Call me naive, but might there be a correction coming - a global renaissance of the human heart?

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It is possible that we in the West might yet look back on the first third of the 21st century and feel embarrassed at how wantonly petulant things became.

Ashamed, maybe, that we'd grown so accustomed to peace and pluralism that we nearly traded them in for the tinny kick-down satisfactions of intolerance and tribalism.

The positive signs are there if you look. Individually they seem small. Cumulatively, they can be marshalled to challenge the grim fatalism which has felt permanent since the GFC.

Doubtless, this has been a rough century so far for optimists - collapsing trust in norms and institutions, climate denial, runaway greed and inequality, resurgent racism, a pandemic of incivility, a real pandemic which saw the good-faith efforts of authorities traduced, and an accumulation of unprecedented power in the hands of sociopathic billionaires, oligarchs and autocrats.

But just as you need the blackest night to best see the stars, the hints of something better are twinkling.

Hints like the belated realisation by Angus Taylor last week that appeasing Pauline Hanson's rancorous nationalism meant disaster for the once big-tent Liberal Party, deepening Australia's divisions and hastening national failure.

Not so long ago, an ebullient Hanson was freely attacking the Coalition for plagiarising her policies, branding it gutless.

Not so now. After his curious reluctance to reject Hanson's fanciful Australian "monoculture" plan, Taylor seems to have worked out where his existential threat lay.

He came out swinging in a midweek speech declaring Hanson's vaporous ideas would bring an "eternity of pain", sending inflation soaring and the deficit too. Well done, sir.

Just four of her unfunded promises would cost the government a trillion dollars over a........

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