The Minefield

It’s common these days to refer to “the return of nationalism”. But that assumes that nationalism receded for a time, like the tide, and here the world is, now, getting its pants legs wet. Such an assumption misunderstands the peculiar character of nationalism. It would be better to think of it as a swell, as a political phenomenon that periodically gathers power and force, that crests and crashes, but that never entirely goes away. It’s always there, beneath us.
Nationalism belongs to the emotional valence of the collective life of a nation state. Using the analogy of Aristotle’s taxonomy of the moral emotions — with, say, cowardice on one end of a continuum, foolhardiness on the other, and courage sitting in between — we could even think of nationalism as an extreme expression of the bundle of political emotions that ordinarily manifest as civic pride or patriotism, among them: love and fear, loyalty and hatred, attachment and jealousy. But with nationalism, it is as though the emotional balance is out of whack. 
Ever since the origin of the term at the end of the eighteenth century and its subsequent emergence in the nineteenth, nationalism has typically been associated with three components:
Membership — the recognition of an “imagined community” constituted through shared language, ethnicity, religion, geography and so on;
Self-determination — the demand for sovereignty over a defined territory;
“Civil religion” — the existence of self-reinforcing symbols, practices, rituals, stories which serve to reify “the nation”, turning the abstract idea of national membership into a lived experience.
While there is undeniable overlap with patriotism, nationalism adds the additional element of bellicosity. Not just national pride but superiority. Not just love of one’s own place and people (patria), but a corresponding antipathy toward other nations — including “others” within one’s own borders. Nationalism thus tends to be a Janus-faced phenomenon, with its heedless pursuit of territorial and tributary interests without and its requirement of the dominance of an ethnic and religious majority within.
We could think of nationalism as the political equivalent of what happens when proper “self love” (amor sui) turns inward on itself (incurvatus in se) and devolves into egotism.
Ever since the Second World War, nationalism has been indelibly associated with territorial ambition, categorical violence, a pseudo-religious zeal, utter partisan loyalty. As George Orwell puts it, “Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.”
And yet over the last decade, a form of brazen nationalism has been willing to speak its name, to own its ambitions and cast off the veneer of polite cosmopolitanism. It has both fed off and fuelled intense popular emotions — fear, resentment, disgust, patriotic love — and seems willing to regard one’s nation as “beyond good and evil”, as answerable to no criteria other than its own interests. The problem, of course, is that bellicose nationalism invites responses in kind.
Is nationalism a term that can be rehabilitated, or even redeemed? Orwell was convinced that “every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty”; is nationalism compatible with the kind of constructive shame that follows from truthful encounters with one own history? Is it possible to cultivate an appropriate sense of self-love that does not devolve into group narcissism?
David Moscrop is a Canadian political columnist and commentator. He is the author of Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones and the forthcoming “On Nationalism”.

There are four stories that could justifiably be described as foundational to Western culture: the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden; Prometheus’s gift of fire to humanity; Doctor Faustus’s pact with the devil; and Victor Frankenstein’s act of monstrous creation.
Not only are the principal names immediately evocative to anyone who hears them, but that recognisability allows for nearly endless variations on their original themes. This is, in part, what gives these stories their staying power.
But these stories could themselves be said to represent four variations on a still older theme: the longing for some forbidden knowledge, to transgress a proscribed limit — or as WH Auden would put it, the desire to “know too much”. In each instance, rightly or wrongly, the pursuit itself brings a severe punishment, even catastrophe. This is what gives each of these foundational stories an element of tragedy, of pathos. About whom could it not be said that, even though we know the danger of going too far, we want to do it anyway?
And yet it is at this point that an important difference emerges between Faustus and the other three stories. Eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, granting fire to humankind and giving life to a “creature” of one’s own making all point a certain ambition, a restlessness, an unwillingness to remain in a perceived state of underdevelopment or adolescence. The consequences of that restlessness may still be both foreseeable and severe, and so suggest a lack of wisdom or trust or prudence — but that doesn’t mean the acts themselves are either base or self-seeking.
The same cannot quite be said of Christopher Marlowe’s depiction of Doctor John Faustus at the end of the sixteenth century. It is true that, at the outset, explicit reference is made to the flight of Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who fastened wings to his back with wax, but which melted when he ventured too close to the sun. Speaking of Faustus: “His waxen wings did mount above his reach, / And, melting, heavens conspir’d his overthrow; / For, falling to a devilish exercise, / And glutted now with learning’s golden gifts, / He surfeits upon cursed necromancy …”
But even here, the point is not that Faustus went further than he should in his chosen disciplines, but rather that he abandoned them in favour of sorcery. And what Faustus seeks from the outset is not so much forbidden knowledge as it is wealth and renown — his own version of Lucifer’s sin of “aspiring pride and insolence” — and his attraction to necromancy’s “words of art” are mere means to that end.
In other words, the reference to Icarus places the emphasis not on the ambition of Faustus’s heaven-ward reach but on the precipitous nature of his subsequent fall. Indeed, the trajectory of Marlowe’s play could be said one of perpetual descent: from the heights of academia to the utter solitude of his plunge into hell.
In Marlowe’s play, it is not Lucifer who is the tempter, but Faustus who actively seeks out the means of his own “voluptuousness” — on the belief that the cost (“his soul”) can either be indefinitely deferred or that the bill will never come due (“Come, I think hell’s a fable”, Faustus says; to which Mephistopheles replies, “Ay, think to still, till experience change thy mind”).
The lesson of the tragedy of Doctor Faustus probably remains the ridiculousness of the exchange of long-term beatitude for short-term prosperity and pleasure. The bill always comes due. But what Marlowe also reminds us is that the punishment is already present in the solipsism, the self-enclosure of the lives heedlessly devoted to pleasure. As Mephistopheles puts it, “for where we are is hell”.
Guest: Kate Flaherty is the Head of English and Senior Lecturer in English and Drama at the Australian National University.

The federal budget is, in many respects, the high point of Australia's political calendar. This federal budget is no exception. The public had been primed for weeks to expect a series of significant reforms this year. But it is striking how little there is in the budget by way of direct social benefit.
The budget is broadly redistributive — it removes certain tax concessions that disproportionately benefit the wealthy — but it does not then distribute that additional tax revenue to those struggling with cost-of-living pressures. Even the $250 permanent annual tax offset for workers is quite modest and deliberately non-inflationary.
It would seem that the object of this “rebalancing” through changes to capital gains tax, negative gearing and discretionary trusts is “intergenerational equity” itself: the budget adjusts the tax system so that it benefits property investors less than first home buyers — even if these benefits are dispersed over time and only gradually felt.
The question is, does the underlying philosophy of this federal budget provide a template for budgets-to-come?
Guest: Luara Ferracioli is Associate Professor in Political Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and Philosopher-in-Residence at the Sydney Policy Lab.
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THE MINEFIELD - LIVE AT THE SYDNEY WRITERS’ FESTIVAL
24 May 2026
“The Return of Nationalism and the Crisis of Democracy”
With each new election, geopolitical deal and technological advancement, it seems like the ideals of democracy are slipping away. In this special live recording of ABC Radio National’s The Minefield, hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens discuss the state of democracy today with Canadian podcaster and political scientist David Moscrop.
When: Sunday, 24 May 2026, 4-5pm
Where: Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh, NSW, 2015
To purchase your tickets: https://www.swf.org.au/program/festival-2026/abc-the-minefield-live
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NEXT WEEK: Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus”
Expressions like “deal with the devil”, “selling one’s soul” and “Faustian bargain” are woven through our language. And popular culture is filled with variations on the unsavoury theme of attaining wealth, fame and pleasure by permanently corrupting one’s soul.
In the third week of May, Waleed and Scott will be turning their attention to the source of these tropes: Christopher Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus”. It was first performed in 1592, just a year before Marlowe’s own untimely death.
It is neither a long nor an overly complicated play, but it is powerful and ethically rich. We will be discussing the so-called “A-Text” of Marlowe’s play, revised in 1604. We hope you’ll join us in reading the play beforehand.

One of the by-products of digital technology’s pervasiveness in our lives is its seeming irresistibility. However much we try to remain conscientious objectors, to resist its allure, its promises of convenience and casual pleasures, to keep some part of our inner lives free of its influence, we soon discover that it is of the essence of new technological forms to exceed their boundaries, to seep out into the wider culture — into our language, our rhythms and habits, our expectations, our ways of seeing and interacting with the world.
Such that, before long, we find we’ve become like the technologies we created. It’s like the Turing Test, but in reverse. And once that happens, precisely because there’s no longer any “outside”, it can become very difficult to think clearly about what is, in effect, our habitus. This is how technology ushers us into a condition of unthinkingness. Perhaps we could call it habituation.
Digital technology’s irresistibility and sheer scale can make our efforts at thinking seem tiny, irrelevant, insignificant. Perhaps the best we can do is occasionally pause, and try to make sense of underlying rules that govern online experience — perhaps we could call it “the grammar of online life”: the rules of the game, as it were, that you must obey if you want to go viral.
Over the last ten years, one of the most popular forms of online content is the reaction video — a kind of split-screen experience in which viewers watch both a piece of content (the livestream of a game, a movie trailer, a music video, another YouTube clip and so on) and another person’s reaction to that content. There is something about the desire to see the facial responses of other people, their seemingly spontaneous responses to what they see and hear, that is inseparable from the viewers’ enjoyment of the content itself. It is similar to the experience of hearing audience laughter during a sitcom, and before that “canned laughter”.
Emotion here is the currency. But the point isn’t that the emotion is felt — rather, that it is conveyed. It is communicated. It is as if the emotion is the content.
But even if we were to regard all social conventions as performances, as various ways of paying homage to the rules that govern social interactions, this commodification of emotions — which is to say, turning reactions into content — invites such a degree of performance, of exaggeration, that would be impossible to sustain the kind of un-self-consciousness that is essential to authenticity.
To put this another way: the online emotion economy encourages participants — whether on reaction videos or video podcasts — not to be themselves but to act themselves; not to listen to what’s being said, but simply to react to it. What is this doing to our capacity to cultivate moral responsiveness?
Guest: Nicholas Carah is the Director of Centre for Digital Cultures and Societies and Professor in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland.
Nicholas makes reference to Rose Horowitch’s article in The Atlantic: “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” (1 October 2024).

In a speech to the National Press Club, Health Minister Mark Butler announced a series of sweeping changes that the federal government will make to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
In the thirteen years since it was legislated, the growth of the NDIS has surpassed all expectations. By 2030, the Productivity Commission projected that the scheme would cover around 550,000 people and cost about $40 billion. This year there are already 760,000 people on the scheme at a cost of $50 billion. On the current trajectory, by the end of the decade there will be 900,00 people on the NDIS and it will cost $70 billion per year — this would represent a greater expenditure than Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme put together.
Concerns over the affordability of the NDIS are nothing new, and since returning to government Labor has repeatedly indicated their intention to curb its growth (even if, while in opposition, they resisted the Coalition’s efforts to do the same). But in an economy threatened by high inflation and at a time of increasing cost-of-living pressures — from fuel and food to housing — it is understandable that the federal government would feel a certain urgency to bring the NDIS under control, not least for the sake of the long-term viability of the scheme.
And yet, what was telling about Butler’s speech was the way he proceeded to justify the radical changes the government has in store for the NDIS — which include removing around 160,000 people from the scheme by 2030 and reducing the projected annual cost by $15 billion. He swiftly pivoted from its long-term viability to its declining “community support, or social licence”.
Citing research conducted by Talbot Mills, Butler claimed that 70 per cent of Australians think the NDIS has “gotten too large and struggles with dodgy providers” and that 60 per cent think the scheme is “broken”. He went on to detail mistakes in design and “structural flaws” that make the NDIS susceptible to fraud. He drew particular attention to criminal behaviour on the part of unaccredited “third-party” service providers and neglect by unqualified support workers.
Given the dearth of qualified, registered, sufficiently committed carers, it was perhaps inevitable the NDIS would become “a soft target for shonks and rorters”, as Butler described them. It is, frankly, baffling that there wouldn’t be tighter government regulation over who could qualify to be paid to provide such support in situations that demand attentiveness and care.
But some of the criticism that is now being levelled at the design of the NDIS threatens to besmirch its original moral genius: the provision of support to those with a disability in the form of personalised budgets, such that those in need of care would be accorded the dignity of “choice and control” over the form their care would take. Which is to say: it turned people with a disability from those for whom everything must be done, those who are a societal “problem” needing to be solved, and who must rely on the “good graces” of others; to those who are rightfully accorded agency in their own pursuits on an equal basis with other Australians.
While this approach effectively created a competitive “disability services market” over which there has been far too little oversight, such a market is also the condition of possibility for the type of agency and equality the NDIS promises.
This raises a number of dangers lurking beneath the government’s proposed reforms. In addition to the inherent danger that the expressed intention to reduce the number of people covered by the NDIS will see some people denied the care and support they are entitled to, there are a range of unintended moral consequences that accompany the reputational damage done to the NDIS itself.
If we accept that the NDIS is noble if flawed, that it was a worthy aspiration for a nation like ours and represents a tremendous collective achievement which nonetheless needs to be placed on sustainable and just footing — the question becomes: how can the federal government address the “structural flaws” and escalating costs without undermining public faith in the NDIS itself?
Guest: Jennifer Smith-Merry is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellow and Professor of Health and Social Policy in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Sydney.
You can read Professor Smith Merry’s reflections on the moral risks and consequences that accompany the federal government’s NDIS reforms, on ABC Religion and Ethics.
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THE MINEFIELD — Live at the Sydney Writers’ Festival
24 May 2026
“The Return of Nationalism and the End of Democracy”
With each new election, geopolitical deal and technological advancement, it seems like the ideals of democracy are slipping away. In this special live recording of ABC Radio National’s The Minefield, hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens discuss the state of democracy today with Canadian podcaster and political scientist David Moscrop.
When: Sunday, 24 May 2026, 4-5pm
Where: Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh, NSW, 2015
To get tickets: https://www.swf.org.au/program/festival-2026/abc-the-minefield-live
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UPCOMING EPISODE: CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S “DOCTOR FAUSTUS”
Expressions like “deal with the devil”, “selling one’s soul” and “Faustian bargain” are woven through our language. And popular culture is filled with variations on the unsavoury theme of attaining wealth, fame and pleasure by permanently corrupting one’s soul.
In the third week of May, Waleed and Scott will be turning their attention to the source of these tropes: Christopher Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus”. It was first performed in 1592, just a year before Marlowe’s own untimely death.
It is neither a long nor an overly complicated play, but it is powerful and ethically rich. We will be discussing the so-called “A-Text” of Marlowe’s play, revised in 1604. We hope you’ll join us in reading the play beforehand.