Every year Anzac Day comes around and events held across Australia attract ever growing numbers of people. At dawn services proportionately more youthful and larger crowds venerate the memory of young men (and some young women) who died in the many wars Australia has fought since the late 19th century.
The growth in popularity of Anzac Day is an intriguing phenomenon. It occurs in a period when the vast majority of Australians have never had anything to do with the armed services and have never experienced violence, other than perhaps in the street or the pub or the home.
Australia no longer has conscription or national service and most young people, especially those with tertiary education, would not consider the military as a future career path. The Australian Defence Force has been struggling to meet its recruitment quotas for some time now.
So the reason Anzac Day draws such large numbers cannot be that those who attend have a personal connection to the services. There are also some underlying cultural currents at work.
There is no doubt that Anzac Day represents a form of nationalism — this is not to belittle it, only to recognise its true nature. Anzac Day is part of a process of national imagining that takes place through ritual commemoration — a process described by historian Eric Hobsbawn in his book The Invention of Tradition and by Benedict Anderson in his famous exegesis of nationalism, Imagined Communities.
By paying tribute to the Anzacs, Australians reinforce their sense of common identity: in doing so the Australian nation is imagined as a sovereign and limited community defined by certain ideals.
Arguably this focus on ideals is what makes Anzac Day so popular. Day to day political affairs and cultural and social debate is often antagonistic — democracy as a process of public argument rather than public reasoning. And in the realm of morality, modern life is defined by a plurality of moral perspectives so that it is difficult to form a moral consensus on a wide variety of issues. Anzac Day, by contrast, is an occasion for public concord and consensus — it is marked by displays of solidarity.
The 20th century political theorist Isaiah Berlin argued that nationalism often manifests itself most strongly in a community that has suffered some wound. Certainly Indigenous Australians have suffered a great wound. But on first reflection it appears that other elements of contemporary Australia have not so suffered. Unlike in Russia, Japan, China or Germany, modern Australians do not have a vivid collective memory of suffering.
Of course those who returned from the World Wars and the various other conflicts of the 20th century were marked forever by the knowledge they had acquired of human life and death. Today, in a period of unparalleled wealth, in which most Australians are far removed from war, Anzac Day is a way of instructing ourselves about the place of suffering in Australia's historical experience.
But perhaps modern Australian society has in fact suffered a wound, for which Anzac Day is a balm of sorts. Perhaps the wound suffered is a hollowing out of our moral and political culture, what the Scottish philosopher Alasdair Macintyre has described as the severing of our contemporary moral vocabulary and moral concepts from their philosophical and cultural roots.
We have plenty of ideals. We celebrate 'courage', 'mateship', 'loyalty' and 'fairness' but it is not clear how these ideals are integrated into a broader moral system or how they actually shape and ground our social life. Without being rooted in a conception of the 'good society', concepts like the 'fair go' (which is essentially a conception of justice) are readily interpreted according to the political priorities of the day.
In this context of disagreement and confusion about the nature of a moral vocabulary we might share, Anzac Day acts to sooth and smooth over the hollow.
As a day of commemoration it has distinctly moral themes in its focus on the virtues thought to be epitomised by the Anzacs, namely courage and loyalty. But it also allows people to get a grasp on what these ideals might mean beyond rhetoric — they are shown to us in action in the stories of sacrifice, compassion and heroism that Anzac Day brings forth.
So we have Simpson and his donkey who helped bring in the wounded, and we have the statue at the back of the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance of a soldier carrying his wounded mate over his shoulders.
Anzac Day is a day on which many of us can imagine Australia as having some kind of moral being in which we are all connected — and connected by virtues such as those we learn were evinced by the Anzacs. But we need to keep on interrogating the virtues and moral ideas evoked on Anzac Day. In the context of our actual social life, what do they mean? And to what moral vision do they orient us? Do they suffice?
Benedict Coleridge is a recent honours graduate of the University of Melbourne.