But for the moment I am interested in Gelder's and Jacobs' inability to find some common ground. But I want to suggest that its source may be as much psychological as intellectual. This is very much to the point and helps to explain many of the actions and reactions of the present Government and also the anxieties of many Australians. Instead they take their stand firmly within our culture and within the academic sub-culture to which they belong, to focus on 'discourses of the sacred'. They have every right to do this, of course.
Scholarly detachment is all very well.
But it seems to me, especially in situations of this kind when two cultures confront one another, that scholarship also has a public responsibility. Similarly on another occasion in the course of an ABC Radio National program Jacobs told the interviewer that 'the occupation of Aboriginal sacredness may be a crucial requirement for our culture'. This kind of ambiguity is common enough, of course, and another note of the 'postmodern'. But in another sense theirs is a fairly old-fashioned view in that in the long run they are defending the status quo, both political and intellectual. 7 Gelder and Jacobs remain within the culture, culture which cannot cope with difference and in this sense remains assimilationist.