Days of Whine and Poses - the cultural left

Since the 1970s the Cultural Left has worked its way up to senior positions in the Australian film industry, universities, arts organisations and some quarters of the public service, fighting yesteryears lost battles: post modernism, relevatism, “whole of language” teaching in schools and arts funding for highly sectional interests.

They should not be confused with the political left, born from the union movement, who seek to roll back the more rapacious effects of an increasingly deregulated labour market.

David McKnight in his book, Beyond Rght and Left hit the nail on the head when he wrote:

The battle over culture wasn’t meant to be won by the Right, it was meant to be won by the Left. In the 1970s as old style socialism faded, culture became the chosen terrain of battle of the new Left which emerged from the new social movements. This new Left increasingly rejected the inadequacies of class analysis and preoccupation with economic analysis.

The new left or the Cultural Left believed social change was blocked not by armed force but by comfortable beliefs and values which in sum constituted capitalist culture and ideology.

The Cultural Left lost the plot somewhere in the 80s. People got sick of the “bleatings” of ethnic and green groups, of NIMBY’s and the multitude of small pluralist groups trying to effect sectional social change.

While some people applauded this alleged cultural liberation from the tyranny of “mainstream attitudes and beliefs”, others experienced it (and still experience it) quite differently - particularly as change hit families as the effects of economic globalisation took hold.

McKnight said:

Many people started to feel social disintegration. Rather than feeling free, they felt fractured. Instead of gains, many felt the loss of stable families and stable jobs and the ebbing of familiar truths. Nor was this merely imagined. Divorce did rise, the incidence of certain crimes did increase, social change occurred rapidly. And progressive ideas with their emphasis on liberation and personal change were blamed for this.

Many felt the loss of stable families and stable jobs and the ebbing of familiar truths keenly. Divorce rose, the incidence of certain crimes increased, social change occurred rapidly. And “progressive ideas” with their emphasis on liberation and personal change were blamed for this.

Enter John Howard. I’m no fan of the Howard government or more correctly, the Howard Junta. I’m still - some might say anachronistically - a punch drunk fighter for the Keating vision of an international Australia.

The genesis of the demise of the Cultural Left is a curious phenomenon that requires some examination. These are my own observations, drawn largely from working at university and in the media.

First of all, the majority of the Cultural Left is made up of older baby boomers. This is one of the reasons why they lost the war. They had mythologised themselves as White Knights, the heralds of peace and reason, and that they would be the victors in the culture wars. They thought of themselves as Vic Morrow in the 1960’s TV show Combat, mowing down objectors with gritty determination.

So convinced were they of their righteous fight to maintain an ideological stranglehold over history, secondary school curriculums, the humanities, film schools and sections of the public service, that they did not see that mainstream Australia, from Quilpie to Broome, from Melbourne to Perth, thought they were an irrelevance and had moved on long ago.

Without delving in to parody too much, the Cultural Left met over coffee, lunch, drinks and dinner to reinforce their views on the evils of the Northern Territory intervention, big business, advertising, the defence budget, to name just a few. They so rarely encountered any coherent opposing arguments that they thought their group-think as the views of all right-thinking people.

They see themselves as part of the intellectual elite, full of ideas about how the country should be run, yet with no involvement in the process or power to do anything about it. Yet they have excellent access to the media and know how to use it creating an “us and them” effect, which people are heartily tired of.

This ignorance of the realities of government and management enables them to occupy the moral high ground. They see themselves as clever people in a stupid world, upright people in a corrupt world and compassionate people in a brutal world.

When I worked at university, there was one industry committee I had mixed feelings about. Members of film industry committee were the caboose of the Cultural Left. They came cap in hand as they lobbied us for more money and more film courses. They were like turn-of-the century firebrand Methodists with a sense of “to the high cultural ground born”.

After two years I got sick of their harping and trotted out some facts on the parlous state of the film industry and why it was a bad idea to keep enrolling 140 students a year when, after five years of graduations, not one student had gotten a job. I had my policy hat on. They hated facts. If the cultural elite was comprised of supermen and women with super opinions, facts were their kryptonite.

I called their neurotic grand standing the “Days of Whine and Poses”. Yet they were not bad people. Their decency or mendacity could not be read from their political opinions. It’s just that there wasn’t any place for them in institutions committed to teaching, publishing research and collegial teamwork. They were the antithesis of collegiality.

They represented attitudes towards authority and privilege that might have been understandable 40 years ago but have since morphed into mindless and economically illiterate commentary on current events and issues.

Theirs was a specific worldview foregrounded by external enemies while remaining blissfully unaware of their own prejudices. If only one had the luxury of knowing one was right all of the time.

“I developed a (provocative) rule of thumb when it comes to examining the nostrums and prescriptions of the middle-class culture producers, who often come from the progressive cultural Left: whatever they say our people should do, we should look at the opposite of what they say because that will usually be the right thing to do,” said Noel Pearson in The Australian (July 21, 2008).

Let me make this clear. There is no organised opposition to the Cultural Left. Pearson probably doesn’t have much in common with many critics that have been labelled “conservative” by the Cultural Left. One understands the world through the prism of personal experience. It was more a case of people from all walks of life saying, “enough is enough of this rubbish”.

It is one of those weird political inversions that those who fought the Cultural Left were trying to advance social and economic reforms, while all the time being blocked by those with sectional interests. Anyone who has worked in a large organisation knows it’s hard to get a consensus opinion. With the Cultural Left, it was impossible. So in political terms the Edmund Burkes of the world became radicals and the Robespierre’s became the conservatives.

The Cultural Left ignored the fact that modern Western civilisation stands on four pillars, and elected government is only one of them. Equally important is the rule of law. The other two are economic: the right to own private property and the right to buy and sell your property, goods, services and labour.

But analysis was irrelevant to the Cultural Left. Ultimately, it was not a question of whether a policy worked but whether it was right or wrong when judged by the standards of the Cultural Left.

Of course many of the Cultural Left still inhabit positions of power in the media so their voice won’t suddenly fall silent over night. Their incoherent manifesto will become history as their generation (and mine) becomes history. They will be studied by history students as a curio, an anomaly, a worthy footnote in this nation’s development.