#ChangeTheAnthem

Australians all, let us not lie

#ChangeTheDate is all the rage this year. Personally, I’ve got bigger sausages to grill. I reckon it’s high time we change the national anthem.

Article was originally published by the late great Bob Ellis, who once told me to go fuck myself, on 26 January 2010

Excerpt:

‘Advance Australia Fair’ makes us cringe. And when we stand up for it, we are usually, inwardly, lying.

Every one of the first six lines rings false. We are not young. We are not free. Our soil is not golden. Wealth does not come from toil here, but from birth or short-selling or real estate. And though we are ‘girt by sea’ so are all islands, and we are an island, and this is scarcely worth noting. And our land does not ‘abound with precious gifts’, it is two-thirds desert. Unless you count uranium I suppose, and the immensity of coal that is currently choking the planet, it does not abound, it is a desert waste.

The very first line, ‘Australians all, let us rejoice’, rings as false as ‘I did but see her passing by’ or ‘tough but humane’. In real life you rejoice or you do not, you cannot be asked to rejoice. You can be asked to give thanks, for that is a form of words. You can be asked to bow your head in prayer. You cannot be asked to rejoice, for that is a spontaneous emotion, and you have it or not.

A national anthem should above all not lie to us; not lie to us clumsily, or even smoothly. It can avoid certain historical subjects, for we all have ugly national secrets, but it should not say things that are not true.

‘Young and free’ was not true of Aborigines for our first 189 years and it is not widely true of them now. Outback squalor, infantile deafness, poor education, child-betrothals, incest, wife-beating, frequent gaolings and Third World levels of health outcomes, do not add up to freedom.

Nor can the world’s oldest continuing cultural traditions, 40,000 or 50,000 years of them, be called young. This country is only young if we ethnically cleanse from our national memory our original people, and the half million we murdered or brought through trauma and grief to death by kidnapping, alcohol, unjust imprisonment and centuries of mockery.

Canada has a history as abominable as ours but has a good national anthem that does not slither into lying. And so, in a more rousing way, does (amazingly) New Zealand.

Ours, alas, is very different and, on most grand occasions, dismaying. What should we do about this bear-trap of denial, untruth, bad poetry and poor music?

——–

I have a fascination with national anthems. We live in an intensely visual culture, so in our continuing national struggle to emerge from our colonial past we focus perhaps inordinately on our flags and dates on a calendar. But flags and dates are contentious. Ask ten people what the union flag in the corner of our flag represents – other than the purely factual point that we used to be part of the British Empire – and you will get twenty different answers.

Anthems tell you what they mean, in the music and in the poetry. They are a window into a nation’s heart. A good anthem gathers and connects, with confidence, a nation’s past, present, and future, so that it need not be fearful of itself. Such an anthem has broad appeal beyond those for whom it is written – note the substantial fan base that the Soviet anthem has gathered in the United States, to cite just one of many examples. A good anthem affirms, it consoles, and it unites.

Australia has such a candidate. And yes, while “there is no law that says a national anthem can’t be three minutes long”, I reckon the last stanza of I Am Australian should suffice.

It tells of our land, the land of contradictions, of great beauty and immense hardship, the sacred land, the land of inescapably shared histories. It speaks of our individualist spirit, but also our commitment to look after one another. It is unapologetically confident without being arrogant.

Perhaps if we have a national anthem like that, it’d be a little easier to agree on a date.

I’m the hot wind from the desert
I’m the black soil of the plains
I’m the mountains and the valleys
I’m the drought and flooding rains
I am the rock, I am the sky
The rivers when they run
The spirit of this great land
I am Australian

We are one, but we are many
And from all the lands on earth we come
We’ll share a dream and sing with one voice
“I am, you are, we are Australian”

We are one, but we are many
And from all the lands on earth we come
We’ll share a dream and sing with one voice
“I am, you are, we are Australian”

Conflict vs Mistake

Conflict vs Mistake

Today’s article was originally published by Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex on 24 January 2018. Sharing it here on its first anniversary because I lowkey reckon this is one of the most important piece of political writing of this decade.

The Political Compass is wrong. The fundamental divide of politics and society today isn’t between left-wing and right-wing, nor between authoritarians and libertarians. It’s not even the one between anti-establishment populists and the globalist elites, as many have suggested.

The fundamental divide, I now firmly believe, is the roaring mental chasm that separates conflict theorists and mistake theorists.

I think both mentalities have their place. But as for how we go about bridging that chasm, well…

Excerpts:

Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. The State is diseased. We’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure. Some of us have good ideas, others have bad ideas that wouldn’t help, or that would cause too many side effects.

Conflict theorists treat politics as war. Different blocs with different interests are forever fighting to determine whether the State exists to enrich the Elites or to help the People.

Mistake theorists think racism is a cognitive bias. White racists have mistakenly inferred that black people are dumber or more criminal. Mistake theorists find narratives about racism useful because they’re a sort of ur-mistake that helps explain how people could make otherwise inexplicable mistakes, like electing Donald Trump or opposing [preferred policy].

Conflict theorists think racism is a conflict between races. White racists aren’t suffering from a cognitive bias, and they’re not mistaken about anything: they’re correct that white supremacy puts them on top, and hoping to stay there. Conflict theorists find narratives about racism useful because they help explain otherwise inexplicable alliances, like why working-class white people have allied with rich white capitalists.

Mistake theorists think that free speech and open debate are vital, the most important things. Imagine if your doctor said you needed a medication from Pfizer – but later you learned that Pfizer owned the hospital, and fired doctors who prescribed other companies’ drugs, and that the local medical school refused to teach anything about non-Pfizer medications, and studies claiming Pfizer medications had side effects were ruthlessly suppressed. It would be a total farce, and you’d get out of that hospital as soon as possible into one that allowed all viewpoints.

Conflict theorists think of free speech and open debate about the same way a 1950s Bircher would treat avowed Soviet agents coming into neighborhoods and trying to convince people of the merits of Communism. Or the way the average infantryman would think of enemy planes dropping pamphlets saying “YOU CANNOT WIN, SURRENDER NOW”. Anybody who says it’s good to let the enemy walk in and promote enemy ideas is probably an enemy agent.

Mistake theorists naturally think conflict theorists are making a mistake. On the object level, they’re not smart enough to realize that new trade deals are for the good of all, or that smashing the state would actually lead to mass famine and disaster. But on the more fundamental level, the conflict theorists don’t understand the Principle of Charity, or Hanlon’s Razor of “never attribute to malice what can be better explained by stupidity”. They’re stuck at some kind of troglodyte first-square-of-the-glowing-brain-meme level where they think forming mobs and smashing things can solve incredibly complicated social engineering problems. The correct response is to teach them Philosophy 101.

Conflict theorists naturally think mistake theorists are the enemy in their conflict. On the object level, maybe they’re directly working for the Koch Brothers or the American Enterprise Institute or whoever. But on the more fundamental level, they’ve become part of a class that’s more interested in protecting its own privileges than in helping the poor or working for the good of all. The best that can be said about the best of them is that they’re trying to protect their own neutrality, unaware that in the struggle between the powerful and the powerless neutrality always favors the powerful. The correct response is to crush them.

Deeyah Khan on fighting extremism

This filmmaker spent months interviewing neo-Nazis and jihadists. Here’s what she learned.

Excerpts:

I’ve been an anti-racist campaigner pretty much most of my life, having experienced racism from childhood. It’s personal to me, and I’ve responded in all sorts of ways — being angry at racists, shouting at them, confronting them, protesting against them, self-righteously shunning them. I’ve done all that, and I’m not sure what difference it made.

A lot of people misunderstand me when I say that I believe in engagement and dialogue. I’m not saying this is the only way to counter extremism. What I’m saying is that this has to be an option on the table if we actually care about reducing extremism.

Most of these men get so much attention once they do something horrible, or once they say something horrible. Before that, they’re invisible. And I think there is something really powerful in that, and perhaps that says more about us as a society than it does about them. But it ought to give us pause when we shower extremist groups with constant media attention.