The Vatican is probably the oldest and biggest men’s club in the world.  The problem started in Genesis but got much, much worse with Augustine – after he had had his fill.  To an outsider, the refusal of the church to allow equal standing to half of its adherents or humanity is a prime driver of its decline to the status of a relic.

A piece in the press recently told of the disappointment of women to a decision adverse to them being taken by a plenary council in the church.  A lot of delegates left the meeting in a silent protest.  Many were obviously distressed.  How would you be if those in control of your church said because of your sex, you were not equal in the eyes of God?

Greg Craven, a former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, said this was ‘a carefully managed political exercise.’  A spokesman for the ladies appeared to think this was a rebuke.

Why?  This was an intensely ‘political event’.  There were different views about how people should deal with each other in a community.  Doubtless people collected in groups according to their opinions.  They took sides – and saw what we call factions.  That is what politics are all about.  Nothing comes out of the Vatican that is not the result of a ‘carefully managed political exercise.’  We see too much of this.  People being put down by a label.

Speaking of which – what does the word ‘Catholic’ add to ‘University’?  What does a Catholic university do or offer to do that other universities don’t?  More importantly, what sane person would want to study medicine or law in a university where the teaching is influenced by the teaching of the religion of those running the faculty?

Finally, Greg Craven was wont to call himself a lawyer.  There is a big difference between one who practises in a profession and one who teaches those who wish to enter it.

Passing Bull 321 – The Craven Men’s Club

The Vatican is probably the oldest and biggest men’s club in the world.  The problem started in Genesis but got much, much worse with Augustine – after he had had his fill.  To an outsider, the refusal of the church to allow equal standing to half of its adherents or humanity is a prime driver of its decline to the status of a relic.

A piece in the press recently told of the disappointment of women to a decision adverse to them being taken by a plenary council in the church.  A lot of delegates left the meeting in a silent protest.  Many were obviously distressed.  How would you be if those in control of your church said because of your sex, you were not equal in the eyes of God?

Greg Craven, a former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, said this was ‘a carefully managed political exercise.’  A spokesman for the ladies appeared to think this was a rebuke.

Why?  This was an intensely ‘political event’.  There were different views about how people should deal with each other in a community.  Doubtless people collected in groups according to their opinions.  They took sides – and saw what we call factions.  That is what politics are all about.  Nothing comes out of the Vatican that is not the result of a ‘carefully managed political exercise.’  We see too much of this.  People being put down by a label.

Speaking of which – what does the word ‘Catholic’ add to ‘University’?  What does a Catholic university do or offer to do that other universities don’t?  More importantly, what sane person would want to study medicine or law in a university where the teaching is influenced by the teaching of the religion of those running the faculty?

Finally, Greg Craven was wont to call himself a lawyer.  There is a big difference between one who practises in a profession and one who teaches those who wish to enter it.

Politics – Vatican – Gender – Greg Craven

The letter below was not published by The New York Times, which is sad, because I think it is correct.  And that is before you get to health care and abortion

Dear Editor,

The primary function of a king is to keep the peace to protect his subjects.  Our common law started with a command from the king (a writ) alleging a breach of the king’s peace ‘by force and arms.’

That function in your republic is: ‘to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty…’

A citizen bearing arms threatens peace and tranquility.

By allowing and encouraging citizens to bear arms, the Supreme Court is preventing government from properly performing its function to ‘insure domestic Tranquility.’

The Union is therefore in terms a failed state.

And the court did this in Heller in rude, partisan and triumphal language that is now mirrored in Dobbs.  Those justices never learned the ancient wisdom that the most important person in court is the loser.

You will not find anything remotely like this anywhere else in the common law world.

It is all so sad.

The book What’s Wrong?  written with Chris Wallace-Crabbe is out now and in a bookshop near you.  Here are some extracts

7       The problems with dogma

There was a famous experiment in the US that you can get on YouTube.  A group of students are working out in passing at basketball.  Some are in white and some are in black.  You are asked to count how many times the ball is passed between those in white.  It takes about a minute.  Very few people who carry out that task notice a gorilla walking right across the middle of the set.  The gorilla is in black, but that may not make much difference – the observer is concentrating on the movement of the balls between those in white.  Following the bouncing ball produces a kind of tunnel vision.  You are so focussed on what you see as the whole point of the exercise that you miss the blindingly obvious. 

We see something very similar every day with people who are dogmatic.  They can get so focussed that they are like one‑eyed football supporters.  We are speaking of a species of prejudice, but it is worth looking at it in its own right.

A dogma is an opinion that is stated with authority and that is held as binding by those who adhere to that authority.  Dogma is big in ‘think tanks’, the current repositories of secular faith.  But also among our scattered fuellers of civil discord.  The Oxford English Dictionary has for dogmatic: ‘Asserting dogmas or opinions in an authoritative or arrogant manner.’  If someone says that you are being dogmatic, they are not paying you a compliment.  Rather, they are suggesting that you are too heavy handed in the way you hand out your views and seek to impose them on others. 

It is something we run into often in arguments about football, religion – especially sectarian issues – and politics.  An argument on politics between a North and South Korean would soon founder on dogmatism.  But dogmatism is not confined to Communists, Fascists, or those who subscribe to the teaching of a church.  It is all around us.  It inheres in every profession.  The trick is to be able to determine where it is legitimate and required, and where it just leads to debilitating short‑sightedness.  Passionate believers, like the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and some animal rights groups, are very prone to dogmatism. 

People who hold on to dogma are by definition dogmatic.  One example occurs when some who subscribe to a right to life assert that, as a consequence, no form of abortion can be tolerated because it involves the taking of a life, which is murder.  A person who is a dedicated pacifist must adopt the role of conscientious objector in a war, but if the whole populace did that, the nation would be undefended. 

Immanuel Kant, the great philosopher who was a lapsed Pietist, wrote a paper called What is Enlightenment?  It began with the answer:  ‘Man’s emergence from his self‑incurred immaturity.’  What is immaturity?  It is ‘the inability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of another.’  Kant concluded by saying that an enlightened government finds it can profit by treating man ‘who is more than a machine in a manner appropriate to his dignity’.  In the meantime, he had said:

Dogmas and formulas, those mechanical instruments for rational use (or rather misuse) of its natural endowments are the ball and chain of his permanent immaturity. 

Dogmatism is not only the prerogative of people of faith.  It is, of course, the case that those who deny God are likely to be at least as dogmatic as those who affirm God. 

But Kant was also aware that conflicts about dogma between people of faith tend to get lethal.

Now, when, as usually happens, a church proclaims itself to be the one church universal (even though it is based upon faith in a special revelation which, being historical can never be required of everyone), he who refuses to acknowledge its (peculiar) ecclesiastical faith is called by it ‘an unbeliever’ and is hated wholeheartedly; he who diverges therefrom only in path (in non‑essentials) is called ‘heterodox’ and is at least shunned as a source of infection.  But he who avows allegiance to this church and diverges from it on essentials of its faith (namely, regarding the practices connected with it), is called, especially if he spreads abroad his false belief, a ‘heretic’ and, as a rebel, such a man is held more culpable than a foreign foe, is expelled from the church with anathema (like that which the Romans pronounced on him who crossed the Rubicon against the Senate’s will) and is given over to all the gods of hell.  Exclusive correctness of belief in matters of ecclesiastical faith claimed by the church’s teachers or heads is called orthodoxy. This could be sub‑divided into ‘despotic’ (brutal) or ‘liberal’ orthodoxy. 

This is strong stuff, but we are reminded that the higher the stakes are on dogma, the greater the risk of being caught on the wrong side.

11     The vice of labelling

Some years ago, a lady at Oxford, en route from the reading room to the dining room for breakfast, was heard to say: ‘I have just been described as a typical Guardian reader, and I’m trying to work out whether I should feel insulted.’  A discussion about the meaning of the word ‘presumptuous’ then followed.

There is no law or custom that says that we should apply a label to people – or put them in boxes, or in a file, or give them a codename.  There is no law that we should not.  But most of us can’t help ourselves.  So what?

Well, most of us don’t like being put into boxes.  That is how we tend to see governments or Telstra or a big bank behaving toward us.  Nor do most of us want to be typed.  When someone says that an opinion or act of yours is ‘typical’ of you or your like, they are very rarely trying to be pleasant to you.

Most of us just want to be what we are.  You don’t have to have a university degree specialising in the philosophy of Kant to believe that each of us has his or her own dignity, merely because we are human.  We are in a different league to camels and gnats.  So, if I am singled out as a Muslim, a Jew, or an Aboriginal, what does that label add to or take away from my humanity?  What good can come from subtracting from my humanity by labelling me in that way?

So, the first problem with labelling is that it is likely to be demeaning to the target, and presumptuous on the part of the labeller.  We are detracting from a person’s dignity.  We put registration numbers on dog collars, and we brand cattle, but we should afford humans the courtesy – no, the dignity – of their own humanity.  After all, we can scarcely bring ourselves to think of that time when some people were tattooing identifying numbers on the bodies of other human beings. 

The second problem with labelling is that it is both loose and lazy.  If you say of someone that they are a typical Conservative or Tory, that immediately raises two questions.  What do the labels Conservative and Tory mean?  What are the characteristics of the target that might warrant the application of the label? 

In this country, at the moment, the terms Left and Right hardly mean anything at all – except as terms of abuse – which is how the words Tory and Whig started in England.  These terms are now generally only applied by one side to the other.  Not many people are happy to have either of those labels applied to themselves.  The categories are just too plastic and fluid.

There is one curious distinction in the way that these terms are applied in this country at the moment.  The Murdoch press is happy to call followers of the Fairfax press or the ABC ‘the Left’ (or ‘the PC Left’ or ‘the Love Media’), but those members of the press very rarely respond by calling readers of the Murdoch press Right Wing (or Far Right, or worse).  Is the difference one of custom or courtesy – or don’t we know or don’t we care?

Similarly, the labels Liberal and Labour hardly stand for any difference in principle any more.  At the time of writing, on any of the major issues in Australian politics, what were the differences in the policies of those parties that derived from their platform?  (We will come back to this point later, too.) The old forms of name‑calling between Liberal and Labour mean nothing to our children – absolutely nothing.  These old ways are as outmoded as name‑calling between Catholics and Protestants.  And there is some common ground in the two shifts – very many people have lost faith in both religion and politics.  The old tensions or rivalries just don’t seem to matter anymore.

Unfortunately, and notwithstanding the obvious problems we have just referred to, labelling is not just common but mandatory in far too much political discussion in the press, and certainly for shock jocks or those who make a career out of working TV chat shows.  While some people naturally thrive on conflict – Napoleon and Hitler are two bad cases – some journalists in the press engage in conflict, for a living.  These people rarely have a financial motive to respond reasonably, much less to resolve the conflict.  To the contrary, they have a direct financial interest in keeping the conflict as explosive as possible.  It is notorious that controversy feeds ratings and that bad news sells newspapers.

If you put up an argument to one of these people who live of the earnings of conflict, the response will very commonly involve two limbs – a personal attack  on you (the Latin tag for which is ad hominem), followed by some labels, which are never meant as compliments.  So, for example if someone, were to query the rigour of the government’s policies  toward refugees, a predictable response would be ‘What else would you expect from someone who subscribes to the ABC?  How would you like these people to move in next door?’  There is no argument – just vulgar abuse.

The disintegration of thought is palpable, but a lot of people are making a handy living out of it – and not in ways that do the rest of us any good.

There is commonly a third problem with labelling – it generally tells you a lot more about the labeller – some would say the sniper – than the target, and the answer is rarely pretty.  And if you pile cliché upon label, and venom upon petulance, the result is as sad as it is predictable.  You disappear up your own bum. 

Let us take one label that became prominent in 2016 – right across the western world.  There has been a lot of chatter – some call it white noise – about populists.  Who are they?  One of the problems with this word is that people who use it rarely say what they mean by it.  If you go to the Web, you will find references to ordinary or regular or common people against political insiders or a wealthy elite.  These vague terms don’t help – to the contrary.  What do they mean? Is dividing people into classes a good idea in Australia now – or anywhere at any time?  And if it is simply a matter of the common people wresting control from a wealthy elite, who could decently object?  Is this not just democracy triumphing over oligarchy?

Populus is the Latin word for ‘people,’ with pretty much the same connotations as that word in English.  Do populists, therefore, appeal to the people for their vote?  Well, anyone standing for office in a democracy does just that.  The most famous political speech in history concludes with the words ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’.

But the word populist is not used to describe anyone standing for office.  It is used to refer to only some of those, and the difference seems to be in the parts of the people that are appealed to and the way in which that appeal is made.

So, what kind of public do populists appeal to?  Well, those who use this word say that the people appealed to are anything but the ‘elite’ – those who have got on well in life because of their background or education, or both.  In both the UK and the US this feeling about the elite – which might look like simple envy to some – is linked to a suspicion of or contempt for ‘experts’.  People do, however, tend to get choosy about which experts they reject.  This rejection does not extend to experts who may save their life (in the surgery, or at 30,000 feet) or their liberty, but it may explain the curious intellectual lesion that many people of a reactionary turn of mind have about science and the environment.

Another attribute of the public appealed to by populists is that they have often missed out on the increase in wealth brought about by free trade around the world and by advances in technology.  These movements obviously have cost people jobs and are thought by some experts to be likely to cost another 40% over the next ten years.

A third attribute of those appealed to by populists is said to be that, in their reduced condition, they value their citizenship above all else, and they are not willing to share it.  They are therefore against taking refugees or people whose faith or colour threatens the idea of their national identity. 

Now, if folk who use the word populist are describing politicians who appeal to people with those attributes, they may want to be careful about where they say so.  The picture that emerges is one of a backward, angry, and mean chauvinist.  That picture is seriously derogatory, but it adds warmth and not light to the discussion.  If that is what people mean when they refer to populists, then it is just a loose label that unfairly smears a large part of the population.  The term does then itself suffer from the vice of labelling that we have identified. 

So, we would leave labels with George Bush senior, who said that labels are what you put on soup cans

12     Tribalism

We started this chapter on the subject of prejudice as the main corrupter of thought, and near the end of it we come to a common source of prejudice – you might call it tribalism or clannishness, or just the herd instinct.  It is our tendency to surrender our judgment, and therefore our dignity, to the crowd, or the mob.  In its most terrifying form, it is the lynch mob, which the French reached on a national scale during the Great Terror of the French Revolution in 1794.  The surrender was more complete, and the consequences more financially severe, during the Great Crash in 1929, but we see it all round us every day, and as often as not we do not notice when we have switched into the mode of group control. 

A harmless form is the one‑eyed Collingwood supporter.  Indeed, one reason why people enjoy that part of the entertainment industry called sport is that this is just the area, either in the stands or on the terraces or around the firm’s coffee machine, where independent judgment can be suspended and blind prejudice masquerading as loyalty can be safely put on show.  (You might from time to time graciously applaud someone from the other side, but you may want to watch who you do that in front of.)  You can even blow the ref a raspberry without going to the slammer.

One worrying form of clannishness is the tendency of some groups to form their own language, and retreat behind it when they come under attack, when they feel insecure, or when they just feel like being pompous.  Lawyers and doctors used to be notorious for this, but both have improved.  It is no longer smart or clever to be obscure; the contrary is the case. 

A clannish corruption of thought is dangerous because it obscures meaning – it makes the author harder to pin down – and it masks a crude self‑interest in protecting the relevant group as the proper or even the sole repository of truth.  This is very worrying when they are unable to spell out a verifiable meaning for the benefit of the uninitiated.  Secular thinkers for many centuries have accused priests of doing just this – of denying ordinary people access to the truth, or, if you prefer, the light, by refusing to give them the keys to the codes.  You might recall that, before the Reformation, you could be burnt at the stake in England if you dared to translate the Bible into the native language of the believers.  That must be the ultimate example of people being asked to take articles of faith on trust.

We see examples of this form of clannish or tribal protectionism, and the consequent mutilation of language and logic, in the newer social sciences – which some think is a phrase that contradicts itself – and in marketing, among ideologues, especially think tanks and their acolytes, political advisers, and also in some parts of academia.  We tend to see the problem at its worst with the political ideologues – the advisers tend to be hard‑headed people who hardly believe anything, whereas the ideologues bring commitment and passion, and so are likely to invoke that most dangerous ingredient in rational discussion called sincerity.  (We will come back to sincerity in the next section.) 

The problem now is that you are dealing with people with a position and with a patch to defend.  Helen Garner referred to people ‘who have an agenda’.  You are dealing with someone who subscribes to articles of faith, and they may not realise or accept that articles of faith lie outside the borders of rational debate.  You might therefore be talking to a zealot.  Zealots are people whose zeal has infected their judgment.  They become like one‑eyed Collingwood supporters, but much, much worse, because they believe that the stakes are so big.  In the language of the stock market, they have their own skin in the game. 

Unable to see the world from the other person’s point of view,  they are very likely to think that they have uncovered the logical answer – that is, the answer, and there can only be one of those.  They become progressively less able to see that reasonable people might differ on almost any question relating to human behaviour or belief.  That is to say, they get less and less tolerant, and intolerance is the cancer of sensible discussion. 

Agenda bearers tend to look on disputes not as debates about ideas but as conflicts between the kinds of people who hold various ideas.  They become emotionally attached to their own side and emotionally opposed to the others.  We saw that the writer in The Australian who is obsessed with PC correctness said  it was unfair that ‘we’ did not have the same remedies as her adversaries.  With agenda bearers, judgment goes clean out the window.  They are ready to argue about things that they know little or nothing about, and that must end up in bullshit.  They then get ready to attack almost anything said by the other side, and to defend almost anything that has come out of their side.  They become driven by and to conflict.

They therefore pick fights that they do not have to pick, and so they ignore the first rule of advocacy – if you have a good point, make it, and don’t bugger it up with a dud; if you don’t have a good point, shut up.

Agenda bearers are heavily into mockery, and into nodding and winking among themselves.  They are not beyond leering or even jeering, and they may have an obsession about sneering: one of those cases where they project their own feelings and reactions onto their opponents.  They often accuse others of being dogmatic or feeling morally or intellectually superior because they have right on their side.

They disdain experts, but that disdain tends to get wobbly at 30,000 feet in an electrical storm, or if they need urgent heart surgery, or if they get framed for a murder they did not commit – or even if their super fund goes down the tube. 

They are long on conspiracies, especially when it comes to the newspapers or television consulted by the other side.  Indeed, they stereotype people by reference to their chosen media – readers of Fairfax or viewers of the ABC must be like readers of The New York Times or The Guardian, and must oppose the Murdoch press, or Fox News.  (Would you be insulted if described as a typical Age reader or an adherent to Fox News?  Or would you just think that the author of the remark was thick and presumptuous?) 

If you are not into these nuances, a word that people known as culture warriors may be fond of, you are not part of the game.  Indeed, there are times when they seem unable to choose their cheerleader – the Famous Five or Kim, Enid Blyton or Rudyard Kipling.

Ideologues are very defensive about their own culture or faith – words broad enough to mean or contain just what they want them to mean or contain – and very suspicious of those who want to share the good life, or who threaten to change its underlying fabric.  For this purpose, they may allow a shock jock or some other gutter‑rat to put up kites for them, but the sensible ones always preserve deniability and a distance from the overtly vulgar.  (These gradations were very carefully measured during the French Revolution.  The punctilious Robespierre could benefit from the work of Marat in stirring people up, without adopting his squalid venom.) 

Their arguments are mainly aimed at the man – ad hominem – in part because of the innate or acquired hostility of those advancing the arguments,, and in part because they tend not to play by the rules, and in part again because they have lost control of their moral or intellectual compass.  They always accuse the other side of hypocrisy, of which they are World’s Best Practice exponents, and of utter indifference to the consequences of their ideology – which they are past noticing in themselves.  Even when they set out their own contradictions in black and white, they cannot see them for what they are.  They are not just biased or unbalanced – they are wilfully beyond persuasion.  In ordinary terms, they are crippled by the chips on their shoulders. 

You will recognise here many of the attributes of a bush lawyer and of far too many of our politicians.  It will only get worse – as people subscribe to internet sites for the true believers, and commune in language‑killing terms on what are preposterously described as social media, and banish the anxiety that comes with uncertainty by cocooning themselves in their own echo chambers.

13     Bullshit

There might be residual categories of falsity which are commonly described, and not just in Australia, as bullshit.  Lest it be thought that that word is too common for a book directed to professional people, let us refer you to a priceless little monograph by Professor Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University, On Bullshit.  As we set out on the inscription page, the professor said: 

It is just this lack of a connection to a concern with truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as of the essence of bullshit … Bullshit is unavoidable wherever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.  The essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.

Being fake does not, of itself, mean that you are wrong.  Since we have referred to politicians, we have already seen that Professor Frankfurt cites a remark that is the credo of politicians: ‘Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through.’  He says that bullshitting involves a kind of bluff, and that it is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements that people make do not necessarily reveal what they in fact believe or feel.  And since it may be objected that we have taken objection to things done in all sincerity, especially the ideologues referred to in the last section, we may say what  Professor Frankfurt also says at the very end of this little book, ‘Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial – notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things.  And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.’ 

At his first press conference, the Press Secretary for President Trump was caught lying.  A White House staffer called Kellyanne Conway then lit up the world with her defence.  The Press Secretary, we were assured, was merely offering ‘alternative facts.’  She may have just been getting into her stride.  The President issued an executive order aimed at certain immigrants.  There was worldwide condemnation of the order as a ban on people of one faith, Islam.   The targets were identified by their citizenship of nations that were Muslim.  Conway said that the ban could not be called a Muslim ban because it did not extend to all Muslim countries.  And she did so with a straight face.   Conway either believed what she said — or she did not.  Which do you find the more discomfiting?  And do you notice how the President gets to maintain deniability by multiplying the links in the chain of his advisers?  It’s all just part of a very squalid game.

These emphases on people being unconstrained by a concern with truth and on bullshit being phony, rather than merely false, are central this book.  They are also very instructive on the links between bluff merchants, bull artists, and con men. 

We will come back to the subject of bullshit later in this book.  It is a proper subject of study, and a reminder that the headings for the ways we can go off the rails are not terms of art, and are very far from being a comprehensive account of how we can go wrong in fact.  It is the same for the failures of logic described in the next chapter that are commonly called fallacies.  Is there any hope that in the future the West will look back on the year 2016as that in which bullshit reached its peak?

A History of England, Principally in the Seventeenth Century, by the German historian Leopold Von Ranke is a great read.  Ranke had two great arts – he knew that the work of an advocate or judicial assessor is to make the point clearly and simply and cut out the waste.  You don’t spoil a good point with a dud – or with incontinence.  And he also knew that the job of a narrator is to tell a story.  This is a sadly rare double.  Those in the academy who don’t have it – the majority – can get snaky.

But Ranke also had a fine eye for the illuminating example or illustration.  He is one of the few – Gibbon was another – who used footnotes to good effect.  It is no surprise that in writing his history of England, this great German scholar cited as a major source the archives of the ancient Republic of Venice.  You might get that European vision from the French or the Dutch – but not from the English.

And because we know that Ranke burrows down in remote primary sources, we listen when he makes statements that are large.  Like – the glory of their arms abroad lay nearest to the heart of the French nation, and the legal settlement of their home affairs to that of the English.  Or – in the 16^th century, the part of England in emancipating the world from the rule of the western hierarchy directly influenced the religious revolution throughout Europe as well as its own constitution.  The sacerdotal reaction was directed at England – and its successful resistance was of great service to Europe.  It’s as well that both such comments came from a German –that level of sweep is not smiled on in England as it is in Europe.

We get nervous now about talking about ‘progress’ in history after Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Sarajevo.  But it does seem to me that we can see two themes in perhaps a maturing among us in the course of our history.  One is the emancipation from magic and the supernatural – like religion.  Another is the movement to have our standing determined by what we do rather than what our ancestors did – this is what Maine called the movement from status to contract; merit rather than pedigree.

The history of England is full of both.  But its major contribution has been to work out a way that the people could control their government – in their case, their king.  No other country ever got close to what they were doing when the English were at it.  And only a few have since caught up.

As it seems to me, there were three great peaks in the long constitutional journey of the English – Magna Carta in 1215; the Act of Supremacy of 1534; and the Declaration of Rights of 1689.  Ranke focuses on the last – which effectively settled the constitution of England – and therefore ours – after a century of grinding conflict that forever denoted, often in blood, the political character of the nation.

In my view, the English are prone to underestimating the legal effect of Magna Carta and the political consequences of the Reformation – which in England had almost nothing to do with God or faith.

At Runnymede, the barons had the whip hand – and they applied it in the enforcement clause.  If the king ratted – and they knew he would – they could appoint their version of receivers and managers.  Its terms would make Putin blush, and it was Exhibit A in King John’s submission to the pope that he had sealed the charter under duress. 

Ranke had qualms about the finality of that contract between the king and the people.  (The barons expressly stipulated that those down the line should have the benefit of the Great Charter.)  But at least Ranke saw it for what it was – a contract.  The English are curiously coy about this.  It does matter.  The tribes of Israel had a covenant with God.  So did west bound English Puritans.  But you won’t find deals like that among the Medes, or Persians, or subjects of the Pharaohs.  Or between Hitler and the Wehrmacht – or between Putin and the rulers of Russia – the oligarchs.

The pope quashed Magna Carta as King John offered Rome an appalling deal.  There had to come to a time when the English would lock out a foreign potentate from preventing them governing their realm as they wished.

That time came when a different pope could not meet the request of an English king to allow him to settle the succession to the English throne by remarrying.  The pope could not do that because of a conflict of interest.  The loyalty of the Vatican to the Holy Roman Empire cost it the Church of England – and put a very big hole in the reach of Rome in Europe.

How did the English underestimate the impact of their grasp of religious Home Rule?  The short answer is – look at what happened to nations that never got it until it was too late – like France, Spain, Italy and Russia.

As nations matured, their peoples did not just seek to reduce the place of the supernatural, or magic, in their lives – they wanted to reduce the role of the middle man, the priest.  They were coming to the view that the church might be causing more trouble than it was worth.  The protest of Luther was about faith and the church.  The English revolt had next to nothing to do with either

The English effected the divorce not by royal proclamation, but by a series of acts of parliament.  By doing that, the Crown tacitly acknowledged that ultimately sovereignty in England rested in the Crown in parliament – or at least, that is what the parliament and its champions would argue. 

Here was a real accretion of power.  Among other things, the title of the Crown, and the government of the church, all derived from the parliament.  The church became in substance a department of state.  The Crown was at the head of both, and by and large the Anglican church has behaved itself since, and not caused any trouble to the Crown or the nation.

The Act of Supremacy followed an act that had a recital of complacent self-satisfaction that Jefferson would later mimic – ‘Where, by diverse sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire….’  There is just a little laxity with veracity there.

But here, then, was a declaration of independence which the English had to defend against a Spanish invasion.  The soldiers of the Vatican would certainly have burnt Elizabeth at the stake as a heretic; would-be assassins had already been offered Paradise.  After that speech at Tilbury from their queen, England was about to flower as a nation.  Ranke observes all this with the eye of eternity.

In the next century, the English would finally come to terms with their king.  But now they had dealt with God and his church.  After they had fixed things with their king, they could turn their full attention to the aristocracy. 

The history of Ranke is ‘principally’ about the role of the four inept Stuart kings who provoked the English through their parliament in curtailing the power of the king in the settlement after what they call the Glorious Revolution.  (And not many English people now recall, or ever knew, that an essential part of that revolution was performed by an invading Dutch army that patrolled the streets of London.)

Magna Carta said the king was under the law.  The Act of Supremacy said the Church of England was under the law.  The Declaration of Rights said that both were under parliament.  Game, set, and match.  Enlarging the franchise would take time, but not blood.

There was, then, another employment contract with the Crown.  This time, they did not use a receiver and manager as enforcer.  They said to the king ‘You can’t have an army unless we agree.  But we remain armed.’  That was enough.  The English of course have never invoked this right to bear arms.  The Americans just get it horribly wrong, through a sad mix of credulity and venality.  And a shocking ignorance of their constitutional antecedents.

The narrative of Ranke is so good to follow about the Stuarts, God’s gift to parliamentary democracy.  None of them was up to it, but the worst were Charles I and James II.  The English executed the first.  They just ran the other out of town.  On the way, he threw the seals into the Thames.

James I put silly ideas about Divine Right into the head of his son Charles I.  Ranke describes Charles as lawyer-like and priest-like.

His strict propriety of demeanour bordered on male bashfulness; a serious and temperate soul spoke from his calm eyes…All the world had been wearied by the frequent proofs which his father had given of his untrustworthiness, and by the unfathomable mystery in which he enveloped his over-wavering intentions: they expected from the son more openness, uprightness and consistency.  They asked if he could not also be more decidedly Protestant.

The first part is word perfect for the role of Alec Guinness as Charles in the film Cromwell.  The second part about the father perfectly fits the son.  The English could not trust him.  We have recently seen a Prime Minister achieve the same status – with a less terminal conclusion.

The problem set in when, for dynastic reasons, Charles married Henrietta, the sister of a French king, by proxy before Notre Dame.  To get the deal done with approval from Rome, the future king had to make promises about the treatment of English Catholics that directly put him in conflict with his duties as the head of the Church of England.  He did not recall how a such a conflict had cost Rome the loss of England – and he could not foresee that a worse conflict with James II would see the end of the Stuart line.  Part of the marriage compact was secret, and Charles II would enter into a secret pledge about Catholicism with France –the cash was worth a Mass – that in a subject would be the highest form of treason on in the books. 

Ranke reports on the trial of Strafford – moments of high theatre.  Strafford put the wind up the English like no other.  This man of great gifts had changed sides, joined the king, and commanded an army in Ireland.  The English had to get him before he got them.  In persuading the Commons, St John produced one of those lines an advocate would die for.  This is one of those brick wall moments in history.  Say what you like – he had to go.  (A similar wall would have arisen if Hitler had not killed himself.  He could in no way have been allowed to live.  Churchill did not fancy any trial of the major war criminals.)  It is a riveting story.  (Miss Wedgwood tells it wonderfully.  The academy doesn’t like her either.) 

And in the middle of the 17^th century, the role of the English people in the choice of their governors was fundamental.  Charles I would not sign the law that warranted the execution of Strafford.  But he had to.  His advisers could not guarantee his personal safety from the people if he did not.  Nowadays we would give that sort of revolution a colour.

In an age that is not at all religious, it is easy to forget the pervasive force of faith and liturgy in other times and places.  At one time or another, it has sent most nations off the rails, and led to the worst of our wars.  God brings out the grizzlies in us.  After the two world wars, a majority of Germans said that the worst war in their history was the Thirty Years War in the 17^th century – a direct product of the Reformation.

To understand that English history from say 1215 to 1689, you only need to look elsewhere.  The French were centuries behind when they tried to do it all in one big bang, and they had to endure a century of misery as a result – after the ego of a Corsican upstart accounted for the lives of five million people.  The French were still dealing with feudalism in 1789.  The German nation was only brought together by Bismarck, who led a liberal state, but something in their psyche led to the one of the most evil regimes the world has known and to two world wars. 

Spain, Italy and Greece still do not have their act together, and the Church has been a curse in each of them.  The Dutch and Nordic states alone look calm and stable.  The Baltic states have endured agony and the Balkans are case studies in every form of political failure or evil.  The Celtic fringe in the U K now looks very ready to pull out – the eight hundred years of race-driven misrule of Ireland is a frightful blot on England.  (And that peace even now is in hazard because an unprincipled caste betrayed almost every plank of the English platform that Ranke describes.)  Poland and Hungary are not up with Europe yet. 

That leaves Russia.  It has never been decently governed.  The Orthodox Church is now sponsoring a war by Russia against a nation whose people pray to the God of the same Church.  It may just be the most inept and evil ecclesiastical body ever.  Russia liberated its serfs in the same year that Lincoln emancipated the slaves (1863).  Russia is neither European nor Asian.  It is yet to have anything like its 1215 moment with its rulers.  It is the black hole of the world. 

The United States has also not been able to deal with the corrupting stain of slavery, and its deviations from the English model.  Its failure to house train God, or Trump, mean that only very generous people continue to describe it as civilised.

Let us look further at those two nations.  If we go back to the movement away from the supernatural and toward merit counting more than pedigree, then, in a state that claims to be civilised, we should be looking to find people having an equal opportunity of their own individual worth being determined by their own actions rather than those of their parents or people they know.  The French 1789 ideal of equality may have been realised there as a matter of law, but they are nowhere near ironing out differences that arise from class, colour or faith.  And the dreadful inequalities in wealth and income bedevil not just western countries.

Slavery, or serfdom, in any form is a direct repudiation of equality.  That and empire are two reasons why it was silly for Oxbridge to call ancient Greece or Rome civilised.

Slavery, or serfdom, has not been an issue in England since way back in the Middle Ages.  Well before the white people settled here in this continent, the English courts had ruled that slavery was not recognised at common law.  It was of such a nature – ‘so odious’ – that it could only be supported by positive law.  The English parliament outlawed the slave trade in the first part of the next century.  If you look at when the Russians liberated their serfs – or claimed to have done so – the difference in the time-line with the English is about half a millennium.

Both Russia and America remain victims of caste.  Russia has only ever been ruled by force.  It has never known anything like the rule of law – which is fundamental to our notion of civilisation.  Slavery split the American union once, and it still hangs heavy over the land now.  It looks to me that the sort of people who support Trump have never forgiven others for putting a black man in the White House.  They now fear they will be overrun by people of colour – who, in their eyes, are inferior people.

History teaches that these are the sorts of self-righteously aggrieved people that rise to the surface in any revolution.  They were in full and hideous display in the attack on the Capitol – which is still ignored or allowed by a large part of what used to be the American establishment.  What a falling off have we seen there?

A similar although much wealthier class in Russia use their power and wealth to control the organs of power and confine power and wealth to a select few.  ‘Equality’ may as well be a meteorite from Mars.  In the result, we have the abomination of Putin and the crime of the war against the Ukraine – and a murder of truth that makes Trump look like a choir boy.

There is a sad kicker.  The end of slavery in England was in large part due to agents of Christianity – in particular, the Church of England and the maligned Quakers.  Here was a mighty achievement – and the first real basis of our claim to be civilised.  Sadly, corrupt versions of that faith are heavily implicated in the damage done to their people and the world by Trump and Putin.

So, in both America and Russia, we are looking at a failure of a whole people to attain the first level of maturity – a liberation from magic or the supernatural – like religion.  And in both countries what is there called ‘religion’ is in the hands of people you would not wish to break bread with.  The Russian Orthodox Church has a frightful record of collusion with the Tsars and the KGB – and now Putin.  In the best of all possible worlds, the first three people to be prosecuted for war crimes in the Ukraine would be Putin, Lavrov, and the Patriarch of Moscow.

It is deeply worrying that neither America nor Russia has been able to tame the demons of superstition.  And now one organ of government in the Union, whose members are appointed for life, is pronouncing death dealing edicts about abortion and guns that are driven by venality and the supernatural.  

There must be something seriously wrong with in a nation that has an education system that allows so many people to put up with a man who is so obviously a fool, a crook, and a coward.  But in a time when science allows us to look back through billions of years, a large part of the American Congress believes that is impossible.  They would not accept voodoo from their heart surgeon, but they allow their superstition to dictate how we deal with our bodies and our planet.

Who in all conscience could describe such a state as civilised?

Well, some of those statements are large, and I doubt whether Ranke would have accepted them – at least at the lectern.  But we need to recall not just our story, but those of other peoples. 

Very few tell it as well as Leopold Von Ranke.  My set of six volumes is the original Oxford University leather-bound set in English of 1875.  You can get online an Indian company’s rebinding of a facsimile edition in handsome leather in your choice of colour for about $A50 a volume delivered. 

My recollection is that at one time some at Oxford decided that Ranke’s work should be set for students in place of Macaulay.  A fly on the wall may have had to duck buckets of blood that night.

Ranke – civilisation – English constitution – America – Russia.

Some of the nonsense coming from big accounting firms passes belief.  A lot of people at KPMG were found to have cheated in exams.  About 1100 were accused.  Of cheating between 2016 and 2020.  Many were found guilty.  A complicated process by a body having some regulatory function took a long time on it.  Some were fired.  Others cautioned.  The AFR says the watchdog is keeping the names and penalties secret. 

Obviously, public confidence in what used to be a profession does not rank with that watchdog – a very somnolent poodle.

I used the past tense because this report is one of those that suggests that these big firms are not professional.  If you are found to have cheated in an exam, you cannot be trusted. That being so, you would be a danger to the public.  You cannot therefore be or remain in the profession.  There is high authority for the proposition that these regulators are there to protect the public – not to punish the wrongdoer.

Instead we get this from KPMG.

Our integrity is not up for negotiation.  We have implemented a comprehensive remediation plan designed to respond to this matter, and we continue to strengthen our ethical culture.

That bullshit alone show that we are not dealing with professional people.

Ethics – accounting – KPMG – regulators.

Manning Clark

Abridged History of Australia

By chance, I picked up a copy of Manning Clark’s History of Australia as abridged by Michael Cathcart.  I paid only $10 for it at the local flea market, but I had trouble putting it down.  I have read the original six volumes – twice.  I am a fan of the author.  He knew his job was to tell a story.  The raw materials are hardly inspiring.  The history of Australia has the same problem as the French Revolution – heroes are hard to come by, but there is plenty there to make you blush, if not hang your head down.

When I reread Strachey’s Eminent Victorians a while ago, I was struck by how much work God had to do with each of those lives.  Manning Clark was concerned with the phenomenon described as the death of God.  His language is frequently biblical, but the whimsy comes with compassion.  For me, the apotheosis of both style and story comes with parts of volumes four and five – the period from, say, 1851 to 1915– that included marks on our canvas like Eureka, Lambing Flat, Burke and Wills, Ned Kelly, White Australia, and Gallipoli.

Let us look at how we got off to a bad start on education and why it has remained a mess ever since.  The problem for the ‘reforms’ of the 1870’s was not so much God, as schism.  The latter is man-made.

The reforms entrenched the sectarian divisions they were designed to overcome, not least because the Catholic Church withdrew its children from the public system.  The question of whether or not the government should subsidise denominational schools remained a bitter source of conflict into the following century.  [And this century.]…..The children of the rich did not meet on common ground either in the classrooms or the playgrounds of the Australian colonies.  In some schools a room was set aside for the children of the rich….In this way the parents of the gentry and the upper ranks of the bourgeoisie ensured that the fine edge of gentility should not be dulled by familiar intercourse with common children, until the time came to attend a private school such as Melbourne Grammar School or the Presbyterian Ladies’College, where the prejudices they had inherited from their parents were consolidated into the habits of a lifetime.

We buggered that right up, and that very English divide is still with us.  We also buggered it up with help from another part of our schizoid mother country.

In the national schools, the children were taught to venerate Her Majesty Queen Victoria; in the Catholic schools the children learned to venerate the Holy Father, and to adore the Holy Mother of God.  In the national schools, the children learned of the glories of British arms, and the spread of a beneficent British civilisation over the whole world….;in the Catholic schools, Ireland was presented as the centre of the universe, and England as a place from which had come the men who had reduced the loveliest island on God’s earth to a land of skulls……In the national schools, the classroom walls were decorated with the likenesses of Queen Victoria, and of civil and military heroes of English history; in the Catholic schools classroom walls were decorated with prints of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Virgin and the Pope.  Yet they had much in common.  Both school systems enforced a strict segregation of the sexes; both urged their pupils to mortify the flesh; both taught a morality pleasing to the ears of men who held the purse strings in the colonial parliaments.

So, we not only inflicted social division on the children; we also gave them religious hate.  The second has evaporated, but the first lives on as a national disgrace.  Have we also allowed a ‘strict segregation of the sexes’ so that ‘the prejudices they had inherited from their parents were consolidated into the habits of a lifetime’?

We are reminded that the poet Henry Kendall thought that Australia belonged to ‘clowns, liars and charlatans.’  Boy, just look at us now.  One local newspaper was ‘Australian because it treated life as a cruel joke.  Its mockery was Australian.’  You find the word ‘mockery’ a lot in Manning Clark.  Clark was not a mocker, but the mockers waited until he was dead to move in on him.  A man who looked on others with an eye of pity was cruelly betrayed by people who should have known better.  Those mean and jealous people cruelly foreshadowed the jeerers, sneerers and leerers inflicted on Australia by a Flash Harry who checked out for the United States.

This was just another upswing of that petty mediocrity that so sadly disfigures what passes for our national character.  As Clark remarked, ‘in Australia, the upstart conservative, the mean man, often defeated the generous man and the visionary.’  As it happens, on the next page, we get the ‘money-changers had begun to set the tone of public life in Australia.’  These are truths that have sadly endured, and are not seen by those who best exemplify them.  Well, as Billy Hughes reminded our national parliament, at least Judas had the decency to hang himself – and throw away the thirty pieces of silver.

The Labor movement got off to a mean and rocky Australian start.

Writing and talking as though the love of all mankind distinguished them from all previous political groups, articulate Labor spokesmen inflamed their followers with hatred against the Chinese, the Jews, the English, the Pacific Islanders, and indeed almost all strangers in their midst.  Mouthing the platitudes of the Utopians about a new society in which all hatred would cease, and God’s destroying angels would disappear off the face of the earth, their candidates for election to the colonial parliaments represented themselves to be reformers rather than revolutionaries, preservers rather than destroyers.

We know about those people who love all mankind.  The man that Carlyle called the Evangelist of the French Revolution, Rousseau, loved all mankind – he just abandoned all his children to the Foundling Home.  ‘This arrangement seemed to me so admirable, so rational, and so legitimate, that the only reason I did not boast openly of it was to spare the mother ….All things considered, what I chose for my children was for the best for them, or so I genuinely believed.  I could have wished, and still wish, that I had been reared and brought up in the same fashion.’  Would Stalin have approved of the solicitude for the mother?

Those who came to federation had to deal with ‘the inexhaustible inertia of the people as a whole.’  That’s what we are – inert.  In no colony did more than 46.33% cast a yes vote.  We could also be crudely nationalist.  The Bulletin urged Australians to turn their backs on ‘Queen Victoria’s nigger Empire.’

Our first PM was ‘a middle of the road man, an Australian bourgeois politician.’  Toss-pot Barton believed political issues could be resolved by chaps over Scotch.  Some idiot referred to ‘the good revolutionist of Nazareth.’  Then in March 1901’the Reverend Mr Edgar electrified his congregation by giving permission to the men during a Melbourne heatwave to remove their coats.’

But the Victorian Chief Justice, Sir John Madden, feared that a darker purpose was at work.  Taking his stand on the Bible, he warned that women’s suffrage would abolish soldiers, war, racing, hunting, football and all manly games.  The Bulletin worried that intermarriage with niggers could lower our national type.  Australians ‘had descended from their lofty eminence as a society of peace and goodwill’ and ‘Australia had suddenly acquired notoriety in the civilised world as a centre of human barbarism’.  Was the author of Ecclesiastes right?  Is there nothing new under the sun?

In the 1950’s parents in Melbourne were horrified by the gyrations of Elvis Presley.  How did their forebears handle the sex appeal of Wagner?  ‘Inside the Exhibition Building, society women fanned their faces to hide their response to the sensuous music of Wagner.  Men fidgeted in their seats as a trumpet, bassoon and a big bass drum inflamed their senses.’  Out of doors, politics stayed in the gutter.  Billy Hughes ‘hissed and spat at his opponents like a cat defending its own territory against an invader.’

Here are some passages that go to the core of our political life, that show why we are so different to the United States, and why the words ‘conservative’ and ‘socialist’ are so very slippery in the context of Australia.

George Turner [Victorian Premier and first Treasurer of the Commonwealth] was also said to have ‘no horizon in his mind, no perspective in his politics, no proud surface upon which he rested.’  But where Reid [News South Wales Premier, later Prime Minister] often flirted with the Bohemian fringe in Sydney, to the scandal of the frowners in St Andrew’s Cathedral, Turner was always a model of British bourgeois propriety.  Balancing the books was his great passion in life.  By his great industry, his zeal and his deep conviction, he helped to raise that criterion into the standard by which politicians came to be judged in Australia.

The liberals wanted a compromise between the conservative insistence that property must enjoy special protection in any colonial federal constitution, and the labour call for one man one vote…..

On the role of the state in economic life, the liberals saw themselves as supporters of the traditional role of government in planting civilisation in the Australian wilderness.  Government had played the major role in the supply, distribution and control of labour in the convict period.  Government had performed a similar role in the selection, transport and distribution of free immigrants.  Government had developed a network of country and suburban railways not on any abstract principle of the role of government, but because in Australian conditions, private or free enterprise could not or would not embark on such activities.  Liberals believed in a continuing partnership between the two.

The Mildura experiment in irrigation was a model of that harmony of interests which the liberals detected between government and free enterprise.  Alfred Deakin had been greatly impressed by the irrigation schemes set up by George and William Chaffey in California when he visited there in 1885.  In 1888……the government of South Australia interested them in a similar scheme in Renmark.  In Los Angeles, the Chaffeys had developed their schemes under the American practice of free enterprise – that, in American experience was what produced the greatest wealth, the greatest efficiency, the greatest service to the consumers and the highest material rewards to the people of initiative, drive and unbounded energy.  That was what generated a lively society, a society with a great pulse of life, a people who were magnificently alive, and not characterised by the dullness and mediocrity of people mollycoddled by governments, churches, charity organisations, or those self-appointed improvers of humanity who made decisions for people, thereby depriving them of the exercise of the right to decide for themselves, a necessary condition for the flowering of the personality.  The Chaffeys built their model villages….to the background of angry exchanges between conservatives very voluble on the evils of government interference and radicals clamouring for more government control.

Here is a warning about treating with barbarians – like Hitler.

The conservatives were in a dilemma.  A barbarian was threatening the very foundations of society, but the barbarian might have his uses.  He was offering to wipe Bolshevism off the map of the world: he was already destroying trade union power: in a most brutal and barbarous fashion, he was rooting out decadence in Germany.  The barbarian has talked of the German need for Lebensraum (living space); perhaps he could find it during his crusade against Bolshevism.  Hitler could be used and then dropped – monsters had their uses.

How different is the dilemma currently facing Republicans over Trump?

When Bertrand Russell quit our shores in 1950, he said, graciously, some might think:

Perhaps you are all too comfortable to take so much trouble.  Perhaps you will be content with a moderate and humdrum success, but I hope not.  I hope that….you will be content to take the risks involved in aiming at great success rather than acquiesce in the comfortable certainty of a moderate competence. 

Manning Clark was not optimistic, and neither am I.  We have settled for a safe, inert mediocrity.  People who rock the boat make us very nervous.

Carlyle said that history was a collection of biographies.  That is in large part just what this book of Manning Clark is.  It’s not just that history can be entertaining – it does its job better when it is.  I haven’t enjoyed a book so much for a very long time – at least as far back as when I last read The French Revolution by Carlyle.  At least we got one thing right.

Gideon Rachman wrote a piece in the FT comparing Johnson with Trump.  I sent him the note below, to which he graciously responded.  I may add another difference.  It is very hard to foresee any circumstances in which Johnson might seek to exercise any control over the Conservative Party – or stand again for the top position.  In truth, it is impossible.

I understand the point that MPs may be slow to move against a bad leader until they feel that their seat is threatened, but the power of Trump over so called Republicans appears to have a different basis.  He threatens to get his minions to take seats off his opponents in his own party.  It is one thing to be voted out.  It is another to be kicked out by a thug.  I do not see that in England, and I would not expect to see the raw cowardice of Republicans if I did.

One reason is that the amorphous English establishment is much older and much more entrenched – by caste as well as class.  They have been at it for so much longer.  They invented this game.

Another reason is that the English system is not presidential – which Boris did not understand – and their party system, to which the leader is responsible, is so much stronger.  They invented that too.  On the morning after two big resignations, PMQ, and a speech by a resigning minister, the PM had to face something harder – a Committee of his own party.  Who showed no sympathy.  The first question was : ‘How’s your week been so far?’  The chances of that happening in the US with anyone – let alone Trump – would be one of the following – nil, nix, nought, and zero.  As would any Tory MP falling for the notion of a stolen election or glossing over an armed rebellion.

The monarchy is another difference.  It is fundamental that the queen can only act on the advice of her ministers.  But my understanding is that there are three grounds on which she could refuse an election sought by a PM.  All three were in play here.  And one thing a Tory PM could never be forgiven for is putting the Crown in hazard – especially this ageing lady.

So, the UK is worlds apart in dealing with this kind of spoiled brat.

As it happens I picked up Ranke’s History of England todayto read of Charles I.  One delight of that work is the judicious use of footnotes.  A pamphlet for the election of the Long Parliament said : ‘We elected such as were not known to us by any virtue, but only by crossness to superiors’.

What a gorgeous line!

Crossness to superiors – there ought to be more of it.

The Tories have to live with the deal they struck with the devil.

They said he was good because he was popular.  On that ground alone, would they prefer Barabbas to Jesus of Nazareth?  Just over eighty years ago, by the most popular politician in the world was a small house painter from a small town in a small country.  His name was Adolf Hitler.  The chip he had on his shoulder would cost the lives of more than fifty million people.

They said Trump had won a huge majority.  He did – with the brazen deceit that is his trade mark.  And he did not do it for them.  There is only ever one reason why he does anything.  He showed that in the worst public farewell on record.

And they said they owed him loyalty.  In this they made the mistake of putting second their loyalty to the monarch whose realm he was intent on putting asunder.  In this also, they sadly aped the generals of the Wehrmacht who gave an oath of personal loyalty to an Austrian corporal who was twice passed over for promotion to officer status, and they also came dangerously close to the total and cowardly sell-out by Republican elders, those gloomy, fading, white sometime stentorians, who are now forcing a general reconsideration of the role of cowardice in public office.

It now looks to be too late for the rebel colonies to learn from their more settled mother country in how to deal with a spoiled child who is trashing the joint.

PTories – Johnson – Trump

SCARLET AND BLACK

Stendhal, 1830

Folio Society, 1965; bound in cloth embossed boards and slip cased; translated and with an introduction by Margaret Shaw; wood engravings by Frank Martin.

She was a simple soul, who had never risen even to the point of criticising her husband, and admitting that he bored her.  She supposed, without telling herself so, that between husband and wife there could be no more tender relations. 

Stendhal was an alias of a Frenchman named Henri Beyle.  He had many aliases (or pen names) and history has had trouble coming to grips with the man behind them.  He came from a respectable family in Grenoble and served under Napoleon.  During that time, he witnessed the burning of Moscow.  He then held various government positions that allowed him to write.  He was very vain, not very handsome, and he saw more in his attractions to women than they did – so distinguishing him sharply from both Balzac and Hugo.  He spent much time in Italy, and fell for their notion of manhood.  For him, Italy was a country of love and hate.  Men loved for passion and they died for love.  He thought that in Italy men dared to be themselves.  It would be interesting to know how he squared his adulation of Italian men with the fact that his hero, Napoleon, wiped the floor with them.

Stendhal was the image of the artist against the world, the bearer of a kind of self-imposed separation or alienation.  That masque may hide the most awful snobbery, but Stendhal suffered acutely from two lesions that beset men of France at that time and have done so since.  First, there was le peuple.  ‘I love the people, I hate their oppressors, but it would be a perpetual torture for me to live with the people…I had and I have still the most aristocratic tastes, I would do everything for the happiness of the people, but I would sooner, I believe, pass two weeks in every month in prison than live with shopkeepers.’ 

Then there was Napoleon – the man who said that the nemesis of France was a nation of shopkeepers.  (The business of shopkeeping may be prosaic, but is there anything else wrong with it?)  Stendhal wrote of one of his heroes: ‘For many years perhaps not an hour of his life had gone by without him telling himself that Bonaparte, a penniless and unknown lieutenant, had made himself ruler of the world with his sword.’  Would he have felt the same about Hitler when he was at the height of his powers?  Will the French ever get over the little Corsican?

Stendhal has at least something in common with Cervantes – and other writers like him.  His style was dry and spare.  He even said that before starting to write each day, he would read a page of the Code Napoléon in order to chasten or flatten out his language.  He sought to avoid describing dramatic moments in a dramatic manner.

I make every effort possible to appear dry.  I want to impose silence on my heart which imagines it has much to say.  I always tremble in case I may only have written a sigh when I wished to note down a truth.

As a result, Zola said that Stendhal was the father of the naturalistic school.  He is principally remembered for two novels, The Charterhouse of Parma and Scarlet and Black. 

The latter was based on a celebrated murder trial.  Somerset Maugham remarked that ‘Stendhal was more interested in himself than anyone else and is always the hero of his novels…Julien Sorel, the hero of Le Rouge et le Noir, is the kind of man Stendhal would have liked to be.  He made him attractive to women and successful in winning their love, as he himself would have given everything to be, and too seldom was.’  Well, there must be some limit to that notion – Sorel ends up being executed for murder. 

Following the plot of the murder trial, Sorel seduces the mother of children he is engaged to teach, ‘not because he is in love with her, but partly to revenge himself on the class she belongs to, and partly to satisfy his own pride.’  Then he does fall for her, but propriety means he has to give her up.  He goes to a seminary.  Then he gets a post with a real aristocrat.  The daughter of the Marquis falls for Sorel – because he was different to the aristocrats who surrounded her and who despised them as much as she did.  She also sensed his ambition and she saw his dark side. 

Maugham said: ‘Those two self-centred, irritable moody creatures scarcely know if they love with passion, or hate with frenzy.’  When the daughter gets pregnant, the Marquis has to consider consenting to the union.  At this point, the hero loses it.  He suggests the Marquis asks the prior mistress for a reference!  When she blows Sorel’s cover, he seeks final revenge.  You might think this sounds more like an Italian opera than a French novel, but Maugham says the novel had to end this way – had Sorel gone on to fame and fortune, he would have been a different hero in a different book – he would have been like Rastignac, the hero of Old Goriot.

Julien Sorel comes from peasant stock in a small rural town.  He has been abused by his father and brothers.  He sees the priesthood as the way out and up.  A priest teaches him Latin.  The socially aware mayor appoints him as a tutor to his three children.  The mayor instructed Julien to cease to have anything to do with his family friends as ‘their tone would not be suited to my children.’  He had married a wealthy heiress when she was young.  Madam de Rênal had been brought up by Sacred Heart nuns who hated the French because they were against the Jesuits.  She was only thirty.

She was a simple soul, who had never risen even to the point of criticising her husband, and admitting that he bored her.  She supposed, without telling herself so, that between husband and wife there could be no more tender relations.  She was especially fond of M. de Rênal when he spoke to her of his plans for the children, one of whom he intended to place in the army, the second on the bench, and the third in church.  In short, she found M. de Rênal a great deal less boring than any of the other men of her acquaintance.  This wifely opinion was justified.  The Mayor of Verrières owed his reputation for wit, and better still for good tone, to half a dozen pleasantries which he had inherited from an uncle…As he was in other respects most refined, except when the talk ran on money, he was regarded, and rightly, as the most aristocratic personage in Verrières…..

The flatteries of which she had been the precocious object, as the heiress to a large fortune, and a marked tendency towards passionate devotion, had bred in her an attitude towards life that was wholly inward.  With an outward show of the most perfect submission, and a self-suppression which the husbands of Verrières used to quote as an example to their wives….her inner life was in fact dictated by the most lofty disdain.

Well, there you have the dry style and fierce psychological insight of Stendhal – and an insight into the wreckage that would almost certainly follow if she fell for the tutor.

The second part of the novel deals with the aristocracy.  These people look down on anyone not descended from a Crusader (apparently forgetting that the Crusaders lost.)  It is a world of mental stagnation and frightful boredom.

There is no income of a hundred thousand crowns, no blue riband that can prevail against a drawing-room so constituted.  The smallest living idea seemed an outrage.  Despite good tone, perfect manners, the desire to be agreeable, boredom was written upon every brow.  The young men who came to pay their respects, afraid to speak of anything that might lead to their being suspected of thinking, afraid to reveal some forbidden reading, became silent after a few elegantly phrased sentences on Rossini and the weather.

Here are the aspirations of the Marquise de La Mole.

Baron de La Joumate was a chilly creature with expressionless features.  He was small, thin, ugly, he spent all his time at the Chateau, and, as a rule he had nothing to say about anything.  His speech revealed his mind.  Madame de La Mole would have been passionately happy, for the first time in her life, if she could have secured him as a husband for her daughter.

What a drab, cruel world.  Barry Humphries and Clive James would have liked this writing, but is it any wonder that adultery was the order of the day?  And it is no surprise that the daughter would be ripe for plucking by the hero.

In having an affair with Sorel, Mathilde is, in the words of the author, outraging her caste.

‘If, with his poverty, Julien had been noble, my love would be nothing more than a piece of vulgar folly, an unfortunate marriage; it would lack that element which characterises great passion; the immensity of the difficulty to be overcome and the dark uncertainty of the issue’.

Her brother sees Julien differently.

Beware of that young man who has so much energy…if the Revolution comes again, he will have us all guillotined.

Here is how this dry writer describes the end of his hero.

The bad air of the cell was becoming intolerable to Julien; happily, on the day on which they told him he was to die, a lovely sun enlivened nature, and Julien was in a courageous mood.  To walk in the open air was to him a delicious sensation, as to walk on land might be to a sailor who has been long at sea.  Well, everything is going well, he told himself, I don’t lack courage.  Never had that head been so poetic as when it was about to fall.  The sweet moments he had passed in the woods of Vergy crowded upon his memory with the utmost force.  Everything took place simply decently, and on his side without affectation.

It takes nerve to write as sparely as that, but you can see why Stendhal had such appeal for the later American writer named Ernest Hemingway.  He would take aspects of the hero of the other great Stendhal novel as a model for parts of Farewell to Arms.

For many, now, the passion of this 19^th century melodrama will be way over the top; a political sub-plot in the second half of the novel comes from and goes to nowhere; then with a rapid change of pace, the whole deal unfolds in three pages; some might ask whether the hero has any heart at all; and it’s a bit rough to be executed for murder when the victim is alive and begging for mercy. 

But, boy, this guy could write, and this novel is a stand-out.  And fans of the film La reine Margot will recall that the de La Mole family had form with the severed heads of lovers.

Like a lot of the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust, this one is a study in caste in France after Napoleon.  They make you wonder why the French bothered to have a revolution at all.

Four Corners last night reminded me that fifty years ago, it was the ALP that was stricken by faction, especially in Victoria.  Now it is the Liberal Party, especially in New South Wales.  The sitting MP who was attacked is a very decent woman whom I would vote for.  The rest are mongrels.  No sane person would wish to go anywhere near any of them.  It was further evidence of what we know – the party system in general, and the two-party system in particular, is in deep trouble.  What follows comes from a draft of a book about what is wrong in government and business in Australia.

And in Australia the case of the Liberal Party is even more fraught.  They usually govern in conjunction – in ‘coalition’ – with the National Party.  That party used to represent those in primary industry and contained some of the world’s best practice agrarian socialists.  (Most of our tax laws were written for the relief of farmers.)  Just what that party stands for now is a little like the quest for the real presence.  But what is now clear is that this ménage ȃ trois is very heavily on the nose for about two out of three Australians.

It is not just these two parties that involve coalitions – each of the two major parties increasingly looks like a coalition of factions in itself.  The Victorian ALP used to be the most notorious for being riven  by faction.  That mantle now looks to have been taken by the New South Wales Liberal Party.  Factions of one kind or another are inevitable in any political or social grouping – a school council, a club committee, a student’s representative body, the management of a large law firm, the Royal College of Surgeons, or the office holders in a trade union. 

But they are also poison to outsiders.  They bring images of manipulators, puppeteers in the Godfather, or the most notorious ‘faceless men.’  There is something inherently sinister about factions.  And common experience suggests that those who have the time and inclination to go in for this back-room back-stabbing hardly ever represent the general feelings of the overall members of the relevant body.  Most people are not so zealous about such affairs – and that is one reason why they are not going into political parties any more.  If you say of an Australian that he or she is a political animal, you might be asked to step outside.  Most Australians would rather not get their hands dirty, that way or at all, and they leave the field to the enthusiasts, the extremists – and the branch-stackers.  And it will only get worse for the major parties if good people decide to invest their time and energy in the independents.

There is something inherently dangerous and hence sinister  about any kind of division within groups of people.  The result tends to be what we call faction.  The Oxford English Dictionaryis almost colourful:

A party in the state or in any community or association.  Always with the imputation of selfish or mischievous ends or unscrupulous methods…..Factious spirit or action; party strife or intrigue; dissension.

It is the dissension that is fundamental.  And that leads immediately to an allegation of disoyalty.  And that is the most venomous charge that can be levelled against a member of any group.  In religion, it is a charge of heresy that in other times saw people burned at the stake.  And that is the reason why when the English were developing the Westminster system of parliamentary and cabinet government in the 18^th century, the term ‘party’ was anathema.  His Majesty’s ‘loyal opposition’ was a contradiction in terms.  It is worth recalling therefore that our system of two party parliamentary government arose out of heresy.

Common experience suggests that division and therefore faction are more likely to arise in a group that wants to effect radical change, or in one that has lost its way.  People in business know that the whispering starts when business is slow, and experience suggests that faction is more active in a party in opposition than one in government. 

And let us return to the point that experience suggests that those who have the time and inclination to drive the agenda – stated or merely aspired to by some – of a group of people may not reflect the views of the members of that group as a whole  (In my five years at Melbourne University in the 60’s, I frequently wondered who sprinkled what on the Weeties of those in the Student’s Representatives.  From time to time I would experience similar quizzicality at the Victorian Bar.)

It was all there on TV.  The worst is Alex Hawke.  A boy wonder who has never had a real job and who is there for one reason only – Alex Hawke.  He even looks shifty – like the Inquisitor of El Greco.  He shows why people turn away from the major parties and look to independents – and why that gets up the noses of other people who have never had a real job.

Liberal Party – ALP – Factions – Hawke – Four Corners