“Maybe our species is not fit for purpose – perhaps hard fact and comforting fiction are inseparable in the human psyche; and our time in the universe will be as fleeting as a passing shadow,” writes “The Gadfly” columnist ROBERT MACKLIN. 

MY old French master, with his quiet smile at the double entendre, told us: “Words have gender; people have sex”. 

It was a nice line – memorable but inoffensive, instructive but debatable. However, it was the following questions and answers that have kept the memory fresh. Everyone had a go and we walked away feeling pretty good.

Today, while the ballooning world population affirms that people still indeed have sex, they also share the “gender” marker with the written, spoken (and shouted) word. In fact, “gender”, “sexual preference” and a growing alphabetical list of hormonal predilections have expanded the vocab far beyond the old English master’s imagining.

At the same time, we’re engaged in a worldwide revolution to recognise and redeem the behaviour of those on the male side of the hormonal spectrum towards the female of the species. 

What in the master’s day was laughingly called “the battle of the sexes” is a laughing matter no more. For months, it seems, the Parliament has been obsessed with it.

It comes just as two other existential issues bear down upon us – the weird 20th century-style war in Ukraine, which could so easily turn nuclear; and the almost inevitable runaway heating of the globe leading to mass extinction, perhaps even of our own role as the apex predator. 

Our responses to these threats do not bode well. Dictator Putin is downloading his atomic warheads to his thuggish enforcer in Belarus. This will give him the squeak of deniability should one of them “accidentally” explode over Kyiv. 

The bodies of hundreds – soon to be thousands – of climate escapees are piling up in the depths of the Mediterranean as our fellow “people smugglers” enrich themselves with their victims’ plight. 

Others of similar ilk are feeding an insatiable addiction to escape reality with the illusion provided by cocaine, heroin, alcohol, speed, LSD or anything else that offers surcease from the normality of an earlier age.

Across the Pacific the gun-crazy, evangelical Americans are shooting each other in schools and businesses as they’re forced to choose a president between a kindly old dodderer and a rabble-rousing conman. They’re threatening war with our biggest trading partner, which is run by a pretend emperor, while Xi Jinping himself uses provincial Taiwan as a symbol of his historical magnificence… as though history really gives a damn.

In the middle of all this, we’ve finally begun to realise the shocking pain of dispossession us whitefellas imposed on the Aboriginal people who had lived in relative harmony with the natural world from time immemorial. 

And a new government is taking the first step in a healing process called the Voice to Parliament (together, alas, with the lawyerly “and the executive government”).

It feels like we’re fighting on all fronts while blinded by the smoke of a raging bushfire… and our usual weapons of informational force majeure are scattered to the four wild winds of social media. 

Perhaps the answer is hiding in plain sight. To engage it depends on our willingness to step back from the chaos and seek the common denominator that connects them. 

Perhaps the old English master touched a hopeful chord, one that spoke thoughtfully, humorously and a little provocatively, of the rules we make to navigate our way through our brief span of communal life. At least we listened to the questions and answers.

But maybe our species is not fit for purpose – perhaps hard fact and comforting fiction are inseparable in the human psyche; and our time in the universe will be as fleeting as a passing shadow. 

robert@robertmacklin.com