Fear and loathing in the age of unenlightenment

Even here in the clever country, in the 21st century, public servants are reduced to gibberish when asked the simple question, ‘What is a woman?’

Just this week the PM told Indigenous Australians that after two centuries of dispossession and disadvantage the answer to their ills was renewable energy. Really? Picture: Peter Eve

Our society, in this modern age, has a problem with facts and reality. Even here in the clever country, in the 21st century, public servants are reduced to gibberish when asked the simple question, “What is a woman?”

Women and girls are forced to play sport against biological men and share changing rooms. Handing down a judgment against a sex offender in a Sydney court last year a judge referred to “her penis”.

We are constantly told that the renewable energy sources that have made our power more expensive and less reliable are the cheapest form of reliable power. The repercussions are crippling our economy.

Schools are encouraging staff and students to indulge teenagers who choose to identify as cats. On climate, students are encouraged not to consult the factual records or expert texts but to laud and emulate student activist Greta Thunberg.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. Picture: AFP

University students and green-left politicians take to the streets to protest against what they claim is a Palestinian genocide, even though the Palestinian population has grown faster than the Jewish population and it is led by the Islamist extremist terrorists of Hamas who exist to inflict genocidal violence on Jews in the Middle East. Unspeakable terrorist atrocities are characterised as the resistance of the oppressed.

The story of our nation, perhaps the world’s most peaceful and inclusive settlement and colonisation project (still imperfect, of course), is taught as a shameful epic. From a platform of unprecedented prosperity and ingenuity, young people are imbued with a sense of guilt and doom.

It is Old Testament fire and brimstone promulgated through digital age secularism. Generations that are prosperous and materialistic like no other, and more protected from the vagaries of nature, blame the generations that have given them all this for an impending Armageddon that is largely imagined and entirely avoidable.

Black is white, war is peace, and lies are truth.

Just this week the Prime Minister told Indigenous Australians that after two centuries of dispossession and disadvantage the answer to their ills was renewable energy. Really?

Meanwhile, in the country’s most affluent electorate, teal politician Allegra Spender took to social media to ask, “Will nuclear work for Australia?” Here is my suggestion for next week’s question: “Will the wheel work for France?”

We are in strife. This malaise strikes at the heart of our civilisation.

This is a denial of our bounty and its origins, and it weakens all that we have built. We are undermining our foundations.

No doubt people have been saying the world is going crazy since the first rumbles around primordial campfires. Yet for those of us who were adults before the beginning of this century – those who experienced a pre-digital age – the sense of astonishment and even despair about our trajectory is intensifying.

Since the Enlightenment the positive developments in knowledge, education, technology and prosperity in Western countries have been staggering, and their benefits have been shared with the rest of the world. The global population is now larger, more prosperous, healthier, better educated and more socially and physically mobile than anyone could have imagined at the time of Australia’s Federation or even in the post-war boom years.

Yet in the Western world there is a prevailing sense that we are disowning the building blocks of our success: the faith in rational thought; respect for democratic institutions; commitment to family, community and country; reverence for learning and the lessons of history; promotion of informed scepticism; and endorsement of a work ethic that values experience.

None of this matters to Instagram influencers. It cannot be conveyed in a TikTok video.

Despite our rich and hard-won history built on reason and science, we have trouble now with the simplest of concepts.

What is a woman and what is a man? Can society function with unreliable energy? What is the point of borders? Should religion and state be separated? Is it our duty to preserve life or terminate it? Do facts matter or are we entitled to our own truth? What matters most, our sex, the colour of our skin, our sexual persuasion or the content of our character?

It is easy to dismiss the concerns. They will be dismissed by some as old people yelling at clouds.

Sure, we are not on the brink of collapse. It is a truly privileged time to be alive in a country like ours. But there are threats from outside and within, and I know many of you share the sense of foreboding. There is a complacency that assumes we can continue to enjoy the benefits of Western liberal democracies without fighting to protect them.

This overlooks the lessons of history, and the way that just last century the entire world was plunged into conflict twice, in essence to protect the rights of sovereign nations and individual people. During the Cold War most people understood others were out to undo our good fortune. Yet now the threats and subversion are just as serious, whether they come from Chinese political interference, Russian expansionism, cyber attacks or Islamist extremism. All of those who wish to unpick the fabric of our society find useful idiots among the green-left.

Those who scoffed at the “clash of civilisations” thesis still fail to comprehend the impact of Islamist extremism on our world – from the deliberately perpetuated grievances in the Palestinian territories to the worldwide threat of Islamist terrorism, from the malevolent aims and nuclear aspirations of Iran to the demographic tensions in Europe and Britain, and from the calls for sharia law in Western countries to the rise of virulent anti-Semitism.

Yet authorities here and in other liberal democracies attempt to smother even any discussion of the issues.

The Prime Minister, the Attorney-General and the ASIO director general held a media conference this week to announce an increase in the terror threat level and failed to mention the word Islamist. Instead, ASIO’s Mike Burgess did the opposite and highlighted “Islamophobia” – making the insultingly ludicrous claim that it is almost as prevalent as anti-Semitism.

We need facts and objectivity more than ever. But they are being pushed aside by feelings and ideology.

This has long been a problem, especially from the political left where sanctimony and emotion rule supreme. Right-of-centre parties are far less ideological and therefore tend to be more firmly rooted in reality (which is not to say they do not sometimes twist facts or push nonsense for political reasons – just look at last year’s bunkum about the Uluru Statement from the Heart being 26 pages long).

Bertrand Russell was on to all this last century: “Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.”

Which brings me to why all of this is getting worse.

The digital age and social media should have made us smarter than ever because they give us instant access to all information and connect us all at every level of society – but they have had the opposite effect.

Debate is being polluted by falsehoods, fake news, ill-informed opinion, prejudice masquerading as reality, and the triumph of emotionalism and feelings over facts and reality. The worst of our human instincts is being amplified because there is no quality control or curation via a public square.

The world would be a better place and a smarter place if the smartphone were eradicated tomorrow. But that will never happen, so what to do?

American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt speaks to the horrible damage we are doing to children by giving them unfiltered access to these tools. This is troubling enough, but the same factors are changing our media, our politics, our relationships and our suburbs.

Perhaps we will learn to switch, as some of my wiser friends have done and as I have started to do. Perhaps we will rediscover the supremacy of the organic over the digital.

But a word of warning. The Albanese government wants to pass a “misinformation” bill that would set up a government agency as the arbiter of truth.

This is the last, the most dangerous and regressive, change we should consider. Governments have secretly censored us during Covid, lied to us over border protection, immigration, economics, and climate and energy – to paraphrase Jack Nicholson, they cannot handle the truth.

What misinformation would the government disallow? That vaccine mandates are wrong and ineffective? That electricity prices have not gone down by $275? That “renewable energy superpower” is a contradiction in terms? That a person with a penis cannot be a woman? That Australian emissions reductions cannot change the climate?

All these statements are true but are at odds with what we are told. Sadly, I do not know how to fix this era of falsehoods and un-enlightenment, but I do know that giving more power to governments to control information will make it only worse.