Refugees and racism in Australia: An alternative view

The recent case of a family of Tamils the government chose to return to Sri Lanka, whence the parents had fled (the children were born in Australia), highlights some things about our treatment of refugees that need some cool appraisal. Twitter skews very progressive, so it is not a reliable gauge of public sentiment. The view on Twitter is that the government is doing the wrong thing in trying to send the family back, potentially, to danger. Peter Dutton, the home affairs minister, gets described using some pretty hard language.

Then another thing happened. John Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, who relocated from his native South Africa to Adelaide 17 years ago, wrote a piece on refugees for New York Review of Books that came out in the 26 September issue.

Coetzee has form on this front however. His 2013 novel, ‘The Childhood of Jesus’, deals with a refugee although the country where the boy ends up is not named. A book with a similar title appeared a few years later and the Wikipedia page for the author says there’s another one coming out next year. I started the first of these novels and didn’t finish it, finding it tendentious. There was no freedom for the reader in the novel’s world, you had to have one opinion about the protagonist and one only.

The NYRB piece is written in the same fashion as that novel. The article runs to over 6000 words and revisits commonplace talking points of the left, linking the country’s refugee policies to the kind of outdated racism that belonged to the colonial period and the first half of the 20th century. And although Coetzee mentions post-war migration, there is not a single mention in the piece of the word “multiculturalism”, which is the policy that has driven migration and refugee since the early 1970s, long before Coetzee chose to make this country his home. After Canada, Australia was the second country in the world to adopt multiculturalism as official government policy.

This oversight from a prominent writer is disappointing, but at least Coetzee does one thing good in his piece. He outlines the basis for Australia’s refusal to admit refugees who come here by boat. I’ll include this whole section for the reader’s information.

Australia’s treatment of refugees is constrained by a number of treaties. First among these is the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, ratified in 1954 though with a number of reservations. This convention confirms the right (already enunciated in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration on Human Rights of 1948) of any victim of persecution to seek and enjoy asylum. It also binds signatories not to return asylum-seekers to the countries from which they have fled, a requirement known as non-refoulement. 

While adhering to non-refoulement, Australia has over the years exploited two lacunae in the convention, namely that it does not confer on an asylum-seeker the legal right to enter the country where asylum is sought, and that it does not oblige the country where asylum is sought to grant asylum. Successive Australian administrations have therefore taken the position—validated by Australian courts—that a person who enters Australian territorial waters without the requisite papers is in Australia illegally, whether or not that person has come to seek asylum. 

The question of asylum was repeatedly debated in the United Nations in the 1960s and 1970s. Australia voted alongside its allies the United States and the United Kingdom in favor [sic] of the right of asylum, while consistently reserving its position on the actual admission of asylum-seekers. In 1977 it spelled out that position: Australia “will wish to retain its discretion to determine ultimately who can enter Australian territory and under what conditions they remain.”

So, the Morrison government refusing to accept some people as “refugees” is not, as so many people on Twitter say, illegal. Even Coetzee says it is not, and why would he lie when his purpose is to embarrass the government and, by extension, Donald Trump?

Now, there is one thing which causes a lot of people a lot of anxiety. This is the warehousing of innocent people in unpleasant circumstances on Pacific islands (Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, and Nauru). Labor introduced mandatory detention of refugees coming on irregular boats in 1992 and in 2001 the Howard Coalition government opened an offshore camp for them. This was closed in 2008 by Kevin Rudd, the Labor PM, and the boats started to arrive again, so Julia Gillard, who had replaced Rudd, reopened the camp in 2012.

Currently, Labor and the Coalition have offshore processing of refugees as party policy and neither party says it will allow people coming on irregular boats to settle in Australia. The main difference between the two parties seems to be that the Liberals label refugees who come by irregular boats “illegal” and Labor does not. This debate has been going on for almost 30 years and the jury is well and truly in.

Despite what Coetzee says in his article, Australia is very welcoming of migrants. Migration is the biggest component of population growth, even larger than natural increase. Both major parties support multiculturalism and both support high levels of migration. OECD rankings have Australia as the fifth-best country for social mobility behind the Scandinavian countries, even despite the poor performance on these terms of the Indigenous population here, so it’s clear that people who move here are able to get good jobs and to keep them.

People who come to Australia have good lives and that’s why they come. And even though there is a right-wing fringe in the community that dislikes foreigners, such people as go to make it up are very much in the minority. Even in the electorates that would be expected to have the highest number of voters choosing One Nation, the party’s share of the vote in elections are usually much lower than either of the majors achieves.

Not all One Nation voters are xenophobes, of course, although a distrust of people from overseas appears to constitute a major part of the party’s ethos. And for that matter even some Greens voters are anti-immigration (since it’s bad for the environment). Many Liberal and Labor voters, furthermore, probably don’t like migrants or having a high level of migration, but despite all this both of the major parties go out of their way, in public, to appeal to communities that have a large proportion of migrants in them.

A bigger issue, of course, is why there are so many dysfunctional polities supplying steady streams of migrants and refugees trying to get visas that allow them to live and work in Australia. Again, Coetzee makes no mention of either of these things in his article. Donald Trump might be stupid and he might be unpleasant and he might be ignorant and he might be narcissistic, but he is right on this point: the caravan of refugees never stops. What are developed nations supposed to do? How to deal with an unceasing flow of want and desperation? Where to put all the people who want better lives? Why are things so bad back home that they have to leave in the first place?

No-one is asking this last question but it is the single-most important question to ask. It’s not enough to blame venal and corrupt leaders. Ordinary people enter government in such countries and when they do they turn out to be just as bad as the ones they replaced. There is probably a reason for this. If you won’t participate in the skimming of funds into your private bank account, the people around you who are doing it will suspect you might dob them in, so they ostracise you if you don’t get involved too. Honest officeholders and accountable institutions seem to be something that you only find in the developed world.

Despite this, Australians give migrants visas and passports, employ them in good jobs, give them home loans and even, in some cases, marry them. Over 50 percent of Australians have at least one parent born overseas. However, irregular boats arrivals are not tolerated because they are messy, they are risky, and because they disadvantage people who try to arrive through more conventional means. This aspect of the character of the Australian people – a sense of fairness – is never remarked on, though it is quite evident, as is the existence of a multitude of reasons why migrants from developing nations could be excluded if the government chose to make that a point to pursue. In fact, the government is very accommodating of people from developing nations. This is because the Australian people are, too.

As for refugees warehoused on Pacific islands, they are a billboard designed to put off others who might try to come on irregular boats. The plight of these people is lamentable and must be regretted, and the government should be trying to find an appropriate solution to it. I have no suggestions to make as to what form such a solution might take but rallying the troops in order to get rid of Trump seems, to me, to be a bit facile. Coetzee, for his part, should be grateful that he has been able to make a new life for himself in Australia, a place free of the endemic crime that mars existence for millions of people in South Africa.

Western civilisation and the role of religion

It's true that things like democracy and science are western inventions, but the delineations of "western civilisation" are not well-known in the broader community. How did we get here? Where did it all come from? Why in Europe and not elsewhere?

You hear things in the media all the time that refer to these and similar questions. Just the other day on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) panel show The Drum, Murdoch journalist Caroline Overington was gushing about religion and how it had contributed to western civilisation. On the ABC again for the National Press Club address, Jennifer Westacott, head of the Business Council of Australia, was talking about how technological changes would require people to keep learning to ensure they remained employable into the future.

The thing is that everything started with the arts. The development of jet engines and antibiotics entailed a long process but essentially it was one that involved the gradual democratisation and consequent expansion of knowledge that started when Dante Alighieri (1285-1321) and Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) began to write in the vernacular instead of in Latin. Taking his cue from them, in England John Wycliffe made an English translation of the Vulgate Bible (the Latin book used by the Catholic Church; the translation was finished by 1382). His heresy was adapted further by Jan Hus in Bohemia, where it survived for 100 years before Luther's.

In the meantime, movable type had been invented in Germany in 1440 and with more and more affordable books appearing the process of nominalisation, where new words are formed out of complete sentences or out of phrases, accelerated learning.

The first new translation of the Bible into the vernacular from its originary languages was launched in Spain by Isabella of Castile and was finished in 1520, inspiring the Humanists in norther Europe to do likewise, which also resulted in the production of vernacular translations of works by classical Roman authors (the collection of which Petrarca had made fashionable). As monarchs and other community leaders adopted the new religious practices in northern Europe, boys were taught how to read. The Catholic Church got in on the act in 1540 with the establishment of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), in a Spain now ruled by Isabella’s grandson, Charles V. (The first university had been established in Bologna in the late 11th century.)

The 'Essais' of Montaigne, who had been brought up by his father to read widely, appeared in 1580. In his book the writer turns away from God to look inward at himself. Bacon's 'Novum Organum' appeared in 1620, in which the writer again turns away from God and tells people to study the natural world and how to go about it. In 1695, the Licensing of the Press Act was allowed to lapse in England, spurring the emergence of magazines which helped the process of nominalisation by promulgating tens of thousands of new ideas for an emerging middle class.

The rest, as they say, is history. What is clear however from knowing how this process unfolded is that it was usually religion that formed a barrier against the democratisation of knowledge. In order to get over that barrier, men had to fight against a stubborn Catholic Church intent on maintaining its rights and privileges. To a large degree, the process of democratisation that I’ve just described was carried out despite the actions of the Church, not because of it.

Western civilisation is most definitely under threat

Although Van Badham is right that the places Pauline Hanson thinks the threat is coming from – the cultural elites such as university academics – are largely useful, in fact, Badham is wrong to say there is no threat. The threat has never been greater since 1989 and is increasing with each year that passes.

The project proposed by the Ramsay Centre will probably go ahead, to start things off on a side note. Of the academics surveyed about the proposal, about one third were against it, one third were in favour of it, and one third were unsure about it. The University of Sydney has sent a counter proposal to the centre and is waiting for their response.

But the bigger problem is that there are so many threats to our way of life now that China has started to grow economically and that Russia has shown an inclination to disrupt the processes that govern our lives. In many countries around the world representative government is not practiced, such as Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Syria, Egypt and others. Several eastern European countries, and now Brazil, are starting to show cracks in their governmental processes as autocrats there start to view democracy as an unnecessary and messy and obstructive, guided in their obsessions by China and Russia.

During the Wentworth by-election a woman named Jodie Salmon tweeted a photo of her hand in the voting booth before she had filled out her ballot. The comment in the tweet was, “The pen is mightier than the bonesaw.” The comment was a reference to the alleged Saudi killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey, and was especially apposite as he had been killed for wanting to encourage more transparency in government in the Middle East. Salmon is alive to the implications of China’s reluctance to allow its citizens to vote for their leaders, and wanted to show what she thinks of autocrats wherever they exist. Saudi Arabia is hardly alone.

I wrote on 6 September about how we got to where we are, and I plan to write about it again in the near future. That earlier blogpost takes in the emergence of everything that we value today, from antibiotics to jet engines and from ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ to the secret ballot. What it also notes is that many countries have perversely decided to take the good things (antibiotics and jet engines) but not the things that compromise their complete control of the power that is at the command of those who hold the reigns of government (‘Finnegan’s Wake’ and the secret ballot). Van Badham is being dishonest, but what do you expect of a committed ideologue, who more closely resembles the people she puts herself opposite, than she does those whose fire she borrows to animate her harangues: the writers and thinkers who have fed the engine of the growth of western civilisation.

The greatest story never told

The other day I saw a link to a story published by the US news outlet BuzzFeed that contained a set of short reviews of 35 new books (mostly, but not exclusively, novels) and I had a look at who had been recommended to read.

Out of a total of 35 authors, 24 were women and a large proportion of all the recommended works were by people from backgrounds that were other than European. The same day I had read a story published on Medium about cultural appropriation written by a woman who is ethnically a mixture of Chinese and European. She lives in Scotland and said she has always been puzzled by the concerns some people seem to have about westerners borrowing influences from foreign cultures. Lionel Shriver, the US author, made similar comments publicly some years ago, and was attacked for them.

The two things made me think. I made a comment on the Facebook post that included the Medium story, talking about how it was evidently fine for people in developing economies to benefit from the advantages offered by modern technology and from democracy, which were European innovations that had appeared at specific places at specific times for specific reasons, but somehow westerners were being made to feel guilty for making Chinese food. There was no response to my comment, which to me spoke volumes.

At the same time as these things are being discussed, the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is having discussions with the University of Sydney about a degree program, although the Australian national University in Canberra had earlier refused to countenance a degree program organised with the think tank because, it said, it did not want to compromise its standards by relinquishing control over staffing and curriculum decisions. Someone I know on Facebook who teaches at the university has been vocal, publicly arguing against such a collaboration on the grounds that it would serve merely to promote the narrow interests of an ideologically-driven organisation at the expense of real scholarship.

But the problem is also visible in the way that Australian intellectuals deploy ideas taken from postcolonial studies in their work, often in a way that suggests that they feel a kind of nameless guilt about belonging to the dominant global culture. In whatever way they can, they want to rebalance the scales in favour of the oppressed. Hence the BuzzFeed book recommendation list avoiding men from Anglo backgrounds.

I wrote about this last month in a post that started out as a review of a book by an Australian about an endangered migratory bird. The fact remains that modernity is the greatest story ever told, and it pivots around three specific things that occurred in northern Europe starting in the early 14th century. Those things are:

• Literature in the vernacular instead of Latin
• Moveable type
• The Reformation

All of this contributed toward formulating the Humanist project, from the definition of humanities studies promulgated by the classical Roman author Cicero. It happened at specific places at specific points in history at specific points in time. Without any of the three components listed above the revolution in learning would not have taken place.

There is a fourth element as well which I have not listed as it was arguably less influential. This is the rediscovery of classical Roman and Greek literatures, starting in the 12th century with the reintroduction of the work of Aristotle to Europe. Some people might argue that the explosion in learning that started in the 16th century could not have happened without this element, and I agree that it was a powerful spur to innovation because it served to offset the stultifying influence of the Catholic Church. Certainly, people like Petrarch, Montaigne and Bacon, whom I mention in what follows, were richly conversant with classical literature.

The Humanist project started in the Middle Ages with the appearance of the vernacular poetry of Dante Alighieri (1285-1321), whose ‘Commedia’ in three books took an encyclopedia view of the world. His innovation was taken up by Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374, also known in English as Petrarch) who grew up in Avignon in southern France with his parents, who were part of the court of the Pope, who had moved there for political reasons, and he launched by his example the Renaissance craze for resurrecting classical Roman and Greek books for contemporary audiences. He also wrote love poetry in Italian.

This trend for publishing books in the vernacular instead of Latin was no doubt one of the reasons why John Wycliffe, an Oxford scholar, began to push for a vernacular Bible. He completed an English translation from the Vulgate (the official Latin version belonging to the Catholic Church) by 1382. His heresy inspired Jan Hus (1369-1415), in what was then known as Bohemia, to demand church reform 100 years before Luther protested the sale of indulgences (the practise of enabling people to get expiation for their sins by giving money to the church).

The first vernacular Bible translated from the original languages it was written in (Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic) was actually published in Spain in around 1520, just a few years after Luther’s initial overtures to the church, by Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. Their ‘Complutensian Bible’ exerted a profound influence on the later Humanists in northern Europe, who took the gains won from their leaders in the realm of religion, which saw them developing personal relations with God instead of ones mediated by the hated clergy, to spread their ideas through the new medium of printing, which had arrived in around 1440 in Germany.

Different countries had different solutions to the problem of educating boys in how to read the vernacular, which was now required by the new Christian denominations so that people (at least, men) could worship their God. In England, the tide turned when Henry VIII told the Pope to rack off and, unable to get a divorce from his Spanish wife, who could not give him the son he craved, set up his own church in England instead. As a result all boys went to school, and hence we have Shakespeare.

The new technology of printing threw up unexpected jewels in unexpected places, including Montaigne’s ‘Essais’ (1580), in which the French author turned away from God, the normal point of reference for writers of the time, and examined his own feelings. In 1620, Francis Bacon’s ‘Novum Organum’ appeared which is like a manifesto for the scientific method. In it the English statesman told his readers to turn away from the divine and instead focus their attentions on the secular realities surrounding them.

But apart from these individual works that changed the ways that people thought about themselves and their places in the world, the bigger influence was due to all of those men publishing books on all sorts of subjects as a great rate, in fact at a speed that was unprecedented in history. The process of nominalisation, whereby sentences and phrases are distilled into nouns (and verbs) that could then be deployed along with adjectives (and adverbs) in other sentences for the purpose of strongly promoting arguments in the public sphere, was accelerated by the new technology and by the new regime of education that proliferated especially in northern Europe.

In England, where the largest number of new discoveries appeared over the ensuing centuries, culminating in the industrial revolution and the invention of the steam engine, popular magazines that contained articles about new scientific discoveries alongside reviews of new novels and books of poetry were printed and consumed throughout the country in the 18th century by a newly-literate middle class. And women were an integral part of the public sphere, as we can see notably in the success of the novels of Jane Austen in the early decades of the 19th century.

All of this because of vernacular poetry. Everything we value, from antibiotics to jet engines, from the internet to Bob Dylan, comes from the process of nominalisation super-heated by demand for printed material among ordinary people.

Why it didn’t happen in China, where movable type had appeared earlier than it did in Europe, was due to the centralised form of government that obtained there. With one source of official power and a spreading bureaucracy with a subservient army, it was possible for the state to tightly control what was published in every corner of the realm, whereas in Europe many different countries competed for supremacy against one another. The dynamism of the European market for knowledge, where different rulers sought to achieve an advantage over their neighbours in all sorts of ways, including through their militaries, meant that there was competition for ideas there in a way that China could not equal. Diversity is strength.

The China nexus is important here because you can see the new reality that was enabled by science influencing how relations between Europe and China developed from the 18th century. In 1793 George III sent an embassy to Beijing headed by a peer of the realm named Macartney. His embassy set out in a square-rigged ship of the same kind that had been used for centuries for commerce, war and diplomacy. The embassy took several years, during which time Macartney met with the emperor, who eventually refused the overtures of the UK monarch in favour of setting up trade links. The emperor needed nothing and his people were quite ok without European goods. Thanks, but no thanks.

This wasn’t the end of the problem however, regardless how the emperor saw things. The British fought two wars against China in the middle of the next century when it was able to deploy steam vessels against the emperor’s sail-powered junks. The first of these wars ended in 1841 with the cession of Hong Kong to the British and the establishment of other trade ports along the coast. A second war was fought between 1856 and 1860. In both cases, the British were victorious due to the superiority of their military technology. The wars also served to weaken imperial sway over the country (the emperors were from a foreign dynasty, the Qing, who had established rule over the country in the 17th century) which resulted in the overthrow of the dynasty at the start of the next century.

This story of technological and scientific progress should also give courage to political progressives, as well, as they have of late been made to denounce rising waves of fascism among people of European ancestry. In Australia, we had recent reason to listen to such views because Steve Bannon was interviewed by Sarah Ferguson on the ABC’s ‘4 Corners’ current affairs program. Bannon was erratic, overbearing (consonant with his chosen “maverick” pose), and displayed an alarming lack of knowledge about things he spoke about. He struck me as more of a walking bag of talking points than an experienced political debater, and I think that he would not last a week in the public sphere in Australia if that’s where he was based.

We are used to more sober analysis here, based on facts rather than on sparkling random notions conjured out of the zeitgeist like magic cards grabbed out of the air by a magician giving a smooth performance on-stage. So my story is actually an antidote to the hatred of lunatic right-wing ideologues, in fact it is the only effective antidote, as it explicitly contradicts the tales of racial superiority that have been peddled by the unethical to manipulate the gormless since the end of the 19th century. Here, now, is a story that everyone can participate in, because it sets out in a clear and unambiguous form exactly what happened, when, where, with whom, and why.

“Integration” when used to talk about migrants is racism

Do a Google search with the words “Alan Tudge” and “integration” and you get a few News Corp stories applauding the minister’s stance as well as one from the Guardian dated 20 July about an idea put forward by the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to introduce a “values” test for migrants. The first three paragraphs of this last story contain a lot of material:

Australia will consider adding a “values test” for those considering permanent residency in order to protect its “extraordinarily successful” multicultural society, Malcolm Turnbull said. 

The prime minister confirmed what his citizenship and multicultural minister Alan Tudge told the Australia/UK Leadership Forum overnight, where he floated the idea of a “values” test to fend off “segregation”. 

Tudge told his London audience “our ship is slightly veering towards a European separatist multicultural model and we want to pull it back to be firmly on the Australian integrated path”.

The notion that Australia somehow borrowed multiculturalism from Europe is just plain wrong. Multiculturalism was first introduced in Australia as official government policy in 1973 under the ALP of Gough Whitlam. To his eternal credit, the Liberal Party’s Malcolm Fraser, who succeeded Whitlam as PM, kept the policy in place. When Whitlam made that historic decision Australia was only the second country in the world to adopt multiculturalism as official government policy. The first had been Canada. Europe copied Australia, not the other way round.

And the policy is a cornerstone of the peaceful society that we all enjoy, despite attempts by the Liberal Party to disturb the peace. Our security services rely on good relations with minorities in order to properly do their jobs. Without the trust that goes with tolerating (for example) the burqa in public, their work would be impossible and we would be having more people killed in the centre of Melbourne instead of just one by crazy ideologues in cars.

Once more the Liberal Party shows just how far away from “liberalism”, the ideal held out for the scrutiny of the people of the Commonwealth in the 1950s when the name was adopted, it has travelled. The 1950s and 1960s were a kinder, more tolerant era. The university library at the ANU in Canberra is named after Robert Menzies, the politician who made the name change. It is a building that is unapologetically Modernist in design, much like the Reserve Bank in Sydney, which was built at around the same time.

Such buildings were meant to say something about the new political settlement that ended WWII, a settlement where migrants were welcomed regardless of whether they could speak the language, so that they could lead meaningful lives and provide for the children the government wanted them to have in order to support the economy.

Words like “assimilation” and “integration” are codewords for racism, put out there in the community by cowardly Tories in order to appeal to the baser instincts of the outliers on the loony right. You put the thumb screws on migrants and stupid people applaud. It’s pure dog-whistling.

The address that Fraser Anning made to the Senate yesterday during which he called holding a plebiscite to limit immigration the “final solution”, was part of a play for power. Anning represents a small party with its base in far-north Queensland. Queensland is a funny state where the regions have a large degree of influence related to their distance from the state capital. People in FNQ call Brisbaneites “Mexicans” because they come from south of the border (which they want to draw at Rockhampton).

Anning’s carefully-chosen words are aimed at rustling up support among his base by riling the hated elites in NSW and Victoria. It’s exactly like Leyonhjelm’s attack on Senator Hanson-Young: it is designed to garner support and he has achieved his aim beautifully. There’s no way not to cover this kind of dog-whistling but if you do cover it you are doing just as much harm as good.

The regions are crying out for migrants, who usually settle in the big cities, and don't care where they come from as long as they settle down in town and get jobs. And the crowning irony of all of this of course is that it was rural Queensland who were as much against the marriage equality ‘Yes’ vote as were the migrant enclaves of western Sydney.

African gangs: must be something in the water

On 15 November last year I wrote about the results from the marriage equality postal vote. In that poll, 17 electorates voted ‘No’ when asked if they thought the law governing marriage in Australia should be changed to allow people of the same sex to marry. Of those 17 electorates, 12 were in the Sydney metropolitan area. Of those, nine electorates had large concentrations of people who had stated in the 2016 Census that their religion was either Islam or Hinduism. These were the electorates of Barton, Blaxland, Chifley, Fowler, Greenway, McMahon, Parramatta, Watson and Werriwa.

Of the remaining five electorates that voted ‘No’, two were in Melbourne’s metropolitan area: Bruce and Calwell. Both electorates have significant concentrations of Muslims.

The other electorates that voted ‘No’ were all rural seats in Queensland.

If you look at the 2016 Census figures that show ethnicity, Sydney has more people born overseas.

• Both parents born overseas: 60,420
• Father only born overseas: 150,269
• Mother only born overseas: 108,726
• Both parents born in Australia: 798,863

For Melbourne the figures are similar but not as large.

• Both parents born overseas: 47,126
• Father only born overseas: 136,637
• Mother only born overseas: 99,278
• Both parents born in Australia: 779,973

So it seems that in Sydney the heavy concentrations of migrants in specific areas (go to Lakemba or Auburn for Pakistani or Lebanese food; to Hurstville or Ashfield for Chinese; to Harris Park for Indian; to Blacktown for Filipino or Punjabi) serve to give people a more solid sense of identity that sustains them in their daily lives. In Melbourne, migrants tend to be more evenly spread out in the broader community, and seem to be less concentrated in small enclaves. That might be the reason for the African gangs panic. Or else there’s something in the water in the southern capital that makes the place prone to unwarranted panic. It should also be noted that the numbers of Africans in Australia is so vanishingly small that the Australian Bureau of Statistics does not even single them out for counting in their figures unless they were born in South Africa. In which case they are more likely to be white.

Refugees are like the children of dysfunctional families

Last month I wrote a blogpost about identity politics and how it has failed to help many of the groups of people that rely on it to sustain them in their communities. The post was titled ‘When identity politics start to fail’ and it got the normal number of pageviews, neither good nor bad. But the refugee problem that keeps popping up reminded me of that post and what I had said in it, and brings me back to the topic.

Refugees are like children who have grown up in dysfunctional families where the parents neglect and abuse them. The leaders of countries like Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan and Myanmar, where most of the world’s refugees come from, rule in the absence of functional representative government, often at the point of a gun, and marginalise large segments of their populations while getting rich in office from corrupt practices. China is helping countries like this (Cambodia is another one it helps) because it refuses to give its people the power to choose their own leaders. With this example before them, these corrupt nations think that you don’t need democracy to be successful, and so they drag their feet on reform and use the military to maintain their power (Egypt and Thailand are other examples here).

But their leaders refuse to import the kinds of ideas that they and their people need in order to live productive, healthy lives in the pursuit of happiness. Nationalism and a kind of stubborn pride helps them to keep such ideas out of the polis. This is where identity politics fail. It helps you to feel good about yourself but it can also stop you from learning things if they are wrapped in packaging that you don’t like. The parents indulge their base appetites and the children, the refugees, become the problem of the developed world, which are like foster homes for the entire global community.

The stories these leaders and their people tell themselves in order to justify the status quo are not working and the postcolonial narrative peddled by intellectual elites in those countries and in the developed world, inspired by the nonsensical claptrap of postmodern theory, only functions to keep them ignorant and prey to any stray compulsion that overtakes them while they go about their daily lives. They have, in manty cases, lost the kind of connection to tradition (such as a royal family) that helps to sustain people by giving them a good example that can help regulate their everyday conduct.

Religion, which binds some of these communities together, fails because it tends to be at war with democracy practically everywhere (Turkey and Iran come to mind). Other ways that people use to generate cohesion in their communities, such as tribes or languages (think Afghanistan or Myanmar), also work against the basic aims of human rights because they create minorities that are abused by partisan ruling classes. There are tribal groupings in developed economies but these tend to align closely with the parties that exist in the political system. You are a “leftie” or a “conservative” or a person belonging to some other category that derives from the system of government itself, so there is usually no fundamental conflict between your personal allegiance and your political views.

People in developing countries are fed a lot of rubbish at the top and at the bottom, though both high culture and popular culture, and are for the most part unable to correctly read the messages that come out of the developed world by way of the products of the mainstream western culture industries such as rock music and cinema. They haven’t got the cognitive tools they need to learn the lessons these artefacts embody for everyone else and they dismiss the whole package of western values because they find that some aspects of western culture to be in conflict with their own tastes.

But we know that the people in these countries want to have the same things that people in the west enjoy: a fair go. The opportunity to get ahead based on talent, hard work, and the inherent gifts that nature has endowed you with. Just look at the name of the political party that Recep Tayyip Erdogan leads in Turkey. In Turkish it’s known as the AKP, but the English translation is “Justice and Development Party”.

You get the government you deserve, goes the old adage. It’s not just the leaders in these countries that are at fault, it’s entire populations that are making life unbearable for so many. And because so many of the communities that Trump caustically calls “shitholes” have not developed the cognitive tools that can enable them to properly handle the technologies that come out of the west, they then become dangerous to their neighbours as though a child had been given a loaded gun to play with (Russia is a classic example of this). It’s like the famous line Jack Nicholson playing Colonel Nathan R. Jessup used in the 1992 film ‘A Few Good Men’: “You can’t handle the truth!” Given the tools to kill, stupid people merely choose to kill. It becomes, “You can’t handle this technology!”

What to do about this seemingly intractable problem of unweaned populations suddenly finding themselves in an adult world? Last Thursday I made a half-tongue-in-cheek blogpost suggesting that we should train up young emissaries at our universities in the theory and practice of western civilisation and send them out with the task of spreading the cognitive tools developing nations need to fully function in the modern world. I dubbed them “soft-power shock troops”.

At the end of the post, I added that private corporations might be asked to help pay for such people because politically-stable countries make better markets for their products, and they would in the end benefit from the spread of reason that would follow. But maybe another way to get results would be to tie development aid to goals to do with governance. So in order for funding to continue, target countries need to meet agreed-upon markers in terms of liberalisation of the political system and the establishment of a viable civil society.

The post got a fair number of views but no-one took it very seriously, least of all people in the intellectual elites in the west who have drunk the Kool-Aid of postcolonial theory. People like Noam Chomsky are part of the problem because they feed garbage to people living in the developing world, pointing at figures from our shared history saying, “Blame them!” This device tells people in these countries that they don’t need to change they way they behave, and so naturally they don’t. It exonerates them of responsibility for their criminal actions.

But while the leaders in the developing world are relieved of any burden of responsibility for the wellbeing of the general community by their peers in academia in the west, the refugee problem their conduct produces shows no signs of evaporating. Quite the opposite, in fact. Tens of thousands of them cross borders in an effort to enter Europe and America every year. Many more try to get to Australia but are stopped by measures deriving from bipartisan policies. These debates are certainly not going to go away any time soon. As long as the dysfunctional families of the developing world continue to abuse and neglect their children, refugees will continue to seek safe havens in the foster homes of the global community.

America, the sick man of the West

Playing to his ignorant base (ignorant because of cost-cutting meted out to the public education system over generations, which has left an entire generation of Americans unable to think for themselves), Donald Trump blames globalisation for the endemic wealth inequality that bedevils a country when the real problem is that democracy itself, along with its fruits, has been sold, like everything else in the place, to the highest bidder. The managerial class and its lobbyists in Washington DC have so skewed the system in America that the ordinary worker effectively has no voice. Hence workers’ frustration with the status quo.

America is a failed experiment where everything has nothing apart from a price. Encouraged by extremists animated within the dynamics of the old Cold War, politicians and businesses have let the commons be ransacked and pillaged over generations, and extreme wealth inequality has led to the election to the executive of a fool and a demagogue. American democracy is broken. Unalloyed by an effective commons, capitalism there is out of control. The  political divide is in fact the mere obverse of the same coin that has created conditions where an unbridled free market mindset feeds the greed that keeps most people in it poor.

The judicial system is broken. Judges are elected to office based on their ideological predisposition, rather than their probity or wisdom or knowledge of the law. This systemic corruption goes all the way up to the highest court in the land, where party appointments ruin any chance the country has to escape the strictures of political bias. And gerrymandering of federal electoral boundaries to favour Republicans is so bad because of the fact that there is no federal electoral commission to draw them; boundaries are set by partisan state governments.

The minimum wage (currently set at $7 per hour) is so low that ordinary workers often have to keep two or more jobs just to pay the rent and be able to feed their children. The prisons are filled to bursting with inmates inspired by poverty and poor education to commit crimes. America has more people in jail per head of population than any other country in the world. It’s healthcare costs are outrageous. It costs America 50 percent more than the OECD average to keep people well but mortality strikes Americans on average three years earlier than the OECD average. Your employer pays your healthcare and if you have no job you cannot go to the doctor, so employees are rendered more pliant in the workplace.

In Australia, where we enjoy a much more effective system because the commons (embodied in such institutions as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the excellent state public schools, the Australian Electoral Commission, Fair Work Australia, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, and others) are still relatively intact, meaning that ordinary people can afford to feed their children and give them a good education, the Liberal Party is intent on making us more like the sick man of the West, even though we know that this does not help people live their lives. In fact it hurts them in many ways.

The sale of the electricity generation and distribution systems in New South Wales, to give a recent example of how bad things can get, has led to exorbitant retail price rises there. The sequestering of unconventional gas and its conversion to liquid in Queensland so that it can be exported to overseas markets, means that Victorians, especially, who rely on gas heaters to keep them warm in winter, are paying more for their comfort.

Privatisation and the dismantling of the commons does not function to help ordinary people. It merely favours a small clique of rich men and women who sit at the apex of the corporate pyramid among the ranks of the rent-seekers who choke the ordinary worker by quarantining the productivity gains they produce in the form of high salaries and share dividends. Even the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia now says unions need to have more bargaining power so that wage increases can be negotiated across the board. Spending money locally is good for the economy. Giving more money to a single mother with two children earning $70,000 per year is going to stimulate the retail sector in a fashion that is much more effective than you would see if you gave $1000 a month to someone earning $200,000 per year.

America is the sick man of the West but it continues to bedevil Australians because ideologues here anachronistically hold it up as a beacon of freedom; most of the things make it deserve that cachet lie deep in its past. Russia ruined America a long time ago, many years before Putin arrived on the scene as a player in domestic politics there.

Privatising the ABC is typical of the brain-farts of extremists in the Liberal Party. The ABC is one of the best things about democracy in Australia, bringing people together, left and right, in one place. It gives people with different political views a place where they can gather to discuss ideas and policy options in a rational way. It binds us as one unit and strengthens our social fabric in many ways. It forms part of the essential glue that keeps society together, uniting us in a way that few other institutions do. The ABC also funds progressive and innovative programming that the commercial networks would never risk their dollars backing.

Ideologues like Murdoch hate the ABC not because it gives their own products competition in an open marketplace but because it means that people have access to accurate news and so the men in positions of influence like himself cannot manipulate the opinions of the population with their biased editorials. The ABC’s rigorous editorial policies keep it impartial so that it performs in a way that hands-on owners like Murdoch detest. It dilutes their power. Power they use to get outcomes they want in order to further their business goals, such as hobbling the National Broadband Network.
In the final analysis, by cutting funds to the ABC the Coalition is saying that they want ordinary people to be badly-informed and easily-manipulable, just like their cuts to funding for universities are designed to do. Ignorant people vote conservative. (At least America can still teach one useful thing.)

Study of western civilisation need not be a bigot’s dream

On 14 April this year I put up a post on this blog titled, ‘We need to study western civilisation again.’ This was long before the brouhaha about the Ramsay Centre began to roil the Twittersphere and raise people’s blood pressure. The Australian National University announced last week that it would not take up the offer of the Ramsay Centre to set up a chair of western civilisation there, but other universities, including my alma mater, Sydney University, are considering it. Academics there have been using social media to gather signatures on a petition designed to ensure that such a project never gets off the ground.

On the ABC’s Q and A program on Monday night there was a question from the audience addressed to the university’s vice-chancellor, Michael Spence, who was on the panel, about the Ramsay Centre’s proposals. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, which I subscribe to, Spence said:

"We don't think a course that evaluates the contribution of western civilisation makes sense, nor indeed a course that compares civilisations," he said. 

"But there is on the table the opportunity for support for study in the humanities, and we have an extraordinarily rich tradition in the humanities, 147 units of study in what you might call core western civilisations. 

"If there's an opportunity for funding for study in the humanities, that's a conversation we've got to have. The question is, on what terms we can have it."

Other views have emerged as well, including those of Elizabeth Stone, principal of Queenwood girl’s secondary school in Mosman. She said in a story in the same paper on the weekend that while we still have a fair way to go to achieve parity in terms of things like pay and leadership, women in the West are much better off than their counterparts in other places. She says more than this, though.

I think Spence is right in that we need to avoid an ugly, unthinking exceptionalism, but I’m in general agreement with Stone and I think it’s time to take a step back and look at what’s really at stake here. While it’s regrettable that unpleasant characters such as John Howard and Tony Abbott – men with disappointing and socially-conservative views – are associated with the Ramsay Centre, the possibility for fruitful study in this case is actually quite real.

When you look at other places in the world, such as China and Iran, what strikes you as so valuable in the West is our appetite for public argument. In many places, the types of debate that we see emerging around the subject of the teaching of western civilisation in the public sphere would not be tolerated. In China, they could shut down your social media account, put you in jail, or torment your relatives, if you publicly said things critical of the government. In other countries, the government might just shut down Twitter altogether to prevent debate taking place.

So the current debate is prime facie evidence of the vitality of western civilisation. It is par for the course. The roots of our Manichaean disposition go all the way back to the ancient Greeks, where topics were discussed publicly in debates involving free men. (Slaves and women, of course, were not encouraged to participate openly in civic life.) You might even go back further than that to find them, to the pantheon of the ancient Mesopotamians. Their families of gods were the subject of much discussion, forming material for stories that helped the communities that belonged to that civilisation to stay strong and for their people to live meaningful lives together.

Much of the distracting noise currently being generated around this subject centres, of course, on the gigantic legacy of Karl Marx, as though he were somehow an alien suddenly arrived from outer space instead of a German writer with ideas so radical that the only place in Europe where he could safely do his work was England, which had a long history itself of tolerance for intellectual endeavour, learned over centuries of conflict where many people lost their lives, parts of their bodies, or at least their livelihoods because of what they said publicly. Marx is just as much a part of western civilisation as Winston Churchill.

One of the people that Stone referred to in the story where she is quoted is Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist and public commentator whose life in the 18th century still provides inspiration for women around the world today. There is even a train station on the Northern Line in Sydney named after her, so we know that this infatuation with her talents has long been shared by people in the broader community here. Wollstonecraft represents one of the best parts of the 18th century, a time when women unfortunately had few legal rights compared to men, and when the dead hand of the state religion was so oppressive that people who did not live their lives within the communion of the Church of England could not even get government jobs.

After she died from complications arising from childbirth, in 1797, her husband William Godwin published a memoir of her life. It appeared in 1798 and was received grimly by the public. It served to tarnish Wollstonecraft’s reputation for generations due to what was portrayed in it: by the standards of the day an unorthodox lifestyle. While the Victorians were by-and-large in favour of social improvement, they were also very much inspired by the more evangelical forms of Christianity, that had previously been embraced mainly by extreme elements in the community.

Wollstonecraft had had a daughter, Fanny, who was born out of wedlock in 1794 and whose father was Gilbert Imlay, a freewheeling American businessman. Godwin accepted little Fanny into his household after Wollstonecraft attempted suicide and they had forged an intimate relationship. The daughter born to the marriage of Godwin and Wollstonecraft was Mary Shelley, who published the novel ‘Frankenstein’ in 1818 (200 years ago this year). Young Mary was the wife of the brilliant and iconoclastic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The story of the birth of the monster who has inspired millions of children throughout the world by way of the products of popular culture is exhilarating and could form part of any degree in western civilisation, if one were established at an Australian university next year.

Man-made monsters continue to bedevil people, of course. The separation of church and state is just as important, in many parts of the world, as is the right to choose the method of worship your own conscience dictates. Both represent freedoms that have been fought for over centuries as people have worked to discover how to live together in society at the same time as they respect the freedom of the individual. Who should govern? Under what conditions can the state tax you? What kinds of books can be published? What is art?

At each step in the journey to where we are now – a fragile place we know because of the dead hand of autocracy that lies across much of the world, and because of the equally shocking spectre of demagoguery that is starting to appear in many democracies as economic inequality rises – we see seeds for future growth. Such new beginnings can be good for humanity or they can, perversely, be destructive. The journey is never over, but time (so far as we know) regrettably travels only in one direction.

Returning to that April blogpost, I recommend that you go and read it, it’s full of interesting insights, including an analysis of the process of nominalisation whence everything that we hold dear derives, including the progressive political views that animate so many people in the West, including me. In the end it is not Marx that is the enemy of freedom. The political left has helped the West to remain productive and stable, just as Parliament enabled the royal family in Britain to remain in place well past its logical use-by date, by giving the working classes a legitimate focus for their energies and a rallying point around which they can gather peacefully in order to secure changes in the polis that are in their interests. The political left is democracy’s insurance policy, its safety valve.

Because teaching western civilisation should not be about shutting down the arguments coming from the left of politics in developed countries. That would just be silly (although going by the examples set by such dullards as Tony Abbott and John Howard, that’s probably about all many supporters of the idea aspire to). The real enemies of western civilisation are the two kleptocratic bastard children of Marx – Russia and China – whose leaders stubbornly refuse to give their people the right to choose who leads them. Their influence needs to be combated and teaching western civilisation can be a fruitful way to marshal the forces of good in a battle against autocracy that looms dark on the horizon.

Sunday 17 June to Saturday 23 June is refugee week in Australia. This is all very well, but as I noted in the April blogpost already referred to, refugees continue to enthusiastically travel to developed countries. Perhaps what we need are soft-power shock troops who can be sent out in the service of good governance, like Mormon elders, young men and women with big hearts and white short-sleeved shirts and black name badges, to transport the methods of democracy and disinterested office-serving to any number of countries around the world that seem intent on surrendering up legions of unwanted citizens as regular as clockwork every month and every year, year-in and year-out, on leaky boats and on rattling train cars. Donald Trump could sign onto the scheme, and import Australian graduates with degrees in western civilisation to help improve the quality of government in developing countries in Central and South America, where they could help to stamp out the corruption that corrodes the social fabric in dozens of otherwise-viable democracies.

Soft-power shock troops would have to be personable and intelligent, of course. The same feelings that keep our societies united and strong also tend to exclude ideas that come from outside them. You’d need to smuggle in the seeds of good governance wrapped in some sort of gaudy cloth, such as economic success, lest they be rejected by natural human impulses fuelled by ugly nationalistic exceptionalism. The same things that make the Communist Party of China dismiss as “Western” the freedoms that its people so desperately crave that in their millions they post their money overseas willy-nilly, so that it can be invested in real estate, a sure bet in stable Australia, because you honestly doubt what the future holds for you and your children at home.

The type of scheme I’m describing would also be good for the arts graduates (Americans, probably motivated by the kind of pedantic hair-splitting that underpins much of their “innovation”, routinely refer to the “humanities”) that would be generated by teachers professing expertise in western civilisation. So often in the past, people with good intentions and BAs have left academia and gone to work in dull desk jobs. A guaranteed job with the challenging soft-power shock troops, an avenue with clear career paths that will be prized globally for the quality of its members, would help make sure the new BA holders get on the ladder to property ownership and the kind of solid superannuation account they can rely on in retirement.

Western countries already send people to countries with developing economies and rudimentary democratic systems in order to scrutinise the conduct of elections, so there are plenty of precedents for the soft-power shock troops I propose to establish on the back of the creation of degrees in western democracy. They could also be sponsored by private enterprise, on the basis that a more robust democracy is better able to foment economic growth and provide new and profitable markets for such companies as Apple, Microsoft, Nestle, Unilever, and Johnson & Johnson.

Periodisation and reform

Someone put up on Facebook the other day an article about our habit of periodisation: giving names to different generations of people coming through in society. So we might talk about Baby Boomers or Millennials with the same familiarity as we talk about the music of the 1970s or of the 1990s. We do it with ease and facility. It’s almost second nature in fact. And so some people are asking whether it is still useful to use such labels to classify people despite the existence in their character or education of attributes that might clash with the stereotypes we hold about them.

And it made me think about periodisation in general and what purpose it serves, and has served in the past. It occurred to me that the big categories that we use to segment recorded history – like “Renaissance” and “Enlightenment” – were first developed in the 19th century by scholars working in academia. This was a time of important reform movements in Europe inspired by the American Revolution of the previous century. The English Chartists of the 1830s through to the 1850s pressed their government for electoral reform so that a larger number of people could receive the franchise. The British establishment also took steps to remove the Test Acts, which had for centuries excluded Catholics from holding public office, from the statutes. Big changes were afoot, so big in fact that they served to ensure in the long term the stability of the constitutional monarchy in the United Kingdom, while kings and princes on the continent would lose their crowns over the ensuing years as communities pushed to take power that was not voluntarily ceded to them.

Queen Victoria appeared at the beginning of this period in the UK, and her reign has become emblematic for the reform movement for many writers. Also notable at the time was a man named William Morris, who with a group of friends in 1848 formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the first art movement. The Romantics who inspired Morris and his friends had not applied that sobriquet to themselves, and as often as not it had been used as a form of opprobrium by critics. The difference this time was that the Pre-Raphaelites applied the name to themselves quite openly.

It was done in a spirit of reform and in opposition to the industrial economy with its machines and poverty, that surrounded them. The painters in the group admired Medieval stories and took as their model in painting the early Renaissance painters of northern Italy, such as Giotto and Mantegna. Morris would go on to convert his interest in manufacturing to found the Arts and Crafts movement, a group of thinkers who wanted to tame the excesses of design in the industrial age. They felt among other things that the form of an object should follow its function, and this impulse would in later generations inspire the continental thinkers who founded the Bauhaus, which led to what we know now as Modernism in architecture.

This process of critique and synthesis that is characteristic of modernity started therefore during a time of intense change as technology altered the delineations of people’s lives in Europe and America. We still live in the shadow of such men and women today. Essential to the process is the ability to talk about what you are interested in, and it is in the context of this need that periodisation appears. If you cannot name something you cannot discuss it and therefore you cannot improve it. Making names to measure time and segment it through the use of manageable and widely-shared semantic referents is essential to the process of reform and improvement, which should always be out goal as we move onward tied to that crazy arrow, Time, which despite what we are told by scientists seems only ever to travel in one direction.

We need to study Western civilisation again

This month on the news we heard that a number of African athletes in Queensland come to compete in the Commonwealth Games had gone missing, presumably with an intent to seek asylum here. In Australia, the word “refugee” is a term as politically loaded as it is in Europe, where tens of thousands of people embark on the risky business of crossing the Mediterranean Sea from Africa in frail boats every year, landing on islands in Italy or Greece. Here, we patrol the seas between Australia and Indonesia, where refugees come by plane to buy passage on flimsy boats, and turn them back.

People just won’t stop coming unbidden to countries in the developed world, and you have to ask why. John Keane in his 2009 book on democracy goes some way toward explaining such notions as the idea of disinterested “office” pioneered by the Medieval church, in order to understand how government can be conducted in the interests of the community, rather than for reasons of private gain. And what is the meaning of “reputation”, and why is it so important to protect yours? Why will some people still not swear oaths in official contexts? Such issues are germane to any discussion about the teaching of Western civilisation in schools.

I was looking into the teaching of Western civilisation and came across an article published in the New York Post, a populist rag that caters to people living in that famously creative city. Apparently, the teaching of Western civilisation in universities in America was popular until the Civil Rights movement of the 60s and 70s resulted in many institutions dropping such courses from their curriculas in favour of courses on world history. But I think, along with some people in the Liberal Party in Australia, I am afraid to say, circumstances have changed and it is time to revisit the policy.

The reason is complex. Originally, everything came from the arts. Schools of applied sciences, such as medical and engineering departments in universities, didn’t start to appear until the late-19th or early-20th centuries. Before that, people who wanted to study “natural philosophy” or the mechanic arts would enrol in special schools set up in the regions in England, often run by people affiliated with radical Protestant churches, to learn what they needed to know to run the machines that animated the industrial revolution. But the sciences had flourished since the Renaissance because many minds had participated in scientific debate in the public sphere.

In the 18th century and continuing into the succeeding century, miscellaneous journals that people could subscribe to that contained articles about new scientific discoveries alongside reviews of popular works of poetry and fiction, were being published in England. The novel as we understand it today emerged in the same era and was finally perfected by Jane Austen in the early-19th century.

What is certain is that all scientific discovery, from the time of the earliest vernacular translation of the Bible out of its originary languages (Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic) around 1520, occurred through the process of nominalisation. You take a sentence or phrase or clause and your form a new word to mean that same phrase or sentence or clause. You think of a word like “implement” or “sect”. And then you allow it to be deployed in other sentences with qualifying adjectives in order to create meaning and to further an argument. Or else you coin a verb like “evolve” and you allow it to be used in sentences with qualifying adverbs where it can be used to do the same things. In such ways, the progress of knowledge occurred, fuelled by the new technology of moveable type (invented in Germany around 1440), which brought down the costs of books to affordable levels, allowing ordinary people to accumulate libraries and become active participants in the debate. All knowledge that we have today derives from this simple cultural mechanism. It was an accretive progress, that occurred across many generations and involved whole communities participating in various ways in the debate. But it was primarily a process of discussion of ideas.

In the last century, the author CP Snow talked about the “two cultures” and regretted that people versed in the arts had little knowledge of the sciences. Today, the problem is the reverse. People who understand the technological implementations of fundamental science lack the background they need in the fine and literary arts to allow them to meaningfully negotiate the future. How do we use the technologies that we are inventing? Can you divorce high technology from the democratic process? Do we need a bill of rights for robots? Such questions are immediately pressing but it’s not clear where the answers will come from.

Added to that the continuing decline in importance of religion in the lives of ordinary people in all developed countries, and you find that the fine and literary arts can be positively useful in filling in the gaps that appear in the framework of learning about ethics and morals.

We know that reading novels, for example, helps to bolster feelings of empathy in people who do it. Literary and fine arts education can help to form an important bridge in forming the mental infrastructure that ordinary people need in order to navigate the complexities of modern life. The novel itself is a relatively recent innovation, dating from the 17th century. But it would help us to understand how this dominant form of literature developed and prospered in our cultures, and how has it been viewed at different points in its progress from a novel (literally) form of entertainment, to the main game. And what happened in the meantime to poetry? When did popular culture separate from high culture, and why? Such questions and other similar ones could be covered in a course of study dedicated to Western civilisation, as well as courses designed to show how the process of nominalisation helped to foster scientific progress.

We see the importance of such study all the time. When we read a tweet lie “Suicide Is A Society-Wide Problem That Needs A Society-Wide Solution”, we can understand that what is needed is an educative process that helps people across the whole of the community to find a solution to a pressing social issue. Where do you start to teach such ideas? In secondary schools, because secondary school education is mandatory in all developed economies.

Is the 21st century a promising age for autocrats?

Last year we had the 19th party congress rubber-stamping decisions already made about China’s leadership behind closed doors, and this year we have Putin’s “reelection” in a rigged popularity contest where the only viable contender was forbidden by corrupt justices from running. There were staged elections in Egypt. Cambodia’s Hun Sen, in power for the past 40 years, visited Sydney for an ASEAN meeting. In late December and early January there were widespread protests in Iran over official corruption. The only place that has been quiet has been Thailand, where the generals are still in power having ousted the elected prime minister in 2014. Yes, it was that long ago and still no elections there. I’ll have a pad see ew, thanks.

China and Russia are making it easier for petty autocrats like Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and General Prayut Chan-o-cha to take and keep power. And the resurgent prevalence of autocracy is being driven by resentment. There is a French term for it: “revanchism”. The term dates from the inter-war years when the German people were mobilised by the Nazis through a democratic process they ultimately dismantled to seek revenge on the allied powers following the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, which formed the full-stop to WWI. In China and in Russia the people are powering resurgent nationalism in order that their countries can lay claim to what they see as their deserved places in the world.

You might say that something similar is happening in the US, but at least there Trump has a limited tenure, although an Australian I know who lives in the US and has done for 40 years, worries about Trump resorting in the end to dictatorship.

China justifies its power grab by claiming that Western standards in the province of human rights are alien to its culture, but the fact is that they are happy to take advantage of everything else that Europe has offered up that is constructive and meaningful, such as technology and science. Even though these things derived from the same Humanist push that resulted in the emergence of representative democracy.

In the beginning, there was no boundary separating the ideals of the researcher in the physical sciences and the struggle for individual fiat. The desire for accurate translations of the Bible from its constituent originary languages into local vernaculars combined with the rediscovery of the classics of Rome to fuel scholarship in northern Europe. The popular journals that published treatises describing new scientific discoveries for the benefit of the broader populace also critiqued imaginative fictions describing injustices righted by sublunary heroes. The men who voted for local representatives in Parliament also ran the companies that converted scientific discoveries into useful technologies. The children of those men formed communities of opinion that helped to dislodge oppressive laws from the statutes.

An ironic twist in this derives of course from the fact that the powerhouse of the Enlightenment project, the Protestant middle classes, were manifestly sustained by revanchism in their personal and professional lives. They were naturally Christians and so relied on a religion founded on a fantasy of revenge over an injustice ultimately corrected through the so-called Ascension. Being Protestants, they were doubly motivated by revanchist sentiment because their breakaway churches were founded on the back of claims of corruption within the preeminent church of Catholicism.

The working classes as well were furthermore motivated to support the leadership in countries like England through the use of othering. Although their wages barely kept them alive and infant mortality was a crushing weight on morale because of disease resulting from poor access to clean drinking water, the men of England freely gave their allegiance to an unbroken line of kings and queens and patriotically lost life and limb in war after war waged against the hated French, and for novelty the hated Dutch. The way that popular culture of the time painted national heroes in hues deeply coloured by nationalistic exceptionalism is a template for how popular sentiment in China is manufactured by the Communist Party at will against the Japanese, for example, or against the Americans in Iran by the mullahs.

You can see where this is all heading. Here are aspects of European history that the leaders of China and Russia can positively embrace because they ideally fit their narratives. They say that the West has for too long humiliated their national pride and it is time to rebalance the ledger, and exact exemplary punishment. So hail to the chief!

Traditional narratives of revenge are easy to come by in any number of secular books in any case – take the fairytale Cinderella for example – and so even though they might profess unease about accusations of autocracy levelled at Putin and Xi the people in those countries still accede to the temptation to come out into the streets to support them. The 21st century promises a rocky ride unless the Russians and the Chinese can be tempted to alter the narrative and force their leaders to surrender temporal power to the demos.

Just as a coda to this little essay, it struck me the other night when thinking about this post that Francesco Petrarca, who launched the Renaissance by writing Italian-language love poetry and reintroducing the letters of Cicero to the popular imagination, had relocated his household to the south of France where he heard the French songs of the troubadours. So the Enlightenment project, from which stems everything that we prize, was begun by an immigrant.

A secularist manifesto

I was talking with my brother about a spiritual side for secularism but he objected saying that the difference between those who believe in God and the rest of us is that only one of these categories of people gives credence to an ephemeral and completely disembodied force in the universe. According to him, secularists must also be materialists, people who lay the blame for and identify the roosts of all phenomena – from the birth of stars in far-flung galaxies to the emergence of ideas inside the individual human brain – in causes rooted in the laws of physics.

I had been talking with him about dad, who passed away seven years ago next March, and mentioned a book titled ‘The Songlines’ I reviewed on this blog on 29 May 2010. It was published in 1987 by British author Bruce Chatwin. Dad gave it to me in 1988 for my birthday when I was 26 years old and inscribed it in the front. The book was among our first postmodern cultural products to examine the unique mythology of Australian Aborigines, whose culture we know now goes back 65.000 years after their ancestors emerged from Africa as part of an outlandish migration.

The “songlines” of the title are the stories told by Aboriginal elders about the country they live in. They believe that the country will disappear if the songs are not recited. The book compares the lifestyles of the Aboriginal inhabitants of an outback settlement with those of the white inhabitants. In the second half of the book Chatwin does an about-turn and looks at the cultural processes that formed his own personal mythology, those points of reference and ways of thinking that contrived to make him who he was. It was a self-conscious and reflective response to a challenge laid down by an ancient race of people who he identified as foreign to himself.

Chatwin wrote several travel books and had a special interest in nomads. Although the book occupied him for several years leading up to his death in 1989 from HIV-AIDS it wasn’t his final publication. In a way, it functions as a map defining belief among the inhabitants of the settlement. Whereas the white inhabitants seem to have lost the anchor point for their moral compass, the Aborigines retain vital connections to the land that sustain them. Or most of them.

Those who profess belief in a religion and thus belong to a religious tribe tend to emphasise the dangers lying in wait for the unwary in a putative world where value is allocated purely on the basis of material worth, an imagined place where belief in a God is entirely absent and there is no spiritual aspect to a person’s life. But these are merely self-interested attempts to buttress belief in what is more and more evidently a superfluous deity. Like Chatwin, each one of us carries within him- or herself the traces of our own personal mythology. We recognise fellow travellers or enemies based on the patterns they inscribe in the fabric of shared discourse and through the personal points of reference they evidence. We have lists of benevolent spirits – artists, writers, performers, singers, statesmen, elders – who serve to embody the ways we allocate value in our lives. We worship at personal shrines.

People take the measure of us by the points of reference that we recite as we lay out the markers of these tribes in public. We might give a special value to a couple of lines in a popular song, or a theme spelled out in a book by a favourite writer. We pledge fealty to such moments in our personal songlines by invoking arcane words in our conversations with others, who we meet on our diurnal rounds, and who might recognise shared experience thereby. We also might define who we are by reference to tribes we do not belong to, and describe them in less than flattering terms. People are sensitive to the presence or absence of such markers and respond with approbation or censure based on indices that reflect their own personal value systems. We validate our personal Gods through such discourses.

But whichever tribe we belong to we all still need to live together in one society. In a secular democracy individual agency is implied in the vote, and rules are made by the majority of the people in the jurisdiction. All that is required is to describe the boundaries of the electorate, to formulate the criteria according to which we include or exclude who is entitled to cast a vote. In such a world, people decide in the absence of an all-knowing deity. God has been supplanted by the majority.

In the secular West, important points of reference for democrats can be found in the 17th century in the United Kingdom. It was a period of great change and a time when the boundaries between religious and the political concerns were being drawn, sometimes by force of arms and at other times through public debate. Notables at the waystations in the development of the institution of pluralist democracy are such men as William Tyndale, who made the first accurate translation of the Bible into English, and William Harvey, who confirmed pulmonary circulation, and women such as Mary Wollstonecraft, who advocated strongly for the rights of women at a time when they were treated as less than men, and Mary Lee, a suffragette who demanded the full participation of women in the political life of Australia.

But remarkable icons collected in our procession through life are not the only things that serve to identify us as true-believers to others met on the journey. A crucial date is 1620, when Francis Bacon’s ‘Novum Organum’ was published. This is a philosophical treatise advocating for the first time undertaking what we know now as the scientific method. An openness to varied experience and a concomitant willingness to deduce the true causes of things from accurately-observed evidence rather than sophistically rely on old formulations inherited as received ideas, also serve to characterise the secularist. We demonstrate our commitment to secularism by privileging a plurality of viewpoints and being open to new inputs. We don’t stubbornly circumscribe our experience in order to bolster within it any particular set of referents. Credible value can be assigned to countless objects within the limitless boundaries of our purview, as Chatwin discovered in his travels. As is true for sexual reproduction, diversity in the demos equals strength.

Such an open and inclusive way of living truly characterises the attitudes of a community that is ever on the point of discovering things. It is equally not limited to a particular land or environment, but instead uncovers nourishment wherever it finds itself and in the bosom of every people. It is the way of explorers, like Australia’s first people, always on the verge of stumbling upon a new haven to fold into its lore.

Rather than insisting on an origin in a specific place, the true secularist yearns for an ephemeral goal: to be able to identify, name, talk about, and understand every new thing. Rather than a mere thirst for novelty this is a profoundly-relevant admission that the boundaries of experience are forever growing in an endlessly-expanding universe.

I mentioned to my brother that the ultimate origin of the universe – a time that might be delineated by describing the moment just before the big bang – was still obscure, but he said that the concept of time itself is a secular phenomenon, just as much as the concept of space is.

What lies outside the universe remains still to be revealed, however, if it ever can be discovered by people living and using tools that lie entirely within the material realm. But since everything comes from the arts perhaps help is at hand. In order to prove that God does not exist we might therefore need to work to invent an instrument that has as its sole purpose the observation of Him. To build such a device you might need to define from scratch a whole terminology with at its core the ability to give names to and describe the behaviour of invisible things, a panoply of ephemera, a whole world replete with insubstantial desires and faint aspirations. You would need a new set of words equivalent to the first person singular or the notion of “want” or to the idea of “help”. Who would you ask for help if you wanted to start out on such an enterprise?

As a note on the theme of “diversity is strength”: it’s worth noting that another consequence of the religious strife of the 17th century was that Australia was created at Federation with no state religion. This had as much to do with the collective memory of the turmoil of those distant years as it did with the like decision of America’s 18th century founders to eschew an official religion. Even though most people alive at the time would have considered having a religious link necessary to living a good life. If only Australia’s founders had taken a similar view in relation to Asian immigration. In the late-1880s there was popular resistance in the colonies to Chinese immigration and as a result it virtually stopped. The economic depression that beset the colonies in the 1890s may have been milder had their borders been more open. The White Australia Policy introduced in 1901 to keep Asians out survived two world wars. It wasn’t until the 1960s that moves were made to abolish it, and then in 1974 multiculturalism was adopted as official government policy. Not a moment too soon. With high immigration levels Australia now has one of the strongest economies in the world. The photo below shows the Newtown Baptist Church, in Church Street, Newtown. It was open for use in 1870.

Celebration of our criminals exposes a cultural chauvinism

Long before Mark "Chopper" Reid was a household name we had Ned Kelly, a celebrated rogue although a deadly criminal. Nowadays, there are plenty of books about Australian criminals, including Carl Williams, Roger Rogerson, Lindsey Rose, John Ibrahim, Alphonse Gangitano, Richard Kuklinksi, and Robert Farquharson. There are hundreds, probably thousands. And while it's only in the last 40 years or so that as a nation we have come to terms with our convict past, the tide has well and truly turned, and those who can trace their family histories back to the early days of the colony - especially if their forebears were convicts - are happy to enlighten you by announcing the news.

There is a strong demotic streak in Australia. For example, every year when the Archibald Prize exhibition of finalists is held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the TV news always gives viewers notice of the winner of the vaunted Packing Room Prize, where the judge is the head packer working at the gallery. (The head packer's name is Brett Cuthbertson.) The prize is usually given to a conventional portrait of no particular artistic merit, other than its fidelity to nature. Winners of the prize tend to be large, smooth renditions of famous local TV personalities.

But that's not all. Just down the road from the gallery is a statue of Robert Burns, the famous Scottish poet of the 18th century, which was erected in 1905. Burns is most famous for the fact that he was an unlearned farm labourer. (He also wrote the lyrics to one of the most famous songs in existence, 'Auld lang syne', a sentimental ditty everyone is familiar with.) And another statue can also serve to illustrate my point. Outside the Queen Victoria Building on Druitt Street is the statue of the monarch presiding over the street, but next to it is another statue: that of  a Skye Terrier named "Islay", begging above a wishing well. It was erected in 1988.

These three examples of Australian kitsch serve to illustrate the demotic streak in the culture, one that exemplifies a tendency to seek out the lowest common denominator, the ordinary, and the real in preference to the celebrated, the showy, and the artificial. On the other hand, to celebrate criminals - who personify this demotic bias because they offer no challenge to the individual's sense of self (undistinguished, ordinary, and common) - is also to prefer these qualities in preference to the brilliant, the excellent, and the uncommon. It is to say, without any ceremony, "We are plain, unimaginative people whose only aspiration is to be rich."

For the criminal has the same aspirations as the capitalist - the other side of the same coin, so to speak - which is to be at the same time wealthy and drunk, and to gamble on sport. It is so easy to admire the criminal because he or she shares the same goals as the average bloke: to never have to do a lick of work, or to have to strive for some seemingly-unattainable goal. And we're proud of this aspect of ourselves. We consider it to be one of the things that sets us apart from other people. We have a chauvinist's love of our demotic roguery, although it is hardly a point of difference in any real sense: people all over the developed world are happy indulging their baser instincts, providing a poor example to their peers in the developing world.

My relatives, my neighbours, my friends

Offshore detention for indefinite periods of asylum seekers is the policy of both major political parties in Australia because the majority of the Australian people support a policy that results in stopping the arrival of asylum seekers by boat.

There's no point blaming the politicians for the terrible outcomes that we have seen, including sexual assault of adults and children, due to the continued operation of the detention camps. Your neighbour, your friend, your relative are responsible for this impasse.

And if there are 37 babies being returned to detention in the camps, the question you have to ask is "Why?" Where did these babies come from? Well, we know where babies come from and how they are conceived. But how wise is it to make children at a time when you have no home over your head, even no safe place to go to at night, let alone a passport. How can these beleaguered women bring such trouble on themselves that they make children under these circumstances? Unless it is a deliberate manouevre designed to generate a sense of sympathy in their audience. Their audience: you, the Australian people.

Desperate times, as they say ... But not wise. And not responsible. Such highly irresponsible conduct on the part of asylum seekers - let alone how deserving their case is - cannot be indulged with considerate behaviour.

I find the whole debate terribly depressing. On the one hand I believe that we should be welcoming more asylum seekers in Australia. In fact, I have repeatedly called for an asylum seeker-processing office to be established in Jakarta to facilitate immigration to Australia for those who want to come. On the other hand, I'm clearly in the minority here. Most people do not want to see more immigration. The state of the roads in metropolitan Australia and the cost of housing there are such that sympathy for asylum seekers would have to be relatively low.

So although I would like to see more people coming to Australia - it doesn't matter to me if they come by boat from Indonesia or by Qantas jet from somewhere in Africa - the majority of my countrymen and -women hold different ideas. I have to accept that I am in the minority, and as a result of that decision I do not blame politicians for the plight of asylum seekers in detention in offshore camps. It is the will of the people. My relatives, my neighbours, my friends.

I'm grateful that Australia has strong institutions

This corrupt buffoon is Najib Razak, the prime minister of Malaysia. According to a New York Times story he is desperately trying to wriggle out of accusations of corrupt conduct. To that end he has already dispensed with the services of one Malaysian attorney general. The people there are outraged but nothing happens and this slimy leach continues to hold power.

Nothing like this could possibly happen in Australia. The Opposition here would mercilessly taunt the PM for his sins. Meanwhile, the media would whip up a frenzy of outrage within the community, and the community would be heard not only through social media but also through the opinion polls. The government's ratings there would plummet and there would be calls from within the ruling party to change the leadership. It would be a bloodbath the likes of which we have not seen for decades.

We often talk of institutions like political parties, the High Court and government departments. But the range of institutions is wider than just these capital-letter organisations. The Twittersphere, for example, is a recent institution that requires more study to really understand how it works. Some people who use Twitter regularly have become very adept at using it to their personal advantage, but as a general rule it is largely an unknown. It tends to be a bit more of the left than the broader Australian community, for example, because it is still largely made up of fairly early-adopters, people who always tend to be a bit better endowed in the IQ stakes than the average punter. And we know from past studies that there is a direct correlation between IQ and political persuasion, with the smarter people tending to be able to hold more than one thing in their mind at one time, making them more likely to be comfortable with the complexities inherent in progressive stances.

And the media has been understood to be a critical institution in society for a good 200 years, at least since the French Revolution, when it was famously called "the fourth estate". Unfortunately even in a country like Australia the media gets short shrift often. Few people have much sympathy, for example, with its current economic difficulties, difficulties that are due to the advent of the internet and the subsequent lowering of the cost of entry into publishing.

But we would be lost without the media. How else could we reliably get information about all the things that we need to know in order to make an informed judgement on polling day? In a large democracy with millions of people living in geographically-distant places, like Australia, the media becomes absolutely essential for everyone. Without it we simply cannot know what is going on. I think nobody thinks that their own immediate community represents the whole of the country. This is why I support the media by keeping personal subscriptions to several mastheads. It's not a lot of money but for me it's an insurance policy against totalitarian government, which would be the likely outcome for us in the absence of a competent media.