There’s a motif in Homer that one finds repeatedly – it is honourable to show kindness to the wanderer, noble to greet strangers with an open palm. This is the code of the free spirit, of the warrior. To fail to show kindness and generosity to a traveller is to lapse into dishonour. By living like a bug, hostile to strangers, and fearful that every passing footstep may spell doom, one not only renounces honour, joy and courage, but humanity itself.

It is precisely this honour that is lacking in so many in Australia today. It is lacking in the wretched Rightists, who fill their media columns and blogs with casuistry on the need to repel and brutalise asylum seekers. It is also lacking in our politicians. Wilson Tuckey, for instance, best known for assaulting an Aboriginal with an ironbar, thinks that Australia’s military might should be brought to bear on these seeking asylum by boat on our shores. Prime Minister Rudd thinks that it is not murderers, rapists, war-mongerers, or arsonists, but ‘people smugglers’ who are the ‘scum of the earth’, who ‘trade on the tragedy of others’, and who, in good Conservative Christian fashion, ought to ‘rot in hell’. This lack of honour, this cowardice, this pusillanimity, to use a more precise term (literally, Latin for ‘small of soul’) is plainly evident in those ‘real’, ‘patriotic’ Australians who, with their Southern Cross tattoos, and their bumper stickers reading ‘Fuck off we’re full’, decry a nation which they believe is being swamped by aliens. As Bob Ellis wrote, these people are not a majority, but they are certainly vocal, and well-represented in both the media, and among the political classes. Twisted with ressentiment, and in need of an outlet for their grievances, Asians on leaky boats present an easy target.

The facts on asylum seekers who come to Australia by sea tell a different story, of course. Most asylum seekers do not risk a sea voyage to come here. Most who do are then granted asylum as legitimate refugees. Evidence is thin on the ground that any such asylum seeker has posed any major problem for Australia in any way hitherto. Whilst the dishonourable profess that they are not racist, there are clear undertones of bigotry in the furore over asylum seekers. A few Sri Lankans are a cause for Australian outpourings of panic, despite the fact that, since 2001, Australia has allowed entry to over 10,000 white Zimbabweans fleeing the Mugabe regime. Clearly, some victims of circumstance are more worthy than others.

To revisit a bit of history, in the late 1930s, German Jews were persecuted non-citizens within their own land. Despite this, the world’s powers, particularly the US and the UK, failed to accept German (and other European) Jews as refugees or immigrants. The disastrous consequences of this recalcitrance and xenophobia are well-known. In response, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was established in 1951, in an attempt to provide some basic rights and assistance to displaced persons around the world. Australia is among many other developed nations that have agreed to international conventions that commit nations to the protection of asylum seekers and refugees.

This background of xenophobia and catastrophe is the context in which Australia’s commitment to refugee rights was affirmed, but it seems that this background has been forgotten. One can well imagine what some of our concerned friends on the Wretched Right would say to the asylum seekers of the late 1930s. It is harder to understand the seething hatred for so-called people smugglers. With the exception of those  who do not provide safe passage to their charges, but rather, expose them to harm through negligence, ‘people smugglers’ are regarded as heroes in many other contexts. The history of WWII and its build up is full of daring escapes across borders, aided by ingenious locals. For a contemporary Australian ‘patriot’,  Sigmund Freud, for instance, was a mere ‘queue-jumper’, who used money and contacts so that his family may avoid a fate that he and the other you-know-whos had to endure. The East Germans made numerous attempts to flee communist rule and defect to the West. For Prime Minister Rudd, those that assisted these people are mere ‘scum of the earth’, despite the fact that it’s difficult to imagine life in the DDR being any better than that in Afghanistan, or for a Tamil in Sri Lanka.

And for these Australian vultures circling the boats of asylum seekers – what are their objections to the ‘boat people’? One of the first is that these people are not genuine refugees, but merely ‘economic refugees’. We already know that this is false – 4 of 5 asylum seekers are in fact legitimate refugees. In any case, dismissing the status of ‘economic refugees’ is ignorant and hypocritical. In a globalised economy, it makes no sense to reap the benefits of cheap labour overseas (i.e. cheap imports to Australia) and then complain about the chaos and displacement that is a corollary to such a system. The second main object is that asylum seekers are ‘queue-jumpers’. Again, this is pusillanimity writ large, as if the only criteria for admission to Australia ought to be a willingness to adhere to inept bureaucratic processes. At bottom, these objections do not express anything of substance so much as they disguise the fact that asylum seekers fulfill a very precise, and necessary role in the Australian ‘patriot’s’ demonology, and will continue to play this role for as long as ressentiment exists, reasons be damned.

In Aristotle’s Ethics, we encounter an argument where happiness is held to approximate a ‘mean’ of sorts. To put it differently, the aim of life, according to Aristotle, is to have neither an excess, nor a deficiency of a ‘virtue’. That is to say, some anger, or some lust, or some pride may very well be a good thing in certain situations, as long as you don’t take it too far, or are found anemic in these qualities. The one possible exception to this rule, in the Ethics, concerns pusillanimity and its opposite, magnanimity (translating the English word from its Latin origins, this means  ‘greatness of soul’, itself a translation of the Greek megalopsuchia). Magnanimity is achieved by placing honour at the fore; the honourable are, for Aristotle, ‘disposed to confer benefits’, and, do not ‘nurse resentment’. The Homeric heroes invoked at the start of this post exemplify this magnanimity. The Wretched Right, the ‘patriots’, and the spineless politicians represent its opposite. With this in mind, it is evident that the very ‘debate’ about asylum seekers is beneath us. To debate on the terms of the pusillanimous, to enter into the logic of racism, cowardice and ressentiment ought to be shameful for men and women in a relatively free land in one of the richest countries on the planet. It is in the name of honour that I call on Australians to make their assessment of the asylum seeker ‘problem’ by observing the facts with the gaze of magnanimity, and by rejecting a popular worldview that is fit neither for us, nor the wanders who seek our assistance.