Lettters to the Editor

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Michael Thwaites and the ACT

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SIR: In the June issue Peter Ryan quotes from a poem by Michael Thwaites about enlisting in the Second World War and asks, “But how many Australians recall the name of Michael Thwaites today?” The answer is, quite a few.

We in the ACT well remember this man whose kindly courteous manner masked his high intelligence. We know he was a pre-war Rhodes scholar, a King’s gold medallist for poetry, an officer on an anti-submarine escort trawler, he served most effectively in ASIO and would certainly be recalled with awe in that office. In that role he authored Truth Will Out (1980) about the Petrovs.

In 1989 I bought his fine collection of poems The Honey Man that was launched here. Assistant parliamentary librarian at Canberra, where he’d lived from 1971, Thwaites regularly walked in the hills behind the Australian War Memorial, and his Atlantic Odyssey (Oxford, 1999), one of the great books about war at sea, is on my bookshelf. Government archives record his appointment as an officer in the Order of Australia in 2002.

Michael was a valued member of the ACT Writers’ Centre. Following his death in November 2005 his Unfinished Journey: Collected Poems (1932–2004) was the posthumous winner of that year’s ACT Writing and Publishing award. In 2009 the Michael Thwaites Award for the year’s best poem by a member of the Writers’ Centre was named in his honour; each year one of his sons presents this prize.

His reputation remains high in the bush capital he loved. His surname is to be considered as a street name in the new Canberra suburb of Wright in which all streets will be named after Australian poets. Next year Halstead Press will publish an ACT-funded anthology to celebrate Canberra’s centenary in 2013; it will include work of excellence by our living and deceased writers and is likely to include a contribution by Thwaites.

Suzanne Edgar, Garran, ACT. 

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Bringing Smallpox with the First Fleet 

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SIR: In my article “Poxy History” (September 2010) I sought to address the vexed question of whether it was probable or even possible that the British introduced smallpox to New South Wales in 1789.

Your correspondent, Christopher Warren (April 2011), challenges my conclusion that variolous matter was unlikely to retain its infectivity after two years that included a two-month voyage through the tropics and two summers of storage in Sydney. In particular, Mr Warren calls me to account for not utilising the findings of Wolff & Croon (1968). There are, in fact, a number of other periodic assays of smallpox viability that I did not mention: Huq (1976) or MacCullum & McDonald (1957), for example. I chose, rather, to rely on the data generated by the most comprehensive, rigorous study of the problem, that of the WHO, as detailed in its 1988 report, Smallpox and its Eradication.

Readers may consult the on-line edition (http://whqlibdoc.who.int/smallpox/9241561106.pdf) to see what its author, the late Frank Fenner, had to say about those earlier studies and the need for more detailed research under field conditions (see pages 480 and 1334). Here, I merely point out that Wolff & Croon’s variolous matter (taken from sufferers of variola minor) had to be put through a complex temperature-controlled incubation process before its infectivity could be established and tested. In its uncultivated state as dried scabs, as carried by the First Fleet, such material was considered less hazardous to handle.

Mr Warren and others assume that the First Fleet’s variolous matter would have been stored in some “cooler microclimate” within the ship. But life in the tropics below decks, even wooden ones, was notoriously hot. This is why I introduced the example of Madeiran wine. Modern production procedures heat the wine to 60°C to achieve the same outcome as was produced by a round trip to the West Indies during the eighteenth century.

With the arrival of the First Fleet in early 1788, variolous matter was landed at the hottest and most humid time of the year. Mr Warren’s notion that it would have been insulated and protected in a storehouse must surely be seen as wishful thinking—if medical supplies were under any cover at all at that busy time it would have been canvas.

H.A. Willis, Perth, WA. 

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The Burka Habit 

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SIR: I have admired Babette Francis’s lucid and courageous articles for a long time, and I am embarrassed to disagree with her “Burka Blues” (Letters, May 2011). But surely the point at issue is not whether the burka is uncomfortable, tent-like and regarded as restrictive by women in Muslim-majority countries. I happily give way to Ms Francis on all such matters.

The point at issue is whether a secular-humanist state such as Australia should use its coercive powers to forbid a certain style of dress. When I was growing up in New Zealand, where Catholic influence on public life was far less than in Australia, Roman Catholic nuns’ habits were often attacked for all the reasons commonly advanced against the burka, including the possibility of their being used to conceal weapons. The total weight of most nuns’ habits then far exceeded that of the burka, and I can recall a Queensland convent that was outraged when the local bishop, in his role of visitor, tried to persuade the nuns to wear their summer habits in summer and their winter habits in winter. No, the rule said winter habits had to be worn from October to March, and nothing would prevent the heroic sisters from teaching in stifling classrooms wearing heavy woollen habits, designed for a European winter, in the height of a tropical summer. The greater the opposition to the practice, the greater was the determination to retain it. So much for “the Stockholm syndrome”.

In time, good sense prevailed; as it will with the burka, provided external opposition does not make loyalty to the burka synonymous with loyalty to a religion and a community.

The section of the Catholic community that is so stridently railing against the Muslim community at the present time looks sadly like the selfish man who kicks away the ladder by which he himself rose: no one else may enjoy the tolerance he has been granted by a society that once regarded him as alien, owing ultimate loyalty to a foreign power and on the side of the Irish terrorists.

Donat Gallagher, Townsville, Qld.  

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What Is to Be Done? 

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SIR: George Nikolic in his letter (June 2011) states, “Lenin may well have more than once said ‘What is to be done?’ but the quote is misattributed in the ‘The Intelligent Voter’s Guide to Global Warming’ (April 2011). In Russia this is a famous phrase, the title of Nikolai Chernishevsky’s 1863 novel What Is to Be Done?”

There was no misattribution in this article, of which I was a co-author. Lenin wrote a famous political tract, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, published in 1902. Lenin was greatly influenced by the revolutionary and ascetic hero of Chernishevsky’s novel—hence his tract of the same name.

Mr Nikolic goes on to suggest “that at least some of the emissions reduction would give us a cleaner environment regardless of lessening the amount of carbon dioxide produced”. I’m not sure what this statement implies. Developed countries have largely cleaned up their environment by specific measures to reduce the emission of sulphur dioxide (which causes acid rain) and particulates such as black carbon, and to phase out the use of ozone-depleting CFCs and lead in petrol. These measures were implemented without reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and is beneficial for plants. The “hard” evidence is that doubling its current atmospheric level is likely to increase global average temperatures only by about one degree Celsius. Any increase above this level is extremely speculative. This small increase may be beneficial.

There are 1.5 billion people who do not have access to electricity, which they can be given cheaply only by burning fossil fuels (or at some time in the future by nuclear energy). With rising living standards and greater education (facilitated by cheap electricity), reproduction rates will fall and the demands for a cleaner environment increase.

Like many, I’m concerned that human beings have an excessive footprint. We are squeezing out other species with whom we once shared the planet. But having begun the project of modernisation, we have to complete it. Renewable technologies are not up to the job. They’re just coloured soap bubbles.

Reducing carbon dioxide emissions is far from being a fuzzy good, as Mr Nikolic implies. It is not going to happen in the next couple of decades, and if it did, it would be bad for poor people and the environment. It may be an inconvenient paradox—to use Al Gore’s favourite adjective—but to shrink humanity’s footprint, we first have to let it grow.

Geoffrey Lehmann, Lindfield, NSW. 

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Germans, Freedom and No Work 

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SIR: Rod Moran wrote an excellent article “The Nazis and the Muslims” (May 2011) covering the Nazis’ attempts to get the Middle Eastern Muslims to rise up against the Allies. He did not mention that this was history repeating itself: in the First World War the Germans carried out some immensely well prepared and brave clandestine operations in particular by Otto von Hentig and Captain von Niedermayer as well as the ruthless agent Wilhelm Wassmuss, whose tasks were to encourage the Muslims to drive the British out of the Persian Gulf and to destroy the British Empire in India. The Germans even told the Muslims in Persia and Afghanistan that Kaiser Wilhelm had converted to Islam. But for some very dedicated British intelligence officers and a few British and Indian soldiers it could have succeeded. The Germans of course did it for their own gains as they wanted control of the oilfields in the Middle East and their own colonies.

The winds have now changed and Germany has a great wave of Islamic immigrants who have nothing in common with its indigenous population, whose birth rate is dwindling. These immigrants have no wish to integrate into German society and are becoming increasingly hostile. However this is now common throughout most of Western Europe.

In the same issue Jane Downing wrote an interesting story, “Uhuru”, set in what was Tanganyika, uhuru meaning “freedom”, which became the cry towards the country’s independence and the end of colonial administration. I was there and know the two towns she mentioned: Dodoma and Dar es Salaam. When people greeted me with “Uhuru”, I whispered back prophetically, “na akuna khazi” (“and no work”).

It is such a pity she spoilt a good tale by stating that the slave traders were white. They were in fact Arabs; the most renowned in the middle of the nineteenth century was Tippu Tip. The Arabs had been slave trading in East Africa for centuries, in particular from Oman, using Bagamoyo port north of Dar es Salaam to the island of Zanzibar, just off shore, before catching the monsoon back to the Arabian peninsula. The Europeans did not slave-trade from there but from West Africa.

Richard Clifford, UK. 

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If You Believe That … 

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SIR: There is a story about the great Duke of Wellington that has come down to us. He was walking one evening in Hyde Park with an attractive lady, a Mrs Smith, on his arm, and he was accosted by a stranger, who said to him, “Mr Smith, I presume.”

To which the Duke replied, “Sir, if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”

I was reminded of this story by reading Peter Jonson’s review of Ian Morris’s book Why the West Rules—for Now, when I came across this sentence: “Climate change sceptics will stop reading at this point, but Ian Morris is another distinguished thinker who believes human activity is causing global warming—that may greatly impede human progress.”

Any person with claims to be considered as a “distinguished thinker” and who believes that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is causing global temperatures to rise, is someone “who will believe anything”.

There is no empirical evidence at all to suggest that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have had any measurable impact on global temperatures. The Medieval Warm Period provides the best historical testimony to this statement. Anthropogenic additions to this huge atmospheric reservoir of carbon dioxide comprise about 3 per cent of the annual flux between oceans, biosphere and the atmosphere, and are dwarfed by the flux between the oceans and the atmosphere. In recent years carbon dioxide concentrations have been rising (5 per cent in the last decade) and global temperatures have been flat or declining. Melbourne (Peter Jonson’s home town) has just experienced its coldest May for forty-one years.

These facts are very easily discovered and should be familiar to anyone who reads Quadrant.

I now know I do not need to read Ian Morris’s book and I am disappointed that Peter Jonson takes him seriously.

Ray Evans, Newport, Vic. 

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Educational Decline 

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SIR: Miriam Dixson’s fine handling of the Western legacy (May 2011) prompts many a local footnote. May I be allowed just one? No need to seek further than the syllabuses of our local schools and universities for a Great Betrayal of our European cultural origins. Until recently the study of a European language (ancient or modern, and not excluding English) was almost a complete education in itself. The present pragmatic and narrowly contemporary focus, however, has dumbed it down to a boring infantilism, more apt to repel than attract. And the study of European history has been equally effective in rendering our heritage practically invisible.

Stan Scott, Melbourne, Vic. 

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Christianity and Women

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SIR: Michael Giffin’s review (May 2011) of Robert Royal’s The God That Did Not Fail repeats the common claim that Christianisation improved the situation of women. In matters legal, this is arrant nonsense. In both Roman law and proto-common law, Christianisation undermined the legal status and rights of free women, the process proceeding in much the same way in both legal realms. First, free women lost control over their fertility by the banning of abortion and contraception. Rape—always a crime against the person in classical Roman law—came to depend on whether a woman was a virgin, or married (Christianisation legalised rape within marriage), and how she was dressed. In short, what to the Romans was a crime, and always the man’s fault, in Christian law became a tort, permitting the apportionment of liability. Blackstone, the great English legal commentator—when contrasting the pagan Roman law of rape compared with that of his own, common law system—noted this characteristic:

[Women] whom the Roman laws suppose never to go astray, without the seduction and arts of the other sex: and therefore, by restraining and making so highly penal the solicitations of the men, they meant to secure effectually the honour of the women […] But our English law does not entertain quite such sublime ideas of the honour of either sex, as to lay the blame of a mutual fault upon one of the transgressors only.

Treating the victim as a putative “transgressor” was not an improvement in the status of women.

Second, women lost the right to judge and exit a marriage by the severe limitation, and then (by Justinian) the abolition of divorce. Having lost any legal control over very basic aspects of their lives, the next (logical) step was that women, so spectacularly distrusted as decision-makers, lost property rights within marriage. By contrast, married Roman women under classical Roman law retained full property rights and legal capacity; they could also initiate divorce unilaterally on equal terms with men.

The Christian view that married persons were “one flesh” turned out to mean that the husband’s flesh embodied all the legal rights and authority: any legal appeal by women being to civil or church courts entirely made up of men under a religion which conceived God in masculine terms and where religious authority was male. This process culminated in the institution of coverture marriage, where women lost their capacity to bring suit, own property and earn an income, a situation not remedied in England until 1882, with passage of the Married Women’s Property Act.

So authority was masculine, the feminine was what lacked authority. The veneration of Mary as mother of God was a limited refuge, given conception without sex was such an impossible standard of female perfection and the doctrine of Original Sin was used with particular intensity against women. St Thomas Aquinas, morally parsing the severity of rape according to how much the rights and authority of any responsible male had been intruded on (Summa Theologica 2:2 Q.154) is sadly indicative of wider patterns.

This is why the process of the secularisation—that is, the de-Christianisation—of law over the last couple of centuries has seen dramatic improvements in the legal status and rights of women. Many conservative Christians are clearly frustrated that issues they thought settled in the fourth, fifth, eleventh or whatever century have been re-opened in Western civilisation and their perspectives have been losing. The biggest single reason for this has been the way capitalism and technology have been empowering women. (The empowering of women also appears to be what most outrages those purist monotheists, the jihadis, about the modern West.)

Christianisation undoubtedly did improve the status of children, but that is not the same thing; it is unpleasant to read a standard textbook on Roman law and note the position of slaves and children improving after the coming of Christianity while the position of women declines. There was also nothing particularly remarkable in women having pastoral and administrative religious duties in early Christianity. Women also had important pastoral and administrative responsibilities within many pagan religions, particularly Rome’s and Egypt’s, helped by the fact that polytheist divinity could most emphatically be female: early Christianity was responding to a wider pattern in also giving women pastoral and administrative duties, a pattern it successively abandoned as it became more entrenched and has only (very partially) re-embraced as women have become more powerful.

For any form of monotheism to improve the status of women, a society has to be remarkably misogynist: which Roman society of the late republic and early empire was not. The more common pattern has been for monotheism to increase the level of institutionalised misogyny. For example, Islam and classical Athens share many common patterns regarding the restriction of women and elevation of masculinity: Islam has however been even worse precisely because it is monotheist, so the de-legitimisation of the female is even more intense.

The notion that Christianisation only has good effects is a fairy tale that some find comforting, but it is simply not true and it is particularly not true for the status of women.

Michael Warby, Seddon, Vic. 

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What Ayn Rand Said 

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SIR: As a review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Mervyn Bendle’s article “Did Atlas Shrug?” (May 2011) is perceptively accurate; as a review of Rand’s biographical details and the movement she spawned, it is partially accurate; but as a review of her philosophical ideas it is superficial at best; and as a review of her potential legacy it is negatively biased.

Its bias arises from Bendle’s reliance on academic commentary such as Anne Heller’s biography Ayn Rand and the World She Made while ignoring more positive commentary and what Rand herself wrote in her non-fiction books and articles. He quoted Heller twenty-seven times, but found nothing in Rand’s published works worth quoting other than a few snippets from her novels—in fact his analysis suggests that he hasn’t read any of Rand’s non-fiction.

Most of the words Bendle does attribute to Rand come not from her published works but from what someone said she once said or what she scribbled somewhere but didn’t publish. Since Rand was a hoarder, and nearly all her letters, journals, marginalia, recorded interviews and speeches, even jottings, have been made public, there are plenty of words to choose from, arising from all sorts of contexts; but a commentary that relies on such snippets, as selected by unsympathetic intermediaries, while ignoring everything Rand considered worthy of publication, can hardly be considered an objective assessment of her legacy.

To pick an example of the distortions that result from Bendle’s approach (by no means the most egregious example, but one that readers can most easily check for themselves), take the following passage: 

In 1959 she was invited onto The Mike Wallace Show on CBS television, where Wallace devoted the entire thirty-minute program to an interview with her. At the outset he asked: “Miss Rand, would you agree that, as Newsweek put it, you are out to destroy every edifice in the contemporary American way of life?” “Yes,” she replied calmly, “I am challenging the moral code at the base.” He then asked, “Whence did this philosophy of yours come?” “Out of my own mind,” she explained without hesitation: aside from some assistance from Aristotle, she had devised the entire system—the culmination of human wisdom—herself (Heller, p. 308).

This is Bendle’s condensation of what Heller wrote, which was her condensation of what was said in that interview. But the first question was not asked as it is presented here; words spoken between that first question and Rand’s answer have been omitted; and words spoken between her “yes” and the second question have been omitted. In other words, Rand’s words have been pulled out of their context. (Readers can verify this for themselves by finding the full interview on line via Google.)

The result of Bendle’s approach is a negatively biased review of a negatively biased review of all the negatively biased reviews Rand attracted over the last sixty years. By trolling through such negativity from critics of the Left (who hated her for her denunciation of socialism) and critics of the Right (who hated her for her dismissal of faith) and libertarian critics (who hated her for her condemnation of subjectivism) and disgruntled hangers-on (who hated her for a variety of reasons), Bendle performs the service of exposing how preposterous they could get. But to then suggest that hysterical references to one-party states and gas chambers reflected a “tendency towards tyranny” is … confused. A hostess’s tyranny over the placement of her dinner guests is one thing; a one-party state tyranny involving gas chambers is something else. For those interested in Rand’s “tyranny” in the former context I recommend Letters of Ayn Rand, and 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand; for those interested in her “tyranny” in the latter context, I recommend Rand’s published non-fiction and Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.

Bendle does not pretend to review Rand’s philosophy beyond its political implications, and it would be beyond the scope of his article to attempt such a review, but where he does venture a characterisation of that philosophy he gets it quite wrong. Objectivism is not a “kind of revealed truth”; if it were “kind of” anything, a revealed religion would not be it. Neither is it “quasi-existentialist”; if it were quasi anything, existentialism would not be it. Objectivism explains why existence is primary, consciousness being its identification, and why reason is the specifically human means of identifying existence; but this is an entirely different approach to existentialism’s avowedly irrationalist approach to (the nauseating absurdity of) existence. Consequently Objectivism and existentialism arrive at diametrically opposed views of the nature of existence and humanity. Neither is Rand’s philosophy anything like Nietzsche’s.

Bendle claims that:

Rand fell under the spell of Nietzsche, attracted by his ideal of self-overcoming, his exaltation of the will, his uncompromising atheism, his analysis of the master–slave moralities, his disdain for the masses, and his promotion of the heroic, solitary Übermensch: “from this point on, her major characters would be more or less overtly Nietzschean” (Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, 2009, p. 42).

What Bendle doesn’t divulge is that Heller went on to say that: “it wasn’t until she was writing The Fountainhead that she was able to loosen Nietzsche’s seductive hold on her imagination”; instead he calls The Fountainhead a “Nietzschean novel”. It isn’t. In Rand’s introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, she stated her

profound disagreement with the philosophy of … Friedrich Nietzsche. Philosophically, Nietzsche is a mystic and an irrationalist. His metaphysics consists of a somewhat “Byronic” and mystically “malevolent” universe; his epistemology subordinates reason to “will,” or feeling or instinct or blood or innate virtues of character.

The hero of The Fountainhead, Howard Roark, is the very antithesis of an Übermensch with a master–slave morality. The novel does have power wielders, but they are its arch-villain, Ellsworth Toohey, and compromised antagonist, Gail Wynard, who are shown to be impotent against Roark, precisely because he is a creator rather than a power wielder.

Bendle includes some perceptively positive appraisals of Rand’s rousing legacy, for which he is to be commended—he is unlikely to find any support within academia for any such appraisal. But he misses entirely the potential of her philosophic legacy, which goes way beyond her defence of liberty, science and capitalism, to provide those enlightenment values with the moral and epistemological foundation they deserve; a foundation ground not in faith but in reason.

John Dawson, Chelsea, Vic. 

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Free Will and Faith 

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SIR: David Elder (Letters, April 2011) insists that determinism and free will are incompatible, and seems unaware of the existence of another position, which contends that these notions, appropriately understood, are in fact compatible. Compatibilism is a well-established philosophical viewpoint, represented by such figures as Moritz Schlick (patron of the Vienna Circle), R.E. Hobart and P.F. Strawson. Earlier sympathisers, in their various ways, with a compatibilist stance include Hobbes, Hume and William James. A useful source on compatibilism is Free Will and Determinism (ed. Bernard Berofsky), 1966. Any good dictionary of philosophy will include an entry on compatibilism, and I’d particularly recommend the article on compatibilism by Michael McKenna in the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; this includes an extensive bibliography and a supplement, “Compatibilism: State of the Art”.

In the wake of my review of 50 Voices of Disbelief (September 2010), Elder refers to philosopher Philip Kitcher’s “ridiculous attempt at demonstrating moral equivalence between any religion and Mein Kampf” (April 2011). But Kitcher attempted nothing of the sort, as I hope would have been clear from my review. Kitcher’s concern was the epistemically disastrous consequence of relying upon faith to justify any beliefs. As I put it in my letter of January-February 2011, he pointed out that faith alone, unconstrained by any canons of rationality, could be invoked to justify any beliefs at all, including “such abhorrent ones as those expressed in Mein Kampf, or … such infantile ones as embodied in The House at Pooh Corner”—as well as any kind of religious beliefs. Far from suggesting a moral equivalence between any religion and Mein Kampf, Kitcher’s argument should serve as a warning to theists that relying on faith to justify their beliefs would leave them impotent to reject Hitler’s inhuman doctrines, or any other reprehensible creeds—as presumably they would wish to do.

Robert McLaughlin, Ryde, NSW.