Windschuttle on the "Perverse Ideology" of "Adversary Culture"

One of the most perceptive critics of today's history profession is Keith Windschuttle, author of "The Killing of History" [highly recommended -- available from Amazon, click on one of the ads at the top of the blog].

Here Windschuttle discusses the etiology of the "perverse ideology" of left-wing "adversary culture" in Australia. His observations, of course, could apply with equal force to other nations. Recognize anyone you know? I know I do.

It is this despair about the majority of the Australian people that constitutes the principal unifying theme of the adversary culture of this country's tertiary-educated middle-class professionals. This social group is a minority but a sizeable one. Its critics sometimes call it the inner-city Left, the new class, or the cultural elite. It dominates our film and theatre industry, our arts and literature, public broadcasting, the Fairfax press and the humanities and social science departments of our 38 universities. Its leading lights were educated and radicalised by the upheavals within universities in the 1960s and 1970s. Its support for a republic and the Greens means most commentators put it on the left of politics, but it is a very different kind of leftism to the traditional variety.

Before the 1960s, being on the Left meant siding with the trade union movement, the left of the Labor Party, or the Communist Party and its various fronts. The leading Marxist historians of the 1950s Robin Gollan and Ian Turner romanticized the militancy of the industrial and rural union movements. Russel Ward's history, The Australian Legend, published in 1958, argued that the true Australians, the outback workers, were inherently left-wing, and the ideal of mateship stood for collectivist and socialist values.

A decade later, however, a new university-educated Left rejected all this. By the 1960s, the industrial working class seemed too satisfied with its lot to constitute a revolutionary vanguard. The Left went looking for other constituents. The movements that emerged among radical feminists, homosexuals, Aboriginal activists and other so-called marginalised minorities were not impressed by the traditional Marxist concept that the leading role in history was to be played by the white, male, blue-collar working class. Moreover, the university-educated left itself had little empathy with those who worked down mines, in shearing sheds or on the factory floor. Avoiding those kinds of occupations was the very reason they went to university in the first place.

The upshot was that they ditched the old white working class and then proceeded to vilify it....

The author of the most illuminating analysis of the sociology of this emerging class is Katharine Betts in her book The Great Divide. Betts says that in the 1960s members of the new class could choose between two existing cultural options: the Anglophile norms of established wealth, with its big houses, gardens, wine and golf clubs, and the locally-produced culture of the lower orders, with its suburban quarter-acre blocks, poker machines, beer, barbecues and football. Employed on salaries, they could not hope to emulate the rich, and suburbia was what they were desperately trying to escape. So they created a third option by developing a culture of their own.

It meant moving back to the inner city districts that their parents' generation had regarded as slums, buying and gentrifying then cheap nineteenth century houses, and switching their allegiance from British to European culture. They constituted the market for art-house films and European literature. They ate at ethnic restaurants and switched from beer to wine. Several of the films of the 1960s, especially Zorba the Greek, established the idea of the “marvellous ethnic”, of continentals who really knew how to live the full life, untrammeled by uptight Anglo-Saxon inhibitions. “Tradi­tional southern-European society is in fact tightly bound by values of honour, female chastity and family authority,” Betts writes, “but cultural tourists will always find the foreigner they imagine.”

The same group opposed the Vietnam War and, although they drew much of their inspiration from writers in the United States, they adopted the prevailing anti-Americanism of the Western intellectual Left. They were firmly against what remained of the White Australia Policy. They decided that support for these policies by older and more parochial Australians was based on racism. Hence, the fashionable causes of the day defined traditional Australians and their way of life as the problem, and immigrants and their way of life as the solution. Cultural diversity became a symbol of social prestige that distin­guished this new class from the old Anglophile establishment. More importantly, these values were radically different from those of the outer suburbs from where most of the new professionals had emerged. Their principal object of hostility was not old wealth but the Australian masses, with their materialism, racism, sexism, and insularity.

Multiculturalism became their beacon. Multiculturalism in Australia originated as a perfectly civilized policy to ease immigrants into their host society. However, in the hands of its most fervent academic and bureaucratic exponents it became a program for radical political change. It rests on the proposition that the culture of the West is an elite hegemony of white European males, which marginalizes, represses, and victimizes women, the poor, indigenes and adherents to non-Christian religions....

Read the whole thing here.

Thanks to Toby, the Bilious Young Fogey, for pointing this out.