Just as vulgarity can sometimes transcend itself and become something else (I am thinking of Gillray and Las Vegas), so silliness can sometimes transcend itself and attain sociological significance.
Germaine Greer has written a transcendently silly pamphlet about a proposed future for her homeland, Australia. She wants it to become what she calls an Aboriginal Republic, though the exact meaning of this term is unclear even to her, which is not altogether surprising, since Aborigines lived in stateless societies before the arrival of the Europeans. However, her mind is so completely stocked with clichés that she often uses words that have connotation but no denotation, as a kind of shorthand. For example, she suggests that Australia should become a hunter-gatherer society, presumably because hunter-gatherers are assumed by the modern right-thinker to be environmentally friendly and at one with the beneficent vibrations of the cosmos. No concrete suggestion is forthcoming as to how the five million Sydneysiders, for example, are to transform themselves into a bow- and-arrow brigade, living on assorted roots, grubs and game. Of course, like all great conurbations, Sydney already has its hunter-gatherers: they’re called burglars and robbers, but I don’t suppose this is what she meant.
She thinks that Australia as an Aborigine Republic could make common cause in the United Nations with other formerly colon- ised countries. It would thereby join the ranks of victim states, thus achieving the moral purity of, say, Idi Amin’s Uganda, Hafaz Assad’s Syria or Ne Win’s Burma.
Greer’s Australia, to whose problems her constitutional vapourings are supposedly the answer, is a place unrecognisable to me, and seems to exist largely in her fantasies. For her, it is a continent utterly ruined by rapacity and colonised by none but crude alcoholics, who have created a society of which nothing good whatever can be said. This society has only destroyed; it has created or built nothing of any value. Its inhabitants are wretched, sobering up only to inject themselves with drugs in order to sink back into unconsciousness or to commit suicide. They aren’t even prosperous, working, according to her, for a miserable pittance.
Strange, then, that half the world should wish to migrate there, despite the fact that Australia is, in Greer’s view, deplorably monoglot instead of being laudably polyglot. If only Australians would learn Pushtu, Spanish, Farsi, Italian, Cambodian, Kurdish, Greek, Arabic, Russian, Chinese and Tamil, instead of so intolerantly sticking to English! Mind you, on her view of Australian society, any attempts to keep refugees out must be considered laudable, for it is preserving them from the living hell they will find if they get there.
Luckily for Australia, according to Greer, a solution to the alleged impasse created by this loathsome society is at hand: the noble savage. Australians should recognise what she calls, without troubling the reader with anything as crude as a definition, their ‘aboriginality’. What is certain is that all goodness, wisdom, culture and knowledge inhere in the Aborigines. They are so spiritual, in fact, that Greer has only to sit with them ‘on my mattress under the river gums’ (why the mattress, one might ask, in one so aboriginal?) to ‘feel all around me a new kind of consciousness in which self was subordinate to awelye, the interrelationship of everything, skin, earth, language’. Gosh, the Aborigines were able to subdue Greer’s sense of self! There must be something to them after all.
This kind of insincere and highly derivative drivel — the Australian equivalent of Marie Antoinette playing at shepherdess — is not without interest, for it tells us quite a lot about the soul of modern man. It is not self-hatred, exactly, for not even her worst enemies would accuse Greer of that: rather, it is a kind of moral exhibitionism, a claim of superiority to all those who haven’t communed with the Aboriginal Brahman on mattresses under river gums and who have instead made lives for themselves in Sydney or Melbourne.
Actually, I think Greer may be right to point to an existential unease common in Australia, but it is certainly not an unease unique to Australia. We now have societies in which quite large numbers of people have no religious belief, no interest in the life of the mind, and no struggle for survival. For them, the difference in reward between working very hard and not working at all is not great. What, then, can engage their minds or impassion them, apart from personal crises of their own making? That is why self-destructive social pathology is so prevalent, but not just in Australia.
I suspect that what infuriates Australian intellectuals about Australia is their profound irrelevance to their own society, thanks to the fact that Australia is about as good as modern, large-scale human societies get. Australia can easily confront man with the irreducible discontents of human existence, once his desires have been met, discontents which intellectuals are powerless to assuage.
The Russian model of the intelligentsia, as being the bearers of a providential historical role, has exerted a baleful influence on the imagination of western intellectuals ever since the Russian revolution at least. Unlike a Russian exile such as Herzen, however, Greer is of no real importance. This is her scream of protest.
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