Secrets to good writing

I wrote this, because it came up on Quora as a question, What makes good writing?

I should say up front that there are a lot of much better writers than me, most of whom write for television, in various countries, but Europe, UK, America, Australia and New Zealand are the ones I’m most familiar with.

 

I should also point out that you can be ‘good’ at something without being ‘known’, so to speak. Not all ‘good’ cricketers play for Australia and not all ‘good’ footballers play in the national league. I have a friend who has won awards in theatre, yet she’s never made any money out of it; it’s strictly amateur theatre. She was even invited (as part of a group) to partake in a ‘theatre festival’ in Monaco a couple of years ago. Luckily, the group qualified for a government grant so they could participate.

 

Within this context, I call myself a good writer, based partly on feedback and partly on comparing myself to other writers I’ve read. I’ve written about this before, but I’ll keep it simple; almost dot points.

 

Firstly, good writing always tells the story from some character’s point of view (POV) and it doesn’t have to be the same character throughout the story. In fact, you can change POV even within the same scene or within dialogue, but it’s less confusing if you stay in one.

 

You take the reader inside a character’s mind, so they subconsciously become an actor. It’s why the reader is constantly putting themselves in the character’s situation and reacting accordingly.

 

Which brings me to the second point about identifying good writing. It can make the reader cry or laugh or feel angry or scared – in fact, feel any human emotion.

 

Thirdly, good writing makes the reader want to keep returning to the story. There are 2 ways you can do this. The most obvious and easiest way is to create suspense – put someone in jeopardy – which is why crime fiction is so popular.

 

The second way is to make the reader invest in the character(s)’ destiny. They like the characters so much that they keep returning to their journey. This is harder to do, but ultimately more satisfying. Sometimes, you can incorporate both into the same story.

A story should flow, and there is one way that virtually guarantees this. When I attended a screenwriting course (some decades ago), I was told that a scene should either provide information about the story or information about a character or move the story forward. In practice, I found that if I did the last one, the other 2 took care of themselves.

Another ‘trick’ from screenwriting is to write in ‘real time’ with minimal description, which effectively allows the story to unfold like a movie inside the reader’s head.

 

A story is like a journey, and a journey needs a map. A map is a sequence of plot points that are filled in with scenes that become the story.

None of the above are contentious, but my next point is. I contend that good writing is transparent or invisible. By this I mean that readers, by and large, don’t notice good writing, they only notice bad writing. If you watch a movie, the writing is completely invisible. No one consciously comments on good screenwriting; they always comment on the good acting or the good filmmaking, neither of which would exist without a good script.

 

How is this analogous to prose writing? The story takes place in the reader’s imagination, not on the page. Therefore, the writing should be easy-to-read and it should flow, following a subliminal rhythm; and most importantly, the reader should never be thrown out of the story. Writing that says, ‘look at me, see how clever I am’, is the antithesis of this. I concede, not everyone agrees.

 

I’ve said before that if we didn’t dream, stories wouldn’t work. Dream language is the language of stories, and they can both affect us the same way. I remember when I was a kid, movies could affect me just as dramatically as dreams. When reading a story, we inhabit its world in our imagination, conjuring up imagery without conscious effort.

 

 

Example:

 

The world got closer until it eventually took up almost all their vision. Their craft seemed to level out as if it was skimming the surface, but at an ultra-high altitude. As they got lower the dark overhead was replaced by a cobalt-blue and then they passed through clouds and they could see they were travelling across an ocean with waves tipped by froth, and then eventually they approached a shoreline and they seemed to slow down as a long beach stretched like a ribbon from horizon to horizon. Beyond the beach there were hills and mountains, which they accelerated over until they came to flat grassy plains, and in the distance they saw some dots on the ground, which became a village of people and horses and huts that poked into the air like upside down cones.

Did the Universe see us coming?

 I recently read The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking (2010), co-authored by Leonard Mlodinow, who gets ‘second billing’ (with much smaller font) on the cover, so one is unsure what his contribution was. Having said that, other titles listed by Mlodinow (Euclid’s Window and Feynman’s Rainbow) make me want to search him out. But the prose style does appear to be quintessential Hawking, with liberal lashings of one-liners that we’ve come to know him for. Also, I think one can confidently assume that everything in the book has Hawking’s imprimatur.

 

I found this book so thought-provoking that, on finishing it, I went back to the beginning, so I could re-read his earlier chapters in the context of his later ones. On the very first page he says, rather provocatively, ‘philosophy is dead’. He then spends the rest of the book giving his account of ‘life, the universe and everything’ (which, in one of his early quips, ‘is not 42’). He ends the first chapter (introduction, really) with 3 questions:

 

1)    Why is there something rather than nothing?

2)    Why do we exist?

3)    Why this particular set of laws and not some other?

It’s hard to get more philosophical than this.

 

I haven’t read everything he’s written, but I’m familiar with his ideas and achievements, as well as some of his philosophy and personal prejudices. ‘Prejudice’ is a word that is usually used pejoratively, but I use it in the same sense I use it on myself, regarding my ‘pet’ theories or beliefs. For example, one of my prejudices (contrary to accepted philosophical wisdom) is that AI will not achieve consciousness.

 

Nevertheless, Hawking expresses some ideas that I would not have expected of him. His chapter titled, What is Reality? is where he first challenges the accepted wisdom of the general populace. He argues, rather convincingly, that there are only ‘models of reality’, including the ones we all create inside our heads. He doesn’t say there is no objective reality, but he says that, if we have 2 or more ‘models of reality’ that agree with the evidence, then one cannot say that one is ‘more true’ than another.

 

For example, he says, ‘although it is not uncommon for people to say that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true’. He elaborates: ‘one can use either picture as a model of the universe, for our observations of the heavens can be explained by assuming either the earth or the sun is at rest’.

 

However, as I’ve pointed out in other posts, either the Sun goes around the Earth or the Earth goes around the Sun. It has to be one or the other, so one of those models is wrong.

 

He argues that we only ‘believe’ there is an ‘objective reality’ because it’s the easiest model to live with. For example, we don’t know whether an object disappears or not when go into another room, nevertheless he cites Hume, ‘who wrote that although we have no rational grounds for believing in an objective reality, we also have no choice but to act as if it’s true’.

 

I’ve written about this before. It’s a well known conundrum (in philosophy) that you don’t know if you’re a ‘brain-in-a-vat’. But I don’t know of a single philosopher who thinks that they are. The proof is in dreams. We all have dreams that we can’t distinguish from reality until we wake up. Hawking also referenced dreams as an example of a ‘reality’ that doesn’t exist objectively. So dreams are completely solipsistic to the extent that all our senses will play along, including taste.

 

Considering Hawking’s confessed aversion to philosophy, this is all very Kantian. We can never know the thing-in-itself. Kant even argued that time and space are a priori constructs of the mind. And if we return to the ‘model of reality’ that exists in your mind: if it didn’t accurately reflect the external objective reality outside your mind, the consequences would be fatal. To me, this is evidence that there is an objective reality independent of one’s mind - it can kill you. However, if you die in a dream, you just wake up.

 

Of course, this all leads to subatomic physics, where the only models of reality are mathematical. But even in this realm, we rely on predictions made by these models to determine if they reflect an objective reality that we can’t see. To return to Kant, the thing-in-itself is dependent on the scale at which we ‘observe’ it. So, at the subatomic scale, our observations may be tracks of particles captured in images, not what we see with the naked eye. The same can be said on the cosmic scale; observations dependent on instruments that may not even be stationed on Earth.

 

To get a different perspective, I recently read an article on ‘reality’ written by Roger Penrose (New Scientist, 16 May 2020) which was updated from one he wrote in 2006. Penrose has no problem with an ‘objective independent reality’, and he goes to some lengths (with examples) to show the extraordinary agreement between our mathematical models and physical reality. 

 

Our mathematical models of physical reality are far from complete, but they provide us with schemes that model reality with great precision – a precision enormously exceeding that of any description free of mathematics.

 

(It should be pointed out that Penrose and Hawking won a joint prize in physics for their work in cosmology.)

 

But Penrose gets to the nub of the issue when he says, ‘...the “reality” that quantum theory seems to be telling us to believe in is so far removed from what we are used to that many quantum theorists would tell us to abandon the very notion of reality’. But then he says in the spirit of an internal dialogue, ‘Where does quantum non-reality leave off and the physical reality that we actually experience begin to take over? Present day quantum theory has no satisfactory answer to this question’. (I try to answer this below.)

 

Hawking spends an entire chapter on this subject, called Alternative Histories. For me, this was the most revealing chapter in his book. He discusses at length Richard Feynman’s ‘sum over histories’ methodology, called QED or quantum electrodynamics. I say methodology instead of theory, because it’s a mathematical method that has proved extraordinarily accurate in concordance with Penrose’s claim above. Feynman compared it to measuring the distance between New York and Seattle (from memory) to within the width dimension of a human hair.

 

Basically, as Hawking expounds, in Feynman’s theory, a quantum particle can take every path imaginable (in the famous double-slit experiment, say) and then he adds them altogether, but because they’re waves, most of them cancel each other out. This leads to the principle of superposition, where a particle can be in 2 places or 2 states at once. However, as soon as it’s ‘observed’ or ‘measured’ it becomes one particle in one state. In fact, according to standard quantum theory, it’s possible for a single photon to be split into 2 paths and be ‘observed’ to interfere with itself, as described in this video. (I've edited this after Wes Hansen from Quora challenged it). I've added a couple of Wes's comments in an addendum below. Personally, I believe 'superposition' is part of the QM description of the future, as alluded to by Freeman Dyson (see  below). So I don't think superposition really occurs.

 

Hawking contends that the ‘alternative histories’ inherent in Feynman’s mathematical method, not only affect the future but also the past. What he is implying is that when an observation is made it determines the past as well as the future. He talks about a ‘top down’ history in lieu of a ‘bottom up’ history, which is the traditional way of looking at things. In other words, cosmological history is one of many ‘alternative histories’ (his terminology) that evolve from QM.

 

This leads to a radically different view of cosmology, and the relation between cause and effect. The histories that contribute to the Feynman sum don’t have an independent existence, but depend on what is being measured. We create history by our observation, rather than history creating us (my emphasis).

 

As it happens, John Wheeler made the exact same contention, and proposed that it could happen on a cosmic scale when we observed light from a distant quasar being ‘gravitationally lensed’ by an intervening galaxy or black hole (refer Davies paper, linked below). Hawking makes specific reference to Wheeler’s conjecture at the end of his chapter. It should be pointed out that Wheeler was a mentor to Feynman, and Feynman even referenced Wheeler’s influence in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

 

A contemporary champion of Wheeler’s ideas is Paul Davies, and he even dedicates his book, The Goldilocks Enigma, to Wheeler.

 

Davies wrote a paper which is available on-line, where he describes Wheeler’s idea as the “…participatory universe” in which observers—minds, if you like—are inextricably tied to the concretization of the physical universe emerging from quantum fuzziness over cosmological durations.

 

In the same paper, Davies references and attaches an essay by Freeman Dyson, where he says, “Dyson concludes that a quantum description cannot be applied to past events.”

 

And this leads me back to Penrose’s question: how do we get the ‘reality’ we are familiar with from the mathematically modelled quantum world that strains our credulousness? If Dyson is correct, and the past can only be described by classical physics then QM only describes the future. So how does one reconcile this with Hawking’s alternative histories?

 

I’ve argued elsewhere that the path from the infinitely many paths of Feynman’s theory, is only revealed when an ‘observation’ is made, which is consistent with Hawking’s point, quoted above. But it’s worth quoting Dyson, as well, because Dyson argues that the observer is not the trigger.

 

... the “role of the observer” in quantum mechanics is solely to make the distinction between past and future...

 

What really happens is that the quantum-mechanical description of an event ceases to be meaningful as the observer changes the point of reference from before the event to after it. We do not need a human observer to make quantum mechanics work. All we need is a point of reference, to separate past from future, to separate what has happened from what may happen, to separate facts from probabilities.

 

But, as I’ve pointed out in other posts, consciousness exists in a constant present. The time for ‘us’ is always ‘now’, so the ‘point of reference’, that is key to Dyson’s argument, correlates with the ‘now’ of a conscious observer.

 

We know that ‘decoherence’ is not necessarily dependent on an observer, but dependent on the wave function interacting with ‘classical physics’ objects, like a laboratory apparatus or any ‘macro’ object. Dyson’s distinction between past and future makes sense in this context. Having said that, the interaction could still determine the ‘history’ of the quantum event (like a photon), even it traversed the entire Universe, as in the cosmic background radiation (for example).

 

In Hawking’s subsequent chapters, including one titled, Choosing Our Universe, he invokes the anthropic principle. In fact, there are 2 anthropic principles called the ‘weak’ and the ‘strong’. As Hawking points out, the weak anthropic principle is trivial, because, as I’ve pointed out, it’s a tautology: Only universes that produce observers can be observed.

 

On the other hand, the strong anthropic principle (which Hawking invokes) effectively says, Only universes that produce observers can ‘exist’. One can see that this is consistent with Davies’ ‘participatory universe’.

 

Hawking doesn’t say anything about a ‘participatory universe’, but goes into some detail about the fine-tuning of our universe for life, in particular the ‘miracle’ of how carbon can exist (predicted by Fred Hoyle). There are many such ‘flukes’ in our universe, including the cosmological constant, which Hawking also discusses at some length.

 

Hawking also explains how an entire universe could come into being out of ‘nothing’ because the ‘negative’ gravitational energy cancels all the ‘positive’ matter and radiation energy that we observe (I assume this also includes dark energy and dark matter). Dark energy is really the cosmological constant. Its effect increases with the age of the Universe, because, as the Universe expands, gravitational attraction over cosmological distances decreases while ‘dark energy’ (which repulses) doesn’t. Dark matter explains the stable rotation of galaxies, without which, they’d fly apart.

 

Hawking also describes the Hartle-Hawking model of cosmology (without mentioning James Hartle) whereby he argues that in a QM only universe (at its birth), time was actually a 4^th spatial dimension. He calls this the ‘no-boundary’ universe, because, as John Barrow once quipped, ‘Once upon a time, there was no time’. I admit that this ‘model’ appeals to me, because in quantum cosmology, time disappears mathematically.

 

Hawking’s philosophical view is the orthodox one that, if there is a multiverse, then the anthropic principle (weak or strong) ensures that there must be a universe where we can exist. I think there are very good arguments for the multiverse (the cosmological variety, not the QM multiple worlds variety) but I have a prejudice against an infinity of them because then there would be an infinity of me.

 

Hawking is a well known atheist, so, not surprisingly, he provides good arguments against the God hypothesis. There could be a demiurge, but if there is, there is no reason to believe it coincides with any of the Gods of mythology. Every God I know of has cultural ties and that includes the Abrahamic God.

 

For someone who claims that ‘philosophy is dead’, Hawking’s book is surprisingly philosophical and thought-provoking, as all good philosophy should be. In his conclusions, he argues strongly for ‘M theory’, believing it will provide the theory(s) of everything that physicists strive for. M theory, as Hawking acknowledges, requires ‘supersymmetry’, and from what I know and read, there is little or no evidence of it thus far. But I agree with Socrates that every mystery resolved only uncovers more mysteries, which history, thus far, has confirmed over and over.

 

My views have evolved and, along with the ‘strong anthropic principle’, I’m becoming increasingly attracted to Wheeler’s ‘participatory universe’, because the more of its secrets we learn, the more it appears as if ‘the Universe saw us coming’, to paraphrase Freeman Dyson.

Addendum (23Apr2021): Wes Hansen, whom I met on Quora, and who has strong views on this topic, told me outright that he's not a fan of Hawking or Feynman. Not surprisingly, he challenged some of my views and I'm not in a position to say if he's right or wrong. Here are some of his comments:

You know, I would add, the problem with the whole “we create history by observation” thing is, it takes a whole lot of history for light to travel to us from distant galaxies, so it leads to a logical fallacy. Consider:

Suppose we create the past with our observations, then prior to observation the galaxies in the Hubble Deep Fields did not exist. Then where does the light come from? You see, we are actually seeing those galaxies as they existed long ago, some over 10 billion years ago.

We have never observed a single photon interfering with itself, quite the opposite actually: Ian Miller's answer to Can a particle really be in several places at the same time in the subatomic world, or is this just modern mysticism?. This is precisely why I cannot tolerate Hawking or Feynman, it’s absolute nonsense!

Regarding his last point, I think Ian Miller has a point. I don't always agree with Miller, but he has more knowledge on this topic than me. I argue that the superposition, which we infer from the interference pattern, is in the future. The idea of a single photon taking 2 paths and interfering with itself is deduced solely from the interference pattern (see linked video in main text). My view is that superposition doesn't really happen - it's part of the QM description of the future. I admit that I effectively contradicted myself, and I've made an edit to the original post to correct that.

 

Not losing the plot, and even how to find it

As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, the most difficult part of writing for me is plotting. The characters come relatively easy, though there is always the danger that they can be too much alike. I’ve noticed from my own reading that some authors produce a limited range of characters, not unlike some actors. Whether I fall into that category is for others to judge. 

But my characters do vary in age and gender and include AI entities (like androids). Ideally, a character reveals more of themselves as the story unfolds and even changes or grows. One should not do this deliberately – it’s best to just let it happen – try not to interfere is the intention if not always the result.

I’ve also pointed out previously that whether to outline or not is a personal preference, and sometimes a contentious one. As I keep saying, you need to find what works for you, and for me it took trial and error.

In my last post on this topic, I compared plotting to planning a project, because that is what I did professionally. On a project you have milestones that become ‘goals’ and there is invariably a suite of often diverse activities required to come together at the right time. In effect, making sure everything aligns was what my job was all about.

When it comes to plotting, we have ‘plot points’, which are analogous to milestones but not really the same thing. And this is relevant to whether one ‘outlines’ or not. A very good example is given in the movie, Their Finest (excellent movie), which is a film within a film and has a screenwriter as the protagonist. The writers have a board where they pin up the plot points and then join them up with scenes, which is what they write.

On the other hand, a lot of highly successful writers will tell you that they never outline at all, and there is a good reason for that. Spontaneity is what all artists strive for – it’s the very essence of creativity. I’ve remarked myself, that the best motivation to write a specific scene is the same as the reader’s: to find out what happens next. As a writer, you know that if you are surprised then so will your readers be.

Logically, if you don’t have an outline, you axiomatically don’t know what happens next, and the spontaneity that you strive for, is all but guaranteed. So what do I do? I do something in between. I learned early on that I need a plot point to aim at, and whether I know what lies beyond that plot point is not essential.

I found a method that works for me, and any writer needs to find a method that works for them. I keep a notebook, where I’ll ‘sketch’ what-ifs, which I’ll often do when I don’t know what the next plot point is. But once I’ve found it, and I always recognise it when I see it, I know I can go back to my story-in-progress. But that particular plot point should be far enough in the future that I can extemporise, and other plot points will occur spontaneously in the interim.

Backstory is often an important part of plot development. J.K. Rowling created a very complex backstory that was only revealed in the last 2 books of her Harry Potter series. George Lucas created such an extensive backstory for Star Wars, he was able to make 3 prequels out of it.

So, whether you outline or not may be dependent on how much you already know about your characters before you start.

Road safety starts with the driver, not the vehicle

There was recently (pre-COVID-19) a road-safety ad on some cinemas in Australia (and possibly TV) for motorcyclists. We have video of a motorcyclist on a winding road, which I guess is the other side of Healesville, and there is a voiceover of his thoughts. He sees a branch on the road to avoid, he sees a curve coming up, he consciously thinks through changing gears, including clutch manipulation, he sees a van ahead which he overtakes. The point is that there is this continuous internal dialogue based on what he observes while he’s riding. 

What I find intriguing is that this ad is obviously targeted at motorcyclists, yet I fail to see why it doesn’t equally apply to car drivers. I learned to drive (decades ago) from riding motorcycles, not only on winding roads but in city and suburban traffic. I used to do a daily commute along one of the busiest arterial roads from East Sydney to Western Sydney and back, which I’d still claim to be the most dangerous stretch of driving I ever did in my life. 

I had at least one close call and one accident when a panel van turned left into a side road from the middle lane while I was in the left lane (vehicles travel on the left side, a la Britain, in Australia). I not only went over the top of my bike but the van started to drag the bike over me while I was trapped in the gutter, and then he stopped. I was very young and unhurt and he was older and managed to convince me that it was my fault. My biggest concern was not whether I had sustained injuries (I hadn’t) but that the bike was unrideable.

Watching the ad on the screen, which is clearly aimed at a younger version of myself, I thought that’s how I drive all the time, and I learned that from riding bikes, even though I haven’t ridden a bike in more than 3 decades. It occurred to me that most people probably don’t – they put their cars on cruise-control, now ‘adaptive’, and think about something else entirely, possibly having a conversation with someone who is not even in the vehicle.

In Australia, speed limits get lower and lower every year, so that drivers don’t have to think about what they’re doing. The biggest cause of accidents now, I understand, are distractions to the driver. We are transitioning (for want of a better word) to fully autonomous vehicles. In the interim, it seems that since we don’t have automaton cars, we need automaton drivers. Humans actually don’t make good robots. The road-safety ad aimed at motorcyclists is the exact opposite of this thinking.

I’m anomalous in that I still drive a manual and actually enjoy it. I’ve found others of my generation, including women, who feel that driving a manual forces them to think about what they’re doing in a way that an auto doesn’t. In a manual, you are constantly anticipating what gear you need, whether it be for traffic or for a corner, to slow down or to speed up (just like the rider in the ad). It becomes an integral part of driving. I have a 6 speed which is the same as I had on my first 2 motorbikes, and I use the gears in exactly the same way. We are taught to get into top gear as quickly as possible and stay there. But, riding a bike, you soon learn that this is nonsense. In my car, you ideally need to be doing 100km/hr (60 mph) to change into top gear. 

We have cars that do their best to take the driving out of driving, and I’m not convinced that makes us safer, though most people seem to think it does.

Addendum: I acknowledge I’m a fossil like the car I drive. I do drive autos, and it doesn’t change the way I drive, but I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the experience. I accept that, in the future, cars probably won’t be enjoyable to drive at all, because they will have no 'feeling'. The Tesla represents the future of motoring, whether autonomous or not.

Is liberalism under siege?

Like most so-called liberal-minded individuals, I read liberal-minded media, like The New Yorker, but I also acquire The Weekend Australian, religiously, every weekend (a Murdoch broadsheet newspaper). Like most weekend tabloids, it has ‘sections’ and pull-out segments, including a Weekend Australian Magazine and Weekend Australian Review. These pull-out segments often include profiles of people from all walks of life, coverage of arts and culture, as well as commentaries on topical issues.

There is a curious dichotomy in that the main body of the paper has opinion pieces that are predominantly and overtly conservative, whereas the ‘pull-out’ sections (mentioned above) have far more liberal content. Having said that, this weekend, there was virtually a full-page article called Voice, Treaty, Truth: Heart, which was an extract from a book called Treaty by George Williams and Harry Hobbs (who are, respectively, Dean and lecturer in the faculty of law at the University of NSW). It gives a potted history of the treaty process in Australia for indigenous people, with well written arguments on why it’s a necessary process for all Australians. The idea has long been opposed by conservative voices in Australia, so it says a lot that it finds expression in a conservative newspaper.

I only reference the article to give contrast to other feature articles dealing with the current ‘black lives matter’ crisis occurring in the US and spilling over into Australia on the same weekend. In particular, 3 opinion pieces by Paul Kelly (Editor at Large), Greg Sheridan (Foreign Editor) and Chris Kenny (Associate Editor) that provide different yet distinctly conservative views on the divisive issue. None of them are apologists for Trump, yet Sheridan and Kenny, in particular, are critical, to the point of ridicule, of the backlash against Trump, and downplay the racial schism that has become a running sore over the past week.

But I wish to focus on Paul Kelly’s commentary, The Uncivil War Killing Liberalism, because his arguments are more measured and he takes a much wider view. Kelly has been critical of Trump in the past – in particular, his incompetent handling of the COVID-19 pandemic right from the outset.

Kelly effectively argues that liberalism is under attack from both sides, with the political desertion of the ‘centre’ all over the Western world. I’ve made the same point myself, but, even though I’d guess we’re of a similar vintage, we have different perspectives and biases.

Kelly provides a broad definition, which I’ll quote out of context:

...liberalism means equality before the law regardless of race, equal access to health care and education on the principle of universalism.

This is an ideal that is far from fulfilled in virtually every democracy in the modern world, and is manifest in faultlines, particularly in the US, which is the main focus of Kelly’s essay. He more or less says as much in the next paragraph:

Yet the US today is engulfed in a series of social crises, with life expectancy falling for three successive years since 2015.

Kelly sees Trump as a symptom, or a ‘product’ of a ‘decline into cultural decadence’ (quoting conservative New York Times journalist, Ross Douthat, from his book, The Decadent Society). Kelly clearly agrees with Douthat when he quotes him: Trump exploits the decline of liberalism while being an agent of that decline.

But, like many conservative commentators, Kelly lays at least part of the blame with what he and others call ‘the Elites’. He quotes another American author, Christopher Lasch, from his 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites:

The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America’ as they imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes and complacent, dull and dowdy.

There is a social dynamic occurring here that I have seen before, and so I believe has Kelly. I’m thinking of the 1960s when there was a revolt against postwar conservative values that was arguably augmented by the introduction of oral contraception. It included a rejection of the dominance of the Church in both legislative and family politics, as well as shifts in feminist politics, the effects of which are still being experienced a couple of generations later. Were the ‘radicals’ advocating those ideals the ‘elites’ of their generation?

One of the major differences between American and Australian cultures is obvious to Australians and a surprise to many Americans. In Australia, religious belief is rarely an issue, and certainly not in politics. This wasn’t always the case. When I was growing up there was a divide between protestants and Catholics that even affected the small country town where I lived and was educated. The dissolution of that division was one of the more providential casualties of the 1960s. These days, most Australians are apathetic about religion, which renders it mostly a non-issue.

The reason I raise this is because militant atheism is most aggressive in countries where fundamentalist religion is most political (like the US). In other words, when you get extreme views becoming mainstream, you will get a reaction from the polar opposite extreme. And this is what is happening in politics pretty well worldwide.

So Kelly is right when he contends that Trump is the manifestation of a reaction to left wing ideologies, but he leaves a lot out. If one goes back to the ‘definition’ of liberalism, scribed by Kelly himself, the word ‘equality’ tends to stick in one’s craw. Inequality is arguably the biggest issue in the US which has been exacerbated by recent events. Even in the pandemic, which one assumes is indiscriminate, Black deaths have outnumbered Whites, which suggests that health care is not equitable.

It would seem that people (well, conservative political commentators at least) have already forgotten both the cause and the consequences of the GFC. The GFC hit middle America hard and it is their hardship that Trump exploited. So, the so-called ‘decadence of liberalism’ is a straw man that hides the discontent caused by the sheer greed of the people whom Trump and his ‘Tea Party’ allies really represent.

Kelly argues that ‘aggressive progressivism’ is one, if not ‘the’ cause of the ‘assault on liberalism’, to use his own words. He doesn’t say, but one assumes by ‘aggressive progressivism’, he’s talking about the strong push for renewable energy sources in response to what he calls ‘climate change alarmists’. Curiously, it’s been reported in the last week that industry leaders (you know, the ones who vote for conservative governments) are pushing for more investment in renewable resources. So we have industry groups attempting to lead the (conservative) Australian government, following the paralysis of the last decade by consecutive governments on both sides.

Kelly also argues that ‘individualism’ is one of the factors, along with ‘multiculturalism’, which he denigrates. In Australia, I’ve witnessed at least 3 waves of immigration, all of which have brought out the best and the worst in people. But generally people have got along fine because we tend to live and let live. As long as people from all backgrounds have the same access to health care and education and job opportunities, then there is very little societal dislocation that the xenophobes warn us about. There is inequality, especially among indigenous Australians, and I think that is why the recent protests in America have resonated here. Equality, I believe, starts with education. There is an elitism around education here and it is a political minefield. But the ideals of liberalism, expressed so succinctly by Kelly, surely start with education.

If one takes a broad historical perspective, it’s generally the ideas and ideals of people on the Left of politics that develop into social norms, even for conservatives of later generations. This is arguably how liberalism has evolved and will continue to evolve. Importantly, it’s dynamic, not static.

How do we understand each other?

This is the latest Question of the Month from Philosophy Now (Issue 137 April/May 2020), so answers will appear in Issue 139 (Aug/Sep 2020). It just occurred to me that I may have misread the question and the question I've answered is: How CAN we understand each other? Whatever, it's still worthy of a post, and below is what I wrote: definitely philosophical with psychological underpinnings and political overtones. There’s a thinly veiled reference to my not-so-recent post on Plato, and the conclusion was unexpected.

This is possibly the most difficult question I’ve encountered on Question of the Month, and I’m not sure I have the answer. If there is one characteristic that defines humans, it’s that we are tribal to the extent that it can define us. In almost every facet of our lives we create ingroups and outgroups, and it starts in childhood. If one watches the so-called debates that occur in parliament (at least in Australia) it can remind one of their childhood experiences at school. In current political discourse, if someone proposes an action or a policy, it is reflexively countered by the opposition, irrespective of its merit.

But I’ve also observed this is in the workplace, working on complex engineering projects, where contractual relationships can create similar divisions; where differences of opinion and perspective can escalate to irrational opposition that invariably leads to paralysis.

We’ve observed worldwide (at least in the West) divisions becoming stronger, reinforced by social media that is increasingly being used as a political weapon. We have situations where groups holding extreme yet strongly opposing views will both resist and subvert a compromise position proposed by the middle, which logically results in stalemate.

Staying with Australia (where I’ve lived since birth), we observed this stalemate in energy policy for over a decade. Every time a compromise was about to be reached, either someone from the left side or someone from the right side would scuttle it, because they would not accept a compromise on principle.

But recently, two events occurred in Australia that changed the physical, social and political landscape. In the summer of 2019/2020, we witnessed the worst bushfire season, not only in my lifetime, but in recorded history since European settlement. And although there was some political sniping and blame-calling, all the governments, both Federal and States, deferred to the experts in wildfire and forestry management. What’s more, the whole community came together and helped out irrespective of political and cultural differences. And then, the same thing happened with the COVID-19 crisis. There was broad bipartisan agreement on formulating a response, and the medical experts were not only allowed to do their job but to dictate policy.

Plato was critical of democracies and argued for a ‘philosopher-king’. We don’t have philosopher-kings, but we have non-ideological institutions with diverse scientific and technical expertise. I would contend that ‘understanding each other’ starts with acknowledging one’s own ignorance.