Submission: on Part IIA of the Racial Discrimination Act

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Pursuant to the section 7(c) of the Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Act 2011, on 8 November 2016 the Attorney-General referred to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights the following two matters for inquiry and report:

  • whether the operation of Part IIA of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) (including sections 18C and 18D) impose unreasonable restrictions on freedom of speech; and
  • whether the complaints-handling procedures of the Australian Human Rights Commission should be reformed.

The following are responses by the RSA to the questions posed in the Terms of Reference of this Inquiry.

1.   Whether the operation of Part IIA of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) imposes unreasonable restrictions upon freedom of speech, and in particular whether, and if so how, ss. 18C and 18D should be reformed.

The Rationalist Society of Australia is a strong supporter of freedom of thought and freedom of expression as foundations of a good society. Freedom of thought must have no limits but the freedom to express those thoughts should have limits​, with the intent ​to prevent violence ​or intentional harm.

From the RSA's perspective, we recognise the need for legal remedy to speech intended to cause harm on racial grounds but think the words used in 18C have, consciously or not, invited a threshold too low for a society that values robust debate. If the RDA were to be changed, we would recommend replacing "offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” with "degrade, intimidate or incite hatred or contempt" as recommended by former Federal Court judge Ron Sackville.   

2.   Whether the handling of complaints made to the Australian Human Rights Commission (“the Commission”) under the Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986 (Cth) should be reformed, in particular, in relation to:

  • the appropriate treatment of:
    •      trivial or vexatious complaints; and
    •      complaints which have no reasonable prospect of ultimate success;
    •     ensuring that persons who are the subject of such complaints are afforded natural justice;
  •  ensuring that such complaints are dealt with in an open and transparent manner;
  •  ensuring that such complaints are dealt with without unreasonable delay;
  •  ensuring that such complaints are dealt with fairly and without unreasonable cost being incurred either by the Commission or by persons who are the subject of such complaints;
  •   the relationship between the Commission’s complaint handling processes and applications to the Court arising from the same facts.

The RSA believes the QUT case in particular appears to demonstrate a need for improved processes when the Human Rights Commission handles complaints under the RDA.​

​The process for dealing with complaints should be reviewed and improved. Vexatious complaints or those with little chance of success should be terminated as soon as possible.​

3.   Whether the practice of soliciting complaints to the Commission (whether by officers of the Commission or by third parties) has had an adverse impact upon freedom of speech or constituted an abuse of the powers and functions of the Commission, and whether any such practice should be prohibited or limited.

If there is to be freedom of speech in our society, then clearly it would be illogical to prohibit ‘third parties’ from urging individuals,​ who may have a legitimate complaint, to take this to the HR Commission. This is a legitimate role for ‘third parties’ in a robust public debate.

​However, there seems to be an implication in the question that Officers of the Human Rights Commission solicited complaints - perhaps comments ​made ​by the Race Discrimination Commissioner? However, there is a difference between informing individuals of their rights under the RDA and urging them to make a complaint. The former is quite proper and should be encouraged; the latter would be overstepping the mark. But we reject the implied assumption that such overstepping has happened.

HR Officers should be careful making statements in the public arena but like all speakers, they have no ​​control over the interpretation of such statements made by journalists or members of the public.

On this basis we do not agree with the premise of this question. No action should be taken.

4.   Whether the operation of the Commission should be otherwise reformed in order better to protect freedom of speech and, if so, what those reforms should be.

We are aware some groups are calling for the RDA to be amended to include ‘religion’ as a protected ground under the RDA, so it would read ‘race, religion, colour or national or ethnic origin’. The RSA would strongly object to any such amendment. Race and religion are logically dissimilar: race is an immutable characteristic and cannot be changed, but religion is a choice. There must be freedom to comment upon, criticise, even ridicule religion in our society.

Malcolm Roberts: defining his nonsense

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Angry white men and the movement that's been defined as "Organised Pseudo-legal Commercial Argument" (OPCA). Delusional nonsense, really, but it can be dangerous ...

Source: Malcolm Roberts: defining his nonsense - » The Australian Independent Media Network

Malcolm Roberts
Senator Malcolm Roberts scratching his head (as well he might)

New One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts has been known to sign legal documents as ‘Malcolm-Ieuan: Roberts., the living soul’, representing a corporate entity known as MALCOLM IEUAN ROBERTS.

In a document entitled ‘FIAT JUSTITIA, RUAT COELUM‘, addressed to the then Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Roberts demanded to be exempted from the ‘carbon tax’ and compensated $280,000 if the Prime Minister did not provide full and accurate disclosure in relation to 28 points explaining why he should not be liable to the tax. He addressed Gillard as ‘The Woman, Julia-Eileen: Gillard., acting as The Honourable JULIA EILEEN GILLARD’, Prime Minister of Australia.

Where does this rubbish come from?

Apparently it’s not as rarefied as you may think.

A Canadian judge, JD Rooke, has waded his way through voluminous documents generated by litigants like Malcolm Roberts and written a definitive ‘Guide to the Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument‘ (OPCA).

It may come as no surprise that most of this stuff comes from the United States, but Canada and now Australia have their fair share.

Rooke says in his introduction to the Guide that he has developed a new awareness and understanding of a category of vexatious litigant, variously called Detaxers, Freemen, Sovereign Citizens, the Church of the Ecumenical Redemption International, Moorish Law and other labels. Litigants use a range of techniques promoted and sold by certain ‘gurus’ to disrupt court operations and attempt to frustrate the legal rights of governments, corporations, and individuals.

Freemen on the land believe they can opt out of being governed; that what people understand to be laws are merely a form of contract that applies only if people agree to it. Sovereign citizens believe that natural citizens are not subject to any US Federal law; many believe only white men have rights because they don’t accept the validity of amendments to the US Constitution, in particular the thirteenth, which abolished slavery, and the nineteenth, which gave women the vote.

Drawing on a particular case study (Meads v Meads), Rooke documents these OPCA techniques. He concludes that persons using the techniques ‘often hold highly conspiratorial perspectives’, believe that ordinary people have been ‘unfairly cheated, or deceived as to their rights’ and that they have the right to try to break ‘the system’ and retaliate against ‘their oppressors’.

How do people get to know about these techniques? The answer is that they buy them; from the equivalent of modern snake-oil conmen, who take advantage of naive, angry men (and they are usually men), convincing them their anger is justified and if they would only buy the package on offer, they could reassert control of their lives.

Rooke lists the main North American perpetrators: Russell Porisky, David Kevin Lindsay, John Ruiz Dempsey, Robert Arthur Menard, Eldon Gerald Warman, David J Lavigne, Edward Jay Robin Belanger, David Wynn Miller.

It seems Malcolm Roberts had at least a couple of gurus: Lavigne and Miller. Lavigne promotes the argument that a person need not pay tax on a moral or conscience basis. Miller advocates a bizarre form of ‘legal grammar’ which is legally incomprehensible.

Neither is Australia immune. Sydney-based Frank O’Collins is an OPCA guru, promoting a new code of law he calls ‘Divine Canon Law‘ which he claims trumps both common law and statute law. His ‘Unique Collective Awareness of DIA’ (UCADIA) represents a ‘spiritual and legal presence, a structure of knowledge and a language of pure meaning’. He refers to his critics as ‘skeptics, disinformation agents and mentally ill supporters of the parasitoids’.

While Rooke concludes that all OPCA strategies are invalid, being vexatious, he warns that ‘members of the OPCA community have proven violent‘, particularly those from the sovereign citizen movement. A 2014 survey of perceived terrorism threats in the US listed sovereign citizens ahead of Islamic extremists and racist skinheads.

What the hell goes on in these people’s minds?

Left puts bigotry on a pedestal

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What does it mean, these days, when someone says their politics are “left-wing” or “progressive”?

Source: Left puts bigotry on a pedestal

What does it mean, these days, when someone says their politics are “left-wing” or “progressive”?

This has always been debatable, but in recent times these terms have taken on meanings that earlier generations of leftists would scarcely recognise. Ideas that used to be thought cons­titutive of left-wing thinking have been turned on their head.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Ali

To see what I am getting at, ponder the following thought experiment. Try to imagine how a moderate leftist in the social-democratic tradition (my own position) or a liberal in the American sense might react on awakening today from suspended animation after a half-century.

Say they had just listened to Martin Luther King’s great civil rights speech of 1963 in which he yearned for the day when his children would be judged by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. Back then, King’s sentiments were seen around the world as the quintessence of liberal progressivism.

Suppose further that the cryogenic experiment were conducted on one of the campuses of the University of California, Los Angeles. Imagine that the subject of our experiment is a member of staff and, needing to be brought up to speed on university policies, is sent on a course on how to avoid “micro­aggressions”, words or phrases that are deemed subtly racist. Such training recently was made mandatory at the behest of University of California president Janet Napolitano.

Our Rip Van Winkle would be amazed to learn that the dreaded microaggressions included statements such as “When I look at you, I don’t see colour”, or “There is only one race, the human race”. Such sentiments are not even to be uttered, let alone debated, in what would seem to our reawakened liberal like some Bizarro World ­alternative reality.

So what has happened? In a nutshell, there has been a comprehensive rejection by progressive academe of the intellectual inheritance from the Enlightenment, the “revolution of the mind” that transformed Europe and North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Enlightenment stressed argumentative rationality and the scientific method. It ­favoured open debate of contentious issues, including the ability to freely critique religious doctrines. It is a universalist vision in which people are seen as members of a common humanity, each pos­sessing rationality and agency, and not just creatures of the particular cultural or religious milieu into which they are born.

Distinguished historian of the Enlightenment Jonathan Israel identifies a subcurrent that he termed the Radical Enlightenment that added a strong commitment to equality of people irrespective of race, gender or class to the intellectual freedoms demanded by the mainstream Enlightenment. Until recently, leftist intellect­uals across the board happily would trace their lineage back to this movement. Even advocates of communist totalitarianism honoured Enlightenment principles by claiming that their “scientific socialism” provided the fullest realisation of Enlightenment ideals.

Today the “Enlightenment project”, as they now style it, is typically disparaged by intellectuals of a progressive bent. The ideal of human universality is discarded in favour of the politics of culture and identity; the value of reasoned ­debate questioned as argument is seen as just a mask for the exercise of power; the quest for objective truth is replaced by an emphasis on narratives and stories; and the right to strongly critique religion abrogated, albeit selectively.

In his book The Seduction of Unreason, American political philosopher Richard Wolin gives a comprehensive intellectual genealogy of this development. He notes “one of the peculiarities of our times is that Counter-Enlightenment arguments, once the exclusive prerogative of the political Right, have attained a new lease on life among representatives of the cultural Left … As a prominent advocate of postmodern political theory contends, one need only outfit the Counter-Enlightenment standpoint with a new ‘articulation’ to make it serviceable for the ends of the postmodern Left”.

Welcome to the leftist Counter-Enlightenment. In Britain and the US some critics have coined the term “regressive leftism” for this movement. There are two aspects to the regressive Left ideology. The substantive content of the ideology is identity politics, the view that people should be seen in their essence not as members of a common humanity but as bound to a particular identity group.

There is an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy written by a sympathetic academic that expresses it thus: “… it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition. The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of ‘universal humankind’ on the basis of shared human attributes; nor is it for respect ‘in spite of’ one’s differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different.”

Note that when members of a particular identity group demand respect for “oneself as different” they are not talking about respecting each person’s individuality and agency. On the contrary, they insist that people accept being defined by their identity and that they stick to the accepted script, the particular narrative of victimhood, that pertains to their group.

Members of each victim group are urged to claim ownership of — indeed, to be extremely proprietorial about — all aspects of their culture, including ephemera such as clothing and cuisine. We must all stick to our own cultural reservation. To violate this tenet is to commit the high crime of “cultural appropriation”.

American writer Lionel Shriver delivered a brilliant critique of this mentality and its deadening effect on fiction writing at the Brisbane Writers Festival last weekend, to the horror of organisers, who immediately disavowed her remarks.

And woe betide anyone who breaches this cardinal rule, as dissenters from within Islamic culture such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali have found. At best, they can expect condescension from bien pensant progressive intellectuals, some of whom denounced Hirsi Ali as an “Enlightenment fundamentalist”.

They will be pilloried in progressive media and will face attempts to bar them from speaking on campuses and elsewhere, as when Hirsi Ali was barred from speaking recently at Brandeis University in the US at the behest of a coalition of “progressive” student groups. Then there are the death threats from Islamist extremists intent on punishing the crime of apostasy. The Council of Ex-Muslims on Britain released a report this year detailing how extremist preachers have been given free rein to speak on British campuses while its own leader, Maryam Namazie, a leftist from an Iranian background, has been subjected to sustained efforts — including death threats — to stop her speaking.

These activities consistently have been backed by campus student organisations including, incredibly, feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender groups.

The de facto alliance that has developed between the Left and militant Islam, the most reactionary force in the world today, is the strangest and most disconcerting political development in my lifetime. If identity politics is the substantive part of this mutant ideology, the compliance and enforcement arm is the system of thought control we nowadays term political correctness.

According to the PC mindset, someone who openly or even privately challenges core tenets of identity politics is not just wrong but morally depraved. Such a person is not to be engaged with argumentatively, but must be vilified, censored and, where possible, pursued legally using instruments such as the iniquitous section 18C of our Racial Discrimination Act and equivalents in other countries.

Given their head, “progressive” politicians will introduce even more restrictive laws. Former British ­Labour leader Ed Miliband pledged before the last British election to make Islamophobia, which he never bothered to define, an aggravated criminal offence.

Regressive Left activists often claim to be fighting against “fascism” or “the extreme Right”. Ironically, they are the ones who, time and again, resort to classic 1930s fascist tactics such as wrecking the meetings of their opponents and in some cases harassing or attacking attendees.

I experienced this last year while attending a meeting at the University of Sydney that was being addressed by a speaker known to be defensive of Israel, a position now verboten on cam­puses around the world.

The meeting was disrupted by a chanting mob led by a young woman with a megaphone, the leaders making clear afterwards that they were there not to challenge or debate but to silence.

Some local academics actually defended this behaviour on the ground there was “no inherent right to free speech” if it contravened the progressive world view. There are even calls at Ivy League colleges in the US for the right to “free speech” to be supplanted by the insistence on “socially just speech”. Incredibly, the young woman leading the protest shouted her outrage that a speaker from the virulently anti-Semitic Hizb ut-Tahrir organisation had previously been blocked from speaking at the university.

This sort of coddling of extreme anti-Semitism, thinly masked as anti-Zionism, is one of the most revolting aspects of the regressive Left. American professor of queer theory Judith Butler, described as a “postmodern colossus” and a leading figure in the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, has in­sisted that Hamas and Hezbollah be seen as part of the “global progressive Left”. Both these groups have expressed the aspiration to exterminate all Jews; in Hamas’s case it is in its founding charter. Butler received some criticism over this, but her stellar standing in the progressive academic pan­theon was undiminished.

And it is not just academics. British Labour leader Jeremy ­Corbyn spoke warmly of his “friends” in Hamas and Hezbollah.

So it is pretty clear what the regressive Left is against. But what is it for, exactly? Its members would answer that they are fighting for “social justice”. Actually, it would be more accurate to say they are for social justice activism. Earlier incarnations of leftist ideology all had some conception of the “good society” they were working for, even if sometimes a terribly flawed one as with the communists.

Go to the websites of radical Left groups bearing names such as Socialist Alternative and you will see that there is no alternative. They do not even attempt to posit one. They are essentially nihilists who stand for nothing. Activism is a goal in itself, not some desired societal end state.

The supreme recent exemplar of social justice activism is the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. This movement is spawning imitators around the world including Australia, according to a recent ABC report.

Academic practitioners of the field known as critical race theory sprang into action to lend theoretical support. The tenor of some of this stuff would have stunned our Rip Van Winkle. There is an article on the website of the Harvard Law faculty that calls for “race-based mobilisations”, language that would not have been out of place in 30s Germany.

For the social justice activists, two kinds of questions are strictly off limits. First, narratives of victimhood must not be challenged, no matter how compelling the contrary evidence.

Hence, the shooting of a young black man in Ferguson, Missouri, was a straight-out case of murder, the victim shot with his hands raised. This version of events has been completely debunked since. But no matter, the critical race brigade sticks to this narrative in its “scholarly” articles, including one by a prominent academic at the Western Sydney University that referred to Ferguson matter-of-factly as a “racist murder” well after the facts were established.

This is not mere sloppiness. Reading this stuff, you quickly ­realise that for this kind of “scholarship” facts, evidence and the truth are strictly irrelevant.

Which brings me to the second type of unaskable question. Does the activism actually do any good? Has Black Lives Matter actually improved the lives of people trapped in impoverished inner-city ghettos? All the evidence indicates the contrary. Homicide rates in inner-urban areas have risen sharply since BLM started, reversing a decades-long declining trend. FBI director James Comey has linked this to the abandoning of proactive policing by cops fearful of vilification and prosecution.

Have the prospects for Palestinians to lead a decent life been enhanced by the international BDS campaign that urges them to stick to their rejectionist guns, thereby precluding a settlement with Israel and condemning future generations to repeated conflict?

Have young girls in Muslim communities benefited from the sentiments expressed by feminists such as Germaine Greer, who condemned efforts to outlaw female genital mutilation as “an attack on cultural identity”?

In Britain, hospitals are reporting an average 15 cases of this each day, yet there have been no successful prosecutions despite the practice being illegal since 1984. Where are the feminists on this and on forced marriages? Nowhere, it seems, with a handful of honourable exceptions. It seems that for the regressive Left there is a hierarchy of correctness in which cultural respect is trumps.

The kind of moral catastrophe this can induce is shockingly displayed by events in the northern English town of Rotherham. Across 16 years, 1400 girls, most from dysfunctional white families, were subjected to sexual abuse of organised gangs of sexual predators of Pakistani Muslim background. As two subsequent official reports disclosed, all arms of government that should have protected the girls — the police, social ser­vices, schools, the Labour-controlled local council — were paralysed by a dread of being labelled racist or Islamophobic.

I think of regressive leftism as a mind virus, a paralytic disease that is severely inhibiting the ability of Western societies to properly debate some of the most important issues they face. It is suffused with civilisational self-loathing — severely condemnatory of “white” post-Enlightenment Western societies yet prepared to overlook or apologise for the most egregious defects in other kinds of society.

To see what can result from this paralysis, look at Europe as it grapples with the consequences of its leaders’ decision to effectively dissolve its external borders with North Africa and the Middle East.

Consider the enormity of the transformation Europe is undergoing and imagine how it will look in several decades if this continues. Yet Europe’s elites seem incapable of conducting an honest debate about the implications of this, since this would involve asking some tough questions about whether Islam, with its undoubted violent and supremacist aspects, is ultimately compatible with liberal societies. Some of Europe’s leaders actually seem to have become reconciled to the prospect of large parts of Europe becoming Islamised. After all, what could be worse than the existing civilisation that is nothing but a sorry litany of racism, colonialism and oppression? And the biggest losers from this will be the self-styled progressives. What prospect for gay rights under the new dispensation?

This fecklessness and intellectual paralysis would be far less serious if it were confined to the Left proper, but it is not, as exemplified by Angela Merkel’s extraordinarily naive actions in the past year. The impulse to censor and anathematise anyone who challenges the prevailing zeitgeist can be found in parties regarded as centrist or even right-wing. This has created space for the emergence of new political forces throughout the Western world including Australia, with a surge in support for Pauline Hanson at the recent elections.

I believe the time has come for a fundamental rethinking of the lines of political division. At this his­torical juncture decent leftists must drop the masochistic obsession with denigrating post-Enlightenment Western civilisation and join with liberals, conservatives and others in a concerted effort to defend it against the unprecedented threats it now faces.

Author: Peter Baldwin was a minister in the Hawke and Keating Labor governments.

Letter: Medical Treatment Planning and Decisions Bill

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The Hon. Jill Hennessy
Minister for Health
Victorian Parliament.
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13 September 2016
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Dear Minister,
 
The Rationalist Society of Australia congratulates you and the Andrews Government for introducing the Medical Treatment Planning and Decisions Bill to give legal recognition to advance care directives in Victoria.
 
This welcome development has been a policy aspiration of the Rationalist Society for many years. Our 10 Point Plan for a Secular Australia includes the following:

Guaranteed control over one's own body, free from religious interference, when facing the end of life

    • ‘Advance directives’ should be given legal force.
    • Physician-assisted suicide, with appropriate safeguards, should be decriminalised.
    • Governments should fund non-religious palliative care services.[space height="30"]
So while this is a welcome development, it does not yet meet all of our objectives. In particular we strongly encourage you and your colleagues to ensure the Government's response to the End of Life Choices Inquiry includes legislation to enable voluntary assisted dying. As you would be well aware, the vast majority of voters in this State (and others) have expressed their desire for such reform for many years, only to be frustrated in various parliaments by religious conservatives. It is time for the people to have their wishes fulfilled!
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We also urge the Government, when considering resource allocation for palliative care services, to make sure there are more non-religious services to counter the dominance of religious agencies in this field.
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Sincerely,
 [space height="20"]
Dr Meredith Doig
President
Rationalist Society of Australia

Women Beyond Belief: Discovering Life without Religion

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As a woman and a rationalist, I have found it hard to understand the plight of women who continue to believe in a personal God and a literalist Bible. Women Beyond Belief is a book of revelation: stories of social conditioning and personal self-doubt that have kept women ‘in their place’ historically and in our modern, supposedly educated world. Besides the sometimes wrenching accounts of eventual awakening, Karen Garst provides a very useful account of the Judeo-Christian tradition of subordinating women that should be read by any woman who still labours under the delusion of
a beneficial deity.

Women Beyond Belief“Often these days, I can accept my own thoughts and feelings with curiosity and compassion. It’s astonishing to me that I can experience compassion that doesn’t require any judgment or warping of my being. Sometimes I even have bouts of wonder or joy, free from any dogma or deity, which also amazes me. I’ve discovered that as I am kinder to myself, I am kinder to other people (although I have a long way to go here…) I have friends who love me as I am—I am so grateful for them! If I want peace, I ponder the moon and listen to the tree frogs, or I run off to the beach and watch white foam flying off of green-glass waves. I still stare up at the stars, but there’s no prayer, only peace. These days, that’s enough. The dictionary defines integrity as “soundness,” “honesty,” and “the state of being whole, entire, undiminished, and unimpaired.” These are perfect words for how I am beginning to feel; it’s as though I am beginning to breathe again. I still have a life to make. But I am getting me back. All of me. Now that’s what I call a miracle.” Ann Wright.

Ann Wright was raised in a fundamentalist Christian sect. She is one of 22 authors who wrote an essay about her journey away from religion.

US-based author Karen Garst has compiled these essays into a book entitled Women Beyond Belief: Discovering Life without Religion. Garst became incensed by the 2014 Hobby Lobby ruling of the US Supreme Court, which excused craft store Hobby Lobby from following the dictates of the Affordable Care Act; they were allowed to continue failing to provide certain forms of birth control to their employees. “Will we never end the fight for women’s reproductive rights?” Garst said. Once again, religion had influenced American law; politicians continue to cite religion in supporting restrictions on abortion; funding is banned to Planned Parenthood; and there are still a host of other issues that are against women.

The first leaders of the New Atheism movement that arose after 9/11 were men: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. They came with backgrounds of science and philosophy. They launched a renewed effort to show people how destructive religion can be and how all Abrahamic religions are based upon an Iron Age mythology, borrowing from other mythologies of the time.

Dr Garst adds a focus on women and the role this mythology has played in the culture of many countries to denigrate and subordinate women. She states that 'Religion is the last cultural barrier to gender equality.' And she is right. More and more women atheists are speaking out. And as we all know, if women leave the churches, they will collapse.

With supportive reviews by Richard Dawkins, Meredith Doig, Valerie Tarico, Peter Boghossian, Sikivu Hutchinson and other atheist authors, Women Beyond Belief is available from Amazon. Karen Garst's blog is at Faithless Feminist.

Ancient Philosophy for Modern Life

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Philosophy lessons of the ancients relevant to our globalised, information age.

Source: Five Books: Jules Evans recommends the best books on Ancient Philosophy for Modern Life

For many, ancient philosophy seems to be something which is completely removed from modern life. What first got you interested in the ancient philosophers?

I got into philosophy through cognitive therapy. In my late teens and early twenties, when I was at university, I suffered from depression and anxiety. Eventually I heard about this type of therapy which was apparently good at treating that sort of thing. It was called cognitive behavioural therapy. It suggests that our emotions are to some extent caused by our beliefs and attitudes. If we become aware of our unconscious beliefs and the way that we interpret the world, we can see how that leads to our emotions. So if we change the way we interpret the world, we will also feel different.

I went along to a CBT support group, and it worked quite quickly. I stopped having panic attacks, my moods improved and it got me on the road back to health. So I started to research what this therapy was. It was invented by two American psychologists called Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis. In the 1950s they had both turned from psychoanalysis to ancient philosophy for inspiration, particularly to Socrates and the Stoics – who were the first in Western culture to argue that our emotions follow our beliefs. It fascinated me that this form of therapy, which is now so widely used, should have come so directly from ancient philosophy. It made me completely re-evaluate ancient philosophy and its usefulness in modern life.

That ties in well with your first choice, where Donald Robertson reveals the connection between CBT and ancient philosophy.

As we’ve discussed, the founders of CBT were directly inspired by ancient Greek philosophy. CbtUnfortunately, not many people are aware of that connection at all. Even a lot of cognitive therapists are unaware of it. That is partly because Aaron Beck was keen to present CBT as an evidence-based scientific therapy, so the philosophical roots of CBT were somewhat swept under the carpet. Donald’s was really the first book to properly explore the relationship between ancient philosophy and CBT. Donald runs one of the main CBT schools in the UK, and he wonderfully brings together a scientific thoroughness and a scholarly appreciation for the intelligence and beauty of some of the original philosophical material.

In what way can the book specifically help therapists with their work?

CBT takes a lot of great things from ancient philosophy. But there is a value in also going back to the original material, because there are other techniques and exercises that the ancients used which CBT doesn’t yet use, like certain visualisation techniques for example. Another value of going back to the original material – as Donald does – is that it is so beautifully written. It is much better written than a lot of modern CBT books. So you can either read something quite recent and not that well written, or you can go back and read Plato, Marcus Aurelius or Lucretius, some of the greatest writers ever.

Do you think the majority of psychotherapists are resistant to the idea that CBT is based in philosophy, or do you feel it is something that they think can enhance their work?

I don’t think they are resistant to it at all. It’s just that a lot of them aren’t aware of it. I think more and more psychologists are really interested in the links of their work to philosophy. They are aware that sometimes CBT can be instrumental and technocratic, and that there are more interesting, broader questions about what it means to live a good life that are worth exploring. The same is true on the philosophy side. More and more philosophers are interested in how modern psychologists are trying to test out some of the ancient philosophical techniques for wellbeing.

Your next choice, Philosophy as a Way of Life, gives us an interesting perspective on the history of spiritual exercises, from Socrates to early Christianity.

Philosophy AsPierre Hadot is not that well known, but the people who are aware of him really love and value his work. He was a French academic, a specialist in Neo-Platonist mysticism. One day he went into his local bakery, looked around at the people queuing for bread and thought: Neo-Platonist mysticism means nothing to these people and is not much use to them. So he started to become interested in the more practical philosophy of the Stoics and the Epicureans, and this idea of ancient philosophy not as abstract theory but as a way of life, something that ordinary people can practise every day to live better and happier lives.

That idea of philosophy as a way of life and a set of daily practices is one way to get more people into philosophy. One of the reasons why people today are so into Buddhism or yoga is because it gives them something they can practise every day.

What kind of spiritual exercise from the ancient philosophers did he think would still be useful in today’s modern world?

One thing Hadot wrote about was the idea of keeping a journal. At the end of each day some ancient philosophers would keep track of what happened during the day – what they did well and what they did badly. The idea is that if you want to change yourself and get rid of bad habits, first you have to track yourself. Humans are such forgetful and unconscious creatures, we don’t always realise who we are or how we’re behaving. So we need to keep track of ourselves. Epictetus, for example, said if you have a bad temper count the days on which you don’t lose your temper, and if you manage to do it for 30 days then you can consider yourself to be making progress.

Using a thought journal is a technique that CBT has brought back. If you have depression or anxiety and go and see a cognitive therapist, they will suggest that you keep a journal and keep track of your thoughts and habits, to bring more self-awareness into it and also so you can see the progress that you are making. You might have a day that you feel really down but you can look back and see that actually you have made a lot of progress from, say, three months ago.

So that is one practical exercise which the ancients used that is really useful today. In fact, we are actively developing this technique today. Now there is a lot of new technology such as phone apps which we can use to track ourselves. There is a movement called the Quantified Self, where people develop different devices to keep track of themselves, their diet, their exercise regimes, their moods, their daily activities. Their motto is “self-knowledge through numbers”, which is a very Socratic idea.

You have just written a book which gives some interesting case studies showing just how people from all walks of life have been helped by many different ancient philosophers. What is your favourite example of that?

One of things I write about is the technique in ancient philosophy of choosing your role models, known as the exemplum technique. This is the idea that if you really want to take on board an ethical idea it helps if, rather than just considering it abstractly, you think about someone who really embodies that idea or that value. Then you can see that person as a role model and try to emulate them. This is very much the approach of Plutarch, a Greek philosopher and historian. He was aware to what extent we imitate the people around us. We are always consciously and unconsciously copying the behaviour of people around us, so he suggests we try to do this more consciously. We should soak our imaginations in good role models – and he tried to provide such ethical role models in his book Parallel Lives.

I thought of this when I interviewed someone called Louis Ferrante. Louis grew up in a bad neighbourhood in New York and the roles models in his environment were all gangsters. They were all the people who had the power, success and money. So he became a gangster. He joined John Gotti’s mafia gang and by the age of 20 he was quite a successful hijacker, making lots of money, getting the best tables at restaurants and so on. Then he got busted and sent to a high-security prison when he was 22.

At one stage the prison guard told him he was nothing but an animal. He was in solitary confinement, getting his food through a slot in the door. And he thought, I really am an animal. He looked at some of the people he had thought were role models, like John Gotti, and he said it was like seeing Caesar without his cloak. So he taught himself to read and came across the book Plutarch’s Lives in the prison library, which had stories of great figures from history like Caesar. He was so taken by this book that he stole it from the library. Then he felt bad about stealing it and brought it back. He was inspired by all the stories of people from history who had done incredible things, and had often gone through situations that were worse than his. He started reading biographies of people like Nelson Mandela, and he says that experience of finding better role models saved him. He got out of prison and became a campaigner for literacy in prison. That is just one story I really like which shows ancient philosophy in action in today’s world.

Alain de Botton has been dubbed a philosophical agony uncle, and has done much to make philosophy popular.

Consolations Of PhilosophyI think of the revival of ancient philosophy as happening in three waves. The first wave was in the 1950s through people like Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, how they rescued ancient philosophy and bought it back into psychotherapy. Then there was the second wave of people in academic philosophy, led by people like Pierre Hadot, who returned to the idea of philosophy as a way of life. The third wave, which has been around since 2000, was led by Alain de Botton, and it was about making ancient philosophy popular and accessible to ordinary people.

The Consolations of Philosophy, his third book, introduced to the mass market the ideas of philosophers such as Seneca, Montaigne and Nietzsche. And it was a best seller. But academic philosophers were horrified. They accused him of dumbing down philosophy and turning it into self-help. If you look back at some of the reviews of that book, they were really vicious. But I think he was absolutely right. If you read the Stoics or Epicureans or even Plato, they say that the aim of philosophy is to make people happier and more fulfilled. And I think Alain de Botton won that argument. If you now look at where philosophy is 10 years on, it is much more concerned with things like flourishing, happiness and the good life.

That is also true for academic philosophy, which has shifted in the direction that he went. For example, Yale university now does a course in the philosophy and psychology of the good life. Stanford does a course in the art of living. American academic philosophy has moved much more in that direction too, with the work of philosophers like Michael Sandel or Martha Nussbaum. The idea that philosophy should enable us to live happier and better lives is much more common today.

But academic philosophy in Britain is in real trouble in comparison. Far fewer people are studying it both at A level and university level. Many philosophy departments are being closed in British universities, and if there is going to be a revival in British academic philosophy then it needs to connect with people’s aspirations and get back to that original mission of helping people lead better lives. There is a lot to be learnt from de Botton, if academics can just get the sneers off their faces.

Thinking about this idea of the good life – how can ancient philosophy help us to have one?

We all have values and a model of the good life that we follow throughout life, but often our model of the good life is unconscious. We picked it up unconsciously from our childhood, our friends, what we happen to watch on TV or the music we listen to. And often our unconscious life philosophy won’t work for us. If you have a bad life philosophy, it can really mess you up. But the amazing thing about being a human is that we have the capacity to reflect on our unconscious values, and consider if they are working for us. If they are not, we can choose different values and a different course in life.

Philosophy at is simplest is that fundamental human process of thinking about the coordinates in our automatic GPS, and whether it is working for us. Why is it that we keep on crashing? Maybe we can choose a better path in life. That is something which we all do naturally, and it is fundamental to being human. The benefit of actually studying philosophy or reading it is that it helps us to do this natural activity a bit more consciously and articulately. And it introduces us to the ideas of people who thought really clearly about what is worth seeking in life.

Next up, The Price of Civilisation by Jeffery Sachs explores what we need in an age of globalisation and economic crisis.

Price Of CivilisationWe have talked about how there has been a revival of ancient philosophy in modern psychology. One of the things that really fascinates me is how that is feeding into public policy and politics. Ancient philosophy offered a form of self-help, but it wasn’t just for individuals, it was also communal and political. Some ancient philosophers thought about what governments can do to help their citizens find fulfilment. You find that idea in Aristotle. His Nicomachean Ethics are all about how individuals can seek fulfilment, and it feeds directly into his Politics, which asks what the best form of society is to help people achieve that fulfilment.

The idea that governments have a role in helping us find happiness was very unfashionable for several decades, because it was seen as a recipe for tyranny. Just think about how the communist governments in Russia or China insisted that they knew best how to help their people find fulfilment and positive liberty, and the sort of tyranny that led to. Liberal philosophers like Sir Karl Popper, Sir Isaiah Berlin and John Stuart Mill insisted that we should be free to pursue our own version of the good life in our own way. Everyone has a different idea of happiness so the government should just stay out of it, they thought. But in the last few years, governments – encouraged by the psychology and philosophy of wellbeing – have decided that they should get back into the business of trying to help their citizens become happier.

This is the politics of wellbeing?

Exactly. But how can a government know if they are actually enhancing the wellbeing of their citizens? One answer governments have tried to come up with is to start measuring our national wellbeing – as the British government started to do in 2011.

That is a very difficult thing to do, given that we are all individuals with different ideas about what wellbeing is.

I agree, and this is partly what Jeffery Sachs’s book is about. He says that we need to look back to the wisdom of philosophers of the past to re-find our collective moral compass – particularly to thinkers like the Buddha and Aristotle. He thinks that national wellbeing measurements are a way for governments to re-find their moral purpose. So rather than just pursuing GDP we can try and enhance wellbeing. Other economists have argued the same thing, but it is interesting that Sachs should come out and say this because he was a key philosopher in neo-liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, which was very free market and focused on the bottom line of GDP. So it is a real sign of the times that such an influential economist should have said we need to go back to Aristotle and start measuring national wellbeing.

It is a very much a phenomena in British politics as well. The coalition government is full of Aristotelians. Oliver Letwin, David Willetts and I think David Cameron himself are all Aristotelians. On the one hand, it’s quite exciting that suddenly these philosophical ideas of the good life should be at the heart of public policy. But it’s also quite weird that we now have the Office of National Statistics going around trying to measure our eudaimonia, which is the word the Greeks used for fulfilment or meaningful happiness.

The problem as I see it is that there are different ways to define happiness and wellbeing. The Office of National Statistics has said: “We know there is more than one way to define it, so we will measure both the utilitarian definition of wellbeing, by asking people how happy they are, and also the Aristotelian definition, by asking people how worthwhile they feel their life is.” But of course there are many more than just two ways to define wellbeing. I think people should be empowered to explore the different definitions of wellbeing, rather than forced down one path. We have to be careful to find the right balance between the [ancient] Greeks’ idea of the good life and our liberal right to choose our own path.

Finally you have chosen Cognitive Surplus.

Cognitive SurplusClay Shirky’s book isn’t really about ancient philosophy, but explores one of the reasons why there is a revival of community philosophy today. As discussed, there is the rediscovery of the ancients’ idea of philosophy as a therapeutic way of life, and this naturally leads to questions of community. Ancient philosophy wasn’t just individual self help. It was very social and communal. The Stoics would gather together under the Colonnade in their Athenian marketplace to talk about philosophy, the Epicureans lived together in a commune called “the Garden” outside Athens, the Aristotelians had their own community called the Lyceum, and so on.

As we return to this idea today, we’re starting to ask what is the best way to bring people together to practise philosophy communally? Alain de Botton came up with one answer, which was to set up The School of Life in London. Another part of the answer is the Internet, which is bringing people together online and offline to share ideas, and to discuss, debate and practise philosophy. You have Facebook groups, Yahoo groups and meet-up groups like the London Philosophy Club, a philosophy group that I am involved with.

Which is growing, despite the fact that less people are doing philosophy for A levels or at university in the UK.

Yes, it is. Practical philosophy is booming outside of schools and universities. There is a huge demand for it. To go back to Clay Shirky’s book, it talks about how our culture has been transformed by the shift from TV to the Internet as the main media source. In his view – and I think it is correct – we have gone from the passive consumption of culture to a much more active, involved and engaged consumption and co-production of culture.

He suggests, for example, that the TV sitcom was the opiate of our culture for several decades. We didn’t have genuine communities, which is why we got into things like Friends orCheers – because it gave us a virtual community we could watch. But the Internet creates more engaged and co-productive communities. It has led to the re-creation of what [German sociologist] Jürgen Habermas calls the public sphere, like the Athenian marketplace or 18th century coffee houses. That is one of the reasons why there is this revival of community philosophy today, because through the Internet it is much easier to get together with other people, and to get involved in philosophy rather than just watching an academic pontificate on television. People wonder why philosophy isn’t on TV. The main reason is because everyone is out doing it.

Do you think the pace of the digital age necessitates any particular philosophy?

I think there are some types of philosophy that probably fit with the Internet age better than others. The more practical it is, the better. Also, the more it is embodied in real life stories the better. People respond better to that, which is why the ancients would often tell the lives of philosophers. Look at the success of Michael Sandel, who is the leading public philosopher today. His lectures on justice are a huge Internet hit. Part of that is because he is so good at engaging his audience. He doesn’t just talk for half an hour. Instead he gets his audience to debate certain types of ethical problems.

Do you think people are starting to use philosophy as an alternative to following a traditional type of religion?

Some philosophies are theistic, so it doesn’t have to be either/or. In Catholic universities in America, philosophy is compulsory. Several of the leading philosophers today are Catholics, like Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. But for many it is an alternative to organised religions. For example, the Skeptics is a grassroots movement with several million members. I visited their annual conference in Las Vegas called The Amaz!ng Meeting, where they hang out and listen to speakers like Richard Dawkins, then go back home to spread the word.

If philosophy is going to be a genuine alternative to something like Christianity, it is really about creating forms of community that bind people together. There is a very interesting study by an anthropologist called Richard Sosis about which communities lasted longest in 19th century America. He found that those communes which demanded more from their members lasted a lot longer – and religious communes, probably for that reason, lasted longer than secular communes. If philosophy wants to be an alternative to religion, then the question is how much can philosophical communities demand of their members without turning people off or being accused of being cults.

Again, it’s the question of trying to find a balance between the ancient idea of the good life, and our modern liberal insistence on being free to follow our own path. Liberals are always loitering at the door of communities, afraid to commit. We crave for community, but we’re commitment-phobes.

Jules EvansJules Evans is a philosopher and writer. He is Policy Director at the Centre for History of Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London, and co-organiser of the London Philosophy Club. He has written and spoken on psychology and philosophy for The Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, Psychologies, and for radio. Evan’s first book is Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations. He also writes a blog called Philosophy for Life.

Are we asking the wrong questions on Dying With Dignity?

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Television producer and performer Andrew Denton has provided us all with some useful and important information about voluntary euthanasia in his podcast series and book, and has asked some interesting questions.

Unfortunately they are not the questions about dying with dignity that actually need to be answered.

Andrew is proposing a bureaucratic, literally tortuous process where we must seek and then obtain, over time, permission to die from doctors we do not know.

The whole question of seeking permission suggests that Australians need gatekeepers to control the most private of decisions: when do I want to die; when have I had enough? These are questions we may all have to ask ourselves, given the wonderful, ambiguous medicalised society we live in.

Surely how we die is a personal decision, and one we should be allowed to make ourselves?

The key question that needs to be asked is: Why can we not elect to die gently, legally, when, where and with whom we choose?

Unfortunately, what purports to be the Yes case for law reform on voluntary assisted dying is in fact what I call the Not Only ...But Also position: not only must you be terminally ill and your death imminent, but also you must get permission.

Why is such a process necessary?

Yes we do need changes to the laws about dying.  That question has been asked and answered with a resounding Yes for 20 years.

In response to the Not Only But Also position, we need to ask: Why do we need ‘permission’ at all?

Beverley Broadbent
Beverley Broadbent chose to commit suicide in 2013. She was not dying of terminal illness, nor was she depressed or unhappy. But at 83, she wanted to die.

Denton and Dr Rodney Syme and all the other advocates of the Not Only… But Also position are seeking to replace one sort of ‘gatekeeper,’ rooted in religious belief, for another.  While they rightly seek to take power and control from the religious lobby, they then advocate that we give that power and control to the medical profession.

Some doctors and medical organisations have, like religious institutions before them, stepped up to assume a gatekeeper role: they seek to protect us from our own choices, and Denton and Syme propose we help them do it.

Both churches and doctors are unrepresentative groups hungry for power that does not belong to them.  That power belongs to us, and through us, our politicians.  That group, as Denton rightly points out, have totally abrogated their responsibilities to us by refusing to act to liberalize the laws, and by acting only to censor and restrict access to information about our current limited and illegal options.

There is a profound arrogance in the attitude of the Not Only But Also campaigners – the same arrogance displayed by those religious advocates who overturned the Northern Territory dying with dignity legislation, and of whom Denton is so critical.

The questions we need to be asking now are:[list type="bullet"]

  • Why do we need gatekeepers?
  • Why should power and control not be in our own hands?
  • Why do our decisions have to be verified and approved by doctors?
  • Why are our political representatives such cowardly failures?
[/list]

 

What I am proposing instead is a law that would allow something that is already happening in Australia: the choice of taking Nembutal, and dying without violence.

We should be able to get a prescription for [re-]legalised Nembutal, and take it or not when we choose, not be forced to seek, and then be granted permission.

Hundreds if not thousands of Australians are now smuggling drugs and taking action themselves.  But they must do it in secret, by breaking the law and without their family around them for fear of exposing them to criminal charges.

Andrew Denton has done valuable work in promoting this issue. However his ‘solution’, also advocated by Dr Rodney Syme and the Dying With Dignity organization, merely transfers the power and control, previously held by Churches and politico-religious campaigners, to doctors, not into your hands.

There is no need for such arrogance.  Rather, some humility is needed.

There is no need for gatekeepers, no need to impose ‘solutions’ about this most personal of decisions.

To choose life or to choose death is, should, and must be a truly personal choice. Yes indeed as Denton quoted Mandela, ‘Let’s walk each other home’ – and let’s add ‘in ways we each choose ourselves…’

Deb CampbellBorn and educated in Melbourne, Dr Deb Campbell spent 25 years working operationally and as a research and policy analyst in intelligence, industrial relations and indigenous affairs in the private and public sectors, and in universities, in Victoria, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory. She holds a PhD in industrial relations history.

Deb has written business book reviews for the mainstream press, contributed to local newspapers and self-published a history of a local community enterprise. Most recently she is the author of Doing Us Slowly: what’s happened to the Australian voluntary euthanasia debate?

Free Speech and 18C: A Rationalist’s Perspective On A Way Forward

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With conservatives and libertarians leading yet another campaign to degrade racial discrimination protections, Dr Meredith Doig weighs in with an alternative. 

Source: Free Speech and 18C: A Rationalist’s Perspective On A Way Forward - New Matilda

Freedom of speech is back on the agenda in the new federal parliament, but in all the breathless hoo-ha about section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA), what’s usually overlooked is 18D.

18C makes it unlawful to say something reasonably likely to ‘offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate’ someone because of their race. 18D contains exemptions intended to protect freedom of speech. Artistic works, scientific debate and fair comment on matters of public interest are all exempt from 18C, as long as they are said reasonably and in good faith.

Sections 18C and 18D were introduced in response to recommendations from the 1991 National Inquiry into Racist Violence and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. These inquiries found that racial hatred and vilification can cause emotional and psychological harm and that even mild, low-level behaviour can soften the environment for more severe acts of harassment, intimidation and violence.

In applying 18C, the courts have consistently held that the conduct under question must involve ‘profound and serious’ effects, not ‘mere slights.’ Less than 3 per cent of racial hatred complaints ever make it to court.

The extensive and continuing debate about this issue is understandable, as it involves balancing two fundamental principles of a liberal, pluralistic democracy: liberty (and specifically, freedom of speech) andequality (specifically, social equality/non-discrimination).

The United States tends to favour the first of these two principles, with the Constitution’s First Amendment guaranteeing almost absolute freedom of speech.

In 1988 evangelist Jerry Falwell initially won a case claiming emotional distress caused by the magazineHustler. Hustler had printed a fake advertisement that suggested Falwell lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. But the US Supreme Court reversed that judgement, ruling that the ‘free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern’ was of paramount importance.

France, on the other hand, prohibits public or private communication which is defamatory or insulting; for example it and many European countries outlaw Holocaust denial.

So have we got the balance right in Australia?

Opinion is divided. Free speech activists like the Institute of Public Affairs and libertarians like Senators David Leyonhjelm and Malcolm Roberts rail against the curbs: ‘Free speech is free speech … The only person who decides if I’m upset is me … Offence is always taken, not given.’

Liberal Democrats Senator David Leyonhjelm, during an August 2016 appearance on ABC's Insider's program.

Liberal Democrats Senator David Leyonhjelm, during an August 2016 appearance on ABC’s Insider’s program.

Fairfax journalist Mark Kenny argues neither of these “self-promoting misanthropes” would know what it’s like to experience discrimination, and rejects as ridiculous the idea that offence is all in the mind of the recipient.

The ancient Stoics would not have agreed with Kenny. They reflected extensively on how to deal with insults and offence; the Romans were very good at them.

Consider these: “All you do is run back and forth with a stupid expression, jittery as a rat in a roasting pot” (Petronius) and “You’re an informer and a mudraker, a con-man wheeler-dealer, a gigolo and an educator in evil. All that, Vicerra, and amazingly, you’re still broke!” (Martial) and “Everything you say is so unbearably boring, by Hercules, that it’s murder by monotony” (Plautus).

Advising on how to cope with such taunts, the great Stoic sage Epictetus wrote, “If someone responds to insult like a rock, what has the abuser gained with his invective?” In other words, it is up to the recipient of an insult to choose how to respond; remain unmoved and there is no gain to the insulter.

These days we tend to associate the word stoic with an unfeeling attitude – the proverbial stiff upper lip. But the ancient Stoics were not averse to feelings: they just divided them into useful ones and unhelpful ones. The anger that comes from experiencing an insult is unhelpful, and the Stoics had various ways to deal with it.

Firstly, they said, you might pause and consider whether the insulter may actually be right. If so, there’s no point in getting upset; learn from what they have said.

Secondly, if the insulter is behaving like a petulant child, consider that they deserve pity rather than anger.

Third, you might respond with humour. When Cato was advocating a case in court, an adversary named Lentulus spat in his face. Rather than getting angry, Cato wiped the spit and said, “I will swear to anyone, Lentulus, that people are wrong when they say you cannot use your mouth.”

Epictetus would have argued that protecting the disadvantaged from insults is counterproductive, leading them to believe they are powerless to deal with insults without the authorities interceding on their behalf. Better to teach the disadvantaged techniques of insult self-defence like the ones above.

But back to the present day. A possible solution to this intractable issue has been suggested by former Federal Court judge Ronald Sackville. In Anti-Semitism, Hate Speech and Part IIA of the Racial Discrimination Act, Sackville proposes two amendments that would achieve a more defensible balance between the legitimate protection of vulnerable groups from serious hate speech and the values of free speech.

The first would replace the words ‘offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate’ with the more demanding standard of ‘degrade, intimidate or incite hatred or contempt’. The second would assist courts in interpreting the legislation, replacing subjective criteria with objective tests: instead of judgements based on complainants’ subjective responses, the courts would use the objective test of how ‘a reasonable member of the community at large’ would respond to the behaviour in question.

Sensible suggestions from a rationalist’s point of view.