POLITICAL BIAS IN THE ARTS (Australia’s other Red Centre)

GILES AUTY, Quadrant Magazine March 2001

Contemporary Australia presents itself to the world as a paradise for surfers, swimmers and sportspeople and as an eventual economic Eden to those who flee harsh political climates to try to come here from elsewhere. But what sort of intellectual climate is on offer here, not just to visitors and immigrants but also to born and bred Australians?

The first point that needs to be made on this subject is rather an odd one. A significant proportion of recent and longer-term immigrants to Australia have come from countries where left-wing, totalitarian regimes are or were in the ascendant: the old Soviet Union, communist Eastern Europe, Vietnam and China. What would have been unknown to all these folk, as their leaking freighters or other, more legal means of transport brought them closer to Australia's shores, is that at the heart of their chosen destination's culture, academics were hard at work trying to recreate Australia to resemble those very regimes the immigrants were so desperate to flee.

Perhaps the first thing we should recognise about intellectual life in Australia is that a millstone of hypocrisy and seemingly invincible blindness lies like a dead weight at its centre. Picture, if you will, a Marxist professor of cultural studies from Melbourne, Monash or elsewhere as he drives his massive, off-roader to his weekender on the Mornington Peninsula (he new vines were planted last year). What does he know or care about the lives of hundreds of millions of present and past inhabitants of Romania, East Germany, Ukraine, North Korea, Cambodia or all those other past or present communist paradises?

Of course, our professor would have all his qualifications and excuses at the ready: Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism and so on were not real Marxism but aberrant variations. He, personally, is a neo-Marxist, of course (otherwise known as "postmodernist") and thus an infallible interpreter -to suit contemporary Australian conditions- of the ideas of a German who died in exile roughly 120 years ago.

All postmodernist initiatives are Marxist in origin and, can be recognised by their need to find a supposedly oppressed minority as their mainspring -even when the "oppressed" "minority" turns out to be a statistical majority. Ironically, when postmodernist courses in women's studies and gay, lesbian and queer studies were set up in Australian universities, the only group to remain unrepresented -as an object for cultural scrutiny, that is -became heterosexual men. As a percentage of the total population, heterosexual men can now certainly claim minority status; although whether we are yet oppressed enough to become fit objects for study may be debatable.

Will we live to see a chair in heterosexual men's studies created at an Australian university? A rather more urgent creation might be a course in which future Aboriginal leaders and activists and would-be sociological writers for Australian broadsheet newspapers study the history of the world outside Australia. The recent histories of the unfortunate countries I mentioned above would form the core of the curriculum. Students of the course might be encouraged in the refreshing view that Australia is not a uniquely terrible country, after all.

Sadly this is not an impression one would get from listening to many of Australia's current crop of cultural and social commentators. Where have these people been and what have they seen and read that leads them to such strangely distorted judgments? No one who has traveled widely, especially in former or current communist countries, can possibly believe that contemporary Australia is a hellhole of exploitation, inequality and oppressive government, or that this country's history should be an object only of contrition and shame.

Indeed, when comparison is made with the formative histories of almost any other country or sometime colony, Australia tends to emerge as a beacon of good sense, good administration and goodwill -even if the last may some times have seemed misguided. The kind of history taught to young Australians today at tertiary, secondary and

even primary levels is often a gross and deliberate misrepresentation of what truly occurred. Postmodern historians claim there is no such thing as an objective view of history. Habitual liars are similarly unable to accept that anyone, anywhere is ever telling the truth.

Communist regimes have been notorious for rewriting their own histories, and one needs look no further than the Marxist origins of the postmodernist approach to the

teaching of history in Australia to see the same influences at work. Here is history which springs largely from political theory and in which facts need more than an occasional massage to fit the theoretical slots created for them.

Barry Maley, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, had this to say about the influence of postmodernism in society in the December 2000 issue of the New Zealand Education Development Foundation publication, Cuttingedge:

Beyond the philosophical idealism and relativism of postmodernism its central tenets critique western civilisation from a structuralist and cultural perspective that emphasises command of the cultural and institutions (Gramsci et al), and the concealment of "bourgeois power" in those institutions and the ideology which justifies them (Foucault et al).

The leading ideas emerging from this criticism are that western civilisation is inherently capitalist, exploitative and oppressive of minorities; destructive of the environment; racist, sexist and patriarchal, Eurocentric and monocultural; and that the character and power of its institutions are maintained by forms of discourse, the analysis of which (by deconstruction) reveals its true and repugnant nature.

Accordingly, such Western institutions as private property rights, private enterprise and competitive markets, the rule of law, constitutionalism, free speech, the family, education, science, religion, voluntary associations and private charity, art and literature, and an ideology of individualism-all of which sustain and reproduce western civilisation and which disperse power-must be destroyed or radically transformed and the "discourse" captured in order to be liberated.

From the 1970s to the present, this view of western civilisation and its Australian variant has dominated teaching in all but the science-based faculties of our universities and colleges. Many of the graduates of these faculties, trained under such teachers, now staff our schools, universities, law schools, public and private bureaucracies, the churches and the media.

To anyone predisposed to value any kind of open, liberal democracy, Maley's dispassionate analysis makes chilling reading. Here, in peace time, in one of the most prosperous and least-threatened nations in history, many of those responsible for the education of our young cannot wait to destroy the basic character of Australian life.

With what would they replace it? No communist or socialist utopia can ever exist, for the excellent reason that all attempts to create human perfectibility through social engineering are doomed to failure. In the more dogmatic and disastrous forms taken by such attempts millions of people were annihilated simply for their supposed political shortcomings by would-be social engineers. If anything ought to cause us to value the democratic privileges of an open society, it must be historical facts such as these. Unfortunately, left-wing political utopianism is an incurable disease which generally seeks to excuse one failed social experiment even as it initiates another.

The common factor in the futility of nearly all these experiments is to ignore the known realities of human nature. Social legislation merely encourages the appearance of social virtue-which may not, in any case, really be virtue at all, especially since the advent of political correctness.

People may develop genuine virtues through family upbringing, intelligent reasoning, ethical or religious belief, or education and training. Genuinely virtuous or altruistic behaviour is seldom if ever encountered where all these factors are absent. The myth of the innate virtue of the common man is no more credible than the myth of the innate virtue of his employer.

To divide society arbitrarily into opposed polarities: bourgeoisie and proletariat, men and women, blacks and whites, homosexuals and "straights", Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals, is a familiar Marxist and neo-Marxist ploy and by now is as outdated and irrelevant as most other Marxist thinking. What statistical likelihood is there that genuine virtue -or vice- would be confined to any one of these or any other arbitrary groupings?

Notwithstanding any arguments that might be advanced against Christianity -or other complete and inclusive moral and spiritual systems- it does not suffer from any such basic defect. While Marx dismissed religion airily as "the' opium of the people" he was right at least in its addictive nature so far as faithful people are concerned. What else can explain the rapid revitalisation of Christian and other religions in former communist countries the moment their repression ceased? Whatever debates may rage about the relative value, efficiency or morality of different economic and social systems, any religious believer would be mad to embrace an ideology or economic and social system which precluded the right to religious freedom for himself or others.

Where do our would-be revolutionary educators stand on this subject or on that of democratic freedoms in general? When their dreams of direct political revolution faded -in the Western world, at least- the would-be political revolutionaries of the late 1960s began what one of their prophets, the German Rudi Dutschke described as "the long march through the institutions". This meant working to subvert Western institutions from within, acting as a form of destructive, revolutionary cancer in universities, schools, cultural institutions, churches, public broadcasting, government agencies and the like. Who is to say they have not been almost entirely successful?

If you do not want your own children indoctrinated in the latest postmodern, neo-Marxist theories -revisionist history, multiculturalism, post-colonialism, structuralism, gender theory, feminism, political correctness and the like- what alternative, let alone remedial, steps can you take? For practising Christians, almost all these postmodernist programs deliberately undermine or pour scorn on traditional beliefs. For those who cannot afford to send their children to ostensibly Christian private schools, what remains?

Such questions would make for extremely interesting listening if debated openly by advocates of opposed viewpoints. But in my experience, at least, open public discussion of such vital issues seldom takes place in Australia. This is partly because the social engineers in our midst seem entirely convinced about the infallibility of their doctrines and that only harm could result from any increase in public debate or scrutiny to all those institutions they currently control.

Although happy enough to accept the benefits of life in tolerant and prosperous democracies, revolutionary social theorists do not personally believe in democracy -let alone in open debate- but simply in achieving their self-approved ends by any means

available. Muzzling, marginalising, discrediting or shouting down dissenting voices is merely part of this process. Intellectual life in Australia suffers in consequence, as downy writers or artists making art who feel they have outgrown whatever traditional juvenile involvement they may have had with left-wing revolutionary politics.

In present day Australia, the arts (like education, the media, publishing and metropolitan and national public broadcasting) have generally become the collective fiefdoms of left-wing ideologists, whichever state or federal government is in power. It is perhaps symptomatic of this state of affairs that one of One Nation's main planks in a recent Queensland election should have been the abolition of public funding for the arts. Their electoral strategists clearly expected this initiative to be popular.

But it is not merely the generally unsophisticated supporters of One Nation who have begun to feel increasingly hostile to the virtual hijacking of arts funding by politically motivated individuals and organisations. Arts funding is paid for by all taxpayers. Why should those with centrist or conservative political views therefore be obliged to support costly artistic events the sole aim of which is to discredit or destabilise the present, democratically-elected government of Australia?

Such anomalies occur all the time but generally go unremarked, partly because the prevailing culture in the arts in Australia is almost entirely left-wing. In 1999, for instance, a huge project was launched involving over seventy-six visual artists, performers, sound artists and composers, fifteen curators and thirty speakers. This apparently provided "a multi-voiced consideration of cultural practices and acknowledges the important place art has in politicised cultural commentary, reflection and intervention".

The event was Australia Perspecta 1999, which chose "Living Here Now: Art and Politics" for its theme. Can you guess what kind of politics these were? Can you guess who provided "generous financial support"? The Australia Council. The entire tone of the event and its catalogue, which featured a bright red cover, was feverishly critical of Australia's current government. Much of the catalogue was composed of fashionable structuralist prose and was therefore semi unreadable but, where intelligibility occurred, it consisted mostly of, propagandist sentiment attacking John Howard ("The bathos of this nationalist nostalgia, which was embodied in Howard's draft preamble to the Constitution with its call for mateship and appeal to a Christian god is far from harmless").

When the Australia Council was founded it took the Arts Council of Great Britain as its model. Both bodies therefore exist under what is known as an "arm's length" arts policy, meaning they are free from interference by the national government. Regrettably, neither body has ever sensed any reciprocal obligation in this clause. In fact, both the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Australia Council show overt political bias in the nature of the bodies, projects and individuals which they and their committees select for funding. The make-up of external, advisory committees also accurately mirrors the funding bodies' own basically leftist, quasi-progressivist ideologies. In terms of appointments within the bodies themselves, these generally reflect hermetic and self-perpetuating cultures.

Everyone who works in the arts, with the possible exception of the invincibly naive, understands the political and ideological undertones which provide keys to

opening the coffers of public funding. In short, any project seeking support will improve its chances immeasurably by the mention of postmodernist ideologies and shibboleths: AIDS, Aboriginality, feminism, post-colonialism, multiculturalism, gender issues and so

on and so forth. By the same token, anything concerning traditional values in art or life would probably be laughed out of court. Anyone suspected of being critical of neo-Marxist, postmodern ideologies would certainly need to look elsewhere for moral, let alone financial support.

The much-vaunted Australian idea of the "fair go" does not apply any longer -if it ever did- to the funding of the arts, which is taking its tenor instead increasingly from the concept of "official art" associated formerly with the Soviet Union. Everyone who works above a certain level in the arts knows that an officially favoured art, generally reflecting leftist ideology, exists today in most Western countries, so Australia is not necessarily an exception. The variations between countries simply represent matters of degree rather than any difference in ideology. .

Thus for many years, centrist and conservative politicians and journalists in Britain have complained of the political bias shown by Britain's national broadcaster, the BBC, both on radio and television, almost throughout the range of its programs. But such bias is almost imperceptible compared with the breathtaking blatancy of the political bias

exhibited regularly by the ABC, almost across the board. A program made by the

comedienne Elle McFeast which was broadcast at the time of the coalition's victory in the federal election of 1996 will stay in my mind as an example of political hatred more appropriate to the French Revolution than to a national broadcaster in a present-day democracy.

To an outsider to Australian culture, it is tempting to wonder whether some factor may exist in the national psyche which induces the too-ready embrace of often implausible theory providing it has origins elsewhere. Is the prostration of so many of Australia's would-be intellectuals before postmodern theory simply a novel variation, in fact, of the cultural cringe?

Being a relatively new country -or at least one in which Eropeanisation came late-Australia has many areas in which it cannot compete with longer-established nations: in sheer depth of tradition in the visual arts, architecture, music, literature and philosophy, to quote only a few examples. But what if traditions of any kind can somehow be spurned and overturned in the light of new cultural and political theories? Is not (new) Jack as good then as his (old) master?

If this theory is correct, the overwhelming embrace of what are often unsound postmodernist theories in Australia would be echoed in countries of broadly comparable Europeanised antiquity -for example, New Zealand and Canada. And this is exactly what has taken place. It seems more than a coincidence that the consequences of the wholesale adoption of postmodern theories should have reached their most extreme form in these three countries. A further common feature of more recently Europeanised countries is a relative absence of self-righting mechanisms. Thus recent "politically correct" legislation in Canada and New Zealand has often been to the acute disadvantage of the ethnic groups principally responsible for creating modern institutions and prosperity in both countries.

In Canada, the well-meaning Anglican Church has been virtually bankrupted by class actions brought by lawyers supposedly representing the interests of indigenous Canadians. The historic setting up of Christian missions has suddenly metamorphosed mysteriously into "cultural genocide". The implications of such events for Australia are far from difficult to foresee. In such areas the absence of "self-righting" mechanisms, such as the guidance provided by historical precedent, and indeed common sense, is felt most keenly.

As a cultural commentator, my objections to postmodernist theory are, in fact, more frequently on grounds of common sense than of ideology. A lot of postmodern theory strikes me as philosophically unsound, although my ideological opponents prefer to characterise any reservations about their practices as "failures" of imagination or understanding.

But perhaps one example will suffice here to demonstrate a general tendency. It is not generally appreciated, for example, that the origins of the artistic movement known as concept or conceptual art are entirely ideological in character. The bizarre theory is that if art can be held to consist largely of immaterial ideas and concepts then the commercial art market will become deprived of recognisable objects in which to trade -thus hastening the demise of capitalism. Like a great deal of other ideological claptrap, this idea had its origins in the late 1960s although, as usual, earlier examples have been claimed.

The notion was welcomed and seized with both hands by the artistic avant-garde not least because it largely dispensed with the troublesome business of physically making art or the skills traditionally required for doing so. (Anyway, skills had by then become "elitist -that is, not everyone possessed them.) But as any sentient practitioner will know, in art an enormous gulf separates concept and substance. The greater part of artistic achievement consists of bringing an interesting idea to complete fruition. For all I know, Velazquez may have conceived the idea for Las Meninas, Beethoven for his Ninth Symphony and Shakespeare for Henry V while in their bathtubs. But if the only evidence provided to the rest of us were phials of the bath water in which these great imaginings had been conceived, we would all be very great losers.

Incredible as it may seem, a high percentage of conceptual art exists at just this witless level. When curatorial enthusiasm for conceptual art was at its height, one self

styled artist went for a long, circular walk -walking had suddenly become an art form-then put together a small board showing the particular area of an ordnance survey map he had apparently traversed, a snapshot of the locale and a few lines of doggerel. This ground-breaking work was snapped up by the Tate Gallery in London and its author has gone on to become very rich and famous indeed.

Conceptual art is merely one of the largely foundationless notions spawned by postmodernist ideology. But, like other largely unresisted and equally questionable ideological initiatives emanating from the same source, it seems here to stay. Does not that tell us something very sad about the general state of intelligence in academia?

Regrettably, the education of our young, the running of our cultural institutions and the general tenor of public debate are all more likely to spring today from deeply flawed ideological arguments than from any rationality or sense. The consequences of collective idiocy are all around us. The only remaining question is how much longer we wish to tolerate the intolerable.