Today is Australia Day, 26^th January 2019 considered as a celebration of the arrival of a fleet of British ships in Sydney Harbour in 1770.

Unfortunately it is not a day all souls in Australia wish to celebrate by consuming a mountain of tinnies down at the beach. There is also a rally of Aboriginal people in Canberra today, who wish to point out that they were here first and have at least, equal rights to the country.

It’s a difficult one, because both sides have a point. History (in my personal definition) consists of one dam thing after another. This includes previously undisturbed or (from the other view) undiscovered tribes, races or lottery winners – who would have preferred being left alone.

Clearly ships without engines cannot travel backwards any more than history can be rewound, so for purely pragmatic reasons, those hiding have to factor in the certainty of being found – eventually.

The important point in my view, is that the rights of those being ‘discovered’ are respected – in modern times these would be classified and defined as ‘human rights’. So ignoring the benefit of hindsight in too large a dose, the rights of indigenous peoples in say, Australia were largely ignored, even if this was out of a sense of ‘doing the right thing’; such putting European style clothes on them.

In New Zealand, I believe the Maori s were given a better ‘deal’ under the Treaty of Waitonga than their counterparts in Australia. Having said that, the Maori s gave the previous inhabitants of New Zealand a very bad deal indeed – few survived – so history can teach us all.

My point of conjecture is that humans find it alarmingly hard to be ‘universal’ in their love and trust of one another. Even when Homo Sapiens Sapiens left Africa and / or the Euphrates basin and headed north, the Neanderthals already in Europe were not too happy to see them. (Recent DNA evidence though, suggests that some Neanderthals were very happy to see them.)

In modern man there remains, what I call, the ‘football shirt’ mentality. This would be more accurately termed ‘tribalism’ by an anthropologist but the behavioural mechanisms are the very similar. Let me explain the football analogy.

If you quizzed the eager fans queuing for an important league football match to ascertain their level of understanding of the rules of the game, I expect they would all score in the region of 90% and above. In other words – they are fully conversant with the rules. However, fast forward to a moment in the game where there is a dispute of what just happened, say – ‘was a player offside just before scoring?’ The supporters who benefit from the goal will all swear that the player was not offside. The rival supporters will all swear the opposite.

Although they know how the game works in their heads, their hearts will filter what they have just seen in favour of their beliefs and prejudices. In other words, a bias is in command. At worst this is manifest as violence and hatred, at best, a conviction that the referree has left his white stick in the dressing room. What has happened is that the stadium has become emotionally divided.

Most so called ‘racism’ has this origin and manifestation although the word has complex meanings in modern usage (so much so that the Norwegians refuse to use it in legal definitions and prefer alternatives). However ‘racism’ is a bias or prejudice against a perceived group so that, that group suffer a loss. In the case of the football match, they may lose the game. In the case of an undiscovered tribe in a rain forest or continent, the effect may be considerably more serious than loss of a game.

Some tribalism persists irrevocably in modern western societies and is encapsulated in ‘religion’.

I remember Rabbi Lionel Blue speaking on the radio and telling a story of a Jewish boy arriving at his new primary school in Northern Ireland. He is quizzed by a Catholic boy and Protestant boy about his religion. On hearing that he was a ‘Jew’ they both looked confused. After a pause the question was asked, ‘Are you a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew?’

With the perfect logic that is characteristic of the naïve and very young, we have an example of the irrationality of bias and prejudices of religious and cultural dogma. It may surface in a form of an unusual form of dress or a way of thought. In every instance it is worthy of deep mistrust.

At the end of the day (and at the end of the world) we will all be judged for our actions. Such things as the unconscious biases (that we all contain through parental and cultural conditioning) will reveal how prejudiced we have been to our fellow beings.

If you haven’t followed my train of thought, then watch the news when the Aliens arrive! As the jets and missiles are loosed at their space craft, consider for a moment what very highly advanced spiritual people, aliens probably are.