Social theory

Friday essay: ‘mourning cannot be an endpoint’ – James Bradley on living in an Age of Emergency

Retrieved on:

Friday, April 5, 2024

Although it is early, the day is already unseasonably warm, the sky hazy with smoke from hazard-reduction burns to the south and north of the city.

Key Points:

Although it is early, the day is already unseasonably warm, the sky hazy with smoke from hazard-reduction burns to the south and north of the city.
Walking to the water’s edge I wade out and dive, then stroke outwards until my breath gives out and I surface with a gasp.
There is something very particular about looking back towards the shore from deeper water.
Amid the convulsions of COVID, a hastening wave of calamity has made it clear that the first stages of climate breakdown are upon us.
Food production will decline markedly, especially in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Central and South America.
Warming and acidifying waters will severely impact the fisheries that provide one-third of the world with their principal source of protein.

A shift

Attempting to comprehend its immensity and fluid multiplicity alters us, making it possible to glimpse new continuities and connections.
As the late Sven Lindqvist observes in his interrogation of the racist and genocidal foundations of European imperialism, “It is not knowledge we lack.
It is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.” In other words, the path through involves more than just a shift in energy sources.
It begins in a reckoning with the past, and demands a far more fundamental reorganisation of the global economy, a shift to a model that operates within planetary boundaries and shares resources for the benefit of all.
Such a shift is not impossible.

Beauty and astonishment

How do we make sense of the disappearance of coral reefs, of dying kelp and collapsing ecosystems?
How do we imagine a world in which the massing life that once inhabited not just the oceans but the earth and the sky is largely gone?
More than that, however, the act of openness creates the possibility of love and joy and – improbably – wonder.
However much has been lost, the world still hums with beauty and astonishment.

No less importantly, it is to recognise that despair is also a form of turning away.
Yet, like the scientists working to save coral reefs, he said he did not know what else he could do.

Instead, grief must be part of a larger recognition that there is no longer any way back, that the only route now is forward.
Surviving it demands we build a world that treats everybody – human and non-human – as worthy of life and possibility.
I turn to look out to the horizon, its fading margin between sea and sky a space of grief, but also possibility.
This is an edited extract from Deep Water: the world in the ocean by James Bradley (Hamish Hamilton).

James Bradley was the recipient of the Copyright Agency Non-Fiction Fellowship for 2020.

Explainer: the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is profoundly contemporary

Retrieved on:

Monday, September 25, 2023

No account of the modern era – not just modern thought – could ignore him.

Key Points:

No account of the modern era – not just modern thought – could ignore him.
But like any major thinker, there are risks in summaries – some of which give us clues about Rousseau himself.
Although he is known as a social and political philosopher, Rousseau’s creative output does not resemble that of a contemporary “theorist”.
These are now conventional tropes, but they were only emerging at the time Rousseau was writing.

Natural or artificial

Rousseau had shot to fame a decade earlier, after winning an essay competition advertised in the literary magazine Mercure de France.
Where much philosophical discussion had been centred around the distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural”, Rousseau opposed the natural to the artificial.
He argued that what we ordinarily think of as civilisational progress creates – and then aims to satisfy – new and artificial vices, serving our vanity and not our natural needs.
In fact, he proposed there were many good reasons to think they were greater in both.
Read more:
Guide to the Classics: Voltaire’s Candide — a darkly satirical tale of human folly in times of crisis

Society and inequality

Developing these ideas, in 1754, Rousseau wrote his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men.
In it, he attempted a thought experiment which imagined what humans may have been like in a “pre-civilisational” state.
Rousseau was aware that this act of imagination was speculative and he could not be sure of its results.
He held that inequality was artificial.

Education and politics

The first was the institution of a new kind of education; the second was reorienting politics towards a new moral foundation.
In Émile, or On Education (1862), Rousseau wrote a treatise on education in the form of a bildungsroman – the first and likely the last of its kind.
He sought to outline the conditions of a good education, which he thought should be based on lived experience and the development of individual character, not rote learning, mechanical memorisation, or even the reading of books.
As for moral education, young people should learn about the consequences of their actions.
Rousseau’s terminology has oriented discussions of morality, self-development and politics from the 18th century to the counterculture of the 1960s, the New Age movement of the 1980s, and beyond.

Deism and human nature

According to Rousseau, we know what we know of God from Nature and Reason alone.
In Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques (1776), Rousseau addresses this question directly, and in typically Rousseauian fashion:
whence could the painter and apologist of human nature have taken his model, if not from his own heart?
He has described this nature just as he felt it within himself.
whence could the painter and apologist of human nature have taken his model, if not from his own heart?
He has described this nature just as he felt it within himself.

Ghassan Hage is one of Australia's most significant intellectuals. He's still on a quest for a multicultural society that hopes and cares

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, July 19, 2023

The Racial Politics of Multicultural Australia – Ghassan Hage (Sweatshop) The publication of The Racial Politics of Multicultural Australia by the Sweatshop Literacy Movement represents a significant collaboration.

Key Points:

The Racial Politics of Multicultural Australia – Ghassan Hage (Sweatshop) The publication of The Racial Politics of Multicultural Australia by the Sweatshop Literacy Movement represents a significant collaboration.
Hage is an Australian Arab immigrant, whose forebears came to Australia in the 1930s and settled in Lithgow, where they established a clothing factory.
Sweatshop is an urban political project created in western Sydney by a younger generation of Australians from Arab and other immigrant and refugee backgrounds.
While the republished works were mainly written early in the second generation, their continuing relevance is both salutary and disturbing.

What is a White person?

For Hage, it is a self-referential category into which White people put themselves.
That is, people who think of themselves as White are White people.
Nor is it racial, in the older sense of race as a bio-social category, with shared DNA clusters associated with territories of origin.
Rather, it is a “fantasy position” born out of colonial history, one that is essentially European.
It is imagined to be rooted in the stories of north-western Europe: stories of empires won and an Enlightenment project sustained.

White Nation

In White Nation, Hage draws on two methods: one provided by his studies with Pierre Bourdieu in Paris, and another developed in the social anthropological space of ethnography and listening.
White people, suggests one letter, are more immediately seen as Australian (part of the dominant cultural group), even when they have only recently arrived.
As Hage notes, White multiculturalism evades any commitment that “we are a multicultural community in all our diversity”.
Moreover, argues Hage, these views, be they for or against multiculturalism, all stand upon an edifice that assumes White superiority – and fantasises Australia as a place in which White superiority “should reign supreme”.

The politics of White decline

In the decades since White Nation first appeared, the politics of White decline have become an increasingly mainstream concern.
This narrative played a key part in the anti-vaxx movement, despite the multicultural makeup of that movement.
Both played a role in White Nation – but they foreground Against Paranoid Nationalism.

Worrying and caring

In Against Paranoid Nationalism, Hage proposes that two opposing stances – worrying and caring – establish the parameters of the narcissism and paranoia engulfing Australia.
Worrying about the nation’s present and future breeds an intense fear and hatred of outsiders who might threaten the interests of those who claim a unique right to worry.
In the process, people become less willing to hope for a more caring future.
We are all the better off for Hage’s eclectic, systematic, imaginative and penetrating assessment of the human condition in this time of late imperialism.

William McBride, Ph.D. is recognized by Continental Who's Who

Retrieved on:

Monday, April 18, 2022

Garnering over fifty years of experience in education, Dr. William McBride has led an impressive career.

Key Points:

Garnering over fifty years of experience in education, Dr. William McBride has led an impressive career.
Throughout his acclaimed career, Dr. McBride has gained extensive expertise in Social and Political Philosophy, Legal Philosophy, and Continental European Philosophy.
Thereafter, Dr. McBride attended the University of Lille from 1959 to 1960, where he was a Fulbright Fellow.
Later, Dr. McBride attended Yale University, where he obtained his Master of Arts degree as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in 1962.

William McBride, Ph.D. is recognized by Continental Who's Who

Retrieved on:

Monday, October 11, 2021

Garnering over fifty years of experience in the field of education, Dr. William McBride has led an impressive career.

Key Points:

Garnering over fifty years of experience in the field of education, Dr. William McBride has led an impressive career.
Throughout his acclaimed career, Dr. McBride has gained extensive expertise in the areas of Social and Political Philosophy, Legal Philosophy, and Continental European Philosophy.
Thereafter, Dr. McBride attended the University of Lille from 1959 to 1960, where he was a Fulbright Fellow.
Later, Dr. McBride attended Yale University where he obtained his Master of Arts degree as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in 1962.