Twiggy describes an Australia we don’t know

Andrew Forrest ‘should reach for his own chill pills’. Picture: AAP

Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest may be the most Australian person he knows, but he doesn’t know his countrymen and women very well if he thinks Australia is about to “split down the middle” and succumb to “racism and violence”.

In an interview with SBS the Perth billionaire expressed his fears of a racist conflagration in a “manner similar to what’s transpired in other countries”. Although he failed to name these countries I presume he has in mind Indonesia, a nation that since independence in 1945 has subjected its Chinese population to discriminatory laws, expulsions and mass violence. Or perhaps Japan, one of the world’s last remaining monocultures.

Racism, in fact, is rife in our corner of the world. Australia, in contrast to most of its northern neighbours, is a model of multiculturalism, openness, ethnic and religious diversity, tolerance and democratic stability. That’s not to say racism doesn’t exist in Australia. The condition of our Aboriginal population remains an abiding source of collective shame. And the pandemic does seem to have fuelled a small number of assaults, both physical and verbal, on people of Asian appearance. That, of course, is reprehensible. But it’s a profound misreading of the present state of Australian society to see it as somehow on a similar trajectory to countries in our region beset by deep racial fissures.

Racism has brought about the near ruin of Sri Lanka and Myanmar. In Malaysia, a country ruled for more than two decades by the unapologetically anti-Semitic Mahathir Mohamed, social policies are specifically designed to entrench the privilege of one ethnic group: indigenous Malays. And in India, where the “idea of India” championed by Mahatma Gandhi is one of multiple religious and ethnic identities, violence against ethnic and religious minorities is common.

Recently an evening newspaper in the southern Indian city of Mysore ran an editorial, since retracted, directed at the country’s Muslim minority. “The nation is currently hosting an annoying 18 per cent of its population self-identifying as rotten apples,” it read. “An ideal solution to the problem created by bad apples is to get rid of them.”

Then there is China itself, where a 10km-square urban enclave in the boom city of Guangzhou is known locally as “chocolate city”. McDonald’s in Guangzhou was forced to apologise in mid-April when it put up a notice in English that read: “We’ve been informed that from now on black people are not allowed to enter the restaurant.”

The ban was an expression of – not the exception to – popular sentiment. “This is China, not Nigeria,” trumpeted China’s microblogging site, Weibo. Nigeria’s Foreign Minister, Geoffrey Onyeama, felt compelled to issue a formal complaint.

The prevalence of racism in the Asia-Pacific doesn’t excuse racism within our borders, but it should help to shape a response to the problem. The first step is to acknowledge that racism, though morally repugnant to most contemporary people, has deep behavioural roots and is hard to eradicate.

A dog, to most others of its species, is a dog. But humans have a long history, extending through prehistory and flourishing under the Reich, of regarding fellow humans as sub human.

One of Western culture’s great stains is the marriage of racism and imperialism, an unholy alliance that led to the widespread enslavement and exploitation of millions of people in Africa, Asia, South America and the Pacific. But then, paradoxically, one of our culture’s great contributions to moral progress has been the forging of intellectual and imaginative tools to engage with racism and suppress it.

An inclusive humanist ideal is aired in the Hebrew Bible, where God commands his chosen people to treat all as one before the law: “The sentence you pass shall be the same whether it be on native or on stranger.”

The Apostle Paul took this injunction and gave it a radical edge: “There are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Jesus Christ.” Many centuries later Christianity fired abolitionist William Wilberforce in his ultimately successful campaign to end slavery in the British empire. The poison of racism also has its antidote in the secular intellectual tradition. German-American moral philosopher Hannah Arendt thought that the Homeric poems, which invite us to picture Trojans and Greeks (Achaeans) as equally heroic and equally noble, planted the seeds of humanist universality. “This had happened nowhere before; no other civilisation, however splendid, had been able to look with equal eyes upon friend and foe, upon success and defeat,” she wrote.

In Chapter 19 of Voltaire’s Candide, the hero meets a negro slave who tells him: “When we work at the sugar-canes, and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off the hand; and when we attempt to run away, they cut off the leg; both cases have happened to me. This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe.” Touche!

Similar bigotry-busters are also found in the Eastern intellectual tradition, particularly Buddhism, with its ideal of compassion for “all suffering beings”.

Of course, no one civilisation possesses a monopoly on the virtues of liberty. Observes Nobel laureate Amartya Sen: “Support for ideas of liberty and public discussion, and what may be called basic human rights, have been articulated no less often in Asia – in India, China, Japan and in various other countries in East, Southeast, South and West Asia – than in Europe.”

One response to the pandemic the world over has been a rise in globalism, humanism and a deep appreciation of the universality of suffering. Contrary to this spirit we’ve certainly seen a spike in xenophobia, racism, tribalism. The two instincts – one open, the other closed – are diametrically opposed. And they are at war. The victor will most likely shape the world order for the next few decades.

How do we ensure the former prevails? Certainly not by fearmongering of the kind rolled out by Forrest, which has a slightly intimidatory air: keep mouthing off about China and you know what will happen! If we can listen to our better angels, maintain sober leadership, and encourage consensus around some core principles within our own tradition, I think we’ve got this. Twiggy, in the meantime, should reach for his own chill pills.