Ibis are kinda big and kinda there. ^[1] Big enough for us to double-take at the scimitar-curve of their beaks, and there enough to shield our lunches from their hungry lunges. They bob and tread with fear around us, yet never wander far enough from the chance of feasting on our excesses.

When present, they are hard to ignore. In Sydney their materiality is easily smelt and felt: their stench, their honk and their cartoonish silhouette often overshadow their more numerous avian kin.

Their overshadowing presence is not merely material, however, but distinctly cultural. 2016 was the year of the ibis meme boom, and had The Guardian held their ‘Australia’s favourite bird poll’ a year earlier, the magpie would surely have been Trumped by their black and white bin-dwelling cousin. ^[2]

Ibis, seemingly created for caricature, are a memers dream. They adorn walls, skin, bins, beers, merch, picture books, cartoons, canvases, our socials and therefore our minds. Paradoxically, they are at once easily humanised and easily demonised: blank canvases that trot around us, their ubiquity and unmistakeable shape leaving them readily receiving our projected neuroses and diagnoses. Therefore, the stories we tell about the ibis say a lot about us and them. They are beautiful creatures that we forced out of their habitats and into our bins; they are ugly creatures that dwell in our filth: they literally drink us up and vomit us out.

Thesis

To understand how they are understood, I propose that they show us looking back at ourselves; they reflect the conflicting ideas of human nature we thrust upon them. They measure modernity’s taint by the hue of their plumage; they signify modernity’s guilt, but, gratefully, the hope of modernity’s redemption. They are black, they are white, they are dirty, they need a wash, they need to go home, but where is home now? Are they not there already, beakfirst into my bin, memefirst into my mind? Why do I call myself (and this column) the Marrickville Ibis?^[3]

The ibis as a political animal^[4]

To further our inquiry, I will consider the ibis according to the two most influential, though most thoroughly opposed, modern conceptions of human nature; namely those belonging to grumpy Mr Hobbes and idealistic Mr Rousseau, by applying them to a trueish story centred on where the ibis congregate in Marrickville. This much-vaunted congregation, opposite the other hallowed centre of Inner West civic life, Marrickville library, is a poultry-polis par excellence that bespeckles the palm trees along Marrickville Road in front of St Brigid’s Church.^[5] Due to the preponderance of poo that gunks up underneath this polis, the locals call it Splatter Alley. There is another reason, though, why this alley bears this name, to which the following story will bear close witness…

***

A fresh-feathered babe opens his eyes for the first time. He looks around at the bespattered green fronds that dovetail to make the bed underneath him, then looks up to see those that made it for him: mama and papa, looking at him down their long noses with their gleaming black eyes. He closes his own black beadys and inhales through his black snout. All he can smell is poo. A noise of soft satisfaction, a cooing honk: his first.

Our baby ibis is further satisfied when he hears another honk, just like his, up here in the palm trees, and further honks, down below.

They must be like me, he thinks to himself in his tiny ibis head.

He peeks his beak through the fronds and sees other nests, just like his, and other babies, just like him. Happy honks.

Some deeper, less happy, honks come from below. They must be friends too. He looks down and hears a carcophany of honks from the Great Path Below; he sees giant metal friends with agreeable smells and noises, all ambling past his home towards the Great Grey Palm, a lone tree set beautifully with three glowing orbs of different colours: red, amber and green.

I wonder why the giant metal friends only move when the green orb glows, thinks our baby.

Wondering leads to wandering, and our baby takes one giant leap for ibiskind by stepping straight out of the poultry-polis and toppling honkfirst into the state of nature, his fall cushioned by a mound of zebra-coloured guano. Dazed, but still in unblinking wide-eyed appreciation of his new existence, our baby wanders onto the Great Path Below towards the Great Grey Palm.

Alas, our baby’s mama and papa ibis never told him about the one bird of prey every baby ibis must fear, a foul introduced species that every day runs afoul of every road safety law and yuppie green-NIMBY norm of the Inner West: Fordus Raptorus. Our baby doesn’t know that this heartless steel beast accelerates quickest when the amber orb glows. Our baby doesn’t know that the beast reaches maximum velocity in school zones, on main roads and near public places. Our baby doesn’t know his nest adorns the front of a school on Marrickville road, opposite Marrickville library. What our baby doesn’t know will hurt him.

Some human younglings are walking on the footpath parallel to the Great Path, holding hands behind their teacher, all wearing big sunhats and enjoying the late afternoon sun and energy that comes right before hometime in summer. One little youngling sees our baby ibis wander onto the road.

‘Miss look a beautiful baby pigeon!’

‘Yes yes there’s always a beautiful baby pigeon. Actually no no that’s not a pigeon that’s a gross ibis, stay away from them or they’ll steal your lunch. Come on now, we’re almost ther…’

The teacher is stopped dead by the roar of the Raptor in full fang: a full-throated, fossil-fuelled growl straight from the furnaces of Hades.

Our baby and the youngling both turn to see the source of the dread noise. The Ford Raptor has reached max speed, mulleted hipsters and tote-bag toting jaywalkers falling either side of it like tattooed bowling pins.

The youngling opens her mouth, her eyes already beginning to tear up, the trauma of what she is about to see and smell already spreading like black ink through her synapses.

Our baby sees the tyres. Our baby closes his eyes for the last time. The Great Grey Palm glows blood-red.

***

Rousseau: “the ibis is born free but everywhere is in chains”

The ibis is a noble savage, a victim cruelly displaced from his natural home by the creeping land-lust of modern colonisation and consumerism.^[6] This oppression has coarsened the ibis: they do the best with the crappy hand they’ve been dealt; their fondness for the bin juice and the disgusting of modernity is their attempt to repurify environmental degradation by giving new life to that deemed purposeless, derelict, trash.

The story shows the inborn benevolent naivete of our baby ibis, as yet untainted by the corruptions of the techno-industrial ecocidic state that surrounds his flock’s meagre refuge. ‘Twas his innocence and the Ford Raptor’s malevolence that led to the externalising of his internals. Rousseau would argue the only way to break this cycle of trauma and exploitation is to rearrange the distributive machinery of society based on what is good for all, not allowing for the rapacity of private interest. Only by destroying Ford, the Raptors they produce, and the assembly-line crapitalism they represent, can we and the ibis return to an Edenic coexistence based on a new, swampy collectivism: the social contract of the general swill.

Hobbes: “the condition of ibis is war of every one against every one”

Contra Rousseau, Hobbes would say that this sad tale of splatter-down economics merely shows the barbarity of the state of nature. The Raptor’s rupturing of our baby is just what happens when the strong encounter the weak. Everyone plays the wargame of the survival of the fittest, man is merely its ultimate practitioner. The ibis are no less barbarous than us; that gleam in the eye of mama and papa ibis could just as easily have been hunger or the insatiable yearning for violence as the tearful pride of new parenthood. Even a conglomerate Levibisthan, a power-hungry Sovereign with the monopoly use of legitimate force, would just shift the blood-stained knuckledusters of the state of nature onto the iron fist of the State.^[7] The reality of life for the ibis is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Who’s right? Let’s fight

These contrasting visions animate the lasting divisions of our culture war. They are visions in the true sense of the word: what we see, our perception of reality, and what we wish to see, our preference for reality. The ‘constrained’ vision is Hobbesian in that it believes humanity is naturally flawed and requires constraints to flourish; these constraints being the hard-won norms that allow for society to exist at all, therefore needing conserving and watchful protection.^[8] The ‘unconstrained’ vision is Rousseauan in that it asserts any outside constraints impede man’s inherent perfectibility, and therefore any constraint, whether it be racism, sexism, nationalism or the creation of constraints in the first place, must be abolished for a just society.

This conflict of visions is seen daily in the struggle between globalists (who tend to be unconstrained progressives) and nationalists (who tend to be constrained conservatives).^[9] Globalists want all drawbridges flung open lest we corrupt ourselves from the inside out, whereas nationalists want the drawbridge shut lest we be corrupted from the outside in.

Both visions have noble intentions. The globalists are grounded in the belief in the equal dignity of everyone; who are you to judge and exclude based on something as confected and arbitrary as nationality? Love must be universal.

The nationalists foreground how you best love someone based on their proximity to you; you should show partiality to your spouse over a Norwegian oil-driller you’ve never met, and expect them to do the same. Love must be particular.

The true problem everyone faces in the conflict of these visions is how we see those who see differently to us. Both sides see the other as the chief despoiler of their vision of the good: they see the monstrous in the Other and struggle to accept them.

The constrained vision is rightly suspicious of threats to the norm, particularly those who wish to radically change the wise constraints on which society is built: those on the extremes and those on the outside. The abnormal is Othered. The unconstrained vision believes you show your own monstrosity when you Other another.^[10] Othering itself is othered, the only thing you can judge is judgmentalism.

The mutual monstering within our society’s contrasting visions will remain so long as man maintains his myth that he is his ultimate measure of meaning. The constrained devolves into ressentiment: a hateful jealousy of those better at conforming to the Norm; the unconstrained, anomie: the infinite loneliness of normlessness, with true tolerance and trust impossible. We are left as ruthless as Robespierre, faithfully practising what Rousseau preached in guillotining those that do not conform to the general will; in other words, violently cancelling those who disagree with us. It’s easy to despair at the options, accepting either the bloodshed implicit in the status quo or the bloodshed of the revolution to upend it, only for a new hegemon to hedge us in.^[11]

Are the ibis Other?

How does the ibis fit into this? Surely most of just find them to be curious and comic creatures, charming at best and chunderful at worst, not icons of ideology.

Yeah. That’s probably true.

But the stories we tell about them do tend to fit the conflict of visions thesis: as explored before they can be oppressed environmental refugees oppressed by modernity’s incursion on their natural habitat; they can be barbaric parasites bludging off the excesses of their master, modern man.

Unconstrained victim

^[13]

Constrained Scablord

^[14]

It could be speciesist to reject them, cold-shoulderable to accept them.

But they are just birds, birds that live in our bins, whether because of a Taronga Zoo breeding experiment gone wrong or just a relocation based on the opportunity of material gain provided by the Big Smoke.^[15] They do evince a commendable retrievalist ethic in how they find new life in our old trash, but ultimately remain amoral animals with an urge for cannibalism and coprophagy that we cannot hold them responsible for, because they aren’t us.

Who are we then? Is there an end to our doom cycle of vision conquering vision, power conquering power, man measuring man? Are we just as drenched in liquid modernity as the ibis, tainted by our own filth, with no better hope than making the best of the garbage we are given?^[16]

Local and global forever estranged, the contending over constraints forever unconstrained; the culture war would leave us with our own neuroses and diagnoses, as slaves to our environment, our system, our own barbarity.

The Other who is the Norm

But, although we are prisoners, we are prisoners with the hope of freedom. Not the false hope of the individual subject freeing themselves from subjection through solipsistic self-interest, nor the false promise of a bloodless revolution to restore us to innocent harmony with nature.

We need something Other that transcends the mess we’re in, but also that comes immanently into our mess to sort the mess out. We need a norm outside us that gives us something immutable to conform to, but works inside of us to make the conforming possible: mess can’t drive out mess.

This norm-giving Other is a person. The ibis merely reuses our natural mess, Jesus redeems our supernatural mess: the ibis dives in our bins, Jesus died for our sins.

Jesus is the only one who can judge unjudgmentally, unify the one and the many, and give us local purpose for universal hope. He is the dividing line between life and death, the friend of the friendless, the lover of the unlovable. He knows every dark monstrosity you have committed and yet flings the drawbridge of his love open and beckons you into his light, accepting you despite what you’ve done.

What is ludicrous is Jesus was Othered unconditionally by those he unconditionally redeemed from Otherhood. The only man to ever perfectly practice the perfection he preached we killed for being a liar. In truth, if not for this wrongfully killed Palestinian Jew who was born 2000 years ago, there would be no hope or freedom for the Inner West, or anywhere. He broke Rousseau’s chains and ended Hobbes’ war by winning the war against death, to give us himself.

Living in light of the light of the world

Jesus sees us as broken by our own hands in this world, but perfectible by his in the next; he sees us this way this even as he washes his blood off our hands. If we share Jesus’ vision, we trust that our best life is not just doing the best with the mess we’ve made for ourselves, but to live knowing that the garbage will be hand-sorted by Truth and Love himself. If we share Jesus’ vision, we must acknowledge the wisdom and limitations of the two dominant visions of reality, but always throw open our arms to accept every one, regardless of their vision, particularly the further it gets from our own. Culture care is the best approach to the culture war; the best way to win an argument is not to have one, but to instead win someone for Jesus. He died for people of all nations, his love is universal, but he died for those he chose, his love is particular. He commands us to love our neighbour as ourself; our neighbour being anyone, but particularly those closest to us, our actual neighbours, our Inner West. This vision is the light we need to see.

This column will hopefully be a written expression of this vision of culture care, something that sheds light on the intersection of culture, community and Christianity in Sydney’s inner west.^[17] It pays homage to our ibis friends, symbolic sentinels of our culture and honking reminders of our need to steward faithfully the environment God has given us. Their redeeming of that deemed unlovable is a reminder of Jesus’ love for unlovable us; the promise of their reconciliation with their original environs a reminder of the incoming Kingdom of heaven: Jesus’ sure and true vision of reality.

Like the proverbial canary down the mine, we have chucked the ibis into our metaphysical rubbish to see what sticks. They are more easily anthropomorphised than other birds because, at least in the material culture of the Inner West, they’re kinda big and kinda there. They show us who we are, or who we think we are, but they are birds, not people. They live with the dread of man; close enough to enjoy his material excess but far enough to avoid his moral excesses. But we can be consoled, that if the Lord even provides for the ibis, how much more will he provide for ibus.

1. Ibis has trumped ibes, ibises, ibi and ibides as my plural of choice for this article (Marrickville Ibis is not just me or this column, but the great stinking throng of ibus). Also plural: the other titles considered: Why the ibis, Consider the ibis, The ibis as a political animal, The ibis as modernity’s redemption, I stared into the ibyss, and the ibyss stared back into me. ↑
2. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/magpie-edges-out-white-ibis-and-kookaburra-as-australian-bird-of-the-year This election was stolen! ↑
3. Actually the real story is I deleted my old facebook due to the now-familiar concerns of its blunting of the soul with its slot-machine approach to human networking: a short-circuiting of the mirror neurons that left me constantly agog and drooling, my reward centres pulling and repulling the pleasure-lever to watch the pretty pictures the Zucc and co conjured up for me in exchange for my hearts desires, which they then dutifully quantise, datify, then repackage to be sold to the highest (or lowest) bidder. After my heroic desertion of facebook, I then went right back onto its dopamine-drip to organise some local open mic nights for my church, creating a throwaway account, ‘Marrickville Ibis,’ to use its very convenient event organisation and messaging portals due to the inescapable fact that it works coz everyone is on it. Some of the people there wanted to befriend me (online and offline), so I added them on facebook. My account name then became a good way into the gospel when talking with work friends (‘why are you called Marrickville Ibis? Are you ok?’), and a good way to preserve memeish anonymity in our days of metadata omniscience and curious students looking for their teacher’s (hopefully funny) online footprint. The truth is I can’t get off facebook, I am trapped, drums, drums in the deep, the way is shut and the dead keep it, the way is shut, I cannot get out… ↑
4. We live in an age where power is the most powerful tool to diagnose the sins of our age. As the state is the biggest tool going around (looking at you, the Man), politics has slowly enveloped civics as the dominant means by which we ingroup ourselves and outgroup the Other. Since the democratic election of the Nazis, we hold our elected wielders of power in the highest disregard, but asymmetrically. Our guy is fine, their guy is Cthulu, the antichrist, or even worse, Donald Trump/Joe Biden. Although I jest, our politics is homophilising dangerously, though whether this is just coz we’re:
   a. at an inflection point of a historical cycle that trends bloodthirstily towards revolution, or
   b. just more aware of the devilish dance of power because of Foucault and Nietzsche, the whirrs of antisocial media and the global dread of nuclear-powered geopolitics,
   remains an either-or and/or a both-and beyond the scope of this article. Given my thesis of the ibis reflecting our nature, and given the spirit of our age is to be hyper power-conscious, it bears to symbolic reason that the ibis is a political animal. ↑
5. The polis, from which we derive politics, is the city-state considered by Aristotle to be a natural consequence of our rational essence (we need an audience to hear our endless philosophising!). We are rational animals, therefore political animals, according to Aristotle. Nowadays we would say we are political animals, therefore irrational animals. Go figure. ↑
6. Rousseau never actually used the term noble savage in his writings, though it is often attributed to him as a way to explain his idea of human perfectibility, pretty much man’s ability ‘to learn and thereby to find new and better means to satisfy his needs’. ie, people aren’t born perfectly good, but, different to all other animals, we can become perfectly good through lots of intellectual effort. He thought things go wrong and chains fly when men reach puberty and develop amour propre (self regard), coz then we start to think we’re better than our peers, particularly in vying for sexual favours from women (lol). His views are more complex than my caricature of his philosophy, but perfectibility and its spawn nevertheless have provided the philosophical ballast for the unconstrained view of human nature throughout modern Western thought. ↑
7. The ‘state of nature’ is Hobbes’ term for man’s condition of brutishly living for himself when he free from the restrictions of a ruling power. The Leviathan is Hobbes’ term for the social contract necessary to tame the state of nature, made up by individuals forfeiting their right to kill each other by instead giving it lawfully to a commonwealth sovereign State. The name is pinched from the enormous sea-monster in the bible, so next time you’re bored in line at Service NSW just remember it’s just another head of the hegemonic hydra just waiting to snap you up… ↑
8. Haidt uses Sowell’s conflict of visions thesis to buttress his claim that a way of forging nation and globe together is through inclusive assimilation. ‘Tis a good read: https://www.humansandnature.org/the-ethics-of-globalism-nationalism-and-patriotism ↑
9. Obviously this dichotomy (as any dichotomy) is limiting, but we all have limited space and time to communicate the vagaries of thought so they’ll have to do. I’ve omitted several notable views of human nature. Locke would see the ibis as trotting honking tabula rasas. Derrida would see the ibis as the forgotten Other in Western theorising about animals; we are animals just like them, but we’ve been irrationally constructed as rational compared to them. My mum would say ‘Stop writing these weird ibis articles and get a real job’. ↑
10. Perceiving monstrosity has mutated over time to shift focus from the modern boundary-crossing monster in Other to the postmodern boundary-creating monster in self. Halberstam, Judith. “Making Monsters: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” In Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, 28-52. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995, p.25. ↑
11. Nietzsche was hilariously sceptical of harebrained political revolutions: ‘A delusion in the theory of revolution. — There are political and social fantasists who with fiery eloquence invite a revolutionary overturning of all social orders in the belief that the proudest temple of fair humanity will then rise up at once as though of its own accord. In these perilous dreams there is still an echo of Rousseau’s superstition, which believes in a miraculous primeval but as it were buried goodness of human nature and ascribes all the blame for this burying to the institutions of culture in the form of society, state and education. The experiences of history have taught us, unfortunately, that every such revolution brings about the resurrection of the most savage energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages: that a revolution can thus be a source of energy in a mankind grown feeble but never a regulator, architect, artist, perfector of human nature….’(Human, All Too Human, vol. I, sec. 463, tr. Hollingdale) ↑
12. By Josh Wilcox from fb. ↑
13. From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO-OpFjHRbE ↑
14. Actual black and white ibis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoywgwFAPDU ↑
15. ‘Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To ‘be modern’ means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just ‘to be’, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying underdefined. Each new structure which replaces the previous one as soon as it is declared old-fashioned and past its use-by date is only another momentary settlement – acknowledged as temporary and ‘until further notice’. Being always, at any stage and at all times, ‘post-something’ is also an undetachable feature of modernity. As time flows on, ‘modernity’ changes its forms in the manner of the legendary Proteus . . . What was some time ago dubbed (erroneously) ‘post-modernity’ and what I’ve chosen to call, more to the point, ‘liquid modernity’, is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago ‘to be modern’ meant to chase ‘the final state of perfection’ — now it means an infinity of improvement, with no ‘final state’ in sight and none desired. (Zygmunt Bauman, 82) . ↑
16. Though really I guess it’s just my blog, so this column is just whatever I want to write about I guess? Gee what’s all this hifalutin window-dressing for one man’s vanity! I’ve just created this strange blog in my own strange image. My sensuous mind is particularly puffed up today… ↑