THE LIBERAL HUMANISM DREAM

Unless liberal humanism can re-assert its own vision of the ‘good life’: fairness, freedom, irreverence and the adventure of living with difference, it will remain stunned by the appeal of authoritarian governments like Xi’s China and Modi’s India to provide a sense of belonging, purpose, family, faith and recognition, however cynically packaged.

Professor Lefebvre of Sydney University, Festival of Dangerous Ideas

I lived the liberal humanist vision. Its spirit of embracing diversity and adventure has taken me on a student trip to Japan and China in 1968 during the Chinese Red Guards’ Cultural Revolution, embracing the politically left-wing bohemian world of the Sydney Push in the early 1970s and to an inter-racial, cross-cultural marriage across the colonial frontier into PNG during its tumultuous and exciting transition to self-government and independence in 1975. After the dissolution of my marriage and return to live and work in Australia, further cross-cultural romantic relationships ensued, finally leading to a long and immersive spiritual journey in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. This included looking after a young Tibetan Buddhist teacher refugee in New Zealand and travelling with him to Tibet, and undertaking several retreats, including a long three-year retreat at Lerab Ling in the south of France.

During all these times, as a single working mother, I successfully jumped in and out of jobs across the government, non-government, private and university sectors, while taking time out to pursue my personal passion projects. You could say I was a risk taker, both professionally and personally— someone who took courage from risk, undergirded by a confidence that came from a plan B in my back pocket. I had that confidence of the baby boomer generation. That armed with a good education I could always get a job. And, of course each job created its own legacy of valuable work experience.

END OF AN ERA

The social compact that underpinned this vision of liberal humanism, and energised the women’s liberation movement of my generation, is now unravelling as the logic of neo-liberal privatisation of public goods and preferential tax treatment of asset-based wealth has driven increasing levels of wealth inequality and economic precarity.

Of course, as the post-colonial scholars remind us, liberal humanism’s social compact never actually extended to those marginalised by colonisation’s epistemic violence against their cultures, languages and knowledge systems—even the very colour of their skin. Now even those of us previously buffeted by unassumed privilege are feeling the cold winds of this unravelling, even among the well-educated who have taken consumer-affluence as their normative right.

When Australia’s privatised Telstra CEO gets a $700,000 annual pay increase to a salary of $6.8 million (despite being penalised for a national outage that damaged the economy and people’s lives), yet the Government is touting a $250 tax refund to workers earning less than $65,000 as being meaningful, widespread cynicism and derision results. In the face of government subsidies to private education and health, and profit extraction in the privatised provision of basic utilities: telecommunications, electricity, gas, housing finance, and transport (toll roads and bus services), the Hawke-Keating compact of the social wage has become increasingly hollow. This despite the Albanese government’s continued attempts to protect it through Medicare, bulk billing incentives, superannuation, and the regulation of minimum wages. But inflation continues to exact its toll as we roil with the global uncertainties of wars and supply chain vulnerabilities.

RE-VISIONING THE ‘GOOD LIFE’

Although I am a child of Australia’s affluent liberal humanism, as I plunged into the turmoil of failed relationships and the legacy of my childhood travails, I also became a child of a very different framing of ‘liberal humanism and the good life’, through the lens of Tibetan Buddhism. A ‘good life’ of personal freedom, the realisation of my potential, and social justice now included a focus on an inner life of wisdom awareness and an intimate sense of compassionate interbeing with all of the world around me, as my ‘true nature’ awaiting for me to but realise it.

Personal freedom, not in terms of consumerism and travel, but as liberation from being under the control of disturbing emotions and negative thinking. Freedom from the hope and fear of worldly preoccupations: hope for gain and fear of loss; hope for fame and fear of infamy; hope for praise and fear of blame; hope for happiness and fear of suffering.

Would that possibility give me the fearless courage and inner compassion for myself to deal with life’s curved balls, now seen as but a test of my inner equanimity?

As the Feminists have always declared: the personal is the political.  Many men are now feeling similar challenges to questions about their identity as ‘successful’ men, as they grapple with the hollowness of career and money as sources of meaning and purpose in their lives.

This is reflected in the widespread yearning for ‘authenticity’ in a world of blatant political spin and confected rage or virtue signalling. That indeed, as the ancient Dhammapada advises us, and which underpins the modern interest in ‘mindfulness’ and cognitive therapy:

We are what we think
All that we are arises with our thoughts
With our thoughts we make the world
Speak or act with a disturbed mind
And trouble will follow you
As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart

Speak or act with a wise and contented mind
And happiness will follow you
As your shadow, unshakable

The Buddhist view of life has revealed to me that socio-economic structural change alone cannot deliver the ‘good life’ promised by liberal humanism unless we come to terms with our very human vulnerability to disturbing emotions and confused thinking. Our susceptibility to a sense of separation, which is reinforced by Western cultural ideas of the human/nature, and mind/body split. And from this comes the yearning that gives rise to endless ‘wanting’ (the engine of consumerism), which can easily become greed and envy. Or to a sense of ‘not wanting’, and from this comes resentment, frustration, anger, and jealousy.

I also learned, through the direct experience of contemplative meditation, how my strong sense of a self-identity, which I felt pulled to protect and defend, could give way to a more fluid idea of my own agency, arising moment by moment. I was not trapped by memories and feelings of the past. That within, once I learned how to allow thoughts and emotions to simply pass through my mind without grabbing me, lay an inner sense of my ‘self’ that was spacious and vividly aware, flowing with life.

Learning how to come back to this inner simplicity as a source of contentment and capacity to deal with life’s curved balls is what we all need. In a world where we are intrinsically interdependent, yet vulnerable to the distortions of our thoughts and emotions, we must begin by first taming our own vulnerability to the distorted thinking and feelings that give rise to all the self-centred pride, jealousy, envy, anger and greed that is displayed in the many ills of today’s body politic. Without this, socio-economic structural change will always be captured by the ‘demons’ of our human propensities.

THE INTERGENERATIONAL LEGACY

While emotionally well-resourced by my Buddhist spiritual life, living my liberal humanist dream has left me with a legacy of economic precarity. A legacy I seem to have unwittingly passed on to my sons and now my grandchildren. I do manage to own my house, but it now has its own burden of a reverse mortgage required to support my adult sons, neither of who have been able to get into home ownership, and have battled various setbacks. The longer I live, the more the bank eats the house.

I wonder what my legacy of the ‘good life’ is for my sons? One takes his spiritual nourishment from the ocean, his love of surfing, and his love of going camping with his kids. He carries his PNG-Trobriand Island heritage of  the importance of family, and gets his meaning and purpose in life from his role as a father. My other son is more adrift, but deeply invested in the drama of modern politics and the rise and rise of the far right: the antics and scandals of Trumps America, the new leftist Democrats, and the Andy Burnham pivot in the UK. While I am a text person, he is a YouTube person, avidly following various political pundits. They both keenly follow sport.

While well-educated and politically aware, and well connected to their extended family in PNG, both are economically trapped in the precariat. Along with so many similarly caught, they are re-visioning what a good life might mean for them, rather than descending into the frustrated rage fantasy politics of One Nation style populism. Trump’s America being the cautionary tale.

REALITY CHECK WITH GEN Z

My 28-year old grandson is living this re-visioning and it awaits my younger granddaughters.

Jasper’s parents separated when he was two years old, but he has a good relationship with both his father and his stepfather, from whom his mother separated when Jasper was still in primary school. He also has a good relationship with his mother, an artist who has led a somewhat itinerant life moving between Australia, Europe and the UK. On his father’s side he has three half siblings, two girls and one boy. On his mother’s side, one brother, and another step-nephew who is the son of his stepfather. A fractured extended family network, yet connections remain strong. And that is something in this day and age.

He recently came to me for a quick visit on a brief holiday from his life in Melbourne as a single man, living in a share house with his childhood friend and partner. Jasper has a fine arts photography degree from RMIT, after a brief time at a vocational college working on video game design. His friend works as a bartender. Jasper works for a photography retail firm, but says he has no ambition to move into any management role, and even eschews direct contact with customers. At home in his share house, he shares a studio with his friend, where he works on his personal photography passion projects.

Jasper hasn’t partnered up yet with anyone. He says for the last couple of years his mental health hasn’t been very good and his world felt very small. But this had expanded wonderfully since he joined his father and sisters (one aged 8 and the other 13) on a trip to Papua New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands to take the ashes of his grandfather, my ex-husband, Charles Lepani, who had recently died, back to be buried with his mother on Bau clan land in Losuia, and on Toliwaga clan land in Vakuta, where his own father, Lepani Kaiuwekalu Watson’s ashes are buried. This momentous journey plunged Jasper into a completely different world. Where connection into large family groups is the basis of a life worth living, and where he truly began to appreciate the full value of his cross-cultural connections across his wider extended family. It was also in the Trobriand Islands where he discovered the complexities of kinship, where giving and receiving is the glue that keeps these relationships strong. To receive, you must give.

Although at first he said he felt quite overwhelmed, he began to relax because everyone was so warm, welcoming and lively with all the ceremonial activity associated with the burial of the ashes. Jasper said he took many photographs, and now he wants to make a book based on these.

I told him about my own journey to the Trobriand Islands, first even before I married Charles, when we still just university students, and then later after we came to live in Port Moresby. We had visited Vakuta when Jasper’s father, my eldest son, Genou, was only about 12 months old. The purpose of that visit was a special ceremony to end the mourning period for the death of Charles’ grandfather, Upawapa Watisoni, the chief of Vakuta Island. I handed over my own book collection about the Trobriand Islands to Jasper and encouraged him to do the research and bring his book project to life.

It was the vivid remembering of that journey, while I was visiting the Trobriand Island collection of artefacts in the Australian Museum in Sydney, with my two small sons, that marked a fork in my own search for the good life, propelling me into a spiritual journey, into new ways of knowing. So compelling was my direct experience of strong energy flowing from these artefacts through me, that it challenged everything I had assumed about the nature of reality, shaped by my university education. My former father-in-law, Lepani Kaiuwekalu Watson, had told me that Europeans like me were ‘heavy’ to the spiritual forces that informed his culture. Now it appeared I was no longer heavy, despite myself. And this marked my ability to gain a greater sense of connection to Australia’s Indigenous cultural foundations.

I am not sure if I have passed any of this on to my children and grandchildren. Both my sons are politically engaged, but neither have become Buddhist practitioners, even though they have always liked my being a Buddhist.

They find the idea of meditation and listening to teachings too passive. Neither of them has a love of the intellectual life that still informs mine. Jasper eschews politics and world affairs altogether as too depressing, but is an avid consumer of YouTube. He talks of the possibility of going to live in one of Japan’s depopulated rural villages where housing is available. Where he can grow his own vegetables and pursue his passion for art-photography and love affair with muscle cars, which apparently is a ‘thing’ among his generation in Japan. He previously visited Japan with his former stepfather, so he also knows life as a ‘foreigner’ in Japan and getting a visa would be difficult. My eldest granddaughter is a great reader and deep thinker, and keenly interested in what makes people tick. She talks of becoming a psychologist, but who know where AI companions will take that possibility? Exploring gender diversity seems to be the adventure of her generation. She’s aware of her father’s economic precarity, sees the fragility of marriage across her extended family network, and sees her own future living in shared houses with friends.

TO RECIPRICOL COMMUNITARIANISM

Enlivenment
Spreading the seeds of relationality
A New/Ancient way of being, thinking and doing

All across the world, underneath all the noise and fury of mainstream media, and the outrage harvesting of algorithmic capitalism, there is a growing turn towards communitarianism. Towards a re-imagining of life away from globalism towards localism. Towards the enlivened living of recipricol relationality.

Not the defensive, nostalgic parochial localism of One Nation’s monoculture, but a communitarian localism of different forms of sustainability, responsibility and connection. A re-visioning of the good life away from hyper-consumerism, the treadmill of servicing debt and professional ambition. A new search for escape from becoming a data product for algorithmic capitalism via the increasingly suspect products of AI and social media. Where conquering space holds no glamour and simply looks like more alienation, as the sky fills up with space junk.

A return to the ideals that informed the intentional community movement of the 1970s before it was fractured by recreational drugs promising bliss and was subsumed by capitalist consumerism. While crystal meth and frustrated anger still ravages the socially and racially marginalised, new ways of thinking are beginning to take root and gain traction.

This will not be a re-working of the Welfare State, with its focus on redressing social deficits, and heavy bureaucratic institutional structures. Instead, the great intellectual and political project that awaits humanistic progressivism looks to address both a new relationship with the natural world, and actualising the ideal of reciprocal relationality that modifies individualism, and which meets our human desire for meaning and purpose in life, including its moral, social and spiritual dimensions, across all our different skills and capabilities.

This will be a bottom-up movement of human adaptability, small community initiatives shaped by local possibilities in the crack and crevices of the decaying older order. Even as that order chases dreams of continued hyper-consumerism and productivity through the AI Revolution, green energy transition and increased military spending and controls over immigration to defend the viability of the nation state—a political artefact of the 20^th century.

Will AI finally kill off our love affair with technological entrancement as we look for new ways to sensuously reconnect with life and one another in all its multiplicity, as the life worth living?