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Cultures Who Fear the Future

Lloyd Morcom

G21 AUSTRALIA Correspondent

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Lloyd Morcom

It's hard to get a handle on the future. Nanotechnology, biotechnology, control of the genome and the amazing video editing abilities of the new Macs, versus overpopulation, the possibility of new disease epidemics, the refugee crisis, the greenhouse effect and reality TV.

We think in polarities: either/or, good and evil. The truth out there is that everything happens all the time, and every human type; saint, warrior, opportunist and planner, sensualist and ascetic is wandering the earth looking for their opportunity, their big chance. The flow of time and circumstance can raise them up or cast them into irrelevant obscurity.

So too with cultures and communities. Many of us feel very threatened by change, and I follow with particular interest Kevin Carey's musings: it seems England has a particularly strong sense of loss and threat on both the left and right of politics.

This is understandable when you look back over the past four hundred years of English history. From the Tudors until the First World War, there was a steady rise in Britain's wealth and security. A huge middle class, grown wealthy on trade and manufacture, studded the country with stately homes. The same middle class, by reason of its numbers and wealth, was able to acquire political power without the vicious struggle which took place in other societies.

The English have always been conscious of their good fortune, never more so as when it is under threat. In times of war, there has been a great outpouring of histories of Britain which recall past invasion scares with plenty of opportunity to show enduring English virtues. One of my favourites is Carola Oman's Britain against Napoleon, which interleaves commentary with extracts from contemporary diaries and newspapers. The propaganda stories of C. S. Forrester such as The Ship or Brown on Resolution are in a similar vein.

But the more virtues you can enumerate, the more you are conscious of your vulnerability. It all seems downhill from there.

By contrast, Australian culture and history seem a pretty thin affair. White settlement commenced a little over two hundred years ago. The country became an independent sovereign nation exactly one hundred years ago -- we're in the middle of our Centenary of Federation celebrations at the moment. Until the government ran a series of ads on TV, most Australians (myself included) couldn't name our first Prime Minister!

There has never been an Australian aristocracy. I recently installed a sound system in Como House, one of our stately homes built one hundred and fifty years ago and a jewel of the National Trust. I was struck by how tacky it was: an aping of the real thing back in Britain by people with a bit of money but not much taste.

Australian society is a peculiar thing. Imagine cutting off English society slightly above the level of shopkeepers, and transporting the bottom half to a desert land. That, plus a strong admixture of Irish refugees, was what the place was like until the end of World War Two. A nation of forelock tuggers, looking for an absent master.

This attitude still resonates, with our present Prime Minister being a magnificent example: a man with the character of a small town accountant, mean and tricky (a leaked internal party assessment of him) in his dealings with equals and underlings, falling over himself in undignified haste to please who he perceives as superiors (George Dubblya, who's probably not even fully aware of his existence).

It is a nation with a shaky memory of its past. Most people have trouble naming their grandparents, except for retirees who've made a hobby of genealogy.

There is a concentration on the immediate, the domestic. Melbourne, my closest city, is a place with no sweeping landscapes but at its heart are leafy suburbs full of modest or dignified private houses, often featuring magnificent gardens. Gardening is a Melbourne obsession.

Until the sixties, intellectual and cultural life was very thin indeed.

Things have changed now but still celebrations such the Centenary of Federation and before it in 1988, the Bicentennial, are curiously artificial affairs which don't seem to deeply move the nation's soul (if it has one), but provide forums for politicians to preen and strut and grants for artists.

Since the Second World War Australia has absorbed large numbers of migrants from many places. Italians and Greeks came in droves, with marvellous effects on the cuisine. Jews came from Europe (Melbourne has the highest number of Holocaust survivors in the world), followed by Yugoslavs, Lebanese, Vietnamese and others now too numerous to mention.

To go to a market in Melbourne and see those stunning and haughty African women in their traditional bright colours is a pleasure. Of course it doesn't last, as their children will acquire Australian accents and Australian tastes and won't be exotic at all.

Because the great secret and truth of Australian identity is that it is all in the accent, and the largely unconscious traits absorbed along with it.

The other great truth about Australians is that they are tribal. Ideas, social position, the specialised roles of the professions: all are effortlessly laid aside once Australians have a drink in their hand and are standing around the barbecue discussing sport. The downside is that ideas are not valued, nor is talent, except for the talent of fitting in. To be uninterested in sport, as I am, is to cut yourself off profoundly from not only society as a whole, but often your family, too.The gifted and the energetic often flee to Europe or America.

The result is a curious mix of a conservatism born of disinterest, and a radical ability to cope with change due to a weak attachment to anything other than this vague tribal notion.

All this is a pointer towards the characteristics of the cultures best able to cope with the changes crowding in on us. As a rule, those with no strong attachments to ideas or institutions obviously have the flexibility needed, although attachment to the rule of law will be an asset. Otherwise, Afghanistan would be the place of most promise as having the least to lose through change.

Those having most difficulty will be the ones clinging to what they see as identities under threat, i.e., the Europeans and Japanese and regimes controlled by religious conservatives, such as Iran or China.

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