11 April, 2024
Dear Reader,
On several occasions at the end of WWII army commanders who liberated German concentration camps forced local people to file through, under guard, meet some of the prisoners and witness for themselves the horror of it all. For most of those people the experience must have been deeply traumatic, and it is said that some were driven to suicide by the shame and shock of reality. Our attitude has very commonly been: ‘so it should be traumatic – serves them right’. When you see the record of those places on film your anger rises up to choke you. It is easy to feel vengeful towards civilians who lived near the camps and didn’t know, or pretended not to know, what was really going on.
On calmer reflection, though, we might decide that most of them probably were ignorant of the details, because the human capacity for self-deception and the denial of unpalatable truths is a highly developed mechanism. Certainly most Germans could not fail to be aware that so-called enemies of the state disappeared from time to time. But in challenging times you don’t ask too many questions and you’d prefer to think that such removals were justified and humanely carried out.
According to human rights activist Dr Joanna Howe, in the ten years 2010 to 2020, in Victoria and Queensland alone, 724 babies survived abortion and were left to die. Hungry, thirsty, abandoned, alone. This is just the tip of an iceberg, a mountain of human rights violations that are lawful and even commended in several of our states so far and probably soon in all the rest. As a nation, denying these things altogether or pretending that they are not important, we have lost all claim to moral superiority. How dare we point the accusing finger at Adolph Hitler – or Pol Pot or Joe Stalin – when we ourselves are so compromised by evil? Or at German villagers who didn’t know what was going on, or at least persuaded themselves that it couldn’t be too bad, that such things ‘don’t happen here’.
As a nation we permit and practise pre-natal infanticide on an enormous scale. Let’s abandon that lame word ‘abortion’ (like that other weasel word ‘women’s health’, it conceals reality) and call it out for what it is. Post-natal infanticide will come next, as inevitably as the night follows the day.
Many readers will perhaps feel that I focus too closely on this issue, neglecting more serious threats to the survival of our rich civilised inheritance. But to my mind there are no threats more serious than the killing of the innocent, and the lying and deceit that strives to keeps it hidden.
I suppose we do have a better excuse than the German village people: they were shown actual evidence of atrocities, whereas the media go to great lengths to keep the truth of ‘abortion’ hidden from us. On public television you can watch any number of warm-hearted Vet shows, and witness any number of veterinary procedures, but they’ll never let you see a human ‘termination’, because if they did the tide would turn.
Our guest writer in this edition of the Dawson Centre newsletter is Barry Spurr, Literary Editor of Quadrant. Dr Spurr was Australia’s first Professor of Poetry and a university academic for forty years. He is an acute and fearless commentator on the failings of modern mass education.
With best wishes for Eastertide, and many thanks,
David Daintree
GUEST ARTICLE: EVERYBODY HAS WON
by Barry Spurr
‘And all must have prizes’. So the Dodo answers, after the ‘caucus-race’ in Alice in Wonderland, when the participants cry out in chorus, ‘But who has won?’ This nonsense is set to become our decidedly unfunny reality, thanks to the caucus of the Federal Labor Party and its Minister for Education, Jason Clare.
In 1960, the eldest child of our neighbours in Canberra was completing the Leaving Certificate, with the intention of matriculating to university. I remember this clearly, sixty-five years on, as it was remarkable, for two reasons. Then, just 5% of school-leavers, in Australia, went on to university. Further, this child was a girl, which made it even more remarkable, as most of the matriculants of those days were boys.
Fast-forward to today and tomorrow. Now, more than 50% of school-leavers proceed to university, where, moreover, the majority of the enrolments, today, are female. In its latest bright idea, hard on the heels of squandering hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars on a failed referendum, the Government is proposing that, by mid-century, some 80% of school-leavers will go on to degree courses. Students can earn a degree from a vocational college, too – the New South Wales TAFE sector, for example, is now advertising the ‘degrees’ it is offering.
Universities themselves – which, in the 1950s, were of the size of large high schools, with maybe 3000 students – have sprawled into suburb-like communities, with enrolments surging (on several metropolitan campuses) towards 100,000. And the number of universities has more then quadrupled: there are now 42 in Australia. In 1960, there were just 10.
All of this is presented, utterly uncritically, by Government, the university authorities themselves and in most of the media commentary, as a wondrous development: let the great day come when everybody goes to university, and everybody has a degree.
In fact, the disastrous shortsightedness of the policy is truly breathtaking. This great leap forward in the name of equity, is, in fact, a huge step backwards (already, indeed, well under way) in terms of eroding the standards of entry and, subsequently, assessment for tertiary study; the quality (therefore) of the qualifications granted, and the utter devaluing of first – or bachelor’s – degrees, in general. When everybody has one, it is as plain as day that the necessity will arise, for those who want to stand out from the crowd, for career and employment purposes (and who does not?), to pursue postgraduate qualifications. Then these, in turn, will need to be degraded (as they already have been, with people engaged in doctoral study that once would have been assessed as master’s work) to accommodate the ever-increasing need to attain such qualifications. Also, in order for a respectable level of degree-completion to be sustained, to justify the vast enrolments envisaged, courses for the intellectually-incapable who will be in the ascendant in universities by mid-century, thanks to this hare-brained policy, will need to be so tailored in order that people who should never have been admitted to a university in the first place can progress through to graduation with what will become, in time, a worthless first degree.
As Gilbert and Sullivan pointed out in simple wisdom that is, nonetheless, apparently beyond the ken of these ideologically-driven policy-makers: ‘when everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.‘
Further, with such degrading of standards, those students who are genuinely of university calibre, will inevitably find themselves in classes where they will be forcibly retarded, rather than stretched and challenged, in their intellectual development (once, the principal function of a university education) as concerns of equity will determine that nobody should feel ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘unsafe’ if stretched by course content, presentation and discussion.
What is happening in universities cannot be detached from the ongoing meltdown of the Australian school system. The most recent of numerous analyses of this is Alan Lee’s article, ‘Examining Educational Failure’ in Quadrant (April, 2024). Yet, it is somehow imagined, that illiterate and innumerate Year 9 students – as a survey has shown many to be – will be transformed, by some abracadabra and within a mere couple more years of what passes for schooling, into worthy, university-calibre students.
The Australian education system, already in deep trouble across all sectors, will only be further dumbed down by this latest policy. What is alarming is that so little in the way of in-depth critiques of it have been wanting. But most extraordinary is the silence of academics themselves, who are content, apparently, to see their own institutions degraded by this utterly wrongheaded project, driven, not by a commitment to merit and educational excellence, but political ideology.
Barry Spurr.
FOR FURTHER READING
‘EASTER, CREATION AND HOLINESS’
George Weigel, Senior Fellow of the US-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote this wise meditation on time, eternity and the eternal purposes of God. Our grateful acknowledgement to First Things.
RICHARD DAWKINS AND CHRISTIANITY
‘The Cut Flowers Civilization’
This article from the Jewish World Review offers an interesting and novel angle on both Dawkins as a man (a ‘cultural Christian’, in his own words) and on Christianity. The author is controversial conservative orthodox Jewish commentator Ben Shapiro.
ABORTION: VICE-PRESIDENT HARRIS VISITS CLINIC
This is a very good report from Ben Terangi (courtesy of Mercatornet): ‘One might have hoped that by 2024, the world’s most powerful administration would have come up with an argument or two for abortion, rather than relying on euphemisms, denials of scientific fact, smears, accusations and outright inversions of the truth.’
MESSAGE TO A YOUNG WESTERN AGNOSTIC
One of our readers has submitted this letter to an atheist. We thought it clever, witty and not too unkind! –
‘You call yourself an atheist. Permit me, on the strength of your own remarks, to query this chosen identifier. Frankly, you – like most other antipodeans purporting to be atheists – strike me as being among the most florid and proselytising of polytheists. There seems no fashionable, culture-specific idol which you will not bow down and appease: whether it be democracy, or unrestricted Third World immigration, or MeToo, or same-sex marriage, or media empires hard-wired for the most brazen possible deceit, or whatever other form of modish irrationalism is hardest on your hormones at any given time. Your pantheon (if you will forgive me for saying so) makes Paganism’s pantheon look positively underpopulated.’
GROWING UP IN THE SIXTIES
This meditation, The Fourth Turning and a Generation in Crisis, by Anthony Howard, reflects on the intriguing notion of Strauss and Howe that ‘societies experience cycles of roughly 80 to 90 years, divided into four turnings: a High, an Awakening, an Unraveling, and a Crisis’.
COMING EVENTS
MELBOURNE TUESDAY 21 MAY
FREE SPEECH UNION OF AUSTRALIA
Symposium on Intellectual Freedom in the Academy
The symposium will be held in conjunction with a speech by Jonathan Rauch, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Prof Salvatore Babones will chair the event.
BRISBANE SATURDAY 1 JUNE
Classical Education: Making a Comeback. Seminar and Dinner in collaboration with LOGOS AUSTRALIS. The keynote speaker will be Andrew Kern, founder and president of the US CIRCE INSTITUTE. FULL DETAILS AND BOOKINGS HERE. Discounted early-bird rates are available until 6 May.
HOBART, LATE JUNE
Toby Young, British controversial social commentator, founder and director of the UK Free Speech Union, associate editor of The Spectator is hopefully coming to Hobart in late June. Details are being worked out – watch this space!
HOBART SATURDAY 6 JULY
COLLOQUIUM 2024
The Ninth Dawson Centre Colloquium, Saturday 6 July 2024
Authentic Humanism
and the Crisis of Culture
The Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies is an independent, not-for-profit think tank, dedicated to promoting enhanced awareness of the riches of the Christian Intellectual and Cultural Tradition.
Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) is considered to have been the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century. He is principally known for his powerful defence of the vital role of the Christian religion as a central strand of Western culture, but he also insists –
‘It is true that Christianity is not bound up with any particular race or culture. It is neither of the East or of the West, but has a universal mission to the human race as a whole…’
We in the Dawson Centre believe that every civilisation is shaped by a religious impulse, something fundamental to and inseparable from human nature, and that civilisations wither when this impulse is smothered or suppressed. In the twentieth century, and perhaps even more now, we have seen that nexus between Religion and Culture, between Faith and Reason, challenged by tyrannical forces of both the Right and the Left.
Not only is the belief in God as our ultimate reality widely denied, but our confidence in objective truth, goodness and beauty has been dealt a near fatal blow by the soi-disantintellectual elites that dominate the educational high ground. Our young people must be saved from this.
On Saturday 6 July the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies will host its ninth annual colloquium in Hobart, Tasmania. The Dawson Colloquium is a conversation, rather than a multi-stream conference. There are no keynote speeches, as all are considered important to the flow of ideas, and speakers are encouraged to attend all papers.
The Colloquium will be held again at the Italian Club, 77 Federal Street, North Hobart. The after-dinner speaker this year will be Emeritus Professor Steven Schwartz AM FASSA, formerly Vice-Chancellor of three universities (Brunel, Murdoch and Macquarie) and currently Senior Fellow of the Centre for Independent Studies.
CALL FOR PAPERS
We invite submissions from persons interested in addressing the topic. Speakers should not only identify and evaluate threats to the Christian culture and humanism, our common heritage, propose practical strategies for preservation and restoration.
Total time allocation for each paper will be 45 minutes, which should include time for questions and discussion (the proportion at each presenter’s discretion). Proceedings will be recorded and posted on the internet, and published late in 2024 or early 2025. A submission implies consent to online and print publication.
Proposals should be sent to Dr David Daintree, Director, Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies director@dawsoncentre.org, 0408 87 9494.