Culture

3. Davie, Anglo-Australian Attitudes (17 January 2024)

by kurto

Explores the Anglo-Australian relationship through stylishly recounted stories of upper-end society, culture, and sport (i.e., cricket): Australia’s ties have been fraying and the country must inevitably become a republic. Davie correctly assumes that connections which are not husbanded must decay; wrongly presumes Aboriginal problems means British and Irish heritage must also be; and nowhere considers that the Westminster tradition has been helpful to an effective political system. Less systematic assessment than a series of essays, Davie looks to have been deflated by 1999’s ‘no’ vote: ‘spiritual independence cannot be rushed’.

Menzies and cabinet had been surprised to discover Australia’s politics did not map to Britain’s. The key cultural break of the 20th century was Curtin’s refusing to deploy troops to Burma, prompting Aussie recognition that self-defense should trump imperial concerns. However, Britain’s 1941 decision to prioritize Europe was no betrayal, as in David Day’s telling. Australia and Britain hardly collaborated in postwar immigration: the UK resisted sending skilled people; the Aussie unions didn’t want those trained outside the British system; the ‘whingeing Pom’ had committed only £10 to emigrate and so took things for granted. The 1930’s self-deception (i.e., appeasement) did not persist in the 1960s, when the political class took the measure of Britain’s turn to the EEC and its Commonwealth Immigration Act – no more favored treatment for the dominions – and in turn opened toward Asia. 1964-70 was the most difficult period since the early colonial era, but the author confuses the correlated rise of the Tigers and China with causing England’s turn to Europe.

Manning Clark thought Australia was a geographic terms and self-contained historical topic. Stuart McIntyre and Davie see parallels to Australia in Canada and New Zealand, notwithstanding differing attitudes toward republican status. British educators and artists in exile are portrayed as exercising outsized influence on elite Aussie culture. In cricket, following a nuanced study of 1937’s bodyline tour, Aussie pragmatism ‘routs’ English romanticism. Less encompassing than Pringle, he dedicates an entire chapter to Windsor gossip and another to the editorial echelon of the chattering class.

‘When an Aussie enters a British room, you can hear the chains clanking’.

16. Pringle, Australian Accent (5 August 2023)

by kurto

Effectively a series of essays treating Australian society and culture, borrowing DH Lawrence’s conclusion that ‘the land is too big for the people’ – that is, British settlement on the eastern coast has generated bourgeois wealth but neither distinct culture nor identity. The Scottish-born, erstwhile editor of the Sydney Morning Herald observes the country in the mid-postwar era, when it was emerging from isolation via auto, radio, and plane. Politics comprised small matters, comparable to 18th-century England, when a man could launch a party and come to power in a lifetime. The Santamaria affair, which drove Soviet Communists from the Labor Party, receives the most specific attention. Wealth makes Aussies feel they are better off but not better. The Aussies were content with middle-class suburbia, there being nothing higher or transcendent, though all express longing for the Outback. Until the advent of TV, it was always better to be outside. In some of his best passages, from p115, he writes:

[In the Outback] Time resumes its ancient majesty of years and seasons. … There is nothing yet in the towns and cities which can compare with this lonely, privileged life of the graziers in the bush. Urban life is still essentially a second-hand version of urban life in England, America, and Europe. It would be hard to point to anything which is specifically Australian except, perhaps, the universal enjoyment of the pleasures of an outdoor life. … This open-air life has many virtues. It produces a strong, health, contented population, remarkably free from the worries and neuroses of most Western civilisations. … But it does tend to depress still further the general standards of education and the arts. … Unfortunately in Australia this low standard of cultural awareness seems to extend much higher in the social scale.

The country required an educated class, Pringle thought, for the rich especially graziers had declined to lead. But the country had no firmly established, nationally idiomatic arts – many of the most talented decamping to England. There was an emerging Rousseauan fetish of the Aboriginal, an observation well struck. Worried about Indonesia and Asia, unsure of its relationship with the UK, Australians are ultimately said to be lonely and disappointed (as per Lawrence’s Kangaroo). The concluding essay on Sydney rings true. The Lawrencian conclusion less so. Absent profound political crisis, crafting a unique, strong identity inside 250 years would be indeed miraculous.

4. Lewis, Crisis of Islam (22 Oct 2011)

by kurto

Surveys the historical events and cultural trends which have produced Islamist terrorism. After reviewing Muslim theology pertaining to war and the West (particularly Christendom), the author assesses the Crusades, Renaissance and Reformation Europe, and the post-revolutionary era leading to the founding of Israel. America came to be the enemy both because it supplanted Britain as paragon of the imperialist West and also as it represents libertinism (i.e., separation of church and state, permissive public sexuality, commercialism). The failure of Islam to adopt to the market economy and democratic government have mired the peoples of the Muslim world’s Arabian heartland in destitution. Ironically, the one success story, Saudi oil production, has been so tightly restricted to elites that the country has become the wellspring of radical Wahabism, which often disregards traditional theology. A succinct and useful contribution to understanding the distinction between holy war and Muslim terrorism, but what can the West do to remedy matters?

13. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (18 Aug 2016)

by kurto

Studies mid-Victorian society and politics, contending that education and culture (‘sweetness and light’) is a surer path toward human perfection than religion or government. Culture promotes considering social issues from many angles, whereas religion (especially Dissent, preoccupied as it is with disestablishment) trends toward a single, inflexible approach. Hebraism is obedience to authority, Hellenism is independence of thought. Arnold also treats of class (aristocrats, bourgeois, and working) views of political order and governance, which are inevitably self-interested and so again want the leavening of culture. Libertine individualism is the greatest of all ills.

1. Himmelfarb, Past and Present (4 Jan 2018)

by kurto

A collection of essays treating giants in the history of ideas from the Victorian era forward, often with a view to present applicability. The underlying theme thus runs against historicism. One of the most enlightening chapters shows how Matthew Arnold’s stance against philistinism (i.e., belief in cultural equality) grounds opposition to the anarchy of multiculturalism. In contradistinction, to democratize culture is not to treat all forms as equal but to make the better forms available to all. William James is praised for observing that truth comes not from logic or science but experience and reflections, building on Lionel Trilling’s view that the search for truth, though likely to fall short, is undertaken as a point of intellectual honor – and the probability that something good may come of it. As to Thomas Carlyle, the role of the prophet is to criticize not to construct. In transition to politics, the author welcomes TA Eliot’s view that the field is more important for the pursuit of moral perfection than physical easement; Einstein’s ‘rationalism’ may have been a scientific triumph but can be shown a political failure. The recovery of morality in politics will entail less government so that value-driven participants can act on their beliefs. At the outset, in a chapter on Strauss, Himmelfarb writes that while Thucydides preceded Machiavelli and Hobbes in seeing politics as struggle for power, contra Plato, his view that justice holds a central place distinguished the Greek historian from the modern political scientist.