Some thoughts for the religious and the secular

Dear ,

Thanks for your support during the year. While not everyone on our email lists comes to our functions, pays membership, or donates, if you are reading this you are one of the circa 40% who read it each time, and that continuing interest helps to keep us going.

As it is never the same 40% each time that applies as well to the 60% who will be too busy doing something else to read this email.

It’s important that we continue to do what we do, and that we convert others to the cause. 

Not so long ago the views we hold were the majority views, particularly on economics. Australia was always a wealthy country, but opening-up the economy in the 80s and 90s to allow individuals to invest and innovate, speculate and save, and bargain on their own terms, moved Australia from mediocre to outstanding. This undertaking was joint between the right and the left.

Now there are multiple forces combining to reverse many of those policies and break the sensible consensus apart.

At least two generations have been taught at school that safety is paramount. This includes the so-called precautionary principle, which effectively says if you can imagine a risk so catastrophic it would destroy civilisation, then you must devote all your resources to it, no matter how improbable the risk might be.

It also includes antiseptic playgrounds, and teachers intervening in every internecine dispute instead of letting the kids sort it out themselves. And the reversal of the maxim that “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” to the idea that language that offends is violence.

Urbanisation and densification mean that so many people are disconnected from how things are actually produced, and where they come from. We’ve never undervalued white collar jobs, but it seems that a large number of people undervalues blue-collar ones.

They are incurious as to how things are put together. The products of agriculture turn up vacuum-packed in the fridge, without any hint of the blood and dirt and death that contributed to it. Everything else is made, delivered or fixed by someone else.

Boys no longer build things in the back yard, or tinker with cars – they glue themselves to computer screens and build imaginary worlds online using electrons. Girls no longer sew or knit. (And while these are gross gender stereotypes, they are far more accurate than the idea that gender is a social construct that can be changed at will.)

So we end up living in a magical world where things just happen, and just as in Hogwarts, if you use the right words, with just the right inflection and the delicate flick of a wand, the laws of physics can be repealed and just about anything created. Carbon neutral by 2050? Just put out a media release.

Then we are encouraged to identify as members of groups defined by gender, race, sexuality, income and whatever else can be leveraged to take power from one group and give it to another, even when the power is an illusion.

Last there is the entitlement, which sometimes manifests as noblesse oblige, that comes with wealth. We’re doing so well that some of us think they can coast. We don’t understand the struggle that went to build things, and think we’re entitled to luxury. Some of us feel guilty to be wealthy, or think that there is so much around that we can gift it away and there will always be more. All of which leads to an economy with falling productivity and assets in the hands of people who waste our collective inheritance.

All of these trends have intersected in our response to COVID. We’ve become so risk averse that we’ve directed all our resources to ensuring no one dies of COVID, at the cost of neglecting other health, economic and well-being issues.

We’ve become hostage to the pronouncements of the necromancers called “Health Professionals”, no matter how many times they contradict themselves, or disagree amongst themselves. Our politicians have taken our inheritance and sprayed it around to the deserving and the undeserving, and they’ve done their best to scare the hell out of us to justify their actions. Instead of trusting us to act in our own best interests, they decree lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccination.

We’ve seen all this before, and many of the same elements were present in Palestine at the time of the Incarnation, which we celebrate this Saturday as Christmas.

The political economy of the Roman world rested on the taxation by the powerful of the productive. While Rome had an agrarian economy, its great wealth rested on conquest, and its economics were like the mafia – “If you pay your tax we won’t break your windows, and we’ll ensure no one else does either”. Rome eventually went broke as its inhabitants wanted more wealth without working than its economy could provide, or its generals conquer, while barbarian tribes redistributed some of the plunder to themselves.

In Jesus’ day taxation didn’t go to build schools and hospitals, just to enrich the upper class. It was a real deadweight on the productive classes, of which the parents of Jesus were representative. His father was a tradie, possibly ultimately moderately wealthy, building houses for the entitled Greeks in the nearby town of Sepphoris.

Jesus' birth was subject to a travel mandate to return to  his home town as part of a census ordered to be taken by the Emperor Augustus Caesar. This must have been terribly disruptive to the business of his father Joseph and dangerous to his mother Mary. Childbirth was the single most hazardous thing a woman could do in that day, yet she was expected to travel a route of around 145 kms (a bit further than the trip from Brisbane to Toowoomba) bumping along on a donkey. Caesar didn’t care. You can't manage what you can't measure, and he was important (divine actually) and they weren't.

As an adult Jesus challenged the received wisdom. He often neglected the “check-in”-like health taboos of his day. His first miracle involved filling stone jars used for purification purposes with wine, and his disciples were renowned for neglecting the ritual washing of hands before eating.

He invented the phrase “the spirit, not the letter, of the law” in a rebuff to mere legal formalism, and demonstrating a commitment to outcomes, not process.

In the Jewish world you had to follow all of the rules, or risk becoming a social outcast. In the Roman world, if you were not a Roman citizen, then you had no rights. Jesus denied both points of view and recognised that we all have equal value.

It’s these views, and others allied to them, that have come to infuse our liberal democratic free market world, and it is these values that are at risk from safetyism, magical thinking, identity politics, and entitledness.

But it is worth remembering that the world before Jesus was a pagan one, with a lot of similarities to the world some want to create now. From very unpromising middle-class origins, the movement he started, and which flourished after he orchestrated his own execution by the state in the most successful political theatre of all time, the Crucifixion, came to dominate the Western world.

Reasserting those views is a daunting task, but we start with a lot of benefits that the early Christians didn’t have. Theirs was a religious fight, but ours is a secular one. They didn’t seek political power, at least not originally, but we seek to exert political influence.

Happy Christmas,

GRAHAM YOUNG
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR