The Minefield

Ever since Aristotle, it has been recognised that money poses a particular threat to the integrity of political office. Ever the realist, Aristotle knew that those who seek political office are invariably motivated by a certain ambition (philótimo). Though not problematic in itself, but when combined with avarice (philochrematía) it can give rise to a form of corruption as corrosive as the unconstrained exercise of political power.For as Aristotle would put it, one who accepts gifts (katadōrodokoúmenos) will also be one who shows favouritism (katacharizómenos). He holds up as an example the council of “elders” (gérontas) in Sparta, who were “well known to have taken bribes and to have been guilty of partiality in public affairs” (Politics II.1271). The fault of the Spartan system, he concluded, the source of its underlying political rot, was a kind of pervasive unaccountability (aneuthúnos), such that citizens no longer had a reasonable expectation of impartial treatment from lawmakers — which is to say, they could no longer expect justice.The suspicion of hidden influence and the fear of special consideration undermine the faith of citizens in our shared institutions to behave justly. Even when these institutions are conducting themselves equitably and representatives are making decisions on principled grounds, the ubiquity of money in politics breeds mistrust and ensures that suspicion lingers just below the surface of democratic life.This is why any healthy political order depends on trust and is sustained through rigorous forms of public accountability. For once democratic faith is lost or significantly damaged, it lends credence to the claims of populist entrepreneurs and charlatans that politics per se is corrupt and that anti-democratic means are the only way to fix an untenable status quo.Concerns around overt political corruption and undue influence being exerted by oligarchs and billionaires over government policy have reached endemic levels in places like the United States, the UK and France over the last decade. And while Australia has been spared the luridness and eyewatering sums of political “donations” now commonplace in US politics, public faith in this country has nonetheless been challenged, to say the least, over the last month by a series of political scandals from across the political spectrumIn each case, the question of money in politics goes deeper than what is legal — it goes to what corrupts public perception of, and faith in, democratic politics itself. Is that criterion best served through aggressive anti-corruption bodies? Or is there a case for something more thoroughgoing: not just caps on donations or a prohibition on donations from certain sectors, but a ban on private donations altogether?Guest: Yee-Fui Ng is an Associate Professor of Law at Monash University, where she specialises in the areas of public law and political integrity. Her most recent books are Combatting the Code: Regulating Automated Government Decision-Making in Comparative Context and The Rise of Political Advisors in the Westminster System.

According to every available metric, the number of people who read books across almost every demographic in countries like Australia and the United States has fallen precipitously over the last fifteen years. Whether it be for enjoyment or edification, reading books is no longer something many of us choose to do. As Rose Horowitch writes in her recent cover story for The Atlantic, “The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most — retirees, women, and college graduates — have seen a collapse.”This isn’t to say we don’t read. Indeed, the paradox is that this crisis of literacy comes at a time when we are inundated with words. The incessant production and circulation of texts constitute our cultural milieu, to the point that we could say these messages are our medium.But isn’t there is a vast difference between merely looking at or reacting to or skimming words on a screen, and the kind of sustained attentiveness or self-forgetting patience that is demanded by the commitment to immerse oneself in a book? Just as there is a vast difference between expressing oneself in writing and supplying prompts to a chatbot. It is not merely that the activity is different; so too is the effect the activities have on our inner life.When he was trying to make sense of the peculiar process involved in reading-with-understanding, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it this way: “When I read a poem or narrative with feeling [mit Empfindung], surely something goes on in me which does not go on when I merely skim the lines [die Zeilen … überfliege] for information.”How are we to account for this difference? And how does it relate to the “something” that Wittgenstein refers to? The size of the text has something to do with it. Both Søren Kierkegaard in 1846 and Ray Bradbury in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, warned against the effect of the ever-increasing abbreviation of our modes of writing on our interior lives. Bradbury’s nefarious Captain Beatty thus anticipated the trajectory that would lead to the advent of social media with remarkable precision:“Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending … Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column … One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”But, as they say, size isn’t everything. Big books are not necessarily “good” or “serious” or “weighty” books, and there is an infinite distance between a well-wrought poem and a tweet. Rather, what seems to matter is the time that is involved, and the intensity or focus of the inner labour that the text demands. Which is to say, what matters is our exposure to the moral reality of another as it presents itself to us in that text.This brings us to the other paradox of our moment. The proliferation of modes of communication and expressions of opinion has not brought about greater exposure to the moral reality of others. Through the speed, the superficiality and the algorithmic selectivity of our rapid-fire systems of hypercommunication, we have effectively walled ourselves off from the strange, the other. As the Korean-German philosopher Byung Chul Han has argued, the “digital web inhabited by the ego has lost all that is foreign … we operate in the numerical space of the Same”. He continues: “Literature and art are on the way to the Other. The desire for the Other is their essential trait.” But today, “the silent voice of the Other is drowned out by the noise of the Same. The literary crisis ultimately stems from the expulsion of the Other.”In some religious traditions, there are habits that are instilled to prepare readers for encounter with the absolutely “Other” — which is to say, the sacred — in certain texts. By means of these habits, the ego is set aside, or rather, is put in its place, by means of the disciplining of time and the cultivation of what Simone Weil would call the “unmixed attention” she would equate with prayer. Such reading is meant to be a form of ecstasy, in the sense of being drawn outside of one’s self. Today, however, as Han writes, “the economy of attention”, oriented as it is to the fleeting satisfactions of the self, “overgrows both the poetics and the ethics of attentiveness”.Is there a connection, then, between our prevailing condition of contempt for others, our habits of moral grandstanding and of antidemocratic impatience, and the decline in our willingness to read books? Ought we to begin thinking of the skills required to read well — “with feeling”, as Wittgenstein put it — as a kind of preparation for moral encounter with others?Further reading:Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”, The Atlantic (1 October 2024)Rose Horowitch, “The End of Reading Is Here”, The Atlantic (8 July 2026)Sophie Gee, “Inventing Devotion: How Books Taught Us to Feel with One Another”, ABC Religion and Ethics (30 June 2026)Maryanne Wolf, “How Do We Cultivate Deep Reading Processes in a Digital Age?”, ABC Religion and Ethics (20 February 2023)Guest: Sophie Gee is Professor of English at Princeton University and the inaugural Vice-Chancellor Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Sydney. She is the co-host, with Jonty Claypole, of the Secret Life of Books podcast, and the author, most recently, of The Barbarous Feast: Eating and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century World.You can listen to the first episode of the Secret Life of Books podcast series on George Eliot’s Middlemarch here.

Even for those who don’t gamble, the exponential growth of online sports betting since 2018 has made it impossible to avoid. Not only have odds and ads been seamlessly integrated into sports broadcasts, but the language of betting has now become pervasive in sports commentary. Thanks to ease of access through mobile technology and their relative value as ready-made “content”, speculation and predictions are the air that sports fans now breathe.It is into this cultural environment that prediction markets have recently exploded. Prediction markets are online platforms that accept wagers on whether relatively specific events will occur by a certain date, whose payout is determined by the likelihood of that event occurring. These zero-sum “event contracts” can cover everything from geopolitics to popular culture. Real examples include: will Justin Bieber perform during the World Cup final half-time show; what will the high temperature be in New York City on a particular day; will Nicolás Maduro still be the president of Venezuela at the end of 2025; will Trump use specific words during the State of the Union; will the second coming of Jesus Christ take place before 2027.Like sports betting, prediction markets have grown rapidly in both value and reach over the last two years. The odds of one platform accompanied the broadcast of the 2026 Golden Globe Awards, and at the end of 2025 media companies like The Wall Street Journal, CNN and CNBC announced partnerships with prediction markets to integrate their data directly into news coverage.Advocates for prediction markets insist they represent a sophisticated form of “crowd sourcing” and that, in a world of unaccountable punditry and rampant misinformation, the financial incentive is a way of getting people to “put their money where their mouth is”. (A similar rationale has been given for the superiority of calculated sports bets over irrational fandom.) We could think of this as a kind of corruption of Karl Marx’s famous aphorism from the Communist Manifesto: analysts have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to profit from it.Such high-minded epistemological justifications notwithstanding, we have already begun to witness the ethically problematic uses to which prediction markets can be put. In January 2026, one platform allowed users to bet on whether Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be ousted by 1 March (though the company subsequently issued refunds and refused to honour what amounts to a “death contract”). There has also been a predominance of perfectly timed bets on covert military operations involving Venezuela and Iran, leading the Anti-Corruption Data Collective to conclude “that certain categories of political prediction markets, especially those tied to military activity, display signs of asymmetric information and potential insider trading”.Such concerns over corruption have led both to the prosecution of a member of the US military and the passage of the Banning Event Trading on Sensitive Operations and Federal Functions (BETS OFF) Act by the US Senate, prohibiting politicians and staff from trading on prediction markets.This raises a number of pertinent questions. Do the epistemological claims offered by prediction markets hold up — or do they not only incentivise corrupt behaviour but, thereby, signal a pervasive distrust in more ethically credible sources of knowledge and expertise? In countries where prediction markets are not legal, like Australia, what does the habit of viewing the world through the predictive lens — which treats the trivial and the tragic alike as fodder for speculation and profit making — do to our sense of justice, legitimacy and decency?Guest: Adam Piovarchy is a Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Australia. He is a lead investigator on a research project examining the ethics and politics of prediction markets.

It’s no mystery why David Frankel’s 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada was a hit. The movie had all the ingredients of a certain kind of success. Take a bestselling novel (by Lauren Weisberger) about a midwestern girl trying to make it in the big city, place it in the hands of a screenwriter known for broadly appealing rom-coms (Aline Brosh McKenna), cast a much-loved screen legend in an uncharacteristically villainous role (Meryl Streep) and put her alongside a doe-eyed starlet on her way to becoming a superstar (Anne Hathaway) … then set the plot in the rarefied world of haute couture and divide it between New York and Paris — what’s not to love?What is a little surprising is that The Devil Wears Prada should have achieved the quality of a certain timelessness (despite being released a year before the now ubiquitous iPhone). It is a cinema classic whose enduring appeal and pop cultural resonance have been demonstrated by the global success of a sequel, two decades on.But does the film’s success point to narrative and thematic elements that run much deeper than the appeal of the glossy surface?Take, for instance, the obvious Faustian connection, evoked both in the title of the film and the blunt words of Emily (played by Emily Blunt) to Andrea Sachs (Hathaway): “You sold your soul the day you put on your first pair of Jimmy Choos.” The narrative arc of the film is, broadly, the naïve Andy’s “descent” into the world of high fashion, cultural influence and sterile, superficial beauty, only to step back from the hellmouth of corruptibility at the end, lest she too share Miranda Priestly’s (Streep) unhappy fate. Does this mean that Andy also shares in Faust’s culpability, less a victim than a participant in his own damnation?Who, then, plays the role of the seducer? Who is the film’s Mephistopheles, also trapped in a hell of diabolical design? Is it Emily — starved, harried, contemptuous, miserable? Is it Christian Thompson (Simon Baker) — urbane, erudite, well-connected, corrupting, and ultimately impotent? Surely it is Nigel (Stanley Tucci) — personable, appealing, but a slave to Miranda’s imperious demands, and a prisoner to a corrupted vision of beauty (“size six is the new fourteen”). And to what extent does Andy escape unscathed, given her string of broken relationships?The Devil Wears Prada also draws deeply on those specifically New York stories of tragic or monstrous success. Stories like Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 The Sweet Smell of Success (with imperious newspaper columnist JJ Hunsecker playing the Miranda Priestly role) and Darren Aronofsky’s 2011 Black Swan, or John Badham’s 1977 Saturday Night Fever and Mary Harron’s 2000 American Psycho, or Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street and Taylor Hackford’s 1997 The Devil’s Advocate. Is New York really a place of opportunity, or is it the kind of environment in which the price of success is one’s own soul?The transformation that Andy Sachs undergoes in the first half of the film initially looks like an external accommodation to a class or caste of society where one wants to belong — a sartorial equivalent of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, though with Nigel in the role of Henry Higgins. But if there is any lesson from the film, it is this: in a culture where appearance is essence — which is to say, how you look is who you are — the change of appearance rarely remains skin deep.Finally, The Devil Wears Prada trades on, and in no way resolves, one of the central contradictions in modern democracies — one that is explored at length by Elizabeth Anderson: in political cultures that prize agency and democratic self-determination, many workplaces are tyrannies, and bosses despots. The glimpses we get of Miranda’s unhappy home life, however sympathy inducing they are, does not reduce our sense that she presides over a domain in which she has no equals, no one to whom she is morally answerable. All there is, is the standard of aesthetic perfection and cultural sway to which she has sacrificed everything (apart from, of course, her Harry Potter-devouring twin daughters).It is therefore diabolically fitting that, at the film’s end, Nigel’s ambitions for professional self-determination and Emily’s momentary escape into the world of bread rolls and chocolate pudding are both frustrated. They end the film, presumably, where they began — namely, imprisoned and mendicant.The question is: where does the film leave its audience? Are we left longing for the world of glamour that had seduced Andy — and us, vicariously — or are we content with the nobility of a job reporting for a modest newspaper that would soon be swallowed by the advent of social mediaGuest: Clare Bowditch is an Australian musician, broadcaster, author and actress.

Essential to the profitability and widespread adoption of modern technologies is the need to conceal their costs — the human labour, the unjust or exploitative working conditions, the environmental degradation and drain on natural resources, the reduction of precious goods to mere ‘raw material’. By means of such concealment, those who enjoy the conveniences these technologies afford are lulled into a state of (what Hannah Arendt called) “unthinkingness”. The benefits simply appear, and consumers are left incurious about how it could have happened so quickly, so cheaply, with so little friction.The other thing that is crucial for the success of such technologies is the way that their speed, financial backing and sheer scale project a sense of irresistibility — what Shoshana Zuboff has termed “the cult of inevitabilism”. Put otherwise, the belief that resistance, however principled and noble, is ultimately futile. So get on board or get out of the way.Artificial intelligence represents, in many ways, the apogee of both aspects. The assumption that AI development hovers somewhere between an “arms race” with existential stakes and the key to unlocking untold productivity and economic growth has had the effect of reducing calls for prudential care and democratic consultation to little more than inconveniences to be gotten around rather than objections to be engaged with meaningfully. At the same time, the twin mantras of “more compute” (more chips, more data centres, more electricity) and “more data sets” have been used to legitimate both the expenditure of unimaginable sums of money and the indiscriminate (and ultimately illegal) use of intellectual property for the training of AI models. You could call this theft generative AI’s original sin.In both cases, the guiding philosophy seems to be that the purportedly beneficial ends will have justified the unprincipled means. Which is to say, the emergence of artificial general intelligence will cicatrise the moral wound inflicted by these companies’ originary theft. After all, what’s a little copyright infringement between inhabitants of an AI-ushered utopia?And yet, beginning in 2024, despite the size, the rapaciousness and the heedlessness of these AI companies, a number of courageous pockets of profoundly human opposition have emerged. To date, perhaps the most consequential are the resistance on the part of local councils in the US and UK to the construction of data centres, and the lawsuits filed on behalf of writers, artists and some media companies against the illegal use of their copyrighted work to train generative AI models.Met with such opposition, unsurprisingly, AI companies are looking for new terrain on which to construct their data centres, and new sources of data to be strip-mined for their models. Concerns are that the Australian federal government is attempting to position itself as an attractive destination for these companies, and Australia as the beneficiary of the investments that come with them. But at what price to Australia’s creative industries?Last year, the Productivity Commission proposed a “text and data mining exception” to the Copyright Act, paving the way for AI models to be trained on the copyrighted work of Australian authors and artists. Concerned that this exemption may be revived as part of a proposed deal with AI companies to “attract more than $50 billion worth of datacentre investment”, authors and artists converged on Canberra last week to oppose any such dilution of legal protections to their intellectual property.The questions raised by this opposition are difficult and extremely consequential. Is “fair compensation” for the use of these artists’ works sufficient to heal the moral wound inflicted by the original theft of their work? Is the establishment of a fund to support future artists enough to encourage and sustain such creative work, when the cultural effect of AI is to devalue both human creativity and the time and labour required to truly create? Aren’t both current and future authors and artists jeopardised by the indiscriminacy with which training models treat “data”, effectively equating the collected works of Dostoevsky with 100,000 hours of transcribed YouTube videos, and reducing them all to raw materials?“Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI”, by Alex Reisner, The Atlantic (20 March 2025).“I don’t want a US tech bro as a patron — which is why artists must defend our copyright in the age of AI”, by Anna Funder, The Guardian (6 July 2026).Guest: Anna Funder is Professor of Practice in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney, and the award-winning author of Stasiland, All That I Am and, most recently, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life.

In 1967, after reaching the heights of social and political influence in 1963, after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and having been instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr watched his popular support fall precipitously away. He had reached the lowest point of his life on the public stage, with fully two-thirds of Americans disapproving of him. King’s rousing vision of nonviolence — of racial coexistence within a community defined by mutuality, interdependence and love — seemed to be growing ever more remote following the landmark civil rights legislation. The Black Power movement was gaining influence, and in 1967 alone there had been 76 violent riots across major American cities.Then, in April 1967, King denounced the US military involvement in Vietnam — a war that was wildly popular with the vast majority of Americans. For his supporters, it was strategically counterproductive to so connect the cause of civil rights with the goals of peace activists; while Barry Goldwater, the standard bearer of a kind of atavistic conservatism, characterised King’s words as treasonous.King had also grown concerned that the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts represented, for many Americans, the end of their concern. This legislation had ushered in a kind of complacency that absolved them from any further inconvenience or moral concern.Now that Black people had been granted equality de jure, what was needed was for them to be accorded equality de facto — especially in education, employment and housing, and not only in the South. Therefore, in the autumn of 1967 King launched what would be known as the Poor People’s Campaign, which was meant to culminate in a new march on Washington DC in the spring of 1968.But disagreement with the ambitions and unruliness of the campaign from within, coupled with outright antipathy from the Johnson administration due to his opposition to the war in Vietnam, plunged King into a condition of deepening despair. Even as he gave himself with increasing desperation to the cause, and tried to rally support for the Poor People’s Campaign across the South, he suffered from a growing sense of futility. The constant threat of being killed did nothing to alleviate his depression. According to those closest to King, he was physically, emotionally, spiritually exhausted.In March 1968, King received a request from Memphis, Tennessee, to offer his support for the 1,300 of the city’s sanitation workers, who had gone on strike for better pay, the ability to organise and improved working conditions after two of their number had been killed on the job. King accepted the invitation, believing that Memphis would mark the beginning of a nationwide campaign against poverty and housing discrimination.In Memphis, he and his team met with reticence among their own number and political opposition to mass demonstrations — including a federal injunction obtained by the city prohibiting any demonstrations for ten days, after one such march had been derailed by violence. On the evening of 3 April, King was scheduled to speak at Bishop Charles Mason Temple. Because of severe storms, King believed turnout would be suppressed. He was, moreover, sick with the flu and asked Ralph Abernathy, whom he described as “the best friend that I have in the world”, to speak in his stead. But when Abernathy saw the church was filled to capacity, with more than 3,300 people packed into the building, they sent word back to King telling him the people needed to hear King speak, even if briefly.Once King arrived, Abernathy gave an unusually long introduction — close to 30 minutes — in order to minimise the strain on King himself. King spoke without notes, and was evidently unprepared. He habitually started his speeches slowly, haltingly, in order to allow them to reach a series of rhetorical peaks. But his weariness on this occasion was evident from the beginning. At times, the speech feels improvised, vague, superficial, a little meandering; at other points, it feels as though he is playing his “greatest hits”.But as King goes on, the speech grows in clarity and coherence. He begins with a kind of survey of human civilisation and the struggle for enlightenment and freedom — a historical arc spanning from the liberation of the slaves from Egypt to the gathering that stormy night on behalf of the sanitation workers of Memphis, all expressing the same cry: “We want to be free.” He concludes with a survey of the high points of the civil rights movement, expressing his gratitude for the gathering in Memphis to now belong to that number — and inviting those gathered to see themselves as continuing the common struggle.Between these two surveys, he urges the audience to see their struggle on behalf of others through the lens of the “dangerous unselfishness” of the Samaritan who tended to the man beaten and bloodied on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho in Jesus’s parable.But near the end of the speech, at one point King’s voice trails off a little. He uncharacteristically does not finish a sentence he has begun: “And they were telling me …” He breaks off to recount a threat to his life as he made his way from Atlanta to Memphis by plane earlier that same day. His voice slows down once again. He refers twice more to the “threats” he has faced: “What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?”But in the final two minutes, his voice grows at once strong and carefree. He repeatedly says he “doesn’t know” what is going to happen next and “doesn’t mind” about the “difficult days ahead”. But he couples that with one of his characteristic statements of modest moral purpose (such as “I just want to be a good man” or “I just want to leave a committed life behind”, on other occasions): “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.”What is remarkable is not only the absence of ego in these sentiments and the lack graspingness that accompanies the fear of death. It is King’s ability, having begun by invoking the journey out of Egypt, to conclude by pointing those gathered to the task ahead, now described as the departure from a wilderness of hatred and violence and into the “promised land” of mutuality, interdependence and love:“I just want to do God's will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”Guest: Stan Grant is a proud Wiradjuri man, a theologian, and the Vice Chancellor’s Chair of Australian-Indigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University. He is the Director of Yindyamarra Nguluway and the author, most recently, of When Words Fail Us: Truth Beyond Time.

If One Nation leader Pauline Hanson managed to reignite a public debate with her assertion that Australia is “a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural” during her address last week to the National Press Club, it is only because certain anxieties over multiculturalism have long been smouldering in the social undergrowth, just waiting to be fanned into flame.The question of immigration, handwringing over the racial constitution of the nation and the desire to maintain Australia’s essential “Britishness” go back at least as far as the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act. And these concerns continued to resurface throughout the twentieth century. As the then Minister for Immigration and future leader of the Liberal Party, Billy Snedden, said in 1969 (the year after Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech):“I am quite determined we should have a monoculture, with everyone living in the same way, understanding each other, and sharing the same aspirations. We don’t want pluralism.”It wasn’t long afterward, the White Australia Policy was dismantled and multiculturalism became official national policy, culminating in the 1989 National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia. Just seven years later, the rise of John Howard and the election of Pauline Hanson placed both multiculturalism and immigration back on the table.Debates over the proper levels of immigration are, of course, entirely appropriate in a healthy democracy. Immigration policy is something about which citizens should be able to deliberate and disagree without fear being called xenophobic. But something potentially dangerous happens when the debate turns to multiculturalism, as longstanding government policy, itself. For then we are not discussing prudential concerns about the proper allocation of limited social and economic resources; instead, we are discussing the desirability, or not, of our fellow citizens, our neighbours, those with whom we find ourselves pursuing a common life. We are discussing who truly belongs, and who does not.One of the dangers of the discourse about “the utterly flawed policy of multiculturalism” (as Hanson put it) is that it turns fellow citizens into abstractions, other cultures into barriers, our neighbours themselves into impediments one’s own sense of wellbeing and social comfort.As John Dewey argued a century ago, it is not enough for our experience of democracy to be confined to elections and abstract values (call this the vertical orientation of democratic life); democratic habits must pervade everyday life and casual interactions with our fellow citizens (call this democracy’s horizontal or relational aspect). In the same way, multiculturalism cannot remain a government policy or series of eight goals; for it to become a moral reality, it must find inter-cultural expressions in civic life. It is in this way that we go from being strangers to one another, to fellow citizens.The desire not to feel like “strangers in our own home” or to be a “monocultural” society is surely a form of the desire to eliminate strangeness from our lives, to achieve what Pierre Rosanvallon calls the radical “simplification of the social bond” through the commonalities of culture, custom and language. But what does this longing conceal, and what does it assume both about “culture” and “national identity”?Guest: Glenda Ballantyne is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Swinburne University of Technology, and Coordinator of the Australian Intercultural Cities National Network.

Over the last twelve months, there have been two conspicuous trends in federal politics. One is the precipitous decline in electoral support for the Liberal Party, which began before last year’s federal election and has continued apace ever since. The other is the rise in One Nation’s electoral fortunes, which began to tick upwards in September but then took a leap in December and January.Both trends converged, rather spectacularly, in the latest Resolve Political Monitor, conducted for the Nine newspapers. Not only had the Coalition’s primary vote drop to 20 per cent (an all-time low), but One Nation’s primary vote shot up to 29 per cent (passing Labor on 28 per cent). Moreover, Pauline Hanson emerged as preferred prime minister with a third of respondents, while Anthony Albanese was selected by 29 per cent — opposition leader Angus Taylor took only 16 per cent of nominations.This poll comes little more than a month after One Nation won the Farrer by-election in rural New South Wales, with a commanding 40 per cent of the primary vote, thereby gaining its first lower house seat in federal parliament. And it came days before Pauline Hanson’s first address to the National Press Club in Canberra, three decades after she entered parliament.Almost exactly forty years ago, then opposition leader John Howard famously said “the times will suit me”. The same could now be said for Pauline Hanson. For three decades she has been a fixture of federal politics. The major parties have variously denounced and attempted to accommodate her views on immigration, multiculturalism and Indigenous policy, among other things. But while the political landscape around her has changed, she has not. If anything, due to the excesses of political rhetoric and perverse incentives of a social-media saturated informational ecosystem, the electorate has grown inured to what once would have been scandalous, perhaps even disqualifying. In an age of Trump, Hanson comes across to many voters as simply “plain spoken”, as the “voice of reason”.The question, however, is whether One Nation’s electoral support is, in fact, an affirmation of the party, its policies (such as they are) and its leader, or merely a kind of aggregated discontent with the major political parties? Is One Nation the temporary beneficiary of voter anxiety and anger — with polling and by-elections here functioning as a means of political communication — or does this point to a more profound disintegration of two-party politics? Does One Nation’s current rise reflect what Pierre Rosanvallon described as the three-fold simplification at the heart of populism’s more general appeal (the simplicity of the ‘natural’ social bond over against the difficulties of multiculturalism; the simplification of the cause of current social problems; the simplification of the political remedy, over against the complexities of deliberation) at a time of dizzying complexity?Either way, Pauline Hanson’s ability to both appeal to and harness electoral discontent in times that are characterised by “a near-constant sense of crisis, spanning the economic, social and political”, presents a challenge to the exercise of responsible political leadership — particularly that of someone like Anthony Albanese, whose moderation and commitment to a kind of gradualist centrism rarely touches the political passions that animate our current moment.Then again, in the UK and Europe, far-right parties have tended to poll well between elections and have even enjoyed a degree of success in European parliamentary elections and by-elections, only to see their support fall away come the general election. Is something similar happening in Australia?Guest: Paul Strangio is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Monash University and the author, most recently, of The Alchemy of Leadership: Seven Australian Prime Ministers in a Turbulent Twenty-first Century.

One of the criticisms often directed at democratic politics is that it is irresponsibly, even dangerously, short-term in its orientation. The wellbeing of future generations, to say nothing of the sustainability of the planet, rarely matter more to lawmakers than the cost-of-living pressures experienced by their constituents or the outcome of the next election cycle. Short-termism, therefore, would seem to be baked into democracy; hence, for some, the only way to act seriously with the future in mind would be for those with power and resources to do so unilaterally.There is no denying that democratic politics is constrained by short-term thinking. It is likewise true that our moral imaginations suffer from the incapacity to recognise the claim that future generations may properly make on our current actions — or even to recognise that such moral obligations exist in the first place.But there is no reason to deny such obligations. As Annette Baier argues, the “only special feature in the moral tie between us and future generations lies in the inferiority of our knowledge about them, not in the inferiority of their ontological status … Neither their non-presence, nor our ignorance of who exactly they are, nor our uncertainty concerning how many of them there are, rules out the appropriateness of recognizing rights on their part.”In line with this sentiment — though shorn of the concept of obligation that the language of “rights” assumes — a number of influential philosophers have made a case for what they’ve called “longtermism”. Its central tenets are relatively straightforward. William MacAskill lays them out in his best-selling book What We Owe the Future:“that, impartially considered, future people should count for no less, morally, than the present generation”;“that there may be a huge number of future people”;“that life, for them, could be extraordinarily good or inordinately bad”;“that we really can make a difference to the world they inhabit”.Because this outlook is wholly utilitarian, the “huge number of future people” is doing a great deal of work in MacAskill’s formulation. In effect, longtermism takes utilitarianism’s spatial concern with achieving “the greatest good for the greatest number” and transposes it temporally, onto the vastness of time. It doesn’t simply prioritise the indefinite prolongation of the human species in the face of possible extinction threats. It also accords a certain moral priority to the “untold number of future people”. So MacAskill writes:“Future people count, but we rarely count them. They cannot vote or lobby or run for public office, so politicians have scant incentive to think about them … They are utterly disenfranchised … I see longtermism as an extension of [social movements for civil rights and women’s suffrage]. Though we cannot give genuine political power to future people, we can at least give consideration to them. By abandoning the tyranny of the present over the future, we can act as trustees — helping to create a flourishing world for generations to come. This is of the utmost importance.”How, then, do we go about freeing the future from the “tyranny of the present” — which here should not be limited to mere short-term thinking, but also the expressions of our more proximate, immediate obligations to human and non-human creatures? It is at this point that longtermism’s consequentialism gives way to a certain technotopian impulse. Abandoning the logic of limits, of democratic restraint and reduction, of a more pastoral and educative understanding of democratic self-governance, longtermism favours instead the unleashing our technological capacities and reach. As Émile Torres puts it:“Longtermism tells us to maximise economic productivity, our control over nature, our presence in the Universe, the number of (simulated) people who exist in the future, the total amount of impersonal ‘value’ and so on. But to maximise, we must develop increasingly powerful — and dangerous — technologies; failing to do this would itself be an existential catastrophe.”It is little wonder, then, that longtermism has become the “secular credo” of Silicon Valley.The question is whether the utilitarian “moral arithmetic” of longtermism is inherent to the task of acknowledging the moral reality of future generations? Are there other ways of inhabiting a properly precautionary disposition that is not so willing to sacrifice the present on the altar of the future?Guest: Kirsten Mann is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Philosophy at Australian National University.

It could be said that human beings reveal who they most truly are as they approach the end. For the end of one’s life is not simply its terminus ad quem; it is also its telos, its goal or meaning. A life that has been lived in the thrall of egotism, whose fundamental pursuit has been the safeguarding and satisfaction of the self, will almost certainly, at the end, turn inward upon itself and find itself grasping, desperately, at something like immortality — as the indefinite prolonging of the self. It would not be surprising for such a life to be shrunken, fearful, petty, suspicious, diminished at the end, rather than open-handed, open-hearted, at peace.Consider the example of Shakespeare’s King Lear, who craves flattery and reassuring falsehoods, who obsesses over small offenses and slights to his ego, who remains unconcerned with truthfulness and unnourished by the love of his youngest daughter.On the other hand, a life that is lived meaningfully — which is to say, a life that serves a purpose beyond itself — is able to approach the end without fear, not only because a certain humility has become a habit of life, but because the prospect of the end brings what is most important into sharper focus. This is perhaps what Socrates had in mind when he said that “the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death” (Phaedo, 64a).Here we could think of Martin Luther King, Jr’s final sermon at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, on 3 April 1968, during which he reflects on threats made to his life. “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life”, he admits. “Longevity has its place.” Then he immediately says, “But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’ will … And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man.” Or consider the philosopher Stanley Cavell, writing tenderly in his memoir that, “anticipating the ending of my life, I am becoming freer than ever of the desire to persuade”. Or Toni Morrison, after surveying modern literature’s fascination with evil (“Evil has vivid speech; Goodness bites its tongue”), affirms “these last forty years, I have become more and more invested in making sure acts of goodness (however casual or deliberate or misapplied or … blessed) produce language”.Only lives spent renouncing egotism, and pursuing what matters most, could speak such words.So occasionally over the coming months, we’re going to spend some time in the presence of those who are approaching the end, listening to what they have to say. It may not be the end of their lives, but their lives will, in each instance, be approaching a pivotal moment for which their habits of life, their daily devotion to a cause bigger than themselves, will have prepared them.Perhaps the most historically consequential of these moments has just been observed by millions of Muslims around the world. In February 632 CE, twenty-three years after receiving his first revelation in a cave near Mecca, the Prophet Muhammad would lead tens of thousands of his followers back to the city of his birth with the intent of guiding them through the full ritual of the hajj. It was to be his final pilgrimage.Over the course of several days, Muhammad led them in the seven processions around the Ka‘aba — the simple square structure believed to have been constructed by Adam, and then rebuilt by Ibrahim/Abraham, the first monotheist, and finally by Muhammad himself — followed by the journey back-and-forth seven times between the nearby hills of Safa and Marwa, thus re-enacting the frantic search of Hagar, wife of Ibrahim, for water for their dying child Ismail. The Prophet then led them to the plain next to the rocky hill of Arafat and addressed those gathered. His message has all the marks of finality about it. Here is part of what the Prophet said (the translation comes from Yahiya Emerick):“O People, listen to my words, because I don’t know if I will ever be with you here again after this year. Therefore, listen to what I’m saying carefully and take these words to those who could not be here today.O People, your lives, property, and honour are sacred for you until you appear before your Lord, just as you consider this month, this day, and this city sacred. Return the things that are entrusted to you to their rightful owners. You will meet your Lord, and He will hold you answerable for your actions.Know that every Muslim is a brother to every other Muslim and that Muslims are one brotherhood. Nothing is allowed for a Muslim if it belongs to another unless it was given freely and willingly, so do not oppress each other.All practices of idolatry and ignorance are now under my feet. Every right of revenge coming from unjust murder in pre-Islamic times is rescinded …Charging interest is forbidden; therefore, all interest obligations are also cancelled. Your original money is yours to keep. Do no wrong and you will not be wronged.O People, be aware of God concerning women. Indeed, you’ve taken them on the security of God and made them lawful to you with God’s words. Indeed, it is true you have certain rights with your women, but they also have rights over you. It is their duty to honour their intimate obligations and not to do improper actions. If they do, then you will have the right to reprimand them, though not harshly. If they respect your rights, then to them belongs the right to be fed and clothed in kindness. Treat your women well and be kind to them for they are your partners and committed helpers. It is also your right that they not make friends with anyone you don’t approve of and never be unfaithful.Beware of Satan for the safety of your way of life. He has lost all hope in leading you astray in this land, but he will be happy if you follow him in small things. Therefore, abstain from obedience to Satan. Indeed, I’m leaving behind me two things, the Book of God and my example, and if you follow these two you will never go astray …O People, listen to me closely. Serve God, say your five daily prayers, fast during the month of Ramadan, and give of your wealth in charity. Perform the hajj if you can afford it and obey whatever I command you, for that is the only way you will get into Paradise.O People, indeed your Lord is One and your ancestor is one. All of you belong to the line of Adam, and Adam was created from dust. An Arab is not better than a non-Arab nor is a white better than a black or a black better than a white except in piety. The noblest among you all is the one who is the most pious.O People, no prophet will come after me, and no new way of life will be born. Reason well and absorb the words that I am telling you. All those who listen to me shall pass on my words to others and those to others again; and may the last ones understand my words better than the first.Be my witness, O God, that I have conveyed Your Message to Your people.”Accounts have it that, when he finished, Muhammad prayed, “My Lord, have I delivered the message?” His followers replied, “Yes, you have.” In June of that same year, he died.What is immediately apparent about this sermon, quite apart from the substance of its message, is the way the Prophet conveys:the novelty, the sheer newness, of the revelation with which he had been entrusted — such that what came before is consigned to an age of idolatry “ignorance” (Jāhiliyyah);the importance of these words, of this “way of life”, being taken to heart, put into practice and passed on faithfully to those not present on the plain of Arafat — such that “the last ones understand my words better than the first”;the absence of ego, the humility to question whether he himself had discharged his sacred vocation faithfully: “My Lord, have I delivered the message?”Within the Islamic tradition, the example of the life and conduct of the Prophet Muhammad are morally normative, not merely descriptive. So what can we learn about what it means to “approach the end” from the example of his farewell sermon?Guest: Mahsheed Ansari is the Higher Degrees Research Coordinator and Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation at Charles Sturt University.For additional reading, Dr Ansari recommends:Martin Lings, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources.Fethullah Gülen, Prophet Muhammad: The Infinite Light.Yahiya Emerick, Critical Lives: Muhammad.

It’s common these days to refer to “the return of nationalism”. But that assumes that nationalism receded for a time, like the tide, and here the world is, now, getting its pants legs wet. Such an assumption misunderstands the peculiar character of nationalism. It would be better to think of it as a swell, as a political phenomenon that periodically gathers power and force, that crests and crashes, but that never entirely goes away. It’s always there, beneath us.Nationalism belongs to the emotional valence of the collective life of a nation state. Using the analogy of Aristotle’s taxonomy of the moral emotions — with, say, cowardice on one end of a continuum, foolhardiness on the other, and courage sitting in between — we could even think of nationalism as an extreme expression of the bundle of political emotions that ordinarily manifest as civic pride or patriotism, among them: love and fear, loyalty and hatred, attachment and jealousy. But with nationalism, it is as though the emotional balance is out of whack. Ever since the origin of the term at the end of the eighteenth century and its subsequent emergence in the nineteenth, nationalism has typically been associated with three components:Membership — the recognition of an “imagined community” constituted through shared language, ethnicity, religion, geography and so on;Self-determination — the demand for sovereignty over a defined territory;“Civil religion” — the existence of self-reinforcing symbols, practices, rituals, stories which serve to reify “the nation”, turning the abstract idea of national membership into a lived experience.While there is undeniable overlap with patriotism, nationalism adds the additional element of bellicosity. Not just national pride but superiority. Not just love of one’s own place and people (patria), but a corresponding antipathy toward other nations — including “others” within one’s own borders. Nationalism thus tends to be a Janus-faced phenomenon, with its heedless pursuit of territorial and tributary interests without and its requirement of the dominance of an ethnic and religious majority within.We could think of nationalism as the political equivalent of what happens when proper “self love” (amor sui) turns inward on itself (incurvatus in se) and devolves into egotism.Ever since the Second World War, nationalism has been indelibly associated with territorial ambition, categorical violence, a pseudo-religious zeal, utter partisan loyalty. As George Orwell puts it, “Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.”And yet over the last decade, a form of brazen nationalism has been willing to speak its name, to own its ambitions and cast off the veneer of polite cosmopolitanism. It has both fed off and fuelled intense popular emotions — fear, resentment, disgust, patriotic love — and seems willing to regard one’s nation as “beyond good and evil”, as answerable to no criteria other than its own interests. The problem, of course, is that bellicose nationalism invites responses in kind.Is nationalism a term that can be rehabilitated, or even redeemed? Orwell was convinced that “every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty”; is nationalism compatible with the kind of constructive shame that follows from truthful encounters with one own history? Is it possible to cultivate an appropriate sense of self-love that does not devolve into group narcissism?David Moscrop is a Canadian political columnist and commentator. He is the author of Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones and the forthcoming “On Nationalism”.

There are four stories that could justifiably be described as foundational to Western culture: the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden; Prometheus’s gift of fire to humanity; Doctor Faustus’s pact with the devil; and Victor Frankenstein’s act of monstrous creation.Not only are the principal names immediately evocative to anyone who hears them, but that recognisability allows for nearly endless variations on their original themes. This is, in part, what gives these stories their staying power.But these stories could themselves be said to represent four variations on a still older theme: the longing for some forbidden knowledge, to transgress a proscribed limit — or as WH Auden would put it, the desire to “know too much”. In each instance, rightly or wrongly, the pursuit itself brings a severe punishment, even catastrophe. This is what gives each of these foundational stories an element of tragedy, of pathos. About whom could it not be said that, even though we know the danger of going too far, we want to do it anyway?And yet it is at this point that an important difference emerges between Faustus and the other three stories. Eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, granting fire to humankind and giving life to a “creature” of one’s own making all point a certain ambition, a restlessness, an unwillingness to remain in a perceived state of underdevelopment or adolescence. The consequences of that restlessness may still be both foreseeable and severe, and so suggest a lack of wisdom or trust or prudence — but that doesn’t mean the acts themselves are either base or self-seeking.The same cannot quite be said of Christopher Marlowe’s depiction of Doctor John Faustus at the end of the sixteenth century. It is true that, at the outset, explicit reference is made to the flight of Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who fastened wings to his back with wax, but which melted when he ventured too close to the sun. Speaking of Faustus: “His waxen wings did mount above his reach, / And, melting, heavens conspir’d his overthrow; / For, falling to a devilish exercise, / And glutted now with learning’s golden gifts, / He surfeits upon cursed necromancy …”But even here, the point is not that Faustus went further than he should in his chosen disciplines, but rather that he abandoned them in favour of sorcery. And what Faustus seeks from the outset is not so much forbidden knowledge as it is wealth and renown — his own version of Lucifer’s sin of “aspiring pride and insolence” — and his attraction to necromancy’s “words of art” are mere means to that end.In other words, the reference to Icarus places the emphasis not on the ambition of Faustus’s heaven-ward reach but on the precipitous nature of his subsequent fall. Indeed, the trajectory of Marlowe’s play could be said one of perpetual descent: from the heights of academia to the utter solitude of his plunge into hell.In Marlowe’s play, it is not Lucifer who is the tempter, but Faustus who actively seeks out the means of his own “voluptuousness” — on the belief that the cost (“his soul”) can either be indefinitely deferred or that the bill will never come due (“Come, I think hell’s a fable”, Faustus says; to which Mephistopheles replies, “Ay, think to still, till experience change thy mind”).The lesson of the tragedy of Doctor Faustus probably remains the ridiculousness of the exchange of long-term beatitude for short-term prosperity and pleasure. The bill always comes due. But what Marlowe also reminds us is that the punishment is already present in the solipsism, the self-enclosure of the lives heedlessly devoted to pleasure. As Mephistopheles puts it, “for where we are is hell”.Guest: Kate Flaherty is the Head of English and Senior Lecturer in English and Drama at the Australian National University.

The federal budget is, in many respects, the high point of Australia's political calendar. This federal budget is no exception. The public had been primed for weeks to expect a series of significant reforms this year. But it is striking how little there is in the budget by way of direct social benefit.The budget is broadly redistributive — it removes certain tax concessions that disproportionately benefit the wealthy — but it does not then distribute that additional tax revenue to those struggling with cost-of-living pressures. Even the $250 permanent annual tax offset for workers is quite modest and deliberately non-inflationary.It would seem that the object of this “rebalancing” through changes to capital gains tax, negative gearing and discretionary trusts is “intergenerational equity” itself: the budget adjusts the tax system so that it benefits property investors less than first home buyers — even if these benefits are dispersed over time and only gradually felt.The question is, does the underlying philosophy of this federal budget provide a template for budgets-to-come?Guest: Luara Ferracioli is Associate Professor in Political Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and Philosopher-in-Residence at the Sydney Policy Lab.—THE MINEFIELD - LIVE AT THE SYDNEY WRITERS’ FESTIVAL24 May 2026“The Return of Nationalism and the Crisis of Democracy”With each new election, geopolitical deal and technological advancement, it seems like the ideals of democracy are slipping away. In this special live recording of ABC Radio National’s The Minefield, hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens discuss the state of democracy today with Canadian podcaster and political scientist David Moscrop.When: Sunday, 24 May 2026, 4-5pmWhere: Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh, NSW, 2015To purchase your tickets: https://www.swf.org.au/program/festival-2026/abc-the-minefield-live—NEXT WEEK: Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus”Expressions like “deal with the devil”, “selling one’s soul” and “Faustian bargain” are woven through our language. And popular culture is filled with variations on the unsavoury theme of attaining wealth, fame and pleasure by permanently corrupting one’s soul.In the third week of May, Waleed and Scott will be turning their attention to the source of these tropes: Christopher Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus”. It was first performed in 1592, just a year before Marlowe’s own untimely death.It is neither a long nor an overly complicated play, but it is powerful and ethically rich. We will be discussing the so-called “A-Text” of Marlowe’s play, revised in 1604. We hope you’ll join us in reading the play beforehand.

One of the by-products of digital technology’s pervasiveness in our lives is its seeming irresistibility. However much we try to remain conscientious objectors, to resist its allure, its promises of convenience and casual pleasures, to keep some part of our inner lives free of its influence, we soon discover that it is of the essence of new technological forms to exceed their boundaries, to seep out into the wider culture — into our language, our rhythms and habits, our expectations, our ways of seeing and interacting with the world.Such that, before long, we find we’ve become like the technologies we created. It’s like the Turing Test, but in reverse. And once that happens, precisely because there’s no longer any “outside”, it can become very difficult to think clearly about what is, in effect, our habitus. This is how technology ushers us into a condition of unthinkingness. Perhaps we could call it habituation.Digital technology’s irresistibility and sheer scale can make our efforts at thinking seem tiny, irrelevant, insignificant. Perhaps the best we can do is occasionally pause, and try to make sense of underlying rules that govern online experience — perhaps we could call it “the grammar of online life”: the rules of the game, as it were, that you must obey if you want to go viral.Over the last ten years, one of the most popular forms of online content is the reaction video — a kind of split-screen experience in which viewers watch both a piece of content (the livestream of a game, a movie trailer, a music video, another YouTube clip and so on) and another person’s reaction to that content. There is something about the desire to see the facial responses of other people, their seemingly spontaneous responses to what they see and hear, that is inseparable from the viewers’ enjoyment of the content itself. It is similar to the experience of hearing audience laughter during a sitcom, and before that “canned laughter”.Emotion here is the currency. But the point isn’t that the emotion is felt — rather, that it is conveyed. It is communicated. It is as if the emotion is the content.But even if we were to regard all social conventions as performances, as various ways of paying homage to the rules that govern social interactions, this commodification of emotions — which is to say, turning reactions into content — invites such a degree of performance, of exaggeration, that would be impossible to sustain the kind of un-self-consciousness that is essential to authenticity.To put this another way: the online emotion economy encourages participants — whether on reaction videos or video podcasts — not to be themselves but to act themselves; not to listen to what’s being said, but simply to react to it. What is this doing to our capacity to cultivate moral responsiveness?Guest: Nicholas Carah is the Director of Centre for Digital Cultures and Societies and Professor in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland.Nicholas makes reference to Rose Horowitch’s article in The Atlantic: “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” (1 October 2024).

In a speech to the National Press Club, Health Minister Mark Butler announced a series of sweeping changes that the federal government will make to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).In the thirteen years since it was legislated, the growth of the NDIS has surpassed all expectations. By 2030, the Productivity Commission projected that the scheme would cover around 550,000 people and cost about $40 billion. This year there are already 760,000 people on the scheme at a cost of $50 billion. On the current trajectory, by the end of the decade there will be 900,00 people on the NDIS and it will cost $70 billion per year — this would represent a greater expenditure than Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme put together.Concerns over the affordability of the NDIS are nothing new, and since returning to government Labor has repeatedly indicated their intention to curb its growth (even if, while in opposition, they resisted the Coalition’s efforts to do the same). But in an economy threatened by high inflation and at a time of increasing cost-of-living pressures — from fuel and food to housing — it is understandable that the federal government would feel a certain urgency to bring the NDIS under control, not least for the sake of the long-term viability of the scheme.And yet, what was telling about Butler’s speech was the way he proceeded to justify the radical changes the government has in store for the NDIS — which include removing around 160,000 people from the scheme by 2030 and reducing the projected annual cost by $15 billion. He swiftly pivoted from its long-term viability to its declining “community support, or social licence”.Citing research conducted by Talbot Mills, Butler claimed that 70 per cent of Australians think the NDIS has “gotten too large and struggles with dodgy providers” and that 60 per cent think the scheme is “broken”. He went on to detail mistakes in design and “structural flaws” that make the NDIS susceptible to fraud. He drew particular attention to criminal behaviour on the part of unaccredited “third-party” service providers and neglect by unqualified support workers.Given the dearth of qualified, registered, sufficiently committed carers, it was perhaps inevitable the NDIS would become “a soft target for shonks and rorters”, as Butler described them. It is, frankly, baffling that there wouldn’t be tighter government regulation over who could qualify to be paid to provide such support in situations that demand attentiveness and care.But some of the criticism that is now being levelled at the design of the NDIS threatens to besmirch its original moral genius: the provision of support to those with a disability in the form of personalised budgets, such that those in need of care would be accorded the dignity of “choice and control” over the form their care would take. Which is to say: it turned people with a disability from those for whom everything must be done, those who are a societal “problem” needing to be solved, and who must rely on the “good graces” of others; to those who are rightfully accorded agency in their own pursuits on an equal basis with other Australians.While this approach effectively created a competitive “disability services market” over which there has been far too little oversight, such a market is also the condition of possibility for the type of agency and equality the NDIS promises.This raises a number of dangers lurking beneath the government’s proposed reforms. In addition to the inherent danger that the expressed intention to reduce the number of people covered by the NDIS will see some people denied the care and support they are entitled to, there are a range of unintended moral consequences that accompany the reputational damage done to the NDIS itself.If we accept that the NDIS is noble if flawed, that it was a worthy aspiration for a nation like ours and represents a tremendous collective achievement which nonetheless needs to be placed on sustainable and just footing — the question becomes: how can the federal government address the “structural flaws” and escalating costs without undermining public faith in the NDIS itself?Guest: Jennifer Smith-Merry is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellow and Professor of Health and Social Policy in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Sydney.You can read Professor Smith Merry’s reflections on the moral risks and consequences that accompany the federal government’s NDIS reforms, on ABC Religion and Ethics.—THE MINEFIELD — Live at the Sydney Writers’ Festival24 May 2026“The Return of Nationalism and the End of Democracy”With each new election, geopolitical deal and technological advancement, it seems like the ideals of democracy are slipping away. In this special live recording of ABC Radio National’s The Minefield, hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens discuss the state of democracy today with Canadian podcaster and political scientist David Moscrop.When: Sunday, 24 May 2026, 4-5pmWhere: Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh, NSW, 2015To get tickets: https://www.swf.org.au/program/festival-2026/abc-the-minefield-live—UPCOMING EPISODE: CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S “DOCTOR FAUSTUS”Expressions like “deal with the devil”, “selling one’s soul” and “Faustian bargain” are woven through our language. And popular culture is filled with variations on the unsavoury theme of attaining wealth, fame and pleasure by permanently corrupting one’s soul.In the third week of May, Waleed and Scott will be turning their attention to the source of these tropes: Christopher Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus”. It was first performed in 1592, just a year before Marlowe’s own untimely death.It is neither a long nor an overly complicated play, but it is powerful and ethically rich. We will be discussing the so-called “A-Text” of Marlowe’s play, revised in 1604. We hope you’ll join us in reading the play beforehand.

There has long been a gap between the emergence of new forms of technology and the development of laws designed to mitigate their dangers. But with the rapid advances in artificial intelligence and immersive technologies, that gap is becoming increasingly problematic.Take the example of wearable technology, such as smart glasses. Companies like Meta, in particular, have poured vast amounts of money into the development and commercialisation of augmented reality (XR) headsets. This would seem to represent the natural extension of the decades-long ambition to commodify and capture the attention of users — combined now with seamless search, audio, call, image/video and geolocation functions.But quite apart from their troubling military and law enforcement applications, there are a range of ethical problems presented by the widespread adoption of smart glasses.For example, on the side of the wearer/user, the interposition of technology directly into one’s field of vision — thereby making the technology the immediate object of one’s gaze — corrupts the ethical concept of attentiveness and further erodes our capacity to be morally present to others in a technologically unmediated way.Smart glasses also erode the concept of a shared reality by imposing prompts from interested parties and advertisers directly into users’ field of vision. And speaking of interested parties, don’t these forms of wearable technology represent new means of acquiring vast amounts of data for advertisers and the training of large language models?What about those who are being observed by wearers of smart glasses? We are assured that safety measures are in place to indicate to non-consenting parties that they are being recorded. But even if those safeguards are trustworthy, the mere possibility of misuse imposes a degree of suspicion between persons that cannot help but be corrosive. And this doesn’t approach the opportunities for abuse that are presented by the technology itself — not least due to embedded facial recognition technology.Then there is the wider issue of the prospect of the inescapability of technology itself, even for those who attempt to opt out or evade the datafication of their lives by tech platforms. It is clear that legislation needs to catch up in order to encompass the vast new possibilities for harm presented by wearable technologies with AI integration. But are we prepared for what that same technology might do to our moral conceptions and habits?Guest: Milica Stilinovic is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Sydney, where she is working on the ARC-funded project “Governing Immersive Technologies”. You can read her analysis of the social harms of smart glasses on ABC Religion and Ethics.—The Minefield — Live at the Sydney Writers’ Festival24 May 2026“The Return of Nationalism and the End of Democracy”With each new election, geopolitical deal and technological advancement, it seems like the ideals of democracy are slipping away. In this special live recording of ABC Radio National’s The Minefield, hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens discuss the state of democracy today with Canadian podcaster and political scientist David Moscrop.When: Sunday, 24 May 2026, 4-5pmWhere: Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh, NSW, 2015To get tickets: https://www.swf.org.au/program/festival-2026/abc-the-minefield-live—UPCOMING EPISODE: CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S “DOCTOR FAUSTUS”Expressions like “deal with the devil”, “selling one’s soul” and “Faustian bargain” are woven through our language. And popular culture is filled with variations on the unsavoury theme of attaining wealth, fame and pleasure by permanently corrupting one’s soul.In the third week of May, Waleed and Scott will be turning their attention to the source of these tropes: Christopher Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus”. It was first performed in 1592, just a year before Marlowe’s own untimely death.It is neither a long nor an overly complicated play, but it is powerful and ethically rich. We will be discussing the so-called “A-Text” of Marlowe’s play, revised in 1604. We hope you’ll join us in reading the play beforehand.

Ever since the eighteenth century, there has been a prevailing belief that mutually beneficial commercial relationships between nations provide a powerful disincentive to international conflict.Montesquieu perhaps put it best in his Spirit of the Laws (XX.1-2):“Commerce cures destructive prejudices, and it is an almost general rule that everywhere there are gentle mores, there is commerce and that everywhere there is commerce there are gentle mores … The natural effect of commerce leads to peace. Two nations that trade with each other become reciprocally dependent; if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling, and all unions are founded on mutual needs.”After the devastation of the First and Second World Wars, the principle that commerce is conducive to peace was the guiding philosophy behind the establishment of some of our vital international institutions. And even if its implementation has been inconsistent and most of the economic benefits have tended to flow upward toward wealthier nations, the belief was that such disparities represent a fault in design not in the animating principle itself. We should remember, for instance, the role interdependence played in thawing Cold War antipathies. As West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt told US President Jimmy Carter in 1980 regarding Germany’s decision to develop a joint energy policy with the Soviet Union, “those engaged in trade with each other do not shoot at one another”.But the practices of interdependence and “oil diplomacy” that emerged from energy crises of 1973 and 1979 paradoxically reinforced the reality of a further source of instability — one that has become especially pronounced in 2022 and again in 2026, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the current conflict in the Middle East. And that is what Michael LaBelle calls the use of energy as a “weapon of war”, in which assertions of state sovereignty intentionally disrupt relationships of energy interdependence in order to inflict economic pain.This leaves nations like Australia — which is both a major energy exporter (of LNG and the critical materials for solar panels, among other things) and extremely reliant on fuel imports for our own energy needs — vulnerable to disruptions in the global supply chain as the result of international conflict. When this sense of vulnerability translates into higher fuel costs or uncertain supply, and when it accentuates an already palpable sense of rising unaffordability, it can be a catalyst for democratic instability and popular resentment.Even as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledges the reality of Australia’s dependence on other countries for our fuel needs by making diplomatic trips to Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei, he has also stressed the need to reduce that dependence: “The Middle East conflict has reminded us of … the need to make more things [in Australia], of the need to not be at the end of supply chains and to be less vulnerable to global events.”For many, becoming “less vulnerable” means pursuing greater “energy sovereignty”, or even “energy nationalism”. But what would that pursuit entail? Some insist it means a turn to far greater reliance on renewables; for others, the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act (EPBC) has denied Australia access to its own oil reserves. And then there is the vexed question of the balance between Australia’s LNG exports and its domestic reserves. But on top of all this is the likelihood that greater “energy sovereignty” will likely prove more costly to voters.The tension between these three elements — the benefits of interdependence, the dangers of vulnerability to global supply chains, and the domestic costs of greater self-reliance — presents one of the most vexing problems of our time.Guest: Hamish McKenzie, Deputy Program Director of Grattan Institute’s Energy and Climate Change program.—UPCOMING EPISODE: CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S “DOCTOR FAUSTUS”Expressions like “deal with the devil”, “selling one’s soul” and “Faustian bargain” are woven through our language. And popular culture is filled with variations on the unsavoury theme of attaining wealth, fame and pleasure by permanently corrupting one’s soul.In the third week of May, Waleed and Scott will be turning their attention to the source of these tropes: Christopher Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus”. It was first performed in 1592, just a year before Marlowe’s own untimely death.It is neither a long nor an overly complicated play, but it is powerful and ethically rich. We will be discussing the so-called “A-Text” of Marlowe’s play, revised in 1604. We hope you’ll join us in reading the play beforehand.

There is a thread that’s been left dangling from our show at the end of last year on Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fourteenth century “Allegory of Good and Bad Government”, painted on the walls of the Sala dei Nova in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico.The dominant figure of Justice sits on the left side of the central mural. She has her thumbs on two scales to hold them in balance, with angels on either side meeting out punishment and just recompense. Directly below her sits the figure of Concord (Concordia), a carpenter’s plane across her lap, as she weaves together the judgements into a red-and-white braided rope. This rope then passes from her hand to the hand of the first of 24 citizens who stand along the base of the mural.The rope finally becomes the staff held by the figure of “the Good Commune” — or, perhaps, “the Common Good”. It is as though the Common Good is constituted by concord among citizens, from which citizens in turn hope to receive what is necessary for their shared life.From Roman philosophers like Cicero down to the artists of the Italian Renaissance, there has been an understanding that concord — or what we now might call “social cohesion” — proceeds from the fair distribution of justice, and is grounded in the confidence of citizens that it is being distributed fairly. But what happens when concord begins to fray?This month, the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion will be handing down its interim report. It is fair to say that, since the horrific attack at Bondi Beach that precipitated the establishment of the commission, social cohesion is under severe strain, perhaps to breaking point for some communities.The question for us now is: When the conditions of public trust in a society have weakened, could the deliberative capacity of a mini-public — such as a citizens’ assembly — help restore it?Guest: Ron Levy is a Professor in the College of Law, Governance and Policy at the Australian National University.

Within days of the commencement of the war that has enveloped the Middle East — and that continues to severely disrupt global energy supplies — a familiar pattern began to emerge in some of the world’s most prosperous democracies. Much as they did at the outset of the pandemic, people began stockpiling. Then, it was toilet paper and food; this time, it’s fuel. In cities across Australia, long lines formed outside petrol stations and tensions flared as motorists seized their opportunity to fill not just their cars, but jerry cans as well.Since then, the fears that motivated this behaviour have only heightened as the war goes on, petrol prices sharply rise and “not in use” signs appear on petrol pumps. The federal and state governments have already introduced measures designed soften the economic blow of significantly more expensive fuel. And while the prospect of rationing fuel reserves remains some distance away — at this stage, at least — the Prime Minister is nonetheless urging Australians not to use “more fuel than you need”.It is nonetheless telling that the mere possibility of fuel rationing has seemingly sent a chill down the nation’s collective spine. The prospect of government restrictions on petrol is tailormade to the exacerbate the underlying conditions of distrust, division and resentment, and to make the parties who are most adept at harnessing that resentment, that distrust, more attractive still.There is something here that is eerily reminiscent to the popular backlash to US President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech to the nation, with its modest request for voluntary sacrifices in the face of a similar energy crisis:“And I’m asking you for your good and for your nation’s security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense — I tell you it is an act of patriotism.”Carter’s exhortation proved wildly unpopular then, and there is every reason to wonder whether similarly voluntary measures would be politically costly now.This presents us with a dilemma. We’ve long known that liberal democracies are averse to sacrifice, and that the basest yet most effective commentary on federal budgets divides the population into “winners” and “losers”. We know that economic growth is the precondition of political stability. Does this mean that liberal democracy is, fundamentally, a politics for times of prosperity? Is the corollary, then, that, during times of scarcity and sacrifice, the majority of the electorate revert to being populists?For John Rawls, one of the defining features of a society dedicated to “justice as fairness” is the agreement among citizens to bear each other’s burdens, “to share one another’s fate”. The challenge, then, is how to inculcate those just dispositions — we could call them the habits or virtues constitutive of democratic morality — such that, during times of scarcity, we do not turn habitually to fear, envy and self-interest. For when that happens, citizens soon become competitors, and neighbours become threats.There is every reason to believe that intermittent energy crises will be a feature of our common future. If our social commitments are this fragile in times of prevailing prosperity, what will become of them in the face of shared hardship?Guest: Melanie White is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales.

One of the words we use to describe political authority gone wrong is "autocracy": which is to say, the concentration of power in a unitary figure who then exercises that power without countervailing constraints and for its own sake. To borrow an expression of St Augustine, autocracy is a form of political authority that curves in on itself.Because most citizens have a clear sense that governance ought to be for something beyond political self-interest or naked self-enrichment, we rightly take a dim view of politicians who are unmoved by the interests and opinions of their constituents. But, of course, only tyrants are prepared to present themselves as wholly disinterested in the lives of those over whom they rule.Autocrats don't claim to be in it for themselves; they typically insist that they represent, serve and fight for "the people" — but "the people" politically defined as those who truly belong to the nation, those who build and contribute, those who are loyal and patriotic. In short, those who can be encompassed by the political pronouns "us"/"we". Accordingly, autocrats also claim to be defending the nation and its interests against "they"/"them", who have no part or place in the nation's life and are therefore no voice in the conversation of politics.What is corrupting about autocratic rule, then, is not simply that it is "corrupt" in the conventional sense of using the affordances of political office for private gain. Rather, it is the way autocracy throws off the basic constraints that define political authority in a representative democracy, and thereby betrays its character.In democratic life, we are constantly being reminded of the contingency of political authority and its fundamental accountability. When autocratic power lays claim to the necessity of an unconstrainted mode of executive decision-making — most often in the face of some "emergency" which suspends the normal functioning of democratic scrutiny — it corrodes the conditions of democratic life, precisely because representative democracy reveals what political authority really is: contingent, correctable and inherently contestable.As George Kateb writes in "The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy": “political authority is suspect when undivided and thus untroubled by antithetical voices … when it moves too easily or takes shortcuts to accomplish its ends, or when it prevents appeals and second thoughts, or when it closes itself off in secrecy or unapproachability.”It is no stretch, then, to say that autocracy is a politics of contempt. It is contemptuous of deliberation and mutual accountability; it is contemptuous of expertise and the constraints of precedent; it is contemptuous of any notion that the source of one's legitimacy could be extrinsic to one's own self. Which is why, ultimately, autocracy is a form of contempt for the people.It is for this reason, perhaps, that autocracy depends so much on the aesthetics of power: spectacular performances of force mask the lack of substance beneath, designed as they to eliminate accountability and overwhelm deliberation.This episode of The Minefield was recorded in front of a live audience at Customs House in Brisbane as part of the University of Queensland's "Dialogues Across Difference" event series.Guest: M Gessen is an acclaimed and multi-award winning Russian-American journalist, author and activist, known for their influential writing on authoritarianism, human rights and LGBTQ+ issues — most notably in their columns for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and their books Surviving Autocracy and The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Gessen is a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

It’s like déjà vu all over again. After launching a devastating but limited series of strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and against the nation’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists in June last year, the United States and Israel recommenced hostilities against Iran at the end of February.The objectives of this ‘war’ are similar — to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities and remove the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic regime — but its implementation is more thoroughgoing, more open-ended, more uncontainable, and more problematic in terms of its basis in international law.There is near consensus among international law experts that the US-Israeli attacks on Iran come in violation Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. And yet neither the United States nor Israel seem interested in justifying their actions in terms of their legality (unlike their “middle power” allies, who are intent on using the language of “collective self-defence”). In its place are assertions of power, of unassailable might, of moral legitimacy, of “good and evil”, of an “intolerable threat” posed by Iran.The casual way that international law has been cast off in the conflict that is spreading across the Middle East raises pressing and pertinent questions about the moral considerations that undergird international law itself.Guest: Tamer Morris is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, where he focusses on international law, United Nations peacekeeping and international humanitarian law. You can read his penetrating article on the illegality and (il)legitimacy of the Iran war on ABC Religion and Ethics.

If there is something inherently suspicious about political appeals to “the heart” — which is to say, attempts to exploit unreflective prejudices and reactive emotions — then it is also true that a form of politics that is unresponsive to heart-felt appeals to a common humanity, to compassion, to decency, is dangerous.How can we maintain the precarious balance between a politics that trades cheaply on emotion, and one that both comes from and appeals to the heart?Guest: Christos Tsiolkas is the author of eight novels — Loaded, The Jesus Man, Dead Europe, The Slap, Barracuda, Damascus, 7 ½, The In-Between — and the short story collection, Merciless Gods. He is a playwright, screen writer, essayist, radio host and currently a film critic for The Saturday Paper. In September last year, he delivered the 2025 Ray Mathew Lecture at the National Library of Australia, on the topic “Fence-Sitting”.

Over the course of this Ramadan series, we are exploring the contours of a cardiocentric conception of the moral life. The notion of the primacy of the heart goes back three millennia: it finds expression in the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, and in the philosophy of Aristotle; it pervades the pages of the sacred texts and subsequent traditions of Judaism and Islam — and even now, its remnants persist in our everyday speech, as if to remind us of an older wisdom.In this broader conception, the heart is a kind of physio-spiritual organ which, at once, coordinates the body’s movements by providing its orientation within and opens the person to moral realities without. A central feature of “the heart”, then, is its capacity for moral responsiveness. The heart is not all there is to the moral life — there is moral reasoning, and there are moral obligations — but it may not be a stretch to say that “the heart” is the moral life’s indispensable element. In a hadith, Muhammad is reported to have said: “There is a piece of flesh in the body if it becomes good the whole body becomes good but if it gets spoilt the whole body gets spoilt and that is the heart.”Last week, we touched briefly on the fear that is often expressed in Islam of the heart being “sealed off”, rendered impervious to divine wisdom or moral appeal. Within the Jewish tradition, this fear is expressed in terms of the heart being “hardened” (literally “toughened” or “strengthened”). In both traditions, this condition is most particularly associated with the figure of the Pharaoh of Egypt (see, for instance, Exodus 7:13, 22; 8:16; 9:24; Qurʾān 10:88). He is not, and cannot be, responsive to the divine appeal — and for that reason, he is damned.Because the worst thing that can happen to a heart is for it become hardened, Pharaoh acts as a cautionary figure (see Deuteronomy 15:7). Through his repeated refusals, his heart toughens to the point that it grows impervious — at which point, his heart is given over to what is called in the rabbinic tradition “the evil impulse”. As Rav Assi puts it in the Talmud (Sukka 52a): “At first the evil impulse is as thin as a spider’s gossamer, but in the end it is as thick as a cart-rope.”It is unsurprising, then, that in the we often find prayers in the Jewish tradition (which characterises prayers themselves as “work of the heart”) asking to be kept from having a “hard heart” and to be granted “an understanding heart” — literally, a listening or responsive heart).In a time like ours, when the temptation to refuse or fail to see others as fully human — as making some claim on our sympathy, our compassion, as requiring from us some hesitation — is everywhere apparent, what would it mean to cultivate an “understanding/responsive heart”? What can we do to avoid a “hardened heart”?Guest: Avril Alba is Professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation at the University of Sydney.

Sometimes the language we use every day, often unthinkingly, contains within it traces of a much older wisdom. Consider the phrases “I’ve changed my mind” and “I’ve had a change of heart”.The first thing to notice is activity described by the verbs: one is something that we do — as the result of learning new information, or having experiences that alter our values or view of the world; the other is something we undergo, something that happens to us — we see something we couldn’t see before (as though the light shines differently upon it, as Wittgenstein would say), or the same person or phenomenon evokes a different feeling from us.Perhaps it’s accurate to say that changing one’s mind is like taking a different path or going in a different direction, whereas having a change of heart is more like changing one’s compass bearings. But does that mean we are simply passive when it comes to such a reorientation of heart?In this Ramadan series, we are examining what we’re calling the cardiocentrism of the moral life — which is to say, the vital importance of cultivating the inner disposition of what we most often call “the heart”: the faculty which stands for both our inner-most selves, and that which makes us receptive to moral realities or truths outside of ourselves.The heart can act as a kind of moral compass which responds to moral realities we’d prefer to evade or avoid. Consider the pivotal moment in J M Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, when the eponymous character responds to demands for reasons or “principles” that would ground her horror in response to the mass killing of animals for food: “I was hoping not to have to enunciate principles”, she says. “If principles are what you want … I would have to respond, open your heart and listen to what your heart says.”So perhaps we can’t change our hearts, but does this suggest it is incumbent on us to maintain a certain “openness” or sustained “exposure” to moral realities we’d rather ignore — and that such openness is a precondition for undergoing a change of heart?Guest: Claire Zorn is the multi-award-winning author of five novels and the author/illustrator of two picture books. Her most recent book is Better Days.—UPCOMING LIVE RECORDINGWhen: Tuesday, 10 March 2026, from 1:45 pm to 3 pmWhere: Customs House, The Long Room, Brisbane City, QLD“The Aesthetics of Power: Why Authoritarianism Needs Spectacle”As democratic norms erode around the world, the performance of political power has become increasingly theatrical. From militarised displays to orchestrated media moments, authoritarian movements rely on spectacle to project stability, legitimacy and inevitability.In partnership with the Brisbane Writers Festival and as part of the University of Queensland’s Dialogues Across Difference series, this special live recording of ABC Radio National’s The Minefield brings together acclaimed journalist and New York Times columnist M Gessen with co‑hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens. Together, they will explore why modern authoritarianism depends on spectacle — and how aesthetics shape the public imagination and the conditions of democratic life.Attendance is free, but registration on Eventbrite is essential.

Judging by the way we use the word in everyday speech, we intuitively know what we mean when we refer to “the heart”. We are most often gesturing toward the essence of a thing, its core, what you reach once you strip everything non-essential away.That idea is very much in keeping with what we do each year during the month of Ramadan: we try to put wider concerns and contentious debates in politics, society and culture to the side in order to focus on some of the more fundamental dispositions and practices that sustain and deepen the moral life — essential things that we frequently neglect in our haste and agitation.But, of course, that’s not the only way we use the word “heart”. It’s also a reference to what is truest about us, our interior orientation, what we want and value, sometimes despite our attempts to present ourselves otherwise or dissemble what secretly resides within. When we use terms like “heartfelt” or “heart-to-heart”, aren’t we talking about a deeper kind of emotion or a more sincere or authentic kind of conversation, one in which certain conventions or forms of conventionalised self-presentation have been set aside?The idea of the centrality of the heart is a very old one, stretching back to the ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China. But it was Aristotle in the fourth century BCE who gave the concept of ‘cardiocentrism’ its most thoroughgoing articulation. He considered the heart to be the organising principle of the body — its primary organ, its ‘archē’. The heart is the location of the soul and the source of the body’s heat; it is the organ that receives sensory stimuli from without and directs the body’s movements from within. He thus conceived of the heart as constituting, at once, the seat of intelligence, emotion, will, desire and sensation, and the inherent (or efficient) cause of the body’s unity, integrity and coordination.This cardiocentric conception would eventually be taken up in the High Middle Ages by theologians and philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averröes), Al-Ghazālī, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, and even in the seventeenth century by English physician William Harvey.While it is no longer credible as a psycho-physiological theory, it is nonetheless striking how the centrality of the heart continues to pervade our language and moral sensibilities. Even now, “the heart” seems to possess a kind of double-aspect, it faces simultaneously in two directions: it stands for our inner-most selves (consider the term “heart of hearts”); it is also that which makes us receptive to moral realities or truths outside of ourselves. As Stephen Darwall puts it, “the heart” refers to: “the cluster of emotional capabilities and susceptibilities that fit one for emotional connection: dispositions to feel joy, grief, sadness, fear and distress for others, gratitude, trust, love …”.Perhaps it is not a stretch to say that the moral life is cardiocentric, even though our physiology is not. Doesn’t this suggest that the health of our “hearts” should be a matter of moral, not just physical, concern?Guest: Stephen Darwall is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of a number of landmark works of modern moral philosophy — including, chiefly, The Second-Person Standpoint and, more recently, The Heart and Its Attitudes.

One of the most unyielding aspects of life in the modern West is, perhaps, the ultimate value that we’ve come to accord to appearance. It is as though our essence, all that matters most about us as human beings, lies on the surface: our soul resides in our skin; how we look reveals who we truly are.Over the last three decades, this has become especially pronounced through our various forms, not so much of self-expression as self-creation — from hair removal (or recovery) to body art, from strict fitness regimens and body sculpting through to the widespread uptake of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.None of these activities are wrong or detrimental in and of themselves. But when the gap between people is an ontological one — those who are self-creations are of a higher order than those who are still subject to the natural order — the result can be a hierarchy of beings whereby one is viewed with envy and the other with contempt. This can, of course, create its own drive toward conformity and belonging (experienced as an elevation in status) and the desire to escape social punishment, from shame.Fashion can work similarly. As W. David Marx puts it:“Fashion is a never-ending process of ‘chase and flight’. Low-status individuals chase high-status individuals by imitating their conventions, which forces elites to flee to new ones. Since this fleeing will lead to another round of chasing and then fleeing, fashion creates perpetual cultural change, with status serving as the motor.”Again, there is nothing inherently problematic about the desire to conform — which is to say, belong — or the complex cultural demands asserted by fashion. But when it becomes a form of tyranny, the criterion by which our social status is judged, and either fashion or its fashionable refusal becomes the primary means by which we express our sense of ‘self’, the effect can have a suffocating, rather than freeing, effect on our inner life.We partly acknowledge as much already in places like Australia in our insistence on school uniforms: for a particular period of our children’s lives, during which education, the cultivation of habits of learning, curiosity, discovery and surprise, takes precedence, we don’t want them judging others or being judged on the basis of what clothes they can afford. But taking ‘fashion’ out of the equation, we hope they will distinguish and express themselves in other ways. Which is to say: a certain denial of forms of individual expression (clothing) elevates everyone to a common level (community of learners) thereby enabling other ways to distinguish or express themselves (through the cultivation of interiority and sociality).Within certain traditions of moral philosophy, this could find an analogue in a kind of modesty of expression: call it a commitment to non-ostentatiousness, a certain understatedness, a reticence to draw attention to oneself in order that one’s actions may not distract attention from others. It is not invisibility so much as it is principled transparency: desiring that the gracious light of one’s dignified life and actions be the means by which others are seen as worthy objects of love and bearers of dignity.But this also has expressions in certain religious registers — as when a modest uniformity of appearance (such as the use of headcoverings, habits, robes and so on) signifies not so much the suppression of individuality as a common dedication and even the dignity of service to others or to the divine.Could this point us in the direction of ways that the preciousness of the individual — and the richness of the interior life — can be saved from the tyranny of cultural demands for individuality?

One of the common laments we heard last November, as Australia marked the fiftieth anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government, was that Australian politics has lost its ambition — that the Labor Party, in particular, no longer had the stomach to take big risks and pursue sweeping reforms. The very act of celebrating the audacity of Gough Whitlam, it seemed, was designed to deliver a stinging rebuke to the moderation of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.There is, of course, a compelling counterargument that can be made. Voters tend not to reward ambitious proposals for reform — especially not from opposition, as both John Hewson and Bill Shorten learned — and they will sooner withdraw support from an incumbent government than vest it with confidence and a broad mandate. Voters’ fear of finding themselves on the wrong side of the “winners/losers” ledger is just too great. The decline of centrist political parties, the fragmentation of the electorate and the rise of opportunistic electoral coalitions around sometimes incommensurable, often inchoate grievances, moreover, has made it easier for political entrepreneurs and the parties of grievance amass influence.The French political philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon characterised this as the politics of rejection, as the exercise of “negative sovereignty”, as the aggregation of discontent — and, as he puts it: “Rejection is the simplest thing to aggregate. Indeed, all rejections are identical, regardless of what may have motivated them.” Put otherwise, it’s easier to get to “No” than it is to “Yes”.Albanese is clearly attuned to these political realities. At the 2022 election, he was the beneficiary of widespread disaffection with Scott Morrison and of his own self-presentation as an inoffensive, steady, safe pair of hands. He watched the Voice referendum come undone through the aggregation of rejection. In 2025, Labor’s large parliamentary majority owed plenty to Australian voters’ disdain for Donald Trump, and Peter Dutton’s unwise efforts to lash himself to Trump’s mast in order to reap the benefits from his political tailwinds.Since the attacks on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza, Albanese has assiduously tried to walk a middle-path through a deeply divided society, making important concessions to each side (including recognition of a Palestinian state) and appealing to the democratic virtues of common decency and mutual respect. His accession to call a royal commission into antisemitism after the Bondi massacre and the haste with which hate speech legislation was pushed through parliament are, perhaps, the exceptions that prove the general rule.Everything Albanese has done as Prime Minister seems to have been geared toward promoting a more inclusive, more cohesive society through incremental changes.During his second term, Albanese has benefited from a Coalition in disarray, that no longer seems capable of or willing to paper over the philosophical and temperamental differences between them. Under Sussan Ley, the Liberals are more of a centre-right party, even as rivals within her party and her erstwhile Coalition partners are seeking to position themselves to reap the electoral gains from the surge in support for One Nation.Deep social and ideological divisions — over Gaza, immigration, housing affordability, intergenerational wealth disparity, racial discrimination, religious freedom — are now poised to embolden the political extremes in this country. As it already has in the United States, the UK, Germany and France, the political centre is under threat from the unyielding (and often irresponsible) demands of grievance. And after years of incremental changes and promises of progress, the electoral bill is coming due.The question now becomes whether moderation, inclusivity, decency and incremental change are still political virtues, or are they electoral liabilities?Guest: Sean Kelly is a columnist for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and a regular contributor to The Monthly. He is a former advisor to Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. He is the author, most recently, of Quarterly Essay 100, The Good Fight: What Does Labor Stand For?

If there is a single adjective that captures the difference, both in tone and in action, between Donald Trump’s first presidential term and his second, it’s “unconstrained”.Whatever limits might have been placed on his conduct, his designs, his instincts during his first administration — legal, congressional, electoral, conventional — now seem to have fallen away, leaving Trump emboldened to pursue a series of ambitions that he’s long harboured.Mass deportations by militarised agents, revenge against his political opponents, the extortion of purportedly unsympathetic institutions (most notably law firms and universities) and his own personal enrichment have, perhaps, been the most brazen of these pursuits. But over the last two months, a different kind of ambition has come into view: the desire for territorial expansion and absolute sway over the countries and territories of the western hemisphere.This first manifested itself in the Trump administration’s increasing fixation on Venezuela. It began as a series of nearly two dozen missile strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean that were purportedly carrying narcotics on behalf of drug cartels, then proceeded to the seizure of oil tankers departing Venezuela, and finally culminating in the brazen capture and arraignment of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro on drug trafficking charges.While Maduro’s corruption and brutality are notorious, and there is some precedent for the kind of case that is being brought against him, what was alarming was Trump’s clear interest in Venezuela’s oil reserves and his insistence on keeping Maduro’s unelected government in place under a care-taker leader, Delcy Rodríguez. His rationale was as brutal as it was clear: “if [Rodríguez] doesn’t do what’s right” — which is to say, what the Trump administration dictates — “she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro”. It’s no stretch to suspect that Maduro’s capture and prosecution was meant to communicate that same message to Venezuela’s neighbours.The imperial logic here would have been familiar to city-states of Athens or Rome: the rulers of conquered territories and peoples would be kept in place but reduced to vassals, and would pay for their survival by offering tribute (taxes, natural wealth, crops, slave labour) to enrich the centre. Failure to pay tribute would be met with lavish punishment. (Karl Marx famously called this the first expression of “the tributary mode of production” in pre-capitalist societies.)So successful was this Venezuela operation, and having been met with such little international resistance, Trump seemed emboldened to press his long-standing claim on the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland. This was the second shoe to drop, as it were. Like Venezuela, his desire for the United States to “own” Greenland was framed as a kind of international security imperative: “Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China … The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.” But upon meeting with resistance on the part of NATO nations — which Trump, unsurprisingly, interpreted as ingratitude (“I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States”) — his willingness to threaten coercion in the form of military force or punitive tariffs laid bare the underlying sense of territorial entitlement.In his justly praised speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered one response to Trump’s ambitions:“if great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from ‘transactionalism’ will become harder to replicate. Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.”This was then reiterated in the determination of European leaders to resist Trump’s bullying tactics.But the prospect of what might be called hemispheric hegemony — the refusal of “great powers” to be constrained by the interests of what Joseph Goebbels called “crummy little states”, the “reorganisation of the world” along the lines of regional sway and each powerful nation being given “its own proper place” — has unsettling echoes not just of the Monroe Doctrine but of the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan that signaled the end of the “tottering” and “effete” League of Nations.Are we justified in worrying about a similar disregard of law- or rules-based restraint?You can read Brendon O’Connor’s reflections on Trump’s posturing over Greenland on ABC Religion & Ethics.

The massacre at Bondi Beach on 14 December 2025 — during which two gunmen targeted a group of Jewish Australians who had gathered to mark the first day of Hanukkah, killing 15 people — violently punctuated two years of escalating antisemitic incidents.Bondi was an act of terror that realised the worst fears of many Australian Jews, who had seen their synagogues and restaurants torched, their houses, schools and electorate offices vandalised, and members of their community ostracised, harassed and abused on city streets, in cultural institutions, on university campuses.Adding insult to grievous injury was the fact that so many Australian Jews had expressed their feeling of being estranged and afraid within their own country, only to have their fears routinely minimised or dismissed.Horrific events of this kind invariably elicit a collective reckoning. What are the contributing factors that created the conditions in which something like this could occur, and what can be done to ensure nothing like it happens again? For many Australians, the act of discriminatory violence at Bondi represented a four-fold failure:the inability of police and intelligence services to prevent the attack;the laxness of existing gun control laws;the inadequacy of laws involving hate speech, hate crimes and hate groups;the unwillingness to take the fears and experiences of members of the Jewish community seriously in the face of rising antisemitism.The first and last of these failures will be the particular focus of the recently announced royal commission. But the Albanese government was intent on moving quickly to address the second and third by recalling parliament to pass new legislation. In so doing, the federal government confronted some of the dangers involved in legislating in the aftermath of a national tragedy.Not only are there the general risks of overreach, of scapegoating, or of unintended consequences due to laws that are written either too specifically or too vaguely. There is also the role that the emotion can play in attempting to craft a legislative response to the loss of these particular lives — which included someone who survived the Holocaust, some who died protecting others, rabbis, parents, grandparents and siblings, a 10-years-old girl.But then there is also the fact that this mass shooting took place in the context of a period of heightened social conflict and emotion over the war in Gaza following the 7 October 2023 attacks. There can be little doubt that the large public displays of anger at the State of Israel and grief over the killing of tens of thousands of men, women and children in Gaza contributed to the climate of hostility experienced by many Jewish Australians — whether they supported the actions of the Netanyahu government or not.So it seemed inevitable that the tidal wave of sorrow and remorse over the victims of Bondi would slam into the wall of anger and grief over the devastation of Gaza — to say nothing of concerns, on the left and the right, that new hate speech laws would supress or criminalise forms of robust political expression that should otherwise be protected. For the new laws to pass, something would have to give.In the end, on Tuesday, the federal government was able to pass two significantly amended bills — one involving gun control, the other addressing hate speech, hate crimes and hate groups; the first with support from the Greens, the second with members of the Coalition. The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Bill 2026 focusses now on the grounds on which an organisation could be specified as a “prohibited hate group”, an expanded definition of “hate crimes”, new visa refusal powers and the creation of an “aggravated grooming offence” aimed at “religious official[s] or other spiritual leader[s]” who advocate violence or teach hate to those under the age of 18.What the public and political debate over these laws has exposed, in the process, is a fundamental lack of agreement over the nature and harms of “hate speech”, or understanding of its effect on groups and individuals in a democratic and diverse society. We have also seen how risky it is to address hate speech simply by criminalising it.You can read Kath Gelber’s reflections on the first and final versions of the federal government’s hate speech laws on ABC Religion and Ethics (here and here).

How should we wrestle with the problem of loving the art, but being unsettled by the behaviour or the beliefs of the artist who created it? It would be a mistake to see it as just an ethical problem. It is also an aesthetic problem. Because knowing what we know causes us to see the work differently.

Could a stand-up routine ever rise to the level of "art" — the kind of performance that rewards multiple viewings, whose humour grows and deepens, which contains subtleties waiting to be discovered? Enter US comedian John Mulaney with a 2017 comedy sketch. There is something undeniably enduring, timeless even about Mulaney's act.

When saving face is paramount to all other considerations, others invariably pay the price in order for the untrammeled supremacy of the ego to persist. But by permitting someone to "save face", are we not providing a constructive way of keeping them within a moral community?

There are few things more peculiar to a person than their preferences; why they favour one genre of music or one style of writing over another. And in our world of endless digital reproduction, we increasingly rely on recommendation algorithms to curate or triage our encounters with culture. But algorithms tend toward massification; they rule out the possibilities of both aesthetic achievement and sheer surprise.

AI is sometimes portrayed in utopian terms as the essential technological innovation. At other times, it's described as representing an existential threat to human life, a technological creation that will inevitably lay waste to its creator. Regardless of how we view it, could the cost of AI extend far beyond economics?

It is one of the casualties of democratic politics that citizens rarely remain indifferent about the governments they elect. By investing politicians with their hopes or fears, their aspirations and anxieties, voters ensure that they will take the performance of a government personally. This is why politics cannot be emptied of emotion: electors and the elected are bound together by filaments of expectation and accountability, and the conditions of their common life depend on the maintenance of those delicate affective bonds.But when contempt, corruption, greed, incompetence, inattentiveness, unresponsiveness, popular suspicion and outright violence are allowed to eat away at these bonds, it is the political and civil life of the nation as a whole that suffers. For in such conditions, good governance becomes impossible — either because politicians habitually treat the electorate with disdain or because voters are so aggrieved that they gravitate towards those who will give voice to their discontent.That’s why it is imperative to do what can be done to strengthen the political, civic and moral bonds that connect citizens with one another and governors with the governed.How might we cultivate the capacity to imagine that politics can, in fact, be a means of pursuing and achieving the good, that there are virtues inherent to the political vocation? It may well begin with the recovery of an almost pastoral vision of politics as what emerges out of a people’s concern to care for their common life.It is just such an imagination that is richly on display in a series of murals painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the walls of the Sala dei Nova (the Hall of the Nine, otherwise known as Sala della Pace, the Hall of Peace) in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico between 1337 and 1340. Lorenzetti’s commission was at once to visualise the philosophical undergirding of the political system of Siena under the stewardship of nine self-selecting governors, and to remind those dispensing justice and those seeking it of the stakes of their deliberations.Lorenzetti evidently drew on the political vision of the Nine — their own understanding of the virtues that are inherent to the vocation of good governance — and he/they drew liberally from the tradition of soulcraft/statecraft from the Italian renaissance, as well as from Seneca and Cicero, Augustine and Aquinas. The question is whether we, in our time, with our resources, can recover an analogously compelling vision of guarded optimism, of mutual accountability, of prudence and wisdom, such that we, too, can articulate the conditions in which politics can be a force for good.

In the world of book sales, what “romantasy” is to fiction, autobiography/memoir is to non-fiction. There is an undeniable appetite for the purportedly true stories of famous or otherwise public figures whose lives are shrouded in PR or private interests.Moreover, autobiographies have a kind of inherent meaning or telos — disparate elements come together to form a narrative which always will have been meaningful. Part of our desire to read such memoirs is certainly prurient, a wish to know more than we are entitled; but part is also inspirational or “admirational”, nourishing the belief or hope that our lives, too, will end up having been meaningful.And yet, there is nothing uncomplicated about the task of telling the story of our lives. There is an ethical flaw at the heart of such a task: given how given we are to self-justification and self-absolution, how ungenerous we can be in response to the actions and intentions of others, how forgiving we can be to our own inconsistencies and hypocrisies, and how blind we often are to the effects our own behaviour to other people’s lives, who’s to say we are adept at narrating our stories truthfully?And yet our story is our own, and there is a certain humiliation, a certain violence, that accompanies an inability to tell it — for our lives to be wholly narrated by someone else, as though we were a footnote to their story.What, then, are some of the ways that we can discover truthfulness “in the innermost parts” (as the Psalms put it)? There are other forms of life-writing that would seem to evade or at least temper the temptation to self-deception. The example of Helen Garner’s decision to publish her diaries — raw, flawed, achingly human — would stand as a morally credible counterpoint to the sheer overwhelming excess of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Then there’s also the auto-fictional experiment of Rachel’s Cusk’s Outline trilogy, whereby readers come to know the central character only through her attentive conversations with others. One of the most remarkable recent examples is Helen Elliott’s memoir Eleven Letters to You, which is less an autobiography than it is an account of the friendship, truthfulness, decency of others — Elliott is simply “the hinge holding it all together”.Could it be that we simply cannot know ourselves, the meaning of our lives, without the provocation and perspective of others, who help us come to see that the truth about ourselves is most often discernible through our actions and relationships?

It feels like, for so much of this year, in one form or another, we’ve been trying to count the costs that technological innovations are exacting on our humanity — how AI, in particular, is altering (perhaps irrevocably) our relationship to words, to writing, to beauty, to creativity, to taste, to work, to the natural world, to our interior life.From the very beginning, our concern has been that the allure of convenience — or, better, of frictionlessness — is making us overlook or fail to reflect adequately upon what is lost when certain forms of difficulty are eliminated from our lives. After all, difficulty can be one of the ways we register the true value an activity. To lose the difficulty is to lose precisely what it is that makes the pursuit worthwhile in the first place.A perfect example of this dilemma presents itself in Apple’s announcement that its new AirPods would include a “Live Translation” feature that would allow users who speak English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese to understand each other (with the promise of more languages to follow). Particularly for travellers, this technology promises to break down the language barrier and alleviate the stress of not being able to understand one’s taxi driver or waiter. It purports to be the digital equivalent of Douglas Adams’s “Babel fish” from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — your own private in-ear interpreter.Now, there are questions about the AI technology — and the large language models that undergird it — that give plenty of reasons to doubt the adequacy or accuracy of the automated translation. As anyone who has tried Google Translate knows, the translation-by-prediction-and-equivalence that machine learning is capable of producing is most often shallow, error-ridden and has a tin-ear for idiom, allusion or humour.But let’s leave those drawbacks to the side for now, and suppose that the technology will eventually be capable of producing fluent, largely accurate translations from one language into another. This still doesn’t overcome the importance of friction, of difficulty, the experience of being suspended between, not just languages, but also cultures and conceptual worlds, and the patterns and rhythms of expression that cannot easily be separated from the meaning of the sentences themselves. At best, automated translation can provide the illusion of, or a kind of ersatz substitute for, “understanding”.To translate from one language into another — particularly when what is involved is poetry or literature — is not merely to find a series of relatively accurate equivalences; rather, it is to find oneself suspended between two worlds, acutely aware of precisely what is not translatable from one language into the other. And yet it is just this experience that at once exposes the limits of our own modes of expression and thinking, and opens up the possibility of creation, discovery and surprise.If translation becomes one more of those difficult tasks we are content to sacrifice on the altar of convenience, we may find that the difficulty is not the only thing we lose.You can read Ross Benjamin’s article “The Costs of Instant Translation” in The Atlantic, and his reflections on translating Daniel Kehlmann’s novel “The Director” on ABC Religion & Ethics.

Earlier this month, in response to a disturbing rise in youth crime in Melbourne, Victoria’s Labor government adopted a key policy that the LNP took to last year’s Queensland state election.The LNP policy pledged (among other things): to apply adult penalties to children under 18 who committed a range of violent and non-violent offences; to impose mandatory minimum sentences for certain offences committed by children; to abandon the principle that detention should only be used as a last resort when it comes to children; to require judges to give greatest consideration to the effect an offence has on victims when sentencing childrenThe policy was undeniably popular with Queenslanders. In the human rights statement accompanying the Making Queensland Safer Act 2024, the newly elected government acknowledged that the amendments would “lead to sentences for children that are more punitive than necessary to achieve community safety”, and that mandatory sentencing is “in direct conflict with international law standards”. Even so, the government insisted:“these measures and the purposes to which they are directed are clearly supported by Queenslanders and are a direct response to growing community concern and outrage over crimes perpetrated by young offenders. For this reason, the amendments include an override declaration which provides that they have effect despite being incompatible with human rights …”Human rights concerns notwithstanding, and despite the efficacy of such punitive measures now being questioned, Victorian premier Jacinta Allan has proposed a similar suite of legal reforms — which would see: children as young as 14 being tried and sentenced in the County Court; a significant increase in the maximum jail sentences; a requirement that judges “clearly prioritise community safety in sentencing decisions”; the formation of a new Violence Reduction Unit.Like in Queensland, these proposed youth justice reforms are aimed at addressing community concerns and acknowledging the consequences of violent crime on victims. Both goals are not only worthy, but are integral components of any well-functioning justice system. Punishment must deter wrong-doers and provide some succour to victims; it must denounce wrong-doing and protect the community — but the emotions that drive any pursuit of retributive justice (anger, fear, contempt, the desire for revenge) must be tempered by a more “forward looking” commitment to prevention and rehabilitation.Victoria’s proposed youth justice reforms thus compels us to grapple with: the limits of punitive responses to crime; what we believe prison/detention to be for; to what extent society’s desire for punishment needs to be tempered by other responses that might decrease the likelihood of re-offence; how much discretion should be afforded to judges when sentencing; whether an emphasis on rehabilitation and early intervention can be reconciled with the anger society feels at crimes that tear at the social fabric.You can read responses by Kate Fitz-Gibbon and Abraham Kuol to Victoria’s proposed youth justice reforms.

Ever since 2023, a class of GPL-1 based drugs — which for two decades were used to treat type 2 diabetes — have been heralded as a “revolution in weight loss” and signalling the “end of obesity”. While these drugs go by different names, they’ve become popularly grouped under the shorthand “Ozempic”.It’s no exaggeration to say that Ozempic has become a cultural phenomenon. Millions of people in the United States, Australia, South Korea, the UK, the EU take semaglutide injections, not to treat diabetes, but in order to reduce their hunger and eliminate what is sometimes called “food noise”.Obesity has long been moralised — associated with laziness, ill-disciplined eating, poor diet, a general lack of self-control. But expensive weight loss drugs like Ozempic have, to date, exacerbated the class dimension of obesity. This was nicely captured in a 2024 South Park episode (called “The End of Obesity”), in which Cartman is denied a prescription because the drug isn’t covered by insurance and his mother can’t afford it; as a consolation, the doctor recommends that he listens to more Lizzo. Cartman’s response: “Rich people get Ozempic, poor people get body positivity.”This begins to point to one of the most troubling aspects of the widespread use of weight loss drugs. It does not have to do with their use per se, or their further applications (to other health conditions or to treat other forms of addiction). Even the question of prohibitive cost may soon be partially resolved with plans underway to make some GPL-1 drugs more affordable.The more concerning issue is the cultural environment in which drugs like Wegovy or Mounjaro or Ozempic are now being taken up — cultures long preoccupied with dieting and weight loss, and which have elevated the physical aesthetic attributes of thinness, firmness, smoothness and vigour to the level of virtues, even moral demands. Conversely, obesity is stigmatised as ugliness, incontinence, laziness, a sign of servitude to cravings and bad habits.Such that, even when the sleek physical appearance achieved by means of, say, Ozempic, and has nothing to do with self-control or superior habits, its users continue to accrue the social benefits associated with thinness.The testimony of women and men, for instance, who have career or social opportunities open up to them after using Ozempic is, frankly, heartbreaking and often contemptible.If we want to laud the health benefits of weight loss drugs, and explore their application to help address other forms of harmful behaviour, that’s one thing. But to use such drugs to reinforce a kind of cultural aesthetic hierarchy is both troubling and ethically problematic.If you, or someone you know, is struggling with an eating disorder or with body image, support is available. You can call the Butterfly Foundation on 1800 33 4673.

The availability of increasingly powerful generative AI tools has radically altered the creative process. Anything that we can imagine can be turned into an image, a video, a text, a song — the process is frictionless, effortless, fast and has led to a torrent of digital effluent (what is often called “AI slop”) being pumped into our online habitus. And while the content may range from the banal to the surreal, from the nonsensical to the utterly indecent, it is at least instantly consumable.The time and sheer human labour that it takes to create, as well as the effort that is involved in contemplating, tarrying with, learning to enjoy or even love a work of “art” are both lost in vortex of instantaneous production and effortless consumption.But can friction really be separated from the creative process? Immanuel Kant made the productive aesthetic distinction between “the taste of sense” (that which I might find immediately, effortlessly pleasant) and “the taste of reflection” (that which may not be immediately enjoyable, and which may require effort or patience or instruction before yielding its treasures). According to Kant, what is truly “beautiful” is only available to the taste of reflection.And yet beauty does not necessarily offer itself to us as the result of effort. Throughout the history of philosophy and in various religious traditions, there are all manner of paradoxes that attend to “the beautiful”. Beauty may be transcendental, but it is also experientially ephemeral, even delicate; it attracts us, but it is lost when we try to capture or consume it; it draws us to it, but often points beyond itself or even forbids us; the human longing for beauty may be inherent, but we frequently need the assistance of others to recognise it; beauty may be an end-in-itself, but it often emerges serendipitously — and its lasting effect may be the way it brings us closer to others.So what is it that we stand to lose if we lose the capacity for the experience of beauty — whether through neglect, or disinterest, or haste, or due to our immersion in a digital milieu of AI slop and sensory overload?

For the last two years, there has been a steady drumbeat of protests — sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly — in the centre of major Australian cities involving hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands and, in one instance, hundreds of thousands of people. The vast majority of these protests have been pro-Palestinian and opposed to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.But this isn’t the only cause that has brought people out onto the city streets in their hundreds and thousands. Climate activists have disrupted traffic and targeted museums, farmers and volunteer firefighters staged a large demonstration against the Victorian government’s emergency services tax, women’s rights and trans-rights activists clashed in Melbourne, a number of huge anti-immigration rallies have been held Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and elsewhere — and in many of these instances, the demonstrations have been a magnet to people and groups on either ideological extreme wanting to exploit the protests to further their own goals, as well as to counter-protesters wishing to offer a full-throated challenge of their own.While these protests have only rarely turned violent, the considerable disruptions, vast logistical challenges and public safety risks they pose have meant that state governments, the police and the courts have increasingly been called upon to adjudicate whether, how and the extent to which they can be restricted. Neither the states nor the protesters themselves have gotten everything they’ve wanted — with the NSW Supreme Court finding against a law that “impermissibly burdens the implied constitutional freedom of communication on government or political matters”, and the Court of Appeals prohibiting plans for a large protest at Sydney Opera House in the interests of “public safety”.Protests are meant to be disruptive (if they can be sequestered to some quiet corner of a city where they will bother as few people as possible, what’s the point?) and contentious (if they do not invite serious disagreement, and even confrontation, there are probably more effective means of getting the message across). Protests can also be thought of as one of the vital forms of democratic activity that take place outside of elections and without the mediation of elected representatives. They are a form of blunt, mass communication: their message is simple and confronting; and the size of gathering matters almost as much as the message (partly because of its intended audiences).The question that is preoccupying us at the moment is: what does it mean to protect the right to protest, the freedom to express one’s dissent from the status quo, while also protecting the public against the various ways (intentionally or not) protests can turn ugly?

For the second time this year, millions of people have taken to the streets of cities and towns across the United States in response to the authoritarian tendencies and tactics of the second Trump administration.These crowds gathered under the “No Kings” banner to register their deep disapproval of: immigration raids and deportations without due process; the deployment of National Guard troops to cities against the wishes of elected officials; the use of legal threats, intimidation and extortion against the administration’s critics and non-sympathetic institutions; the selective prosecution of Trump’s political opponents and protection of his supporters; the closure of federal departments and mass sackings of federal workers; harsh proposed budget cuts that will disproportionately affect the poorest Americans and their ability to afford health care; and overt forms of corruption undertaken to enrich the president, his family and allies.It is undeniably heartening to see citizens join with their neighbours to express a shared commitment to certain democratic values in the face of the relentlessness and brazenness of an administration that treats those values with contempt.And yet Trump’s second coming has brought with it something else — certainly present in the first administration, yet, like so much else, exaggerated and emboldened this time around. There is a manifest indecency, a crassness, a cruelty and delight in the humiliation of others, a contemptuousness and a preparedness to sacrifice basic forms of democratic morality on the altar of political partisanism. Leave aside the rhetoric used by senior administration officials in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or the grotesque flirtations with Nazi symbols and racist tropes by GOP staffers.In response to the “No Kings” demonstrations, President Trump posted an AI generated video of himself piloting a jet labelled “King Trump”, which he flies over protesters and dumps what appears to be excrement over them. The White House proceeded to post an AI generated image of President Trump and Vice President Vance on thrones, wearing crowns, over an image of Democratic leaders in the House and Senate wearing sombreros.Partisan politics, it seems, becomes licence to disregard the fundamental moral constraints on conduct toward our fellow human beings, to say nothing of members of the same political community. As George Packer puts it, “Once morality is rotted out by partisan relativism, the floor gives way and the fall into nihilism is swift.”And yet for someone like John Dewey, the cultivation of everyday democratic virtues like decency, mutual consideration, turn-taking, forbearance and gentleness in our speech — as well as, negatively, the refusal to call each other names or to form ourselves into cliques and castes — is the way “democracy becomes a moral reality”.So while protesters gather on the streets to take a stand against such an obvious assault against the edifice of American democracy, it could well be that there is a more insidious threat working its way through the soul of the nation — as well as those of advanced democracies like Australia, France and the UK — in the form of the disregard for democratic decency itself. Dewey didn’t think a democracy could survive without this moral glue. Do we really want to find out if he was right?Guest: George Packer is an award-winning author and a staff writer at The Atlantic. His most recent book is a political novel called The Emergency.

There is no doubt that silence can be a form of cowardice: a refusal to speak up or speak out on behalf of others, an unwillingness to join our voices with theirs lest we be made to bear their punishment. In such a case, we could say, the absence of words is not empty but full — full of self-protection, of ego.Being silenced, in turn, can crush the soul — to have our words treated with contempt; to speak into the void, knowing that there is no common medium that will bear our plaintive cries to the ears of another; to be consigned to inexpressiveness, to moral suffocation; to be rendered powerless, without voice, without agency.There is the silence of mute incomprehension — to find ourselves overcome or overwhelmed by grief, by loss, by the injustice of the world. In such instances, it’s not so much that we choose silence as it is that silence seizes us. At such moments, it would feel obscene, indecent, to say anything.These are three forms of silence that are like wounds or bruises on the soul. They may simply be, but none of them is desirable. But while there are forms of silence that are imposed, there are also forms of silence that are adopted. Even cultivated.Consider the world envisaged by Ray Bradbury in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 — a world in which noise and incessant speech are compulsory. It is a world in which the stillness that often accompanies solitude, is made nearly impossible. For even when someone is alone, there are little electronic thimbles called “seashells”, radio devices that beam talk and noise and talk and noise directly into the ears. It’s unsurprising that, in Bradbury’s world, a world without silence is a world in which reading impossible and books are redundant. And the struggle of the novel’s central characters is how to cultivate something like a capacity for interiority.But fully a century before Bradbury’s novel, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard lamented a prevailing condition of “talkativeness”, of “chatter”. And what is it to chatter, Kierkegaard asked?“It is the annulment of the passionate disjunction between being silent and speaking. Only the person who can remain essentially silent can speak essentially, can act essentially. Silence is inwardness. Chattering gets ahead of essential speaking, and giving utterance to reflection has a weakening effect on action by getting ahead of it … When individuals are not turned inward in quiet contentment, in inner satisfaction, in religious sensitiveness … then chattering begins … But chattering dreads the moment of silence, which would reveal the emptiness.”Interestingly enough, Kierkegaard said that the phenomenon of chatter began with the advent of the popular press, which gave so many people so very much to talk about, to the point of imposing on citizens an obligation to “have an opinion” on everything.And perhaps it is the imposition of chatter, the expectation, the demand even, that we speak, that we make ourselves heard, that we hope to escape by cultivating a capacity for silence. For it is only when speech emerges from silence that that speech can have any weight. In such an instance, our words bear in them the silence out of which they emerged.In our time, there is an expectation of expression, of speech, of noise. We are repeatedly told that “silence is violence” or that “silence is complicity”, that action is demanded and that inaction is “culpable”. And there’s no doubt this can be true. But it is also the case that speech can be little more than self-assertion, the bringing of ego to bear upon the world. Silence, by contrast, can be a way of cultivating attentiveness, of practising responsiveness, of tarrying with contradictions or uncertainty, of deepening speech rather than adding to the cacophony of opinion.But perhaps most importantly, speech that emerges from silence can create opportunities for moral encounter and invitations for mutual understanding, as opposed to the zero-sum dynamics of self-assertion and persuasion.Guest: Stan Grant is Distinguished Professor at Charles Sturt University and the Director of Yindyamarra Nguluway. He is a theologian, a prolific author, and he recently delivered the Simone Weil Lectures on Human Value at Australian Catholic University on silence, poetry and music.

The politics of immigration has returned in recent months — and returned with a depth of feeling that suggests it never truly went away. It’s always there, lingering just beneath the surface of Western societies, waiting to be tapped into by politicians skilful (or brazen) enough to harness its power.So Donald Trump went to the 2024 presidential election excoriating his predecessor’s record on immigration and for “losing control” of the southern border control; by contrast, he promised the “largest deportation operation in American history”. In mid-September, as many as 150,000 people took to the streets in central London as part of the “Unite the Kingdom” rally organised by far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Demonstrators wrapped themselves in the Union Jack, waved St George’s flag and held aloft wooden crosses amid calls for “remigration” and other forms of mass deportation.Closer to home, also in August and September, a series of “March for Australia” demonstrations took place across Australia’s major cities against “mass migration” as the root of any number of social and economic problems: from housing shortages, food prices and traffic congestion to increased levels of social division and a declining sense of national “identity”.And as is invariably the case, there are politicians prepared to make the most of the social ferment. Leaving aside the surge in support for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party, we can point to Senator Jacinta Nampijimpa Price’s recent comments about Indian migrants and Liberal MP Andrew Hastie’s blunt identification of post-pandemic immigration levels as “the real reason you can’t afford a home”.Conservative political parties across Western democracies have “won” the debate over “border control”. It has been the clear intention of centre-left parties to neutralise the politics of “irregular arrivals”. What’s left, then, is the debate over multiculturalism and levels of immigration.And yet this is dangerous political terrain. For however much researchers point to the economic benefits of immigration, or the lack of clear connection between international student numbers and rising house prices, or the historic success of Australia’s bipartisan commitment to multiculturalism, “fact-checking” cannot touch the underlying emotions to which anti-immigration rhetoric appeals. Moreover, one of the reasons anti-immigration rhetoric is so successful is the fact it is at once parasitic and opportunistic. As social researcher Rebecca Huntley recently put it, “Whatever the top anxiety people have at any one time, they will graft an anxiety about immigration on it.”Given the affective dimension of both social cohesion and anti-immigration rhetoric, is there a way of appealing to political emotions as a way of addressing these anxieties without giving way to their more insidious expressions?

In a remarkable column from 1944, George Orwell bemoaned the sheer range of social and political phenomena to which the label “Fascist” was being applied — to the point that he believed the word itself had become “almost entirely meaningless”. And while it conveyed little more than a term like “bully” would, “Fascist” nonetheless carried an emotional charge, a degree of opprobrium, that such an everyday word did not.For this reason, Orwell concluded, the label should be used both precisely and sparingly: “All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”During the first Trump administration, a debate broke out among historians and political philosophers as to whether what the United States was witnessing amounted to “fascism”. For some, the term was an accurate description of a political disposition and form of political expression which at once had deep roots in American history — reaching back even before the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the “America First” phenomenon in the 1930s — and enjoyed certain family resemblances with the European movements with which we ordinarily associate the word. For others, calling the Trump administration “fascist” was either premature, a form of rhetorical overreach or a misdiagnosis.In many respects, that debate now seems quaint. For after the 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol and the various forms of executive action taken by Donald Trump in his second administration — including the extortion of universities, law firms and media companies, the use of masked ICE agents to detain and “disappear” people without due process, the deployment of the National Guard on the streets of American cities, and the targeted prosecution of political adversaries — that which was merely feared has now come to pass.But does this mean the description “fascist” should now be used freely as a way of characterising the Trump administration — the way “populism” was after 2016? Not only are there serious questions about the rhetorical efficacy of the term’s use (even if it is historically or politically accurate) or its ability to mobilise an electorate against a common democratic threat. There is also the prospect that the use of the term itself could provide a degree of licence, in the minds of some, to take matters into their own hands and engage in outright political violence.This points to a kind of two-fold paradox involving “fascism”. On the one hand, fascism is itself a paradoxical political phenomenon in the way it holds together seemingly incommensurable impulses. As José Ortega y Gasset famously remarked in 1927:“It asserts authoritarianism and organises rebellion … It seems to pose itself as the forge of a strong State, and uses means most conducive to its dissolution, as if it were a destructive faction or a secret society. Whichever way we approach fascism we find that it is simultaneously one thing and its contrary, it is A and not A …”On the other hand, while the term “fascism” could accurately convey the gravity of the situation facing an advanced democracy, the very use of the term could deepen the democratic dysfunction and thereby exacerbate the political conflict. Would we be well-advised, then, to follow Orwell’s advice and use the term only ever circumspectly and not as a rhetorical weapon against our opponents?Guest: Jason Stanley is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he is also the Bissell-Heyd-Associates Chair in American Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. He is the author of How Propaganda Works, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and, most recently, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.

This week is the first ever “Minefield Mailbag”, where Waleed and Scott try to respond to what’s been on our listeners’ minds.The questions they take on cover such diverse topics as society’s obligations to self-professed “sovereign citizens”, whether NATO is to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, why “virtue signalling” may not be such a bad thing after all, and the discrete relationship between philosophy and gardening.If you’d like to submit a question for a future mailbag, or propose a topic for a future episode, you can send an email to [email protected].

It would be hard to overstate the significance of Charlie Kirk within the conservative movement and in the Trump administration. By some reckoning, his influence and social media prominence were second only to Donald Trump himself.As the founder and face of Turning Point USA, Kirk was pivotal in driving Trump’s appeal among younger voters — particularly young men. And, indeed, his singular appeal was to have made a muscular, self-assured brand of conservative Christian nationalism appealing in a hyper-online age. Hence his podcast would come to enjoy the kind of online saturation reserved for few other “content creators”. The social media algorithm was Charlie Kirk’s vernacular.It would not be right, however, to call Kirk an “online influencer”. Instead, he was a MAGA evangelist, a charismatic figure in the full sense of the word. And like all charismatic figures, while he tried to instil belief in young people, he also came to be the object of their belief — they could derive confidence from his confidence, from his self-assertiveness, from his ability to answer his detractors. Which is why his willingness to engage with his opponents in front of large crowds at colleges and on university campuses was integral to his persona.It is certainly to Kirk’s credit that he engaged in frank debate with those who were offended by his strident political convictions. But the performative logic of these “debates” was not to convince so much as it was to “own”. The true audience were not those physically present. Which is to say, point of the debates was to be turned into “content”.This begins to approach the significance of Charlie Kirk for those who have been left devastated by his assassination. Quite apart from the inherent indecency and immorality of taking the life of a young husband and father, killing Kirk has been received as an attack on a belief system — with its intertwined religious, racial and political elements — that sees itself as already threatened by “enemies within”.Assisted by how increasingly prominent his own Christianity became in recent years, Kirk represents what “America” will look like when it is made “great again”. It is no wonder, then, that he is quickly becoming canonised as a MAGA martyr.Finding smug satisfaction in the death of Charlie Kirk is to allow oneself to fall outside the bounds of fundamental decency. Wishing to “right the record” of his immoderate, frequently bigoted rhetoric, after his death, in such a way that it makes it sound as though Kirk “had it coming”, is also utterly indecent. And while there is no virtue in performing grief that one does not feel, being contemptuous of those who are grief-stricken over Kirk’s murder is itself democratically corrosive.Indeed, one of the predicates of political violence is the inability to recognise the humanity in one’s fellow citizens, and to see them only ever as bearers of a particular ideology — as “abstractions”. And that’s what is worrying about this particular political moment. Once citizens are turned into ideological abstractions — whether they’re called “fascists” or members of the “radical left” — they can be sacrificed in the service of a greater cause. In this way, contempt or the abandonment of basic decency are the conditions of possibility of “categorical” violence.If contempt and indecency are the kindling, then an event like the assassination of Charlie Kirk could provide the spark that turns the United States’ current “cold” civil war into a theatre of political violence.

In August, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh from The Bookshelf on Radio National, teamed up with the indomitable Sophie Gee — Professor of English at Princeton University, Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Sydney, and co-host of the podcast The Secret Life of Books — and Scott Stephens from The Minefield, to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen (1775–1817).In front of a live audience at the State Library of New South Wales, the quartet discussed Austen’s innovative approach to fiction, why her novels are of such abiding interest to moral philosophy, the importance of “a room of her own” when writing, and her subtle critique of patriarchy, gender norms, slavery and religion.Finally, they reflect on three exemplary moments in Austen’s last three novels — Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816) and Persuasion (1818).This episode was originally broadcast on The Bookshelf on Thursday, 11 September 2025.

Whether it is in geopolitics or in social and personal relationships, the overweening desire to “save face” can have manifestly unjust and outright damaging consequences.Those who continue to languish under Iran’s oppressive regime take little comfort in Ayatollah Ali Khamenei being afforded the opportunity to shore up his public standing following the US missile strikes on its nuclear facilities. And Hannah Arendt correctly observed at the heart of the ‘Pentagon Papers’ a willingness on the part of the US government to lie to the American people about the status of the war in Vietnam, and thus to prolong an unwinnable and inhumane war, in order to protect “the reputation of the United States and its President”.When saving face is paramount to all other considerations, others invariably pay the price in order for the untrammeled supremacy of the ego to persist.But “ego” does not quite grasp the social complexity bound up with the concept of “face” — which suggests something closer to “honour” or a kind of thick social reputation, standing or prestige that is conferred by others, the loss of which is no mere bruised ego but a threat to one’s social existence.While this concept of “face” has partly been appropriated from Chinese culture, it nonetheless has roots in the ancient of honour/shame cultures of the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, and, as Kwame Anthony Appiah points out, finds expression fully as much in Western Europe and West Africa as it does in East Asia.Thus Immanuel Kant will warn about the moral dangers of “defamation” and of the intentional dissemination of scandalous information which, even if true, “detracts from another’s honour” and “diminishes respect for humanity as such … making misanthropy or contempt the prevalent cast of mind”. He concludes:“It is, therefore, a duty of virtue not to take malicious pleasure in exposing the faults of others so that one will be thought of as good as, or at least not worse than, others, but rather throw the veil of philanthropy [Menchenliebe] over their faults, not merely by softening our judgements but also by keeping our judgements to ourselves; for examples of respect that we give other can arouse their striving to deserve it.”Kant recognises that frequently the desire to humiliate another is not about their reproof, but about our own relative aggrandisement.Does this suggest that giving someone the ability to “save face”, even when they are found to be in the wrong, can function as both a rejection of the zero-sum logic that often prevails in honour/shame cultures (in which there is only so much social prestige to go around) and a constructive way of keeping them within a moral community?

There is something undeniably disorienting about the way AI features in public and political discussions.On some days, it is portrayed in utopian, almost messianic terms — as the essential technological innovation that will at once turbo-charge productivity and discover the cure to cancer, that will solve climate change and place the vast stores of human knowledge at the fingertips of every human being. Such are the future benefits that every dollar spent, every resource used, will have been worth it. From this vantage, artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the end, the ‘telos’, the ultimate goal, of humanity’s millennia-long relationship with technology. We will have invented our own saviour.On other days, AI is described as representing a different kind of “end” — an existential threat to human life, a technological creation that, like Frankenstein’s monster, will inevitably lay waste to its creator. The fear is straightforward enough: should humanity invent an entity whose capabilities surpass our own and whose modes of “reasoning” are unconstrained by moral norms or sentiments — call it “superintelligence” — what assurances would we have that that entity would continue to subordinate its own goals to humankind’s benefit? After all, do we know what it will “what”, or whether the existence of human beings would finally pose an impediment to its pursuits?Ever since powerful generative AI tools were made available to the public not even three years ago, chatbots have displayed troubling and hard-to-predict tendencies. They have deceived and manipulated human users, hallucinated information, spread disinformation and engaged in a range of decidedly misanthropic “behaviours”. Given the unpredictability of these more modest algorithms — which do not even approximate the much-vaunted capabilities of AGI — who’s to say how a superintelligence might behave?It’s hardly surprising, then, that the chorus of doomsayers has grown increasingly insistent over the last six months. In April, a group of AI researchers released a hypothetical scenario (called “AI 2027”) which anticipates a geopolitical “arms race” in pursuit of AGI and the emergence of a powerful AI agent that operates largely outside of human control by the end of 2027. In the same vein, later this month two pioneering researchers in the field of AI — Eliezer Yudkowsy and Nate Soares — are releasing their book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI.For all this, there is a disconcerting irony that shouldn’t be overlooked. Warnings about the existential risk posed by AI have accompanied every stage of its development — and those warnings have been articulated by the leaders in the field of AI research themselves.This suggests that warnings of an extinction event due to the advent of AGI are, perversely, being used both to spruik the godlike potential of these companies’ product and to justify the need for gargantuan amounts of money and resources to ensure “we” get there before “our enemies” do. Which is to say, existential risk is serving to underwrite a cult of AI inevitabalism, thus legitimating the heedless pursuit of AGI itself.Could we say, perhaps, that the very prospect of some extinction event, of some future where humanity is subservient to superintelligent overlords, is acting as a kind of decoy, a distraction from the very real ways that human beings, communities and the natural world are being exploited in the service of the goal of being the first to create artificial general intelligence?Guest: Karen Hao is the author of Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination.