WHAT DOES BELONGING MEAN?

I am provoked by the current political debate about immigration and multiculturalism, and the creeping anxiety about what constantly evolving agentic AI might mean for our humanness in a political ecosystem that bridges the carbon/silicon divide. Mental illness, in the form of psycho-social discomfort is pervasive. We live in the Age of Anxiety. Old assumptions are losing credibility. Many of us feel adrift.

We humans are social creatures. Even while we value our own unique individuality, we want to locate that within a sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves.

For many centuries we found this through our connection to the place where we were born and the family and wider social grouping within which we were raised, bringing with it the language(s) we spoke, the values we honoured, and the rules that constrained our individual desires, in the stories told around the family hearth.

Stories that deepen our connection to a sense of place that extend our sense of family connection well beyond our fellow humans. Where the soil beneath our feet and the stars in the night sky envelop us with the belonging of deep connections that are not easily severed.

Stories that link us to wider cosmologies, peopled by ancestors, gods, demons, angels and other mythic creatures that fire our imagination. Stories and people we have met in books and films, in graphic novels and through the art of animé.

Or in today’s world of war and climate change-driven migration to other lands, we might find this in our nation-state identity, on full display in the World Cup events. Wider still through our religious faith, even while this might expose us to fractious currents of inclusion and exclusion that have dogged the history of universalist religions that bind together people of many different nationalities and racialized ethnicity.

And equally set them against one another with competing claims to be the only true expression of God’s intent for humanity. The terrible tragedy of religious wars.

THE MIGRATION STORY

Immigration has become the political crack in the story of liberal humanism. As climate change, global economic uncertainty and geo-political fortunes change, the 20^th century system of a world of nation states in which people find their sense of belonging is fracturing. People are on the move. Seeking refuge. Seeking economic opportunity. Seeking safety.

Writing in The Conversation, Louisa Jones notes:

The history of immigration policy in Australia is full of yes-no contradictions: fear jostling with hope, exclusion with openness. The British and their descendants, [have] never meaningfully reconciled with the original sin of having invaded a continent, then constantly added people to it, most of them in their own image.

Australia has always struggled with questions of racial and cultural difference.

In thrall to his Oxford University experience, Tony Abbott, now President of the imploding Liberal Party, attempts to lionise Australia’s Western Enlightenment inheritance, which he locates in ‘white’ Anglo-Celtic culture. Pauline Hanson’s desperate call to enshrine an Australian monoculture echoes Alfred Deakin’s rationale for Australia’s 1901 Immigration Restriction (White Australia) Bill.

Australia should tolerate nothing within its dominion that is not British in character and constitution or capable of becoming Anglicised without delay. For all outside that charmed circle the policy is that of the closed door.

One of the first initiatives of the newly established federation that birthed Australia as a nation state, it sought to protect ‘white workers’ from cheaper coloured labour, and denied the very existence of its Indigenous peoples as citizens of this new nation.

Under the pressure of global events and avowed values of liberal humanism, Australia finally abolished its White Australia policy, recognised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as Australians in the 1967 Referendum, and in 1973 copied Canada to adopt a universal visa policy.

MULTICULTURALISM

However, while Australia’s ethnic diversity is growing, especially through migration from China and India, followed by the Middle East, our so-called liberal humanism rests on a bedrock of national economic self-interest. Unlike the US, we never entertained the conceit of the Statue of Liberty, welcoming the huddled masses of the world to our shores.

In today’s immigration system, visas are granted for needed skilled workers that underpin the health and care sector, fee-paying international students to fund our universities, and business investment migrants to fill the coffers. Working holiday visas and cheap Pacific Island labour through the PALM scheme are brought in to keep the horticultural sector going, where widespread exploitation and abuse of workers’ rights persist. Humanitarian and family reunion migration is a tiny proportion of our immigrant population.

Prime Minister Albanese says multiculturalism is who we are.

From the 400 different First Nations language groups, to the Anglo-Celtic (English, Irish, Scottish) convicts and their gaolers who colonised and named Gondwana ‘Australia’, thus capturing the imagined southern land, Terra Australis, for the British Empire, and declaring it terra nullius, unoccupied. Ripe for appropriation.

Albanese claims Australia, as ‘the world’s most successful multicultural nation’, can become a microcosm for the world that shows that people of different ethnicity, different faiths and different backgrounds can live in harmony.

VOICES OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Other, more discerning voices from the Sur-Sur Southern Knowledges initiative at Western Sydney University’s Institute of Cultural Studies take this claim to greater heights in their recent publication Sur Southern knowledges: Education, sustainability and social transformation, co-edited by Professor Juan Francisco Salazar of WSU.

As Genaro Oliveira explains, to be truly multicultural, Australia must transcend its privileging of the Western canon (knowledges). Just as feminism has challenged the hegemony of the male voices under patriarchy, multiculturalism must allow alternative geneologies of thought and insight from the non-European voices of the Global South.

Drawing on the rich knowledge traditions of South America and insights from Australia’s rich migrant diaspora communities, they urge us to consider that the true wealth of multiculturalism is not just a microcosm of jostling food cultures and celebratory ethnic cultural festivals, but the possibilities of new ways of thinking and making sense of our experiences. The voices of many of our migrant communities, along with those of our Indigenous cultural foundations.

Only this will ensure our multiculturalism is a genuinely complex ecology of different and complementary knowledge systems, which each provide a portal into different ways of experiencing ourselves within the wider eco systems of the natural world.

Only this will challenge the entrenched racism that is a pervasive reality for both Indigenous Australians, and non-European migrants. This is particularly important as we watch the Euro-US liberal order implode before our eyes, exposing the hypocrisy and venal greed that hid in plain sight under its banner of ‘Freedom’. Now flaunted in the freshly gilded rooms of the White House, and on display in the Palace of Versailles.

Oliveira names these key thinkers of the Global South: Paulo Friere, Frantz Fanon, Ngü was Thiong’o, Gayatri Spivak, Asma Lamrabet, Boaventura de Soursa Santos, Claude Ake, Achille Mbember, Amilcar Cabral and Anibal Quijano. There are many others. To these we can also add the voices of the growing group of Australian First Nation voices that have been nurtured through the various schools of Indigenous knowledge systems across Australian universities, working in collaboration with their non-Indigenous colleagues, who are now speaking back to modern Australia.

As I have suggested in previous blog posts, this is the great intellectual task awaiting Australians—not the vain attempt to recover ‘White Australia’.

The African Australian academic, Finex Ndhlovu in ‘Frontier Diasporas, Ontologies of Incompleteness, Unfinished Possibilities: Decolonising Migrant Identity Narratives’, explores the necessity for us to move beyond our encirclement within the Western knowledge canon. To recognise that, for all its intellectual strengths, this canon also represents the sins of epistemicide (the killing of other ways of knowing) in the universalising posture of the imperial knowledge tradition of the modernity/coloniality complex, for which the reckoning has come.

AUSTRALIAN VALUES

Reflecting the economic, political and cultural dominance of its ethnically Anglo-Celtic population, Australia’s much vaunted cultural harmony is huddled under the umbrella of a unifying English language, the British institutional inheritance, and the evolution of a set of values that is said to define being truly Australian. While the 2021 census reveals 27.6% of Australians were born overseas, the top country of origin was still the UK. Over 51% of the population report an Anglo-Celtic ancestry, in addition to the 29% who report Australian ancestry. Less than 4% reported Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island ancestry.

The Australian values to which all new citizens must adhere are:

• Respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual
• Freedom of religion (including the freedom not to follow a particular religion), freedom of speech, and freedom of association
• Commitment to the rule of law, which means that all people are subject to the law and should obey it
• Parliamentary democracy whereby our laws are determined by parliaments elected by the people, those laws being paramount and overriding any other inconsistent religious or secular “laws”
• Equality of opportunity for all people, regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, race, or national or ethnic origin
• A ‘fair go’ for all that embraces: mutual respect; tolerance; compassion for those in need; and equal opportunity for all.
• The English language as the national language, and as an important unifying element of Australian society.

Australian Values’ are often summed up under the idea of ‘mateship’ and ‘a fair go’ that draws historical strength from the emancipation of convicts into free settlers and the rejection of inherited social class privileges. These values are shaped by the Judaeo-Christian, liberal humanist story of Australia’s colonial settler culture. They must now include the more complex tones and nuances of the voices of the Global South.

In his forthcoming book, Man of Earth, Mik Aidt links questions of Australian values to what we mean by belonging.

I began asking myself whether the challenges we face in modern society share a common root. Loneliness. Political polarisation. A search for identity, and the rise of the manosphere, neo-nazis and climate denial. The appeal of conspiracy theories all appeared to be expressions of the same underlying condition: The longing for belonging. People looking for their place in the world.

Drawing on the complex histories of African migrant communities in Australia, Ndhlovu argues that our unifying ‘Australian Values’ should allow for ‘ontologies of incompleteness’ and the ‘unfinishable possibilities’ of an evolving rich ecology of multicultural ways of knowing and being.

The need for nuance within these values recognises how they translate into different experiences within the cultural fabric of Australian society. Points of contention for further exploration arise in the tension between the strong property-based individualism of Euro-US culture and the communalism of the Global South; between individual rights and the reciprocal relationality of how life on Earth actually unfolds.

And while a universal national language (English) can be a unifying factor for communication purposes, all languages encode particular cultural ways of knowing and experiencing. Only our exposure and intimacy with other languages will give us entry into the wider cultural ecology of a true multiculturalism, including the recovery of Australia’s First Nations languages that encode the deep mytho-poetic story of Australia’s ancient history.

THE AI CHALLENGE

While English might be our national language, engineering is the language of Agentic AI, which is now providing a mirror for what defines our shared sense of being human.

Mik Aidt explores what the story of masculine identity might mean as the AI revolution rolls over us in his forthcoming book, ‘Man of Earth’. Drawing on his own personal journey, he discusses how men might redefine their sense of masculinity from the impulse for domination and control to one defined by their relational responsibility for service to all life on Earth, as we transition to a truly eco-civilisation.

In this important book, which you can follow on his substack, Mik Aidt urges us to understand why, with the AI revolution upon us, the question of masculinity matters more deeply than it may first appear, more deeply than just concerns about the manosphere.

A civilisation organised around domination already possesses enormous power. Artificial intelligence may multiply that power. The systems humanity has created over centuries – financial systems, military systems, political systems, media systems and industrial systems – are beginning to acquire tools capable of operating at unprecedented speed and scale.

In war, AI is already being used to control drones. The future of warfare could soon involve armies of AI-controlled robots and the use of AI-enhanced chemical weapons, deadly bacteria, and nuclear bombs.

The challenge is no longer simply technological. It is cultural. It is moral. It is civilisational.

Mik Aidt reminds us that, despite the gains of feminism in large parts of the world, particularly the Western world, the patriarchal worldview of masculinity still occupies many of the commanding heights of society. Most governments are still led primarily by men. Most large corporations are still led primarily by men. Much of the global financial system, military system and fossil fuel economy remains under the influence of values inherited from an earlier age.

Thus, he argues, if a civilisation organised around domination creates increasingly powerful AI systems, those systems may become extraordinarily effective at helping that civilisation dominate. More efficient extraction. More sophisticated surveillance. More targeted manipulation. More concentrated wealth. More powerful weapons.

We already see this rolling out. Aidt reminds us that an AI system of algorithms created by software engineers does not possess wisdom. It does not possess conscience. It does not possess humility. It simply pursues the goals it is given.

 And those goals are being determined not by the people through political representation, but by the private corporations who own and are developing the world’s AI systems, as they scrape and mine the intellectual property of humanity.

BELONGING WITHIN OURSELVES

However, we might find our sense of belonging as we grapple with these complexities, by simply coming home to ourselves.

My Buddhist teacher would tease us. You are never ‘at home within yourselves’.  You are always ‘out there’, lost in thoughts about past hurts and disappointments, or dreams and worries about the future.

Instead, he said, we could discover how to just be at home with ourselves, our attention gently on our breath—one breath at a time. Breathing in the energy of enlivenment, and releasing all the tensions we hold on our out-breath. Letting go. And, in this way we can discover our inner refuge of spacious awareness, replete with the warm glow of a courageous compassion, which includes the simple act of self-acceptance, just as we are.

We could gently discover that this sense of Individualised Self, with which we struggle, which never feels ‘good enough’, which often feels lonely and misunderstood, is not a fixed thing. Not something we must anxiously protect or project onto the world, but a fluid process of self-ing and becom-ing.

Woven together by different forms of consciousness that permeate our embodied minds, moment by moment. Our five sense consciousnesses that connect us with the rest of the living world around us, including our own bodies, and our sixth mental consciousness of self-reflective awareness, replete with our sense of personal agency.

In the discovery of our essentially fluid nature, at home with change and unknowingness, we can slowly learn how to ‘let go’ and come home to ourselves. To find a sense of belonging and security that no one can take away from us. No matter where we now find ourselves living. No matter the colour of our skin and racialized identity imposed on us by others. No matter our sense of gender identity or sexual orientation.

When we are at home within ourselves, we find a sense of belonging that invites others to feel at home with us. We no longer need feel buffeted or seduced by the shrill nationalism of identity politics and the religious and culture wars that seek to divide us from one another. At home in ourselves, we can relax into a profound sense of interbeing with the world around us—other people, animals, plants, birds—all the elements of the landscape that holds us in its arms.