Disunity is death
The Hon John Anderson AO delivered the 2020 John Howard Lecture, speaking about why identity politics is tearing us apart.
Thank you so much, Nick Cater and your team for having me tonight at this great annual event, and allowing me to say a few things.
John, thank you very much for your kind words, which I appreciate very much indeed.
I often pinch myself and ask was I really so fortunate as to have served with two men of a character and ability, and all-around solidarity and character as Peter Costello and John Howard in what I still believe was a very good Government - two men who passionately believed in the importance of good public policy for the nation they, and I, are so deeply committed to.
It fell to me this year to be the raconteur in Canberra at the National Archives of Australia as they prepare for the release of the 2000 Cabinet Papers on 1 January. The deal is that if quite a few select members of the media are given embargoed copies there’s an official historian who has said nice things about the depth and capability of the government that you headed up; a couple things she takes issue with, which I dare say you’ll learn about on the 1st of January.
That was the year of the Olympics, of course, and amongst other things, we had quite a debate in Cabinet about how to protect the name of a man most of us revere, you in particular: Donald Bradman. Everybody wanted to attach their name to the tacky piece of merchandise they wanted to sell during the Olympics, and we had quite the discussion about it. I got to thinking, and I’d just had a wander through the Bradman Museum, about the way in which you, John, reflected so well the qualities that we remember him for - quite apart from his sportsmanship - in that he was so modest in victory, gracious in defeat. But there was something else. Bradman was astonishingly intentional, and determined to pursue whatever it was in his life that he was focused on at any given time.
John Howard understood deeply that a major task for a democratic leader is to foster unity and a common sense of purpose and destiny wherever possible among the people being led. The nation in the end is no more and no less than the sum total of the individuals who make it up, and leading a democratic nation forward is only possible to the extent that trust and cooperation, and a commitment to the broader good as well as one’s own self-interests are extant in the people.
John was a leader who clearly held a strong set of convictions about where he thought the country should be going. He was able to convey that vision through skilled and patient advocacy, and he had about him the personal qualities necessary to persuade people to work with him to achieve those ends.
He was also known to express the view that the things that unite us are far stronger and more durable and enduring than the things which divide us.
I think all of us here tonight would share with him a deep love of liberal democracy, which secures the four freedoms spoken of by Franklin Roosevelt and our own Bob Menzies - notably from two sides of the centre divide:
Freedom of speech
Freedom of worship
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear
The vigorous pursuit and defence of these freedoms unquestionably aids the journey towards a flourishing and harmonious society, and indeed surely constitutes the reasons that so many have been attracted to the West itself and to the Western model.
Yet my friends, I think we all share a deep concern that those elites who hold the bulk of the microphones and, it seems the cultural heft in the West today, seem determined to divide us - not unite us - at every turn.
We are, it seems, at war with one another: men versus women, race versus race, and generation against generation.
David Brooks, author of another book I would recommend, if you've not read it, The Road to Character, describes the West as more polarised, tribalised, and distrustful than ever, and makes the powerful argument that these now constitute our primary political problem because they make it increasingly difficult to develop and implement good public policy on all the major challenges that confront us.
Many people point to the advent of social media, and its power in the modern political pantheon, but in reality of course it serves mainly as an amplifier for these underlying attitudes and the way in which people behave. A very powerful amplifier, but not so much the core problem as one which provides a means for ever-louder megaphones.
Once, the obstacles to reform and progress were essentially political, where people argued out policies on the basis of evidence and facts and reason, often with great heat but nonetheless on reasonably rational grounds, whereas they are now increasingly cultural. Appeals to the common or greater good based on evidence and reasoned debate fall foul of emotion, the outright denial of evidence all too often, and an unprecedented degree of tribalism.
And indeed the very laws of the land reflect this new tribalism. The never-ending plethora of human rights law and machinery that started in the Whitlam era, well-intentioned as some of it may have been, in reality encourage us to a selfish approach to competing and often conflictual claims to our rights, all too often at the expense of someone else. As Salvatore Babones has said in his book The New Authoritarianism, the right to pursue happiness has somehow transitioned into a right to be happy. And the further we go down the convoluted and legalistic rights-based approach, the more complexities we create and the less we see of simple decent respect for one another and the right to our beliefs, values and our own conscience. All too often self-assured technocrats - the expert class that so clearly think they know what is good for us- decide whose rights will prevail when they compete, and all too often the law and the courts will fall into line.
That respect for one another, even when it has been, for example, simply the begrudging acknowledgment that my neighbour down there is a bit quirky but is entitled to his views even though I don’t like them, has been critical to the success of the Western model.
Yet a frightening “new authoritarianism,” to quote Babones, that rejects our traditional approach to individual dignity and freedom is taking hold.
Niall Ferguson, the eminent economic historian, believes that we are living through the end of 500 years of Western ascendancy. He sees the three greatest threats to the West as being in ascending order: radical Islam, the possibility of miscalculation between the reigning superpower and the rising superpower, but most critically the greatest is the rejection of the history and the legitimacy of our own culture.
And he observes that, if we could recover our own sense of ballast and balance, those other issues would be a very great deal easier to deal with.
Marx famously observed that a people cut off from their history are easily persuaded. Yet we have ensured that we no longer, and our children no longer, understand our own cultural roots. We deny our past achievements and overstate and misrepresent our mistakes to suit modern narratives and modern agendas rather than the truth, and we have lost faith in ourselves - at the very time in which those who wish us ill are full of all conviction, as Yeats had it.
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay have published a book which should be on everyone’s Christmas reading list called Cynical Theories. You can also find a conversation I had with these two people on my website, it went up this afternoon, they are two of the three people who wrote 20 spoof academic papers and put them out to periodicals, and you may recall that 11 of them were published. The one that caught my imagination, if not fancy, was the one that was entitled ‘What We Can Learn About Rape Culture by Observing Canines in Public Places.’ And it was published in a serious journal!
But two of those remarkable people have put this book together. Steven Pinker, no less, has written of it. Many people are nonplussed by the surge of wokery: social justice welfare, intersectionality, and identity politics that has spilled out of academia and inundated other spheres of life. Where did it come from? What ideas are behind it? This book exposes the surprisingly shallow intellectual roots of the movement that appear to be engulfing our culture. Have you heard that language is violent and science is sexist, all while being told that being a beast is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society? I commend it to you. And here’s a riddle for you: what exactly is intersectionality, and how did we as taxpayers come to spend $4.5 million trying to establish whether or not the campus of the University of Sydney was a safe place for people of intersectionality? I’m not going to try to answer it for you, I just pose the question.
The authors unpack Critical Theory very carefully, and frighteningly reveals how powerful the whole set of concepts has become.
They write that we have reached a point in history where the liberalism and modernity at the heart of Western civilisation are at great risk on the level of the ideas that have sustained us.
The academic doctrines known as Critical Theory underpin what we have come to call identity politics. Those who have come to see the true nature of the world, enlightened by Critical Theory, are said to be awakened; or taking from the African-American vernacular - “woke”. So there you go. That’s where it comes from.
According to Pluckrose and Lindsay, postmodernism - which ran its course - and Critical Theory, which in a sense followed in its footsteps, “rejected Christianity and Marxism and all other great philosophies … [but] also rejected science, reason, and the pillars of post-Enlightenment Democracy.” The same can be said for wokeism, which is merely the popularisation of the messages of postmodernism and Critical Theory preached, as many of you may have suspected, in the universities very widely over the last generation.
It is now everywhere and is frighteningly pervasive: in our universities, our schools, our media, the entertainment sector, dare I say it, as someone from the bush, in many of our boardrooms, and it is plainly influencing our politics.
Identity politics, based as it is on Critical Theory, tries, as Lindsay and Pluckrose put it, to “dismantle structures and institutions, and revolutionise on a cultural level … it tends to believe that society is organised into systems of power and dominance.”
Furthermore, it actually openly condemns Liberal Democracy with all its rights and freedoms as an elaborate and well-disguised way of oppressing women and racial, cultural and sexual minorities.
How on earth do we understand it? Can I say to you: I don’t find it easy. But there are many excellent minds that have grappled with it and written about it, and I can say this to you I think quite safely: there are four identifiable features that help us understand this.
Firstly, it sees the basic unit of analysis not as the individual, as liberalism has it, or economic class, as Marxism has it, but in the newer identities of race, of gender, and of sexuality. In several respects this shift away from the individual to the collective isn’t just academic in its implications.
We must remember that principally, the modern liberal democratic order is premised on the dignity of the individual, so that individual rights should only be interfered with in situations of clear and present danger. If you haven’t been thinking about that quote a bit this year, you should have been. This is entirely alien to historical political arrangements that see society not in terms of individuals but in terms of one or other of various class masses. The ultimate object of state protection is the collective, which means that individual rights are either non-existent or defined wholly in terms of what is deemed by the political elites of the day, in whatever system it is, as being in the best interests of the whole, if not narrowly the party. Inevitably in such societies individual rights are always deemed to be in tension with the collective; witness the fate of free speech, religious liberty, freedom of association, the freedom not to associate, and economic liberty in every society that ever existed that privileged the collective over the individual. History, I put it to you, is our best guide here, and is a much better teacher than philosophy, and many of the governmental and political courses, I suspect, that are run in our educational institutions.
Can I just add that when you start to talk about individuals, well-meaning people often say “that sounds selfish,” and to those who want to say that I just remind them that many powerful speakers, from Locke, to Jefferson, to Mill, to Menzies emphasized that every individual has dignity, and every individual must recognise the dignity in others. The doctrine of the individual is not a selfish doctrine. It is far from it. It says that if I matter, I must respect the fact that you matter and have dignity and worth as well. Individualism was never to be confused with selfishness.
But once analysis shifts from the individual to the collective, one’s loyalty becomes monopolised by the collective, and ultimate loyalty is owed to the party that claims to represent the collective. In liberal democracy, you and I enjoy many loyalties: to our families, to our consciences, to our beliefs, to our communities and, of course, to the country that we live in. Liberal democracy historically recognises multiple loyalties, as evidenced in the practice of allowing conscientious objection to participation in war. No such plurality of loyalties is permitted once the notion of individual dignity and rights is set aside in favour of the collective or the tribe.
The second identifiable feature of identity politics is that it sees our society as merely a theatre of struggle. Life is about struggle. All relations are power relations. I thought many of them were love, or commitment, or loyalty-based. But no: according to this theory, they’re all power relations. Everyone is either a victim or a victim-maker - an oppressor. This is inspired partly by the Marxist analysis of relationships and has to a large extent carried over to identity politics. In fact, identity politics lies half way between individualism and communistic collectivism; it is in fact tribalism.
The third identifiable characteristic is a simple one: all inequality of outcome is because of discrimination.
Robin Di Angelo, maybe the widest-read purveyor of identity politics today, in her best-seller White Fragility puts it this way: “If we truly believe that all humans are equal, then disparity of condition can only be the result of systemic discrimination.” You can imagine the totalitarian state you would have to set up to ensure that everybody was absolutely equal in every possible way, including the condition they found themselves in.
Fourthly, identity politics seeks to overthrow social conventions, institutions, rules and practices. The tearing down of statues is a powerful reflection of the determination to reject the notion of Western civilisation. The grim determination to insist that gender is a social, not a biologically-based, construct attacks the foundational place of science (and of reason) in our culture. As Edmund Burke said in reference to the French Revolution, “Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.”
The impact on our children can only be concerning as the new thinking strips away all the old verities and certainties and insists that we each find our new identity in the new world by self-referencing, self-defining ourselves with, if many have their way, not so much as a guide as to even our male or femaleness to be recorded on our birth certificate. When it proves all too much for too many of our children there is always someone present to relieve them of all their anxieties by assuring them that their real problem is that they are a victim.
And we see it in the attack on language, where ambivalence in language becomes the woke activist’s best friend: as we face demands to use gender neutral pronouns while the very meaning of words are flipped so as to undermine the capacity for us to communicate and to debate effectively with one another:
Diversity turns out to be uniformity of thought
Tolerance is eradicating traditional views
Love is punishing dissenters
Equality is one group dominating over the rest
Colour-blindness is racist
Anti-racism turns out to be utterly and totally obsessed with race
The list goes on.
The move to defund police in the United States provides a real insight into how wokeism is more about imposing an ideology than addressing real-world needs.
Despite the polling which shows very clearly that Americans in general and African Americans in particular do not want less policing, social justice reforms to policing in New York and Minneapolis have resulted in nasty spikes in violent crimes. Who do you think the most vulnerable might be? Well, a hint as to who they might be is that the most common calls for police help by people worried about violence are from African American women. Where are the real priorities for some of these woke activists?
As commentator Os Guinness has it,
According to Critical Theory, the only factor that counts is power … such an analysis is applied to all the categories of society in terms of gender, race, class, and age. Once the “victims” are identified they are “weaponised”, to be used in an assault on the status quo. That is not to say that there are not genuine victims, there are, but many genuine victims are often overlooked, as the protests mount, and only the victims that are useful to the Left are proclaimed…
There is an ugly new dogmatism here, which is strong on absolutes like sin - but is not universal sin anymore, just so-called white supremacist sin.
Little prospect of any redemption or of forgiveness - how any relationship can work at any level, in a marriage, in a family, in a community, in a nation, without the capacity to forgive - is ever offered by these people, and a culture that denies forgiveness and gives only condemnation (and even, in this media age, cancellation) for those who dare to transgress is a pretty ugly one. And when restitution and reconciliation are pursued without forgiveness, we face the very real prospect of a power conflict without end, and as Os Guinness points out, unless decisively checked, the result will be a backlash towards anarchy that will only reinforce a trend towards authoritarianism, because extremes always reinforce one another in the end.
The movement plays strongly on the very great importance that many, but especially the young, place on the importance of empathy. Who could deny that Black Lives Matter? Who could be against equality for women?
But Canadian professor of psychology Jordan Peterson has often spoken profoundly on the mistake of transforming empathy from an important part of personal relationships into a justification for social policy. He warns us all: “Don’t think an empathy culture will save you. You have to think. You can’t just feel.”
Empathy is a fine value so far as it goes. But it can induce people to so identify with victims that it can force the retreat of rational analysis into both the actual claim of victimhood - are middle-class women or racial minorities in lucrative professions really oppressed? - and whether the demands of the aggrieved are just or even good for the aggrieved person - remember what I said above about defunding the police.
In turn because it tends so strongly to deny agency - the idea that people are responsible for their own actions and that an attempt to rescue somebody in a difficult situation often requires help, but also a stepping up by those who presumably hope to escape their victimhood - the victim is not responsible no matter how they have behaved for their plight whether real or imagined. Undiscerning empathy often tends to make it harder, not easier, to help real victims.
And lest you think I’m sounding hard-hearted, I want to say to you that it’s incredibly important that we seek to be sympathetic to those who are in difficult situations, but sympathy may be more valuable than empathy.
Sympathy allows us to imagine the hurt of another while still being able to rationally assess their claims, and might be more helpful in the long run.
The other really serious problem with identity politics is its emphasis on groups rather than individuals. This is a really important point indeed. A person becomes righteous or wicked based purely on which gender or racial group they belong to. We draw the lines of virtue, if you like, not somewhere across every human heart, but according to which group you belong to. As Jonathan Haidt said, we are teaching our children to believe that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, that you should always trust your emotions, and that life is a battle between good people and bad people. Well, to say that a person becomes righteous or wicked based purely on which gender or racial group they belong to, I think is an extraordinarily dangerous idea. In the old days in fact we would have, and Martin Luther King would have, called this racism, pure and simple. He wanted the colour of skin to be ignored. He wanted people to be judged on the content of their character, his children in particular. Nowadays it’s called social justice. Whole classes of people are then cast as oppressors: the dividing line between good and bad is drawn between groups, rather that somewhere across every human heart as Aleksander Solzhenitsyn had it. Identity politics can no more provide social unity than the historical injustices it claims to be solving.
So how do we find a better way forward? That’s what matters.
Perhaps we should begin with Oracle of Delphi’s injunction to “know thyself”.
Each of us needs to make sure that we’re not sleepwalking in the midst of this. We need to recognise just how powerful and how pervasive identity politics has become, and we need to carefully assess the degree to which we are being seduced, or intimidated, or both, into accepting its dangerous sirens.
I’m sure you will have heard, and I’m frankly often amazed at how often young people will say to me that they feel enormous pressure to be silent about what they really think, and they often feel pressured to say things that they do not believe to be true. What a sad reflection on where we’ve allowed our society to go to.
Secondly, we must again learn our own history. The new activists have been able to powerfully deploy their monstrously revisionist versions of history as their most powerful weapon because so few can see, let alone understand, how they’re being manipulated. The most powerful weapon we can turn back against them is the true full story of our culture. But we have to know it. We have to understand it. We have to believe it.
No-one pretends that our history is perfect, but liberal democracy has been by far the most effective political structure for human flourishing and for the ending of oppression. It’s very easy to say that Western civilisation is barbaric and oppressive; but what about the following?
Origins of modern science and medicine
Emphasis on universal human dignity
The rule of law
Abolition of slavery
Introduction of religious toleration
Freedom of speech
Unprecedented prosperity and lifespans
Equality of opportunity
Rise of modern democracy
Individual rights and the vote for women
Universal education for all classes
Technology making life much easier
Abundance of food
Guaranteed clean drinking water
The list goes on. That’s not exhaustive. And I’m not saying that these good things are not found elsewhere, but all of these originally found their genesis and their fullest expression here in the West. With this list I’m not trying to denigrate the rest of the world, I’m just trying to remind cynical Westerners - because that’s what we’ve become - that much that they’d hopefully agree constitutes great progress was driven by Western civilisation as it unfolded.
Our own country’s story is quite powerful too:
Founded explicitly to be without slavery (even though slavery was then practised elsewhere in the British Empire and in America)
Colonies were some of the earliest modern democracies (mid-1850s)
Women in Australia were the second in the world, after NZ, to get the vote
Early introduction of the 8-hour day (mid-1850s)
Early nods towards decent living wages (1907) and an old-age pension
And here’s the point: these were fought for because of our ideals - human dignity, freedom, equality - not in spite of them.
Thirdly, we must support all those who are developing the weaponry to fight back.
In Australia our greatest risk may not so much be an empathy culture as an apathy culture. Certainly we don’t want to fight these battles with the acrimony and increasingly violent tribalisation that characterises the American culture wars. But at the same time we don’t want to just capitulate, in the way that seems to increasingly frequently happen in two countries that I dearly love: Canada, and the UK. Our history and situation is unique, and we need to engage, and do it in a civilised but firm and Australian way.
We must actively support those who are on the frontline of the battle for the soul of our culture. The Menzies Research Centre, is one of those, and a very important one, and I am a huge admirer of what you, Paul [Espie AO, Chairman of the Menzies Research Centre], Nick [Cater, Executive Director of the Menzies Research Centre], and the rest of the crew do. Keep it up. It’s incredibly important. Even in the past few days Nick Cater has written brilliant defences of religious liberty, the foundation liberty of liberal democracy, against new laws emerging in that extraordinary place to the south of us [Victoria]. To abandon the fight for religious liberty is to send a clear message to activists, to technocrats, and to legislators: “You can now decide what is most sacred to us.” And I’m sorry, I don’t want to live in a country where someone else decides what is most sacred for me. Let’s also support existing institutions doing their best to teach the humanities in a more balanced way than they often are in the universities. I think particularly of the excellent Campion College in Sydney, and the potential for enormous and positive impact from the Ramsey Centre for Western Civilisation.
But finally let me conclude: we face another, perhaps even deeper, problem than identity politics: the erosion of the foundations of belief in the human dignity that made much Western progress possible in the first place. Recently the historical foundations of Western progress have been illuminated by the brilliant British historian Tom Holland in his best-selling book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. He says this:
If secular humanism derives not from reason or from science, but from the distinctive course of Christianity’s evolution — a course that, in the opinion of growing numbers in Europe and America, has left God dead — then how are its values anything more than the shadow of a corpse? What are the foundations of its morality, if not a myth?
And our very own Menzies, a man of towering intellect, with an extraordinary capacity to communicate - I find myself so envious of his abilities - made a similar point, albeit more narrowly related to our commitment to democracy:
But a true conception of democracy goes even beyond this, for democracy is more than a machine; it is a spirit. It is based upon the Christian conception that there is in every human soul a spark of the divine; that, with all their inequalities of mind and body, the soul of men stand equal in the sight of God… [T]he chief end of the State becomes man – man the individual, man the immortal spirit.
In our secularised and pluralistic society, it is not clear what the foundation of our belief in human dignity is. Some of you may say that we believe in human dignity because it works: look at the results, you would say. But the question is how long we can hold this belief, given the attacks upon it, without the faith that originally justified it. Perhaps we can, perhaps we can’t.
Again, my best thought is to remind us all to fairly study our own history. I would contend that if we study it fairly we will be awestruck at the achievements of the West. We will see the incredible legacy of the dialogue between Christianity and the classical world, which is my definition of the Western tradition.
Perhaps we will also be curious enough to reconsider the truth of the theological propositions that undergirded our belief in human dignity, and thus our commitment to democracy and freedom. And I conclude by saying this: if we do, then we will be uncovering a tradition that, at its best, will be a far greater foundation for unity, justice, and freedom, than Critical Theory and its spawn identity politics could ever be.
Thank you.