One could argue that given that the seat down position is statistically the most used position, it should be left in that position.
Or isn’t it about time that men sat down to pee?
The overwhelming evidence is that not many men have the accuracy or the decency to pee straight and not to drip. Even in the best restaurants.
Ruling: All people should sit to pee.
GOOD AND BAD FORM IN CONTROVERSY
We are not particularly happy with the conduct of controversy in this land.
The Inspector-General feels that some misunderstanding exists about how to conduct a ‘controversy’ and where it should happen.
There are two qualities which characterise us as Australians but again do not distinguish us. Other cultures share these qualities – but not many.
These qualities are civility and urbanity.
Civility we define as basic public courtesy and peaceable public behaviour. Obviously, we frequently fall from grace in our aspirations towards civility but at least, as a culture, we do aspire and often achieve a high degree of civility. Up to about six drinks.
Urbanity is perhaps a more stylish and polished public behaviour – advanced civility if you like. You will have to do a one-month program with the Inspectorate to qualify for urbanity. The cost of martini-drinking is included in the fee.
One of the tenets of civility is the willingness to be publicly courteous with those with whom we disagree or dislike when inescapably we find ourselves in their company.
Another is the capacity for negotiating without violence with those we oppose or of whom we strongly disapprove.
The third tenet of civility requires that we exercise discernment about when and how we choose to disagree with our opponents.
Hence, when we have recognised a public figure we dislike in the supermarket, it does not follow that we should ram their trolley. Civility requires the containment of disagreement to appropriate places.
Intellectual disagreement and disapproval is only humanly bearable when it is confined to the diverse forums we have created for civilised disagreement.
The media, the letter to the editor, talkback radio, the seminar, the meeting, the festival, the private letter, even the fax, the critique, and the satire are the forums for expressing disapproval and disagreement.
A further tenet is that one does not disagree with all the powers at one’s disposal.
The forums for confrontation do not include the abusive telephone call late at night, the burning of fiery crosses in people’s front gardens. Or painting slogans on the walls of people’s homes. Or the harassment of the family of public figures of those we oppose.
People who engage in the public discourse cannot go about the ordinary parts of their life without fear of abuse; talented people will consider public life not to be worth the candle.
What about civility and Hitler?
What about the invitation you receive in 1939 to lunch with Hitler?
Do you refuse as a protest against his policies?
Do you accept and argue calmly and rationally for a change of his policies?
And when he rants, do you thank him and hope that he will have lunch with you when next he visits your part of the world?
Or do you accept the invitation and assassinate him after dessert?
What do you do in 1942 when the lunch invitation arrives?
The Office accepts that there are some people and movements which are unacceptable in a civilised society – that threaten free society in a very tangible way (imprisoning opponents, for example).
Assessing and meeting that threat is part of the judgment of being a liberal democratic citizen.
Sometimes the threat cannot be extinguished without legal suppression or violence.
Democratically elected dictatorships or viciously anti-liberal and inhumane governments may have to be rebelled against.
Some people are to be shunned.
Some people are not worth arguing with.
These are judgments to be made about those who consistently and deliberately offend against civility.
These judgments have to be made on a case-by-case basis.
The guidance in making these judgments comes from a knowledge of history as well as a considered interpretation of the situation confronting us.
Inhibitions of discourse
There is an expression which has been around for some time now called Political Correctness which bedevils our conversation and public discussion.
But it is not PC which is a problem now. The problem is that we no longer know what subject is PC.
It has a very fuzzy meaning.
Essentially, the term applies to the attempt to use political piety (disguised as humanism or parading itself as an upholder of prevailing notions of ‘decency’) to place certain ideas beyond question or joke. Further, to make the questioning of those ideas an offence against the decency of the discourse.
The natural opponents of Political Correctness are satire, comic heresy, bad taste jokes and ultimately, the questioning mind and the lateral-thinking mind.
Political Correctness has been a source of inhibition and prudishness in conversation, and the butt of innumerable jokes but it lives on.
Political Correctness closes down discussion – when we dare to buck it we hear ourselves having dutifully to say in an uncomfortable voice, ‘I suppose that is politically incorrect.’
And of course what is PC in one circle of thinking is non-PC in another.
For example, in some subgroups it is not currently acceptable to criticise American foreign policy. In others it is not acceptable to support it.
The few examples we wish to visit in this investigation belong to what might be called the humanist-liberal subgroup. Or the progressive subgroup.
In truth, we also want to talk about Compulsive Anti-Political Correctness but before we do we would like to visit some of the categories of thought which have had the blanket of Political Correctness draped over them as being no-go areas for open discussion.
These include the notion of sexism, the notion of racism, and the notion of multiculturalism (all of which we support but where we feel the meaning of the terms have drifted wider and wider until they are disruptive of discourse).
Reckless use of the term ‘sexism’
The original and precise meaning of sexism and one to which we subscribe is words, conduct, laws and customs which contribute to the belief that women are intrinsically inferior to men or contribute to the invisibility of women in society – vocabulary such as policemen/firemen instead of police officers/fire fighters and so on.
The fact of the matter is that all generalisations about gender (male or female) are sexist.
But the word ‘sexist’ is flung around and increasingly involves a misapplication and reckless allegations.
Sexist is often confused with public expressions of sexual desire, sexual depiction, sexual flamboyance, sexual display, erotica, and especially jokes of sexual nature.
It results in the mumbled confusion of someone saying, ‘Oh, we suppose that’s sexist?’ – an expression of utter confusion.
There are such things as sexist statements and practices and we do not support these. But the word is not at all clear-cut. We have to be very careful when we allege ‘sexism’ even, or especially, when we allege it silently or publicly against ourselves.
We call it false-feminism, a political position which is really a new prudery masquerading as genuine feminism.
Camille Paglia uses the example of dance clubs in the US where women dance naked or semi-naked, usually around poles and in front of mirrors on stage, while men watch. She says these are really contemporary versions of ancient temples where men came to worship fertility and the female form. And at these ‘temples’ they pay homage and offer up gifts (by placing dollar bills in the garter belts of the women). She says it is not a sexist act to go to these places.
You may or may not buy this interpretation but
we offer it as an example of how the allegation of sexism is not always clear-cut.
And some jokes are funny because they offend contemporary political propriety – they are funny, in part, because they are inconsequential heresies. Yes, some jokes are belligerently ‘silencing’ but it is better to live in a robust world than in an atmosphere of inhibited blandness.
We quote some other confusion in use of the word ‘sexism’.
Example One: A professor of English introduces the wife and daughter of a friend, knowing that we know their husband and father as a writer (he is absent).
He says, ‘Helen is Peter’s wife and Anna his daughter; I suppose that’s a sexist thing to say.’
To find a point of common connection and to identify Helen and Anna in this way to us is not sexist.
Example Two: A leading playwright is on stage as a member of a panel of other writers at an international writers’ festival. He asks permission to invite his wife to sit up on the panel with the others.
He feels that this is demonstrating an anti-sexist attitude.
Yet we see it as a sexist act. That is, giving his wife a privilege on the basis of her sexual role in his life.
And we wish to stress that in suggesting that there is confusion and misuse of the word ‘sexism’, in no way do we wish to say that sexism does not exist and that it is not in every way demeaning. We believe it requires our vigilant and vigorous attention.
But we need to be precise in our usage otherwise it kills conversation, especially about sexual matters.
Compulsive Anti-Political Correctness
Australians, in a healthy way – although also in a perversely unhealthy way – do have the tendency to buck Political Correctness but this has lead to another curious and infuriating phenomenon – even more mindless than Political Correctness – but perhaps more vicious. It is the posture of Anti-Political Correctness.
We have observed a veritable appetite, say among some columnists, to oppose anything which sounds humanistic or what they consider to be held as politically correct by liberal-humanists – and Political Correctness, it has to be remembered, contains within its list many genuine virtues (it is the social implication that these virtues are beyond discussion which is the problem).
It is a sure sign of political mindlessness to oppose all of the agenda of one’s opponent. ‘Oh, stop being Politically Correct,’ they will say, whenever a defence is mounted of a liberal-humanist position.
We think Anti-Political Correctness is now the greater bane. A compulsive need to ridicule every humane or ‘softhearted’ impulse in areas of the indigenous people, illegal immigrants, feminism and so on.
THE MYTHICAL MIDDLE CLASS AND OTHER UNACCEPTABLE CATEGORIES OF CONTEMPT
The Office wishes to clean up its desk by disposing, once and for all, of certain nuisance matters which buzz around our intellectual life like blowflies.
We wish to come down on these as a brutal Lord Baygon in this Land of Flies.
Firstly, Contemptuous Categories Without Useful Content.
The Office does not wish to hear ever again the expressions ‘the middle class’ or ‘the bourgeoisie’ as in ‘a padded middle-class world’ and ‘I found it hard to get too perturbed about the anguishes of an inner-springed bourgeoisie’, both from excellent playwright Jack Hibberd in the Australian (‘bourgeoisie’, Jack? Ah, the vocabular dregs of our youth).
Our Office was without explanation for the expression ‘inner-springed’ unless it refers to a bed mattress, and we suspect that in these days even Jack’s mythical Lower Classes would have sprung mattresses. Jack may be using it figuratively as in ‘well-sprung’?
We have another example from the Sydney Morning Herald where a reviewer writes of a film that it is ‘a right wallow in middle-class angst’ and so on and so on; day in and day out, we find the term used, especially in arts criticism.
We read a review in the Australian newspaper of a production of David Williamson’s play The Department by the excellent Rodney Fisher where he describes the play as holding a mirror up to the bourgeoisie. ‘The bourgeoisie – that frustrating, uncomprehending human barrier to change and reform …’
We may not know what precise social division is being described here but we know that what lies behind the use of the term ‘middle class’, is contempt.
From what perspective or social standpoint do those who use the term see life?
It could be used by those who feel excluded from what they imagine as an unfairly privileged middle class above them. If this were so, it would be a simple, and perhaps understandable, expression of resentment and envy.
But this Office doubts that the writers who use the term are really looking ‘up’ at the class above them with resentment.
It is more likely used by those who feel that they are by attitude, values and intellect above what they imagine as a middle class and are thereby looking ‘down’ at the fabled middle class.
It certainly implies the existence of other classes above and below. However, we rarely, if ever, hear attacks on the opinions, values or styles of the lower classes and never hear of the upper classes (maybe ‘the wealthy’ have replaced the upper classes, or the A List – both equally sloppy social categories).
We occasionally hear people boasting a ‘working class’ background but we have not yet brought charges of Inverted Boasting against them.
The one exception on record of a reference to the lower classes is that of the fine commentator, David Marr, who has said in evidence that the lower classes (or was it ‘the Communists’?) are characterised by putting out their milk bottles unwashed. That was when we had milk bottles. Perhaps the lower classes disappeared with the milk bottle.
Our Office does have some complaints before it though, of the occupation of ‘street sweeper’ being used as a bottom rung on the social ladder.
Recently, a news story was published about a solicitor who worked as a street cleaner.
The axis of this story was the juxtaposing of the two occupations within one person and the implication that readers would find this polarity astounding. Except those readers, that is, who are street sweepers or those whose parents were street cleaners and who, consequently, might miss the ‘delicious’ point of the story.
There have been references to an underclass in Australia. The expression is used in the US, and as usual we feel we should try it out on our society to see if it fits or not.
The underclass, by definition, is below every other ‘class’ and is used in the US to describe those who have fallen out of the economic and welfare system.
But in a welfare state such as Australia, together with its remarkable network of private sector social service organisations, it is difficult to see how an underclass could exist except perhaps one made up of those who refuse help or who have deliberately distanced themselves from help (in the US this behaviour has been identified as a strange and intractable part of the underclass).
Which is not to deny that there are people who find themselves on the poverty line.
To return to the expression ‘middle class’. It could, we suppose, mean a statistical band of the population with middle incomes (that is, around a point equidistant from the highest and the lowest incomes). But while this might tell us about middle bands of income, it does not tell us about the behaviour or values of people with such incomes.
We now call Raymond Williams, social analyst and author of the book Keywords, as a witness on this matter. He says, ‘Class is an obviously difficult word … both in its range of meaning and in its complexity … and where it describes social division.’
It surely is.
In Marxist sense, there are ‘wage-labourers, capitalists and landlords’. Marx also added in the lumpen proletariat (bohemians and others with tenuous relations with economic production). But Marx also chopped and changed his usage of the term ‘class’.
These days, the Marxist definitions do not tell us much about the people in those broad divisi
ons. Those divisions are in no way a reliable indicator of behaviour or values or opinions.
For instance, these crude class divisions don’t tell us that much about the voting patterns, recreational preferences, sexual morality, or even home ownership of those within those divisions. Nor do income differences predictably translate into behaviour or values.
The Bureau of Statistics divides the population into five income groups and from lowest to highest, about a third of each group, for example, owns a house.
The Bureau of Statistics divides the workforce into four groups defined by how they are paid: employers, self-employed, wage and salary earners, and unpaid family helpers (the continued expression ‘salary’ as distinct from ‘wage’ is quaint).
It further divides the employed into eight groups: managers and administrators, professionals, para-professionals, tradespersons, clerks, salespersons and personal service workers, plant and machine operators and drivers, and labourers and related workers. There is an implied hierarchy in this listing which may in some cases have no relation to income. Some salespersons, for example, might earn a huge income while a theatre administrator might earn less than a machine operator.
Statistically, there is no official ‘middle class’. And perhaps statistically there is no suburbia.
It may just be another of those mythical boundaries we make to help forge for ourselves a superior identity.
Perhaps it is an expression used by people who fear they belong to a middle class and then, for whatever pathological reason, hold themselves in contempt.
Or perhaps it is used by those who feel they once belonged to this fabled class and have fortunately escaped it. They are really then, pouring their scorn on their families from which they have escaped.
And, as in the US, most people describe themselves as ‘middle class’. That usually means neither very poor nor very rich – but again, it tells us nothing much else.
Interim Finding: We hold that there is nothing wrong with pouring scorn on one’s families from which one has escaped. But to extend one’s family into a social class and to condemn the lot is perhaps a bit unfair.
The Inspector-General of Misconception Page 6
