CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
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 |  Subject: Janet Albrechtsen: Smashing up the orthodoxy  Fri Sep 06, 2019 11:51 pm | |
| Iconoclasts needed. Area: any field of endeavour. Location: Australia. Job description: to build a large team of other freethinkers. Skills needed: will need to work alone at first, stepping away from existing groups you work in. Must have sharp analytical skills, able to withstand the seduction of groupthink. Must be curious, able to question orthodoxies of any age, old and new ones. Must be unflinching in the face of criticism, or imagined criticism, able to weather reputational slurs, personal attacks, protests, threats in the pursuit of speaking truth to power. Must have verbal skills to express basic common sense and to inspire others, providing cover and courage to others to speak freely too. Must be able to say no.
Author and journalist Lionel Shriver at home in Brooklyn, New York.
Most people are part of the madding crowd. From writers and publishers, to practitioners of politics and those in education, leaders in corporate Australia, journalists, even comedians and certainly Hollywood, it’s not easy walking away from the seductive warmth, the primal urge to be part of an established crowd.
Yet right now, with so many deadening orthodoxies killing creativity, innovation and progress, we need iconoclasts. I met two of them, both women, last weekend. Listening to them, I wondered: where would we be without iconoclasts? Through the long meandering story of Western civilisation, sharp and edgy free thinkers, not crowd pleasers, have pushed us towards more enlightened paths.
Galileo challenged the Catholic Church with his crazy-brave scientific discoveries — including that the sun, not the Earth, is the centre of the universe — and was slammed as a heretic. From Socrates to Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, George Orwell, Emmeline Pankhurst, Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi theologian Martin Niemoller, these people were dissidents refusing to accept the orthodoxy of their times. Some died for their convictions. They all changed the course of the future, gifting us how we live today.
Today’s rebels are no less important in encouraging progress, freedom, innovation and human flourishing. They don’t risk death but they do risk their jobs, their reputations, endure personal attacks, social media lynch mobs, and group expulsion.
When American writer Lionel Shriver was asked to speak at a writers festival in Brisbane in 2016, she didn’t have to give a speech about how identity politics and cultural appropriation is killing creativity in the arts. She could have given the speech she had been asked to, some unimaginative warm and mushy guff about “community and belonging”.
Instead, Shriver chose to splash some cold water on modernity, waking us from our reverie that new rules around writing fiction must be for the good of literature and social cohesion. She raised a simple truth: if fiction writers cannot write about characters outside their own experience, they are limited to writing a memoir — in her case, one about a 50-something white woman.
Objections based on cultural appropriation would have neutered Shakespeare, killed off books by Charles Dickens and Truman Capote, every fiction writer with a tremendous imagination would be cut down. And for what? To satisfy the emergence of identity politics, where a person’s identity is defined by a trait they cannot alter: their skin colour, their race, their sex, their sexuality. This idea is deadening to our humanity, crushing our freedom to create our own identities, over a lifetime of experiences that will never mirror another person’s identity.
Even though they approved her change of topic, festival organisers abandoned Shriver to the wolves. The frenzied hysteria that enveloped her exposed the homogenous world of arts. Shriver could have skulked away, hidden from that controversy, abided by the rules. Instead, she decided to keep fighting the orthodoxy enveloping books and publishing. As she told the audience at Consilium last weekend (a conference organised by the Centre for Independent Studies), by outing herself as someone who thinks differently: “It puts people on the lookout, that I am not to be trusted and that my fiction is to be approached in a state of suspicion.”
Shriver has not taken a step back. She took aim at the practitioners of identity politics, mostly white “progressives” who “express warmer feelings towards races other than their own”.
“This whole movement of identity politics is largely the creature of the white, well-educated and affluent. In fact, the people who go on about privilege are mostly the privileged; they’re white, affluent and well-educated and in competition with each other over who can be more righteous. I am mostly being tyrannised by my own kind. But these are also the same people who buy books, review books and publish books.”
These peddlers of modern orthodoxies “are either cowards, or compulsive conformists”, she said.
Where is an Australian version of Shriver?
Claire Fox was sitting next to Shriver last Saturday on a panel about the future of humanities at university. Though Fox defies labels, the former social worker has attracted plenty. I prefer this one in The Guardian from 2005: “Claire Fox is, if not the devil, then someone who holds devilishly unsettling views.”
Fox is a free spirit, a libertarian politician, a Brexiteer member in the European parliament who has said she wants to lose “her stupid MEP job”. She once belonged to the British Revolutionary Communist Party. She founded the Academy of Ideas “to create a public space where ideas can be contested without constraint”. She runs an annual Battle of Ideas festival and a Debating Matters competition for students aged 16 to 18. She also co-founded a residential summer school, The Academy, which aims to demonstrate “university as it should be”.
Fox is a feisty defender of Western civilisation, not as some construct of the West but as a series of tested ideas that lead to universal human flourishing. Her book, I Find That Offensive, takes aim at identity politics and a modern climate that “routinely catastrophises and pathologises both social challenges and young people’s state of mind’’.
At Consilium, Fox caused a genuine frisson of excitement. She said we need to say no. “When a group of students turn up and say ‘pull down that statue’, you just say: ‘No, we are not doing that, that is ridiculous.’ ” Instead, what happens today is that: “Everyone goes ‘Oh my goodness, let’s set up a committee’.”
Fox lamented the “institutional inability” of grown-ups to stand up to bleedingly obvious nonsense. Just look at the fawning over, and exploitation of, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg. “Greta came to the UK and the British government sat with their mouths open and said: ‘We have so much to learn from you.’ And they gave her a standing ovation. She then went to speak to a natural gas and oil industry group and they said: ‘We are humbled, Greta, we are listening to you.’ ”
Like Shriver, Fox is an iconoclast who understands that great ideas are lost if we don’t defend them from modern conventions trying to render them irrelevant. This country could do with a football field full of sassy unconventional types such as Fox.
Both women challenge the authority of self-appointed cultural dietitians. As Shriver told us last weekend: “The only thing that gives their dopey rules any teeth is obeying them, so I don’t. My new book has two black characters in it, one of them is really nice, and the other one is a complete bitch. She’s going to get me in trouble.”
There are other mavericks, across different fields, who should be recognised for trying to alter our illiberal trajectory. Another deadening wasteland, corporate Australia, is swamped by governance orthodoxy that is killing new ways of doing business, stifling entrepreneurs. Last weekend, Gerry Harvey said no to those corporate canons. He said he would not be part of the slavish box-ticking exercise to meet gender and diversity targets that is driving retailing expertise from the boards of David Jones and Myer. The annual results of Harvey Norman, compared with DJs, for example, tell you that Harvey is right. He is also brave. Today, this kind of common sense will make you an apostate, and an iconoclast.
In April, when students at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts called for esteemed humanity professor Camille Paglia to be sacked for not toeing the transgender line, the president of the university, David Yager, said no.
In a spirited and rare defence of the intellectual freedom on campus, Yager told students: “Artists over the centuries have suffered censorship, and even persecution, for the expression of their beliefs through their work. My answer is simple: not now, not at UArts.” Sadly, there is not a single university vice-chancellor in Australian who comes close to Yager.
Katharine Birbalsingh, a teacher in Britain, defied her critics and withstood protests and personal attacks to set up the Michaela Community School. It is a free school in London’s Wembley Park, where students might be labelled disadvantaged.
She doesn’t label them that way. There are no excuses for students, no special favours. Birbalsingh brings discipline, knowledge and high expectations into her classrooms. Students respond with respect for learning and ambition. And last month, five years after the school opened, her first cohort of final year students blitzed the GCSE results.
When Birbalsingh battled the ideological leftish orthodoxy that controls education, her students won. For the sake of our students, we need a teacher like Birbalsingh in this country.
In any industry, it takes one or two nonconformists to provide cover for others to stand up. It won’t happen immediately, so kudos to the early combatants. But it will happen. African-American comedian Dave Chappelle invites us to laugh at identity politics. It’s not a safe space but it’s a hilariously funny one, and pointedly accurate in places.
Some people will always stick to the safe spaces offered by orthodoxy. But I have discovered there are many people who want to tackle suffocating conformism across myriad industries.
They love listening to others take up the battle, but they tell me privately that they can’t join the ranks of free thinkers by speaking publicly.
Even those who have built up tremendous wealth and influence whisper about the consequences if they put their heads up: career paths blocked, cushy appointments lost, fewer invitations to nice events, possible expulsion from social groups.
It does happen, I lost a government board gig because I said that Malcolm Turnbull was a lousy Liberal prime minister. Big deal.
We should remember what free thinkers from our past, those who delivered us our brilliant lives, endured by speaking truth to power.
Maybe if we praise iconoclasts more often, others will find the courage to join their ranks, and the controllers of orthodoxies will lose the power to punish free thinkers.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/smashing-up-the-orthodoxy/news-story/16266fe96949247cc7628a4ed0deec4a
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RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
| | Subject: Re: Janet Albrechtsen: Smashing up the orthodoxy Sat Sep 07, 2019 12:08 am | |
| - CovOps wrote:
- “The only thing that gives their dopey rules any teeth is obeying them, so I don’t.
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