Month: December 2025

Bondi

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

One difference between us and the apes – from which we humans came – is cutlery.  Cutlery is part of what we call courtesy, which is what helps humans get along with each other.  Apes do not know courtesy.  That is a significant plus for us in the evolution of humanity.

Another plus is that we think about how we relate to each other and seek to develop rules that we call morals and which we can elevate into rules of law.  Apes do not deal in morals or laws.

But there are at least two big minuses. 

One is that we think more than animals do, and we can find ways to hurt or destroy other humans.  We are capable of consciously doing evil.  Apes do not seek to hurt or kill anything.

The other minus is that we humans tend to believe in the supernatural.  We call that religion.  By definition, religion is beyond logic.  It is premised on faith.  It is therefore out of bounds for many of us, and there are very many types or brands of faith.

The Bible is scripture recognized in some parts by the three major faiths in Australia.  It says there is only one God, and that He favours one group of people over others.  He promises them land and authorizes them to kill men, women and children who stand in their way.

That teaching, and the teachings of other faiths, have been the cause of much hate and misery in the world.  Just as one example, I set out the account of Edward Gibbon of what occurred when the Crusaders entered Jerusalem.

A bloody sacrifice was offered by his [Tancred’s] mistaken votaries to the God of the Christians: resistance might provoke, but neither age nor sex could mollify their implacable rage: they indulged themselves three days in a promiscuous massacre; and the infection of the dead bodies produced an epidemical disease.  After seventy thousand Moslems had been put to the sword, and the harmless Jews had been burnt in their synagogue, they could still reserve a multitude of captives whom interest or lassitude persuaded them to spare.  The Holy Sepulchre was now free; and the bloody victors prepared to accomplish their vow.  Bare-headed and bare foot, with contrite hearts and in a humble posture, they ascended the hill of Calvary, amidst the loud anthems of the clergy; kissed the stone which had covered the Saviour of the world; and bedewed with tears of joy and penitence the monument of their redemption.  This union of the fiercest and most tender passions has been variously considered by two philosophers: by the one, as easy and natural; by the other, as absurd and critical.

(The first philosopher referred to is David Hume; the second was Voltaire.)

After the horrors of two world wars, a poll was taken in Germany of the war that terrified them most.  It was the ultimate war of religion, the Thirty Years War.

In my lifetime, there have been many wars, but the most lethal has been the conflict in the Holy Land following the creation of the state of Israel, and the division of Palestine.  Both sides claim vindication by faith as justifying violence and killing.

This has led to frightful repercussions for the diasporas of Muslims and Jews around the world.

It is far too early to draw conclusions, but the events of yesterday in Bondi appear to be one of those repercussions.

It is a fact of life that when a community is challenged its people look for scapegoats.  Elsewhere, I wrote:

In Ancient Greece there was a practice or rite of casting out someone like a beggar or cripple orcriminal in the face of some natural threat or disaster.  There are traces of a far older tradition in Syria when a goat would be invoked in the purification rites for the king’s wedding – a she-goat was driven out into the waste with a silver bell on her neck.  More recently, but before the Greek custom developed, the Old Testament, Leviticus 16:8, said that ‘And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel.’  The goat of the Lord was sacrificed, and the high priest by confession transferred the sins of himself and the people to the goat that was permitted to escape in the wilderness – where its fate would depend on what sort of predators it might have to contend with.  There was a form of atonement.  The goat that escaped became the ‘scapegoat.’  The traditions or rites might be said to prefigure the role of the Son of God being offered up to redeem mankind by atoning for its sins.  A scapegoat is one who is punished for the sins of others.  This ancient Middle Eastern rite has become a universal custom involving people rather than goats.

But the term has got much wider than that – a scapegoat now is not just one that has to answer for the sins of others; it has to answer for all the problems and failings of what might be called the host people.  So, in the most gruesome example, the Nazis held the Jews responsible for all the lesions on the German people, moral or economic. 

Typically, people look to outsiders to be their scapegoats.  In Europe and the United States in this century people have turned on migrants in the face of adversity. 

Will that happen here in Australia in light of the events at Bondi and elsewhere?

There are serious problems in making migrants into scapegoats in Australia – for which, if I believed in God, I would thank Him.

If by ‘migrant’ you refer to someone who was born outside this country, or is the child of such a person, then more than half of us are migrants.  You cannot scapegoat a majority. 

And I thank every such ‘migrant’ for helping us to escape our somnolent ride into mediocrity under a foreign monarch and a distinctly unreliable president.

Then, there are those who were here before us in the land we call Australia – the First Nations.  They were here for say sixty thousand years before us.  In their eyes, all white people are ‘migrants’ and very recent ones at that.  (I put to one side that a substantial number of Americans prefer Genesis to those timelines, because if you can jettison truth and reality for one purpose, you can do so for others.) 

We Australians say that the Americans lied when they said that all men are created equal.  But did not we white people lie when we said that we ‘settled’ here?  Do not the actions of the ‘settlers’ in Palestine now show just how slippery that term is?

That leaves the fundamental issue.  At the core of what I regard as ‘civilization’ is the notion that each of us has our own worth or dignity just because we are human.  It is a violation of that premise to suggest that a person may be denied that worth just because of the history of the group that that person belongs to.  Branding is what we do to cattle.  The aspersion of inferiority is in my view the root of most evil in our humanity.

It was therefore a relief to see humanity at Bondi.  A man tackled one killer and seized his weapon.  A boy then threw a rock at the killer.  The press says that the hero is a fruit shop owner named Ahmed.  They have not named the boy. 

We might forego the predictable reactions of some politicians, local and foreign, and leave blaming migrants to people like Farage and Trump.  But we should not spare what passes for the Opposition, which is both inept and tasteless.

Two questions interest me more.  We think our gun laws are sound enough to make us safe.  How did the killers get access to these weapons and that ammunition?  I suspect that the white settlers of the gun lobby have weakened our defences in our laws.  (And I say that as a former gun owner.)

Will the survivor live to talk?  The press says the killers were father and son.  The mother says of the survivor: ‘Anyone would wish to have a son like my son…he’s a good boy’.  The photo shows him a keen and proud student of the Koran.

I suspect that God will be invoked.  It would be ironic for God to be the ultimate scapegoat in a nation founded by English convicts.

Namier on English politics

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Sir Lewis Namier made his name with The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III published in 1929.It landed like a bomb, and Namier attracted conflict all his life.  I idolize him.  As a practising lawyer, I found it odd that Namier was said to be revolutionary because for primary evidence he preferred contemporary notes made at the time to secondary rehearsals made by scholars who were not present at the relevant times.  I then regarded him as I regarded Maitland on the history of the common law – if the inquirer devotes his life to digging so deep and with such understanding, he may well command our intellectual assent when he ascends to make observations that in others may sound too large and unfounded.

In 1961, Namier published the second edition of England In the Age of the American Revolution.  Amid the mountains of primary evidence that Namier assembled in the work of a lifetime, we still find large statements of insights that distinguish the story of England from that of Europe or the United States.  All of what follows comes from that second edition. 

It is a story of a remarkable people written by a most remarkable man.

***

The social history of England could be written in terms of membership of the House of Commons, that peculiar club, election to which has at all times required some expression of consent on the part of the public……In its origin, the House of Commons was akin to the jury, and the representative character of the two were in a way cognate; from an intimate knowledge of conditions, the House declared the sense of commonalty on questions which most patently and directly concerned them….it came to represent not so much the sense of the community, as the distribution of power within it…(3)

England knows not democracy as a doctrine, but has always practised it as a fine art.  Since the Middle Ages, no one was ever barred on grounds of class from entering the House of Commons, and in the House all Members have always sat on equal terms; as between freemen, England never knew a rigid distinction of classes….

Trade was never despised, and English society has always showed respect for property and wealth.  The financial expert, usually a moneyed man, was valued in the House, and the Treasury has for centuries held a pre-eminent position in the government…. ‘gentry are always willing to submit to raising their families by what they call City fortunes….’ (6)

Feudalism was a system of social organisation whereby both army service and administrative functions were bound up with the holding of land. (7)

The fine growth of English Conservatism is due, in a high degree, to the country having been free from the revolutionary action of war within its borders, and of militarism within its social organisation.  The true Conservative is not a militarist. (8)

Trade was not despised in eighteenth century England – it was acknowledged to be the great concern of the nation; and money was honoured, the mystic common denominator of all values, the universal repository of as yet undetermined possibilities…. for the English are not a methodical or logical nation – they perceive and accept facts without anxiously inquiring into their reasons or meaning. (13)

Classes are the more sharply marked in England because there is no single test for them, except the final incontestable result; and there is more snobbery than in any other country, because the gate can be entered by anyone, and yet remains for those bent on entering it, a mysterious, awe-inspiring gate. (14)

Whereas on the Continent scholarships rank as poor relief, at Oxford or Cambridge the scholar holds a privileged position, coveted as a distinction.  More intellectual work is done by aristocrats in England than anywhere else: …. What is not valued in England is abstract knowledge as a profession, because the tradition of English civilization is that professions should be practical and culture should be the work of the leisured classes. (15)

When a tribe settles, membership of the tribe carries the right to share in the land.  In time, the order becomes inverted: the holding of land determines a man’s position in the community. (18)

English history, and especially English parliamentary history, is made by families rather than individuals; for a nation with the tradition of self-government must have thousands of dynasties, partaking of the peculiarities which in other countries belong to the royal family alone.  The English political family is a compound of ‘blood’, name and estate, the last, as the dominions of monarchs, being the most important of the three…. the men who are most intimately affected by the government have a primary claim to share in it; in reality, this conclusion is based on instincts and modes of thinking much deeper and much more cogent than any conscious reasonings…. [the British Parliament] is territorial rather than tribal….

Though the State primarily belongs to the owners of the land, it is the circulating part of the nation which is most directly concerned with government…. (29)  Trade is the natural form for the acquisitive endeavor of islanders… (30) Continental nations engaged in wars for loot and talked of glory (31); the English went out for adventure and talked of trade…. (32)  Colonies… were not ‘planted with a view to founding new empires, but for the sake of trade….’ (37)

No great historic problem has ever been settled by means of a brilliant idea…. Restraint, coupled with the tolerance which it implies and with plain human kindness, is much more valuable in politics than ideas which are ahead of their time; but restraint was a quality in which the eighteenth-century Englishman was as deficient as most other nations are even now. (36)

The basic elements of the Imperial Problem during the American Revolution must be sought not so much in conscious opinions and professed views bearing directly on it, as in the very structure and life of the Empire; and in doing that, the words of Danton should be remembered – on ne fait pas le proces aux revolutions.  Those who are out to apportion guilt in history have to keep to views and opinions, judge the collisions of planets by the rules of road traffic, make history into something like a column of motoring accidents, and discuss it in the atmosphere of a police court.  (40)

History is made up of juggernauts, revolting to human feelings in their blindness, supremely humorous in their stupidity.  One of the greatest caricaturists that ever lived, Francesco Goya y Lucientes, reached the highest level of historical humour in his picture of a military execution of Spanish rebels.  A bundle of feeling, suffering humanity is huddled together in the last stages of agony, despair or defiance, and facing them stands a row of the most perfectly trained Napoleonic soldiers, with their hats and rifles all cocked at the same angle.  One knows that the next moment the rebels will be at peace, inanimate matter, and the firing squad will dissolve into a number of very ordinary, dull human beings.  Similarly in Breughel’s ‘Fall of Icarus’, the true humour of the tragedy is not so much the pair of naked legs sticking out of the water, as the complete unconcern of all the potential onlookers…….History of infinite weight was to be made in the absurd beginnings of a reign which was to witness the elimination of those who had hitherto governed England…..and the break-up of an Empire such as the world had not seen since the disruption of the Roman Empire – history was to be started in ridiculous beginnings, while small men did things both infinitely smaller and infinitely greater than they knew.  (131)

In the absence of distinct definable programs, it was becoming increasingly difficult to say who, from the angle of practical politics, should be considered a Tory and who a Whig …. and parties at all times at all times rest on types and on connections rather than on intellectual tenets…. (179)  Moreover, the disturbing element of personal connexions is always present in politics; the game is played by groups, and human ties continually cross and confound the logic of social and political alignments.  (184)

The territorial magnates were the nucleus of that governing class, whose claims even now are based on rank, wealth, experience, and a tradition of social and political pre-eminence (or, according to George Meredith, are ‘commonly built on birth, acres, tailoring, style, and an air’).  (181)

***

We don’t get history like that anymore.  And that is a great worry, because every word of it bears on our travails here and now.  Namier was I gather from people at Cambridge not easy to like, and I can understand how he may have unsettled the academic Establishment.  But Sir Lewis Namier stands very high in my pantheon because of the depth of his insights into our humanity.