Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar

What could the romantic poets of the Eighteenth Century possibly teach us about modern politics?  

For those struggling to convince people to question existing practices and consider new ways of doing things, the answer is: quite a lot.  

The romantics invited audience to see the world with fresh eyes – even something as humdrum and everyday as a lime tree, in the case of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or a yew tree, as with William Wordsworth.  

TS Eliot later summarised this as “Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar” and sociologists adopted it as an objective. It can be a very effective tool in politics and policy as well. 

In 2016, a fellow at the right-wing Cato Institute wrote an article arguing: “Conservatives use ‘patriotic correctness’ to regulate speech, behavior and acceptable opinions.” Alex Nowrasteh was writing for an audience that would have, in the main, despised supposed “political correctness” for its close-mindedness, censuring and sensitivity.  

But as Nowrasteh pointed out, those wrongs were repeated by conservatives attacking opposition to the Iraq War as “treason”, banning the anti-War Dixie Chicks from radio stations to make “safe spaces”, and treating terrorism as an “existential threat” when the risk of dying in a terrorist attack is very low.  

Framing what felt like a natural, patriotic reaction as akin to “political correctness” helped readers see both political correctness and patriotic correctness differently.   

In a different medium but with a similar goal, Professor DJ Nutt wrote for the Journal of Psychopharmacology about “Equasy – An overlooked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms”.  

Nutt approached the unfamiliar “equasy” as an academic would a drug like ecstasy: looking at frequency of harm, whether elements of addiction are present, and costs to society. By some measures, equasy turned out to be much more dangerous than ecstasy.  

He then pulled back the veil. Equasy is “Equine Addiction Syndrome”, the sport of horse riding.  

The question of why anyone would risk their health and life doing illegal drugs becomes more legible when it is compared to a familiar trade-off like the risk of injury in sport.  

Australia Institute research often concerns policies that seem strange at first blush.  

Our book The Nordic Edge took reforms that are unfamiliar in the Australian context – like higher taxes and more spending on social services, very high electric vehicle adoption and policies encouraging public interest journalism – and made them familiar by explaining how they work in Scandinavian countries. 

Similarly, truth in political advertising laws naturally raise philosophical questions about what the nature of truth is and practical and democratic questions about who decides what is and isn’t true.  

Australia Institute research explaining how the laws have worked in South Australia for 40 years without major incident helps allay these very reasonable fears.  

A different but equally useful comparison is to existing laws against misleading conduct in trade and commerce. I spoke to a small business owner who was surprised and amused that these laws were not extended to the politicians who made these laws. Truth in political advertising laws, which people outside South Australia and the ACT have no direct experience of, became familiar by comparison to consumer laws that business owners have followed for decades.  

Of course, something being familiar doesn’t make it good – any more than something being strange made it bad. But if you are facing an intractable disagreement, it can help to reframe the topic so both sides see it with fresh eyes.