Society
Monetary Sovereignty and Mark Blyth’s critique of MMT
Professor Mark Blyth’s critique of MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) is, even in one and a half minutes, in my view, basically correct: Below, I have paraphrased and expanded the suggested objections a little so as to apply to the UK, rather than just Scotland.. He suggests that Britain has a substantial capacity as a sovereign... Read more
Nuclear frisson: On Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer
The best scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer comes towards the end of the movie. The titular physicist is talking to Einstein, recalling a previous conversation in which they’d discussed the possibility that an atomic bomb would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. ‘When I came to you with those calculations’, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) reflects, ‘we thought we might start a chain reaction that could destroy the entire world’. ‘What of it?’ asks Einstein, as the rain begins to fall. ‘I believe we did’, says Oppenheimer. Cue the movie’s final, surreal sequence: a fusillade of nuclear missiles spearing upwards through a canopy of cloud, shooting through space as Oppenheimer looks on from the fuselage of a military aircraft, and—the movie’s closing image—a tsunami of fire spreading over the Earth. The logic of nuclear proliferation rendered as apocalypse. [More here.]
Chess, nostalgia and AI: Two recent essays for Griffith Review
Paywalled, I’m afraid, but consider subscribing!
The defence: Chess vs artificial intelligence
Nostalgia on demand: Streaming memories in the experience machine
Orwell everywhere: Truth-telling in a post-truth age
EVERY NOW AND then a sort of morphic resonance overtakes the world of literature. For reasons that are far from obvious, a number of books about (or around) the same broad subject will suddenly materialise in a way that itself transforms public interest and even shapes public sentiment. In 2023, for example, the name of a certain English radical began to appear in the literary pages – the subject of fresh biographies, critical reappraisals and even fictional reimaginings. Meanwhile, and completely out of the blue, my teenage son set aside the Game of Thrones series and began to read said radical’s greatest novel – a futuristic, dystopian satire on the prospects for English socialism, written in the middle of the twentieth century. Now he’s moving on to the essays. It’s all a bit mysterious. George Orwell is trending. But why? [More here.]
Who do you think you Uhr? A review of David Marr’s Killing for Country
This review was first published in The Weekend Australian
*
Running to almost half a thousand pages, prodigiously researched and immaculately written, David Marr’s Killing for Country is surely one of the books of the year. Modestly described as a ‘family story’, it is in fact as solid a work of history as one could hope to find on the shelves. Clearly, the book holds enormous significance – enormous personal significance – for its author. But Marr brings the same forensic approach to this narrative of the frontier wars as he did to his celebrated biography of Patrick White, to his monographs of Tony Abbot and George Pell, and to his indispensable account of the Tampa/Children Overboard affair and Pacific Solution, Dark Victory. It is a magnificent achievement, and a necessary intervention, on a subject that still divides Australia: the violent dispossession of its native peoples.
It was the discovery that his great-great-grandfather had served with the Native Police that set Marr off on this bold endeavour. The son of Edmund Blucher Uhr, scion of a poorly connected family with pretentions to Irish nobility, Reginald Uhr and his brother D’arcy were both officers in this notorious outfit, which cleared land of its Aboriginal owners at the behest of the squattocracy, avenging attacks on farmers’ livestock and ‘dispersing’ troublesome gatherings. ‘Dispersing’ was a euphemism, of course, but so too was ‘police’: as even contemporaries understood, the NP was a quasi-military unit, not a tool of law enforcement. It’s estimated that over 60 years it murdered more than 100,000 people.
The NP began its campaign of killing in the Darling Downs in 1848, but its brutality reached its feverish peak as it moved north in the 1860s, in the wake of Queensland’s break from New South Wales. Its campaigns were characterised by a basic asymmetry, as the belligerents in the frontier wars operated according to different principles: the Indigenous peoples saw themselves as redressing grievances through evening up the score, while white retaliation was inordinate. A pattern quickly established itself. Colonial expansion led to Indigenous resistance, which led in turn to further dispersals. Notwithstanding that these acts of violence were often met with disapproval by the colonial authorities, the indulgence shown towards them was baked in, in a way that gives the lie to the idea that the NP was dispensing justice. The reality is that it was clearing the land of black bodies.
This picture is complicated by the fact that the NP comprised units of eight to ten such bodies under the command of a single white one. But in Marr’s telling, this organisational structure was something of a genius-stroke, in that it drew on the multinational nature of the Indigenous population and on the profound connection to place – to country – that characterises Indigenous society in general. As he puts it:
What made them strange and dangerous to each other was being away from their own country, the country that made them who they were. Here was a deadly conundrum. While officially denying their attachment to land, colonial authorities would rely on that profound attachment – and the divisions it provoked – to raise a black force that would strip them of their country.
Such an arrangement also allowed the NP to characterise the murdering as what a US Republican might call ‘black on black’ violence. The recruitment of Aboriginal men gave white officers a handy alibi when questioned by their superiors.
Why would the killers need an alibi? The question may sound ridiculous, but conservative history warriors who criticise histories such as these, will often suggest that their authors are guilty of projecting modern values backwards (this is the so-called ‘black armband’ charge). But what emerges from these grisly pages, and from the accounts of the contemporary outrage directed against the clearances, is a picture of a system of ‘justice’ founded on a gargantuan hypocrisy – hypocrisy being the compliment that vice implicitly pays to virtue. In other words, many of the men in this ‘story’ knew full well that they were involved in an immoral undertaking, and commentary that attempts to downplay this reality is, itself, unhistorical. This is not to say that the picture is simple: history is a tragedy, not a morality play. It is simply to agree with the author that if it is possible to feel pride in one’s country, it should be possible to feel ashamed of it too.
Marr does not make a show of such feelings. In his television appearances, he will often adopt the sort of demeanour that (I imagine) sends conservatives round the bend: the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger eyes; the casual, cruising exasperation at the politics he doesn’t share, and is, therefore, self-evidently preposterous. But here the tone is even and controlled. One notes the slightly ironic adjectives and the occasionally sardonic descriptions. (‘He recruited blacks as guides. He also shot blacks who stood in his way. Somerville was a genial and unscrupulous gentleman of the warrior class.’) But in general he lets the material speak for itself. Goodness knows, there’s plenty of it. As Marr notes – again, a little sardonically – one good thing about the colonists is that they wrote plenty of fine letters home.
The attitudes evinced in those letters, or the language in which those attitudes are couched, will no doubt distress most contemporary readers, and it would be vacuously polemical to assert that nothing’s changed. It has. Nevertheless, it is the achievement of this book to invite us to reflect on the many connections between contemporary Australia and its bloody past. That past is not a foreign country. It just speaks in thicker accents than we are used to.
David Marr, Killing for Country: A Family Story (Black Inc.; $39.99; 468pp)
The eighth day of creation: how the new cultural technologies take us into the posthuman
In Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2018), the British writer Aaron Bastani puts a leftist spin on the Promethean view of technological development. While noting the revolutionary potential of recent genetic innovations, he insists that the latter are no different in kind from the selective breeding practices of the past: they are simply another great leap forward in humankind’s mastery over unruly nature. Referring to the movie Elysium (2013), which depicts a world where biotechnologies are only available to the very rich, Bastani’s only political concern is whether the new genetic technologies will be privately or socially owned. All other questions are beside the point, at least as far as he is concerned. As he puts it, with alarming insouciance: ‘Before editing the human genome at scale such efforts should be subject to vigorous public debate. But how much difference is there between improving nutrition for health outcomes and optimising our biological programming? Not much’. [More here.]
Big Tech goes ballistic
A month or so out from Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated biopic Oppenheimer, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community is having its own Oppenheimer moment. Like the director of the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos Laboratory, who famously came to regret his part in the development of the atomic bomb, the Big Tech Titans are falling over each other to declare themselves ‘the destroyer of worlds’. Open letters and statements, high-profile resignations, and appearances before the US Senate are just a few manifestations of this collective show of soul-searching. The tech bros have unleashed their creations on the world, and now they are demanding to be put on the leash. [More here.]
A review of Rai Gaita’s Justice and Hope
As philosopher and broadcaster Scott Stephens suggests in his introduction to Justice and Hope, Raimond Gaita’s principal contribution to the practice of moral philosophy is to have opened it up to readers and audiences that wouldn’t usually encounter it.
Most notably in his memoir Romulus, My Father (1998), but also in A Common Humanity (2000) and The Philosopher’s Dog (2002), he has found a language in which to address the question of what we owe to one another that is free from the bloodless, esoteric jargon of academic philosophy. [More here.]
Here Be Media
A talk to the Economic Society of Australia: Monsters in the Machine, Technology, Growth & Human Flourishing
An Author Talk with Goldfields Libraries
An appearance on the Breaking the Spell podcast