I recently got back my copy of John Gardner's 'The Art of Fiction', and not having looked at it in a number of years I decided reread from the front. Interestingly enough the first big section covers why one must have a literary education in order to tackle being a writer and heroes through all the arguments in favour of having an education. If one had to distill it into a two sentence pitch, it boils down to this:
- You need to have some kind of intellectual context and framework for doing your writing.
- If you don't have any context you're very susceptible to being a crank.
It's a little bit like how John Goodman's Walter thunders at Steve Buscemi's Donnie in 'The Big Lebowski', "you don't have the context Donnie!" The above two points would be John Gardner thundering at any novice writer attempting to write without a literary education of some description.
Which led me to ponder about pedagogy and why we insist - in general - on people getting any kind of education in anything, and it comes down to the fact that without it, your thinking could be that of a crank. When you look at the One Nation senators Hanson and Roberts, you take Gardner's point. If those people had an education worth spit, they wouldn't be saying the things they say. The fact that they don't possess the education to be Senators of this land, is betrayed by the very crank opinions they cast about.
That might sound like snobbery towards a woman whose main careers running a fish-and-chip shop and found her calling in politics relatively late. Back in 1996, she was the sort of talent the Queensland Liberal Party could find to run for them, and illustrates the low level education of that state. And while not everybody needs an education in order not to be a crank - as was the case with Paul Keating - most mortal minds cannot negotiate the path away from crank-dom without an education.
In fact, the path around crank-dom is so fraught, one can be susceptible to its gravitational pull, even with an education - as is the case with Malcolm Roberts. Roberts' case is more egregious because he had the opportunity of being educated as an engineer, which means he would have spent a minimum four years at a university, and for him to have formed the idiotic opinions he has formed and is trying to foist upon this very land, is nothing short of a tragedy; The 'reverse-miracle' whereby it is both unexpected, irrational, inexplicable, yet totally undesirable. The institution who conferred a degree upon Malcolm Roberts should be ashamed of itself for sending out into the world a mind so barren and misshapen.
As to the portion of the population to whom we apportion the blame of voting in this bunch, the same can be said. Back in the first incarnation of One Nation,the demographic support for the said party was always heavily distributed towards those with less or completely without an education, and least amongst those who could boast of an education. The fact that the nation could produce so many people who could be persuaded by such cranks, leads one to conclude that our education system has been subpar for quite a number of years. Funding Gonski isn't exactly going to fix this problem in a hurry. Worse still, if the conservatives of this land are a little taken aback by their brethren in rightwing politics, they only have themselves to blame for perpetuating the kind of class society that breeds such ignorance and cranks.
Cranks And Conservatism
On the Left, you used to have hard core Marxists. I don't know if they're still around rabbiting on about the eventual and imminent collapse of capitalism and citing page from 'Das Kapital'. They were cranks. Notably they went into hiding after the collapse the USSR. They're not coming back anytime soon, which is a kind of blessing. Of course, they've been replaced by the sort of Regressive Left social justice warrior types that make you cringe so maybe the Left is not freed from crank-dom either
Be that as it may, the Right had fewer cranks until relatively recent times. This was because they were cowed into hiding by the utter historic failure of Adolf Hitler who was chief amongst cranks to represent the right; it was Hitler who amassed a compendium of crank opinions and turned them into apolitical manifesto which resulted in catastrophic consequences. Citing right wing crank notions easily bought them comparisons to Hitler, which is about as favourable as being likened to shit on a stick.
The problem lately has been that the memory of Hitler is too far away and there are people with not-enough-education willing to try out some of these right-wing-crank opinions. Worse still, there are enough voters with not-enough-education to think these are somehow novel solutions to complicated problems with which they do not wish to entangle themselves, and this breeds the kind of crankiness we see in politics today. Any (pardon the pun) right thinking person would recoil at being compared to Hitler. Some of these people don't think it's such a bad thing.
Anyway. The point I want to make is that the Corgi Bernardis of this world might have an education, but are choosing to be wilfully ignorant when it comes to crucial issues such as climate change. it is then utterly unsurprising that he would like the Liberal Party to adopt some of One Nation's policies. He seems to have no idea how that reads on the headlines. The fact that he is oblivious to its impact tells you that his education, much like Malcolm Roberts' education was entirely faulty.
Similarly, the Prime Minister's desire to pin the event of the power outage in South Australia upon renewable energy illustrates the kind of wilful stupidity bolstered by crank opinions, shows just how far our nation has fallen in the intellectual stakes. It is hard to believe that at some point only half a decade ago, we viewed Malcolm Turnbull as a man of good sense and genuine advocate for having sensible climate policies. Now we can understand him as being no less a crank than Barnaby Joyce or Tony Abbott or worse still, Malcolm Roberts.
The take home message is this: a democracy is only as good as the education of its citizens, and judging from our politicians, we can see our education sector has failed us utterly.
On The Name Malcolm In Australian Politics
Just as an aside...
They say history repeats first as tragedy, then as comedy; thus, if Malcolm Fraser was the tragedy and Malcolm Turnbull the comedy, Malcolm Roberts must be the unwanted Hollywood sequel no one wants to see.