Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Philosophy

Tarenorerer, Another Warrior

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I went to my favourite local bookshop last week (River Read) looking to be entertained and distracted. I settled on an historical romance. I chose ‘The Burning Island’ by Jock Serong, published just last September.

After reading the back cover and flicking through, I knew I was buying into a story that begins in Sydney about 200 years ago with the main character a tall, cynical spinster who sets off on an adventure. I also noted that it was about a shipwreck, specifically the Britomart – wrecked off the coast of Tasmania in 1839 under suspicious circumstances. I had recently visited a coral reef called Britomart.

Eliza Grayling is conflicted and a paradox – and thus so human. Her relationship with her father is fraught, and through the story she proves a very poor judge of character in many ways.

But then again how fully can we know another person. And how can we know when we are being betrayed or misled – whether by a person, a group, an institution or the zeitgeist of our civilization?

If you never trust, and you never submit, then you can never be betrayed – or at least never be betrayed again. But what can you build? There is the African proverb if you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far – go together.

In Serong’s story/The Burning Island, Tarenorerer is an Aboriginal woman of about the same age as Eliza Grayling, who takes Eliza prisoner and then eventually befriends her.

According to Aboriginal folklore Tarenorerer was a terrorist and a freedom fighter who would never give up, or give in.

In 1828 she assembled warbands of both men and women and trained them to use muskets against white settlers and to kill their livestock.

In reading the story of Tarenorerer I am reminded that resistance fighters almost inevitably lose the war, even if they have a few victories in battle along the way. But there will always be such warriors who exist beyond culture and colour – they are an archetype representing a specific set of universal, recognizable human behaviours, and they emerge when there is profound injustice.

I’m writing this on 26th January, a day variously referred to here in Australia as ‘Invasion Day’ or ‘Australia Day’. My colleague at the IPA, John Roskam, has just released a video, with former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, about the importance of Australian values and that they are under attack. I don’t share all the same values as these two conservative men, but I share many of the same values. Most importantly they encourage the pursuit of the truth and its continual testing, always and only against the evidence.

We can, and should, argue about whether our national day be celebrated on 26 January, or 3rd December – the day of the Eureka Stockade. Better still, let’s make it a day in the future: the day the Murray River’s estuary is restored by blasting the Mundo barrage/sea dyke, or the day Peter Ridd gets his job back at James Cook University, or the day the Australian Bureau of Meteorology restores 3rd January 1909 as the hottest day ever recorded in Australia.

But these things will never be achieved unless we get together under a common banner with some agreed and shared values, against the hegemony.

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The Feature image is by Robert Hawker Dowling – Robert Dowling | Group of Natives of Tasmania, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12635841

My Atheism Denies Hell, But Applauds Mary McKillop

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MY late father told me not to admit that I was an atheist … when I was preparing to appear on the ABC television program ‘Q&A’ back in October 2010.

It was likely that Tony Jones would ask me a question about Mary McKillop being made a saint, as this was a media headline back then.

Through history atheists have been vilified.

During the nineteenth century in Britain, for example, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from the University of Oxford for publishing a pamphlet explaining his atheism. At the time, those unwilling to swear Christian oaths during judicial proceedings were unable to give evidence in court.

Nowadays, atheism is tolerated in the West, but not in many Muslim countries where atheists are sentenced to death — presumably with the assumption he/she is going to hell. In these countries atheism is often confused with apostasy, which is defined as the abandonment or renunciation of a religious or political belief or principle.

I’ve never actually embraced a religion — though I was raised in the Presbyterian tradition — so I’m not sure how I could renounce it.

The idea that someone like myself simply does not believe is very difficult for many/most people to accept. But it is a fact. I’ve always looked to nature, not the Bible, for answers to the big questions. So, I’m fascinated by natural landscapes, which I feel always provide me with some solace, as well as understanding.

The coastline where I live at Noosa, for example, has a history that dates back perhaps 145 million years. I’m referring to the dolorite intrusion to the north of Granite Bay. Tea Tree Bay, just to the north again, has interesting wave cut platforms of sandstone, with abrasions called potholes – by geologists. I’m keen for a knowledgable geologist to explain how old these formations in this level bedrock are likely to be (see the feature image for this blog post) and what they might tell us about sea level change.

It is a fact the etching in a shoreline hold history, and meaning, for some people – myself included.

This does not mean I am in any way intolerant of those who believe in the presence of a God. When Tony Jones did ask me about miracles back in 2010, I replied:

JENNIFER MAROHASY: Like the Prime Minister [who back then was Julia Gillard], I don’t believe in miracles but I do think that it is important that we have heroes and Mary McKillop is a hero for a lot of people, particularly within the Catholic faith and I’m very pleased that for those Australians their hero is being recognised and being recognised in the Vatican and I understand that Mary McKillop stood up against paedophilia within the church and I think it’s wonderful that the Catholic Church is not only recognising a woman but an Australian and somebody who has stood up to issues that didn’t necessarily make her popular back then.

So, while I’m an atheist I respect the beliefs held by others, including Christians and Muslims.

There is a media preoccupation at the moment in Australia with the footballer Israel Folau who was sacked from the Australian team for claiming that all homosexuals, and also atheists, are going to hell.

I understand that such a claim is likely to be more offensive to a homosexual who may also be a Christian, than to an atheist who does not believe in the concept of hell. Nevertheless, I suggest that homosexuals as well as atheists be tolerant of his perspective. In fact, I thank him for having the fortitude to be so upfront in what I perceive as his ignorance. Surely, it is better that the ignorant man tell us what he is thinking so that we can have some discussion about this, least he keep the untruth to himself and let it fester.

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The photograph is of me, and some potholes etched into Tea Tree Bay, Noosa National Park, and was taken with my new drone (Skido) in June 2019.

In Search of a New Way

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FIFTY years ago, on 7 July 1967, Time magazine ran a cover story entitled, ‘The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture’.   Modern environmentalism is in some ways a product of this Flower Power movement, but a still-born version.

It has become replete with particular moral codes – right ways of doing things – ostensibly underpinned by a scientific consensus.   Yet most leading environmentalists live energy-intensive lifestyles.  They profess to a relationship with nature, yet they have limited first-hand experience of it.  They claim their authority from science – yet they are intolerant of scepticism.

More than ever we need a new approach.  One that is free of the patriarchy so deeply embedded in the Christian tradition.  But one that is also free of the hypocrisy and intolerance that underpins an emerging new value system that places a premium on being extraverted, optimistic, popular – and passionate.

In reality the Earth is a harsh, though beautiful place. A more meaningful and resilient existence might be found with less hubris and more nature.

The Minority is Always Right

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THANK YOU to everyone who heard Maria Pita and sent a letter off to their favorite politician or editor, or made comment in the long thread online at The Australian, highlighting the many inadequacies in the recent report by the Technical Advisory Forum into the homogenization of historical temperature data by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

I've been travelling, and reading my Kindle, including a great book by Christopher Booker.
I’ve been travelling, and reading my Kindle, including a great book by Christopher Booker.

I haven’t seen any of the many letters copied to me over the last week published anywhere, but sometimes it takes time for the majority to see that The Emperor really has no clothes. This realization can sometimes be hastened when we point out the missing detail, for example, I like the following letter sent to Bob Baldwin by Peter Rees of Geelong.

Sir,

While there are some encouraging recommendations from the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM)’s Technical Advisory Forum, it is extremely frustrating that they haven’t mentioned anything about the BOM providing FULL details of why they altered stations like Rutherglen so dramatically.

The 1973 minimum temperature was reduced by 0.5 Degrees C and working backwards increased this until there was a massive 1.8 Degrees C reduction between the recorded and homogenized temperatures in 1913.

This changed a slightly cooling trend to a warming trend and the BOM refuse to provide detailed information on why it was done.

I quote from Dr J. Marohasy:
“The Bureau has provided information at its website suggesting that there was a need to make adjustments to Rutherglen for the period prior to 1966 and that this “was determined from an objective statistical test that showed an artificial jump in the data during this period.” But what was the statistical test actually performed on the data? Why is this not documented? The raw temperature record for Rutherglen has a virtually identical trend to its six neighbouring comparison sites, while the homogenized ACORN-SAT temperature series for Rutherglen is strongly biased towards warming”

If the BOM are not compelled to provide this information then the question has to be asked, why not? If they have valid reasons for the “objective statistical test”, then surely it would be in everyone’s interest if it were made known.

It is surely within your authority that you instruct the advisory committee do this or else add it to the terms of reference.

I would appreciate a reply to this email and please specifically address the Rutherglen issue with your comments on why or why not it should be addressed.

Regards, Peter Rees, Geelong

HAVING been traveling for the last month or so, I’ve had an opportunity to spend more time than usual reading my Kindle. I have particularly enjoyed reading ‘The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories’ by Christopher Booker.

Christopher Booker is perhaps better known to us as the columnist for The Sunday Telegraph who writes about how future generations will look back on the global-warming scare with shock at both how gullible the general public were, and how the official temperature records were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth having warmed much more than actually justified by the data. He’s also written about story telling more generally, and from a Jungian perspective. Let me reproduce some pages from this book, so relevant to the problem of getting the alternative perspective heard:

THE RULING CONSCIOUSNESS

The real problem with the ego, as the only part of our psyche through which we can be conscious of the world, is that it is so structured that its awareness must always be limited. However much we may try to eliminate its distortions and to dissolve its conflict with the objective unconscious, some element of subjective distortion and blindness must inevitably remain. And just as this applies to the consciousness of the individual ego, so it equally applies to that collective consciousness which tends to develop in any human group or society. Of course no group of human beings can establish a single, undifferentiated consciousness, through which each member of the group views the world in exactly the same way. But in any group or society it is possible to discern certain prevailing tendencies of view, even if the views of a minority of members of the group may conflict with them. Groups of human beings develop a sense of common identity, shared values, shared assumptions of what they believe to be true or important. And in this respect they develop a collective ego-consciousness.

We see this most obviously when they are swept up in some great shared emotion, as in the collective state of hysteria which grips a crowd at a football match or the sense of collective unity associated with times of war. But in any group it is possible to discern what may be called its ruling state of consciousness: that which determines what views, values and behaviour are at any time generally considered acceptable, and those which are regarded as beyond the pale, condemned as disruptive, eccentric, alien or mad. And one has only to consider what extraordinary changes come over the state of consciousness prevailing in any society through different times in history (the dramatic variations in what is considered acceptable that we see in everything from patterns of moral behaviour to fashions in clothes) to see that there cannot be any time when the ruling consciousness is objectively right, by some absolute standard, in everything it holds to be important or true.

It is naturally easiest to appreciate this in societies where the prevaling consciousness is furthest removed from our own. Until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for instance, the ruling consciousness decreed that the earth was flat and that the sun went round xanax it. To challenge that consciousness, even though it had no basis in fact, was virtually unthinkable. As the old song had it, `They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, when he said the world was round’.

For challenging the received wisdom that it was the sun which moved while the earth stood still, Galileo faced such duress from the Papal inquisition that publicly he conceded the point (even though, as he did so, he was said to have muttered under his breath `but it still moves’).
We may today laugh knowledgeably at the blindness and arrogance of those inquisitors, because we have inherited the new prevailing wisdom which Galileo helped to shape; just as we may express moral outrage at all those who became rich from the eighteenth-century slave trade in the days before moral perceptions changed and the inhuman cruelty of the slave-system became obvious for all to see. But what we may not recognise is just how many firmly-held convictions making up the prevailing consciousness of our own time are just as ill-founded as the belief in a flat earth or the social acceptability of slavery: because the point about any state of ruling consciousness is that it is based on unconscious assumptions so deep and all-pervading that they are taken for granted. In any society, organisation or group, the unconscious psychological pressure to accept those assumptions is so great that only a few outsiders have the clarity of vision to perceive from `below the line’ how baseless and unjustified they are.

In fact the ruling consciousness of any group with a sense of common identity provides an exact parallel to the state of consciousness in individual human beings. Because it is centred on a collective ego, it can exhibit precisely the same tendency to distortion and subjectivity that we see in human individuals. As we see in, say, a political party, there will thus be a significant element of unconsciousness in the way that group behaves, whereby it remains collectively unaware of its own deficiencies. Just as we see in an individual, the more one-sided the ruling consciousness becomes, the greater the area of shadow its one-sidedness creates. And the denser those shadows, the more we are likely to find within them people who represent those values and that wider awareness which, `above the line, in the ruling consciousness, have gone missing.

It was his perception of this psychological characteristic of human groups which Ibsen summarised in those words from An Enemy of the People quoted at the head of this chapter: `the majority is always wrong’ and `the minority is always right’. This is an observation which on the face of it might seem perverse, contrary to common sense, inviting the ridicule of all received opinion. But it is precisely `received opinion, the ruling consciousness, which by definition can never grasp the subtle truth of the point Ibsen was trying to make. He is not of course saying that whenever the majority of the human race agree on something they must in all cases be wrong. Most people accept, for instance, that it is undesirable for human beings to go around killing each other. They are not misguided in this belief just because they are a majority. There are many issues on which the majority of people hold similar beliefs and are right to do so. But at any given time, in any human group, large or small, there will be a generally prevailing state of consciousness which in very significant respects will be blind; which will be unable to see the world objectively. It is in this sense that, as Ibsen put it, the `majority, the ruling consciousness, is always wrong. And there should be nothing particularly surprising about this, since it is self-evident that in any collection of human beings there will be only a minority who have achieved that degree of self-understanding which can allow them to see the world without their perception being in some way fogged or skewed by unconscious subjectivity.

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Reality…

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Accepting the reality of change gives rise to equanimity – Allan Lokos.

Yeppoon coastline in November 2011, looking south east to what was once a volcanic plug…
Yeppoon coastline in November 2011, looking south east to what was once a volcanic plug…

The Secret is To Keep Thinking

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ACCORDING to a Marxist, and good friend of mine, ‘the left’ has lost its way because too many adopt the ‘correct line’ on issues without any need to investigate first. In essence, they have stopped thinking. Screen Shot 2014-10-11 at 11.45.54 AM

All this is explained in his first post at ‘C21st Left’ with the slogan/subheading, ‘Sous les paves, la plage!’ (beneath the paving stones, the beach).

But it’s not just the left that has stopped thinking.

After I returned from the Heartland Climate Conference in Las Vegas I penned ‘Three facts most sceptics don’t seem to understand’, as I despaired the absence of critical thinking, and
enlightenment values, in the most popular keynote addresses. I suggested that scepticism should be of entrenched dogmas, while supporting ideas and research that can potentially contribute to human progress.

My favourite Marxist touches on similar themes in his first blog post:

Support Progress. I use a capital ‘P’ in order to stress that there is such a thing. It happens through human imagination, ingenuity and engineering. As Engels pointed out long ago, humans are distinguished from all other animals in that we can create what we can imagine.

Harmony with Nature – Sustainability – have never been part of the left’s lexicon. Marxists believe in unleashing the productive forces through the further mastery of Nature and through freeing research and production from the social relations imposed by capital. This is the opposite of the ‘green’ world outlook.

Here the Marxist is directly attacking the romantic vision that is now very much a part of correct thinking in Australia.

While this blog is normally focused on issues concerning the natural environment, I’m opening the following thread to thoughtful comments on the more general topic of ‘correct thinking’ with the addition of the following comment from ‘C21st Left’:

Internationalism: ‘they’ are ‘us’. Be ‘they’ oppressed people resisting a fascist regime in Syria or asylum seekers reaching our shores in unauthorised boats. Or ‘foreign workers’ arriving lawfully on special visas. In a globalising world, humanity is one, as never before.

The circles one mixes in too often dictate responses to such issues as sustainability and immigration, when what is perhaps needed is more critical thinking.

A problem, to quote C.G. Jung, is that, “Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the effective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies.”

Empty slogans and wish-fantasies can be found everywhere and on all sides. The secret is, perhaps, to check whether or not we are ‘thinking’, rather than just adopting ‘a correct line’ dictated by someone who stopped thinking long ago.