Totally and utterly running off the rails.
Pilots of the brain waves.
We used to go to church to learn about our sins. Today we go to our inbox and click on the latest message from the human resources department.
Qantas wants to purge its staff of bad thoughts by enrolling them on a training course conducted by the NeuroLeadership Institute, an organisation with an unsettling name that claims to remove the tumour of prejudice from the human brain.
The course will teach staff to “call out” unconscious bias, leading to improvements in gender balance, talent management and the wokely-dokely culture in general to which our national airline aspires.
How? By using “brain-based, process-focused and outcome-driven methodologies” based on “deep neuroscience research”. The results, or “outcomes” as we are obliged to call them, will be “better decisions”. Adopting this contentious program clearly wasn’t one of them, if the mumbo-jumbo language of the promotional leaflet is an indication of the precision of thought behind it.
We are left with the awful suspicion that the Qantas HR department has too much time on its hands, and money in its diversity and inclusion budget that is itching to be spent. The bureaucrats get to enhance their status by seeming to be doing something about unconscious bias, a problem no one knew existed until the neuroscience industry thought it up.
That, at least, is the kindest explanation. The alternative, that the people running Qantas think that resetting the human brain is as simple as rebooting the in-flight entertainment system, is considerably more troubling.
Neurobiology in its purest form — the scientific study of the nervous system — has made rapid progress since World War II thanks largely to advances in molecular biology, electrophysiology and computer science. The brain’s neural circuitry is better understood and the range of treatments to help it function smoothly is more effective.
The pseudoscience of behavioural neurology, on the other hand, is one of many infant disciplines taught in modern universities that swell the ranks of the educated by teaching nothing useful at all. It borrows from the biology of the brain, human and non-human, to make deterministic assumptions about what makes people tick. In its more adventurous forms, it presumes to use that understanding to make us better people. It is at this point that we find ourselves involuntarily, perhaps even subconsciously, shouting: “Enough!”
The search for scientific rules that explain why humans act as they do — quirkily, temperamentally and frequently irrationally — inspired some of the most tragic misadventures of the past century.
Communism was an attempt to put scientific order on human societies. It aimed to make the interaction between humans more efficient by forcing them to surrender self-will to a scientifically competent state.
The defining assumption of eugenics, that national destiny is determined by biological traits relating to race, spread like a virus in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, driving ill-advised social movements from Sydney to Stockholm to San Francisco. Nazism was its purest and, by far, the worst form.
Biological determinism is again in vogue, underpinning the new “science” of intersectionality with its notions of victimhood. Your destiny as a person of colour is decided at birth. Ditto the destiny of white people, driven to become oppressors by inherited traits.
The ferocity with which proponents of intersectionality defend this betrays the significance of biological determinism to their thinking. Even those who seek to change their biological gender do so because they were born that way.
The arguments are examined by Douglas Murray in his new book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender Race and Diversity. Since Murray is gay, he has the courage to discuss this sensitive issue more frankly than most.
The science of homosexuality is surprisingly unsettled, notes Murray. The zeitgeist, on the other hand, has settled on the assumption that sexuality is decided at birth. Yet Murray concludes that the notion that our sexuality determines your membership of an oppressed class is fragile. The idea that being gay bonds you with lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals and so forth in a wider marginalised class is even less robust.
It is a division based not on fact but from a modern ideology born out of the frustration of Marxist academics at the failure of the original class narrative to inspire revolution.
The growth of the new anti-capitalist movement that harvests bespoke gender, race, indigenous, sexual and environmental causes into a powerfully disruptive force has changed the nature of our universities, says Murray.
“The purpose of large sections of academia had ceased to be the exploration, discovery or dissemination of truth,” he writes. “The purpose had instead become the creation, nurture and propagandisation of a particular, and peculiar, brand of politics. The purpose was not academia, but activism.”
The movement of the muddle-headed has not stopped at the university gates. Marxist contagion is present to a greater or lesser extent in every corporate bureaucracy.
The Qantas HR department, one suspects, is not rich on people who fly or service planes. Forgive our unconscious bias for a moment, but it probably has its fair share of graduate inductees with subprime degrees in novel branches of science or sustainability studies.
In these conditions the diversity and inclusion fixation flourishes, encouraging the bureaucracy to consider every part of the business through that lens. Biology, disguised as diversity, becomes the predominant factor in the appointment process. Competence comes second.
Senior branches of management and the board are too busy or too enchanted to work out what happens to a business that becomes swamped by a culture that is predominantly anti-business and possesses Marxist anti-capitalist undertones.
Qantas should quietly pushback against the woke zeitgeist while it still can. Its safety record is a tribute to the quality of its pilots and maintenance staff. The friendliness of its cabin staff is testimony to its inclusiveness.
These are not resources that can be enhanced by wheeling staff into the hangar and delving beneath the cowling. They will undoubtedly be improved, however, by getting the lip-curlers off their backs.
Nick Cater is executive director at the Menzies Research Centre