This year is one of Australia’s most consequential for public debate: complex, fraught and momentous.
Discussion around the referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, for example, challenges us all to take a more rigorous and respectful approach to cultural matters. But instead of rising to this task, we too often see a cavalier approach to the harm caused by baseless, misleading or racist commentary.
I’m beginning to suspect, for example, that Nine newspapers The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald have developed a template for first-time opinion pieces — one that unfairly exposes unsuspecting writers to attack. Such pieces saturate lead paragraphs with search-engine-optimising outrage triggers before outlining the writer’s personal struggle, centring themselves in a debate that’s not theirs.
Two recently published pieces follow this pattern.
Hazel Edwards is the author of the popular 1976 children’s book There’s a Hippopotamus on Our Roof Eating Cake. Her February opinion piece — whose headline reads “After more than 200 books, don’t tell me who I can write about” — begins: “I’m not Indigenous. I’m not Muslim. I’m not a refugee. I’m not transgender. I’m not disabled. And I’m not a hippopotamus who eats cake.”
Edwards claims writers who can’t work with a contemporary level of cultural competence are facing “censorship”, leaving “science fantasy satire [as] the only ‘safe’ way for an author to portray a culture other than their own”.
Confusing commercial success with cultural authority, Edwards then contrasts “sensitivity” readers and “expert” readers, implying there is no expertise in identifying presumptions and bias in representing another culture. (Meanjin published Özge Sevindik Alkan’s response, who disputes Edwards’ claim that their co-authorship relationship began at her invitation.)
Academic and writer Yannick Thoraval begins his March opinion piece — headlined “I’m a university lecturer and wokeism is stifling free debate in my classroom” — by listing what he calls “trigger words” such as “ ‘faggot’ (as in a bundle of sticks) and ‘racism’ ” with all the nonchalance of explaining away a swastika as an ancient good luck symbol.
Thoraval dismisses students’ cultural awareness as “woke sensitivity” without exploring the nature of their concerns, instead suggesting that any discussion of “appropriate” ways to navigate cultural difference must be “Orwellian”.
He does reveal a self-awareness, avowing he “felt ill-equipped to manage” such debate. It is important to note that universities offer formal training in this area. And that’s not Orwellian, it’s professional development for facilitating the sophisticated debates that should characterise every Australian classroom.
One of the opinion editor’s greatest challenges is to avoid causing further harm by conferring the authority of the masthead on to writers who feed structurally entrenched prejudice, whether intentionally or otherwise.
When the impact of such harm is made clear, intention is routinely offered as a get-out-of-jail-free card. It was just a joke; I didn’t mean it; you’re misunderstanding me — we’ve heard it all before. Thoraval also goes down this path, suggesting that “teachers and students need to trust in each other’s beneficent intentions”.
Offence and harm aren’t negated by intention, of course. You’re not magically granted a debating gold star because you didn’t mean to cause harm.
Individuals are harmed when their cultural or gender identity is subsumed by someone choosing to centre their own experience and/or represent theirs. Harm is caused to communities when they’re marginalised from a debate that’s theirs to lead. Harm is caused to a nation when racist political commentary is normalised.
Which brings us back to the Voice.
The Voice is an important opportunity to publish pieces that enrich our understanding of democratic processes, countering the rampant simplifications and obfuscations we’re seeing. This puts non-Indigenous opinion editors in an arduous position. It’s impossible to overestimate the need for high-quality published opinion ahead of the referendum, and that means fostering constructive debate without causing harm.
There is no public value in baselessly attacking an Elder as “not completely Indigenous”, or maligning the Voice as “racist at heart”, or discrediting decades of nationally distributed collaboration behind the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart as a “Canberra voice”.
The misleading, deceptive or false claims in Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s No strategy have already been analysed by too many commentators for me to list.
A healthy public debate needs a broad diversity of views, argued from unique perspectives that offer evidence. The subject-matter experts and cultural leaders quoted by journalists are essential to daily news stories, but they tend to be just short quotes within a brief piece. Beyond this, we need the deeper insights afforded by opinion pages.
As well as offering us those deeper insights from new or established voices, opinion pieces also validate that most critical of civic questions: what do you think? Of course we can disagree, but only when arguing in good faith, not parroting sensationalist nonsense. (Nor is Crikey above a little clickbait — just ask Guy Rundle.)
When we see complex matters debated with rigour, our confidence in democracy grows. We can respect cultural perspectives, argue on the basis of evidence, and talk about sovereignty, treaty and truth-telling.
We might not be able to access what’s unconscious in our bias, but we can ask ourselves who is being centred in a debate, who is being spoken of and spoken for, and whose voice is not being heard.
So let’s keep asking the big questions, and go looking for answers in publications whose integrity we can trust. What will a Yes vote mean for Australia? What does the No case really propose, and why? Whose views are displaced by that high-profile person claiming they’re being silenced? Is that really an opinion piece, or just a rant?
Nice piece, Esther – thanks 🙂
I’ve never really been one for reading opinion pieces, but decided to read them regularly when I bought my Crikey subscription because each edition is a pretty quick read. From my experience over the last ten months, your advice that we “ask ourselves who is being centred in a debate, who is being spoken of and spoken for, and whose voice is not being heard” is excellent.
I could not have put it so eloquently as you have, but that is exactly what I have discovered is necessary. This is particularly important as we can’t know enough about all the topics opinion writers ‘explore’.
Now I am seeking out opinion pieces where I previously ignored them, and have found that there are those who offer informed and respectful opinion and those who just feed the market that exists to degrade certain people despite the evidence to hand.
“Is that really an opinion piece, or just a rant?”
A question which might equally be asked of this article.
For starters, the core of Dr Anatolitis’ argument has nothing, yes, nothing to do with the debate on the Voice referendum. It is all about bagging what two authors have written about completely different topics (the standard ultraliberal sacred cows of Crimespeak and cultural appropriation). I see no reason to suppose, from what is actually written in the articles concerned, that their authors intend to vote any other way than YES (which is, after all, more than can be said for Comrade Lidia). It seems to me to be simply a crude exercise in establshing guilt by association.
And if we pass on to the second diversionary issue, “saturating lead paragraphs with search-engine-optimising outrage triggers“, I would quietly point out that the second paragraph of this article contains no fewer than five such “outrage triggers”: “Indigenous Voice to Parliament”, “respectful”, “cultural”, “harm” and “RACIST” (handy one, that – you just have to shout it at someone and there’s no need to read another word they write) – all, in their special insider meanings, serving as signals to orthodox ultraliberal readers that they are about to read the CORRECT LINE, and thus may safely read on without fear of having to wince, gnash their teeth or rush sudddenly out of the room yelping incoherently. And they keep on coming as the search engine works its way through.
Any reader who has gone to the bother of reading the two supposedly offending pieces will discover to their surprise that they are both perfectly reasonable perspectives, gently, persuasively and humorously argued, with which I’d guess at least 90% of educated, thoughtful Australians would agree without many quibbles. Their one common failing, it seems, is that they criteek the CORRECT LINE, and as such must by definition be objectively pro-fascist. In both cases the authors’ reasons for disagreeing with the CORRECT LINE are articulated quietly and pesuasively – a stark contrast to the CORRECT LINE itself, which generally seems to be imposed on the rest of us from somewhere on high, springing out fully-armed like Athene from the head of Zeus, without the courtesy of consultation, discussion, persuasion or even explanation (other than the occasional supercilious lecture about how its custodians are motiivated solely by altruism, humanity and sincere grief over the sufferings of the Oppressed), and must be assumed axiomatically to be self-evident.
But because those authors are objectively (or maybe even subjectively) pro-fascist, there’s no need to engage with their arguments. It’s sufficent to play the man/woman, call them names and enedavour through miracles of casuistry to associate them with Humpty and Senator Price, who in their turn will no doubt be properly embarrassed to discover what kind of company they are keeping.
What all this has to do with “complex matters debated with rigour” quite escapes me. If anything, it illustrates how rigour and rigidity are not just different things but opposite poles.
Meanwhile, in the time it has taken you to read this article and the correspondence, another dozen Ukraininan kids will have been pulped by missiles in their homes, an unknown number of their parents or siblings will have died inconspicuously in a freezing muddy trench, a few dozen more harmless American civilians will have been massacred in the street with assualt weapons, a hundred or so employed Australians will have defaulted on their mortgages and/or gone into personal bankruptcy, a dozen of of their unemployed compatriots will have given into despair and topped themselves, six or seven will have died waiting in the queue in Emergency, several hundred will find themsleves tonight out on the streets with no shelter for the first time in their lives, and most likely a couple more Koories will have died in the cells. Thank god we have orthodoxy-sniffers to keep us focused on the things that really matter.
That was beautifully put….
One other unfortunate consequence of this culture purity, which is also the cause of some of the issues you mention at the end, is that it has completely cannibalised the left because to now be considered “left” you only need to be seen to be “socially liberal” and many of these people are also fiscally conservative which is the root cause of most of our problems – governments not spending money, governments being so small as to be useless and in the thrall of the “markets”.
It doesn’t matter so much that as many words again are devoted to saying, simply, it doesn’t matter?
Ah. You must be the one-dimensional man Marcuse was talking about. I always wondered where he’d got to.
♪♪Standing in the Sun he’d cast no shadow ♪♪♪ – apols to the Monobrow Bros.
Must be.
A fascinating response that illustrates the responsibility we readers must take when we read, and that “reader presage” can have an incredible difference on the meanings we make when we read opinion pieces.
I found the two, very different ways the co-authors experienced their time together to be very interesting and well worth consideration as a great many people experience the “same” working partnership differently. Again, there is a difference in presage but this time “author presage” that seems to be core.
I could really relate to this because much of my working life has been spent in multi-disciplinary settings where the most productive work requires people to understand and respect both personal difference and professional/discipline difference.
It was also fascinating to read the teacher’s experience and the possible impact of the teacher presage and author presage he brought to the classroom.
Woke just means we listen respectfully and genuinely seek to understand each other’s experiences and points of view and incorporate evidence into thinking and behaving around social issues. But for this author, such an approach becomes woke ideology which seems likely to put his teacher self in a very defensive position when discussing such personal issues that can be very sensitive.
I found myself wondering if this is a teacher with a great need to do some critical self-reflection and unpack his personal pedagogy – something all teachers need to do regularly though don’t necessarily know to do it and/or have the time to do it.
I really appreciated the concepts implicit in the opinion pieces chosen and their value for how we talk and think about a Voice – confirmation bias, presage (of various types), critical self-reflection and even personal pedagogy as the run up to the referendum presents an excellent opportunity for lifelong and life-wide learning should we choose to accept it. I didn’t see anything pro-fascist in anything I read – not in Esther’s piece nor the three opinion pieces she discussed.
I also appreciated your mention of Senators Thorpe (assuming that is who you meant when you said Comrade Lidia) and Nampijinpa Price. I would add someone like Dean Parkin who has yet another view of a Voice. Understanding each of their positions (along with others whose names are not in the public arena) has been central to my evolving consideration of a Voice because I don’t come from a First Nation which has necessitated the application of the concepts I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Those concepts are also important as we learn about things like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the horror it has unleashed.
“Woke just means we listen respectfully and genuinely seek to understand each other’s experiences and points of view and incorporate evidence into thinking and behaving around social issues.”
I’m afraid it doesn’t. Actually, the word has lost any meaning it ever had, evr since it got hijacked by the Sneering Right to become a generic boo-word for anyone to the left of Ron De Santis. For a while it was used on the Left, faute de mieux, to designate a specific tendency in Left thought which is distinct from traditional radicalism, mainly in its obsessive focus on “marginalised communities” at the expense of broader issues affecting the welfare of entire classes, nations and planets. Ever since that tendency has become the most visible in the American intellectual Left and its supine Australian avatar, to the point where many people think of it as representing the entire contemporary Left, it’s become clear to me that it deserves a name of its own, In the same way we have names for Maoists, Trostskyists and Greens which can be treated as more or less dispassionate analytical constructs rather than simple terms of abuse. I’ve been working for the last couple of years on defining that construct and building a coherent critical analysis of its ideology, and I have to say so far it’s been a pretty lonely project (though Guy Rundle’s concept of the “knowledge class” covers a lot of the same ground).
The name I’ve chosen is ultraliberalism – “ultra” on the analogy of ultraleftism (what Lenin called “Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder”; Comrade Lidia is the most visble exemplar of ultraleftism in Australia today), “liberalism” to indicate that it belongs within the tradition of American liberalism rather than traditional Australian or European radical leftism, in that it starts from the assumption that Oppression is something that only affects outliers, i.e. that the existing liberal political institutions work well enough for those who inhabit the bump in the distribution curve, and radical intervention is necessary only at the excluded fringes.
In effect, ultraliberalism is the left fringe of liberalism (American-style) just as neoliberalism (market authoritarianism) is its right fringe. This is quite a helpful way of looking at it, as in both cases a philosophy built originally around a core of classic liberal values – tolerance, inclusion, diversity, free choice, critical discourse – has somehow morphed into their direct opposites, even while continuing to play lip service to the original values. Most politically aware people today would agree that neoliberalism ended up deeply illiberal in its effects, but there’s much more reluctance to accept the bleeding obvious evidence that ultraliberalism has brought with it a different but still scary authoritarianism – a belief that there is only one Correct Line (which, pace Chairman Mao, falls out of the sky), a refusal of dialogue with anyone who questions that orthodoxy, reliance on ad-hominem abuse to deal with dissent, a stifling correct-speak drawn from the same family of constructed languages as management-speak and Pentagon-speak and with the same tendency to blot out inconvenient facts or stand them on their head.
There’s a lot more to this, of course, and it would really take a book to even start fleshing out the ideas, or maybe a very long article (I don’t suppose Meanjin will take one from me on the topic). It’s hardly the thing to explain in a subsidiary reaction to a comment on a 2-day-old article which not many people seem to have read anyhow. I raise it mainly to make the point that the very vagueness of the word “woke”, its lack of specific reference, is a trap. It’s easy enough to say “I’m woke” when you mean “I’m politically aware, I see things from the point of view of the powerless, I understand how much unfairness there is in the system”, but the risk you run is that you will either be equated by others to ultraliberalism, or else that the ultraliberals will try and claim you for one of their own. At least giving the thing a name of its own (even if someone else eventually thinks of a better one) makes it easier to work out whether that is what you actually want to be.
Incidentally, I think we must be reading different things into”presage”. Its only meaning that I’m aware of is “foretell”, but it looks like you mean something else by it. Is this a new coinage from one of the Critical Social Justice disciplines that I haven’t yet come across?
Yes, superbly put.
The overwhelming sentiment underpinning this article, and so much else advanced by self-described ‘progressive’ voices now, is the deeply internalised assumption that thee is certain ‘objectively true’ set of views and opinions that any ‘rational, critical’ person will come to embrace…if only they can overcome a list of ‘self-evident’ biases, prejudices, ignorances and intellectual shortcomings.
It’s a passive-aggressive condescension that you just learn to very politely and cheerfully sidestep. Especially given that one key purpose of this sort of preemptive framing of ‘debate’ is often to bait an over-reaction from those who disagree/dissent for no less rational, critically examined reasons, so the originator can then have their projected prejudices validated via a series of strawman fallacy points.
The Voice ‘debate’ is very much being engineered as this kind of contrived rhetorical exercise. Much of the modern progressive left really has come to be unable to differentiate ‘objective fact’ from what is really just ‘subjective opinion’, leaving its only response to different opinions being to label it ‘irrational’ or ‘biased’ thinking, and so on.
It’s harmless enough if you just gently decline to accept the loaded terms of debate. They are usually easy to spot, in the ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’ kind of way.
Yep, fair point JR.
Some of us however, well me to be precise, do occasionally have difficulty in both ‘very politely and cheerfully’ sidestepping the pas/agg approach and ‘gently declining to accept the loaded terms of the debate’. Do not such responses inevitably result in the ‘preferred’ narrative dominating the debate on matters cultural?
Can do, for sure. But the alternative – to try to ‘articulate your way beyond the bonds of the artfully imposed framing in good faith’ invariably plays into their hands, by legitimising the illegitimate, bad faith terms of the debate. Once you’ve engaged in their terms, attempts to try to extract yourself only invite rhetorical escalation: you’ll be called ‘defensive’, ‘aggressive’, ‘reactionary’, and so on.
The key is to not fall into the trap of trying to ‘persuade’ someone who you can recognise from that start is disingenuous: who for all their fluff about ‘open minds’ and ‘civil debate’ has every intention of concluding the worst about your views and why you hold them, largely as part of their own need for confirmation bias on complex, nuanced issues.
This article is a good example, as are many of Crikey’s content-pieces, and for the larger part, the overall claims to ‘independent’ journalism. It’s a very ‘progressive’ characteristic just now, but all partisan stripes-advocates play the game, though. Plenty of progressives exhaust their hood will and divert their resources trying to argue in good faith with righty trolls, too.
It is a first rule of debate/persuasion to eschew false formulations, aka neologisms, jargon, buzzwords, etc ad nauseam.
Alas, today that seems to apply to vast swathes of thought & speech, from the low political to higher forms of intellectual pursuit.
That the now common phenomenon of an invited speaker, no matter their qualifications, bona fides & credentials, can now be canx (my recollection is that the first was The Germ herself at Cambridge – can anyone confirm – ?) by the offense seeking, outrage brigade bodes ill for the Future.
If any.
yeah..and from memory germaine also backed off from her unremarkable (and not terribly offensive at all) ‘men in dresses’ sceptical line in a mighty hurry…fairly sobering, just how powerful is the survival instinct for those who make their living from intellectual debate.
Not the Germ – she has grown even more ascerbic on ‘cocks-in-frocks” brigade.
On Why Sex-Change Is a Lie. The Independent Magazine, 22 July 1989 Greer argues that “the trans ideology is entirely counter-feminist, in that it treats ‘femininity’ as the core truth of womanhood. Femininity is a ‘role you play’ and for that to become the given identity of women is a profoundly disabling notion”.
https://twitter.com/terfcitations/status/1550465693073567744?lang=en
Geez what a great read. Not just as acute as ever, but incredibly prescient, too.
But thirty years old. I’m sure I’ve seen GG undergoing the ritual ‘self re-appraisal’ so common among modern ‘legacy feminists’ who ought to have nothing to prove to anyone about their career-long commitment to women’s well-being. Maybe it was this…
Germaine Greer tells Q&A her trans views were wrong, but then restates them | Germaine Greer | The Guardian
Got to say, it’s utterly unedifying and demoralising to see even someone as lifetime-tearaway and indepedent as Greer…well, grovelling – it’s the only apt word – before a tribunal of spectacularly trivial, mediocre, lemming-brains. That quip from Tony Jones – the thinking transwomen’s token straight BFF – about Greer and hole-digging is skin-crawling in its smug, mug-for-the-camera condescension.
This narcissistic, aggressive Men’s Movement is making smart women voluntarily ridiculous, all over again.
Reply in moderation, Ano.
It’s beyond frustrating when lines of argument are interrupted by inexplicable moderation like this. Often it’s just logistic banality, or some algo glitch. But sometimes it’s hard not to conclude the dice is being editorially loaded. Crikey’s claim to independence and an appetite for free debate can often feel dubious.
Thanks – there’s always Plan B?
Enjoyed reading the AI responses you posted – did I detect slightly less optimism in your comments regarding it’s capacity to produce material that doesn’t (even if slightly) incline to the left?
Yeah possibly…it’s interesting how the attempt by OpenAI to avoid the usual internet hostilities is tending towards a ‘sanitised’ conversation that by default tends to ‘flatter’ the passive-aggressive/motherhoodisms of modern ‘woke’ (pejorative sense) conversation. History tells us that by far the most insidious, and ultimately catastrophic, oppression of free speech invariably arrives swaddled in ‘polite’ language and tone…
My 16 year old says that ‘gaming’ AI inputs to try to transcend this risk – authoritarism by the politeness police – is the ‘new subversion’…it’s one of the reasons I like to embrace rudeness as my own default pozzy! (That, and I’m just a fart-in-church type by nature…) 🙂
ChatGPT is already PCed up the wazoo – I’ve tried to have it write a joke (something no machine has yet managed though I’ve seen Magpies & Sulphas with a sense of humour sadly lacking in many people) – along the old “A,B & C go into a bar…” but it keeps replying that it does not ‘do’ harmful stereotyping.
Yes, I’ve tried to do blue limericks – always a good benchmark – and the best you can crank out of it is a kind of puppy-dog Adam Hills anti-humor.
Michael Palin, the grannies’ favourite unthreatening Python, came out on R4 (UK) a couple of years back with a limerick which was removed from the repeat.
“The bloke said ‘gosh you’re a tight ‘un”/ the woman said “You silly soul, you’re in the wrong hole/there’s plenty of room in the right ‘un“.
That didn’t scan as I forgot the correct Limerick format –
“There was a young lady from Brighton,
Whose bloke said ‘gosh you’re a tight ‘un,
She said ‘you silly old soul,
You’re in the wrong hole,
There’s plenty of room in the right ‘un“
It was that penultimate word that always trips the madBot – even when cunningly concealed in other words such as the Thomas the Tank engine’s adipose challenged director.
Fun fakt – his original nickname is now gornnn, a grandchild tells me, from reprints after lip pursing from the sensitivity brigade. Thomas Bowdler has returned – he was 200yrs too early.
Good grief. You are right! I shall try a bowdlerised version, as a control post.
*
F-t u-ly st–id tr–l woman. F-t ugly st–id tr–l man.
Hmmm. One shall have to continue one’s empirical research of the Crickety AlgoBot…assuming this sneaked through…
*
In unbleeped form, it did not! We are in trouble!
Fat. Ugly. Stupid.
Troll.
Yep. It’s the ‘t’ word…rhymes with roll.
God help us if we ever have to discuss Tolkien!
Or the old nursery rhyme about Billy Goat Gruff.
I’m very late back to the party but enjoying the convo nevertheless. I’ve not reconnected with GG for some time but will have a squizz at the articles referenced by you and JR.
My thoughts re the revolutionary possibilities of ChatGPT remain pessimistic – I fully concur with your very erudite observation – ‘PCed up the wazoo’…. I’m stealing that.
Cheers.
Feel free but it’s hardly original.
It’s the precision, not the originality that appeals.
Often the most useful convos occur when the squawking curtain-twitchers have moved on the next shiny, outrageous object of hate, and you can use the free real estate to engage in more nuanced chats without risk of getting your bottom smacked.
Sadly, but inevitably, even the lure of the ‘free real estate’ you reference is not enough to warrant engagement. Another one bites the dust.
Keane’s return to Crikey today (Monday) and the sentiment therein (holding BH in the same regard as Bernard Collaery and Assange??) does not bode well, for this long time reader at any rate. But good luck to Keane and Crikey, a win is a win, after all, even by default.
Keep at it, JR, someone needs to!
Ditto with Peter Hartcher’s hostile, scare-mongering and ill- informed rants about China, also in Nine newspapers
Wokism is the worst thing in the universe.
It acts both as a call to arms for the right and a means for dividing the left.
Since the right is all about individualism – and only really benefits wealthy and privileged individuals – they benefit from the division that is caused by a constant sense of outrage.
Meanwhile the left is about the collective – particularly amongst the underprivileged- so will always be vulnerable to division which is then magnified by endless outrage.
It is entirely self-defeating. It self-censors would be allies and draws attention to demagogues.
It’s almost like it was invented a Russian lab….
You are correct, but you must remember both sides hate the poor.
I love the bit about the academic who thinks receivng advice is Orwellian. You can evidently call yourself “academic” without actually reading stuff.
Most advice is definitionally unwanted: you can usefully take your decisions in the light of advice but not routinely in accordance with it. “Never in doubt” is a euphemistic synonym for “embarrassingly often wrong”.
When a teacher admits they don’t have fundamental teaching skills but it’s all the students’ fault, readers should have enough sense to move on to the next article.
Well it depends on the tone of that “advice” and whether there is a subtext that if the “advice” is not heeded they will lose their job.
Not really
Fascinating response.