An Antidote to Confusion

This book comes at an important moment not just in Australia’s cultural history, but in the history of the Western world. Denis White is a highly knowledgeable and skilled philosopher but, without insulting philosophy, he is more than a philosopher. He has not only been an academic, he has set up successful businesses, and he’s a strategic planner of considerable skill. When I was working in the Howard government, Denis’s experience advising Malcolm Fraser enabled him to make a proposal to me when I was Minister for Education about how Australia should pursue international education. As director of the Prime Minister’s office, he witnessed the exercise of power at the highest levels in Australia and learnt an enormous amount about the matters covered in this book.

White avoids jargon, picking up the language that people naturally use in their endeavours, and bringing that into philosophy. He has a gift for using common language to convey important thoughts. He writes, “governments must be perceptive about reading the future of others, even of groups of which they are themselves members”. He writes that governments must have “an ear to the ground, a feel for the winds, and an eye on the horizon”.

That sort of language is what makes the book so readable, even gripping. Governments are not just centres of power or authority; they are organisations and institutions comprising people who must think and feel for those they are governing and must resist the temptations that are always there to expand their power and control over the society that they govern.

By using this kind of language White invites us to put governments into a perspective in which they exist not somewhere “up there”, telling people what to do; they exist with a purpose which the book spells out. That purpose is the evocation of people’s humanity and their potential, and the duty to provide them with opportunities. To do that effectively governments need to think about the world in particular ways. If governments think about the world to evoke the potential of citizens, they will govern a society which is progressive, harmonious, tolerant and respectful.

This is a deeply humane book. It focuses on two simple ideas: that people make ways of life, and as individuals they are responsible for the ways of life they seek to build.

That’s why this book is so timely. We’ve just had, in London, a conference of “The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship”. While one might debate the details of the contributions to that conference, there isn’t any doubt that what the participants are looking for is the kind of responsible citizenship and the role for government which will only be underpinned at its greatest depth and foundations by a philosophy of the kind White spells out.

This book comes at a time when there is great confusion in our political culture and in our major governing parties about how they should think about their role. Paul Kelly wrote recently in the Australian, referring to the crisis in the Middle East:

Israel is not just fighting Hamas, not just fighting an information war. It is fighting an identity ideology that denies its legitimacy. Moreover, to the extent that such ideology gains a foothold in Western nations, such as Australia, it threatens to tear apart their contemporary, multicultural foundations. And what are our leaders doing? They seem stuck in weasel words and weakness.

Jennifer Westacott, former chief executive of the Business Council of Australia, looking at the way industry works today and its confusion of priorities, writes in the Australian Financial Review:

to me the most fundamental challenge in this country is to re-group around tolerance and respect, because right now, we are witnessing debate that lacks civility, lacks truth, lacks respect, and lacks tolerance. We are not a country of haters. Hate does not belong in Australia, any form of hate.

This is where we are now, and if you want to be somewhere else you should understand the arguments and values in this book.

Professor Tim Lynch, of Melbourne University, recently wrote an article in which he made the point that “identity politics has made us stupid”. We can no longer see how to analyse the problems we have we have before us because “woke” identity politics fails to provide governments with the concepts that can actually make sense of reality.

It is becoming starkly evident that a fixation with identity politics by political parties and governments prevents them finding their way to rational policy solutions, especially where racial or gender identity is concerned, but also with areas such as education and the treatment of criminals, and when experience, skill or character are forgotten. Without identity politics the government would almost certainly have avoided the disaster of the Voice referendum.

Denis White says that “just as certain sounds which are not music can draw an audience [maybe he has a car crash in mind], so thinking about humans that is totally wrong and misconceived can draw to itself a kind of mind that cannot encompass reality”. He writes that as soon as the group per se is set over against the individual, or the individual against the group, we are “trying to make progress with square wheels”. We can’t move forward. That is exactly what Jennifer Westacott is saying, it is what Tim Lynch is saying, it is essentially what Paul Kelly is saying, and what many others are saying. We are struggling against the prison erected by the dominant ideology in our conceptually impoverished culture.

Rousseau began The Social Contract by saying that “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains”. The chains of incomprehension are drawing very tightly around us at the moment, and it’s no coincidence that the last wonderful chapters of this book highlight the importance and fundamental character that freedom and opportunities give to individual people. Freedom is fundamental. Denis writes that “freedom is not a value” and, unlike John Stuart Mill, he argues that it is not just something that produces benefits. It is not a value we choose, but a necessity for humanity to be expressed. There can be no expression of humanity if an individual does not have responsibility for his or her own life. Denis’s words are these:

If we ask what freedom and diversity come to in the end, the answer is that they will always be the lifeblood of the human world. So nothing is more central, more basic, more integral. If humankind does not persist with diversity and freedom, if everything falls into some centre, then all is lost, though not forever. For some real meaning is given to that faith in youth, which is the hope of the future, if we take into account that an implication of human beings being on their own is that each generation is on its own and has a capacity to change the world.

That’s the quality of writing and thought that is in this book, which is set to be a classic of its kind.

John Stuart Mill was a utilitarian. In his great essay On Liberty, freedom had to produce certain benefits. Its chapter headings were “Liberty of Thought and Discussion”, “Individuality as One of the Elements of Well-being”, “The Limits of the Authority of Society over the Individual”. All these topics are dealt with in Denis’s book. But I think Denis’s book goes beyond On Liberty in the depth with which it treats the background, the context, the mechanisms by which freedom translates itself into a respect for humanity. And it does so in a way which is so engaging, so attractive in its language, so simple, that I challenge all those who don’t think of themselves as philosophers and who wouldn’t necessarily read a book on philosophy, to pick up this book and look at some of those chapter headings.

I recommend that you enter the book in the areas where you think you might learn something, or enjoy Denis’s discussion, and then move through the text as your inclination takes you, as you seek the expansion of what is a tremendous framework in this brilliantly illuminating work.

In many ways this book is a life’s work. Denis has written very good books on other subjects, but this book brings together, through a long gestation, the thought that is Denis’s own philosophy. It links him to the world, and he offers it to the world, saying, it can help us solve the problems that currently are so gripping us. It can loosen the chains that bind us by providing the concepts that can help us think our way through these difficulties.

A Philosophy for the Human World
by Denis White
Connor Court, 2023, 390 pages, $39.95

The Hon. David Kemp’s most recent book is Consent of the People: Human Dignity through Freedom and Equality 1966–2022, the fifth and final volume of his history of Australian liberalism.