In Australia, anti-intellectualism has become something of a national pastime. We are champions of the common folk and heartily reject political and academic elitism. Cutting down the tall poppies is standard, and lauded, practice.
But while we have been proudly adopting this attitude as part of the Australian identity, we have also allowed it to undermine the quality of our national security and defence policies. A sufficiently rigorous intellectual basis is difficult to discern in recent decisions that hinder our ability to protect ourselves, even as we know our adversaries prepare for war.
The Defence Strategic Review (DSR) confirmed that Australia no longer has a 10-year warning time for planning and preparedness, yet our most important defence capability responses to the deteriorating strategic situation are somewhere in the future.
Australian decision-makers have succumbed to the tyranny of short strategy by responding only to immediate political pressures while making parsimonious attempts to access the most rigorously tested ideas and understand the interrelationships between means and ends. We choose ordinary decisions over extraordinary ideas. The recent move away from accessing expert external providers and out-of-the-box thinkers and towards trusted in-house expertise confirms this anti-intellectual movement. The development should make us feel more than a little uncomfortable, as it is not just anti-intellectual; it is also anti-democratic.
Centralisation and control of information are in the toolkit of autocratic regimes. During the Cultural Revolution, fear of external ideas led to the widespread persecution of intellectuals within Chinese society, and today the Chinese Communist Party controls information to such an extent that it is used as weapon against the Chinese people. Concerted efforts to centralise or control knowledge, which seems the trend in Australia now, is at odds with the principles and the mechanics of our democracy. We should remain mindful of this point, whatever the risks that discordant ideas and voices may seem to democratic cohesion.
Certainly, provision of external expertise has recently been blighted in Australia with instances of bad behaviour and dubious offerings. Some have sought profit above service, and at times even at the expense of ethics and legality. And the products churned out by some general consultancies offer little in terms of challenging ideas or even evidence-based analysis, often inhibited by their own strong anti-intellectualism. Moreover, the insularity of many of the public universities risks creating a self-referential intellectual class that is ‘no longer capable of distinguishing the bartering of interests from the jettisoning of principles’. However, the federal government’s efforts to curtail the conduct of the few wrongdoers has resulted in unreasonable constraints on knowledge infrastructures, writ large.
The Varghese Review into federal funding for strategic policy work is an opportunity to reinforce the important role that external experts play in bringing contestability and intellectual capability to the national defence and security discourse. But if the review results in further constraints on the field of defence and security thinking, and further centralises policy-relevant knowledge creation, we cut off any attempt at gaining an intellectual edge on our adversaries. Fostering a broad and diverse fellowship of strategic policy thinkers that can hold government to account for securing the nation is becoming more important. Indeed, it is a vital element in our participatory democracy. We must democratise the fight to protect our democratic system. This is especially if universities continue in their intellectual decline.
What is ignored in this conversation, however, is the need for improved engagement with those who, as a matter of course, work at the intersection of scholarly and everyday knowledge but are not housed in formal strategic policy organisations. Peppered throughout university departments, research houses, small advisory firms, consultancies and elsewhere are highly skilled experts who exercise independent thought and have a clear sense of civic duty as they commit their means to improving policymaking through research and new ideas. They are intellectuals in the most applied sense and committed citizens of our democracy, but they are increasingly prevented by government policy and practices from providing their services to the national cause.
We would do well to heed Friedrich Hayek’s observation that knowledge is dispersed. That to ‘act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm’. Knowledge, we should remember, ‘never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess’. In that sense bureaucratic organisations, whether public or private, are not ideally suited to effective knowledge-creation.
The benefits of dispersed knowledge are obvious in initiatives like Wikipedia, the logic of which is to create free, open and self-correcting content through the collaborative efforts of a community of users. But dispersed knowledge is also a form of practical collective intelligence. Examples of this include the Coastwatchers program, which relied upon a small band of civilians in remote locations as an early warning network in the Pacific during World War II. More recently, we’ve seen creative use of open-source intelligence in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, collective knowledge is especially effective if it can be brought together at these critical moments.
This returns us to the DSR and the National Defence Strategy (NDS), the government’s response to the DSR. The whole-of-nation approach in the NDS requires harnessing all arms of Australia’s national power to achieve an integrated approach to defence and security. Does this include using the diverse intellectual capability that exists beyond government? Moreover, in the DSR, net assessments were championed as a means to improve decision-making in national defence. But are those trying to develop this capability within government coming up against the same sorts of challenges that bureaucratic thinking creates? Net assessment requires out-of-the-box ideas and access to expert research and knowledge far beyond defence and national security circles. The best options often come not from standard defence or security dimensions but from unexpected economic, technological or human skills and capacities—and more often from their innovative combinations.
Knowledge does not thrive when it is centralised or confined. If everyone contributes, a better product is more often made. So, if we are to move beyond the tyranny of short strategy, we must redress our anti-intellectualism and become enthusiasts of diverse knowledge and the marketplace of ideas. Efforts to concentrate knowledge in-house and limit pathways for external knowledge providers will, at best, result in myopia. At worst, they may become a worrying echo of autocratic regimes, where free-thinking and independent ideas are deemed threats to the state. In its dispersed nature, knowledge encourages liberty and is the source of societal and material flourishing. This is the democratic edge. We should be fostering knowledge as a national weapon. Indeed, it may become a potent form of intellectual warfare. History repeatedly shows that ideals and ideas win wars.