The link below is to a book review of ‘Conscience,’ by Andy Naselli & J. D. Crowley.
For more visit:
https://www.9marks.org/review/book-review-conscience-by-andy-naselli-j-d-crowley/
Category Archives: Not My Review
Not My Review: The Diabolic (Book 1) – The Diabolic, by S. J. Kincaid
Donald Horne’s ‘lucky country’ and the decline of the public intellectual
Shutterstock.com
Frank Bongiorno, Australian National University
Steve Irwin and Donald Horne died a year apart, during the twilight of the Howard era. The government offered Irwin’s family a state funeral in 2006. It had not done the same for Horne, although he was famous for his 1964 book The Lucky Country and had been one of the country’s leading journalists, editors and intellectuals for half a century.
That may well tell us something about the value we attach to people who wrestle with ideas rather than crocodiles. It might also say something about a conservative government’s attitude to a renegade, or about the indifference or hostility of the wider political class to independent public intellectuals.
I read The Lucky Country for the first time as an undergraduate in 1990 and didn’t find it all that exciting. I can see now that the failing was that of my 21-year-old self rather than Horne’s. I re-read the book about four years ago and was struck that time by the raw power of Horne’s vision of Australia as a lucky country whose people were “adaptable” but whose elites were mainly “second-rate”.
Goodreads
Horne’s message was that while Australia had been lucky, he was doubtful whether it deserved its luck and was worried that, unless it lifted its game, its good run would not last. But the purpose of Horne’s use of the phrase “the lucky country” is usually forgotten. It is commonly misunderstood as laudatory.
A new collection of Horne’s selected writings, edited by his son Nick, includes selections from The Lucky Country’s beginning and end. Their force, intelligence and insight had quite an impact on me yet again and, when seen in the context of a larger body of his writings, show how Horne refined his views over the years.
Progressive, but not romantic
The selection begins with an essay by a former student, University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis, who reminds us that Horne was very much a man of the right early in his career, making his name as a staunchly anti-communist servant of Frank Packer’s media empire.
Horne edited two significant quality publications of that era: The Observer, in the late 1950s, and then the conservative, racist and decrepit Sydney Bulletin after Packer acquired it in 1960. The new collection contains an account, written late in his life, of Horne’s attemp to reform The Bulletin. To the objection that he should not remove the banner that it had carried “from time immemorial” – “Australia for the white man” – Horne replied that it not always been the magazine’s slogan. Previously, it was “Australia for the white man and China for the chow”.
Although he never held public office, Horne was great at clearing away political rubbish of this kind, turning The Bulletin into one of the country’s liveliest and most influential publications. He was increasingly in tune with the modernising impulse in Australian life of the 1960s and ’70s. Modernising, but not revolutionary or romantic, Horne’s progressive views included anti-censorship, anti-White Australia and engagement with Asia.
The Lucky Country was Horne’s first book and, although he would write many fine and wise things in the years ahead, he never again managed that kind of magic. His fiction was not a great success, his history and biography competent and even lively without achieving for him a place in the front rank. But his writings on culture and society, and his more introspective (but not solipsistic) late and posthumous work, remain provocative.
Probably the biggest surprise of The Lucky Country was Horne’s support for the distinctly unfashionable republican movement, a cause to which he devoted much energy and thought in the second half of his life. The dismissal of Gough Whitlam as prime minister in 1975 angered Horne greatly. This was not so much because he was an admirer of Whitlam and all his works – he was not – but because the dismissal suggested that the democratic effort to change Australia had been defeated. The dismissal sparked Horne’s Death of the Lucky Country.
That attitude lost Horne some of his old friends on the right, but he was already making new ones who shared many of his catholic interests and passions. This new edition of selected writings allows us to gain a sense of the range of those concerns, which extended across politics, business and the economy to history, psychology, museums, tourism, everyday life, literature, the arts and much else. In the absence of a biography of Horne – surely something that will happen in due course – this collection traces the main contours of his life through his own writings, including chapters from his much-admired autobiography.
Who will be the next Donald Horne?
In many ways, Horne was an Australian pioneer in the field that eventually came to be called cultural studies. As an academic, he found a home in political science, but he was never the captive of any discipline. The role of roving commentator continued to appeal. Horne did not much like scholarly paraphernalia such as footnotes, bemoaning:
the “universitisation” of intellectual life … an arid division of labour increasingly related to the administrative manipulation of universities into specialist disciplines with career paths measured in citations.
But there were surely greater dangers to the public intellectual looming in the shadows, dangers hinted at in the reaction to Horne’s republicanism. The public culture that had allowed Horne to exercise such influence was already in decay by the time of his death in 2005.
It is not that there are no opportunities today for the kind of discussion Horne valued; there are probably more than ever, in part thanks to social media. It is rather that these occasions are mainly for preaching to the converted.
In Horne’s prime as a writer, that last decade of the post-war golden era between the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, a renaissance in the local media and publishing industries gave intellectuals with something to say, and the ability to say it well, brief access to a mass market. A central role of the public intellectual, as Horne conceived it, was to change the minds of this audience. Twitter and Facebook, however, are not places where people are likely to be persuaded to alter their thinking but rather to gain confirmation for what one already believes.
Australia has its public intellectuals, but it is hard to think of any who quite manage Horne’s range, insight or authority. There may in fact be good reasons for the more uncertain place of the public intellectual in Australia today, beside the trend towards specialisation and the impact of a more fragmented public culture.
Being white, Anglo and male, Horne would probably not be threatened with rape, or trolled out of the country – as appears to have happened to Yassmin Abdel-Magied. Ours is now hardly the kind of public sphere to encourage the adventurous expression of new ideas. The purpose of intimidation is to warn anyone who imagines that they might have something new and bold to contribute that they can run, but they can’t hide. Even an intellectual terrier such as Horne would have found the going hard.
Donald Horne: Selected Writings (ed. Nick Horne) is published by La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc.
Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Not My Review: The Disappearances, by Emily Bain Murphy
Not My Review: The Dragon’s Blade (Book 1) – The Reborn King, by Michael R. Miller
Not My Review: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1793)
The link below is to a book review of ‘The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.’
For more visit:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/10/autobiography-benjamin-franklin-100-best-nonfiction-books
Not My Review: How Does Sanctification Work? by David Powlison
The link below is to a book review of ‘How Does Sanctification Work?’ by David Powlison.
For more visit:
https://www.9marks.org/review/book-review-how-does-sanctification-work-by-david-powlison/
Book review: The Death of Expertise
shutterstock
Rod Lamberts, Australian National University
I have to start this review with a confession: I wanted to like this book from the moment I read the title. And I did. Tom Nichols’ The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters is a motivating – if at times slightly depressing – read.
In the author’s words, his goal is to examine:
… the relationship between experts and citizens in a democracy, why that relationship is collapsing, and what all of us, citizens and experts, might do about it.
This resonates strongly with what I see playing out around the world almost every day – from the appalling state of energy politics in Australia, to the frankly bizarre condition of public debate on just about anything in the US and the UK.
Nichols’ focus is on the US, but the parallels with similar nations are myriad. He expresses a deep concern that “the average American” has base knowledge so low it has crashed through the floor of “uninformed”, passed “misinformed” on the way down, and is now plummeting to “aggressively wrong”. And this is playing out against a backdrop in which people don’t just believe “dumb things”, but actively resist any new information that might threaten these beliefs.
He doesn’t claim this situation is new, per se – just that it seems to be accelerating, and proliferating, at eye-watering speed.
Intimately entwined with this, Nichols mourns the decay of our ability to have constructive, positive public debate. He reminds us that we are increasingly in a world where disagreement is seen as a personal insult. A world where argument means conflict rather than debate, and ad hominem is the rule rather than the exception.
Again, this is not necessarily a new issue – but it is certainly a growing one.
Oxford University Press
The book covers a broad and interconnected range of topics related to its key subject matter. It considers the contrast between experts and citizens, and highlights how the antagonism between these roles has been both caused and exacerbated by the exhausting and often insult-laden nature of what passes for public conversations.
Nichols also reflects on changes in the mediating influence of journalism on the relationship between experts and “citizens”. He reminds us of the ubiquity of Google and its role in reinforcing the conflation of information, knowledge and experience.
His chapter on the contribution of higher education to the ailing relationship between experts and citizens particularly appeals to me as an academic. Two of his points here exemplify academia’s complicity in diminishing this relationship.
Nichols outlines his concern about the movement to treat students as clients, and the consequent over-reliance on the efficacy and relevance of student assessment of their professors. While not against “limited assessment”, he believes:
Evaluating teachers creates a habit of mind in which the layperson becomes accustomed to judging the expert, despite being in an obvious position of having inferior knowledge of the subject material.
Nichols also asserts this student-as-customer approach to universities is accompanied by an implicit, and also explicit, nurturing of the idea that:
Emotion is an unassailable defence against expertise, a moat of anger and resentment in which reason and knowledge quickly drown. And when students learn that emotion trumps everything else, it is a lesson they will take with them for the rest of their lives.
The pervasive attacks on experts as “elitists” in US public discourse receive little sympathy in this book (nor should these). Nichols sees these assaults as entrenched not so much in ignorance, more as being rooted in:
… unfounded arrogance, the outrage of an increasingly narcissistic culture that cannot endure even the slightest hint of inequality of any kind.
Linked to this, he sees a confusion in the minds of many between basic notions of democracy in general, and the relationship between expertise and democracy in particular.
Democracy is, Nichols reminds us, “a condition of political equality”: one person, one vote, all of us equal in the eyes of the law. But in the US at least, he feels people:
… now think of democracy as a state of actual equality, in which every opinion is a good as any other on almost any subject under the sun. Feelings are more important than facts: if people think vaccines are harmful … then it is “undemocratic” and “elitist” to contradict them.
The danger, as he puts it, is that a temptation exists in democratic societies to become caught up in “resentful insistence on equality”, which can turn into “oppressive ignorance” if left unchecked. I find it hard to argue with him.
Nichols acknowledges that his arguments expose him to the very real danger of looking like yet another pontificating academic, bemoaning the dumbing down of society. It’s a practice common among many in academia, and one that is often code for our real complaint: that people won’t just respect our authority.
There are certainly places where a superficial reader would be tempted to accuse him of this. But to them I suggest taking more time to consider more closely the contexts in which he presents his arguments.
This book does not simply point the finger at “society” or “citizens”: there is plenty of critique of, and advice for, experts. Among many suggestions, Nichols offers four explicit recommendations.
-
The first is that experts should strive to be more humble.
-
Second, be ecumenical – and by this Nichols means experts should vary their information sources, especially where politics is concerned, and not fall into the same echo chamber that many others inhabit.
-
Three, be less cynical. Here he counsels against assuming people are intentionally lying, misleading or wilfully trying to cause harm with assertions and claims that clearly go against solid evidence.
-
Finally, he cautions us all to be more discriminating – to check sources scrupulously for veracity and for political motivations.
In essence, this last point admonishes experts to mindfully counteract the potent lure of confirmation bias that plagues us all.
It would be very easy for critics to cherry-pick elements of this book and present them out of context, to see Nichols as motivated by a desire to feather his own nest and reinforce his professional standing: in short, to accuse him of being an elitist. Sadly, this would be a prime example of exactly what he is decrying.
To these people, I say: read the whole book first. If it makes you uncomfortable, or even angry, consider why.
Have a conversation about it and formulate a coherent argument to refute the positions with which you disagree. Try to resist the urge to dismiss it out of hand or attack the author himself.
I fear, though, that as is common with a treatise like this, the people who might most benefit are the least likely to read it. And if they do, they will take umbrage at the minutiae, and then dismiss or attack it.
Unfortunately we haven’t worked how to change that. But to those so inclined, reading this book should have you nodding along, comforted at least that you are not alone in your concern that the role of expertise is in peril.
Rod Lamberts, Deputy Director, Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Not My Review: The Expanse (Book 1) – Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey
Not My Review: Sinai and the Saints – Reading Old Covenant Laws for the New Covenant Community, by James M. Todd III
The link below is to a book review of ‘Sinai and the Saints – Reading Old Covenant Laws for the New Covenant Community,’ by James M. Todd III.
For more visit:
https://www.9marks.org/article/book-review-sinai-and-the-saints-by-james-m-todd-iii/
At the BookShelf 
You must be logged in to post a comment.