Clinging to the wreckage

Some things stick in the mind, like when I heard John Howard, then Prime Minister, talk about the "national interest". I am not sure what the context was but suspect it was concerned with the boat people.

It occurred to me at the time that a new thing had occurred, that the national interest was now the basis of all policy. What more do you need? Now, of course, it is a common phrase and competes with the phrase "national security", that other vacuous entity that excuses anything.

To quote Robert Jenson; "When communal vision of transcendent destiny fails, temporal values become demonic". This is when all we have to say to justify any action at all is to say that it is in the national interest or it pertains to national security. China has learnt the language and uses it against us.

What happens to a people when this short circuit argument runs the country? We become a zombie nation, or rather an inanimate machine that grinds along following its programming. The machine grinds on despite cries of injustice or calls for compassion and it smashes everything in its path. And then, because we love our country and are patriots of the lukewarm, Peter Allen sort, we praise ourselves and declare that we are truly a great country, indeed the envy of the world. Such an attitude mistakes Donald Horne's title "The Lucky Country" as a statement of blessedness rather than the irony intended; that our luck has not been earned.

If we applied this sense of meaning to an individual, we would be appalled. We would describe a complete narcissist who cares for nothing but his or her own interests and safety no matter what the cost for others. Is a country like a person? We certainly talk historically as if countries have desires, aims, various personal characteristics. That is an abstraction, of course, but it is commonly accepted that countries act in the world in certain ways that we may describe in moral terms as we would describe the actions of a person. We can talk about, for example, Germany making a full acknowledgment of its role in WWII and Japan being unwilling to do so. We can talk about the ruination of Russia and China during their communist period and their failure to join the nations in truth telling. Britain behaved like a greedy child in the colonial era, Australia has been blind to the existence of its indigenous peoples. Countries are judged by their actions and these judgments are judgments that can be made of individual human beings.

When there exists in our mind nothing other than the immediate, we become enslaved to the immediate, to the things that are at hand. That is the limits of our horizon. Thus, education is defined as an exercise in job preparedness, politics is all about the economy (jobs and growth). We admire pragmatism because it undercuts ideology, that troublesome child of political life. But pragmatism is not ideology free. There is no such thing as neutral ground, actions are chosen for many reasons, not least being how they will play politically. Pragmatism is just another name for "the ends justify the means". We want to stop the boats, so we lock up people who have come by boat to act as scarecrows placed on our shores as a warning. In darker times they would be heads on spikes.

The American founding fathers that landed at Plymouth arrived there because they could not see the Reformation being completed while James I was king and sought a new land that would become the epicentre of Christ's return and the establishment of the kingdom of God. The story of how that all went wrong involved deficiencies in Puritan theology mixed with bad Enlightenment philosophy (the pursuit of happiness) and resulted in American civil religion that saw the merging of God and the Stars and Stripes. Nevertheless, America began with a transcendent vision of its future, no less than the coming of the kingdom to which all nations will look; a city on a hill. American exceptionalism has deep roots! The failure of the American experiment is obvious now in economic inequality, political partisanship and general greed that leaves a worrying underside to American life. The kingdom of God has become the kingdom of mammon.

Australia escaped such nonsense. It inherited no high-flown theological base and has been from the start a nation centred on the present seculum with little looking to a future that was not the price of wool and wheat. Perhaps this is the origin of Australian larrikinism, as shown by the lack of respect diggers showed their commanding officers. A "she'll be right" attitude permeates the national psyche. There is something attractive in this, the willingness to "take the piss" and not take authority too seriously. It marks us off from the more regimented nations, the Teutonic seriousness about small things, the English respect for "form" and the Asian obsession with "face". We do belong to the new world and this underlies our affection with America.

This is the lighter side of the Australian character. Underneath this there often lies, in individuals, a terrible vacancy that may be described as nihilism. We are not alone in this as the period of late modernity deepens in its characteristics. We find it in American life despite its hype-religiosity. David Jenson again:

The post-Vietnam generation contains persons barely aware even of their personal pasts. With no hopes at all, not even able to grasp what a hope would be, they are human molecules moving at random in moral space, giving no more than pragmatic allegiance to any community whatever. In this they but mimic their parents, in whom nihilism was concealed only by the last tatters of the success ethic.

While Australia has not plumbed the depths of political chaos that America has under Trump, the seeds lie close to hand. Jenson may as well be describing almost any Western country including our own. We are as blinded by the image of mammon as any. The GFC was precipitated by individual and corporate greed, our commission into the banking industry reveal similar moral failings but on a smaller scale. We have experienced the big miners transferring profits overseas in order to avoid the full payment tax in Australia and individuals scurrying to the decreasing opportunities to evade their tax bills.

There is no doubt that Australia represents a sweet spot among the nations. It has, by and large, avoided the kind of religiosity that has crippled American Christianity and the hard patriotism that melted blood, soil and fatherland into the substrate of fascism and that dreadful amalgam of the British Empire of God King and Country. We owe this to an accident of circumstance in that we owe our first founding to a brutal social system in England in the 18C in which many of the lower classes had to steal simply to survive and were caught up by the law and crowded the jails. Transportation to the colonies was a pragmatic arrangement that showed that English Christianity was an instrument of the aristocracy as if the Beatitudes did not exist. This is why Australia, in general, was saved from the high-flown religiosity as was seen in the New England Puritans of Massachusetts and their amalgam of those ideas with the destiny of the nation. We have, by historical accident (Horn's luck) escaped the grip of inadequate religious formulations and the hard patriotism that leads to all kind of ills.

However, our freedom, one might say our vacuity, comes at a price and that price is paid out in national superficiality and unquestioned hedonism. It is significant that none of our foundational universities had a place for the study of theology, even though the English models of Oxford and Cambridge were, from their inception, places where this was studied, in their earlier history, exclusively. The role of Oxbridge was for a long time to produced educated priests for the Church of England and in later centuries a first in classics and humanities from Oxbridge opened doors to a whole array of top-level jobs in government and education. In this light the present federal government's attempt to cripple the Humanities through higher fees seem short sighted and philistine. The exclusion of theology as a university subject has nothing to do with the Constitutional ban on an established religion or discrimination according to religion.

While Australia has suffered the decline of the Churches with other Western countries, it appears to be more drastic here because of the fragile base of theological education that is not well supported in the newer universities. The Roman Catholic church has also seen huge decline in congregations but is supporting theological education through campuses of Notre Dame and the Australian Catholic University. It will soon be very difficult to train clergy in Australia and this means that Christianity is destined to resort to a kind of folk religion which is the worst of all outcomes. Witness the support of Trump among white evangelicals.

I might remind readers that theology is not about private religion but about a tradition of rational thinking about what it means to be human that has lain at the base of our civilization for two thousand years. Its absence will and is allowing the uncritical return to "religions" of a different kind, hedonism and mammon being the most common. The accumulative aspect of capitalism threatens to divide society between the rich and the poor and rob us of any understanding of community. There will not be enough of the old morality to hold us in and we will continue down the path of selfish aggrandisement and the search of even higher and luxurious lifestyles.

Horn observed that "Australia does not have a mind. Intellectual life exists but it is still fugitive. Emergent and uncomfortable, it has no established relation to practical life." I was shocked to see a woman on television complaining about the suspension of the football because "that is all we have". If you are male, then you will not get far in conversation with other males if you do not take an interest or support a team in the footy. I am sure other Western countries are similar. It is not that sport is bad, but that it seems to be a place holder for any life of the spirit or the mind. It has become the thing that fills the void. It provides a community of sorts and at least shallow identity, but I think that we rely on it overmuch.

We have come a long way since Donald Horne wrote his Jeremiad against his home country. We do have a thriving arts community and many dedicated readers and theatre goers and the ABC, despite the cuts from the philistines that are so focused on the economy that they do not see that it is the spirit that counts. However, like most Western countries we do not know what we are for.

The default national anthem played endlessly on the ABC, "We are Australian" proclaims that "We share a dream and sing with once voice: I am, you are, we are Australian". What is the dream that we share? Again, no temporal answer will suffice, will keep out temporal values from becoming demonic. There is only one answer to the question of personal and national purpose, and it sounds impossible to the majority in our country, it is to glorify God. What else can be said?