Last night, I attended the launch of this very worthwhile effort to bring some civility back into the public square and public discourse here in Brisbane.
The aims and objectives of this group should be applauded and seeing a full house of some 250 at the venue (Customs House) was encouraging.
The event was a debate on Post-Modernism between Democratic Socialist, Economics Professor John Quiggin of the University of Queensland and visiting Canadian-American libertarian philosophy Professor Stephen Hicks.
I must admit to some serious bias in my pre-suppositions on attending this as I can’t see how a Democratic Socialist can ever claim to have any skill and understanding of economics (think Venezuela over the last 2 decades – I think a Socialist Economist is an oxymoron).
Also having listened to Hicks online argue that the Post-Modernists of the Left had abandoned both facts and truth and could not help but act in angry and uncivil ways, I had thought their dialogue and the contrast between the two would be a lot more clear-cut and abrasive or caustic to some degree.
But what I also hoped for was a lack of emotive language and ad-hominem attacks if this was to be a truly civic discourse.
Instead Quiggin started off mocking Kelly-Anne Conway and other staff of the USA President Trump in a rather rambling, disjointed and unconvincing manner, based on very old news of questionable veracity. But he got worse with his emotive vitriol, for example in calling the conservative US magazine the Federalist, ‘intellectual manure’.
Hicks started with a great analogy about baboons which was then used by the moderator (another Leftist apparently) in connecting the two introductions regarding Kelly-Anne Conway and Baboons so as to conflate the two and in turn mock Conway. The constant mocking of Trump (that continued throughout the debate) to suggest he was not intelligent enough to follow their debate and was perhaps ‘pre-human’ was disappointing, but I sensed sadly that the audience overall had no issue with this.
It does seem very hard, even for Professors, to avoid emotive language and ad-hominem attacks with trying to discuss or debate people they seriously disagree with. I think we have a long way to go to overcome this.
Given that Hicks is a Libertarian and not really conservative or right-wing (he mistakenly argues that conservatives wish to return to a pre-modern era), the debate was not between the Left and Right of politics at all and so did not really highlight the great chasm and conflict that has grown between them in recent years.
Further illustrative of this was Quiggin’s attempt to paint Post-Modernism as right-wing by applying it to Hitler and the Nazi’s. As the Nazi’s along with Mussolini were Fascists which is very much a form of Socialism and in no way right-wing and conservative, the fact that Hicks did not even attempt to refute this line of argument was also disappointing.
Interestingly, they both argued that John Stuart Mill was a Socialist - while Yoram Hazony argues he was a Nationalist - see https://luke443.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-virtue-of-nationalism-by-yoram.html
The highlight of the night for me then (apart from meeting and engaging with an interesting audience member who described himself as a ‘progressive’), was an excellent rejection of the use of such terms as ‘Climate Denier’ by Professor Hicks. Given the continual and irrelevant referral to Climate Change by Professor Quiggin, Hick’s response and argument that the term skeptic was much more acceptable, was balanced and helpful in promoting the goals of this event.
The aims of this group are indeed admirable, so I hope to see their next effort more fully confront the challenge of the cultural and political divide between Socialism and Conservatism.
To better appreciate the issues at stake here, I find it hard to go past the works of Dinesh D'Souza. I would also recommend the latte Roger Scruton's 'Conservatism https://www.audible.com.au/pd/Conservatism-Audiobook/1781257523 and the US politician Rand Paul's 'The Case Against Socialism' https://www.audible.com.au/pd/The-Case-Against-Socialism-Audiobook/0062954881
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