The Intellectual Health of the Nation
In Monty Python's famous Bruce sketch, a bunch of beer-swilling Aussies, resplendent in khaki, welcome a "man from Pommeyland" into their elite band of Bruces. He is the latest recruit to the Philosophy Department at the University of Woolloomooloo.
One of the Bruces teaches classical philosophy, another lectures in Hegelian philosophy and a third is an expert in logical positivism, as well as looking after the sheep dip. The fresh recruit, "New-Bruce", is down to teach Machiavelli, Bentham, Locke, Hobbes, Sutcliffe, Bradman, Lindwall, Millar, Hassett and Benaud.
Whether inadvertent or not, Monty Python's pot-shot at intellectual life in Australia touched on some of the prevailing thinking of the post-war years, when some of the country's leading intellectuals felt like isolated figures in what they viewed as a barren cultural landscape. In 1958, the Nobel prize winning author, Patrick White, spoke derisively of "The Great Australian emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions". The Melbourne-based social commentator Arthur Phillips, who wrote in 1950 of the "cultural cringe", spoke of the "estrangement of the Australian intellectual".
The journalist Donald Horne, who penned The Lucky Country, had this to say of his country back at the beginning of the 1960s: "Intellectual life exists but it is still fugitive. Emergent and uncomfortable, it has no established relation to practical life. The upper levels of society give an impression of mindlessness triumphant....Australia might seem depraved, a victory of the anti-mind."
On the back of the last blog about the health of Australian literature - and thanks for such an informed and erudite response - I wondered whether it was worth assessing the health of intellectualism in Australia.
Admittedly, it is hard to measure in any meaningful way, but you could marshal a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that it is in fairly good shape. There's the popularity of literary festivals, which are reporting record attendances; the loyal readership for high-brow magazines and journals like The Australian Literary Review, Quadrant, The Quarterly Essay, The Griffith Review and The Monthly; and the launch of and which run a lot discussions, lectures and interviews on some fairly esoteric subjects.
Public intellectuals have also been in the forefront of some of Australia's most pressing recent debates, from environmental degradation (the novelist, Richard Flanagan), to bushfire policy (the Melbourne-based academic, Robert Manne); from asylum seekers (the writer David Marr) to indigenous affairs (Noel Pearson); from anti-terror laws (Richard Flanagan again) to marine conservationism (Tim Winton).
In her excellent book, Literary Activists: Writer-intellectuals and Australian public life, the academic Brigid Rooney argues that the first decade of the 21st Century has seen an upsurge in literary activism, despite claims to the contrary. "Australian literary writers have been furiously engaged in activism and debate," she writes. "Indeed this period has seen the efflorescence of Australian literary activism."
If the Howard years brought greater activism, the Rudd years were supposed to deliver greater acceptance - certainly of public intellectuals on the left or centre-left. Remember, the new prime minister gathered a thousand of the country's finest brains for the 2020 Summit last year, and asked them to think big.
Yet with this huge intellectual blood-bank at his disposal, Rudd made only a few withdrawals. Of the 962 separate ideas to emerge from two-days of summitry, only nine were minted into policy.
There is an argument that Australians favour the pragmatic over the abstract, the practical over anything that whiffs of pretentiousness. This might have undercut the influence of some public intellectuals.
In his newly-published book, the Liberal party politician, Tony Abbott writes: "Conservatism prefers facts to theory; practical demonstration to metaphysical abstraction; what works to what's in the mind's eye. To a conservative, intuition is as important as reasoning; instinct as important as intellect." Arguably, you could replace the words "Conversatism" and "conservative" with "Australia" and "Australian" this passage would still ring true. Certainly, Kevin Rudd often seems to prefer the programmatic over the philosophical. His phrase of the month, uttered at a press conference in Berlin, was "detailed programmatic specificity" - a formulation which apparently left German translators flummoxed.
Now back to the cricket...
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