Impressions

[Mugwump]

^ Stui, I have no problem with more security in EDs, because workers need to be protected. What I have a problem with is the way the pattern, and its causes, goes undiscussed.

[stui magpie]

Trust me, it's being discussed, just not via the media.

[Mugwump]

Hi MW, I trust you're enjoying your visit to Melbourne and I hope the Pies do the right thing and win a game for you before you leave.

I don't understand what you have in mind when you refer to the 'cultural norms & behaviours' from 30 years ago. Could you elaborate?

Thanks. I hope it was not significant that the first game they played after my arrival was the worst they have put in for the year.

I don't think I referred to "the cultural norms and behaviors of 30 years ago". I think I said we needed to return to understood cultural norms and behaviour, because the last 30 has seen a steadily increasing level of violence. By "uniform, understood cultural norms", I meant respect for the law, a deep understanding of, and affiliation with, Australia's history and traditions, and a familiarity with the modes of life and speech that once made us one people in a shared land. Today, I think we have become, like most Western nations, rather like an aircraft carrier moored on the earth, where different communities land, and live within a geographic and legal envelope, but without much real affinity or common purpose. This underpins, I think, the civic detachment which makes violence much more likely. It also underpins the level of inequality we tolerate, since we do not see ourselves in other Australians.

[npalm]

I can't help feeling that you're judging the present too harshly and romanticising the past.
I agree that there was generally more respect for the law and less civic detachment in the past but there was no shortage of intolerance and violence back then.

Present day Australia has no shortage of problems but its a better place than the Australia I grew up in. Its a better place for Women, for the Indigenous, for the LGBTI. And its even a better place for some of us sad old white males.

[Mugwump]

I can't help feeling that you're judging the present too harshly and romanticising the past.
I agree that there was generally more respect for the law and less civic detachment in the past but there was no shortage of intolerance and violence back then.

Present day Australia has no shortage of problems but its a better place than the Australia I grew up in. Its a better place for Women, for the Indigenous, for the LGBTI. And its even a better place for some of us sad old white males.

Oh I agree that those things needed to change. People occasionally say that I want the past back, but I don't. I would like some aspects of the past back, where I think we chose the wrong future, and reasonable liberalism became fractious libertarianism. It was quite possible to make those just reforms without the relativism that leads to the criminality, family breakdown, child abuse (always there but I think greater now), Drug dependency, terrorism and inequality that we have today.

Life today is better for many sad old white men. If nothing else, most of them bought and inherited cheap property that has become very expensive. So they are often doing well. I don't think it is better for the young, for the children with siblings from three or four fathers, for the ice addicts, and for the victims of a murder and GBH rate that is approximately 8 times what it was in 1960, and accelerating. Social breakdown has happened before to complacent civilisations, and nothing makes us automatically immune from it. Our history and institutions are a vaccine, but those are being eroded while we squabble over stale ideological ground.

Modern democracy is about a hundred years old. Western ultra-liberalism (aka postmodernism) is about 30 years old. It is quite possible that these two things are incompatible, and this may be the real meaning of Trump and the fracturing of America's civil society. Where America goes, the West tends to follow. These questions are not a matter of the past, they are a matter of the cultural choices we are making, mostly unconsciously, in this present.

Asia, strangely, is getting on very well indeed by taking almost an opposite course entirely. Its politics are different, but it is far closer to the society we had 50 years ago in its social values. That too is interesting.