Hardly a week goes by without discussion of “points-based immigration”—one of the few policies raised as a matter of routine in British focus groups over the last 20 years—or, in the US, Australia’s gun laws. Admiration of late has centred on its status as a prosperous, open, liberal democracy somehow able to manage Covid-19 without prior experience of Sars and with a close relationship to China (plus many Chinese immigrants).

I’m not saying one shouldn’t copy Australia. It is stable, orderly, well-governed and already steaming out of its shallow coronavirus recession. For decades, it has enjoyed uninterrupted growth, low unemployment, high immigration, and a high minimum wage. It’s often claimed the latter three cannot exist simultaneously, but in Australia they can and do. I grew up in the country and had a ringside seat at its system of governance when I worked in Canberra. Australians are good at running things.

But I do want to sound a note of caution. People admire Australia without understanding why it succeeds, and without asking whether other countries can simply import its methods. They fail to realise Australia’s governance values are relatively unusual, products of a distinctive political culture and electoral system—nurtured over 60 years—that may not travel.

First, however, it’s important to clear away some undergrowth—the authority-defying “Australian larrikin”. This figure is present in the country’s literature but does not exist outside it. While Australia has an intensely egalitarian culture and commendable social mobility, it is an authoritarian country and its police in particular expect compliance. That’s why the world has been treated to video footage of the Bill nicking pregnant women in their homes and dragging protesters out of cars. Australians are both the descendants of convicts and of their gaolers.

If John Locke is the father of the US Constitution and John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith the fathers of British approaches to governance, then Australia’s dad is Jeremy Bentham, the bloke who described natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts”. He rejected the idea of natural or divinely given rights preceding the establishment of state authority, arguing that rights are creations of law, and without government there are none. Rights, in other words, come from states. The contrast with John Locke is immediate and obvious: for Locke, individuals and their rights come first, and government comes afterwards. The state for Americans is a bottom-up creation where citizens transfer to it by social contract only so much authority as is strictly necessary for mutual benefit and
protection.

Most importantly, where the US favours liberty and rights over democracy and majorities, Australia favours democracy and majorities over liberty and rights. To this day, the country has no Bill of Rights, and what rights do exist (usually at the state level in a federal system) are simple acts of parliament that can be repealed by a hostile government.

Aware that Bentham’s approach to institutions tended to produce electorates that saw the nation-state as a vast public utility, Australians put immense care into designing the country’s institutional arrangements and electoral system. There is little beautiful rhetoric in the late 19th-century constitutional debates of its Founding Fathers—a notable contrast to the American equivalent. There is, however, astonishing attention to detail and a willingness to pinch good things from other countries and civilisations: the secret ballot from the Romans, referendums from Switzerland, the Westminster system from Britain, an elected upper house comprised of senators apportioned equally between the states from the US, federalism from Germany. An obsession with policy detail still forms a major part of Australian governance.

Onto this was bolted several Australian innovations: compulsory registration and compulsory voting; voting on Saturdays; an incorruptible system of postal votes; equal-sized constituencies whose redistricting was managed by an impartial electoral authority; preferential voting blended with what is now called Single Transferable Vote; a secret ballot where—unlike the Roman and related systems—electors did not bring their pre-filled ballot to the polling station, but a state official gave them an unmarked, pre-printed one before they entered the voting booth. And, of course, the famous “democracy sausage” on polling day (Google it).

This modified form of the secret ballot went global. When you cast your ballot in a UK general election, you are using an Australian-designed system down to the finest detail—yes, even your pencils, mandated by Australian electoral officials to avoid the messiness of dipping pens. For many decades it was called “the Australian Ballot”, even by Americans. Notably, the developed country that makes least use of Australian innovations is the US, one of the reasons it struggles to make its elections free and fair. Harvard University’s Electoral Integrity Project ranks the American system 57th in the world. Among core Western democracies, it comes in at rock bottom.

This extraordinary regime began to emerge in 1860 and was complete by 1924. Even many Australians do not appreciate the extent to which it is a logistical marvel, more so given it was developed and perfected in a country with huge distances, heavy reliance on transport by bullock trains or pony and trap, and, for some of the period, no telegraph. It is the foundation of what economists call Australia’s “high state capacity”—roughly, the ability to get shit done—and is not easy to reproduce. This is not only because it is hard but because it involves thinking about politics in a different way, chiefly by rejecting US and EU “rights-talk” and Lockean social contract theory.

Locke, Smith, Mill, and Bentham had no empirical evidence for any of their claims. When Locke and later Rousseau argued, contra Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke, that man was naturally peaceful and industrious—born in freedom but everywhere in chains—they were not to know that the evidence points the other way. Scholars such as Steven Pinker did the research and crunched the numbers, finding that not only is there no evidence of rights in non-state, hunter-gatherer societies, the cultures in question were also violent horrors with a murder rate that makes modern Venezuela and medieval England alike look like oases of peace and plenty. Even the most advanced pre-modern civilisations usually had a weak or absent conception of rights, and where conceptions were strong, they were limited. Rights-talk among Roman jurists—and remember, Rome provided the parent legal system for the EU and all its member-states save Ireland and Scandinavia—was confined to property and to Roman citizens.

In following Bentham, Australia placed itself on Team Hobbes, and although like Locke a social contract theorist, Hobbes’s assessment of non-state societies turned out to be correct. Man, in the state of nature, really did live a life that was nasty, brutish, and short. Locke’s tabula rasa (the blank slate) is empirically unfounded. Australia’s founding fathers and the country’s approaches to governance are therefore explicable in part by luck, not choice. Australia got the science right by accident.

For decades, there was a consensus that it was impossible to centrally plan an immigration system, until what Douglas MacArthur once called “the giant unsinkable aircraft carrier” scuppered it. Like France, Australia is fond of grands projets. Unlike France, it enjoys success at seeing them through. However, this has limits: many of the claims—made by the likes of FA Hayek and others—about the scale of what economists call “the knowledge problem” and concomitant difficulties of central planning are true.

Those who remember the 2019 election may recall one of Labour’s manifesto promises: free broadband for all. It was routinely mocked (Boris Johnson called it “a crackpot scheme”), and rightly so. Australians in these islands were heard to observe that even we can’t do that. The Australian equivalent—known as the “National Broadband Network”—has been an expensive flop. Attempts to blame one of the country’s two major political parties for its failure assume—in hubristic Australian fashion—this is another thing the giant public utility that is AusGov can just do.

Then there was “Robodebt”, an elaborate scheme using algorithmic data-matching to track benefit overpayments. It was a disaster, and unlike the NBN cock-up (responsible only for slow internet), produced genuine hardship as people all over the country were stung with fake debts and ordered to pay up (or else). As of late November, Scott Morrison’s government has quietly shelved it and gone back to pen and paper. It’s also been forced to settle a class-action suit arising from the bungle for a sum north of a billion Australian dollars. This in a country with a modest population, low unemployment, and relatively few benefit recipients.

It’s significant, in my view, that Australia’s immense state capacity has foundered when it comes to “big tech”. Maybe we have to abandon the belief that we can technologise everything: it isn’t magic and there are many tasks to which it is unsuited. Relatedly, if Australia cannot make state-backed high-tech and algorithms work, it’s likely no-one can.

Australia’s exceptional governance is as odd as its egg-laying mammals, songless birds, and scentless flowers. Replicating it even in part requires an understanding of what lies beneath it, and the peculiar environment in which it developed. Failure to do this may mean attempts to transplant it to other countries fail as organ donations sometimes do, and to everyone’s detriment: donor and donees alike. 

The post Emulate Australia? It’s not that easy appeared first on Standpoint.

However—and because he has a flair for narrative as well as exposition—Ridley’s stories of people who kicked against the pricks in one way or another and so contributed to human betterment do far more than charm or amuse. The extraordinary treatment of Thomas Newcomen after his death is a case in point. Historians did not want to believe a humble Devon ironmonger had developed the first practical device capable of converting heat into work. Elaborate conspiracy theories tried to take credit from him and give it, by turns, to a French academician and then a Fellow of the Royal Society. Snobbery directed at those who work with their hands is not only the province of Extinction Rebellion: it has ancient roots.

Much of the commentary on How Innovation Works since publication has turned on Ridley’s political views: his “lukewarmism” (the belief that man-made climate change is real, but not harmful), technological optimism, and libertarian sympathies. And yes, it is true he argues innovation prospers in democratic countries where the state plays a minimal role. He suggests recent government support for innovation in the form of research and development is simply a function of the size of modern states. Innovation happened without state direction in the 19th century, and with it in the 20th, but the state also “went from spending 10 per cent of national income to 40 per cent”.

In my view, foregrounding his politics in this way is to review the man and his previous books, not How Innovation Works. For me, discovering how the nimblest solutions to age-old technical problems emerged before scientists understood them, often
developed by unlettered or modestly educated people, was revelatory. In Britain, coal miners, blacksmiths, and nurses were prominent; in the US, France, and Australia, dairy farmers, stonemasons, and school teachers. In more recent times, engineers have come to the fore, much as they did in antiquity when unnamed Roman army engineers produced both concrete and cantilevers.

With relatively few exceptions, “official” knowledge factories (universities in particular) either did not contribute much at all or arrived with an explanation for what an innovator had achieved long after the fact. Steam engines led to our understanding of thermodynamics; it was not the other way around. Except—and this is in my view a warning—in certain totalitarian states (Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan, the People’s Republic of China). There, the universities came first.

It is sobering to be reminded that Soviet and Nazi research—when not infected with Lysenkoism or “German Physics” or similar rank cobblers—often gave scientists in liberal democracies a run for their money. There is a reason the US pinched Nazi Germany’s rocket scientists after the Second World War. There is a reason Sputnik was first in space. Authoritarian states can produce excellent science.

It was only Communist failure to translate scientific advances into products enhancing quality of life for the masses that meant the US, France, and UK took the lead. It is telling that Soviet authorities allowed the 1940 film Grapes of Wrath to be released in the country as a propaganda exercise. However, cinemagoers were amazed how in America people fled poverty in a car. In Soviet Russia,  you hoofed it. The movie was withdrawn. While the USSR likely had the technical smarts to develop an iPhone, there is no way it could bring it to market.

The fact that China can do that—it is a genuine and successful example of what is probably best described as “authoritarian capitalism”—is a powerful counterclaim to Ridley’s “small state” argument, one that, to his credit, he tackles head-on. He accepts that China’s innovation and economic growth has killed off the Whiggish belief that economic freedom would lead ineluctably to political liberty. He then does his level best to explain how, and to sound a note of caution. Maybe Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism will kill the goose that laid the golden egg. And maybe it won’t. 

Given universities across the developed world are now in coronavirus-induced crisis, pleading for bailouts and bewailing the loss of their international student income (while also treating their most recent freshers as Covid-19 guinea pigs), Ridley’s historical survey of innovation and its heavy dependence on tradespeople, industry, and the professions—not academics and scientists doing what is sometimes called “basic research”—is salutary. Maybe Tony Blair’s desire to send 50 per cent of young people to university (achieved and then surpassed last year) is a fool’s errand in the original sense of the term. That is, a newcomer to a group or job is given a nonsensical task by older or more experienced members or managers. Think naval recruits sent to empty the steam locker, or apprentices told to fetch a glass hammer. The joke, unfortunately, is on the young, forced to behave like crabs in a bucket and clamber over each other simply to survive, let alone succeed.

For decades, ever-expanding higher education was justified on the basis that it increased human capital for the individuals who attended, while graduates’ enhanced knowledge conferred benefits on society as a whole. The fact that increased human capital appeared to produce higher incomes for many was used to justify the introduction of tuition fees in the UK and Australia, and led to their dramatic increase in the US. If the human capital argument plus social benefit argument is true or even only partly true, free university tuition is really just a cash grab by the middle class—a means by which the poor and uneducated pay for the exam-passing-classes to go to university.

However—and especially as returns to tertiary education have begun to go in reverse—the “human capital” plus what is often called “positive externalities” case has started to fall to bits. Research by economist Bryan Caplan in the US and political historian Stephen Davies in the UK makes a compelling case that increased university attendance and costs have not created a more skilled and productive workforce. Education’s role in the acquisition of human capital with its beneficial social spillovers peters out, for the most part, at GCSE. The idea that higher education fees reflect higher private returns to graduates is a mirage.

Both Caplan and Davies maintain the growth of higher education is instead about labour market regulation and signalling. It controls access to well-paid and (more importantly) high status occupations by making them dependent upon acquiring the certification of a degree (any degree). Degrees are costly signals of mostly pre-existent qualities and attributes that make the holder a good employment bet: clever, conscientious, and conformist. Think of it like this: if education merely serves as a signal, society would be better off if we all got less. Caplan points out that a university degree puts one in the top third of the education distribution, so bosses after a top-third employee demand the credential. Now, imagine everyone had one fewer qualification. In those circumstances, employers in need of a top-third worker only require A-levels. Employee quality would be signalled about as accurately as it is now, but without young people spending years in student poverty, delaying gratification, and punting relationships and family-formation into the never-never.

In other words, degrees are an intellectual peacock’s tail and serve to signal a very specific kind of fitness. They also (like the peacock’s tail) habitually get in their owners’ way. One thing the recent contretemps about “woke” degrees in “grievance studies” has exposed is how hidebound many academics actually are—the kind of people who haven’t had an original idea since primary school. Tertiary education has thus become bitterly and unproductively entangled with the worst form of meritocracy.

Say “meritocracy” to most people, and those north of 45 will likely define it by reference to “the right person for the job”, and if that was all it were, meritocracy would be a genuine social good. However, as Davies points out—in tandem with the expansion of higher education and almost certainly as a result of it—it has now become something quite sinister. People under 35 are often open in their belief that it means some forms of work or certain occupations are intrinsically better than others.

This leads to a situation where certain people are seen as more worthwhile and valuable than others, and was captured most vividly during recent protests when footage emerged of BLM and Antifa activists berating US police officers for not going to college. The young progressives teeing off like this really do believe the way to decide who gets “higher” jobs is on the basis of merit as identified by formal academic attainment. This privileges one kind of talent or ability over others and, more profoundly, means some kinds of position or role are demeaning and others elevated. Talent in the form of academic ability is used as a proxy for talent in general. This is little more than crediting Newcomen’s Engine to a Fellow of the Royal Society all over again, or telling your plumber to use the tradesman’s entrance.

Davies—unlike Caplan—accepts that a degree can be what economists call a “pure consumption good”. That is, valuable to the person who earns it even though it is procured purely to satisfy current wants or needs, rather than to produce another good. This approach to higher education still exists in some countries: the Australian tradition of encouraging future lawyers to complete another degree—typically in the liberal arts—while reading law (lengthening the course to five or six years) is an example. Few of the people who pursue classics or literature or history at the same time as learning how to draft a commercial lease or incorporate a company will get work as classicists or novelists or historians. The rationale—given at the time such dual degrees were introduced—was to ensure the members of an important profession were not “dreadful boors” (a jab directed their way by none other than D.H. Lawrence) at social functions.

There are exceptions to the argument against human capital acquisition I have sketched out above, mainly in the professions (think medicine, law, engineering), but this is in large part because doing the actual job requires mastery of a large body of technical knowledge and how to apply it. Notably, this is the sort of human capital put to productive use that Ridley documents over and over again in How Innovation Works. Where an innovator did go to university, it was to enter a profession. Even in education-factory countries like China this sometimes turns out to be true. Hon Lik, who developed the first portable electronic cigarette (patents and prototypes dating back to the 1960s were roughly the size and weight of early mobile phones), was a pharmacist by day and a garage tinkerer by night. The new device first rid him of his two packs a day smoking habit, then helped his family boot the cancer sticks, and finally made him a lot of money as his harm-reduction-based method of ingesting nicotine went global.

Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote that a society could produce “a very polished, but a very dangerous” group of citizens by giving them “a sense of wants which their education would never teach them to supply”. De Tocqueville’s aphorism now goes by the name of “elite overproduction”, which puts numbers on the crabs-in-a-bucket phenomenon which signalling and credentialism imposes on the young. It amounts to a situation where too many people are chasing too few elite places in society, creating a large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes. Many of those graduates, under the impression they were joining society’s top tier, will never get there and instead be left disappointed and indebted. Worse, some have studied various activist-based subjects, which make unfalsifiable—even quasi-religious—assumptions about power and oppression. Unsurprisingly, this group in particular seek to create a new aristocracy of the spirit.

An aristocracy in the proper sense is based on the idea that people should have power because they have virtue—it is “rule by the best”. Historically, it was tied to landowning and “a stake in the country”. But for people with no money and plenty of entitlement, the idea that moral virtue equals status—even an expectation that one’s views will be given weight in public policy—is seductive. And then along came coronavirus to throw millions out of work, many from the demographic most likely to cause trouble, so it’s socially dangerous as well. Relatedly, elite overproduction provides high-octane fuel for the culture war. Resentment of the way the meritocratic labour market works is, I suspect, the main factor behind our current political realignment and the rise of so-called populism. We’re all afflicted by credentialism that—given so much taxpayer money is wasted on signalling—is sucking the life out of an economy already in free-fall.

How Innovation Works is a reminder of some simple truths. We should not be in the business of rewarding people materially or socially simply because they are clever. That—to pinch one of Adam Smith’s insights—is like holding people in high esteem simply because they are wealthy. It buttresses the widespread belief that intelligence is earned in some way (statistically, both intelligence and wealth are usually inherited) and that people with one or another narrowly defined traits are better human beings as well. Upholding the moral equality of persons and equality before the law is tricky at the best of times without introducing aristocracies of the spirit based on “learning” into the mix. The latter really does make prejudice against the “uneducated” the only acceptable prejudice and is destructive of civil society, as the dreadful and fraught debate over Brexit disclosed. Newcomen’s practical gifts and his ability to use them to deliver a genuine public good made any gains he accrued personally easier to justify. More broadly, people like him and the other historical cases Ridley discusses make inequality of outcomes acceptable, if not entirely moral.

The situation we have right now is neither acceptable nor moral.

The post Meritocracy makes a new ruling class appeared first on Standpoint.

These people contrive to land in court by any means possible, although the most common involve making false crime reports or bringing frivolous civil claims. My first “baby barrister” memory does not involve a scratchy wig or excessively warm robes (this in rural Queensland, which is hot by UK standards even in winter). It’s a memory of the number of people who hang around the courthouse and treat trials as spectacles for which they do not have to pay. Murders and rapes are always popular among, ahem, viewers.

Non-lawyers are usually astonished when I say this; I suspect it’s only accepted because I’m a lawyer and can describe what I’ve seen. “Wasting police time” and the more serious “perverting the course of justice” have been on the books in various forms for centuries, while vexatious litigants (the civil court equivalent) existed in Ancient Rome. Roman jurists complained about people lingering around the courts “looking for opportunistic reasons to bring suit”.

It’s something I’ve been called on to explain quite a bit of late given there’s been a global uptick in false hate crime reports and false crime reports more broadly. However, while it’s true people do this sort of thing because there’s a psychological payoff, a truism of economics is that you get more of what you subsidise and less of what you tax. By indulging such mantras as “believe women” or “believe the victim” we’ve succeeded in making a bad thing that’s always existed worse. It now looks as if the Klan springs eternal: fake hate has become a perverse way for members of racial minorities to use fictional attacks by members of white hate groups to explain away their own struggles with narcissism and attention-seeking.

Without attempting to make a laundry list, it’s worth noting that some of the hate crime hoaxes and false crime reports have been absolutely mind-boggling—in the sense of being “as well-planned as the 1983 Brink’s-Mat heist”. While phoning in hundreds of bomb threats to Jewish community centres—first in the US, then globally—Michael Kaydar ran a phone bank out of his home, masking his caller ID using a service called SpoofCard and paying for it using Bitcoin rather than a traceable credit card or PayPal. He routed the calls through anonymous proxy servers overseas, sending the FBI on multiple wild goose chases.

Meanwhile, the bomb threats continued. Jewish care homes and day schools began evacuating with almost routine regularity. The threats were seen as evidence that anti-Semitic fringe groups were emboldened by Donald Trump’s election. It was only when Kaydar accidentally forgot to use his proxy server, disclosing a real IP address—location Ashkelon, Israel—that police finally traced it to a wi-fi point the teenager was accessing through a giant antenna pointed out of his bedroom window.

Needless to say, both Israeli police and the FBI let rip with a number of justifiably salty complaints about wasting police time, while a Jewish friend of mine made the bitter observation that Kaydar “had made it harder to live in the world as a Jew”. 

Closer to home, Operation Midland was a skein of horrors that cost the Metropolitan Police hundreds of thousands of man-hours and an as yet unknown sum in compensation to those wrongfully accused of running a VIP paedophile ring. The investigation itself carried a price tag north of £2.5 million, while former Tory MP Harvey Proctor—who was falsely accused of rape and murder and lost his house and job as a result—is thought to be seeking more than £500,000  for loss of earnings and damage to his reputation. These vast exercises in organised criminality tend to overshadow smaller incidences of the same thing, but be in no doubt that people such as Liam Allan (fake rape allegation) or even those tasked with investigating the ongoing Jussie Smollett brouhaha in Chicago have had their lives comprehensively upended.

No one really knows how many reports—as a percentage of all crime reports—are provably false. My pupil-master (an eminent QC and later Supreme Court judge) said 10 per cent was a good rule of thumb. He did, however, tell me that way back in 2006 and as anyone who hasn’t spent the last few years living under a rock knows, since then we’ve experienced an immense moral panic about historic sex offences (#MeToo), an allegedly off-the-scale racist US president, and Brexit.

On that last point, I’m reasonably satisfied that the increased hate crime widely reported from June 23, 2016, onwards and seized upon by the Remain camp after its shock defeat was a classic example of moral panic, and that most of the reports were false.

This is because no evidence is required, only the victim’s subjective feelings. Worse, many reports are not made to police, but to an online portal called “True Vision”, which allows (and encourages) anonymous submissions and also permits the alleged victim to forbid police follow-up. Even when contacted in person, police officers are not allowed to contest an alleged victim’s interpretation of events. They can’t even ask, “Are you sure?” All this is set out in grisly and authoritarian detail in the College of Policing’s Hate Crime Operational Guidance. It’s got so that we’re encouraging people from minority backgrounds (loosely defined) to audition for respect by being the most insulted person in the village.

Increased appetites grow by what they feed on, and we are currently subsidising victimhood and taxing resilience. This means more of the former and less of the latter, along with more (and more costly) miscarriages of justice.

The post Hate-crime hoaxes appeared first on Standpoint.

Facebook recently banned a number of outspoken conservative commentators from its platform, and one equally prominent progressive religious leader. The former included the alt-right Briton Paul Joseph Watson, while the latter was none other than perennial controversialist Louis Farrakhan. An enormous contretemps ensued on both sides of the Atlantic, with Donald Trump wading into the debate.

“I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms,” the President thundered on his favoured toilet wall, Twitter. “This is the United States of America—and we have what’s known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH! We are monitoring and watching, closely!!”

Trump then set about re-tweeting the banned figures—a notable act in itself, because Twitter has traditionally been the most censorious of social media outlets.     Facebook, meanwhile, was always somewhere in the middle, with YouTube least severe of all. It was Facebook, however, that hosted the Christchurch Shooter’s live stream, becoming an unwitting vehicle for its distribution all over the internet. Times have changed.

Falling in behind Trump, even moderate conservatives and conventional media dialled up the outrage, pointing out the extent to which social media is now exercising editorial judgment like orthodox publishers.

Another, smaller group (mainly Americans) also argued that “platform access” is a civil right, eschewing the “publisher” argument. The walled gardens of social media, they suggested, are a new public square, to which everyone has access as a matter of right. This group would mandate social media adherence to the First Amendment—a striking departure from existing US jurisprudence, which only imposes 1A on the government, not private bodies.

Both these arguments are wrong. They’re wrong, however, in interesting ways. In future, it may also become necessary to pick one and make it right by force of law, a process fraught with danger. We are confronted with a civil society mess, and the only law always in force is the law of unintended consequences.

Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act and Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive govern social media. Both exempt YouTube and Facebook from legal liability for their users’ posts. Twitter, for example, cannot be sued if one of its users defames another user. Importantly, neither EU nor US law mandates that such entities act in a neutral fashion. Section 230, in particular, was enacted to allow online communities to engage in reasonable, good-faith moderation without fear of undue liability for their users’ posts.

The immunity provided is not absolute. Section 230 has no effect on the notice-and-takedown regime imposed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), for example. Article 13 imposes a duty on large corporates that host user-created content to take active measures to prevent copyrighted material from being uploaded without permission, under penalty of being held liable for users’ copyright infringement.

However, a US doctrine known as “fair use” permits limited use of copyright material without having first to acquire permission. This provides a defence to infringement claims, and means that DCMA isn’t particularly onerous. In the UK and EU, by contrast,  “fair dealing” only provides for specific exemptions from copyright protections, and permission has to be sought from the rights-holder in advance. Article 13 states this “shall not lead to any general monitoring obligation”, but as technology currently stands, it’s difficult to see any alternative to automated filters. And making social media liable in advance for users’ IP violations is among several classic indicators of publisher status. It goes hand-in-hand with liability for defamation.

So, YouTube and Facebook and Twitter aren’t publishers in the eye of the law—yet. That could change. Exercising editorial control in a politically-slanted way is an open invitation to legislators to amend or repeal Section 230 or the Copyright Directive or, in the UK, treat social media as broadcasters and drag them under Ofcom’s aegis.

This would delight traditional media by levelling the competitive playing field, forcing Facebook and YouTube to hire armies of lawyers and exercise editorial oversight that isn’t only political but also attuned to quality control. That’s why The Times supports it. Just as the only law always in force is the law of unintended consequences, one should always bet on self-interest, because it’s the only horse that’s trying.

Relatedly, conservatives who think the way to stop social media censoring right-wing pundits is to treat web companies in the same way as the BBC are delusional. Once social media entities become publishers, any political bias already present will be baked in. Like a newspaper or cable channel, they’ll have a slant. Twitter will be left, Facebook and Instagram centre-left, YouTube centre-right to right, and so on. It would mean much less opportunity for untrammelled speech of any sort.

One thing publishers do (and have always done) is act as gatekeepers. Not everyone has a column in Standpoint. Even getting a letter to the editor into the newspaper or a right-of-reply on the BBC is dependent on appealing to gatekeepers. The only way to impose neutrality on social media would be to treat it as a utility, like Royal Mail or BT. Utilities are not liable for any content but are also not able to engage in censorship (or moderation) except as required by law. Royal Mail can’t refuse to deliver your post unless you use it to commit a crime. And despite the hopes of some Americans, treating social media as a utility is vanishingly unlikely in the UK or EU and even less likely in the US, given the way the law there is framed.

It’s possible this vast experiment where everyone could speak at once will soon come to an abrupt halt. I suggest—before we return to how things once were—that we undertake an honest appraisal of where we are now.

The post Baked-in bias appeared first on Standpoint.

The country has had five PMs in eight years — six if you count Kevin Rudd twice — which is enough to make anybody’s head spin.  Australia’s baffling transformation into Italy with crocodiles began in late 2007, when John Howard’s centre-Right Liberal-National government was dying on its feet. He’d been PM for twelve years and in 2004 had achieved the rare double of a majority in both houses of Australia’s parliament. As often happens, power went to his head, and unpopular union-busting legislation (“Workchoices”) blew up in his face. On November 24th, Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party won in a landslide. Howard lost his own seat, only the second PM in Australian history to do so.

I’m a national of Australia and the UK and have lived and worked in both as a senior adviser to an Australian senator and engaged in assorted policy-wonkery in the UK. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the political question most Brits ask me is: “What’s with all the PMs? Is there something in the water down there?”

My answers have been as unsatisfactory to me as to everyone else. There is no overarching explanation for Australia’s political revolving door. Many accounts overstate how much is structural, blaming everything from the country’s confrontational political culture (British visitors are horrified by the swearing and naked hostility of Australian question time) to an over-reliance on Newspoll (the country’s leading pollster).

In fact, we’ve had a number of PMs who weren’t good at the job for different reasons and Australian politics is brutal when that happens. Once a precedent was established, it also gave ideas to those who followed. But like Tolstoy’s families, each felled prime minister was unhappy in his own way.

Australia is a peculiar country. Similarities to the UK are more apparent than real, something Brexit has thrown into sharp relief. Australians look on in bemusement when seeing Britain’s civil service, the Tories, and Labour trip over themselves and fall down separate flights of stairs. Australia, by contrast, is orderly, prosperous, and well-governed. It came through the 2008 global financial crisis unscathed. It has the highest minimum wage and lowest unemployment in the OECD. Alone among western liberal democracies, it has few populists of either Left or Right, despite admitting multitudes of immigrants. Over a quarter of Australians were born abroad, double the number in the US or France. It has enjoyed 28 years of uninterrupted economic growth. Younger Australians have no direct experience of recession, and even middle-aged Australians only remember one with clarity (1991).

This oddness stems from Australia’s political system, which is like that of no other nation. It has compulsory voting (enforced rigorously), Saturday elections, and a written Constitution only alterable by referendum requiring a majority of the electors in a majority of states. Its House of Representatives — despite being elected using “instant runoff” or what locals call “compulsory preferential” — isn’t hugely different from the Commons. It’s based on constituencies and marginal seats determine which leader commands a majority. The Senate, however, could not be more different from the Lords.

The Senate can reject all bills, including budget and appropriation bills, initiated by the government in the House. It’s also elected differently, using what’s known as single transferable vote or Hare-Clark — a blend of preferential voting and proportional representation modified to suit local conditions by Australia’s greatest electoral systems reformer, Catherine Spence. The proportional aspect inevitably gives rise to a “crossbench” of one or more senators from minor parties unrepresented in the House. Australians are proud of this system, to the extent that Spence appears on the five-dollar note. It’s thus a distinctive hybrid of Westminster and US bicameralism: two houses, alike in dignity and power, in chilly Canberra, where we lay our scene.

By mid-2007, I was in Oxford. I missed Rudd’s “Kevin 07” campaign. Nonetheless, even from afar I noticed how he rode into office at the fag end of Howard’s extended reign and proved adept at hiding his private character from the Australian people. It’s difficult to convey just how stratospherically popular he was for the first two years of what should have been a three-year term. He was young-ish, bright — a diplomat before entering politics, he spoke fluent Mandarin — and had an extraordinary rags-to-riches life story; his parents were poor share-farmers from country Queensland. Cartoonists drew him as Tintin, complete with quiff.

There were warning signs, however. Rudd was intellectual and lacked a conventional background in the trade union movement or Labor’s “factions”. (Australia’s Labor Party has formal factions: “Labor right”, “Labor left”, “Labor unity” and so on.) The factions allow local branches to endorse candidates who are a political known quantity. Labor’s trade union talent feeder has also long produced patient and able negotiators. Rudd was a poor cultural fit in his own party and inscrutable to non-Queenslanders.

Meanwhile people in Queensland Labor didn’t like him, but were intimidated into silence by his intellect and his popularity. Rudd was aware of this widespread dislike. So before becoming leader he cultivated the media, going over the parliamentary party’s head and appealing directly to the people. Among other things, he secured himself a regular slot on the top-rating Australian morning television programme, Sunrise. Every week for six years, the Australian public — and especially stay-at-home-mums — saw a charming, bookish, clever-clogs with shiny blond hair on the telly. The result was that Rudd becames a household name while still a backbencher.

His personality became apparent to people in Canberra not long after he was elected, particularly among staff and the Press Gallery. He burned through staffers and had a reputation as a “swear bear”. Despite his diplomatic background, he was prone to astonishing rudeness when representing Australia overseas. Inexplicably, the Chinese — who liked and admired him thanks to his linguistic abilities — were often targets. “Those Chinese fuckers are trying to rat-fuck us,” he said within earshot of the Chinese delegation at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009.

A micromanager who suffered from terrifying analysis paralysis and routinely tried to buzzword his way out of trouble, he presided over a chaotic office and notoriously demanded immense briefings at 2 am. These consistently went unread. When his staff started to spend weekends in nearby Bateman’s Bay — a pretty seaside resort and infamous mobile reception dead spot — he forbade visits to the town.

The work piled up. Cabinet ministers and staffers conspired to keep him busy elsewhere so they could deal with Deputy PM Julia Gillard. Governance was clearly only happening while Gillard was acting PM, but the bottlenecks Rudd allowed to build placed her under huge administrative pressure. Policies implemented late thanks to Rudd’s dilatory decision-making started to go badly wrong. A scheme to provide home insulation at reduced cost was so badly mismanaged that four installers (two tradesmen and two apprentices) were killed by unsafe work practices.

New governments often have rocky first terms as they learn governing is much harder than opposing. This was amplified because Rudd suffered from having followed a government that remained fundamentally competent. The electorate may have tired of his predecessor John Howard, but he had managerial skill, a trait prized in Australian politics across the spectrum. His predecessors Bob Hawke and Paul Keating were also competent administrators. Rudd, by contrast, was an exemplar of the incompetent managerialism dissected in Scott Adams’s Dilbert: Australia had the Pointy-Haired-Boss as PM.

Unlike Rudd, Gillard was a product of Labor’s Left faction and the trade union movement; she was a labour lawyer before entering politics. Gillard’s staff adored her and she was calm and disciplined. Cabinet ministers and Labor MPs (or the Labor “caucus”, as that party’s MPs are collectively called in Australia) started to conspire against him. Although Rudd’s incompetence began to be reflected in opinion polls, he still enjoyed considerable public popularity.

When Gillard deposed Rudd as party leader, the process was uncommonly swift and brutal, taking place over a single day, June 23, 2010. In the end, no vote occurred: Rudd realised he didn’t have the numbers and resigned with immediate effect. Caucus heaved a collective sigh of relief. After all, the usurpation merely formalised reality. Rudd begged Gillard for a spot in cabinet, which was denied. He sulked for a mere 23 days. Anxious for electoral endorsement, Gillard called a snap election for August 21, 2010.

Rudd had thumped Howard in 2007. The Liberal-National Coalition should have been out of office for a decade. However, Tony Abbott, the most effective opposition leader Australia has seen in many decades, now confronted Gillard. She was in the fight of her political life while Rudd watered his resentments until they grew into a tree bearing ugly, poisonous fruit.

During the campaign, he fed damaging cabinet leaks to friendly journalists. Questions about Rudd haunted Gillard daily. She couldn’t give credible answers without risking retaliation. Her popularity plummeted. Like Theresa May in 2017, Gillard relied on slogans and wooden, set-piece speeches. On polling day Australia returned a hung parliament, and she limped across the line with the help of Greens and independents. She had promised not to introduce a carbon tax, but doing so became crucial to secure Greens support. Abbott, of course, used this to full advantage.

Gillard’s path to power was also ill-fated. Although she came from the Labor Left faction, most of her supporters in caucus came from the Labor Right, long associated with able, centrist governance. This faction includes Australia’s largest private sector trade union, the Shop, Distributive, and Allied Employees’ Association. The “Shoppies” are the last Australian union with a Catholic-dominated hierarchy, and while they’ve helped keep Australia’s minimum wage the highest in the OECD, they’re socially conservative, opposed to abortion and gay rights. The pound of flesh exacted for their support was public opposition to marriage equality.

This reached its apogee on September 19, 2012 when Gillard voted against same-sex marriage — the bill to introduce it was defeated in both Houses. Gillard was a public feminist who declined to marry her long-term hairdresser-partner because marriage was a state-run, patriarchal institution. Abbott made hay with the hypocrisy of it.

Gillard was hampered by her gender in a way someone like Margaret Thatcher wasn’t, simply because even soft left political traditions tend to see MPs from under-represented groups as representative of those groups rather than as individuals with their own politics. She had the impossible task of being all things to all women. Though capable and well-liked by her staff and caucus, she was unable to mesh this insider’s perception of her with the public’s view.

Like Rudd, Abbott was an outsider in his party. The Liberals and Nationals (commonly called The Coalition) have existed under various names since 1923. From the first they appealed to well-heeled business people, wealthy farmers, professionals, and Protestants. Over time they broadened their catchment to include prosperous tradesmen and small farmers and, as with the Conservatives here, became Australia’s natural party of government. Abbott was a conservative Catholic politically closer to the Shoppies who caused Gillard so much grief, and had occasionally voted Labor in his youth.

A Rhodes Scholar and boxing double-Blue, he was an aggressive anti-feminist and anti-gay campaigner in student politics while supporting an expansive welfare state and trade unions. On his return from Oxford he went to seminary to become a priest, but quit before ordination. Labor courted him, but he was disquieted by socialists in Australian unions and hated Labor’s progressive shift on social issues such as abortion and prostitution. It took years before he landed on the right (wing) side of the aisle.

And he hated Gillard, even when she did something with which he agreed — such as opposing same-sex marriage. Abbott treated Gillard with unvarnished contempt. His strategy was simple. He said no to everything Labor attempted to advance. His relentless negativity delegitimised her, and made her look stupid and whiny. His signature line, every time Labor sought to change anything, was to expectorate about “a great big new tax on everything”. In the background, meanwhile, Rudd continued undermining Gillard. During one particularly fractious question time, it emerged that Rudd called the Lodge — Australia’s official prime-ministerial residence and home to Gillard and her partner — “Boganville”. “Bogan” is Australian for “chav”.

Labor collapsed in the polls. Gillard faced catastrophic defeat. And Rudd saw an opportunity to return to the Lodge. Again, he mounted his campaign from outside parliament. He drew on his Queensland connections and Labor’s alarming loss of members to induce members of the Labor caucus to back him. He sold it as an attempt to save the furniture: to retain some marginal seats was enough, because Abbott was burning the government to the ground.

This time there was a leadership ballot. Rudd won 57-45. He then called a snap election for September 7, 2013. Abbott defeated Rudd, but not as badly as he would have defeated Gillard. Labor saved its furniture. The party then reformed its internal processes to make it impossible to depose the leader in a caucus coup.

Abbott was now Prime Minister. It’s safe to say he was terrible at it. His relentlessly negative style, so effective in opposition, became a severe handicap. He could not govern. Every policy he proposed — even sensible ones, such as maternity leave — had to be sweetened with lashings of other people’s money. For a centre-Right leader, he was astonishingly profligate. Australia started to run budget deficits.

By this point, I was Senior Adviser to Senator David Leyonhjelm and spending considerable time in Canberra. David was a classical liberal crossbencher at least notionally unsympathetic to Labor. However, we learnt how good Labor was at negotiating when helmed by someone with roots in the union movement. Labor’s new leader, Bill Shorten, was the insipid John Major of Australian politics, but he dealt intelligently with friend and foe alike.

Abbott’s inability to articulate a positive case infected his cabinet colleagues. Ministers were at a loss as to how to sell policies that couldn’t be dressed up as stopping, banning, or repealing something. Leyonhjelm called it “a sort of anti-communication”. Every time Abbott opened his mouth, he convinced people of the merits of his opponents’ case.

Abbott also proved a weathervane,  reacting unthinkingly to the prevailing political wind. He reneged on promises such as  repealing Australia’s badly drafted hate speech legislation. He introduced punitive anti-terror legislation hoping Labor would reject it, allowing him to use this against them. They refused to be “wedged” and supinely let it pass. He lost 30 Newspolls in a row, often by large margins.

Malcolm Turnbull was waiting in the wings for his moment. A multi-millionaire banker and brilliant lawyer best known in the UK for giving MI5 a bloody nose by ensuring Spycatcher was published in Australia, Turnbull loathed Abbott. The feeling was mutual. Like Abbott, Turnbull was a Rhodes Scholar, but there the similarity ended. A more intellectually able man, he spoke beautifully and often wittily, and had wide interests in literature and the arts. Turnbull was also a more conventional Liberal. Socially liberal and economically conservative, he disliked Abbott’s fondness for welfare spending.

Unlike Labor, neither of the two Coalition parties had reformed their method of selecting leaders. In December 2009, while in opposition, Abbott and Turnbull had scrapped over the leadership. Abbott emerged the victor by a single vote, but the structural warning went unheeded. In September 2013, Turnbull overthrew Abbott, taking the bulk of the Liberal parliamentary party with him, as well as the charismatic deputy PM, foreign minister Julie Bishop.

Like Rudd, Turnbull initially enjoyed enormous popularity. A much better parliamentary performer than Shorten, he made the Labor shadow front-bench look like amateurs during Question Time. However, as with Gillard’s Shoppies-backed victory over Rudd, social conservatives who switched their support from Abbott to Turnbull also exacted payment: Turnbull was to put same-sex marriage to the Australian people in a non-compulsory postal plebiscite, rather than hold a parliamentary vote. But, Australians being Australians, they still voted in huge numbers — turnout was 80 per cent. And the vote in favour was an overwhelming 62 per cent.

This should have sounded a warning to social conservatives. But it didn’t. Australia’s centre-Right parties had become infected with silly ideas from the US about “getting out the base”. Conservative Christians (often Mormons) took over local branches. These people loved Abbott, but were deeply unrepresentative of the Australian population. Lack of representativeness has consequences, because Australia has compulsory voting. There is no need to “get out the base”. The base will vote for you anyway, and if it stays home it will be fined. Turnbull proved incapable of holding together the traditional Howard-style “liberal moderates”, and the new, US-style religious right.

Turnbull also had many of the same character flaws as Rudd. While he was popular with the public, among colleagues he was known for his tempestuous, expletive-filled rants and grumpiness. His failings and the Coalition’s internal divisions came home to roost when he scraped in with a one-seat majority in the 2016 election. His attempt to reduce the influence of the Senate’s crossbenchers by modifying Spence’s voting system also backfired. Thanks to years of practice, Australians understand their complex electoral system and how to manipulate it. Even more minor party senators were elected, and Pauline Hanson — Australia’s red-headed fish-and-chip shop owner turned leader of a populist anti-immigration party — made a triumphant return to Federal politics.

Lacking Labor’s union-based negotiation skills, the Coalition proved incapable of steering legislation through the Senate crossbench. Meanwhile, the hard right continued to undermine Turnbull from within. Parliament became shambolic, no more so than when authoritarian (and deeply unpopular) ex-copper Peter Dutton last year attempted to overthrow Turnbull, only for Scott Morrison to overtake him on the inside. Sold as a compromise candidate, Morrison is actually Australia’s first Pentecostal PM and suffers serious representativeness deficit. Across the political spectrum in secular Australia Conservative Evangelicals are the butt of jokes about snake-handling and speaking in tongues.

Shorten seems, in his unobtrusive way, to be maintaining good order as opposition leader. But if Labor wins May’s election, it will be interesting to see how long this lasts. It wouldn’t surprise me if he spends several terms in office. Australians are overdue some of the dull competence they like so much.

The post How Australia became Italy with crocodiles appeared first on Standpoint.

Two books received like this were Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life and Amy Alkon’s Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence. Both are self-help. For a long time they languished at the bottom of my “chancers” pile, even the 100-page taster foregone. I’d read precisely one self-help book: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I did so on instructions from my pupil-master 14 years ago. An habitué of bookstores, I nonetheless let shelves of “self-help” groan under their own weight. The thought of reading more self-help than Carnegie’s famed effort made me want to swallow my own face.

However, Peterson became newsworthy for reasons unrelated to his book while I had to copy-edit an Alkon piece for another publication, so I read both on flights to and from a friend’s wedding in Corfu. And found myself feeling for the people who read them, not because either book is bad, but because so many people — including huge numbers of young people — need to be told obvious things about how to comport themselves. At one point I turned to my partner and asked, “Do these people not have parents? Surely parents are there to teach you to avoid slouching, or to wear deodorant, or be kind to animals.”

“My parents did, and your parents did,” came the response, “but not other people’s parents.”

My sympathy gland enlarged, I resolved to pay attention to those around me who wanted to be “normal”, who wanted to find a comfortable niche in the strange and fragmented modern world we’ve made for ourselves. “Normies” — although still the majority — are surrounded and interpenetrated by an efflorescence of peculiar sub-cultures, most of them online, and many of them newly influential. And the people in them — while capable of being tech-savvy and clever — often do not know that wearing odd socks to a job interview is, ahem, not a good idea.

There is something to be said for normality, for averages, for social rules. Anyone who thinks Jordan Peterson in particular is running some sort of cult needs to realise that people read his book because they have no idea, and that fact is not their fault.

My parents brought me up with Debrett’s, of course. I learned things like “No brown in town” and “Always fight your battles from the front” from my father (ex-Royal Navy). I suspect I did view philosophy as a form of self-help, although I never called it that. I later became aware of the gag where Virgil tells Dante librarians in Hell are buried upside down in seething mud because they classified self-help books in the philosophy section.

Peterson in particular has copped real stick for being a poundshop philosopher. This is partly because the quality of his writing varies depending on what he’s saying. The self-help advice is expressed clearly, but it’s also trivial. Let children compete; take care of your body; try not to look too desperate on a date.

The parts of the book dealing with philosophy are carried over from his first book, Maps of Meaning. They’re poorly written in the only sense that matters, which is that he fails to communicate his point to the reader. He doesn’t even have Adam Smith’s excuse that you’re supposed to read the first book before attempting the second, because they’ve clearly got very different markets.

Peterson’s big idea is the “archetype”. I can best describe it as a kind of moral or normative template that runs through all human mythologies across different cultures. He thinks there are several of these — although he’s coy about what they are — and that people can draw upon them as a framework to give their lives personal meaning.

If you went through his work with a fine-toothed comb you’d end up with a list of pretty familiar storytelling tropes — the classic male hero, the moral or steadfast woman — but he never lets you get that far and would probably call you a philistine (or threaten to slap you) if you tried to describe his archetypes with that level of clarity.

“Archetype theory” (for want of a better phrase) comes from Carl Jung, the other founder (along with Sigmund Freud) of modern psychoanalysis. For my sins (and partly because I’m a novelist who was first a classicist) I’ve read quite a bit of Jung, as well as quite a bit of Jung’s later popularisers — particularly Joseph Campbell, he of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest there is something in Peterson and Jung and Campbell’s claims at the highest level. That is, there really are about a dozen narrative structures and maybe about 20 character composites that appear over and over again in myth and fiction — with minor variations — all over the world. Structuralists call these “tropes” and it’s the structuralist understanding of them that informs online repositories of popular culture such as TV Tropes (which is, as the webcomic XKCD suggests, the most extraordinary time sink on the internet).

I suspect the most popular of these (one thinks of the Aeneas-Dido narrative in Virgil, for example) probably have a biological basis, although I don’t know how to go about proving that. Wriggling further out along the limb on which I’ve deposited myself, I’m also going to suggest one of the reasons literary fiction often sells poorly is because it sets out to subvert tropes in ways many people dislike.

Relatedly, authors, directors, and playwrights can accidentally (or deliberately, if they’re very skilled) invoke a trope and create a firestorm of interest and sales (and, sometimes, opprobrium, if the trope has been tweaked enough to make people’s hair stand on end but not enough to make them pull that hair out by the roots).

Peterson uses stories and archetypes to ground his belief that improving your personal character makes the world better. This is paired with a dislike not just of socialism but rationalist philosophy in general. He’s basically a “global” traditionalist. He really believes custom contains mysterious wisdom in the old-fashioned sense that we should follow it without trying to understand it. And he thinks this wisdom is the same all around the world.

In that sense his hatred of postmodernism is the narcissism of small differences. Both Peterson and the postmodernists dislike rationalists (because rationalists try to create models through which the world can be understood), and empiricists (because empiricists try to interrogate the world with their senses). Both think knowledge is constructed in some way inaccessible to us. They simply have different approaches to liberation. Postmodernists talk about tearing down “violent” hierarchies while Peterson argues hierarchies are often there for good reason.

But — putting aside all the pokes at him, many of them ideologically motivated — his advice is sound. Baby barrister me started out in the trial division of the Queensland Supreme Court in what is sometimes known euphemistically as “the regions”. And most of the people who finish up in front of the beak in Australian country towns simply haven’t been parented. All the things we think are absolutely standard and should come pre-installed don’t. Families are a mess, there’s domestic violence; kids don’t go to school, or if they do they don’t learn anything; toddlers subsist on junk food. I have seen fat, toothless 19-year-olds in the dock.

A sense of Peterson’s soundness comes from reading Amy Alkon’s very different work of self-help. A stronger writer, she is aware in a way Peterson isn’t when she’s at risk of seeming faintly ridiculous: her chapter on the importance of ritual, for example. Nonetheless, much of what she says is so similar to his and both are such meticulous scholars that I started mining their footnotes, only to discover they often use the same research. This is particularly noticeable when it comes to what Alkon calls “embodied cognition” and Peterson’s Rule No 1: stand up straight with your shoulders back. It turns out you really can shift other people’s perceptions of you (and your perceptions of you) by carrying yourself differently. Your body isn’t just ground transportation for your brain. What you do with it matters.

My mother threatened to stick a broom up my backside if I slouched. I didn’t need Alkon and Peterson; I had my mother. Other people didn’t have my mother. Maybe this is a good thing. My mother took no nonsense, least of all from me. It also suggests people who mock kids for reading Jordan Peterson and following his advice somewhat slavishly have what I’m going to call “parenting privilege”. It’s all very well for people like you and me who have been brought up normally to take a pop at him. And yes, we’re (still) the majority. Most people are, in fact, brought up normally. However, a sufficiently large number of people have been “dragged up” (to use my mother’s expression). They haven’t been taught to wash themselves, to say please and thank you, to stand their ground, to avoid pointless comparisons of themselves with wholly dissimilar others.

We’ve known for decades that some people who don’t really have it in them to be parents nonetheless learn — usually from books. So, likewise, some people have to learn how to “adult” out of a book. And once they do learn that’s great because having people around who understand manners, personal hygiene, animal welfare, not being a bully — regardless of how they came by that understanding — makes the world a more pleasant place for the rest of us.

In that sense, Peterson’s claim that improving oneself improves society is almost certainly true. “If the young men who read Jordan Peterson actually do what he says,” says a relationships counsellor friend of mine, “they will indeed make themselves more attractive to members of the opposite sex. I have been doing this job for 20 years. I know this is true.”

Both Alkon and Peterson are also critical of how pseudoscientific is much of the self-help literature with which they compete. “This book does not contain The Secret,” Alkon says in her wise-ass Detroit way. “Supposedly, if you want a new car, you just picture it and think grateful thoughts about it (as if it were already yours) and some pocket in the universe will unzip and out will drop your fabulous dream ride, right into your life.” Maybe self-help has to be written anew for each generation, and Jordan Peterson is Dale Carnegie for our times.

“Normality” took a battering in the second half of the 20th century. Lots of people were angry about it and did their level best either to tear it down or render it definitively gauche. Who wanted to be normal? Normies were dull. From the playwrights who festooned theatres in the 1960s and gave us things like Marat/Sade to the Beats and the 1968 countercultural slogan IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID, people irritated with the status quo sought to put a landmine under it and blow it up.

Hammering the normies and transgression for the sake of transgression became a thing and is still a thing. Except, as Irish commentator Angela Nagle observes, it’s become an end in itself, at once “negative, nasty, and nihilistic”. Now it lives online in festering cesspools frequented by people who have no idea (and whose absence of ideas is not their fault) but who need rules and want normality. These are the internet’s unloved lost boys and lost girls. With little leverage and less hope for enjoying what we normies still consider the basic elements of a decent life — marriage, work, house, community — they have found Jordan Peterson (also online; he started with YouTube videos) and Amy Alkon and the rules and ritual they crave.

And dear lord, those rules and rituals are needed, because so often people who aren’t normies are still children, even once they’ve turned 30. Not a week goes by when there isn’t a monstrous internet conflagration over some utter triviality, from politicians dancing to novelists daring to write characters unlike themselves. A recent sacrificial victim is children’s author Amélie Wen Zhao, who withdrew her first book from publication despite having signed a half-million-dollar three-book deal. Accused of racism and cultural appropriation and “causing harm” — those tired standbys of the outraged and talentless — she wilted. None of the critics had read her book. When she abased herself, apologising to the Twitter mob, I saw in my mind’s eye academics paraded in dunces’ hats while surrounded by Red Guards carrying big character posters.

These days, literature’s culture war explosions take on a particular form. Gone are fights over bad language and sex in Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Ulysses. Instead, they’re about Young Adult books. Science fiction. Fantasy. Teenagers never lay the mines, but the blow-ups are about the genres most dear to them. We are two generations into a Peter Pan era where people refuse to grow up.

This is where I’m supposed to offer platitudes about how it’s OK if some people’s favourite novels are all meant for children while Disney makes all of some other people’s favourite films, but I refuse. “When you cease being a child, put away childish things” is close enough to Peterson’s pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient to do advisory work.

If you are emotionally devastated by the leftward lean of science fiction to the point of launching a campaign to “take back” the genre; if the moral struggle that gets you out of bed each morning is purging racism from young adult fantasy novels; if you feel besieged by the political predilections of self-declared gamers (or betrayed by the politics of game reviewers); if you use films about comic-book characters to form your worldview; if you cast about for a metaphor to describe your deepest beliefs and find only Harry Potter . . . you are still a child. You need to step back and work out why your identity is so invested in escapist fancies designed to appeal to confused children halfway through puberty.

And when it comes to Harry Potter, Peterson should make “read another book” his Rule 13.

The post Why being normal is the new normal appeared first on Standpoint.