Ways of Seeing

From Griffith REVIEW Discussion
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

10 February, 2011
Minnie Biggs
(Kurrajong, NSW)

Dear Griffith,

Ways of Seeing, for me, all interesting...and standing way up and out were the 2 pieces – ‘White me’ and ‘At the gateway of hope’.

Together they are even stronger!! They dig into such a complex area and resonate deeply. Also honest and true, pain and all. (I went and ordered RAFT!)

Thank you!

Minnie Biggs

9 March, 2011
Mel E Henderson (MEH)
via email

Dear Editor,

I have just read your fascinating essay from Griffith REVIEW 31: Ways of Seeing, which was extracted in the Sydney Morning Herald (29 January, 2011).

I enjoyed your article and will get a copy of Griffith REVIEW 31: Ways of Seeing in due course. I have bought several Griffith REVIEW editions since you began this publication.

I am now retired at age sixty-six and writing (slowly but surely). Having started my working life in a British steelworks at age sixteen I ended up being a practicing psychologist for some forty years and have taught in two Australian universities on a number of the many facets of the discipline.

In response to your excellent article, I reluctantly assert that in the area of applied psychology we do not yet have, to quote from your article, ‘deep’ or more importantly reliable scientific knowledge of the psyche, brain and societal factors that influence basic life-philosophies and schemas, human information processing, decision making, emotional un-biasing, group effects, or end-point behaviour (to name only a few elements of ‘being human’).

Every psychologist has (implicitly or explicitly) their favourite writers based on their life-experience, training, patients/clients they have sought to help, and their overall reading.

The field of psychology has its ‘handful of high calibre professors’ in each industrialised country – but – is it is also beset in many of the front-line therapists and consultants with the perennial waves of fashion and narcissistic commercial imperatives whose ‘flesh is (always) heir to’ (to paraphrase the Bard). In my estimate this affects as much as 50 to 70 per cent of the applied psychology workforce, as with most other twenty-first century professions. (See Ivan Illich, Disabling Professions)

That is, the significant problem of the nexus between income self-interest – the myth of treatmen’ (based, in my view, on the usually erroneous use of the medical model in applied psychology) – and professional ethics in the therapeutic psychology side of the equation (Medicare’s reluctant inclusion of psychology in its health professions rebate system included).

Judging by your cv details I imagine you will not have time to read them but Emeritus Professor David Smail of Nottingham University is one of the best contemporary writers on the above dilemma(s). I recommend his earlier book The Origins of Unhappiness for an introduction to his ‘renegade’ (but highly-informed) ideas.

Erich Fromm’s many works on the problem of man (and woman) in consumer society are still considered classics by many. They remain useful in a discussion of the role of the humanities and social science. Some suggest they are even more relevant today than when he first wrote them. For example, To Have or to Be (1976), and The Art of Being, published well after his death via the International Erich Fromm Society (1996).

Finally, no self-respecting social scientist or psychologist can afford to ignore Sociology Professor Zygmunt Bauman’s incisive analysis and lucid works.

Thank you for the Griffith REVIEW in a frequently confused and cruel world (in the eyes of younger people).

MEH, PhD

10 March 2011
Ron Fischbach
(Cleveland, QLD)

Dear Editor,

One of the contributions in the first edition of Griffith REVIEW (Edition 1: Insecurity in the New World Order) ‘Sorrows of Empire’ by Chalmers Johnson, is as relevant today as it was in 2003. Similar opinions were expressed in Andrew O’Hagan’s address to the Perth Writer’s Festival, heard on the ABC just last week. None of this is producing a groundswell of opposition to the existing order. Both our leaders have assured the US government of our undying friendship and the Australian public agrees with their stand.

There are only two possible positions open to individuals: Either they are part of their society or civilisation, or they are thrown out on their ear. We may at times be critical of some aspects of politics but if we went one step too far and dared to denounce the entire system, we wouldn’t last two minutes. Our professional commentators and opinion makers know the rules and they employ legal advisors to stop them from flying too close to the flame (of sedition). What we get from all our media is the apparent truth but never the final, ultimate truth about it all. Western mythology has it that the bad guys suddenly jumped up out of nowhere, forcing us, the good guys, to deal with their menace. But this puts the cart before the horse.

There are one or two books that could show us that the good guys haven’t always been the good guys. To get some idea of what America was like before the two world wars we might read The Imperial Cruise by James Bradley (Little, Brown & Co, 200) and The Legacy of the Monroe Doctrine (Greenwood Press, 1999) by David W. Dent, and we might conclude that Teddy Roosevelt and his fellow Americans were the prototypical racist Nazi imperialists. Another history book, Empire (Basic Books, 2003) by Niall Ferguson can be read as an indictment of British imperialism. Yet the author’s final comment reads ‘In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese, and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins?’

No doubt, this is the popular view – a hundred years of brainwashing has done its job. Even as good a historian as Ferguson is too blind to see that the predatory imperialism of the West was what provoked the rest of the world, not the other way round. Those who came too late in the race for possession of a word-wide empire found themselves seriously and unfairly disadvantaged by the two giants who vigorously resisted attempts by others to muscle in on their game. There was no place for them at the rich tables of the West. Germany, Japan, and Italy were largely confined to the same borders they had been defending for centuries against invasions from every side yet western propaganda saddled them with the stigma of having territorial ambitions. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Having achieved top dog status and everything that goes with it by way of advantage, the West could afford to be more liberal, more healthy and better educated than the rest of the world’s inhabitants. In time they even managed to curb their racism, albeit reluctantly. The trouble is that to maintain their position on top of everyone else, they are continually at war against the bad guys who are everywhere. As Chalmers Johnson already pointed out, there are many more on the waiting list. The consequences in terms of credit crunches, global pollution, streams of refugees, we blame on them, not us.

Britain’s far-flung colonial empire could not be reassembled today because it would be wrong. Nor could America be allowed to win the West the way it was won last time, by dispossessing the natives. But the West’s immoral foundations are nonetheless the foundations for its present role of global bully.

However, if I’m not careful I’ll be tossed out on my ear: as a migrant I can still be deported even after sixty years’ residence in this orphanage, which treats its inmates usually better than they might be treated elsewhere.

Ron Fischbach

14 March 2011
Louisa John-Krol
(Clayton South, VIC)

Dear Editor,

John Armstrong’s book In Search of Civilization (Penguin, 2009) and essay ‘Reformation and renaissance’ (Griffith REVIEW 31: Ways of Seeing) inspired me to articulate or revise long-held views, especially after discussion at the Melbourne launch of Ways of Seeing. Like Don Watson, John has revived what Harold Bloom calls the ‘personality’ of the essayist, though his scope of reference is broad, chronologically and culturally, from Virgil to Okakura. When John quoted T.S.Eliot, it occurred to me that he might have influenced Bloom’s ideas about retrospective influence; I refer to Eliot’s words: ‘What happens when a new work of art is created... happens simultaneously to all the works of art that have preceded it.’ I call this the conversation of the centuries.

John’s question as to why academics study the humanities – or what makes people flock to the Uffizi – is significant. Is art a bank vault to which experts hold the key, while the rest of us jostle for a glimpse? How do we integrate such heritage into our lives? I cried when I first saw Botticelli’s two paintings The Primavera and The Birth of Venus. My responses ranged from profound to banal. On the mundane end, I was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the paintings. Secondly, I wept for my squandered potential at university in the ‘80s, where I clashed with the coldly relativist fashion that John aptly identified as another form of ‘orthodoxy’. It was unthinkable for academics to recite anything with passion. I didn’t discover the grace of Milton’s Lycidas until later. (Happily it escaped the text-decoders; those knuckleheads might have ruined it.) Are they the ‘decadent cultural elite’ to which John refers?

On another level, Botticelli’s subjects arrested me because I’ve always loved mythology, folklore and fables, from the Greco-Roman classical pantheon, to Sufi Tales of the Dervishes – just about anything with a genie or dryad in it – so naturally Botticelli’s subjects arrested my imagination. While watching the painting, I was conscious of an inner soundtrack: Respighi’s Trittico Botticelliano. We are not classical buffs. We collect various genres. We are whimsical dabblers. But viewing Botticelli’s paintings, the aforementioned music crashed into blossoms and waves, as if eye and ear colluded in a mysterious dance that defied physical space or time. Finally, I was overcome by a sense of homecoming. Not to geo-racial origin, but poetic genesis. If ‘civilization is the art of Memory’, then ancient Greeks were wise to describe Her as the mother of Muses.

I agree that ‘The gap between "interesting" and "glorious" or "adorable" is vast’. There is a similar gulf between ‘provocative’ and ‘tender’. Why did it become unacceptable to say so? I shudder at abuse of the adjective ‘awesome’. To be struck with awe once happened rarely, perhaps upon beholding a mountain: a mingling of respect, terror and joy moved one to describe it as ‘awesome’. Now people flog the word as a synonym for ‘ok’, ‘cool’, ‘yeah’, ‘gotcha’, ‘sure mate’, ‘right on’ and other inane affirmations many times a day, like ‘bleating into a mobile phone on a crowded train’. John identified how, when the merits of another person enter one’s consciousness, ‘they are cut down’ to fit the mind’s ‘limited template’. This is ‘the secret of prejudice.’

It’s a war of souls, whereby laser beam brains attempt to define, direct, or demean more subtle, diffused awareness that craves solitude, which Isaiah Berlin called ‘spiritual retreat’. Pop psychology simplistically calls it an assault by extroverts upon introverts, with trite analogies of varying-recharge-time, as if we were batteries. Yet I suspect this goes deeper. It feels like what Bernard Shaw called an enmity of souls. It’s what happens when management finds dreaminess inconvenient.

However, reflecting on John’s criticism of victimhood in the arts, I wonder if I’ve been simplistic to lay all blame on change-managers for attacks on the Humanities. Perhaps if postmodernists had not decreed that quality was ‘relative’, or frowned on classics as ‘elitist’, they might not have provided an excuse to turf books by Virgil, Homer, Ovid, Horace, Plato, or Euripides into dumpsters? Would this iconoclasm have happened if we’d learned to defend our heritage rather than deconstruct it? Why did we fail to convince administrations and bureaucracies that a digital revolution need not mean abandoning old books? One problem was that there wasn’t enough mental space for debate. The fray split too quickly into right or left camps. Although active in the union, my views on culture were seen as conservative. Despite my enthusiasm for the internet, I was stereotyped as a luddite. To be passionate about classical literature was to be dismissed as traditionalist, backward or toxic. Why? John nailed it when he suggested we all need to be intellectually prepared to argue across, between, or beyond, political platforms.

I respect John’s distinction between depth of influence and susceptibility to fashion. I deplore faddishness – a tendency to be smitten by novelty – which in some public schools meant (a) discarding books from earlier centuries to make way for computers; (b) throwing refugees, asylum seekers and other teens with limited English skills into noisy combined classes in ‘flexible learning spaces’, where they could no longer hear clearly, nor focus on a line of vision; (c) abandoning routines, causing stress for students with autism or other disabilities; and (d) confusing inspiration with engagement, patronizing people with notions of social relevance, treating them as factory fodder or at best, corporate cyphers.

It’s ironic that Labour parties in the West have run such revolutions or ‘paradigm shifts’, considering the results make it harder for the poor to compete academically: a post code increasingly determines access to the Humanities. I attribute this to technocracies lacking what John calls the ‘largeness of spirit’ to accept that traditions can have both flaws and wisdom. Maturity is loving something ‘without pretending that there was nothing wrong with it’. Michael Ward, in Planet Narnia, portrays C.S. Lewis as ‘a staunch defender of liberal education...keen to keep alive the idea that "free study seeks nothing beyond itself and desires the activity of knowing for that activity’s own sake. That is what the man of radically servile character...will never understand."’ (He’ll merely question its usefulness.)

I’ve known teenagers who craved higher culture than what was available locally or in mass media. According to the youth of Dandenong, Cranbourne, Pakenham and Narrewarren, ‘Springvale is an inner suburb’. They are right. Melbourne’s demographic centre is far south-east of the tram grid. So why do the Victorian Arts Centre, Writers Centre, National Gallery, Ian Potter Centre, Federation Square, City Loop, Royal Melbourne Zoo, Royal Botanical Gardens, Immigration Museum and Parliament House, still pretend to be central? A truly inclusive culture will confront this problem. One way is to invest in the artistic and philosophical flowering of our sprawling suburbs. Another is to reverse train ticketing fees, so that Zone 3 would be cheapest. If you live in South Yarra or Carlton, you enjoy proximity to most leading icons and free seminars, along with trams and relatively safe trains. Why not compensate outer-suburbanites for time and risk? Same for citizens in remote rural locations. A predictable objection is that they cheerfully travel to a Grand Final, Royal Melbourne Show or Grand Prix. Yet such events encourage crowds, whereas a literary evening caters for individuals, pairs or small groups, easily targeted on remote stations. If our only safe access to a perceived cultural centre is in the safety of packs, what are the likely long-term consequences?

John articulated another dilemma: ‘Either you have a clear social respect founded on fear or you have a greater emphasis upon kindness, and a reduction in civility’. By softening discipline, we failed to prepare a generation for life’s challenges, or the humility and respect essential to civilization. Consider this in the light of John’s words: ‘In thrilling to grandeur, we become grand; in responding to serenity, it enters our souls...’ Whilst it’s idealistic to assume that everyone, given ample opportunity, would partake with equal wisdom, dignity, grace or sweetness, I’ve known hundreds of tough teens who eagerly absorbed poetic nourishment. Someone dear to me, a child of immigrant factory workers, taught himself to read beyond the curriculum. He read Dostoevsky in freeway tunnels. His own students recently fell in love with Oscar Wilde’s plays. If you’ve taught in regions of rampant homophobia, you’ll know how extraordinary this is.

I release music on a French indie record label www.prikosnovenie.com that recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary. This company exemplifies your proposed combination of economic and soulful prosperity. While many celebrities plummet into debt, sacrificing credibility for security only to lose both, the lesser known artists in my global tribe keep aesthetic integrity. Encompassing such genres as contemporary-medieval, neoclassical, mythic folk, dreamrock, ambient, ethnic fusion, or faery-gothic, we found each other on the world wide web, while in exile from Popularism. As John puts it: ‘Once you have markets, cultural democracy and freedom of opinion, questions about merit and meaning will always be settled by majorities and money’, which ‘have no real authority on questions of value.’

Our house wears peeling linoleum and cracked concrete, but is abundant in ‘the book and the flower’, in Rilke’s sense. In my industrial suburb, buildings fall short of both ‘office and spire’; they fail to satisfy any ideal, corporate or artistic. Yet this is our city’s demographic centre: let industry and art unite here! We are surrounded by new Australians of many races and creeds. I challenge the literati to look deeper than our factories and tips. Travel on our train lines. Imagine our lives. Include us in your dialogue. This is the conversation of the centuries.

Louisa John-Krol