Tag Archives: Frank Furedi

We glibly assume

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I went to hear Frank Furedi on Monday who spoke along with Nick Cater, and the message was that we must be brave and speak out because silence is the great betrayal of our values and yada yada yada etc. So I spoke to them both after and pointed out that there are major consequences for stepping out of various lines of conformity. And in speaking with Nick Cater, I was also asking him to sign my copy of A Better Class of Sunset, a collection of Christopher Pearson columns he had edited, which I highly recommend. But then when I got home I opened the book at random and found myself on the first page of the section on the Culture Wars and at a column titled, “The political correctors”. And there I found this quote from Les Murray who says exactly what I was trying to say myself:

We glibly assume in Australia that there is such a thing as freedom of speech but for most people there is not. If they express opinions which aren’t on the agenda, they are punished with extreme social opprobrium. They can lose their social life, their sexual life, their jobs. Ours is, for all its pretence of liberty, an age of timidity and terrible conformity.

Two of my close associates have in the past month or so lost their jobs for statements that their employers refused to have associated with their organisation. It is a risk that anyone who blogs or tweets or says anything in public that is not part of organisational policy runs. We have freedom of speech in the sense that the government will not put you in jail for what you say, but there are so many other ways to make you pay very dearly, it is no longer necessary. To be brave requires bravery, and not many of us have the kind of bravery that allows their entire careers to be shot to pieces through some gesture that will not deflect the world in its way by so much as an inch.

The thoughts of Frank Furedi on our latest troubles

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Frank Furedi wrote the best book on World War I that I know and has now bought in on our most recent episode of attempted terror. Having been part of a generation that had the same sense of alienation that he uses here to explain, I am somewhat sympathetic to this assessment. But my own conclusions from my days on the très-très bored left of my student “rebellion” has left me with the firm conviction that the only way to deal with such people – the kind of people that I was myself – is to provide no leniency of any kind. Do you want to protest? Fine, but you should also understand there are real risks to your life and future. Not that we are here dealing with the kind of larks we were on protesting in front of the American embassy or whatever. These people are violent criminals, and while we can try to understand them, there should be not an ounce of tolerance for any of this. This is from his article in today’s Oz, Youth rebellion that embraces authority:

In Australia and elsewhere the attraction of radical Islamist ideology is preceded by a rejection of society’s Western culture. Many young people who find it difficult to gain meaning from their lives in their wider community life react by rejecting it. Their Muslim peers sometimes go a step further and express their alienation through the medium of a jihadist outlook. The appeal of this is that it provides a coherent and edgy identity. It offers the cultural resources for the constitution of a distinct Islamic youth subculture.

Radical young Muslims self-consciously distance themselves from the moral and social conventions of a society they claim to loathe. However, their rebellion against the way of life of their community is coupled with a rejection of the customs and behaviour of their elders and family members.

Invariably such a response bears the hallmark of a generational reaction against the behaviour and way of life of the parents. That reaction is also directed ­towards the way their elders express their cultural and religious identity. One manifestation of this reaction against the conventions of their elders is the adoption of the outward markings of an in-your-face Islamists cultural iden­tity. That is why young Australian Muslims are likely to be more religious and anti-Western than their parents. They are likelier to sport a beard as symbol of piety, wear the veil or go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. They are likelier to perceive the West as a threat to Islam.

Well as long as they understand in return that we now see Islam as a threat to the West then they will understand where we are now at. This is a two-way street. No one attacks them first in any part of the world so what they think of as “attacks” are complaints along the lines of “I hit him when he hit me back”. Whatever they may feel about the glories of their own way of life, no one can see it from the outside looking from our own worldview in our very sweet, kind and gentle westernised communities.

Marking the start of World War I

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World War I was the most momentous historical event of the past century, having consequences that continue to haunt us still. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, to take only one example, continues to reverberate through the Middle East with no end in sight. I have tried to engage with what is being written but so much of it feels remote. It might just as well be about the Napoleonic Wars. Not that I have written anything that will change any of that, but I did post a piece at Quadrant Online only because I could not let the moment go by without at least saying something. And what I have written about is my favourite book on the war, which is Frank Furedi’s First World War: Still No End in Sight which at least sees the war as the momentous event it is. The article is about the succession of wars we have fought since 1924, each one to defend entirely different countries even though those countries did manage to keep their names.

That WWI broke up ancient empires and created new ones is not in doubt. That we would be as different as different could be had WWI been somehow prevented I also have no doubt. But such is the way of the world. Major events happen, as they will continue to do. What Furedi does is remind you that things change and nothing stays as it is. There is no permanence, and that everything you think really matters, down to the core values by which you set your moral compass, is but windblown ephemera whose existence a century from now cannot be even remotely guaranteed.

We live in our own time in a particular place and can be lucky or unlucky in how it turns out. A hundred years from now is as unimaginable to us as we would have been to the lads who joined up at the start of the war a century ago.