My criticism, in what was a generally favourable review, was that, after forty years and sixteen volumes, the ADB had never published its criteria for inclusion. These criteria ought to be published with each volume.

Dr Kingston, though, does give details of the quotas applied. There is a geographical quota. If, say, two per cent of the population of Queensland at a given period is included then, hey presto, roughly two per cent of every other state’s population for that period will also be included. Simple, really, like painting by numbers. Except that it is fatuous.

Then there are additional quotas. Or what seem like quotas, as the author is too shy to state this baldly and resorts to obfuscation: ‘[R]ough checks for occupation, gender and ethnicity are applied, mainly as a guide to the relevance of the collection as a whole to the evolving story of the Australian people …’ For ethnicity, substitute race and you see how offensive this is. A female Estonian glazier from Tasmania would be a shoo-in – even if incompetent. But in a work such as the ADB, such quotas are repugnant. They skew history.

Perhaps, though, I am in error and the ADB really is about worthiness. Dr Kingston, who is Chair of the NSW ADB Working Party, thinks so, and she should know. Surely, though, it is not just about ticking the quota boxes. What are the other criteria for inclusion in this premier reference work of Australian biography? I think we should be told.

Paul Brunton, Sydney, NSW

Against militancy

Dear Editor,

It is surprising that an essay as one-sided, prejudiced and historically and philosophically uninformed as that of Tamas Pataki’s (‘Against Religion’, ABR, February 2006) should make it into print, let alone find a home in ABR.

First, some obviously contestable assimilations. As he points out, Pataki restricts his attention to the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But if his critique is of religion in general, why take the Abrahamic faiths as paradigmatic of religion? Where have the countless other religious faiths, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism, disappeared to? But Pataki likes to assimilate not only religion to monotheism, but also monotheism to the kind of evangelical or fundamentalist faith practised by the Hillsong church and George W. Bush, thus giving the impression that religious traditions are far less diverse than they in fact are.

Second, Pataki litters his essay with bold and brazen statements without offering anything, or at least anything barely credible, in their support. He writes, for example, that religion ‘is remarkable because there is no supernatural dimension and no spiritual objects with which one can have real relationships’ (emphases his). Are we simply meant to take this on faith? We are also told that ‘bullying is an inseparable feature of monotheism’, and are then given some examples from the world of religious fundamentalism. It would seem to many, though, that Pataki’s statement is itself a prime instance of bullying: if you cannot see behind the façade created by monotheism, then you must be mad, bad or worse. Further on, we are presented with the simplistic image of reason and religion as warring factions, with no mention made of the intellectual giants of the past and present who have embodied the tradition of fides quarens intellectum (e.g. Aquinas, Leibniz, Locke, Levinas, Plantinga).

Finally, Pataki’s Freudian account of religious belief as the product of fear and infantile attachment strikes one as a gross generalisation, and this even if religious beliefs are entirely false. The fact that religious believers can be, and often are, just as well-adjusted, contented, morally upright, intelligent and tolerant as those who think of themselves as non-religious might lead us to a more positive outlook on the motivations and values undergirding religious beliefs, even if we think there is no supernatural reality answering to such beliefs.

There is, in short, great depth and variety in the world’s religions, and this is inevitably overlooked or distorted in the lambastes of militant atheism (and militant theism, too).

Nick Trakakis, Clayton, Vic.

Religious faith and human tolerance

Dear Editor,

Most humans are introduced to religious practices and beliefs through acculturation during childhood. Where did Tamas Pataki find those youths turning to religion in former communist societies? In the event, how could attachment theory enable the adoption of religious belief in normal societies? If the psychological mechanism posited by Kirkpatrick and others comes into play only subconsciously, how would anti-religion philosophers, psychologists and psychoanalysts demonstrate causal relationships? If the only means of acquiring knowledge are the ‘slow accumulations of the sciences and humanities’, and the paths to knowledge are restricted to the limited methodology of the sciences and humanities, then Freud et al. have no more to offer than the speculative philosophers among the religious believers.

Which religions bother Pataki and those he quotes – all three monotheistic desert religions? If so, did the foundation teachings of these religions cause the untold misery of the human race? Or was it the power-exercising leaders of the religious institutions which took over the teachings? What about the forest faiths, in all their complexity, their diversity, their lack of an authoritarian Good Book, and their freedom (for most) from a hierarchy of priests?

Did the teachings and practices of all the major religions undermine reason, and inhibit curiosity and imagination? How then did the Muslim people aid the development of science in Europe? How did the Hindus achieve such complex conceptualisations about the nature of reality? And why is it that so many of the speculative physical cosmologists of recent times are entranced by these conceptualisations? Religion is an exceedingly vast, diverse and complex area of human endeavour.

Pataki offers us only his beliefs, based on selective quotations from philosophers, in an attempt to diminish the role of nearly all religious beliefs. Could I suggest that he read Easwaran’s translation of The Upanishads (Arkana series)?

Setting up a straw man (of a limited type) and throwing at it a couple of burning coals from Western psychology and related subjects does not help us to understand, much less explain, the complex human behaviour which seems to reflect a wider range of human motivations and external influences than that set out by Pataki.

But by all means let us get rid of all authoritarian priesthoods.

Raja Ratnam, Narooma, NSW

Tips from Baha’u’llah

Dear Editor,

I can understand Tamas Pataki’s frustration with religious thought and the political influences upon it. It would take quite a lengthy article to discuss the problems inherent in the essay in detail, but, as most stem from the premises underlying the various arguments, perhaps the best advice is to study stronger rather than weaker premises for religion. My favourite has been the works of Baha’u’llah (1817–92), which clearly identify the purpose of religion, the behaviour to which religionists should aspire, methodologies for fulfilling that aspiration, working towards the eradication of prejudices and a just world in a peaceful, service-orientated attitude, and developing a religious organisation that is supported by humility and service rather than power and politics.

Even the atheist should find valuable ideas.

Owen Allen, Atherton, Qld

No simple answers

Dear Editor,

Having abandoned religious belief after devoting twenty-five years of my adult life to living and preaching it, I think I know what’s wrong with the major forms of Western religion. Also, for what it’s worth, I have a lifetime’s involvement in professional philosophy. So I can say with some confidence and credibility that Tamas Pataki’s recycling of reductionist criticisms misses the point entirely. If one is serious about the question one must take religion at its best. Perhaps the vague and dubious psychological diagnoses Pataki espouses explain something about some people’s religious motivations, but anybody who knows any seriously religious people realises that there is a great deal more to it than that.

The most important set of claims about Christianity is that it gives an ultimate purposeful significance to our lives through a set of traditions, stories (especially those about Jesus and his more important followers), sacred rituals and personal interactions with a supernatural agent who ties together all facts and all values in his intentions and powers. That is a great and glorious promise, but, even at its best, Christianity fails, as many of us have found, to deliver what it promises. It is not a uniquely effective force for good. People can live lives that are at least as good and meaningful without it. The claims of religions to superior significance and value are just as baseless as the claims of traditional aristocracy to nobility. In fact, most of the moral and social achievements of the past few centuries are the product of secular humanism.

The basic damage that religion does in our situation is that it poses as the only alternative to a discredited rationalism (to which so many professional philosophers cling) or to a radical nihilism. If there is no god and no eternal truths, anything goes, life is meaningless, valueless and so on. The ‘liberation’ from religion is illusory because it delivers us to a world of nothingness. Philosophers are often complicit in this, especially those who pride themselves in being rigorous and hard-nosed reductionists.

Of course, we live in a world rich in meanings that have been constructed, refurbished, amplified and instantiated in a host of ways over the centuries. We are constantly reviewing, testing and developing that heritage. Reflective people are increasingly conscious that all our concepts and values are fluid and contextually variable. There are no absolute and unique concepts or truths (not even in mathematics or physics). There is no point in pretending that we need or could use a truth so definitive and clear that everybody would accept it. The illusion that it would be a good thing comes from the dangerous political objective of unanimity. It is not a curse that we are capable only of limited and provisional answers to our vaguely formulated questions. On the contrary, the point of living is that we can never exhaust the ways in which we can find meaning and fulfilment in our individual and communal efforts to improve every aspect of the cultural constructions we have inherited.

But if there are no ultimate questions, much less comprehensive right answers, there are plenty of wrong or misleading or irrelevant ones. It is important not just to accept that they are wrong but to sift them for elements of truth and to understand what is mistaken in them. Australian cultural practices have tended to be simplistically adversarial, especially in religion and politics. It is about time we got a bit more sophisticated.

John Burnheim, Glebe, NSW

Tamas Pataki responds

Dear Editor,

Some correspondents have complained that I failed to recognise the diversity of religion, regarded the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition as paradigmatic, or did not consider religion at its best. I stated explicitly (p.37) that I would be focusing on the monotheisms: that is obviously different from treating them as paradigmatic and does not entail a denial of diversity. It was my awareness of diversity – the discussion of Greek polytheism underlined it – and the fact that my critical design applied most clearly to monotheism that induced the restricted view. The essay was a sally against religion, not an audacious attempt in 5000 words to completely dismantle it, desirable as that end may be. I was trying to illuminate some of the destructive features of the major religions currently in the thoughts of most reflective people. The method was to relate those features to a few of the manifold malign psychological currents motivating many of the religions’ votaries: principally, to ineluctable attachment and narcissistic needs when these detach the individual from reality. I did not suggest that all who were religious were motivated by such psychological forces, nor that such motivation was all there was to the psychology of (all) religions, nor that psychological explanation accounted for the totality of religion. I explicitly rejected all three propositions (p.39). But it remains that the highlighted needs – for infantile narcissistic satisfactions etc. – are widespread motives to religion and frequently result in delusional configurations. Their operations are largely unconscious and their effects are subtle: I presented the case in a non-technical way, which I hoped would resonate with insightful readers.

Neither my reliance on attachment theory and psychoanalysis nor my particular constructions are radical. Yet John Burnheim thinks that the latter are vague, dubious and reductionist, and they strike Nick Trakakis as gross generalisations. Ian Scutt (ABR, March 2006) and Graeme Wilson (ABR, March 2006) are offended by the references to Freud. Such remarks indicate that their authors just don’t grasp the psychology or know what is currently happening at the intersections of the relevant disciplines.

In his thoughtful letter, John Charalambous asks about the ‘faiths that don’t fit the monotheistic mould. Are they just as delusional and dangerous …?’ (ABR, March 2006). He instances Theravada Buddhism, which is atheistic and relatively parsimonious in its metaphysics. I suspect that many monotheists would not consider Theravada a religion at all, though in our times ‘Christian Buddhism’ and ‘Christianity without God or a divine Jesus’ have been endorsed. This illustrates, incidentally, the diversity that caused me to focus the essay: evidently, an atheistic religion, or one that recognises gods but pays no special heed to them (as in some other traditions), doesn’t exemplify the hazardous object-seeking in the supernatural that I wished to expose. I have no firsthand experience of Buddhism, but my best conjecture is that it has sought a solution to the problems of attachment and narcissism opposite to that of monotheism. Instead of seeking illusory attachment, Buddhism seeks detachment from the world and the ego, a kind of renunciation of narcissism. The aim, as Charalambous states, is independence. In so far as it escapes the pathological dependency of which the monotheisms are cultural crystallisations, it seems to escape the cycles of self-afflicted humiliation, rage and aggression that characterise the latter religions. Whether in achieving detachment it inadvertently invigorates other incarnations of narcissism, I cannot say.

In the essay, I stated that no one has produced rational grounds for belief in deities (p.39), and the essay was patently premised on this proposition. I am, of course, familiar with the philosophical arguments for the existence of deity. Trakakis seems outraged at my failure to go over this turf. But, in my opinion, the arguments are feeble, and I think that the majority of post-Kantian philosophers who have considered them would agree. I don’t imagine for a moment that a thousand stakes will finally lay them: if ever a philosophical argument has been well and truly slain, it’s the one for (intelligent) design; yet here it is again, blessed by cardinals and entertained by politicians. But even if I thought that these ‘proofs’ had something going for them, and even if I could have meaningfully discussed them in a dozen words, they would have been largely irrelevant to the essay. It’s a rare bird that acquires religious belief because it thinks that the ontological argument is sound. My interest was in the reasons, often very different from the avowed reasons, for which the vast majority of religious people do believe, and those reasons have little connection with Aquinas’s five ways or with Plantinga’s anti-foundationalism; and only little more connection, with the content of religious teaching and morality.

Before reading the letters of Scutt and Wilson, it hadn’t occurred to me that my references to various authors could be seen as ‘gratuitous’ and ‘selective’ appeals to authority. I included citations for the usual scholarly reasons: occasionally for felicitous expression, mostly to acknowledge priority. I do not cite authorities to ‘bolster’ views I hold: where I accept a view, it is not because I revere the author holding it, but because the author’s reasons for holding it seem to me good ones. Of course, I can see how people brought up in faith and to reason on the rock of religious authority could easily come to think that others reason as they do. And that confinement of reason, as I argued, is not the least of the problems of religion.

Tamas Pataki, St Kilda West, Vic.

Defending Hugh Stretton

Dear Editor,

Dennis Altman’s review of Hugh Stretton’s Australia Fair (ABR, February 2006) is provocative, as all reviews should be. Nevertheless, Altman is not as enlightening or as fair about the book as he might have been. His main criticisms centre on what he sees as the limited possibilities for social democracy, as Stretton defines them, given the rise of globalisation, neo-conservatism and the limits of older ideas about equality and state action. Altman argues that Australia Fair is old-fashioned, out of touch, timid and unrealistic, and adds little to Stretton’s previous books.

It is certainly true that Stretton is consistent, but his work has also been admirably creative over a long period. Australia Fair may well come to be seen as among his best creations. The book has all the central Stretton themes about the complexity of social understanding, and his defence of the mixed economy and equality is systematically applied to what many take to be some of the most important and difficult issues facing us: how to reconcile economic growth and human happiness, grapple with population ageing and longevity, adequately deal with the economic and social impacts of technological change, balance rights of access and the rising costs of education and medical care, and better deal with environmental change and limits. The picture which emerges is subtle, insightful and balanced in its grappling with the new complexity from an egalitarian viewpoint. The criticisms of the book as being out of touch and adding little miss the mark by a wide margin.

Altman’s criticisms reflect limits in the received views with which he agrees. Two deserve response. First, Altman has much to say about the ways in which social change and new demands for social recognition on a global stage stand in the way of the kind of political vision that Stretton defends. Economic and social mobility make for a more complex and interesting world, but also a less tractable one. But any reading of the debates about the political impacts of globalisation still leave open a good deal of autonomy and possibility for nations to shape their own destinies. Public opinion urges them to do so on many issues – both in conservative and progressive directions. In Australia, we have had plenty of the conservative in recent times, rather less of the progressive.

There is also sleight of hand in these arguments as they are expressed in debates about equality. Altman suggests that Stretton is very timid in seeing inequality as mainly a problem of economic distribution rather than cultural and social recognition, as if there can be an easy separation between them. For Stretton, recognition and respect grow best in a society in which economic opportunities and social participation, particularly through employment, are open to all, and where inequalities of income and wealth are more moderate than they are in today’s Australia. Altman presents little to counter Stretton’s claims.

Second, Altman’s review reflects the now familiar hostility on all sides to the state’s role in economic and social policy. But any defence of the mixed economy to which most of us are committed must face up to the nature and content of the mix. The mix involves the building, reshaping and interrelation of public, private and other social institutions. What to do about these questions has been one of the most consistent foci of Stretton’s intellectual energy over a long period. Australia Fair carries on that work and offers a strategy renewing and extending the public role. But that extension is not hidebound or inattentive to the implications for other realms and interests. It may run up against other views and interests and depend on strong leadership to take it forward. But rather than unfashionable, it is perhaps among the most important of the challenges Australian society faces.

Lionel Orchard, Brighton, SA

Richard Johnstone replies to Jacki Weaver

Dear Editor,

Jacki Weaver is quite right to give me an ‘F’, on the grounds of misattribution (ABR, March 2006). Both Noeline Brown’s memoir and her own (which I reviewed in the February issue) refer to Margaret Fink. I had planned to compare the two references, but somehow managed to conflate them instead. I apologise for my error and for any distress it has caused.

Weaver is also right when she questions the practice of criticising a book simply because it is not the one the reviewer wanted it to be. If my closing remarks can be construed as an example of that practice, I can only say that it was unintentional. I meant to convey by my final comments something of the full significance of both Brown’s and Weaver’s contributions to the growth and vitality of Australian film, theatre and television.

Richard Johnstone, Sydney, NSW

Dubious logic

Dear Editor,

In responding to my review of Yve Louis’ The Yellow Dress (ABR, November 2005), Kerry Leves makes two claims: that my review suffers from a lack of attention to the text; and that greater familiarity with aspects of Mogul civilisation would have led me to respond differently to the poem in question (Letters, ABR, February 2006). He is mistaken on both counts. As someone who has always approached reviewing with a sense of responsibility, I find the imputation of carelessness offensive. It is the sort of ambit claim an aggrieved author or an advocate might make in the first flush of disappointment, but one that it is not wise to advance except where factual accuracy is being contested. Which leads to his second assertion.

Leves’s dubious logic conflates them, but there are two issues involved. At least the first, one would have thought, is obvious: in-depth or even academic knowledge of a subject is an advantage – often a clear prerequisite – in non-fiction reviewing, but can hardly be held up as a defining factor when evaluating works of the imagination, especially poetry. Speculation about how I might have responded to historical subject matter treated in a different medium is plainly fatuous. Secondly, there is the issue of the degree of sympathy a reviewer may bring to a given theme: for instance, Leves’s travels in India might well have coloured his own response. I contend that such sympathy cannot be assumed as a right, but has to be won on the strength of writing that is fresh, imaginative and engaging.

Lastly, Leves invokes the issue of the marginalisation
of poetry. This is a complex debate, but one thing is certain: reviewers who refrain, for fear of giving rise to controversy, from voicing unpalatable opinions arrived at in good faith serve neither the cause of poetry nor its readers.

Michael Sariban, Brisbane, Qld