We Were All Made In The Image: On othering, humanism and the Enlightenment legacy

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

— Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1

I. Where It Began

In 2010 I founded Blak and Black with a specific grievance and a broader instinct. The grievance was personal before it was political. When my family complained about the conduct of an ACT public servant whose views and behaviour we considered those of a white supremacist, the AFP’s response to us – to the complainants – was itself racist. In the course of executing a search warrant at our home, AFP Constable Rowena Penfold (now Commander) made remarks toward my family that were degrading and racially directed. Separately, AFP Commander Frank Jamieson cleared the public servant, Angel Marina, of assault and indecent assault allegations without interviewing the principal witnesses – among them an Anglican minister. Marina, an ACT public servant at the relevant time, subsequently left the ACT public service after three women made bullying complaints against him. These matters were mentioned in the ACT Supreme Court in 2016 and in my 2017 trial, and the record is what it is. What I learned from that experience was not abstract. It was that a federal police force, when confronted with complaints from an Indigenous family about racially motivated conduct by a public servant, was capable of treating the complainants as the problem.

That experience shaped what I read afterwards in the public record. The AFP’s cooperation with Indonesian authorities in the Bali Nine case, which delivered young Australians into a jurisdiction where the death penalty was a foreseeable outcome; the handling of Schapelle Corby; the AFP’s operational role in the Northern Territory Emergency Response, conducted under legislation that suspended the Racial Discrimination Act – none of these were surprising to someone who had already seen, at close range, how the force conducted itself when the complainant was Indigenous and the respondent was not. The instinct underlying Blak and Black was harder to name at the time, though I can name it clearly now. What I was resisting was not merely a set of Australian policy failures or a string of bad editorial decisions. I was resisting something older and more portable than any of that – the human habit of drawing a circle around “us” and placing certain others permanently outside it.

My father was born on Erambie mission in Cowra, in central New South Wales. He was Wiradjuri. My mother came to this country as a refugee, carrying the memory of a culture the world had tried to erase. I grew up with both inheritances, and with the knowledge that dispossession and displacement are not historical categories – they are living conditions, passed down through families like a second language. When I sat down to write in the early years of Blak and Black, I was not theorising. I was reporting from the inside of something real, including from inside the experience I have just described.

The longer I wrote, and the more widely I read, the more I came to understand that what I was documenting in Australia was not exceptional. The casual cruelty of othering – the instinct to render a person or a people as less than fully human, as a problem to be managed rather than a community to be respected – is not a specifically Australian failing. It is a recurring feature of human societies under pressure, and its recurrence across cultures and centuries should give us no comfort at all.

II. The Theology of Equality

I am a humanist. I am also a person who believes in G-d. These two positions are sometimes thought to be in tension; I have never experienced them that way. My theism is personal and independent of any organised religion. It is grounded in a conviction that existence is not arbitrary – that the universe is not morally indifferent, even if it is vast and largely silent. And it is inseparable from a particular reading of what it means to be human.

In my understanding, all were created equal in G-d’s image. The Hebrew phrase is בצלם אלהים, b’tzelem Elohim, and it carries within it a demand so radical that most of human history has been spent evading it. If each person is made in the image of the divine, then to diminish a person – to other them, to reduce them to a category, to treat their humanity as conditional – is not merely a social wrong. It is a theological offence. It is a desecration.

This is not an abstract proposition. When a government policy is designed to make a people invisible, that is a desecration. When a police force treats an entire community as presumptively criminal, that is a desecration. When a media ecosystem reduces First Nations people to statistics of dysfunction while ignoring the structural causes of that dysfunction, that is a desecration. The language is strong because the situation requires it.

I write as a humanist and as a Jew, and within both traditions there is a strand of thought that refuses the moral adequacy of indifference. The prophetic tradition in Jewish thought is not primarily about prediction. It is about speaking uncomfortable truths to power and insisting that the treatment of the vulnerable is the truest measure of a society’s character. That is a tradition I claim, regardless of denominational affiliation. It is one of the intellectual inheritances I bring to this work alongside Homer, alongside Stoic philosophy, alongside the Persian poets who understood that wisdom is not the property of any single civilisation.

III. The Enlightenment and Its Honest Critics

There is a tendency in some quarters to speak of the Enlightenment as if it were simply a European project – a set of ideas produced by a specific group of people in a specific historical moment, and therefore contaminated by the failures of that moment. The honest version of this critique is not easily dismissed. Charles Mills argued that the social contract tradition was always also a racial contract, an agreement among Europeans about who counted as a contracting party. Sylvia Wynter has shown how the figure of “Man” in Enlightenment thought was constructed against a racialised excluded other, such that universalism and exclusion were not opposites but partners. Domenico Losurdo demonstrated in detail how the architects of liberty defended slavery without apparent cognitive strain. These are not strawmen. They are arguments with archival weight.

I take them seriously, and I still do not accept their conclusion. The reason is this: every one of those critiques is itself an Enlightenment performance. Each appeals to universal standards of evidence, consistency, and moral dignity in order to expose the failures of those who claimed to hold such standards. The critique does not stand outside the project; it stands inside it, holding the project to its own promise. That is not an accident. It is what makes the critique persuasive. The alternative – that there are no shared standards, that exposing hypocrisy is itself just another exercise of power – would dissolve the critic’s authority along with the target’s.

The Enlightenment also drew on Persian and Islamic scholarship, on classical antiquity, on long traditions of Jewish rationalism. It was, in its best formulations, universalist: the claim that reason, dignity, and rights belong to all human beings, not as a gift from any state or church, but as a condition of their humanity. What made it genuinely radical – and what made it Western in the sense that matters – was not geography. It was the institutional embedding of those ideas: the separation of powers, freedom of conscience, habeas corpus, the press, the university, the independent judiciary. These were not inevitable developments. They were hard won, and they remain fragile.

We are living through a moment in which that fragility is visible. The V-Dem Institute’s annual democracy reports have, for several years now, documented a sustained global decline in liberal democratic institutions, with the average level of democracy worldwide returning to levels last seen in the late 1980s and a growing share of the world’s population living in countries moving in an autocratising direction.¹ The mechanisms are familiar across cases: the delegitimisation of independent institutions, the cultivation of grievance as a political resource, the identification of internal enemies, the normalisation of contempt for those outside the circle of belonging.

Australia is not exempt. The Farrer by-election of 2025, in which One Nation took a seat once considered safely held by the Coalition, is one data point among many. What matters is not the single result but what it indicates about cost: that a vote for a party whose central political offer is exclusion can be cast in rural New South Wales without significant social penalty and without serious media alarm. The threshold has moved. That movement is the phenomenon worth attending to.

IV. The Grammar of Othering

Othering is not always violent. That is part of what makes it so persistent. It operates, most of the time, at the level of assumption – in the questions that are not asked, the perspectives that are not sought, the voices structurally excluded from the conversations that shape policy and culture. It operates in the word “community” when it is used to mean one community and not another. It operates in the phrase “law-abiding Australians” when the implication is that some Australians are less likely to be law-abiding by nature. It operates in the editorial decision about which deaths are worth a front page and which are worth a paragraph on page fourteen.

I have spent fifteen years documenting those editorial decisions. I began that work, as I have said, from inside a complaint of my own – a complaint that taught me what it means to be treated as a problem by the institution one has approached for help. From that vantage point, I watched the AFP’s conduct in matters that shaped wider public perception of who the force was willing to protect and who it was willing to expose: the Bali Nine, the Corby case, the operational role in the Northern Territory Emergency Response. I have watched governments of both major parties treat First Nations Australians as a problem requiring management rather than a community requiring justice.

I have also watched a particular rhetorical inversion become routine. The vocabulary developed to describe the experience of historically dispossessed peoples – displacement, erasure, cultural threat – has been adopted, with remarkable fluency, by majoritarian movements who face none of those conditions. White grievance politics in the United States, the “great replacement” discourse in continental Europe, the staging of native-born ethnic majorities as embattled minorities in their own countries: these are not failures of language but deliberate appropriations of it. The rhetoric of dispossession is being used to defend the structures of dispossession. That inversion is worth naming because it is one of the most effective techniques the politics of exclusion has developed in the past two decades.

The same grammar appears across the Anglophone and European right: an imagined community of authentic belonging, threatened by outsiders portrayed as both powerful and contemptible – a combination that should be logically impossible but is politically irresistible.

Simone Weil wrote that the first obligation of any serious moral life is attention – the capacity to see the person in front of you fully, without the distortions of self-interest or ideology. Othering is the systematic failure of that attention. It is the substitution of a category for a person. Because it is systematic, it requires systematic resistance – not merely individual acts of goodwill, but institutions, habits of thought, and public cultures that refuse to let the category stand in for the human.

V. What I Am Not Abandoning

I want to be clear about something. The argument I am making – that the othering of Indigenous Australians is a symptom of something universal, and that the appropriate response is a humanist commitment to the equal dignity of all persons – is not an argument for abandoning the specific. The universal does not dissolve the particular. Wiradjuri sovereignty is not dissolved by humanism. The specific injustices of Australian colonialism are not rendered less urgent by the observation that similar dynamics have operated elsewhere.

The point is the opposite. The universalist framework gives the specific grievance its full moral weight. When I argue that the treatment of Indigenous Australians by the AFP and by successive governments has been unjust, I am not arguing from sentiment or tribal loyalty. I am arguing from a principle: that all persons are of equal moral worth, that the structures of a just society must reflect that equality, and that Australia has systematically failed that standard. The universalism is the ground on which the specific claim stands.

I write as a humanist, a Jew, and a Wiradjuri man. Those identities are not in contradiction. They are, in my experience, in conversation – each one informing and enlarging the others. The Wiradjuri tradition of relationship to country, to community, to the obligations that bind the living to the dead and to the not-yet-born, is not incompatible with the humanist tradition of reason and universal dignity. The Jewish prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power is not incompatible with the Stoic insight that all rational beings share in a common logos. These are different vocabularies for overlapping recognitions.

What unites them, for me, is the refusal of contempt. Contempt is the emotion that makes othering possible. It is the feeling that permits a person to look at another human being and see something lesser, something not quite deserving of the full consideration one extends to oneself and one’s own. Every tradition I have drawn on in this work – Indigenous, Jewish, Stoic, humanist – treats contempt as a corruption. Not a sin in the moralistic sense, but a failure of perception: an inability to see what is actually there.

VI. What the Enlightenment Requires Of Us

I am not naive about the Enlightenment’s historical record. The same period that produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man produced the Atlantic slave trade at its peak industrial scale. The same intellectual tradition that articulated universal human dignity produced racial science. These are not incidental contradictions; they are constitutive of the Enlightenment’s actual history, and any honest engagement with it must hold the achievement and the failure simultaneously.

But the answer to that complexity is not to abandon the project. It is to insist on its radicalism – to take seriously the claim that all were made equal, and to measure existing institutions against that claim relentlessly. The tools of Enlightenment critique – reason, evidence, argument, the appeal to principles that transcend particular interests – are the tools required to expose the Enlightenment’s own failures. That is what makes them worth preserving.

How, concretely, do those tools resist the grammar of othering? Not through abstract assertion but through specific institutional practices: a free press that names what is happening rather than what powerful people would prefer it to name; a judiciary willing to apply the same standards to majoritarian and minority claimants; universities that protect the conditions of disagreement rather than the comfort of agreement; freedom-of-information regimes that allow citizens to see what is done in their name; statistical agencies whose methods cannot be bent to political convenience; electoral systems that make the disenfranchisement of any group costly to those who attempt it. None of these institutions is sufficient on its own. None functions without contest. But together they make it possible to argue across difference rather than only across identity, and that capacity is what othering specifically attacks.

The alternative is a politics organised entirely around identity and grievance, in which there are no shared standards of argument and no possibility of persuasion across difference. That politics is already visible. It is the politics in which every institution is assumed to be corrupt, every opponent is assumed to be acting in bad faith, and the only legitimate basis for solidarity is shared ethnic or cultural origin. It is, in other words, the politics of othering applied universally – a world organised entirely around the distinction between us and them, with no remainder.

That is not a world I am willing to accept. Not as a humanist, not as a Jew, not as a Wiradjuri man.

What does defending this legacy actually require of those who would defend it? It requires more than affirmation. It requires using the institutions while they still function: making freedom-of-information requests, supporting independent media in conditions where its commercial base is collapsing, sitting on juries, contesting bad laws in court, voting in by-elections where the cost of voting for exclusion ought to be higher than it currently is, and refusing – in our own speech, in our own editorial choices, in our own assumptions – to let categories stand in for persons. These are unglamorous obligations. They are the obligations the Enlightenment legacy imposes on anyone who claims to inherit it. They are also the only ones available.

The legacy is imperfect, contested, never fully realised. It is also the best institutional inheritance the modern world possesses for building societies in which the equal dignity of all persons is something more than a rhetorical claim. The work is to use it before it is taken from us.

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¹ See the V-Dem Institute’s annual Democracy Report series, available at v-dem.net. Readers are encouraged to consult the most recent edition for current figures.

Blak and Black was founded in 2010. This essay is part of an ongoing body of work addressing racism, democratic erosion, and the politics of exclusion in Australia and globally.