Opinion: Humanity shining through in even the darkest moment is a story worth believing in

By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

During a free-flowing Christmas Day chat across the dinner table, it was put to me that the Live Aid concerts 40 years ago had done Africa more economic harm than good.

The 16-hour marathon (the concert, not the lunch) which occurred simultaneously in London's Wembley Stadium and JFK stadium in Philadelphia in July, 1985, attracted a huge global television viewership estimated at between one and two billion. Many millions of dollars were raised by the world's leading musicians and countless others, all working for free.

It had felt like one of the high points of humanitarian progress - a hinge-moment where dire need was elevated above minority greed. A rare case of into sight, into mind.

Apparently, however, subsequent modelling indicated that by showing war-torn Ethiopia's famine and the gaping inequality between countries, Live Aid also had the effect of cooling both tourism and business investment by the wealthy West over the longer term.

Even assuming this is true, does it make Bob Geldof's (Boomtown Rats) and Midge Ure's (Ultravox) determination to save as many African lives as possible, wrong?

To be even more precise, could that perverse outcome have been predicted as a consequence of urgently delivering food aid and care to starving people during an acute human emergency?

And, if that possibility were somehow knowable, should that risk rule out action to feed and shelter millions? Of course not.

For me, though, the concern about such observations taking hold in the public mind is that they foster an already pervasive sense of doubt which in the end can become paralysing.

Doubt is the scourge of our information-saturated public discourse because its creation is among the easiest assignments there is. Just look at how it has been injected and weaponised against the overwhelming evidence of human-induced global temperature change.

I recall somebody telling me once they would never give to a charity because of a TV story showing the money was soaked up in administrative costs. A tiny doubt with big consequences.

Governments like it too. It is why almost nothing hard or radical is ever tried. We cannot increase the dole from its unliveable rate because it might encourage some to stay unemployed. That wouldn't be fair, right? But where's the evidence?

Uniquely, doubt doesn't have to prove itself like other things.

It need not even be plausible. Take our refusal to remove egregious market distortions in the property sector (negative gearing, capital gains tax concessions) which help to lock young people out home ownership. We're told this would result in fewer rentals on the market despite the fact that such property subsidies are uncommon around the world.

Politicians on both sides bang on endlessly about increasing housing supply without doing anything dramatic or decisive to increase it. Instead, they lament state and local government red-tape and planning constraints or workforce shortages. But mostly, they shelter in the doubt that anything more decisive could work.

The truth is, they will do anything to avoid telling the affluent middle that their precious tax breaks are being removed and that their reliably wealth-generating static assets might stop performing.

Meanwhile, the solutions to real problems linger beyond reach: rising homelessness, endemic mental health problems, Aboriginal deaths in custody, violence against women, hospital over-crowding, chronic aged care shortages, persistent wealth inequality, ongoing environmental destruction. These problems occupy the virtuous apron of political class concerns, but their resolution is never quite central enough to a politics in which the rules say: make no sudden moves, create no new losers, and always sex-up small changes with big rhetoric.

For me, these normalised contradictions tend to feel starker and more unconscionable at this time of year, as the circumstances for the propertied majority are paraded in the faces of those without.

Christmas-New Year can be joyous, yes, but perhaps also it should be an interregnum when we use the time and space to reflect on our still accelerating materialism, and on the fact that despite habitat destruction and climate havoc, our cars get larger and our houses too.

Going back to Geldof and Ure, I suspect most of us would rather have an optimism rooted in the possibility of human improvement over the withering cynicism and self-interest we have currently.

Even more so in the digital age, it is too easy to tear down such efforts and to pick apart the narrative lore of past human progress.

Whether it be the dismissal of major scientific advances such as the Moon landing or vaccine breakthroughs, cynics seek to corrode the very idea that positive change is possible.

There will never be any shortage of people to tell you that Oskar Schindler didn't save any Jews except those he wanted to exploit, or that there never was a Christmas Day truce in 1914 between the German and British trenches.

Generally, these protestations miss a critical point. There may not have been an actual soccer game on "no man's land", or indeed, even a ball, but the Christmas Day cessation of firing did happen. In any event, it matters as a piece of cultural narrative precisely because of the contrast it strikes with futile slaughter that ordinary men were required to visit on each other amid the frozen mud and muck.

Surely, humanity shining through in even the darkest moment is a story worth believing in - especially at Christmas?

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.