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March 3, 2006
This quote is from Frank Brennan's 'Asleep at the wheel in precarious amoral waters', the Seventh Manning Clark Lecture, delivered at the National Library. Brennan says that when retiring as a teacher at ANU in 1975, Manning Clark was asked if it had all been worthwhile. He recalled attending the requiem mass at St Christopher's Cathedral in Canberra the previous year for his friend Eris O'Brien:
"The procession after the service reminded me of the Catholic, Protestant, and the Enlightenment - symbolising what one had thought our history was about, in part. But there was a sequel. Outside the church, as that bell tolled its melancholy dirge for the dead, I was seized with that dread which has never been far from me in the last ten or so years: that the bell was tolling a requiem for the only vision of life with which I had any bond.
"I feared that all these three ways of looking at the world, and the men who believed in them, were about to be replaced by men who believed in nothing; men with the appetites of the sybarite and the morals of the Pharisee; men who were not touched by the story of the prodigal son, or Schiller's great Hymn to Joy, or Mozart's Magic Flute, or Karl Marx's point about moral infamy, or the teachers of the Enlightenment on tenderness, or Steele Rudd's Dad, or Henry Lawson's Christ figure - men without pity, with that great hell in the heart, of not being able to love or be loved."
Manning Clarke is definitely out of fashion in Howard's conservative Australia. He's too negative and he belongs to the much maligned black armband interpretation of Australian history. and never makes an appearance in all the celebrations. Still that phrase the ' bell tolled its melancholy dirge for the dead' is very apt image for the goings on by the utilitarians at the Australian Wheat Board--- and their kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's regime that breached United Nations sanctions against Iraq.
I listened to the Nationals debate this issue yesterday in Parliament during a matter of public importance. Ian Causley could see there wrong--it was about doing business, and the commercial reality of trade in the Middle East required kickbacks. Get real.
As Brennan points out the issue here is that Sadam Hussein's regime:
'.. was not just any regime in receipt of kickbacks. Our Government was convinced that this government was developing weapons of mass destruction. Our Government was adamant that there was a need for strict sanctions or war. '
So trading with enemy in breach of UN sanctions was okay because it was all about profit and the end justified the means.
Is this not a conception of a false life? Is it not a conception of an essentially corrupt or diseased life? An indication of the way that our ethical life is deformed, stunted and distorted. Isn't that not what Manning Clarke is saying? There is a pattern of deformation in these kids of practices
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I guess this is the effect that 'dirty hands' can have on all of us. This is a very interesting piece, Gary, as is Frank Brennan's. It helps me see why I feel pretty bad about being an Australian at the moment, as do many others. Our ability to behave with public morality has been greatly curtailed. It creates dissonance between the public and the private life, when we want to achieve harmony.