No madman's manifesto

THE flawed logic of Norway's mass murderer must be rebutted, not dismissed as raving.

TO read Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Breivik's manifesto is to peer into a mind of obscurity and contraction.

His European declaration of independence, a literary prelude to mass murder, is testament to the danger of reading to confirm, rather reading than to learn. It is an educative approach antithetical to the Enlightenment method of inquiry Breivik claims to champion and results in fallacies that justify killing, including a distorted revision of Western ideas about individuality and political freedom.

Breivik's declaration has been dismissed as the confused raving of a madman. However, despite its prejudice and hostility, his writing is often lucid, which makes it especially pernicious. Italian politician Mario Borghezio has already praised it for containing great ideas.

To dismiss Breivik as a mad, lone wolf excises him from our collective conscience and rationalises censorship by omission, which British sociologist Frank Furedi has revealed as an intentional strategy adopted by some media in the wake of the Norway atrocity ("Ideologues hijack Norway massacre", The Weekend Australian, July 30).

But history is a caution against such silence. Mein Kampf survived Hitler's stay in prison to justify genocide and Mao Zedong's Little Red Book fanned revolution by famine in China and social movement in the West. Manifestos outlive the man and, irrespective of Breivik's fate, his words will remain. Intellectuals of all political persuasions may consider it a public responsibility to address them in the interest of mitigating further harm.

There are many public figures cited as exemplars of Western culture in Breivik's manifesto. Notable Australians among them include former prime minister John Howard and former treasurer Peter Costello, who were praised for their belief that immigrants should adopt Australian values. Keith Windschuttle, editor of Quadrant magazine, was also cited for his defence of Western Enlightenment philosophy against the perceived encroachment of cultural relativism in education.

The theme that predominates in Breivik's work is an intense fear that the freedoms commonly associated with Western culture, such as freedom of thought and expression, are under attack from the march of cultural Marxism through public institutions, especially universities. He believes that higher education generates culture powerfully and begs authority by linking his conception of Western freedom to John Henry Newman, the historical champion of liberal arts universities and their anti-utilitarian mission. The ideology of cultural Marxism is pitted against this ideal, which Breivik claims originated with Antonio Gramsci, developed through the Frankfurt school and student revolutions of the 1970s, and has been transmitted thenceforth by feminists. It is this ideology that Breivik associates negatively with political correctness, the proliferation of multiculturalism and the suppression of Western freedoms.

He holds feminist women especially responsible for the success of Marxism and the dissolution of Western culture, proposing that: "Women should not be encouraged . . . to take anything above a bachelor's degree . . . Males, on the other hand, should obviously continue to be encouraged to take higher education bachelor, master and PhD."

But Breivik's writing on freedom contains two fundamental flaws, even before we account for his horrific assault on the principal freedom of life on which all Western civil liberties and human rights rest.

The first flaw is that the main purpose of freedom is to serve utilitarian ends, rather than be a right unto itself whose ends may be observed, but not forced.

The second is his ignorance of Western philosophical traditions, in which the most fundamental tension arises between the concept of individual freedom and the principle of do no harm. Finding the balance between this positive and negative liberty, as Isaiah Berlin understood them, is the hard work of democracy that shapes its contemporary constitution.

Philosopher A. C. Grayling elucidates, "It is obvious that in the interests of peaceful and co-operative societies and the individuals in them, liberty . . . cannot be unfettered; we could not tolerate a situation . . . in which a stronger person could use his strength to dominate, dispossess, rape, enslave or otherwise maltreat weaker people."

For Breivik, the purpose of individual freedom is one-sided; it is the assertion of his vision of culture. In this endeavour, he joins a long line of despots from the Right and the Left, the West and the East, who also thought they should be free to secure their liberties by depriving others of theirs. It is the basic formula of totalitarianism, whose main impediment is the participatory democracy Breivik so loathes. Yet democracy is a quintessentially Western body politic arising from ancient Greece, the philosophical heart of our culture that seeks a foundation in the liberal arts, progression in global citizenship and evolution in the open, Socratic debate that characterises mature polities.

Breivik sought to channel the history of Western civilisation into the barrel of a gun, contorting liberty to pursue his own ends. It was an action that no person educated in the Western philosophy of freedom would imagine as consistent with its traditions.

A more enlightened view was espoused during World War I by Richard Livingstone, former vice-chancellor of Oxford University, who revealed that the bounty Western philosophy leaves for humanity is a lesson in temperance, not violence.

If we consider how often in the 21st century we fail to think out the underlying principles of our beliefs or actions, how often we are victimised by unanalysed ideas, how indifferent we are to knowledge, how careless of truth, how ready to lose our temper and say things that turn discussions into partisan quarrels, then we shall see how much we have still to learn from Socrates.

Jennifer Oriel is a Melbourne-based writer and higher education analyst.