Government complicit in promoting 18C moral crusaders

The explosion of vitriol triggered by the Bill Leak case demands a psychological explanation. For stating a truth that should not be stated, according to a sizeable minority of the population, a cartoonist — for whom there is conventionally broad ­licence — is pilloried as a racist, deluged in hate mail and dragged before the Human Rights Commission.

Freud’s concept of negation ­explains a lot. What appears in surface behaviour is the opposite of its unconscious motivation, the act deliberately inverting its true ­nature. In Freud’s own examples, negation is provoked by feelings of guilt — as with the mother who worries she does not love a child enough and compensates by spoiling it. Or, in another illustration that is of greater relevance here, there is the forced smile in someone whose ideal of themselves is that they are a nice person, who smiles on the surface to cover up unconscious aggression. “To smile and smile and be a villain.”

In the present case, “racial ­hatred” is invented in order to persecute it. This allows the pious accusers to vent their own hatred with a good conscience. The accusers’ self-image is that of peace-loving compassion, of a good person committed to social equality and harmony, yet the psychic reality is one of simmering ­resentment. Irritability and free-floating rage are then projected on to the perpetrator, in this instance Leak. It is imagined that by silencing him, the anger within will be silenced, exorcised, with the troubled self liberated from impulses in itself that it doesn’t like.

Moreover, the venting of rage without normal accompanying guilt allows the powerful pleasure of emotional catharsis. Such catharsis not only quickens the blood but may contribute to identity. I hate, therefore I am! More specifically, the morally outraged ­becomes a person of merit and significance, crusading for the good under the flag of virtue. All crusaders are dependent for their identity on their targets; and given the strange twists of masochistic guilt, the more innocent the target often the more intense the persecution.

Edvard Munch’s painting of The Scream has struck a chord over the past century, becoming a symbol of a particular modern type of anguish. It seems apposite here, picturing an emaciated skeletal head wrought by wide-eyed terror as it blocks its ears to silence the swirls of nightmare that ­encircle it. A throbbing counterpoint of explosive word and reactive scream rises to a crescendo, followed by redemptive silence.

Good conscience is easy in the case at hand because the projected victims, remote community Nor­thern Territory Aborigines, are an extremely underprivileged group. The supposed championing of them represents a compassionate and charitable cause that cannot plausibly be questioned.

The argument so far requires some qualification. One needs to separate rational concern — even justified guilt — from false guilt mobilised for a political purpose. The British settlement of this continent did mean the dispossession of the indigenous population from their lands. While ­“invasion” is the wrong word, in that the takeover did not happen by means of a landing army followed by set battles over territory, the traditional term “settlement” is too benign. Many European Australians are rightly uneasy about how the prosperity they enjoy today was enabled in the beginning, and about the long-term consequences for some ­descendants of the displaced original inhabitants.

The rational and sober analysis of the dreadful conditions that exist today in most remote indigenous communities was made by Peter Sutton, an anthropologist working with Aboriginal populations for 40 years, who assisted with many land rights cases. His 2009 book The Politics of Suffering was a troubled, measured critique of three decades of liberal compassionate policy, on the grounds it has made suffering in remote communities worse. Sutton was as far from an unsympathetic or ­uninformed observer as one can imagine, yet he was met not just with disagreement and counter­argument by some of his fellow ­anthropologists but he was ­attacked with breathtaking vitriol. Like Leak, he had spoken the unspeakable truth. It was ­demanded that he shut up.

The Spanish Inquisition exemplified this kind of pathology in ­extremis, as did the medieval practice of persecuting women deemed to be “witches”. A society pervaded by paranoid fear of the devil within searches under every leaf for ­imagined heresy or blasphemy.

Post-religious societies have experienced their own variants. Secular Nazism persecuted min­orities who it claimed were polluting the purity of the nation. More recently, and with less gravity, radical groups in universities have demonstrated violently, and since at least the 1960s, shouted down opinion they did not want to hear. Munch’s scream looms like an emblem spirit over campus politics.

Here is another example of ­negation, with modern institutions whose very reason for being is dedication to the free discussion of ideas and the objective pursuit of truth, becoming the location for illiberal intolerance of views that go against the fashionable grain. Once again, the assumption seems to be that the expression of such views will corrupt the innocent ­listener and pollute the institution. It is as if the one remaining freedom is the freedom to silence the stigmatised other.

Any crusade needs a faith. Since the 1960s, it has mainly been a neo-Marxist ideology of domination and oppression that has prevailed. According to it, modern Western capitalist societies are ­Satanic oppres­sors of the weak and the disadvantaged. Bill Leak’s caricature of a dysfunctional indigenous family hit the nerve with unintended forensic precision.

What is new in this history of intolerance is the role of the state. The civic order representing the citizenry — the state — should be defending the primary democratic principle of free speech. A society that limits free speech, limits the freedom of the press and interferes in the untrammelled capacity for free association — citizens gathering together voluntarily to form clubs, unions, interest groups, charities, indeed for any kind of mutual enjoyment. Hereby are compromised two out of three of the key conditions for democracy as a successful and flourishing political form, a free press and voluntary associations, as spelled out by Alexis de Tocqueville in his study Democracy in America. Tocqueville’s third necessary condition was an independent judiciary.

The civic culture of the West has prospered to a large degree ­because of the separation of politics from religion. As Jesus taught: “Leave to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act goes against this wisdom, inviting pseudo-religious zeal into the public sphere and providing it with poten­tial legal authority. It induces any aggrieved citizens to take those of whom they disapprove to court, if in the quasi-judicial form of the Human Rights Commission.

We are rapidly learning that there is nowhere practical to draw the line about what speech is tolerable and what is not to be tolerated — apart from that limited by ­existing defamation laws and perhaps laws proscribing incitement to ­violence.

The Coalition government could in the past, with some ­cogency, decide that the repealing of section 18C was not worth the expenditure of political capital that would be required. Events have now taken over. The government, via its own Human Rights Commission, is complicit in promoting a new order of blasphemy law. It is complicit in giving legal clout and status to those offended, for whatever dark psychological reasons, by what someone else, for instance Leak, might say. This situation is no longer tenable in a self-respecting liberal democracy.

John Carroll is professor emeritus of sociology at La Trobe University.