Author: Geoffrey Gibson

Why history? 5 MEDIEVAL

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5

MEDIEVAL

If you go from about the time of the sack of Rome in 410 to about the time of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, you span a phase that we call the Middle Ages, the period that comes between what we call the ancient world and the modern world.

Rome had ruled what we call Europe and when it lost Rome’s governance, the world was a mess.  England would be settled by Danes and Germans.  The now peaceful Scandinavian peoples sent out wild raiders called Vikings.  The murderous insecurity of these dark times – that we call the Dark Ages – is pictured in epics like Beowulf and The Poetic Edda.  People looked for protection.  One person would pledge loyalty to another in return for protection.  You can see this in the Mafia in the film The Godfather.  We now call this the feudal system.  Although the relations may have begun voluntarily, the burdens and benefits were passed on from one generation to the next.   They became issues of caste – whereas our law is seen to move from status to contract, here that process was reversed. The feudal system did lead to the institution of knighthood, and romantic ideas and ideals about chivalry, courtesy, and honour. Le Morte d’Arthur is very different to Beowulf.

Europe came to be dominated by the teaching of a Jewish holy man called Jesus.  The Jews believed that they had a covenant with God and that they were his chosen people.  Jesus taught that God was open to all – his teaching was therefore Catholic.  He took up with prostitutes and lepers and got right up the noses of the local religious Establishment.  He effectively signed his own death warrant when he took to the money people in the Temple. Jesus may well have breached the local religious law, but the imperial man on the spot had him crucified on a false charge of treason in an act of judicial murder.  The followers of the man called Christ – ‘Christians’ – believed that he had risen from the dead and that following him could lead to eternal life.  The creed spread very fast, in some part because of the way the Romans persecuted his followers.

As we saw, Constantine converted, and moved the empire to the east – although the church would remain firmly seated in Rome. The priests drenched the simple teaching of Jesus in Greek philosophy.  They loved casuistry. They claimed a monopoly of knowledge.  Only they knew the mystery. They even forbade people reading the words of Jesus in their own tongue.  It has always been hard for an establishment body to cope with the teaching of a man born to blow up the establishment.  The church became hopelessly corrupt and inbred.

In 570, an Arab called Mohammed was born at Mecca.  He too believed in only one God and that he had found the only way to Him.  Mohammed thought that he crowned the teaching of Moses and Jesus.  (Muslims don’t believe in the crucifixion, much less the resurrection.)  He was a fighting prophet, and he taught that his followers would go to paradise if they died fighting for their faith.  That faith was quickly carried by the sword across the north of Africa and Europe into Spain.  The surge of Islam was first stopped there and later outside Vienna.  The Arabs developed arithmetic and made paper, and served to store the bases of Western learning.

The religions of Greece and Rome look silly to us, but since they did not claim to have the answer, they were a lot more tolerant than the three that came out of the desert in the Middle East. Three does not go into one.  The German or French ruler Charlemagne was instrumental in stopping Islam’s advance into Europe.  In 800, he revived the notion of Caesar when the pope crowned him head of the Holy Roman Empire.  This curious body would endure for a thousand years, and muddy the development of the German nation.  But the church intervened more darkly to inspire crusades against Islam.

The popes also offered paradise to those who fell for Christ.  At the start of one crusade, the Christians got into practice by slaughtering Jews.  Wars between these three faiths are still going on. They all have blood on their hands. None of those religions was good for that half of humanity called women.  The Catholic Church made a woman the Mother of God, but did little for her daughters on earth.  The doctrine of Original Sin suggested that women were the source of evil, and infected the attitude of humanity to sex for millennia.  On the plus side, the Church was instrumental in setting up universities.

Genghis Khan led the Mongol hordes out of Asia in the thirteenth century.  There was then an empire from Beijing to Russia.  This opened Europe to Asia.  Marco Polo travelled in Asia and opened Asia to Europe.  One result of the Mongol risings was a drifting bunch of refuges called gypsies.  China went through a form of rebirth, but then kept to themselves behind their wall.  At least until the time when Constantinople fell to the Turks, China looked much more advanced than the West.  Some in Islam may have felt the same, but all that was about to change.

Here and there – Playing way from home

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During the Vietnam War, the Americans forgot all the lessons that they had taught the British during the War of Independence about fighting wars on someone else’s land either for or against regime change.  Both America and Britain forgot the lot when they invaded Iraq to effect a change of regime.  The price we are all paying now is horrific.

A number of people have written books about the nature and grossness of the errors of the invaders (the most unrepentant of whom is Mr John Howard).  One of them is Occupational Hazards (2006) by Rory Stewart.  Stewart spent some time in the army before walking across Afghanistan and joining the Foreign Office.  He was one of the Englishman charged with bringing Western democracy to Iraq.  He is now a Tory MP.

As you read this book, you are torn between laughing and crying.  This note is a very anecdotal reflection upon that book.

Shortly after Stewart got to Iraq, a local told him that:

Uneducated people, tribal people, without reading and writing are now in the city…..They do not understand what is government.  Because they do not understand what is religion….Religion is about the respect for the other human being.  Each of us is created by one God.  Each of us is respected.  This is religion.  Even the Jewish religion.  But these men do not respect one another.  Things are very bad now…..We are not stupid.  We know what games your government is playing with oil and with Israel…

How could you overcome those misgivings?  They were, after all, justified.  Stewart soon lost his faith in our human quest for order.  The Iraqis insisted that only a police state could restore security.  But people back home thought Iraq could be both secure and democratic.  They thought they could get good order without secret police, brutality and torture.  They disbanded the army, sacked all senior Baathists and discussed the possibility of psychometric tests for senior officers and ‘gender-awareness workshops’. ‘We had arrived promising democracy not a warlord.’  It defies belief.

There was an ugly tribal murder. (Well, not many murders are pretty.)   One British officer spoke of the rule of law.  The answer was that:

Ninety-five policemen in my force are related [to the deceased] and they are in shock…We all know the best way to do this is through the tribal channel, and if people play fast – putting on police uniforms and taking them off, giving a few people a rough time – well that’s just how it goes.  I don’t know where you think you are living…..

There were always problems with interpreters – conscious and unconscious.  A bad example was ‘Coalition’ being translated as the ‘occupation’, ‘a word of great resonance for Arabs, conjuring the French occupation of Algeria and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.’  How did the Coalition expect the Arabs to forgive them for supporting ‘the Israeli occupation of Palestine’?  An opinion poll showed two thirds of Iraqis thought they were occupied.  How could they not?

This is how a local thanked the Coalition.

The occupying forces have proved that greed, cruelty and ambition are their guiding ideals; that insensitivity and stupidity are the only qualifications for your administrators; cowardice and pusillanimity for your soldiers; stinginess and prejudice for your development workers.  Large and small puppets on the hands of grasping fists of the elders of Zion….

Other than that, everything in the garden was rosy.

There were problems with clerics as well as with the tribes.  One cleric responded to the notion of the rule of law this way:

What matters is God, children, possessions, lives.  These things are more important than the law.  Forget the law.  God is above the law and I represent God.

Given that the rule of law in England was the product of more than a millennium, how could the English answer this invocation of God?  Well, the ‘democracy experts’ in the US were on the case.  They said Iraq was not ready. Bosnia had taught them that elections that were too early led to extreme sectarian parties.  That left the occupiers as king-makers and any model they chose was going to be controversial.  They were like blind men in a darkroom looking for a black cat that wasn’t there.

The power brokers were the sheikhs.  Stewart thought they were more ‘an irrelevant feudal remnant…[but]….little more than small-time rural gangsters, setting up extortion rackets under the pretence of security or skimming from contracts.’  But Stewart, who is now a member of Cabinet in Britain, managed to pay ‘them the respect they thought they deserved.’

Security – maintaining the peace – was the constant issue.  A new governor told Stewart that he intended to ‘take full control of the police, establish a secret intelligence service, ban demonstrations, arrest a journalist who had criticised him, and expel his Sadrist opponents from the council.’  What could be more natural?  One Iraqi policeman gave a response that was pure MFB.  ‘It’s not my fault that things are a mess – it’s your fault that we police are poorly trained and poorly equipped.’

An American ‘democracy expert’ came to Baghdad for ‘capacity-building’.  He put up a drawing that looked like a dog.   One sheikh said: ‘We are an ancient civilisation and they treat us like Congo cannibals.’  The democracy expert said: ‘Welcome to your new democracy.  I have met you before in Cambodia, in Russia, in Nigeria.’  At which point, two sheikhs walked out.  The expert had no runs on the board.

It was only after Abu Ghraib that Stewart saw ‘for the first time that they had always assumed that we were doing these things and had never believed my statements about human rights and the rule of law.’  The game was up.

Stewart wrote a speech.

We stand at the Ziggurat of Ur at the centre of the world’s first civilisation.  Within one hundred meters of us lie cuneiform tablets written in an alphabet invented here 5000 years ago, 85 generations before anyone in Italy, Britain, or America began to write…A little further and we come to the oldest law court in the world and the house where Abraham was born.  Here is the birthplace of civilised man, the foundation of our urban life and of our philosophy.

Shortly before Stewart left, the Sadr militia executed a female student at Basra University Engineering Faculty for wearing jeans at a picnic.  The Governor of Basra justified the militia.  The picnic had been ‘decadent.’  Women had sat with men.

The people who invaded Iraq forgot all their history.  What about the civil war we call the American War of Independence?  The older Pitt, by this time the Earl of Chatham, one of the most experienced war time leaders England has ever had, knew what the home ground advantage meant: ‘My Lords, if I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I would never lay down my arms – never, never, never.’

What about the French Revolution?  When it was first suggested that France go to war to export the revolution, Robespierre, the latter-day terrorist, said that no one ever liked ‘armed missionaries’.  Doesn’t that sum up the main problem for the absurdly named Coalition of the Willing in Iraq?

Why history? 4 ROME

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The Greeks developed a myth about Rome being founded by a refugee from Troy called Aeneas. The apotheosis of that myth is reached in the epic poem The Aeneid by the great Roman poet Virgil. The other myth of the foundation of Rome was home-made.  The traditional date was 753 BC.  Romulus was said to have been born a bastard and to have been cast into the Tiber, but providence directed the river to swirl him ashore and a wolf to suckle him and a shepherd to rear him.  Later he would murder his twin brother, Remus, and provide wives for his settlers by raping the Sabine maidens. So far we have a militant warlike refugee who drives to suicide someone who trusted him and a bastard who is weaned by a wolf, who commits the primal crime of Cain, before completing his holy mission by raping the neighbours.  Those auspices were not so good – they are indeed very ominous. But some at least at Rome thought that this myth was worth recording as saying something about the eternal city.

Rome was divided into patricians and plebeians, words which have much the same meaning today, except that the division then was one of caste. The nature of the split is gorgeously framed by Shakespeare in Coriolanus.  The Romans got rid of their kings, and they always put great weight and faith in the word ‘republic’.  But then they fell into class wars.  They saw themselves as free, but power tended to stay with their senate, as they did not develop a form of representative government like a parliament.

Rome extended its power over Italy and near areas. The process is described in Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus, which tells of human sacrifice and other barbarities. The Romans were much better at dealing with allies and conquered people than the Greeks.  They were real empire builders.  They were also more business-like – they extended Roman citizenship to others.  In the third century BC, Rome fought long hard wars with its African trading rival, Carthage, which was led by the great Hannibal.  They defeated Hannibal and destroyed Carthage.  Their impact on Africa is described by Shelley in the poem Ozymandias.

The wars Rome undertook called for a paid army and the Romans themselves became weakened.  They looked to gladiators and turned killing into a game.  Their religion was not civilising.  Their soldiers had to be paid out of booty of conquest and that led to vicious faction fighting among the generals who returned to Rome to hand out the benefits of their conquests.  Cicero would later attack these mercenary generals, but Rome never found a way to stop the conflict between them.  The nature of this faction fighting, like territorial disputes between mafia capos, is described in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. When you go from Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus to Marius and Sulla, you go from the butchered to the butchers – and to a march on Rome.

Internal division promotes the strong man.  Julius Caesar extended the Empire over much of Europe and North Africa.  It was bad luck to be in Gaul (France) when Caesar needed to curry favour to win an election.   He did so with butchery. Caesar was made dictator, but when he showed signs of becoming a king, the Roman republicans murdered him (in 44 BC).  There was yet another civil war.  Antony (like Caesar, a lover of Cleopatra) was defeated by Octavian (Augustus) who made himself Emperor.  The Roman republic was finished.

The emperors called themselves gods.  Many were degenerate, and most were put there by the army.  They succeeded where the Greeks had failed in imposing law and order.  Most of Europe would adopt their laws.  The language of Latin would also be used throughout Europe.  Their roads covered most of the known world.  They developed a literature from that of the Greeks, but deep down they were concerned with power and money.  They gave up enquiry and they despised science.  For the most part they had a well-organised army, but their religion was primitive and based on sacrifice.  It was ripe for a takeover.

The emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and moved to Byzantium (Constantinople) in about 323 A D.  The Empire had stretched the resources of Rome far too far.  It was sacked by nomads from the area of Germany – the Huns, Vandals and Goths.  The Eastern Empire, based in Constantinople (Istanbul), lasted for another thousand years.  This was the Byzantine Empire.  It gave rise to the Orthodox Church, maintained the learning of the Greeks, and offered a buffer between divided Europe and Asia.  It fell to the forces of Islam in 1453.

Gibbon said: ‘Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperors, that, whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same.  A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike led to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder.’  That, sadly, was equally true of the Republic.  As an exercise in government, Rome was a disaster – as is Italy today.

Passing Bull 116 – Father does not know best

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Donald Trump Junior made a fool of himself about a meeting he should never have attended.  If you believed in genetics, you might say something mordant.  He then made a bigger fool of himself by forgetting about the meeting and then lying.  When this was brought to the attention of pater on Air Force One, Dad immediately dictated a response for Junior.  We can just imagine pater bathing in the awe of his minions as he worked with granitic splendour in the crisis.  The President’s response was both stupid and misleading, and seriously damaging to Junior’s case – and the standing of the government.  The White House met the furore by saying that Dad had acted ‘as any father would’ and ‘with the limited information available.’

First, the President of the United States is not just ‘any father.’  Putting to one side that the President might be mad, our Prime Minister has the President’s personal assurance that he is the greatest man in the world.  Secondly, the son is of age, and allegedly capable of looking after his own affairs.  How many sane parents want to dictate to adult offspring indefinitely?  (Junior turns forty this year, more than half the biblical allowance.)  Thirdly, the case is a fortiori here, when Junior is supposed to be running the business of the family to the exclusion of Dad.  Fourthly, a person of average intelligence in a crisis with limited information would wait until he gets decent information before committing himself and others.  What if this idiot invokes the codes on limited information?

While on the subject of bullshit, a lot of people are calling for the head of Ian Narev, who is a serious challenger to Tony Abbott for the tile of the most loathed Oz.  He has presided over a disaster while being paid $12 million plus – the worth of 155 tellers.  The directors are responsible for managing the business.  Why don’t they resign?  For them to fire the CEO would have the same moral and intellectual value of a football club firing the coach for its failure to accept responsibility.

Finally, there is a group of embittered old men who are bigoted in religion and who are standing in the way of how ordinary people wish to conduct their lives.  They invoke God to do so.  Of whom do I speak – Parliament House, Canberra, or the Vatican?

Poet of the month: Walt Whitman

A child’s amaze

SILENT and amazed, even when a little boy,

I remember I heard the preacher every Sunday put God in his statements,

As contending against some being or influence.

Why history? 3

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3

GREECE

The Iliad of Homer tells of the Trojan War.  The myth was handed down by word of mouth until it was put in writing in about 700 BC.  Together with Ulysses, it became a kind of bible for the Greeks.  These myths looked back to times well before Moses of prehistoric cities at Mycenae, the seat of Agamemnon, and in Crete.  I said elsewhere of the hero of the Iliad: ‘Achilles is the worst kind of aggressor – he is super-sensitive to insult or affront.  T.S. Eliot called Achilles a ‘spoiled teenager’. The capacity of Achilles to sulk is limitless.  This is a characteristic of a high-born, spoiled brat.’  At bottom, things don’t change.  We now see Achilles in the White House.  That is apt for a book that links us to animal acts in prehistory.

Especially in the fifth century BC, the Greeks went through a phase of explosive growth that looks unique in the history of the world.  They lived in and about towns.  They never formed a nation, and their internal jealousy would be their undoing.  They went through phases of monarchy, aristocracy and oligarchy.  They wound up with a gentlemen’s club version of democracy – only male citizens need apply.

Athens at its height rested on slavery and a protection racket, a kind of empire.  Athens had achieved this pre-eminence by leading the defence against Persian invasions in battles like that of Marathon.  It was they who stopped an Asian takeover of Europe.  It was about the time Athens had its empire that Greece produced dramatists like Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, and philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

But the Athenian confederacy became an empire, and an empire of free states is a contradiction in terms.  Then Athens made Sparta jealous. If you reflect on the English in Ireland, or the Dutch and other whites in Africa, and apartheid, or, perhaps, the Nazi occupation of France, you will begin to follow Sparta. The people Sparta conquered were called ‘helots’, state controlled but privately managed.  This Spartan form of slavery was cruel, greedy, and unique.

The State ruled this version of Animal Farm with an iron discipline that the Prussians admired.  The first object was to create invincible warriors, and their soldiers frequently adopted the Japanese model of atoning for defeat by suicide.  To pursue their ideals, each Spartan had to be relieved of having to maintain himself or his family.  Education and marriage were all conditioned to maintain a perfect army.  There was of course a Krypteia or secret police.  The young Spartans had to get practice at killing. They were sent out with the power to kill any helot who looked suspicious.  And as with any fascist state, corruption was everywhere.  Nor should we leave Athens out here.  The Republic of Plato is a blueprint for fascism.

The war between Athens and Sparta – the Peloponnesian War – dragged on for decades.  The Greek city states were exhausted.  A cunning ruler called Philip of Macedon had little trouble subduing the shattered Greeks.  His son found himself in trouble at home, so he went out and conquered the world.  This was Alexander the Great.  He got as far as India before dying in 323 BC.  The following period is called the Hellenistic period.  One city Alexander created, Alexandria, became a store house of knowledge in dark times that followed.  Otherwise, European intervention in that part of the world was about as useful then as it has been recently.

The blazing meteor of ancient Greece had just burnt out. It subsided into the Mediterranean, never to be revived.  Even now, it looks like a failed state.

Here and there – Injecting religion into the political stew

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The German philosopher Immanuel Kant understood that of the conflicts deriving from religion, the conflict between believers in different faiths was far less toxic than the conflict between different sects in the one faith.  The first, let’s face it, just comes from the luck of the draw; but the second savours more of conscious choice, and of betrayal.  It’s one thing to be called an infidel; it’s another thing to be branded as a heretic.  People got burnt alive for heresy; infidels were usually just sent to the back of the bus, or over the border.  If a community finds sectarian hatred combining with ethnic differences and political factions, it has to deal with a very dangerous cancer deriving from three nasty sources.  It has happened at least twice in Australia, and one man, from a foreign land and subject to a foreign power, was deeply involved in each case.

Two of the most unpopular people in the history of Australia were Daniel Mannix and Bob Santamaria.  They were unpopular for at least two reasons.  They sought to inject their religious views into Australian political life, and they used their own special gifts for that purpose – and in the case of one of them, he did so with imported venom.  In the result, the Catholic and Protestant divide became almost as ugly here as it was in Ireland, and the party of the workers was split and rendered useless – so disenfranchising, in effect, a whole generation.  The divisions in our community festered like tumours, and caused serious damage to the standing of both Catholics and those of Irish stock in Australia.

In my view, the damage went further, and these two men made substantial contributions to the decline of religion here.  And I fear that I see the same happening again, and it is again being driven by the same faction within Christianity, in areas of public life where public opinion has shifted very considerably from the old dogmatisms embraced by the embittered and threatened faithful.  When the backlash comes, as it surely will, a lot people will recall the strife wrought upon us here by Daniel Mannix and Bob Santamaria.

All those thoughts came to me as I read Brenda Niall’s Mannix (2015) which struck me as a very fair, balanced, and sensible book.

Mannix was nearly fifty when he got to Melbourne.  His life had been sheltered – cloistered – in a teaching environment where his aloof sense of superiority was relatively harmless.  The teaching then was not conducive to allowing men consigned to loneliness to deal with the world as it is – a world of which half are women.  At the Seminary, Lectures in Pastoral Theology warned the young men about being seen in company with women – even their mother or sister.  ‘It is contrary to taste in clerical behaviour to walk with a lady in the street, no matter how near.  The laity do not like it.  It seems to them incongruous and it is so.’  The author comments:

The reasoning behind this is not just that female company means moral danger.  The priest must be a man apart from human ties.  That was clericalism, destructive then and ever since.

Just how destructive these attitudes have been is now agonisingly clear to the entire world.  The holy man known as Our Lord consorted with prostitutes.  Where in the life or teaching of Jesus of Nazareth is there any support for this exclusionary but poisonous ‘taste in clerical behaviour’?

The future Archbishop of Melbourne found his political feet quickly.  ‘To reason with the average politician unless you vote against him also, is about as useful as throwing confetti at a rhinoceros.’  The author says this was not tactful, but ‘Mannix could never resist a pithy phrase.’

In truth, God did not do Mannix a favour in sending him to Australia in 1913.  The young nation was about to heed England’s call to war at the very time when five centuries of England’s racist contempt for the Irish would finally come home to poison people on both sides of the Irish Sea.  The Irish attitude to the English and the war was the opposite of ours.  It became hopelessly toxic after the English shot those involved in the Easter uprising.  Any chance of Mannix reflecting any part of the Sermon on the Mount when it came to the English went clean out the window.  And yet the English Crown was and is our Head of State.  How was this conflict to be resolved?  What mattered more to Mannix – God or Ireland?

The book has good anecdotes about the principal opponent of Mannix – another foreign born Hell raiser, the Welsh Protestant, Billy Hughes.  At Versailles, Woodrow Wilson told Hughes he only spoke for five million people.  ‘I speak for sixty thousand dead.  For how many do you speak for, Mr President?’

It was on conscription and state aid for Catholic schools that Mannix nailed his theses to the door.  The first issue poisoned Australian public life during the First World War, although it did not stop a government fifty years later from imposing a viciously unjust conscription is an unjust and losing war, while the second issue continues to infect our whole policy on education.

These two public controversies created Mannix as leader.  Being seen in single combat with the prime minister gave him a status that no other churchman attained.  If there had been no war in Europe, and if Home Rule had come quietly to Ireland, would Mannix have been a hero to his people?  A priest who had known him at Maynooth thought not.  Mannix was not loved until he was reviled, said Father Morley Coyne.  Out of the hatred roused in the war years came a strong bond with the people.  An unlikely alliance between the austere intellectual and the working class Catholics was formed in 1916.  That was one element in the Newman College campaign.  It also brought the university closer to the aspirations of working class Catholic parents.  A Catholic college might open the door to privilege.  ‘My son the lawyer’, ‘my son the doctor’….these were better dreams than ‘my son at the front.’

Mannix ‘was not loved until he was reviled’ may be the key to the whole book.  Is a relation founded on revulsion sound for a man of God?  What about a chip on your shoulder about the Protestant Ascendancy?  The English Crown – our Crown – does have to be not just a Protestant, but a communicant Anglican.  How big a problem was this for this profoundly Irish man?

When Mannix went to England, they blocked his entry to Ireland.  He could not see his mother.  Lloyd George offered to allow her to visit her son in London.

She would have accepted Lloyd George’s offer if her son had allowed it.  She felt that his isolation in England was leading him astray; he simply did not know how it was in Ireland.  He made his choice, with what degree of pain or regret no one can ever know.  He put politics ahead of the family tie, and his mother never saw him again.

A man who puts an idea ahead of a person is flirting with Perdition.

There were some pluses.  Mannix became reconciled with Hughes in circumstances that are movingly recorded in the book.  The long serving prison chaplain Father Brosnan said that he learned confidence from Mannix and not to be concerned ‘with who people were.’  If properly fashioned, that is a very useful lesson.  But from time to time, Mannix was rebuked from Rome for his politics.  On one occasion, he was directed to refrain from ‘any statement whatever of a political character.’  Like throwing confetti at a rhinoceros.

This was at a time when Rome sent an envoy to Australia whose task was to dilute the Irish bias among Australian prelates.  The man chosen was Giovanni Pannico, whose English was far inferior to his Latin and who charged like a wounded bull for officiating at church functions.  Pannico was ruthless.  He despatched a man called Lonergan to Port Augusta.  The move killed him.

What the author called the Vatican chess game was lost by Mannix, but he did get his red hat at a time when a new ethnic front was opening up.  Italian migrants were landing in numbers, but ‘the Irish-Australian Catholic majority, rapidly rising in the world, kept its distance from this new underclass.’  It was ever thus.  I have heard Greeks complain of the Irish conspiracy to lock them out of the heights of the professions.

The relationship between Mannix and Santamaria was close and strong.  The ‘split’ came from the ‘Movement.’

The Movement, which owed its existence to Mannix and Santamaria, was an informal Catholic organisation.  Nameless and secret, it came to the rescue of the beleaguered trade unionists.  Santamaria saw the possibilities of the parish structure, and Mannix, who controlled the diocese, gave him the power to use them.  Every Catholic belonged to a parish.

This might remind some of the Freemasons.  What they got was ‘a straggling mass of spiritual infantry’, more militant than the Salvos, and feared and loathed by a large part of the nation.

They showed that almost helpless affinity with the Right that troubles so many Australians.  Most Australian Catholics sided with Franco who was a murderous dictator and an ally of Hitler – with whom the Pope had done a deal.  ‘They saw General Franco as the saviour of European civilisation which Spain embodied.’  The most polite term for that mindset from most Australians would be ‘warped’, but here again religion was driving some Australians into manic positions on another foreign quarrel.  The notion that Mannix expressed political views as a private person was risible.

And Mannix kept expressing views about foreign affairs.  He deplored the bombing of German civilian targets as well as Coventry, and he said that the use of the atomic bomb in Japan was ‘indefensible and immoral.’  If so, Truman and Churchill were war criminals.  Was this man of the cloth really so lethal?  Was he aware that Truman was advised that an invasion of Japan could well cost America one million of its men?  What did an Irish prelate know about ‘unconditional surrender’?

The part dealing with Mannix and Evatt is especially sad.  An authentic Australian stirrer meets an authentic Australian tragedy.  The dealings about funding schools do not make good reading.  The author says Santamaria was shocked by Evatt’s opportunism.  He said Evatt was ‘a man without a soul’.  (How many successful Australian politicians are remembered for their ‘soul’?)  But as the 1954 election drew near, Mannix was very much for Evatt.  He had been tempted by Evatt’s promises of almost unlimited sums for Catholic schools.  Then along came Petrov, and Labor lost.

In November 1954, he [Evatt] made his bid for survival as leader by denouncing Movement members and supporters for disloyalty, and by indirectly exposing the still unknown Santamaria’s role in undermining Labor Party independence.  Another Labor Split – the third in Mannix’s time in Australia – brought back much of the sectarian bitterness of the conscription period.

It’s almost too painful to read.  A generation – mine – was denied two party politics, and the broad sunlit uplands were overshadowed by religious hate.  The hatred was awful.  As one Caucus meeting became a melee, one leader jumped on a chair and screamed ‘Take their names’, and Evatt descended into a long night of madness.  One sane but bemused ALP MP said: ‘I no more like Australia receiving instructions from Rome than from Moscow.’

All that has gone now, but with it, most of the religion has gone too.  In driving to and from Ballarat the other day, by different routes, I passed about twenty churches.  Nearly all of them now are little more than relics.  It’s very sad.  Only God knows how much that decline owes to the misused talents of two clever zealots.

Brenda Niall’s book looks very sound to me, but it is not a pretty or happy story.  These are dark pages of a tawdry history that our children have been happy to put behind us.

Why history? Part Two – Towns

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2

TOWNS

The breakthrough came with taming animals and the raising of crops.  People were not tied up just staying alive.  They could do more by dividing their labour.  They could live together in towns.  Petra was one of them starting about 300 BC, but there are traces of settlements at Jericho nine thousand years before that time and many thousands of years before the time when the events described in the book of Genesis could have taken place.  Disputes about native title in that part of the world are therefore likely to be resolved by arms.

Settling in towns and farming with the seasons gave people a sense of order.  The development of bronze then iron led to better tools and more killing.  Writing started.  People could record their myths.   (Our aborigines relied mainly on Songlines.)  Trade started.  People had to count things.  Coins were made to replace barter – and to allow the ruler to take his cut.  People learned pottery and cloth-making.  They invented the wheel and the plough, and their animals served the people.

Settled life, if not civilisation, started in what we call the Middle East and North Africa while savages still roamed over what we call Europe. From about 4000 BC, the Egyptians developed papyrus for writing, a calendar and arithmetic.  People in Syria built a library and an army.  In Babylon, they looked at the stars and made clocks. The Phoenicians were a trading people who created an alphabet that the Greeks then Romans developed.

A form of civilised life started in India in about 2500 BC and the first of the great dynasties of China started in about 1500 BC.  Slavery somehow sprung up with the arrival of order and security.  Class in India gave way to caste.  The Brahmins, or priests, were at the top and the Pariahs, or outcasts were at the bottom.  Religion became a source of power over people, and across the world its exponents would seek a monopoly of knowledge.  Priests of all kinds commonly felt fear and jealousy when confronted with knowledge outside their realm.  In China, the leading position of Mandarin was obtained by merit and learning.  The Chinese script was hard to learn and this affected the spread of reading and writing.  The Chinese locked themselves in behind the Great Wall.

Tribes of the people of Israel overran what came to be called Palestine. They occupied land between the great powers of Egypt and Babylon.  Moses said that God gave him his ten commandments.  These tribes claimed to be chosen by God, and that God had promised them the land of Palestine.  They proceeded to act on that promise with their swords.  Their God was fearfully personal and jealous, and by our standards brutal, but this people had and still have an amazing capacity to stick together.  They were people of the word, and they developed books that contained their entire history and moral code.

There was only one God, but his laws were universal.  The Ten Commandments are close to the root of what we call western civilisation. They underlie our view of the sanctity of life and what we now see as equality before the law.  Two prophets, that we will come to, would give rise to the most populous faiths in the world.  Sadly, conflict within and between these three faiths would cause indescribable cruelty and misery across the history of mankind.

In the sixth century BC in India, Gautama gave up the life of the rich and powerful. People called him the Buddha.  He told people the Way, and this religion then spread through India and the rest of Asia. Buddha preached against caste, but it prevailed in India.  Confucius was teaching in China at about the same time.  He spoke of respect for the past and for the aged – very Chinese virtues.

We have been looking at what we might call the alphabet of civilisation, the bread and butter of settled life.  This is a very large statement, but people in those times do not look to us to have been big on big ideas or high art.  They were bent on forms and appearances, and lurks or magic – just like so many in government or business today.

Too many accounts of civilisation look too much on art and architecture.  It’s not much good having beaut pictures if you can be murdered in your bed.  Let us look then at the phases of law-giving described by Sir Henry Maine in his book Ancient Law. 

First, the law consists of little more than judgments given by a king with divine inspiration.  What the king gave, at least in the first instance, was a judgment (or ‘doom’), not a law; he was a judge, not a law-maker. Next, we have an aristocracy that becomes the keeper of the law. The aristocrats’ monopoly is not of divine instruction or inspiration, but of knowledge of the laws.  In the third phase, habit becomes custom and custom becomes law, a kind of unwritten law.  The Pharaoh would make a decree in a given case.  Repeated enough, this decree would become a decree in the broader sense.

The next phase is the codes.  The best known are The Code of Hammurabi, The Laws of Moses, The Laws of Solon of Athens, The Twelve Tablets of Rome, and later the Corpus Iuris of Justinian.  The Code is some form of protection against fraud and abuse by the aristocracy (or the priesthood).  But the codes get widened in their application by the process of analogy.  As a result, a prohibition of a specific act for the purposes of promoting cleanliness can descend into ceremonial abstinence or ritual ablution, and a division of people by status can degenerate into ‘the most disastrous and blighting of all human institutions, Caste.’

These problems are worse where the ruling body, the aristocracy, draws its power from religion rather than politics, or the military. These generalisations are dangerous, but this may be one of the great differences between East and West, that the ruling parties were able to divorce themselves from the power of religion earlier in the West than in the East.

Here and there – The appetite for revenge – Punishment as a measure of despair

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

If I kick a dog, it will want to bite me.  If you hit me, I will want to hit you back.  Our instinct is not to forgive those who trespass against us, but to trespass against them.  Our instinct leads us to seek revenge.  That’s one of those instincts that we share with animals.  The Oxford English Dictionary has this for ‘revenge’:

The act of doing hurt or harm to another in return for wrong or injury suffered; satisfaction obtained by repayment of injuries.

We might fairly say that our law was born and shaped to control our instinctive need to take revenge.

We need to look first at what the original wrong or trespass was.  Oliver Wendell Holmes said in this in The Common Law:

It is commonly known that the early forms of legal procedure were grounded in vengeance.  Modern writers have thought that the Roman law started from the blood feud, and all the authorities agree that the German law began in that way.  The feud led to the composition, at first optional, then compulsory, by which the feud was bought off…..Vengeance imports a feeling of blame, and an opinion, however distorted by passion, that a wrong has been done.  It can hardly go very far beyond the case of a harm intentionally inflicted: even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.

Later, Holmes said that our laws dealing with wrongs and crimes all ‘started from a moral basis, from the thought that someone was to blame.’  A ‘law which punished conduct which would not be blameworthy in the average member of the community would be too severe for that community to bear’.

It follows that the punishment must be measured by the level of blame of the offender.  Holmes referred to the view that at least one purpose punishment is to deter the criminal and others from committing similar crimes.

Thus the punishment must be equal, in the sense of proportionate to the crime, because its only function is to destroy it.  Others, without this logical apparatus, are content to rely upon a felt necessity that suffering should follow wrongdoing.

Holmes saw in this emotional imperative ‘the notion that there is a mystic bond between wrong and punishment.’  That was very different to the view ‘that the infliction of pain is only a means to an end’, namely, deterrence.

Well, in the year of grace 2017, we prefer the deterrent view to a ‘felt necessity’ or ‘mystic bond’ that wrong-doing must lead to suffering, but we still feel a need to have our basic moral standards and our personal safety vindicated by the law.  We tend to lump the latter under the heading of ‘retribution’, meaning repayment.  How you distinguish retribution from revenge is a question that is a little too metaphysical for my taste.  Of the three factors mentioned by Holmes – revenge, deterrence, or retribution – only deterrence looks to be capable of being tested empirically.  We would now add reform or rehabilitation – that too may be capable of at least some measurement.

But on any view, the punishment must fit the crime.  Otherwise, as Holmes said, we contravene the teaching of Kant – and I think of Jesus – that every person has their own dignity or worth, and that we as a community must not treat a person as a thing, or merely as the means to an end.

For present purposes, at least three other conditions must in my view be met when we as a community seek to punish one of our members as a criminal.

First, since the law has taken vengeance from the victim and family, the punishment must be inflicted by and under the law, and not by the victim – or by the mob.  Secondly, the punishment must be adjudicated according to the rule of law.  We are all equal before the law, even cardinals of a church or magistrates of a court, and we can only be deprived of our rights by a judgment given after due process and by a court sitting according to law.  Finally, since the law inflicts the punishment on behalf of the community, the community must accept responsibility for ensuring that the punishment is that which has been ordered by the court – and no more.  So, when criminals were flogged, the community assumed some responsibility for ensuring that the punishment did not lead to the death of the criminal.  So now, if our law requires that a criminal be deprived of their liberty by imprisonment as a punishment, we as a community have the responsibility to ensure that the deprivation of liberty is the only punishment that the court has ordered – and not that the criminal is raped or murdered or bashed into a vegetative state.

(I may say that all of this discussion is predicated on the notion that our law of punishment has a basis in logic that underwrites the very considerable legal industry that expounds it at such length.  I was not able to detect such a logical basis when I studied Criminology in 1965, and I have not seen it since, despite having sat on tribunals over thirty years where the issue passed blithely over my head.  To say that a sentence of eight years conforms to logic or theory better than one of four or six to me resembles awarding points for difficulty to the Beatitudes.  But that is a discussion for another day.)

A recent edition of The Saturday Paper had the following story.  Robin Irvine worked a 12 hour shift in a coal mine.  Driving home, above the relevant speed limit, he failed to see a woman cyclist, a mother and a wine-maker, in time.  The collision killed her.  There were no drugs or alcohol involved.  It looked like a case of fatigue.  Irvine was devastated by the consequences of his actions.  He was charged with negligent driving causing death.  The court was told he was experiencing ongoing psychological issues from his involvement in the death.  A pre-sentence report said Irvine would benefit from supervision and counselling and that he was eligible to undertake community service.

The magistrate, who was known as ‘Fierce Pearce’, did not adjourn to deliver sentence.  He sentenced Irvine to twelve months imprisonment.  That is very rare for this kind of offence.  Irvine’s lawyer was in shock.  He asked for bail pending appeal.  The police did not oppose bail, but the court refused it.  (It is not clear to me who first used the term ‘flight risk,’ or what evidence there was of such a risk.  What is clear is that it would have been ludicrous to suggest that Irvine should have been held in custody pending the hearing of the charge.)

Irvine was taken to a high security prison that houses serious criminals and that has a history of assaults on prisoners.  With the assistance of other prisoners, a violent twenty year old prisoner bashed and stomped on Irvine, and left him in a vegetative state.  After two years in rehab, Irvine lives with his mother who has to look after him.  The state allowed him $5000 compensation as the victim of a crime.  In the trial of the prisoner for assault, the Crown could offer no motive.  Irvine and his wife are divorced.  He and his mother have been sent to hell.  According to the report, Magistrate Pearce will retire this year at the age of 71.

Not just we lawyers, but all Australians should be sick at heart over this outrage.  If there is a God worth worshipping, his will has been flouted in what mortals should call a crime against humanity.  If you look at the principles I have sought to set out, each one of them has been violated.

I first ask whether the hearing gave due process.  Was this one of those old time magistrates who say ‘I’m the sheriff in this town, and it’s my way or the high way.’  I’ve seen courts like that.  You wonder why you bothered to turn up.  The decision has been taken before you get to your feet, and it’s rule by a man, and not by the law.  But that is just surmise, so I put it to one side.

What is not matter of surmise is the impropriety and unfairness of the sentence of imprisonment.  According to the press report:

Statistics maintained by the NSW Government show that of the 65 cases [on this charge] dealt with between 2013 and 2016, only two people were jailed. A large percentage received non-conviction orders, the most lenient sentence available.

On that basis, it is nigh on impossible to support the sentence of imprisonment in this case.  And the magistrate must have known the records which made his sentence improper and likely to be set aside on appeal.

It is that which makes his refusal of bail not just capricious and unreasonable, but arbitrary and cruel.  That is a complete repudiation of the rule of law.  And, again according to the report, this magistrate had form for this form of cruelty.

In 2010, 13 men who had been jailed by Pearce had their sentences quashed.  When District Court judge Garry Neilson came to the case of Ian Klum, he wept when told Klum had been bashed to death at Grafton jail while awaiting the outcome of his appeal against a sentence for the offence of driving while disqualified.  Magistrate Pearce had refused an application by Klum for bail pending his appeal.

The judicial arm of government therefore behaved dreadfully in this case.  Then both it and the executive arm surrendered all care by putting Irvine straight into this kind of prison at Wellington.  This is what the press report says:

Wellington houses around 500 inmates, some of them violent offenders or gang members moved from other jails across the state to isolate them….

Bashings and sexual assaults are a regular occurrence in Australian jails, yet individual offences feature little in public discussion.  If Irvine had been beaten this way in Kings Cross on a Saturday night, his assault would have been front page news.  Yet his maiming in a place where the state was responsible for his wellbeing slipped by without any media attention or scrutiny.

Our jails, dangerous places at the best of times, are shockingly overcrowded.  The state’s 37 correctional facilities were built to accommodate 11,000 prisoners.  Current figures show more than 13,000 inmates, and the number has been rising.

In 2015 the Minister for Corrective Services approved two-person cells being used to accommodate three inmates.  In January this year it was reported that assaults on prison premises had increased by 37 per cent over the past two years.

Let me go back to revenge, and our instinctive reaction to seek revenge – which it is a hallmark of a civilised community to seek to contain.  We are, we hope, beyond the stage of the ‘felt necessity that suffering should follow wrongdoing’ as being a sufficient justification for punishment in general or for a particular sentence.  The punishment must fit the crime and we musn’t use real people for target practice.

Anyone who believes that a stint in Wellington, or any other such place, will send the inmate out a better man is wilfully delusional.  So, in my view, is anyone who believes that community security can be improved, either measurably or at all, by increasing the time that convicted criminals spend in jail.  Isn’t the truth rather that most prisoners will come out worse than they went in?  As I understand it, overseas experience says that this problem is worse in terrorist cases, and that the time that terrorists spend in jail just hardens them up to do better next time.  If that’s the case, trying to contain terrorism by holding terrorists in jail for longer terms is about as sensible as trying to lasso a herd of elephants with spaghetti.

What I see rather is that the courts are just taking some of the worse offenders out of circulation for a time – because in the absence of any alternative form of punishment, no one has thought of a better idea.  It’s like an expensive form of cold storage.  In the name of heaven, who would want to be found within the same state as the man who maimed Irvine when he gets out?  He looks to me to be a homicidal maniac now.  Will he not just get worse in the psychopathic Gehenna that is called Wellington?  If our security were paramount, wouldn’t they just throw away the key?

Well, if all that is the most rational account that we can give of punishment, how far have we moved from the instinctive need for revenge?  How far removed am I on this from my dog?  If we see imprisonment as a pis aller, a last resort, I am reminded of some remarks by an Anglican divine, J M Thompson, about a French terrorist, Maximilien Robespierre, that punishment is a measure of despair.

He could, indeed, read men’s minds, but he could not judge their characters; so he could make them think what he thought, but he could not make them do what he wanted.  Faced, as every preacher of a difficult creed is faced, sooner or later, by the problem of unbelief, he was too small-minded to forgive and yet powerful enough to punish.  But punishment is a measure of despair.  It may cause conformity; it cannot produce conviction

But why, then, have jail terms kept increasing and with them our prison populations?  The answer, I think, is that governments have acceded to the demands of parts of the press to increase the terms of jail sentences.  Those demands are not couched as rational arguments founded on evidence of the application of a given theory of punishment.  Rather, they derive from a mystic bond between crime and punishment, the belief that wrongdoers should suffer pain.  That is to say, they derive from our instinct for revenge.  And these demands are not made from a felt need to improve our community.  They are made in pursuit of profit by business people whose adherence to either sense or evidence can go clean out the window where there’s a dollar to be made.

So, we have governments responding to irrational dictates from the press to put more people in jail and to keep them there longer, and then completely failing to see that those jails properly serve the governments’ purpose.  You end up with the frightful and unjust tragedy suffered by Robin Irvine and his mother.  And you wind up with the suspicion that we have fallen this low at the behest of the mob and their chosen organs in the press.

No nation that is so governed can call itself civilised.

As for us lawyers, I think we need to answer the question put by Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learned the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and stopped us being truthful and open…Are we still of any use?

Passing Bull 115 – More bull on conservatism

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

Some time ago, I quoted Simon Blackburn’s definition of ‘conservatism’ in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.

Conservatism :Originally in Burke an ideology of caution in departing from the historical roots of a society, or changing its inherited traditions and institutions.  In this ‘organic’ form, it includes allegiance to tradition, community, hierarchies of rank, benevolent paternalism, and a properly subservient underclass.  By contrast, conservatism can be taken to imply a laissez-faire ideology of untrammelled individualism that puts the emphasis on personal responsibility, free markets, law and order, and a minimal role for government, with neither community, nor tradition, nor benevolence entering more than marginally.  The two strands are not easy to reconcile, either in theory or in practice.

The word has been rendered worse than useless by reactionary elements in the Liberal Party, and apostles of the IPA in the Murdoch press.  People like Abbott and Bernardi are doing their best to work up sectarian strife, although fortunately now, most sane people cannot be bothered.  In two generations all the cranks, theorists, ideologues, and Catholic trouble makers have gone from the Labor side to the Liberal side.

As best as I can see it, these reactionary souls stand for the following: they dislike Muslims, gays, and wind farms; they loathe the ABC and the Fairfax Press; they are consumed by hate for anything to do with human rights and they gaze with the utmost suspicion anything to do with fighting corruption.  They adore God, Her Majesty (even though she is by law a Prot), the flag, and coal.  What any of that has to do with any version of conservatism is not clear.  What is clear is that they have no interest at all in conserving the planet.

In their worst manifestations, they even like Trump.  Two particularly vile commentators on Sky salute him.

Trump is nowhere near being a Republican, much less a conservative.  If you had to put a label on him, it might be something like Leninist nihilist.  But in one of those trumpet voluntaries that we get every now and then from the female cadres of the IPA, Janet Albrechtsen said this about Trump and Islam after his speech in Riyadh ( in a visit which led to regional unrest in record time):

Trump offered up the kind of moral clarity that drove the West to defeat Nazis and Soviet communists. What has happened to us in the interim? Paralysed by political correctness, we walk on eggshells so as not to offend. Ask hard questions about immigration? You’re a racist. Talk about Islam and terrorism? You’re an Islamophobe.  Keep calm and stay quiet? Not anymore. It’s time to get angry.

That newspaper was having a field day about Islam then, but Trump offering clarity on anything?  On morals?  Does anyone read this nonsense before it hits the streets?

Students of commedia dell’arte will be familiar with Scaramouch.  He indulged in grimaces and affected language.  He was what the English would call a bounder or a cad, even if he did play it for laughs.  Someone described him as ‘sly, supple, adroit, and conceited.’  Donald Trump, the darling of conceited nuts in Australia, has just appointed his namesake. The man looks to be exquisitely in character for the role.

Poet of the month: Walt Whitman

A clear midnight

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.

Night, sleep, death and the stars.

Why history? Part 1 – Stone

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

[This is the first part of the revised version of a short history of the world that I wrote for my daughters in 1990.   I began with a warning.  ‘This sketch is intended for my children, who are currently undergoing varying degrees of adolescence.  If  nothing else, it exemplifies two maxims of history: it depends on what story you believe, and it is written by the winners.  This sketch is hopelessly selective, incurably biased toward the West (and in particular the traditional Anglo-Saxon view) and loaded toward the present.  For anyone other than a WASP MCP, it is probably at best irrelevant, and at worst offensive.  There is little fact – it is almost all comment.  If I were you, I would not accept any of it.’ This version of the history of the world is less than 9400 words.  It is therefore shorter than so many judgments of our superior courts.  There’s a lesson there.]

WHY HISTORY?

A very brief history of the world

Geoffrey Gibson

2017

CONTENTS

  1. Stone
  2. Towns
  3. Greece
  4. Rome
  5. Medieval
  6. Interlude: Civilisation?
  7. Rebirth
  8. Kings
  9. Revolutions
  10. Explosions
  11. Civilisation – Are we there yet?

I

STONE

Did it all start with a bang or a whimper?   I wouldn’t know, but the hot-shots favour the big bang.  That’s fine, but where did it come from?  It’s all very well to say, as some ancients did, that the elephant stands on the tortoise – what does the tortoise stand on?

Until recently, most people on earth took their history of humanity from religious texts.  Most now believe that human beings evolved from animals.   The theory of evolution was pioneered by the English scientist Charles Darwin.  He revolutionised the way we think about a lot of things, and we will come back to him.  Science has also developed ways of dating artefacts from the past so as to prove, to the satisfaction of most people, that the account of creation in the Bible is physically impossible.  (Although a frightening number of people in the U S Congress still believe it.  It may be not be long before people ask if they are mad.)

It looks like this process of evolution was completed round about 200,000 years ago in Africa, in that part of Africa that is now one of the most backward parts on earth.  (Being first isn’t everything.)  We think that humans started moving out of Africa about 70,000 years ago.  They got to Australia after that.  Artefacts of our blackfellas can be dated to about 65,000 years ago.  Their occupation of this continent is so long compared to the tiny fragment in time of the white settlement that white people cannot get their heads around it. It looks like America was uninhabited when the first humans arrived here – when Tasmania was attached to the mainland – and the Maoris did not reach New Zealand until centuries after the birth of Christ.

We apply the label Neanderthal to the earliest man.  Applied to someone now – say a backward politician – that term is one of abuse (like knuckle-grazing).  They were savages.  Their first job was to stay alive.  They didn’t need Darwin to tell them about the importance of survival.  The symptoms of what we now call panic attacks show how we learned to heighten our responses to heightened danger.  People had to eat, find shelter, and stay warm – or cool.  They learned to speak.  People spoke to each other.  The apes hadn’t done this.  They learned to light fires.  They developed tools – and from tools came weapons.  We take the term Stone Age from our use of stone tools. These men we call Neolithic – about say 10,000 BC, although stone tools have now been found in Australia that are 65,000 years old.

Like our blackfellas, these people were nomadic.  They wandered in the forests and the savannah and sought out caves.  They didn’t cultivate the land or crops, or stay long enough in one place to develop towns.  This phase in our story is by far the longest.  We refer to the period before writing was developed as prehistory.  We now see writing and the division of labour that town life permits as essential to what we call civilisation.

We cannot now know what part fear played in human life then.  We now live with the risk of extinction by nuclear war.  But they must surely have lived with the threat of death or injury from nature, starvation, or predators, animal or human.  Having only a rudimentary knowledge of nature, what we call the supernatural may have had some charm.  So, some men came to claim power over others, either because they were stronger, or because they knew more, or because they were persuasive.  The fear of the unknown has always been a potent force for us.  They painted.  They developed totems and taboos.  We see all this in the Dreamtime and in big swinging dicks on Wall Street.

The Songlines of our aborigines go back a very long way.  In 1857 a blackfella told a white settler north of Melbourne that his grandfather could recall tracing the Yarra River down to the Heads where it entered the sea.  As Geoffrey Blainey remarked, it was a grandfather one hundred times removed whose memory was invoked.

And people began to notice not just that they were different to the apes, but that they were different among themselves.  There were differences in language, skin colour, and customs.  When the white people landed uninvited at Sydney Cove, the blackfellas required ocular proof that the white men were in fact men.  When people think they are somehow different to others, it is rare for one model to think that the other model is superior.  What you get is a kind of sibling rivalry.  And there is conflict not just about survival, but about beliefs.  They might kill not just to guard their territory, but to honour a leader or to appease a god.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was a man of towering intellect who stopped three bullets during the American Civil War – he spoke of ‘that unspeakable somewhat’ that allows us ‘to face annihilation for a blind belief.’

So, before the end of what we call prehistory, mankind was infected by two searing divisions from which we have never recovered – caste and race.