Public ideas
Why is the left so boringly sincere?
Those who read about the 1960s, and the few who actually remember it, know that the left of the time had its heroes, must-read authors, and music. The heroes were Ho Chi Minh for the hard left, Abbie Hoffman for the soft left. Although few got past the first few pages of their works, Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse were on the must-read list: the ability to drop at least a few quotations was required. Crosby Stills Nash and Young provided the angry voices, while Peter Paul and Mary sang kumbaya for the sensitive left.
Van Badham, writing in The Guardian, asks who are filling these ranks in the 2020s? Her article – Rightwing culture has Alex Jones-style craziness to energise it. What does the left have? – laments that absence.
She became aware of that cultural vacuum when she was researching for her book QAnon and On: a short and shocking history of internet conspiracy cults.
Like Gramsci (another name the left used to drop), she stresses that “politics flows downstream from culture”, although these days that truism is quoted from Breitbart.
She urges the left to do better:
Australia has a centre-left government, and with it a chance to right some prevailing social wrongs, address climate threats and re-structuralise fairness and shared opportunity into the economy. This isn’t going to happen if the cultural expression of “leftism” remains fixated on individualist identity projects, nor if a policy understanding of “diversity” extends only as far as representing experiences contained within a privately-schooled middle class.
What will the world look like in 2050?
We can be reasonably certain that the world will be subject to a hotter and angrier climate, and if the past is any guide to the future, we can be almost as sure that submarines and associated issues of military sovereignty, alliances, budgetary costs, and industry participation will still be on the agenda.
What's left of the Berlin Wall — a highly symbolic strip of concrete
Stan Grant asks what the global order will look like in his post: The Ukraine war may be a battle for the global order. But with China's rise and democracy's decline, what will it look like in 2050?
In fact he asks if there ever has been a “global order”. Maybe the term was simply something fashionable to talk about in that brief period of western triumphalism following the fall of the Berlin Wall. If there ever was an order, the west was less than diligent in observing it.
Wisely, he doesn’t answer his own question, but he is in no doubt that whatever order emerges, it will be strongly shaped by China, in a world where the US will be the only western nation among the world’s top ten economies.
The media’s social responsibilities
The Sydney Morning Herald recently ran, over three days, a series of alarmist articles (paywalled) titled “Red alert”, warning that Australia faces the threat of war with China within three years. The reader could get the impression that we will shortly be in the same situation as Ukraine, but defending ourselves against a much smarter, better-armed and technologically advanced invader.
This coverage shocked many people because even though it draws on a number of contributors, all five were on the same hawkish side, taking one line on an issue about which there is a wide range of differing views among foreign policy specialists. Also the Sydney Morning Herald is believed to retain the Fairfax tradition of reporting that is relatively free of partisan bias.
On Saturday Extra, Geraldine Doogue discusses this coverage, as well as the Murdoch media’s re-publication of vile comments about ABC journalist Lisa Millar, originally posted on social media. Her guests are Monica Attard (now at the University of Technology Sydney) and Matthew Ricketson of the University of Canberra: Media ethics in the social media age. (20 minutes)
Has the so-called mainstream media licence to re-publish the filth trolls post on social media? What purpose is served in disseminating this material?
There are standards, observed by most media, about avoiding lurid details of suicide, terrorists’ activities, and domestic violence: should these standards extend to what can be seen as sensationalist warmongering, as in the Sydney Morning Herald example?
Ricketson suggests that some of the offending material can be suppressed at its source through regulation of social media. But we should realize that social media often picks up important issues ignored by most other media, coverage of the work of the commission into Robodebt providing a case in point.