The Origins of Hope

by Tony Kevin (www.tonykevin.com)

Presented at the Manning Clark House Symposium: Science and Ethics: Can Homo sapiens Survive? Canberra, 17-18 May 2005

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My scientific credentials are minimal. I had thirty years as a policy formulator and practitioner in the foreign relations and national security areas of Australian governance, followed by six years thinking and writing about such issues from an increasingly radical and dissident perspective. In those six years, I have gone through the kind of "shaking" process that Nikolai Blaskow in his talk here today described the human rights dissident Jan Patoka as having undergone in Communist Czechoslovakia.

I have a civil engineering degree — relevant to this conference, though in the area of applied, not pure, science. Also, a multicultural family background — Irish-Australian and Viennese-Jewish on my part, now blended by marriage with a young Cambodian family. A lot of refugee experience has touched my life both through my mother’s family and my wife’s family. Postings in Soviet Union, Poland, Cambodia were ethically enriching, if confronting, life experiences.

This has been a brilliant conference. I want to focus on a few themes, at times drawing on personal experience:

1. Social Darwinism and how it has corrupted our thinking about global issues: leading to the tyranny of the nation-state model, of state winners and losers, as the world organising principle. To my mind, this model is at least as pernicious as the tyranny of the market model of economics. We need to escape from it.
2. Is the national security state mode of thinking distracting us from our real problems which concern our shared global commons, and is this mode of thinking deforming and debasing our moral capacity to address these problems? I believe the answer to both questions is, Yes.
3. What are the prospects for a real sense of common humanity taking hold in society, with all its positive ethical and practical consequences? Why do I hope that a rediscovery of our common.humanity will help us find answers more quickly and happily to the problems of our global environment? And I will argue that other conceivable approaches to "our" problems (and I ask, who is Us here?), involving "Fortresses" and "Lifeboats", are false dead-ends in both a moral and practical sense.

**

I live in a 60-year-old small double-brick house — 140 square metres - in an older suburb of Canberra. It had two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room with fireplace, a dining room. Its kitchen has a hardworking "Canberra" fuel stove. In 1948, it was a slightly up-market home for a small family with one or two children. My cousins - five children — grew up in a similar three bedroom house in Lane Cove, Sydney, about the same size as my house. Three brothers shared one bedroom, two sisters shared the other. There was one bathroom.

Those houses would be considered way too small nowadays - "Povertyville". Even after I extended my house when I retired — two extra bedrooms and a study. Now it has six people living here — soon to be increased to eight, with my sister-in-law’s new husband (and maybe, a new baby) to come to stay with us.

My income now is half what it was a few years ago when I was working fulltime. My consumption — my ecological footprint, my demand on resources — is shrinking. Yet I have never felt happier. There is joy and life in our house, crowded as it sometimes feels. I am "downshifting", sharing space and resources with more people, in all kinds of fun ways; and it is fun.

In a way, I’m like that notional householder in yesterday’s metaphor who had to consider whether he wanted three families to share his house where there had been only one before. But I feel no sense of sacrifice or loss. Indeed I feel I am rediscovering some of the lost quality of life of 1950s Australia.

Our ‘Affluenza’ that is making us so sick and dissatisfied is a very recent thing — we have changed so much just in two generations. Our recent past is another country now — "we did things differently there". The same can be said of Europe and North America. And it is in those same two generations that we lost the extended family — which I am now happily rediscovering, through my multicultural family. I am learning so much from my Cambodian extended family; how happy people can be, even with relatively little.

In so many ways, Australia’s immigrant families behave in the way we used to — sharing living space and cooperating come easier to them than to modern Anglo-Celtic Australians. The affluent West’s high demands for space and resources are recent. In C19, and in the first half of C20, our way of life was not so different from the modest levels of prosperity that are now being attained by large numbers of middle-class people in Third World countries.

I think it is misleading, and leads to bad policy, to overemphasise poverty and misery in the Third World. Unless political and economic misgovernance, civil wars, oppression of minority races or religions, external destabilisers like the Arab-Israel conflict or the War on Terror afflict them, many people in the Third World are fairly content with their life circumstances and their sense of place. Most people don’t want to become refugees or economic migrants. They will only move if they are pushed or pulled.

Not that there are not substantial inequities of welfare in the world that must be addressed obviously, there are - — but the quality of life index is, I think, a lot flatter than relative GNP dollar indices suggest. I draw on firsthand experience of how Poles and Cambodians live now in their countries — both thought of as poor countries, in need of external help.

If we succumb to a sort of "triage" view of the world — that large numbers of people and states are really beyond help, and there are just too many of them to try to help - it tends to reinforce and validate selfish and life-denying ways of looking at our present challenges.

**

The history of European and American colonialism — exploitation of the resources and markets of the world — was essentially rapacious and destructive of indigenous economic systems and cultures. We must never forget what Western expansionism did to India and China. This process was propped up, and rationalised, by an unassailable belief that Europeans managed things better. Social Darwinism was the prevailing popular science philosophy. It dressed up the reality of "We take what we want from the word, our might makes right " in pseudo — scientific clothes, the convenient rationalisation: "Because we deserve it - our success proves that we are the most efficient society at this time." Read Edward Said on this.

Until the 1960s, the language of race was everywhere. It dominated policymakers’ vocabularies and categories of thought. Right up to the 1950s in Australia, public people spoke and wrote unselfconsciously of "our British race" or "our British stock". People were obsessively classifying, defining national strengths and weaknesses, measuring shapes of heads and noses, speculating about how to improve the race through eugenic breeding. Races were defined on a success-failure scale. Many were condemned as having failed.

I recalll a little poem by Hiliare Belloc here — like me, a Catholic, English-educated , able to poke gentle fun at what was often pretty nasty Anglosaxon racism:

 

"The Three Races"

Behold, my child, the Nordic Man

And be as like him as you can.

His legs are long; his mind is slow;

His hair is lank and made of tow.

And here we have the Alpine Race.

Oh! What a broad and foolish face!

His skin is of a dirty yellow,

He is a most unpleasant fellow.

The most degraded of them all

Mediterranean we call.

His hair is crisp, and even curls,

And he is saucy with the girls.

I see this poem as a satirical take on foolish eugenics — on bad science. In similar ways, Dean Swift — an Irishman - satirised bad science in Gulliver’s Travels, in his description of the scientists of Laputa.

I have a particular interest in Ireland’s experience of massive ecological catastrophe just six generations ago — the potato blight that in three years shrank Ireland’s population from eight to three millions, through starvation, starvation-related disease, and forced emigration of the hungry. The whole fabric of Irish life changed especially in the countryside. It was like the notional crack down the middle of the Greenland icecap suggested to us earlier — it permanently changed Irish self-perceptions and Irish society.

Meanwhile, just a few hours’ boat ride away, England the governing power heedlessly pursued its industrial revolution and its consolidation of global empire. There was little public sense of any British obligation to help in the Irish people’s desperate plight. England waited for the invisible hand of the market to provide a solution. And Irish emigrants fleeing the ecological disaster at home were derided and demonised as stupid and dishonest.

These were entrenched attitudes of the dominant culture. Dean Swift had satirised them the previous century in his essay "A Modest Proposal" - proposing that Ireland solve its economic problems by exporting its surplus babies to help satisfy the growing demand for meat at the table, as English affluence increased.

There was no sense in Britain of common humanity with the Irish - they were seen as an inferior race and society. The Irish came last in the British Isles pecking order, after the English, Scots and Welsh. And this was considered to be an educated, scientifically based view. It was an early example of social Darwinism.

We like to think we have now moved past such crude racial stereotyping. We now have a slightly more sophisticated version — cultural social Darwinism. We’ll accept a modicum of racial mixing in our society — enough to have a range of interesting restaurants and some welcome diversity in the arts and in the fashion industry - but a majority of us still demand fairly rapid mass cultural assimilation into our dominant Angloceltic culture. Multiculturalism — understood as a sincere respect for the depth and diversity of the various root cultures enriching our society - is widely misunderstood, and increasingly threatened. The promulgation and defence of what are claimed to be "Australian values" is seen as of the utmost importance to our "national cohesion".

In yesterday’s Sydney Daily Telegraph there was a front-page news story with photo of a 17 year old girl in a hijab. It was accompanied by an editorial, and two opinion pieces by house columnists Piers Akerman and Anita Quigley. All savagely condemned the decision by the NSW Dept of Education that, if they so wished, Muslim girls attending a state high school in an area of Sydney where many Muslims live could wear such white headscarves to school as part of their compulsory school uniform. This brave young woman was personally demonised by the newspaper for her personal choice, in the most snide way. Predictably, the resulting reader feedback on the newspaper website was even more hostile to her — the newspaper, one of the worst in the Murdoch stable, had succeeded again in whipping up anti-Muslim prejudice in Sydney.

We cannot address the future of this planet unless we think in global terms - as so many speakers said in different ways yesterday and today. Yet we fritter away our energies and resources in pointless and destructive arguments and divisions between nations and cultures. Our whole structure of official international dialogue is based on the sovereign nation-state as the unit of identity. Humanity does not have a vote in the UN — only states do.

There is no equality among nation states — we all know that some are vastly more powerful than others, one in particular. The United States, most of the time, can bully or bribe other governments to get the global outcomes it wants, and block those it does not want.

Here, I think, is the destructive social Darwinist pecking order again. We live in a world hierarchy, from successful powerful states to poor so-called "failed" states. The former preach to the latter on democracy and good governance - indifferent to, often unconscious of, their own serious failings and deficiencies as human societies at home. Australia has enthusiastically entered this game as a US supporter.

In the social Darwinist pecking order, we worry about how we are doing — in Olympic medals, in growth, in consumption.

We have not yet reached the US stage of thinking the world’s resources belong to us, as the most successful nation-state economy. But we fret a great deal about protecting our borders and our sovereign resources. We have become a well-armed, quite highly militarised, national security state. We are quite a long way already towards Fortress Australia — I‘ll come back to this.

Our sovereignty is more illusory than real — we have given much of it away to the dominant US economy. But that is OK, because we think — mistakenly — that they are like us and that they will help protect us in time of need.

More optimistically, at the same time I can see the beginnings of the decline of the moral validity of the self-justifying nation-state. This barren philosophy is seen through by increasing numbers of thoughtful young people in all countries, to whom it more and more makes better sense to "think globally - act locally". They have a healthy distaste for jingoism and a natural openness to the world. Many NGOs are global in their thinking — as some of their very names suggest: Medecins sans Frontieres, World Vision, Caritas, Global Witness. They claim a right to speak, and be heard, as global citizens.

The important ideas and values are no longer national — they are global. They express and defend our common humanity.

This frightens our conservative governments and newspaper magnates who are always trying to whip up an aggressive patriotism. I think they are on the decline though they are powerful, well-resourced, and will have some short-term wins. .In the longer run the Australian people will see how hollow and pointless this agenda is. In the end, we will hold onto what is good about our pride in Australia, and we will reject the divisive and self-congratulatory crap that is being ceaselessly pumped into us about what it means to be Australian.

We have to do this, if we are to contribute strongly — as we can and must, being rich and well-educated and technically advanced — to the addressing of the global resources and environment problems we are talking about in this conference.

We don’t have much time —two generations — but we can change quickly. We need "enormous changes at the last minute". We can make those changes because the values to support them are already in us — instinctively — even though we are urged to suppress them and live in the moral straitjacket of homo economicus.

Brave visionary people — many of them, women — are laying down the blueprint for those lifestyle changes now.

In my lifetime I have slowly and painfully tried to make such changes, I have begun to escape my conditioned enslavement to the nation-state and compulsive consumption. I have worked back over many years, trying to rediscover that intuitive knowledge and understanding of the unity of life that we all start with as children — the precious kind of knowledge that Clive Hamilton spoke so memorably about yesterday.

I find my Catholicism is helping me manage this moral transition. A sense of unity of the world and of humanity with nature can be found in the Catholic tradition — of course a lot of other less admirable things are there too. Catholicism helps me sustain and enrich a global perspective. It has ceased to be a European project — it is truly global now, as for that matter are the other great world religions. It really has absorbed globalism however much it still lags on issues of human sexuality and reproduction. That will change.

As we learn again to value and celebrate life in all its richness, and to face the reality that death awaits us all, we will not feel we are making sacrifices in moving to simpler less exploitative lifestyles. I agree very much with the speakers here who said that fear will not drive us to live differently and consume less — but hope of a happier and more meaningful life will.

* *

Fortress Australia already has a long intellectual and military history. The fear of invasion has weighed on us from the beginning of European settlement — and of course we took Australia by force from the aboriginal people. Our strategic planners have spent a lot of time thinking about, gaming, scenarios of an unarmed refugee invasion in small boats from our north - people fleeing maybe from an ecological catastrophe or outbreak of racial or religious civil violence in their homelands - and how to protect our nation from that scenario.

Philip Baxter — after whom our newest migration detention gulag is appropriately named — was haunted by the nightmare vision of a flood of sick unwanted people after a nuclear holocaust. I think he coined another seductive Orwellian phrase — Lifeboat Australia. He argued that we might have to defend the remnants of civilisation and a healthy unradiated gene pool here by having the independent armed strength and the national will to turn away such people — and that we had to have our own nuclear weapons, as a force equaliser.

Social Darwinism again — survival of the fittest. If we are weak or soft we will be swept away by others who are stronger or more desperate or more determined. Those kinds of wicked ideas had considerable vogue in their day — they were a sort of Australian proto-fascism - and they still lurk in the dark corners of our national security thinking.

There is still a view in national security circles that the state is not to be questioned — that reasons of state may in times of need justify conduct that at the level of individuals would be properly regarded as criminal.

Thus, what has to be done will be done, overtly or covertly, to "preserve the integrity" — another Orwellian phrase — of our borders. The deaths of women and children will be instigated, in waters safely far away from Australia, and then denied and covered up under national security secrecy obligations.

Our ADF desensitises its personnel by target practice to sink impounded refugee boats. Our Navy personnel practice the operational protocols of slave ships, learning how to move large numbers of desperate unwilling people around by force and deceit. Our police set up ruthless sting operations in cooperation with people smugglers in Indonesia, that sink or disable boats and generate huge amounts of fear and misery. And our senior politicians and public officials deny everything, and say it was nothing to do with us.

I don’t think even Philip Baxter could have imagined or condoned the cruelties towards our fellow human beings that the Australian Government instigated and practiced in 2001. And it was truly a whole-of-government operation. Many people were involved in what was done, and in what was covered up.

In times of renewed national security stress, such practices may return again.

In national security states, the essential distinction between what is allowable conduct in peace and war is blurred, and ultimately disappears. The right to self-defence is corrupted into a licence to kill, or to turn a blind eye to the deaths of whatever is defined as threatening or potentially threatening in the future.

Social Darwinism again. Whatever it takes for the organism — the nation-state - to survive in its present form — whatever the moral cost.

None of this would happen - or could happen - if we proceeded from the proper and natural love of our fellow human beings, a sense of the preciousness of every human life, no matter how poor or vulnerable that person is.

Our kids learn decent public ethics in primary school. They learn to love one another. . My children’s primary school motto — a little parochial school - is ‘Walk in Love and Peace". The school tries to express that philosophy in its practices. It is not alone — most primary schools have a similar ethic.

Something happens at the high school level. Ignorant bigotry starts to creep into kids’ attitudes. Some kids shrug it off and reject it. Not everyone does. I feel so sorry for those Muslim schoolgirls in Sydney, having their precious sense of personal religious identity mocked by bigoted and self-righteous Anglo-Australians.

* *

Science — how can it help ? How can it do no harm? Bad science in the service of ruthless nation-states has done harm: Social Darwinism, "German" science, "Marxist" science …But I feel safe with the scientists we have heard speak in this conference. The scientific ethic so brilliantly articulated yesterday by David Green was truly reassuring.

More positively, how can science help? I think it can help us eliminate the remnants of ethnic prejudice. It can bolster our sense of human unity in diversity. Modern genetics — the priceless knowledge that we all come from the same sets of DNA, different packaged to suit different environments — gives scientific backing to the moral position of a common humanity.

The insights of ecology, that take us beyond the kind of mechanistic applied science that I was brought up on, and were so well explained yesterday by Geoff Davies, help us understand the fragility and interdependence of living systems - like those coral reefs we heard about yesterday from John Chappell.

I have learned in this conference that there is a sound scientific basis for value systems premised on a belief in our common humanity: like the Carl Sagan conference theme, and Bob Brown’s "one planet, one person, one value" philosophy. This is not just soft sentimental thinking. It is about our survival and the survival of the endangered species we share our planet with.

**

I do believe that our species can now, up to a point and subject to man-made threats to our biosphere, influence the direction of its further evolution. This means there is a need for ethically based social choices in pure and applied science. Those choices mist be based on a vision of common humanity — of our duty of care to all our fellow men, women and children on this planet — or else they will be bad selfish choices that will leave us more miserable than ever.

I strongly agree with the speaker yesterday who argued that people like us have to join in public moral debate. We cannot leave the field to the bigots, the fundamentalists, the dividers of human society.

We have to tell those who feed off the national security state that there is no foreign enemy. The enemy is us, in our misguided and divisive way of seeing the world.

China and India have a very strong sense that the West’s present affluence was built on its past exploitation of their resources and societies. They want to claim their place in the sun now. The statistics of their growth in consumption of resources are frightening, but I am confident that — having once proved their point — they will join in efforts to fix the planet, and will make very effective contributions based on their traditional cultural values of balance and moderation. That is, if our national security gurus do not meanwhile manufacture a preventive war against these threatening rising powers, and thereby bring the whole thing crashing down on us yet again.

The next two generations will be difficult and challenging. Things may get worse before they get better. Australia now has the technology, and in some powerful quarters the will, to become a quite efficient, authoritarian, and militarily strong national security state. I see many signs of this trend. We cannot take our freedom for granted. We have to use it, stand up publicly for what we believe. We have to be ready to say the unsayable, even if we know that word-recognition technology will record when and in what context we have said it: forbidden words like SIEV X, for example.

We need to challenge the wicked idea of a clash of civilisations. What we share with the Islamic civilisation is so much more important than our differences. Wise people on both sides know that. We need to be brave enough to say it.

Much of the Islamic resentment against the West is well founded, If we address it, we will eliminate motives for terrorism. Terrorism is the weapon of the weak — they do not play fair, because they have no other means. And yesterday’s terrorist is often tomorrow’s revered national leader. Diplomacy is about reaching practical accommodations with your potential enemies- finding nonzero-sum solutions. We need to relearn that skill, if we are to save the planet.

As a species we need to tread more lightly on the world. We will delay that needed transition, if we go on misdirecting and squandering resources and brainpower in the pursuit of absolute military supremacy. The US is the worst offender but we as a military ally share that responsibility. New Zealand offers a different, better vision of national security.

We are badly and wastefully governed. Trivia absorbs huge amounts of our political attention and energies. It wears us down into a dull apathy...

In summary — I am optimistic, because I know humanity can find a way through this present ecological crisis if we direct and focus our energies and creativity properly, proceeding from a decent moral understanding of our responsibilities to our children and grandchildren — to our species . This understanding can come from either a religious or humanistic perspective. But it has to be articulated and fought for. There are no cop-out solutions, no way of fencing ourselves off from the world. We are all in this together.