It’s getting hard for many Australians to find their place in today’s political landscape. The left and right are now so impossibly polarised that there is no civil dialogue. Both extremes become increasingly hardened in their positions as they shout into their own echo chambers, protecting themselves and their clan with their own selected and sometimes distorted information.
It makes you wonder if we are seeing a civilization in decay. I suspect that China rather hopes it is.
Universities have allowed their humanity departments to have their thinking narrowed and conformed to a social engineering agenda. Its lecturers promulgate their green-left ideas; secure in their government funded jobs and safe in the knowledge that they have no responsibility for making their neo-Marxist or nihilistic ideas work in reality. (Who can think of a time when they have ever worked?)
It is curiously ironic that their radical agenda is funded by the institutions/government they seek to undermine.
Our university’s humanity departments have generated society’s opinion leaders who have become our Gnostic priests. They dominate the media and tell us what we should believe… and you depart from their teaching at your peril. You will be ‘cancelled’, de-platformed, rendered jobless, trolled, and pilloried unless you stay within the confines of their narrative.
Sadly, the likelihood of our universities reforming their humanity departments so that they are truly inclusive and educational is probably about the same as the ABC’s ability to reform itself, i.e. zero. Both have immersed themselves so deeply in their culture that they simply don’t see themselves as they truly are, or recognise they have a problem. I doubt very much will happen unless government brings some financial consequences to their narrowing of education, confining it to issues of race, gender, and sexuality, as reflected in the woke, resentment and cancel cultures they promote.
Are these militant clans partly the result of Facebook selectively feeding its subscribers the favoured rhetoric of their own clan… to the exclusion of other valid views? Is that exacerbating the problem? Certainly, the power of the giant Internet platforms is worrying. The CEO of Twitter now sits in judgement over an American President and cancels his account––and action that would be easier to accept if it was universally applied to all the vile despots using Twitter. In Australia, we have the CEO of Qantas electing himself as the nation’s moral leader in the sexuality debate. He has filled the vacuum left by the institutional church that has been shamed into silence both by the abuse it has allowed to flourish within its ranks and by its lack of unity over basic doctrine.
And then we come to the appalling actions of the conspiracy theorists of the far right who feel disenfranchised and forgotten by the privileged ruling elite that has been careless of their wellbeing. I’m not sure I have the words to describe the horror and absurdity of what I have been seeing, particularly in America. I see intimidating bullies carrying assault rifles in the streets. I see people waving a pistol in one hand and a Bible in the other. What holistic understanding of the Bible has given them this mandate? How has their doctrine become such a polluted distortion of Christianity? Where do they see the likeness of their actions in the life and teaching of Jesus? Who has taught them these distortions… and why haven’t church leaders risen with one voice and called it out for what it is?
And so the bewildered middle Australian is left stranded and abandoned by the absurdities of left and right. Who will speak for them?
This is the question that is currently exercising the minds of the Australian Labor party. What is their identity? Who will they represent? On one hand, they are courting the green-left vote of the inner city, latte-sipping set, whilst also wanting to protect the jobs and incomes of workers whose industry relies on affordable energy, sensible wages and a healthy market economy. After all, the workers are the ones at the end of the line who actually make things. Their industry underpins all of society. Personally, I think this opportunity to re-think, and carefully re-evaluate, could be very healthy and fruitful for the Labor Party. I want them to become a credible force that encourages a more equitable sharing of wealth. (The rate at which the richest 1% is getting richer, whilst the poor are becoming poorer is a distinct concern.) However, to do this, they will need to move beyond mindless class-warfare rhetoric, and do some seriously relevant and creative thinking… because the middle Australian, stranded between left and right, is looking for hope.
