Freedom of Christendom

“Australia is a country built on Christian values.”

One Nation, Islam policy

Australia, as we know it, began with the explicit understanding that its laws should be built on a Christian reading of the Bible. John Quick – one of the drafters of the Australian Constitution put it this way:

“The Christian religion is … recognised as a part of the common law. There is abundant authority for saying that Christianity is part and parcel of the law of the land”. [1]

It’s a contentious statement, but it’s history. History, however, is a story; and this is one that needs to be heard.

Christian influences on Australian law predate the constitution, arising from the English law system. As one Commissioner for the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia recorded:

“In a 1649 case, an English court declared that ‘the law of England is the law of God’ and ‘the law of God is the law of England.’ In a 1676 case, Chief Justice Lord Hale stated: ‘Christianity is parcel of the laws of England, therefore to reproach the Christian religion is to speak in subversion of the law.’” [2]

This law automatically transferred to any new British colony, with one restriction – the country must be uninhabited:

“…if an uninhabited country be discovered and planted by English subjects, all the English laws then in being, which are the birthright of every subject, are immediately there in force.” [3]

Australia, or New South Wales as the colony was first known, was determined to be uninhabited. As a result, Bristish law with its interpretations of Christianity was directly imported.

“There is a very great difference between the case of a Colony acquired by conquest or cession, in which there is an established system of law, and that of a Colony which consisted of a tract or territory practically unoccupied, without settled inhabitants or settled law, at the time when it was peacefully annexed to the British dominions. The Colony of New South Wales belongs to the latter class…” [4]

As Justice Hargraves said in 1874:

“‘Christianity is part and parcel of our general laws’; and that all the revealed or divine law, so far as enacted by the Holy Scripture to be of universal obligation, is part of our colonial law…” [5]

Despite her critics, Pauline Hanson’s opening sentence is correct. Australia is indeed a country built on values that were deemed to be Christian. This is true for one reason only, and that is that the British who came to Australia determined the country to be uninhabited. It wasn’t that they didn’t see the people who were here, it was that they considered them not of sufficient importance to qualify as people.

They also saw no value in Indigenous law. One early case stated that:

“Aborigines ‘had no law but only lewd practices and irrational superstitions contrary to Divine Law and consistent only with the grossest darkness.” [6]

This argument was perfectly circular:

1. If the country was inhabited by a people possessing their own law, British law could not be introduced.
2. Aboriginal law was deemed inconsistent with Divine/British Law and therefore invalid, so British law could be introduced.

By 1865, the London Times was calling the Australian invasion “a never-ceasing war”. Consider that in light of the claim that this country was “peacefully annexed”.

Recent work by the University of Queensland has unearthed a large collection of documentation from the Queensland Native Police. Much of their killing was hidden under official terms; for example, the practice of surrounding a camp in the darkness then massacring every living person was reported as “dispersal”. Up to 75 people were killed in individual massacres for which the paperwork was not destroyed, amounting to a total body count of 65,000 over the span of a few decades [7]. Many people were forced to hunt sheep and cattle as they starved from the theft of their land, so in some cases, the invaders threw poisoned dampers out in the bush to bait them like they would pest animals. Killing the indigenous people in this way was common enough to have a special name: “The Harmony” [8]. In Tasmania, martial law was declared, giving immunity for the murder of Aboriginal people. They were frequently shot for dog meat. The Reverend T. Atkins claimed that the European victory in this war was God’s judgement because these people had failed to subdue the earth. When the last male ‘full blood’ Tasmanian died, his head was skinned to souvenir the skull, his hands cut off, then the body stolen from the grave. His wife, Truganini, later made the dying request “don’t let them cut me, but bury me behind the mountains”. Her body was buried, but then exhumed, and her skeleton placed on display in the Tasmanian Museum.

One commentator summarised these events with the words:

“We must come to the conclusion that the beneficent creator never intended Tasmania to be the permanent home of the savage, but to be filled with a free, an honest, and a gentle people.” [9]

It is clear that Australia was not settled, it was not peacefully annexed; it was invaded. The invaders knew that it was inhabited, because they killed the inhabitants. There were good people amongst them; compassionate, just people who defended the owners of the land, but there were not enough of them. The First Australians were overrun, and Christianity was installed as the law of the land.

There are three realities that need to be recognised from this.

It was contrary to British law

Australia was not terra nullius; it was inhabited and it had its own law – a system that had ensured the survival of rich culture for 65,000 years, making it perhaps the most successful legal system in existence. If Aboriginal people are human beings, then it follows that to install British law in Australia was illegal under British law.

It was contrary to Christianity

The Apostle Paul said in Romans 13: 1-2:

“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.”

It is worth noting that the authority at the time Paul wrote those words was the Emperor Nero. If the British migrants had indeed followed Biblical direction, they would have submitted themselves to the existing law of the land.

It is contrary to the principle of freedom of religion

The One Nation policy goes on to say:

“Secularism is asserting the right to be free from religious rule and teachings or, in a state declared to be neutral on matters of belief, from the imposition by government or religion or religious practices upon the people.”You cannot on one hand state that Australia has freedom of religion and does not impose religious practice on the people, and on the other argue that Christian practices should be enforceable by law. This is not freedom of religion, it is Christendom. This is coopting a religion to build an empire.

 

Christianity has held a position of unrivalled privilege in this country, but the privilege was stolen. Australia is a “Christian” country specifically because the first English refused to accept the Aboriginal nations as fully human. The past can’t be changed, but the power structures built on it can be recognised and challenged.

The challenge for Christians in Australia then is whether they want to gain the world by losing their souls. We can either have Christianity, freedom of religion and the rule of law, or we can claim that stolen privilege and say that we are a Christian country. We cannot have both.

“Today Christians… stand at the head of [this country]… I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit … We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press – in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past … (few) years.”

Adolf Hitler, quoted in: The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, 1922-1939, Vol. 1 (London, Oxford University Press, 1942), pg. 871-872

REFERENCES

[1] Quick, J. & Garran, R.R. (1901) The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth. Angus & Robertson.

[2] Zimmerman, A. (2014) Constituting a “Christian Commonwealth”: Christian foundations of Australia’s constitutionalism. The West Australian Jurist, 5, 123–152.

[3] William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), Ch 2.

[4] Cooper v Stuart (1889) 14 App Cas 286, 291

[5] Ex parte Thackeray (1874) 13 SCR 1

[6] Justice Burton, in R v Jack Congo Murrell (1836)

[7] Richards, J. (2008) The Secret War: A True History Of Queensland’s Native Police. University of Queensland, St Lucia, Qld.

[8] Blomfield, G. (1986) Baal Belbora: The End of the Dancing. Alternative Publishing Co-operative Ltd., Chippendale, NSW.

[9] Harris, J. (2013) One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity, 2nd (ebook). Concilia, Brentford Square.

Justice and Djerabar

There was a time when old men could sit on the rocks of Ilkan maladul as the first light hinted silver over indigo harbour waters, when pelicans floated black and prehistoric against the new sky and voices would lift in response to sing words remembered from the Dreaming:

Gnooroome tatwā natwā natwā.

Gnoroome tatwā natwā, natwā,

tarra wow, tarra wow.

In such days, the star Sothis (Sirius) rose over the Egyptian desert and at the prompting of seers, Pharoah Khufu sent his labourers to begin work on the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was a time that marked the beginning of new things, of the ascendancy of a species that would rebuild the natural world to suit the powerful on the backs of the weak. Slaves slept as the desert sun passed below the horizon, but the same sun rose on old men marking stone with images of life, voices echoing across the water in song to Carranga bo murray – the ‘great’ birds, loved in the dawn while the great pyramids gathered death under a dying sun.

The carvings remain, but no one sings to pelicans on Ilkan maladul now. Now the stone echoes jackhammers and a casino takes shape; a new monument to the ingenuity that powerful men have to take what they want from less powerful ones. With an Orwellian flair, the point was named Barangaroo in honour of a Gadigal woman married to the famed Bennelong – first prisoner of the first fleet.

Barangaroo was an extraordinary woman, a strong voice among the Dharuk that first met the invaders. Her friend Daringa was more gentle, and this showed when one day a convict stole her fishing tackle in May 1791:

The governor ordered that he should be severely flogged, in the presence of as many natives as could be assembled, to whom the cause of punishment should be explained. Many of them, of both sexes,  accordingly attended… There was not one of them that did not testify strong abhorrence of the punishment, and equal sympathy with the sufferer. The women were particularly affected; Daringa shed tears; and Barangaroo, kindling into anger, snatched a stick, and menaced the executioner. [1]

Governor Arthur Phillip appears to have had a genuine desire to act justly, to treat people in the same way regardless of race. What might have been his response then when he saw the pain his actions caused the woman they were intended to defend? The thief had caused her anger, but he had given her tears. What could have been his judgement when he saw the Gadigal draw back in horror from the brutality of these new invaders, when Barangaroo set herself to bodily defend the man that had stolen from them because what he had done was dwarfed in her eyes by the monstrosity of what was now being done to him by the Governor?

The answer seems plain enough from history: the Gadigal and other ancient nations of Australia were to be ‘educated’ in justice.

The idea that justice and retribution are the same thing is common across many human cultures. Or, more accurately, common across many species. It may not be a formal construct, but if you’ve had dogs, you know it’s there. The difference is that humans have a particular capacity for motivated reasoning. We take the same instincts that guide other animals, and prop them up with arguments to make them feel less like instinct and more like something we chose because we had thought it through. One way we do this is to push the instinctive part another step back, further out of sight.

Take for example racism. Generally people know that racism is nothing more than an ignorant base instinct, and because they want to be better than that, they construct reasons to justify their racism. People believe that they didn’t  boo Adam Goodes because they expect Aboriginal people to know their place, they believe it was because of his “appalling behaviour”. They know his behaviour was so much more appalling than others, not because they’re fully aware of it, but because the base instinct arising from the “us and them” amygdala in their brains gives them an overwhelming conviction that it’s true. Their racism is still entirely based on base instinct, but now the instinct has been pushed back out of sight.

In 1997, an anonymous writer explained that Aboriginal people do not deserve assistance to recover from the genocide because:

They killed and ate their own women and children and occasionally their men… The older women were often killed for eating purposes, like livestock.

Whether this claim had any basis or not was irrelevant; Pauline Hanson published it in a book she called “The Truth”.  And despite an initial backlash she now has four senators in the Australian Parliament. Like this week’s Bill Leak cartoon in The Australian portraying Aboriginal fathers as neglectful drunks, it is indicative of a culture that has to tell itself scary stories about the people whose blood is on our hands. Yet within the first few years of arrival in Sydney Cove, William Dawes had learnt the word Putuwá from the Dharuk, meaning :

…to warm one’s hand by the fire and then to squeeze gently the fingers of another person. [2]

The stories white Australia tells itself have little room for acts of such tenderness, done so frequently that they have their own names.

Our instincts for vengeance are no different. We prefer the term retribution to revenge as it has a more respectable ring to it, but that again is just marketing. We learnt that revenge was bad when we were kids, so we call it an adult name now.

We have more to us than motivated reasoning powers though; we are able to question our instincts. This has become a mark of progress in societies: the recognition of revenge as a base instinct and of the need to override it. We talk about eye for eye thinking as the epitome of a vengeance paradigm, but there was a time when it was progressive thinking. Moses most certainly used it as his argument for vengeance as justice, but it was also an argument that vengeance should deliver only equal harm, not escalate the damage.

To many however, the fact that Moses taught vengeance at all is enough to push their instinct back out of sight and dress it in the semblance of reason. But Jewish progressives over time constantly questioned even Moses’ advances. Moses had insisted that Moabite descendants should never be allowed on consecrated ground because they deserved vengeance, yet the most consecrated place in all of Judaism was built by the Moabite descendant Solomon. Isaiah prophesied that the single sign of the Messiah coming would be that a young, unmarried girl would fall pregnant. Traditionally people like the word ‘virgin’ here, but Isaiah didn’t say virgin (bethulah), he said almah. Bethulah is a medically specific word based around the word ‘tear’, in reference to the Jewish tradition of collecting the sheets from the wedding night to prove from the presence of blood that an almah (young girl) was in fact a bethulah up to the point of her marriage. What this means is that if an almah fell pregnant, Moses’ retributive justice allowed only one response: stoning.

The sign of Emmanuel therefore meant something very specific: it wasn’t the announcement of a miracle for which the only evidence was the testimony of a pregnant girl, it was the profound claim that the Messiah could only make it to birth if someone in power defied Moses and let her live. According to Isaiah, Israel’s hope was dependent on its rejection of retributive justice.

This was later reflected in Jesus’ very explicit denouncement of eye for eye thinking, and in his statement that love was the fulfilment of the law. If the law is defined as love, then any action that is not love is opposed to the law. If justice has to be kept “in balance” with love as an equally valid but opposing weight, then by definition, justice is unlawful. Which leaves only the inescapable reality that the word does not mean what some people think it means.

Jesus’ teaching did not only challenge the dressing up of base instinct as the voice of God, it built on ideas explored by prophets such as Jeremiah to make sense of the confusion.

Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of his oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the alien, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.

Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice,
making his countrymen work for nothing, not paying them for their labor.[3]

Justice, they argued, is not about punishing wrong, it is about doing right, making things right. This is why the gospel writer Matthew was able to call Joseph a “just” man for defying Moses’ law and refusing to stone Mary to death. This is a definition of justice wholly consistent with love, not an opposing philosophy that has to be compromised with it.

If we consider the concept from a rational framework, the goal of retribution in a justice system is not vengeance itself, but to establish a deterrent. It is a threat that might prevent people from doing wrong, or if they do – protect others from it happening again. But what then if there is a better deterrent than retribution? The worst criminals often suffer from psychopathy, which, like narcissism and machiavellianism is an inability to empathise with others. Another trait that psychopaths have is that they are unable to learn from punishment. It’s not that they don’t care; if anything it often hurts them more. What psychopaths can’t do is relearn the consequences for an action. They are permanently optimistic, so that no matter how many times they might have been punished for something, their brains are physically unable to think  that perhaps it’s not worth doing it again because of the negative consequences [4].

But it’s not just that retribution is entirely ineffective in the places where justice is most needed; it is counterproductive across a much wider spectrum. Kids who are spanked more often are more likely to bully other kids, be violent, dishonest and steal [5]. If their father administers the spanking, they are more likely to be cruel to animals [6]. When it comes to raising kids, the evidence is overwhelming: retributive justice is a big part of what is wrong.

There was a time when spanking was a progressive form of discipline. The old Jewish approach was to beat children with a rod [7], but people recognised that if discipline was the goal rather than retribution, perhaps there were less harmful approaches. That is the beauty of our capacity to question: we are able to learn from our mistakes. Jesus’ teaching that love was the ultimate form of justice does exactly that – it defies the base instinct behind retribution that defines a person as evil. Love can boldly defy the abuser, but it does not do so by dehumanising them. The goal of love is to set them free as well as to defend their potential victims, achieving restoration for all parties. It is a definition of justice that makes rational sense.

It is this rational sense that guides one culture after another away from retributive justice as it matures. While prisons have become a massive industry in the US, in the Netherlands they are closing down due to lack of prisoners. Some decades ago, Finland had one of the highest rates of incarceration in Europe, but when they asked whether it was working, the evidence was decisive. They could either have retribution, or they could have justice and a stable society. Today they and other Scandinavian countries still have prisons because there are still people that others need to be protected from, but those people are treated with dignity and kindness, and their numbers have dropped by two thirds. Even murderers have the opportunity to spend the last years of their sentences in open prisons, where they have their own keys and can freely come and go to shop, study at University or work a job.

Treating guilty people well offends people who are not used to the idea. It feels unjust, because they have learnt to think of their instincts as reliable guides. But the third of prisoners that spend time in open prisons are 20% less likely to re-offend.

Retribution is part of a world view that sees power as something that defines good. It is a means of enforcing compliance, where something becomes wrong because you will suffer for it – be spanked, go to prison, burn in hell. It breeds self interested people that act not out of concern for others, but out of fear for themselves. This is part of the great clash that has taken place in Australia: the invaders encountered a mature culture that had faced many of its demons and grown. This is not to say that retribution had no place among the First Australians; in some nations it was still central to their conception of justice. But many of its expressions had been confronted, exposed as empty and left behind.

William Scott – an early settler that grew up amongst the Worimi near present day Port Stephens described them in his memoirs:

They are kind to one another, and to those with whom they come in contact, their generosity being proverbial. They were happy, simple in their way of living, and more prone to laughter than to tears…

Among themselves there were seldom any disputes or quarrels. They seemed always to regard life as a huge joke to be enjoyed to the utmost. With their children they were patient, affectionate and marvelously forbearing. Never once in my life at Carrington did I see a Piccaninny slapped or chastised. They were fond too of pets.

A people who could treat their children and pets in this fashion could have little guile or evil in their hearts. And so I always found it.

As I have said before, life was a joke, and the more laughter they could crowd into it the merrier passed the days. Good temper pervaded their whole conduct and it was hard to put any of them out of countenance. [8]

The Australians have been so easily overlooked by many because this acquired wisdom of acceptance meant that they didn’t create great monuments to themselves. These were people who had learnt that survival did not come by domination, so what was “great” to them – murray – was not a pyramid built by slaves, but a bird gliding slowly overhead.

It was with this understanding refined over tens of thousands of years that Barangaroo and Daringa watched Government soldiers forcibly tie a man up and tear the flesh off his back. It didn’t matter what the man had done; the act of retribution was an expression of dark instinct that had become abhorrent to them because they had access to empathy. It was little wonder then that one of the main names given to the first invaders was Djerabar – the word they used for a musket [2].

Yet as time passes on, the maturing of Djerabar culture is falling behind the pace set by our capacity for destruction; we have become toddlers playing in the tool shed. In the US, people buy guns because they believe that there are bad people that they must be prepared to kill, and in every home where a gun is stored, the likelihood of being murdered by a gun triples [9] because the extent to which we embrace retributive justice defines the scale of the risk that we pose. In Australia people talk about a Christian heritage, but they don’t mean the ideas that Jesus taught. They refer to dominion; the right to force politicians to open Parliament with prayers to our god no matter their thoughts on him, the right to teach strangers that our god will hurt them if they don’t agree to the demands we tell them he has made.

So it is in such a Djerabar culture that US Presidential candidate Donald Trump was able to openly say that he would kill the families of terrorists. War is the ultimate retribution, the point where the makeup of civilisation smears and runs to expose the truth. It does not need to be this way. We don’t have thousands of years in which to learn, but we have thousands to learn from. Others have done it in the past, are doing it today. It is so long past time that we listen to wisdom and learn justice.

The battle was conducted in the most fair and open manner; each party drew up in two lines, armed with spears, shields and boomerangs, and threw spear for spear for a considerable time, before any damage was done. At length a Yarra-Bandina black was slightly wounded in the forehead and a Calliteeni black transfixed by a spear.

This concluded the fight; both the hostile parties now mingled together in a most friendly way; and the Yarra-Bandini tribe was even more anxious than the other in their efforts to alleviate the wounds of the dying man.

…the Austral Aborigine conducts his warfare in a controlled and formalised manner so minimum damage was done to man or countryside. And aggression being assuaged, good feeling and compassion was the order of the day and it may be said that in this all-important aspect of humanity on earth, the Australian Aborigine has achieved a degree of civilisation so far not attained by the other people of the world. [10]

_________________________________________

References

1. Tench, W. (1793) A complete account of the settlement at Port Jackson in New South Wales, G. Nicol and J. Sewell, London.
2. Dawes, W. (1791) William Dawes’ notebooks on the Aboriginal language of Sydney, 1790-1791, Hans Rausing Endangered Language Project and SOAS Library Special Collections, Blacktown, NSW.
3. Jeremiah 22:3, Jeremiah 22:13
4. Gregory, S., Blair, R.J., Ffytche, D., Simmons, A., Kumari, V., Hodgins, S. & Blackwood, N. (2015) Punishment and psychopathy: A case-control functional MRI investigation of reinforcement learning in violent antisocial personality disordered men. The Lancet Psychiatry, 2, 153–160.
5. Straus, M.A. & Mouradian, V.E. (1998) Impulsive corporal punishment by mothers and antisocial behavior and impulsiveness of children. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 16, 353–374.
6. Flynn, C.P. (1999) Exploring the link between corporal punishment and children’s cruelty to animals. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 61, 971–981.
7. Proverbs 13:24
8. Bennett, G. (1929) The Port Stephens blacks: recollections of William Scott. Chronicle Office, Dungog
9. Kellermann, A.L., Rivara, F.P., Rushforth, N.B., Banton, J.G., Reay, D.T., Francisco, J.T., Locci, A.B., Prodzinski, J., Hackman, B.B. & Somes, G. (1993) Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home. New England Journal of Medicine, 329, 1084–1091.
10. Clement Hodgkinson, Australia from Moreton Bay to Port Macquarie, Oct 1844

The selfish submissive

There is a small species of moth that hatches in the flat agricultural land of the western slopes, from southern Queensland down to Victoria. As the spring commences, they grow wings and fly often as far as 1000km to settle on specific peaks high in the Snowy Mountains where they sleep for the summer before heading back to their birthplaces and laying fresh eggs in the autumn. The ability of Bogong Moths to navigate such vast distances against the wind and find an exact location is superb. And in a broad existential kind of way, quite enviable. I think of the years I spent longing for direction and purpose, for some indication that what I was doing had meaning and that I did not just dig a hole to earn the money to buy the food to get the energy to dig the hole; to have some kind of internal compass like that would have saved a lot of heartache.

Some people find all of the direction that they need in the rules they follow. Obedience and respect for authority impose a sense of order on the world, the awareness of something larger than ourselves that we can become part of. Do the right thing and get a job, work hard and if it is asked of you; give for the sake of your country. People can give extraordinarily under such circumstances, and memorials are filled with the names of those who have died for the cause that their country told them to die for. The call arose and they bravely responded – Australian and U.S. soldiers in the Middle East, Middle Eastern soldiers defending against them. All taking their cues of right and wrong  from the authority that stands over them.

Do all who follow the rules of their country then do what is right? It would be difficult to claim that if countries issue opposing commands. The nationalist answer is “of course not, only the rules from my country!” The irony of the fact that their nationalist enemies believe the same is lost on them because tribalism is immune to reason. This is the territory of raw instinct, and right and wrong have become subject to authority. If the leader says it is right, then it is right and facts have become irrelevant. Americans loyal to President Bush Jnr. were shown his own report admitting that there had never been Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq after all; but rather than questioning the fact that they had invaded a nation and killed so many people on false pretences, the loyal followers found themselves believing in WMDs with even more fervour [1]. It’s a kind of loyalty called inferred justification, and people cling to it as a lifeline because taking a reasoned approach endangers the compass that gives them direction and purpose.

The security that comes from obedience to authority can become so important to some that they will do anything to stay true to it. In an effort to understand how the Holocaust had happened, social psychologist Stanley Milgram convinced a number of volunteer test subjects that by pressing a button they were delivering increasing electric shocks to someone. Despite cries of pain and pleas for mercy, two thirds of the subjects were prepared to increase the shocks to lethal levels because they had been instructed to do so. Subjects showed signs of an embattled conscience, believing that they were causing someone pain against their will, but those who continued did so because they trusted Milgram’s assurance that it was for the greater good, and critically – because they understood that he would carry all responsibility [2].

In the war trials following WWII, it became clear that Nazi officers had similar reasoning patterns. Whether they saw the pain of their victims or not was irrelevant; their concern was that they were not responsible for the atrocities they carried out. In what became known as the Nuremberg Defence, people guilty of horrific acts absolved themselves of responsibility with the words “orders are orders”. The German Supreme Court had earlier expressed those sentiments in this way:

“…all civilized nations recognize the principle that a subordinate is covered by the orders of his superiors “[3].

If upheld, this principle would have absolved war criminals of all personal responsibility. The International Military Tribunal did not accept this, and responded with Nuremberg Principle IV:

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

You can’t however legislate instinct, and the appeal to International Law is lost on a nationalist mind led by loyalty. The appeal to another authority becomes blasphemy.

Hitler’s second in command Hermann Göring did not have the reputation as an anti-Semite and four times secured the release of his younger brother Albert from prison after he had worked with the resistance to free prisoners from Nazi concentration camps. He had the capacity to empathise and was an intelligent man who behaved courteously and cooperatively with his jailers after the war [4], yet long after his country had lost, he defended his actions with the words: “As long as my enemy threatens me and demands absolutely unconditional surrender I fight to my last breath”. He didn’t seize on the opportunity to sue for mercy despite the written belief of Hitler that at the last Göring had betrayed him to cooperate with the Allies, but responded by saying it “grieves me deeply that the Fuehrer could believe in his last hours that I could ever be disloyal to him” [5].

If loyalty to an authority is the compass that gives your life purpose, then pressure and hardship will only increase your dependence on it, blinding you to all else and infusing you with such meaning and intensity that you will readily die rather than deny it. This is the reality that we live with, because in the end our brains share the same components with sheep in a flock, following a leader into danger, jumping over invisible threats because the leader did so.

All we, like sheep.

There are two objections that will be raised at this point. In the first case, many will say that the people doing these things are just bad people; we of course could never do such a thing. But the world isn’t made up of goodies and baddies, it’s made of humans who do cruel things and kind things for complex reasons. If an American child has a dad who buy guns because he thinks the goodies should have more guns than the baddies do, history has shown that child is now 3 times more likely to be shot [6]. By their good dad. Because there are no goodies and baddies, just flesh and bone people with chemicals driving instincts like cyclones through the heart of their glorious humanity.

In the case we’re discussing however, the goodies/baddies division is even more misleading because if anything, the opposite is true. A study published two months ago found that the personalities most likely to continue administering electric shocks in the Milgram experiment were those that society would call conscientious and agreeable [7].

Conscientious, agreeable people in general are more likely to torture you to death if they are ordered to do so.

One of the things I love about science is that such counter-intuitive discoveries are a hopeful sign that we’re onto something. Learning something new so often means correcting something false, so contrary to popular belief science is more about disproving things than proving them. New ideas and understandings arise when we falsify wrong ones.

In this case, the key to understanding lies in combining this knowledge with an earlier study of the same question from a different angle. The researchers in that study found a very obvious personality trait behind the behaviours – the people most likely to obey and torture are the most authoritarian people [8]. Note how this changes the picture slightly – the risky people now are conscientious, agreeable people who also believe firmly in submission to authority.

This brings us to a fundamental issue of morality. Which is better – the child who doesn’t hit their brother because they will get in trouble, or the child who doesn’t hit their brother because they don’t want to hurt their brother? Who has a higher moral standard – the woman who works hard at her job because she wants to do it well, or the woman who works hard at her job because there are cameras in the office? Authoritarianism can make us more agreeable and conscientious, but when it does, the good traits arise out of concern for the self, not for others. Submission to authority in this context is ultimately a selfish act, and this is exactly what we see in society. To date, every single study on the subject has found that kids who have been taught to do good out of fear of punishment are more likely to be anti-social than other kids that never had that authoritarian upbringing [9, 10]. The conscientious, agreeable people who were prepared to torture an innocent stranger were that way because they were more concerned for their own welfare than for the stranger. They didn’t want to get in trouble.

The second objection is a religious one: if International Law trumps national law, then surely God’s law trumps both. Christians and other faiths have long traditions of civil disobedience, choosing punishment or even death because they value a version of right and wrong that they believe comes from God over others. The reasoning is sound, or so it appears. Consider the words of prominent Reformed theologian R C Sproul [11]:

“The most significant issue that any human being will ever face is the question ‘how can I escape the judgement of God.‘”

If there is a god and that god has a standard of right and wrong against which we will be judged, then what could possibly be more important than to ask how we measure against that judgement? In one sense this seems unarguable, but it is only unarguable if we first accept the same premise that made subjects more likely to do harm in the experiments: that our own welfare is more important than the welfare of others.

So what if there is conflict between our own welfare and the welfare of others? What if – just as escaping the judgement of a human authority leads some to hurt others, escaping the judgement of God does the same? Imagine for a moment that you are in the crowd receiving these instructions from Moses:

“When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may [the word “may” does not exist in the Hebrew] take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby. However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes.”

Now, say that you believe Moses was speaking on God’s behalf, and ask yourself whether this moral compass resolves your dilemmas. Someone has surrendered to you and you have the power over them. Do you be obedient and force them into slave labour, thereby escaping the judgement of God, or do you treat them with kindness? Perhaps the city did not surrender but defended itself against your invading army. You won the battle and there are now female survivors. Do you choose a woman to take as ‘plunder’ and thereby escape the judgement of God, or do you refuse to rape her and instead be kind to her? Perhaps the city you invaded is part of the Promised Land, and you have defeated it. You’ve entered a home and there is a small child cowering in the corner – do you kill the child and escape the judgement of God, or do you be kind to them?

Notice that putting the source of authority one step further back does not resolve your moral dilemma; you are still faced with one simple, ultimate decision: do I put my own interests first and submit, or do I put the other first and rebel?

This is the great illusion of the Moral Compass: in the end, we all choose our own bearing.

We can say “who am I to question the Almighty?” but we are pretending if we do. We do know. Worshippers of Moloch offering their babies for sacrifice knew. Soldiers standing with drawn swords over pleading children knew. John Calvin knew when he agreed to burn Servetus at the stake for heresy, he was aware that it tore at his very humanity and concluded that the humanity would have to go.

“God is defrauded of his honor, unless the piety that is due to him be preferred to all human duties, and that when his glory is to be asserted, humanity must be almost obliterated from our memories” [12].

 

We cannot escape our moral dilemma because ultimately we remain responsible for our choices; the notion that some greater authority bears that responsibility is an illusion and it is only in facing this reality that we have a chance to find the direction and meaning that we long for. We are not moths with no choice but to follow our instincts or sheep wired to follow the leader; humanity includes the ability to choose and to question. Making decisions that give us favour with an authority, give us an escape from the judgement of God or open heaven to us are only enough to give us ultimate meaning if we first decide that our own welfare is the ultimate good. It is a sense of purpose and a morality given to us purely by the base instinct for self-preservation. It is raw, unadulterated natural selection.

Such a sense of meaning is in the end no more meaningful than waking in the desert, flying to the mountains and returning in the autumn; it’s only meaningful if we choose to infuse it with meaning. We can just as easily find meaning if instead we elevate the welfare of others above our own. Not to avoid punishment or because we are being watched – those are still selfish motivations; we are capable of finding satisfaction purely from seeing good done.

It’s a vision that is also articulated in some religious circles; Jesus called it his good news of the Kingdom. Just as he was only born because Joseph consciously disobeyed Moses’ law and refused to stone Mary for her unexplained pregnancy, Jesus described a fully-extended love by which people were saved not from God, but from sin. From a hell he called Gehenna – the valley where powerful people sacrificed others on ‘the flame that never dies’. Longing to escape the selfishness of our culture and instincts and to replace it with a conscious choice to love in a way that is less at the whim of instinct sounds very much like meaning and purpose to me.

 

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References

1. Prasad, M., Perrin, A.J., Bezila, K., Hoffman, S.G., Kindleberger, K., Manturuk, K., Powers, A.S., 2009. “There must be a reason”: Osama, Saddam, and inferred justification. Sociol. Inq. 79, 142–162. doi:10.1111/j.1475-682X.2009.00280.
2. Milgram, S., 1963. Behavioral study of obedience. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 67, 371–378. doi:10.1037/h0040525
3. Finch, G.A., 1921. Superior orders and war crimes. Am. J. Int. Law 15, 440–445.
4. Kelley, D.M., 1946. Preliminary studies of the Rorschach records of the Nazi war criminals. Rorschach Res. Exch. 10, 45–48.
5. International Military Tribunal, 1946. Cross examination of Hermann Goering, Nuremberg IMT.
6. Kellermann, A.L., Rivara, F.P., Rushforth, N.B., Banton, J.G., Reay, D.T., Francisco, J.T., Locci, A.B., Prodzinski, J., Hackman, B.B., Somes, G., 1993. Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home. N. Engl. J. Med. 329, 1084–1091.
7. Bègue, L., Beauvois, J.L., Courbet, D., Oberlé, D., Lepage, J., Duke, A. a., 2015. Personality Predicts Obedience in a Milgram Paradigm. J. Pers. 83, 299–306. doi:10.1111/jopy.12104
8. Elms, A.C., Milgram, S., 1966. Personality characteristics associated with obedience and defiance toward authoritative command. J. Exp. Res. Personal. 1, 282–289.
9. Straus, M.A., Mouradian, V.E., 1998. Impulsive corporal punishment by mothers and antisocial behavior and impulsiveness of children. Behav. Sci. Law 16, 353–374. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1099-0798(199822)16:3<353::AID-BSL313>3.0.CO;2-O
10. Durrant, J., Ensom, R., 2012. Physical punishment of children: lessons from 20 years of research. Can. Med. Assoc. J. 184, 1373–1376.
11. Holmberg, E., Johnson, J., 2004. Amazing grace: the history and theology of Calvinism. The Apologetics Group. doi:10.1353/cal.1999.0077
12. Calvin, J. 1554. Defense of Orthodox Faith against the Prodigious Errors of the Spaniard Michael Servetus

Thought and memory

Places have memories. The small voices that echo through forests are gathered like old clothes and photographs and woven into the songs of Lyrebirds and Magpies. Trees grow on their past; Black Oak on the summit plateau of Mt Kembla suggest that there have been no fires there for years and the growth rings in the stumps of felled trees record the dry years and the good ones. For the oldest stories though, you need to go under hill, beyond the tree roots and into the stony bones of the mountain. Old mine shafts burrow into these memories, hidden behind the scrub along the coal-pony trail and the lonely Windy Gully cemetery; but access to them is now barred because their resurrection led to too many such graves.

Yander-airy (Silvertop Ash) nuts

These memories stretch back to days before Antarctica lost its forests, back to some of the darkest times our earth has known. Their story is inextricably tied to the Tunguska basin of Siberia, where the hills bear the distinct flat tops and steep sides of basalt country. Country like the Monaro grasslands that I miss deeply, where you could hear cold wind in grass and stone as hard grains of snow blew over from the mountains on their fringes; but this wilder, colder country continues beyond where our ranges and horizons, forests and deserts would set its boundaries. The Siberian Traps cover an area nearly the size of Australia – basalt ridge beyond range, lava cooled to bedrock from one of the greatest periods of volcanism in earth’s history [1]. Throwing so much ash into the air that they caused massive global winters, [2] the lava burned into even older coal seams and the resulting fly-ash poisoned the oceans on an unimaginable scale, ending nearly all marine life [3, 4]. As the bodies decayed and the pH of the ocean changed, the carbon returned to the air along with the burnt coal seam and the gases emptied from the volcanoes to utterly alter the earth’s climate. It was very nearly the end of life on earth [5]. The carnage was laid out in a vast global graveyard, coal seams and fossils, memories of life and loss. Images buried for ages that dwarf civilisation but are held in the memory of the landscape like a lyrebird’s call or a magpie’s warble can hold the voices of the birds. But these are not just images of former lives, the lives themselves hold memories of the light and air they have grown in and the things they have eaten; energy captured and stored in the coal and oil. Energy to power the red ute for the driver to drop the clutch and burn his tires, impressing a girl and filling the hills with smoke. Smoke to start me on my climb to the top of the mountain, where I can leave behind the echoes of motorbikes in the hills and enter the eerie silence of an oncoming change. In one small tree that the Dharawal called tdjeunen (Blueberry Ash), I watched a Yellow Robin, Crimson Rosellas and two species of Thornbill flit through the branches without making a call. It’s a reverent silence. The aura of a desert wind in rainforest foretelling possible snow on the higher Gandangarra country; weather for Black Cockatoos to wheel and cry on the storm, riding the front like a wave. She-oaks whistle on the plateau under a sky of ridged clouds, ripples in the lee of the range. Something ancient and wild is happening and the Dharawal daughter of the west wind is holding her breath.

Mt Kembla summit trail

Fortified and calmed by her silence, I head back down the mountain trail to where a burned out car body lies at the roadside in the pass; a four-wheel drive tailgates me as I leave. The driver can afford the diesel because Western companies staved off skyrocketing oil prices by gaining access to Iraq’s reserves, because the Coalition of the Willing invaded a country on false pretext, killing 100,000 people in one year [6]. Unarmed people for the main, people going about the business of driving their kids to school, building houses, praying, picking fruit and operating on patients. The destruction of that society caused an implosion of one group blaming the other, of grief-fuelled insanity turning brother against brother with justifications grabbed where they could be found so that the numbers had escalated to over 600,000 in the next two years [6]. And it spreads, again spurred on by Western nations securing their oil interests, secretly backing insurgencies [7] that send refugees fleeing Syria and surrounds in catastrophic numbers, then issuing stern warnings about the rebels they had backed so that their voters rally in fear and faith to the flags they stand with. Cheap fuel it turns out still has to be paid for by someone; but it’s not only by the lives of people we don’t know and don’t really care about. It was always this way; children made the old coal mines run. A boy was blown out the entrance to the Bulli coal mine in 1887 and 81 people killed because they had been given the choice to either face the danger with dangerous lighting that could cause explosions or to let their families starve. Just 15 years later, 96 men and boys were killed in the same way under Mt Kembla while unions sat in a meeting to battle the company for safer conditions. But despite condemnation from a Royal Commission, safety lights were not provided for another four decades.

A girl dragging coal in Victorian England.

People are still given the choice to work in the mines or go without. Clean, safe and renewable industries like solar and wind produce far more jobs per dollar spent [8], but the Australian Government spends $3.5 billion a year just to find new fossil fuel deposits [9] for the companies. And how our instincts betray us; people in need of cheap electricity to power big TVs and keep enormous houses at a comfortable temperature are quick to hear Alan Jones claim that wind-powered electricity costs us $1502 per Megawatt hour, somehow missing the actual figure of $80, which is just over half the price of coal power. There is money in digging up bones, but not for people trained to believe that their existence can be defined by the word consumer.

Winderong on Mt Kembla

A few enormous Red Cedar can be found on the southern face of Mt Kembla – winderong was their name before we forgot it. Next year will be the 200th anniversary of the night when a baby cried in the darkness, giving away the location of the Dharawal to Macquarie’s soldiers who then drove them off a cliff and hung the bodies of the warriors Durelle and Cannabayagal from trees as warnings to any possible survivors [10]. We may have lost their names that night, but small birds still flit through the undergrowth in the shelter of the trees, and leeches stand upright on ferns waiting for passers by. Something in me recoiled from the idea of leeches feeding on my blood when I first moved here from drier places, but I soon recognised how little they asked and how little they hurt, how easy it was to break the seal with my fingernail and put them back on a plant without hurting them. Below this place, coal trains echo along the escarpment with a volume that demands attention and a force that will ride over any life in their path. Australia exports 50,000,000 tons per annum of coal to China, a country where quarter of a million people die every year from the smog it produces. Not all of those deaths are ours; our percentage of coal is responsible for about 3,900 deaths, or 41 Mt Kembla coal-mine-disasters per year. Thought and memory are hard, hard things to entertain; they leave you feeling stained and unclean, and too often there is an aroma of death in their wake. Perhaps that’s why the old Norse legends said they were ravens. It’s easier to let them pass, not to hear them croak in the afternoon emptiness; once you’ve heard them you can no longer listen unknowingly to the sound of the power lines crackling with the harnessed energy of Pangaea’s mass grave. We block our ears and cover our eyes, we buy a bigger TV to distract ourselves more effectively, a more comfortable car. Distractions from thought, tools to re-write memory and history, and to repeat that history with new foolishness. But life continued after Tunguska. The continents cracked and spread, colliding to build mountains, rising to provide wanderers passage to new country and falling to cradle new life. The world became wider and richer and the Illawarra rainforests cloaked the slopes and plains. And there in the shadow of the yander-airy and winderong the lyrebirds collect the voices of their forests into memory. White coachwood bark glistens in the shadows over moss and ferns, she-oaks whistle on the heights and the daughter of the west wind stands watch over an age of coal trains, chimneys scattering poisons over people trapped into their servitude; the wheels of a machine attempting to impose permanence and comfort with destruction and fear. Old, wild things hidden in the shadows and hollows, waiting for people to discover that humanity can be something more than the next great extinction, waiting for brave people to leave the path, listen to the wind, love the small things and meet memory with thought.

  References

1. Reichow, M.K., Pringle, M.S., Mukhamedov, A.I. Al, Allen, M.B., Andreichev, V.L., Buslov, M.M., Davies, C.E., Fedoseev, G.S., Fitton, J.G., Inger, S., Medvedev, A.Y., Mitchell, C., Puchkov, V.N., Safonova, I.Y., Scott, R.A., Saunders, A.D., 2009. The timing and extent of the eruption of the Siberian Traps large igneous province: Implications for the end-Permian environmental crisis. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 277, 9–20. doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2008.09.030
2. Saunders, A., Reichow, M., 2009. The Siberian Traps and the End-Permian mass extinction: a critical review. Chinese Sci. Bull. 54, 20–37. doi:10.1007/s11434-008-0543-7
3. Grasby, S.E., Sanei, H., Beauchamp, B., 2011. Catastrophic dispersion of coal fly ash into oceans during the latest Permian extinction. Nat. Geosci. 4, 104–107. doi:10.1038/ngeo1069
4. White, R. V, 2002. Earth’s biggest “whodunnit”: unravelling the clues in the case of the end-Permian mass extinction. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London 360, 2963–2984.
5. Sahney, S., Benton, M.J., 2008. Recovery from the most profound mass extinction of all time. Proc. R. Soc. B Biol. Sci. 275, 759–765. doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.1370
6. Burnham, G., Lafta, R., Doocy, S., Roberts, L., 2006. Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey. Lancet 368, 1421–8. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)69491-9
7. U.S. Department of Defense Iraq Report, August 2012. http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version1
8. Grudnoff, M., Denniss, R., 2014. Will we let the sun shine in? – Trends in the Australian Solar Industry. Policy brief No. 65. The Australia Institute
9. Bast, E., Makhijani, S., Pickard, S., Whitley, S., 2014. The fossil fuel bailout: G20 subsidies for oil, gas and coal exploration. London. http://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2014/11/G20-Fossil-Fuel-Bailout-Full.pdf
10. Liston, C., 1988. The Dharawal and Gandangara in colonial Campbelltown, New South Wales, 1788-1830. Aborig. Hist. 12, 49–62.

Talking trees

I had closed my eyes to listen to the waves as I sat on the sand, so I didn’t notice the huge dog approaching until his smiling face met mine eye to eye – just checking everything was ok. Moose and I have met before on the pre-sunrise beach, and his particular friendly bounce has become part of the place. Not all dogs there are the same though, as was apparent when one rushed me as I jogged past a few mornings ago. He didn’t bite my outstretched hand, but like his owner he did look like he wanted to. It’s a part of a dog’s brain that switches into action sometimes when a strange voice is heard or feet with an unknown sound and smell walk past the gate; a very basic part called the amygdala flicks the ‘enemy’ switch on and the world is immediately divided into the two packs of us and them. Our pack gets loyalty, homecoming welcome, brave defence and a tail thumping on the floor when you enter the room; their pack – no matter who they are – gets bared teeth and the threat of bad things to come.
We might like to think we are above that sort of thing, a little more advanced, and in one sense we are. Humans have a very well developed area of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex that acts as a kind of error checker and it means that we have the option of acting on our instinct or rejecting it; the catch though is that it is only an option and our amygdala can be very convincing. If you’ve ever stood in church or under a flag, if you’ve ever listened to a song, been to a football game or watched old soldiers salute and felt shivers down the spine and that resolute sense that you are encountering something greater than yourself, then you have felt just how persuasive your amygdala can be. It doesn’t run on reason but on symbols – chord progressions, traditions, turns of phrase that trigger embedded messages; it can wash us away with the overwhelming sense of being part of something enormous. It’s primal, powerful, beautiful.

It is precisely because our amygdala is beyond reason that it can be so convincing to many; its power is mystical. Just like the dog’s brain, it divides the world into our pack and theirs; the people we care about and the ones we won’t. Lovers meet under the moon of their amygdalas, the small knot of cells and chemicals croons to them when they see the face of their babies, their children, and the community of people like them. We grow to trust these instincts when we are given no reason not to, we question them less and the error checker in us lies dormant. If we are not careful and give ourselves over to this drug of abandonment and blind obedience, we grow amygdalas and shrink anterior cingulate cortexes. This makes us increasingly conservative, we want to keep the world the way we know it – a place where instinct gives us love and community; tells us who we can trust and keeps us safe from those we can’t. And in doing so we begin to forfeit a part of what makes us human.

Like dogs snarling at innocent joggers, instinct-driven people don’t question their rejection of the other; they know. As a boy growing up in a conservative home, church and school, I was wary of people who didn’t follow my religion. You couldn’t fool me, I knew that there was something secretly untrustworthy about them. Hospitality in the U.S. Deep South may be legendary, but that didn’t stop several hundred good white people from hunting and massacring every African American they could find in the town of Rosewood Florida 92 years ago, because the same raw instinct was behind both actions. The same instinct that led good German people to love their countrymen also led them to kill Jewish people, led good Americans to turn Jewish refugee boats around, leads good Australians to do the same to refugees fleeing the Taliban, to keep them in concentration camps where children forget their names because they are referred to by number, where people with scars from torture are placed on planes between guards that drive their heads down between their knees if they call for help so that they can be forcibly sent back to the people they had escaped. So many disappear and are never heard from again, but good, neighbourly Australians don’t lose sleep over it if they have given over to the primal high of following and belonging to Team Australia.
Giving over to conservative faith in instinct over reason means that the tail begins to wag the dog. We begin to make decisions using primal instincts like disgust, using our rational minds to make arguments that justify them instead of questioning them. As a primal instinct, disgust can be helpful in telling us whether something is safe to put in our mouths or not, but it’s not foolproof. Kids often get disgusted by things like veggies or kissing, but those things are not inherently wrong. Disgust is a largely learned instinct; toddlers play with poo. Foods loved by one culture will disgust another, sexual activity that is intimate for some will seem abhorrent to others. Disgust is the embedded will of the pack, but it speaks with the voice of a god, and while ever we bow down to such instincts and formulate society and religion to endow them with eternal truth, we fool ourselves into surrendering the part of our humanity that remains free to choose and to question. If we foster this conservative mind while isolating ourselves from interaction as equals with others outside of our packs, we dumb down our brains and grow the same darkness we have watched others grow in the past.
Cultures have long recognised the great tension that lies within us. I recently spent some nights camping near Mt Yengo in NSW, at a place where neighbouring Dharruk, Wiradjuri, Wonnarua and Awabakal nations joined the Darkinjung on their land for Burbung (1). Similar international gatherings happened at other places like Pigeon House mountain on Yuin country, or Tidbillaga (the Snowy Mountains) in Ngarragu land. While instinct serves much of basic life well, these nations recognised the need to mix with their outgroups, to feast together, celebrate, play, sing and intermarry. Growing and elevating the anterior cingulate cortex over the amygdala extended even further however; Burbung was the ceremony where boys were recognised as men, a time when they encountered Daramulan and received what the Ngarragu called bagal, the kinship with another species. From that point on, the welfare of an entire plant or animal was in the hands of this young man, just as women received bagal in other ways. Bagal was the glue that connected not only different nations, but even different species. One story says that the voice of Daramulan was given to the trees (2), so that as the days grew after winter and the Waratahs flowered, the breezes set the trees talking and the gales gave them the shout of Daramulan, calling people to Burbung and feast with the other, reminding them forever of bagal and their undying connection to all things living.

There is a deep irony that so many millennia of learning and wisdom were wiped from Australia to be replaced with something that people called Christianity, when the core teachings of the man it was named after so utterly refuted this cruelty to outgroups. “Love your enemy” was not a strategy to manipulate others for peace, it was a direct challenge to instinct. Everyone – even the people you look down on most – already love their friends and family. But you, you can be extraordinary if you choose. You have the choice to be ordinary and love your neighbour, or you can redefine your neighbour as anyone you have the opportunity to love. Jesus’ term was captured in the Greek word teleios, from which we get the word telescope. Fully extended. Fully extended love does not stop with your pack, your tribe, your species; the instincts that tell you to do that can be questioned. You have the freedom to do it. You are free to break out of the cultural boundaries if you see that they are cruel or wrong. Like the German officer that helped my Dutch Grandfather escape a German labour camp, like the Palestinian doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish who continues his fight to end hatred between Israel and Palestine even after Israeli tanks deliberately targeted his daughter’s bedroom. Like the West Papuan leader Jacob Rumbiak who forgave his Indonesian captors after decades of torture; like the Yura Aboriginal woman who stood between the convict who had stolen her property and the man punishing him for it with a whip.
Our instincts can take us to powerful and beautiful places. We can love them, enjoy the chills, let the love for our friends, a beautiful face, a smiling baby, the landscapes that have embedded themselves in our souls wash over us. It is profoundly, stirringly human and we should allow ourselves to dive in deeply and feast on it; but our experience of it will be all the richer if we don’t abandon the rest of our humanity while we do so. Don’t fool yourself into hearing the voice of God in the chemicals that wash through your brain. Don’t let the word truth come to mean the things that you feel so strongly; let it keep its meaning and pursue it instead. Love your enemies and discover that you have none, eat Halal food with your Muslim neighbours and discover the bagal you share, choose not to hurt the small life that annoyed you; be kind. It is a strange thing, but by discovering your humanity, you awaken to a world whose heart was beating around you the whole time you were sleeping.

1. Matthews, R. 1897. The Burbung of the Darkinjung tribes. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria. X. 1-12
2. Hartland, E. S. 1898. The high gods of Australia. Folklore. 9 (4). 290-329