Apr.23 | The apocalypse at Albert Park
The reaction to Posie Parker revealed what really moves us.
Like most people, I’d never heard of Posie Parker before the media drums started beating. Her visit last month was apocalyptic in the original sense of the word—a revelation, a situation that draws back the veil and lets us see things as they really are. Parker’s visit did this in spades. Even a quick glance at Wikipedia will tell you that Parker’s views and some of her actions are, to put it mildly, controversial. But it was the response to her that revealed something both ugly and profound about the myths that move us. We often use “myth” to mean fiction, but myth has another and more important definition. It’s an explanatory story that conveys meaning, usually about things that are existential and transcendent, as when JRR Tolkien famously told CS Lewis that Christianity is a myth but one that happens to be true. Myths are all around us; not just the ones about Jesus, Ranginui and Papatūānuku, or nirvana that we label spiritual or religious, but the ones that inspired the vitriol before, during and after Parker’s gathering at Albert Park. Myths and the meanings they convey are incredibly powerful, and they aren’t neutral. With the cover stripped off them, it’s time to ask which meanings and which stories we want animating our society.
For an example of what I mean, there’s no better place to start than Golriz Ghahraman tweeting that she was “So ready to fight Nazis” as she made her way to the protest. The Nazis are a totemic symbol of evil, the clearest and most uncomplicated example we have of the forces of darkness being overwhelmed by the forces of light. Fighting Nazis doesn’t just convey a sense of sacrificial heroism; it supplies meaning at the most fundamental and irresistible level, which is why a twenty-first century MP jockeying for pre-election relevance might be so keen to attach that sense of moral certitude to her politics, even if walking up Princes Street is not obviously the same as assaulting the Normandy beaches. Sure, there was a reason for Ghahraman to reference Nazis, sort-of—Australian media reported the presence of neo-Nazis at prior events and that was all the justification Ghahraman needed to appropriate the myth, never mind that they had crashed those events and that Parker had explicitly disavowed any association, saying "They're absolutely not associated with me whatsoever. I absolutely abhor anything to do with Nazis. It's preposterous they even exist in 2023."
Myths abounded at Albert Park; Parker was doused in tomato juice by activist Eli Rubashkyn because “it represented the blood of ‘our people’”, Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson told media that “violence in the world” is caused by “white cis men”, protest leader Shaneel Lal said “I feel fearful for my safety” while marshalling 2,000 people in support. All of these are expressions of something visceral, not intellectual, something that comes from the bowels, not the brain. These actions and statements are designed to appeal to the emotional, pre-reflective part of our selves, the part that embodies the stories and the myths that move us and that drives most of what we do most of the time. It’s hard for us to acknowledge this because we live in a society that is, at least in theory, material, secular, and rational—or, as others have put it, a society that is disenchanted. But the theory doesn’t match reality. It just stops us recognising that we are, as the concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl said, meaning-seeking creatures. We can’t live without meaning any more than we can live without food. The question, then, is which meanings are worthwhile, which ones make for a good life and a good society.
This is a deeply uncomfortable question because we’ve long bought into the fiction of official neutrality. You do you, I’ll do me, and no-one will judge anyone or anything. But there is no neutrality; there is no view from nowhere. Even to insist on neutrality isn’t neutral, because it shuts down moral argument, shared public reasoning and story-telling about how we could or should live. But more fundamentally, there’s no neutrality because people aren’t neutral. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, people actually have views about what is right and wrong. Pretending that we’re neutral just masks this and prevents us having an honest conversation about it. We saw the pretence of objectivity dissolve multiple times around Parker’s visit when the myths that animate many of our cultural leaders broke into view. Media described Parker as “anti-trans” not pro-women; their coverage of Rubashkyn was invariably sympathetic, never mind the pending assault charges; the Minister of Immigration, Michael Wood, publicly regretted his inability to prevent Parker entering New Zealand and said her views were “vile and incorrect”; the High Court, reviewing his immigration decision, took note of Woods’ views while expressing “considerable sympathy” for those trying to keep Parker out of the country; media present at Albert Park described the scene as “rowdy” but not violent, never mind the assault on Parker or her need of a police escort through a hostile throng to leave the park, or footage of an elderly woman being punched in the face by a protestor.
It’s time to stop pretending that we can be neutral about the meanings that move us, because they have very different consequences. One of the primary myths driving the reaction to Parker’s visit was that staple of identity politics, the belief that society can be divided into two classes: victim and oppressor. Both groups are typically defined by fundamental characteristics like sexuality, race, religion, or gender, so once you’re lumped into a group you’re stuck with it and with the status conferred on it: oppressors are bad, therefore victims are good. This is why victims, paradoxically, enjoy a privileged status. It’s why Lal could tweet, after helping chase Parker out of the country, that “trans folk” had “a tough week” while simultaneously accepting the Young New Zealander of the Year award. Everyone is either an oppressor or a victim, a Nazi or an ally, and there can be no compromise with oppressors or with their evil. This divides society into tribes, fuelling polarisation and extremism of the sort we saw at Albert Park.
This is why the victim-oppressor myth, which treats some people as having special moral status, is such a dead and self-defeating end. Historian Tom Holland and writer Paul Kingsnorth point out this is profoundly at odds with the democratic premise that we’re all of equal moral worth, a premise that owes its origins to the Christian myth of original sin. Everyone is equal because everyone is imperfect; “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart”, as Aleksander Solzhenitsyn said in The Gulag Archipelago. This is the mythology that, because it recognises our common imperfection, celebrates virtues like humility and civility and, because it recognises every person’s common humanity, recognises the dignity of all people regardless of their views. A public square shaped by these virtues would look radically different to the one we find ourselves in today. So how can we change course?
We need something that looks much more like formation than education, and something that’s more experiential than intellectual. When Sir Peter Gluckman was asked how we could respond to the situation created by Parker’s visit, he said it was an issue of understanding human rights and “we don’t do that in our schools, most people don’t know what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights means”. But this simply doesn’t touch the real issue. There is no realistic scenario where anyone at Albert Park, whether for Parker or against her, would have behaved any differently had someone stood up and recited the text of the UDHR. Yes, we can educate people about these things, and historical knowledge helps us appreciate our inheritance of hard-won freedoms. But abstract knowledge and international human rights instruments don’t make people virtuous; only other people can do that. This starts, as always, in families, where children have a particular way of life modelled to them—whether that’s the victim-oppressor one, the Christian one, or something else. In our families we don’t just learn a set of ideas, we embody a set of appetites, of deep desires for a certain way of being in the world for better and for worse. It continues when we move out into community, where we encounter people who are different to us yet still like us in some essential way, in workplaces, unions, sports clubs, volunteer organisation and places of worship. And it continues again when we move out into society, into a public square that grants cultural power and authority to some views and not to others. This is where we learn what our society, or at least our elites, approve of from their actions, not just their words.
None of this will be neat, and nor should it be—passionate protest is a good thing and arguing about ultimate meaning is always controversial because something real is at stake. It’s also inevitable, and the current alternative, where the victim-oppressor story is the power behind an officially neutral throne, will just give us more of what we saw at Albert Park. Mere education about rights will not make things better, even assuming we could entrust it to leaders like the Minister of Immigration who have already decided which worldviews are “incorrect”. Far better to re-moralise the public square and allow a plethora of voices to have an honest conversation about the meanings we want driving our debates and the mythologies that actually produce them, without allowing lazy accusations of “culture war” to shut down the discussion. Far better, too, for all of us to do what we can in our own lives, our own families and our own communities, to make the meanings we believe in regardless of what the elites may say, and pass them on to our descendants.
Great article ... thank you
All very sensible, Alex. I dream that one day we will have well-educated public servants and representatives again who might be prepared to listen to such sensibility and engage in rational discussion. Keep up the good work.