A Manne for all Seasons
by Daniel Batt
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 62
Spring/Summer 1998/1999

Introduction

The Melbourne Age's Martin Flanagan goes so far as to say that Robert Manne is "identifying a new centre of political thought". Since Manne left the conservative journal Quadrant in a blaze of controversy, his cultural comments seemed to have gained a breadth of respect his Quadrant days seemed to prevent. Zadok's Editor, Daniel Batt, asked Robert about the roots of this 'new political thought'.

Robert, do you see the study of history as a better guide to understanding morality than philosophy or ethics?

No, it's the way I've come to it, because there was such a stark bit of history in what happened to my family. I would never pose historical understanding against philosophical understanding. Indeed, in some ways I wish I had done more of the latter. I feel that to not know history as a human being is to have missed out on some layer of understanding which I think everyone should have.

You have said that the Holocaust is the "ground of your being". Why such a heavy ontology?
I don't understand why. It's not as if my parents forced this knowledge on me-if anything the contrary. It was such a pain in their lives. They both had felt very European and then were forced out of European society and had to flee. That pain they didn't much want to talk about. But for some reason as a child I learnt about what had happened and it gave me some sense of my own identity, as fragile or vulnerable or marginal, and some sense of what human beings are capable of-which came as such a shock I never recovered from it.

The Holocaust has had a profound effect on Jewish and Christian theology. Was this part of your thinking?

No, not at all. I've seen it always as a human thing. And in so far as I have any thoughts about God, it was never in the sense of him following a particular people or peoples. Human beings have done terrible things to other human beings for as long as we have recorded what they have done, so if one's religious sense is vulnerable to the thought, "If there's a God, how could these things happen?", then it's not over the holocaust that it's vulnerable, it's vulnerable over everything.

Is the study of the Holocaust in any sense a search for the 'true' and the 'good' by which we judge such evil?

What you say is interesting and I've been thinking about it recently. No, I don't think you can say that you find the good through that evil. By-and-large you find evil through that evil and you learn what human beings are capable of.

How then do you develop what you have called a "moral instinct" for the study history?

Well, by calling it instinct almost assumes there's something in it which is not learned or does not come from a process of rational thought. Almost all human beings have an instinct for the good, although very often they lose it or allow it to die off. And there are very dark periods in which only very remarkable people have it in their lives. That's why the interesting thing about Henry Reynolds' book on Australia in the 19th century is how few people were able to keep alive in regard to what was happening to the Aborigines.

But I don't think this ever comes from a process of reading or thinking or rationality. One of the things that shocks me about Nazism is that the élitist and most vicious part of the Nazi movement were often reasonable scholars or had gone through a very rigorous process of education. So I don't think that those processes of thinking lead people to the good. Often, the most simple people are the finest people.

How can one regain this "moral instinct"?

I don't know. I suppose for some people the sense of vulnerability might re-ignite some sense of the good. Who knows?

Is there anything to learn from this Clinton/Lewinsky fiasco?

Even 30 or 40 years ago people blushed when a lie was exposed. One of the big generational changes is that people are very relaxed about it. It's connected with a dying off of shame and it's one of things I find very difficult to understand.

But I think the lying thing is an incredible change in a political culture. And I don't know how you can conduct politics if there is no real cost for lying, which in a way there isn't now. In Australia we've got one technical problem which is that we've inherited the Westminster system and if a minister deliberately misleads the House they must resign. Now I suspect if the Westminster system were reinvented by us we wouldn't have such a convention.

The business about Dubai-I followed the evidence with great care in a way that I think public opinion would have followed it 30 years ago. So every time there was a leak, I read it carefully to see what it added up to. So it turned out, on the evidence, that it was almost impossible to believe that Peter Reith did not know what was going on about Dubai, simply because his main advisor was the contact man between Chris Corrigan and the two guys who organised the Dubai operation.

You can't prove it in the end, but it's so close to being impossible to believe that I just assumed that public opinion would rise in anger at this misleading of the House. But people weren't really upset about it. Just as they are not really upset about Clinton. I mean, apart from his strange sexual behaviour, of which people are very forgiving, there's also the business that he's mislead everyone for so long. That's one thing we're going to have to wrestle with in public life: how you can construct a decent civil life without lying being regarded as a bad thing.

To: Part 2