Ms Jourova’s Words

Ms Jourova’s Words

Sir: In his recent piece “The Central European Kulturkampf”, Nicholas T. Parsons falsely claims that in my “revealing outburst” I asked European Commissioner Vera Jourova, “Why didn’t she just keep her mouth shut?” I never used these words, which are claimed to be quotations from me by Mr Parsons.

I am sure your magazine is committed to high ethical and journalistic standards and thus it does not publish forged, fraudulent quotations. Therefore I would like to kindly ask you to publish an errata to the piece that explains that the quotations used by Mr Parsons are incorrect and he falsely claims that I ever made the above statement.

I am very much looking forward to your answer.

Daniel Hegedüs
Fellow, The German Marshall Fund of the United States
via email

Sir: I am sorry that Mr Hegedus should feel I have misrepresented his views. However, on April 19 he tweeted the following:

Why couldn’t she bring #Art2TEU in game? Or why couldn’t she simply remain silent? I can find nowhere in her mission letter that her task is to legitimize autocratizing governments. Is she the same @VeraJourova who once successfully pushed #EPPO through all EU institutions?

On the same date:

We could long discuss whether the #EnablingAct violates Art 2 TEU or Art 19 TEU for example, I am sure it does. But even if Jourova has no solid legal ground to start an infringement against the #Hungarian government, why is she so apolitical that she admits that.

It does not appear that his views have been very seriously misrepresented.

The more substantive point I was trying to make is that the Hegeduses of the world always claim to be strict adherents of the rule of law and this claim is the main burden of their (in my view) partisan and sometimes unscrupulous campaign against Hungary. The key sentence for any of your readers who may be interested is, “Why is she so apolitical that she admits that?” They are for the rule of law—so long as the decisions go their way. Hungary has consistently maintained that the campaign against it is chiefly political. Mr Hegedus’s stated view would seem to confirm that.

Nicholas T. Parsons
via email

Aboriginal Society

Sir: I empathise with Joanna Hackett’s concern (July-August 2020) that Bruce Pascoe’s Young Dark Emu will be used uncritically in schools.

As one who has read anthropological and historical accounts of traditional Aboriginal society, I concur with her objection to Pascoe’s statement that Aboriginal people constructed “a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity”. I find it too trite to argue the case about “peace and prosperity”, both Western concepts foreign to traditional Aboriginal society. The claim of a “pan-continental government” is, however, perhaps harmfully misleading. It was the small-group nature of Aboriginal society, regulated by extendable kinship rules, and without formal political and hierarchical organisation, which kept the society so “nimble” and made something like a “treaty” inconceivable.

More importantly, I feel sad that Pascoe seems to feel the need to argue that Aboriginal society was really like the coloniser’s agricultural society, as though this makes it more to be respected. This seems to me to continue the colonial view that Aboriginal people were lacking in the “higher” arts and were therefore inferior. Surely the essence of the success of traditional Aboriginal society was that as hunters and gatherers, they developed the skills and knowledge which resulted in the maintenance of the natural productivity of Australia for 60,000 years (or whatever the latest figure is).

On the matter of agriculture, I browsed Pascoe’s original Dark Emu book to see if I could find any reference to men tending or dealing with native plants. I could not, but I stand to be corrected. Nor could I find any reference to men carrying digging sticks and coolamons (for gathering), or women carrying spears and woomeras (for hunting the larger animals). To seek to present Aboriginal society as agricultural, if that is what Pascoe does, is to characterise it as “women’s work” to a degree. Now that, indeed, would get up the nose of the men.

Jan Cooper
Terrigal, NSW

The Passive Right

Sir: For me the vital necessity of Quadrant as a feature of Australian life could hardly have been exemplified better than by Michael Connor’s deeply moving “The Great Escape” in the July-August edition.

Not having grown up in Australia I have always found the semi-automatic espousal of socialist and other left-wing causes by people of intelligence a bit difficult to grasp. Perhaps the relative lack of interest shown by the political Right here explains even more than I realise. In England I was appointed to bodies dealing with the national curriculum and environmental and artistic issues, very possibly at the direct behest of Margaret Thatcher. Imagine the benefit of something similar happening here.

I have always maintained that all right-wing causes require “an ethical umbrella”. I therefore also salute the sanity of Michael Cashman’s letter in the same issue of Quadrant. Responsibility starts with the individual conscience. Unless the political Right makes a major intelligent input into education and the arts at all levels here I can’t see much future hope for us. I grew up and served in the military during the Cold War—a vital experience Australians largely missed.

Giles Auty
Echo Point, NSW

Scruton’s Lebenswelten

Sir: Mervyn Bendle’s reply to Paul Monk’s wish to base conservatism on “some form of philosophical atheism” (July-August 2020) is enlightening and gives those who are open to the supernatural experience a sense of hope.

Bendle previously raised this question earlier this year in his obituary for Sir Roger Scruton (March 2020). Scruton’s philosophy is built around the concept of Lebenswelten, lifeworld, a sense of wonder. A conservative all his life, Scruton felt alone in a world of “arrogant scientism” and “fallacious denial”.

Seeking alternatives to the transcendent has failed again and again according to Scruton, as those who deny God attempt to find a replacement in mankind. Humans are subject to error. Something else is needed—not the denial of the transcendent, not reaching out for utopia. Scruton’s search for a conservative answer is what Bendle writes about here. The Death of God argument will not serve; relativism nor nominalism either. And Richard Wagner’s “Redemption of the Soul through Art” as another possibility has also failed.

Finding a way back to God is not necessarily doomed to fail, thinks Scruton. Constructing a viable alternative is what his life’s work was about. So what should we look for? He had explored Matthew Arnold’s poem, “Dover Beach”, as one possible way forward; however, for Scruton, Lebenswelten is the answer.

In his latest essay Dr Bendle gives the reader a glimpse of Roger Scruton’s thinking. I commend it to anyone who may have missed it. It might also lead us to some of the fifty or so books of Scruton’s (which one feels sure Bendle has read) and an understanding of his Lebenswelten.

Robert Westcott
via email

Clark and the Webbs

Sir: What an utter pleasure to read Professor Ross Fitzgerald’s excellent piece on Manning Clark, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and the Fabians in your July-August issue.

Readers may be interested to know that Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s long working relationship included a trip together, in 1898, to give lectures in Australia. Their visit indicated the interest in Fabianism in Australia at the time.

From my perspective, it beggars belief that, before his wrote his wartime letter of condolence to Sidney Webb, Manning Clark wasn’t aware of the Webbs’ massive book, first published in 1935, that lauded the Russian Revolution and the policies of Joseph Stalin.

Peter Andrew
Lake Illawarra, NSW