The Minefield

It feels like, for so much of this year, in one form or another, we’ve been trying to count the costs that technological innovations are exacting on our humanity — how AI, in particular, is altering (perhaps irrevocably) our relationship to words, to writing, to beauty, to creativity, to taste, to work, to the natural world, to our interior life.From the very beginning, our concern has been that the allure of convenience — or, better, of frictionlessness — is making us overlook or fail to reflect adequately upon what is lost when certain forms of difficulty are eliminated from our lives. After all, difficulty can be one of the ways we register the true value an activity. To lose the difficulty is to lose precisely what it is that makes the pursuit worthwhile in the first place.A perfect example of this dilemma presents itself in Apple’s announcement that its new AirPods would include a “Live Translation” feature that would allow users who speak English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese to understand each other (with the promise of more languages to follow). Particularly for travellers, this technology promises to break down the language barrier and alleviate the stress of not being able to understand one’s taxi driver or waiter. It purports to be the digital equivalent of Douglas Adams’s “Babel fish” from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — your own private in-ear interpreter.Now, there are questions about the AI technology — and the large language models that undergird it — that give plenty of reasons to doubt the adequacy or accuracy of the automated translation. As anyone who has tried Google Translate knows, the translation-by-prediction-and-equivalence that machine learning is capable of producing is most often shallow, error-ridden and has a tin-ear for idiom, allusion or humour.But let’s leave those drawbacks to the side for now, and suppose that the technology will eventually be capable of producing fluent, largely accurate translations from one language into another. This still doesn’t overcome the importance of friction, of difficulty, the experience of being suspended between, not just languages, but also cultures and conceptual worlds, and the patterns and rhythms of expression that cannot easily be separated from the meaning of the sentences themselves. At best, automated translation can provide the illusion of, or a kind of ersatz substitute for, “understanding”.To translate from one language into another — particularly when what is involved is poetry or literature — is not merely to find a series of relatively accurate equivalences; rather, it is to find oneself suspended between two worlds, acutely aware of precisely what is not translatable from one language into the other. And yet it is just this experience that at once exposes the limits of our own modes of expression and thinking, and opens up the possibility of creation, discovery and surprise.If translation becomes one more of those difficult tasks we are content to sacrifice on the altar of convenience, we may find that the difficulty is not the only thing we lose.You can read Ross Benjamin’s article “The Costs of Instant Translation” in The Atlantic, and his reflections on translating Daniel Kehlmann’s novel “The Director” on ABC Religion & Ethics.

Earlier this month, in response to a disturbing rise in youth crime in Melbourne, Victoria’s Labor government adopted a key policy that the LNP took to last year’s Queensland state election.The LNP policy pledged (among other things): to apply adult penalties to children under 18 who committed a range of violent and non-violent offences; to impose mandatory minimum sentences for certain offences committed by children; to abandon the principle that detention should only be used as a last resort when it comes to children; to require judges to give greatest consideration to the effect an offence has on victims when sentencing childrenThe policy was undeniably popular with Queenslanders. In the human rights statement accompanying the Making Queensland Safer Act 2024, the newly elected government acknowledged that the amendments would “lead to sentences for children that are more punitive than necessary to achieve community safety”, and that mandatory sentencing is “in direct conflict with international law standards”. Even so, the government insisted:“these measures and the purposes to which they are directed are clearly supported by Queenslanders and are a direct response to growing community concern and outrage over crimes perpetrated by young offenders. For this reason, the amendments include an override declaration which provides that they have effect despite being incompatible with human rights …”Human rights concerns notwithstanding, and despite the efficacy of such punitive measures now being questioned, Victorian premier Jacinta Allan has proposed a similar suite of legal reforms — which would see: children as young as 14 being tried and sentenced in the County Court; a significant increase in the maximum jail sentences; a requirement that judges “clearly prioritise community safety in sentencing decisions”; the formation of a new Violence Reduction Unit.Like in Queensland, these proposed youth justice reforms are aimed at addressing community concerns and acknowledging the consequences of violent crime on victims. Both goals are not only worthy, but are integral components of any well-functioning justice system. Punishment must deter wrong-doers and provide some succour to victims; it must denounce wrong-doing and protect the community — but the emotions that drive any pursuit of retributive justice (anger, fear, contempt, the desire for revenge) must be tempered by a more “forward looking” commitment to prevention and rehabilitation.Victoria’s proposed youth justice reforms thus compels us to grapple with: the limits of punitive responses to crime; what we believe prison/detention to be for; to what extent society’s desire for punishment needs to be tempered by other responses that might decrease the likelihood of re-offence; how much discretion should be afforded to judges when sentencing; whether an emphasis on rehabilitation and early intervention can be reconciled with the anger society feels at crimes that tear at the social fabric.You can read responses by Kate Fitz-Gibbon and Abraham Kuol to Victoria’s proposed youth justice reforms.

Ever since 2023, a class of GPL-1 based drugs — which for two decades were used to treat type 2 diabetes — have been heralded as a “revolution in weight loss” and signalling the “end of obesity”. While these drugs go by different names, they’ve become popularly grouped under the shorthand “Ozempic”.It’s no exaggeration to say that Ozempic has become a cultural phenomenon. Millions of people in the United States, Australia, South Korea, the UK, the EU take semaglutide injections, not to treat diabetes, but in order to reduce their hunger and eliminate what is sometimes called “food noise”.Obesity has long been moralised — associated with laziness, ill-disciplined eating, poor diet, a general lack of self-control. But expensive weight loss drugs like Ozempic have, to date, exacerbated the class dimension of obesity. This was nicely captured in a 2024 South Park episode (called “The End of Obesity”), in which Cartman is denied a prescription because the drug isn’t covered by insurance and his mother can’t afford it; as a consolation, the doctor recommends that he listens to more Lizzo. Cartman’s response: “Rich people get Ozempic, poor people get body positivity.”This begins to point to one of the most troubling aspects of the widespread use of weight loss drugs. It does not have to do with their use per se, or their further applications (to other health conditions or to treat other forms of addiction). Even the question of prohibitive cost may soon be partially resolved with plans underway to make some GPL-1 drugs more affordable.The more concerning issue is the cultural environment in which drugs like Wegovy or Mounjaro or Ozempic are now being taken up — cultures long preoccupied with dieting and weight loss, and which have elevated the physical aesthetic attributes of thinness, firmness, smoothness and vigour to the level of virtues, even moral demands. Conversely, obesity is stigmatised as ugliness, incontinence, laziness, a sign of servitude to cravings and bad habits.Such that, even when the sleek physical appearance achieved by means of, say, Ozempic, and has nothing to do with self-control or superior habits, its users continue to accrue the social benefits associated with thinness.The testimony of women and men, for instance, who have career or social opportunities open up to them after using Ozempic is, frankly, heartbreaking and often contemptible.If we want to laud the health benefits of weight loss drugs, and explore their application to help address other forms of harmful behaviour, that’s one thing. But to use such drugs to reinforce a kind of cultural aesthetic hierarchy is both troubling and ethically problematic.If you, or someone you know, is struggling with an eating disorder or with body image, support is available. You can call the Butterfly Foundation on 1800 33 4673.

The availability of increasingly powerful generative AI tools has radically altered the creative process. Anything that we can imagine can be turned into an image, a video, a text, a song — the process is frictionless, effortless, fast and has led to a torrent of digital effluent (what is often called “AI slop”) being pumped into our online habitus. And while the content may range from the banal to the surreal, from the nonsensical to the utterly indecent, it is at least instantly consumable.The time and sheer human labour that it takes to create, as well as the effort that is involved in contemplating, tarrying with, learning to enjoy or even love a work of “art” are both lost in vortex of instantaneous production and effortless consumption.But can friction really be separated from the creative process? Immanuel Kant made the productive aesthetic distinction between “the taste of sense” (that which I might find immediately, effortlessly pleasant) and “the taste of reflection” (that 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.And yet beauty does not necessarily offer itself to us as the result of effort. Throughout the history of philosophy and in various religious traditions, there are all manner of paradoxes that attend to “the beautiful”. Beauty may be transcendental, but it is also experientially ephemeral, even delicate; it attracts us, but it is lost when we try to capture or consume it; it draws us to it, but often points beyond itself or even forbids us; the human longing for beauty may be inherent, but we frequently need the assistance of others to recognise it; beauty may be an end-in-itself, but it often emerges serendipitously — and its lasting effect may be the way it brings us closer to others.So what is it that we stand to lose if we lose the capacity for the experience of beauty — whether through neglect, or disinterest, or haste, or due to our immersion in a digital milieu of AI slop and sensory overload?

For the last two years, there has been a steady drumbeat of protests — sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly — in the centre of major Australian cities involving hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands and, in one instance, hundreds of thousands of people. The vast majority of these protests have been pro-Palestinian and opposed to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.But this isn’t the only cause that has brought people out onto the city streets in their hundreds and thousands. Climate activists have disrupted traffic and targeted museums, farmers and volunteer firefighters staged a large demonstration against the Victorian government’s emergency services tax, women’s rights and trans-rights activists clashed in Melbourne, a number of huge anti-immigration rallies have been held Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and elsewhere — and in many of these instances, the demonstrations have been a magnet to people and groups on either ideological extreme wanting to exploit the protests to further their own goals, as well as to counter-protesters wishing to offer a full-throated challenge of their own.While these protests have only rarely turned violent, the considerable disruptions, vast logistical challenges and public safety risks they pose have meant that state governments, the police and the courts have increasingly been called upon to adjudicate whether, how and the extent to which they can be restricted. Neither the states nor the protesters themselves have gotten everything they’ve wanted — with the NSW Supreme Court finding against a law that “impermissibly burdens the implied constitutional freedom of communication on government or political matters”, and the Court of Appeals prohibiting plans for a large protest at Sydney Opera House in the interests of “public safety”.Protests are meant to be disruptive (if they can be sequestered to some quiet corner of a city where they will bother as few people as possible, what’s the point?) and contentious (if they do not invite serious disagreement, and even confrontation, there are probably more effective means of getting the message across). Protests can also be thought of as one of the vital forms of democratic activity that take place outside of elections and without the mediation of elected representatives. They are a form of blunt, mass communication: their message is simple and confronting; and the size of gathering matters almost as much as the message (partly because of its intended audiences).The question that is preoccupying us at the moment is: what does it mean to protect the right to protest, the freedom to express one’s dissent from the status quo, while also protecting the public against the various ways (intentionally or not) protests can turn ugly?

For the second time this year, millions of people have taken to the streets of cities and towns across the United States in response to the authoritarian tendencies and tactics of the second Trump administration.These crowds gathered under the “No Kings” banner to register their deep disapproval of: immigration raids and deportations without due process; the deployment of National Guard troops to cities against the wishes of elected officials; the use of legal threats, intimidation and extortion against the administration’s critics and non-sympathetic institutions; the selective prosecution of Trump’s political opponents and protection of his supporters; the closure of federal departments and mass sackings of federal workers; harsh proposed budget cuts that will disproportionately affect the poorest Americans and their ability to afford health care; and overt forms of corruption undertaken to enrich the president, his family and allies.It is undeniably heartening to see citizens join with their neighbours to express a shared commitment to certain democratic values in the face of the relentlessness and brazenness of an administration that treats those values with contempt.And yet Trump’s second coming has brought with it something else — certainly present in the first administration, yet, like so much else, exaggerated and emboldened this time around. There is a manifest indecency, a crassness, a cruelty and delight in the humiliation of others, a contemptuousness and a preparedness to sacrifice basic forms of democratic morality on the altar of political partisanism. Leave aside the rhetoric used by senior administration officials in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or the grotesque flirtations with Nazi symbols and racist tropes by GOP staffers.In response to the “No Kings” demonstrations, President Trump posted an AI generated video of himself piloting a jet labelled “King Trump”, which he flies over protesters and dumps what appears to be excrement over them. The White House proceeded to post an AI generated image of President Trump and Vice President Vance on thrones, wearing crowns, over an image of Democratic leaders in the House and Senate wearing sombreros.Partisan politics, it seems, becomes licence to disregard the fundamental moral constraints on conduct toward our fellow human beings, to say nothing of members of the same political community. As George Packer puts it, “Once morality is rotted out by partisan relativism, the floor gives way and the fall into nihilism is swift.”And yet for someone like John Dewey, the cultivation of everyday democratic virtues like decency, mutual consideration, turn-taking, forbearance and gentleness in our speech — as well as, negatively, the refusal to call each other names or to form ourselves into cliques and castes — is the way “democracy becomes a moral reality”.So while protesters gather on the streets to take a stand against such an obvious assault against the edifice of American democracy, it could well be that there is a more insidious threat working its way through the soul of the nation — as well as those of advanced democracies like Australia, France and the UK — in the form of the disregard for democratic decency itself. Dewey didn’t think a democracy could survive without this moral glue. Do we really want to find out if he was right?Guest: George Packer is an award-winning author and a staff writer at The Atlantic. His most recent book is a political novel called The Emergency.

There is no doubt that silence can be a form of cowardice: a refusal to speak up or speak out on behalf of others, an unwillingness to join our voices with theirs lest we be made to bear their punishment. In such a case, we could say, the absence of words is not empty but full — full of self-protection, of ego.Being silenced, in turn, can crush the soul — to have our words treated with contempt; to speak into the void, knowing that there is no common medium that will bear our plaintive cries to the ears of another; to be consigned to inexpressiveness, to moral suffocation; to be rendered powerless, without voice, without agency.There is the silence of mute incomprehension — to find ourselves overcome or overwhelmed by grief, by loss, by the injustice of the world. In such instances, it’s not so much that we choose silence as it is that silence seizes us. At such moments, it would feel obscene, indecent, to say anything.These are three forms of silence that are like wounds or bruises on the soul. They may simply be, but none of them is desirable. But while there are forms of silence that are imposed, there are also forms of silence that are adopted. Even cultivated.Consider the world envisaged by Ray Bradbury in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 — a world in which noise and incessant speech are compulsory. It is a world in which the stillness that often accompanies solitude, is made nearly impossible. For even when someone is alone, there are little electronic thimbles called “seashells”, radio devices that beam talk and noise and talk and noise directly into the ears. It’s unsurprising that, in Bradbury’s world, a world without silence is a world in which reading impossible and books are redundant. And the struggle of the novel’s central characters is how to cultivate something like a capacity for interiority.But fully a century before Bradbury’s novel, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard lamented a prevailing condition of “talkativeness”, of “chatter”. And what is it to chatter, Kierkegaard asked?“It is the annulment of the passionate disjunction between being silent and speaking. Only the person who can remain essentially silent can speak essentially, can act essentially. Silence is inwardness. Chattering gets ahead of essential speaking, and giving utterance to reflection has a weakening effect on action by getting ahead of it … When individuals are not turned inward in quiet contentment, in inner satisfaction, in religious sensitiveness … then chattering begins … But chattering dreads the moment of silence, which would reveal the emptiness.”Interestingly enough, Kierkegaard said that the phenomenon of chatter began with the advent of the popular press, which gave so many people so very much to talk about, to the point of imposing on citizens an obligation to “have an opinion” on everything.And perhaps it is the imposition of chatter, the expectation, the demand even, that we speak, that we make ourselves heard, that we hope to escape by cultivating a capacity for silence. For it is only when speech emerges from silence that that speech can have any weight. In such an instance, our words bear in them the silence out of which they emerged.In our time, there is an expectation of expression, of speech, of noise. We are repeatedly told that “silence is violence” or that “silence is complicity”, that action is demanded and that inaction is “culpable”. And there’s no doubt this can be true. But it is also the case that speech can be little more than self-assertion, the bringing of ego to bear upon the world. Silence, by contrast, can be a way of cultivating attentiveness, of practising responsiveness, of tarrying with contradictions or uncertainty, of deepening speech rather than adding to the cacophony of opinion.But perhaps most importantly, speech that emerges from silence can create opportunities for moral encounter and invitations for mutual understanding, as opposed to the zero-sum dynamics of self-assertion and persuasion.Guest: Stan Grant is Distinguished Professor at Charles Sturt University and the Director of Yindyamarra Nguluway. He is a theologian, a prolific author, and he recently delivered the Simone Weil Lectures on Human Value at Australian Catholic University on silence, poetry and music.

The politics of immigration has returned in recent months — and returned with a depth of feeling that suggests it never truly went away. It’s always there, lingering just beneath the surface of Western societies, waiting to be tapped into by politicians skilful (or brazen) enough to harness its power.So Donald Trump went to the 2024 presidential election excoriating his predecessor’s record on immigration and for “losing control” of the southern border control; by contrast, he promised the “largest deportation operation in American history”. In mid-September, as many as 150,000 people took to the streets in central London as part of the “Unite the Kingdom” rally organised by far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Demonstrators wrapped themselves in the Union Jack, waved St George’s flag and held aloft wooden crosses amid calls for “remigration” and other forms of mass deportation.Closer to home, also in August and September, a series of “March for Australia” demonstrations took place across Australia’s major cities against “mass migration” as the root of any number of social and economic problems: from housing shortages, food prices and traffic congestion to increased levels of social division and a declining sense of national “identity”.And as is invariably the case, there are politicians prepared to make the most of the social ferment. Leaving aside the surge in support for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party, we can point to Senator Jacinta Nampijimpa Price’s recent comments about Indian migrants and Liberal MP Andrew Hastie’s blunt identification of post-pandemic immigration levels as “the real reason you can’t afford a home”.Conservative political parties across Western democracies have “won” the debate over “border control”. It has been the clear intention of centre-left parties to neutralise the politics of “irregular arrivals”. What’s left, then, is the debate over multiculturalism and levels of immigration.And yet this is dangerous political terrain. For however much researchers point to the economic benefits of immigration, or the lack of clear connection between international student numbers and rising house prices, or the historic success of Australia’s bipartisan commitment to multiculturalism, “fact-checking” cannot touch the underlying emotions to which anti-immigration rhetoric appeals. Moreover, one of the reasons anti-immigration rhetoric is so successful is the fact it is at once parasitic and opportunistic. As social researcher Rebecca Huntley recently put it, “Whatever the top anxiety people have at any one time, they will graft an anxiety about immigration on it.”Given the affective dimension of both social cohesion and anti-immigration rhetoric, is there a way of appealing to political emotions as a way of addressing these anxieties without giving way to their more insidious expressions?

In a remarkable column from 1944, George Orwell bemoaned the sheer range of social and political phenomena to which the label “Fascist” was being applied — to the point that he believed the word itself had become “almost entirely meaningless”. And while it conveyed little more than a term like “bully” would, “Fascist” nonetheless carried an emotional charge, a degree of opprobrium, that such an everyday word did not.For this reason, Orwell concluded, the label should be used both precisely and sparingly: “All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”During the first Trump administration, a debate broke out among historians and political philosophers as to whether what the United States was witnessing amounted to “fascism”. For some, the term was an accurate description of a political disposition and form of political expression which at once had deep roots in American history — reaching back even before the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the “America First” phenomenon in the 1930s — and enjoyed certain family resemblances with the European movements with which we ordinarily associate the word. For others, calling the Trump administration “fascist” was either premature, a form of rhetorical overreach or a misdiagnosis.In many respects, that debate now seems quaint. For after the 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol and the various forms of executive action taken by Donald Trump in his second administration — including the extortion of universities, law firms and media companies, the use of masked ICE agents to detain and “disappear” people without due process, the deployment of the National Guard on the streets of American cities, and the targeted prosecution of political adversaries — that which was merely feared has now come to pass.But does this mean the description “fascist” should now be used freely as a way of characterising the Trump administration — the way “populism” was after 2016? Not only are there serious questions about the rhetorical efficacy of the term’s use (even if it is historically or politically accurate) or its ability to mobilise an electorate against a common democratic threat. There is also the prospect that the use of the term itself could provide a degree of licence, in the minds of some, to take matters into their own hands and engage in outright political violence.This points to a kind of two-fold paradox involving “fascism”. On the one hand, fascism is itself a paradoxical political phenomenon in the way it holds together seemingly incommensurable impulses. As José Ortega y Gasset famously remarked in 1927:“It asserts authoritarianism and organises rebellion … It seems to pose itself as the forge of a strong State, and uses means most conducive to its dissolution, as if it were a destructive faction or a secret society. Whichever way we approach fascism we find that it is simultaneously one thing and its contrary, it is A and not A …”On the other hand, while the term “fascism” could accurately convey the gravity of the situation facing an advanced democracy, the very use of the term could deepen the democratic dysfunction and thereby exacerbate the political conflict. Would we be well-advised, then, to follow Orwell’s advice and use the term only ever circumspectly and not as a rhetorical weapon against our opponents?Guest: Jason Stanley is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he is also the Bissell-Heyd-Associates Chair in American Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. He is the author of How Propaganda Works, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and, most recently, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.

This week is the first ever “Minefield Mailbag”, where Waleed and Scott try to respond to what’s been on our listeners’ minds.The questions they take on cover such diverse topics as society’s obligations to self-professed “sovereign citizens”, whether NATO is to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, why “virtue signalling” may not be such a bad thing after all, and the discrete relationship between philosophy and gardening.If you’d like to submit a question for a future mailbag, or propose a topic for a future episode, you can send an email to [email protected].