If it is indeed a "postmodern fallacy that the time of grand narratives has passed", then I wonder what Mervyn Bandle would make of Boaz's grand (ahem) narrative?

Boaz said, apparently without irony: "We are by and large 'blank pages' when it comes to knowing where we came from." And his post demonstrated this amply.

Boaz, we are free today because we fought 20th century wars against Nazism, Fascism, Japanese Imperialism and Communism, which have rather more to do with our freedom now than the battles against medieval Muslim armies at Tours and the Siege of Vienna. In fighting those 20th century wars, we were fighting the direct products of a modern, industrialised, westernised world-view: The Nazis and Fascists were Christian, the Communists western, and the Japanese Imperial army cherry-picked and modelled itself closely on the German, Russian and French military traditions.

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists took many of their queues from great Western philosophers, including Nietzsche & Kant - and Western scientists like Darwin, and western economists like Marx - indeed they were the epitome of rationalism in their inhumanity.

And let's not forgot "The Media and Art" world's role in promoting Nazism, Fascism, Communism and Japanese Imperialism. Yes, great instruments of freedom they are, Boaz.

And, inconveniently for Boaz's Hooray-for-the-West view of history, it was Muslim scholars who preserved much of the intellectual inheritance of the Classical world while Europe slumbered through the Dark Ages, and mathematicians with suspiciously Arabic and Hindu-sounding names that gave us algebra and the concept of zero, with which Galileo and Newton wrought their genius.

According to Boaz, we're also free because of the British Empire. Would that be the same British Empire that abandoned Australia at Singapore, in our very direst hour of need, against the greatest threat Australia had ever faced?

Empires get to be empires by enslaving entire populations. How does that contribute toward freedom, exactly?

I'd say "WAKE UP" Boaz, but I know I'm wasting my breath.

Why, Mervyn Bandle, is it false to claim we are 'liberated if we have no sense of who we are, where we come from, what we stand for and where we are seeking to go as a nation'? What if one's sense of self, of history, of cultural identity, of nationhood, is one in which one is not entitled to, or deserving of, say; voting rights, equal pay, unmutilated genitals, the freedom to leave the house unsupervised? What if one's sense of self, of identify, of nationhood, is one in which one must perform national military service in order to be judged a worthy human being, or one must bash poofters, or drink to excess every weekend in order to be a real man? Such people have a strong sense of who they are and where they come from and what they stand for - but are they liberated?

If we are to accept the notion of 'liberated' formally to mean an absence of constraint, then surely somebody with few, or no, pre-conceived ideas about themself or their nation truly does experience a kind of liberation - if only from orthodoxy and prejudiced thinking. Sure, this is not a comfortable or even well-informed position from which to make certain decisions - but how is it not 'liberated'?

I am talking here of the existential self as conceived by Satre - the 'me' that decides, ultimately alone, and hopefully without coercive externalities intruding. This can indeed be liberating, albeit challenging to many.

We should always try and get our facts right. The Muslim Arabs only knew certain of the classical authors. Obviously they did not preserve any of the classical Latin authors. Even in the case of Aristotle they did not know The Politics and were universally hostile to democracy, which they knew from Plato's critique of it, and what might be termed the civic traditions of the classical world. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, did they know Thucydides. When people emphasise the importance of the Muslim world in preserving classical learning they tend to ignore the role of the Greeks and Byzantium. And they tend to do this for specifically ideological reasons.

Nice photo Rancitas. Hope your blog prospers.

Apropos Boaz_David's list of why the West is great, I'd have to say it's a bit bizarre. But then, so is Mercurius's rebuttal. I get a bit tired of Hitler getting trotted out as the paradigm of absolute evil. Evil he was, but there's plenty of others up there with him. Genocide was not invented by Hitler.

Anyway, you can't judge Western culture on the basis of every crack-pot dictator - the culture never existed that didn't have its psychopaths. What you can't, and shouldn't, deny is that at this point in humanity's history the West has provided the definition of political culture that all, with a couple of crackpot exceptions, accept as being the best.

It's something to be celebrated.

"It would be nice if the motives of the meeting were such but they are not. it will be a fight between liberal and conservative worldviews and truth will not be considered."

Precisely. Both Howard and friends at one end, and the entrenched academic left (eg. ABC) whine when they don't get their own way. It's all about power.

BOAZ_David: With all that I've read about western civilisation, what strikes me the most is the absurd nature of it. There's plenty wrong with the modern world, and I'll be the first to criticise post-modernism. However, European civilisation wasn't built on ideology, it was built on power. The most ridiculous example of this would possibly be that France (supposedly a Catholic nation) fought Austria (also Catholic) in what started out as a religious war (against protestants) in the first half of the seventeenth century precisely because they had a big rivalry. Another that springs instantly to mind is that Britain, France and the Ottomans fought Russia in the Crimean War in part to stop the Russians from carving a piece out of the Ottoman Empire, yet little over a half century later, Britain, France and Russia were allied together and ended up doing precisely that. Even leaving out what happened in the colonies (and how the intellectual grandeur of Europe was built on blood money), the whole thing is bizarre, especially when you consider how inbred the lot of them were.

Why not simply avoid both the usual left and right doctrines and acknowledge that western civilisation has produced both the best and the worst that humanity has to offer and somehow see how we can work positively with that?

bushbred: I think Lincoln is one of the most misunderstood and unjustly glorified men of history. The man was a tyrant who ruthlessly suspended the freedom of the press and had tens of thousands of arbitrary arrests made. Also, look into his thoughts on negroes before emancipation became a political tool he could wield for his own ends.

Pick any period in history and consider what would be a comparable role to the one you are playing/living now (this is possible for every role - everythinbg we do now has evolved from something) - just as you would place a piece of tracing paper over a map to imagine how a landscape may have previously looked).

Are you a master or slave? How many masters are there and how many slaves are there? Whose narrative are we really living out, yours, mine or someone elses?