Festival of dangerous ideas

James Heywood

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 78 summer 2009

In October 2009, the first Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI) was presented by Sydney Opera House in conjunction with
St James Ethics Centre. James Heywod reports.

The inaugural FODI was a huge success, with more than 9,400 people buying tickets for events and an estimated 2,000 more engaging with the event indirectly. Among highlights were presentations from Australian-based Islamic leader Keysar Trad and internationally acclaimed writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens.

Polygamy and other islamic values are good for Australia – Keysar Trad

Presenting the case for polygamy appeared a suitably dangerous start to the day ...

Keysar Trad knew he was speaking on a topic considered controversial by some, not least as a subject “associated with a religion that is regularly maligned by politicians and the media.” Polygamy has been around since before the advent of any of the monotheistic religions and since it remains legal in numerous countries today, Mr Trad hoped to propose its adoption in Australia.

Trad began with historical examples of polygamy originating from scripture. Moses, Abraham, Jacob, Solomon and David, among others, each had multiple wives. Before Islam, Arabia was a hotbed of licentiousness and degradation and it was through God that Mohammed limited the number of wives. To allow for closer unions, Mohammed declared: “Take a second wife only if she could be loved and cherished as the first”. According to Trad, Western society cannot afford to mock Islamic endorsement of polygamy while monogamy allows for unseen mistresses and concealed extramarital affairs. It is a question of men seeking to be more just towards one another.

Trad mentioned a number of ways in which Muslim women experience greater freedom than Christian females and quoted the theosophist Annie Besant, a women’s rights activist who believed “monogamy with a blended mass of prostitution was a hypocrisy and more degrading than a limited polygamy,” and that Western divorce laws left women with little property or right of succession in comparison with Islam. The Qur’an affirms: “Be ye kind to your wives; be just to them; if there is a quarrel, seek reconciliation before divorce.”

In the fifth century, Byzantine emperor Justinian was the first to have passed laws expressly banning sexual unions except those within a monogamous, heterosexual marriage – though he himself possessed a mistress. Societies outside the Roman Empire practised alternate forms of familial relations while Byzantium was constrained by same-sex monogamy. Polygyny, the act of a man possessing more than one spouse, and polyandry, in which a female takes one or more husbands, continued in much of the world.

Trad’s argument for polygamy in Australia forthwith excluded the right to polyandry. Even though he claimed that monogamy and clandestine polygamy “are no longer working for modern society”, at this point in the speech any alternative placing women on a lesser footing had not raised eyebrows among the audience.

Polygyny had become the topic. Islamic teaching permits the practice so long as a man can treat his wives equally: any man unable to do so was to refrain. The number of wives was thus limited to four and to men who possessed the means to maintain equality among spouses.

While polygamous relationships may also fail, polyandry is not an acceptable ‘equaliser’ since no monotheistic faith has condoned it and differing libidos between the two sexes make it unfeasible. Trad quotes the therapist Bettina Arndt as saying that in monogamous relationships a woman loses her libido, though this point would be disputed by members of the audience during question time.

For polygyny to be practised, it must be according to defined Islamic rules. Consent of all parties and that of the guardian of a previously unmarried woman, an agreed dowry and adult witnesses are required. Trad emphasised that a polygynous union must be religious, primarily since secular courts do not “compel the parties to live together or be faithful to each other or to fulfil each other’s needs for intimacy.” Secular unions avoid commitment while separation or divorce brings emotional and financial trauma. Modern marriage appears to have lost it meaning.

Trad summarised: “What does a fellow with an active libido do in a monogamous society?” If he loves his wife, is polygamist by nature and wants to avoid the evils of prostitution, then what are the possible options? It’s time to pull down the Byzantium-constructed facade of monogamy and permit men with this “innate drive to support more than one woman in matrimonial capacity.” The “enforced myth of monogamy” has had its day. Mistresses and prostitution are nothing more than polygynous expressions of society. Polygamy “is about making man responsible for his libido.”

Trad talked very dangerously indeed. During question time one audience member suggested the same topic might be addressed by a female Muslim, providing an even more adventurous start to next year’s festival.

Keysar Trad is President of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia.

Religion poisons everything – Christopher Hitchens

Like many people attending Christopher Hitchens’ presentation to FODI, I am neither theologian nor scientist ...

Religious ritual played a minimal role in my early life, with a simple unenthusiastic blessing delivered at meal times in an attempt by my parents to silence my sisters and I for an entire minute. Until adolescence my mother insisted on my irregular attendance at church. For most of my adult life, I believed that organised religion was primarily for others, but also that historic horrors inflicted by the Holy Office, fear-mongering preachers and the abundance of guilt handed down by the clergy were more or less a thing of the past. Religion has been neither bad, nor good, but certainly not poisonous.

Post 9/11, atrocities committed in the name of a deity gain wide media coverage, and the argument against religion is gaining momentum in secular societies weary of the growing number of inhuman acts inflicted in growing number.

For Christopher Hitchens, religion is both delusional and cancerous, a belief system incompatible with modern science, a sadistic and harmful system based entirely on untruths and reeking of totalitarianism. For Hitchins, it is demonstrably not the basis for human morals and indeed, probably quite the opposite.

Nevertheless, people still struggle to accept that the human species is simply the product of eons of evolution. It’s natural to hope we are part of some plan. After four billion years the human species is not the culmination of the evolutionary process. Hitchens quotes the sobering reflection of the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees: “It will not be humans who watch the sun rise a billion years from now.” But why shouldn’t we find this awe-inspiring? Well, it is.

To think that something other than human beings will watch our closet star die when we have long since evolved into another form or simply vanished from the face of the Earth is, as Hitchens states, “arresting”. Depressing too, but nonetheless, as awe-inspiring as anything to be had from a holy text.

Hitchens continues our story of insignificance with his capricious and indifferent God. Allowing for evolution and palaeontological evidence that places us on this speck of a planet for just a flicker in geological time, you must then accept that for the entire period of human struggle from the African savannah to approximately several millennia ago, God just simply sat back and watched. As human society evolved slowly, making miniscule but ever-increasing improvement to our existence along the way, the divine forces were impassive. And it would seem, unaware of our suffering. If you believe in God, says Hitchens, you must also swallow this unpalatable truth.

And then there is extinction. Almost nothing but mass extinction. That we are the product of a capricious, indifferent and wasteful God who has watched indifferently as 99.9% of all life forms became extinct seems cruel enough, and for Hitchens serves only to demonstrate the crudeness of the architect who might have devised such a plan.

Until this point in the speech, religion would seem just illogical in the face of science. But Hitchens senses the worst of human nature in the idea of the Abrahamic God. One leader. One people. One regime. For Hitchens “it smacks of totalitarianism”; the proposition to love thy neighbour is nothing more than insidious compulsory love. Anything that compels humans to think or act in a particular way is against the philosophical mind and must therefore be treated with utmost suspicion, and demythologises the idea that human morality originated from a system that extorts our love. Hitchens just finds that idea creepy.

Morality is not the exclusive domain of the religious mind. The instinct to protect children is, according to Hitchens, innate with humans and not the concern only of the religious. “Care, love and protection of them is something shared by all of us”, and it is not from the Bible that we are to take any lesson. Contrarily, Abrahamic religions are the basis for genital mutilation and child marriage. Hitchens is clear: “Civilisation begins where that evil nonsense leaves off. It’s time to outgrow religion and leave this awful nonsense behind.”

Naturally Hitchens has detractors. He is accused of being a militant atheist and as uncompromising as any religious fundamentalist. But Hitchins is also ready to admit that religion is here for the long term. I imagine he voiced the feeling of many in the audience by stating: “I don’t expect people to give it up; I just want them to leave me out of it. Don’t teach it to my children and don’t expect me to live under it in any way.” Certainly more live-and-let-live that I’d anticipated.

I do have religious family members and perhaps out of familial bond I can’t quite agree that religion poisons everything. Religious relatives who offer flaky justifications for their beliefs hardly seem infected by something that makes them think irrationally or act with prejudice. I do not possess faith. They do. It might just have to remain as that.

Christopher Hitchens is a British-American author, journalist and literary critic. He describes himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism and reason. In September 2008, he was made a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Bring back conscription – Chris Barrie

Provocatively perhaps, Admiral Barrie argued for the return of conscription at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

When I lived in Turkey, I was often asked about my memories of national service by friends who then expressed disbelief that I had not spent a single day in some type of compulsory government civil service. I would often receive a wry smile suggesting that I had either cunningly evaded the call-up or otherwise managed to avoid the counterpart to the Turkish national requirement that all males spend up to eighteen months serving in their military forces.

While some Turkish friends waxed lyrical about friendships formed and of cherished memories, in private conversation they often admitted how they resented the obligation, how difficult it had been to spend time away from their families and the real fear that they would be sent to border regions where hostile conflict was a reality. For most, the two biggest issues were the paltry remuneration and the length of service that removed them, without any recourse, from their university studies and family. As an outsider, I could never have strong convictions either for or against a system in which I played no part, though my sense of self-determination naturally predisposed me to reject any proposition to bring back conscription.

Retired Admiral Chris Barrie knows well that conscription is still a touchy subject in Australia. He prefaced his talk with the caveat that his proposed scheme remains a work in progress, and spoke of the ongoing struggle to attract a necessary number of recruits into all of the defence forces.

Volunteers don’t come easily when times are good. Further, during peace time, recruitment succeeds only when unemployment remains high. Even by setting salaries commensurate with work done and with the support of numerous experts from the defence forces, private sectors and ministers, a military career choice still fails to attract the numbers required. This has been an ongoing concern for many years.

Chris Barrie’s interest in bringing back conscription first began during a conversation with the president of the Swiss Federation during the Sydney Olympics: a Swiss official explained that “the national service makes us Swiss.”

Admiral Barrie argued in support of conscription like this: The military is constrained, unlike other industries, from importing labour from overseas. Any Australia of the future needs to consider seriously its positioning within the Asia-Pacific region. If the global population is to number ten billion by mid-century, Australia’s population will hardly register a blip on the neighbourhood map. With population projection for Indonesia at over 300 million, and one-and-a-half billion each in China and India, our nation may well struggle to hold its significance in the region. Add to this the greying of Australia, with perhaps one quarter of the population aged 65 or over in 2050. There will be few people to provide defence for the many.

A projected reality or not, Barrie understands the collective baggage the nation has regarding conscription and his proposed Australian Universal Scheme (AUSSIE) would seek to avoid errors of the past. A national scheme would be a uniquely Australian institution that was universal and compulsory for male and female citizens. Labour would be properly remunerated and flexibility the key. In short, it would be possible to undertake a wide range of services, from aid work to provision of services for the elderly and work in remote communities; it would be adaptable to individual needs.

It’s hard to see how effective conscripts will toil beside people who have chosen the military as a career path. If motivation is the key to success in any endeavour, it could be hard going to gain worthwhile outcomes from generations who have known almost nothing but self-determination. And there’s the philosophical issue that is hard to resolve. It hardly seems fair to enslave the young to protect a nation of grey-haired seniors who failed to have the foresight to tackle this issue a long time earlier.

Barrie wants broad community discussion. There is the issue of conscientious objectors, the possibility of involvement in unjust conflicts and the idea that such a scheme is nothing more than servitude or state-sanctioned bondage. Controversially, there would be sanctions and punitive measures for those who refused to complete the scheme would be implemented.

In my view, Barrie’s plan may remain unpopular for some time yet, but it is brave and forward-thinking. It’s certain that we’ll hear more about it in the future.

Admiral Chris Barrie (retired) was chief of the Defence Force between 1998 and 2002.

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