The Simone Weil Lecture on Human Value is hosted by the School of Philosophy. It was first held in 2000, an initiative of Professor Raimond Gaita. It is a free public lecture held annually in Brisbane and Melbourne.
Each year, a distinguished international scholar is invited to give a public lecture and academic seminar at ACU. The lectures are inspired by Simone Weil’s ethical vision that is rooted in attentive compassion and obligation to others, her unstinting desire for the Good, and her non-negotiable commitment to justice.
2022 Simone Weil Lecture
‘We do not breathe well’: Tending the moral conditions of our common life
To be delivered by Scott Stephens, the ABC’s religion and ethics editor, and co-host of The Minefield.
Melbourne
Tuesday 8 November 2022
6.00pm for 6.30pm start
ACU Melbourne Campus
Philippa Brazill rsm Lecture Theatre
20 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy
Register to attend in Melbourne
Brisbane
Thursday 10 November 2022
6.00pm for 6.30pm start
ABC Brisbane Centre
114 Grey Street, South Brisbane
Register to attend in Brisbane
About the lecture
Over the past three years, nothing has preoccupied us more than the air around and between us. First came the pandemic – which made us profoundly wary of our fellow breathers, unwilling to occupy the same space lest they deprive us of the ability to breathe. Then came the murder of George Floyd – which provoked many hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets with banners or their bodies inscribed with the words “I can’t breathe”, signifying the extent to which the toxic legacy of cruelty and contempt had condemned them to a state of moral suffocation. Finally, the “airwaves” themselves, the mass media – both mainstream and social – which once bore the promise of turning the hearts of citizens toward one another in mutual recognition, grew so foul with all manner of mendacity, hatefulness, contemptuousness, vanity and outright intimidation that it has become effectively unbreathable.
What was Walt Whitman intimating when he wrote, “Democracy most of all affiliates with the open air”? He was suggesting something about the moral conditions of our common life, remembering that the etymology of the word conditions presumes the activity of speaking-together. The health of a democracy relies on the quality of the air, and the space between citizens. It depends on the daily cultivation of certain habits and dispositions like attentiveness, hesitation, patience, forthrightness, forbearance, mutual accommodation.
Under the conditions of a pandemic, we have become unreal to one another and inattentive to one another’s words. Now, as the pandemic seems to be nearing its end, can we yet recover a proper sense of what it might mean for democracy to become a moral reality? If we can, it will have to involve waging against the corruptions of our shared air.
About our speaker
Scott Stephensis the ABC’s online religion and ethics editor, and the co-host, with Waleed Aly, of The Minefield on ABC Radio National. He is also the co-author, with Waleed Aly, of Quarterly Essay 87: Uncivil Wars – How Contempt is Corroding Democracy (2022).
In collaboration with
The 2022 Simone Weil Lecture is a collaboration between ACU and ABC Radio National.
