Hollowed Out

The Unbearable Lightness Of All Being

I'm still reeling from the Martin Place siege. I didn't write about it yesterday, but I am specifically distraught about one of the victims Katrina Dawson. Sydney is a small enough that there are people around me whose lives intersected with hers and her family. It's like 2 degrees of separation, sometimes 3. Above all, her life and career to date reads like an exemplary human being we would all want to spire to or at least have our kids grow into. I'm sure she had her foibles but it's rare you find a life that reads like a perfect record.

She was by all accounts a remarkable human being. Topped her school, topped her state in graduating; topped the law faculty at Sydney University; got a masters at UNSW; topped the class in her bar entrance exam; a loving, admired mother of three; by all accounts she was the best of the best - and her life came to an abrupt end at the hands of a malicious jerk. To tell you the truth I'm aghast at this turn of events for her and her young family.

I'm doubly aghast because her death seems to open up a void, a nihilistic space of nothingness that stares back, absent of meaning. The religious sermon delivered does not fill it; philosophy can only abstract it, but it cannot fill it; it just feels like if you wanted conclusive proof that nothing in this life has any profound meaning, you could point to this siege and her death. The violence that befell her didn't come looking for her specifically - she had not made an enemy of this man. There really was no rhyme nor reason to the violence that felled both Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson. The allegedly political stance taken by Monis was hardly credible, legitimate, or real - it was just some bullshit he came up with in order to try and give some meaning to his senseless stupid life. But if there's one thing that's certain, his life was devoid of any serious meaning. He sure made sure of that one by ending on a note of gratuitous violence.

Our own liberalism offers very little help in all of this mess. Officials from Iran claimed that they asked to extradite this Monis back to Iran and they said our government refused. Our government presumably refused because having issued political asylum to this man it must have assumed that a return to Iran would be giving him up for political reasons and therefore against our sense of freedom (or whatever liberal principle we might have had). After all what could possibly happen to the man? Probably torture, so they said 'no'. Our government probably didn't look too deeply into the possibility that the Iranians genuinely/legitimately wanted this man for fraud.

So we held on to him in Australia because giving him up to Iranian authorities would mean we were giving up on our liberal principles. He wrote disgusting letters to the family of dead servicemen. He was convicted of harassment but his sentence was only 300hours of community service. Rather than just do the community service, he fought the sentence al the way to the high court (and lost). He had his wife killed and set alight. He pretended to be a healer and sexually assaulted women. Each time he found himself in front a of a judge he got the benefit of the doubt and got bail. At each and every turn where this man might have been taken off the streets, our very liberal principles put him back onto the street.

Hence you'll have to forgive me if I feel a little shirty about my own small-'l-liberalism just for this week. We effectively fight for the rights of the very people who would kill us senselessly. It sure makes you want to embrace fascism and looser gun laws, even if only temporarily. There is no meaning to any of this. Nothing bloody well matters.

I don't envy the task of her widower husband who must explain mummy's death to three kids. I can't possibly imagine how he's going to frame it with any kind of meaning when he explains what happened. In my humble opinion, there is not a sensible conversation to be had there. If it is just tears and embraces, that would make more sense than any words that can be uttered. There's nothing but the meaningless void.

We should all be nice to each other a lot more. Life's really short.

The Pinko Crisis

Pinko Blues

The big irritating topic of the month was the brouhaha surrounding Ben Affleck's appearance on Bill Maher's show together with Sam Harris. You all know what happened next - Ben Affleck said "That's gross, you're bigoted, and you're racists," then proceeded to lambast Maher and Harris for the rest of the short segment. What was more perplexing was how Affleck would garner a lot of public support for having tarn a stand against racists and 'Islamophobes', and then there was a dearth of any kind of sensible discussion about any of the topics. Since then Sam Harris has put up an excellent explanation of his side of the fracas so I won't be mounting a defence of atheism or central state materialism here.

What I do want to write about is this growing notion that you can't criticise a group of people for having a particular beliefs, and to criticise them is

1. somehow intolerant 
2. leads to 'ethnocide' and that is 
3. tantamount to genocide.  

These thing are clearly big leaps. You can be tolerant of people having beliefs and still question the basis for their beliefs. This is not offensive in of itself - although let's be honest is is offensive to religious thinning to ask any questions, no matter how value neutral the question might be. All the same, asking questions of beliefs does not automatically indicate intolerance. If people are going to go around waving their beliefs, then it is legitimate that they get ridiculed for their silly beliefs.  It's just the split coin of freedom of religion and freedom of expression.

The second notion that questioning the ideas in other people's cultural beliefs leads to ethnocide needs some examination. If we came across a tribe of people 'X' in a remote place of the world and they had a cultural practice that was against our values (and you can insert your most hated taboo here), is it ethnocide to try to change their practices?

I am reminded of a friend of mine who once taught a high school class about evolution. A muslim girl  raised her hand, and said "sir, I don't think you should be pushing your Christian views on to us."
Is teaching evolution ethnocide?
Sometimes bog ignorance is exactly that and getting educated might mean the abandonment of dearly held beliefs. After all, things that fly in the face of reality have a limited utility. It's hard to argue the gain in utility by the ignorant as ethnocide.

The third notion is perhaps the most pernicious. It suggests if we were to change people's beliefs, it would spoil their culture, and if their culture is gone, the people are gone. It is argued vehemently that this is genocide. I have great trouble with this construction. Genocide, to my mind of thinking is systematically targeting a people and trying to kill them into extinction. As the Ottoman Turks did to the Armenians or the Nazis did to the Jewry in Europe, or the Bosnian Serb did to the Bosnian slims, which was to round them up an kill them; that strikes me as the working historic model of genocide, from whence we get this notion. The jump from ethnocide would mean if you taught the tribe 'X' not to commit taboos, it kills Tribe 'X'.

I have a friend Roddy the Samoan, who once told me that his people used to eat people. Roddy felt that this was just wrong. Some Samoans wanted to hide behind cultural practices as a defence, justifying cannibalism but Roddy was dismissive of such arguments. He felt that some things are just wrong and better left behind.
If you make Samoans stop cannibalism, is this ethnocide? Did they really lose their identity as Samoans when they stopped the practice? Can this legitimately be called 'genocide' in the same sense  as the Ottoman Turks and Nazis and Bosnian Serbs carrying out their respective killing programs?If we did, aren't we cheapening the definition and gravity of the genocide offence to take a cheap political shot? Is that a worthy exchange? Really, I think not.

I raise all this to point out to the hysteria on my own side of politics with the desire not to demonise people. It's understandable that we ought not demonise anybody for their beliefs. Not even Satanists - even though they're really into demons themselves - and so I totally understand the politically correct impulse to say one should not attack a people for their beliefs. Yet Maher and Harris made those caveats, just as any proper thinking small-'l' liberal pinko would do - and really wasn't the point under dispute. The mischaracterisation of their position that followed has left me wondering just how polarised the left end of the left has become.

The crux of the argument is, how explicit are the injunctions to attack apostates and infidels in Islam, and should this cultural practice really be given a free pass on the basis of our liberal tolerance. This actually hides a very difficult problem. For instance in Algeria during the 1990s Muslim brotherhood put up a candidate for election whose electoral promise was to shut down democracy and return Algeria to Sharia law. In other words, the candidate stood in a democratic election on the promise of ending democracy. It's unthinkable in the liberal west that we could have such a candidate, let alone that such a candidate would find significant popular support. Just how far must our tolerance stretch for these ideas? Is it really unreasonable to say, "look, you can have your religion but we're keeping our laws and institutions." Is that really bigotry, racism and 'Islamophobia'?

This is sort of weird. We're at the point where some small-'l' liberals are willing to sell out their own institutions and traditions that gave them the small-'l' liberalism for the sake of staking out the most politically correct position. And being the small-'l' liberal pinko lefty that I am, I'm just not comfortable crossing that bridge to that penultimate PC-ground being staked.
Instead I would posit that an infinitely open mind is not a mind at all.

Perhaps missing in this trendy-lefty intramural crossfire of abuse is that we have to understand that appeals to tolerance includes a hefty dose of our own cultural baggage that allows us to understand what tolerance might look like. we have freedom of speech, expression and religion, and nobody is talking about revoking those things. It really shouldn't exclude discussion of whether Islam has injunctions that we might find politically for philosophically unacceptable. That's not 'white privilege' and 'entitlement', as some have claimed in lauding Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck shouting down the discussion is privilege and entitlement.