Public ideas
Breaking together
The quality of life in most countries peaked around 2016 and then began slowly to decline.
That’s an assertion in Jem Bendell’s book Breaking together: a freedom-loving response to collapse, reviewed in a Conversation essay by Tom Doig, of the University of Queensland: If the world’s systems are “already cracking” due to climate change, is there a post-doom silver lining?
That was a notable year: it was when Britain left the EU, turning its back on the world, when Donald Trump won the US election, and not long after Scott Morrison became our prime minister. Politically these were indeed dark days.
But, as Doig explains, Bendall isn’t necessarily talking about catastrophic developments. A metaphor he uses is the boiling frog syndrome, because we don’t notice incremental changes. The planet heats up a little more, traffic congestion worsens, the press reports a few more racist attacks, the generational gap widens. The boiling frog metaphor goes only so far, however: the frog dies, but we adapt. And for most of us there are so many big things happening in our lives – we have children, shift interstate, experience the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – that we’re inclined not to notice the big changes in our collective lives.
Bendall goes on to suggest we don’t have to be trapped by this process of “creeping collapse”, a term he borrows from Jared Diamond. His sliver lining is a suggestion that we can adopt a lifestyle of “ecolibertarianism”, replacing globalized trade with local production and exchange, capitalism with cooperatives, and big finance with microfinance.
This is all reminiscent of the 1892 New Australia Movement, when a bunch of 238 people, stressed by the privations of the 1890s depression, and pissed off by the newly-formed Labor Party’s conservatism, headed off to Paraguay to form a new society. The venture slowly biodegraded.
But the work’s main message, about slow decline to which we adapt, does seem to be relevant to our age. We should keep in mind, however, JK Galbraith’s warning that “all pessimism has an air of authority”.
Something’s wrong when dispassionate critical thinking at an ivy league university makes news
“Which side are you on in the Israel-Palestine conflict?”
That’s a question that should never be asked, let alone answered “Israel” or “Palestine”.
I’m not taking this roundup into foreign policy: I commend Pearls and Irritations as an excellent forum for foreign policy. But the way people in countries all over the world are reacting to the conflict reveals a great deal about how events such as a war in the Middle East, or for that matter a referendum about recognition of aboriginal people, can lead to passionate political polarization. If one side is right the other side must be wrong, to put it in simple Manichean terms, and the way to assert your view is to shout loudly at the other side.
University campuses have always been places where young people gather to express their indignation about real and perceived injustices, but they often become too strident. Kelsey Wang and Jerimiah Rayban, students at Dartmouth College, write that many ivy league universities in the US have experienced incidents of anti-Palestinian and anti-Semitic attacks, and in some cases donors have withdrawn funding in retribution for schools’ responses to the war: Ivy League universities react to Israel-Hamas war.
This is unfortunate. Universities are not partisan institutions. Rather they are places where people come to explore issues, to question their own opinions, to analyse public ideas, and to delve into the many complex facets of issues covered only superficially, or in a partisan style, in conventional media or in social media.
In a situation like the present conflict we might expect that universities, which generally have schools of international relations or similar disciplines, would be bringing together faculty and students to learn and discuss the issues. It’s an opportunity for students to learn about sources of information and their biases, to learn about the historical aspects of the conflict, to learn about the symbolic importance of places, to learn about the culture, religious traditions and political and economic structures of the parties involved, and to learn that there are not two well-defined “sides”, but many complex movements and loyalties.
What has shocked some observers, including Anthony Bubalo of the Asia Society in Australia who was a guest on the ABC’s Saturday Extra last week, is that when Dartmouth held such a forum – two successive forums in fact – it was so out of the ordinary that it became a news item in The Economist, and a major news item in US newspapers. As Bubalo said, something that should have been unremarkable became remarkable. (His comments are on The Pick segment of the program, from 6 to 10 minutes, but it’s always informative to tune in to the whole segment.)
You can hear a short podcast on National Public Radio describing how Dartmouth faculty from the Jewish Studies and Middle East Studies programs have established these forums. Or you can watch the entire second session on an 86-minute video. (Apparently the first forum wasn’t recorded.)
It is unsurprising that when students delve into political issues they will form strong opinions and express them publicly. But as Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, an Egyptian novelist and former diplomat, now on the Dartmouth faculty said to students:
You don’t have to pay to come to an ivy league college to be indignant. You can do that at home.
On the Saturday Extra session Geraldine Doogue suggests in Australia we have more forums in which public conversations can be held. Perhaps the US is more polarized. The ABC is certainly one institution that provides such a forum. In address to the Friends of the ABC Managing Director David Anderson describes clearly how the national broadcaster is handling the Israel-Palestine conflict. He explains that impartiality does not require every perspective to receive equal time or for every aspect of an argument to be presented.
It’s unfortunate that such a principle did not seem to guide the broadcaster’s approach to the Voice referendum. Every assertion, no matter how idiotic, illogical, or just plain false, was given airtime; misleading assertions about “race” and “detail” were rarely challenged; and every view had to be treated as “news”, a format that is more likely to polarize rather than to inform.