I dislike groupthink whatever form it takes. No doubt the “progressive” left often deserve harsh criticism, at times as much for the writing style you rightly mock as for the frequent sanctimony and conceptual confusion they display. They’re often pretty easy targets, as are their counterparts on the other side of the divide. Still, I don’t see Krygier or Clendinnen fitting very comfortably into that mould. Any more than, to take someone who hails from the conservative side of the political spectrum, I would Owen Harries.

All of them strike me as a serious, independent thinkers whose primary intellectual passion is to deepen our understanding and pursue, as best they can, the truth. Wherever that may lead and whatever their flaws.

It may be helpful to explore the reasons why Martin Krygier and others have such strong negative views on Quadrant (after Robert Manne). I think this reflects a very unhappy situation that has come to pass in the humanities and social sciences since the troubles of 1968 and after. This is too long ago for most people to remember and the nature of the transition has not been adequatly documented so far as I know, although bits trickle out in books like Andrew Reimer’s “Sandstone Gothic”. Actually that book was more about departmental politics, losing the plot and dumbing down, but all those processes went on in parallel with more overt politicisation in other schools and departments.

The core of the matter is that the social and political sciences have been politicised to such an extent that it has become quite normal and acceptable for prima facie academic work to read like a party politcal pamphlet. A prime example is Us and Them, eds Sawer and Hindess, reviewed on Catallaxy.

http://catallaxyfiles.com/?p=2310

Where Quadrant once appreciated the complexity and variety of motives, options and choices, exhibited curiosity and even occasional puzzlement, raised the tone and enriched the vocabulary of debate, its central role now is as radical vulgariser and simplifier. In particular, its energies are directed to composing an enemy, against which it and its allies can flaunt their fearless contrarianism. The intended reduction to which this leads is a simple choice between one identikit pack — the usual suspects — and the anti-pack pack, Quadrant’s herd of independent minds.”

Beautiful.

I wonder if it’s useful to clearly distinquish notions of “preciousness” — which I think we agree is primarily based on matters of style or taste — from any broader judgement of a public intellectual. Krygier, for example, in a “Perspective” he did on Radio National in 2005, writes about how vital it is for issues of public import to be treated as a conversation, all the more so when those issues carry great emotional freight:

A conversation necessarily has more than one party, and it is a peculiarity of their engagement, as distinct from a monologue, a harangue, a tirade, a shouting match, that participants treat each other with respect. What might that involve, particularly when passions are high and moral energies charged? It’s hard to say precisely what it should include, but I think we can recognise what it must avoid. And my general point is this: there is a rhetoric of critique that can easily provoke the rhetoric of reaction, as a mirror does a reflection. It relentlessly moralizes what the other with equal determination seeks to sanitize, exaggerates what the other is determined to minimize, demonizes what the other sanctifies, closes off exactly the complexities which the other also denies, but for opposite ends. That rhetoric has not been my subject today, though it has elsewhere. And anyone concerned to stimulate the conversation of citizens has, I believe, a responsibility to avoid it.

Earlier in that brief talk he singles out Clendinnen as having “sensitively and imaginatively demonstrated” (in “Dancing with Strangers”) that there was both good and bad in the early contacts between whites and Aborigines. Krygier seems to have a more varied style, a much defter touch with humour and the vernacular but there seems little doubt he would join arms with Clendinnen against both what he calls “the rhetoric of critique” and “the rhetoric of reaction”.

None of which of course is intended to suggest anyone should escape criticism. I guess I just find myself inclined to leap to the defense of those rare individuals whose integrity seems made of whole cloth.

I think a lot of our writers are a bit precious - with the exception of Martin Krygier, whom I heard speak with Geoffrey Robertson at MWF last year. He was very much in my mind as I read your comments above. It is hard, perhaps, for people not to be precious about intellectual endeavours they build their lives around, especially in a country that hardly notices them at all really.

I don’t blame historians for wanting to keep fiction writers honest and I really struggle with renovated historical fictions that play fast and loose with the facts in the name of a good story, all the while protesting that they have some ability to channel the truth while they do so. A lurid example is Lynne Reid Banks’ books about the Brontes. Ewwwh, they were horrid. Simply horrid.

I shall read on with ear finely cocked.

And her fastidiousness is one of the things I like. I’m a purist too. No point in falsifying history when the whole point is to see how far you can get to the truth of the matter. What other point could there be. It’s the truth of the matter that the novelists claim for themselves too, but I think she deals with them well. (At least with Kate Grenville - not sure about Malouf.

I guess I think she fancies what she’s doing as a little more than it is. I don’t have it on me any more - I sold it to a second hand shop I think - but reading the holocaust (from memory) had too many self conscious references to her own venture into what was possible for the human being etc for my taste.

But it really is just my taste - a pretty minor point.

I think Clendinnen would be the first to acknowledge she’s a bit of a purist. I’m not sufficiently knowledgable to judge whether she takes that inclination to potentially precious extremes but my layman’s impression so far is that she’s not interested in novelty of interpretation for its own sake. In “Dispatches from the History Wars”, another essay from her book I’m currently dipping into, it wasn’t clear to me for quite a few pages where her sympathies lay. By the end, I felt it was fair to say they lay in the search for truth, however ambiguous and elusive it might at times prove to be. No doubt a claim most historians would make but not an easy standard to march under, I would have thought, particularly with such politically loaded topics.

Towards the close she says:

The currently politically motivated simplifications can only impede the development of our individual analytic capacities and a reliable sense of social responsibility. Historians have a special duty: to resist opportunistic falsification of the precious record of past experience, from whatever quarter the deforming impulse might come.

In this essay, at least, my impression is that she lives up to that duty. More than that, everything of hers I’ve read so far suggests to me that this kind of fastidiousness is a consistent trait, perhaps even the leitmotif of her work. I can’t quite see how this could properly be termed precious, or am I somehow completely missing the point you were making?

I do associate her with a rather precious school of history in Victoria. I did honours in history and audited lectures by Greg Denning at Melbourne Uni. He was all the rage and was into history as a kind of exploration of alternative ‘readings’ of things. Paul Carter was another one with all his stuff about maps.

Now I really got off on history as the recovery of meaning that had been lost to us. But somehow although that was Denning’s schtick he didn’t and doesn’t impress me. There was something that I thought was affected about his whole enterprise - as much as I was sympathetic to its origins. Indeed I tried to practice history in a similar way. But beyond trying to recover original meaning, I think Denning took it a bit further. He somehow took it to a place where it seemed to me he showed a kind of preciousness about the unusual nature of his historical ‘readings’. Viz Captain Bligh’s Bad Language.

Inga flirts with the same kind of theory - but I think she’s more grounded than Denning. I admire her journey into the South American Native societies. I admire the way she speaks of her quest - to render them intelligible by understanding their differences from us. But I’ve only read her apologias for her studies on this stuff, not, sadly her books on this subject.

Though I agree with her points against the ficionalisers of history - and I think her points were well made - I still detect a slight vein of preciousness about her enterprise.

Anyway - that’s all for the record - a bit of nit-picking on someone whose writing and speaking I always find thoughtful and provocative. Can’t ask for much more than that.

I’ve not read “Reading the Holocaust” but did just finish the essay “Building Treblinka” from the book I mentioned above and thought she handled it rather well. As you say, subjects don’t come much more daunting.

All in good time . . . .