Letters to the Editor

SIR: Brian Wimborne’s article on “The Roots of Green Politics in German Romanticism” (July-August 2012) brings to mind a speech which I made in the Senate on October 28, 2003, in which I made essentially the same point. Like Dr Wimborne, I referred to the works of Arndt and Riehl, and to Professor Peter Staudenmaier’s book Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience. Staudenmaier wrote of the volkisch movement:

At the heart of the volkisch temptation was a pathological response to modernity. In the face of the very real dislocations brought on by the triumph of industrial capitalism and national unification, volkisch thinkers preached a return to the land, to the simplicity and wholeness of a life attuned to nature’s purity. The mystical effusiveness of this perverted utopianism was matched by its political vulgarity. While “the volkisch movement aspired to reconstruct the society that was sanctioned by history, rooted in nature, and in communion with the cosmic life spirit,” it pointedly refused to locate the sources of alienation, rootlessness and environmental destruction in social structures, laying the blame instead to rationalism, cosmopolitanism, and urban civilization. The stand-in for all of these was the age-old object of peasant hatred and middle-class resentment: the Jews …

     Reformulating traditional German antisemitism into nature-friendly terms, the volkisch movement carried a volatile amalgam of nineteenth century cultural prejudices, romantic obsessions with purity, and anti-Enlightenment sentiment into twentieth century political discourse. The emergence of modern ecology forged the final link in the fateful chain which bound together aggressive nationalism, mystically charged racism, and environmentalist predilections.

My speech was widely de­nounced at the time, in particu­lar in the Fairfax media and by the ABC. Perhaps this was an illustration of the operation of “Godwin’s law”, which prescribes that whoever first likens his opponent to a Nazi loses the argument. The point which I then made (and which Wimborne also makes) is that the Greens are, at heart, a fundamentally authoritarian political movement, and that the philosophical source of Greens ideology lies in the dark forests of German romanticism. That philosophical movement was the progenitor of many mutant political strands, bound by a common devotion to the zealotry which begets authoritarianism. No serious person who has followed the course of the Australian Greens over the last decade could seriously now doubt their zealotry, their anti-Semitism or their contempt for democratic values.

George Brandis
The Senate
Canberra, ACT

SIR: I have been aware of the links between environmentalism, since the late 1960s, and Green politics, and National Socialism. Brian Wimborne’s article provides further background to my limited knowledge. I would find it helpful if Mr Wimborne could address some other aspects of National Socialism which I think are linked, specifically eugenics and euthanasia. I think this would be helpful in responding to arguments for a “right to die with dignity” justifying euthanasia and in the light of the recent (in my view misplaced) honour given to Professor Peter Singer. I think the more the background to such doctrines is known, perhaps they will gain less traction.

Stanley Croker
(via e-mail)

SIR: I have just been watching a documentary on the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, and was struck by the “scientificness” of the project. The reality of putting imagination, theories and engineering plans into practice, over the course of decades, just to commence the investigation of sub-atomic particles; the scale of it, the patience, humility and diligence of all the thousands of people concerned—what a contrast with the abasement of science, the “unscientificness” of the global warming “project”. And seeing this on a day when I read that even New Scientist publishes a claim that the medieval period was warmer than previously claimed. There must be a book in comparing these two “scientific projects”!

Anthony Sharpe
Randwick, NSW

SIR: While I understand Peter Barclay’s discomfort with the concept that there is no end, or indeed no start to existence (July-August 2012), I do not see the need to attribute our universe and its existence to an “all powerful, all-wise being as the creator of everything”.

My interest in astronomy and the universe led me inevitably to the Big Bang and the writings about its formation and development. These writings tend to concentrate on the development from its minuscule starting point, to the expansion of what has become the current universe. So my interest was sparked by this intriguing situation, which leads you to thinking about not only how it was triggered, but what came before that. And in considering the start of the universe and studying the evolution of the known universe, you invariably come to the question of how, or if, it will end.

Addressing the latter, and not getting into all the current suggested alternatives, one of the most logical suggestions is that eventually, in an extended time-frame that we can only just postulate, the whole mass that makes up the known universe will eventually break down and spread out evenly into the lowest and simplest form of matter and then eventually come to a rest. At that time, as everything will be in equilibrium, there will be no pressure to induce any future change and that will remain the situation, forever. That does not mean there is no future, only a future of which we cannot take part, unless the remains of our atoms sitting in stasis can be said to be part of that. In other words, what remains is everything reduced to its simplest static form.

There may be other scenarios about the evolution of the universe, with a different conclusion such as a “collapse-then-expand cycle” that repeats itself ad infinitum, but again that means there will never be an end to everything, just a permanent recycling.

After all, just because something stops moving, existence doesn’t. In other words, the future is forever, very still, but continuing forever. I took some time to be able to cope with this scenario, but its logic eventually succeeds when there seem to be few other scientific or philosophical alternatives. I found this concept intellectually challenging, but in the end the only logical concept. On the other hand the concept that something must have always existed and that therefore there is no start to existence, is much harder to absorb, even if philosophically it is equally valid as the permanent continuation of existence.

Something must have triggered the Big Bang that started our known universe and therefore there was something there before that to instigate that action. And ipso facto, something before that and so on. No matter how far you look back, there must have been something there to start each phase. So, again logically, there can never be a first start or a final finish. Perhaps the whole thing is just a massive time circle, which has no start or finish, as Einstein suggested.

We do not understand, or have evolved science insufficiently, to be able to unravel these extensions of time with scientific theories or proofs. We are probably only slightly further along the scientific path to understanding the explanation of everything than Copernicus was when he began to realise that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. It will take some time yet.

I appreciate that having a “creator of everything” is attractive and comforting, especially when faced with the gaunt alternative that otherwise seems to minimise the importance and existence of human life. But, when relating it to the greater expanse of the universe as we know it now, we (the human race and all the living things on Earth) are a microscopic component of a universe whose size and age are difficult for scientists, let alone the non-scientifically trained members of society, to absorb. If we vanished overnight, the effect on the universe would be imperceptible. Our entire period here will be just a minute fraction of this solar system’s existence.

Not understanding how something exists does not mean you then have to attribute its existence to “an all-powerful, all-wise” being. That methodology is pre-science and something you would expect from pre-science believers. It seems far more reasonable to me that we should be able to attribute our existence to being a very minor part of a massive natural development of a solar system, without some form of inferiority complex. We consist of a selection of chemicals that have evolved into living organisms with a brain that provides cognitive powers sufficient to be aware of and to exploit its existence. That it uses some of those powers to question how it evolved is perfectly natural and may be happening to beings on millions of planets circling millions of stars. As our scientific knowledge evolves, so will the need to rely on “unknown powers” to explain our existence be reduced.

Some find the lack of need to attribute our existence to anything but physics and chemistry unnerving. I find it fascinating to watch the answers to our existence being progressively revealed.

Tony Caldersmith
Ourimbah, NSW

SIR: Dr Peter Barclay’s article is something I read with great interest, though I am not sure that the use Barclay makes of the resurrection of Jesus is sufficient to sustain his exercise in apologetics.

Be that as it may, I should like to focus on a minor point when he quotes the passage from 1 Corinthians (15:12–19), suggesting that it provides a “reason why Christian believers would experience a bodily resurrection”. Here Barclay is talking about the general resurrection, which is distinct from, and largely independent of, the resurrection of Jesus. Before the events on the road to Damascus, Paul, being a Pharisee, would have preached the general resurrection, but not the resurrection of Jesus. Afterwards he preached both.

In the passage quoted, Paul was concerned to counter a tendency by some Corinthian Christians to question the general resurrection. He would have been aware that a denial of the general resurrection, reading: not everyone is raised, did not necessarily imply a denial of the resurrection of Christ, and presumably for that reason chose to represent the Corinthians’ scepticism by the stronger version: no one is raised. For it is only the stronger version which yields the tautology that opens this pericope: “If there is no such thing as the resurrection of the dead then Christ was never raised.” And the use of that tautology enabled Paul in turn to concentrate on the resurrection of Jesus, of which he himself was a witness. By further indicating some dire consequences, if his witness were not accepted, he made it appear that the question of general resurrection had been conclusively argued for, whereas the most he had done was to show that if Christ had been raised, someone had been raised.

In other words, in this passage Paul did not produce an argument for the general resurrection; instead he engaged in what might be viewed as a nice piece of rhetoric to bring some disharmonious voices into line.

A further point is that if Barclay should take Luke’s time-frame of the resurrection appearances literally, as he seems to be doing, it may be necessary to remove Paul as one of the witnesses of those appearances.

Tony Winkelman
Ringwood East, Vic

SIR: The two articles on religion in the July-August issue represented quite a contrast. The first, on the existence or otherwise of Muhammad, was thoughtfully and carefully argued. The second was not up to the same standard.

It was perhaps overly ambitious to cover both the origin of the universe and the truth or otherwise of the resurrection of Jesus in one six-page article. This coverage was only achieved by a series of assertions, from the author himself and by quoting various noteworthy Christian apologists. These assertions were seldom supported by argument. In the end, the article represented little more than religious propaganda.

A prime example is the quote from Sir Edward Clarke suggesting that the evidence for the resurrection would be strong enough to convince the High Court. It is hard to see how the written evidence contained in the Gospels would even be admissible in court—expert Bible scholars are unsure of the identity of the authors of the Gospels; such experts believe the Gospels are based on oral history (hearsay) and/or the writings of other unknown authors; there is no expert consensus on when the Gospels were actually written, other than that it was decades after the events they describe; the only preserved copies of the Gospels are dated further decades after they were originally written, with no certainty that they were not changed by copyists in the intervening years. These factors surely ensure that the Gospels don’t meet the standards required for evidence in our courts.

Religion is definitely a subject that a leading intellectual journal of ideas and historical and political debate like Quadrant should cover. Unsupported religious propaganda, however, should have no place in such a journal.

Finally, given all of the above, the brief biographical information on the article’s author should have included the fact that he is a retired Presbyterian minister.

Samuel Beaux
Neutral Bay, NSW

SIR: In the July-August Chronicle you make a lot of sense in highlighting the problems posed by the incremental accumulation of power by the United Nations and its affiliates that threaten the sovereignty of states. However, the attack on UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre is a regrettable choice of target.

The World Heritage Centre, through its listings and oversight, seeks to protect cultural and natural sites of “outstanding universal value”. Most sites are cultural (745) or natural (188), with some mixed sites. Australia has about forty listed sites, including Fraser Island, the Blue Mountains, Kakadu National Park, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (GBRMP) and the Sydney Opera House.

You say that Australians are happy to accept the listing of various natural areas on the UN’s World Heritage list, “thinking such an action would simply give us international prestige and boost tourism”. Australians, in my opinion, are much more perceptive than this remark seems to imply.

In Australia, the natural areas protected are in essence irreplaceable. The Great Barrier Reef has taken millions of years to evolve. To threaten any part of it by the comparatively short-term commercial activities of coal mining is unthinkable. That the Deputy Premier of Queensland, Jeff Seeney, proposed alterations to the boundaries of the GBRMP to allow extended dredging and excavation in the vicinity of Gladstone harbour, and thus possible damage to this part of the GBRMP, is a joke.

The federal Minister for the Environment, Tony Burke, fortunately quashed this idea, thereby emphasising the inviolable status of this natural wonder, “no matter what the cost to coal exports”.

Peter Gerard
Guyra, NSW

SIR: The June Chronicle makes some good points about what could be called the over-education of our young people. The more people complete high school and obtain degrees, the less these certificates and degrees are worth.

Then there are the supposed social benefits of a more educated population. The United States must have about the most educated population in the world but it also has the highest homicide and infant mortality rates in the Western world. Its education system is looking like a colossal white elephant and Australia seems likely to duplicate it.

Garth Fraser
Hobartville, NSW

SIR: James Guest writes in the July-August issue, inter alia, of “Hitler’s being democratically elected by a majority”. This is not the first time I have seen this error. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party received only 37 per cent of the vote in the November 1932 elections. He convinced President Hindenburg (“that old cab-horse”), who was senile, that he could form a coalition with some conservative and nationalist members of the Reichstag. Hitler soon manipulated and dominated them and the rest is history.

Hitler never achieved a majority in any truly democratic election.

John Weir
Double Bay, NSW

SIR: As a coda to my report “The New Battle of Anghiari” in the May edition, it may be recorded that a charge of damaging the Vasari painting The Battle of Marciano was dismissed on June 7. The heritage organisation Italia Nostra had complained that drilling six holes in the painting in the search for the lost Leonardo masterpiece had caused criminal damage. An investigating magistrate held that since all six holes had been drilled in cracks or old plaster under official supervision there were no grounds for supposing the fresco had been damaged or rendered unserviceable. The Procuratore of Florence, Giuseppe Quattrocchi, has archived the file.

Geoffrey Luck
Sydney, NSW