"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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The 'Unhappy Country'?
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October 13, 2010
Peter Beilharz in his Australia: The Unhappy Country, or, a Tale of Two Nations in Thesis Eleven (Number 82 2005) says that there are many narratives or myths of foundation concerning Australia.
I want to enter this labyrinth by telling two alternative tales of foundation. Then I shall proceed to tell a second tale, or set of stories, about social division in Australia, about the two – or more – nations that make up what we call Australia today. All this adds up to some- thing like what Hegel called the ‘unhappy consciousness’, the consciousness of self (or nation) as dual-natured, contradictory being, both unable to change and unable to contemplate being without change, both aware of possibility and yet afraid of its impossibility. The point is to change it. How?
He begin with the prison society and the later, new age, new world social laboratory which emerges with federation into the 20th century. These are, respectively, negative and positive stories of the foundation of Australia as first, global effluvia or white trash or the gulag; and then secondly, as the civilizational blossoming of a New Britannia in the Southern Seas--of a white or imperial labourism. He asks:
If there are fundamental divisions in Australia – two nations, or more – then the resulting question might not be, why should this be so, but why have we – and others – dreamed of a false unity, a singularity of identity and national purpose, framed within the model of a singular and representative nation-state?
If Australia is a nation in a world of nations could there not be more than one nation? He says yes:
What remains, beneath this [nation], is a sense of cultural divide which is easy to caricature and often actually transgressed but nevertheless active, between a rural and regional culture of survival, mateship and adversity and an urban and suburban proclivity either for civic privatization and lifestyle ghettoes, or else for cosmopolitanism and alternative values in alternative lifestyle ghettoes. Are these, then, two nations? The lines of division and of difference in opinion are too varied and fine, too shifting to fit this template.
Theydifferences are more of futures imagined possible:
One version, to simplify, calls on the 1960s image of the Lucky Country, and asks that its values orient the future possible. Another responds to the claustrophobia and provincialism of that old world, and dreams of something, in today’s setting, more European than old Australian or even Anglo-American.
He adds that:
the populist image of the nation is a construction, a project, a task which the dominant historic bloc has to recast anew each day, or in each crisis, through each manoeuvred threat to our safety. And this, finally, is why we in Australia (and elsewhere, I venture) are bound to be the Unhappy Country, for this is a situation without a solution. The dream of new world, new start, struc- tured by British imperial consciousness, was a dream of oneness that is empirically unsustainable and ethically undesirable. That dream of a new world is now a dream for an old world. We now inhabit a brave new world, all of us, where the challenge is to exercise a hermeneutics of suspicion towards the historic values which inform our cultures, and to clarify and radicalize the immanent values in them which open to democracy and equality. Unhappiness, after all, is one precondition of the idea of future possible progress.
If the Lucky Country was an ambit for complacency, then the idea of the Unhappy Country makes clear the challenge, and this, indeed, remains a global and not only an Antipodean issue. The problem lies less in our values than in the fact that we do not share them.
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:29 PM | Permalink |
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