The West and Narrative Deprivation

It’s enlightening to consider G K Chesterton’s well-worn quotation, “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing - they believe in anything" in the manner of the course of the Western world’s cultural narrative.  The Welfare State removed the need for religion by substituting secular compensations for religion’s core offerings; the progress of science removed the need for spiritual explanation; the anarchist Left methodically dismantled cultural identity; political correctness steadily removed racial identity; and globalisation, the European Union, and American cultural dominance and hegemony diminished national identity. 

This leaves denizens without a narrative focus, so any group with a long and strong narrative tradition, however shallow, primitive or prescriptive, is seen as being somehow more spiritual, deep and worthy.  Given the West’s loss of narrative and its ability to defend what remains, criticism of these out-groups is considered off limits.

A typical example of this unconscious and uncritical acceptance of an alien and antagonistic culture, with an implicit ‘swallow it, it’s good for you’ doctrine, was broadcast on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon, on the 9^th of October 2014, under the title of ‘An Australian Muslim woman defends her right to wear the niqab.’ Kathryn Ryan interviewed Semaa Abdulwali, an Australian medical science student who had an opinion piece published in The Guardian three days earlier.

I could try to make excuses for this interview.  Perhaps Semaa Abdulwali fed Kathryn Ryan the questions she wanted asked.  The interviewee was just 20 years of age and it could be that Ms Ryan wanted to spare her immature sensibilities.  Maybe Ms Ryan was so scared of repercussions that shallow and uncritical questioning was her only option.  It’s possible that Ms Ryan was so keen on Islam that she only asked supportive questions. Deep questioning must be left solely to Kim Hill, so it’s outside Ms Ryan’s ambit.  It was an off-the-cuff interview requiring no research.   Or perhaps there’s a line which cannot be crossed when interviewing ‘people of faith’, especially Muslims. 

The end result of this anodyne, unchallenging interview was to discredit Nine to Noon and demonstrate contempt for its listeners, even though we know Ms Ryan can do better.

Why did Ms Ryan not query her statement, “I don’t want to be controlled and told what I can and cannot wear: that is oppression”?  Did the irony not occur to Ms Ryan that Islam, more than any other religion, dictates what women should wear?  One lives by societal control to a greater or lesser degree (e.g. wearing seatbelts, wearing clothes in public, removing crash helmets in banks, etc.) and one does in Rome what Romans do, so why is she the exception?  If a Western woman tries walking alone wearing a summer dress in in any Middle Eastern country, Israel excepted, she would find herself in trouble in no time at all, so why does Ms Abdulwali not show a bit more respect for Australian mores?  She can remove her niqab in public at will, but if she tried that in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Pakistan, she would be lucky if ostracism was her worst punishment.  She might have been killed in Canada, Iraq or Somalia.

Ms Ryan could have asked her about the role of Islam in the highly circumscribed lives women live in countries subjected to that religion.  WikiIslam can give excellent pointers. 

There are questions that could have been asked encouraging insight and introspection into the issues Ms Abdulwali raised but none was asked.  A third-party query would have been helpful, such as, “Some would say that this is grand-standing, ‘Look at me and my outward display of piety,’ ‘I’m insecure and the niqab covers it wonderfully,’ ‘it draws attention to you; attention which it seems you crave.’  What would you say to that?”

How about communication, Ms Ryan’s stock-in-trade?  What could be more inhibitory than a head covering to face-to-face communication? Muffling the voice will not help mutual understanding either.  Covering the face in this manner is a deliberately confrontational, self-indulgent affectation.

Ms Abdulwali’s juvenile foible could have been exposed not only for its shallow moral underpinnings but as a deliberate and offensive display of Islamic supremacism. 

Is it fear of Islam that Radio New Zealand won’t ask hard questions?

Child Poverty and Retirees

There is a change in moral discourse that TV3's The Nation is encouraging, which is to vilify retirees and blame them for child poverty by taking too much in “tight financial times”.  In interviews with Dr Jonathan Boston and Dr Russell Wills on 14 June 2014, interviewer Lisa Owen asked such questions as, “Do we treat children as well as we treat retired people?”, “Do we need to take from retirees and redirect some of that money to poor children?” and “Is it time for our seniors to take a hit for the good of the younger generation?”.  While the good doctors refused to contribute to that particular angle, it is clear that The Nation is narrowing the debate to a simple issue of taking from one class of beneficiaries and giving to another.

This echoes Social Welfare’s reversal of attitude towards unemployment benefit recipients, from being victims of capitalism’s need for a flexible staffing resource, to being the cause of their own misfortune.

The Nation has created a straw man argument instead of examining the wider causes and cures.  The financial position of retirees hasn’t changed since the Superannuation Scheme was introduced in 1977. Since that time there has been a massive shift in ownership of public resources into private hands, tax reductions for the wealthy and none for the poor, and punitive taxes such as GST affecting the poor disproportionately. Instead of examining issues such as the tax base, rural unemployment, or alternative economic redistribution The Nation is urging segments of society dependent on benefits to fight each other like rats on an electrified floor.  The “tight financial times” spoken of is a contrived situation maintained by dissembling.  A real current affairs programme should be capable of exposing its fallacy.

Ms Owen’s core assumption was that the amount of money available for beneficiaries is fixed and only the proportions can be changed, but this is clearly false.  It is a subject of government policy.  She did not ask what policies needed to change to aid New Zealand’s poorest.  She never raised questions of changing tax policies such as reducing GST by taxing a wider range of transactions. 

The Nation considers raising the age of eligibility of superannuation as an unavoidable necessity, without considering its obvious concomitant, that of reduced job availability.  Why isn’t The Nation advocating the moral obligation of retirement at 65 to release occupations to younger people as a means of reducing poverty? 

I have no issue with The Nation taking a crusading line, but its producers need greater breadth and depth of vision, not to mention historical insight, before articulating it.