By Jeff Sparrow
Essays
On Borrowed Time
Robert Manne
Black Inc., $34.99
Intellectual Robert Manne.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
The new book by Robert Manne – his third volume of essays – begins with the piece that gives the collection its title. "In the early spring of 2016," Manne writes, "I woke in the middle of the night, at a time when my defences were down, aware of a lump in my throat."
The sensation ushers him into a succession of tests and treatments that culminate in the surgical removal of his larynx – a process that a different writer might describe as a "cancer journey". But Manne's not that kind of essayist. Like Orwell, a figure lurking behind much of his work, he's a moralist (in the good sense of the word) but rarely a sentimentalist.
On Borrowed Time by Robert Manne.
He describes his operation and recovery in a prose sufficiently sparse that we reach the final paragraphs before the piece reveals itself as a love letter – a tribute to Manne's partner, Anne, and an endorsement of the ancient commitment to "have and to hold … for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part".
For decades, Manne's been acknowledged as Australia's pre-eminent public intellectual, a stature that gives an obvious poignancy to his loss of the mechanism for speech. Indeed, when his oncologist first warns that his voice box might go, Manne responds instinctively, "I'd rather die".
Despite his eventual reconciliation with surgery and the humiliations attendant upon it, the brush with mortality lends the book its thematic coherence. For these are writings about the necessity of dissidence, even – and perhaps especially – in circumstances when speaking out might be painful.
For instance, the several essays on climate change (a longstanding preoccupation) make plain that a clock's ticking for all of us and the planet we share.
Manne notes that, only a few years ago, a bipartisan commitment to climate mitigation could be found throughout the industrialised world – during the 2008 presidential election, the Republican candidate John McCain proved nearly as outspoken about global warming as his opponent.
Today, though, denialism features almost as a matter of principle for conservatives, the result, Manne says, of a deliberate campaign by those with a material stake in the status quo. We see the consequences in two essays about Malcolm Turnbull.
In the first, based on an interview in early 2012, Manne finds much to like in the then shadow minister for communication and broadband, a man he describes as the "principal inheritor of the noble but now threatened liberal tradition stretching from Alfred Deakin to Malcolm Fraser, and the principal obstacle to the Howard-inspired and Abbott-led transformation from small-l liberalism to populist conservatism".
In the second, published in 2017 under the telling title Malcolm Turnbull: A Brief Lament, Manne muses about the metamorphosis of a minister who described climate change as "a profound moral challenge" into a leader who laughed as treasurer Scott Morrison clowned with a lump of coal in parliament. Was Manne wrong to expect any better? Perhaps. Yet what makes this collection interesting is the eclecticism of his enthusiasms: Noel Pearson and Fraser, yes, but also Kevin Rudd, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
Manne revisits the debates of his own Cold War past, arguing that new documentary material substantiates charges levelled by anti-communists against the radical journalist Wilfred Burchett. Yet he also writes with genuine horror about the massacres of 1965 and 1966 in which the Indonesian military murdered half a million or more leftists and concludes, ''If I had known then what I know now, while my attitude to the crimes of communism would have been no different, I hope I would have had sufficient judgement to have given the anti-communist movement a far wider berth".
He finds much to admire in Pope Francis' environmental encyclical Laudato Si but also – and quite remarkably for a former Quadrant editor – enthuses about Naomi Klein's anti-capitalist This Changes Everything "as among the most brilliant and important books of recent times".
There's a final resonance of the title, too, one implicit throughout. Public intellectuals depend on a public – a broad, non-specialist audience open to long, serious arguments.
In rumination on the modern university, Manne voices an old-fashioned commitment to the "search for knowledge and understanding … and the life of the mind".
If, in our market-driven age, such values seem themselves to be on borrowed time, this book makes a powerful case as to why they matter.