'The Declaration of She’ll Be Right'

Frederic Loliee’s 1906 work, entitled, apparently without irony, A Short History Of Comparative Literature From The Earliest Times To The Present Day, contained a view of national literature, common at the time, that is based upon deterministic and essentialist assumptions. He regaled the reader at length with the “relative imperfections” of the “Oriental mind”, the “Greek genius and its weaker side”, and the features the “French mind”, “German thought”, “Anglo-Saxon talent” and so on, assembling laundry lists of poets and novelists that each nation could claim as its own, as though the corpus of literature was territory to be staked out and divided in line with imperial practice.

Through such windy and circular dissertation, Loliee saw fit to claim in a scholarly work that a sense of refined cultural “[t]aste ... is an essentially French faculty”, leaving the reader to wonder where, in the neurophysiology of a French person, this marvellous organ is to be found.

A fashion by 20th century scholars such as S.S.Prawer was to use close linguistic analysis to discern alleged national “essences”, producing such post-hoc claims as Latin having the sound of “a great nation” because its frugality of articles, pronouns and prepositions gave a “harder, more purposeful sound”.

Prawer also cited Wilma Muir’s claim of the “will to power” supposedly inherent in German, claiming that the hierarchical linguistic structures of German gave rise to a culture of subordination and control.

While it can indeed be plausibly submitted that language “limits our world” by demarcating the boundaries of possible thought, it is quite another thing to claim a causative behavioural link. Moreover, when theorists ascribe national character to the local language, it amounts to a circular (and sinister) claim that a people cannot be other than they are, because their language makes them so.

Such arguments echo the discredited essentialist theories of J. Gottfried Herder, circa 1780, who ascribed “national” characteristics to local climatic or geographic conditions, in a kind of environmental chauvinism, viz:

... it is obvious to everyone that the region of the most perfectly formed people is a middle region of the earth, lying, like beauty itself, between two extremes [where] ... a mild regularity of the seasons appears to have great influence on tempering the passions ... [whereas] the predatory Turcomans, who roam the deserts or the mountains, retain a hideous countenance even in the mildest climate.

What predictions, I wonder, would Herder have made about Australian people, based on our climate?

To conclude, perhaps we should return to the never-written "Declaration of She’ll Be Right", in which we Australians hold to be self-evident the truths that: everybody on the dole is a bludger; the Prime Minister is a bastard but he’s a better bastard than that other bastard; foreigners are alright but why don’t they speak English and why can’t they drive; this is the greatest country in the world; and I’m not racist but.

In this light, we can see that there is no binding parchment for Australia, and perhaps there never should be, in a land where people truly value freedom.

For it is a totalitarian fantasy to insist upon certain values all Australians must hold in common. I shall not therefore venture to assert some statement of what creeds Australians “should” hold, for to do so would be in conflict with another principle I consider to be rather more precious and more fragile; namely freedom of thought.

I shall leave it to others to carry the cudgels of the thought police: if others wish to make declarations about what thoughts are permissible in our free and democratic society, then they must accept the label of totalitarians, else that term has no meaning whatsoever.