Is Australia's lack of critical conservative thinking something very deep?

One thing about Australia that I have noticed differentiates it especially from most of the United States, but also from at least those parts of Europe between the “European Divide” (those areas that do not drain to the Mediterranean or the Atlantic west of the Basque Country) and the Baltic is the absence of thinking that is both critical and conservative.

As Robert Inchausti shows in Subversive Orthodoxy, between the French Revolution and the emergence of punk rock conservative Christians offered quite a number of highly interesting critiques of society that were to have a significant impact on political thinking through the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. However, Inchausti’s book gives no example from Australia, and related writers like Allan Carlson give very few. It is noteworthy how, despite the conservatism and religiousity of Australia working class and the dominance of large sections thereof by the Catholic Democratic Labor Party, the kind of "antipolitical politics" described by Inchausti is completely absent. So is conservative criticism of Australian lifestyle and culture a là Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful (to which Australia, with its flatness and natural unity, is the purest antithesis).

Other area where critical, but conservative and religious, thinking is absent

1. are the forestry-dominated economies of Scandinavia, the Pacific Northwest (Joel Garreau’s "Ecotopia") and New Zealand. Here religion has never been remotely strong owing to the scarcity of resources inherent in an economy where harvesting occurs only once in a lifetime - as opposed to every year with farming, herding or most hunter/gatherer economies. Moreover, since timber is easier to steal than food, forest owners can concentrate wealth very strongly, which leads to militant unions that encourage big government and secularism. In such a society religion is seen as irrelevant and highly orthodox, disciplined faith as a means of pacifying the masses, especially as big government encourages women to masculinise.
2. Europe south of the “Divide” (Italy, Spain, Portugal) is a very different case, but “subversive orthodoxy” is equally absent because the Catholic Church was so closely tied to the ruling classes that offering any sort of criticism of the social order meant challenging Church authority and orthodoxy. This could be argued of Latin America and perhaps Germanophone Europe as well.

What this may reflect, as I, following Rod Dreher, say in my previous post, is that Australia’s low-density suburban lifestyle is simply not a threat to religious practice as the hectic, high-density lifestyle of European and Asian cities certainly is.

The result is that in suburban Australia people can be devoutly religious whilst still socialising within a culture generally rather sceptical about religion. This is simply impossible in the cities of Europe, East Asia, and even much of North America. As Rod Dreher and Sara Maitland say, to practice religion in such environments requires extraordinary levels of self-discipline and the self-enforced exclusion of many conveniences most people desire.

In the absence of such requirements, critical thinking, even if Christian and conservative, naturally loses its entire purpose.

Thoughts on riding from Belgrave to Pakenham

Today I set myself a challenge I had desired for a long time: to ride by myself in the ranges east of Belgrave Station - which I felt would provide some sort of challenge for me and maybe even help myself to improve my grossly obese body mass.

I had hoped that I would be able to travel to Belgrave earlier when the weather was much better, but it was only today, on a day hotter than average for November but the coolest day for many weeks ahead it seems, that I got out of the house early enough to be able to take a train to Belgrave at a reasonable hour.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take my water bottle, which I certainly would have needed on a day of 25˚C with blazing sunshine - and I knew it was to become hotter and hotter all through the remainder of the month. I bought two discounted bottles of Diet Coke, but as my mother and dentist had told me, the drink could not quench my thirst at all adequately. the train trip to Belgrave was trouble-free and there was little problem with my behaviour: accostings of other people, whilst not completely absent, were much fewer than normal. However, once I began cycling on the road to Gembrook with the expectation I might be able to go even beyond Gembrook towards Tonimbuk and the Black Snake Range, I realised that I was not well-prepared. I was having to push my bike on the side of the road except on downhill stretches, and took over two hours to travel the eleven kilometres from Belgrave to Emerald.

The striking thing, though, was how much safer I felt on the road than I ever have riding suburban laneways! In the entire ride, I never failed to hear a vehicle coming in either direction and consequently could always stay far off the road to avoid being hit. That I was never in danger is the more remarkable when one considers that the whole road was listed as a blackspot zone for people on bicycles! It does reveal, as I have been studying lately, the influence of an environment as quiet as the Dandenongs - which I can tell you is by no means as far towards a silent environment as one can go.

During the trip towards Gembrook, I stopped at Emerald Library for an hour to refresh myself, after having a donut and cream lamington at the local bakery. I then went onto Cockatoo, but when I realised I was only halfway to Pakenham I felt it would be a ridiculous idea to follow my original plan to reach Gembrook and beyond. Thus, without hesitation, I turned my bike towards Pakenham. It was an easier, mostly downhill, ride to Pakenham, but it took longer to find the station than I expected. Worse than that, by the time I reached the station I was so tired that I fell asleep on the train - even with my iPod in my ears! It was also hard to keep the bike stable on the train. Moreover, when I reached the city and transferred to a train to Rushall Station (so that I would be mostly riding downhill instead of uphill) I found that I had strained myself in the chest region and was worried about how difficult it would be to ride even from Rushall to my home in Carlton. When I did reach home, I was so tired that - very unusually for me - I went straight to bed after having a bit of fruit to eat.

All in all, I feel as though I do want to repeat the trip - even though the climate is changing so fast that it will be from now on very hard to do this sort of cycling outside of a short period in the winter and I will have to wait until long after returning home from Europe for weather cool enough to try it again!

First step to solve Melbourne's urban crisis

In today’s Age, Brian Buckley shows that devastation is threatened by Melbourne having a projected population of seven million by 2049 – and this in a city with no fresh water and a climate as hot and dry as that of Arabia!

Buckley is right to be appalled that Melbourne emits more carbon than London – a city twice the size and living on soils with an order of magnitude more soil nutrients per unit area.

If ecological justice remotely existed, the average resident of Melbourne would emit no more than one thousandth the carbon of the average European city, simply because the ancient Australian environments are so fragile.

To achieve ecological justice Australia must:

1. put an absolute ban on new non-residential roads
2. tranfer a rail:road spending ratio of 1:4 to at the very least a situation where rail spending exceeds road and air combined
3. make car, mining and fossil fuel corporations pay the entire cost of climate-related disasters like bushfires and the Queensland floods
4. phase out irrigation in at least the southern Murray-Darling Basin (which global warming models strong suggest will soon become desert)
5. aim to revegetate as much farmland as possible with native flora
6. use fuel taxes to pay for rail as well as road construction

The trouble with achieving any of these goals is that Buckley cannot understand the emotional benefits a sprawling city has, viz:

1. at least three times as much housing space (or, as much space per person for a four-child family as for a one-child family in Europe or Asia)
2. because larger families build deeper emotional ties, people become more compassionate and sensitive
3. lower mean house prices in suburbs add to the increased possibility of family formation
4. the much slower pace of life vis-à-vis densely settled European and Asian cities (I can testify to this from living even a few days in London how incredibly fast-paced it was compared even with inner Melbourne)

A fast-paced and hectic lifestyle, as Rod Dreher wrote in his excellent book Crunchy Cons, encourages a shallow, highly materialistic and unemotional lifestyle in which satisfaction of the ego overrides everything.
Dreher argues that the lifestyle of noisy cities is of itself as force against tradition. Sprawling suburbs, as I can testify living in Ashwood and Keilor Downs, are much quieter and slower-paced, giving people much more time for reflection. The slower pace also offers, according to Dreher, opportunities for socialisation that are hard in the inner city. E. Michael Jones (a writer whom I have definite distaste for) apparently made a similar argument in his book Living Machines.

That selfish materialism dominates the culture of Europe, Asia, Canada and New Zealand there can be no doubt. David D. Kirkpatrick shows people in those nations to be obsessed with individual choice to the complete exclusion of tradition or morality. They wish to have the highest-quality and most individual records and books in a manner that serves, if you will, to build bigger and bigger egos and leave no room for relationships. (Those on welfare tend to be even more materialistic in this way, as Arthur Brooks shows).

For the majority who are not autistic or otherwise lacking empathy, such a culture and lieftstyle is extremely repellant. Like a magnet, even modestly empathetic people are lured to Melbourne's sprawling suburbs, and want conditions under which their way of life is not threatened. Buckley does not consider that sustainable development in Australia would require a severe effort both

1. at home by not pandering to a powerful road lobby and
2. abroad by sanctioning Australia for its exceptionally bad environmental standards and realising that its living costs are, ecologically, untenably low

The Janjawid and rhinos

Long interested in poaching of rhinos because of their rarity and the knowledge of how their horns are used to make ceremonial daggers in Yemen and medicines in now-affluent nations of East Asia, it is terrifying to know that in the present economic downturn rhino poaching is increasing after efforts to stabilise rhino populations in the eighties and nineties.

What is surprising is that, in Sudan and Chad, poaching of the now extinct Northern White Rhino constituted a major source of funding for Muslim terrorist groups known as the Janjawid. The Janjawid are camel-herding tribes of the eastern Sahel who have been the major force kiling non-Muslims in southern Sudan and adjacent Chad over the past decade. The price of rhino horn is so high that the Janjawid, even with no more rhinos to kill, still have a good deal of money from their operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo where the last Northern White Rhinos were found. More than that, the Janjawid also have elephants to poach for ivory if they run out of rhino horn.

What is more revealing still is that Janjawid insiders admit that the Sudanese government sponsors poaching. Doing such a thing is terrifying even for a country that is not a signatory to CITES (neither is Yemen) but is shows extremely bad behaviour on the part of the Asian dealers who buy rhino horn and who are signatories to CITES.

How will the media view the Nineties?

In dissecting Jonathan Leaf's The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties, I have noticed how commentators note here that

The media has always seemed to look down its collective nose at the Fifties, and the Seventies, and even the Eighties. (How could the media, with its usual biases, not despise a decade dominated by Reagan - and at its end - by the collapse of communism?)

What I have been thinking about lately is the question of how the media will come to view the Nineties.

The first thing I considered analysing this question is whether the media will support the Nineties simply because for most of the decade a Democrat was President - something that occurred in the Sixties but not in any of the decades said to be criticised by the left-wing media. The spread of democracy in poorer nations and the end of (at least outside the Middle East) US-sponsored overthrows of governments for moving too close to Communism is another reason for praising the Nineties. The efforts to deal with the ecological crisis (though Mariana Trench-level petrol prices prevented anything from being done in the US at least) are another reason for praising the 1990s. The related Kyoto Protocol and successful phase-out of CFCs and halons will make the 1990s, despite the radical climate changes which are too little-known outside Australia's scientific community, possibly further praised.

Although Nirvana and other grunge bands have not maintained the critical reputation they once had, there remains the popular viewpoint that the 1990s saw the demise of many of the worst moments in music history, such as the middle-of-the-road muzak that dominated 1980s America.

There is also the point of the PMRC being largely overthrown and bans on politically correct rap and metal being eliminated.

On the other hand, there are many serious issues about the Nineties that would make support for it difficult. One of course is the fact that teen pop and nu-metal, which the fashionable hate. I would also say that the Nineties stand as the only decade since 1950 where, in Jonathan Leaf's words,

the most important (new) intellectuals were on the political Right.

The Nineties saw a major reaction to the radicalism of the Bush Senior era. Even though it was led by Silent like Pat Buchanan, Robert Bork, Peter Kreeft, Donna Steichen and Judith Reisman, it soon grew to encompass younger writers like E. Michael Jones, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Rush Limbaugh, Roger Kimball and Dinesh D'Souza. Another big conservative moment in the Nineties was the publication in 1996 of Michael J. Behe's Darwin's Black Box, whose theory of "intelligent design" has become a clarion call for many people who find Darwinism inherently radically nihilistic. I must say that "intelligent design" is a less convincing argument that most things coming from Regnery.

All in all, it is hard to tell if the Nineties will be remembered more favourably by "politically correct" media than the Seventies or Eighties. My brother has even said that it is unlikely there will be such strong emotions about the Nineties as exist about the Sixties and even the Eighties (both of which are actually similar in that they began conservative and ended with a radical cultural revolution).