Perhaps the most striking aspect of the culture wars has been the extent to which they have turned upon tendentious readings of the character of the Australian people. Australia’s radical intellectuals have always displayed a special penchant for imagining their countryfolk after the manner of their own dreams and nightmares, either as noble harbingers of social transformation or as dark repositories of prejudice and reaction, according to preference and circumstance.
I would really love to read a good book on the upper-middle class in Australia, in terms of economy, society, family, and lifestyle. However, it only took a few seconds of hearing Andrew West on the radio to know that this wasn't going to be that book. He presents a dichotomy of people in the upper-middle class: "culturalists" and "materialists". It doesn't even matter what those terms mean, because there's only one thing you really need to know in this world: as far as human beings, human societies and human issues are concerned, (nearly) all dichotomies are bullshit.
It's unfortunate but not surprising that West is, as usual, presenting an over-simplified point of view. When he ran a blog on The Sydney Morning Herald website, most of his articles put everything into ideologically neat boxes, with more "left-wing" and "right-wing" descriptors than I can stomach before noon. It's funny, though; when I read (ages ago) that he was doing research for this book, research involving interviewing actual families, I figured that this would force some reality into the end result.
Incredibly, having framed the book around his "culturalists" and "materialists" dichotomy, West consciously ignores the latter category. From Burchell's review: "In fact, West’s materialists aren’t real people so much as stage props. They’re standing in for real people ...". This, he says in the introduction, is because they do not make interesting objects of study. What the...?! There is absolutely no point advancing a theory if you aren't going to expend some effort justifying it with evidence and demonstrating that the theory is useful.
West isn't one of those "radical intellectuals" from the Burchell quote above. His imaginings don't proceed from dreams and nightmares; he's just over-zealous in categorisation where it's unnecessary. Anyway, I don't want to be a nark and whinge about one person's writing. After all, he writes a lot of good stuff and gets published widely. I'll still read the book, because reviews have said that it's amusing and interesting. It's just a shame I can't expect it to be too enlightening.
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