The famous quote from Jonathan Swift goes, “everything old is new again,” but the cycle never completes, as would Ouroboros, the emblematic serpent of ancient Egypt and Greece represented with its tail in its mouth, continually devouring itself and being reborn from itself. There is progress, of a kind, whether reactionary, conserving, or reforming. It is the Spiral Historiography.
Australian myth, sociology, history is in that spiral. Reading Ryan Cropp’s Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country (La Trobe University Press, 2023) one becomes dizzy with the similarity between the 2024 and 1965, as well as the differences. Have we progressed as a nation? Cropp writes at the end of the chapter on ‘The Lucky Country’:
The responses to The Lucky Country seemed to justify Horne’s repeated argument that the problems of Australian politics in the 1960s were obscured by outdated rhetoric and old ways of thinking. The political culture was shifting, and the boundaries of left and right were in flux. (169).
In the page before (168), Cropp wrote: “Donald Horne — like the nation he described — was still in a state of transition.” In 2024 the transition appears to be the perennial spiral. Between 2024 and 1965, what is still there:
- Federation-style Australian imperialist beliefs (163);
- An intellectually-hollow republican debate (164);
- The dominance of American cultural paradigms (5, 8, 22, 81, 107, 169-70, 192-4): in one quarter, American-styled hard materialism and inflationary consumerism, and in the other quarter, the American Revivalist Tradition (ART); and from Horne’s famous line,
- “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.” (162)
Like Horne’s “scattershot sociological survey” (160), sociology is again spiraling into new form. Sociological thinking is rolled into a person’s historical thinking because the other new emerging fields, Public History, and Public Sociology, speak the same language. Undergirding this Cognition is philosophy, epistemology, ethics, and critical thinking. There is also a critical and lucid engagement with contemporary philosophies of history which makes a sustained case for a return to the ideas of history and social science as developed by R. G. Collingwood and Peter Winch.
From various overlapping fields, in multidisciplinary-interdisciplinary education, the difficulty for persons to understand, even their own cognition, is to understand:
- Key and Relevant Concepts
- Picture-Image and Language
- The Politics of Thinking
- Neuroscience and Perception
- The Humanities Discipline as Primary
The key difference between 1965 and 2024 are the differing periods of the economy. In 1965 it was still a Menziesan growth model. That began to fall apart in the 1970s, and completely fell apart in the 1990s, and persons today had to live through a brutal period of a confused economy. Another difference is that the Horne, basically, charged politicians as “dull” (161-2). Today, having lived through the 1960s* the older generation of politicians ought to know better. Politicians are now in wilful ignorance keeping the fool population in ignorance (Cropp talks about the appeal of Horne for his younger generation, of 1965, but their youthful ignorance before the Menziesan machine).
*in the Australia the 1960s was the early 1970s, circa 1969 to 1975. (165)
The Humanities Discipline has been an existential crisis in Australia for some time but it was different to the pre-Dawkins 1965. At the heart of the “humanities in crisis” thesis for American and Australian society is the anti-intellectualism thesis, beginning with Richard Hofstadter (1963). This is the legacy of “Australia in the Sixties”. A significant part of the ‘anti-intellectualism for both United States and Australia is a popular outright rejection of the sociology discipline, as it was declared to be “new sociology,” but the problem is made worse by the discipline’s own confusion on its own future. What is new in 2024 are the revaluations of Digital Humanities projects which has had a history as far back as the mid-1960s.
What is most significantly different is the new paradigm of Cognition Histories and Cognitive Sociology. Cognition is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses, and although there are disciplinary différence there are no cognition différences as comprehensive understanding.
As disciplinary différence, significant slices on the global history of sociology, philosophy, and historiography has been around discussions in conceptions of learning; e.g., of Micro and Macro scopings, and Thin and Thick concepts, with the best scholars examining what Randall Collins calls, “interaction ritual” (IR). Randall Collins’s book, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), teaches on the problems of schooling, along with the paradigmatic criticism from Ivan Illich (via Michael Macklin).
Conceptually, a number of other psychological theories may also shed light on behaviour in the political context of avoiding understanding human factors, such as cost-benefit analysis, and free-choice paradigm. We continue to make ethical judgements, despite the dismissive nonsense about not making judgement. We can identify a person’s motivation as malice, intellectual laziness, or just plain ignorance. These are what Bernard Williams called thick concepts – the way we, at the same time, combine our valuation and facts of the matter in language. In current discussions today on democracy, the biggest threat is the thin concept of “We the People”, and the solution is the thick concept of “We the Persons”.
All of the terms and concepts of thinking has a fit to, not one, but to several overlapping schemas. True learning is three metaethical concepts, which align together, and with all other terms and concepts mentioned in Dr Buch’s Cognition series: Open Access, Open Participation, and Open and Level Playing Field.
The reason why we are moving into this open paradigm is partly due to Horne’s effort to open a window to breeze out the nation’s mind. However, the approach has always been there in the intellectual traditions. The Oscar Wilde novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, reminds us of the consequences of substituting an aesthetic for an ethical conscience.
Historically, and often, persons of the fool population do not understand what they think they see in the Image. The spiral has moved and intensified. Media and the academy often provide false messaging where we are believe that “this” person is “smart”, that the economy is “smart”, and that “A.I.” is smart, all based in false assumptions. The benefits of the Transmedial Pedagogical Form, as technology, does not address the traditional-historical problem of propaganda. A fool population of technicians are in the wilful ignorance of the intellectual content to question, of why, why not, and who?
You-I-we are projecting into the image what you-I-we think you-I-we perceive, but the measure of what is correct in that perception, is to the extent you-I-we know the history, and know it because you-I-we have opened your-mine-our mind to open learning and prepared to put aside your-mine-our presumptions (the prejudices of assumptions).
The key concept here is perception. Neuro-philosophy, in basic terms of ontology, demonstrates that reduction, in the science, cannot explain the integration of thought and emotion, and the explanation can really only come down to the language of science; indicativism is to denote, meaning here that all we have is the language of the experience, and not an affirmative ontology.
The remaining question is why persons in the fool population cannot perceive such influence upon (each) their lives? Is it wilful ignorance or is it cultural anti-intellectualism?
Featured Image: Author Page in Donald Horne’s Death of The Lucky Country.
Neville Buch
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