Author: ericknight

Words, not ideas, have got in the way of our latest political train wreck.  The Australian heartland, I would suggest, has the same generous idea about our nation’s future. Semantics, however, have gotten us into a terrible mess.

It was John Howard who first made the distinction between the words “multi-cultural” and “multi-ethnic”. His point was that a people are one, but their countries of origin are many. People as different as Cory Bernardi and Chris Bowen would agree with that statement. But it was a clumsy distinction. Chris Bowen’s speech this week was a deliberate attempt to revive this semantic ghost for political effect. It worked. Scott Morison has been tripping all over the place ever since.

My advice, for what it’s worth, is to leave language to poets. Qantas has made famous the words of two of our great song-writers, Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton. It’s aired every time we step onto a Qantas aircraft because it expresses perfectly and beautifully what we all think.

We are one, but we are many
And from all the lands on earth we come
We share a dream and sing with one voice:
I am, you are, we are Australian

Rumour has it that there was a rather nasty stoush between a bishop and an abbott last week. Julie Bishop was cagey about what it was over. It is clear what it should have been over. Abbott’s decision to reallocate foreign aid funding to pay for the floods is an error of judgment.

In Battle Lines, Abbott acknowledged that the Liberal party has traditionally struggled with an image problem. The problem is that swing voters see the Liberals as cold-hearted. I say it’s an image problem because this doesn’t need to be the case. No party can claim a monopoly on a good heart. Political parties, you may be surprised to know, rarely disagree with purposes: better health care, better education, helping the down-and-out. What they disagree on is how to achieve these purposes.

Both sides want to help Queensland. But Abbott made himself the news story by axing foreign aid to pay for the floods. Instead he should have tried to cut bottom line spending deployed in unproductive projects under the $42 billion stimulus package. The message here is fiscal responsibility.

I have commented elsewhere why Gillard’s levies are fiscally imprudent. The flood bill should be paid for out of the national budget. It is a very serious problem if the Treasurer is running the economy on such a fine margin that it cannot pay for natural disasters. It’s like the Seinfeld episode where Kramer tries to see how far he can drive his car in the red zone of the fuel tank. Missing this point and being close to a policy suggested by Qld One Nation is a mistake.

In 2005, George Lakoff wrote a book called Don’t Think Of An Elephant. The book was Lakoff’s explanation for why the Democratic Party had been out of power for so long in the United States. Lakoff had sent the book off to some boutique publishers and had been knocked back several times for being too niche. When it finally got accepted, Lakoff half expected never to hear about it again. Within twelve months it had become a sensational hit within the ranks of the Democratic Party.

To explain why it was a hit, you need to know a little bit about George Lakoff. As a linguistic student in the 1960s, Lakoff had studied under Noam Chomsky. Lakoff had been one of Chomsky’s prodigies but the pair had fallen out over a rather obscure difference of opinion. Chomsky’s theory of language was that words had great beauty for their own sake. Lakoff’s view was that the meaning of words resided in deep cavities of our psychology. To understand the meaning of language, you had to understand the human mind.

For Lakoff, the human mind was hardwired in one of two ways. They were directly associated with your relationship with your parents. One half of the population, Lakoff contested, were brought up under a strict parent model. These people responded to language which sparked metaphors of discipline and order. The other half of the population responded to the “nurturant” parent model. These people responded to language which endorsed mutual responsibility and equality.

Lakoff’s claim in Don’t Think Of An Elephant was that people who responded to strict parent figures were hard-core Republicans. Those who responded to the nurturant model were hard-core Democrats. Swing voters had a bit of each in the them. Winning political campaigns for the Democrats came down to a simple strategy: hitting the nurturant metaphor in people’s minds hard enough and more frequently.

To illustrate the point, Lakoff gave an example. The reason Republicans had been so successful in winning voters was that they could summarize what they stood for in ten words or less: lower taxes, stronger defense, smaller government, free markets, family values. If the Democrats could do the same, Lakoff surmised, their fortunes would turn. Lakoff suggested some key words: broad prosperity, stronger America, better future, effective government, mutual responsibility.

I mention this on the day after Australia Day only to explain why I struggled with a book called Reclaiming Patriotism. The book was written by Tim Soutphommassane, a political philosopher I met briefly whilst in Oxford. Tim’s book was aimed for a progressive audience. His argument (at the risk of over-simplifying it) was that the left had ceded jingoistic language to the right. His call to arms was to take it back.

I struggle, firstly, to believe that anyone on the left would admit that they feel queasy around words like liberty, egalitarianism, and democratic citizenship. But the more significant problem for me is Tim’s suggestion that the true deficiency for the left is in language. It’s not at all clear to me why language should be the pre-occupying theme of progressive discourse at the moment. Surely it is more important for left people to be asking itself ‘what can I do to be patriotic’ rather than ‘what can I say to reclaim the language of patriotism’?

Language only goes so far. You can say you want a fair shake of the sauce bottle, but people will only believe you if you seem like the sort of person who speaks that way. People have a way of seeing through slogans.

National monuments are not a time for a nation to be modest. Think of Buckingham Palace, the Egyptian Pyramids, and the Eifel Tower. Americans, most of all, are enthusiatic subscribers to this philosophy which is why I was suprised to find my visit to the Capitol Building in Washington DC last December so enjoyable.

As the crowds of American tourists flooded into the auditorium for the 1.30pm screnning of E Pluribus Unum, I was sure that I had made a mistake. I like Americans, but not that much. The truth, though, was once the movie started I rather got into the swing of things.

E Pluribus Unum is the motto of the US. Latin scholars inform me it means ‘from many one’. The theme of the movie, as far as a pundit like me could discern, was that America – a nation built by immigrants – was united by the idea of freedom.

Waleed Aly, in his essay The Patriots Act, once said that Americans framed their national identity around a civic identity rather than a cultural one. The distinction deserves some explaning. Aly’s point was that America found its unity in an idea rather than the appearance of its people. It didn’t matter where you came from. It mattered how you treated your neighbour.

It is an admirable notion. Some might disagree that America embodies it but the Americans deserve points for trying.

The day before Australia Day, it is worth asking what Australia’s motto would be. Would it be cultural? Is it civic? Is Waltzing Matilda a song about a white ex-Englishmen or a man irreverent towards authority, or neither? I’m not sure. But if we ever did get a motto, my only vote is that it not be in Latin.