During the American half of her life, Arendt worked variously as an editor, a journalist, a writer and a university teacher. She became known as one of the most formidable intellectuals of the twentieth century. Her books — The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) foremost among them — became hugely influential and have aged well. Her essays and published correspondence with key individuals in her life — including her lover Martin Heidegger, her mentor and friend Karl Jaspers, her first husband Günther Anders and her second husband Heinrich Blücher — provide yet more fascinating insights into a brilliant mind.

But it has never been easy to categorise Arendt. A famous interview she gave on West German television in 1964 began with a disagreement. “I think you are a philosopher,” the interviewer Günter Gaus said to her. “Well, I can’t do anything about that,” Arendt interrupted, “but I’m of the view that I’m not a philosopher. I think I’ve finally said farewell to philosophy. I studied philosophy, as you know, but that’s not to say that I stuck with it.”

The biographer is expected to fill in blanks, eliminate uncertainties, fit episodes into a cohesive story, and provide historical context. An intellectual biography should also relate a writer’s life to the texts she left behind and construct a narrative that makes sense of the trajectory of her thinking.

Thomas Meyer’s Hannah Arendt: Die Biografie, published last year in Germany to much acclaim and forthcoming in an English translation in October, does all that. He claims his is the first book about Arendt based on archival research, but even if it weren’t he has obviously done more than others to track down written sources. For many years, he has served as editor of Arendt’s collected writings in German. His understanding of her ideas and his extensive sleuthing has produced a comprehensive picture.

May 1941 also marked Arendt’s entry into an English-language universe. Until that point she had written in German, though she was also at home in French — from 1933 until 1941 she lived in exile in France — and read classical Greek and Latin as fluently as her mother tongue. English hadn’t been part of her world until she began lessons in 1940, but it didn’t take her long to write and publish in that language. She immersed herself in an Anglophone world in the second half of her life, though she never abandoned German; in the 1964 interview she told Gaus she knew a lot of German poetry by heart and the lines kept circling at the back of her mind.

Much to his credit, Meyer is interested in Arendt’s entire oeuvre. She wrote almost all her books twice, usually first in English and then in German (sometimes based on a text prepared by a translator). These aren’t German and English versions of the same text. It’s easier to express philosophical ideas in German than in English, Arendt once remarked, while the English language is better suited to thinking politically. When she imagined her German reader, she assumed some philosophical concepts needed little explanation; her American audience was better versed in a tradition of political thought.

Meyer is a diligent chronicler who avoids anachronisms. He discusses Arendt’s life and intellectual journey against the backdrop of the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, rarely filtering it through the lens of his own times. Only when he writes about the men in Arendt’s life does he become judgemental. He disapproves of her relationship with Heidegger (as do many Arendt admirers), is critical of Jaspers, and seems to consider Blücher, the love of her life and her husband for more than half of it, a philanderer who couldn’t hold a candle to her intellectually.

Meyer is thorough. It’s only after a twenty-two-page family history that readers learn Hannah Arendt was born at 9:15 pm, weighing 3.695 kilograms. I can empathise with him: of course he wants to share all the detail he has been able to unearth. And since Arendt’s life was complex and complicated, why not document all its twists and turns?

It’s time to come clean: I found Meyer’s book unwieldy and unnecessarily slow and his curiosity somewhat antiquarian. But I am being unfair, and I know why: I began reading Meyer’s book at the same time as I started on Lyndsey Stonebridge’s biography of Hannah Arendt, We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love & Disobedience. The plan was to consider these books in tandem, life chapter by life chapter. I soon abandoned that idea. Not because Meyer’s book is boring, but because Stonebridge’s is riveting. I was able to return to Meyer’s text sooner than expected simply because I couldn’t put down Stonebridge’s fast-paced narrative.

Her approach is as anti-antiquarian as could be. She is interested in Hannah Arendt as a companion in today’s dark times. And thus her narrative has two protagonists: the biographer and her subject. “I’ve tried to think my own thoughts in the place of Hannah Arendt,” Stonebridge writes, before conceding that “there may be moments [when she] also thinks her thoughts in my place.”

The two seem to have much in common: both come across as passionate, generous and at times opinionated. They complement each other: Stonebridge is not only Arendt’s interpreter but also the one who knows about the world almost half a century after Arendt’s death. It’s different from the one Arendt inhabited, but no less out of joint. Stonebridge convinces her readers that Arendt would have much to say about a world that “seems to be in the grip of a relentlessly awful plot.”

Stonebridge’s frequent references to her own times help the reader to understand why Hannah Arendt and her writings still resonate. The fact that she is read perhaps at least as much now as in the year she died may seem surprising. After all, Arendt hadn’t gathered followers around her who would take responsibility for her posthumous reputation. Her intellectual taste might be considered old-fashioned: with a few notable exceptions, she was not much interested in contemporary political theorists and philosophers, but instead engaged with Plato and Kant. She was one of the very few women in her line of work, but did not consider herself a feminist. Her writing doesn’t support the kind of identity politics that are so fashionable these days. She could come across as arrogant, if only because she often deemed it unnecessary to translate quotes from other languages.

Besides, Hannah Arendt didn’t leave a grand theory behind. It’s not possible to draw on an overarching “Arendtian” framework in the way some people purport to explain things from a Marxian or Freudian perspective. She is not somebody on whose writings we could comfortably lean. But we can take courage from her highly original attempts to understand the world. “What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing,” she wrote in the prologue to The Human Condition. Is there anything less simple than that? Thinking, though, was something Hannah Arendt was particularly good at.

“She wanted to think exactly like Rahel Varnhagen, to shadow her thought and experience as closely as she could so that she might better understand her own emotional, intellectual and at the time often perplexing life,” Stonebridge says about Arendt’s relationship with the German-Jewish writer and salonnière whose biography Arendt finished writing in Paris. Arendt once called Varnhagen her closest friend, although by then that friend had been dead for about a hundred years. Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka occupied similar roles in Arendt’s life.

Stonebridge’s relationship with Arendt is evidently also close, which makes hers a particularly personal book. Shadowing her biographical subject’s thought and experience, she followed literally in Arendt’s footsteps. Visiting Montauban in the southwest of France, the town where Arendt stayed in the summer of 1940 after her escape from the Gurs internment camp, Stonebridge “carefully counted the sixty steps across the square that it would have taken Arendt to get from her stuffy room to the cool companionship of the library.”

“Perplexing” is an attribute that appears more than once in Stonebridge’s book. For good reason: it characterises the twists and turns not only of Arendt’s life but also in her way of thinking. Stonebridge quotes Arendt quoting Plato’s rendering of a Socratic dialogue: “It isn’t that, knowing the answers myself I perplex other people,” Socrates reportedly said to Meno. “The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.” Whereupon Arendt adds: “Which, of course, sums up neatly the only way thinking can be taught.”

Of course? Arendt was an accomplished teacher who often performed her thinking in front of an audience — in fact the text Stonebridge uses here was labelled “a lecture” when first published in 1971 — but having been a teacher I know that many students resent being infected with perplexity. It requires skill not to lose them.

Skill is also on display when Stonebridge confronts her reader with the perplexities of Arendt’s ideas and life without trying to dissolve them. Arendt would have appreciated that. “I am often captured by the sense that there exists something she will not give up; something precious, mysterious even to herself, but very strongly present,” Stonebridge writes.

But isn’t that just the point of all of this? she might say now, chin resting in her smoking hand from her place in the bar in the underworld where the lost angels of the last century gather at dusk. That we are unknowable even to ourselves, maybe especially to ourselves, and yet capable of collective miracles? Isn’t that what you must fight for again now?

The subtitle of Stonebridge’s biography promises lessons. Arendt may have much to teach us: about indifference, about plurality and about racism, to name but three of the topics she wrote about. Stonebridge avoids turning Arendt into a Vordenker, somebody who does the thinking on others’ behalf. Arendt did not see herself in such a role either. She was principally interested in Nach-denken, in the exercise of chasing and thinking through issues that she found difficult. Such Nach-denken required close attention, patience, imagination and the willingness to leave well-trodden paths.

Without compromising her intellectual independence, Arendt relied on at least one Vordenker herself. Immanuel Kant taught her that our ability to think makes freedom possible and that how we think has moral consequences. From him she learned much else, including the idea that to think politically and critically required an “erweiterte Denkungsart,” which Arendt translated as “enlarged mentality.”

For Arendt, Kant was a familiar figure, and not just because she had read his Critique of Pure Reason when she was sixteen. Arendt grew up in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad), where Kant had spent almost his entire life. After having lived for more than twenty years in New York she admitted to a German journalist: “In the way I think and form judgements, I’m still from Königsberg.”

Perhaps the most important lesson provided by Arendt via Stonebridge is a challenge: Think! How not to think is also a key lesson of We Are Free to Change the World, and here the focus is on Arendt’s essay about Elizabeth Eckford and the other children known as the Little Rock Nine, who in 1957 dared to attend a racially segregated high school in Arkansas’s capital city. “As for the children, forced integration means a very serious conflict between home and school, between their private and and their social life, and… children cannot be expected to handle them and therefore should not be exposed to them,” Arendt wrote.

Here she was not mindful of the need for an “enlarged mentality.” She didn’t travel to Little Rock, she didn’t talk to Eckford and, most importantly, she didn’t take seriously the girl’s experience. Arendt didn’t to think empathetically about Eckford’s situation because she considered empathy an apolitical and therefore inadequate response. But she also failed to think critically about it. It says much about Arendt, however, that after her essay “Reflections of Little Rock” had been published she realised that she had been wrong and admitted as much in writing.

Although Arendt was a public intellectual par excellence in the second half of her life (and one who expertly used the media), she didn’t think it was her role to shape public opinion. Do you want to make an impact with your work, Gaus asked her in 1964. “To be honest with you, I have to tell you: when I’m working, I’m not interested in impact,” she replied. “And when the work has been completed?” he persisted. “Well, then I’ve finished it.” She explained that her main aim was to understand, and that writing helped her to do that. And anyway, asking her about her impact was something only a man would do: “Men are always so concerned about making an impression.”

I loved reading Stonebridge’s book because I felt that in at least four key respects she does justice to Arendt. For one, her biography is exceptionally well written. That matters because Arendt herself wrote well (in German more so than in English) and because she valued good writing. She frequently quoted poetry in her writings — and poets also appreciated reading her. The final passages of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the poet Randall Jarrell told her in 1950, “seem a sort of crushing unbearable poem, quite homogeneous, something the reader feels and understands at the same time… I feel as if I’d seen the other side of the moon.” She is well-served by a biographer whose prose is sharp, elegant and captivating.

Gaus was incredulous when Arendt insisted that she was not a philosopher. Stonebridge understands why she said “goodbye to philosophy for good.” Arendt might not have endorsed Marx’s dictum — “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it” — but she distinguished between philosophising, on the one hand, and thinking politically and critically, on the other.

Arendt was prompted to think not because of an abstract conundrum but because the world was out of joint. Her thinking was informed by her experience as a refugee and as a Jewish woman who had been lucky to escape the fate of the millions of other Jews murdered in the Shoah. All this provides her thinking and writing with a sense of urgency.

Stonebridge shares that sense of urgency. “Hers was not a call for a return to political reason (such as you often hear today),” Stonebridge writes, “but for a kind of emergency thinking that may, she said, in the end, be all we have.” Our world is in much need of the kind of emergency thinking that Arendt practised and Stonebridge advocates.

Yet even while thinking and writing about a world out of joint, Arendt was committed to living well. Friendship and love were important to her, a fact that we might easily lose sight of when reading Eichmann in Jerusalem or The Origins of Totalitarianism. Stonebridge’s biography keeps the loving and much-loved author of these books in focus. It ends with a call to her readers, which would, I am sure, have met with Arendt’s wholehearted approval: “Now pay attention and get on with the work of resisting the sorry reality that you find yourselves in. And for goodness’ sake — a puff of smoke, raising a glass of Campari — have some fun!” •

Hannah Arendt: Die Biografie
By Thomas Meyer │ Piper │ €28.00 │ 521 pages

We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love & Disobedience
By Lyndsey Stonebridge │ Jonathan Cape │£22.00 │290 pages

The post Emergency thinking appeared first on Inside Story.

Well-known to Lindsay enthusiasts, Cranny-Francis has written articles and organised conferences about his life and work, maintains a website, arranged the publication of his “political autobiography” The Fullness of Life and edited a volume of selected poems. In this first book-length single-author study of Lindsay’s life and work she has hit on an elegant solution to the problem of the hyperactively full life of her subject. He was someone whose works demand attention to his ideas, and whose ideas demand attention to his life. Jack Lindsay is structured around a core of six chapters, each dedicated to Lindsay’s book-length studies of English authors: John Bunyan (1937), Charles Dickens (1950), George Meredith (1956), William Morris (1974) and two on William Blake (1927 and 1978). This frame is filled in with chapters that provide biographical and intellectual context and discuss his other relevant works, helping the reader to understand, without being overwhelmed, how Lindsay’s approach to writing was influenced by his experiences and ideas.

This structure works well to illuminate Lindsay’s eclectic, self-fashioned life-philosophy, with its associated preoccupations, values and imagery: the struggle for unity, culture as expressive work, the archetype of death and renewal. The system evolved over time, but many elements were present from the first.

Inevitably Cranny-Francis omits or barely glances at much of Lindsay’s output. She makes barely a mention of his forty-three novels and seven biographies of artists. It would be hard to guess from it that Lindsay’s most cited study is about alchemy in Roman Egypt, or that the one most discussed by academics is a historical novel set in the British civil war.

Depending on what counts as a book, Lindsay published about 160 in his lifetime, as well as hundreds of articles, stories and poems. About a half of his writing was historical and biographical, a quarter fiction, and the remainder criticism, social theory, translations, polemics and poetry. Most of his publications were concerned with the past, usually the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Lindsay’s classical training is apparent in the eclectic character of works in which history, mythology, philology, archaeology, anthropology, aesthetics and philosophy are seamlessly blended.

All of Lindsay’s mature writing was underwritten by a self-fashioned philosophy or credo. Its most fundamental principle was what Cranny-Francis describes as the “embodied connectedness” of things. He often called it “vital unity,” “wholeness,” “Life” or “the fullness of life.”

In Lindsay’s thought the concept of vital unity assumes as many guises as energy does in physics. One of his symbols for it was Dionysus, the mysterious deity of wine and rebirth, leader of a disorganised band of enthralled creatures — satyrs, maenads, nymphs, centaurs, Pan the god of shepherds — who found no place on Mount Olympus. Another symbol was the figure of “the people,” which he sometimes called “the folk,” and occasionally “the masses,” each term with its particular political inflection. Human unity implied solidarity, equality, ethical responsiveness and mutual aid.

As Cranny-Francis observes, Lindsay extends the idea of unity to all spheres of human activity, including the natural world. John Bellamy Foster, noting Lindsay’s evocations of a “patient earth… ‘eternally reborn’ through labour and ritual practice,” identifies him as a forerunner of Marxist ecology.

Lindsay found the origins of the idea of unity in Plato, or even further back in Parmenides and Pythagoras, but a slightly less distant inspiration was the sixteenth-century excommunicated priest Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), who melded Renaissance humanism with materialism. Lindsay was stirred when he encountered Bruno in the early 1930s, subsequently writing a novel about him (Adam of a New World, 1936), and translating De la causa, principio e uno (Cause, Principle, Unity, 1962). Later he would claim that reading Bruno led him directly to Marxism.

Lindsay’s intense awareness of the interconnectedness of the living world had implications for his everyday life. Cranny-Francis quotes from an episode in The Fullness of Life during his years with the poet Elza de Locre in the early 1930s, when he lived in desperate poverty.

A local farmer had gifted a couple of rabbits to them as a neighbourly gesture. Confronted with the reality of having to skin and disembowel the animals before cooking, Lindsay found himself unable to proceed. He contemplates the economy of death on which a meat-eating society is based, particularly when social organisation has reached a point where meat protein is no longer essential to the diet: “One’s symbiosis with the earth is therefore in terms of unceasing violence and murder; and one knows, deep in one’s being, that one lives only by a system of blood-victims.”

“A communist society which is not vegetarian,” he concluded, “seems to me a hopeless contradiction.”

The young Lindsay called the absence of unity abstraction or dissociation; later, under the influence of Hegel and Marx, he favoured the word alienation. He argued that alienation has always been present in human life and has always provoked resistance. Throughout history that resistance has taken many forms — initiation rituals, shamanic flights, alchemy, art and poetry, and political revolt. The struggle against alienation shapes people’s relationships with one another and the world, motivates the protests of the wretched and exploited, and underlies attitudes to nature. Great thinkers and creative artists throw light upon its diverse manifestations.

Blake’s prophetic books explore the “world of false consciousness, of alienation,” according to Lindsay, and he praised Dickens for “the discovery of dissociation and the alienation of man from his fellows and his own essence, the stages of struggle against the dissociative forces, and the intuition (uttered in symbolic forms) of the resolving unity.”

Lindsay regarded religion as both a product of alienation and a form of protest against it. His vision of the world was also infused with hope for a fulfilment somehow always just out of reach. In a letter to Edith Sitwell on her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1955 he confessed to having been at times “very close to the catholic creed… indistinguishable perhaps from ekklesia of the faithful — the people who are Christ.”

Affinities between his system and Christianity are not difficult to uncover: sin as alienation, humanity crucified, Life the Eucharist, Paradise a vision of love and freedom. He was familiar with such syncretisms in the Ancient World: in a book about Roman Egypt he references a tomb in the Roman catacombs of Pretextatys on which Dionysus is identified with the Lord Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts, and burials in the Vatican Necropolis of Christians who also worshipped Isis and Bacchus.

Alienation has become all-pervasive in the modern world, chiefly because of money and science. Following Thomas Carlyle, Lindsay often referred to the institutions and customs associated with money as the “cash-nexus.” From all the possible elements of human relationship associated with the exchange of goods, money abstracts a single factor, that of utility, and makes the remainder redundant. The dehumanisation implicit in the use of money reaches its apogee with capitalism, which turns life itself into a commodity. In his study of William Morris he declares that “a genuinely new society can be born only when commodity-production ends, and with it division of labour, money, market-systems, and alienation in all its many shapes and forms — above all alienation from labour.”

The other powerful alienating factor of modernity is the scientific method stemming from Galileo and Descartes, which Lindsay consistently attacked as “mechanical,” “divisive” and “quantitative.” Cranny-Francis notes that “Lindsay returns repeatedly… to Blake’s criticisms of science and the post-Enlightenment rationalism on which it is based.” Lindsay was not at all opposed to scientific inquiry, nor wholly dismissive of the achievements of post Enlightenment science. But in Marxism and Contemporary Science (1949) and a later trilogy on alchemy, astrology and physics in Greco-Roman Egypt he refused to separate knowledge of “nature” from other kinds of knowledge. There is a single interconnected world, and all ways of knowing it are likewise interconnected. The “sciences” discussed in Marxism and Contemporary Science are not physics, astronomy or chemistry, but biology, anthropology, art criticism, psychology and history.

For Lindsay, decisive proof that contemporary science has taken a wrong turning was the atomic bomb, the culmination of alienation’s will to self-destruction. Today he would no doubt make the same criticism of the digital revolution and genetics.

But there is a nagging problem with alienation, though Lindsay, more of a poet than a philosopher, seems never to have addressed it, and neither does Cranny-Francis. It parallels the problem of evil in religions that postulate a benign creator. Where does alienation come from? How can the world be a vital unity and at the same time a site of struggle against division?

Some cosmologies have an explanation. An idealist can say that the world of the senses is a flawed copy of a perfect and eternal world that is glimpsed only in thought. The unity is “above,” the struggle “below.” But Lindsay was trenchantly opposed both to idealism and to hierarchy. For him mental and spiritual phenomena are autonomous, but in the final analysis dependent on matter. Cranny-Francis mentions his debt to the Sydney-born philosopher Samuel Alexander. Alexander was an early twentieth-century advocate of emergence, the theory that complex systems produce attributes and activities that do not belong to their parts. Could emergence explain the origin of alienation? It isn’t clear how.

At a psychological level, though, Lindsay’s biography provides a paradigm case of a conflict between longed-for unity and actual division. Lindsay’s father was the writer and artist Norman Lindsay, one of Australia’s best-known humourists and artists in the first half of the twentieth century, notorious for his sexual libertarianism and hostility to Christianity. Cranny-Francis dwells sensitively on Jack’s difficult relationship with Norman. “The story of father-son relationships threads through all of Lindsay’s writing, fiction and non-fiction,” she writes. When Jack was nine years old, Norman left his wife and three sons. The fatherless family moved to Brisbane, where young Jack lived in a state of genteel but disorganised impoverishment, loved but neglected by his vague and increasingly alcoholic mother until her sister’s family finally took charge and sent him to school. Unsurprisingly, the theme of a lost birthright appears often in Lindsay’s novels and histories.

Norman renewed contact with his son only after his academic achievements had earned him scholarships to Brisbane’s elite Grammar School and the University of Queensland. Lindsay, ecstatic to be restored to his famous father’s attention, was Norman’s devoted acolyte for the next decade. Then they fell out bitterly.

Norman’s entire life was a fierce act of will to sustain the exhilarating freedom of his adolescence, when he had followed his older brother out of a shabby mined-out gold town to marvellous Melbourne and lived in careless poverty, pursuing a self-directed course in drawing, reading, flaneuring and witty companionship until Jack’s conception brought that delightful life to a sudden end. For the rest of his life Norman acted out his ambivalence, alternately praising and denouncing his son. In 1967 he wrote to him, “I can’t help but laugh when I think of what our biographers are going to make of the break and reunion of our relations. They will have to do the best they can with its human dramatics for it is quite impossible for them to realise the compulsions behind them.”

Jack Lindsay did not have children until his late fifties. He was an anxious, self-critical parent, and never ceased to yearn for his father’s distracted attention.

Turn for a moment I say
Turn from your obdurate place
In that clarity of stone,
That terrible folly of light,
Turn for a moment this way
Your abstracted face.

Lindsay understood the importance of this personal history for his literary career, confessing to a close friend that “if my parents hadn’t parted I doubt if I should have become a writer at all.” Cranny-Francis suggests that his description of William Morris also applies to himself:

From one aspect there never was a more impetuously frank man than Morris; he lives restlessly in the open and follows his convictions out without concern for the consequences to himself or anyone else. From another aspect he appears a hidden figure, moved by a passion of which the multiple effects are plain but the central impulse obscured. I suggest that along the lines I have sketched we can bring the man and the artist into a single focus, and see the way in which his personal dilemma was transformed into a dynamic of acceptance and revolt, of deepening insight into the nature of his world and into the ways in which the terrible wounds of alienation can be healed.

A succession of recent British scholars has sought to recover Lindsay as a forerunner of practitioners of cultural studies, an influential field of interdisciplinary research instigated by British theorists — among them Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams — in the 1970s. Although they didn’t reference Lindsay, the founders of cultural studies were almost certainly familiar with some of his work, and there are strong points of similarity in their ideas. In particular, they all affirmed the political significance of culture.

Marx had suggested a base–superstructure model of social formation, according to which economic relationships ultimately determine the organisation of politics, law, religion and creative expression. The implication was that economic interests always trump cultural factors. The practical effect was to concentrate efforts to build socialism in workplaces, which in effect meant and trade unions. This left little place for cultural creators. Like cultural studies, Lindsay steadfastly rejected that model.

Another tenet of cultural studies that Lindsay anticipated was the idea that significant cultural change comes from “below.” Lindsay believed that plebeian practices and values, and their fraught and contradictory clashes with the practices and values of ruling elites, are the major source of cultural innovation. He made the point forcefully in a letter to his friend and fellow critic Alick West:

The concept is that culture is created by the expropriators, fundamentally expresses their position and needs, and has no close relation to the concrete labour-processes and the producing masses. I should like to suggest that something like the reverse is the truth. The people are the producers and reproducers of life, and in that role are also the begetters of culture in all its shapes and forms — though in a class-divided society the ruling class expropriates culture.

Lindsay’s view stemmed from the conviction — shared with Ruskin and Morris — that work and aesthetic production had once “been harmoniously united, and that they still ought to be, despite the general movement towards degradation and mechanisation.” Before commodity production alienated workers from the products of their labour — in this historical sketch uncommodified slavery is conveniently forgotten — work was done in order to create both necessary means of living and pleasing or profound emotions. Each was a joyful undertaking. Once, communal work had always been accompanied by singing and chanting. Understanding this had motivated William Morris to take on, in Lindsay’s dated language, “the full political and social struggle which alone could have as its aim the achievement of brotherhood and the ending of commodity-production.”

In A Short History of Culture Lindsay traced the essential identity of art and work back to the movement of bodies in space. From the classicist Jane Harrison he took the observation that the repetitive, rhythmic behaviours that create the necessities of life — poundings, liftings, plantings, weavings, cuttings, stalkings, throwings — are shared with dancing. Like her, he considered dance to be the primal kind of cultural creativity. Citing another book of Lindsay’s criticism, After the Thirties, Cranny-Francis writes:

Lindsay identifies in dance the rhythmical control of movement that characterises human activity and being. It bodily enacts the purposive behaviours that enable the group to maintain social coherence, engaging them through the rhythm of the breath: ‘Body and mind are thus keyed together in new adventurous and interfused ways.’ The dance becomes an exploration of the embodied being required to achieve a specific purpose, such as a hunt. It lifts the dancer (and observer) into the realm of ‘pure potentiality’ where ‘desire and act are one’; where the bodily disposition required to engage successfully in a particular activity is achieved and communicated. In this process, Lindsay argued, human beings imaginatively engage aspects of everyday life and rehearse the modes of being, thinking and acting that enable them to achieve their needs and desires. For Lindsay this is the role of culture in the formation of being and consciousness, whether it be the ritual art of early societies or contemporary literature, visual art, theatre and dance.

If communism means opposition to capitalism and desire for a future free of oppression and exploitation, Lindsay was certainly a communist. No one seems to know exactly when he joined or if he ever left the British Communist Party, but he was actively affiliated with it from the late 1930s until at least the 1970s. MI5 put him under surveillance. He stayed in the party when it demanded he recant his ideas, and again after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s brutality in 1956. There is no doubt about the strength of his allegiance. But was Lindsay a Marxist communist? He certainly called himself one. Cranny-Francis, along with just about everyone else who has written about him, takes it for granted.

Yet there are grounds for wondering about Lindsay’s Marxism. What kind of Marxist converts on account of a Renaissance philosopher? Marxism profoundly shaped his thinking but it was not Lindsay’s foundational postulate. He came to it as a plausible derivation from a more fundamental constellation of ideas about culture and history that he had already arrived at. Some of his creed was shared with Marxism, some was dissonant with it. If, in the manner of a party apparatchik, one were called on to prepare a list of his heresies, it would be an easy brief: he largely discounts or ignores economic forces, flirts with idealism, sees revolutionary potential in “the people” rather than “the working class,” and has a Romantic, even reactionary, understanding of Communist aims.

Late in life, Lindsay began to concede the point. The Crisis in Marxism (1981) is highly critical of most prominent twentieth-century Marxist theorists, particularly Adorno and Althusser. In one of his last essays he declared that he was “diametrically opposed to all closed systems,” including Lenin’s. “I have found all Marxists, orthodox or not, to be hostile.” Among an eclectic list of influences ranging from Keats to Harrison to Dostoyevsky, only two Marxists appear: Lukacs, and Marx himself.

In a sense, of course, debating whether Lindsay was “really” Marxist is as futile as debating whether Mormons are Christian or Alevis Muslim. In another sense, though, it matters. As long as Lindsay is seen as first and foremost a Marxist, his ideas remain submerged beneath the complexity and weight of a hundred and fifty years of Marxist theorising. To perceive what is most original in his thought, it needs to be disentangled from what has become a distracting integument.

Promised a scholarship to Oxford after he graduated from the University of Queensland but told that he would have to wait a year, Lindsay refused to enrol. For most of his life the lack of a higher degree and his oppositional politics would have made it difficult if not impossible to work as an academic. He gave no sign of wanting to. Even his most esoteric books were not aimed primarily at academics, nor did they please many of them. Ironically, today it is chiefly they who keep his memory alive. Anne Cranny-Francis’s book is no exception, but it deserves a broader readership. We need not agree with Lindsay’s controversial opinions to hope that this remarkable thinker will become better known. •

Jack Lindsay: Writer, Romantic, Revolutionary
By Anne Cranny-Francis | Palgrave Macmillan | €119.99 | 416 pages

The post A dynamic of acceptance and revolt appeared first on Inside Story.

Schreiber is the author of several literary essays and biographer of Susan Sontag. The original edition of this memoir was a bestseller in Germany and stands out among the flood of books addressing our supposed epidemic of loneliness. The idea that social connection is the key to happiness and disconnection the root of mental ill health has become the new commonsense, stamped into our consciousness by lockdowns and compelled distancing. Many writers have offered diagnoses of the problems of loneliness and prescriptions for overcoming it, but few provide such a vivid first-person account and fewer still bring such an erudite sensibility to the task.

The backbone of Alone is life-historical. In 2019 Schreiber has an epiphany that things are going wrong; by Christmas “I stop believing that this life, as I live it, as I live it alone, is a good life.” He is partly restored by a writing trip to Switzerland, struggles through the compounding isolation of the pandemic, and embarks on a trip with friends to the Canary Islands that turns into a sort of sabbatical. Along the way he finds a series of therapeutic diversions, all of them physical activities that relieve some of his self-consciousness: gardening, hiking, knitting and yoga.

Off this narrative spine Schreiber hangs a series of meditations on the solitary condition, heavily supported by big thinkers. His intellectual tastes run philosophical and French, and anyone with a passing acquaintance with the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s will recognise many of his theoretical muses: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard. At times the insights are rich, especially in contrast to the shallowness of some psychological and sociological accounts of loneliness, but at other times the price seems high. I had hoped never again to encounter the word “phallogocentrism,” but there it was. And do we need a deconstructionist to tell us that we should not insist our friends conform to all of our wishes?

Schreiber’s analysis of friendship is powerful, pointing out its many forms and virtues — it is non-exclusive, voluntary, enduring — but showing how often it is made to defer to coupledom and the “grand narrative” of romantic love. Friendship is often pictured as a stage of life prior to nesting, and Schreiber notes with some disdain how many couples withdraw inward, a dynamic especially evident during the pandemic. Even so, he is scathing about how friendship has been misrepresented in the Western philosophical tradition, in which he claims it is portrayed as a quest for similarity and equality, the perfect friend idealised as “another oneself.” There is an element of straw-manning (and patriarchy-bashing) here, but Schreiber is adamant that friendship needs to be celebrated for its embrace of diversity rather than sameness, a conviction that resonates with his emphasis on the importance of friendship in queer communities.

He is equally incisive and contentious on the topic of loneliness. Drawing the standard distinction between loneliness and being alone, the latter an objective lack of social contact, the former subjective distress over the degree or quality of contact, Schreiber writes of the pleasures and benefits of solitude, admitting to enjoying some aspects of pandemic isolation. Being alone can be good and loneliness is not all bad. Though painful, it is not a disease, and the important lessons about loss and compassion to be learned from it mean it should not be dreaded. Some hand-wringing about the loneliness epidemic is reactionary, he suggests, motivated by nostalgia for the traditional family.

But Schreiber also muddies the conceptual waters. Solitude would normally be understood as positively valued aloneness, but he criticises it as “the presentable, dignified version of loneliness,” a word people use to deny the shameful reality of their true but taboo feelings. Although he sometimes confuses the picture by using solitude and loneliness interchangeably, Schreiber adds some useful complexities here. Loneliness may be distressing but also ethically and existentially desirable, and solitude may be a pathway to self-knowledge but also a cover for self-deception.

Schreiber makes no attempt to hide his ambivalence about being alone. He can present himself as bravely fronting the challenges of solitude and rising above coupled conformity but also admit to holding petty resentments and vulnerabilities. He can clothe his loneliness in grand ideas and social critique but also express his unhappiness with naked honesty. In one breath he flays romantic relationships and claims not to want them anymore, and in the next he confesses to feeling unlovable.

At times these vacillations suggest a cerebral Schreiber who reads the loftiest French theory and criticises the idea of self-care as “the ultimate victory of neoliberal late capitalism” while coexisting uneasily with a visceral Schreiber who likes to watch Friends, loves yoga and acknowledges that his neurotic misery may be due more to a lack of sunshine and exercise than existential angst.

Schreiber is a perceptive and relatable writer. He grapples with many of the same trials of social life that we all face, trials that became significantly more challenging in recent history. As a character in this memoir, he is not so much rounded in the literary sense — deep, complex and many-faceted — as he is jagged. The conflicts and quirks that other writers might edit out are on candid display in this book. It is well worth spending a few hours of quality solitude with it. •

Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living
By Daniel Schreiber | Reaktion Books | $34.99 | 152 pages

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Former National Party leader Barnaby Joyce recently made some comments about the makeup of the Voice to Parliament:

What you’ll see is people on $300,000 a year, twenty-four of them, and they won’t be elected, they’ll be selected. Which one are you going to select? Which tribe are you selecting from? I’ll give you a little tip, they don’t get along. You pick one, watch out, the other one’s coming. Right down to families, families don’t get along. A group of people, highly paid, they’ll be like a quasi House of Lords.

As the late, great Tommy Cooper used to say, “Deja Moo: the feeling that you’ve heard this bullshit before.”

We all recognise bullshit when we see it, but do we recognise it as a genuine philosophical concept? Could we one day find ourselves attending an erudite lecture on the topic by Oxford University’s Rupert Keith Murdoch Professor of Philosophy?

If you were in the habit of visiting bookshops around 2005 you may recall encountering a little hardback called On Bullshit. Written by someone with the unlikely name of Harry G. Frankfurt, it became an unlikely bestseller.

On Bullshit looked like one of those “joke” books they stack next to the cashier’s desk. I’d happily bet that many of its buyers were jaded Christmas shoppers on the lookout for a last-minute stocking stuffer. But it was, in fact, a serious work of scholarship, with a serious message.

Frankfurt, who died this month at the age of ninety-four, was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University who made substantial contributions to moral philosophy. He is also the father of Bullshit Studies and On Bullshit is the nascent discipline’s seminal work.

I’m sure he hoped to be remembered for his writings about free will and moral responsibility in a deterministic universe, but it was his pathbreaking theorising on bullshit that got him invited onto 60 Minutes and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, and assured him a place in the popular culture.

By all accounts Frankfurt was a committed intellectual: it was philosophy, not fame or money, that got him out of bed each morning. Predictably, he was also committed to the truth — as a concept and as a practice. Asked why he chose Descartes as the subject of his first book, for example, Frankfurt happily admitted that he was attracted to the brevity of the Frenchman’s books.

First published in 1986 as an essay in Raritan and then as that very short book, On Bullshit grabbed the imagination of so many because it identified something that was obvious as soon as Frankfurt pointed it out: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”

Using his training as an analytical philosopher, Frankfurt then went further and defined this phenomenon: bullshit is not just lying, it is indifference to the facts: “the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.”

Truth-tellers and liars, Frankfurt argues, are playing in the same game on the same playing field. Liars may seek advantage by lying to hide the truth but, just like an adherent of the truth, they know what it is. In essence, they agree about the rules of the game and have their own kind of respect for the facts. A liar understands that if he’s caught out in a lie, there will be consequences.

The bullshitter, on the other hand, is sitting in the grandstand, tweeting on a smartphone, and pretty much ignoring the game of truth and lies. The bullshitter’s intentions are very different. As the old saying goes: “Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through.”

As Frankfurt writes:

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off… He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.

The great bullshitters of our age — you know who I mean — are certainly highly skilled purveyors in counterfeit thought; they don’t care if what they say is true or is not true.

What they really care about is conveying a politically useful impression of themselves to their audience; they care about their image and the power that flows from it. They bluff to deceive and deceive to bluff; they cherrypick ideas and facts and present them as an advertisement for themselves.

This is why Frankfurt believed that bullshit is a greater dishonesty than lying: if you don’t have to believe that something is true, you’re free to believe that anything might be. In a democratic system where accountability is supposed to depend on facts, this is highly corrosive. The public square becomes a kickboxing ring without an umpire.

Unfortunately for Bullshit Studies, Frankfurt’s argument is weakest when he attempts to explain just why there is so much bullshit around nowadays. “Bullshit is unavoidable,” he argues, “whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” Now this is true — to a certain extent.

Writing near the beginning of the digital age, Frankfurt never anticipated that the rivers of bullshit would soon become tsunamis, supercharged by the internet, social media and a 24/7 media cycle.

But none of this really explains where the original impetus comes from and why it’s so rewarding for its proponents. Unfortunately, I think it comes from us: the audience.

Barnaby Joyce says things, and because they’re colourful and he’s a member of parliament, the media reports them. Then, as he intends, someone else responds in outrage and the media reports on that. By creating a clickfest, Joyce has manoeuvred debate about the Voice referendum to just where he wants it: circling the drain.

Frankfurt’s short essay — great as it is — would have benefited from being just a bit less short: bullshit has a long history.

In his classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1964, the historian Richard Hofstadter explains that American politics has always been “an arena for angry minds.” A nation’s political rhetoric, he says, reveals its political psychology — and it’s not a pretty picture.

“I call it the paranoid style,” writes Hofstadter, “simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy.” Take one bullshitter, add a dash of social media, stir into a bowl of paranoid style and you get a recipe for disaster.

Hofstadter’s essay is full of examples from American history, such as the red scare of senator Joe McCarthy, but he argues that the paranoid style can be found anywhere.

It’s a view supported by recent science, As one survey of the field suggests, “paranoia should not solely be viewed as a pathological symptom of a mental disorder but also as a part of a normally functioning human psychology.” Being a bit paranoid was an evolutionary advantage. Our ancestors who were too scared to go into the dark forest may have been more likely to pass on their genes because oftentimes the dark woods were dangerous. And then the tribe’s big man — possibly the original bullshit artist — came along and exploited it.

Harry Frankfurt learnt the hard way about the dark side of our fascination with bullshit. Impressed by the popularity of his little book, Knopf paid him a six-figure advance for whatever he came up with next. The sales of the book he produced, On Truth, were disappointing. •

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Here in Australia, despite hopes of rehabilitation, around 50 per cent of ex-prisoners serve another term in jail. As criminologists joke, this kind of statistic would have led to radical change in any other policy area. Yet until recently abolition movements have been sidelined as a utopian hangover from the 1960s.

In the past few years, however, campaigns in the United States and Australia have highlighted police brutality against minority populations. Coalescing in the Black Lives Matter movement, they have brought into the public arena calls for the abolition of police and, by extension, prisons.

In his latest book, The Idea of Prison Abolition, American philosopher Tommie Shelby considers the arguments in favour of abolishing prisons by analysing the work of well-known abolitionist and activist Angela Davis. The idea of prison abolition has a long tradition, probably since prisons themselves came into use. This is more recent than you might think: imprisonment as a penalty for wrongdoing has only been used since the late 1700s, which may well be the best argument for taking the idea of abolition seriously.

There is nothing inevitable or natural about imprisonment as a response to offending. It produces many undesirable outcomes, not the least of which is huge disruption to families. Family support is one of the most powerful elements in preventing reoffending, but when I interviewed prisoners in eight NSW prisons about their sentences, it didn’t seem to be a priority for the system. As one prisoner, Dave, told me, “[My kids] want to come and see me but I don’t want to bring them here, to this place.” “This place is horrible,” said Chris, whose family lived hundreds of kilometres away. “My missus — just because she’s associated with an inmate she doesn’t get treated well.”

Shelby’s book approaches abolition as a legitimate social movement and a coherent set of theoretical principles. In some ways the title is a misnomer: it could equally have been called “Arguments Against the Idea of Prison Abolition.” Short of accepting Davis’s ultimate conclusion, though, Shelby agrees with many aspects of her analysis. Mass incarceration as currently practised in the United States is difficult to justify from any perspective — moral, philosophical or practical. Rather than abolition, Shelby argues for imprisonment to be used sparingly, contingent on the achievement of social justice goals. Throughout the book he engages with the need to tackle inequality as a precondition for prison reform.

Bombarded as we are with representations of the US criminal justice system, our obsession with crime sometimes blinds us to the differences between the two countries. If we elide the distinction between the American and Australian systems, we miss the point of Shelby’s work, and Davis’s too. Both reflect deeply on the intersections between slavery and criminal justice in the United States.

More importantly, the impact of Australia’s history of colonisation needs a very different analysis, starting with the symbiotic relationship between the colonisation of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people and the continuing over-policing and over-incarceration of those communities. The effect may be the same — over-incarceration and racially distorted policing and criminal justice practices — but the aetiology and therefore the solutions could well be different. With that proviso, Shelby’s work provides some good thinking tools for us to interrogate our own system.

Shelby’s basic position is that, if incarceration provides a way for society to prevent or reduce crime — particularly crime that causes “great and irreparable harm” — then abolition is not justified, no matter what other arguments, moral or practical, can be marshalled. Put another way, if imprisonment can reduce the harm that crime causes to society then, no matter the harm to the offender, it can be morally justified.

Acknowledging the considerable disagreement as to whether prisons reduce crime, he points out that there is little evidence that “alternatives” fare any better. If, as he puts it, “background conditions are just” then, for him, incarceration has legitimate uses.

While she has written widely on many aspects of the criminal justice system, Angela Davis’s abolitionist views are distilled in her 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete?. To an extent, Shelby reduces that book’s complex matrix of thought to a single theme: that imprisonment is, to put it somewhat crudely, a tool of capitalist domination. This oversimplifies a more nuanced argument, but for Shelby her revolutionary Marxist standpoint lessens the power of her calls for abolition.

Is Davis taking an abolitionist position because prisons lack a moral basis, he wonders, or simply as a part of a radical project of abolishing institutions that shore up the capitalist society?

Tommie Shelby writes as a professor of African and African-American studies expert in a broad range of issues, including the ghetto, hip-hop culture and now prisons. As a philosopher with a political focus he is mainly concerned with justifying imprisonment from a moral point of view — indeed, he accepts that jail’s harmful effects mean the onus lies on those arguing for its retention to provide arguments supporting it.

While he critiques Davis’s functional approach, which sees imprisonment’s function as supportive of capitalism, he approaches the subject in a similarly functionalist way. Even if a practice is morally or philosophically justified, he asks, does it work? Does it do what we want it to do in the real world? Then he turns the point around, using the functional argument to justify the philosophical one — if it works then it is philosophically and morally justified.

In attempting to examine imprisonment through the prism of the aims of the criminal justice system, Shelby takes on a Sisyphean task. Sentencing can feel like a downward spiral of impossibly conflicting ideas that cancel each other out. The somewhat exasperated pronouncement of the High Court of Australia that our sentencing aims are like “signposts pointing in opposite directions” sums it up well. Philosophy can’t reconcile the fact that, in practice, it is very difficult to rehabilitate someone while you are also causing them pain by punishing them.

But that is not the level at which Shelby engages abolitionist arguments. He takes the aims he thinks can and should be fulfilled in a society where the types of inequalities present in the United States have been defeated and leaves the others alone. To establish the preconditions of social justice, he implies, would allow a more integrated approach to often-conflicting aims.

With high rates of recidivism a feature in most countries, whether in high-imprisoning societies like the United States or relatively low ones like Australia, it is difficult to find evidence of specific deterrence: imprisoning an individual does not seem to make them less likely to offend in the future. General deterrence — the idea that the mere existence of the criminal justice system prevents crime — is more defensible.

That latter fact supports one of Shelby’s most persuasive propositions, that imprisonment serves a valuable symbolic function as a “linchpin” of the criminal justice system serving to “anchor” other penalties, with the threat of prison producing compliance in people undertaking less restrictive penalties like probation. The existence of the prison provides the “enforcement tool” for these other penalties, which, as he rightly points out, are perfectly compatible with imprisonment and therefore not really alternatives. Our system ostensibly functions this way already.

But Shelby does rather gloss over concerns about “alternatives” as a way back into the prison — the idea that even more benevolent forms of punishment like community service or probation can, if administered poorly, impede rehabilitation by setting up a “back door” to imprisonment. Social workers know all about how people can be set up to fail. They also know that rehabilitation is more complex than it may seem, which makes Shelby’s suggestions about how prisons could be made less “criminogenic” seem somewhat naive and curiously remote from how prisons actually work. In this and other areas his self-admitted focus on theory (or vision) rather than praxis is evident.

Shelby is careful to state that he doesn’t believe that retribution is a morally justifiable rationale for imprisonment, although he implies that some degree of harsh treatment is necessary to avoid vigilante-style revenge on the part of victims.

As for rehabilitation, the view that prison may be a time of reflection and a chance to change antisocial habits hints at the aims of the early prison builders in the United States, the term “penitentiary” meaning just that, a place for penitence. As one schooled in praxis, I find it difficult to reconcile this rosy view with the scarcity of good prison rehabilitation anywhere in the world except perhaps the Nordic countries.

Ironically, given that abolitionist thought is often characterised as utopian, Shelby’s imagined prison system is itself quite utopian, although he sees the need for coercive rehabilitation. Drawing a distinction between prison work as slavery and as fair exchange for bed and board is similarly difficult in practice. But Shelby is in the business of the possible and these things are, theoretically, possible.

Shelby carefully examines Davis’s early personal experiences with the criminal justice system during her involvement with the Black Panther movement. He is happy to treat urban ghettos as sites of oppression alongside prison, which involves accepting that Black prisoners in the United States are “political prisoners” jailed for their opposition to injustice. This does not mean that prison has no utility, rather that it should not be used as a site for political oppression.

Like Davis, Shelby sees the necessity of dealing with the unequal social conditions that underlie the overrepresentation of people of colour in the US prison system. He examines in some detail how these matters could be tackled, with prison remaining as a penalty of last resort. He engages with issues of victimisation, pointing out that it is necessary to respond to both the future risk the perpetrator may pose to others and the need to avoid actions of revenge on the part of victims if the punishment is not considered adequate. Incapacitation may certainly be justified on the first condition, but it seems possible to deter vigilante behaviour without necessarily using imprisonment.

Shelby’s admiration for and agreement with Davis on many levels is evident, but his characterisation of her vision sets up the familiar binary of reformist versus abolitionist. If we believe reform efforts are always counter-revolutionary because they integrate potentially positive moves into the ultimate project of exploitation, then it is a choice between the two. But perhaps it is possible to challenge this binary while still taking an abolitionist perspective.

In fact, much current “abolitionist” writing is not inconsistent with this approach — and in many ways this is what Shelby has done in his sensitive and approving examination of the many questions on which he and Davis agree. If abolition is seen as a way of thinking about punishment rather than an “all or nothing” goal, then reform needn’t be inconsistent. As prominent writer and activist Brea Baker says, “Abolition is an ongoing process of assessing and replacing any system that doesn’t serve all of us.” If abolition is a process, then what happens along the way may be just as important as the final outcome. •

The Idea of Prison Abolition
By Tommie Shelby | Princeton University Press | $49.99 | 224 pages

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Perhaps the sheer number of Žižek’s books — averaging about two each year since the early 2000s — makes it hard to find a definitive entry-point. Perhaps it is his free-flowing style, alternating between anecdotes and esoteric, jargon-laden philosophical argumentation. Or perhaps it’s a well-deserved dose of his own medicine: he confesses to not having seen half of the movies he criticises, with the latest offence being committed against Matrix Resurrections in 2022.

For some, his wide-ranging commentaries and humorous style signify a public intellectual par excellence; for others, they reveal a clownish charlatan. A podcast dedicated to discussing his ideas is called Žižek and So On, capturing his most famous signature phrase (“pure ideology” comes a close second). His personal idiosyncrasies include incessant nose-rubbing and sniffling and a studied refusal to wear a button-up shirt in public appearances.

Two YouTube videos, in juxtaposition, testify to Žižek’s internet-era pop-star status. The first is a nine-hour collage of a lecture series he delivered on Friedrich Hegel; the other, a seven-second clip, shows the philosopher obliviously enjoying hotdogs on the street, probably in his hometown of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he still resides. Both have attracted hundreds of thousands of views and many adoring comments.

Although Žižek made his name interpreting Marx, Hegel and Jacques Lacan — and interpreting the world through them — he seems to have consciously renounced the position of authoritative intellectual. His eccentricities are the performative embodiment of this stance — as the philosopher himself insists, the truth of one’s belief is in one’s actions, not some elusive, self-deceiving inner life. Perhaps his nervous tics are a physiological manifestation of the imposter syndrome which he fully embraces.

Bar-El’s new book, How Slavoj Became Žižek: The Digital Making of a Public Intellectual, likewise embodies some of the qualities it ascribes to Žižek. As his title suggests, Bar-El is not concerned primarily with Žižek’s theories or politics, but the sociological and historical process by which he became a global phenomenon. The substance is in the form.

Zižek’s emergence from the political and intellectual crossroads that was Slovenia, where he was born in 1949, had a certain inevitability. As the west-most component of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Slovenia enjoyed a connection with the “free world” unmatched by other socialist states thanks to the relatively liberal rule of Josip Tito and his successors. A vibrant intellectual scene was facilitated by its soft border with Italy and thus the rest of Western Europe.

In the absence of a unified and rigid official Marxist doctrine, Yugoslavia’s door was open to various theoretical formations. The Frankfurt School, Existentialism and Structuralism all found audiences and interlocutors there. Žižek was reading “Marx at age fifteen, Heidegger at twenty, Derrida at twenty-five, and Lacan and Hegel at thirty,” writes Bar-El, and embarked on his second PhD in Paris in 1979, having worked briefly in the communist bureaucracy.

Žižek and his theoretical fellow-travellers formed the Ljubljana School in the early 1980s. Rather than submitting to Eastern Marxism or Western Structuralism, they appropriated the core insights of Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and also drew on a mix of other traditions. It was an early example of Žižek’s “superpositioning,” a term from quantum mechanics that Bar-El uses to describe the creation of a third position from an existing opposition as a way of breaking out of theoretical and political deadlocks.

Žižek’s move to France had a crude materialist rationale too: he wanted to escape his uncertain prospects in an institution in which the Yugoslav party-state pickled its dissident intellectuals. Unemployed on returning from France, Žižek is no stranger to marginalisation.

Dissidents enjoyed much greater freedom in Yugoslavia than in any other self-proclaimed socialist countries. In fact, not only did the authorities tolerate cynicism about the country’s doctrine of “self-managed socialism” but also they regarded such cynicism as a prerequisite for continued compliance to the system. One of Žižek’s favourite anecdotes was how, in the mid 1970s, two of his acquaintances lost their party jobs for being true believers of official ideology.

The best way to challenge a purportedly tolerant, self-critical regime was therefore through self-conscious “overidentification,” which dissident art collectives, especially the punk movement, increasingly did in their public performances throughout the 1980s. While attacking an ideological edifice from without could unwittingly reproduce shared presuppositions, overidentification threatened to lay bare their hidden reversal in the regime’s operation.

Like Žižek’s other lessons from “real socialism,” this insight would be applied to his intellectual intervention in the liberal-democratic West. The torture carried out in Abu Ghraib prison, for instance, was not scandalous because it deviated from “American values” but because it was the “obscene supplement… the barbarism that sustains our civilisation” in the middle of a “pre-emptive war” that sacrificed the lives and livelihoods of Iraqis for the perceived security of America and its allies.

Žižek’s theories are always immanently political while seemingly easily discoverable in popular culture. Having himself undergone military service, he finds overidentification in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, in which the protagonist remains a proficient soldier because of his cynical distance, while “Private Pyle” is subsumed by the “voice of the superego [of military discipline]” and becomes (self-)destructive. Bar-El doesn’t include this example, but he does identify superpositioning between fact and fiction as another characteristic Žižekian move.

As “actually existing socialism” crumbled and the future of Slovenia became uncertain, pluralist left-wing movements vied for influence against neoliberal nationalists. The vision of a capitalist regime contained in an organic national community was the antithesis of the Ljubljana School’s theoretical lynchpin of the “split subject”: the inherently contradictory individual subjectivity within any politico-ideological system, which are themselves contradictory too.

Žižek narrowly lost the race to be one of four presidents of Slovenia in 1990, running as a candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party — a move intended, he explained, to claim the popular banner of liberalism before free-market proponents could. He seems to enjoy performing such politically charged linguistic manoeuvres. During the 2020 US election campaign he advised progressives to embrace the label “moral majority” on the basis of their commitment to equality and meeting human needs, in contrast to a political right that was increasingly resorting to “alternative facts,” brutality, and obscenity. It was the same reason he gave for his tame presentation — for some, frustratingly tame — in his famous 2019 debate with Jordan Peterson.

Bar-El details the contrast between Žižek’s lacklustre reception in France in the late 1980s and his subsequent phenomenal success in the Anglophone world. The making of a public intellectual is inexorably social. The French scene, with long-established and heavily fortified intellectual communities, left little room for a new entrant distinguished by his superpositioning between disciplines, between academic and politically engaged writing styles, and between French theories and German Idealism. Nor was Žižek helped by the controversial status of his PhD supervisor, Jacques-Alain Miller, or his own insistence on taking Lacanian psychoanalysis out of clinics and into the realm of philosophy (to the disapproval of Miller himself).

Helped by the “post-Marxist” political philosopher Ernesto Laclau, who also provided a preface, Žižek published his first English-language book, the theory-dense The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). As Laclau articulated it, Zizek was positioned — by himself and others — “to address the problems of constructing a democratic socialist political project in a post-Marxist age.” Thus began his long association with the leftist non-academic publisher Verso, which would open up an international readership for others in the Ljubljana School.

Professional and personal networks brought Žižek and his theories into dialogue with Judith Butler, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and other prominent intellectuals. The fall of communism in Europe also created a space for him to, as Bar-El succinctly puts it, “explain the East to the West, in Western theoretical terms and channels.” An early example, not mentioned in the book, was a 1996 documentary that opens with Žižek standing on a bridge in Ljubljana and informing his audience that the river beneath him is the geographical boundary between Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) and the Balkans. On one side is “horror, oriental despotism,” where women are subject to horrendous violence and “like it”; on the other is “Europe, civilisation,” where women suffer likewise “but don’t like it.” The obvious materialist point aside, this was the quintessential Žižek: forsaking scholarly respectability for black humour; delving into “low culture” to reveal inherent, deep contradictions; questioning seemingly natural oppositions to gesture at what he sees as a true alternative.

Žižek’s rise in the global scene coincided with the onset of the digital revolution during the 1990s, a decade in which his unparalleled output and “copy-and-paste” quality (“self-plagiarism” for his critics) fitted perfectly. His “Hegelacanese” — as Bar-El calls his synthesis of Hegel and Lacan — proved remarkably apt at encoding key ideas in easily transmittable packages, regardless of whether the consumer has the wherewithal to decode them properly. If anyone was producing memes it was Žižek.

After the 9/11 attacks and during the war on terror his prolific and timely commentary propelled him into prominence, and here Bar-El provides an excellent summary of his counterintuitive arguments and their reception. From then on, Žižek would not let an international cataclysm go untheorised — the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the ongoing ecological crisis and (presumably too late to be included by Bar-El) the Covid-19 pandemic, publishing a book on the latter as early as March 2020. His growing intellectual and cultural impact is attested to by his growing associations, including with Julian Assange, Yanis Varoufakis and Sophie Fiennes, who directed two documentary films that brought Žižek and psychoanalysis into the cinema.

The public interventions came at the expense of Žižek’s scholarly credibility, with academics increasingly viewing his (often suspiciously) swift public interventions as regurgitative and crowd-pleasing. Some, such as the political philosopher John Gray, fault Žižek for “reproduc[ing] the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he perceives in the operations of capitalism” and thus achieving a “deceptive substance.” His Hegelacanese has attracted controversy, and his ever-expanding interdisciplinary forays also led to further questions of his status as a philosopher. Indeed, Žižek positions himself as a member of the public that he addresses, with his subjective doubt resonating with that of his audience.

Bar-El is very precise here: “Žižek both assumes and rejects the position of an authoritative intellectual, enjoying its universal and general status while denying its elitism and exclusivity.” In this he follows Lacan in arguing that the “subject-supposed-to-know” — the benevolent, internally consistent authority, fully identified with the role conferred by the social order — does not exist. As Lacan famously put it, “The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king.”

Like the French, the Anglophone world has trouble determining what Žižek’s role really is. His work is often introduced in the context of literature studies rather than philosophy, and most of his followers discovered him outside the universities. And yet, as evidenced by the commercial success of his thousand-page doorstopper, Less Than Nothing (2012), there is a hunger in the reading public for a philosopher who brings the intellectual ivory tower and the masses to each other’s level, seemingly without compromising either philosophical niceties or socio-political relevance.

Žižek’s insistence on demonstrating philosophical ideas through examples, even mundane or vulgar ones, is not merely a pragmatic choice. He treats pop-culture artifacts as a window into the ideological unconscious that operates beneath visible social phenomena. In accordance with his reading of Hegel, he doesn’t regard theory as existing separately from its concrete manifestations. Indeed, examples can subvert the ideas they are supposed to reflect.

He thus rejects a common leftist refrain that Marxism was never truly practised in the communist countries, as if there was some “pure” spirit of Marxism on an astral plane invariably perverted by historical contingences. The failure of “actually existing socialism” must instead be traced to the blueprints and their authors — though without negating the necessity to continue to “fail better,” as Žižek’s favourite Samuel Beckett refrain goes.

This is one of most important keys to understanding Žižek. It isn’t mentioned by Bar-El, whose focus on the process and phenomenon of Žižek’s rise and fall within the confines of 189 pages inevitably requires trade-offs. Certain historical details, especially pertaining to the Slovenian scene of the 1980s, could also have clarified Žižek’s positions and performances. Bar-El might well have looked with understandable envy at Žižek’s freedom from constraints of contemporary academic publishing.

By the late 2010s, with his habitual “superpositioning” earning him increasing ire in progressive and leftist circles, Žižek had essentially vanished from publications like the Guardian and the London Review of Books. One controversy Bar-El briefly mentions is Žižek response to the refugee crisis, though his views on the 2016 US presidential election and transgenderism also rankled (and the latter continue to do so), and some further details here might be illustrative. Rejecting the mainstream humanitarian framing of the issue, Žižek argued that Europe has an obligation to resettle many more asylum-seekers because it was culpable in the destruction that generates mass dislocation. Resettlement must be conducted in a highly organised and coordinated way, he opined, rejecting the “open border” stance of many on the left. And the visible suffering of the drowning migrants shouldn’t obscure the plight of those who don’t even have the means to escape.

More controversial is Žižek’s critique of multiculturalism. He insists that irreducible differences exist between communities’ “ways of life,” the shared ethical frameworks and customs that enable them to function. Any polity that hopes to accommodate immigrant populations successfully must therefore openly renegotiate some of the basics so that discontent isn’t repressed and harnessed by xenophobic reactionaries.

True to his Hegelian bent, though, Žižek also contends that some struggles “cut across civilisations” to form the basis of universal solidarity — and who could deny that Europe and America are not themselves grappling with fundamentalism, of the Christian variety, and anti-feminist backlash? I leave it to the reader to judge for themselves whether Žižek’s suggested renegotiation is more practical than calls for “open borders.”

While Bar-El’s purpose largely precludes subjective judgements about Žižek, he doesn’t conceal his sympathy. And given his often-brief treatment of the content of Žižek’s various interventions, a reader needs to be somewhat familiar with the Žižek cannon and style in order to follow the narrative with ease. Fortunately, aside from Žižek’s voluminous writings and innumerable public appearances available online, there is also The Žižek Dictionary, published in 2017. (For his critics, its existence — and that of the International Journal of Žižek Studies, is further evidence of the self-indulgent posturing of the man and his disciples.)

Bar-El’s repeated invocation of terms like superpositioning can, at times, make his text feel mechanistic, although it does double as a tribute to Zizek’s own highly reiterative style. His sympathy extends to somewhat uncritically using the term “cancel culture” to describe Žižek’s intellectual marginalisation, a move that uncannily mirrors his subject’s insistence upon terms like “gender-identity ideology,” which risks lending credence to conservative rhetoric. As Bar-El points out, however, the function of Žižek’s transgressions has been to reveal the “normative social field” — the unquestioned presuppositions that have led to the ideological deadlocks in which the left too often finds itself.

Ultimately, Eliran Bar-El offers a useful framework with which to examine Žižek’s work in the past and present: as an intellectual who defies easy categorisation, as a one-man phenomenon made in a network of influences and for a digital age, and as a figure whose performances are inseparable from his philosophical insights.

His latest act of superpositioning, responding to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Žižek rang the alarm on Putin’s expansionist intent and called for a “stronger NATO — but not as a prolongation of US politics,” making him even more suspect among some leftists as well as alienating him from Moscow-controlled Russia Today, one of the few remaining outlets that still regularly published him and with a wide reach. On the other hand, his warning of Ukraine’s other “colonisation” by Western neoliberalism has not endeared him to the liberal or conservative mainstream either.

It is perhaps appropriate to consider how the term “superpositioning” serves as a signpost to a relatively recent iteration of Žižek’s philosophy. Explicitly borrowing from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, Žižek posits “ontological incompleteness” — that our reality itself has an inherent incompleteness at its most fundamental level. This is Žižek at his purest, as Bar-El accurately describes: superpositioning himself as an (anti-)philosopher attempting to grapple with the horizon of understanding imposed by language. The Lacanian “lack” at the heart of the human subject and the “big Other” — the virtual symbolic order that guarantees meaning — is thus inscribed into existence itself, as if the universe rejects its own authority.

This incompleteness has a temporal dimension as well, in that the meaning of the past is determined by what transpires in the future. For Žižek, catastrophes like the failed communist experiment cannot be redeemed. But whether they remain meaningless deviations from progress or a manifestation of historical cycles, or whether they can be re-rendered into the first iterations of an emancipated world we can’t hope to foresee, is the stake of the universalist struggles being waged today. •

How Slavoj Became Žižek: The Digital Making of a Public Intellectual
By Eliran Bar-El | University of Chicago Press | $49.95 | 256 pages

The post And so on appeared first on Inside Story.

Although they may not have reached these heights of nihilism, many people do wish their lives would end, or at least that they could be cut short if they became unbearable. With assisted dying increasingly in the news, Caitlin Mahar’s new book, The Good Death Through Time, presents an enlightening history of the desires of people suffering from terminal illness or planning for a dignified ending, and of the cultural shifts, religious values and medical advances that have shaped, supported or obstructed them.

Before acquiring its more familiar contemporary meaning about 150 years ago, euthanasia simply meant a good death. Dying was seen as a spiritual ordeal to be endured with Christian patience, and thus a test of courage and character. Much emphasis fell on what came after death — salvation or something much worse — rather than its attendant agonies. “For the faithful,” Mahar writes, “a good death was marked by the embrace or overcoming of suffering rather than its elimination.”

Just as well: doctors at the time had no power to alleviate pain. In fact, they believed it was beneficial to health, and were more apt to cause than cure it with their treatments. In any event, preparing the soul for death was judged more necessary than dulling the mind.

Some of this changed in the mid nineteenth century with the advent of opiates and other anaesthetics, prompting the earliest medicalisation of dying. Euthanasia came to refer to deaths eased by a physician’s care with the aid of narcotics. Pain was increasingly seen to lack redemptive qualities; reducing it might even help the dying to focus on spiritual matters. Mahar argues that this shift in attitudes reflected a more general rise in people’s dread of suffering and sensitivity to discomfort.

That rise, which William James characterised as a “strange moral transformation,” drove campaigns to reduce needless pain by outlawing vivisection, corporal punishment and blood sports. But it also provoked a backlash that foreshadowed present-day sneering at thin-skinned progressive “snowflakes.” A British critic of the voluntary euthanasia movement in 1906 ridiculed it as the home of pain-averse “literary dilettanti” and “neurotic intellectuals,” a charge later echoed by an opponent of euthanasia legislation who worried “we were getting too soft as a nation and too sensitive to pain.”

Mahar offers a compelling account of the rise of British voluntary euthanasia activism in the 1930s, a movement that originated within the medical profession and aimed to give doctors the power to accelerate lingering deaths using morphine and other narcotics in strictly limited circumstances. Despite having eminent supporters such as George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, legislation failed after opponents raised concerns about the potential for abuse by relatives, slippery slopes, medical overreach, and the challenges of regulation.

The revelation that the Nazi regime euthanised well over 100,000 disabled people further damaged the voluntary euthanasia cause, reversing prior support within the medical community and undermining public support for the idea that some lives are “not worthy to be lived.” Mahar shows how eugenics-inspired advocacy for involuntary euthanasia of the intellectually disabled — advanced in Australia by University of Melbourne anatomy professor Richard Berry, whose name was permanently scrubbed from a campus building in 2016 — has tarnished the voluntary euthanasia movement.

The Good Death Through Time provides an authoritative examination of euthanasia debates, court cases and initiatives from the 1950s to the present. Mahar identifies shifts in the groups viewed as suitable for euthanasia, including people on life support or in unrelenting pain not linked to a terminal or incurable condition, as well as in the rationales offered for the practice. Although reducing suffering remains paramount and fear of pain may paradoxically have grown with medicine’s rising capacity to palliate it, voluntary euthanasia has been framed increasingly as a matter of rights, dignity and personal empowerment rather than alleviation of distress.

Australia has been near the forefront of legislative developments. Advocates for voluntary euthanasia argue that overly narrow eligibility requirements have led to unnecessarily bad deaths for those excluded. Disability activists, on the other hand, caution against broadened criteria, citing the Dutch experience of rising euthanasia among people with dementia or mental illness. Mahar concludes with a concise epilogue covering this recent context.

The Good Death Through Time is a lucid and well-documented guide to a challenging topic. Mahar provides a sympathetic but clear-eyed picture of euthanasia’s many protagonists and perspectives without forcing a single view onto the reader. The scholarship is global, but the focus on Australia and Britain adds to the book’s local relevance.

Mahar’s work is especially compelling as an account of the medical profession’s role in euthanasia, in all its meanings. The profession’s views on the desirability and scope of euthanasia have waxed and waned, its pharmacological tools enabling the practice while altering popular attitudes and increasingly pathologising pain. There is no better guide than this one to the wider context of current debates about assisted dying.

Philosopher Dean Rickles’s Life Is Short approaches death from a quite different angle, though he would agree with proponents of voluntary euthanasia that how we fashion our lives and deaths should be a profoundly personal choice. In re-visioning Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, he wants to persuade us that although we may dread the end of life and entertain fantasies of eternal youth and immortality, it is life’s finitude that gives it significance.

“To have a meaningful life,” he writes, “death is necessary.” Only by having and recognising limits — “the very stuff of meaning” — can we make purposeful choices to create our selves and realise our futures, rather than being tossed around by life.

Life Is Short takes this idea and runs with it through eight brief but somewhat meandering chapters. Rickles suggests that the desire for immortality, or even just for a longer life, is often driven by a reluctance to foreclose future possibilities by making hard choices in the present. He dissects the difficulties individuals face in dealing with our future, notably temporal myopia — discounting the future relative to the present — and the less familiar but no less destructive favouring of the future at the present’s expense.

The key to overcoming these “diseases of time,” he suggests, is to develop a strong sense of connection with one’s future self rather than seeing it as a stranger. “[O]ur present self just is the future self of our past self! Treat every future time as equally as Now, because it will be Now later, and it will be your Now.”

How we should go about making a more meaningful life comes down to making it a project (“Project Me”), carving out a future by choosing and acting rather than leaving options forever open. Doing this requires us to overcome the sense that life is provisional and not yet quite real, which Rickles dubs “onedayism.” That process of overcoming involves understanding ourselves and our motives better. We must move beyond the childish feeling of being unbounded and invulnerable to a mature commitment to a purposeful life and work, dull as that may sound.

Despite his general breeziness and references to contemporary popular culture, Rickles’s intellectual influences have an oddly mid-twentieth-century flavour. Existentialist writers (Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, early Woody Allen) get guernseys, with their ruling image of solitary individuals creating heroically authentic selves against a backdrop of cosmic meaninglessness.

Carl Jung takes centrestage in the book’s second half; not the kooky, occult Jung of mandalas, the collective unconscious and flying saucers but the wise Jung of personal identity and the process of maturation. Rickles discusses at some length Jung’s ideas about individuation — the development of a coherent self through understanding our unconscious motivations — and how the archetypes of the present-oriented child (Puer) and the prudent elder (Senex) shape how we age.

What is noteworthy about this cluster of ideas is not just how much they have been generationally cast aside, but also how they portray our orientation towards life and death as fundamentally lonely and stoical. To Rickles, the authentic, unprovisional life is one in which individuals exercise their will by making resolute choices, pruning the branches of their tree of possibilities, and committing to a specific future.

There isn’t much room for other people in this vision of autonomous self-creation. They tend to figure primarily as the conformist horde who stand in the way of us becoming authentically ourselves by tying us down with their norms and expectations. Yes, each of us exists as a solo being with a unique beginning and end, but something is missing in an account of life’s meaning when relationships and social life are so apparently incidental.

It is well worth spending one of the last thousand or so Saturday afternoons we have left on Life Is Short, but in some ways it is an odd book. Contrary to its subtitle, it offers few concrete prescriptions for living a more meaningful life, so it is not a self-help book, however highbrow. Despite the amiable, self-disclosing persona of the author, its level of abstraction is too high for it to be accessible in a de Bottonian way, although Rickles sprinkles it with some memorable epigrams (“death anxiety is the ultimate FOMO”). Its intellectual style is too associative and wandering to be a philosophical treatise on the nature of life’s meaning.

All the same, as a meditation on a very big question — perhaps the biggest of them all — Life Is Short achieves its goal of making us think about the unthinkable. •

The Good Death Through Time
By Caitlin Mahar | Melbourne University Press | $35 | 256 pages

Life Is Short: An Appropriately Brief Guide to Making It More Meaningful
By Dean Rickles | Princeton University Press | $34.99 | 136 pages

The post Appointment with death appeared first on Inside Story.

Between 2014 and 2021 Janna Thompson wrote twenty-three reviews for Inside Story. She was among our most valued contributors, obliging, perceptive, forceful and — that rarity — always on time, and we were deeply saddened to learn of her death during our publishing sabbatical in June. Here, in an expanded version of his talk at this week’s memorial gathering, Tim Oakley recalls his former colleague.

Let me say a little about Janna’s role as a member for forty-seven years of the La Trobe University philosophy department. She joined us as a lecturer in 1975, and retired as a professor at the end of 2011. But she remained an adjunct for the next ten years, continuing her research activity and regularly attending departmental seminars. Over that period, my own attendance at the seminars was made more pleasurable by the habit of meeting Janna for coffee beforehand.

Janna contributed enormously, in both quantity and quality, to the department’s research output. In particular, she is internationally famous for breaking largely new research ground with her work on intergenerational justice. Others will tell you more about this, but I can say that she started a whole new research field almost single-handedly. Nowadays there are hundreds of journal articles and books on the topic, all citing her in their bibliographies.

She had me look over the draft of her ARC Discovery Grant application near the start of all this. I had seen many such applications and written some myself, but hers blew me away. The project was meticulously thought-out and justified, and had significance in spades. I thought, if this doesn’t deserve a grant, nothing does. (The ARC assessors, I’m glad to say, took the same view.)

That project, like almost everything that Janna worked on, had a wonderful virtue: it had direct relevance for society. Crudely put, it is about what we owe the past, and what we owe the future. Janna’s take on this was very much against the common view that we owe nothing to either. Almost all of her work — five books, two co-edited collections, and a very large number of journal articles and book chapters — had a bearing on vital social issues. Philosophers: when you need to defend the value of philosophy to the public, point to Janna’s work. Further, she was that most valuable philosophical researcher, a writer whose arguments are delivered with a clarity that makes them accessible to those outside academic philosophy.

Here is an example of the high regard she enjoyed. I had an email recently from the editors of a special issue of The Monist. This is a highly rated international philosophy journal published out of the United States.

We are great admirers of Janna Thompson’s work. A few months ago, Janna had sent us an article, in first draft, for a special issue of The Monist on Transgenerationality, Community and Justice… Unfortunately, she passed away before the article was accepted.

The Monist would like to publish the manuscript posthumously, including a note explaining that it is one of Janna’s last works. The Monist would also like a colleague of Janna’s to add a short text to the article, even if only two pages, explaining Janna’s contribution to philosophy (a kind of tribute).

Just to be clear, Australian philosophers do not standardly get this sort of treatment in international journals.

Quite apart from her research output, Janna made a great contribution to philosophy at La Trobe. In seminars — seminars on any topic — her contributions were acute, penetrating and constructive. She was a good, tough-minded thinker, committed to weighing evidence and careful reasoning, but at the same time essentially constructive in her contributions. (I might add, she showed the same virtues on departmental committees.) Despite concentrating her research on human rights, and global and intergenerational justice issues, she was in fact a very good generalist, with a capacity to think through any type of philosophical problem. I benefited personally. She generously read drafts of papers of mine on epistemology, and sometimes made the most useful comments on them that I received from anyone.

Janna also made a great contribution to the department’s teaching program. She was a very good teacher, regularly scoring high praise in student surveys. She took teaching seriously, as evidenced by her undertaking the Diploma of Tertiary Teaching when it was offered at Monash. She is, I believe, one of the very few philosophers to have done so, if not the only one. She taught a wide range of subjects, and developed new subjects with great success. In addition she was also a genuine team player, willing to step in and take over a subject that had to be taught when the usual lecturer was on leave or ill. Imagine the workload!

We were, in philosophy at La Trobe, for a long time superbly lucky. We had not just a very accomplished group of academics, but we had a department where for the most part our colleagues were our friends, we cooperated, and we had a feeling of common enterprise. It’s not like that everywhere. Janna was very much part of that, and a willing contributor to that culture.

I have been speaking about Janna’s role in the La Trobe philosophy department, but she was a striking figure in other spheres as well. She was a fighter for social justice in all sorts of capacities outside the university, where her activities were undertaken in line with rigorously worked-out positions on what ought to be done. She once stood (unsuccessfully) for the Victorian parliament. She was a public intellectual of the best sort, writing many pieces for the Conversation and Inside Story. (How she managed to find time to get all this done is anybody’s guess.)

Another aspect of her life was that she was an adventurer and athlete, taking many overseas cycling trips of the most strenuous kind, kayaking over wild water rapids, and other such activities. She regularly cycled from home to the university, undeterred by two separate accidents when she was injured after being hit by cars.

I am extremely grateful for having had the privilege of being one of Janna’s friends. She probably had closer and more intimate friends than me, but we spent good times together, and I, with my wife Eve, shared with Janna meals, visits to galleries, concerts, and weekends away together at our holiday house. I, like other friends, spent time with her in her last months and days. Janna faced death as those who knew her would expect — without the least trace of fear or self-pity.

Janna was a first-rate philosopher, a first-rate colleague, a committed fighter for justice, an adventurer, an extraordinarily fit long-distance cyclist and trekker, and other things as well. But she was also straightforwardly a very good friend, to me, and to many of us. This occasion is about celebrating Janna, of course, and it’s not about us, her friends, family and admirers. Nonetheless, let me just say, losing her hurts, doesn’t it? My sympathy goes to those who feel that loss. •

Janna’s articles for Inside Story

Janna Thompson’s crime novel, Lockdown, has just been published by Clan Destine Press

The post What we owe the past, and what we owe the future appeared first on Inside Story.

What causes epistemological stubbornness? Bad reasoning, according to the authors’ diagnosis. People who suffer from this condition fail to take into account evidence that might contradict their assumptions. They jump to conclusions from too little evidence; they make implausible assumptions. The cure, the authors think, is the tools that philosophy can provide: its methods of reasoning and “its millennia-old history of recommendations for how to lead a good, rational, and examined life.”

Some of what they think philosophy can teach are methods of reasoning. Nadler and Shapiro take us through the rules for good reasoning taught in courses on critical thinking. They tell us how to identify a sound deductive argument, how to assess conclusions that depend on induction, and what you should keep in mind when you are searching for the best explanation for a phenomenon. They identify common mistakes of reasoning: reaching a hasty conclusion from a small number of cases, assuming that correlated phenomena have a causal relationship, and accepting evidence that tells in favour of a belief while ignoring considerations that might disprove it. They warn us against mistakes that practically everyone, including philosophers, make when they reason about probabilities. They do this job well, using amusing anecdotes and examples, real and fictional, to illustrate good and bad reasoning.

But how much can such lessons accomplish? The people the authors describe as epistemologically stubborn are undoubtedly reasoning badly. Those who think that only a small number of Jews were killed in the Holocaust are ignoring mountains of evidence. Conspiracy theorists who think that Covid is a hoax make the implausible assumption that thousands of officials and doctors all over the world have conspired to produce false data and withhold information. Those who think that vaccination causes autism fasten on a few cases of vaccinated children with autism and ignore studies that show the incidence of autism to be no lower among the unvaccinated.

Yet those who attempt to dispute conspiracy theories and other forms of bad thinking often find that providing counterevidence or pointing out errors of reasoning is ineffective and sometimes counterproductive. Epistemological stubbornness is often rooted in a strong emotional commitment and a course in critical thinking is not likely to be a cure.

If not a cure for the epidemic of bad reasoning, then perhaps lessons in critical thinking immunise people against succumbing to a false system of beliefs in the first place. But even as a safeguard against falling into epistemic error their effectiveness can be doubted. Research in cognitive science shows that critical thinking is not a skill like bicycle riding or making bread — something that once learned can be exercised in many different situations. A student who learns how to recognise the fallacy in an argument is often unable to detect fallacies in other arguments — even when the logical structure is the same. People’s ability to reason often depends on their background knowledge rather than application of the rules. Critical thinking is hard to teach and apply, and we have reason to believe that the rules and guidelines supplied by philosophers are not much of a protection against falling into error.

But Nadler and Shapiro think philosophy has more to offer than guidelines for critical reasoning. Bad thinking doesn’t merely affect the beliefs you have and the actions you do. It reveals what kind of person you are. Philosophy, they believe, can save us from ourselves by putting us on the path to wisdom and the right way of living. A wise person, they say, is someone who knows how to live well, and living well requires exercising good judgement. Having a good life, being virtuous and thinking well are together the ingredients of wisdom. The hero of their book is Socrates, who believed that an unexamined life was not worth living and regarded it as his mission to force his fellow Athenians to explain and justify their beliefs, whether they wanted to or not.

Nadler and Shapiro also subscribe to Plato’s view that living well depends on having true beliefs. A person whose beliefs are false cannot have a good life, but we can’t be sure that our beliefs are true unless we are willing to criticise and justify them. We might question whether this Platonic view is true; living well and being knowledgeable don’t always seem to go together. And we might also wonder whether it is possible to justify all of our beliefs. Perhaps some of them have to be taken on faith. Nevertheless, we can agree with these philosophers that if we, like Socrates, are prepared to critically examine our beliefs then we will be less likely to exhibit the epistemic stubbornness that causes even good people to think badly.

Why then does Nadler and Shapiro’s antidote for bad thinking seem simplistic? One reason is that those who hold the views that these philosophers abhor believe they have performed the Socratic task of self-examination. They have done their research; they have criticised and rejected beliefs that they used to hold; they believe they have uncovered the truth; and like Socrates they are prepared to challenge authority, and question and criticise those who adhere to conventional ideas. Any account of why bad thinking happens to good people has to explain why people fall into error despite their commitment to discovering the truth and criticising false beliefs.

The problem with Nadler and Shapiro’s approach, it seems to me, is that they regard bad thinking as an individual failing and assume that the cure is to get individuals to reason better. They focus on the individual and aim to save her from herself. They pay no attention to social conditions that are conducive to good or bad reasoning, and they don’t attend to the ways in which good reasoning requires cooperation and the assistance of others.

One indication of this lack is their failure to discuss the role played in our lives by the testimony of others. Most of what we believe about the world was told to us by school teachers, experts or people with direct experience. We know that Earth revolves around the sun and rotates on its axis, not because of our own experiments or observations, but because we were told that this is so and we believed those who told us. Nadler and Shapiro think that we should examine the evidence for and against our beliefs, but few of us have the time or the expertise to determine for ourselves whether the predictions of climate scientists are accurate or whether immunologists are right about the efficacy of the vaccines for Covid-19. A lot of what we believe depends on trusting what others tell us, and reasoning well requires us to think about where we should place that trust.

Our dependence on testimony means that knowledge is not a personal achievement but the result of cooperation between individuals who share with each other information and views deriving from their experiences and expertise. Without relevant background knowledge our efforts to do our own research can lead us down blind alleys and make us vulnerable to views of charlatans. As participants in the social system of knowledge production and use, the most rational course, most of the time, is to trust what experts tell us — whether they are plumbers telling us why our pipes leak or immunologists telling us why it is safe for us to get vaccinated. To understand why good people are susceptible to bad thinking we must therefore explain why so many people are willing to believe members of a group peddling a conspiracy theory rather than the views of experts.

It is, perhaps, not so difficult to explain why good, intelligent people might be seduced by views that seem to be plausible or thrilled by the impression that they have uncovered a secret that has been kept hidden by the authorities. It is more difficult to explain why they hang on to their beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. What makes them so epistemologically stubborn?

This question can probably only be answered by sociologists or social psychologists. But a partial answer may have to do with a reason for belief that Nadler and Shapiro briefly discuss. Sometimes believing is a prudent thing for a person to do. Pascal thought it was prudent to believe in God even though there is no way of proving His existence. If God doesn’t exist, the belief is false but having it does you no harm; but if God exists and punishes those who don’t believe in Him, then your belief will enable you to escape his wrath. Nadler and Shapiro allow that in some circumstances we are justified in believing something for prudential reasons even when available evidence tells against it. Suppose your past performances give you good reason for believing that you have no chance of winning your next race. But you believe that you can, and because of the confidence and determination that having this belief gives you, you do win. The belief justifies itself by helping you to do better.

If your society punishes those who don’t believe in God, then it would be imprudent to express your doubts. For the sake of a safe and comfortable life it would be better still if you could bring yourself to share the belief. You will no longer feel alienated from other group members; you can regard yourself as truly belonging. Group bonds are, after all, important not only for an individual’s survival but also for her sense of who she is and where she belongs, and they are often cemented through shared beliefs. But this makes it not only prudent to adhere to group beliefs; they also believe that a stubborn refusal to countenance criticism is a mark of loyalty and commitment.

Those who are bonded together by their belief in a conspiracy theory or who join together in demonstrating against Covid restrictions have found an identity as a member of a supportive group who see themselves as standing against evil or conspiratorial forces. They are not likely to accept the arguments of people they oppose or regard as unenlightened, or to countenance the possibility that their common cause is mistaken.

The problem is that group beliefs can be ill-founded or downright irrational, and as Nadler and Shapiro emphasise, this matters morally if they cause harm. Those who want to be epistemically responsible and loyal to the cause of their group can find themselves in a difficult position.

Socrates is a hero, especially to philosophers, because he refused to compromise his epistemic ideals. He was determined to force Athenians to explain and justify their beliefs — whatever the consequences. They condemned him to death, not because he was irritating but because he questioned religious and moral beliefs that they believed were essential to the harmony and good order of their society and, worse, encouraged the young to follow his example. He argued, in vain, that he was performing a good service for his society. But even in a liberal social order many people find it difficult to accept that those who dissent, question official historical narratives or blow the whistle on their country’s injustices can be loyal citizens.

Socrates was heroic because he refused to give up his epistemic ideals even in the face of death. Patients with serious cases of Covid who continue to deny that the disease is real are a perverse form of anti-hero. They refuse to give up the beliefs to which they are committed in the face of the most overwhelming empirical evidence. They take epistemic stubbornness to a new height.

How much can philosophy really contribute to curing good people of bad thinking? Less than Nadler and Shapiro think, I am forced to conclude, but not nothing. Philosophers can present rules for good reasoning, a valuable thing to do even when many people ignore them; they may be able to find ways of making people think more critically. They can champion ideals of critical inquiry and laud those who follow them even in adversity. Most of all they can encourage the creation of communities that value differences of opinion and critical exchange. Those who teach philosophy to children have found a way of encouraging communities of enquiry bound together by a commitment to respectful exchange of ideas. There is no reason to think that such groups cannot become more prevalent among a society’s adult members. •

The post Thinking by numbers appeared first on Inside Story.

The boys grew up to become two of the most accomplished scholars, writers and administrators of their generation. Contemporaries in age — Wang Gungwu will be ninety-one in October and Amartya Sen eighty-eight in November — they both recently published absorbing memoirs of their lives as outstanding scholars and exemplars of a humble cosmopolitanism that is becoming increasingly rare.

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998 and has been an international public figure ever since. He has been a faculty member of Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, an adviser to governments and sought-after speaker.

There are many eminent Professor Wangs in the world, but anyone who has read into the history of Asia soon discovers there is only one “Gungwu.” As well as being an immensely productive and wide-ranging historian, Wang Gungwu has been a distinguished scholarly leader at the Australian National University and the National University of Singapore, and for nine years was vice-chancellor of the University of Hong Kong.

The professional lives are public knowledge. Many readers, however, will find the early lives of the two men tantalising. They provide an opportunity to ponder two questions: how the British Empire in its declining years affected two clever children; and the extent to which practices and traditions of China and India shaped two outstanding intellectuals.

As the titles of their books indicate, each has grappled with “identity” and the need to reconcile the values of family and mother tongue with the English language and the legacies of the British Empire. Wang was a national of China until 1949, when he became a citizen of the Federation of Malaya; later, in 1979, he became a citizen of Australia. Sen has remained an Indian citizen, in spite of being “very used to standing in long queues at passport checkpoints.”

Wang was born in 1930 in Surabaya in today’s Indonesia (then the Netherlands East Indies), where his father was headmaster of the town’s only Chinese high school. The Depression impoverished the school, and the family moved to British Malaya where his father became an inspector of Chinese schools in the town of Ipoh. When Wang was growing up in Malaya, “home” was China.

Sen’s experience of “home” was more certain and omnipresent. It was Bengal, perhaps the proudest region of India, and there was no dispute that Bengal was within India. His father, a PhD in chemistry from London University, taught at Dhaka University, but Sen was born at his mother’s home at Santiniketan in western Bengal. Until the age of eight, his family lived in Dhaka in eastern Bengal (today the capital of Bangladesh).

Three aspects of their childhoods contributed powerfully to making them the men they became. Their early experiences also highlighted similarities and differences between being Chinese or Indian in the last days of European empire.

First, both boys delighted in embedding themselves in the culture and languages of their families. “For many years,” Sen wrote, “Sanskrit was close to being my second language after Bengali.” He learned Sanskrit from an adored maternal grandfather, a teacher of Sanskrit and philosophy at Santiniketan, where the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore had begun a progressive school before the first world war.

Out of empire: Sixteen-year-old Wang Gungwu with his parents, Wang Fuwen (left) and Ding Yan in front of their home in Green Town, Ipoh, Malaya, on the eve of their departure to China. From Home Is Not Here.

Wang Gungwu’s first language was “a variety of Mandarin,” and he soon learned “that there were many kinds of Chinese” — Hakka, Hokkien and the Cantonese he learned from the family’s servant. His father, a trained teacher of languages from what became Nanjing University, “decided to teach me classical Chinese himself.” Father and son sat together each night to read classical texts. “My father wanted me to learn a language that was not spoken and rarely used except in formal documents.”

It proved sound preparation for a scholar of Chinese history. Sen experienced a similar but less direct augury of his future when he discovered that “there was a strong complementarity between my interest in Sanskrit and mathematics.”

A second important element of the two childhoods was the encounter with English. Here their experiences differed, but the outcome was the same: both became masters of their third or fourth language.

In Sen’s family, there had been English speakers for at least three generations. It seems to have been expected that he would become fluent simply from lessons at school and occasionally hearing English spoken around him.

Wang’s father, on the other hand, was the first in the family to learn the foreign language. He had studied English in high school because he felt “he knew enough Chinese literature and needed to improve his understanding of the outside world.” He determined that his son should also learn and sent him to an English school in Ipoh. By early adolescence, with the help of lots of movie-going, “at a very basic level, I was now comfortable in both languages, Chinese and English.”

Sen, however, felt “my progress in English was very slow,” and even on the ship to Britain when he was twenty, he was perplexed by the question, “Would you care for some chocolate?” which, for a budding philosopher, opened up various possibilities about what caring for chocolate might entail.

The third great impact on both children was the second world war. For Wang it was close and personal. After the Japanese landed in Malaya and occupied Ipoh in December 1941, he and his parents fled the town and for a few weeks hid on remote rubber estates and in caves. When the fighting passed on, they returned to town, and eventually his father was absorbed back into the education system, now overseen by the Japanese.

To make ends meet, Wang and other children sold soap and small items in the bazaar. “One day, the Japanese came to the market entrance and placed several human heads on a high stand not far in front of our stall.” It was to warn looters. Later, he was part of a crowd that witnessed a beheading. “I was horrified and had nightmares.”

Sen’s experience was grim and insidious. In 1943 the “Bengal famine” killed up to three million people. In Calcutta, Sen saw human skeletons “dying on the streets.” Even in distant Santiniketan “perhaps 100,000 destitute people had passed through… on their long journey to the big city” where they hoped to find food. “The continuous cries for help… ring in my ears even today.”

His maternal grandmother told him to give one can of rice to anyone who came to the door, but only one — we “have to help as many people as we can.” As an economist, Sen earned a large part of his fame from his work on the causes and prevention of famine.

The war, however, had a curiously beneficial effect on both lives: it freed them from the regimentation of colonial school systems and from the rote-learning that had been part of classical education in China and India.

For Wang, these were wonderful “years of unfocused learning,” He mixed with people of all sorts — Malays, speakers of various Chinese dialects and Indian labourers with whom he occasionally drank toddy. In the two disorganised years after the war, he indulged his passion for movies, saw 400 films and, like a diligent historian, made notes about many of them.

For Sen, the war meant that he was sent away from Dhaka and Calcutta to the safety of Santiniketan. His education from the age of eight was “at the remarkably progressive school” founded by Tagore. The school’s emphasis was “on fostering curiosity rather than competitive excellence… I loved it.”

Moves to great colonial cities marked the end of childhood for both men. Wang left Ipoh for Singapore and the University of Malaya in 1949. Sen left Santiniketan for Calcutta and Presidency College in 1951. By coincidence, they both arrived in Britain in 1954 — Sen on the way to Cambridge, Wang Gungwu to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

There is much, much more in these memoirs than childhood reflections, and it would take a far longer essay to do them justice. They trace personal lives, careers and the circumstances that shaped research. Wang Gungwu’s two volumes include sections written by two of the women in his life — his mother and his wife Margaret, who co-authored Home Is Where We Are.

Sen’s is a great portmanteau of a book — the sort of suitcase you’d pack for days on the road with entertainments, lectures, historical visits, formal dinners and philosophical reflections. At one pole, there is a delightful dry humour and personal tales of ill health and undergraduate life. At another, there are exchanges with economists and philosophers, mini-essays on Indian history and ruminations on the research questions, such as social-choice theory or the economics of famine, that have occupied a lifetime.

Both men appear to have resolved the contests about where “home” is in favour of being “at home in the world,” concluding that friendship, respect and “home” can be found wherever we are — if we are curious and open to learn. It’s an enviable attitude in the current world of closures. •

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For Aristotle, friendship was not just a pit stop on the way to the real goal of romance or a family, nor was it a few cheeky wines after work in the Agora with his mates Hermias and Pythias. Friendship, he wrote, “is most necessary for our life.” No one, he said, “would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other goods” (such as wealth or health).

It wasn’t just the deep and authentic connection that attracted him, nor the fact that he believed happiness to be impossible without friends. Aristotle thought of friendship as the foundation of all political life. Good legislators pay more attention to friendship than justice, he wrote. Friendship, with its focus on reciprocity, trust, mutual goodwill and a willingness to make sacrifices, “hold[s] cities together.” To this extent I am certain he would rail against any government that holds friendship in contempt.

Here in Sydney, people who live alone, are a single parent or have a disability have only just been permitted to nominate a friend to enter their “social bubble.” They had to endure five weeks of isolation before being granted this very basic right. Victorians had to wait two months during their long lockdown last year. Until then, they were permitted to visit an “intimate partner,” possibly a stranger they’d met on Tinder, but were not allowed to visit a lifelong friend.

Before social bubbles, visits to intimate partners fell under the heading of “caring and compassionate visits” but visiting friends didn’t. Intimacy, in other words, was defined according to sex rather than, say, trust, laughter, shared intellectual or cultural interests, or reciprocal care — the values we associate with friendship. During a time of mass low-level anxiety, the laws implied that single people would find more solace in a random person with whom they might want to have sex than their closest friend.

It’s a good thing that the laws have finally changed in New South Wales, but what can we learn from the debate, and how might it inform the way we live post-lockdown?

Above all, I’d argue that the debate about lockdown visits was poorly framed. The commentary overwhelmingly treated the problem as if it were all about the plight of sad singles — pale-faced loners who peer glumly out of windows while smug couples jog by, laughing, with their labradors. Couples and families were the norm against which all other relationships were measured and declared lacking. Singles were seen as grievously incomplete, pathologised and pitied for what are in fact perfectly legitimate and often happier life choices. The logic was circuitous: they felt alone during Covid because they lived alone, not because they were denied the right to visit a close friend.

But what if we treat this as a debate less about the problems of singledom and more about the diminished status of friendship in our laws? After all, this is clearly a moment when the law has intervened in our emotional lives and sought to privilege one status (romantic) over another (friendship). Justified as a necessary measure to prevent movement between households, the laws failed to acknowledge that movement was already happening, it’s just that it was compelled to involve lovers rather than friends. In a situation that can best be compared to the dystopian film The Lobster, singles were told to couple up or face months of psychic torture.

If people living alone in New South Wales have felt isolated over the past five weeks then it was because they were denied the right granted to every other person in Australia to have someone with whom they could cheer Olympians, order in dinner and generally consume too many negronis. Had friendship been enshrined in law as something to be protected, much like marriage or family, then social bubbles would have been automatically granted and fewer people would have suffered.

There is nothing natural or inevitable about the low status we accord friendship. In other places and at other times friendship has occupied an exalted social and legal position, equal or even superior to the involuntary bonds of family or the caprices of romance. Aristotle’s thinking offers us a window into the reverence accorded to friendship in ancient Greece, which eighteenth-century philosophers and voyagers drew on when encountering cultures that sanctified friendship.

Philosopher Alberto Fortis was one of them. In his bestselling anthropological tract Viaggio in Dalmazia (1774), he observed that the Morlacchi people of Venetian Dalmatia (present-day Croatia) had a “nobler capacity” for friendship than modern, civilised Europeans; in fact, it was almost a “point of religion” among them. Morlacchi friends would “tie the sacred bond at the foot of the altar” in a ritual, much like a wedding, that “contains a particular benediction, for the solemn union of two male or two female friends, in the presence of the congregation.” He claimed to have been present “at the union of two young women, who were made Posestre (sacred friends) in the church” and saw how satisfaction “sparkled in their eyes, when the ceremony was performed.”

Joseph Banks and the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville were among the European voyagers who were delighted to stumble on friendship pacts, or taio, in Tahiti. Formalised between people of the same sex, status and age, these pacts blended intimacy with instrumentalism — taios would offer each other emotional support as well as food, labour, land, and sexual partners. It was also through friendship pacts that cross-cultural exchange occurred. Banks’s journal records how he solemnised his friendship with Cook by being wrapped in cloth and presented with a green bough, after which both men “lay our hand on our breasts” and said taio, “which I imagine signifies friend.”

Eighteenth-century voyagers quickly understood the taio bond because they came from a culture that valued friendship and elevated it into law. Natural law theorists from Cicero to Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius justified imperial commerce on the basis that God willed (in Grotius’s words) that “human friendships should be fostered by mutual needs and resources.” Jobs were filled, money distributed, intimacies forged, and identities constructed all through the framework of friendship.

Matthew Flinders could write to his friend George Bass that “there was a time when I was so completely wrapped up in you, that no conversation but yours could give me pleasure” without anyone raising an eyebrow. Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith, two social reformers in America, could be more devoted to each other than to their husbands without a hint of scandal. When Addams travelled without Smith, she would often lug an enormous portrait of her friend with her, and when they journeyed together, they would demand a double bed.

When and why did friendship slide down our hierarchy of relationships? To my mind, the process began in the early twentieth century with the rise of the nuclear family, and with it, the notion that all our emotional needs could be fulfilled within the four walls of the home. Any society that subscribes to this myth necessarily devalues the succour of friends. Care becomes privatised and limited to blood relations, and as families become smaller so too do their moral visions. Promoting that shift was the rise of homophobic sentiment in late nineteenth-century works of sexology and popular Freudianism, which culminated in the anti-gay witch-hunts of the 1950s.

As someone who experiences unbounded elation through long chats with friends and despondency at their absence, I would love to see friendship protected by law. In the short term, this would mean that social bubbles would be built into the architecture of lockdown laws. In the long term, it would mean changing our laws to enshrine the rights of friends, including (as legal scholar Ethan Leib has argued) broadening paid medical leave to allow friends to take care of one another during sickness; allowing friends to sue on another friend’s behalf; and giving friends a legal right to make medical decisions on our behalf.

And why should romantic couples have the monopoly on lavish weddings? Friends’ registers could be established and maybe we could bring back those friendship necklaces we all loved so much in year nine. And who wouldn’t be happier attending a lavish affair solemnising the commitment of two adoring friends than another boringly ostentatious wedding? Throw in a trip to Tahiti or Croatia and I’d be there with bells on. •

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These doubts are reinforced by the collection of aphorisms and homilies that Baggini abstracts from Hume’s writings and presents at the end of his book.

There is no algorithm for good reasoning.

When life on earth is good, we have no need to gaze longingly to imaginary heavens.

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

Nature is always too strong for principle.

And so on. These words of wisdom might sometimes be insightful but they don’t seem especially profound. Out of context their meaning is unclear.

Nevertheless, The Great Guide serves a useful purpose. Baggini, a British philosopher and journalist who aims to make philosophy widely accessible, admires Hume and thinks he should be better known. He follows the philosopher from his family home in southern Scotland to the village in France where he wrote his most famous work, then to London and finally to Edinburgh, where he made his home, on the way telling us about Hume’s ideas and bringing together his philosophy and his life and times. The result is entertaining and informative. The reader learns about Hume’s philosophy and his more popular writings, and about Hume himself and the intellectual circles in Edinburgh and Paris where he was welcomed and celebrated. Baggini’s Hume-inspired homilies are given vital context.

Hume’s life and works lend themselves in two ways to this guide to being human and living well. First of all, there’s the life of a man with many friends who liked fine food and good company and wasn’t at all apologetic about it. He thought religious belief was superstition but wasn’t a militant atheist; indeed, some of his friends were clergymen. He suffered setbacks without becoming embittered. His first book, A Treatise on Human Nature, for which he is now especially renowned, failed to attract the attention he thought it deserved, and he was rejected for university positions because of his reputation as a heretic. He responded by turning his talent to other enterprises, revising his writings, and taking a job as a librarian.

In later life Hume enjoyed being celebrated in the salons of Paris but was content to settle down to a quiet life in Edinburgh surrounded by friends. He faced death with equanimity. When the biographer James Boswell came to see him on his deathbed to find out whether he still refused to believe in an afterlife, Hume calmly replied that he thought it “a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist forever.” His friend Adam Smith described him as “approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfect wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.”

To persuade us that Hume has much to teach us about living well, Baggini can also draw on Hume’s own writings. After the failure of his early philosophical work, Hume made his name as a man of letters by writing popular essays on subjects like love and marriage, divorce, commerce, the idea of a perfect commonwealth, and progress in the arts and sciences. He revised parts of the Treatise to make his philosophical ideas easier to understand. His essays, collected together in several volumes, and the history of England that he wrote in midlife made him one of the most celebrated intellectuals of his day. He was also a prolific letter writer who expressed his views about social life and literary topics to his friends and acquaintances. Baggini has a lot of material to draw on.

Is Hume really a good example of a person who lived well? Do his writings provide a good guide to the good life? Baggini admits that Hume’s opinions were not always admirable. He thought that slavery was wrong but believed that “negroes” were naturally inferior to whites. He liked the company of “modest” women but thought that women were by nature deficient in judgement. These prejudices were, to be sure, common among people of his time and place. But by accepting them, Baggini points out, Hume failed to heed his own philosophical good sense: “Prejudice is destructive of sound judgement, and perverts all operations of the intellectual faculties.”

In his opinions about politics and society Hume was deeply and unshakably conservative. When London workers were massacred by troops for protesting against the imprisonment of the reformer John Wilkes, Hume described the protesters as a “rascally mob” who had “more liberty than they deserved; and perhaps more than any men ought to have.” He had no sympathy for proposed reforms to expand the right to vote or to make parliament more accountable to the people. He supported the monarchy and thought republics were only suitable for small societies.

Reason sometimes led him to explore radical ideas, but he always managed to work his way back to supporting the status quo. A society of equals would achieve the greatest wellbeing, he calculated, but taking from the rich and giving to the poor was unacceptable because it would require an intolerable loss of liberty. People should be able to remove a bad government, he allowed, but the importance of maintaining the rule of law meant that this remedy was permissible only in cases where tyranny was extreme. He supported American independence but only because he thought that control by Britain over a distant unruly population was unfeasible.

Not being able to get a divorce, he said, condemns couples to suffer the cruelty of preserving a union that has dissolved into hatred. But he went on to argue that rules against divorce should be supported for the sake of children and to promote marriage as a binding relationship. Fired up by his views about the dangers of religion, he sometimes suggested that churches should be closed and clergy left to find more useful occupations. But he settled down to the opinion that having an established church is a good thing because it encourages uneducated people to be moral and serves as a barrier to competition among sects that promote fanaticism.

In other words, making Hume’s writings into a guide that modern people can accept requires a careful selection of quotations. A reader of Baggini’s book might also wonder whether Hume was too complacent, too self-satisfied and too lacking in passionate engagement with the world to serve as a model for the good life. He had several close friendships but never anything that can be called a romantic attachment. Relying on his account of his own life, we have to conclude that he got along well with almost everyone but loved no one, that there was no cause that he passionately supported, and that he never had a motivation strong enough to call into question the comfortable, independent life he had achieved. Those who think that a meaningful life should contain close attachments (even at the cost of independence), strong commitments, risk-taking and confrontation of demons won’t be so ready to accept Hume as an example of someone who lived well.

It is also difficult not to suspect that the equanimity he cultivated put limits on his ability to understand human nature. After he befriended the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and invited him to England when he was being persecuted by political authorities, he arranged for the Frenchman to get a pension from the British government but otherwise left him to fend for himself. When Rousseau got the idea that Hume was plotting against him and complained to his friends, an outraged Hume denounced him as wicked and mad. Rousseau was a difficult man, easily offended and subject to paranoia, but just the same, Hume didn’t seem inclined, or was perhaps unable, to sympathise.

I have been a fan of David Hume ever since I wrote my undergraduate honours thesis on his argument against miracles. But I have to confess that Baggini’s account made me like him less. He remains one of the people I would like to dine with — especially since he was noted for being a good host. As an exemplar of the good life or a guide to living well, though, he has limitations.

Yet he was undoubtedly a great philosopher. The Treatise he wrote in his youth is now recognised as a book that challenged not only philosophical orthodoxies but also what many of us would like to believe about the world, human capabilities and the nature of morality.

We are inclined to believe in a necessary connection between causes and their effects — that when a cause occurs its effect must follow. Hume points out that neither perception nor reason is able to discover a necessary connection between physical events. All we experience is a constant conjunction of events that predisposes us to anticipate the second whenever the first occurs. When morning comes we expect the sun to rise. But it is always possible for our predictions to fail.

We are inclined to believe that we have a self that gives us a persisting identity and perhaps survives death. But Hume looked into himself and found only a succession of ideas, impressions and feelings. The self, he concluded, is merely a collection of psychological states held together by contiguity and memory. We would like to think that moral truths are embedded in the nature of things: that causing someone severe pain just is wrong. But Hume points out that no normative conclusions follow from the facts of the world. “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” Morality, he argues, depends on our emotional responses to our experiences and the behaviour of others.

Hume’s exploration of the limits of human knowledge was difficult work, and in the Treatise he says that it led him to the point of mental collapse:

The manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning… I begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.

Doing philosophy, as Hume describes it here, is unsettling, uncomfortable and even scary. Those who simply want to live a good life would be better off avoiding it. Baggini does his best to convince us that Hume in his early work is simply exercising common sense and that his aim is not to invite scepticism about human knowledge but to reinterpret or find a better basis for what we want to believe. Few acquainted with Hume’s work will be persuaded.

Hume had an antidote for the mental state caused by philosophical labour:

I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

One interpretation of Hume’s career is that after completing his greatest work he became addicted to the antidote and avoided the speculations that gave him pain. This is not entirely true. He did not give up on the ideas of the Treatise and he rewrote parts of it to make it easier to understand. Near the end of his life he wrote a brilliant essay criticising the deist belief in God as the creator of the world — though by writing it in the form of a dialogue between three friends he was able to be cagey about his own position.

Baggini’s book may succeed in making Hume better known, though it’s likely to leave its readers wondering how he was able to galvanise Kant, inspire Bentham and give generations of philosophers so much to think about. If you are not put off by his bourgeois complacency and his conservative, sometimes obnoxious, views on politics, you will find Hume a congenial character. You will also appreciate Baggini’s description, with photographs, of the places associated with Hume in England, Scotland and France. Although Baggini’s tourism sometimes seems pointless — he found that many of the places where Hume lived and worked no longer exist, have been completely altered, or are inaccessible — he also gives us an imaginative glimpse of Hume living his life and doing his work.

Hume wrote most of the Treatise while staying in the village of La Flèche in the Loire Valley of France. He made use of the library of its Jesuit college (now a school for military families) and got on well with the Jesuits. They were too sophisticated to be much troubled by his irreligion and Hume liked the challenge of arguing with them. By means of Baggini’s evocation of place I imagine Hume strolling through the cloisters of the college with a Jesuit acquaintance, trying out the argument he had just thought of against belief in miracles. “I thought it very much gravelled my companion,” he reported. •

The post The good life appeared first on Inside Story.

He Jiankui was convicted by a Chinese court for violating scientific and medical ethics. But the scientists who had developed the technology already knew the risk that this line could be crossed; and they also knew that the potential benefits of gene editing were too great to ignore.

Gene editing is at the centre of a new book by American journalist Walter Isaacson, well known for his biographies of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci and others. In The Codebreaker, Isaacson focuses on one of the scientists who developed the technology, Jennifer Doudna, who went on to win the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier for “rewriting the code of life.” Doudna is an ideal protagonist for Isaacson, having played a leading role both in the revolution in biological science and in the public debate about its ethical implications.

But the story Isaacson tells in this compelling book is about scientific discovery itself and the scientists who made important contributions to breaking the code of life. Their breakthroughs, interactions, rivalries, and growing concern about the implications of their work are his larger subject.

Isaacson describes Doudna’s girlhood curiosity about why a type of swamp grass in her native Hawaii curled up when she touched it. “Nature is beautiful,” Doudna says, and its beauty is one of the themes of the book. But Isaacson also makes it clear that success in science requires more than curiosity and aptitude. Doudna was successful because of her willingness to take risks, her ability to collaborate and coordinate the work of a team, and — not least — her “competitive streak.”

Risk-taking was a feature of her early career. After Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA — the molecule that carries the genetic code of all living things — most research focused on how its sequences were put together in humans and other forms of life. Doudna had a hunch that RNA, the molecule responsible for expressing genes and manufacturing proteins in human cells, plays a more fundamental role in the origin of life than most others thought. She and her team at the University of California in Berkeley discovered that strands of RNA in a bacterium would cut up invading viruses and paste copies into its DNA, thus making it immune to future virus attacks.

Working together across national borders, Doudna and Charpentier discovered how this cut-and-paste operation works and how it can be manipulated. In their prize-winning publication they predicted that it could be used to edit genes in humans as well as in other complex forms of life.

By using a system similar to that employed by bacteria, teams of scientists soon learned how to take a gene out of a human cell and put another in its place. With a bit of help from postdoctoral researchers, Isaacson was even able to do it himself. The practical implications of gene editing are obvious. If genes can be replaced, then those that cause undesirable effects can be edited out.

Isaacson describes a successful experimental use of gene therapy to treat a woman suffering from sickle cell anaemia. Stem cells extracted from her blood were edited and reinserted into her body. The treatment affected the cells in her body only, but gene editing also makes it possible to replace genes in germline cells, which alters the genetic code of future generations. This was the problematic step taken by the Chinese scientist.

Isaacson’s book has two main themes. First, he provides an account of the development of genetic technology through the eyes of the scientists concerned. To achieve this, he immersed himself in their world. As well as conducting many interviews with those involved in the discovery process, he attended their conferences, spent time in their labs and joined them in their informal conversations over dinner. Second, he explores the implications of gene editing for humanity’s future and how scientists have grappled with the ethical issues it has raised.

Although Doudna’s career takes us into the world of twenty-first-century science, not all the pressures and ethical challenges are new. The tension between science as a collaborative enterprise and the rivalry of scientists seeking credit for a discovery has always existed. Which competitive behaviour is fair and which is unethical is adjudicated by the scientific community itself. It was all right, most of her colleagues agree, for Doudna to beat her competitors by putting pressure on a journal to fast-track the publication of a paper. “I would have done it myself,” admitted one of these rivals. It was not all right for James Watson to take Rosalind Franklin’s data from her lab without her permission in order to be the first to construct a model of DNA.

When scientists are encouraged to work with industry, form their own companies and take out patents on their discoveries, and when universities hire lawyers to ensure that they profit from the work of their scientists, collaboration can become the victim of market incentives, confidentiality agreements and legal proceedings. Isaacson describes how Doudna and her team became embroiled in a long, costly dispute with another group over a patent on gene editing. Agreeing to share patent rights, Isaacson concludes, would have been more sensible and better for the progress of science. Many of the scientists he interviewed agreed.

Though his account shows that the close relationship between industry and science can have detrimental effects, Isaacson is convinced that, overall, it works out for the best. Scientific innovation is costly and risky, he says, and without collaboration with industry and the incentives provided by intellectual property law, progress in genetic technology would have been much slower. Even if he is right, there is reason to doubt whether the public good, or the good of science, is best promoted by the incentives of the market. Could public trust in scientists be one of the casualties? Some think so. “Financial interests undermine the ‘white coat’ image of the scientist,” a bioethicist complained to Isaacson.

Doudna dreamed one night that Hitler visited her, wanting to learn about genetic engineering. Disturbed by this nightmare she decided that bioscientists had to confront the ethical implications of gene editing technology. At a conference in California in 2015 all agreed that using the technology to cure disease by editing non-inheritable genes was a good thing provided it could be made safe. But most of the attendees also agreed that using it to alter heritable genes is more ethically problematic and has to be controlled.

The consequences of altering heritable genes, intended or not, will be visited on our descendants. If mistakes are made, it is they who will suffer. This is one reason why bioscientists were alarmed by news of the Chinese babies. But the ability to alter the human genetic code has the potential to bring great benefits. The technology could some day be used to eliminate Huntington’s disease, sickle cell anaemia and other genetically carried diseases. It could be used to make humans immune to viruses like Covid-19. Those who attended the Napa meeting had good reason for not wanting a total or permanent ban on its development and use.

The problem with germline editing is not merely that a future Hitler might be able to use the technology to construct what he regards as a master race. The ability to edit our genes could propel us down what ethicists call a slippery slope. Genetic engineering to eliminate disease seems obviously desirable. Why not also eliminate congenital deafness and blindness? Why not prevent the birth of children with low intelligence or ugly features? Why not use the technology to increase intelligence, to make humans taller or more muscular, or to give future people new capabilities like night vision or resistance to harm from radiation?

Isaacson worries that unrestrained use of the technology will decrease human variety and the good that comes from diversity. He points out that it could also have bad consequences for social harmony and liberal institutions. Wealthy parents will be able to afford genetic enhancements for their children, poor parents will not. Economic inequality will turn into genetic inequality, widening with each generation. He also takes seriously the warning of the philosopher Michael Sandel, who thinks that the ability of people to sympathise with the plight of others will be lessened when our characteristics are no longer given to us by nature.

One of the most serious objections to allowing parents to choose their children’s characteristics is that they will no longer be so ready to love whatever child they get. Their regard will be conditional on whether their children meet their expectations. They will insist on value for money. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas fears that a loss of autonomy — a denial of the right of individuals to choose their own goals and way of life — will be the inevitable consequence of making children into goods manufactured according to the specifications of parents or the state.

One suggested way to arrest the slide down the slippery slope is to draw a line between genetic therapy — using gene editing to cure disease and disability — and genetic enhancement — using it to make better babies. The first, according to this view, should be permitted; the second should not.

But the distinction is fuzzy, and many ethicists are not convinced of its importance. Parents enhance their children’s opportunities by giving them a good education, bioethicist John Harris points out. Why shouldn’t they be able to improve their opportunities by means of genetic technology? The Australian bioethicist Julian Savulescu argues that parents have a duty to bring into the world children who will have the best possible lives. If genetic technology makes a better outcome possible, then they ought to use it.

Doudna and most of her fellow scientists think that governments shouldn’t permit the market-driven development and use of genetic technology — at least until the implications are thoroughly discussed. “If we are wise,” concludes Isaacson, “we can pause and decide to proceed with more caution. Slopes are less slippery that way.” But one of the thoughts likely to trouble readers of his book is that ethical qualms, however wise, and restrictions, however judicious, are likely to prove a weak bulwark against the desire of many parents to use whatever means are available to give their children advantages. If some parents are prepared to use unethical and illegal means to get their children into top universities, they will probably also be prepared to use unethical and illegal means to give their children what they regard as the best genes.

One of Doudna’s colleagues told her that he had been consulted by an entrepreneur who proposed starting a business called Happy Healthy Baby that would enable parents to choose some of the genetic characteristics of their children. The scientist told the entrepreneur that the technology was not likely to be approved by the American government in the foreseeable future. Not a problem, the entrepreneur replied. She would set up her clinic in a country that was more permissive. Parents who could afford the treatments would be willing to travel. •

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Sydney-based philosopher and historian Stephen Gaukroger believes that philosophy, though not dead, suffers from disabling ill health. But, he adds, this isn’t a new development in the history of Western philosophy. Becoming subservient to science is only the latest chapter in a history of “failure.” In this thought-provoking book he subverts the story of progress presented by those histories of philosophy that aim to explain how the discipline found its way to the views they support. In concentrating on the failures of philosophy he believes we can learn something important about its nature — and thus about possibilities for its future.

Philosophy as an enterprise with a distinct claim to knowledge came into existence with the ancient Greek philosophers, Socrates and Plato. Their primary purpose was moral — to determine how individuals can live a good and virtuous life — and they opposed those who thought virtue meant conforming to social conventions. To be moral, they insisted, you have to ask basic questions about the nature of justice, piety and virtue. Plato’s answer was metaphysical. Knowledge, he believed, is achieved only through acquaintance with ideals that have an existence independent of things of the world. The good life means organising oneself and society in harmony with these ideals, and only a philosopher knows how this can be done.

By setting out to ask and answer questions about the nature of virtue, these early thinkers constructed philosophy as an abstract, second-order discourse. Gaukroger thinks their approach to moral questions failed to tackle issues of great concern to ordinary people: the conflicts between desire, duty and loyalty explored in Greek tragedies, and the requirements attached to social roles. From the start, he says, philosophy’s answer to the question of what is a good life was inadequate, but its real defeat came with the rise of Christianity, which had answers to this question that depended on a relationship to God and the belief in an afterlife. Philosophy in the early Middle Ages became totally subservient to theology.

Philosophy as an independent approach to knowledge got a new lease of life in the late Middle Ages when its practitioners felt the need to reconcile Christian theology with the development of knowledge based on empirical investigation, and to justify central Christian doctrines like the immortality of the soul and the transformation of communion wine into Christ’s blood. The desire to explain why Christian beliefs were true created a real need for philosophy, says Gaukroger. Thomas Aquinas and other philosophers met the challenge by using Aristotle’s metaphysics to argue that there is a natural law, discoverable by reason, that all individuals, whatever their faith, ought to accept, and that reason was capable of establishing the truth of basic Christian doctrines.

According to Gaukroger, the ascendency of philosophy as the dominant form of knowledge was completed by Descartes, who argued that all beliefs had to be founded on what could not be doubted by reason. His aim was to reconcile Copernican astronomy with religious faith by setting up reason rather than scripture as the true source of theological as well as scientific knowledge.

Locke and other philosophers influenced by new scientific knowledge had other tasks of reconciliation to perform. They needed to explain how the commonsense view that we discover the nature of the world through our senses could be reconciled with research that seemed to show that all we can ever perceive are impressions received by our sense organs. In the moral realm, they wanted to reconcile the virtues of frugality, prudence and benevolence with the profligacy and self-interest that made a commercial society prosperous. Adam Smith, who celebrated the latter in The Wealth of Nations, advocated a moral philosophy that made sympathy the adjudicator between conflicting values. Jeremy Bentham, on the other hand, argued that public good — the happiness of the greatest number — was all that mattered in moral decision-making.

Everyone recognises that human existence relies on the veracity of sense perception. Anyone can use sympathetic engagement with others to determine what they ought to do. For Bentham, and later for John Stuart Mill, determining the greatest good was a matter for empirical investigation. Philosophers, it seemed, had no distinctive claim to knowledge and no special role in enabling people to act morally. Once again, philosophy’s claim to a special status had failed. David Hume made this failure evident by showing that speculative reason leads to scepticism rather than knowledge.

Kant renewed the claims of philosophy by taking Hume’s scepticism about the role of metaphysical speculation as a reason for arguing that philosophy’s true task is to define what makes knowledge possible. What we can know, he argued, depends on the categories our minds impose on data of the senses, and philosophy’s role is to investigate the operation of these categories and the world they construct. Kant’s philosophy, Gaukroger explains, was the beginning of an ambitious but ultimately doomed attempt to devise a theory of everything. This project culminated in Hegel’s attempt to complete philosophy by incorporating all of history and thought into a logical progression ending with absolute knowledge. But this view of philosophy lost favour when it became evident that science could make a better claim to provide an account of everything.

After this final failure, Gaukroger says, the fate of philosophy was to become as subservient to science as it had, in earlier times, been to theology. Some philosophers have resisted this fate. Wittgenstein’s contextual account of meaning and Heidegger’s focus on the human condition are attempts to show that not all matters of importance can be resolved by science. But Gaukroger doesn’t seem to think that they, or any other philosophers, have provided a promising new direction for philosophy.

Gaukroger’s history of philosophy highlights how many of the causes of its failure and rebirth came from outside the discipline. The attempt to found virtue on an idealist metaphysics failed because of changes in society and the rise of Christianity. The resurrection of philosophy was motivated by changes within the Christian world and the confrontation of Christianity with other monotheistic religions. Philosophy failed as a means of reconciliation because of the moral pluralism that was partly created by the rise of a commercial society. Philosophy as a theory of everything was abandoned because of the outstanding success of science.

If the direction of philosophy is driven by external developments, then its future is not likely to be decided by philosophers drawing lessons from the failures of philosophy. Perhaps a serious environmental crisis or the prospect of complete control of the human genome will create the need for a renewed philosophical enquiry into what it means to be human.

Some philosophers will likely object to the language of failure that pervades Gaukroger’s history. Many still regard Kant’s transcendentalism, Descartes’s epistemology, Aristotle’s account of the virtues and Plato’s idealism as important contributions to an understanding of ourselves and the world. The pretensions of these philosophers may be unjustified, but their accomplishments are real. Some will object, rightly I think, to Gaukroger’s cursory treatment of philosophers who have refused to become handmaidens of science, particularly those in the phenomenological tradition. And some won’t agree that philosophy’s present state is as dire as he supposes.

The present state of philosophy, he thinks, is illustrated by the answer given by the Oxford analytical philosopher John Austin when he was asked for a definition of philosophy. Philosophy, he said, is what philosophers do. This definition, though unhelpful, is apt because contemporary philosophy lacks a central core or an agreed method. Philosophers like me, whose expertise is in political philosophy or ethics, inhabit a different philosophical world from those who investigate the nature of time, those who work with cognitive scientists on artificial intelligence, or those who develop systems of logic. Nevertheless, there is something to be said for a subject that resists definition, regards every area of human thought and action as a potential object of inquiry, and has no respect for discipline boundaries.

Gaukroger sometimes wonders whether the original sin of Western philosophy was to set itself up as a self-sufficient, second-order discipline sitting in judgement over all human thought and action. This, he suggests, was bound to lead to failure. No form of knowledge is independent and self-justifying. If this is the right prognosis for the failures of philosophy, then its future direction lies not in further attempts to become “the queen of the sciences” but in collaboration with others. •

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The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth — known as the Jefferson Bible — was a cut-and-paste job. Jefferson collected Bibles in English, Greek, Latin and French, cut out the passages from the Gospels that displayed “the most sublime morality ever fallen from the lips of men” and pasted them in a folio of blank pages. Left behind in the mutilated Bibles was what he called the “dross added by Jesus’s biographers.” Jefferson’s purpose, he said, was to rescue the teachings of a great moralist — superior to Socrates or Cicero — from the misinterpretations and distortions of the writers of the Gospels. “It is as easy to separate those parts,” he wrote to his friend John Adams, “as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.”

Absent from Jefferson’s Bible is any appearance of the supernatural. His Jesus performs no miracles, makes no claim to be the Son of God and forgives no sins. His birth is not heralded by angels and he is not resurrected. The Bible ends with a stone being placed in front of his grave.

In the remaining years of his life Jefferson used his Bible for bedtime reading but made no attempt to publish it, and few people knew of its existence.

Peter Manseau, a curator of American religious history in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, has written a biography of the Jefferson Bible, one in a series about the lives of great religious books. Despite its obscure origin as Jefferson’s private project, the life of this book continued well beyond his death, and in the 200 years since its birth it has undergone changes and served purposes that Jefferson could not have imagined.

Manseau relates how the Jefferson Bible was discovered, exhibited and many times published, and how it eventually became an American icon presented to members of Congress and buried along with the Declaration of Independence under the cornerstone of the memorial to Jefferson in Washington. Its existence, he says, is a manifestation of the American idea that existing materials can be reshaped into something new. Its later history shows how this reshaping has continued through more than two dozen printed editions into the twenty-first century.

Just as Jefferson believed himself to be presenting the true message of Jesus, the many interpreters of his Bible presented what they thought was Jefferson’s true purpose. The uses to which the Jefferson Bible has been put, the many editions and introductions published, reflect not only the ideological commitments of these interpreters but also the concerns and preoccupations of their times.

The Jefferson Bible came to light mostly through the efforts of Cyrus Adler, a curator at the Washington-based Smithsonian Institution, in the late nineteenth century. Recognising that a mutilated Bible in a private collection had been one of the sources of Jefferson’s clippings, he eventually discovered the Bible itself among the papers held by Jefferson’s great-granddaughter. Purchased by the Smithsonian, it became a star attraction in an exhibition of Bibles designed to demonstrate the American ideal of religious tolerance and diversity.

John Fletcher Lacey, a devout Christian and Jefferson-admirer who sat in Congress for much of the period from 1889 to 1907, credited himself with bringing the Bible out of obscurity and to the attention of the American public. His proposal to have the US government print 9000 copies for existing and future members of Congress caused an uproar of condemnation from pulpits all over the country. But his campaign was successful and private publishers were quick to take advantage of the publicity to publish their own editions. The Jefferson Bible became a bestseller.

Some editors reshaped the Bible according to their own agendas. In the 1920s Henry Jackson, a clergyman and the founder of a college of social engineering, enlisted Jefferson’s Jesus to serve his reforming aims by modernising the language of the text, adding passages that he thought had wrongly been left out, and writing an introduction that presented both Jesus and Jefferson as practical reformers of society.

Douglas Lurton, who had received a copy of the Bible from his congressman father, brought out a modernised edition in 1940 as a statement of American values in opposition to “the anti-Christian butchery of the despots of the Old World.” The Unitarian pastor Donald Harrington saw the Bible as an antidote to the fears and follies of the cold war. “We need to drink deeply of the peace found in [Jefferson’s] righteousness.” By the mid twentieth century the Jefferson Bible had become an expression of faith for many Americans. “My religion is based entirely on the so-called Jefferson Bible,” declared congressman and Baptist pastor Adam Clayton Powell.

The Jefferson Bible has been enlisted in both sides of the culture wars. David Barton, a protégé of the Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, argues that the Bible proves that America was founded as an essentially Christian nation. The American Humanist Society produced a Jefferson Bible for the twenty-first century that included passages from the Hebrew Bible, the Bhagavad-gita, the Qur’an and various Buddhist writings — not only to prove that the same cut-and-paste operation could be performed on other religious books but also to construct a text for a more inclusive American society.

How should we assess the Jefferson Bible as a work of religion or ethics? Making judgements about its content is not Manseau’s main purpose, but he expresses doubts about Jefferson’s project of picking out the ethical jewels of Jesus’s teaching from the supernatural dross. Without the miracles, he thinks, the Gospel narrative doesn’t make sense. Jesus tells the Pharisees that it is lawful to heal on the Sabbath but does no healing. He indicates that a woman who washes his feet should be forgiven her sins but does not tell her that her sins are forgiven.

“With miracles hinted at but never delivered, forgiveness discussed but never offered, the text often has the feeling of a series of jokes without their punchlines,” he writes. “Jefferson’s Jesus stories are all set up with no pay off.”

As a philosopher I prefer to approach the Jefferson Bible not as an attempt to make Gospel stories wholly consistent with Enlightenment rationality but as a book that gives us the bare bones of Jesus’s ethical teaching. Is Jesus the greatest moral thinker of the ancient world, as Jefferson supposed? Or are the ethics of the Gospels an unsystematic and inconsistent collection of moral commandments and practical wisdom? Those who read Jefferson’s Bible must judge for themselves.

But even a cursory reading of the text reveals an important difference between Jesus’s teaching and the moral philosophies of ancient Greeks and Romans like Plato and Cicero. Jesus’s words were meant for ordinary people — women as well as men — and not merely for an educated male elite. He preached against religious laws and practices that didn’t serve human needs. Perhaps these were reasons why Jefferson, a founder of American democracy, was so deeply inspired by Jesus’s teachings. •

The Jefferson Bible: A Biography
By Peter Manseau | Princeton University Press | $44.99 | 232 pages

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These package deals, he says, are responsible for the political tribalism that divides families, causes rifts in public institutions, makes compromise and reconciliation impossible, and “cancels” those who dare to dissent from any aspect of their group’s platform. Ethical packaging is a personal problem for Mumford because, as he says, he wants to be a public intellectual who can make a name for himself on social media by expressing controversial views without being blocked or unfriended.

Why should those of us who are not especially concerned about Mumford’s career as a public intellectual share his vexation over ethical packaging? To be tribal, he explains, is to favour “us” over “them,” to identify with a group culture and to fight vigorously against anything, within or without, that seems to threaten it. Political tribes are divided by visions of the good, he says, and that’s a bad thing. Their package deals don’t merely serve the common interests of their members but also try to remake the social world according to the tribe’s idea of what is right and good. They oppose each other by taking an uncompromising stand.

When ethics becomes tribal, Mumford says, people find it increasingly difficult to make compromises. Members of a tribe are expected to accept ethical positions simply because they are markers of tribal identity. The possibility of disagreement and dissent is undermined, precluding rational arguments about what ought to be valued and which positions are compatible with those values.

Two questions are likely to occur to anyone who reads Mumford’s diagnosis. First, why should we believe that ethical packaging is so prevalent in political and social life? His book is written with US politics in mind and he admits that Americans divide along political lines over issues that people in other countries don’t find so divisive. Many Australian conservatives support the gun control legislation brought into existence by a Coalition prime minister. Other issues, though more likely to divide people along political lines, are far from being part of a package. Sexual liberation is identified by Mumford as an issue that divides the left from the right, but many feminists support bans on sexual relations between those in a position of power and their students or subordinates. Many people with strong religious beliefs oppose abortion and assisted suicide but follow the Pope in veering left on social and environmental issues. And in Australia, as in many other countries, support for assisted suicide, abortion rights and gay marriage doesn’t come only from the left. Public opinion polls and the referendum on gay marriage demonstrate widespread support across the political spectrum.

The second question is whether the polarisation that Mumford deplores has much to do with ethics. Those who resist an increase in the minimum wage or more generous unemployment benefits may be motivated by class interests or simply a desire to pay less tax. Those who support assisted suicide may be thinking about what they want to be able to do when they reach the end of their life. Self-interest underneath a thin veneer of moral rationalisation may be the real driver of social division.

Mumford never really answers these questions, but that turns out to be irrelevant to his main purpose. In Vexed he mostly concentrates on what he regards as his job as a public intellectual: to challenge widely held ethical beliefs. He takes six moral positions, three commonly held by people on the left and three more likely to be held by conservatives, and argues that they are wrong, or at least more questionable than their proponents suppose.

People on the left, he argues, ought to join conservatives in rejecting assisted suicide. They ought to have doubts about sexual liberation and the pro-choice position on abortion, and about genetic enhancement. Conservatives ought to favour gun control and higher wages for workers. They ought to oppose restrictions on the civil rights and opportunities of ex-prisoners.

Mumford is good at making an ethical case. His arguments are clear and cogent. He makes good use of empirical data and jars readers out of their dogmatic assumptions by means of thought-provoking case studies. Readers who hold the views that he opposes will indeed be challenged. Two examples illustrate his method for attacking ethical packaging.

A basic value for people on the left, he thinks, is inclusivity: a commitment to protecting the vulnerable and defending the marginalised. This value, he argues, is not compatible with support for a “right to die.” To legalise assisted suicide, he thinks, is to ignore the interests of some of the most vulnerable and marginalised people in our society — the aged — who are especially vulnerable because our society, unlike more traditional communities, treats them as unproductive burdens.

Once assisted suicide becomes legal, he thinks, remaining alive will become a choice that elderly people will have to justify. Negative social attitudes towards the aged will persuade many of them to conclude that they have no justification. Mumford doesn’t think that restrictions on access to assisted suicide — like those in force in Victoria — will hold back the right-to-die push for very long. Inevitably, eligibility for assisted suicide will be extended first to the chronically ill and then to those with serious mental health issues, until it seems legitimate to allow any elderly person who is depressed and thinks he or she is a burden to take this option (as he believes is now the case in the Benelux countries). Best not to start down this slippery slope. Those on the left, indeed anyone who regards inclusivity as a primary value, ought to oppose assisted suicide in any form. It should not be part of their ethical package.

Conservatives believe in family values. Because they regard the family as the moral backbone of society, they are rightly worried about high rates of divorce and family separation. But Mumford thinks they wrongly put the blame on cultural factors — on a lack of commitment to marriage or the selfish desire of individuals for personal fulfilment. The “cultural poverty thesis” is a part of the conservative package that he wants to challenge. He cites empirical studies suggesting that the primary reason for family breakdown is poverty. Not having enough money is stressful; it leads to bad decisions and conflict. It is not a recipe for a flourishing family. Conservatives who cherish family values and want families to thrive thus have good reason for supporting measures that help the poor. “To the extent that the Right is committed to laissez faire, to the extent that it has endorsed the evisceration of unions and resisted anti-trust enforcement, the Right has ignored its family values.”

In other chapters, Mumford argues that conservatives who believe in the sanctity of life should favour gun control, and that liberals who criticise consumerism should have doubts about sexual liberation. Those on the left who profess reverence for nature should be against genetic enhancement and those on the right who stress the importance of personal responsibility shouldn’t deny ex-prisoners civil rights or prevent them from obtaining opportunities that could give them a new start in life.

Mumford naturally hopes that readers will be convinced by his arguments and accept his conclusions. If they do, ethical packages will no longer exist. What’s more, liberals and conservatives will find themselves in agreement on many issues. Everyone, he thinks, ought to value inclusivity, the sanctity of life and family relationships. Everyone ought to be critical of consumerism and revere nature. If people with different political identifications can be persuaded to reason consistently, they will often reach the same conclusions. The tribalism that plagues political life will disappear and Mumford will no longer be vexed.

Unlikely? I suspect so. Conservatives have a view of the good that is different in significant respects from that of people on the left. Political divisions are not likely to be healed by Mumford’s attempt at reconciliation. Moreover, those who favour assisted suicide or legalisation of abortion and those who oppose government intervention to decrease economic inequality have many arguments at their disposal and a complex system of values. They will find ways of countering Mumford’s reasoning. Despite his best efforts, ethical views will continue to come in packages.

But ethical agreement and the unpicking of ethical packages are not crucial to Mumford’s campaign against tribalism. What he really wants is not an agreement with all of his views, which he must realise is unlikely, but a revival of ethical conversation. He wants people to think about what they should value and whether their positions on moral issues are compatible with their values. If they are willing to engage in this exercise then they must admit that their views could be mistaken. They must be prepared to surrender or modify their positions and to accept the existence of dissent and disagreement. They must try to understand and appreciate the views of their opponents. Their ethics can’t be tribal.

Nevertheless, Mumford’s attempt to force people to reason about their values might risk treating the symptoms of political tribalism and failing to engage with the real causes. If the forces that divide people result from their allegiance to a party, a cause or a person, then an appeal to common values or ethical consistency is likely to have little effect. True believers will always find reasons, however questionable, to support their ethical positions. They will always be inclined to think that the positions of their opponents are morally pernicious. Reason, as Hume said, is the slave of the passions. Something more is needed. Mumford realises this and calls it “moral imagination.”

Moral imagination, Mumford tells us, is a sympathetic appreciation of the needs of others. It requires attention to hidden suffering — for example, the suffering of old people shut away in nursing homes. It asks us to consider the plight of future generations and the needs of people in other countries. Moral imagination, he says, is a form of cosmopolitan sympathy; we have to learn to care about people whoever they are and however distant they are from us in space or time. Cosmopolitan sympathy does not mean giving up a special concern for members of our family or nation, he assures us. We would be deficient as moral agents if we thought only about distant people and ignored poverty and suffering on our doorstep. But we need to broaden our sympathies and direct them especially to those who are poor and oppressed.

Mumford thinks that moral imagination will make us more inclined to accept the positions he argues for in his book. He also thinks of it as a cure for tribalism. If people have a sympathetic appreciation of the needs and suffering of others, then some causes of division will simply disappear. There is no room for racism, sexism or homophobia in a cosmopolitan moral order. And other causes of division will be mitigated by mutual appreciation and sympathetic understanding.

This is Mumford’s remedy for tribalism: rational argument bolstered by the exercise of moral imagination. But is it likely to work? From the perspective of moral philosophy, a lot of conceptual work obviously needs to be done in order to resolve the conflicts inherent in a cosmopolitan ethics. But the more serious difficulty is persuading people to satisfy its demanding requirements. Mumford thinks we are capable of being cosmopolitans. He believes that human nature need not get in the way, that we are not irrevocably tribal. He ends with an expression of hope. “We must begin by believing in ourselves again.” •

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Josh Frydenberg and his Coalition colleagues have often framed their aversion to government largesse as an argument about our responsibility to future generations. “Every dollar we spend today is a borrowed dollar,” said the treasurer ahead of the budget. “That’s the reality and the debt will be there for future generations to pay back.”

Finance minister Mathias Cormann agrees. He once compared budget deficits to parents using their credit cards to pay for the weekly groceries and then leaving their children to pick up the tab. “Not a single parent would expect their children to pay off that credit card in those circumstances. Neither should the Australian government.”

Does this mean that the current taxpaying generation is behaving unethically by allowing the government to amass a $213 billion deficit to inject life into the economy, and leaving others to pick up the tab?

In reality, the government had little choice but to spend on a vast scale. What might make that spending more or less ethical in intergenerational terms will depend at least partly on the effectiveness of the budget measures according to the government’s job-creation goals.

Take the tax cut for people in work, which creates a multibillion dollar hit to the budget bottom line, or a permanent increase to JobSeeker payments, again with a multibillion dollar price tag. Which one will be judged to have had a greater impact on job creation — and hence a greater ethical justification — in a decade’s time?

The government chose the tax cuts, using the argument that relatively well-off taxpayers will stimulate the economy by spending the extra dollars or investing in job-creating businesses. But economists know that people on higher incomes are more likely than others to save any extra income they receive or park it in tax-protected assets that don’t generate jobs, like negatively geared property. That’s especially true in uncertain times.

That’s why a majority of leading economists agreed that putting cash in the bank accounts of unemployed Australians would be a better bet, since that money would mostly be spent on food, rent and other essentials and quickly circulate through the economy.

The preference for tax cuts over a permanent increase to JobSeeker is indicative of the character of the budget and how the Coalition’s political message has shifted. Once, its primary claim was “deficit and debts are bad, surpluses are good.” Now it concedes that borrowing to stimulate the economy and create jobs is necessary, but asserts that business and private investors must take the lead, not the government. The constant thread is an ideological preference for small government.

So, the $3 billion spend on roads and other shovel-ready infrastructure projects over the next four years is dwarfed by the $26.7 billion cost of enabling businesses to instantly write off the cost of new assets. And support for the housing sector takes the form of more incentives for first homebuyers rather than direct investment in building homes for renters on low incomes, who can never aspire to own a house.

The common ground across the political spectrum is the urgent need to create jobs. But even if the recovery is to be led by the private sector, that still raises questions of priority. Should the government throw its financial weight behind a gas-led recovery or a wholesale shift to a renewable economy? The response to this question might depend on how seriously you follow the scientific evidence of accelerating climate change.

And here’s an interesting thing. The concern that some political and business leaders show for not burdening future generations with public sector debt is rarely matched by an equivalent resistance to saddling future generations with the catastrophic consequences of more droughts, floods, hurricanes, bushfires and crop failures. An uninhabitable Earth is one hell of a credit card bill to leave to our kids.

The well-established cognitive bias to preference immediate rewards over future gains helps explain inaction on climate change. Carbon pricing is an attempt to counter this perceptual flaw by bringing future costs into the present.

An equivalent ethical justification exists for government borrowing in response to the pandemic recession — it can reduce long-term harm. The recession’s impact is being felt acutely by people who have lost their jobs or watched their small businesses go under. They need immediate assistance. But the damage will also reach well into the future.

We know, for example, that many older workers who lost jobs in the early 1990s recession — the one we “had to have” — never worked again. A downturn forces young people out of the workforce or prevents them from gaining a foothold in the labour market, leaving them demoralised and limiting their life prospects. Training opportunities are lost; skills stagnate. Research and development stalls, as does investment in new plant and equipment.

Collectively, these are known as “scarring effects,” and they cause profound damage to the fabric of society. As Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe warned in a recent speech, “The clear evidence from history is that the deeper and more protracted a downturn, the more severe are the economic scars.”

We have to hope not only that the government’s multibillion dollar bet on a business-led recovery pays dividends, but also that the benefits are widely shared. As Chris Richardson from Deloitte Access Economics points out, the recession’s impact is unevenly distributed, with regions that were already doing it tough “now struggling a lot more” and affluent areas less severely affected.

The differences are not only geographic; the fault lines are also gendered, class-based and generational. As an outright homeowner with thirty-plus years of well-paid employment and a healthy superannuation balance behind me, I am much better placed to ride out a downturn than a single mother casually employed in the tourist trade.

So when the treasurer tells Australians, “We have your back,” someone like me, pocketing my backdated tax cut, might feel better protected than an unemployed worker who just had his or her coronavirus supplement slashed.

The government’s role in borrowing and investing should not be confined to restarting the economy; it should also make sure the risks are shared fairly. And we can’t assume that the collective good automatically arises out of the cumulative effect of private companies seeking to grow their businesses, and of citizens and families advancing their personal interests through individual spending decisions.

Public borrowing for direct public investment in housing, education, research and healthcare isn’t like flexing the credit card to put your groceries on the never never; it’s laying the foundations for future prosperity. A business-led recovery, and giving Australians back more of “their own money” in tax cuts push risk back onto individuals and households. •

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Bregman is a historian who also writes books about philosophy. Given his age and the range of his imagination, he has been called a wunderkind; I am inclined to call him a visionary. But he is humbler than that, content to describe himself as an investigative journalist. He contributes to the Die Correspondent, a highly regarded Dutch online newspaper that eschews advertising on principle (and now has a US edition). Die Correspondent resembles Intercept, or Inside Story and similar organs here and overseas that play such a vital role in keeping independent, long-form journalism alive.

But it’s as a writer of books that Bregman has made his greatest impact. Humankind is a huge, ambitious work, a critical survey of research in the natural and social sciences, woven together with the skill of a born storyteller. Its basic premise is that, as individuals, we Homo sapiens are fundamentally decent people. Not particularly smart, but good.

It’s an audacious proposition, though Bregman is not the first to assert it. As an undergraduate anthropology student long ago, I learned that it was cooperation rather than the Social Darwinists’ much-vaunted competition that gave Homo sapiens our evolutionary advantage. Bregman, given to snappy loaded phrases, calls it “survival of the friendliest.” And for this he has drawn on a mindboggling amount of research from a range of fields, though chiefly evolutionary biology, a discipline that has grown substantially since I was a student and has come up with intriguing findings about our physical and cognitive characteristics.

Hence Bregman’s renaming us as Homo puppy. This is his term for “self-domestication,” a concept derived from studies of how we tamed animals. Domestication involves breeding for desirable outcomes. As wolves were bred into dogs, for example, they became more juvenile, friendly and what we might even call cute. Their snouts became shorter, their tails curlier, their bodies smaller. Likewise, we Homo sapiens differentiated ourselves from other primates and humans. Our brows and jaws became smaller, our faces flatter, our skulls rounder, our bones thinner.

Natural selection was at work, but what scientists now make of it diverges widely from earlier interpretations of how our species became dominant. From biology to archaeology, advanced techniques have led to the more nuanced understandings of this process that Bregman discusses. The fact that the friendliest among us succeeded most as parents gave us the ultimate advantage over other kinds of humans.

Those other kinds included the Neanderthals, who the latest research indicates were smarter than us. They had larger brains, for one thing, and their technology was arguably as advanced as ours at the same point in time. Compared to us, though, they were loners, fitted best for the harsh conditions of the Ice Age. They lived in smaller communities and didn’t move around as much as we did.

As is his style, Bregman characterises the two species as Geniuses and Copycats. Homo sapiens didn’t necessarily invent things, but they picked up skills and technologies from people they mingled with, Neanderthals included, adapting and improving them. Still essentially hunter-gatherers, their communities could be large and organised enough to allow for construction of impressive monuments. Bregman cites Göbekli Tepe, a Turkish archaeological site discovered to be the world’s oldest temple, built not by slaves for rulers but by collective endeavour. By and large our ancestors were peaceful people as well. The archaeological record yields next to no evidence of murder, sustained intertribal warfare or other repeated violent acts.

All of this flies in the face of what we’ve come to believe about ourselves: what Bregman calls the “veneer theory of civilisation.” To elaborate this he takes us back to the Enlightenment, and the opposing social theories of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

In one corner is Hobbes: the pessimist who would have us believe in the wickedness of human nature. The man who asserted that civil society alone could save us from our baser instincts. In the other corner, Rousseau: the man who declared that in our heart of hearts we’re all good. Far from being our salvation, Rousseau believed “civilisation” is what ruins us.

Even if you’ve never heard of them, the opposing views of these two heavyweights are at the root of society’s deepest divides. I know of no other debate with stakes as high, or ramifications as far-reaching. Harsher punishments versus better social services, reform school versus art school, top-down management versus empowered teams, old-fashioned breadwinners versus baby-toting dads — take just about any debate you can think of and it goes back, in some way, to the opposition between Hobbes and Rousseau.

So how did the Hobbesian theory — the one that states we are at bottom selfish beasts apt to revert to barbarism in any crisis, with only the Leviathan state between us and our murderous impulses — get the imprimatur? For Bregman, the defining moment was when we started farming. A group of tribes came to the Fertile Crescent, settled there, and started planting crops — the spring shoots of civilisation. Accompanying this move came the growth of cities, the instigation of hierarchies, and the supplanting of the old disinterested gods with all-knowing omnipotent ones and of tribal leaders with dynastic monarchs.

Of course, this is a gross simplification of developments that countless writers have devoting careers to describing. But the point to be made, and Bregman makes it convincingly, is that settling down wasn’t the unqualified advance we have long assumed it to be. Along with Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, another bestselling narrative, Bregman contends that the agricultural revolution ushered in problems that beset us to this day. Failing crops led to periodic famines. Settlement in confined spaces made us prone to disease. Right now, we’re experiencing a pandemic, for us a once-in-a-century event, but before the public health and medical advances of the last 200 years or so — a mere blip on our 200,000-year timeline — plagues were common occurrences in human settlements.

I mentioned an Australian connection for Bregman’s research, but actually there are two. The first involves William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a novel about a bunch of British schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island. Bregman first read it in his teens, and it made a profound impression — as it has on just about every one of its readers, who at a guess would number in the tens of millions. Published in 1954, it won Golding the Nobel Prize for Literature, and all these years later it remains in print, is still being studied in schools, and has been the inspiration for reality TV.

After beginning to question its premise — that humans left to their own devices will ineluctably revert to their vicious animal nature — Bregman noted its depiction of the Hobbesian veneer theory as the secret of its success. Golding, he learned — “a man who beat his kids” — had a very poor opinion of human nature.

Then Bregman got wind of a real-life incident in which some boys were shipwrecked on a Pacific island and survived for a year and a half until they were discovered. Nothing like Golding’s characters, they were bored Tongan teenagers who “borrowed” a boat and went sailing for a lark. Finding themselves on their own they created a mini-society that went a long way towards proving that Rousseau, not Hobbes, was right. The island, deserted years before, was ‘Ata, part of the Tongan archipelago.

The Australian connection? Bregman learned from a digitised Age article that a thirty-five-year-old Australian sailor named Peter Warner discovered the boys in 1966. Given their ages at the time, Bregman figured out that some of the boys, and Warner himself, might still be alive. He was right, and took the opportunity of the 2017 book tour to visit Warner and his friend Mano Tauto, a survivor, on Warner’s property near Lismore.

The ‘Ata discovery was covered in the press back when it happened, a documentary was attempted, and then the incident was forgotten. Unlike Golding’s fiction, people found the real story difficult to believe.

The truth is, we find stories about goodness rather boring. We’re hooked on darkness, and the way the news is presented has a lot to do with it. Bregman calls it an addiction, one best avoided if we want to keep things in perspective. A century of two world wars and a worldwide depression hasn’t helped. The Holocaust alone exemplified the depth of cruelty our species can descend to, and in its wake psychologists undertook experiments purporting to prove what each of us is capable of in extremity.

On re-examination, though, the findings of those experiments have been shown to be spurious. And here’s where the second Australian connection comes in. The woman whose work has done most to debunk them is Gina Perry, a Melbourne psychologist Bregman met on that fateful 2017 book tour.

If nothing else, Bregman has succeeded in toppling Hobbes from his perch. He doesn’t argue that humanity has no dark side. The friendliness of our species tends not to apply outside specific social units — in other words, outside our tribes. Tribalism has stayed with us down the millennia, accentuated by authoritarian societies of one kind or another, including our own. If our hunter-gatherer ancestors were less noble than Rousseau would have it, they were arguably healthier and happier than their civilised descendants.

Yet time and again, the closer we get to our neighbours, as they did, the friendlier we can be. Those further from people unlike themselves are the ones most likely to fan the tribal flames. Here Bergman points to our leaders, who for various reasons find it in their interest to manipulate us. We have given them power, and power inevitably corrupts.

Humankind is an absorbing, challenging work. Its analysis is both intricate and sweeping. Its end points are the demise of democracy, or at least its withering, and the imminent threat of climate change. We have been let down by our leaders, but our greatest danger lies in the cynicism this has bred in us.

Bregman is weakest, I believe, when it comes to countering these dangers. Some of his suggestions, like the basic income of his previous book or the participatory budgets he advocates here, are not without their problems. But in proving that deep down we are decent creatures who can work together for the common good, he has shown us where to start. •

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We don’t agree with Aristotle. These days we believe that all humans have equal worth and dignity, a doctrine enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Our morality has become cosmopolitan. How this fundamental change in morality came about, its implications, and the difficulties that still attend it are the subject of philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s new book.

The cosmopolitan tradition can be traced back as far as the ancient Greek Cynic Diogenes, who regarded wealth and class distinctions as irrelevant to the capacity to live a virtuous life. To prove his point he made his home in a barrel. A more reasoned attempt to make a distinction between the moral worth of a person and his or her social position was made by the Stoics and Cicero, the great Roman statesman and philosopher of the first century BC. Cicero believed in the existence of a human community in which everyone possessed an equal status. This equality, he believed, is ours by nature and entails universal duties of justice. We are embraced, he says, by the same law of nature and this forbids us to do violence to others and requires us to protect them from the violence of others.

Nussbaum credits Cicero with founding a cosmopolitan tradition that was revived and built on by European thinkers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The philosophers of international relations, Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, were influenced by Cicero and so were Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. Cicero’s book De Officiis (Of Politics) became a kind of biblical text, she says, for the makers of public policy around the world. “But in one important respect this Bible was more like the serpent in the garden.”

Cicero’s account of justice was flawed, she believes, because of its indifference to the needs of strangers. Cicero thought that people have special duties for the wellbeing of their family members, friends and fellow citizens, but are not obliged to inconvenience themselves for the sake of people outside these relationships. If these individuals are poor, hungry or suffering from a maldistribution of resources this is no concern of theirs. Nussbaum thinks that this view of Cicero’s is not only morally wrong but also inconsistent with his own account of justice. A duty to protect individuals from violence requires us to make sacrifices for their sake.

Nussbaum’s quarrel with Cicero is not philosophical nit-picking. She thinks his mistaken view of justice continues to influence our approach to cosmopolitan justice. We agree that it is wrong to violate the rights of others, but we are less inclined to believe that we ought to help them obtain the resources they need. We accept duties to our fellows but believe that helping strangers is merely a matter of charity. Nussbaum thinks that a morally sound cosmopolitanism must be concerned for the wellbeing of all humans (and indeed sentient animals). In her exploration of the cosmopolitan tradition she wants to discover why it is flawed and how it can be repaired.

The flaw, she thinks, can be traced back to Stoicism, a philosophy that spread through the ancient world from the third century BC. Like Diogenes, the Stoics believed that human dignity has nothing to do with social status. The ability to reason and to live a virtuous life, they insisted, belongs to every human being; Aristotle was wrong about the variability of human worth because he focused on superficial differences between people. But if the difference between a slave and a free person is only superficial — if a slave can live a life of reason and virtue — then why object to slavery? And why should poverty matter if the soul is free?

Stoicism encouraged an indifference to the fate of others. Good Stoics are supposed to curb their emotional responses to their own fate or the fortune of those near to them and to concentrate their attention on serving humanity as a whole. Nussbaum considers this an impoverished point of view that denies the affection and concern we have for those near and dear, and praises Cicero for breaking with Stoicism by insisting on special duties to family, friends and fellow citizens. But the problem for cosmopolitanism remains. How do we reconcile these special duties with an insistence that all humans have an equal moral value?

These are the philosophical problems that European thinkers had to wrestle with when they adapted the cosmopolitanism of the ancient world. Two of these thinkers made important advances, says Nussbaum, though they failed to overcome all of its flaws.

Grotius, the seventeenth-century Dutch political philosopher, adapted cosmopolitanism to serve the cause of religious and political freedom. Every person, he insisted, is by nature autonomous and ought to be free to determine his or her beliefs and way of life. Slavery is incompatible with individual rights and so are attempts by one nation to dominate others. Nations should treat each other with respect in peace and war. His belief that people of every nation have a right to decide how they should be governed is the basis for his pioneering contribution to international law.

Grotius also believed that individuals have a right to have their needs satisfied. People have no right to monopolise resources that others need. Nussbaum notes the tension between this idea and Grotius’s insistence on the right of national sovereignty but credits him with a concern for human welfare that Cicero and the Stoics lacked.

The eighteenth-century philosopher and economist Adam Smith was an heir of the Ciceronian tradition but he was also a keen observer of society. Like Cicero and the Stoics, he endorsed a morality of human equality based on the capacity of each person for rational choice. But he was also well aware that working and living conditions could so degrade individuals as to make them incapable of exercising meaningful choice. People need education in order to develop their rationality, he argued, and they also need resources sufficient for a decent life. Smith is famous for his support of free enterprise and trade, but he also believed that workers should get a fair share of the wealth of their nation and that nations should cooperate on equal terms for the sake of the wellbeing of all humankind.

Nussbaum thinks that Smith was working his way towards a position that she would support in his most famous work, Wealth of Nations. She is disappointed by his later reversion to the Stoic doctrine that material conditions should make no difference to the ability of a person to be virtuous. The virtuous person, says Smith, demonstrates a manly indifference to the blows of fortune; he can think and act impartially by refusing to be moved by womanly sentiments. His idea of virtue is clearly infected by gender stereotypes and an assumption of masculine superiority, and Nusbaum thinks they are mainly responsible for his reversion to Stoicism. But the old conundrum of the Stoics also lurks in the background. If people can be degraded to the extent that their ability to be rational and moral is diminished then it becomes more difficult to insist that humans are of equal worth.

In a global economy, where people are linked together through trade and manufacture, where some are affluent while others are impoverished, and where an increasing number of refugees are seeking a place to live, a cosmopolitan theory and practice is more necessary than ever before. The flaws in the tradition need to be faced and overcome. Nussbaum thinks her survey points in the right direction. The tradition’s philosophical flaws, she thinks, are best overcome in the framework of the capabilities approach that she has developed with the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen.

An appeal to capabilities stresses the commonality of human needs while allowing for the different goals and desires that humans develop within their cultures. Humans are born with innate endowments that give them the potential to develop further capabilities through nurture and education. But what defines the entitlements of human beings, according to the theory, are the capabilities that they ought to be able to exercise in their political and social environment. These include not only good health, adequate shelter and freedom from assault, but also an adequate education, and being able to form attachments and affiliations, engage in critical thinking, enjoy recreational activities and participate in politics. Cosmopolitan justice depends on these capabilities being realised for all humans, and everyone in world society shares the responsibility for realising this goal.

All humans are equal, according to Nusbaum’s theory, because their basic capabilities give them the potential to develop and exercise capabilities intrinsic to a flourishing human life. But humans with severe mental disabilities do not have these basic capabilities and some humans have them to a greater degree than others. If the properties that make humans valuable occur to a greater or lesser degree in individuals, then the very idea of human equality is once again under threat. Any account of human equality that depends on properties that individuals possess, whether actual or potential, is bound to run into the same difficulty. It will not escape Aristotle’s case for believing that all human beings are not of equal worth.

Nussbaum downplays an aspect of the cosmopolitan tradition that might prove helpful. Cicero and the Stoics emphasise human sociability — not merely as a capability that individuals should be able to develop but as a basic fact about human existence. For them, being human and being a world citizen go together. Grotius gives this idea a new twist by claiming that human beings possess the Earth and its resources in common. This is why he thinks that those with unmet needs can legitimately take from those who have more than enough to satisfy their needs. If it is a basic moral fact that individuals are world citizens by virtue of being human, then they get all the rights of membership just by being born. Their particular properties are irrelevant. This way of grounding human equality also has its problems, but it may turn out that cosmopolitanism can be more successfully defended as a philosophy if it takes a communitarian rather than an individualist direction.

But getting the philosophy right is only a small step in overcoming the difficulties that cosmopolitanism faces. How can it be put into practice? What responsibilities does it give us?

Nussbaum has a few things to say about cosmopolitan practice. She agrees with Grotius that political self-determination is best achieved in a world where the sovereignty of nation-states is respected. She does not think that the goal of cosmopolitanism ought to be a world state or a world regulated by international organisations. She worries about violations of human rights within states but thinks that they are often best countered by the moral pressure of international forums. She thinks that we all have a duty to ensure that the capabilities of all the world’s people are achieved, but she also thinks that foreign aid is almost always counterproductive. She suggests that we can help people help themselves by writing reports, books and articles they can use. It is difficult not to suspect that she is privileging the activities that she does herself: participating in international forums and writing books.

Most of us are cosmopolitans. We believe in the existence of human rights. But we aren’t sure what they are, why they exist, or what a cosmopolitan morality requires. Nussbaum’s book doesn’t answer all of the questions, and the answers she gives are open to debate. But her book not only provides a valuable perspective on the cosmopolitan tradition. It also encourages us to consider how we can realise the moral ideal of cosmopolitanism in our own time. •

The post The needs of strangers appeared first on Inside Story.

Now, while I wasn’t entirely wrong — for Gordon-Smith is indeed witty and the chapters do stand alone as essays — I was mostly wrong. Stop Being Reasonable defies easy classification, but it’s certainly not a solipsistic first-person endeavour. Instead, Gordon-Smith has written an engaging, outward-looking book that invites readers to contemplate what it means to exercise reason, to hold beliefs, to experience emotions and to have your worldview challenged or even shattered. These are huge questions, and even when broken down into more manageable chunks they have preoccupied philosophers for entire careers and across generations. Gordon-Smith sensibly and entertainingly brings them down to earth by hooking them to true human stories, or what she calls the “muddy reality of being a person.”

Of special interest to Gordon-Smith is the question of what it takes to change a person’s mind, an inquiry prompted by a failed experiment she conducted, the outcome of which changed her own mind about the persuasive power of evidence and “reason.” Over a number of weeks, armed with recording equipment, she hit Sydney’s Kings Cross to pose a question to the passing parade of catcallers: “What were you hoping for just then?” She expected to follow up this opening gambit — and “reason them out of doing it again” — by appealing to research and her own authority as a woman.

Instead, she was flummoxed to find that while most of the men she approached were open and friendly — and willing to be recorded — they believed that women responded positively to their banter, their pats on the bottom and their suggestive winks. Edited down, the experiment made for a memorable, if squirm-inducing, episode of the popular US radio program This American Life. In prose, however, without the intimate proximity audio can provide, the catcalling experiment is comparatively flat on the page — or perhaps I never accepted the terms of the experiment in the first place, including the presumed benefits of a “rational conversation.” The radio episode generated major interest and seeded the idea for the book as a whole, but here it stands somewhat apart, a mildly diverting curiosity, from the more compelling five chapters that follow.

At least three of the true stories presented by Gordon-Smith could be ripped from the tabloids or the plots of made-for-television movies. Man leaves religious cult for the love of a truly good woman. Wife accidentally discovers her husband is an adulterer and a paedophile. Happy, middle-aged man learns he is adopted soon after two strangers knock on his front door. One case is literally taken from reality television, albeit from its early, more unpredictable and less-scripted days: Alex, an Oxbridge toff, passes as a bouncer on the British series Faking It, an experiment so invigorating he breaks out of the straitjacket of a fixed self.

In each chapter, Gordon-Smith pans in and out from the quotidian and sometimes sensational details of the case studies to the larger questions that animate her project. Her approach is probing and inquisitive but also deeply empathetic. Rather than judge her subjects for any perceived lapses in judgement or reason, she humanises them and their plight. Instead of reiterating tired mantras like “she must have known” about Susie, who accidentally discovered her husband John’s dark past on the family computer, she questions the assumption that emotion or trust are antithetical to reason or logic, for “trust has its own claim to being rational… [for] it is rational to trust because intimate relationships require it.”

The most perplexing story centres on Nicole Kluemper, already famous in the United States as a contested example of someone with repressed memory of child sexual abuse. The various twists and turns of this case have left the adult Kluemper unsure of the validity or content of her own memories, as well as her identity as a survivor of abuse. Given this rich and gritty material, and Gordon-Smith’s access to the players involved — including the controversial and indefatigable psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, author of The Myth of Repressed Memory (1994) — it is not surprising that this is both the most engrossing and the most (necessarily) irresolute chapter. Gordon-Smith’s skill here is to not take sides — other than Kluemper’s — which makes for riveting reading.

Gordon-Smith peppers Stop Being Reasonable with insights and propositions from well-known and lesser-known philosophers and critical thinkers. She casts her net wide and her choices for a particular conundrum or theme can be refreshingly eclectic, as they are in the chapter about Alex, who rejects the predictable life he was born into as a member of the upper class. Here, Gordon-Smith sweeps Oliver Sacks, Virginia Woolf, Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan and British banker-cum-philosopher Peter Goldie, among others, into formidable teams of defenders and opponents of the idea of a stable self. She also writes vividly of her own first encounters with philosophical thought, including that of René Descartes (of course) and nineteenth-century mathematician William Clifford. Reflecting on Clifford’s equation of doubt with moral courage, she writes, “I loved the pure anarchy of the way philosophy like this tried to leave you with less knowledge instead of more.”

Gordon-Smith clearly knows and loves philosophy — she’s a graduate student in Princeton University’s prestigious philosophy department — and is obviously adept at communicating it to a broader audience. In addition to her work on This American Life, she’s been a researcher and interviewer on Radio National’s long-running program The Philosopher’s Zone. Yet while Stop Being Reasonable falls broadly into the genre of “pop philosophy,” I found the strengths of the book to be storytelling and character rather than its passages of philosophical writing in the mode of popularisers like Alain de Botton. For all of de Botton’s irritating qualities — and he’s clearly as divisive a figure as he is an influential and successful one — his blending of plot and philosophy in early books like On Love was audaciously clever.

More recently, Australian writer Julienne van Loon’s The Thinking Woman impressed with its thoughtful merging of memoir and feminist philosophy. Like Gordon-Smith, van Loon encourages a generous definition of philosophy, but she also dedicates more time to introducing and explaining her chosen philosophers and their work. At times, in its philosophical content, Stop Being Reasonable feels rushed and underdeveloped. I was left wanting more, which is a compliment as well as a criticism. Gordon-Smith is clearly a gifted writer and thinker, and Stop Being Reasonable bodes very well for her future work on the page and on the airwaves. •

Stop Being Reasonable
By Eleanor Gordon-Smith | NewSouth | $27.99 | 274 pages

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In the years that followed, I learned the hard way that authors don’t set book prices and academic writing is not a pathway to wealth. I came to realise that my dislike for Eagleton was immature and irrational. But rather than abandon it, I found grounds for renewal in one of his book reviews:

The cult of the Individual Life is… ultimately self-defeating. For one thing, most individual existences are routine and unremarkable… Biographies cannot help reminding us, in the very act of distilling the uniqueness of their subjects, of just what tediously generic creatures they are… even the most wayward of geniuses have to get themselves born and educated, fight with their parents, fall in love and die.

Eagleton’s disdain for individuality went against everything I believed as an aspiring psychologist. The ways we tell our life stories disclose our complex selves, and to flatten them into a few generic chapters seemed deeply anti-psychological. Our lives are, of course, moulded by our social and economic positions, but there is surely a degree of narrative uniqueness to the autobiographies we spin in our heads.

I was reminded of my pique when reading David Brooks’s The Second Mountain. On its face the book is a guide to living a morally enriched life, but it is inseparable from its author’s autobiography. Brooks, a conservative columnist at the New York Times and author of numerous widely read books, most recently The Social Animal and The Road to Character, will be known to Australian readers through his regular appearances as a political analyst alongside Mark Shields and Judy Woodruff on PBS NewsHour, broadcast locally by SBS. Five years ago, Brooks divorced his wife of twenty-eight years, began a relationship with a much younger researcher who worked for him, and underwent a spiritual transformation that prompted a partial conversion from his natal Judaism to Christian faith. When Brooks writes about the second mountain, it is clear that he is catching his breath from a recent climb.

For Brooks the second mountain is the one we must ascend after falling off the first. In his telling, the first mountain is the struggle for personal achievement and happiness, an individualistic quest for conventional success. The dark side of this struggle is loneliness, depression, a crisis of meaning, distrust, and the social and political tribalism that they breed. When people realise the bleak ecology of the first mountain or have their faith in it shaken by misfortune, they enter what Brooks describes biblically as a valley or wilderness. From there they can make a decision to follow a different path and climb the second mountain.

According to Brooks, this peak is higher than the first and has an entirely different moral system. Instead of “hyper-individualism” there is an ethos of belonging and community, which Brooks dubs “relationalism.” He concludes his book with a relationalist manifesto that lays out, in sixty-four numbered paragraphs, the tenets of this middle way between individualism and collectivism. On the second mountain people strive not only for social connection but also for permanent “moral joy” rather than mere transitory happiness. They aim to transcend rather than enhance themselves, and to offer unconditional care to those who are less fortunate than themselves. What unites them is a set of commitments — to a vocation, to a marriage, to a faith or belief system, and to a community — and the bulk of the book is dedicated to groups of chapters exploring these four commitments.

Brooks writes amiably, openly and without showiness, aside from a tendency to over-season his prose with quotes from the great and good, with a tilt towards Americans and religious figures. There is Lincoln and C.S. Lewis, King and Kierkegaard, Dillard and Dostoyevsky. Most chapters are relatively short and pithy, the main exception being a chapter within a section on faith that pivots to Brooks’s spiritual awakening and remarriage and is twice the length of any other. Here he describes an extended process of religious doubt and dalliance that ends with him committed to a form of Christianity while remaining culturally Jewish. The centrality of personal faith to Brooks’s journey up the second mountain becomes clear here, although it is perhaps less likely to feature in the journeys of most Australian readers. However, any suspicion that The Second Mountain is just another book for elevating solo souls is mistaken. Brooks writes thoughtfully on the dependence of personal development on positive institutions and communities — “second mountain institutions” — and his own efforts to build them.

Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. Indeed, he wrote it twice, once in an essay published in 1932 and once in his posthumously published novel The Last Tycoon. He probably didn’t mean it on either occasion, presenting it on the first occasion as something he once thought. If anything, the idea of second acts is especially prominent in American ways of storying lives, with their frequent themes of relentless optimism, manifest personal destiny and reinvention. Exploring how everyday people compose these personal narratives has been the research focus of the eminent American psychologist Dan McAdams. In some respects an anti-Eagleton, McAdams has devoted his career to understanding how we create personal myths with distinctive character types, themes and trajectories, binding our past, present and imagined future into a coherent sense of personal identity.

In interviews with middle-aged, middle-class Americans, McAdams has found that many life stories conform to what he calls a “redemption narrative.” These narratives contain five common elements. The protagonist experiences early advantage in life, has a precocious awareness of suffering or injustice in the world, develops a strong moral compass, is driven to act selflessly for others, and passes through a period of personal adversity into a redemptive future. Although some might be inclined to view this formula cynically, McAdams has found that adults in midlife whose personal stories match its contours are especially committed to making a positive contribution to future generations, an aspiration the great but unfashionable psychoanalyst Erik Erikson referred to as “generativity.”

Brooks does not cite McAdams, but his first mountain–second mountain scheme has more than a whiff of redemption narrative about it. The second mountain of joyful belonging redeems the first mountain of individualistic striving. In this regard, The Second Mountain is an occasionally inspiring tale of personal transformation and hope that flows along a deeply carved narrative channel in American culture, saturated as it is with religiosity and optimism.

How well this narrative resonates with readers with different backgrounds is open to question. For some, perhaps especially women, personal transformation is less a movement from individualism to relationalism and more the reverse movement from social obligation and embeddedness towards liberation. For people outside the American milieu, this romantic narrative of onward-and-upward overcoming will feel foreign and the constant uplift hard to stomach. I suspect many Australians will relate better to a comic narrative in which the protagonist bounces through a series of ups and downs without an unironic sense of personal mission or heroism.

Most of all, I wonder how distant or illusory the second mountain might seem to young people and others whose economic vistas are less rosy than fifty-something professionals. Creeping casualisation and the gig economy are making it more difficult for people to reach the foothills of a first mountain of conventional career success, let alone ascend it. Brooks is correct in identifying individualism as one element of what is wrong with contemporary American life — the untrammelled rise of the market is a correlated element that he tends to neglect — but we might hope for ways to find social connection and community that don’t require people to pursue self-seeking ambition for the first decades of adult life only to find it wanting in midlife.

It is no criticism of Brooks to observe that his book’s main target audience has a particular age, class and cultural profile. The average second mountaineer may be a well-off late boomer or an early gen Xer, but that is no reason to scoff at their aspirations to joy, community or selfless commitment to others. The world would not be worse off if more people embraced lives of service and altruism. But it is important to remember that some of us live socioeconomically closer to the mountains than others. Terry Eagleton would surely agree. •

The post The second mountaineer appeared first on Inside Story.

Why should this be so? The actual content of Folau’s views don’t explain it. I imagine that few of the people Folau is referring to will be disturbed by the message itself. Many of them do not believe in hell or they subscribe to a religious doctrine that does not hold that their sexual preferences are sinful. Perhaps young people, insecure about their sexuality, may be disturbed to find that a sporting hero thinks that people like them are bound for hell, but they will be able to find other role models who do not have this belief.

Folau also declared that atheists are bound for hell, but few express a worry about atheists feeling unwelcome at a rugby match because of his presence. Atheists are expected to tolerate the presence of people who oppose their view. Why is it different for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersexual or queer?

The only explanation for why the continued presence of Folau might make LGBTQI people feel unwelcome or unsafe is because it is assumed that being gay is not merely a sexual preference but an identity. If being gay defines who a person is then an attack on their sexuality is an attack on the person. It is a way of saying that such a person should not exist. And if someone attacks a person’s very identity then the attacker is defined as an enemy of such people and this identity is inseparable from whatever else he does; it even pollutes the groups or people he associates with. This is why it is assumed that allowing Folau to remain on the rugby field would make an LGBTQI person feel uncomfortable and unsafe. Atheism, on the other hand, is assumed to be merely a belief, however fervently held.

The belief that a person’s identity gives her, or her defenders, a justification for censoring and excluding those who object to her way of life has become prevalent even in institutions that are supposed to favour free speech. John Finnis, a distinguished philosopher of law, faced a campaign to have him sacked from Oxford University because of opinions he expressed on homosexuality in an academic article a long time ago. Like Folau, Finnis held (and may still hold) the view that homosexual behaviour is a sin and ought to be discouraged by society. He recommended a traditional Christian attitude: we should hate the sin but love the sinner.

The problem for Finnis is that this distinction between people and their acts is not made by those who attack him. Finnis’s article is now read as a dehumanising attack on those who have an LGBTQI identity. Having been outed by his critics he can no longer be regarded as a person they can be comfortable with as their teacher — whatever the content of his courses. No distinction is made by his critics between the sin and the sinner.

Many of those who disagree with Folau’s exclusion complain that his freedom of speech has been violated. But limitations on freedom of speech can be justified for the sake of the dignity and safety of others. If the AFL is justified in disciplining players for making racist comments, then what is wrong with a ban on football players or academics who publicly oppose expressions of LGBTQI identities?

The answer to this question hinges on the role that identity is supposed to play in social and political relationships. Can we justify a morality and politics that uses identity as a reason for excluding or limiting the expression of others. Is it a mistake for society to validate or encourage appeals to identity?

This latter question is addressed by Stan Grant in On Identity, a book in Melbourne University Press’s “little books on big ideas” series. Grant, an author, journalist and former foreign correspondent, has a personal reason for disliking the division of society into identities. Although he is a member of the Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi community in central New South Wales, he feels that to identify himself as Aboriginal for official purposes is to deny the existence of his white grandmother, who had the courage to choose an Aboriginal man for her partner. It is to acquiesce in a history of defining people by their race. It denies the reality of his upbringing in a neighbourhood where white and black people lived side by side.

Grant thinks that identities not only enforce a history of segregation and deny the complexity of human heritage. They are also bad for individuals. They limit what people can be or feel. They deny the possibility of love that is central to Christianity. They stifle creativity. James Baldwin, says Grant, was able to realise his potential as a writer when he moved from America to Paris to escape the crippling identity of being a black man. But when he returned to America to contribute to the struggle for black liberation, he became a mere propogandist at the expense of his creativity. Identity, Grant says, does not liberate, it binds.

Grant’s criticism of identities has much in common with John Stuart Mill’s opposition to social conformity in On Liberty. Mill believes that the worst restriction on individual freedom is not state control but the stifling effect of social expectations. Individuals are forced by public opinion to become what others think they should be. They are denied the ability to discover and express their own individuality. For Grant it is not simply social expectations that hinder the development of individuals but their acquiescence in an identity. And the problem is not merely that individuality is squashed. Identities also nurture tyrants. “Identity, even with the best of intentions,” he writes, “falls too easily into the hands of petty tyrants — those identity police who monitor our words and actions, trolling social media to keep people in their lanes, telling us who qualifies to write or read — or monstrous despots who crush love under their boots.”

Mill wants everyone to realise him- or herself as an individual. But people come into the world with identities, and self-realisation cannot amount to a denial of the attachments that these identities bring with them. Grant prefers the vision put forward by Édouard Glissant, a Martinique poet and philosopher, of society as a creole garden where people have many identities and are not completely defined by any of them. “Yes, I am a Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi person, I am Irish, I am Australian, I am Indigenous and, as I said before, I have been all of those things and I am none of them.”

In a creole society people have identities that they value. But they are not imprisoned by any one of them and they transcend all of them. An insult in this society may wound but it can never be a threat to personhood. Those who condemn or insult are never defined by the position they express. In this society a person can be a conservative Christian, freely express his views, and yet also be acknowledged by those he regards as sinners as a good rugby player, a good teacher, a loving father and a valued member of his community. In this society people can acknowledge that there are good, indeed lovable, people on both sides of a conflict.

The problem is that we don’t live in this kind of society. As Grant admits, the identities that imprison people are often thrust on them. They are not only inescapable; they are also disvalued. They bring a stigma with them. People who have a disvalued identity can’t get out of their prison simply by refusing to accept the way in which they are defined. And those who act as gatekeepers of this prison are not merely voicing their views when they taunt or disparage. They are expressing their hate or distaste for all people who have the identity they despise or fear. They are signalling their allegiance to others who share their commitment to maintaining the subordination or exclusion of those they hate.

If they are educated, talented and lucky, individuals in a subordinated group may find an escape into other identities. They can, perhaps, go to a place like Paris where people are not so prone to have prejudices against people of their kind. But the fewer their opportunities, the less power people have over conditions that affect their lives, the more inconceivable is the creole existence that Grant regards as ideal.

Grant presents these people with a paradox. A struggle for freedom from the prison of a stigmatised identity requires a collective struggle — a solidarity with those who share the same oppression. The aim is to reject the low status that their identity imposes on them, but they can’t escape being so identified. They can’t change their skin colour, their heritage or their sexual preference. Their only option is to remake their identity into a source of pride and power. Identity imprisons people but it also has the potential to free them from oppression. Grant allows that this is so. What he emphasises is the price that has to be paid. “The identity of empowerment is split from the same atom as the identity of hate.” The identity of empowerment, he says, creates its own prison for individual expression, its own hate and its own tyrants. If this is the price of liberation, he suggests, then it is too high.

Many people would disagree. Baldwin probably knew that his creativity would suffer when he returned to join the black liberation movement. But joining the struggle was something he felt he had to do. Those who fight against the oppression of their group are often moved by love. Grant’s essay is frustrating because he provides no alternative for those who agree with what he says about the dangers of identity but also want to oppose the oppression that blights their lives.

Is there a way to escape the paradox of identity that Grant so movingly presents? One is to make a struggle for liberation into an inclusive movement open to anyone who shares the same ideals. Martin Luther King, who was well aware that such a struggle could breed hate, resentment and violence, represented the movement for black equality as a struggle for white as well as black Americans — for anyone who shared the dream that one day “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

The other way is to keep a firm grip on what is supposed to be the objective of the struggle: the creation of a society in which individuals are respected whatever identities they have and are not imprisoned in any of them. Those involved in a movement of liberation have to ensure that the world of “us” and “them” created by their struggle does not turn into their final destination. This objective is not served when people assume as a matter of course that those who criticise their identity have thereby identified themselves as a threat to their kind. Avoiding the harms that Grant describes requires a difficult balancing act for all members of a liberal society. They must decide when it is legitimate to limit what people can do and say for the sake of protecting members of an oppressed group from threats to their dignity and safety, and when prohibitions violate the right of individuals to express their beliefs.

Not all identities should receive the same treatment. There are good reasons why the AFL should crack down on racist taunts by players and fans. Racial vilification and the harm it causes is a continuing problem in our society. But there is no good reason why Folau should be banished from the football field for stating his religious beliefs. Members of the LGBTQI community continue to face discrimination but nevertheless their entitlement to their sexuality is accepted by most Australians — as the marriage-equality poll revealed. They have no reason to feel insecure or unwelcome because of the views of a member of the conservative Christian minority. They do not need the protection of oversensitive officials. They can join the atheists in disagreeing with Folau’s opinion while appreciating his skill as a rugby player. •

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It was 1938 when Woolf wrote this, and war was looming. Today the places where we must think have expanded, and when the social media and the fake news come streaming in on us, when presidents take to Twitter and the bad behaviour of politicians and celebrities gushes onto our phones, when the riches of the rich are impossible to comprehend, when the trolls grow angrier, it is hard to know what to think, where even to begin. But think we must.

Yes, I thought, as I opened this book and saw the impressive array of women Julienne van Loon has interviewed — including Siri Hustvedt and Laura Kipnis, Julia Kristeva and Rosi Braidotti. It took me a while to correct the misapprehension that can come with a title and an epigraph. I should have taken more notice of the cover: the face of a woman cropped to show only the mouth, partly open and aswoon with feeling.

Towards the end of van Loon’s journey through her interviews with these impressive women, she asks: where are you at? It is a question she says we should all be asking each other, not so much for our physical whereabouts — though that can be crucial when a friend is in trouble — but to enquire about our own journey of becoming in the precarious world we inhabit. It is a question that holds the book together, though I did not realise it until I reached the end, for The Thinking Woman is not so much a book of interviews — though they form an organising principle — as van Loon’s own reckoning with where she is at now, as she approaches fifty.

Where life has brought her as a thinking, feeling woman, who has loved, and loved again, who has given birth to a child and worked for her living, who has wondered and feared as she has moved from city to city. How do we think our lives as well as feel them, she asks; how do we give meaning to the buffeting of emotion and the mismatch of the demands and expectations that are made of us? These, too, are questions asked by Virginia Woolf, and the thinking women who came before, and after, her. Where are we at with that, now, as women of the twenty-first century?

With three novels to her name, van Loon is at her best when those she interviews are as alive as her writing. She visits Marina Warner in her North London house with its “tiny” L-shaped garden which, that day, was “an attractive mess of late summer flowers.” Drinking tea in the kitchen, they talk and they wonder, in both senses of the word: they muse, and ponder, and enquire; they let themselves be “struck by wonder” at the marvels of myth and fairytale, of Scheherazade and the Alice of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. It’s an exhilarating encounter that has Warner and van Loon riffing on the importance of listening to other voices and marvelling at “the strangeness and possibility” of insects that spin their own cocoons and metamorphose — like the beings of ancient stories — into beguiling new form.

Can our capacity for wonder, van Loon wonders as she leaves the house, “actually change who we are”? Yes, she replies to her own question. Yes, and yes.

And so does our capacity for play. Indeed, we cannot wonder if we have not learned from our earliest becoming how to play. When Siri Hustvedt opens the door of her Brooklyn brownstone, the temperature outside dropping to code blue, that is the question van Loon has come to discuss. And should you doubt the importance of play, from those first to-and-fro noises between a mother and her baby, then contemplate what happens when a child is born into an environment so impoverished and abusive that she has no experience of play, none at all: none of those baby noises, none of the mimicking and hiding behind a hand, none of the counting and jumping rope. When Hustvedt encountered such a child in her work at the New York Hospital, the girl was twelve years old with no capacity to imagine, no ability to enter a story or a character, no cognitive comprehension of metaphor. All that was left to her as a mode of thinking was the damaged stasis Hustvedt describes as “concrete.”

“I think of play as a way of sorting out the world,” Hustvedt said — that mulling and wondering and trying other shapes and finding the patterns as we venture further into the world. Without play, we barely live.

Which raises, again, the question that lurks in the undergrowth of this book: “What is this ‘civilisation’ in which we find ourselves?” How are we to comprehend a world in which something as fundamental and human and universal as the play of a child can be obliterated? What is this “civilisation” that reduces so many to poverty and fear as the inequality in wealth reaches levels — van Loon quotes Thomas Piketty — not seen since Woolf was young.

The one Philosopher (with a capital P) whom van Loon interviews is Nancy Holmstrom. As van Loon says, philosophy as an academic discipline is still largely a male preserve, and Holmstrom’s path to the Chair of Philosophy at Rutgers University was far from straightforward. Van Loon turns to her for her work on capitalism, its structures and its impact on women. This is the chapter in which she thinks about her own history of work, and how different it has been from that of her grandmother and mother. It is at this point in the book that she writes of her jump from the security of a continuing university position to the precarity of a writing life — although she does now have a research fellowship at another university. It was a decision made as the work of university teaching was becoming caught in the malign influence of “profit and competition” that also had Marina Warner leaving her university.

As these things so often are for women, van Loon’s decision to jump was a move also for love. As memoir it makes interesting reading, but Holmstrom never comes alive as interlocutor, and the chapter sinks in the gap between the personal and the collective, between van Loon comprehending her own particular story and the task of coming to grips with the dire state of our polity.

As Holmstrom says, and van Loon agrees, “the challenge” for all of us is “to come up with an alternative… To unleash our imaginations and collectively work out what such an alternative would look like.” Which thinking person would not agree? But the uncomfortable thought is whether it is a matter of privilege — however precarious — for those of us who can opt for a thinking, writing life even to ask the question? And then what?

The last of van Loon’s thinking women is Rosi Braidotti. I’d expected her to be a tough subject, but on the contrary she shines a light as a presence in the narrative and as a guide, as van Loon thinks back to a friendship of her twenties with a woman called Jo. It was one of those early engagements that illuminates the path as we venture into the world. But as van Loon’s career consolidates, albeit shakily, Jo’s propensity to schizophrenia darkens. She is admitted to — and escapes from — various psychiatric hospitals, and finally lands back on the streets. Here, the question of where are you at takes on a hard immediacy for Julienne van Loon.

It is a powerful final chapter which, with Braidotti as guide, brings us back to Virginia Woolf. Not on the omnibus, having us think as we pass the Cenotaph — but in her playful love and friendship with Vita Sackville-West. It was there, more than anywhere other than at her desk, that Woolf could live the fluidity of being and becoming, of thought and feeling, that takes immortalised shape — as Braidotti and van Loon agree — in Orlando. That is the Virginia Woolf whose spirit hovers over this book, not the stern rider on the omnibus.

The Thinking Woman does a lot to help us think about how we can, how we could, even how we should, deal with our own feelings, and find the fluidity of imagination to live thoughtfully and fully. In this she has a long and honourable lineage. As to the next question, the hard question of thinking our collective way towards a better world in which life on the streets is no longer an unsurprising fate, I await volume two. •

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Skip forward to January 2019, and the newly minted Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has promised to stop the “ideology of gender” being spread in schools. The Catholic Church began referring to the problems of “gender ideology” in the 1990s, and the expression has spread internationally among the conservative right. The most surprising development, however, is that the same language is now being used by some feminists who consider Butler and those who share her views to be a threat to feminism and women.

Also in January, Judith Butler published a response to the backlash against “gender ideology” in the New Statesman. In reply, the Cambridge Radical Feminist Network outlined the dangers of Butler’s ideas for feminism in Medium, reflecting its view that a “transgender agenda” is undermining feminist achievements. Low-level suspicion of gender theory has existed among radical feminists for some time, but as transgender rights have gained visibility the debate has coalesced into a more obvious division.

This debate highlights the evolution of a peculiar divide in feminist circles: a schism between gender theorists, such as Butler, and self-identified “gender-critical” feminists who reaffirm an immutable biological basis for the category of female. This debate has created an impasse: how do we determine who is an authority on feminist issues, and who is included and excluded in gender-focused policy matters?

The debate raises a number of other questions, too. Is gender theory really so dangerous for feminism? What do theorists such as Butler actually argue? Is there any merit in gender-critical claims? And can a common feminist ground be found?

Judith Butler is best known for her 1990 book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, which has become a mainstay of many women’s and gender-studies programs across the world. Gender Trouble arrived during the AIDS crisis, when a new language was emerging around the word “queer” to describe sexual practices and identities that rebelled against the discrete categories of “gay” and “lesbian.” Within this social context Gender Trouble has played a central role in precipitating a new way of thinking about the relationship between gender and sexuality in the academy.

First, though Butler identifies as a feminist she challenges the traditional feminist distinction made between sex (as biology) and gender (as culture). Feminists have long argued that biology does not determine capacity. As Simone de Beauvoir proclaimed in her 1949 book The Second Sex “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. Feminist sociologist Ann Oakley explicitly theorised this idea as the sex/gender distinction in her 1972 book, Sex, Gender and Society. Many feminists have since separated gender from sex as a strategy to emphasise that women’s lower hierarchical status in society is not innate.

But many feminists and gender theorists have always maintained that bracketing off supposedly biological sex as a fixed given is limiting, and that we need to look at how these categories are themselves socially constructed and maintained. For example, feminist biologist Myra Hird emphasises that only relatively recently have Western cultures understood biological sex as two discrete binary, complementary categories. That is, our current understandings of sex, which we take as a given, have a human-made history that is well understood by biologists.

In this vein, Butler suggests that the material can’t be separated from the social. For example, the pronouncement “It’s a boy!” on the birth of a child (or even a foetal scan) carries with it a weight of social expectations. Combinations of external genitalia, chromosomes and other bodily features are denoted as “sex” and cannot escape the social meaning that comes with the designation “boy” or “girl.” For this reason, many of these thinkers use the term sex/gender to denote that they are inseparable. From here, Butler argues, sex/gender becomes seemingly fixed or reified through repeated acts of gendered “performativity.”

This has often been misread as a suggestion that gender is a “performance,” but Butler is simply saying that gender only exists as a set of bodily acts and styles that appear natural but are actually informed by society. Importantly, Butler doesn’t think that anyone can easily transcend or escape the expectations of gender and sexuality when sex/gender is a key way through which people “read” one another. One cannot straightforwardly “choose,” because while gender and sexuality are expressed at a personal individual level, they are dictated and determined by a much larger social context. Butler argues that the gender binary system is violently enforced, and there are consequences of falling outside of gender expectations. Resisting gender norms is possible but also very dangerous. As Butler describes in Gender Trouble and in her New Statesman piece, her hope has always been to critique the systems of gender that limit possibilities for self-expression.

Because of this assertion that sex/gender is inescapable in contemporary societies, Butler is also a supporter of trans rights. For Butler, gender is a problem because of the constraints and expectations it puts on people. Her pragmatic position is that if there are more liveable ways for people to act and be “read,” such as transitioning to a gender different from your sex-assigned-at-birth, or self-identifying with a new gender category such as non-binary, then why not? This can only serve to expand the limits of selfhood and self-expression that the current gender order imposes. While she is radically deconstructionist of gender and biological sex, she is a supporter of trans politics and affirmation.

Some of Butler’s feminist detractors argue that in making the fairly radical argument that biological sex is not a fixed, binary thing, and also supporting trans rights, she must be claiming that gender is “innate” — that we have an internal, psychological sense of gender that we need to discover and reveal, which has nothing to do with biology. But Butler is actually suggesting we radically rethink what we understand as “natural.”

While Butler set out to critique the system of gender that sees bodies as locked into a rigid binary system, gender-critical feminists claim that she “is in flat earth territory when she argues that biology is socially constructed.” Gender-critical feminism developed out of radical feminism, a political movement that emerged in the 1960s and 70s. Radical feminists argue that women constitute a female class (sisterhood) and are oppressed by a male class (patriarchy). Gender-critical feminists are particularly focused on the biological as central to defining women as an oppressed class. The biological should not be subject to sociological and cultural inquiry, they argue, because doing so undermines the struggle for women’s equality.

Some gender-critical feminists also call themselves “gender abolitionists,” suggesting a surface commonality with Butler and feminist sociologists such as Barbara Risman, and trans studies theorists such as Kate Bornstein, who also call for the abolition of gender. The most explicit statement Butler has made on the matter was in Gender Trouble, when she suggested a “new sort of feminist politics… that will take the variable construction of identity as… a political goal.” But while radical feminists stop at the aim of abolishing gendered meanings attached to biology (the categories of which they see as fixed), these other gender theorists argue that it is the underpinning biological binary itself that keeps the myth of two gender categories going. That is, sex roles cannot be abolished while we still have the idea of two biological sexes.

Gender-critical feminists’ emphasis on biology has come to a head around discussions of transgender identity. Time magazine declared the “transgender tipping point” in 2014, but a backlash has come from conservative groups and from feminist groups alike, particularly in the United States and Britain. While some transgender scholars have in fact questioned Butler’s overly deconstructionist approach, gender-critical feminists see Butler’s work as actively challenging simple definitions of “sisterhood.”

Representative of this criticism is the recent use of the term “adult human female” to describe cis-women — women whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth — to draw a distinction between those assigned female at birth (who gender-critical feminists claim should be the only subjects of feminism) and those who come to identify as women later in life. The argument is that if we challenge the idea of biological sex too much, we lose the capacity to challenge sexism. But knowing that something is a social construct (like “race”) doesn’t mean we don’t know it has very real social impacts.

Prior to radical feminists using the term “gender critical”, feminists who insisted on the biological basis of sex were (and still are) often described as “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists,” or “TERFs.” In response, some radical feminists described themselves as “trans critical,” which eventually morphed into “gender critical.” The debate and the new language of gender-critical feminism herald a conceptual and semantic mess. This has serious policy implications, given that gender-critical feminists claim that their cause is undermined by the gains of transgender rights activists, and that the two groups’ interests are mutually exclusive.

Ultimately, feminists of all conceptual persuasions agree that gender is political and deserves political action. The issue that remains is how to theorise gender — whether we follow Butler, gender-critical radical feminism, or new trans feminist approaches.

Conceptual impasses aside, it should be of great concern that some of the ideas espoused by radical/gender-critical feminists are closely allied with ideas being promoted by the conservative right. While both see Butler and trans activists as a threat, the conservative right is more broadly trying to wind back gains made by feminists and reinstate “family values.” Why would gender-critical feminists ally themselves, however inadvertently, with those who actively, openly and sometimes violently reinforce gender roles, rather than those who wish to interrogate the sex/gender system?

A more generous reading of both the utopian and the pragmatic politics of many gender theorists could reduce the intensity of the reaction among gender-critical feminists. While gender theorists undermine some of the easier conceptual givens of some earlier feminisms, such as the reality of biological sex, they are not denying that we live in a world where binary ideas shape opportunities and expectations. In the words of original radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, “we are talking about radical change. And though indeed it cannot come all at once, radical goals must be kept in sight at all times.”

Lived experiences of gender are much messier than any neat theoretical divisions suggest. Rather than hyper-focusing on trans activists as a problem for feminism, feminists could unite pragmatically on specific issues, such as violence, reproductive rights and harassment, around a common ethos such as the reduction of harm. This would not require complete consensus but would focus on real threats to liberation rather than imagined, abstract ones. •

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Appiah, a philosopher, novelist and public intellectual, is a critic of the identities of race, religion, class, nation and culture that are playing such a prominent role in contemporary political conflicts. He wants to persuade us that much of our thinking about their importance is unhelpful or just plain wrong, and that we would be better off to think in new ways. He has put together his criticisms in a book that is a model of philosophical writing — challenging, well argued and timely, and a pleasure to read.

Appiah accepts that identities of some kind are inevitable. We have an irrepressible tendency to clump together in groups and divide the world into “us” and “them.” Identities encourage cooperation and give people a place in the world, but they also encourage falsehoods and self-deception. When we divide people into groups we often assume commonalities that don’t exist. We develop expectations based on those assumptions and we force people into moulds we construct for them. Appiah points to traditional beliefs about gender differences as obvious examples of essentialist thinking about identity, and he credits feminists for developing the critical tools he uses to reveal the falsehoods in the identities he examines.

The problem with appeals to “Western civilisation” is the implication that something essential separates the West from the rest. According to a common narrative, the West is the unique inheritor of the ideas and ideals of classical Greece, and Westerners are imbued with the qualities that derive from this heritage. Those qualities only truly exist, the argument goes, in Western countries.

This narrative ignores the role that the Muslim world played in preserving, developing and transmitting classical ideas. It exaggerates the differences between cultures and the commonalities among those deemed to be Western. It supposes that culture is indivisible and unshareable. It confuses culture as a pursuit of high-minded people with the culture embodied in everyday life. “How have we managed to persuade ourselves that we’re the rightful inheritors of Plato, Aquinas and Kant when the stuff of our existence is more Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian?” Appiah asks. The notion of Western civilisation is based on lies and confusions, he believes, and functions mainly as a weapon of cultural warfare. This is why he thinks that it ought to be jettisoned.

Appiah comes to the same conclusion about race and class. Race, as we know it, was the product of nineteenth-century pseudoscience that used biological criteria to locate people in a racial hierarchy. Although biologists long ago rejected race as a meaningful category, ideas about racial differences linger on not only in the ideology of the far right but also in the thinking of many ordinary people. Appiah compares the survival of racial identities with a model made from wax that has melted away to leave an empty shell. The space left by the refutation of racial pseudoscience has been filled with prejudices constructed out of our imaginings.

Class, Appiah believes, is also a pernicious category based on false assumptions. He would prefer a society without class hierarchies, but he doesn’t believe that it will ever exist. A liberal society is supposed to offer citizens equal opportunities, but wealthy people with connections are often able to ensure that their children get privileges they haven’t earned. A society more equal in wealth and power would eliminate some of the worst effects of class hierarchies. But class differences are not simply a matter of differences of wealth or power, Appiah points out; they can also be based on education or profession, and they are marked by ways of behaving and speaking that distinguish those who regard themselves as upper class from those of “lower” orders. A more equal society would allow people with talent to rise to the top regardless of their background, but it would not prevent them from looking down on “losers.”

In an ideal society, identities based on race and class would not exist. Individuals would be valued for their unique qualities. People would not regard themselves as superior or special because of being Western, Asian or African. But Appiah has a more favourable view of identities based on religion and nation, though he argues that they too are infected by false assumptions. The most serious mistake made about religious identities is to assume that a religion is defined by articles of faith or the teachings of a religious text. A religion, Appiah points out, is also a practice, a community and a tradition, and people can belong to a religious group without agreeing on a doctrine. Those who insist that their texts are the word of God ignore the fact that what counts as their religious canon is the result of a selection. They ignore the fact that these texts are often ambiguous and are always subject to interpretation. “To be a scriptural adept,” writes Appiah, “is to know which passages to read into and which to read past.”

The idea of a nation as a group of people who believe that they share a common ancestry and care about this supposed commonality is another legacy of the nineteenth century. Appiah reminds us of the problems caused by national identities. The question of who belongs to the nation and who doesn’t can lead to conflict, exclusion and even genocide. Like many critics of nationalism, Appiah insists that nations are not natural social kinds. They are constructed — in some cases out of groups that have nothing much in common. He presents Singapore as a reasonably successful example of how a people can be made out of groups with different histories, cultures and languages. National identities, as Appiah points out, pose a serious challenge to liberal states. But he does not criticise people for having them. He is not among those who think that they should not exist.

There is a tension in Appiah’s position on religion and nation. He is a liberal philosopher, cosmopolitan in outlook and an adherent of the idea of individual autonomy promoted by John Stuart Mill. Mill thinks that the worst enemy of individual freedom is the social pressure to conform. Identities of religion and nation, as well as class, race and culture, exert this pressure and Appiah believes that they also encourage irrational and harmful beliefs. Why then should any of them be tolerated in a rational liberal world order?

Appiah’s answer comes out of his own background and experiences. His mother came from an English family that could trace itself back to the Normans. His father was Asante, a patriot who wanted to liberate Ghana from colonial rule. He grew up in Ghana but was educated in England, and as an intellectual he has no reason to be bound to any country of origin. But he values the identities that connect him with his ancestry. This is evident in his account of his participation in an Asante ceremony to honour his father’s memory — a practice, he says, that was embedded within a spirit of community and fellowship.

This points to one of the great attractions of Appiah’s book: the stories he tells about people like him who exist between identities. The most remarkable is Amo Afer, an African boy brought to Europe in the mid eighteenth century. His ducal patron gave him a good education and he went on to earn a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Wittenberg. After a distinguished career of writing and teaching, he returned to the Gold Coast village of his birth, where he acquired the reputation of a soothsayer.

These stories are the best expression of Appiah’s philosophy. They show that identities can have value but that they should not prevent individuals from adopting and adapting the ideas of others. They should be worn lightly and critically. •

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Which moral assumptions and practices must people share if they are to live together peacefully in the countries and cities that the globalising world is creating? What makes social order in these cosmopolitan environments break down, and what can be done to restore it? These are the difficult questions Michael Ignatieff poses in The Ordinary Virtues.

Ignatieff, now the rector and president of the Central European University in Budapest, has had a distinguished career as an author, academic and Canadian politician. His book is the result of a project sponsored by the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs to discover the ethics ordinary people use when they confront conflict, corruption and tragedy, and the challenge of living together in a diverse society.

Ignatieff and his team left the halls of academe and the privileged enclave of mid-town Manhattan to travel into the communities where most people live.

Ordinary people, as Ignatieff defines them, are those who are not moral philosophers or human rights activists. They include people who have benefited from globalisation but also the less privileged. Ignatieff and his team visited suburbs of New York and Los Angeles where people are confronted in their daily lives with the problem of getting along with others of different races, religions and ethnic backgrounds. They went to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and to Bosnian cities devastated by war and ethnic cleansing. They talked to people who were trying to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, to black South Africans frustrated by the corruption of their government and persisting inequality and to people in Myanmar about the crisis in Rakhine state.

Is there a universal morality evident in the way that people respond to the ethical issues that affect their lives? He found that “human rights talk,” the lingua franca of Western governments and cosmopolitan elites, was not to be heard in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, among the people displaced from Fukushima or even among the poor in New York and Los Angeles. Nor did these people appeal to a cosmopolitan morality of the kind advocated by some philosophers. Their ethics is not expressed in universalising propositions: it is a practice learned by example and experience. It is situational, responding to the people they encounter and the complexity of their circumstances. It is biased in favour of their family, friends, neighbourhood and community. Not for them a morality that gives them duties to all of humankind. But it is also a morality capable of finding common ground with strangers and outsiders. The people Ignatieff encountered practised what he calls “ordinary virtues”: tolerance, trust, honesty, respect, resilience and hope.

In Jackson Heights, part of the New York borough of Queens that is home to African Americans, Jews, Hondurans, Dominicans, Nepalese, Koreans and many other groups, tolerance is a workaday social practice. Almost half were born in another country and most families speak a language other than English, yet people have found a way to live together, maintaining their own communities and separate private lives but sharing public space and institutions.

In areas of Los Angeles that were once riven by race riots, trust between people of different ethnic and racial groups can flourish because of reforms to the police department and the work of community groups and political alliances. In the villages affected by the Fukushima disaster in Japan, Ignatieff finds resilience and hope among survivors who are not only rebuilding their own lives but also helping others to do so.

The ordinary virtues cannot thrive if political conditions don’t favour them. Ignatieff stresses the fragility of the unspoken consensus that makes it possible for people to get along. The success of cultural diversity in global cities depends, he says, on whether they deliver “every day, a certain rough justice: jobs that don’t discriminate, employers who pay what they owe, landlords who keep their places up, police who don’t pick on the undocumented, courts who rule fairly.” Success also depends on all people having an opportunity to better their position and on politicians who avoid stirring up animosity for the sake of political gain.

In some of the places Ignatieff’s team visited, conflict, bad government and crimes of the past threaten the survival or even the possibility of ordinary virtues. In Bosnia, where the divisions caused by war and genocide overshadow daily life, he concludes that hope for the revival of ordinary virtues depends on a slow process of reconciliation that could take generations. In the Rio de Janeiro favela of Santa Marta he found the ordinary virtues prospering as a result of government programs to improve policing and to drive out drug gangs. But this improvement hinges on continued expenditure and an honest police force, and is put at risk by the corruption that infects Brazilian politics.

In Myanmar, the big question for citizens is not how people should treat each other but who counts as belonging in the country. A politics that builds national unity by treating marginal people such as the Rohingya as dangerous interlopers is not conducive to the practice of ordinary virtues. In South Africa, where the promise of liberation and reconciliation has been replaced by discontent among young black people about their prospects, the peaceful settlement that ended apartheid is coming under question. Persistent poverty is another challenge to the practice of the ordinary virtues.

All of this is reasonable, indeed rather obvious. A more thorough investigation would dig deeper into the causes of hatred and conflict and the conditions required for peaceful and cooperative co-existence. But Ignatieff’s aim is not to engage in sociological research. Nor does he present a philosophical exegesis on the virtues, or even a complete list of what they are. His main purpose is to defend three claims. The first is that global morality consists of ordinary virtues rather than the morality enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights or defended by the non-government organisations that preach reconciliation and protest about violations of human rights. The second claim is that the practice of ordinary virtue works best in a society where people are able to maintain their separate communities — that living apart is what makes living together possible. The third claim is that liberal societies provide the best environment for ordinary virtues to flourish.

Ignatieff’s first claim is backed up by his conversations with ordinary people. He noted that all those he talked to, whatever their class or race, assumed that they had the right to be heard. They took themselves to be equal contributors to a moral discourse in which others, including outsiders, were participants. They had imbibed the idea of human equality that is basic to human rights. But the morality they actually operated with made no appeal to rights or any other moral doctrine.

This is not surprising, but it does not show that human rights are irrelevant to the lives of ordinary people. The morality that people use depends on context. The language of rights, as the philosopher Joel Feinberg points out, is what people use when they want others to know that they and their interests deserve respect. It is the uncompromising language people are likely to employ when they confront government officials or protest against oppression and exploitation.

This use of moral language is evident, in fact, when Ignatieff tells of the struggle of a woman from a favela to get proper compensation from the government that destroyed her home. She demanded that her rights as a citizen be recognised. But the language of rights is not so appropriate when people are working out how to cooperate with others, when they are negotiating an agreement, thinking about their family obligations or wondering whether they should trust someone.

Ignatieff thinks that the fact that the ethics of ordinary people centres on their own lives, their families and communities supports the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s view of morality. Hume argued that morality is driven by our emotions and that it is natural for people to focus their moral concern on their near and dear. We are not inclined to accept duties to others just because they are human. Ignatieff agrees. Virtue, he says, is local. This is why appeals to human rights don’t persuade most citizens that they ought to allow more asylum seekers into their country. Canada, he says, has had the most success in persuading citizens to accept refugees because its program appeals to the hospitality and generosity of Canadian families and depends on their willingness to sponsor individual refugees.

What this demonstrates is not the failure of a universalist ethics but the role that emotions like sympathy play in our moral life. Hume argues that our emotional responses to the plight of strangers can be the basis for an impartial view of justice. Indeed, the human rights movement was born of people’s horrified responses to Nazi genocide.

But Ignatieff is probably right to say that what humans share, above all, is not a consensus about moral principles but a desire for a moral order that allows them to think of their lives as meaningful. Yet a secure moral order and a meaningful life may require a global consensus about what should be done to solve common problems like climate change. There is a need for a universal morality.

Ignatieff’s doubts about human rights as a universal ethics also stem from his belief that human rights institutions often do more harm than good. He is critical of the agencies that tried in vain to reconcile the Bosnians and Serbs. “Why did they ever think it was their business?” he asks. Only time, generational change and the slow work of local civil society organisations have a chance of creating tolerance and trust in Bosnia. He is also critical of human rights organisations that condemn Aung San Suu Kyi without understanding the complexities of Myanmar politics. He is right, of course, to insist that organisations should take context into account. But when people are murdered or driven from their homes in large numbers how can external organisations refrain from condemnation?

The second conclusion Ignatieff draws from his exploration of ordinary virtues is that the “moral operating system” of ordinary people works best when they are able to maintain their separate communities. This follows from the central position that family and community plays in their lives. There are, however, reasons for thinking that separation can have bad effects. Feminists point out that women in traditional ethnic communities can be restricted and coerced in ways that are contrary to basic liberal values. Separation is also not a good thing when it takes the form of racial segregation. The separation of black and white communities in the United States is an unfortunate legacy of a history that perpetuates racism and disadvantage. The separate lives and communities of black and white South Africans are a sign that the bad effects of apartheid have not been overcome.

Separation may also not be a good way of perpetuating the ordinary virtues in the long term. If the conditions that encourage ordinary virtues among diverse people are so fragile, then it might be better to encourage more integration. Sometimes Ignatieff seems to agree. He sees hope for the future in the way that young people in Bosnia cross the ethnic boundaries their elders constructed and in the unselfconscious embrace of a mixed-race couple in South Africa. His point, however, is that people have to be able to choose. Governments should not force them to integrate.

Ignatieff’s third conclusion is that a liberal society provides the best political framework for the exercise of the ordinary virtues. When the law applies equally to everyone, people can find a predictable order for their lives. They don’t have to barricade themselves in their ethnic or religious community for the sake of security. When they enjoy freedom and the rights of citizenship, they can live according to their idea of the good. All liberal societies have their faults; none is entirely free of corruption, political favouritism or powerful groups that pursue their own interests at the expense of the general good. But a liberal society, at least, has means of uncovering and dealing with problems and conflicts that prevent the ordinary virtues from flourishing.

Once again, it is difficult to disagree. But doubts about the capacity of liberalism or the will of liberals to deal with critical problems emerge from some of Ignatieff’s encounters. Some of these problems arise from the fact that the freedom of commerce and choice that liberal societies allow their citizens is not always conducive to the development and persistence of ordinary virtues. Ignatieff notes that the children of Queens are not educated in the same schools: white people send their children to private schools; black and ethnic children go to state schools. Schools segregated along class or racial lines don’t only perpetuate privilege, they also get in the way of what Ignatieff sometimes presents as hope for the future: everyday contacts between people of different groups, especially between the young.

The system of free trade championed by liberals is also something that can turn against the ordinary virtues. Ignatieff notes that peace in Los Angeles depends on the existence of jobs and industries that are threatened by competition from Asia. Any economic downturn, major technological change or loss of industry to competitors could lead to a return of racial conflict or animosity towards new immigrants.

In South Africa, he encounters young black citizens whose opportunities are hampered by the hold that white people retain over industry and ownership of most of the land. Some favour a reform that would return some of the land to black people. In response, Ignatieff raises the spectre of what happened in Zimbabwe when Mugabe drove white owners from their farms. These young people, he suggests, expect too much from liberation. Liberal freedom is not egalitarian, he says, and black South Africans ought to be content with the fact that most people are now better off. “Progress is progress,” he writes. “It’s just not redemption or reconciliation. But it is something.”

In my view this makes too light of the problem that persistent inequality poses for liberal societies. Inequality divides people, and when it is severe it is almost inevitably accompanied by poor prospects and greater vulnerability to crime for those on the bottom, and illegitimate uses of police and bureaucratic power. Severe inequality can undermine a common concern for the public good that is necessary for the health of liberal society.

It is not beyond the powers of a liberal society to do something about inequality. Nor is it contrary to liberal philosophy. One of the virtues of Ignatieff’s book is that it makes us think about the political prerequisites of a society that encourages the people of a multicultural or multiracial society to tolerate and trust each other, to live in peace with hope for the future.

Another virtue of the book is its ethical fieldwork. Ignatieff and his team left the halls of academe and the privileged enclave of midtown Manhattan to travel into the communities where most people live. Their encounters may sometimes have been superficial, their sample of opinions limited. Where they went was determined by where their organisation had contacts. But their findings are significant, above all, for revealing the importance to most people of living an ethical life. ●

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Martha Nussbaum wants to challenge these assumptions. As a philosopher who has written prolifically about the emotions, she thinks that anger is one we ought to avoid. We should also avoid rituals of accusation, apology and forgiveness, along with retributive punishment and other manifestations of vindictiveness and the desire to humiliate. Rather than looking back in anger, we ought to cultivate a forward-looking concern for others. Rather than revenging a wrong, we should try to do something about the conditions that cause wrongdoing.

Nussbaum uses the third part of Aeschylus’s Greek tragedy the Oresteia as her inspiration. In The Eumenides, the Furies transform from savage inflictors of angry revenge into upholders of the law in the city of Athens. She stresses that this conversion not only made punishment subject to law, but also transformed the backward-looking desire for payback into a forward-looking concern for the wellbeing of the city’s people.

Nussbaum presents her case against anger as a matter of common sense. As a motivator of action, she argues, anger has features that ought to worry any rational, moral person. Intrinsic to anger, she believes, is the desire for payback. But this reaction is irrational. The black teenager can’t be returned to life; Whitlam couldn’t be restored to office.

When anger motivates an attack on those who insult or demean us, it has a point. We can hurt or deter the people who fail to treat us in a manner we think we deserve. But the preoccupation with status that triggers this anger, says Nussbaum, is morally questionable. A person who has a proper understanding of what is important in life should not be troubled by such trivialities. She follows the Stoics in her approach to the slights that we experience in everyday life. We should avoid an angry response and train ourselves to rise above them.

But there is an important difference between resentment triggered by the failure of others to recognise your status in a social interaction and anger caused by the failure of others to treat you as an equal citizen or as a holder of human rights. The anger of the black citizens of Ferguson seems justified because they had good reason to think that they were not being properly respected as citizens.

Nussbaum allows that anger can sometimes serve a useful purpose. Anger at the way they are treated can alert people to the injustice of their society. Anger can express our opposition to wrongdoing. Nussbaum approves of what she calls “transition-anger” – the indignation of people in the face of an injustice. But she calls it transitional because she thinks that this indignation should quickly transform itself into a forward-looking determination to prevent future injustice, to improve the lives of those who have been harmed, and to achieve reconciliation with wrongdoers.

What form should this transition take? One obvious answer is that we should move from anger to forgiveness. But Nussbaum thinks that our conception of forgiveness is too much steeped in the confessional rituals of Christianity. To get forgiveness from God, we have to grovel – to confess our sins and accept our status as abject sinners. Offering our forgiveness to wrongdoers on condition of repentance, she thinks, can be just another means of humiliating them and affirming our superior status. Even unconditional forgiveness is suspect because it so easily functions as a way of demonstrating the forgiver’s superiority.

A proper transition overcomes the desire for payback and affirmation of status. What form it should take depends on the nature of the wrong and the relationship between wrongdoers and victims. Nussbaum thinks that the biblical story of the prodigal son provides a model for parental behaviour. Parents ought to respond with love to the wrongdoing of their children. The misdemeanours of a spouse or a friend are reason for grief. Anger caused by a betrayal of trust should quickly transform itself into a concentration on recovery, she thinks – saving the relationship if possible; if not, moving on without it.

Wrongs that really do require punishment should be turned over to the law, as in the story of the Eumenides. But Nussbaum takes issue with punishment as retribution, objecting even to the word “punishment.” The desire to give wrongdoers what they deserve is, in her view, just another manifestation of payback. Punishing criminals does not undo their crimes. As an expression of community anger, punishment is a morally dubious assertion of superiority to the “criminal classes.” Nussbaum favours a forward-looking utilitarian approach to punishment that concentrates on reforming criminals, deterring crime and, above all, implementing social programs that tackle crime’s causes.

Punishment can be cruel, humiliating and vindictive. But Nussbaum’s forward-looking focus loses touch with what most people regard as essential to a system of law: that people ought to be held accountable for what they do, and that victims, their families and other members of society are owed a response that answers to the wrong that was done. Punishment can’t undo a wrong, but it can demonstrate respect for individuals by acknowledging the harm done to them as victims of crimes and by holding wrongdoers responsible for their actions. Substituting general social ends for aconcern with what a perpetrator deserves does not give victims their due.

This does not mean that our criminal justice system is fine as it is. Nussbaum’s criticisms of the way we handle crime are mostly justified. She is right to point out that the desire to punish often gets in the way of tackling the social problems that encourage crime. She is also right to point out that imprisonment is not a good way of reforming criminals and to suggest that we should look for other ways of dealing with offenders – particularly juveniles.

By taming the Eumenides, according to Aeschylus’s play, revengeful anger was transformed into the dispassionate rule of law. An obvious objection to a transition from anger that depends on the rule of law is that it gives no help to those who are oppressed by the laws of their society. What else can they do but express their justified anger by hitting back at their oppressors? Nussbaum counters this objection by presenting three exemplars of transition-anger in the face of oppression.

Martin Luther King Jr began his famous “I Have a Dream” speech by referring to the injustices faced by blacks in American society – good reasons for anger. But he quickly went on to call for a struggle that would bring black and white Americans together to work for a society in which they could live in harmony as equal citizens. Nelson Mandela was willing not only to negotiate with whites but also to befriend them. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was conducted in his spirit of amnesty; it emphasised truth-telling but didn’t inflict punishment or require that offenders apologise or show remorse in order to be forgiven. Gandhi’s practice of non-violent civil disobedience was an effective means of resisting oppression with compassion for oppressors rather than anger.

Nussbaum doesn’t suppose that non-violent resistance will always be effective. Self-defence is legitimate and sometimes violent acts are the only available means. But she thinks that King, Mandela and Gandhi did not just show that non-violence and acts aimed at reconciliation are sometimes effective. They also showed that it is possible to replace anger with compassion, sympathy and a desire for reconciliation – even in the face of oppression.

There is a lot of good sense in Nussbaum’s position. By turning away from the anger she must have felt towards the man who killed her child, Rosie Batty made her tragedy into a campaign against domestic violence. Angry responses to discrimination tend to create an angry backlash and exacerbate social divisions that make things worse for victims as well as other members of society. Martin Luther King Jr understood that. So do many of the people in the Black Lives Matter movement.

One of its leaders, Tory Russell, expressed a forward-looking perspective when he toured Australia last year. We need to “build a movement that encompasses not only economics but equality and equity inside the system,” he said, “and also be allowed to have some reconciliation around what happened in the past.”

But Nussbaum’s prescription is for those who have the means to transform their anger into a positive program of recovery from injury or a campaign to overcome injustice. People who have few opportunities for improving their lives, who are badly paid or unemployed, who suffer systematic discrimination or poverty, and who are ignored by politicians however they vote often have nothing but their anger as leverage to bring about change.

Those who want to eliminate anger as a force in their society need to deal with economic and political factors that trap people in desperate lives. Overcoming anger cannot be simply a project for individuals. Although Nussbaum doesn’t give this matter sufficient thought, her book as a whole is a timely challenge to those who think that anger is the appropriate reaction to law-breakers, terrorists and people who don’t share their political views. She convincingly argues that a better society and better politics depend on replacing anger with more constructive responses. •

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I know he surfs at that spot, though, so it almost certainly was Australia’s most famous philosopher checking the swell. My friend and I were returning from taking a look and had concluded that the waves were too small and messy. Perhaps we should have shared that information, but then we might have denied him a certain pleasure; a few minutes spent gazing at the ocean can never be counted as wasted time.

Seeing Peter Singer at the beach reminded me of an event at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre a couple of years ago. His presentation that day, and particularly his answer to a question from a woman named Rachel, has nagged at me ever since.

It was April 2015, and Singer was there to fire a Midday Shot at a capacity crowd. The topic was effective altruism, or “The Most Good You Can Do,” which is the subject (and title) of his most recent book. He paced slowly around the stage, intoning in a slightly gravelly voice, his flat Australian accent tinged with an American inflection after seventeen years at Princeton. There was nothing slick or showy about his presentation: with its clunky PowerPoint slides, it was less a philosophical excursion than a workmanlike attempt to convince and convert.

Singer wants us to help make the world a better place. This is the great intergenerational, utilitarian project that he compared in a previous book, The Life You Can Save (2009),to a climb towards the summit of an immense mountain. He believes we have already broken through the clouds and are in sight of the peak. “There are sections of the route that will challenge our abilities to the utmost,” he writes, “but we can see that the ascent is feasible.” In this belief he echoes the great liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, who wrote in Utilitarianism (1863) that “no one whose opinion deserves a moment’s consideration can doubt that most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits.”

There is data to support this optimism. In his keynote address to the 2013 Tasmanian Writers Festival, Singer quoted UNICEF’s calculation that 6.9 million children died in 2011 before the age of five, generally from one of six poverty-related diseases, including diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia. It’s a shocking figure – thirteen children dying every minute – yet it is also relatively good news. In 1990, the annual number of under-five deaths was twelve million. By 2015, according to UNICEF, the number had fallen further, to 5.9 million worldwide (or eleven children per minute). In the space of fifteen years, infant deaths halved, even as the planet became home to an extra two billion people.

Utilitarianism is often seen as a commitment to maximising happiness, or creating the greatest good for the greatest number of people, but Singer generally formulates it the other way around, as minimising misery. He believes that we do the most good, and make the world a better place, by reducing the avoidable suffering and premature deaths of humans and animals.

At the Wheeler Centre, he used Toby Ord, the Australian founder of the organisation Giving What We Can, as an exemplar. When he was a philosophy student at Oxford University, Ord survived comfortably on an annual scholarship of £14,000 (about A$22,000); having completed his PhD, he saw no reason to live more extravagantly, even though he would soon enjoy a higher income. Using a standard academic salary as his guide, he estimated that if he donated two-thirds of his lifetime earnings to carefully chosen charities, then he could, in effect, save the lives of 1000 children. It seemed a small sacrifice to secure such a significant good, so Ord committed himself to living on no more than £18,000 per year (about A$28,000) and to giving away everything he earned above this amount.

Ord was nudged towards effective altruism by reading “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” an essay Singer wrote, aged twenty-five, in 1971 (recently republished with a new foreword by Bill and Melinda Gates). There, with the refugee crisis accompanying the bloody birth of Bangladesh as a backdrop, Singer argued that deaths in East Bengal from a lack of food, shelter and medical care were entirely preventable if we – human beings – only made the necessary decisions. He pointed out that the financial support Australia provided to millions of Bengali refugees at the time amounted “to less than one-twelfth of the cost of Sydney’s new opera house.” Today, Singer might mention that Australia’s annual contribution to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (around $72 million in 2016) is less than a quarter of the amount we spent preparing athletes for the Rio Olympics ($340 million).

Surviving comfortably: Toby Ord discussing effective giving at a forum in London in 2013 sponsored by Intelligence Squared and Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management. Deutsche Bank

Singer is never difficult to read. As he says in the introduction to a new collection of short essays (Ethics in the Real World: 86 Brief Essays on Things That Matter), he holds to the view that if something cannot be said clearly enough to be understood by people who have not studied philosophy then it is “probably not being thought clearly either.” He constructs arguments much like a brickie builds a wall, establishing a firm footing and then laying down a series of straightforward propositions that lock together to form a solid conclusion.

The foundation stone of that famous essay ­– and indeed of much of his subsequent writing – is the unarguable but easily neglected belief that “suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.” The next layer seems equally straightforward: “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” Accepting premise A – that avoidable suffering and death are bad – makes it hard to dispute premise B – that we should help to alleviate the suffering of others, at least when we can do so at minimal personal cost. Yet we might already be uneasily aware that Singer is leading us into ethical territory that we would rather avoid.

In the famine essay, Singer brings these implications home with the analogy of a drowning child that has become his trademark. “If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out,” he writes. “This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.” We will surely agree, unless we are nihilists and hold that the death of a child is of no importance, in which case we are also rejecting Singer’s primary claim that avoidable suffering and premature death are bad. Perhaps there could be an individual so self-absorbed as to prefer spotless clothes to saving a drowning child, but such a person would be universally condemned for failing in a most basic and shocking way at the task of being human.

In his example, importantly, Singer makes it easy for us to act: the pond is shallow and we don’t need to risk life or limb to save the child. Only relatively trivial possessions – an expensive pair of shoes, for example – could possibly be damaged. To fail to save a child in such circumstances would constitute a moral transgression of the highest order.

But Singer is leading us towards a much less comfortable version of premise B, which points to the larger truth that there is always a real child drowning somewhere in a metaphorical shallow pond. Granted, we don’t see the child in a literal sense; she is not drowning in a suburban park as we walk past. But we know that she exists, that she is in trouble and that we are in a position to help her. In fact, thanks to UNICEF’s figures, we know that eleven such children “drown” every minute. Many of us know, too, that we could save at least one of those children with minimal personal discomfort, if only we shifted our priorities. If we fail to do so, it is because we are willing, more often than not, to rank her life as less important than something else, like a new pair of shoes. In shifting our attention, we evade our moral responsibility. We fail to live as human beings should rightly live.

Perhaps you don’t accept Singer’s implicit suggestion that postponing or cancelling construction of the Sydney Opera House would have been an “insignificant” price to pay for helping more refugees in East Bengal in 1971. You might also reject my implication that we are funding Olympic athletes at the expense of the UNHCR. Respectable arguments can be made about the wider benefits of beautiful architecture and success at international sporting events. Yet it’s hard to disagree with the proposition that affluent citizens of a country like Australia could do a great deal more to reduce the suffering of unseen-but-known refugees around the world.

Spread across those of us on comfortable incomes, the cost of doubling, tripling or quadrupling Australia’s contribution to the world’s chronically underfunded refugee agency would be modest. If the top fifth of Australia’s roughly nine million households gave $200 each, this would raise $360 million, or five times Australia’s current annual contribution. It is worth noting that households in this top quintile receive more than 40 per cent of Australian income and own more than 60 per cent of the nation’s wealth. The sacrifice required to achieve a fivefold increase in Australia’s contribution to the UNHCR can be compared to the wealthiest Australian households postponing the purchase of one pair of new shoes for a season or two.

Peter Singer is not the first to weigh the difference between our immediate, mundane concerns and the life-and-death interests of distant others. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith asked readers to contemplate “a humane man in Europe” who learns that “the great and populous empire of China was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake.” The man might be momentarily saddened by the event, but would then “go about his business or his pleasure… with the same ease and tranquillity as if no such accident had happened.” China’s catastrophe would not disturb our cultivated European’s nightly slumber in the slightest, whereas the gentleman would surely not sleep a wink if he went to his rest in the certain knowledge that his little finger were to be chopped off first thing in the morning. As Smith observes, “the destruction of that immense multitude seems clearly to be of less concern to him than this paltry misfortune of his own.”

Impartial spectator: the political economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790). Detail from a portrait by an unknown artist. Scottish National Gallery/Wikimedia

Smith then outlines a scenario in which our cultivated European is offered the option of avoiding the loss of his pinkie by sacrificing the lives of one hundred million fellow human beings in China. “Human nature jumps back with horror at the thought,” he comments. Our “sordid” and “selfish” feelings are overcome, Smith concludes, when “reason, principle, conscience” remind us that “we are only one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other.” Self-love is trumped by a more powerful affection, “the love of what is honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our own characters.”

Mill says something similar in Utilitarianism: human dignity finds expression in a noble character that gives no greater weight to one’s happiness than to the happiness of others. For Mill, the “ideal perfection of utilitarian morality” is the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Singer reaches the same conclusion. In How Are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest (1993), he writes that the golden rule “is as close to an objective basis for ethics as can be found.” Singer makes no recourse to religion. Nor does he draw on notions like virtue, dignity and nobility of character. Reason enables us to discover the golden rule, he says, because it tells us that “our own sufferings and pleasures are very like the sufferings and pleasures of others” and therefore “there is no reason to give less consideration to the suffering of others, just because they are ‘other’.” With this understanding, we transcend subjectivism and adopt “the point of view of the universe” (a phrase Singer borrows from another nineteenth-century utilitarian, Henry Sidgwick). Smith and Mill express a similar idea when they talk about adopting the perspective of an “impartial spectator.”

It is hard to fault Singer on these arguments. Not everyone will accept his expansion of our circle of concern to the suffering of animals, but if we sidestep that issue by confining our thinking to human affairs, then the logic appears sound. I know it is painful and debilitating to go without food for a significant period; reason tells me that other people experience an equally unpleasant sensation and equally damaging physiological effects when they are starved of nutrition. Since I have no grounds to think that my hunger matters more to me than their hunger matters to them, reason tells me that I should do what I can to alleviate the hunger of others, at least to the point at which my efforts to help would cause significant loss to myself or my loved ones.

Our tendency to put self-interest and personal wants ahead of the needs of others may have sound evolutionary roots. But, as Singer writes, reason takes us beyond the evolutionary need to “survive and reproduce” and leads us to conclusions that can be at odds with “our more basic desires.” We see this in the mundane example of what we put in our mouths: evolutionary biology encourages us to want things that were once scarce in the human diet but are now abundant, like sugar, salt and fat; reason tells us that we must control such appetites or suffer the long-term consequences.

The logic is deceptively, disturbingly simple. If we are to live by the ethic of the golden rule, then we must help refugees to the extent that we can afford to do so. We can choose to follow what Smith terms our sordid and selfish feelings – as most of us do, most of the time – but in refusing to go where reason leads, we can no longer claim that our behaviour is rational or that we are living ethical lives.

These steps in Singer’s argument establish the basis for altruism, for doing what we can to reduce the suffering of others. But his reasoning also requires that our altruism must be effective – or, as he put it on ABC TV’s Q&A shortly after I saw him in action at the Wheeler Centre, that we get “value for money” from our donations. When we buy a dishwasher, says Singer, we generally research its effectiveness compared to other models. He finds it strange that we rarely evaluate charitable gifts in the same manner. On Q&A, Singer said that if we made donations in this way then we would not give money to “train guide dogs to help the blind” in wealthy countries like Australia, which costs “tens of thousands of dollars,” when giving something like $100 to the Fred Hollows Foundation can avert a case of blindness caused by trachoma in the developing world. (Fellow panellist Amanda Vanstone, chair of Vision 2020 Australia, did not think the matter was so clear-cut.)

Sometimes such a calculation does appear straightforward. I wouldn’t find it hard to choose between helping the National Gallery of Victoria to acquire a new frock for its fashion collection and supporting the work of the Hamlin Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia. Does that mean that we shouldn’t spend any money on fashion museums until we have eradicated reproductive health problems around the globe? I can be dismissive of fashion, but a designer once stopped me in my tracks by reminding me that bodily adornment has been a characteristic human behaviour ever since humans came on the scene. So the study of fashion can tell us something important about ourselves as a species.

Like Singer, we may find it obscene that Jeff Koons’s work “Jim Beam – J.B. Turner Train”– a stainless steel train filled with bourbon – sold for US$33.8 million at Christie’s, but that doesn’t negate the fact that artistic creation is a distinctly human activity that enriches our lives. Are art and culture always less important than physical health and wellbeing? Would the world be a better place if Bach had devoted himself to curing leprosy instead of composing partitas? According to Singer’s logic, I should discourage my pianist son’s ambition to a professional life in music, since it is unlikely to be lucrative; instead, I should coax him towards a high-income financial career, so that, like Singer’s former student, Wall Street trader Matt Wage, he can give away a big share of his super-sized salary to reduce poverty.

By expressing the utilitarian standard in the negative – as reducing avoidable suffering rather than increasing possible happiness – Singer largely sidesteps these complications. If promoting happiness is not our concern, then we do not need to ask whether some ways of pursuing happiness are of greater value than others. Liberal societies like Australia tend to assume that there are as many valid ways of pursuing and achieving happiness as there are different individuals. We tend to make no distinction between the happiness that comes from riding a jet ski, the happiness that comes from contemplating a Joy Hester painting, or the happiness achieved by helping a fellow human being overcome adversity through a generous act. Hence, GDP per capita becomes the proxy for human wellbeing, because money enables each of us to pursue our happiness in our own way. Yet the question of what constitutes human happiness (or flourishing) is a central concern of moral philosophy that raises complicated questions about whether reducing suffering is always more worthwhile than facilitating greater individual agency, increasing joy, pursuing knowledge, enhancing intellectual stimulation or providing aesthetic pleasure.

For Singer, we just have to do the maths. If we do, then we will always donate to save lives before supporting the arts. We will give a donation that has a high probability of saving one life ahead of a donation that has a low probability of saving ten; but if the chance of saving ten lives is 20 per cent, then that will be the better investment. Evaluating ethical choices by numbers is confronting, but it also raises more complexities than Singer seems to acknowledge.

Which brings me back to Rachel’s question at the Wheeler Centre in April 2015. She began by gently chiding Singer for suggesting that preventable blindness from trachoma was a problem confined to the developing world; it is a sad truth that trachoma is endemic in Australia too, primarily among Indigenous communities. As a midwife who had worked in Central Australia as well as in Asia and Africa, she then asked Singer to reflect on what she called “the numbers game” – the fact that $100 spent on eye health in remote Aboriginal communities would do far less to reduce suffering in quantitative terms than $100 spent improving sight in a populous village in Tanzania.

In response, Singer argued that as citizens of a wealthy nation we should pressure our government to eradicate trachoma among Indigenous Australians, but that, because he is “strongly influenced by numbers,” he generally puts his charitable money where it could “help the largest number of people.” In other words, he would give to the Fred Hollows Foundation to cure blindness in poor countries in Africa before committing funds to Central Australia.

The specifics of this argument invite an obvious reply. Fred Hollows began his work in Australia: witnessing appalling eye health and pervasive trachoma disease in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory inspired his life-long and ultimately global crusade against curable blindness. The Fred Hollows Foundation continues that work in remote Indigenous communities today, and its advocacy was instrumental in securing funding for a government program to eradicate trachoma there by 2020. So donating to a pioneering charity that apparently helps only a small number of people at high cost may well be the catalyst for something larger, with important practical and political effects far beyond its immediate remedial impact. No mathematical calculation can tell us that in advance.

But there is a deeper issue at play here. As Australians whose wealth was secured in large part by the colonial expropriation of Indigenous lands, do we not owe a particular responsibility to those people whose lives are blighted by the enduring consequences of that act of dispossession? This question raises issues of affiliation, obligation and historical justice that Singer’s utilitarianism seems ill-equipped to address.

We can see similar concerns arising in relation to refugees. In September 2015, when the number of displaced people reaching the borders of the European Union had passed 100,000 per month, Singer outlined his views on the appropriate ethical response to asylum seekers in an opinion piece with the confident title “Escaping the Refugee Crisis.” He argued that it is time to reconsider the 1951 Refugee Convention, because it has given rise to the “new, often unscrupulous, and sometimes lethal industry of people smuggling.” It seems odd that an ethicist concerned with reducing unnecessary suffering should blame people smuggling on an international humanitarian treaty rather than on the equally modern phenomenon of militarised border controls that hinder safe passage, especially given that the business of people smuggling pre-dates the signing of the Convention.

Singer also asserted that “it has become difficult for tribunals and courts to determine who is a refugee, as defined by the Convention, and who is a well-coached migrant seeking a better life in a more affluent country.” While it contains some truth, this statement oversimplifies a complex reality. It suits governments to suggest that there is a neat distinction between economic migrants and “legitimate” refugees, but the world is messier than that. Consider the case of people displaced by climate change, a group likely to grow rapidly in coming decades. If its farm is inundated by seawater or taken over by desert, a family will be unable to sustain itself if it stays put. Yet if family members pass through the rich man’s gate without an invitation they will be labelled as economic migrants “seeking a better life in a more affluent country.” (The 1951 Convention, of course, makes no provision for environmental refugees.)

In keeping with his search for effective forms of altruism, Singer argued that it makes economic sense to hold refugees in already overwhelmed countries of first asylum like Pakistan, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, rather than allow them to make their way to the West. Why? Because (doing the maths again) it costs four times as much to support a refugee in a rich country than a poor one. While this might be accurate – and while there is obviously a strong case for increasing funding for the work of the UNHCR in countries of first asylum – Singer overreaches when he claims that “people smuggling – and deaths in transit – would be eliminated” if displaced people “were sent to a refugee camp, safe from persecution, and supported financially by aid from affluent countries.”

Anyone who has read Ben Rawlence’s magisterial City of Thorns (2016), a book chronicling the lives of nine people in the world’s largest refugee camp, at Dadaab in Kenya, will understand, as Singer surely must, that food, shelter and safety from persecution are not sufficient for a fulfilled human life. They don’t compensate for the loss of a sense of purpose, personal agency and future possibility. Even if people are well-fed, protected from the elements and safe from violence, they may still prefer a risky onward journey to the futility of indefinite waiting. Hope is more likely to be found in individual initiative and action than in putting your trust in governments, bureaucracies and aid agencies, even when they are well-intentioned.

The final step in Singer’s argument about refugees is that we must engage in the “emotionally difficult” task of turning away people who cross our frontier in order to send them to the “safe haven” of a well-supplied camp. This is no longer to adopt “the perspective of the universe,” in which we recognise that the suffering of another is very much like our own; rather it is to see other people as pieces on a chessboard, devoid of agency and aspiration, who can be contained geographically at our convenience, with the happy side effect of protecting our own advantageous position in the world.

Certainly Singer argues that if his conditions were met, then affluent countries should also “fulfil their responsibility to accept more refugees from the camps.” This would be a welcome development: around sixty-five million are currently displaced around the world, and fewer than 100,000 are accepted annually for resettlement in the West. But a dramatic increase in resettlement places is not much more likely than the push for open borders that Singer summarily dismisses on the basis of “our species’ lamentable xenophobic tendencies.”

We can compare refugees arriving at Western borders with the homeless people who had the temerity to spoil the atmosphere of the 2017 Australian Open in Melbourne in January by camping outside Flinders Street station. Would they have received more help and attention if they had stayed out of sight until the tournament was over? I think not. Similarly, if refugees could be quietly contained in the “safe haven” of refugee camps, it seems likely that the rich world would happily leave them there forever. As William Maley writes in his recent book What Is a Refugee?(2016), people smugglers hold the rich world to account “by presenting them at their borders with refugees whose needs they have recognised in principle, but whom they would prefer not to have to help.”

Among the organisations to which I have given modest donations is Refugee Legal, a not-for-profit community legal service in Melbourne that provides free advice to asylum seekers living in Australia, advocates for alternative policies and pursues landmark legal cases. I have also provided financial and practical assistance to a refugee family I have come to know in Melbourne. According to Singer’s reasoning, I have lost perspective. I am giving to the cause that most tugs at my heartstrings rather than to the organisation that can do the most good with my money. I am being led around by my empathy rather than my reason. The truly effective altruist rises above such subjectivism. If, like Singer, I was “strongly influenced by numbers,” I would do more good – reduce more suffering among more people – by directing my money to the UNHCR to provide direct relief to refugees in countries of first asylum.

But this isn’t the end of the matter. Asylum seekers assisted by Refugee Legal, and the particular family that I have helped, suffer in specific ways under policies of the Australian government: a government to which I pay taxes, a government that represents me and acts on my behalf. I can’t ignore the suffering around me, to which I am connected and for which I feel in some immediate way responsible as a member of this political community, even if the number of people involved, measured against the scale of the global refugee crisis, is small. To refuse to help on the basis that I could do more good in other ways would be like walking past the child that I can see drowning in the pond because my time is better spent providing life-saving medicine to rescue five other children “drowning” in a refugee camp in Turkey. Proximity and affiliation matter: we act not only because we reason in abstract and calculating ways, but also because we feel in immediate and tangible ones.

We also live in political and social communities that require our involvement if they are to thrive. I fear that Singer’s “strongly influenced by numbers” approach risks devaluing the ordinary ways in which donations of time and money for immediate and very local purposes contribute to a society that is worth living in, one where bonds of mutuality and cooperation can tip the balance against self-love, indifference and greed. A decision to volunteer in a school canteen, bake a cake to raise money for a kindergarten or donate to support a neighbourhood soup kitchen may be parochial and subjective, and is almost certainly based on proximity and affiliation. It is unlikely to save the life of a child suffering a poverty-related illness. Yet it is from this kind of engagement that the fabric of community is woven; our lives unfold in particular places and our everyday interactions and affiliations imbue them with shape and meaning.

Giving our labour or money to local causes may not do as much to reduce the global quantum of suffering as donating a large proportion of our salary to an international development agency, but it helps to craft a society based on an ethic of solidarity and reciprocity, and perhaps contributes, over time, to a political environment in which increasing foreign aid is seen as more important than winning Olympic medals.

Sometimes, too, giving money is the easier option: we can feel good about being generous without getting emotionally entangled or coming face to face with another person’s distress. A financial contribution can buy the excuse that we’ve done our bit.

We could say also, as Singer might, that art doesn’t save lives. On this basis he would discourage cultural philanthropy, at least until we have attained the peak on the long climb up his utilitarian mountain. But we need spiritual nourishment to sustain us on that journey. Literature, visual art, film, music and other forms of creative expression invite us to pause, reflect, contemplate and feel. They encourage us to find worth in goods beyond the material and the consumable, invite us to see the world in new ways and embolden us to take the imaginative leap into other lives. The arts help us to develop empathy and compassion; these may be unreliable emotions on which to base all our actions, but their cultivation is essential if we are going to care at all. Reason alone is unlikely to get us there.

Whatever my disagreements with Singer, though, when I apply his criteria to my own life I come up short. Arguing about where we can do the most good, or about the value of art, or about whether animals matter as much as humans can easily become an excuse for doing little or nothing. As Singer says, “What is the point of relating philosophy to public (and personal) affairs if we do not take our conclusions seriously?” He doesn’t expect us all to live on less than the minimum wage like Toby Ord, or to donate one of our two healthy kidneys to the next person on the organ waiting list like Missouri student Chris Croy (another effective altruist inspired by Singer’s famine essay and profiled in The Most Good You Can Do). Singer knows that kidney donation is a relatively low-risk procedure, and that most donors live a healthy life with only one kidney, yet he is not willing to donate one of his own. He acknowledges that he “only” gives away a third of his professorial income, not two-thirds like Toby Ord. He uses examples like Ord and Croy to provoke people like me – affluent citizens of a rich country – to ask ourselves searching questions about what more we can do.

I have made a monthly donation to Oxfam since getting my first secure full-time job in my early twenties. Reading Singer, listening to him speak, and writing this essay caused me to triple that regular contribution, and to agree with my partner that we will aim to donate at least 5 per cent of our annual household income to charitable causes. This is the percentage that Singer suggests as a minimal starting point for those who lead secure and comfortable lives. The causes we choose, however, won’t necessarily match those that do “the most good” according to Singer’s utilitarian calculus.

The next time I run into Peter Singer at the surf, I will stop to introduce myself. We share more than friends in common; like him, I also took up surfing in my fifties – as he writes, “too old ever to become good at it, but young enough for surfing to give me a decade of fun and a sense of accomplishment.” Actually, I hope for a bit more than a decade of fun. And perhaps, one day, Peter Singer and I might even share a wave. •

The post Surfing with Singer appeared first on Inside Story.

Excitement dissipated somewhat when the 370-strong assembly was kept waiting for half an hour while microphones were tested and the live stream was set up to reach a wider audience of around 20,000. In the confusion, Jason Reza Jorjani took to the podium to deliver his opening address without formal introduction. He was not about to let the significance of the occasion be diminished.

“Something truly momentous took place this winter of 2016 to 2017,” he began. He was not referring to the election and inauguration of Donald Trump, but to “a development that in the long run will prove to be even more significant for the redemption and revitalisation of our world.” He proceeded to announce the merger of three key players in the alt-right movement: the US-based National Policy Institute, headed by Richard Spencer; Henrik Palmgren’s Red Ice media network, which originated in Sweden; and Sweden-based Arktos Media, a publishing company under Friberg’s management, of which Jorjani is editor-in-chief. They would henceforth operate under the banner of the “AltRight,” with a shared website.

Tensions and disagreements were to be anticipated, Jorjani said. But they were clear in what they stood united against. “The alternative right unequivocally rejects liberal democracy.” For anyone outside the movement, this is a sufficiently confronting statement to prompt immediate disconnection. What is about to be unloaded surely goes under such labels as “fascism,” “white supremacy” or “neo-Nazism,” and who wants to hear any more?

Perhaps these labels are not misplaced: Jorjani went on to quote “the German jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt,” who was also, as he omits to mention, a member of the Nazi Party and prominent advocate of Hitler’s ideas of justice. But the problem with switching off – of holding up such labels like an exorcist’s crucifix against a threat of evil possession – is that you don’t learn anything.

The new AltRight convergence builds on the alliance formed last September between the Trump campaign and Steve Bannon’s Breitbart media, widely regarded as a gateway to alt-right ideas. Hillary Clinton described the Trump–Bannon alliance as “a landmark achievement” for the white supremacists of the alt-right. With the ascent of Bannon to a key role in the Trump administration, the movement is becoming a force majeure in US politics. We cannot afford to be ignorant of what they are about.

Benjamin Teitelbaum says he researched Lions in the North, his book about right-wing activism within music culture, as an ethnographer, immersing himself in the social milieu, observing, engaging in dialogue, and holding off from judgement. “Labels matter to me,” he writes on his publisher’s blog:

I almost never describe them with words like “racist,” “fascist” or “extremist.” Instead I label them as they label themselves: “nationalists.” I’m often criticised for the choice, with some alleging that my language euphemises and normalises dangerous causes. Though such concerns are valid, I have nonetheless come to think that de-escalating the tone of our language is vital if we want to better understand the political earthquakes reshaping our world.

Teitelbaum has some personal acquaintance with Friberg, and describes his transformation from a skinhead to a sharp-suited mining executive and media entrepreneur. Friberg’s agenda is to bring about a similar transformation across the alt-right movement. His view, according to Teitelbaum, is that you can’t change politics at the polling booth. You must change the culture, and to do that “you have to have people who can write, speak and produce art and media.” Friberg’s Motpol think tank in Sweden targets smart young people who will not shy away from the conceptual challenges of “metapolitics” and theoretical modelling.

Richard Spencer, the most politically aggressive member of the AltRight partnership, made a rousing speech to a gathering of white nationalists in Washington on 19 November last year, following Donald Trump’s election victory. A few days after being caught on camera leading a Nazi salute during his speech – “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” – he was punched in the face by a hooded assailant as he emerged from another gathering. The video clip of the incident went viral.

But Spencer is no street brawler. In a Mother Jones profile he is described as articulate and well-dressed, with prom-king good looks. He graduated with distinction from the University of Virginia, majoring in English and music, and went on to study for an MA at the University of Chicago, where he wrote a thesis on Theodor Adorno. His alt-right turn was inspired by reading Nietzsche. Like Friberg, Spencer believes in elites.

The alt-right intelligentsia habitually rails against globalisation and the colonising forces of Western liberalism. Its own “identitarian” agenda is linked with a commitment to the deep traditions that, they say, bind nations and peoples into cohesive, enduring and meaningful forms of cultural unity. They sometimes label themselves traditionalists, or paleoconservatives.

According to the mission statement on its website, Spencer’s National Policy Institute is “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.” Andrew Joyce, editor of the institute’s journal, Radix, mounts a counterattack on left-wing “Antifa” (anti-fascist) characterisations of their agenda. “Nationalists,” he writes, “the alleged ultra-conservatives, increasingly distinguished themselves by their open desire for cultural revolution; a destruction of all that is, a revisiting of what once was, and the planned construction of what might be.”

This is putting it mildly compared with a statement Steve Bannon is alleged to have made to Washington journalist Ronald Radosh at a book launch in November 2013. “I’m a Leninist,” he said. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state… I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Bannon subsequently refused to confirm the statement, but the role he has played in the past six months has done little to contradict it.

Drawing on his Goth heritage, Henrik Palmgren identifies the Red Ice enterprise with the Norse creation myth of the Ginnungagap, in which the world arises from the gap between fire and ice. “A perfect balance between these extremes creates the conditions for life… The explosive power of the sun and the coldness of space.”

Thirty-six-year-old Jorjani, a scholar of Persian cultural history with a PhD from the philosophy department at Stony Brook University, is an engaging speaker: measured and lucid, capable of holding the attention of a wide audience as he expounds the intellectual history of the Persian empire from Zoroaster to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the late shah of Iran.

In Prometheus and Atlas, the book based on his doctoral thesis, Jorjani also demonstrates a sophisticated knowledge of European philosophy. Grounding his case in the writings of Martin Heidegger, Jorjani presents an argument that technology is “a non-neutral world-colonising force” within modernity. He is concerned to trace the prehistory of this force back to the ancient world, characterising the Titans, Prometheus and Atlas, as “gigantic spectres of Technoscience.”

From here he develops the theme of “the spectrality of Nature,” seeking to rehabilitate a view of the phenomenal world in which the paranormal is restored to a central role and parapsychology has a determining influence on all human relations. Hardly the stuff of the average doctoral thesis, but he is evoking a fin de siècle scenario in which radical foreclosure will come unless all prospects are thrown wide open.

But the apocalyptic tendencies in the alt-right vision take full flight in the work of Alexander Dugin, a formidable spokesman for the traditionalist movement, who is known for his close ties to the Kremlin, and has been dubbed “one of the most influential intellectuals in Russia.” He’s also been called “Putin’s brain,” a title he politely declines, saying that Putin has a perfectly good brain of his own – it’s just that they think alike.

We must return to the philosophical foundations of history, Dugin declares, and “make a metaphysical effort in order to solve the current problems.” A reckoning is imminent, and Dugin adopts Heidegger’s term Ereignis, “the event” to describe what he heralds as “this sudden return to Being.”

In his 2012 book The Fourth Political Theory, Dugin dissociates himself from the paths of communism, fascism and liberalism, urging the need for a fourth way and a new Enlightenment. This begins with a rejection of the progress imperative that he associates with liberalism. “Then all that is ancient gains value and credibility.”

Whatever else may be in the mix, this part of his doctrine can surely be taken seriously and accorded respect. It does not, of course, translate easily to the world of American liberalism. Dugin is a Russian atavist, as Tolstoy was. Putin can boast that theirs is a thousand-year-old culture. Traditions of theology, literature, dance and iconography go back further than anything most American citizens can claim as their own.

What Dugin defines as “liberalism” conflates elements and positions that are diametrically opposed in most Western political systems. It means global financial capitalism, an ideology that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, in which individualism reigns supreme and there is no such thing as society or culture. It means the mechanisation of human beings in a virtual economy that denies an existence to real industry and real production, under a new kind of global dictatorship based on the financial elite.

But just as opponents of neoliberalism may be nodding their heads, he crosses the fence and attacks the principle of human rights as another manifestation of this extreme individualism. It posits the human as an atomic unit, he says, without cultural context. In Russia, citizens do not see themselves as being apart from “the people.”

In interviews, Dugin will sound off about Western liberals for twenty minutes or more without any prompting, and his indictments become more virulent as he gathers momentum. Freedom of the individual has produced another kind of enslavement, he says, as the reign of the cyborg encroaches and natural humanity is erased by a new order of transhumans and posthumans, degenerates, freaks and monsters, “the world’s clowns.” Theirs is a domain in which “nothingness seeps through all the cracks.”

It’s the world of the simulacrum and, yes, Dugin has read Jean Baudrillard, and a lot of other works from the postmodern syllabus. He displays some of Baudrillard’s techniques of argument, including the practice of pushing a hypothesis to an extreme that opens out into a sensational version of how things are, or what they are becoming. Postmodernity, says Baudrillard, is a culture in which “the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.”

Dugin couldn’t have put it better himself, surely, though he does put things well, at least when he is writing rather than speaking extempore in rather laboured English. Baudrillard’s America was the epitome of postmodern vacancy. Perhaps what Dugin is really talking about is not liberalism, but America itself, and its exercise of virtual colonisation through technology and the free market. Right and left hardly seem to belong in this picture at all. With its swirling hyper-realities, it is surely too unstable to have any such simple orientations.

Whether it is liberalism, or postmodernity, or just America, Dugin’s adversary is conjured as a lurid portrait of neo-totalitarianism. We are seeing a liberal dictatorship, he says, with a messianic determination to impose its values. Now that totalitarianism is dead, liberalism has discovered its own totalitarian nature. We have to stop it before it is too late, and its whole posthuman modality is upon us.

There’s demonisation going on here, but Dugin would counter that he himself gets demonised. He is, he claims, the only person to have been banned from the United States purely for his dangerous ideas.

Demonisation and counter-demonisation are the dynamics of paranoia. Surely we can do better than this, and break the cycle? Reading Dugin, or Jorjani, both of whom are fine writers and serious thinkers, I find the paranoia giving way to regret. There’s so much to agree with here, and so many stark contradictions to address.

Many of the charges Dugin levels at liberals are precisely those we have been making against ourselves through the academic disciplines of the humanities. His call for a deep decolonisation to counter the long history of cultural imperialism in Britain and Europe, his insistence on the subliminal racism of Western civilisation, the tendency to project and impose cultural values on other cultural traditions – all this sounds like Cultural Studies 101. His objections to free-market ideology and global capitalism are a pale reflection of the trenchant critiques that have been appearing on an almost daily basis from leading economists in Europe and the United States.

Yet he looks to Trump as the great hope for cultural change. Trump the global capitalist, whose home is a high-rise gilded palace above the city of New York, who hobnobs with billionaires and magnates on the golf course at weekends?

Jorjani, an American citizen, looks back to his Persian heritage for an equivalent depth of cultural identity. He declares that technoscience must be appropriated to a wider and more profound intellectual endeavour so as to “transform it into something other than a purely destructive one that uproots all traditional cultures.” Why, then, is he supporting a US president who has taken the side of a multinational corporation and shut down the Indigenous American protest over the Dakota pipeline?

The political dangers of traditionalism are obvious. It can lead to conflicts over historical boundaries. And it cultivates fierce ethnological identification – the spectre of ein Volk – attended by hostility towards peoples whose cultural worlds seem to be encroaching on one’s own. Most of the alt-right traditionalists are anti-Islam and anti-immigration.

Jorjani’s attempts to haul cultural history onto a political platform are certainly questionable, and they have led to an ill-judged suggestion from the faculty at Stony Brook that his doctorate should be reviewed. In response to an abstract of Jorjani’s thesis published on the philosophy blog Leiter Reports, one contributor contended that “this nature worship, technophobia, worshipful reversion to Greek myths… is the common coin of brown shirts when they’re doing their best to be obscure, intellectual and highbrow.”

I don’t recall the thousands of books on technophilia and technophobia published in the 1990s being implicated in any campaigns for the resurrection of the Third Reich. And far from being “worshipful” towards the ancient Greeks, Jorjani argues that their cultural achievements did not measure up to those of the Persians and Egyptians. It’s true that the philosophers with whom Jorjani most readily engages – Kant, Nietzsche, Feyerabend and Heidegger – are associated with the ideologies of National Socialism, but the discursive world of philosophy is no anodyne environment. Many twentieth-century thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, have paid close attention to Carl Schmitt’s ideas.

Jorjani recently sought to distance himself from Perennialism, an aspect of traditionalism that posits some higher order of wisdom at the heart of an enduring culture. “Our greatest enemy in this venture [an Iranian renaissance],” he said, “is not Islam, but the Traditionalist mentality of Javidan Kherad [eternal wisdom] or ‘Perennial Philosophy’ that cannot tolerate fundamental uncertainty and honest intellectual conflict. This Javidan Kherad… has its origins in a false reconstruction of Sassanian culture on the basis of an Islamic-Mongol mentality that is truly going to be the death of us if we do not have the courage to free ourselves from it.”

The appropriate response to Jorjani and others of the alt-right intelligentsia is surely to question their arguments through an honest public exchange of ideas. Tensions over the rise of the alt-right are only exacerbated by an absence of substantive debate. Typically, the leading spokesmen of the movement (and yes, they are all men) address like-minded audiences in forums designed to promote their agenda. They deliver monologues rather than engage in dialogue. They do protracted interviews on Red Ice radio, during which they are supportively prompted by presenter Henrik Palmgren. They don’t like being labelled and stereotyped in the press, yet the labelling and stereotyping of liberals is part of their own core business.

Paranoia is the real enemy. It is an inflammatory and contagious disease, and no culture is immune to it. We are a long way from confrontation with a fully-fledged and militarised movement for Aryan supremacy, and invoking the prospect only invites it. Why do so, when more concerted attempts at communication might change the dynamics?

Whether the AltRight merger Jorjani announced in Stockholm constitutes a momentous development is open to question. None of the three organisations involved has a vast following. Audience figures for Red Ice television and radio peak at around 100,000. Spencer addresses crowds of a few hundred people, and items published by his National Policy Institute typically attract no more than a few dozen shares. Arktos media is evidently a flourishing concern, but its books don’t make the bestseller lists.

Jorjani’s claim that the merger has some redemptive global significance is based less on the prospect of mass impact than on the anticipation of a cultural revolution led by a new elite, whose currency is ideas. “Politics is downstream from culture,” according to Andrew Breitbart, Bannon’s former business partner, and founder of Breitbart News. Friberg’s strategy of forming an intellectual elite is born of the same conviction.

This is quite contrary to the view most educated liberals would have of the thinking fostered in the new White House administration, but it is echoed repeatedly in Breitbart editorials. “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” published in Breitbart in March 2016, states that “one thing stands out above all else: intelligence,” and describes the leaders of the movement as “dangerously bright.” Their ideas may be dangerous, but they are born of argument, and may be subject to negotiation and change in response to it. •

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The Manus detention centre has been found to be unconstitutional and must close; the PNG government says refugees can settle in the country if they choose, though few want to. Nauru has made it clear that refugees can’t remain permanently on its territory. Bill Shorten might have promised to redouble efforts to find alternative resettlement places, but the reality of the Labor–Coalition unity ticket is that neither side has the faintest idea of where these refugees might go.

To justify the policy of offshore processing and turnbacks, both parties resort to the realist language of necessity. When recycled prime minister Kevin Rudd announced shortly before the last election that no one arriving by boat after 19 July 2013 would settle in Australia as a refugee, he described the measure as “hard public policy… which must now be implemented.” It was a “practical step forward,” he said, and would be taken “calmly, rationally and with resolve.” Australians might have “kind and compassionate” hearts, but we would accept the policy because we also have “hard heads.” In other words, we must focus entirely on the result we are seeking and ignore (or suppress) any niggling emotions that might prompt us to discuss the ethics of the process we use to get there.

Turnbull used remarkably similar arguments during the 2016 election campaign. On Q&A, responding to a contractor’s description of the situation on Manus – “It is terrible the way they treat the people there. They are treated worse than animals” – he acknowledged that the policy was “harsh” but insisted that it was necessary because “the alternative is far worse.”

“None of us have hearts of stone,” the prime minister added, while insisting that the situation requires us to behave as if we do. To resettle refugees from Manus and Nauru in Australia would be, he says, “the biggest marketing opportunity for the people smugglers you have ever seen.” They would exploit our “weakness” and the “boats would be setting off again.” The consequence would be “women, children and families drowning at sea.”

Labor’s policy differs slightly from the Coalition’s. It would abolish temporary protection visas and open up Manus and Nauru to journalists. But in the first leaders’ debate during the campaign, Shorten was eager to show that he and Turnbull were essentially one. “We would defeat the people smugglers,” he said. “We accept the role of boat turnbacks, as we should, because we don’t want to see the people smugglers back in business.”

While the emphasis shifts, both leaders give essentially the same reasons for why we must be tough: to defend the integrity of our borders, save lives at sea and defeat the smugglers. On Q&A, Turnbull added keeping children out of detention to the list. In his time as immigration minister, Philip Ruddock claimed that harsh policies were needed to shore up public support for an orderly migration program that might otherwise be overwhelmed by a xenophobic Hansonite backlash.

Regulating movement across borders, combatting people smuggling, saving lives at sea, keeping kids out of detention and countering racism – all these are legitimate aims of public policy. Indeed we might say that policy-makers are obliged to act to realise such aims. Problems arise, though, when we are told that there is only one realistic, hard-headed way to do this, and when leaders insist that moral questions are an unwelcome and unhelpful distraction from the necessary task of achieving a practical solution.

“No amount of moral lecturing from those who seem unable to comprehend the negative consequences of an open borders policy will bring forth those solutions,” immigration department head Mike Pezzullo told Senate estimates in February 2016. “All that can be done is being done,” he insisted, with reference to the search for resettlement places beyond Australia and New Zealand. Pezzullo suggested that to deal in the real world of necessity, we must be wary of giving expression to feelings like empathy. “Yielding to emotional gestures in this area of public administration simply reduces the margin for discretionary action which is able to be employed by those people who are actually charged with dealing with the problem.”

The famously hard-headed Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith, best known for his description of the invisible and indifferent hand of market economics, might argue otherwise. He regarded empathy (or sympathy, as he called it) as the fundamental human emotion, crucial to our capacity to establish norms of behaviour that enable us to live together cooperatively. For Smith, emotion (“immediate sense and feeling”) rather than reason is the source of our “first perceptions of right and wrong.”

Defenders of Australia’s system of border control would say that this is an area of public administration that must be quarantined from such troublesome moral sentiments. A hard head can’t be combined with Smith’s soft heart. We must do what is necessary.

In his discussion of just and unjust wars, political philosopher Michael Walzer argues that the word “necessary” enfolds two meanings – inevitable and indispensable. To say that something is inevitable is to accept that it could not be otherwise; it is the outcome of forces beyond our control, like a natural disaster, or an event that we could not possibly have anticipated because of our ignorance of essential facts. We can only decide if something was inevitable with the benefit of hindsight. To describe an action as indispensable, though, is to make it contingent on some particular outcome; it is to assert that A is necessary (indispensable) in order to achieve B. And this kind of argument is always open to challenge.

Walzer discusses this issue with reference to the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War (a text Turnbull also likes to reference). The Athenian representatives argue that it is necessary (indispensable) to invade the island of Melos in order to maintain and expand their empire. To allow Melos to remain neutral would show weakness and so invite other subjugated territories to rebel. With thirty-eight ships and 3000 soldiers waiting offshore, the Athenian “negotiators” tell the Melian leaders that they have no choice but to surrender. The Melians refuse to submit, and defend their stance with talk of what is right, rather than what is necessary. The Athenians respond by arguing that if the Melians had the upper hand, they “would be acting in precisely the same way.” The Melians are duly crushed.

The Melian Dialogue is the classic example of realism in international relations and a staple text in defence studies and foreign policy training. The thrust of the realist reading is that while we might clothe our actions in the language of justice, dignity and honour, when push comes to shove, it is interests and power that hold sway in international relations. Noble talk is just gloss. In the end, as the Athenians say, “the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” The dictates of realism and necessity draw a line under, or through, moral arguments.

The applicability of this doctrine to the policy of offshore detention and turnbacks is apparent. We are told repeatedly that there is no other way. Policy is instrumental in achieving one particular aim – stopping the boats – and the only valid measure of assessment is whether that aim is achieved. “You could say we have a harsh border protection policy, but it has worked,” a newly installed Turnbull told RN Drive in September 2015. “’I know it is tough, but the fact is that we cannot take a backward step on this issue.” There is no place for moral qualms or ethical discussion.

But, as Walzer points out, if “necessary” really means “indispensable,” then it should mark the start of a moral argument, not its end. He asks us to step back from the final, fateful dialogue between the Athenians and the Melians and consider what kind of debates may have taken place in the assembly in Athens some months earlier. Away from the front line, he contends, crucial questions of morality and strategy must have been in play. Will the destruction of Melos really reduce the risk to Athens from its client states? Might massacring the Melians in fact weaken the empire, since Athens will be seen as ruthless and tyrannical? Is it right to make an example of Melos to expand Athens’s imperial ambitions? Are there alternative policies that might achieve the same outcome without the same loss of life? Perhaps the questioning might have gone even further: is maintaining and expanding Athenian imperial power really a desirable aim in the first place?

With no known record of these discussions, Walzer admits that he can only speculate as to what was actually said. He does note, though, that Thucydides recorded an earlier debate about the fate of the Mytilene, who had broken ranks with Athens to ally with Sparta. The assembly first determined a collective punishment: all the men of Mytilene would be put to death and all the women and children enslaved. The next day, the assembly softened the decree. (“Only” a thousand ringleaders are condemned to die.) The amendment could be seen as “realist” in the sense that the assembly determines that massacring or enslaving the entire population might undermine the stability of the empire, but Walzer’s point is that (at least in Thucydides’s account) the citizens’ repentance and concerns about excessive cruelty cause them to revisit their original decision. “Moral anxiety, not political calculation, leads them to worry about the effectiveness of their decree.”

In other words, Walzer concludes, the destruction of Melos was not inevitable. It was a deliberate choice, and a different process of deliberation and a different choice were possible. The same can be said of our border protection policies; they too invite and require debate that draws on ethical principles as much as practical outcomes.

Some people might claim that what we do in Manus and Nauru can’t be described as punishment. People are safe from the persecution they faced in their homelands; they are fed and clothed and given shelter. This argument is unsustainable, and amounts to wilful ignorance, especially after the publication of Madeline Gleeson’s carefully documented book Offshore. To punish some asylum seekers in order to deter others is to treat people as means not ends, and so breach the Kantian categorical imperative that sits beneath contemporary conceptions of human rights.

We can ditch Kant and argue instead on the moral ground of utilitarianism – the greatest good for the greatest number or, to express it as Peter Singer does, doing all we can to minimise “avoidable pain and suffering.” We might argue, as many of our politicians appear to do, that the reduction of suffering achieved by preventing drowning at sea justifies any increased suffering caused by detention on Manus and Nauru. But such a crude calculus invites its own crude utilitarian rejoinder: might not the reduced suffering of displaced people who make it to safety counterbalance the increased suffering of those who die in the attempt? Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers around the world appear to have drawn exactly this conclusion.

Any serious attempt to discuss the issue in utilitarian terms would require a more nuanced debate and a broader perspective. If our yardstick is the biggest possible reduction of avoidable pain and suffering, then we can’t focus solely on those displaced people who happen to come into Australia’s orbit; we must also consider what we can do to help the record numbers of people forced from their homes around the world.

I am not trying to suggest that there is an easy or obvious solution. To say that we should simply deal compassionately with those who manage to get here is to risk lives at sea and let the smuggling networks determine who gets protection and who does not.

My argument is that the real world and the moral world can’t be separated and that tough moral debate is a necessary part of the process of practical policy. If we incorporate moral considerations into our thinking, then we will have to work harder and think differently about our approach. This does not mean being impractical and indifferent to outcomes. Over the past four years, Labor and Coalition governments have spent billions of dollars vigorously pursuing deterrence through offshore detention; might the situation look different if similar energy and resources had been devoted to working with neighbouring governments to build a comprehensive regional protection framework?

If necessity rules our actions and realism is transcendent, then all discussion of justice is pointless and all talk of morals irrelevant. But this is not the case. Moral arguments have purchase; they are every bit as “real” as instrumentalist approaches and practical outcomes. Inconvenient as it can be to those in power, morality exists in the world (alongside strategic and other interests) and, as Walzer writes, “notions about right conduct are remarkably persistent.” That is why passionate concern about what happens on Manus and Nauru keeps returning to the surface: morality matters to us as human beings.

It is the capacity to make moral choices that allows us to describe ourselves as free beings. “Stand in imagination in the Athenian assembly, and one can still feel a sense of freedom,” writes Walzer, referring to the decision about the invasion of Melos.

Athens destroyed Melos when it was at the height of its imperial power. Thucydides’s history goes on to describe the subsequent naval expedition to Sicily, which ended disastrously for the Athenians. This turning point in the Peloponnesian war led to Athens’s ultimate defeat by Sparta.

So the real realist lesson may be this: when political leaders invoke the language of necessity, it is time to be on our guard. •

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From the perspective of the philosopher and historian Wayne Hudson, my students were groping their way towards ideas that belong in the realm of religious thought. The first of his two aims in Australian Religious Thought is to demonstrate that religious thinking has been more prevalent in Australia than most people think. He wants to refute the publisher who told him that a book on this subject would be very short. His second aim is to argue that religious thought is not confined to the doctrines of churches or theological writings: it can be found in advocates of secularism, in the views of disbelievers and many social reformers, and in the beliefs of those who seek a spiritual path outside conventional religion. 

The themes into which Hudson divides his study are chosen to reveal the diverse material that makes up Australian religious thought. The first theme, disbelief, encompasses those who take a critical and sometimes condemnatory stance on religious tenets. By rejecting doctrines that they think are false or irrational, disbelievers distinguish themselves from unbelievers, who doubt what they would like to believe, and from nonbelievers, who have no interest in religious questions.

By including disbelief as a category of religious thought, Hudson might be accused of confusing religious thinking with thinking about religion. It would be odd to regard the militant atheist Richard Dawkins, for instance, as a religious thinker. But the disbelievers that Hudson features are people with a religious background or religious concerns who moved into disbelief as the result of dissatisfaction with religious dogma or ecclesiastic authority, or because they thought that the true meaning of religion was better pursued in an alternative framework.

The author Marcus Clarke, for example, thought that Christianity was moribund, and attacked official religion and conventional ideas of God in his best-known work, For the Term of His Natural Life; nevertheless, through most of his life he retained a belief in God and a hope that the true aim of religion could be achieved through the betterment of humankind. Ada Cambridge, a novelist and wife of a clergyman, wrestled with doubt and came to believe that organised religion got in the way of proper appreciation of earthly joy. Alfred Deakin, one of the fathers of the Australian Federation, became a spiritualist and a member of the Theosophical Society in his search for a religion compatible with science. Patrick White rejected conventional Christianity on aesthetic grounds but retained a belief in the sacred within ordinary life.

Hudson’s second theme, sacral secularity, attempts to capture those thinkers who find a sacred mission in secular affairs. He is at pains to point out that the secular has had many different meanings in Australia, and that secularists don’t necessarily exclude religion from the public realm. Some of those who advocate secular education do so because they think it best serves religious ends or because they don’t want education to be dominated by the clergy of any church. Some sacral secularists dedicate themselves to political and social causes because they believe that service to others is the best, or only legitimate, manifestation of the religious impose.

Henry Lawson, for instance, thought that the essence of Christianity was humanism. A true Christian, he said, is “one who is sorry for most men and all women and tries to act to [this creed] to the best of his ability.” William Lane, a labour activist and the founder of a utopian community in Paraguay, regarded socialism as the true realisation of religion and believed that communism was “part of God’s Law.” Some sacral secularists take a sociological view of religion as a force for binding people together in a community; others think that God’s plan is working itself out in the secular world.

Sacral secularists are not generally interested in reforming religious doctrines or organisations. Religious liberals, on the other hand, see the reformation of their religion as their objective. Some of them take issue with the doctrine of the trinity; some, like the novelist and feminist Catherine Helen Spence, doubt the divinity of Christ and argue for the existence of a non-supernatural religion. Some want to reform the church or supplant it with a different form of worship. Charles Strong, an influential minister in the Scots Church in Melbourne in the late nineteenth century, wanted to return to a primitive form of Christianity without hierarchy or dogma.

While disbelievers, liberal reformers and sacral secularists often have philosophical or theological opinions, Hudson treats separately religious intellectuals for whom religious philosophy or theology was central. Among philosophers he singles out are William Ralph Boyce Gibson, a professor at Melbourne University who used Husserl’s phenomenology to provide an account of the presence of God in human consciousness; Max Charlesworth, a Catholic intellectual influenced by existentialism; and Kevin Hart, who has used the philosophy of deconstruction to gesture towards a transcendent God who can’t be represented in thought. Theologians in Australia have opinions on the role of the church, the reformation of church doctrines, the relation of Christianity to other religions, and the concerns of feminists.

Hudson uses his last theme, post-secular consciousness, to discuss thinkers who are secularists in rejecting conventional religion but who retain ideas of the sacred. Some find the sacred in nature, some in the sensual and the passionate. Some draw an inspiration from process philosophy as a form of evolution that reaches towards a higher form of existence; others look to science or psychoanalysis for a new interpretation of the sacred. Charles Birch promoted the idea of a value-laden universe, and environmental philosophers like Richard Sylvan, Val Plumwood and Freya Mathews argue that nature has a value in its own right. Peter Read thinks that the value to Aborigines of their land is the key to a superior view of the sacred.

Hudson’s survey proves his point: a lot of religious thinking has indeed taken place in Australia, and many Australians who are celebrated for their secular activities have been influenced by religious ideas. He gives some thinkers more attention than others. He has a lot to say about philosophers of religion and presents some of their theories in detail, but feminist theologians get only a passing glance. He is interesting and informative about those he labels disbelievers, but not so attentive to most of those in the post-secular camp.

Hudson’s conception of religious thought is inclusive but there are obvious gaps, the most glaring of which is his failure to include Aboriginal views about their law and land. Hudson is well aware of this deficiency but thinks that Aboriginal thought needs a separate treatment – one that challenges the very idea that it can be squeezed into a traditional conception of religion. He does discuss attempts by non-Aboriginal scholars to take account of Aboriginal spirituality, however, including the pioneering work of Max Charlesworth.

Aside from his venture into post-secular ideas of the sacred, the religious thought that Hudson discusses is almost all Christian or critical responses to Christianity. Indeed, most of the religious thinkers he features were Protestants. This emphasis is partly explained by his focus on the development of religious thought among settlers and non-Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia up until the late twentieth century. These Australians came mostly from a Christian tradition, and Protestants of one kind or another were for a long time the dominant religious voices in the colonies. Up to the time of the Second Vatican Council, most Catholics adhered to doctrines laid down by the Church. Australian Jews, Hudson says, were not much inclined to engage in religious thought – perhaps because of their more precarious existence as a minority group.

Hudson says that he is not interested in thought that merely reflects or applies conventional doctrines. This statement is intended to explain why he largely ignores the religious ideas of Jews, Muslims and Buddhists in Australia, and perhaps it also explains why he gives B.A. Santamaria, one of the most influential religious figures in Australian history, only a passing mention.

Readers are likely to wonder whether there is anything especially Australian about the religious thought that Hudson discusses. Many of the thinkers he includes were born or educated overseas, and most were oriented to the work of European philosophers and scholars, and took part in European controversies. This is especially true of Australian theologians and philosophers of religion, who participated in an exchange of views with theorists overseas. The fact that they happened to be located in Australia made no discernible difference to their views about religion.

Of course, a cosmopolitan outlook does not preclude the existence of an Australian school of thought. Australian philosophers in the mid twentieth century developed a materialist metaphysics that is still identified in the philosophical world as Australian philosophy. Some Australian theologians and philosophers of religion gained an international reputation but their ideas did not come together into a common, distinctive outlook on their subject matter. 

Those religious thinkers who found their mission in reformist activities often got their ideas from overseas, but used them to engage with social issues in Australia. They formed movements and founded publications concerned with the issues of the day. The Catholic Worker wrote about workers’ rights as well as opposing communism and criticising capitalism; from an Anglican perspective, the Morpeth Review dealt with current affairs as well as theoretical issues.

Whether any religious thought is truly Australian might be interpreted as a question of whether living on this continent brings forth a new religious impulse. Some have concluded that the influence of the Australian environment on religion is destructive. The Bulletin writer Alfred George Stephens argued that the spirit of Australia – “the undefined, indefinable resultant of earth and air, and conditions of climate and life” – undermines religion because it breeds a utilitarian and sceptical outlook. Marcus Clarke’s dismissive view of religion might have been influenced by the brutality of Australia’s convict origins.

Most attempts to point the way to religious thought that is truly Australian focus on understanding and adopting aspects of Aboriginal spirituality. Convinced that Aboriginal culture was primitive and inferior, most religious thinkers took a long time to recognise the complexity of Aboriginal law and to appreciate the nature of the relation of Aborigines to their land. Some theologians have now begun to work towards the integration of Christianity with Aboriginal ideas of the sacred. Other religious thinkers believe that Australian hunger for spirituality can only be satisfied by incorporating Aboriginal sacred experience into our cultural heritage. Hudson points out, however, that few of them have any deep acquaintance with Aboriginal language or culture.

Hudson wants to demonstrate that religious thought has played a much greater role in Australian history than most people suppose. But the significance of the radical, critical and reformist ideas that he discusses depends not only on their quantity or quality but also on their effects. How influential were the ideas that he discusses? Some Australians made notable contributions to theology or philosophy of religion. Some have had an impact on the life and thought of their contemporaries. After being kicked out of the Presbyterian Church for his heretical views, Charles Strong established his own church in Melbourne, which for a time attracted 1000 members. Unitarians, Christian Scientists, spiritualists and other alternatives to conventional religion have had a presence in Australia.

But Hudson admits that new ideas about religion primarily had their impact among well-educated people. It’s likely that most religious people in Australia had little knowledge of these developments and little interest in their disputing of orthodoxy. The real challenges to the doctrines of established religion came not from the religious thinkers that Hudson features; they came instead from feminism, the gay and lesbian movement, and campaigns for voluntary euthanasia and the right of women to choose abortion.

Hudson also thinks that social movements are often inspired by religious ideas, but this raises the question of what counts as religious. Hudson’s definition is vague and unsatisfactory: religious thought, he says, either falls within religion in an organisational sense or is related to organised religion. “Relation to religion in an organisational sense is crucial,” he writes. What counts as organised religion he leaves unexplained. Moreover, many of the ideas he discusses, especially in the section on post-secular consciousness, have no obvious relation to organised religion. Those who believe in the intrinsic value of nature probably don’t regard themselves as engaging in thought that has anything to do with conventional religion. Those whose disbelief takes them far away from orthodox doctrines have only a historical and critical relation to the religion of their earlier days.

In Australian culture more broadly, the term “religion” suffers from inflation. My local newspaper used to have a section titled “Religion” featuring the outpourings of fanatical followers of their AFL team. The Australian Oxford Dictionary allows that your religion can be the thing you are devoted to. Although Hudson sometimes lapses into this overly inclusive concept of religion, he is generally careful to ensure that thought described as religious has at least a whiff of the sacred or spiritual in it. Nevertheless, his failure to produce a satisfactory definition of religion leaves the reader wondering whether all the ideas he describes have enough in common to come under the label of religious thought.

Their commonality, I’d suggest, has to do with problems faced by organised religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – problems that motivated thoughtful people to look for a new way of maintaining values that they regarded as essential to personal or social life. The advance of science was a challenge to Christianity, as was biblical scholarship that questioned the narrative of the Gospels and the divinity, or very existence, of Jesus. Individualism and consumer capitalism undermined the solidarity and way of life of communities that had been united by religious belief. A growing acquaintance with other religions challenged the certainty of church doctrines.

The thinkers Hudson describes as religious were people who took these challenges seriously but refused to accept the stance of those who aimed to replace religion with a scientific worldview that left no room for the sacred. These opponents of scientism were reluctant to accept a reduction of the world to a collection of physical particles and forces, or humans to a contingent product of evolution who had no hope of finding a meaning for their existence. They refused to give up the idea that their lives had a spiritual dimension, and they wanted a community that could dedicate itself to a mission higher than increasing the gross national product.

Those who faced the challenges to organised religion and did not want to give up the transcendence, meaning or social purpose that religion had provided went in the directions that Hudson describes. Some attempted to reform the doctrines or theology of organised religion to take into account science and biblical scholarship. Some turned away from religion to personal life or consciousness as a source of spirituality that was immune from scientific reductionism. Some found their sacred mission in the goal of improving society and humankind and some located sacredness or irreducible value in nature.

In nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Australia, most of these searchers for the sacred were familiar with the ideas of organised religion. They had a religious, mostly Christian background and even those who came to disbelieve made use of the ideas that were part of their religious heritage. In the later twentieth century, the connection between organised religion and what Hudson calls post-secular consciousness became tenuous or non-existent. Hudson is not so foolhardy as to claim that all of our ideas about value are basically religious. But those who search for meaning or spiritual values in a world dominated by scientific ideas and economic preoccupations have a common cause, whether they are religious in a conventional sense or not.

It is this quest that brings together the views discussed by Hudson under the somewhat misleading label “religious thought.” The same refusal to give up on the existence of spirit or the sacred was exhibited by my students when they answered my question about their religious beliefs. I am not a participant in this spiritual quest, but after reading Hudson’s book I found myself agreeing with the historian and former Jesuit Greg Dening: “The language of religion is a mysterious language. I doubt, however, that it should be dead.” •

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Some of our dismay comes from a fear that many people will end up poor and unemployable, and only a few of us will benefit from new opportunities. But our trepidation also reflects the role that work plays in our lives. For most people, having a job is a source of self-respect.

The social changes we face require a rethinking of our values. It is this task that the philosopher Bertrand Russell undertook eighty-four years ago, at the height of the Great Depression. His essay, In Praise of Idleness, has been republished with extensive notes, an afterword and a foreword by Bradley Trevor Greive, an author of popular humorous books. As Russell’s witty companion, Greive informs and entertains us with interesting facts about Russell’s life, works and influence. Russell’s writings are a great discovery that he wants to share with his readers. “Russell’s every neural impulse,” he writes, “was an earthquake that rattled my tiny brain around inside my head like an oyster in a tumble dryer.”

Russell was born in the age of Queen Victoria and was active into the 1960s. Among philosophers, he is most noted for his work on the foundation of mathematics and his explanation of why the sentence “the present king of France is bald” makes sense even though there is no such person. As a public intellectual he was notorious for his criticism of religion, his pacifism, and his advocacy of sex education and gender equality. He was once turned down for a position at the City University of New York out of a fear that he might corrupt the morals of the young.

Russell wrote seventy books and thousands of articles, and gave countless lectures and interviews. He went to prison for his opposition to the first world war and, with Jean-Paul Sartre, organised an unofficial war crimes tribunal to draw attention to the misdeeds of the Americans and their allies in the Vietnam war.

Russell not only wrote a lot, he also wrote well. When my students ask me to recommend a book on the history of philosophy I always suggest they read his History of Western Philosophy. Though full of his philosophical prejudices, it is far more interesting and readable than texts that try to be more scholarly and even-handed.

Greive is impressed not only by Russell’s output but also with his refusal to endorse common opinions without subjecting them to criticism and his willingness to accept criticisms of his own views. “Ultimately what made Russell a more gifted thinker than most – and by most I mean virtually everybody who has ever lived – is that he was happy to be unsure or indeed proved wrong.”

But it is not just Russell’s ability to doubt that Greive wants to feature; it is also his wisdom. The text of In Praise of Idleness is broken up with quotes from other of Russell’s writings, each accompanied by Greive’s remarkable illustrations: big-eyed, expressive adaptations of exotic animals originally drawn by seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrators. “When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man,” says Russell, and this quotation is accompanied by a puzzle-eyed monkey and a frog searching for something that has eluded its grasp – perhaps the exact truth.

Should we accept Greive’s assessment of Russell’s greatness? Philosophers are divided in their opinion about the worth of Russell’s philosophical works – as they are divided about everything else. Many of the views expressed in his more popular books are now widely accepted as having been superseded. Despite the clever aphorisms that Greive extracts, some of his writing has not aged well. But Greive does us a service by bringing In Praise of Idleness to our attention. Its republication is a timely resurrection of a work on a subject that we need to think about.

Russell’s basic argument is easy to state. The belief that all the work we do is virtuous or necessary is an illusion. Modern technology could allow everyone to enjoy an adequate standard of living while doing a lot less work – about half, in fact. All the work needed from each individual, Russell thinks, is four hours a day. Freed from spending so much of our lives at work, we would have the leisure to engage in enjoyable and creative activities to the benefit of ourselves and society.

“In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day,” Russell writes,

every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving… Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality… Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out.

Russell’s argument seems easy to criticise. An economist is likely to tell us that arranging the economy so that everyone has an adequate standard of living and just four hours of work would require too much interference by government. A sociologist will add that most people won’t want to work less if this means that they can afford fewer consumer goods. A psychologist is likely to doubt whether people would really benefit from having more leisure, and an international relations expert will certainly be scornful about Russell’s idea of how war can be stopped.

But these criticisms are based on existing ways of living and valuing. Russell is asking, and trying to answer, basic questions about the value of work and leisure, the way we ought to live our lives, and how we can be happy and productive. He is trying to persuade us to change our way of thinking. The issues he is tackling are important for us, and his conclusions require serious examination, even if we end up disagreeing with them.

Work is what keeps an economy going and gives people a means of life, so to question its value might seem like a ridiculous and fruitless exercise. For most people, though, work means being forced to spend a large part of their life doing what they don’t really want to do. In his provocative way, Russell compares work to slavery, and sees the fight for the eight-hour day as one of the most significant struggles of the labour movement. He is simply proposing a more radical version of what these struggles aimed to achieve.

In saying that work in a modern economy is a form of slavery, Russell is operating with a narrow conception of what counts as work. Work is of two kinds, he says: “first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.” Manual labour is what he has in mind, not work in the service industries that play such a dominant role in developed economies. He is not thinking of childcare, nursing, social work or any other kind of work where the prominent activity is relating to other people. And he does not seem to be speaking for those who like their work and think it is worthwhile, or those who get a kick out of workplace competition and a sense of accomplishment from a job well done.

Russell believes that there are also other reasons why we should be critical of work as we know it. He thinks that we have imbibed a morality that has made willingness to work into a virtue. We admire those who work hard, put in the hours and take on extra responsibilities, and we denigrate those who are seen as slackers. Russell calls this a slave morality. He also thinks that work breeds conformity and prevents people from thinking critically about what they are doing. The investment banker who gets a thrill from buying and selling bonds is as much in thrall to the requirements of the job as the labourer on an assembly line, and is as little inclined to reflect on the ethics of what he or she is doing.

The worst thing about work, according to Russell, is that it blocks creativity. It leaves us at the end of the day without the time or inclination to reflect on what we are doing or to engage in any activity that requires a creative use of our mental faculties.

Idleness is praiseworthy, Russell thinks, because it frees us up for creative and enjoyable activities. The plausibility of this statement depends on understanding what he means by idleness. He makes it clear that what he praises is not the forced idleness of the unemployed or the idleness of the free rider who expects to live off the labour of others. Idleness is not spending your time in passive activities or filling your days with Facebook. It is the space you can make for yourself, free from the demands of your working life, to observe, reflect, play, engage in hobbies, lose yourself in your imagination or learn new things.

Greive thinks that Russell’s ideas about the value of idleness were influenced by his childhood experiences. Brought up by a domineering and demanding grandmother, Russell would escape from his lessons and lose himself on the family estate, observing nature and reflecting on what he was learning. He later regarded this time out from the demands of his formal education as the most important part of his childhood.

It is certainly true that Russell has a typical philosopher’s idea of what is good for a person: namely solitary meditation. Most people would probably prefer to spend their leisure time socialising or participating in family life. But these activities can also be both enjoyable and productive. We don’t have to share Russell’s preferences in order to appreciate what he says about the value of idleness.

How about those who wouldn’t know what to do with more free time? Russell thinks that more education would solve that problem – presumably an education that emphasises creativity and critical thought rather than one that concentrates on preparing people for a life of work.

Idleness, Russell argues, is good for individuals, and it is also good for society. It stimulates creativity and it makes people more kindly and less inclined to fight each other. Greive enthusiastically agrees, at least about the former. “Russell’s argument is a call to action for every citizen of our age of ideas and, if applied, heralds the next wave of enlightened entrepreneurs.” Whether idleness is the mother of invention, whether people with more free time become kinder – these are propositions for which we need more evidence. But even if idleness is not the key to peace and human progress, its value for individuals is a sufficient reason to recommend it.

You can be impressed by Russell’s praise of idleness and remain doubtful about the practicality of his ideas. Greive, the author of books about personal life, takes Russell’s essay as a call for individuals to change their priorities. He tells us that he was inspired by Russell to make better use of his spare time. “Over the next ten years I travelled the world, founded a national poetry prize, participated in wildlife conservation programs on every continent, qualified to be a Russian cosmonaut in Moscow, competed in Polynesian strongman contests in Moorea and took up cooking, gardening and adventure sports.”

Russell is not just advocating a change of values, though. He also wants a revolution in social and economic life. We should stop producing so much – a heretical idea for economists – and be satisfied with less. We should aim for a society where everyone contributes more or less equally to the labour necessary to ensure a decent life for all. Presumably this requires not only a fair amount of material equality but also quite a lot of social engineering. It is not obvious that there is scope in this social world for capitalists to set the terms of employment and maximise output in order to produce a profit, or for entrepreneurs to get rich.

What Russell is advocating (contrary to Greive’s view) is a form of socialism. Although he disliked the dictatorial power of Soviet rulers and their devotion to making people work, he didn’t object to the idea of a centrally planned economy. Russell’s ideas, in fact, can be located in a tradition of socialist thought about how work can become less onerous and more self-fulfilling in a society not constrained by the requirements of capitalism. For those suffering from the Great Depression, the view that capitalism had to be replaced by a managed economy was almost common sense – which is how Russell treats it.

The fall of the Soviet Union is supposed to have taught us that a planned economy doesn’t work. Does this mean that Russell’s proposals for changing our economic and social life belong in the dustbin of history? Perhaps we should instead take to heart Russell’s insistence that received truths ought to be doubted. A planned economy in an age of artificial intelligence may be a feasible proposition, and it doesn’t have to be undemocratic. But even if we reject Russell’s socialism we need to take up the discourse that Russell hoped to initiate about work and leisure and how they should be distributed. A good life for everyone in the twenty-first century depends on it. •

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What should we make of a character trait that motivates ennobling acts of self-sacrifice but also pernicious deeds? This is the central question John Kleinig asks in this investigation of loyalty and loyalties. His search for an answer is motivated not only by general philosophical curiosity but also by a career of teaching and researching police ethics. Police demonstrate the good side of loyalty when they take risks to back each other up in dangerous situations, but the bad side takes over when they lie or hide evidence to protect each other.

Despite its drawbacks, Kleinig defends loyalty, not only as a trait with its good points but also as an important moral virtue. Loyalty, he says, is the disposition to deny oneself for the sake of relationships you value and associations you identify with – to stand by them, to look out for their interests and not to betray them. It is not always a moral matter. If you abandon your football club after a season of lost games, you might be accused of disloyalty but you have done nothing morally wrong. But in many relationships – friendships, for example – loyalty is a moral requirement.

Being loyal is not a contractual obligation, nor merely a matter of doing one’s share in a relationship. Loyal people are prepared to make sacrifices for their associates without counting the costs to themselves. They care about the objects of their loyalty and regard maintaining their relationship as a matter of personal integrity.

Kleinig distinguishes loyalty from devotion to a cause or an ideal. Loyalty takes as its object other people (friends, family, workmates), an association (corporations, churches, professions, political parties, nations, states), rulers or a supreme being. It is also different from solidarity: those who act in solidarity do not necessarily value their relations with each other; instead, their focus is on achieving a common goal. But this distinction can be hard to draw. People who value their relationship may do so partly because it achieves an important aim, and those who act in solidarity must be able to depend on each other. Police who maintain solidarity with each other are also exhibiting loyalty.

Some critics of loyalty worry about its effect on moral objectivity. Loyalty can lead people astray because it blinds them to the faults of the objects of their loyalty. If you care about your mates then you are disposed to regard them in a positive light, which makes it easy to overlook or downplay the bad things they do. If your loyalty encourages you to believe that your first duty is to look after their interests, then you are likely to ignore other moral considerations. Loyalty, say its critics, can prevent us from being morally rational and autonomous.

Other critics complain about the partiality that is inherent to loyalty. You favour some people just because of their connection with you, and this puts loyalty in conflict with any moral position that requires us to treat all individuals with equal consideration. In his recent book, The Most Good You Can Do, Peter Singer argues that our overriding moral duty is to maximise the amount of good we do. We can do more good by helping people in poor countries than by providing benefits to members of our family, to friends or to people of our nation. Loyalty hinders morality because it gets in the way of doing the most good.

Kleinig defends loyalty as a virtue by arguing that it plays an indispensible role in our lives. We are social beings – not just because we depend on others for our existence but also because our sense of self depends on relations with others. By identifying with other people and by regarding our relations with them as valuable we live richer lives than we would live as socially isolated individuals. We are able to flourish and realise ourselves more fully. Loyalty, he says, is an executive virtue that enables us to maintain valuable relationships by curbing our self-seeking impulses. It requires us to make sacrifices. Life without loyalties would be lonely, unfulfilling, narrow and mean.

Friendship provides one of Kleinig’s best cases for regarding loyalty as a virtue. More than almost any other social relationship, friendship is mutually enriching, and it is this, according to Kleinig, that makes it a peculiarly and especially important site for personal flourishing. Friends are supposed to care about each other and act for each other’s sake. They are supposed to respect and appreciate each other’s point of view. A friend is not supposed to undermine or betray.

Loyalty among family members is not difficult to defend either – at least in cases where families are not dysfunctional. The close, personal relations of family life give its members an experience of intimacy, loving care and concern that is essential to flourishing and self-realisation. A history of intimacy and love forges bonds that contribute in an obvious way to an individual’s identity and sense of worth.

Friendships and family are natural breeding grounds for a loyalty that generates moral commitments. These relationships play such a central role in a good life that any moral philosophy that tries to tell us we ought not to be loyal to family and friends reduces itself to absurdity. Even Singer admits to an irresistible propensity to favour the members of his own family. But these relations, good as they often are, have their moral hazards. People who care deeply for friends and family members are exploitable. The desire to help them can subvert processes that are supposed to be impartial and fair to everyone. Kleinig thinks that these hazards can be lessened, if not entirely avoided, by putting limitations on loyalty. People should choose their friends carefully. The study of loyalty, he says, is a study of the ties that should bind.

People should also put limits on what they are prepared to do for each other. They should never take leave of their moral judgement. A person should be ready to visit her friend in hospital or to help her move house, but she should draw a line at helping her to dispose of a body. Parents should make sacrifices to ensure that their children get a good start in life but they should not bribe a judge for their sake. No one can be blamed for having a special regard for their friends and family members, but it is not wrong for Singer to insist that we ought to do less for friends and family and more for impoverished strangers.

The demands of loyalty should always be open to criticism. According to Kleinig, this applies even to a person’s relation to God. As a test of loyalty, the God of the Old Testament asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Kleinig thinks that Abraham was justified in complying with God’s demand – not because God’s commands should be unconditionally obeyed but because he had good reason to believe that God would not allow Isaac to die. Because God had always shown loyalty to Abraham and his family, Abraham was justified in trusting in the goodness of God. Whether this reasoning exonerates either of them, though, is open to doubt.

Kleinig admits that recognising loyalty as a virtue makes moral life complicated. We cannot satisfy the demands of loyalty by following general moral rules or subscribing to Singer’s utilitarianism. Life and literature is full of examples of people who face a conflict of loyalties or a conflict between their duties to friends and family and more general moral requirements. Kleinig does not think that a moral philosopher can tell us how to resolve these moral dilemmas. Ultimately, we must fall back on our own good judgement.

Loyalty becomes more open to question when it motivates behaviour in organisations or when it is manifested as nationalism or patriotism. People do often identify with their corporation, church, political party, nation or state and Kleinig accepts that these identifications, and the loyalty they demand, are often legitimate. Indeed he thinks that loyalty to a state – providing it is liberal and democratic – is a moral requirement. But this argument seems problematic. It’s true that a person without friends is not likely to live a good life, and family relations play an important role in human existence. But people can surely flourish without identifying with their company, their church, their nation or their state. Moreover, criticisms of loyalty are more cogent when applied to relationships with corporations, states or other powerful organisations, where the moral hazards that attend loyalty are more likely to lead to seriously bad consequences.

We don’t have to look very far to find manifestations of the bad consequences of organisational loyalty. One reason why child molesters in the Catholic Church were able to get away with their crimes is because their deeds were ignored or kept secret by superiors who were acting out of loyalty to the church or to fellow priests. Loyalty encouraged them not only to cover up wrongdoing but also to treat the demands of victims as threats to the reputation or finances of the church. Whistleblowers are often reviled and punished because their superiors, and even their fellow workers, regard their revelations, however much in the public interest, as a betrayal of the loyalty that employees are supposed to owe to their corporation.

Loyalty in organisational contexts also threatens to get in the way of the rational judgements that ought to govern our relations with organisations. Unlike humans, organisations are not valuable in their own right. They exist to serve a function – a corporation to make a profit for its shareholders or provide a useful service, churches to provide spiritual sustenance as well as other goods, states to protect the lives, freedoms and wellbeing of citizens. Whether these organisations are good or bad depends on how well they fulfil these functions while satisfying legal and moral requirements. Members must critically assess the behaviour of their organisations and reform them if necessary. But if people identify with their organisation and regard their relationship to it as good in itself then they are not likely to be critical of the way it operates or to pay much attention to the complaints of outsiders. Loyalty seems all too likely to get in the way of a necessary critical perspective.

Kleinig doesn’t think that loyalty is incompatible with a critical stance. Good friends should be prepared to admonish each other for bad behaviour, he says, and the patriot should take to heart the words of Carl Schurz: “Our country, right or wrong: when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.” Kleinig traces the historical development of a “loyal opposition” to ensure that governments always face criticism.

But the fact remains that loyalty, as Kleinig has so far presented it, works against the critical attitude. If people identify with their association, if they value their relationship with it for its own sake, if the wellbeing of the organisation is bound up with their personal integrity, then members will not be inclined to be critical. They will avoid searching out reasons for criticism and become defensive or hostile when others do. This reaction is especially likely when the group seems to be under threat. Kleinig notes that after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Americans who criticised their nation for its policies or failed to demonstrate patriotism in an approved way risked accusations of disloyalty.

Does this mean that loyalty outside the sphere of friendship and family is a bad thing? If loyalty to organisations takes the same form as loyalty to friends and family then that conclusion is hard to avoid. But when Kleinig argues that loyalty to organisations can be a good thing, his justification takes a different path from the one he follows to justify loyalty in friendship and family relations, and as a result the concept of loyalty takes a new form – one that he doesn’t sufficiently distinguish from loyalty in the context of personal relationships.

His justification for organisational loyalties begins by stressing the social usefulness of some organisations. A well-functioning state, for instance, gives indispensible benefits to citizens. It protects their rights, ensures their wellbeing and gives them means for pursuing their individual goals. But a state can only reliably provide such benefits if its members are committed to sustaining it, even when doing so requires effort and self-sacrifice. The importance of sustaining a valuable organisation like a state is particularly obvious when it is supposed to provide benefits for future as well as present generations.

States are supposed to serve their citizens. Sometimes they subscribe to ideals such as equality, democracy, freedom and human rights. But if sharing ideals or common purposes is all that holds people together, then they are all too likely to be driven apart by disagreements over the interpretation of these ideals or strategies for implementing them. A complex organisation will only be sustained by members who are committed not only to what their group stands for but also to their particular project of achieving it. Their solidarity has to take the form of a commitment to stick by each other and continue to work together through bad times and good, to settle their disagreements and to find ways of living together despite differences. Maintaining a state requires loyalty and Kleinig thinks it can reasonably be demanded from all citizens.

Kleinig’s failure to clearly distinguish loyalty in friendships and family relations from the kind of loyalty that should sustain organisations is a major flaw in his account. Organisational loyalty need not take the form of identification with the group or its members. It could be motivated by cold-blooded reasoning, though it would be unusual for people who share the project of maintaining or building an organisation to fail to develop positive attitudes towards each other. Unlike the loyalty of friendship, organisational loyalty need not, and should not, require participants to value their relationship for its own sake. This kind of loyalty is conditional on the goals of an organisation being achieved or at least achievable; it has to be critical.

Recognising differences between loyalties has implications for where loyalty ought to be invested. Some organisations are unworthy of loyalty because they have evil purposes. Some are not proper objects of loyalty because it is better for their purposes to be served by other motivations. Despite Kleinig’s defence of loyalty to organisations, it does not seem to me that they are suitable objects of loyalty – at least not those that are run for profit. Those who work for a corporation should do their job and not betray its legitimate secrets. In return for an appropriate reward they should dedicate themselves to working for the good of the organisation.

Perhaps employees also have a duty not to undermine the reputation of their corporation without good reason. But they do not have a duty of loyalty. They should not be expected to make sacrifices for the company beyond what they are paid to perform. They should not be expected to stick with the company if they can be better rewarded elsewhere or if they think that the corporation’s objectives can be better fulfilled by another group. Loyalty in the context of a corporation – particularly a business corporation – is a recipe for exploitation, for subversion of the public interest and for silencing those who have a legitimate complaint.

Loyalty, says Kleinig, has a Janus face. The pleasing side of its countenance smiles on deeds that enhance individual existence and maintain social wellbeing. The ugly face reveals bad deeds done for associates and misplaced loyalty to improper objects. Organisational loyalties, even when justified, compound the moral hazards of loyalty by requiring a balancing act between faithfulness to the purposes an organisation is supposed to achieve and loyalty to the associates who work together to maintain it. If its members become disillusioned with progress or find themselves in disagreement, too much of an emphasis on ideals can destroy an organisation. And too much loyalty to associates can cause members to lose contact with moral standards that the organisation ought to fulfil.

Dealing with this problem is a perennial task for any social order. Its solution cannot be left to the good sense that Kleinig recommends for putting limits on personal loyalties. It requires institutional remedies. Kleinig discusses how the existence of a “loyal opposition” ensures that criticism has a place in politics. But experience shows that the rituals of oppositional politics are not always a sufficient check on uncritical loyalty.

Barbara Ehrenreich thinks that dissent, rebellion and “all-round hell-raising” are the true duty of patriots. The same could be said about any institutional loyalty – whether to a church, a political party, a university or a trade union. The difficulty is to make sure that loyal hell-raisers have a respected place in their organisation. •

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Terry Eagleton, distinguished professor of literature at the University of Lancaster, is a literary theorist, a cultural critic and an opponent of the “new atheism” of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. He opposes their views not because he wants to defend religion but because he thinks their position shows a lack of understanding of human psychology and society. Atheism, he says in his new book Culture and the Death of God, is not as easy as it looks. Though we live in a secular culture that seems to have little use for religion, we have not succeeded in killing off God.

Religion, Eagleton argues, fulfils two important functions. It not only sustains individual lives by providing meaning and values that transcend mundane existence; it has also provided the glue that holds societies together by motivating people to accept the sacrifices required by morality and political life. This was why rulers of eighteenth-century Europe feared the spread of irreligious doctrines: fears that translate in modern times into a concern about how a society driven by individual self-interest can hold itself together without some unifying force. Religion was able to fulfil these functions, Eagleton thinks, because it had the ability to appeal to rich and poor, to members of the intellectual elite and to uneducated people. It combined abstruse theory with imagery and ritual, intellectual rigour with an appeal to the senses.

“The history of the modern age is among other things the search for a viceroy for God,” writes Eagleton. But nothing has succeeded in filling the role: not reason, nature, spirit, art, imagination or even culture.

The Enlightenment failed to provide a substitute for religion because of the dry, abstract nature of its principles. As Eagleton puts it, “Reason cannot offer us ecstatic fulfilment, a sense of community or wipe away the tears of those who mourn.” Indeed, most Enlightenment thinkers had no intention of disturbing the faith of the masses.

Hegel, Schelling and other Idealists recognised the failings of the Enlightenment and attempted to find an absolute grounding for existence and human freedom in a free, harmonious, transcendent subjectivity. But their abstractions had no hope of filling the gap left by a loss of religious belief. For a time, art was given the task of connecting humanity with transcendent value. Romantics saw Nature or the imagination as a source of comfort, spirituality and revelation. But art appreciation is as remote from the masses as Enlightenment reason. Nature is cruel and the imagination can create horrors.

The most plausible substitute for religion, according to Eagleton, was culture as a form of cultivation that requires spiritual inwardness as well as respect for tradition. But it, too, failed in its ability to reach down from the lofty heights inhabited by an elite to the rest of the populace.

Eagleton’s complaint against all these attempts to provide a substitute for God is that they failed to motivate the masses. The exception is nationalism, and Eagleton makes too little of its ability to unify people and motivate them to care about the fate of each other. In this respect nationalism seems a better candidate than culture as a substitute for religion. It has been responsible for evil as well as good, but so too has religion.

A more basic reason why modern thought has failed to kill off God, in Eagleton’s view, is that it has taken over the trappings, doctrines and aims of religion and merely restated them in a secular form. Enlightenment thinkers and idealists, like religious ideologues, aimed to provide a universal foundation for morality and the law. Nationalism has its rituals and its saints in the form of national heroes. Art, nature and culture are supposed to introduce us to transcendent values.

Eagleton is following in the footsteps of Nietzsche, who was, he says, one of the few to recognise that the death of God also requires the death of morality and spiritual transcendence. But Eagleton points out that even Nietzsche failed to appreciate the implications of his own philosophy when he proclaimed the coming of the Overman as the superseder of craven, guilt-ridden Man.

Only postmodernism has truly brought about the death of God. A philosophy that doesn’t need or want unequivocal truths, that is not in search of foundations and has no truck with the self as a source of meaning, has no need for God or any substitute. But God refuses to stay dead. The needs that religion fulfilled have not gone away. The resurgence of religious fundamentalism, the war against terrorism as well as the divisive tendencies of consumer capitalism are driving people back to a search for the values and certainties that religion provided.

EAGLETON performs this march through the history of Western culture with verve and style. He is knowledgeable about literature as well as philosophy and he moves with ease from Coleridge to Fichte and from T.S. Eliot to Edmund Burke. He is the master of the pungent phrase and the witty aphorism. Sometimes he is inconsistent and sometimes he is unfair to the thinkers he discusses. Rushed along by his energetic prose, though, readers are not likely to mind all that much.

Eagleton is no fan of postmodernism and he doesn’t applaud its annihilation of religion. Though his purpose is not to defend religion or to offer a solution to our predicament, he makes a few gestures in the direction he thinks we must go to dissolve the forms of life that produce a need for religion. We need a morality that begins with the human body and makes a connection with lived experience. We need a religion that takes seriously the message of Christ and his solidarity with the poor and the oppressed.

There is nothing new about these ideas. Romanticism also emphasised the body and lived experiences. Philosophers since the Enlightenment believed that morality ought to be grounded in human needs and experiences. Many reformers and revolutionaries have taken Christ’s example to heart. These recycled materials seem a poor starting point for a radical change of consciousness and society.

Eagleton’s tentative prescriptions reveal an underlying tension. He is drawn towards the Marxist idea that the need for religion, and the reason for God’s refusal to die, is found in the nature of capitalist society rather than in the inadequacies of philosophy or the needs of the human heart. He emphasises the deficits of consumer capitalism: its sterility, its encouragement of a volatile and restless subjectivity that lacks firm beliefs or grounding convictions. Because “too much doctrine is bad for consumption,” postmodernism is the philosophy that suits it.

But postmodernism is not enough to do away with the deficit. Hence the resurgence of religion and extreme ideologies. This analysis suggests that a better society (though what form it would take is not clear) would eliminate the need for religion or any substitute. Social revolution, not philosophy, is needed to bring about the death of God. But Eagleton never says this because he is well aware that religion cannot be reduced to its social functions and that the quest for a basis for morality and the values required for social and political life is an enterprise that has to be taken seriously.

Is it true that this quest has discovered no substitute for God? In following Nietzsche down the path of nihilism Eagleton is predisposed to regard any pursuit of ideals, any adherence to an ideology, any appeal to moral values as religion in disguise. He criticises John Gray for this kind of reductionism, but he engages in it himself when he claims that philosophers who attempt to justify universal values are promoting religion in another guise.

To think that truth is important, to defend human rights, or to think that we have a duty to help the poor and oppressed is not the same as having a religion. One of the differences is the way these secular beliefs are justified and held. Religious prescriptions ultimately rest on an interpretation of scriptures as the word of God or the teachings of religious authorities. Secular morality and values are justified by appeal to needs or sympathies, communal loyalties or respect for human individuals (or living things or nature). Values can be dogmatically held and Eagleton is right to point out that some philosophers believed that reason could deliver indubitable moral principles. But for the most part we have become accustomed to uncertainty and to moral beliefs supported only by the best reasons we can come up with.

Uncertainty means that there truly is no substitute for religion. There is no secular doctrine that can do what religion was supposed to do: unite us all under the umbrella of a faith, provide us with unquestionable moral rules, tell us our place in the world, give us a meaning for our existence and a worldview that brings together facts and values, empirical laws and divine will. But then religion never really did those things – not even in Christian Europe. There were always people with different faiths or different interpretations of them. There were always dissenters and heretics. There were always doubts about the Christian story of creation, resurrection and redemption. Secularism merely added to or amplified challenges that already existed.

A faith that everyone subscribes to is not a possible or desirable objective – especially in a multicultural society that contains people of many different beliefs, as well as atheists and agnostics. It is a recipe for persecution and exclusion. This is one thing postmodernists got right.

Does it really matter that there is no secular substitute for God? Eagleton seems to assume that a substitute fails if it cannot do everything that religion did (and by religion he seems to have Catholicism mostly in mind). But it is more plausible to suppose that most of us find reasons for being moral and cooperating with others, and ways of finding life meaningful, by cobbling together all sorts of beliefs, ideals and emotional propensities: our sympathy for others, our ability to find value in nature, art or relations with others, our connection to our children and grandchildren, our work, our love of country or attachment to a community, and so forth. Religion, for those who have it, is part of the mix.

Eagleton sees the history of the modern age as a search for a viceroy for God. But this search, and the problem that gave rise to it, are part of a deeper history that sometimes comes to the surface in his account. The modern age is defined by the rise of science and the split it caused between a material world determined by the laws of nature and qualities we associate with mind and spirit: thought, free will, value and spirituality. Reconciling spirit and matter, determinism and free will, or reducing one to the other, has been the principal task of modern philosophy and theology. Eliminating or reconfiguring God is just part of that job.

Eagleton’s approach to modern history is influenced by his background in literature and cultural studies. His interest is not so much in philosophical and theological theories as in their relation to society and culture. This causes him to misread the intent of some of the thinkers he discusses. They were not, for the most part, in the business of providing a substitute for all of the things that religion has done. Nor were they trying to sell a doctrine to uneducated people. But he is right to emphasise that religion has played an important role in Western societies and that its influence is by no means a thing of the past. His perspective makes him one of the most interesting of recent writers who have turned their attention to a phenomenon that many secular thinkers would prefer to ignore: the persistence of religious ideas in political life and culture. •

Culture and the Death of God
By Terry Eagleton | Yale University Press | $34.95

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The treatment of asylum seekers is an example of how emotions can be managed for a questionable political purpose. Against their power to direct our attitudes and behaviour, an appeal to human rights principles or to our international obligations is relatively powerless.

In Political Emotions, one of Martha Nussbaum’s aims is to explain why emotions matter in political life. Theorists who ignore them or dismiss them as irrational outbursts of feeling fail to understand the forces that encourage or undermine just relations, that draw people in a society together or drive them apart, that encourage inclusion or incite prejudice.

In this and her previous writings Nussbaum, a leading American philosopher, presents emotions as appraisals of the world coming from people’s ideas of what is important to them. Our emotional life is influenced by our animal natures as well as our culture and our own experiences. While Nussbaum thinks that a lot can be learned about human emotions by studying animals, her argument hinges on the fact that humans are uniquely capable of extending compassion and love beyond the confines of their immediate relationships. And humans are also capable of “radical evil”: of deliberate cruelty towards others. Nussbaum believes that overcoming our tendencies to evil and developing our potential for inclusive love is the key to a just society.

Advocating love as an underpinning for justice is likely to strike many readers as a strange or unrealistic proposition. Love, as we usually think of it, is a selective emotion. We love some people and not others. We don’t love strangers or people with uncongenial characteristics. An undiscriminating love for our fellow citizens seems not only too much to ask. Surely it also offends against the very idea of love?

This puzzling aspect of Nussbaum’s position is explained by her view of emotions as appraisals rather than feelings. Love for her is not necessarily, or even normally, a passion. Nor is it by nature exclusive. Her idea of love is probably best understood as augmented respect for others. It involves a positive orientation toward other individuals, a predisposition to be understanding and compassionate, to be moved by their joys and sorrows, to make an effort to appreciate their points of view, and to be motivated to contribute to their wellbeing. Love in this sense is capable, at least in principle, of indefinite extension. Nussbaum thinks that it can be extended to include all of our fellow citizens and, beyond that, all of humanity.

To explain what makes love in this form possible, and to explore where our propensity for evil comes from, Nussbaum relies on the theory of child development of psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott. Unlike most animal young, babies do not have the ability to satisfy their own needs. Vulnerability and children’s ways of dealing with it are central to psychological development. Narcissism and the urge to control their environment in order to satisfy their needs alternates with love for those who care for them and with wonder at the world around them. As the child develops, the urge to control others continues to vie with the outward directed emotion of love. Some never transcend their narcissism, and even those who do can lapse into a condition where disgust, fear or envy governs their relation to others. The existence of a just society, according to Nussbaum, depends on promoting our tendency to love and curbing our urge to dominate and exclude. Her aim is to explain how a society can do this.

The precursors of her project were philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century who wondered how liberal democracies could be held together without the binding force of monarchy and traditional religion. Auguste Comte, for example, thought that only a prescribed, state-regulated “religion of humanity” could do the job. The issue of how a liberal society can hold itself together has resurfaced in the context of strains produced by ethnic and religious diversity and polarised politics. In some countries these tensions threaten the very existence or effectiveness of democratic government. Nussbaum doesn’t directly address these problems but they hover in the background of her discussion.

She doesn’t approve of Comte’s autocratic prescriptions. She wants to navigate a path between the rocky jaws of Scylla – a dependence on communalism and homogeneity – and the watery grave of Charybdis – a reliance on unmotivating abstract principles. She wants a form of patriotism that allows citizens freedom to criticise and to live and worship according to their values. But she also wants a bond strong enough between citizens so that they are willing to make sacrifices for each other’s sake. She wants the togetherness of patriotism without exclusion of groups that don’t fit the national stereotype. She wants people to love their nation without distrusting or denigrating foreigners. She wants a form of patriotism that does not exclude cosmopolitanism. Finding the route between the perils of pernicious nationalism and watery liberalism depends, in her view, on our ability to love.

Her explanation of why love matters for justice is partly carried by philosophical argument. She begins by outlining the kind of liberal democratic society she favours. This is a society that values individual liberty and a culture of criticism. It insists on the equal worth of all individuals, on equal opportunities and on equality before the law. It does not subscribe to a particular view about the good life but encourages and encompasses many different conceptions of the good. Liberty is an important value but so is equality. The society she favours is a welfare state – one that ensures that all individuals have sufficient resources to live a decent life. Like John Rawls, whose view of justice she subscribes to, she assumes the existence of capitalism and the economic inequalities that it inevitably produces. In her conception of a just society, inequalities are tempered by a system of redistribution that favours the least well-off.

Political philosophers, she claims, have not attended sufficiently to the problem of how individuals can be motivated to establish and maintain such a society. Principles of justice, a just constitution and just institutions, she argues, are not sufficient to withstand the destabilising forces of greed and envy or the divisiveness and exclusion that can result from our natural propensities to fear and disgust. Even less can abstract principles and ideals motivate us to overcome the problems of a society that is far from perfectly just.

PEOPLE are not reliably motivated by abstract principles. A dedication to the principle that all men are created equal did not prevent segregation in the American South. A commitment to equality before the law and a belief in a “fair go” for all individuals has not prevented discrimination against Indigenous Australians. Widespread support of human rights has not prevented bad treatment of asylum seekers. Yet Nussbaum’s attempt to use love to fill the gap between liberal democratic principles and the motivations of citizens seems both puzzling and implausible.

It is puzzling because it is far from clear how love, even as she conceives it, supports a democratic society of equals. Compassion and sympathy can be a matter of noblesse oblige. But even if it is the appropriate emotion for a democratic culture the problem remains of explaining how citizens can be encouraged to love each other when so many things – differences of race, culture, class and ideology – drive them apart.

True to her own theory, Nussbaum does not depend on philosophical argument to make persuasive her account of love and its role in politics. Much of that work is done by examples, fictional and real, of loving relationships and the means leaders have used to encourage an inclusive love of country and its people.

She opens her discussion with a compelling account of how Mozart and his librettist in Marriage of Figaro contrasted the struggle for ascendency between the count and Figaro with the playful openness and equality in the relations between Susanna, the countess and their co-conspirator, Cherubino. At the end of the opera the feminine approach to love triumphs. The count is humbled and asks forgiveness; the countess generously gives it. Susanna and Figaro are reconciled in love. The contest for domination is over; former antagonists unite on equal terms and join in a happy, playful celebration.

This is a picture of what Nussbaum thinks love ought to be like. It ought to be inclusive, uncompetitive, accepting and playful. It ought to encourage equal relationships. But can it be produced in a political context? Her way of answering this question is to focus on moments of history when leaders were able to make an effective appeal to what Abraham Lincoln once described as “the better angels of our nature.”

One of these moments was Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which used the occasion of mourning for those killed during the civil war to reinterpret American history in an inclusive way and to rededicate the American people to the task of building a democratic union. Another was Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech, which is uncompromising in its commitment to racial equality but at the same time rejects hatred and violence and appeals to the patriotic sentiments of both black and white people.

One of the virtues of Nussbaum’s discussion is that she doesn’t draw her examples only from America or other first world countries. Some of her most vivid illustrations of the unifying force of love in politics come from the history of India. They include Gandhi’s symbolic gestures of inclusion and his appeal to the humanity of his opponents, and Nehru’s speech on the occasion of Indian independence, looking forward to a struggle of Indians to build together a prosperous and free nation.

These invitations to participate in a struggle for a just society are deeply moving. But the obvious problem with Nussbaum’s demanding conception of love is that it is likely to be a temporary accomplishment. We know that the count will go back to his philandering ways and that he and Figaro will soon resume their adversarial positions. Lincoln’s generosity and appeal to a common cause did not prevent bad blood between North and South or the institution of racial segregation in the South. Nehru’s appeal to unity has not prevented antagonism between religious groups.

Another problem is that Nussbaum’s account of how love enters politics seems to concentrate overly much on the good (or bad) example of leaders. This emphasis leaves out of consideration one of the factors that many regard as critical: the influence of the structure of a society, its institutions and practices, on the attitudes and propensities of its citizens. Nussbaum rejects the libertarian conception of society, but she pays little attention to the ways in which capitalist relations or other structural features might hinder (or help) the creation of a society united by the emotion of love.

A further problem with her emphasis on leadership is that it doesn’t give sufficient credit to the protest and grassroots movements that often do the heavy work of changing social attitudes. Kevin Rudd’s apology to stolen generations was one of the few moments in recent Australian history when a leader presented the kind of reconciliatory message of inclusion and nation-building that Nussbaum admires. His speech had a positive impact on Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians alike. But his speech resonated with so many people because the way had been prepared for its reception by protests of Indigenous Australians, the support they got from many non-Indigenous Australians, local gestures of reconciliation, the Aboriginal tent embassy, “sorry books” signed by thousands of Australians, and many other actions calling attention to injustices and promoting reconciliation.

In her account of means for promoting an inclusive patriotism Nussbaum doesn’t depend on good leadership alone. Her book contains an inspiring discussion of how the design of monuments, the layout of public parks, the existence of public festivals, poetry and music can make a contribution. The experiences that encourage an inclusive love among citizens can be part of everyday life and not just the product of a moment in history.

Just the same, the reader is likely to be left with the impression that the forces that drive us apart are stronger and more ubiquitous than those that draw us together as citizens of a diverse nation. An experience of democratic citizenship in a public park is not likely to do much to counter the hierarchies and competition that play so much of a role in the rest of our lives.

Nevertheless progress toward a more just society is possible. Most Australians have learned how to live in a multicultural society. For the most part we are willing to appreciate the contributions, points of view and ways of life of people of different cultures. Despite occasional anxiety about what it means to be an Australian, we generally accept that there are many ways of being one. Despite continuing expressions of racism, most white Australians think that Indigenous Australians and Indigenous culture have an important place in the nation and they accept a responsibility to overcome disadvantages that Indigenous Australians continue to suffer.

What caused these changes is a matter of debate. Nussbaum assumes that each nation has to find its own way, and doesn’t provide any blueprints for reform. But she rightly emphasises that achievements cannot be taken for granted. Inclusive love even in an imperfect form is an accomplishment that requires continual labour of governments and citizens. It did not take much to unleash negative attitudes toward asylum seekers. One of the great virtues of Nussbaum’s book is that she forces us to take seriously the emotions that can bind people together or drive them apart – even in a stable and prosperous democratic society. •

The post Between pernicious nationalism and watery liberalism appeared first on Inside Story.

Luckily it was a beautiful, clear winter’s day, perfect for driving – and therefore perfect for thinking. I swept down the highway, aware of the speed limit but anxious about being late. I became conscious of my mind and its incessant wandering and jump-cutting. Associations bred thoughts, which resulted in feelings, which then changed into something else again.

Look: a dead fox by the side of the road. “Not so clever now, eh, Mr Fox?” I thought. When did I see Fantastic Mr Fox? Was George Clooney in that? Look at that, another dead fox. Two in just two… Watch out, you’re nudging 120 again… A detour through Goulburn because of a truck crash – bugger, bound to be late now. Oh, the Big Merino. I went on a school excursion there when I was eleven – thought it had closed down.

Is this really my consciousness in action, all over the place like a maggot on a hot chop, I asked myself. (Phew, the Federal Highway at last, almost there!) Well, yes, I guess it is.

And then I was skirting the edge of Lake George. I focused on a single memory. My father’s work as a travelling salesman took him to Canberra along this road many, many times and he once told me something interesting about Lake George.

Sometimes, he said, it’s full, and sometimes it’s largely empty. I looked across the vast expanse of grass that is Lake George today, towards the wind farm far on the other side. The water rises and falls, my father used to tell me, but no one knows where it comes from or where it goes; it’s all a bit of a mystery. There were theories, of course – high evaporation rates might lead to sudden drops in the lake’s depth; maybe hidden aquifers disperse it into the Yass River. But no one really knew for sure. At least that’s how he told it. It sounded a bit like the study of consciousness.

“WHEN I was ten, I got glasses for the first time because I was short-sighted in one eye. The whole world moved into 3D; it suddenly got somehow deeper.”

David Chalmers, professor of philosophy and director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, is telling me about the first time he really became aware of the problem of consciousness. “Suddenly I had binocular vision and the world just popped out. And I thought, what the hell is going on here?”

The young Chalmers knew enough to realise that there was a scientific explanation for what he was experiencing. Yet he felt – intuitively – that there was more here than met the eye. Literally. “Why does it feel like this? From the inside? Why does it sort of just pop out, subjectively?”

Although he didn’t realise it at the time, Chalmers had discovered the question that would still dominate his intellectual life nearly forty years later. “How does all that objective stuff – the processing of the brain that you might understand from a mechanical point of view – how does that produce subjective experience?” And nobody, says Chalmers, really knows the answer.

The adolescent Chalmers was a self-described “science geek,” the nerdy kid who read books like Douglas Hofstadter’s bestseller on the mysteries of cognitive science, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. By the time he got to Adelaide University he was well on his way to a career as a mathematician.

But the interest in philosophy, particularly the philosophy of the mind, lingered. “You scratch a scientist and you’ll find a philosopher,” he says. “Get them in the pub and give them a few drinks and pretty soon the physicists who’ve been talking about their experiments will be asking, What does it all mean? What is time? How does the mind work?”

Chalmers did very well at university – except in the one philosophy subject he took. He didn’t fail, but he didn’t excel at it either. Then he got a Rhodes Scholarship and went to Oxford in 1987 to do a doctorate in mathematics. But his heart wasn’t in it.

He had come to the view that the frontiers of mathematics had already been thoroughly explored. “There are big problems in maths, but they’re not fundamental problems. The most fundamental but unanswered questions in science were to do with the mind.” He wanted to do philosophy and he wanted to study consciousness.

So a young man with a brilliant track record in one subject decided to follow his passion and start almost from scratch in another tough field of intellectual endeavour. And then of course he had to tell his parents.

It was, he says now, a bit of a difficult time. “At one point my Dad said, Don’t tell me you’re going to spend your life looking for the soul? And I said, Yep, that’s pretty much it. But now I think he’s made his peace with that decision.”

When Chalmers finally decided it was philosophy or bust, he looked into using his Rhodes Scholarship to do an undergraduate degree in the discipline. “Oh, no – you don’t want to do that,” he was told. “You should go straight into the graduate program.” Chalmers was a little taken aback: “What kind of Mickey Mouse field is this?” He remembers thinking that in maths it would be “totally impossible” to slip into a discipline in this way.

Oxford philosophy, he soon discovered, was not his cup of tea. A bit conservative, a bit too concerned with language, and not fascinated enough by the questions that fascinated him. So he wrote to the man whose book had made such an impression on him as a teenager. And Douglas Hofstadter wrote back to him, and said he should come to Indiana University. Chalmers’s first thought was: “Where’s Indiana?” And his second was: “When can I get there?”

When he finally arrived at Hofstadter’s Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition to research his PhD in 1989, he discovered three things. He had found his life’s work. He had joined the community of scholars he needed to pursue it. And, to top it all off, he had arrived at one of the world’s pre-eminent research centres devoted to the study of consciousness just as interest in the area was reawakening all around the world and across a number of disciplines. His timing was perfect.

After laying dormant for a good part of the twentieth century, it’s difficult to say exactly why the problem of consciousness took off in the early 1990s. But there were some key developments around this time.

The development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI, and other brain scan technologies revolutionised the study of neuroscience in the early 1990s. And when the functional MRI came on the scene a little later, scientists had the ability for the first time to map the brain and its processes as they occurred. They could watch as different parts of the brain responded to external stimuli. They could observe the neural correlates for speech, or vision or fear. So could neuroscientists armed with an MRI machine unlock the mystery of consciousness?

Suddenly, consciousness was cool and people wanted to talk about it. At about the same time renowned scientists started to take a keen interest in speculating about consciousness. Francis Crick – one of the discoverers of DNA – published The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul and declared that “consciousness is now largely a scientific problem.” A little while later the American philosopher Daniel Dennett entered the arena with a book titled simply, Consciousness Explained.

So there it was: consciousness was in plain sight, its understanding easily within our grasp. David Chalmers wasn’t so sure.

THE MAN who answers my knock on his front door is tall, with long, greying hair. He famously favours bright T-shirts; today it’s an Aboriginal design in red and yellow. He might be one of Australia’s leading philosophers, but to me he looks like the keyboardist from a band that was big in the eighties.

Chalmers lives in a large, modern brick house surrounded by bush in the hills above Queanbeyan. It has a pool and a beautiful outlook. I ask him why a man who lives alone needs such a big place. He explains it’s because of the guests. Chalmers is always entertaining philosophers at his home, from visiting professors to questing postdoctoral students; he’s the sort of philosopher who loves a good party almost as much as he likes a good paradox. His website contains everything from the most abstruse of his scholarly papers to a collection of jokes about philosophers, as well as an archive of photos commemorating the many conferences and gatherings of philosophers he attends each year.

But to get the work done he leads a sort of double life: alternately monkish and convivial. Chalmers maintains two studies in his house. In one he accesses the internet and deals with the myriad emails his life as a philosopher generates. “Philosophy is a very interactive subject,” he explains. “We talk to each other, we argue, we bounce ideas around.”

But his other study is not connected to the world; it’s for the hard work, a place where he can’t be distracted by the Net or phone calls. Sometimes he hunkers down here for several days at a time, working long hours, alone and focused, only emerging for a walk in the bush or meals before heading back to his desk.

Chalmers has always thrived on hard work and sociability. When he got to Indiana in 1989 he discovered he was working among artificial intelligence experts, psychologists and other philosophers. The philosophy of the mind was in foment at the time and he had landed in a place where it dominated discussion. He submitted his doctorate by 1993. And the next year he was invited to give a paper at the first “Towards a Science of Consciousness” conference, which was held in Tucson, Arizona. “I was a nobody then, but they happened to put me in the first session, and I gave this talk about the problems of consciousness,” he says.

The young Australian explained that consciousness could be divided into two types of problems: Easy and Hard. And his talk proved to be a bit of a hit. “Everyone was saying, Oh, yeah, the Hard Problem, he nailed it!” He was invited to contribute an article to Scientific American, which was titled “The Puzzle of Conscious Experience.” And his thesis was published as a book called The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.

I suggest it was a musician’s first number one single, and Chalmers agrees. “After the first hit single, you’ve got to worry about the follow-up album – if the album’s crap, you’re a total one-hit wonder.” Luckily for Chalmers his book did well and his career in philosophy received a hard-won boost.

So what are the Easy and Hard problems in consciousness? The Easy problems are the things we know science can explain. We know from science how our eyes work, for example. Photons strike your retina, and electrical signals pass along your optic nerve to the different parts of your brain to do with visual perception. And – voilà! – you have seen the colour red. But the Hard Problem asks: what is your subjective experience of red in this instance? Does redness evoke an emotion or memory; is your red the same as my red; did red alter your private mental life and how did it do this?

According to Chalmers, the Hard Problem is a major sticking point in our understanding of consciousness. Knowing more and more about the science underlying the brain’s function gets us no closer to understanding the subjective nature of experience: “What [does] it feel like from the inside; why does it feel like anything; and how can we explain that?” The core of the Hard Problem, he says, “is a simple thing like a feeling of pain.” To demonstrate, he slaps his arm with a sharp thwack. “Oh boy, why did it feel like that?”

The Easy Problems are not trivial, of course. Mapping the brain in all its complexity is an enormous scientific challenge, but the Hard Problem is where the mystery of consciousness lies.

“We’ve got this great chain of explanation,” Chalmers says. “Physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains some aspects of psychology, but then where does consciousness fit in? There’s this big gap between all that physical stuff and consciousness. So one of the things I’ve tried to argue – in principle – is that all that physical stuff doesn’t add up to an explanation of consciousness. So you’ve got your physical fundamentals – space, and time, and mass, and charge. They explain a lot of stuff, but they don’t explain consciousness.”

Ultimately his argument leads Chalmers to believe that consciousness may itself be a fundamental in the universe, just like mass or time. And, he assures me, it’s not such a far-fetched idea. Back in the nineteenth century the phenomena of electromagnetism could not be explained in terms of existing principles. So science shifted the electromagnetic charge over into its own box and called it a new fundamental entity, with its own laws.

Maybe, Chalmers conjectures, consciousness should be thought of in the same way. And maybe, therefore, it’s more widespread than we think. It could be in many things: apes, dogs, butterflies. To some this might all sound a bit Buddhist, but has anyone got a decisively better idea? Not really. For the moment, consciousness remains pleasingly ineffable and attractively puzzling.

AFTER a succession of academic posts at several prestigious universities in the United States, Chalmers returned to Australia in 2004 as a Federation Fellow. He’s never regretted it. As he looks out on the gum trees surrounding his house he tells me Australia is home, and the ANU is a great place to work, with a wonderful reputation for philosophy. And the discipline, as ever, grips his imagination.

“Philosophy is another way of seeing the connections among things and really just trying to dig deep to the foundations of what’s going on,” he says, warming to his theme. “You ask: why does the apple fall? Ah, the laws of motion. But why the laws of motion? Ah, I don’t know. Pretty soon you’re doing philosophy… It is a frustrating business some of the time, and it’s hard, but I still can’t believe they pay me to do it.”

His next book is called Constructing the World and is based on the John Locke lectures, which he gave last year in Oxford. He’s obviously excited about this work.

“When I first got into philosophy I just wanted to think about the mind and consciousness, I didn’t care so much about language or metaphysics,” he says towards the end of our conversation. “But it turns out if you think about consciousness, you’ve got to think about the structure of reality as well. What are the fundamental building blocks of reality? And pretty soon, that’s metaphysics. You have to think about language. What are the words we use to describe consciousness, or to describe reality? How do you put those together?”

Many years ago now, when he was not yet thirty and still working on the book that made his reputation, Chalmers had dinner at a Chinese restaurant. At the end of the meal, he cracked open his fortune cookie and the little slip of paper declared: “Your life will be full of delightful mysteries.”

I’m not a philosopher, of course, but I think it might just be a defensible description of David Chalmers’s reality. •

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