Author: Geoffrey Gibson

Why history? 9 – Revolutions

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In 1765 Watt made a steam engine.  This led to more travel, and the world shrank.  Factories were built.  These required both capital and labour.  The craftsman was on the way out.  Workers were brutally treated.  This was the Industrial Revolution.

The English sought to tax the American colonies without giving them representation.  The Americans reacted to George III as the English had to the Stuarts.  This was the American Revolution.  In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson said that the compact between America and the English Crown had been broken, and that all men were equal.  This was a bare-faced lie because slaves were anything but equal.

The French had supported the American rebels and went broke doing so.  Louis XVI had to convene an ancient assembly to ask for money.  When this process was threatened, the mob stormed the Bastille for arms on 14 July 1789.  This was the start of the French Revolution.  The French king and nobility had not been conditioned to negotiate as they had been in England and they were annihilated.  But the peasants had not been relieved of most of their feudal burdens, as they were now, and the middle class had little experience in government.  There was chaos and a reign of terror.  The way was open for the strong man, but no one could have predicted Napoleon, a military and administrative genius.  Ideals got lost and an emperor replaced the king.  The attempt by Napoleon to force people to be free only ended at Waterloo in 1815.  More than five million had died in wars driven by his ego.  The great poets of the Romantic Revolution – Keats, Shelley, and Byron – had celebrated the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, but Beethoven renounced Napoleon when he became Emperor.  It took France a century to recover.

There were more uprisings and revolutions in 1848.  Garibaldi led the emergence of Italy and Bismarck led the formation of Germany.  Europe at large carved up the continent of Africa while trading in slaves.  Africa still feels the wounds.

It was slavery that led to the American Civil War.  The Southern states depended on it, although it had been declared illegal at common law and trading was outlawed by statute in England.  This was modern war, more lethal than the Napoleonic Wars.  The Americans lost more in it than they have lost in all other wars.  The political genius of Abraham Lincoln saved the union.  At Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke of government of the people, by the people, for the people.

The Russian Revolution erupted finally in 1917.  Lenin misapplied Marx’s theory and left the succession to Stalin, a grisly dictator who ruled by terror for decades and killed many, many millions of Russians.  In Asia, Japan was awakened from its slumbers and defeated Russia in a war.  China began to throw out European intruders.

The lot of ordinary people improved in Europe and the U S.  Electricity and the phone improved communal life.  Governments accepted responsibility for education.  Workers formed trade unions.  The goal of socialism was to break down the class system and involve government in distributing wealth and looking after ordinary people – from cradle to grave.  The great novelists – like Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy – threw light on our condition.

One Englishman and three German Jews revolutionised the way we think.  Darwin said that all nature was evolving, that man was descended from the ape, and that only the fittest survived.  The Church went mad; people said God was dead; others wondered who were the fittest.  Karl Marx was an anti-Semitic Jew who never set foot in a factory.  He developed an elaborate theory that said that capitalism would end when the workers took control (the dictatorship of the proletariat), private property was abolished, and we all would live happily ever after.  Religion had failed to impose world order – now it was the turn of the atheist.  Just look at Cuba or North Korea.  Sigmund Freud analysed hysterical women and explored the subconscious of bourgeois Vienna.  He saw sex everywhere, but now the analyst could challenge the priest for the confessional.  Albert Einstein rewrote the laws of physics.  His Theory of Relativity rattled science.  His shattering insights put science beyond our reach – as religion had sought to do – and led to the splitting of the atom.  It looked like the future was here. He died in my tenth year.

Passing Bull 120 – An abundance of dogma

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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. 

The quote above is from a book I wrote with Chris Wallace-Crabbe called Language, Meaning and Truth.  Dogma may be necessary for faith or football, but it seldom helps thought.  There’s a fair bit of it about at the moment.

The ‘fuellers of civil discord’ are hard at work – on all sides as Mr Trump might say – in the debate, if that’s the word, on marriage equality.  The church relies on dogma, without querying its moral right to inflict its articles of faith on others.  The no-sayers on Sky stand by their trademarks of leering, sneering, and jeering, while handing out coat-hangers.  Mr Bolt says his side is being bullied by the Left.  This is all very sad, because it debases sound secular dogma – that we are all equal under the law.

There is a debate, too, about the spate of hurricanes in the U S.  They appear, to put it softly, to be influenced by an increase in sea temperatures.  But that won’t wash with Mr Trump or his supporters.  This is not so much dogmatism as intellectual blindness induced by tribalism.  If the supporters of Mr Trump share his world view, truth simply doesn’t matter.  Others can prove what they like; they just solemnly keep the faith.  To that extent, the marriage equality and climate change debates have something in common.

There has been a curious failure of dogmatism in Texas, the throne room of capitalism.  People there are compelled by law to insure against flooding through a government body.  That sounds like the ‘socialism’ involved in Medicare, the Antichrist of Ted Cruz and other Republican senators.

But some Republican Senators have stayed true to their dogma.  Some actually voted against government relief to victims of the weather.  There has always been a curious reluctance to legislate for the welfare of the citizens of the United States.  Section 8 of the U S constitution may therefore come as a surprise to many Europeans and Australians.  It provides:  ‘The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises to pay the Debts and to provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.’  The anti-Welfare dogmatism of Republican welfare-deniers strikes not just at sense but decency.

Finally, we have our Prime Minister invoking Stalin because someone complains of an untrue statement about the inscription on a statue, and his government denouncing the Opposition for ‘socialism’, whatever that means.  They are issuing their denunciation while they endeavour to regulate every aspect of the power, energy, and banking sectors.  And they are engaged in seeking to regulate markets and the way trading companies run their businesses because they are incapable of devising much less implementing a political program for our welfare at least on energy and the environment.  Most electors know that the failures of government on energy are driven by dogma on coal and renewable energy.  Sane people are mystified that otherwise intelligent people can get dogmatic about coal or issues of fact that can be tested by accepted empirical means.  What has faith got to do with coal?

Poet of the month: Emily Dickinson

“Houses”—so the Wise Men tell me—

“Mansions”! Mansions must be warm!

Mansions cannot let the tears in,

Mansions must exclude the storm!

“Many Mansions,” by “his Father,”

I don’t know him; snugly built!

Could the Children find the way there—

Some, would even trudge tonight!

Why history? 8 Kings

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KINGS

The English had traditions of popular councils and judgment by the people (trial by jury) going back to Anglo-Saxon times.  Their kings also reigned before the Norman Conquest in 1066.  In 1215, the barons extracted a promise from their king to rule by law.  They sought a government of laws rather than of men.  This was the Great Charter or Magna Carta.  It has many meanings, but the English said it meant that as the law made the king, the king was under the law – not above it.  This document is hugely important for the rule of law.

We saw that the Tudor King Henry VIII went to his parliament to be free of the Pope.  The seventeenth century saw a long contest for pre-eminence between the Stuart kings and their parliaments.  Parliament claimed the sole right to raise revenue.  If you control the purse strings, you are in control.  Charles I sought to raise money outside parliament.  This led to Civil War, the execution of the king, in 1649, and to the rise and dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell.

But England was not ready for a parliamentary republic, especially one led by bigoted Puritans who wanted to shut down pubs.  There was accordingly a peaceful restoration of the Stuart monarchy. But the Stuarts never learned.  James II picked fights with his parliaments – this time over religion.  James was Catholic and he wanted to share the love.  This led to the Glorious Revolution.  The Dutch intervened and installed William of Orange as king and his wife, a daughter of James II, as queen.  The English stitched their new monarchy up under terms of a service agreement like that entered into by a CEO of a public company.  This was the Bill of Rights of 1689, which still forms part of the law of the State of Victoria.  It settled the issue between the Crown and parliament in favour of the parliament.  It is still the basis of England’s parliamentary monarchy.  A few years later the parliament granted life tenure to the judges, and the platform of the English constitution was securely in place.

What did this platform stand on?  It stood on a body of case or judge made law going back to the time of Magna Carta.  If you wanted the court to intervene you had to persuade the court to command your adversary to appear before it.  This command was called a writ.  You had to persuade the court that the facts that you alleged came within the record of a prior intervention by the court.  In other words, you had to find a precedent. These arguments about writs are the start of the judge made law that came to be called the common law.  It is difficult to overstate the importance of this development, for it was the common law that eventually would underlie the whole English constitution.  Why?  Because the judges acknowledged that parliament was supreme, and could override the common law.

The development of a strong legal profession and judiciary was essential for the history of England as we know it.  First it challenged the intellectual monopoly of the church.  Then it gave backing to the process and statutes of the parliament.  The Inns of Court that made up the bar became a kind of finishing school for the ruling class.  They supplied king breakers from hell to bring the Stuarts to heel.  Most importantly, they resisted applying Roman law.  All these factors made England very different to Europe.  The English look to go by trial and error, and rationalise it later if they must.  Europeans like to work out a theory and seek to apply it. It’s the empirical against the rationalist approach.  One gives us the common law.  The other gives us the Code Napoléon.  They are as alike as Venus and Mars, as Europe is out finding again.

In France, the divine right of kings went unchallenged.  Louis XIV had far more power than any English king, but he moved his court to Versailles.  The Holy Roman Empire spread over much of Europe as the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Its emperors, the Habsburgs at Vienna, also enjoyed supreme power.  So did the Russian Tsars – more so.  Peter the Great tried to move from their Asian past by building St Petersburg and moving his capital there from the Kremlin.

The Church presided over the divvying up of South America by Portugal and Spain.  The Dutch, a powerful trading nation, went into Africa and Indonesia.  Christian Europe traded in slaves from Africa.

Philosophy found new life after Descartes, and it was applied. Authority came to be questioned by people like Voltaire.  The geniuses of Spinoza and Kant sought to build a whole world view, including a complete code of ethics, independently of religion.  Both were reproached.  Rousseau got starry eyed about the social contract and the dream of a noble savage.  This would be called the Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment.  Science was respected, and medicine would become respectable.  The classical European sensibility reached its peak with Mozart.  Beethoven struck out on a brave new course.  This was what would be called the Romantic Movement. Little of this mattered to most people who had little power, wealth or knowledge.

English Puritans settled North America.  There they were the majority, and it showed. Through a trading company, the English displaced the Moguls of India.  Russian Cossacks spread east so that Russia reached the Pacific.  Captain Cook opened up the whole Pacific, and the English could empty their jails on the vastness of Australia.  White settlers would start to rob and kill Stone Age people who had been there for a period about 200 times that of white settlement since.

Passing Bull 119 – Two pieces in the AFR compared

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In last Friday’s AFR Laura Tingle, in my view the preeminent political journalist in the country, and John Roskam had pieces on facing pages that had as much in common as clotted cream and Chateau Yquem.  They give insight into the failure of our politicians.

Laura Tingle reports on items in the news and then offers this inference to be drawn from those facts.

Yet increasingly, what is occupying federal politics is the need for the government to step in and correct market failures, or even just the impact of sheer market greed. In other words, the business community has brought any such ‘reregulation’ on its own head.

Apparently unsatisfied with enjoying one of the longest runs of the highest profit shares of GDP in the post-war period, the government’s sense of obligation to act in the financial and energy markets reflects efforts to stop profit gouging in oligopolistic markets that are a testament to the limits of, or policy failures, of deregulation.

If you compare the performance of ASX sectors against similar international indices, it is instructive that the utilities, finance and energy sectors in Australia – all oligopolistic in nature – wildly outperform global figures.

Equally, if you look at indices covering information technology, consumer staples and discretionary spending, and the industrial sector, the performances reflect an underwhelmingly poor comparison, which raises questions about the calibre of our business leaders…..

My colleague Phil Coorey reported earlier this week that the banking industry had noted that the weight of regulation and taxes imposed on banks over the past 18 months was costing shareholders of the big four almost one-quarter of their returns…..

But most of the other imposts complained of by our banking insiders are responses to actual or looming market failures by the banks themselves. And that’s what governments ultimately should be there to correct or address…..

Lose the moral high ground and you soon start to lose all the arguments – something the business community is increasingly finding to its cost.

This is an engaging analysis of what is going wrong for our political and business leaders.  We need this because people have lost faith in all of them and the old labels and dogma are useless.

By contrast, John Roskam begins with a sententious trombone blast of his tribal allegiance.

The refusal to celebrate Australia Day by a handful out of the more than 500 local councils nationwide represents more than just another example of political correctness run amok.

Once you see that weasel term ‘political correctness’, you know that it’s just a matter of time before you will see ‘political’ or ‘media elites’ (or ‘class’) and ‘populism’.  And sure enough, out they pop.  Those labels are worse than useless.  They are bolt-holes for the intellectually lazy.  Mr Roskam may be aware of this because he refers to some brand new labels invented by a former director of an English ‘centre-left think tank’ – ‘Anywheres and Everywheres’.

Most Anywheres are comfortable with immigration, European integration and the spread of human rights legislation, all of which tend to dilute the claims of national citizenship.

Anywheres are likely to be highly educated with professional jobs who have a commitment to notions of mobility and novelty and who place less emphasis on ‘identity, tradition and national social contracts [faith, flag and family]’.

Somewheres are more rooted and usually have ‘ascribed’ identities – Scottish farmer, working-class Geordie, Cornish housewife – based on group belonging and particular places, which is why they often find rapid change more unsettling.

A ‘populist’ backlash against ‘elites’ was inevitable. In a democracy it is unsustainable for the interests of the Somewheres to be ignored as they’ve been. Goodhart has a nice summation of populism: ‘If there is a single idea that unites almost all variants it is that the interests of the virtuous, decent people and corrupt, liberal elites are fundamentally opposed.’

What is the point of any of all this abstraction and labelling?  As if to acknowledge the problem, Mr Roskam quotes his source as saying that three bodies have a common emotionless analytical style – ‘corporations, think tanks, consulting firms’.  What nonsense.

Well, Messrs. Roskam and Goodhart remind us with their nice summation of what a weasel word ‘populism’ is.  We might wonder at the differences between ‘decent people’ and ‘liberal elites’, whoever might wash up under those brollies, but it is hardly surprising if there is some opposition between the ‘virtuous’ and the ‘corrupt’- presumably, the good guys and the bad guys, the white hats and the black hats.  And the whole house of cards wobbles over a myth.  This is soul-stirring bullshit.

(It is interesting to learn that some people still use the word ‘virtuous’, although we may be forgiven for doubting if many followers of Hanson, Farage or Trump are addicted to it.  Robespierre, the ultimate terrorist, was very fond of the word ‘virtue’, and that was part of the reason that he lost his head.)

As best as I can follow Mr Roskam’s drift, it is that because the natives are restless, we should lower our sights and our standards.  That seems to me to be the very problem that afflicts both our political and business worlds, so I’m unsure if that is what Mr Roskam had in mind.

Poet of the month: Emily Dickinson

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—

And sore must be the storm—

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm—

I’ve heard it in the chillest land—

And on the strangest Sea—

Yet, never, in Extremity,

It asked a crumb—of Me.

Why history? 7 – Rebirth

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At the end of the epoch called the Middle Ages, Europe could have succumbed to the Muslims or the Mongols. It did not.  From the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it went through a period of rebirth (Renaissance) and reformation that for better or worse led Europe to dominate the world.

Medieval thought was closed and religious.  St Augustine and St Aquinas built huge theories on Greek philosophy that had nothing to do with the Sermon on the Mount.  The ancient learning was kept alive in Arab universities and Christian monasteries.  Some religious leaders began to assert rights of the people.  People got more interested in this world than the next.  They sought to live in hope rather than fear.  Paper had been developed in China and by the Arabs and its arrival in Europe, together with that of printing, led to explosions of knowledge.

Copernicus said that the earth moved around the sun.  Galileo proved it.  He destroyed doctrine by observation and experiment.  The world was no longer the centre of the universe.  The Church made Galileo retract.  Some say he said e pur si muove.  In the seventeenth century, the genius of Newton set out the bases of modern physics.

The artistic and scientific rebirth started in large European towns, principally Florence, Venice and Rome. The Medici were vicious and corrupt, but they were patrons of the arts.  Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Raphael revived classical forms and gave the world masterpieces it still marvels at.  Their work would be carried on by artists like Titian and Durer and, much later, Turner. The Divine Comedy of Dante and the remarkably bourgeois Canterbury Tales of Chaucer had ensured that great writing would survive.  Writers like Montaigne and Rabelais created new forms.  Machiavelli wrote of realpolitik.  In Don Quixote, Cervantes gave the world its first novel.  Many think that it is still the best.  No one will ever get near Shakespeare.  The break from narrow ways of thinking dominated by the Church led to claims for human rights summed up under the word ‘humanism’.

As well as being intellectually closed, the Church was hopelessly corrupt and unfaithful to the life and teaching of the son of the carpenter.  Many popes behaved more like princes than priests.  The Renaissance popes were shockingly degenerate.  The Church sold religious rites.  Five hundred years ago this year (2017) a German priest announced his protest against sales meant to fund a rebuilding of St Peter’s.  His protest would split the Church, and his movement would be called the Protestant Church.  Their aim was to go back to the bible and let people go to God without the intervention of a priest.

This reform movement in Europe was religious or spiritual.  In England it was entirely political.  Henry VIII needed a divorce to secure the succession – the first duty of a king.  The Pope could not agree – he had a conflict of interest involving the Holy Roman Empire.  England therefore broke with Rome.  It did so by acts of its parliament, one of which said ‘this realm is an empire.’  This course strengthened the parliament and guaranteed independence to England.

As with most reactions, there was a lot of nastiness.  Luther said too much, and he could be quoted to support actions against the Jews and the peasants.  The Germans were the wrong people to be told to keep religion out of politics.  The cold blooded Swiss Calvin spoke of predestination.  At least Luther was human.  Churches were defaced by Protestant fanatics.  The English locked in the gentry by giving them the confiscated monasteries.  But Macaulay said that only the French Revolution could be compared to the Reformation.  Each was ‘a revolt of reason against Caste.’

Geographic horizons broadened as much as the artistic and intellectual.  Portuguese sailors rounded the horn of Africa, and in 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed to America.  Then Magellan sailed around the world.  Spain took the Cross and the sword to the natives in the Americas in search of gold.  Cortez found and looted the Aztecs.  Pizarro found and looted the Incas.  Wherever they went, the Europeans treated the first inhabitants as savages.  This did nothing to alleviate the superiority complex they felt over people less advanced or less fortunate than themselves.  And as often as not, they thought that their superiority was a gift from God.

Here and there – Two Nationalists Compared

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But of course there are vast differences between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump.  Hitler came to power with brownshirts and only the semblance of legality.  He trashed the constitution and put his secret police in black shirts.  He set out to rule the world and to murder a race.  He betrayed his nation and left it a smoking rubble.  Trump will do no such things.  But the two men still have a lot in common.

Both call themselves ‘nationalists’.  This celebration of the home team leads to a perverted kind of ‘patriotism’ and to nativism – a preference for home grown people over imports.  This is a curious result in a migrant nation.  It leads to conflict and division at home and a loss of respect abroad.

Few educated people in the West call themselves ‘nationalists’.  Those who have failed in life grab their nationalism with both hands.  If they have nothing else, they have their birth certificate.  They must resist their prize asset being soiled by others – like Muslims, or migrants, or refugees.  The losers among us also need to have someone to look down upon.

They want war with those they call the ‘elite’.  That weasel term here means those who have won life’s glittering prizes of wealth and power.  Since it’s the losers against the winners, we should not be surprised if the results aren’t pretty.  There is not much point in talking about ‘populism’.  That’s just a loose label for what follows.

Both leaders came to power on the back of the failure of the international economic order.  For Hitler, it was the Crash of 1929 and the Depression.  For Trump it was the Great Financial Crisis.  Both events undermined confidence in the status quo and created a giant reservoir of hurt below and vulnerability above.

Both leaders appealed to their people who had been most hurt by these world events.  Creating a sense of massive injustice was simple.  The world system hadn’t just failed – it was rotten and evil.

And with this sense of injustice came self-righteousness.  The mob looked like the sans–culottes in Paris in 1793.  They had lost out because of the crimes of others, and they were in no mood to leave vengeance to God.

Both leaders promised their followers that they would utterly cast out the old order.  They would cleanse the stables and restore the nation to the glory of a largely imaginary past.

Their thinking on how they might do this is equally obscure.  Mein Kampf says that Hitler stood for nationalism, hate, and the destruction of the Jews.  There is little else left in these ravings.  Trump doesn’t stand for anything at all.  His self-love is so consuming that there’s no room for any logical policy.

Trump will do or say anything to get power.  That’s all that matters.  A ‘policy’ could only stand in his way.  He and his followers are destroyers not builders.  It’s not what they’re for that matters, it’s what they’re against. 

Both leaders don’t just disregard truth – they look with contempt on those who respect it.  Their followers happily join them in their own world.  The assembly looks like a religious cult with its own language, rites and values, all taken on faith alone.

Trump is not out to trash the Constitution, but he shamelessly shows his ignorance of the rule of law – and his disdain of it.  He routinely scorns the judiciary and Congress.  He has now pardoned a government officer found guilty of contempt for abusing the constitutional rights of others.  This crook routinely sneered at racially different people.  He looks like a true fascist.  Trump likes him, and rewards him.  The world looks on at the old spectre of that frontier love of violence and lawlessness.

Trump stands for all that others fear in America, but he puts more value on throwing a scrap of meat to his crowd than on his sworn task of maintaining the constitution.  In this he resembles Nero and the circus, or Pontius Pilate and Barabbas.  Of one thing we may be sure – neither God nor the oath means anything to Trump.  His ego leaves no room for either.

Trump, too, seeks to rule in part by force and fear. He showed his powers of intimidation in a shameful episode – the self-abasement of his ministers at that first North Korean styled cabinet meeting.  People outside the U S again looked on in horror.  This happened in a nation that had given the world Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.

Both leaders can turn viciously on people they think have let them down, including bunnies who have been loyal to them.  But Hitler maintained his key supporters for twelve years.  Trump has discarded most of his in eight months.  The one thing you mustn’t do with Trump is to hug the spotlight.

Both leaders brought their own scapegoats.  Hitler had the Jews and the banks.  Trump has Muslims, migrants, international trade, and that hold-all of the politically inane – ‘political correctness’.  Neither leader ever said ‘sorry’ in his life, and because neither can do any wrong, each finds scapegoats to cover for his mistakes.

They both know about propaganda.  The American Constitution and press make the Goebbels model unavailable in the U S.  Trump simply brands any statement he doesn’t like as ‘fake news’.  That’s enough for the faithful.  Why interrupt the dream?  And Trump has something Goebbels didn’t – the fantastic reach of Twitter.

Both leaders had trouble with ratbags at the bottom of their base.  Hitler murdered a lot of his in the Night of the Long Knives.  Trump does not have that option.  Hitler was in a murderous class of his own on race, but America has entered a new dark age on the world stage when Trump reneged on his denial of his dregs.

Americans now have to live with the nightmare that they have elected a president who cannot unequivocally repudiate his Nazi and KKK supporters.  Trump sees ‘very fine people’ among them.  They in turn are jubilant and very grateful to their president.  Has America ever stood so low in the world – even during the agony of Nixon and Watergate?

Both leaders seek a kind of religious aura.  They demand that their followers give them faith.  This notion of faith is vital.  The followers must have faith to withstand all opposition.  It also helps them reject any evidence against the leader.  Visceral politics lives on faith.  It’s something that you pledge in your guts.  It is by definition irrational.  People like Hitler or Trump can’t bear rational analysis.

Both leaders also put great value on personal loyalty.  That is what cost the Wehrmacht so dearly with Hitler.  The generals had sold their soul, and given up their selves.

Both leaders are at their happiest when they are ranting to their adoring ‘base’.  Whether either believes any part of their rant is a matter for conjecture or God.  Some independent observers saw glimpses of Germany in 1933 in Trump at Phoenix.  Trump there looked like he may have studied the Führer.  You get someone to work the crowd and then come on – and stand silent.  Hitler would let the tension build, like a guileful lover.  But he was much better at modulating his pace than Trump.

Hitler was a lot more astute than Trump.  Trump just can’t help himself when the spots go on him.  He soaks up the applause while clapping himself, like a spoiled child being commended over nothing.  If only it could last forever, and if only he didn’t have to face Congress, judges, and journalists – or the facts.  At least Hitler knew what the word ‘leader’ entails; Trump has no idea.

Both Hitler and Trump did all they could to warn the whole world of their unfitness for office, but their bond with the faithful is unbreakable.  It derives from an unsettling communion between people who are desperate in different ways.  The leaders are desperate for power, and they will say and do anything to get it.  The faithful are desperate for vengeance, and they will give up almost anything to get a leader who can deliver it.  What you then get is a kind of Faustian pact, where people on both sides burn their bridges.

The upshot is that the followers cannot believe that their chosen champion could betray them.  Their leader can do no wrong.  They have surrendered the right to say otherwise.  The Germans believed this to the end, even when it should have been obvious that Hitler was betraying them.

With his health care and tax policies, Trump has signalled that he will betray his followers.  He will strip them of benefits to give tax cuts to his promoters.  But the mob doesn’t see this.  They don’t want to see it.  They have to believe that their ‘redeemer liveth’.

What, then, do we have?  President Obama is a man of intellect and integrity.  Trump has neither.  Obama gave the nation health care and sought to extricate it from Afghanistan.  Trump promised to repeal health care and to get out of Afghanistan.  He has broken both promises.  He has now committed his country to an indefinite participation in a war it cannot win – in a world that no longer respects America.  Was ever a nation’s fall from grace so swift and so complete?

There is one more difference between Hitler and Trump.  Hitler fought for Germany through the worst war the world has seen.  He was rejected for command, but there was no doubting his courage under fire.  He was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class.

There was never any risk of Trump taking up arms for his country.  That was as likely as his paying his fair share of taxes.  The suggestion that Donald George Trump may be a true American patriot is just another hideous untruth in a life made up of moonshine.  The permanently spoiled brat called Donald Trump is a disaster for America and the world.

Passing bull 118 – Bull about the Commonwealth Bank

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The following letter was published in the AFR.

Dear Editor

We discuss CBA in a legal vacuum.  The law says the business of a company is to be managed by or under the direction of its directors.  We talk as if the CEO is responsible for managing the business.  That’s wrong.  The board might delegate some powers – it cannot devolve its responsibility.

If the directors are truly responsible for failures of management of CBA, they should resign.  But our business community lost that moral fibre two generations ago.  And because our discussion is premised on a legal fallacy, the board is allowed to pass the buck to the CEO.  That’s as satisfying morally or intellectually as a footy club firing its coach because of the weakness of the team.

But still, no one goes.  Executives lose bonuses – north of a million each.  But given executive pay levels, this will hurt executives less than a speeding fine would hurt me.  And a fine that is ten times the pay of high school teachers will be defended by those who say there is no problem of inequality of income.

So, we have a shot-duck government that no one believes, and a business community that is spineless at the top, corrupt in the middle, and bitterly deprived and discontented at the bottom.  That’s just the cocktail that gave us Farage, Hanson, and Trump.

It also makes the case for a full inquiry into our banks unanswerable – if only to educate company directors.

Yours truly,

Geoffrey Gibson

The following piece was published, with some amendments, in The Guardian.

Koalas at the tills

If I drive above the speed limit, I may be fined.  I may lose my licence, and therefore my job.  If I kill someone while speeding, I’m liable to go to jail.  In weasel terms, I’m ‘accountable’ or ‘responsible’ for my driving.  The CBA mess raises this question: are its directors legally responsible for that mess?

We talk in a legal vacuum.  The law says that a company’s business is to be managed by or under the direction of its directors – but we talk as if the CEO is responsible instead.  That’s wrong.  Directors can delegate powers – they cannot devolve responsibility.  The CEO is responsible to the board; the board is responsible to shareholders. But armed with a legal fallacy, the directors try to duck for cover.

The banks say their problems are ‘cultural’ and the law can’t fix cultures.  What nonsense!  What if there is a ‘culture’ of greed driven by remuneration schemes put there by the board?  What if a macho culture drives men to intimidate women?  Is the law then powerless?

No, the directors of CBA are responsible for all this mess – and here it’s strike three.  Two generations ago, directors would have been pushed to resign.  But that was when bank managers mowed their nature-strips with Qualcasts on Sunday arvos.  Now we do not respect the City, and it’s left to the regulator to tap the directors’ sense of decency.  Their licences may not be presently at risk, but might not a court rule on their legal responsibility?

The directors relied on management.  In court, they would have to show they made independent assessments of the executives’ advice.  This law is hard.  How many of the CBA directors knew enough about banking to assess independently what their whizz kids were saying?  Did the directors reasonably believe that their powers were always being properly exercised?

Here is the Volkswagen dilemma.  Either the directors knew what was going on or they didn’t.  The malefactors were either working under the directors’ direction or they weren’t.  Which is worse?  If the government was telling CBA that something was wrong, can the directors now say that they thought everything was OK?  Weren’t they at least put on inquiry?  Win, lose, or draw, should we not spend some taxes putting these directors in the witness box so that they can explain to us Australians just what they do for their money?  And as for winning – well, it’s curious, but the banks don’t often win in court.

If you watch The Big Short at the cinema, you will hear groans of resignation at the end – nothing happened to the crooks.  Big corporates never get to face our criminal justice system.  Two teams of ineffably urbane lawyers stitch together an evasive dissemblance of regret – apologies are so demeaning; the corporate pays an agreed sum to government, which would otherwise be called a bribe; the shareholders take the hit; and the executives collect their bonuses and move on to the next fatted calf.

We learned long ago that power corrupts.  We are now learning that wealth – itself a form of power – is even more corrupting.  Have those at CBA been allowed to get away with all their wrongs because so much money slushes around that no one will mind the odd little leak?  Is it possible to imagine a more corrupting sentiment in a bank?

So far as we know, no one has yet gone from CBA.  Some executives have lost bonuses north of a million dollars.  That’s more than ten times what we pay high school teachers.  That will have hurt them less than a speeding fine hurts me – and their ticket hasn’t been at risk.

Very few directors went to jail over the GFC.  We protect them like we protect koala bears.  Company directors’ status appears to put them outside the law.  This apparent privilege deeply upsets the punters.  Our criminal justice system really works over those at the bottom – but we don’t lay a finger on those on high.  Are these koalas, then, untouchable?  More invulnerable even than cardinals?

This class difference is very cancerous.  We should all have the same legal rights.  But, then, this company pays its CEO more than 100 times what it pays its tellers.  Do you see why inequality – in both money and status – is such a loaded word now?

So, we have a PM reduced to a grinning buffoon; a government that gets everything wrong by either instinct or tradition, and that just ignores us; and a business world that is indolent and protected at the top, greedy and corrupted in the middle, and deprived and angry down below.  Those are precisely the forces that generate a sense of caste and that gave us Farage, Hanson, and Trump.

They also make the case for a full inquiry into our banks unanswerable.

Warren Buffett manages differently.  A scandal at American Express left subsidiaries owing $60 million.  Should the parent voluntarily honour those debts?   Buffett said their business depended on trust.  We hear that truism a lot now, but Buffett paid the debts to set ‘standards of financial integrity and responsibility which are far beyond those of the normal commercial enterprise.’  For Buffett, it was not enough just to comply with the law; the CBA can’t even manage that.

And what happened to the good old bank set up to guard our common wealth?

Poet of the month: Walt Whitman

A Child Said, What Is The Grass?

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,

Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,

It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;

It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mother’s laps, And here you are the mother’s laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,

Darker than the colorless beards of old men,

Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!

And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,

And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

What do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;

The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,

And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Why history? 6

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6

INTERLUDE: CIVILISATION?

The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are fundamental to what we call ‘western civilisation’.  The Greeks knew none of it.  Nor did Rome until it was too late.  Ancient religion was not about love.  As a result, the ancients look to us to be hard-hearted, to be missing something.  Aristotle said that ‘it would be strange if one were to say that he loved Zeus’.  It would truly have been madness – for a Greek or a Roman.

The Greeks did not see mankind as sinners requiring redemption; nor did they see people trying to behave according to their conscience.  Divine favour was won through ritual, by paying formal cult. The most important form of cult was the sacrifice, and the most important of those was the blood sacrifice.  (Our word ‘sacrifice’ comes from two Latin words meaning ‘make holy’.)

In imperial Rome, the poet Juvenal said that ‘the public has long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestowed … all else, now… longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses.’  In one show put on by Claudius, 19,000 condemned prisoners manned ships for a staged naval battle.  They saluted Claudius: ‘Hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you.’ The audience got a say in whether the loser lived or died.  The defeated would then kneel with his hands behind his back or clasping the legs of the victor and ‘take the iron’ when the crowd would yell ‘he has it!’ It sounds rather like a bull-fight. Christians were thrown to the lions out of fear – that the local gods may have been offended and might retaliate. In the less vicious republic, a rebellion of slaves was answered by crucifying 6000 of them on the Appian Way.

Ancient Greece and Rome were by our standards barbaric. Barbarism is the reverse of civilisation. Their constitutional structures were also hopelessly  uncivilised.  The inability of Greek city-states to live with each other led to their demise.  The Romans never developed a decent policy for succession for their rulers. As a result, very few died in their bed.  The Empire was run in the way that the SS would have run the Reich after Hitler.

Why then do people say that the ancients or, for that matter, the medieval world, were civilised?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘civilize’ as ‘to make civil; to bring out of a state of barbarism, to instruct in the arts of life; to enlighten and refine’.  People who extol ancient Greece and Rome as ‘civilised’ presumably use the word in this final sense.  They see ‘enlightenment’ and ‘refinement’ as being enough to outweigh the barbarity of slavery, empire and their unholy religions.  They see civilisation even though neither Greece nor Rome had then been blessed with the respect for the dignity of each human life which is elemental to our concept of ‘civilisation’.  Unlike Hamlet, the ancients had not heard the beautiful notion ‘that there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.’  They could not have understood Hamlet’s agony about ordained revenge.

In his book, Civilisation, Kenneth Clark said that he didn’t know what ‘civilisation’ was.  He then compared a tribal African mask to a sculpture of the Apollo of the Belvedere of the 4th century BC.  He said ‘I don’t think that there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilisation from the mask’.  He acknowledged that ‘there was plenty of superstition and cruelty in the Graeco-Roman world’ but said that mankind had at times sought to ‘approach as nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection – reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium’.  There are at least three issues here. 

First, most people could not give a hoot about and do not appreciate the kinds of ‘enlightenment’ or ‘refinement’ referred to; indeed, most people in a pub would have as much trouble in following what Clark was saying as I do.

Next the relative terms are in any event very variable.  If I were choosing art for my home or place of work, I would much prefer the African mask to the Apollo; but, then, I like aboriginal art, which would have been foreign to Clark, and pop art, which would have appalled him.  The fact that the Apollo is a ludicrously idealised and stylised portrait of a vain pagan god that Napoleon looted from the Vatican does not add to its charms.

And, finally, it is not much good having a refined ear for Mozart’s Requiem if you can be murdered in your bed, or your having a Ph D for analysing the downward smile of the Mona Lisa if you can be raped or cast into prison forever on the mere say so of a prince or a bishop – or if you just cannot get enough food or water to live.

So, it’s time for the Oxbridge myth of the civilisation of Greece and Rome to be put to sleep forever.  Nor do I think this picture changed much during what we call the Middle Ages – but in my view we then reach a stage in our journey where we can see the beginning of what we call civilisation.

Here and there – Entertaining migrants

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Some of us are old enough to remember just how cold and drab this dump was until we were blessed with waves of European and then Asian and African migrants that helped to break the choker hold of Saxons and Celts.  Arthur Boyd, A Life, by Darleen Bungey deals with some of the first wave.  The names are familiar to the art community, but their vibrant contributions to our national life deserve wider notice.

Yosl Bergner was a Jewish refugee from Warsaw.  His father had implored Polish Jews to quit Europe.  He had come to Australia looking for land for a Jewish settlement.  For that purpose, he explored the Kimberley with a young blackfella and a white truck driver.  It wasn’t the heat, or the wet, or the remoteness that put him off – the author tells us that he couldn’t imagine the new Zion with so many flies.  When Yosl got here, just in time, he did so with firsthand knowledge of the great art of Europe.  He quickly befriended Arthur Boyd and declared that most of Arthur’s work was rubbish.  This was new for Arthur.  He thought that Yosl, who scavenged the discarded vegetables at Victoria Market, was ‘a very forward bloke.’  Yosl described himself as ‘a Jew with a complex’ who saw anti-Semitism all around him.  He traded in his bike for three tubes of paint, but unlike the native artists, he didn’t like the bush.  Arthur looked at Yosl – who would surely have been at home in Catch 22 – as his first contact with Bohemia.  (He was I think yet to meet the Reeds and their set.)  It may have gone both ways.  I didn’t know this, but some hookers in Melbourne then used cigarette shops as fronts.  Yosl stepped into one – but he didn’t like what he saw.  So he asked for a packet of cigarettes!  That’s when Yosl learned the local terms of trade.  ‘First pay, then fuck, then buy cigarettes.’  To his enduring credit, Yosl complied.  He believed that ‘prostitutes have their professional pride and self-respect and you don’t have to hurt their feelings.’  What a noble expression of tolerance!   Could this perhaps be a true Australian value?

Stanislav Halpern was known as Stacha.  The author says this:

Halpern’s pottery describes Halpern: earthy, solid, with an alluring overlay of vivid decoration, applied with great eagerness and speed.  He was a Jewish-Polish refugee who spoke broken English through the side of a twisted mouth that usually sprouted a cigarette.  He was a blower of kisses, an embracer of life.  Stacha Halpern and Arthur became great friends.  They shared characteristics, such as shortness of body and strength of arms, and both worked with robust physicality.  Neither cared a jot about convention.  Both wore their hair long and both were amused at the abuse thrown one night from a passing car: ‘Get off the road, you poofters!’

There’s something inalienably homely about that story.

Danila Vassilieff hit town like a typhoon.  He was a Cossack peasant who had fought on the Eastern Front in the Great War and had become a Colonel in the October Revolution.  He was captured by the Bolsheviks, but he escaped to live with nomadic Tartars in Azerbaijan and Persia.  He travelled through India, Burma, Manchuria, and Shanghai.  This man of the world had an overpowering personality.  He was a ‘history-laden’ figure.  He helped build a railway line at Katherine, and he took up banana and sugar-cane growing before painting.  The Medici at Heidi (the Reeds) took him in for his ‘curious splendour’ and his expression of the ‘pathos and loneliness, the violence and tragedy’ of the human condition.  Nolan thought it was the man rather than his art that carried the whack.

Karel Zoubek was a gifted Czech musician.  He had been a soloist at both German and Italian embassies.  He was detained in Tehran and transported to Iraq.  From there he was deported to Australia.  There he was interned.  He got out in 1945.  His wife left him ‘after he beat her with hands he had declared too sensitive for manual labour.’  He was fined two pounds, but served seven days instead.  He entertained the inmates with violin solos.  He was a small man who had one other flaw.  He was a pathological pants man.  He just couldn’t help himself.  He propositioned every woman in the Boyd family.  He said ‘I am eunuch.’  This puzzled the ladies – until they realised he was saying ‘I am unique.’  Boyd’s wife answered the proposition with a flying tomato, but Boyd’s mum, Doris, fell for him.  This was too much even for the peace-loving Arthur.  He convinced the family that they should get Zoubek committed.  They got him before a shrink.  The meeting, the author tells us, went well – too well.  Zoubek sounded OK.  But just as the interview was ending, Zoubek lent across the table and gave the shrink the benefit of his mind: ‘The trouble with you is you fuck too much.’  Well, that bloody did it!  As he was bundled into a cab, Zoubek realised what the game was.  ‘Some party.  I’m surprised at you.’  The men in white coats were in the car behind.  Zoubek was sandwiched between Arthur and another in the back seat.  John Perceval was in the front in the death seat.  This was Arthur showing his cold side – but, in the name of heaven, this dude looked like he was having it off with Mum!  Later, Arthur painted Zoubek with mad fierce eyes – ‘he’d hypnotise you with his absolute madness.’  Some may have felt something like that while looking at the paintings Boyd and Nolan were painting around then.

Well, that’s how the land of the long week-end and six o’clock closing under an English monarch got some exposure to Europe.  This was about a generation before Victoria banned Playboy and some idiot proposed an entertainment tax on contraceptives.  God only knows what the matrons of Balwyn or Brighton may have made of these four migrants.  But the more important question is: would our government let any of them in now?  As best as I can see, they all arrived by boat, and their English may have been as doubtful as their manners – or their religion.

Passing Bull 117 – The ungenerous generalities of the IPA

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Followers of the IPA are different to most Australians.  The IPA team revels in generalities, abstractions, dogma, and philosophy.  Most Australians are too sensible to take any notice of that sort of ideological stuff.  Our disinclination is, frankly, one of our pluses.  It was therefore a little surprising to see Mr Roskam of the IPA publish the piece below in the AFR this morning.  Mr Roskam there acknowledges why most Australians cannot be bothered with this sort of generalised political philosophy, but he then goes on to make the observations in the three other passages that I have underlined.  In doing so, he resets his own very high bar for bullshit.

After this country’s politicians eventually work out who is and isn’t entitled to sit in Parliament, hopefully they’ll turn their attention back to more important things – like the plebiscite on same sex marriage.

Despite the seemingly endless discussion about the issue and the cry from advocates for change for politicians to “just do it because it’s popular”, there’s been remarkably little public debate about the consequences if a majority of people vote “Yes” to change the legal definition of marriage.

Partly this is because both supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage are for the moment arguing about the technicalities of what marriage is, and partly it’s because Australians take a narrow and utilitarian view of human rights and are reluctant to engage in philosophical arguments – unlike in the United States.

The debates around the free press and the Gillard government’s attempt in 2013 to regulate the media, and now the ongoing controversy about the appropriateness of legislation which makes it unlawful to offend someone on the basis of their race reveal that in Australia when it comes to fundamental issues of principle, there’s a tendency to pick a partisan side first and invent a rationalisation for it second.

In the wake of a “Yes” vote, how we talk about same-sex marriage and how we’re allowed by the government to talk about it, is part of a much larger conversation about how Australians talk about questions of sexuality, gender, race, and politics. Gradually the bounds of what by law we can and can’t say about these things are being limited, and at this stage there’s certainly the potential for the legalisation of same-sex marriage to reduce our freedoms rather than extend them.

The question to be asked in the plebiscite: “Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?” is at best disingenuous – and at worst dishonest. The answer that many reasonable people would give is – “it depends”.  It’s completely consistent for someone to believe that two people who love each other should be able to get married, while at the same time also believing that those who publicly state that marriage can only ever be between a man and a woman should not be guilty of breaking the law for expressing such an opinion.

If the plebiscite passes, whether it will in fact be unlawful for say a Christian or Muslim school to teach the “traditional” view of marriage is unknown – as yet no politician has wanted to answer. The question is not hypothetical.  Last year the Catholic Archbishop of Hobart was alleged to have breached Tasmania’s anti-discrimination laws for distributing a brochure saying marriage was between a man and a woman.

It’s surprising the “conservatives” in the Coalition who were so eager to have a popular vote on same-sex marriage did not demand that the public should vote on the actual legislation implementing same-sex marriage. The result of a “Yes/No” plebiscite on same-sex marriage is as meaningless as that from Labor’s own proposed plebiscite on Australia becoming a republic.

Same-sex marriage is often presented as a matter of personal freedom. But freedom cuts both ways. At the moment anyone is free – without threat of legal sanction – to describe traditional marriage as a product of the capitalist patriarchy that enslaves women. In fact that’s exactly how marriage is labelled in more than a few critical theory classes at universities across the country. The advocates of a “Yes” vote in the plebiscite would increase their chances of success if they reassured the public that should the law be changed, same-sex marriage could be talked about in exactly the same way as is traditional marriage.

Marriage is more than a legal construct, it’s a cultural and social institution and it’s entirely appropriate the community should have a say on its future.  But it should be a real consultation about the specifics.  It’s incumbent on those who want change – whether to the definition of marriage, or our head of state, or anything else so significant – to explain how the change will work in practice.

One of the lessons of history is that the habit of authoritarians is to talk in generalities.

Is Mr Roskam really afraid that when this nation does recognise same sex marriages, which is just a matter of time, the law that grants that recognition may not avoid the possible consequence that ‘those who publicly state that marriage can only ever be between a man and a woman should not be guilty of breaking the law for expressing such an opinion’?  We hold our politicians in low regard, but could they really be as bad as that?  Or is Mr Roskam just giving new meaning to the term ‘scare tactics’?  I know that members of the IPA are morally and intellectually warped by their obsession with bans upon some kinds of discriminatory speech, but must that obsession lead to this kind of logic chopping?

In truth, what I think you see here is that sad wish of those who falsely call themselves ‘conservatives’ to find ever more complicated reasons for maintaining that we must never change.  That I think is what Mr Roskam meant when he said that ‘in Australia when it comes to fundamental issues of principle, there’s a tendency to pick a partisan side first and invent a rationalisation for it second.’  That’s not just the method of the IPA – it’s the whole bloody point of its existence.  They daily go into the trenches to ensure that we remain forever frozen in the cocoon so finely woven for us by the Holy Imperial Trinity of God, the Crown, and the Church.  It’s not hard to name a team that wants to genuflect at that throne or altar.  Messrs Abbott and Roskam, and Teams Sky and Murdoch, are up there with the best of them.  And the rest of us just have to put up with the nappies.

Poet of the month: Walt Whitman

A glimpse

A glimpse, through an interstice caught,

Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room, around the stove, late of a winter night–

And I unremark’d seated in a corner; Of a youth who loves me, and whom I love, silently approaching, and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand;

A long while, amid the noises of coming and going–of drinking and oath and smutty jest,

There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.