John Anderson and the Examined Life

John Anderson, Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University from 1927 until he retired in 1957, was the single most important influence in my life, and in the lives of a great many other Australians. Reflecting on events, you might say the same about Sir John Kerr.

Anderson taught us to think. It is a tribute to him that half a century later he should still be under attack from those who don’t want us to think.

My years as a philosophy student were 1952 to 1954, ending three years before Anderson retired, and eight years before he died. It was all about the inquiring mind, the examination of arguments to establish whether or not they were acceptable.

I didn’t seek to emulate Anderson, but Socrates, which would I imagine have satisfied Anderson. The Free Thought Society, with its regular meetings over which Anderson would preside, had gone by 1954. They were shouldered out of the way by the Libertarians, who had, I believe, one meeting at which a paper was discussed, and then evolved into a social group which has served since as an example to a widening number of our youth.

I knew, fifty years ago, that science would never find the ultimate particle, because a particle is by definition measurable, and therefore divisible, and that the halves would then themselves be measurable, and so on, ad infinitum.

I knew that the past is irrevocably gone, because you cannot step twice into the same river. So did the American author of Pocohontas’s signature song in the Walt Disney cartoon movie. I knew from the lecture on the Platonic dialogue, the Euthyphro, that there is no way to establish an ethical system derived from higher authority.

If virtue was that which the Gods esteemed, was it virtuous because the Gods esteemed virtue, or did the Gods esteem virtue because virtue existed independently of their regard? Poor Euthyphros, who was taking his father before the magistrates to be judged for killing a slave, gave up and went home.

Three years of this sort of thing, and one was left with the syllogism, the ultimate particle of logic, that if a healthy cat has four legs, and this is a cat, then it has four legs. Put another way, if you can’t say something about what is before you, then you must suspect it.

Thus equipped, one was ready for life, as a journalist in my case for I already was a cadet reporter, for the law at the bar and on the bench, for politics, for the public service, for teaching.

One was also left to conclude that there is no such thing as natural law, that is to say God-given law, or law inherent in the nature of things. Ethical codes are what society at the time agrees on. It encompasses burning witches at the stake, burning heretics, killing Jews, gypsies and communists, eating captives from neighbouring tribes and so on.

So there was a problem. Anderson’s course was part of the theology course, and the spirit of free inquiry was having the same impact as Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Aspirants for the church are not supposed to question, to begin wondering whether there really is a God, and it didn’t take long to get the point: that regardless of whether or not there might be, there was no way that the existence of God could be proven. This problem was dealt with by creating a second chair, of moral and political philosophy, under the chairmanship of Professor Alan Stout, who alas turned out also to have a logical mind. Malcolm Fraser dealt with a not dissimilar problem, the radicalisation of officer cadets at the University of New South Wales, by establishing a military university, the Australian Defence Force Academy.

Catholic universities were set up, Catholic colleges at secular universities, run in one case by Opus Dei. Led by Bob Santamaria and Cardinal Daniel Mannix, the Catholic church involved itself in politics.

And then, of course, there was the passage of time. Anderson’s successor, David Armstrong, found himself in a struggle with those who wanted Marxism taught as philosophy. Armstrong prevailed, and properly so. I would place Karl Marx’s thinking in so far as it is prescriptive, as a doctrine, in which, as with religion, you are required to believe, and not as philosophy, which is a process, and one which most certainly does not make a Marxist out of anybody.

Coincident with this, a new philosopher, Jacques Derrida, arrived. I was getting on with life around the world and in Australia. Not until I was appointed to the Council of the National Museum did I encounter postmodernism and relativism. I bought books. I talked to people, but nobody seemed to understand this new phenomenon.

Eventually, I concluded that it was a bastardised form of the Platonic dialogue in which the aim of study and questioning was to destroy all belief in anything, and that relativism was the complete abolition of ethical systems. It wasn’t the social contract, or the common law, or natural law as revealed by God’s men on the ground in the world. It smacked of popular journalism: if someone said it, then it was true that someone said it, and thus it was true.

I recall a seminar at the museum on a fight between mounted troopers and Aborigines in forested country. The Aborigines inflicted casualties on the horsemen, who pursued them to another clump of trees where the troopers inflicted heavy casualties. How? Firing muzzle-loading muskets from horseback, while being speared from all sides. The sincere lady reporting this event escalated the toll from ten to 300 on unrealistic say-so.

On his retirement from the governor-generalship, Sir William Deane, who wrote the main Mabo judgment while he was on the High Court, gave a moving account of a massacre that never took place. One man had killed another in a fight over a woman.

When Anderson was appointed to the chair in philosophy, we had better things to do in Australia than worry about the Enlightenment. We had finally become a unitary state. We were building industries, struggling to hold jobs during depressions, fighting wars. We sent soldiers to the Boxer Rebellion, and although they arrived after it was over, we caught the Zulu wars, the Boer War, the First and Second World Wars, Korea and Vietnam.

Anderson entered this world and taught a nation to think. He brought the Enlightenment with him from Scotland, which produced sensible philosophers. And then, thanks to Hitler, there were the Jews. If John Anderson had his adherents, so too did Henry Mayer, who was a Dunera boy and lectured in Political Science. Sydney University was a great institution, and the 1940s and 1950s were a belated renaissance in a country which, while it was a very nice place to be, was provincial.

James Franklin observed in the September 2009 issue of Quadrant that Anderson was materialist, atheist and more interested in criticism than in synthesis or moral uplift. Fifty-five years is a long time, but I cannot recall ever having heard reference to “synthesis” or “moral uplift”. Our label was realist, rather than materialist, and as for atheism, one is minded of the title of a Christmas joke book now in the stores: You Say I’m a Bitch Like It’s a Bad Thing. Surely the freedom of religion that atheists fight for applies to the freedom not have a religion, if that is where free inquiry takes you.

It is with some diffidence that I take up the cudgels on Anderson’s behalf, for I was a pass student, struggling to make it to lectures when the basic Sydney Morning Herald shift was 2 p.m. to 11 p.m., and struggling once I got to the lecture to stay awake, although that was not as much a problem with Philosophy as it was with Ancient History.

I thought of myself as an Andersonian, but did not say so, until not long before he died Professor Eugene Kamenka, head of the history of ideas unit at the ANU, and one of the Jews who made such an important contribution to our mini-renaissance, observed that I had lived my life in a spirit of Andersonian inquiry. And so I had, although turning theory into practice took time. The first responsibility of a journalist is to get it right. You worry about interpretation afterwards.

But fifty or sixty years ago nobody worried about interpretation at all. It is quite dismaying to read newspapers of that era, and to observe how humdrum and uncritical was not only the political writing, but also the financial writing. My own moment of illumination came when I was working for the Daily Nation in Nairobi, when I had occasion to report the words of the Luo leader, Oginga Odinga, who was demonised by the Nation.

My interpretation was not to interpret, but to report him straight, and well, so that his points were brought out. Odinga was much touched. It had never happened before. He invited me to his next party, to show his appreciation. Odinga didn’t make it into office when independence came, but his son Raila is currently prime minister.

One other spur to my decision to write this piece is that I must be about the last Andersonian still active. There were only a couple more classes, and although those influenced by Anderson were active for thirty more years, the distance between 1955 and 2009 is fifty-four years.

Anderson’s unanswerable logic in dealing with the proofs for divine beings—that there could not be such proofs, since inductive logic was impossible and without a starting point deductive logic, no matter how cleverly it was argued, had to be unsound—was what made him controversial. It would not have happened had theologians not sought, through a mixture of metaphor and invalid syllogisms, to prove the unprovable.

So the clergy now say that there has to be an Act of Faith, which is fair enough. If you want to commit to religious belief, surely that is your right, although it is not a right to impose on others those values and beliefs that you thus acquire along with your faith.

Andersonians tend to be somewhat hard to classify, for the examined life, in my view, must lead towards the entrepreneurial society, which is conservatism, but it must also lead to belief in individual freedom. For the major parties that is a political contradiction which can be troubling.

The ALP could not understand how the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, could as a Labor lawyer and a mate, dismiss Gough Whitlam in 1975. But Kerr, an Andersonian, stood by his principles and his national responsibilities, and paid a terrible price for putting those principles ahead of ALP mateship as his friends of a lifetime turned their backs on him.

What is truly troubling are the signs that the principles of individual freedom are under attack. There is a religious revival lurking about. Hillsong is mass emotion. The Church of England, which was established in the cause of national sovereignty, is tempted by Rome, which again has powerful intellectual forces at work. Once it was the Jesuits, then Catholic Action targeting the ALP, and now it is Opus Dei which has a presence in the Liberal Party. Some Christian schools teach that the world was created 6000 years ago.

It is useful to ask whether John Howard, on his government’s economic record our greatest-ever prime minister, might have been less positive in what he called his “social conservatism” had he found the time during his student days to add philosophy to law. His legacy to his party is an escalation in factionalism that has shaken its members and seen the departure of three potential leaders. He is not his party’s greatest-ever national leader.

How do we know that social conservatism enjoys divine sanction? How do Tony Abbott and David Clarke know that they are right in pursuit of a religious agenda that brooks no compromise? Is the right to life really a right when it is applied to the bodies of women? Is moral certitude the high point of civilisation, or a path to its destruction?

Ironically, and for the first time, there is empirical evidence as to the afterlife from beyond the grave. Kerry Packer died at a polo match. He was revived by the heart surgeon Victor Chang, and came back to report on his experience. “There’s nothing there,” he said. And yes, I am well aware that induction is not about reaching major conclusions on the basis of one instance.

Ironically also, the religious debate in the English-speaking world has revived. Books condemning religion have appeared. God Is Not Great and The Portable Atheist by Christopher Hitchens, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris have done well.

However, John Anderson was special. He was ours. Moreover, his concern was not to prove that there was no God, but to show that the arguments purporting to prove the existence of a god were based on invalid logic. In the examined life, spurious assertion is put to the test. In a political context, that includes spin.

David Barnett wrote “The Museum Against Democracy” in the October issue.