Our Cultural Heritage: Remembering Sir Walter Murdoch: Australia’s Forgotten Stoic
Sir Walter Logie Forbes Murdoch was born on 17 September 1874 at Rosehearty, a fishing village near Aberdeen in Scotland, the fourteenth and youngest child of the Reverend James Murdoch, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland. He came to Melbourne with his family at the age of ten, attended Camberwell Grammar and Scotch College, and graduated from the University of Melbourne with a BA in 1895 and MA in 1897, taking first-class honours in logic and philosophy. After teaching in schools he joined Melbourne University as an assistant lecturer in English in 1904, before becoming one of the foundation professors of the University of Western Australia, where teaching began in 1913. He later served as UWA's chancellor from 1943 to 1948. He died in South Perth on 30 July 1970, aged ninety-five.
His name survives most conspicuously in Murdoch University, whose naming was announced shortly before his death. Yet the institution has outlived popular knowledge of the man. That is unfortunate because Walter Murdoch was once among Australia's most widely read public intellectuals. Beginning with his first published essay in 1899, he wrote for newspapers for decades. His Elzevir articles appeared in the Argus, his essays were syndicated through the Melbourne Herald network, he broadcast on radio, and from 1945 for nearly twenty years he wrote a weekly question-and-answer column syndicated throughout Australia and New Zealand. His first major collection, Speaking Personally, appeared in 1930. The Australian Dictionary of Biography observes that perhaps no other Australian writer built so extensive a reputation principally upon the essay as a form of communication.
Murdoch's public philosophy was not a system. It was a temperament taught repeatedly to ordinary newspaper readers: face the fact, distrust comfort, resist pomposity, keep your judgment as your own. In that sense, he came surprisingly close to producing an Australian vernacular Stoicism.
There is no need to pretend that Murdoch was Marcus Aurelius transplanted to Perth. He did not organise his thought around the classical Stoic doctrines of logos, apatheia, providence or the dichotomy of control, and describing him straightforwardly as a Stoic philosopher would go beyond the evidence. What he shared with the Stoics was something more interesting: a conception of character in which the inner life must not become the possession of circumstance, fashion, authority or the crowd.
He was the son of Scottish Calvinism who lost the old theological certainty without entirely losing its discipline. The creed weakened; the demand upon the self remained. That helps explain the peculiar combination running through his essays: scepticism without nihilism, seriousness without solemnity, moral judgment without much appetite for preaching.
The world, as Murdoch saw it, was always tempting people to settle. He called the temptation "the suburban spirit." He did not simply mean houses with lawns and red-tiled roofs. He meant a condition of the personality: the mapped career, the borrowed opinion, the comfortable convention, the amusement that fills the evening so that thought never has to begin. Young Australians, he wrote, must not "tamely settle down to the unadventurous, barn-yard sort of life to which modern civilisation is apt to condemn us."
That sentence gets close to the centre of him. Civilisation can produce comforts without producing character. Indeed, comfort can become one of character's principal enemies because it allows a person to confuse an undisturbed existence with a good one.
Here Murdoch approaches an old Stoic insight. Epictetus repeatedly distinguishes what happens to us from the judgment we make about what happens. Marcus Aurelius returns obsessively to the need to guard the ruling faculty against impressions imposed upon it from outside. Murdoch translated something resembling that discipline into the language of the Australian newspaper essay. Do not surrender the mind merely because surrender is comfortable. His Stoicism was therefore philosophical before it was heroic. The first thing requiring self-command was judgment.
That explains his hostility to propaganda. In the late 1930s Murdoch drew a distinction that deserves recovery: democracy believes in education while Fascism believes in propaganda. Propaganda stupefies; education emancipates. The difference was not merely between two methods of communicating political information. It concerned two different conceptions of the human being. Propaganda wants the response without the judgment. Education wants judgment before response.
A free society consequently requires more than elections and constitutions. It requires people capable of resisting intellectual manipulation. A population trained to repeat the approved response without examining the proposition has surrendered something prior to political liberty: sovereignty over its own mind.
Murdoch eventually put that principle to a difficult test. During 1950-51 he vigorously opposed the attempt to outlaw the Communist Party. This was not because he had become a communist. It followed from his conviction that the state should punish unlawful acts rather than opinions. The Australian Dictionary of Biography describes his opposition to the attempted ban as vehement and stalwart.
There is something distinctly Stoic in that refusal to allow fear of an enemy to determine the principles by which one treats him. Justice ceases to mean very much if it applies only to people whose opinions one finds agreeable. The independent mind must remain independent even when the crowd can supply excellent reasons for abandoning independence.
Murdoch's own politics make him more interesting rather than less. He was no tidy ideological package. He supported women's rights and the League of Nations, opposed Western Australian secession, championed unpopular causes and during the Depression became an enthusiastic advocate of Douglas Social Credit, an enthusiasm his biographers regarded as damaging to his credibility. For us, that makes him a great public intellectual!
His achievement was not possessing an infallible method for arriving at correct political conclusions. It was insisting upon the individual's responsibility to arrive at conclusions rather than rent them from the prevailing fashion.
His humour performed the same function. When Walter Pater offered the famous ideal of burning with a hard, gem-like flame, Murdoch could answer with tripe and onions. When Bertrand Russell erected philosophical grandeur upon "unyielding despair," Murdoch could bring the same deflating common sense to bear. He distrusted ideas that became too pleased with their own magnificence.
The joke was philosophical. A Stoic distinguishes the thing from the impression surrounding the thing. Murdoch's humour often did likewise. Strip away the magnificent adjective, the fashionable abstraction and the solemn intellectual pose. What remains? Can the proposition survive contact with breakfast?
That is not anti-intellectualism. Murdoch was a professor of English with first-class honours in logic and philosophy, steeped in literature and capable of ranging casually across European intellectual history. His target was intellectual vanity: the point at which sophistication becomes a means of preventing ordinary reality from answering back.
His life also gave him plenty of opportunities to test the philosophy against fortune. He was passed over for Melbourne's recreated chair of English in 1911 and went west instead, becoming a founding professor at a new university that initially conducted its teaching in tin sheds in Perth. He experienced professional disappointments and family losses, while old age brought increasing deafness and failing eyesight. Yet his intellectual curiosity persisted. In 1964, already ninety, he made the last of several visits to the Italy he loved. Even near death, when told that Western Australia's second university would bear his name, he reportedly responded appreciatively before adding that it had better be a good one. That small joke is almost a summary of the man. Honour arrives; do not become intoxicated by honour.
Here the resemblance to Stoicism becomes strongest. The Stoic does not necessarily reject reputation, wealth, office, pleasure or longevity. He rejects their authority to determine the value of the self. Murdoch accumulated honours: CMG in 1939, an honorary D.Litt. from UWA in 1948 and KCMG in 1964, but his public persona remained suspicious of precisely the pomp by which honours acquire their psychological power.
His reflections upon ageing belong to the same tradition. Growing old, for Murdoch, was not fundamentally the accumulation of years. It began when a person ceased living through love, hope and faith and began living principally through memory. Curiosity therefore became almost an ethical duty. To remain interested in the world was to resist the inward surrender that could precede physical death by decades.
Success, if the word must be used, consequently had little to do with defeating everybody else. It meant maintaining curiosity, preserving humility after recognition and hope after disappointment, refusing cruelty and cynicism, and eventually meeting death without surrendering one's nerve.
This is a quieter Meditations than Marcus Aurelius wrote, and an unmistakably Australian one. There is no emperor contemplating mortality beside the Danube, no grand metaphysics of cosmic reason. There is instead a newspaper essayist in Perth telling readers, gently and often mischievously, to stop kidding themselves.
Murdoch's philosophy also differs from classical Stoicism at an important point. The ancient Stoic frequently withdraws moral significance from external circumstances: what ultimately matters is virtue, which remains within our control. Murdoch was more socially interventionist. His sympathy for underdogs repeatedly drew him into public causes. He helped connect the young University of Western Australia with the surrounding community, supported women's rights, became involved with the League of Nations Union, argued about economic policy and defended political liberties. His was therefore not a Stoicism of retreat.
Self-command was valuable partly because it made citizenship possible. A person who cannot govern his own judgment is easily governed by propaganda. A person terrified of social disapproval cannot defend an unpopular principle. A person who measures life exclusively through material comfort will sacrifice inconvenient liberties remarkably cheaply.
That is where Walter Murdoch suddenly stops seeming historical. He wrote for a literate middle Australia that still possessed a relatively common inheritance of the Bible, British institutions, newspapers and books. He could attack the suburban spirit because writer and reader largely understood the moral vocabulary within which the criticism was being made. Much of that common language has disappeared. The suburban spirit has not. It has acquired better technology.
The picture show and evening newspaper have become streaming entertainment, algorithmic feeds and the infinite scroll. Propaganda did not disappear when European Fascism was defeated. It became faster, personalised and capable of following its recipient from breakfast until sleep. The modern citizen possesses access to more information than Murdoch could have imagined while possessing unprecedented machinery for avoiding sustained thought.
His distinction between education and propaganda is therefore more important, not less. Education cannot simply mean possessing qualifications. A highly credentialled person can be extraordinarily susceptible to intellectual fashion. Murdoch's deeper educational ideal concerns the formation of judgment: learning how to encounter an assertion without immediately asking which tribe approves of it. That is Stoic territory again. The decisive freedom is internal.
What we can recover is more modest and perhaps more useful. Do not take your opinions ready-made. Do not confuse comfort with wisdom. Do not mistake intellectual fashion for thought. Do not permit propaganda to substitute emotion for judgment. Do not become so impressed by success that you lose humility, or so damaged by failure that you lose hope. Remain curious enough to revise yourself. And when fortune eventually removes the things it always removes, try not to surrender the one possession over which you have some claim of government: your own mind.
Walter Murdoch's public philosophy was never a system. It was a discipline of intellectual character delivered in instalments to newspaper readers. Australia produced no Marcus Aurelius; not yet. But for much of the twentieth century it had Walter Murdoch, quietly reminding people over breakfast that a mind is for use.
Sources
Walter Murdoch, On Rabbits, Morality, etc. Selected Writings of Walter Murdoch, ed. Imre Salusinkszky (UWA Publishing, 2011).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Murdoch
https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/murdoch-sir-walter-logie-7698
https://www.murdoch.edu.au/explore/about-murdoch/our-history/sir-walter-murdoch
