Santamaria: a man without quality?

Just a few days after the death of B. A. Santamaria another Santamaria wrote to the Age (4.3.98) seeking a moratorium. Speaking on behalf of thirty-three grandchildren he wanted the writers of articles `giving Grandad a bad name ... to bite their tongues for a month or so while we, his grandchildren, try to come to grips with the passing of our hero'. While one can sympathise with this plea as an expression of familial sentiment its inconsistency is entirely transparent. Heroes do not assume their prominence by way of family relations. They earn their good names for some of the people, and along with the distaste of others, within the public realm. Certainly Santamaria served as a focus for deep-rooted loyalties, but the policies he pursued and even more the methods he adopted just as often gave rise to elemental antipathies. In his case especially it is totally unlikely that public discourse can be constrained by respect for private grief.

A few days on I met a friend who, twenty-five years ago, had been a Catholic schoolboy. I mentioned that some of the public comment was too narrowly political and mentioned Bob Hogg's article which had appeared in the Age the day before. Far from sharing my reservations he thought the article was spot on. Recalling his schooldays, he exclaimed with some vehemence, `Santamaria was the moral force behind the people who were beating me'. Yet, as he went on to say, there was one thing he had to thank him for, he had turned him towards the Left.

Twenty-five years ago when, responding to Labor's election slogan, It's Time, the Australian people voted the coalition parties of the day out of office; they also brought to an end the period in which the National Civic Council, along with its electoral wing, the Democratic Labor Party, could play a decisive role in federal politics. It was a transformation which, at the time, could be readily enough interpreted as just another swing of the political pendulum. It is far easier now, as the rush to globalisation gathers pace, to see that it was also the point at which a new generation was pressing for a reconstruction of the established ways of living in every field of life. The relation of the Catholic hierarchy to its laity was just one more field in which this shift was at work: it was also one where the rupture was particularly severe.

Just because of its social basis among people whose forebears had suffered a bitter oppression in Ireland, the Church in Australia was in relatively close fusion with its laity while at the same time quite marginal to the life and politics of the Protestant establishment. It was as if it existed in a time warp, a fertile field for the pursuit of the Catholic social policies which had been developed in Europe as the working-class masses drifted away from religious attachments in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hence in Australia, in some contrast to major European countries, the bond between hierarchy and laity remained outwardly strong. Within that bond, for nearly sixty years B. A. Santamaria was the most influential exponent of Catholic social policy within Australian life and politics.

Some people, in recent weeks, have spoken of him as the most significant figure in Australian political life this century. John Howard, who--so Gerard Henderson suggests--had never met him, nevertheless regarded his passing as of such significance that he flew to the only semi-conscious man's bedside; one can only wonder whom he was addressing. Malcolm Fraser, who, along with a vast range of national figures, was in clandestine communication with Santamaria, stepped outside the political sphere as such and described Santamaria as an outstanding intellectual.

In any significant sense of the phrase Santamaria did not fit the type. He was almost entirely an operator and a publicist. Highly effective as no doubt he was, as a political strategist, spymaster and an influence pedlar the intellectual and moral framework of his social and political efforts was set firm at an early age. Deeper reflection, a sense of history as distinct from a sense of threat to what he took to be the central tenets of his faith, were distinctly outside his range: therein lay his central problem.

When in the early sixties the whole ground within which Catholic social policy had been set for more than a century began to shift, Santamaria's project was basically at an end. While he retained some elements of a general staff along with an elaborate network of contacts the new generation had now caught sight of a different world. If, as they grew to maturity, Santamaria had been the real force behind the whole array of institutional constraints integral with parish, school and suburb, younger people now gave their answer. They voted with their feet and left the church in droves.

With more truth than insight Santamaria could confess in his memoirs that by and large his life had been a failure. However his role is eventually viewed, the probability is that his disappointments will be seen to have far more to do with the fundamental impracticality of the Catholic social policies developed in Europe than with any particular individual who sought to implement them.

The church's response to the loss of the working-class masses in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe was spelt out in a number of famous encyclicals. The most famous among them was Rerum Novarum---Of New Things--which appeared in 1891, just twenty years after the Paris Commune. Sonorous, even portentous, in tone, it surveyed the surge of revolutionary protest along with the more general transformation of life which was inseparable from the industrial age. Fundamentally critical of the doctrine of class struggle Rerum Novarum totally condemned materialism. Yet its interpretations offered no real insight into the way in which the capitalist market not only contributed to poverty and injustice but also played a central role in a transformation of the way in which human beings were socially constituted.

This reality is far clearer today as commodity relations continue their rapid march through the institutions, but in the nineteenth century when the foundations of modern Catholic social policy were being laid down it was by no means clear. Capitalist social relations, the new-found prominence of commodity markets, labour itself as a commodity, were all treated from the standpoint of what purported to be moral categories--greed, equality, justice--of directly universal significance. Being grounded in the radically different order of life recorded in the New Testament they had no quite specific connection to capitalism itself as constitutive of a distinctive form of human being, and with that of a distinctive type of moral disorder. Aggravating, perhaps guaranteeing, the absence of critical insight was the fact that the only significant critique of the commodity which highlighted its moral significance was the Marxist one. And as if to ensure that this improbable source of a moral guideline for Christians would be ignored Marx himself elaborated his account of the fetishism of commodities with a backhanded slap at religious belief. Yet from a Christian standpoint the centrality of commodities, of things to be possessed or appropriated, within the contemporary sense of being, depends upon a pervasive idolatry: not the worship of one or another particular false god but an attachment to things as such which affects a total culture.

There was no real chance for the two perspectives to find common ground. Marxists themselves ignored their central insight into commodity relations. Instead they promoted a sense of class struggle legitimated by the impoverishment, the inequalities and the injustice associated with the distribution of the social product. The chance to elaborate the meaning of that struggle in conjunction with a more profoundly ethical critique of capitalist culture than Christianity could offer was ignored. Meanwhile the depravities associated with the absence of any sufficiently active ethical centre accumulated within the socialist alternatives to the capitalist order.

These are just a few of the more general framing elements of an historical situation in which B. A. Santamaria came to sup with fascists and proto-fascists while using a distinctly short-handled spoon. Spurred on by the very single-mindedness of his commitment to Catholic social policy he was quite unable to recognise the shallowness of Christian interpretation of the half articulate human impulse within `atheistic materialism'.

From a passing moment in his early life in the thirties when he spoke of capitalism as a greater problem than communism, Santamaria soon passed on to active support of the fascist insurgency in Spain. After spending the war years in laying the groundwork for his part in the coming struggle against Communist influence, by the early years of the Cold War he was an active supporter of US senator Joseph McCarthy and already engaged in the historic struggles within Australian internal and internationally oriented politics which have been so actively remembered in recent weeks.

With the end of the Cold War and as the rush to globalisation gathered pace Bob Santamaria reverted to the critique of capitalism. As one who was never remarkable for deeper reflection his commentary, while thoughtful and pointed enough for him to be called into ALP circles as a consultant, never moved beyond the parameters of his early experience of Catholic social policy. Meanwhile, as globalising capitalism more actively presents itself as an especially crass materialism, there is a clear irony present. Christians of various denominations are beginning to rediscover the ethical significance of the classical critique of commodity relations as at least a significant point of departure for a renewal of a sense of value and meaning.

A review article of Santamaria's own updated autobiography by Geoff Sharp appeared in Arena Magazine No. 30, Aug-Sept 1997.