I read Tracee Hutchison’s critique of Germaine Greer, and although I often don’t agree with Hutchison, this time, I think she’s spot on in her criticisms of Greer. In Greer’s essay On Rage, she says:
In considering the desperate condition of Australian Aboriginal people after 200 years of abuse physical and mental, we should not be surprised to find towering rates of domestic violence. Children taken from their parents and treated cruelly in institutions will learn cruelty. Children who are bashed by their parents will bash their own children; children who see their fathers bash their mothers will replicate the same pattern in their own relationships.
…
What is obvious is that when the Aboriginal man was dispossessed by the white intruder he lost his moral authority over his family.
Understandably, elders and other indigenous people have queried and criticised Greer’s generalisations.
What kind of a feminist makes excuses for men who are violent towards their women and children? Anyone who excuses such actions is no true feminist in my view. Surely a fundamental tenet of being a feminist is that one does not support violence towards women by men, and does not make excuses for it? One may try to explain why certain social conditions have prevailed…but this reads more like an excuse in my book. It makes me recall a diagram in an article by Larissa Behrendt, an indigenous feminist, in which she drew a hierarchy whereby white men oppressed white women, white society oppressed indigenous society generally, and then within indigenous society, indigenous men oppressed indigenous women. Indigenous women came at the very bottom of the hierarchy. Greer just perpetuates this kind of a hierarchy.
Essentially, Greer’s argument is that indigenous men have been ill-treated by colonisation, and thus they suffer an uncontrollable rage which robs them of their capacity to restrain themselves from beating their wives and children. But this is not the fault of indigenous men: it is the fault of colonisation. We can’t expect indigenous men to change. I would find this deeply offensive if I were an indigenous man.
It seems to me that colonisation must explain some of the problems faced by indigenous people, as many diverse indigenous groups all around the world have suffered from societal breakdown, alcoholism and the like. But does that mean that indigenous men are entitled to lose their tempers? This seems incredibly patronising to me. It implies that indigenous people lack the capacity to take control of their lives. In fact, it harks back to racist stereotypes of the “savage”.
It has always seemed to me that the message to indigenous people must not be one of rage and despair, but one of hope. Yes, colonisation has reaped a terrible price on their communities, and there is no doubt that all indigenous communities have suffered as a result, whether as a result of disease, removal from traditional land, violence, rape, and destruction of established social and familial order. But you can either let it take control of you or take control over it. The latter is far more difficult, and requires not only inner strength, but also needs sufficient support networks and the like. However, the former choice is one which is ultimately hopeless. It denies any possibility of agency, change and adaptation, any understanding between cultures, and any forgiveness. It denies any opportunity to move forward. Ultimately, it denies indigenous people the same opportunity as anyone else to strive to have the best in life.
The thing which I find most problematic about Greer’s theory is that she seems to say that it’s okay to beat your wife if you’ve had a really bad experience and history. I wonder: would she say that same about white men who beat white women? Does it depend on whether you’ve had a hard upbringing or not? What about men of any culture or race who have suffered as a result of warfare or upheaval? It seems to me that one can’t start offering excuses for this kind of behaviour because one starts to validating all kinds of violence against women and children. Why, also, should women and children bear the brunt of aggression which is not their fault? To leave them in that situation and to make excuses just seems appalling. Understanding how something has happened is one thing, saying it can’t be changed is another.
If I was the child of a violent relationship, what I would find most empowering is if someone said, “You don’t have to continue on like this. You don’t have to replicate this just because your parents behaved like this. You can change the way in which you operate, and I will help you to do that.” This is the message which should be given to indigenous children, to allow them to live in hope that things will get better.
Update
Have a read of Kim’s post at LP, which links to an interesting article by Larissa Behrendt and Ruth McCausland outlining the limitations of the “personal responsibility” approach. It’s no good asking people to take personal responsibility if they don’t have the support networks and resources to do so. So you can force parents to send their kids to school by cutting off welfare payments, but if the teaching is substandard and the kids can’t hear what the teacher is saying because they have severe infections in their ears, ultimately you won’t achieve anything.
Kim’s reading of Greer was quite different to mine, which explains why her response was different. Perhaps it would have made a difference if I’d seen Greer on Q&A. The part of Greer’s essay which raised my ire (and which I forgot to quote in this post) was the following:
How was he supposed to cope when the woman who was his designated wife was taken from him and used by the white intruder, and then as insolently abandoned with her children by him at foot? If she went voluntarily it was bad enough; if she was kidnapped and he was powerless to rescue her, his misery would hardly have been less. When he found himself with the responsibility of rearing the children of the white man who would neither acknowledge them or support them, his feelings toward them and their mother can hardly be expected to be benign.
I read that as not only an explanation, but an excuse for violence by indigenous men towards indigenous women who had already suffered rape and violence at the hands of white men. That’s what made me mad.
As a clarification to some of the criticisms made below, I’m not suggesting that the government should sit back and do nothing, and just let indigenous people take personal responsibility for their problems. There is definitely a need for adequate resources, healthcare, schooling, support networks, infrastructure and the like. People can’t take personal responsibility if they don’t have the support of their community and the government to do so. Further, it’s a complex problem which requires consultation with indigenous communities about what their needs are and what is appropriate. There is no “easy fix”, and no way that I’m suggesting that indigenous people can just shrug off 200 years of alienation and oppression: it will be a long and difficult process. It’s not just governments, or just individuals who can fix the problem. All I am saying is that it has to be a holistic exercise - government, communities and individuals all taking responsibility for those aspects they can control.
Update II
Marcia Langton has written a critique of Greer in The Australian today which indicates that she read Greer’s essay in the same way I did. Worth a read.
Update III
Kim has now read Greer’s book and posted a review - go and have a look. Sounds like it’s different in emphasis to the essay I read in the SMH. I will have to read the book at some point. For now, final judgement is withheld until I get an opportunity to read it.
125 Comments
I’m sorry Legal Eagle, but I have to ask, have you read Greer’s book or just what Hutchison thinks she says? (And indeed - has Hutchison read the book?)
And why is explanation seen as justification? Greer is not giving permission to Indigenous men to express rage, she is analysing why they expess rage. Why is that distinction so hard to understand?
An astoundingly naive reading from our feathered friend. You have NEVER read the history books recitation of two hundred years of traumatic brutality or suffered to the extent on your own life that might comprehend the dying spasms of the terminally mutilated?
When does white society get a bit honest about what thisis alla bout. Starting with the vested interests of press and media and their hired guns, who continue to benefit from the destruction of indigines.
Yes, I have benefitted from the takeover of this country too, but enough’s enough and time to pay some rent instead of murdering the innocent for the profit.
Paul, I’d be careful of making judgments about LE’s knowledge of history or background ’suffering’. The ‘I’m more oppressed than you are’ or ‘these people are more oppressed than you are’ game is particularly vacuous, and one almost guaranteed to lead nowhere in particular.
I don’t have a dog in the Greer fight, but I will make a few observations, which are also tangential to the post over at LP.
1. Australia treats its genuinely eccentric intellectuals shockingly - that’s why they leave. Boiler-plate intellectuals like Craven or Manne are fine. Oddballs like Greer are doomed.
2. An Australian intellectual who chooses to leave Australia needs to realise that ‘ex-pat’ status means Australians will probably react badly to any commentary on the old ‘home’.
3. It’s very easy to get out of touch with a place when you’re away from it. I’ve found this when I’ve been living away from Australia - things get harder and harder to grasp, people change etc.
I agree with Kim on this — it’s not clear to me that Greer is trying to find a justification, versus make an observation. For example, I could write the same thing in scientific form:
“Research has shown that men from bad situation X have a Y% greater chance of being involved in domestic violence”
and there’s no implication at all and nor does it excuse the domestic violence.
“It’s very easy to get out of touch with a place when you’re away from it.”
I had the opposite experience actually — my feeling was that very littles changes in Australia (and NZ, even less!), although of course Greer has had a few more years away to miss out on changes that did occur (and I think things really did change until the 90s when a new social equilibrium seems to have been found).
This post, along with most of the media, is attacking and responding to what Greer ’seems’ to be saying rather than engaging with her actual argument.
If you saw her on Q&A the other night, and perhaps if we all read her tract, Greer is in no way condoning bad behaviour or excusing the perpetrators. She is arguing that in our search for solutions we cannot continue to ignore this fundamental problem. We need to find ways to move forward. Listening would be a good start.
But hey, it’s always simpler to shoot the messenger.
I think that LE is right on the money here . when it comes down to understanding Greer we should not ignore the fact that she is an unreconstructed Marxist and that she lives on the other side of the planet (and has done so for 40 years) Greer is not offering any solutions for the problem here and her explanation of aboriginal male behaviour is just patronising and simply wrong.
Conrad, I think you’re right about the 90s. I spent several long stints away from Oz, and am now a permanent ‘refugee’. Each time it got stranger (and harder) to return. This was especially the case when I disappeared off to Italy for long stints and went months without speaking much English.
That said, I did notice some fairly basic errors in Greer’s piece for the SMH - Thomas wasn’t the first black justice on the SCOTUS, Marshall was, and Katter has no base in the NT that I’m aware of. I’m curious to see what John H has to say about her medical comments.
Kim, before writing this post, I closely read Greer’s essay On Rage which is exerpted in the post. I haven’t read her entire book, however.
As I say in the post, as an explanation of why violence occurs, I think her argument is justifiable. The fact that indigenous communities all over the world which have been colonised by different groups at different times have similar problems shows that obviously, colonisation causes these problems. So far, so good.
Nor do I seek to deny that indigenous communities have suffered terribly in the last 200 years, or seek to downplay that suffering. Indeed, I think that acknowledging that is a very important part of healing and moving forward.
But if Greer is providing an explanation not an excuse then I think her essay was ill-written and failed to convey that adequately. I didn’t see her on Q&A, but just went off what she wrote in her essay. To me, it read like something which sought to absolve Aboriginal men of personal responsibility for their actions. Yes, colonisation has destroyed their culture, and there has been violence, dispossession, death and rape. But there is a choice in how one moves on. One can either say, “It’s the whitefellas fault” and wait for someone else to fix it, or you can take personal responsibility.
The last 30 years have been an exercise in whitefellas trying to fix the problem and it hasn’t been working. What I think is needed is adequate mental health, alcoholism and counselling support services to help people take personal responsibility.
I suppose my perspective comes from watching various people struggle with mental illness and addiction. My own observation is that there is a limit to what I can usefully achieve. I can be there to support, but I can’t make them better. Ultimately, that’s their choice.
The same analysis applies to the indigenous situation. We can be there to support, but we can’t make it better without the people we are trying to help wanting to get better. The way I read Greer’s analysis, she argued that it had to be whitefellas who fixed the problem because aboriginal men were consumed by rage. I don’t agree. It has to be a joint effort, not a unilateral effort.
I am no fan of Greer but I was impressed with some of her comments on Q & A last week. However she seems to labour under the Freudian\psychoanalytic concept that to change behavior we must first understand the causes of that behavior. I don’t agree with that, if only because one can spend years searching for the causes of behavior and still be guessing. To be fair to Greer many people still cling to this psychotherapeutic concept. For a few people understanding what they *think* is the cause of their behavior does seem to help but those tend to be exceptions.
I lean more towards that dreaded behaviorism and think that strategies needs to be directly aimed at modification of present behavior. Sadly, because these aboriginal behavior problems have become so deeply entrenched across generations it is going to be very difficult to institute change. It will probably require a generational approach to the problem because too many aboriginal adults have been raised in an environment that strongly facilitates all sorts of aberrant behavior. Thankfully Rudd appears to have recognised the need for a generational approach.
The psychologist Alexander was visiting an addiction lab one day and seeing all the rats in the cages thought to himself: if I was stuck in a cage all day I’d want to get high too. So he created Rat Park, which was more like a Rat Paradise. In this environment even previously addicted rats would not drink the opium tainted water. A famous study on British public servants found that the lower down the command chain and the more repetitive and mundane work performed correlated with rates of atherosclerosis. Studies on primates have found that those lower on the social hierarchy have altered dopamine receptor densities, in particular the dopamine D2 receptor, this receptor being strongly implicated in addictive behaviors. A New Zealand study found that those with a specific allele for the HT2A and serotonin transporter, together with significant early childhood trauma, were quite vulnerable to depression.
At present I can only engage in arm waving but the foregoing demonstrates that environmental conditions and in particular early childhood conditions can strongly predispose individuals towards undesirable behaviors. This is not just a problem for aborigines but also raises serious questions about our prison structures and the perpetuation of generational ghettos that arise in many First World environments. This is where I disagree with the authors of The Bell Curve, they underestimate the importance of parental SES on childrens’ future prospects and over emphasise IQ, though SL is an interesting exception in this regard. (The caveat here is that she is extraordinarily intelligent and who knows what might have happened had her dyslexia not being recognised.) We can stomp and shout about individual responsibility all we like but for individuals who have been subject to these conditions it is largely falling on deaf ears. There is a biological substrate to their destructive behaviors and that is extremely difficult to address.
Perhaps the biggest mistake was the creation of these outback communities where aborigines could purportedly preserve their traditional lifestyle. Isolated, lacking resources and services, not being able to engage in productivity activity, these are conditions that are disastrous for any individual. I know that from personal experience, I have only recently recovered from several years of a visual problem that made it impossible for me to work and all but destroyed my hopes of future employment. It is bad enough being a freak but compounded with the loss of employment and purpose for so long is devastating and I’m still not confident I can recover from that. For many aborigines in these communities it must be much worse so I am not surprised that they have all but given up hope for a better future. It might be interesting to compare the success rate of aborigines raised in urban settings and these communities. By “success” here I do not mean necessarily mean gainful employment and economic success but also that they demonstrate a range of behaviors that are positive and uplifting not only for the individual aborigine but for those around them.
My own perspective on this issue is quite despairing. I believe that for many adult aborigines it is too late to hope for complete recovery. The challenge lies in providing the best possible environment for the upcoming generation. The problem there is immense because it is the current aboriginal adults who largely determine that environment.
Sorry SL but I can’t perceive any easy solutions to this problem. I am not sufficiently aware of Greer’s perspective on this issue so I have provided my perspective. As the above demonstrates, even my precious behaviorist orientation is woefully inadequate. I can only suggest that the politicians and economists get out of the way and let the anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists become the principle constructors of interventions to help aboriginal people. I am probably being too fatalistic about this issue but in my defense history is on my side.
Finally, a holocaust survivor once commented: If a tragedy brings people together it hasn’t been that tragic. The implication is that when conditions become truly terrifying, morals and concerns about others are quickly forgotten. In “Man’s Search for Meaning”, the holocaust survivor Frankl noted that those who survived the camps were typically those that had hope, either a family out there waiting for them or some other purpose in their lives. Aborigines are confronted with a tragedy of immense proportions.
Legal Eagle, I don’t doubt your good faith in all this but I do doubt that strategies that are targeted towards mental health issues and addiction are likely to be effective here because the problem is the entire situation of the communities rather than individual pathology.
The question that you need to answer is what happens after individuals take responsibility? In many cases we’re talking about lives destroyed and blighted by alcohol and drugs, and functional illiteracy at best, and people ravaged by disease.
In addition, I think the thrust of your argument is identical to what Greer was criticising - an avoidance of any real responsibility on our part and a one-sided demand. That’s not obviated by suggesting various forms of assistance - because in practice such assistance is not and never will be provided because it is too expensive and we don’t want to pay for it. We need to come to terms with that.
I also wanted to make the point - wrt the question in the title - that feminism implies an understanding of the totality of gender relations which includes male behaviour. Your criticism of Behrendt for articulating something that is true - and that she would bemoan - really does leave me struggling to see that you’re distinguishing between facts and value judgements here.
In addition, to reinforce the point I was making above, to pick a less emotive instance of intervention, I’d refer to my post on some other research conducted by Behrendt - on the effectiveness of welfare quarantining in achieving its aim of increasing school attendance and outcomes. The point made is that parental “responsibility” is only a small factor - according to the evidence - in ensuring that kids go to school. More important are health and the quality of schooling itself. Those things are very much in the domain of the state, but the money isn’t spent, and the problem - in quite an ideological way - is pushed back on the parents as if “responsibility” can cure all ills. It cannot.
More broadly, the entire paper I discussed is worth reading because it turns a very skeptical eye on all the arguments for mutual obligation. Even those who would support this framework would benefit, I think, from testing that support against challenging counter-evidence and analysis.
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/08/15/mutual-obligation-and-indigenous-policy/
Kim, thank you for pointing me to your post and to Behrendt’s article; I hadn’t had a chance to read either before I wrote my post.
I don’t think our positions are so far apart. I certainly wouldn’t advocate just “leaving” indigenous people to sort out their own problems. I think if people are to change their lives, it is crucial that they receive proper medical, social and schooling services to enable them to do that in the first place. Also, it’s not just an individual thing, it’s a community thing as well.
So Behrendt and McCausland’s article is very interesting, because it makes the point that without adequate support, and without addressing underlying problems, personal responsibility doesn’t work any more than any other approach. You can’t function well at school if your ears are too blocked to hear anything the teacher is saying, or if your stomach is empty.
So I’d agree: personal responsibility doesn’t achieve much if you don’t have adequate support, resources and infrastructure. Obviously, it’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be quick. As John says, there are generations of psychologically and physically damaged people here.
I suppose my own position would be a middle way, where the obligations of the government to provide adequate services and support were fulfilled, but I still think that we can’t unilaterally fix any of these problems without acknowledging that ultimately, responsibility lies with the people themselves to effect change.
Greer’s piece annoyed me because I read it as saying “It’s settler Australia’s fault if indigenous men are violent towards their families, we can’t expect them to be able to control themselves given the terrible history of colonisation.” Perhaps that’s not what she meant (as I say, I didn’t see her on Q&A, I just went off her essay) but if so, she needed to state her position more clearly.
I hear what you’re saying, LE. I don’t read Greer that way.
The missing link in your formulation it seems to me is that in the current set up individual responsibility is demanded, but communal responsibility - that is to say co-determination and consultation about what should occur - is too often lacking. I think experience in this area shows that if that’s absent, things will fall far short of expectations.
that is to say co-determination and consultation about what should occur - is too often lacking.
As a friend of mine preparing to do her Masters in Public Health commented: first rule of Public Health 101: if you don’t get the community involved in the planning you may as well not bother.
Kim, we’re playing all around the blog houses here - I’ve finished up responding to you on the LP thread - need to do better blog cross-referencing…
Yes, that was my problem with the NT intervention - no consultation with the community, just barging in. Such a thing is destined to fail.
The other thing is that people must actually want help - if you offer them “help” which isn’t needed or which is inappropriate, there’s no need to bother.
LE, we’re in furious agreement then! Except about Greer - but I’m suspending judgement o her argument as a whole until I get the chance to read the book.
SL, yep!
Have now cross posted to you at LP, Kim - I’ve been in and out all weekend, which explains the sporadic nature of my responses to threads. Whoops, and I was supposed to be resting, although I certainly wasn’t up to anything too energetic.
Cheers, LE, saw that!
Couldn’t detect Greer excusing male violence against women in aboriginal communities from the quotes listed here. I think the outrage you’ve expressed does her a considerable disservice. Having Iain Hall jump on your bandwagon to blast out a few bum notes does you a disservice.
Well I followed the links and watched Greer on Lateline here and didn’t see anything that I thought compromised her feminism. As she pointed out, the essay is about Rage, the use of the example of Aboriginal communities in Australia was one of several. She is not, nor has she claimed to be a specialist in indigenous cultures, or in neurophysiology and her primary gripe seems to be her disagreement with treating the social disfunction of these communities as a result of grief rather than rage. She has also been careful to point out that there is some evidence (not conclusive) that the social violence may have existed prior to colonisation so Rage is unlikely to be the entire cause [anyone else having a '28 Days Later' moment?]. Will have to look for her Q&A performance online.
I’d be interested to read the full essay, though I am disappointed by the clear factual errors from someone who went through Cambridge. Her ideas are interesting but undermined by sloppy research.
Lad Litter, first and last ad-hom warning.
Iain is dyslexic (like me) but (unlike me) doesn’t work so hard at correcting technical errors. Some of his insights are very high quality indeed, but obscured by problems with spelling and style. I’m willing to put in the extra effort to understand where he’s coming from (even when I disagree). So should you. His point about Greer’s long residence away from Australia is a valid one, and one I made myself.
Her continual wading into issues about which she knows very little (along with the predictable bite-back from Australians who don’t like her) is one of the less edifying annual spectacles engaged in between Australia and the UK (give me the cricket and rugby league Ashes any day). As someone in almost identical circumstances - an intellectual rejected by and large in Australia on a scholarship to Oxbridge - it’s something I hope to avoid in the future.
Actually Helen I am not Dyslexic but my spelling is crap (because It does not come naturally to me) But I do work rather hard at getting on top of this problem anyway.
thanks for the kind words about my insights though.
“Iain is dyslexic (like me)”
Why don’t I put in a diagnosis here? Neither of you are dyslexic. No-one that can write blog entries, books, etc. is dyslexic. You might be slow readers, make spelling errors, but you are _not_ dyslexic. Perhaps you once were poor readers, but you arn’t now. People (and parents) love to think this of their kids even when it isn’t true.
As a comparison, the bottom 5% or so of kids that really are dyslexic in English speaking countries can’t even read or write at all, or they are limited to mainly high frequency words (nonwords, like scloblle, murphet, zigout, or irregular words like aisle, pint, are extra fun).
In adults, I wouldn’t even consider you dyslexic if you were reading at less than about 700 words per second — and that’s awfully slow. If you have poor spelling, well, you’re just like 40% or so of the rest of the English speaking population.
Well unlike you Conrad, she can at least read Wikipedia…
Conrad, you may be a sharp fella, but last time I looked you weren’t a neurologist, from where I have a diagnosis as recent as March last year (necessary for Oxford’s disabilities unit). I was diagnosed at 10 (also by a neurologist) due to inability to write or spell my own name. I hide most of my technical errors by a clever bit of software that detects my mistakes.
Maybe I don’t fit your experience of dyslexia, but I think I can be pretty confident of my diagnosis.
SkepticLawyer, I understand neither the dyslexia reference that follows your warning and how it relates to my comment, nor the warning itself.
I have to go to bed, and I’m more than a little annoyed with where this thread has gone, so I’m closing it until I either get back from training tomorrow, or LE comes back.
Lad Litter, as I say, different people read things in different ways. I’m not the only one: Tracee Hutchison obviously read it the same way as I did. If I were Greer, I’d add something saying more explicitly that I did not condone rage which resulted in injury to women and children.
Perhaps she thought it was self-evident that she objected to such conduct…just as I thought it was self-evident when I first wrote this post that I supported proper governmental support. Obviously it wasn’t evident from the initial criticisms, so I have clarified that.
So: maybe Greer wasn’t saying what I thought she was saying. I’m willing to concede that, and suspend judgement for the moment. But I do think that she didn’t write her piece well enough if two intelligent women read it in the same way. Writing a blog post in haste is one thing, but writing an academic essay in haste is another.
I don’t think she’s a bad person. But on reflecting on this over the last day, I do think she’s a person who fires off an opinion without thinking through fully how it might be received (or misreceived) (think of the Irwin piece), and then gets into trouble afterwards.
On the point that Greer is an expat weighing into things which don’t concern her - I don’t have a problem with that. Absence from one’s country can give you a different perspective. Possibly a more objective one sometimes?
That being said, I do know that when I lived in the UK for 4 years, I had a particular idea of what Australia was “like”. By the time I’d come back, Australia had moved on in many respects and my impression of Australia was out of date. So one does have to be wary.
f you were reading at less than about 700 words per second
Who is dyslexic???
—
Greer is no dill, she knows that if you want to create an issue you have to be controversial. While that may lead to some outrageous claims on her part, it does bring attention to the issue. I sometimes wonder if this wily woman is a tough nut who is prepared to cop some flak for the sake of a cause.
Fine, LE. You have clarified and I share your view on Greer in that she gives so many of her most trenchant critics so much ammunition. In this case, not as much as it would have seemed at first. Now, seeing as how SkepticLawyer is tucked up in bed, could you attempt an explanation as to why I was given a warning by her and how dyslexia came into any of this?
Lad Litter, I’d say it was having a go at Iain just cos he’s Iain, rather than saying what precisely you disagreed with in his comment. I disagree with Iain on many things, but if he has a valid point, I’ll consider it with the same respect that I’d consider anyone else’s opinion.
The dyslexia thing comes from the fact that people often have a go at Iain for typos and spelling mistakes - perhaps SL thought you were attacking him on that basis? I’m not sure.
My personal point of view is that I don’t care if the Lord High Poomba of RWDBs comes and agrees with my point of view. That in and of itself is not a consideration which will make me change my mind. I take my own counsel and have my very own wing as a result.
However, if someone (like Kim) comes along and respectfully points out some issues and arguments which I might have missed, I’m more than happy to rethink/clarify my opinion - which I did in this case.
Sometimes I miss details in things because I’m a natural speed reader (untrained). My Mum is too - obviously it’s genetic. So when I’m reading complex legal things, I have to slow down and take written notes just to make sure that I don’t miss anything! So reading slowly can actually be advantageous in some contexts!
Okay no worries warning noted, my reference to Iain’s agreement with your post was smart-alecky. Bum notes was referring to his description of Greer as Marxist; and expat and her arguments as patronising; and wrong; There were no typos in Iain’s comment and I wouldn’t have a go at him (or anyone else) for that anyway. That’s the domain of commercial radio shock jocks and their blogosphere equivalents.
That’s all good then. The difficulty in blogging is that it’s so easy for things to be misread. And people read their own agendas into things.
I’m prepared to admit I might have done that with Greer. I get very sensitive to any suggestion that young male indigenous rage is excusable because an indigenous student of mine had her place trashed by some indigenous lads and had a nervous breakdown as a result. She had already been abused by her mother and by her foster families, so it was the straw the broke the camel’s back. I feel very strongly that the rage of those blokes was misdirected and inexcusable, and perhaps that’s what got me arced up!
Hi,
sorry if I was appearing rude — I wasn’t intending too. I was just surprised that you could go from being a dyslexic to what you are now . That’s very unusual in my books (sorry I also should have also said 700ms per word), which made me wonder (people constantly call themselves dyslexic based on poor definitions — there’s a big difference between reading/writing poorly, which is very common, and being dyslexic. We often get diagnoses where I work for dyslexia from various places, but if I check the people out myself these are inevitably incorrect — most people with dyslexia of course never get to university).
Incidentally, I realize the probability of me knowing about neuroscience and dyslexia is really low, but in fact, this is one of the areas I do know about really well — I promise
If you don’t believe me, you can look here if you are really interested:
http://opax.swin.edu.au/~cperry/Papers.htm
I notice that one of my papers is also in the rather problematic Wikipedia entry also.
Yes Conrad,
I remember a prior discussion sometime ago wherein someone cited a paper claiming that high numbers of business people claimed on self report questionnaires that they were dyslexic. I responded that this was unlikely and people often thought they had dyslexia or or ADHD. I think it was you who replied that in trials one could obtain a control group simply be selecting those who claimed they were dyslexic.
BTW, I am no expert in neurophysiology. And for the sake of brevity I did not go into stress response dysregulation, serotonin dysregulation, and perhaps most critically, the relationship between childhood environment and nutrition as these impact on cerebral maturation.
I know another very smart law grad who suffers from diagnosed dyslexia too. I’d say it’s more common than it would at first appear. She also gets around it with software and spellcheckers…although sometimes when she picks the wrong spellcheck option this can backfire…
Ooo, linguistics. Shiny!
I love linguistics. It fascinates me.
Loved first year linguistics at UQ back in the days Rodney Huddleston (Dictionary of Grammar) was still teaching and am seriously tempted to follow it up now I live next to Edinburgh Uni as it’s one of the few UK faculties teaching it at undergraduate level. Linguistics professors also seem to make some of the most interesting authors.
Australia treats its genuinely eccentric intellectuals shockingly - that’s why they leave.
Indeed. If they’re mild-mannered, middlebrow, mildewed milquetoast (yawn) then they’re awroite in ‘Straya ’cause they don’t make us feel loike the pack of dumb shits we are.
Example. Tom Wolfe wears white suits because back in the early 60s he had a summer suit made of material too heavy for summer. But it was beautiful suit so he wore it in winter.
Course all the 5th Ave stiffos ummed and arred so of course he kept wearing white suits.
In this country they would’ve shouted him down as being a wanker and told him to ‘wroite nawmal ahhtuculls’ for the papers. And then he would’ve moved away. So this icon of contemporary dandyism and one of the great innovators in journalism would never’ve prospered here.
Still happens. Or rather, still doesn’t.
Surely a fundamental tenet of being a feminist is that one does not support violence towards women by men, and does not make excuses for it?
Well I think that’s true LE. But excusing things is not the same as explaining them. They’re often confused. A lot of people attempting to make rational, cool-headed, sense of 9/11 were attacked for being ‘understanding’ toward ‘Evil’.
It’s an unfortunate attribute of human (and other animal) existence that individuals deals with blows reigning down on their heads from farther up the food chain by passing them on down.
I haven’t read anything Greer’s done really since The Madwoman’s Underclothes so I’m not certain whether she’s trying to ‘excuse’ their behavior. There is a tension between social causes and the individual responsibility in explaining high rates of violence amongst Aboriginal Australians.
Oftentimes the arguments meet each other in dead opposition. They shouldn’t. Both are pertinent. Our country bears a certain responsibility for the plight of its indigenous citizenry. We need to square with that.
But I agree with you wholeheartedly - that doesn’t give a wifebeater a get-out-of-jail card simply because he’s Aboriginal. Or it shouldn’t.
I commend to all the essay from Marcia Langton that points out just how racist Germane “proud Marxist ” Greer’s essay on rage actually is I quote her conclusion.
As a social commentator Greer has done her dash, Having repeatedly chosen abortion over having children she now reaps the reward that such things bring, namely being alone and bitter in her old age. She repeatedly demonstrates that she knows nothing of the lives of real people, nothing of the lives of the ordinary women she purports to argue for. But the arrogance and hubris that is so evident in her essay on indigenous rage shatters her last shard of credibility. Frankly the world will be a better place when Greer shuts up about the things that knows bugger all about or when she draws her last breath.
Cheers Comrades
sorry quote from here
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24202631-7583,00.html
“the world will be a better place when Greer shuts up about the things that knows bugger all about or when she draws her last breath”
Wishing someone dead really elevates the debate, doesn’t it Iain? I wonder if Skeptic Lawyer might feel like withdrawing her recommendation to put in the extra effort to understand where you’re coming from after that one.
Follow the thread, try to comprehend what’s written there and put your stupid obsessive prejudices aside.
Lad Litter
Greer has based her entire career on her hate spewing misandry. With her foray into the problems within our indigenous subculture she has added patronising racism to her CV. My comment here is actually a cut and paste from my post this morning at my own blog written after reading Marcia Langton’s essay in the Oz this morning. I am sorry if you read my comment as actually wishing Greer immediately dead, my intention was to make the point that thinkers and polemicists of Greer’s ilk are actually an anachronism in this day and age and that the world will be a better place when they realise that their moment has passed or when they eventually cark it .
Cheers mate
Germaine Greer is not a “scholar”. She is an ill-informed termagant, who is projecting HER rage onto aboriginal men. She just had the unbelievably good fortune to be able to trade on her cheekbones and her polemical masterpiece The Female Eunuch for fifty years. Her decision to abandon scholarship in favour of celebrity and op-ed bloviating has proven to be extremely shrewd given her limited scholarly potential; she has made a motza and good luck to her!
She is the very worst of Luvvie - an English teacher-type Marxist - who does not seem even to realise just how clulesss she is. She knows three-fifths of fuck-all about aborigines - let alone aboriginal male rage - largely because she is clueless about men fullstop.
On Q&A, she was like a car accident, horrifying to behold but we can’t help craning our necks to gawk. The dopey bint knew nothing about the Russia/Georgia contretemps and revealed a child-like ignorance of geopolitics in general.
Her comments on aborigines are ridiculous, ignorant, and racist.
Thank god she lives in England!
“they eventually” instead of “the…” in the penultimate line
damn my spelling
Unlike thinkers and polemicists of YOUR ilk, Iain
What have you got against Me LL?
Legal Eagle
I wouldn’t give any credence to Larissa Behrendt. She never fails to write incoherently. This should not surprise as she is a product of the Critcal Legal/Race Studies cult.
Again, JG, I take people on a case by case basis - no pre-conceptions - I just read what they have actually written this time. The report written by Behrendt is well-written and makes sense. Not a hint of critical race studies in it - more empirical than theoretical. If it read like nonsense, I wouldn’t hesitate to say so with alacrity.
Iain, I am heartened that Marcia Langton read Greer’s piece in the same way I did. It seems to me that the essay is ambiguous and capable of two different readings. Still, I’ll wait to see the book before I draw any final conclusions about what Greer is saying. It may be that it has more details or qualifications?
Apart from that, she’s OK, eye, John Greenfield?
That “unbelievably good fortune” came quite deservedly. She has woken up Oz from a deep stupor and told them that the phlegm in their throat best be spat out than held back and cultured. She has told the rest of the world the same. Oz and the world should feel very fortunate that she, like Socrates, some two and a half thousand years earlier has acted like a wasp, biting at us, waking us up, making us jerk-and-shove, thinking and acting for a change and towards a change. But, alas, Oz and the world, is still inhabited by large pachyderms with even thicker crania, with inflexible minds and tightened hearts.
She has made one single and very correct comment about Georgia and from that you inferred that she… “revealed a child-like ignorance of geopolitics in general.”
Have you even read “The Female Eunuch?” or anything else of hers for that matter?
Because you blame someone for knowing “fuck all” about something perhaps you ought to make sure you can’t be accused of the being equally as ignorant.
I’ve never read so much misogynistic, anti-intellectual bile and drivel in my life!
Not a scholar indeed!
I must admit L E that I think that you have a greater tolerance for Greer than I do! While I would make the effort to read her book if and when I could borrow it from the library the thought of actually enriching her by actually spending money on buying the book is just to masochistic for me to contemplate.
I sincerely think that she could not add much of substance that would make the faulty premises of the essay any more legitimate by the sheer weight of verbiage in a longer treatment of her ideas.
Oh, I don’t think I will actually BUY her book! I’ll borrow it from the library when it becomes available. After all, money is tight when you’re off work, and I’d prefer to spend money on a fun book (eg, SF).
I think it’s fair to suspend judgement until I have the fullest possible version of someone’s argument. This is just my preliminary judgement, as it were.
glad to hear hat you won’t actually buy her book LE
It would’ve been more credible if Langton had actually applied this research of which she speaks to Greer’s polemic in a way that demonstrates an actual factual inconsistency.
It’s interesting how so much commentary has been generated by us and we’ve none of us really read the book. Methinks I’ll stop by Borders on the way home and peruse the volume.
Germaine Greer is a Marxist? That’s a first for me? Did I miss an elephant?
She called herself a Marxist in the Q&A interview, presumably to get a rise out of Carr and Bishop (it didn’t work - they both ignored it). I’m not sure she meant it to be taken seriously, although I must admit I don’t like it when people throw the ‘I’m a Marxist’ tagline around so casually. As far as I’m concerned it’s tantamount to labelling oneself a Nazi in public (supporter of a vicious and murderous ideology), and should be treated accordingly.
The whole show is worth watching just to see people scurry back to the safety of entrenched positions. The one really intelligent comment actually came from Greg Sheridan, who is usually a serial dill (a stopped clock is right twice a day, I suppose).
Someone asked whether feminism was the most successful revolution of the 20th century. Sheridan commented that revolutions are horrific things that leave piles of corpses everywhere, and that something positive like feminism (’allowing women to be treated as free human individuals’) should not even be mentioned in the same breath. That was a fair point, I thought.
Well Greer is a genuine scholar, but her field is English Literature not sociology or even the dreaded ‘wimmins studies’ (SL and I actually first met in an argument over whether Feminist Philosophy actually existed in the UQ Philosophy Dept. tearoom - we both said no). It’s the fact she’s a genuine Professor that makes the factual errors niggle so much as she should know better. I don’t buy the ‘not qualified to comment’ argument as I have a deep suspicion of those “properly authorised to comment” after SL’s experience in Australia many years back. If there’s an outrageous injustice then being human makes you qualified to speak out, though you do bear the burden of proper research or you risk undermining your argument as Greer has done. Again though, her primary argument in this essay is on rage vs. guilt with the Aboriginal examples peppered in as one of several samples, though I note with dismay she has also written an entire book called “White Fella Jump Up” on Aboriginal problems in the past. I do wonder if the opprobrium heaped on her this time around is actually more about her previous book than this little essay.
Episode 13 of Q&A featuring Greer (with that silly Marxist comment) can be watched here. The relevant conversation is in the latter half of the hour long program.
Thanks for that link, DEM.
SL, the point Greer made about her marxism in that Q&A program -the only point about her “marxism”- was to show where it affects her mental modus operandi: “Reality first, Ideology, second. I know that Marxism -I being one of them in my own churlish and conservative way - has had a bad press attack since its inception, more intensified during the cold war but these days, in the soft, middle class couches of the current generation, it means little more than a mental tactic; one which no longer has the blistering rush of dogma that it used to. Forget the word and forget the history of the word. Examine the woman’s utterances. Personally, only a few utterances here and there in all I’ve read from her, were either beyond my mental agility or I disagreed with; and of course, that doesn’t mean other readers would not have difficulty elsewhere in her belief system.
Her shorter version of her leaflet on… http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/08/01/1217097533898.html (thank you LE!) …reflects her views on the need to understand “grief” and to address it but, in order to get to the big, the most damaging problem, the problem that manifests itself in suicide and barbaric behaviour towards one’s close ones on need to examine “rage:” its seed, its womb, its growth, its devastating effect to its owner and to those around him/her. Suicide, by that thinking, emanates from rage and not from grief. If I had anything to add to that analysis -and I would find the courage necessary to do such a thing a most elusive attribute in me- I would say that grief and rage are interwoven and, perhaps even, undetachable from each other, perhaps the former, unless treated, might be the parent of the latter; but I’m only guessing here and guessing adds little to research
In any case, I can follow Greer’s core assertions with no problem at all: Rage paralyses the mind. Perhaps only for a short time or perhaps for a long time. So far though, the only way whitefella treated blackfella rage is with guns, whips and lengthy imprisonment or sleazey and ineffectual tipping of buckets of money where, once again, whitefella made the profit and blackfella sucked the grief and the rage.
Her solution -if anyone should expect a solution in this instant- is to ask the men what it is that would placate their rage. Try to find how, really, whitefella can help. We would probably get an answer that we would not like and that would be fair but in my opinion, it would be fair and valid. I can see them say, “Piss off out of my country!” Or at least some of them would.
I think Greer was a great thinker in her younger days and women like her played a vital role in getting women on a more equal footing with men. But maybe intellectuals are like scientists in that their best work is usually done by the time they reach 25.
Greer now reminds of the bevy of retired scientists who screech and squawk about the “global warming hoax”.
As GregM over at LP has shown, Greer’s contemporaneous writings are littered with ridiculous errors, not to mention the questionable quality of her arguments. I feel a little sad for Greer, a woman who only recently made a goose of herself on Big Brother (what was she thinking!), but I have less tolerance for those of my comrades on the Left who reflexively defend her and dismiss her critics as sexist or reactionaries or whatever else grabs their fancy rather than engaging the arguments.
BTW, this blog is a credit to both LE and SL!
Golly, there is some bigotry at this site!Greer declares her Marxist, eg crit theory approach, (at least she has one, beyond ad hoc Hansonist knee-jerk!) and we get post after post of, McCarthyite “drown the witch” bigotry.
Then we get fed more self-presentative, wilful in the face of explained fact, nonsense, that continues the insistance that a small group of scapegoats are not (largely) victims of a pathology imposed upon them by history and white neglect and brutality, but unlike all the rest of us, willfully wicked.
Then to top it all, the nasty and spiteful peice of work, Langton, is cited as witness for the prosecution, while the real v illains of the peice, the grasping developers, politicians, ideologues and big business so representative of the underlying pathology , are let off scot free, as muddled blog and media souls rush forth to embrace the Tony Abbott “Blame the Victim” middle class approach to welfare scapegoatism. The intrinsic wickedness and sloth of the target group in their outrageous usurping of middle class mortgage-belt tax cuts for actual survival, against the upkeep of lifestyle of narcissistic, botoxed, four wheel driving, gym club membering, coke snorting, hair-gelled, wine bibbing, restaraunt gormande poseurs.
For a closer look at a real look at OZ in micro, can this writer commend this weeks 4 Corners”, on dysfuctional Port Hedland, to fellow villagers.?
Thanks for confirming my point, Paul
Thank you Melaleuca, for the compliment - it’s great when people enjoy our blog.
Paul:
I presume you’re a soft sciences graduate as i recall the same lingo in class. Am I right?
Well I went and had a squiz at On Rage last night. Borders is great. Unlike a lot of other bookstores it is a library. I didn’t buy the book. But in Carlton at least it’s doing well. Only one left where there had been 20. Interestingly it’s stacked in the ‘fiction’ section not ‘Australian politics’.
Anyway.
I did scan the book. I use the method outlined in Wayne Hudson’s lecture: “How To Read A Book in 15 Minutes” which I hope he’s still giving somewhere.
It’s a short book . I was looking for a few things. But there were two main goals.
One was to find out what feminist faction the book’s polemic could be associated with - social constructivist or those few heretics who understand there’s something called nature and it matters. I was pleased to read that in explicating rage she described it as a physiological phenomena with physiological consequences.
The other goal was to investigate Legal Eagle’s claim that:
On Rage is a polemical work coming square from the ‘black armband’ view of history. Greer is not interested in exploring Aboriginal culpability in the nasty business that dominates discourse on the subject at present. So, indeed, we get a big dose of The White Man is a Shit.
It is, however, not accurate to describe Greer as a ‘luvvie’ as John Greenfield did. The ‘luvvies’ insofar as this term is useful, where universally full of Joy the day Kevvie said: ’sorry’. I myself expressed cynicism and was roundly treated as a partypooper at LP for doing so.
Hah! Greer does it too. She think it was a bit of symbolism designed to make white people feel better.
The book begins by describing a parliamentary speech by Bob Katter on the ALP’s underperformance in managing the environmental degradation in rural Qld. The speech was given in barely controlled rage. She describes her own rage in the face of a Media Guy at a dinner party poo-pooing indigenous people.
Rage is natural. We know rage. Rage can wrestle control from Reason. Right?
She describes rage as a physiological phenomena that we control socially. But, that, as a society we sometimes tolerate. Even if it has dire consequences.
To demonstrate this she alludes to the ‘fact’ (and would learned counsel correct me if she’s wrong) that provocation is a defense against a homicide charge in England. That a man who is frustrated, driven to despair, beholden of massive stores of pent-up rage; and who then kills his wife in a furious argument - that this man: in many of the jurisdictions of the English speaking world may use his rage as a defense. He may walk free.
This is possible, she writes. She does not excuse this behaviour.
It is no longer possible in the Australian states of Victoria or Tasmania where provocation has been eliminated from the legislation as a mitigating factor in dealing with domestic violence. <i<And she congratulates these states for doing this.
She applauds.
She does not repeat clearly that Aboriginal men are subject to these same laws. But she is a controversialist, she knows people will sensationalize her and twist her words. And she’s also aware that there is already quite a lot of talk about the culpability of Aboriginal men. She’s not going there. She’s reiteratting the culpability of society.
And she does it well. I was full of ‘yes, buts’ as I perused this book here and there but it is well researched, there’s a comprehensive command of several fields pertinent to the subject. It’s a reasoned and very well written polemic. I forgot that Dr Greer writes so well.
I haven’t read the whole book, nor considered criticisms by others who’ve done likewise. I can’t comment on the validity of her claims nor can I judge to what extent she distorts the whole picture. As a partisan polemic she will inevitably be doing just that. Join the club.
However it is simply not true that she is ‘excusing violence’. She regards the violence of Aboriginal men as destructive, crazy and stupid. She’s seen it first hand and describes it quite well.
She also regards it as the product of history as something irrational but understandable and anyway ever present. Not likely to go away soon.
I myself believe that its useless to adopt guilt ridden metaracist stances toward this problem, a problem so ingrained amongst certain Aborigines that there may, as Greer writes, not be a solution. I belive that those who criticize perpetual subsidization of Aboriginal ethnicities are correct. No good comes there.
But whatever the truth of various factoids massed by ideologically motivated partisans in the Culture Wars it’s pretty undeniably that Aboriginal people the world over have been fucked over badly. The results are the same everywhere.
And there are consequences one of these is rage.
As far as I’m concerned it’s tantamount to labelling oneself a Nazi in public (supporter of a vicious and murderous ideology), and should be treated accordingly.
Humbly disagree. It’s undeniable that Marxism has created the most successfully murderous states in history however there is a contradiction between the ideology’s intentions and its consequences.
Marx, like Roussaeu or Plato, was one of these people who thought they had The Answer to Everything. Well actually Roussaeu and Plato did, Marx endeavoured to come up with Answer and failed. And he knew he failed.
He was an idealist who dreamt he was a materialist; a scientist. Marx’s errors are the errors of Marxism.
But Marxists themselves weren’t murderous generally speaking. Nominally Marxist strongmen and professional revolutionaries like Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the rest resemble Robespierre and Napoleon more than Western Marxist intellectuals like Eric Hobsbawn or even Communist spies like the Rosenbergs.
The ideology is totalistic, like Roussaeu, like Plato and totalistic ideologies are to be avoided. Robespierre admired writers like Voltaire. So do I. But his way of applying Voltaire (or not) is, ahem, somewhat different. Snappy dresser tho’.
There was no contradiction between Nazi ideology and policy. Their revolution wasn’t betrayed. They meant to do just what they did. Fortunately they were over-confident and incautious. Unfortunately for those who suffered the Shoa we were too cautious.
That doesn’t mean that Marxists aren’t batshit in certain ways. I was always exacerbated at the British Marxists I knew at Uni who somehow thought the Sovs were okay. (??) One of ‘em once caught me reading Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and asked me, “Is he still Soviet bashing?”
“Well yes Tony,” said I, “but remember they bashed him first.”
Great book.
and totalistic ideologies are to be avoided.
You mean like: we know the best way to run an economy?
Or how about: if it isn’t a scientific explanation(and those, upon close inspection, are too often misnamed) it isn’t an explanation.
Or: if you can’t explain it reductively then you can’t explain it.
Or, if you’re a marxist or lefty or neocon or libertarian everything you say must be bunkum.
Thanks for your thoughts Adrien, always worthy of my limited attention.
Thank you Adrien: your analysis is, as always, insightful. Perhaps I need to sneak into Borders and have a 15 minute perusal too…
Thanks, Adrien for the philosophical mini-analysis.
But no thanks for the mini-analysis of “On Rage.” Had you sat down to read the book from page 1 to page 100, you’d be out of Borders within the half hour; and you’d have a more complete picture of what Greer actually said, which is so different to what you just said. Fragmenting a small piece of work like this is unworthy of a sentient adult. In fact, it’s downright mischievous.
As I was reading your… let me control my rage here… little extrication I heard myself saying “yes, but” quite a number of times. I wonder why?
Greer’s little pamphlet as a cogent, coherent and most eloquent piece of work. The best of poetry, if you like. What you’ve done was to hop from one phrase to another, like a petulant bee hopping from flower to flower, forgetting that the little honey you’ve collected is part of a huge beautiful field.
Leave Wayne Hudson’s lecture for the likes of Readers Digest, mate. It’s no way to read anything seriously. I bet you fast forwarded through the film War and Peace, ey?
Melaleuca, le, jc:
Not the same crew who leaked Sir Les Pattersons assessment of Helen Clark, are you?
Provocation (if accepted by the jury) reduces murder to manslaughter; it is not a complete defence (unlike, say, self-defence, which can - if raised by the accused and accepted by the jury - lead to someone walking free). Once again someone’s tangled up the law. I’m going to have to read this thing in gory and grisly detail now, if only to see how much bad law there is in it.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, Adrien. Good intentions don’t save Marxists from legitimate equivalence with Nazis. I’m told Heidegger and Carl Schmitt were nice chaps too (both Nazis, both eminent philosophers). All of it should be marked ‘caution: toxic, people employing in practice have been known to kill millions’.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, Adrien.
So what should I do then, take the advice of someone without good intentions?
All of it should be marked ‘caution: toxic, people employing in practice have been known to kill millions’.
And so one could say of corporations: Caution, high probability will exploit people, degrade the environment, take money off corrupt governments that kill for fun …
So what should I do then, take the advice of someone without good intentions?
They’re called politicians John, and we do it all the time.
They’re called politicians John, and we do it all the time.
Reminds me of a Simpson moment: Two political banners in the scene:
Democrats: We Can’t Govern!
GOP: We’re plain Evil!
OK, here’s a question. Assuming her arguments are correct, what constructive solutions does Greer have for dealing with the problem of indigenous male rage? I know that she says white people should help assuage that rage - but how? What should be done?
Well, LE, for one thing, she says we ought to ask the men what they want us to do. WE (whitefellas) should it because the women have neither the courage -for a mountain of reasons, and the education and the men, because, they’re perpetuating their own ill treatment. But I also don’t expect the photographer of a crime scene to solve the crime. We might get some ideas from the photograph as to how the crime has taken place and we may then direct our attention more correctly to the obvious but we cannot ask the photographer to explain all the intricacies of that crime and, indeed how to make sure that such crimes don’t recur.
Greer has many suggestions, put obliquely because that’s all she can do, as a reporter, a keen observer and student; but I would not be expecting her to say: here’s a pill -a panacea- that all aborigines can take and the problem will go away. If there were such a pill -even in our wildest corners of our fantasies- then that pill would need to be also taken by whitefella; and that, alas, is the rub, the sticking point.
The book shows in gory detail the reason for the blackfella’s rage. It’s one that would very logically happen in any society, particularly in a small, hunter-gatherer society. It also shows the symptoms of this paralysing and excruciating rage. They are what we are witnessing now. These symptoms will not go away very easily. The Oz blackfella has been struggling with that rage for around a couple of hundred years. Greer talks of societies that have been struggling through that rage for thousands of years and are still unable to conquer it -one reason being that the conquerors will have the conquered in constant dispossession. Remove them from one compound and scatter them around in other compounds. Make them fill one lot of forms and documents only to trash those and begin with a new lot of documents invented by a new bureaucrat, changing nothing or even worsening the conditions of the dispossessed. And so the cycle of infinite bullshit goes round.
Systems are set up SO AS to fail.
There are inhumane things that whitella does that are simply and very blatantly disregarded by the whitefella authorities. No point in listing them all here but one would not have to be too sensitive to sympathise with the blacks.
Really, it only took about half an hour to read the book; and I’ll be using it as a reference for ever. I have a fairly ample library and this little tract will enhance it even more.
DEM has ordered the book from Boomerang in Australia - it’s not available in a single British bookshop, not even Blackwell’s, a fact I find somewhat disturbing. I will read it and - as an adjunct - fact-check the law.
British reviewers are harder on basic errors (imagine what the TLS would do with Clarence Thomas, Katter, provocation - and those are just the ones we know about) than Australians, and I must admit GregM has done the mother of all fiskings of her Bali piece over at LP. I was astonished to see she thought Menzies declared war on Germany ahead of Chamberlain in 1939, and - even worse - that her belief in this somehow had policy implications for Australia’s conduct of the war. Talk about building a house on sand!
There does seem to come a point where failure to grasp the most elementary information about the subject one is addressing fatally undermines the rest of the argument - no matter how clever one is in other respects. I have a nasty feeling that has happened here.
I must admit I find the prospect of being a truly wide-ranging public intellectual just about nullified by Greer’s recent performances, coupled with the walking ignoramus than is Robert Manne and others of his ilk. It does seem that there is simply too much information in the world to marshal effectively across disciplines. The consequence is that there will be no more polymaths to light up the daily papers, which is sad.
I console myself, though, with the thought that there is room for the person who can explicate his discipline in accessible language - a Tim Harford or Robert Nozick. Dawkins writes beautifully and inspiringly about science, for example, but his attempt on theology in The God Delusion was shrill and under-researched. Maybe - in a world where there is simply so much to know - this is the best we can hope for.
Adrien/A.Atomou
I will give a more sober expansion of my Greer post anon, but I do not retract even one syllable. The dopey bint should be taken out the back shed and put down.
SL
Reading Dawkins’ book made me cringe for hours on end. The silly duffer does not realise that Science is a sub-discipline of Theology.
Don’t bother, John, really, not for my sake, anyhow!
Totally agree with the proposition that indigenous people should be consulted extensively about what they need/want. In fact, part of helping people to take personal responsibility should be to ask them what they want rather than to force the solution on them. Indeed, I see the NT intervention as inconsistent with the idea that people should take personal responsibility; it is the very opposite.
I am sure it is very frustrating to watch successions of ill-conceived “help” come in and make no difference at all. That has been one of the problems from the start - even those with the best intentions have presumed they know best when maybe they should have listened instead.
But I don’t see what the rage theory has to do with that point. What does it add, apart from giving people an excuse to behave badly? Maybe Greer didn’t intend it to be an excuse: but I am sure that some bully-boys will use it as an excuse.
No, LE. Greer does not excuse bad behaviour from anyone but she does give us an explanation of its source and the difficulty of managing it. I really don’t want to start cutting and posting from her book. Not only the exercise will destroy the flow of her wonderful, strong and poignant thesis but it will help very little in understanding it. We may all discuss it when we have all read it. I don’t care whether people find her a rebellious, passionate genius, like I do, or they see in her a different human being altogether; so long as they have read, with an open mind, what she has said. The “On Rage” tract bulged my eyes. Mrs At. has just finished it a few minutes ago and, she too, felt the same way. She is now reading Greer’s “The Change” (about menopause).
In my hand, I’ve got “Shakespeare’s Wife” and right from her Intro, I’m hooked. It’s not only her stunning facility with the language. It’s what she does with all of your senses: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, hands and your mind. Apart from The Female Eunuch which I’ve read the moment it was published I did not get to read anything more than short essays here and there from her, or heard disjointed interviews. These books remind me of the pleasure I felt reading her first book, the pleasure one gets when one reads an articulate mind.
t does seem that there is simply too much information
Damn right and presciently commented upon by that wonderful Jewish American writer Saul Bellow:
It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future
157
“A professor in California has estimated that on an average weekday the New York Times contains more information than any contemporary of Shakespeare would have acquired in a lifetime. I am ready to believe that this is more or less true, although I suspect that an educated Elizabethan was less confused by what he knew. He would certainly have been less agitated than we are. His knowledge cannot have lain so close to the threshold of chaos as ours.”
“What good is such a plethora of information? We have no use for most of the information given by the New York Times. It simply poisons us.”
302
“They know no more about how it all works than we do. So we are in the position of savage men who, however, have been educated into believing that they are capable of understanding.”
308
Interviewer question:
Does the adult Bellow criticize himself for this? [embracing past ideologies]
No, I don’;t see how I can. To avoid every temptation of modern life, every pitfall, one would need a distinct genius. No one could be so many kinds of genius.”
And I love this …
129
“Our way of going about thinking is not something on which we can congratulate ourselves.”
After catching up with an interview on 10 (i think?) and a monumental ad hominem from Dahvine in WSMH, am now convinced beyond doubt that my money has been on the right horse vis a vis Greer and a conclusion that a scummy right wing misrepresentation of her position has again been perpetrated.
Spot on Greer is and whether certain classes complicity makes them uncomfortable or not, I rejoice that a figure as substantial as Greer has decided to enter the fray and blow away the farrago of lies that is represented by the neo colonial antics represented in the form of the NT ” Intervention”.
Sad to see that right wing cranks have derailed at least one thread on the topic, over at LP, though.
John Greenfield -
I will give a more sober expansion of my Greer post anon, but I do not retract even one syllable. The dopey bint should be taken out the back shed and put down.
Funky cold medina (except the bit about execution going a bit too far_. Just, um, read the book ‘ey.
Reading Dawkins’ book made me cringe for hours on end. The silly duffer does not realise that Science is a sub-discipline of Theology.
Science is a sub-discipline of theology?
Mmmm ‘kay?
You should explicate this thesis at Catallaxy. Jason hasn’t lost his temper for weeks and needs too badly. As for myself try the dish. But I don’t think you’re gettin’ anywhere with that dog son. It don’t hunt.
Why don’t you like Robert Manne Skeptic?
There does seem to come a point where failure to grasp the most elementary information about the subject one is addressing fatally undermines the rest of the argument - no matter how clever one is in other respects. I have a nasty feeling that has happened here.
It should but it, very unfortunately does not. One of the depressing things about visiting the ‘Politics’ section of bookstores is that they are crowded with (mostly American) polemics that liberally deal with fact and are simply designed to preach a certain message to the converted.
The message is:
You are the Good Guys,
They are the Bad Guys;
Our story is the Right One, and Their’s is a pack of lies.
Their both packages of cherry picked fact, distortion and out and out bollocks. It’s highly dishonourable. And unfortunately we are all bred like cattle to be passively receptive to whatever takes our fancy.
‘S why I like people like John Dean, Nick Cohen and Ophelia Benson. They take their own sides to task.
Cheers for the legal clarification btw it did sound a tad hyperbolous.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, Adrien. Good intentions don’t save Marxists from legitimate equivalence with Nazis. I’m told Heidegger and Carl Schmitt were nice chaps too (both Nazis, both eminent philosophers). All of it should be marked ‘caution: toxic, people employing in practice have been known to kill millions’.
Heidegger and Schmitt are not such good examples of Nazis. Heidegger’s memoirs of his relationship with the Nazi Party are interesting. The way he tells it he realized they were psychopaths early on and ceased active involvement. He remained a member for safety reasons. In his favour he maintains that none of his students from c 1932 or so onwards became Nazis which, if true, would provide testimony to a certain ‘resistance’.
Schmitt was a Machiavellian type who harboured anti-democratic prejudices. His experiences with the Nazi party produced an interesting polemic on Political Romanticism which was highly influential amongst a certain circle I travelled amongst at Uni. I don’t buy Schmitt’s ‘I was just doing my job’ schtick. Sometimes you do have to take a side and there are limits to anything most especially patriotism. However he did learn some lessons. Maybe one day the rest of us’ll follow suit.
Schmitt’s critique applies equally to the Marxists or to anyone who eschews the complex and gritty matters of state for some Utopian Dream.
My point viz the Marxists is that altho’ they created an image of the future in which, in Orwell’s words, one imagines a boot in a human face forever, they didn’t have this in mind when they started out. This is telling because a lot of political romantics have shangri-la in their heads and end up producing mega-purgatory.
Nazis however romanticize the boot in the face. It’s what they live for. If I had a choice of dinner guests I think I’d pick the Marxist over the Nazi. Less likely to smash the dinnerware.
The importance of the distinction is debatable. I tend to think that any all-encompassing quasi-theological approach to society runs the risk of producing an autocratic nightmare whatever its content. Robespierre and St Just essentially lauded the same 18th century Enlightenment figures that I do. They ended up doing very similar things to the bolsheviks.
Voltaire’s admonitions viz free speech must be jealously guarded therefore, likewise Winston Smith’s declaration that freedom equals the ability to say 2+2=4. It’d also help if we all admitted to ourselves that no-one’s ever right about everything.
I strongly suspect that Heidegger was being - at the very least - disingenuous after the act. He was the one who started every lecture with a Nazi salute, while Schmitt recommended that there should be a separate ‘Judaica’ section in every German library into which all Jews (not just German ones) should be corralled. What’s interesting is how modern theorists who are otherwise quite lefty mine his Constitutional Theory for insights, largely because they don’t have a very good account of authority.
Sorry to be a bit OT, SL, but since I’ve done some work on Schmitt (though I’m not one of the lefty Schmittians!) and am still doing some, I’d be interested in the reference for the Judaica comment, which I haven’t seen before.
Dear Ms Greer,
I’m a big fan of your work. Can I be your fact checker?
Sincerely,
DeusExMacintosh
DOH! Of course that should have read MAY I be your fact checker (at least I didn’t offer to edit her grammar…)
I’ve read the book now and posted my review here:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/08/21/on-rage-germaine-greer-reviewed/
Happy to oblige, Mark. The German original is in an article entitled ‘Die deutsche Rechstwissenchaft in Kampf gegen den juedischen Geist’ (1936) 41 Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung 1193 (no umlauts on this machine, alas) and is part of a section where he identifies normative theories of the rule of law with Jewish thinkers, ranging from Spinoza to Kelsen; he then goes on to advocate that their work ‘be kept in a special Judaica section of German law libraries to highlight their alien mode of thought’.
There is an interesting discussion of Schmitt’s legacy in the context of constitutional theory (which covers his anti-semitism, albeit tangentially) in David Dyzenhaus, ‘The Politics of the Question of Constituent Power’ in M Loughlin & N Walker (eds) The Paradox of Constitutionalism OUP 2007. I have the Dyzenhaus paper if you’re keen to read it.
Thanks for that, SL. One of the problems in assessing Schmitt is that much of what he wrote post 1933 hasn’t been translated - probably in part because it wouldn’t be all that comfortable for his admirers.
I’d be interested in the Dyzenhaus chapter - I’ve read some of his earlier stuff on Schmitt.
On its way, Mark, to the email address you use for this blog - and I should extend a tip of the hat to Prof Les Green, who set it as part of our Jurisprudence course
Excellent work, Kim. Thank you indeed!
There’s always the reflex response to observations such as those made by Greer. “What then does she propose we do about it?”
Can one ask the mirror to correct the reflection it gives us when we look into it, particularly after a hard night’s drinking?
Greer has done a splendid job (and splendidness is graded quality) of taking a mirror and showing us one aspect of our society. That’s all. What we see in that mirror annoys us immensely. Frustrates us and, we may add outrages us. There’s nothing pleasant to see in there. Or if there is, then it surely should be that there are people who have the strength of conviction and the rage to do the exercise of placing the mirror directly where the problem lies and to have that mirror made available to us all.
But whatever we must do, we mustn’t attack the mirror. That is a fruitless exercise which will render us paralysed and which will keep the ugliness that mirror reflects uncorrected.
The suggestions that come out of Greer’s book have all to do with putting the government institutions on notice: Do something about the continuous raping of blackfella’s daughters by whitefellas, in particular, punish the grogmongers, stop changing “procedures,” stop dislocating, add facilities and infrastructure, hospitals, schools, roads, transport -that are functional and well staffed, stop accusing, stop denigrating, stop building up structures that are set up to fail, begin acknowledging and owning the effects of whitefella’s callous and criminal behaviour and attitude (culturally ingrained) towards the aboriginal people, stop sleeping!
But, alas, whitefellas came up with a derogatory term for doing all that: “black armband view of history!” So, there! We’ve got a label, now there’s no need for us to do anything. No need to ask why the aboriginal community turns its back, en masse, when our Prime Minister makes speeches to it.
Had I not also being a damned atheist, I’d be ejaculating, “Thank God for Greer!”
“Oddballs like Greer are doomed.”
Let’s hope you don’t take the ad hominem attacks into the court room. What make Greer an oddball, that she is widley published, that she writes expressively, that her agrument are cogent and expressed exactly in the written word? SK needs to come up with something a litle more substantial if she’s to get into the big tent.
Atomou, I guess part of my difficulty is that I am an intrinsically practical person. I really like “fixing” things (hence lawyering is probably a good choice for me if I want to fix relationships/transactions that are broken). That’s always what I want to know at the end of an analysis: so now what? What is the solution? What’s the upshot of all this?
That’s probably a personal quirk of mine - it’s why my thesis is half theory, half practical - because I really can’t bear to consider something in the abstract without contemplating how it would actually work and what needs to be fixed.
Of course, in this context, the problem is not easily fixable, particularly not by someone in my position. I think it really has to be indigenous people who say what the solution is (a valid point made by Greer in her essay).
It does worry me, however, that her analysis is not particularly empowering for indigenous people.
I strongly suspect that Heidegger was being - at the very least - disingenuous after the act. He was the one who started every lecture with a Nazi salute, while Schmitt recommended that there should be a separate ‘Judaica’ section in every German library into which all Jews (not just German ones) should be corralled. What’s interesting is how modern theorists who are otherwise quite lefty mine his Constitutional Theory for insights, largely because they don’t have a very good account of authority.
Thanks for these nugget Skeptic. I find the subject matter arising from the moral judgements of Nazi and Marxist ideology quite interesting and would like to delve in a bit deeper at some point. I’ve had the good fortune to be taught about Marx by people who were neither fervently pro nor anti Marxist. The first such teacher also taught me very well why the command system is ‘fubar’. The phrase: “They would love that school uniform, to them that would be stylish.” says it all.
RE: Heidegger and Schmitt. I tend to agree about Heidegger. Seeing as how he was a Nietszchean scholar he should’ve known better. I’m not certain if he had access to Nietzsche’s letters to his sister which roundly condemned anti-Semitism but if you’ve read The Geneology of Morals you know what he means by ’slave’ and that the Nazis were the very worst example of the slave mentality. The word resentiment describes the Nazis attitude to the Jews.
Schmitt’s suggestion is typically bureaucratic and fails to observe what the Nazis were really doing. They were not interested in preserving Jewish literature at all. Such a library as he envisaged would demonstrate the disproportionate cleverness of the Azchanazem hence feeding the resentiment and disproving the master race notion.
Scmitt was one of those cold blooded types that signs papers. He’s the reason thugs take power.
DEM - Viz fact checker - chuckle
Patrick B, for someone who spends a great deal of time following me around and needling, you obviously haven’t noticed that for me, ‘oddball’ is an entirely praiseworthy term.
And may I also suggest that your next exercise in needling will be your last.
Good point re Patrick B. SL. It does seem that “oddballs” are doomed. For example, a recent study found that how one dresses can be a very significant variable in promotion and employment prospects. Hmmm, so much for merit and productivity. Studies like this are legion and what worries me about the current trend of society is that oddballs are being increasingly marginalised because society is becoming increasingly conformist.
We need oddballs, these individuals are more likely than conformists to drive change and innovation in our society.
I fully support eccentricity. I am an oddball. As a teenager I tried to conform, but it was impossible, so now I revel in my difference.
I have to say that I think eccentrics are more acceptable in Britain than in Australia. It was my four year stint in Britain which taught me to love my eccentricity.
Hey LE,
Yes, I think there is even a study showing the British are more tolerant of eccentrics. I used to joke with people: what is the mad rush to ascend to the apex of The Bell Curve, everyone desperately clamouring up that slope will make for a very boring world of clones.
LE, I’ve got where “you’re coming from.”
I don’t quite understand the phrase “intrinsically practical person”, though, I suspect you mean that you can’t help being a “fixer.” None of us can, really. We all want to “fix things” (one way or another, some “thing” or another); but there, Plato would be very austere with you: “You said that as a lawyer you like to “fix relationships/transactions that are broken.” He would say to you, “fine, be a lawyer and fix the things that are within the spectrum of that job -and nothing more. Leave the other experts, (those trained by the State) to do their own work.”
Greer, in this case, is -if we were to give her a job title- an investigative reporter, a journalist. She does assiduous research and she publishes that research. What’s more, her writing skills are “to die for” and so, reading her work is, at least to my mind, close to a sublime experience.
To put it even more bluntly, she could be a police reporter, reporting on individual crime scenes… she simply chose to report on bigger, wider crimes.
And so, we should expect Plato to give her a lovely big tick of approbation for her work as a reporter. Had she ventured into trying to be a sleuth, or a lawyer, even an advocate of those she’s reporting on, Plato would put a dirty big cross all over her work. “That would never do!” He’d say, shaking a belligerent finger and kneading his eyebrows. “Each man and woman to their job!”
Of course, things are not quite as firmly cut and separated in modern-day, “real life” but the admonition still stands to quite a good degree.
Personally, I worry when people announce “solutions” for things they don’t know how to solve. To protract my metaphor, let me think of a General Practitioner who refers a patient to a specialist for further evaluation and perhaps surgical intervention. I’d hate for the GP himself to be doing the surgery required on my body -unless, of course the situation was extremely urgent.
Similarly, I love the little book “On Rage” because, that’s what it’s about: Rage. She uses the Oz aborigine, as well as aborigines from other colonies as paradigms. What went on and still goes on in Canada is mind-blowing.
Empowering to the aborigines? Why should she bother doing specifically that? Why should she bother changing facts and realities? Why lie? Why give gratuitous compliments? Would not that require a different expert, another specialist? Would she not be condemned for being patronising, or for not knowing what she was talking about? She didn’t set out to “help” or “empower” anyone; just to report a phenomenon and that, I daresay, she did excellently.
A clear view of a problem is already quite empowering. It might also be conducive to rage but, let’s hope the rage of knowledge can be translated into some positive action by the experts and by those with the sincere will to apply that expertise.
I saw more rage exhibited by the euthanasing of a distressed whale than by the abominable treatment we meted out to the indigenous people; but that’s another story!
When I taught indigenous students, my attitude was always to try to encourage them. So one student said, “I can’t go into the library, they’ll just think I’m in the wrong place.” I made her come into the library and borrow a book with me standing beside her. She saw that she was treated just like anyone else.
And when students said things like, “I can’t do it”, I’d say that I had faith in them. I’d make it clear that believed that could do it, even if the message they’d been getting all their lives was that it was all hopeless and that they couldn’t do anything.
I just get concerned that by focussing on the negatives, the message will be reinforced that it’s all hopeless and there’s nothing anyone can do. Yes, things are grim (I’m certainly not denying that) but I hope one can move beyond rage into constructive action.
I guess my own personal experiences have played a big part here - something bad happened to me, and I spent a year or two being enraged about it. But then I realised that I wasn’t getting anywhere, and that success and a good life is the best revenge. So I acknowledged that pain, hurt and rage, but I left it behind where it belonged, in the past. Dwelling on it and dissecting its cause wasn’t healthy or constructive, although it is understandable, and a necessary part of getting over trauma.
My concern is that by focussing on rage specifically, it will cause some to use it as an excuse as to why things cannot change. People will not be able to move on, just as I was unable to move on for a while. Therefore, I don’t see how reporting it is helpful.
True re baby whale - it’s the immediacy of it - and the media by which the story was delivered. I do get cross at how indigenous concerns get put on the backburner sometimes (until someone jumps up and down and makes a fuss). At least Greer’s essay has brought it back to the forefront of the news.
So one student said, “I can’t go into the library, they’ll just think I’m in the wrong place.”
Awww man - that’s just so sad.
RE: Oddballs.
You’re right John. Let’s praise the oddballs. In facts let’s pay them. I’ll get a PO BOx and you can send your cheques there.
I’m a bona fide weirdo. The word ‘individuality’ was mentioned three times in my high school reference - In Qld that’s not a good thing.
Adrien, it damn near broke my heart. But after two years of having me as a tutor, she was able to go into the library with her head held high. That’s one good thing I’ve done in this life.
My school reports always said something about individuality. And opinionated. Yeah.
Those are interesting comment, Legal Eagle. Please forgive my harsh words. like you I don’t feel these sorts of issues should be politicised in a cheap way.
You mean, “stew” on it ?
You aren’t starting to get older are you?
If I could, I’d have a box of chocolates sitting on your lounge room coffee table right now.
You know the way to the heart of a woman in her last quarter of pregnancy…chocolate has tasted horrible all the way through until the last week or two! Mmm. Chocolate.
my mum reckoned when she was carrying me, she actually got a taste at one stage for soap powder?
A woman I used to work with told me her sister ate sticks of chalk during pregnancy. And I’ve heard of other women getting a taste for dirt, bricks and other really strange stuff.
Fortunately I haven’t developed any weird tastes like that…I just like sour things more than I usually do. And I liked sour things a lot before. The main thing is that various tastes which appealed to me pre-pregnancy are not very appealing - someone offered me asparagus last night - ugh! just can’t eat it.
What a terrible thing- not being able to enjoy asparagus!
Asparagus is the richest dietary source of alpha lipoic acid, a remarkable endogenous antioxidant that a wide variety of benefits.
Hey SL
You promised us a piece on La Greer’s Rage. Now, might be the time. She has given her recent swipe for Our Nic appearing in Orstraya. And now our darkmissus lady Professor Marcia Langton has bitchslapped the crazy old aunt locked up in the cellar. I adore La Langton. But boy, she looks like she can drinkl@
Asparagus is the richest dietary source of alpha lipoic acid, a remarkable endogenous antioxidant that a wide variety of benefits.
Dude one of my New Year’s Resolutions will be to read your blog more often.
just wondering why there is no articles on the profound violation of human rights in australia atgainst people who are deemed as psychiatrists as ‘mentally ill’ bc they say so..
Merilyn
Ah, and where exactly are these “human rights”?