Finlaysons' Women in Business
Ms Blanche D’Alpuget
Delivered the following address to the The Finlaysons' Women in Business Network in Adelaide
31 October 2002
The Network was established in 1997 and is comprised of Finlaysons' women, lawyers and managers, and other women known to the firm. An important aim of the Women's Network is to have fun while building and fostering relationships between women at Finlaysons and women who are influential in business and government.
BLANCHE D'ALPUGET: My mother used to say there are two sorts of people in
the world: the organised and the disorganised. If she'd met Joanne Staugas,
Mum would have given me to the gypsies and adopted Joanne in my place. A
whole year ago it was Joanne who began twisting my arm, ever so lightly but
firmly, to persuade me to come out of retirement, as it were, to speak to
you this evening. And she did not let up until about 5 minutes ago. I thank
her deeply and thank you for coming. As a result of Joanne's, shall we say,
organisational skills, I had my talk written and printed out by the morning
of October 12 and I'm glad now that I did, for two reasons. First, I was so
churned up by the mass murders in Bali that I probably could not have
gathered my thoughts had I started work after that dreadful date. Second,
what I'd chosen to talk about so closely addressed the issues of tragedy and
injustice which we face, that to include the events in Bali I needed to add
only a sentence and a half. But that is for later.
If I were a man, or a skilful and frequent public speaker, I would now tell
you a joke just to lighten things up. But since I am neither, I'll read you
a poem instead. It's not very long, just 11 lines, and it's from a new
collection by the great contemporary Polish poet, Adam Jagajewski. This, of
course, is a translation. The poem is called The Soul.
We know we're not allowed to use your name.
We know you're inexpressible,
anaemic, frail and suspect
for mysterious offences as a child.
We know that you are not allowed to live now
in music or in trees at sunset.
We know - or at least we've been told -
that you do not exist at all, anywhere.
And yet we still keep hearing your weary voice
- in an echo, a complaint, in the letters we receive
from Antigone in the Greek desert.
The reference to Antigone probably has layers of meaning, but the one that
jumps out at me is that she was the guide for her blind father. I don't
recall from Sophocles' play if she was in a desert with him, but what
Jagajewski is saying is that she is now; she is trying to reach out to us
from the desert which encroaches upon our founding culture, that of Greece.
So really, this poem is a lament about the state of Western culture and
about us as individuals, about the state of our souls.
I want to talk about our culture and then go on to what I believe women -
especially women, for reasons I'll come to - can do to slow, to halt and,
one hopes, to reverse the mutation downwards that is under way in western
civilisation. The next big thing for women I promised to talk about is their
enormous, unsuspected role in guiding our culture out of its decline. This
'next big thing' will not increase your salary package but it can shatter
the internal glass ceiling, the one that separates our egos from our souls,
the one that, broken, opens the door to gladness.
In a city such as this, so well-planned and rational, so courteous and
justly proud of his history of democratic rights and responsibilities, it
may be hard to believe that Western culture is mutating downwards. In
Adelaide you are privileged to a very civil society - outbreaks of barbarism
and violence notwithstanding.
Cultural mutations are difficult to see because they happen in small,
discreet steps and over a period of years: some graffiti here, a popular
song there, an outrageously extravagant party, perhaps, an article published
which a decade earlier would have been rejected as anti-social. These are
the droplets that gather to make a flood.
The Melbourne sociologist, Dr John Carroll, to whose books I am much
indebted, writing a few months ago about the twin towers of New York and
what their destruction has meant, referred to the twin pillars of Western
culture. One is: Know Thyself. That is, be conscious of what you are doing,
of what motivates you, learn to recognise the true face of your fears and
desires behind its mask of self-righteousness. The other is: Nothing in
Excess. The two, therefore, are rationality and restraint. Both are
essential to a healthy democracy, to a balanced society.
But look at what we're living in. In place of restraint, greed. I don't
think I need to go on about thirty million dollar packages for CEOs - common
in America and already happening in Australia, at least in Sydney. The
blinding greed of the Western business world, and in many cases the
corruption of its servants, lawyers and accountants, is not news. But these
guys - and they are guys, the only publicly outed exception so far being
Martha Stewart - these guys are a symptom, rather than the cause.
In enthusiastically downsizing their staff, in exploiting cheaper and
cheaper labour to make their products in order to pocket more and more
millions themselves, these men show the ruthlessness of material desire when
it takes command of the human brain and heart. It's through our brains and
our hearts, the ego's tools, that our desires express themselves.
Buddhism teaches that desire is endless. This is not a mystical insight,
it's just a statement of fact.
Let me give you a statistic. In Australia at the end of the 1970s the ratio
of an average wage to a CEOs salary was one to five. Now it is one to 30,
that is a 600 per cent increase. But in America, in the past 10 years alone,
the difference between the wages of an average worker in a company and its
CEO has risen from a ration of one to 40 to a ration of one to 420. That is
more than 1000 per cent in one decade. And where America goes, need I remind
you, Australia follows. William McDonough, President of the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York, commented on the increase, said he had been around for all
of the 1990s and could assert that the quality of CEOs had not improved
ten‑fold in this period. So it's just robbery.
A society in which the upper middle class robs the rest will, inevitably,
become discontent and fickle.
The 20th century, which from a humane point of view was mostly appalling,
had for the developed, Western world one great, countervailing virtue: it
was the century which decreased social inequality - and women have been
major beneficiaries of that. But in the latter part of the century, this
trend reversed, and now there is nobody and no institution to rein in
rampant individualism. Rampant? It's almost feral, and is both a symptom of,
and a further impetus to, the weakening of that force which ties people to
each other and creates the sense of connection which is the essential
ingredient of conscience. In Sydney, just try catching a bus while carrying
heavy shopping bags and see if any of the children, men, or less encumbered
younger women stand up to offer you a seat. Or, for a really down-to-earth
example, consider public wash-rooms: we've been accustomed to the cubicles
being paper-strewn, with doors covered in graffiti. But I can remember in
the '50s, '60s and '70s when this was not so; there was a delicacy between
strangers then which we have now lost.
So, what has happened to our moral sense?
We know that for a couple of centuries after the Enlightenment the various
churches continued to struggle along as the guardians of the great issues of
life and the mysteries of death, but they rotted from within and now have so
little belief in themselves as bastions of universal laws, eternal truths
and uplifting transformation, that some time after the middle of the last
century they began turning to political and social activism in an attempt to
be "relevant". Frankly, the trade unions did a better job.
The one moral authority now left standing in Western society is the
individual's conscience, but daily this is proving itself to be no match for
the libertine cravings that appear all over the place, and with such brazen
self-confidence they no longer seem grotesque. We have reached the point
where, while we may not accept them, we're conditioned to expect them. It's
a by-product of the market economy, the apologists apologise. They say it's
the market that determines these things - as if human beings have no say in
the market. That, of course, is self‑serving nonsense (as George Soros, for
one, has pointed out). Let me stress this point: I am not among those who
hold an unqualified loathing for economic rationalism; I object to economic
rationalism without social responsibility. For example, why cannot the
humungous capital flows that flood across national boundaries each day,
often putting entire economies at risk, why can they not be subjected to a
small level of taxation? And the taxes spent on helping to alleviate the
poverty that afflicts a third of the world's population? Reason? Fear of the
Power of Greed.
But in the Western cultural inventory, about which Mr Osama bin Laden speaks
so caustically, we are not confronted only with the unrestrained greed of
the upper middle class - although that is the easiest to attach because it
arouses the envy of everyone else. Consider for a moment other cravings:
pornography, for example. Whenever I open my email I'm presented with a list
of spam, offering variously to show me photographs of hot teenage chicks,
something else called "barnyard fun" and, recently, a new product that will
increase the size of my penis. This is sicko.
It is also, of course, balefully sexist. But it is worse than that too, for
it creates the familiar, daily environment, the ordinary backyard in which
the poisonous weeds of paedophilia can germinate and grow. Certainly, it's a
feminist issue that women are only 30 out of 700 at the senior bar in
Australia and women make up only 10 per cent of non-executive directors of
companies. But last time I looked, women were 100 per cent of mothers and
the debauchery and destruction of a woman's most intimate and sacred work -
her giving birth to and nurturing of a child - seems to me a feminist issue.
Where are the feminist vigilantes throwing eggs at the gorgeous silken robes
of bishops? Or at least demonstrating outside churches - since it is
churches, as institutions, that have been so wicked in this regard. Where
are the feminist cyber‑warriors bent on wrecking the web-sites of the
paedophilia rings around the world? Nowhere - because there is no longer an
active feminist movement able to discuss and develop strategies and plans of
action to deal with these issues. Or any other issues. We all know what's
happened: feminism sought to address the discomfort experienced by women
universally in the age of patriarchal authority. Due to feminism's success,
old boilers like us who were active in the women's movement, have all
reached a level of comfort, materially, socially - that is legally - and
most importantly, psychologically, and we're resting on our laurels.
Now, I think a rest is necessary.
I don't want to sound contradictory and I hope the thread of my argument
will lead you to my reasons. But for the moment let me say: I think we need
to integrate fully into our personalities the opposites we have embraced -
the competitiveness of the corporate world, the cooperativeness of nurturing
- because just as consciousness raising was essential to feminist success in
the 1970s, I believe that psychological individuation, the clicking together
of opposite aspects, is the key to the next stage. And the signs are that
Generation X women are doing this work. Let me call it a state of 'Alice',
as in Through the Looking Class - because what I am talking about lies on
the other side of the mirror, that glass within.
I'll return to psychology, but first, some other aspects of our society that
show the insidious downward mutation of which we need to be aware.
Consider popular fiction. Overwhelmingly, the topic of contemporary best
sellers - not literary novels which have a minuscule readership - but
well-written, witty, successful novels, is crime. Usually violent crime.
This tells us several things about Western culture. I'll mention one: the
pervasive sense of social pathology (Snowtown comes to mine) - of society
being in a state of weird disorder and needing the hero-detective to exert
his, or these days mostly her, magical powers to restore social harmony.
In the 1930s, when Raymond Chandler began writing crime fiction, it was
considered an act of desperation that an educated man (he'd read Classics at
university, as I recall) had turned to such a declasse genre. Crime stories
were for semi-literates.
Chandler was an alcoholic with the seat out of his pants when he began to
write them - and it was an act of desperation, to make money - but he was
also a minor genius with an intense moral conviction about personal
integrity which he enunciated with gloomy, sardonic brilliance and
persuasion through his detective character, Philip Marlowe. The crime novels
of today are all his pale heirs - pale and I would say degenerate, for there
is a gruesomeness to the murders, a slavering over sadistic details which
demonstrates the coarsening of public taste that has occurred since Chandler
began to write. It's as if we, the readers, have grown a hard, shiny
carapace over our compassion and sensitivity which allows us, like
cockroaches in garbage, to enter all kinds of revolting worlds. This is an
attitude of mind in today's readers that frightens crime writers themselves:
Thomas Harris, authority of the trilogy: Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs
and Hannibal, wrote almost a whole chapter in the final book scolding
society for its fascination with cruelty and went on to his cannibal chapter
as satirical comment about the excesses of liberal humanism as we now
experience it. Nobody blinked. Nobody thought he was pulling their leg. They
loved the extremism. Harris was appalled and said so in many interviews.
I have had personal experience of this wretched attitude. In my last novel
called: White Eye, as a minor issue I set out to lampoon the bland
acceptance of violence in contemporary fiction, and did so, I thought, by
putting 3016 murders in the book. I'm pretty sure that was the number, if
you added them all up carefully. Not a single reviewer noticed.
This same coarsening of public taste is evidence in the movies and in
popular music: foul language, mega-violence and softcore porn has become
such a cliche we've ceased to notice it.
Consider fashion. Some years ago Yves St Laurent lamented, "People don't
want to be elegant any more. They want to be seductive." Now they don't even
want that. John Galliano and Alexander McQueen are fashion vandals whose
haute couture could be labelled toxic waste, but guess what? Audiences went
goofy over it.
The message of all this is: nothing is sacred..
And yet, there is a world-wide yearning for the earth to become once more an
enchanted place. Hence the passion for Harry Potter, for fantasy fiction,
and for Nature. This yearning, experienced by the tens of millions of Potter
fans, by the hundreds of millions who find a self‑transcending solace in
Nature, is, it seems to me, an echo from that voice which cries out in the
Greek desert. That soul, which a brilliant scientist, the Nobel laureate,
Francis Crick - he of DNA fame - announced to be nothing more than an
assembly of nerve cells.
Well, I haven't been awarded the Nobel Prize (yet), but I beg to differ with
Sir Crick. And in a few minutes I'll deal with him.
First, let's recall those heady days at the beginning of the 1970s when the
women's movement in Australia really started to bite and night after night
and on weekends young women - and a few old suffragettes - began attending
consciousness raising sessions. It's breathtaking to realise how far we've
come. Thirty years ago women (with a tiny few exceptions, all of them from
South Australia, I think) lived half of their potential, at best. The female
ego was fragile, often brittle, and unwholesome. Its tools of brain and
heart were unable to function with full power; the result was women who were
bored, peevish, insecure and malicious. Women's liberation has achieved,
overwhelmingly, liberation of the imprisoned and tortured ego, which gave us
the psychological freedom to change our central life activity - our work -
from inside the house to the outside, if we so chose, and for freedom of
choice in life's central delight, love. Thanks to feminism women could
become rounded human beings, incorporating "masculine" interests,
occupations and physical courage. Women's egos grew strong. They became not
only more rounded than they were before, but more rounded than men.
Unfortunately, men by and large have not done the psychological work of
incorporating feminine receptiveness and nurturing which will be necessary
to liberate their own egos, which remain: easily injured, defensive,
boastful, aggressive, secretive ... and still unable to wash a pair of
socks.
This is a great pity, both on an individual level and for society itself,
because the fulfilment of the ego leads - and I wish to quote John Carroll
again - "to the release of its concerns, so that the soul may rise. Not on
denial of one or the other, but on a balance of the two". In a perilously
unbalanced world, balanced individuals are sorely needed.
Look at our situation: from within, the West is in decline; while outside,
predators plan their next attack. In the past 12 months all our easy
assumptions about the security of cities, the stability of nations, the
safety of our own and our children's lives, have been turned upside down.
Adelaide, I'm told, as a strong Lutheran tradition, so you are perhaps
familiar with Luther's terrifying insight that God's earth is not a just
place. Human effort at overcoming injustice must be made. But to admit to
oneself that, no matter what, life on earth will remain unjust - this,
friends, is bitter indeed. Think about it: the good can suffer; the wicked
may not. A hundred young Australians blasted to death in Bali; three
thousand people incinerated and pulverised in New York. Some said it was the
fault of their governments' foreign policy, and therefore - in the case of
the Twin Towers attack - a kind of justice. What odious nonsense. The truth
is clear, simple and harsh. If you doubt me, sit with your parents as they
die - or worse, a spouse, a sibling, or, most incomprehensible of all, a
child. Those looking for their lost children through the charred remains of
the Sari nightclub can tell us there is no logic to suffering. Our hearts
and minds, our egos, cannot comprehend such injustice.
For this is the realm of the soul.
The soul dances to a different tune, to the music issuing, as Carroll puts
it, from that great star named Fate. The soul is not rational - nor
anti‑rational. Whereas the ego thinks, the soul has faith. The ego
experiences feelings, positive and negative, but the soul experiences
worship. The ego resists; the soul surrenders. Its concentration is on the
sacred and therefore it accepts what is - that what will be, will be. And
this acceptance gives gladness to life - a humble and, however great the
sorrow of the mind and heart, an underlying, unquenchable cheerfulness. IT
is these qualities that come to our rescue in times of tragedy, such as we
have just experienced. Such as we face in the years ahead.
Thanks to the work they have done in the past three decades on their
attitudes, on their egos, on their consciousness, on themselves as human
beings, women, but not men, unfortunately, are now fully equipped and ready
to take the next big step in development, from ego to soul. In the world of
the 21st century, which threatens to turn our beautiful shining cities into
rubble, civilisation must have soul's vision to lead it forward. And here is
Antigone, to guide us through the desert. In what will be most important for
a renaissance of Western culture, women are now fully capable of taking the
lead.
Thank you.