of human existence (or Original Sin, if you prefer), rather than by defective political arrangements, does not necessarily please the intellectuals, who are left with nothing, or nothing very much, to think about and rectify.
It was therefore a godsend—to Australian intellectuals, that is—when it was discovered, or rather asserted, that the country was founded upon the worst of all possible acts, namely genocide. Here, at last, was something for Australian intellectuals really to get their teeth into. The Tasmanian aborigines died out about sixty years after the settlement of the island by the British, and the historians claimed that this was the result not of accident, but of deliberate policy. Present-day Australians, therefore, are little better than very rich men whose fortunes were founded upon a great crime, which Balzac considered to be typical of the whole class of rich men. Australians are leading their happy and prosperous lives on a foundation of corpses; penitential angst is therefore in order.
The Tasmanian genocide was soon accepted worldwide as an indisputable fact. Indeed, whenever a journalist anywhere needs a list of genocides, the Tasmanian rarely fails to appear in it. When, therefore, the Australian historian, Keith Windschuttle, published an enormous and very detailed book examining the evidence for the genocide, and found such evidence had been misconstrued where it had not been entirely fabricated, you might have supposed the world in general, and Australia in particular, would have breathed a sigh of relief: here was one genocide the less with which to upbraid humanity. But you would have been mistaken. Screams of pain rent the air and the author was reviled. Irrespective of the historical truth of the matter (and as far as I am aware, Mr. Windschuttle’s most serious claims have not been refuted), it was clear that a sector of, if not the entire, Australian intelligentsia actually wanted there to have been a genocide. Why?
I pass over in silence the fact that the great Australian Original Sin might lend power and importance to the intellectual episcopacy (ably assisted by its attendant bureaucracy) of the Church of Verbal Atonement. The love of truth, while it exists, is generally weaker than the love of power. Rather, I refer to the psychological effects and moral consequences of the crime-and-folly version of history, so amply justified by the Tasmanian genocide.
If history is indeed but the record of extreme nastiness, then we have nothing to learn from it except that we, who of course are people of unalloyed good will, must do things—everything—differently in the future. The moral reflections of people in the past were nothing but a fig leaf for their own misbehavior on a grand scale—sheer hypocrisy, in fact. In the words of Doctor Johnson, they discoursed like angels but behaved like men, and they honored every one of their precepts more in the breach than in the observance. In the absence of any religious conception of Original Sin (by comparison with an historical conception of a foundational injustice, such as the Tasmanian genocide), by means of which the imperfectability of man could be accepted, without at the same time absolving him of the need individually to strive for virtue, either perfect moral consistency or complete amoralism becomes the standard of judgment. Of course, those who still believe in the religious conception of Original Sin, even as a metaphor, are now very few, at least among the class of people who set the intellectual and moral tone of society as a whole.
Whether amoralism or moral perfectionism is chosen as the standard, one great advantage accrues: it frees us from the weight of the past. Free of any inherited taint, we have not only the right, but the duty to work everything out for ourselves, without reference to what anyone else has ever thought. We are moral atoms in motion through a vacuum, to whom the past means nothing, or at least nothing positive or worthy of emulation, or even maintenance. It is rather something to be avoided at all cost, lest it infects one with its crimes and follies.
5
The Effect of Pedagogy Without Prejudice
IF ONE IS morally obliged to clear one’s mind of the detritus of the past, in order to become a fully autonomous moral agent, it would seem to follow that we have an obligation not to fill the minds of the young with any detritus of our own manufacture. It is hardly surprising, then, that we increasingly invest children with authority over their own lives, and at ever earlier ages. Who are we to tell them what to do? The word “pupil” has almost been eliminated from usage in the English language, and has been replaced with “student.” The two words have very different connotations. A pupil is under the tutelage or direction of someone who knows what the pupil, for his own good, ought to know and to learn; a student has matured to the point at which his own curiosity or ambition permit him to follow his own inclinations, at least to some extent, where his studies are concerned. Of course, there is, and ought to be, no sharp dividing line between these two phases of an educational career, any more than there is between infancy and childhood, childhood and adolescence, and adolescence and adulthood. The absence of clear demarcations, however, does not mean that there is no difference between infancy and adulthood. No doubt the length of the phases of an educational career ought to vary according to the characteristics of the person involved. Perhaps some children are so naturally curious, and with such an instinct for the important and useful, that they can be left unguided almost from the first. But unflattering as it may be for our conception of human nature, this cannot be true of most children, who are not self-propelling along the paths of knowledge and wisdom.
Not all attempts to guide children on to these paths are successful, needless to say, as the disorder that prevails in so many of our schools amply testifies. But this in turn is evidence of a failure by parents to inculcate self-control in their offspring. And this is the result of investing their children with an authority to make choices and exercise vetoes as soon as they are able to express, or even to indicate them.
An interesting, if unintended, illustration of this appeared in a recent edition of the most prestigious general medical journal in the world, The New England Journal of Medicine. An editorial considered the relation between the epidemic of childhood obesity that is afflicting America and the rest of the Western world (and, indeed, the affluent classes of the rest of the world), and the advertising for fatty, salty junk food directed at children. The editorial, in my view unexceptionally, came to the conclusion that such advertising should not be permitted. It did not, however, mention the underlying premise that made such advertising immoral: namely, that it aimed deliberately at children who were not yet sufficiently old or autonomous to assess its claims or resist its charms.
It is difficult to know in advance what practical effect a ban on advertising junk food to children might have (I suspect it would be slight), but the editorial was very revealing of what, for lack of a better term, I shall call the Zeitgeist. For the editorial stated that the advertisements gave children the impression that the junk foods in question were made just for them, and that they as children knew best what was good for them, and should therefore be the arbiters of what they ate. And this, said the editorial, made it more difficult for parents to control their children’s diet.
Not a word was said about parents’ proper authority over their own children. (We are speaking here of children of a very young age. According to the evidence, the obesity of children begins very early in their lives, well before anything that could possibly be construed as the age of reason. The pattern of overindulgence, principally in what is bad for them, is established before they go to school.) The author of the editorial regarded the television on which advertisements for junk food currently appear as a natural phenomenon, like the atmosphere, over the watching and influence of which parents could be expected to exercise no control. But what kind of parents, one might ask, is incapable of saying No when children want something they should not have?
Lazy or sentimental parents, no doubt. They use junk food in much the same way as (though with far less excuse than) Victorian parents used Godfrey’s Cordial, that is to say opium in syrup, to stop the crying and screaming. But there is more to it than that. Anyone who has observed a mother in a shop or supermarket solicitously and even anxiously bending over a three- or four year-old child to ask him what he would like for his next meal
