One of the dilemmas raising children in an era when Wokeism dominates every institution is whether to bluntly express your opinions on various topics or, instead, hedge and sanitise so they don’t regurgitate your views in full and, in doing so, render themselves social pariahs.
I may regard the ‘you can choose your biological sex’ madness with a mix of horror and laughter, but do I really want this disposition displayed by my kids, when they have to circulate in society, get and retain jobs, pass university courses, and generally get along with people?
I face this problem nearly daily, as my kids are still attending educational institutions, so their heads are being pounded with nonsense. How do you handle this? I’ve asked a lot of friends, and no one has figured it out.
I once witnessed a prominent conservative advise his daughter to write a pro-Woke angle in one of her university essays, even though she disagreed with him and wanted a conservative bent.
When I asked him about it, he told me that he always advises young people to think independently, read widely, and form their own views, but when it comes to anything that can impact your grades or career, then toe the Woke line.
His argument is one of average benefit, it is less likely that a conservative will sabotage a young person expressing conservative views than it is a Woke teacher or human resources activist. The Woke obsessed, in his view, have less tolerance and mercy for views that depart from their dogma.
A recent flashpoint issue I’ve had to deal with is that of gun ownership, with one of my kids setting me up for a showdown, armed with freshly learned points about mass shootings and gun-related deaths in the United States.
I hedged my response. I was personally pleased that Australia has strong prohibitions against gun ownership, with thanks to former Prime Minister John Howard, but I was thankful that American citizens were able to bear arms and had this right protected by the Second Amendment.
My child pretty quickly attacked my hypocrisy. I admitted it was inconsistent but argued that as America is the world’s police force, particularly in helping secure democracies like Australia, ensuring America remained a free and democratic country was pretty important.
And, in my opinion, having high gun ownership amongst citizens meant that no prospective dictator would have much success in trying to control the lives of Americans and cancel elections. In other words, guns kept America largely a free country.
Even as I was making my argument, I realised how stretched, indirect and even incredulous it sounded. To Woke teachers and the young minds they poison, I’m sure it would be dismissed as a crank conspiracy fear.
I posed this question to help my case: Why is there a dictatorship in China and Russia, but not the United States? Why have many countries been ruled by non-democratically elected strong men, but never in America?
I argued that the American Constitution had checks against power that had proven successful in preserving freedoms and democracy, and one factor was, probably, citizen gun ownership. Guns helped keep America free and, in turn, America helped secure other free democracies
I told the story of an Iranian friend who hated guns, but recently concluded that it was the lack of guns amongst citizens in Iran that allowed a highly unpopular religious regime to remain in power, by controlling the heavily armed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp.
Having outlined what, I considered the benefit of guns, we then moved on to the costs.
‘But what about all the mass shootings and killing?’
I admitted this was a very heavy price, and that’s why I was pleased that gun ownership in Australia is severely restricted in cities, to lower gun-related deaths. To bolster my stance I invoked the favourite conservative trope, ‘freedom is not free’. My child was fascinated with this concept. Did gun ownership really mean we have more freedom to do what we want?
I now promised to prove it with data the next day compiling some statistics. My intention was to produce a scatter plot showing a positive correlation between countries where citizens have a lot of freedom, and also high rates of citizen gun ownership.
There appears to be quite good data for both variables. A joint project by credible organisations, including the US Cato Institution, produce what is called the Human Freedom Index. It rates countries from 1 to 10 on both ‘economic’ and ‘personal’ freedoms. They have around 79 distinct indicators, covering many aspects to society, including the Rule of Law and the Size of Government.
There also appeared to be quite good data on gun ownership rates of civilians, split by country.
By creating a graph with the ‘X’ axis showing guns per 100 citizens, and on the ‘Y’ axis, a measure of personal freedoms from 1 to 10, I got the statistical software to plot 141 countries. Each dot on the graph represented one country.
Once the graph was rendered, it didn’t come out like I had expected. Rather than a pattern of positive correlation, the plot was a mess, without any obvious pattern to the naked eye. Yemen was a serious outlier, it had the second-highest rate of gun ownership, yet the lowest freedom rating. Denmark had a very high freedom score, yet only an average rate of gun ownership amongst citizens.
But I was not done just yet. The statistical charting software has an option to plot what is called a ‘trend’ line, which summarised the data into a single set of points.
I chose the option of ‘linear trend’, and it inserted a line on the scatter plot. This is a more statistically rigorous means of assessing correlation than that provided by the naked eye.
Now there was some success, the linear trend line was indeed upward sloping, providing some evidence that high gun ownership was associated with higher freedoms, but this association was not statistically ‘significant’.
Incidentally, I had some other data which allowed two other findings. One was the higher gun ownership did lead (as expected) to more gun-related deaths, proving a point made by my child.
But, ironically, high gun ownership was not associated with higher murder rates, in fact the trend line pointed down on this relationship.
The good thing about kids coming home with the latest Woke assertion is that it forces you to spend a bit more time considering your own rebuttal, hoping what they learn from you is more factual and less rhetorical.
You can’t easily dismiss your children as you can like a carefully selected talking head on ABC Q&A program; you can’t simply just retreat into some echo chamber.
Kids are at you all the time.
More to the point, because you don’t want your child to be a social pariah, you try and be as reasonable as possible, cutting more slack to woke views than you would, say, after a few beers down at the pub.
If my child adopted my views on US gun ownership, I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing for their career, I still don’t have a good answer to this parental dilemma.
Anyone?
Nick Hossack is a public policy consultant. He is former policy director at the Australian Bankers’ Association and former adviser to Prime Minister John Howard.
