A Proper Defence Academy

SIR: Your article “Gender Diversity in Khaki” (September 2017) confirms the serious misgivings of those who, more than three decades ago, feared placing the study of humanities and social sciences at the proposed new Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) in the hands of the University of New South Wales or, indeed, any other Australian university. Even a cursory review of the way many academies within those universities were teaching Australian history should have sounded alarm bells. Australia’s future military leaders need to understand and appreciate the quality of the heritage they are trained to defend. Impressionable young officers can do without uncritical exposure to the virus of identity politics which infects the study of humanities and social sciences in Australian universities.

Sadly, the founding fathers of ADFA failed to appreciate the excellent model that already existed in the Rampart Range of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains: the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) which had opened in 1958, almost thirty years before the ADFA. While drawing on the experience of West Point and Annapolis which had been educating professional officers since 1802 and 1845 respectively, the prominent military and civilian leaders responsible for establishing USAFA designed an academic curriculum for the aerospace age. As a fully accredited institution of higher learning, USAFA offered a four-year degree course conducted by eighteen departments within four major divisions: Basic Sciences, Engineering Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences. A co-operative graduate program with carefully selected universities enabled exceptional students to study for a masters degree in Astronautics, Economics, History, International Affairs, Management, Applied Mathematics or Physics.

The essential difference between ADFA and USAFA was that every USAFA academic was a serving officer, either American or from an allied nation. As a young squadron leader lecturing in history and international relations at the Royal Air Force College, I was seconded in 1967 to USAFA’s History Department. My American colleagues were exceptionally well qualified both in terms of doctorates from leading universities such as Princeton and Yale, and active service in the Second World, Korean and Vietnam wars. Furthermore, in contrast to the situation in Australian universities and of great benefit to USAFA cadets, considerable emphasis was placed on the quality of teaching.

Incidentally, not one academic at the United States Air Force Academy conducted research into Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Gerry Worsell
Tweed Heads, NSW

Wonders by Torchlight

Sir: I thoroughly enjoyed M.G. Kile’s letter (July-August 2017) about Melissa Coburn’s lack of appreciation for Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. That she failed to find it engaging puts her among the great majority of people, presumably. They lack both the stamina and the imagination to immerse themselves in its extraordinary riches of perception and expression. Having done so myself, I can testify that, far from being an ordeal, it was the experience of a lifetime.

During 2014-15, under treatment for metastatic melanoma and often forced to rest, I read all six volumes (some 4500 pages altogether) in the famous English translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, published by the Modern Library in 2003. I found myself utterly enchanted and read every word. My first thought at Proust’s famously serpentine sentences was how exquisitely balanced and coherent they were. My second was to wonder how a man afflicted by degenerative lung disease can have found the energy to compose such sentences and to read them back to himself.

People talk vulgarly of the “bucket list” of things to do before you die. I was teetering on the brink of mortality and it occurred to me that reading Proust might be a fine way to round out a lifetime of reading—a fitting Swann song, as it were. I was not disappointed. On the contrary, I found myself in awe of Proust’s mastery of language and his stunningly varied nuances of expression. Time and again, in astonishment, I would re-read whole passages, highlight them, share them with anyone who would listen.

There was a third thought, which is worth sharing in such a context as this. It was only in 1994 that the magnificent paintings in the Chauvet Cave were discovered by archaeologists, after having been immured for some 27,000 years. When the cave was fully explored and dated, it was realised that there were, on the floor along the side of the painted walls, the fossilised footprints of a boy, perhaps twelve years of age, and his wolfhound, going back to before the cave was sealed by a landslide all those millennia ago. He had walked through with a torch, presumably gazing in awe at the stunning paintings of Ice Age beasts that were already, when he looked at them, some five thousand years old.

All this is set out in Jean Clottes’s Return to Chauvet Cave: Excavating the Birthplace of Art: The First Full Report (2003). As I contemplated the image of that young boy with his torch walking through Chauvet Cave, I felt that he embodied the very idea of a reader deciphering signs placed on a surface by someone else. Reading Proust while seriously ill, I identified with that Aurignacian boy of long ago. But whereas he gazed at paintings of animals by torchlight and had to decipher their meaning with a mind unillumined by any history or written records, I was gazing upon immense galleries of signs in the Roman alphabet and interpreting them in the light of all that has occurred in France and around the world since the Ice Age ended.

Picasso reportedly marvelled at cave paintings found before those at the Chauvet Cave and exclaimed, “We have invented nothing!” Reading Proust, one realises that, on the contrary, “we” have invented a great deal—a very great deal. The privilege of a literate inhabitant of the contemporary world is to be able to go in search of lost time and absorb its wonders by torchlight. But, as Alain de Botton pointed out, Proust showed how one can absorb in depth the wonders even of one’s own life. Roger Shattuck’s books on Proust, not least Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time (2000), not only open up the riches of Proust’s writing, but make available to others the cognitive process implicit in Proust’s perception of things in the context of time. Melissa Coburn might like to start by setting aside the time to read Shattuck.

Paul Monk
Melbourne, Vic

Arthur Cotton in India

Sir: The quoted statement by Shashi Tharoor that the British colonial rulers “had no interest in the well-being of the Indian people” (September 2017) may be true of some, but not all. One person who stands out in the history of India is Arthur Cotton, who initiated irrigation projects in the south of India, which were widely copied in other areas and brought great benefits.

Arriving in India in the early 1800s, Cotton immediately saw that there was a huge problem with the monsoonal rains delivering great amounts of water most of which was lost in the ocean. The rains sometimes arrived in greatly reduced amounts or not at all.

The chief projects on which he worked, or which owe their existence to his initiative, were works on the Cauvery and Coleroon rivers, Tamil Nadu, and later, a much bigger project on the Godavari and Kistna rivers, Andhra Pradesh. Both areas were prone to famine, leading to miserable deaths. In spite of obvious difficulties, a system of irrigation seemed the solution. Cotton encountered much resistance from the British government. And according to an Indian friend of mine, there was even resistance from the Indians themselves. But these were overcome.

On the Cauvery there was an existing system which dated from ancient times, but which had become seriously impaired. Using expertise from ancient dam-building techniques, Cotton was able to master the difficulties of building on unstable sandy river beds. The scheme was a great success and permanently prevented the further occurrence of famine. Indians watched the values of their lands increase!

Cotton then turned his attention to the Godavari delta region which had recently endured a terrible famine, and which experienced precarious rainfall. When the rain did arrive, the river would overflow its banks and flood the surrounding country. The project involved the building of a huge dam and about 1100 miles of canals. It was a huge success. Having been continually plagued by extreme poverty and distress, the district was now one of the most prosperous in India. It was able to send food to areas of India affected by drought.

Few tourists visit Andhra Pradesh. They prefer to visit the north of India where there are such sites as the Taj Mahal, a structure built to commemorate a favourite wife! And it seems that few historians visit Andhra Pradesh either. Again and again I pick up a history of India and there is no mention of Arthur Cotton. He just does not fit into how colonial history should be written. He does not fit the picture of the grasping colonial, and so is left out of history. But the beneficiaries of Cotton’s well-executed schemes know better. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that in south India, Cotton is still revered. In Andhra Pradesh he is a folk hero. In many a home, with no anxiety about water shortage or crop failure, Cotton’s portrait hangs in a prominent place.

Rex Dale
Brunswick, Vic

Cartel Capers Observed

Sir: Having read our chapter on the economy during the post-war Menzies governments, Tony Thomas (July-August 2017) concluded that we were “seemingly unfamiliar with pre-1974 cartels”. Not true. Pincus’s 1963 honours thesis discussed price fixing in the oil industry, of which he had direct knowledge: his job included hand-delivering BP’s tender documents to Shell House before the tender deadlines. And Pincus is co-author of Government and Capitalism (1982) with a large section titled “All the restrictive practices known to man”. As for Ergas, he has been involved with trade practices law since the 1970s and served as an adviser to the (then) Trade Practices Commission.

Moreover, the statement Tony Thomas attributes to us seems to make the point succinctly: restrictive practices were widespread, favoured producers at the expense of consumers and encouraged inefficiency.

But yes, we did not write what Tony Thomas would have written on the Menzies era, and so we failed on his standard.

Henry Ergas & Jonathan Pincus
via e-mail

Human Rights and Moral Failure

Sir: Human rights talk, now so evident in the discussions on same-sex marriage, has dominated public discourse throughout the West since the 1970s. Samuel Moyn, the great modern historian of human rights, has described human rights as “the Last Utopia” (his book of this title was published in 2010).

Anyone familiar with the history of political ideas will know that utopias do not have a good track record. Moyn documents the failure of human rights discourse on two levels. He notes first that it has conspicuously failed to provide the necessary ethical depth needed for meaningful political debate; and second that it has been used repeatedly and predominantly in the late twentieth century by powerful states and interest groups to justify their oppression of the weak by force or by tyrannical legislation. Anyone familiar with the recent history of the UNHCR would recognise this failure.

John Witte, whose vast intellectual output has generated an entire discipline in the study of the relationship between religion and law, has also noted the failure of human rights to resolve the problems facing legislatures in modern pluralistic societies. While human rights have been touted as an alternative moral framework that is capable of providing for all the needs of a “secular” state, this has been shown in practice to be a delusion.

Human rights have been used as an intellectual vehicle to drive religion out of the public square. However, two points should be noted. First, human rights discourse is not adequate to deal with moral conflict in the political arena. In so far as politics does actually involve discussions about ethical issues, human rights cannot in principle solve or effectively mediate in these disputes. Second, in the post-Christian era, the pluralistic societies of the West are faced with the problem of integrating competing moral frameworks into secular political and legal structures. The solution is not a crass and tyrannical “secularism”. Rather what is needed is a different paradigm for pluralism that transcends the delusory utopia of human rights, and genuinely provides for freedom of conscience.

Witte and Moyn in different ways note the importance of Christianity in the history of human rights. Moyn notes the rise specifically of human rights in the immediate post-war period on the foundations of a predominantly Christian worldview in the West that privileged the idea of the innate dignity of all people. However, he also notes that it has since been disconnected from its Christian foundations and is, as it were, in free fall. Witte sees human rights more as one strand in a long tradition of rights in general, going back thousands of years. In particular he notes the evolution of political rights in the hundred years or so before the Reformation, when rights became part of the polemic of religious (Christian) freedom. It is this tradition, rather than the false hope of “human rights” and a superficial secularism, that has the moral depth and intellectual apparatus necessary to find a way for pluralist societies to flourish.

Stephen Due
Belmont, Vic

A Process, Not an Event

Sir: In his response (Let­ters, September 2017) to my essay “The Future of Christianity” (July-August), Phillip Turnbull makes an error of fact. The term AahYah is used forty-three times in the Old Testament, where it is often translated as “I will be” or “I shall be”. I did not mean the Church’s future would be revitalised “by going back to a marginalised, persecuted catacomb community”, precisely because the original Jesus movement existed before the catacombs. I meant the Church needed to return to the Christ of first-century Judaism, rather than confining Christ to the zeitgeist. One of the virtues of process philosophy and theology is the idea of creative becoming over static being. In other words, God is a process, not an event, so is his Son, and so is the mystery of our salvation. It is theologically incorrect to deny God, or our life in God, access to the future tense. To think otherwise is to deny the physical and metaphysical reality of flux and change, and deny us the hope on which our faith rests.

Michael Giffin
Paddington, NSW

A Pointless Effort

Sir: Having re-read Keith Windschuttle’s observations on the state of Arts and History departments in Australian universities, (“A Disaster of the Active Kind”, May 2017) I read with interest the rebuttal by Dr Stephen Garton, Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Sydney, in the September issue.

I am not an academic or historian. I began my Arts degree at Sydney University in 1961. I still remember that year fondly. I studied English Language under a truly inspirational lecturer.

Coming to Dr Garton’s reply: Windschuttle attributes a “paltry” four books to Garton, who seems to agree but refers to three other books he co-authored. I make that Windschuttle 1, Garton 0. Windschuttle then refers to two of Garton’s books inspired by the French “post-structuralist, anti-humanist and gay theorist”, Michel Foucault. Garton agrees but refers to other books he has written on other topics. Windschuttle 2, Garton 0. Garton then wonders if Windschuttle has actually read his books. I would be extremely surprised if he had not but let’s call that one even. Garton then refers to Windschuttle’s “regrettable exaggerations”. By way of confirmation, Garton then refers to a number of blandly named courses offered in the Faculty Handbook. Well, unless one does not live in the postmodern world (think “Safe Schools”) this makes it Windschuttle 3, Garton 0.

Garton concludes with a glowing tribute to the Sydney University Department of History which he rather revealingly asserts is “one of the few [History] faculties in the world” that can claim to be reasonably unbiased.

Despite his efforts, Dr Garton has failed to land a glove on Mr Windschuttle’s original article.

Kerry Boulton
Brisbane, Qld