Week 32: Responsibility to Project
Week 32: Responsibility to Project
A podcast appearance discussing family court failures, and the ascension of women's football.
Understanding Institutional Failure
This week I appeared on the podcast The Divorce Survival Guide with Kate Anthony to discuss the concept of “parental alienation” and how it has captured family courts worldwide – allowing violent and abusive men to rig these systems to their advantage. As someone who abhors violence, exposing this incredibly successful legal ruse is something I have become passionate about – and written quite a bit about – and something I am always keen to speak about given the opportunity. I don’t claim any great expertise, but feel a responsibility to use whatever skills I do have to address this issue.
More broadly, the structural failings of family courts are a stark example of how bad ideas become embedded within institutions. Through this lens, this phenomenon offers some instructive lessons for other institutions on the nature economic and professional incentives, the persistent danger of ingrained biases, and how systems become lazy, automated, and fail to have sufficient processes of self-scrutiny.
Part of my advocacy around this issue is to break the perception that this is siloed as a “women’s issue” or an issue of no consequence to our societies. How our institutions treat women and children is the true reflection of our social health. And alongside this, it is about recognising the concentric circles of violence that spiral up from individual and household level, to community and national level, to international level. Initiatives from the field of International Relations like the Women, Peace and Security agenda, and Feminist Foreign Policy, understand these connections. The world’s primary security problem is domestic violence. We still don’t discuss it as such, however I believe that these initiatives are starting to make an impact with making this recognition more mainstream.
Women’s Sport Matters
The big positive global event on at the moment is the Women’s Football World Cup. Currently at the semi-final stage and I have the luxury of having two teams – Australia and Sweden – still in the draw, and with the potential to meet each other in the final. While following both the games and the media in Australia the public interest has been incredible. Here in Sweden interest is just as passionate, with flags draped outside homes and shops, and people walking around town wearing the team’s jerseys.
What we are witnessing is a major shift in global attitudes towards women’s sport. Reflecting this, the prize pool for the World Cup has increased from $30 million to $110 million from the previous iteration. But beyond the increased financial resources being dedicated to the game, there is also the emotional resources, the personal investments we feel for these teams.
The attendance record for the tournament already passed the previous tournament by the Round of 16 – testament to the Australian and New Zealand public’s enthusiasm. While according to FIFA, by the end of the Group Stage global television and streaming viewers were breaking records on a daily basis (and have undoubtedly continue to do so in the knock-out stages – in Australia the quarter-final against France was the second most watched sporting event of the past two decades).
As a parochial Melburnian I should note that the attendances for the World Cup would have been much higher had the two largest stadiums in Melbourne been available for usage (these were tied up with the Australian Rules football season). With only the 30,000 capacity Melbourne Rectangular Stadium being used for the tournament, Australia’s – and possibly the world’s – most enthusiastic lives sport attendees have only been able to provide middling crowds by the standards of the city. The World Cup is poorer for not having a capacity Melbourne Cricket Ground as part of its festival of football, but what should be apparent is that such is the interest in women’s football that the final (with or without Australia) would have had no problem filling its 100,000 seats. Pressure on the venue to host games in the future will now be intense.
This Week’s Reading and Listening:
Is This The Australian Government’s Marshall Plan?
Marc Purcell and Grant Wyeth – The Diplomat
“Will this be the Albanese government’s Marshall Plan? A strategy is only effective if it is used and resourced – and on the actual overseas development assistance dollars, the policy is mute.
However, there are reasons to be hopeful. Labor came into office with promises of an addition US$307 million for Southeast Asia and US$344 million for the Pacific, each over four years. Since then, Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong has pulled a rabbit out of the budget hat twice now, succeeding in incorporating temporary aid increases funding from the previous government’s COVID-19 response permanently into the aid program. This is a positive signal of strategic intent.
There is clearly work to be done. Australia has a feeble ranking as 27th out of 31 OECD aid donors. Canberra’s desire to co-host a Climate COP with the Pacific and a future Security Council bid – alongside ongoing infrastructure competition with China in the Pacific – will not come cheap. The true indication of strategic intent will be whether future budgets commit the resources to match this policy’s ambition.”
Sankarshan Thakur – The Telegraph (Kolkata)
“There is a vice greater than the vice of bigotry and its attendant ills. It is the vice of giving it a free pass, the vice of collaboration.
It is not nearly enough to pass judgement on Modi and the widespread dismantling and mayhem he has wreaked in his terms in power. Modi is an architect of fractures, that’s the credo with which he has marched since he deciphered, with diabolical clarity, the dividends of Gujarat 2002. Violent sectarianism — verbal and physical — has become a sanctioned creed under him.
Does any of it harm him? We’ve only accorded him award and applause. We are happily living off a diet of lies — malevolent lies, constructed lies, deliberate lies; blatant, unembarrassed lies.
We have stopped to think for ourselves. We listen to the most absurd mumbo-jumbo with rapture and invest in ludicrous wisdoms against our good sense and knowledge. We wantonly ignore the disfiguring of our history and heritage. We seem to have forsaken our collective intelligence to embrace pure baloney, or at least we don’t seem to mind it.
The truth may be this, and it is for us to grasp: we have been systematically turned into a laboratory of diminution, we are willing material for dipstick trials. Each time idiocy or affront is inflicted on us is a test of how much we can be reduced to. That’s either acceptable or people must step up and do something about it. Until that happens, we will necessarily be accomplices — interested or indifferent — if not active participants in this ghastly overturning of our nation.”
Inside Afghanistan’s Secret Schools (audio)
Sana Safi – BBC World Service
“In March 2022, a mere seven months after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, second level education was banned for girls, leaving around 1.1 million of them without access to formal schooling.
Then in December that year, all female students were refused access to universities and colleges. But across the country, Afghan women and girls are fighting back, and defying the Taliban government by continuing their education in secret.
Founded and, for the most part, staffed by women, secret schools have started to emerge from the shadows, offering online and in-person classes to those brave enough to attend.”
Pakistan’s Military Won’t Loosen Its Grip
Husain Haqqani – Foreign Policy
“Once the generals’ darling, Khan is now their bête noire. He asserts that the army wants to dismantle his party and end his political career, which seems to be true—even more so since his conviction. But instead of finding a solution within the framework of parliamentary democracy, Khan has acted with increasing belligerence. He chose to play a zero-sum game when he could have sought reconciliation with other politicians to strengthen democratic institutions. Khan seems to present a choice to his political opponents: accept him as their leader, paving the way for one-party leadership, or join with the military to keep Khan out of power, thus perpetuating civil-military authoritarianism.
In the zero-sum game he chose to play, Khan will most likely end up with nothing. But his political opponents hope—unrealistically—that the military will eventually take a back seat, handing over control of key policy decision to civilian leaders. Khan’s polarising politics have made that even less likely. The generals cannot allow him back into power because of his potential for revenge; they see little reason to give a free hand to less popular politicians, who are dependent on the military to stay in power. Facing repression, the PTI may be reduced to a Khan fan club, angry about its hero’s circumstances but with few serious ideas about weakening the army’s grip or otherwise transforming Pakistan.
Democracy requires a civil opposition as much as a government limited by norms and rules, and Pakistan currently has neither. Experience suggests that recent developments have only prolonged hybrid rule in Pakistan—and indefinitely postponed the advent of full democracy.”
Autocrats’ Favourite Word? Democracy
Mike Smeltzer - Freedom House
“While many antidemocratic leaders issue duplicitous statements about their commitment to democratic norms and practices, others have sought to redefine democracy. A few have gone a step further, rejecting the premise of the post-Cold War democratic consensus altogether.
In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has advocated for “illiberal democracy,” declaring that liberal democracy—a robust form of democracy that entails the protection of a full array of individual and collective rights—is in irreversible decline. To this end, Orbán has chipped away at the country’s once-democratic institutions, rejecting the notion that checks and balances, civil society, and an independent press corps are necessary for democracy. As a result, Hungary’s Democracy Scores have fallen farther than any other country in Freedom House’s Nations in Transit survey, where it once was categorised as a consolidated democracy but is now a hybrid regime.
Today, the world’s illiberal leaders are developing ever-more sophisticated ways to spread poisoned messages beyond territorial borders. In this environment, the ability to recognise and explain the difference between hollow “democratic” rhetoric and the tenets of a truly democratic system is fundamental to countering authoritarian abuses, and promoting democratic systems where leaders are accountable to voters and fundamental rights and freedoms are upheld.”
Memo To Liberals: The Cold War Is Over
Becca Rothfeld – The Washington Post
“In particular, I wonder if Berlin has more to offer than Moyn grants. He characterises the Oxford icon as colluding in “expurgating perfectionism from the version of the tradition he defended” — and while it is true that Berlin did not justify liberalism in terms of individual self-realisation, it is also true that he did not regard it as a mere barricade against barbarism. Instead, he understood it as intent on nurturing a different value — diversity. Liberalism, by his lights, was a matter of acknowledging and respecting the “plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate.”
Berlin worried that pluralism might not amount to an especially thrilling program. A liberal call for affording “each human group sufficient room to realise its own idiosyncratic, unique, particular ends without too much interference with the ends of others, is not a passionate battle-cry to inspire men to sacrifice and martyrdom and heroic feats,” he regretfully confessed. But I think he may have underestimated the power and dignity of difference. What could be more touching than his insistence that each culture is “of infinite value, as souls are in the eyes of God”? Why should liberals limit themselves to fostering a single sort of perfection when we could enjoy “as many types of perfection as there are types of culture”?
John Gray - The New Statesman
The logic of AI is the progressive displacement of actual experience by mechanical simulacra. Instead of the daily encounters that enable communities to sustain a common life, random collections of solitary people are protected from each other and themselves by unblinking video surveillance. Rather than connecting in troublesome relationships, they are turning to cyber-companions for frictionless friendship and virtual sex. The contingencies of living in a material world are being swapped for an algorithmic dreamtime. The end-point is self-enclosure in the Matrix – a loss of the definitively human experience of living as a fleshly, mortal creature.
A depleted human species may linger on, but AI may still bring an end to the human era. If ever more people opt for a programmed existence in the techno-sphere, the human world will be emptied of meaning. What will be lost are the fugitive sensations of accidental lives – the defiant smile in the face of cruel absurdity, the glance that began a love that changed us forever, a tune it seemed would always be with us, tears in the rain.
David Brooks – New York Times
“The founders of the therapeutic ethos thought they were creating autonomous individualists who would feel good about themselves. But, as Lasch forecast: “The narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity.”
If we’re going to build a culture in which it is easier to be mature, we’re going to have to throw off some of the tenets of the therapeutic culture. Maturity, now as ever, is understanding that you’re not the centre of the universe. The world isn’t a giant story about me.
In a nontherapeutic ethos, people don’t build secure identities on their own. They weave their stable selves out of their commitments to and attachments with others. Their identities are forged as they fulfil their responsibilities as friends, family members, employees, neighbours and citizens. The process is social and other-absorbed; not therapeutic.”
James Livingston – Project Syndicate
“The practical question for conservatives is how to restore the patriarchal family to its rightful, protective place between the market and the state. They can’t very well take us back to a household economy, no matter how anti-corporate they sound. They can’t undo the economic events of the last century, or even the last 20 years, without renouncing the modern, corporate capitalism that they constantly celebrate. But while they have no way of reinstating the social basis of bourgeois society, they can impose its virtues, including male supremacy in the threadbare costume of patriarchy, by political means, as authoritarian regimes elsewhere have done, and as Republican state legislatures are doing in the US.
The first step is to reassert paternal control of female sexuality, by restricting or abolishing access to abortion. In an uncanny twist on Robert Filmer’s argument with John Locke, and Carl Schmitt’s argument against modern liberalism, the state will now stand in for the paterfamilias.
The second step is to reestablish heterosexuality as the binary norm that must govern everyday social life as well as marriage contracts. The gender troubles created by industrial society and then consumer capitalism, which is to say the choices enabled by the passage from bourgeois society to corporate capitalism, are to be adjourned by legislation. Marriage is to be a bond that unites only males and females, for whom sexual pleasure is a means to social ends – reproduction and familial continuity – not an end in itself, and for whom birth control by any method is, therefore, inconceivable.
These are the inevitable results of manhood conceived and executed as the restoration of patriarchy, as Hawley, his conservative contemporaries, and his many predecessors understand it. The fear of Woman, a deep anxiety about the erasure of sexual difference and the eclipse of male supremacy, animates every item on their agenda, from the books they write and the speeches they give to the legislation they sponsor. There is nothing embarrassing about this agenda, as they see it, which is why they are untroubled by their association with Donald Trump’s egregious misogyny, and why they are happy to be reprinted, cited, quoted, and otherwise publicised for displays of childish fright at the spectacle of female sexuality and power.”
There’s no playlist this week. But instead I will leave you with the new single from my friends Prue and Zac – aka Popular Music.