Public ideass
Stan Grant on time, democracy, politics, the media and John Coltrane
If you have an hour to spare you might care to listen to Stan Grant’s delivery of the 2023 Vincent Lingiari Memorial Lecture at Charles Darwin University. It’s partly an account of his retreat from journalism since he left the ABC last year, set around the theme of time as philosophers of all traditions, including Australian aboriginal philosophers, see it.
You won’t find a point-by-point analysis of the Voice campaign: he gets on to the Voice only in the last few minutes where he asks “How many times can we say ‘no’ to these people?” and says “Too much has been said already and we are buried under a blizzard of noise and lies”.
The website is a little difficult to navigate. Nothing happens until 35:40 minutes when the Vice Chancellor introduces the session. Grant comes on at 73:40 minutes, and runs through to 129:00 minutes.
Grant also has a short interview (3 minutes) on the ABC where he explains why the media is incapable of dealing with an issue such as 200 years of colonization. “The media has revealed its shortcomings and that the media is not a place for complexity, truth is too much to be left to television”.
For the connection to John Coltrane, you will need to listen to the Vincent Lingiari Memorial Lecture.
How we believe weird stuff
Who can dispute a claim that aliens from outer space regularly visit Earth, leaving no trace of their existence?
Because these clever creatures leave no trace, there is no conceivable way we can test whether it’s wrong. It’s a junk statement, because it’s indisputable.
Teachers use this and similar statements to illustrate the logical fallacy of the non-testable-hypothesis, one of the many forms of bullshit fertilizing social media and political statements.
Students – at least those who don’t goof off in class – are generally quick to see the fallacy, and have fun creating their own untestable statements – “the moon landing was a clever fake”; “Harold Holt was taken by a Chinese submarine”.
It’s mostly harmless fun, but in his Policy Post Martyn Goddard draws our attention to weird things many Australians believe. A third of us believe that extra-terrestrials have visited Earth, and a third of us (possibly not the same third) believe that “the story of creation in the Book of Genesis is a factually true account”.
Still harmless, but more seriously he notes that 21 percent of us believe that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by scientists.
Such beliefs have consequences because through political processes they guide public policy. More seriously, they add to a basic distrust in government and in the institutions of democracy. There is strong evidence, for example, that the Russian government was working to promote Brexit in order to disunite Europe, and was working to see Trump elected in 2016.
Goddard’s post goes into conspiracy theories, and into the outrageous claims around the Voice referendum. Had we voted for the Voice, the UN World government would have confiscated our land. That’s absolutely incapable of refutation, because we didn’t vote for the Voice: we should be thankful, therefore, that we have been protected from this evil.
Arguments of this nature – if X, then Y will happen, where Y is something horrible – are conservatives’ most reliable political ammunition. Dutton and his colleagues gave them a successful run in the Voice campaign: it’s a fair bet that he will use them as we try to confront other policy challenges.