Fractured Realities.

How To Heal A Fractured Society: On March 27th 1939, Michael Joseph Savage opened the new Social Security building on Aotea Quay, Wellington, replacing, in just six weeks, the Aitken Street building destroyed by right-wing arsonists earlier that year. As the economic and social historian, Bill Sutch, later recalled: “The ceremony took place in the presence of thousands of people, in time to mark, five days later, the end of poverty.”

IT’S A PRETTY CONFRONTING VIDEO. Recorded in Starship Hospital, it shows “Baby Will” being taken from his protesting parents for pre-operative tests. Perhaps the most jarring aspect of the video is the father’s loud and repeated accusations that the Police officers present are acting illegally. As if the court case, which the father witnessed, was of no significance. As if the judge’s decision – which found in favour of the medical authorities seeking guardianship of the infant so that the life-saving surgery he needed so urgently could go ahead – was not binding. Clearly, the “reality” inhabited by the father differed radically from the reality inhabited by the Police officers, the medical staff, and the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders.

Kate Hannah, of the University of Auckland’s “Disinformation Project”, characterises the situation depicted in this disturbing video as “a split reality”. Human-beings in the same room, breathing the same air, and utilising the same light, nevertheless believed themselves to be engaged in entirely different activities. “Baby Will’s” parent believed their child was in imminent danger and were trying to protect him. The Police and Starship’s medical staff believed they were doing what was necessary to save a baby’s life. Tragically, the impasse could only be resolved physically – by the Police officers interposing their bodies between the child and its parents.

Much of the responsibility for the emergence of this split reality lies with the augmented powers of communication vouchsafed to “ordinary” people by the Internet and social-media. It is now relatively easy to pour false or misleading information into the minds of tens-of-thousands of citizens.

Ironically, these extravagant lies have the power to effectively inoculate their victims against the truth. If people can be persuaded that, as Donald Trump insists, “the whole system is rigged”, then all the officially-sanctioned expertise in the world becomes untrustworthy. The alienated masses’ response to ‘the facts’, echoing Mandy Rice-Davies’, becomes: “Well, they would say that – wouldn’t they?”

It would, however, be wrong to think that this triumph of misinformation and disinformation is a new thing. Technological innovation has empowered all sorts of communications over the centuries. The equivalent of a twenty-first century video, recorded on a smart phone, might be the anti-elite graffiti daubed on the walls of Ancient Rome; or the inflammatory religious pamphlets, illustrated with blood-curdling woodcuts, rolling-off the new-fangled Protestant printing-presses of the Sixteenth Century.

If ever there was a time of split-realities, it was during the Reformation. At stake in this great 100-year-long falling-out between Christians was nothing less than the individual’s immortal soul. The perceived existential threat, registered by Protestants and Catholics alike, wasn’t just to their well-being in this world, but to their long-term location in the next!

But, if religious disputes were bad, political conflicts proved to be even worse. In no other facet of human existence are split realities more common than in the hotly contested realm of political belief – and action.

Consider the following passage, drawn from an editorial published in The Dominion on election-day 1938:

Today you will exercise a free vote because you are under this established British form of government. If the socialist government is returned to power your vote today may be the last free individual vote you will ever be given the opportunity to exercise in New Zealand.

A level of paranoid hyperbole to rival even the most egregious National Party troll on Twitter!

Not that Labour Party voters took their lead from the Tory press – not in 1938. That was the election in which Labour received its greatest ever share of the popular vote, an astounding 55.8 percent. If reality was split in 1938, then Labour’s portion was a large one. Not even the united and venomous opposition of what we would today call the “mainstream” media could shake the loyalty of Labour’s voters.

The reality inhabited by working-class New Zealanders prompted an unequivocal endorsement of the government they had elected in 1935. Change had been promised, and change had been delivered. And “their” government wasn’t finished – not by a long shot. A vote for Labour in 1938 was also a vote for “Social Security”. The eponymous Act of Parliament, passed before the election, was due to come into force on 1 April 1939. If New Zealanders wanted a welfare state, then they knew what to do.

There are some interesting parallels between the elections of 1938 and 2020. Both came after a sustained period of crisis – seemingly overcome as the result of Labour’s inspirational leadership. The voters were grateful; they were keen for more; and they were willing to vote for it – even some National supporters. The big difference between 1938 and 2020, of course, is that Jacinda Ardern had nothing like Mickey Savage’s Social Security Act waiting for voters on the other side of the ballot-box.

Not everybody was on-side with Savage’s agenda. In the wake of Labour’s landslide victory, and with the Social Security Act’s coming-into-force date fast approaching, forces on the other side of the Thirties’ fractured reality struck back – torching the new Social Security Building that was rising on its Aitken Street building-site, barely a stone’s throw from Parliament. The smoke that swirled around Parliament in February/March 2022 was not without precedent.

Those ugly scenes in Starship Hospital this week are an echo of the unprecedented divisions that opened up in the months immediately following the 2020 Labour landslide. Future historians will sift through those months for explanations as to how and why the love for Labour and its leader was lost. Much will be said about vaccination mandates and extended lockdowns, but those, alone, will not be enough to explain the steady erosion of Labour’s position.

Perhaps, we should ask ourselves what would have happened to the mood of New Zealanders if, in the wake of the arson attack in Aitken Street, Savage had announced that, in the name of national unity, he was going to repeal the Social Security legislation. Imagine the sense of betrayal, the sense of loss. Imagine the level of animosity ordinary working-class voters would have directed towards the Labour Party. We can only speculate as to whether or not it would have exceeded the disappointment experienced by the New Zealand electorate in 2021/22 as kindness was cancelled, and the Team of Five Million disbanded. One outcome, however, is easily predicted – reality would have become even more dangerously fractured.

Except, of course, Mickey Savage did not do that. This is how I described his response to the arson in Aitken Street in No Left Turn, published in 2007:

“We have got to get the Social security Act working on April 1st and it’s going to work”, Savage told the country […..] and his government were as good as their word. “We are not going to weep,” said the irrepressible Minister of Public Works, Bob Semple. “It is a question of getting our backs into it, and getting the job done.” While firemen were still dampening down the smoking ruins on Aitken Street, Semple promised the construction of a replacement building within six weeks. The Public Works Department, Fletcher Construction, and the building firm of R.C. Love began work immediately on a site in Aotea Quay. James Fletcher admitted that this schedule would “necessitate the working of two 10-hour shifts, and it is anticipated that approximately 150 men will be required for each shift”. It is a measure of how vital the replacement of the building was seen to be that the normally obstreperous building trades unions agreed to work the site around the clock. Even more remarkable is the fact that the contractors agreed to take no profit!

On March 27th 1939, Savage opened the new building. As the economic and social historian, Bill Sutch, later recalled: “The ceremony took place in the presence of thousands of people, in time to mark, five days later, the end of poverty.”

That’s how you hold a country together.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 12 December 2022.

Too Many Angels And Devils.

 

He’s got the fire and the fury

At his command

Well, you don’t have to worry

If you hold on to Jesus’ hand

We’ll all be safe from Satan

When the thunder rolls

We just gotta keep the devil

Way down in the hole

─ Tom Waits, “Way Down In The Hole”

WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE about Stuff Circuit’s Fire and Fury? It’s a well-made documentary of the sort New Zealand television used to make, but now only produces intermittently. It seeks answers to the questions many New Zealanders have been asking themselves since Parliament Grounds went up in flames on 2 March 2022. The driving force behind Fire and Fury, the highly-experienced journalist, Paula Penfold, has delivered on her promise to go behind the events of that day and name the names of those who were, at least in part, responsible for the disturbing scenes that marked the end of the weeks-long anti-vaccination protest.

Why, then, has the documentary left me feeling vaguely uneasy? And, before you object – “It’s meant to! – my uneasiness has nothing to do with the unsavoury cast of proto-fascist conspiracy theorists and “influencers” whose faces and words feature so prominently throughout the documentary. Sure, these people are loathsome, and their comments teeter alarmingly on the brink of outright criminality, but that is entirely unsurprising. From the get-go, the tone, sound-track, and crepuscular palette of the production cues the viewer for the darkness of its subject-matter.

Borrowing their title from Tom Waits’ Way Down In The Hole suggests that the makers of Fire and Fury see their subjects as being down there with the Devil. Perhaps that’s it? Perhaps it was my unconscious conflation of “Jesus’ hand” with the hands of the documentary’s producers, that gave me the uneasy feeling that I was being led to someone else’s holier-than-thou explanation for the rolling political thunder of our times.

Bluntly, Fire and Fury relies much too heavily on the “expert” commentary of Kate Hannah, a principal investigator and director of The Disinformation Project, a state-funded research exercise run out of Te Pūnaha Matatini at the University of Auckland. In an interview with Dale Husband on the Māori radio station, Waatea, Hannah revealed that The Disinformation Project had been set up in February 2020, immediately prior to the outbreak of the Covid-19 Pandemic, to counter the anti-government, anti-scientific, and anti-medicine narratives that the authorities were clearly anticipating.

What is it that disturbs me about The Disinformation Project? Surely, having people monitor the misinformation and disinformation being spread deliberately during a major medical emergency is an entirely sensible government initiative? Any undermining of the collective effort to protect the population from the effects of a potentially deadly virus is prima facie evidence of evil intent. Many would say that identifying and neutralising such anti-social elements is an important state responsibility.

True enough, but why bury such a unit deep in the dense undergrowth of academia? And why appoint as its director a woman whose Masters thesis was on Nineteenth Century American literary culture, rather than a qualified medical administrator? If such a unit was needed, then why not set it up within the Ministry of Health, and make it answerable to the then Director-General of Health, Ashley Bloomfield?

The problem is, the moment you start asking questions like this you immediately run the risk of being branded a conspiracy theorist. And that just circles the whole argument back to its starting-point: the dark narrative of evil intent which lies at the heart of Fire and Fury.

The question, never satisfactorily answered, which lies at the heart of the heart of Fire and Fury is – Why? What is it that prompts individuals to create false political, economic and cultural narratives in the first place? More importantly, what is it that makes otherwise perfectly sensible and caring people follow these fantasists down their rabbit holes?

Well, what led Alice down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carrol’s famous children’s story? Wasn’t it the sight of a waist-coated white rabbit consulting a pocket-watch and muttering “I’m late!”? Who wouldn’t want to get to the bottom of a sight as peculiar as that!

Many people find themselves caught up in events over which they exercise no control, and which they do not understand. Since, in small matters, they find it easy to identify cause and effect, they assume (wrongly) that big events can be equally easily explained.

This is by no means an unreasonable assumption, given the propensity of governments to explain large events in the most simplistic terms. Those who remain unconvinced by these official versions, all too often discover their scepticism is entirely justified. Nothing encourages the growth of conspiracy theories faster that citizens discovering that their own governments have conspired to deceive them.

In Fire and Fury, Kate Hannah explains the concept of what she calls “necessary” or “protective” violence. Once a group of citizens convinces themselves that their government, motivated by pure evil, is “coming after their kids”, then there is nothing they will not contemplate to keep their loved ones, and their homeland, safe.

Step this argument back a few paces, and it is possible to grasp how individuals of an authoritarian and/or paranoid temperament, having learned that their government has deliberately lied to them, decide that striking back with lies of their own is not only justified – but also the only effective way to balance the scales.

Like the evil wizard in the tale of Aladdin, the conspiracy theorists come offering “new lamps [lies] for old”. And, like all good liars, they mix in a hefty portion of the truth in with their falsehoods. “Why is it,” they ask, “that you will never encounter people with information contradicting the government’s claims in the mainstream news media?” While most people will respond by pointing out the idiocy of spreading false information during a pandemic, a not inconsiderable minority will accept the conspiracy theorists’ explanation that the news media are nothing more than the paid mouthpieces of a government unwilling to tell its citizens the truth.

It is a great pity that Paula Penfold and her team did not spend more time talking to the fiery and furious individuals around whose behaviour the documentary was constructed. A pity, too, that they did not explore in greater depth the popular conviction that the Public Interest Journalism Fund – which paid for Fire and Fury – is proof of the conspiracy theorists’ contention that the mainstream news media has, indeed, been bought and paid for.

Yes, there is an argument to be made that it is better to allow these “influencers” to condemn themselves out of their own mouths, than it is to interview them one-on-one. Equally, there is an argument for doing both: broadcasting their views – and also asking them to explain why they continually engage in such dangerous speech. Watching Fire and Fury, it is easy to apprehend its makers’ fear of “the mob”. The hostility directed towards journalists who were “just doing their job” by militant anti-vaxxers certainly was frighteningly intense.

And yet, these people are New Zealanders, too. And perhaps that is what, in the end, made me feel so uneasy about the Fire and Fury documentary. Watching it, the viewer cannot help being struck by the vast epistemological gulf separating its subjects from its makers.

Listening to Hannah and the other, equally disdainful “experts” consulted by Penfold and her team, the viewers could be forgiven for thinking that they was listening to a team of anthropologists describing the cultural practices of a particularly belligerent tribe of indigenes. Certainly, the inclusion of Rebecca Kitteridge, Director of the SIS, among that commentary team does not bode well for the future safety of this truculent tribe.

Fire and Fury didn’t quite call them “deplorables” – but it came close.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 15 August 2022.