Professor, journalist and author, Wiradjuri man Stan Grant drew on sociologist Zigmunt Bauman’s characterisation of the present age as “liquid modernism” in painting a bleak picture of the new generation trapped in identity politics at the Richard Johnson memorial lecture, organised by the Centre for Public Christianity last night.
An encounter with “Kate”, a young indigenous woman in tears at a National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholic Council meeting, informs Grant’s talk, as he reflects on her and how he has let go of bitterness in his life.
“She can barely contain herself. Through her tears, she tells me that the slaughter of people in Gaza, the starvation, homelessness, and suffering of children trigger a reminder of what happened in Australia to her Aboriginal ancestors. For this young woman, I’ll call Kate, the war in Gaza has merged with Australian history, but not in a way that might inspire her to make the world better…
Grant observes that Kate cannot see the Israeli victims of Hamas.
“Of course, the sheer enormity of the atrocity in Gaza is beyond anything she has seen, and her solidarity is what morality demands. What Kate cannot see is that we are all implicated in a world of murder. The victim today can be the perpetrator tomorrow. I would’ve liked to have thought that tears are our truly shared human language. I have reported from the Middle East, I know Israeli mothers and Palestinian mothers.”
Grant reflects: “All I can think is that we have so failed. We have given Kate a world of 24-hour news, faceless, friendly, constant distraction, disposable entertainment. It is a world stripped of beauty for beauty’s sake, an altogether cynical world. At school. If she’s exposed at all to the classics, Kate would be more likely to encounter Bach, Jane Austen or William Shakespeare as problems to solve or worse enemies, such as the misery of critical theory, which has insinuated itself into our fast food lecture halls. The sheer wonder of art becomes lost in late modernity’s lies that reduce the life of firming potential of universal truth to the atomised truths of lived experience. Or, in Kate’s case, imagined lived experience. “
He’s sad for Kate, cut off from culture, captured by identity. “I may take solace that she will have at least read some of the Bible. Yet even her faith is pitted against her culture. I know from experience how many times Kate will be asked, How can you be Aboriginal and Christian as if God arrived on the first, as if Christified by a loving is now colonised. What disturbs me is that it is highly likely that Kate will have been told that such things, Shakespeare, the Bible, are not Aboriginal. This is not an idea of being Aboriginal that I grew up in a family with an Aboriginal mother and father. My relatives were Aboriginal. We were part of an extended clan and community, and I was never told that God, music, literature, or art were not for us. I can still recall the thrill of reading Dickens’ Great Expectations. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Mark Twain’s Huckberry Finn’s Adventures. Among my most treasured Christmas gifts was the book of Greek mythology. I did not understand why at the time, but when I first saw Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, I felt the presence of God.”
Critical theory fails us. “To take a little philosophical detour, remember that post-World War II critical theory was conceived as a project of emancipation from the excess of enlightenment, rationality and reason, which leads to holocaust, but it has morphed into something unground, untethered and shared.
The past is always present, and we are haunted by ghostly wars that never end; the dead never sleep. Our ancestors have pitted against each other. For the distraught young woman before me, Shakespeare would more likely be a caricature of whiteness or misogyny. Tha bard will be a butterfly whose wings she would be encouraged to pluck to bring you back to work rather than be inspired to take flight to this world of imagination, love and betrayal, courage and treachery, that explores the outer limits of the shared human experience. Kate would be led down the dark corridors of identity that posits humanity as a battle for yours.”
Grant recoils from a world where AI takes the place of humanity. He mounts a complex argument that concludes “We freed ourselves from nature. We killed God and down machines may conquer us. There is no artificial intelligence that can work harder and longer than we can, that can process information faster than we can. The machine does not get tired, does not have bad days. The machine has no existential crisis, no yearning, no loss, no joy …
“We have entered what one of the masterminds of Google, Ray Kurzweil, called the singularity, when the machine and the human are indistinguishable. This future is coming at us at warp speed. Kurzweil said, Listen to this. ‘In the 21st century alone, we will undergo the equivalent of 20,000 years of technological progress.’ Progress is what it is, that is frankly unimaginable, that maybe the point is that it is unimaginable. It is beyond my imagining, beyond human imagining because it is beyond the human.”
Recounting a recent news story of a woman, Jesse from Shanghai, who formed. a relationship with a bot. ” Now we are desperate, lonely people to a humiliate ourselves for human contact … Sociologist Zigmunt Bauman coined a new phrase, liquid Modernity…
“Abandon all hope, of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity. In liquid modernity, society resembles a shopping mall and the imperfect balance between freedom and security. It is a place full, but empty of difference, a homogenised space where we can revel in the great gift of modernity. Bauman called them non-places. The stranger is no longer a human to be encountered but a threat to be avoided. Divided. We shop, we are shopping addicts in a liquid modernity where freedom is endless choice and emancipation is efficiency, desire is a swipe away, a new suit, a pizza, a partner delivered straight to your door. This is a world of Uber Eats and Married at First Sight.”
And identity is caught up in this world of simulacra. “Nobel prize-winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen called these Solitarist identities. Identities that reduce you to one essential thing. Are you black or are you white? Are you Muslim or are you Hindu? Are you Catholic, Protestant, or Palestinian? Sen, who was born into the sectarian violence of Indian partition, says this is a good way of misunderstanding nearly everyone in the world—solitarist identity senses killed and killed with the bad. In a 40-year career in journalism that has taken me into the darkest corners of the world, every conflict I have come across at its heart is a solitarist identity. Identity forged in toxic memory, history that will not die and resentment without it and it’s a lie. That’s the truth. Solitarist identity is a lie.
“We have mapped the human genome, which shows us that there are 3 billion letters in our genetic code and almost all are identical. 99.9% of our DNA is the same, but think about the horrors we have … the crimes against humanity contained in that fraction of a per cent of our DNA. In that fraction of a per cent, the suffering of Gaza and the memory of crimes against her [Kate’s] people did not have to be that way.”
These are excerpts from a long lecture, but are necessarily incomplete. The whole lecture will be soon available here https://publicchristianity.org/collection/rjl/