Public ideas
Values and identity
Two posts raise issues about Australian values and identity. Should we try to define them, or should we leave them implicit and evolving?
Australian values
Bernard O’Kane ponders what members of the Coalition parties have in mind when they talk about “a return to Australian values”. To what period are they suggesting we return? Pre-1788? – unlikely in view of their stance on the Voice. The rule of the Rum Corps? – a possibility in view of the Coalition’s record of crony capitalism.
O’Kane, writing in Open Forum, is fairly sure they are referring to what is known as the postwar era after 1945 when our immigration program, as a proportion of our population, was at rates much higher than they are today. It is also notable that around 1945 Australia reached a peak of Anglo monoethnicity before all those Mediterranean and Slavic people came in. But at least they were “white” and “Christian”.
In this regard he notes Tony Abbott’s claim that “our character is essentially Anglo-Celtic and Judeo-Christian”. It’s amazing that someone who had the benefit of a Jesuit education at high school and a period in a seminary studying theology would use a such a sloppy term as “Judeo-Christian”.
In his post A return to Australian values? O’Kane doesn’t try to lay down any version of Australian values. He looks at how the norms guiding our public behaviour have changed over time, and concludes:
It is clear our values are in a state of flux and there are many variables influencing this state. It is wrong and very likely highly divisive to suggest that our immediate post war society has a predominant right over what we might evolve to be sometime in the future.
Identity
If Australian values are in a state of flux, how about the Australian identity? A reader sent this link to an article in the London Review of Books by Adam Schatz, Another country – with recognition of James Baldwin’s use of the same title.
His theme is the search for identity that has been of concern for American intellectuals ever since 1776. It’s a painful search, because it has to acknowledge the morality that has nurtured theft from the land’s original owners, slavery, a civil war, aggressive foreign ventures, and now the demolition of enlightenment values and institutions by the Trump regime.
Besides his London Review of Books article, he has an 80-minute YouTube presentation on the same theme.
Australians observing the USA cannot help noticing how this search for identity has been a recurring theme in that country – from the Gettysburg Address to Easy Rider.
We share many of America’s original sins, particularly in relation to the land’s original owners. But we have tended to avoid that search, even when we were prompted to embark on it by the Uluru Statement.