Tom Elliott claims right of reply - Part 1

Almost a month after my response to Tom Elliott's 3AW segment on the review of the exceptions to the Victorian Equal Opportunity act, I received an email from him claiming the right of reply. The segment occurred while he was filling in for Derryn Hinch on 3AW's drive time. Because I have been away for more than two weeks I have not been able to attend to it until now. My reply will be in two parts.

Gerard,

I came across your rebuttal to my 3AW segment on religion a month ago, and just thought I’d exercise a private right of reply.

I hope you’ll forgive me if I do it in point form.

Tom,

No problem. I am only too pleased to hear from you, and with a reply that is rational and polite, which is a great deal more than can be said of your 3AW colleagues Neil Mitchell and Derryn Hinch. Both have responded only once to my emails and website comments challenging their arguments and their prejudiced views. Mitchell called me a "rightwing ratbag" and Hinch irrelevantly brought up the English Act of Succession which bars Catholics from becoming monarch. I will make a point by point reply, which in parts will of necessity be lengthy.

1. You think I’m representative of a ‘powerful class’. Which class would that be? My opinions are mine, and have never been forced upon me. I come from a religious family and attended a religious school, for example. As an atheist (assuming that’s the class to which you refer), I’d say we’re not a very powerful group at all given how much money and attention is lavished upon various religious groups.

GW: You're being a tiny bit disingenuous, don't you think? Yours views on religion, homosexuality, same-sex "marriage" - these I have heard on your radio stints - are indicative enough. But it is your loudly declared atheism issuing from your unabashed claim that all legitimate knowledge comes by way of "science" that really places you. (I will come back to this fallacious claim.) Tom, your social views place you in the politically correct class. And not powerful? Really, I can't believe you're serious.

You have to be someone like me - a white, ageing, male, conservative (orthodox) Catholic - to know what prejudice is in our decaying "liberal" society and to know who the dominant political class is, not only in Australia but in the Western world. But other than this direct personal experience, which is not accessible to you, can you name a person or group or stream of thought in our major institutions that is distinctly conservative?

I fear you will have a problem with this question. Despite your MA in philosophy from Oxford University, you give no indication that you understand what philosophical conservatism is and that like most PC people you merely dismiss (philosophical) conservatives as at best mistaken, at worst trapped in "fairytales at the bottom of the garden". For more of my thoughts on this matter, go to my Conservatism and Political correctness pages (or click on the links on my homepage). I need not repeat it here.

It is an indication of your present narrowness of thinking that you appear unaware of the intellectual discourse of those sharply critical of political correctness and its provenance. As an example, and in support my claims about the hegemony of the politically correct class, let me quote from Keith Windschuttles' tribute to Paddy McGuinness on his retirement from the editorship of Quadrant (Quadrant, March 2008, pp. 3 - 4):

...If you made [in 2000] any disparaging remarks about groups favoured by the Left, especially feminists, gay liberationists, multiculturalists or Aborigines, you were branded a racist redneck and you became persona non grata, not only in the mainstream news media but in the one institution that was supposedly our last bastion of independent thought and free speech, the university. Indeed, in 2000, on any university campus in the country, a debate that questioned the orthodox version of Aboriginal history would have certainly provoked violence.

Some well-known precedents left no doubt about this. In the previous decade, left-wing university activists had responded to views they opposed - in particular those of psychologist Hans Eysenck and historian Geoffrey Blainey - by violently disrupting their lectures or forcing their cancellation on security grounds.

By the end of the 1990s, the politicisation and intolerance of the universities were being matched in much of the news and opinion media. Large bureaucratic media organisations, whether private or publicly owned and where no one was really in charge any more, had been captured by the more ideologically committed of their staff. The result was a narrowing of intellectual opinion and standards, the closure of debate on a range of topics, and the exclusion of dissenting voices.

Of course, I am not suggesting that you manifest the intolerance described here. I am merely pointing out the dominance and power of the class that promotes and guards many of the views you hold.

When you say that "we're not a very powerful group at all given how much money and attention is lavished upon various religious groups", I am afraid that this is faulty reasoning. You are also reducing a rather complex rights and government budgeting matter to simple terms that are dictated by your anti-religious prejudice.

It does not follow that government aid to private schools means that the PC class is "not very powerful". It may mean that, but not necessarily so. Indeed, the question is decided empirically, in the actual circumstances of government. The policy to provide (you colour the matter by saying "lavish") government money to private schools is, I suggest, prudential. Regardless of the ideological animosity some members of a Labor government (it is always Labor governments) may harbour towards private schools, particularly religious schools, they have to deal with the basic rights of their citizens (right to associate, right to religious belief, parental rights), and the right of all to share in government money by virtue of their citizenship and their contribution in tax payments. There is, in addition, the critical issue of government budgeting.

You're the economist and financial adviser. Tell me: what would the government, any government, be up for if all the private schools were suddenly changed into state schools, or worse still, if the private organisation running a school sold up and sent their students to the local state school? You might not know this, but the state aid issue was brought to a head during the last years of the Menzies government when the students from the Catholic schools in Goulburn turned up at the local state schools. It's only those like the democratically unaccountable academic feminist overseeing the review of the exemptions to the Victorian Equal Opportunity act that would dare to collapse religious schools without any regard to the larger consequences - and the basic rights of citizenship.

There is another factor here that needs to be considered, something that might be repugnant to your social sensibilities. Many parents - I have no idea of the percentage - send their children to private schools because their conception of education goes far beyond what could be called the technical skills of education: reading, writing, arithmetic, science and so on. Indeed, a moral education under which one understands enduring values, respect for others, and knowing how to behave in a community are just as important. Religion is not the main motivation here. They think they get more of this in private schools and especially in religious schools. And are they wrong? This is something I can speak about.

You see, I have a life time behind me of working in educational publishing and bookselling. For more than eight years I ran my own small business selling books to school libraries. I've walked in and out of hundreds of secondary schools. It was sometimes a struggle to avoid harassment as I made my way to and from the library. I was confronted by fifteen-year-old kids in some state schools who were your future street thugs, and perhaps worse. At no time during those years did I have such an experience or make such observations in private schools. Your old school, Carey Baptist Grammar, was a case in point. You would have no idea how different Carey is from some of the state schools in the west and north-west of Melbourne. I don't want to labour the point, which is that there are many factors to be considered in the issue of state aid to schools, the most important of which are basic rights and the rights of citizenship. No government can ignore them.

Finally, you say your opinions are your own. If you don't know the arguments supporting views counter to yours, how justified are you in saying your opinions are truly your own? Wasn't that J.S. Mill's point: the clash of opposing opinions would yield the truth?

2. Deductive vs inductive reasoning. Yes, I do know the difference between these, as I did a MA in philosophy (amongst other things) at Oxford (not that doing this guarantees such understanding, but it suggests I’ve come across the point before).

Alas, you give the impression that if you were acquainted with the distinction between deductive and inductive reasoning you are no longer clear about it. Similarly with whatever philosophy you read, it was either narrow or you have forgotten much of it. That's my impression from your replies.

3. You claim I’m ‘PC’ (Politically Correct, presumably). I’m usually accused of the complete opposite! PC types usually say we must respect all alternative belief systems, religions and cultures, whereas I say some are clearly better than others.

I can understand that your PC friends, particularly your gay friends, think you're the complete opposite - meaning conservative, I assume. That's because they're ignorant of what conservatism is really about, and most likely think it is about free market economics and business, which is what you are in. The basis of political correctness is a materialist metaphysics and an empiricist epistemology, which on your own account you subscribe to. Again, see my pages on PC and Natural Law conservatism.

And as for PC types respecting "all alternative belief systems", don't make me laugh. They only respect people and views they approve of. The rest are to be driven from the public square, or preferably disempowered. The empirical evidence is overwhelming. Political correctness is a body of rigid dogma that is rigidly applied, as the fantasising academic feminist is attempting to do with the Equal Opportunity act.

4. Re. the freedom to associate, etc. Yes, I agree with this as a general point. But the schools you mention are not like clubs as you point out. For a start, private clubs don’t accept a good portion of their funding from the State Govt, which religious schools do. Second, religious schools must teach the state curriculum, i.e. they are not completely free like churches to espouse whatever beliefs they like. Hence there is a significant difference between a church or club, and a partially state funded school.

I am happy that you acknowledge the right to associate. But it is not a general point; it is a crucial point in this discussion, as are parental rights and freedom of religion, all at the core of a tolerant liberal society. As I have said, the attempt to manipulate legislation that will either downgrade or cancel these rights is evident of a fascistic spirit right at the heart of the Victorian Labor government.

I will insist on the strength of my analogy comparing schools to clubs, rather than with a business. That was the crucial point: that religious schools are not like businesses. Your argument was that they were. It remains unsustainable. Second, the fact that schools receive government funding does not affect the analogy. Funding does not change the nature of a school, as government funding would not change the nature of clubs like sports or hobby clubs. It is their nature that is relevant in the analogy, not their funding. Third, you constantly exhibit your prejudice in implying that religious belief is arbitrary and irrational.

If you knew anything about the Church you would know that in Catholic belief faith and reason go together, that some of the most refined and subtle expositions of the nature of reason and knowledge have issued from Catholic philosophers and theologians. The last two popes, for example, are acknowledged as first class intellects. Perhaps the ignorant ocker who rang you about "fairies at the bottom of the garden" would scoff at that. No intellectual of any standing would deny the status of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

The Church and its schools have no problem with an educational curriculum based on reason. More than that, Catholic schools should be at the forefront of those objecting if pernicious ideology and faulty technical knowledge appeared in a school curriculum. They would do what I am doing now: offer reasoned arguments to counter deficient and prejudiced views.

Tom, stop peddling that nonsense about irrationality and the Church if you don't want to sound like that ignorant ocker caller. It's not worthy of you.

This will end part 1 of my response. The issue of Galileo and science deserves a separate comment. I will also deal with the question of diversity and "blind faith" in part 2 and conclude with a small discussion of the fallacy of scientism, a fallacy that underwrites Richard Dawkins' abusive intolerance of religion.

5. Re. my personal views on religion, just because plenty of clever people also believe(d) in religion doesn’t mean that its worth cannot be challenged. And there are also plenty of historical examples of established churches trying to hold scientific enquiry back, e.g. Catholicism and its persecution of Galileo. So rather than argue this point by example, I’d simply say that if we subjected religion to the same sort of scientific inquiry that most other subjects receive, then belief via faith alone wouldn’t stack up. I know you’ll disagree with this, but it’s the core of what I think – and it’s based upon observation, not blind faith. As an aside, do you believe in the animistic gods (plural) followed still by certain tribes in Africa? And if not, why not?

6. Finally, regarding diversity, I would argue until I’m blue in the face that a school where people of different faiths and beliefs taught would, by definition, be more diverse than one where everyone believed the same thing. If you don’t really believe in diversity, then fair enough – but if you do, then it’s hard to argue that by rejecting it, somehow the sum total of it will be increased!

Regards

Tom Elliott

Tom Elliott
Managing Director
MM&E Capital Limited
Level 7, 350 Collins Street
Melbourne, Vic. 3000
Australia
Tel: +61 (0)3 9601 4511

Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com