Persuading others to give up flying

Once you have given up flying, the next question is if, why and how to persuade others to give up flying as well. In this post I will focus on the persuasion of your social network (your friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances). Influencing strangers will be the topic of another post.

Why you should persuade others to give up flying

The least obvious reason for trying to get others to give up flying is to keep yourself honest. Maybe you are wrong about giving up flying. When you seek to persuade others you open the door to them persuading you. Persuading others of your position will provide a useful dose of critical resistance to your position. This is a vital part of advocacy: thinking through whether you are actually pushing a good idea. If not you risk harming rather than helping the world. The risk of getting this wrong actually grows over time. The longer you advocate a cause, the greater the risk becomes that you will be unwilling or emotionally unable to admit that you were wrong about it. You should be very vigilant about this risk and the best way to deal with it is to speak to people you disagree with about it as often as possible. Conveniently, speaking to people you disagree with is also one of the most important things you can do if you are in fact right about the issue.

The second and most obvious reason for advocacy though is that we need other people to give up flying to slow and beat climate change. As an individual there are only so many flights one person cannot take and then you personally are at zero flights. There are about four billion flights being taken a year and we need every single person on those flights to join us, that is, to get to zero flights.

Why you in particular should be an advocate

While you are very useful in the broader discussions that happen between strangers, you are absolutely critical in getting your social network to give up flying. You need to be an advocate of giving up flying in your social network because the people inside your social network, such as you, have an ability to influence the others inside the network, that outsiders (the government, activists and commentators) can never have. Outsiders can map out the issues but only those inside the social network, people’s actual living friends and family, can make the issue ‘real’. To demonstrate this principle in a non-political setting, consider how many advertisements we get for things and yet still many of us only take up a new product after a friend does.

Imagine everyone in the world divided up into little social networks of a few hundred friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances. Wherever someone in that social network is flying, we need someone else in that network to give up flying to demonstrate to the former that giving up flying is possible. Your actions inside that social network of family and friends are working in combination with the external activists and commentators but both are essential. You need to add that spark of credibility and reality to those famous activists and commentators.

Get ready though, it can be very tough. A lot of people object to bringing political issues into social settings and you can expect a lot of pushback. You may find it much easier to discuss these issues with complete strangers than within your social network. In fact the very reason you can be so persuasive to your social network is because of the pressure on you to not bring politics into social settings. But you really have to do so. The pushback you get arises from the same phenomenon that will make your advocacy within your social network so effective: the expectation that politics only enters social settings when the issue is very serious. When you cringe and worry about bringing up not flying in a social setting just remember that no politician, activist or commentator can bring the credibility to this issue within your social network that you can.

How to persuade others to stop flying – passive measures 

The mere act of giving up flying is itself an act of persuasion. Provided your friends and family actually know you have given up flying, you will be persuasive even without saying anything further. Generally, our actions are more influential than our words. This is because our actions actually have a ‘cost’ whereas talk is cheap. When you talk about climate change, some people might think you are just wanting the kudos of being ethical and well informed without actually caring, that you’re fake. But when you act on climate change, you demonstrate that climate change is an issue so serious that you are willing to incur costs for it.

One of the most persuasive things you can do is to not only not fly, but to live a cool life without flying. Look for ways to achieve the fun and personal growth you used to get from travel from other ways now that you will not be travelling. That will demonstrate to other people that giving up flying will not be the end of the world.

How you live a cool life without flying is different for each person. Just one example of a cool life without emissions from my own life is as follows – but bear with me as it probably will seem a bit strange. For years I have been meaning to publish regularly on my blog but have not got around to doing it mainly through procrastination and laziness. Now that I am not flying I have so much more motivation to get off my rear and publish every week. Publishing my blog is not a substitute for travel but the feeling of satisfaction I get is something wonderful in my week. I am more disciplined and motivated to do so now knowing that I will not be flying. Why? Because in previous years the ‘wonderful’ thing in my life was international travel. Now though, I know that I won’t be having those cool trips so have to find wonderful here at home. The blog does not give me the same experiences and emotions I would get from travel but it does give me something wonderful and special. Maybe for you your nervousness about being a beginner as an adult has stopped you from trying some new hobby (surfing or dancing for example). If you are no longer travelling you might be able to push through that nervousness and get the specialness and wonder from surfing or dancing that you used to get from international travel. The possibilities are endless.

If you give up flying and live a cool life and your friends know that it is a life without flying that is an enormous contribution. If the thought of more active advocacy turns you off so much that you think it might actually damage your resolve to not fly any more, don’t do it. Better to make a small permanent change than a grand start followed by a reversal. If you announce you are giving up flying and then change your mind you will damage the cause within your social network. Just as only people inside the social network can demonstrate how real the issue is, any demonstration by you that the cause is unrealistic will be very real to your family, friends and acquaintances. If you think you can give up flying and actively advocate the issue, read on. In fact, you might want to read on anyway because it is often very difficult to tell people about not flying without ending up advocating the cause in answering their many questions. Some general observations on advocacy are as follows.

Active measures to persuade others to give up flying

Try to make the experience pleasant. Try to make the experience for the other person more like buying a new product rather than getting a lecture. Although you must not ever lie about climate change and the following analogy is pretty limited: you can, just as a bit of a shorthand, try to imagine yourself more as a salesperson than a lawyer or teacher. You don’t want to force people to not fly, you want them to want to not fly.

When somebody changes their mind, it is not just an analytical process, it is also a psychological process. People need to have a set of ideas that makes sense in a conceptual way but they also need to have the psychological ‘space’ to change their mind. While we would all like to imagine that we are driven mostly by the ideas, in fact we are driven very much by things like how our ideas will make people like us or not. That is, the process of changing our minds can be much more psychological than analytical. Very much so in most cases. For this reason, when getting people to change their minds about flying, we need to base our approach as much on psychology as on analysis.

Keeping the discussion on ideas rather than people will give psychological space to people to change their minds. Updating our ideas is less threatening than admitting another person was right. Even when you are talking about ‘ideas’, the psyche, the tribe, people’s pride, vanities and ego are all the loud but silent subtext to the ideas. Therefore, try as much as possible to not be adversarial. Speak calmly, never shout, don’t sigh and moan about disagreements and in all ways try to strip out the emotional and tribal (pride, strength, posturing) out of the moment.

The smaller the audience is the more likely people are to change their minds. For some people with massive egos, they will not care less about being seen to change their mind mid-conversation. However, most people have various foibles and neuroses and will to various extents, not like to ‘come second’ to an idea. That is, they feel that when somebody changes their mind on something, they are ‘losing’ and that person is ‘winning’ and that this is unpleasant. Therefore, the bigger the audience listening to a conversation, the more important it is to have the argument centre on ideas rather than the theatre of ‘who won’.

Map the issues out but do not be belligerent and do not demand people make some public statement or acknowledgment that they have changed their mind as this will make the discussion about people rather than ideas. Do not even press them for an answer or position. Lay out the argument, make sure they are aware that you have already given up flying (a very strong and ‘real’ argument) but then drop the issue. This will allow people space to later change their mind later and in your absence. Conversely, if you press someone for an answer, they may be driven by pride to stick to their guns. If somebody asks to change the subject, let them.

Do not try to ‘win’ the argument straight away and do not be disillusioned if you are not immediately successful in changing minds. Not only can it take a long time but it can require numerous different approaches. Your efforts at advocacy are just one instance in which people will be exposed to these ideas. You are working, even unknowingly, with other advocates and commentators. You may have a conversation that completely ‘fails’ to win a friend over to giving up flying. What you may not see though, is that your conversation has almost won them over and they are now in a perfect frame of mind for something they see tomorrow to change their mind. Rather than ‘winning’ people over, just aim to plant the seed by letting them know you have given up flying. If there is no discussion about it, no problem. Just planting that seed is useful.

Regularly bring the conversation back to the benefits of giving up flying (pushing back climate change and delaying and hopefully stopping the floods, droughts and wars that will come with climate change). Do not deny or contest the idea that giving up flying will be bad, it will be bad if you view it in isolation. Instead, explain that that sacrifice of giving up flying is part of a bigger picture and longer story of a safer and more comfortable world.

And that is what it is all about, a safer and more comfortable world with fewer floods, droughts and wars.

 

 

 

Giving up flying when your friends and family don’t.

How do we give up flying when our friends and family don’t? In Australia we are effectively asking them to also give up any international travel they might want to take with us. I wrote about this last week as part of my ‘responses to arguments against giving up flying’ but it is worth elaborating on because for some people it will be the hardest part of not flying.

One of the key features of a relationship, be it a friendship, family or a lover, is the desire to give benefits to our family and friends that we would not give to the rest of the community. This encompasses everything from keeping a space in a queue for a friend, to taking a bullet for your family – but doing neither for strangers. I call this the ‘us first’ desire. It is a universal part of how we live our lives.

The problem is that the ‘us first’ desire is also completely at odds with any action we might take in a ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation. The tragedy of the commons is the problem whereby something that is owned by everyone ‘the commons’, does not get looked after because it is in no single individual owner’s interest to do so. Giving up flying is an example of the tragedy of the commons because when I give up flying, I do not benefit any more from the improved climate than the person who did fly.

It is really hard missing out on things that every body else is getting. And it is even worse when it comes through the prism of someone you care about. When a friend tells you about their recent overseas trip you might feel a bit saddened by having given up flying but you can cope. But when someone overhears their girlfriend hearing from her frenemy about her recent trip to Thailand it will feel like chewing glass knowing they have asked that sacrifice of her for the sake of the climate, and now she is suffering the indignation for it.

While we would never articulate it this way, we do essentially ask ourselves, how can I make my lover, family member and/or friend feel better or get better stuff than the rest of the community? In turn, how can I do this when I am giving up fying? If you are asking that question, really there is no way that not flying can ever be the answer. The better response then is to not ask that question. The better response is to ask what is the meaning of your life? How does being better or getting more than others contribute to that?

If you make leadership a big part of how you live your life, that sense of your identity can enable you to endure hardships like ‘losing’ in the competitive consumption of modern social life. The choice by you to put community before your friends and family by not flying is what leadership looks like. This is analogous to the young men and women who risked their lives in defending Australia in World War II while other Australians stayed home. Those who stayed home enjoyed all the benefits of freedom and none of the harm of combat. This was deeply unfair. Yet the young warriors still kept signing up. That is what leadership feels like. It can hurt but it is also part of a life lived on the highest moral plane of the human social condition: leadership. You will be surprised how much you can endure when it is part of a life lived with mission and purpose. When you overhear your girlfriend being bested by her frenemy, take a deep breath and remind yourself, ‘I am a leader’.

Another important way to understand what is going on is that you have a different construction of the word ‘us’, so your ‘us first’ desire will manifest differently. When you put the community’s interests over your family’s interests, you are treating all of humanity as ‘us’. Kindness to strangers is universally espoused but less frequently practiced. You are living your life as the best version of humanity when ‘us’ is everybody.

Despite the ‘us first’ impulse we actually already do still sometimes act in the community’s interests. Here are some examples. If your dear little son Freddy has always had his heart just set on making a snuff film you would not facilitate that dream. Complete strangers who never said a word to each other will come together to help each other after a natural disaster. So we do both us first things and community first things, the question is only where we strike that balance. Getting society to give up flying for the good of all is just on the wrong side of where that balance is struck right now. How we get society to that point is a separate issue and a pretty big one that I cannot detail here. For now, my point is just that it is possible at times for us to act in the common good: it is not a paradigm shift, a revolution or anything as dramatic. It is just doing in one situation what we already do in another. So don’t despair. Society giving up flying is far off, but it is doable.

Leaders actually do get some personal benefits if they give up flying, even in the realm of the competitiveness of modern social life and the ‘us first’ ethos.  If you are the one among your friends or family who leads the charge on giving up flying you will have bragging rights for ever when everybody else gets on board. In fact, if you do persuade all your friends and family to give up flying, the longer you had to suffer alone, the longer and harder you were challenged on the merits of this, the more of a legend you will be. Prescience, foresight and bucking the crowd are celebrated in countless stories told by friends. Just have a listen at the next social gathering, there will almost always be stories like ‘Joey bought XYZ company when everybody said it was a dud…Jimmy listened to Nirvana before anyone had heard of them…everybody rushed in to surf at snapper rocks but Johnny took us up to Tugun and the waves were heaps better… and on and on it goes. ‘Hey, Timmy’s spot on, flying is really messed up, we’ve stopped flying too now.’

If life were lived best by just satisfying the most desires then happiness would map neatly with money and the stuff we buy, but it does not. Being a leader and having a purpose to your life other than more stuff might actually make you happier. If you take the lead on giving up flying you might not only not mind not flying, you might even be happier than if you took that trip because you will be part of something bigger than yourself. It will be one of the monuments of your life.

But the greatest benefit is the fact that you will avert the rising sea levels, floods, droughts, species extinctions and wars that will come about with climate change. The issue of course, is that you giving up a particular flight now for a tiny contribution to the benefit of the whole world avoiding a hypothetical war in thirty years time seems remote to the point of absurdity to some. But unless somebody goes first, we are guaranteeing climate change. Going first is leadership. Waiting for others is fanning the flames. The link between that particular flight now and the aversion of climate change later seems remote to the point of absurdity, until you look at it from the other direction. Imagine time in reverse, how was climate change averted? If we did stop climate change it would be in part because we ended aviation in its current form. If that happened someone must have taken the first step. Maybe the person in your family or group of friends was you.

When life takes you to a point where you have to make a choice between your normal ‘us first’ impulses and an existential threat to the community in a tragedy of the commons format, there are no easy answers. It is a really awful situation. But we can take solace, of a sort, from the fact that our decision is not the cause of this awful moment, climate change is. Climate change is the greatest challenge of our generation and slowing and stopping it will be our greatest achievement. Great victories over great challenges are full of hellish moments, excruciating choices and lessers of two evils. Above all they are achieved by people leading. The alternative is for the planet to slowly become uninhabitable. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Be a leader. Quit flying.

 

 

 

 

 

Responses to arguments against giving up flying

In a few weeks I will take what I am planning to be my last two flights. I love travel and some of the most amazing moments of my life have been while living overseas. Yet I am now going in the opposite direction and giving up flying (and as an Australian effectively giving up international travel). I am doing this because air travel is a luxury item that has a terrible impact on the climate. Climate change is dangerous and it can be significantly slowed and maybe even averted.

Deciding not to fly is just one of the things we can do to reduce emissions but it is probably the first order of business because it is a luxury item. Almost nobody needs to fly. We can all live pretty good lives without ever flying again. If we are going to have some emissions it should be reserved for industrial and agricultural production so we can all live comfortable (rather than luxury) lives. While it would be great if the governments of the world put a punitive tax on air travel, that is nowhere on the horizon politically so until then, it’s up to us.

My response to climate change is to push political action inside political parties; in the electorate; reduce my emissions; and encourage others to reduce theirs. Cutting flying is the single best thing I can do to reduce my own emissions.

That the end of recreational aviation is essential for action on climate change is conceptually straightforward (at least to me) and hopefully does not need much elaboration. The rest of this blog details my response to the best arguments against giving up flying that I have heard – and why they are not strong enough to warrant us continuing to fly.

Issue: The plane will take off whether you are on it or not.

This is correct but misses the bigger issue. Every passenger on a plane makes it more likely another plane will be scheduled in the future. So if a plane is scheduled, yes, it will take off even if there are very few passengers on it. But the airline will be very likely to not schedule that flight again next year. It does not even have to be barely empty for a flight to not be worthwhile for an airline because air travel is a low margin business. Even a small decrease in the number of people on a flight can see that flight scrapped next year.

Issue: Travel is wonderful.

This is one of the best arguments against giving up flying. Everybody who gives up flying and (in large countries like Australia, effectively gives up international travel) is absolutely losing something great. There is no sugar coating that. The Australian who can never travel abroad lives a less vivid and meaningful life than the one who can, all other things being equal. But we are getting climate stability in return. We cannot have both and I would like a stable climate more than a world where people get to see foreign countries. A world without international travel is the lesser of two evils compared to the floods, droughts and wars that climate change will cause.

It is also possible to get some of the things we get from travel in other ways. Some of the reasons we travel are to experience different cultures, to be challenged and to unwind or de-stress. Travel is great for getting these things but in the following paragraphs are some other ways that will give you some of those benefits that do not involve flying. To be clear: none of these are as good as travel, the point is only that they are going to go part of the way to consoling your loss from not traveling.

How can we experience different cultures without flying? If you happen to live in a multicultural city you can attend the various cultural festivals that the various local communities other than yours put on.

You can also be exposed to people who might notionally have the same culture as you but who by dint of economics are living a very different life from yours, by volunteering for an organisation that works with disadvantaged people. You will not only gain an appreciation for the lives of others, you will also be making their lives better. If you have not done this kind of thing before you might be surprised how rewarding it is for you too. If you have enough money to afford an international holiday, there are very likely people in your own country living very different lives from yours. No it will not be a different ‘culture’ per se, but it will be exposure to a very different way of living which will have a similar effect.

How can we be challenged without flying? You can be challenged by trying new hobbies or activities. Spending half an hour a day for the rest of your life learning the piano may seem an odd alternative to a trip to Fiji, but with dedication you could make something really amazing. You could even dazzle the Joneses every time they come over with your piano skills (which I mention just in case ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ is part of your motivation for travel). You may feel more motivated to work at becoming good at some hobby or art form than when you learned as a kid, knowing that you won’t have amazing adventures overseas so you will have to make your life amazing right here.

How can we de-stress without flying on a plane? You can unwind and de stress through meditation and yoga. For some people yoga and meditation seem either too absurd or too insipid to be of any use to anybody but millions of people swear by both of them. There are free tutorials and apps online that can assist you with this. Insight timer is one that I have used and enjoyed for meditation. There are also often meditation and yoga groups in your local area that can help for a very small amount.

Another great way to de-stress is to take a holiday in another town. Just being out of your own home can often make you relax because all the chores you normally feel like you should be doing cannot be done.

One of the things that Australians rave about in South East Asia is the very cheap massages. In Australia the masseuses are paid much more and the overheads are higher so the massages will always be cheaper in South East Asia. But even a very cheap flight to Bali could fund several massages in Australia. Another alternative is taking a massage course and regularly giving your partner a massage and vice versa.

Of course, there is no reason you cannot do all of the above and travel. And of course, the above are really only consolations, I am not suggesting that they are better than travel. However, you may be surprised how much less the sacrifice bothers you when you are doing it as part of a considered effort to achieve something wonderful.

Issue: you can carbon offset it.

Offsetting is not as good as not flying, though it is better than not offsetting.

The first problem with offsetting goes back to the scheduling lag issue mentioned above. That is, every time you get on a flight, it means airlines will schedule more flights in the future. Offsetting keeps the airlines in business at their current size, meaning it is more likely that there will be airlines operating in future and more supply of aviation and cheaper aviation and therefore more flights. We need to drastically scale back aviation. While we should still have some aviation for business, urgent freight and international families, the recreational sector has to be effectively ended.

The second problem is that it is not clear how much offsetting actually occurs. CNN reported findings of the European Commission that 85% of carbon offsetting schemes failed to deliver “real, measurable and additional” emission reductions, and that some projects would have happened anyway (https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/airline-carbon-offsetting/index.html).

However Forbes reports that ‘While the jury is out, and there exist many unsatisfactory schemes, the majority of offsetting options are vetted and monitored by independent third-parties, with the money you pay to offset your flight truly going towards funding their carbon-reducing programs. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/03/05/does-carbon-offsetting-really-allow-you-to-fly-guilt-free/#197902615603 Yet offers no source for this claim! I am not willing to rely on offsets until I know that they work. It seems a bit inconclusive.

Putting aside the issue of whether all offsets work (which is what the above articles deal with) we can have more confidence in whether a given offset program works. That is, if you want to fly with a certain airline, you could put in some meaningfully useful research into whether that particular program is any good, which government regulates it, what criticism or praise it has received etc. If you can do a legitimate and effective offset that is great and much better than not offsetting.

However, effective carbon offsetting does not counter the issue, detailed above, that you have made it more likely that that flight will be scheduled again next year. It also sustains the current culture of everybody flying, and this drives the ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ phenomenon that makes it hard for everybody to stop flying.

Issue: I don’t mind not flying but I cannot inflict that choice on my partner (girlfriend, wife, kids, mate getting married in Thailand etc).

This is one of the strongest arguments against carbon offsetting. If you give up flying and your partner and kids don’t take any consolation in the alternatives detailed above, then yes you are really inflicting a sacrifice on them and that will be hard. Even if you are single you are significantly dealing yourself out of the dating stakes with any of the many people who might like both you and travel, when you tell them you won’t fly.

But we should rise to this challenge. That desire to take your partner on a long haul flight to somewhere exotic is comprised of two things. Firstly, the desire for you and your partner to have an amazing experience. I won’t ‘rebut’ that, it is a very normal desire. It is a genuinely hard ask for your partner and comes down to nothing more than your commitment to climate action relative to your relationship. Not easy.

The second reason is less obvious, and may well not apply to a lot of people but it is definitely worth talking about: keeping up with the Joneses. Part of the motivation for taking your partner or kids overseas is that everybody else is doing it and that there is a level of competition about who is living the better life. Your friends might be supportive of your decision to not travel. But what will really hurt will be those second tier ‘frenemies’ (with whom you are competitive, for better or worse) who will travel while you don’t. That sense of competition with quasi friends is rarely spoken of, but often felt. It is nothing to be ashamed of. However, this also means that we can take a lot of pride in resisting this pretty base instinct. Some years down the track you might also have outflanked the Joneses with your social nous and prescience when they too stop flying. There is also the fact that your not flying arms the better parts of the Joneses nature: when you choose not to fly you make it easier for them to do so too because they won’t be ‘losing’ to you.

Issue: flying only contributes 2% to total emissions.

This is true but very misleading. There are only a tiny number of people flying so the emissions per person and per flight are huge. Coal fired power plants, petrol burning cars and methane belching cows produce more emissions in total but benefit vastly more people. I could not find a neat stat on the total number of people who fly but in 2017 there were about 4 billion passengers on flights. Note that does not mean that 4 billion people flew, somebody who flew several times would count as several flights. Think 4 billion tickets sold a year. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericrosen/2018/09/08/over-4-billion-passengers-flew-in-2017-setting-new-travel-record/#4112d12b255b In one week there would easily be 4 billion car journeys and daily there would be 4 billion people eating meat or dairy, using coal fired electricity etc.

The answer to this discrepancy is not to get people in the developing world to fly more to ‘even up’ the imbalance. If you use a plane to go from A to B and somebody else uses a car, train or motorbike the person on the plane is creating far more emissions. I cannot give you a single figure because it depends on so many variable factors but in general flying is a hugely emissions intensive way to travel. See two examples of comparisons done by National Geographic and the BBC.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49349566

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/features/carbon-footprint-transportation-efficiency-graphic/

We should be targeting our emissions at areas where they will do the most good. Me taking an overseas holiday does me good but the people getting to drive instead of walking or eating meat instead of beans does far more good for them. We need to get to an economy where everybody gets equal access to what energy is necessary for a comfortable life, not a luxury life. The more people are flying the fewer emissions we have to spare for the industrial and agricultural systems in developing countries to give them a comfortable life.

Argument: tourism and overseas education creates jobs (and in large countries like Australia, are unviable without aviation).

This is an incredibly important issue, especially for Australia, where international tourism and international education are massive shares of our exports and are relatively labour intensive compared to coal, gas, wheat and iron, our other exports. If we move to effectively end recreational aviation we will be ripping up huge industries and the country’s economy will suffer very badly. A lot of environmentalists down play this or are unaware of how the economy works. We have to be frank about the situation: we will be choosing to damage and effectively destroy many people’s businesses and jobs. What is also downplayed is that even if you do not work in tourism or education in Australia, whoever your customers are are only a few degrees of separation from people who do, not to mention the tax paid by tourist and education businesses. All Australians will have to get by with less if we do not have a tourism or education sector and without aviation these industries will effectively end on their current scales and natures.

That does not however, mean that we should do nothing. We should choose to be poorer, but safer. We will have harder, plainer lives with less money but we will not risk the very bad consequences that could come about with climate change.

Climate change could cause for example, unprecedented droughts and floods that would then lead to war. It is a complex comparison between the certain reduction in our economy now versus the uncertain impact of climate change in the forms of floods and droughts in as yet unknown places and times. I do not dismiss the concerns of those who think we should choose the certain economic output now over the less certain improvement in the climate in the future. But I disagree with them emphatically. I would rather be poorer and have greater certainty that Australia will not be subjected to a lethal combination of flood, drought and sea level rise making this place uninhabitable. Essentially I would choose the agriculture sector and the coastal residences over the aviation dependent parts of our economy.

Book review of Silent Invasion by Clive Hamilton

I first heard about this book during an ABC recording of a panel discussion at (I think) the Byron Bay writer’s festival. It was an interesting discussion about Human rights (with Clive Hamilton, Gillian Triggs and some others on the panel) but two things really surprised me. While modern politics often enrages it so rarely surprises me and when it does it’s really exciting.

The first surprise was Clive Hamilton (a very left wing public intellectual) complaining about what actually is a ‘silent invasion’ of Australia by Beijing. It surprised me because normally the left focuses on national self improvement rather than foreign threats. Whenever I hear a left wing guy pushing a normally right wing issue (or vice versa) I always pay attention. A great example from the other side of the spectrum was just days prior where Andrew Bolt had come out in defence of some of the ABC following appalling behaviour by its management and the government.

The second surprise (and frankly horror) me was that Clive Hamilton confronted Gillian Triggs (who is a board member of Melbourne University) about the fact that Melbourne University Press refused to publish his book due to fear of upsetting Beijing. I thought that surely he was embellishing or exaggerating this. I was horrified though when it turned out to actually be the case. An Australian University had caved to Beijing. Gillian Triggs has invested so much of herself in pushing human rights in this country. Yet all she could muster when dealing with Hamilton’s confrontation was a serpentine lawyer’s pirouette, ‘well it got published somewhere else’, that served to deflect the issue rather than engage with it. Someone like Triggs had fought so hard for such noble causes but could not defend Australia’s freedom of speech from the biggest thugs of all. Just awful.

The book is concise, cogent and well written. You simply will not believe just how much Beijing is tampering with Australia’s politics, business and academia.

Just some of the many interesting things:

Beijing has identified Australia and New Zealand as the weak links in the western alliance and is trying to co-opt us.

The Chinese language media in Australia has been captured by allies of Beijing and now pushes Beijing’s line on everything. Some Chinese radio stations now even let the Chinese government vet their guest list.

People say that Beijing is just pursuing its own interests without regard for Australia’s interests, no different from Britain, the US or Japan. The problem is that the BBC, NHK or Facebook do not seek monopoly control of information, seek to silence critics or use deception and subterfuge.

Australia’s ABC has been censoring its news to avoid offending Beijing. Mediawatch (bless) apparently exposed this.

There is a split in the Australian Chinese Community. The older generation (coming often from Taiwan, HK, Singapore and Malaysia) tend to be quite liberal and cosmopolitan. The newer generation from the mainland and have been indoctrinated by their government into extreme nationalism and xenophobia.

As a bit of a sidebar, it was interesting that Hamilton wrote extensively and seemingly quite freely and plainly about the risks of ethnic Chinese Australians acting against Australia’s national interest. It was interesting because so many people agonise so much about the tension between confronting Beijing and inciting racism. He was aware of the risk and was careful and responsible and regularly stated that the ethnic Chinese were themselves victims of Beijing. However, he did not seem to hold back in any way. It struck me that perhaps the reason he was so calm and plain in writing about this issue is that he is not at all racist and actually knows that. It made me wonder (not really related to his book) if the people on the right who are most sensitive to the accusation of racism are themselves sometimes aware deep down that they actually are racist. Anyway, back to the book…

Beijing  uses nationalism and xenophobia as a source of legitimacy post the Tian An Men square massacre in 1989. The Chinese cannot so much as blink at their own government but when they are nationalist and xenophobic they can literally riot in China.

The biggest donors to both the liberal and labor party are Chinese businessmen with close links to Beijing.

Australian universities are hooked on Chinese students who are huge cash cows.

Beijing has targeted retired Australian politicians, bureaucrats and military officers for persuasion playing on a kind of ‘relevance deficit disorder’.

Beijing has no interest in pursuing military invasion but instead seeks economic domination which will give it exactly the same outcome.

Beijing targeted John Alexander in the December 2017 Bennelong by-election to punish the Turnbull government for its foreign interference laws.

Beijing targets the ethnic Chinese (regardless of citizenship) for intelligence and appeals variously to their sense of Chinese patriotism, fear of reprisal against mainland resident family members and/or opportunities for lucrative business and academic opportunities and/or denial of visas for re-entry to China.

Beijing’s claim to have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty is nonsense. When they exerted the most control (1949-1978) things were the worst. Things have improved because they have controlled fewer aspects of the Chinese economy China since 1978.

 

So, what to do?

Time and again I was reminded of Chomsky and Pilger writing about US imperialism. One of the best insights of Chomsky’s was that the cold war was marketed as a conflict between the US and the Soviets but that most of the cold war was really the US and the Soviets repressing their own allies.

Paul Keating, Bob Carr and Andrew Robb who now work for China Inc all try to shut down criticism of Beijiing with talk of critics being cold war warriors. The implication being that they are dreary John Howard suburban reactionaries unlike the cosmopolitan big thinkers like Robb, Keating and Carr. Keating claimed to know the Chinese because of his access to their leaders and establishment. It was awful to see a grand, truly visionary and inspiring former PM such as Paul Keating be so utterly captured by Beijing. As if, as Clive Hamilton noted, Beijing’s oligarch’s would confide in anybody. I don’t think these guys work for China for the money. The psychological angle though sadly makes a lot of sense. They are former Prime Ministers and Foreign & Trade Ministers who are struggling to adjust to normal life (who wouldn’t?) and have been captured by a government expert in coercion.

Sadly, Robb, Keating and Carr are sort of right in that there are echos of the cold war here. Unfortunately I think the parallel is not with Australia’s earlier military confrontation with Beijing and its allies in Korea and Vietnam. No, the most obvious and most worrying parallel for Australia’s relationship with China is South America’s and the Middle East’s relationship with the US. China won’t seek to physically occupy us but will seek to tamper with our politics if we ever seek to get a better price for our exports to China or if we ally closely with countries China does not like. In the cold war metaphor we are looking down the barrel of being Allende’s Chile or Mossadegh’s Iran, not Menzies’ Australia.

I worried a little bit about even publishing this blog post. Beijing’s efforts to tamper with Australian society only grow. Having intimidated most of the ethnic Chinese community in Australia, presumably they will start intimidating the general public in time. Maybe they will. I don’t care. Some things are worth suffering for. Resisting the influence of a gangster government that hates academic freedom, human rights and accountability and transparency in government is one of them.

The challenge though will be to resist Chinese imperialism in a way that does not sell our soul in the way that for example Cuban ‘resistance’ has resulted in the subjugation of its own people by itself.

We need a government that will resist Chinese imperialism but not lose its head and sell out who we are. We need to double down on liberal democracy not retreat from it. If Beijing is trying to turn the ethnic Chinese against us we should not turn on them. We should try to ‘flip them’ as they say in spy movies. Beijing wants to use us as a test case for the destruction of western liberal democracy. Why not use the ethnic Chinese as a test case for the destruction of the Chinese Communist Party. If we can win them over we will have a million people arguing against the Chinese Communist party’s legitimacy. A million enthusiastic democrats who as ethnic Chinese will have more influence on Chinese people in their critique of Beijing than any white foreign minister ever will. We will also be a better place to live and strengthen our relationship with Chinese-Australians.

Instead of banning Beijing’s influence on Chinese media in Australia, let’s challenge the Chinese government to debates on those media. If the Chinese communist party can be debated in Australian media, why can’t they afford the same opportunities to mainland Chinese?

Let’s be deeply open to the best argument that Beijing has: that western colonial powers did appalling things to China. It is a stain on our history and we should be sensitive to Chinese people’s feelings about that.

Let’s openly challenge the ridiculous notion that only the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing can represent the Chinese people. Let’s condemn the absurd notion that they deserve credit for the Chinese economic miracle.  Let’s turn Chinese chauvinism 90 degrees. Yes China is a wonderful country with a matchless, awesome history but surely that means that the Chinese Communist party’s claim to being responsible for the Chinese economic miracle since 1978 is ridiculous. If China is normally on top then its current trajectory is just a return to form for China, not some ‘miracle’ from Beijing. It’s obvious if you think about it for two seconds: the Chinese have above average IQs, an incredible work ethic, an education culture and there’s a billion of them. It is not a miracle to build a good economy out of that. If the Chinese communists are such amazing stewards how come Singapore, HK and Taiwan all got rich first?

Beijing will definitely retaliate with devastating sanctions on our tourism, education and other industries which will almost certainly lead to a hard recession. We will be subjected to intense cyber harassment from mobs of Chinese netizens. We will be at odds with the country that will soon be the most powerful in the world in every way. The argument from Robb, Keating, Carr et al is that because our economy relies so much on exports to China we cannot upset Beijing. The problem is that the result of continuing submission to Beijing is yet more dependence on their economy. That will ultimately end up with us having less and less control of our own lives and we will end up with our politics all messed up as it is in Latin America and the middle east thanks to decades of American ‘protection’. Yes we will lose money but we will stop the slow death of our freedom. I also think that there is something exciting and galvanizing about a country setting off on a david and goliath struggle when the goliath is so sinister. People in World War II had loved ones lost and intense material hardship but they also had a great feeling of purpose and unity. The Chinese Communist Party tries to make out that it is the essence of China. It isn’t, they’re just gangsters, same in every country, it’s worth being poorer to fight gangsters. Life is about more than money. If we are all 25% poorer it will be very tough but if we dedicate ourselves to the destruction of tyrants we will be legends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thoughts on the ‘me too’ movement (in no particular order).

Introduction

The ‘me too’ movement was a series of disclosures of sexual assault and harassment in 2017. It was an incredibly hot topic of conversation with my friends.

Me 

I am acutely self conscious as I write this – what will people infer about my sex life and dating life? If commentary is autobiography can we ever talk about desire without opening up the centre of our souls? Maybe this explains the level of fever in the discussion because whenever we discuss this we are so vulnerable.

Celebrities?!

I cringe at how there seems to be almost nothing new or surprising about the accounts of sexual assault and harassment in Hollywood but it is somehow being treated as some kind of revelation. It seems identical to the sorts of things that ordinary women have been complaining about for years all over the world. I guess what got under my skin about it was that there would be some kind of intellectual or cultural leadership attributed to a group of people (Hollywood) who are pretty ordinary. Why are you listening to Gwyneth Paltrow when I’ve got three degrees?! It also got under my skin that maybe people would basically ‘me too’ anything celebrities did. That is, it was a serious issue boiled down to the ‘let’s be like the cool kids’.

The reality is though, as much as I malign the elevation of Hollywood to some kind of intellectual and social leadership, ‘me too’ has achieved something. Women get assaulted and harassed and feel they cannot report it and ‘me too’ encouraged them to push back. It has achieved more than I have. When the law is broken it is more likely to be enforced because of ‘me too’.

So much disagreement that wasn’t really there

Like so many issues, there seemed to be as much of a conversation about the conversation as there was a conversation about the issues and the former was regularly bat-shit crazy. In particular there seemed to be a lot of straw man arguments about men who thought rape was ok and women who wanted to ban romance. Yet I never came across a serious feminist who said there should be no romance nor did I come across a serious conservative who said that rape was ok. Yet so much of the public discourse seems to start with the ubiquity of these views as a predicate before the speaker or writer then heroically states that they themselves actually thought that rape was bad or that they themselves thought romance was ok. 90% of society agrees on 90% of the norms of modern dating. This issue is characterised by our agreement on many fundamentals, not our disagreement on the outrageous fringes.

Where we do disagree

The public discourse is better centred on the places where reasonable people disagree in good faith, mostly on technical issues in the centre. For example, reasonable people could have different constructions of consent. Instead of click bait about women who want to ban romance or men’s rape culture, we could have a useful discussion about a) the fact that women will feel vulnerable whenever alone with a man behind closed doors b) that that fact is not intuitive to men who seldom feel physically threatened and c) men don’t have to not put the hard word on a girl, just keep in the back of their mind that a girl might be silent out of fear rather than acquiescence.

Gender…or power?

If men had something women wanted as much as men want sex from women and women were more powerful than men, they would as likely to act on it. That is, I think the moral bankruptcy of sexual assault and harassment may not be endemic to men. Rather the power is. There are no natural experiments here and so many variables so I admit this is in no way falisifable. In a sense, sexual assault and harassment is the exploitation of power for personal benefit. The reason I won’t pay Woolworths more than $3 for their milk is because I have the power to do so and the reason they won’t give me more than 3l of milk for my 3 quid is because they have the power to do so. Sexual assault and harassment are more extreme instances of the exploitation of power: a very wide spread phenomenon.

Perhaps we have a conversation in general about power and the very human failings and temptations of exploiting power and the corrosive effects on our morals of anonymity and secrecy. That would also set us up for applying those same principles to the many other situations where power is abused and anonymity and secrecy corrode. Who would not want the bullied to speak up? Who is not on the bullied’s side? Of course, people are very amenable to subscribing to general principles but applying them to a particular instance is a very different story. Maybe moving it away from particulars and on to general principles in order to get agreement on the particulars is too unwieldy.

A discourse about power rather than gender may make men more amenable to get on board. Feminists understandably ask, ‘why should we have to tailor our message to assuage men who cast the first stone anyway?’ That is a fair point and from a moral point of view unanswerable. It goes to a long standing dilemma of getting what you want in politics rather than being faithful to your ideology – no easy answer on that front. In any collaborative, consensual endeavour (think every single day at work) 10% of people do 90% of stuff and nothing important ever got achieved without compromises.

‘Me too’ is not killing romance at work

I have asked loads of women out at work and will continue to do so and think that a heightened willingness of women to speak out about sexual harassment does nothing to diminish that. The only way my dating life has been informed by what I have heard women say about sexual harassment is as follows. Firstly, at work I ask a woman out once and if she says no I do not ask again whereas in my non-work life I have asked out some girls two or three times before giving up. Secondly, I never ask a girl out for a drink at work unless I know her a little bit as there is a 0.1% chance she actually is a psycho who could later weaponise my entreaty. Thirdly, I have a slightly different posture and pitch at work. If I ask a girl out in life I might lean in and make quite intense eye contact but at work I would keep a little bit more distance and just say something like, hey, let’s get a drink, super low key. Fourth, I always make sure there is some third party within earshot when I ask them out at work.

What the above means is that the prospect of women complaining about me sexually harassing them has done essentially nothing to the usual vector of dating at work. You work with a girl for a while, you get along, then your work conversations linger unnecessarily, then you start talking about non-work related things, then she smiles when she sees you more than when she sees Bob from accounting, then by the time you actually ask her out it’s almost a done deal.

I actually have a lot of confidence that if I politely asked a girl out for a drink at work and she came up with some bogus sexual harassment claim none of my managers would take her side in bad faith. In fact, I think it is my female managers who would actually be the most likely to shoot down a bogus complaint made by a female colleague.

As any guy knows, the brain’s generation of reasons to not ask a girl out grows exponentially as the moment of truth draws closer. On the morning you decide to ask her there is just a ‘Fuck it, why not? She can only say no, whatever.’ But later, in the final minutes as you approach her to actually say the words the brain helpfully provides you with a trillion more reasons why you should walk away and not ask her (plus a litre of adrenalin and a pulse as subtle as a jack hammer). Maybe sometimes men use the prospect of sexual harassment as an excuse because they are just terrified in that moment because of mere stage fright. Later on it changes from a self-gratifying fictive excuse to what you think actually happened.

The ‘me too’ movement actually enhances dating.

Listening to conservative men speak about sexual assault and harassment is like listening to left wing people talk about economics. ‘Me too’ is great for dating for the following reasons. 1. Women feel more relaxed and comfortable about reporting sexual assault and harassment. 2. Men are faced with a more credible threat of sanction if they commit sexual assault and harassment. 3. Women face a reduced threat of sexual assault and harassment. 4. Women are more willing to engage in behaviours that might otherwise carry with them a risk of sexual assault and harassment. For example, going back to a guy’s house without yet having decided to sleep with him. 5. Dating is more fun because women are up for more stuff. For example, when you’re having awesome conversation with your date and the restaurant closes, a girl will probably pull the pin if she does not want to sleep with you but in future she might feel open to going back to your place to keep chatting even though she does not want to sleep with you. Like the importance of property rights in a market economy (and so many things in economics) it is counter-intuitive (Conversely, once you work it out you become evangelical about it because you ‘discovered’ it). I think the problem is that a lot of conservative men just blow up on an emotional level on this topic in the same way lefties won’t move past their gut on economics.

Pro-disclosure is not anti rule of law 

The ‘me too’ movement does not require any kind of diminution of the rule of law and men’s right to due process and the presumption of innocence. It’s a very serious issue because men can suffer irreparable harm from a mere allegation. Any contested allegation on uncorroborated evidence is very difficult to adjudicate. Encouraging women to be more confident in reporting sexual assault and harassment is in no way in conflict with men being afforded the entirety of the rule of law in defending these allegations. The difficulty women have in proving the sexual assault and harassment is the obverse of the difficulty men have in disproving it.

Men can understandably worry that the more febrile society gets in its backing of women as victims of sexual assault and harassment the more open it is to post modern destruction of the rule of law. This requires a delicate balancing act. Encourage women to report sexual assault and harassment to the police and employers but also confront any link people draw between that and the need to cut back on the rule of law. It is easy conceptually but it becomes a delicate balancing act in practice because so many bad faith participants in the discourse will use any complexity to wreck things.

Falsifying a rape claim does not impugn others who allege rape honestly. It is an aberration and corruption of that issue – not its central feature. When a woman says she was sexually assaulted or harassed we should afford both her and the man an assumption of innocence. Assume the woman is not lying and the man is not a rapist until the claims are formally adjudicated. If we want reasonable people to be more vocal about reporting sexual assault, and make our public institutions more welcoming of women in that situation, men are going to be more exposed to having their reputations ruined by psychos and nutters. That does not change the core issue. It does mean however, that the more integrity there is in the process the more men will support it.

Conclusion

My intellectual accord with the ‘me too’ movement came second. My gut said ‘shut up you whingers’ at first. There was not really any strong reason or rationale for that initial position it was just a gut thing, maybe me being a bit tribal or partisan. The moral is, keep the conversation going and given time people’s thoughts can overcome their gut. In the dating world I have so much more power than women by the lottery of birth. It is not easy to accept that you are the powerful one. That does not excuse my denials but ‘welcome to the inner workings of my mind’.

As with so much in gender relations, men and women have different characters, desires and limitations. Men and women sometimes want different things in sex and dating and there are going to be many disagreements and disappointments. As with any novel and complex situation our compasses should be honesty, courtesy and open mindedness. Having a difficult conversation is never easy but if we’re patient and wade through it we get somewhere better.

Epilogue – Edertainment 720 and Entertainment 720

Given that my blog is inspired by Aziz Ansari’s entertainment720 from the amazing show ‘Parks and Recreation’ I have to touch briefly on him. I actually read a little bit into that one and it seemed like he was just pushy on a date. That is poor form but people who tried to link that with the ‘me too’ issue seemed to miss the movement’s most resonant and important features. Namely, it involved breaches of the law and people using power to get away with it. Aziz Ansari was guilty of neither of those things. If people want to have a campaign for nicer dating go for it, but it kind of diluted the much more important message of ‘me too’. The law is being broken and people feel they cannot ask for it to be enforced. That does not preclude us also having a campaign for more chivalrous dating but they are not the same things and we have bandwidth issues for which problems we address first.

 

The Righteous Mind – by Jonathan Haidt

The righteous mind by Jonathan Haidt details some ideas that are useful for people trying to understand why we disagree about politics. It details the ways in which politics can be explained by cognitive science, rather than thinking about people’s life experiences. The latter approach is how many (including me, until now) attempted to understand most of what happens in politics. There is no grand unifying theory but a number of really useful insights.

Politics suffers from an illusion of reason. Everybody says that they have some reasoned, rational, clear theory for why they hold their political views. However, most people (left and right) form a gut judgment on politics and then later on find some theory by which they can justify it.

Haidt summarises a number of philosophers by saying ‘I can’t call for the community to punish you simply because I don’t like what you’re doing. I have to point to something outside of my own preferences, and that pointing is our moral reasoning. We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgement’.

This is immediately appealing but Haidt makes it compelling by backing it up with clinical evidence. Like women who are heavy coffee drinkers being given a (fictitious) study linking coffee consumption and breast cancer who then find more flaws in the study than women who don’t drink coffee and men.

Haidt did some research of his own and he provides some transcripts of interviews, all of which follow a very familiar pattern. ‘It’s obvious that people were making moral judgments immediately and emotionally. Reasoning was merely the servant of the passions, and when the servant failed to find any good arguments the master did not change his mind.’

Haidt recounts Peter Wason’s work in 1960 where people were given a mathematical problem to solve and could ask for more information about the problem as they went along. Wason observed that people sought out answers that would confirm their first theory, rather than information that would have disproved their theory (and so shown them they needed to start again with a new theory). This is very important, because the latter approach is much more efficient but it is the former approach that people nearly always go with. This has implications beyond mathematics, including politics. It explains why people seek out echo chambers for their political media. It is a more pleasant experience. Sadly, people will invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully.Haidt says that when we want to believe something we ask ourselves, ‘Can I believe it?’. We look around for a way to do so and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence , we stop thinking’.Wason says, ‘Judgement and justification are separate processes’.

Alex Jordan at Stanford asked people to make moral judgments and in half the cases sprayed a really foul smell nearby. ‘Sure enough, people made harsher judgments when they were breathing in foul air’.

Haidt recounts the work of autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen who found that the two leading ethical theories in Western philosophy were founded by men (Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant) who had strong leanings toward autism That is not a problem in and of itself. However, they both came with theories about how the mind should work. Haidt notes that in psychology we want to know how the mind actually works, not how it should work and that that can only be done by observation, for which empathy is critical and with which people on the Autism spectrum struggle.

People are trying harder to look right than to be right. Haidt cites the work of Tetlock, who in essence says that person A doesn’t just use reason to show person B why they should hold this view, person A actually seeks to convince themselves.

One of the saddest parts of the book is the work done by Drew Westen in 2004. He got very partisan people and showed them three quotes. The first two showed their candidates looking hypocritical and the third slide resolved the hypocrisy and showed the candidate now looking good. The brilliant thing is that he had them in an fMRI (brain scan) while that was happening. During the first two slides (showing the hypocrisy) the dorso-lateral prefontal cortex (dlPFC) (the part of the brain that does cool, calm reasoning) shut down, and the emotion related bits of the brain were activated. It gets worse. When the third slide was shown, showing that the candidate was in fact not hypocritical, the brain released a little hit of dopamine, a pleasurable neurochemical. In short, when trying to get people to change their mind, we are dealing with something as intractable as a mild drug addiction.

Schwitzgebel’s study found that books on ethics are more likely to be stolen or not returned than books on other areas of philosophy. Expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behaviour.

Haidt says that our morality is made up of six foundations: the care/harm foundation; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; sanctity/degradation and liberty/oppression. He also explains the evolutionary history of these, which in turn demonstrates how big a part they are of our selves. He makes a great analogy to tastebuds and says that political movements that rely on just one of these foundations is like a restaurant that only serves sweeteners like honey and sugar and no other parts of a meal. Haidt diagnoses one of the key reasons people cannot understand each other as ‘moral monism’.

Haidt notes the study by Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan that found that almost all research in psychology is conducted on Western, Educated, Industrialised, rich and democratic people (with the acronym WEIRD) and that these people are actually not very representative of the general public. In summary, the more WEIRD you are the more you see a world of separate objects, rather than relationships and this puts you at odds with most of the rest of the world.

The very concrete example Haidt gives is from his own research where he presented moral questions to university students and to ordinary people at the McDonalds in a working class part of Philadelphia. One was whether it was ok for a man to have sex with a dead chicken before he cooked and ate it. The university students would say, ‘it’s perverted but if its done in private, it’s his right’. The people at McDonalds would say, ‘You mean you don’t know why that’s wrong, what planet are you from?’.

Haidt explains that in politics we are quite groupish (as opposed) to selfish. We don’t ask what’s in it for me, but what’s in it for us.

Sadly, I think a lot of people will try to resist the ideas in this book because for so many of us, our political views are an important part of our own self image and therefore part of our self worth. To be told that we are a bit more heart and a bit less head when it comes to politics, that is a very confronting idea. Fortunately the book avoids, for the most part, talking about contentious policies. Instead it has a strong neurological and psychological focus which I think gives some of the most tribal partisans some space to have their minds opened a little (here’s hoping anyway).

One of the more surprising parts of the book is the way that he explains how and why groups (family, sports teams, nations, creeds) are so important to people. Haidt is a card carrying US Democrat (centre-left). He says that team-work not only sets us apart from other animals it is incredibly pervasive. As he notes, we will never the headline ‘45 college students co-operate without pay to prepare for opening night of Romeo and Juliet.’

Haidt says that ‘We can look more closely at people’s strong desires to protect their communities from cheaters and free riders because if they are allowed to continue their ways would cause others to stop co-operating, which would cause society to unravel’.

Haidt shows the various biological examples where when a way is found to suppress free riding, organisms can co-operate and the group then thrives. Evolution has hardwired team ethics into us.

He then goes on to explain how religion is a great way to suppress free riding and cheating. He recounts the work of Sosis who did a long term study of communes in the US in the 19^th century. 20 years after their founding 6% of secular communes were still functioning while 39% of the religious communes were. The work of Haley and Fesser, showed that people cheat less when a cartoon like image of an eye is nearby. He really hits the nail on the head when he quotes Rappaport, ‘To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.” When secular organisations demand sacrifice from people, they have a right to demand a cost benefit analysis. In other words, religion enables co-operation without kinship and so puts religious groups at an advantage.

He makes the useful management tip that managers should stimulate competition between teams but not competition between members of the team.

Haidt quotes Hatemi who found that in a survey of 13,000 Australians there were several genes that were very different between progressives and conservatives.

Haidt did a study with Graham and Nosek in 2011 where they gave a survey on moral foundations to 2000 people, first as themselves, then as liberals (progressives) and then as conservatives. The people who were least able to predict the views of the others were the progressives, especially those who described themselves as very (progressive).

Haidt makes a nice point in distinguishing conservatism and orthodoxy in that the conservative critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of reason. Orthodoxy on the other hand is about fidelity to a transcendant moral order, the bible for example. This is a distinction of which most progressives are unaware.

Finally he finishes with four policy prescriptions for government. They are that government can and should restrain corporations; that some problems really can be solved by regulation; that markets are miraculous and that if you destroy all groups and dissolve all internal structures, you destroy moral capital.

Haidt also makes something that I think every atheist would do well to reflect on when trying to understand, if not agree with, religious people. That is that scientists focus on individuals and their supernatural beliefs, rather than on groups and their binding practices. This collective, communal nature of religion is a large part of the appeal of religion, even though it is not stated – in my opinion.

What really blew me away though was the notion that our evolution might be much more affected by recent events than we thought. He starts with the example of Europeans and Africans developing lactose tolerance due to the domestication of cattle. That is, our recent environment has influenced our genetics.

He summarises some of the findings of Lawrence Kohlberg, one of the most powerful insights for which was that role playing would stimulate moral sophistication and that peer relationships allowed more opportunities role play than hierarchical relationships. Some of you will have choked on the term ‘moral sophistication’ but it is my summary of a summary. Haidt’s exposition is much more lucid.

Haidt writes, ‘As a first-year graduate student, I didn’t have the confidence to trust my instincts’. This is really just an aside that Haidt makes but it actually is something that I thought could have been developed a lot more. That is, that university is a very adolescent place in many respects. When I look back at student politics at my Australian university it really was a continuation of the group identities of high school. There was a lot of us and them and the conflict always seemed much more important than the outcomes.

Tensions between groups is often the way we channel tension within the groups. This reminded me of the way that quite often within political meetings there will be an awkward dead calm in the emotional flow of a conversation that is quickly smothered over by reference to the common enemy.

If you’re interested in finding out more about these ideas but won’t have time to read the book, I recommend the one hour podcast with Jonathan Haidt talking to Russ Roberts on Econtalk – http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/01/jonathan_haidt.html

 

New conservative reflections on our invasion of the Indigenous nations of Australia

There are benefits to so called conservative in acknowledging the so called progressive’s case that the British and Australians invaded the Indigenous nations of Australia. It will be conservatives losing a battle, but winning a war.

We should remember that when conservatives discuss White Australia’s past, we do so from a position of strength. We should be comfortable, and gracious.

Any survey of global history reveals that the making of war is a common occurrence. Some progressives will describe pre-colonial Indigenous nations as some kind of utopia but they have effectively zero documentary evidence. We have no indication that the Indigenous nations were any less warlike than any other stone age civilisation. In 1788 every country on earth was warlike.

In 1788 the British were able to put 245 marines on the other side of the planet, bearing the most sophisticated weapons in the world. The British beat the Indigenous nations because their civilization had more sophisticated technology. We will never know if Indigenous nations would have sent warriors to Britain, because they never had the ability to do so. In a world of warlike nations, we were the best. We should be gracious victors.

We should also not get too carried away with our own triumphs. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond and Why Nations Fail by Daron Aceomoglou explain that there is a lot of geography and accident in Western Europe’s rise to global dominance.

How do we know there was an invasion? 

There is documentary evidence of the massacre of Indigenous Australians by non-Indigenous Australians and that evidence was compiled by non-Indigenous Australians themselves i.e. compiled by people with no interest in exaggerating Indigenous suffering. The Wikipedia page ‘Australian frontier wars’, has an overview with links to sources.

We also have some documentary evidence of Indigenous nations as recorded by the British in their first encounters. There were many Indigenous nations which appeared to have vibrant cultures and functional social institutions, most of which have largely gone. It is almost too obvious a point to state. They were there, most are not there now. Something happened.

To me that looks a lot like an invasion. Whether you call it an invasion or not though, nobody is denying that something terrible happened to the Indigenous nations. I consider it an invasion but will just note there are people who disagree, as the semantics are not the main game.

Acknowledging the invasion will move the debate to a more sophisticated place

I do not suggest for one instant that acknowledging an invasion occurred will not hurt. It will. The worst elements of the left will run a mile with it and it will feel like a great loss. The progressives love this issue because the facts back them up. If for no other reason, let’s concede the progressives this, so we can move on.

It will be a lost battle that leads to victory in the war. That is because it will take the debate, and the country, to a better place. If there was an invasion, why did that happen? If it had not happened, what would the world look like? What is the right response to the tragedies of the past?

Why did the invasion occur?

The invasion happened because Britain was acting like every other country did. Throughout history almost every state has sought to dominate and subjugate its neighbours. Countries have usually stopped invading their neighbours only when they stopped winning battles. The British were no less interested in subjugating other countries than the Arabs, the Aztecs, the Mongols and so on (the Chinese say they never sought conquest but the Tibetans, the Uighurs and the Vietnamese have a different opinion). The point is not that invading a country is ok. The point is that it is normal.

What if the invasion did not occur?

One implication of maligning the invasion is that it was the difference between paradise and paradise lost for the Indigenous nations. This is completely false. Had the British not invaded Australia, another European power would have some time in the 19^th century. Had the Europeans not invaded Australia, the Japanese, the Indonesians or the Maori would have.

The Indigenous nations were invaded because invasions are normal and because other countries had superior weapons. It was a tragedy but no more or less tragic than the Roman invasion of Celtic Britain, the Arab invasion of Europe, the Crusades, the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the countless undocumented clashes between neighbouring stone-age tribes all over the world and throughout history.

Acknowledging atrocities committed against Indigenous Australians accords with our own ethics.

We aspire to treat people as we would want to be treated. Instead of thinking of the Indigenous nations as some alien race, remember that they were mums and dads, children, siblings, cousins, friends and lovers. They saw loved ones murdered. We would be furious if someone said that that did not happen to us.

We do not need new ethics to come to terms with what happened to the Indigenous nations, we only need the courage to apply our own ethics. We should hear a massive alarm bell whenever we cannot reconcile our political beliefs and actions with first principles of life such as empathy and honesty.

Your ancestors did this, not you

To acknowledge that an invasion occurred and that our ancestors played a part in it is not to accept culpability personally. We do not jail people because their parents killed someone. Very few progressives actually push this line anyway.

What the debate would look like after acknowledging the invasion

The progressives are not monolithic. There are some progressives in whom the terms progressive and conservative trigger a pathos not unlike the terms ‘Carlton’ and ‘Collingwood’ or ‘Souths’ and ‘Manly’ in footy fans. They are driven by the conflict more than the hope of a better place. Yet there are also a lot of progressives who are first-rate intellectuals with strong morals driven by the hope of a better world. We must empower the latter. (It is a little simplistic, most progressives have a bit of both in them, as do conservatives.)

Within the Labor party, these two forces are in conflict as to how the party should operate. We can influence that with our own behaviour and emasculate the worst elements. When we publicly reflect on our shortcomings we drive a massive wedge between the thoughtful, reflective progressive and the shrieking partisan warrior progressive. We give the progressives the space to acknowledge their own errors in other areas.  We live our lives with honour and valour. We lead.

‘Yes, you are right and we were wrong. Australia has a bloody past. Yes, an invasion occurred and it was our ancestors that did it. Yes, yes, yes.’ That moment will hurt.

Yet maybe it will hurt like giving up smoking. It feels like it will be the end of the world and for a brief time it really is. Then the pain passes and the world has changed. The forum is a little less partisan and the progressives a little less nutty. Having let logic and reason guide us to somewhere painful but righteous, we are much more compelling in demanding that the progressives do the same. Losing a battle on the past sets up a more reasonable political forum in which to debate the present and the future.

Review of Australia’s Second Chance by George Megalogenis

Australia’s Second Chance by George Megalogenis is a great work of history but does not appear to be the work of topical, relevant advocacy to which the title suggests it purports. It chronicles the role of immigration in Australia’s development. It argues that Australia’s society and economy will benefit from increased migration and that the quality of political leadership is pivotal in the impact immigration will have on a nation. It is full of countless fascinating events in Australia’s history and for that alone it warrants reading. I enjoyed it immensely and will be buying more of his books as I love history that focuses on politics and economics.

Yet it left me wondering, what was the point of this book? It was entertaining but is that all it was meant to be? Writing an entertaining book is a worthy endeavour, and no small feat. Yet the title and the conclusion suggest otherwise, so what is the conundrum it is seeking to address? The idea that migration is good for the economy is not in dispute. No major party is arguing against migration. There is not even a party that is losing votes to one that is arguing against migration.

Perhaps the best lesson to be drawn from this book was the harm done to a community by divisive leadership. Sadly, anybody familiar with the diaries of modern political leaders (as Megalogenis no doubt is) knows that none of them will be reading many books in office. A call to unity in politics for the national interest is great but if he wants the attention of the powerful, sadly, he needs a more concise medium. The best case scenario is that somewhere out there is a future politician who did have the time over Christmas to read Australia’s Second Chance. They saw the power of inclusive politics in the tales of the contrasting wartime leadership styles of Billy Hughes and John Curtin, and may one day be sitting at Cabinet. Fingers crossed.

The book is great at chronicling the fascinating history of immigration in Australia but it is in the arrangement of the individual facts into complex arguments where the book loses its way. It seemed like the sort of sound byte style argument that might stir the converted but which is too poorly constructed to convert anybody. The three pages of the conclusion are perhaps the best example of this. The contrast between this book and the more tightly sequenced predicates of an academic argument were considerable. It almost seemed like the thoughts of those who might disagree with Megalogenis were so far from his mind he had not considered how it might be scrutinized. He may have thought that the ideas he was prosecuting were so manifest that detractors do not exist. In large part that is the case, which again begs the question, why write the book? The book is a pleasure to read for adding more detail to our history but its title suggests it seeks to offer guidance at a critical juncture. Sadly it does so on an issue that is not in dispute.

Megalogenis appears to try at times to conflate asylum seekers with immigration in general and perhaps it is that debate in to which he is seeking to contribute. Yet the numbers do not support it. Our immigration intake has dwarfed our refugee intake for decades. There was much talk of how we increased our refugee intake this year from 13,750 to 25,750 to take in another 12,000 Syrians. Yet even effectively doubling our humanitarian intake it makes it only one-seventh the size of our normal migration intake. Moreover, despite the rhetoric, our refugee intake has remained between 13,000 and 25,000 for decades now. The policies in contention have addressed the method of determining the quantum much more than actually addressing the quantum.

After the Tampa in 2001 the composition of our refugee intake changed but the quantum did not miss a beat. In short, the boat arrivals dropped but they were matched by increases in arrivals by plane. This is critical because the marine transit of refugees from Indonesia to Australia has a 3% fatality rate compared with 0% for air transit. Another critical factor is that it is in the interests of both the Liberal party and the Greens that this not be understood. I plead with those who think John Howard was bad for refugees to please, please read my post of April 2014 on this topic.

One of the main themes in Australia’s Second Chance is that Australia’s desire for migrants is always a generation out of step with the people who want to migrate. Throughout our history, just when Australia had decided it was ready to receive migrants from a given place, they had gone elsewhere, usually the US. Megalogenis recounts how hostile Australians were in the early 19^th century to Irish orphans girls migrating to Australia and to the British after World War I. After World War II, Australia would have gladly had more British and Irish but received mostly Italians, Greeks and Yugoslavs. By the 1970s, when Australians had become accustomed to Southern Europeans, the Mediterannean economies had rebuilt and the migrants stopped coming. Instead, our migrant intake took on a more Asian balance, which caused new concerns in some parts of the community. Now Chinese and Indians make up the bulk of our migration yet their booming economies may soon stifle the outflow of their people.

Australia’s Second Chance reads like a Greek tragedy. I can imagine it, the little known lost chapter of the Illiad. Australia, the main character, had dropped an amphora of Grange Hermitage on Athena’s foot. In revenge, every day, Athena offered to Australia only those migrants which it would not want until tomorrow, yet when the morrow came Australia only wanted those migrants which would be offered the following day, and on it went. So it was that Australian would remain forever dissatisfied with its immigrants.

I was struck that one of the central predicates of the book, that greater economic output is the objective of a society, was not unpacked and examined. Economic output has many benefits but is an economy based on population growth without end a sustainable model? Is it a moral one? It is a complex argument. It would have been good to hear why Megalogenis considers this to be the way ahead for Australia. Growth of two or three per cent per annum is still exponential growth. The hope that innovation can counter the difficulties of achieving growth without end in a closed system is appealing, but is not without considerable weaknesses. Nature provides a lot of evidence that a closed habitat cannot support constant population growth and that the adjustment mechanism (increased death) is, well, painful.

The other related problem is in using Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a litmus of whether Australia’s economy is working. Megalogenis is a big fan of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating’s opening up of the economy in the 1980s. Undoubtedly it was good for economic output. Was it worth losing the auto industry? Any economist will tell you it was. Yet having large numbers of blue collar workers trade stable employment in manufacturing for casual employment in the service sector has a cost. That cost, for example, parents no longer having both Saturday and Sunday off, is not revealed in measurements of aggregate economic output. The shortcomings of GDP are a bit of a cheap shot and in the book Megalogenis openly acknowledges how impersonal national accounts are, to his credit.

Megalogenis’s Murdoch heritage shows through when he notes that it was a Fairfax publication that lead the first media campaign against a vulnerable migrant group, in that case against Irish orphan girls. You can hardly begrudge him taking that jab. Megalogenis gives the impression of being a bit of an ALP fan and it must have been a long slog for him working at The Australian during the Gillard years when his boss had the PM firmly in the cross hairs.

As mentioned above, one of the critical shortcomings is that the book does a poor job of joining the individual facts into theories. Facts are not presented as a tightly sequenced set of predicates landing deftly at the conclusion. At the start of part three GM writes that ‘White Australia…was the reason Australia could not find new sources of wealth to replicate wool and gold.’ Yet most of the preceding chapters indicated that the main cause of the economic slow down between between 1890 and 1940 were the drop in migration in general, not just the Chinese. Further, he had detailed that the drop in migration in general was caused in large part by the severity of the 1893 recession. To give just one example, Megalogenis had already noted earlier in the book, ‘People were not prepared to come [to Australia] at their own expense while the economy remained so depressed, and the country lost more people to overseas than it received between 1892 and 1908.’ It almost seems as if the book is targeted at people who already agree rather than as a tightly sequenced set of predicates that could convince others.

Another good example of this is the following. ‘The stated aim of the White Australia policy was to secure social cohesion through racial purity but [the WWI conscription debate] proved this to be wishful thinking. Anglo and Celt were white, but no longer united’. What?! The White Australia policy and the conscription debate were discrete and the latter was in no way necessitated by the former. There had been considerable tensions between Australian Roman Catholics and Protestants long before the conscription debate.

Megalogenis suggests that migration and the policies of colonial governments diminished sectarianism, and they might but they need more evidence. He writes that Catholic and Protestant had defied their parents by preventing Australia from becoming another front in the civil war in the 19^th century. It is true that we did not have the intensity of sectarianism that existed in Ireland or the USA. However, we did still have sectarianism. Moreover, it is not clear that our reduced levels of it were a choice by us or due to government policies, let alone a choice as part of a higher calling. The argument is plausible but not concrete.

Perhaps the convicts and gold diggers were not as religious as people in Ireland or the United States. Megalogenis notes Lachlan Macquarie’s observation of Colonial Sydney, ‘…religious worship almost totally neglected.’ He later notes a nearly identical sentiment by Governor Lamb.

Yet there is still great scope for pride in Australia’s advances against sectarianism. Megalogenis notes New South Wales sanctioning Catholic religious ceremonies in 1803, before Britain. One of the very simple explanations for this enhanced religious harmony was that in such an alien land the soldiers felt more affinity with the Irish, in Ireland they would have opened fire in them if there was trouble.

In a society as prosperous as Australia, the much more compelling argument for immigration is that people with different points of view will make for a more interesting society. Yet this can only be understood through the recounting of the stories of individuals, whereas it is in aggregated stories (statistics) that Megalogenis largely keeps the book. The tale of Sidney Myer’s rejoinder to critics of his generosity to the poor, ‘He gets most who gives most’, was stirring. There could have been so many more. The few that there were were great.

Megalogenis does a great job of building awareness of the dispossession of the Indigenous and Pacific Islander communities. His use of the term local instead of Indigenous or Aboriginal is particularly effective. One of the most constructive things we as non-Indigenous people can do is to put ourselves in the shoes of Indigenous people and let our reflections on this inform our opinions. By using the term ‘local’ and ‘settler’ instead of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘British’ he just makes that, sometimes unsettling, process a little more likely to happen. This is because the dichotomy of ‘local’ and ‘settler/newcomer’ is less emotive yet still conveys the essence of the event. It therefore makes people a little more receptive to hearing that perhaps there is more truth to the tales of genocide than we thought.

In general, his tone on this subject is never hectoring or sermony. He plainly presents the facts and largely leaves it at that. His recounting of the fact that Australian born and schooled children of Pacific background were deported is a great example, as is the account of the mass murder on the Carl. Giving people the historical accounts of dispossession, without condescendingly positing the conclusion they should draw, gives some emotional space to change their mind. It is one of the few parts of the book that might change people’s opinions on an important issue.

As an avid student of history I was struck by the extent of the gender imbalance in Australia as revealed in Australia’s Second Chance. It is very well known that we were convicts but whether convicts or not, to live in a community with an enormous gender imbalance could have influenced people’s behaviour even more.

Megalogenis details the many ways that economics drove racism and in the more laissez faire labour market of the 19^th century this was all the more likely. Yet when reading of the Australian Workers’ Union purporting to object to Italian migrants ‘not on racial grounds’ but due to economic reasons I could not help but be reminded of the utterly transparent objections to the building of mosques in modern Australia, because of concerns about … parking.

One of the recurrent themes is that so much social change is driven not by ideology but by accidents of history. A great example is the policy of extremely small plots on the gold fields, intended to discourage people from mining but leading to what Megalogenis calls, accidental egalitarianism. Another is that a ten-hour day was so much harder in Australia than England because of the heat. Yet another is that the Chinese were so susceptible to scare campaigns because they were concentrated in the gold fields rather than the capitals where the politicians assembled. By the way, those intrigued by the impact that quirks of history can have would enjoy Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson. It is also what might have been with Australia’s Second Chance, a huge survey of history leading to a powerful and pivotal idea.

I was fascinated to read of the tension between Britain and the colonial governments over their anti-Chinese policies. The Chinese would rank Britain as first among equals of the villains prior to the Japanese. Britain had invaded China militarily to insist on its right to export opium to it in the mid 19^th century. Yet it was also pressuring Australian colonies to end their anti-Chinese sentiment, albeit only to ensure an open door in China. Still, Britain as the defender of Chinese interests…interesting.

As an Australian it was discomforting but healthy to have to read that the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem features a quote from Australia’s representative at the Evian conference on Jewish refugees in 1938.

Another less chilling surprise was that founding father Henry Parkes, he of the Centenary of Federation $5 note, and NSW Premier at the time, devoted himself to stopping the  Irish- born from exceeding the English-born population.

The book I had read immediately before this was Satyajit Das’s Banquet of consequences that catalogues the litany of policy errors before, during and after the global financial crisis in 2008. We have nothing on the risk seeking of banks in Australia in the 1880s. As Megalogenis recounts, then the banks were not just lending too much to their clientele to buy property, the banks were actually buying property themselves!

Despite Australia’s ongoing efforts to achieve social harmony in a diverse society I was encouraged by the following fascinating insight, ‘This is one of the oldest rules of the politics of race: the anti migrant vote is weakest in the areas where the migrants actually live.’ This book should have been printed 20 years ago, when Pauline Hanson entered Parliament.

Mr Megalogenis, thank you for writing this book, it was a pleasure to read, I think you can do even better though.

The way ahead on inequality

Summary

There is a great focus in the media on financial inequality but the much worse equality is parental inequality for children. The answer is a greatly expanded and improved public education system, open 8 hours a day, 365 days a year. Both major political parties would need to donate several sacred cows each to the bipartisan cause or it will never happen. Higher taxes and welfare cuts that funded free private schools for poor kids would be such a sacred cow rich political compact. It would offer ways to make teaching as prestigious as law or medicine. In so doing, it would apply the best people in society to one of our most pressing needs: the flourishing of the children of disengaged parents.

Parental inequality

There are some kids whose parents are healthy, selfless, dedicated, patient, affectionate, strict, sober, effective and loving parents. There are others whose parents are ill, lazy, selfish, drunk, inattentive and distant from their children. There are children who grow up in safe neighbourhoods and others who grow up in violent neighbourhoods. This is the inequality we should be talking about.

Financial inequality is missing the point. Imagine two families: family A, which is rich, family B, which is poor. The rich kids have their own bedrooms with ensuites, the latest video game every Christmas, go to a posh school with an underground heated swimming pool, have private French lessons, go skiing every year etc.

The poor family have their kids sharing bunk beds in the same room, go to a public school, home cooking every meal for two decades, second hand books and clothes, occasional muggings and robberies, frequent sound of police sirens, endless queues for public services, never holiday outside their own home etc. It is certainly unfortunate and unfair but in my mind the difference between those two families is not a priority.

What is a priority is the inequality between the following two families. Think about the poor family listed above and imagine there are two families like that, two poor families, let’s call them family C and family D. Family C is poor but with dedicated parents and Family D is poor but with really troubled and inattentive parents.

The kids from the Family C always feel loved by their affectionate parents. The only (very important) exception is when the parents reprimand their children, very forcefully, when they do something dangerous. Yet even this strictness is just another mode of love. The parents read to the children when they are infants, kick the footy to them when they are a bit older and are a source of patient, thoughtful counsel during their adolescence. Their home is characterized by love, order and safety.

The kids from Family D grow up with parents who are drunk, on drugs, violent and mostly unconcerned with their children’s lives. The children’s home life is characterized by fear and a lack of love, affection or even attention. The parents find it tiresome to say no to the kids so let them do whatever they want. The inequality between these two poor families is something we should be doing something about.

What to do…

One of the big ideas from the left is that the right response to inequality is the redistribution of money from rich to poor. You could double the income tax (In Australia this is currently 45%, so increase it to 90%) on family A and give it to family D and the kids would remain unloved. Forget about ‘Occupy Wall Street’, we should be occupying pubs and lynching the parents whose kids are deprived of desperately needed affection and discipline. Yet that is not going to happen in a democratic society. So, what to do.

The best thing to do is to greatly expand and improve the public education system. Rather than trying to reform families we simply make the family a smaller part of the kid’s life. In rough parts of town, run the schools eight hours a day, every day of the year and serve three meals a day there. The kids only go home to sleep. This will not solve the problem but it is something we can do and it will make a big difference.

The weekends and the week nights after 3pm would of course be optional so the effective parents from families A-C above would opt out and have their kids at home. Given that not all kids would be there, it would be necessary to have a special curriculum on the weekends. Perhaps sport, music, art and remedial maths and English would be the focus. The kids would have an environment of safety and order.

There is an endless amount of possibilities and details here, but in short it would be a greatly expanded public education system with a greater focus on pastoral care and nutrition. Yes, this would be the state taking over the role of parenting.

The principal political challenges are paying for it, and dealing with the concerns people will have about the hollowing out of the family structure.

Funding…and politics

This would be a big challenge as the cost would be enormous – to basically triple the school hours and give away up to 21 meals a week per child. The only way would be very serious tax hikes or very serious spending cuts – someone else has to get less if we are to devote more to kids from dysfunctional families.

Take a moment to re-read that last sentence. Yes, there is a very serious political challenge here but it is something of which most people would be broadly supportive. The trick then is to make sure we are doing that and only that. The problem is that when we try a big reform the reform gets hijacked by people wanting to do all sorts of other things with it and the other side tries to kill it.

Let’s imagine a Labor Premier announced that they would now run schools seven days a week, eight hours a day and serve three meals. There would be a large part of society who would be concerned that this would see big tax hikes, to waste money on bureaucrats, bad teachers and wasteful government procurement in a system that would seek to inculcate left wing dogma on the children etc. These are legitimate concerns, which could then be aggravated and amplified by an aggressive and opportunistic opposition.

What a government would have to do is to prove to the opposition that they are only doing this for the sake of the children. The concern of the opposition, and the people they represent, is that the government will use this big reform to clobber whichever parts of society they don’t like.

A Labor government would need to offer up some politically painful things to demonstrate to the opposition, with facts not words, that they were actually doing this for the kids. If the Labor government could swallow some bitter political pills that would drive a wedge through an opposition between those members of the opposition wanting a better community and those just wanting to win elections.

One way would be to (via the Federal government) reallocate the existing welfare budget so that it was spent through the schools instead of the troubled, ineffective parents. Parents would just fill out a form and their parenting payments and family tax benefit would be paid to the school who would cloth and look after them from 9-5, 7 days a week, instead of being paid to the parent.

If more money were needed there could be say, a 10% cut to all unemployment benefits. This would be horrifying to the ALP base and the Greens would run a mile with it, at first. Yet it would be the right thing to do because unemployed adults, legitimately needy though they are, are simply a lower priority than kids of dysfunctional families.

It would also be politically imperative. The agony this would cause the ALP would also give a Liberal opposition cover to agree to income tax hikes, cuts to superannuation concessions, reforms of negative gearing, the list goes on. Number one on my list of possible taxes would be the re-introduction of inheritance taxes.

Whatever the exact bundle of tax hikes and spending cuts, there are a range of ways that an expanded public education system could be funded, if only the major parties would give each other some political cover to do so. The key to bipartisan support is to spread the pain. Each political party should donate an equal number of sacred cows to the reforms.

The greatest political cover the Labor party could offer the Liberals would be not on how the money was raised but on how it was spent. Labor could offer to have the new system be managed by the private sector. That is, private companies would be paid to run the schools. The schools would remain free to the parents, but the state would pay a certain amount for every child educated. This already happens on a very large scale in Sweden.[1] The charter schools in the United States are much less developed than in Sweden but using the same principle of private provision of services to poor people, and growing rapidly.[2] Parents love them so much they often even have to allocate places by lottery.

Liberals love private provision of government services while Labor wants more services. There is a saleable compact around which bipartisan progress can be made: tax hikes/welfare reallocation to spend more money on a bigger public education system delivered by the private sector. There would be immense pain all round for the politicians yet this would be sustainable if it was spread between Liberal and Labour.

The Greens would of course seek to exploit this and say that they could not support it if a cent comes out of welfare to fund it. They would be very popular on twitter, but parents would be very interested in any reform to education that both Liberal and Labor agreed on. The Greens would wither in the face of parents looking down the prospect of more money being spent on their kids. Ok Greens, you have a better answer, sure, how will you be getting it through every legislature of every state and territory and both houses of the Commonwealth Parliament?

Business would likely say that Australia will suffer in competition with other countries if it raises income taxes. I think the issue is a bit more complex but for argument’s sake, let’s say that yes, raising income taxes to fund free private schools every day of the year will encourage some companies to move offshore and Australia will be a bit poorer. According to the IMF (via Wikipedia) Our GDP per capita (at PPP) is now $46,550.[3] Let’s say we take a 10% hit (very pessimistic) due to this policy. Well, we would go from $46,550 to $41,895. We would still be richer than Finland or France.

Could we not, as a country, just choose to be poorer to have kids spending less time with troubled, ineffective parents? Nobody would be starving as a result. If our economy were a bit smaller but we had kids spending more of their youth in a safe, healthy environment, would that not be money well spent?

Better teachers

What if our teachers were the cream of the crop of our society? What if students had only wonderful people as their teachers? What if school principals could pick from any person in society and have them spend their whole work-week with society’s least loved children? They could pick the most talented people of all. It would not be as good as a loving parent but it would be beneficial. Publicly funded private schools, free to parents, are one of the fastest ways to get to a glamourized teaching profession. It would be a way to give teaching the money and prestige that medicine and law currently have.

Replacing bad teachers with great ones would be a wonderful part of a kid’s life and kids with troubled, ineffective parents need that someone wonderful so much more. We need to get the worst teachers out of teaching and the best people from other jobs, e.g. law and medicine, to go into teaching instead. To get the very best teachers we need teaching to be the most desirable profession. That is not currently the case. There are many, many, fantastic teachers but there are also some who teach simply for lack of alternatives and are not good at it.

So first of all, sacking bad teachers. It is currently very difficult and rare for teachers in government schools to be sacked. It is legally possible but it is an ordeal for the school principal.

Having schools run for profit is critical to being able to fire bad teachers. Here is why. Whatever, the industrial relations regime, firing staff is awful for the manager doing it. The thought that a bad staff member might send you broke is the rock to the hard place of the unpleasantness of firing staff. That is why private sector managers fire staff and government managers do not. Private sector managers do not like firing staff any more than government managers but private sector managers run the risk of losing their job if their employer goes bust. The risk is even worse for private owners of businesses who lose everything. It is those awful scenarios that motivate private sector managers through the pain of firing a staff member.

However, we cannot simply make all current teachers more easily sackable, because that will also make the great ones leave. So the second half is to make teaching as desirable as possible.

How could we make teaching even more desirable a career than law or medicine? A massive pay rise is the simplest way. Raise taxes high enough to enable a tripling of teacher’s pay. That would then attract a whole lot more people to teaching, which would raise the academic entry scores to get in to teaching at university, which would make teaching more of a by word for intellectual brilliance, so make it more prestigious, which would attract more recruits and on it would go.

In fact, when the pay triples, the fact that teachers could realistically be sacked actually becomes a positive. All the teachers who do not get sacked have the prestige of a profession from which other people regularly do get the sack. Another feather in your cap.

Whatever medics say about the Hippocratic oath and whatever lawyers say about justice, there is some element, of some or all of them, who are attracted to their professions because to be a doctor or a lawyer is to tell people you are rich and brilliant. There is nothing wrong with that. We should use this phenomenon. Let’s give teaching the money and prestige that law and medicine now have.

The private provision of public services is critical to getting the bipartisan support for the massive tax hikes needed to pay for tripling teaching salaries. The thought of having more money being managed by state education departments would be, quite understandably, politically toxic. Not least of all because it would actually be a bad idea.

Education, like law and medicine, is the provision of a complex service. They are all very demanding professions and bad doctors, lawyers and teachers have very serious consequences. Teachers should be employed like lawyers: pay the good ones a fortune, sack the bad ones very quickly and replace them with another applicant. Schools should be like suburban doctors’ clinics in Australia: Medicare provides some (or all) of the money but private sector professionals deliver the service.

The best and most talented people in our society would be dedicated to the education, pastoral care and general flourishing of kids from the most dysfunctional families. It would not end inequality but the better the public schools are the lower the impact of the troubled, disengaged and ineffective parents.

How to address the concerns about the hollowing out of the family

Currently schools in Australia operate 6 hours a day, 5 days a week and 40 weeks a year (1200 hours a year). I am proposing a system that would operate 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year (2,912 hours). The difference (1,712 hours a year) is the extent to which the state would be taking over from parents. That would be a big change in society and concerns about it would be very understandable.

Yes, it would be better if parents were all dedicated, but some are not. If you know a way we can make bad parents good, go for it. I support and encourage whatever that is – I just doubt it is likely to happen. A bigger, better public education system is needed because for the time being we have to accept that we do have some troubled, ineffective parents. Substituting their parenting with a bigger, better, public education system is the lesser of two evils. What is more, it is politically doable. It would not end parental inequality but it would be an improvement.

Another important part is that provided kids’ attendance on weekends and on weekdays after 3pm is optional, the most ardently opposed to the system can just not participate. Most parents would, especially on weekends.

So far I have been talking mostly about the impact on children of troubled, ineffective and disengaged parents. But it would also be good for the parents who are dedicated but simply time or money poor. Even Families A-C above might be interested in having their kids be at school between 9 and 5 instead of 9 and 3 because the parents may be working until 5.

Which brings me to family E. Family E is a family that is not flat broke. Both parents work. Mum is an aged care worker and dad is a security guard. They adore their kids and show this by being strict when they need to be and affectionate every other time. However, they have pretty low hourly wages so have to take a 40 hour a week job, as a minimum. Having the state look after the kids for 40 hours a week instead of the current 30 would be an enormous help.

Having the school prepare three meals a day and look after your kids for as long as you are at work would just be an efficient system. Many kids already have paid after school care at the schools, right now, anyway. Others have baby sitters or are looked after by elder siblings. They could continue with this.

Another variation on family E, is the good parents who happen to live next door to a family with hopeless parents and end up taking their neighbour’s kids under their wing. Another heroic feature of working class Australia is the grandparents in their 50s, 60s and beyond, who suddenly find themselves the full time carers of their infant grandchildren. They are saints, but they need more hands on deck. Free private schools running every day of the year would be just that. Let’s not forget the great parents whose parenting is crippled by illness. The list goes on. The children of the disengaged, trouble and ineffective parents would benefit the most but many others would to.

Best of all, politicians could agree on it so it would become the law of the land.

If you disagree I would love to hear from you in the comments section below.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/05/sweden-private-profit-improves-services

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_schools_in_the_United_States

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita#List_of_countries_and_dependencies

 

 

 

A golden rule of politics – ‘the loved ones test’ for arguments

A golden rule of politics – ‘the loved ones test’ for arguments

Overview of ‘the loved ones test’

One of my golden rule of politics is to only say those things about an issue or an opponent that you would be willing to say to or about them in front of their loved ones, ‘the loved ones test’. If an argument does not pass the loved ones test then do not say it, ever. Applying the loved ones test to your arguments will filter out your weakest arguments. It is not even necessary for you to ever meet your opponents’ loved ones or even care about your opponent, you can just imagine what your argument would be like in that situation.

This might sound like a naïve plea for politicos to sacrifice their political desires to the greater good of decency and courtesy. No. While the loved ones test for arguments may make you nicer, it is actually a way of making you a much more effective political combatant. It makes you more persuasive – not less. It greatly limits the number of arguments you can make but does so by eliminating your weakest arguments. Personal arguments are weak arguments. Ever noticed how abuse and personal attacks crop up when someone realizes they’re wrong?

Examples of what does and does not pass the loved ones test

Let’s put politics aside for a minute and think about the kinds of things you would and would not be willing to say to somebody in front of their loved ones.

Imagine you came home and noticed a scrape along the side of your car, a corresponding scrape along the side of your neighbour’s car and a pedestrian said that they had seen the neighbour hit your car. Certainly you would confront the neighbour about them having crashed into your car. If they denied it you would refer to the corresponding scrape on their car and the pedestrian’s testimony. We are most willing to speak ill of people in front of their loved ones when it is a very serious matters and it is very clear what has occurred. We stick to the facts, the evidence and the matter at hand rather than personal attacks. The arguments we make in front of people’s loved ones are also our strongest arguments.

The less serious the matter and the less certain we are of what actually happened, the less inclined we would be to confront someone about what they have done with their loved ones listening. It would also be a weaker argument. For example, if you had a vague hunch that your neighbour was a bit lazy at work you would be very, very unlikely to raise it in front of their loved ones. It is an unfortunate issue but not that big a deal and you are not sure if it is true. It is the kind of argument you would not make in front of somebody’s loved ones.

Use the loved ones test even if you despise your political opponents

It is worth reiterating that you do not have to care about your opponent to see value in the loved ones test. It may sound like a concession to the other person’s family but it is not. In fact, many of the people you argue with in the political realm are strangers whose family you never meet. The loved ones test is only a short-hand mental device to keep you focused on very serious matters where it is very clear what is going on. Such matters are your opponent’s weakest ground, which is precisely where you want as much of the argument to take place as possible.

Political example – climate change

Let me give you an example. In 2011 I moved a motion in support of the carbon tax at a meeting of the liberal party. At no point did I say that my opponents were in the pay of oil companies, nor did I say that my opponents were stupid or ill informed. I had no evidence for any of these things so they were weak arguments. In fact I didn’t speak of my opponents at all. I stuck closely to the facts, I spoke only of the science, economics and politics of the matter. I never raised my voice and I never lectured or condescended to anybody.

My motion was smashed 38-2 but afterwards a number of people came up to me and said things like ‘I’m not convinced but you brought me closer to changing my mind than ever before’, and ‘I never really thought of it that way’. I had lost that battle but was a small step closer to winning the war. Courtesy is a very useful tool in changing minds.

Political example – on shore asylum seekers

Another great example is the discussion of the treatment of on shore asylum seekers in Australia. You can see my post from April 2014 on the reasons why I am very strongly in favour of policies that offer no advantage to onshore asylum seekers over off shore asylum seekers. Whenever I speak about this issue I imagine that an asylum seeker in Nauru or Christmas Island is listening (not my opponent but somebody who stands to lose out). It makes me very circumspect and cautious about getting things right. You’ll see on my post precise language and plenty of footnotes. Not only do I know that I am making my case honourably, I am making it effectively too.

Importantly, you need never make any exceptions to this. Often when I am arguing in support of no advantage policies I will be called a racist or heartless by my opponents. I never reciprocate by calling names because personal attacks are weak attacks. Instead I restate the facts again but explain how these policies are not racist and why they are not cruel. My opponent feels listened to and the slur against my name has been refuted in the best way. I never tell people it is illegitimate or inappropriate to call me a racist or heartless. I take what they say at face value, without judgment and reconfigure my best arguments (anything I would say in front of an onshore asylum seeker) to address the key ideas within my opponent’s slur. It also gives my opponent space to calm down and re-focus on the central issues, of which personal slurs are never a part. The more implacable a person is in their personal attacks on you the more damaging it is for their argument for them to keep talking. The more decent and honourable you are in response, the starker the relief in which their abuse is shown and the worse they look.

Even when you have run out of the arguments you would make in front of their loved ones you should not use the lesser arguments (which you would be unwilling to repeat in front of someone’s loved ones). Instead, stick to the family friendly arguments and try to reconfigure and re-present them in new ways that might be more easily heard and digested by your opponents.

When I am trying to convince people of the merits of no advantage policies for offshore asylum seekers I never make any arguments other than those included in my blog post from April 2014, that is the strong ones, the ‘loved ones test compliant’ arguments. Even if the strong arguments have not yet worked in winning the discussion, I don’t then try the weak arguments and personal attacks. If the stats from the Houston report do not win them over, I never bother with ‘the UN only criticizes Australia because it’s a conspiracy blah blah…Gillian Triggs is left wing…Asylum seekers are terrorists etc’. These are weak arguments because they lack evidence and/or relevance and as such I would not say them in front of Gillian Triggs, an asylum seeker or a UNHCR rep. Stating them would make my case weaker. Instead I return to the strong arguments and just try to reframe and reconfigure them again and again to get closer to changing minds.

The loved ones test as a way to stay sane in politics

As well as being effective at changing people’s minds the loved ones test is also invaluable for staying physically and emotionally well in politics. Arguing with people can be very physically and emotionally draining. The thought that you are doing it honourably and playing the long game can be an enormous consolation. The focus on the long term lessens the sting of the short term from the grind of daily advocacy. Even when you don’t convince someone of your argument you can take consolation in having improved the standard of public discourse.

Perhaps the most important consequence of only saying about an issue what you would say in front of their loved ones is that you limit yourself to only saying things you would be willing to say in front of YOUR loved ones too. This allows you to integrate your political life into your personal life seamlessly. If you are making a nasty snarly personal attack on someone outside a polling booth you run the risk of a relative, friend, neighbour or colleague passing by and wondering why you are behaving appallingly. The loved ones test is a great personal insurance for you. You will never be embarrassed by your politics. When there is no tension between your personal and political lives you can sustain political engagement longer and harder.

The loved ones test helps motivate others in your party

The loved ones test is also an excellent way to motivate the other people in your organization. Everyone in politics has had something like the following experience. You are discussing some issue with a group of like-minded people and feeling that you are really, really right. Then, someone from outside the group (a passer by, a waiter, the partner of one of the members of your group, anybody) puts a very different take on the argument. Suddenly the people who were so adamant shrink from the issue and go quiet. It is very depressing. In contrast, if you are willing to stick to your argument in the face of new criticism, new circumstances and a new opponent, you will motivate your team more than any pep talk could: by demonstrating with actions how good your argument is. You say to your team: here is an argument that I would make at any time and in any place. The loved ones test means you will have fewer yelling echo chambers but you will also have a more robust and durable set of arguments that will sustain the motivation of your organization in more varied situations.

Why is this not more widely practiced if it is such a good idea?

The main reason it’s rarely practised is that applying the loved ones test is difficult in the short term and only rewarding in the long term. In the heat of the argument the personal attack is very, very tempting. Sticking with the loved ones test is tough in the short term, you need a lot of self control and discipline and only really pays off in the long term. It is just hard. That does not mean it is the wrong thing to do. We regularly fail to prioritise the long term over the short term even when it is a good idea (ever met somebody who did not stick to a budget or diet or who set a goal and then gave up?). It is a very normal part of the human condition to choose the short term over the long term, but that does not mean it is a good idea.

If this is such a good idea, why are you sharing it?

You may be thinking, ‘if he wants to promote carbon taxes and off shore processing of refugees isn’t it bad for him if opponents of these ideas start using the loved ones test because then those opposing arguments will also be more effectively advocated?’ The answer to which is that if opponents of carbon taxes or any issue I am advocating use the loved ones test and still have a compelling argument then I want to hear it. I want to know if I am wrong about an issue and if my opponents use the loved ones test I will find that out more quickly.

The other reason I want every one in politics to use the loved ones test is that it is how I want us to end up. I would love to have a society where people were calm and thoughtful in talking about their disagreements (not just political ones). The more often I use the loved ones test the more space I make for my opponents to use it too. In life, as in politics, we should start out how we want to finish, winning lots of discussions is just a bonus.

If you disagree please tell me why.