Two weeks into the federal election campaign and surprise, surprise, Peter Dutton has returned to condemning “the woke agenda”, echoing President Donald Trump’s attack on diversity programs in the United States, and promising to do the same here if elected on May 3.
Within days of becoming president, Trump signed off on the elimination of government diversity programs, ordered that only “two sexes – male and female” be recognised, confirmed transgender members of the military will be removed, and announced that for the first time in its history, the US will have an official language – English.
Peter Dutton and Donald Trump have both run unapologetic “anti-woke” campaigns.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen, AP
In December, Dutton said he would not stand in front of the Indigenous flag if elected. In January, he vowed to slash cultural diversity staffers among the public service, and by February, he pledged to wind back spending on Welcome to Country ceremonies. Last week, he returned to this vague and fertile ground, saying he plans to crack down on the “woke” curriculums to avoid kids being “indoctrinated with something that is the agenda of others”. One feels he’s just getting warmed up.
The kindest thing that can be said about dismantling diversity programs is that it’s retrograde. And by retrograde, I’m not just referring to a Happy Days self-image of society, where everyone is white and middle class, the men rule the workplace, the women run the home, and all is seemingly well in the world – though these kinds of pictures stem from the same outlook.
Half a century ago – the time of “greatness” MAGA supporters and some within the far-right of the Liberal Party long to return to – Western society had a very different understanding of what it was to be human. Back then, evolutionary scientists believed the success of Homo sapiens – the great “social leap” propelling humans ahead of all other primates – was underpinned by a mythical creature, Man the Hunter. It was man’s hunting prowess, they believed, that led to cooperative thinking and language, and enabled men to hunt and bring back the bacon for their families – just like the Cunninghams.
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In this theory, only two adult roles had relevance: hunter husbands, and gatherer/carer wives. To prop up this model for humanity, scientists turned to baboons and rhesus macaques, where males are aggressive and competitive to establish dominance, and females are the sole carers for their babies. Society was (and still is, in many areas) welded onto this anachronistic notion of who humans are.
However, this picture has been almost entirely debunked. It’s now accepted that humans evolved in extremely complex social structure called “cooperative breeding”, where shared care of children was the norm, women contributed to the supply of food, and children often had many “parents”. It’s likely that this village system of child-rearing – requiring so much cooperation, trust and understanding – is at the heart of human’s explosion in emotional intelligence and neurological development, and our success as a species.
The baboon is no longer considered a relevant model; it is now accepted that humans have more similarities to chimps and bonobos (peaceful, sensitive primates). Human’s biggest difference to these other great apes, though, is social structure. For cooperative breeders, diversity and fluidity are key, which is what you tend to see in human societies.
