THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT
I have been asked to discuss with you how to help a political movement coalesce around an idea, drawing on the experience in America. There is, in America and in many parts of the world today, an emerging consensus for the restoration of civil society. It sets before historians a difficult task, for in many ways it does not bear the slightest resemblance to the template of modern history. It is not the brain-child of a great man, nor is there a primary manifesto, nor even a slogan, to assert its message. There is no alignment of powerful interests promoting it either publicly or behind the scenes. All the same, it is at hand, and it may well be the driving force of the next century.
I am no prophet but I will tell you what I see happening in America and what I think its implications may be. I will do my best, however, to avoid even the slightest appearance that I am trying to suggest to you what it may mean for Australia.
In that regard let me position myself a bit. In preparing for my trip to America, I did some reading to get up to speed on current affairs in that country -- perhaps to see if many of the same debates that are going on in America are also going on here. I recall opening an issue of the Review and thinking they must be engaged, as we Australians are, in a serious debate over capital punishment, for I saw a chart entitled "Use of the Guillotine 1980/1993". The chart indicated 1992 was a high point for this practice and, according to the data, I surmised that some 255 heads had been chopped off in that year. Now I may be conservative, but even so, it struck me that there are more efficient, and certainly less messy, instruments of public policy available today.
I was beginning to think that America was even more different from Australia than I had supposed. Then, when I saw that "guillotine" referred to a deft legislative procedure for bulldozing laws through the legislature, of course I revised my opinion. Perhaps the U.S. is more like Australia than I had first supposed.
1 am aware, of course, that being "more like the U.S." is hardly at the top of every Australian's wish list, so you will be glad to know that I will make no assumptions on that point. Whereas we sometimes affectionately refer to them as "The Yanks" and they, that is those Yanks, have concluded that the central government in their country is too powerful and that the citizen is not powerful enough.
The national election of 1994 in America was a quiet, deliberate, temperate rebellion against the overarching idea of government in most of the twentieth century. Writing in the New Yorker of 23 January 1995, essayist Michael Kelly summed up nicely the heart of this idea and I quote:
that for the sake of America's social, economic and moral well-being, the country must be led by a wise, powerful central authority, an activist federal government that would serve as a combination national social engineer and national policeman. The government does for the citizens, towns, cities and States what they are too weak, poor, benighted or corrupt to do for themselves. For more than half a century, this view of government has informed the actions of Congress and of Presidents, and it has been the core of the Democratic Party philosophy.
Do not believe the pundits and the partisan interpreters of the 1994 elections who cannot bear to face its implications. They say that Americans were caught up in an anti-incumbent fever. But the voters did not go to the polls to throw out incumbents; they went to throw out Democrats. How many incumbent Senators, or Congressmen, or Governors from the Republican Party were thrown out? Not a single one.
Nor did Americans, as one TV commentator infamously put it, "throw a tantrum" like so many "two-year olds". If the people are intemperate and immature, as he argued, democracy is dead.
To the contrary, in the United States the democratic process is showing very promising signs of life. Last November, Americans, without parades and waving flags, without a rallying cry, without any of the trappings of an epochal event, went to the polls and literally swept from office the political party that has been, for much of this century, the embodiment in America of the "national idea".
The progressive project to construct within America's borders a great national community which would summon Americans away from selfish interests and parochial allegiances, toward a commitment to an overarching national purpose -- this national idea -- emerged at the turn of the century, in response to what appeared to be dramatic and permanent changes in the way Americans had traditionally conducted their everyday civic lives.
Prior to the ascendancy of the progressive welfare state, at the turn of the century, American life had been organised around what historian Robert Wiebe has described as "island communities". Citizens were closely bound one to another, by strong families, tightly-knit neighbourhoods, and active voluntary and fraternal groups. The citizens' churches and voluntary groups reflected and reinforced their moral and cultural virtues and imparted these to their children, surrounding them with a familiar, breathable moral atmosphere. Through small, local, "human-scale" associations, Americans not only achieved a sense of belonging and connectedness, they also tackled the full range of social and human problems that today have largely become the province of government. Voluntary social welfare associations ministered to the vulnerable according to the tenets of compassion and charity implicit in the community's shared virtues. The citizens' schools were run in accordance with those virtues, and with extensive citizen involvement. Critical public decisions were made in township meetings, ward conclaves, or other small, face-to-face gatherings in which the individual's voice was as important as his vote, perhaps even more important.
This, of course, is the America celebrated and immortalised by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America. "Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations". He noted this because this was how virtually every significant public problem was to be solved. Nor was this an accident of history. Tocqueville understood it was the concrete result of the careful design of the founding fathers of the United States.
This decentralised, civically vital way of life, however, was doomed, in the view of the progressive theorists like Walter Lippman and John Dewey, and public figures like Theodore Roosevelt and to some extent, Woodrow Wilson, who saw irresistible forces of modernity that would sweep away the boundaries that had historically contained and preserved the island communities. Communication and transportation technologies, huge industries, big cities and massive immigration had, in their view, rendered small government unsustainable.
Populists argued to preserve or restore the ethos of the small town, but progressives, who won the argument, saw in its demise the dawn of a new and higher form of community: the national community. The essential instrument of this new order would be a powerful and active national government.
Decades before it was elevated to electoral hegemony by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, the progressive vision of Big Government was set out tellingly in 1909 by Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life. In his famous formulation, the Jeffersonian values of "community of feeling and ease ... of communication" could now be established within the nation as a whole, using the Hamiltonian instrument of the vigorous central government. Through regulatory measures, central government could tame those great and disruptive concentrations of private wealth, the corporations, turning them into "economic agents of the whole community". The government would also become "expressly responsible for an improved distribution of wealth" and would begin to alleviate, through the progressive income tax and social welfare programmes, the inequalities of wealth that might imperil the sense of national oneness. A vigorous programme of "Americanisation" would serve to integrate diverse immigrant populations into a single, coherent people. "Scientific management" and other new developments in the social sciences explained to government elites how enlightened, bureaucratic administration could bring order to the chaotic masses.
The national idea, in Croly's words, would see a "subordination of the individual to the demand of a dominant and constructive national purpose". A citizen would begin to "think first of the State and next of himself", and "individuals of all kinds will find their most edifying individual opportunities in serving their country". Indeed, America would come to be bound together by "a religion of human brotherhood", which can be realised "only through the loving-kindness which individuals feel ... particularly to their fellow countrymen".
The national community would inevitably raise the Presidency to a new level of eminence, for, as Woodrow Wilson pointed out, the President possessed "the only national voice" in American public affairs. And in the First World War progressives would discover the awesome capacity of war to nurture public spiritedness and national oneness. John Dewey would speak appreciatively afterward of the "social possibilities of war". Liberalism would never forget this lesson and, in times of peace, its causes would be packaged as "the moral equivalent of war".
Seen in the kindest light, the progressives, more enthused than Enlightenment philosophes by the infinite potential of applied reason, sincerely believed that fine minds and university departments devoted to the study of the social sciences would bring into being a valid and capable expertise in the diagnosis and treatment of social disorders. But their benign and benighted aspirations can hardly justify the bold contempt they held for the common citizen. John Dewey urged broad public education in the social sciences so that citizens would learn, in Timothy Kaufman Osborn's formulation, "the radical insufficiency of the maxims of everyday conduct", as well as that the roots of most problematic situations do not lie within the jurisdiction of the locality and hence that their commonsense analyses of those situations are unreliable. The good citizen now accepted his "inescapable dependence upon those trained in the expert methods of the social sciences" and graciously backed out of public affairs in deference to the social science experts, who alone knew how to manage the complexity of modern public life.
These cruel dismissals of the lower classes mark the influence of Social Darwinism on the thinking of elites, in America and around the world, at the turn of the century. It was, after all, that philosophy which originated the notion that society can, and indeed must, be studied scientifically. Applied to individuals, it recommended eugenics; applied to society, it recommended the centralisation and professionalisation of politics. "Governmental betterment" reforms reduced the influence of local interests with at-large, city-wide systems of voting and representation. Similar "reforms" ensured that local schools were removed from the influence of everyday citizens organised around religious or ethnic values. Reformers were particularly anxious to drive religious expression and teachings out of the schools, for it was the progressive conviction that traditional sectarian religion was but a benighted retrograde system of myths -- virtually a poison that must be purged from common consciousness in order to establish the undisputed hegemony of the social sciences. Indeed, many of the progressives understood the new sciences to be a secular evolution from or substitute for religion: a realisation of the kingdom on Earth, or, to recall Croly's term, a "religion of human brotherhood".
The triumph of progressive structural reform would mean, in essence, that citizen involvement in public affairs had been reduced from active, face-to-face public problem-solving on a daily basis, to passively casting a ballot for a handful of offices every other year or so. That ballot would be aggregated with vast numbers of other solitary votes into a mandate for an elite corps of professional experts, who were now to conduct the real business of public life.
While it continued to be implemented wherever its elites held influence in the 1920s, the progressive project's most spectacular advancement was the establishment of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. In taking responsibility for -- that is, control of -- the economy, Roosevelt had shifted to the national government powers that would in time be applied to any and all problems that politicians might gain votes by promising to solve.
From that time, until this past November, the party that had come to rule with Franklin Roosevelt had held America hostage, not so much to the "national idea" itself as to the power they had accumulated to achieve it. The progressive vision had begun to fade, as many visions do, after it was most fully realised in Lyndon Johnson's aptly named The Great Society. The centrepiece of the Great Society was, of course, the "war on poverty". "War evokes co-operation ... [and a] sense of brotherhood and unity", Johnson explained, in an appeal that is somewhat ironic given the intense opposition his policies in Vietnam were later to receive. Disaffection with the national idea was not based at first on the fact that it did not work -- that would come later -- but on its denial of aspirations for authentic community. New left radicals saw the pin-striped suits the bureaucrats were wearing and accused them of "corporate liberalism", calling for a "participatory democracy". The communitarian strain of radical leftist thought would ultimately be overwhelmed by its companion doctrine of personal liberation in uninhibited self-expression which would go on to play havoc with our civic institutions and virtues.
(Interestingly enough, the Democratic Party, in the wake of the rise of the '60s counterculture, deftly wedded its economic statism to individual license in the moral and cultural spheres.) The Black Power movement called on Blacks to "create their own sense of community and togetherness". And from the other end of the political spectrum, the so-called "hard hats", mainly ethnic Catholic workers, whose city neighbourhoods were pockets of resistance to the excesses of modernity, saw that the national government had launched a massive assault -- through cold, bureaucratic edict or even colder judicial fiat -- against the traditionalist prerogatives of locality and neighbourhood to define and preserve their own ways of life. Suddenly, they could neither pray in their neighbourhood schools, nor indeed count on sending their own children to the neighbourhood school because of compulsory busing, nor ban from the community forms of expression or sexual conduct considered offensive, nor define the conditions under which abortion might be proper, nor even enforce the most rudimentary forms of civil order under the police power.
It is an often overlooked fact that, after 1964, no one would again win the Presidency by boasting grandly about building a great national community, a great society, a great national idea in America. No one would again call proudly and forthrightly for a shift of power to Washington and away from local organic networks. Indeed, every President from 1968 to the present has placed at the centre of his agenda the denunciation of centralised bureaucratic government, along with promises to slash its size and power, and to reinvigorate states, small communities and civil society's intermediate associations.
What explains an erosion of the idea of national community so severe that even the Democratic Party itself now hesitates to speak up for it? The project to create, at the level of the nation, a sense of mutuality and oneness that appears readily and naturally only at the level of the family or the local community, was, and could only be, futile. For a period, in times of crisis, when the threat to the nation is sufficiently obvious, the American people will pull together as one. But as they do so, they will not be forming a national community to protect ... a national community. The America they love is not an abstraction, it is people they know and places they feel at home and a way of life in which moral virtue is present. That is what they will defend, and when it is safe, they will return to it.
Viewed in this larger perspective, it is now perhaps easier to understand the tsunami of 8 November 1994. For the seventh time in a quarter of a century, the American people in 1992 had elected the Presidential candidate, styled as a New Democrat, who had persuaded them that he was the most sincere about reversing the growth of government. (All three candidates, incidentally, had earnestly made that claim.) And for the seventh time, early deeds, such as proposing government absorption of the health care industry quickly gave lie to the words, and informed the American people that, once again, they had been fooled and misled by empty rhetoric.
In 1993, Americans were presented with a proposal for free health care provided by the government. They didn't want it. It wasn't the free health care they objected to, it was the "provided by government" part. In 1994, in a mid-term election on Tuesday the 8th November, without parades, without a rallying cry, without a warning, the American people went to the polls and literally threw out the people, the party and the politics that had been running their country, uninterrupted, since 1932.
The project that led to these stunning events does not strictly conform to the topic of rallying around an idea, because so much of its success had to do with exposing the inequities of bad ideas rather than espousing the virtues of good ones. After all, the best ideas for politics don't come to us directly from manifestos, they come from our nature baptised by its better angels. The project then is to recognise and remove the obstacles to good ideas and, in the fashion of good government, get out of the way.
As an Australian associated with neo-conservatism, who has seen the lot of conservative political thought go from near zero to national endorsement in three decades, give or take a few years, the question of the role of ideas in politics is critical. This is particularly important when you hope to include businessmen in a coalition. The first lesson: Ideas have consequences, a much repeated phrase, but true. It's often the businessmen who seem to be the only people in the world who do not know this. The business community has a proper respect for facts, it seeks them everywhere and wants to base all of its decisions on them. But ideas and images which can vary remarkably from facts are the driving force of politics, of law, of education, and of the media through which the general public is informed. Advocates of bad ideas must be active in politics and media because their ideas are not supported by facts and need to be supported by political power. Therefore if they would be free, advocates of good ideas must also be active in politics and media, if only to oppose bad ideas. Facts are, of course, absolutely indispensable, but we must understand that they do not speak for themselves. I should add that if facts could speak for themselves it's a damn good bet they wouldn't have anything to say about post-structuralism, or deconstructionism or existential phenomenology, but that's beside the point.
Second lesson: To beat a horse, you need a horse. To pose ideas you must have ideas. The problem for us of course is that it is a more difficult task to draft abstractions that conform to reality, than to draft abstractions, as the left does, that conform to abstractions. Convenient terms like neo-conservatism are formulated to locate an idea within an on-going political conversation in which, at the time and in the place, it will be understood. More durable terms, like Michael Novak's very fortunate "Democratic Capitalism", are crafted to reassert fundamental principles, in this case by highlighting the unity of two expressions of the idea. For example, I am now frequently using the term "New Citizenship", it expresses the return of responsibility and authority from government to intermediate institutions in which one is not a drone in the hive of the almighty State, nor an equally alienated individualist forever defending his personal sovereignty against all comers, but is a citizen of influence in his own life. Whether the "New Citizenship" becomes an entry in future encyclopedias, is not the point, it is an entry in the current debate in America, a refinement, within the context of that debate -- an idea.
So to get back to the topic I was asked to address, if the opposition has ideas and agendas, we must have ideas and agendas. If they have scholars and experts, we must have scholars and experts. If they have magazines and other media outlets, we need them as well. During the 1970s, a network of think-tanks began to form in Washington, publishing books and journals, issuing reports, holding conferences and giving the media a name and telephone number to call for a conservative commentary. Many of them realised that the American university was hopelessly corrupt and saw the need for serious scholarship outside of the academic intellectual establishment. Before the think-tanks, an intellectual who was not in step with the herd was invisible, and had no future. Ideas that were not sanctioned by left-wing elites began to gain some circulation. Books and magazines that might have been read covertly in the early 70s were, by the end of that decade, shamelessly displayed on desks and coffee tables. More recently, the phenomenon of talk radio has emerged with extremely popular national and local call-in radio programmes through which a conservative is often expressing an outraged vox populi and is given a forum denied to it by the large media establishment. In America they saw that once the intellectual hegemony of the left was contested, the left was required to make arguments instead of unchallenged assertions.
When there are competing sets of ideas to choose among in the public debate, issues take on a defining role. Americans today are up in arms about a reformulated gasoline, designed through a cooperative effort of government and industry. This is a product intended to solve certain environmental crises, real or imagined. The Americans hate this reformulated gasoline. Five years ago I would have expected them to blame industry, today I am not surprised that they are blaming the government. In an issue very close to their heart, the harm done to innocent children by the miserable performance of American education, they are nearing the point where that too is being blamed, as it should be, on the government.
Defining issues are the substance of the now famous contract with America that the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, designed -- a ten-part pledge taken by Republican candidates for the House of Representatives in 1994. It was a master stroke, an act of genius and leadership and a singularly wise implementation of the horse race metaphor. It was not an ideological manifesto, but a list of ten proposals responding to issues that had been developed in the post-Reagan American policy debate, including term limits, a balanced budget, a line item veto, and so on. All of them, in one way or another, an attack on the imperial national government and a repudiation of the ideas that had been the basis of the Democratic Party's regime.
I hope I've made the point that Newt Gingrich's ascendancy and the conservative electoral triumph of 1994 owe a great deal to the wisdom and hard work that preceded them, but I do not want in any way to diminish his contribution. Indeed I will turn to Newt Gingrich as the consummate example for my concluding point: he's a winner. Before he became their leader, Republicans in Congress had accepted the role of being the number two party. They had also accepted terms of debate that implicitly acknowledged the supremacy of left ideas and programmes. They apologised for conservative policy preferences and believed the best they could do in Congress was beg for a scrap of moderation in liberal legislation. Newt Gingrich never did this. He challenged liberal policies with conservative policies, he believed that if the Republican Party took the people's side in the national debate they would eventually become the people's party. Simply stated, the third lesson: Don't apologise for being right.
MORAL EDUCATION AND THE FAMILY
Twelve days ago, with a Brisbane youth group, I attended a very lively and instructive weekend conference in Melbourne for about 200 young people. Only a few hours before talks were due to finish, the conference organiser asked unregistered members of the audience please to pay for their attendance so that future events of similarly high quality could take place.
The night before, because some 25 people had showed up for a social gathering and dinner unannounced, she had had to race out for food for which she hadn't been reimbursed. On Sunday, after staff responsible for registration had left the tables guarding the entrance, a new horde -- including adults -- had taken unbooked advantage of mid-morning talks and lunch. Many of the offenders, apparently, had done the same thing the year before.
If inconsiderateness of this type were an endangered species, I would probably not have begun my talk this morning by referring to it. But attempts to secure free lunches, as we're all aware, occur these days with uncommon regularity. Not just the young people we know intimately, but many adult acquaintances of ours, fail to ask themselves the essential question, "What do I owe people who organise activities from which I expect to derive personal profit?"
The mind-set which prevents this question from being asked, and which springs from a self-centredness verging on solipsism, is vividly rendered in a brilliant movie which, ironically, I first saw on video two days before I left for my Melbourne weekend: Robert Altman's Short Cuts. This film, set in Los Angeles, provides the finest, and also the most frightening, view of modernity I have yet seen. Like other recent movies which are almost as good -- Muriel's Wedding, Once Were Warriors, Forrest Gump -- it has a lot to say about family life. But its underlying theme is faithlessness.
In Altman's movie, form and content are inseparable. Throughout the film, short cuts reminiscent of the filming techniques of countless TV programmes move us, in staccato fashion, from one scenario to another -- not because Altman is trying to appeal to youngsters with short attention spans, like the makers of Sesame Street, but because rapid temporal and spatial shifts have immediate cultural meaning. All of us, Altman implies with unsparing wit, have concentration problems; and all of us fail to see connections crying out to be seen. As a second viewing makes abundantly clear, apparently random juxtapositions of frames in the movie are not random at all.
Robert Altman's large point, underlined by his own visual short cuts, is that most of us do not look long and hard enough at anything. Cutting corners is a way of life for us: not simply because we're easily distracted or endlessly preoccupied, or because fast-forward is our preferred mode, or because we actually like microwaved dinners better than baked ones, but because the pace of our lives -- not just technological advance itself -- is much too rapid to be manageable. What requires careful notice passes us by or overtakes us before we know it.
Short Cuts contains many haunting scenes. At a busy hospital, a father who hasn't seen his adult son for many years suddenly turns up, blurts out to him facts about his life which have been plaguing him for years, but finds that he is talking to a stranger who is much too absorbed in his own serious problems to take an interest in his. A lone boy, ignoring the fact that the living room of his home has been completely wrecked and is overloaded with broken objects, makes a beeline for the television set after a weekend away with his mendacious mother and one of her two lovers.
A talented jazz singer whose band rehearsal is interrupted by her equally talented daughter, a cellist, reacts with such callous matter-of-factness to the news brought to her of the death of their neighbour's young son that the young woman flees from her mother's cafe, devastated. A waitress who treats an injured child with helpless, but unmistakable, concern rationalises with her own daughter about the sexual abuse endured by her years before at the hands of the drunken de facto who is still living in the family caravan.
In view of the menacing consequences of the torpor dramatised in these sequences and in others, it is not surprising that many of the characters in Short Cuts spend countless hours drinking. Nor is it surprising that an equal number explode without warning in response to everyday threats to their usual routines. Although Altman doesn't allude directly to the most highly publicised disorder suffered by school children at the moment, A.D.D., he shows that attention deficits which have their sources in familial neglect, and which demand but don't receive proper scrutiny, are a commonplace of modernity.
If we were Forrest Gump, we wouldn't sit on a bench at a bus stop or perch on a stump all day, slowly psyching ourselves up for a visit with a person dear to us, reflecting on the past, or waiting for a child to arrive home at the end of a school day. Like Altman's men and women, we have forgotten the meaning of T.S. Eliot's well-known term "the still point". We don't know what contemplation is. We memorise nothing except TV ads: it takes too long. We receive our opinions cooked: in five-minute interviews on Derryn Hinch and Ray Martin or rapid-fire bursts on radio talk shows.
In a letter published in a recent issue of Quadrant, Marlene Goldsmith -- a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council for whom I have a lot of time -- remarks that she found Short Cuts too unbearable to see through to the end. Her reason for feeling this way makes perfect sense to me, even though what I did myself in response to the shocks generated by the film was to see it twice. Because I took things in the second time that had earlier been too quick for me, I found at least some redeeming features in characters who would otherwise be very easy to write off completely.
This may sound odd, but unlike Marlene Goldsmith, I was comforted, not dismayed, by the fact that Altman portrays a world which is almost devoid of hope. What cheered me was his metaphysical realism: his unerring sense of the emotional blindness underlying our whole way of life. If enough people were to react to the everyday events depicted in the film with "fear and trembling" -- as Quadrant's editor, Robert Manne, says in the previous issue of the magazine that he did -- we could witness significant cultural change instead of being blown off the planet or slowly poisoned by noise and pesticides.
It's impossible to watch Altman's characters without being implicated in their failures. The more likeable adults in the film know moments of alertness, generosity and courage, and some of their acts are competent, helpful, and even beautiful; but at critical junctures all of them display an unconscious indifference to others which is frightening in its ordinariness. The casual treachery to spouses, children, friends, and lovers which relentlessly follows from their bad moods, their habitual procrastination or inertia, and their perpetual fogginess simply can't be written off as remote from our own lives.
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Last year, when I spoke about moral education and the family at an international conference on family life, one of the things that I did was contrast a quaint best-seller popular in the 1850s, Charlotte M. Yonge's The Daisy Chain, with a 1970s novel commonly taught in schools and twice filmed: S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders.
There isn't time for me to read you the passages from both novels which I read then, but I am going to offer some generalisations about differences between these two books which bear a family resemblance to ideas explored in Robert Altman's film. As well as making observations about the nature and the implications of changes in family practice over the last century and a half, I'll be offering suggestions about what can be done to restore a measure of sanity to the contemporary scene.
The Daisy Chain, besides being a study of family life, is the portrait of an age long gone. In it, the ten children in the May family who are the object of Charlotte Yonge's sustained attention are united by the devotion of their parents to each other and to them, and by their love for one another. After their mother dies suddenly in a freak carriage accident -- caused, I can't help remarking, by speed and inattention -- they continue to depend for sustenance on what she has given them, and on shared family activity, especially good talk. Their conversation is not simply about the daily round. They converse about large moral issues which spring from it, and which require considered scrutiny: for example, the effect of ambition on the course of our lives, or the nature of service to others.
In the fiction written by Charlotte Yonge's contemporaries and their immediate successors, the need in children for moral instruction of the kind offered regularly in The Daisy Chain by Mr and Mrs May is unmistakable. But this need is largely unmet. What's clear from what is spoken about as missing in, for example, Dickens' Hard Times, Jane Austen's Persuasion, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, and Henry James's What Maisie Knew, is that when weak parental witness is compounded by the absence, in the home, of sound, habitual, direct teaching about good and evil, children suffer very deeply.
In the best modern fiction, as in films like Short Cuts, disintegration takes many forms, but it has in common a number of key features. In the home, its chief signals are little or no family conversation about morally important issues and no dialogue -- as there was a century ago -- lamenting its absence. In novel after novel, we meet youngsters who have nobody or, at best, only one adult capable of providing sound moral teaching -- which, of course, is what is meant by the term "a crisis in authority".
S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, which is about two teenage gangs, and which is taught in huge numbers of Australian government and non-government schools, beautifully exemplifies a trend now pervading the English-speaking world. In it, "home" is the city streets. The immediate object of life is survival: getting others before they get you. Loyalty is confined to gang members. Barriers which prevent people from making any real contact are present everywhere. Joy and harmony are virtually unheard of. Everybody's favourite tune is "Johnny One-not".
As in Altman's film, reflection is a luxury: under ordinary conditions, there is no time for it. Teenagers are too busy seeking excitement or running from trouble to stay put. Long-range goals do not exist, and there are no adults who possess moral authority. The young cannot begin to live wisely -- not simply because it is so hard for all human beings to want what they should and to exercise appropriate will-power to achieve it, but because no grown-ups in The Outsiders are capable of imparting knowledge about what ought to be loved.
Charlotte Yonge -- in contrast, only 140 years earlier -- knew not just that mind and heart must be trained, and trained together; but she knew something about how essential training of the mind and the will is undertaken. In The Daisy Chain, home is The Home. Values are imparted by the family, especially the mother, and reinforced by trusted adults and children at church and at school. Even when justice is violated in these three bedrock institutions, rebellion against people who have abused their authority is discouraged. Fortitude is urged.
In Yonge's world, children and adults together muse about how serious temptations should be tackled. Most (not all) of their discussions get somewhere -- chiefly because both parents provide knowledgeable instruction in ordinary circumstances and in crises. The environment in which such instruction is offered is safe and secure. Thus, even though errors -- some, quite serious -- are made by family members, growth takes place. Small wins are slowly transformed into significant change for the better, and ruin is shown to be avoidable.
The reason for this encouraging state of affairs is not simply that short fuses do not disfigure Yonge's entire world. It is that religion is a powerful teacher in the lives of her characters, just as it was in her own. Unlike her better-known colleagues and successors, Charlotte Yonge regularly prayed, attended church, and allowed herself time for serious reflection; and she wrote in the light of faith. So although some of her major characters neglect their real obligations, succumb to worldly temptations, and close their eyes to the needs of others as disastrously as do most of the adults in Short Cuts, others fare very much better.
A fact rarely mentioned in this era of political correctness is that religious faith, put into practice through good works, confers unmistakable benefits. The chief one is peace of mind: a commodity as blatantly absent from the stressed-out universe of Short Cuts as it is from S.E. Hinton's fiction. In the art of Charlotte Yonge and her spiritual descendants -- one of whom is Eric Roth, who wrote the screenplay for Forrest Gump -- it is clear that although nobody is exempt from suffering, people who are taught to keep faith with others are immeasurably happier, and much more likeable, than those who aren't.
Of course it isn't easy to be faithful to our best selves or to those around us. Yonge is not the first writer to show how difficult it is, nor is she the best one. But her depiction of family life, like Shakespeare's in the comedies and the romances, has the virtue of portraying characters who are not defeated by life, and who sometimes display heroic virtue. In the history of the adult novel, this is unusual.
For most of its short life -- scarcely more than two centuries in all -- the novel has been what James McAuley termed an individualistic "bourgeois" art from. The common good, particularly in its communal forms, has not been its central concern. And even in its treatment of individual fortunes, its structure has encouraged a focus on relatively small change -- not on the revelations which engender major spiritual transformation. The essential subject of religious literature – salvation -- has not preoccupied the great run of novelists. Indeed, lately, novels for adults and adolescents have been oppressively nihilistic.
* * *
In case mention of these features of literary history strikes you as tangential to the topic I'm supposed to be discussing, namely, moral education and the family, let me assure you that it's not. Modern fiction, like older narrative literature and modern film, is an essential means of instruction for the young: a preserver of timeless continuities and a potential force for renewal which we cannot afford to do without. Its spiritual content is not a matter to be lightly tossed over, ignored, or obscured.
Stories are the most powerful means of shaping character known in civilised society. That's the reason the May family discusses Bible stories in their free time. It's also the reason for the enormous, and of course justifiable, popularity of the lives of the saints. All of us like listening to tales with strong plots, even if they're recounted by old, somewhat garrulous, friends. At the video shop where I borrowed Short Cuts, the young girl at the desk answered a question I put to her about Philadelphia by saying, "Yes, you'll like this. Most people do. It tells a great story".
It just happens that the usual modern vehicles for telling stories about home and hearth lack the power of narrative modes widely admired in an earlier day -- for example, myths, legends, fables, epics, and "long" poems. These modes are rich in imagery; and, often, they depict the marvellous and the miraculous. Children respond very strongly to them. Adults, these days, don't -- probably because they are not accorded a prominent place in even the better book shops, or reviewed in weekend newspapers, or taught in popular university English courses; so adults don't regularly experience them.
Novelists writing for adults haven't sufficiently appreciated what Mother Teresa would call "little miracles" to allow them their rightful place. And because the novel is a relatively recent literary invention, powerfully influenced -- as all art is -- by the spirit of its day, it hasn't had very fertile soil in which to thrive. Even during the Victorian age, many strong-minded people dismissed its content as frivolous, as certain latter-day purists who haven't been to the movies in years dismiss film.
This is not to suggest that character formation depends entirely on our immediate response to the promise, "I will thee a tale unfold". There is obviously a great deal else, besides story-telling, that all of us can do for children and youth so that they are compelled to reflect more fully on private morality.
Direct, clear, systematic instruction in the virtues, in the manner recommended in, for example, David Isaacs' Character Building or Esther Joos Esteban's Education in Values, is certainly called for. William Bennett's Book of the Virtues, which includes discursive as well as imaginative prose, has graphically demonstrated, through its sales, our contemporary hunger for such instruction. All of us, not just the young, need role models whose histories transcend this time, this place. Recently, at Pierre Ryckman's splendid Latham Lecture, I found one such model in Confucius.
Playing team sports, going camping or bicycle riding, listening to music with decent words, attending shows and exhibits, or watching movies and videos and talking afterwards about their content -- though not necessarily straight away -- are additional, near-effortless ways of communicating with the young about significant matters. Activities of this kind are also, of course, a fine means of sharing experiences with young people which they themselves clearly want to have.
American philosophy professor Christina Hoff Sommers argued recently that university students often emerge from the latest recommended remedy for anomie -- courses in Practical Ethics -- thinking that there is no right and wrong: only good and bad arguments. One counter to this view, as she rightly suggests, is instruction in moral philosophy, starting with Plato and Aristotle. Plato's more dramatic dialogues -- for example, The Crito and The Apology -- and Aristotle's Ethics are indispensable guides to the good life: not least, because they demonstrate something about the kind of person to be, and how to become that person. In the hands of good teachers, what's more, they have immediate intellectual appeal.
In making these broad suggestions about moral education, I don't want to leave you with the impression that the forms of insanity rife in today's world can be met entirely by rational means. The power of faith and trust -- virtues recommended not just by Robert Altman and Charlotte Yonge, but by many of the other artists and teachers to whom I've referred today in passing -- depends on the recognition that reason can take us only so far. But unless we are conscious of how far that is, we won't ever know the meaning of the phrase "stay the distance".
HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF AUSTRALIA'S VALUES
Let me begin by welcoming the 1994 Report of the Civics Expert Croup entitled Whereas the people: Civics and Citizenship Education. The Group consisted of Professor Stuart Macintyre, Ernest Scott Professor of History in the University of Melbourne, Dr Ken Boston, Director-General of the New South Wales Department of School Education, and Ms Susan Pascoe, Co-ordinating Chairperson (Policy) of the Catholic Education Office in Melbourne. Their Report is a big improvement on comparable official publications of recent years. It considered that "effective civics and citizenship education" should encompass among other things "the basic liberal democratic values that sustain our system of government and enrich its operation". (1) The Report added that
Australia is fortunate in the dense network of civic associations and civic involvement that provide the basis of civil society. The rule of law, rights of free association, free speech and the other freedoms that protect civil society are a vital component of the civil sphere. (2)
and
As we approach the centenary of the Commonwealth, Australians are able to look back on a remarkably successful record of democratic self-government. The public institutions created in the closing years of the last century have proved flexible and resilient. The outcomes of the democratic process enjoy popular acceptance -- in contrast to the experience of most other countries, we have seldom experienced a challenge to the legitimacy of our civic order or resorted to violence. The political process has operated peacefully. A broad measure of freedoms has been maintained and extended. The rule of law operates. There is a high level of toleration and acceptance. (3)
My only demur is that the institutions which have served Australia so well were not created at the end of the nineteenth century, but were only adapted then. They were an inheritance from the political culture of the colonising peoples of Great Britain and Ireland.
The Group advanced some of the criticisms now common of nineteenth-century Australia:
Those who established Australian citizenship a hundred years ago took as the basis of such a framework of values, a White Australia of British descent and imperial loyalty where men would be breadwinners and women would be dependants. (4)
They quoted, too, comments made to them by Senator Nick Bolkus, Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs:
Civics education should ... identify the progressive development of our inclusive, tolerant, democratic society which, as it has matured over the last hundred years, has been successfully transformed from a comparatively monocultural society to a rich and harmonious multicultural society. (5)
The Group and Senator Bolkus insufficiently appreciated two points of fundamental importance. The first is that in conditions of civil society it is comparatively easy to extend political rights to groups hitherto unenfranchised, but it is very difficult to create a liberal-constitutional order in totalitarian regimes, or closed societies, to use Popper's expression, in which there is very little social interaction independent of governmental control. (6) Secondly, a century ago it was mainly people of British descent, together with a few other peoples of Western Europe, who had experience of a framework of liberal-democratic values, constitutionalism and the rule of law. Although Australia in 1900 was largely monocultural, that culture was pluralist and flexible. It included many diverse elements, such as the distinctive culture of the German communities of South Australia. Ongoing tensions between Irish Catholic values and the Protestant traditions of the British Isles were a major formative influence on Australian values. Australia's political structure could accommodate a variety of races or ethnicities, as well as diverse religious and political adherents, provided that they accepted the rule of law and the liberal-democratic order. In 1900, the Australian Labor Party and the Australian Workers Union were at the forefront of the White Australia policy largely because they feared that the large-scale entry of Chinese, Pacific Islanders and other non-Europeans would rapidly undermine a relatively new society with a small population. Chinese miners, although mainly industrious and law-abiding, remained in separate groups under the control of a boss and knew nothing of the rights which Australians took for granted. China, Japan and other Asian states were, of course, even more hostile to immigration and foreign influence than were the Australian colonists. In 1995, the liberal-democratic values prized by the Civics Expert Group are not widespread in what is now often called "our region" and completely absent in most of it. The successful assimilation of recent Asian immigrants, many of whom were already accustomed to British or other European influences, does not demonstrate that Australian colonists a century ago were foolish or wicked. Nonetheless, exclusion on purely racial grounds underestimated the capacity of the mainstream tradition derived by Australia from Britain to incorporate new groups.
THE DENIGRATION OF THE AUSTRALIAN PAST
The balanced tone of the report of the Civics Expert Group contrasts sharply with the denigration of the Australian past which became politically correct during the last two decades. On 8 December 1941, John Curtin responded to the entry of Japan into the Second World War with these words:
We here, in this spacious land where, for more than 150 years, peace and security have prevailed, are now called upon to meet the external aggressor. ... We Australians have imperishable traditions. We shall maintain them. We shall vindicate them.
In 1995, young people in schools and universities are told little of any "imperishable traditions", but much about evils allegedly committed by racist, sexist and environmentally-insensitive white invaders. Leading publishers have been active in trashing the Australian past. Penguin Australia and McPhee Gribble, for example, jointly published in 1988 to celebrate the centenary, Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee's Constructing a Culture: A People's History of Australia. All the essays in that book enlarged upon the introductory words of the editors: "Held up against the millennia of Aboriginal experience, the last 200 years seem but a brief, nasty interlude". (7) In the Year 11 Australian Studies course for South Australian secondary schools, devised when Ken Boston was Director-General of Education, the main event in Australia's past is the dispossession of the Aborigines. (8) Recommended contemporary topics are "the Land Rights claims of a particular group of Aboriginal people", but not the property laws that affect other citizens, and "people from non-English speaking backgrounds", but not those from English-speaking backgrounds. Special attention is directed to Australia's "position on the Asian rim", but not to Australia's position as an outpost of European civilisation with very little in common, politically and culturally, with the Asian rim. To be sure, it would be wrong to encourage mindless triumphalism, but it is at least as bad to propagate so negative and false a picture.
AUSTRALIAN VALUES A CENTURY AGO
Most Australians a century ago wanted to preserve their traditions, which were essentially British and Irish. Even the most radical thinkers doubted that the short Australian past had yet acquired significance or interest. A.J. Stephens, literary editor of The Bulletin, lamented:
In Australia, we have no temples, no ashes worth the name. We have still to make the history and create the legendary associations which are such a powerful binding force in national life. The Murray to Australians is still only a geographical label, but think what the Thames means to an Englishman! ... Think of Westminster Abbey ... of how [Nelson's] sailors were nerved by the signal "England expects ..."! What a mass of record and tradition, of song and story, of memorable life and love and death, presses behind that England! "Australia" is meaningless by comparison, lacking the inspiration of the past. (9)
Sir John Hay, President of the Legislative Council of New South Wales, asserted (17 March 1880), "However much they might be interested in the history of Australia, yet no one would think that the history of Australia was a thing likely to afford any particular improvement of the mind". John Anderson Hartley, Director of Education in South Australia, rote in 1885:
The demand is sometimes made that we should teach specially Australian history, because we live in Australia. To me this seems to be a mistake. In the first place our adopted country is very largely in the happy position of "having no history"; and further it would be a great pity that we should lose our association with the glorious past of England. After all, we are citizens of the Greater Britain, and the memories of the defeat of the Armada, or the taking of Quebec, should stir our pulses much more than the gallant deeds of the defenders of the Ballarat Stockade. I do not forget that the records of Australian exploration are bright with stories of patient endurance and self-sacrifice, but these would find an appropriate place in connection with the geography of the country. (10)
However, Australian history gradually came to possess greater interest, with explorers and "pioneers" as its highlights. It was considered less controversial than earlier British and European history, which many educators feared would fire sectarian disputes. Far from there being a strong push in Australian schools to inculcate nationalism or imperialism through history teaching, there was considerable resistance to having any history taught at all. The Senior Inspector of the Victorian Board of Education, A.B. Orlebar, argued in 1864 that, although "English history is particularly important to our youth", he was "obliged to report against its introduction into our schools as an infringement of the hours of secular instruction ... I have examined school histories of England, and I do not know one to which either the Roman Catholic or the Episcopalian or the Presbyterian parent could not justly object". (11) Nonetheless, in 1884, history was introduced as a distinct subject in Victorian government schools, in order to "familiarise the scholars with the prominent facts of British and Australian history, give them an intelligent conception of the constitution under which they live and foster a wholesome taste for reading". There were similar developments in the other colonies.
A school newspaper, the Children's Hour, founded by Hartley in Adelaide in 1889, illustrated mainstream values. It included South Australian material from writers such as the radical feminist Catherine Helen Spence, but its central message was that the children of South Australia should have "pride in their membership of the greatest race the world has ever seen", as well as love their "homeland of South Australia". (12) Such sentiments seemed highly nationalistic to some recent commentators, but their ideological intensity was mild compared with that of most late-nineteenth-century nation states (and most contemporary states, including all of Australia's Asian neighbours). One critic, Simon Firth, (13) cited Stephen Henry Smith, Director of Education in New South Wales, as an example of chauvinism, but Smith's school histories celebrated the whig-liberal pantheon of opponents of absolutism and personal rule, and social reformers such as Shaftesbury, Peel, Cross and Florence Nightingale. He did not try to cover up blemishes in the English past. Students throughout learned not only of English (or British) victories, but successful invasions of Britain from the Romans to the Normans, as well as defeats by Robert Bruce and Joan of Arc, and were taught to admire many who had defeated them.
The explicit moral values of Australian schools a century ago were akin to those of the "civil religion" of the American common school, to use Robert Bellah's expression. (14) Although doctrinal religious teaching was excluded from government schools during ordinary school hours, the moral code was firmly rooted in traditional Christian values. The sociologist Willard Waller began in the 1930s the debunking of American common schools as "museums of virtue" controlled by "despotism poised in perilous equilibrium", (15) but it took several decades before they became instead laboratories of vice. In Australia, radical historians now claim that compulsory schooling based upon the values of civil religion "amounted to a concerted attack on working class culture", and "an assault on the work patterns, habits, customs and attitudes -- the culture of working people", because it aimed "to eradicate many aspects of the children's behaviour and replace them by new ones -- a different mode of timekeeping, dress, speech and morality". (16) Ian Davey and Pavla Miller rejoice that in South Australia "working class" children expressed open resistance to the regimen imposed on them by persistent disobedience and, even more graphically, by attempts to burn the schools down or at least vandalise the buildings and made schools into "arenas of class conflict in both senses of the term". However, despite this heroic student resistance movement, the schools of Australia exerted a positive influence. From the 1860s to the 1960s, crime rates among juveniles fell during each decade, despite the strains of two World Wars, and the Depression of the 1930s. Catherine Helen Spence, Australia's leading nineteenth-century woman thinker and author of a school textbook entitled The Laws under which We Live, declared towards the end of a long life, "I have lived through a glorious age of progress. Born in 'the wonderful century', I have watched the growth of the movement for the uplifting of the masses". Overall, the "civil religion" conveyed to students that there were permanent moral values which were accepted by ordinary decent people everywhere.
The Civics Expert Group noted the importance given to exemplary lessons on honesty, industriousness, punctuality and patriotism and the emphasis on duties to parents, relations, friends and oneself. The Group dissociated itself from historians who "have often characterised -- almost caricatured -- early civics courses as jingoistic exercises in the service of middle-class prejudices". (17) Attention was drawn to the 1922 New South Wales syllabus committee, which recommended that history should be "free from national egotism" and should aim "to broaden the outlook of the pupils, and to encourage respect for the point of view of other races than our own".
SUGGESTIONS FOR CURRICULUM CONTENT
The Civics Expert Group cited some very wise words from David Malouf:
Can I suggest some aspects of our form of government that we take for granted but which are very rare? The first is that we actually believe in government; believe that a government can be fairly elected and, once there, will act in our interest, whether or not we actually voted for the government in power. Most people in the world do not trust their rulers, whether elected or not. Their distrust is blood-deep and based on bloody experience. We might also ask our young people to study our system of government and the law, comparing them with the way things are managed elsewhere ... A study of the development of our system of government, of course, will involve our students with the study of a good deal of English history; and we ought not to be afraid of that. It will not hurt young Australians to discover that much of what is best in our system we did not make ourselves. (18)
I end this paper with a few suggestions on suitable historical content for an understanding of Australian values. They are divided into three parts: the overall Western context, the mainly British, and the mainly Australian.
a. The Western inheritance
Christianity
It is impossible to understand the development of Australia without understanding the religious beliefs shared by most of the colonists. When not ignored completely in Australian schools today, beliefs shared by Christians are neglected in favour of matters on which they disagreed. Fundamental to the thought of most Australian colonists, like all earlier Christians, was that human beings partake of the divine and yet are constantly tempted towards wrong-doing. The doctrine of original sin discouraged millenarian extravagance, but belief in redemption guarded against despair at human wickedness. Christianity was available to all people, irrespective of race, class and status, gender, or past conduct. It was a universalistic creed.
Openness
It was in Western Europe that successful civil or open societies emerged. This owed something to the mediaeval conflict between Empire and Papacy. The failure of either to subdue the other ensured that religious dissenters often found places of refuge from charges of heresy. Political divisions also aided the survival of the mediaeval universities, in which Christian theology interacted with Greek philosophy and science. Many religious leaders, such as St Bernard of Clairvaux, were convinced that pagan knowledge could only lead to the damnation of Christian souls, and would gladly have snuffed out the universities. In Islam, an intellectual movement more brilliant in its day than anything in Christendom, epitomised in the names of Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd), was crushed by obscurantists who argued as did St Bernard. As a result, the Renaissance and the emergence of modern science took place in Europe and not in Islamic lands. These took place in Western and not Eastern Europe, partly because priestly celibacy in the Catholic West forced the Church to extend educational opportunity widely, in order to recruit a new generation to conduct the sacraments. This was vital in stimulating social mobility, but was not envisaged by Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand) when in the eleventh century he succeeded in outlawing marriage for the Roman clergy.
The spirit of inquiry
Some Christians, such as the Jesuits in China in the seventeenth century, who were attacked in Rome for their syncretism, took an interest in alien cultures, even if only to be able to proselytise more effectively; but it is from the Classical Greek strand in western thought that the comparative perspective and the spirit of inquiry mainly arose. Herodotus, "the father of history" was fascinated by cultures very different from his own. His example was followed at the height of Roman power by Julius Caesar, Tacitus and others. Western Europeans, with the British very prominent, extended this tradition. They explored the relationships between the language systems and other cultural attributes of peoples in every continent, rediscovered Ancient Egypt when Arabs and their Turkish rulers had no interest in the Pyramids or their contents, and showed that Sanskrit was an "Indo-European" language and wrote its first modern dictionary. They told the Aborigines of Australia something pleasing to them, that their ancestors had been here for many thousands of years, and something less pleasing, that those ancestors were themselves immigrants from the north. They produced dictionaries and books in Aboriginal languages. Bernard Lewis pointed out that
The other great civilisations known to history have all, without exception, seen themselves as self-sufficient, and rewarded the outsider, and even the sub-culture or low status insider, with contempt, as barbarians, Gentiles, untouchables, unbelievers, foreign devils, and other more intimate, less formal terms of opprobrium. ... By contrast, the special combination of unconstrained curiosity concerning the other, and unforced respect for his otherness, remains a distinctive feature of Western and Westernised cultures, and is still regarded with bafflement and anger by those who neither share nor understand it. (19)
Universalism
The comparative, or critical, standpoint, made the leading British and other European thinkers far less ethnocentric than earlier human generations. It created a capacity to criticise one's own society, as well as others, from the standpoint of universal values. Slavery, for example, was a feature of almost every society after the development of agriculture, which enabled slaves to be put to work at a profit for the first time. Serfdom in mediaeval Europe was less oppressive than slavery in pre-Columbian America or Africa, but during nearly three centuries of the triangular slave trade between West Africa, the Americas and Western Europe, including Britain, the worst features of several systems of slavery were combined. However, it was in Western Europe, with Britain and France in the lead, that first the slave trade and then slavery itself were denounced and then abolished. As Bernard Lewis put it, "Western technology made slavery unnecessary. Western ideas made it intolerable". (20) Like every other prima facie good, the critical spirit can go astray. In its extreme antinomian form it created the counter-culture that reviles the faults of our open societies, but accepts with complaisance far worse faults in closed societies. Despite the warning of Matthew xxiii, the adversarial intelligentsia continues ever more avidly to strain at gnats and swallow camels.
b. The British inheritance
Parliamentary government
England was, by the seventeenth century, exceptional among the states of Western Europe in retaining a functional parliamentary system. Elsewhere, mediaeval States-Generals and Parliaments became associated with feudal discord and civil strife and were suppressed by absolutist monarchs, supported by peasants and townspeople seeking peace in their time. Fortunately, as it turned out, Henry VIII allied himself with parliament when he broke with Rome, so that both monarchy and parliament emerged stronger at the end of the English Reformation. During the seventeenth century, civil wars in the British Isles appeared to confirm the judgement that parliamentary institutions created internal strife and that political liberty and national power were incompatible. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, first Britain and then the United States of America proved that liberty and power could be combined, and several European states began to emulate their ways. This was a critical leap forward in human history and one yet to be made in many countries.
Religious toleration
The failure, after the Reformation, of Catholics or Protestants to crush each other helped to create wider toleration in Western Europe, first in the form of cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion), which enabled different faiths to co-exist, if only on opposite sides of frontiers. Toleration was regarded by Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists alike as a painful temporary expedient before it was elevated as a valued principle. During the Civil Wars of the 1640s in Britain, none of the combatants at first intended to tolerate the religion of the other. Charles I and Archbishop Laud on one side, and the Puritan leadership of the Parliament on the other, believed equally in a single national church based on pure doctrinal truth. Religious, and with it political, tolerance again emerged largely because no one was capable of establishing uniformity. The overthrow of James II was another example of "the fortunate fall". There were massive difficulties in developing new structures to replace those of divine hereditary monarchy, but the follies of James made it a task that had to be tackled urgently. The basis of limited, constitutional monarchy was made possible by a monarch unwilling to be limited constitutionally. There was also serendipity in the great expansion of wealth and world power that coincided with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. If, in the early eighteenth century, most English people had been poorer than in the past, they might have supported the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745.
Individualism
The concept of the individual as a rational autonomous agent owes something to the Christian idea of the soul and the accountability of each person directly to God, and something to the idea of the inquiring mind in Greek philosophy. However, it was not until the age of Locke and Hume in Britain that the idea fully matured that the legitimacy of government was based on the free consent of individuals. This revolution in political thought was made easier by the fact that the English had already been for several centuries the most individualistic people in Europe, and thus in the world. More English men and women left their home areas to seek work, married outside their parishes of birth, and sold land to start up life again elsewhere, than in any other country. This also made it relatively easy for the English to go overseas as colonist. (21) Yet this idea of the mobile individual also depended on the existence of uniform rules and laws, first within England itself and then in its colonies. Individualism and the common law were symbiotic, not antagonistic.
c. Australian content
The convict era
Study of the English penal system and Australian convictism illustrates the central paradox of freedom: we would like unbounded freedom for our own actions but fear the unbounded freedom of others. Linked to this paradox are problems concerning the balance between justice and mercy and of quis custodes ipsos custodiet: who will police the police? By the end of the eighteenth century, England had a very harsh penal code, but policing bordered on the non-existent, and the jury system and writ of habeas corpus provided better safeguards for legal defence than were found elsewhere. Convictism made full extension of English legal and constitutional practice impossible in Australia, but early colonial courts followed English precedents as closely as they could. Convicts could only be charged with crimes known to English law and on indictment following strict judicial requirements. In early colonial times, most law enforcers were convicts. Convicts could petition the Governor, could give evidence in court against masters to whom they had been assigned, and could not be physically punished by them. These conditions were very different from those of slavery. Nearly all the convicts, including many with life sentences, gained their freedom. Some became wealthy and prominent in colonial life. Many convicts showed a dual attachment to their new country and the old country that transmitted its laws and culture. (22) This was the case even before transportation was ended and internal self-government achieved. By 1820, the main worry in Westminster about New South Wales was that convict conditions were so easy that the deterrent effect of transportation had been undermined. Australian convicts had, at least potentially, greater legal and political rights than had the law-abiding in most parts of the world. No revolution was needed to enable them to advance to full citizenship and political autonomy. (23)
The Aborigines
Aborigines were not citizens for over a century after British colonisation began in 1788. Enabling Aborigines to understand the laws and conventions that underpinned the new civil society, so that they could share the rights and burdens or citizenship, was no easy matter, irrespective of the intentions of colonial governors and officials in Australia, or Parliament and public opinion in Britain. By the end of the nineteenth century, few Aborigines could look back on their contacts with white society with any joy. Yet, painful as the process had usually been, there were great potential gains for Aborigines in the new Australia. The very consciousness of Aboriginality, the sense of sharing a common cultural heritage, only arose from experience of contact. Aborigines had never known that they lived on a great island continent and had possessed no common language. By 1900, probably a majority of Aborigines could communicate with each other in English. Culturally, by 1900, if they saw them as relevant to their needs and wished to make use of them, Aborigines had access to facilities for education and health not only more abundant than those in traditional Aboriginal societies, but more extensive than those available to many Europeans in the eighteenth century. Incorporation into the new Australia opened up, too, a far wider range of material goods than those which attracted many Aborigines to enter white settlements voluntarily in earlier years. Aborigines and other Australians faced very difficult choices between assimilationist and separatist policies, but it was the open society that made the choice possible.
One nation for one continent
Although the several Australian colonies had no formal relationship with each other except through Great Britain, and although the continental land mass was only slowly explored and settled by them, the new Australians had no doubt that they would create a single nation, based on British institutions, which would occupy the whole continent. Very early in the piece William Charles Wentworth foresaw
... Australasia float, with flag unfurled,
A new Britannia in another world.
The republican Joseph Furphy described his greatest novel, Such is Life, as: "scene, Riverina and Northern Vic; temper, democratic, bias, offensively Australian", but the traditions and values closest to his heart were derived from English literature and British history and, beyond them, from the lands of the Bible and the classical Mediterranean. Furphy and most of the radicals of his time wanted to build a united and independent Australia on foundations developed during generations of open political debate in Britain.
In 1890, Henry Parkes urged delegates to the Australasian Federation convention in Melbourne:
Make yourselves a united people, appear before the world as one, and the dream of going "home" would die away. We should create an Australian home ... We should have "home" within our own shores; "home" with all the lofty ideals for the mere socially ambitious. We should have avenues of employment for the most gifted among our sons, and there would be no object of ambition superior to what could be presented to them on the spot which gave them birth. (24)
Yet, combined with Parkes's call for "one nation, one destiny", was his planting of an English oak as a symbol of ongoing attachment to Britain. He believed that "the crimson thread of kinship" would continue to link Australia's destiny to that of Britain, as well as unite Australia. Shared values derived from Britain were the basis on which the colonies formed the federal Australian Commonwealth.
A century onwards, Australia is racially highly diverse. Their own crimson threads of kinship are rightly valued by most Australians of every origin. The present Commonwealth Government generally encourages this sentiment among minority ethnic groups, but dismisses as un-Australian the historically more important ties with Britain. There is no doubt that the attachment to Britain of a century ago, proved in sacrifice in 1914 and 1939, is now much weaker. Yet, if any serious challenge should arise to Australia's security and freedom, our main hope will lie in the adherence of Australians to shared values by which they wish to live and for which they would, if necessary, give their lives. Those shared values can only be those on which the new Australia was created during the nineteenth century. Those values have proved highly extendable and sufficiently durable and attractive to bring to our shores hundreds of thousands from less fortunate lands. I hope that the report of the Civics Expert Group is a sign that our own great cultural and political inheritance will no longer be belittled in high places, but cherished and safeguarded as it so richly deserves.
VALUES AND JUDGEMENTS: CREATING
SOCIAL INCENTIVES FOR GOOD BEHAVIOUR
A DISCOURSE OF VIRTUE
It is with some trepidation that, as an Australian, I address an American readership on so sensitive a question as that taken up below. In fact, I know little about the social and cultural affairs now facing the United States. But I have spent the better part of the last decade grappling with issues of this kind in Australia. Through this effort, I have reached certain conclusions which I believe may have broader significance. I offer them here, for your consideration, in the hope that I may contribute something of value to your own still evolving debate on politics and culture.
As I am a not social scientist, I confess to being pessimistic that social science can ultimately contribute much to the resolution of the profound social ills of poverty, despair and decay evident in America's core central cities. This is not to disparage the often ingenious efforts that social scientists employ to fathom the intricacies of human behaviour. Still, I question whether real change in the lives of real people, depends much at all on answers to the kinds of questions that social scientists pose.
Why this scepticism? Because modern social science speaks a language of cause and effect -- "If we design this programme, then they will respond in that way". Yet I am now convinced that the core social problems of our time require for their solution a language of values -- "We should do this; they ought to do that; decent people must strive to live in a certain way". This is the language of the pulpit, not the conference room. In the discourse of the "policy wonk", who speaks fluent "conference-ese", there is no place for language like this.
Yet, we know that our most serious social problems are connected with dysfunctional behaviours adopted by young people in our various communities. As a number of critics have emphasised recently, there is a relationship between the behavioural problems of the poor, and the cultural crisis affecting the middle and upper classes in America, as evidenced by rising divorce rates, the spread of venereal disease, the problems of our education system, increases in teen suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, our problems in international competitiveness, our flight from responsibility into various therapies which stress our victimhood, and so forth.
At issue here is our capacity as a moral and political community to engage in an effective discourse about values and ways of living, and to convey normative judgements which arise out of that discourse. I am dubious about the ability of modern political rhetoric to rise to the challenge which such a "discourse of virtue" poses to public figures. Consider the collective guffaw with which much influential opinion received the promotion of "family values" in the last American presidential campaign. This was not just partisanship; it was a contemptuous rejection of the very idea of a public discourse which might judge how we should organise our family lives.
This is an interesting situation, for judgement is not unknown in our public discourses. National campaigns have, indeed, been waged, aimed at some aspects of behaviour, with positive results. Smoking is the obvious example, successfully inveighed against over the last generation, with both public and private efforts. Our national consciousness of environmental issues has been raised in recent decades, in part through the use of public rhetoric and exhortation which has had a powerful normative aspect to it. One only need read Vice-President Al Gore's book, Earth in the Balance, to see that. But efforts at public exhortation about sexuality, marriage, fatherhood, and child-bearing are far more contentious because, unlike in these other areas, such efforts cut against the ideological grain of the great "liberation" movements which have swept through our society in past decades. Even some conservative Republican presidential candidates are reluctant to engage in public rhetoric with a direct moral message. This should tell us something about the limits of politics as a means of addressing profound questions of value.
THE LIMITS OF ECONOMIC DETERMINISM
Another reason to be sceptical about the utility of social science is that its fundamental behavioural assumptions begin from a materialist viewpoint. Economic or biological factors are supposed ultimately to underlie all behavioural problems, even behaviours involving sexuality, marriage, child-bearing and parenting which reflect people's basic understandings of what gives meaning to their lives. The view is that these behavioural problems can be cured from without, that government can change these behaviours, that if you can just get the incentives right, then everything will be fine. This reflects a philosophy of mechanistic determinism, wherein the mysteries of human motivation are supposedly susceptible to calculated intervention, if only the government were sufficiently committed to try.
Yet there is another view, illustrated by the carpenter from Galilee who reminded his tempter, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." And to the biological determinist, whom Christ does not address directly in the Gospels, one readily imagines He would say something like, "God is not finished with us when he deals us our genetic hand." But such an emphasis cuts against the modern sensibility.
Deterministic views of social disorder lend themselves easily to the favoured lines of partisan argument about social policy. Those who favour expanded government can argue that we either pay now for social "investment" programmes, or pay later, for welfare or prisons. Those who want the federal budget to shrink can cite the worsening conditions of the ghetto in the face of the growth in social spending over the last generation as evidence that Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" failed. Those who seek a middle way can split the difference by talking about the receipt of benefits needing to be accompanied by an acceptance of responsibility on the part of the poor, though the government must provide services which help the poor to accept their responsibilities and so on. We are all familiar with this language.
These debates are sterile and superficial. They fail to engage questions of personal morality. They fail to talk about character and values. They do not invoke any moral leadership in the public sphere. The view seems to be that in a pluralistic society such discussions from public officials are inappropriate.
I am reminded here of a distinction introduced by the economist Albert Hirschman between tastes -- defined as individual preferences about which we do not argue (for example, whether we like apples or pears), and values -- defined as preferences over which we do argue, both with ourselves and with others. We do not, for example, treat a preference for discrimination against blacks or women as a taste to be accommodated. Rather, we attempt to persuade, cajole, or compel our fellows to make "progress" in such areas, and we insist that our educational institutions instil in our young the "proper" views concerning them. Values, in other words, are personal preferences so central to our collective lives that as a political community we cannot properly be neutral about them. As Hirschman has noted: "A principal purpose of publicly proclaimed laws and regulations is to stigmatise antisocial behaviour and thereby to influence citizens' values and behaviour codes."
Consider that we do not teach in our schools the comparative virtues of alternative ways of living. We give only muted public voice to the judgements that it is wrong to be sexually promiscuous, to be indolent and without discipline, to be disrespectful of legitimate authority, or to be unreliable or untruthful or unfaithful. We no longer teach values, but offer "clarification" of the values that the children are supposed to have somehow inculcated in them without any instruction. We elevate process ("How does one discover his or her own values?") over substance ("What is it that a decent person should embrace?"). The advocacy of a particular conception of virtuous living has virtually vanished from American public discourse. Who will say that young people should abstain from sexual intimacy until their relationships have been consecrated by marriage? These are, in this present age, not matters for public discourse.
Most Americans believe that one-and-a-half million abortions a year constitutes a profound moral problem for our society. Yet, the public discourse on this issue is dominated by the question of a woman's right to choose, not the moral content of her choice. Nearly all of us would prefer, on moral as well as pragmatic grounds, that our 15-year-olds not be sexually active. But to take this stance in the face of an epidemic of sexually transmitted disease invites ridicule from the highest officials. Government, it would appear, should confine itself to dealing with the consequences of these moral lapses, rather than taking on the issue of morality directly.
Now, I am not one for tilting at windmills. The emergence of morally authoritative public leadership seems unlikely at this late date. We shall have to look to the private agencies of moral and cultural development, in particular communities, to take on the burden of promoting positive behavioural change. In every community there are such agencies which seek to shape the ways in which individuals conceive of their duties to themselves, of their obligations to each other, and of their responsibilities before God. The family and the church are primary among these.
These are the natural sources of legitimate moral teaching, which must be restored if the behavioural problems which afflict American society are to be overcome. Such a restoration obviously cannot be the object of programmatic intervention by public agencies. Rather, it must be led from within the communities in question, by the moral and spiritual leaders of those communities.
VALUES, POLICY AND THE STATE
Let me talk now, for a few moments, about the role of the state. Public policy is more than the implementation of technical solutions to the problems of governance. It is also a powerful symbolic mechanism through which are communicated the values and beliefs of a people. As well-known conservative columnist and writer, George Will, has famously put it: "Statecraft is Soulcraft." The means-end calculation of the social scientist or policy analyst is insufficient to provide a full account of what government does. Crucial also is the expressive content of government actions. The actions taken by the US Congress in the next months regarding welfare reform will represent a powerful expression about the duties and obligations of citizens, and about the standards of conduct expected from individuals. These messages will both shape and reflect the values of the citizenry.
It is now widely accepted that placing upon welfare recipients the obligation to engage in activities which limit their dependence is necessary and legitimate public policy. Far from being punitive, as some liberal critics of this proposal allege, the imposition of such an obligation represents a keeping of faith with a social accord of mutual expectation. The key point to recognise is that the state cannot escape the necessity to communicate some moral message by the actions it takes, even if only by default. The failure to impose obligations on recipients is also an action, which signals what is valued in society.
The audience for these normative messages is not limited to the set of people directly affected, but extends to the entire population. Indeed, sustaining political support for public provision to the needy requires the maintenance of some compatibility between the values expressed through the policy, and the beliefs broadly held by the public. The conduct of public policy also communicates something to the citizenry at large about the moral standing of those persons directly reached by policy. In the case of welfare, structuring assistance so that it leads to the eventual attainment of self-sufficiency by recipients actually shows respect for the subjects of state action, and enhances the dignity of these persons. By holding up a common standard of behaviour to all citizens we evidence our confidence that those who may now need our assistance are capable of becoming self-reliant. This avoids the situation in which "we" who are capable of responsible conduct and of generosity, deign to provide for "them" who, by virtue of their dependency, are rendered objects of our concern, but are not treated as responsible moral agents. The notion that to treat the poor with dignity one must withdraw all constraint on the recipient, and simply hand over the benefit unencumbered, is in fact a contradiction. The absence of an enforced expectation that those in need will, in due course, join the self-supporting, concedes that the needy are incapable of actions regarded as minimally expected of ordinary citizens -- hardly a dignified posture.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CIVIL SOCIETY
Thus, in addition to providing direct economic incentives (via the tax code and through the design of programmes providing financial benefits), the state sets the moral background within which civil society operates. But it is the civil sector of families, community organisations, churches and various private philanthropic undertakings which must do the real work of promulgating and instilling values. The role of the state, while important in matters of public communication, is ultimately quite limited in matters of transforming the values of individual persons.
One source of this limitation is the fact that encouraging "good behaviour" intrinsically requires that discriminations be made among persons based on assessments that are difficult, legally and politically, for public agencies to make. Having distinguished between right and wrong in public rhetoric, it becomes necessary in the concrete, ambiguous circumstances of everyday life to discern the extent to which particular individuals have risen to, or fallen short of, our expectations. That is, promoting virtue requires that standards be set and communicated, and that judgements be made as to whether those standards have been met. The making of such judgements requires knowledge about individual circumstances, and the drawing of distinctions between individual cases, which may exceed the capacity of public institutions. Because citizens have due-process rights which cannot be fully abrogated, public judgements must be made in a manner which can be defended after the fact, and which carry a high burden of proof as to their legitimacy. Families and churches are not constrained to the same degree.
Consider the difficulty of a state-sponsored agent making the judgement as to whether a welfare recipient has put forward adequate effort to prepare for and find a job. The information available for this decision is generally limited to the observations of a social worker, and the self-report of the welfare recipient concerning her activities, together with a check on whether job interviews previously arranged have been pursued, etc. Beyond this, very little information can be brought to bear. Action to limit the assistance due to a belief that the recipient was not trying hard enough might not stand up to subsequent judicial review. (Indeed, such actions might not be carried out by state employees who believed the obligations thereby imposed were not appropriate.) But, of course, families and communal groups providing help to the same individual would base their continued assistance, in part, upon just such information. They would discriminate more finely than a state-sponsored agent ever could between the subtle differences in behaviour among individuals which constitute the real content of morality and virtue.
This point is especially critical when behavioural distinctions may have a disparate impact by race, and where charges of racial discrimination could arise. Anticipating these charges, public agents may withdraw from the degree of scrutiny of individual behaviour which produced the racially disparate outcome. The fact is that the instruments available to public agents for the shaping of character are coarse and relatively indiscriminate, in comparison with the kinds of distinctions and judgements which people make in their private social lives all the time. Moreover, the ways in which a public agent can sanction individuals' dysfunctional behaviour -- withholding financial benefits primarily -- may not be as compelling as the threat of social ostracism and peer disapproval which is readily available in private associations. The purpose of these observations is to caution against an overly optimistic assessment of the power of legislation to reverse the regrettable trends in the social behaviours of citizens.
It is also the case that state action is encumbered by the plurality of views as to what constitutes appropriate values in our society. The public morality reflected in state action is necessarily a "thin" conception of virtue, weak enough to accommodate the underlying diversity of value commitments amongst the various sectors of our society. This contrasts sharply with the "thick" conceptions of virtue characteristic of the moral communities in which we are embedded in private life. The conflict over sex education illustrates this point. Introducing into the public schools in any large city a curriculum of sex education that teaches the preferability of two-parent families might be resisted by educators who would cite the great number of their students from single-parent backgrounds. Yet it is arguable that these are the students most in need of hearing the authoritative expression of such value judgements. Of course, the same would not be true of sex instruction undertaken in a parochial school context.
My general proposition is that civil society and the state provide complementary inputs into the production of virtuous citizens. Legislators should look for ways to encourage virtue by encouraging the development and expansion of those private, voluntary associations within which the real work of character development is best done. Mutually-concerned persons who trust one another enough to be able to exchange criticism constructively, establish codes of personal conduct, and enforce social sanctions against what is judged as undesirable behaviour, can create and enforce communal norms which are beyond the capacity of the state to promulgate effectively. The coercive resources of the state, though great, are not especially subtle.
CONCERNING THE BLACK COMMUNITY
Finally, I would like to discuss these ideas in relation to social problems affecting the black community in the United States. I want to consider just how the moral-ethical sensibilities of black Americans took root in the experience of slavery. My central point is easily stated: Enslaved persons were driven by brute circumstance to create among themselves a culture with spiritual and moral depth of truly heroic proportions. They simply had no choice. The brutality of the assault they endured -- upon their persons, their relations one with another, and their sense of dignity and self-respect -- was such that either they would be completely destroyed as moral beings, or they would find a way, through faith, to transcend their condition. As Alan Keyes has puts it in his recent book, Masters of the Dream: "In effect, [the slaves] secured themselves against the depredations of a system devised to destroy their self-respect by storing their sense of personal worth in a form that made it hard to damage and hard to steal away." Enslaved persons had to learn to transcend their material condition, or they would have been destroyed. That "man does not live by bread alone" was for them more than a theoretical proposition; grasping the truth of that proposition was their key to survival.
The Africans brought to America in bondage came to embrace the Christian faith, and to find in it the means of their moral salvation. A wealth of historical, theological and cultural scholarship amply documents this claim. It is also supported by the surviving primary accounts, and the spirituals and "sorrow songs" of the slaves themselves. This Christian faith, and the relationship with God to which it gave rise, was fundamental to preserving a sense of worth and dignity among enslaved persons. Again quoting Keyes, it permitted them "to feel that they existed in and for themselves, rather than through their relationship with the enslavers". Faith allowed those held permanently in bondage to avoid being consumed by their hatred, their despair, or their fear.
These moral and spiritual values, forged in what Herbert Storing once called "the school of slavery", proved to be profoundly significant in the post-slavery development of black Americans. It was the emphasis on hard work, education, and decent living characteristic of the first generations of blacks after emancipation which made possible their considerable progress. A spirit of self-help, rooted in a deep-seated sense of self-respect, was widely embraced among blacks of all ideological persuasions, well into this century. They did what they did -- educating their children, acquiring land, founding communal institutions, and struggling for equal rights -- not in reaction to or for the approval of whites, but out of an internal conviction of their own worth and capacities. Even acts of black protest and expressions of grievance against whites were, ultimately, reflections of this inner sense of dignity. The crowning achievements of the civil rights movement -- its non-violent method and its successful effort at public moral suasion -- can be seen as the projection into American politics of a set of spiritual values which had been evolving among blacks for over a century.
It is, therefore, with a sense of deep remorse that I must recount how, in the last generation, this ethos of self-reliance, moral rectitude and unapologetic Christian piety has lost its place of primacy among black political, spiritual and intellectual leaders. They have, indeed, fallen upon rather hard times. The ideological presuppositions of current black American political advocacy seems a world apart from the historic ethos which I just mentioned. Some leaders, in civil rights organisations and the halls of Congress, are wedded to a conception of the black condition, and a method of appealing to the rest of the polity, which undermines the dignity of their people. They seek, it would seem, to make blacks into the conscience of America, even at the price of their souls. Though it mocks the idea of freedom to hold that, as free men and women, blacks ought nevertheless to leave the determination of the normative framework of their communal life to the vicissitudes of government policy, this is precisely what has been done. The rhetoric is: "It costs more to keep a young black man in jail for a year than it does to send him to Yale for a year" -- as if the difference between him being in jail or at Yale is a matter of the size of some bureaucrat's budget, rather than the behaviour of the young man himself, and of those charged with his guidance and care.
What a historic abdication of responsibility is this posture among contemporary black political leadership, considering the blood that has been shed, the sacrifices that have been made, and the determination, commitment and dedication that have been shown by blacks of previous generations. While black youngsters in the ghettos murder each other, poison their bodies and their minds with drugs and promiscuous sex, and ignore their responsibilities to their children, their community and their nation, there is no place in the political lexicon of black leaders for talk of values, morality and virtue. If they can quote the Bible's book of Amos in public, as Martin Luther King, Jr., famously did -- "Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream" -- then why not also the passage in First Corinthians concerning sexual immorality, in which Paul states: "Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God. You are not your own, you were bought with a price. Therefore, honour God with your body." Which of these biblical injunctions is more relevant to the contemporary behavioural crisis afflicting black America?
Today's black leaders have become ever-ready "doom sayers", alert to exploit their people's suffering by offering it up to more or less sympathetic whites as justification for incremental monetary transfers. But this posture ignores the great existential challenge facing black America today. The challenge is that of taking control of our own futures by exerting the requisite moral leadership, making the sacrifices of time and resources, and building the needed institutions so that black social and economic development may be advanced. No matter how windy the debate becomes among white liberals and conservatives as to what should be done in the public sphere, meeting this self-creating challenge ultimately depends upon black action. It is to desecrate the memory of their enslaved ancestors to hold that, as free men and women, blacks ought nonetheless passively to wait for white Americans, of whatever political persuasion, to come to the rescue. A people who languish in dependency, while the means through which they might work toward their own advancement exist, have surrendered their claim to dignity, and to the respect of their fellow citizens. If they are to be a truly free people, they must accept responsibility for their fate, even when it does not lie wholly in their hands.
This is a point of genuine spiritual truth, but it is also a practical point with deep political implications. The fact is that promoting virtuous behaviour amongst the black American poor is essential to achieving the political goals of more inclusive social policy and expanded opportunity for this population. Whites do not need to be shown how to fear black youths in the cities, which is implicitly the view of advocates who threaten "long hot summers" if jobs programmes and affirmative action are not expanded. Instead, whites must be taught how to respect and how to love these youngsters. An effective, persuasive black leadership must project the image of a disciplined, respectable black demeanour. That such comportment is not inconsistent with protest for redress of grievance is a great legacy of the civil rights movement. But more than that disciplined protest is required. Discipline, orderliness and virtue in every aspect of life will contribute to creating an aura of respectability and worth. Such an aura is a valuable political asset, and the natural by-product of living one's life in a dignified, civilised manner.
Because racial oppression tangibly diminishes its victims, in their own eyes and in the eyes of others, the construction of new public identities and the simultaneous promotion of self-respect are crucial tasks facing those burdened with a history of oppression. Without this there can be no genuine recovery from past victimisation. A leading civil rights advocate teaches young blacks the exhortation: "I am somebody." True enough. But the next and crucial question is "Just who are you?" The black youngster should be prepared to respond: "Because I am somebody I will not accept unequal rights. Because I am somebody, I will waste no opportunity to better myself. Because I am somebody, I will respect my body by not polluting it with drugs or promiscuous sex. Because I am somebody -- in my home, in my community, in my nation -- I will comport myself responsibly, I will be accountable, I will be available to serve others as well as myself". It is the doing of these fine things, not the saying of fine words, which proves that here is somebody to be reckoned with.
That is, whether or not the youngster is "somebody" has little to do with the colour of his skin, and everything to do with the content of his character. This inner-city youngster is not on his own in his struggle to live a more virtuous, more righteous life. None of us is. God is our co-pilot in this, as in all of life's journeys. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians: "No temptation has seized you except what is common to man; but God is faithful, He will not allow you to be tempted beyond your ability, but when you are tempted He will provide a way out so that you can bear it." Let us tell the youngster about this good news, so he will look for that way out.
CITIZENSHIP: ITS MEANING, PRIVILEGES AND OBLIGATIONS
I will talk only about citizenship in Australia. I will talk only about citizenship in democracies. In contrast, in a dictatorship or strong-armed government, a citizen has different rights and duties.
First, I offer a few thoughts about democracy. I believe that democracy is far and away the best form of government. I do not think it is necessarily the best for every nation. Democracy might not, at first, be appropriate for a nation that has a low standard of living, a high level of illiteracy, grave administrative problems and powerful and plundering neighbours. Nonetheless, I greatly respect that post-War western tradition of trying to set up infant democracies in infant nations. It's a way of saying to them that "you deserve nothing but the best for the start of your journey as a nation".
At the same time, democracy is not an easy system of government. We claim it is easily operated. If it was easy, if it was instantly superior to rival forms of government, it would have had a much longer history.
Democracy is really a creation of the last 200 years -- I apologise to any Athenians present.
In Australia, there is complacency about democracy and therefore about citizenship. Democracy is seen as surpassing any rival system; but there is a chance, maybe a 33 per cent chance, that in 200 years' time democracy will be only a minor system of government, or a quaint fossil. Of course there is also a chance that democracy will be world-wide and universal.
The strongest military power in the world, the United States, is a democracy, and that has helped to spread democratic seeds even on stony ground. The day might come when the strongest military power in the world is not a democracy. I'm not being pessimistic, just pondering.
Democracy seems easy-going and laid-back, but is actually demanding. It requires a sense of civic responsibility in a substantial minority of its citizens. Democracy requires, as far as we know, certain shared values. It requires a willingness to debate. And it requires a common language for that debate.
Initially, and I stand open to correction, democracy rose more in the prosperous nations, and by its ability to harness talent, helped to increase the prosperity of those nations. Faced with less prosperity, democracy loses a lot of support. Democracy, in the early 1930s, when the world depression was hovering, was brittle. There will be other times when democracy is unable to deliver the miracles too often expected of it. The danger to democracy in many other countries might come from economic conditions, from international or civil wars, from environmental threats or even from world government.
I believe, incidentally, that the first attempt at world government will be made within the next two hundred years and will probably fail. But there will be other attempts.
As an institution, democracy tends to promise more than it can fulfil. Put another way, democratic leaders are a little inclined to favour the painless solutions because they're the solutions that we, the electors, demand.
At times democracies have placed the very institution of democracy in peril by neglecting their own defences. To make your defences stronger is sometimes painful. Germany offers us a lesson. Germany in the 1930s had perhaps less than one tenth of the natural resources and maybe one tenth of the population of the many-sided alliance that had defeated it in 1918. And yet Hitler hit that democratic alliance for six in the first phase of the Second World War. Why? Because the democratic nations, the winners in 1918, were not prepared to make sacrifices to counter Hitler when he was about to re-arm or busily re-arming.
Australia was in that half-hearted number. We don't like to say so, but one of the reasons why so many Australians were captured by the Japanese in 1941 and 1942 was that their own nation had ill-equipped them for war. And therefore they were easily captured. Public opinion as well as political opinion played a large part in a decision that meant that many Australians were ill-prepared for war.
Australia is one of the world's oldest continuous democracies. Long may it flourish. I doubt, however, whether democracy is quite as vigorous as it was. I offer the view that democracy was healthier in Australia 40 or 60 years ago than it is today. Moreover, the decline in democracy, if it has happened, has aroused virtually no comment. I'm not speaking of a terminal illness, but an illness that should be diagnosed.
Even in Australia, in this relatively ancient democratic stronghold, there is a tendency to take democracy for granted. There is a tendency to misuse it, to demand too much of it, to take it for granted in the consoling belief that it is a Titanic and unsinkable. Every system of government is sinkable and liable to be replaced. I point to a few icebergs large and small, now visible in Australia.
A sense of citizenship is vital in a democracy. The citizens are the final judges in the political process. Unfortunately in Australia, citizenship is largely the responsibility of the Department of Immigration, and that Department is largely the lobby for recent immigrants and those of their relatives who hope to arrive soon. That Department is really a pocket borough with no concept of Australia as a whole and its needs.
In my view, Australia's notion of citizenship is a disgrace. We, more than probably any country in the world, throw away our citizenship. Anybody can become a citizen with ridiculous ease. Applicants for citizenship have to live here or claim to live here for only two years, and one of those years can be spent overseas.
They need to know no more than a few words of English. If they are over 50, they need to know no English. They can also maintain their allegiance to a foreign power while an Australian citizen.
The prostitution of Australian citizenship took place under Mr Hawke. To read the Parliamentary Debates is to look in vain for any governmental idea of what is in the interests of Australia as a whole. In 1984, in the parliamentary debate which led to the watering down of our citizenship, Mr Peter Staples summed up the views of many of his colleagues. If, he said, migrants want early citizenship, what right do we have to deny it. I think a nation has every right to deny citizenship to those who know nothing about the nation they have just entered. As for the question of English, one Senator insisted that to demand an English prerequisite in a migrant would be in-built discrimination. She did not seem to realise the Parliament holds all its sessions in English.
Without that in-built discrimination, without a common language or, say, two common languages, we are reduced to the level of monkeys: even monkeys probably have a common language. This kind of nonsense is sometimes applauded in the serious dailies, which do not seem to realise that their very circulation depends on the same inbuilt discrimination, the same common language.
I offer a second comment. Not only do we demean citizenship by thrusting it on newcomers. We also demean democracy by compelling newcomers to vote. They might know little about Australia and have no previous experience of democracy. But they are compelled to display that ignorance by voting. Compulsory voting, I remind you, was introduced by the Federal Parliament by a conservative government in the mid-1920s when English was almost universally spoken in Australia.
I don't believe that if voluntary voting were reintroduced, it would necessarily serve one political party for any length of time. But at least it would proclaim the truth that democracy should rest on common sense. The keystone of democracy is that every voter has to accept some responsibility for the nation's well being. The keystone of democracy is that every voter can be an assessor of the government's recent record. Compulsory voting, mindless voting, challenges that principle. Democracy is taken too lightly by the notion of compulsory voting.
I offer another piece of evidence that democracy in Australia is not quite as healthy as it should be. There is a strong view, reinforced by a section of the media based in Canberra, that certain topics are too dangerous to be handed to the people for decision at election time. Immigration is one topic. Again and again, newspaper editors and others insist that there must be a bipartisan approach, and that the major political parties must follow the same policy -- providing it is a policy they approve of. We hear, again and again, that the Australian people themselves can't be trusted to vote on immigration. Nearly every Immigration Minister in the last twelve years has followed this line of argument.
Aboriginal affairs is another topic not to be entrusted to the people. The press joined with Mr Keating in wiping it from the agenda at the last Federal election. And of course the Native Title Bill was deliberately introduced to Parliament without any chance of members of the public seeing that Bill, and a strong attempt was made to push it through as quickly as possible. It's too important an issue for Aborigines and all other Australians to be rushed through Parliament. It will remain a smouldering topic in Australia for many years to come.
If there are certain issues that can't be discussed in a democracy -- and numerous intellectuals and the serious daily newspapers sometimes enforce that taboo -- then our moral and intellectual guardians are really showing some disdain for democracy. In intellectual circles in Australia, especially in the social sciences and humanities, there is an ambiguous attitude toward democracy. That attitude is increasingly powerful in education.
I draw your attention to another straw floating in the wind: the role of taxation in democracy. As an aside, I used to be able to fill in my own tax returns, just as I think the great majority of Australians could. Indeed, in the late 1950s, one could even read the Tax Act, then a small document, and even lodge an appeal, unaided. Now, of course, like three-quarters of Australians, I need a tax agent. The system is so complicated that only a tax expert understands it: or as many privately say, even they do not understand it.
I submit that taxation is at the core of the political process. In the 1770s, North Americans revolted against British rule, because they said they were victims enduring taxation without representation. In short, they had virtually no say in the taxes they paid. We have moved a short distance toward that stage. Remember, one of the reasons why Dr Hewson lost the last election was that he tried to transform the tax system, but the great majority of voters didn't even know what the existing system was.
I think it is important that citizens, or a sizeable number of citizens, should know roughly how the tax system operates. Indeed they probably should know more about the tax system than they know about the machinery of government, the Parliaments, the courts and so on.
When the Civics Expert Group did their task last year, their brief would have entitled them to look at taxation as one of those areas of government which are befuddling the average citizen. But they didn't look at taxation.
Historically, taxation disputes have played a big part in testing the legitimacy of governments. George Washington knew that. So did Peter Lalor. The Eureka Stockade of Ballarat was largely a dispute about taxation or what the government did in return for its htaxes. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the trend in certain parts of the world was towards the dispersal of political power, tax revolts often had democratic results. The opposite can happen. I'm generalising and not referring specifically to Australia.
One final point. More than ever before, those in power speak frequently about the rights of minorities and rarely about the rights of the majority. There will always be a tension between the rights of the majority and the rights of minorities. But I find it strange that the rights of the majority are so often challenged and so rarely defined.
Democracy depends on its citizens receiving basic rights. These include reasonable freedom of expression, a say in the government of the nation, the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, and also some of the near-rights, which will vary from generation to generation. But democracy equally depends on citizens accepting responsibilities. In the last ten years our civic and political leaders, far more than in the past, have emphasised civic rights much more than civic duties and civic responsibilities. I think we are the first generation of Australians to be assured, again and again, that we can all increase our rights without any increase in our responsibilities or duties. This is almost the formula of the charlatan.
Democracy, if it is to continue over a long period, depends as much on the shouldering of obligations as on the claiming of rights. For that reason it is a difficult as well as an impressive system of government.
Only a stone's throw from here is one of the most notable Parliament Houses in the world. It should, along with the Parliament House in Adelaide, be famous, because ultimately when the history of democracy is written, the institution of democracy in South Australia and Victoria in the mid-1850s will be classed as landmarks in world history. When you consider the conditions under which democracy was established in Australia in the mid-1850s, you can only applaud those early voters and those early legislators. Most of the legislators had no experience of any kind of government, not even municipal government, and you can only applaud the way they set about the difficult task. They had their failures, they had their disappointments, but they set up the nucleus of a system of government which we still have and which we still prize.
Since all those who are interested in politics, or nearly all those who are interested in politics, are partisan to some degree, it's vital that from time to time we set aside our partisanship and ask ourselves not simply what will promote the political views which we individually believe in, but what will promote that democratic system which will enable those views, if sensible, to prevail.
ENDNOTES
1. Civics Expert Group, Whereas the people: Civics and Citizenship Education, Canberra, AGPS, 1994, page 7.
2. Ibid., page 16.
3. Ibid., page 13.
4. Ibid., page 14.
5. Ibid., page 15.
6. See E. Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals, New York, Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1994, and a review of it: K. Minogue, "Necessary Imperfections" in The National Interest, Winter, 1994-95, pages 83-8.
7. V. Burgmann and J. Lee, Constructing a Culture: A People's History of Australia, Fitzroy, Victoria, Penguin Australia and McPhee Gribble, 1988, pages xiv-xv.
8. Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia, Australian Studies, Extended Subject Framework, Adelaide: Peacock Publications, 1991.
9. The Bulletin, 9 December 1899.
10. Cited in E. Kwan, Making "Good Australians": the Work of Three South Australian Educators, University of Adelaide, unpublished M.A. Thesis, 1981, page 28.
11. A.R. Trethewey, "The Rise and Fall of History in the Victorian State Primary School: a Study of Response to Changing Social Purposes" in Australian Journal of Education, X11 (3), 1968, 266.
12. Children's Hour, July 1897, page 103.
13. See, for example, S.G. Firth, "Social Values in the New South Wales Primary School 1880-1914" in R.J.W. Selleck (ed.), Melbourne Studies in Education, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1970.
14. R.N. Bellah, The Broken Contract: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial, New York, Seabury Press, 1975.
15. W. Waller, The sociology of teaching, New York, Wiley, 1932.
16. I. Davey and P. Miller, "Forced to Resist: The Working Class and the Imposition of Schooling" in Radical Education Dossier, 16, 1981, pages 35, 34.
17. Civics Expert Group, op. cit., 1994, page 30.
18. Ibid., page 25.
19. B. Lewis, "Eurocentrism Revisited" in Commentary, December 1994, page 51.
20. Ibid., page 50.
21. See Alan McFarland, The Origins of English Individualism, London, Blackwell, 1978.
22. This division of political loyalty was achieved easily among most Australians of British origin but less so among those of Irish and Roman Catholic extraction. See Geoffrey Partington, The Australian Nation: Its British and Irish Roots, Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Press, 1994.
23. See J.B. Hirst, Convict Society And Its Enemies, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1983.
24. C.M.H. Clark (ed.), Select documents in Australian History 1851-1900, London, Angus and Robertson, 1977, pages 475-6.
