The Minefield

Since the start of November, the Australian government has made two significant announcements aimed at preventing the harms that social media platforms are causing to the mental health of adolescents — but are these measures enough?

Most of us are aware that the emergence of social media platforms and their omnipresence in our lives have fractured public discourse and undermined the conditions of democratic deliberation. But we are only now beginning to grapple with the way corporations — having already decided to make “values” and “ethics” central in their self-presentation to consumers — have become increasingly susceptible to public pressure to deal harshly with employees who express controversial, distasteful or simply divisive opinions. As a result, limitations on the speech of employees are being tolerated that would rarely be accepted within a democratic society.

“Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.” Such is the assessment of Peter Wehner — a Republican strategist and former adviser to President George W. Bush, and an outspoken critic of Trump himself — in the aftermath of the former president’s thundering re-election victory. It was not an electoral college landslide of the order of Barack Obama’s in 2008 or Bill Clinton’s in 1996. But it was sufficiently decisive as to command a reckoning. Perhaps most obviously, his victory relegates the Biden presidency to a kind of hiatus within what may well prove to be Trump’s twelve-year dominance of American politics. The fact that Trump survived all the forces arrayed against him — political, legal, economic, cultural, popular — reinforces the power of his “persecution” narrative, and will likely only deepen Americans’ disdain for democratic institutions. One of the live questions of this election is whether Trump’s resurgence will encourage the would-be-antidemocratic leaders of other nations to follow his playbook.

One of the defining features of the last century is the fact that “evil” has become more vivid to our imaginations and common in our language than “good”. Stan Grant joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether “evil” is, in our time, a concept worth holding onto. Or does its use and misuse in our public discourse cause more harm and confusion than good?

There is something undeniably satisfying about revenge. When we feel we have been aggrieved, harmed or humiliated, it is natural to want payback. In ancient Greece, to inflict such an injury was conceived of as incurring a debt — and the only way to make the perpetrator “whole” was to have the injury repaid in kind. The paradox — as Socrates, Sophocles and Euripides all knew — is that revenge, though it is desired, is never satisfying, because it gives rise to a perpetual cycle of hit-and-retaliation. The future is thereby foreclosed by the need to repay the past. As Martin Luther King, Jr. put it: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.” In democratic politics and geopolitical conflict, the language and logic of revenge have begun to reassert themselves. What can be done to break out of its hold?

Just weeks before a US presidential election, a combination of political mendacity, the perverse incentives offered by social media platforms, and opportunism on the part of content creators/consumers, have come together to form a perfect storm. The tragic irony is that the devastating consequences of these forces have become apparent in the aftermath of two hurricanes which hit the American south-east in quick succession. With state and federal elections around the corner, and little more than a year after the failed Voice referendum, can anything be done in Australia to stem the tide of online mis/disinformation? Legislative attempts to hold social media platforms to account are undoubtedly important — but the more urgent task may be addressing democracy’s current “trust deficit”.

After the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the outcome of the Brexit referendum, “populism” became the catch-all diagnosis for everything the ails democratic politics. But its polemical use has tended to obscure rather than clarify the meaning of the term.

The policy of negative gearing — which gives the owners of investment properties an unlimited ability to deduct losses from their overall taxable income — has come to symbolise the disparity between the different ways Australians see home ownership: for some, it is a means of wealth creation; for others, it represents the ever-receding promise of shelter, stability, security. It is unsurprising, then, that the policy would evoke such strong feelings whenever it re-enters public debate. Will changes to negative gearing solve Australia’s housing affordability crisis? No. But inquiring into why it elicits such powerful emotions can help us think more clearly about the moral dimensions of our relationship to housing and home ownership.

The war poetry of Wilfred Owen refuses the comfort of hollow consolation in response to the mass loss of life — it also urges the sacrifice of the kind of bellicose pride that sees nothing but territorial gain and national self-interest, and is prepared to offer up the lives of the young to these ends.  In a time of heightened violence and bloodshed, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens – along with acclaimed concert pianist and award-winning writer Simon Tedeschi – attempt to recover the rhetorical power and moral significance of two of Owen’s best-known poems, “Strange Meeting” and “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”.

With the US presidential election on the horizon, to say nothing of a number of Australian elections, our airwaves, news sites and social media feeds are filled with political rhetoric. Many of us have come to accept political rhetoric — with its obfuscations, generalisations, exaggerations and outright evasions — as the price of doing business with democratic politics. Is there a meaningful difference anymore between political rhetoric and propaganda? What disciplines and constraints must political rhetoric adopt in order to keep itself free of the propagandistic temptation?

Given the dependence of many Australian universities on international student fees, a significant drop in enrolments with no corresponding increase in government funding will likely yield a decline in the quality of teaching and research, a reduction in academic staff, and a precipitous tumble down the world university rankings.  This would do considerable damage to Australia's fourth largest "export". If the forecasts are accurate, why would the federal government embark on legislation that amounts to an act of national self-harm?

One of Australia’s greatest strengths has been the remarkable diversity of its multicultural society. But is this also a potential source of weakness? In this live recording at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens, along with guest Stan Grant, explore the internal and external forces that risk undermining our sense of social unity.

Even for a nation obsessed with the concept of “freedom” — or perhaps it would be better to say, concepts, not all of them easily reconciled, some of them utterly incommensurable — the prominence it was given during the recent Democratic National Convention was arresting. It was as though the Democratic Party vaulted the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush alike — both of which used “freedom” as a mantra, a talisman, a point of vital differentiation over against communism and terrorism — and return to the muscular wartime rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt, with his vision of domestic or civic freedom. But are these competing visions of freedom not doomed to remain in an untenable tension without a mediating or underlying conception of freedom’s nature and limits?

In democracies with a history of racial injustice, are “colourblindness” and recognition of a “common humanity” — which were at the heart of the moral philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. — desirable as expressions of our commitment to justice as equality?

When the first episode of Seinfeld went to air in 1989, it faced stiff competition from a packed field of American sitcoms. By its finale in 1998, the “show about nothing” had redefined the sitcom genre and conquered comedy. Critical to its success was the unlikely alchemy of the four central characters — their navigation of the interpersonal conflicts and petty irritations of New York City life, and their heedless disregard for conventions of morality. That was the trick: the situations they found themselves in had to be relatable, but the characters themselves could not be sympathetic. They had to be superficial, selfish, inconstant, immature, monstrous — which is to say, “Bizarro” — versions of themselves. As co-creator and executive producer Larry David put it, the guiding philosophy was “no hugging, no learning”. But, as it turns out, there may just be a kind of moral seriousness lurking beneath the mania.

Humour can often be a response to the sense of being ill-at-home in society — perhaps even ill-at-home in the world. But whether it takes the form of fatalism or self-deprecation, all such forms of ironic self-distancing have a sting in the tail.

In one form or another, comedy often proceeds from a certain exaggeration of life — exaggerated bodily movements, or facial expressions, or scenarios, or reactions. These exaggerations have an unreality to them, but still maintain an uncanny relationship to more “normal” life. Put another way: sometimes comedy is just plain silly, the art of relishing the fun of suspending our expectations and upending our social conventions. What is happening when performers give free reign to the silly? Does it cut the cords of empathy and invite the audience to become mere spectators — whose enjoyment is vicarious, but not really participatory? Or does silliness bind performer and spectator together, inviting them to see reality in a different light?

Immanuel Kant called laughter a form of the disappointment of the understanding — which is to say, surprise — for which the body then compensates: “Whatever is to arouse lively, convulsive laughter must contain something absurd … Laughter is an affect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into a nothing.” But surprises, it turns out, come in many shapes and sizes — from a slip or a fall, to a near-miss when you expected an accident, to an uncanny coincidence where you expected randomness. Does our laughter, then, express delight at the surprise, or a desire to set things straight?

The attempted assassination of former US President Donald Trump, while undeniably shocking, was not altogether surprising. It was just the latest blow in a steady drumbeat of political violence that has only grown louder over the last decade. This reflects the fact that political violence is “in the air”, and is increasingly being regarded by many Americans — and citizens of nations around the worlds — as a justifiable response to political disagreement. What does it take for such violence to become thinkable? Do we possess the democratic antibodies to resist the contagion of violence?

Comedy happens when something occurs that makes visible just how futile are our most earnest efforts, and how superficial are our solemnities, our moments of greatest seriousness and decorum — hence the deep connection between comedy, absurdity and tragedy.

Because our lives are increasingly tailor-made, we are constantly seeking ways of distinguishing ourselves from others. What is being lost through is our sense of a humanity whose inherent vulnerability to misfortune, malfeasance and violence makes us dependent on one another.

The Beatles composed their best music in the years after 1965 — so what could account for the ecstatic response the band received in the United States and Australia in 1964? Why were they “big” before they were “good”?

On 30 May 2024, after two days of deliberation following a five-week trial and hearing the testimony of 22 witnesses, a jury of 12 New Yorkers found former President Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony charges. But do the facts of the case brought against him, and the overriding fact it was brought in an election year, present insurmountable political risks?

The results of the recent European Parliament elections have only fuelled the growing concern across the member nations of the European Union that far-right, radical right, Eurosceptic and otherwise anti-immigrant parties are, once again, on the rise.

Apple Music recently released its list of the “100 Best Albums”. It was, without question, a clever marketing technique — but one that raises the problem of whether it’s appropriate to rank works of high human achievement in the first place.

At a time when so many eyes are on international courts, is their apparent failure to protect civilians in Gaza — or to punish the perpetrators of 7 October — further damaging an already shaky public confidence in the concept of international law?

It’s 18 months since the technology company OpenAI made its wildly popular interface with an advanced large language model — GPT-4 — available to the public. What has ChatGPT done to the habits of thought and consideration that produce distinctly human expression?

Protests are, by their nature, unequivocal and univocal. They tend to avoid nuance or fine distinctions, and most often do not invite dialogue. They make demands. Does the particular vocation of universities place ethical limits on the forms of expression available to protestors?

Reciprocity, cooperation, kindness, turn-taking, forbearance, empathy, experimentation — can these counter the decidedly illiberal, impatient, anti-pluralistic, well-nigh apocalyptic energies that now seem resurgent in parts of the West?

During the pandemic, there was a sudden renewal of interest in Harold Ramis’s 1993 film “Groundhog Day” — especially its bleaker aspects. But this missed its sophistication and humanity, to say nothing of its acute depiction of moral growth.

Residents of Sydney have found themselves understandably overwhelmed by the compound traumas of two stabbing attacks in three days. How are we to make sense of the cycling-through of emotions in response to shocking public violence?

There has been an odd confluence of events over the past couple weeks that has managed to intensify the sense of a conflict between two of our most important democratic institutions: the law and the media.

Does the failure on the part of Israel to enable the provision of humanitarian aid or to do everything in its power to prevent civilian casualties suggest “a blameworthy indifference to Palestinian lives”?

It is important to remember that Thoreau’s motivation for withdrawing was neither escapism nor apolitical quietism. The fact that he departed on 4 July signals an invitation to discover a different way of living together.

If Thoreau regards withdrawal and solitude as means by which we learn to escape self-deception, then they may well be little more than preparation for the moral demands friends make of one another.

Solitude is neither alone-ness nor idleness. It is strenuous and takes practice. Solitude does not simply happen in the way that isolation or loneliness does — it must be inhabited.

Are periodic bouts of withdrawal from life’s urgent demands and heated debates necessary to regain a sense of our shared humanity, and to renew the commitments that sustain the moral life?

Waleed Aly, Scott Stephens and philosopher Stephanie Collins field questions from a live studio audience on crowd-behaviour, conformity and the importance of dissent.

Ever since Plato, “crowds” have been associated with irrationality, emotivism, conformism, short-term thinking, and herd-like behaviour. But what if it turns out that crowds are collectively more intelligent than their individual members?

What are we trying to convey when we reach for a word like “evil”? Is it something about a person’s actions or character? Is it what they do or the manner in which they do it?

It is worth reflecting, not just on what is singular about Taylor Swift at this particular cultural moment — why she attracts both the loyalty and the animus that she does — but on what it is about live music events that now draw millions of people to them.

Over the last 18 months, enormously powerful generative AI tools have been placed in the hands of anyone who wants them; as a consequence, the internet and our social media feeds have been inundated with wholly or partially synthetic content.

Because it is sustained by nothing more substantial than a weave of trusted institutions, shared habits and moral commitments, democracies are highly susceptible to the corrosive effects of distrust; Jedediah Purdy joins Waleed and Scott to discuss the necessary conditions for democratic life.

Ours is a time when institutional distrust, digital disinformation and mutual suspicion have become pervasive — but can democracy withstand epistemic and social fragmentation of this kind?

Professor Maryanne Wolf joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether we are entering an age of widespread moral illiteracy — an incapacity to engage in the processes that make up the habit of deep reading.

It is fair to say that boredom is a distinctly modern terror. But, as Stan Grant discusses with Waleed and Scott, what if existential boredom points us to our deeper need?

Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s depiction of Saturn eating his son is a haunting portrait of lust and the fear of one’s own finitude. Christos Tsiolkas joins Waleed and Scott to look into that darkness, and discover what looks back.

Now that John Cleese has announced that the iconic series will return, it’s worth examining what made Fawlty Towers a masterpiece — and whether its interaction with the political climate of the 1970s had anything to do with it.

Platforms like Spotify have transformed the way people listen to music through their use of recommendation algorithms and customised playlists designed to cater to either a particular activity or a particular mood.

Australian novelist Briohny Doyle joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to examine Charles Dickens’s unforgettable tale of misanthropy and remorse, and discover how its aesthetic techniques and ethical vision continue to speak to us today.

What is a state for? How does its nature, actions, and limits differ from other corporate bodies? Is the relationship of a state to its citizens fundamentally that of a service provider to its clients?

If we are not careful, the use of incentives to encourage people to purchase electric vehicles could backfire by offending our sense of fairness.

The latest Mapping Social Cohesion report from the Scanlon Foundation paints a complex picture that helps us understand the conditions within which social cohesion is able to strengthen, and those factors which cause it to become brittle and even break down.

Calls for an end to the devastation of Gaza, and the death and displacement of its residents, reached a crescendo on Remembrance Day. While the moral case is compelling, it raises questions that are complex and consequential.

Nearly a century after its publication, Australian novelist Charlotte Wood joins Waleed and Scott to discuss what Virginia Woolf’s essay tell us about egotism, contempt, creative freedom and the possibility of moral transformation.

Because referenda are zero-sum contests, the message they convey is paradoxically both obscure and unambiguous — which is to say, their meaning is open to interpretation and unintentionally harsh.

Australia recently marked ten years since the introduction of Operation Sovereign Borders — a policy whereby refugees entering Australian waters by boat were met with unwavering, military-led deterrence.

The civilian massacres in Israel on 7 October and the devastation inflicted on residents of Gaza both make claims on our humanity, on our capacity to recognise and respond to the deaths of others — but some find these claims mutually exclusive.

One of the great paradoxes of democracy is that those who will have to bear the consequences of the political decisions we make now have little-to-no say in the decision-making process itself.

Most of us are aware of the environmental costs associated with international tourism. But have we considered whether travel enhances or diminishes our moral lives?

Blame and forgiveness are two of the most natural responses to wrongdoing — and yet, increasingly, these responses are viewed with a degree of suspicion, if not outright hostility, due to the myriad ways they can go wrong.

Is there any way of retrieving the deliberative conditions under which democratic life is possible, when the social media cacophony makes hearing one another so hard?

We’ve reached the point in mass culture, to say nothing of the “higher culture” of academia, when criticism is the norm. To the point that we increasingly define ourselves by what we hate.

Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s depiction of Saturn eating his son is a haunting portrait of lust and the fear of one’s own finitude. Christos Tsiolkas joins Waleed and Scott to look into that darkness, and discover what looks back.

Now that the PM has announced the date of the referendum, it’s worth remembering that the zero-sum nature of referenda can unleash the kind of bruising rhetoric that does lasting damage to a political community, no matter the outcome.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has recently reintroduced the prospect of nuclear power as part of Australia’s commitment to decarbonisation. But what is behind the push for nuclear, and does it make sense in a nation like this?

When Oxford University proposed to confer an honorary degree on the man who ordered an atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe condemned the decision as “shar[ing] in the guilt of a bad action by praise and flattery”.

When US President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon of his crimes, did he thereby place the presidency above the law — or did he understand a hard reality about democratic politics that should inform the multiple prosecutions of Donald Trump?

It is fair to say that boredom is a distinctly modern terror. But, as Stan Grant discusses with Waleed and Scott, what if existential boredom points us to our deeper need?

Are the doomsday scenarios associated with Artificial “Super” Intelligence distracting us from the ways that the pervasive use of AI is already corrupting our use of language and the transmission of knowledge?

Earlier this month, US President Joe Biden made the surprising decision to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions. Does the threat posed by Russia outweigh the moral considerations that place such weapons beyond the pale for many other nations?

Western culture’s association of ageing with decline and obsolescence fuels (and is fuelled by) a desire to dissociate ourselves from our age — but such forms of subtle and overt ageism express contempt for something that is essentially human.

The newly formed National Anti-Corruption Commission faces both unrealistic expectations and a potentially fraught political climate. Professor A.J. Brown joins Waleed and Scott to discuss how it can restore popular faith in democratic politics.

Platforms like Spotify have transformed the way people listen to music through their use of recommendation algorithms and customised playlists designed to cater to either a particular activity or a particular mood.

The tendency over the past four decades has been for governments to try to shield their populations from energy shocks and their associated “cost of living” crises — but is such a response truly sustainable?

The proposed Voice to Parliament is particularly susceptible to two arguments: that it violates the principle of equal citizenship; and that it will enshrine a divisive form of “identity politics” in Australian public life. Whether these arguments hold depends on our understanding of the meaning of democratic equality.

The final season of HBO’s prestige television series Succession confirms that the various characters’ willingness to betray, deceive, manipulate and enact an unrelenting cruelty upon one another has all but assured that, in the end, everyone loses.

It’s been a long time since a policy adopted by the federal government has presented such a knot of party-political, parliamentary, social and ethical problems — Professor Miranda Stewart joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to try to untangle it.

At the end of Monday’s Q+A, Wiradjuri man and journalist Stan Grant stated: “We in the media must ask if we are truly honouring a world worth living in.” Why aren’t more taking him seriously?

As the fourth and final series of the HBO television show “Succession” approaches its finale, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens revisit the first three seasons. Why does this show matter? What does it tell us, despite its opulence and obscenity, about what is of greatest value in human life?

We live in an era dominated by vast digital platforms, what David Auerbach calls “meganets” – the sheer volume of data they trade in and numbers they produce seem to render them unassailable, irresistable.

Hyperconnectivity has coincided with an epidemic of loneliness — but is loneliness simply part of the human condition? Samantha Rose Hill joins The Minefield to discuss whether we can counter its harmful effects while nurturing genuine solitude.

Can soldiers be trained to kill their fellow human beings without that training doing irreparable damage to the moral lives of the soldiers themselves?

In the final episode of our Ramadan series, we explore the roots of our occasional heedlessness when confronted by the plight and pleas of another person: What could make us callous to their suffering, and how should we respond?

In the fourth instalment of our Ramadan series, we discuss whether “knowledge” which is wielded in a way that demeans others, or which is accumulated as a form of vanity, can really be considered beneficial?

For this third show in our Ramadan series, we’re asking what it is about the human condition that seems to drive it to perpetual discontentment? What is the virtue of repose, and when does “contentment” become indolence or conformity, a chronic lack of curiosity?

Ego-centrism is a form of inattentiveness, a failure to be responsive to the moral reality of another person. In this second instalment in our Ramadan series, we explore how such inattentiveness can corrupt our words and actions.

What does it mean to be intellectually humble? How might such humility be cultivated? What are its benefits — both to ourselves and to those around us?

Now that John Cleese has announced that the iconic series will return, it’s worth examining what made Fawlty Towers a masterpiece — and whether its interaction with the political climate of the 1970s had anything to do with it.

What made the Online Compliance Initiative — better known as the Robodebt scheme — so egregious is the way it was designed to treat those purported to be “welfare cheats” with utter contempt.

Even though we rarely frame it in these terms, it is hardly inappropriate to refer to the relationship between a parent and a child as a moral relationship. Professor Luara Ferracioli joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to explore the nature, and limits, of that relationship.

There are good political and philosophical reasons for seeing free and equal access to early childhood education as an expression of our shared commitment to justice.

Dr Lauren Gurrieri joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss the sophisticated ways sports gambling operators are targeting new clientele — through targeted ads and by parasitising existing social media technologies.

Professor Naomi Baron joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether ChatGPT and its soon-to-be-released competitors, with their lure of efficiency and ease, are threatening the human ability to write.

Professor Maryanne Wolf joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether we are entering an age of widespread moral illiteracy — an incapacity to engage in the processes that make up the habit of deep reading.

Professor Mark McKenna discusses with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens why any proposal to change the Australian Constitution must navigate Australians’ conservative disposition and underlying sense of national pride.

While political comedy has long been a distinguishing feature of truly democratic cultures, one of the more notable shifts over the past two decades has been the merger of comedy into political commentary. What has this done to the conditions of our common life?

Perhaps no “moral emotion” in our time is more reviled than shame. It is regarded, certainly in the West, as uniquely destructive to a healthy sense of self, as psychologically damaging and socially abusive, and to be avoided at all costs. Professor Owen Flanagan joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether shame has been given a bad rap, and why we might need more of it.

There is no doubt that emotions like anger can be a proper response to the persistence of injustice or inequality or prejudice or cruelty in the world. But it can also be exhausting and insatiable in its desire for retribution, or to impose one’s will upon the world. Should we, then, seek to renounce anger?