Bob Gould, 1937-2011
Source: Self-published pamphlet, December 4, 1997, 33 King Street, Newtown, NSW, Australia
Transcribed by Steve Painter
As I write this, B.A. Santamaria is recovering, at the age of 82, after an operation for a brain tumour. It is one of the ironies of history that alongside his own supporters and followers, who are no doubt remembering him in their prayers, very many secular people like myself, including many of his old political enemies, are devoutly hoping for his survival.
Indeed, when Bob Santamaria took ill, he had to cancel a public appearance in Adelaide with Clyde Cameron, one of his main old antagonists, with whom he has been publicly becoming friendly in the last few years. Santamaria, in fact, in recent years, has become an extraordinarily well-read and well-researched modern version of the Old Testament prophet, Isaiah, particularly concentrating his keen intellect on the obscene speculative madness of the rapacious global version of finance capital.
Many people, including very many left-wingers, are impressed by the way this 82 year-old man keeps up with the literature, and gets a twinkle in the eye as he fortifies his assaults on finance capital with quotes from and references to assorted authorities such as George Souros, Lee Kuan Yew, John Ralston Saul, John Maynard Keynes, and even occasionally Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
Paradoxically, Bob Santamaria's life-threatening illness coincides with the kind of stockmarket crack-up that Santamaria has been predicting for quite a few months now. It has become almost a bit of a joke at public left-wing gatherings like Politics in the Pub in Sydney, that I often get up and preface my remarks on some economic question by pointing out that it's a strange world in which Bob Santamaria is the public intellectual making the most leftist statements on many matters.
It is a further paradox of public life in Australia that the public figure whom left-wingers, like myself, admire and feel represented by, because of his courageous, sensitive and intelligent public statements, is Her Royal Majesty's Vice Regal Representative, the Governor General, Sir William Deane.
Sir William is, of course, an old Grouper, once a member of the NSW executive of the Democratic Labor Party. His public utterances are clearly a worked-out representation of his Catholic religious conscience, expressed carefully, with his barrister's and judge's shrewd assessment of how far he can push the envelope, so to speak, in his Vice-Regal role.
The spluttering against him of the reactionary side of politics is considerable testimony to his consumate skill in this sphere.
I don't want to simplify this scenario too much. On social and cultural questions, Santamaria and his organisation, the National Civic Council, and other old Groupers, hold deeply conservative views with which I sharply disagree, such as birth control, gay rights, abortion rights, etc. Even on the question of multiculturalism and immigration, on which their standpoint in the 1940s was very civilised and progressive for the period, they are now ultra-conservative.
I'm poles apart from them on those matters. I would, in fact, point out to them that the best and most courageous people in the Catholic intellectual tradition in Australia stood out in their opposition to xenophobia, particularly Cardinal Moran and the 1890s, who defended the Chinese against the White Australia Policy, and was caricatured by Phil May in the Bulletin for it.
And the redoubtable Archbishop Daniel Mannix defended German Lutherans and German Catholic Priests against the chauvinist British Empire madness during the First World War.
One of Santamaria's last newspaper columns before his illness was an acid and rather angry defence of Catholic religious symbols against the crude post-modern pseudo-art, Piss Christ and Virgin in the Condom. Surprisingly, even on this question, I found myself agreeing with Santamaria at least to some degree.
I have spent the last 30 years fighting against unreasonable censorship, particularly in political and sexual matters. I'm proud of that struggle and I don't regret any of it. Generally speaking, censorship is bad. I also think that the blasphemy laws that the Melbourne Catholic Archdiocese appealed to as a last resort should be abolished. They are archaic.
Nevertheless, I believe that the Melbourne gallery and the Sydney gallery both displayed shockingly bad taste in treating crude attacks on the deeply cherished religious symbols of Catholics, as some kind of art. They wouldn't do it to Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim or Aboriginal religious symbols, and if they did they would rightly be seen as racist bigots. Why do it to the Catholics?
In the final analysis I wouldn't ban the exhibitions, but as an atheist and generally an opponent of censorship, I would join the public demonstration against this crude caricature of people's deeply held religious beliefs.
Over the last two or three years, I have participated in or been instrumental in organising several seminars in which old left-wingers and old Groupers have got together in a more or less civil, but often very fiery atmosphere, to take a longer view of all the issues in the great Labor split of the 1950s.
Participants in these discussions included the Communist Jack McPhillips and the Grouper Laurie Short from the Ironworkers Union; the left-wing Labor Party Steering Committee leader Arthur Geitzelt, and the Grouper ALP organiser, subsequently DLP leader, Frank Rooney; the Catholic Priest Ed Campion, and the Communist Party Secretary Laurie Aarons; the Grouper leader from the Clerks Union, Jim Macken and the left-wing leader from the Sheetmetal Workers Union Jack Heffernan; the Movement organiser and later DLP president Kevin Davis; Clyde Cameron, Tony Mulvihill, myself and many other participants on the right and the left.
The cautious coming together of these old antagonists on the common ground of defending traditional Australian trade union rights against the new industrial barbarism expressed by Conzinc Rio Tinto was spelt out recently in one of Santamaria's columns. He carefully explained that in his view Peter Reith was quite wrong and playing with fire if he attempted to justify using troops on the waterfront by reference to the use of troops by the Chifley government in quite different historical circumstances during the 1949 coal strike.
On a more local note, it was fascinating to see the unusual mixture of people from the Sydney left and right when Jenny George, president of the ACTU, from the left, launched old Grouper Jim Macken's new book defending traditional trade unionism, Australia's Unions, A Death or a Difficult Birth? in the Strangers room at Parliament House.
Some people may view Bob Gould as a bit like Forrest Gump, played by Tom Hanks in the recent American movie, but as a bit player I have been present at a surprising number of significant Australian events over the past 45 years.
The very first of these was the Tuesday afternoon event at Morgan's Bookshop in Castlereagh Street in October 1954. At the time I was working just around the corner as a book shelver in the Public Library, now the State Library. I used to haunt Morgan's Bookshop and had become acquainted with Alec Shepherd, the proprietor,through my adolescent interest in Labor politics.
I was on a late lunch break, and nicked around the corner to the social gathering in the bookshop to celebrate its first anniversary, to discover that the gathering was in a great state of excitement with Herbert Evatt, Alec Shepherd, Alan Dalziell and other close advisers to Evatt, locked in discussion of a typewritten document, which turned out to be the momentous attack by Evatt on the Grouper Movement, which Dalziell, as Evatt's private secretary, released to the press later that afternoon.
The Labor split of the 1950s has given rise to a number of interesting and useful books. By far the best is Bob Murray's book, The Split. Paul Ormonde's book The Movement, B.A. Santamaria's autobiography Against the Tide, Jack Kane's autobiography and Clyde Cameron's autobiographical reminiscences are all extremely illuminating. Even in the last year or so two major biographies of Evatt have appeared, as well as a political biography of Laurie Short by his daughter, a major book on ASIO by David McKnight and even a massive history of the Labor Council of NSW, all of which have useful new material on the split.
The literature on the subject is pretty wide and still growing. I must make my standpoint on these matters clear, and it is hard for me to write about them without some emotion. I come of a Catholic labour movement family and I was educated at the big, upper working class/lower middle class Catholic School, St Patricks at Strathfield, where I did the Leaving Certificate in 1953; and my adolescence and early manhood were absolutely dominated by big questions of religion and politics: the ALP and socialism, the Groupers and the Communists, etc.
I was born into the middle of it, so to speak. My father, "Wingy" Gould as he was called by his contemporaries, was a one-armed ex-World War I digger and a Catholic. His life was an excellent expression of the complexity, contradiction and richness of the relationship between Irish Catholic Australians of his generation and the labour movement. He was one of 10 children of a Fenian Irishman who emigrated in 1880 from Tipperary and settled as a small dairy farmer outside Kempsey in NSW.
After the traumatic experience of seeing most of his mates killed and himself losing an arm in 1918 in Flanders, my father came back from the war, became a primary school teacher and threw himself into the vortex of Labor politics in the 1920s and 1930s. He was in those days a die-hard Langite, a member of the Inner Group faction that backed the rebellious Labor Premier, Jack Lang.
He was a socialist of the old school, and a theorist about the socialisation of credit. In the early 1930s he was a member of the Communist-led organisation in the Teachers' Federation, the Workers' Educational League, but as he stuck to Lang in the disputes of the middle 1930s he had fallen out with the Communists, and was later a foundation member of the ALP Industrial Group in the Teachers Federation in the 1940s, which he left bitterly and forever when it first admitted to membership Mrs Preston Stanley Vaughan, a well-known Liberal Party member and member of the Ladies Auxiliary of the Masonic Lodge.
My father was one of a small group of Langite leaders expelled from the ALP along with Lang for opposition to conscription during the Second World War. Despite his anti-Communism, Steve Gould strenuously opposed the ban on the Communist Party in 1951. (Incidentally, the debate over the attempted ban split St Patricks College at Strathfield down the middle, both brothers and boys.)
I remember my father saying, with a rather dry smile on his face, about a rather deaf Communist Party building worker who lived next to us at Beverley Hills, with whom he used to have interminable and sometimes bitter political arguments, that if the ban went through and the coppers came to get him, we'd have to help him hide from them, and he wasn't joking.
As an old Langite, he disliked Evatt, but he supported the ALP strongly against the Groupers and the DLP at the time of the split. He well understood what it was all about! Later on, when I was up to my ears in the necessary agitation against the imperialist war in Vietnam, he supported us unswervingly in our activities in opposition to the war.
Due to a leg shortened when his left arm was blown off during the first imperialist war, he could not march in demonstrations, but he always proudly minded the old Third World Bookshop in Goulburn Street when all the young ones were off at the demonstrations (a necessary security precaution in those bitter times from 1965 to 1972).
My father finally died at 80 in 1974. He died happily, or as happily as anyone can ever be said to die, still very much in his own way a religious Catholic, about a week after the 1974 mid-term federal elections, which Labor won narrowly, during which he had organised Jack Lang, his old leader, to speak at a public meeting in Randwick for Joe Riordan in the Phillip electorate, where he lived.
It was just this sort of complex but powerful tradition that was one of the basic objective factors in the decisive defeat of Santamaria's very energetic and determined attempt to eliminate the progressive side of the Catholic labour movement tradition and ultimately to swing the Catholic working class and lower middle class vote behind the Tory parties in Australian politics.
Niall Brennan, in his biography of Mannix, also catches very well the force of these traditions, which defeated Santamaria's enterprise, when he talks about his own father, Frank Brennan, a left-wing Labor Catholic federal parliamentarian, and his relationship with Daniel Mannix. In his autobiography, Against the Tide, Santamaria describes his own youth, living behind, and working long hours in, his family's fruit shop in working class Brunswick, and then going on to the university and joining the Campion Society (the small society of young Catholic intellectuals) and later starting the Catholic Worker.
These chapters are of absorbing interest to me. That is my bit of turf too. Twenty years on, in 1953, in my last year of school at St Patricks, I too joined the Campion Society, by then solidly influenced by Santamaria's Movement, and the next year, when I went to Sydney University at night, I joined the Newman Society (the Catholic student club) and simultaneously the Communist-led Labor Club, as well as taking out my first Labor Party membership ticket, at the age of 17.
I had for a year or so considered myself a sort of Catholic anarchist anti-Communist socialist, in the tradition of my father, and I already considered myself an anti-Grouper Catholic, having shed a brief and always rather uneasy flirtation with News Weekly while still at school.
For the next few years my life was completely dominated by these matters. I became increasingly hostile to the Groupers. Over the next couple of years I painfully shed my Catholic religious beliefs and since about the end of 1954 I have considered myself a dialectical materialist and an atheist, philosophical views which in my case have deepened with time. The process of definitively losing my Catholic religious beliefs and acquiring the beginnings of a Marxist philosophical outlook was a painful but decisive development in my own personal life.
But none of this happened all at once. 1953 and 1954 were the extraordinary years when Eddie Campion, Honi Soit editor in 1953 at Sydney University, now a priest and a lecturer at the Catholic University and boss of the Australia Council, Jack Callaghan, Jerry Nelson and others, had all broken with the Movement.
In 1953 Campion had caused a minor political sensation in the Labor movement in Sydney by publishing in Honi Soit, the student newspaper, a graphic article exposing the activities of the Santamaria Movement, which included a quite spectacular flow chart outlining the organisation of that movement.
I spent 1954 working by day at the Public Library, and by night moving in this turbulent milieu of young Catholics beginning to fight the Movement, going to meetings of the Newman Society in a derelict terrace house next to the pub opposite the university in Parramatta Road, where we had feverish discussions about the Movement, which still appeared to have the full support of the Catholic hierarchy, and where we discussed far into the night the complex questions of Marxist atheism versus Christian existentialism, listening to the lectures of the very persuasive anti-Movement Catholic philosopher, Father Con Keogh.
I also attended meetings of the Labor Club and became increasingly fascinated and persuaded by the Stalinist seriousness of the Communist Party members who dominated that organisation.
That year I also joined the Steering Committee, the factional organisation of the left in the ALP. In particular, I remember Eastern Suburbs Zone meetings at Peters Corner in Randwick, where we very conspiratorially fought back against the Santamaria Movement, which was at that stage riding high and controlled the ALP executives in both NSW and Victoria.
I vividly remember first hearing Arthur Gietzelt give one of his, to my then mind, very impressive, scientific reports on how to beat the Groupers to a central Steering Committee meeting in a strange space, rented by the Esperanto Society, under the Harbour Bridge at North Sydney.
This meeting contained such people as diverse as Charlie Oliver of the Australian Workers Union; Con Wallace, a colourful city ALP identity who owned the Hasty Tasty at Kings Cross; Tony Mulvihill, later ALP assistant secretary and a Senator; Edna Roper, later a Labor MLC; Issy Wyner of the Painters and Dockers Union; Bob Sutherland of the Public Service Association; Doug Morey, who later became mayor of Waverley; Tom Morey his brother, a tally clerk who later became the state member for Bligh; and a very callow me.
I acquired at this time an awed respect for the extraordinary political energy and ruthless political professionalism of Gietzelt, who was the dynamo of the struggle that eventually smashed the Movement in NSW, and who was the critical liaison point, so to speak, between the broad Steering Committee coalition against the Groupers in the ALP and the Communist-Party-led broad left faction in the ALP-affiliated unions.
Like many others, I have retained a good deal of this respect for Arthur, despite subsequent bitter political differences. That year, 1954, I attended as an observer in the gallery my first ALP annual State Conference. Coincidentally, this was the first conference in the Town Hall, and I have not missed attending a June Conference since, in the 1960s and the 1970s, almost always as a delegate. (I've never for that reason managed to attend the main part of that other great regular Queens Birthday weekend Sydney cultural event, the Film Festival. Such is life!)
I remember hanging around the draughty Town Hall corridors of that 1954 Conference completely dominated by the Groupers, having a weekend-long, intense political discussion of social democracy versus communism, with my then mate, Denis Freney, at the time, like myself, a rapidly leftward-moving member of the ALP.
We stopped our discussion from time to time to watch the Groupers riding high in the conference below. The flash-point that year was the struggle of Jack Dwyer, then a part of Ray Gietzelt's ultimately successful battle to up-end the Groupers in the Miscellaneous Workers Union, to get into the ALP.
Arthur Gietzelt and Edna Brown moved and seconded his admission to the ALP. Then a grey-haired little union official, Bill O'Neill of the Australian Railways Union, the wild and colourful crowd-pleaser to the Grouper Mountain at the ALP conferences of those days, made one of his incredibly exuberant red-baiting speeches, to deadly effect.
At the height of his peroration, O'Neill waved his arm and pointed into the air, and shouted, referring to the applicant's long-past Communist Party membership: "Once a Commo, always a Commo!" Conference then overwhelmingly rejected Dwyer's application.
Freney and I bitterly returned to our theoretical discussion in the corridor, our own movement to the left markedly accelerated by the sight of the reactionary forces manifestly on the march on the conference floor below. It was to this fantastic build-up of political tensions that Dr Evatt's personal declaration of war on the Groupers lit the fuse.
People like myself in our many hundreds, including a very large number of Catholics, rallied to the side of Dr Evatt, and we followed energetically the generalship of Arthur Gietzelt and the old broad Steering Committee for the next few years in the rapidly widening political war.
I remember many pro-Evatt rallies, bitterly contested regional conferences and the volatile 1955 NSW conference that the Groupers won despite the incredibly nimble chairmanship of Joe Chamberlain from the federal executive. I have a mental image still of the anti-Grouper floor leadership of the Conference, the trio of Tony Mulvihill, Bob Sutherland and Arthur Gietzelt moving around that Conference like ninja.
I was one of the many anti-Groupers from all over Australia who flocked to Melbourne during the first decisive Victorian election after the split. The Cain Labor government lost power and the Grouper preferences put the Liberals in, but in working class electorates the Groupers were decisively defeated by official Labor, which they gratuitously abused as Evatt Labor. They lost all their seats but one and they held only about a quarter of the Labor vote, and the shape of Australian politics for the next 15 years emerged.
I worked for Dinny Lovegrove in Carlton. We followed the Groupers around, pasting over Grouper snipes with grey "Labor rat" snipes, which were an exact replica of the red-rat posters with which the Groupers had been harassing whoever they called Communists for the previous few years.
Needless to say, Lovegrove, a rather colourful ex-Communist who had switched over from the Grouper side at the last possible moment in the split, won the seat comfortably. The battle that went on for control of the ALP and the trade union movement took place in draughty ALP branch meetings on week nights in public school rooms and town halls all over Australia, in regional and state ALP conferences in bigger draughty town hall rooms on weekends, in trade union executive meetings and conferences, in bitterly fought trade union elections and even in shop stewards committees on the factory floor.
It was still an age when activists of the left and right sold newspapers and dished out leaflets and pamphlets. The Grouper paper News Weekly was the organ of the right. The Communist weekly Tribune and Jack Lang's personal weekly paper, The Century, with its long, detailed anti-Grouper articles written by labour movement figure and journalist Jim Ormonde, were the bibles of the left. It was still the age of small pamphlets.
The Grouper pamphlet, Labor Nails the Rebel Lies, and the Communist pamphlet, Catholic Action at Work, being typical of a wide, wonderful and colourful popular literature that circulated widely. Frank Hardy's vast, rambling, rather unliterary novel of Australian life, Power Without Glory played a curious and deadly role in turning the tide against the Groupers in the Australian working class.
Despite its ostensible literary defects, this extraordinary, shambling collection of Irish storyteller's anecdotes, with its odd mixture of sporting scandal, criminal and corruption stories, major political scandals, scurrilous personal gossip, and other odds and ends, caught the imagination of the working class and middle class Australian reading public.
Little documents, purported keys to Power Without Glory, giving the alleged real names of all the characters, sold for quite high prices in those times in pubs all over Australia. The book became the all-time Australian bestseller in working class circles, far outdistancing the Bible.
This was unfortunate from the point of view of the Groupers, for amongst all the other stuff in Power Without Glory they were amongst the villains and the left and the Communists were the heroes, and the Power Without Glory view of the Groupers became quite a powerful ideological force in Australian society.
One can well understand the rather unforgiving attitude of the old Groupers and the still existing News Weekly at the time of Hardy's death a couple of years ago. No novel of Australian politics has ever had quite such an impact as Power Without Glory before or since.
The civil war for control of the ALP and the unions was very much fratricidal. There were two essential poles of attraction. On one side was the Stalinist, but still very powerful Communist Party, with perhaps six or seven thousand members and on the other side was the lay Catholic organisation, the Movement, possibly a bit smaller than the Communist Party, with about 4000 members.
The ideologue of the Communist Party was Lance Sharkey and the ideologue of the Groupers was B.A. Santamaria. Both studied and publicly commented on the strategy of the other from time to time. In the immediate postwar period the aggressive stance of the Communist Party alienated the centre and the Labor Left but by the early 1950s the aggressive stance of the Groupers had done precisely the same thing in reverse, and the Communist Party, trying to be on its best behaviour, managed to form an alliance with the centre and the Labor left, and the Groupers were crushed.
The bitterness of this civil war for the labour movement was heightened by the fact that the social composition of the two broad factions, left and right, and the two more elite groupings within them, were very much the same. By and large the participants on both sides were the best and most serious elements of working class Australia, generally self-educated people with a real interest in ideas and strongly held beliefs.
They were people used to tithing themselves financially for the organisation of their choice. The Communist Party and the Santamaria Movement, for instance, both raised prodigious sums of money for their newspapers, pamphlets and other activities out of the purses and pockets of ordinary people of modest means.
Both broad factions were capable of rather incredible feats of electioneering, particularly in trade union elections, in those far-off days before telephone polling. The Groupers were specialists in door-knocking, but after a while the left were no slouches at this either, despite their attacks on the Groupers for using door-knockers outside the particular union's membership.
The most exotic events in the calendar of trade union elections were elections in the old Amalgamated Engineering Union, before the big metal trades amalgamation. The rather archaic rules of the very important AEU banned printed propaganda in union elections, but some canny Grouper established the precedent that handwritten election addresses were legal under the union rules.
Quite a few times in the late 1950s and the early 1960s I was one of a couple of hundred assorted leftists who would voluntarily assemble night after night in a big room in the Buffalo Hall in Regent Street, admitted strictly by password, laboriously producing handwritten copies of an election address for some leftist or other in the AEU.
Our only wry consolation for this dreadful but necessary activity was the reflection that somewhere else in Sydney in another draughty hall, a couple of hundred Groupers were doing the same thing. Many of the activists on the right and the left were effective self-taught public speakers, with considerable wit and often home-spun erudition, and the stormy ALP conferences of those days, with spectacular speakers like Laurie Short or Bill O'Neill on the right and Tom Uren or Win Childs on the left, were colourful, unruly, long-winded, interesting events.
The backdrop to this political battle was the beginning of the long boom. The activists of both factions were the self-educated elite of the Australian labour movement, but by and large they weren't exactly monks or hermits. They were engaged in the political battle by their lights, as they saw them, but they were doing other things also.
Many a Communist Party activist in industry was also starting a little business somewhere, or building houses in the outer suburbs and speculating in a modest way in real estate. One spectacularly successful electrical discount house was started by a talented working class members of the Communist Party and got its initial impetus through members of industrial branches of the Communist Party throughout industry in Sydney selling television sets on commission during the boom in the early days of that medium.
Similarly, on the Grouper side, Paul Keating's father, Matt Keating, was not untypical of many right-wing Labor Catholics out of the working class who started small businesses — in Keating's case, a successful small engineering workshop. It's not surprising that many of the activists on both sides in this battle were improving their position in Australian society as the opportunities presented themselves.
But as these people's material position improved, they still believed that it was right and good to lend their financial and physical support to the causes they believed in, and the battle between the left and the right was fought between people who knew a thing or two, had plenty of tricks in their arsenal, knew how to raise money for their respective causes, and no longer had the arse out of their trousers, so to speak.
There were even often family relationships between people on either side of the divide. Many members of the Communist Party — possibly a majority — came from Irish Catholic families. Many of the anti-Grouper Labor Party members were still practising Catholics. Many old friends found themselves on opposite sides in these battles, which sometimes mediated the bitterness and on other occasions made it more intense.
It was like a bloodless version of the Irish, Spanish, English or Greek civil wars. The deliberate but unprecedented decision by the leadership of the Santamaria faction to give their preferences to the Liberals, thereby keeping them in power in parliamentary elections, was the decisive turning point in this political battle.
They succeeded in keeping the Liberals in power for the next 15 years, but their influence in the working class rapidly declined. The majority of Catholic workers continued to vote for the ALP and the Grouper faction was further isolated by its logical and, in a way courageous, but deeply mistaken stand against the humane social mood and the great social upheavals of the 1960s and the 1970s.
The Groupers, like everybody else in the working class movement, wanted the best possible education for their kids, and like everybody else, they took a great deal of satisfaction as their kids poured into universities, getting a better education than they had been able to aspire to — particularly in that brief few years, a moment really, under the Whitlam government when higher education was free.
But even the children of the Groupers were not immune from the social upheavals of the times. Many a pro-Viet Cong, hippie, dope-smoking student at Monash University in the late 1960s was the child of a working class Catholic supporter of the Victorian DLP. But all that is another story.
My youth and early manhood were completely dominated by this political battle, for nine or 10 years. Most of the fighters on both sides were older than me, and most are gone now. I remember them all with great respect and considerable affection.
Those working class Australians, both allies and opponents, and the books, newspapers and pamphlets I soaked up were my university in life and politics. It was a very important war, and my side ultimately won, more or less, which I still regard as a good thing.
The things I learned in those battles came in very useful later, for instance in the struggle against the war in Vietnam, in which I became intensely involved. I also learned from the battlers of that generation of Australians, both my allies and opponents, the subtle point that it's a human thing to try to prosper in life, but that what can make some human beings different is their capacity to devote their energies and resources, as well as to prospering in life, to the causes that they favour for improving the human condition.