Days of Whine and Poses - the cultural left

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”.