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TOM'S
TAKE...
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The conundrums of my new-found friendship with Cliffy Baxter... Dear all,
I have to say I keep laughing at myself and where I have ended up. Fancy the arch-conservative Tom Scott ending up in an evangelising partnership with the inveterate fabian socialist and passionate peace activist Cliffy Baxter? Despite all our differences of opinion on so many matters we've become firm mates. We must have five or six telephone conversations a day and these days I usually end up rolling around on the floor laughing myself stupid at whatever next mad antic, or character, he is proposing for Catholica. What fun it has been working with him watching, and encouraging the development of his menagerie. What are we trying to do here? In a sense we are trying to laugh at ourselves — and we're trying to get everyone laughing along with us at the aspects of our faith that take themselves far too seriously and end up distracting all of us from what is, in the end, really important. We'll see in due course how successful a communication tactic it is in reaching out to the audience we eventually seek to attract to Catholica Australia. In the meantime we intend to continue having a lot of fun while we put this together. Behind all the hilarity though, Cliffy has often gotten me thinking more seriously on a range of issues, particularly those on which I am not altogether convinced by his arguments. There are two of those issues that I'd like to briefly explore in this Take...
Last night I found the interview with former Liberal Leader, John Hewson, on the Andrew Denton program quite fascinating. (The transcript should be on their website by the time this article in published.) Hewson made the observation that in many ways he had a similar upbringing to the present Liberal leader and Prime Minister, John Howard. They both came from fairly strict religious households in the upper reaches of the working class or lower reaches of the middle class. Their parents struggled financially and endeavoured to do the best for their kids. In some ways I also came from a similar background except the religion in our household was Catholic. Our gravitation to Liberal or Conservative politics is not what one would have expected given our family backgrounds. (For our American readers, the Liberal Party of Australia is the party on the "conservative" end of the spectrum here and this always makes it confusing in trying to understand Australian politics. The founder of the Liberal Party, Sir Robert Menzies, chose the name Liberal in the late 1940s in the old understanding of classical Liberalism. The ways in which we popularly understand, and use, the term "liberal" today is more associated with libertarianism than the understanding of Classical Liberalism that Menzies had in mind.)
I have to confess I am not a great fan of the Liberal Party of Australia today — particularly after watching the performance of Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanston, responding to Tony Jones on Lateline last night concerning the revelations of the Edmund Rice Centre for Social Justice about the fate of asylum seekers who were returned to Afghanistan. (See transcript or watch the video HERE.) Nor am I a fan of John Howard albeit that I do have enormous respect for his Machiavellian skills in reading the popular mind, trading on popular prejudices and the baser human instincts, and using these to maintain the Liberal Party in power. I honestly do not think we have seen a politician in the entirety of Australian history who has honed these skills in the way our present Prime Minister has done. Certainly he has built a more prosperous nation. I would question though that he has built a nation of more noble people ... a people who do care about others, who are interested in justice — whether it be social, economic or judicial — and whether, in the final evaluation, the populist policies he pursues builds a fairer, more honest, and ethical nation. Besides Cliffy, I have other socialist mates. In fact, back in my activist days in the Liberal Party I often used to exclaim that I'd prefer having a bunch of socialists to dinner rather than a pack of Liberals. You can have a decent conversation with socialists which you can't do with Liberals. The vast majority of them would not know what a political philosophy was if it hit them over the head. I was reminded of all this just a few days ago observing the discussion on the CathNews board with the newly resident atheist over there, FNA. In the Catholic Church it is often more fulfilling, and spiritually growth-inducing having a conversation with a committed atheist than it is with a pack of "loyal Cafflicks".
When push comes to shove though and I listen to my mate Cliff's socialist bleatings about how bad the capitalists are I continue to part company with him philosophically. In the choice between a collectivist-based political economy and one which is based on providing the maximum freedom for the individual to go out and start new enterprises I continue to believe that Adam Smith's insights continue to be basically correct. The individual striving to establish a market for his or her produce and promote it in a market as free from government and artificial regulation as possible I believe does eventually lead to the lifting of all people to greater levels of prosperity – and, more importantly, personal freedom – than does a collectivist system that seeks to shackle individual initiative, enterprise and entrepreneurship. I am not denying here that socialism or collectivist political philosophies are not also seeking to advance the prosperity and personal freedoms of the community they serve. I think they are. They do choose a different road though by which to try and bring it about. My argument, or disagreement with the socialists and collectivists is over which "system of thought" does most efficaciously actually lead to greater prosperity and the personal freedom that is underpinned by prosperity. The other area in which I still find myself at odds with Cliff — and, indeed, with some of my own children — is on the question of the response we take to violence and terrorism in society. Self-evidently there are in the world many potential Adolf Hitlers or Joe Stalins still out there. World War II did not rid the world of the totalitarian mindset. If you happened to watch the horrific story on Four Corners last night of the application of Sharia Law in Iran that should be enough to convince anyone of that. I am not convinced that a Mahatma Gandhi-like spirit of pacifism and non-violent response to totalitarianism, or terrorism, is adequate. Despite the claims some Christian Pacifists endeavour to make, I think it is a misreading of Jesus Christ to portray him as some kind of "turn the other cheek, go ahead and bomb the rest of my house" pacifist. I honestly find the extremist left-wing, pacifist readings of Jesus misread the essentials of the "Good News" and what the heart of "the Word" or "the Way" is as much as do the extremist, literalist, fundamentalist Christians who read Jesus Christ as though he is some kind of mummy's boy social conformist or let's-bomb-the-bastards bigot. Cheers, Tom Links:
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