1986: On Two Experiments in Civilisation
Toorak.
How gratifying it is, when one’s private convictions begin to resemble historical inevitabilities. Having now published two modest studies—one on the cultivation of a proper gentleman, the other on the deferred triumph of daughters—I find myself accused of contradiction. What nonsense. Both pieces advance the same argument, merely in different costumes. Whether one is manufacturing a duke or curating a debutante, the moral principle is constant: progress must be mannered.
Critics—usually men without tailors or women without tact—have claimed that my emphasis on restraint, posture, and suitable marriage “fetters the energies of youth.” Indeed it does. Energies require fetters. Unrestrained youth produces activism, hairstyles, and media studies. The polite throttling of impulse, by contrast, produces civility. Education itself was founded upon the idea that certain liberties must be postponed indefinitely. I merely extend that wisdom to life.
In training my son for gentility and my daughter for grace, I have conducted, what you might call, an experiment in conservative modernity. The results are already apparent: Fabrice speaks with authority he doesn’t entirely understand, and Verity listens with comprehension she doesn’t entirely admit. Both are excellent outcomes; society depends upon such misunderstandings.
My critics imagine that by advocating “conservative behaviour” I wish to paralyse change. If only. Change, in my experience, exhausts everyone while improving nothing but statistics. What I recommend is not paralysis but choreography—motion so rehearsed that evolution appears decorative. Progress must never resemble urgency; it should unfold like good service—unseen, effective, and tipped discreetly.
The notion of “delayed gratification,” which vulgar psychology treats as a developmental milestone, is in truth the foundation of order. We are told that the modern child must express, the modern woman achieve, the modern man emote. Underneath this therapeutic democracy lies anarchy in chiffon. Once people cease to defer pleasure, they cease to require manners. The collapse of deference is never far behind.
I am not opposed to advancement—provided it occurs within frames of decorum. When Fabrice eventually marries (well, above his income if not his intellect), and Verity secures her transcontinental legitimacy, they will be engines of renewal disguised as nostalgia. True conservatism does not prevent development; it trains it to curtsy.
I have observed that those who demand reform are invariably those unsuited to its results. Australians, being constitutionally experimental, suppose that equality improves quality. I assure them, it merely redistributes disappointment. People flourish best when restricted. Take vines, corsets, and sentences: all require constraint for beauty. Society no less.
Between my two essays there is, I admit, a mild gendered symmetry. The boy is sculpted toward command, the girl toward influence. Yet both arrive, ideally, at composure. Composure is the visible form of conscience; it allows civilisation to correct its errors without confessing them. The loud demand purity; the refined prefer consistency.
Some readers object that such conservatism is inhospitable to authenticity. I reply that authenticity is rarely attractive up close. The truly genuine are almost always ill‑arranged. What keeps a nation decent is its talent for pretence—the daily decision to behave better than one feels. That, surely, is patriotism polished to ethics.
When I was younger, I too flirted with newness—the fashions, the parties where people addressed one another by first names within minutes. It felt liberating, until it began to look inexpensive. One grows tired of sincerity; it wrinkles faster than silk. These days I prefer the company of institutions. They at least never tell you to be yourself.
Thus my two positions—apparently opposing in object but identical in aim—must be read together as a manual for survival. The son’s genteel conformity ensures continuity outwardly; the daughter’s cultivated patience secures it privately. Between them, society endures the modern age with faintly English good humour. The rest—politics, feminism, innovation—are merely passing fashions that will, in time, seem embarrassing in photographs.
The world insists upon change because it mistrusts competence. But history’s quiet thesis—the one written in silver frames on mantels—suggests otherwise: everything worth admiring was once called reactionary.
Indeed, when I look at Fabrice upright in his blazer, and Verity sitting faultlessly on the edge of discontent, I feel nearly altruistic. They may never change the world. Excellent. They will, I hope, preserve it—graciously, incorrectly, and on behalf of those too impatient to notice it was already quite adequate.
You are here: States of Grace > Evidence