In Review: Quarterly Essay 41

David Malouf, "The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World"
 

Let me go out on a limb and say that the greatest source of unhappiness in the contemporary world – or at least in the Australian corner of the contemporary world – is . . . wait for it . . . the long-term variable-rate home mortgage. Maybe that’s being a little unfair to the purveyors of home-loan products. Let’s say it’s not just mortgages, but the long-term debt-servitude which mortgages impose on a hefty proportion of the population. Hm, maybe “debt-servitude” is a bit strong. How about indebtedness in general? Or how about indebtedness combined with the whole increasingly unstable all-pervasive nature of contemporary work? Frankly, isn’t it just insane to think that people are going to feel happy in a world in which they are saddled with decades of debt and in which the permanent revolutionising of economic life simultaneously makes the very means by which they pay off that debt (work) ever more piecemeal, short-term, part-time, round-the-clock, and, possibly within a couple of years, obsolete? Add to it all what you might call the systematic technical complexity of contemporary life and Phillip Larkin’s boldly miserable counsel:


Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as quickly as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself

can start to seem like plain old-fashioned good sense.

By technical complexity I mean two things. Of course there’s technology in the sense of high-tech equipment - the all but self-spawning new generations of mobile phones, the unthinkably sophisticated white-goods, etc. But there’s also technology in the sense of abstract rule-governed mechanisms – the latter including the bureaucracy that exists (supposedly) to make rational decisions about social life based on informed deliberation, as well as the order-giving networks and techniques and procedures that regulate the lives of individuals and institutions, right the way round the globe.

Here’s the thought: if the individual gadgets were all there were to living in a technically complex world – if it weren’t for the All-Encompassing Technical Systems – then human life in the age of global high-tech civilisation would be a breeze. It would simply be a matter of deciding which of the gadgets makes a big enough positive difference to your life; where potential benefits seemed doubtful – you could choose not to buy the latest iPhone, or the mood-enhancing hair-care products. On the other hand, if your cost-benefit calculation came out pretty much evenly, you could buy all the new products and just take the risk of being annoyed, over-stimulated and, probably, over-indebted.

Of course the upside to living in a systematically technified world is not difficult to see. The multiplication of choice that all the gadgets and systems make possible is obvious, their convenience undeniable. And in any case, a systematically technically complex world is in many ways a matter of plain necessity: mass societies made up of lots of different sorts of people doing lots of different sorts of things simply wouldn’t function if all there were to hold the show together were the sorts of unspoken rules and rhythms that governed most of life until quite recently in the past. If you think that the world could be made to function much more simply than it does, then think about trying to organise a progressive tax system with liabilities calculated precisely according to income across an entire national territory, or indeed try organising national flood relief. Without a bureaucratic apparatus and a swag of complex technical systems in place both of these things, and many others we acknowledge to be good and necessary, would be simply unthinkable.

And yet, and yet. If the blessings of Technified Existence are something that are waved in our faces virtually every minute of the day, the downside is something we all know in our bones. Consider the big, rapid-fire changes technology continually makes to the conditions of everyday material existence – who doubts that they're disorienting, even when there’s a palpable sense of excitement in the air? Or consider the little-remarked process of technification going on in the realm of human knowledge: I’m thinking of the relegation of non-technical bodies of understanding-and-experience to the status of superstitious nonsense; whether it's sensitivity to art or sensitivity towards the rhythms and needs of the human body, living in a technified world seems to lead to non-scientific ways of grasping reality being written off as insubstantial or simply a waste of time. Consider the more or less acute sense of powerlessness that every one of us experiences every single day as we’re confronted with the fact that a once accessible, humanly comprehensible corner of our lives has become the preserve of experts whose help we now depend on to perform the most necessary tasks. Or consider the fact that, in dealing with the scattered agencies of a complex social world, we’re constantly confronted with the abysmal habit of our fellow human beings to invoke the naked authority of the Great Nothing in the Machine: yes, once again, the computer says no, and, let’s face it, in day-to-day life, no matter how tech-savvy we are, The Computer, The System, The Agent of Mechanised Necessity – that is, The Computer in the broad sense – does say no to us, time and time and time again.

Faced with it all, the choice is seemingly ours – to ruthlessly accentuate the positives or to swallow hard and battle on. But to decouple ourselves in a truly satisfactory way - to pursue some sort of ideal of quiet self-cultivation without the help of the machines and the wider systems seems practically impossible; in a lot of instances it would be palpably insane. Happiness in the sense of settled contentment has fled from the world.

So we have a rough answer to the question why happiness eludes most of us, even now that the historical sources of human misery – disease, back-breaking labour, food shortages – have largely been dealt with, at least in the Australian corner of the global village. It’s a pity David Malouf doesn’t have an answer of his own to give us in QE41 – at least not one that addresses itself directly to the contemporary world and the extraordinary phenomena of misery that often seem to dominate it.

Part of the problem lies with the title of QE41: “The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World”. It’s simply misleading, and I suspect it wasn’t the author’s own choice. Malouf himself is much more interested in what you might call ideal images of happiness, particularly those deriving from the ancient and the early modern world, rather than the world of today; the position from which he wants to meditate on happiness is not in amongst the jumble of today’s world, with its gadgets and products and systems, but from his own version of Montaigne’s secluded “little back-shop” where we can be “all our own, entirely free”. In fact, the little back-shop is the place he wants to encourage us to seek out happiness of our own.

However the main problem lies less with QE41’s title than with its overall argument.

Malouf gets himself into trouble early on by making a categorical distinction between happiness, which he says belongs to “our personal interior” realm, and liberty, which is supposedly a more social virtue. (Life, to add the third of the rights Jefferson’s American Constitution calls inalienable, belongs for Malouf in a third category, that of Nature.) Dividing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness between three separate existential domains in the way Malouf does generates a pseudo-problem. If happiness is largely personal and liberty largely social, how can you square the demands of the two except by a sort of legislation that is bound to detract from the former? Happiness turns out for Malouf to be a strangely ineffable state of personal being impervious to the social duties and constraints that liberty brings with it.

After teasing out what Jefferson means by the “pursuit of happiness”, Malouf goes on two long excursions. The search for contentment in modernity is determined negatively, we learn, by our inner restlessness and positively by the pursuit of bodily pleasure. Restlessness is something like a primordial given of the human condition, and technology on this picture, far from being just a modern fetish, is an expression of a rollicking human-all-too-human disquiet that has been with us since the start of human history. On the one side, modern man complicates his restless, technically inventive nature by forming a Faustian compact with the machine in order to satisfy his material wants ever more completely. On the other side, he discovers new, or really not so new, modes of happiness: as the medieval Christian consciousness of sin recedes in the early modern world, sex and bodily pleasure come to be seen, in roughly classical Graeco-Roman terms, as more than just a source of temptation; the art of Rembrandt and Rubens creates its own monuments to the world-historical moment - not to the terrors but to the joys of the flesh, and to the nuances of interpersonal feeling that the joys of the flesh light up.

At the end of this circuitous historical path, QE41 gives us a peek at “how we live now” – and not a minute too late. Some of what for Malouf are the deeper sources of contemporary anxiety are turned up at last. The world has grown so big! (While human consciousness for most of history hardly extended beyond the distances we could see or walk, it now extends to the ends of the earth.) Yet the world has also grown so small! (The extension of our consciousness, and our physical powers, now confronts us with a definite image of planetary life as a limited – and decidedly fragile – totality within a vast and indifferent-seeming universe.) All in all, the big-small out-of-shape world has developed proportions that fail to square with our existence as embodied beings with limited powers of sensory perception and movement.

The problem here is not exactly that Malouf is wrong about any of this; his problem is giving a sense of depth to the homespun wisdom his observations suggest - without a bit more analysis, the observations dissipate into the kind of intellectual haze familiar to us from 1001 newspaper opinion pieces. And without more details, the observations also seem decidedly gainsayable. Yes, most of us have trouble giving specific meaning to the macroscopic and microscopic worlds that four centuries of unlimited scientific discovery have opened out (though the fans of sci-fi and Steven Spielberg aren’t completely lost for directions here). But, as Malouf himself says elsewhere in the essay – where the world exceeds the body’s grasp, there the mind and the imagination can more than make good our sense of unease; concepts and the intuitive rush of feeling are part of a deft existential move that we've been making since long before science and technology put distant galaxies and microscopic creepy-crawlies within the range of sensory experience.

Then there’s what science has been discovering about the brain and genes and . . . oh, and The Economy: more indefinite sources of disquiet. All three worry Malouf because what we’re learning about them suggests they have a will of their own; they play havoc with our conventional notion of ourselves as autonomous agents. The Economy in particular Malouf thinks functions in the mental universe of today roughly the way Fate did in mental universe of the ancients. Economic events are often spoken about as if they are both absolutely vital to our survival and taking place way above our heads. Whether The Economy lifts us up to the pinnacles of wealth or shoves us all the way down to misery, It/She/Whatever it is often seems inscrutable and cruel. Again, it all seems broadly true, but a tad unilluminating.

Papering his main insights together on the very last page of the essay, Malouf tells us:

For all the scope, both of time and space, that contemporary forms of knowledge have made available to us, what we can fully comprehend – that is, have direct sensory experience of – remains small; and only with what we have fully comprehended and feel at home in do we feel safe. . . What is human is what we can keep track of. In terms of space this means what is within sight, what is local and close; within reach, within touch. . . What most alarms us in our contemporary world, what unsettles and scares us, is the extent to which the forces that shape our lives are no longer personal – they know nothing of us; and to the extent that we know nothing of them – cannot put a face to them, cannot find in them anything we recognise as human – we cannot deal with them. We feel like small, powerless creatures in the coils of an invisible monster, vast but insubstantial, that cannot be grasped or wrestled with.

The last bit is fair enough, maybe. It seems to pick out one feature of globalizing, technology-driven mass society, viz its impersonality, and render it in slightly damp plaster-cast prose. But if you ask me, what comes before – in particular the idea that what is "truly human" is what we can touch and see - is simple-minded rustic empiricism: it suggests nothing so much as the muckiness of small-is-beautiful nostalgia. Malouf’s sense that the mind has autonomous powers of reason, speculation, image-making and story-telling that are there to complement the activities of the body seems to have deserted him at this point. And that’s not all that gets left out of the picture. If the rejection of the Christian vision of the body as a source of sin is one of the early modern world’s happier innovations, does it remain an unambiguous one? The body is something that is subject today to a truly miserable range of constraints and pressures whose origins lie far from the ascetic ideals of Christianity. In being liberated for the experience of pleasure, bodies are increasingly treated as mechanical instruments; primed and polished, they become the target of vast commercial campaigns of improvement that seem to leave a lot of people feeling insecure within their own skins just as radically as Christian puritanism did. The early modern world might, up to a point, make it possible for human beings to experience bodily joy, but the technological civilisation that modernity eventually gave rise to also makes the human body tendentially irrelevant, as more and more work, and more and more social life in general, is conducted without the need for human beings’ physical presence.

Building up to the topic “the way we live now” by surveying some of the key historical moments in the pursuit of happiness from pre-modernity and early modernity might seem like a good idea. But Malouf’s conclusions are inconclusive. There are some ritualised worries about all those medical advances not having cured us of our deeper discontent, and some equally conventional muttering about the bad news delivered to us daily by the media about the health of the planet. But then strangely we’re back with Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian image of man, which suggests to Malouf the classical Graeco-Roman notion of proportion and measure, then, lastly, with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Shukhov – the man who has another 3500 days to spend in a Soviet gulag and who, by the end of Solzhenitsyn’s novel, is able to rest content with a fruitful day’s scrounging and scheming. By an irony that strikes me as rather gruesome, and not entirely willed, Malouf offers up Shukhov as a sort of paradigmatic happy man of modernity. The lesson seems to be that Shukov has discovered a secret that many of us never hit upon – that true happiness is only attainable within limits – in moderation, or, again, in a – kind of – classical proportion. And that’s pretty much where the deepest problem with QE41 lies. Malouf’s essay continually falls away from the question of happiness in its radical contemporary form in favour of a rather ill-focussed search for the sources of happiness, or the lack of it, in the worlds of literature, art and history. What Malouf manages to uncover in passing in Plato, Montaigne, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vitruvian Man, etc. has an interest, and a sensitivity, of its own, but a lot of the time it’s simply irrelevant to the question it feels like his editors set him. The problem is that there’s a strict limit – for instance - to the explanatory value of suggesting that The Economy functions like Fate or that Technology is a sign of a primal human restlessness. The analogies drawn from the art and philosophy of the past to illustrate those two generic points are all right as they go, but QE41 fails to really pin them down or follow them through. And that makes it decidedly light-on as a piece of serious reflection.

All in all, QE41 has a bit of a leaf through the lengthy catalogue of modern misery we keep on adding to at one end and failing to shorten at the other. It makes clear that the way the catalogue is filling out so rapidly at the front has something to do with our inability to stop scratching the technological itch, with the super-size free-market economies we’ve created, with all the associated complexity and impersonality and formal rationality, and with the sense that the world presents itself to us as a scatter of piecemeal problems to be solved: Malouf knows our faith that the world is improvable by such gimcrack problem-solving means has itself become problematic. Yet in the end he’s unwilling or unable to really look into the heart of darkness – for that’s where his swag of images from aesthetic life don’t fit him out with the necessary equipment.

The problem QE41 sets for itself is happiness and the problem Malouf founders on is the key one. The ideal of happiness he is pleading for – the singular life within “our personal interior realm" where we can settle down and meditate philosophically - is itself something of an antique. The very way he sets up the ideal seems to require ignoring that any contemporary version of Montaigne’s little back shop would by definition be systematically interconnected to a degree that would’ve been inconceivable to Montaigne – from the inside of the technically primed physical body all the outward.

In the end there’s something deeply unchallenging about Malouf’s vision – something as unchallenging as all those Sunday broadsheet pieces about how busy the modern world is, and how insensitive we’ve all become to the beauties of contemplation, solitude and silence. Don’t the authors of all this stuff notice the insistence with which people are exhorted to seek out, and do actually seek out, exactly the thing they’re said to be incapable of? Malouf is roughly in the same boat: gesturing towards an ideal that is already an unsatisfactory, unsatisfying fragment of the real. As for endowing our Shukov-like struggles within the fateful encampment of the planetary economy with a resigned sense of classical proportion – well, in the sketchy form QE41 presents it, the ideal comes across as a bit of a cop-out: it just raises the question why we should settle for anything less than understanding how we got to this dark place where we’re equally the prisoners and the camp-guards and the camp itself.

If we understood how we got here, maybe we'd actually be less miserable - and maybe making a break for the gates wouldn’t seem so crazy. Indeed, why should the illuminati of humankind really be happy with anything less?

How unfunny is Catherine D?

Review: Catherine Deveney "God is Bullshit: That's the Good News"
 

Though it shouldn't dissuade you from becoming an atheist (or persuade you), the fact is that there have always been a fair number of them for whom the attraction is obviously the opportunity to have some rough fun at the expense of what other people take very seriously. These people are not so much born rebels as serial pests, Bart Simpsons in battle dress. If you wanted a technical name for them, it would have to be social scatologists - people whose atheism comes down basically to sticking their fingers up their bums, whipping them out and waving them round chanting gleefully that God, that pathetic non-existent fkn loser, hasn't struck them down for their sins yet. On the other hand, especially since the days religion started having to justify itself in the face of scientific enquiry, journalistic scrutiny and scatological provocation, there have always been quite a few testy metropolitans who have argued rather fatuously for their beliefs on the grounds of sheer historical necessity: religion has been taken seriously for the longest time and should therefore be taken seriously today. In a broadly secular society such as our own, the sort of ill-natured to-ing and fro-ing that goes on between the two groups seems like just another sideshow - an exercise in mutual irritation that the mainstream media is happy to bring to the boil, especially at the time of the two main Christian festivals, when the rest of the world is just taking a breather. Such is the eternal nil-all draw that seems bound to be replayed over and over again on the margins of the social realm.

Exactly why it's bound to be a nil-all draw is complex, but if I had to say in 30 words or less - what might, very roughly, be called the scientific view of the world has run into problems of its own, both intrinsic and extrinsic, but religion, including the Christian religion, has established itself as a bit of a refuge against some of the forces in the world that are advancing and have been for a long time and have caused a lot of people severe anxiety in the process. - Much as you might get people to agree in questionnaires to the proposition that they "believe what science says" (whatever that actually means), our society just doesn't seem capable of acquainting large enough numbers of people with the complex bodies of bio-geo-physical fact that fly in the face at least of more literalist interpretations of the Bible. On the other hand, there's probably a general perception that most Christians and religious folk take the notion of charity and social cohesion a little more seriously than most and much more seriously than they are, and indeed can be, taken by the dominant institution of the contemporary world - the market economy. Religion, in broad terms, probably isn't going backwards because there's a bit of a sense that it functions, partly, as a counterweight to the at times pitiless spirit of commercialism that permeates almost every aspect of the systems by which we supply our ever-multiplying material needs. If religion is not going backwards, I'd say, that has little to do with the fact that large numbers of people put themselves down as nominal Christians or say they believe in some sort of transcendent or supra-worldly plane - such beliefs are normally so totally content-less and so devoid of practical consequences that they should hardly be called religion at all and certainly not Christianity; but it does have to do with the not unjustifiable perception that religion is a viable path of self-restraint in a world dominated by grossly excessive consumption. The fewer needs you have the happier you are, as the saying goes; well, in the crack-brained rooting-tooting-cussing-gorging times we live in, when maxing out your credit card is something to group text your friends about (LOL) and when your patriotic duty in an economic crisis is to go out there and FKN-WLL SHOP, religion is seen as a powerful motivation to slough off superfluous needs and ignore various palpably insane social imperatives.

This brings me to Catherine Deveney, whose show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival I stopped by to see last night. Deveney, as I'm sure you already know, is one of the scatological atheist brigade, but before I get to that - a disclosure: I have been an un-fan of Deveney's for many years now - not so much because of what she writes - which is such a stew of smart-arsery and brow-beating that I rarely read it - but because of what she represents: the celebrity columnist, viz. at a once-serious newspaper now determined to turn itself into a super-size Who Weekly, whose fairly unremarkable life and equally unremarkable mind leaves her with nothing much to do in her thrice-weekly columns but talk about herself and aimlessly hang sh*t on people. Her stand-up comedy aside, Deveney's career has essentially been a variation on a theme whose monotonous key notes are filling up column inches and giving readers a sense of social superiority. The idea of the people who commission this stuff seems to be to give The Age's readers the chance to get themselves close enough over breakfast to the source of self-important snark (Deveney), quirky navel-gazing (Marieke Hardy), cosy principled "musings" (Kate Holden) or 2-minute-noodle-style literary knowingness (Shane Maloney), so that they can head out into the world - if not feeling an inner glow, at least feeling forearmed with someone else's ironies. - It's important to bear in mind, by the way, what all this guff - guff that undoubtedly knows it's guff - has come to edge out of the newpaper almost completely - that is, book reviews, film reviews and social criticism that fulfil the minimal criteria of grown-up commentary - talking about the topic for more than three sentences back-to-back and not using the elbow-room that new-style subjectively coloured journalism gives you as a pretext for talking about what bit of obnoxious or poignant behaviour you were witness to last time you were at the supermarket. - That The Age continues to employ Deveney as a tv writer is a sign of the deep downwards spiral it entered into long ago; the abrasive scatter-brained smugness might sometimes be amusing in a column devoted to Catherine's larger-than-life personality, but applied to a medium, tv, that would be well served being written about from a thoughtful informed perspective, it's inexcusable.

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We interrupt transmission to present you posthumously with no less than six epigraphs. Just in case you'd been tempted not to read on by so many preliminaries. . . CS

It is quite possible nowadays to rebel against rebellion by being conventional. Of course this doesn’t mean that all conventionality has just the right mystical rebellious qualities. . . But then how to stand out from the crowd if this is the trick you’re trying to play? That requires imagination. . . - Lion

Not only did he not believe in ghosts, he wasn't even afraid of them. - Lichtenberg

I flew too close to the sun – on wings of pastrami. - George Costanza

All theology represents an intellectual rationalisation of the possession of sacred values. No science is absolutely free from presuppositions, and no science can prove its fundamental value to the man who rejects these presuppositions. Every theology, however, adds a few specific presuppositions for its work and thus for the justification of its existence. Their meaning and scope vary. Every theology. . . presupposes that the world must have a meaning, and the question is how to interpret this meaning so that it is intellectually conceivable. - Max Weber

Scientific progress is a fraction, the most important fraction, of the process of intellectualisation which we have been undergoing for thousands of years . . . Let us first clarify what this intellectualist rationalisation, created by science and by scientifically oriented technology, means practically. . . Does it mean that we, today, for instance, everyone sitting in this hall, have a greater knowledge of the conditions of life under which we exist than has an American Indian or a Hottentot? Hardly. Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that he may “count” on the behaviour of the streetcar, and he orients his conduct according to this expectation; but he knows nothing about what it takes to produce such a car so that it can move. The savage knows incomparably more about his tools. When we spend money today I bet that even if there are colleagues of political economy here in the hall, almost every one of them will hold a different answer in readiness to the question: How does it happen that one can buy something for money – sometimes more and sometimes less? The savage knows what he does in order to get his daily food and which institutions serve him in this pursuit. The increasing intellectualisation and rationalisation do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. . . It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather than one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualisation means. – Max Weber

The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked though to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism. For then science encounters the claims of the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented, cosmos. In principle, the empirical as well as the mathematically oriented view of the world develops refutations of every intellectual approach which in any way asks for a "meaning" of inner-worldly occurrences. Every increase of rationalism in empirical science increasingly pushes religion from the rational into the irrational realm; but only today does religion become the irrational or anti-rational supra-human power. The extent of consciousness or of consistency in the experience of this contrast, however, varies widely. Athansius won out with his formula [I believe because it is absurd] in his struggle against the majority of the Hellenic philsophers of the time; it does not seem inconceivable, as has been said, that among other reasons he really wanted to compel them expressly to make the intellectual sacrifice and to fix a limit to rational discussion. Soon afterwards, however, the Trinity itself was rationally argued and discussed. - Weber

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All of that said though - there's no denying that the larger-than-life personality does work for Deveney as a stand-up. In her promo material for the Comedy Festival she describes herself as "atheist eye-candy" - which is pretty much the sort of self-admiring tripe that her columns are full of. But when she stalks round on stage in high-heels and a low cut dress and hoots, Tallulah Bankhead style, about being atheist eye-candy she actually makes herself into what she says she is; instead of just writing egomaniacal comic IOU's, she gives herself the chance to play on or against the expectations that come with that sort of sexualised self-presentation. Likewise when she tells us the story of her pre-teen attempts at joining the ranks of Catholic altar boys at the start of God is Bullshit. What did they make her as punishment for even asking? A . . . liturgical dancer: down she goes on bended knee and swirls her arms bizarrely above her head, part matador, part calisthenics teacher - at last she's showing us the stupid side of religion. Or take this development of the show's mainline title:

"George Pell is doing a show at the Comedy Festival did you know? It's called. . . Catherine Deveney is bullshit." 

Crikey Review of: Clive Hamilton - Requiem for a Species

Could our goose already be cooked when it comes to climate change? If you think the question itself is beyond the pale I can only recommend you have a read of Clive Hamilton’s latest effort. Does the question itself smack of an alarmism you want nothing to do with? Well, unless you think that life in this world is incapable of tossing up situations that are alarming then that isn’t quite a good enough response, according to Hamilton, whose central premise in his ominously titled Requiem for a Species is indeed that there is next to no chance we can avoid passing the tipping points climate scientists have been telling us we’ve been approaching for several years. And, like it or not, he supports what he’s got to say with layer upon layer of well-reasoned argument.

Just as importantly, he’s got the tone downpat. A lot of Requiem for a Species – I won’t say all – is written with a restraint that belies the passion the author clearly feels about our environmental predicament. – Getting the right written tone, if you ask me, is one of the things that separates the climate change sheep from the climate change goats, given that both of the rough parties to the debate about the topic regularly claim to be arguing in defence of rational intellectual and scientific standards. In spite of his pessimism, Hamilton remains a credible partisan of a rational cause because he adheres to general manners and methods that derive ultimately from scholarly research and investigative journalism. In argument, he wins hands down over, say, his opposite number in the debate, Andrew Bolt, whose defence of “scepticism” or “reason” comes with sledge-hammer sarcasm and those under-explanatory 8 – 10 word sentences that might as well end with a spray of exclamation marks, even if they don’t actually come with them. Hamilton, you could say, passes one basic test of rational credibility by not resorting to scorn, clowning and the dubious negative pathos of quasi-prophetic denunciation.

So what’s Hamilton’s reasoning? The science – notwithstanding the swifties pulled by some of the East Anglian climate science division – is looking horribly horribly bad for us. Although you wouldn’t guess it from mainstream media coverage of Tony’s struggle with Malcolm’s struggle with Kevin brought on by that. . . CPRS. . . thing, worst-case scenarios on climate change have been turning into middle-of-the-range scenarios for several years in the scientific literature on the subject. As Hamilton details in Chapter 6 of Requiem for a Species, large groups of credentialed climate scientists gather nowadays to hold conferences called things like “4 degrees and beyond: Implications of a global change of 4+ degrees for people, ecosystems and the earth system.” (Anyone who wants a first-hand impression of the dry analytic minds who head the climate science fraternity should have a listen to John Schellnhuber’s contribution to the gathering.) Whatever dents have been put in the public credibility of the thesis of anthropogenic global warming by the diffuse air of scandal surrounding “climategate” and the not-so-diffuse air of failure surrounding Copenhagen, all the main evidential threads pointing to the forbidding seriousness of the problem remain intact.

Problem number two for Hamilton is that the world is actually carbonising economic production at exactly the time it needs to be de-carbonising, and fast. The figures for the decade just closed are in: global emissions of CO2, in large part driven by fossil fuel combustion, rose at 3% a year during the decade – a rate of increase that, if reproduced over coming decades, will easily push atmospheric CO2 content into the 600 – 1000ppm band by later in the century. Developed countries like Australia, which probably need to move first, seem to want to underwrite the coal industry decades into the future, by compensating it for most of the pain of a cap-and-trade system and by upholding the technological fiction that Carbon Capture and Storage can allow us to dispose thoughtfully of emissions – though nobody at all is prepared to make this claim for CCS over the vital decade we’ve just moved into.

Economic growth, for Hamilton, is as fetishised as ever, before and after the Great Recession – a sort of structural reason for pessimism. The imperative to grow the economy the easy way, using relatively plentiful supplies of fossil fuel, irrespective of environmental constraints or whether it makes people happy to be involved in turbo-charged economic life, is a large part of what got us into the pickle in the first place and there is no sign any of that is about to change. Unfortunately the fifteen years that preceded the Great Recession have created an up-and-coming generation that is likely to include some of the biggest hyper-consumers of all time – as Hamilton puts it, people who go in for the self-defeating business of defining their very selves in terms of purchases and purchasing power. And then there’s the Chinese who, in spite of their relatively rational assessments of the science of global warming, are in the middle of creating an economy based more and more on coal-fired domestic consumption.

Hamilton points to a shared assumption of political progressives and conservatives on the question of growth:

The association in both progressive and conservative thinking between economic growth and progress is so deeply entrenched and vigorously defended that it cannot rest solely on any empirical association between higher material consumption and greater. . . happiness.

The key indicator that economic growth has a quasi-supernatural meaning in today’s world is that human beings who buy into it, and especially their elected representatives, are capable of acting against what worldly wisdom ought to be telling them – that above a certain level, material consumption is just as likely to make people miserable as it is to make them happy. So when it is demonstrated that cutting greenhouse gas emissions would in all likelihood have a minor effect on economic growth and none on the amount of sunshine in the world, we have an unambiguous demonstration of growth’s symbolic or utopian power: the feeling is almost that even if material contentment were to remain as high as ever in the transition to a low-carbon economy, something horrendous would have happened all the same – our unavowed belief in the sanctity of growth itself would’ve been called into question.

In the central chapter of the book, where Hamilton presents his freshest material, things get really grim. Here he turns his attention to “the many forms of denial”, left-wing denial, right-wing denial; everyday denial dawdling into your inbox from a friend and organised denial flowing from the centres of power; principled denial which shades into contrarianism and scientific devil’s advocacy and, trickiest of all, what you might call practical denial – the sort that congratulates itself for having recognised the problem, avows its concern and . . . flies off to Paris for a quick holiday all the same . . . Hamilton gives us the basic pre-history of the denialist tide that is swelling at the moment. There can be no doubt, on this view, that a small number of corporations and radical conservatives made a strategic decision following the close of the Cold War to paint environmentalism and, if need be, parts of the scientific community, as the new threat to Our Lives and Values. This was politicking of a particularly hard-nosed variety, though it is completely mistaken to attribute machiavellian duplicity to everyone who thinks they sense the threat. (Whether it will be enough to hollow out the bases of conservatism – Waleed Aly’s thesis in his latest Quarterly Essay – only time will tell; the intellectually defensible conservative notion that no knowable theory can truly encompass society and culture has been inverted in the case of the radical anti-environmental conservatives into a knowably false theory with an inbuilt paranoid inclination - all that stuff about nefarious IPCC-engineered world-government.)

The decision to demonise environmentalism in any case seems to be bearing fruit, particularly at the moment. The anti-environmental cause is starting to mobilise free-floating resentment of science (an elite of experts), government (an elite of decision-makers) and considered intellectual perspectives of all kinds – first and foremost in the U.S. For Hamilton, it’s cause for more pessimism: climate change denial seems to be channelling general low-level wishful thinking as well as a more specific sort of ugly right-wing populism at exactly the time when an almighty push needs to be taking place to bring emissions down by 40% on 1990 levels within ten years – just to give us an even-money chance of keeping temperature increases later in the century to under four degrees. That’s four degrees.

What is The Great Stage?

"A review of the reviewers might at long last yield an idea or two about art and writing. For wouldn't such a meta-review make clear one or two authentic feelings of distress about Art's pitiful condition in this an-aesthetic era of artistic over-production? The poetry, novels, essays and anthologies themselves have nothing to say. They refer, if they refer to anything, to a lost time in which these forms of literary art had form, when Time itself had time and made a present of it to Art, which can manifestly not arise in a world that no longer believes in Eternity, when no one with the ability to write could have faith that the future would grant him readers that are any different from those he sees around him: those infernal writer-readers who are all just about to drop the pose of readerly attention and begin to shout into the latest digitised megaphone of egotism. You seek in vain amid the literature of today for world-views. You look up from your book and find tvs and billboards and inadvertently come across the closest you can get to Weltanschauungen nowadays: Anschauungen, which is to say – rapaciously multiplying percepts."

- or so I thought three years ago.

The Great Stage is turning out to be something more than than the open-ended exercise in criticism it was originally intended as. Still, for the sake of partial self-definition, here's a draft of the answer to the question "What is the Great Stage?" that dates from the early days.

"The Great Stage is a response to a three-fold critical malaise:

1. Print media in Australia is visibly faltering. At present the only dynamic aspect of Australian newspaper culture would seem to be the interaction between the business models of the supermarket managers in command and the tabloid-cum-glossy fare they judge can be sold to the largest number of readers. Under such conditions, the public function of revieweing and criticism is becoming harder to sustain as the culture pages of major broadsheets fill up with monster-sized pictures, interview-pieces, endless food and wine tips and the diary-like musings of celebrity columnists. The 800-word book review – already of limited use for the purposes of the critic – is itself coming to seem a luxury; for a long time it has formed part of the penumbra of a life-style journalism with most of the qualities of advertising (even if it appears above the line separating paid publicity from what claims the reader's attention on other grounds).

2. Universities have ceased to offer critics meaningful points of intellectual contact, much less places of refuge. Our educational institutions were once one of two indispensable reference points of critical activity: in the person of the critic, the relatively heady world of academic scholarship remained connected with the everyday reality of the theatre, the studio and the writer’s corner. By contrast, today universities’ very intellectual function is under threat as "serious scholarship is replaced by an entrepreneurial striving for research money and media attention." (Harry Redner) In short, criticism and academic life until recently belonged together as part of the same cultural manifold – both offered something to the artist, because both sought to give shape to free intellectual perspectives. In an era like our own when university education is subject to the equally sterile logic of bureaucratic control and free market economics, that ceases to be the case in a radical sense. Free critical activity and routinised academic life have come to mutually exclude each other; the social sciences and humanities in particular have increasingly become the haunt of radical academic conformists who dish up their sensibilities for the book market, shuffle their specialities between journals and conferences, deliver up their mechanical models of mind and society to a passively assenting public or join the ranks of administrative power-brokers and let fly with that disgraceful mixture of bombast and blandness with which our universities are expected to procedurally justify themselves.

3. The net poses a range of very different problems, though as the social domain freest of political constraints it remains the obvious place to launch a venture in general criticism. Yet the dilemmas of specialisation which present an obstacle to general criticism in the world-beyond-the-net are often reproduced online at a higher level of complexity; the generalism required to interpret art in relation to the social and cultural problematics of our day is even less likely to emerge in a virtual world where every fragment of an idea generates its own authoritative-looking pronouncements within its own teeming online enclosure. And that’s not even getting started on the raft of further problems the web generates for the critic. Foremost among them is the problem of.taking critical responsibility: in a medium where too many writers let fly with their opinions from behind a veil of anonymity, criticism either fails to develop or degenerates into self-important snark; where speech acts take on the quality of sound-bites for quasi-technical reasons – where the sheer volume of speech determines the speaker’s visibility – two essential aspects of criticism, analysis and interpretation, fall away and a third, evaluation, is radically abbreviated. . . So if yours truly is going to get a spot of criticism going, he might have to take evasive action against all sorts of things – against the purveyors of cheap ironies – against the army of sub-commentators for whom being online means first and foremost giving up on self-control - against all who spare themselves the labour of the concept, in order to be ready with the snappiest instantaneous assessments of everything the world of art and writing have to offer." 

Truly,

CS

Review: Harry Redner's Aesthetic Life: The History and Present of Aesthetic Cultures

Harry Redner’s account of aesthetic life in his book of the same title is one to which the classic dictum of Lichtenberg applies: Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. Replace “good taste” with the more awkward “sense of aesthetic value” and you have Redner’s guiding insight in a nutshell: giving an account of what art is means avoiding all artful pleas for one’s own taste. It means submitting taste to multi-dimensional critical scrutiny on the highest intellectual level. Redner, in short, always has his reasons at his disposal. In Aesthetic Life he is never tempted to evade careful explanation of his whys and wherefores with picturesque rhetorical gestures or baroque theoretical artifice, or by sprinkling the names of the classics across the page.

The book’s subtitle, “the history and present of aesthetic cultures”, gives further clues to his intentions. The key to Redner’s aesthetics is the idea that aesthetic life is historically and socially formed - thus pre-formed, reformed and deformed – in ways that can be generalised about. The present becomes something like a necessary perspective on these socio-historical travails; aesthetic history for Redner cannot but be the history of the present, which for him means a tale told from the point of view of a time, our own, when the coherence and indeed the practical survival of aesthetic life are radically in question. The argument follows the pattern of Ethical Life (2002), which culminated in the claim that contemporary ethics is subject to a number of painful and historically unprecedented paradoxes, in large part because of the way free markets and the activities of modern states have displaced and rationalised (often rationalised away) the multiple ethical ideals of the past.

In each of the major divisions of this new book, Redner deploys a suite of basic aesthetic categories. They provide the machinery of his view of aesthetic life and his method in large part is to explain what he means by them, put paid to associated theoretical misconceptions, then deploy the machinery in his own account of how art works. The latter he does with some flair and considerable intellectual afflatus.

In Book 1 he presents what he calls the elementary aesthetic qualities, as well as a three-fold division between the constitution (composition, construction, fabrication), presentation (performance, exhibition) and reception of art. The aesthetic qualities include, among others, humour, beauty, form, design, expression (musical and dramatic) and verisimilitude. Redner thinks of them as something like the raw material of our experiences of art, anthropological universals which play a part in everyday life but are also aesthetically elaborated in line with the guiding ideas of individual cultures. (Simplifying considerably, jokes are the source of comedy; daily sing-song develops into honed musical art; speech-making and yarn-spinning flow over as epic narratives and novels; proverbs and the metaphorical tidbits of day to day speech take on definite aesthetic form as poetry; and they each do so in ways that fit with the evaluative interpretations that dominate a culture’s view of reality.) A highlight of this part of the work is the swift and effective overhaul Redner performs on the problem whether aesthetic qualities are subjective or objective, roughly – is beauty (or humour or any basic dimension of aesthetic value) in the eye of the beholder or in the beautiful object itself? The answer is neither and both. Beauty is not statically either in the beholder or the object, it comes to inhere in the beholder and the object because of the way social norms and aesthetic standards are absorbed by individuals, then subsequently transformed and sent into social circulation again. Another way of putting it would be to say there is no fundamental subjective (inner, psychological) or objective (outer, material) grounds to which to reduce judgments about whether something is beautiful, funny etc. Aesthetic judgment is intersubjective, taking place within a framework of evaluative interpretations that are supplied but not mechanically determined by a wider culture. So at last that old chestnut has been plucked from the fire of philosophical wrangling. . .

Book 2 makes a categorial distinction between art, high art and great art – forms between which Redner intends to make no invidious comparison. By “art” pure and simple he means the aesthetic life of tribal peoples, as well as the folk and popular arts of historical cultures. “High art” is the product of literate civilisations which do things like create cities, form states and found elaborate social institutions. “Great art” is high art raised to a higher power of self-consciousness and loosened from its traditionalist moorings. The great art traditions, among which Redner includes those of Greece-Rome, China-Japan, India, Islamic Persia and modern Europe, are the traditions which develop a sense of their own historicity and a self-reflexive language of aesthetic criticism, together with a strong sense of the individual artistic personality. (In cultures that support a great art tradition the notion of artistic personality begins to shape what it means to be an individual in the first place.)

Book 2 takes us right up to the threshold of the present, with the aesthetically fateful twentieth century just closed. The main fact of recent aesthetic history for Redner is that the great art tradition of modern Europe has been brought to a (somewhat definitive) end, having been subject in the course of the twentieth century to a severe devaluation of its highest aesthetic values; though multiple threads of the tradition are still there to be grasped, by century’s end no strong sense of art’s purpose or direction remains intact. Here is where Redner sees a role for criticism, which, as the argumentative apparatus of Book 3 tells us, is the concerted artful practice of analysis, interpretation and evaluation. Great criticism comes into existence – at least it did so at the height of the European great art tradition - when critics formed the vital point of interconnection between practicising artists and academic scholarship. A re-vitalised criticism is what aesthetic life is crying out for today given the pervasive sense that aesthetic value judgments have nothing but a flimsy subjective basis and the enormous question mark posed by the dominant cultural institution of our times – a homogenised culture industry of elephantine global proportions.

Review: Corinne Grant at the Comic's Lounge

To one side of the conformism of public and workaday life, Australians are capable of much wry fun. They acknowledge many of the better jokes made at their expense, not just the cheap ones made compulsively by ferrets like Rove. At the Comic's Lounge in North Melbourne the better jokes can be heard. Last night I felt as if I heard some of them, told by Corinne Grant and Adam Richards, the secret of whose art seems to me to be in positioning themselves to one side, though never too far to one side, of the comic and workaday conventions to which comedians and the rest of us conform.

On the tram north from the city, two likely lads tried out some malign humour of their own on me. Were they speeding? Not in the literal sense of the word. The no. 57 tram to West Maribyrnong was taking them to the showgrounds for a party at that slow speed Melbourne trams like best, somewhere between walking and cycling pace. With a druggy nonchalance, one of them asked me what my name was. When told, he informed me I was lying: with a nose like mine my name had to be Pinocchio. I told him it was a dud of a joke and asked whether he had another. His friend did, but it turned out to be worse: was I some kind of f*cking emo? If not, why was I wearing all that black? My nemeses had bright knitted tea-cosies on their numbskulls, the ones with the long dangly bits at the side – ideal for hanging them with, I thought; I said – couldn’t they see the blue shirt beneath my inky cloak and – two substandard jokes on the trot did they want to have one last try or quit without further disgracing themselves? Next, something interesting happened. They realised I was ready with half-decent comebacks and wasn’t going to pretend to ignore how obnoxious they were being like everyone else on the tram. A little wave of universal bruverhood rippled across the scene. For the rest of the trip we played a game of ethnic 20 questions (I tried to guess what part of the world they came from, they tried the same out on me); they complimented me and my date on our respective choice of companions for the evening; they even asked for invitations to the wedding. I said they’d only be getting invites if they could guarantee they wouldn’t wear woolen bonnets. Not to be outdone, the lovely CW (my date) chimed in – maybe they should promise that they would wear the knitwear, so the wedding guests would know when the Moroccan village idiots had arrived. The village idiots doubled over with laughter, acknowledging they’d been dealt a couple of palpable comic hits. I shook CW’s hand, then theirs, told them not to f*ck too much sh*t up at the Showgrounds and got down in front of the North Melbourne Townhall. As the tram rounded the corner into Abbotsford St, village idiot no. 1 was hanging from the handrails and swinging his feet up into the faces of those around him.

We enter the Comic’s Lounge and head upstairs. Our names are crossed off a list and we push out into the lounge bit – a red carpeted space with some couches, a bar and lots of mirrors. The comedy takes place through some swinging saloon doors, in a room with a low ceiling big enough to host a big Greek wedding. There are trestle-tables at the back and round numbers for more intimate gatherings up the front. On all of them there’s plenty of Comic’s Lounge paraphernalia. About the only annoying thing about the place is the way it spruiks itself before, during and after the show.

. . . Enter Corinne Grant. She opens with a routine about "LOL" – don’t stick it at the end of a text message saying you heard your friend’s grandma died. Grant has already extracted from someone in the front row the confession that they thought LOL meant “lots of love”. Clattering pearls of laughter. Grant is clearly pleased – she hunches forward as though she’s got stomach cramps, a deliberately forced grin on her face – the compulsiveness of public laughter itself seems to be getting a grilling. Before handing over to Gab Rossi for his bracket, she’s up on the comic heights twice more. The first thing in her sights up there are aging hippies who make their own soap (out of squeezed together leftovers, creating what she calls “a pube sandwich”). Then it’s the turn of school-age white gangsta rappers on PT (whom she forces herself not to laugh at in case their fragile adolescent d*cks drop off). Let’s not say Rossi lowers the tone – the tone isn’t that high to start with. (One of his opening gags is “I woke up this morning and saw a great pair of tits – and I thought – I gotta lose some weight.”) But Grant is in another league. She’s the unpretentious wise-cracking blonde, unbuttoned on most topics, straight-laced about a few – the girl-next-door raised to the power of 10. Rossi by contrast is the patriotic male slob, the sub-normal bloke whose one character trait – not necessarily a redeeming one – is that once he’s poured out the slop-bucket of his mind in public, he has the rudimentary honesty to own the contents. Half-way through his bracket he regales us with his reasons for being a tea-totaler. The first is that he doesn’t need to drink to get himself to the point where he’ll flop his chop in public – give him $2 and he’ll do it anyway. As funny as that is, it’s a touch too consciously low-brow. (A paradox for Australian humorists: though obscenity is one of the most powerful kinds of subversiveness, what are you subverting if you’re playing that card to an audience for which obscenity itself is de rigueur?)

Age Review of Damon Young's Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free

We live in an age not given to deep or extended reflection. The phenomenon of lifestyle philosophy is part of a sporadic and slightly tortured effort by philosophers to make themselves relevant to such an age. For better or worse, philosophy stopped being what it once was, the much vaunted queen of the sciences, several centuries ago. And the times are definitively over when a literary or philosophical education was seen as a necessary preparatory to life in the wider world. A fair portion of academic philosophy has coped with that by remaking itself in the image of a technical discipline, with its own sub-disciplines, journals and professional cadres. Lifestyle philosophy has struck out in the opposite direction. Its working assumption is that philosophy can be made as applicable to everyday life as the individual lifestyle philosopher dares to make it.

Damon Young's Distraction is very much in this vein. Subtitled A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free, it takes up the perennial theme of individual liberty and does something with it very much along the lines of Alain de Botton or John Armstrong. It shares the attractions and the pitfalls of Armstrong's work, which at its best can give readers a gentle introduction to a philosophical theme but at its worst reduces the history of ideas to something colourless and quaint, a sort of boutique blandness.

Young argues that distraction is the very opposite of freedom - it is what robs us of our authentic selves and radically narrows our ability to give shape to individual character. This all seems unambiguously true; we live in times that are rife with diversions of dubious value, a seemingly endless array of trivia. For Young, we can all be happier, healthier and wiser if we concentrate on what we truly value, and the lives and works of great philosophers and artists apparently show us how we can go about it - they're quintessentially edifying, or so the argument goes.

In seven chapters Young surveys the areas of contemporary life where distraction exercises its devilish and humdrum charms - in the world of work, in our dealings with technology, in war and politics. But he also takes us on a Cook's tour of Western cultural history in search of a cure. This is where the problems begin. The meanings of thousand-page novels, philosophical systems and their authors' lives are condensed into paragraphs or single sentences - the meaning of T.S.Eliot's life is that "hard work pays off", with Marx it's that "in the economy there's no such thing as a free lunch", while Plato's idealistic disaffection with the Greece of his day suggests to Young we shouldn't "flinch or close our eyes" when confronted with "the opportunity to live".

The potted versions of the lives seem slightly irrelevant to Young's theme and he often strains to derive much coherent, reflective meaning from them. Too often the result is stereotyped life-stances that Young plays off against one another. Thus too much romanticism in life is a consistent no-no. On the other hand, adhering too strictly to reason, order and principle underplays the importance of emotion and imagination. Yes, indeed. But can any of the great philosophers really have recommended a life of unadulterated romance or the reasoned eradication of passion? Young writes as if they might have, so he can guide us to the middle ground, from which freedom gently beckons.

The difficulty is not so much Young's style, which is at times lively and (maybe a touch predictably) amusing. It's a problem with his self-help-y point of view. The overall cast of Distraction isn't equal to the grand idea of a new book about freedom. Flattening writers' lives into a digestible series of underpsychologised set pieces isn't enough to make a compelling case about liberty or individuality in our times.And even if we'd like to think that the wisdom of past ages could be transferred into our personal philosophical bank accounts without further ado, the question remains whether the historical context of an Eliot or a Plato's life was so different from our own that the project of letting them speak to us directly is bound to fail.

Young is right that we live in distracting times. But is more freedom or self-realisation quite the solution? There are good reasons to think the opposite but they don't get a look in. Might not some of our ills - from stockmarket turmoil to climate change - be the byproducts of the very liberty Young advocates? To see that, the cruel problem of freedom needs to be grasped from a less comfortable point of view than that of Distraction.

A naturalist and a gentleman: ABR review of Tom Frame's Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin in Australia

‘The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore,’ says Max Weber, ‘wherever rational empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism.’ Darwinism, or so one version of the history of modern culture goes, is the culmination of the process of disenchantment, the last step in the transformation of the world into a causal mechanism.

Where the great minds of early modern science concur in thinking that scientific study of the creation acquaints human beings better with the majesty of the creator, Darwin’s theory of natural selection seems to dispose of the creator without further ado. The famous core of it is the hypothesis that undirected biological change acts as a creative force, generating new species and ensuring that those that are best adapted to their environments have the greatest reproductive success. As plain as it sounds, the implications are startling – species need no longer be thought of as immutable creations of divinity; man himself no longer appears minted in the image of God; the earth, as a whole, acquires a distinctively modern natural history that dispenses with all notion of divine provision for human needs and aspirations. ‘It is like confessing to murder,’ Darwin wrote in an 1844 letter to Joseph Dalton, as the new theory put him on an unavoidable collision course with the proponents of a one-off biblical creation.

Is Darwinism true but deadly to all forms of Christian belief, as it is sometimes claimed to be? Is the causal mechanism it invokes hostile to religious and ethical meaning per se? These are the questions which motivate Tom Frame in Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia. But as the title suggests, they are far from Frame’s sole preoccupation. The first half of the book gives us a highly readable history taking in the formation of Darwin’s mind, his visit to Australia and a range of Australian reactions to his ideas – from the elegant pro and contra of the colonial period to the arid productions of the Creation Science movement. While in the second half of the book Frame gives the social history of Darwinism a contemporary edge by referring it back to his 24-carat question of meaning – how radically has Darwinism changed what it means to be Christian – Evolution in the Antipodes is informative and consummately fair-minded in its dealings with both past and present.

Darwin’s visit to Australia on the Beagle in early 1836 provides Frame with his main historical point of orientation. The brief Australian sojourn was something of a working holiday, with Darwin’s time divided between social obligations, field trips and exchanges with local naturalists. His account of his experiences for The Voyage of the Beagle (1840) gives as good an indication as any of his general mindset. The Voyage contains a fair amount of amateur cultural anthropology, some of it with an ugly undertone belonging squarely to the Age of Empire. Aboriginal Australians Darwin unhesitatingly calls ‘men in their lowest and most savage state’. Missionary Christianity he thinks of as an unambiguous force for moral improvement in the Pacific. (Frame presents it all neutrally as the sort of cultural chauvinism typical of Darwin’s day.) On a different level, but equally of its time, is Darwin’s commendation of the life of the sea-going naturalist – a veritable hymn to wholesome Protestant activity:

In a moral point of view, the effect [of the sea-going naturalist’s life] ought to be, to teach [a man] good-humoured patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of making the best of every occurrence.

Nothing Darwin observed in Australia, Frame tells us, made any special contribution to the theory of natural selection as it was to emerge after his return to Britain. Curiously, Darwin seems to have been unreceptive to his Australian surrounds – unwilling to imagine his way into the physical environment and repelled by its apparent lack of form. His notes about what he saw are a mixed bag – some useful grist for his evolutionary mill, some high-toned visions of a future Australian civilisation and some unconscious rehashings of his own Victorian present.

Frame’s chapter on Darwin’s own religious feeling is especially good. On the existence of God, Darwin was nothing less – though nothing more – than agnostic from his late-thirties onwards. Natural selection, however, led him to unreserved scepticism about the existence of hell, the notion that God reveals himself in nature, and especially the divine inspiration of the Bible. What is notable, though, is that, in spite of this, his personal morality remained well within the orbit of Christian teachings. Unlike some of his followers, Darwin never seems to have questioned whether altruism is the supreme ethical capacity of human beings (though he thought that it could be accounted for as an evolutionary extension of the social instincts of animals). The man himself was a naturalist and a gentleman, an orthodox Victorian one, or, as Frame puts it, an adherent of basic Christian principles, if not a Christian believer. Thinking through the consequences of his new theory for religious belief seems simply not to have been part of what he considered his scientific business. Frame demonstrates conclusively that Darwin’s shift away from his youthful Anglicanism was no lurch towards militant atheism. ‘The habit of looking for one kind of meaning [of the naturalistic variety] deadens the perception of another [religious meaning]’ – as Darwin himself joylessly puts it on mature reflection.

Anyone with a rough feel for the history of ideas will infer that Darwin’s doubts about conventional religious belief emerge from a standard background in Enlightenment philosophy and biblical criticism, mediated by one or two layers of polite English free-thinking. In the light of Frame’s account, treating Darwin himself as ‘the devil’s chaplain’, as some of his contemporaries did, seems ridiculous. But Darwin’s reticence about religion cuts both ways. Chapter nine of Evolution in the Antipodes shows just how unwilling he was to go out of his way to deprive others of their grounds for belief, something the militant Darwinians of our own era could learn from, if they agree that Darwin was something more than a supreme scientific mind. The vulgarity of many a neo-Darwinian criticism of vulgar superstition – kicking obsessively at everything that resembles a metaphysical crutch – is something Frame manages to quietly censor just by sketching more and less moderate possibilities of contemporary Darwinian thought.

Later in the book, Frame ventures into the dark realms of Creation Science and its neighbouring states of extremity, the lunar landscape of biblical literalism, multiplying religious factions and argumentative vicious circles. The debates Evolution in the Antipodes re-enacts between well-funded creationists and testy professors of biology bring out the best in no one. With the existence of God and His relationship with His creation at stake, the parties slug it out with all the paraphernalia of modern marketing at their disposal. The outcome – though Frame hesitates to say so himself – is not so much a nil-all draw but an unedifying game whose players all deserve red cards, a situation in which public discourse of the divine and the natural is cheapened.

So, if the universe was not created by God ex nihilo, and if human beings were not created in God’s image, do we still have reason to believe in God, especially in a Christian God who is loving and all-powerful? The answer suggested by Darwinism and insisted on by some Darwinians is in the negative. Frame’s point in Evolution in the Antipodes is that the negative answer can be taken for granted too easily. Yes, Christian belief is still possible, more than that it is still reasonable, he wants to say, but not without a reinterpretation of the nature and meaning of the deity and His relationship to His (supposed) creation. The trouble with where Frame winds up in the book is that the reinterpretation has not quite taken shape, though the landmarks in the Australian history of the reinterpretation have been generously surveyed. Frame, an Anglican bishop, is very much a believer in the reasoned road to God. Faith for him is an amalgam of observation, reflection and inspiration, a sort of affectively enriched empiricism. His God is one who enacts, or in some sense is, the continuous and ongoing process of creation, an immanent Being quite close to the God of pantheism.

It is a shame there isn’t space for Frame to give us his reflections on some alternatives – for instance that of drawing the dividing line between matters of fact and matters of faith more starkly (the path of a Kierkegaard, for whom faith totally transcends any scientific findings). Frame, in the end, is probably unwilling to take this turn because his is primarily an ethical religiosity, one inclined to appeal to rational knowledge, rather than make Christianity’s moral imperatives into inscrutable commandments of God.

That said, Evolution in the Antipodes remains a superb layman’s introduction, both to Darwin and to one side of Australian intellectual history. It pinpoints the way Darwin’s main ideas were influenced by the intellectual, social and scientific debates of his own day, the way those ideas acted on society and the way society continues to act on itself in the light of its understanding of them. Darwin himself, one feels, would have been bemused to see the mutation of natural selection from an approach to definite scientific problems to an all-purpose attitude, something more than a set of theoretical tools, but less than a philosophy.

Above all, Frame’s use of sources is second to none; Evolution in the Antipodes effortlessly assimilates an enormous array of materials into one coherent line of historical interpretation running from the late eighteenth century to the present. In its way, it is a model of a type of book we need more of in a world where science has its cultural meanings imposed on it by its social surrounds and where the sheer complexity of the scientific enterprise opens an ever wider field to arbitrary assertions of irrational meaning. All in all, this is a thoughtful work of popular science that puts the science in a broad cultural context while also allowing it to appear to one side of all cultural controversy.

Age review of John Armstrong's In Search of Civilisation

John Armstrong’s In Search of Civilisation runs two intersecting arguments. The first is that civilised culture comes into existence where material and spiritual prosperity mutually enhance each other. The second is that “any ambitious account of civilisation has to be an account of how we should live, individually and collectively.”

The emphasis there is on the “should”. Armstrong says at the outset that he is not much interested in civilisation as an historical or sociological phenomenon. What he’s after is the essence of civilisation and the essence of civilisation, he hopes, can function as a source of cultural idealism in a world in which such idealism feels like it is under permanent attack.

Out he comes and says it, with his characteristic directness: philosophy can and should be the basis of all civilised aspirations, the goal of philosophy being the realisation that the good, the beautiful and the true are one . . . Civilisation ought to make us wise, kind and tasteful. And the purpose of the economy is to promote exactly that.

Armstrong basically wants to define civilisation as whatever makes personal self-development possible. Within that limited compass, he has plenty to say. How you deal with the little things in life and how you enjoy yourself are under-recognised parts of what it is to be civilised. Healthy civilisations are those which imbue routine activities with the qualities of works of art. Civilised societies are those which help individuals develop a sense of sophistication and refinement. They support “good accumulation”, money-making with a sense of higher purpose. They even improve the quality of relationships.

As in his earlier Secret Power of Beauty, Armstrong’s strength is in condensing complicated thinking into the clearest simplest terms. In Search of Civilisation contains a topnotch 2 page summary of Freud’s case in “Civilisation and Its Discontents” and a mildly amusing modern adaptation of Aristotle’s ethics.

He’s also good at teasing out both sides of cultural conflicts that materialise partially in individual life. His chapters on “decadence” and “barbarism” genuinely do something with those over-wrought nineteenth century terms; if you thought you could do without your inner bogan or your inner dandy then according to Armstrong you mistake the way modern civilisation necessarily produces both.

Several of Armstrong’s observations have a sort of low-key reflective heft: the specialised world of art scholarship can be as culturally dispiriting as plastic statuettes of Michelangelo’s David; a bit of old-fashioned sublimation of desire is not just good but downright noble.

There are a couple of problems with tone. For one, Armstrong can sound sanctimounious when he speaks on behalf of his readers. When he assumes too easily that his own professed longing for civilisation resonates with “our” deepest needs and concerns, “our” humanity, he sounds like Tony Blair transported into a philosophy tutorial.

Though not exactly irrelevant to his theme, the grace, charm and material comfort of Armstrong’s own way of life are put on display with a mite too much self-satisfaction, gently suggesting that he himself embodies the civilised ideal his book sets out to explain.

One-dimensional expressions of ardour for civilised things are a second problem. Armstrong’s intention is clearly to avoid dry philosophical technicality. But surely he might have found other ways of doing so than avowing that he is “penetrated to the depths of his soul” by so many things? Sometimes the intrusions of authorial personality simply seem, well, a bit embarrassing. They make the book too much about Armstrong and not enough about civilisation.

“Perhaps we are inescapably marked – when it comes to ideas – by early life. . . My deepest fear is of loutish bullying and, close second, of appealing for help and being told the problem lies in me. Uncritical emphasis upon ideas like difference and equality is terrifying. . .”

There are also some broader failings related to the substance of Armstrong’s thinking about civilisation. Because he chooses not to engage with the problem of civilisation historically, he doesn’t acknowledge that the very concept might have changed radically under modern social conditions.

His stated aim is to re-make the “tarnished idea” of civilisation. But how is this possible without recognition that we live in an increasingly globalised world that has all but effaced former boundaries between cultures? How does it differ from nostalgia if it doesn’t face up to the paradoxes with which technology confronts the aesthetic and ethical ideals of old?

Because Armstrong doesn’t qualify his argument about the virtues of materialism, he overestimates the way economic success can be a neutral second pillar of civilisation alongside spiritual prosperity. The possibility he doesn’t consider is whether contemporary economic life in a high-tech globalised world has a radical potential to act as a sort of acid for dissolving the forms of culture and civility that ground the life of civilised communities.

The results are all around us. The “civilising” content of the cultural past is re-packaged as another sort of economic product. As that content is made available in relatively cheap standardised form to masses of people the world over, it is evacuated of a large part of its meaning. Nor is the high-minded re-assertion of the civilising mission of high culture likely to do any good under such conditions. High culture is well and truly catered for as a niche product within a mass market, which is ultimately where Armstrong’s work takes its place. - It is not just that the petunia in the onion patch is unlikely to convince the onions to become petunias. We’ve got to the bizarre point where the petunia’s attempts to convince the onions sow the seeds of more onions.

Armstrong’s sections on the contribution of material prosperity to civilisation represent the real weakpoint of his thought. Where the rest of his book is often psychologically canny, in the sections on culture’s relationship to money Armstrong wants to deal with a large-scale social conundrum without bothering with the detail of how societies work. His few nods in the direction of economics are unconvincing.

Nor does the book engage enough with the collective side of the enterprise of civilisation that on Armstrong’s account is supposed to be the complement to the individual side. The organisations and institutions of civilised life hardly make an appearance. But without them the book’s notion of civilisation looks more like a personal idyll than a coherent ideal.