A fine joke about prejudice I heard a Jewish New Yorker (political writer David Rothkopf) tell on YouTube last week goes like this:
Two old friends, one Jewish, the other Chinese, are chatting on a Central Park bench. The Jew says, “I’m always surprised that I enjoy our friendship so much.” His Chinese friend asks why he’s surprised, to which the Jew replies, “You know, Pearl Harbour.”
The Chinese man is startled. “But I’m Chinese, not Japanese; it wasn’t the Chinese who bombed Pearl Harbour.” His Jewish friend responds, “You know, Chinese, Japanese, it’s all the same.”
After a short silence, the Chinese man says that he, too, is surprised they’re friends. Asked why, he says, “Titanic”. The Jew says, “Titanic? What are you talking about? Jews didn’t sink the Titanic.” To which his Chinese friend replies, “You know, Goldberg, Greenberg, iceberg… all the same.”
The Jew takes a moment to ponder this, then they move on to other things, as friends do.
If that joke wasn’t told by Paul Ehrlich, who died last month aged 93, it ought to have been. Born of Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, this giant of evolutionary biology and fervent advocate for sustainable living was also a gifted raconteur and storyteller.
Ehrlich burst on to the global scene in 1968 with The Population Bomb, a book he co-wrote with his wife Anne (who survives him, aged 92), which said that Earth was over-populated and would soon run out of resources. That flew in the face of political and economic orthodoxy, then and now, calling for more people spending more money.
The Ehrlichs weren’t alone in their concern. The 1972 Club of Rome study The Limits to Growth anticipated collapsed economies and populations in the first half of this century due to resource depletion and environmental destruction. And Ehrlich shared the 1990 “Swedish Nobel” Crafoord Prize with E.O. Wilson, the great ecologist and champion of nature conservation, who died in 2021.
There are signs that Ehrlich’s predictions of half a century ago were right in substance, but his timing was definitely out. Earth’s resilience and man’s ingenuity have kept things ticking over when he said they would be dead and buried.
He was branded a doomster who despised humanity, but his informed, thoroughly entertaining media chats said otherwise. Like Wilson and biologists generally his interest was life in all its forms, wild and domestic, non-human and human. He just wanted our species to fit better with the others.
In that vein, Climate Tasmania’s David Hamilton has referred me to some thoughtful observations in a substack post by Alex Fein, a consultant with opinion pollster Redbridge. She writes that deep-dive surveys show that Australia, far from being polarised, is much more united than divided, strongly committed to social unity and mutual support.
Seeking to divide and distract, writes Fein, people protecting their hold on levers of power have magnified Australian cultural and social differences, leaving the impression that we’re a polarised society and that rising support for One Nation “represents a lurch to the far right.”
Instead, she says, One Nation’s rise represents “a furious rejection of the neoliberal consensus shared by both major parties”. Redbridge polling shows that Australians strongly object to Labor and the Coalition accommodating sectional interests’ demand for laws that are clearly against the national interest.
Redbridge found that when given the space and time to talk about what actually matters to them, Australians revealed strikingly consistent wishes: being able to afford a decent life, functioning healthcare and education, a future for our kids, kindness, fairness and supportive communities.
Adds Fein: “And they want a government that governs: that legislates and regulates in the public interest and stops letting only the powerful dictate terms.”
Extremism exists: the loud voices within One Nation and other right-wing groups in Australian politics aren’t just stooges of big business. But their noise is amplified by those making money from division, distracting us from maintaining a functioning, coherent society.
The spirit that moved the Ehrlichs, Wilson and the Club of Rome team, and that moves climate and environmental scientists today, is shared with the vast bulk of humankind. We are united, not just within Australia but globally, in our desire to leave our world better for our presence.
We continue to have our differences. A person with Jewish heritage isn’t the same as someone from China. Cultural and racial differences will always exist because without variety there is no life.
But we are inclined by our nature to make connections, to be together in a common cause, in defiance of the forces threatening to tear us apart. Just like those friends on the Central Park bench.