RealitiesOfDomesticViolence

The Australian 20thAugust 2016

Domestic violence groups have built an industry on skewed figures
Eva Solberg is a Swedish politician, a proud feminist who holds an important post as chairwoman of the party Moderate Women. Last year she was presented with her government’s latest strategy for combating domestic violence. Like similar reports across the world, this strategy assumes the only way to tackle domestic violence is through teaching misogynist men (and boys) to behave themselves.

The Swedish politician spat the dummy. Writing on the news site Nyheter24, Solberg took issue with her government’s “tired gendered analysis”, which argued that eradicating sexism was the solution to the problem of domestic violence. She explained her reasoning: “We know through extensive practice and experience that attempts to solve the issue through this kind of analysis have failed. And they failed precisely because violence is not and never has been a gender issue.”

Solberg challenged the government report’s assumption that there was a guilty sex and an innocent one. “Thanks to extensive research in the field, both at the national and international level, we now know with great certainty that this breakdown by sex is simply not true.”

She made reference to the world’s largest research database on intimate partner violence, the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge project, which summarises more than 1700 scientific papers on the topic.

She concluded that her government’s report was based on misinformation about family violence and that, contrary to the report’s one-sided view of men as the only perpetrators, many children were experiencing a very different reality: “We must recognise the fact that domestic violence, in at least half of its occurrence, is carried out by female perpetrators.”

One of the key patterns that emerged from PASK, Solberg said, was that violence in the family was an inherited problem and children learned from watching the violence of both their parents. “To know this and then continue to ignore the damage done to the children who are today subjected to violence is a huge social betrayal,” she concluded. “The road to a solution for this social problem is hardly to stubbornly continue to feed the patient with more of the same medicine that has already been tried for decades.”

There’s a certain irony that this happened in Sweden, the utopia for gender equality and the last place you would expect misogyny to be blamed for a major social evil. But despite Scandinavian countries being world leaders in gender equality (as shown by the 2014 World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index), Nordic women experience the worst physical or sexual violence in the EU. Given this inconvenient truth it seems extraordinary that for decades the gendered analysis of domestic violence has retained its grip on Sweden — as it has in other Western countries, including Australia.

No one would deny that it was a great achievement to have men’s violence against women fully acknowledged and to take critical steps to protect vulnerable women and ensure their safety.

But it has been shocking to watch this morph into a worldwide domestic violence industry determined to ignore evidence showing the complexities of violence in the home and avoid prevention strategies that would tackle the real risk factors underpinning this vital social issue.

Here, too, we are witnessing Solberg’s “huge social betrayal” by denying the reality of the violence being witnessed by many Australian children.

Just look at the bizarre $30 million television campaign the federal government ran a few months ago, which started with a little boy slamming a door in a little girl’s face. A series of vignettes followed, all about innocent females cowering from nasty males.

The whole thing is based on the erroneous notion that domestic violence is caused by disrespect for women, precisely the type of “tired gender analysis” that Solberg has so thoroughly discredited.

Yet our government spent at least $700,000 in funding for research and production of this campaign — just one example of the shocking misuse of the hundreds of millions of dollars that Malcolm Turnbull boasts our government is spending on domestic violence.

Our key organisations all sing from the same songbook, regularly distorting statistics to present only one part of this complex story.

There is a history of this in Australia. “Up to one quarter of young people in Australia have witnessed an incident of physical or domestic violence against their mother or stepmother,” Adam Graycar, a former director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, wrote in an introduction to a 2001 paper, Young Australians and Domestic Violence, a brief overview of the much larger Young People and Domestic Violence study.

Somehow Graycar failed to mention that while 23 per cent of young people were aware of domestic violence against their mothers or stepmothers, an almost identical proportion (22 per cent) of young people were aware of domestic violence against their fathers or stepfathers by their mothers or stepmothers — as shown in the same study.

This type of omission is everywhere today, with most of our bureaucracies downplaying statistics that demonstrate the role of women in family violence and beating up evidence of male aggression.

How often have we been told we face an epidemic of domestic violence? It’s simply not true. Most Australian women are lucky enough to live in a peaceful society where the men in their lives treat them well.

The official data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows violence against women has decreased across the 20-year period it has been studied, with the proportion of adult women experiencing physical violence from their male partner in the preceding year down from 2.6 per cent in 1996 to 0.8 per cent in 2012. (Violence from ex-partners dropped from 3.3 per cent to 0.7 per cent.)

“There’s no evidence that we’re in the middle of an epidemic of domestic violence,” says Don Weatherburn, the respected director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, confirming that these figures from national surveys carried out by the ABS provide the best data on domestic violence in the country.

He adds that in NSW “serious forms of domestic assault, such as assault inflicting grievous bodily harm, have actually come down by 11 per cent over the last 10 years”.

The most recent statistics from the ABS Personal Safety Survey show 1.06 per cent of women are physically assaulted by their partner or ex-partner each year in Australia. This figure is derived from the 2012 PSS and published in its Horizons report by Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety, available at http://bit.ly/1ZYSyEj. The rate is obtained by dividing cell B9 in Table 19 (93,400) by the total female residential population aged 18 and older (8,735,400).

One in 100 women experiencing this physical violence from their partners is obviously a matter of great concern. But this percentage is very different from the usual figures being trotted out. You’ll never find the figure of 1.06 per cent mentioned by any of the domestic violence organisations in this country. Their goal is to fuel the flames, to promote an alarmist reaction with the hope of attracting ever greater funding for the cause.

What we hear from them is that one in three women are victims of violence. But that’s utterly misleading because it doesn’t just refer to domestic violence. These statistics are also taken from the Personal Safety Survey but refer to the proportion of adult women who have experienced any type of physical violence at all (or threat of violence.) So we’re not just talking about violence by a partner or violence in the home but any aggressive incident, even involving a perfect stranger — such as an altercation with an aggressive shopping trolley driver or an incident of road rage.

That’s partly how the figure inflates to one in three, but it also doesn’t even refer to what’s happening now because these figures include lifetime incidents for adult women — so with our 70-yearolds the violence could have taken place more than 50 years ago. And the equivalent figure for men is worse — one in two.

As for the most horrific crimes, where domestic violence ends in homicide, we are constantly told that domestic violence kills one woman every week. That’s roughly true.

According to AIC figures, one woman is killed by an intimate partner or ex-partner every nine days. One man is killed by his partner about every 30 days. So it is important to acknowledge that male violence is likelier to result in injury or death than female violence towards a partner.

The fact remains that almost a quarter (23.1 per cent) of victims of intimate partner homicide are male — and we hardly ever hear about these deaths.

It is not serving our society well to downplay the fact female violence can also be lethal, towards men and towards children: women account for more than half of all murders of children (52 per cent).

These are all still alarming statistics but here, too, there is good news. Domestic homicides are decreasing. The number of victims of intimate partner homicide dropped by almost a third (28 per cent) between 1989-90 and 2010-12, according to data supplied by the AIC (http://bit.ly/2bxn1GO).

Chris Lloyd is one of a growing number of Australian academics concerned at the misrepresentation of domestic violence statistics in this country. An expert in statistics and data management at the Melbourne Business School, Lloyd confirms our best source of data, the ABS’s Personal Safety Survey, clearly demonstrates domestic violence is decreasing.

He, too, says it’s wrong to suggest there’s an epidemic of domestic violence in this country. “Many of the quoted statistics around domestic violence are exaggerated or incorrect,” says Lloyd. “Contrary to popular belief and commentary, rates of intimate partner violence are not increasing.” He adds that while he understands the emotional reaction people have to this crime, “emotion is no basis for public policy”.

He’s concerned that Australian media so often publishes misinformation — such as a recent editorial in The Age that repeated the falsehood that domestic violence was the leading cause of death or illness for adult women in Victoria.

As I explained in my Inquirer article “Silent victims” last year (http://bit.ly/29CV5zD), it doesn’t even make the list of the top 10 such causes. The Age ignored Lloyd’s efforts to correct its mistake, ditto his concern about erroneous media reports that inflated domestic violence figures by using police crime statistics — a notoriously unreliable source.

As Weatherburn points out, it’s very difficult to determine whether swelling numbers of incidents reported to police reflects an increase in actual crime. “It may simply be a tribute to the excellent job that has been done to raise awareness of DV, encouraging women to report, and efforts to get the police to respond properly,” he points out.

Weatherburn believes that the slight (5.7 per cent) increase in reports of domestic assault in NSW during the past 10 years could be due to an increase in victims’ willingness to report domestic assault; he points to the 11 per cent drop across that time in serious forms of domestic assault, such as assault inflicting grievous bodily harm, as a more reliable picture of the trend in domestic violence.

Weatherburn adds that valid comparisons of state police figures on assault are impossible because each police force has a different approach to recording assault. But in many states the goalposts have also shifted.

The explosion in police records is due in part to recent expansions in the definition of family violence to include not just physical abuse but also threats of violence, psychological, emotional, economic and social abuse. Look at Western Australia, where this changed definition was introduced in 2004. That year West Australian police recorded 17,000 incidents of violence, but by 2012 this had almost tripled to 45,000.

Other states report similar trends because of these expanded definitions.

“If a woman turns up to a police station claiming her man has yelled at her, the chances are that she’ll end up with a police report and well on her way to obtaining an apprehended violence order, which puts her in a very powerful position,” says Augusto Zimmermann, a commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, who explains that AVOs can be used to force men to leave their homes and deny them contact with their children.

Often men are caught in police proceedings and evicted from their homes by orders that are issued without any evidence of legal wrongdoing. “It is a frightening reality that here in Australia a perfectly innocent citizen stands to lose his home, his family, his reputation, as a result of unfounded allegations. This is happening to men every day (as a consequence) of domestic violence laws which fail to require the normal standards of proof and presumptions of innocence,” Zimmermann says, adding that he’s not talking about genuine cases of violent men who seriously abuse their wives and children but “law-abiding people who have lost their parental and property rights without the most basic requirements of the rule of law”.

The growing trend for AVOs to be used for tactical purposes in family law disputes is also pushing up police records of domestic violence. “Rather than being motivated by legitimate concerns about feeling safe, a woman can make an application to AVO simply because she was advised by lawyers to look for any reason to apply for such an order when facing a family law dispute,” says Zimmermann, who served on a recent government inquiry into legal issues and domestic violence.

A survey of NSW magistrates found 90 per cent agreed that AVOs were being used as a divorce tactic. Research by family law professor Patrick Parkinson and colleagues from the University of Sydney revealed that lawyers were suggesting that clients obtain AVOs, explaining to them that verbal and emotional abuse were enough to do the trick

The bottom line is that police reports tell us little and the ABS Personal Safety Survey remains our best source of data, showing the true picture of domestic violence. But there’s one more vital fact revealed by that survey that rarely surfaces: men account for one in three victims of partner violence.

You’ll never find this figure mentioned on Our Watch, one of our leading domestic violence organisations, annually attracting government grants of up to $2 million. In May, when Lucy Turnbull became an ambassador for Our Watch, she was welcomed by its chief executive, Mary Barry, who thanked the ambassadors for “engaging Australians to call out disrespect and violence towards women and advocating for gender equality”, which was “exactly what the evidence says is needed to end the epidemic”.

Our Watch staff spend their time writing policy documents and running conferences all firmly locked into the gender equity framework. The site’s facts-andfigures pages include lists of cherry-picked statistics about violence against women but male victims are dismissed by simply stating that the “overwhelming majority of acts of domestic violence are perpetrated by men against women”.

There’s an interesting parallel here. As it happens, this one-inthree ratio is similar to the proportions of suicides among men and women. Among males, 2.8 per cent of all deaths in 2014 were attributed to suicide, while the rate for females was 0.9 per cent. Imagine the public outcry if the smaller number of female suicides were used to justify committing the entire suicide prevention budget to men. So why is it that all our government organisations are getting away with doing just that with the hundreds of millions being spent on domestic violence?

According to one of Australia’s leading experts on couple relationships, Kim Halford, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Queensland, most family violence does not fit the picture most of us have when we imagine domestic violence — a violent man severely beating up his partner to control her. Such violence makes up less than 1 per cent of family violence.

Most family violence is twoway aggression, with international research showing about a third of couples have a go at each other — pushing, slapping, shoving or worse. Given the shame and stigma associated with being a male victim of family violence it is not surprising that men downplay these experiences in victim surveys such as Australia’s Personal Safety Survey. It’s only when men and women are asked about perpetrating violence that the twoway violence emerges, with women readily admitting to researchers that they are very actively involved and often instigate this type of “couple violence”.

“Thirty years of international research consistently shows that women and men are violent towards each other at about the same rate,” Halford tells Inquirer.

As one example, two major meta-analysis studies conducted by psychology professor John Archer from Britain’s University of Central Lancashire in 2000 and 2002 found that women were likelier than men to report acts such as pushing, slapping or throwing something at their partner. Archer pointed out that women were likelier to be injured as a result of the couple violence, although there was still a substantial minority of injured male victims.

This two-way violence wasn’t what most researchers expected to find, admits a leading researcher in this area, Terrie Moffitt from Duke University in the US. “We asked the girls questions like, ‘Have you hit your partner?’ ‘Have you thrown your partner across the room?’ ‘Have you used a knife on your partner?’ I thought we were wasting our time asking these questions but they said yes, and they said yes in just the same numbers as the boys did.” Moffitt’s work with young people was part of the world-renowned Dunedin longitudinal study back in the 1990s that recently featured on the SBS series Predict My Future (http://bit.ly/29NEDwQ).

It is telling that Australia has not conducted any of the largescale surveys focusing on perpetrating violence likely to reveal the two-way pattern shown elsewhere. But gender symmetry did emerge in violence studies published in 2010-11 by Halford that focused on couples at the start of their relationships, newlywed couples and couples expecting a child together. Even with these early relationships, about a quarter of the women admit they have been violent towards their partners — just as many as the men.

Halford suggests that perhaps three-quarters of a million children every year in Australia are witnessing both parents engaged in domestic violence. Only small numbers see the severe violence we hear so much about, what the feminists call “intimate terrorism”, where a perpetrator uses violence in combination with a variety of other coercive tactics to take control over their partner, but as Halford points out, even less severe couple violence is not trivial.

“Children witnessing any form of family violence, including couple violence, suffer high rates of mental health problems and the children are more likely to be violent themselves. Couple violence is also a very strong predictor of relationship break-up, which has profound effects on adults and their children,” he says.

The 2001 Young People and Domestic Violence study mentioned earlier was based on national research involving 5000 young Australians aged 12 to 20. This found ample evidence that children were witnessing this twoway parental couple violence, with 14.4 per cent witnessing “couple violence”, 9 per cent witnessing male to female violence only and 7.8 per cent witnessing female to male violence only — which means about one in four young Australians have this detrimental start to their lives. The report found the most damage to children occurred when they witnessed both parents involved in violence.

It is often claimed that women hit only in self-defence, but Halford points out the evidence shows this is not true. “In fact, one of the strongest risk factors for a woman being hit by a male partner is her hitting that male partner. It’s absolutely critical that we tackle couple violence if we really want to stop this escalation into levels of violence which cause women serious injury,” he says. Of course, the impact on children is the other important reason to make couple violence a significant focus.

Naturally, none of this rates a mention in the section on “what drives violence against women” in the official government framework (http://bit.ly/2a3sVOQ) promoted by all our key domestic violence bodies. Nor is there any proper attention paid to other proven, evidence-based risk factors such as alcohol and drug abuse, poverty and mental illness.

The only officially sanctioned risk factor for domestic violence in this country is gender inequality. “Other factors interact with or reinforce gender inequality to contribute to increased frequency and severity of violence against women, but do not drive violence in and of themselves” is the only grudging acknowledgment in the framework that other factors may be at play.

At the recent hearings of Victoria’s Royal Commission into Family Violence, experts in alcohol abuse and mental illness spoke out about this blatant disregard of the 40 years of research that addresses these complexities. “It is simplistic and misleading to say that domestic violence is caused by patriarchal attitudes,” said James Ogloff, a world-renowned mental health expert.

“A sole focus on the gendered nature of family violence, which labels men as the perpetrators and women as the victims and which identifies gender inequity as the principal cause of family violence, is problematic on a number of levels,” said Peter Miller, principal research fellow and co-director of the violence prevention group at Deakin University.

Miller was involved in a comprehensive recent review of longitudinal studies involving predictors of family violence that identified childhood experiences with abuse and violence, particularly in families with problem alcohol use, as key predictors of adult involvement in domestic violence. He has encountered obstruction in conducting and publishing research into the role of drugs and alcohol in family violence.

The evidence is there about the complexities of domestic violence, but on an official level no one is listening. The reason is simple. The deliberate distortion of this important social issue is all about feminists refusing to give up hardwon turf. Ogloff spelled this out to the royal commission when he explained that the Victorian family violence sector feared that “recognising other potential causes of violence could cause a shift in funding away from programs directed at gender inequity”.

Forty years ago an important feminist figure was invited to Australia to visit our newly established women’s refuges. Erin Pizzey was the founder of Britain’s first refuge, a woman praised around the world for her pioneering work helping women escape from violence. On the way to Australia Pizzey travelled to New Zealand, where she spoke out about her changing views. She had learned through dealing with violent women in her refuge that violence was not a gender issue and that it was important to tackle the complexities of violence to properly address the issue.

Pizzey quickly attracted the wrath of the women’s movement in Britain, attracting death threats that forced her for a time to leave the country. She tells Inquirer from London: “The feminists seized upon domestic violence as the cause they needed to attract more money and supporters at a time when the first flush of enthusiasm for their movement was starting to wane. Domestic violence was perfect for them — the just cause that no one dared challenge. It led to a worldwide million-dollar industry, a huge cash cow supporting legions of bureaucrats and policymakers.”

In Pizzey’s New Zealand press interviews she challenged the gender inequality view of violence, suggesting tackling violence in the home required dealing with the real roots of violence, such as intergenerational exposure to male and female aggression.

News travelled fast. By the time Pizzey was set to leave for the Australian leg of the trip she was persona non grata with the feminists running our refuges. Her visit to this country was cancelled.

That was 1976. Since then the gendered view of domestic violence has held sway, dissenters are silenced and evidence about the true issues underlying this complex issue is ignored. And the huge cash cow supporting our blinkered domestic violence industry becomes ever more bloated.

How often have we been told we face an epidemic of domestic violence? It’s simply not true
Bettina Arndt is a Sydney-based social commentator.

PC world

THE AUSTRALIAN

The death of humour

BILL LEAK

Forget terrorist attacks, it’s humourless hipsters who threaten our way of life

I told a joke at a dinner party in 1978 and no one laughed. I knew it was a good joke because I’d laughed until my tonsils showed when I first heard it and everyone I’d gone on to tell it to had done the same.

But not this mob. Their constipated faces suggested a belly laugh ready to emerge, but they seemed determined not to let it as they squirmed in their chairs, grimaced and flapped their hands in disgust.

My host, an intimidatingly intellectual Marxist academic lecturing not in art but in “visual communication”, launched into a vicious but eloquent tirade of abuse, excoriating me for having told a joke that was racist and sexist, and therefore unworthy of being told in his exalted company.

While I didn’t know it then, I’d been belted by someone wielding the weapon now known as political correctness. They were opening salvos in a war on humour itself that has forged a strange alliance between supposed Western progressive thinkers and the anti-progress force of Islam.

Political correctness has been thriving in the Islamic world since the seventh century. Not even the smuggest, most self-righteous social justice warrior in Australia today could hold a candle to Mohammed, who made the antiguy guy David Morrison look like Rodney Rude. Mohammed occasionally smiled but would never display his tonsils, though one of his disciples once did report excitedly that he “indeed saw the Messenger of Allah laugh till his front teeth were exposed”.

He also advised his followers not to laugh because “laughing too much deadens the heart” and warned them off joking by saying: “A man may say something to make his companions laugh, and he will fall into Hell as far as the Pleiades because of it.” In other words, the reward for anyone telling jokes and making his mates laugh was to spend eternity burning in the fires of hell.

If you want to crack a gag at an Islamist open mic night you’ve got to make sure you stick within the guidelines as laid down in the Koran and Hadith. And that means “for humour to be in accordance with Islam, the joke should not insult anyone, should not frighten anyone, should be within the limits of Islamic tolerance, should tell the truth, should not be offensive, should not contain un-Islamic material or promote immorality or indecency”.

Sound familiar?

If you substitute PC for Islam in that set of rules you’ve got the rules governing humour as laid down by the progressive Left in the democracies of the modern world. Right there, in a nutshell. Except you’d have to leave out the one that demands you tell the truth because the primary purpose of PC is the avoidance of it.

As human beings, we are hardwired to a need for transcendent, sublime experience. We need access to a higher level of consciousness that provides us with an escape from the mundane realities of everyday life in a way that’s more enduring and more rewarding than, say, a night out on the eccies. So what is it about the sublime that postmodernist progressives find so objectionable? You don’t deconstruct a joke before laughing at it; when you get it, you experience it. And you don’t read or analyse a work of art; you experience that, too.

Both, at their best, give you access to the sublime.

But by demanding of art that it must have a literal meaning, postmodernism has demeaned and suffocated art by reducing it to the level of illustration, and the whole idea of art as a means of accessing the transcendent has gone right out the door. Visitors to galleries are now required to read the artist’s statement first before plunging into the work itself for fear of not knowing how to navigate their way around it, not understanding its meaning and walking away baffled. But there’s no artist’s statement next to Picasso’s Guernica, Beethoven didn’t write a list of instructions for people to read before listening to his symphonies and you didn’t need a degree in philosophy to find Groucho Marx funny. He just was.

So, with access to the sublime through art now denied and Christianity discredited, environmentalism has emerged to fill the higher power vacuum and become the religion of choice for everyone who claims not to have one. It is every bit as oppressive as Christianity used to be and Islam still is, its high priests preach just as much fire and brimstone from their pulpits, and its devotees are every bit as dull. Its influence is so pervasive that our postreligion, atheistic society has not only become a deeply religious one, it’s on the verge of transforming into a theocracy.

If you’re found guilty of heresy against the new religion its perpetually offended and outraged adherents respond with the same sort of savagery that once drove Christians to burn witches and now drives Islamists to acts of mass murder. And you’re kidding yourself if you don’t believe they wouldn’t happily make the transition from metaphorical lynching on social media to actual lynching if given the chance.

Prudishness used to be the prerogative of the straitlaced conservative who attended church and was derided as a Bible-basher. Today, virtue signalling and censoriousness are fashionable so it has become the prerogative of the hipster. And with the sanctimonious hordes lying in wait, armed to the teeth with Twitter and Facebook accounts and ready to ambush anyone who transgresses the unwritten laws of the new puritanism, the cartoonist’s job gets harder every day.

The trick has always been to look at a serious issue, exaggerate it to the point of absurdity and draw what you see when you get there. But the trick doesn’t work in these strange times when the more ridiculous an issue is, the more seriously it’s taken. And if you’re starting at the point of absurdity, where do you go from there? What’s the point in pointing out the absurdity inherent in something that’s obviously absurd and, more important, why isn’t everyone already laughing?

Why didn’t everyone just burst out laughing when, for example, someone suggested the dark arts of penis tucking and breast binding be taught to little children as part of the school curriculum? If we, as a society, weren’t losing our sense of the absurd, no one, let alone government ministers in the federal parliament, would have been able to keep a straight face when they heard that one. It would have been even more difficult to suppress a chuckle when that same person went on to explain that teaching little kids cross-dressing techniques would stop them being nasty and calling each other names and that no one would find it silly if the whole exercise were to be disguised as an anti-bullying program.

I mean, give me a break. In their relentless quest to transform society into the dismal utopia of their dreams, not even the innocence of childhood is safe from attack by the authoritarian barbarians of the new left intelligentsia. And because the progressive fundamentalists now are trying to dictate what’s permissible when it comes to cracking jokes, just like the barbarians of fundamentalist Islam, cartoonists have found themselves on the frontline.

The keyboard warriors of the

Prudishness today is the prerogative of the hipster and virtue signalling and censoriousness have become fashionable humourless Left could learn a thing or two from that old prankster, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who said: “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humour in Islam. There is no fun in Islam.” And he wasn’t joking.

In 1989 he issued a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for writing a book. Sixteen years later a group of cartoonists in Denmark proved you no longer had to go to the trouble of writing a whole book to put your life, and the lives of others, in danger; drawing a cartoon would do the trick.

Two hundred people died in riots that swept across the world because a single page full of cartoons was published in a Danish newspaper.

Ten years later, 12 people were shot dead in the office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, five of whom were cartoonists.

Two days later I drew an innocuous cartoon in response to this atrocity and woke up the next morning with a roaring fatwa. Officers in the counter-terrorist unit were picking up instructions to “fellow mujaheddin” in Australia from some wannabe gangsta of Islamic State to hunt me down and kill me for having offended the delicate sensitivities of adherents of a religion that imposed restrictions on humour.

Like the big brains in our human heads, our sense of humour is something that has taken a long time to evolve and we’ve developed it for very good reasons. By laughing at the things we fear most, humour enables us to rise above them. Our ability to recognise and laugh at the absurd provides us with a mechanism for keeping things in perspective without which we’d all go insane. Just as our sense of smell tells us a prawn has gone off and we’d better not eat it, our sense of humour tells us something’s absurd and we’d better not take it seriously. But unlike the smell of the rotten prawn that makes us reel back in disgust, the sudden impact of a front-on crash between the serious and the absurd makes us burst into laughter — a visceral, cathartic explosion of enjoyment not even the dourest intellectual would describe as unpleasant.

And what sort of dour intellectual would want to deny any other human being such simple but transcendent moments of pure joy? It would have to be someone who, through some perversion of the evolutionary process, had arrived at a stage where a conscious effort to suppress the urge to laugh at something funny was no longer required. This person would have achieved a state of humourlessness Mohammed himself would have admired and the likes of my academic mates back in 1978 could only dream of. Someone like Rebecca Shaw, for example.

Tim Blair wrote a hilarious column on May 9 in which he argued that if the man previously known as Bruce Jenner can now call himself Caitlyn and be considered a woman and a white woman named Rachel Dolezal can now be considered a black woman because that’s what she says she is, then it’s unfair that Belle Gibson isn’t allowed to be considered a cancer survivor just because she has never had cancer.

In a blistering response, Shaw, who identifies as a humorist — “one of Australia’s leading satirists”, no less — and writes hysterical columns that appear on the SBS website, went to great pains to explain why Blair’s column wasn’t funny. Among other damning insights, Shaw claimed Blair failed to amuse because he was “a writer making comparisons between two completely unrelated things” — a view that would have surprised most thinkers who have tried to understand why some things make us laugh, including Arthur Koestler, who believed “humour results when two different frames

of reference are set up and a collision is engineered between them”.

For most of us reading Blair’s column no explanation of why it was funny was needed; it just was. And certainly for anyone reading Shaw’s musings, no explanation of why they weren’t funny was needed either; they just weren’t. The thing that does require an explanation is how someone like Shaw can be considered a satirist. She and the legions of others who stormed in to provide her with back-up spend their time looking for things to be offended by, instead of amused by, and then getting angry about them instead of laughing at them.

Satire is an offensive weapon

and when you fire it off someone, somewhere, will claim their feelings have been hurt. That’s their business. If they choose to be the collateral damage in a humour assault, it’s hardly the fault of the person who launched it.

You can’t keep loading up the cannon and blasting away if you’re going to waste time worrying about people who prefer to be offended than amused.

The cartoonist’s task has always been to reveal uncomfortable truths in a humorous way. People will pause to reflect on something, no matter how confronting it is, if they’re able to laugh at it first.

As a white, cisgendered Aussie male of a certain age, I could identify as a member of a persecuted minority myself and luxuriate in self-pity while being perpetually offended. Instead I find myself not only disillusioned but also frankly amazed that the contagion of political correctness could ever have spread to our shores.

Our legendary larrikin streak was one of our greatest national assets and, if it were still in good shape, would have made us immune to it.

We used to be instinctively anti-authoritarian and cynical, which made it almost impossible to offend us, and was the reason Australia became a breeding ground for great cartoonists. But it’s not any more because, instead of manning the barricades against this plague, our cartoonists, with a few honourable exceptions, rushed to embrace it. They abandoned a proud, national tradition of iconoclasm, wit and invective, and defected, en masse, to the purse-lipped prohibitionists and wowsers of the green-left intelligentsia.

It’s no wonder that so few of them have drawn a cartoon that was surprising, provocative or funny since. And how could they? As George Orwell said: “You cannot be really funny if your main aim is to flatter the comfortable classes.” When he wrote that in 1941 the people who made up the “comfortable classes” weren’t the sort of climate change miserabilists with dietary requirements and ironic beards that comprise the establishment today. And you’d think the last people on earth who’d want to become part of a crowd like that would be Australian cartoonists.

But they do. They want to be cool, they want to be popular; liked on Facebook, followed on Twitter. So at a time when their duty to offend has never been more pressing, they go out of their way to appease the offenderati by making their cartoons as inoffensive, as insipid, as possible.

Islamists have declared war on our civilisation and the best our politically correct politicians can do is assure us that if we all delete the word Islam from our vocabularies the threat, along with the word, will somehow just magically disappear. And our cartoonists, whose job it is to ridicule politicians when they spout nonsense like that, are letting them get away with it. Well, they shouldn’t.

You may not be able to ride your pushbike without a helmet, you may have to look at close-ups of corpses while you’re outside in the rain having a smoke, and old Nanny State may have assumed the right to tell you when it’s time to stop drinking and go home to bed, but here in the Lucky Country you can still find a space where it’s safe to tell a joke and people like me can still make a living out of poking fun at people in power.

It was hard enough to find somebody who hadn’t already heard the joke I told at that disastrous dinner party and now, after it has been circulating for nearly 40 more years, it’s almost impossible. But my mate Ramin, who comes from Tehran and knows a thing or two about what it’s like to live in a country where you can be thrown into jail and flogged for dancing, hadn’t heard it until I told it to him a week ago. I hadn’t even reached the final word of the punchline, “And why do you ask, Two Dogs …”, when he threw his head back and laughed until his tonsils showed.

The cartoonist’s task has always been to reveal uncomfortable truths

Bill Leak draws the daily editorial cartoons in The Australian. He has won nine Walkley Awards, 19 Stanley Awards and two News Awards.

Politics

Populism is diminishing democracies from Philippines to US

• THE AUSTRALIAN
• MAY 14, 2016 12:00AM
• SAVE
• PRINT

• Greg Sheridan

  Foreign Editor

  Melbourne

  https://plus.google.com/101372426793016687263

This was the week the world changed. The giant waves of crude populism — the new unstoppable force in global politics — crashed through the flimsy defences of the political establishment everywhere, defences that once looked so unassailable.Left-wing populism and right-wing populism, in truth lightly disguised twins, are devouring the politics of the centre, whether centre right or centre left.

In jurisdictions as different as they can be, sharing only the feature of being democratic in their politics, gross, vulgar, hyper-partisan populism is winning victory after victory for irrational hatreds and prejudices.

This week in The Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte was elected president by a big margin. The mayor of Davao City, Duterte once joked at the rape and murder of an Australian nurse that she was so good-looking he wished he had got in first. He boasted of his association with Davao death squads. He offered to kill hundreds of criminals and dump their bodies in Manila Bay. He abused the Pope in foul terms and cursed him for causing traffic gridlock during his visit. And he said that if his nation’s congress attempts to thwart his plans, he will dissolve it and rule The Philippines without congress.

Why did he win? His main promise was to crack down on crime, which is, as ever, a plague in The Philippines.

But Duterte’s victory follows six years of outstandingly good government by Filipino standards under the outgoing Benigno Aquino III, which saw the most rapid economic growth in the country since the earliest days of Ferdinand Marcos.

When ordinary voters were asked why they supported a figure such as Duterte, many of them said the same thing that Donald Trump’s new supporters say in the US: he seems authentic.

Authentic is the new vile word of democratic politics. Being authentic seems to mean you rejoice in your ignorance, you are dedicated to vulgarity and abuse, and your policies are incoherent.

The US also reached a new stage in the rise of populism this week. Oddly, it didn’t directly involve Trump. Bernie Sanders, the 74-year-old socialist from Vermont, smashed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary in West Virginia. He has won 19 states to her 23. Sanders calls for a revolution in politics; he wants to implement socialism, he wants to smash up the banks, cut the military, impose radical new climate change policies, soak the top 1 per cent, make the rich pay and all the rest, without any idea about how these impulses might be reconciled with each other, or with the limitations of the physical universe.

But here’s the thing that was different this week; here is the marker of a new paradigm:
one-third of those who voted for Sanders in West Virginia say that if the US presidential election in November is a contest between Clinton and Trump, they will vote for Trump rather than Sanders’s political stablemate Clinton.

In a further radical development, new polls have Trump neck and neck with Clinton, especially in the key battleground states.

A month ago, Clinton led Trump by wide margins. Clinton is the last defender of centrist politics in the US, and her position has been steadily worsening for weeks.

There are differences between left-wing populism and right-wing populism.

Left-wing populism wants to smash capitalism in the interests of the climate, it tends not to be so nationalistic, though outside the US it is virulently anti-American, and it is mostly pro-gay rights.

Right-wing populism is intensely nationalistic and often nativist. It wants to smash capitalism, as it currently works, in the interest of giving more government money to the middle class.

But the common core of left and right populism is much more important than their differences. The common core is a seething anger beyond proportion to any injustice or imperfection that really exists in the society. The common core is a determination to smash politics-as-usual, with all its messy compromises.

The common core is a demand that government give more and perhaps endless transfer payments to the middle classes as well as to the poor. The common core is a hatred of international trade, which is really a hatred of foreigners, made palatable to the Left and newly attractive to the Right. The common core is a demonisation of any political competitor. And the common core is a loss of any sense of balance, restraint, coherence or responsibility, and an absolute contempt for the proper processes of democracy.

The third great moment of populist triumph this week was the impeachment by the Brazilian Senate of the democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff.

There are lots of reasons to be critical of Rousseff. Brazil is suffering recession. Rousseff is not a very attractive politician. But she was impeached for allegedly fudging the figures of the national budget, surely a “crime” of which most governments are guilty, and impeached by a congress with dozens of members who are facing charges of actual corruption, of dishonestly putting money in their own pockets.

But that is the character of the new populism, a contempt for traditional restraints. This wave is breaking everywhere. Centrist politics is in full, panicked retreat.

A couple of weeks ago, Austria held a presidential election. Because no candidate won 50 per cent of the vote there will need to be a second round. The winner in the first round was the gun-toting Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party. Second placegetter was Alexander Van der Bellen from the Green Party.

The Austrian centre is mortally wounded. For the first time since 1945, neither the Social Democrats nor the Christian democrats will win Austria’s presidency. Hofer says he will veto Europe’s free-trade deal with the US, he is ardently anti-immigrant, but he is pro-welfare payments.

Eastern Europe is swinging away from moderate centrist democracy, which replaced communism in what seemed a historic and enduring triumph, and is instead heading towards populist authoritarianism.

Hungary’s government says it wants to build an “illiberal state”.

The Polish government wants the media to do as the government tells it to do.

The Czech President joins in anti-Muslim rallies.

Populism is destroying rational economics, with unknowable consequences. In Britain the populist UK Independence Party, which made huge gains in recent local council and Welsh assembly elections, started life as Eurosceptic and economically rationalist, arguing for smaller government and lower taxes.

It has abandoned economic rationalism and favours greater government money for almost everybody. It is leading a populist assault notionally from the right, but which is potentially more dangerous to the British ­Labour Party than to the Conservatives.

One central feature of populism is that its proponents know they will almost certainly never have to make the real, painful, inevitable compromises of effective government. They can and do promise anything and everything, things that cannot go together.

Trump says he will pay down $US19 trillion of debt, increase military spending, protect social entitlements and balance the budget. It can’t be done, by him or by anyone else.

A new Italian party promises to double the pension. This will bankrupt the country. It’s not about economics, they say, but justice.

The attachment of tremendous moral intensity to irrational policy positions is the essence of populism. Populism has brought about the massive growth of parties that don’t care for compromise.

In 1955, 96 per cent of the British electorate voted Conservative or Labour. Both of these parties had coherent policy packages that made the essential compromises of reality and offered alternative but coherent policy platforms.

Last year, barely two-thirds of Brits voted for either of the main parties. This is not a splendid flowering of diversity but a flight from responsibility.

The same trends are evident in Australia. In 1975, 95 per cent of the vote went to the Coalition or to Labor. In 2013, it was little more than three-quarters in the House of Representatives and less in the Senate.

There are many reasons people vote for minor parties, but there is no escaping the fact no minor party really offers a coherent program in which means and ends are matched. Those minor parties that used to preach fiscal discipline, such as Germany’s venerable Free Democrats, have disappeared.

Our own politics are profoundly shaped by the global rise of populism. This is obscured only a little by the eclipse of the Palmer United Party. That came about for two clear reasons unrelated to policy: the commercial demise of Queensland Nickel and the personal divisions within the PUP Senate team. But, as in the US, it is our main parties that are now becoming ­hostages to populism or enthusiastic vehicles for it.

The Liberal-National government under Malcolm Turnbull has virtually given up on fiscal consolidation. And fiscal consolidation, of course — the idea that you might take something away from some voters to balance the budget, live within your means, avoid a long-term debt crisis, keep the taxation burden in order, promote wider economic growth — is the very opposite of populism.

So while the Turnbull government is not a populist avatar, it is a prisoner of populism. Even its rhetoric is now unconsciously apeing the rhetoric of the populist Occupy Wall Street movement, the anti-1 per cent movement, the movement that demonises high-income earners.

Thus in justifying perfectly defensible changes to superannuation arrangements, Scott Morrison this week commented that if you are in the top 1 per cent, you can afford to pay some more tax.

Here is the new Liberal response to populism — a mild, measured, well-mannered offer to manage the populist impulse less damagingly than Labor would. But gone is the rhetoric of smaller government, deregulation or any real effort to lower taxes.

If the Coalition is a prisoner of the new populism, Labor is its enthusiastic proponent. At a time when the nation faces a $40 billion deficit and already pays more than $12bn a year in interest, when foreign debt is $1 trillion, when our terms of trade have moved decisively against us, Bill Shorten offers a massive new burst of social spending, demonising of the banks, entrenched labour market rigidity to protect unions and lock the marginalised out of work, and endlessly increased welfare to keep them dependent forevermore.

All this at a time when the evidence has never been weaker that increased spending on education, along the lines of the huge increases we have had during the past 1½ decades, produces any tangible benefit.

One central part of populism is an utter distrust of government and the integrity of government processes. So all claims for good policy are inherently suspect. The only thing the electorate accepts from government is money. More transfer payments, more money for health and education, salary increases for public servants of all kinds.

The electorate just about believes government can deliver on this, but good economic policy, long-term tax relief, these are now meaningless. All of that resides in a realm of policy discussion much of the electorate no longer takes seriously.

What has caused this global rise of populism? That is a very big question. Here are some initial, sketchy suggestions.

There is obvious anger at the income inequality that seems to have been exacerbated by the global financial crisis of nearly a decade ago, and the stagnation, especially in the US, of wages for the bottom half of society.

But that alone is a most unsatisfactory explanation. The West endured the Depression and resorted only to the moderate efforts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the US and a Labor government in Australia. There was no Donald Trump or anything like him.

Instead, here are a few other longer-term likely culprits.

One is the education system. Western education, at school and university level, is infused with the idea that the West is corrupt and wicked in all its works, that capitalism is destroying the environment, that Western history is one long brutal story of military conquest, that Western society is sexist, racist, homophobic, militarist, that Western religion is irrational.

Often an exaggerated hostility to the West is the chief connecting thread of education. The examples of this are countless. Israel is demonised in part because it is a Western-patterned society in the Middle East, so naturally Victorian Certificate of Education students study a locally written play depicting Israel as evil and the oppressor of the Palestinians.

Second, US politics, and therefore global politics, has undergone a long discrediting. Watergate under Richard Nixon shocked Americans and convinced them that their president can lie and cheat. Bill Clinton’s scandal with Monica Lewinsky was not so important in itself, but Clinton lied about it under oath, proving that anything goes.

And the Republicans responded in spades with abuse. Both sides became hyper-partisan. They spoke about each other in terms of extravagant disrespect in a way that Americans had not been accustomed to speaking of their political leaders.

Then came the failures of Iraq and the sense again, even if not justified, that the government had lied to the people. The disappointment of Barack Obama followed. And US political culture lends its character in some measure to democratic political culture everywhere. There is nothing more derivative than allegedly spontaneous populist outrage.

Third, American popular culture, which in truth is global popular culture, has for a few decades now produced film after film, TV series after TV series, in which the villain is the US government, the CIA or a big corporation. That is now many people’s mental reality.

Fourth, the corrosive influence of social media on public debate serves above all to amplify complaint and abuse, and complaint and abuse are the dark heart of populism.

These turbulent currents threaten a kind of permanent crisis in governance across the democratic world.

And our only weapons in response are rational argument and the petty integrity of facts.

This could all get much worse before it gets any better.

Vocations

Crisis Magazine

Sacrificing Religious Life on the Altar of Egalitarianism

BR. JUSTIN HANNEGAN

Young Catholics are spurning religious life.  According to the Official Catholic Directory, there were only 1,853 seminarians studying for American religious orders in 2011.  That’s less than half the number of religious seminarians that were studying in 1980 (4,674), and less than one tenth the number that were studying in 1965 (22,230), according to Kenneth Jones’ Index of Leading Catholic Indicators.  Even the most successful religious orders are suffering.  The U.S. Dominicans boast of increased vocations, but today they have only about 100 student brothers (compared to 343 in 1965).  Dominican vocations may have increased in the past few years—likely as a result of perceived orthodoxy, strong community life, and aggressive promotional efforts—but they are still anemic.  Orders like the Dominicans look successful only because everyone else has hit rock bottom.

According to Jones’ figures, the Passionists went from having 574 seminarians in 1965, to 5 in 2000.  The Vincentians went from 700 to 18.  The Oblates of Mary Immaculate went from 914 to 13.  The Redemptorists went from 1,128 to 24.  The same story holds for the Jesuits, OFM, Christian Brothers, Benedictines, Maryknoll Fathers, Holy Cross Fathers, Augustinians, and Carmelites.  American religious vocations have been decimated, and they remain decimated today.  Religious life in America, therefore, continues its precipitous decline: according to the USCCB, compared to the 214,932 American religious in 1965, there were only 102,326 religious in 2000; 84,918 in 2006; 80,137 in 2008; and now 69,405 in 2013.  Of the 69,405 religious who remain today the average age is close to seventy years old.

What happened to religious vocations?  Some commentators blame heterodoxy within American orders.  Others blame our glitzy, debauched culture.  Still others blame a prevailing spiritual malaise amongst Catholics.  But there is another cause for the vocations crisis that commentators fail to recognize: vocations directors, counselors, and authors, despite their best intentions, systematically undermine religious vocations.

Suppose that you are considering religious life.  Today’s vocations counselors will advise you to search your heart for a desire to live religious life; and they will tell you that if you don’t find this desire you are probably not called.  For example, James Martin, S.J., prominent Catholic author and editor of America, writes in an article for the VISION Vocations Network, “God awakens our vocations primarily through our desires.”  He claims, “Henri Nouwen became a priest because he desired it,” and “Thérèse of Lisieux entered the convent because she desired it.”  Fr. Martin Pable, author of the widely recommended guide to religious discernment, A Religious Vocation: Is It for Me?, also focuses on desire.  He says that we are called to religious life by a “natural desire or attraction toward
the life.”  If we are “repulsed or just not attracted” by religious life, that’s “a sign we are not being called.”  Vocations directors across the country refer young Catholics to authors like Martin and Pable.  They also echo Martin and Pable’s discernment advice.  Sister Colleen Therese Smith, vocation director of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, says that when it comes to your vocation “your own deepest desires do in fact reflect God’s deepest desires for you.”  The Mid-America Cupuchins’ vocation team says that the first sign of a religious vocation “can be phrased by the question, ‘Do I have a desire for the life?’”  Sister Margie Lavonis, vocations counselor for the Sisters of the Holy Cross, says, “One of the best ways to discover what God asks of you is for you to listen to the deepest desire of your heart.”  Other examples abound.  The prevailing opinion amongst those who talk and write about discernment is that God calls men and women to religious life by placing an innate desire for religious life in their hearts.  If you have no such desire, it is unlikely that you are called.

This advice, although it looks harmless on the surface, ends up thwarting religious vocations.  Men and women who prayerfully examine their desires almost never find a strong desire for religious life lodged in the depths of their hearts.  Religious life, in itself, is not a desirable good.  Religious life is a renunciation.  It is a kind of death.  It involves turning one’s back on what is humanly good and desirable.  Consider the life of a Trappist.  A Trappist monk deprives himself of sleep, deprives himself of food, gives up a wife and children, puts aside the joys of conversation, gives up his personal property, rises at 4:00 in the morning every day to chant interminable psalms in a cold church, loses the opportunity to travel, and even relinquishes his own will.  The thought of being a Trappist is not an appealing thought.  It instills a kind of dread—the sort of dread that we feel when we contemplate a skull, or when we stand over a precipice, or when we look across a barren landscape.  All forms of religious life have this repulsive effect.  All forms of religious life, at their very core, consist of three vows—poverty, chastity, and obedience—and each of these vows is repulsive.  The vow of poverty means giving up money and property; the vow of chastity means giving up a spouse and children; and the vow of obedience means giving up one’s own will.  No one has an innate desire to sever himself from property, family, and his own will.  No one has an innate desire to uproot three of life’s greatest goods.  Such a desire would be mere perversion.

Everyone, however, has an innate desire to get married.  Religious life is a renunciation, but marriage is a positive good.  So, if we ask people to decide between religious life and marriage on the basis of their desires, they are going to choose marriage every time.  And that’s what’s happening.  Vocations directors tell their advisees to prayerfully search their desires in order to find their vocation.  The advisees search, and what do they find?  An aversion to religious life and a desire for marriage.  So they choose marriage.  Meanwhile, religious orders shrink and die.

If we want to revitalize religious life, we need to rethink our methodology.  We need to stop telling people to look within their hearts for an innate desire for religious life.  They have no such desire.  Instead of asking people whether they desire religious life, we should ask them whether they desire salvation—whether they desire to become saints.  If sanctity is the goal, then religious life and all its harrowing renunciations begin to make sense.  Although religious life is the hardest, most fearsome way to live, it is also the most spiritually secure, most fruitful, and most meritorious.  Saint Bernard of Clairvaux tells us that because they renounce property, family, and their own wills, religious “live more purely, they fall more rarely, they rise more speedily, they are aided more powerfully, they live more peacefully, they die more securely, and they are rewarded more abundantly.”  According to Saint Athanasius, “if a man embraces the holy and unearthly way, even though as compared with [married life] it be rugged and hard to accomplish, nonetheless it has the more wonderful gifts: for it grows the perfect fruit, namely a hundredfold.”  Theresa of Avila even tells us that she became a nun, against her own desires, because she “saw that the religious state was the best and safest.”  Religious life is daunting, it is tough, and it requires us to give up many good things.  But, according to the Church and her great saints, it is the surest road to holiness.  And that is why we choose it.  The only way to increase vocations is to tell young Catholics the truth about religious life.  Religious life is the most effective means to sanctity—more effective than marriage, and more effective than any other calling.

Vocations directors, however, are unwilling to talk about religious life as the most effective means to sanctity.  One reason for this unwillingness is their fear of contradicting the Second Vatican Council’s universal call to holiness.  According toLumen Gentium: “All Christians in any state of life are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of love.”  This message is both true and good.  But many Catholics take the message a step farther than it was intended to go.  They infer that because all people are called to become saints all vocations must be equally effective means to sanctity.  This is a great error.  The view that marriage and religious life are equal paths to holiness is contrary to the writings of saints like Bernard, Athanasius, and Theresa, but it is also condemned by the Council of Trent and contradicted by John Paul II in Vita Consecrata.  Session XXIV of the Council of Trent declared: anyone who denies that it is “better and more blessed to remain in virginity, or in celibacy, than to be united in matrimony; let him be anathema.”  Pope John Paul II reaffirmed this teaching in Vita Consecrata: “it is to be recognized that the consecrated life… has an objective superiority.”

Today’s ubiquitous assumption that marriage and religious life are equal paths to holiness is not merely bad doctrine.  It is also a deathblow for religious life.  Once you accept that religious life and lay married life are equally effective means to sanctity, you undercut the only compelling motivation for becoming a religious.  If lay married life provides an equally effective means to sanctity, plus the goods of pleasure, family, property, one’s own will, etc., then it is irrational to choose religious life.  Choosing religious life over marriage would mean punishing yourself for no good reason.  It would mean turning your back on—showing contempt for—the goods of God’s creation while gaining nothing from your sacrifice.  If lay married life gets you to sanctity just as easily and reliably as religious life, then all that religious life amounts to is a kind of masochism.  In the words of University of Washington sociologist Rodney Stark, “what does a woman gain in return for her vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience, if she… acquires no special holiness thereby, while spending her working hours side-by-side with married women who now are officially seen as her equal in terms of virtue, but who are free from her obligations?”

Well, therein lies the problem.  In order to protect an imagined equality between vocations, today’s vocations directors and counselors are selling masochism under the label ‘religious life.’  No wonder there are so few takers.  Even secular sociologists—after closely examining the data—recognize this as the primary cause for the vocations implosion.  Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, in their joint paper, “Catholic Religious Vocations: Decline and Revival,” claim “the data are conclusive that the collapse of Catholic [religious] vocations was self-imposed, not merely incidental to the process of modernity.”  The decline in religious vocations “was in response to a cost/benefit ratio that had suddenly gone from positive to negative.” “[T]he doctrine denying that special holiness attached to religious vocations transformed the remaining sacrifices of the religious life into gratuitous costs.”  In light of these costs, and “in the absence of the primary rewards of the religious life, few potential recruits found it any longer an attractive choice.”  Young Catholics have been offered masochism under the label ‘religious life,’ and they have wisely rejected it.

If we want to revive religious vocations, then we have only one option.  We must tell the uncomfortable truth.  Religious life is the most effective, reliable means to sanctity and salvation—more effective than marriage, and more effective than any other calling.  This is a tough, unpopular message.  But if we refuse to speak this message, religious life will continue its inevitable decline.  If we refuse to speak this message, then we have chosen to sacrifice religious life on the altar of egalitarianism.