Author: Average Thief

“Be kind”

During New Zealand’s first Covid lockdown, I lost track of the number of journalists, DJs, Mayors and other commentators and public figures urging us all to be kind to each other.   In the current resurgence, we are again being urged by all and sundry to be kind – just kind – and the cry is now echoed elsewhere such as along Australia’s eastern seaboard. 

Apart from obeying the Covid rules, it seems that kindness is considered by some to be the only behaviour needed to get us through the pandemic (and, I suppose, through whatever else the future may hold). 

We all know how good and important kindness is.  Its value is especially apparent to people who routinely experience its opposite (malice) or even just its absence (indifference).

Receiving a little kindness can make an enormous difference to a day that is otherwise bleak (or worse).  People who are acutely aware of this include people whose work involves frequent interaction with members of the public – such as workers on the retail frontline, who serve a hundred or more people a day, many of whom don’t bestow a civil word or even eye-contact and some of whom are overtly rude.  Even a little kindness can give colour and sweetness to a person’s day.

So, I have nothing to say against kindness: I’m all for it.  However, I do object to urgings that speak of kindness as though it is all we need – because it isn’t, it’s not even close.

Kindness and love

“Kindness” is the short form of “lovingkindness”, which is how it used to be referred to.  This is presumably because kindness is an element of love.  This is an old association that runs deep in our culture: we are all familiar with a passage from the New Testament that begins with “Love is patient and kind” and is commonly used at both church and secular weddings.  The passage reads as follows:

Love is always patient and kind; love is never jealous; love is not boastful or conceited, it is never rude and never seeks its own advantage, it does not take offence or store up grievances.  Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but finds its joy in the truth.  It is always ready to make allowances, to trust, to hope and to endure whatever comes.  Love never comes to an end.  (1 Cor. 13: 4-8a)

While most familiar at weddings, this passage was not written for married couples.  It was part of a letter written to the early Christian community of Corinth and is concerned with behaviour in the community context.  It fills out “love” in “Love your neighbour …”.

The passage reveals that there is a great deal more to loving your neighbour (and your spouse, of course) than just being kind to them.

For this reason, a narrow focus on kindness will not really help us.

Nurture is not enough

Returning to the above passage, I would say that kindness – and, I suggest, patience and being “ready to make allowances” – represent what might be called the nurturing side of love.  Along with qualities like empathy, compassion, inclusiveness – which the proponents of kindness have also been urging on us for some time as though these qualities were the sum total of morality.

However, nurture is only a part of a viable ethos.

In fact, some of the other ingredients of love are quite unlike kindness and nurture: for example, endurance (plain hard work) and valuing the truth (which can sometimes seem unkind).  All just as necessary as kindness – all just as loving.

These nurturing virtues are the sweets of morality – lovely but not a balanced meal, and certainly not a balanced diet that sustains life or a community. 

Those moral moderns (known as the “woke”, for the time being) who urge only kindness and other sweets don’t appear to have heard of “tough love”; nor the constraint of doing right (eg telling the truth) without always deferring to feelings; nor endurance, which is critical because, after all, serious love is for the long haul.  They seem to prefer the path of least resistance – saying “Yes”, which might seem kind to the person you’re talking to.

In fact, nurture on its own can actually be dangerous.  Our cultural wisdom about “moderation in all things” exists because all good things can be done badly: a person can “have too much of a good thing”.  Our wisdom even warns us that you can “kill with kindness”.  Consider parents who can only say Yes to their child and the disastrous impact this has on the child.  Recall that teachers are increasingly required to indulge students in the same way.  This pampering and indulgence create narcissistic entitlement and unrealistic expectations: today, we see its dysfunctional product all around us.

Too much nurture is bad for you.  Being held too tight can stunt growth.  Some embraces smother.  Love and morality are an adult subject, not an occasion for handing out lollies and putting everyone on a sugar high.

Conclusion

So, while kindness (or nurture generally) is necessary and wonderfully good, it is nowhere near enough.  Love is for all seasons, kindness is for use when kindness is what love requires.  In fact, when love requires something different, kindness can be dangerous. 

Advocating kindness as a complete ethos is such extreme soft-sell that it should make the buyer wary.

Cardinal George Pell’s recent acquittal in the High Court of Australia hardly made the news here in New Zealand.  On the face of it, this is strange when you consider how much media attention was given to the Royal Commission’s findings over there, the charges laid against Pell, his trial and conviction and the failure of his appeal to the Victorian Court of Appeal (in the Supreme Court of Victoria).  These events were all big news, reported on heavily, even gleefully.

Of course, it’s only strange “on the face of it”: once you take into consideration the deep and heated anti-Christian prejudice in the New Zealand media, the silence about Pell’s acquittal is hardly remarkable.  Perhaps they hoped New Zealanders wouldn’t even know about the acquittal.  Perhaps they’re right.

It’s been more difficult for the Australian media to squash the story, so the focus has been on such petulant nit-picking as, “They didn’t find him innocent”.  Never mind that courts never find people “innocent”.  They don’t need to.  We are presumed innocent until a court says otherwise.  Pell has been returned to that state of presumed innocence, which is the same legal state that you and I occupy.  In the law, that’s as innocent as it gets.

Petulance is the grief response of the bitter and immature.

Pell was hung, drawn and quartered in the Australian media for several years.  Every time a complainant made a statement or gave an interview, there was a frenzy of reporting.  No analysis, though.  No critique.  Just strident repetition.

The public was not given much of an idea about the strength of the case when charges were laid by the police, when the Magistrates’ court referred the matter to trial, when the Office of Public Prosecutions filed its indictment, when the trial judge charged the jury, when the jury gave its verdict, when Pell appealed the verdict or when that appeal failed.  And now we know why.

The recent decision of the High Court of Australia – a joint unanimous judgment of the Full Bench (7 judges) – is the first time the case against Pell has been laid out in all its dubious glory.  The HCA’s conclusion:

“there is a significant possibility in relation to charges one to four that an innocent person has been convicted”.

This seeming understatement is as damning a conclusion as can be reached in the upper echelon of the criminal justice system.

The HCA decision can be read here:

http://eresources.hcourt.gov.au/downloadPdf/2020/HCA/12

Reading the judgment, you know immediately that whatever drove the Police, the OPP, the trial judge and the Victorian Court of Appeal, it was not the evidence.

The Police and the OPP might be forgiven if it were to emerge that the aggressively anti-Christian (sorry, “progressive”) Victorian Government pressured them into laying charges and launching the prosecution.  However, the members of the Victorian Court of Appeal have no such excuse.  The majority should have been above faddish cultural ideology, and they weren’t: they swallowed it whole.

It’s very disturbing to see just how high the rot has risen in the Victorian criminal justice system.  I say “rot” because a weaker word won’t suffice.  The majority of the Victorian Court of Appeal strayed so far from first principles that it is still hard to believe it happened.

The HCA decision reveals that the prosecution, trial and appeal were wrong at the most fundamental level.  Anyone who’s ever worked in prosecution knows that the prosecution has to prove the offence beyond reasonable doubt.  We know this means that, if the available interpretations of the evidence include one that is reasonably consistent with innocence – if there is, you might say, a reasonable (not fanciful) possibility of innocence – then acquittal must follow.  And we know this analysis applies to the whole body of evidence, taken together.

Here, the onus was shifted, and not just slightly.  It seems that the majority of the Court of Appeal were so impressed with the demeanour of the primary complainant that they decided to accept his evidence as prima facie true, and then looked at the rest of the evidence critically to assess its impact on that truth.  They concluded that the evidence of the many witnesses who gave evidence of the after-Mass movements of Pell and others on the day in question (the “opportunity witnesses”), although also persuasive, still left a possibility of the complainant’s evidence still being true – a possibility of guilt, in other words.

This completely inverts the proper reasoning.  They decided at the outset to rank the evidence (and the witnesses who gave it), rather than analyse and evaluate the whole body of evidence.

Why would they do such an outlandish thing?  It seems that their methodology was very like “Believe the victim” – let’s say, “Believe the victim if he presents as believable”.  They appear to have been powerfully influenced by the ludicrous “Believe the victim” of #MeToo.  I don’t know how else to explain their wayward reasoning.

Whatever the solution is to the real and significant problems #MeToo has unearthed, “Believe the victim” is not it.  The Victorian Court of Appeal only met #MeToo halfway and still produced a gross injustice.

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Andrew Gunn derides any concerns that the Ministry of Health’s Covid tracer app is “Big Brother gone mad” (‘The Ministry of Health’s NZ COVID Tracer app is “Big Brother gone mad” ……’, 23/5).

https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/121586608/the-ministry-of-healths-nz-covid-tracer-app-is-big-brother-gone-mad-

The article is labelled “Opinion/Satire”, which of course is simply a licence to jettison the few remaining constraints on the expression of woke journalistic opinion.  “Can’t you take a joke!?” is what he’d deploy to counter any objection – forgetting how recently woke journalists abhorred this response from men accused of misogyny.  No “satire” on the wrong side of the fence, apparently.

Gunn’s article inadvertently raises another issue.  His blithe acceptance of the Big Brother label reminds me that, for some time, there have been a number of gender-specific expressions that feminists have not tried to gender-neutralise and appropriate – such as middleman, yesman, conman, hitman and boogyman.  Big Brother is another.  I assume there are others.

The feminists’ focus has been on concepts and roles they want to appropriate, like “chairman” and “policeman”.  They are outraged by the “glass ceiling”, which they say thwarts their upward career trajectory towards executive management and the like; but they don’t even mention the “glass floor” that preserves them from doing work that is seriously dirty, damaging and dangerous.  No “empowerment” to be found beneath the glass floor – only work.

That’s why, in the woke culture that is being imposed on us, we are very unlikely to hear of “yespersons” and “boogypersons” etc, even though there are plenty of female practitioners around the place. The reason: the rather self-serving assertion that women are morally superior, they don’t make moral compromises and they cannot be dangerous.  Top this up with “Believe all women”, and all is well: nothing to see here.

And the feminists complain about male narcissism!

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Hoping for a strong future for journalism, with a “healthy news ecosystem”, James Hollings takes us on an interesting exploration of a range of possible futures (mass vs social, state vs private, monopoly vs diversity) (“A NZ without journalists: The implications of the combustion of our biggest news group”, 17/5).

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/300013540/a-nz-without-journalists-the-implications-of-the-combustion-of-our-biggest-news-groups

Hollings appears to be one of New Zealand’s journalism gurus.  He has decades of experience and he is “the programme leader of journalism at Massey University”.  He speaks with a high degree of credibility, even authority.

He presents himself as an independent and impartial figure – he even claims to champion free speech – yet the article is saturated with bias, and his bias is with the movement that is throttling free speech:

• Describing a past era in New Zealand’s history when there were a very large number of very small news outlets – “often two or three to a town” – Hollings tells us that the “small business owners” who ran them were not just “entrepreneurial”, but “voraciously entrepreneurial”. Really, “voracious”, all of them?  Anyway, he prefers “big media”.
• Describing the benefits of big media outlets, Hollings reminds us that Stuff has taken down “some rich and powerful villains” (emphasis added).
• He also reminds us that “Big private has the money and independence to take on bad governments – as we saw in Watergate”.
• Hollings warns us of the risks associated with big private media: it “can be prone to capture by oligarchs with axes to grind”. Looking more closely, however, he tell us “Oligarchs can be reasonably benign, like the Sulzberger owners of the [progressive] New York Times, or arguably manipulative and self-serving like [conservative] Rupert Murdoch” (emphasised words added).
• Then, considering some of the legal barriers to obtaining information, Hollings asks “Why do we maintain the right of (inevitably rich) individuals to browbeat news media with the threat of ruinous defamation proceedings?” (emphasis added). It is in this context that he decries certain laws as “the barrier to true free speech”.

In this article, Hollings is telling us that journalism is important, not simply to tell us the truth (no matter what the truth happens to be), but to protect us from villainy and the abuse of power – though not all villainy and all abuse of power, only the villainous rich and the excesses of conservative governments.  We are being told here that the only people who have power and are capable of abusing it are the rich and conservative.  Similarly, only the rich and conservative would try to control or censor the news!!  The only villainy we need to be protected from is what you might call “traditional villainy”.

We all know this isn’t true.  We all know about traditional villainy, but we have also come to know “progressive villainy”.  We all know that our principal institutions have been taken over by “progressives”.  We all know that, because one of those institutions is the mass media itself (thanks to people like Hollings who “programme” students of journalism), we only ever hear one side of serious contentious issues.  We all know we are being told and constantly reminded which opinions and people are good and which are bad.  We know the kids are being told the same things in the schools – because the education system is another institution that has been taken over.  We know we are not able or permitted to discuss any of this in public, and that it’s increasingly difficult to discuss it in private.  And we know this is because the “progressives” have found a variety of means of shutting down free speech: they pretty much monopolise the megaphones and they muzzle, intimidate and punish the holders of contrary views.

Does Hollings not know this?  Has he been in the game for decades and emerged naïve and blind in one eye?  It seems unlikely, doesn’t it?  It is far more likely that he is at heart a serious ideological player (not a reporter), and therefore a part of the problem.

Hollings’ “healthy news ecosystem” seems to be the unhindered expression of “correct” views.  Whether or not he personally aims to inhibit the expression of contrary views is unclear, though it seems very likely:

• media bias is not among the limited range of concerns he feels for the future of journalism;
• thanks to the programming of journalism students by Hollings and others, very few journalists hold conservative views (and those who do struggle to get their material published).

Some time ago, I greatly admired journalists and considered them essential to a functioning democracy.  Now that they’ve become players rather than reporters, I’m quite ambivalent about them.  They can get by without my admiration.  Nonetheless, for the little it is worth, I will admire them once again when they start telling the whole truth.

Meanwhile, journalism is a critical part of the new power to which truth must be spoken.

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