Category: Blog posts

Every year, as my boyfriend James and I discuss how we’re going to vote in the Triple J Hottest 100, we have a faux-debate on some song that James thinks deserves to be in the 100, but I think has no chance. In the past it was Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’, Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’, and this year, James was determined that Gangnam Style deserved to be number one.

Now, to be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever really been against these songs making the top 100 (James may disagree with me on that), but every year I’ve been certain that none of them would come close. Every year I have been right.

But this year, as I’ve reflected on the top 100, I’ve had to really think about why Gangnam Style didn’t make the list. In fact it wasn’t even on the list of voting options in the lead up to the countdown. It’s strange, because in many ways Gangnam Style is the exact sort of song that Triple J listeners may love. It’s extremely political, with the sort of politics many in Triple J would like, and if you think about it is quite musically innovative. Clearly the music video had a lot going for it too. Psy was even the sort of alternative artist (before he became famous) that Triple J listeners love. In fact, the only thing that made it ‘non-Triple J’ was its overt commercialism (although that was clearly never intended when the song was written) and international popularity.

In their book, “Nation of Rebels”, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter discuss the phenomenon that I think is largely behind the popularity (ironically) of Triple J, and the uniqueness of the Hottest 100 list; counter-cultural movements.

This is a book I read in 2009, so I can’t quote it off-hand, but at it simplest form Heath and Potter explore the growth of counter-cultural movements. They argue that these movements, ones that have aimed at separating themselves with ‘mainstream’ culture, have ended up being co-opted into a consumerist culture that they criticise. Looking at the birth of these counter-cultures, you can see how Triple J fits into this mould. It’s a radio station born for ‘young people’ and designed to showcase music that doesn’t make it into the mainstream. In doing so, Triple J has created its own Australian music ‘counter-culture’, one that rebels against the commercialisation of mainstream music, but in doing so creates its own commercial brand (see how many artists have started on Triple J and have gone to extreme commercial success).

Now, despite my concerns about the political effectiveness of counter-culture movements, I don’t have the problem with the existence of them. In fact, I am a big fan of Triple J and rarely listen to anything else. A diverse society in which people can express themselves in different ways is not a bad thing, and I thinking fighting against some of the bad things in mainstream culture is a good idea. The problem is that in the Triple J world, and the world of many other counter-cultures, we have seen a growth of cultural smugness.

In his chapter in the book Left Turn released last year Christos Tsiolkas described what he called The Toxicity of Smugness. In the piece, Tsiolkas discusses the use of the term ‘bogan’ in left-wing circles, and the smugness that surrounds the term:

“I think that just as the right-wing disavowel of the terminology of class is revealing of conservative politics…there is also something revealing about the evasions and fears of the bourgeois Left in the contempt for the ‘bogan’.   

Tsiolkas explains that this toxicity of smugness is leading to an isolation of the working class in the left, a world in which the bourgeois left is pushing the working-class out.

“The toxicity of progressive bourgeois smugness can be ascertained by how contemptuous is the language used to define the behaviour and expressions for working-class and welfare-class lives. And the danger of this smugness is clear in how few working-class and welfare-class voices are given space to articulate an alternative left politics to one founded either on identity politics or categories of morality.”

Going back to Triple J and our counter-cultures, it has become clear to me how pervasive the toxicity of smugness has become as part of these movements.

Counter-cultural ideas are, and should be designed as a way to rebel against the bad parts of mainstream culture – to provide an alternative. However, as an agent of the left, many of these movements have developed a smug shield to them – one in which anything considered ‘mainstream’, ‘commercial’ or ‘bogan’ is discounted off-hand no matter its quality. Of course there are exceptions to these rules (Apple products being the perfect example), but these only really happen when it suits the needs of the movement.

We can see this clearly with Gangnam Style. Doing some reading on Psy, I could imagine that he would fit nicely within the Triple J counterculture. But, because of some thought of betrayal due to commercialisation he wasn’t allowed in. The same has happened many times in Triple J. I clearly remember a time when people complained heavily that they played Kanye West’s “All of the Lights”. Apparently, even though people loved Kanye’s album, they hated that song because it featured Rihanna.

This smugness has of course lead to a level of isolation within progressive, counter-cultural movements. Of course counter-cultures are designed to separate themselves somewhat, and there is no problem with that, but the idea is to resist capitalism and modern culture, not judge everyone who likes things within that culture. Hell, we should even be able to accept that some parts of mainstream culture are great.

On reflection, I think Gangnam Style was hard done by. I may not have voted for it, and I don’t expect everyone else too, but I also don’t want a smug approach to it just because it is ‘popular’.

On Wednesday, the Katter Party’s Queensland Senate nominee, Bernard Gaynor, took to the tweets to both defend his colleague from Victoria, Tess Corbett (who had linked homosexuality with paedophilia), and to declare that he wouldn’t want a gay person teaching his kids. Here’s what Gaynor had to say:

23 January: Bernard Gaynor ‏@BernardGaynor
As a KAP senate nominee in Qld and former Party National General Secretary I fully support Tess Corbett. #auspol

Bernard Gaynor ‏@BernardGaynor
I wouldn’t let a gay person teach my children and I am not afraid to say it #auspol

Bernard Gaynor ‏@BernardGaynor
If we value free speech and democracy then we would respect the right of Christians to hold their views about right and wrong #auspol

Bernard Gaynor ‏@BernardGaynor
Woah! Just said prayers & put kids 2 bed.Came back to find many ppl tweeting against parental discretion over teachers #goodluckwiththat

Bernard Gaynor ‏@BernardGaynor
Parents should have discretion over who teaches their children #auspol

Yesterday morning, reacting the furore about what he said, Gaynor put out a press release to ‘clarify his comments’. In it he said that even Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard support parental choice, and that:

“This is not controversial. Any society with a basis in common sense would support parental responsibility.”

“It would be a sad day for Australia if its Christian population was prevented from freely practicing its religion.”

Gaynor has since been suspended from the Katter Party and therefore disqualified from the Queensland Senate spot. What’s ironic about the entire episode though, is that in essence Gaynor’s press release was right; in recent weeks Prime Minister Julia Gillard has shown a position very similar to Gaynor’s.

I’m not saying that Julia Gillard believes there is a connection between homosexuality and paedophilia, and I’m pretty sure she would find Corbett’s views as repulsive as anyone else. But Gaynor’s position and argument was one based around religious freedom; that as a Christian man he should have the right to choose who teaches his children based on his religious beliefs. For him, that means no gays near his kids.

It sounds strangely familiar. In fact, it was just last week that Julia Gillard was reported to have actively reassured religious groups, and in particular the Australian Christian Lobby, that their legal rights to discriminate against homosexuals would not be encroached upon. Gillard told these groups that under the new Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill, religious organisations would retain their right to discriminate against those who might cause “injury to religious sensitivities.” (It was this bill that Corbett was being asked about when she made her statements). It has been specifically clarified that members of the GLBT community can fall under this grouping.

What does that mean? It means that religious schools and organisations will be able to continue to discriminate against teachers and staff, refusing to hire or being able to fire someone because they are gay, lesbian, bisexual or trans*. It also means that religious schools would continue to be able to block the enrolment of students because of their sexual orientation.

Whilst this may not be a broad-scale policy that Gaynor seemed to be advocating, one that allows parents to block LGBT teachers supervising their kids wherever they send their students, the principle is pretty much the same. It is a policy cloaked under the guise of religious freedom, which allows religious institutions to discriminate against GLBT people based on their sexuality and their gender identity.

And whilst Gillard clearly wouldn’t stop LGBT people teaching her children (if she had them), and whilst she doesn’t believe there is a connection between homosexuality and paedophilia, her policies are supporting, and even encouraging, those who do to discriminate at will. She has become an enabler of people like Corbett and Gaynor; an enabler of discrimination.

When you think about it this way, you can see that there is really little difference between the two; the bigot and the enabler. In fact, I have to ask myself who is worse? Because the bigot can only flourish as those around enable their behaviour. And in recent weeks, it’s Julia Gillard who has become the enabler of bigots all around the country.

As bushfires ravaged Australia over the past weeks, journalists from around the world have started to tune in. A couple of weeks ago Guardian columnist George Monbiot took his turn, discussing not only our heatwaves, but our Opposition Leader’s response to climate change. Here is what he had to say:

“I wonder what Tony Abbott will say about the record heatwave now ravaging his county. The Australian opposition leader has repeatedly questioned the science and impacts of climate change.”

“So far Abbott has commented, as far as I can tell, only on the fires: “Our thoughts are with the people and the communities across the country who are impacted by the bushfires,” he says. Quite right too, but it’s time his thoughts also extended to the question of why this is happening and how Australian politicians should respond. He says he’s currently on standby with his local fire brigade, but his opposition to effective action on climate change is likely to contribute to even more extreme events in the future, this looks like the most cynical kind of stunt politics.”

This piece really made me take a step back. It’s not just that it’s an interesting critique on Abbott’s ongoing climate denial and the Coalition’s climate policies, but it’s also one that is clearly needed. It has filled a void that Australian journalism, which has refused to challenge Abbott or the Coalition on their climate denial, has left wide open.

Let’s take a look for example at the exact quotes that Monbiot points out. One of Tony Abbott’s most famous climate quotes is when he said on Lateline:

“the science is highly contentious, to say the least…If man-made CO2 was quite the villain that many of these people say it is, why hasn’t there just been a steady increase starting in 1750, and moving in a linear way up the graph?”

It’s a pretty striking interview, and it’s not the only Abbott has questioned mainstream climate science (see the climate change is crap statement, and this quote from an event in Western Australia last year).

Despite this however, when looking back over his time as Opposition Leader, his climate denial has only really hit mainstream media consciousness a couple of times. There was the direct response to the climate change is crap statement, the time when a video surfaced of Abbott both denying climate change on breath and then advocating a carbon tax in the next (although the discussion here was more around the carbon tax quote than the climate denial quote), and when Julia Gillard took aim in Question Time in 2011 (although this ended up in a discussion over the word ‘denial’). Compare this to the amount of analysis over Julia Gillard’s ‘there will be no carbon tax under a Government I lead’ statement and you will see that time and time again Abbott gets a free ride.

At it’s not just Abbott, it’s the entire Coalition. For example, with Abbott on leave recently, Acting Opposition Leader Warren Truss filled the void, declaring that it was “too simplistic” to link climate change with the recent heatwaves. Despite the science which is now starting to show evidence that would challenge Truss directly on this view, very few in the media actively questioned his statements. It took an academic from the Australian National University, Phil Gibbons, to do some research on Truss’ other statement that the bushfires would result in more CO2 emissions than our coal power planets, finding that he was clearly wrong.

The same lack of scrutiny can also be said of the Coalition’s climate policies. For example, a study in June last year showed that if enacted, the Coalition’s climate policy would cost taxpayers $24 billion. Despite this however, no one could ever claim that the Coalition’s climate policies have received anywhere near the level of scrutiny it deserves.

I’m not saying that it is the job of journalists to go and find scientific papers and debunk every pseudo-scientific statement from every politician. In fact, given that it is not current policy, I even understand that the Coalition’s climate position may not get as much scrutiny as the Governments.

But, just once, we need journalists who can ask the questions – people who can ask where Tony Abbott gets his facts from, people who ask academics what the reality is, people who can probe to see whether the Coalition’s policy is going to work.

Climate change is the defining issue of this century. Given the impact it is and will have, we need journalism that will actually question what one of our major parties is saying and doing on the issue. Australian journalism has failed so badly though that we now have to rely on a British columnist to do the work for us.

A recent article in the New York Times, Can forgiveness play a role in the criminal justice system?, has recently brought out some discussion about the nature of our justice system.

The article is based around the story of Conor McBride, who, when he was 19 shot and killed his girlfriend Ann in a fit of rage. The article goes through how Conor, his family, and Ann’s family, the Grosmaires went through a process of mutual grieving, and then forgiveness in the aftermath of the murder. I’ll let you read the story and article yourself, as there is no way I could do it justice in this post (be prepared to take a little time, and potentially shed a few tears – but it’s worth it).

One of the most interesting elements of this piece outside the story itself, is the way in which the McBride’s and the Grosmaires used a process called “restorative justice” to deal with the crime. The author, Vera Tirunik, describes it like this:

Most modern justice systems focus on a crime, a lawbreaker and a punishment. But a concept called “restorative justice” considers harm done and strives for agreement from all concerned — the victims, the offender and the community — on making amends. And it allows victims, who often feel shut out of the prosecutorial process, a way to be heard and participate. In this country, restorative justice takes a number of forms, but perhaps the most prominent is restorative-justice diversion. There are not many of these programs — a few exist on the margins of the justice system in communities like Baltimore, Minneapolis and Oakland, Calif. — but, according to a University of Pennsylvania study in 2007, they have been effective at reducing recidivism. Typically, a facilitator meets separately with the accused and the victim, and if both are willing to meet face to face without animosity and the offender is deemed willing and able to complete restitution, then the case shifts out of the adversarial legal system and into a parallel restorative-justice process. All parties — the offender, victim, facilitator and law enforcement — come together in a forum sometimes called a restorative-community conference. Each person speaks, one at a time and without interruption, about the crime and its effects, and the participants come to a consensus about how to repair the harm done.

The methods are mostly applied in less serious crimes, like property offenses in which the wrong can be clearly righted — stolen property returned, vandalized material replaced. The processes are designed to be flexible enough to handle violent crime like assault, but they are rarely used in those situations. And no one I spoke to had ever heard of restorative justice applied for anything as serious as murder.

Reading this really made me think about the role punishment, and forgiveness plays in our justice system. There are obviously many goals behind our justice system; punishment for offenders, retribution and maybe closure for those who have had a crime committed against them and in the end ‘rehabilitation’ for those who have committed a crime.

In reading this article however (noting it is based in the US, and Australia would be different), it becomes really easy to start to question how good we are at achieving any of these goals, even at the most basic level. Our system almost seems to be devoid of any sort of emotional healing for anyone involved in the process. It is based on rationality – we collect the ‘facts’ about a crime and then, based largely on decisions taken outside of the specific instance, we dictate a punishment.

In doing so we remove emotions, and people, from the justice process. It stops victims and criminals from being able to tell their story, it takes away the capacity for there to be any emotional retribution or healing, and it gets rid of any chance we would ever have at forgiveness for a crime. In the end this eliminates the final goal of justice system – that of ‘rehabilitation’. Instead of finding ways to forgive people, we spend all our time punishing them, casting them as criminals for the rest of their life, never letting them back into a world of ‘non-criminality’.

In the end we have to ask ourselves, what happened to our ability to forgive? When did we get so angry, so focused on punishing everyone who has ever done something wrong to the maximum of our ability? Maybe the Grosmaires and McBrides could be an inspiration. If, even for such a horrible crime, they could find away to forgive, and eventually to heal, then we could do so too.

Today I’m moving on to the second part of my review of the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault. In this post I am going to be focusing on what is only 20 pages of Foucault’s piece, but what are probably the most important, his chapter titled Scientia Sexualis.

Before we start, let’s just recap of where we left off: the repressive hypothesis. In my last review we saw a challenge from Foucault; one where he called on us to question what he called the ‘repressive hypothesis’, or the argument that we live in an age of sexual repression and censorship. Foucault argues that in fact, that we have seen an explosion of sexual discourse over the past centuries.

So, how has this explosion of sexual discourse occurred? Let’s start at the back of this chapter to get our answer. Foucault argues that what we’ve seen is the development of what he calls scientia sexualis – or what I would call the scientification of sex. Scientia sexualis is a scientific discourse around sex focused around obtaining sexual ‘truth’.

“Let us put forward a general working hypothesis. The society that emerged in the nineteenth century – bourgeois, capitalist, or industrial society, call it what you will – did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it. Not only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex.” (p. 69)

So how did we develop this scientific ‘truth’ of sex? Foucault argues that societies have historically done this in two ways. First, is the mode used largely in Arabo-Moslem societies, China, India, Japan and Rome; ars erotica:

“In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated in experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and forbidden, nor by reference to the criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experience as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul.” (p.57)

In the Western World however, scientia sexualis is focused around the method of confession. Foucault argues that since the Middle Ages, confession has been a major tool used in the West as a means to reveal the ‘truth’. This ritual of discourse is one which unfolds in a very distinct power relationship, one in which the confessor has some authority above them that requires the confession. The confession however, also provides a sense of purification for the confessor – it absolves them of their sins. In that sense therefore, confession is a bottom-up process – one in which the confessor is the instigator through coming to the confessional booth.

Scientia sexualis was the movement where confession moved from the confessional booth in church, into the scientific and medical world, into the world of psychiatry. It was here that these confessions began to be noted, taken down, codified, and used to develop an understanding of scientific truth. Foucault argues that this was a momentous time:

“It was a time when the most singular pleasures were called upon to pronounce a discourse of truth concerning themselves, a discourse which had to model itself after that which spoke, not of sin and salvation, but of bodies and life processes-the discourse of science. It was enough to make one’s voice tremble, for an improbable thing was taking shape: a confessional science, a science which relied on a many-sided extortion, and took for its object what was unmentionable but admitted nonetheless.” (p.64)

Sexual confession therefore became a practice of science. Science began inducing confessions through codifying an inducement to speak in clinical practice, creating causality (often negative) between people’s sexual practices and the events in their lives, forcing out something that was inherently hidden, scientifically interpreting what was and wasn’t said, and through medicalising the effects of confession (p. 65 – 67).

With science at its base, the discourse around sex now therefore took on two distinct orders of knowledge; biology and medicine. If we think about this clearly, you can easily see this today. Our discourse around sex is focused on the medical and biological – how can we improve our sexual performance, what sort of drugs can we take to do this, what is medically wrong with people who engage in ‘perverse sex’?

This scientification of sex went well beyond this discourse however. As Foucault explains:

“But beyond these troubled pleasures, it assumed other powers; it set itself up as the supreme authority in matters of hygienic necessity, taking up the old fears of venereal affliction and combining them with the new themes of asepsis, and the great evolutionist myth with the recent institutions of public health; it claimed to ensure the physical vigour and the moral cleanliness of the social body; it promised to eliminate defective individuals, degenerate and bastardised populations. In the name of biological and historical urgency, it justified the racisms of the state, which at the time were on the horizon. It grounded them in “truth.” (p.54)

What we see therefore is a great is a twofold process; one in which the new discourse of sexuality, scientia sexualis, forces sexual confession through scientific practices, and a second which then transforms these confessions into the ‘truth’ around sex – a truth which often has much meaning and impact beyond someone simply knowing people’s sexual practices.

And this is where we return to our original repressive hypothesis. Whilst we have seen an explosion of sexual discourse – this does not mean a lack of sexual repression. It is just that this repression is now framed in a scientific manner – it is framed in ‘truth’. If we think about it in that way, it is in fact much more terrifying than the original repressive hypothesis Foucault posited.

This video has been doing the rounds quite heavily recently. The piece is a lecture from Mark Lynas to the Oxford Farming Conference on the 3rd of January about genetic engineering (GE).

In the speech, Lynas describes his journey from being an anti-GE campaigner, to a fervent supporter. The story is actually quite common; one in which the ‘science’ convinces Mark to switch from anti to pro-GE. After discussing this transition, Lynas  goes in to heavily rip into the environment movement. He effectively argues that the movement is willingly allowing people to starve as they fight for an illogical ideological position advocating for ‘natural food’.

Now, I have to say that I am not anti-GE. I am probably like Lynas was a number of years ago – I simply haven’t read enough about it to create an informed opinion. And, even as an environmentalist, I have been willing to come out against anti-GE campaigns, including the destruction of GE crops by Greenpeace activists in 2011.

Despite this, like so much of the discussion round GE, I find Lynas’ speech really frustrating, almost infuriating. I think it is the epitome of the problematic way many, particularly environmentalists and those on the left, treat science in our society.

Lynas’ argument is based almost solely on the support of ‘science’. He argues that as he got engaged on climate change, he saw a contradiction between his ‘pro-science’ climate campaigning, and his ‘anti-science’ GE campaigning. As he said:

“For me this anti-science environmentalism became increasingly inconsistent with my pro-science environmentalism with regard to climate change.”

“Obviously this contradiction was untenable. What really threw me were some of the comments underneath my final anti-GM Guardian article. In particular one critic said to me: so you’re opposed to GM on the basis that it is marketed by big corporations. Are you also opposed to the wheel because it is marketed by the big auto companies?”

It is in making this comparison that Lynas makes a massive mistake. Supporting one stream of science does not mean we have to support another. Science is a broad field, with many different streams looking at a range of different areas.

Let’s take a look at climate change and GE for example. The science behind these two things are very different, and this distinction is extremely important. Climate science is about discovering and reporting an effect humans are having on our world. GE however, is a form of science that is trying to solve a problem (whether that problem is not enough profits for big companies, or global food shortages). It is a science that is creating new things – new technologies for our world.

In blindly supporting GE science therefore – to say that we have to support it because it is ‘science’ – we are not only supporting the GE , but we are also promoting science as the key way to deal with the problems we face. This is vastly different to supporting climate change, which is more about backing scientists up when they say they’ve discovered something about the world.

The problem with this is that science doesn’t take into account many of the social, economic and power realities of our world. For example, when it comes to agriculture, many of our problems don’t stem from a lack of food, but rather from inequitable distribution of food. Power relations in our world are leading to a situation where poor people in the third world are starving, whilst the wealthy have far too much food and are wasting significant amounts of it. GE science doesn’t deal with this in any way and we invest money in as much GE technology as we like, but it still isn’t going to solve this problem.

Building on to this, science often then builds into these power structures, creating solutions focused wholly at those with power and not those without power. Whilst I have to believe many of the stories of how GE has helped impoverished people that Lynas points out, there is often another side to the coin; one in which scientific research, funded by large companies, is focused to benefit (or in other words to make more profits) those who are already doing well. Whilst this may have some ‘trickle down’ effects it is not science that is inherently designed to help impoverished people. If we want to challenge these social issues therefore, there is absolutely nothing wrong with opposing a scientific field that builds into these power structures.

Does that make GE a bad thing? Not necessarily. Clearly technology development has to be part of the mix of the solutions we need to fix food security issues. But, we also need to have a much more nuanced, and serious discussion to this debate. Science is only one part of the mix, and sometimes we may want to decide that the scientific solutions available don’t fit with our desired goals. It is perfectly reasonable to say we don’t want to use, nor want to spend money, on what science has provided at this point.

But what seems to have happened is that we have now created a world in which we say ‘it’s scientific’ so therefore it must be the solution. Ironically, we’ve started to worship science, just as many others worship the religion that we often deride.

This could be okay if science was an encompassing ideology, one that tool into account the social, economic and power realities in our world. But science doesn’t do that – it is just one part of our current system. Living solely by this is not a healthy approach.

Did you see this image over the past week? If you haven’t, and don’t know what it is, this is the Bureau of Meterology’s forecasting map for last Tuesday. Last week, temperatures in Australia got so hot that the Bureau had to add another colour to the map – the strange light purple in the middle of South Australia.

In an odd way this looks like some strange art. In a way it is beautiful – the different colours merging together to creating this apex in the middle of the country.

Yet, when you started to look a little deeper, and think about what this represents, it will probably take your breath away.

This map, this art, doesn’t just represent one hot day in Australia. It represents so much more than that. This is, literally, an almost artistic representation of everything we are doing to our planet. This is a representation of the fact that we have now gotten to the point where we are literally changing the climate map. Our actions, and our actions alone, are literally changing the shape of our climate – WE are causing more extreme weather, sea level rises, heatwaves. It’s us.

No matter which way you look at it, this map is a big f#$king deal.

Yet, despite everything it represents, I don’t think this map, this thought that we are actually changing our climate, is getting the treatment it deserves. Instead of stopping a nation, and creating an outcry of demands for action, the Bureau’s new map was just another story on the news. It was almost hum ho. Somehow the idea that we are literally changing the climate in which we live has become a regular news story – something we just absorb in everyday life.

And it’s not as if this is because we can’t figure out what to do, or even figure out who is causing it. We know how this is happening. We can even figure out who it is who is changing out map. It is the fossil fuel companies – the Gina Rinehardts, Clive Palmers, Nathan Tinklers of the world, who are changing our maps. Yet for some reason, we treat this story, we treat them, as if it is something normal – as if they are regular protagonists in a story of competing priorities. But they’re not – we’re not. This is not a normal development, one that can just fit into a news story; one where we need to debate the different priorities until we come to a solution. This is much bigger than that.

Let’s take a step back. Let’s think about what we’re doing. We are actively changing our climate. In fact, there are a small number of individuals and companies who are changing our climate.

This is a big fucking deal.

Jonathan Moylan, civil disobedience and our moral priorities

On Monday, a little known activist, Jonathan Moylan, armed with his lap top and a phone, wiped $314 million off Nathan Tinkler’s Whitehaven Coal. Sitting in a forest, Moylan sent out a media release on an ANZ template announcing that that the bank was withdrawing funding from the new Maules Creek coal mine. The release sent Whitehaven’s share prices plummeting and by the time it was found out to be a hoax, over $300 million had been wiped off the company (the share price has now recovered to its original state).

Whilst many have lauded Moylan’s courage to raise the issue of coal mining in Australia, his actions have also been followed by moral outrage. Many have complained that his actions were ideological, morally corrupt, and that he ripped off ‘ordinary people’ for a political stunt.

In starting this debate what Moylan has done therefore is directly pointed out the very strange moral priorities we have in our society; priorities that say that causing a temporary drop in a company’s share price is a more reprehensible act than fuelling global climate change.

Civil disobedience has a long and rich history in challenging the immoral in our society. Whether it is Rosa Parks sitting on the front of a bus, Nelson Mandela standing up to Apartheid, or Gandhi fighting against British colonialism we often revere those who engage in civil disobedience for a true moral cause.

In celebrating these figures what we have done is made an active moral decision; one which said that we think that the immorality of segregation, Apartheid and British Colonialism was bad enough that it was worth breaking the law to oppose them. That breaking the law, even though at times it hurt other people, was the right moral choice.

And it is in understanding civil disobedience in this manner that the response to Moylan’s actions becomes very interesting.

In the criticisms I’ve seen of Moylan the basic argument I can gather against his actions (beyond those of concerns around fraud) is that it was immoral for Moylan to cause such a big drop in company profits and take money off ‘regular shareholders’ (an argument I think is rather weak given that the drop in share prices was so temporary). Building on to this many have used a ‘right to private property’ argument, stating that it is immoral for someone to take away someone else’s private property, and right to have that property, for their own political means. The immorality of Moylan’s actions was his ‘property theft’.

I have to say, I’m no fan of taking money off working people, but the moral outrage to Moylan’s actions point to a very strange moral decision. Whitehaven is investing heavily in a product that is causing serious global destruction. This is a product that fuelling climate change, increasing global temperatures, creating more extreme weather events, and likely causing serious impacts that we are yet to comprehend.

In doing so this is a company that is aiding the destructions of people’s lives all around the world. If the new science is right for example, and we can already see links between climate change and extreme weather, then the actions of companies who are investing in coal, have now started to take the lives of many – the people who have died in floods, fires and cyclones globally. Building into a private property argument these companies have also actively (in a sense that they know coal is causing climate change) taken away people’s property. It’s the property of farmers, whose crops that are now dying, the property of individuals, whose houses are being destroyed in floods, fires and storms, and the property of communities whose infrastructure is being destroyed. If Moylan hurt “ordinary people” whose lives ‘depend on the stock market’, he was doing so to defend the “ordinary people” whose lives depend on the climate.

In the end the outrage points to a pretty odd moral decision to me. We have decided on a moral reasoning that says that causing a drop in share prices is worse than investing in a product that is causing probably one of the worst crises human kind has ever face. We’ve got a moral reasoning that says that the property we have now in the form of shares is more important than people’s houses, the community’s infrastructure, and ultimately people’s lives.

Now, there is a chance that Moylan will end up in gaol over his stunt on Monday. That’s not something I am against (although I will actively question the laws and Government that allows coal mining to continue). That is the price that those who engage in civil disobedience pay. It is part of the act.

But whilst we sit here and get morally indignant about what he has done, I think it is important that we start to question our moral priorities. We need to question the priorities of a Government that places short term profits ahead of our future. We need to question the morals of our community that places short term profit and shareholder gain ahead of long-term planet security.

Because if given a choice between someone causing a temporary blip in a coal companies share price and others who invest in fuelling global climate change, I know which actions I consider more morally reprehensible.

 

Summer is a great time to finish books, and over this last break I managed to complete an epic: the first volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. Whilst volume one isn’t long (only 159 pages in the version I have), it is to say the least, tough going. Foucault’s language is not only tough to get through, but his ideas are complex, meaning you cannot glide through this book with a switched off mind.

However, in that sense, the History of Sexuality is also a stunning read. If you’re willing to open yourself up, put some time into it, and think hard, then you will come out of this piece with not only some great ideas, but also potentially with a VERY different perspective on sexuality.

Because of the complex nature of this, I’ve decided I won’t be able to squeeze everything into one post – so this is just part one of what will be a multi-post review (hopefully this will mean you will get more out of the reviews too). Today, I’m going to have a bit of a look at the basis under which Foucault builds his thesis; what he calls the ‘Repressive Hypothesis’.

I think to understand The History Sexuality, and why it is so challenging, we have to think about our assumptions when it comes to understand the relationship between power and sexuality. It’s the sort of assumption that I came to when reading this pieceand the sort of assumption I assumed Foucault would be describing. This is the assumption that we live in a world of sexual censorship; one in which capitalist and bourgeoisie has suppressed discourse around sex, and where power structures are aimed solely at suppressing sexual activity. This is what Foucault calls the ‘repressive hypothesis.’ He describes it as thus:

“At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain frankness was still common, it would seem. Sexual practices had little need of secrecy; words were said without undue reticence, and things were done without too much concealment…

“But twilight soon fell upon this bright day, followed by the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Sexuality was carefully confined; it moved into the home. The conjugal family took custody of it and absorbed it into the serious function of reproduction. On the subject of sex, silence became the rule.” (p. 1)*

When explained in that way it sounds logical, it is the sort of idea that one could easily ascribe to. We live in a world of sexual repression, one in which our society refuses to talk about sex, and in which the law is used to suppress sex. We can see a lot of that in our history. But this is not the sort of idea that Foucault wants to promote; in fact Foucault builds the basis of his piece by challenging this thesis; by arguing that there has in fact been a discursive ‘explosion’ over the last centuries.

“At the level of discourses and their domains, however, practically the opposite phenomenon occurred. There was a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex – specific discourses, different from one another both by their form and by their object: a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward.” (p.18)

How have these discourses exploded? Foucault argues that the discoursive explosion stemmed from the Counter-Reformation, where the Roman Catholic Church encouraged its followers to confess their sinful desires and act. This act of confession has now however moved beyond the catholic form of confession in the confessional booth. What we have seen a proliferation of confessional speak – the need to confess one’s sexual deeds. As part of this need to confess, we have seen a proliferation of new forms of sexual discourse, ones that move well beyond the discourse of heterosexual monogamy:

“The discursive explosion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused this system centred on legitimate alliance to undergo two modifications. First, a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy. Of course, the array of practices and pleasures continued to be referred to it as their internal standard; but it was spoken of less and less, or in any case with a growing moderation…

“On the other hand, what came under scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex; reveries, obsessions, petty manias, or great transports of rage. It was time for all these figures, scarcely noticed in the past, to step forward and speak, to make the difficult confession of what they were.” (p. 38)

These new ‘forms’, now spoken about, now confessed, created a new field of sexuality; unnatural sexuality.

“Whence the setting apart of the “unnatural” as a specific dimension in the field of sexuality. This kind of activity assumed an autonomy with regard to the other condemned forms such as adultry or rape…” (p. 39)

These unnatural forms were what started to be classified within a system of ‘perversion’. A legal and moral system arose that created what Foucault called a new ‘sub-race’ of humans.

“An entire sub-race was born, different – despite certain kinship ties – from the libertines of the past. From the end of the eighteenth century to our own, they circulated through the pores of society; they were always hounded, but not always by the laws; were often locked up, but not always in prisons; were sick perhaps, but scandalous, dangerous victims, prey to a strange evil that also bore the name of vice and sometimes crime.” (p. 40)

And whilst these ‘unnaturals’ may have been hounded, locked up and decried as sick, there was very little done to suppress them to the point of elimination. Instead, society created an analytical, and scientific order for these people (more on this in later posts):

“The machinery of power that focused on this whole alien strain did not aim to suppress it, but rather to give it an analytical, visible, and permanent reality: it was implanted in bodies, slipped in beneath modes of conduct, made into a principle of classification and intelligibility, established as a raison d’être and a natural order of disorder.” (p. 43 – 44)

This is probably one of the most challenging elements of the basis under which Foucault develops his thesis. The general assumption for many who discuss the power relations behind sexuality is that we live in a world of sexual suppression – that those who hold power are out to stop sexual discussion and completely repress any form of ‘abnormal’ sexuality through legislative mechanisms. Foucault however takes a much more nuanced approach than this. Yes, I think he would argue, there are those who want to repress any forms of sexual discussion and expression, but the power realities are much more complex than that. Whilst there are those who want to repress, there has also been an explosion in sexual discourse. He explains it best:

“We must therefore abandon the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression. We have not only witnessed a visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities; but – and this is the important point – a deployment quite different from the law, even if it is locally dependent on procedures of prohibition, has ensured, through a network of interconnecting mechanisms, the proliferation of specific pleasures and multiplication of disparate sexualities.” (p. 49)

It is here where Foucault’s thesis is built, and it is quite a challenging one at that. I will leave this post at that and return with where Foucault goes next, how this explosion of sexual discourse has lead to what he calls Scientia Sexualis, the ‘scientification’ of sexuality.

* The page numbers for this review refer to the Penguin classic version of the book (the very worn-out version in the cover-photo)

Whenever compulsory voting comes up in the public debate (see stories about the QLD Government considering scrapping compulsory voting), it inevitably leads to a longer discussion about the nature of our democracy. How can ensure that people are enfranchised in our electoral system? How can we get people involved in politics? Does our system do this?

Whenever this debate arises, it always astounds me when proponents of compulsory voting come out against proportional representation. More problematic is when ‘left-wing’ people come out against prop-rep because it leads to too many ‘radicals’ entering Parliament. Left-wingers look towards the rise of the British National Party (BNP) in the UK, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and the Swedish Democrats in Sweden and say ‘we don’t want that here’.

I’m absolutely no fan of extreme right-wing parties. But I’m also no fan of excluding people from our political processes because we determine them to be ‘too radical’. So here goes my defence of allowing more radical parties into our Parliament, and why the left should be happy to risk some extreme right-wingers as well.

My arguments fall across three general categories; enfranchisement, political debate, and political power.

Firstly, in a general sense, I think proportional representation is probably one of the most important elements to ensure, that at least within our current system, that people can stay enfranchised. It is much more important than compulsory voting.

In many ways we’ve grown up in a world where we’re expected to fit within two political boxes – left or right – and then vote for one of two major parties along those lines. The reality is however, that the world doesn’t work like that, and even along the left-right spectrum there are lots of different colours. It is without a doubt that, under our current democratic systems, proportional representation is one of the best ways to ensure that this spectrum is represented.

The reality of this of course is that we can end up enfranchising people we don’t like – radical, racist, sexist, homophobic right-wingers. But if we want to talk about an engaged and enfranchised community, this is a reality we have to deal with, and one we should confront, rather than try and hide from using the political system.

This leads onto my second argument, the argument of political debate. Hiding radical right-wing parties simply hides the debate we need to have. Whilst we may achieve a result in that radical people are pushed into centre parties, and therefore have their views stifled, it doesn’t mean that the views and issues go away. They are just left to fester, without any real political debate. I don’t think this is a healthy way to defeat the ideologies we oppose.

If we look at countries that have some form of prop-rep, we can see that allowing the extreme out into the open can allow genuine debate to occur. Take a look at the issue of racism and immigration for example. In the United Kingdom, the BNP took the mantle of racism on over the past couple of decades, and had members elected to the European Parliament. Yet, the rise of the BNP also lead to some serious discussion around racism in the UK, and in particular, some strong left-wing campaigns around the issue. The result of this is the recent decimation of the BNP, as left-wing communities mobilised against the open racism they promoted. That doesn’t mean racism has been solved in the UK, but it certainly is being addressed.

But, I think the refusal to have that political debate probably hides the biggest reason many in the left are anti-proportional representation: power.

Despite what I may think about many far-right parties, I think in some ways they are very similar to those on the far-left. Whilst we end up with very different conclusions, both those on the far-left and (most elements of) the far-right are fighting against the current system as it stands. The reason we are seen as radical is that we are challenging the fundamentals of the way the world works in order to completely overhaul it for something that we see as being better.

The refusal to engage in this debate therefore is one of power. The reality of ‘centre-right’ and ‘centre-left’ parties in modern democracies is that they are no longer real ideological creatures engaging in great debates about the nature of our world. They have agreed fundamentally on the system we have and simply want to tinker around it in different ways to achieve slight different goals.

Keeping other parties out therefore is simply a way to hold onto that power – to ensure we don’t even start a debate that questions our current system. Whilst, as a left-winger, you may not want to change our system, forcing out discussion as a way to ensure you keep your own power is certainly the highest form of disenfranchisement.

If we ever achieve proportional representation in Australia, I will be one of the first on the front lines fighting against any new right-wing parties that may emerge. But in using the current political system to stop new parties from being able to enter Parliament, the left is doing itself no favours.