Organisational Virtue

Sir: The article by Stuart Lindsay (September 2018) addresses attempts by legal professional associations to become active in modern human rights trends. Like the law associations, the medical profession’s leadership has acquired similar politically correct views. Not only has the Australian Medical Association passed comments on Aboriginal rights, but also on climate change and illegal immigration. Like the trade unions and big business, organisations are increasingly making statements outside their areas of reference.

Professional organisations like the AMA are constituted to set and maintain standards among their group and to liaise with other organisations when changes or improvements are suggested. They are not instituted to engage in virtue-signalling, and indeed have no authority to do so without polling their membership. To speak without authority on behalf of their members, on matters irrelevant to their function, is improper. Let us hope they do not follow unions and big business by misusing their members’ or shareholders’ money in pursuing activist agendas—we do not need yet more social justice warriors.

Graham Pinn
Maroochydore, Qld

Sir: I was interested to read Cardinal Pell’s claim, “After pornography, religion is one of the most visited topics on the internet” (September 2018). I wouldn’t be surprised if this was true. There is something about humans that would indicate that we are made for intimacy and that our happiness is dependent on the degree to which we achieve this.

The two Jewish/Christian creation myths in the Bible (and by myth I mean a true story outside of history) would indicate this. In the first account of creation (Genesis 1–2:3a) God makes mankind in His image and likeness, unlike the rest of creation which is not made in His image and likeness. What sets mankind apart is our ability to be in a relationship with God in a way the rest of creation can’t be. Mankind is not primarily homo sapiens, the discerning, wise or sensible person, but homo orans, the praying person. According to the myth, what makes us different from everything else created is that we can communicate with God because God desires this intimacy with us and indeed it is the bedrock of our humanity instilled in us. In short, it makes the extravagant and perhaps to some, offensive claim, that to be fully alive is to be in a relationship with God. That is what makes us human.

But in the second myth (Genesis 2b–3:24), a creation account written by a different school of religious thought, another insight about humanity is presented to us: that to be fully human men and women must relate to each other and experience intimacy, and through that intimacy realise the fullness of their identity (Genesis 2:18–25).

The complementary creation accounts offer two sides of the one penny. Intimacy with God and with each other. It’s in our DNA. It’s what we are made for. Sex and religion. And the tragedy is, they are the two things we can get hopelessly wrong. They are the two things we generally fail to understand. They are the two things we can pervert and misuse. The rest of the Bible, and human history, seems to bear this out. Yet if one made the claim today in the West that sex and religion are the most important things to deal with in life and make some sense of, I suspect most people would laugh, if not pour scorn. For me, this means that most people are estranged from essential meaning. And I include myself amongst hoi polloi.

Gloria Dei vivens homo. Vita autem hominis, visio Dei. The Glory of God is the living man. However, the life of man is the vision of God (Ireneaus of Antioch).

Phillip Turnbull
Cornelian Bay, Tas

Sir: The mock-conservative British government of Theresa May created two new Dames in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

One was lifelong leftist activist Emma Thompson. The other was academic Mary Beard, who claimed of the 9/11 mass-murders: “However tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming.” She said she merely wanted to point out that bullies, “even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price”.

Hal G.P. Colebatch
Nedlands, WA

Sir: It was extremely encouraging to read Magnus O’Mallon (September 2018) describing the reflection, in modern art, of the hopelessness and nihilism in Western civilisation today, in contrast to the art of the West in past times, which was infused with the belief that life was full of hope and worth living. But what was even more heartening was that, instead of his essay being just another “bleak piece solemnising the death of our culture”, he made it a battle cry.

I was particularly struck by his words “battle cry” as I had recently read an article by a Catholic who used the very same words exhorting others to expurgate the perversion and heresy now rife in his church, perhaps the last robust structure representing Christianity in the West. Christianity and its principles—hope, charity, love, peace, justice and forgiveness—lie deep in the foundations of Western civilisation, and the art that reflects these principles is grand, beautiful and filled with hope. It seems that we in the West have been asleep for some time, and, while we were sleeping, evil and his helpmate nihilism have quietly slithered in unnoticed, and are now within the walls of the city. A major battle lies ahead.

Richard Forrest
Pacific Pines, Qld

Sir: When the systems which help society make meaning out of the world and the ideas manifest in them are broken we must turn to knowledge in other forms. Our schools, our journalistic heritage, our academia, and our legislative bodies have been so far devalued and unhinged that they no longer have the credibility to provide what we require.

I propose that the money from the Ramsay Centre be employed where it can be utilised best. Clearly, this is not in the tertiary institutions they are aiming to fertilise. Where is it?

People like Jordan Peterson have provided a useful model for a potential solution. Largely, he takes the academics to the people and they come. Surely we could work on a way to use the internet, legal frameworks and willing academics to initiate a broad and incisive educative experience that enables people to move their thinking forward.

As an educator, but more importantly, as a citizen and parent, I implore those who believe in balance and the value of the individual to make a truly informed decision about how to be in this world, to persevere.

Glenn McPherson
via e-mail

Sir: Joe Dolce’s praise for Michael Portillo’s ancient and modern railway journeys (September 2018) is well spoken. However, he shunts himself up one of Dr Beeching’s long-gone branch lines when he claims that the oldest railway line in Britain ran between Liverpool and Scarborough. As every shivering Crewe or Clapham Junction train-spotter armed with nothing more than tenacity, a tatty notebook and a chewed pencil knows full well, the first railway line ran between Stockton and Darlington.

John Dorman
Toowoomba, Qld