Read an extract from The Way We Are by Hugh Mackay.
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Fake wisdom
In the Age of Opinion, you can say whatever you like and expect to be taken seriously, as long as you assert your opinion confidently enough and no one in the room has any actual evidence to the contrary. (‘As everyone knows . . .’ or ‘I recently read something . . .’ are favourite rhetorical devices.) In the Age of Opinion, weirdly, there’s a suspicion of experts who might actually know what they’re talking about—‘Why should their opinion carry more weight than mine?’—especially when the internet can provide ‘evidence’ for practically anything.
If you know where to look, you’ll find support for whatever crazy theory you might want to propose—though, given the number of conspiracy theories being floated every day, even the word ‘theory’ has a bit too much gravitas to be appropriate. There’s also a plethora of ‘research’ available in the mass media and on the internet—some of it rigorous and reliable, some of it decidedly flaky—so you can usually back up an opinion with ‘the research says’. In the Age of Opinion, no one is likely to question you too closely about the integrity of the research you’re quoting. After all, you’re only called on to express your opinion, not to justify it.
Easy answers, instant explanations, quick solutions . . . there’s no shortage of demand for any of that and no time for a more thoughtful, considered approach. In my own field of qualitative social research, I used to insist that no findings be discussed with a client until at least a couple of weeks after all the fieldwork had been completed, so there was sufficient time for rumination, reflection and careful interpretation of the data. Today, clients expect to have so-called ‘top-line findings’ delivered as soon as the fieldwork is done—or, preferably, to sit behind a two-way mirror so they can observe the data being gathered and draw their own conclusions on the run.
As the world becomes a more uncertain place, with the very survival of our species now in serious question, our appetite for certainty is as strong as ever, or perhaps even stronger. We are so desperate for answers that even uninformed opinions, unsubstantiated theories or reckless generalisations will do.
The problem is that once we’ve been exposed to that uninformed opinion, unsubstantiated theory or reckless generalisation, we’re at serious risk of simply accepting it at face value. If we have no prior knowledge to test it by, and if it sounds plausible, we’re likely to take it on board, become attached to it and possibly even be prepared to defend it.
Here’s an unfortunate quirk of human psychology: the flakier the proposition we’ve accepted and the more we lack solid evidence for it, the more likely we are to cling to it.
This is known as the Dunning–Kruger effect, after Justin Kruger and David Dunning, who reported in a 1999 journal article that being ignorant of our own ignorance causes us to overestimate our competence. As Charles Darwin had long ago remarked, ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.’ And Bertrand Russell was scathing about people whose confidence in their views exceeds their qualifications to hold those views: ‘The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.’
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Our attitudes, beliefs, convictions and prejudices are remarkably resilient (‘notoriously resistant to change’ is a less charitable way of putting it). Once an attitude—or even a piece of information, true or false—takes up residence in our mind, it’s very hard to dislodge. Adolf Hitler’s arch propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, understood this when he wrote in his diary that ‘experience shows that whoever speaks the first word to the world is always right’. In other words, our minds are highly receptive to new information, as long as it doesn’t contradict a view we already hold.
Replacing something we ‘know’ with information that appears to contradict it is a different thing altogether. That’s a real challenge for us, even when it’s a relatively trivial matter. ‘But I’m sure you pronounce your surname Mack-eye—I was told that a long time ago,’ a man once said to me when he was about to introduce me to speak at a conference. He only mentioned it because someone else had just told him it was ‘Mack-ay’ to rhyme with ‘okay’. I assured him that it is indeed pronounced to rhyme with ‘hay’ (except when I’m in Scotland, where such a pronunciation would simply be mocked), but my words fell on deaf ears. Moments later, clinging to his conviction, he introduced me as ‘Hugh Mack-eye’. (Better, by far, than the MC who once introduced me as ‘Hugh Grant’.)
Or it can be more serious. Having been told that a person you’re about to meet is untrustworthy and unreliable, it’s very hard to ignore the filter that has thus been imposed on your perceptions of that person. Everything she says and does will raise questions in your mind about her sincerity, her integrity or her real intentions.
If you know the world is flat, or that the sun goes around the Earth, it will seem ludicrous for anyone to suggest otherwise. No wonder Copernicus ran into so much trouble! It took nothing less than a scientific revolution to dislodge those ideas from the popular mind.
Intuition is often admired and given credit for perceiving ‘truth’ in the absence of any other evidence. But intuition can be a trap, too: once you’ve convinced yourself that something is the case on the basis of nothing more than a hunch, even evidence to the contrary can be dismissed as unconvincing. Early religious upbringing, too, can create certain prejudices, expectations and dispositions that may take a lifetime to modify in the light of personal experience—the idea that ‘bad things won’t happen to good people’, for instance, or that prayer is a way of persuading God to do things to please you . . . make it rain, perhaps, or let your side win a war.
Conventional wisdom can be a bit like that. Things that ‘everyone knows’ can still be wrong: it’s just very hard to convince people of that, once they ‘know’ what they’ve been told, or even what they’ve intuited because ‘it’s so obvious’.
Let’s reflect on a few opinions that have achieved such widespread currency that they amount to conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, that ‘wisdom’ turns out to be fake. A few lines of argument in this book are unlikely to change many people’s minds . . . but let’s see how we go.
Fake wisdom: There are distinctive ‘Aussie values’.
On 25 April 2006, the Beaconsfield goldmine in Tasmania collapsed. Of the seventeen miners who were underground at the time, fourteen quickly escaped and one, Larry Knight, was killed. The other two, Brant Webb and Todd Russell, were trapped almost one kilometre below the surface. Five days later, contact with them was established and they were finally rescued on 9 May, two weeks after the collapse.
The unfolding drama of the contact, the laborious drilling of a rescue tunnel and the ultimate rescue were widely covered on television—and, incidentally, brought Bill Shorten, then the national secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union, to national prominence. A huge media contingent remained at the mine site as preparations for the rescue proceeded, ready to capture the moment when Webb and Russell would emerge.
It was a remarkable rescue that attracted international attention—as have similar rescues, in assorted settings, in many countries. But one of the features of the Beaconsfield saga was the way in which Australian politicians, journalists and other commentators kept insisting that the rescue was a wonderful example of ‘Aussie values’, ‘Aussie courage’ and ‘mateship’ on display, as if Australians would be uniquely concerned about rescuing their trapped miners—unlike, say, Russians or Canadians or Welsh.
Do we imagine that, faced with a crisis like the Beaconsfield mine collapse, people in other countries would have said, ‘It looks as if there are a couple of fellows trapped down there. Seems pretty hopeless. Let’s call it a day and maybe come back and check the situation in the morning’?
Really? Haven’t we seen extraordinary footage of heroic Italians rescuing people from the catastrophic mudslides of 2022 and 2023? Haven’t we been moved by the sight of Turks and Syrians struggling against the odds to locate survivors of the 2023 earthquakes? Or Ukrainians desperately searching for people in the wreckage of apartment buildings hit by Russian missiles?
Rescuing the victims of a disaster. Caring for the sick and the wounded. Responding to the needs of the disadvantaged and marginalised. Feeding the hungry. Offering a bed to the homeless. These are things that, throughout human history, human beings have done for each other because that’s how members of a social species behave when the need arises. Rescuing trapped miners—even going to the most extra-ordinary lengths to do so—is an example of human nature on display. These are human values, not specifically (and certainly not exclusively) Australian values.
We do ourselves a great disservice when we try to perpetuate the myth that ‘Aussie values’ are exceptional or even unique, or when we try to appropriate to ourselves the human qualities and values that make this a wonderful species to belong to. Yes, there are other less attractive features of human behaviour—like violence, exploitation, prejudice, neglect of people in need—we might not want to be associated with, and you’ll notice we never try to claim them as uniquely ours, even though they are as much in evidence here as elsewhere.
It’s a great temptation, when nationalistic zeal is upon us, to make all sorts of outrageous claims about how uniquely good we are. Our soldiers are the bravest, toughest and most courageous! No, they’re not. Many of them, like many other soldiers, including those we have sometimes regarded as enemies, have been brave and tough, and sometimes courageous. But, as with every other country that has ever fought wars, there are plenty of dark episodes in our military history, including our recent ill-judged military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Our medical system is the best in the world! No, it isn’t. It’s extremely good, but so are lots of other country’s medical systems. (The Netherlands’ system is wonderful. America’s is probably the best, if only you could afford to access it.)
We’re more passionate about sport than any other nation! No, we’re not. Try telling that to English, Argentinian or Spanish soccer fans.
We always punch above our weight! No, we don’t. We sometimes do, and we’ve cracked the formula that says if you put enough money into a particular sport, you’ll probably win some medals in international competition. And, like most countries, we’ve produced some outstanding people who have done outstanding work in science and the arts. But when it comes to human rights, we’re hardly a shining example to the world: you wouldn’t want to examine our treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers too closely, nor the treatment of our First Nations peoples. And we punch way below our weight when it comes to carbon emissions reduction. (We’re still selling our coal to other countries and then accusing them of polluting.) Nor could we claim to be anywhere near the Scandinavian countries when it comes to social welfare or public housing or a commitment to true equality.
And the famous Aussie ‘fair go’? When you examine it closely, that doesn’t look too flash, either. Until quite recently, we didn’t even give women a fair go, let alone our First Nations peoples.
What are these unique Aussie values, then? Surely we’re not going to claim some version of liberté, egalité, fraternité, are we? The French were onto that as long ago as 1789—you may recall they had a revolution about it—and our devotion to the concept of ‘mateship’ is not only unacceptably blokeish in the twenty-first century but is no more than a rough trans-lation of fraternité.
Beware of hubris posing as patriotism! Beware of assuming that our noblest qualities are uniquely ours! Most of the values we claim as cornerstones of our way of life are simply the touchstones of any modern liberal democracy: respect for persons, regardless of age or sex; respect for democracy and its institutions, including the rule of law and the principle of parliamentary representation; the rights to freedom of speech, assembly and religion. All such democracies claim to discourage the exploitation of the weak by the strong, and to abhor prejudice that leads people to make judgements about each other based purely on some category they represent—whether defined by ethnicity, gender, religion, politics or otherwise. All such democracies condemn the oppression and abuse of minorities.
We’d sign up to all those values, wouldn’t we? We even manage to adhere to some of them, but we’re a bit half-hearted about others. And when we say we aspire to live by those values, we could scarcely claim them as uniquely ours without offending every other liberal democracy on the planet.
What about our allegedly distinctive brand of humour? It’s just as derivative as everyone else’s. There’s actually a very small pool of ‘core’ jokes that keep being refined and recycled and adapted to suit different contexts and cultures. Even our historical practice of saving our vilest jokes for Indigenous people can be matched by other countries with Indigenous populations. Shame often shows up as humour.
You know that ‘quintessentially Aussie’ joke about the Texas rancher who visits a cattle station in Far North Queensland? Bragging to the Australian owner about the size of his own ranch, the Texan says, ‘It’s so big, I can get on my horse on the eastern boundary, ride all day, camp over-night and ride all the next day, and still not reach the western boundary.’
‘Yeah,’ says the Aussie. ‘We used to have a horse like that . . .’
Quintessentially Aussie? Precisely the same joke pops up in Belgium but it’s about slow trains, not horses.
Even the suggestion that there’s a unique or ‘authentic’ Australian spirituality looks a bit thin when you examine it. When we examine the concept of ‘spirituality’ detached from its religious moorings, we’re not talking about anything uniquely Australian:
the sense of our interconnectedness with all creatures and with the earth that sustains us
the need for kindness and compassion in all our dealings
the urge to create myths and metaphors and tell stories that express our deepest yearnings, and that capture our most appealing visions, dreams and beliefs about the world and how to live in it
the need to honour our ancestors and respect their heritage
the value of quiet contemplation and deep meditation upon the meaning and purpose of our lives.
You can find those themes everywhere from the Aboriginal Dreaming to Christianity, from Hinduism to Buddhism and from Baha’i to Humanism or SBNRs (spiritual but not religious). Different practices, different myths, different words, but essentially the same yearning for meanings that will help us make sense of our life in this world, and perhaps even in some unimaginable world to come.
The Way We Are
by Hugh Mackay
Australia's leading social psychologist examines our society today and asks timely and urgent questions about its future.