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June 09, 2006
What were the culture wars? They had long been symbolized by the debate about preserving Western civilization or purge it of the nasties.Theory was the big bear--- the politics of race and sex, reliant on theory instead of evidence--- in the 1960s-inspired culture wars.
Here's Murdock's Australian working itself up into what can only be called hysteria:
What do a perforated shipping container, a medical student who can't tell the difference between a heart and a liver and a poster advertising the movie Gandhi have in common? No, they are not all exhibits in the current Sydney Biennale – only the shipping container made it in this year. Rather, they are all symptoms of a postmodern rot at the core of Australian academic and cultural life that seeks to divorce art from beauty, replace skills-based excellence with warmed-over sociology and inject a politicised, deterministic view of the world in which identity groups trump individuals into virtually every sphere of life.
And the rot goes back to the rebellious youth in the 1960s.
The editorial says:
Australia was spared much of the turbulence that hit the US and Europe in the late 1960s. The fallout, in the form of academic obsession with politics and postmodernism, didn't hit the country's campuses until the 1970s. But this new movement was made particularly powerful by the fact that when the drama of adolescent rebellion, driven by vast numbers of youth raised in previously unimaginable privilege and luxury, played itself out writ large in the streets and on the campuses of cities such as Paris, Chicago and Berkeley, the culture's guardians didn't fight back but instead rolled over. An entire generation of students were essentially told that their youthful worldview was correct and superior to that of their professors. As a result, the rising generation never matured or learned to value the things they never stopped rebelling against. Thus the reflexive antipathy to all things Western that infects so many state curriculums: witness science courses that teach that Western science "is only one form among the sciences" (as occurs in South Australia), music classes where turntables are treated on a par with classical instruments (as was proposed in WA), and the "black armband" school of history which treats Australian history as nothing more than a tale of racism and colonialism.
The reflexive antipathy to all things Western? There lies the hysteria. It's hysteria because it is such a exaggerated distortion of reality. The 1960s rebellion was about the search for indiivdual happiness, freedom as self-realization and self-fulfilment that threw off the contraints that traditional (religious) morality placed upon individual desires. That rebellion from a puritanical morality is part of the ongoing secularization of liberal society. The conservatives want to re-establish the constraints on the "destructive" (sexual) desires.
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Why does the Australian care so much? This editorial is bonkers - rabid. I wonder who wrote it and whether he or she really believes that thing about 'postmodern' medical students.