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Beware! The crisis is coming!

By Don Aitkin - posted Monday, 17 August 2015


Why do serious and apparently well-informed people put forward such easily countered propositions? I asked that about John Menadue and his website. The only answer I can provide is that they have become believers, not analysts. Or, if you like, they are only interested in how to counter such dire issues, not on whether or not there is any real need to try to do so.

So, as we see all the time, in default of decent argument and evidence, what they do is tell us that there is a ‘crisis’, that things are ‘dire’, that we must act, NOW! There is a nice little aphorism about successful barristers, to the effect that if they’re losing on the facts, they pound the law; if they’re losing on the law, they pound the facts; if they’re losing on both, they pound the table. In our politics today, there’s an awful lot of pounding the table.

Yet we are the best educated version of Australian society that there ever has been. I’ve been through all this in many previous essays, and won’t rehash it now. Maybe there has always been a lot of pounding the table. There certainly was in the 1950s, with the Cold War and the DLP split. There was in the 1960s, too, with respect to the war in Vietnam and conscription.

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We may be better educated (meaning that more people have more years in formal education), but it is not obvious that we are more reasonable. There seems to be a willingness to believe, on the part of people who have their university education behind them yet have forgotten what ‘critical thinking’ is all about. I’ve written about this before on a few occasions, and think it has something to do with the decline of organised Christianity, the prevalence of disaster in our mass media, and a pervasive feeling of guilt that we Westerners are doing well when others, less fortunate, are doing badly. And that we are responsible for everything.

It doesn’t matter that we are not responsible for everyone, and it doesn’t matter that we can do nothing much for most of them anyway. What matters is the feeling of guilt, and the offering of expiation if we DO THE RIGHT THING – even if, as I argued recently, stopping burning coal will not reduce temperatures in a discernible way. We will feel better about it, and that is the important thing.

If I’m wrong in this assessment I’d be grateful for an alternative view which carried some plausibility.

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About the Author

Don Aitkin has been an academic and vice-chancellor. His latest book, Hugh Flavus, Knight was published in 2020.

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