Australian Super Problems

Superannuation must be built on reality, not stereotypesADAM CREIGHTONFollow @Adam_Creighton
Dangling the carrot of an optional near 10 per cent pay rise for workers or promising a universal age pension would be a significant proposal with plenty of merit.
12:00AM AUGUST 29, 2020

The biggest policy battleground over the next year will almost certainly be superannuation.

The government is sitting on the retirement income review, a recommendation of the Productivity Commission from 2018 that is bound to raise troubling questions for the super sector.

Aware of the political risks of tinkering with super, the government instructed the panel not to make specific recommendations, but the facts alone should make it obvious what needs to be done.

The review will probably show, just as the Henry tax review did a decade ago, that lifting the superannuation guarantee to 12 per cent, as is currently legislated, will cost far more in fees and forgone tax revenue than it could ever save in age pension outlays.

Fees are about $30bn a year, concessions are about $36bn, while age pension savings are, very generously, less than $10bn a year.

Proceeding with a policy that’s a net drain on public finances, especially when budget deficits and debt have ballooned, is questionable. The review will also make it clear mandatory super contributions are paid by workers, out of their gross incomes, rather than by employers. The genius of Paul Keating’s innovation, compulsory super, is that it appears to workers as if contributions are made by their employers.

But the economic incidence is very different from the legal incidence. Employers pay workers’ income tax, on their behalf, yet few believe an increase in income tax would be borne by the boss.

From the employer’s point of view, employees’ income tax and superannuation contributions are the same. The government says what proportion of workers’ pay goes in tax, super and disposable income.

In the short term an employer might choose to absorb an increase in the compulsory savings rate, but in the long run the government cannot dictate how much a business will spend on payroll. It must by definition mean lower take-home pay for workers.

Absent these two arguments, the super industry is likely to fall back on a paternalistic one: people don’t save enough without compulsion. While savings myopia might feel right, it’s empirically wrong. People are simply not spending their accumulated savings in retirement and instead are leaving significant bequests, research shows.

To be sure, uncertainty about how long we will live naturally induces precautionary saving, although this becomes less and less a justification the older we become (and the probability of dying increases).

A major study of 10,000 age pensioners in 2017 found that at death the median pensioner still had 90 per cent of their wealth compared to the start of their retirement. “On average, age pensioners preserve financial and residential wealth and leave substantial bequests,” the authors concluded.

We are hardwired, whether for cultural or biological reasons, to protect or grow our wealth. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does undermine the claim that people aren’t saving enough. On the contrary they might be saving too much.

Grattan Institute analysis of the Survey of Income and Housing conducted by the ABS similarly found retirees typically maintained or increased their non-housing wealth through their retirement.

“Wealth appears to have dipped only because the global ­financial crisis reduced capital ­values, rather than because retirees drew down on their savings,” says Grattan.

“The bottom third by wealth of the cohort born in 1930-34 (aged 71-75 in 2005) increased their non-housing wealth from $68,000 in 2005 to $122,000 in 2015,” the ­authors pointed out.

The government has known this tendency for some time, too. As social security minister in 2015, Scott Morrison pointed to research by his own department that showed 43 per cent of pensioners increased their asset holdings during the last five years of life, and a quarter maintained them at the same level. “Less than a third of pensioners actually saw their ­assets decrease in their last five years,” he said.

What is the point of providing concessions if the savings are not being used to fund retirement but are simply passed on? It would be better to scrap the concessions, pay a bit more in age pension, and use the difference to radically cut income tax rates for everyone.

While the Coalition government is unlikely to propose anything like that, there’s an argument for being bold. The fact around three million Australians have just accessed their superannuation is a massive chink in the armour of compulsory super.

The government could make super voluntary, in effect offering a significant pay rise to any worker who wanted it. Remember, employers don’t care whether workers’ pay is sent to a super fund or the worker’s bank account.

The savings could be used to make significant cuts to income tax, or make the age pension universal, thereby scrapping the means testing that has so twisted the incentives of the over 65s. About 80 per cent of retirees already receive the full or part age pension. A universal pension would remove the significant disincentives to work that pensioners face, dramatically simplify retirement and end the game of retirees’ engineering, quite understandably, their affairs in order to receive a part-pension.

There are powerful political reasons for being bold, too.

Labor will be hoping the government does seek to delay or stop the increase in the super guarantee. That would give the party, rendered irrelevant by the corona­virus, something to fight for, even if it were for the vested interest of the super industry rather than working people. Indeed, a senior Liberal once told me the biggest supporters of compulsory super were older, wealthy Liberal voters, who believed the poor should be forced to save for their retirement so as not to be a burden. The ­median worker, let alone the poor, can never save enough to provide the equivalent of an age pension.

Regardless, facing a hysterical campaign from Labor and the doubts among its own base, it could lose the debate.

The government needs a positive plan rather than promising to stop something from occurring. Dangling the carrot of an optional near 10 per cent pay rise for workers or promising a universal age pension would be a significant proposal with plenty of merit.

The government’s successful early access scheme, which has seen around three million people withdraw almost $40bn, has delivered a body blow to compulsory super. Now is the time to reform it.

DeathsInCustodyFacts

GEOFFREY BLAINEY
No point in ignoring facts and history

1:55PM JUNE 14, 2020

On New Year’s Day, no major economist, no famous medical scientist and no political leader had predicted that this would be a tumultuous year.

At first the coronavirus was the world’s feared enemy. Soon it turned into an economic crisis, and now in many nations it is a looming threat to law and order or the sparks of a cultural revolution.

That the campaign against statues is occurring especially in England is a shock. On reflection it should not be puzzling because the British Isles have enjoyed such political continuity, having suffered no invasion since 1066 and no civil war since the 1640s. Therefore it has centuries of statuary and art still standing in public places.

While some Australians publicly applauded the events in Bristol this week, most probably watched with surprise and even apprehension. The statue of Edward Colston was attacked by a small crowd consisting of protesters and — judging by the media illustrations — spectators who seemed more intent on taking photos. The deputy governor of the British company that once held a monopoly for transporting slaves in British ships from West Africa to the West Indies, Colston could be denounced as partly responsible for the 19,000 slaves who died during those voyages. Yet Colston was also a benefactor of Bristol, helping to found schools in an age when education was a luxury.

Why should a mob and not an elective assembly reach this sudden decision that Colston’s statue be heaved into the harbour? A civic statue is a work of art. Don’t works of art merit some protection, or do we allow the statue-thugs to break into an art gallery and cut the nose off a portrait of a long-dead person? As for the city library, why not set fire to offending books?

You might excuse this censorship of the enemy’s culture during an all-out war, but this is not a war. Or perhaps it is already a culture war.

In the eyes of moderate radicals living in Britain, their nation’s most admired prime minister in the 19th century was William Ewart Gladstone, for whom we once barracked when studying history at school long ago. Yet he was the son of the wealthiest owner of slaves in the West Indies, and as a member of the House of Commons the young Gladstone indirectly helped his father’s income from slavery at the time when the slave trade was being abolished.

Now the statue-breakers in Australia, invisible for years, have emerged with their hammer or paint-splasher. James Cook is already a target. A discordant band of Western Australians have rediscovered governor James Stirling. South Australian rebels have turned on CC Kingston in a glaring display of ignorance. They are shattering the reputation of the politician who, perhaps more than any other, took the steps by which Australia became the world’s first nation to give to women both the right to vote and the right to stand for parliament. The long-dead Kingston is now vulnerable because he was one of the legislators who voted for the White Australia policy. Another offence — he should know better — is that his statue stands near an Aboriginal flagpole.

While this month’s Australian marchers were provoked by the dreadful death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, they were stirred equally by our history of Aboriginal deaths in custody. Many of the marchers tried to publicise these deaths not only to fellow Australians but to people around the world.

Australia has its faults and failings, past and present, but by today’s world standards it can hardly be singled out as racist. It has never tolerated slavery.

Even in the era of the White Australia policy, Australians’ attitude to exotic migrants was little different to the attitudes of most European nations.

In the past 30 years we have, measured by the size of our population, admitted more refugees than almost any other nation, and usually afforded them housing ahead of our own homeless Australian-born people.

It is easier for a new migrant to gain voting rights here than in any nation in Asia or the Middle East. But some Australian universities display a tendency to be servile rather than independent. Beijing, and Uluru at times, must not be offended. The anti-statue crusade found instant supporters here.

The essence of studying history is that, as best we can, we try to wear the shoes and put on the spectacles worn by people of the past. We try to see the obstacles and dilemmas they struggled against or evaded. We also hope that the future will try to understand why we made blunders, and learn from failures and achievements of our era.

The statue-topplers, however, have no time for debate. Those who have just banned the once-prized film Gone With the Wind have no time for discussion. In the US it is almost taboo to ask questions publicly about the campaign Black Lives Matter.

In Australia those critics who doubted whether crowded street marches should be permitted when the coronavirus was still at large were reminded that the fight against racism — an enemy loosely defined — was as crucial as the war against a deadly virus. Those painful minutes in Minneapolis were a timely reminder of painful decades in Australia.

This burning topic was already entangled with another. In 1987 the Hawke Labor government, in a courageous gesture, set up a royal commission to investigate Aboriginal deaths in prison and in police custody.

The belief then was widespread that there the Aborigines had suffered an exceptionally high death rate. It was agreed that this exhaustive inquiry would probably harm our international reputation, but might also find a way for reform and prevention.

Learned judges, and many witnesses from every state and territory, met in a variety of courtrooms.

More than three years later the official verdict surprised most mainstream citizens. In short, the typical indigenous prisoner had been no more likely than the typical non-indigenous prisoner to die in custody. They were just more likely to be arrested and to end up in prison.

The Australian Institute of Criminology assiduously began to count and monitor, year after year, the total of deaths in custody, but their observations and statistics are not familiar to most people who, in good faith, marched last weekend. Their findings were not familiar to the television reporters who courteously questioned the marchers.

I heard no mention, saw no slogan, that proclaimed the truth that non-indigenous prisoners were more at risk than indigenous prisoners of dying while in police custody or prison. Expressed another way: the death rate for each 1000 prisoners is lower for the indigenous than for the non-indigenous.

Prison deaths probably cause more concern among the Aboriginal public. Many of their relatives die in prisons far from home and close relatives. Many commit suicide.

Since the early 1990s one-third of all indigenous deaths in prison have been the result of suicide, usually by hanging. Moreover, half of those prisoners had previously attempted suicide.

Fortunately, strong attempts have been made by governments and prison officials to lower the suicide rate in recent years. The main cause of death of indigenous prisoners, especially after 2004, is natural causes: heart troubles predominate, but they might well be a result of earlier living conditions.

An unexpected trend is for the indigenous prison population now to increase at the faster rate; they now constitute 30 per cent of all prisoners.

The high Aboriginal incarceration rate has been the topic of numerous reports and was the message on many of the handwritten notices held aloft by protesters last weekend. It has given Australia a burst of unfavourable publicity, and China this week subtly exploited it.

To solve the prison problem will not be easy. Money alone has failed to solve it. In my eyes — I could be astray — the prison dilemma now seems far more urgent than the question of whether the Constitution should be altered as to embrace or favour the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

The global surge of unrest in the past fortnight had another surprising effect. The British history of this land began as a kind of prison. How to reform that prison was a major debate in the middle of the 19th century. Unexpectedly the prison debate is back again.

Historian Geoffrey Blainey’s latest book is Captain Cook’s
Epic Voyage.

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

TheWokeSociety

UK Daily Telegraph

Douglas Murray

From the green movement to trans, the dogmas of the age are both dangerous and rarely challenged

 All ages have their dogmas, taboos and sacred values. In this regard our age is no different from any other. What is so striking is the sheer oddity of the things we have decided to make holy, the things deemed so crucial that almost everyone feels compelled to agree publicly with them or at least to pretend to agree with them.

Christianity, in its Protestant and Catholic forms, at least made sense. There was an origin story and a body of learning and scholarship that grew out of it. The occasional burnings at the stake were a reminder that overreach can happen but there was a logic to it that an outsider could comprehend and even a critic might understand. What, by comparison, is the logic of the unifying themes of our own age?

Being concerned about the wellbeing and future of our planet is a natural and healthy instinct. But how is one to square that instinct with the attitude of the moment? An attitude best demonstrated in an apparent willingness, at any moment, to grip our head in our hands and shout: “We’re all going to burn.” We celebrate strange child prophetesses when they come to tell us we have sinned. We listen when we are told that wholesale societal immiseration is the only way out of our situation. And a disturbingly high number of adults turn out to be prepared to agree publicly with the most insane claims if for no other reason than to keep the peace.

When Extinction Rebellion vandals dig up a beautiful lawn in the name of saving the environment the police stand happily by. When the same group bring the capital city to a standstill the police seek to appease them and even work with them. Before long every politician is in agreement not just about the debate but the terms we must use to describe it. So now everyone agrees that we are living in a “climate emergency”, a term nobody used this time last year but which nearly all politicians now reach for whenever a river bursts its banks simply because a bunch of fringe extremists have a skill at bullying everyone into agreeing with them.

What are our other sacred values? Well one is that there is no such thing as biological reality. The same police who are happy to stand by as hooligans wreak violence take any transgression against the emerging trans orthodoxy especially seriously. As do the political class, once again demonstrating why intelligent people steer clear of politics these days.

On morning television earlier this week the Labour Party’s Dawn Butler was being questioned by Richard Madeley about her party’s recent insistence that people who believe in biology should have no place in the Labour movement. As somebody who wouldn’t be sad if the Labour Party never got anywhere near power ever again one might be tempted to encourage such initiatives. But the problem is that such dogmas have a tendency to break out from the places that nurtured them. The exchange between Madeley and Butler was a fine demonstration of the problem.

What Madeley was trying to do – very gently it must be said – was tease out whether there might not be some dilemma underneath the claim that the Labour Party is now making about the right to be whatever gender you say you are. Butler would hear none of it. As with all truly dim people, she had already decided where the parameters of the discussion should be even though she is majorly, magnificently, mortifyingly wrong. Madeley asked her whether chromosomes and external signs of sex may not be signifiers of some kind? Did they not, in fact, suggest that sex is not a social construct but a visible, provable biological reality?

“Talking about penises and vaginas doesn’t help the conversation,” Butler countered, wearily, as though such things are so last century. It was clear that Butler’s ideal conversation would be one in which evidence and facts had no place at all. She went on to suggest that Madeley was implying that “trans women aren’t women” which made Madeley backpedal for his life, insisting that of course he wasn’t saying anything of the kind. By introducing genitalia into the conversation he was merely putting forward a possible argument that some lunatic fringe weirdo might still attempt to advance. “I don’t hold that opinion at all,” he insisted, like a man begging for his life.

“When a child is born they are identified and observed in a particular sex,” he continued, his mouth audibly drying, as anyone’s might when they know the words might be their last. “A child is born without sex,” Butler immediately rejoindered. “The child is informed [sic] without sex at the beginning, but anyway.” And there you had one of the other great beliefs of the time. The insistence that however many days we have left before we all burn to death, we might best use them pretending that the penis is a social construct invented only yesterday by Richard Madeley to give cover for his transphobia.

If our society’s sacred values have come to seem madly random and ill-thought through that is because they are. And if some of us object to them and would like to see them interrogated more regularly, more publicly and more assertively it is for a number of reasons.

The first is that the taboos and sacred values that we are currently embedding as a form of replacement religion are mad and bad in and of themselves. It is not good to tell children that they are unlikely to make it into adulthood. It is not wise to pretend that biological reality is merely a figment of some bigoted imagination. But it’s what comes next that is the real problem.

For a society softened up by such stupidity will in time lose the capacity to push back at anything and will fall for absolutely everything. We are relatively lucky that at present the worst the green extremists have done is some intermittent anti-environmental vandalism. We are lucky that the trans extremists have merely limited themselves to intimidating the occasional meeting of women’s rights activists.



The test comes when a society is forced to move on from these ideas to ones even more far-ranging and sinister. It’s not enough to just get with the beat. And if you do, then rest assured that the beat after next might be absolutely anything.

Men & women

THERE’S NO QUESTION OF OUR BIOLOGICAL SEX

COLIN WRIGHT EMMA HILTON

That is settled as a scientific fact, not a construct
Transgender ideology can take on a comical character, as in a recent American Civil Liberties Union commentary objecting to sales tax on tampons and similar products while pondering: “How can we recognise that barriers to menstrual access are a form of sex discrimination without erasing the lived experiences of trans men and non-binary people who menstruate, as well as women who don’t?”

Yet it’s one thing to claim that a man can identify as a woman or vice versa. Increasingly, we see a dangerous and anti-scientific trend towards the outright denial of biological sex.

“The idea of two sexes is simplistic,” an article in the scientific journal Nature declared in 2015. “Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.”

A 2018 Scientific American piece asserted that “biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male”.

And an October 2018 The New York Times headline promised to explain “Why Sex Is Not Binary”.

The argument is that because some people are intersex — they have developmental conditions resulting in ambiguous sex characteristics — the categories male and female exist on a spectrum, and are therefore no more than social constructs. If male and female are merely arbitrary groupings, it follows that everyone, regardless of genetics or anatomy should be free to choose to identify as male or female, or to reject sex entirely in favour of a new bespoke “gender identity”.

To characterise this line of reasoning as having no basis in reality would be an egregious understatement. It is false at every conceivable scale of resolution.

In humans, as in most animals or plants, an organism’s biological sex corresponds to one of two distinct types of reproductive anatomy that develop for the production of small or large sex cells — sperm and eggs, respectively — and associated biological functions in sexual reproduction. In humans, reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female at birth more than 99.98 per cent of the time.

The evolutionary function of these two anatomies is to aid in reproduction via the fusion of sperm and ova. No third type of sex cell exists in humans, and therefore there is no sex spectrum or additional sexes beyond male and female. Sex is binary.

There is a difference, however, between the statements that there are only two sexes (true) and that everyone can be neatly categorised as male or female (false). The existence of only two sexes does not mean sex is never ambiguous. But intersex individuals are extremely rare, and they are neither a third sex nor proof that sex is a spectrum or a social construct.

Not everyone needs to be discretely assignable to one or the other sex for biological sex to be functionally binary. To assume otherwise — to confuse secondary sexual traits with biological sex itself — is a category error.

Denying the reality of biological sex and supplanting it with subjective “gender identity” is not merely an eccentric academic theory. It raises serious human rights concerns for vulnerable groups including women, homosexuals and children.

Women have fought hard for sex-based legal protections. Female-only spaces are necessary because of the pervasive threat of male violence and sexual assault. Separate sporting categories are also necessary to ensure women and girls don’t have to face competitors who have acquired the irreversible performance-enhancing effects conferred by male puberty.

The different reproductive roles of males and females require laws to safeguard women from discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere. The falsehood that sex is rooted in subjective identity instead of objective biology renders all these sex-based rights impossible to enforce.

The denial of biological sex also erases homosexuality, as same-sex attraction is meaningless without the distinction between the sexes. Many activists now define homosexuality as attraction to the “same gender identity” rather than the same sex. This view is at odds with the scientific understanding of human sexuality. Lesbians have been denounced as “bigots” for expressing a reluctance to date men who identify as women. The successful normalisation of homosexuality could be undermined by miring it in an untenable ideology.

Those most vulnerable to sex denialism are children. When they’re taught that sex is grounded in identity instead of biology, sex categories can easily become conflated with regressive stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. Masculine girls and feminine boys may become confused about their own sex. The dramatic rise of “gender dysphoric” adolescents

— especially young girls — in clinics likely reflects this new cultural confusion.

The large majority of genderdysphoric youths eventually outgrow their feelings of dysphoria during puberty, and many end up identifying as homosexual adults. “Affirmation” therapies, which insist a child’s cross-sex identity should never be questioned, and puberty-blocking drugs, advertised as a way for children to “buy time” to sort out their identities, may only solidify feelings of dysphoria, setting them on a pathway to more invasive medical interventions and permanent infertility. This pathologising of sexatypical behaviour is extremely worrying and regressive. It is similar to gay “conversion” therapy, except that it’s now bodies instead of minds that are being converted to bring children into “proper” alignment with themselves.

The time for politeness on this issue has passed. Biologists and medical professionals need to stand up for the empirical reality of biological sex. When authoritative scientific institutions ignore or deny empirical fact in the name of social accommodation, it is an egregious betrayal to the scientific community they represent. It undermines public trust in science, and it is dangerously harmful to those most vulnerable.

Colin Wright is an evolutionary
biologist at Penn State University; Emma Hilton is a developmental biologist at the University of
Manchester.

Biologists and medical professionals need to stand up for the empirical reality of biological sex

The Australian

 Monday, January 27, 2020 

BREAKING FREE FROM OUR MOST DANGEROUS DRUG

ROSS FITZGERALD

From humble beginnings, Alcoholics Anonymous has saved millions of lives.

Yesterday, on Australia Day, I was sober for 50 years.

Since I stopped drinking and drugging on January 26, 1970, Alcoholics Anonymous has continued to teach me that for an alcoholic one drink is too many and 100 is not enough.

Indeed, the trick for an alcoholic like me is not to pick up the first drink, and to keep attending AA meetings.

The stark reality is if I hadn’t stopped drinking and drugging aged 25, I wouldn’t have made 26.

Yet had I not started drinking at 14 I may well have taken my own life by the age of 18.

This is because, as a child, I felt like a garbage tip and alcohol enabled me to hold down those dreadful feelings, but only for a while.

Then the progressive nature of the illness of alcoholism began to thoroughly take hold. This was until, through the agency of Alcoholics Anonymous and particularly through attending AA meetings, I was released from the need to drink and use other drugs 50 years ago.

The role of Alcoholics Anonymous in combating alcoholism and other drug addiction deserves to be celebrated.

However, for the millions of lives saved and transformed by this extraordinary movement, just as many have failed to grasp its simple message and the result has been personal hell, family breakdown, and untimely death. Such is the destructive power of alcohol, society’s most pernicious and damaging drug.

On May 12, 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous had its fragile beginning in Akron, Ohio, when a recently sober New York stockbroker, Bill Wilson, fearful that being alone on a business trip, he might return to drinking, hit on the idea of communicating with another alcoholic.

After making inquiries, Wilson was directed to a seemingly hopeless alcoholic physician, Bob Smith.

As a result of listening to Wilson tell the story of his alcoholism, Dr Bob had his last drink on June 10, 1935, which is the date on which AA is regarded as having been founded.

Ten years later, in March 1945, AA began in Australia.

From its beginnings, the AA program emphasised alcoholism as an illness that could be arrested, a day at a time, by complete abstinence from alcohol.

A key aspect of AA’s therapeutic process involves what can be termed the mechanism of surrender. Instead of telling alcoholics to use their willpower, control their drinking or pull up their socks, AA suggests that a much more efficacious strategy is to admit that, at least in relation to alcohol, they are beaten.

This acceptance of defeat often produces, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, a shift in attitude that unlocks new and positive feelings, especially hope and a sense of usefulness.

Surrender in AA involves the letting go of control. Thus at AA meetings one often hears a speaker say: “I’m not a retired alcoholic, I am a defeated one. I’ve thrown in the towel.” To let go in surrender is totally different from fighting alcohol (or life). Despair and hopelessness, not personal strength, is at its source.

Few people realise that the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung was intimately involved in the beginnings of AA.

As Jung explained in a letter to Bill Wilson, “alcohol in Latin is ‘spiritus’ and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison”. Jung maintained that for an alcoholic person the most helpful formula was “spiritus contra spiritum”: spirit against spirit, power against power.

It was Jung’s belief that, for an alcoholic, the primary sources of long-term recovery were to be found in something like a “conversion experience”. This should not be confused with a religious conversion.

In AA it is a conversion to accepting at depth that, in dealing with alcoholism, it is not sufficient to rely on the isolated self. This fundamental psychic change needs constantly to be reinforced or the alcoholic will most likely revert to old ways of thinking, feeling and responding, and hence will eventually drink again.

There is a tendency for some alcoholics who have stopped drinking to believe they can be totally self-reliant and can control their drinking. Alcoholic pride suggests the individual is not really beaten.

Instead of encouraging notions of supposed self-sufficiency, self-reliance and self-control, AA restructures the whole context and asserts that, with regard to alcoholism, the person is defeated.

The AA proposition, “once an alcoholic always an alcoholic”, reinforces a fundamental fact. Thus when I speak at meetings I always begin by saying: “My name is Ross and I am an alcoholic.”

AA’s only theological conception is that of a power greater than the self. This is sometimes conceived as God, as one understands that concept, or one doesn’t.

Just as the traditional stereotype of what comprises an alcoholic often blinds sufferers to the reality of their condition, so can the traditional stereotype associated with God lead to confusion and resistance.

But once the theistic, Christian (or any other) stereotype is done away with, it becomes clear that the notion of a power greater than oneself makes room for all alcoholic people, including atheists like myself. This is the case as long as we are willing to accept and rely on something outside or other than the isolated self, even if it is only the AA group we attend.

At some time during almost every AA meeting in the world, the new person will hear the following phrase: “You may leave this meeting today and need never drink again.” Often this is something that alcoholics have never considered before.

All the elements that comprise AA (attendance at meetings, the notion of alcoholism as an irreversible condition, working with other alcoholics, and the Twelve Suggested Steps) are part of a continuing process of surrender that offers the alcoholic not only freedom from the obsession to drink but also a sense of meaning and a useful way of life. Maintenance of the state of selfsurrender underpins personal recovery and is a continuing source of hope.

Ross Fitzgerald is professor of

history and politics at Griffith

University. His memoir, Fifty

Years Sober, is released by Hybrid in March.

The stark reality is if I hadn’t stopped drinking and drugging aged 25, I wouldn’t have made 26

Fires

REVIVE ANCIENT SKILLS TO BETTER MANAGE BUSHFIRES

VIV FORBES

There were key messages in the smoke spotted by our first explorers
The firelighter was the most powerful tool that early humans brought to Australia.

Fires lit by Aboriginal men and women created the landscape of Australia. They used fire to create and fertilise fresh new grass for the grazing animals they hunted, to trap and roast grass-dwelling reptiles and rodents, to fight enemies, to send smoke signals, to fell dead trees for campfires, to ward off frosts and biting insects, and for religious and cultural ceremonies. Their fires created and maintained grasslands and open forests and extinguished all flora and fauna unable to cope with frequent burn-offs.

Early white explorers and settlers recorded the smoke and the blackened tree trunks. They admired the extensive grasslands, either treeless or with well-spaced trees, and no tangled undergrowth of dead grass, brambles, branches and weeds.

Making fire without tinderboxes or matches is laborious. So most Aboriginals tried to keep their fires alive at all times. When on the move, selected members of the tribe were charged with carrying a fire stick and keeping it alight. In really cold weather several members may have each carried a fire stick for warmth. When the stick was in danger of going out, the carrier would usually light a tussock of dry grass or leaves and use that flame to rejuvenate the fire stick (or light a new one). As they moved on, they left a line of small fires spreading behind them. They were observed by early white explorers and settlers trying to control the movement of fires but never tried to extinguish them.

Early explorers who ventured inland were amazed to find extensive grasslands and open woodland. Their reports attracted settlers to these grassy open forests and treeless plains with mobs of cattle and sheep.

Despite modern folklore tales about Aboriginal fire management skills, anyone reading diaries from early explorers such as Abel Tasman (1642) and Captain Cook (1770) soon learned that Aboriginals lit fires at any time, for many reasons, and never tried to put them out.

If threatened by fires lit by enemies, the most frequent response was to light their own protective fires (now called backburning). Firelighting was deliberate, and sometimes governed by rules, but there was no central plan. There were no firefighters, no 4WD tankers, no water bombers, no dozers. But Aboriginal fire “management” worked brilliantly. Because of the high frequency of small fires, fire intensity was low and fires could be lit safely even in summer. Any fire lit would soon run into country burnt one or two years earlier and then would run out of fuel and self-extinguish.

Early squatters quickly learned to manage fire to protect their assets, grasslands and grazing animals.

Graziers need to protect herds and flocks, homesteads, haystacks, yards, fences and neighbours, as well as maintain grasslands by killing woody weeds and encouraging new grass. So their fire management was refined. They soon learned to pick the right season, day, time of day, place, wind and weather before lighting a fire.

Today we have replaced decentralised fire management with government-nurtured firestorms. First governments created fire hazards called national parks, where fire sticks, matches, graziers and foresters were locked out and access roads were abandoned or padlocked. And green-loving urbanites built houses beside them and planted trees in their yards. The open forests and grasslands were invaded by eucalypt regrowth, woody weeds, tangled undergrowth, dry grass, logs, dead leaves, twigs, bark and litter — all perfect fuel for a wildfire holocaust.

These tinderboxes of forest fuel became magnets for arsonists, or were lit by windblown embers or lightning. With high winds, high temperatures and heavy fuel loads some fires will race through the treetops of oil-rich eucalypt forests.

Into this maelstrom they send the brave volunteers. With insufficient tracks, insufficient nearby water, uncleared tracks, insufficient fuel reduction burning and bush right up to towns and houses, disasters are guaranteed.

Central management and control of burn-off policy has failed. Too often the people in charge did not understand bushfire history and science and were too influenced by green ideology.

Authorities should provide information but not control, which should be returned to landowners, homeowners, foresters and experienced local fire officers.

Locals with fire knowledge, experience and skin in the game could make a huge difference. Residents should be able to demand fuel load reduction near their properties and towns, and carry it out on public land if authorities refuse to do it. It can be burnt, slashed, raked, composted, heaped or buried as long as it is no longer capable of feeding runaway bushfires. Insurance companies should reflect fire risk in premiums.

No Aboriginals and few early settlers used water to fight fires. There were no water bombers, no fire trucks, often not even handspray backpacks. Graziers used backburning from station tracks. Their wives defended the homestead with garden hoses or tried to beat the flames to death with wet hessian bags and green branches. Aboriginals let the fire burn and tried to keep out of its path.

Water is undoubtedly useful to protect homes and towns, to extinguish burning buildings, to stop grass fires and to stop the backburn from escaping in the wrong direction. But trying to extinguish raging bushfires and forest wildfires with water alone is usually a waste of time, energy and water.

We must relearn two ancient skills — remove the fuel load everywhere and use fire to fight fire. Big fires need a lot of fuel. If you own the fuel, you own the fire. If you haven’t managed the fuel, you will not be able to manage the fire. And if your fire escapes and causes damage, you are responsible.

Viv Forbes is executive director of the
Saltbush Club. He has been a pastoralist in
Queensland and the Northern Territory for most of his life.

Climate Complexities

DANGEROUS TO SIMPLIFY THE COMPLEX MATTER OF CLIMATE

The push for consensus has come at the expense of exploratory scientific work

JUDITH CURRY

The UN Climate Change Conference this week in Madrid provides an important opportunity to reflect on the state of the public debate surrounding climate change.

Most of the world’s governments are prioritising energy security, affordability and industrial competitiveness over commitments made for the Paris climate agreement. Even if these countries were on track to meet their commitments, most of the national pledges would be insufficient to meet the Paris targets. At the same time, we are hearing increasingly shrill rhetoric from Extinction Rebellion and other activists about the “existential threat” of the “climate crisis”, “runaway climate chaos” and so on.

There is a growing realisation that the Paris climate agreement is inadequate for making a meaningful dent in slowing down the anticipated warming.

And the real societal consequences of climate change and extreme weather events remain largely unaddressed.

How have we arrived at this point? For the past three decades, the climate policy cart has been way out in front of the scientific horse. The 1992 climate change treaty was signed by 190 countries before the balance of scientific evidence suggested even a discernible observed human influence on global climate. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was implemented before we had any confidence that most of the recent warming was caused by humans. There has been tremendous political pressure on the scientists to present findings that would support these treaties, which has resulted in a drive to manufacture a scientific consensus on the dangers of manmade climate change.

Fossil-fuel emissions as the climate “control knob” is a simple and seductive idea. However, this is a misleading oversimplification since climate can shift naturally in unexpected ways.

There is still great uncertainty about the sensitivity of the Earth’s temperature to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We have no idea how natural climate variability (solar, volcanoes, ocean circulations) will play out in the 21st century, and whether natural variability will dominate over man-made warming.

We still don’t have a realistic assessment of how a warmer climate will affect us and whether it is dangerous. We don’t have a good understanding of how warming will influence extreme weather events. Land use and exploitation by humans is a far bigger issue than climate change for species extinction and ecosystem health. Local sea level rise has many causes and is dominated by sinking from land use in many of the most vulnerable locations.

We have been told that the science of climate change is settled. However, in climate science there has been a tension between the drive towards a scientific consensus to support policymaking, versus exploratory research that pushes forward the knowledge frontier. Climate science is characterised by a rapidly evolving knowledge base and disagreement among experts. Predictions of 21st-century climate change are characterised by deep uncertainty.

Nevertheless, activist scientists and the media seize on each extreme weather event as having the fingerprints of man-made climate change — ignoring the analyses of more sober scientists showing periods of even more extreme weather in the first half of the 20th century, when fossil fuel emissions were much smaller.

Alarming press releases are issued about each new climate model prediction of future catastrophes from famine, mass migrations and catastrophic fires, yet these press releases don’t mention that these predicted catastrophes are associated with highly implausible assumptions about how much we might emit in the 21st century. Issues such as famine, mass migrations and wildfires are caused primarily by government policies and ineptitude, lack of wealth and land-use policies. Climate change matters, but it’s outweighed by other factors in terms of influencing human wellbeing.

We have been told that climate change is an existential crisis. However, based on our current assessment of the science, the climate threat is not an existential one, even in its most alarming hypothetical incarnations.

However, the perception of man-made climate change as a near-term apocalypse has narrowed the policy options that we’re willing to consider.

We have not only oversimplified the problem of climate change but we have also oversimplified its solution. Even if you accept the climate model projections and that warming is dangerous, there is disagreement among experts regarding whether a rapid acceleration away from fossil fuels is the appropriate policy response.

In any event, rapidly reducing emissions from fossil fuels and ameliorating the adverse effects of extreme weather events in the near term increasingly looks like magical thinking.

Climate change — man-made and natural — is a chronic problem that will require centuries of management.

The extreme rhetoric of Extinction Rebellion and other activists is making political agreement on climate change policies more difficult. Exaggerating the dangers beyond credibility makes it difficult to take climate change seriously. The monomaniacal focus on elimination of fossil-fuel emissions distracts our attention from the primary causes of many of our problems and effective solutions.

Commonsense strategies to reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events, improve environmental quality, develop better energy technologies, improve agricultural and land-use practices, and better manage water resources can pave the way for a more prosperous and secure future. Each of these solutions is “no regrets” — supporting climate change mitigation while improving human wellbeing. These strategies avoid the political gridlock surrounding the current policies and avoid costly policies that will have minimal near-term impacts on the climate. And these strategies don’t require agreement about the risks of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions.

We don’t know how the climate of the 21st century will evolve, and we will undoubtedly be surprised. Given this uncertainty, precise emissions targets and deadlines are scientifically meaningless. We can avoid much of the political gridlock by implementing commonsense, no-regrets strategies that improve energy technologies, lift people out of poverty and make them more resilient to extreme weather events.

Judith Curry is president of the
Climate Forecast Applications
Network and professor emeritus at Georgia Institute of
Technology.

Sex And Genders Etc.

Play ‘self-identity’, make yourself up as you go

FRANK FUREDI

Biological sex, determined at the moment of conception, is being rendered meaningless

A modern child can be black, Chinese, male, female — or just confused, like the rest of us
Until recently only children were expected to play and pretend they were someone else — a scary lion, Alexander the Great or Superman. Now adults, too, can join in and get to decide how they want to be seen and identified.

Britain’s Universities and Colleges Union has published a report that contends anyone should be able to identify as black regardless of the colour of their skin.

That means a university teacher with ginger hair and freckles can now — in all seriousness — assert their black identity and gain the validation of colleagues. And anyone who refuses to go along with this performance of blackness risks being accused of a hate crime.

The UCU’s report aims to resolve the current controversy about whether biological males should be able to self-identify as women and be treated as female. The report concludes with a resounding yes — you don’t need to have a uterus and female reproductive organs to identify as a woman. It also went a step further so you can decide if you are white, black or, presumably, Chinese.

It notes that “our rules commit us to ending all forms of discrimination, bigotry and stereotyping” and declares that the “UCU has a long history of enabling members to self-identify whether that is being black, disabled, LGBT+ or women”. The UCU’s argument about the right to self-identify is another way of saying it is up to everyone to decide how others are obligated to see them.

From this standpoint, your sex chromosomes, biology, physical features or cultural origins are more or less irrelevant when it comes to self-identity. Self-identification renders identity a form of role play. It works as a make-it-upas-you-go-along performance and you can adopt whatever role takes your fancy.

Once upon a time the UCU’s report would have provoked the response of “they must be joking”.

Some sensible commentators may still react in astonishment at its preposterous sentiments.

However, with the proliferation of a bewildering variety of new identities, the public has gradually got used to the unannounced arrival of yet another freshly invented identity.

Not so long ago most people were genuinely shocked and surprised when it was announced Facebook now had 71 gender identities to choose from.

Then came the appearance of an endless number of newly minted trans pronouns. In some circles the use of he or she was condemned as a cultural crime of misgendering. Instead zie, sie, ey, ve, tey or e were proposed as enlightened alternatives to the far too restrictive binary pronouns of he and she.

Now with the non-stop attention sections of the media devote to the cultivation of new identities, more and` more people intuit that the obsession with identity is here to stay. The right to self-identify and choose your race or gender enjoys widespread cultural affirmation.

The readiness with which public and private organisations have changed the language used in official forms to include new categories of gender suggests selfidentification is fast becoming institutionalised Society’s preoccupation with identity and selfidentification has acquired an explosive dynamic to the point it is rapidly changing the way we think and the words we use. The recently invented term “sex assigned at birth”, used by numerous institutions and media outlets, conveys the view that one’s biological sex is arbitrary and irrelevant.

Biological sex, determined at the moment of conception, is rendered invisible and meaningless through the administrative fiat of rendering it transitory. The transformation of a birth certificate into a statement of identity preference implies the description of a baby is a provisional one that is likely to alter. The premise of the phrase “sex assigned at birth” is that it is the developing child and teenager who will eventually choose an identity — preferably a genderneutral one — for themselves.

A significant cohort of “up-todate” parents have embraced the ideology of gender neutrality and adopted a style of child-rearing that avoids assigning a biological gender to their child. Such parents assume they are providing their offspring with the freedom to decide for themselves who they want to be.

In reality the embrace of gender-neutral parenting constitutes an act of adult irresponsibility. Instead of guiding their child to help understand their biological attributes and taking responsibility for the development of the child’s identity, they place the burden of character formation on the child.

“Leaving it up to the child” may sound open-minded but its effect is to allow the confusing influences and pressures of popular and peer culture to monopolise the identity formation of young people.

Instead of providing direction and guidance, children are left to deal with a chaotic world dominated by social media, consumer culture and identity politics.

In places of work and in institutions of higher education, people face strong pressure and sanctions should they refuse to embrace a gender-neutral vocabulary.

It is increasingly common to provide people with a list of words they can or cannot use at their workplace. One of the most disturbing targets of linguistic policing are daycare centres and primary schools, which are exhorted to socialise children by preempting them from adopting the language and values of the generations that preceded them. As far back as 1995 the daycare centre at La Trobe University in Melbourne banned the use of about 20 words, including the gender-related terms girl and boy, to promote its mission of altering traditional sex roles. Those who violated the code were forced to pay a fine and treated as if they had used a dirty word.

The focus on altering children’s vocabulary is not accidental. The project of purifying of language is motivated by the objective of altering people’s behaviour.

Language serves as a medium through which human relations are ordered and people’s reality is shaped. Thus, socialising children into a gender-neutral culture and vocabulary aims to alter the meaning youngsters attach to their identity and existence.

Such irresponsible behaviour can mess up and confuse the generations to come, which is why we need to embrace the role of the young boy who exposed the pretensions of the naked emperor with the words “he has no clothes”.

Instead of allowing promoters of self-identification to embarrass us into silence, we have to speak out and insist that playing an identity game does not alter the hard facts of biological sex.

Frank Furedi is a sociologist and
author of How Fear Works: The
Culture of Fear in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury).

Social pressure

Follow Michael Crichton’s Rule

The late writer warned about bending to social pressure instead of heeding evidence.

Jurassic Park” and “Westworld,” from the brilliant mind of Michael Crichton, aren’t real. But neither are a lot of things that pass for arguments these days. Crichton, who died in 2008, gave a lecture at Caltech in 2003 titled “Aliens Cause Global Warming.” In his words, it was about the “uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy” but I took away a lot more. Relax, this column isn’t about climate change.

His first example was nuclear winter. In 1975 the National Academy of Sciences stated that even with multiple nuclear detonations, the effect from dust would be minor. In 1979 Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment said the science was poorly understood and it wasn’t possible to estimate damage. Yet by 1982 the Swedish Academy of Sciences speculated that smoke would cover the Northern Hemisphere, blocking the sun and disabling photosynthesis—nuclear winter.

Within five years, famed astronomer Carl “Billions and Billions” Sagan figured a 5,000-megaton nuclear exchange would cause temperatures to drop below freezing for three months. Of course, there was no empirical study to back any of this. But what amazed me was the observation that no one could take the other side of the argument. Physicist Freeman Dyson said, “It’s an absolutely atrocious piece of science, but who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?” Argument over.

Same for secondhand smoke. In 1994 the Environmental Protection Agency found that 11 studies of the link between smoke in restaurants or offices and cancer were not conclusive, but nonetheless labeled secondhand smoke a Group A carcinogen. The World Health Organization also began to warn against secondhand smoke despite inconclusive studies of its own. Since then, study after study has found no statistically significant relationship between cancer and being near indoor smoking. Yet no one takes the other side of the argument. Except for smokers, no one likes the smell of tar and nicotine while they’re eating or working. Yuck. No one, including me, is actually for secondhand smoke.

Crichton observed: “Once you abandon strict adherence to what science tells us, once you start arranging the truth in a press conference, then anything is possible.” That includes children at the United Nations yelling, “How dare you.” It’s knee-jerk analysis. I call it the Crichton Conundrum: “I’m against it, so these theories must be right—even though the science is most likely bunk.” Shallow, but sadly a reality.

The conundrum is everywhere. Take the $15 minimum wage, a so-called living wage—who could be against that? The problem is that the alternative isn’t necessarily $8 or $10 an hour; often it’s no job and $0 an hour. Lo and behold, restaurants are closing in San Francisco.

Or take net neutrality. No one wants an un-neutral internet, even though that enables innovative pricing to help fund fiber-optic and wireless buildouts. Similarly, we all feel good about “natural” forest management and now California burns.

These arguments are often vague, even Orwellian—the expressions “net neutrality” and “climate change” conceal their shallow concepts. But they’re also Crichtonesque in the way they foreclose any argument from the other side. If you’re against food stamps or children’s health spending, you’re heartless, even though they are inefficient, ineffective and rife with fraud. And friendly sounding No Child Left Behind and Common Core? Sorry, math scores went down.

Free college, day care and medical care? Didn’t Cuba try that? Free or price-controlled goods always end up like subsidized bread in the Soviet Union. You get less of it and empty shelves. The same is true of rent control, as California will soon learn.

Nobel Prize-winning economist (who could be against that?) Joseph Stiglitz last year suggested relief of Puerto Rico’s burdensome debt. Ah, relief—except then Puerto Rico would probably not be able to borrow again for a long time (which applies to student loans as well). And then there’s social justice. No one is for injustice, but now campus mobs are threatening free speech.

Many counterarguments are hard to frame. You can’t just argue the opposite. Crichton reminds us to question the science, the data and the studies, and to argue outside the box you’re put in. Often the answer to most policy questions is “Who pays?” Of course, it’s “greedy corporations” or the 1% fat cats, except that jobs are created by corporations, or funded out of the investment savings of the wealthy, creating new companies and progress. Are you against that?

Why doesn’t anyone make the case for free markets? Because it doesn’t lend itself to easy sound bites: “What do you mean millions of people make billions of price decisions every day that efficiently allocates capital?” Michael J. Fox’s character on “Family Ties,” which ran until 1989, was the last popular free-market spokesman but was portrayed as greedy. Plenty of people still believe it’s better to have governments set prices.

Crichton would have a field day today: democratic socialism, implicit bias, medical marijuana, open curriculum, small class sizes, surveillance capitalism, HOV lanes, electric-vehicle credits, renewable-fuel standards, carbon taxes—it never ends. We’re sorely missing the other side of the argument.

TheJudeanChristianWorld

Secularism's Ongoing Debt to Christianity

By John D. Steinrucken

Rational thought may provide better answers to many of life's riddles than does faith alone. However, it is rational to conclude that religious faith has made possible the advancement of Western civilization. That is, the glue that has held Western civilization together over the centuries is the Judeo-Christian tradition. To the extent that the West loses its religious faith in favor of non-judgmental secularism, then to the same extent, it loses that which holds all else together.

Succinctly put: Western civilization's survival, including the survival of open secular thought, depends on the continuance within our society of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Arguably the two most defining and influential Christian concepts are summarized in two verses of the New Testament. Those verses are Romans 14:10 and John 8:32.

Romans 14:10, says: "Remember, each of us must stand alone before the judgment seat of God." That verse explicitly recognizes not only each man's uniqueness, but, of necessity, implies that man has free will -- that individual acts do result in consequences, and that those acts will be judged against objective standards. It is but a step from the habit of accepting individual accountability before God to thinking of individual accountability in secular things. It thus follows that personal and political freedom is premised upon the Christian concept of the unique individual exercising accountable free will.

John 8:32 says: "And you will know the truth and the truth will set you free." Whatever the theological meanings that have been imputed to that verse, its implicit secular meaning is that the search for truth is in and of itself praiseworthy.

Although I am a secularist (atheist, if you will), I accept that the great majority of people would be morally and spiritually lost without religion. Can anyone seriously argue that crime and debauchery are not held in check by religion? Is it not comforting to live in a community where the rule of law and fairness are respected? Would such be likely if Christianity were not there to provide a moral compass to the great majority? Do we secularists not benefit out of all proportion from a morally responsible society?

An orderly society is dependent on a generally accepted morality. There can be no such morality without religion. Has there ever been a more perfect and concise moral code than the one Moses brought down from the mountain?

Those who doubt the effect of religion on morality should seriously ask the question: Just what are the immutable moral laws of secularism? Be prepared to answer, if you are honest, that such laws simply do not exist! The best answer we can ever hear from secularists to this question is a hodgepodge of strained relativist talk of situational ethics. They can cite no overriding authority other than that of fashion. For the great majority in the West, it is the Judeo-Christian tradition which offers a template assuring a life of inner peace toward the world at large -- a peace which translates to a workable liberal society.            

A few years ago, I saw on television the interview of a reforming prostitute and drug addict. When asked why she had chosen to reform, her simple answer was, "I don't want to go to Hell." I am sure that she had previously received hours of counseling from secular social workers, all without discernible effect. What did it for her was the simplicity of a belief in Heaven and Hell, and with knowing that one day, she would stand alone before her God to be judged.

For the majority of a culture's population, religious tradition is inextricably woven into their self-awareness. It gives them their identity. It is why those of religious faith are more socially stable and experience less difficulty in forming and maintaining binding attachments than do we secularists.

Most men do have a need for God. This, I think, is proven by the desperation with which so many of those who have forsaken the God of their fathers (it has been fashionable to do so) are now reaching for meaning in eastern exotica, new-age mumbo-jumbo, and other attempts to fill the spiritual hole.

Or they surrender themselves to secular ideologies or do-good causes, especially those in which they can mass with others in solidarity, shouting in unison mindless, ritualistic simplicities and waving placards of hackneyed and inane slogans.

Secularism has never offered the people a practical substitute for religion. From the time of the philosophes with their certainties in 1789, the rationally thought-through utopias of those who think themselves the elite of the world, when actually put to the test, have not merely come to naught. Attempts during those two centuries to put into practice utopian visions have caused huge sufferings. But they, the clever ones, never look back. In their conceit, they delude themselves that next time they are sure to get it right. They create justifications for their fantasies by rewriting the histories.

We secularists should recognize that we owe much to the religionists, that we are not threatened by them, that we should grant to them their world. Why should we be exercised over a Christmas Crèche in front of the county court house? It is appropriately symbolic of Christianity's benign but essential role as guarantor of our political and legal systems -- that is, of a moral force independent of andtranscendent to the political. And what harm will come to a child who hears prayer in the schoolroom? I daresay harm is far more likely to come in those places where prayer is not heard.

The fact is, we secularists gain much from living in a world in which excesses are held in check by religion. Religion gives society a secure and orderly environment within which we secularists can safely play out our creativities. Free and creative secularism seems to me to function best when within the stable milieu provided by Christianity.         

To the extent that Western elites distance themselves from their Judeo-Christian cultural heritage in favor of secular constructs, and as they give deference to a multicultural acceptance that all beliefs are of equal validity, they lose their will to defend against a determined attack from another culture, such as from militant Islam. For having destroyed the ancient faith of their people, they will have found themselves with nothing to defend. For the culture above which they had fancied themselves to have risen, the culture which had given them their material sustenance, will by then have become but a hollow shell.

An elite must, by definition, have a much larger base upon which to stand. For Western civilization, that base has over the centuries been the great mass of commoners who have looked to Christianity for their moral guidance and for strength to weather adversity. The elitists delude themselves if they think the common people will look to them for guidance once their religious beliefs have been eroded away.

The greatest crime of the elitists -- if they have their way -- will be their failure to use their gifts of intellect to lead and to preserve. Their sin will be the abandonment of that ninety percent of the population which had provided them with the secure societal and material wherewithal for practicing their conceits and dilettantes.

If the elitists of our Western civilization want to survive, then it is incumbent upon them to see to the preservation of the hoary, time-honored faith of the great majority of the people. This means that our elitists should see that their most valued vested interest is the preservation within our culture of Christianity and Judaism. It is not critical that they themselves believe, only that they should publicly hold in high esteem the institutions of Christianity and Judaism, and to respect those who do believe and to encourage and to give leeway to those who, in truth, will be foremost in the trenches defending us against those who would have us all bow down to a different and unaccommodating faith.