© 1992 Max Harris
© 1992 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
By Max Harris, South Australia
How I miss it, the power and thrust of ideological debate; good minds propounding ideas and better minds demolishing them.
How important to our social destiny the clashing and concord of minds can be, especially when the weapons of wit, irony, ratiocination, analogy and common logic have led to thoughtful sense winning out over silliness.
It is not an age of great debates and involving controversies. The Blaineys and the Keneallys and the Santamarias still give it a go, but they know they are merely shadow boxing.
By and large competitive ideas are expressed as a form of minor field sport, played before a mass audience of television viewers of the kind that are habitually plugged into the commercial networks. The jargon of politicians, journos and saloon bar screamers says it all.
Even the most visible modern form of testing ideas and policies, the television interview, has become a Spanish Inquisitional skill rather than an asking of hard questions which evoke revealing answers.
It is all a great pity, because there are so many issues which are for and of the present times, which could be described as ideological or socio-philosophical, and of some urgency.
A completely different and new age of superpowerdom is coming upon us at high speed. Do we respond by rationalising the idiotic State-Federal divisions of responsibility that bedevil any attempts at dynamic management of our economy and social cohesion?
There is the Australia that lives in the under-educated heads of the young, the psychic instability of the mature, in the values held by one area of the country as against another. The tyranny of distance is an outmoded cliche. The tyranny of insulated thinking is a reality. The country is divided by more factors than simple migrant multiculturalism.
It matters not. The fact is that the world is reshaping its powers and forces and especially its future sets of relationships at such a whizzbang speed that our little noodles can’t keep up with it.
It is not that the shock of the new is not being recorded and reported and ideologically analysed by our much maligned media. I am proud of the quality press for the almost quixotic fashion in which good minds with polymathic abilities are recruited and their prognostic thoughts published.
The best is in danger of being degraded, through the domination of the public mentality, by the worst.
But it is the nature of the aural and visual media to subsume that its patrons possess a short attention span.The convulsive changes in the power and policy configurations of the big distant outside world have to be conveyed in what I understand are called “ 60 -second grabs”. The mass of people are fed endless impressionism which they absorb with minimal understanding.
And that is why most of us are reacting to vast historic global change with catatonic mental insulation.
Gifted ideologues may write for newspapers and what they write may be read by the literate minority. But changed modes of thinking and economic behavioural responses have to come from the whole community. Otherwise tomorrow’s Australia will still be today’s Australia preserved in the aspic of ignorance. We will pay the price for it, the price for shrivelled minds in a time which calls for sharpened reflexes from ordinary people.
A completely different and new age of super-powerdom is coming upon us at high speed.
Our pastors and masters are of no help. They have fallen into the trap of exploiting the electronic media to communicate immediate urgencies. It can’t be done via the short attention span and the expediency of pandering to shallow minds with shallow thinking.
All that comes across is the good old bloke syndrome. I am the same as you. I am an ideological bankrupt like you. I, too, am the living endorsement of the contented ‘she’s right’ mediocrity, just like you viewers.
The world is remaking itself and I have a sense of impending danger, especially for Australia. I have a feeling we are including ourselves out.
The blockage that causes this is the communication problem, that is, the media. The line of communication from ideologues, from those with speculative expertise, runs via politicians through the media to the public. But in the process politicians trivialise because the electronic media make their profits through trivialisation. Even Sartre would admit that this is a pretty vicious old circle.
So there I am. I read the serious thinkers on what’s happening and what will happen. New patterns of power and poverty are shaping up in a context which may involve vicious wars of fanatic, newly-awakened nationalism. Will a new order co-exist with a new chaos?
It is frustrating that not even such questions are entertaining the consciousness of ordinary people. Until we know the questions we can’t prepare the national psyche for the changes to be made within the national character and within ourselves.
We will remain the dumb country, dedicated to the philosophy that this is the future that was. Whoosh!