Today Non- Subscribers get a FREE taste of what they are missing out on.
Have a read of this Insight Politics article then decide whether or not you would like to subscribe to a Silver subscription or upgrade your existing Basic or Bronze level Subscription to Silver.
The Dangerous Silliness of an Intellectual
An Academic Fool Ties Herself in Knots Over Race.
Once upon a time, being not just any old academic, but an actual professor, might have meant something. Usually, that the person so designated was not merely clever, but trained and accustomed to a higher level of thinking than we hoi polloi. An academic, supposedly, had attained some degree of intellectual rigor and disciplined thinking.
Hah.
Despite an Eton education, George Orwell avoided the ivory towers of the academy and worked for a living instead – first in the Colonial Service, then as a writer. Orwell might not have been an academic, but he was a thinker of the highest order. Someone whose intellectual clarity still inspires and educates.
Professor Marcia Langton is an “academic”, donchaknow. But her muddled response to the High Court’s recent decision on citizenship, aliens and Aborigines, or her witterings about an “Indigenous Voice”, should raise doubts about her abilities as a critical thinker. In trying to justify the unjustifiable, Langton ties herself in knots of contradictory arguments and mires herself in a mud of nonsense.
“The idea of ‘race’”, she declares, “must be replaced by a more accurate conception of peoples with unique and ancient cultural and genealogical links to this continent.” Which sounds an awful lot like calling a spade a “rectangular manual earth-moving implement”. After all, Oxford defines race as “a group of people who share the same language, history, culture, etc”.
Langton appears to be parroting the modern conceit that “race doesn’t exist”. Except that, when it suits her, race is as biologically real as she needs it to be.
For instance, in the same piece, Langton approvingly quotes an earlier High Court judgement, that “(m)embership of the indigenous people depends on biological descent from the indigenous people and on mutual recognition of a particular person’s membership by that person and by the elders or other persons enjoying traditional authority among those people”.
So, the notion of race, rooted in biology, permeates her argument.
Yet, she then declares that, “race is a dangerous concept and my view is that we must dispense with it”. Langton both wants to assert that Aboriginal Australians have unique rights, available to no one else, on the basis of their genetic heritage, and that classifying people according to their genetic heritage is racist.
So which is it?
One of the most basic rules of logic is the Law of Non-Contradiction: two antithetical propositions cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. Either “race” as genetic heritage is wrong and “dangerous”, or it is real and essential. It can’t be both.
Langton also enthusiastically endorses Dark Emu, and its author, Bruce Pascoe, despite numerous historians highlighting the mistruths, misinterpretations and flat-out fabrications in the work. Many Aboriginal groups have also flatly rejected Pascoe’s claims to Aboriginality. Yet Langton has declared that Dark Emu “is the most important book on Australia and should be read by every Australian”.
Then again, Langton has also stated – in an academic journal, no less – that Aborigines were at work in “pre-colonial Australia” for “millions of years”.
Langton’s enthusiasm for the “progressive” hobby horse du jour, the “Indigenous Voice” is just as self-contradictory. Despite arguing vehemently against “entrenching racism in our laws”, Langton is one of the prime movers of an elite-driven push to enshrine racial separatism at the highest level of Australian law, the Constitution itself. The foundational document of the “Voice” proposal – which Langton has repeatedly endorsed – explicitly states that Aboriginal sovereignty “was never ceded and coexists with the Crown’s sovereignty today”.
This is yet another self-contradictory statement. “Sovereignty” is a word with a specific meaning: the exclusive, supreme authority within a territory. This definition self-evidently precludes “coexisting” sovereignty over the same territory. If Aboriginal sovereignty was not ceded, then, by necessity, it still applies.
In other words, the “Voice” proponents are calling for an Aboriginal ethnostate over either parts or the whole of Australia. An ethnostate where sovereignty is defined by race.
Langton at least seems to be partly aware of this, despite denying its reality. Not least because it necessarily requires some process to identify who’s Aboriginal and who’s not. After all, if just anybody can vote in an “Indigenous Voice”, then that completely defeats its purpose, “a way for Indigenous Australians to provide advice and input”.
The first practical mission of such a “Voice” would therefore be to identify just who or what is an “Indigenous Australian”.
Certainly, some prominent Aboriginal activists are getting antsy at “Fauxboriginals”: people falsely claiming Indigenous identity. Dr. Stephen Hagan – he of “Cheer Cheese” notoriety – says that the current rubric is being abused to support fraudulent claims. “Anyone can do an internet search on a tribe and spin a good yarn to get around the definition.” Instead, Hagan argues for an “apical ancestor test by going back a minimum of three generations”.
(An “apical ancestor” is “a tribe’s common ancestor who can be demonstrated to be at the apex of the Aboriginal lineage of a group”.)
Marcia Langton is rightly enough alarmed at the prospect of a race-based register of Aboriginal Australians, calling it “the worst instance of racial profiling”. Which it indeed is.
Yet how else can the “Voice” work?
After all, we have a set of criteria to determine who can and cannot vote in Australian elections – and none of them are racial. Any “Voice” must likewise set out criteria for participation. When the “Voice” is based on race – no matter how Langton chooses to define “race” on any given day – as an “Indigenous Voice” by definition is, then clearly it must use some criteria to establish who is a member of that race.
So, no matter how much “Voice” proponents may express righteous horror at a race-based register, an “Indigenous Voice” cannot meaningfully function without one.
None of this is to imply that Professor Langton is actually stupid. Clearly, that is not the case. But it is well known that clever people are often exceptionally adept at believing foolish things. Indeed, as Orwell wrote, “one has to belong to the intelligentsia” to believe some of the most outlandishly foolish ideas. As a case in point, it should be noted – especially given Langton’s dark warnings of “a race-based purge of Aboriginal people” – that the majority of the participants of the Wannsee Conference, which laid the groundwork for the most notorious race-based purge in history, held doctorates.
Those of us blessed not to belong to the “intelligentsia” can at least apply a toolkit of bullshit-filters in order to spot dangerously foolish ideas. A basic test of a foolish idea is whether it violates the Law of Non-Contradiction.
Railing against racism while proposing to enshrine racism in the Australian Constitution is about as dangerously foolish as one can get.
Did you enjoy reading that?
Subscribe to a Silver subscription or upgrade your existing Basic or Bronze level Subscription to Silver today.