Newsletter: Week 15, 2023
Will declining birthrates force states to see their own interests in the interest of women, and can Australians write about Australian politics?
Will States See Their Own Interests In The Interests Of Women?
This week I wrote a piece for The Diplomat on the geopolitics of birthrates. If demographics are destiny, we are entering into a period of shifting balances of power due to declining populations. Aside from the well-known factors driving these trends, what is less acknowledged is that men’s attitudes and behaviours towards women are becoming equally as influential. Women are making the very rational calculation that getting involved with men is often too risky.
What I argued is that our individual behaviours spiral up into larger phenomena that have global consequences. Men’s attitudes and behaviours towards women is something we choose to ignore, pretend isn’t a problem, and certainly don’t realise is an issue of foreign affairs. But as birthrates decline maybe we will?
There is a much larger essay to be written about why states should now see the interests of their women as being aligned with the interests of the state. This issue is one I’ve been thinking about since I started researching and writing about the family court. Justice systems still see protecting men from the consequences of their own behaviour as their overarching objective, but this is not only ethically and morally wrong, it is counterproductive to the capabilities of their countries.
It is archaic to tie state power to male power. We have seen a revolution in female education over recent decades, and the trends in female advancement identified in Hanna Rosin’s 2010 essay The End Of Men have continued to progress since then. Women’s capabilities are increasingly our countries’ primary capabilities.
Even as women have advanced professionally they also still do most of the non-professional labour that our societies are built upon. Iceland’s Women’s Strike of 1975 was a stark illustration that if women refuse to do anything societies struggle to be functional, even for a single day. There should have been a lesson learned from this event, but there wasn’t. Not even in Iceland itself.
Women take on the responsibility of humanity’s daily maintenance despite persistent social conditions that are often highly disadvantageous to them. This is something that we should be at the very least respectful of, if not in awe of. But instead of respect we ask women to also carry male violence for our societies. We instinctively believe that male violence is inevitable and needs to be directed somewhere – men need an outlet for their impulses and this is burden women must carry for us.
Yet emerging social trends like the 4B Movement in South Korea demonstrate the refusal to accept violence and abuse as a condition of relationships with men. As a result, South Korea’s birth rate has collapsed to the lowest in the world. Such a phenomenon might finally forces states to think clearly about the conditions we create for women. Although the South Korean government has had the opposite reaction, instead blaming “feminism” as a negative force creating the country’s low birth rate.
The first country to realise privileging the positive conditions for their women is the key to their overall capabilities will be a country best able to negotiate the emerging shifts in global power.
Can Australians Write About Australia?
The second piece I wrote this week for The Diplomat didn’t turn out exactly how I envisaged it. I sense there has been a vibe shift in Australia’s national mood reflected in recent election results, and I wanted to tie this to a sense of the nation’s character and our natural disposition. The argument instead came out as one about how Australians are trying to build a new party system – to move away from a bi-polar politics (albeit one with the complexity of the Coalition, and the smaller parties around the edges) towards a multi-polar system.
There may be an argument here about how this is the practical reflection of this new national mood, but it might take a bit more thinking and some slower writing to build the case.
But what this has got me thinking about is that I find there aren’t many Australian writers who can explain the country’s politics well – that is, actual ideas beyond the left-right horseshit. The doyen of the Canberra press gallery, Michelle Grattan, mostly calls no-balls and fair deliveries; and George Megalogenis has a widescreen lens on the nation’s trends; but there are very few writers like Waleed Aly who make a real attempt to engage in ideas, to get to the “why” of the nation’s behaviour (although Waleed is often hit or miss it’s the attempt I’m more interested in).
What political commentary in Australia lacks is outstanding writers. There may be people who can also write beautifully and who have compelling ideas about the country, but the editors of the opinion pages of the major broadsheets have little interest in good writing, and even less interest in big ideas. The opinion pages of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald are comically small-minded, while The Australian is a parody of reactionary hysterics. The major current affairs magazine, The Monthly, mostly transmits progressive orthodoxies, and only rarely requires its readers to actually think.
I’m not making the case here that I am trying to fill this void. Just the opposite – I simply don’t know Australia enough to write about it well. And, if I’m being honest, I don’t think I like Australia enough to write about it well either. I’ve spent most of my life trying to get away from Australia – as a teen culturally, and as an adult physically. I know Melbourne, and feel a strong connection to the city (as I always find my way back here), but there is a distinct tension between Melbourne and the rest of the country that would make it difficult to claim knowing one gives any great insight into the other.
This lack of quality writing may be the result of being a smaller country without the market and a critical mass of talent to create a magazine like The Atlantic or The New Statesman. Yet, I suspect Australia isn’t short on talent, but is instead short on the recognition of talent and the desire to invest in it. Most likely (although I wouldn’t know) there are novelists in Australia who grapple with bigger ideas of the country, but it might just be our national demeanour has an aversion to discussing our politics in a sophisticated and eloquent manner.
This Week’s Reading:
Australia And The Geopolitics Of Birthrates
Grant Wyeth - The Diplomat
“Yet instead of a global understanding that men’s attitudes and behaviours toward women need to improve, we are currently experiencing an extraordinary and often intense backlash against female advancement. This backlash is driving the reemergence of populist and authoritarian politics that are destabilising countries, and which in turn may lead to new modes of operation by states, and potentially destabilising balances of power in international relations through these ideological shifts combining with declining populations.
This is why the social trends of other countries are of great concern to Australia’s foreign policy. A middle power like Australia is instinctively sensitive to power dynamics. An awareness of how power shifts, not just when and where, is central to Canberra’s approach to statecraft. What is becoming clear is that population decline is a stark illustration of the intimate links between personal relations and international relations. How our personal relations spiral up into larger phenomena, and how we treat each other, is the foundation on which a state’s capabilities are built.”
The Real Shift In Australian Politics
Grant Wyeth - The Diplomat
“A desire to protect stability is one of the defining elements of the Australian psyche, but this doesn’t necessarily mean Australians have an aversion to change. Preferential voting allows the public to slowly chip away at a party system that they feel isn’t representing their interests without completely setting fire to it. What we are witnessing is a very Australian revolution – measured and methodical, a revolution of process over protest. The preferential voting system provides a safety net for the public’s experiments.
The Australian public is engaged in a long term project to reshape the country’s political landscape to better reflect the current era. Both the Liberal and Labor parties are very much products of the 20th century. Their traditional ideas and interest groups no longer reflect 21st century economic and social realities. This is the current struggle of most conservative and social-democratic parties throughout the West, and some parties are handling it better than others.”
For Japan, ‘Ukraine is the Future of Asia’
C. Raja Mohan - Foreign Policy
“With its increasingly clear-eyed security policies, Japan is reminding the West—especially Europe, which had become geopolitically complacent in the decades after the Cold War—that coping with the challenges presented by China and Russia demands greater discipline. This includes a much needed strategic outreach to the global south, where Kishida has called on other G-7 countries to do more to address developing countries’ own concerns and priorities instead of projecting Western policies and preaching to them about how to run their affairs.
As it rises to become a major geopolitical actor in Asia and the world, Japan has become the unlikely actor persuading the West to rethink its strategic assumptions. As France’s Macron and other European leaders struggle to come to terms with the challenges presented by Russia and China, Japan has injected a much-needed sense of clarity to the strategic discourse in Europe and Asia.”
India’s Population Overtakes China’s, But Numbers Mask A Bigger Story
Gerry Shih & Karishma Mehrotra – The Washington Post
“In Tamil Nadu, officials and public health experts say their success can be traced back to the early 20th century, when the activist and politician Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy, widely known as Periyar, launched a social and political movement against caste and gender inequality. Periyar’s movement emphasized women’s education and continues to influence state administrations.
“We give 1,000 rupees to every university-going girl in Tamil Nadu if she finished her schooling from a government school,” said S. Senthilkumar, a member of Parliament from Tamil Nadu. “Why? Because we want her to study and not marry.”
According to the 2021 national family survey, 84 percent of Tamil Nadu women are now literate, compared with 55 percent in Bihar, the lowest in India. Forty-six percent of married women in Tamil Nadu were employed in the last 12 months, versus 19.2 percent of married Bihari women.”
Democracies Can’t Take Too Much Drama
Ivan Krastev - Financial Times
”The problem is that democracy cannot work either when the stakes are too low or they are too high. Democracy loses credibility when the government changes but nothing else does. But it also forfeits self-restraint when the change of government changes everything.
In a democracy, the losers in an election concede defeat primarily because losing does not mean losing too much — and anyway the next elections are never that far away.
The art of democracy is to leave the future open. The job of the election is to turn madness into reason and to translate passions into interests. The vote gives every citizen a voice but deprives them of the ability to represent the intensity of their beliefs. The vote of the fanatic for whom elections are an issue of life and death, and the vote of a citizen who barely knows for whom she votes or why, have equal weight.
The result is that voting has a dual character: it allows us to replace those in power, thus defending us from the excessively repressive state; but it also keeps passions in check, and defends us from the excessively expressive citizen. Ideally, democracy makes the apathetic interested in public life, while cooling the passion of the zealot.”
Nathan Gardels – Noema
“The world we live in is neither converging as it was in the era of post-Cold War globalisation, nor is it entirely diverging from the premises of a liberal world order, which nourished the rise of those now challenging it. Rather we are stuck in an interdependence of contraries where the extent of integration has itself become the new ground of conflict. Navigating through this dizzyingly complex labyrinth makes it nearly impossible to chart a path out of the maze not in contradiction with itself.
It is not hard to conclude from this intersection of impossibilities that the present balancing act is not sustainable. Perhaps muddling through without clarity will in time succumb to its own entropy, and like the Cold War, end with a whimper instead of a bang. The other possibility is that there is no exit from the labyrinth without crashing through its confining corridors.”
Jason Bordoff and Meghan L. O’Sullivan – Foreign Affairs
Driving the new energy insecurity are three main factors: the return of great-power rivalry in an increasingly multipolar and fragmented international system, the efforts of many countries to diversify their supply chains, and the realities of climate change.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its broader confrontation with the West offer a striking example of how the ambitions of a single leader can create energy insecurity for broad swaths of the world’s population, and the war serves as a reminder that great-power politics never really went away. The U.S.-Chinese contest, however, may ultimately prove more consequential. The intensifying desire of the United States and China to not rely too much on each other is remaking supply chains and reinvigorating industrial policy to a degree not seen in decades. Even with redoubled efforts to produce more clean energy at home, the United States and others will still depend on China for critical minerals and other clean energy components and technologies for years to come, creating vulnerabilities to Chinese-induced shocks. For instance, in recent months, China has suggested that it may restrict the export of solar energy technologies, materials, and know-how as a response to restrictions that Washington imposed last year on the export of high-end semiconductors and machinery to China. If Beijing were to follow through on this threat or curtail the export of critical minerals or advanced batteries to major economies (just as it cut off rare earth supplies to Japan in the early 2010s), large segments of the clean energy economy could suffer setbacks.
Under The Taliban, None Of Afghanistan’s Children Can Really Learn
Palwasha Amarkhill – The Diplomat
“We follow Islam. not the Taliban ideologies. So my daughters have the right to study and work in any major they are interested in. There must not be any restriction on my daughters and all Afghan women.”
Today, it has been nearly two years since any of my siblings have been to school. During that time, my sister and I have been teaching my younger brother and sister using old textbooks; along with this we are looking for opportunities to study online. I believe there are thousands of families who think like my father, and thousands more children – including boys – being kept out of public school to avoid the Taliban’s brainwashing.
It remains to be seen whether international donors will work with the Taliban this time to develop a curriculum in which hate and hostility are propagated. But it seems that due to 20 years of living in relatively democratic conditions and the media revolution, the young generation of Afghanistan will not easily reconcile with an extremist ideological curriculum.”
He Made His Country Rich, But Something Has Gone Wrong With The System
Farah Stockman - New York Times
Anyone who has visited the city-state of nearly six million people has seen how much cleaner and safer and more orderly it feels than the United States. Its airport doubles as a high-end mall. Public gardens bloom free of the litter, pickpockets or homeless encampments that have become familiar sights in U.S. cities. Robberies are so rare — and surveillance so pervasive — that some high-end bars don’t even lock their doors at night. Ferraris and Lamborghinis are everywhere, as if the slogan “a chicken in every pot” had turned into “a sports car in every parking space.”
But now, eight years after the death of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore is at a crossroads…Critics say Singapore is becoming more like a plutocracy, in which well-paid yes men with the right connections to the Lee family rise up the ranks…“The institutions in Singapore, whether it is the judiciary, the civil service, the army, the institutions of higher learning, have all gradually come under direct control in a way that stifles independent thinking and challenge,” Lee Hsien Yang told me. Lee Kuan Yew would solicit different views and occasionally change his mind, he said. “Today, the Singapore authorities no longer have people who would challenge the system to say, ‘Here’s my view. I don’t think you are doing the right thing.’ They are too well-paid.”
The Dangerous Rise of ‘Front-Yard Politics’
Derek Thompson - The Atlantic
“My city’s prohibitive housing costs flow, in part, from the district’s infamous war against new construction. Much of D.C. is off-limits for new development, thanks to widespread single-family zoning, berserk historical-preservation rules, and a long-standing aversion to taller buildings, which stems from both federal law and local rules. If the city’s housing policies are so broken that the federal government has to explicitly tell immigrants to find somewhere else to live, then signage welcoming refugees is both futile and hypocritical. The same neighbourhoods saying yes to refugees in their front yard are supporting policies in their backyard that say no to refugees.
This dynamic—front-yard proclamations contradicted by backyard policies—extends well beyond refugee policy, and helps explain American 21st-century dysfunction.
The front yard is the realm of language. It is the space for messaging and talking to be seen. Social media and the internet are a kind of global front lawn, where we get to know a thousand strangers by their signage, even when we don’t know a thing about their private lives and virtues. The backyard is the seat of private behaviour. This is where the real action lives, where the values of the family—and by extension, the nation—make contact with the real world.”
Francisco Toro – Persuasion
“It’s easy now to forget how shocking the moment was: just after 4pm on May 11th, 1997, Garry Kasparov resigned in the final game of his highly anticipated chess match against Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer. A machine had beaten the human world chess champion in a competitive match for the first time. Commentators used to thinking of elite-level chess as a sort of irreducibly human area of excellence—the pinnacle of our species’ intellect—were forced into a moment of humility, reconsidering the topography at the outer limits of human and machine intelligence.
The fear in that Deep Blue moment was that AI would displace human mastery. It didn’t. It turbocharged it.
This, I think, is the basis for an optimistic read of our AI-enabled future. In some areas, humans may just be left in the dust by the machines. But in many others, what we’ll see is AI becoming deeply woven into people’s professional lives.
A generation from now, I suspect we’ll still have lawyers in the courtroom, but they won’t dare show up without extensive preparation with and through an AI engine. We’ll still have doctors to take care of us, but we’ll consider it shockingly unprofessional for one to attempt to treat us without consulting her AI. We’ll still have engineers designing our bridges and airplanes, but the process of designing those bridges and airplanes will incorporate the insights of AI at every stage. We’ll still have novelists and scriptwriters, but they will take it for granted that to produce minimally acceptable work, they’ll need to lean on AI just like all their competitors do.”