This is to me, what good writing (and oration) is all about. The truth. And the power of the truth.
The Decline of Love and the Rise of Non-Freedom
by Richard Flanagan
by Richard Flanagan
Listen or download in full here via ABC RN Book ShowFrom 16:32 mins in:
. . . It’s the lager of the mind that both parties are now incarcerated in. The racial and social panic that was whipped up to win an election in 2001 has now taken hold to such an extent that neither Party can seem to conceive how to approach the matter without resorting to more hysteria. If Australia does not have a refugee problem like say Italy with over 30,000 refugees arriving there in the last few months, it does have a dismal public life, bereft of courage or humanity and it has created a national myth that now poisons all sides of politics. The myth is that of hoardes of refugees over-running Australia unless harsh policies of dissuasion and internment are employed. For more than a decade this myth, the issue of opportunism and electoral cynicism has been a weeping sore at the heart of our public life. It cannot be blamed solely or simply on John Howard’s Liberal government, it was the product of deep cynicism in both major parties and has since become deeply entrenched in no small part because of the lack of courage within either major party to stand up against it.
The strange drift began in the 1990s under Paul Keating with detention centres and mandatory detention and was immediately strengthened under John Howard’s government. As loony as Hitler’s leibenschraum [sic] was in reverse . .. John Howard’s rhetoric of border protection struck a similarly popular note. The Labor Party is, noted by US Embassy Officials in a Wikileaks cable published the same day as last year’s Christmas Island tragedy, profoundly traumatised by it’s 2001 election loss and remains haunted by it to the present day. Labor’s leadership capitulated to Howard’s vision, and went largely in lockstep with his policy and on coming to power Julia Gillard has essentially reworked Howard era policies with a sometimes ludicrous edge. Wicked as it was the myth only grew more powerful as the rate of suicide, of self-harm of simple and utterly unnecessary waste and wreckage of human life among the refugees ballooned. And perhaps even more damaging was the harm we did ourselves.
Numerous psychological studies have demonstrated how human beings can be de-sensitised easily to the sufferings of others, how empathy can be eroded to the point that otherwise reasonable people can inflict great suffering in good conscience. Australia over the last two decades has been one vast psychological study in which our leaders have de-sensitised a nation to the plight of others. There is no good in this and the portents of where it is leading us in the form and the rise of racist attacks, of the hate websites and of the growing influence of a new far-right, are disturbing. What does it say of a nation? What does it say to a nation when in a time of austerity, of slashing of essential public services, that a billion dollars of Australian tax payers money, our money, is being spent annually to persecute, damage and sometimes destroy the lives of people, of whom 85-90% are finally proven to be genuine refugees. That is to hurt the most powerless and helpless and deserving of help and kindness. It shames us as a nation that claims to be both humane and generous, it belittles us as a people and none of it will deter the wretched of the earth forced to choose between despair and hope from continuing to choose hope.
For much of the latter part of the twentieth century, Australia seemed to be opening up to something large and good. It believed itself a generous country, the land where battlers got a fair go. Whatever happened to the fair go? Whatever happened to the battler? Because if an Afghan Hazara isn’t a battler, I don’t know who is.
In the video footage of last year’s tragedy, it is possible to look down the cliffs of Christmas Island and in the spin-drift blown up from below, to hear not only the screams of women and children, to see not only the drowned and the drowning and a broken boat, but also to glimpse at the promise of what Australia had once been, and with each wave that rolls in it breaks apart a little more. And watching this I realised it is too easy to deride Howard, to dismiss Gillard, to mock Abbott, far harder to understand the larger drift of our times that have led our politicians to this, to behave so abysmally to recognise that neither our problems nor their solutions come with Party tags, for we have reached a moment in history where politics seems suddenly unequal to the terrible problems that beset us.
If we look at Australia over the last decade and a half we are presented with the unedifying and indeed disturbing image of a society whose major institutions failed. And this was not necessarily so in other countries. If it is the case for example, that past US Administrations committed crimes at Abu Graib at Guantanamo and rendition centres, then it was US journalists who first brought them to public light, it was US legal systems and US lawyers that began bringing them into question, it was US public figures who began pressing for change. Nothing like this happened in Australia. If we look to another example, that of Britain, we see that they had what we didn’t--a major debate in parliament about whether they should go to war in Iraq. One after another, loyal Tory MP and loyal Labor MP stood up and said they disagreed with their Party leaders’ support of that war.
In Australia such a questioning of the Party’s leadership position on any issue has become not just unacceptable, but pilloried in the impoverished political judgement of the Canberra Press Gallery as political suicide. To speak out is to be declared a rat, a party renegade, a political naïve. To not speak out is to be rewarded with endorsement and promotion.
And so our Parties failed us, our Parliament failed us, our Media failed us. And the question as to why this was and is, is difficult to answer, though clearly it is to be found in an uneasy examination of the new conformity at the heart of Australian life. For what we have witnessed is a very real corrosion of the idea of truth and respect for those whose views differ from that of power. What we have experienced is a coarsening of public rhetoric by standover men who claim to speak for the ordinary Australian, but seem to represent the interest of government and corporate power.
When the Velvet Revolution took place Vaclav Havel, said the West was wrong to dismiss the experience of Eastern Europe’s history. Rather, he said, it was distorted mirror of what the west would become if it wasn’t vigilant.
Ironically, what we hear parroted in Australia today at ever shriller frequencies are the older mantras of Stalinism, once used to justify the crimes of another century, being recycled by the Right to defend the indefensible. Those who speak out are inevitably demonised as out-of-touch elites. This pejorative use of the word elite begins with Stalin in 1948, when he used it to describe Jewish intellectuals upon whom he was about to turn his terror. We are being told as the old USSR was. that there are things that matter more than truth and individual freedom—national security, the needs of the security forces, special international commercial undertakings. But as Vasily Grossman came to conclude there is nothing higher in this life than truth and individual freedom. Grossman wrote that the striving for these two things is the essence of all human existence.
One of the most potent expressions of our new age is the arrival of a new class, both political player and truth controller, composed of those individuals for whom the role of politician, journalist minder, and senior bureaucrat, are just avatars they inhabit. Interchangeable ways of exercising power against the truth and freedom.
The phone hacking scandal with its revelations of revolving rubics cubes of power, involving media, politics and police, was an illuminating insight into the new class—mediocre vessels empty save for vaulting ambition and endlessly craven souls. Conformists par excellence, capable of agreeing only with power, however or wherever it manifests itself. They are the ones least capable of dealing with the many new challenges we face, precisely because these challenges demand the very qualities the new class lack—courage, independence of thought and the belief in something larger than their own future.
The new class understanding only self-interest, believing only in the possibilities of its own cynicism, committed to nothing more than its own perpetuation, seeks to ride the tiger by agreeing with all the tiger’s desires. Nor does the New Class have any answer other than accommodation for the rise of a new Far Right unseen in the West since the nineteen thirties. At a moment in history when the old verities are crumbling this new Far Right trades in anger and hate, of fear and conspiracies and known enemies. It is interested, not in truth, but in promoting ignorance. Not in freedom of all, but in the righteous punishment of those it regards as the damned. And yet under the rule of the New Class we remain smug and complacent; we confuse robbing the wealth of our land with an idea of national genius, we mistake corporate success for personal prosperities. Yet a few days after BHP announced a record profit of $22.5 billion--Australia’s biggest ever, ABS statistics were released that show Australian’s total disposable income fell for the first time in fourteen years.
Our gilded recession will at some point become a full-blown recession and then what happens? Do we have the political will and ability to deal with the social stresses that will inevitably arise without resort to more attacks on our liberties and more promotion of non-freedom. We need to remind ourselves that material progress, corporate profits and a mining boom do not need freedom to happen. We should not forget that when BHP was heading towards the seventh biggest profit in world history, it did not hesitate to destabilise the elected Prime Minister for proposing to use a fraction of that profit for national good.
Democracy suffers when it is wrongly presumed that its guarantees are to be found in the State, or government, or party, in history, or in myths of national goodness. Democracy may be the best antithesis to tyranny, but it is not necessarily wise or good. It can even at times be an obscene spectacle, guilty of great and historic crimes. It is often stupid, frequently wrong and not given to great leaps and it is in all these things intensely human. But democracy does allow for power and non-freedom to be held in check and it is in this sustained by the courage of dissent and the wisdom of heresy. It is in the preservation and extension of the liberties of the people, that the guarantee of the strengths and worth of democracy is to be found. Democracy at its best is the ongoing movement of humanity toward a better world. And we see all around us that movement stalling, unable to name, far less address central challenges. We need to look the disease of Australia in the eye, this disease of conformity that is ill preparing us for the future. Does Australia still have the courage and largeness it once had when it pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage? Or will it simply become the United Arab Emirates of the West? Content to roll on for a decade or two more glossing over its fundamental problems, while brown coal and frack gas continues to keep the country afloat? Does Australia have the desire to move into the 21st Century, or will we continue to retreat into our past, as a colonial quarry for the empires of others, our public life ever more run at the behest of large corporation, our people ever more fearful of others, our capacity of freedom and truth with each year a little more diminished.
“When reading the gospels”, wrote Oscar Wilde at Reading Gaol, “I see the continual assertion of the imagination as the basis of all spiritual-material life, I see also that to Christ imagination was simply a form of love.” This idea of love as being the basis of all progress seems to me a beautiful and very true observation. Yet in recent times we seem to have lived through not so much a crisis of politics, as a collapse of that most human attribute, empathy. A collapse so catastrophic it sometimes appears to be a crisis of love, manifest in epidemics of loneliness and depression.
In recent years I’ve come to think more and more about Vasily Grossman’s two final novels. Perhaps our homeland is simply the people we love and who love us? Perhaps the only Party of honour is the Party of one. Perhaps the world advances to a better place through the countless acts of everyday goodness shown by millions of people too easily dismissed as ‘everyday’. None of this amounts to a politics or ideology, or a comprehensive answer to any of our problems, I know, but as Rilcous said “live the questions”. Questions lead to poetry, science, freedom. Certainties lead to Andrew Bolt’s blog-site.
We need politics like we need sewerage and like sewerage we should want it to work properly and well, but we should not make too much of it. Not create of it a fetish, by glorifying it daily with celebrations and watching it incessantly on 24 hour tv stations. We make too much of our political leaders and their work, their failings their strivings, their successes, and we make too little of ourselves. For if we take our compass from power we will inevitably arrive in despair, but if we take our compass from those around us, we will arrive at hope.
There are so many forces in the world that divide us deeply and murderously. We cannot escape politics, history, religion, nationalism, for their sources lie as deep in our hearts as love and goodness, perhaps even deeper. In a world where the road to the new tyrannies is paved with the fear of others, we need to rediscover that we are neither alone nor in the end that different. That what joins us is always more important than what divides us, and that the price of division is ever the obscenity of oppression. We need to once more reassert the necessity of witnessing and questioning as the greatest guarantee we can have of freedom.
And if I am left believing in anything it is something very simple, that truth matters above all else. Anything that honours and guarantees the truth is not just good, but necessary and anything like mass conformity that threatens the truth, needs to be challenged. For the road to tyranny is never opened with a sudden coup de etat. It is a long path paved with the small cobbles of silence, lies and deceit that ends inevitably in horror. In Australia, we stand at the head of that road, only history will tell us if as a people we chose the terrible the terrible folly of choosing to walk down it.
In the end none of these themes are ever a matter of Party. This lecture is named in honour of a man of principle, Alan Missen, who was a Liberal politician. Weary Dunlop most likely voted Liberal yet it is no paradox that Tom Uren, once known as the heart of the Left said he learnt his Socialism from Weary Dunlop while a POW. Tom Uren like Weary Dunlop, didn’t agree. And whilst a Labor man through and through, Uren has described the Green’s Bob Brown, another man who doesn’t agree, as having the blood of Mandela flowing in his veins. These are matters of character and to use a word little heard these days--courage. More than ever in this new age Australians need to once more recover their voice and that power of not agreeing with power. It’s time like Slappy Oldham, we looked after ourselves a little more and deferred to power and its Driscolls a little less.
Like the aged Weary Dunlop we could do worse than ponder Ulysses exhortation to freedom, to follow knowledge like a sinking star beyond the utmost bound of human thought. Perhaps freedom is finally a form of love? It is unachievable, illusive. Rilkous’ [sic] hardest test that we destined to repeatedly fail, the greatest challenge, the pursuit of which takes us through an endless cycle of trials and ordeals. But it is our Ithaca and in our journeying towards it there can be no cease.
Good night.
Richard Flanagan's closing speech to The Melbourne Writer's Festival.
