The Minefield

If there is something inherently suspicious about political appeals to “the heart” — which is to say, attempts to exploit unreflective prejudices and reactive emotions — then it is also true that a form of politics that is unresponsive to heart-felt appeals to a common humanity, to compassion, to decency, is dangerous.How can we maintain the precarious balance between a politics that trades cheaply on emotion, and one that both comes from and appeals to the heart?Guest: Christos Tsiolkas is the author of eight novels — Loaded, The Jesus Man, Dead Europe, The Slap, Barracuda, Damascus, 7 ½, The In-Between — and the short story collection, Merciless Gods. He is a playwright, screen writer, essayist, radio host and currently a film critic for The Saturday Paper. In September last year, he delivered the 2025 Ray Mathew Lecture at the National Library of Australia, on the topic “Fence-Sitting”.

Over the course of this Ramadan series, we are exploring the contours of a cardiocentric conception of the moral life. The notion of the primacy of the heart goes back three millennia: it finds expression in the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, and in the philosophy of Aristotle; it pervades the pages of the sacred texts and subsequent traditions of Judaism and Islam — and even now, its remnants persist in our everyday speech, as if to remind us of an older wisdom.In this broader conception, the heart is a kind of physio-spiritual organ which, at once, coordinates the body’s movements by providing its orientation within and opens the person to moral realities without. A central feature of “the heart”, then, is its capacity for moral responsiveness. The heart is not all there is to the moral life — there is moral reasoning, and there are moral obligations — but it may not be a stretch to say that “the heart” is the moral life’s indispensable element. In a hadith, Muhammad is reported to have said: “There is a piece of flesh in the body if it becomes good the whole body becomes good but if it gets spoilt the whole body gets spoilt and that is the heart.”Last week, we touched briefly on the fear that is often expressed in Islam of the heart being “sealed off”, rendered impervious to divine wisdom or moral appeal. Within the Jewish tradition, this fear is expressed in terms of the heart being “hardened” (literally “toughened” or “strengthened”). In both traditions, this condition is most particularly associated with the figure of the Pharaoh of Egypt (see, for instance, Exodus 7:13, 22; 8:16; 9:24; Qurʾān 10:88). He is not, and cannot be, responsive to the divine appeal — and for that reason, he is damned.Because the worst thing that can happen to a heart is for it become hardened, Pharaoh acts as a cautionary figure (see Deuteronomy 15:7). Through his repeated refusals, his heart toughens to the point that it grows impervious — at which point, his heart is given over to what is called in the rabbinic tradition “the evil impulse”. As Rav Assi puts it in the Talmud (Sukka 52a): “At first the evil impulse is as thin as a spider’s gossamer, but in the end it is as thick as a cart-rope.”It is unsurprising, then, that in the we often find prayers in the Jewish tradition (which characterises prayers themselves as “work of the heart”) asking to be kept from having a “hard heart” and to be granted “an understanding heart” — literally, a listening or responsive heart).In a time like ours, when the temptation to refuse or fail to see others as fully human — as making some claim on our sympathy, our compassion, as requiring from us some hesitation — is everywhere apparent, what would it mean to cultivate an “understanding/responsive heart”? What can we do to avoid a “hardened heart”?Guest: Avril Alba is Professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation at the University of Sydney.

Sometimes the language we use every day, often unthinkingly, contains within it traces of a much older wisdom. Consider the phrases “I’ve changed my mind” and “I’ve had a change of heart”.The first thing to notice is activity described by the verbs: one is something that we do — as the result of learning new information, or having experiences that alter our values or view of the world; the other is something we undergo, something that happens to us — we see something we couldn’t see before (as though the light shines differently upon it, as Wittgenstein would say), or the same person or phenomenon evokes a different feeling from us.Perhaps it’s accurate to say that changing one’s mind is like taking a different path or going in a different direction, whereas having a change of heart is more like changing one’s compass bearings. But does that mean we are simply passive when it comes to such a reorientation of heart?In this Ramadan series, we are examining what we’re calling the cardiocentrism of the moral life — which is to say, the vital importance of cultivating the inner disposition of what we most often call “the heart”: the faculty which stands for both our inner-most selves, and that which makes us receptive to moral realities or truths outside of ourselves.The heart can act as a kind of moral compass which responds to moral realities we’d prefer to evade or avoid. Consider the pivotal moment in J M Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, when the eponymous character responds to demands for reasons or “principles” that would ground her horror in response to the mass killing of animals for food: “I was hoping not to have to enunciate principles”, she says. “If principles are what you want … I would have to respond, open your heart and listen to what your heart says.”So perhaps we can’t change our hearts, but does this suggest it is incumbent on us to maintain a certain “openness” or sustained “exposure” to moral realities we’d rather ignore — and that such openness is a precondition for undergoing a change of heart?Guest: Claire Zorn is the multi-award-winning author of five novels and the author/illustrator of two picture books. Her most recent book is Better Days.—UPCOMING LIVE RECORDINGWhen: Tuesday, 10 March 2026, from 1:45 pm to 3 pmWhere: Customs House, The Long Room, Brisbane City, QLD“The Aesthetics of Power: Why Authoritarianism Needs Spectacle”As democratic norms erode around the world, the performance of political power has become increasingly theatrical. From militarised displays to orchestrated media moments, authoritarian movements rely on spectacle to project stability, legitimacy and inevitability.In partnership with the Brisbane Writers Festival and as part of the University of Queensland’s Dialogues Across Difference series, this special live recording of ABC Radio National’s The Minefield brings together acclaimed journalist and New York Times columnist M Gessen with co‑hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens. Together, they will explore why modern authoritarianism depends on spectacle — and how aesthetics shape the public imagination and the conditions of democratic life.Attendance is free, but registration on Eventbrite is essential.

Judging by the way we use the word in everyday speech, we intuitively know what we mean when we refer to “the heart”. We are most often gesturing toward the essence of a thing, its core, what you reach once you strip everything non-essential away.That idea is very much in keeping with what we do each year during the month of Ramadan: we try to put wider concerns and contentious debates in politics, society and culture to the side in order to focus on some of the more fundamental dispositions and practices that sustain and deepen the moral life — essential things that we frequently neglect in our haste and agitation.But, of course, that’s not the only way we use the word “heart”. It’s also a reference to what is truest about us, our interior orientation, what we want and value, sometimes despite our attempts to present ourselves otherwise or dissemble what secretly resides within. When we use terms like “heartfelt” or “heart-to-heart”, aren’t we talking about a deeper kind of emotion or a more sincere or authentic kind of conversation, one in which certain conventions or forms of conventionalised self-presentation have been set aside?The idea of the centrality of the heart is a very old one, stretching back to the ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China. But it was Aristotle in the fourth century BCE who gave the concept of ‘cardiocentrism’ its most thoroughgoing articulation. He considered the heart to be the organising principle of the body — its primary organ, its ‘archē’. The heart is the location of the soul and the source of the body’s heat; it is the organ that receives sensory stimuli from without and directs the body’s movements from within. He thus conceived of the heart as constituting, at once, the seat of intelligence, emotion, will, desire and sensation, and the inherent (or efficient) cause of the body’s unity, integrity and coordination.This cardiocentric conception would eventually be taken up in the High Middle Ages by theologians and philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averröes), Al-Ghazālī, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, and even in the seventeenth century by English physician William Harvey.While it is no longer credible as a psycho-physiological theory, it is nonetheless striking how the centrality of the heart continues to pervade our language and moral sensibilities. Even now, “the heart” seems to possess a kind of double-aspect, it faces simultaneously in two directions: it stands for our inner-most selves (consider the term “heart of hearts”); it is also that which makes us receptive to moral realities or truths outside of ourselves. As Stephen Darwall puts it, “the heart” refers to: “the cluster of emotional capabilities and susceptibilities that fit one for emotional connection: dispositions to feel joy, grief, sadness, fear and distress for others, gratitude, trust, love …”.Perhaps it is not a stretch to say that the moral life is cardiocentric, even though our physiology is not. Doesn’t this suggest that the health of our “hearts” should be a matter of moral, not just physical, concern?Guest: Stephen Darwall is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of a number of landmark works of modern moral philosophy — including, chiefly, The Second-Person Standpoint and, more recently, The Heart and Its Attitudes.

One of the most unyielding aspects of life in the modern West is, perhaps, the ultimate value that we’ve come to accord to appearance. It is as though our essence, all that matters most about us as human beings, lies on the surface: our soul resides in our skin; how we look reveals who we truly are.Over the last three decades, this has become especially pronounced through our various forms, not so much of self-expression as self-creation — from hair removal (or recovery) to body art, from strict fitness regimens and body sculpting through to the widespread uptake of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.None of these activities are wrong or detrimental in and of themselves. But when the gap between people is an ontological one — those who are self-creations are of a higher order than those who are still subject to the natural order — the result can be a hierarchy of beings whereby one is viewed with envy and the other with contempt. This can, of course, create its own drive toward conformity and belonging (experienced as an elevation in status) and the desire to escape social punishment, from shame.Fashion can work similarly. As W. David Marx puts it:“Fashion is a never-ending process of ‘chase and flight’. Low-status individuals chase high-status individuals by imitating their conventions, which forces elites to flee to new ones. Since this fleeing will lead to another round of chasing and then fleeing, fashion creates perpetual cultural change, with status serving as the motor.”Again, there is nothing inherently problematic about the desire to conform — which is to say, belong — or the complex cultural demands asserted by fashion. But when it becomes a form of tyranny, the criterion by which our social status is judged, and either fashion or its fashionable refusal becomes the primary means by which we express our sense of ‘self’, the effect can have a suffocating, rather than freeing, effect on our inner life.We partly acknowledge as much already in places like Australia in our insistence on school uniforms: for a particular period of our children’s lives, during which education, the cultivation of habits of learning, curiosity, discovery and surprise, takes precedence, we don’t want them judging others or being judged on the basis of what clothes they can afford. But taking ‘fashion’ out of the equation, we hope they will distinguish and express themselves in other ways. Which is to say: a certain denial of forms of individual expression (clothing) elevates everyone to a common level (community of learners) thereby enabling other ways to distinguish or express themselves (through the cultivation of interiority and sociality).Within certain traditions of moral philosophy, this could find an analogue in a kind of modesty of expression: call it a commitment to non-ostentatiousness, a certain understatedness, a reticence to draw attention to oneself in order that one’s actions may not distract attention from others. It is not invisibility so much as it is principled transparency: desiring that the gracious light of one’s dignified life and actions be the means by which others are seen as worthy objects of love and bearers of dignity.But this also has expressions in certain religious registers — as when a modest uniformity of appearance (such as the use of headcoverings, habits, robes and so on) signifies not so much the suppression of individuality as a common dedication and even the dignity of service to others or to the divine.Could this point us in the direction of ways that the preciousness of the individual — and the richness of the interior life — can be saved from the tyranny of cultural demands for individuality?

One of the common laments we heard last November, as Australia marked the fiftieth anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government, was that Australian politics has lost its ambition — that the Labor Party, in particular, no longer had the stomach to take big risks and pursue sweeping reforms. The very act of celebrating the audacity of Gough Whitlam, it seemed, was designed to deliver a stinging rebuke to the moderation of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.There is, of course, a compelling counterargument that can be made. Voters tend not to reward ambitious proposals for reform — especially not from opposition, as both John Hewson and Bill Shorten learned — and they will sooner withdraw support from an incumbent government than vest it with confidence and a broad mandate. Voters’ fear of finding themselves on the wrong side of the “winners/losers” ledger is just too great. The decline of centrist political parties, the fragmentation of the electorate and the rise of opportunistic electoral coalitions around sometimes incommensurable, often inchoate grievances, moreover, has made it easier for political entrepreneurs and the parties of grievance amass influence.The French political philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon characterised this as the politics of rejection, as the exercise of “negative sovereignty”, as the aggregation of discontent — and, as he puts it: “Rejection is the simplest thing to aggregate. Indeed, all rejections are identical, regardless of what may have motivated them.” Put otherwise, it’s easier to get to “No” than it is to “Yes”.Albanese is clearly attuned to these political realities. At the 2022 election, he was the beneficiary of widespread disaffection with Scott Morrison and of his own self-presentation as an inoffensive, steady, safe pair of hands. He watched the Voice referendum come undone through the aggregation of rejection. In 2025, Labor’s large parliamentary majority owed plenty to Australian voters’ disdain for Donald Trump, and Peter Dutton’s unwise efforts to lash himself to Trump’s mast in order to reap the benefits from his political tailwinds.Since the attacks on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza, Albanese has assiduously tried to walk a middle-path through a deeply divided society, making important concessions to each side (including recognition of a Palestinian state) and appealing to the democratic virtues of common decency and mutual respect. His accession to call a royal commission into antisemitism after the Bondi massacre and the haste with which hate speech legislation was pushed through parliament are, perhaps, the exceptions that prove the general rule.Everything Albanese has done as Prime Minister seems to have been geared toward promoting a more inclusive, more cohesive society through incremental changes.During his second term, Albanese has benefited from a Coalition in disarray, that no longer seems capable of or willing to paper over the philosophical and temperamental differences between them. Under Sussan Ley, the Liberals are more of a centre-right party, even as rivals within her party and her erstwhile Coalition partners are seeking to position themselves to reap the electoral gains from the surge in support for One Nation.Deep social and ideological divisions — over Gaza, immigration, housing affordability, intergenerational wealth disparity, racial discrimination, religious freedom — are now poised to embolden the political extremes in this country. As it already has in the United States, the UK, Germany and France, the political centre is under threat from the unyielding (and often irresponsible) demands of grievance. And after years of incremental changes and promises of progress, the electoral bill is coming due.The question now becomes whether moderation, inclusivity, decency and incremental change are still political virtues, or are they electoral liabilities?Guest: Sean Kelly is a columnist for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and a regular contributor to The Monthly. He is a former advisor to Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. He is the author, most recently, of Quarterly Essay 100, The Good Fight: What Does Labor Stand For?

If there is a single adjective that captures the difference, both in tone and in action, between Donald Trump’s first presidential term and his second, it’s “unconstrained”.Whatever limits might have been placed on his conduct, his designs, his instincts during his first administration — legal, congressional, electoral, conventional — now seem to have fallen away, leaving Trump emboldened to pursue a series of ambitions that he’s long harboured.Mass deportations by militarised agents, revenge against his political opponents, the extortion of purportedly unsympathetic institutions (most notably law firms and universities) and his own personal enrichment have, perhaps, been the most brazen of these pursuits. But over the last two months, a different kind of ambition has come into view: the desire for territorial expansion and absolute sway over the countries and territories of the western hemisphere.This first manifested itself in the Trump administration’s increasing fixation on Venezuela. It began as a series of nearly two dozen missile strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean that were purportedly carrying narcotics on behalf of drug cartels, then proceeded to the seizure of oil tankers departing Venezuela, and finally culminating in the brazen capture and arraignment of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro on drug trafficking charges.While Maduro’s corruption and brutality are notorious, and there is some precedent for the kind of case that is being brought against him, what was alarming was Trump’s clear interest in Venezuela’s oil reserves and his insistence on keeping Maduro’s unelected government in place under a care-taker leader, Delcy Rodríguez. His rationale was as brutal as it was clear: “if [Rodríguez] doesn’t do what’s right” — which is to say, what the Trump administration dictates — “she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro”. It’s no stretch to suspect that Maduro’s capture and prosecution was meant to communicate that same message to Venezuela’s neighbours.The imperial logic here would have been familiar to city-states of Athens or Rome: the rulers of conquered territories and peoples would be kept in place but reduced to vassals, and would pay for their survival by offering tribute (taxes, natural wealth, crops, slave labour) to enrich the centre. Failure to pay tribute would be met with lavish punishment. (Karl Marx famously called this the first expression of “the tributary mode of production” in pre-capitalist societies.)So successful was this Venezuela operation, and having been met with such little international resistance, Trump seemed emboldened to press his long-standing claim on the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland. This was the second shoe to drop, as it were. Like Venezuela, his desire for the United States to “own” Greenland was framed as a kind of international security imperative: “Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China … The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.” But upon meeting with resistance on the part of NATO nations — which Trump, unsurprisingly, interpreted as ingratitude (“I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States”) — his willingness to threaten coercion in the form of military force or punitive tariffs laid bare the underlying sense of territorial entitlement.In his justly praised speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered one response to Trump’s ambitions:“if great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from ‘transactionalism’ will become harder to replicate. Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.”This was then reiterated in the determination of European leaders to resist Trump’s bullying tactics.But the prospect of what might be called hemispheric hegemony — the refusal of “great powers” to be constrained by the interests of what Joseph Goebbels called “crummy little states”, the “reorganisation of the world” along the lines of regional sway and each powerful nation being given “its own proper place” — has unsettling echoes not just of the Monroe Doctrine but of the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan that signaled the end of the “tottering” and “effete” League of Nations.Are we justified in worrying about a similar disregard of law- or rules-based restraint?You can read Brendon O’Connor’s reflections on Trump’s posturing over Greenland on ABC Religion & Ethics.

The massacre at Bondi Beach on 14 December 2025 — during which two gunmen targeted a group of Jewish Australians who had gathered to mark the first day of Hanukkah, killing 15 people — violently punctuated two years of escalating antisemitic incidents.Bondi was an act of terror that realised the worst fears of many Australian Jews, who had seen their synagogues and restaurants torched, their houses, schools and electorate offices vandalised, and members of their community ostracised, harassed and abused on city streets, in cultural institutions, on university campuses.Adding insult to grievous injury was the fact that so many Australian Jews had expressed their feeling of being estranged and afraid within their own country, only to have their fears routinely minimised or dismissed.Horrific events of this kind invariably elicit a collective reckoning. What are the contributing factors that created the conditions in which something like this could occur, and what can be done to ensure nothing like it happens again? For many Australians, the act of discriminatory violence at Bondi represented a four-fold failure:the inability of police and intelligence services to prevent the attack;the laxness of existing gun control laws;the inadequacy of laws involving hate speech, hate crimes and hate groups;the unwillingness to take the fears and experiences of members of the Jewish community seriously in the face of rising antisemitism.The first and last of these failures will be the particular focus of the recently announced royal commission. But the Albanese government was intent on moving quickly to address the second and third by recalling parliament to pass new legislation. In so doing, the federal government confronted some of the dangers involved in legislating in the aftermath of a national tragedy.Not only are there the general risks of overreach, of scapegoating, or of unintended consequences due to laws that are written either too specifically or too vaguely. There is also the role that the emotion can play in attempting to craft a legislative response to the loss of these particular lives — which included someone who survived the Holocaust, some who died protecting others, rabbis, parents, grandparents and siblings, a 10-years-old girl.But then there is also the fact that this mass shooting took place in the context of a period of heightened social conflict and emotion over the war in Gaza following the 7 October 2023 attacks. There can be little doubt that the large public displays of anger at the State of Israel and grief over the killing of tens of thousands of men, women and children in Gaza contributed to the climate of hostility experienced by many Jewish Australians — whether they supported the actions of the Netanyahu government or not.So it seemed inevitable that the tidal wave of sorrow and remorse over the victims of Bondi would slam into the wall of anger and grief over the devastation of Gaza — to say nothing of concerns, on the left and the right, that new hate speech laws would supress or criminalise forms of robust political expression that should otherwise be protected. For the new laws to pass, something would have to give.In the end, on Tuesday, the federal government was able to pass two significantly amended bills — one involving gun control, the other addressing hate speech, hate crimes and hate groups; the first with support from the Greens, the second with members of the Coalition. The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Bill 2026 focusses now on the grounds on which an organisation could be specified as a “prohibited hate group”, an expanded definition of “hate crimes”, new visa refusal powers and the creation of an “aggravated grooming offence” aimed at “religious official[s] or other spiritual leader[s]” who advocate violence or teach hate to those under the age of 18.What the public and political debate over these laws has exposed, in the process, is a fundamental lack of agreement over the nature and harms of “hate speech”, or understanding of its effect on groups and individuals in a democratic and diverse society. We have also seen how risky it is to address hate speech simply by criminalising it.You can read Kath Gelber’s reflections on the first and final versions of the federal government’s hate speech laws on ABC Religion and Ethics (here and here).

How should we wrestle with the problem of loving the art, but being unsettled by the behaviour or the beliefs of the artist who created it? It would be a mistake to see it as just an ethical problem. It is also an aesthetic problem. Because knowing what we know causes us to see the work differently.

Could a stand-up routine ever rise to the level of "art" — the kind of performance that rewards multiple viewings, whose humour grows and deepens, which contains subtleties waiting to be discovered? Enter US comedian John Mulaney with a 2017 comedy sketch. There is something undeniably enduring, timeless even about Mulaney's act.

When saving face is paramount to all other considerations, others invariably pay the price in order for the untrammeled supremacy of the ego to persist. But by permitting someone to "save face", are we not providing a constructive way of keeping them within a moral community?

There are few things more peculiar to a person than their preferences; why they favour one genre of music or one style of writing over another. And in our world of endless digital reproduction, we increasingly rely on recommendation algorithms to curate or triage our encounters with culture. But algorithms tend toward massification; they rule out the possibilities of both aesthetic achievement and sheer surprise.

AI is sometimes portrayed in utopian terms as the essential technological innovation. At other times, it's described as representing an existential threat to human life, a technological creation that will inevitably lay waste to its creator. Regardless of how we view it, could the cost of AI extend far beyond economics?

It is one of the casualties of democratic politics that citizens rarely remain indifferent about the governments they elect. By investing politicians with their hopes or fears, their aspirations and anxieties, voters ensure that they will take the performance of a government personally. This is why politics cannot be emptied of emotion: electors and the elected are bound together by filaments of expectation and accountability, and the conditions of their common life depend on the maintenance of those delicate affective bonds.But when contempt, corruption, greed, incompetence, inattentiveness, unresponsiveness, popular suspicion and outright violence are allowed to eat away at these bonds, it is the political and civil life of the nation as a whole that suffers. For in such conditions, good governance becomes impossible — either because politicians habitually treat the electorate with disdain or because voters are so aggrieved that they gravitate towards those who will give voice to their discontent.That’s why it is imperative to do what can be done to strengthen the political, civic and moral bonds that connect citizens with one another and governors with the governed.How might we cultivate the capacity to imagine that politics can, in fact, be a means of pursuing and achieving the good, that there are virtues inherent to the political vocation? It may well begin with the recovery of an almost pastoral vision of politics as what emerges out of a people’s concern to care for their common life.It is just such an imagination that is richly on display in a series of murals painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the walls of the Sala dei Nova (the Hall of the Nine, otherwise known as Sala della Pace, the Hall of Peace) in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico between 1337 and 1340. Lorenzetti’s commission was at once to visualise the philosophical undergirding of the political system of Siena under the stewardship of nine self-selecting governors, and to remind those dispensing justice and those seeking it of the stakes of their deliberations.Lorenzetti evidently drew on the political vision of the Nine — their own understanding of the virtues that are inherent to the vocation of good governance — and he/they drew liberally from the tradition of soulcraft/statecraft from the Italian renaissance, as well as from Seneca and Cicero, Augustine and Aquinas. The question is whether we, in our time, with our resources, can recover an analogously compelling vision of guarded optimism, of mutual accountability, of prudence and wisdom, such that we, too, can articulate the conditions in which politics can be a force for good.

In the world of book sales, what “romantasy” is to fiction, autobiography/memoir is to non-fiction. There is an undeniable appetite for the purportedly true stories of famous or otherwise public figures whose lives are shrouded in PR or private interests.Moreover, autobiographies have a kind of inherent meaning or telos — disparate elements come together to form a narrative which always will have been meaningful. Part of our desire to read such memoirs is certainly prurient, a wish to know more than we are entitled; but part is also inspirational or “admirational”, nourishing the belief or hope that our lives, too, will end up having been meaningful.And yet, there is nothing uncomplicated about the task of telling the story of our lives. There is an ethical flaw at the heart of such a task: given how given we are to self-justification and self-absolution, how ungenerous we can be in response to the actions and intentions of others, how forgiving we can be to our own inconsistencies and hypocrisies, and how blind we often are to the effects our own behaviour to other people’s lives, who’s to say we are adept at narrating our stories truthfully?And yet our story is our own, and there is a certain humiliation, a certain violence, that accompanies an inability to tell it — for our lives to be wholly narrated by someone else, as though we were a footnote to their story.What, then, are some of the ways that we can discover truthfulness “in the innermost parts” (as the Psalms put it)? There are other forms of life-writing that would seem to evade or at least temper the temptation to self-deception. The example of Helen Garner’s decision to publish her diaries — raw, flawed, achingly human — would stand as a morally credible counterpoint to the sheer overwhelming excess of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Then there’s also the auto-fictional experiment of Rachel’s Cusk’s Outline trilogy, whereby readers come to know the central character only through her attentive conversations with others. One of the most remarkable recent examples is Helen Elliott’s memoir Eleven Letters to You, which is less an autobiography than it is an account of the friendship, truthfulness, decency of others — Elliott is simply “the hinge holding it all together”.Could it be that we simply cannot know ourselves, the meaning of our lives, without the provocation and perspective of others, who help us come to see that the truth about ourselves is most often discernible through our actions and relationships?

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?