He is the chief executive at The Ethics Centre and co-founder of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, among other philosophical pursuits.

The Examiner recently spoke to Dr Longstaff about issues facing modern society, and ways for the community to improve.

Harry Murtough: How would you define peace? 

Dr Simon Longstaff: I think first of all what it’s not is an absence of conflict, some people say ‘if there’s no conflict, then you have peace’ but it is a far more richer notion than that.

It’s a rich emotion, a positive conception of harmony between people and most importantly a settled capacity to cope with shock, change and uncertainty so there’s kind of a calmness because of positive affiliation that people make where there is enough that joins together different elements of society without it having to be uniform, and in fact that diversities an essential part.

If you’ve got a mono-culture, in which everything is identical then it’s by nature it’s stable, but it’s not peaceful. Peace implies that there are some points of difference which are being held in a harmonious tension.

HM: In 2016 you were named one of Australian Financial Review’s BOSS future leaders, what does that entail?

SL: They were looking for people who were shaping, in some sense, the agenda for this century. 

One of the reasons they’ve probably included me is because for many decades now I’ve been arguing for the importance of not just having a compliant society in which we have rules, regulations, systems and surveillance to keep us all in check. 

But instead a society in which we’re able to incorporate both at an individual and institutional level, a sense of what’s right and wrong which is based on values and principles. 

The world we’re actually moving into is going to be so profoundly affected by things such as technological change, which will see many people’s jobs displaced, new geopolitical realities in which the kind of security assumptions we’ve made as a nation are subject to challenge.

All of this has a disruptive capacity to unsettle a community and if you don’t have these strong bonds then you start to see the sorts of reactions that produced Brexit in the UK or the political turmoil in the United States in which ordinary people say, ‘well who’s looking after our interests? What's the basis on which we remain together?’ and instead of co-hearing there’s just fragmentation.

HM: You conducted an ethical review last year into the of culture and governance of cricket in Australia, what were your observations from that?

SL: One of the things I think is both mysterious and easy to understand about the reaction at the time is how widespread and deep it was.

We're talking about a game, rather than another matter of national crisis, and yet it's impact was vastly disproportionate to what you think an incident like that might have justified.

For many Australians that watched as this kind of stain had spread from politics through business through churches even - they saw individuals and institutions failing to live up to the standards which they claim for themselves and which the community reasonably expected.

Australians thought 'surely there must be some place where that doesn't happen?', it may have been naive but I think people took seriously the kind of thing where people say 'it's just not cricket', as if the place where it wouldn't happen is in this symbol of decent competition like the Australian cricket team.

People were saying 'who have we become? What won't we do? We can't rely on churches or religious institutions, we can't rely on our cricket team, who are we?!' 

That's lead me to think we now need, as a nation, to revitalise our ethical infrastructure.

We spend a lot of time thinking about roads and telecommunications networks; we'll invest in almost any kind of physical or technical infrastructure without understanding this almost invisible ethical infrastructure is just as important in terms of the kind of society we are. 

If you talk to the CEO's of the four major national banks in Australia, they'll tell you if they had an honest conversation that in ten years they'll have 50 per cent less employees, they won't need them because of technology and law firms and accounting firms will also shed people.

The middle class will find their jobs disappearing and unless we recognise that transition has to be both just and orderly, rather than unjust and chaotic, there's going to be a mess.

What will stop it from being a mess is getting this basic ethical infrastructure in place, it's not a conversation we've had as a nation, it's not even an idea that's been able to sink in, but really think that's something we need to do 

HM: Do you think dialogue for this will start from the middle or do you think it will start elsewhere?

SL: I think it's actually going to begin in the community.

Progressively the community will want some basic standards, to know that you [institutions] are thinking about these ethical issues not just giving us technical solutions but ones where you've really thought it through in terms of it's impact on others, and they'll demand it.

Some people will come in as demagogues and they'll appeal to what's base and ignoble in people.

But the lights will go on in politicians and I'm hoping that whatever a person's political persuasion, I hope they'll say 'alright there's our ideology or our political world view and we need that, but there's something even more important, we've got to act in a way that strengthens and preserves our democratic institutions that builds confidence in the community. That's our first duty, not to win'.

Technical mastery, wherever it is in politics or technology; when it is divorced from ethical restraints then that sews the seeds of tyranny, once those bonds are broken anythings possible.

The Peace Festival with it's focus on integrity, is one of those community investments in that ethical infrastructure. 

It may not see itself in those terms, but if you were to join it to other initiatives with a similar effect then you say 'that's what we need to be doing' but if we could collectively do it with our minds really clearly focussed on it as a national agenda then we'd of course have a far greater impact.

HM: In your opinion what makes a good leader in modern society?

SL: First of all I think it requires moral courage, and that means a willingness to examine yourself honestly and acknowledge and own your strengths and weaknesses.

It requires the capacity to engage with what I would call 'constructive subversion'.

You need a leader to subvert the tendency in society to do things how they've always been done, but not to destroy things, and not to impose their own view but to help institutions, organisations, even societies to become more of the thing they say they want to be.

You have to be really brave to do that because so many don't want you to lead - we talk about leadership as if it must always be a good thing but most people who have been leaders know that when they exercise true leadership, a lot of people want to stop it because it disturbs status quo, this is why moral courage is so important. 

It goes back to what we started with which is what made for peace. You're not trying to impose this monochrome, politically correct, fragile consistency, because that's not peace that's just uniformity.

There is incredible diversity, especially in a country like Australia, which we ought to celebrate but we need to manage it where we have enough common ties and enough trust in the way the system works that it has this constructively peaceful and harmonious view.

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