What you perceive as progress depends on your perspective. To the logger, progress is cleared land, but to the conservationist it is trees standing tall. The logger is not wrong to want a job that suits their skills and enables them to provide for their family. And the conservationist is not wrong to want to conserve the environment for future generations. This tug-of-war between self-interest and the public interest is ever present, and maintaining balance is key to everyone not falling over. We know this because we’ve tried the extremes of both.

I have been re-reading the unbearably heart-rending letters sent from my parents in Germany and Austria to their more fortunate family members in Australia in the years leading to the implementation of the Nazis’ Final Solution. The events they describe should be well-known to anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of recent history – and I fervently hope this is true of the current generation of young people. Indeed the Holocaust is so often recounted in novels and film I worry that, paradoxically, many are numbed to its horrors.

Plenty of non-religious Australians have fought, and have died, in war for our country. While the insulting line that there are “no atheists in foxholes” is often thrown around, religion – particularly, Christianity – has never been a unifying force among military personnel. Historians have noted that a great number of diggers during the First World War were not religious. Indeed, many showed a lack of interest in religion and distrusted military chaplains. One researcher and historian Chrys Stevenson has described the very ethos of the Anzacs as “overwhelmingly irreligious”.

A stanza in the Buddhist text Dhammapada states: “There never was, there never will be, nor does there exist now a person who is wholly blamed or wholly praised.” The obituaries for materialist philosopher and Darwinist – a few would say ‘ultra Darwinist’ – Daniel Dennett, who died on 19 April, exemplify the essential correctness of the Buddhist text. While some have provided solid praise for the late philosopher, others have equivocated about his work. Some have been quite critical, although not ‘blaming’ him as such.

This, it seems, is the pivotal year. The moral war has been launched. By December 25, we will have learned whether George Orwell’s 1984 was an accurate prediction of the future or just a scary tale of what might have been. 2024 has already been billed as the ‘Year of the Democracies’ since there are so many nations going to the polls. But some are dark gestures – vile shadows of the process. In Russia, for instance, Vladimir Putin murdered or jailed his opponents yet still conducts a farcical poll and boasts of the result. Xi Jinping continues his act as pretend emperor, and the little dictators trail along.