The miserable words of an online grudge club are not meant to be said aloud. “It is okay to be white” is a motto horrid US teens write down. When a Queensland Senator says it with her voice, she sounds like your embarrassing mum.
When Pauline Hanson warns of an attack “on Western civilisation” she sounds more like Dad. But, how deep is her love for our Western traditions? As deep as a 4chan meme?
This “Western Civilisation” is starting to grate. I just don’t believe its most outspoken admirers like it much.
We shouldn’t bother asking Hanson what this is, because she does tend to speak by negation. She can’t describe Australian without the use of something un-Australian, like that Brisbane schoolkid.
But, those Ramsay Centre boys sure committed to Western Civilisation. Even if its website never committed to a good Western style guide. Then again, the Ramsay Centre is always under attack, as is Western Civilisation. What is Western Civilisation? Well, Board member Tony Abbot wrote that his very Western course was “not merely about Western civilisation but in favour of it”. Nothing could be truer to Western scholarship than its undisguised use as propaganda. You will not merely learn about things but learn to be in favour of them.
This culture war rot is all over the shop. Even Bolt and Blair try it on a bit. Not to be all hoity-toity, but I believe that there’s a decent chance that you, me and them over there honour this West better in a day than your Civilised Ramsay will all year.
Yes, the traditions to which I was born are imperfect. You’ve got your brutal invasions, your colonial massacres, your genders divided into labour categories. You’ve got your failure to address the disasters of the past, your “globalised” present and your imperial bankers and bookkeeping tricks and so on.
Centuries of human suffering made the West a site for knowledge production — no universities without slaves. Even knowing this, I can still say that I admire Western thought. Such a civilising activity.
Do those kids at Quadrant love it, though? I’m sure they’re not thick, but they seem trapped by some old resentment that the left kept up its study and ownership of arts while it went off to do the numbers. I’d have preferred the reverse of this historical arrangement: the Marxists take command of the mode of production, and the Mont Pelerin squad get jobs in galleries.
They really got the better deal. And, if they’d read some Karl Polanyi instead of his Viennese contemporary, FA Hayek, they would know that the market moves ideas, and that ideas so rarely move the market.
I’m a fool for the thought of the West. I read mid-century white European blokes, too. But even when I read Edward Said or Frantz Fanon, am I not also reading in the tradition of the West that these Ramsay types have forgotten? This civilised tradition in which one great scholar builds upon the work of another.
If these toffs really can’t see that studies in decolonisation or trans-national feminism or queer theory or, for heaven’s sake, Marx are not absolutely entwined in the great exchange of ages they defend, then they have not been reading.
Perhaps they read Paul Virilio.
This month, that philosopher was lost. Perhaps the last French philosopher produced by the events of May, 1968, Virilio died September 10. He was 86.
His work for more than four decades was to consider the glitches intrinsic to every new form of technology. The invention of the train is also the invention of the train accident; the invention of the virtual was also the invention of this and other prescient essays.
In 1995, Virilio wrote, “And now a new type of dis-information is raising its head, and it is totally different than voluntary censorship. It has to do with some kind of choking of the senses, a loss of control over reason of sorts. Here lies a new and major risk for humanity stemming from multimedia and computers.”
His study of our accelerated present began when he was small. He heard by radio that German troops would soon march through his town. Minutes later, he heard the sound of boots and it was then that “war became my university”. War changed in his lifetime. The speed of war changed in his lifetime. Everything accelerated, and he didn’t do a bad job of taking it down quite fast.
Interesting bloke. An important thinker. A guy who predicted accidents. But his civilised contributions were not commemorated in local press, not even by the caretakers of the West.
Do you think the Ramsay Centre’s backers have got their wires crossed? Let us know by writing to boss@crikey.com.au.
Hi Helen,
Don’t suppose you could get hold of a copy of that Ramsay Centre draft MOU that is being circulated at U.Syd and get that put up on Crikey? Might be entertaining to see what kind of doublespeak the bigwigs of U.Syd have committed to paper in an attempt to get the Ramsay Centre’s cash while not openly breaching every academic principle in the place.
Hey, A.
It is entirely possible one of my colleagues here has a copy. Perhaps it’s been anonymously uploaded to us by securedrop.
I’ve been following what I can of the story, and, yes, I WILL make some calls.
Because, there are always little culture wars going on at Sydney anyhow, and I am wondering if all will be united against Ramsay.
As you may know, there was a big political split in the philosophy department back in the go-go seventies. And another one soon after in the economics faculty. When I was doing English, the split between postmodern scholars and defenders of the canon was visible nonsense. Maybe all humanities people are now just trying to survive, and can’t afford to have such division. Either way. Sydney and Ramsay. It’s not a thing I thought would happen at the school that did my head in by pouring knowledge inside it!
Ms Razor, you drank from that river, they didn’t make you drink. All they did was supply you with the tools to hone your mind, to drink faster, so to speak.
Why simply Marxism? Let us be clear: the whole of dialectical materialism and Marxism-Leninism is an integral part of Western Civilisation. Would students at the centre be “taught to be in favour” of these things also? And what about “National Socialism and Fascism” , are they not “western”? I wonder…
I didn’t say simply Marxism, T. Not at all.
On Virilio, what a cracker that 1995 article is! “No information without disinformation!” Watch out! That could be appropriated and misused as a slogan. Amongst many other insights, does his prediction of “information war” suggest that the “Russia thing” needs very careful examination after all? (But not with the aim of delegitimising Trump.)
It’s good, right?
Very odd to return to some of these 1980s and 1990s French works. What seemed crazy futuristic paranoia then makes great sense now. In some cases. Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (first chapter available online) and Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control, for instance.
As for Derrida. Hm. Didn’t really keep on finding much use for this deconstruction thing, meself.
Yes, it’s great. Thankyou vm for the link.
What an extraordinary mind – and Helen, thank you again, another great article.
So glad you liked the guy, A. Bit crystal ballsy, right?
Surely you mean “glocal” press?
Throughly amusing Helen – which, I think, is your intention. However there are two statements that could do with a minutes more thought (the “minutes” being descriptive and NOT possessive and hence no apostrophe required).
“they would know that the market moves ideas, and that ideas so rarely move the market.”
Keynes took the contrary view and (even) suggested that vested interest has less effect on markets than ideas per se. Then there is this :
“In 1995, Virilio wrote, “And now a new type of dis-information is raising its head, and it is totally different than voluntary censorship. It has to do with some kind of choking of the senses, a loss of control over reason of sorts.”
Well, twenty years later, have we not arrived at “post truth”(?) which displays a contempt of inductive or deductive reasoning. Lastly, would a baptism in Edward Said relieve your anxieties in regard to the Ramsay Centre’s course on Western Civilisation ?