Melbourne Grammar in the 1960s

Schoolboy dissent at Hogwarts Melbourne

A tale of two headmasters

Weston Bate and Helen Penrose, Challenging Traditions: A History of Melbourne Grammar (Melbourne: Arcadia, 2002)

Part of the appeal of the Harry Potter series is its brilliant dramatisation of the hothouse world of the traditional English boarding school; it is the apotheosis of the schoolboy novel, a genre initiated by Tom Brown’s Schooldays in the mid-nineteenth century, but extended by Rowling into new realms of fantasy, politics and satire. For Americans and others to whom the public school is as strange as the biota of the oceanic depths, the stories enthral as a window onto a remote and exotic world, teeming with weird life forms and bizarre rituals; for those who experienced its unique blend of excitement, boredom, anxiety and terror, they are a nostalgic evocation of the familiar. Magic aside, the Hogwarts professors are well-known types, embodying the range of teaching styles found among the staff of any old-style public school: strict but fair (McGonagal); maintaining rigid discipline by sarcasm, ridicule and fear (Snape); eliciting hard work by enthusiasm and encouragement (Flitwick); down to earth and cheerful (Sprout); winning the pupils’ trust by sensitivity and kindness (Lupin); or their admiration by dramatic display (Mad-Eye Moody). Floating above the specifics of classes, homework, discipline and sport is the remote figure of the headmaster, whose Olympian manner inspires awe and whose interventions in the daily life of the school gain significance by their rarity.

Perhaps it was my pleasure in the Potter stories that set me thinking about my own schooldays, and thus led me to the recent (2002) history of Melbourne Grammar by Weston Bate and Helen Penrose. Naturally enough I turned first to the years that coincided with my time there, and was plunged at once into the authors’ discussion of the rise of anti-war and other dissident opinion among the boys in the late 1960s and early 70s. Among other evidence, they refer to poems published by Don McPhee and Tim Isaacson, and to an article by me on conscientious objection to conscription during the First World War, all published in The Melburnian, the official school magazine, in August 1970. This was the special edition to mark the retirement of headmaster Sir Brian Hone at the end of Second Term, and thus a fitting place for the expression of such sentiments: for contrary to the author’s suggestion that disaffected ideas were “infiltrating” the school “from the universities, especially Monash”, my recollection is that they arose naturally and organically from the liberal education provided by the school under Hone’s enlightened leadership, and particularly as a result of his encouragement of critical and independent thought. I doubt if any of the boys named above had been impressed by Monash firebrands such as Albert Langer, let alone been influenced by them; but in Form V we had all studied the Bluestone Anthology, a collection of British poetry assembled by the school, notable for including a selection of the War Poets, beginning with Rupert Brooke’s naïve idealism and concluding with the disillusion of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and others I cannot remember. Nobody in our classroom at the Lodge could have forgotten the recording of Owen’s “Anthem for doomed youth” that Mr Keogh played for us – “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” – and I still recall the thrill of heartfelt concurrence when we came to his “Dulce et decorum est”:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

At sixteen and seventeen, we had only two years before facing the prospect of being conscripted for the war in Vietnam, and it was precisely the slogans mocked by Owen that were being deployed, yet again, by another generation of Old Men to justify sending us there. Did we also study Owen’s “Parable of the Old Man and the Young”? Perhaps not, but that same appalling image of the vain, obstinate old man slaying his trusting son lay heavily on our minds, and pervaded the writing that we boys produced at that time. It is little wonder that, at the height of the Vietnam War, those searing poems from an earlier conflict had such an impact, and led many of us to change our minds about the legitimacy of war, the morality of mindless patriotism, and the truth of politicians’ promises.

Exposure to ideas of both the Right and (cautiously) the Left was part of the “coercion into new experience” that was part of Hone’s educational philosophy, and this brings us to Ivor Greenwood, right-wing Attorney-General in the McMahon government. Those who remember that time may recall him as notorious for frequent references to the need to preserve laura norda against the rising tide of anti-war demonstrations, and that he was rumoured to be sympathetic to Ustashi terrorists – so much so that he discouraged ASIO from investigating their activities in Australia and even turned a blind eye while it quietly assisted. As Bate and Penrose remark, in First Term 1970 he gave a talk to a meeting of the Upper Sixth in which he deplored the Moratorium marches as a pointless nuisance and an unacceptable disruption to people’s daily business; protest was healthy, but should be confined to letters to the press or MPs, and the ballot box at election times. He did not quite repeat the comment of Victorian Premier, Henry Bolte, that the moratorium was a case of political bikies pack-raping democracy, but it was clear that Bolte’s colourful metaphor was one he would like to have coined. There was quite some dissent from this view, however, and as the Melburnian coolly reported, Greenwood’s talk was followed by a “lively and heated” discussion in which he was unable to establish a clear distinction between the Moratorium and Anzac Day marches. I have no memory of that meeting at all, but judging from a scribbled note in my schoolboy handwriting somehow preserved among my papers, it is likely that I was one of the boys who gave the Senator such a hard time. The note reads:

Do you say that a march commemorating deaths is more commendable than a march seeking to prevent deaths in the future? “Moratorium will obstruct people going about their daily business.” Yes, but so what: Anzac Day, St Patrick’s Day procession and Moomba all do the same. And what if it does? What about the Vietnamese peasants: have not their daily lives been interrupted; have they not been killed “going about their daily business”? Australia is not an especially thoughtful country – the silent majority must be condemned by their very silence. Their inebriate apathy was well expressed by Tanner. There are, however, those who do worry, and who are prepared to commit themselves in order that good may result. If other people are hindered, this is desirable, not otherwise. Without running into danger or being forced to believe in anything, they are given stimulus to think, to throw off their torpor, and ask themselves what is going on, and where they stand. How can we say “business as usual” when such terrible suffering is but a few thousand miles away?

“You are imposing your opinions on others.” Not at all: merely exhibiting them. Many who will march have few other ways of expressing their ideas. Even those who are conscripted to go to Vietnam do not have the vote. People are not compelled to take part; shops will remain open; the marchers will not seize people and force them at the point of a gun to embrace their cause. A demonstration is – as it name suggests – an exhibition, a declaration of belief, not an imposition of belief on others.

I suspect that I wrote down the questions at the meeting and filled in the argument later. Although I could usually find flaws in an argument and formulate tricky questions for a speaker, I was timid about standing up before a large group and left it to bolder spirits to do the talking. On this occasion it is quite probable that I wrote down the questions that were asked by one or more of the other dissenters. It’s not nearly in the same league as Harry confronting Dolores Umbridge with the truth about Voldemort, but the note is still evidence of a well developed capacity for advocacy and a tribute to the quality of the education its author had received.

The incidents mentioned by Bate and Penrose are only the tip of the radical iceberg drifting around the school at that time. To finance an upgraded edition of the school literary magazine Miscellany, of which I was one of the editors in 1969-70, we screened Lindsay Anderson’s movie If, a violent story of repression and rebellion at an English public school that climaxed with the rebels setting fire to the school hall on Speech Day and gunning down the headmaster. Our own headmaster raised no objection to the display of such  subversive entertainment and made the all-but-sacred space of the War Memorial Hall available for the purpose. As I recall, we charged boys 50 cents entrance and nearly filled it to capacity. Such a liberal attitude was entirely typical of Hone’s educational philosophy, which extended to tolerating criticism of his own pet ideas. One of these was the School Committee, an advisory body consisting of the prefects and some elected members which could make recommendations about matters such as dress or the award of sporting colours, and discuss a variety of harmless topics – ants in lockers, the need for more rubbish tins, changes to lost property procedures etc.

In the history of Hone’s headmastership that I wrote for the commemorative issue of the Melburnian I described the committee as “an experiment in democracy” and “an interesting attempt to give the school something of a democratic character”. These were lazy assumptions and far from the truth: as a more clued-up classmate pointed out to me later, the real purpose of the institution was to give boys experience of the formal procedures and informal workings of committees – a very useful skill in the world that most of us would soon be joining. In the less rigorously supervised space of Miscellany I published an article that mocked the powerlessness of the School Committee, describing it as reminiscent of the Roman Senate during the rule of the Emperors. Hone’s only comment when he commended us for the magazine was to remark slyly: “I see you have a few digs at me in that article”. He seemed more amused than offended.

It is unlikely that Hone’s successor, Nigel Creese, would have been so permissive. Bate and Penrose describe him as “Steady as she goes”, building on and consolidating the Hone heritage, but this was certainly not the impression he made in his first few months. In the course of my research for the commemorative history I heard it said (or heard that some people were saying) that there were still Old Boys, members of the school council and possibly even some teachers who still regarded Hone as excessively liberal and a dangerous innovator, and hoped that his retirement would give them the chance to appoint a successor who would turn the clock back and restore the good old days of his predecessor, the disciplinarian J.T. Sutcliffe, when football was king and boys were kept in their place. It is hard to know how I could have derived this impression unless from the staff members whom I interviewed for the project, so I naturally drew the conclusion that I was meant to praise the Hone regime and contrast it with the darkness and stagnation of the period before.

As it turned out, this was not at all what was wanted, and I still possess my original handwritten draft, covered with alterations, instructions and rewritten paragraphs from Mr Brooksbank, one of the semi-retired masters who had been delegated to exercise political supervision over the text.  He made it clear that there were to be no comparisons with Sutcliffe’s headmastership, that there should be more passive and fewer active constructions, that the eulogising of Sir Brian Hone was to be severely toned down, and there was absolutely to be no advice given to the new headmaster about preserving his legacy. I rewrote as instructed, reflecting that the apparent change in line must register ongoing battles among the same forces of progress and reaction that had previously been brought to my attention. Many years later I read Chester Eagle’s memoir, Play Together Dark Blue Twenty, covering the period 1946 to 1951, and rather got the impression that my original understanding had been correct: that Hone had indeed been the warm breath of the Enlightenment, blowing gently into the frozen wastes of the Ancien Regime.

This is speculation: it is just as likely that the conservatives felt that the increasingly permissive mood of the late 1960s required a firm hand in place of liberal accommodation. But whether it was fear of the future or nostalgia for a long-lost past, Creese was their man – a conservative Englishman from provincial New Zealand who would immediately be sharply at odds with the Age of Aquarius, then thought to be dawning. It was, after all, the period characterized by Donald Horne as the “Time of Hope”, when Aboriginal embassies, bra burnings, sit-ins, demos, green bans, and the local publication of Portnoy’s Complaint signaled the dissolution of the Menzies era. One of Creese’s comments after arriving in Melbourne was to the effect that Australian boys were a lot more grown up than New Zealanders – as we no doubt were in those days, even at Hogwarts Melbourne.

Symptomatic of Creese’s desire to set his stamp upon the school was his immediate attempt to reintroduce Divinity as an occasional subject in Form VI, taught by himself. This aroused great indignation in my class, for although there had always been periods when we discussed religious (usually moral) issues, Divinity had never been a formal and examined part of the Senior School curriculum in my time, except in Form III as part of Ancient History, and many of us felt we were being forced back to primary school. Since we were about to sit the grueling HSC exams we also regarded it as a criminal distraction, and the incident now reminds me of Professor Umbridge’s infantilisation of the Hogwarts students – imagine teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts theoretically from a ministry-approved textbook, and not by the actual use of spells! I recall that in one class Creese instructed us to study and write an essay on the Crucifixion. I focused on the last words of Christ on the cross (“My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?”) and, as the devout atheist I had by then become, interpreted them to mean that Jesus was under a delusion as to his divine nature and that he had indeed been ignored by the non-existent god whom he had expected to rescue him. This argument greatly annoyed Creese, who commented that better minds than mine had wrestled with the problem and had reached very different conclusions. I got my revenge by selecting as an end-of-year prize the recently published Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, in which the author argued that Christianity grew out of a phallus-worshipping cult based on consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms – the beautiful Amanita muscaria, which, when it first emerges from the ground, does indeed resemble an erect, though cruelly circumcised, penis.

The event that completed the rupture between Creese and myself was the second Moratorium march in September 1970, early in Third Term and only a few weeks after the new headmaster had taken up his appointment. I and several friends had already taken part in the first Moratorium, back in May, but that was during the school holidays. Hone had referred to the event in the last assembly of First Term, but only to say that if any of us joined the march we should not be afraid to run if it looked as though trouble was brewing. He evidently expected some boys to take part and, just as evidently, felt that they were perfectly entitled to do so. The September Moratorium was in term time, and Creese had made it clear that any boy who wagged school in order to take part would be in trouble. I was in two minds about my own participation, and more concerned with preparation for the looming exams than anything else, but none of my friends was planning to take part, and I had pretty much decided follow their lead when I was approached by some of the younger boys who were determined to demonstrate. They argued that if they were alone they could be punished severely, but that if I was with them the headmaster would be presented with a more difficult situation. As a Sixth Former about to sit an external exam and leave the school for good, I had a fair degree of immunity from discipline, since I could simply walk out any time without seriously compromising my future. This meant that any punishment imposed for wagging school would have to be mild enough for me to regard it as worth accepting for the sake of remaining at the school for a couple more months. But since the penalty would have to be the same for all offenders, the same mild punishment would also have to be imposed on the boys in lower forms, meaning that my presence would protect them from the rigours they might face if they acted alone. I was impressed by this argument, and when the day arrived our small group of four or five walked coolly out the school gates as the march passed by along St Kilda Road. Although I recall the tense interview next day in the headmaster’s study – where I was struck by the enormous size of Creese’s desk, and he reprimanded me for standing with my hands in my pockets – I have no recollection at all of the punishment that was imposed, if any, rather suggesting that the strategy of the younger boys was brilliantly successful.

It would be quite unfair to present these few memories as a judgement on Creese’s headmastership as a whole. Maintaining the Hogwarts analogies, it would be tempting, though a gross exaggeration, to compare Hone with Dumbledore and Creese with High Inquisitor Umbridge, though it is fair to say that on the Dumbledore–Umbridge scale, Hone was more towards the left end and Creese towards the right. Reading Fudge’s complaints about Dumbledore’s eccentricities and Lucius Malfoy’s sinuous comments about the need to restore the school’s reputation, I was immediately reminded of the rumours about the Old Boys who wanted to bring back the good old days at Melbourne Grammar, but perhaps that is too fanciful. Bate and Penrose refer to subsequent problems with drugs and dope-smoking and associated expulsions, but that was after my time, and their book includes a photo of a very casually dressed headmaster assisting at a play rehearsal in the Quad. Creese seems to have mellowed with time, but he was nervous and unsure of himself when he first arrived, evidently keen to display his disciplinarian credentials to the Council that had appointed him, and I suspect that many boys whose schooling overlapped with both headmasters have negative memories of the new order. I am told that at the school leavers’ 40th anniversary reunion in March 2010 (that is, of boys whose final year was 1970 and who thus experienced one term under Creese), there were quite a few hostile mutterings when the alumni manager pointed out his portrait in the Memorial Hall.

Plus ca change … Chester Eagle found Hone’s more affable and relaxed style puzzling after Sutcliffe’s stern, unbending formality, and did not know what to make of him or whether to trust him. It would seem that schoolboys, whatever dissident ideas they may pick up, are such a conservative lot that those who live through the changing of the guard are likely to regard any newcomer with bafflement and suspicion.

References

Weston Bate and Helen Penrose, Challenging Traditions: A History of Melbourne Grammar (Melbourne: Arcadia, 2002)

Chester Eagle, Play Together, Dark Blue Twenty (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble,1986)

Donald Horne, Time of Hope: Australia 1966-72 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980)

AAP not so scientific

American Academy of Pediatrics not so scientific:

Circumcision policy marred by financial self-interest and the distortions of faith

Before we start making assumptions about the objectivity of the policy on non-therapeutic circumcision recently issued by the American Academy of pediatrics, we should bear in mind that doctors who stand to make money from the routine performance of an operation are not the best people to make a judgement as to its necessity; and that doctors are not necessarily as scientifically expert as they would like us to think.

On the first problem, the playwright Bernard Shaw pointed out long ago that doctors who both advised on whether a procedure was necessary and stood to pocket the fee for performing it faced a conflict of interest that must raise doubts as to the recommendation. As the lawyers ask, Cui bono?

It is not the fault of our doctors that the medical service of the community, as at present provided for, is a murderous absurdity. That any sane nation, having observed that you could provide for the supply of bread by giving bakers a pecuniary interest in baking for you, should go on to give a surgeon a pecuniary interest in cutting off your leg, is enough to make one despair of political humanity. But that is precisely what we have done. And the more appalling the mutilation, the more the mutilator is paid. He who corrects the ingrowing toe-nail receives a few shillings: he who cuts your inside out receives hundreds of guineas, except when he does it to a poor person for practice.

Scandalized voices murmur that these operations are necessary. They may be. It may also be necessary to hang a man or pull down a house. But we take good care not to make the hangman and the housebreaker the judges of that. If we did, no man’s neck would be safe and no man’s house stable. But we do make the doctor the judge, and fine him anything from sixpence to several hundred guineas if he decides in our favour. I cannot knock my shins severely without forcing on some surgeon the difficult question, “Could I not make a better use of a pocketful of guineas than this man is making of his leg? Could he not write as well—or even better—on one leg than on two? … The leg may mortify—it is always safer to operate—he will be well in a fortnight—artificial legs are now so well made that they are really better than natural ones—evolution is towards motors and leglessness, etc., etc., etc.”

(Preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma, 1911)

Similar remarks about the foreskin being superfluous, or even that men are better off without it, are regularly made by doctors who make a steady income from performing circumcision procedures, mostly on non-consenting infants and boys. Cui bono? (Who benefits?) indeed.

How scientific is the AAP?

The scientific literacy of American Academy of Pediatrics is also open to question. They are part of a society in which nearly 80% of the population reject scientific biology in favour of various forms of creationism. A Gallup poll taken last June found that 78% of Americans believed that god had played a role in human evolution (or creation), and 46% believed that god created humans in their present form. Astonishingly, no fewer than 25% of people with post-graduate degrees believed this, and 46% of college graduates. Only 29% of post-graduate degree holders believed that “humans evolved, God had no part in process”, but this was double the proportion for all other educational categories (college graduate, some college and high school or less).

On top of this rejection of scientific biology, a disturbingly high proportion of Americans believe in visits and abductions by aliens, but that “the authorities” cover them up; that the September 11 terrorist attacks were a White House conspiracy; that the 1969 moon landing was faked in a movie studio; and that hurricanes are sent by the deity to punish whatever practice the speaker happens to disapprove of. No doubt we shall soon hear such explanations for the damage recently wrought by Sandy.

As Shaw remarked, we should not assume that doctors are pure-minded men of science:

I presume nobody will question the existence of widely spread popular delusion that every doctor is a titan of science. It is escaped only in the very small class which understands by science something more than conjuring with retorts and spirit lamps, magnets and microscopes, and discovering magical cures for disease. To a sufficiently ignorant man every captain of a trading schooner is a Galileo, every organ-grinder a Beethoven, every piano-tuner a Hemholtz, every Old Bailey barrister a Solon, every Seven Dials pigeon dealer a Darwin, every scrivener a Shakespeare, every locomotive engine a miracle, and its driver no less wonderful than George Stephenson.

As a matter of fact, the rank and file of doctors are no more scientific than their tailors; or, if you prefer to put it the reverse way, their tailors are no less scientific than they. Doctoring is an art, not a science: any layman who is interested in science sufficiently to take in one of the scientific journals and follow the literature of the scientific movement, knows more about it than those doctors (probably a large majority) who are not interested in it, and practise only to earn their bread. Doctoring is not even the art of keeping people in health (no doctor seems able to advise you what to eat any better than his grandmother or the nearest quack): it is the art of curing illnesses. It does happen exceptionally that a practising doctor makes a contribution to science (my play describes a very notable one); but it happens much oftener that he draws disastrous conclusions from his clinical experience because he has no conception of scientific method, and believes, like any rustic, that the handling of evidence and statistics needs no expertness.

As an example of this Shaw cited the tendency for Victorian doctors to claim credit for the achievements of sanitary engineering and, in the process, made a prophetic comment on the recent obsession with blaming the foreskin for the African HIV epidemic:

Now let us suppose that in the early nineteenth century somebody had come forward with a theory that typhus fever always begins in the top joint of the little finger; and that if this joint be amputated immediately after birth, typhus fever will disappear. Had such a suggestion been adopted, the theory would have been triumphantly confirmed; for as a matter of fact, typhus fever has disappeared [thanks to greater domestic cleanliness].  The vaccination controversy is full of such contentions. So is the controversy as to the docking of horses’ tails and the cropping of dogs’ ears. So is the less widely known controversy as to circumcision and the declaring certain kinds of flesh unclean by the Jews.

Faith (i.e. religiosity) trumps scientific medicine

The United States is one of the most fervently religious countries in the world (on a par with Iran or Italy), and it is stretching credibility to suppose that the members of the AAP circumcision policy task force are unaffected by this mood. According to the International Social Survey Programme 2008: Religion III database, 80% of the American population identify as Christian, and only 16% have “no religion” – a dramatic contrast with Australia, on 52% and 45% respectively. Indeed, a prominent member of and spokesman for the AAP circumcision policy, Douglas Diekema, is on record as giving greater weight to the faith of parents than to the health and welfare of their children. He was a supporter of the AAP’s short-lived policy on female genital mutilation issued in 2010, endorsing “mild” forms of female circumcision, as a mark of respect for the cultures that traditionally perform such rituals. What is more, in 2010 a boy’s parents were charged with manslaughter after their son died from a urinary tract blockage; they had refused to seek medical treatment for him and insisted on relying on faith healing. At their trial Dr Diekema appeared for the parents as a defence witness.

  

Another member of the AAP circumcision task force, Dr Andrew Freedman, claimed that the new policy was based on medical evidence as to circumcision having minor health benefits, but admitted that he circumcised his own son on the kitchen table “for religious, not medical reasons. I did it because I had 3,000 years of ancestors looking over my shoulder.” Presumably he would still have done it even if there had been no evidence of circumcision having “health benefits”’ or even if there were evidence of its being harmful and risky.

Even those who insist that their support for routine (and preferably compulsory) circumcision of male infants is based entirely on science can exhibit an astounding degree of credulity. In his little pro-circumcision booklet, Australia’s own Brian Morris writes:

“The Bible records that Abraham circumcised himself at age 99, along with his 13 year-old son Ishmael. Not long afterwards his wife Sarah, after many barren years, became pregnant and bore Isaac. Weiss speculates that Abraham had a foreskin problem, possibly exacerbated by the desert environment, and that this problem interfered with his sexual activity. The difficulties were solved by having a circumcision.” (For Circumcision, p. 60, citing G.N. Weiss, “Prophylactic neonatal surgery and infectious diseases”, Pediatric Infectious Diseases Journal 16, 1997: 727-34).

It is surprising to see a molecular biologist who never tires of parading his scientific credentials treating the Old Testament as though it was literal history. As for Weiss’s effusion, you would need to go back to Victorian times (a text such as Remondino’s History of Circumcision) to find a so bizarre a collection of fabulous stories, unsubstantiated assertions and wild non-sequitors. To quote such a farrago as an authority suggests a chronic inability to distinguish scientific evidence from religious myth.

This inability is widespread in the United States, where (according to a Gallup poll of 8 July 2011), 30% of the population accept the literal truth of the Bible as the actual word of God, 49% regard it as the inspired word, and only 17% regard it as a book of fables and legends. It is a pity that the poll did not distinguish between the Old and New Testaments, as it may well be that some of the biblical literalists accept the truth of the crucifixion but not of the stories about Abraham and the ancient Israelites. Most fundamentalist Christians, however, turn out to be fundamentalist only in relation to the first few books of the Old Testament, and many never read much beyond Genesis (hence their rejection of Darwinism – though not, oddly enough, of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton or Einstein). They are better regarded as Old Testament Christians, for if they were New Testament fundamentalists they would understand that the aim of Jesus  and the apostles was to liberate the Jews from the burdensome Mosaic/Abrahamic laws, and they would adhere to St Paul’s prohibition of circumcision. Most fundamentalists are biblical literalists only when it suits them: it is pretty safe to say that very few Jewish people abide by the 600-plus rules and regulations laid down in Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy etc. And if the 80% of Americans who claim to be Christians really were, they would follow the directives of St Paul and resolutely reject circumcision as a Jewish superstition.

As Shaw points out, surgical fashions are far a more a matter of supply and demand than of what we would now describe as the necessary consequence of evidence-based medicine.

Private medical practice is governed not by science but by supply and demand; and however scientific a treatment may be, it cannot hold its place in the market if there is no demand for it; nor can the grossest quackery be kept off the market if there is a demand for it.

A demand, however, can be inculcated. This is thoroughly understood by fashionable tradesmen, who find no difficulty in persuading their customers to renew articles that are not worn out and to buy things they do not want. By making doctors tradesmen, we compel them to learn the tricks of trade; consequently we find that the fashions of the year include treatments, operations, and particular drugs, as well as hats, sleeves, ballads, and games. Tonsils, vermiform appendices, uvulas, even ovaries are sacrificed because it is the fashion to get them cut out, and because the operations are highly profitable. The psychology of fashion becomes a pathology; for the cases have every air of being genuine: fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen, and therefore by doctors.

Of course, Shaw had his blind spots and quirks, such as opposition to vaccination and rejection of Darwinism; these do not, however, invalidate his sceptical attitude to the medical profession, and the Victorian doctor-initiated fashion for circumcising baby boys is a textbook illustration of this principle.

Farewell Christopher Hitchens

Farewell Hitch: We miss you

Christopher Hitchens and the tradition of English dissent

More than a decade later I can still recall the spine-tingling thrill generated by the opening paragraph of Christopher Hitchens’ essay on Henry Kissinger:

In a rather more judgemental time, history was sometimes written like this: “The evils produced by his wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and in order to rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.”

Who would have expected a leftist journalist to appreciate the Gibbonian cadences of Thomas Macaulay, or – with such easy assurance – to quote such an establishment figure as the opening salvo of an attack on a contemporary bogeyman of the Left?  I had been led to the essay by an earlier book on the British-United States relationship (Blood, Class and Nostalgia), and was so impressed by its wit, irreverence and learning that I knew I must read more, and so found the collection For the Sake of Argument. I picked up a copy from Gleebooks on a trip to Sydney, but instead of going out on the town as planned I spent much of that night in its combative pages, cheering Hitch on as he skewered one enemy of the people after another. No left-winger had written with such panache and erudition since Karl Marx himself.

As became apparent on further acquaintance, there was far more to Hitchens than muck-raking leftism. Anyone can call Kissinger a war criminal, but few can back up the accusation with relevant facts and convincing argument. When such a counsel for the prosecution opens his indictment with Macaulay’s verdict on the opportunism of Frederick II we know that we are dealing with no ordinary radical pamphleteer, but an advocate of unusual power and skill. In his autobiography Hitchens remarks that he was too busy playing politics and socialising with the glitterati to do any work at Oxford, but the knowledge of world history and literature revealed in his essays and reviews is so extensive that he cannot have neglected his studies as assiduously as he claims. No matter what the subject, he seems always able to summon the apt quotation or instance, with a facility that drives other writers to despair and leaves them breathless with envy.

Hitchens named moral and physical courage as one of the qualities he most admired, and he did not fail to practise what he preached. He never pulled his punches, but his attacks were always on the powerful or revered; he was not afraid to criticise those on his own side; and he did not shy from situations of personal danger. He defended – and physically sheltered –  Salman Rushdie when much of the cultural “left” was running for cover or mumbling about “not hurting deeply felt religious sensibilities”, and when Muslims had been promised a heavenly reward for murdering him. He did not hesitate to call Clinton a liar. In accordance with George Orwell’s principle that saints should be regarded as guilty until proven innocent, he questioned the credentials of such sainted celebrities as Mother Teresa. He faced personal danger reporting in Northern Ireland and in the Kurdish regions of Iraq, and remained a firm advocate of the Kurds’ right to self-determination. He was not afraid to break with old allies and his own tradition of social democracy when it came to supporting the Bush government’s decision to liberate Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.

In supporting the Iraq war Hitchens was widely accused of deserting the Left and becoming an apologist for the Right, but he was the one who remained loyal to the values of the radical Enlightenment, while much of the Left (so-called) abandoned them to go whoring after ethnic particularists and theocratic fascists merely because they were anti-Western, not appreciating that to be anti-Western was to reject those principles of secularism and critical dissent that had given birth to the Left in the first place. Despite the talk about his move to the Right, it was not Hitch’s values that changed, but his perception of what threatened them. When the danger seemed to be capitalism/US imperialism it was logical to be a Marxist of some sort (preferably Trotskyite or Maoist), but when the threat came principally from Islamic fundamentalism and other forms of religious obscurantism it was time to adopt new strategies and find new allies. Hitch’s political trajectory confounds such inadequate categories as Left and Right, as he has always followed the same star: personal liberty, freedom of thought and expression, independence of mind, and opposition to any kind of tyranny, whether secular or sacred.

The origins of his apparent shift lie in the Iranian revolution in the 1980s and the rise of the Ayatollahs, for as he recalled in his autobiography: “At the moment when Iran stood at the threshold of modernity [having just toppled the Shah], a black-winged ghoul cam flapping back from exile in a French jet and imposed a version of his own dark and heavy uniform on a people too long used to being bullied.” But he identifies the crucial turning point as the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie, the emblematic incident that crystallised everything he loved and hated:

In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual, and the defence of free expression. … To restate the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offence of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment … or to the First Amendment of the Constitution could be imagined.

Despite the accusations of apostasy, Hitchens has been on the correct (i.e. progressive) side of all the key moral and political issues of our time. Invited to admire its achievements he nonetheless saw through Cuban socialism; he never fell for any of the Communist dictators, not even Mao; he denounced the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia; he supported the struggle of the Poles; he admired C.L.R. James (the black Marxist historian); he supported British Labour when everybody else was Tory, and then went Tory when Labour abandoned its principles; he supported the Kurds against Hussein’s genocide, and the Palestinians against the Israeli land-robbers; he was pro-Jewish but anti-Zionist.

Although Hitchens was delighted to learn that his mother was of Polish-Jewish descent, meaning that he was himself Jewish, and never allowed expressions of anti-Semitism to go unchallenged, he did not exempt Judaism from his rejection of religion, nor Jewish people from the obligation to behave in accordance with the principles of justice and decency. He provoked predictable howls when he agreed with a Right-wing Christian fundamentalist that god did not hear the prayers of the Jews (nor those of Christians, for that matter); he was never backward in criticising Israeli policy towards the Palestinians; and he attacked barbarous and backward elements in Jewish culture, such as circumcision, especially the practice of metsitsah, whereby the mohel sucks the baby’s penis after cutting off his foreskin.

Hitchens always displayed a frightening capacity for colourful invective – Mother Teresa as a shriveled Albanian dwarf, Ayatollah Khomeini  as a black-winged ghoul, Paul Johnson as an explosion in a pubic hair factory – but his arguments were never purely ad hominem. He attacks wrongs rather than individuals, but also individuals on the principle that people must take responsibility for their decisions: evil acts cannot be excused by the sorts of rationalisations that Sartre called bad faith, nor overlooked because they are carried out by one’s friends or allies. He has been called insensitive and tasteless because he does not automatically extend respect – much less deference – to those who expect or demand it merely because they have not been able to shake off the illusions into which they were indoctrinated as impressionable children. Respect is something a person has to earn by his own efforts.

It is this rather Protestant ethic that explains Hitchens’ attachment to the values of the Boys Own Annual and the Boy Scout Handbook, as identified by his fellow ironist Paul Fussell: learn to think; gather knowledge; have initiative; respect the rights of others. This also explains Hitchens’ fondness for so many of those old fashioned stories of heroic endeavour by John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle and Patrick O’Brian. The same eccentricity leads him to admire and enjoy other writers whom you would not expect him to approve of, such as the snobbish Evelyn Waugh, the suave Tory H.H. Munro (Saki), and the slightly ridiculous P.G. Wodehouse – whom he defends against the facile charge of making pro-Nazi radio broadcasts while interned in Germany during the war, and in some of whose Jeeves/Bertie Wooster stories he detects marked anti-fascist sentiments, such as ridicule of Moseley’s blackshirts.

In a disarming aside in his polemical God Is Not Great, Hitchens identified his intellectual formation as that of “a Protestant atheist”. This characterisation is spot on, for although he became a U.S. citizen there is something quintessentially English about the style and content of his radicalism, which lies in a long tradition of dissent represented by such diverse figures as William Tyndale (first English translator of the Bible), John Milton, Bunyan, Shelley, William Hone (father of press freedom), Charles Bradlaugh (fearless Victorian secularist) and George Orwell, to whom Hitchens is a worthy successor.

It is the world’s loss that the gods took both Hitchens and Orwell to their heavenly reward long before their time. “Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:/ England hath need of thee”, wrote William Wordsworth at the depth of the Pittite reaction against demands for reform unleashed by the French Revolution. How Orwell would have ridiculed the clichéd sanctimony of the knee-jerk “anti-racism” that makes it impossible for the police to arrest a non-white person without being accused of discrimination, and which automatically transforms illegal immigrants into asylum seekers and refugees merely because their place of origin is a Third World country. There is something in the current mood all too eerily reminiscent of Orwell’s comment on the 1930s (from “Inside the whale”):

The thing that …was truly frightening about the war in Spain was not such violence as I witnessed … but the immediate reappearance in left-wing circles of the mental atmosphere of the Great War. The very people who for twenty years had sniggered over their own superiority to war hysteria were the ones who rushed straight back into the mental slum of 1915. All the familiar wartime idiocies, spy-hunting, orthodoxy-sniffing (Sniff, sniff. Are you a good anti-Fascist?), the retailing of atrocity stories, came back into vogue.

Where is Hitchens when we need him to eviscerate the spineless Western response  to the latest outburst of “Muslim rage”, already involving hundreds of deaths and injuries, as well as children holding placards demanding that people who exercise their right to make unfavourable comments on religious figures be murdered, in traditional style, by decapitation? And all provoked by no more than a silly amateur film on Youtube. If the author is, as has been reported, a Coptic Christian, his own rage is rather more forgivable than that of his targets, considering that the Copts have suffered centuries of persecution by the more powerful and numerous Muslims, nearly to the point of annihilation. One can imagine Hitchens’ reaction on learning the response of the United States’ authorities: not to seek to calm and discipline the rioters, but to apprehend the filmmaker. No doubt their next step will be to arrest rape victims for causing the crime by walking around in public and dressing provocatively.

The death of Hitchens (to perfectly natural disease processes) is a loss that the free world can ill-afford. We must hope that we do not have too long to wait for his successor. Hitchens! Thou should’st be living at this hour:/ The world hath need of thee …