Sutton, Walshe and Pascoe: Empirical truth and racist intensifications

 Let me begin with these three anecdotes. They might appear to be unrelated to begin with. But as I will show they all take us to the issue I want to raise here. They came to my mind in the recent media coverage given to Peter Sutton and Kerryn Walshe’s critique of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu and the social media commentary it has generated.

 

Anecdote 1: 

I am in the car listening to a US radio program. The interviewer is talking to a member of an evangelical sect who had predicted the end of the world on a precise date. It was sometimes in 2005 or 2006. I am writing this from memory. I can’t recall the exact date. What I recall is that the person being interviewed was discussing his sect’s eschatological position. According to the sect the end of the world was accompanied by a state of ‘rapture’. For those who don’t know, ‘rapture’ refers to a belief that at the ‘end of time’ Jesus will snatch all the true believers from the earth and towards the heavens while the non-believers stay on earth and burn and suffer to death. This particular sect, according to the man being interviewed, held a particularly gory version of this: if you are a believer, not only did Jesus ‘suck you up’ away from earth and towards the heavens, but he actually suspends you mid-way through this process so that you can ‘enjoy’ the sight of the non-believers burning and suffering before finally going to inhabit your well-deserved heavenly realm.

 

This was all discussed in the interview. But the point of the interview was that neither the end of the world nor rapture happened at the date it was supposed to have happened according to the sect. The radio interviewer was pretty calm and understanding about all this (I remember thinking: in a way that only liberal Americans can be). Indeed rather than mocking the man or cornering him with the failure of the prediction, the interviewer was trying to help him find a way out. He suggested that maybe the end of the world is not as sudden as we like to imagine it to be. Maybe, he said, it will happen slowly as with global warming. The man’s reply remained and will remain with me forever. ‘Ah. Global warming. The jury is still out on this’ he said.

 

The man accepted the end of the world and the rapture unquestioningly despite the absolute lack of empirical data to support that view. But he doubted the validity of global warming despite the enormous body of empirical data validating it. In the first case he acted as if he couldn’t care less about the question of ‘empirical evidence’. In the second case, he was denying the facts presented by the majority of the scientific community, not by acting as if he didn’t care about facts, but by posturing as if his scientific standards of proof are much higher than all those scientists combined. For in the matter of global warming, unlike in the matter of the end of the world, nothing but the most stringent empirical proof can do.

 

The anecdote highlights the classical difference between belief and knowledge. It brings to mind arguments against thinking those as a binary opposition between different people, as if some people dwell in the world of belief and some people dwell in the world of rigorously evaluated empirical knowledge. In fact, most people’s views are a mixture of beliefs and empirical knowledge. But it also brings to mind something Pierre Bourdieu argued in relation to Levy Bruhl. It is mainly social scientists who have a vested interest in knowledge for knowledge’s sake who dwell primarily in the world of rigorously evaluated empirical knowledge. To demand an investment in rigour from everyone is a form of scholastic fallacy: a belief that everyone is motivated by pure intellectual pursuit. For most people, knowledge is subordinate to non-intellectual practical ends.

 

It is a mistake to think that it is strange that a man who believes in rapture is unable to engage in an empirical pursuit of some truth or another. But it is a mistake to think that the empirical pursuit of the truth is motivated by nothing other than the search for the truth. In the above case, it is clear that it is not the man’s search for the truth that has led to his position on global warming. It is his position on global warming that led to his cynicism towards the dominant existing knowledge on the subject. He was using a form of mega-empirical posturing as a way of reinforcing his belief.

 

Anecdote 2:

A group of people in my local café are discussing a news item in the morning paper. A Palestinian-background male doctor in Sydney was convicted of sexually assaulting his female patients. The man was clearly a creep, drugging his patients and assaulting them in his clinic. One of the women in the café was saying exactly that: that the man was a creep. But she was saying it with particular intensity that distinguished her reaction from that of the other women she was talking to and who clearly agreed with her. I was trying to guess where this intensity came from. I thought she might have been perhaps a victim of sexual abuse herself. But then she said: ‘that’s what you get from seeing a Muslim doctor’ (the doctor, as could be recognised from his name, was actually a Palestinian Christian). 

 

I was struck by the fact that, being partially deaf, I still heard this clearly. The woman felt totally comfortable saying this in a public space. She didn’t even try to lower her voice while saying it. It became clear to me that at least part of the intensity of her reaction was a racist intensity. I remember wondering at the time how one is to point to this racism without wanting to be seen to be defending the doctor. It initiated a long reflection on this question. But it also made me think of something that the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once said. That it is a relief to find a good reason to hate someone one hates for no good reason at all. Racialized people behaving badly are a source of psychological relief to the racists who hate them just for who they are not for how they behave. The intensity referred to above is the symptom of the relief their bad behaviour provides. Similar forms of racialized intensities became a more generalised phenomenon during the public debates about Sydney ‘Lebanese gang rapes’ at the turn of the century.

 

Anecdote 3:

It is 2002 or 2003, I am presenting a paper at a staff seminar in my own anthropology department at the time, at the University of Sydney. It is a piece of ethnographic work on male sexuality in a Lebanese village and its transformation in the process of migration. The paper argued that the usage of the concept of ‘phallocentrism’ as a metaphor in depicting some forms of masculinist cultures should not be universalised. I showed that the particular masculinity in the Lebanese village I was investigating (so I wasn’t generalising about a ‘Lebanese sexuality’ either) was phallocentric in an actual not in a metaphoric sense: that is, it was a penis-centred masculinity. After presenting the paper, a Lebanese-background man I did not know approached me to say that he is disappointed about me reproducing what he saw as ‘negative stereotypes’ about Lebanese male sexuality ‘given what has recently happened.’

 

I immediately understood what he meant by ‘given what has recently happened.’ He was referring to the above-mentioned ‘Lebanese gang rapes’ controversy which had indeed only just abated. I was taken aback by his comment and taken aback by the fact that he was positioning my research in events that had nothing much to do with it as far as I was concerned. The research was actually based on interviews with Lebanese migrants living in Boston. I reacted defensively saying that this was a social scientific anthropological research, and that what I am interested in has nothing to do with how people in Sydney discuss Lebanese male sexuality. I asked him if he was an academic and he said he wasn’t but that my name and the topic of my presentation piqued his interest. ‘As you know, a lot of people are interested in what you have to say’ he said. I replied, always defensively, that this was a specifically academic seminar and that I wouldn’t argue in the same way if I was discussing things on television. 

 

Part of me was genuinely annoyed at the idea that I should let the racism of some people in some part of the world like Sydney decide what research outcomes I should discuss or not discuss. At the same time, I was also worried about the ramifications of my stance. Isn’t that what the scientists who invented nuclear power said about the atom bomb? To be sure, it wasn’t that I was equating my findings with the discovery of nuclear fissure (!) but the socio-ethical questions were the same. Can I really act as if the world of research and science is a world independent of the more general social space in which it is occurring? It is not. At the same time, another question that leads to the opposite path was equally valid: can I be a professional without wanting to establish the autonomy of my findings vis a vis how some people outside the academic field invest in them? There is a social scientific field that is autonomous from the wider social field and where the questions that are asked and the issues that are raised ought to be asked and raised because of their academic and scholarly value not because they reinforce or challenge some politicised stereotype or another. Over the years, I cannot say that I found a satisfactory resolution to this dilemma. However, if I were to see this man again, I would thank him for ensuring that I always think about this dilemma as an unresolvable contradiction in which social researchers dwell and have to negotiate as best as they can. 

 

I trust that people can see how these anecdotes and the questions they have generated are relevant to the way we think about the public discussions generated by Sutton and Walshe’s critique of Dark Emu. Every such specialist debate with social ramifications occurs in what Bourdieu calls a ‘restricted’ and a ‘wide’ field. Debates about music or cinema happen between musicians or film makers (restricted field) and between the consumers of music or film (wide field). In much the same way, one has to be clear about the difference and interconnection between professional anthropological debates and the populist media debates they generate. One cannot treat the two as if they are the same, but nor can we treat them as if they have no bearing on each other. Nor is the value of an anthropological work solely based on the way other anthropologists perceive it. Rightly or wrongly, there are many works that have left a lasting effect on the public imagination, and that continue to be seen among the best of what anthropology can offer in that they move us in the right direction in our search for a better world, while being questioned scientifically: two different bodies of anthropological works come to mind here, the work of Margaret Mead and that of Carlos Castaneda. I am not sufficiently expert in Indigenous anthropology to have a strong view as to whether Pascoe’s work will end up being seen in this way. But it clearly has the potential to move us in this way. If so, Sutton and Walshe’s critique will matter very little regarding the social circulation of the work. My lack of expertise in the field also stops me for judging too categorically Sutton and Walshe’s critique, although I am more than willing to admit that many issues that have been reported to be part of their critique sounds right to my anthropological ears. 

 

But I also wonder if Sutton and Walshe are asking themselves the question regarding the significance of the populist interest in their work that I had to ask following my lecture. Do they really think that the media/populist interest in their work is an interest in truth? Is it? One can immediately think of the many fact-based critiques of the whitewashed early historical accounts of ‘the settlement of Australia’ that never got the kind of populist attention they are now receiving. And, far from me to equate their valuable scholarly critique to Keith Windschuttle’s petty number crunching mode of searching for the truth, one has to ask if it the media/populist interest in the ‘truth’ of their work is not itself actually treating the two exercises as if they belong to the same order of scholarship.

 

It would be a mistake to think that racists do not use empirical facts. But it would be a mistake to think that their usage of facts comes from an interest in the pursuit of truthful facts. For I can already see in the intensity of the populist critique of Pascoe that same racist form of intensification I referred to earlier.