Dispassionate reason, on the one hand. On the other, Mr. Santamaria has been a notably unacademic intellectual. He has put his theory into practice. Through the Movement that he created he has effected major changes for the better in the working life of Australia. In this he has been the insider of insiders. Moreover his extraordinary success indicates a capacity for organisation and a political judgment that would be the envy of the most practical men of the world. His main achievement was, of course, a series of victories over the Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s in its move to take over the union movement. He claims two other successes. The first was to use DLP pressure to make Liberal Party governments take defence more seriously than they would have otherwise. I am not competent to assess this claim: it is a minor achievement compared with the influence over the trade unions. The second claim was to have played a key role in getting 'State Aid' for independent schools. Considering that the Catholic schools have rapidly secularised themselves since receiving government grants, and now play a sizeable role in subverting the religious values to which Mr. Santamaria himself subscribes, this can hardly be claimed as a success. An indirect effect of the Movement, and later its political wing, the DLP, was to keep Sir Robert Menzies in office for 16 years. I suspect that Australia is a good deal the better for that.
Mr. Santamaria is now 72, if a prodigiously alert and hale 72. He is a great Australian. He has spent most of his life regarded by much of this country's establishment as a dark figure, one to be kept at a distance. This judgment was based on ignorance, was utterly unjust, and it needs to be atoned for. With the exception of Sir Robert Menzies, no one has done as much since World War I1 to protect that establishment and its interests, and furthermore to contribute to its central obligation of defending the nation's institutions and traditions. It is time he received due recognition for his services to Australia. It is time to show some gratitude.
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