Exhausted tradition

Cultural Liberalism in Australia.  A Study in Intellectual and Cultural History
by Gregory Melleuish
Cambridge University Press

The intellectual resurgence of liberalism in the 1980s was driven by economic arguments and a shrill anti-statism.  It coincided with the collapse of communism and the rise of Oriental capitalism:  both coincidences fortified the neo-liberal drive.  Its strengths were its commitment to free trade, its rediscovery of competition and market-derived efficiencies, and its hostility to cultures of state dependence.  Its weaknesses were its neglect of civil society, its ignorance of ethical and spiritual bases for human conduct, and its lack of a convincing foundation for social and political order.  Did the strengths outweigh the weaknesses?  Hardly, says Gregory Melleuish;  in Australia the search for a balanced liberalism has still a long way to run.

Against "contemporary liberalism", Melleuish sets out to recover a tradition of "Cultural Liberalism" in Australia.  The search for tradition is a deliberate undertaking, for Melleuish argues that contemporary liberalism possesses little or no historical memory.  Might not the imbalance in contemporary liberalism be put right by recalling the features of past liberalisms?

The author's "tradition" comprises a disparate collection of administrators, academics, functionaries and authors whose intellectual and cultural work from the 1880s to the 1960s was bound by three common features:  an approach to human nature which recognised an ethical and spiritual basis for human identity and activity;  an attempt to apply principles of rationality and scientific inquiry to the workings of human society;  and an ethos of "service" to society and state (or "civic humanism").  Thus defined, the tradition encompasses, amongst others, free trader B.R. Wise, philosophers Charles Badham, Francis Anderson and G.A. Wood, educationalists Peter Board and P.R. Cole, social scientists R.F. Irvine, Clarence Northcott and Elton Mayo, Ministers of the Crown Charles Pearson and Frederick Eggleston, and Ministers of the Cloth Ernest Burgmann and G.V. Portus.

I have no quarrel with this team selection;  my initial reservations about V. Gordon Childe (given his professed Marxism), and Burgmann (the "Red" Bishop of Goulburn) gave way before the author's relentlessly rigorous application of selection criteria.  Nor do I quarrel with the cultural unity of the tradition:  spirituality, science and service were blended to form a highly distinctive cultural outlook, "an amalgam of rationalism, spiritual humanism and liberalism".  As a cultural outlook, it rested on a "faith in evolution as a process through which the world becomes more enlightened, rational and spiritual".

SELF-DESTRUCTION

Ultimately, as the author clearly demonstrates, this faith in evolution carried the seed of the tradition's self-destruction:  Australia in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s did not become a more enlightened, rational or spiritual society.  Keith Hancock and Clarence Northcott ("Realists") responded by modifying their expectations;  Frederick Eggleston, Elton Mayo, Marjorie Barnard and Flora Elershaw ("Idealists") responded with utopianism.  By the 1960s, the tradition had exhausted itself:  James McAuley and Manning Clark denied the possibility of a liberal via media between Rome and Moscow, Catholicism and communism:  "they came to bury liberalism not to praise it".

There is no denying the strength of this argument.  Cultural Liberalism was immersed in evolutionist assumptions about human perfectibility, societal progress and the efficacy of rationality.  Those assumptions inevitably ran aground, bringing the tradition down with it.  Melleuish's explanation for the death of Cultural Liberalism in the 1960s is compelling, and it enlarges our understanding of the "mad mosaic" of post-modernism which succeeded it.

My quarrel is with the author's claim that the tradition provides useful resources with which to tackle the dilemmas confronting contemporary liberalism.  When all is said and done, Cultural Liberalism was a statist doctrine:  it accompanied the extension of state functions, offered an ethos of higher service for intellectuals and functionaries in state institutions (parliament, public service, universities) and sought a perfect harmonisation of enlarged state activity with individual and social "personality".  It characteristically blurred the identities of individual, society and state, leaving no conceptual space for civil society.  It equated citizenship with service within state institutions.

"Why," asks Melleuish, "should Australian intellectuals have been so attracted to a civic humanist and statist variety of liberalism?"

In the years which immediately followed the First World War, the assumptions and practices of Australian statism were subject to their first ideological and political challenge.  Catholic social theory found its first Australian exposition in the journal Australia in 1917, and produced its first breakaway party, the NSW Democratic Party, in 1920.  The Workers' Educational Association, formed in 1913, generated 10 years of social criticism of Australian statism based on the virtue of voluntary association.  Guild Socialism emerged as a major ideological current in the labour movement in 1917, challenging State Socialism.  Eggleston, Hancock, Palmer, Childe, Mayo, Irvine and Portus were youthful participants in these debates;  with the political defeat of the anti-statist currents in the 1920s, Cultural Liberalism absorbed the activities of these individuals.  There was nowhere else to go.

For those Cultural Liberals who came to prominence before the war, the issue is more difficult.  Perhaps it is the case, as Melleuish suggests, that Australia was "born modern", and modernity and statism, in the Australian context, walked hand in hand.  In any case, we may still profit from a reading of the second thoughts of a thoroughly modern nation-builder such as C.H. Pearson, whose National Life and Character, written in 1892, provides a rich reflection on the Australian predicament.

RENEWAL

If contemporary liberalism is to acquire a convincing foundation for social and political order, and renew its acquaintance with civil society, it would do well to examine the traditions of mutual aid and voluntary co-operation in this country, and review our 19th-century interest in the constitutional devices of citizen initiative, referendum and recall.  Both will generate more valuable resources for the renovation of liberalism in our time than will a review of the tradition of Cultural Liberalism.

A similar observation may be made in relation to spirituality.  Cultural Liberalism was characterised by a recognition that human beings possess a spiritual dimension, yet few of its exponents were theologically orthodox, and fewer still were active participants in mainstream Christian churches.  Theosophy held its attraction for many;  even Bishop Burgmann was an unorthodox Platonist.  For most of the Cultural Liberals, spirituality meshed all too easily with problematic notions of human and societal perfectibility.

In renewing itself, contemporary liberalism would do well to re-examine the radical orthodoxy of a Reinhold Niebuhr, with his insistence upon human imperfectibility and a radical dependence upon grace.  In the end, as Michael Novak has noted of Niebuhr, this theological stance acts as a mighty safeguard against economic, environmental and scientific determinisms.  It predisposes individuals and communities against placing faith in rationalism and then seeking refuge in utopianism when rationalism fails to deliver.