GODWIN IS DEAD: Long Live Godwin
'Speaking theologically – pay heed, for I rarely speak as a theologian – it was God himself who at the end of his labour lay down as a serpent under the Tree of Knowledge: it was thus he recuperated from being God … he had made everything too beautiful … The Devil is merely the idleness of God on that seventh day ...' 'Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Nietzsche.
On Tuesday 15th December, 2009, new legislation was introduced in Australia to support mandatory Internet filtering, entitled 'Measures to Improve Safety of the Internet for Families'. The topics targeted for censorship include euthanasia, all circulation of higher than MA15+ video games etc. This followed the lead of many Western countries which have tentatively begun to cut back on the freedom of speech rights of their citizens, in order to strengthen State sovereignty in the face of a communication technology which breaks down social, cultural and territorial boundaries more than anything else before. This regressive movement is being peddled as socially progressive in that it seeks to make the internet safer for families and the community, as the internet becomes part of the stabilising infrastructure of the State. But as with all undermining of human rights, do the gains outweigh the losses, and do such regressive strategies serve only to weaken, rather than equipping and empowering people, today and into the future? For example, currently, website blacklists for ISP blocking are kept classified. Under the new laws (if they are introduced), these blacklists will have to be made public. Considering the blocks are still relatively easy to get around, these lists could serve to provide a complete list of the 'worst of the worst' websites.
I am a child of the early eighties; I spent my early years cocooned inside the affirming world of a thousand Hawke-Keating Labour speeches, before being abandoned cruelly into the harsh paradigm of life under John Howard and the Liberal Party from 1996-2007. This seemed like forever to me, since it spanned my entire era of political awareness until adulthood. I began to dream of Australia on the day the Libs failed to be re-elected as like a prisoner freed from decades in a dungeon, coming to terms with life without such a tight, dehumanising structure. Perhaps the personal responsibility of life on the outside of the xenophobic regime would be too much for us; would we even remember who we were, or what it was we wanted to achieve as a free, democratic society? Maybe the nation would only end up re-offending, just to rediscover the safe certainties of chauvinism and finger-pointing. Could we still get it up, if at all we ever had?
Then, immediately after Rudd won the election, it began to dawn on me just how traumatised we all were as a nation from living through the fear, the guilt and the stifling of creativity that the Howard years had doled out. I had been completely oblivious to the effect this regime had had on me culturally, politically and
emotionally (in fact in every facet of my life - psychologically, even sexually!).
Despite being firmly against basically everything the government did, my entire direct experience of Australian politics existed inside a Howard box. I was so against them, I would often be caught comparing them to Hitler and the Nazis.1 But politically, Howard's career WAS actually very similar to Hitler's. They were both elected by a landslide popular vote the first time round. John Howard achieved the second-largest swing against an incumbent government since Federation. The Nazi Party achieved impressive election results. Even early on, before they had their opponents too intimidated to organize against them they had 32 seats in the Reichstag. During their career, both Hitler and Howard set about dismantling almost every democratic institution they ministered over. Hitler first introduced the Enabling Act in 1933, which gave cabinet total executive power, independent from the Reichstag. Although less extreme, Howard also sought to undermine the power of the senate and the states, in order to increase the power of the federal government. There are many other examples of the undermining and rolling back of democratic processes. They both resorted to extreme fear-mongering. Hitler did it by pointing guns at his own people, declaring war on countries that were not allies, and locking people up in concentration camps, before eventually 'ethnically cleansing' them. Howard did it by pointing guns at the terrorists and declaring war on 'terrorist countries', locking up people in concentration camps, before ethnically cleansing the very people they were claiming to be liberating from their non-Western terrorist oppressors. Of course, a lot less people died, and the Howard government was not totalitarian. It's the similarities in political, rather than military career which I seek to draw your attention to, simply because I believe that we are currently living in a post-tyranny, where even though we've been offered the reins back, we are too scared to take them up. Mandatory internet censorship is yet another example of people's desire for freedom FROM choice.
In their persecution of the Jews (and other minorities, including gays, lesbians, Christians, intellectuals, the disabled, non-Europeans etc2) the Nazis claimed to be heavily inspired by Nietzsche's concept of the overman. The Nazis interpreted Nietzsche's text to justify genocide. But I think that is contrived, he was simply trying to put across the need for each individual to create themselves an identity transcending the previous limitations of human sociological paradigms;
'We, however, want to be those who we are - the new, the unique, the incomparable, those who give themselves their own law, those who create themselves! [...]'
[GS 335]
After World War II, German national and cultural identity went through major philosophical crises, the effects of which can still be easily observed to this day. In 1959, Hannah Arendt, a prominent political theorist and exiled German Jew was offered the Lessing Prize in Germany as a gesture of reconciliation between German nationals and German exiles. In her acceptance speech, Arendt directly addressed the continued unwillingness and inability of the German people to acknowledge the Holocaust. She defined herself not as the self-consistent subject of the German people's newly 'regained' humanism, but as a world traveler, where, through an inner emigration, a refugee constitutes a citizen. But were it not for the German people's continuing paradoxical need for privilege and integrity of identity, this opposition of citizen and refugee could be dissolved; 'As well-intentioned as they were, I was left with the impression that no one existed for them who could not be governed by their intentions.' Public spectacles like this were more in aid of reassuring the national conscience, rather than doing anything to fix the real wounds and their consequences.
A similar public spectacle happened in Australia following the election of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister – the apology to the Aboriginals. Previous to this, Howard had stubbornly refused to make the popularly requested apology, with the argument that it was not these contemporary generations who had committed the wrongdoings, and that it would leave the government open to claims of compensation. Perhaps there was also an underlying fear that the subtext of such an apology would be the indictment of current xenophobic and even potentially genocidal policies. When it came to exerting power, the Howard government's general modus operandi was to distract the Australian public from important changes directly affecting them, with cheap scandalous shots at various minority groups. The successive Rudd/Labour government's modus operandi was to distract the Australian public from the same kinds of important changes through public spectacles of vacuous positivity. The big media event did prove healing on the whole. It empowered Anglo-Australia to feel an integral sense of ownership of their nation. Yet this may have not led to custodianship. Civil liberties and the environment are being threatened more than ever before! And China has a big role to play in both.
Mark Lynas from Guardian.uk claims that as a result of the mobilisation surrounding global warming, we are entering a new phase of global geo-politics, with China becoming the new global superpower. Speaking from personal experience, having been in the room, he also claims that China sabotaged the Copenhagen conference and made it look as if it was the fault of the West. Rudd made a big show of how disappointed he was, and was fighting hard to come to some kind of agreement with China by the end of the summit; a seemingly valiant gesture in the face of a no doubt hopeless situation. How convenient, though, that this global public spectacle of ineffectual positivity came at the same time as Rudd rushed extreme internet censorship laws through the House of Representatives; internet censorship laws which follow China's notorious lead. During the final days of Copenhagen, while news coverage was obsessing over every minute detail of the farcical proceedings, the Australian senate (the only truly democratic institution we have left) began to debate the new internet laws fiercely.
In Rudd's speech regarding these changes, he sought to justify the new policy by saying that Australia is a civilised country which doesn’t need free access to immoral or illegal material. This flawed circular logic reeks of culturally arrogant Christian morality, seeking to prove its own superiority, by differentiating itself in theory from anything it regards as immoral and unAustralian. Our laws should be based on objective ethics, not on some subculture's idea of what is immoral. If subjective immorality is illegal, where will it end?
But it is too easy to scapegoat the Christian lobby groups. To me, the problem does not fundamentally spring from one politically extremist group as differentiated from regular practicing Christians, forcing it’s ideology onto the rest of society. It lies at the heart of religion itself. It ties in with the belief that once a person is caught committing a crime and sentenced, they are now a 'criminal', which is a different kind of person to the rest of us, as if there is some line written in the concrete that a valid person should not cross. Cultural values of virtue shift as we grow and change, and I think in light of the challenges facing our society in this new millennium, we need to make some intelligent and conscious changes to our belief systems. There is no such thing as a categorically defined innocent or evil person. All Christians sin just like everyone else. All humans have the potentiality to commit evil acts. The problem lies in the Christian mentality that irresponsible behaviour is something to oppose and eradicate, rather than something to understand and to heal. This mentality is general to all Christians who still believe in the social responsibility of the church, no matter how liberal they see themselves as being. It lies in the fundamental logic of the belief system which presupposes that there is such a thing as evil, and that goodness springs from eradicating it. Such dichotomies simply reinforce each other, and serve to justify ridding citizens of their basic human rights.
I firmly believe that upon deep analysis of any kind of behaviour, that behaviour will be understood in the correct context of the universal human condition, and cease to have the power given to that which our so-called 'civilised' society deems to be 'evil' or 'bad'. The only way for a truly civilised society to deal with degenerative behaviours is to illuminate and make visible those behaviours, and to acknowledge the potential for their manifestation in all humans. Everything must be appreciated in itself. That is sublime beauty.
When it comes specifically to the question of whether censorship serves any useful purpose, I think it comes down to whether or not the censorship stops the illumination of degeneracy or danger, or merely the proliferation of degeneracy or danger. To use the most uncommon, yet stigmatised example; in the case of child pornography (which isn't YET covered by the new legislation), the act of looking at an image could be deemed proliferation, since part of the violation of the child is the act of looking. But what if someone was doing their thesis on child pornography, to use an easy example? Wouldn’t they at some stage need to look at some? Isn't it about how they perceive the image, as a morally responsible subject in a politically secular country? If someone was to view such an image with a purely critical eye, is this still an act of proliferation? It may be true that reflective, responsible human beings are rare in our society, but does that mean we should act like they do not exist, and penalise them along with the rest of us? Appealing to the lowest common denominator is not going to change the country for the better. Is that what it means to be civilised?
I strongly feel that neither euthanasia nor violent video games are necessarily immoral, nor degenerative or even dangerous, but that has no relevance to my argument. Even if they were, the government has no place, let alone ability to eradicate these kinds of social dilemmas. As Latham said when he exited politics to become a lollypop man for his local primary school; the only thing that is going to create positive changes in communities is people doing it for themselves, utilising a bottom-up approach. This does not mean private justice. This does not even mean playing Internet Nanny. It means facing the degeneracy in oneself, however it manifests, and coming to understand the world in a less knee-jerk, more mature and capable way. Citizens therefore, must have full access to media in order to be full morally responsible human beings and world travellers. This version of moral responsibility is what it means to be human, as this relationship with the human condition is what it means to be truly alive.
1. On internet forums in debating circles, this strategy is considered such a cliche, that a theory was put forward by a guy named Godwin that in every debate, Hitler or the Nazis or the Holocaust would eventually be brought up, and that when this happened, the perpetrator's argument would be deemed invalid. The opponent would deem the argument invalid then by 'invoking Godwin's Law. Note: Not dissimilar to the general foulness of comparing pro-freedom-of-speech campaigners to pedophiles.
2. Basically anyone likely to get in the way of the rolling tank wheels of obtuse logic simply by who they were and their social latitude and longitude. A logic which no longer required embodiment or reality to continue functioning.
Interesting article on China at Copenhagen:
‘How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/22/copenhagen-climate-change-mark-lynas
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