The Dawn of Neo-Apartheid

So here is my big post about the current state of the Indigenous peoples of Australia. At face value, the government response to the "Little Children are Sacred" report (link) is racist in a sense, mainly because it discriminates against Aborigines on the basis of race. But this leads into the biggest problem and focus of this post. There is a stark contrast between the perspectives of the Western "rulers" of Australia (we have more socio-economic power than most Indigenous people) and the perspectives of the Indigenous peoples of Australia. I'll elaborate on the differences of perspectives in another post, but for the sake of this post I wish to frame it in the context of current issues.

Before I go on further talking about the current "national emergency", I would like to think that the government tries to eliminate child abuse throughout all of Australia, and doesn't think the the problem is isolated to Indigenous communities. Having said that, current policies seem to have a whiff of racism, in the context of paternalism. Lets take a look at some of the key responses set out by the government for the current "national emergency":

• "ALCOHOL and pornography will be banned in indigenous communities in the Northern Territory as part of unprecedented federal intervention aimed at stamping out widespread child abuse." News.com.au - 21 June 2007
• "Mr Brough said the scrapping of the permit system – which restricts non-Aboriginal access to indigenous land – applied to town centres and not homelands or sacred sites, with communities able to apply to the Government for exceptions under special circumstance like funerals." News.com.au - 21 June 2007

First issue: Will banning alcohol and pornography help in these communities? People who have addictions will be able to find these elsewhere. The "Little Children are Sacred" Report suggests that a range of solutions to alcohol as a problem, but doesn't suggest banning it. One of the most important solutions (in my own opinion) is:

"That, in consultation with Aboriginal communities, a significant media campaign for Aboriginal communities be designed to both promote healthy alternatives to drinking alcohol and to convey information about the negative impact of alcohol with an emphasis on the relationship between excessive consumption and the increased incidence of child abuse and other family violence." (Page 29 - emphasis is mine)

Second Issue: This is the most contentious of all the "solutions" put forward. How will reducing land rights and indigenous control of communities reduce child abuse? It is easy to see this as a "land grab" by the federal government. This may not necessarily be true, but reducing Indigenous control over land is incredibly insensitive to Aboriginal cultures.

The country is a hugely important aspect of Aboriginal culture and identity. "Country is a place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is lived in and lived with" (Deborah Bird Rose - Nourishing Terrains - pdf). It is the disconnection from the land, the disconnection from identity that has caused many social problem within Indigenous communities. It may sound quite irrational from a western perspective, however, there is also a demonstrated link between health in Aboriginal communities and "Caring for Country" (Healthy Country: Healthy People - pdf).

I'll finish off with another nice quote from Deborah Bird Rose:

"People talk about country in the same way that they would talk about a person: they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country, and long for country. People say that country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy. Country is not a generalised or undifferentiated type of place, such as one might indicate with terms like ‘spending a day in the country’ or ‘going up the country’. Rather, country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life. Because of this richness, country is home, and peace; nourishment for body, mind, and spirit; heart’s ease." (Deborah Bird Rose - Nourishing Terrains - pdf).

We find it hard to understand this perspective, governments more so, but we must be accommodating to these perspectives, we must be not just tolerant but we should accept the alternative "truth" of the knowledge and culture of Aboriginal people in Australia. That is when we will be treating them as equals.

Inherent cultural relativism in the interpretation of the Bible

I've heard people talk about the Absolute of the Word of God. That may be so, but at what point does the Word of God cease being an absolute concept and is altered/changed/adjusted into a relativist concept? Some people talk about the Bible as the Word of God, does this mean the Bible is absolute? How can it be absolute when you have different translations of the original text?

(Image: Hood Museum of Art)

This is my starting point for arguing that inherently the Bible is a cultural relative phenomenon that must be approached as such to understand the relevance and importance of its message. On the issue of translations, if the Bible were originally written in Hebrew (Old Testament) or Classic Greek (New Testament), how can we who read the translated English versions argue that what we are reading is the "truth"? Doesn't the actual process of translation make the end product an exercise in cultural relativism? You see the different translations, King James, NIV etc., why are these different? A translation will need to be approached in the context of the culture that it was written, and only then can a more-correct translation be made. If the text was an absolute, would it not require only a simple literal-translation of the words?

Language changes through time, this often is a reflection of reality or the way that reality is perceived shapes the language. If language is a direct reflection of our culture wouldn't the manifestation of The Word in our own language(s) be a step in the alteration of the Absolute into the relative. Cultural terms, phrases and sayings must be used to explain concepts that may not be fully understood in a different cultural context. So when the Bible was first written down, that would constitute an act of cultural relativism, whereby through its very nature as a written document, any Absolutism is lost. Therefore, we must approach older texts and even cross-cultural modern texts in the context of the author and the cultural setting to understand its meaning.

I'm not arguing that the Absolute cannot exist, but I argue that the Absolute does not exist in the context of people/human. It cannot exist in our minds, because we are cultural beings and will therefore be shaped and moulded in that form. The absolute can only exist in a non-cultural framework, but this can never exist. If people were a-cultural (without culture), that would make us just like the animals.

Truth? That's bullshit!

Why is it that when there is a contradiction, there is instantly an idea that one must be true and one must be wrong? Let us take, for instance, the conflict between science and religion, namely the debate over whether evolution or intelligent-design(creationism) should be taught in children.

You have one side arguing that life on Earth derives from a process called evolution, which was developed by Charles Darwin (simultaneously with Alfred Russell Wallace1). On the other side you have people arguing that life shows "intelligent" design to it, meaning that there was an "intelligent" designer behind the creation of life. There is a contradiction here. One side says it was a natural process, ape-ancestor to man. The other side says, man, designed by an intelligence. The very nature of our society is to interpret this as there is one person being wrong, and one must be wrong, because there can only be one truth. Only one interpretation of the truth2.

So I argue that this is where most conflict is derived from. There is the idea that there is only one truth to all matters. But looking at the world, we are consistently faced with contradictions and are easily able to deal with both truths:

• We know3 that scientifically it is impossible for a woman to get pregnant without there being two gametes to complete a fertilization developing into a zygote. However, 2 billion of us believe that it has happened, and yet we can live perfectly fine with this contradiction of two "truths". (This example came from Annie Ross)
• It is often that we exemplify our beliefs and its truthfulness from the very fact that our faith is strong. In the same stroke, however, we argue that others' beliefs are not true even though they would argue that they have the same strength of faith. It is a contradiction that we all readily live with. (Reference to the closing scene of God on My Side - Andrew Denton)
  

1 Everyone seems to forget poor little Alfred Russell Wallace. This dude developed the Wallace Line. He was a pretty smart cookie.
2 I understand the irony of me talking about the "wrongness" of there being only one truth and the one truth is that there are possibly many, contradictory truths. It hurts my head too.
3 An interesting side note, the word know in Ancient Greek is οίδα which in Modern Greek directly translates into the word for "I have seen". One could argue that the idea of truth as being something that one has seen. Effectively, most of western epistemology derives from Ancient Greek philosophy.

Some little points that are related to this topic that I haven't dealt with here, but I may talk about later: Post-modernism versus modernism; Lewis Binford (that's for all you archaeology people out there!); Processualism and post-processualism (again, archaeology bums!); cultural relativism; epistomology