Launched … James Boyce speaks as Jo (seated) listens …
Well sinners, welcome to the launch of Born Bad: Original sin and the making of the western world, James Boyce’s new history. We’ve all come here to give this wonderful man a big cheer for writing this book and to enjoy that unique institution – the Tasmanian book launch. It’s the launch where everyone in the room is a relative or friend of the author, or they’re asupporter of our precious Tasmanian writers. There’s a lot of love in the room, but speeches have to be kept short because everyone wants to have a drink and catch up with their friends.
What credentials do I have to launch this book? Not one. Except that, like the rest of you I was born with original sin which makes me equally as good, or equally as bad, as any eminent person that James could have asked to make this speech. As James points out in his book, this is the strangely democratising power of the doctrine.
Those of you familiar with James’ prize winning histories Van Dieman`s Land and 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia might think it odd that James Boyce, colonial historian, should write a history of Western European thought. But I don’t think it’s odd, because in spite of the recognition and prizes James has won for his books on early Australian history, I know that being a colonial historian is only one part of his identity.
A few years ago we saw James described in the national media as ‘Australia’s emerging young historian’. Well, we thought. Youngish. But obviously the national commentators were stumped. They were looking for words to describe the new voice which had suddenly erupted onto the national stage and into the middle of what was being called The History Wars. Keith Windschuttle and his like were dominating the public airwaves with their bleakly narrow and small view of Australia. James answered their demoralising arguments and in the process he turned us on our heads – giving us a whole new understanding of both our history and our relationship with this country. He spoke with a scholar’s voice but also with wisdom and compassion. Many people took part in the skirmishes,but it was James, and the story he told about us and about Tasmania, first in his essay in Robert Manne’s book Whitewash, and then in his own book Van Dieman’s Land, it was James who won the History Wars.
So the national media had a problem – here was anew voice but one that was mature, confident and authoritative. Naturally they asked – who was that masked public intellectual? And they thought they had discovered James Boyce, Australia’s emerging, young, historian.
What the national commentators didn’t realise is that James was already known and loved down here in Tasmania. They didn`t realise that James brought to his study of history a lifetime of experience. Before he was ever an historian James was a social worker who worked in some really tough environments with families that were under enormous pressure. He had taken this experience into work doing research for organisations like the Brotherhood of St Laurence and Anglicare Tasmania and he had earned great respect as a deeply thoughtful analyst of social policy and an activist for social justice.
So for those of you wondering where on earth this book came from, just remember that James is a man of many parts. There’s the James who writes history books Mondays to Thursdays and takes every Friday off to help provide the ‘No Bucks’ lunch in a hall in central Hobart for dozens of people who don’t have the money to buy food. There`s the James who subsidised the writing of Van Dieman`s Land by working in a disability group home. There’s the James who continues to rumble away as a one-man campaign for appropriate regulation of the gambling industry. And some nights, on the full moon, there’s another, very different James – the one who dances to Kenny Roger’s The Gambler – but that James is being seen less with age.
Knowing James, it was with enormous interest that I read this book.
Original sin is the idea that Adam and Eve sinned by defying God and eating the forbidden fruit and that this sin is an hereditary stain, transmitted to all descendants of Adam. It is the doctrine that human nature is essentially bad, that we are born corrupted, or in modern terms, dysfunctional. It was St Augustine, the father of Western Christianity, who both shaped the doctrine and added sex and guilt into the mix.
Original sin is such a grotesque doctrine that it is difficult to grasp the weight it has been given in our history. But James’ book is a warning against what CS Lewis called ‘chronological snobbery’, the notion that our ideas are superior to those of the past.
James doesn’t just chart the influence of this doctrine on theological history, but also its influence on the thinkers of the Enlightenment, the thinkers of the nascent social democratic movements, on the emerging discipline of psychology – and ultimately its insidious influence on us today. James argues that the doctrine, about which the Christian churches have largely gone silent, is now so deeply embedded in our psyches that we don’t even recognise it for the cultural baggage that it is.
And on his way to establishing that argument he critiques Richard Dawkins. So that would be Professor Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and eminent thinker, creator of the meme, author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion (2 million copies sold).
When I saw the chapter on Richard Dawkins I heard Sir Humphrey Appleby saying, ‘very brave, Minister’ but by the end of the chapter I was impressed. James argues that Dawkins, like the rest of us, is bound by unseen cultural constraints and that Dawkins’ theory of the selfish gene sits within the cultural belief that people are inherently bad. I did laugh when James established a continuity of thought between Richard Dawkins and St Augustine.
I know that when intellectuals debate it’s not a fight but Tasmania has got one message for Richard Dawkins: Pack yer bags son. Our emerging young historian has taken your ideas and thoroughly explored them. Go Tassie.
So James’ book might be a challenge to how Richard Dawkins thinks. It will be a challenge to how you think. I read it and thought, could what he is saying be true of modern, secular Australia? Could we residents of the land of optimism really believe people are inherently bad? And I thought about how our current political leaders treat people seeking protection in Australia as untermensch, less than men; how our sick and disabled people are ‘leaners not lifters’; how every young jobseeker in Australia, even those with children, are about to have all means of support taken off them for six months of every year because they are people with,quote, ‘sub-optimal behaviours’.
I’m not telling you anything new by observing that our Government thinks that sections of the community are dysfunctional. But is our strangely acquiescent response to these cruelties because we have been conditioned to accept the view that these people are bad?
That is the questioning journey James’ book took me on. I don’t know what your journey will be, but I guarantee you’ll be fascinated by it. On your way you’ll meet beautiful and interesting characters, like the 5th century Celtic mystic, Pelagius, whose sunny view of people deeply irritated St Augustine. And you can dip your lid to the 14th century’s Julian of Norwich. Wanting to comfort the poor, whose hard lives were made harder by a church which told them they were wicked, she wrote the message so beloved of TS Eliot: ‘all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well’.
But there is another, even more compelling reason to read this book.
The reason you must read this book is because it is the product of a unique man. James sees other people as fundamentally good and he is deeply kind. And those two things, so simple, so powerful, constitute a revolutionary way of thinking and being.
His book contains two extraordinary challenges to how we think. One is about how we are to understand human being`s terrible propensity to evil. Yes, James says, people are capable of terrible acts, and evil is pervasive in human history. But, he says, written history also has a bias towards describing the cruelty. He writes:
Documentary sources are largely produced by those with riches, honour, power and scribes. There are relatively few records of the `small` acts of kindness, compassion and self-sacrifice which, almost by definition, seek no recognition but keep children, communities and cultures alive. Honest history must admit that human beings seem capable of all things, and acknowledge that the history of original sin is not concerned with who we are, but who we think we are.`
The second challenge is James`s questioning of what the history of Western people might have been if we had had a different creation story, if we had not been taught we are so bad that our god left us alone in the garden of paradise.
If we had had a different creation story, how different might our relationships with each other be? How different might our relationship with the planet be?
This book, like James’ other histories, like every conversation I have with him, left me believing that I could think differently and that I could be different in this world, and that that difference would make a difference.
One day I was talking to a woman who had read James`s histories. When she discovered that I knew him she said `but what is he like’? I said ‘he`s a good bloke’. She said, ‘no I mean, his books are really different – how does he write like that? What is he like?’ I didn`t know what to say.
I think if I was asked that question again now I would say that James is the historian of small things. He is the person who tells the story of our acts of kindness, compassion and self-sacrifice. He notices us. How grateful we are that he does.
So on behalf of everyone here, not sinners, but good folk all,congratulations James. It`s a great honour to launch Born Bad. We all hope it’s a great success for you.
