In 1950, A. A. (Arthur Angell) Phillips — a teacher at Wesley College in Melbourne and an essayist of growing repute — wrote a piece entitled 'The Cultural Cringe' for the literary journal Meanjin. Phillips was intrigued by a regular ABC radio program:
'The Australian Broadcasting Commission has a Sunday program designed to cajole a mild Sabbatarian bestirment of the wits called Incognito. Paired musical performances are broadcast, one by an Australian, one by an overseas executant, but with the names and nationalities withheld until the end of the program. The listener is supposed to guess which is the Australian and which the alien performer. The idea is that quite often he guesses wrong or gives it up because, strange to say, the local lad proves to be no worse than the foreigner. This unexpected discovery is intended to inspire a nice glow of patriotic satisfaction.'
Phillips's coinage — 'cultural cringe' — struck such a chord, seemed somehow so precisely to nail a particular Australian social and intellectual trait, that it passed into the language. As Sydney University historian Rollo Hesketh describes it: 'Coined in 1950 in the pages of Meanjin, the term has come to refer to Australians' inherent lack of faith in their own culture ... Phillips wished to create a national culture that conceded no inferiority to Britain, and indeed was unembarrassed to be Australian ...'
In much the same way, Donald Horne's title, The Lucky Country, lost its original meaning. His proposition was that 'Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.'
This confronting opinion has been so continuously misinterpreted that Horne was moved to re-state the position in his Death of the Lucky Country (1976), where he expressed his exasperation with how the title phrase had been misused. 'I didn't mean that it [Australia] had a lot of material resources ... In the lucky style we have never "earned" our democracy. We simply went along with some British habits.' Nevertheless, the ironic edge of 'lucky' was lost among the paeans of national praise that the phrase was so egregiously employed to validate.
As far as the 'cultural cringe' was concerned, Phillips had unquestionably noticed and identified a genuine Australian cultural trait — the tendency to deprecate what was local and native in favour of what was international, usually English. As Phillips saw it, Incognito had rightly diagnosed 'a disease of the Australian mind'. He especially objected to the distressing notion 'that in any nation, there should be an assumption that the domestic cultural product will be worse than the imported article'.
Phillips's incisive, witty essay lit a fuse that flickered along through the decades, gaining strength and cogency as Australia's creative artists — writers (in whom Phillips was especially interested), painters, dancers, actors, musicians, conductors, composers — commanded attention, admiration and wonder for their accomplishment, originality and daring. Which was not to say, however, that the idea of cultural cringe disappeared.
"Ring the bells, lock the doors. If you can't keep the bastards honest you can at least keep them out!"
The cringe is still detectable but much disguised. Simon Birmingham's recent vetoing of 11 humanities research projects is a good example of the cringe's transmutation into a version of populist philistinism. Here's his tweeted explanation: 'I'm pretty sure most Australian taxpayers preferred their funding to be used for research other than spending $223,000 on projects like "Post orientalist arts of the Strait of Gibraltar".'
Such intellectual rigour! He's 'pretty sure', his un-sampled research group is 'most' taxpayers and, though it's not evident or admitted in his tweet, he has dropped the first two words of the project. (It actually reads, 'Double Crossing: Art and politics at the Strait of Gibraltar'.)
Birmingham has picked his marks, however. Why are they all from the humanities? The answer is that many humanities research projects, unless explained in detail, can seem precious or far removed from ordinary experience and are sitting ducks for philistine attacks from 'university of hard knocks' critics who, like Birmingham, base their opinion on the title of the project or some version of it.
As Walter Benjamin pointed out, experience is gospel for the philistine who never grasps that 'there exists something other than experience, that there are values — inexperienceable — which we serve'. (Scientific and medical research projects are sometimes even more opaque to the uninitiated but usually safe from ignorant criticism because their importance is assumed.)
Political philistinism in our country has some more recognisable faces: Craig Kelly and Tony Abbott assure us that fossil fuels actually protect us; and there was Barnaby Joyce's assertion that people in K-Mart don't care about climate change (what about Woolies I hear you cry, what about Aldi — this is Simon Birminghamesque research); and there is the Prime Minister's cringeing recourse to ockerisms (well, forget it cobber, we tweet @davenmabel nowadays); and, of course, there was that last graceful week in our national parliament.
Ring the bells, lock the doors. If you can't keep the bastards honest you can at least keep them out!
Brian Matthews is honorary professor of English at Flinders University and an award winning columnist and biographer.
Main image: University of Technology Sydney (Brendon Thorne/Getty Images)