Fear in faith

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Australia is not alone in having a problem with young people wanting to kill other people in the name of their faith.  We got frightful warnings of this kind of problem from murderous attacks in Paris and London over many years.  People in the West have had to come to grips with what is called home-grown terrorism.

The relevant faith is Islam and its followers are called Muslims.  These killings are called acts of terrorism.  But none of those labels alters the fact that we are talking about crime – specifically the crime of murder, the most serious crime in our law.  We should not allow any of those labels, or their connotations, which will vary greatly depending on the audience, to obscure that we are talking not just of a moral or political issue, but the most serious crime that we know.

In the ordinary course, the parents of a child are responsible for both the welfare and conduct of that child until the child comes of age, whenever that may be.  I am talking of moral not legal responsibility, and of a responsibility not just to the child but to others who may be affected by the conduct of the child.  Have the parents of these young killers done their duty to bring children up as members of our community?  When some of these children want to leave the country to fight elsewhere, when they and their parents know or might fairly be taken to know that their death is almost inevitable, have the parents done enough to provide for the welfare of their children?

In the ordinary course, when some of those who subscribe to a faith want to kill those who do not, the members of the faith as a whole will have to accept some responsibility – at least where there is an identified pattern of conduct of people wishing to kill others because of their religion – that is, the religion of the would be killer.  I am speaking now of a responsibility that is morally based but which extends across a community.

If we have a problem, either in ourselves or as a group, the first thing that we have to do is to admit the problem and then accept our responsibility to do something about it.

I am a distant and casual observer, but I have not seen this acknowledgment of a problem of their young would-be killers or an acceptance of responsibility for it from either Muslim parents or religious leaders.  Indeed, it has been hard in the past to find a Muslim religious leader who is responsible for anything.

Some of the labels used are unhelpful if not silly.  (I will deal at another rime with the problems in the notions of ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’.)  We are told Muslims are ‘marginalised’.  They need to ask if they can complain of being outside a home if they have not made a decent effort to join in the home.

Some young Muslims are said to have been ‘radicalised’.  You cannot excuse murder by saying that some evil demon got into your head and gave you bad ideas.  Adolf Hitler got into the heads of the Nazi Party and a large part of the German nation, the first to engage in the annihilation of a race, and the second to follow him in a war that killed fifty million people.  Hitler could mesmerise people, but that power, and that history, do not of themselves absolve those who succumbed to his power.  And if you want to know what it feels like to be ‘marginalised’, ask a Catholic priest – ask any Christian cleric in this country – or a Catholic parent whose son wants to be an altar boy.

It may be – I do not know – that government and the community may seek to deal with the problem of this kind of serious crime by looking at how these people are got at by those who want to put them to evil, but using a weasel term like ‘radicalisation’ – I do not think ‘extremism’ is any better – might just offer a shield to hide behind to those who are or who should be held responsible.  Law enforcement will take its course, but the answer to the real problem must come from within the Muslim community itself.

Take the example of another cause of crimes of violence – drugs.  The law and the community as a whole may wish to try to prevent these crimes by seeking to contain drugs, but the use of drugs does not of itself come even close to diminishing the responsibility of the affected criminal in the eye of the law.  And if the criminal is not of age, the intervention of drugs does not affect the responsibility of the parents of the criminal for the relevant conduct.  One of the first duties of parents nowadays is to do their best to protect their children from contamination by drugs.  I know this from personal experience.  It is now a paramount duty of Muslim parents to do their best to protect their children from contamination by false prophets.

It is hard to see any answer to this problem until the Muslim community as a whole accepts what most here would see as these facts of life. There is plenty of scope for argument at the edges, but it is very hard to suggest that we might have these problems even though Muslim parents and religious leaders have done their jobs well and have nothing to answer for.

It is wrong to say that every Muslim is tainted by or responsible for the actions of a few murderers.  But it is in my view just as wrong to say that the Muslim community as a whole has no responsibility for its part in this problem – at least insofar as these criminals purport to act in the cause of Islam.  It is not enough for those in the community to shrug their shoulders, and blame the internet and the gullibility of youth – or to put some anaemic label on the pathway to murder.

In my view, the comments of Hannah Arendt on the political responsibility of nations are analogous to the issues of the moral and social responsibility of communities for the failings of individual members.

Many people today would agree that there is no such thing as collective guilt, or, for that matter, collective innocence, and that if there were, no one person could ever be guilty or innocent.  This of course is not to deny that there is such a thing as political responsibility which however exists quite apart from what the individual member of the group has done and therefore can neither be judged in moral terms or brought before a criminal court.  Every government assumes political responsibility for the deeds and misdeeds of its predecessor and every nation for the deeds and misdeeds of the past.  When Napoleon….said: I shall assume responsibility for everything France ever did…., he was only stating somewhat emphatically one of the basic facts of all political life.  It means hardly more, generally speaking, than that every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors.

We Australians have been two faced on this –we are much quicker to bask in the sun of Bradman standing up to Bodyline than we are to own up to our murder and rape of the first inhabitants, but like it or not, it is a basic fact of political life that the Muslim community will have to account to others for crimes committed in its name by its own people.

If on the other hand, Muslims find that their faith makes it too hard to come to terms with the way that the rest of Australia lives, they should go to a place where they are more at home.  There will be a price for that, a heavy one, but Australians are not prepared to pay the equally heavy price of their living with the alternative.

The evidence suggests that while the Muslim community is not doing enough, the problem just gets worse.  Islam is not alone in having evil-doers on the fringe.  We have ours in the gutter and on the radio, and if you want to talk about people being marginalised and then radicalised, there are plenty of drop-outs out there who are only too willing to accommodate their soul-mates in violence on the other side.  We have already had frightening insight into these violent radicals at Cronulla and Bendigo.

We now face the nightmare of the migrant nation of migrants importing violence from their past and bringing out the worst in those who are already here.  It is the first duty of government is to keep the peace.  Unless this is done, and the problem is resolved, the end outcome is a form of civil war.  The courses therefore left open to government unless the Muslim community takes responsibility do not look attractive for anyone.

Finally, another bad word is Islamophobia.  A phobia is an irrational fear.  The apprehension that is felt across the western world at the killing that is coming out of Islam is anything but irrational.  You would have to be bloody mad not to be afraid.

Passing Bull 15 – Knights and Dames and Bad Sports – Very Bad Sports

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

The Australian Spectator greatly admired and strongly supported Tony Abbott as PM.  Its writers were very rude about people they saw as ‘Abbott-haters’ – a term they had to share with shock jocks and The Australian about the ABC and the Fairfax press and others.  It was therefore natural that the fall of Mr Abbott would cause as much pain to The Spectator as it did to Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones.  And the pain really shows.

The cover for 26 September has a crude cartoon of the new PM with some waffles.  The editorial refers to the ‘excruciating love-in’ with Leigh Sales on the ABC – Anti-Christ at home in Hades.

Mr Turnbull’s entire 22 minutes of verbiage could be summed up in half a dozen slogans: Terrorists are bad.  War is dangerous.  Governments must work.  And so on.  His lengthy interview with David Speers on Sky News was more of the same with a bit of ‘innovation’ thrown in.  The art of communications – and leadership – is to simply express single-minded core ideas and more importantly, to clearly convey goals your government can be measured by, such as ‘stopping the boats’ or ‘scrapping the carbon tax.’  Mr Turnbull’s banal, patronising platitudes seek to obscure the tough decision-making required of government under a fluffy blanket of cheeky smiles and good intentions.  This is government for the asinine twitter generation.  As we saw back in the days of ‘programmatic specificity’, its charm soon wears thin.

Well, let us put to one side the murder of the English language, and the dynamiting of infinitives – we now know that the Bolt poster-boy is one who has ‘single-minded core ideas.’  Mr Abbott qualifies there – he was not capable of anything else.  You think that Syria is tricky?  Not on your Nelly.  Just pick out a ‘death cult’, keep repeating that ‘single-minded core idea’, and bomb them.  But Mr Abbott was fired not because he was beyond ‘the tough decision-making required of government’, but because he had lost the nerve to make any decision at all.

Mr James Allen is in a more mortal form of agony.  ‘But why are we Abbott supporters now supposed to help Turnbull.’  It would I suppose be damned silly to respond: ‘Perhaps because you are Australians?’  Mr Allen contemplates what might be called the Japanese gambit of hara-kiri:

It’s better sometimes to blow the whole thing up and –let’s be honest – lose to the other team.  Why?  Because you’ll have sent a message that loyalty ‘and no white anting’ and giving us support when things are a bit tough are the price they have to pay, not just that you have to pay.  Reciprocity baby.  Signal-sending my friend.

This sulking really is selfish.  Political parties are what used to carry the system.  The failure of the system comes in large part from the failure of the parties.

Can Mr Turnbull redeem himself?  Yes.  How?  ‘Bring back the pre-election promise to repeal most (or better yet all) of the ghastly 18C.’  Here you have precise insight into the doctrinal purity, so removed from the sense of the nation, which saw our last PM hit the fence with such vigour.

Mr Philip Murphy likes the kitchen sink in the gutter.  The reference to King Cnut is a reference to the crude abuse of an Abbott staffer to the new PM, in itself a golden reminder of the failure of that part of our constitution that said an impartial civil service was essential to our system.  Apart from puerile vulgarity, we know that we are again lost in intellectual abstractions and labels by the sub-heading: ‘Will Malcolm Turnbull be able to hold back the rising tide of illiberalism.’  If you are too liberal, you become illiberal.

Poor Mr Murphy also got Leigh Sales.  Why do these people torture themselves acquiring the stigmata of Antichrist from the ABC and Fairfax?  What really scares Mr Murphy?  Mr Turnbull’s

….following the pattern of others who have been involved in creeping republicanism.  The mooted execution of Knights and Dames is no doubt on top of such a list.

The disease of eternal irrelevance extends to the once respectable parent.  It says that Pope Francis ‘has become the darling of the international left’ and ‘an engaging chatterbox’, but that he should spend less time on the environmental crisis – where his view is ‘alarmist’ ‘and whose scale he may be exaggerating’ – and more time worrying about Christians in the Middle East.

You must feel sorry for these people, eternal victims not just of Fairfax and the ABC, but of Islam, and now the Holy Father and the Supreme Court of the USA.  They have to carry the whole Christian world on their shoulders surrounded by all those demons.

But they are so removed from the rest of the nation that they are political poison.  Australians distrust political theories and ideologies and people who claim to have the answer and look down on others.  We look for something that works, not for doctrinal correctness.  Since we get that from the English, it is curious that people who treat English as a comfy rug do not get it.  Make no mistake – these are the people who brought Abbott down.

Just ask Mark Textor, the man who got him the job.  (Peta says she got it for him, but Mark’s is the stronger claim.)

Nothing says more about the reality marginalisation of shock-jocks and news columnists than their misinterpretation of the decency of middle Australia over Goodes.  Most want media-fuelled division to end.

If I may say so, that was exactly my sense of the reaction of most Australians, and it was an occasion of an appalling lack of leadership on the part of the then P M.  He was the victim of ideologically induced gutlessness.  It used to happen all the time.

And he is now just a bad loser.  As is Mr Campbell Newman.  According to the AFR, he is publishing a memoir Can Do which includes the following:

They [journalists] are not interested in the government or reform or the reasons behind the decisions we made.  They are only interested in the tactical, the here and now, they only ever look for short-term politics and gossip.  And they have got a nerve to ridicule people like me who tried to actually get things done.  And they have always ridiculed and sneered.

Failed politicians are desperately unattractive people.  They and their failed fan clubs are very bad sports.

And we beat the Poms in the World Cup.  On their own turf.  And one of the princes was there.  Barracking for the wrong side.

Poet of the Month: Yeats.

I propose to add to the bullshit column, when I remember, an extract from a poet of the month.  The poet for October is Yeats.  The poetry will not relate to the bullshit, but hopefully provide some respite from a tedious world.  The following extract is from A Prayer for my Daughter.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house

Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;

For arrogance and hatred are the wares

Peddled in the thoroughfares.

How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?

Thirty years on

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

It is not the Eton boating song, but one of Harrow, and not thirty years but forty, that the song goes back from, but thirty years is still something.  Although he thought that he had banned any such show of ritual, on 1 October 1985, an abashed inaugural member of the Taxation Division of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal of Victoria had to sit through a ceremony of welcome, in which I suspect that Ray Finkelstein was complicit judging from the knowing grin on his face, which contained the following remarks:

Although you have a wide practice at the Bar, your interest in literary works has no doubt assisted in your recognised abilities in the area of defamation.  It seems that it has also enabled you to write copious amounts of correspondence to the people you not only deal with on a professional basis, but also on the social plane. 

There was some gushing of the kind you get on these occasions, which it would be at best improvident for me to repeat, and then:

On a lighter note, I gather your disdain for humbug has meant that you are to be approached to be the inaugural President of the Society for the Prevention of Humbug.

Well, at least everyone was on notice that the first head of the Tax Division was anything but a tax lawyer, a disclaimer previously put in writing to the Attorney-General, and now that the member has survived thirty years on that and other tribunals later, perhaps those remarks may be tendered as some sign of constancy in a world made hard by inconstancy.

Some ungrateful types complain of the copiousness of the correspondence, but what would you do without the bullshit – and the continuing war on humbug?

Religious Violence – Not in God’s Name

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is a man of astounding learning and, at last count, sixteen honorary degrees.  When he writes a book with the above title, and the sub-title Confronting Religious Violence, we really should take note.  Not least because his conclusions will frighten you out of your wits.

…the world will be more religious a generation from now, not less…It has to do with demography.  The more religious people are, the more children they have.  The indigenous populations of Europe, the most secular continent on earth are committing long slow suicide…..Within religion, the most extreme, anti-modern or anti-Western movements will prevail.  This is happening in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  The old marriage of religion and culture has ended in divorce.  Today the secular West has largely lost the values that used to be called the Judeo-Christian heritage….Losing its religious faith, the west is beginning to lose the ideals that once made it inspiring to the altruistic…..The moral relativism that prevails today in the secular West is no defence of freedom…..In a world of relativism, what talks is power….So there will be more terror, more bloodshed….The West, indeed the world, has never faced a challenge quite like this.

As it happens, although I am as unreligious as you can decently get, I agree with every word.  As I think the author says elsewhere, the threat is not so much between the religions as within them – or at least the three that we most focus on.

The book looks at the origins of violence among humans, develops a theory of sibling rivalry, and offers explanations for some unsavoury parts of the bible.  I offer a few comments.

First, in looking at history, theology, philosophy, sociology and psychoanalysis – Freud is prominent – not to mention the huge literature of Judaism, it is not surprising if we get spread a bit thin.  For example, the author finds that we are subject to ‘two sets of instincts, honed and refined by many centuries of evolutionary history’ – the readiness to co-operate within our own group and to fight those in another group.  Darwin’s theory of evolution supplies the answer.

Let us put to one side that some people – a substantial part of the US Congress – do not accept that theory, what part does God have to play in our propensity for violence, whether we started in the Garden of Eden or in the backblocks of Africa?  It is a little disconcerting that when the author comes to Nazi ideology, he says it was pagan and propped up by ideas thought at the time to be scientific – including ‘social Darwinism’ the theory that the same processes operating in nature operate in society also.  The strong survive by eliminating the weak.’

It is not surprising that the process, whatever it is, continues in us, since we are its current end product, but it is a little worrying that the author’s starting point on human violence is the same theory.  Similarly, the author flirts with the suggestion that violence does not come from religion – religion comes out of violence.  That is a dangerous place to go for a man of God.

Secondly, Muslims are not the only ones with long memories when it comes to the Crusades.  The author dates the massacres of Jews before the first crusade as the time when Jews became a scapegoat leading, for example, to the Black Death.  ‘That period added to the vocabulary of the West such ideas as public disputation, book burning, forced conversion, Inquisition, auto-da fe, expulsion, ghetto and pogrom.’

Thirdly, Freud figures largely in the theory about sibling rivalry being at the core of the problem of violence.  Any parent of more than one child knows about this.  When she was about three and her sister about twelve months, our number one, a propos of nothing, picked up a handful of sand and pushed it firmly into the face of number two on Green Island, and number two let the mainland know.  A few years later, on Christmas Day, I heard number one pick up a broken toy ukulele and say ‘that one’s buggered – it can be Amy’s.’  But how do you verify the theory that this rivalry is at the core of violence between groups?  And where does it lead you?  Well, one thing it tells you is that it is madness, moral madness, for a parent to treat one child differently to others without good reason

That leads to the next point.  To deal with the complaint that God plays favourites by doing special deals with people he likes, Lord Sacks develops a distinction between the universality of God as Creator and Sovereign, and the particularity of the covenant with Abraham, Moses and the Israelites.  There are two covenants – one with Noah and the rest of us, and the other with Abraham and one particular people.  One represents universality and justice; the other particularity and love.  There is a dualism – a spectre elsewhere for the Rabbi – in Hebrew spirituality.  ‘It accepts the inevitability of the here-and- now.  We are not all the same.  There is an Us and Them.  But God is universal as well as particular, which means he can be found among Them as well as Us.  God transcends our particularities.’

Why in heaven’s name does He bother?  I had thought that excessive, sense-defying intellectualism was a virus peculiar to Christianity.  If it is silly for me to second-guess Einstein, why should I try it on with God?  Does the ordinary member of the congregation understand or accept any of this?

If they do, where does it take us?  God still does a special deal to single out one child from others and that is what inflames sibling rivalry – which the author says is the fount of all our problems.  And if you want to see sibling rivalry in action here it is in the author’s own words:

For all the natural pride we feel in being part of our group – the people of the covenant, a holy nation – we are brought face to face with the fact that others may respond to the word of God better than we do.

If I may say so without offence, that remark gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘patronising’.

It seemed to me that a chicken-and–egg issue runs through a lot of this.  You shift the problem back one stage, but the problem or question remains.  Take the wars of conquest.  The author has to confront the problem lawyers know so well: ‘Whatever else a verse means, it means what it says.’  The Promised Land was taken by people like Joshua with appalling slaughter of men, women, and children, what today we call ethnic cleansing, ordained by God.

As I understand Lord Sacks, he says two things.  First, the victims were offered peace but refused it.  Secondly, the nation of the sword became the people of the book.  It is not hard to envisage a Palestinian response to either suggestion; indeed, as to the nation of the sword becoming the people of the book, I can imagine the reaction of most of Tel Aviv – most of them have to work for a living and help to defend the same nation; neither is within the contemplation of the people of the book.

So, we need some good news, and the author has it.  He refers to the changed relationship between Jews and Christians after the Holocaust.  He might have referred to the remark of Angela Merkel that the state of Israel is part of Germany’s raison d’etre, but he does quote the present pope: ‘God’s fidelity to the close covenant with Israel never failed, and… through the terrible trials of these centuries, the Jews have kept their faith in God.  And for this we shall never be sufficiently grateful to them as Church but also as humanity.’  The author says that ‘this may be the first time that a pope has publicly recognised that in staying true to their faith, Jews were being loyal to God, not faithless to him.  That is a statement capable of changing the world.’

People outside the religious circle may not be so optimistic.  The author elsewhere describes the exodus of Jews from across Europe – largely, as it seems to me, in response to Muslim migration, to put it softly, and the inevitable demographic consequences.  It is not a world that I will be sorry to leave.

May I conclude with perhaps just another example of Us versus Them?  I could hardly claim that Immanuel Kant is a mate of mine, but I will certainly look up if he is attacked.  Having referred to a throwaway line by Voltaire about the Jews (‘Still, we ought not to burn them’), Lord Sacks says that Kant ‘spoke of the Jews as ‘the vampires of society’ and called for ‘the euthanasia of Judaism.’

Kant is revered as a leader of the European Enlightenment, and is widely seen as the best placed to fill the ethical void left by the decline of religion.  We know that Konigsberg, where Kant lived, was the home of a large and successful Jewish community, and that Kant was very proud of the width of his friendships across the city.  (His best friend was an idiosyncratic English merchant.)  We know that Kant had almost a life-long and amicable correspondence with Moses Mendelssohn, a prominent Jewish philosopher and theologian, and the father of the composer.  We know that Kant conducted this correspondence and publicly defended Mendelsshon in a major controversy out of a deep intellectual respect – Mendelssohn had beaten Kant for a big prize.  We know that Kant backed Jewish students to overcome their disability with the establishment, and that he expressed his admiration for the achievements of Jewish students.  We know that Kant was warned off by the Prussian Establishment for his dangerous views on the state religion.  We know that Kant said that both sides would seek to make something out of the preservation of the Jewish people and religion.

One man sees in the continuation of the people to which he belongs, and in his ancient faith which remained unmixed despite the dispersion among such diverse nations, the proof of a special beneficent Providence saving this people for a future kingdom on earth; the other sees nothing but the warning ruins of a disrupted state which set itself against the coming of the kingdom of heaven – ruins, however, which a special Providence still sustains, partly to preserve in memory the ancient prophecy of a Messiah arising from this people, partly to offer, in this people, an example of punitive justice visited upon it because it stiff-neckedly sought to create a political and moral concept of the Messiah.

Kant was a supreme moral and intellectual heavyweight, and is not to be reduced by some gnat straining at a camel.  It is therefore disappointing that Lord Sacks does not give any context at all for the words alleged against Kant, and this in a book which labours the obvious point that context is indispensable in looking at statements that are controversial, and it is more than disappointing that when we go to the notes at the end, it appears that the author is not relying on the primary German source, but a citation by someone in Princeton in 1990 in a book about revolutionary antisemitism.  Really, my lord, third party sledging is not smiled upon in the universities that we most admire.  This might fairly be said to be a sample of the loose thinking and casual smearing that lie at the heart of the whole bloody problem.

J T

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

My footy team lost on the weekend.  I was neither surprised nor upset.  (I might same the same about Ferrari.)  We had a good season and I got my money’s worth.  It was going to be hard without Billy Slater, notwithstanding the great show by his replacement.  And we were beaten by a clearly better side on the night led by Jonathon Thurston.

I have spoken of this player here before.  He is clearly one of the best and most attractive sportsmen going around in this country, one of those it is a shame that we do not get to see on the world stage.  In the course of the game, he gave one my boys a spray that Mr Will Swanton in The Australian said could serve as his motto – words to the effect, omitting colour, that there was no need to act like a half-wit.  Mr Swanton says, and most would agree with him, that that is very good advice for a whole of people in and about sport in this country.

Having orchestrated a high octane win over the Melbourne Storm on Saturday night, a human pinball setting up tries with deft passes and one boomerang kick that ensured the Storm would not come back, Thurston returned to Townsville yesterday as the free-spirited, free-wheeling face and co-captain of a power-house club.  More than 1000 cheering fans greeted the team’s return at the airport.

Good grief – this might take us back to when footy was a game.

Mr Swanton commends the spray about half-wits ‘to any athlete or alleged fan who reckons they have the right to behave atrociously before blaming the heat of the moment as an excuse’.

Thurston is the poster-boy for commitment without the cringe factor.  Thurston shows you can be passionate.  You can give it your all.  And you can still be dressed in the cloak of human decency.

I commend Mr Swanton for his words.  And on Sunday evening you may want to have a look at a real champion in action.  Last night he won his fourth League Medal, so passing Andrew Johns, who I put up there with Ablett Senior.  He is the blackfella in the headgear who somehow does not get killed and, unless I am putting the kiss of death on him, passes the ball in a way you have not seen.  And you should get behind the Cowboys – they are yet to win a flag.  They are like Hawthorn in 1961.

You might also give thought to the other rugby.  There was a show last night on when South Africa won the World Cup, when Mandela went into the rooms before and presented the Cup later – a supreme moral genius of our time.  I can offer you an unsurpassable incentive for this weekend.  Australia plays England – and can knock them out.  The only advice I offer is that when we are kicking for goal, you might want to go to the dunny.  I feel better watching Jason Day with a twenty footer.

From journalist to Tory PM – Part II – Does the Sermon on the Mount apply to governments?

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Eton was not good for Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (Lord Salisbury).  He was brutally bullied and his father would not take him away from the school.  According to Andrew Roberts, Eton fed his ‘pessimism about human nature’, and his assumptions about the ‘cowardice of the silent majority, the cruelty of the mob and the vulnerability of the rights of the individual’ – not so bad in themselves, but worrying when the speaker puts himself above the majority – as he surely will.  ‘I think the human heart naturally so bad that if not checked by true religion, the bad will generally prevail over the good’.  That is far less healthy.  And Salisbury sent his own sons to Eton – because he thought it had improved.  That was a rare welcome of change from a man who was instinctively against it.

At one time, Cecil, while a journalist, said that ‘we are to be governed by a set of weathercocks, delicately poised, warranted to indicate with unnerving accuracy every variation in public feeling.’  Well, we have seen that gutlessness triumphant.  But then he went on to speak of Realpolitik, and to put the teaching of Christ in its place.

No one dreams of conducting national affairs with the principles which are prescribed to individuals.  The meek and poor spirited among nations are not to be blessed, and the common sense of Christendom has always prescribed for national policy principles which are diametrically opposed to those that are laid down in the  Sermon on the Mount.’

This is most important.  We suspect that governments proceed on this basis, but we rarely see it spelt out this way.  The dispensation is said to come from ‘common sense’, not scripture.  Jesus did not say that his teachings did not apply to Caesar.  You will find no support in Scripture for the notion that government is as no-fly zone for the Sermon on the Mount.  And how and when do you draw the line?

Later Salisbury ‘treated scruples….with marked contempt….if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British Empire would not have been made.’  How many hundred millions, including the Irish, would have said – so much the better?  This is an imperial rejection of the Sermon on the Mount.

On another occasion, Salisbury said that ‘The vast multitude of Indians I thoroughly believe are well contented with our rule…they have changed masters so often that there is nothing humiliating to them in having gained a new one.’  But he later said that they would ‘certainly cut every English throat they can lay their hands on whenever they can do it safely’.

Christianity forced its way up from being the religion of slaves and outcasts, to become the religion of the powerful and rich; but somehow it seems to have lost the power of forcing its way down again.

You will find no warrant for that transition in Scripture.  If it is a fair comment, it explains the near terminal position of the Church today.

Accordingly, rebellious subjects could easily be put down.  When some Australian colonists got frisky, Cecil said that ‘four sloops of war could at any time bring the four colonies to their knees.’

This imperial Christian’s views on the Civil War were quite odd – to the point of madness.  He supported the Confederacy because ‘the best chance for the alleviation of the slave’s condition lies in the increased wealth and prosperity of the South.’  Of the Red Indians, he had said that the Americans ‘sought to Christianise the country by the simple expedient of slaughtering all who were not Christians.’  John Wilkes Booth had shown ‘not only courage but the hardihood of desperation.’  And, you, too, Judas?

He was of course brutally racist with the Irish.  ‘A sound whipping – stinging but not injurious – administered once a week for six months is the prescription and the world will have heard the last of Fenianism.’  A whipping that is ‘stinging but not injurious’ – was one taught that at Eton or Oxford?  Like Cromwell, he wanted ‘a strong and merciless hand’ in Ireland.  When people said the Irish should get their freedom like Canada and Australia, Salisbury said that Ireland was only four hours away and ‘a large proportion of the Irish people hated us.’  In one famous faux pas, he compared the Irish to the Hottentots – who were beneath the Orientals governed in India.

As Roberts remarked in another context, ‘Salisbury believed implicitly in the politics of prestige and vengeance.’  So do most politicians – but not many get to live up to it.  If Britain could not rule Ireland, ‘what right have we to go lecturing the Sultan as to the state of things in Armenia or Macedonia?’  In the Transvaal, he said, ‘to put it in a terse Oriental phrase, they have eaten dirt in vain.’  This book really should be compulsory reading for the whole State Department.

Because of his birth, and connections, Salisbury did not have to ask for votes.  He was spared

….days and weeks of screwed-up smiles and laboured courtesy, the mock geniality, the hearty shake of the filthy hand, the chuckling reply that has to be made to the coarse joke, the loathsome choking compliment that must be paid to the grimy wife and sluttish daughter, the indispensable flattery of the vilest religious prejudices, the wholesale deglutition of hypocritical pledges.

Well, at least the ruling class then did not have to mix with shock jocks.

Salisbury did have some journalistic flair.  ‘Matters seem very critical….a woman on the Throne and a Jew adventurer who had found out the secret of getting around her.’  He was spot on there and he overcame his dislike of Disraeli to form a strong combination with him – and to learn from him.  (He learned never to respond to the press unless they were dead wrong.)  He spoke of politicians ‘whose courage overboils in Opposition and only simmers in office.’  There are plenty of those around.

He diagnosed the condition of Greece:

The Greeks have magnificent dreams and splendid recollections but after seventy years of independence, their exchequer is nearly bankrupt, their public men and their tribunals are corrupt, and their punishment of crime is so uncertain by political favouritism and brigandage is beginning to rear its head again.

Yes, we can see that; but later he said ‘the Greeks are a contemptible race.’

He of course savaged Rousseau and Voltaire: ‘By their writings – their infidelity and their rant about the rights of man that the gloomy enthusiasts were inspired.’  He also bucketed moderates like Lafayette, Necker and Sieyes.

They believed intensely in amiable theories, they loved the sympathy and applause of their fellow men, they were kind-hearted and charitably fancied everybody as well-meaning as themselves, and therefore…they were the proximate causes of a civil convulsion which, for the horror of its calamities, stands alone in the history of the world.

There is a lot to be said for that view.

He had the heart of a conservative.  ‘With us the feebleness of our government is our security – and the only one we have against revolutionary changes in the law.’  Is government in the U S and here crippled now by that attitude?

We have so to conduct our legislation that we shall give some satisfaction to both classes and masses.  This is specially different with the classes – because all legislation is rather unwelcome to them as tending to disturb a state of things with which they are satisfied.

This is a true conservative – but not a zealot.  He wanted to legislate about housing for the poor, compensation for workers, and pensions for the aged – for each of which he could be damned as a socialist in the U S today.

When property is in question, I am guilty of erecting individual liberty as an idol, but when you pass from liberty to life, in no well-governed state, in no state governed according to the principles of common humanity, are the claims of mere liberty to endanger the lives of the citizens.

This was the British political genius – never let theory run over the facts.  Which they did in the Boer War when 20,000 Boer women and children died in concentration camps.  Still, Salisbury would not be the last conservative PM who professed to follow the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount who would be content to lock up unwanted foreigners in concentration camps.

And Salisbury also saw exactly how bad politics could get.

Nobody argues now.  They give you an opinion neatly expressed in a single sentence, and that does the work of argument.  My belief is that a fallacy in two lines will carry you further than a mathematical demonstration in two pages.

Bull’s eye!

Well, Salisbury was a real conservative in an imperial age.  He was a man of his time, and what we now call a conviction politician – but it does not look like politics ever change much.  Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.  Although that is not a proposition that would have commended itself to his lordship.

But to come back to the question posed at the head of this note – I am very confident that the present pope would be horrified at merely the suggestion that the question might be asked, and it is impossible to duck that question when looking at our moral obligation to refugees.  What does the Sermon on the Mount say about detention camps for people who claim to be refugees?

Here truly is an issue ripe for discussion.

Up Your North – Parts 6 and 7

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VI

There is a saying, I am not sure if it is Jewish, that whatever does not kill you makes you stronger.  I have always been sceptical of the validity of that proposition – with, say, rape or torture – but it did seem be handy for my arrival at the Bungles.  The events of the day might even change my attitude to Saturdays at large.

I resolved to leave it until the morning to decide whether I would on the morrow go back to the Park.  But when I got up and realised it was a full 80ks to get to where I wanted, which meant about four hours there and back before setting off on the highway, I decided to defer the issue until I was ensconced in comfort in Kununurra.

Breakfast was at 7am – sharp!  And you may not want to play games with Storm number 8.

Any chance of some weeties?

This is a cooked breakfast!

This is what logicians call a non sequitur.  The result does not follow from the premises.  I have had cooked breakfasts all over the world – you even get offered a boiled egg in Paris – but I have never been denied weeties – even as a slushy for the army.  It could send a man’s bowels berserk.  But the South African lady was soft behind her firm exterior.  We compared the Bungles to Table Mountain, where she had come from.  There were big cast iron cooking urns around the campfire outside that reminded me of those used for breakfast on safari in Zimbabwe – one of which held curried potatoes as part of the best breakfast ever – which of course started with weeties.

It was a good breakfast, and I was keen to shake the dust from this wadi off my feet, until a friendly looking dude about my age strolled in to inquire about breakfast.  I said I thought you had to have a token from the night before, but he might try his luck at HQ.  He came back with a big relieved smile and a token that he gave to number 8 before waddling off saying that he could not face breakfast without a newspaper.  He came back with a three day old Australian.

Trevor, for that was his name, was most interesting.  He said that he had been visiting his sister who was doing community work at Warmun (Turkey Creek) about 40ks up the road.  He was sympathetic to the condition of the indigenous people.  He had been shown over the school and he thought it was first rate.  ‘If we have done the wrong thing by these people, and we have, this is a good start in the repayment.’  He told me that he had visited a memorial to murdered aboriginals at Misery Creek – where a stockman had shot and burned aboriginals eating meat because he thought, wrongly, that they had taken his stock.  I told Trevor of my own small part in the repayment, my own little Calvary, the day before, and we laughed.  (I need not I think apologise for the religious reference, because I had firmly in mind that the first miracle was turning water into wine – which could cause bloody mayhem in this part of the world.)

Then Trevor said something that told me he might be a lawyer.  He said that with mandatory sentencing, the bureaucrats had taken over the job of the judges – meaning that government rather than the judiciary was responsible for the sentencing of those convicted of breaking the law.  Up there, you go inside for your third offence.  A young man had just gone in for stealing loaf of bread – because this was his third offence – it would have been insane to do that for any other reason.  We reflected that we like to think that this is how the white men came here to take this land from the blackfellas – by sentencing people to transportation to here for stealing a loaf of bread.  It is a remarkable example not so much of history repeating itself as of our obdurately refusing to learn and being too scared to bend.

Trevor and I swapped cards – I had to go and get mine marked ‘Writer’ – and we had a good laugh about two Victorian lawyers meeting over breakfast in a caravan park at the back of nowhere.  It was a helpful reminder of just how lucky we were – so, I left the Bungles area in as good a mood as I had entered it, and a little better informed, if not wiser.

The 240ks to Kununurra was more scenic.  There was fire damage all along the road and a lot of dead livestock as well as wild life.  I even saw wild horses.  You have to be careful in passing very long road trains.  I thought that the Nissan lacked grunt in overtaking, and its height did not make me confident on the bends on bitumen.  You also have to be careful on one lane bridges – that is something we have in common with the Scots, although the scenery is rather different.

When I got to Kununurra, I breasted the bar of the Visitors’ Centre and politely inquired after the flashiest boozer in town, having even more politely informed them that Florence and I had had a little misunderstanding about the quality of the accommodation booked for me down the road.  They took the news with the quiet equanimity that you expect in those parts.

VII

When I first went to see The Sistine Madonna of Raphael at the Zwinger in Dresden, I was horrified to find, after about thirty hours travel, that the gallery was shut for the duration of my stay there – which I had scheduled mainly to see that painting.  When I finally got to see it a couple of years later, it left me a bit flat – it just did not come up so well in the flesh.  It is famous not just for the Madonna holding the baby, and looking uncertainly into the future, but for the two putti at the bottom, with their credulous or quizzical gazes at a sacramental moment in western art.  There is another painting, I think by Pontormo [I now think after checking that it is by Rosso Fiorentino], of two putti – winged cherubim that looked like innocent toddlers – where the two are seated and one of them is leaning across to whisper something confidential about something that they are reading to the other.

It is a phase of life that every parent remembers with comfort and fondness.  The children are innocent – they are yet to be corrupted by the world.  They are yet to be burdened with the failures of their parents.  They are yet to be taught that people can be distinguished by the colour of their skin or by what they believe or by what their parents are.  They are yet to be formed by an upbringing that teaches them that there is only one God who chose only one people.  Toddlers are not conscious of such differences, whether they are discerned by man or imposed by God.  They are still as innocent as the day that they were born.  If the terms were not so charged, you might say that they are still in a state of grace undefiled by any notion of original sin.

I thought of the putti at the time I saw the most memorable image of the whole trip.  It was at Derby outside a rather battered IGA store.  Two young children about four years old were seated on the footpath.  One was as black as you can get; the other was as white as me.  They were just gabbling on without a care in the world.  It is the only example I recall of a completely easy mixing of colour and culture.  These kids did not even know what the word race means.  We do get conscious of these differences in time, but we rely on our upbringing to control how we express and react to those differences.  We rely on upbringing for courtesy and manners.

I thought about upbringing at the Sports Bar at the Kimberley Grand on that Sunday.  This is the swish upmarket hotel whose elegant luxury I embraced – and it was not over-priced.  The Sports Bar was not in Melbourne Club style, with giant TVs showing about six sports, with pride of place going to the AFL – I watched the start of the Belgian GP there later that evening.  Upbringing came to mind when a young white couple, about 25 but already well spread out, came in for lunch with three kids – aged about five, three, and a baby.  Both parents were drinking what we call pots of beer while taking it in turns to show the oldest kid the rudiments of pool – which required them temporarily to deposit their pots.  The older kids watched the TVs in a desultory fashion, but this was a mother who may choose not to hear a child crying for attention.

I wondered what kind of upbringing this might represent – Sunday lunch at the local boozer.  It was different to what the black kids were getting in the barren Halls Creek – but how different?

What about a white kid who was brought up to think that Sunday lunch was time to spend with grandma over the Sunday roast, although World of Sport was allowed into the family and as part of the family when sport was sport, and the whole world was not in your face, and you had to wait a long time after the event to see the Kennedy assassination on TV?  What about a kid who went to state school and was sent to Sunday School, and then went on to a public school where he got a scholarship and where the day started with religion, and where he was exposed to literature, the national team sports, and to the army and to dancing class, and he was exposed to an education that equipped him to go into a learned profession, and then go on to sample the best that western civilisation can offer all over the world, and colour in that learning at his leisure in stints at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard for kicks?  Was not that kid immensely blessed?  Is he doing enough to pay others back for the benefit of so fine and privileged an upbringing?  Noblesse is no good unless it is oblige, very oblige.

Passing bull 14 – The Canberra Disease

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On the second day after the fall of a Prime Minister, an article commencing on page one of a national daly was published.  That article contained the following.

The inside story of the knighthood has not been revealed before and this information does not come from Abbott.  But Abbott gave Philip a knighthood because he learned the Queen wanted her husband to have one.  The Queen’s son, Prince Charles, had a number of Australian honours, but Philip had not been so richly rewarded by Australia.

The Queen is immensely well regarded in Australia, and rightly so.  Prince Philip, like Prince Charles, is much less popular.

Abbott is a constitutional monarchist, the position a majority of Australians endorsed when the republic was put to a referendum in 1999.  But most Australians are at best small-m monarchists like John Howard.  They don’t want Australia to march backwards to old-style titles and regal pomp and circumstance.

That Abbott unilaterally restored knighthoods at all is an example of how poor his tactical judgment on political management was as a prime minister.

But for the Queen to make a request of Abbott meant that all that was honourable and generous in Abbott – loyalty, chivalry, romance – was lined up against the pragmatic political judgment that should have guided him.

Not only did Abbott endure enormous political damage because of his loyalty to the Queen, he never leaked the exculpatory explanation, which does not excuse his error of judgment, but gives it context, humanises it and may have made it a less toxic political issue.

Abbott’s government fell mainly because of questions of image and style and political management.  His successor, Malcolm Turnbull, in a sense acknowledged that the substance of the Abbott government was good by essentially endorsing all the Abbott positions when he took over as Prime Minister this week.

Abbott’s greatest achievement lies in stopping the boats…..

Generally in foreign policy, Abbott’s record is outstanding….

No one was prepared for the spending cuts in the first budget, or that is to say the electorate was not prepared for them.  In truth, it was a mild enough budget, with most of the notional savings occurring several years down the track.  But Labor, in an act of deliberate national economic sabotage, had baked spending increases into the budget just beyond its own forward estimates in its last year of government…….

Abbott was again partly the victim of wickedly unhelpful external circumstances.  The weird business of needing to rerun the West Australian half-senate election meant that for its first six months the government could not really prepare the electorate for a tough budget, because it was scared of losing at least one senator…..

Abbott was astonishingly successful as opposition leader…..

He has been vilified by the Left for many years and could never expect a fair shake from much of the media…..

Because his Catholicism was so relentlessly and unreasonably attacked, he learnt to shut down about the personal side of his identity…..

He had the potential to be the Liberals’ Bob Hawke.  He had the same easy presence in a bar or at a community barbecue, the same mainstream Aussie bloke manner, along with a powerful intellect.  I thought he would be a hit with Howard’s battlers, labelled only far too late, and unsuccessfully, in his prime ministership, as ‘Tony’s tradies’……

Abbott is without question a fine person.  The basic human ingredients are of the highest order.  But so often his virtues got him into trouble.  And to the end [as] at the beginning, never more was this the case than on the question of loyalty.  Joe Hockey failed as Treasurer, but Abbott would not consider moving him when he was still strong enough to do so.  Yet Abbott has known Hockey for so long…..

There is tragedy in all this but there is also, as Howard remarked, great achievement.  The Abbott prime ministership leaves more pluses than minuses.

Passing bull 13 – Which loyalty?

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The change of PM has brought a lot of hysteria about loyalty, treachery and coups.

Personal loyalties are good and should if possible be honoured.  I did not like Mr Hawke as PM, but he stood up for a mate, Eddie Kornhauser, when it did not suit him to do so politically, and I admired him for it.  It was a good case of personal loyalty in politics.

But members of a government or of a governing party also owe duties to the nation.  Sometimes the duty to the nation will be in conflict with a duty of personal loyalty.  Which should prevail?  There is no one answer.  But it is wrong to say that a person who resolves such a conflict in favour of the duty to the nation has been guilty of treachery by not allowing the personal loyalty to be paramount.  It is not just wrong to say that – it is an abuse of logic and language of the kind that shock jocks live on.  If anyone is to be charged with treachery, it is more likely to be the person who puts personal obligations over those owed to the nation – E M Forster notwithstanding.

It is also wrong to describe a party meeting to vote on the leadership as a coup.  People vote for members of that party knowing that its rules enable just such a change to be made – just as people follow F1 drivers knowing that the rules (‘team orders’) allow teams to require one driver to give way to another.  In February of this year, one such meeting effectively put the PM on probation for six months.  If the party by a majority concluded that the PM had not improved enough in that time, the end was inevitable.

If you want a model of personal loyalty to a political leader being paramount over obligations to the nation, just look at the relationship between the SS and their Fuhrer.  Even our shock jocks might draw the line there.

But in a week that was bound to offer tawdriness, Bronwyn Bishop, if the allegation levelled at her is true, gave new meaning to the term dishonour by voting against the man who in part signed his own death warrant by putting her on probation – simply out of personal loyalty, and when it did not suit him to do so politically.

A little aloofness, please

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When I watched Jean-Claude Juncker address the European Parliament on refugees the other night, I was looking at a room full of people who were almost visibly looking for leadership.  Making allowances for differences in style, I thought that they got some.

That body itself reflects the crisis affecting representative democracy across the West, and in two-party democracies in particular.  People everywhere are sick of place-fillers and time-servers and parties that stand for nothing except themselves.  Voters are repudiating all of them and looking for a way out – so making way for crooks and weirdoes.

As a result, one major party in each of the UK and the US is looking at blowing itself up to kingdom come.  In Australia, the disenchantment has meant that parties have become forced to sack leaders who fall out with the voters.  This show of party power does nothing for faith in the party system.  What is to be done?

The answer is for governments to stop doing the bad things that have put their people offside.  They need the sense to formulate policies and the nerve to implement them – even if they are in the short term unpopular.  Mr Abbott did not have enough sense or nerve.

I think that Mr Turnbull does.  Most of his parliamentary party agree.  The dissidents are the mediocrity that got us into this trouble in the first place.  If you want to see the prescription set out above in action, just have a look at Mr Baird in New South Wales.  He is not just popular because he has shown sense and nerve – he is even respected, something that we have not seen here for a generation.

I doubt that Mr Turnbull presently has much to worry about.  Mr Shorten looks to be a shifty little piece of work.  He has now lost his main prop.  A friend of mine, an artist from a country that knows despair, and who has the gift of getting to the heart of the matter, said: ‘I think Shorten has some character fault.  Really dislike him.  He said he wanted to get into politics, because he wants to be the Prime Minister.  I want to be the Queen of Sheba.’

Mr Shorten looks like Hillary Clinton to me – raw ambition uninspired by any need to serve others.  Every single thing that he does is calculated for its effect.  I wonder if he ever did one sincere thing in all his life.  If this were the season to mow down mediocrities, this talking head should be next.  If he is not, it is only because his party has no alternative.

The other party did have one, and the necessary change was made.  But whatever else may be said of Mr Abbott, he was not in the same mindless blank paper class as Mr Shorten.  If nothing else, Mr Abbott has done more hands on and shown more commitment for our indigenous people than any other Australian politician that I can recall.  There is no basis for saying that this politician was there only for himself.

Mr Abbott’s background was journalism, and it showed.  The press are a large part of the cancer in Canberra.  They see themselves as part of the game, and the results have been awful for government in general, and Mr Abbott in particular.  He was held up by and got in hock to cheer squads on Sky News and The Australian – and two of the more loathsome shock jocks.  Many people felt that this was conduct desperately unbecoming a Prime Minister.  The shock jocks live off the earnings of those who pander to the deprived and depraved just as surely as do pimps for tarts in white boots.  They, however, see themselves as the tribunes of the people.  If you want to know just how sanctimonious tribunes can be, have another look at Coriolanus.

If you want to see the teams that play these blood sports in action, tune into Sky News and watch them spit the dummy if their favourite takes a hit – as happened on Monday night.  Or look at some of the vaporising in today’s Australian (that includes a verbal of Her Majesty).  Most of these players in the press make no effort to hide their revulsion at the other side.  If you want to come to grips with the word sordid, tune into a show called Richo + Jones. 

It was, frankly, silly of the outgoing PM to lecture the press on their role in his fall, or to disclaim ever having played the game himself.  But it was not at all surprising that a member of ‘the team’ should have advised Mr Turnbull to make peace with a shock jock.

That is the last thing we want of our PM.  Any leader has to be aloof at times.  If you look up that word, which has now sadly got a bad feel to it, you will see that it had a nautical origin, of the order to keep the ship’s head to the wind.  It came to mean generally standing at or keeping to a distance.  Any captain or coach of a footy team, much less the captain of a ship, will tell you that a lot of the time, you have to do just that.

One of the reasons that I think that Mr Turnbull is up to the job is that some time ago, he shirtfronted – yes, shirtfronted is the word – that awful twerp they call the Parrot.  If I could offer our new PM some advice, it would be to tell the Parrot and all his ilk to stand behind him, and to banish themselves to that wilderness that overlooks the old town of Jericho.  There is a good precedent for this.

And do not be surprised if there is an election before year’s end, and some surgery at the top of the other party shortly before or after that election.  The roundabout may have one more turn to come, but then I think things will settle down, and then we can all go back to sleep.