Sep.22 | Religious freedom's continuing slide, the precedented pandemic, a valediction, and false compassion
The courts won’t protect what society doesn’t understand or value | Disagreeing with the International Science Council | Retrieving hope from pessimism | Aspiration without outcomes
Religious freedom continues its slide down the hierarchy of protected rights
The courts won’t protect what society doesn’t understand or value
The relationship between faith and social acceptance is changing fast. Yesterday’s majority is today’s minority; what was generally accepted and valued is now marginal. Religious people know this instinctively, and recent court decisions have confirmed it. On the surface, religious freedom is a protected human right—but in the face of widespread social incomprehension, that protection is waning. The High Court’s latest COVID decision continues this trend. Churches and mosques united to argue that some COVID-related regulations, like gathering limits that restricted in-person services, went too far and breached the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Running into a temporal and technocratic approach, they lost. Keep reading
The pandemic was not unprecedented
In which I, a mere mortal, disagree with the International Science Council
It’s common to hear that COVID-19 was “unprecedented”. Among the latest and most august perpetrators are the International Science Council, who recently released a report titled “Unprecedent and Unfinished: COVID-19 and implications for national and global policy.” The Council’s President, fellow Kiwi Sir Peter Gluckman, begins the report with this: “The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented disruption to lives and businesses around the globe.” The pandemic certainly caused widespread suffering and disruption—but was this unprecedented? I imagine my grandparents, three of whom served in uniform in the Second World War, could have told you a bit about global disruption. So could those who lived through the Spanish flu, which killed nearly 9,000 New Zealanders in two months. Calling the pandemic “unprecedented” lacks historical memory and understanding, and this matters for two reasons. Keep reading
Roger Scruton’s valediction
Learning from the final chapters of “How to be a Conservative”
“The default position of the human psyche”, says Roger Scruton, includes “fear, resentment … anger”. Like Matthew Arnold on Dover Beach, he has heard the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of things he holds dear, things that bind us together and make life in common possible. This is a pessimistic ending to his magisterial book, How to be a Conservative—though as the author of The Uses of Pessimism, Scruton may not be troubled by this label. Instead, he may retort, it is only by appreciating what we have lost that we can recover what we value. But to achieve this we must prise the art and the act of recovery from pessimism’s dead embrace—and this appreciation, this hope, retrieved from Scruton’s melancholy, is the final gift his book has to offer us. Keep reading
Aspiration without outcomes is false compassion
The road to hell is paved with aspiration. The old saying, updated for our current Labour Government, was encapsulated perfectly in the Prime Minister’s recent interview on Q+A. “When you compare your policy aspirations with the results your government has achieved, what have you learned?” asked the host. “You know what, I would not ever change the fact that we have always throughout been highly aspirational,” replied the Prime Minister. Pressed on a litany of non-delivery, she went on, “What you’re asking me is to shy away from aspiration …” It’s part of a problem diagnosed by Danyl Mclauchlan in his recent Sunday essay for The Spinoff, “An administrative revolution.” He points to the Q+A interview as a symptom of a wider problem—the increasing divide between the “professional managerial class,” the people who run things, and the people they represent. These elites are “more concerned with the virtual and abstract than the physical” and “the primary purpose of their politics is therapeutic.”
The vision is everything. In 2019 the government unveiled its Road to Zero campaign. This approach to road safety, funded at $3 billion over the next three years, “adopts a vision of a New Zealand where no one is killed or seriously injured in road crashes”, which it pretends it will realise by 2050, and which is accompanied by a $15 million advertising campaign (including the famous $30,000 in illuminated zero signs). … [Waka Kotahi] has more managers, more HR administrators, more accountants. It spent $25 million refitting its offices. But road deaths are trending up even though petrol is more expensive so commuter miles are down. RNZ reported that Waka Kotahi have only installed a fifth of the median barriers they were supposed to, and fewer than a fifth of the side barriers. There are numerous media reports about worsening road conditions around the country.
It’s an illuminating and insightful essay, and a great diagnosis of what I call false compassion. Read the whole thing.