MAGA: "Empathy is out. Assholery is in."

How do you describe the rise of a creature like Trump. Jeffrey Tucker, Robert Bidinotto and Robert Tracinski tracked his early ascent— along with the parallel rise of the alt-right, which simply took the unthinking opposite side, however horrendous, of mainstream issues, without abandoning the collectivism that underpinned them. And the mainstream is still trying to explain MAGAts sufficiently deranged by Trump to follow him so blindly. Doug Muder identifies several "rifts" in American culture that he's lucked into exploiting.

Donald Trump, in my opinion, is not some history-altering mutant, like the Mule in Asimov’s 'Foundation' trilogy. I think of him as an opportunist who exploited rifts in American society and weak spots in American culture. He did not create those rifts and weak spots, and ... they will still be there waiting for their next exploiter. ...

The first rift he identifies is The Rift Between Working and Professional Classes, i.e., between "the people who shower after work and the people who shower before work."

All through Elon Musk’s political ascendancy, I kept wondering: How can working people possibly believe that the richest man in the world is on their side? Similarly, how can people who unload trucks or operate cash registers imagine that Donald Trump, who was born rich and probably never did a day of physical labor in his life, is their voice in government?

The answer to that question is simple: The people who shower after work have gotten so alienated from the people who shower before work that anyone who takes on “the educated elite” seems to be their ally. In the minds of many low-wage workers, the enemy is not the very rich, but rather the merely well-to-do — people with salaries and benefits and the ability to speak the language of bureaucracy and science.

Actual billionaires like Musk or Trump or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg are so distant that it’s hard to feel personally threatened by them. But your brother-in-law the psychologist or your cousin who got an engineering degree — you know they look down on you. Whenever they deign to discuss national affairs with you at all, it’s in that parent-to-child you-don’t-really-understand tone of voice. And let’s not even mention your daughter who comes home from college with a social justice agenda. Everything you think is wrong, and she can’t even explain why without using long words you’ve never heard before. Somebody with a college degree is telling you what to do every minute of your day, and yet you’re supposed to be the one who has “privilege”.

The tension has been building for a long time, but it really boiled over for you during the pandemic. You couldn’t go to work, your kids couldn’t go to school, you couldn’t go to football games or even to church — and why exactly? Because “experts” like Anthony Fauci were “protecting” you from viruses too small to see. (They could see them, but you couldn’t. Nothing you could see interested anybody.) Then there were masks you had to wear and shots you had to get, but nobody could explain exactly what they did. Would they keep you from getting the disease or transmitting it to other people? Not exactly. If you questioned why you had to do all this, all they could do was trot out statistics and point to numbers. And if you’ve learned anything from your lifetime of experience dealing with educated people, it’s that they can make numbers say whatever they want. The “experts” speak maths and you don’t, so you just have to do what they say.

Can we say we haven't seen that same thing here? 

In his 2012 book 'The Twilight of the Elites,' Chris Hayes outlined the ways that the expert class has become self-serving. In theory, the expert class is comprised of winners in a competitive meritocracy. But in practice, educated professionals have found ways to tip the balance in their children’s favor. Also, the experts did not do a good job running the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, and they failed to foresee the economic crisis of 2008. When they did notice it, they responded badly: Bankers got bailed out while many ordinary people lost their homes. ... 

On the public-trust side, people have been too willing to believe conspiracy theories about perfectly legitimate things like the Covid vaccine [and to applaud the appointment of an anti-vaccine loony to the job of Health Secretary]. Trump’s slashing of funding for science and research is a long-term disaster for America, and his war against top universities like Harvard and Columbia destroys one of the major advantages the US has on the rest of the world. But many cheer when revenge is taken on the so-called experts they think look down on them.

There are many genuine reasons to mistrust the people we see so frequently wheeled out by media and government as so-called experts. But you'd be a fool to abandon trust in genuine expertise—or to place that trust instead in know-nothing figureheads like a Trump or a Bannon or (closer to home) to a Winston, Tamaki or the like. 

The next rift he identifies however opens up in this era of Post-Truth Politics. Muder calls it Truth Decay, that realisation that in the marketplace of ideas, truth no longer matters. Post-modernism has won. The mainstream media's peddling opinion has betrayed their prior responsibility to just report the facts — both science and media have been corrupted by government money — and now reality is biting back in the form of a loss of public trust.

And now too many public figures neither know nor care. About anything. And certainly not about facts. Only a short while ago a Libertarian presidential candidate with unusually decent momentum was drummed out of the campaign by not knowing "What's Aleppo?" No, a Republican senator can confuse “gazpacho” with “Gestapo” and no-one blinks an eye.

Along with the lost of trust in experts and the inability of American society to agree on a basic set of facts, we are plagued by a loss of depth in our public discussions. It’s not just that Americans don’t know or understand things, it’s that they’ve lost the sense that there are things to know or understand. College professors report that students don’t know how to read entire books any more. And we all have run into people who think they are experts on a complex subject (like climate change or MRNA vaccines) because they watched a YouTube video.

Levels of superficiality that once would have gotten someone drummed out of politics — [like a Defence Secretary's inability to answer a straight question, or the Attorney General's ignorance of the separation of powers, or the president's complete incomprehension of the Constitution he had sworn only weeks before to defend and protect] — are now everyday events.

So the MAGAts have captured the low ground. For now. They've become the swamp. But in the absence of any coherent programme, all they have is pissing off their opponents. Making liberals cry. Essentially, at the end of the rot, what we are left with is this: Empathy is out. Assholery is in. Basically, when the rubber of MAGAt policies hit the road, they're intended to hit someone. "The cruelty is the point. MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry. If people you don’t like are made poorer, weaker, or sicker — well, good! Nothing tastes sweeter than liberal tears."

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

And that was all just Trump's first term! It's already got much worse.

It’s hard to look at any list of recent Trump administration actions without concluding that these people are trying to be assholes. It’s not an accident. It’s not a side effect of something else. The assholery is the point.

In the absence of anything else of positive substance, that's really all there is.

It's the new unimproved, coerced Public Interest Journalism Fund

"The skirmishing continues between the mainstream media and Google (along with other major platforms) about the [so-called] Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill (or should that be the Coerced and Compelled News Media Subsidy Bill). ...
    "[W]hen the Bill was reported back from the Select Committee, the recommendation was that it go no further. Minister Goldsmith ignored that advice and decided to go ahead with the Bill, much to the consternation of the large digital platforms and the undisguised glee of the [to-be subsidised] mainstream media. ...
    "Google ... [has] been transparent with the Government that ... if the Bill is enacted Google will remove itself from the playing field and will hide [New Zealand] news stories from search results. ... Google would also discontinue its current voluntary agreements through which it partners with and provides some financial support to news publishers
    "[T]he [so-called] Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill is coercive in nature. It compels platforms to negotiate with mainstream media for a means of payment for linking to or aggregating their content. If agreement cannot be reached a regulator steps in and determines what payment should be made. Failure to comply attracts civil penalties.
    "This is neither fair – in that it is compelled and is backed by coercion and the power of the State – nor is it bargaining in that in the final analysis a regulator may fix a payment by diktat. ... [A 'tax' to pay a coerced media subsidy.]
    "[T]here is a solution ... but it lies in existing law, rather than in the creation of a new regulatory bureaucracy backed by a Bill the name of which is in direct contradiction to what it proposes to do. ... [T]he Platforms are ... “free-riding” on the content created by mainstream media ... directly or indirectly without the permission of the 'owner' of that content. Basically that amounts to copyright infringement and the Copyright Act 1993 provides for remedies for infringement as well as a licensing structure that enables a centralised body to administer payment of licensing fees for use of material. APRA for example looks after payments for the music industry. ...
    "The problem for mainstream media, if it insists on proceeding to support the [Bill] is that it will shoot itself in the foot. Whether they like it or not, most of mainstream media traffic is generated through platforms such as Facebook or Google. Should the platforms leave the news aggregation space, traffic to dedicated mainstream media sites will diminish and advertisers will be less likely to place content where the eyeballs seeing it are diminishing. If the [so-called] Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill is enacted, it may well be a Pyrrhic victory for media."

~ David Harvey from his post 'Google vs Media'

" 'The Government is taking immediate action to support New Zealand’s media and content production sector.' This is both an unprincipled and a stupid decision."

"'The Government is taking immediate action to support New Zealand’s media and content production sectors, while it develops a long-term reform programme, Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith says.' ...
    "This is both an unprincipled and a stupid decision. I can handle principled stupid decisions and even unprincipled smart decisions but this is neither.
    "It is unprincipled because it is forcing successful companies in one industry (social networks and search engines) to fund failing companies in another industry (media). The only rationale for this is that Google and Meta have money and Stuff doesn’t. Will we see Netflix levied money to fund home video rental stores? Will we see Foodstuffs levied money to find Whitcoulls?
    "It is also a very stupid decision. ... The Government is going to pass a law to fund a media that will oppose almost everything that supporters of the Government believe in.
    "Even worse, it will set up a structural incentive for the media to become even more left leaning. ... [to] insist the levy be doubled ... [to] create an institutional bias in favour of the parties that will benefit media the most."

~ David Farrar from his post 'Stupid Government backing Willie’s bill'

A fast track to cronyism [updated]

 

The media has been slow to pick up on this National-led government's new policy to help out struggling media organisations.

The policy is to announce, and string out, a steady stream of announcements of blatant knuckle-dragging cronyism, primary among them that Fast-Track Approvals Bill, whose invited-applicant list will be an ongoing gift to every media organisation looking for a colourful headline.

And no on top of that, just to drive home the message, is this weekend's gift to television personality and National Party fund-raiser Paula Bennett of the position of highly-paid chair of Pharmac — in the very week they announce a $1.8 billion increase in the unaccountable bureaucracy's budget to $6.3 billion. Her qualifications for the role? In the absence of a single one of any relevance, one would have to speculate it was her record fund-raising and chasing of donors to the National Party at the last election.

And speaking of donors ....  even the worst resourced newsroom should be able to turn out a veritable assembly line's worth of regular feature articles highlighting which party donors have been favoured with which fast-track approval by three ministers of questionable morals and fitness doling them out like largesse at a corrupt king's court.

As I said a few days ago, it's not a "fast track" for you or me or that small renovation you've been putting off for years as just too damned complicated to contemplate — it's a fast track for cronies and for government bulldozers.

How about we all get the benefit a fast track for our projects, little and large, instead of being tangled up in years of the red tape governments festoon around us while cronies enjoy all the fruits of political favouritism?

In the meantime at least, let's watch the media take advantage of the Government's gift. It should be one that promises to keep giving long after the Public Interest Journalism Fund gives out ...

UPDATE: Yes, of course, businesses need to be able to build. And so do you and I —and for too long we've been stymied in trying to build. But this isn't help for you and me — and when National and Shane Jones promise to "help business" that invariably ends up meaning "help particular businessmen." Just as it does here.

"...the Minister for Broadcasting has been silent. She has been criticised for this approach. In my view she should be applauded."

"Throughout the recent turmoil surrounding news media difficulties the Minister for Broadcasting has been silent. She has been criticised for this approach. In my view she should be applauded. Without any State intervention a solution for the problems surrounding Newshub was found – by the industry and the market. That is as it should be. There has been far too much State interference with the media. The Public Interest Journalism fund ... provides an example."

~ A Halfling's View, from his post 'Dealing with State-Owned Media'

MSM looking for a new handout

"I consider that [the so-called Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill] Bill is ill-conceived. It is a means of subsidising mainstream media which is having difficulty in adapting its business model to the Digital Paradigm. ...
    "The various initiatives and subsidies undertaken by the State - primarily in the form of the Public Interest Journalism Fund - have provided artificial support for mainstream media. Those subsidies have provided a disincentive for mainstream media to adapt to the Digitalk Information Paradigm in a more agile manner.
    "What the Bill proposes is a substitution of one subsidisation scheme for another. ...
    

"Because the problem is the free riding of mainstream media content by platforms like Google and Facebook the solution lies in the area of copyright and intellectual property. What is proposed by the Bill – which was introduced by Labour ... – is a bureaucracy to determine by what means and by how much the large digital platforms will subsidise mainstream media.
    "Reading the mainstream media submissions and listening to some of the oral presentations was somewhat depressing. But then, of course mainstream media would paint a gloomy picture. Who would not when there is a pot of gold at the end of the legislative rainbow.
    "Perhaps mainstream media should address the issue of why it is that public confidence in the news media is at an all time low rather than seeking yet another hand-out."

~ David Harvey from his post (and submission to) 'The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill'

MSM have "forgotten how to learn"

 

Media here feel like they're under attack. It's not just from the politicians that they attack, but it's part of the worldwide wind-down of all legacy media -- characterised locally by the struggles of Stuff and Newshub, and the demise of Today FM.

American commentator Ted Gioia sees it as part of a worldwide battle between "macroculture" (where we all used to watch the same television shows as our neighbours) and the increasingly dominant "microculture" that's destroying it. He reckons that the battle has already reached a tipping point, and in 2024 it will turn into a war.

Take this comment from payment processor Stripe, showing that while legacy media is dying, alternative media platforms continue to explode:

In 2021, we aggregated data from 50 popular creator platforms on Stripe and found they had onboarded 668,000 creators who’d received $10 billion in payouts. We refreshed that data in 2023 and found something surprising: the creator economy is still growing about as fast as it was in 2021. Today, those same 50 creator platforms have onboarded over 1 million creators and have paid out over $25 billion in earnings.

Meanwhile

According to a recent survey by the News Media Association, 90 per cent of editors in the United Kingdom “believe that Google and Meta pose an existential threat to journalism”

All this while streaming services and major newspapers enforce layoffs, Disney claims that "AI will be advanced enough" soon to "never bother with [actors or writers] again," and Hollywood itself seems in freefall.

"The most curious part of this," says Gioia, "is how people working inside the macroculture are the only folks that don’t understand what’s going on." 

They've forgotten how to learn, he reckons.

RE-POST: Yes, Jenna, it is bribery

Broadcaster Jenna Lynch is aghast that anyone could consider being paid to broadcast government lines could in any way be considered "bribery." Oh, her outrage on behalf of the Team of 55 Million.

She appears innocently unaware there is more than one way to curtail free speech. Government organisations who censor speech or expression are one way. Government organisations who pay to promote it, like NZ on Air or the Public Interest Journalism Fund, are another.

To make this point, I’m going to repost a piece from 2006 [with just a few ever-so-slight additions]…

This is a post about free speech.

It is not a piece about outrageous assaults on free speech committed in Paris last month, or by government censorship offices, or by successive NZ governments keen to curtail criticism during election periods.

No, this is a post about a different kind of attack on free speech. One more subtle, and no less chilling. One in which [newspapers, journalists, broadcasters], artists, musicians, scriptwriters, screenwriters, television producers and television production companies are kept afloat by government cash and government grants from [a Public Interest journalism Fund] or Creative New Zealand or Te Mangai Paho or New Zealand on Air or their proxies, or in which many scientists are kept afloat by government grants or by employment in government research projects.

The direct result of this is what Ayn Rand once called ‘The Establishing of an Establishment’*: not just the sponsorship of creative souls [and journalists] to toe a government line, which is bad enough, but an even more insidious kind of greyness inciting would-be creatives to to a cultural line embodied by those doling out and reviewing these government grants.

What's the problem, you might ask? 

 
Well, think about this. There is more than one kind of censorship. In fact, I'd suggest to you that there are two. The first and most straightforward method of censorship is for a government to ban speech that they don't like -- that's just what National and Labour and the Greens and Gareth Morgan want to do at elections. The second form of censorship is one that Ayn Rand called "the establishing of an establishment," and it is even more insidious and no less chilling:

Governmental repression is [not] the only way a government can destroy the intellectual life of a country... There is another way: governmental encouragement.

Rather than simply banning opponents or banning expression, this form of censorship is much more subtle: it encourages expression (or scientific research) that is deemed acceptable, and by implication discourages anyone interested in career advancement from engaging in possibly unacceptable expression or research, .

Governmental encouragement does not order men to believe that the false is true: it merely makes them indifferent to the issue of truth or falsehood.

It makes them sensitive instead to what is deemed acceptable, and thereby lucrative -- it encourages and makes lucrative that very form of sensitivity – and it invites all those lucred up by the process to band together against whoever they perceive as their ‘other’ [especially so if they can be deemed "racist" or a "boomer" who is desperately behind the times].

This is what Rand referred to as "the welfare state of the intellect," and the result is as destructive as that other, more visible and stultifying welfare state: the setting up of politicians, bureaucrats and their minions (the establishment) as arbiters of thinking and taste and ideology; the freezing of the status quo; a staleness and conformity, and an unwillingness to speak out – what Frank Lloyd Wright once called “an average upon an average by averages on behalf of the average” such that in interrogating any one modern artist you would get essentially the same answers as from any other -- in short "the establishing of an establishment" to which new entrants in a field realise very quickly they are required to either conform or go under.

If you talk to a typical business executive or college dean or magazine editor [or spin doctor or opposition leader], you can observe his special, modern quality: a kind of flowing or skipping evasiveness that drips or bounces automatically off any fundamental issue, a gently non-committal blandness, an ingrained cautiousness toward everything, as if an inner tape recorder were whispering: "Play it safe, don't antagonise--whom?--anybody."

If you've ever wondered where this "special, modern quality" comes from, this is perhaps one answer -- through the intellectual mediocrity advanced by this less well-known form of censorship -- a censorship of encouragement. It's a much less obvious and much more insidious method of censorship, and no less chilling for that.

The [US] Constitution forbids a governmental establishment of religion, properly regarding it as a violation of individual rights. Since a man's beliefs are protected from the intrusion of force, the same principle should protect his reasoned convictions and forbid governmental establishments in the field of thought.

Think about it.

* * * * 

* From "The Establishing of an Establishment," republished in Rand's book Philosophy: Who Needs It?, from which the otherwise unreferenced quotes above derive. Highly recommended if you want to get to grips with this subtle form of censorship.

Send a copy to the Free Speech Union.

Treatyism and re-tribalism

"The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was, like all human products, of its time and place. One aim – shared by British and Maori signatories alike – was to establish the rule of law by imposing British sovereignty through British governance. Sovereignty and governance go together as two sides of the same coin – with intertwined meaning. In the decades which followed, the treaty lost relevance in the new colonial society. This is the case with all historical treaties.
    "Revived in the 1970s as the symbol of a cultural renaissance, the treaty was captured by retribalists in the 1980s to serve as the ideological manifesto for the envisaged order – a reconstituted New Zealand. It was given a ‘spirit’ to take it above and beyond its historical location so that it could mean whatever retribalists say it means.
    "This treatyist ideology successfully promotes the false claim of partnership between the government and the tribes. However there is a deeper more insidious strategy propelling us to tribal ethno-nationalism. It is the collapse of the separation between the economic and political spheres....
    "The corporate tribes have already acquired considerable governance entitlements – the next and final step is tribal sovereignty. It’s a coup d’etat in all but name, accomplished not by force but by ideology – enabled by a compliant media.
    "Given the enormous success of retribalism is it too late to reclaim New Zealand from the relentless march to blood and soil ethno-nationalism? ...  

    "Retribalism has attacked ... democracy through the covert use of ideology. I want to talk specifically about how this is occurring ...

    "[First] the treaty is transformed from an historical document to a sacred text.... [and then] the second tactic comes into play. It is the diversion tactic. This ‘how many angels on a pinhead’ tactic operates by diverting us into echo-chamber squabbles – about the 1840 meaning of this word, that word, this intention, that intention. This is all interesting and important material for historians but our concern should be, not what the treaty said in 1840 – those days are gone – it served the purpose of the time – but what it is being used to say today – and for what purpose....

    "[Second], our education system is indoctrinating children into retribalism. The so-called ‘decolonisation’ and ‘indigenisation’ of the curriculum is the method. This is a disaster. Decolonisation will destroy the very means by which each generation acquires reasoned knowledge, and in so doing, the ability to reason....

    "[Finally], an ideology becomes omnipotent when it is not challenged. In a democracy the media should inform us of all competing interests and in all their complexity. We, the people, need to know everything, because it is us who will decide what should happen. Mainstream media has failed to do this – indeed is culpable in embedding treatyism."

~ Elizabeth Rata, from her 2022 speech 'In Defence of Democracy'

The team of $55 million

"Prime Minister Chris Hipkins insists that many voters are suspicious of co-governance only because politicians haven’t explained the concept clearly — but that failure also falls squarely on the shoulders of journalists.
    "As [one former politician] put it: 'One might have expected journalists to delve into what, precisely, the government meant when ministers incorporated this 'misunderstood' concept into lots of Acts of Parliament over recent years'....
    "There can never be a definitive answer to the question of exactly how much the Public Interest Journalism Fund has helped shut down criticism of the Treaty at a crucial time in our political history. But by accepting its conditions, it is undeniable that the media has inflicted a terrible wound on itself by being seen to have compromised its principal assets — trust, credibility and independence....
    "The widespread disdain for the recipients of the Fund’s cash was summed up by the epithet 'The team of $55 million' — a play on 'The team of five million,' which Jacinda Ardern used to rally the country behind her Covid management strategies....
    "The first of the general eligibility criteria [for the Fund] requires all applicants to show a 'commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to Māori as a Te Tiriti partner' — alongside a commitment to te reo Māori. The section describing the fund’s goals includes “actively promoting the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi [and this despite Te Tiriti's own three principles being Sovereignty, Property Rights, and Citizenship] ...
    "The lesson to media organisations seems clear: if the government ever comes calling with a bag of money that requires editorial prescriptions to be followed, take the advice of the advertising campaign that ran in the early 1990s to discourage children from experimenting with illegal drugs — and just say no."

~ Graham Adams, from his essay 'Has Government Money Corrupted Journalism?'

'The buying of the media is nothing less than political corruption of a scale hitherto unknown in New Zealand'

 

"This [Garrick Tremain cartoon] aptly sums up the disgraceful sell-out by our print [and electronic] media to toe the government line.... willingly prostitut[ing themselves] to the government bribe in return for the taxpayer’s unwitting subsidy...
    "The buying of the ... media, so cleverly summed up by Garrick’s cartoon, was nothing less than political corruption of a scale hitherto unknown in New Zealand."

~ Bob Jones, from his post 'Political Corruption'

Much Ado About Something: "The welfare state of the intellect"

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY that a long-dead Elizabethan playwright hits the headlines here at home. Creative New Zealand's decision to defund (or not to defund) a high-school Shakespeare competition spiralled into a debate into what Creative New Zealand should be funding and promoting. Competition supporter Terry Sheat argued a public enquiry must be held into what and how Creative New Zealand goes about its funding choices:

If I were to mark CNZ’s funding criteria and outcomes against the duties under the legislation, I would be forced to give them a failing grade. I wouldn’t give them funding. They are not delivering to the proper scope of their mission statement. Diversity is not diversity of “New Zealand art”, it is diversity of all art in New Zealand, with freedom of artistic expression for all. That is literally in the statute.
    In the case of Shakespeare Globe Centre NZ, funding was terminated primarily if not solely because Shakespeare is, to quote CNZ’s assessment, “located within a canon of imperialism” and not “relevant to a decolonising Aotearoa in the 2020s and beyond.” Vincent O’Sullivan dismissed this as nonsense in his letter published last week in the Otago Daily Times, describing it as “a breathtaking absurdity from a government body whose brief is to promote excellence in the arts.” An editorial in Stuff said that “the CNZ assessment has exposed the obvious problems that come with interpreting art through the narrow lens of national identity and politics.”

And then before you knew it, everyone was debating Creative New Zealand's funding criteria, how it should best promote "Aotearoan art," and whether or not Shakespeare was an "imperialist."[1]

Which rather starts where the argument should end. To me, it’s not an argument about how Creative New Zealand's bureaucrats should choose whom to fund in order to promote the latest fashionable ideals; it's whether these bureaucrats should have the power (and the money) to do that at all! The problem is not how Creative New Zealand goes about handing out money, in other words: it’s that Creative New Zealand hands out any money at all.

And here the issue here isn’t primarily the amounts that the establishment elects to pays out; it’s the effect of what that money buys: which (like its more quotidian companion, the Public Interest Journalism Fund) is intellectual conformity.

You may not realise it (and the dullards at the myopic Free Speech Union almost certainly won't), but this is a free-speech issue -- but not in the way you probably think.

WERE YOU AWARE THAT there is more than one way to curtail free speech? Government organisations who censor speech or expression are one way. Government organisations who promote it, like Creative New Zealand. are another.

I’m going to repost a piece from 2006 to make this point…

This is a post about free speech.  
It is not a piece about outrageous assaults on free speech committed in Paris last month, or by government censorship offices, or by successive NZ governments keen to curtail criticism during election periods.  
    No, this is a post about a different kind of attack on free speech. One more subtle, and no less chilling. One in which artists, musicians, scriptwriters, screenwriters, television producers and television production companies are kept afloat by government cash and government grants from Creative New Zealand and Te Mangai Paho and New Zealand on Air or their proxies, or in which many scientists are kept afloat by government grants or by employment in government research projects.  
    The direct result of this is what Ayn Rand once called ‘The Establishing of an Establishment’²: not the sponsorship of creative souls to toe a government line, but a more insidious kind of greyness inciting would-be creatives to to a culturalline embodied by those doling out and reviewing these government grants.

    What's the problem, you might ask?  
Well, think about this. There is more than one kind of censorship. In fact, I'd suggest to you that there are two. The first and most straightforward method of censorship is for a government to ban speech that they don't like -- that's just what National and Labour and the Greens and Gareth Morgan want to do at elections, and I hope you lot feel disgusted enough about that to do something about it. The second form of censorship is one that Ayn Rand called "the establishing of an establishment," and it is even more insidious and no less chilling: 

Governmental repression is [not] the only way a government can destroy the intellectual life of a country... There is another way: governmental encouragement.

That's right. Rather than simply banning opponents or banning expression, this form of censorship is much more subtle: it encourages expression (or scientific research) that is deemed acceptable, and by implication discourages anyone interested in career advancement from engaging in possibly unacceptable expression or research, . 

Governmental encouragement does not order men to believe that the false is true: it merely makes them indifferent to the issue of truth or falsehood.

It makes them sensitive instead to what is deemed acceptable, and thereby lucrative -- it encourages and makes lucrative that very form of sensitivity – it invites all those lucred up by the process to band together against whoever they perceive as their ‘other’ [and no better target for that than the phoney shibboleth they call 'neo-liberalism'].  
    This is what Rand referred to as "the welfare state of the intellect," and the result is as destructive as that other, more visible welfare state: the setting up of politicians, bureaucrats and their minions (the establishment) as arbiters of thinking and taste and ideology; the freezing of the status quo; a staleness and conformity, and an unwillingness to speak out – what Frank Lloyd Wright once called “an average upon an average by averages on behalf of the average” such that in interrogating any one modern artist you would get essentially the same answers as from any other -- in short "the establishing of an establishment" to which new entrants in a field realise very quickly they are all but required to either conform or go under. 

If you talk to a typical business executive or college dean or magazine editor [or spin doctor or opposition leader], you can observe his special, modern quality: a kind of flowing or skipping evasiveness that drips or bounces automatically off any fundamental issue, a gently non-committal blandness, an ingrained cautiousness toward everything, as if an inner tape recorder were whispering: "Play it safe, don't antagonize--whom?--anybody."

If you've ever wondered where this "special, modern quality" comes from, this is perhaps one answer -- through the intellectual mediocrity advanced by this less well-known form of censorship -- a censorship of encouragement. It's a much less obvious and much more insidious method of censorship, and no less chilling for that. 

The [US] Constitution forbids a governmental establishment of religion, properly regarding it as a violation of individual rights. Since a man's beliefs are protected from the intrusion of force, the same principle should protect his reasoned convictions and forbid governmental establishments in the field of thought.

Think about it.

NOW, IT SOUNDS LIKE good news that the Shakespeare funding has been reinstated, for which everyone and his leather codpiece are praising the Prime Minister's intervention

And I applaud the establishment luvvies and others who came out in defence of one of my favourite playwrights. Good for them.

I'm also happy that for a week or so we've been discussing his work. 

But why should you or I other folk be forced to pay, for the most part, for theatre (or art) you don't like. Especially when this process of bureaucratically-selected funding -- bureaucrats choosing what to fund based on what best fits the government's fashionable cultural concerns -- constitutes the self-same censorship of encouragement New Zealand is presently enjoying with the Public Interest Journalism Fund.

By my own literary and theatrical standards, it looks like the restatement this week was a small win. From the larger standpoint however, the amounts involved are but a tiny pimple one the huge arse of the government-promoted cultural establishment.

If we understand how that whole arts and literary establishment has become so comfortably established, we might feel more uneasy not just about the way this sausage is sliced - but that it's there to be sliced at all.

* * * * * 

1. You would have thought one look at Henry V would answer that one.
2. Cresswell (1996), reposted with the generous permission of Dave Perkins.
3. From "The Establishing of an Establishment," republished in her book Philosophy: Who Needs It?, from which the otherwise unreferenced quotes above derive.
Highly recommended if you want to get to grips with this subtle form of censorship.

[Pics from The Spinoff]