Opinions and Reflections by Paul Monk

Opinions and Reflections: A Free Mind at Work 1990–2015
by Paul Monk
Barrallier Books, 2015, 518 pages, $44.95

Paul Monk is what used to be called a freethinker. He calls himself a “public intellectual”. He lives for ideas and the pursuit of truth. He will not and cannot surrender to any party, ideology, church or sect. Opinions and Reflections, his selection of some 120 commentaries, long and short, on public events over the past twenty-five years, is his way, he tells us, of declaring “Je suis Charlie”. It is his manifesto of freedom of expression.

It begins with an appeal to Socrates (who died for his rejection of Athenian religion) and ends with a celebration of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who faced death for her rejection of Islam). It includes at least one piece written years ago with which he disagrees today (on the assassination of J.F. Kennedy)—but which he includes because it shows that in the pursuit of truth you often make mistakes. So the book is a sort of intellectual autobiography.

He came to his role step by step. Growing up in a Catholic family in Melbourne (his father was a Santamaria man), he began questioning his faith in his adolescence. He felt, he says, like a Jew in a Muslim country. This did not serve him well in worldly terms. Reading, questioning, inquiring became his life. One problem was to find helpful teachers.

He well recalls how scandalised he felt at the opening session of the philosophy class at Melbourne University when the lecturer, the late Len Goddard, slapped him down for asking (as Monk recalls) a question about what philosophy is trying to do. What do you suggest? Goddard asked. Monk referred to the idea that since Descartes philosophy had, for better or worse, been about emancipating us from organised religion. Goddard responded: “I don’t happen to agree. Does anyone else have a question?” Monk writes that he never recovered from his shock at this dismissive answer. He walked out of the class and abandoned the study of philosophy at Melbourne University.

There were several such incidents in Monk’s earlier years. Once he applied for a position as research historian in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The interview was conducted by a well-known academic historian whom Monk found “surly and insulting”. He did not get the job. Fortunately he found some academics who encouraged him and independence of mind—notably J.D.B. Miller and Paul Dibb.

After completing a doctorate on international relations, he found a berth in the Department of Defence and later in intelligence (JIO/DIO). He ended up in charge of China analysis. But a senior officer warned him: “You have to realise that you are a civil servant and not an intellectual; and you are not entitled to hold or express opinions that have not been cleared by the Public Affairs Office of the Department of Defence.” He insisted he would censor anything Monk wrote on any topic. “A few months later,” Monk tells us, “I resigned.” His work since then as a freelance intellectual has been far more “free, creative and useful”. Opinions and Reflections is his evidence.

The range is extraordinary. Nothing seems beyond him—from Timothy Garton Ash on the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989 (that “year of wonders”) to his tempered support for gay marriage (“I am not gay. I am however a believer in clear reasoning”), to the “epic life” of Ariel Sharon, or the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo by a Chinese regime “paranoid to its rotten back teeth”. He discusses Jane’s Fighting Ships, that “fatuous” film Noah, and the book The Wonderbox by Roman Krznaric, whose Moldovan grandmother lived out her life in Sydney, a communist, nudist and vegetarian, whose grandson distilled this inheritance in his book. Monk also considers David Irving, who should not have been denied entry to Australia but been allowed in—provided he agreed to a prime-time television debate in which he was relentlessly examined by a panel of experts on the Holocaust.

There are also reflections on contraception (“few things in Catholic teaching since the 1960s have so offended what many people within the Church would simply call common sense as the Papal ban on contraception”) and suicide (“I face a life-threatening metastatic melanoma”). He violates “Chatham House rules” when he believes it is in the public interest to do so—as after an ANU seminar in 1992 on Russia. (He quoted in the Canberra Times the words of the French Marxist François Heisbourg that Russia is not part of Europe and is not wanted.) Monk also supports whistleblowers such as Allan Kessing, the Customs officer convicted, with a suspended sentence, for leaking to the press classified reports that revealed serious flaws in airport security and the influence of organised crime in s.

You do not have to agree with everything he says. He changes his mind from time to time. But the underlying attitude does not change. He represents the Enlightenment in our time—with all its strengths and weaknesses.

Take his dealings with Quadrant. His first contribution to this magazine was in 1985. I was editor at the time. He took issue with what he called “the disconsolate liberal Spenglerism” of Frank Knopfelmacher and Eugene Kamenka who had argued in Quadrant that the West was losing the Cold War. There was nothing “disconsolate” or Spenglerian about Monk’s Enlightenment liberalism. A friend in Bratislava wrote to him supporting him in this little controversy—evidence of the international reach of Quadrant. But what he calls his “flourishing relationship” with the “venerable” magazine began when Paddy McGuinness succeeded Robert Manne as editor. Monk recalls incidents which capture something of the tensions of the time. Monk had no awareness of the irritations in Quadrant circles over Manne’s illiberal editorial policies which led in the end to his resignation. Monk hit it off with McGuinness and soon became a frequent contributor. But Manne “was another matter altogether”. As Monk recalls it he went to talk with Manne at La Trobe University in 1999. Manne was “very cool”:

[He] accused me of having “joined the other side” and was too busy to spend time talking with me. I saw no reason why we could not have continued to discuss the very issues that so exercised him. That was not his preference, however, and we have never had a conversation in the sixteen years since.

In the years of McGuinness’s editorship, Monk contributed a series of essays republished in Opinions and Reflections in a section called “Intermezzo”. One concludes:

It is from my teacher Frank Knopfelmacher that I learned the term “reconstructive conservative”. Not to start history anew at the Year Zero, but, to the contrary, to consider our circumstances and our actions in terms suggested by the remembrance of things past is, I believe, the way of wisdom. In a world which increasingly appears to be without moorings, this seems to me to be the single most salient lesson that the sixties have to teach us, in the perspective of thirty years since 1968: the Year of the Barricades.

Another of Monk’s Quadrant essays is “Habemus Papam: An Appreciation of John Paul II”, published in July 1998. Monk quotes Mikhail Gorbachev writing in 1992: “Everything that happened in Eastern Europe these past few years would have been impossible without the Pope, without the political role he was able to play.” Monk himself has this to say:

It was the evocation of “truths that can never perish”, which in the end brought down Soviet Communism. To those truths there had been many witnesses and many martyrs but it was their evocation by the Pope in the 1980s that was decisive.

Tolstoy spoke out with little effect. Pope Benedict XV tried in vain to end the First World War. Pius XII is still accused of not doing enough to hinder the Nazis. But John Paul II brought down Soviet Communism. “And he did so not by suspect or Machiavellian popery but by inspirational mass moral and political dissent.”

Monk himself adds a cautionary footnote ten years after the death of John Paul II:

There is no immediate sign of the Papacy crumbling. The Vatican is still widely seen as a corrupt and self-serving cabal of clerics, whose motives and dogmas are widely distrusted and repudiated. Pope Benedict XVI sought to re-evangelise the secular West, but the prospects for that happening do not look promising, even under his apparently good-hearted and reforming successor.

Monk ends his opinions and reflections with a call to arms in support of Enlightenment values in the Islamic world. It will be a long war, he says, but it must be won. “The cost of avoiding these issues has already become too high. The costs of giving up would be incalculable.”

I have only scratched the surface of this remarkable, baffling and often inconsistent collection, and I haven’t even mentioned his love poems, Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty. Find them on the net, read by the author.