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

Part 2

You have mentioned that radical individualism is the sin of the '90s.

There was a time in our society that the individual didn't have enough freedom, there might have been too much constraint in the moral areas or whatever. In the last 20 or 30 years-since the '60s really-there has been an incredible social change in which the balance between obligation and individual freedom has really swung towards individual freedom. Some of the cost are beginning to turn up in the next generation in the sense of anxiety and despair that the younger generation feel, and the terrible mess people make of their lives when the principle of freedom has been the only principle.

But I was talking to a group students the other day and they were beginning to sing the praises of community in a way that I liked. But I said, on the other hand, let's think about the community of the '50s-they were talking about what suburban Australia was like-and I said, "Well, let's think that one of the young women in the street became pregnant by accident. Think of how punitively she would have been treated at that time. She would have been asked to leave (if they had been non-religious maybe they would have had an abortion or whatever), rather than the idea she might have a child in that street." So in other words: the closeness of that time also had a darker side.

Is there a sense to which the constraints on our freedom are overplayed by the libertarians, because they feel that the barricades must always be manned?

Oh, I think they are. They are fighting an old war they cannot stop fighting, which they won 25 years ago. When I was a young person there was an absurdly restrictive Victorian kind of culture and it was absolutely right that that was fought against. Philip Adams won, but he won probably by 1970 or at the latest by 1973.

This really frustrates me, actually. The simplest example is that international raid on paedophile pornography. Now I didn't hear one civil libertarian say that it was outrage that these people were arrested. But I have been saying to people like Philip Adams and Terry Lane for a very long time, "You do believe in censorship. You must! You can't possibly want a world in which certain kinds of images are created for the pleasure of male libido or whatever"-and they always concede the particular case but the next minute they say again: "I'm against censorship."

David Marr in The Retreat from Tolerance gets very passionate about the gay, pornographic film called Hustler White in which there is a pseudo rape scene where a person is slashed with a knife, which was kept in the film, and also burnt with a cigarette, which was cut from the film. Now he makes a big deal about the Office of Film and Literature Classifications asking 'why did they keep the slashing in and not the burning?' But when I read this I thought, is this really an outrage? Has it got this absurd?

Oh, I think that it has. It's like all ideologies; ideology can't cope with even slight set-backs. To take another example: I got interested in the economic debate and, because I'm rather sceptical by nature, I do not think the that skies will fall in if, for example, a certain amount of tariff protection is given to the motor industry. But to the people we call "economic rationalists", any concession on the tariff front was regarded as the end of the world. I think it is the nature of over schematised ideological thinking that leads David Marr to think what from a normal point of view is a trivial event has enormous symbolic importance.

Orwell wrote a wonderful essay called "Notes on Nationalism" where he put his finger on this kind of ideological thinking-that somehow, once religion as a dominant way of thinking went, it was replaced by this very schematic way thinking. Havel the great Czech writer calls it the ideology of the "low rent room" which people have fled to in the absence of something larger and with more stability. Libertarianism is a small version of this "low rent room", where if you can only allow the principle of freedom to run rampant, everything, all the big questions can be solved for you.
How are your politics perceived by your students?

I don't think I'm perceived as an ideologue, because I'm not. I'd be astonished if they'd didn't see that I was interested in what they had to say.

They probably think that I'm from a very remote generation, which they find difficult to understand. I do feel, when we get beyond a certain point, that there is a terrific gap in world views.

But do they share your view on radical individualism being the sin of the '90s?

I don't think they'd put it like that because they tend not to generalise in those ways. They would, however, find that their values are very much those of moral individualism and they'd feel any restrictions to be pretty onerous. They wouldn't like them and they wouldn't understand how they could be anything other then authoritarian. I think the central value for most students is values of choice and any sense that there might be some restriction on choice is an almost impossibly obscure idea.

I don't understand it because choice seems to me such a thin ideal. I mean, who would die for choice? It seems not to be full of any kind of real human content. In order to combat the idea of choice you have to have some idea of the possibility of human beings falling into bad ways-the vulnerability of human beings to evil and the capacity to give in to temptation and so on. And I think most people know that who are not ideological.

See, what choice can't give is meaning. What meaning can you find in the fact that all your society offers you is endless choices which you can make?

To: Perspectives Issue 62