They liken us to a mass murderer — so much for the age of reason

The ABC publishes a culture warrior’s outrageous claims likening me to a mass killer — as if that passes for rational debate.

The culture wars are so out of hand that in retaliation for supporting the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation a university professor will ascribe views to me and The Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan that we have never espoused and liken us to Anders Breivik — the Norwegian far-right terrorist who slaughtered 77 people — and the ABC will publish it.

This is what passes for rational debate in our universities and the public broadcaster as they rail against any advocacy of traditional values and institutions, and any political opinion they perceive as being out of synch with green-left ideals. It is dire. This underscores perfectly why the goals of the Ramsay centre — to refocus our education and debate on to the inherent strengths of our liberal democratic heritage — must be embraced. If ever Paul Ramsay doubted the value and importance of his endowment, they would have been erased this week.

The culture wars are mocked by so-called progressives as futile railing against modernity. The reality is these same people are fully engaged through political parties, academe and public broadcasters in a war aimed at undermining our cultural inheritance and pursuing some vague notion of green-left Utopia. The “culture wars” is any attempt by conservative, right-of-centre or dissenting leftist adversaries to halt their march.

Culture debates are crucial to defend values that underpin our achievements and prospects. The practical implications of lost culture wars are reflected all around us in the warped priorities and disparate failings of our political system. Declining educational outcomes, entrenched indigenous disadvantage, parliamentary dysfunction, deep budget deficits and economic sclerosis are all helped along by fashionable views and a dearth of reasoned debate. The zeitgeist bends and weakens our educational, bureaucratic, political and public broadcasting performance, threatening social and economic achievements.

The ludicrous stiff-arming of the Ramsay centre by the Australian National University proves the diagnosis beyond doubt. It suggests the crisis is deep and that Ramsay’s vision will be even more difficult to achieve than anticipated.

Our post-colonial, postmodern and post-Cold War contrarianism is so shallow that even being broadly in favour of Western civilisation is too much to expect from an academic institution. Nothing should surprise us, I suppose, in a world where feminists laud the burka as an expression of female autonomy, we inflict economic pain on ourselves to make an environmental gesture to the world, and even efforts to export democracy are decried as cultural imperialism.

The Ramsay centre seeks to foster education in the “traditions and practices of Western civilisation: its history, philosophy, literature, science, theology, music, art and architecture”. This is about the least radical idea ever presented to an Australian university, which was probably part of the problem. The healthcare and media billionaire who died in 2014 before his centre could be established also envisaged a scholarship program to create a “cadre” of Australian leaders who would benefit from an “awareness and appreciation of their country’s Western heritage and values”. It is a terrific aspiration but apparently anathema to those who inhabit and run our universities.

Much of the antipathy towards the Ramsay project may stem from its association with Tony Abbott (the green left’s greatest hate figure since Bambi’s mum was shot). In Quadrant Abbott revealed his role in the centre’s inception. He also dared to proclaim: “The key to understanding the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is that it’s not merely about Western civilisation but in favour of it. The fact that it is ‘for’ the ­cultural inheritance of countries such as ours, rather than just interested in it, makes it distinctive.”

It is clear this aim would demand some role for the Ramsay board when it came to course structures and staffing; otherwise the bequest could end up funding just another centre undermining Western values. Yet academic freedom also is a cause central in Western civilisation, so it is inconceivable that some accommodation could not have been reached.

The cultural warriors of the left are great in number, supported by vast public funding, cheered by the public broadcasting behemoth, and they play for keeps. A centre such as Ramsay will need to learn to fight and, while it has been diligent in recruiting Labor-aligned directors, its chief spear thrower cannot be Abbott.

Chief executive Simon Haines is already sounding defensive, condemning hardened positions at ­either end of the political spectrum and refusing to call out the ideological hypocrisy of universities that happily take money to run Arab and Islamic studies or institutes on China and Asia.

No doubt he needs to take heat out of the issue as he pursues negotiations with other universities. Yet he cannot afford to be apologetic about the core mission. An apologetic stance on Western civilisation is precisely the flaw the centre is tackling.

Another risible episode this week perfectly encapsulated how these weaknesses flow through society; in this case it was symbolism over reality in indigenous affairs. In a week we should have been asking how two little girls, aged two and four, could be sexually assaulted in Tennant Creek, we had a kerfuffle about a word being crossed out on the cover of a literary magazine.

The editor of Meanjin, ABC radio host Jonathan Green, took a red pen to the masthead for his latest cover to change it to #MeToo. But Meanjin is an Aboriginal word and Green soon was confronted with complaints. Given the “destruction of land, cultures and language” it was “weird to see Meanjin crossed out”, they said.

Green capitulated in a mess of sorrowful prose. The “blindness to the subtext of obliterating the word Meanjin” was his doing, he confessed, and they whitewashed the “mistake” in a revised cover. Green wrote that the “casual obliteration of a proud indigenous word with the hashtag of a movement dominated latterly by white women” was something he regretted and was a reminder of his “privilege”. Could there be a more irrelevant or mindless controversy while indigenous marginalisation is rampant and children are at risk? This is indicative of a retreat from reason. Green also weighed in on the Ramsay centre. “My other Ramsay question is: how do you make $3.3 billion out of other people’s ill-health?” In one tweet he managed to show disdain for modern healthcare, capitalism, success and philanthropy.

Another occasional ABC voice, Dominic Knight, tweeted that the Ramsay centre might be seeking “boosterism” rather than “nuanced” study and that “you’ve got to have some ‘black armband’ in the mix or it’s just dumb, self-congratulatory, white pride propaganda”. Then, to cap it all, the ABC published a piece by University of Sydney professor A. Dirk Moses that likened those supporting the Ramsay centre to racist mass murder Breivik. And we wonder why a return to the fundamentals of Western civilisation may be needed.

In our efforts to support indigenous communities, the postmodern concerns of identity politics often trump the practical concerns that may stem from Western civilisation. Echoes of the Stolen Generations drown out the cries from children in the here and now.

The civilisational self-loathing permeates a range of debates. Here is Green again, this time commenting on the famous satellite image of the Korean peninsula with South Korea blazing in lights and North Korea blanketed in darkness. Aside from North Korean deprivation, Green noted, the photo showed the “vivid intensity with which the rest of us are destroying our home”. Western civilisation as the destroyer of the planet.

We are being undermined from within. Practical advancement in education, indigenous disadvantage, health, energy and the economy has come primarily through the advancement of Western civilisation. Further gains demand a clear-eyed focus rather than progressive posturing, fashionable causes or identity-driven symbolism.