Young, free, tolerant
In the arena of identity politics, 'feelings' distort perceptions at the expense of the truth and even happiness. By Nick Cater.
Is racism on the rise in Australia? Even given the difficulty of the defining what we mean by racism, the empirical evidence show clearly that it isn’t.
This month the annual Scanlon Social Cohesion Survey, the most authoritative longitudinal study of its kind, found that if anything xenophobia is in retreat.
It also showed that the only 15 per cent of respondents thought that ethnicity was a valid reason for turning down an immigration visa, down from 19 per cent three years ago.
Only 12 per cent thought multiculturalism had been bad for Australia, a figure that has remained more or less constant since 2015. Those welcoming multiculturalism nudged up from 83 per cent in 2016 to 85 per cent this year.
Since the data is so conclusive on this point, it begs the question why so many analysts insist that racism “is rearing its ugly head” or words to that effect.
That claim has been claim made variously in the last 12 months by CNN, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, retiring race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane and others.
The Scanlon survey does give superficial support to the notion of rising racism.
In the first Scanlon Survey in 2007, 9 per cent of respondents felt they had been discriminated against in the previous 12 months because of their national, ethnic or religious background. A decade later the figure had risen to 20 per cent. This year it dropped back slightly to 19 per cent.
The key word in this question is “felt”. In most cases, the conclusion that one has been picked on because of one’s colour or creed is subjective. It is built on unverifiable assumptions about what is going on in an alleged racist’s head.
It requires a particular reading of words or actions that these them in a malign or sinister light.
The notion that one is being excluded from a nightclub because of one’s race, for instance, a common source of complaints to the Human Rights Commissions, assume one knows the motives of the bouncer.
Other interpretations, such as one’s drunkeness, rowdiness or dishevelled appearance, are excluded for no empirically grounded reason.
The reliance on respondents feelings about others, rather than the evidence from questions that test how they think themselves, is a sign of our times.
The rise of emotional reasoning is incisively in Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s recent book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
The notion that one should always trust one’s own feelings is one of three “Great Untruths” that seem to have spread widely in recent years and taken a stranglehold on universities.
Lukianoff and Haidt’s two other untruths, “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker” and “life is a battle between good people and evil people,” are also likely to induce a sense of prejudice in others.
The rise in victimhood culture and an increasing tendency to make harsh moral judgements about those with whom one disagrees have been well documented in Australia and elsewhere.
Once the feeling of racism becomes the measure of intolerance, the claim of growing prejudice becomes easier to sustain.
The feeling that one has been discriminated against on grounds or race or religion is all that is required to lay charges at the Human Rights Commission. If Bill Leak’s cartoon feels racist it is because it is racist.
Yet how one feels about the behaviour of others, and their motives for that behaviour, is a remarkably unreliable measure of actual motivation.
It is prone to multiple cognitive distortions that Lukianoff and Haidt, a social psychologist, describe.
The cognitive distortions of over-generalisation, black-and-white dichotomous thinking and mind reading encourage the error of jumping to a conclusion.
Labelling, negative filtering and discounting positives breed the perception of ill-will in others.
Blaming encourages one to focus on the other person as the source of their negative feeling, and absolves one for taking responsibility for one’s own failings.
It take far less courage to blame a rejection letter on the racism than it does to reflect on the inadequacy of one’s own CV or the scowl on one’s face at a job interview.
Australians are almost certainly less racist, less prejudiced and more embracing than at any time in their history. The tendency of progressives to assume the worst of people is un-generous, un-gracious and unhelpful.