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Left is not woke, with Susan Neiman
1.4k Plays1 year ago
It isn't hard to find a right-wing critique of woke ideology. It is much more difficult to find left-leaning thinkers coming out in opposition to the woke dogma that has superseded traditional, social democratic principles in most western centre-left political parties. This is why Susan Neiman’s new book, ‘Left is not Woke’ is such an important contribution to the public debate.
Susan is one of the world’s most renowned and respected living philosophers. She currently resides in Germany where she is the Director of the Einstein Forum. She’s also a self-described socialist, and she’s set out to separate 'wokeism' from the historic principles of the left.
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Transcript
Introduction to Australiana Podcast
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia, a series of conversations on Australian politics and life. I'm Will Kingston.
Left Ideology and 'Left is Not Woke'
00:00:23
Speaker
It's not hard to find a right-wing critique of woke ideology, which is not surprising, I suppose. It is, however, much more difficult to find left-leaning thinkers coming out in opposition to the woke dogma that has superseded traditional social democratic principles in most Western, centre-left political parties.
00:00:43
Speaker
This is why Susan Neiman's new book, Left is Not Woke, is such an important contribution to the public debate.
Guest Introduction: Susan Neiman
00:00:50
Speaker
Susan is one of the world's most renowned and respected living philosophers. She currently resides in Germany, where she is the director of the Einstein Forum. She's also a self-described socialist, and she set out to separate wokeism from the historic principles of the left. Susan, welcome to Australia. Glad to be here.
00:01:11
Speaker
You're the first philosopher we've been fortunate enough to have on the
Philosophy's Evolving Role
00:01:16
Speaker
podcast. So I want to start with philosophy as a discipline. When many people hear the word philosopher, their mind probably goes to Aristotle or Socrates or Plato. Needless to say, we live in a very different world to the one that those men inhabited. What's the role of the philosopher in 2023 and has that fundamentally changed over time?
00:01:38
Speaker
It depends on which philosopher you ask. Look, I'm surprised to say people think of Aristotle or Plato immediately because you have two good philosophers in Australia. I'm sure you have more than that, but you have two quite prominent ones who are also active in the public arena. I'm thinking of Raymond Gaeta and Peter Singer, okay? Now,
00:02:00
Speaker
There are philosophers who see the role of philosophy as thinking harder about everything. Let me try and be careful. I mean, well, I've implicitly insulted enough people already so that it probably doesn't really matter. The real question is, do you sit like Descartes alone in your room next to the stove and think?
00:02:27
Speaker
Or do you believe that philosophy should provide what none other than Kant called orientation in thinking? Because orientation in thinking is of course orientation in living. And some of us do that. I mentioned two Australian philosophers. Some of us don't, but it was always part of my decision to become a philosopher that one works in the public sphere. And in fact, if you look at
00:02:55
Speaker
the Age of Enlightenment, which is the 18th century where a lot of my work has been focused. In many ways, they were much more contemporary than some of the people you could read in the 20th century because they weren't writing for other philosophers or for their graduate students. Even Kant wrote 15 essays for what was basically a public journal for people who liked to think but were not professional philosophers.
Social Media's Impact on Discourse
00:03:25
Speaker
always thought beginning my life and believe very strongly now that public discussion and public institutions would be much better if they had some serious rigorous thinking. I'm not in any sense suggesting that everybody should become a philosopher, but I do think everybody should take a few philosophy courses or read some of the people who are trying to talk about crucial
00:03:53
Speaker
questions that many people think about. We just have a little bit more time and training to think about them in a clearer and more reasonable way. How would you assess the health of public debate today?
00:04:04
Speaker
That's very sick. I mean, there's just no question. It was a lading question. Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, you used the word health, and so there's no other way to answer. And there's a question that social media has made it worse in two ways. One is by sort of bombing us with more content than we can possibly ever take in. So one reads very quickly.
00:04:26
Speaker
I myself, like many of my friends who grew up reading words on paper, spend more time on screens and one reads differently. People have studied this, one reads more thoroughly if you're sitting back and looking at pages you can turn, perhaps, you know, underline.
00:04:42
Speaker
but you're not being constantly bombarded with more stuff and constantly being seduced to look at something else. You can actually attend to what you're reading. The other thing that the internet has done is through its anonymity, it's unleashed
00:05:00
Speaker
the absolutely worst emotions that we can have. I'll tell you a story. I had, until a couple of years ago, I had resisted getting on any form of social media until I realized I was in some controversies and I was getting blasted on Twitter. I'm the kind of person who would rather know what people are saying about me than not. But I said, I will not tweet back. I just, you know, once a day, I'll see what's being said about me behind my back, so to speak.
00:05:28
Speaker
And the first time somebody said something was blatantly twisting a position and completely misreading it and calling me names and stuff, I really was tempted to do what you would never do if you were standing in front of someone, you know, and you saw their face and their reactions and you see it's a human thing.
00:05:49
Speaker
ready to curse and scream and all that kind of stuff. Okay, if even I, having made this resolution that I'm not going to get drawn into these Twitter fights, if even I can be tempted, good Lord, what happens to people who are not trying to be restrained? But I don't want to blame social media for everything. I don't think that would be fair.
Polarization and Truth in Media
00:06:11
Speaker
Here I can't say anything much deeper than what I think we all know. Our public discussions, with some exceptions, have become incredibly polarized. You know, people tend to put themselves in camps without listening or interacting much with other people, but I think we need to not sort of
00:06:37
Speaker
put the blame solely on social media or on the hopelessness of rational discussion, this is all stuff that's manipulated. And we see it being manipulated if you follow it carefully in many countries. And who has time really to check all their sources? Even in the stuff that you follow and are intensely involved in,
00:07:02
Speaker
It's beyond even professional news people or somebody like me who spends a couple of hours every day reading different news sources in different countries. So how can we possibly expect someone who is, you know, has a job in the United States that often takes two or three to support a family? How can we expect them actually to follow up on what's true and what isn't? I think we should look
00:07:28
Speaker
at the sources of the awfulness of the public debate and not simply say, ah, people are jerks and, you know, they like to yell at each other because, you know, actually, we don't that much. Sometimes it's good to let things out. But most people would actually prefer to have a conversation like this one.
00:07:47
Speaker
I agree. I want to explore the notion of truth a bit further. My undergraduate understanding of philosophy would suggest that in some respects philosophy is the search for truth, but we live in an age where truth is looked at by some people far more subjectively. So the notion of my truth has risen to prominence as opposed to the truth, an objective reality. How do you think of truth and how do you think of it specifically under the lens of
00:08:14
Speaker
of it being a subjective thing relative to an objective thing? Well, first of all, philosophy is defined as a search for wisdom, which is something different from truth. That's very important. But some philosophers do spend their time trying to define truth.
00:08:35
Speaker
There are a number of definitions. It's certainly the expression, my truth drives me nuts. One can say my perspective and my experience, and that's a quite different thing than saying my truth. As for the idea that it's all subjective, one of the people who contributed to that, particularly in the philosophy and history of science, was the French philosopher Bruno Latour, who wrote a quite powerful piece around maybe
00:09:04
Speaker
10 years ago, maybe a little longer, saying, did I contribute to climate denial? And basically apologizing for having, indeed, with a lot of fancy French philosophy. But it got spread in a lot of quarters, not ever with the sort of nuance that I'm sure he intended it. But still, I think people need
00:09:34
Speaker
One of the problems with a lot of contemporary philosophy and contemporary theory is that people use jargon and complex language as a way of avoiding coming down quite hard on, you know,
00:09:49
Speaker
on one side or another of an issue. And I'm sure if you'd asked Bruno the Tour in the 90s, hey, do you mean to say that when we see, because one didn't see as much as one is seeing now in the 90s, do you mean to say it's a subjective question whether or not there's climate change and climate crisis? I don't know what he would have said. I don't know his work that well, but I'm sure that's not what he intended. But then when you begin to
00:10:18
Speaker
do things like that and are not entirely clear about coming down on a really important question. It's very easy for it to get taken over by both so-called left and by the right. I have a passage in my book where one of the
00:10:36
Speaker
main media people in the US write talks about, you know, having, he said, I don't look like somebody who read Lacan College, do I? But he's actually using pretty Lacanian notions. So it's something we need to be careful for. And as I said, I, I take my cues, my writing style, I try as much as I
00:10:58
Speaker
can to write the way the best philosophers of the Enlightenment did write with an eye not towards their colleagues or their graduate students, but to a larger circle of people.
Universalism vs. Woke Tribalism
00:11:10
Speaker
Let's go on to the book. I've listened to a few of your recent podcast guest appearances. Each one has started with the same question, which is how do you define work? Each time you've made the point that when it comes to conversations like this,
00:11:24
Speaker
We don't need definitions. We need analyses. What does that mean? I was violating my own maxim. I know people want a definition. And while I often think they're less helpful than people think, they don't solve all the problems that people want them to solve. That was only the first interview and I listened to it and I thought, nah.
00:11:49
Speaker
You gotta come up with something. And I have something to look, as a matter of fact, but it's the exact opposite of the way that I define the liberal left, okay? So I define the liberal left as committed to universalism rather than tribalism, right? The idea that what unites us as human beings is more important than the things that divide us.
00:12:16
Speaker
Whereas the woke is definitely tribalistic and, you know, thinks that people's tribal identities and whether it's an ethnic identity or a gender identity is more important than the things that unite us. And I use a metaphor in the book about flesh and bones. I think flesh is interesting. It comes in different colors and shapes and sizes.
00:12:43
Speaker
and ignoring it would be entirely silly when we're talking about cultural differences. But the bones are the things that bind us together. They're also what's left of us after we're gone. So I'm trying to focus on the bones where I think many of the woke are focusing on the flesh and misconceiving that.
00:13:07
Speaker
The second thing for me defines the true liberal left is a principle distinction between power and justice. Now, often that distinction is hard to draw, but the idea that you draw it in practice
00:13:24
Speaker
is crucial to every attempt to fight for justice, which is not just more power for my tribe, but you might very well, many people have down through the ages, stand up for somebody else's right to justice, even if they're not from your tribe. And that's why I reject the word ally. I don't consider myself an ally.
00:13:49
Speaker
that suggests that one has shared interests with someone. But the United States and the Soviet Union were allies in the Second World War, and look what happened to that one. So I'm not an ally, but I will try and stand up wherever I can for the human rights of every human being on Earth.
00:14:08
Speaker
And the third important thing that distinguishes liberal left from conservatives is that we believe in the possibility of progress where conservatives really don't. They really think life has been an
00:14:25
Speaker
decline from some golden age and it might get better if the Messiah comes or comes again or however you believe that if you're religious, but they don't see that you can make substantive progress through the action of committed people working together. Now here's where work gets tricky because
00:14:47
Speaker
Of course I know people who think of themselves as woke or would accept that label. It's become rather toxic. So it's mostly used as a term of abuse right now, which is one reason why it's so hard to define. But I know plenty of people who would accept that label
00:15:06
Speaker
who are certainly working for progress in various areas that they've taken on. The problem is the theories that they use undermine the possibility of any sort of progress here. I'm thinking particularly of Michel Foucault, and you don't have to read a word of Foucault in order to be influenced by his work because it's all over. It's in the water system, okay?
00:15:29
Speaker
If you don't believe that progress has been made in the past, for example, if you say the United States was a racist country from its founding and nothing has changed since the days of slavery, you have no hope of making any progress in the future, besides the fact that you're actually defaming the memory of people who fought and sometimes died to make progress.
00:15:52
Speaker
But to say that, you know, nothing has changed since the days of slavery is, you know, it's not just flying in the face of empiricism, it's also betrays an ignorance of how people actually make progress. It usually comes in stages and it's disheartening to read
00:16:15
Speaker
or read or hear all the time where there's been, my own daughters have told me, there's been no progress in fighting the patriarchy. Say, look, I understand if you've lived longer, you see that actually there has been progress. This is not to say that we don't live in a sexist world. Of course, we still do. We still live in a world that's marred by sexism and racism and homophobia.
00:16:42
Speaker
No question about that. But if you can't see that we've made steps forward, I don't know how you're going to have the will to make any others. So the short version of what I would say about defining woke and left
00:16:57
Speaker
is that the woke have emotions that are traditionally part of the left, okay? Sympathy or empathy for people who've been marginalized and the desire to stand with people who've been oppressed. All of those are sympathies that I share. There's an Austrian Jewish philosopher writer named Jonah Marie, who always used to say, the heart beats on the left. So, you know, I think their hearts are beating on the left,
00:17:25
Speaker
But I think they need to think through their theories carefully because they have practical implications. I'm glad that you introduced those three themes because I did, in the back of my mind, have the thought that it would be a handy frame for the conversation. So I want to explore each of those in turn. The first around that shift from universalism to tribalism.
00:17:51
Speaker
It seems to me that the tribes that the woke overwhelmingly care about are arranged according to immutable characteristics, things that you can't change about yourself. Why is that the primary focus as opposed to characteristics which we at least have more control over, like socioeconomic status, for example? Well, that's actually something, well, wait a sec. We don't always have control over socioeconomic status. Let's somewhat, somewhat more control would be the framing.
00:18:21
Speaker
Yeah, look, I do say in the book that the focus is on identities that we're born with rather than what we do in the world, okay? It's what the world has done to us. And I'm writing another book that I don't want to talk too much about because it's not done yet, but I am writing about the shift
00:18:42
Speaker
about not quite a hundred years ago to make the victim the subject of history. And it was something that became, it looked like it was progress because we used to just forget about the voices of the victims. And it's become something else. And so this is a general historical tendency by the way, and you even see it. People like, I mean,
00:19:05
Speaker
I don't know how Donald Trump can continue to see himself as a victim, but he does. That's what people do. But it is about those aspects of our identities.
00:19:17
Speaker
that usually are unchangeable, which is very interesting. My argument is that we all have a whole lot of identities that are of equal importance to us and that they sometimes change over the course of our lives, but reducing all the complexity of our identities down to these two properties is quite strange. Now, what
00:19:43
Speaker
raises a question here is a question of gender identity because there are people who are gender fluid and that means, I mean, it's a long debate that I decided not to go into in this book. I really wanted to write a short, clear book that would contribute to a broad public conversation, you know, and
00:20:07
Speaker
not have too many paths off the main argument. But there's a view of gender as born this way. There's a view of gender as fluid. All of those things are really not my area of expertise, so I'm not going to talk about it. But certainly reducing all of our identities just to race and gender
00:20:35
Speaker
strikes me as an impoverishment, not only because it takes, you know, instead of 20 or 25 identities that we have down to two, but really because it focuses on what the world has done with us, because those are the two that are often most marginalized, instead of what we have done in the world. But I protest the idea that socioeconomic status is always in our control. We
00:21:02
Speaker
Every study in the world shows that not simply the amount of wealth you were born with, but the amount of cultural capital has an enormous impact on what people do with their lives. And that's why I call myself a socialist.
00:21:17
Speaker
or social Democrat if it makes people feel happier. The first three principles that I talked about are common both to people on the left and to liberals. What distinguishes the left from the liberal in my book is the fact that people on the left believe that social rights are part of human rights and that are right to education, healthcare, housing, decent working conditions as it's
00:21:46
Speaker
inscribed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the UN passed, that those are not benefits and not things that would be nice to have, that those are every much human rights is the right to travel, say.
Social Rights and Human Rights
00:22:00
Speaker
Okay, so that if we had all those things, and you do have some of them in European countries, it's not perfect, but Western European countries are
00:22:12
Speaker
way ahead of other places in that regard. It does put your socioeconomic status more in your own hands if you're all starting from roughly the same set of social rights.
00:22:28
Speaker
Sounds to me like a classic left-wing, right-wing debate, which is the conversation which I think society should be having. But I think the interesting thing about your book is that for one reason or another, we are not as much as we should be at the moment. I'm keen just to explore more this concept of identity and the importance of identity. I think sometimes it can be simplified down to a very basic spectrum in the eyes of many people. So on one side,
00:22:54
Speaker
you have the view that we should be entirely color blind or blind to sexual orientation or any immutable characteristic. Just take people as they are as best as you can.
00:23:06
Speaker
On the other side of the spectrum, perhaps you would say the woke side of the spectrum, there is a belief that that identity group is of fundamental importance to how we understand people and how we should organize society. Take that very simple spectrum. Where do you think, Susan, that we as a society should fall on that spectrum in terms of how we think about identity? Well, this is what I was happy when I came up with my flesh and bones metaphor. Asking people to be colorblind is perfectly ridiculous.
00:23:34
Speaker
You know, of course we see color. I mean, we see that the leaves are green. We see that the sky where I am at the moment is blue. So to say that you don't see color when you meet someone would be ridiculous. And often you can see a lot of other things, okay? So denying, and often,
00:23:56
Speaker
but although not always color will give you some clues about someone's background in education but i've been so surprised in so many ways in my life when i made certain assumptions from people's color their physical presentation that i would
00:24:15
Speaker
always warn against presuming too much, you know? And it is certainly true that a black or a brown person navigate the world of color differently. That is, because it's the first thing one sees. People of color, when they're in rooms of only people of color, will say things that white people don't hear.
00:24:38
Speaker
and just the other way around, okay? So of course it plays a role in people's lives, but it seldom plays the main role. And by expecting it to play the main role, we are reducing people and actually harming them. I mean, I can tell you that I've had this happen to me as a woman and it happens all the time. People will say, I mean, Germany, they're quite,
00:25:03
Speaker
Sometimes they're quite specific about it. It gets said, I think, less in other countries today. People will say, oh, won't you be on our board? No, thank you. I'm on 17 already, and I can't take another one. But we need a woman!
00:25:18
Speaker
for gender balance. Okay. So what does that do to me? And I know, you know, the people of color have had this, it reduces whatever I've achieved and done, which makes people want to have me on their board of something to the fact, you know, that I have, you know, different chromosomes and genitalia than other people do. Okay. And I know that people are thinking I've been in many situations,
00:25:49
Speaker
where I see a light bulb go off, you know, metaphorically over people's heads. Oh, she wasn't just hired because she was a woman, you know, that is, as soon as you have make that the defining criteria for a human being or for giving them some kind of, um, I mean, this is a really complicated issue and I have not, I don't have the,
00:26:17
Speaker
definitive solution to exactly how you do it. Of course, I think there should be more diversity both in terms of gender and ethnic background than there is in many places. But the minute that you make that as a major criteria, it casts doubt on all the people who are members of a minority
00:26:40
Speaker
in the group that they only got where they got because of affirmative actions. It's called in the States or quotas as it as it's called elsewhere. And that's an extremely dangerous. I've seen myself thinking that way, by the way, even though I'm aware of the whole thing or affirmative action hire, you know, I want to follow up on on affirmative action and mechanisms that the work use. That's very much so. I think that's a very valid
00:27:09
Speaker
practical concern with, say, an affirmative action quota, that it can lead to marginalization, counterintuitively, of someone who is the beneficiary of that quota. There's also the moral dimension. So the woke would argue that we should positively discriminate today to address negative discrimination in the past. I'm simplifying, but that's broadly the argument. Do you think that sort of positive discrimination is justifiable on a moral level?
00:27:36
Speaker
I see an argument for it. I mean, I understand the argument for it, but I also think it ultimately undermines itself. See, look, as somebody who has been on lots of committees and boards and where
00:27:52
Speaker
people are being chosen, okay? Whether it's students or fellowships or jobs or whatever. To say, I'm only taking this person on pure merit is a bit of a myth because merit is not something you can quantify, okay? I mean, maybe in mathematics, maybe, but in most fields, absolutely not, all right? So there are always various factors that you're taking into account.
00:28:20
Speaker
I am happy with taking past discrimination into account as one factor, but not as the defining one. I want to go to the theme around justice and power. So you talk about the confusion between the concepts of justice and power. You introduced the concept. Can you expand on a bit here about what you mean by that confusion and how does it play out in society?
Justice vs. Power: Historical Lessons
00:28:47
Speaker
It's a very simple distinction. It's the distinction between saying
00:28:53
Speaker
I deserve this because I'm bigger than you are and I'm going to get away with it. And I deserve it because I have some kind of a right to it. One of the great things that the Enlightenment introduced was that distinction. Of course, you can see it in some, you know, earlier writings. But think about what things were like in the 17th century or the
00:29:18
Speaker
beginning of the 18th. There were just simply different laws for aristocrats and for people who were not aristocrats. And if you had an England anyway, and I'm assuming in various other parts of the world, I just know there's so many references and songs about it in England, you could be hanged for stealing the deer of a peasant, even if
00:29:46
Speaker
your children were sorry of a prince or a lord even if you stole to save your children from starving to death okay that was just the law you didn't touch it whereas the lords and the princes had the right to everything from the land the labor and the virginity of of the peasants okay and
00:30:11
Speaker
Obviously, they were revolts at various times. I believe that some sense of fairness and some sense of sympathy is a built-in quality that we all have. Most mammals even have it, interestingly enough, in rudimentary forms.
00:30:33
Speaker
So of course there were revolts against the most egregious forms of injustice, but the basic idea that the fact that you have more power than someone entitles you to do what you like with them was just the way the world was. And the idea that no, actually in virtue of a common human dignity,
00:30:56
Speaker
We have the right to be treated equally to fair trials, to judicial procedure of all forms, not to be subject to know who the witnesses against us were to be represented. All of that stuff is we take it now for granted, but it was actually extremely revolutionary and extremely important. And where it's violated,
00:31:25
Speaker
we are right to be enraged. One of the things that moved me to write this book was my first puzzlement and then indignation about the way in which the woke, particularly the postcolonial theorists, write about the Enlightenment as an agent of patriarchal white Eurocentric men
00:31:54
Speaker
who were trying to talk about universal values as a way of imposing their values on the rest of the world.
00:32:05
Speaker
It's a very standard view right now, and it's very hard to find another one. And I do talk about this in some length in my book, including the fact that the Enlightenment thinkers were the sharpest critics of colonialism on the basis of human rights, on the basis of equal human dignity. So in saying this, that the idea of universal values is just an attempt to
00:32:32
Speaker
impose European values on the rest of the world. They make two mistakes. First of all, there were enlightenment thinkers in other parts of the world. There were enlightenment thinkers in
00:32:43
Speaker
thinkers with enlightenment values in Africa, in India, in China. So other countries that I know less about, not that I know so much about any of those regions, I mean other continents that I know less about, but I know enough to know that there were and still are people using enlightenment ideas and applying them to their cultures
00:33:06
Speaker
coming out of their cultures in a way that was not Eurocentric at all. But what I also find problematic about that argument is a deep cynicism of it. That is, it assumes that the Enlightenment can't really have cared about universal values and can't really have been interested in spreading ideas of
00:33:30
Speaker
liberty and equality among other people, they were using it as a trick to consolidate, assert and consolidate their own power over other people. And that's a move that gets made all the time in, well, post-colonial discussion.
00:33:48
Speaker
based on the assumption that there actually is no concept of universal justice. It's all just a move to fool people that you actually want to have power over. You know, I understand why
00:34:04
Speaker
people can get cynical. We've seen that happen so many times. It's certainly true that people do sometimes use what look like moral arguments to mask what our power grabs. That does happen. But to say that it always happens is to draw a conclusion that
00:34:28
Speaker
I think most of us know in our hearts is not always, is certainly not true. And the woke, it's very rare to hear the woke actually work this out because as I'm arguing, there's not enough serious thought going into what are in fact internal contradictions. You cannot claim to support Black Lives Matter
00:34:55
Speaker
Well, there are two ways you could go. If you're a black person of color, who, quite possibly because they've been disappointed with universalist claims or fake claims to colorblindness in the past, you could say, as the Afro pessimists do, racism against black people is
00:35:18
Speaker
older, longer, stronger than any other form of racism, it's always going to be that way. And the best I can do is want more power for my tribe. You can do that, okay? People who have done that.
00:35:31
Speaker
But you can also be a person of color or a white person and say, no, I support Black Lives Matter because shooting unarmed human beings is a crime against humanity. And it happens too often to people of color. And I am standing up
00:35:52
Speaker
for the right to sit in your car or go to a grocery store and not be shot because or strangled because your skin color strikes somebody the wrong way. You've been interviewed by a fellow Australian recently and he mentioned our constitutional referendum that we have coming up. I think it's a very interesting topic given the experience that you have studying in Germany
00:36:20
Speaker
and studying a great deal on how Germany came to terms with the crimes of Nazism and the feeling of historic guilt. The concept of historic guilt is an undercurrent to the discussion that is taking place in Australia at the moment. What are lessons that Western countries, countries like Australia, can take from the German experience of terrible racial injustices that have occurred in their past?
00:36:48
Speaker
You'd need a whole long lecture for me to answer that question because, and this I have to say, I will, this summer, I'm going to write not a whole book, but a longish essay on the subject. Since I wrote the book, Learning from the Germans, facts have changed both in Germany and in the United States. And while I still believe
00:37:09
Speaker
to simply true, Germany was the first country in the world to put its criminal history at the heart of its national narrative and therefore an important step forward. I don't think it's doing it properly now. And I see pieces of that going on in the United States, which I follow very closely even from Europe.
00:37:32
Speaker
in this, in particular, this essentializing of the so-called victims of history. When you say essentializing, what do you mean? Well, in the way that Germans look at Jews only as victims. They were our victims. We've learned our lesson. They were our victims. So we can't possibly criticize the state of Israel, whatever else it's doing. So
00:37:59
Speaker
That's a big debate that I've been involved in here, but I see a similar debate in the United States. This is usually from white people. We benefited from slavery. We benefited from the time after slavery. There's still discrimination and even murder going on against unarmed black people.
00:38:20
Speaker
and therefore we're going to treat them as eternal victims. And you see tendencies in the writing of history that I find very problematic. It hasn't gotten as bad as it's gotten in Germany, but then it's not quite a parallel situation. So give it all that, what can we learn? Again, I
00:38:45
Speaker
It's something that I've been thinking and working about intensely, so I don't have a short answer to that. We can learn that, first of all, that truth is quite important in thinking about history, and that goes both ways. When I was growing up,
00:39:04
Speaker
We didn't learn anything in the US about the genocide of Native Americans. And we learned a tiny bit about slavery. So obviously, it's way better that we get more truth out there. But people, again, who say nothing has changed since slavery days, have not learned anything about history. So there's a tendency for people out of a sense of guilt and shame to go overboard.
00:39:32
Speaker
in a direction that is also false and extremely unproductive. Another thing that I think we can learn, and perhaps from what the Germans have not done right, is let's look for the heroes in our histories, not the victims. I mean, yes, the victims need to be remembered and their situations restored if we possibly can or repaired, but
00:40:00
Speaker
to focus on victimhood leaves us not thinking about agency. And in every culture, there have been gross instances of injustice. And certainly in every culture I know about, there have been people who stood up against them. And sometimes we forget their names or we forget their stories.
00:40:22
Speaker
And those are the people that I think our histories, our public history should focus on. Obviously also, not to the extent of suggesting that there were more resistance heroes than there were Nazis, because there weren't. I hope that's enough to say about that matter. It's quite complicated. That's enough for me to ponder for the next few weeks, I think,
00:40:47
Speaker
Susan, a really, really thought provoking conversation and more to the point around left is not work. I think it is incredibly rare to find a book that is as intelligent and is still provoking, but at the same time as accessible. And it's certainly both of those things. I think it's a really important contribution to the public debate. So congratulations on an outstanding piece of writing and thank you very much for coming on Australiana.
00:41:10
Speaker
Well, thank you so much. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.