The Minefield

On 24 July, French President Emmanuel Macron announced his intention to recognise a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September, as part of France’s “historical commitment to a just and durable peace in the Middle East”. Just five days later, UK Prime Minister Keir announced that the UK, too, will recognise a Palestinian state in September:“unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza and commits to a long term sustainable peace, including through allowing the UN to restart without delay the supply of humanitarian support to the people of Gaza to end starvation, agreeing to a ceasefire, and making clear there will be no annexations in the West Bank.”These announcements come at a pivotal moment. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is worsening by the day, with the UNRWA Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini, reporting that one in five children are malnourished and more than 100 people have died from starvation. Meanwhile, negotiations between Israel and Hamas that would see hostages returned and a durable ceasefire reached have broken down and there is little prospect of them resuming.It is important to note that, whereas in the past the prospect of recognition of a Palestinian state has been used as a way of getting representatives of the Palestinian Authority to meet certain conditions, here the threat recognition is being used to pressure Israel into abandoning its own intransigence.Even among those who are committed to a two-state solution, however, there remains some doubt as to whether recognition would materially change anything for Palestinians, at least in the short term. So what would be the point of bringing recognition forward in the peace process?

There are few things more peculiar to a person than their preferences. Why it is they enjoy one genre of music over another, or a particular artist within that genre but not others. Why they derive specific pleasure from a certain type of fiction (romantasy, say, or Scandinavian procedurals) whereas others (like Agatha Christie’s Poirot crime novels or dystopian sci-fi) leave them cold.And then there’s that whole undergrowth of what we might call “guilty pleasures”: low-brow books or formulaic television series or lowest-common-denominator movies that we secretly enjoy but would be mortified if anyone found out.Which suggests, of course, that the network of preferences we call “taste” most often has a class dimension to it. Having specific tastes, and finding certain things distasteful, signals our belonging to the social stratum that has learned how to appreciate those cultural objects. It’s not that taste is altogether emptied of its subjective dimension — its ability to evoke authentic feeling, real enjoyment — but rather inner appreciation is in a kind of performative dialogue with the expectations of others.And yet even within the realm of taste, there are subtle distinctions. Immanuel Kant one between “the taste of sense” (what is pleasant to me) and “the taste of reflection” (which may not be immediately enjoyable, and which may require effort or patience or instruction before yielding its treasures). According to Kant, what is truly “beautiful” is only available to the taste of reflection — a form of enjoyment that we want to enjoy with others.In our world of endless digital reproduction, we increasingly rely on recommendation algorithms to curate our encounters with culture — algorithms that work along the lines of, “If you liked that, you will probably like this …” Algorithms, in effect, attempt to make our preferences legible, which is to say, predictable, offering us more of the same in order to keep us interested and engaged.In this way, algorithms can only work at the level of what Kant called the taste of sense — they can operate along the lines of “likes” or “dislikes”.But algorithmic recommendations cannot read the subtleties of our preferences, they tend toward massification, and they rule out the possibilities of both aesthetic achievement — learning how to appreciate, even love, what we didn’t initially “like”.

In a justly famous 1910 essay titled “The Moral Equivalent of War”, the American philosopher William James rejected the “fatalistic view” that war is an inevitability between nations, and expressed his hope of “a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples”.For all this, however, James confessed that he did not believe “peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states … preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline”. He feared that, in the absence of the cultivation of certain martial virtues — “intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command” — a “peace-economy” would ultimately devolve into a “simple pleasure-economy”. Hence his appeal to discover what he would call a “moral equivalent of war”:“If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man’s relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life.”What William James is calling for, of course, is a form of national service — a mass mobilisation of young men (and it is, unquestionably, men that James has in view), not in order to engage in warfighting, but for the sake of nation-building. The cultivation of manliness and military discipline that would result, James hoped, would then form a kind of “cement” upon which peaceful societies could be built.It is a compelling vision, and resonates with calls in many quarters for the establishment of forms of compulsory national service and the restoration of rites of passage for young men — collective experiences meant to initiate them into adulthood, and prepare them for the responsibilities that come along with it. These calls are also arising at a time when the very concept of masculinity itself is shrugging off a degree of the shame or opprobrium it has accumulated (most often in the form of the adjective “toxic”), particularly under the aegis of the #MeToo movement.Indeed, one of the more conspicuous dynamics at work during the 2024 US presidential campaign was the relentless association of “liberals” or “Democrats” with weakness, enfeeblement, effeminacy, hysterical emotionality … whereas Donald Trump and his ilk were powerful, rebellious, virile, stoic — in a word, masculine. It was hardly coincidental that Trump made so many appearances at UFC events and on macho podcasts. In its own way, the 2024 US presidential election was restaging the ancient contrast between Sparta and Athens, between Rome and Greece.“Extreme fitness” content online, the almost religious significance of gyms and the iconography of the “swoll” male body does seem to point to a kind of rejection of the liberal “pleasure economy” in favour of the military virtues of “hardihood”, discipline, preparedness to struggle, “contempt of softness”.And yet this performative masculinity ultimately lives and thrives online — and as such, is not only narcissistic but eschews the “surrender of private interest” and “obedience to command” that William James believed needed to be cultivated in order to ward off self-directed egotism.If we accept that young men may be craving the restoration of a sense of honour, of pride even, to the concept of masculinity, can this be done without the performative egotism, without the contempt for “softness”, without the will to dominate, that seems so much part of online culture?You can read Samuel Cornell’s article “Welcome to the age of fitness content — where men train for battle without ever experiencing war” on ABC Religion & Ethics.

Could a stand-up routine ever rise to the level of “art” — the kind of performance that rewards multiple viewings, whose humour grows and deepens, which contains subtleties waiting to be discovered? A sketch certainly can. Just think of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” from 1944, or the trial of Ravelli in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup from 1933, or Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s “One Leg Too Few” from 1964. With each new viewing, the comedic timing, the precision and cleverness of the puns, the exaggerated physicality, the sheer virtuosity of the writing cannot help but surprise and delight all over again.But with most stand-up, the humour arises from a certain immediacy: the interaction between the material and the peculiarity of the times in which it is delivered, and between the comedian and the physical audience. The frisson that arises from that interaction, the shock or surprise the comedian is able to elicit, is hard to re-experience to the same degree.It stands to reason, then, that if a stand-up act was to endure as a piece of comedic art, it would most likely be performed by a comedian who cut his teeth while working as a sketch writer for a show like Saturday Night Live.Enter John Mulaney. There is something undeniably enduring, timeless even, about his Netflix special “Kid Gorgeous at Radio City”. It was recorded in 2017 — in the aftermath of Trump’s first election to the US presidency, when public bewilderment was still offset somewhat by the belief it wouldn’t last long — and won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special in 2018.Mulaney’s act exhibits a strange sort of genius, though. It is obviously a piece of writing. Indeed, he explicitly references the act of comedic writing throughout the routine.Mulaney is also assiduously non-political — right up until the moment that he isn’t. It begins with a nostalgic nod: “I just like old-fashioned things. I was in Connecticut recently, doing white people stuff …” He makes reference to the oddity of coming across a gazebo that was “built by the town in 1863”: “Building a gazebo during the Civil War, that’d be like doing stand-up comedy now.”And then he embarks on a metaphor for the Trump presidency that has been hailed by many as genius: “Here’s how I try to look at it, and this is just me, this guy being the president, it’s like there’s a horse loose in a hospital …”The aesthetic connection between Donald Trump’s golden coiff and a horse’s mane is, of course, immediately pleasing. As is the invocation of something heedless thundering through a finely tuned environment. There’s the added benefit that Trump’s name is not mentioned once, and yet the entire simile works. The question is … why?

In a digital age, it’s all about “content”. The post or tweet or reel or video or pod is nothing without something in it that permits it to be shared, to circulate, to attract attention, to promote engagement. What matters is the fact of circulation, not the usefulness or accuracy or beauty of what is circulating.In other words, “content” is generated not to last, but merely to attract attention for the time-being; it is designed to be transitory without regard for either epistemic or aesthetic value; it merely fills the void left by the creation of digital platforms; it exists primarily to circulate, which is to say, to go viral; it reduces everything to “fodder”, regardless of the human dimensions or tragedy or seriousness or spuriousness of the story. The perfect encapsulation of “content” is the meme.The ethical and aesthetic problems this presents are not exactly new, but the scale and speed of the “content industry” — especially in a time of generative AI – invests them with a degree of urgency.

As soon as it was published in February 1974, Peter Benchley’s novel “Jaws” was a sensation and remained on the New York Times best-seller list for over ten months. It continued to loom large in the public consciousness when, just 16 months after its publication, a 27-year-old Steven Spielberg adapted it for the big screen.While “Jaws” was the third such best-selling novel to be made into a popular film by the mid-1970s (following Mario Puzzo’s “The Godfather” from 1969, and William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist” from 1971), nothing to date rivalled its commercial success and cultural influence. This had something to do with Universal Pictures’ television advertising campaign, as well as the decision to opt for nation-wide release rather than the staggered rollout which had been the norm. But there was something about the source material on which the film drew — designed as it was to both appeal to and induce a certain terror about swimming in the ocean, about venturing into an alien habitat where humans don’t belong — and the scheduled release date at the start of the summer holidays, that achieved a rare alchemy; a perfect recipe for mass appeal. And so the “summer blockbuster” was born.The genius of Carl Gottlieb’s script and Spielberg’s directorial vision was to pare back the sprawl of Benchley’s novel — its preoccupations with class tensions, political corruption, marital breakdown, economic decline, urban crime and pollution — and reduce the story to two central planks: a monster terrorising a small sea-side town, and three men united in the effort to kill it. The movie is divided almost exactly into these halves (unlike Benchley’s novel, in which the hunt for the shark is limited to last quarter of the book).For all this, however, it is not finally the monster that holds our attention throughout the film — the shark, after all, barely appears, and is most often suggested, by music, by the exposed dorsal fin, by the yellow barrels — but two profoundly human affects:the vulnerability of the town itself, represented powerfully by Amity’s precarious economy and the bodies of the shark’s preferred prey — young women and children;the humanity and unlikely comradery of the three men aboard the far-too-small boat (as Roger Ebert wrote in his 1975 review, the movie works “because it’s populated with characters that have been developed into human beings we get to know and care about”).Without question, the cultural terror over the shark, which had been reduced to a “rogue” killer, a mindless “eating machine”, is one of the legacies of the film, and the impetus behind a range of disastrous anti-shark public policies. But “Jaws” also manages to hold out other lessons — about the danger of putting other priorities over public safety, about the nature of “moral panic”, and about the humanity that is required to ensure genuine threats don’t bring out the worst in us.

On 12 June, Israel initiated a devastating series of strikes on Iran — the goal of which was evidently to diminish the nation’s increasingly problematic nuclear program and to “decapitate” the nation’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists. There is no doubt these attacks were meticulously planned and represent the culmination of a long-term strategy: to neutralise the threat posed by Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen and Gaza.The timing and urgency of the strikes, however, have puzzled many. After all, they came little more than a week prior to the scheduled latest round of talks between the United States and Iran on the future of the latter’s nuclear program. The precipitating event seems to have been the release of a recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which found that “Iran can convert its current stock of 60 percent enriched uranium into 233 kg of WGU in three weeks … enough for 9 nuclear weapons”, and that “Iran is undertaking the near-final step of breaking out, now converting its 20 percent stock of enriched uranium into 60 percent enriched uranium at a greatly expanded rate”.Such findings would certainly have been central to US-Iran talks. But they were taken by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as posing a clear and imminent threat to the State of Israel, and therefore as justifying a preventive attack.Iran then unleashed a series of missile strikes of its own, citing justification on the grounds of “self-defence”. We have, in other words, two nations claiming to be acting in self-defence. But this isn’t peculiar to this specific conflict between historically hostile nations. Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States asserted a right to “pre-emptive self-defence”. Vladimir Putin justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as an act of “self-defence” against a future attack.“Self-defence” thus seems to have become a legally and politically promiscuous term, and can thus be used to justify actions in which no imminent threat is present and for which alternatives are available. What, then, are the legal and philosophical limits to claims that one is acting in “self-defence”, particularly when that entails pre-emptive violence?

Between 1996 and 2022, for all but a brief and tumultuous six-year hiatus, the Coalition has governed Australia. Over this period, not only did the Liberal and National parties dominate federal politics, they defined the terrain upon which the political contest itself would be fought. On any number of policy fronts — from border security and immigration through to taxation, fiscal management and the US alliance — the Coalition staked out what would constitute the new political “centre”.But over the last two federal elections, the Coalition has seen its numbers in Parliament dramatically reduced — losing more than 30 seats to Labor and Teal independents, nearly all of them from Liberal ranks.It was hardly surprising, then, that the Coalition would find itself in jeopardy. After a brief separation, the Liberals and Nationals decided to carry on together. But the underlying tensions between the Parties remain. And yet these tensions are perhaps not as significant as those within the Liberal Party itself:between Liberal members/preselectors and the majority of Liberal voters;between the ideologically liberal and philosophically conservative forces;between the political moderates and aspirational multiculturalists, on the one hand, and those wanting to emulate the more extreme, divisive politics of the likes of Donald Trump, on the other.A divorce from the Nationals could have presented a welcome opportunity to resolve the Liberal Party’s own internal tensions, its lack of identity, its philosophical incoherence. Has the mended political relationship now made that impossible? During an extended period in opposition, can the Liberal Party fashion a truly Australian version of conservatism — one that eschews the more divisive, atavistic, bellicose traits that define it elsewhere?

It is a problem many people increasingly feel they can neither avoid nor ignore: we could characterise it as the problem of loving the art, but being unsettled by the behaviour or the beliefs of the artist who created it.This is a perfectly serviceable way of grasping the outline of the matter, but, on further reflection, it fails to get to its heart. For it’s not that we are merely put off by or disappointed with the artist — as though they have somehow failed to live up to an ethical ideal or have adopted a way of living that is a bit too outré for our liking.What is at issue is not so much disappointment as it is betrayal: we’ve come to know something about the artist so distressing that it cannot help but plunge us into a state of either deprivation (we still value the art, maybe even love it, but no longer know how to enjoy it) or dissonance (we go on pretending that what is essentially private doesn’t matter, and that the art can continue to be enjoyed in its own right). In either case, we are left longing for a lost innocence when we did not know what we now know.Whatever it is that ruins our appreciation of these artists and intellectuals, it is something that threatens to permeate the whole. Call it a kind of monstrousness. In her book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, Claire Dederer perfectly captures the affective dimension of the dilemma concerning great artists:“They were accused of doing or saying something awful, and they made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or … we don’t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption.”It would be a mistake, however, to see the problem of “tainted artists” as just an ethical problem — like wearing affordable clothes that are manufactured under exploitative conditions, or eating chocolate that is not ethically sourced, or buying cage eggs, or a principled refusal to eat meat that otherwise tastes good. It is also an aesthetic problem. Because knowing what we know causes us to see the work differently.You can read an excerpt from Anna Funder’s book Wifedom, on George Orwell’s domestic monstrousness, here.

Fresh from a commanding victory at the federal election, Anthony Albanese began to bundle his campaign policy offerings together in a new package — not just to give these political commitments a kind of internal coherence, but also to stake out what could be distinctive about his premiership as a whole.The term he reached for to sum it all up is “progressive patriotism”. In a conversation with David Crowe for the Nine papers, the Prime Minister explained what he means:“We spoke about doing things the Australian way, not looking towards any other method or ideology from overseas. At a time where there’s conflict in the world, where people are often divided on the basis of race or religion, here in Australia, we can be a microcosm for the world.That says that we’re enriched by our diversity, that we have respect for people of different faith, that we try to bring people together, that we don’t bring turmoil overseas and play out that conflict here, either, and that’s really important.This is a project, if you like, that’s not just about strengthening Australia, but also being a symbol for the globe in how humanity can move forward.”Hearing a Labor leader talk in terms of “patriotism” should not be terribly strange to our ears. Bob Hawke did it in his own vernacular, and Paul Keating was able to combine a certain confidence over Australia’s place in the region with an irrepressible economic self-assurance that was his trademark style — a national confidence, moreover, that needn’t be undermined by a frank acknowledgement of what “we” Australians had done to the First Peoples of this land.But left-leaning patriotism can lay claim to a longer, more noble lineage. It was, after all, the British Labour government of Prime Minister Clement Atlee (1945–1951) and his Minister for Health, Aneurin Bevan, that established the NHS and embarked on an unprecedented public housing program — a welfare state borne along by the winds of post-war patriotic sentiment.For his part, Albanese seems to be invoking a notion of patriotism largely devoid of ideology and exceptionalism, and that is grounded in an enlarged idea of welfarism and social provision. It is a promising and undeniably noble sentiment. But in times like ours, can “patriotism” really shed its exclusivist undertones?Can patriotism be reoriented as a horizontal attachment to our fellow citizens through the shared principles that govern our common life — or must it always involve a form of vertical loyalty, a civic religion that binds some of us together insofar as we swear fealty to a necessarily exclusionary ideal?