The Bloody Crossroads

As we become ever more remote from ‘meatspace’, it’s worth considering the role the scalpel and the needle may play in that development.

If a society consisted of human beings who had been partly engineered or edited, would we think about human life in the same way or would we lose a sense of reciprocity with others?

‘As sure as guns is guns, if we let in coloured labour, they’ll swallow us. They hate us. All the other colours hate the white. And they’re only waiting till we haven’t got the pull over them. They’re only waiting. And then what about poor little Australia?’

Even as it grows more menacing in point of imagery and political polemic, the Australian iteration of the anti-lockdown/anti-vaccination movement (if indeed it is a movement) still has the air of cosplay about it.

The publication of Mark Willacy’s Rogue Forces coincided almost exactly with the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The coincidence was a happy one, no less so for occurring in unhappy circumstances.

In his latest series of documentaries Can’t Get You Out of My Head (reviewed by Guy Rundle in Arena Quarterly No. 6), sociologist and filmmaker Adam Curtis focuses on a number of individuals who sit at the uneasy intersection of modern individualism, an increasingly technologised vision of the human mind and human behaviour, and a liberatory politics denuded of grand historical narratives.

The word ‘challenging’ in the title of Challenging Politics functions as both an adjective and a verb: an adjective in the sense that its author, Scott Ryan, thinks that politics should be challenging; and a verb in the sense that this conception of politics is currently being challenged.

In his extraordinary novel The Rome Zoo, French author Pascal Janovjak uses the eponymous institution to observe one species in particular: not the imperious lions or the mischievous chimps or the pygmy hippopotami, all of which are there in the background, but the human beings that would remove those animals from their natural habitats and put them in cages.

Though Monash University is named for a soldier, I’ve no doubt at all that this important offering from its In the National Interest series – Blood Lust, Trust and Blame, by Samantha Crompvoets – will be labelled by some as unpatriotic for raising a number of uncomfortable questions about the functioning of Australia’s military.

With the Budget Bingo cards now mouldering in the trash, and the budget itself now mouldering in the memory, it’s worth reflecting that the ideological character of an era has less to do with the disagreements between political parties than with the assumptions they share …

The short decade between the global debt crisis and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency was a time of great excitement on the Left. Like the devil in Baudelaire’s The Generous Gambler, capitalism’s power had been based on its ability to convince the world that it didn’t exist; but in the months and years after the financial meltdown, its tail and trotters were distinctly visible to anyone who cared to look.

‘The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.’ So wrote the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality (1754) …

In Australia, Prime Minister Scott Morrison assures us, ‘if you have a go, you will get a go’. In other words, those who make an effort are guaranteed a shot at success. It follows that if you don’t make an effort, you only have yourself to blame when success remains stubbornly out of reach.  

Rachel Doyle’s Power & Consent is about as well-timed as a book can be. Published as allegations of rape and a ‘culture of silence’ swirl around Canberra, it is a formidable salvo aimed at a field already strewn with casualties. Indeed, it is almost too well timed …

Though Bowen begins On Charlatans by asking why social democratic parties command less support among the working class, he spends the great majority of the book outlining the ‘fake legitimacy’ the populist parties offer them – a combination of post-truth rhetoric, resentful white identity politics, hyper-partisanship and climate-change denialism.

To legalise mitochondrial donation may indeed be the moral thing to do, but the broader trend of which it is part requires thoroughgoing analysis, not only by religious groups but also by a material Left whose best traditions have always placed science within a radical humanist frame, not the other way about.