Against Power: Some Thoughts on Rights and Obligations, Kindness and the Public Good.

1.

IT’S HARD to trust the compassion—to believe in the tolerance, to find the masculinity, to give credence to the spirituality, to imagine the love for his fellow man, let alone his fellow woman—of a man with a brutal ideology in his head and a weapon in his arms.

One doesn’t want to hasten to judgment, of course. Many is the good cause that has had to be violently prosecuted or defended. But on the face of it—notwithstanding the spin, at which all manner of ideologues of all manner of secular and religious dogmas seem gifted—things don’t look promising for women, for children, for pluralism, for the humanities, for civil liberties, including free speech, in Kabul right now. A bunch of fellas with beards and battle scars and a fair bit of blood on their hands (and some remarkably expensive looking weaponry they don’t seem able to leave home without) don’t seem like the team you’d put in charge of the causes—equality, respect for women and education, general freedom of thought—the Taliban leadership said the other day they now held with.

Then again, to be fair, things have not looked good for those causes for most of the duration, thus far, of patriarchal capitalism and the best attempts of the west at democracy.

Which is why we need poetry, and why we need it to refuse ideology. Poetry—as literature, as a practice of thinking and seeing and living and saying—reminds us of our deep humanity; it conserves our largeness of mind against the importunings of the small mindedness that always seems to prevail.

Among its many virtues, poetry refuses the mind’s tendency to foreclose, as Seamus Heaney put it. It teaches us how not to jump to hasty judgment. While asking us, as grownups, not to accept all claims at face value and to value among the many offerings, those truths that are more deeply rooted in evidence, in discoverable truth, and vouched for, not by preachers and demagogues and shock-jocks and Foxsters, but by people who have long studied to learn what they know and whose opinions are sustained by robust and measurable reasoning—poetry asks us also always to presume that there is always another way of looking at the same set of facts, that others will see it differently, that one still has something yet to learn.

Poetry, in other words, is for grownups. And it can teach you, if you let it, how to grow up. And on the evidence to hand, we’ll be needing a few more grownups in the coming days.

2.

THIS SUNDAY morning early, with images from Kabul airport and Bourke Street, Melbourne in my mind, where yesterday protestors unconvinced fo the truth of the pandemic or the efficacy of masks, vaccines in general and lockdowns, and passionately convinced of their own victimhood, I walked the dog by the creek, letting him stop now and then to scent and to mark and to wander to the creek’s edge and back, so that together we negotiated a way, more like stitching, or tacking, than, say the path of a car along a freeway, more or less in the direction of town. I should add that our dog, Dante, was on a lead all this way, but I try to make him feel as much as possible like he’s not. And it’s a long one. There is a lot of give and take, you understand.

From a bench under the oak tree—from which, in the warmth of this cross-over season better named by the Gundungurra calendar, I’m sure, than by the Eurocentric phrase late winter, leaves still hung like the mess a crowd leaves after a day at the races—a man in a polite pair of corduroys said to me in a sweet Canadian accent from under his hat: so, he’s the master and you’re the slave. It was at least a variation on the usual platitude about the dog walking its master. At which I normally smile, but with the madness of the world so awake in mind, this time I decided to say the words in response that are always in my mind.

Well, I said, that sounds like a reductive way to understand a relationship that might hold between one being and another, and a little depressing, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. Master and slave? Thought we’d abolished that. We negotiate, he and I. I like his company and he likes mine, and this is how we do it. Is there one right way?

While I’m at it: Why must everything be understood in terms of power relations? What about love? What about patterns of connection? What about beauty? Some things are not negotiable, of course—between a person and their dog, between a woman and their partner, between me and you. So, for instance, he stops every time when we come to a road, even without waiting for my command. I don’t want him running free on the roads even of a quiet neighbourhood like this. Not good for him or for any of us. Hence, the command and the restraint. But if he wants to get his feet wet in the creek and read the urine runes at the base of some of the cherry blossoms, I think it’s his right, and it doesn’t cost me too much time or power to let him do it, so I give a little, and we’re happy.

I think of it as a dance. No masters, no slaves. A lead, and a long one and a reasonable amount of slack, and no barking at strangers. On seats. Under oak trees, for instance. Like now. Like love, not like power. A negotiation. Think about it.

Okay, so maybe I said it faster than that, and not so clearly, but that was the gist, and he got it and said something like okay. I know I’d lost my audience, I know, but that’s not the point.

The point is that it matters when conventional wisdom is unwise. Or untrue. Or inadequate. It matters when simplistic ideas prevail. Things go wrong, and not just for dogs. Things go wrong for all of us when enough of us don’t think supplely and clearly and kindly, when we refuse or fail to find a nuanced way of approaching things, the kind of nuance, the kind of openness and clarity that philosophy preaches and poetry practices. Some poetry, anyway. Some philosophy. Most literature.

We do violence to each other—to women and children, to animals, to the underprivileged, to the non-conforming, to poets, to fish, to rivers, to landscape, to the seas, to the cosmos—when our thoughts are reductive, when they are violent in the adolescence of their assumptions, when they are, as most everyday thoughts seem to me to be, innately exploitive, informed by no more wisdom than winners are grinners and the strong tend to prevail. Why would anyone believe that a dog’s happiness depended upon my unyielding control over him, or that control only manifests as his doing only what I want? And why would anyone assume that our wills were always by nature at odds and in contest? Which world works that way?

Might, unless we include measures of more general adequacy in our understanding of “might”, is nearly always wrong.

Which takes me back—and you can see how my mind walks the same kind of straight lines the dog likes to walk; it goes the way life goes, the way a good poem goes, too—to those proto-feminists in Kabul with the rifles over their shoulders. And to the freedom fighters in the Melbourne streets yesterday, purporting to fight, with flares and QANON platitudes, for all our freedoms, when all they truly want is their own freedom from the facts, their own liberty to disdain scientific truth, their exemption from an obligation we all share: to do what is asked of us all (stay at home, wear a mask, don’t riot on the beach or party in the suburbs for a while) for the sake of us all, in the face of the organic truth of a pandemic.

One shares the lockdown fatigue. But we are asked—those of us who want to be treated like grownups—to grow up. There is a virus; it can kill you or those you love; it is wildly contagious; and we have been slow to protect ourselves against it, so we are, on this island of ours, regardless of what we might like to believe is true, incredibly vulnerable. You can command the tide not to rise, if you like, but you will likely drown. Canute lives in all of us, of course, a toddler grown old, but not wise; but to participate in and benefit from the public good, one needs to leave Canute where he belongs—in one’s childhood days, in a moral tale.

Let me not mock as these protestors tend to mock; let me not scoff. But truly, you protestors with your taunts and your shrill banners, you are against the way things are, you are conspirators against decency and reason and sense, you are an alliance of the gullible and the narcissistic, and I reject your right to speak for anyone’s liberty, including mine, for you have not earned your freedom by common sense and fellow-feeling.

Those who take off their masks to expectorate freely about their freedoms and to declaim violently against their civic duties, who collaborate with the virus by denying it, look as mad to me and as unworthy of sympathy and as lacking in credibility as the new rulers with their shiny weapons (and who armed them, I wonder) in Kabul. You look and sound as much like the champions of freedom and tolerance, my friends, as the Jihadists who’ve stolen power in Afghanistan look and sound like feminists.

These anti-lockdown rioters are not to be confused with the civil rights protestors of other eras and the black rights and women’s fights protestors of the moment: those are protestors whose causes are justice for all, equality for all, freedom for the oppressed from manifest and intolerable social inequities. These anti-COVID protestors have no care for the greater good. They just wish the present difficulties away and want to find someone to blame for it. It is not freedom of speech they practise; it is a refusal to rein in their personal freedoms, as we all must, for the sake of the greater good. (I suspect these are protestors for whom there is no sense of the greater good.) These are protestors who refuse to accept the counsels of reason and the evidence of science. The only rights they care for are their own.

There is nothing civil about the liberties you proclaim or how you proclaim them or when, you idiot conspirators against the organic facts of a virus and against the safety of the wider community. Truly, you are to freedom of speech what the Taliban are to equality. You are the Kim Jong-Ils of Liberty.

3.

THE LINK to the nice man with nice manners and the wrong-headed view of human-dog relations on the banks of the Mittagong Creek? The harm done by carelessness—moral and logical inadequacy—of thought and speech. In particular, there seems to me to be a simplistic idea that runs through all fundamentalist thinking—on the left and on the right, in the church and in the universities, in the suburbs and in the board rooms and in the bedrooms: that rights (like doing whatever pleases me, or speaking my mind, or believing what fantasies I will, or refusing a vaccine) are absolute and illimitable. In truth, as all ethical systems, one way or another, have always understood, whatever right you have is earned by a commensurate duty. Every right comes with responsibilities and edges. So if I think I have a right to the respect of others, I might like to practise respect on others; if my speech is free, if I have a right to declare and act on my opinion, perhaps I ought to earn that right by respecting it in others—and by doing my homework, so that what I say is not hateful, so that it is logically put, not just asserted shrilly, so that what I say makes sense and is based on discoverable evidence, so that I treat my listeners with respect. If I have a right to command my dog, I have an obligation to earn his trust and to respect those of his animal rights I can discover and honour while respecting also the rights of my neighbours not to be savaged or deafened…

And there is an edge to all freedoms, a point at which they must be negotiated and compromised, or else others’ rights will be unacceptably impinged or denied. Where rights are asserted without regard to the effect of the practice of that freedom on the rights of others, then a right becomes an act of violence, of wilful disregard for the public good. An indulgence.

And I want to say to the protestors this: to perform, at personal cost, a duty toward the greater public or environmental good—like staying at home a while and stopping the spread of a virus by various means and to participate in the safety of all the citizens of the world by stepping up having a jab—is not to sacrifice a right (a freedom foregone); it is to earn that right. Several rights: to be safe, to live, to be free, when it is safe, to get about your work and pastimes and pursuits, to speak your minds. This is how rights are earned: by compromising them to accommodate other rights and goods.

And to the man under his tree who thinks, without thinking, I guess, that I have sacrificed power by letting my dog enjoy some of his animal rights—to happiness and a modicum of freedom of limb—I want to say this: if I have a right to “own” a dog, I must earn that right. And how I feel I earn it is not to bully the hell out of him.

4.

EVERYTHING, I want to say, and not just to my friend by the creek, is not reducible to power—power won, power kept, power exercised, lost, or gained. I reject power-relations as an even halfway adequate ethos, or worldview. Power is what obsesses conspiracy theorists. Power is the language of narcissism, of abuse, of colonialism. It is the idiom of exploitation. Power and control: what an impoverished and dangerous, what a depressing and inadequate view of life. What about beauty? What about love? What about dumb luck and grace and mystery? Let’s have a crack at truth and dignity and beauty and diversity and justice instead.

A presumption that power is what a human life depends on for its agency: this has ruined women’s lives, this has enslaved and disenfranchised and it has depleted the earth. The idea of power has wrecked the climate and filled the seas with plastic.

Can we all stop talking about power; can we start now living, instead, the responsibilities that earn us all freedom.

Might, it turns out, is hardly ever right; and it is very often wrong. Look what twenty years of US might—and the purported justice of the US cause, and those of its allies, like us—achieved in Afghanistan: The Taliban.

And your right is not your might; don’t wear what you think you deserve like a weapon; don’t fire it like a gun. Earn it, like the grace it is. Pay what it costs. Pay it in the care you take for the rights of others—those are the rights that count. If getting your way costs others, stop and negotiate. You’re going to have to give something away. That’s the deal with rights.

5.

I HAVE always liked the way Norman Maclean says this: “All good things come by grace, and grace comes by art, and art does not come easy.”

So what is the art you have practised to deserve the grace that is your political ascendancy, your privilege, your free speech or your equality or your safety, or the love or your family? What work have you mastered, what have you studied, how well have you researched, how considerate of others’ views have you been, how much care have you taken of others’ needs, how much care, for that matter, have you taken to frame an elegant and engaging utterance before you open your mouth and share it—how much grace have you yourself attempted, in other words, in practising the art (of living with dignity in a commonwealth of shared and competing rights) that earns you (and everyone else) the freedoms and privileges of living well on the earth.

Have I fulfilled the obligations that go with the freedom I have to write you these too many words? Forgive me if I haven’t. I’ve tried. Now it’s your turn.

6.

BUT JUST a couple more thoughts. Call this an ethics of reciprocity, I am thinking about here. Call it the golden mean. I am talking not about the story, if you like, but the moral. We have too many stories about power. East and west, we live inside dominant narratives, commercial, political, legal, literary, spiritual that are very largely about power. It is the time for a little less story, then, and a little more moral. Poetry’s work. Not to tell you the moral, but to enact it: for everything, as Robert Gray once told me, is equal in a poem, and so is every one.

7.

SOME CLOSING words, by way of a credo. Power does not last. Love, as long as it is not exercised mostly as power—which is to say constraint and control—lasts. Almost regardless and almost forever. The only power that holds has integrity, not just force of arms and weight of numbers, for those rust and fall away. Land, above all things, has power, because it has integrity—you can’t spin the earth; it spins you. Some ideas, but very few theories, last. Ecology is one. Compassion is another. Together they may be as close as we’ll come to sharing the mind of god. Poetry is how sometimes wisdom is apprehended and shared best. Kindness is kinship, and since we are all kin, kindness has integrity, and matters and lasts. What lacks integrity—like cruelty, like power over, like abuse—has failed before it began. Well-cast words have integrity and tend to endure. For what it’s worth, apart from these things, I believe in beauty and elegance as aspirations and measures, and I believe in that radical kindness, that ultimate freedom: love. And dogs and birds and creeks and weather. And rocks. Land and letters and grace.