POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH

An amusing mental somersault: Is "harnessing the power of government" the answer to authoritarianism?

Prof. Stiglitz (below) is undoubtedly a good economist but his Leftism occasionally draws him into failures of logic. Much of what he says below has some truth. There are undoubtedly large inequalities of wealth in society.

But he makes no effort to understand the psychological and sociological causes of that He simply asserts that "neo-liberalism." is the culprit. He says that it has "set us on the road to fascism, to a twenty-first-century version of authoritarianism"

So what is his solution to that? It is "harnessing the power of government" to redistribute resources. So his cure for authoritarianism is more authoritarianism! He is himself a Fascist! Mussolini would approve of his ideas

So for all his pretence of profound analysis he is in the end just an old-fashioned Leftist with old-fashioned Leftist policy prescriptions. Rather pathetic, really

I have previously pointed out another failure of logic in a Stiglitz defence of Leftism:

https://dissectleft.blogspot.com/2023/04/is-cost-of-living-leap-caused-by.html
If you know the Leftist position on anything, you know what conclusion Stiglitz will come to, no matter how many dubious twists and turns it takes to get there. Even his Nobel prize work led to an advocacy of government interventions in the market

How would you define the "good society"?

It's a question Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is asking everyone, in this fraught moment in history.

His new book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, takes a deep look at the question.

"My ultimate objective in this book is to understand what kind of an economic, political, and social system is most likely to enhance the freedoms of most citizens, including by appropriately drawing the right boundaries on freedoms, constructing the right rules and regulations, and making the right trade-offs," he writes.

"The answer I provide runs counter to more than a century of writings by conservatives.

"It is not the minimalist state advocated by libertarians, or even the highly constricted state envisioned by neoliberalism.

"Rather, the answer is something along the lines of a rejuvenated European social democracy or a new American Progressive Capitalism, a twenty-first century version of social democracy or of the Scandinavian welfare state," he writes.

If you haven't heard of Professor Stiglitz, he's credited with pioneering the concept of "the 1 per cent."

That refers to the modern phenomenon of the top 1 per cent of Americans (or more precisely, the top one-tenth of 1 per cent) that have accrued so much wealth and power in recent decades that it's imperilling the US political system.

In 2011, 13 years ago, he explained how the severe growth in wealth inequality, if left unchecked, would keep feeding on itself and drive further inequality and division in politics.

The next year, in 2012, he published The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future (which became a best-seller) to warn of what was coming.

"As our economic system is seen to fail for most citizens, and as our political system seems to be captured by moneyed interests, confidence in our democracy and in our market economy will erode along with our global influence," he warned.

"As the reality sinks in that we are no longer a country of opportunity and that even our long-vaunted rule of law and system of justice have been compromised, even our sense of national identity may be put into jeopardy."

Today, he has returned to that theme in his new book, but from a different angle.

He takes as his starting point the extreme social, political and environmental problems besieging some societies in this age of polycrisis, and wonders how Americans (and citizens of other countries) can reverse the destructive growth in wealth inequality and rebuild a better and healthier society in coming decades.

"The challenges to — and attacks on — democracy and freedom have never been greater in my lifetime," he warns.

What does your ideal society look like?

We may not know it, but when we complain about a new policy, or tax settings, or housing, or our health and education systems, or the rate of population growth, we're often engaging in political philosophy.

Why? Because if we're arguing that some policy isn't good, we must have an idea (whether conscious or unconscious) of what a better policy would be, and that means we're comparing it to some ideal we have in mind.

For example, what's your view on gun ownership?

Should Australians be allowed to have access to guns in the way people in the United States do?

Your answer to that question will say a lot about your conception of "the good society."

Do you think Australians would be freer and happier if the countryside was awash with guns? Would our schools be safer? Would our politics improve?

That's the type of exercise Professor Stiglitz engages with in this book.

He spends a lot of time talking about the economic freedoms that are required for the majority of people to flourish.

He talks about the importance of someone's "opportunity set" — the set of options available to someone during their life, given the resources at their disposal — and how it determines their freedom to act, and what can be gained by good economic and social systems that provide someone with the freedom to live up to their potential.

"People who are barely surviving have extremely limited freedom," he writes.

"All their time and energy go into earning enough money to pay for groceries, shelter, and transportation to jobs … a good society would do something about the deprivations, or reductions in freedom, for people with low incomes.

"It is not surprising that people who live in the poorest countries emphasise economic rights, the right to medical care, housing, education, and freedom from hunger.

"They are concerned about the loss of freedom not just from an oppressive government but also from economic, social, and political systems that have left large portions of the population destitute," he writes.

He reminds us that economic rights and political rights are, ultimately, inseparable.

"When you understand economic freedom as freedom to act, it immediately reframes many of the central issues surrounding economic policy and freedom," he says.

The lies we were told?

To that end, a big chunk of his book is dedicated to arguing why we've been fed a lie by "neo-liberalism."

He says the neoliberal political project has made millions of people in the United States and elsewhere less free, as it's destroyed the US middle class (and severely threatened it in other countries) while enriching the pockets of the ultra-wealthy and undermining democratic institutions.

"The system that evolved in the last quarter of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic came to be called neoliberalism," he writes.

"'Liberal' refers to being 'free', in this context, free of government intervention including regulations. The 'neo' meant to suggest that there was something new in it.

"What really was new was the trick of claiming neoliberalism stripped away rules when much of what it was doing was imposing new rules that favoured banks and the wealthy.

"For instance, the so-called deregulation of the banks got government temporarily out of the way, which allowed bankers to reap rewards for themselves. But then, with the 2008 financial crisis, government took centre stage as it funded the largest bailout in history, courtesy of taxpayers. Bankers profited at the expense of the rest of the society. In dollar terms, the cost to the rest of us exceeded the banks' gains.

"Neoliberalism in practice was what can be described as 'ersatz capitalism', in which losses are socialised and gains privatised," he says [his italics].

The title of his book is an explicit reference to The Road to Serfdom, which was published by the famous Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek in 1944.

Professor Hayek was one of the leading figures of the post-war neoliberal political movement.

He wrote the Road to Serfdom to warn people of the threat posed to freedom, as he saw it, by governments in the 1930s and 1940s that were increasingly willing to intervene in the market system to plan, or direct, some economic activity for the masses.

He spent much of his life trying to rid the world of the influence of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose policy prescriptions inspired governments in countries such as Australia and the UK to pursue "full employment" policies after the war (policies which, coincidentally, supported the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism from 1945 to the early 1970s).

Professor Stiglitz argues that the conception of "freedom" pushed by Professor Hayek and other neoliberals, including Milton Friedman, led us down another wrong path.

"They talked of 'free markets', as if imposing rules and regulations results in 'unfree markets'," he writes.

"They relabeled private enterprises — companies owned by private individuals — as 'free enterprises', as if giving them that appellation would bestow a reverence and suggest that they should not be touched and their freedom should not be curtailed even if they exploit people and the planet.

"[And] the Right claims that governments have unnecessarily restricted freedom through taxation, which constrains the budgets of the rich and thereby … reduces their freedom to act.

"Even in this they are only partially correct because the societal benefits of the expenditures financed by these taxes, the investments in infrastructure and technology, for instance, may expand their opportunity sets (their freedom) in more meaningful ways," he writes.

Professor Stiglitz was born in 1943. He's 81 years old.

He knew some of the people he writes about in the book and had a ringside seat to the "market turn" that occurred in the 1970s.

He's seen the impact that that market-turn had on the US middle class during the past 40 years.

One can easily imagine that the supporters of the vision of "freedom" that's been promulgated by neoliberalism will find plenty of problems with his book, in both its historical analysis and its policy prescriptions.

But Professor Stiglitz takes no backward step. "Unfettered, neoliberal capitalism is antithetical to sustainable democracy," he concludes.

"It is evident today that free and unfettered markets advocated by Hayek and Friedman and so many on the Right have * set us on the road to fascism, to a twenty-first-century version of authoritarianism * made all the worse by advances in science and technology, an Orwellian authoritarianism where surveillance is the order of the day and truth has been sacrificed to power."

Ultimately, he says we must start using the economic system to provide millions more people with meaningful freedom, and that means * harnessing the power of government * to make it easier for people to access the resources that will enlarge peoples' "opportunity set" and improve their economic and political freedoms.

"We are in a global, intellectual, and political war to protect and preserve freedom," Professor Stiglitz warns.

"Do democracies and free societies deliver what citizens want and care about and can they do it better than authoritarian regimes?

"This battle for hearts and minds is everywhere. I firmly believe that democracies and free societies can provide for their citizens far more effectively than authoritarian systems. However, in several key areas, most notably in economics, our free societies are failing.

"But — and this is important — these failures are not inevitable and are partially because the Right's incorrect conception of freedom led us down the wrong path.

"There are other paths that deliver more of the goods and services they want, with more of the security that they want, but that also provide more freedom for more people."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-11/joseph-stiglitz-the-road-to-freedom-neoliberalism-fascism/104210670

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‘George Floyd moment’ for Britain’s white working class

A strange silence has descended over Britain. The noise and riotous mayhem of the past few weeks have given way to an unsettling stillness. As I write this, all I hear is the patter of rain and the distant whirr of a police helicopter. Yes, the state watches over us from the sky, on the lookout for suspicious movements of people.

In part, the silence is an expression of relief. We’re glad it’s over. We’re glad the riots that rocked the nation following the murder of three girls in Southport at the end of July seem to have run out of steam.

There’s shock, too. Many Brits seem almost dazed, dumbfounded by the fire and fury that swept our towns and cities. After all, just a month ago we were downing cold beers and cheering England in the Euros Football Championship. We were welcoming a new government (well, some people were) as Keir Starmer strode into Downing Street following 14 years of Tory rule. All the talk was of a “new era”. The “sunlight of hope” is shining on our great nation once more, said Starmer. Behold the “age of national renewal”, he said. The “grown-ups” are back in power, the broadsheets sang.

“Is it just me but suddenly everything feels … normal?” tweeted former MP Anna Soubry when Starmer became Prime Minister. “No more psychodramas and scandals,” she said. Instead, the nation felt “safe”.

A mere three weeks later, no one felt safe. Buildings were in flames, cops were fighting pitched battles with fuming youths, and looting, not football, was the national sport.

The “sunlight of hope” had been overshadowed by a vast black cloud of violence. The promise of “national renewal” was smashed by the reality of national mayhem.

The speed with which the Starmerite “new dawn” turned into a grim week of violence was extraordinary. From fevered media talk of a shiny post-Tory era to the worst street fighting we’ve seen in years – rarely has the thinness of the line between order and chaos been so starkly illustrated.

That some Brits are now going about in a state of stunned silence is not surprising. For many of the illusions of our society have just shattered before our eyes.

We now know that just beneath the surface of this “grown-up” country our new leaders love to gab about, there lurks a discontent so deep and teeming that it can erupt into violence at any minute.

We now know that our elites are so divorced from reality that they can clink their champagne glasses over their brilliant “renewal” of the nation while out there, in towns they would never deign to visit, violent discord was brewing.

We Brits have had a vision of the gaping moral chasm that separates the rulers and the ruled in the 21st-century West. So if we seem a little sensitive, please bear with us.

But there is something else to the post-riots silence, too. Something more sinister. The uncanny quiet reveals a refusal to talk about what might have caused the riots. A reluctance to ask that most basic, fundamental question of why.

Why did towns blow up, everywhere from Sunderland in the north of England to Plymouth in the south, from Belfast on one side of the Irish Sea to Liverpool on the other?

No one wants to pose this question, far less make a go of answering it. Instead, all you’re meant to say about the riots – all you’re allowed to say – is that it was a bunch of far-right racists making trouble. And now they’re going to jail. The End.

It’s not good enough, is it?

We know for sure what the trigger for the riots was: the horrific massacre of girls in the town of Southport, near Liverpool.

On Monday, July 29, a teenager with a knife invaded a Taylor Swift dance class and visited unholy violence on its young attendees.

Three girls were killed, others were badly injured. The suspect is Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, 17, born in Cardiff to immigrants from Rwanda.

The nation’s horror at the slaughter in Southport quickly boiled over into fury. The first riot was in Southport itself. Gangs of men broke away from the vigil for the girls and started smashing things up. As a result of misinformation swirling around social media, which wrongly said the stabber was a Muslim, some of the rioters laid siege to Southport mosque. It was the most dreadful act of that violent night, with Muslims having to barricade themselves inside their place of worship to escape the vengeance of a throng drunk on fake news.

Over the next few nights the violence spread. In Manchester, Leicester, Leeds, Bristol, Blackpool, Birmingham, Middlesbrough and other towns, mobs came out to shout and fight and set things on fire. There were nasty scenes of bigotry. Not only were mosques surrounded but hotels housing asylum-seekers were invaded and in one case set alight. Mercifully, no one was killed. To call such violence inexcusable is a profound understatement.

Yet we will do our nation a disservice, surely, if we write off the riots as nothing more than a far-right freakout. If we chalk up this week of anarchy to the supposed fascistic urges of “pleb” communities. Alarmingly, that is what is happening. The political climate in post-riots Britain is stifling. There’s a McCarthyite vibe.

Wonder out loud about the grievances that might have propelled so many communities to violence and you risk being damned as an apologist for fascism. You must simply condemn and move on. Wag your finger but don’t engage your brain.

That must make these the first riots, in my memory anyway, where social analysis is all but forbidden. After the London riots of 2011, when urban youths engaged in arson and looting for five long nights, the media did a deep dive into the “social conditions” behind the disorder. Might it have been “cuts to social services” that caused the kids to go wild, wondered the Guardian?

Just two weeks ago there was a small riot in Leeds. Most of the rioters were immigrants. Maybe it was “economic pressures” that made them violent, said the left-wing magazine Prospect.

Guess what Prospect said about the post-Southport riots? Not that. No, these were “ugly riots”, “horrifying” unrest, driven by nothing more than the “foul virus” of misinformation.

There’s a palpable strain not only of hypocrisy but of snobbery too. It seems the moral rule is that when people of colour riot, it’s understandable, maybe even sympathetic. But when the white working classes riot, it’s basically Nazism.

The truth, as always, is more complicated. It was in the very poorest parts of Britain that the riots of the past week played out most fiercely. The violence blew up in “left behind” communities – those parts of the country that have been neglected economically, socially and culturally by the rich, witless inhabitants of the Westminster bubble.

That the fuse for the riots was an act of mass murder is revealing, too. Some are referring to the Southport killings as a “George Floyd moment” for Britain’s white working class. Just as the killing of Floyd enraged African-Americans, reminding them of their vulnerability to police violence, so this obscene assault on girls in a seaside town infuriated “left behind” Brits.

Why? I think because, for many, it felt like a brutal manifestation of all the crises in modern Britain they’re forever being warned not to talk about. Mass immigration, the crisis of integration, the scourge of knife crime, the terroristic imagination – the Southport massacre touched on it all.

And because they have so few outlets for discussing these things – and in fact will be damned as xenophobes if they even try – it seems some folk just exploded.

It wasn’t fascism that drove them, it was their pent-up anxieties about the state of the nation.

It was their tiring of being silenced – of being told it’s racist to worry about immigration, childish to be concerned about knife crime, Islamophobic to fear radical Islam, and so on.

When you put people in a straitjacket of political correctness, eventually they’ll try to break out of it. That’s what the riots were: the brutish cry of a silenced people, the rage of the dispossessed.

Does it excuse what they did? Absolutely not. The rioters alone are responsible for their wickedness. Jail is their just punishment.

And yet, if we want Britain to be truly safe, to bask in that “sunlight of hope”, surely we need to listen to people’s concerns as well as punishing their misdeeds?

Reprimanding the rioters is the easy bit. Fixing the ills that inflamed the rioting is harder – and more important.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/george-floyd-moment-for-britains-white-working-class/news-story/d42d9cf1af60afd9f9191e11e2db37f8

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The most concerning element of tradwife bashing

I enabled a tradwife 40 years ago and she is looking after me to this day when I need it in my old age -- JR

Virginia Tapscott

When it comes to ridiculing and dismissing mothers who work in the home it seems we are becoming increasingly inventive and venomous. At first it was the term housewife that garnered negative connotations and became a derogatory slur uttered with disdain. Next, the stay-at-home mum became the punching bag.

Now it’s the tradwife. New name, same axe to grind.

What is a tradwife?

Google search trends show searches for tradwife – derived from the phrase traditional housewife – began ramping up in 2018 in line with the rise of Instagram influencers role-playing as traditional housewives. They dress up in vintage clothes, make food from scratch and care for their children.

The aesthetic they create ranges from saccharine through idyllic to satire. Sometimes they are religiously motivated; some have breadwinner husbands who “lead the household”; and some have opted out of contraception.

All of this would be unremarkable except they post all of it on social media and have amassed millions of followers.

I’m calling it role-playing because these women do not find themselves in the original set of circumstances that led to many traditional housewives having no genuine choice, such as no access to contraception, little education and no prospects other than child-bearing and homemaking.

Tradwives emulate certain romantic features of this existence by choice and without the harmful reality of necessity, scarcity and oppression. These social media tradwives often are backed by generational wealth and extremely lucrative, successful careers as social media influencers, among other things. Their tech, design, content production and culinary skills are enviable. They also happen to look like bikini models. In short, they have options that our grandmothers most certainly did not.

The tradwife trend is a protest against hustle culture and modern expectations that women will run back to the office a few weeks after giving birth so they can start to be productive again. They rebel against fast food, commercialised care, mass-produced rubbish and rushed days.

Call it an extreme form of protest, but if it’s their choice, if it makes them happy and if they aren’t hurting anyone, who cares? A lot of people, as it turns out.

At first feminists and career women felt only personally attacked by the tradwife trend and hoped it would remain in an obscure corner of the internet. But as the tradwives rose to stardom, the feminists’ private pain quickly erupted into public outrage. After all these years of controlling the message, holding centre stage and blithely dismissing the work of the humble housewife, they did not appreciate the tradwife trend one bit.

From housewife to tradwife

Feminists were alarmed by the sheer number of followers these women attracted. After so carefully and painstakingly constructing the narrative that housewives were sad, unfulfilled, backward and unnecessary, the tradwives shot it to pieces overnight with their intelligence, professional accomplishments, seriously handy skills and, god forbid, their happiness in looking after their kids.

Tradwives hit a nerve with feminists because they directly challenge the idea of career women as the gold standard. Caregivers rarely, if ever, have been able to publicise themselves in the same way career women could until now. Before tradwives, caregivers and movements that sought to include them in women’s liberation struggled to curry favour with the public because care work and unpaid labour have an image problem. It’s not glamorous work. It’s laborious and messy and often lonely, invisible work. It doesn’t pay the big bucks and it goes on in private.

Before the age of social media, the likes of Martha Stewart and Nigella Lawson – the latter of whom popularised the term domestic goddess – made their fortunes through giving womanhood and homemaking broad marketing appeal. Tradwives are kind of like the Martha Stewarts of social media, a bunch of women with undeniable business acumen who knew they could monetise their image and tear down the tired housewife perceptions in an instant.

Tradwives are disingenuous, of course, but so is everyone posting on social media. So are the women who pose as effortlessly “having it all” while battling the emotional and physical turmoil of juggling paid work with carrying, birthing and rearing children.

There are countless career women on social media guilty of virtue signalling and sharing the minutiae of their day-to-day lives. All that has changed here is that housewives decided to do it too. They are defending their choice by fighting fire with fire.

Feminists realised they needed to turn public favour against tradwives and position them as the new bogeyman – the enemy of modern women. The term traditional wife, what tradwives occasionally had called themselves, sounded too distinguished, so it quickly was truncated to tradwife, which sounds far less appealing and is quicker to spit out in disgust. We know this change in terminology did not originate with tradwives themselves because they rarely, if ever, refer to themselves as tradwives.

Mainstream media outlets and women’s media platforms have been absolutely committed to making sure the tradwife label sticks. This makes sense because the media obviously is over-represented by women who are actively engaged in careers and are likely ideologically opposed to tradwives. The articles describe the tradwives as “self-harm for millennial mothers”, cult-like, and victims of oppression and abuse.

Mainstream feminism is seeking to take back control of the housewife narrative by repackaging women who work in the home by choice as representative of something dangerous.

They argue that tradwives “romanticise oppression”, are victims of internalised oppression and are setting a dangerous example for young girls. They argue every which way that any woman in her right mind wouldn’t actually choose this. They dangle tradwives threateningly as what could happen if women let their guard down and assume caregiving roles.

The controversy behind Ballerina Farm and Hannah Neelman
Perhaps the biggest and most recent take-down of a tradwife was mounted by reporter Megan Agnew in The Times.

Agnew visited Hannah Neeleman – known as the “queen of the tradwives” because of her almost 10 million Instagram followers – Neeleman’s husband Daniel and their eight children on Ballerina Farm in Utah. The reporter claimed to have witnessed certain dynamics – after spending all of a single day with the family – that concerned her. Based on her own apparent spidey senses, Agnew set about framing Neeleman as a sad victim of coercive control and “baby trapping”.

The quotes in the article fail to support Agnew’s conclusions, but it’s obvious to any reader that Agnew’s agenda was decided before she set foot in Neeleman’s home. Her preconceived ideas about caregivers and housewives prevented her from seeing Neeleman’s life as a choice. She deliberately reduced Neeleman to an overworked, unhappy wife dominated by her husband, apparently regardless of what Neeleman actually said, because that’s the only image of mothers in the home that Agnew is interested in creating.

Neeleman herself later flatly denied the claims in the profile, but many women seem deaf to her. It’s a stark example of tradwives being oppressed only by other women.

Feminists are right to argue that tradwives are promoting a choice that would render most women vulnerable and financially insecure. However the problem isn’t actually women and the work they do, it’s how this work is viewed and supported by society. The problem is lack of paid leave, work flexibility and carer support measures. Instead of fighting for societal change and policy that would better support unpaid care work and labour, feminists remain focused on problematising women such as tradwives and their choices.

The same women who are up in arms about wealthy tradwives also conveniently ignore the elitist elements of career women. Middle and low-income families often do not have the same luxuries as high-income families who can pick and choose high-quality, boutique childcare centres or take advantage of generous parental leave packages in their high-paying jobs. They promote a choice in which they are buffered from the pitfalls.

For the record, I am not a tradwife. The only time I want my husband to lead me is if I have failing sight. I’d love some freshly baked bread if someone else could be in charge of that. Contraception is absolutely critical at this point for our family and I can’t bring myself to wear an apron. I’ll gradually increase my paid work hours as I see fit. I don’t have a name for what goes on in our house and my role in it, but it has been great and it has been my choice. I’d wish that for anyone, including the tradwives.

I may not be a tradwife but I have been called one in wholesale attempts to undermine my ideas, identity and character. The term is being weaponised against everyday caregivers for doing something as simple as growing veggies or baking muffins. Caregivers who are called tradwives out of spite often then wrongly assume the identity and unwittingly perpetuate the campaign to ridicule and dismiss work in the home.

The definition is slowly expanding to include a much larger subset of caregivers than the original handful of social media personalities in unique circumstances. Girls growing up today will possibly recoil at the possibility of being labelled a tradwife if they take extended parental leave or engage in caregiving on a long-term basis.

Perhaps the most concerning element of the tradwife bashing is the clear attempt to equate people in caregiving and unpaid labour roles with victims of abuse, coercive control and subservience. Not only does this detract from important issues of abuse and coercive control, which occur in all kinds of relationships regardless of your vocation or employment status, but it paints all caregivers as people without agency and unable to advocate for themselves.

The tradwife episode just proves that some women will stop at nothing to find novel ways to tear down mothers who work inside the home. We continue to be our own worst enemy.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/the-most-concerning-element-of-tradwife-bashing/news-story/0b2f99034001c101800f09d667c8e3af

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Award-winning playwright Andrew Bovell calls for rethink on trigger warnings in wake of ‘cannibalism’ claim

Leading playwright Andrew Bovell felt “upset”, “confused” and “physically shocked” when he went to a production of his internationally acclaimed play, When The Rain Stops Falling, and heard a recorded trigger warning state the work portrayed cannibalism.

“I object to my work being depicted as something it isn’t,’’ Bovell said. He added that he found the warning – which revealed “all of the play’s secrets and reveals” just as the show was starting “absurd” and “extreme”.

The Edge of Darkness and Lantana screenwriter joked ruefully: “Maybe they should have issued a trigger warning about the trigger warnings.’’

Yet when the award-winning South Australian writer raised his concerns with the Flinders University Performing Arts Society, which staged his play in July, it “stood by (its) choice to associate the play with cannibalism’’.

The controversy concerns a scene in which a grieving character mixes the dead ashes of her lover into her soup and consumes them. In the foreground, a mother learns about the death of her son.

Bovell said that scene “is a beautiful image and speaks to the poetics of the moment’’ and symbolises the lover’s deep grief.

“All the more worrying, then, that this moment is now described as an act of cannibalism.’’

The Weekend Australian revealed to a startled Bovell that the same cannibalism content warning was used by Brisbane community theatre company Brisbane Arts Theatre, which also staged When The Rain Stops Falling this year.

Brisbane Arts Theatre describes itself as an “iconic, independent theatre company” and its warning about the drama said: “This play contains sensitive and disturbing themes including murder, cannibalism, and child sexual abuse. Viewer discretion is advised.’’

Bovell was told it was likely the Flinders University production copied that content warning, despite the fact that murder and child sex abuse are not directly depicted in the play.

When The Rain Stops Falling, a multi-generational family saga about secrets, betrayal and forgiveness, premiered at the Adelaide Festival in 2008. It toured nationally and to London and New York, where it won five off-Broadway excellence awards and Time magazine named it the best new play of 2010.

Bovell said that despite the claims of the two content warnings, “we don’t see an act of child abuse (in the play). A key character is revealed as being a pedophile. We don’t see any child murdered but there is an insinuation that a child was killed. This (the recorded Flinders University warning) was a premature reveal of a shocking moment and its warnings went on (with) themes of child abandonment and so on … it was so absurd.’’

Bovell stressed he was otherwise happy with the Flinders production and has no interest in pursuing a generational dispute with younger theatre workers.

However, he felt it was time for theatre writers to “push back” against the escalating trigger warning trend in theatre, because such warnings were often inaccurate, contained spoilers and could damage a play’s reputation.

Bovell’s objections come as leading arts figures have spoken out about the escalating trend in Australian and UK theatre. The Weekend Australian recently reported how trigger warnings have been slapped on everything from a fake moth dying on stage to the Nazism theme in the family musical The Sound of Music.

Leading director Neil Armfield said they were a “pet hate’’, while Australian Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett said the growth of such warnings reflected “a lack of mutual respect” between artists and their audiences.

Bovell said he feared such warnings would “infantilise” audiences. He said that in future he may have to “check the trigger warnings before I agree to issuing the rights’’ to theatre companies.

The man who wrote The Secret River stage script was “heartened” by the overwhelmingly supportive response he received to a Facebook post outlining the dispute. On Facebook, actor and writer Noel Hodda said trigger warnings were “anti-theatre” while Rachel Healy, former co-director of the Adelaide Festival, told him: “I would definitely encourage you to push back (against the two content warnings).”

Director Merrilee Mills, who has directed When The Rain Stops Falling, said she was “horrified” by Bovell’s experience, while singer Bernadette Robinson asked: “What’s the point of going to theatre if not to be exhilarated … shocked, challenged? Really, I’m against (trigger warnings).’’

But Brisbane Arts Theatre president Paje Battilana said the drama company puts it content warning on its website and on signs in their venue because “we, like all businesses in our current world climate, do everything we can to ensure the safety of our audiences; this includes mental and emotional safety.”

Asked if the company consulted playwrights about content warnings to ensure they were accurate, Battilana replied: “Unfortunately we rarely have access to playwrights, as plays’ rights are acquired through distributors.’’

Even though The Weekend Australian informed the company about Bovell’s concerns on Thursday, the contentious content warning remained on its website on Friday.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/stage/awardwinning-playwright-andrew-bovell-calls-for-rethink-on-trigger-warnings-in-wake-of-cannibalism-claim/news-story/30552ad44e5c8d34cff1b709b2800634