#7 The writer of Catharsis: history, identity and thinking oneself free with Stan Grant

“Is our liberal democracy up to the task of meeting the ethical claims and challenges of [historical] truth? Are we up to it? Because if we are not, liberal democracy will fall. It won’t fall because China is more strong: it will fall because it is incapable of dealing with the ethical demands that are being placed on it from its own people; its own constituents.”

It is my great honour in this podcast to speak with Stan Grant: International Affairs Analyst at the ABC and award-winning author of books like Talking to My Country, Australia Day, and most recently, With the Falling of the Dusk.

In this wide ranging conversation, we grapple with the big ideas: thinking oneself free through writing and philosophy; the poisonous relationship between history and identity; the return of China and the challenges facing liberal democracy from within. Stan finishes with a clarion call to finish the work we are in: to bind up the nation's wounds for Australia's Indigenous peoples.

00:00
0:20 Introducing Stan Grant
01:05 Books piled up to the ceiling!
01:45 Living in the world of ideas
02:00 The ideas that gave birth to our modern world
02:55 A man who asks questions: ‘I’ve had to try to think myself free’
03:20 Journalism as the ‘first draft of history’
03:50 Hegel’s philosophy of history: ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’
05:10 Hegel and his contradictions
05:45 The process of becoming
06:35 The modern idea of tyranny
07:50 Tragedy and world events
09:47 The Gulag and the Gas Chamber
09:55 The quest for identity and the weight of historical grievance
09:40 The Highway of Despair
11:30 ‘History is the poison in the blood stream of our identities’
11:50 Thinking oneself free
12:30 Nietzsche and ressentiment
13:45 Forgetting and the liberal project
14:22 Writing as a dialectical process
14:40 Jean Améry: Surviving Auschwitz and resentment as virtue
15:30 Mandela and Tutu: Truth and Reconciliation
16:50 The dialectic should never end
17:14 ‘The Australia of my head and the Australia of my heart’
17:25 Do intellectual conclusions hold up under the weight of history?
19:18 Hume: ‘Reason is the slave of the passions’
19:45 ‘I live in Exile’: the storyteller and the nation
22:00 Eduoard Glissant: the poetics of relation
23:00 Richard Flanagan’s advice: ‘You are the writer of Catharsis’
24:10 The train to China
24:40 The dissonance between thought and affairs
27:30 ‘We are potentially sleepwalking to war'
30:00 China’s humiliation and return
31:00 The fall of the Qing Empire
31:40 The Middle Kingdom and China's dark night of the soul
33:30 Mao Zedong: ‘The Chinese people have stood up’
34:15 Xi Jin Ping: completing the revolution
35:25 Liberalism has a history problem
36:30 Hong Kong as a ‘scar on the soul’ of the Chinese nation
37:30 The power of Han nationalism
38:20 Liberalism and its troubled past
41:20 Edmund Burke: a liberal who understands history
43:29 Ideals in politics: Kant’s ‘perpetual peace’
44:00 ‘The moral arc of history does not bend towards justice’
44:45 Progress is a lie: ‘How can you write poetry after Auschwitz?’
44:50 Kant, Hegel, Rawls and Burke: moral failing and what it teaches us
47:10 Challenging liberalism and its claim to neutrality
50:00 In working from within the framework of liberal democracy an effective way of addressing injustices against Australia's Indigenous peoples?
50:35 The Uluru Statement from the Heart as ‘a high water mark of Australian liberalism’
51:18 Individual and group rights
52:20 Doubting the ‘better angels of our nature’
52:50 Dr King’s final sermon: ‘Why America may go to hell’
55:00 Australia’s Shame: Don Dale Detention Centre and the speech I would have given
57:20 Binding up the nation’s wounds
58:30 'Ultimately, something must redeem us’
01:00:00 The writer of catharsis: is our liberal democracy up to the task of meeting the ethical claims and challenges of [historical] truth?

Скачать видео