Australians

Listening to Razib's interview with Claire Lehmann*, an Australian who edits Quillette has set me down some familiar tracks.  I am arguing with her in my head at a lot of places, yet I recommend it anyway. She has an interesting comparison between the extremity of two values, equality and liberty, that are shared between the two cultures but not in the same way. For the record, I think she gets America partly right - better than most - and I appreciated hearing her take on equality. 

She does get the idea of benign socialism backwards, confusing the cart and the horse, but that seems to be common to Scandinavians, NW Europe, and even Canada (though less so), so it's unsurprising. She sees the country as more relaxed and trusting because they have more redistribution. No, people will tolerate a lot more redistribution when everyone looks like second cousins (and actually are fifth cousins) and are therefore more relaxed and trusting. I think this is just too uncomfortable for those cultures to admit, that their generosity and concern for "everyone" does not result from their superior moral instincts, but from their primitive ethnic recognitions. This has become a Hyde Park soapbox of mine over the years. It applies to their supposed tolerance as well.  Hello?  We actually have different races, religions, and ethnic groups here, including many who just got here. Not many countries are even playing in America's league on this one. Only recently has Australia started fielding immigrants from China, India, Philippines, and Vietnam. About 10% of the total. Australia is UK-descended. Rant over. 

No, not quite over.  The different size of places also gives them a false picture of the number of terrible events that happen in America versus their own country.  The US is 13x the population of Australia, so bad things of all description that happen to them once a year happen to us once a month.  It not only affects their perception, it affects ours. We think we are way more dangerous also.  Okay, rant really over now.

But back to the general ideas of liberty and equality.  I had heard long ago that in Australia people are very concerned with people not putting themselves above others. If you are a rich CEO you are still expected to mix with the locals and have a Foster's (or whatever that state's favorite beer is).  No side, as the English would say. The Scandinavians, especially the Swedes, also have this attitude, but I don't know if it's quite the same thing.  Someone with more international experience with me might want to weigh in on that. Americans approve of this idea, we like it greatly.  But we are less extreme in it.  If rich people want to hang out together instead of with us and drink more expensive wines** we mostly shrug, disapproving only mildly. We have our reverse snobbery down pat and don't get too exercised. So we get it, but we think maybe they take it too far, especially when they look at us with annoyance because we don't fully share it.  It bothers them that America has this kind of separation and inequality in attitude.  Why do we put up with it? 

One could reverse the picture on ideas of liberty.  Some Americans went ballistic in accusation against the Australians for have something like concentration camps over Covid quarantine. To Australians, if you wanted to come into their country you had to quarantine for fourteen days, and no, they weren't going to take your word for it. They had reasonably comfortable facilities you had to go to. Don't like it?  don't come. Then in the underpopulated areas (40% of the population is in the SE corner) there aren't many hospitals.  People from out on the periphery who had been exposed were helped to similar facilities.  After two weeks they went home. I don't know the level of pressure applied, but it wasn't forced at gunpoint. (Some) Americans get angry at Australians for not objecting to this infringement on liberty. Well, maybe we do get a little crazy on the topic.  We do have people who insist that if you don't have autonomy you don't have anything, that all your freedoms are suddenly in jeopardy, whether slowly or quickly. 

But what interested me about all this - yes I have taken a long introductory road to talk about something more original - is contemplating how much of this comes from founder effects.  Three of the four British waves of settlement to America - which resulted in our government, laws, and a lot of our public culture, even if other groups contributed greatly to everything else that make up America - were already egalitarian. Tidewater Virginia (and much of Maryland, South Carolina) was hierarchical, but the other groups weren't. This was not so in Europe, nor would it be for a long time. By the time of the French Revolution egalite, liberte, and fraternite may have been in the air, but the egalite part was already different in America. We weredn't bothering about that as much because we already had it, at least in comparison to Europe. The reader will notice the great exception to this was slavery, which even though it was mostly in the regions settled on hierarchical terms, was tolerated everywhere on American soil. It's a pretty solid exception to liberte and fraternite also. 

Still, people have always been capable of going about their daily lives swallowing camels, saying "well, other than that..." and the American ideals of the time focused on liberty in not only the Declaration and Constitution, but all the supporting material. Fraternity, however conceived (there were a few versions in Europe), was also of lesser importance here.  If you were unhappy you could move, and people did. We did not have any official nobility in the states, and that alone separated us from Europe on the matter. The defensiveness with which Australians and Scandinavians adopted equality may stem from their (comparatively) more recent experience of it being a real thing

Australians, on the other hand, were founded as a penal colony and over 200,000 came over the first 80 years in that fashion. Other kinds of settlers came as well, but it was not just the first batch or two of Australians who were felons (about two-thirds were repeat offender thieves), but a constant resupply. The word "liberty" had a different meaning there.  One might think that liberty would then be of outrageous importance in their mind, but perspective is needed.  To be no longer serving a sentence and being allowed to own land for farming or grazing would seem like quite hearty dose of freedom to them. The issue in question after the first few decades was what status those ex-convicts should have. In fits and starts, the Australians decided on full rights and full citizenship. As an unplanned consequence, the fact that only 15% of the convicts were women meant that women had more choices and opportunities than elsewhere.  They married more prosperous (usually older) men, were allowed into professions more readily, and did not face the dangers of abandonment and mistreatment as much. They were in the Commonwealth and there was still nobility on the fringes of experience, but there was not slavery, and having come from officially worse status was an enormous part of founding Australia society. Equality was an open question, fraternity somewhat automatic, and the importance of liberty was less pressing because it was comparative.

Australian wealth was based on mining and agriculture, not manufacturing, complicated trade, collecting rents from inherited property, entertainment, or finance.  I suspect that has a great deal to do with its equality focus as well, though I haven't thought about it at length.

Americans tolerated hierarchy more, because after Abolition, it was unofficial.  It might be on based on fame, wealth, education or a half-dozen other measures, but it was unenforceable, based on perception (plus leveraged advantages of power, sure).

*I can get to the transcript at that link because I am a subscriber.  I don't know if you can as well.  Probably not, but give it a try, those of you who don't listen to podcasts much.

**All wines are more expensive than what I drink