OIKOPHILIA

[Edmund] Burke developed three ideas that, it seems to me, were then and ought to be now the core of conservative thinking: respect for the dead, the “little platoon” and the voice of tradition …

Burke was one of the first major political thinkers to place future generations at the heart of politics … Burke’s view of society, as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn, carries a precious hint as to how the responsibility for future generations arises. It arises from love, and love directed towards what is unknown must arise from what is known. The future is not known, nor are the people who will inhabit it. But the past is known, and the dead, our dead, are still the objects of love and veneration. It is by expending on them some part of our care, Burke believed, that we care also for the unborn. For we plant in our hearts the transgenerational view of society that is the best guarantee that we will moderate our present appetites in the interests of those who are yet to be.

– Roger Scruton, Green Philosophy (2012)

 

Love of home

“Love of home” – oikophilia – is the intriguing idea put forward by the English philosopher Roger Scruton in Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet. It is, I think, a most important contribution to how the pressing environmental problems facing human societies might be thought about and responded to. Scruton’s book brings together the conservation latent in political conservatism and the conservatism latent in environmental conservation – love of the oikos, or household, is the common motivation in stewardship and protection of environment and society.

This common motive is for Scruton natural: the shared love of place:

 

That, it seems to me, is the goal towards which serious environmentalism and serious conservatism both point – namely, home, the place where we are and that we share, the place that defines us, that we hold in trust for our descendants, and that we don’t want to spoil.

… it is time to take a more open-minded and imaginative vision of what conservatism and environmentalism have to offer each other. For nobody seems to have identified a motive more likely to serve the environmental cause than this one, of the shared love for our home. It is a motive in ordinary people. It can provide a foundation both for a conservative approach to institutions and a conservationist approach to the land. It is a motive that might permit us to reconcile the demand for democratic participation with the respect for future generations and the duty of trusteeship. It is, in my view, the only serious resource that we have, in our fight to maintain local order in the face of globally stimulated decay.

 

Environmentalists staring at the stark and impenetrable wall of liberal self-interest frustrating their schemes to turn around environmental decay should read Scruton and pause to reflect on where the mobilising of imposed large-scale bureaucratic strategies against the self-interest of homo economicus has ended up. Put aside your fantasies of eco-revolution and the great green uber-internationale – Scruton proposes another motive potentially as compelling as self-interest: the natural love of home.

Oikophilia is the closest that contemporary conservative philosophy comes to the indigenous love of homeland, but Scruton contrasts religious and kinship affiliations with national ones. Incorrectly, in my view, he makes assertions about tribal affiliations, which must be answered if his notion of oikophilia is to find common ground with the indigenous connection to country. This is the difficulty:

 

It is in contrast with tribal and religious forms of membership that the nation should be understood. By a nation I mean a people settled in a certain territory, who share language, institutions, customs and a sense of history and who regard themselves as equally committed both to their place of residence and to the legal and political process that governs it. Members of tribes see each other as a family; members of religious communities see each other as the faithful; members of nations see each other as neighbours. All these forms of self-identity are rooted in belonging and attachment. But only the sense of nationhood makes territory central and, in doing so, provides the first-person plural adapted to the society of strangers, and to the peaceful coexistence of people who share no family loyalties or religious creed. First and foremost the nation is a common territory, in which we are all settled, and to which we are all entitled as our home …

To put the matter simply: nations are defined not by kinship or religion but by a homeland.

 

Of course homelands are central to tribes. Scruton’s knowledge of the nature of tribal societies and their relationship with territory is too thin, and this is not his main concern, in any case. That is a pity. Because he would realise that his concept of tribal institutions (“The idea of an impartial rule of law, sustained in being by the very government that it sustains, has no place in the world of kinship ties”) is limited. After all, it was in respect of Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s Yolngu society that Chief Justice Blackburn famously observed in 1971 that:

 

The evidence shows a subtle and elaborate system highly adapted to the country in which the people led their lives, which provided a stable order of society and was remarkably free from the vagaries of personal whim or influence. If ever a system could be called “a government of laws, and not of men”, it is that shown in the evidence before me.

 

Scruton would recognise his description of the filial relationship between the Englishman and his native nation resonates with that between the Yolngu and his tribal nation – and speaks to the same conservatism. The barrier that stands in the way of this recognition is Scruton’s point about the exclusivity of the tribe: “when it comes to outsiders – the ‘strangers and sojourners’ in the land of the tribe – they are regarded as outside the law altogether and not entitled to its protection” and “Nor can outsiders easily become insiders, since that which divides them from the tribe is an incurable genetic fault.”

Scruton’s objections can be overcome if we accept layered identities. In this way the universal filiation is national citizenship with one rule of law and system of government. The one rule of law and system of government that applies in Scruton’s native Britain is one which does not oblige – and in fact cannot oblige – unfreedom of religion. In the same way that this one rule of law and system of government preserves and upholds all manner of arcane institutions of inherited privilege (staunchly defended by conservatives from Burke to Scruton), so too are tribal nations consistent with the idea of the commonwealth.

The problem with Scruton’s view of the tribe is that it is a dated caricature. It might have been true at the time of David Livingstone’s adventures in Africa, the Australians making first contact in the highlands of Papua New Guinea or the first whites entering Arnhem Land, but it is now a view of the past. No tribes today live in isolation from other societies: they live within nations, where layers of history have left layers of identity. These tribes cannot be expected to abandon the institutions of their inheritance, inextricably bound as they are to the homelands of their inheritance. It would be as indefensible as expecting the inheritors of Britain’s ancient entitlements to forsake their inheritance.

I want to now discuss one aspect of Scruton’s idea of conservatism – respect for and connection with the dead – as part of a consideration of what it means to be indigenous.

In this passage from the International Court of Justice’s 1975 Western Sahara case, Judge Ammoun captured what lies at the core of the idea of peoples being indigenous to a territory:

 

Mr Bayona-Ba-Meya goes on to dismiss the materialistic concept of terra nullius, which led to this dismemberment of Africa following the Berlin Conference of 1885. Mr Bayona-Ba-Meya substitutes for this a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or “mother nature”, and the man who was born therefrom, remains attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with his ancestors. This link is the basis of ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty.

 

I am not now concerned with the legal question. I am concerned with the metaphysical question: the spiritual notion. The ancestral tie between the land and the man who was born therefrom. Who remains attached thereto. And who must one day return thither to be united with his ancestors.

This is it. This is the nub. This is the essence. This is the source.

Before we have the abstraction of law, we have things that are real. The law is not the origin. It is the ancestral bones in the land that is the source. It is the dust of the ancestors mixed with the dust of the land.

It is from that land and dust that the people of the present came. And it is to that same dust and land that they remain attached. And it is to the same land they will “one day return … to be united with [their] ancestors.”

At the core of all Aboriginal customary law you find these elements. The ancestral tie to the land, the person born from that land, who remains attached to the land and whose spirits will one day return to that land. I would venture to say that these ideas are universal to all indigenous conceptions of relationship to their country, the world over.

My point is that it is not the law that is the wellspring of indigeneity: it is a reality concerning the dead, the living and the people to come, and the country to which they are tied. It is a similar reality of which Scruton writes when he refers to “Burke’s view of society, as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn.” If Burke’s association is real, then it is real in the sense captured in Judge Ammoun’s most apposite definition.

On this interpretation it is theoretically possible to take Andrew Bolt seriously when he protests that he too is indigenous to this country. The bones and dust of his ancestors and all settler and immigrant Australians who made this continent their home have been accumulating and mixing with the ancient soil for 226 years. Aboriginal laws and customs recognise the connections that arise from places of birth and burial. In a real sense the Bolts are becoming indigenous to Australia. Perhaps he could recognise in turn that the bones of Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s ancestors have been returning for millennia to the lands from which they arose.

 

Man cannot live by bread alone

The Cape York agenda I have championed has elements of all three great traditions of political philosophy. This is how I explained it in Up from the Mission:

 

The metaphor of the staircase may provide some fresh insight into why our agenda has so often proven to be so difficult to categorise in conventional political terms. Our focus on social norms has an inherently conservative flavour. But we also emphasised the critical importance of supporting capabilities – and this has a distinctly social-democratic flavour. Then we talk about incentives, the steps that allow people to choose to build their own lives; this has a distinctly liberal flavour.

 

I now see that while the liberal component of our agenda is well developed, the conservative element is not.

It is still a caricature of conservatism. Conservatism is not just about social norms. It is the insight that human beings will not be content when the liberal and social-democratic agendas are fulfilled.

If the engine of self-interest is cranked up, if the structure of incentives is right, if people exercise choice, if private property is well developed, if there is social-democratic provisioning of opportunity and people take responsibility to seize opportunity to build their capabilities – then what people will really want to do is to read the Talmud in Hebrew and Aramaic, or learn archaic Guugu Yimidhirr from old recordings, or build a scale model of King Solomon’s temple.

Aboriginal Australian culture is evidence that when humans are at equilibrium, people build traditions tied to language and land and pass them on to the next generation.

Conservatism is not sending your children to school to paint your fence white. It is insight into the imperfection and mystery of human nature. This imperfection and mystery will ultimately make liberal and social-democratic structures inadequate and binhdhu, without taste.

Conservatism is the idea that distinct peoples should continue to exist because difference is an end in itself. The homogenisation inherent in liberalism and social democracy is risky because it robs us of many attempts to answer the great existential enigmas.

Conservatism is qualitatively different to liberalism and social democracy. Liberalism is based on a few principles, and then people do the rest through their own choices. But there is no end to the number of human traditions. Japanese and Guugu Yimidhirr liberalism are the same; Japanese and Yolngu social democracy are similar; but Japanese and Guugu Yimidhirr and Yolngu traditions are different worlds.

Tradition is by definition about the detail and not the broad principle. To work politically for tradition, you have to make sure the dictionary in ten volumes is written, for example. You have to record and teach the songs that traverse the continent.

Self-interest is the engine that drives everything else in the vehicle of progress. But tradition is the engine that drives human existence.

Johann Gottfried Herder thought Emperor Joseph II was wrong to enforce one official language in his empire. Herder’s Letters for the Advancement of Mankind (1791) contains a fictional dialogue called “Conversation after the Death of Emperor Joseph II”.

 

A. Which innocent preconceptions of the people did the Emperor Joseph offend?

B. Of many I mention but a few; first the preconception of language. Has a people, especially an uncultivated people, anything more dear than the language of their fathers? In it lives its entire wealth of thoughts about tradition, history, religion and principles of life, all its heart and soul. To take from such a people their language or debase it amounts to taking from them their only immortal property, which passes from parents to children.

A. And yet Joseph knew many of these peoples personally and very well.

B. The more it is to be amazed at, that he did not discern the intrusion. “Who suppresses my language for me,” thinks the simple man not without reason, “will also rob me of my ability to reason and my way of life, my honour and the laws and rights of my people.” Obviously, as God tolerates all the world’s languages, so should also a ruler not only tolerate the different languages of his subject peoples, but also honour them.

A. But he wanted to achieve a more expeditious prosecution of commerce, a faster moving culture.

B. A people’s best culture is not fast; it does not allow itself to be forced through a foreign language. It thrives at its most beautiful and, I would like to say, exclusively on the nation’s own land in its inherited tongue. With the language one captures the heart of the people, and is it not a grand idea to plant the seed of well-being in the most distant future among so many peoples, Hungarians, Slavs, Romanians, completely in line with their own way of thinking, in their most distinctive and loved fashion?

A. It appeared to him to be a grander idea to amalgamate if possible all his states and provinces to one code of laws, to one education system, to one monarchy.

B. A favourite idea of our century! But is it feasible? Is it reasonable and beneficial?

 

Conservatism makes the case for continued existence in a deep sense – not just in the trivial sense of having biological descendants.

Continued existence is of lesser concern to Anglophone (or Sinophone) conservatives, because their cultures are too large and powerful to die. Theodore Dalrymple may think people should read more books, but he has no existential angst that there will be no one left who can and will want to read Shakespeare.

Man needs bread, but he cannot live by bread alone.

 

Conservative arguments for constitutional reform

There are two reasons Australian conservatives should support constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. First, conservatism sees intrinsic value in tradition and inheritance – like our British heritage, indigenous tradition and inheritance is important and should be recognised and maintained. Second, conservatives value national unity. They disavow separatism, collectivism and division among citizens, preferring instead individualism bound by a common sense of national unity and patriotism. That is why they should support the removal of references to “race” that serve to divide citizens.

In trying to understand conservative objections to the Expert Panel’s proposals, it is important to understand the Australian mix of liberalism and conservatism, and the influence of constitutional conservatism – the influential group of Australian constitutional experts whom Greg Craven dubbed the “con-cons.” This group, convening as the Samuel Griffith Society, values liberalism and democracy. They insist on parliamentary sovereignty and are ready to accuse judges of usurping parliamentary democracy. They value the Australian Constitution as inherited wisdom.

It is because, as Waleed Aly observed in Quarterly Essay 37, “tradition has its own force and wisdom” that the conservative disposition prefers organic evolution to revolution in society. Conservatives approach constitutional reform with extreme caution. According to Aly, conservatism is “resistant to ideological zeal”: it “eschews utopian designs and adopts far more modest and pragmatic approaches to policy.”

This explains conservative resistance to including principles such as “equality” or “non-discrimination” in the constitution. While valuing free and equal participation in a liberal democracy, conservative pragmatists do not think such ideals can be protected simply by writing them into the constitution. Such alterations risk giving the judiciary too much power.

In their strong aversion to activist judges, constitutional conservatives tend to forget the history that has driven this conversation about constitutional recognition.

Conservatives are concerned with limiting judicial activism, and therefore do not want symbolic words or sweeping “rights” clauses in the constitution. Indigenous advocates need to take these views on board. But what conservatives in turn need to understand, in an effort to find consensus, is that for indigenous people the movement for constitutional recognition has always been about achieving constitutional protection and recognition of indigenous rights and interests within Australia. It is about reconciling the fact that there were peoples here before the British arrived, and making provision for those peoples and their interests to be recognised within the nation. Symbolism and poetry is only one part of it. Substantive change in the national approach to indigenous affairs is the other.

Conservatives need to understand our position too. Our people lived through the discrimination of the past. We have a legitimate anxiety that the past not be repeated, and that measures be put in place to ensure things are done in a better way. If conservatives assert that a racial non-discrimination clause is not the answer, then what is a better solution?

In a recent paper, “The Australian Declaration of Recognition,” Julian Leeser and Damien Freeman assert that the constitution is a rulebook, a practical charter of government that sets out power relationships, such as between the Commonwealth and the states. It is not a vehicle for aspirations and symbolism: these can be articulated in a declaration, not in the constitution proper. But if the constitution is a practical rulebook governing national power relationships, then we should also accept that there is one very important national power relationship that it clearly does not address. Arguably, therefore, the rulebook should be amended to make provision for indigenous people to be heard in indigenous affairs.

After all, if unelected judges should not decide what is in the interests of indigenous people, then who should decide? Indigenous people comprise only 3 per cent of the population, and hardly get a fair say in parliament, even on matters directly concerning them. Parliaments have never been good at listening to indigenous people. This is why the discrimination of the past has occurred. This is the elephant and the mouse problem that has characterised indigenous affairs.

We can find a way of ensuring that indigenous people get a fair say in laws and policies made about us without compromising the supremacy of parliament. Perhaps we could consider creating a mechanism to ensure that Indigenous people can take more responsibility for our own lives within the democratic institutions already established, and without handing power to judges.

As mentioned, conservatives should agree with the removal of racial discrimination from the constitution. They believe in national unity and dislike internal divisions, separatism and collectivism. They must now also turn their minds to how the constitution might be altered so that the discrimination of the past cannot happen again. We don’t want separatism: we want inclusion on a fair basis. We want to be inside the decision-making tent. We want our voices to be heard in political decisions made about us. A mechanism like this – guaranteeing the indigenous voice in indigenous affairs – could be a more democratic solution to the racial discrimination problem.

Constitutional recognition could therefore include removal of the race clauses and the insertion of a replacement power to enable the Commonwealth parliament to pass necessary laws with respect to indigenous peoples, and incorporation of a requirement that indigenous peoples get a fair say in laws and policies made about us. A new body could be established to effect this purpose, and to ensure that indigenous peoples have a voice in their own affairs.

 

An agenda for the classical culture of ancient Australia

Distinct peoples the world over hold hard to four things: their identity as a people, their territories, their cultural heritage and their language. These lie at the core of what is indigenous about those Australian citizens who are Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Let us look at how they have been accommodated in Australia.

The indigenous identity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is recognised at a certain level. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags are recognised as official flags under the Flags Act 1953. They fly outside parliaments, schools, council chambers and other public buildings. They are found on lapel pins of leading politicians and have become an accepted part of the public symbolism of the country.

But below that there is no official recognition of the many tribal nations associated with particular territories. Apart from the registrations that occur under land rights schemes, there is no official status or recognition accorded to first peoples. Some towns and cities have signage at airports or at the entrance of towns, or at public buildings which acknowledge local tribes – but it is not part of any official scheme of recognition.

“Welcome to country” ceremonies and the practices of acknowledging traditional custodians are now part of official protocols in Australia, even if there is more psychological discomfort about it than in, say, New Zealand – where the practice is de rigueur, sincere and there is no question of embarrassment. I witness many Australian ceremonies that are perfunctory or awkward, reflecting the degree to which we are far from the bicultural society New Zealand has become.

No doubt it helps if you have the greatest team of any sporting code in the modern world – the All Blacks – but it is impossible not to feel comparatively impoverished when the haka is performed and “God Defend New Zealand” is sung in Maori and English. I am afraid to say one wipes tears for the hymn of our enemies and cringes at our own.

The other area of great work that lies before us is the naming of places throughout the continent. Thousands of cities, towns, suburbs, streets, bridges, rivers, creeks and other landmarks have Aboriginal names accumulated over two centuries. By the time you count all of the private names of homesteads, farms, residences, buildings and institutions that are Aboriginal, they number in the tens of thousands.

And yet there is little awareness of the provenance of these placenames. People seem not to know that Coolum is an Aboriginal name, as are the great majority of the town names on the Sunshine Coast. It is strange indeed to drive through places with virtually no Aboriginal presence, but all bearing these ancient names. Many Australians simply do not know the difference between Aboriginal and English names. My children and I play a kind of Gregory’s street-map game of ancient Australia – where we get points for finding Aboriginal names: Cooroy, Noosa, Tinbeerwah, Eumundi, Beerwah, Maroochydore, Nambour. And then we pass the roundabout and see this sign: Murdering Creek Road. And I fall silent.

I will make a wild guess and say that fewer than one in a hundred of the ancient names of Australia have been officially recognised. Most features of the continent, its contours, swamps, sandhills, creeks, rivers, headlands and so on, have Aboriginal names of ancient provenance. How can it be that these names are not officially recognised? Other countries have adopted dual naming practices.

When I visit Yuurrgubarraalbigu, on the coast near the old Cape Bedford Mission, I pass a hill with the prosaic but official name of Round Hill, but its true name is Dhamal Nubuun: One Foot. It is ridiculous that a place that had a name at the time of Jesus of Nazareth is no longer officially known by this name.

This is a vitally important agenda for the country. This continent is a named continent, and Australians should know this landscape is rich with meaning and history.

Through land rights schemes, native title rights at common law and under legislation, land reservations and purchases, much has been done to recognise the territorial rights of the contemporary descendants of the original Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes. This is where accommodation has been made, and the process is by no means complete.

The protection of indigenous heritage in the form of cultural artefacts and places has long been provided for in legislation. These are of mixed quality and there are gaps, but this is an area of accommodation that has received attention.

There are institutions for keeping and displaying the country’s indigenous heritage, including a dedicated institution – the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies – but these are not properly supported. There is a yawning gulf between the work they are able to do and the work that needs to be done.

Australia does not have a comprehensive agenda for the recording, preservation, presentation and utilisation of the country’s indigenous heritage. The urgent work, described by Rachel Perkins, of recording the songlines of central Australia is just one example of the work that needs to be done Before It’s Too Late (BITL).

The former director of the then Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, the late English archaeologist Peter Ucko, was the architect of the first BITL push, which saw scores of young anthropologists and linguists deployed to the four corners of the continent to undertake salvage work by making indigenous language and ethnographic recordings. This work captured the knowledge of the last of the old people born in the bush, before the mission era. Some of Australia’s leading anthropologists, such as Peter Sutton, were part of this drive.

Australia urgently needs a BITL Mark 3, since the generation that worked on the cattle stations, who were brought up and worked on the land, and who learnt the languages – the next generation on from the old bush-born generation – are now old and passing on. Much of this knowledge will be lost if we do not grasp the importance and urgency of this work. Also, the work compiled by that first generation of BITL researchers needs to be the subject of urgent work itself: converting the mouldering contents of storage rooms of ethnographers who are now in their seniority into forms that are accessible and useful to future generations. It is no exaggeration to say that the notebooks and journals of the researchers who worked in Cape York Peninsula these past fifty years are themselves part of the world’s heritage. We need concerted public support to secure this heritage. And of course much more recording work, utilising the latest information technology, lies ahead of new generations of linguists and ethnographers. The universities need to be part of this national drive over the coming decades, because they need to provide the personnel for this drive.

In 2001, the world watched aghast as the Taliban dynamited and destroyed the 1700-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. Treasures of older lineage are in danger of being lost to our nation through blindness and neglect rather than vandalism.