Bonus episode: Can democracy be saved with decency? A public lecture by Scott Stephens

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.

Are periodic bouts of withdrawal from life’s 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. 

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 “gift-giving” is.In fact, those who recoil at the idea of receiving the “charity” of others, as well as those who are suspicious of the clandestine giving of gifts and doing of favours —suggesting a corrupt quid pro quo — are more attuned to this ethical complexity than those who take an unseemly delight in the prospect of “out-gifting” 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, “He is a good man, who can receive a gift well”.

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.

In December 1974, “The Godfather, Part II” premiered in New York City. Following the unlikely success and unexpected acclaim that his 1972 adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel received, Francis Ford Coppola was granted almost unlimited discretion to realise his cinematic vision for the sequel — and he used that discretion to greatest possible effect.In fact, “The Godfather” and “The Godfather, Part II” 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 “Godfather” 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 “favours” are beneficent, that he is attentive to his wife and children — all suggest a kind of moral goodness. Whereas Michael, having begun as the most virtuous of Don Corleone’s 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.

Since the start of November, the Australian government has made two significant announcements aimed at preventing the harms that social media platforms are causing to the mental health of adolescents — but are these measures enough?

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 — having already decided to make “values” and “ethics” central in their self-presentation to consumers — 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.

“Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.” Such is the assessment of Peter Wehner — a Republican strategist and former adviser to President George W. Bush, and an outspoken critic of Trump himself — in the aftermath of the former president’s thundering re-election victory.It was not an electoral college landslide of the order of Barack Obama’s in 2008 or Bill Clinton’s 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 Trump’s twelve-year dominance of American politics.The fact that Trump survived all the forces arrayed against him — political, legal, economic, cultural, popular — reinforces the power of his “persecution” narrative, and will likely only deepen Americans’ disdain for democratic institutions. One of the live questions of this election is whether Trump’s resurgence will encourage the would-be-antidemocratic leaders of other nations to follow his playbook.

One of the defining features of the last century is the fact that “evil” has become more vivid to our imaginations and common in our language than “good”. Stan Grant joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether “evil” 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?

There is something undeniably satisfying about revenge. When we feel we have been aggrieved, harmed or humiliated, it is natural to want payback. In ancient Greece, to inflict such an injury was conceived of as incurring a debt — and the only way to make the perpetrator “whole” was to have the injury repaid in kind.The paradox — as Socrates, Sophocles and Euripides all knew — is that revenge, though it is desired, is never satisfying, because it gives rise to a perpetual cycle of hit-and-retaliation. The future is thereby foreclosed by the need to repay the past. As Martin Luther King, Jr. put it: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”In democratic politics and geopolitical conflict, the language and logic of revenge have begun to reassert themselves. What can be done to break out of its hold?