Two former PMs have raised the alarm. Will they be heeded?
Shared morality, once the glue that held the social fabric together, is being torn apart while the broad political spectrum in which social democrats, conservatives and card-carrying liberals live together is under deep strain.By PAUL KELLY
In Australia today, the public is unsettled and getting more unsettled. People distrust the nation’s direction, some probably fear the “valueless void” while others are alarmed about the mental illness contagion among young people, the elevation of personal feelings as the basis for morality, the decline in core school standards, the rejection of objective truth, uncertainty over who is a man and who is a woman, the demand for group identity rights based on race, sex and gender, the erosion of free debate on university campuses, the disputes over whether our history is to be honoured or denounced, constantly lecturing elites who fail as genuine leaders, the lost ability to disagree with mutual respect and, above all, the doomed demand for leaders to display moral values amid a society that cannot agree on what constitutes virtue.
This is a fractured society. Not as fractured as the US. But the shared morality, once the glue to hold the social fabric together, is being torn apart. An alarming number of people are damaged, lonely or depressed. This is the road Australia is travelling.
That great moral leader of our times, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, said: “A free society is a moral achievement, and it is made by us and our habits of thought, speech and deed. Morality cannot be outsourced because it depends on each of us. When there is no shared morality, there is no society.”
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Referring to the dearth of reform and national imagination, Keating, who celebrated his 80th birthday in January, said Australia had much going for it: resources, sunshine every day and a huge pool of savings for investment.
“We should be killing it,” he said. “Instead of that we’re all the time timid, the whole thing is timid and there’s no what I call successful thinking. This timidity sort of seeps; it’s like a perspiration in the country.”
People can agree or disagree with Keating’s policy vision. But few can dispute his lament that Australia has lost its way on numerous fronts – economic growth is weak; per capita incomes languish yet economic reform is barely registered; social progressivism is an article of faith; the culture war is entrenched; Indigenous reconciliation is marooned; and governments are strong on short-term politics yet weak on deliverable vision.
There are many reasons but a fractured society is top of the list. It’s the old football adage: you can’t have high ambition with a fractured team. The failed voice referendum rang the bell – the country was split 61-39 per cent on a decisive moral question. When a country is fractured the obstacles to mobilising majority-endorsed change are immense.
Politicians won’t take the risk. There is too much grievance harnessed against them, too many negative campaigns, too many angry people aroused by social media activism. Above all, there are too many competing moralities. To paraphrase Sacks, when shared morality disappears then political progress is a forlorn hope. This is Australia’s fate. When a nation is fractured, trust is lost and politics sinks into a quagmire.
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Respect for civilisational tradition doesn’t mean there should be more religion in politics. Just the reverse, as Sacks said: “When religion becomes political or politics becomes religious, the result is disastrous to religion and politics alike.”
However, the culture war between progressives and traditionalists has long been waged in Australia in reoccurring cycles of fierce engagement. It is fundamental to the growing fracturing in our society because it is a conflict not just of ideas but of morals – it goes to what we believe and who we are and what we want to be called. This is not the usual cross-party struggle. It is conducted within politics but also inside nearly all institutions, great or small, public or private, with the education system being the cradle of progressivism.
The progressive manifesto is that Western liberalism is immoral with its tolerance of white supremacy, colonisation and invasion, racism, sexism and patriarchy, climate action cowardice, tolerance of inequality and acquiescence before a capitalism too exploitative of workers and too greedy for owners. American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt said the struggle in the US between progressives and conservatives was akin to a battle between “different cultures” – an explicit recognition that the “shared morality” Sacks championed no longer existed in the US, a view probably reflective of its politics since 2016.
Haidt warned: “We just don’t know what a democracy looks like when you drain all the trust out of the system.”
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/two-former-pms-have-raised-the-alarm-w...I don't know what ELSE could be expected after bipartisan multiculturalism for half a century. OF COURSE Australia is fractured. That has been the whole point of diversity/division and multiculturalism.
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