George Santayana famously warned that ‘those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it’. Western nations, having failed to take appropriate heed, are now doomed to have the quote repeated to them over and over again. No foreword to a history textbook would be complete without it.

Most Australians know that our modern history was bloody, but few, I suspect, know the full story. Few have really come to terms with the scale and brutality of the colonial massacres, or the state-sanctioned miscegenation that sought to ‘breed out the black’ from Indigenous Australians. Perhaps only a handful would know that an estimated 10 000 Aboriginal remains are still held in Australian museums, the result of a lucrative trade that only ended in the 1940s.

The conservative-right’s latest offensive in our long-running ‘culture wars’ has been to call out the supposed censoring of Western cultural values by Australian universities. As a student in a philosophy faculty that offers 31 Western and 0 Eastern philosophy subjects, I can assure these brave cultural warriors that we university students get much more than our recommended daily intake of Kant, Mill and Burke.

What should really offend cultural conservatives, though, is the pressing, and indeed much less imaginary, lack of Australian history subjects in our universities. At Melbourne University the history department offers 31 undergraduate subjects. How many are dedicated to Australian history? Ten, you might guess? Far too generous. Five? Warm. Four? Warmer. Three? Ding, ding.

That’s right, history students at my university have the choice between only 3 Australian history subjects, none of which are compulsory. To put that into perspective, 7 subjects are solely dedicated to European history, and 4 to American history. At Monash University, things are hardly better – out of 38 elective subjects, only 4 are Australian history based. The Australian National University offers majors in Ancient History, Asian History and European History, but not Australian History.

Alarmingly, then, not only are most Australians ignorant of much of our nation’s history, but so too are many history graduates. If not history students from Australia’s top universities, who else will continue to uncover and tell vital stories from our past? As issues like reconciliation, treaty and land rights’ rage on in the public sphere, who else will ensure that debate centres on facts and evidence rather than Abbott-esque ideological revisionism? As gripping as his novels may be, these tasks can’t just be left to Peter Fitzsimmons.

The problem we face is far more than just an academic one, and far more than just the frustration of one Arts student who can’t satisfy his passion for Australian history. George Santayana warned us against repeating mistakes from the past, but the problem facing Australia is even more fundamental than this, because a nation ignorant of its history still exists within that history.  

Unless we have thoroughly parsed all of its lessons, we are not modern cosmopolitans looking back on a violent invasion with enlightened principles and values. We have no authority, no perspective, no higher moral vantage point from which we can look down upon our ancestors’ crimes. Their story is our story, and we are part of their invasion – encroaching further and further, day after day.

Those who cannot learn from history, ultimately, are trapped inside of it. Australian universities would do well to remember that.

There is something deeply wrong with politics. We feel it, even if we can’t begin to explain why. Theories of dysfunction abound, yet all treat merely the symptoms. Factions, political donations, and online echo chambers, each are presented as causes. In reality, they exacerbate and obscure the real problem: our ideas.

When media coverage favours personality over policy, our political ideas go unexamined; contradictions fester and inconsistencies pass unnoticed. We then criticise those who depart from gossip to offer a systemic analysis as being too “ideological”. The implicit view being that politics ought to be ‘post ideological’, a space above moral claims consisting solely of rational utility maximisation. Moral considerations become secondary to monetary concerns. A contradiction arises: this itself is ideology. Normalising its assumptions by constant exposure, the constructed begins to appear natural. This is ideology at its purest: obscured by ubiquity.

We don’t need less ideology; we need better ideology. We need ideology that treats society as greater than the sum of its parts, rather than the unquestioned zeitgeist of selfish individualism.

Historically, such a view can be found on the left and right, in the traditions of Marxism and Burkean conservatism. Yet in an era when they are needed most, both are missing in action.

Appropriating the iconography of class struggle, the Left has abandoned the working class. The Australian Labor Party and the Greens adopt increasingly fiery shallow rhetoric to disguise that they no longer have economic interests of the many at heart. Symbolism, once a means to inspire mass action in order to bring about systemic change, has instead become an end in itself. The epitome being Gillard’s ‘misogyny speech’, for on the same day the Government passed legislation cutting welfare to single parents. Or more recently, when the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passed the Senate virtually un-amended. Instead, again on the same day, both ‘left wing’ parties decided to consume the airwaves condemning Pauline Hanson’s (reprehensible) “its OK to be white” motion. Given that her supporters will be among the worst affected by the TPP, a cynical interpretation begins to look as if the ALP was smearing the messenger, so as to preemptively dismiss criticism of their trade policies as coming from backwards, rural bigots. Despite their “backwardness”, Hansonites appear to have greater political nous than University educated lefties, who (mostly) lend uncritical support to the ALP. In the interests of balance: the Greens cut the aged pension, passed the regressive schools funding scheme Gonski 2.0, and destroyed an Emissions Trading Scheme. If there’s an ideology guiding the Australian left, it certainly isn’t socialism.

The Liberal Party isn’t faring any better. Its two competing traditions, liberalism and conservatism, have cancelled each other out. Conservatives, unreflectively embracing neoliberal economics, have assisted in creating a society in which traditional values (religion, family, and community) are replaced by pervasive market logic. Neoliberalism’s assumption of a free, rational individual creates a society in which social relations are transactional, measured for success by their ability to reap the most utility. Innate value derived from something greater than the individual is nonsensical to neoliberal logic. Communities are based on a sense of belonging, often intimately tied to geographic space and location, intertwined with a shared sense of history. The neoliberal solution to geographic inequalities – tax credits for families who uproot – devalues community and by extension unravels social cohesion. This is the antithesis of conservatism. On the other hand, moderate liberals are unrivalled in their ideological vandalism. Founded on the belief in individual liberty, Liberals are almost singularly responsible for the erosion of civil rights in Australia. Consider: under the reinstated ABCC, an employee questioned by a worksite inspector does not have the right of silence. Would a banker be subjected to the same violation of basic rights? But above all, indefinite detention stands out as the most flagrant abuse. Imprisoned arbitrarily without trial, asylum seekers are denied access to the greatest of liberal innovations: habeas corpus. Fraser and Menzies are rolling in their graves.

A full solution to the problems plaguing Western politics remains unclear, but one thing is certain: we need ideology more than ever. To make our theories work, both sides of politics should return to their roots. Conservatives: look closer to home when trying to understand why traditional institutions are failing. Burke’s ‘Reflections on the Revolutions in France’ might be a good place to start. For the left, perhaps its time we picked up the Manifesto one last time. What, after all, do we have to lose?

By Louis Devine