In grim times, we need all our wits, not word games

We live in deadly serious times — of pandemic, a plunge into recession and a dangerous reversal in our national security — yet some educated elites show no grasp of this new reality. Worse, they abuse freedoms and trash democratic values as these legacies of the West are under threat from authoritarian regimes. The parallel rightly has been drawn with the 1930s, a prelude to disaster on a vast scale, and we have the added terror of a miscalculation going nuclear.

On Wednesday Scott Morrison gave a sobering account of our predicament. As Paul Kelly writes on Saturday in Inquirer: “Morrison has warned the Australian people the deepest recession for decades now runs in parallel with a heightening risk of military conflict as the sinews of regional prosperity face ‘almost irreversible strain’, demanding a revamped defence posture and strategy.” As a nation we will need to muster a high seriousness, a spirit of sacrifice and gritty determination to weather the challenges ahead.

Yet we too are swept up in Anglosphere activist hysteria, driven by social media, which turns inward to denounce the historical flaws of the West, oblivious to external threats and manipulation by China and Russia right now and in the future. Imperfect but elected governments in Australia, the US and Europe need the support of an informed and responsible citizenry. Yet these open societies are subject to destructive political attack from within, and the mobs toppling statues and screaming slogans are bereft of ideas for workable reform.

Consider the “progressive” response to Australia’s reluctant but unavoidable decision to invest more heavily in military defence. Some commentators dismiss it as militarism and proof there is no need for financial austerity elsewhere. Sombre ABC figures interview one another about the threat to democracy of an $84m indexation freeze in a $1bn-plus budget. Vested interests lobby the government for handouts, as if the explosion in public debt has blown away any limits to spending. What these Australians refuse to see is obvious to regional powers such as Indonesia that acknowledge the imperative for our more robust defence posture.

China’s police-state takeover of Hong Kong has been compared to Adolf Hitler’s ominous absorption of Austria within the Reich. This strikes at freedom and prosperity in our part of the world, yet it was the remote and misleading Black Lives Matter movement that made thousands of Australians take to the streets in defiance of pandemic restrictions they had championed when others fretted in lockdown. The death of George Floyd was horrific, but viewing it chiefly through a racial lens was questionable, whereas the facts about Chinese government human rights abuses against ethnic and religious minorities are clear. Our anti-racists are overzealous in only some contexts. When the Prime Minister shut down travel from China on public health grounds, there were commentators who framed this as Sinophobic and the kind of thing to be expected of a government imposing “racist” offshore detention on asylum-seekers.

The BLM protests, like cancel culture, suffer from a preoccupation with symbolic struggles and language policing. The New York Times brought urgent news that the Associated Press had decided to capitalise the letter B in black. This conveyed “an essential and shared sense of history”, an AP functionary intoned. The decision followed “more than two years of debate and research”. Imagine if that time and thought had been directed to lifting the quality of school education, which would disproportionately benefit blacks. But why bother with messy realities when you can curate vocabulary?

In Australia, yet again, Closing the Gap targets fail to be met, reflecting real human misery, but activists put their energy into importing the word slavery from America’s historical lexicon. At The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, a clutch of young arts writers cancel themselves as if their “whiteness” must permeate and corrupt their cultural coverage. Nobody wants skin colour to be an obstacle to advancement, but must we reduce individuals to tribal ciphers? Better a writer of unknown race who is faithful to the craft of representing the world than a designated “person of colour” who filters all subject matter through the lens of race. It’s striking that surveys show US black voters on the left are less preoccupied with anti-racism than their white leftist counterparts.

In Inquirer, Noel Pearson makes the point that the “social breakdown consequent upon economic exclusion and unemployment is never a racial­ problem, it is a human problem­”. The dignity of work, a family that functions, safe and thriving communities — these are what people need. Creating culture is hard, cancelling it easy. This doesn’t mean past wrongs should go uncondemned, but it’s better to build monuments to indigenous achievement in real time. Fixing problems and enabling worthwhile lives will require drawing on science, technology and reason, tools that belong to everyone.

The same goes for climate change, as US environmentalist Michael Shellenberger argued powerfully in this newspaper on Thursday. An emotive glossing over of uncertainties that are awkward for an activist narrative only weakens trust in science. Zeal gives green causes traction, but factual honesty and pragmatic policy have to prevail if we are to have any hope of marshalling limited resources for the right outcome. It’s a mistake to be too pessimistic about the frenzy of activism by progressive elites. Pushback has begun. People unwilling to echo empty slogans about complex issues are being bullied into silence and dishonesty. There is resentment and quiet fury among the sensible mainstream, as well as lively debate about how to reconnect with the intelligence and goodwill of the human species for the real work of reform, not woke word games.