It’s worth [it] to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal.
The author of that evil banality was the late Charlie Kirk. The President said he was a martyr. He is – to Trump and the rest of the gun lobby. Just another unfortunate gun death – under God and an Amendment.
Shortly before white men began occupying this country, London was consumed by riots against Catholics. These were the Gordon Riots of 1780. Night after night, many substantial buildings, including the home of Lord Mansfield and his library beyond price, were burnt down, and hundreds were killed when the military established law and order.
Charles Dickens told the story of those riots in his novel, Barnaby Rudge (1841). It is an epic tale full of sound and fury, but an idiot is the hero, and this story is full of significance. In the words of his mother, Barnaby, with the soul of innocence, ‘has been led astray in the darkness of his intellect.’ It must have taken real courage to write a novel so constructed, and having now read it for the third time, I regard it as the most powerful novel that this author has left to us.
It was not in my view an accident that led Dickens to write about the actions of the London mob with an idiot in the central role. In words that will ring true for those who experienced the march against migrants that was patronized by neo Nazis in Melbourne in the beginning of Spring 2025, Dickens spoke of ‘this vast throng, sprinkled doubtless here and there with honest zealots, but composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London.’
One thing the novel is clear on. People in a mob can be divided in two groups – the puppeteers, those who do the manipulating, and the base, those who are content to be manipulated. It is an unholy marriage. In the novel, one of the mob calls a puppeteer ‘so awful sly.’
Reading the novel again has prompted reflections on aspects of the Melbourne disturbances compared to the riots in London.
Selfishness
Even hermits may feel the need to call a plumber, night carter, or doctor. If you wish to live with, or at least have access to, other people, you will not be able to act as if you were one person standing alone. You would have to contradict Richard III expressly when he said ‘I am myself alone.’ (And he is the archetype villain.) If you want to be able to take, you must be able to give. In the vernacular, you must pull your weight.
This is too much for too many. We saw it during the Covid emergency. In an emergency, the need for cooperation and cohesion is increased. Yet many selfish people asserted a right to opt out. They sprouted ideological claptrap about ‘liberty’, or doubts about vaccines. They were more concerned about their alleged rights than the vulnerability of others. They were selfish.
Some even claimed to be ‘sovereign citizens’. Sovereignty is a tricky notion at best, but this looks like a contradiction in terms that makes as much sense as ‘powerless monarch’. There is a term for such people. ‘Bush lawyers’ are serial pests.
Then, after two police officers were murdered, and all available police were involved in a search for a dangerous killer, some decided to go ahead with a public event that they knew would take up police time and cause serious trouble. They generated division and loathing, and some confronted and attacked police at the worst possible time.
They seemed to be equally opposed to recent migrants and those who had been here for many thousands of years before any white people arrived in their boats. (A lecturer of colour at Cambridge said the British Empire was spread by ‘water-borne parasites’. It was a great line about ‘boat people’.) The flag they purported to celebrate features a foreign flag – the one that was run up by those white migrants who first arrived here in 1788. These marchers were in large part as nasty as they were selfish.
Prejudice
Truth matters. Or it used to matter.
We arrive at it, or try to arrive at it, by thinking. There are many ways that process can be corrupted. The most common is prejudice. We tend to prejudge issues based on insufficient evidence and to arrive at an opinion that suits our world view. Antagonism between people of different race, religion, sex, or sexuality typically starts this way. It is harmless in sporting competitions, but poisonous elsewhere.
That is one way we fail to arrive at truth and risk being lost in Fantasyland. But truth as a whole has been undermined by what is called ‘social media’, so that the man who was called the leader of the free world looks to have lost all connection with truth. There is in play a catatonic movement in how people at large think – or, rather, don’t think.
Laziness
Too many people are too loose in their language. We all have our prejudices – about religion and sport for example – but we are insulted if someone says we are prejudiced against people on the grounds of race, sex, or sexuality.
The relevant terms of abuse include ‘anti-Semitic’, ‘misogynist’, and ‘homophobic’. They have all been used so loosely that none has scarcely any useful content left. If John the footballer is said to be ‘homophobic’, the relevant emotion is not fear. Rather, the charge is that John dislikes gay people; that his dislike is irrational; and that he regards all gay people as being in some way inferior. John is in truth endorsing a form of branding – something we normally reserve for cattle.
You do not compliment John by describing him in that way. On the contrary, you are attacking him by denigrating his humanity.
There are then these problems. This charge is far too often made with no adequate foundation. And in circumstances of strife where prejudice and malice too often are manifest. And the person making the charge is indulging in a form of branding, and so engaging in something like the vice he or she is attacking.
Stupidity
This ‘branding’ commonly involves its own kind of stupidity. Do I have the right to call John a loud bigot just because he barracks for Arsenal or Collingwood? Or can I call Ivan uncivilized just because he is Russian? Or can I say that no Irish man can be trusted to pay tax because of the attitude of Irish government to tax?
In each case the available premises do not support the conclusion. The Latin phrase is non sequitur. And in each case, there is an insult to the humanity of the target.
Insult weighed very heavily in the Roman law of civil wrongs. And you can find authority for a very large proposition of Roman law that any affront to the dignity of the individual was actionable for the wrong of inuria. The common law knew nothing of the kind.
Victimhood
You know you are in Lala Land when Donald Trump claims that he and Vladimir Putin, and, for that matter Benjamin Netanyahu, are victims of some undue process. (He is happy to pass over the fact that he is so far at least the only member of the trilogy to have been convicted of a serious crime.) Nigel Farage claims the right to stand up for victims. He says that ordinary English people are victims of excessive migration. That claim was being aired in the marches against migrants here in Australia.
This is I suppose an example of what some people in the press call ‘identity politics’. The problem is that to claim each member of a group should be regarded as different to the rest of the community, and therefore dealt with differently, can lead to the most pernicious consequences in the history of mankind.
Naivety
If you watch programs like American Greed, you will wonder at the stupidity of victims of con men. You may wonder if you could be so vulnerable. ‘There is one born every minute’ is a truth that comes from the fact that the promise of wealth distorts, or blows, people’s minds. They forget one maxim of investment: the greater the return, the higher the risk. At best, the victims look naïve, and when the scam is uncovered, they feel shame that they allowed themselves to be taken for a ride. (I speak from experience of having been scammed.)
Recently, people marched in Melbourne protesting, they said, against migration. Very few would acknowledge that all white people in Australia – the nation of the infamous White Australia Policy – are migrants, or descendants of migrants going back to 1788, but we can put that to one side. We are assured that many of these people were decent people exercising their democratic right of protest in an event that was taken over by neo Nazis.
That takeover was foreseeable, if not inevitable, and those decent people must be naïve to a level that makes them dangerous. They were after all participating in the inevitable replay of an historical process. Children fight hard to gain control of the tree house, and then fight like hell to lock out other upstarts threatening to dilute their power or wealth. Try for example The Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
Jealousy
If you look at western democracies that embody the welfare state – and the U S is not one of them – you face the same problems. People want to receive the same benefits from government, but they don’t want to pay for it. Those at the top get cross at the increasing demands made on them, and those at the bottom are incensed at the lack of fairness in the distribution of income and wealth. And they resent newcomers who look to them to be here to get their heads in the trough. They fear that their own standing is being debased.
You know you have a problem when both ends are whingeing, but it is hard to persuade a bank teller that the system is fair and reasonable when her boss gets paid one hundred times what she gets, and when some professional people are charging north of thirty thousand dollars a day.
Righteousness
This term is not often used favourably now. It is downright obnoxious when claimed for one’s self by the speaker – usually by implication. It is implicit in the bearing of the victims. The self-righteousness of some victims – actual or alleged – can be revolting, especially with those who look like anything but victims, when they seek to benefit from the suffering of others. (A droll observer, might offer, from a safe distance, Collingwood supporters as a good example. People of wealth and standing posing as victims.)
Not many of these standard-bearers of the downcast are surgeons or silks. But we see it now from those at the very top to those at the very bottom when they seek to assert some moral right in what is otherwise a sterile argument about wealth and power – underwritten by the green-eyed monster called jealousy.
These claims on righteousness lead people into melodrama, and claiming a significance that life has otherwise denied them. For a change, they mean something, and they have a cause.
And white Australians baiting migrants and people of colour, when all white Australians are white migrants or their descendants, are about as nasty as you can get. Among other things, apart from our migrant past, you would have to shut down every hospital in Australia if you were to exclude migrants, especially those from Asia and Africa.
Insecurity
Insecurity is no more a vice than anxiety, but it plays a fundamental role in much of our communal unrest. You do not see many professional people or leaders of business at MAGA or Nazi rallies, and you rarely hear complaints or fears about migrants from those whose position or status is secure. The trouble often comes from those who are insecure, and therefore feel anxiety, a form of fear. This then disfigures thought. The great Dutch philosopher Spinoza said:
‘Men would never be superstitious if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune …. The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for the mastery, though usually it is boastful, over-confident and vain. Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved and fostered by fear.’
Some cannot tolerate doubt, and along with superstition, they go after any conspiracy theory that they think might justify their world view.
It is, I suppose, a fact of life, if not language, that the weak are prey to predators. And stupidity and insecurity lead inevitably to gullibility, as Spinoza observed.
People become suckers for those who have the answer. They are vulnerable, and when the aggrieved unite behind a leader, their communal belief and self-righteousness warps their minds, and strife and violence become more incidental than accidental. On a bad day you get the Proud Boys. Here it is the so-called neo Nazis – forget the neo, they are Nazis properly so called.
Macaulay said:
‘We daily see men do for their party, for their sect, for their country, for their favourite schemes of political and social reform, what they would not do to enrich or avenge themselves…. virtue itself may contribute to the fall of him who imagines that it is within his power, by violating some general rule of morality, to confer an important benefit on a church, on a commonwealth, on mankind.’
Ambition
This does not sound like the people we are looking at. ‘Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.’ Big hitters like Alexander, Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Hitler all had ambition and were brought down by it, leaving millions of dead behind them, but it does not seem the appropriate epithet for our protesting marchers. They do not want to join the ‘elites’ – they loathe them.
Intolerance
Attaching headings to these traits should not give these labels any more force than traits to look for in trying to work out how we go off the rails. They are all out there to combine to undo us. But we may have left the worst to last. Intolerance. Sir Lewis Namier knew as much about history as anyone I have read. He said what we miss is ‘tolerance with the restraint it implies.’ If you look at the flare-ups currently being encountered in the U S, the U K, or Australia, they arise from or are driven by intolerance and a lack of restraint.
Venom
The result of these vices can be a loathing that cannot be dismissed as irrational, and a form of vitriol that is anything but rational. Such as Nazis or police killers who call themselves ‘sovereign citizens.’ These people are cancers on the common weal, and in looking at dealing with them, we should bear steadily in mind the forces for evil that were unleashed in Paris in 1789, in St Petersburg in 1918, and Berlin in 1933. Those explosions led to catastrophic losses of life and human dignity. It is curious that two are still celebrated in some parts. But what we do know is that when revolution comes, the scum rises to the surface – and we can already see the scum before our eyes.
Dickens had at least two things in common with Shakespeare – the ability to depict precisely those at the bottom of the barrel, and an unholy fear of the mob. In this Dickens novel, the hero was sentenced to death for his part in the riots. He got a full pardon in the end, presumably on the ground of some kind of diminished responsibility. Medicine may need to refine its views on insanity, and the law may need to do so on criminal liability, but it would be as well to remember the insistence of Hannah Arendt that:
‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.’
DISPUTES with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with persons, entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy, from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity, superior to the rest of mankind. The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence, in inforcing sophistry and falsehood. And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.
David Hume began his Enquiry regarding the Principles of Morals this way in about 1750 – centuries before Fox News or Sky After Dark. Andrew Bolt would have been his Eureka moment – the same passionate vehemence, in inforcing sophistry and falsehood.
In discussing a quintessential cad of the upper class in Barnaby Rudge, Charles Dickens permitted himself what his friend Thomas Carlyle may have called ‘a philosophical reflection.’ (You can find the phrase in the first sentence of The French Revolution.’
The despisers of mankind – apart from the mere fools and mimics of that creed – are of two sorts. They who believe their merit neglected and unappreciated, make up one class; they who receive adulation and flattery, knowing their own worthlessness, compose the other. Be sure that the coldest misanthropes are ever of this last order.
At the risk of being uncharitable, this might bring to mind Canberra, Washington and Westminster – and a fair slice of the press.
Who was it who said that we go to great writers for the truth?
Lectures on Foreign History by J M Thompson is one of my favourite books. I keep going back to it. As a tutor at Cambridge remarked, the Reverend historian wrote at a time when good writing was a prized attribute of the historian – one which we hardly see now.
Here is part of the author’s lecture on the reaction of the Church to the Reformation.
First came the Jesuits – then called ‘the Company of Jesus’. The Company was, he says, a military body living under military discipline. All religious orders had a vow of obedience, but that of the Jesuits was ‘specially strict’. The members were to be directed and ruled ‘as though they were a dead body.’
As for liberty of thought, there is no more room for patriotic agnosticism in West Point than for Jesuit agnosticism in a Jesuit College.
Well, all that has a very different ambience here and now.
Then came the Inquisition.
After this auspicious beginning, the Spanish Inquisition never looked back. It became a weapon of the State as well as the Church. It punished political liberalism as it punished unorthodoxy in religion – they were regraded as two sides of the same coin. It was turned less against Protestants than against Jews, Moors, and renegade Jewish Christians. It chose its victims from the classes best worth plundering. If they could not be burnt, at least their goods might be confiscated, or they might be frightened into purchasing their freedom cash down.
The Reverend was a man of the cloth – and surely also a man of the world.
Elsewhere, we read of the Duke of Orleans in what was called ‘the barbarous age’. ‘His Godhead was the Trinity of wealth, of women, and of wine’.
But it was said that at birth the fairies had given him every gift, but the last fairy said: ‘He will possess all the talents, except the talent for making use of them.’
I know just what the fairies meant – the risk manager’s nightmare.
Where people within a community behave differently as a group within that community, you can get friction. The Gypsies represent a paradigm case, but history offers many other examples. Race and religion are the main drivers – say, black and white, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Christian – but the friction can have many drivers.
Internal religious fights can be worse than those between faiths. Apostasy is one thing – heresy is something else again. The hereafter may be on the line. And the friction can manifest itself in different ways.
Acceptance or rejection?
If the members of the minority have to behave and be seen to behave differently to others in their community, are they not satisfied with what the rest do? Are they in substance rejecting the community at large?
Believing in your faith or tribal connection does not warrant your being seen to demean or despise that of others. But there is a real risk of deadly antagonism where a group in an otherwise tolerant society believes it has an exclusive answer.
This is how Rome saw the early Christians. The pagans were very tolerant when it came to religion – their own, and that of others. But the Christians were fanatics who believed that they had the exclusive answer in the way of the Cross. The Romans were insulted in their majesty, and in their civilised tolerance. The Christians were in truth zealots, even more so than the obscure and singularly distinct tribe that spurned them, and no government likes to deal with zealots.
This leads to a much deeper and slippery trap for a minority.
The fear of combination
Very few in government welcome people coming together to review, comment on, or act in response to government. Milton said that ‘fear of change perplexes monarchs’, but monarchs are in truth aware of the trade union motto that strength comes from unity. And this just gets worse when the true believers shun rather than court their home-grown neighbours. Gibbon was caustic.
By embracing the faith of the Gospel, the Christians incurred the supposed guilt of an unnatural and unpardonable offence. They dissolved the sacred ties of custom and education, violated the religious institutions of their country, and presumptuously despised whatever their fathers had believed as true or reverenced as sacred.
These zealots were following the teaching of a holy man executed under Roman law – and their numbers and fanaticism were bound to be seen to be threatening. Here is Gibbon again.
Roman policy viewed with the utmost jealousy and distrust any association among its subjects; and the privileges of private corporations, though formed for the most harmless or beneficial purposes, were bestowed with a very sparing hand. The religious assemblies of the Christians, who had separated themselves from the public worship, appeared of a much less innocent nature: they were illegal in their principle, and in their consequences might become dangerous; nor were the emperors conscious that they violated the laws of justice, when, for the peace of society, they prohibited those secret and sometimes nocturnal meetings.
Some may be reminded of the Freemasons in Europe at the time of Die Zauberflote; people of colour in the American South may be reminded of a truly evil association given to ‘secret and sometimes nocturnal meetings’.
The embryonic English Labour movement was boosted by a decision of the House of Lords in 1901. In the Taff Vale Case, the English courts held that at common law, a trade union could be liable for loss of profits to employers caused by strike action by members of the union. Although that may now look to be a case of class bias, the action for damages for breach of contract had to be dealt with by parliament if unions were to retain a workable right to strike.
But a more stunning example of the fear of combination can be found in France after the fall of the Bastille. Some workers decided to press for better rewards. Workers used strike federations (coalitions) to get a share of improved trade. This led to the Loi Le Chapelier which in 1791 prohibited all such associations Well, whatever else may be said of 14 July 1789, nothing could have happened without associations. The historian J M Thompson mordantly remarked:
It forbids corporate action, in the name of liberty. It denies it to all alike, in the name of equality. It prohibits any appeal to force, in the name of fraternity.
That is the history of the world – after a huge fight, children win control of the tree house, and then slam the trap-door shut to stop the next hungry lot claiming their share. How could you square slavery with the Rights of Man? How could the Declaration of Independence say that all men were created equal?
And traditionally, the targets of such laws against combinations were directed at the workers rather than the employers. The first economist, Adam Smith, would have none of it.
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters [employers]; though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals.
Those remarks caused me to ask if The Wealth of Nations was banned in some think tanks.
Divided loyalties
The Bible says that no man can serve two masters (Matthew 6 24). It is hard to think of any ruler who does not subscribe very firmly to that view.
Catholics in England after Henry VIII had to explain how they could be loyal to the king or queen of England as their monarch and the head of the Church England, and at the same time owe allegiance to the head of the Universal Church in Rome – who happened to regard the English monarchs as heretics.
The question that had been fraught became unanswerable after the Armada. There is little doubt that the Spaniards would have burnt Queen Elizabeth I at the stake; and then along came Guy Fawkes.
Charles I tested the boundaries, and paid for it with his life. He was not Catholic. James II was, and he went out of his way to provoke every part of the Anglican Establishment in a way that led to his losing the crown and to a change in the English Constitution after the Glorious Revolution. It was, and is, impossible for a Catholic to be the head of state of England – or, now, Australia.
That may all look old hat now, but any attempt to revoke that law – which is entirely repugnant to our general laws – may not be well advised.
The extreme peril of heresy
It is sufficient to set out lengthy citations from Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone.
Now, when, as usually happens, a church proclaims itself to be the one church universal (even though it is based upon faith in a special revelation which, being historical can never be required of everyone), he who refuses to acknowledge its (peculiar) ecclesiastical faith is called by it ‘an unbeliever’ and is hated wholeheartedly; he who diverges therefrom only in path (in non-essentials) is called ‘heterodox’ and is at least shunned as a source of infection. But he who avows allegiance to this church and; diverges from it on essentials of its faith (namely, regarding the practices connected with it), is called, especially if he spreads abroad his false belief, a ‘heretic’ and, as a rebel, such a man is held more culpable than a foreign foe, is expelled from the church with anathema (like that which the Romans pronounced on him who crossed the Rubicon against the Senate’s will) and is given over to all the gods of hell. Exclusive correctness of belief in matters of ecclesiastical faith claimed by the church’s teachers or heads is called orthodoxy. This could be sub-divided into ‘despotic’ (brutal) or ‘liberal’ orthodoxy ….
We have noted that a church dispenses with the most important mark of truth, namely, a rightful claim to universality, when it bases itself upon a revealed faith. For such a faith, being historical (even though it be far more widely disseminated and more completely secured for remotest posterity through the agency of Scripture) can never be universally communicated so as to produce conviction.
For heresy, thousands upon thousands of human beings who were perceived to be deviant would be executed by the followers of a holy man who was executed for just that sin against God.
Imported strife
The conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Great Britain was made far worse by events in Ireland. The contempt felt for indigenous Irish people in England was originally a contempt for a race. It all began before the Reformation split the Universal Church – with, say, the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366. But over time, the division came to be driven by religious differences. And it became even more vicious because the stakes were so much higher.
In a migrant nation like Australia, where still about thirty per cent of the population was born overseas, there is a risk that people coming from foreign regions of conflict may bring that conflict here with them and so infect the people at large. Something like that appeared in the fifties when people coming from the Balkans brought with them the products of centuries of conflict in their old homes.
But far worse for Australia, and so much more lasting, was the conflict between Ireland and England, and Catholic and Protestant. It flared in an ugly and damaging way during World War I, and after World War II it was fundamental to the split in one of two parties in a two-party system. The result marred our politics for a generation. The problem then dissipated, largely because of the decline of religion.
There does not appear to be much risk of imported strife now, but if a group owes or expresses some form of allegiance to a foreign power, its members will need to tread warily if representatives of that power turn publicly against an Australian government. That may well call for a test of allegiance.
Scapegoats
Migrants are usually in a minority, and so become prime candidates for the role of scapegoats.
In Ancient Greece there was a practice or rite of casting out someone like a beggar or cripple or criminal in the face of some natural threat or disaster. There are traces of a far older tradition in Syria when a goat would be invoked in the purification rites for the king’s wedding – a she-goat was driven out into the waste with a silver bell on her neck. More recently, but before the Greek custom developed, the Old Testament, Leviticus 16:8, said that ‘And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for Azazel.’ The goat of the Lord was sacrificed, and the high priest by confession transferred the sins of himself and the people to the goat that was permitted to escape in the wilderness – where its fate would depend on what sort of predators it may have to contend with. This was a form of atonement. The goat that escaped became the ‘scapegoat’. The traditions or rites might be said to prefigure the role of the Son of God being offered up to redeem mankind by atoning for its sins. A scapegoat is one who is punished for the sins of others. This ancient Middle Eastern rite has become a universal custom involving people rather than goats.
But the term has got much wider than that – a scapegoat now is not just one that has to answer for the sins of others; it has to answer for all the problems and failings of what might be called the host people.
The worst example occurred in Nazi Germany. The war had been lost only because of the failings of some generals and because Socialists and Communists had stabbed the nation in the back. Once the German people got released from the hold of these forces of evil, it could realize its potential for the first time, and nothing could stand in its way. The German character was not just innately good – it was superior; therefore, the reason for any failings had to be found elsewhere.
You can see that now in what are called ‘populist’ politicians in the U K, Europe, and the U S. Migrants become the source of all evil. The scapegoat is the natural first base for a weak and insecure person who is a moral coward.
It is also the kind of sloppy thinking that attracts insecure people, edgy commentators and journalists, and weak governments.
The threat to the status quo
The Gypsies may have been seen as a threat to civil order, but they were hardly a threat to the status quo. A minority needs a lot more clout to achieve that status.
The Huguenots in France and the Puritans in England had that clout, in large part because so many came from so high in the society that they were part of. If you are going to be a strident minority, it does not help if you were already far better off than most before you stated your own particular claim to standing in the social fabric. That could lead to the St Bartholomew Day Massacre, what would otherwise be called a pogrom. Historians assess the standing of the Huguenots by looking at what they call the brain drain in France after their brutal suppression and expulsion.
The Puritans would come to be seen as a pest in England. Under Cromwell, this fevered minority wanted to shut the pubs. (They had previously shut the theatres – we could have been denied Shakespeare.)
In America, the Puritans had the numbers – and it shows. Among other things, they could make life difficult for Quakers. The Quakers had been fined, whipped, jailed and banished during Puritan rule in Maryland before it passed its Toleration Act in 1649. Women had been stripped to find signs of witchcraft, but this act made it unlawful to use hostile language about the religion of others, such as ‘Heretick, Schismatic, Idolater, Puritan, Jesuit…’ Then Penn started his Holy Experiment with Quakers in Pennsylvania. At this stage of their development in the New World, the colonists prefigured the Enlightenment. That did not last. Slavery is not compatible with civilisation.
Religion does sadly seem to be at ease with hierarchy – rather like the judiciary. And whatever else may be said about the Friends, they made the existing hierarchy feel uneasy – you could see traces of anarchy – and they were very effective leaders of the movement against slavery together with members of the Church of England. If you take the view that slavery is contrary to any decent notion of civilisation, then the world had to wait until at least this level of abolition before it could consider itself civilised. That is no small proposition. And no small vindication of the Quakers.
The position of the Puritans in England was discussed by Paul Johnson in The Offshore Islanders.
English Puritanism was born among the Marian exiles of the 1550s [when the Catholic Queen Mary was burning Protestants]; it was thus an alien import. It had a consistency wholly foreign to the English….The doctrine of predestination was ludicrous…. The Puritans, like the Roman Catholic extremists, believed that religion was the only important thing in life, whereas most Englishmen thought it was something you did on Sundays. They were influential out of all proportion to their numbers because, like the Communists in our own age, they were highly organised, disciplined, and adept at getting each other in positions of power…. They oozed hypocrisy …But they did not believe in free speech. They believed in doctrinaire religion, imposed by force and maintained by persecution…. The privileges the Puritans claimed for themselves they would certainly have denied to others…Above all, Puritanism was the dynamic behind the increase in witch-hunting.
No wonder they got up the noses of the English, and then took their love of witch-hunting to the New World. It still loves the hunt. Just ask the President.
Caste from within
It is odd to many of us that some minorities have elaborate rules for confining contact with people outside their group. It is as if they were creating their own kind of caste from within – and most Australians regard caste as a dreadful form of discrimination. They are utterly and implacably opposed to any form of hierarchy imposed at birth. We believe, with Sir Henry Maine, that the progress in human society has been from status to contract – we get where we can, not from what we are born with, but what we can achieve in life. The caste system of the Hindus is anathema to us. Among other things, it is an invitation to see people as type-cast, and that offends what Kant called the ‘principle of humanity’.
For example, the Gypsies had elaborate rules relating to dealings with gadze – non-gypsies – with life-changing consequences for those who infringed. Here is what Sir Angus Fraser says in The Gypsies:
Even more pervasive is the dread of contamination….their purity beliefs can now be seen as a core element of their cultures, serving to express and reinforce an ethnic boundary and to delineate a fundamental division between Gypsy and gadzo….Wherever it is strictly adhered to, the taboo system informs all interaction between male and female and Gypsy and Gadzo, and for a Gypsy to be declared polluted is the greatest shame a man can suffer, along with his household. It is social death…. but their overwhelming concern is with the uncleanness of the female and her potential threat to ritual purity…. The code thus serves to isolate those Gypsies who practise it from any intensive, intimate connection with the gadze; and its existence makes all the more understandable the concern, so apparent in their history, to avoid any form of employment that would require such contact.
This book of Sir Angus strikes me as reliable. First, when the author refers to an ‘ethnic’ division, he is referring to what we call ‘race’. Secondly, the strictures relating to cleanliness, women, and contact with others have a lot is common with the beliefs of other ethnic or religious groups. Thirdly, it confirms the truth of the saying that we all need someone to look down on, and that those who see themselves as different very rarely see themselves as inferior – the contrary is the case. Fourthly, these codes militate against assimilation with or acceptance by the majority, with the result that the minority ends up worse off. The various defence mechanisms come back to bite their adherents. Fifthly, to the extent that any such code may require or authorise discrimination against those found to have breached it, it may well be against the law of the land.
Nor should we forget that some among us just get unsettled to run into someone who just wants to be different. Some get unsettled by doubt – they crave certainty where that is illusory.
Others fear a failure to conform – it threatens their attachment and subscription to the body politic which gives them such security and standing as they have. That is why some go clean out of their minds during revolutions – their whole world is exploding under them, and just what will they be left to stand on? It is like driving on dry ice.
Jealousy
Green-eyed jealousy is destructive. When felt at a social level, it arouses the hurt felt at apparent unfairness. It is then potentially lethal. It is a real risk for minorities that are seen to beat the system. Examples are the Huguenots, who came from the upper layers of their world, and the Armenians, who showed a business acumen apparently beyond many of their Turkish neighbours.
I say that as someone who bought this flat in Yarraville from an Armenian chicken farmer in Sydney who just happened to pick up a few blocks of local real estate on a trip to Victoria. The Armenians were certainly very active in redeveloping Toorak – in a manner that held no appeal to the remaining elders. ‘Upstarts’ or ‘nouveaux’ were polite epithets. It is one thing to see people do well; it is altogether another to be overtaken by someone you once saw as beneath you. If you really insult someone, you hit them just where it hurts.
The last tax case I heard involved a scarcely literate Sicilian who migrated here. He was at first a butcher and then a baker who bought land around Werribee so that by the time he got to me, he was worth north of $40 million. Some locals could handle that success story better than others. This will always be a potential problem for what are called ‘aspirational’ migrants who happen to do so much better than the old timers because that is their chosen destiny.
Unity in revolt or persecution
When Benjamin Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence, he remarked: ‘Well, Gentlemen, we must now hang together, or we shall most assuredly hang separately.’ He was surely correct. They would either be the heroes of a new nation or very dead martyrs of the ancien regime. You see the same theme in the Tennis Court oath at Versailles and all the propaganda of the artist David – Lenin and his ilk were rather more prosaic; so was their murder rate.
And persecution is a great bonding force. For ‘persecute’, the OED has ‘treat someone in a cruel or unfair way, especially because of their race or beliefs.’ That was the fate, and the conditioning, of the early Christians, Gypsies and Quakers, and the response to the persecution so often just fuelled the fire by binding the victims together and making them identifiable.
The study of victimhood, which can descend to self-righteousness, is a favourite of those parts of the press that decry ‘identity politics’ – while positively revelling in themselves; and at the same time rubbishing ‘virtue signalling’. It is remarkable how so many who are so well off can feel so oppressed. That is just another record claimed by Donald Trump – and a good slice of the United States.
A triumphant minority
Finally, there is the tragedy than can occur when the minority becomes the majority.
Take the United States and Australia as examples. When the white people first appeared in each, they were in the minority. Because of their overwhelming strength in fighting capacity, they became the majority, and shattered the lives of the indigenous people forever, and in ways that should continue to evoke shame.
In America, the degradation was made much worse by the importation of black African slaves, with the mordant consequence now that fear levels among many white people are made worse by the day by the threat that the white people may find themselves in the minority.
Conclusions
It would be tart to say that when peoples live together, numbers matter – but they do. And scripture may be correct when it says that there is nothing new under the sun.
For many, there is some comfort about the slippery impact of the supernatural in the droll remarks of Edward Gibbon:
The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. And thus, toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.
Finally, some people may get up noses of others just because they seem to be different. At least, that is why I think my dog looked askance at cats. And I don’t blame him.
Being on the nose – the perils of minority
Where people within a community behave differently as a group within that community, you can get friction. The Gypsies represent a paradigm case, but history offers many other examples. Race and religion are the main drivers – say, black and white, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Christian – but the friction can have many drivers.
Internal religious fights can be worse than those between faiths. Apostasy is one thing – heresy is something else again. The hereafter may be on the line. And the friction can manifest itself in different ways.
Acceptance or rejection?
If the members of the minority have to behave and be seen to behave differently to others in their community, are they not satisfied with what the rest do? Are they in substance rejecting the community at large?
Believing in your faith or tribal connection does not warrant your being seen to demean or despise that of others. But there is a real risk of deadly antagonism where a group in an otherwise tolerant society believes it has an exclusive answer.
This is how Rome saw the early Christians. The pagans were very tolerant when it came to religion – their own, and that of others. But the Christians were fanatics who believed that they had the exclusive answer in the way of the Cross. The Romans were insulted in their majesty, and in their civilised tolerance. The Christians were in truth zealots, even more so than the obscure and singularly distinct tribe that spurned them, and no government likes to deal with zealots.
This leads to a much deeper and slippery trap for a minority.
The fear of combination
Very few in government welcome people coming together to review, comment on, or act in response to government. Milton said that ‘fear of change perplexes monarchs’, but monarchs are in truth aware of the trade union motto that strength comes from unity. And this just gets worse when the true believers shun rather than court their home-grown neighbours. Gibbon was caustic.
By embracing the faith of the Gospel, the Christians incurred the supposed guilt of an unnatural and unpardonable offence. They dissolved the sacred ties of custom and education, violated the religious institutions of their country, and presumptuously despised whatever their fathers had believed as true or reverenced as sacred.
These zealots were following the teaching of a holy man executed under Roman law – and their numbers and fanaticism were bound to be seen to be threatening. Here is Gibbon again.
Roman policy viewed with the utmost jealousy and distrust any association among its subjects; and the privileges of private corporations, though formed for the most harmless or beneficial purposes, were bestowed with a very sparing hand. The religious assemblies of the Christians, who had separated themselves from the public worship, appeared of a much less innocent nature: they were illegal in their principle, and in their consequences might become dangerous; nor were the emperors conscious that they violated the laws of justice, when, for the peace of society, they prohibited those secret and sometimes nocturnal meetings.
Some may be reminded of the Freemasons in Europe at the time of Die Zauberflote; people of colour in the American South may be reminded of a truly evil association given to ‘secret and sometimes nocturnal meetings’.
The embryonic English Labour movement was boosted by a decision of the House of Lords in 1901. In the Taff Vale Case, the English courts held that at common law, a trade union could be liable for loss of profits to employers caused by strike action by members of the union. Although that may now look to be a case of class bias, the action for damages for breach of contract had to be dealt with by parliament if unions were to retain a workable right to strike.
But a more stunning example of the fear of combination can be found in France after the fall of the Bastille. Some workers decided to press for better rewards. Workers used strike federations (coalitions) to get a share of improved trade. This led to the Loi Le Chapelier which in 1791 prohibited all such associations Well, whatever else may be said of 14 July 1789, nothing could have happened without associations. The historian J M Thompson mordantly remarked:
It forbids corporate action, in the name of liberty. It denies it to all alike, in the name of equality. It prohibits any appeal to force, in the name of fraternity.
That is the history of the world – after a huge fight, children win control of the tree house, and then slam the trap-door shut to stop the next hungry lot claiming their share. How could you square slavery with the Rights of Man? How could the Declaration of Independence say that all men were created equal?
And traditionally, the targets of such laws against combinations were directed at the workers rather than the employers. The first economist, Adam Smith, would have none of it.
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters [employers]; though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals.
Those remarks caused me to ask if The Wealth of Nations was banned in some think tanks.
Divided loyalties
The Bible says that no man can serve two masters (Matthew 6 24). It is hard to think of any ruler who does not subscribe very firmly to that view.
Catholics in England after Henry VIII had to explain how they could be loyal to the king or queen of England as their monarch and the head of the Church England, and at the same time owe allegiance to the head of the Universal Church in Rome – who happened to regard the English monarchs as heretics.
The question that had been fraught became unanswerable after the Armada. There is little doubt that the Spaniards would have burnt Queen Elizabeth I at the stake; and then along came Guy Fawkes.
Charles I tested the boundaries, and paid for it with his life. He was not Catholic. James II was, and he went out of his way to provoke every part of the Anglican Establishment in a way that led to his losing the crown and to a change in the English Constitution after the Glorious Revolution. It was, and is, impossible for a Catholic to be the head of state of England – or, now, Australia.
That may all look old hat now, but any attempt to revoke that law – which is entirely repugnant to our general laws – may not be well advised.
The extreme peril of heresy
It is sufficient to set out lengthy citations from Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone.
Now, when, as usually happens, a church proclaims itself to be the one church universal (even though it is based upon faith in a special revelation which, being historical can never be required of everyone), he who refuses to acknowledge its (peculiar) ecclesiastical faith is called by it ‘an unbeliever’ and is hated wholeheartedly; he who diverges therefrom only in path (in non-essentials) is called ‘heterodox’ and is at least shunned as a source of infection. But he who avows allegiance to this church and; diverges from it on essentials of its faith (namely, regarding the practices connected with it), is called, especially if he spreads abroad his false belief, a ‘heretic’ and, as a rebel, such a man is held more culpable than a foreign foe, is expelled from the church with anathema (like that which the Romans pronounced on him who crossed the Rubicon against the Senate’s will) and is given over to all the gods of hell. Exclusive correctness of belief in matters of ecclesiastical faith claimed by the church’s teachers or heads is called orthodoxy. This could be sub-divided into ‘despotic’ (brutal) or ‘liberal’ orthodoxy ….
We have noted that a church dispenses with the most important mark of truth, namely, a rightful claim to universality, when it bases itself upon a revealed faith. For such a faith, being historical (even though it be far more widely disseminated and more completely secured for remotest posterity through the agency of Scripture) can never be universally communicated so as to produce conviction.
For heresy, thousands upon thousands of human beings who were perceived to be deviant would be executed by the followers of a holy man who was executed for just that sin against God.
Imported strife
The conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Great Britain was made far worse by events in Ireland. The contempt felt for indigenous Irish people in England was originally a contempt for a race. It all began before the Reformation split the Universal Church – with, say, the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366. But over time, the division came to be driven by religious differences. And it became even more vicious because the stakes were so much higher.
In a migrant nation like Australia, where still about thirty per cent of the population was born overseas, there is a risk that people coming from foreign regions of conflict may bring that conflict here with them and so infect the people at large. Something like that appeared in the fifties when people coming from the Balkans brought with them the products of centuries of conflict in their old homes.
But far worse for Australia, and so much more lasting, was the conflict between Ireland and England, and Catholic and Protestant. It flared in an ugly and damaging way during World War I, and after World War II it was fundamental to the split in one of two parties in a two-party system. The result marred our politics for a generation. The problem then dissipated, largely because of the decline of religion.
There does not appear to be much risk of imported strife now, but if a group owes or expresses some form of allegiance to a foreign power, its members will need to tread warily if representatives of that power turn publicly against an Australian government. That may well call for a test of allegiance.
Scapegoats
Migrants are usually in a minority, and so become prime candidates for the role of scapegoats.
In Ancient Greece there was a practice or rite of casting out someone like a beggar or cripple or criminal in the face of some natural threat or disaster. There are traces of a far older tradition in Syria when a goat would be invoked in the purification rites for the king’s wedding – a she-goat was driven out into the waste with a silver bell on her neck. More recently, but before the Greek custom developed, the Old Testament, Leviticus 16:8, said that ‘And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for Azazel.’ The goat of the Lord was sacrificed, and the high priest by confession transferred the sins of himself and the people to the goat that was permitted to escape in the wilderness – where its fate would depend on what sort of predators it may have to contend with. This was a form of atonement. The goat that escaped became the ‘scapegoat’. The traditions or rites might be said to prefigure the role of the Son of God being offered up to redeem mankind by atoning for its sins. A scapegoat is one who is punished for the sins of others. This ancient Middle Eastern rite has become a universal custom involving people rather than goats.
But the term has got much wider than that – a scapegoat now is not just one that has to answer for the sins of others; it has to answer for all the problems and failings of what might be called the host people.
The worst example occurred in Nazi Germany. The war had been lost only because of the failings of some generals and because Socialists and Communists had stabbed the nation in the back. Once the German people got released from the hold of these forces of evil, it could realize its potential for the first time, and nothing could stand in its way. The German character was not just innately good – it was superior; therefore, the reason for any failings had to be found elsewhere.
You can see that now in what are called ‘populist’ politicians in the U K, Europe, and the U S. Migrants become the source of all evil. The scapegoat is the natural first base for a weak and insecure person who is a moral coward.
It is also the kind of sloppy thinking that attracts insecure people, edgy commentators and journalists, and weak governments.
The threat to the status quo
The Gypsies may have been seen as a threat to civil order, but they were hardly a threat to the status quo. A minority needs a lot more clout to achieve that status.
The Huguenots in France and the Puritans in England had that clout, in large part because so many came from so high in the society that they were part of. If you are going to be a strident minority, it does not help if you were already far better off than most before you stated your own particular claim to standing in the social fabric. That could lead to the St Bartholomew Day Massacre, what would otherwise be called a pogrom. Historians assess the standing of the Huguenots by looking at what they call the brain drain in France after their brutal suppression and expulsion.
The Puritans would come to be seen as a pest in England. Under Cromwell, this fevered minority wanted to shut the pubs. (They had previously shut the theatres – we could have been denied Shakespeare.)
In America, the Puritans had the numbers – and it shows. Among other things, they could make life difficult for Quakers. The Quakers had been fined, whipped, jailed and banished during Puritan rule in Maryland before it passed its Toleration Act in 1649. Women had been stripped to find signs of witchcraft, but this act made it unlawful to use hostile language about the religion of others, such as ‘Heretick, Schismatic, Idolater, Puritan, Jesuit…’ Then Penn started his Holy Experiment with Quakers in Pennsylvania. At this stage of their development in the New World, the colonists prefigured the Enlightenment. That did not last. Slavery is not compatible with civilisation.
Religion does sadly seem to be at ease with hierarchy – rather like the judiciary. And whatever else may be said about the Friends, they made the existing hierarchy feel uneasy – you could see traces of anarchy – and they were very effective leaders of the movement against slavery together with members of the Church of England. If you take the view that slavery is contrary to any decent notion of civilisation, then the world had to wait until at least this level of abolition before it could consider itself civilised. That is no small proposition. And no small vindication of the Quakers.
The position of the Puritans in England was discussed by Paul Johnson in The Offshore Islanders.
English Puritanism was born among the Marian exiles of the 1550s [when the Catholic Queen Mary was burning Protestants]; it was thus an alien import. It had a consistency wholly foreign to the English….The doctrine of predestination was ludicrous…. The Puritans, like the Roman Catholic extremists, believed that religion was the only important thing in life, whereas most Englishmen thought it was something you did on Sundays. They were influential out of all proportion to their numbers because, like the Communists in our own age, they were highly organised, disciplined, and adept at getting each other in positions of power…. They oozed hypocrisy …But they did not believe in free speech. They believed in doctrinaire religion, imposed by force and maintained by persecution…. The privileges the Puritans claimed for themselves they would certainly have denied to others…Above all, Puritanism was the dynamic behind the increase in witch-hunting.
No wonder they got up the noses of the English, and then took their love of witch-hunting to the New World. It still loves the hunt. Just ask the President.
Caste from within
It is odd to many of us that some minorities have elaborate rules for confining contact with people outside their group. It is as if they were creating their own kind of caste from within – and most Australians regard caste as a dreadful form of discrimination. They are utterly and implacably opposed to any form of hierarchy imposed at birth. We believe, with Sir Henry Maine, that the progress in human society has been from status to contract – we get where we can, not from what we are born with, but what we can achieve in life. The caste system of the Hindus is anathema to us. Among other things, it is an invitation to see people as type-cast, and that offends what Kant called the ‘principle of humanity’.
For example, the Gypsies had elaborate rules relating to dealings with gadze – non-gypsies – with life-changing consequences for those who infringed. Here is what Sir Angus Fraser says in The Gypsies:
Even more pervasive is the dread of contamination….their purity beliefs can now be seen as a core element of their cultures, serving to express and reinforce an ethnic boundary and to delineate a fundamental division between Gypsy and gadzo….Wherever it is strictly adhered to, the taboo system informs all interaction between male and female and Gypsy and Gadzo, and for a Gypsy to be declared polluted is the greatest shame a man can suffer, along with his household. It is social death…. but their overwhelming concern is with the uncleanness of the female and her potential threat to ritual purity…. The code thus serves to isolate those Gypsies who practise it from any intensive, intimate connection with the gadze; and its existence makes all the more understandable the concern, so apparent in their history, to avoid any form of employment that would require such contact.
This book of Sir Angus strikes me as reliable. First, when the author refers to an ‘ethnic’ division, he is referring to what we call ‘race’. Secondly, the strictures relating to cleanliness, women, and contact with others have a lot is common with the beliefs of other ethnic or religious groups. Thirdly, it confirms the truth of the saying that we all need someone to look down on, and that those who see themselves as different very rarely see themselves as inferior – the contrary is the case. Fourthly, these codes militate against assimilation with or acceptance by the majority, with the result that the minority ends up worse off. The various defence mechanisms come back to bite their adherents. Fifthly, to the extent that any such code may require or authorise discrimination against those found to have breached it, it may well be against the law of the land.
Nor should we forget that some among us just get unsettled to run into someone who just wants to be different. Some get unsettled by doubt – they crave certainty where that is illusory.
Others fear a failure to conform – it threatens their attachment and subscription to the body politic which gives them such security and standing as they have. That is why some go clean out of their minds during revolutions – their whole world is exploding under them, and just what will they be left to stand on? It is like driving on dry ice.
Jealousy
Green-eyed jealousy is destructive. When felt at a social level, it arouses the hurt felt at apparent unfairness. It is then potentially lethal. It is a real risk for minorities that are seen to beat the system. Examples are the Huguenots, who came from the upper layers of their world, and the Armenians, who showed a business acumen apparently beyond many of their Turkish neighbours.
I say that as someone who bought this flat in Yarraville from an Armenian chicken farmer in Sydney who just happened to pick up a few blocks of local real estate on a trip to Victoria. The Armenians were certainly very active in redeveloping Toorak – in a manner that held no appeal to the remaining elders. ‘Upstarts’ or ‘nouveaux’ were polite epithets. It is one thing to see people do well; it is altogether another to be overtaken by someone you once saw as beneath you. If you really insult someone, you hit them just where it hurts.
The last tax case I heard involved a scarcely literate Sicilian who migrated here. He was at first a butcher and then a baker who bought land around Werribee so that by the time he got to me, he was worth north of $40 million. Some locals could handle that success story better than others. This will always be a potential problem for what are called ‘aspirational’ migrants who happen to do so much better than the old timers because that is their chosen destiny.
Unity in revolt or persecution
When Benjamin Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence, he remarked: ‘Well, Gentlemen, we must now hang together, or we shall most assuredly hang separately.’ He was surely correct. They would either be the heroes of a new nation or very dead martyrs of the ancien regime. You see the same theme in the Tennis Court oath at Versailles and all the propaganda of the artist David – Lenin and his ilk were rather more prosaic; so was their murder rate.
And persecution is a great bonding force. For ‘persecute’, the OED has ‘treat someone in a cruel or unfair way, especially because of their race or beliefs.’ That was the fate, and the conditioning, of the early Christians, Gypsies and Quakers, and the response to the persecution so often just fuelled the fire by binding the victims together and making them identifiable.
The study of victimhood, which can descend to self-righteousness, is a favourite of those parts of the press that decry ‘identity politics’ – while positively revelling in themselves; and at the same time rubbishing ‘virtue signalling’. It is remarkable how so many who are so well off can feel so oppressed. That is just another record claimed by Donald Trump – and a good slice of the United States.
A triumphant minority
Finally, there is the tragedy than can occur when the minority becomes the majority.
Take the United States and Australia as examples. When the white people first appeared in each, they were in the minority. Because of their overwhelming strength in fighting capacity, they became the majority, and shattered the lives of the indigenous people forever, and in ways that should continue to evoke shame.
In America, the degradation was made much worse by the importation of black African slaves, with the mordant consequence now that fear levels among many white people are made worse by the day by the threat that the white people may find themselves in the minority.
Conclusions
It would be tart to say that when peoples live together, numbers matter – but they do. And scripture may be correct when it says that there is nothing new under the sun.
For many, there is some comfort about the slippery impact of the supernatural in the droll remarks of Edward Gibbon:
The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. And thus, toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.
Finally, some people may get up noses of others just because they seem to be different. At least, that is why I think my dog looked askance at cats. And I don’t blame him.
There is what is called a ‘war’ in the Middle East. Israel is one party. The legal status of its opponents has not been identified to me. Nor have I seen any ‘rules’ for a war between one nation and people who are identified merely by their occupying a neighbouring territory.
In fact, the hostility between Jewish people and Muslims in the area in and around what used to be called the Holy Land has been going on for very many centuries. One war last century led to Gaza becoming occupied territory. I do not know what legal standing it has.
What we do know is that a group known as Hamas, which claims to represent the people of the land called Gaza, launched a brutal attack on Israel, and that Israel, as was both expected and intended by Hamas, responded. The war is still going after nearly two years. There is now another front in Lebanon, and Iran felt obliged to surface openly in the conflict.
Some, including some high in the government of Israel, say that Israel started a war without knowing how to finish it. That appears to be mandatory in that part of the world. And we all know about a ‘war on terror’ or a war on a nation holding ‘weapons of mass destruction.’
Most outsiders would say that Hamas is a ‘terrorist’ group. But you may wish to draw the line at saying that any people who employ terror to achieve rights on land occupied by others are ‘terrorists’. That would catch the founders of the United States, the Commonwealth of Australia, and the nation of Israel. (And of course England for about eight hundred years in Ireland.) You can make up your own mind about those called the ‘settlers’.
It is certainly the case that Hamas is committed to the destruction of Israel – for whatever that threat may be worth in fact. But it also looks to be the case that Israel has prevented the nation of Palestine being born – with, it must be said, a lot of help from those claiming to represent the people of Palestine. (A friend of mine says that the leaders of Palestine never miss a chance to miss a chance.) They may be more fractious than those claiming to stand for the people of Israel. (And that is a very large statement.)
People in Australia will take sides if they are connected by blood or faith to the combatants in this war overseas. And their inclination or bias will be quickly apparent, and almost certainly not throw any light or warmth on what is on any view a colossal human tragedy.
Most of the rest of us just want to keep our mouths shut and do what we can to stay neutral. What we certainly want to avoid is bringing conflict into Australia that arises from a conflict on the other side of the world with which we as a nation have no apparent connection.
I am not sure how the numbers between Jews and Muslims add up here now, and the war in Gaza will have consequences. But there is no doubt about the power of the Israeli lobby in this country. And their apparent capacity to commandeer the local Establishment, at least with the parties of the Coalition, does not command universal assent.
Prejudiced commentators show bias in deciding how far back we should go in order to understand this war. Some start at the most recent attack by Hamas. Some with the birth of Israel.
In truth, this whole area has been a hot spot since the time of Moses. Jonathan Sumption disposed of the first fallacy as follows.
One is the idea that this story began with the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023; the other is that any attack on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is anti-Semitic. A fortnight after the attack, António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, pointed out in the Security Council that it “did not happen in a vacuum”. It followed 56 years in which the Palestinians in Gaza had suffered “suffocating occupation… their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people displaced and their homes demolished.” He was expressing the self-evident truth that if you persistently treat people like that, hatred, violence and terrorism will eventually be the response. The Israeli ambassador objected to his attempt to “understand” terrorism and demanded his resignation on the ground that his words were an anti-Semitic blood libel. This neatly encapsulated both falsehoods.
In my view, the only place to start is with the first books of the bible – that each of the three main faiths gives some heed to.
Those books stand for the following propositions. There is only one God. But there are many tribes or peoples. Those tribes or peoples are all different and in no way equal. God has a favourite tribe. It is therefore in order for some people to be better off than others, just because Providence has raised their tribe above others. God has promised land to his favourite tribe or people. And authorised them to kill women and children who get in the way. One example of that authority is set out below. People outside of God’s protection – beyond the Pale, if you prefer – could choose between forced labour and death. Then there is one example of the exercise of that authority. According to the Bible, with the help of God, the Israelites killed 12,000 men, women and children in one day at the town of Ai – because they had chosen to live on the Promised Land.
Ever since then, that land has seen similar acts of brutality. They have seen the worst kind of wars – those where each side is convinced, or at least persuaded, that it has God on its side. Warriors claiming to be Muslims sought conquest by the sword. So did Crusaders claiming to be Christians. They got prepared to massacre Muslims by massacring Jews on their way to the Holy Sepulchre. Such has been the horror and destruction wrought in the name of religion in the Holy Land.
To return to the present, the current casualty rate in the war is running at about twenty to one. There are tens of thousands of Australians who have an interest in the conflict on either side. Anyone claiming that one side is blameless is blind. Anyone claiming the right to give an objective judgment is deluded.
So, the only course for our government is one of neutrality. That is, I think, the course followed by the relevant minister, who is so much ahead of her colleagues, it is embarrassing.
But it was not the course followed by the Opposition. It looks to have put votes before principle and the national interest. It has done this before. It is ironic that the Opposition supports the claims on one side in the Middle East that go back a few thousand years, but wiped off like a dirty bum the claims of peoples here that go back sixty thousand years.
I have no idea what the answer may be. But it seems clear that decent people on both sides will bear the scars of this tragedy for ever.
The various emanations of God behind this vast human tragedy are, we are told by people on all sides, omnipotent and eternal.
The War in the Middle East
There is what is called a ‘war’ in the Middle East. Israel is one party. The legal status of its opponents has not been identified to me. Nor have I seen any ‘rules’ for a war between one nation and people who are identified merely by their occupying a neighbouring territory.
In fact, the hostility between Jewish people and Muslims in the area in and around what used to be called the Holy Land has been going on for very many centuries. One war last century led to Gaza becoming occupied territory. I do not know what legal standing it has.
What we do know is that a group known as Hamas, which claims to represent the people of the land called Gaza, launched a brutal attack on Israel, and that Israel, as was both expected and intended by Hamas, responded. The war is still going after nearly two years. There is now another front in Lebanon, and Iran felt obliged to surface openly in the conflict.
Some, including some high in the government of Israel, say that Israel started a war without knowing how to finish it. That appears to be mandatory in that part of the world. And we all know about a ‘war on terror’ or a war on a nation holding ‘weapons of mass destruction.’
Most outsiders would say that Hamas is a ‘terrorist’ group. But you may wish to draw the line at saying that any people who employ terror to achieve rights on land occupied by others are ‘terrorists’. That would catch the founders of the United States, the Commonwealth of Australia, and the nation of Israel. (And of course England for about eight hundred years in Ireland.) You can make up your own mind about those called the ‘settlers’.
It is certainly the case that Hamas is committed to the destruction of Israel – for whatever that threat may be worth in fact. But it also looks to be the case that Israel has prevented the nation of Palestine being born – with, it must be said, a lot of help from those claiming to represent the people of Palestine. (A friend of mine says that the leaders of Palestine never miss a chance to miss a chance.) They may be more fractious than those claiming to stand for the people of Israel. (And that is a very large statement.)
People in Australia will take sides if they are connected by blood or faith to the combatants in this war overseas. And their inclination or bias will be quickly apparent, and almost certainly not throw any light or warmth on what is on any view a colossal human tragedy.
Most of the rest of us just want to keep our mouths shut and do what we can to stay neutral. What we certainly want to avoid is bringing conflict into Australia that arises from a conflict on the other side of the world with which we as a nation have no apparent connection.
I am not sure how the numbers between Jews and Muslims add up here now, and the war in Gaza will have consequences. But there is no doubt about the power of the Israeli lobby in this country. And their apparent capacity to commandeer the local Establishment, at least with the parties of the Coalition, does not command universal assent.
Prejudiced commentators show bias in deciding how far back we should go in order to understand this war. Some start at the most recent attack by Hamas. Some with the birth of Israel.
In truth, this whole area has been a hot spot since the time of Moses. Jonathan Sumption disposed of the first fallacy as follows.
One is the idea that this story began with the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023; the other is that any attack on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is anti-Semitic. A fortnight after the attack, António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, pointed out in the Security Council that it “did not happen in a vacuum”. It followed 56 years in which the Palestinians in Gaza had suffered “suffocating occupation… their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people displaced and their homes demolished.” He was expressing the self-evident truth that if you persistently treat people like that, hatred, violence and terrorism will eventually be the response. The Israeli ambassador objected to his attempt to “understand” terrorism and demanded his resignation on the ground that his words were an anti-Semitic blood libel. This neatly encapsulated both falsehoods.
In my view, the only place to start is with the first books of the bible – that each of the three main faiths gives some heed to.
Those books stand for the following propositions. There is only one God. But there are many tribes or peoples. Those tribes or peoples are all different and in no way equal. God has a favourite tribe. It is therefore in order for some people to be better off than others, just because Providence has raised their tribe above others. God has promised land to his favourite tribe or people. And authorised them to kill women and children who get in the way. One example of that authority is set out below. People outside of God’s protection – beyond the Pale, if you prefer – could choose between forced labour and death. Then there is one example of the exercise of that authority. According to the Bible, with the help of God, the Israelites killed 12,000 men, women and children in one day at the town of Ai – because they had chosen to live on the Promised Land.
Ever since then, that land has seen similar acts of brutality. They have seen the worst kind of wars – those where each side is convinced, or at least persuaded, that it has God on its side. Warriors claiming to be Muslims sought conquest by the sword. So did Crusaders claiming to be Christians. They got prepared to massacre Muslims by massacring Jews on their way to the Holy Sepulchre. Such has been the horror and destruction wrought in the name of religion in the Holy Land.
To return to the present, the current casualty rate in the war is running at about twenty to one. There are tens of thousands of Australians who have an interest in the conflict on either side. Anyone claiming that one side is blameless is blind. Anyone claiming the right to give an objective judgment is deluded.
So, the only course for our government is one of neutrality. That is, I think, the course followed by the relevant minister, who is so much ahead of her colleagues, it is embarrassing.
But it was not the course followed by the Opposition. It looks to have put votes before principle and the national interest. It has done this before. It is ironic that the Opposition supports the claims on one side in the Middle East that go back a few thousand years, but wiped off like a dirty bum the claims of peoples here that go back sixty thousand years.
I have no idea what the answer may be. But it seems clear that decent people on both sides will bear the scars of this tragedy for ever.
The various emanations of God behind this vast human tragedy are, we are told by people on all sides, omnipotent and eternal.
The serenity of the golf day for Donald Trump the other day was cruelly disturbed by the sight of the homeless. He has ordered in the National Guard.
This sad episode calls to mind a passage from Carlyle, The French Revolution about another absolute ruler. King Louis XV.
Louis, we say, was not so happy; but he did what he could. He would not suffer Death to be spoken of; avoided the sight of churchyards, funereal monuments, and whatsoever could bring it to mind. It is the resource of the Ostrich; who, hard hunted, sticks his foolish head in the ground, and would fain forget that his foolish unseeing body is not unseen too. Or sometimes, with a spasmodic antagonism, significant of the same thing, and of more, he would go; or stopping his court carriages, would send into churchyards, and ask “how many new graves there were today,” though it gave his poor Pompadour the disagreeablest qualms. We can figure the thought of Louis that day, when, all royally caparisoned for hunting, he met, at some sudden turning in the Wood of Senart, a ragged Peasant with a coffin: ‘For whom?’—It was for a poor brother slave, whom Majesty had sometimes noticed slaving in those quarters. ‘What did he die of?’— ‘Of hunger:’—the King gave his steed the spur.
The front and back pages of The Age today are all bad news for the AFL. Commercial TV has snubbed the game tonight between two ‘giants’, Carlton and Essendon. The sports pages discuss the sacking of the coach by Melbourne, and ask whether this is the worst AFL season ever. The final eight looked settled half way through the season, and too many matches since then have been just frightful. A grizzly Melbourne winter just got a lot worse for most of its people – including me, a Melbourne supporter for more than seventy years.
It now looks like three ‘powerhouse’ clubs – Carlton, Essendon, and Melbourne – need a revolution from within to revive; while the Eagles are declared broken, North Melbourne has lost whatever spark it had, and St Kilda is the forever bridesmaid. The performance of Brisbane and the two new clubs are the bright lights.
Football in Australia is a game vital to the upbringing of our children and to the sanity of us adults. It is an essential – indispensable – part of our communal life. For most of us, it takes the place of religion, with the MCG as its communal heart and shrine. If you have not been there on Grand Final Day or Boxing Day, you have not lived in Melbourne.
Football is an integral part of a vibrant city. There are times when you can feel it in the air, and we can survey each other with what John Keats called ‘wild surmise’.
And somehow life just gets better.
For those reasons, the people who run football hold offices of public trust.
Football at the top is still a game, but it is also a business. The clubs are part of the entertainment industry, revolving around the rights to view and broadcast the games on television.
As such, the standing of a football club will turn on the quality of its business management. And the way to test the business management of each club is to assess its performance in the AFL competition each year. How did your team go? Where did it finish?
If you look at the results of the AFL competition for this century, it is clear that Collingwood, Geelong, Hawthorn, and Sydney have been well managed, but Carlton, Essendon, and Melbourne have not – indeed, they are what may be called ‘basket cases’. (I put the others to one side.) The sometime chieftains of the tribe are no more now than spent uncles, who can be relied on to spoil a family gathering. (If you think that is an allusion to The Dead of James Joyce, you are correct.)
The conclusion is in my mind inevitable – there has been a bad failure of management at each of those clubs. But the response is the same as that of our government ministers – they do not accept responsibility, but on a bad day, they just sack the poor bunny in the limelight.
And utter some worthless bromide. The head of Melbourne said ‘we are a proud club…. and an ambitious club.’
And for that, our pride gets us one flag in sixty years, and the rest is just purgatory.
The people running footy are like those in government. They are wont to bang on – ‘bloviate’ is the term – as if they think we came down in the last shower.
What we can see, then, is a failure of management in the way that most AFL clubs conduct their business. (If it matters, I doubt whether many of the top 100 on the ASX come out much better.)
And it looks like that failure is now manifest in the management of the AFL – from the Chairman down. A somber veil of mediocrity has descended, a house specialty here in Oz. There is far too much mumbling and grumbling, and it passes my understanding that the AFL can slap us all in the face by counting out free TV on some nights, and saying ‘If you want to watch the best we can offer in the comfort of your home on a miserable winter night in Melbourne, you will have to shell out a kicker to Rupert Murdoch, or the like.’
It is hard to imagine a worse case of business management. It all depends on keeping faith with your customers – and the AFL is losing it. And that is before you get to the swooning salaries of the hangers-on.
It looks to me that those running the AFL have lost touch with you and me after being duchessed with cocktails and canapes by the set lovingly patronized by their Chairman when at home at fortress South Yarra. When did they last down a Four’n Twenty in the outer with the real footy followers?
The AFL is also losing it by its grubby dealings with and condescension to the gaming industry. This is a simple but gross moral failing, and one that taints the AFL – and all of us who support it. And our governments. If the AFL was listed on the ASX, I would refuse to invest in it on this ground alone.
And then there are the grifters in the press and elsewhere who just want to clip their ticket, and make the simple sound tricky. They are like flies buzzing on refuse, and with their fellow travelers in sleaze, they show why I have not been to a game since 1999.
I still enjoy tuning into a game occasionally, but so much of the tribal fervor has gone with the wind of the dollar and the glare of the machines.
I have been fortunate to have a fall-back in Melbourne Storm, who have been well managed since their inception, and who have therefore kept my patronage and membership – although the big contribution of the NRL was to make themselves public enemy number one south of the Murray. It was like test cricket – a sworn enemy! A simple verity of childhood and youth. (I subscribed to the Rebels four days before they finally hit the fence in another display of Australian communal incompetence.)
And there was a time when you went to watch the footy on Saturday arvo, and your one regret as a Melbourne supporter was leaving the Prince Alfred beer garden after lunch. The rest was just foreseen misery – penitence, if you prefer.
Otherwise, those in charge of management at the AFL and its clubs, and those in the media and government, need, in the immortal words of the Couldabeens, to have a very good look at ‘votre selves.’ You are badly letting down us and our game.
And that is a very bad place to be in the City of Melbourne. Even if this comes to you from one who has grown old, and one, like King Lear, who is cranky as a result.
But oh, for those times in Glen Iris more than seventy years ago, when every second kid in Rosedale Road had an Essendon jumper with number ten on his back, and the world was so much simpler – and, on a good day, even innocent.
The Woes of the AFL
The front and back pages of The Age today are all bad news for the AFL. Commercial TV has snubbed the game tonight between two ‘giants’, Carlton and Essendon. The sports pages discuss the sacking of the coach by Melbourne, and ask whether this is the worst AFL season ever. The final eight looked settled half way through the season, and too many matches since then have been just frightful. A grizzly Melbourne winter just got a lot worse for most of its people – including me, a Melbourne supporter for more than seventy years.
It now looks like three ‘powerhouse’ clubs – Carlton, Essendon, and Melbourne – need a revolution from within to revive; while the Eagles are declared broken, North Melbourne has lost whatever spark it had, and St Kilda is the forever bridesmaid. The performance of Brisbane and the two new clubs are the bright lights.
Football in Australia is a game vital to the upbringing of our children and to the sanity of us adults. It is an essential – indispensable – part of our communal life. For most of us, it takes the place of religion, with the MCG as its communal heart and shrine. If you have not been there on Grand Final Day or Boxing Day, you have not lived in Melbourne.
Football is an integral part of a vibrant city. There are times when you can feel it in the air, and we can survey each other with what John Keats called ‘wild surmise’.
And somehow life just gets better.
For those reasons, the people who run football hold offices of public trust.
Football at the top is still a game, but it is also a business. The clubs are part of the entertainment industry, revolving around the rights to view and broadcast the games on television.
As such, the standing of a football club will turn on the quality of its business management. And the way to test the business management of each club is to assess its performance in the AFL competition each year. How did your team go? Where did it finish?
If you look at the results of the AFL competition for this century, it is clear that Collingwood, Geelong, Hawthorn, and Sydney have been well managed, but Carlton, Essendon, and Melbourne have not – indeed, they are what may be called ‘basket cases’. (I put the others to one side.) The sometime chieftains of the tribe are no more now than spent uncles, who can be relied on to spoil a family gathering. (If you think that is an allusion to The Dead of James Joyce, you are correct.)
The conclusion is in my mind inevitable – there has been a bad failure of management at each of those clubs. But the response is the same as that of our government ministers – they do not accept responsibility, but on a bad day, they just sack the poor bunny in the limelight.
And utter some worthless bromide. The head of Melbourne said ‘we are a proud club…. and an ambitious club.’
And for that, our pride gets us one flag in sixty years, and the rest is just purgatory.
The people running footy are like those in government. They are wont to bang on – ‘bloviate’ is the term – as if they think we came down in the last shower.
What we can see, then, is a failure of management in the way that most AFL clubs conduct their business. (If it matters, I doubt whether many of the top 100 on the ASX come out much better.)
And it looks like that failure is now manifest in the management of the AFL – from the Chairman down. A somber veil of mediocrity has descended, a house specialty here in Oz. There is far too much mumbling and grumbling, and it passes my understanding that the AFL can slap us all in the face by counting out free TV on some nights, and saying ‘If you want to watch the best we can offer in the comfort of your home on a miserable winter night in Melbourne, you will have to shell out a kicker to Rupert Murdoch, or the like.’
It is hard to imagine a worse case of business management. It all depends on keeping faith with your customers – and the AFL is losing it. And that is before you get to the swooning salaries of the hangers-on.
It looks to me that those running the AFL have lost touch with you and me after being duchessed with cocktails and canapes by the set lovingly patronized by their Chairman when at home at fortress South Yarra. When did they last down a Four’n Twenty in the outer with the real footy followers?
The AFL is also losing it by its grubby dealings with and condescension to the gaming industry. This is a simple but gross moral failing, and one that taints the AFL – and all of us who support it. And our governments. If the AFL was listed on the ASX, I would refuse to invest in it on this ground alone.
And then there are the grifters in the press and elsewhere who just want to clip their ticket, and make the simple sound tricky. They are like flies buzzing on refuse, and with their fellow travelers in sleaze, they show why I have not been to a game since 1999.
I still enjoy tuning into a game occasionally, but so much of the tribal fervor has gone with the wind of the dollar and the glare of the machines.
I have been fortunate to have a fall-back in Melbourne Storm, who have been well managed since their inception, and who have therefore kept my patronage and membership – although the big contribution of the NRL was to make themselves public enemy number one south of the Murray. It was like test cricket – a sworn enemy! A simple verity of childhood and youth. (I subscribed to the Rebels four days before they finally hit the fence in another display of Australian communal incompetence.)
And there was a time when you went to watch the footy on Saturday arvo, and your one regret as a Melbourne supporter was leaving the Prince Alfred beer garden after lunch. The rest was just foreseen misery – penitence, if you prefer.
Otherwise, those in charge of management at the AFL and its clubs, and those in the media and government, need, in the immortal words of the Couldabeens, to have a very good look at ‘votre selves.’ You are badly letting down us and our game.
And that is a very bad place to be in the City of Melbourne. Even if this comes to you from one who has grown old, and one, like King Lear, who is cranky as a result.
But oh, for those times in Glen Iris more than seventy years ago, when every second kid in Rosedale Road had an Essendon jumper with number ten on his back, and the world was so much simpler – and, on a good day, even innocent.
Many summer schools at Cambridge and Oxford – and one at Harvard – have been lights in my life. One or other university in England used to ask questions about what I suppose might be called my ‘race’. Fortunately, they gave me the option of declining to answer. This was just as well. It’s not just that I did not know what the answer was – why was I even being asked? I could not give a hoot about what label about race someone may seek to pin on me – but why would someone even try?
I suppose an exception would be if someone tried to pin me as being ‘Aryan’. That would be deeply offensive – like calling someone – of either sex – an acolyte of Ayn Rand. For that matter, I would be unsettled to be called ‘white’ – what decent inquiry could that be a response to?
As best I can see, I am a common garden Australian – in the name of God, anything but ‘Aussie.’ My dad’s mum was born in Scotland – hence my middle name ‘McPherson’. On one of my trips through the Highlands, I got into the heart of the territory of the clan McPherson and visited the clan museum. I went in thinking I might make a donation – as a member of the family, so to speak. But I was informed, and not apologetically, that I was disqualified because the alleged clan connection was through the female line.
‘McPherson’ means ‘son of a parson’. My wife was born Clark and said to be Irish. Clark meant ‘cleric,’ and the Scot thought she may have a stronger claim to being Scottish. At that point I decided that they could stick any donation in a place happily made more accessible to those wearing a kilt.
That is a full account of any inquiry into my ancestry. (But I was glad to hear years later that the McPhersons had a claim to fame. Culloden was the site of the battle where the English toweled up the Scots once and for all. My lot, I was told, were a day late. Smart bastards.)
I was reflecting on this the other day while going to see my podiatrist. He is Indian. How do I know? Because he is a person of colour with an Indian name and accent and we naturally discussed his background when discussing cricket, which has the power of religion in India. Like so many from India, he is a passionate follower of cricket, especially when India is involved.
We discussed a recent Test Match in England when most of the crowd was said to be Indian. Perhaps I should say ‘of Indian extraction,’ since most of them probably lived in the U K. We laughed at the difficulty of imagining such a scene in the land of any other former imperial power – like France, Spain or Holland.
When I lived an hour out of Melbourne in the sticks, I was occasionally heard to mutter that the problem was that there were too many white men. In Yarraville, our needs are mostly met by people from every part of Asia. The Greek and Russian Orthodox churches and the Greek and Italian cafes now look very Establishment, and if you cross over to Footscray, you may wonder what part of Africa or Asia you have landed in.
But in what instances might it be appropriate to talk of the racial background of someone? If I say my mate Joe is Australian, Chinese, Aboriginal, Muslim, White, Coloured or Jewish – what does the epithet add to the conversation? (I put to one side instances where the epithet may have consequences for the times of the meeting or the food to be served.)
If I say Joe is Aboriginal or Jewish, I am I think making a statement about his racial antecedents. When might that matter? Put differently, when might a statement about the race of a person become racist?
The Australian Constitution contains on my search only one reference to race. Section 25 refers to persons of any race being disqualified from voting by the laws of a state. ‘Race’ is not defined, but had its own meaning in the Imperial Parliament of the Empress of India. The primary criterion was colour, even when Disraeli was Prime Minister of the U K.
Nor is the word defined in the Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act 1975. Its operative provision (s. 9) refers to ‘race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin.’ Those terms are not synonymous.
A glance at the Macquarie Dictionary (7th Edition) shows what a minefield we have.
race…. a group of people sharing genetically determined characteristics such as skin pigmentation or hair texture…. the differentiation of people according to genetically determined characteristics…. a group of people sharing a language or culture or traditional beliefs or practices….
racism…. the belief that human races have distinctive characteristics which determine their respective cultures, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule or dominate others…. behaviour or language…. either demonstrating an inherent prejudice without specific hostile intent or, alternatively, intended to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate…
Jewish: of or relating to or characteristic of the Jews; Hebrew…
Hebrew…a member of that branch of the Semitic people descended from the line of Abraham; an Israelite; a Jewish person….
Perhaps I should set out s. 9 of the Commonwealth Act:
It is unlawful for a person to do any act involving a distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of any human right or fundamental freedom in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.
It is apparent that the Commonwealth regarded the qualifier of ‘race’ as being at least potentially different to the qualifiers of ‘colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin.’ ‘National’ looks to be in a different kind of field to ‘race’, ‘colour’, ‘descent’ or ‘ethnic origin’. But if you are speaking of ‘national origin,’ that may be as hard to shake off as ‘ethnic origin’ or ‘race’ ‘colour’ or ‘descent’.
But when might any such distinction matter – decently or at all?
As I recall it, the Irish got justifiably sick of being on the wrong end of tasteless slips or slurs. There is no doubt that England’s ‘Irish problem’ began many hundreds of years ago because they regarded the Irish as racially inferior – they had about the same level of contempt for indigenous peoples in Ireland as their successors would show to indigenous people in Australia when they settled here. ‘Beyond the pale’ was an exercise in apartheid in the fourteenth century. (The English had similar feelings of superiority toward the Scots, but the Scots were armed and dangerous to the people of England in their own homes, and accordingly were treated with less obviously lethal contempt.)
If you can afford a Zegna suit, a Panerai watch, or a Ferrari, you will be said to enjoy ‘Italian flair’ – and pay heaps for the privilege. The Germans on the other hand have not had a good press since Dante or even Tacitus – where they are treated as a nation of drunks. But they also meet more sinister and persistent aversions. When I started following F1, Michael Schumacher was preeminent. He was also guilty of misconduct – that I was, and am, prepared to make allowances for. Then I read a sensible analysis by an English journalist who said that Ayrton Senna was much worse. But his misconduct was mere ‘Brazilian flair,’ whereas Schumacher showed ‘ruthless Teutonic efficiency’ – and ‘Teutonic’ has shades that go back to the Dark Age.
Here was a typical case of how we slip back to prejudice through a combination of haziness, laziness, and nastiness.
If I talk about Joe’s beliefs, these are matters that Joe can, at least in theory, change. But that is not the case if I am talking about qualities ascribed to Joe at birth – race, colour, or descent.
The real vice in each case is the same. I am allowing an incursion into Joe’s dignity or worth that arises merely from the fact that he is human. If it matters, the person who most clearly stated that opinion was a German named Immanuel Kant. It may be described as a masthead of the Enlightenment – which was in large part driven in Germany.
The other disservice I do Joe in looking at attributes he might be said to have been saddled with at birth is that it may appear that he has been denied the benefit of the movement, in what we call the civilized world, by which our rights are said to derive from Contract rather than Status.
And if we find that status is in some way genetically determined, at what point might we enter the verboten world of caste?
The upshot is that I see little or no point in talking about my race or that of any other people. There are of course some harmless exceptions – like the wonderful capacity of Pacific Islanders to play rugby, or the endurance of Africans in long distance athletics, but they are exceptions.
And I am happy enough to live with ‘Australian’ as my only relevant signifier of my background or standing in my community. If I had been embraced by the McPhersons at Newtonmore, and become a devoted self-proclaimed Scot, with the zeal of a convert, could I perhaps have got to the stage where I felt being called on to decide which was my best call sign – Australian or Scots?
Or perhaps I may have reflected on The Divided Self written by the Scot R D Laing who said that if you put up a front long enough, you might wind up with nothing left behind the screen. (At least, that is how I read it a very long time ago at university.)
As for religion, most people believe that religion holds nothing for them – except the one they subscribe to. That is my view, except that I have no exception. I have no faith in any religious faith. Others can do what they like that is lawful, while I hope that they do not get in my way, either politically, or so as to cause me grief when it comes my time to go.
If you want to know why I am so cool about God, consider Deuteronomy 20:16-18. The passage begins:
But of the cities of these peoples which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive. But you shall utterly destroy them….
As I follow it, the three major faiths to come from the Middle East give some credence to the book that contains this command from God to annihilate tribes other than God’s chosen people: ‘let nothing that breathes remain alive’. Can you imagine anything more lethal? On a bad day, it might lead me to believe in another venomous proposition – Original Sin.
Since I was born in 1945, I came into man’s estate in Australia in a democracy crippled by the strife within one of the two major parties. That strife was in no small part driven by forces out of Ireland and Rome – at least, that is what I was taught as a God-fearing Protestant. The bigotry was both hurtful and harmful. To my mind, it showed a national immaturity that only ended with the steep decline of religion.
When the English and Irish strife arrived here, both sides were holier than thou, and my country right or wrong. But it was beyond doubt that England had treated Ireland appallingly over the centuries, at first just on racial grounds, and later on both racial and religious grounds. We don’t need to see anything like it again, and I am relieved that my children know nothing about sectarian or foreign division within Australia.
As I recall it from the mists of time, there were two twists in the tail for the Irish diaspora and the sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics here in Australia. One was that if people here wanted to identify with people in Ireland, they were entrusting their standing to forces beyond their control. What did they have to say about terrorism and the IRA?
If I claim to be identified with a foreign regime because of some perceived genetic connection with those who run it, I may bring down on my own head unwelcome imputations if that regime behaves inhumanely.
The other issue with the Irish was that of divided loyalty. This erupted in Britain with the Reformation, the Act of Supremacy, the Spanish Armada, and Guy Fawkes. It was settled in the Glorious Revolution of 1689. The result is that under the English constitution, and therefore relevantly ours, we cannot have a Catholic head of state.
I wonder if we could pass a law to that effect now. A key part of our inheritance from the United Kingdom would be against the laws that we presently have in place.
Well, then, in the year of Our Lord – anno domini – 2025, why do any Australians feel any need to get tied up about their ancestry? Isn’t being Australian enough?
After all, have we not enough on our plate already in dealing with the oppression of our indigenous people in the years that have elapsed since Governor Arthur Phillip ran up the Union Jack at Sydney Cove in 1789, and commenced the process leading to the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia?
It helps to remember that Australia, as it now is, started off as a jail for the rejects of Britain – and those in charge were not much better than the convicts. And not one of either had an ancestry to write home about.
Not much of a rock to build a bloody nation on.
With Compliments 