The Cambridge Dictionary defines a bigot as “a person who has strong, unreasonable beliefs, and who does not like other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life”. Bigotry is an individual attitude characterised by two distinct dimensions, baseless beliefs and an intolerance of others, and is exemplified by xenophobia, racism and misogyny.

The nature of bigotry

Bigotry is an anachronism in the modern world, having been displaced in the course of human intellectual and social evolution. The development of a common language and the widening circulation of reliable information strengthened individual understanding of a shared social meaning, and diminished individual uncertainty and insecurity. With the development of higher-order cognitive capabilities, primitive instincts, visceral emotions, brute force and superstition have been displaced by science, reason, shared knowledge and an evolving hierarchy of rules governing individual and social behaviours.

Bigotry represents a conscious individual decision to repudiate the personal morals and core social values that are the foundation for a civilised society. Bigotry empowers the individual to arbitrarily define their own personal reality, while rejecting the views and worth of others. Because bigotry shifts the framing of meaning to the self-serving individual, the basis for rejecting and dehumanising others can be entirely subjective, irrational or malicious.

Why is bigotry on the rise?

Bigotry is an individual attitude that promotes baseless beliefs and is intolerant of others. Human conceptions of their individual and social reality have evolved over millennia, founded on a shared (science and reason-based) understanding of the physical and social world. For many years, a traditional knowledge order has sustained widespread community trust in the veracity of information by upholding the principles of honesty, truthfulness, integrity, objectivity, accuracy, balance, consistency and the verification of fact.

Technological advances in the 21st century have transformed the quantity, quality and immediate impacts of information on the individual and society. The exponential expansion of social media over the last two decades has been instrumental in the creation and wide dissemination of an enormous quantity of new, largely undifferentiated information that is not part of the traditional knowledge order.

Social media has completely transformed the nature and extent of social participation, providing individuals with instantaneous and largely unfiltered access to the world. Often facilitated by anonymity, social media can enable the expression, dissemination and sometimes validation of fear, hatred, lies, conspiracy, paranoia, denigration and unbridled prejudice. In an environment where anyone and everyone can publish anything and everything, the virtual absence of any standards regulating the veracity or accuracy of what is published on social media is profoundly challenging the traditional knowledge order.

The diminishing influence of the traditional knowledge order, and the consequent inability to distinguish between widely divergent types of information (from fact to baseless beliefs), has eroded community confidence in all forms of information, increasing uncertainty, cynicism and distrust. In 2020, former US president Obama observed, “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemic crisis."

This growing uncertainty and distrust have been exploited and exacerbated by a diverse range of malicious actors who are willing to promulgate baseless beliefs in order to engender division and insecurity, and to damage established institutions (including scientific bodies). There may be no greater example of the disproportionate impacts of baseless beliefs than the public discourse surrounding the existential threats posed by climate change. Despite the overwhelming science and the increasing frequency of catastrophic natural events like fires and floods, there are significant elements of the Australian community which continue to question the veracity of the established scientific knowledge.

Because politics involves the mediation of diverse and often competing ideas, bigotry may offer short-term electoral advantage by misleading or damaging opponents. Australia may be particularly susceptible to the erosion of the core values of dignity, respect, fairness, compassion and the rule of law because of their politicisation, and because of their limited formal articulation in a constitution, charter or bill of rights. A whole new language of denigration has emerged to impugn the motives of those advocating for the retention of these core values, including terms like woke, culture wars, identity politics and virtue signalling.

Finally, the growing reach and impacts of artificial intelligence, with a capacity to seamlessly integrate the existing body of knowledge and independently generate new (potentially fake) information, is further eroding the community’s trust in all information.

In addition to the diminishing influence of the traditional knowledge order and an associated increase in community distrust, the 21st century has been uniquely impacted by a series of existential threats that have engendered fear and intolerance of others in the Australian community. The global war on terror post 9/11; wide-reaching economic restructuring and dislocation due to globalisation; the increasingly severe adverse effects of climate change with catastrophic fires and floods; and a global pandemic at the end of the second decade; have all contributed to increased levels of fear and insecurity in the Australian community, in particular a latent fear of foreigners (xenophobia).

While the strength and influence of the personal morals and core social values that shape and bind a civil society can fluctuate, they sit in stark opposition to bigotry. Fear and distrust in the wider community are corrosive to the maintenance of these important norms, and to social cohesion generally. In a multicultural country like Australia, that was originally founded on racist and xenophobic policies (the White Australia policy), the potential for internal divisions and the return of archaic prejudices remains ever-present.

Community surveys in the last five years have revealed a sharp increase in the racism experienced by Chinese-Australians following the COVID 19 pandemic, and more recently shown a marked rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia following a flare-up in the Middle East. Latent xenophobic sentiments have been further inflamed by the alarmist (fear-based) rhetoric of Australian security officials.

There may be no greater example of the stupidity and ultimately self-destructive nature of xenophobia than the Australian Government’s recent decision to place caps on foreign student numbers as a response to political fear-mongering on the excessive number of foreigners in Australia. Tertiary education has been the second largest export industry in Australia for more than a decade, and the decision to limit foreign student numbers is causing incalculable damage to the international reputation and financial viability of the Australian university sector, and, more broadly, to this country’s longer-term research capabilities.

Implications for social cohesion in Australia

This article contends that the technology-enabled disintegration of the traditional knowledge order and the resultant growing distrust of all information, in conjunction with a fear-based increase in the intolerance of foreigners, have combined to facilitate a marked rise in bigotry in Australia.

There are a diverse range of potential adverse implications should bigotry continue to play an influential role in Australian social policy:

• The community’s trust in and commitment to important social institutions (including our democratic systems of governance) will continue to decline, making the aggregation of power (acquiring a clear mandate) and implementing changes more difficult;
• Australian politics will continue to focus on short-term reactive and populist responses, rather than long-term vision and strategic change;
• The level of overt racism within the Australian community is likely to rise, with an associated increase in the membership of issue-specific tribal groups expressing extreme political and social ideologies;
• A growing nationalism and protectionism in foreign policy is likely to increase the polarisation of nations, raising the prospects of international conflict;
• Civil and respectful public discourse will continue to be compromised by exaggeration, lies and fear-mongering;
• At the individual level, altruism and a sense of public duty will continue to be displaced by egoism and self-interest; and
• The Australian university sector will continue to contract and increasingly become financially unviable.