The extent of the emotional response to Diana’s death surprised everyone. Its source again was the illusion created by the media that we knew Diana intimately — something she had encouraged by the sympathy she radiated, and by her confessional behaviour. The death of Mother Teresa on Friday night will compound these perceptions and further confuse the definition of saintliness. But there was more to Diana’s adoration than that. People need their stories, their rituals, the chance to share emotions with someone away from the adversarial world of politics and the law. Diana offered them all that; as once the Queen did, when as a too-young woman she took on the burden of sovereignty in Westminster Abbey in 1953; and adoring crowds learnt from a lipreader that a supportive Prince Philip had whispered: ‘Where did you get that hat?’ But their story is old now, and full of disillusion. The British people were grieving for the loss of more than Diana. They were grieving for themselves.

But six million people in a state of high emotion is a dangerous force. In this case it has been a gentle and unifying force; in other circumstances, as Britons have seen, anger can turn to riot. In his chapter on propaganda in The Unconscious Civilization John Ralston Saul quotes Mussolini:

‘The crowd doesn’t have to know. It must believe...If only we can give them faith that mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains are moveable, and thus an illusion may become reality.’

‘One of the characteristics of propaganda’, Saul goes on, ‘is that wherever possible, music and images replace words. This is particularly easy on television and in films where words are innately of tertiary importance... For propaganda, language is virtually irrelevant. That is the point of it.’

In Australia recently there has been a great deal of emotion in public life; and it is a worrying thing to me that we have a Prime Minister who, like the Queen, does not understand the power of the imagination. It cannot be said that John Howard understands ceremony or sympathy. Instead, he wants to fix our frustrations with practical politics. He is doing his best to be a practical man; but all the big issues he has had to face in his first year in office have been emotional ones: the Port Arthur massacre, the reduction of the public service, the Wik decision, greenhouse gases, desalination, the stolen children, rising rumours of racism and a declining reputation in Asia; the closure of BHP Newcastle, media ownership, parliamentarians’ rights and rorts, the leak of embarrassing Treasury documents. Practical solutions do not suffice for any of these. What is also needed is the reassurance that the moral significance is understood, that pain inflicted by government decisions is recognised, that we are in this together. That is the Australian way. Our present government has been admirably successful at reducing our deficit. But we are not yet gaining much comfort from the achievement.

The cusp of the millennium is one of the most exciting times in which we could be living; the speed of change is also making it one of the most frightening; and our response to that so far has been to demand that our masters take control. In the light of this it is no surprise that a conservative government was swept into office with such single-mindedness in 1996. But no government anywhere today can offer that reassurance. And since our new leaders did not at once demonstrate the kind of dynamic which embraced all our concerns we have begun to seek saviours nearer to home. History has demonstrated that ignoring a problem will not make it go away; and that resentment breeds revenge. Pauline Hanson did not go away; the stolen children have not gone away. They are now part of the history of the Howard Government. Real life does not come edited like fiction or the news. It needs ceremony, it needs a good theatrical director.

And it needs good social critics.

The arts are the guardians of social criticism. Not only do they hold the mirror up to nature, they shape it, they bring it consciously to order to enable us to examine, realise and understand the life around us. Today our arts are richer and more diverse than they have ever been in our history, thanks to the investment of public and private funds over the past 30 years. The arts and entertainment are a huge industry today, rapidly becoming, thanks to film and TV, one of our major exports. That is part of the problem — the industry. The objectives of art and entertainment have become indistinguishable in the public mind — and that of government — in the same way that research and development face the same imperatives as mass production. The arts over the past 30 years, since the Australian Council for the Arts and other funding bodies were established, have been enormously influential in changing our view of ourselves — of even teaching us to recognise ourselves — on stage, film, television, in literature and the visual arts. Australian writers are read as widely as foreign writers; and are studied by students as widely as the classics. I don’t need to give you examples. But there has been a price. The industrialisation of the arts has discouraged subversion, has ignored the lessons of history, and in many cases has led to gross self-indulgence. The industrialisation of the press has done the same.

America’s richest man, the money-market tycoon George Soros, in a now notorious article in the Atlantic Monthly recently summed up the dilemma and called for change. ‘There is an ongoing conflict’, he wrote,

between market values and other, more traditional value systems ... As the market mechanism has extended its sway, the fiction that people act on the basis of a given set of non-market values has become progressively more difficult to maintain. Advertising, marketing, even packaging, aim at shaping people’s preferences rather than, as laissez-faire theory holds, merely responding to them. Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as the criterion of value. What is more expensive is considered better. The value of a work of art can be judged by the price it fetches. People deserve respect and admiration because they are rich. What used to be a medium of exchange has usurped the place of fundamental values, reversing the relationship postulated by economic theory. What used to be professions have turned into businesses. The cult of success has replaced a belief in principles. Society has lost its anchor.

This is not news to any of us but it is compelling that it comes from a man who chooses to give away 300 million dollars a year for the public good and who single-handedly has attempted to address the economic problems of Eastern Europe in defiance of his own government’s apathy.

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