5 December 2017, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
In 2016 I wrote that we lived in a world gripped by fear – if only I had realized how good we had it then! How much worse is it now, as the utterly remarkable 2017 comes to a close? I don’t know that I have ever experienced a year with so many violent and oppositional currents. Every day I turn on the radio with equal amounts of excitement and trepidation. In the words of Dorothy Parker, I think to myself, as the ABC news theme (mercifully not yet ‘updated’) cranks up ‘What fresh hell is this?’
Some mornings I have had reason for jubilation; the resounding Yes vote for same sex marriage is the latest one but also Emmanuel Macron beating back the ghastly Marine le Pen, the sudden fall of that old despot Robert Mugabe, the surprise win by Jacinda Ardern and the continued popularity of Justin Trudeau. But mostly my heart has sunk. Surely I am not alone in finding that the mere sound of Donald Trump’s voice causes bile to rise in my throat? The news about climate change just gets worse and worse, Brexit continues its lurch towards disaster, our own timid government ricochets from one self-inflicted wound to the next and the desperate refugees on Manus and Nauru suffer unendingly and virtually unnoticed. Two certifiable nut-jobs intermittently bellow nuclear threats at each other (and one of them launches missile tests, playing – apparently – the world’s deadliest game of chicken). Then there’s the drip, drip, drip of news about random disaffected fuckwits who mow down masses in the US with automatic weapons or their equally despicable and inadequate brothers in arms who mow down unsuspecting pedestrians with cars and trucks.
On the other hand we see women, the LGBTQI community, people of colour and first nations people gain strength and confidence. We also see the fight to contain climate change continue regardless of the attempts by the right to prevent it. Thanks to the ALP’s win in the Queensland election, the Adani mine looks less likely to go ahead and, of course, here in South Australia, Elon Musk has won his bet and built his huge battery storage facility in less than 100 days. I think that means you guys will have to pay for it, but it is a wonderful story none the less. There is even a small amount of good news about the Barrier Reef. Huge economies like California and New York are standing up to Trump and his climate vandals and Europe is becoming positively revolutionary about renewables. Perhaps most importantly of all, business has seen the writing on the wall and knows that coal is the power of the past.
As a battered old feminist I cannot quite believe the on-going fall out from the Harvey Weinstein revelations (themselves, I suspect, a fall out from the Trump win). It is incredible to see powerful, predatory men held to account for the first time in history. It is as if women, once they got over the shock of Hillary Clinton’s loss – and to a misogynistic buffoon, talk about rubbing our noses in it - suddenly realized how angry they were and now Weinstein, Hoffman, Spacey, Louis CK, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly, Roy Moore, Don Bourke et al are copping the shit almost as substitutes for Trump, the pussy-grabber-in-chief. As one tweeter put it, the most depressing thing about the last 12 – 18 months is how easily people believe the worst rumours about a woman and how easily they dismiss the worst behaviour by a man.
Yet, for every action there seems to be an equal and opposite reaction. As many people become more ‘woke’ (to use a word I have only just learned the meaning of), many other people become the opposite, closing their eyes and ears to anything that threatens their perspective. Racism, sexism and homophobia are both under concerted attack and being waved as badges of courage. Nazis have gained confidence from the persistent dog whistling from the right wing media and right wing governments, particularly the Trump administration. The old powerful elite (white, straight men, mostly educated in private schools) sense they are losing their stranglehold on power and they are fighting back and fighting back hard.
In our existential dread we thrash about for people to blame – the left, the right, Muslims, refugees, feminists, believers, unbelievers, terrorists, multinationals, banks, politicians, unions and that reliable old omnibus – political correctness. The one thing we all agree on is that the future looks alarming and utterly unpredictable. We are, we believe, in uncharted waters.
But, perhaps that is not so. Perhaps human beings have been through something like this before.
In 1440, Johannes Guttenberg invented the printing press and changed the world. Prior to this technical marvel, every book had to be handwritten - predominantly by monks laboring in scriptoriums. In Europe, information was controlled by a tiny number of educated scholars, most of whom were priests of the Catholic Church, and almost all books were Bibles. Most of the rest of the population were illiterate. Information was guarded zealously and people were woefully ignorant. Those in power liked it that way. The many Bibles and religious texts that were laboriously produced by hand were written exclusively in Latin, a language ordinary people did not understand. When people participated in worship (and it was compulsory) religious ceremonies were conducted in that same dead language, with the priest behind a screen, his back to the congregation. Worshippers were only permitted to participate in a pre-ordained, ritualistic manner. Indeed, it was one of the tenets of the Catholic Church that ordinary people should neither read the word of God nor pray to God directly. Their only contact with their maker had to be through a man of God; a priest – everything else was heresy. In this way, the priests and the Church controlled virtually all information for centuries. And through controlling information, of course, they also controlled the population.
In my other life, I have written a trilogy of YA historical novels about Elizabeth 1 and this has meant I had to research her life and times. As I did so, I began to see powerful resonances with the present.
Elizabeth Tudor's very existence was a direct consequence of the dramatic changes happening in the power structures and organization of the world at that time. Changes that were the result - as I suspect they always are - of a technological innovation. In the 1500s it was the printing press. Elizabeth Tudor was born in 1533, during the tumult that followed the first information revolution. We are currently living through the second.
It was the invention of the printing press that gave rise to the Protestant reformation. Suddenly, books - most of which remained Bibles - could be produced much more rapidly and in greater numbers and at much lower cost. With more books available, supply created demand. People, particularly those with means, began to learn to read. Even before Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in 1522, cracks were beginning to appear in the ironclad control the Catholic Church had previously exercised over access to information and knowledge.
Even the language of knowledge started to change. Luther translated the Bible into the German vernacular and William Tyndale translated it into English. Such was the Church’s fear of the spread of information both men were excommunicated. Tyndale was eventually condemned as a heretic. He was strangled and his body burnt at the stake. But, even in the face of such draconian consequences, people continued to demand their own direct relationship with God and their right to read the Bible in their own language. What people were really agitating for, perhaps, was access to information and knowledge. They were no longer willing to know only what the priestly class wanted them to know.
Elizabeth Tudor's mother, Anne Boleyn, was a devout and evangelical Protestant. Famous as the coquette who held a King's ardor at bay for a decade until he eventually made her Queen (trivializing serious and intelligent women is a very old human habit), it was his determination to get a divorce from his Catholic first wife so he could marry Anne that led to his countries break with Rome and the establishment of the Protestant Church of England. Henry VIII was a Protestant for political, dynastic and sexual purposes, but Boleyn was a true believer. Her tenacious commitment to ideas such as each Christian’s right to a direct & personal relationship with God was one of the reasons she made so many powerful enemies.
In response to the Protestant schism and the threat it posed to their power and control, the Catholic Church burnt heretics, hunted them down and tortured them. The Spanish Inquisition was formed to stamp out heresy. Huguenots were massacred in France and wars were fought between Protestant and Catholic nations. Elizabeth herself lived under a Catholic fatwa. (Protestants were brutal and fanatical too.) It is estimated that many people (the figures are disputed and vary from about 60,000 to 9 million – your guess is as good as mine) were executed as witches between the 14th and 18th centuries in Europe. (It is interesting that being a witch only became illegal in England with the accession of James 1 who followed the reign of Elizabeth 1 – nothing like a good witch-hunt (literal, not metaphorical) to put uppity women back in their place again.) The handbook of the Inquisition, of course, was called “Malleus Maleficarum” or ‘A Hammer for Witches”. Given some of the rhetoric about feminists today ‘feminism is cancer’, ‘feminazis’, the lock her up chants that followed Hillary Clinton everywhere and the recent survey that found 1 in 5 Australians think women are becoming ‘too outspoken’ its enough to make any outspoken woman’s blood run cold. Especially after the world wide explosion of sexual harassment allegations, many of us older feminists are bracing ourselves for the backlash.
Despite the horrific price paid by so many, none of it worked. The Catholic Church had to slowly share power. Not only with Protestants but also with the growing secular society that emerged as a result of widening education. From ruling half the world, to such an extent that Pope Alexander VI actually divided the new world in two and gave one half to the Spanish and the other to the Portugese, Catholicism became just another branch of Christianity. As education and knowledge spread the Reformation was followed by the Enlightenment. And then all the liberation movements that emerged thereafter - including the abolition of slavery, child labour and increased rights for women. After all, if every man could have his own relationship with God, why not every woman? Why not every slave? This democratization of the word of God led slowly - but logically and inexorably - to democracy itself; predicated on the idea that all men (even, perhaps, women) were created equal – in the image of the divine. Everyone ended up entitled to, not just a relationship with God, but with a vote and a say. One followed inevitably, I think, from the other. As those in power understand only too well, once a few difficult questions begin to be asked, a great many more will follow.
The Internet is at least as revolutionary as the printing press and we are struggling with the effect it is having on today’s information gatekeepers. In the west, these are no longer the churches (as has been powerfully illustrated by the overwhelming Yes vote in the non-binding survey)– although they battle on manfully. The mainstream media, particularly newspaper proprietors - the high priests who used to set the daily political agenda - big business, banks, retailers and governments are all feeling the loss of control. Many of them are thrashing about in protest, trying to hold onto a power that they once held so effortlessly, they may have begun to see it as a divine right.
Now that literally everybody with a smart device has not only access to the media, but the actual ability to create content themselves, things that used to be kept quiet are getting out. Suddenly everyone can have a direct relationship with what used to be privileged information, Wikileaks and Edward Snowden have brought that home to the powers that be in no uncertain terms. I can’t help wondering if Assange, Snowden and Chelsea Manning are the William Tyndales of our time.
Wherever you look in the modern world, old certainties are collapsing. Bricks and mortar retailers are struggling to hold onto customers and profits. The music industry has returned to concerts and touring to make money, not just because of internet piracy (I am seeing Paul McCartney next week), but also because even when fans legally purchase their download, prices (and so profits) have collapsed. The troubadour, it seems, is back. The same is true for books, films and TV. Quite apart from Australians being the biggest internet pirates in the world (our response to the absurd Foxtel monopoly), advertisers are in a cold sweat about how to catch viewer’s attention in these days of fragmenting media, Apple TV, Netflix, IQ, live pause and fast forward. Those who rely on making a profit to exist are badly shaken. Rupert Murdoch began his attack on the new media landscape by berating public broadcasters like the BBC and ABC, aware that their publicly subsidized model allowed them to offer viewers much better service than his stations could afford. The right have fuelled his criticism by bleating about bias and managerial managers have compounded the damage by falling prey to the doctrine of yoof, trivializing content and dumbing down what they program from a mistaken and patronizing view of what young people might want. Public broadcasters are now under siege around the world. Will they survive? I cannot tell you.
Newspapers – direct products of the invention of the printing press - appear to be on the brink of extinction, at least in hard copy and on weekdays. And news stories no longer break on the evening news or in first edition headlines or even on radio. They break on twitter, instagram and on facebook. The witnesses to earth shattering events now upload their smart phone photos and videos instantly. Who needs an expensive camera crew anymore? Owning the information, the truth, the facts, no longer has the currency it once had so is it any wonder that people are making up their own facts, creating their own news, choosing their own truth and their own lies.
Spin which once merely meant spinning a factual story so that you put its positive emotional load forward rather than it’s negative (everything contains both) has spun out of control. Now spin is all there is and the public are made dizzy trying to pick the truth from the lies. Now, cyberwars are being fought via the corruption and manipulation of information. Hillary Clinton was defeated by a toxic mixture of racism (white America was seeking revenge for Obama), sexism (the ancient trope of the evil of women who seek power) and – as is becoming ever more clear - malevolent foreign interference. Democracy is being undermined by those who want autocratic power. These days, they seek no longer to own information (they can’t - so they’ve given that up) but to own the truth by getting to decide what it is. If information can no longer be owned and controlled, it loses its value. What has value now is spinning information to the point of outright denial (a fact suddenly isn’t a fact) or complete fabrication (the largest inauguration crowd ever). And an industry is growing up around it.
A story broke last week about an organization called (typically) Project Veritas. Project Veritas (literally Project Truth) attempted to deliberately plant a false accusation about Alabama Republican Senate hopeful Roy Moore with a journalist at The Washington Post. Moore has been accused by a number of women of molesting them when they were very young teenagers. He was also once banned from a shopping mall for bothering young girls. The sting operation – carried out so that the false story could be revealed and thereby cast doubt on all the accusations – was thwarted by the professionalism of and thorough checking by the journalists at the Post. Nevertheless, and this is almost the most shocking thing – Project Veritas is claiming the whole thing as a victory!!! Worse, Moore is climbing in the polls. Do people – particularly God fearing people – actually care that Moore is very likely a child molester? As long as he only molested girls, it appears they do not.
Orwell, it seems, was only out by a few decades. The rot that spin has created was obvious even 20 years ago when otherwise fairly honest and well-meaning govts were persuaded to put lying titles on things –designed to influence responses or at the very least placate any opposition – some that spring to mind include “No Child Left Behind’ ‘Building the Education Revolution” and, of course, the aforementioned “Project Veritas”. When you hear shit like that, it is a clue. Whatever the claim in the policy or organisation’s title, expect them to do the exact opposite. Indeed, the epidemic of psychological projection that appears to have infected the old power elites, whereby every accusation of an ideological enemy turns out to be a disguised confession of their own bad behavior (I am looking at you, Donald Trump), is reaching plague proportions.
Yet not all is lost in this seething, angry mess. The reason the powerful are in such a panic, the reason they fling accusations about willy nilly and stoop to childish (and appallingly amateurish, honestly if you haven’t already, read about the Project Veritas attempted sting, it’s pathetic) trickery is that they see their power is fading. The problem with all their increasingly desperate and shrill flailing about is that reality bites. As Philip K Dick said ‘reality is that which, if you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away’ (hello, climate change, but more about that later).
Indeed, that indomitable old dame feminism has found herself firmly back on the political agenda despite being declared dead every decade since 1911. This, like the advances women made after the invention of the printing press and subsequent increase in the education of women, is thanks to the internet and the unmediated access women’s voices now have on social media. Jimmy Saville got his timing right, Harvey Weinstein and Don Burke not so much. When the women of India find the courage to march in the streets to protest the endemic rapes in that country because access to social media (even the poorest have smart phones) has allowed them to express their feelings to one another in ways that were never available to them before – you know the world is changing. The current outpouring of rage by women on the Metoo hashtag is entirely due to the internet. LGBTI activists have been asserting their rights and their impact completely nullified the expensive advertising and PR campaign mounted by the “No’ case. Tony Abbott mistakenly thought he could use the same tactics he did against the Republic vote back in the 90s and prevail. But the times they are a-changing and the vote precisely mirrored the pre-campaign polling. All that scaremongering went to waste and that fact has only further panicked those who see power as a zero sum game – and naturally theirs.
Worse, if you are trying to hold onto power and control, is that your attempts to manipulate can easily blow up in your face. I hesitate to bring up Cory Bernardi’s name in South Australia, but his attempt to scaremonger about boy’s cross dressing at Craigeburn primary School to raise money for girl’s education “Do it in a Dress” is too delicious an example of this to ignore. The school hoped to raise $900. Thanks to Bernardi drawing national attention to their project, they raised over $275,000. Maybe the public is not as easy to fool as some of our leaders appear to think.
The response of today’s powerful class to this comprehensive loss of control mirrors that of the Catholic Church 500 years ago. They are furious and frightened and they are fighting back. Their politics have moved sharply to the right. Only 3 decades ago, it was a conservative government that reacted with compassion and generosity to the first boat people from Vietnam. Bob Hawke – after whom this lecture is named – reacted to the Tianiman Square Massacre with tears and also a comprehensive welcome for any Chinese students who wanted to stay in Australia and many did. Now, even Labor governments appear to be in some kind of competition with their conservative counterparts as to who can be most cruel. In my darkest moments, I worry that the desperation of the men on Manus and Nauru may be experienced by many more people before this historical shift is done. Amnesty and other such organisations have never been more vital. We simply must not stay silent when anyone’s human rights are violated. And it is good to see that there is a positive side to what I am calling The Trump Effect. People are trying to fight back in any way that they can. When Trump won the first things I did was subscribe to the New Yorker, become a monthly donor to Pro Publica and give a donation to Planned Parenthood and The Guardian. I wasn’t alone. That is another unlooked for upside to the election of Trump, newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post, bucking the trend of declining readership, have seen their circulation figures rise for the first time in decades.
An inchoate sense of old certainties starting to crumble may also help explain the increased aggression and irrationality of old fashioned lobby groups like the NRA. Never mind the evidence (even 28 dead, most of whom were very young children, at the tragic Sandy Hook massacre) fear of losing power and control is only likely to make those who feel threatened clutch their weapons closer.
It is human nature to react to a sense of losing control in general by clamping down twice as hard on anything you can control in the particular. Hence, perhaps, the triumph of the measurement-maniacs in areas like health, education, government policy and management theory. Command and control methodology is back in fashion from synthetic phonics and direct instruction in our classrooms to what Donald Horne once called ‘fantasies of exactitude’ in the worship of data over experience in just about every sector. Worse, what now goes by the once liberal term of ‘reform’ often looks much more like old fashioned authoritarian ‘control’ when viewed up close. Forget fascism and communism, as author C.J. Samson said, what we may be facing now is the development of toxic democracies characterized by nationalism and xenophobia, both favourite bolt holes for the frightened and insecure. The rise of Donald Trump, the triumph of Brexit, the re-emergence of Pauline Hansen, are signs of just such a fear-based response. If things feel out of our control, many turn to leaders who will find us scapegoats to blame. We also look to a nostalgic view of the past, fantasies of a golden age, if you like. After his election, many tried to argue that Clinton was the conventional, establishment candidate and Trump the change-maker. Never mind the convoluted thinking that leads anyone to argue that after 44 men in suits a 45th man in a suit is the unconventional choice, the clue to Trump’s true colours was in his slogan ‘Make America great again’. Its that word ‘again’ that reveals how backward looking his supporters really are. Actually, I suspect Trump wants to take America way, way back, to the despots of old, to kleptocracy and rule by robber Barons. (Hello 1500s) Either that or he and Putin are planning to strip America of all that is of value and sell the rest for parts. The American system is a robust one, however, and the press, the media and most forcefully of all women and people of colour are fighting back as hard as they can. Putting Roy Moore aside for a moment, in the first local elections since Trump’s win, Democrats won where they never had before, women stood and won office in larger numbers than before and, most satisfyingly of all, a transwoman stood and beat the Republican who had introduced the cruel and discriminatory ‘bathroom bill’. The danger remains, however, particularly in Trump’s opportunity to appoint a plethora of conservative judges who will have lifetime appointments and could comprehensively change the legal freedoms of many Americans, particularly women, LGBTQI people, people of colour and immigrants. This is a real and profoundly disturbing risk.
And while it is the news/fake news dichotomy that is the most obvious symptom of our current malaise; there may be a paradox at the bottom of our confusion. I can’t help wondering as I look at the mania for measurement and putting a number on everything if our obsession with objective data and evidence-based decision making (noble though they may be in many ways) that has made us all much more vulnerable to believing any old shit. You see, we have all been asked to suspend our own judgment and good old gut feel in the face of so-called evidence. We have all had to put our misgivings aside and try to ignore the ringing of our bullshit metres because somebody has presented us with a study or a survey telling us the opposite of what we have seen with our own eyes and we have been forced to doubt ourselves so often that maybe it is now easier for us to accept truth as lies and lies as truth.
But it is in climate change denial that the powerful most resemble the Catholic Church of the 15th century. Faced with the (literally) earth shattering realization that the old economic model of continuous growth is starting to decline and that the planet’s resources are not infinite, many of those running the world have reacted by closing their eyes and covering their ears - stubbornly refusing to see. Like the Inquisitors of old they prefer to accuse climate scientists of heresy and conspiracy than listen. Using somewhat more subtle tactics than burning or torturing, they have still managed to intimidate many – including our public broadcasters - into a nervous silence or, at best, spurious attempts at balance. Professor Brian Cox debating One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts on the ABC’s QandA for example. I won’t labour the point by mentioning Galileo, but you get the idea.
Of course, such tactics didn’t work for the Catholic Church then and won’t work for the powers that be now. But, if history is any guide (and it’s the only one we’ve got) we should expect the powerful to continue to fight back hard and to fight dirty for some time to come before they bow to the inevitable. The fear and loathing around debt and deficit, the constant pressure on public services, particularly those that serve the vulnerable, are examples of desperate attempts to take back control. Living in a constant state of ‘crisis’ helps keep people docile. Frightening them into compliance by taking away social safety nets is another way, as is exhausting them by making jobs insecure and asking them to work until they drop. Increasing the barriers to further education is another method of keeping control in the hands of the already privileged. Noam Chomsky puts it like this;
“Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt they can’t afford the time to think. Tuition fee increases are a disciplinary technique, and, by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the disciplinarian culture. This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy.”
I’m not saying political leaders have done all this consciously or as some sort of conspiracy but, as I was taught in my advertising career long ago, if you want to know why someone does something – follow the benefit.
However, the part of the world where the impact of this latest information revolution may be most powerfully felt is in those parts of it that did not experience a reformation last time around.
We can see that already in what used to optimistically be called the Arab Spring. Not just the explosions of dissent in Egypt, Libya, Syria and more surprisingly Thailand and even Hong Kong, but also the general resurgence of fundamentalist Islam (and Christianity, for that matter) makes perfect sense when looked at through the prism of history. In 15th century Europe the once all-powerful church tried – vainly as it turned out – to shut down access to newly available information and to continue to control the population. In the 21st century, extreme anti-information movements like the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and ISIS are attempting to do the same thing. But it isn’t simply such overtly medieval groups who are railing against knowledge and truth. Christian fundamentalists are becoming just as extreme. It is claimed that it is impossible for women to get pregnant from rape because their bodies shut it down. It is claimed that more guns make people safer not more at risk. It is claimed that refugees and undocumented migrants are more of a threat than disgruntled white men hungry for revenge. It is claimed that vaccinations are bad for children’s health, that 9/11 was a conspiracy and perpetrated by the Americans, that climate change is a hoax, that Sandy Hook never happened and that Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile ring in the basement of a Pizza restaurant in DC. It is claimed that abortion causes breast cancer. It is claimed that the gender wage gap is a myth. And people believe this shit. Conspiracy theories, misinformation, fake news, calling real news fake news, downright lies, political spin, spurious attempts at balance, constant accusations of bias are all attempts by those in power to keep that power by controlling and defining truth and lies. The authoritarians are fighting the liberals (they want to make authority, hierarchy and inequality great again) in every corner of the planet.
They will fail just as they did 500 years ago. The only question is how long it will take until they do.
We do not have the same luxury in terms of time that we had in the 15th century. Climate scientists believe it may already be too late to cap global warming at 2 degrees and no-one really wants to contemplate what effect uncontrollable global warming may have. Add to that the super-destructive weapons that technology has put into the hands of modern humans – entirely the wrong humans, at the moment, and I cannot help fearing what state the world may be left in once the virtual reformation has run its course.
In the words of George Santayana “those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.” My only hope is we repeat them in a hurry.