An Obadiah Slope column
Good news from Adelaide airport with the launch of Australia’s first “try before you fly” program with Virgin Airlines. Families with an autistic child or people with mobility issues were given the opportunity to board an actual aircraft and test the experience.
This brought to mind Obadiah’s sudden concern one day almost two decades ago as he farewelled his oldest daughter, the one with autistic superpower, on a flight to Shanghai for the Special Olympics. “‘”Oh my goodness, she’ll be locked in a metal tube for nine hours,”‘” he thought. Of course, she came through with flying colours.
###
Top at the top end: Compiling a story about the impressive statistics underlining what a good job Nungalinya College is doing, Obadiah is struck by a memory from a fair while ago. Obadiah was mailed an update from the college fundraiser “as one of our chief supporters,” which came as a real shock to this niggardly donor. This reminds Obadiah to say that training Indigenous Christians is a cause all his readers should support. Go here!
###
The week’s reading: Obadiah has been remiss in not noting the recent 40th anniversary of Michel Foucault’s death, the philosopher who shaped the thinking of the present age, perhaps more than anyone else. But Sohabd Ahmari of Compact magazine was on the ball. His The Bleak Genius of Michel Foucault is worth a careful read.
Ahmari’s thesis is that Foucault’s critique of power has resulted in power being appropriated by new centres of power. “Foucault’s ingenious methods for analyzing power have now emerged as but one more strategy for the maintenance and expansion of existing institutional power. This, even as these institutions themselves remain susceptible to his critique of what he called the “devious and supple mechanisms of power.”
Ahmari recounts his discovery of Foucault as a young Trotskyist searching for a way aout of the limitations of orthodox Marxism, a journey that Obadiah saw many of his left contemporaries travel.
“As he explained in The Birth of Biopolitics—his 1978-1979 lecture at the Collège de France and one of the rare instances in which he pulled back the curtain, as it were, on his lifelong methodology—Foucault asked history to tell the story of a given universal as if the universals don’t exist at all. Foucauldian historiography would trace the ‘concatenations’ of institutional structures and discursive practices that surrounded a given human field—be it sex, psyche, family, or what have you—developing ‘knowledges’ regarding it, transposing their grids on it, invading the field, and ultimately generating, distributing, and redistributing power between the various nodes of the social order.
Foucault produced the thought pattern for all who stand against the “normal” in the name of overthrowing power. “Since the agents of this ‘power-knowledge’—priests and spiritual directors, educators and disciplinarians, scientists, physicians, psychoanalysts, judges, social workers, etc.—inevitably examine and categorize their subjects relative to the often-moralistic norms of their expertise, the ‘normal’ and normativity must be seen as outgrowths of, and legitimating buttresses for, this very power.”
We could hardly discuss Foucault without discussing sex. Here, Ahmari’s analysis will hit home for many Christians. “This dynamic is perhaps more readily apparent in Foucault’s application of his science of power to sexual politics than in the still somewhat speculative realms of genetics and biotech. The overarching thesis of his History of Sexuality—that “sexuality” is an invention of the institutions that have defined, governed, and proliferated it as discourse, and whose power has waxed has a result—should be familiar enough. In another one of his strokes of genius, Foucault pointed out for example, that whereas ancient civilizations (and many non-Western ones down to modern times) typically regulated sodomitic acts, it was the modern West that conjured the figure of the “homosexual.” The homosexual had to be disciplined and regulated, to be sure, but he was also constantly forced to confess his “truth” (so much for repression). And not just the homosexual, but also the hermaphrodite, the masturbator, and so on….
“A network of benevolent-seeming structures—schools and colleges, employers and retailers, psychologists, surgeons, and pharmaceutical giants—presents the subject with abnormal habits and desires with a “never-ending demand for truth,” as Foucault put it. The cadence of this demand has shifted, to be sure—we reject normativity, we welcome your abnormality, let us help you become who you “really” are—but the compulsion to confess is no less pressing for that. And just as was the case in an earlier stage of modernity, the expert bearers of power-knowledge continue to valorize and legitimize their power on the basis of the nonexistent universal. Once the confession has been extracted, the same old processes of medicalization and psychiatrization can proceed apace. “See how indispensable my gender science is!” boast the Pfizer executive, the top-surgery provider, and the medical-claims adjuster.
“Michel Foucault left behind a double-edged sword. Careful how you wield it.”
###
The week’s Journalism: Independent journalist Rebekah Barnett has done a great job of pulling together a very detailed account of Doctor Jereth Kok’s journey from online posting to suspension of his medical license and his appearance before the Victorian Consumer and Administrative Tribunal.
Her account, Doctor, under an ’emergency’ five-year suspension, finally goes to trial over social media posts, which will give even the closest follower of the case new information. here is how she documents the original complaints and the role Obadiah, then editing Eternity, played in it.
“Dr Kok first found out he’d fallen afoul of AHPRA [Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency] when he received a letter from the regulator the week before Christmas in 2018. The letter informed Dr Kok that he had been under investigation for nine months after an anonymous complaint was lodged against him in 2017 for comments he made online about the same-sex marriage plebiscite.
“Another anonymous complaint was made in 2019, this one relating to an article Dr Kok wrote, titled ‘A medical perspective on transgender,’ for Christian news site Eternity News, and other comments he’d made online. Following the second complaint, the Medical Board took immediate action to suspend Dr Kok’s medical registration.”