PublicHealth

The Australian

THE WEST’S CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE – IT’S A TREND TO DIE FOR

GREG SHERIDAN

For 50 years, popular culture in Australia and the West has mocked authority, glorified rebellion, sanctified the individual’s quest for ever deeper self-realisation and told us that Western governments are dishonest, corrupt, wicked and primarily act as agents of racism, colonialism, sexism, economic exploitation and environmental despoliation.

All this is reinforced by academic culture, which sheets all these sins home not only to Western governments but to Western civilisation generally.

Is it any wonder that these societies are having so much trouble in the coronavirus crisis responding to essential lifesaving directions from their respective governments?

The most successful societies in tackling COVID-19 through social distancing and similar suppression measures are Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea. The widespread elements of their success are well known — large-scale testing, contact tracing, tough travel restrictions, strict social distancing, strict isolation for those infected or possibly infected, and above all co-operative societies that take what governments say seriously.

These four are all deeply Confucian societies. You have to be careful about cultural generalisations but Confucianism is a powerful influence across all Northeast Asian societies (plus Singapore), just as the Judaeo-Christian inheritance used to be the most powerful and pervasive influence in the West.

The Analects of Confucius stress proper relations, family fidelity, respect for elders, respect for authority, personal morality and acting with some decorum. They esteem formal education, sober wisdom. You should respect and obey your parents, you should respect and generally obey your government.

Confucianism is not all bottomup obligation, for it also requires governments to justify “the mandate of heaven” by acting decently for all citizens.

Today, citizens in Confucian societies are able to work out that government edicts to practise social distance or self-isolation are more important than edicts such as “don’t litter” or “pay attention in class”. But having grown up in a culture in which they obey directions that say don’t litter and pay attention in class, they are more likely to follow lifesaving directions.

I am not arguing here that Confucianism is better than the Judaeo-Christian civic tradition. Nor am I arguing the reverse. It’s more relevant that Confucian societies have maintained their traditions. Their governments, even their education systems and parts of popular culture, reinforce this. In contrast, we have mounted a socially suicidal and nearly insane attack on our own traditions for at least the past five decades.

Christianity and Confucianism sometimes seek to approach similar civic virtues but get there in different ways. There is nothing in Confucius more pro-authority than the famous passage in the New Testament’s first letter of St Peter, which says: “For the Lord’s sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him …”

Confucius and Peter were saying different things. Both are open to interpretation, but both understood that the good life requires submission to authority.

Yet popular culture in Anglo-American societies, and in most of Western Europe, demonises every traditional institution and demonises government itself, while glorifying the existential rebellious individual who makes a heroic stand, typically against a designated set of pantomime villains: government agencies, corporate greed, property developers, organised religion et cetera.

Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, told me this week it was important that a government enter a crisis with some “social capital” and people believe the government and its key agencies, and the mainstream media, tell the truth in a crisis.

But Australia, like the West generally, has been on a determined path of destroying all that vital social capital.

Hollywood, and its Australian imitators, and the British film and television industry, are almost (not entirely but almost) incapable of making a production that deals with security issues in which the ultimate bad guys don’t turn out to be one or other of the Western security agencies.

In the Cold War the villains were always the Russians. In the postmodern world the villains are always us, our government and our institutions.

In the digital universe, every conspiracy theory you can imagine flowers in wild profusion. But many of these wacky ideas get a very good airing in mainstream entertainment. I haven’t yet seen the ABC TV series Stateless but I’ll bet you a hot Chico roll it portrays the Australian state as the agent of unique wickedness. What else would it do?

Beyond popular culture is the deep academic conviction that all Western civilisation is inherently based on evil — racism, sexism, economic exploitation, colonialism — without any positive affirmation of the magnificent achievements of our own tradition.

Beyond popular culture, online conspiracies and the deep madness of much of the humanities in Western universities, there is a trend in psychology and culture, certainly in that bloody crossroads of popular psychobabble, to elevate the individual, and the individual’s infinite curation of their own identity, as the defining ambition of human life.

In a brilliant piece in this month’s Atlantic magazine, David Brooks describes how the American family has collapsed in the past 70 years. Its collapse doesn’t hurt rich people too much because they can buy replacements for family

— therapists, carers, tutors. And they can buy assistance to keep their own small families functioning. But it has been a disaster for poor people, who are left with nothing. Brooks argues that over the past 70 years life has become freer for individuals but more unstable for families, better for adults and worse for children. The move from big extended families to ever smaller nuclear and sub-nuclear, so to speak, families has meant the poor have fewer people to help with bad economic times, rough psychological passages, the ups and downs of childhood. Rich folks buy this assistance. Families are also sources of authority and social capital. When they go, the authority and social capital go.

One difference with Confucian societies is that their governments do everything they can to support families and to promote traditional family structures. Both sides of politics make this impossible in societies such as Australia. The left hates tradition and works to destroy it, the libertarian right can’t stand anything that smacks of government social engineering.

I am inexactly connecting an immediate crisis with long-term cultural trends. But the inability of large numbers of its citizens to accept and yes, obey, simple government directions that are literally lifesaving is a sign of a relatively recently acquired, grave weakness in our culture.

In the digital universe, every conspiracy theory you can imagine flowers in wild profusion