The divergence revealed – again

Whilst I have known for a number of years now that Australia’s culture is diverging from that of the Enriched World, two articles I have looked at today seem to imply that this divergence is very real and actually occurring today.

Rod Dreher in ‘Wellesley’s First World Problem’ does a great deal to show just how masculinised (a synonym for secularised) the Enriched World has already become, as he illustrated women, frustrated that laws trying to equalise their outcomes with men cannot do so effectively, are beginning to actually take testosterone to turn them into men. Although the idea of women taking testosterone is not something I have imagined, if one looks at the Boomers’ cultural ambassadors AC/DC, one sees them say:

“Shoot to thrill”
“Play to kill”
“Too many women”
“Too many pills”

it is extremely easy to see why so many feminists would wish for women to be turned into men on a large scale. The very fact that radical feminists have embraced this rather than question the Weltanschauung of AC/DC – a worldview much more consistent through the AC/DC canon than is the Bible or the Qur’an) is very telling as to what it says about the mainstream of Enriched World culture today. A culture that follows what ‘Shoot to Thrill’ says is a culture that believes there are too many women and that it would be better with only men – despite the impossibility of reproduction! Dreher shows that women are trying to be men because they feel they will be stronger and tougher if they do so, even if there are regulations in colleges that they be only for women.

In contrast, The Guardian in its ‘Australia Is on the Road to a Tea Party Revolution’ reveals just how far and how rapidly Australia is moving towards the policies advocated by the Tea Partyists in the United States. Despite its criticism, The Guardian itself thinks this shift likely to continue because of Australia’s uniform media.

Whereas Obama’s support among the American Millennials was and is much too strong for any Tea Party revolution, and the Republican Party too pragmatic about losing more marginal states of the mid-east, Australia lacks such qualms. Its comparative advantage in land-intensive industries like family housing and agriculture means Australia still possesses a strong “community culture” that works in manual trade, mining and farming jobs largely lost from the Enriched World.

These people – in the middle and outer suburbs of Australia’s cities – express themselves primarily via family and community rather than what Michael Woolridge called “work”  but is more accurately “art” and constitutes the primary means of self-expression for people of the Enriched World and a few Australian academic communities. In addition to Woolridge, David Brooks has noticed how much smaller the “self” is in suburban Australia than for people in Blue America, Canada, New Zealand or Eurasia. As critics of the “War on Poverty” have argued, this sense of community in suburban Australia makes its residents extremely suspicious of people on welfare, because they believe in a level of self-reliance rarely seen in the Enriched World.

Outer suburbanites do recognise as few others do how the governments of the Enriched World, despite a rhetoric and ideology of radical egalitarianism, govern for a tiny minority – for a start those without high-paying jobs cannot afford the geographically restricted and heavily regulated housing supplies of most Enriched World cities. This is a critical problem for the Enriched World but one considered only by the Right, whose solutions are almost certainly effective but politically unviable. On the Left it is argued that increased welfare from taxing the super-rich could allow everyone to afford housing in cities like London, Vancouver or New York, an idea shown outlandish by history and one that makes the modern Left look extremely hypocritical.

The division we are seeing between Australia and the Enriched World is in many ways profoundly natural – experienced ecologists like Antoni Milewski, Tim Flannery, Ian Rowley and Dustin Rubinstein known that Australia’s animals are much more social and group-living than those of the Enriched World – and profoundly disturbing because it, as The Guardian points out, ignores the critical issues facing the future on both sides.