Interesting thing noted: the status quo having reckonings and identity crises

Private schools, American exceptionalism, Burning Man and Australian "fair go"

Sometimes you pick up on a theme that bubbles to the surface in different corners of the same pot (were a pot square). And you wonder if it’s coming from the same heat source.

The theme that has bubbled forth for me this week: The big structures that have defined the status quo for yonks are facing redundancy.

These are not brand new themes, but they seem to be converging and dialling up in frequency. And I’m not an historian or political analyst. I claim only to notice patterns in this instance. Here, I plant a bunch of news items from the past week or so in the one post and we can make of it what we will.

Why would you live in the UK?

I’ve just been in the Motherland and I’ve picked up on a number of conversations questioning the relevancy of the Not-So-United-Anymore-Kingdom. Brexit, the passing of the Queen, the decline of the economy (such that Poland and Slovenia are about to surpass)…it’s prompted a leading British radio stations to ask: What is keeping anyone in the UK?¹

It seemed to be the dominant conversation while I was there among many friends and peers, replacing the one that talks about how wonderful London is on a nice day and the untold joys of Hobnobs and going to the theatre. Such that you have defensive headlines like:

A number of books are also hitting shelves, such as Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics, questioning the former Empire’s identity. And I find it telling the French are working to create a smoother passage for the Irish to get to France, bypassing the UK.

America’s not-so-exceptionalism

Commentators now claim the US is no longer a democracy. This week I read reviews of the book “Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West” and articles titled, America Is an Empire in Decline. Meanwhile, BRICS is expanding and looking to decouple from the US dollar and potentially rival the US’s geopolitical might. Again, of course, this is a conversation that has building for some time, but seems to be gaining more traction beyond academic circles.

And Australia…boy are we heading for a face-off with ourselves!

Current polls indicate the country will vote against The Voice at the October 14 referendum. (Catch up on what The Voice is about here; I will be doing a larger post next week on the issue).

I can’t stop thinking about how we will all feel about ourselves when we wake up on October 15 to a “No”. When we see the international headlines: “Australians Says No!!! to Last Chance to Help the World’s Most Disadvantaged First Peoples”, “Australia says: We Prefer the Racist Status Quo”.

I think a nation always gets its clearest wake-up call when we see ourselves as viewed through the eyes of the rest of the world.

We didn’t “hear” former Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech until it went viral around the world, right?

A “No” will say a lot about us. It will hold up a ghastly reflection to the nation. Will we be able to hold onto the “egalitarian” image of ourselves (which I already regard as a wholly outdated myth)? What will replace it? How will we discuss the phenomenon when we get asked about it by people we meet when travelling overseas?

A very long period of reckoning awaits us. And I think it will be painful… and required.

Other things crumbling and being reassessed:

The end of private schools? The Economist asked this question this week.

“When it comes to university entry, a quiet revolution has been under way. Prestigious universities across Britain have been changing their admissions criteria in order to attract a more diverse range of students. Most strikingly, the share of places at Oxford and Cambridge going to pupils from government schools has risen fast, while private schools’ share has fallen. Families who were already worried about private schools’ eye-watering fees—in Britain the average cost for a day pupil is more than £16,000 ($20,000) a year—and about stories of boarding-school misery now also wonder if an expensive education will count against their children when they apply for college.”

The article acknowledges the situation in the US is also shifting now that affirmative action has ended. Which sounds counterinitutie except that the previous laws focused on race. So universities wishing to address diversity will now have to focus admission balance more broadly on straight-up class. Which will likely see kids from posh schools have to join a queue.

Have you been following this debate in the US? I have and I’ve found it fascinating. An interesting and bizarrely progressive “woke” causality.

Burning Man drowns:

Outdoor festivals are no longer viable in much of the world. This essay by Cory Doctorow in The New York Times describes this years’ Burning Man disaster and it provides an insight into both the end of of a certain type of “good times” and how we will have to live in end times:

The world is getting more and more unpredictable. Nothing is going according to plan. When the heavy weather hits, you’ve got to hunker down, share your snacks and pass around your flask, take care of one another, and find a way to enjoy the thing you mustdo, because the thing you wanted to do was just canceled. Again.

We’re all going to have to learn some MacGyver skills. We’re all going to have to cultivate patience and solidarity. And the organizers? They’re going to have to figure out how to keep the port-a-potties clear, because radical self-reliance and radical inclusion go only so far.

Institutions, free world leadership status and national identities are going through a fundamental and I feel irreversible shaken up. It’s the vibrational fallout from larger seismic shifts, of course. We can feel it, right? None of it is that surprising.

We’ve been dismayed and despairing that the current system can keep on keeping on in the face of all the evidence that it is destructive, cruel and existentially threatening. Well, it turns out, a rotten centre can not hold. Indeed nothing that has become this complex and big can ever hold, at least not indefinitely (as per the The Great Filter theory and others that describe the process of a species becoming so complex it winds up…eating itself.).

So where does the above leave you and I? Drawing on a bunch of MacGyver-esque skills, I guess. And cultivating practices now that will equip us for the transition to…who knows what!

As it happens, my Wild conversation this week can help. I caught up with the British journalist Ian Leslie who has published a book, fittingly titled: Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It. In this conversation we get quite urgently to this very wild point: To survive going forward we need to reclaim our curiosity. You’ll have to listen in to understand the beautiful intricacies of why and how.

Sarah x

1. I struggled to dig up the actual link to this radio talkback moment…but you can get the gist from the grab.