Posts Tagged ‘humanism’
On Palestine, settler colonialism, humanism, and the universe
I was always a bookish kid so it wasn’t surprising that my mother, who very much encouraged me in this, bought me a big book to read one Christmas, when I was ten or eleven years old. I knew it was my mum, she was the one who encouraged all that, packing the house with books and getting us, my two older siblings and I, out to the library in the next suburb every fortnight or so.
This book, though, has a special place in my memory, though I can’t recall the precise title or the author, and the book itself sadly disappeared from my belongings, along with almost everything else, a lifetime ago. It was a history of the ‘American West’, and it included two chapters, titled something like ‘Blood in the mountains’ and ‘Blood on the prairie’. The emotional impact of these chapters on me was profound, and lasting. Nowadays we describe this ‘land-clearing’, or more accurately ‘people-clearing’, process euphemistically as settler colonialism, and of course it happened here in Australia. The story is generally told this way – ‘we came, we saw, we conquered, and we improved the lot of the vanquished, or at least of those who survived’, though I’m pretty sure that the author of the book I read presented no such silver lining, to his credit.
All of the above is preliminary to a reflection on Israel-Palestine, another version of settler colonialism, which has been ongoing, really since the 19th century. But in more recent times we’ve wised up a little to the injustice of it all, and we can’t use the excuse that United Staters and Australians have used – that it was all in the past, that we know better now than to call indigenous peoples ‘savages’. We even like to have their artwork on our walls.
So I can be holier than thou about the Palestinian situation?
Actually, it’s simpler than that. It’s just like that old book about the West, it’s about siding with the victims. I also like to use the ‘no free will’ argument – we didn’t get to choose the culture or ethnicity we were born into. Or the species, for that matter. Would I have preferred to be a bonobo? Not really… but then, there’s the sex…
The fact is, being born Palestinian in the contested region of Palestine-Israel in the 20th or 21st century is one piece of bad luck among many (Rohingyas in Burma, Congolese under Leopold II’s ‘Free State’, Chinese under Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’, Ukrainians under Stalin and his Holodomor). Then again, luck isn’t the word – it’s about brutality, selfishness, indifference to suffering, all the negative elements of humanity.
But now, more than a quarter of the way into the 21st century, with global communications prying into every corner of the globe, we can’t so easily hide the cruelty, the arrogance, the blatant injustice of what the perpetrators avoid describing as settler colonialism, that quaint descriptor.
I’m writing this because, due to the choice, by a reading group I’m a member of, of a novel by an Australian author of Palestinian and Egyptian parents, Randa Abdel-Fattah, who was recently ‘disinvited’ to Adelaide Writers’ Week, probably the nation’s premier writers’ festival, for reasons unknown to me. This action prompted a boycott by so many other writers that the event had to be cancelled, an unprecedented situation in the event’s history, as far as I’m aware. I should say that a terroristic attack in the area of Bondi Beach in December last year (2025), carried out by members of an anti-semitic organisation called Islamic State, in which 15 people were killed, appears to have influenced the Writers’ Week Committee’s decision.
Randa Abdel-Fattah’s novel, Discipline, told a story of young Palestinian-Australian intellectuals struggling to get the message of the plight of their people heard by the media and academia in Australia. As an ‘oldie’, I found all the talk about Whatsapp, Insta Tiles, Tik-Tok, LinkedIn, flipbooks, app interfaces and such to be exasperating. I found the Moslem or Arabic cultural and religious references – Allahu Akbar, Bismallah, Salafi, Wallahi, intifada, iftar, koshari, fajr and so on – a little more interesting, but, insofar as they’re religious, not so much. Frankly, I find all religious beliefs to be just plain silly, especially given what we now know of our universe and our evolutionary history, though I make some effort to recognise that they’re bound up with heavy cultural identity and such. I’m just glad, or lucky, not to have been brought up in such a heavy culture. No free will and all that.
Having said that, the novel has refocused my attention on the Israel-Palestine horror-show, and that above-mentioned term, ‘settler colonialism’. The first book I read on the issue was The Case for Palestine, by an Australian lawyer, Paul Heywood-Smith, which introduced me to Zionism, Theodor Herzl, the buying of land in the region by wealthy Jews, and the pressuring of governments, notably the British government, to accept a more or less exclusively Jewish homeland in Palestine. For Palestinians, this has been a horror story, of displacement, cruelty and, especially in the early years of this displacement, up to and including the Nakba, international indifference. The land of Palestine, the land of Caanan, was multicultural for millennia. What has happened to it has been, from a humanist perspective, a catastrophe, resulting in hatreds and enmities that seem eternal. A friend of mine used to call it the problem of ‘heavy culture’, and as a person who doesn’t particularly identify with a nation (though a ‘sovereign citizen’ I most certainly am not), and enjoys the multiculturalism – and the remoteness – of the country I inhabit – I tend to agree. This morning I sat around a table conversing with two Columbians, two Chinese and an Australian, and in earlier conversation groups with Japanese, Sri Lankans, Koreans, Mexicans and Taiwanese, mostly recent arrivals, and I could feel in their faces, voices and movements that they were happy to be here – perhaps even relieved. I’m possibly being a little starry-eyed, but this is the sort of country I always want to live in.
And yet, I’m still drawn to the world’s horror-zones – Palestine, the USA, China, Russia, Sudan, Ukraine and the like – mostly hoping for good news rather than wallowing in shadenfreude. I think it’s just identifying with the human under stressful conditions, and hoping for happy endings, or just signs of improvement…
Anyway, I’m now reading with great interest The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, which gives a rich and broad account of this tragedy from something of an insider’s perspective, as his family have for generations been part of Palestine’s intellectual elite. I don’t suppose the book has a happy ending, but what could such an ending look like? A sudden, or gradual respect for those who can trace their ancestry in the region back thousands of years? But then, why would that ancestry make them more respectable than others? I presume that my ancestry goes back tens of thousands of years, as does everyone else’s, and if they stayed much of that time in one region, that hardly makes them more worthy than those who chose or were forced to move around. And of course for 90% of that ancestry there were no countries, though there were emerging languages and cultures, no doubt with relations between them varying from very warm to very cold….
All of this is what you might call humanist chatter. As I like to say, there are no real countries, we made them all up, mostly by people saying ‘this is our land exclusively and if you argue we’ll fight you and, if necessary, kill you, and by the way I think that land over there is ours too…’, etc, etc. But all of these people will die, and countries will disappear, and humans too, but the land will endure for longer, though not in its current form, for it too will transform, as it has in the past, and… to speculate further is a bit beyond me.
Where am I going with all this? I’m not sure, except that to say that a particular piece of land belongs to a particular culture is always questionable to say the least. We have become more international, more culturally fluid, more multicultural as they say, and this is bound to continue, so the key is to get people to stop fighting over what was never theirs to begin with, and to recognise that their project should be to mutually thrive, learn about and enjoy the land, the planet, the universe that we rather miraculously find ourselves being tangled up in.
Reference
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 2020
Rutger Bregman’s Reith lectures, an amateur commentary: lectures 3 & 4
In his third lecture, Bregman brings up the Fabian movement in Britain, whose most well-known members today were G B Shaw and H G Wells. It was named after a famous Roman statesman and military commander, Fabius (full name Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus), whose delaying tactics against Hannibal of Carthage strengthened Rome at a time of crisis. So the Fabians favoured gradual, piecemeal tactics to improve society – reform as opposed to revolution. Here’s Bregman’s opening remarks:
It begins with a tax system that is fair, simple, and based on the principle that work and wealth should play by the same rules.
Bregman’s issue here is definitely my own. Money made from money (Trump is a classic example, but there are many many others) is more ‘protected’ from the tax system than money made by work. So, Bregman asks, what do we do to encourage, if not enforce, a fairer tax system and a sense of social justice? I for one, would want to bring to the attention of the super-wealthy that their wealth isn’t as ‘deserved’ as they like to think it is – but what a task that would be!
The Fabians emerged from and split off from a broader, Quaker-inspired movement of moral reform in the late 19th century, feeling that political reform was the vital issue, and that this reform needed to be gradual and rational, bringing the majority of the people with it, if possible. Unsurprisingly, the movement held great appeal for many of the intellectuals of the day. They produced essays in pamphlet form, focussing on brevity and conciseness, with elegant packaging, and which invited those interested to attend conferences and debates on relevant issues. The movement became fashionable, in effect. It turned economics into a near-popular topic and was a major force in the formation of the British Labour Party. The movement spawned a very radical tax system, which reached such proportions that, in the 1960s, bands such as the Beatles and the Stones complained about being impoverished. Poor things! Unfortunately, since those days, the rich have had it much easier to retain and increase their wealth, as a range of schemes and tactics have emerged to protect private capital, including whole companies created to do just that.
Anyway, this Fabian movement managed to become ‘cool’, and increasingly successful into the 20th century. Education and healthcare were a major focus, as well as limits to working hours and extra pay for overtime. Women’s rights became an issue, as did the progressive taxation system that George Harrison maundered on about – until he found a tax haven, no doubt. In fact, it was into the 1970s that things began to change, and Bregman blames it on the neo-liberal movement, which began around the 50s and included some well-known names, particularly Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. This was of course about a minimal state and maximal markets – the rule of self-interest.
So, when the 70s brought increased unemployment, a drop in economic growth and an inflationary surge, the neo-liberal strategies of small governments and big, untethered markets began to sound enticing. It became the centrist approach for a time, gaining acceptance not only from conservatives such as Thatcher and Reagan, but also from supposedly centre-left figures such as Clinton and Blair. But over time – and Bregman is surely right on this – the price was a widening rich-poor gap, a reduced sense of community, an untameable capitalist class, ecological problems and the like. He claims that neoliberalism is dead, and we are searching for, in need of, new ideas and approaches, a ‘conspiracy of decency’.
So, towards the end of this third lecture Bregman claims that this conspiracy is at hand. I’m not sure that I agree, but he might be talking about something like a universal basic income, which I’ve written about before:
Imagine a state that embraces this role fully, where the brightest minds don’t waste their time polishing power points at McKinsey, but build high-speed rail, or cure entire classes of disease. Imagine the massive profits from AI, technology rooted in decades of government-funded research, flowing into a national wealth fund that paid every citizen a monthly dividend.
Yes, all this is nice to imagine, and we may well be working towards a world of greater leisure, but the forces of greed and empowerment over others don’t seem to be reducing….
So to Bregman’s final lecture, which he calls ‘fighting for humanity in the age of the machine’. He began, rather startlingly for me, with the free will issue, which I’ve come to terms with, mostly in the last decade or so, through reading, first Sam Harris, but particularly Robert Sapolsky’s massive work Behave, and its follow-up, Determined. Yet unlike Bregman, accepting our deterministic world hasn’t particularly traumatised me – probably because those works simply confirmed me in my ‘suspicions’, which were much more than suspicions.
I was a little startled, too, to learn that after a traumatic ‘loss of Christian faith’ period, Bregman found a hero worth worshipping in Bertrand Russell, that first Reith Lecturer, and a towering figure in philosophy and ethics, whose writings I’ve always enjoyed but have read too little of – time to correct that…. ah, time, time. Interestingly, he too experienced youthful crises – life-threatening ones, it seems – regarding free will and religious faith. These were issues that troubled my own youth, though they were certainly not existential crises.
Bregman quotes the simplest observation/advice from Russell, ‘love is wise, hatred is foolish’. This, of course, goes with the ‘no free will’ view. Understanding that people are what they are due to all sorts of determining factors may not enable you to love them, but it certainly makes it feel foolish to hate them, and I’ve often, in recent times, checked myself with this commonplace insight.
When Russell presented his Reith lectures in 1948, the world had been convulsed by two massive wars and was facing the spectre of possible nuclear annihilation. We’ve gotten used to living with this possibility after many decades, in which nuclear arsenals have expanded, but have never since been called upon. According to Bregman, though, we’re now facing another threat, a rather more amorphous one, in the rapid development of AI. Who knows where that will lead us, how much a benefit, how much a threat?
When, next, Bregman speaks of the five questions posed by religion, my mind drifts to the five essential questions formulated by Kant which I learned years ago. Or maybe they were four.
- Who/What am I?
- What do/can I know?
- What should I do?
- What can I hope for?
These questions, with some slight variants, seem existentially fundamental. And Bregman’s answers, or my takeaway from them, are fairly vital to me.
Who are we? The planet’s greatest co-operators. That, after all, is how we created AI, and nuclear weapons, and vaccines, and nations and governments and education systems and science and civilisations. Of course, with the growth of complexity came the development of hierarchies. And yet… I’ve read in the past that with the development of agriculture came fixed hierarchies, ownership of property and so on, but I doubt it was that straightforward. Hierarchies exist in chimp and bonobo societies, which we can observe directly, but the hierarchies of the earliest humans and their direct ancestors don’t leave traces. It’s likely that farming, and what we call ‘civilisation’, consolidated those hierarchies, sometimes to a socially destructive extent, as Joseph Henrich argues in The WEIRDest people in the world. Above all, this civilisation has had a massive impact on the planet itself, altering its atmosphere, wiping out many other species, and reducing its ‘size’, from our perspective, from that of our whole world, to a tiny speck in a galaxy that is itself a tiny speck in the universe as we know it.
And now, AI. This might be part of the fifth question to add to the four I gave above, but it’s definitely a ‘we’ question. Where are we going? Is AI the end of the road, the last of our inventions? Here’s Bregman’s summary of the bad news:
Literacy and numeracy rates are plummeting, teenage depression, anxiety and suicide attempts and anxiety are rising, face-to-face socialising is collapsing, as we retreat indoors, eyes glued to the screens, and solitude is becoming the hallmark of our age
This isn’t just opinion. The statistics provide confirmation. And this has happened before the rise of AI, which can hardly be expected to improve the situation. The online platforms tend to reward extreme views rather than ‘bland’ centrists ones, and Bregman quotes from a study in Nature:
Those with both high psychopathy and low cognitive ability are most actively involved in online political engagement.
This of course gives a skewed view of what the majority, who quickly grow tired of engaging with extremists and their violent reactions, are thinking. And when the most rational people start to give up, real danger ensues.
On this problem, Bregman tries something surprising, to me at least. The temperance movement was a reaction to the widespread abuse of alcohol – and its encouragement by profiteers – in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And the loudest voices against this abuse belonged to women, many of the same women who demanded the vote. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand why. Alcoholism was largely, though certainly not entirely, a male problem, leading to violence, abuse and family neglect.
Today the addiction is to computer games and other internet distractions, and with AI become normalised on top of this trend, the outcome is hard to predict, and even harder to be optimistic about. AI, as Bregman says, is a ‘supercharging’ technology, but we barely know what that means, and how it will affect current lifestyles. Current polls reveal a growing pessimism about the technological future.
But of course Bregman ends on a positive note, or tries to. What matters, he says, is not what people believe, but what they do. As the spectre of AI descends upon us, people need to act to protect the common interest, the human interest, which as we know is also the interests of the vast web of life from which we have sprung. AI is not, of course, like climate change, or alcoholism, it raises different questions which we need to be alert to, such as ownership, power, inclusivity versus exclusivity, and a close monitoring of effects. The common good is, of course, paramount. This is a difficult task – as Kierkegaard cleverly said, and which Bregman reminds us of – ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards’. And this applies not only to our own lives, but our collective cultural lives. We must be alert to the mistakes we will inevitably make, and correct them as quickly as possible, to minimise damage. The future is ours to create, so we must be careful, and wise, and in the most important sense, loving.
Reference
Rutger Bregman’s Reith lectures – an amateur commentary. Lectures 1 & 2
As I’m thinking of picking Rutger Bregman’s Humankind as my 2025 book of the year, I noticed, through browsing someone else’s youtube feed, that he has delivered this year’s Reith Lectures. I listened to the first lecture today, but due to a surfeit of Christmas cheer I was barely able to make sense of it. I also don’t really know what the Reith Lectures are supposed to be about, so let me start there.
They’re a BBC thing, named for Johnny Reith, first BBC director-general, and a Lord and a Baron and such, though whether he became the BBC’s D-G because he was a Lord and Baron, or vice-versa, I don’t want to know. Anyway the inaugural lecturer was old Bertie Russell back in ’48, so that was definitely a good start. Apparently the topic can be anything that ‘enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation’ – and presumably other nations too.
Humankind had a very international, humanist approach to society and its problems which certainly gave me something to hope for, what with Putin, Trump, Gaza and such, so I’m sure these lectures will be worth listening to. However, he warned that the first lecture would be focussing on the bad stuff – the problems before the possible solutions. So, in this lecture he talks about the survival [and thriving] of the shameless. ‘A time of monsters’, he calls it, after Antonio Gramsci. According to Bregman, focussing on the USA, we’re hearing a lot of BS from private companies as well as the giant, prestigious educational institutions about the great example they’re setting in corporate citizenship. It’s hard for me to make a judgment, as I live on a different planet, but it’s obvious that big tech, big oil and the like spend vast amounts in trying to convince us of their wonderfulness, while global warming accelerates, the rich-poor gap widens, and many basic needs, such as housing and healthcare, are left unmet.
What Bregman seems to be emphasising in this first of, I think, four talks, in which he quite deliberately discusses fascism, a term that I notice is beginning to be used almost favourably by some, is the rise of corporations answerable to nobody, and able to buy and manipulate politicians, and whole political parties, to particular ends. This is particularly evident in the US, while Europe is mostly overwhelmed and dithering, unable to choose between opposing or placating. Bregman puts the situation in neat soundbites regarding the self-serving nature of elites – ‘a meritocracy of ambition without morality, intelligence without integrity’. Those with integrity, he claims, are outnumbered, though I think it’s better to say that they’re outmanoeuvred, due to inequalities of wealth and power. There are many who are so powerless that they simply aren’t counted or considered. In any case, he finishes this lecture with a call to a moral revolution. Of course – we just can’t continue like this. So, on to the second lecture.
The abolitionist movement, something that comes up in my reading of Darwin’s life, notably his disagreements with the great US botanist Asa Gray during the 1860s and their Civil War – Darwin being a fierce abolitionist, not much interested in the nuances of north-south USA politics – that’s the major topic of Bregman’s second lecture.
I should point out here something fairly obvious – that I’m summarising, perhaps badly, these lectures entirely for my own edification. The lectures are available online and it would of course be better to watch them than to read me. Oh, that’s right, nobody reads me.
Bregman does a good line in soundbites – this is about seriousness v laziness, determination v apathy, good v evil, and so on – that’s how he starts each lecture, with a nice optimism, or at least hopefulness. Humanism, no less. So he starts the lecture with the downfall of the decadent Tzarist regime in Russia and the horror of the Bolshies, with the ideologue Lenin giving way to Stalin the nihilist terrorist. But then remember the goodies – Florence Nightingale, Louis Pasteur, the suffragettes, Norman Borlaug and the green revolution. He then quotes Margaret Mead, very nicely:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
I’m writing this largely for my own sake, to focus on the important stuff, as I’m going through some personal difficulties at the moment, and focussing on these global issues is a help and reminder.
Bregman, though, is following up on Mead’s remark, and the individuals and groups who made a positive impact. So while the current ‘unravelling’ of humanism is going on in Gaza, in Ukraine and in the US, he takes us back to late 18th century Britain – the ‘redemption’ part of his ‘three-part sermon’ (his words), ‘misery, redemption and thankfulness’. Interestingly, he wants to focus on those individuals and ‘small groups’ aforementioned, rather than the larger forces such as the ‘scientific revolution’ or ‘democratisation’, and as I come to the end of Janet Browne’s second volume of Darwin biography, The Power of Place, I recognise Darwin as one of those individuals, who risked so much, especially at the beginning, to bring attention to our connection with all other life forms…
So the anti-slavery movement of the late 18th century was essentially British. Britain was for a time the largest slave-owning and trading nation, Liverpool being its major trading centre. This trade rose with the British Empire itself, but the backlash, according to Bregman, was sudden and surprising. Starting with a small London-based group of twelve men, the anti-slavery movement took hold throughout the island surprisingly quickly, and nowhere else, at least at the time. The whole of the US economy was based on slavery well into the 19th century, and Britain was heavily involved in the slave trade in previous centuries, but it was British pressure that ended the slave trade in Europe. Bregman describes this anti-slavery push as weird and unlikely, more or less coming out of nowhere:
In the summer of 1787, it spread up and down the country like wildfire. It was all over the newspapers and in the coffee houses there was talk of little else.
No sure how Bregman knows this, but he goes on to mention how impressed Alexis de Tocqueville, himself an apostle of equality, was by the speed and brilliance of the movement.
In Bregman’s account, it was all about those 12 black-hatted men and their meeting in that year, 1787, to initiate perhaps the world’s first human rights campaign. It’s easy for us, in retrospect, to see slavery as morally repugnant and patently unjust, and yet, clearly, this was not the general attitude in the ‘free’ USA of the 1860s, nor in the thoroughly Catholic Spanish colonies that Darwin visited, and was appalled by, in his Beagle days. Bregman emphasises the lack in Europe of anything like the anti-slavery movement in Britain. It was only British pressure, apparently, that slowly turned the tide. Or not so slowly:
The Royal Navy launched a massive campaign against the slave trade, which would go down in history as ‘the blockade of Africa’. It has been described as the most expensive international moral effort in modern history. Two thousand slave ships were seized and 200,000 enslaved people freed. Researchers have estimated that direct British efforts brought about the eradication of 80% of the global slave trade.
No wonder Chaz Darwin could consider himself at the pinnacle of the most civilised nation on the planet, tut-tutting at his less benign neighbours’ treatment of the world’s savages. But I judge from a world well into the 21st century, changed mightily by the ground-breaking work of Darwin and others.
Bregman feels that today, the west’s best and brightest are generally not driven by solutions to climate change, the next pandemic or democratic collapse, that’s to say, ethical or humanitarian issues – and my own limited experience of the young and bright chimes with this, I must say. And yet the British abolitionist movement, according to Bregman, was largely an entrepreneurial one – with William Wilberforce, something of a Johnny-come-lately, being given much of the credit. Deserving of more attention was Thomas Clarkson, the youngest founder of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. His involvement started at Cambridge, when he won a prize for his essay on the topic, which may have started as a vanity project, but afterwards consumed his life. Other experts claim that Clarkson was the ne plus ultra of British abolitionism.
So the late 18th century was a time of decline, according to Bregman. There was of course the French Revolution and its subsequent reign of terror, and in Britain, parliamentary drunkenness and decadence was commonplace, and George IV, who became Prince Regent in 1811, was notoriously repulsive. London had gained a reputation as the world’s sex capital – petty theft for young men and boys, prostitution for young women and girls. Public executions were a popular spectacle, and mistreatment of animals was in vogue – foreigners were horrified at the decadence.
So it was within this context that the abolitionist movement – of Quakers and other evangelicals – evolved. And according to Bregman, it was all about practising good behaviour. He ends this second talk by advertising his own project – ‘The school for moral ambition’ – something to raise us out of the mire of selfishness, incompetence, ethnic hatreds, greed, callousness, dishonesty and indifference that makes the news so hard to follow these days.
And so ends his second lecture.
bonobos and capitalism?
Jacinta: The theme of capitalism has been playing in the back of my mind lately…
Canto: Really? Can you hum a few bars?
Jacinta: Well it’s a theme with many variations, so it’s hard to know where to start….
Canto: With bonobos? Are they capitalists?
Jacinta: Well, that’s the point, capitalism can be defined very broadly and inclusively, which would leave the anti-capitalists – people who define themselves as socialists or communists – with not much ground to stand on.
Canto: You mean like capitalising is what we all do to survive and thrive, like capitalising on balmy weather to spend a day at the beach?
Jacinta: Yes, but even the negative aspects of it might be inescapable, like capitalising on other living things for our food, by, uhh, eating them. Even vegetarians can’t avoid that.
Canto: But by eating the fruit of the tree, you’re not killing the tree. You’re even helping the tree to multiply, so long as you spit the seeds out, on fertile ground.
Jacinta: Yeah vegetarians always do that. But that’s sort of a good example of how hard it is to be ethical capitalists. Trees, like every other living thing, have evolved to multiply, so, in the most amazingly complex but non-sentient way, they cover their seeds, carrying their offspring, in tasty wrappings for insects and birds to peck or consume so that the seeds fall down or are blown away or shat out, and one in a few thousand ends up in the right spot to grow into another tree, just as one of a gazillion spermatozoa ends up in the right spot to grow another mammal. We humans, though, have taken capitalism to another level. Earlier states or civilisations, developments out of agricultural society, depended very much on the labour of slaves, or serfs, or villeins, in a system that more or less fossilised landed aristocracies. But it was a thoroughly capitalist system that worked, to the extent that it grew the human population, establishing us more than ever at the top of the food chain.
Canto: But surely most modern anti-capitalist thinkers have a much narrower view of capitalism. Does Marx have anything still to offer? Neo-Marxism?
Jacinta: I don’t know – but whenever I encounter a self-professed socialist or communist, and I occasionally do, I always want to ask them if they believe in democracy.
Canto: Well there are people, and parties, that call themselves social democrats. I assume that’s a kind of ‘soft socialism’, with the aim of convincing, or ‘educating’ the populace into viewing socialism, or at least a less hierarchical employer/employee system, a more distributed ownership of the means of production, a taxation system that favours the more disadvantaged, a quality education and healthcare system that favours the same, should get their vote every time, or more times than most.
Jacinta: Yes and there are political organisations like the Chinese Communist Party, which isn’t really a party at all, which give communism a bad name, if it ever had a good one. And there are thinkers who seem to define themselves as anti-capitalists, who seem to take the view that if we can only change the system, as so many young people are keen to do, and become less rapacious and more keen to care and share, the human world will be so much better.
Canto: And yet they never mention bonobos. That’s a shame. We get caught up with these ‘isms’, including conservatism and liberalism, and they box us in and make enemies of others. Bonobos have a society, but it would be silly to call it leftist or rightist, capitalist or socialist. Yes they capitalise on available resources, and they socialise with each other for fun and comfort and sex, which is also a form of capitalism, broadly speaking, but again labelling it this way seems a bit dumb.
Jacinta: Yes, to me, the key is to develop a sort of humanism which is more like bonoboism with all the big-brained human stuff thrown in. Modern science seems like that to me, I mean the practice. That community has its spats, as do bonobos, but mostly its collaborative and supportive. They need more sex perhaps, but, you know, sublimation and all that.
Canto: Yes, that’s interesting. There’s some hierarchical elements in the scientific community, with team leaders and stuff, but the focus isn’t so much on power, as it so often is in politics, the focus is on improvement – better data, better tools, better theories, better results, better connections.
Jacinta: Yes it’s generally a relief to turn to science, especially as an antidote to US-style politics, which is so absurdly divided. I think the social media world has very much exacerbated that situation. People have gotten stuck in their bubbles, and there’s so much hate talk, it’s exhausting.
Canto: So getting back to capitalism, I agree that it’s inescapable, and the key is what we call ‘mixed’ capitalism, and the disagreements are or should be about the degree of regulation, the degree of taxation, the degree of exploitation (of people, resources, land and so forth). That means coming together on boring things such as wage indexation, healthcare, education, housing, environmental protection, interest rates, crime and punishment and the like. Imagining that we can change the system in some holistic way by implementing a particular ideology just ignores ye olde crooked timber of humanity….
Jacinta: Our current federal government, cautiously centre left, seeking to be collaborative and so getting hit from both sides (but not too hard), seeking to mend fences with our neighbours, with some success, and looking to tackle a number of difficult issues re housing, global warming, our overdeveloped service economy and neglected and dying manufacturing sector – this new government has many challenges, as all governments do, but it has more women in it than any previous government, and many smart independent members. Collaboration across the political spectrum has never been more of a possibility, it seems to me, than ever. This is something that a diverse, active population needs, and will hopefully support, for a while. An opportunity worth capitalising on.
on blogging: a personal view
I have a feeling – I haven’t researched this – that the heyday of blogging is over. Even I rarely read blogs these days, and I’m a committed blogger, and have been since the mid 2000s. I tend to read books and science magazines, and some online news sites, and I listen to podcasts and watch videos – news, historical, academic, etc.
I should read more blogs. Shoulda-coulda-woulda. Even out of self-interest – reading and commenting on other blogs will drive traffic to my own, as all the advisers say. Perhaps one of the problems is that there aren’t too many blogs like mine – they tend to be personal interest or lifestyle blogs, at least going by those bloggers who ‘like’ my blog, which which gives me the distinct impression that those ‘likers’ are just trying to drive traffic to their blogs, as advised. But the thing is, I like to think of myself as a real writer, whatever that is. Or a public intellectual, ditto.
However, I’ve never been published in a real newspaper, apart from one article 25 years ago in the Adelaide Review (the only article I’ve ever submitted to a newspaper), which led to my only published novel, In Elizabeth. But I’ve never really seen myself as a fiction writer. I’m essentially a diarist turned blogger – and that transition from diary writing to blogging was transformational, because with blogging I was able to imagine that I had a readership. It’s a kind of private fantasy of being a public intellectual.
I’ve always been inspired by my reading, thinking ‘I could do that”. Two very different writers, among many others, inspired me to keep a diary from the early 1980s, to reflect on my own experiences and the world I found myself in: Franz Kafka and Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne’s influence, I think, has been more lasting, not in terms of what he actually wrote, but his focus on the wider world, though it was Kafka that was the most immediate influence back in those youthful days, when I was still a little more self-obsessed.
Interestingly, though, writing about the world is a self-interested project in many ways. It’s less painful, and less dangerous. I once read that the philosopher and essayist Bertrand Russell, who had attempted suicide a couple of times in his twenties, was asked about those days and how he survived them. ‘I stopped thinking about myself and thought about the world’, he responded.
I seem to recall that Montaigne wrote something like ‘I write not to find out what I think about a topic, but to create that thinking.’ I strongly identify with that sentiment. It really describes my life’s work, such as it is. Considering that, from all outside perspectives, I’m deemed a failure, with a patchy work record, a life mostly spent below the poverty line and virtually no readership as a writer, I’m objective enough and well-read enough to realise that my writing stands up pretty well against those who make a living from their works. Maybe that’s what prevents me from ever feeling suicidal.
Writing about the world is intrinsically rewarding because it’s a lifelong learning project. Uninformed opinions are of little value, so I’ve been able to take advantage of the internet – which is surely the greatest development in the dissemination of human knowledge since the invention of writing – to embark on this lifelong learning at very little cost. I left school quite young, with no qualifications to speak of, and spent the next few years – actually decades – in and out of dead-end jobs while being both attracted and repelled by the idea of further academic study. At first I imagined myself as a legend in my lunch-time – the smartest person I knew without academic qualifications of any kind. And of course I could cite my journals as proof. These were the pre-internet days of course, so the only feedback I got was from the odd friend to whom I read or showed some piece of interest. My greatest failing, as a person rather than a writer, is my introversion. I’m perhaps too self-reliant, too unwilling or unable to join communities. The presence of others rather overwhelms me. I recall reading, in a Saul Bellow novel, of the Yiddish term trepverter – meaning the responses to conversations you only think of after the moment has passed. For me, this trepverter experience takes up much of my time, because the responses are lengthy, even never-ending. It’s a common thing, of course, Chekhov claimed that the best conversations we have are with ourselves, and Adam Smith used to haunt the Edinburgh streets in his day, arguing with himself on points of economics and probably much more trivial matters. How many people I’ve seen drifting along kerbsides, shouting and gesticulating at some invisible, tormenting adversary.
Anyway, blogging remains my destiny. I tried my hand at podcasting, even vodcasting, but I feel I’m not the most spontaneous thinker, and my voice catches in my throat due to my bronchiectasis – another reason for avoiding others. Yet I love the company of others, in an abstract sort of way. Or perhaps I should say, I like others, more than I like company – though I have had great experience in company with others. But mostly I feel constrained in company, which makes me dislike my public self. That’s why I like reading – it puts me in an idealised company with the writer. I must admit though, that after my novel was published, and also as a member of the local humanist society, I gave a few public talks or lectures, which I enjoyed immensely – I relish nothing more than being the centre of attention. So it’s an odd combo of shyness and self-confidence that often leaves me scratching my own head.
This also makes my message an odd one. I’m an advocate of community, and the example of community-orientated bonobos, who’s also something of a loner, awkward with small-talk, wanting to meet people, afraid of being overwhelmed by them. Or of being disappointed.
Here’s an example. Back in the eighties, I read a book called Melanie. It was a collection of diary writings of a young girl who committed suicide, at age 18 as I remember. It was full of light and dark thoughts about family, friends, school and so forth. She came across as witty, perceptive, mostly a ‘normal’ teenager, but with this dark side that seemed incomprehensible to herself. Needless to say, it was an intimate, emotional and impactful reading experience. I later showed the book to a housemate, a student of literature, and his response shocked me. He dismissed it out of hand, as essentially childish, and was particularly annoyed that the girl should have a readership simply because she had suicided. He also protested, rather too much, I felt, about suicide itself, which I found revealing. He found such acts to be both cowardly and selfish.
I didn’t argue with him, though there was no doubt a lot of trepverter going on in my head afterwards. For the record, I find suicides can’t be easily generalised, motives are multifactorial, and our control over our own actions are often more questionable than they seem. In any case human sympathy should be in abundant supply, especially for the young.
So sometimes it feels safer to confide in an abstract readership, even a non-existent one. I’ll blog on, one post after another.
a bonobo world etc 28: finding connections through difference
some of the language and cultural groups in modern China
Our human world is divided into many nations – 195 or so according to the UN, but this all depends on how you define the term. We know that there are many peoples who see themselves as separate and distinct from the nations they happen to inhabit, and prefer to consider themselves a nation of some sort, and some have named their nation – the Uyghurs of East Turkistan, the Kurds of Kurdistan, the Catalans of Catalonia, the Basques of Cantabria (and many other names) and the Samaritans of Samaria, to name a few – while others, such as the Hazaras, the Rohingyas, the Yorubas and the Tamils, may or may not have specific named territories they would like to claim as their own. In Australia, some have spoken of hundreds of Aboriginal nations, generally associated with language groups. And since we know of about 7,000 existent languages, each associated with particular cultures, there seems to be something of a barrier to any simplistic notions of globalism and global problem-solving.
This is the difference between human apes and other apes. We have divided into distinct groupings, which it seems, our ancestral hominins, going back to CHLCA – the chimpanzee (and bonobo)-human last common ancestor – didn’t do. But is this true? Could it be that the neanderthals and others formed separate cultural groupings within themselves? And how is it that language, which creates such barriers among peoples today, became so diversified as we went forth and multiplied?
Clearly language is a near-unique human capacity. The neanderthals, though, are now known to have possessed a hyoid bone – a horseshoe-like bone in the neck – which may argue for speech capacity. Hyoid fossils have also been found attributed to Homo heidelbergensis and dated back half a million years. If these extinct hominins had language, was it the same language? Language is a means not only of communication but of instilling and handing down cultural praxis, so who knows? The idea of sub-dividing Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis and perhaps others into distinct language and cultural groups really makes the brain spin.
Today, with the greater ease of travel, and with the general tendency of humans, and most other species, to migrate from regions of great danger and few resources to regions of greater resources and fewer dangers, we find that the most economically successful countries are becoming increasingly multicultural, and naturally those countries seek to make a virtue out of necessity.
There are clearly positives and negatives about multiculturalism. Minority cultures understandably seek the comfort of their familiars, leading to ghettoism. They also have vulnerabilities that are exploited by the dominant culture, taking on low-paid or under-the-counter work eschewed by others, and accepting poorer housing and other conditions. Discomfort with difference works both ways of course, and it has been the case that, going back to the days of the early slave-dependent cultures of Greece and Rome, slaves were considered something less than human even by the intelligentsia (and women in somewhat similar ways). The difference today is, or should be, that we know how nonsensical those attitudes were. And yet they persist, in muted form.
There’s also the view, put forward for example by Sam Harris in The moral landscape and, in different form, by David Deutsch in The beginning of infinity, that some cultures are objectively superior than others, especially in terms of law, science and progress. Their general argument is that those cultures that are static or archaic in terms of lore and ideology need to ‘get with the program’ being followed by most developed countries in terms of the pursuit of deeper and richer knowledge and the tools and technologies that flow from that knowledge. And yet, paradoxically, some of that knowledge and research informs us that indigenous cultures in particular, such as existed for tens of thousands of years in Australia, developed practices and technologies over that period which allowed them to live in relative comfort in a landscape that new arrivals from Europe found inherently inhospitable – though of course those new arrivals didn’t by any means give up, and eventually found ways to exploit enough of the land and resources to become populous and dominant.
In reflecting on all these differences and tensions, we need, I think, to always keep in mind how situated we are. None of us chose the cultures we were born into, and this heavy fact should help determine our sympathy for those born into more or less different cultures, as well as those born better or worse off in our own. And there are many features common in our humanity. As a teacher of international English, I’ve taught students from scores of different nations and cultures, and clearly from a range of different positions within those cultures, and I’ve been struck by the broad lines of humanity they share, in terms of humour, ambition, anxiety, desire and wonder. All of these emotions or traits are a kind of human substrate, a permanent foundation upon which human cultures, which come and go and transform and so forth, are constructed, sometimes obscuring the view of the basic humanity that really connects us.
The language barriers may be about to erode, by means of technology – at least the barriers between major languages, such as Mandarin and English (the minority languages will inevitably get the rough end of this particular stick). Electronic translators are a long way from the Babel fish thought up by Douglas Adams in The hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy, a device like Apple’s AirPods which instantly translates every language in the universe into your own, but earpiece translators are already with us, and are bound to improve. It’s surely better than having everyone learn the same, dominant language. But the real promise of this technology is the promise of collaboration, and the reduction of truly artificial, or human-created, differences, and strengthening that human foundation that underlies those differences. Something to hope for.
References
Madelaine Bohme, Rudiger Braun & Florian Breier, Ancient bones, 2020
a bonobo world? 9 – humanism, bonoboism, doggism and science
a caring and sharing bonoboist society – and these are all females, except maybe the kiddy
In Homo Deus: a brief history of tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari writes rather disparagingly of humanism. Here he goes:
It would accordingly be far more accurate to view modern history as the process of formulating a deal between science and one particular religion, namely humanism. Modern society believes in humanist dogmas not in order to question those dogmas but rather in order to implement them.¹
And so on.
So what exactly is humanism? I should probably make the fuck-nose sign here, but let me write about my personal interaction with the concept. Of course I’d heard of humanism but hadn’t really given it much thought before entering university in my 30th year, in spite of having read a few philosophy books etc. At uni I fell in with a few eager-beavers with whom I entered into D&Ms on politics, ethics and the meaning of life. One day in the midst of an intense session, one interlocutor pulled back, gazed at me with furrowed brow and said ‘You’re such a humanist’. I could only shrug and I truly didn’t know whether he was insulting or commending me. Montaigne-like, I was ever drawn to matters pertaining to myself, especially when others appeared to express an interest. I’d noticed, in my regular browsing at the uni bookshop, a book with the title On Antihumanism or Towards Antihumanism or something similar. This was the mid-80s and post-modernism was unfortunately still thriving. It seemed the book was treading that path – Barthes’ ‘death of the author’ tweaked to ‘death of the human’, opposition to any anthropological defining of the Homo sapiens category, muddied with much Foucauldian, Derridean and Lacanian rhetoric.
So I began to feel much sympathy for humanism, and I was drawn particularly by two negatives: it wasn’t religious and it wasn’t nationalistic.
So, religion – and what does Harari mean when he says that humanism is a religion and a dogma? Well, it seems nothing more than the bleeding obvious: that humanism replaces worship of gods with blind worship of humanity. Now, I admit that there’s an element of truth in that. Witness, again Deutsch’s The beginning of infinity (and no amount of mathematising can can obscure the connection between infinitude and godliness) and Bronowski’s heaven-bent Ascent of Man. In fact I recall, during my period of membership in a humanist organisation (I’m rarely a joiner of such groups and it rarely lasts for long), an attempt to create a kind of humanist church with cheery singalongs and happy clapping. It all sounded naff as taffy to me.
But my own take on humanism was that it involved the realisation that we humans were on our own, and reliant on each other, for better or worse. And that we were one species, and as such needed to take collective responsibility for our damages and to build on our strengths. I also thought it was bleeding obvious that we were above all self-concerned, even self-obsessed. This strikes me as nothing more or less than a biological fact. Bonobos are the compassionate apes, so they say, but the compassion ends mostly – perhaps not entirely – with their own species. You might call this bonoboism, and it makes a lot of biological sense. My pet dog goes apeshit on spotting another dog during our walks, it never fails. She wants to get close, to sniff, to fight, to fuck, who knows? You might call this doggism, but it’s not doggy dogma. It’s funny – humans have interfered with dogs phenotypically for centuries – flattened faces, lengthened legs, bent backs, tufty tails and much nasty neotenising, but dogs never cease to recognise their own polymorphous kind. Of course they have a nose for that kind of thing, but it’s the sight of their fellow beasties that sets them off. I wonder what the science says?
Anyway humanism. Of course, we don’t have to be invested in our own species. I recently heard an interview with a softly spoken, very reasonable-sounding gentleman who is dedicated to the extinction of Homo sapiens, reckoning that the species has done far more harm than good. He’d done his bit, not by knocking off his neighbours, but by getting himself desexed. Only 7.8 billion more to go – ok, maybe only half that number, but then with sperm banks… it’s all so hard.
There are videos around, depicting what life might be like in the future if human apes suddenly disappeared. All very verdant and lush and lovely, but they don’t dare to visualise forward for more than a few decades. How about a couple of million years hence? Not so long, geologically speaking. We’ve been a most unusual apex predator, but there’s no reason not to assume that an even more unusual and rapacious predator will evolve. So I wouldn’t give up on our species just yet.
Still, I’ll never feel entirely comfortable with identifying as a humanist. I just don’t like isms much, they make me reach for my water pistol.
Anyway, returning to Harari, what’s to be made of humanism’s apparent deal with science? His argument is that science is really not so much about knowledge as about power. The power to produce more answers, and more stuff. To win the race against hunger, you find ways to produce more foodstuff. To reclaim land, you find ways to produce more foodstuff using less land. To reduce toxic or climate-affecting emissions, you find, or produce, new forms of energy with fewer nasty emissions. Yes, there will be vested interests blocking production and denying problems, but science will always find a way, and we’ll always go that way, eventually. Or so the deal has it.
Of course, Harari is right. I don’t happen to agree with his definition of humanism, but that’s really a minor issue. To me, it’s a deal science makes with a certain kind of self-confident optimism. A ‘we will overcome’ jingoism, for our species. And I must say, I have mixed feelings about all this, because my view of science has a personal element, for I have something of an unrequited love affair with science. I think she’s brilliant, sexy and endlessly enthralling. To me, she’s the gift that keeps on giving. Through her machinations, unknown unknowns shift into known unknowns or unknown knowns, and in the future more unknown unknowns will begin to be known, and yet we won’t quite know what we don’t know about them, even if we know what we don’t know. And really, I don’t even know whether I know what I’m saying.
So science, with its how questions, is a quest to give us more power, over life, the universe and everything, for knowledge is power. But we’re not going to stop travelling down that road. As many have pointed out, to have the power to create something you need to know how it works, from photosynthesis to viruses to intelligence or consciousness. And we’re working on all this stuff, for better or worse.
Are we working on creating a more compassionate society, a bonobo society or something like? Sort of – and many are passionate about this. But I’m not sure we even know what society is, let alone how to make it better.
- Y N Harari, Homo Deus, p 231
References
Homo Deus: a brief history of tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari, 2016
The beginning of infinity, by David Deutsch, 2012
Operation Pressure Pump, the struggle with anti-Americanism, and the future of humanism (!?)
Having succumbed to the strange lure of Korean period dramas, and the not-so-strange allure of the incomparable Ha ji Won, in recent times, I’ve been reading a real history of Korea, Michael Seth’s fast-moving, highly readable book in the Brief History series.
Seth’s book moves perhaps a bit too quickly through the vast time-span of Korean civilisation before the twentieth century, but no matter, I was keen to find out more about the Korean War, its causes and consequences, about which I knew practically nothing.
In brief, the Korean War was an outcome of the Japanese occupation of the peninsula, and its surrender and withdrawal in 1945. The vacuum thus left was occupied by the Americans in the south, and the Russians in the north, a division demarcated arbitrarily by the 38th parallel. This quasi-official division, which seemed to go on indefinitely and which the Koreans were never consulted about, came as a massive affront to a people who had effectively governed their own undivided region for centuries.
Nevertheless, communism was in the air, and held a certain appeal for some of the Korean peasantry and some intellectuals, fed by Russian and Chinese propaganda. In the poorer north, Russian and local communist leaders were able to introduce reforms which had a direct and immediate benefit for the landless peasantry, while the Americans, apparently clueless about Korean politics and history, tried to maintain order by continuing some of the hated repressive measures of the Japanese.
People on both sides of the 38th parallel wanted and expected reunification of the country in the near future, which makes what eventually happened one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century. The north, under the discipline of Russian Stalinist policies of ‘x-year plans’ and ultra-nationalist workaholism, took the initiative, building up a powerful military force with which to invade the south and enforce reunification, and a Stalinist paradise. By this time Kim Il Sung had imposed himself as the Great Leader of the north, dealing ruthlessly with all rivals.
The north’s attack took the south completely by surprise, and was almost a complete success. They captured all the southern territory except for a small area around Busan, Korea’s second city in the south-east corner. By this time General MacArthur had been appointed to head the southern defence, and with American arms and reinforcements arriving quickly, the invaders were pushed back.
The northern invasion was extremely unpopular in the south, and few of the peasantry, who were generally better off than their northern counterparts, were interested in what Kim’s Stalinists had to offer. So – and again I’m simplifying massively – things eventually went back to a stalemate centred upon the once meaningless, and now very meaningful, 38th parallel. Warfare dragged on for another couple of years, mostly around that parallel.
And that’s how I come to the title of this piece. Operation Pressure Pump, which commenced in July 1952, came about as a result of American frustration with the stalemate. Here’s how Seth describes it:
Thousands of bombing raids destroyed every possible military and industrial target, the dams and dikes that irrigated the rice fields. Pyongyang and other northern cities began to look like Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the A-bomb, with only a few buildings standing. More bombs were dropped by the Americans on this little country of hardly more than 8 million than the allies had dropped on either Germany or the Japanese Empire in WWII. As a result, the North Koreans were forced to move underground. The entire country became a bunker state, with industries, offices and even living quarters moved to hundreds of miles of tunnels. Nonetheless, civilian casualties in these bombing raids were appallingly high.
A brief history of Korea: isolation, war, despotism and revival – the fascinating story of a resilient but divided people, p 126
Now, this was new knowledge to me, and I haven’t heard too many Americans talking about it, in the various media outlets I’ve been listening to lately, as a black mark against the country’s name – and some Americans are self-critical in this way. Okay, it was sixty-odd years ago, and since then there’s been Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq (twice), and a few other ‘minor’ interventions, so, who’s remembering?
So, I’ve been quite critical of the USA on this blog, and I do actually worry from time to time that I’m being unfairly anti-American. I try to relieve this concern by noting that the USA simply follows the pattern of every other militarily and economically powerful country in history. It bullies its neighbours and exploits all other regions, including its allies, to enhance its power. It also falls victim to the same fallacy that every previous powerful nation falls victim to – that its economic power is evidence of moral superiority. Their myth of American exceptionalism is arguably no worse than that of British benevolent imperialism or the civilising influence of the Roman/Egyptian/Babylonian empire. In fact, all nations are 100% self-interested in their own way. A middling country like Australia bullies smaller countries, such as East Timor over oil in the Timor Sea, while kowtowing to more powerful countries like China and the USA, in which case its self-interest lies in how to kowtow to one country without offending the other.
But let me return to Operation Pressure Pump. The greatest casualties of war are ordinary people. It’s worth dwelling on this as ordinary people currently face the consequences of stupid decisions over Iran. ‘Ordinary people’ might seem a condescending term, but it’s always worth remembering that the vast majority of people – in Iran, North Korea, Australia, the USA or elsewhere – aren’t intellectuals or politicians or national decision-makers or religious leaders or general movers and shakers – they’re people whose lives revolve around friends and family and trying to make a reasonable living. Warfare, and the damage and displacement it causes, isn’t something they can ever seriously factor into their plans. It just happens to them, a bit like cancer.
So the US bombing campaign was something that happened to the North Korean people in the early fifties. Another thing that happened to them was ‘communism’ or the despotic nationalist madness of Kim Il Sung. So they were doubly unlucky. As a humanist, I like to think my politics are simple. I consider bullies to be the worst form of human life, and I expect governments to be most concerned about protecting the bullied against the bullies, the exploited against the exploiters. I actually expect government to be an elite institution, like the media, the judiciary, and the science and technology sector. I also expect governments to put humanism above nationalism, but that’s a big ask. The UN hasn’t so far proved to be an enormous success, as members have generally put national interests above broader global interests, but it’s certainly better than nothing, and some parts of it, such the WHO and the UNHCR, have proved their value. I don’t think there’s any other option but to struggle to give more teeth to the UN, the International Criminal Court and other international oversight agencies. We should never allow one nation to accord to itself the role of global police officer. Of course these international bureaucracies are cumbersome when flashpoints occur – the aim is always to prevent these things from happening. The current Iran situation was entirely preventible, and was entirely due to the USA’s appalling Presidential system, which has allowed an irresponsible, attention-seeking buffoon to hold a position with way too much power and way too little accountability. There’s no doubt that Soleimani was an unpleasant character, but reports were that his activities were much reduced due to the Iran Nuclear Deal of 2015, a famously well-crafted deal by most accounts, which was destroyed by the buffoon.
So, this piece of unilateral bad acting by the USA takes us back to the terror bombing of North Korea in the early fifties. I’m certainly not saying that this cruelty made North Korea what it is today, but it didn’t help. We just have to learn to be more collaborative, more willing to negotiate and to understand, to hear, the other side, and stop being such belligerent male arseholes. We have a long way to go.
some thoughts on humanism and activism
What Australia needs
I’ve been a little more involved in ‘movements’ in recent years, though I’m not usually much of a joiner, and I’ve always been wary of ‘activism’, which is often associated with protesting, personning the barricades (doesn’t have quite the aggressive ring to it, does it?), even a bit of biffo – if largely verbal, by preference. I’ve just been hungry for a bit of stimulus – salon culture, witty and cultured and informative exchanges with people cleverer than myself. But since I’ve been occasionally asked to engage on a higher, or deeper level, in ‘the culture wars’, on the side of reason, atheism, secularism, humanism, whatever, my thoughts on the matter have started to crystallise, and they’re hopefully in evidence in my blog writing.
I don’t mind calling myself an activist for humanism, or for other isms, but I think we should be activists for rather than against. Now it might be argued that to argue for one thing is to argue against another, so it doesn’t really matter, but I think it matters a great deal. It’s a matter of trying to be positive and influencing others with your positivity. Secular humanism has a great case to promote, as do reason, self-awareness and ‘skepticism with sympathy’.
I’ve learned from years of teaching students from scores of different countries and cultures that we all can be excited by learning new stuff, that we’re amused by similar things, that we all want to improve and to be loved and appreciated. The ties that bind us as humans are far greater than those that divide us culturally or in other ways. I’ve also learned that the first principle of good teaching is to engage your students, rather than haranguing or badgering them. This may not seem easy when you’re teaching something as apparently dry and contentless as language and grammar, but language is essentially a technology for communicating content, and if we didn’t have anything meaningful or important to communicate, we’d never have developed it. So the key is to engage students with content that’s relevant to them, and stimulating and thought-provoking enough that they’ll want to communicate those thoughts.
I suppose I’m talking about constructive engagement, and this is the best form of activism. Of course, like everyone, I don’t always ‘constructively engage’. I get mad and frustrated, I dismiss with contempt, I feel offended or vengeful, yet the best antidote to those negative feelings is simple, and that is to throw yourself into the lives, the culture, the background of your ‘enemy’, or the ‘other’, which requires imagination as well as knowledge. I mis-spent a lot of my youth reading fiction from non-English backgrounds – from France and Germany, from Russia and eastern Europe, from Africa and Asia. It was a lot cheaper than travelling, especially as I avoided a lot of paid work in order to indulge my reading. Of course I read other stuff too, history, philosophy, psychology, new-wave feminism, but fiction – good fiction, of course – situated all these subjects and issues within conflicted, emotional, culturally-shaped and striving individuals, and provided me with a sense of the almost unfathomable complexity of human endeavour. The understanding of multiple backgrounds and contexts, especially when recognising that your own background is a product of so much chance, creates multiple sympathies, and that’s essential to humanism, to my mind.
However, there are limits to such identifications. Steven Pinker discusses this in The better angels of our nature (the best advertisement for humanism I’ve ever read) by criticising the overuse, or abuse, of the term ’empathy’ and expressing his preference for ‘sympathy’. Empathy is an impossible ideal, and it can involve losing your own bearings in identifying with another. There are always broader considerations.
Take the case of the vaccination debate. While there are definitely charlatans out there directly benefitting from the spread of misinformation, most of the people we meet who are opposed to vaccination aren’t of that kind, usually they have personal stories or information from people they trust that has caused them to think the way they do. We can surely feel sympathy with such people – after all, we also have had personal experiences that have massively influenced how we think, and we get much of our info from people we trust. But we also have evidence, or know how to get it. We owe it to ourselves and others to be educated on these matters. How many of us who advocate vaccination know how a vaccine actually works? If we wish to enter that particular debate, a working knowledge of the science is an essential prerequisite (and it’s not so difficult, there’s a lot of reliable explanatory material online, including videos), together with a historical knowledge of the benefits of vaccination in virtually eradicating various diseases. To arm yourself with and disseminate such knowledge is, to me, the best form of humanist activism.
I’ll choose a couple more topical issues, to look at how we could and should be positively active, IMHO. The first, current in Australia, is chaplaincy in schools. The second, a pressing issue right now for Australians but of universal import, is capital punishment.
The rather odd idea of chaplaincy in schools was first mooted by Federal Minister Greg Hunt in 2006 after lobbying from a church leader and was acted upon by the Howard government in 2007. It was odd for a number of reasons. First, education is generally held to be a state rather than a federal responsibility, and second, our public education system has no provision in it for religious instruction or religious proselytising. The term ‘chaplain’ has a clear religious, or to be more precise Christian, association, so why, in the 21st century, in an increasingly multicultural society in which Christianity was clearly on the decline according to decades of census figures, and more obviously evidenced by scores of empty churches in each state, was the federal government introducing these Christian reps into our schools via taxpayer funds? It was an issue tailor-made for humanist organisations, humanism being dedicated – and I trust my view on this is uncontroversial – to emphasising what unites us, in terms of human rights and responsibilities, rather than what divides us (religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation etc). To introduce these specifically Christian workers, out of the blue, into an increasingly non-Christian arena, seemed almost deliberately divisive.
Currently the National School Chaplaincy Program is in recess, having been stymied by two effective High Court challenges brought by a private citizen, Ron Williams, of the Humanist Society of Queensland. As far as I’m aware, Williams’ challenge was largely self-funded, but assisted by a donation from at least one of the state humanist societies. This was a cause that could and should have been financed and driven by humanists in a nationally co-ordinated campaign, which would have enabled humanists to have a voice on the issue, and to make a positive contribution to the debate.
What would have been that contribution? Above all to provide evidence, for the growing secularism and multiculturalism of the nation and therefore the clearly anachronistic and potentially divisive nature of the government’s policy. Identification with every Christian denomination is dropping as a percentage of the national population, and the drop is accelerating. This is nobody’s opinion, it’s simply a fact. Church attendance is at the lowest it’s ever been in our Christian history – another fact. Humanists could have gone on the front foot in questioning the role of these chaplains. In the legislation they’re expected to provide “support and guidance about ethics, values, relationships and spirituality”, but there’s an insistence that they shouldn’t replace school counsellors, for counselling isn’t their role. Apparently they’re to provide support without counselling, just by ‘being there’. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just have their photos on the school walls? The ‘spirituality’ role is one that humanists could have a lot of fun with. I’ve heard the argument that people are just as religious as ever, but that they’ve rejected the established churches, and are developing their own spirituality, their own relationship to their god, so I suppose it would follow that their spirituality needs to be nourished at school. But the government has made a clear requirement that chaplains need to be members of an established religion (and obviously of a Christian denomination), so how exactly is that going to work?
While humour, along with High Court challenges and pointed questions about commitment to real education and student welfare, would be the way to ‘get active’ with the school chaplaincy fiasco, the capital punishment issue is rather more serious.
The Indonesian decision to execute convicted drug pedlars of various nationalities has attracted a lot of unwanted publicity, from an Indonesian perspective, but a lot of the response, including some from our government, has been lecturing and hectoring. People almost gleefully describe the Indonesians as barbarians and delight in the term ‘state-sanctioned murder’, mostly unaware of the vast changes in our society that have made capital punishment, which ended here in the sixties, seem like something positively medieval. These changes have not occurred to the same degree in other parts of the world, and as humanists, with a hopefully international perspective, we should be cognisant of this, aware of the diversity, and sympathetic to the issues faced by other nations faced with serious drug and crime problems. But above all we should look to offer humane solutions.
By far the best contribution to this issue I’ve heard so far has come from Richard Branson, representing the Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP), who spoke of his and other commissioners’ interest in speaking to the Indonesians about solutions to their drug problems, not to lecture or to threaten, but to advise on drug policies that work. No mention was made about capital punishment, which I think was a good thing, for what has rendered capital punishment obsolete more than anything else has been the development of societies that see their members as flawed but capable, mostly, of development for the better. Solutions to crime, drug use and many other issues – including, for that matter, joining terrorist organisations – are rarely punitive. They involve support, communication and connection. Branson, interviewed on the ABC’s morning news program, pointed to the evidence showing that harsh penalties had no effect on the drug trade, and that the most effective policy by far was legalisation. It’s probably not a story that our government would be sympathetic to, and it takes us deeply into the politics of drug law reform, but it is in fact a science-based approach to the issue that humanists should be active in supporting and promulgating. Branson pointed to the example of Portugal, which had, he claimed, drug problems as serious as that of Indonesia, which have since been greatly alleviated through a decriminalisation and harm-reduction approach.
I hope to write more about the GCDP’s interesting and productive-looking take on drug policy on my Solutions OK website in the future. Meanwhile, this is just the sort of helpful initiative that humanists should be active in getting behind. Indonesians are arguing that the damage being done by drug pushers requires harshly punitive measures, but the GCDP’s approach, which bypasses the tricky issue of national sovereignty, and capital punishment itself, is offered in a spirit of co-operation that is perfectly in line with an active, positive humanism.
So humanism should be as active as possible, in my view, and humanists should strive to get themselves heard on such broad issues as education, crime, equity and the environment, but they should enter the fray armed with solutions that are thoughtful, practicable and humane. Hopefully, we’re here to help.