In Nineteen Eighty-Four there's scene in which Winston Smith ponders the purpose of his job which is to rewrite historical documents. He asks 'I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. As one time it had been a sign of madness to believe the earth goes round the sun: today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.
Totalitarianism can do many things. It can lock people up. It can make them believe 2 + 2 = 5 (as Winston writes in the dust on the table at the Chestnut Tree café at the end of the novel). And it can make people believe they're 'a minority of one'. In Nineteen Eight-Four it's 'a sign of madness' to think as Winston does (until he is tortured into thinking something else) that 'the past is unalterable'.
Totalitarians understand the point of 'divide and conquer'. Totalitarians divide and divide and divide until eventually they conquer and there's just one of you by yourself. If everyone is thinking the opposite of what you're thinking, inevitably, like Winston, you'll ask yourself 'am I wrong? and you'll come to believe
the truth actually is determined by a majority vote.'
All of this is a way of saying that from time to time I like to check in to make sure I'm not the only one thinking what I'm thinking. Which is why I read The Spectator Australia, and Quadrant, watch Sky News, and immerse myself in the comments section of articles in The Australian. (My favourite pieces in newspaper are the pro-Voice ones that have beneath them hundreds of comments explaining why the piece is wrong. I scroll through them nodding and uttering to myself 'that's exactly what I think!' and 'I wish I'd thought of that!' and 'they said it much better than I could have! and 'why isn't Anthony Albanese asked that at this next press conference?'
So for example in a piece today in The Australian by Sean Gordon arguing that 'conservatives' should support the Voice, 'Brett' wrote this:
Sean, I would like to think that as we are both Australian citizens that we have more in common than difference. This means that while we might all have and respect our different circumstances, ancestries, educations etc, that at the end of the day, looking towards the future, we share the same aspirations of commonality, and community for the good of all.
However the longer the Voice debate goes on, I am coming to realise that many aboriginal leaders think the way forward is highlighting our differences, rather than what brings us together. Quite simply, I don't think prioritising our differences and treating people of different racial heritage differently and separately is the way forward for our community as a whole. It's a No from me.
It's nice to know you're not alone. But it's more than nice. Sometimes you need to know you're not alone. When I was the executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs people would say to me the first priority of the IPA should be to spread our message to 'undecideds' and those 'in the middle'. And I'd reply 'No quite.
Our first priority is to tell our members and supporters THEY ARE NOT ALONE. And to keep on telling them. After we've done that we can move on to the undecideds and those yet-to-be-convinced.'
Which brings me to what I wanted to talk about this week. A recent example of someone asking the same question I've often asked and two examples of people identifying some home-truths. They're from the United States, the UK, and here in Australia.
First, there's Leighton Woodhouse writes with Michael Shellenberger on Substack. Woodhouse has had Emmy nominations for his documentary films and was once a union organiser. You could safely say he was of 'the left'. In a piece from last Sunday - 'What Happened to the Left?' he said this:
Last week, Glenn Greenwald appeared as a guest on the Ben Shapiro Show. The coupling, Shapiro pointed out, was 'weird'. For years, Greenwald and Shapiro have traded vicious barbs on Twitter. Greenwald called Shapiro 'genuinely a fucking idiot' and also 'soulless'. Shapiro has called Greenwald 'a wolf', as well as a 'useful idiot'. But here were the two together, agreeing on a lot more than they disagreed on.
Liberal [in the American sense of the word] haters of Greenwald claim that he became a right-winger a long time ago, so his newfound collegiality with his erstwhile nemesis, Shapiro, is hardly a surprise. But that lazy explanation is belied by the common ground they now share. Among the points of agreement in their conversation: the U.S. security state is undermining democracy, America should be brokering peace in Ukraine instead of fuelling the conflict, and our free speech is being undermined by the arrogance of elites.
All of these were standard leftist reflexes a mere decade ago. Greenwald would have been right at home arguing each of them back then in his column in the Guardian, or in Salon [a left-wing journal] before that. If Greenwald now belongs to 'the right', then it seems that the right has moved to him rather than vice versa. Which invites the question: where, exactly, is the left now?...
For those of us over the age of, say, 30, it's a dizzying experience to have to presume that the most vociferous critics of corporate/state censorship and US military adventurism probably have a MAGA hat somewhere, and to get used to erstwhile Bernie [Sanders] and Elizabeth Warren defending the integrity of pharmaceutical corporations and CIA spooks.
One day a few months ago, I had lunch with a group of Bay Area feminists who opposed the intrusion of biological men into female-only spaces under the cover of trans rights. Many of them were lesbians and the older ones among them may well have been hippies in the 60s. 'Did you see Tucker last night?' one of them eagerly asked. Some of the others responded gleefully that they had. One of them had once been a guest on the show.
Woodhouse explains what's happened as follows - 'The children of the ruling class have colonised the left, and are using its moral language to malign the broader American public as a bigoted, ignorant, dangerous mob'.
I think that's true but there's something deeper too. It's about power.
The left is more interested in power than in principles. 'Power', whether economic or cultural or political, in whatever Marxian/Frankfurt School way you define it is the central concept to the left's interpretation of the world. The 'principles' the left once claimed they believed in, such as say freedom of speech or the equality of citizenship, were only ever a means to an end. And now that the left has in large part gained they power it sought the principles the left used to gain power are no longer useful. Freedom of speech can be used to challenge the left's power - which is why the left embraces censorship. Freedom of speech is a weapon of the powerless against the powerful..
There's lots of caveats and generalisations in what I've just said but it's the simplest and most obvious answer to Woodhouse's question. If you take the left at it's word and that everything really is only about 'power' then what's occurred is no mystery. What's happened to the left is that it got into power'.
The second remark is from one of my favourite publications, The Telegraph in the UK and a piece by Fraser Nelson. Last week he wrote about how 'Fact Checkers' are attempting to turn differences of opinion into questions of 'fact'. And from that follows that a different opinion can be 'misinformation'.
The BBC's own team of truth-deciders, modestly called 'Reality Check', are rather selective in the realities they check. When David Attenborough's excellent Wild Isles documentary claimed that '60 per cent of our flying insects have vanished', it was a startling claim - but one the fact-checkers let slide. It can be tracked down to an amateur study asking motorists to count splats on their number plates. Had Attenborough said that more people die each from cold than from heat, he'd face outcry and a full Nigel Lawson-style inquisition. The former chancellor faced a three-month investigation by a press regulator for making precisely this claim.
When fact-checkers instead target those who go against the grain, it serves to enforce groupthink. The Swedes have a word for it: the 'opinion corridor'. If you step outside it, you can expect investigation, harassment or to be flattened.
Of course Australia also has its 'fact checkers'. One of them is 'RMIT ABC Fact Check' that recently 'fact checked' the statement 'that indigenous Australians already have a Voice to Parliament'. According to them the answer is 'No'. The right of every citizen to vote and and participate in the democratic process doesn't qualify. Only a 'Voice' that is enshrined in the constitution counts as a 'Voice'.
Lastly there's a story about what's happening at the University of Melbourne. An associate professor of philosophy, Holly Lawford-Smith has lodged a complaint with WorkSafe Victoria, the authority responsible for workplace health and safety, alleging the university breached their responsibility to provide a safe workplace. Lawford-Smith has been the target of a campaign of vilification including being called a 'fascist' because she 'openly challenges the priority given to gender identity in public policy'.
What caught my attention in the story were the comments from Kathleen Stock, the British academic who was forced to resign from the University of Sussex after a three-year campaign for her to be sacked. The last few sentences were very interesting.
I hope that Holly has got public, vocal support from colleagues. I suspect she hasn't got as much as she should have. [That's the application of the minority of one rule.] The only way you can send the right message is public solidarity from fellow academics. [To show you're not alone.] I didn't have that. Either they agreed with the protesters or they were too frightened and didn't want a similar thing to happen to them.
I don't blame students for having authoritarian mindsets. That goes with the territory of not knowing much about how things work. I blame the university authorities for being so cowardly and capitulating.
Of all the explanations for the supposed Green/Left/socialist attitudes of young people I've come across that's one of the best. 'That goes with the territory of not knowing much about how things work.'
Instead of pandering to young people's prejudices and unquestioningly accepting their demands imagine if a university vice-chancellor next time students protested at being hurt/offended/triggered said 'you think you know what you’re talking about, but you don't - in fact you wouldn't have a clue - you're here to learn from people who know more about the world than you do.' Which is close to what one or two American college presidents have done - but no university vice-chancellor in this country would dare anything like that. It's no surprise left wing parties and leaders around the world - Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, Keir Starmer in the UK, the Greens in Australia want to reduce the voting age to 16.
And another thing
Talking of universities our friends at the Centre for Independent Studies yesterday released an outstanding esearch paper 'Degree Inflation - Undermining the value of higher education' by Steven Schwartz, the former vice-chancellor of Murdoch University and Macquarie University. Stephen also writes on Substack and what he says is terrific.
These are some of the key points from ‘Degree Inflation’:
- 'Twenty per cent, or more, of today's university students, would have been better off financially by skipping university and going straight from school to work. The same is true for the thousands of students who drop out of university each year.'
- 'Yet, universities continue to churn out more degrees, each worth less than the previous one. They justify their behaviour with fatuous 'economic impact' studies designed to claim that universities are engine of economic growth. Even a cursory look at these studies reveals a shaky foundation of assumptions, assertions, and guesses.'
- 'Universities claim their degrees remain relevant because they endow graduates with higher-order cognitive skills applicable to any job. They offer no objective evidence for this claim.'
Stephen's solutions include 'where feasible, dropping degree requirements for jobs. Overnight, the value of professional societies, vocational schools, online educators, specialised training, and the military would be enhanced.'
'Perhaps the biggest challenge of all is the reinvigoration of the cultural, moral, and character-building functions of higher education. It is not easy to challenge the myth that universities exist solely for economic advancement, but it is worth trying.'
Thank you indeed. It is nice to know that you're not alone in this increasingly dangerous world. Bless you.
Great thoughts John. I'm going back and read it again. So much in it. Thank you.