SomeInterestingFacts

The Australian

WITCH-BURNING CURE WILL BE DEADLIER THAN THE VIRUS

RJ SMITH

We should focus on protecting those truly at risk, without a rush to economic suicide
We are in the midst of the strangest event of our lives. Societies have shut down. Families and whole nations face financial ruin. Walking the streets is now a crime from Paris to Sydney to Mumbai. And all of this has occurred not despite the will of the people but because of it.

The reasons are well known. There is a virus on the loose. It is transmitted by humans and is killing tens of thousands. It is an existential threat at which all resources must be thrown and all energy expended.

This is the popular mantra. And if true it would justify the incredible events we are witnessing. The problem is that it appears not to be true, a fact few are willing to entertain amid the hysteria that prevails. Yet its falsity is suggested on a cursory review of the best available data.

That data is provided by Italy, an early epicentre of the virus with many deaths.

On March 26, the country’s peak health organisation — the National Institute of Health — published a report with details of the 6801 deaths the country had recorded to that point. This is a considerable sample size, and the figures are revealing.

The first statistics of note are those about the average age of casualties, which is 78. The median is

79. A little more than 95 per cent of victims were over 60, and zero deaths were recorded for people under the age of 30.

Then there is the method of designating the virus as the cause of death, which includes anyone who had tested positive for it before dying. In other words, many were said to have died from the virus when in truth they merely died with it.

Third, 98 per cent of casualties of a random sample of patients had a pre-existing chronic illness, or comorbidity, at their time of death. About 21 per cent suffered from a single comorbidity, 26 per cent from two, 51 per cent from three and just 2 per cent with none.

Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy’s Health Minister, recently reported: “On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus.”

The overwhelming majority of Italy’s deaths involved chronically ill and elderly patients.

This is not to diminish these tragedies. But the questions arise: why are we surrendering our hard-won civil liberties and committing economic suicide when this virus poses a danger to only a small portion of our society? Why do we not pour all of our resources into protecting the vulnerable?

The answer is that a 24-hour news cycle, with its morbid tallying of deaths, images of corpses and sensationalist reporting of outlier cases has whipped the public into a frenzy that politicians have had to take extreme measures to appease.

And anyone who questions the collective unreason is denounced on social media as a bloodthirsty mercenary who favours the economy over human life.

History shows time and again the reaction to a perceived crisis becomes the true catastrophe. Like the execution of witches until the mid-18th century or the scapegoating of Jews for poisoning wells during the Black Plague, evidence and logic are of no use to us now. There is an existential threat, and anyone who denies it is not just a denier but the cause.

None of this is to say this virus is not dangerous. It is. But the level of threat it poses is being exaggerated, and the response to it exaggerated as a result.

This is especially true in Australia, where infection rates appear to be relatively low and the government containment methods are among the most draconian worldwide.

If the government has compelling data to support this strategy, it should release it. But there seems to be no correlation between the scale of the threat and the economic and social damage we will suffer responding to it.

There is a disaster afoot. But it is not the COVID-19 virus. It is the putative remedy, a fact we will not appreciate until it’s too late.

RJ Smith teaches law at Paris universities I (Pantheon-Sorbonne) and X (Nanterre).

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

Our Free Will

 The Australian 

Monday, January 27, 2020 

THINKING FOR OURSELVES — PRECIOUS AND THREATENED

HENRY ERGAS

Auschwitz worked because so many had been coerced to fall in with mass opinion

Seventy-five years ago, as the war raged with unrelenting ferocity, Australia’s daily papers reported, typically in a snippet at the bottom of page 4, that on what is now Australia Day a “terrible concentration camp” had been captured at Oswiecim, in southwestern Poland.

According to Reuters, “tens of thousands of people were tortured” in the camp, while “thousands more were shot”.

In reality, 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz, of whom 960,000 were Jews. But the scale of the horror only began to become apparent months later, as other camps were liberated and the first newsreels were released, including a film, showing piled corpses and gaunt survivors, projected throughout Australia in May of that year.

Worldwide, the shock was enormous, including to those who had no illusions about the Nazi regime.

“We expected anything from that bunch,” Hannah Arendt, who had narrowly escaped deportation to the death camps, told Gunter Grass in an interview on German television in 1964. “But this was different. It really was as if an abyss had opened.”

Suddenly it became evident “that things which for thousands of years the human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be manufactured right here on Earth, that Hell and Purgatory, and even a shadow of their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern methods of destruction”.

“We had the idea that amends could somehow be made for just about everything. But not for this. Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us ever can.”

At first, in trying to make sense of the incomprehensible, Arendt thought that perhaps Kant was right; perhaps there lurks, within the human mind, a capacity for “radical evil”, which acts with a diabolic force that can neither be explained nor understood by the conventional “evil motives of selfinterest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice”.

But as she reflected on the sheer scale of what had been done, Arendt found Kant’s account unsatisfactory. There were, for sure, plenty of monsters among the murderers; but vicious hatred was far less evident than might have been expected among the tens of thousands of people implicated in the killing machine. “At every level, the Nazis produced more evil, with less malice, than civilisation had previously known.”

That “banality of evil”, she argued, was only possible because so many Germans had suspended their sense of judgment: the capacity, when the accepted norms have evaporated and the guidance of tradition has broken down, to think critically for oneself.

The faculty of judgment “will not find out, once and for all, what ‘the good’ is” but “when the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope, and everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in”, the criterion it imposes — “whether I shall be able to live with myself in peace when the time has come to reflect on my deeds and words” — is all that stands between humanity and catastrophe.

And it was the courage to act on that criterion, and the conviction that their actions, however modest they might be, would form part of “the enduring chronicle of mankind”, that prompted ordinary people, such as Wehrmacht sergeant Anton Schmid, to risk their own lives to save those of others.

A devout Roman Catholic, Schmid hid Jews in his apartment, obtained work permits to save Jews from massacres, transferred Jews to safer locations, and aided the underground. It is estimated that he saved as many as 300 Jews before he was arrested, tortured and executed.

“The moral of such stories,” wrote Arendt, “is simple and within everybody’s grasp: it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”

Whether, if tested, we would live up to that standard, we cannot know, and hopefully will never need to learn. Nor can we know what new and dreadful evils mankind, in its infinite inventiveness, reserves for the future.

What we do know is that the moral strength to think for ourselves remains as precious and as threatened as ever.

To say that is not to suggest that the dangers we face are in any way comparable to those braved by Schmid and the other “Righteous Among the Nations”. However, it is undeniable that the pressures to bow to mass opinion grow stronger every day, as does the hysteria that assails those who dare question the self-images of the age.

Those pressures do not come from the fear of disappearing into the “Nacht und Nebel” (night and fog) the Nazis promised their opponents. But as Alexis de Tocqueville warned nearly two centuries ago, it is rarely the thug who says “you will think as I do or die” who poses the greatest threat to liberal democracy.

Rather, it is the voice that proclaims: “You are free not to think as I do; but from this day forth you shall be a stranger among us. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they too, be shunned in turn.”

No doubt, our democracy will find a way of coping with those pressures, as it has with so many others. Whatever their defects, Australians retain a down-toearth practicality that has always inoculated them both to promises of a Second Coming and to claims of an impending apocalypse. And they still have that sardonic sense of humour that has made them notoriously unreceptive to humourless, conceited ratbags and tinhorn demagogues.

But each people must win their liberty every day afresh — a liberty to which nothing is more inimical than the godlike certainty that muzzles the voice of others, stops all discussion and reduces social relationships to an ant heap.

Seventy-five years after its liberation, Auschwitz’s last survivors are passing away; each anniversary, the commemorations become more of a diplomatic formality, in which ritual replaces memory.

Inexorably, the morning hangings, the specially designed benches on which inmates were whipped until every bone was broken, the cages in which prisoners were starved to death, the operating theatres where children were deliberately infected with disease, the gas chambers and crematoriums, are fading into history. For the sake of our common humanity, the lessons must not.

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).

CarbonFears

LET’S NOT POLLUTE MINDS WITH CARBON FEARS

IAN PLIMER

Talk of an emergency is ignorant, populist scaremongering
As soon as the words carbon footprint, emissions, pollution, and decarbonisation, climate emergency, extreme weather, unprecedented and extinction are used, I know I am being conned by ignorant activists, populist scaremongering, vote-chasing politicians and rent seekers.

Pollution by plastics, sulphur and nitrogen gases, particulates and chemicals occurs in developing countries. That’s real pollution. The major pollution in advanced economies is the polluting of minds about the role of carbon dioxide. There are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black. Such terms are deliberately misleading, as are many claims.

But then again, we should be used to this after the hysteria about the Great Barrier Reef bleaching that has really been occurring for hundreds of years, fraudulent changing of past weather records, the ignoring of data that shows Pacific islands and the Maldives are growing rather than being inundated, and unsubstantiated claims polar ice is melting. By ignoring history and geology, any claim of unusual weather can be made sensational.

We’ve had reefs on planet Earth for 3500 million years. They came and went many times. The big killer of reefs was because sea level dropped and water temperature decreased. In the past, reefs thrived when water was warmer and there was an elevated carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. Reef material is calcium carbonate, which contains 44 per cent carbon dioxide. Reefs need carbon dioxide; it’s their basic food.

We are not living in a period of catastrophic climate change. The past tells us it’s business as usual.

It has never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming.

Climate models have been around 30 years. They have all failed. Balloon and satellite measurements show a disconnect from climate model predictions. If they have failed across the past 30 years when we can compare models with measurements, there is little chance that the climate projections across the next 50 years will be more successful. Modellers assume carbon dioxide drives climate change. It does not. The role of the sun and clouds was not considered important by modellers. They are the major drivers for the climate on our planet.

We emit a trace atmospheric gas called carbon dioxide at a time in planetary history of low atmospheric carbon dioxide. The geological history of the planet shows major planetary climate changes have never been driven by a trace gas. Just because we are alive today does not mean we change major planetary systems that operated for billions of years. Earth’s climate dances to rhythms every day, every season and on far larger lunar, ocean, solar, orbital, galactic and tectonic cycles. Climate change is normal and continual. When cycles overlap, climate change can be rapid and large. Sporadic events such as supernovas and volcanic eruptions can also change climate.

The main greenhouse gas is water vapour. It is the only gas in air that can evaporate, humidify and condense into clouds that precipitate rain, hail and snow. These processes involve a transfer of energy, and water vapour makes the atmosphere behave like a giant airconditioner. Carbon dioxide is a non-condensable atmospheric gas like nitrogen and oxygen. Water vapour in air varies depending on temperature and location from five times the atmospheric carbon dioxide content in deserts to more than 100 times in the tropics. Water is 12 times more effective than carbon dioxide with respect to all incoming and outgoing radiation.

Earth is unevenly heated. Our spinning oblate globe is influenced by two fluids of different composition and behaviour moving chaotically against each other over the irregular solid surface of the planet. Oceans hold most of the planet’s surface heat, not the atmosphere. Processes that occur during sunlight do not occur at night due to the prime driver of our planet’s surface temperature: the sun.

Carbon dioxide is plant food. It is neither a pollutant nor a toxin. Without carbon dioxide, all life on Earth would die. Plants convert carbon dioxide, water and sunlight during photosynthesis into sugars, cellulose, fruit, vegetables and grains, which animal life uses as food. Marine organisms also take up and use carbon dioxide. Plants need almost three times today’s carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere to thrive. For decades horticulturalists have pumped carbon dioxide into glasshouses to increase yields. The fossil record shows that a thriving and diversification of plant and animal life occurs every time the atmosphere had a very high carbon dioxide content. In the past, warming has never been a threat to life on Earth. Why should it be now? When there is a low atmospheric carbon dioxide content, especially during very cold times, life struggles.

For the past 500 million years, the atmospheric carbon dioxide content has been decreasing and if we halved today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide content, all life would die. This carbon dioxide has been removed into the oceans and is sequestered into coral, shells, limey sediments and muds and on the land into coals, muds, soils and vegetation.

Air contains 0.04 per cent carbon dioxide. We add carbon compounds to our bodies from food and drinks and exhale carbon dioxide. The human breath contains at least 4 per cent carbon dioxide. Our bodies contain carbon compounds. If we were so passionately concerned about our carbon footprint, then the best thing to do is to expire.

In our lifetime, there has been no correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature. On a larger scale, the ice caps show that after a natural orbitally driven warming, atmospheric carbon dioxide content increases 800 years later. Rather than atmospheric carbon dioxide driving temperature, it is the opposite. Geology shows us again there is no correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature. Each of the six major past ice ages began when the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was far higher than at present. The thought that a slight increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide will lead to unstoppable global warming is demonstrably wrong.

In the past decade China has increased its carbon dioxide emissions by 53 per cent, 12 times Australia’s total carbon dioxide output of 1.3 per cent of the global total. The grasslands, forests, farms and continental shelves of Australia adsorb far more carbon dioxide than we emit. The attack on emissions of the gas of life is an irrational attack on industry, our modern way of life, freedoms and prosperity. It has nothing to do with the environment.

Emeritus professor Ian Plimer’s latest book is The Climate Change Delusion and the Great Electricity Ripoff (Connor Court).

There are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black

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.