Category: Language

The right-wing blur

~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

For many commentators, the political right is just a blur. The various labels – conservative, neoliberal, neoconservative, New Right, economic rationalist – are thrown around according to fashion as much as meaning. Six years ago (pdf) I wrote an article on how ‘New Right’ was largely squeezed out by ‘economic rationalism’, which in turn was being challenged by ‘neoliberalism’, now the favourite. Despite the irrelevance of ‘neoconservatism’ to Australian politics, it is frequently used here as if it had some descriptive power. In the blogosphere we debate posts on what classical liberalism and conservatism have in common, but journalists don’t even know that there is a difference.

I was reminded of this twice over the last few days, first in this George Megalogenis piece and again when I read Monday’s Crikey. According to the radical leftist Jeff Sparrow,

Remember Katherine Betts’ The Great Divide? Paul Sheehan’s Among the Barbarians? Michael Thompson’s Labor Without Class? Mark Latham’s From the Suburbs? The decades worth of columns in The Australian; the reports churning out from the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies?

The narrative was always the same. A chasm separated ordinary, decent Howard-voting Australians from an arrogant tertiary-educated, intellectual elite: a clutch of sneering know-it-alls who wanted to overrun the country with immigrants, make everyone guilty about Aborigines and brainwash the youth with Parisian post-modernist mumbo-jumbo.

Certainly there is a populist conservative strain in right-of-centre Australia. But this is not universal. Continue reading “The right-wing blur” →

Seeking closure after decades?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

“I would say to all members of the family of the crew of HMAS Sydney, our Government sends our condolences for the loss of these brave young men.

“This is a day … which begins a process of closure for many families of the crew of the Sydney. [emphasis added]

– Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on the discovery of the wreckage of HMAS Sydney, which sank in November 1941, with the loss of 645 lives.

Grief can, of course, last for a lifetime. On my occasional strolls through cemeteries (the Melbourne General Cemetery is just up the road, with the graves of several of my 19th century ancestors and relatives) I find the decades-old graves with fresh flowers sad but touching.

But beginning a process of grieving sixty-six years after death? Many people have criticised the spread of the ‘therapy culture’ into ordinary language. The idea that we cannot recover from the death of someone we love until their body or grave is found seems unsound to me. Fortunately those bereaved by the loss of HMAS Sydney were from a (seemingly) more resilient era.

It is one of the paradoxes of the time that though there is less objective cause for the extremes of ill-being than there was in the 1940s, more people are reporting such ill-being. There is a debate about whether or not the statistical trends record real changes or just different descriptions of ordinary feelings.

But surely promoting the idea that grief can’t be put into the background until a body is found can only be bad for well-being, postponing the adjustment to loss that most people feel as time passes? We should not encourage people to spend 70 years with disabling grief, on the idea that bodies or graves are necessary for ‘closure’.

Do conservatives dislike women’s shoes?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 50 Comments

A common trope for the conservative sophist is to claim that all the miseries of modern life were absent in the Edenic golden past, and therefore a return to living in the manner of our ancestors (eg. women barefoot and pregnant),…[emphasis added]

– LP blogger Mercurius

The claim that conservatives want to keep women ‘barefoot and pregnant’ is a feminist-leftist cliche, but it is a rather puzzling charge. The pregnant part I understand; that it is women’s role to have and raise kids is a reasonable caricature of conservative views. But barefoot? Despite having spent much time in my 20s reading conservatives, I recall no passages on the dangerous properties of women’s footwear. (Indeed, it was the feminists themselves who turned women’s shoes into something of a political issue, and in my student politics days it was lefties who used to wander around barefoot.)

Nor do conservatives typically idealise an ‘Edenic golden age’ before the ‘miseries of modern life’. According to another leftist cliche, they want to take us back to the 1950s, which is well into the period of ‘modern life’. (And indeed it is leftists who who get taken in by ‘noble savage’ stories about an idyllic life before the corrupting materialism of modern life, and condemn conservatives for their lack of sympathy for traditional Aboriginal life, in which women really were barefoot.)

My many books of word and phrase origins fail to help explain ‘barefoot and pregnant’, but Wikipedia suggests that:
Continue reading “Do conservatives dislike women’s shoes?” →

How long will ‘economic conservatism’ last?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 32 Comments

Kevin Rudd may be reluctant to call Labor left-wing, but he’s happy to cloak himself in conservatism. It started last year when he invoked – albeit inaccurately – British conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott in his criticism of market forces. After becoming leader, he endorsed – albeit inaccurately again – Australia’s most successful conservative leader, Robert Menzies, as preferable to Howard.

And more recently Rudd has been calling himself an ‘economic conservative’, which Josh Gordon wrote about in The Age on Saturday. As Gordon says, not so long ago this would have been a negative term, but such is the general agreement that has built up around the main component parts of ‘economic conservatism’ – Reserve Bank independence and a balanced if not surplus Budget – that ‘conservatism’ on these matters is uncontroversial.

Even Labor’ s once-true believers are getting in on the consensus. If Howard being cheered by CFMEU members was the most bizarre aspect of the 2004 campaign, for me the most bizarre aspect of the 2007 campaign was the enthusiastic applause from the party faithful at Labor’s launch when Rudd said:
Continue reading “How long will ‘economic conservatism’ last?” →

The not-always-reliable Oxford Companion to Australian Politics

~ Andrew Norton ~ 25 Comments

For the last few days, I have been dipping into The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics, edited by Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts. It contains over 400 entries on a wide range of Australian political topics. Many of the contributors are good choices: Ian Hancock on the Liberal Party, Murray Goot on public opinion, Galligan himself on federalism, Peter Coleman on political cartoons, Ian Marsh on think-tanks, and Judy Brett on political culture, just to name a few.

But the trouble is that Galligan and Roberts have also chosen as contributors people who are as much activists as academics on their Companion subject. A hardline lesbian feminist like Sheila Jeffreys is not the kind of person you’d ask to give a even-handed account of pornography or prostitution. But at least Jeffreys can tell the difference between fact and opinion, which is more than you can say for some other authors.

Take the ANU’s museum-piece Marxist, Rick Kuhn, who is given the entry for ‘class’. While unlike Clive Hamilton he probably isn’t ignorant of the sociological research on class in Australia, he does ignore it in favour of a straight Marxist account, right down to implicitly predicting revolution:

Continue reading “The not-always-reliable Oxford Companion to Australian Politics” →

How rude is ‘bullshit’ in the Tony Abbott sense?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 29 Comments

Back in July, I defended the use of the term ‘bullshitting’ in the Harry Frankfurt sense, as connotating that the speaker is indifferent to whether or not he or she is saying is true or meaningful. When politicians have to parrot the party line or offer insincere pleasantries at a function they are ‘bullshitting’.

But how about this from Tony Abbott yesterday:

At the conclusion [of the National Press Club debate], as they shook hands for the cameras, Ms Roxon said: “You can’t even get here on time.”

Mr Abbott replied: “It certainly wasn’t intentional.”

Ms Roxon: “You can control these things, mate. I’m sure had you wanted to, you could.”

Mr Abbott: “That’s bullshit. You’re being deliberately unpleasant. I suppose you can’t help yourself, can you?”

Ms Roxon: “I can’t help myself and you’ve well and truly earned it today.”

That I think is ‘bullshit’ in the more conventional usage. It’s an accusation of talking nonsense with connotations of unpleasant bodily discharges to make it more offensive.
Continue reading “How rude is ‘bullshit’ in the Tony Abbott sense?” →

The academic ‘we’

~ Andrew Norton ~ 15 Comments

Once there used to be a royal ‘we’ – the word ‘we’ used to mean ‘I’, as in Queen Victoria’s ‘we are not amused’. These days royals almost never say ‘we’ unless they mean ‘we’. The current British monarch doesn’t even always use ‘we’ when she could. In a phrase association game, the answer to ‘my husband and I’ is ‘Queen Elizabeth II’.

Yet there is one place in which people still say ‘we’ when they mean ‘I’, and that is academia. Only a couple of weeks ago I had to remove the academic ‘we’ from a sole-author article to be published in Policy. At his blog, Andrew Leigh labels this usage ‘pretentious’. Insofar as the academic we is an implicit reference back to the royal we, he is right. But I am not sure that is what academics are consciously doing when they write ‘we’ instead of ‘I’.

Perhaps it reflects the collegial tradition within academia. As Damien Eldridge (himself an academic) writes in Andrew L’s comments:

Continue reading “The academic ‘we’” →

Friendship and Facebook

~ Andrew Norton ~ 86 Comments

I’ve read a bit about the philosophy of friendship over the years, but none of it is much use when encountering Facebook for the first time. Thinking myself too middle-aged for what I thought to be a youth site I hadn’t even looked at it until last week, when Jacques Chester asked me to link to a Liberty and Society group and I decided (in my middle-aged caution) to check before I linked. But I had to join first, and every day since I have received emails from Facebook telling me that person X, Y or Z has added me as a ‘friend’ and wanting to confirm that we are in fact ‘friends’.

In most cases, it’s been pretty easy to ‘confirm’ these people as friends. But can I be a ‘friend’ of someone whose name and face I don’t recognise? (from the friends we have in common I presume we must have met, but I don’t remember it). Or someone whose name and face I do recognise but I haven’t seen them, been in touch with them, or even thought of them for years? On the other hand, not confirming someone as a ‘friend’ could be seen as rude. Just because I am not a friend doesn’t mean I want to make an enemy.
Continue reading “Friendship and Facebook” →

What is ‘bullshitting’ in the Harry Frankfurt sense?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

David Rubie thinks I breached by own comments policy in saying:

Most critics of ‘neoliberalism’ are bullshitters in the Harry Frankfurt sense; ie not so much liars as people who just don’t care whether what they say is correct or not.

This was a reference to Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s essay ‘On Bullshit’, which became a surprise bestseller a couple of years ago when Princeton University Press put it between hardcovers.

The term ‘bullshit’ is, in most contexts, mildly vulgar, but I think Frankfurt was right to use it because it picks up a shade of meaning lacking in some of the similar words we could use to describe the statements of people saying or writing untrue things. The Wikipedia entry gives its origins as:

“Bull”, meaning nonsense, dates from the 17th century (Concise Oxford Dictionary), whereas the term “bullshit” is popularly considered to have been first used in 1915, in American slang, and to have come into popular usage only during World War II. The word “bull” itself may have derived from the Old French boul meaning “fraud, deceit” (Oxford English Dictionary). The term “bullshit” is a near synonym.

The ‘bull’ is more important than the ‘shit’, because ‘nonsense’ is the idea being picked up in using the word ‘bull’ and carried across to ‘bullshit’. When we say someone is ‘bullshitting’ we might mean that they are telling lies, but it is more likely that we are saying that they are talking nonsense, which doesn’t require them to be consciously telling untruths.
Continue reading “What is ‘bullshitting’ in the Harry Frankfurt sense?” →

A rushed report

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

The Premier even thanked the media, saying he respected the role journalists play. Said state rounds ere among [the] most professional in country. (emphasis added)

But even the most professional reporters can include a typo and miss a word when breaking a big story, the surprise resignation of Victorian Premier Steve Bracks. From The Age online, 10.54am.