Does the responsibility of government imply a duty ‘not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed upon but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation’, as Michael Oakeshott described in his 1962 essay On Being Conservative: ‘not to stoke the fires of desire but to damp them down’?
Oxford Dictionaries selected ‘post-truth’ as its 2016 international word of the year: ‘an adjective relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals’. Inflaming execrable passions, politicians in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe have promoted offensive views on minorities, immigrants, and women. Previously unacceptable racist and misogynist discourse has been legitimised and even aggrandised. Hate speech and the rejection of difference is justified as breaking the shackles of political correctness. The attraction of plain speaking, a metaphor here for vilification and persecution, marginalises balanced and rational input from informed ‘experts’. People who work with evidence are pilloried as meddling technocrats, any compassion in their approach disparaged as out of touch with the exigencies of real life. Money talks, and scientific or critical thinkers are told to walk. “Some of the richest people in this country”, says Trump, “are people who can’t even read or write… but they’re a lot smarter than the guys coming out of Harvard, let me tell you”.
The structural shocks of advanced global capitalism have coalesced with toxic debates on borders and bodies, bringing attacks on those perceived to threaten the values, practices and opportunities of a way of life seen as increasingly precarious. Criminal justice policy has become fused with issues of national security, and previously open countries are turning towards isolationism and xenophobia, acting out routines that are part swagger, part paranoia. Fundamental liberal democratic values of tolerance, equality, freedom from oppression, and even the rule of law, are threatened. The idea of social justice is under more extreme pressure than ever, while human rights are perceived to be red-taped fetters on the doing of real justice.
On 20th January, a president will be inaugurated in the United States who wants to build a border wall to keep Mexicans out, and considers it fine to talk about grabbing women by the pussy, so long as the conversation is in the locker room. The US security agencies have published their ‘high confidence’ conclusion that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin ordered the cyberhacking of the Democratic Party’s campaign in order to get Trump elected. Welcome to a world in which the most powerful person is pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, climate change denying, twitter-trolling, conflict of interest abusing and crony-promoting: an unapologetic admirer of the cult of personality represented by the model of the autocratic nationalist strongman. Paul Krugman recently wrote in the New York Times that on inauguration day ‘America Becomes a Stan’.
Where does New Zealand figure in all this, and where do we go from here? For a country so popular with British and North American citizens looking to escape the madness back home, we harbour a variety of confronting criminal justice and wider social policy realities: a very high imprisonment rate; a criminal justice system that has long disproportionately affected Māori; a culture that allows the creation of justice policy on the basis of extreme, aberrant cases; the normalisation of violence against children and women. To what extent do facts like these challenge the assumption that New Zealand is surely fair, inclusive and respectful enough at its core to be able to resist the tenebrous prejudices that seem to be consuming other countries?
The Victoria University of Wellington Institute of Criminology is hosting a one-day ‘public criminology’ symposium on 17 February 2017. We will question the role of academic research in light of recent global political events. The symposium is free and open to all – register to attend on eventbrite.
This was originally published in The Dominion Post on 19 January 2017.