Afleveringen
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The political climate over the last six months in much of the world has been undeniably dark. Itâs little wonder that so many people seem to have given in to despair.
The causes of this prevailing condition are numerous â they include the ongoing death and destruction in Ukraine and Gaza, the devastating return of dead Israeli hostages, the rising tide of antisemitic and Islamophobic violence, the tearing of Australiaâs social fabric, the ascendancy of anti-democratic forces in the worldâs advanced democracies, the seeming impotence of international and constitutional law to safeguard our ideals of justice and accountability, the waning of political determination to address climate change.
Our despair stems from a sense of radical disappointment with the state of the world. It is not only that the world seems impervious to our collective aspirations for justice, peace and the protection of the vulnerable â it is as if the world rewards mere force and a casual indifference to the fragility of human life.
Over the four weeks of the month of Ramadan, we will be exploring some of our responses to this radical disappointment with the world â beginning, appropriately, with despair itself. Should despair always be avoided? When it gives rise to resignation and a kind of nihilist inaction, yes. But despair can also be a morally fitting response to the preciousness of what it is that is lost or under threat.
Could it even be, as Henry David Thoreau recognised, that despair can be âthe slime and muckâ out of which hope, like a water lily, can grow?
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As the results of the recent German election came in, a familiar pattern took shape. A broadly unpopular centre-left political party was voted out â due, in no small part, to its immigration policies and perceived economic failures â in favour of a centre-right party who pledged to adopt a âstrongerâ approach to borders and migrants, and to restore the nation to its former prosperity.
Lurking in the wings, meanwhile, is growing far-right movement that cannot overtly be courted by the governing parties, but whose popular appeal is implicitly acknowledged in the way they frame their policies and rhetoric.
For decades, the âfirewallâ (die Brandmauer) has stood between the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), on one side, and the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and the centre-left Social Democratic Party, on the other. But forces from with without, and political tactics from within, seem intent on testing whether that non-cooperation agreement should continue to hold.
So is a âfirewallâ â which seeks to limit the parliamentary influence of the far-right â the right way to defend a constitutional democracy, or does it undermine claims of democratic legitimacy?
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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At a time when the Australian community seems to be so deeply divided along multiple faultlines, there was something somewhat heartening about being able to share a common outrage. Thatâs only word that captures the depth of public response that greeted a now infamous video in which two nurses at Bankstown Hospital seemed to express extreme anti-Israeli/antisemitic sentiments and allegedly boasted about killing Israeli patients in their care.
While some have used the video to exacerbate tensions within Australian society, the broader response points to a recognition of the sacred obligation of heath workers to attend to the vulnerable bodies in their care. It is an obligation that was reaffirmed immediately and forcefully after the video came to light.
The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation led the way:
âWe know that health and peace are deeply connected â one cannot exist without the other. Through our commitment to care, compassion, and justice, we continue to uphold these values and stand against all forms of violence, hatred, and discrimination. Our strength lies in our unity, and we must always uphold the principles of respect, kindness, and understanding toward one another regardless of background, faith, or identity.â
And then there is Mike Freelander, a paediatrician and the federal Labor member for the NSW seat of Macarthur:
âWe health professionals have an obligation to care, treat and protect our patientsâ health and this is an obligation we take immensely seriously. This is a sacred responsibility that is universal, no matter which God we pray to or none.â
And finally, Jamal Rifi, a Lebanese Australian doctor, who said:
âNo health practitioner should ever treat anyone differently based on their religion, culture or nationality. We treat them as human beings.â
It is hard to remember a time when shared institutions (such as hospitals and the courts) and shared commitments (the obligation to care for patients, or the dignity of the accused) have been more important. Their moral significance lay in their indiscriminacy. When hate speech and other forms of discrimination occur in such institutions, it can damage the faith we have in the institutions themselves.
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In 2016, the Western Bulldogs made an improbable run to the AFL Grand Final. The seventh-place team would beat the minor premiers, the Sydney Swans, and end a six-decade drought. But their longest serving player, the erstwhile captain and heart-and-soul of the team, Bob Murphy, would not take the field. In the third round, a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament had ended the 17-year veteranâs season.
After their triumph, Murphy watched his teammates walk up to the dais, one by one, to receive their premiership medal. He felt elation, and pride, at his teamâs success. But there was an undeniable separation between him and them. As he wrote in his memoir, Leather Soul:
âThe Dogs sat atop the football mountain as famous victors and I was part of that, but the 22 players on the field had just become football immortals. There was a clear line between the 22 who played and the rest of us. Thatâs just how it is in our game.â
The secret to the Bulldogsâ success was âteam over individualâ â and no one embodied that ethos more than Bob Murphy. He tried to console himself that it couldnât be any different after their Grand Final victory.
But then the Bulldogsâ coach, Luke Beveridge, said into the microphone, âIâd like to call Bob Murphy to the stand âŠâ
What did this experience teach Murphy about the emotional cords that bind teams together, about the importance of shared stories, about the centrality of connection?
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There are few jobs in professional sports that are more important, and more unforgiving, than that of coach. Their most significant work is invisible to the fans. When things go wrong, the coach is usually the first to be blamed. When the team is enjoying success, it is the players that typically reap the accolades.
Coaches can make or break a club. They can transform mid-tier teams to genuine contenders, and they can utterly âlose the locker roomâ.
But the weight of responsibility that many coaches feel is not just the expectation to win. Itâs the cultivation of a winning culture â creating the kind of environment that encourages players to sacrifice for one another, and strengthening the bonds that enabling them to withstand the dangers of failure and success.
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Athletes would seem to be the embodiments of strength, discipline, autonomy, self-reliance. Of all people, we would expect them to be invulnerable to the moments of self-doubt and weakness that afflict the rest of us.
And yet, particularly after serious injuries or during long periods of convalescence and rehabilitation, many athletes experience intensified forms of the vulnerability â the dependency upon others, the dis-ability, even â that are essential to the human condition.
So what can the experience of physical limitation on the part of elite athletes tell us about what Alasdair MacIntyre calls âthe virtues of acknowledged dependenceâ?
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Within certain religious traditions, pride is a âspecial sinâ because it involves an overestimation of oneâs self â making oneself a little âgodâ in oneâs own eyes. But Aristotle did not regard pride as such to be a vice, only its unwarranted or unmerited expressions.
The important thing for Aristotle was not to seek recognition or adulation from just anyone. Instead, we should try to do things that make us proud of the person we have become â and that elicit pride from those we respect and admire.
Many people are (rightly) turned off by arrogant or contemptuous or boastful athletes. But the ability to be proud of oneself â the person Iâve become, what it took for me to get here, that Iâve honoured the faith my mentors placed in me, to say nothing of the time and effort of the team around me â is surely inseparable from athletic achievement. From true greatness.
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Over the next five weeks, we are going to be exploring a series of profound moral dilemmas with some of Australiaâs most accomplished athletes. How has their life in elite competition prepared them to wrestle with challenges so many of us have faced ourselves? Has sporting excellence succeeded in bringing out the best in them? If so, what can that teach the rest of us?
But before we examine the best, it seems only fitting that we first acknowledge the worst. In their frequent displays of superiority, and in their demand for adulation â even âworshipâ â elite athletes mark themselves as a class apart. More than billionaires, music stars and monarchs, it is athletes who seem to live among us like gods: bigger, faster, stronger than the rest of us.
Should we be surprised, then, when these athletes do not want to be bound by the normal laws of human behaviour? After all, the arenas they inhabit are governed by rules of their own, and their conduct in these arenas evokes older, mythic, more violent times: a time of combatants, aggressors, warriors, giants, titans. Is it any wonder that so many elite athletes â given their physical supremacy, the vast sums of money at their disposal, and the ready throng of worshippers that surround them â should be peculiarly susceptible to the arch-vices, the seven deadly sins?
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One of Australia's greatest strengths has been the remarkable diversity of its multicultural society. But is this also a potential source of weakness? In this live recording at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens, along with guest Stan Grant, explore the internal and external forces that risk undermining our sense of social unity.This episode was first broadcast on 08 September 2024.
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It is worth reflecting, not just on what is singular about Taylor Swift at this particular cultural moment â why she attracts both the loyalty and the animus that she does â but on what it is about live music events that now draw millions of people to them.This episode was first broadcast on 18 February 2024.
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During the pandemic, there was a sudden renewal of interest in Harold Ramis's 1993 film "Groundhog Day" â especially its bleaker aspects. But this missed its sophistication and humanity, to say nothing of its acute depiction of moral growth.This episode was first broadcast on 05 May 2024.
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Because our lives are increasingly tailor-made, we are constantly seeking ways of distinguishing ourselves from others. What is being lost through it all is our sense of a humanity whose inherent vulnerability to misfortune, malfeasance and violence makes us dependent on one another.This episode was first broadcast on 07 July 2024.
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Are periodic bouts of withdrawal from lifeâs urgent demands and heated debates necessary to regain a sense of our shared humanity, and to renew the commitments that sustain the moral life? This episode was first broadcast on 17 March 2024.
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Poised as we are at the brink of our great annual festival of shopping, wrapping, giving and exchanging, we can sometimes forget just how ethically complicated the act of âgift-givingâ is.
In fact, those who recoil at the idea of receiving the âcharityâ of others, as well as those who are suspicious of the clandestine giving of gifts and doing of favours âsuggesting a corrupt quid pro quo â are more attuned to this ethical complexity than those who take an unseemly delight in the prospect of âout-giftingâ another.
In its best forms, we like to think of gift-giving as an expression of a sense of gratitude that the other person is in the world, and that we get to share the world with them. What is meant to be communicated by such gifts, then, is the simple acknowledgement of their preciousness to us, and that our lives our bound together.
Should gift-giving elicit a kind of reciprocity? After all, as Marcel Mauss recognised, gifts create forms of obligation, even indebtedness. So just as there is an ethics of gift giving, there is also an art to gift receiving. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, âHe is a good man, who can receive a gift wellâ.
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Democracy is in retreat, authoritarianism on the rise. But this has happened before. So how did big thinkers of the past respond to the threats to democracy, and what can we learn from them?
Scott Stephens delivered the Humanities Research Centre 50th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture at the Australian National University on 31 July 2024. It was recorded and subsequently broadcast as part of the SOS DEMOCRACY series on Big Ideas.
After the lecture, Scott answers questions from Dr Kim Huynh, the Deputy Director of the Humanities Research Centre, and members of the audience.
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In December 1974, âThe Godfather, Part IIâ premiered in New York City. Following the unlikely success and unexpected acclaim that his 1972 adaptation of Mario Puzoâs bestselling novel received, Francis Ford Coppola was granted almost unlimited discretion to realise his cinematic vision for the sequel â and he used that discretion to greatest possible effect.
In fact, âThe Godfatherâ and âThe Godfather, Part IIâ are rare instances of films that far outstrip, in both its narrative depth and its aesthetic form, the source material on which they are based.
At the heart of the first two âGodfatherâ films is a stark contrast. Vito is virtuous within a cinematic universe in which legality and morality are not synonymous: the fact that his assassination of the tyrannical Don Fanucci is celebrated, that his âfavoursâ are beneficent, that he is attentive to his wife and children â all suggest a kind of moral goodness. Whereas Michael, having begun as the most virtuous of Don Corleoneâs sons, falls deeper than the others could have gone.
Having begun alone, somewhat removed from the family, Michael ends the film utterly, existentially, morally, isolated.
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Most of us are aware that the emergence of social media platforms and their omnipresence in our lives have fractured public discourse and undermined the conditions of democratic deliberation.
But we are only now beginning to grapple with the way corporations â having already decided to make âvaluesâ and âethicsâ central in their self-presentation to consumers â have become increasingly susceptible to public pressure to deal harshly with employees who express controversial, distasteful or simply divisive opinions.
As a result, limitations on the speech of employees are being tolerated that would rarely be accepted within a democratic society.
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âDonald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.â Such is the assessment of Peter Wehner â a Republican strategist and former adviser to President George W. Bush, and an outspoken critic of Trump himself â in the aftermath of the former presidentâs thundering re-election victory.
It was not an electoral college landslide of the order of Barack Obamaâs in 2008 or Bill Clintonâs in 1996. But it was sufficiently decisive as to command a reckoning. Perhaps most obviously, his victory relegates the Biden presidency to a kind of hiatus within what may well prove to be Trumpâs twelve-year dominance of American politics.
The fact that Trump survived all the forces arrayed against him â political, legal, economic, cultural, popular â reinforces the power of his âpersecutionâ narrative, and will likely only deepen Americansâ disdain for democratic institutions. One of the live questions of this election is whether Trumpâs resurgence will encourage the would-be-antidemocratic leaders of other nations to follow his playbook.
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One of the defining features of the last century is the fact that âevilâ has become more vivid to our imaginations and common in our language than âgoodâ. Stan Grant joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether âevilâ is, in our time, a concept worth holding onto. Or does its use and misuse in our public discourse cause more harm and confusion than good?
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