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Wuthering Heights – and Shakespeare

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

A few years back now, I bought the Franklin Edition of this novel.  Now I have just finished what was at least my fifth reading of the novel.  This edition is bound in leather, and the American drawings are almost photographic compared to the bleak wood cuts in the Folio Edition. 

After I had first read this version, I placed it at number 1 in the series of great books called A Curated Library.  It is elemental and unique, like the book that had been number 1 – Carlyle, The French Revolution.  And reading it again, I was reminded of the advice of a tutor at Cambridge.  ‘Don’t read it as history.  Treat it like opera or an epic poem.’

In the Foreword to the Folio, another Yorkshire novelist, Phyllis Bentley is recorded as saying:

On the moors one could escape from all the conventional restraint and battle fiercely with earth and sky… It is this untamed moorland and its untamed characters, who admit no restraint in their fierce passions, which give Wuthering Heights its incomparable air of dark, wild, stormy freedom.

That would accord with my sentiment that we are all like Hottentots tip toeing around the crater of a live volcano, when there is no known rule about who might fall in. 

I set out my impressions about fifteen years ago in the extract below, and I will just add a few observations about a novel about our inclination to lock out the outsider.

There is quite a bit of Antony and Cleopatra in Cathy and Heathcliff – a blazing untameable, but unworldly passion, except this time the gypsy is the male.  And there is a lot of Romeo and Juliet, except this time the lovers bring their dooms on their own heads.  And there are issues not just of class, but of caste.  There are aspects of this tragedy, for that is what it is, that call to mind Othello, theultimate outsider (depending on your view of The Merchant of Venice).

And this is a revenge story, as searing as the revenge in Titus Andronicus.  Then, in the end, two battered misfits survive the rubble to unite the two houses of the star-crossed lovers, and go out in quest of what Churchill called those broad sunlit uplands, in a way that calls to mind the magical finale of the Julie Taymor movie, or the ethereal peace found at the end of Die Walküre. 

You can, as they say, treat the novel as an opera, just as Wilhelm Furtwangler did for the symphony.  But, putting all labels to one side, this is one of the most searing and explosive moments in our literature.

Well, in addition to Shakespeare, Emily was brought up on the adamantine strictures of the Old Testament, the closet subtlety of Virgil, and the fiery imagination of Milton.  Perhaps no one else wrote like Emily because so few were brought up like that.

It is not just the location that makes this novel different – it is the times.  Class was all pervasive.  Servants were different – and less entitled to respect.  (That puts it softly.)  ‘Equality’ was a myth blown up by the French.  When Heathcliff returns, should he take food in the parlour, or stay in the kitchen with the servants?  Good grief, might they have had to set two tables?  Children were treated coldly, if not cruelly.  And sickness of any kind carried the threat of death.  Sick people had to be nursed over long periods.  Sanitation was not understood, and medicine was not far removed from the barber shop. 

The author died at the age of thirty.  When you compare her age and that of her sister, or Jane Austen, with that of Charles Dickens, you can gauge what we missed.

God only knows what may have happened if Mozart had lived as long as Shakespeare.

*

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Emily Brontë (1847)

Franklin Library, 1971.  Fully leather bound, with gold edges and figured endpapers.  Illustrated by Alan Reingold.  Preface by Charlotte Bronte.

… and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.  It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am.  Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same….

Wuthering Heights has passages like this that some English ladies – and I do mean ladies – that you might meet at Oxford University know by heart.  It has become part of the English psyche.  It was the first and only novel of a young woman from Yorkshire who had probably scarcely been kissed by a man, and it fairly raises the question: just what did they put on the porridge of those young girls up there back then? 

Emily Brontë was brought up in Yorkshire with a Celtic ancestry of an Irish father and a Cornish mother.  Her father was an Anglican minister and the parsonage was the centre of the life of the family which included a sister, Charlotte.  The girls went to a harsh Curates’ Daughters’ School, but they had the run of their father’s library, so that their education in literature was so much better than what modern children get – the Old Testament, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, and the rest. 

The children’s mother died young, as was common in that time, and their aunt had a fiercely Calvinist view of the world.  The children began creating their own tales and legends and creating their own worlds for those legends.  They spent some time in Europe, but they were unhappy away from the parsonage.  The novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte came out two months before Wuthering Heights.  They are very, very different books.

When you think of Wuthering Heights, think not of a novel.  Think of Shakespeare – the passionate young Hamlet jumping into the grave in defiance of convention to embrace the dead body of a woman who went mad and then killed herself when Hamlet so coldly and cruelly rejected her; think of King Lear, plunged into madness by his sustained rage at being rejected by the one woman he loved; think of Othello, tipped over the brink of madness by the thought that the young, white woman he loved was not true to him; think of Macbeth, who allows the woman he loves to push him so that his ambition sends him and her to their respective hells; think of Malvolio, who is cruelly tricked into believing that his lady loves him and then is even more cruelly accused of being mad; and think of Prospero, who uses his powers of magic to bring together those who had wronged him and then brings them undone – and then buries his magic. 

Think of opera.  Think of The Flying Dutchman, and the thumping romantic drive of the music of the sea by Wagner, and the story of a rejected loner doomed to roam alone until he finds redemption.  Think of painting.  Think above all of La Tempesta by Giorgione.  Against a nocturnal European landscape, with sawn-off pillars and odd buildings, and lightning in the sky, a young man in contemporary costume stands calmly watching over a nude woman suckling a child.  Have you ever seen anything so enigmatic?  What on earth can it mean?  Or are we simply impertinent to seek to put into words what this great artist put on canvas?  Well, then, why not just enjoy it? 

Wuthering Heights is the story of a man despised and rejected of men, who is then rejected by the woman he loves, and who sets out to and does get revenge upon the whole pack of them, but who then, in the emptiness of his achievement, is reconciled to the memory of the woman he loved. 

The scenes between Cathy and Heathcliff on his return are the most blazing.  ‘I meditated this plan just to have one glimpse of your face – and a stare of surprise, perhaps, and pretended pleasure; afterwards settle my score with Hindley; and then prevent the law by doing execution on myself.’

The score settling would have to be terminal.  This is as elemental as Greek tragedy.

In their final argument Heathcliff looks to Nelly like a mad dog foaming at the mouth.  There is a level of sustained hysteria rarely seen outside of Dostoyevsky.  Heathcliff and Cathy flay and lacerate each other like mad monks.  It is like crossing Medea and Now, Voyager.

Has any other English writer unleashed emotional power – passion – like this?  The fury that Heathcliff unloads on those who should have been close to him – for example his wife and his son – must unsettle any reader.  Heathcliff twice refers to Cathy as a ‘slut’.  Nelly got it right when she said they were ‘living among clowns and misanthropes’.  But the more revenge and power that Heathcliff gets, the emptier becomes the shell of his life, and then we see that the second Cathy is looking to change things by being civilized.

For Heathcliff, God and Satan are one, and equally irrelevant, but somehow, he manages to induce his own death, so that he can be at one in the ground with his Cathy. 

The novel ends in this way: ‘I sought, and soon discovered, that the three headstones on the slope next the moor …I lingered around them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and the harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’.  It is so English, and yet so wild.  And the ending is as rich as that of The Dead by Joyce.

This novel comes up at us out of the earth like a novel of Christina Stead –a rough uncut diamond.  It is all rawness, and it is found in Yorkshire, of all places.  Antony and Cleopatra, Abelard and Heloise, Tristan and Isolde, and Romeo and Juliet come at us from the mists of the past and foreign places.  (Charlotte found her male lead in Rochester in Jane Eyre – those Brontë girls sure liked their men strong and tough.)  

Our novel is altogether more modern.  Heathcliff is the original angry young man who comes undone because his girl is not ready for him – Cathy prefers the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie, with a little bit of bovver on the side. 

Well, who could blame her?  Heathcliff was a gypsy, and he had all the makings of a real bastard.  And yet we know that neither was ever going to find peace above the ground.  How come, then, that Geoffrey Boycott was so boring? 

*

And if I can bring this note to an end by swapping from cricket to footy, when you get into this book, you are playing with the big boys.  What a shame for us that we never got a reading of this book with Heathcliff read by Richard Burton.

Quo vadis, Conservatism?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The most abused word in our language may be ‘conservative’.  When applied to the political attitudes of a person or party, what does it mean?  Is it of any use here in Australia now?  Do we have a conservative political party?

The Shorter OED has: opposed to change and holding traditional values… (in politics) favouring free enterprise and private ownership.  The Macquarie has: disposed to preserve existing conditions…cautious or moderate…traditional in style or manner….

These categories are very wide, and obviously open to questions of degree.  They practically invite the application of bromides like ‘broad church’ – until the body is so wide that it is no longer a church. 

Most labels are suspect – this one is even more so.  Some people are optimistic about the work of government.  Others are pessimistic.  Some crave change.  Others fear it.  There may be deep emotional values underlying differing world views.  The place of ‘science’ in all this is wobbly.  The temptation of deception is strong.  And the poseur might have a field day.  Especially one who craves the ear of the ‘people’.

We can see the room for slippage in the notion of ‘conservative’ from the definition in The Oxford Definition of Philosophy.

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

Those remarks are English and dated now.  No sane person here would refer to ‘a properly subservient underclass’.  But no political party in the Welfare State can reject ‘benevolent paternalism’.  That would be political suicide. 

We inherited the Welfare State from the English.  The constant political issue is that we demand to retain the benefits, but we turn against those who want us to pay for them.  The result is that our government is broke, because its members are too scared of us to do what is required.  They just pass the buck to the next lot. 

They deny that, but we do not believe them.  Nor do we do anything to fix the problem.  This failing looks to be inevitable in our model of democracy.  I have no idea what the end will be.

Another thing we inherited from the English was a rejection of theory or ideology.  We distrust both.  ‘Ideology’ comes from the study of ideas.  We act on the lessons of experience rather than the demands of logic.  You see very different attitudes across the Channel or the Atlantic.

Another thing we inherited from England, after America had not, is that the English had accepted the responsibility of government for looking after the poor from at least the time of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603).  In the sixteenth century, before white people had even seen America, the English people had assumed obligations for their poor that would have been abhorrent to their Puritans back then, and which still look at best alien to most Americans today.  By 1563, the English had made a law for the compulsory levy for the maintenance of ‘impotent, aged and needy persons’.  The Oxford History of England records that the English accepted that the poor were ‘a charge on public benevolence’ and that ‘responsibility in the matter could not be left to the conscience of the individual, but must be enforced by law upon everyone.’ 

The English did not do this for ideology or out of charity, but for the prosaic object of keeping the peace against vagabonds.  They faced reality, not God.  Common sense trumps theory.  The distance from this very old English position to that in America now is as deep as the Atlantic.

When you add to that the fact that the Welfare State was introduced to England by Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in the People’s Budget, you get a better idea of the difference between us and the U S. 

Before Churchill, Disraeli had been the pin-up boy of English Conservatives.  That did not stop him taking the plunge and introducing something like universal male suffrage.  The great Prussian, Count Otto von Bismarck, had done the same for Germany before he introduced the Welfare State there.  Disraeli and Bismarck were archetype conservatives – and I admire both.

‘Conservatives,’ then, could be alarmingly ‘progressive, to use another very plastic label.  Even when ‘conservatism’ was in full flower it allowed policies we now call liberal or progressive and which would be pure heresy to those who claim to be ‘conservatives’ in the U S today.  Burke, Bismarck and Disraeli did things that would lead to apoplexy on Sky After Dark.

England had both a conservative party and a liberal party.  (Churchill flitted between both, but he was one off.)  England still has a party with ‘Liberal’ in its name beside the party of the Tories.

Australia has a party called the Liberal Party.  It also claims to be conservative, although its lore is that the title ‘Liberal’ was deliberately chosen.  It now looks neither liberal nor conservative.

For about a generation it was wedded to a party of very determined agrarian socialists.  That party now looks to be in the hands not of farmers, but mining companies and urban ideologues in think tanks.  The coalition further dilutes any recognisable platform.

What are the results in Australia? 

 First, neither of the two main parties can come close to forming a majority in parliament.  Each is on the nose to the public at large.  One is accused of forgetting its roots or past.  The other is accused – and fairly accused – of not fulfilling its obligations in opposition and of turning its province into a one-party state. 

Secondly, on vote-driving issues, the only differences between the two parties are those of degree.  With the possible exception of preserving the environment, neither major party offers policies that derive from its platform, and are different in substance to those of the other side.  Each is engaged in a listless and useless game of charades that turns people right off politics as a whole.

Thirdly, whereas two generations ago it was the Labour Party that was unelectable because of division, ideology, cranks, and crooks, now it is the turn of the Liberal Party.  They look useless and bent on sustained irrelevance under the sedative of the ideology of their media drivers. 

It is best to pass over the National Party and One Nation in silence.

The conclusion is, I think, that the word ‘conservative’ has no place in Australian politics.  It is at best useless, and at worst misleading.  Like ‘socialist’, it is a darling dodo of our time.

And no populist can claim to be ‘conservative.’  They stand, they say, for ordinary people against the ruling Establishment, whose members they brand with the term ‘elites’.  I long for the day when an Australian says ‘I don’t want the best cricketer in my Australian XI – I want a dinky die Aussie battler or bludger.’  Or someone walking into a hospital saying ‘I need surgery to deal with a life-threatening condition, but I don’t want a Top Gun surgeon – a GP from the sticks suits my schtick.  I distrust all elites.  I am but a child of the people. Who was it who said of the people, by the people, for the people?’

The most hilarious claimant for the label ‘conservative’ is Donald Trump.  His mission is to obliterate the whole status quo by deceit, and if necessary by violence and force.  And a frightening number of Americans are happy to go along for the ride on a violent road.  And the last thing Trump wants to ‘conserve’ is the planet.

His major trumpet, Fox News, has nothing to do with politics.  It exists simply to enrich and aggrandize its owners.  In this respect, it resembles Trump.  By contrast, the function of the Murdoch press in Australia is simple.  It appeals only to a portion of the voters who can only vote for one party, and while doing so makes that party unelectable.

The American ideology is home grown – the family, God, and the flag.  They look still to have a hankering after royalty, as do the French, but at its worst in the U S, you get the spewing hate of Stephen Miller, who is besotted by the very idea of ideology.

There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.  It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless.  It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth.  Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul.

You would not want to be left alone in a room with a man who talks like that.  Goebbels would have blanched.  This is wild uncharted Scapegoat Territory.

So, the future looks bleak for democracy all round. 

Conservatism is a natural and decent instinct, but it has been claimed by people who are anything but decent, either because they are stupid, or greedy, or both.

Oddly enough, Australia may be well placed to deal with the Fall.  This is because we are not interested in ideology – or, for that matter, politics at large.  Life offers so much more.  Most sane Australians would much prefer to talk about footy or cricket than the so called ‘culture wars’.  And that is very healthy.  Australians correctly suspect those who have the time and inclination to indulge in what are called the ‘politics of grievance’.  What more do these people want?  What drives them to keep stirring the possum?  Did they not have enough toys in their childhood?

I was reminded of a very cold morning in the middle of winter on a crowded platform on a railway station an hour from Melbourne some years ago.  Then came the dreaded announcement.  The train was delayed.  Yet again.  That led to the following conversation.

I am going to punish these bastards for this at the next state election.

So am I, Mate.

Can you just remind me, Cobber – which set of bludgers claims to be running this bloody joint at the moment?

Passing Bull 412 – The spellbinding hypocrisy of Americans and guns

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

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.

The Mob – and Some of our Vices

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

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.’

Passing Bull 411 – Hume on dodgy moralists

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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.  

Passing Bull 410 – The Enemy Within

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

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?

More on Minorities

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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.

Being on the nose – the perils of minority

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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.

The War in the Middle East

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

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.

Passing Bull 409 – The President and the Homeless

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

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.