Raimond Gaita

Raimond Gaita was born in 1946 in the then Western Zone of Germany. He was brought to Australia at the age of four by his Romanian-born father and has described their relationship in successful book, later made into a film: Romulus, My Father. Gaita was educated at St Patrick’s College, Ballarat, Melbourne High School, the University of Melbourne (BA Hons, MA) and the University of Leeds (PhD).

Gaita was until 2011 Foundation Professor of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University and Professor of Moral Philosophy at King’s College London. He is currently Professorial Fellow in the Melbourne Law School and the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, and Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at King’s College London. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Although Gaita holds an appointment in a Roman Catholic university, he is perhaps better described as a theist than a believer in any creed. Politically he is not attached to a particular party but is generally anti-conservative, with especial antagonism towards England. Her combination of Englishness and conservatism made Margaret Thatcher a particular object of his detestation until John Howard replaced Thatcher as his main personal dislike in public life. Issues arising from the Holocaust and Arab-Israeli relationships are of particular interest to him, partly perhaps because his wife is a Jew.

Gaita wrote of Mrs Thatcher: 

during the years of her premiership she undermined the dignity of Parliament and other institutions … was accused of lying to Parliament during the Westland Affair … brazened it out and encouraged her accomplice, Leon Brittan, to do the same … threw them [the police] into an ugly and violent conflict with the miners whom Arthur Scargill called out on strike … because she believed that if she broke them, then she could intimidate the entire trade union movement … The police beating their new fireproof shields with their fists, in the style of Roman centurions spoiling for battle … It was a chilling sight, and a heart-breaking one for anyone who had previously been proud of the unrivalled decency of the British Police … Gaddafi can now reasonably (albeit hypocritically) refuse the extradition to Britain of the Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing because one cannot be confident that they will get a fair trial[i] [my emphasis] 

Even association with Margaret Thatcher or her causes aroused Gaita’s wrath: he alleged that Max Hastings during the Falklands War “showed no understanding of how terrible it is for a soldier bravely to sacrifice his life while being seriously deceived about what he is doing”.[ii] Hastings had put himself under fire on several occasions as a war correspondent. Had Gaita undergone similar experiences at his universities?

On his return to Australia Gaita described the Howard government’s Intervention in the Northern Territory, following the “Suffering Children” report, as a “deliberate attempt to create moral and political confusion”. Not a word about child abuse on a mass and shameful scale! As with his assessment of Mrs Thatcher, Gaita’s comments on John Howard make it hard to grasp what he means by the “absolute value” he attaches to each person.

Although purporting to be above sordid political concerns, Gaita rarely misses an opportunity to disparage Western societies. He states that his daughters, like many of their peers, “believe that their generation and that of their children are likely to be overwhelmed by conflicts arising from the shameful gap between the rich and the poor nations, compounded by ecological crises” and he fears they are right. Yet more young people, one might suppose, fear the rise of Islamic terrorism or Chinese power much more. Australians above the age of Gaita’s daughters might also think that military dictatorships and civil wars in the post-colonial period have done far more to reduce Third World living standards than have the advanced industrial states.

In the 1990s Gaita, concerned for the future of Israel, was alarmed by the “hundreds of thousands, from Jordan to Bangladesh, who applauded him [Saddam Hussein] when he sent missiles to Tel Aviv and applauded him even more loudly when he threatened to fit them with chemical warheads … some battles are against the forces of darkness”. Gaita wrote, “Judging by the enthusiasm with which they greet the words of some of their politicians and religious leaders, one should conclude that millions of Muslims have a murderous hatred for the Jews because murderous hatred of the Jews is what they applaud. They do so in the Middle East, in Asia and in Europe.” Gaita could find then “no reason for thinking that the Allied forces in the Gulf War should have negotiated longer before going to war. And there are people, such as Saddam Hussein, with whom dialogue is impossible for anyone who is not a saint.”

Even Ronald Reagan received Gaita’s praise: “It may be debated whether the President of the United States should have called the Soviet Union an Evil Empire. No one will now deny that what he said was true, without a trace of exaggeration.”[iii]

In 2003 the Australian with most experience on the matter, Richard Butler, a UN weapons inspector of impeccable long-term left-wing beliefs stated: 

Iraq does have weapons of mass destruction. There’s no question of it, and that is serious. And Iraq’s current stance with respect to this final opportunity they’ve been given to be disarmed is actually to cheat. The declaration of their weapons is not honest and the conduct of some 400 inspectors that have stayed on the case in recent times has been superficial and inconsequential. So there is a problem, a serious problem, that needs to be addressed, not only because of the problem of weapons of mass destruction but because … the Security Council of the United Nations has endangered its own credibility and future. 

Butler bemoaned the “absence of a mechanism” to ensure that international treaties are observed but, even as he spoke, Saddam Hussein was successfully organising wholesale evasion of the Food for Arms arrangements made by the UN. Leading figures in the UN were profiting from these evasions. As each week went by, Saddam became more confident that he could defy with impunity the terms of the armistice and interim peace treaty he had signed. Gaita accepted Butler’s view of the situation.

The weapons of mass destruction that Butler and other authorities expected to be found in Iraq were not found. Whether Saddam Hussein was carrying out a game of double bluff, or whether weapons were moved to safe hiding inside or outside Iraq, remains uncertain. The West, including Australia, had to choose between two evils: war on Saddam or his retention of absolute power and continued support for terrorist activity. Despite all the setbacks since his overthrow, the attempt to establish civil society in Iraq and to reduce terrorist threats was a responsible and defensible course of action for the democratically elected leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, among other countries, to take.

Yet by 2004, as the Iraq war dragged on, Gaita moved into opposition and vilified those who continued to think as he had done previously. In a Quarterly Essay entitled Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics, Gaita demanded: 

Did we liberate Iraq? My question has several parts. What kind of “we” is here invoked? What are its implications? Is Iraq liberated? Is it a good thing that Saddam was toppled? …

… we allowed ourselves to be led into one of the most volatile parts of the world by an ally who was hated in many parts of it. 

He alleged that the “Christian triumvirate” took the Australian people to war “on a falsehood”, namely that Saddam Hussein’s rejection of UN inspections made it likely that he possessed weapons of mass destruction that he had pledged to destroy in order to secure an armistice at the end of the first Gulf War.

Gaita thought that “Many people have wondered whether Bush, Blair and Howard are victims of their own mendacity. The answer, I think, is yes.”[iv] That statement appeared on the same page as one of Gaita’s many paeans to Plato. Yet Plato advocated use of the “noble lie” that all are born into one of three separate groups in which the Gods require them to stay. 

Although Gaita changed his mind about the Iraq War, he was consistent in his personal conduct. He saw himself as standing above the common herd of academics. He commented on Charles Taylor’s The Sources of the Self: “Very few people in the world including, very likely, its author would understand the whole of it.”[v] Fortunately for us one of those few was in our midst.

Gaita distinguished between academics who “speak increasingly often on public and political issues, claiming the authority which stems from their mastery of a discipline” and “academics who speak in their own name, merely as citizens”. The so-called experts are the worse group: Gaita warned us to “remember that it is not science, economics, history or philosophy which now informs academic life, but academic scientists, economists, historians and philosophers who make a show of doing it”. Such folk should leave public discourse to their betters, as should: 

right-wing atheists [who] lecture (mainly) Catholic and Anglican clerics on what is good and honest religion. And, often, they are not merely atheists, but atheists of the most spiritually insensible kind—those found in rationalist and humanist societies … Their politically motivated meddling in a debate they barely understand … is a clear instance of the politicization of religion, and of a kind worse than liberation theology.[vi]  

What about the unlearned masses? Gaita argued that if many citizens “believe that their fellow citizens vote against them in culpable ignorance of important facts or arguments, or because they made no efforts to understand their opinions and interests then their resentment may weaken their sense of the legitimacy of government”.[vii] Gaita revealed that he himself was close to this despair under the Thatcher and Howard regimes: 

the concepts that are fundamental to sober political judgment have come under attack. These are the concepts of common sense and of common knowledge. Furthermore, argument is compelling only among those who can exercise sound judgment, and it is the mark of sound judgment to find some things not worth considering. 

And who better to define “sound judgment” than Raimond Gaita?

Gaita does not understand the basic notion of essentially contestable concepts. He wrote: “It is difficult at the best of times to know what to do when experts disagree on matters of public importance, but the difficulty becomes of a different order if one is cynical about their integrity.” Yet it is because people of equal knowledge and intelligence disagree on matters of public importance that we have a multi-party system and a wide variety of religious and other organisations.

Gaita is made even more pessimistic by “even the best newspapers”: they place obstacles “in the way of those who strive to understand things honestly and objectively. The editors seem to do it for no better reasons than to pander to the vanity of their journalists.” [viii] Gaita seemed to resent others who made a similar pitch, such as Douglas Kirsner and Jenny Lee, who called on academics to become “the critical conscience of society”. Gaita dismissed “the breathtaking arrogance of it”.[ix] Evidently Kirsner and Lee could not “explain their concept and what it is to be an intellectual academic in whose light academics might acknowledge such responsibilities”. Trespassers keep out! How do we distinguish between the true philosophers and the false sophists? Well, sophists are motivated “more by the charms and excitement of ideas than by a concern for truth”. How do we expose the false prophets? We ask Raimond Gaita.

Very few people in public life meet Professor Gaita’s strict standards. In 1993 he asserted that British ministers “propose things that even the most brutish ministers of education would have been embarrassed to say publicly only ten years ago”.[x] Just what these proposals were was not detailed. Few of Gaita’s professional colleagues come up to scratch either: “Philosophers now flirt with power and the attractions of an urbane worldliness to an extent that makes the emasculation of their subject little short of inevitable.”[xi]

Professor Gaita is grateful that he is not as others: not like those academics “who have undermined in their students a capacity to be nourished by the finest works in our past” and whose ignorance ensures that “the minds of the young are disfigured by jargon which neither they nor many of their teachers understand, even though only a modest degree of intellectual honesty would reveal this to them”. Public intellectuals often challenge the good faith of those who fail to accept their opinions: such people are not merely mistaken—they are dishonest as well.

During a bad-tempered dispute with Professor Bill Rubinstein about war crimes, Gaita committed himself to rash generalisations, such as: “It is evident that the leaders of the Jewish community were never concerned to bring mere war criminals to justice. They were interested only in those who had committed crimes we now associate with the Holocaust …” There were certainly enough suspects of Holocaust-associated crimes to keep concerned Jewish survivors and descendants busy, but not all Jewish leaders thought alike, or grieved only about Jewish victims. Gaita often relies on the notion of the unthinkable: that “some things are beyond discussion”. He seems not to realise how steep is the slippery slope into censorship …

Gaita’s moralizing is often one-sided. He finds it difficult to “understand why white slave owners could treat black slaves as they did”; but does not even mention white slaves of black slave-owners, as prevailed for several centuries in the Mediterranean and Middle East.[xii] He asserts that rejection of the concept of “Aboriginal self-determination” means denial of equal political rights with all other Australians, when he knows full well that the objection is to a separate state, or states, for Aborigines. 

Professor Gaita frequently cites exemplary words or deeds and then appropriates them by implying that he himself has learnt the lesson and in consequence possesses the relevant virtue. For example, he declared that Pantelimon Hora, his protector during his adolescence, often told him stories of men and women who had been persecuted or ridiculed for their beliefs or who had resisted tyranny. Always, he said, even in the most appalling circumstances, there have been a handful of men and women who redeemed humanity by the nobility of their vision and their courage to be true to it. Gaita’s own membership of that handful was clearly implied. Furthermore, because 

the ferocity of Hora’s scorn for arrogance and humbug invariably gave way to laughter, his stories never inclined me [Gaita] to cynicism. Nor did they tempt me to become a debunker … Those who were inspired by [Martin Luther] King’s speech were often aroused to action but they were also taken to something deeper. They developed a new sense of the importance of justice to their lives—to what it means to lead a fully human life. 

Gaita was doubtless one so inspired.

In moral philosophy Gaita advances what seem simple but sublime values, that often provide the title of a book or article, such as Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception; Thinking about Love & Truth & Justice, and Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics. We are told, “We must love one another or die” and that love should hold the position that virtue holds in the ethics of Aristotle, sympathy in the ethics of David Hume, and respect in the ethics of Immanuel Kant. Gaita is in favour of love rather than hatred, good rather than evil, and forgiveness rather than condemnation. He considers all individuals precious and is willing to converse with all, or most, of us about these mighty matters. Yet, far from always loving his enemies and blessing them that curse him, Gaita finds it very hard to deal with them civilly.

He recommends to us “Plato’s simple but profound insight that we become like what we love”; and cites Socrates that it is better to suffer evil than to do it. He urges that “The Judaeo-Christian God does not just happen to be good, and belief in Him is so intimately tied to moral concern that if someone were to say that they believe in God but have to settle whether this requires serious moral concern of them, we would say they were not talking of the God of our Western tradition.”[xiii] Gaita expands these simple-sounding concepts into complex and turgid prose that few can comprehend but which often impresses or intimidates. As Gilbert described the type in Patience: 

The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.
And everyone will say
As you walk your mystic way,
“If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Why, what a singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!” 

Gaita’s arguments, once understood, are often shoddy and unconvincing. For example, he advances a very poor argument in favour of equality in esteem and legal standing for homosexual relationships: he contends that “our sense of heterosexuality has already been so cheapened that any argument of that kind will lack force”. Yet the conduct of heterosexuals is irrelevant to moral judgment of, say, homosexuality, bisexuality, incest, or sexual relations with animals. Gaita often failed to give coherent answers to questions he himself raised, such as, “Should a known homosexual be permitted to be headmaster of a school” and “Should he be permitted to take his partner” to school functions?

Gaita is a counter-bigot. He attributes bigotry and intolerance to people “who appear to believe that gay sexuality does not have the kind of depth that deserves to be celebrated in marriage”.

Against factual arguments such as “bad social consequences, especially for children”, Gaita can respond that the facts are disputed: that is valid in that relevant data about children of gay marriages is not yet available, but it is a consequentialist response uncongenial to Gaita’s general mode of thought. A more congenial response might be that such children are only disadvantaged because of popular prejudice, not of objective defects in their condition.

Gaita may be right in holding that many opponents of gay marriage do not “see depth at all in gay sexuality”. I must confess that the more I see of its public manifestations, the shallower I find it, but to Gaita people like me have a defect: a “kind of blindness to the meaning of gay sexuality”, whereas those like him have fullness of sight. To my sort, Gaita correctly suggests, “even if the law were to permit gay marriages, these would be marriages in inverted commas only”. We are required, as Thomas More was by Henry VIII, to affirm a positive belief, not merely to remain grimly silent. Otherwise, we stand accused of “denying the depth and the dignity of their sexual being [of gays]”.We are thus “partially blind to their humanity”, so that revision of the Marriage Act is an “urgent political imperative”.

When asked, “Is there ever a time where torture can be condoned?” Gaita evades the difficult issues that surround “lesser evil” choices and launches into a disquisition on Kant’s categorical imperative and the Nazis. He rejects as intrinsically wrong most counter-measures to terrorist threats and the like. Just the man terrorists would like to be in charge. Gaita is dismissive of “applied philosophy”, but it would be helpful if he gave clear accounts of, say, how to reconcile Platonism with Christianity or Judaism, how to control population effectively if contraception is forbidden, and other problems of significance.

A more pardonable weakness in Gaita’s ethics is that advocacy of the unattainable may well discourage efforts to achieve the best achievable. Why urge belief in the “inalienable dignity and rights of all human beings, or of human beings as ends in themselves or as owed unconditional respect”, when that is impossible to achieve and undesirable were it possible. In controversy Gaita frequently shows little respect for his adversaries.

Yet there is no doubt that Gaita’s memoir of his father has moved many readers and that he has put the sorrows of his family to a high spiritual purpose. I believe that Romulus, My Father will enjoy a niche in Australian, and wider, literature, after Gaita’s tedious moralising and contempt for Margaret Thatcher and John Howard have long been forgotten.