Touche for DJ! I was Boratted in text - I'm sure I did pick up CJ's 'Boratting' with the stuff about female, mature-aged, etc. Didn't expect two to do it in a row...

I think the false distinction Merc describes here is called 'class'. The 'Phillistines' do less to prove the falsehood within class systems than they do to deny the real effects thereof. So it's not just "in our heads", but built into post codes, advertising, and the education system, for example. It's even apparent in the funny ways people like Christopher Pyne, Alexander Downer (upper-middle) and John Howard (middle) speak English (Sorry to seem partisan - these guys are just too obvious). These are falsehoods indeed, but the lies continue to play a major part in driving an inefficient socio-economic system. Just ask people in real estate or banking to find out how such irrationality keeps pumping the big bubbles of debt.

Again, the falsehoods of these distinctions are found in the adherents' claims about truth, or more broadly "quality" and "value". I've met many upper-middle opera-goers who know barely a word of sung Italian, German, or French, much less about the actual music. And we can't expect Howard to know or really care about Shakespeare: he just wants to express his deference to a certain class identity.

It is right that people are concerned about the effects of such class denial and the spread of elitist behavior e.g., deceit and guile as virtues, more blatant cruelty and more obvious decadence. But again, it all points to the ideological and moral quagmires of Neo-Liberalism. I think intellectuals have a duty to expose such falsehoods via critical examination.

Well Mil, if the high culture/low culture thing is all about class as you suggest, then that makes this article doubly amusing, for author MacLennan has some socialist and Marxist leanings, as evidenced by his scholarly writings on the teaching of English language in Australia and his critique of Australian education as being in thrall to a capitalist agenda.

Heh...so we have an apparent Marxist supporting the class-based snobberies of high culture/low culture - and a whole chorus of pomo bashers cheering him on --> and I'm sure many of the commenters in this forum who sympathise with the article would be having heebiejeebies right about now.

It's also one in the eye for the conservative commentariat who love to portray postmodernism as some sort of lefty pinko plot...when pomo pulls the rug out from under Marxism and pretty much all other absolutist schemes.

They are all hoist upon their straw men...or, as Hamlet would put it, "words, words, words."

Ahh but Mercurious, don't you see? Via a post-modern deconstructionist approach, the academic establishment is programming young minds into a process of marxist thought, though interestingly this is done by a relativist approach that refuses to acknowledge the superiority of a single ideology.

So as I see it, there's an amusing game of cat and mouse where the cultural conservatives have painted the academic establishment as inculcating their own marxist values on students. The problem is, that they're doing it via a post-modern syllabus that by its very nature can't place a particular ideology on a pedestal.
How someone who accepts relativism can push a particular ideology (aside from relativism itself) is beyond me.

In other words, the conservatives are just mad the teaching's not outright conservative. Boo hoo.

Actually, the problem with relativism is it can make it harder to gauge results, which is something the wiser cultural conservatives have latched onto.

I just want to make a point here - I used to be a Marxist and it was definitely not a relativist ideology. The organisation I used to belong to was very firm regarding what was right and what was wrong. That organisation (and Marxist thought interpreted by Lenin, Bukharin and Trotsky) all had what you could call a "grand narrative" of history and were contemptuous of other political ideologies. Quite the opposite of what I can glean from post-modernism. You could accuse my erstwhile comrades of being "politically correct" (to haul out another cliche) but not relativist. I hope that clarifies things.

I refer to class dynamics because of their enduring and typically implicit meaning, which I perceive to have been hardly touched by the po-mo wrecking ball. Po-mo has probably otherwise smashed the Marxist Grand Narrative into a hard-to-sell relic, but some of that narrative's ambitious predictive claims on history have been appropriated (in typical style) by Neo-Liberalism. My latest reading of Engels, for example, evoked frighteningly clear impressions of the 'trickle-down' nonsense trumpeted loudly from the 1980s. Like a cunning virus, Neo-Liberalism both adopts and circumvents key aspects of Marxist eschatology; an ideological heist robbing progressives of much that hitherto served as references, if not tenets. Hence the supposed witnessing of 'ends' to 'history', 'society' and class. That last point has a peculiar Australian expression via increased publicity and rhetoric about "our egalitarianism" and "mateship", all during a period of middle-class welfare and relentless erosion of workers' last vestiges of collective self defence.

I urge that we see through the neo-lib/-cons' brand-marketing in this: their 'attacks' on po-mo are the same fakery as their other spin advertising themselves as 'conservative' to constituents nostalgic for the Cold War when genuine limits and penalties were applied to monetarists. These people are not conservative: their aim has been to reduce all human relations to some financial exchange, more or less. So Hayek's exception about 'family' should be seen as fakery too, probably just to better market his works to conscientious anti-socio/psychopathic capitalists.

However, Postmodernism is perfectly compatible with the Neo-Liberalist project; indeed, it often helps it along by depicting all modes of consumption as matters of individual 'choice' irrespective of 'class' (a taboo term for the regime). Therefore, we should probably not be surprised when the regime pays lip service to opposing such practices as: ridiculing disabled people, relativizing art, trading in plastinated corpses as ornaments - or even in children and adults for labor. Note too the regime's unease with conscription, even when in crusading warmonger mode: troops must have somehow 'chosen' to get blasted to bits or crippled by Iraqi guerrillas.

BTW, MacLennan's article was probably written in gadfly mode.

I am a first year film student at QUT. Michael Noonan is one of my lecturers. As part of lectures we have looked at the shows in question. I have seen cut footage, uncut footage and have met the two men in “downunder mystery tour”. Take note I say men. This article refers to them as "two intellectually disabled boys". That is an insult. One is around twenty and the other is at least forty.

This is the Noonan's documentary is the first piece I have ever seen that has made me confornt the misconceptions I have about disabled people. After screening and discussing some footage, the two men "William and Craig" were invited up to the front of the lecture to field questions from the class. They were completely at ease and very aware of when they were being funny.

This article talks about the piece as if the two men were simply put into staged situations. They footage which contains the "we would share her" comment takes place outside the house the two men share. After realising the connotation of what he has said the young man actually goes on to says "No, not like that". The older man laughs at him and says "your funny". "Philistines of relativism at the gates" does not mention this, why would it when it seems intent on robbing disabled people of their voice, or infact acting as if they don't have one.

(will continue in next post)