Leonard Colquhoun

“The unexamined life is not worth living”, Socrates (469 BCE — 399) is recorded by Plato1 (428 — 348) as saying …
John Warrington, in Everyman’s Classical Dictionary, claims that “Socrates believed he had a divine mission to [get people to examine] systematically the fundamental assumptions from which discussion of conduct and morality arose”. In other words, an unexamined ideology or religion is not worth following — many readers will be aware that this approach to matters of importance in the Socrates’ Athens led to his conviction for ‘impiety’ and his suicide by hemlock. Two and a half millennia later, in our versions of democracy2, examining and subsequently publicly changing your well-known beliefs can be just as politically risky (though, thankfully, not as likely to be as fatal — see Pinker below), as one of our political giants of the 1970s-80s has found out.

Ex-PM Malcolm Fraser has moved Leftwards over the last decade, having (presumably) examined his previous positions and found them wanting. Some revile him, seeing this as currying favour with the prevailing academic and cultural elite; others admire him as someone who is prepared to admit, both to himself and in public, that his earlier stances needed changing. Many would like to see more of this, especially among those who now embrace Fraser, such as his great adversary, ex-PM Gough Whitlam.

Not for him, it seems, as far as can be judged by the public record, any admission that he might have been just a little bit at fault, not for him any matters for judgement due for re-examination. Strong-minded adherence to principles or arrogant pig-headedness ? It reminds one of the assertion by Julius Caesar (in Shakespeare’s eponymous play)

“I would well be moved, if I were as you;
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me:
But I am constant as the Northern Star – for always I am Caesar”3.

Is an always-I-am-Gough worth living by ?

Unthinking and uncritical adherence to an ideology or (an interpretation of) a religion is never in the long run, nor often in the short run, good for you. But even before that sort of rigidity has set in, unexamined applications of theories can bring one undone: witness the silliness of how incompatible the profit motive of private ownership is with running, say, a health system or aged care. This is not to say that the sorts of efficiencies commonly linked to private enterprise have no role to play in such endeavours; nor is it carte blanche for brain-dead working-to-rule that is often seen as typical of the public ‘service’.

Then there’s “It seemed like a good idea at the time”, with its implied “but is it one now ?”

Take the 1970s belief, hardening over time into an unbending Great Idea which only unreconstructed racists would question, that Australia’s remote-area Aboriginal peoples are better off living a ‘traditional’, that is a largely Stone Age life(style), uncorrupted by all the evils of modern Western consumerist, competitive, capitalistic — and, worst of all, Anglo-American — culture.

“A mix of anthropological romanticism and Marxist collectivism, the remote settlement program was principally the concept of H.C. Coombs, Australia’s ultimate Sir Humphrey Appleby. His high-minded objective was to enable un-citified Aborigines to pursue a traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle ‘uncontaminated’ by modern Australia. “http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21708619-31501,00.html

J J Rousseau, whose only claim to influence ought to be that he was one of history’s most blatant ‘Do-as-I-write, not-as-I-live’ hypocrites, would’ve been proud of ‘Nugget’ and all those who were the driving forces behind this idea.4 But, as the Good Book says somewhere, “by their fruits you shall know them”, and the ‘fruits’ of this benignly-intentioned apartheid are that on many indicators of wellbeing, outback Aborigines are now worse off than they were 30 or 40 years ago, a claim now forcefully asserted by many indigenous spokespeople themselves.

Which is not to advocate a return to the status quo ante, but to examine where things have gone so horribly wrong, and put as many to right as quickly as possible. No matter how noble the intentions, an unexamined Coombs dystopia is not worth living in.

Saying ‘Sorry’ (and the associated marching over a bridge near you) has come to symbolise a progressivist approach to Aboriginal deprivation and disadvantage. But do these sorts of activities mean a change of consciousness, a deepening awareness of continuing responsibilities, both on a personal level and at the national level ? Or are they little more than tokenistic, one-off, feel-good acts to assuage any contrived guilt, a convenient ‘Well, that’s that, now let’s get on with life’ ? Are they an impetus to further beneficial activity, or just a substitute for effective endeavour ?

Take, for example, the consistent views of the Sydney Morning Herald on this matter:

“For Aborigines, an apology from the Prime Minister would . . . be an important victory” (14 January 2000);

“The question of saying sorry . . . goes to the essence of the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians” (6 March 2000); and

“Howard still seems unable to grasp the emotional force . . . of the call for a national apology for past brutalities” ( 5 April 2000).5

But there’s a new tone to the SMH editorial of Monday 28 May 2007:

“ANY exasperated parent is familiar with it: ‘Sorry.’ A child’s easy, insincere apology delivered for form’s sake, to keep the peace after some impoliteness or breach of family rules. The nation can be thought of as a family; if so, then the call for an apology from non-indigenous to indigenous Australians should be seen as a call for the same sort of empty gesture.

“True, we live in an age of apologies . . .

“Yet apologising – however sincerely — for things for which one cannot possibly be responsible is not only practically useless. Because it has no constructive outcome, an apology trivialises real problems. Its effects — if it has any — are likely only to be negative. By sanctifying and confirming Aborigines’ victimhood, it negates what reserves of pride and strength they possess.”

The full Socratic is at http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2007/05/28/1180205156521.html

The West’s general impression of women in Muslim nations, societies and cultures is that they are oppressed by a male-dominated attitude to life, re-inforced by the power of a repressive religion, utterly out-of-touch with world-wide developments in the 13 or so centuries since that creed was founded. Symbolising this externally is the Islamic / Islamist dress code for women6, comprising items of apparel variously known as chador, hijab, niqab, and burqa. Apologists, mainly from Islamic / Islamist nations and societies, and from some Muslim communities in the West, and also — and many people would find this at best surprisingly inconsistent, or, at worst treacherously hypocritical — some Western feminists — argue that it’s for female protection from the uncontrollable (sic) sexual desires of men. You’d reckon that, apart from some religiously enthusiastic Muslims and fanatical Islamists, few in the West would see the chador or the burqa in a positive light.

Yet, in a recent NY Times article, “A Quiet Revolution in Algeria: Gains by Women” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/26/world/africa/26algeria.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all
readers are invited to re-examine their attitudes to this most distinctive sign of Muslims as The Other. It invites us to ponder whether, in some specific circumstances, in particular times and places, repression-by-chador might be capable of another, more positive (at least, for the time being) interpretation. It may mean that a determinedly secular Algeria, whose current political foundations are to found more in Western socialism than in Middle Eastern religiosity, might be able to pick a path through the minefields of the battlefields pitting Islamist fundamentalism against post-colonial modernity.

The 20th century has been mankind’s most violent and murderous, right ?

Think of the military slaughters of the Great War, the civilian and military death toll, especially including the Holocaust, of World War II, the uncounted scores of millions who’ve died in the pursuit of Marxist utopias in the USSR, the Peoples Republic of China, Vietnam, North Korea and Pol Pot’s Kampuchea (now Cambodia). Add to that death-by-maladministration in post-colonial Africa and other Third World horrors. On smaller scales we have gun cultures in the USA and much of Latin America, and epidemics of fatal drug addiction and unprecedented crimes against children in much of the developed world.

Things have never been so crook, right ?

Wrong, according to Steven Pinker:

“In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.

“Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.”

Often, particularly in this Drowning-in-Data Age, perception is clearly not the reality. Today, atrocities from the other side of the globe can accompany our evening meals; the cruel murders of two young red-soccer-shirted English girls can draw us into wells of deep sadness; a missing child here, and wantonly vicious murder there, can seem an intimate part of our lives. And some of us recall John Donne’s 300-year-old question “ask not for whom the bell tolls”. But the physical and societal reality is that these crimes are not an integral part of our daily lives: the so-called ‘Information Age’ is overloading us with, dare one say it, irrelevant data.

Perhaps, there’s a subliminal feeling of guilt that, in the words of a former British PM, we’ve “never had it so good”. Read Steven Pinker’s re-examination of 21st century life: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html

Lastly, there’s the claim, sometimes tongue-in-cheek (at least partly), occasionally in deadly (though often boringly deadening) earnest, that if it truly was a woman’s world, we’d all, and not just the women, be better off. Who better to give this proposition a sharp Socratic re-examination that last week’s columnist7 in The Australian’s “The Wry Side”:

“IF one more person says the world would be a better place if it was ruled by women, I’ll scream. Loudly, with lots of unladylike grimaces and flying spit.

“Feminists are right to say chicks should fill about half the planet’s leadership positions. But claiming this will result in a better, kinder, gentler globe is unmitigated crap, right up there with ‘I don’t usually do this sort of thing on a first date’ and (from Brazilian waxers) ‘it won’t grow back for at least six weeks’ . . .

“If women ruled the world, it would not be a better place. Odds are it would look a whole lot like it does now, minus the irrational sexism that falsely elevates chicks morally while unfairly thwarting them logistically.

“Ironically enough, the key to women achieving more power may be owning up to the large numbers of the sistren who don’t deserve it.”

For the full Brazilian on this, see http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21777884-12274,00.html

Empirical scientists know that their search is never-ending, that their core modus operandi is a continual and continuing search for answers, and that new answers will call for the examination of old truths. In the political, philosophical and religious spheres, while there may be somewhat different operating principles, to cling to old ideas for their own sake is ultimately futile. Aristotle (384 – 322), the third of the founding trio of Western philosophy, was recorded (in a Latin copy of a Greek original) as reckoning “Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth”.

1 Interesting that a re-examination of Plato himself is recommended by one of today’s most eminent scientific thinkers: “Quantum leap of faith — once we ditch Platonism we can apply modern physics to the universe’s natural laws, says Paul Davies” http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21815547-12332,00.html

2 Athenian democracy is occasionally dissed as a fraud because women and resident aliens were excluded from the process, but on balance this attitude seems to focus on what wasn’t present rather than on what was, on what was yet to be achieved centuries into many futures, rather than on the one-step-for-mankind which had been taken.

3 A conflation of Act III scene i lines 58-60 with I ii 213 (Folio Society edition).

4 Significant, too, that among the ideas in Rousseau’s “A Treatise on the Social Contract” (“Du contrat social”, 1764) is the demand that individuals must surrender their rights totally to the collective ‘general will’, and that the aberrant can “be forced to be free” — hardly surprising that the entry in Chambers Biographical Dictionary further tells us that his main thesis is vulnerable to what it terms “totalitarian misrepresentations”. How very coy ! All those tens of millions “forced to be free” in gulags of various types as simply the by-products of “misrepresentations”.

5 Cited in CUT’N’PASTE, The Australian, Wed 29 May 07

6 Some Western apologists in the self-loathing commentariat excuse the burqa because they equate it with the traditional habits of pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic nuns, conveniently overlooking the fact that ‘getting thee to a nunnery’ was for a very small minority and largely optional for its 50% demographic, even in nations that were constitutionally RC. The visit to Australia by Ayaan Hirsi Ali to ‘give the final word’ (as www.swf.org.au puts it) at the 10th Sydney Writers Festival (Monday 28 May to Sunday 3 June 2007) gives a sharper contemporary focus to this matter. An interview with her at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21736466-5001986,00.html

7 If you’re wearied almost unto death by some of the tendentiously repetitious will-to-live-sapping seriousness with which TT seems replete, there’s more of Emma Tom at http://www.emmatom.com.au/

Leonard Colquhoun 7248

For www.oldtt.pixelkey.biz
June 2007