Clive James, RIP

Sir: The other day I thought I could feel a slight hesitation in the world’s rotation. I suspect that it was the loss of Clive James from our literary scene.

Like many young Aussies at the time, I travelled to England (then called “Going Home”) about a year before Clive, and went through experiences similar to those he recounted in his books. His books later vividly brought back that time in our lives and captured me as a dedicated Clive James reader.

His contribution to writing and poetry has been remarkable and will be cherished by his band of followers, of which I am a serious member.

Thanks, Clive, you have given us enormous reading and listening pleasure over many years. Long may your reputation endure.

Tony Caldersmith
via email

Money-Grubbing Academic Slums

Sir: Christopher Heathcote’s anecdotal article (November 2019) about an indigenous student who was undeservedly passed, pushed and processed through a Group of Eight university makes for fascinating reading, but it should not allow us to think that assessment of other students’ academic performance in our tertiary education institutions is any less farcical. It’s not.

The commercialisation and massification of Australia’s tertiary education system have combined to make it in universities’ interest to attract and retain as many students as they can. Corporatisation and managerialism are the means by which administrators pressure academics to not only accept unsuitable students but pander to such “clients” no matter how unworthy they are. Academics are conditioned to accept that if they don’t do what their managerial masters want then their jobs might not be secure.

Nearly twenty years ago a columnist in Quadrant, the late Peter Ryan, described universities in the post-Dawkins era as “money-grubbing academic slums” (April 2001). Since then the system has been further trashed in the name of such nonsense as “anti-elitism” and “social inclusion”, and this country’s economic dependence upon foreign and other full-fee-paying students has reached even more alarming proportions.

Such claims are no longer provocative. They are confirmed in numerous books and journal articles, in newspaper and television exposés, and in countless thousands of posts in the media whenever these issues are raised. It’s no longer a question of whether this situation exists but what, if anything, can be done to reverse it.

Malcolm Saunders
Rockhampton, Qld

What is the West?

Sir: As a Westerner, I was happy to consider Michael Kowalik’s contention (November 2019) that the world owes the West. Alas, it stands on a number of implausible claims.

He writes that the “most critical transformation” in our development was the discovery of the laws of logic by Aristotle (who lived 2300 years ago). The problem is this: Aristotle’s work was known in several civilisations that didn’t undergo the same transformation. His own ancient Greek culture, then the Roman empire, then the Byzantine and Islamic empires of the Middle Ages, all knew of Aristotle’s work. The medieval Catholic Europeans did include logic as an introductory subject in all universities, but they didn’t suddenly transform into modern secularists.

Kowalik’s “second critical transformation” is the work of the philosopher Kant (who died only 215 years ago). Apparently Kant taught us to see “others as beings of the same ontological kind”.

Here I make an aside, because Kowalik quotes Kant’s interpreter Korsgaard on “the function of the normative principles of the will”. The usual categorisation is Intellect/Appetite/Will. Normative principles exist in the intellect. The appetites sometimes support normative principles and sometimes oppose them. The intellect says normatively, “More cake isn’t healthy” and the appetite says “More cake”, and our wills must decide. Normative principles are not “of the will”.

Regarding Kant, the idea of all people being “of the same ontological kind” doesn’t originate with him. It is found in Christianity, and in the Jewish scriptures. Perhaps it exists in eastern religions also. Kant seems to have found a very circular way of saying, “Treat others as you would like them to treat you.” This saying has been discussed in millions of sermons, tracts and books over two millennia. Kant influences small numbers of academics, and some of them reject key aspects of his philosophy.

Kowalik says: “The post-Enlightenment West has given aboriginal people everywhere the greatest gift one can imagine: it has endowed them with objective humanity.” What were they before? When sixteenth-century Spanish priests campaigned for laws to protect the American natives from slavery and exploitation, didn’t they recognise that the Indians were as human as themselves? Kowalik thinks that the core of objective humanity is a “secular, non-contingent status”. What about me? I am a religious person, not secular. Do I lack objective humanity?

Kowalik decides to reinterpret Christianity in the second half of his essay. He suggests that the premise of Christ “dying for our sins” should be understood as “God died so that we may sin, with impunity”. The problem is that the people who believe that Christ died for our sins mainly reject that understanding. We know Kowalik has had a few allies because St Paul spends a paragraph or two rejecting this notion.

It would be good if people who pontificate on Christianity learned about it from Christians. Nietzsche, an enemy of Christianity, is quoted. So is a writer called Thomas Altizer. Online one learns that he was a radical theologian who incorporated Nietzsche’s “death of God” and Hegel’s dialectical philosophy into his systematic theology, which he based on the poet Blake!

Near the end of the essay we read that we live in “the only cultural sphere which is in principle open to unbounded introspection”. Not true—all cultural spheres allow unbounded introspection. The question is what happens when one voices one’s thoughts in public. In today’s West, the wrong opinions can get you abused, thrown out of clubs, investigated or fined by a government agency, and sacked by your employer. Kowalik’s West is not the one I inhabit.

Michael Cashman
Grange, Qld

Kedron Brook

Sir: It was a pleasure to read George Thomas’s letter (December 2019) on “Be My Saturday Girl”, a song I remember well but, although I consider myself a bit of an aficionado of popular songs from the 1920s through to about the 1970s, I didn’t know it was by Australians. In this context I want to mention a shamefully overlooked Australian composer and performer, Kevin Johnson. Some might remember his big hits, “Rock and Roll I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life” and “Bonnie Please Don’t Go”, but he also wrote some other lovely songs, words and music. Here is a chorus of “Kedron Brook” to give you the idea of his lyric writing:

When the gentry were waltzing to the gentle Maxinas
and the hansom cabs swayed like young ballerinas
and life was as sweet as an old concertina
that rattled its way through a holiday.
When the night was the sight of the weary lamplighters
and the crowded marquees with the bare-fisted fighters
and the bustles and bows of the Saturday nighters
were rustling their way through a Saturday …

Give yourself a treat and listen to “Kedron Brook” on YouTube.

Peter Jeffrey
Griffith, ACT