Robert
Manne
LEFT RIGHT LEFT: POLITICAL ESSAYS 1977–2005
Black Inc., $34.95 pb, 534 pp, 1 86395
142 3
THERE
ARE AT LEAST three reasons why we left-leaning,
right-thinking, middle-class readers
value Robert Manne’s essays. Over
the last twenty years, he has —
in books, as editor of Quadrant
from 1988 to 1997, as a newspaper columnist
— been writing with an un-common
intellectual lucidity. He is that rare
combination of good scholar and good
journalist. His style is trans-parently
reasonable: his essays shine as models
of speaking rationally.
Intimate with this is Manne’s other
virtue: the connection his reason has
with morality, and the open way in which
he elucidates, in essay after essay,
from one year to the next, notions of
common decency. Such values — the
Kantian, humanistic values — do
not usually need arguing. But Manne’s
work has involved the necessary activation
of them in the battles to which he has
been drawn like a duck to water in the
shooting season. Politically, he has
always been a meteorologist, a spotter
of bad ideological trends, the better
to name them and to combat them as matters
of history and political judgment.
This combination of reason transparently
applied and the values underpinning
common decency gives another stamp to
Manne’s essays: they display a
militant degree of common sense. And
of course, this trinity is profoundly
friendly to ‘our’ sense of
ourselves. In fact, Manne’s implicit
construction of his audience is, even
when he is reminding readers of moral
axioms or the facts of history, a collusive
one. Reading him seems to create in
the mind a healthy space, one conducive
to decent conversation, to the civilised
discourse we like to affirm as democrats.
Even as he offers correctives, his is
the correction our better selves like
to have. No wonder The Age and
the Sydney Morning Herald named
the professor of politics our favourite
public intellectual.
I realise I am idealising the civic
space that Manne’s style characteristically
fosters. He can be very stern. In this
book, we have his famous crucifixions
of the communist journalist Wilfred
Burchett and the myth-loving historian
Manning Clark. For historian Keith Windschuttle,
Manne organised a whole book of people
to destroy the case against Aboriginal
slaughter in Tasmania. He confesses
that, as an Australian-born son of German
Jews who fled the Holocaust, his views
can be ‘overdetermined’, which
is to say that when he is most biographically
driven to write on racism and refugees
he is as loaded with need as with judgment.
There is something rigid about Manne.
But this does not detract from the third
reason we value him.
Few essayists in Australia have defined
key contemporary issues so thoroughly,
especially in the areas of war, refugees
and Aborigines, the topics that dominate
this important book. Here we have his
landmark Quarterly Essay In Denial
(2001), which documented the policy
of the removal of Aboriginal children
in the era of assimilation. I think
that the essay deals crudely with the
concept of assimilation, and applies
a model of racism that oversimplifies
many years of complicated relationships
on the Australian frontier. It is nonetheless
definitive and sits in the company of
a sizzling forensic challenge to the
judgment by Justice Maurice O’Loughlin
in the Cubillo and Gunner case that
there was no evidence for a policy of
forcible removal. In Denial stakes
out the ground in a way that makes it
hard to imagine how a decent person
could argue with it. Manne’s long
essay is a long lament for humane accountability
in relationship.
The same can be said of his other Quarterly
Essay, Sending Them Home (2004),
which is about border protection policy
since September 11. This essay, with
its excruciating case studies and balanced
policy analysis of a difficult national
issue, also seems to stand complete,
unanswerable. Reading it produces the
grave pause that invites political action.
Overall, then, what Manne does is shed
practical light on burning issues by
tabling authoritative documents for
the historical record. Another paradox:
he is a polemicist with a gift for producing
classics.
‘Ours is a polemical culture,’
Raimond Gaita wrote recently. ‘We
must think hard ...’ Too true.
We value Manne as an aid to what at
school used to be called Clear Thinking.
Except that polemic is not the best
friend of the essay. To be polemical
is, as we know, not to be ambivalent,
nuanced or in flux with regard to ideas,
values or the emergent aspects of one’s
life. It is to be rather impatient for
clarity, to be preoccupied with right
and wrong at the expense of the deeper
intelligence we might call sensibility.
To be polemical is usually to write
as if one knows exactly where one is
culturally, historically and psychologically.
Show me the polemicist who explores
uncertainty.
I
don’t wish to be misunderstood
here (as Manne says several times himself).
His essays are not crucially under-pinned
by certitudes with regard to cultural
change, values and history — although
it has to be said that, with regard
to the ‘counterculture’ that
generated most of the culture wars,
Manne oddly distances himself from the
revolution of the 1960s. He creates
the impression that he was there at
the time but did not inhale. Still,
the bold organising principle of this
collection makes Manne anything but
safe, since we are invited to witness
his passage from his brief early moment
on the left (when he opposed the Vietnam
War) to the right and then to the left
of politics.
In a shapely biographical sketch, enough
to make one envious of its political
coherence, he owns up to various errors.
He tells us, for instance, that the
term ‘political correctness’,
with which he once lashed the left with
such relish, is now too cheap a label
for him to use. He has come to think
that his opposition to economic rationalism,
which helped lead him away from his
New Right colleagues on Quadrant, and
which generated one of his most important
books, might have been better left to
economists. He confesses to coming late
to our shameful Aboriginal history,
even though he also now admits (at last)
that the communists were the good friends
of the Aboriginal cause back in the
1930s. Manne seems to say, almost, that
he poured himself into Aboriginal issues
as soon as the Cold War ended, substituting,
so to speak, Australian racism for Stalinism
as his bad object. All these concessions
to fallibility — as if the public
sphere needs to be a confessional, a
construction with a Stalinist echo —
Manne tables in this book, for his betterment
and ours as his critical and nonetheless
approving readers.
Yet the retrospection is not entirely
straightforward. While all the above
is declared, Manne is not one to admit
error as easily as his biographical
pitch would suggest. In fact, he says
that, on the key issues of refugees
and war, it is not so much that he has
moved from right to left as that ‘the
culture has changed’. This is an
unfortunate construction. It seems to
imply that Manne thinks he has been
right all along. For an essayist to
give this impression (even if he feels
it sometimes in private) is for him
to be locked into the vice of polemicism.
A key mentor for Manne was George Orwell,
who tried to write with the full sensibility
of the novelist and failed. But Orwell
as an essayist succeeded marvellously
because his pellucid prose was at one
with his moral integrity and civic courage,
a perfect vehicle for striking a blow
for ‘democratic socialism’.
And so with Manne, who essays on Orwell
here, but unfortunately in a way that
rather domesticates Orwell. He praises
Orwell for being right about fascism
and communism, and for defending both
liberty and equality. He dismisses Orwell’s
socialism because he judges ‘socialism’
as being entirely outdated. This is
conventional wisdom and in keeping with
what the right wanted to stress about
Orwell during the Cold War. What Manne
leaves out is Orwell’s radical
internationalism, and the ways in which
his thought pivoted on an opposition
to imperialism in all its forms. Orwell
thought that social justice at home
could and should not happen unless there
was social justice for those impoverished
by colonialism. This thought is hardly
out of date, indeed very much in keeping
with our present dilemma. Nor was Orwell
without his flaws, some of which Manne
has inherited, and which you can see
at work whether he is arguing from the
left or the right.
Before going any further, Manne on the
right should be praised for what he
was not. His work did not have the paranoid
twistings of Frank Knopfelmacher. Nor
did it have the spiritual vanity of
James McAuley, or the dark certainties
of Vincent Buckley in the days of Catholic
Action. Manne’s mental atmosphere
was less extreme; he had more daylight
in him even when most zealously putting
the boot into the left. His zealotry
excelled itself, of course, just after
the Cold War ended. I could not read
him without feeling he was slandering
everyone on the left as a Stalinist.
A triumphalist tone came with a tendency
to use ‘left intellectual’
pejoratively, as Orwell did. I happened
to agree with Manne about the communists
who duck-shoved on Stalin. But I thought
and still think that overall he was
wrong about ‘the left’ because
he never properly considered the industrial
wing of the labour movement (another
shortcoming of Orwell’s).
Here, I should say I am writing with
my own sense of overdetermination, as
my father was a militant unionist who
rejected membership of the Communist
Party. He did so for reasons Manne would
have approved of, but during the Cold
War he would not have uttered them to
a Robert Manne because he did not want
to feed the ideological hungers of a
right that had nothing to say about
the machinations of the US. The leftism
of activist humanists like my father
— a welder and blacksmith whose
politics had been shaped on the factory
floor, whose political sensibility was
a matter of communal loyalty and class
struggle through two generations —
was not going to bow to polemic that
diminished the sacrifices of so many
workers, least of all at a time when
plotters such as B.A. Santamaria were
so obsessed with communism that they
were prepared in the process to discredit
a whole union movement. In this book,
Manne has a eulogy to Santamaria in
which he notes without qualm that the
arrival of the Democratic Labor Party
kept the ALP out of office for two decades.
It would have been good, in the context
of Manne’s stocktaking about his
own movement from right to left, if
he had reflected on this as a matter
of longer-term political judgment. If
Labor had governed a few times between
1950 and 1972, Australia would probably
be a less conservative and reactionary
place than it is now.
Manne’s other blind spot —
taking this book as a whole — is
the US. It was most apparent in the
debate over Pol Pot, when Manne, having
rightly attacked the leftists who were
slow to recognise the killings, went
on to declare ‘wholly irrational’
the idea that ruin from the massive
US bombing may have helped the Khmer
Rouge take control. That was then. Today,
to speak of a blind spot about the US
might seem odd in the light of Manne’s
recent opposition to the war in Iraq.
He is trenchantly critical of the neo-conservatives;
of the lies about the war — here
and in the US. He is agonised by the
torture Australia effectively condones
in the wake of the US dismissal of the
Geneva Conventions. As a patriotic Australian,
he deplores the Howard government’s
subservience of foreign policy to the
White House. And so on. All this is
clear from his recent writings in response
to September 11, the ‘war on terror’
and the pre-emptive attack by the ‘Coalition
of the Willing’. What more, one
might ask, could we want? My point simply
is that the left has long had many profound
things to say about the US. They can
be said intelligently without even being
‘anti-American’ in the cheap
sense. But Manne has not begun to speak
of them, and I can’t help feeling
that some residue of his once having
been a Cold War warrior will not allow
him to run the risk of sounding ‘anti-American’.
Our intellectuals will never be free
until they don’t give a damn about
that.
It
should be obvious by now that I do not
think of Manne as of the left. Perhaps,
after his remark about the culture changing
around him, nor does he, even though
the title of his book seems to murmur
a wish to be of the ‘left’
that once so ostracised him. Certainly,
in his pieces on the culture wars —
on pornography, feminism, parenthood,
euthanasia — he is not speaking
from the left but rather as a conservatively
worried husband and father from the
Melbourne suburbs (another reason to
be liked by Age readers). In itself,
not being of the left does not categorically
matter, but it does make it easier to
understand why Manne has yet to write
directly about the unions (which he
says he supports), the media, the Greens,
the environment, let alone the poor
of the world. It is not that he is without
a world perspective — far from
it: his defence of Middle-Eastern refugees
is partly based on the political horrors
they have been through, which the policies
endorsed by relaxed and comfortable
Australian leaders callously ignore.
While Manne is attuned to the agonised
mess of contemporary politics in this
world, there are areas naturally connected
to his interests at which he has yet
to arrive; when or if he does, he will
find a very useful body of leftist thought
waiting for him. I hope he goes there.
Meanwhile, he remains a liberal democrat
with a brave, clear heart, a man who,
at present, is writing without an agenda.
He is invaluable. And if I have given
the impression that all of this book
is concerned with the big issues of
conscience, I must correct it by saying
that Manne’s journalism on the
leading public figures of our day is
astute and witty. He nailed Hanson with
Howard in the wings, and rightly predicted
that Hanson on her own would not last.
He got a bullseye with Latham before
his downfall. Is there a better tag
for Keating than ‘half Manning
Clark, half Milton Friedman’? Sometimes,
of course, he does not nail so much
as encounter, and goes away thinking,
as he did with Noel Pearson, face to
face with the social ruin of Aboriginal
communities on Cape York. On Aborigines,
Manne may well be travelling away from
leftist thought on welfare, and it would
indeed be ironic if on this issue he
ended up again in the company of the
right. The Pearson piece made me hope
for more by Manne where he shares his
processes of thinking.
Manne is, as a deep Australianist, writing
with a love of this country that I sometimes
feel I am losing. He tells us he has
always had this love because, early
on as a migrant, he realised the unique
value of British institutions that have
been leavened by egalitarianism in this
wide brown land. Despite the present
climate of war, mendacity and xenophobia,
Manne is keeping faith with the idea
of Australia as a decent democracy.
He is liberal in the best sense, which
creates hope.
