There was a kind of fever in the newsroom, the way that the media can descend into a whirlpool largely of its own making. Only the most tenuous links to terrorism were needed: my first front-page story was an interview with some sheikh in Melbourne’s north whose name had been mentioned in court documents for someone being tried for something in Spain. I had no idea about this man’s background or circumstances, but there I was in what looked like a former warehouse in Brunswick asking him whether he was a member of Al-Qaeda. The day the story appeared a media pack laid siege to his house.
The tendency of news media is towards sensation and maximising polarity – presenting in endless iterations the situations and people that are good and those that are bad. When the media sniffs out a stark polarity of some kind it goes to work. Whether a public existential threat is real or substantial is not so important because the “strong story” is primary.
The black-and-white, “good versus bad” formulations in the media aren’t helpful when it comes to tackling the world’s issues. It’s not that there are no clear problems that need to be addressed – like climate change and security – and people doing good and bad things in a variety of ways, but that the complexity of the world and interconnectedness of everyone and everything calls for a nuanced vision.
In the globalised world of the 21st century there is a strong overarching movement towards unification, the breaking down of boundaries and divisions. With it has come an exposure and meeting of the great variety of cultures and ideas that belong to the whole human family. Such globalised change inevitably produces tensions and brings to the fore aspects of the old order in reaction. When people like Tony Abbott, Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch beat the “us-and-them” drum in relation to Muslims, they are giving voice to the old circumstances of established power and related boundaries and identities. They are trying to reassert a status quo that is changing fast around them and in doing so convey the sense of fear and threat that comes from an old order giving way to the new.
The global age carries a challenging package of unity and diversity that have to be held and nurtured simultaneously. We are one world – ecological reality tells us so – and yet diversity in all its shapes and forms is vital for human and non-human wellbeing. It will be fascinating to see the kinds of global structures that emerge in future to tackle problems like climate change which are properly addressed not by a gaggle of nation states with competing interests but by a body deciding for the welfare of all and the whole.
In the meantime, the dull roar of the purveyors of “us and them” on all sides is likely to get louder, conflicts intensify and suffering increase as we humans blunder our way towards more enlightened ways of being with each other and the planet. There really is no “us and them”. There’s just us.
