Don’t confuse simplification for clarity

 

Peter Strempel, 19 July 2026

Simplification of complex ideas has valuable rôle to play in any discussion, but oversimplification comes with the risk of distorting reality to create disinformation, misinformation, and sometimes outright lies.

Why would this be important to you? Maybe to understand how not to do yourself what you claim is actually the responsibility of others trying to mislead you. Like rationalizing your own inability to concentrate on any one topic for more than a few seconds as being ‘bombarded’ with information overload that you nevertheless obsess over voluntarily by being glued to your hand held device. Or like infantilizing others by demanding they cater to your inability to concentrate and focus by offering you only the briefest of simplifications, without evidence or reasoned argument.

That’s how headlines, TV news, and social media work: simplification to the point of distorting any message coming close to reality or truth. Just enough punch to grab attention, just enough apparent relationship to the topic to not appear to be an obvious lie.

A more useful perspective might be offered by looking at the question of reductionism or simplification from a more disciplined approach. Starting with a consideration of the most prominent work of the admittedly obscure German philosopher Hans Vaihinger, progressing to the more recent ideas of English-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, and looking at what we could learn in contemporary, everyday contexts by just paying attention to some bad habits in that light, as well as explicitly recognizing how the media, old and new, manipulate us.

Hans Vaihinger’s 1911 work, Die Philosophie des Als Ob,[1] translated into English (1924) and revised (1935) by British polymath Charles Kay Ogden[2] carried the central idea that human thinking naturally tended towards a metaphor and analogy-laden simplification or reductionism, which he thought of as ‘fictions’ or fictive treatments of more complex ideas. The simplifications were to facilitate communication without getting repeatedly bogged down in the detail of complex ideas. Vaihinger gave as an example Adam Smith’s reductionism of all human motivations being governed by ‘egoism’ (self interest); a severe reduction of the full complexity of human motivations necessary for Smith to propose any coherent explanation of political economy at all. Vaihinger concluded that this reductionism was ‘of great value’ as a fictional metaphor, but ‘positively ruinous as hypothesis or dogma’.[3]

The example given clearly applies to a great number of contemporary reductionisms. We are told about the Big Bang theory, glossing over tremendously complex calculations of hypothetical events. We are told of budget deficits in news articles hiding the complexities of taxation and expenditure measures, how they are calculated, and even the precise nature of what comprises a deficit. We are inveigled with advertisements for miracle cures that are anything but miraculous, or wonder drugs that are much less wonder than profit-driven stop gaps. In media labelled ‘news’ we are lied to by commentators claiming insight but revealing no evidence for assertions made, with repeated, conspicuous claims that status quo conformity is in fact ‘centre left’ politics and political extremism is in fact ‘centre right’ politics.

Staying with that last example, the very words ‘centre-left’ and ‘centre-right’ ought to raise the question by whose definition of the political continuum are they that? And if they are at the ‘centre’, then distinctions like left and right ought to be micro-measures, making them almost indistinguishable. Yet they are not, and often billed as ‘clear’ alternatives to each other. The terminology is therefore less simplification than disinformation about major ideological and policy differences.

Flowing from the distortion of reality contained in those simplified terms about politics, when we are told that right wing extremism is in fact ‘centre right’ politics, we are supposed to accept uncritically that its extremes have other politics even further to the right, and therefore must be the new ‘centre right’, perhaps by assuming the Overton Window has shifted so far to the right as to make the extreme no longer appear to be extreme. That was indeed the project pursued by Trump strategist Steve Bannon, driven by his attack on the credibility of media he regarded as too progressive by ‘flooding the zone’ with right wing extremist ‘shit’ and with conspiracy theories undermining the idea credibility in media altogether.

But if that revised definition of centre right were accepted as ‘truth’ in itself, it then lends itself to further simplifications, such as pejoratively labelling anything to the left of right wing extremism (which once included conservatism) as ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’. It is precisely the way in which president Trump has characterized the American mainstream conservative party, the Democrats,[4] as communists,[5] with the deliberate to undermine Democrat election chances in favour of the Republicans’ melange of plutocrat, libertarian, and Christofascist justifications for corruption and dismantling democracy itself.

There are risks attached to fictive simplifications that can lead to completely obscuring or even ideologically redefining the complexity for which they were stand-ins. In this way, for example, the Australian Labor Party has not been recognized in mass media as Australia’s only conservative party, while the extremism of the Liberal-National Coalition is hidden by the wrongly attributed label of ‘centre’, and the overtly populist-fascist nature of One Nation is never mentioned as that at all. Because even the people on the political right know that the label ‘right wing’ bears distinctly negative connotations. Deservedly so. It is not by accident or whim that an adviser to mining billionaire Gina Rinheart, the conspicuous sponsor of One Nation, demanded from the Saturday Paper that it delete the characterization of Rinehart as politically ‘far right’.[6] The demand, without any justification, is certainly for dishonestly disguising the political orientation of someone so obviously hoping to manipulate politics with One Nation’s giddy mixture of reactionary, fascist, libertarian, bigoted, and plutocrat rhetorics, most likely motivated entirely by anticipated personal gain.

Moving on, a more recent work by Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, As If: Idealization and Ideals (2017), confirms that Vaihinger’s ‘as if’ simplifications are ‘laws or theories that are literally false but that provide an easier and more useful way to think about certain subjects than the truth in all its complexity would’.[7]

The fiction is useful only for certain purposes. If it is not to lead us astray, we have to recognize the ways in which it deviates from reality, and to correct for those deviations when they make a difference that matters. This is in fact the concern of the recently developed field of behavioral economics, which tries to identify the consequences of systematic deviations of actual human behavior from the standards of classical economic rationality.[8]

This focus on political economy is not academic. It has a direct relationship to political claims that neoliberal political economy, often called free market or trickle down economics, should favour the rich on the promise their increased wealth would flow downwards to the less wealthy. That claim is based on the ideological assumption that free market choices are in fact free from the contrived distortions and deliberate corruptions pursued by corporations and the wealthy, and that their wealth would indeed flow through an entire economy, which 40 years of evidence has consistently proved to be an utterly false claim. And yet the claim is often a core feature of the very right wing extremism Gina Rinehart and other billionaires favour. Clearly because it promises to make them even more wealthy, and because the promised increase in wealth under a right wing extremist government does not flow anywhere but their own bank accounts, minus the expense of buying politicians and political parties to maintain that benefit.

It also helps to explain why mainstream and social media are so hostile to progressive politics promoting a fairer political economy: those media, old and new, are owned and operated solely for profit by corporations owned by billionaires seeking to become ever more wealthy. As an end in itself.

American philosopher Thomas Nagel, in reviewing Appiah’s book, made an acute, if apparently obvious observation: ‘An ideal that cannot be implemented is futile.’[9] Appiah seems to think of Vaihinger’s simplifications or fictions more in terms of ‘idealizations’ of complex ideas.[10] The question becomes: what’s the point of reducing reality to an ideal, or simplified model, if it has zero relevance to the circumstance or problem to which it is applied? The answer is evident in every economic planning and technology failure. Imposing futile models without accounting for specific contexts requires not much effort in thought or logistics. The popularity of not thinking remains astonishingly immune to recognition of the many failures it helps to create. It is a conspicuous feature of technocratic management models, as taught in MBA and other management courses, that they vanquish critical thinking. Their very attractiveness in offering connect-the-dots, one-size-fits-all models and methods for achieving outcomes removes the effort and difficulty in individual human creativity, insight, and innovation, substituting them with a dull consistency of process. It is like achieving the McDonalds goal of eating exactly the same hamburger in every outlet across the world, regardless of culture, language, or politics, and ignoring any outcome of better, more affordable nutrition, or the integration of local cuisine to broaden the appeal in local markets. The uniformity of the process itself becomes the outcome, regardless of the stated expectations. Over and over again. That is the fertile ground for the currently overhyped promises made for AI.

AI plagiarism engines do little more for organizations than a business process analyst might: automating and streamlining processes in operations, eliminating the cost of employees by doing so. A methodology that offers quick savings but mostly leads to longer-term organizational failure for discarding the people who might have driven innovation, realized productive new outcomes, and staved off accountancy-led failures. You don’t really need human employees, driven by managers, to fail. You can just automate the failure to begin with.

In media, though, the plagiarism aspect of AI is much more sinister: the technology can be used to generate fake ‘news’ stories, and even television broadcasts devoid of any journalism, any real humans, or any rational relationship with reality. How much of what we watch and read, assuming it news, is not in fact already entirely idealized, simplified fiction?[11]

Appiah conceived of reductionism or idealization as only an intellectual tool, not an end in itself, and its products as not commandments or ideologies, but as simplifications used to gain different perspectives and new insights. You protect yourself from being lied to with reductionist idealizations by not falling for the snappy headline, the pithy slogan, or the terse assertion. Not without looking for evidence from credible sources. That is, if the topic matters to you. And you make it harder for lies to succeed by not insisting on the valorization of terseness and the vacuity of demanding only the shortest of summaries when ‘consuming’ information. Synopsis explains nothing, offers no evidence, and easily misleads because it assumes an agreed ‘understanding’ that may not exist. In that way it becomes easy to construct propaganda lies disguised as news or expert insights: they don’t have to be proven with evidence or rational argument.

Brevity that obscures facts or evidence has no inherent value, no matter how much it is claimed that busy people have no time to pay attention, or that many words just mean their authors don’t understand their topic. To credibly make those assertions, you must first have understood the complexity of the meanings to be conveyed or questioned. And how is that done with only summaries of questionable value?

Notes

[1] The work was wordy, sometimes ambiguous, and tended towards the extant trend of devising a needlessly grand theory constructed around one or two original ideas.

[2] Even in translation and with revisions, the book remained inaccessible and did not reach wide audiences.

[3] Vaihinger, Hans (2021), The Philosophy of As If, Routledge Classics, 17-18.

[4] Graham, David A., ‘The Democrats Are Now America’s Conservative Party’, Ideas, The Atlantic, 8 July 2023 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/conservative-democrats-supreme-court-status-quo/674643/> [accessed 18 July 2026].

[5] See, for example, Cancryn, Adam, ‘Trump Ramps up Attacks on Democrats as “Godless Communists” Ahead of November’s Midterms’, CNN, 26 June 2026 <https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/26/politics/trump-communists-democrats-attack> [accessed 18 July 2026]; Schermele, Francesca Chambers, Zac Anderson and Zachary, ‘Trump’s Bashing Dems as “Godless Communists.” Will It Matter in the Midterms?’, USA TODAY, 5 July 2026 <https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/07/05/donald-trump-democratic-socialists-communists-midterms-affordability/90787786007/> [accessed 18 July 2026];

Smith, David, ‘Trump Attacks Democrats as “Godless Communists” in Test of Midterms Message’, US News, The Guardian, 26 June 2026 <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/26/trump-democrats-communists-midterms> [accessed 18 July 2026].

[6] Editorial, ‘The Rinehart Emails’, The Saturday Paper, 18 July 2026 <https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/editorial/2026/07/17/rinehart-emails> [accessed 18 July 2026].

[7] Nagel, Thomas, review of Kwame Anthony Appiah, As If!, The New York Review of Books, 65.6 (2018) <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/04/05/as-if-kwame-anthony-appiah/> [accessed 18 July 2026].

[8] Nagel, (2018).

[9] Nagel, (2018).

[10] Appiah, Anthony Kwame, As If : Idealization and Ideals, Harvard University Press, 2017, ix–xvi.

[11] See, for example, Meade, Amanda, ‘News Corp Using AI to Produce 3,000 Australian Local News Stories a Week’, Media, The Guardian, 31 July 2023 <https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/aug/01/news-corp-ai-chat-gpt-stories> [accessed 19 July 2026]. How much further has this method of generating stories progressed since 2023, and across all mass media? And how much further in another three years?

Joyce ulterior motives for Christian nation comments?

 

Peter Strempel, 17 July 2026

When I read that ex National Party bull at the gate, Barnaby Joyce, newly motivated to join the shambolic One Nation he thinks he can wrest away from its current leader, declared Australia a Christian country, I thought he’d just had a few too many shandies that day.

But of course context is everything. He was at a Christofascist rally, masquerading as a ‘gala dinner’ promoting anti-abortion messages, rubbing shoulders with fringe people like the Make Australia Christian Again crowd. One wonders where those people get their funding. And how Joyce thinks this will track with women voters.

On the other hand, Joyce is better known for being drunk than moral integrity, beliefs in anything other than his own fortunes, political nous, leadership qualities, or coherent media statements. But he might just be smarter drunk than Hanson is when completely sober.

The Christian remark was really about wooing white Christian nationalists who are probably better known as neo-Nazis, the genuine Christofascists with theocratic ambitions, and those deluded country folk who still think the church—any Christian church—stands for petit-bourgeois decency and stability. Joyce was, after all, a National for years, and could be credited with knowing his former party got some of those votes in the past. Perhaps he’s also hoping to steal some of those votes away from the Liberal Party, which has been similarly wooing the far right, if somewhat more coyly than Joyce

It’s galling to admit Joyce is entirely correct on another level, whether he is fully conscious of it is another question, like the one about his state of consciousness when his face is beetroot red and he’s flat on his back son some footpath.

Anyway, so long as the English monarch, who is also head of the Anglican Church, remains Australian head of state, no interpretation of the constitution against religious discrimination can make a secular state of Australia. Sanctimoniously hypocritical prayers are still part of parliamentary commencement rituals, as if anyone in that place ever demonstrated any recognizable Christian virtues. Perhaps they just mean to acknowledge all the vices of Christianity over the centuries.

And there persists a quite bigoted attitude among those Protestants who dominated the Liberal Party and business establishment from the Menzies era onwards against Catholics of Italian and Greek descent, though today it seems more focused on Muslims than on Catholics.

Perhaps another foundation for that Protestant bigotry can be undermined by the next census. If enough Australians nominate that they don’t have any religious affiliations, and the statistical reality becomes that most Australian people are in fact atheists, meaning the country is secular despite the symbolisms of state.

One other thought. Perhaps it hadn’t escaped Joyce that the antisemitism royal commission has actually stirred up quite a bit of resentment, including especially against Israeli Judaeofascism. I wouldn’t put it past Joyce to be opportunistic enough to ogle that demographic the way he has been photographed lecherously ogling Vikki Campion’s legs.

‘Progressives’ have become extremists

  

Peter Strempel, 13 July 2026 

Over the weekend I foolishly spent a few hours commenting on a post by a Broome-based ‘digital creator’ masquerading as a ‘citizen journalist’ (BASE News Australia) who had decried an interview (by Sarah Ferguson on 7:30) with an Iranian professor as proof that the ABC has been captured by evil right wing ideologues, and proclaiming a pretty simple-minded Iranian propaganda message as a triumph of ‘flaming’ or ‘burning’  (or some other such juvenile punishment) of the ABC host.

The point I made was that the ABC host was constrained by an editorial policy that has been unethically influenced by long-term attacks from right wing extremists, and that the professor offered a defence of Iranian terrorism visited on its own people, and the rest of the world, as somehow being a secret Israeli conspiracy all along. It was such a silly proposition I couldn’t quite understand how anyone could think it credible.

Nor could I understand how dismissing Iranian propaganda must necessarily be mistaken as support for Israeli-US attacks on Iran. And yet that was the argument I let myself be drawn into: that I must be a supporter of Judaeofascist genocide for not taking the Iranian side. Uncritically. As if ignorance of contemporary world history, ethics, or even my own self interest as an infidel Iran has declared fair game for torture or murder must be dismissed as irrelevant.

My argument was that all the armchair do-gooders on the thread were stunningly uncritical in enforcing binary thinking, demanding that issues are always black and white, only that side or the ‘other’ side, our tribe or theirs. I can think of many entirely rational grounds for dismissing both sides in this binary confrontation, or to be indifferent to either. That’s called pluralism, and relies on independent thought and the freedom to give voice to it.

I faced not just bots and fake profiles seeking to condemn me as a supporter of Israeli genocide, but real people earnestly trying to mansplain (there were a few women in there too, but is womansplaining a thing?) to me how I must either support Iranian or Iraeli-US lies. No permission to choose a third option, or multiple alternatives.

My response was to reject this artificial binary constraint. My interlocutors either could not understand, or refused to acknowledge pluralism as a valid option. As far as I can tell that failure or refusal to understand and/or acknowledge pluralism is a totalitarian impulse; a kind of pseudo-religious ideological faith.

Unfortunately, the same totalitarian impulse seems to have infected more formal progressive politics too. None more so than the appalling Stalinist political correctness that appears to hold sway inside the Australian Greens.

The Guardian ran an editorial comment today that suggested the Australian Greens had flatlined in opinion polling while One Nation had soared because the former had not ‘connected’ with voter anger. Maybe. What they have connected with is tribalism and censorious claims to moral certainty, which is always an ominously absolutist claim, and more than a little religious in its ambition. A claim to knowledge of absolute, objective truth.

The worst political mistake the Greens made in recent times is to align themselves with Iranian propaganda defending its sponsorship of world wide terrorism, including the funding and control of Hamas, and their joint, complete lack of empathy or mercy for the Palestinian people. Neither Iran nor Hamas give a damn how many Palestinians are slaughtered in their cynical game. Not too many voters would defend Israeli genocidal policies. But why would that mean they would choose to support murderous Iranian imperial ambitions instead? And why would anyone using social media let mostly anonymous Greens zealots lecture or condemn them for not supporting a doctrinaire policy enforced with the methods of Stalinist witchhunting, coercion, cancellation, or even expulsion from the party? Would the Greens take people into the woods and shoot them in the back of the neck if they could get away with it? I sometimes wonder.

Which brings me to a second, less high profile strategic mistake made by the Greens that is possibly even more unforgivable: the obscene, perverse obsession with gender queer-transsexual ‘rights’. Most recently it erupted in the expulsion of Greens co-founder Drew Hutton for defending freedom of speech against the sacred cow status within the party of so-called ‘trans rights’. It turned out the expulsion was illegal even under the party’s own rules, but it demonstrated the Stalinist orientation of the Greens. Free speech and pluralism of opinion were to be sacrificed to the politically correct accusation—not reality or truth—of transphobia, and the demonization of gender critical feminists, now pejoratively dubbed trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) despite the fact that most of them simply want the same thing the scared cows do: the right to choose their own identity. Not long ago this unhealthy ideological obsession led to the expulsion of a party convener on entirely vaccuous grounds. (I have examined the TERF witchhunting hysteria in detail previously.) Nothing to do with transphobia, unless you also accuse such feminists of misandry, and a kind of politically incorrect misanthropy more generally. (See Freri and Ferguson, Sakkal and Massola, Feminist Legal Clinic, Tuohy.)

For me the foulness of this Stalinist culture war was driven home by a conversation I had a couple of years ago, in which I was called a transphobe by a Greens supporter for proposing that there are no rights if they don’t apply to all people equally. The argument from my interlocutor was that trans people deserved special rights because they were more discriminated against than most others. I asked the question: ‘You argue that trans people deserve not one, but two identities. They are trans people, but also either men or women, depending on their chosen orientation. But feminists insisting on gender specific definitions of their own identities get to have no legitimate identity at all. Isn’t that just misogynist witchhunting dressed up in politically correct clothes?’

What I got in reply was adolescent petulance about not acknowledging how wrong I was in not just agreeing with the Greens’ ideologically distorted view.

I responded by arguing that any right reserved for only one group of people is not a right at all, but a privilege. Implicit in such a conception is the idea that all ‘rights’ become arbitrary and contingent on whim, subject to being bestowed or withdrawn by fiat. And that the largest group of people facing uninterrupted historical discrimination are women, however defined, but that the Greens make no argument to elevate women to sacred cow status, because there’s no guarantee that such a position could offer cynical exploitation of culture wars tropes.

The response was a hurt expression, followed a few seconds later by a repetition of the charge that I was a morally deficient person for not agreeing to be dictated to, and censored, in the name of some imagined righteousness, and absolute certainty about a ridiculous subversion of ethics and logic.

I doubt many voters have much sympathy for such tyrannical, ideological, and dishonest positions. If the Greens choose to be totalitarian in their political instincts and actions, they will never transcend minor party status. There just aren’t enough sacred cows who vote, and plenty of voters for whom creation of a scared cow status for anyone is anathema to their daily concerns.

The Greens’ ideological imbecility aside, perhaps worst of all for Australian voters is that the supposedly progressive ALP has endorsed a special envoy for Israeli subversion of Australian sovereignty. An envoy who is busy demanding that Israeli counterintelligence be in charge of supervising the public conduct and speech of every Australian, especially in government, in universities, and now also at the ABC and SBS. There is little doubt the current Israeli regime is a genocidal Judaeofascist autocracy—fascist because it gives the power of law to ideological/religious bigotry. But it may soon be a crime to say that. There’s nothing progressive about such a policy, and imposing partisanship in a foreign blood feud with no outcome other than barbaric cruelty and bloodshed in perpetuity is not a popular policy in Australia.

Being dispassionate about such issues makes it easier to understand why there is still so much support for right wing extremists, whose policies are undoubtedly the worst for the nation, and who are uniformly supportive of the Judaeofascist Israel. In fact it was the right wing News-Nine-Seven media cartel that conducted a hysterical public campaign demanding the subversion of Australian sovereignty in favour of censorship by Israel in this country. But the political right has successfully positioned itself as the saviour from ‘left wokeness’. Never mind it has its own baleful political correctness.

It seems no matter which way you may choose to vote, you have to vote against secular democracy, freedom of thought and speech, and against the pluralism without which individual liberty and political choice in Australia will be extinguished. And, for all the ideologically deluded numbskulls who want it this way, my final word is that multiculturalism isn’t possible in such an environment either, so the ‘progressives’ I described here are actually not much better than One Nation nihilists and their monoculture.

Literary reactionaries are their own worst enemy

 

Peter Strempel,  21 May 2026

James Ley’s reflections on the decline of literary studies and critique (The Monthly, May 2026) aren’t entirely wrong, but illustrate a blind spot, or even astonishing ignorance, that makes the academics and practitioners of literary appreciation and critique as guilty of the discipline’s decline as the pseudo-religious technocrat cultural vandals driving neoliberal political economy.

Ley’s introduction to his topic is his vaguely sarcastic review of some recent literary and literacy doom-and-gloom press in the USA, but he observes ‘separate surveys in the United States and United Kingdom have found that, over the course of a year, 40 per cent of their populations will not read a single book’, and that ‘a recent study by researchers at Monash University’ found

around a quarter of Australians will neither read nor listen to a book in a given year. Recreational reading is in decline and the trend is more pronounced among the young. Local book sales are soft. In 2024, they went backwards. The institutions that have traditionally provided material support and professional opportunities for writers and thinkers – universities, journalism, publishing – are all in parlous states.

Ley points to social media as culprits in promoting a kind of digital ADHD, promoting the gamut of disinformation, misinformation, and outright lies. No great insight there. It’s just chorus these days.

From there, Ley engages in some introspection about the literary canon, about who determines what is of value, and what is not, and about the debates around worthiness among gatekeepers in the academy. And here Ley seems to ignore reality as much as anyone posting on X.

Missing from his perspective is the critical turning point in modern philosophy, the emergence of the post-modern, that likely began when Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and its claims about a fundamental ontology, dissolved metaphysics. Heidegger’s claim was that a study of what exists is necessarily a study of ‘being’ in its form of human existence, and that this fundamental ontology is central to all other knowledge domains, strengthening Nietzsche’s critique of bourgeois values by implying they are likely only arbitrary ‘chatter’.

Why does that matter to literary critique? Because there is a strong argument that the advent of the novel was the expression of bourgeois self-assertion against the power of the old hierarchies of moneyed or institutional power: aristocracy, capitalists, and the church. Those values appear now to be self-indulgent, pompous, and boring. Being boring is the worst possible attribute of literature, and yet the academy keeps promoting such works as part of the Western canon, and critics keep using them as yardsticks of literary worth.

So, for example, unlike many others I see little instructive value in the moral pedantry of writers like Sterne, Defoe, Scott, Dickens, Hardy, the Brontës, Zola, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, Kipling, Conrad, and an apparently lengthy list of others considered part of the literary canon. But I do see value in knowing of their stylistic devices and diction, and especially their place in the history of literature. I come to my conclusions by having read some works by all of the mentioned authors, and having been alienated by what I thought of as quite boring prose with plots and characters of little direct relevance to my own life or times, and then being doubly alienated by the fawning admiration of those authors by academics and critics who seemed to be promoting the idea of objective and timeless standards that invalidate all other perspectives.

I see that model of critique as a kind of pseudo-religious tyranny of imposed meaning. Not at all unlike Ley’s definition of culture wars ‘as struggles for institutional dominance framed as issues of morality’. I would have rephrased that as ‘institutional hegemony based on arguments proposed as absolute certainty about supposedly objective standards that are in fact purely subjective ideological assertions’. Which is essentially the same as my definition of political correctness, whether coming from the ideological left or right.

I see that kind of intellectual tyranny as reactionary in light of the post-Heideggerian development of a continental European hybrid of what is often misnamed ‘cultural studies’ — an ugly formulation with unfortunate armchair left wing connotations in the Anglophone world — but which does combine aspects of literary critique with post-metaphysical philosophy and other humanities disciplines, especially history, historiography, and sociology.

In the USA this still unfinished experiment was hijacked in the 1960s by idiot professors and their student acolytes as a call to arms for some sort new left militancy, as if intellectual inquiry demanded simple-minded ideological alignment. There has never been a requirement to adopt any or all ideas of any thinker as consequence of reading or understanding that thinker.

Nevertheless, thus discredited, the body of work labelled post-modernism didn’t establish itself as an academic discipline in its own right, and even in the more class conscious Britain, the post Marxist dominance in cultural studies robbed it of the power of pluralism, intellectual tolerance, and the possibility of synthesis between opposing views, or at least an intellectual debate rather than the infantile culture wars posturing the Western world has been cursed with since at least the 17th century (via the English, Scottish, and continental European reformations, and in the Anglophone world, especially through James I’s and Charles I’s political blundering. Vainglorious mismanagement of their parliaments that led to the English civil war, and more importantly in hindsight, the settlement of the new world by bloody-minded, authoritarian Protestants).

However, the controversy around post-modernism, perhaps more accurately labelled ‘cultural studies’, is no reason to maintain an allegiance to a dated, sterile canon, with dated and sterile theories in literary critique. It will just kill off the entire field, the way philosophy has died as a vibrant centre of debate since all that remained was the desert of ‘analytical’ philosophy, trying to establish credibility by emulating mathematics and claiming affiliation to the hard sciences.

In the spirit of the lifelong learning that was a catchphrase during my undergraduate years, it seems fair to ask why literary studies as well as philosophy have not embraced a more eclectic curricular range, making electives and even majors available from other schools, departments or faculties. Both literary critics and philosophers could benefit , for example, from the journalistic techniques for clarity in writing, and a grounding in modern history and prominent cultural ideas. Among many other knowledge domains.

If pushed to the question what the future of literary critique should look like, I honestly don’t know, but I have an idea about a possible direction. One of the most notable, relatively recent developments in US philosophy was the defection in the 1990s of Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty from academic philosophy departments to faculties teaching comparative literature. He argued the ascendancy in campus politics of the stale and scholastically irrelevant ‘analytic’ philosophy professors made no room for embracing continental European ideas in philosophy, which were best discussed not in the pseudo-mathematical cum scientific blather of atomism, logical positivism, and a revived metaphysics, but in terms of literary critique of the texts and the cultural developments engraming them. Rorty was particularly intrigued by the continuity or development of thought traceable through Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, taken as a gestalt rather than any specific aspect of the individual thinkers. Gaining an insight to the gestalt inevitably recommends some familiarity with the works of Parmenides, Aristotle, Scotus, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Gadamer, the fictions regarded as literature proper, and political philosphy since the Enlightenment. Read as literary works rather than just academic philosophy, and revealed as such by understanding the socio-political and economic frameworks in which their authors operated.

In that way, literary critique could embrace the ideas shut out of philosophy departments and through alliances with other departments or crossover electives, rebuild itself more generally as the new must-have foundation in liberal arts and humanities that really ought to be required in all degree studies.

Ley is probably right about the nihilism of consumer technology, especially in mass communication, but the engagement with the nihilistic effects is still a personal choice, and before pointing the stink-finger at only the young (under 40s), as American right wing culture wars crusaders tend to do, it might be quite instructive to gather evidence of exactly how that cohort consumes and generates meanings. I’m betting the ‘young’ see little value in stale, deprecated bourgeois values embedded in bloviating prose fiction. But they might appreciate an insight into how the world developed into the place they inhabit today.

I think there is an argument to be made that maintaining a dated canon is a reactionary rearguard action by professors who’ve made careers of them, but are frightened by the historical cultural developments of the 20th and 21st centuries. There is no such thing as an objective reason why literary studies and critique should be stuck in paradigms and values of the past. Not that study of the cultural past should be abandoned entirely. It just needs to be presented to highlight its relevance today, after the humiliating surrender of bourgeois values to the arid monetization of everything under the yoke of neoliberal political economy; as a guide to the historical development of literary appreciation and critique, not as its sum total.

A field of study based on principles of fundamental ontology and human meaning creation might well be the only viable counterweight to neoliberal political economy and its corrosion of democracy, humanism, and the academy itself. An elevation of the immaterial as the legitimate master and guide of political economy; Ley called it ‘forms of intellectual inquiry that are essential precisely because they have no specific application, no predictable or quantifiable effect, and no obvious end’.

It’s true that a hybrid discipline combining elements of multiple humanities disciplines need not be confined to undergraduate attempts at sounding clever by stuffing essays with abstract and often meaningless academic jargon. Clear language can and does often use a lexicon that doesn’t assume audiences are all ill-educated louts, but it is the subject matter that dictates diction. And that subject matter would be much more interesting if a literary critique enlightened us about the particular political and economic circumstances of an artist’s work: what clique of patronage and funding did she belong to; what politics and social orientation did he promote; can it be discerned what influences they reveal in style and themes; what are the contrasts with related low-brow culture; and why should someone who is not interested in academic theory or narrow literary circles bother ‘consuming’ the text? In other words, address a wider audience to prevent senile decay or extinction of literary studies and its extra-academic practice in critique.

I’m not proposing this as some innovative new approach, but rather as the logical extension of my own 1980s English degree, from which I graduated with a journalism major and politics minor. What I propose here is a retreat from the hyper specialization of humanities to an eclectic consolidation and survival of the humanities overall, in which critical thinking is the key to all other considerations, because that’s what’s been vanquished most notably from tertiary education, and what might be most commercially saleable in the era of AI slop.

Most interestingly for me is the possibility of extending a literary style and eclectic analytical framework to topics outside the arts. Why should political and economic analyses in media, which no longer deserve the rubric ‘news’, not be arresting and inviting prose? Narration offering contrasts, comparisons, and a breadth of knowledge to eclipse the mortifyingly boring he-said-she-said stenography of rehearsed statements by politicians, and engaging conversational prose laced with insights offered by the humanities rather than the rather idiotic, ignorant commentary of ‘editorialists’, who are today mostly piss poor propagandists paid to disseminate plutocrat media owners’ simple-minded prescriptions for plutocrat-controlled kleptocracies. People who devise low-brow narratives normalizing political systems in which the sham of democracy is kept on life support by the same plutocrat thieves owning and operating idiots posing as politicians?

If we have to suffer that kind of neoliberal playground for robber barons and their cut-throat mercenaries, we might at least expect and support critique of all kinds that isn’t just predictably boring, irrelevant to the realities we face, and too timid to call out the lies sold to us by mass media.

Australia promotes imported hatreds

 

 

Peter Strempel, 8 May 2026 

Antisemitism is odious, but is it more odious than support for genocidal Judaeofascism? And is ‘Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism’ Jillian Segal being paid or otherwise influenced by Israel to deliberately and falsely conflate opposition to Judaeofascism with antisemitism? More to the point, why are Australians being told they must take sides in a centuries-old feud between Jews and Moslems? And what happened to freedom from religion?

Questions I think are not being asked in the current round of Australia’s self-flagellation about religious elitism.

Isn’t it bad enough we must suffer the Christofascist infiltration of Liberal Party branches, and the possible destruction of that party because of it? It may be true that Christian churches and their congregations don’t commonly face violence or vandalism, the way some Jewish people and synagogues do. But my right to critique Christians, to ridicule, lampoon, or even ‘offend’ them, has never been challenged, the way it is proposed now for anyone claiming to be Jewish.

Reading about testimony by a dual Australian-Israeli citizen nurse makes me wonder, if you openly display support for Israel today, are you not doing the same thing people outside Germany did in the 1930s when they supported Nazi Germany? Can it be argued that the display of the star of David is the equivalent of displaying swastika symbols?

I think it’s more difficult than the Nazi example, because the star of David is both a religious and a nationalist symbol. And I don’t want any part of that insoluble conundrum. But my government is now forcing me to engage with the question, and I don’t support its feeble failure to defend Australian neutrality in the disastrous forever-wars being waged in the Middle East. In the name of religion, but more realistically, because of the inherent intolerance embedded in all religions.

Things weren’t always this way in my lifetime. I still remember being firmly pro-Israel from the 1960s onward, in its fight to exist at all, and to repulse repeated attacks by Arab neighbours intent on its obliteration. I still remember the PLO and its successors rejecting all two state proposals, and other compromises. And I still remember how there was a day in the 1990s when I realized Israel had been hijacked by religious extremists, Zionists intent on annihilating the Arab population in what was once called Palestine. I was free to form all those judgements, based on my own critical analysis, even if I was also always exposed to Americanocentric pro-Israel propaganda as part of the cold war alignments.

If it is no longer my right to form my own judgements about political developments anywhere in the world, because a particular religion or regime says so, and my government collaborates in that monstrous act of totalitarianism, I have been betrayed, and my government has committed treason. The treason of unconstitutionally suggesting that people who say they are Jewish should henceforth receive preferential treatment in the formulation of laws that do not apply equally to other Australians. Without also granting me a vote in Israel.

To be quite clear, I am opposed to all religions, and especially the fascist kind that claims the right to embed its beliefs in legislation, forcing its superstitions and bigotries onto others. Moreover, I am convinced there is no solution to the Middle Eastern feuding. Not until one or the other side has murdered all of its supposed enemies. I want no part in that recidivist barbarism. I reject any pressure to take sides in a squabble in which both sides are ethically irredeemable, having abandoned all humanity, and their own religious commandments about seeking peace and understanding.

We have laws against violence and vandalism that don’t reference specific ethnic or religious groups. What really needs fixing is the gamut of laziness and incompetence in enforcing those laws, and punishing the guilty. Apparently that’s just too difficult for our police forces, or maybe those police forces are just shoulder-shruggingly indifferent to some types of crime. Like domestic violence and the associated murder of women. Like white collar crimes by the rich and powerful. Crimes no one is in a hurry to address, and definitely not with the zeal of the antisemitism witchhunt now under way. So, what needs fixing is the lack of professionalism and discipline in our police forces, not a new tranche of laws to privilege a tiny minority religion in Australia.

It is clear to me that all religions are rife with bigotry, and deserve censure and ridicule for those prejudices. However, its adherents should not have to suffer violent and property crimes for lack of law enforcement. That’s where this debate should begin and end. 

I just don’t care for the religious victim narrative. It smacks of the culture wars attempt by the Coalition Christofascists to legislate special privileges for their preferred cults. The only true victims in the entire public debate about religion are those who are forced to endure religion, with all its superstitious gibberish, its monstrous bigotries, its sadistic hypocrisies, and its ignorant self-righteousness. And I mean any religion, without special exemptions based on spurious anecdotes and irrational personal biases. As has always been the case.