Welcome to Big Tent. Live events. The Locked Down Life Online event series brought to you by Torch,
the Oxford Centre for the Humanities Research Centre for the Humanities as part of the humanities cultural programme itself,
one of the founding stones for the future. Stephen Schwarzman, Centre for the Humanities.
My name is Wes Williams and I'm a professor of French literature and a fellow of Edmund Hall,
and I'm also the knowledge exchange champion here at Torch.
The Big Tent Live event series is our way of bringing together once a week researchers and students,
performers and practitioners from across the different humanities disciplines.
We will explore here important subjects and ask challenging questions about areas including the environment,
medical, humanities, ethics and I, the public, the private and the common good.
And we will celebrate storytelling and music, performance, poetry and identity.
We're bringing you this event programme online to complement keeping our distance with critical, creative, close up and personal connexion.
We hope that you're safe and well during this difficult and challenging times.
Now, I'm going to embarrass both our speakers by saying a little bit more about them,
about their work and why we thought it'd be a good idea to bring them together this evening before we start.
But before doing that, I'd like to remind you, the audience, that if you would like to put any questions to us,
because during the event tonight, please pop them in the comments box on YouTube.
We encourage you to submit these as early as possible so that we have time to answer as many as possible in the Q&A,
which will follow our initial discussion in 40 minutes or so.
Now onto our excellent speakers tonight. It is a singular honour to host and to welcome Professor Henry Bubba from Harvard University
and Professor Margaret Macmillan from the Faculty of History at Oxford University.
Herman Cain, Bubba, is the N f Rothenburg professor of the humanities at Harvard University.
He's one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies,
having authored numerous works exploring cultural change and key questions concerning cosmopolitanism,
governance, the regulation and distribution of power. And, of course, narrative.
In 2012, he received the Padma Bhushan Award in the field of literature and education from the Indian government.
His most celebrated and influential works include nation and narration and the location of Culture,
which was reprinted as a Rutledge classic in 2004 full.
And it's been translated into Korean, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Serbian, German and Portuguese.
A selection of his work has just recently been published in a Japanese volume.
Harvard University Press are about to bring up his forthcoming book, A Global Measure, and Columbia University Press will publish his next book.
The Right to Narrate. Turning now to Professor Margaret Macmillan.
She's an emeritus professor of international history and a former warden of some Antony's College, Oxford.
She researches and writes on British imperial and international history of the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Her landmark books include Women of the Raj Peacemakers, Paris, 1919.
The Uses and Abuses of History and the War That Ended Peace.
Her forthcoming book, War How Conflicts Shaped US, grew out of the BBC as reflectors, which she delivered in 2018.
Tonight, they have come together to offer some reflections and a discussion on the topic of being unprepared.
And just so we ourselves are prepared for the treat that is to come.
I thought it'd be useful to delineate the kind of programme for the next hour or so.
Professor Barber will begin with a series of reflections setting out the terms of the debate,
a kind of mini lecture which is also in its way, a prose poem on what it might mean to be unprepared.
Professor McMillan and I will then return to your screens to allow Margaret both to respond to some of the issues raised by Homi
and to set out a number of further questions and perhaps to offer some larger term historical perspectives on the current moment.
My task in all of this is to keep things moving. And to introduce questions from you, the audience.
Once we open up the discussion still further in the last 20 minutes or so of time, we have together.
Thank you all for joining us. And now, without further delay, I'll hand the metaphorical microphone over to you.
Homy. Thank you. Thank you very much, Wes.
Thank you for your wonderful introduction. Thank you for your invitation.
I want to thank the entire torture team for making this possible and doing so in such a gracious way.
And, of course, my friend and colleague and much admired historian Margaret Macmillan for so graciously agreed to be in
conversation with me on what might sound like a little goofy idea that I had on being unprepared at this moment.
But I think you ought to know that today you have achieved for me an impossible dream.
By do the kind agency of torch. I am in Cambridge, at Harvard and in Oxford at the same time.
And that would be a wonderful place to be and a wonderful time to be in.
So thank you very much for making this dream come true.
Well, in the life and art section of the Weekend Financial Times, the 9th of May.
Gillian Tett, chair of the FTSE US editorial board, published a front page article titled Against the Odds.
Her essay is a reflection on risk as an existential predicament involving individuals
and institutions who find themselves on the anxious knife edge of hazardous choices.
The risk averse choose a future protected by norms of reasonableness, predictable security and cautious optimism.
Risk takers summon up the Dutch courage to face precarious futures of doubt and danger in the hope that contingency
may unlock unimagined realms of agency liberty and opportunity in the midst of quarantine cabin fever.
Gillian Tepp prises open the porthole to speculate on the risks of a post lockdown and future.
Ted asks, How will governments and individuals weigh the difficult daily decisions facing us when we leave lockdown?
Her answer is derived primarily from her expertise as a financial journalist immersed in the risk management markets and financial institutions.
This time around, however, Ted focuses on the culture of risk.
Culture matters, she writes emphatically as she lays out her leading argument medical data and economic trade-offs.
Will certainly play an important part in any decision.
Governments and individuals make to return to public communal styles of life.
But as we juggle with risk, supposedly neutral data risk models and forecasts, she argues, will have to come to terms with psychological biases,
cultural assumptions and inconsistent incentives because medical science can reveal death rates and frame mortality rates.
But models cannot tell us when and how we might feel safe.
In a place like America, Tech concludes, it is also possible to imagine a rebellion whereby the burden of risk is handed back to the individual.
Ted refers, of course, to Kobe related deaths and the post lockdown rebellion.
She imagines would most likely be staged by Trump in ethno nationalists for whom wearing a face masks is an affront to their First Amendment rights,
which I assume include the right to create pandemic.
Bandino pandemonium in the service of making America great again.
But Ted speculations on the risks to human health in the aftermath of the lockdown,
considered in the wake of the risk to back black lives on the public highway at the hands of the police lead me
to reflect further on the language of risk and the nature of rebellion as part of the post lockdown predicament.
We were cautiously expecting to emerge from lockdown to embrace some version of our
public lives and reclaim something of the fair shared freedoms of public spaces.
What we were quite unprepared for. Was the tragic resumption of public life.
As a result of an unwarranted, unwarranted and unprovoked public death.
Instead of gathering on neighbourhood streets, maintaining the hygiene of social distancing,
bystanders in the Powderhorn district of Minneapolis witnessed the kerbside killing of George Floyd.
All eight point four, six minutes of asphyxiating agony.
As Derek Sheldon, a white police officer, extinguished a life with the pressure of his knee.
Despite Floyd's repeated pleas for mercy. I can't breathe.
And witnesses imploring Shervin to desist. He he dug his knee into Floyd's neck.
Several hundreds of thousands of protesters across the world risked the ravages of Kobe to exercise their right
to protest against a system of criminal injustice that would enable a routine procedure of law and order.
To result in a brazen act of violence resembling a public execution.
Americans were as unprepared for the viral pandemic.
As they were for the pandemonium of racial policing.
According to the Pew Global Survey published on June the 12th, 2020,
the levels of interest in the protests nearly match the shares of Americans who were
following news about the Corona virus outbreak in late April before Floyd's death.
Of course, Americans knew about police violence against blacks, but this was a kind of singular waking up.
What does it mean to be unprepared for something that has a long history of happening?
Reported pandemics have occurred for several hundreds of years and police
killings of black men and women in avoidable and unjust circumstances in the UK,
as in the US, are part of a recurrent cycle of institutional racial violence.
And yet that moment to being unprepared. The global response, for instance, to the last eight point four,
six minutes of George Floyds life circulated on social media is rarely recognised as a significant feature of public historical life.
It is too quickly absorbed into normative narratives of cause and consequence, reason and risk, sentiment structure.
The singular death most often becomes part of the predictable data of structural racism.
Except when it doesn't. Is unpreparedness solely or even principally an effective response to an event
with the limited scope for political efficacy and the historical record?
I've chosen this complex system for two reasons. First, it speaks of contingent circumstances in which people find themselves at a loss for action,
an agency they are unprepared for an event or eventuality because their destiny is simply out of their hands.
Secondly, however, the term is also one to which governments resort in evading their states of unpreparedness to explain away
their culpability and responsibility when faced with the consequences of misgovernance or miscalculation.
In such circumstances, they resort to the language of crisis and emergency in order to argue that
their failures are in large part a consequence of overwhelming circumstances.
The ubiquitous use of the phrase being unprepared in the media and public discourse is not only a matter of words.
We were unprepared for Trump. We were unprepared for a dread for 9/11.
This recurs continually. We were unprepared for the recession of 2008.
Unpreparedness is descriptive of events and experiences as they occur in the present.
But it is also a form for a pre future predicament of predictive,
precarious behaviour that shares the way in which we recognise and conceive of the relationship between knowledge and action of principle and policy.
Increasingly, with the rampant disregard for facts, science,
history and human dignity displayed by those who occupy the highest offices in countries around the world,
citizens and residents are being actively unprepared to stand up for their democratic rights and
representations or to organise around these public goods by the exercise of authoritarian laws,
punitive regulations, discrimination and censorship and the depredations of social media.
This leads to the worst excesses of social polarisation and ethnic tensions amongst those with the least empowered and entitled in our societies.
In these circumstances, I want to suggest to be unprepared may be for the citizen, an inflexion point,
one that primes you for becoming an effective agent by first taking you back and then giving you the opportunity to recover and write yourself,
and hence to stand up against the illegitimate uses of power and the uses of a ball of authority
that we see when governments use unpreparedness to shield themselves from their for them,
from their own failings. Thought of in this way,
the panicky moment of unpreparedness for the people might well prepare you to live up to the
responsibility of taking action under pressure and making decisions in relation to risk.
Unpreparedness may appear to be a pre political moment in the life of the subject and the citizen,
but may may also be a quality of time necessary in the midst of flux and fire to decipher an ethical predisposition that leads to deliberative action.
Unpreparedness is a moment in time in history that engages four subjects and citizens with complex human emotions ambivalence,
fear, doubt, disappointed. Oh, that belong to the darker side of psychic life and ethical deliberation.
These emotions are often overwhelmed and obscured by the more valiant public virtues of courage, confidence, decision and valour.
Unpreparedness for all its volatility and turbulence marks an essential turning
point in the transition between the uncertain anxiety of self examination.
And an unavoidable commitment to acting in the public good.
To be open, to be unprepared is to develop a viable capacity to engage in the ethics of mutual understanding and equality
and to be committed to the modest art of listening and learning from cultures of difference and disadvantage.
And these two qualities are the beating heart of the Democratic experience.
Such, my friends, is the revolution in ethical conduct and political consciousness.
The James Baldwin, my closest friend in these fragile times, has unforgettably described as the resilience of the negative way.
And I quote him, The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks,
the total liberation in the cities, in the towns before the law and in the mind.
The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of black people.
It is not too much to say that they who have been so long rejected must now be embraced.
And no matter what psychic or social risks,
black people are the key figures in this country and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as theirs.
Protesters the world over who were prepared in recent times to witness another law and order racial killing,
unprepared to witness this, decided to risk their lives, their health, and in some cases, their livelihoods.
In a spirit of unpreparedness to stand up as a people, whatever the odds for issues of global inequality,
race, injustice against minorities and the tyranny of ethno nationalist leaders democratically elected,
who in these current crises have played fast and loose with issues of public health, state control, surveillance and violence.
Yes, the moment of unpreparedness is as figurative a historical measure as is a period or an age or other,
such definitions of the historical long duration through which we construct the meaning of events and construe their social outcomes.
But the unprepared carries with it the effective charge of a political or historical moment of southernness.
A stunning illustration of emotion and ethics leading to cognition and uncertainty.
Uncertainty to decision and action.
It is this very temporality of Southernness friends that marks the advent of both Kobe 19 and Black Lives Matter as global phenomena.
We knew all about the science of pandemics and the racialisation of police power.
But we were quite simply. Unprepared for the suddenness and the severity of both dovetailed and entangled into our everyday lives.
The importance of acknowledging the suddenness of contemporary crises as they overwhelm us and
be prepared to negotiate with their unprepared presents as grounds for transformative change,
has a long philosophical genealogy. Soran care.
Good God. Author of The Concept of Anxiety 1844 and the Sickness Until Death 1849.
Could there be more timely titles for our times? Has this to say.
The moment he writes is a figurative expression.
And therefore, it is not easy to deal with. What we call the moment Plato calls the Southern.
The possible corresponds to the future for freedom.
The possible is the sudden future, and the future is for time.
The possible. To both of these corresponds anxiety.
An accurate and correct linguistic usage, therefore associates anxiety and the future.
If I'm anxious about a past misfortune. Then it is not only because it is in the past, because it may be repeated.
It may become future. And that, I believe, is what the unpreparedness as a form of thought and action prepares us for, to pause, to think.
To entertain one's anxiety and uncertainty. In order to be able to construct a future in which the trauma of the past doesn't return as we know it.
In the fact that these thinkers with the ideas that these thinkers cast on the darkness of humanity and racial death,
I argue in kickout God sense and in Baldwin spirit.
In favour of the sudden movement, the anxious unpreparedness that drives freedom to reach its future moment.
Or better still, to achieve its momentum.
As the future moves to embrace us in a form of mutual understanding, equitable living.
And a shared sense of the good life. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Humming Margaret, thoughts?
Both by way of response to this piece and also by way of taking up the challenge
that he offered right towards the end of the sort of longer genealogy, philosophical and historical of this idea of being unprepared.
Well, there's so much to say because Homi has said so much in it, it's such a pleasure to be on this panel with him.
When I knew him as an undergraduate, I always found him enormously entertaining and stimulating.
But I didn't know that he would turn into this marvellous guru, homely, if I may call you a guru.
Thank you so much for this. And I just want to pick out a few things. There's so much to talk about.
And I think people may have questions as well, but I think I'm very struck and I think it's a very important idea by your notion of the singular
awakening that sometimes history goes on and things seem to be much the same from one year to the next.
And then suddenly something happens. There's almost a rupture and a shift and we begin to have to look at things differently.
And I know a lot of people are saying after the pandemic is over.
And I think that's a big if. Actually, it may never be over.
It may simply become part of the fabric of our lives and something we expect just as malaria is
part of the lives of so many people in so many parts of the world and other diseases to HIV AIDS,
for example. We haven't conquered. We tend to like to think we can conquer things that we don't always.
And it may be that COGAT 19 is simply going to become part of the world in which we live.
But I do think what's happened is we've been forced to look at our own societies in the imperfect responses,
in the injustices that have been shown as a result of the cover 19 and its coincidence with Black Lives Matter.
I think in the end, the year we knew about this is, as Homi rightly said,
we knew that the police tended to take to treat black people in different ways.
But we've seen it so vividly now we can't pretend that we didn't know anymore.
We've we've been forced to confront that knowledge. And I'd like to think that we simply cannot go back to where we were,
that there has been a crucial and very important shift and that we will be looking again at US societies.
I hope so. And I hope that the optimistic note, which ran through so much of what we was saying on which we ended is the right note.
When I look at history, there are so many examples of us as a species ignoring what's right in front of our noses.
I mean, I've worked on the outbreak of the First World War and there were plenty of warnings of what it was likely to turn into,
plenty of warnings that it might become a stalemate.
Plenty of warnings that the industrial and organisational capacity of Europe was so enormous that it was in danger of destroying itself,
which, of course, it came quite close to doing. And yet people explained it away.
We we have a capacity and maybe it helped to save us as a species of capacity not to look at uncomfortable facts,
a capacity to explain away evidence even if it stays in the face.
And I think we did this with the previous pandemics.
We explained in a way we said, well, Saras was dealt with and we had, I think, a face perhaps like people in the past, how to face in the gods.
And some still do. We had a faith in science or as the British government keeps on calling it, the science as if it would solve all problems.
And I think we have a complacency. We get through a crisis and then we go back that well, that was all right.
We got through it and we move on. I like to think that this time we can't go back.
And I like to think that we're going to have to live with what my colleague in Oxford, Paul Collier, who's described as radical uncertainty.
This is a world in which we're going to have to live and it won't necessarily be pleasant.
But I think it's something that we're going to have to come to terms with us. Why we were so unprepared.
I think is partly and again, homie mentioned this. We have come we have, I think, got used to the idea that someone, somewhere will find a solution.
And I think we've also, as you said, quite rightly tended to disregard fact.
And we've tended not to look at evidence. We've tended to explain it away.
I mean, I'm so tired when I read into these people say I don't believe in the Koban 19.
I mean, it's not a question of believing in the Trinity or not or believing that Mohammed was was was was the prophet.
It's not a question of belief. It's a question of fact.
And I think we've we've been living, I think perhaps too much in a world in which emotion trumps facts when people say,
I feel, I feel I don't want to wear a face mask.
And of course, what they're really saying is I don't want to pay any attention to the facts and I don't want to take responsibility for others.
You know, we have a language of liberty, particularly the United States, which is being used to deny the importance and responsibility for each other.
And so I'm hoping very much show me that you're right, that we will be forced into recognition, that we need knowledge.
We need to deal with the awkward facts.
We can't just explain the way or put them under some sort of carpet that we need to deal with the inequities in our societies,
which have been so revealed. I mean, can we now go back and say we're gonna forget about it?
I fear that that will be a temptation. I don't see how morally we possibly can.
I mean, it's been brought so clearly to our attention. We should have known before. And I think a lot of us feel that.
But what I fear and I will still end on an optimistic note, but I fear and I'd like to.
You think about this one. Is that a temptation will be and we see it already to blame others and to say it's not our fault,
it's not our fault that we weren't prepared because it was someone's plot. You know, we're saying this already.
And what the Chinese some of the authorities are saying it was a CIA plot.
The Americans are saying it was a Chinese plot in India's.
As as you know that as it may, the Muslims are being blamed in a centre of Europe and in places like Hungary.
The Roma are being blamed. Immigrants are being blamed. And I'm afraid that there may be a search for scapegoats,
which will allow us to avoid taking responsibility for the world in which we live, in which are going to have to live.
But I'm gonna go with you. I like your optimism. I like to think you're right.
I hope you are. So please keep trying to persuade me.
Margaret, I want to thank you for that beautiful, generous and deeply thoughtful response to these ideas that I put out there,
which really don't have any genealogy and for me are only a few months old.
I mean, I thought about this notion of unpreparedness very recently and then somehow it's you know, people have responded to it warmly.
So I want to thank you for this very beautiful and eloquent ethical presentation.
This is not simply a presentation around history and ideas.
It is it's not only about our presence, but it as that kind of sustenance of an ethical perspective.
And I thank you for that perspective in your work. I thank you for this for this.
In D.C. this evening. And I want to and I you know, I did do two things I want to say.
One is I completely agree with you that there is this sort of belief that, you know, science will sort it out.
Somebody somewhere will sort it out. Governments will sort it out.
Now, much of that scientists, as Lorraine Dastan at the Max Planck Institute put it very well quite recently,
said this pending pandemic movement is a kind of zero degree of empiricism movement.
That's why you keep areas. And I think she's right. There are seems to be zero degrees of 16th century.
She said you at such a moment do. But it's the way in which governments are using these moments.
You know, these moments where there is seems to be at this point in our negotiated sense of knowledge,
do using them in ways that are deeply problematic.
And just two things. One, going back to your your your your work on the on the on the First World War, which was in a way,
a crucial moment where the notion of Western imperial progress internally and externally was deeply questioned.
And in fact, the world broke apart, rather, on that. I think it's at the heart of Iran's work on the First World War.
So I want to know about how you look at what's happening around progress.
You know, the great notion that the great machine, the great juggernaut of progress will just carry on.
So that's the long historical view, and given the more immediate view,
because my notion of the unprepared is both a long historical view and and the and trying to emphasise what happens in the singular moment,
as I put it, in the short moment or in the closing moment,
do you see that the time of Democratic political parties as of these systems, two party, three party systems with affiliates,
with key constituencies, with long histories, with projects and with their constitutions, that this is a form of politics that is somehow dying out.
And now we have a new form of movement politics, as you began to see after the First World War.
And I'm a very bad historian, so please correct me if I'm wrong. You begin to see a movement politics.
You begin to have seen Bannon say we don't care whether the Democrats, you know,
now speak to the white victims of globalisation and beat up a little stuff and beat
up some sort of grassroots support that we don't get what the Republicans say we are.
Same thing in India. Hindutva is a movement we don't even get for the old BJP or the old Congress or the new Congress.
We are leading a movement.
This notion of progress in the long the breakdown of progress in the long historical moment and the construction of a politics of movement,
only maybe 30 percent of the population. But what will happen whether wins the election?
Will this movement continue? Well, it I it worries me because I think I mean, yes.
To the actual first point about progress in science. I think the Europe of nineteen hundred was of course it had its problems,
but I think there was a tremendous confidence that it was in the forefront of civilisation.
Now we don't talk in those terms anymore, but that's how they felt and they felt that they were becoming more and more rational, more more scientific.
And the First World War, of course,
turned that upside down and show them that they were as full of emotion and irrational fears and hatred and cruelty as anyone else.
And I think it shook European faith enormously in themselves. But a lot of that faith and progress and civilisation went across the Atlantic.
I think the United States, which in a way it was an inheritor of it.
And I think what this present crisis has done is shake the confidence of a lot of people in the United States,
but also around the world, that the United States actually is capable of providing the sort of action that it needs.
I mean, it is absurd that the richest country in the world couldn't find enough facemasks and couldn't produce them quickly enough.
And this is a country which turned basically on a dime, as we are saying can attend,
turned around enormous lands in the Second World War and suddenly started producing tanks and planes on a huge scale.
Why isn't doing it today? And I do think the psychological. It's another site, singular moment.
I think that there's something has shifted psychologically and I'm not sure it will ever come back again.
Democratic is dying out. I mean, Democratic parties aren't as exciting as movement parties.
They don't have the razzle dazzle as much. They don't have the leader. And we should remember what those sort of movement parties led the world into.
And what also concerns me about what is happening. And I think a lot of Democratic parties are languishing and not doing that well,
is that Democratic parties themselves are a type of democratic politics. They are themselves compromises.
And if we are to live in this world and allow for other people to have dignity and allow for other people to have autonomy as individuals,
then we must respect their views and we must be prepared to negotiate with them.
I mean, this assertion that I am right and you are wrong is is very, very dangerous.
And Democratic parties, for all their faults, and we all know their faults,
have formed a forum in which negotiation can take place and movements, demonstrations.
I mean, I sympathise enormously with the people who've been demonstrating.
I mean, I think it's so encouraging that the crowds that we see in the media in the United States are all ages,
all ethnicities, far more white people than they were in the similar marches in the 1960s.
That's enormously important. But if we're going to have real and lasting change, then there is a lot of really hard work to be done.
And it's not very exciting, but organisation.
I mean, I had an interview with one of the Black Lives Matters leaders who said we don't want organisation.
And I can understand that.
And I can understand why they're suspicious of organisation when they look around and see what sort of political organisations are around them.
But without the lobbying, the making of policies, of drawing up the bills, the creating of programmes, the money being spent,
the reform of education, reform of the police, I mean, these are things that have to be done, I think.
So I hope you know, I hope we harness that emotion, but I hope that it can be used to produce real and lasting reforms.
Can I jump in here, because as often happens on these first evening,
eventually you're already in the discussion beginning to answer some of the questions that are coming through.
I'd say it's fabulous. It's great. But there's one or two in particular, which I think go very much in line with the discussion you're just having.
So, for instance, there's one from Ripon which is asking you both really whether there's a whether there are similarities,
parallels is too strong a word between the ethno nationalism, which you referred to me in your talk,
and the ethno nationalism which fuelled the Second World War. We've talked about the First World War as a reference point.
Are we anywhere near the kinds of ethno nationalism that referred that that fuelled the Second World War?
That's one question. And the other question is, in effect, how do we mobilise unpreparedness of the kind that you've been talking about?
Precisely so that history, if you like, doesn't repeat itself. Margaret, do you want to take the first of those questions first?
Yes. Well, ethno nationalism. I mean, it is an enormously powerful force.
It's one of the things actually the Marxists missed. They thought that when the world had a proletarian revolution,
there would be no more ethnic nationalism because it wouldn't be necessary that
it was simply a tool for the capitalists to divide up the working classes. And I think we've realised and.
Anderson wrote rather brilliantly on this. The power of ethnic nationalism.
It's a sense of belonging. It's a sense of being with people like you. It's a sense of being part of something.
And I think that is a very deep human need. And of course, we have seen how very dangerous it is because part of ethno nationalism is we belong.
And you don't it's about wrong borders and it's about excluding people.
And the sorts of Eskinder nationalism you got before the Second World War made that sort of distinction.
And it makes it today. I mean, you see it in the handbook.
You see it in what's happening in Orban's Hungary, at least what he's trying to do in Hungary.
And what it does also is elevate the nation above any of the individuals who happen to be alive at the time.
And so all sacrifice must be made in the name of the nation, the nation to wage war.
The nation is entitled to wage war. The nation is entitled to expanded. If you think of Hitler and the expansion of the Aryan people.
So, yes, I think there are very, very dangerous features and I think we should be very, very careful about it today.
Was well, welcome to our questioner and thank you very much for your question.
I just want to add to Margaret, sir, excellent response to the ethno nationalist predicament or frame of mind,
which is very much that the majority is threatened, is threatened.
It's a kind of paranoid majoritarianism, the majority threatened by these minorities.
And they are migrants. They are black people. They're OK. So I think that's an important thing to say about the mindset.
The other thing that frightens me is the capture of the ports in India.
The Supreme Court has been captured, I'm afraid, and it had a remarkable tradition of independence.
But of late and I'm not saying this from the outside,
you just have to read the newspapers and see what what what some of the decisions that had recent to be made.
And, of course, although we have seen very interesting turnarounds recently in the Roberts court,
the American Supreme Court is also teetering on a knife edge,
if indeed if that is the case, because there is, you know, in a sense, a more a more conservative majority.
But recently there's been a correction on three very important recent.
So I think that the courts are crucial in trying to control some of these in some of these issues at looking around the world.
The courts are not in great shape. I just want to say about how do you mobilise unpreparedness?
That's a very good. It's an old question, but it's one that repeats.
And I think that I can provide a kind of programmatic answer.
But what I can say is that we have to think about the role technologies at bay played now in constructing social media groups.
Not always positive, because all politics is always about ambivalence, something open breaks, yet something tells you you'll fix it somewhere else.
But I think technology will play a very important role.
And something that I'm writing about is the way in which the video image circulates in a global way.
It's not understood. Similarly, everywhere.
But whether it was for long Curti, you know, the Turkish boy, the Syrian boy who died on the Turkish coast and suddenly the EU wakes up in a moment.
We were unprepared and pre owns its major discussion around refugees at that moment, the George Floyd moment,
which has now become a mural across the world in all kinds of mediums, in all kinds of places.
There's something about visual representation and it's compelling role in what I'm calling this effective and ethical area of the unprepared,
how it can be organised. I think Margaret's very important is an open question, and I don't know the answer.
And I'm very into that question, I guess goes back to what you were saying right at the beginning of your talk about effect and the
extent to which being unprepared might be a particular form of emotion or a particular kind of effect.
And you've already said a little bit about that, but quite a few questions here are asking.
So what's the relation, if you like, between emotion and action? How it's another way of asking the same question.
How do we move from this? What you talk about being taken aback to.
Yeah.
To turn to turning the unprepared into a into some kind of something which, if you like, isn't purely affect, will affect is never purely effort.
That's why, you know, our emotional lives are never purely our emotional lives in the inherent hunter or any sense.
They belong both to the what and the who of off of our subject, the public and the private.
So in a way, affect is the way in which our imaginations are captured by a great ethical idea or a great political project.
So without that action, without that desire, driving you to commit yourselves or driving groups to commit yourselves, there can be no responsibility.
There can be no sacrifice. There can be no good balancing of priorities.
So ethics is not only about effect. As I said, it's about the psyche. It's about the dignity.
And it is about the ethical and the political. So affect is only something that pulls these things together.
You can always tell if somebody is doing this without putting their heart in.
It is actual and they're doing it only for some mercenary ends.
That's one of the problems of our politics.
We see people are entering public service, but with financial gains clearly so clear that you can't miss it.
So I think effect is a kind of moral corrective as much as it is anything else.
So you can't purely have a politics about it because I think it's wrong.
I do want to say, however, that the debt that we have to seek.
And we don't think enough about this. I'm also arguing, apart from this issue of the complex intersection between affect and action.
I'm also saying that there has to be a moment of political reflection.
Democracy is built on that.
The proposition of deliberation, parliaments, when they work well are institutions of deliberation, not merely mud slinging competitions.
You know, you did this is I'm gonna do worse.
These moments of deliberation, which demand a slower approach both to constructing our values and to observing the world,
really do need to be reintroduced.
And my way of distracting from the kind of teleology of progress or the immediacy of action is to say the unprepared.
As I think I said in the book, is a place where our own self reflection.
And other times, the ritual group, it doesn't have to be individual, that moment of self reflection,
self location and moving into the public realm of responsibility and action is important.
So we should not and we should not imagine that these are simply pre political moments.
These are moments that really show us how the private life of the personal life dips over into the public.
Tipping point, their inflexion points. Yet again, I think you've answered one of the questions, which is, is unpreparedness a process or a moment?
And I think you're saying, well, and I'm in fact, there was one thing you said in the talk,
which I've written down because I often so good, whereby unpreparedness is a quality of time in the midst of flux and fire.
And that's what you've just been talking about, that that reflective moment, which is not separate from the flux in the fire,
but it's an extension of time for a moment for a parent, which is also a process, as you just said.
One very quick thing, Margaret.
And whereas if you'd let me the long piece that I'm working on at the moment also looks at the issues we've been talking about,
or a lot of it focuses on qualified immunity,
which is the rule by which it's a civil rule, by which a lot of police practises,
as we understand them and deplore them, are protected by either unions or dispute that.
And what if the the element of qualified immunity, what is at the heart of it?
Decisions made by the police officer who we assumed to be responsible,
a reasonable income tax which are continually changing and split second decisions have to be made.
If you read the case, you read the Supreme Court judgements on this.
And this is true in many countries. The the the the state forces are often exonerated because it is said these are professionals.
Of course, they missed this or they missed that. But they are acting in moments of the claim is in moments of rebellion.
Now, there are various ways in which the law deals with it and qualified immunity.
It says, in order to prove to disprove that, you have to find a case, a precedent which is as close to the case you're in.
But if the law of the doctrine says the case you're in is always evolving.
How do you find an illogical precedent? Which is why.
People have said as far as the Supreme Court in America goes,
they have made it clear they really don't want to have to deal legally with police reform.
I keep sending these qualified immunity, you know, please back.
And I. So it's receive a concept by qualified immunity. As I've been arguing, the longer these functions on this moment of time.
These moments of time. Are we judge them. You've made that clear.
Sorry, I. I do want to get straight to something I'm just working on,
but I just thought I have to bring this to the whole political a legal doctrine around these sorts of issues.
Thank you, Margaret. I think I was thinking as Hoby started, you know, should I just kind of go for it?
As you were talking about unpreparedness, I think we also need to think about preparedness,
because the police may say that they're acting in the heat of the moment in a sudden crisis.
But, of course, they have been prepared by that training, which in some countries is crazy military.
And we know that's part of the point of military training.
But when you suddenly are in a crisis moment, you act almost automatically because you've had so much training.
And I think you can be prepared in other ways to be prepped, prepared by police unions that always protect you,
whatever you've done, and that you see other cops who have done dreadful saying simply being moved on.
So I think the converse side of unpreparedness and it sometimes is used as excuses is the preparedness.
But the other question, I think, which is really important is who is going to be doing the reflecting on this singular moment?
And I don't see here in the U.K. much signs of any reflection going on in the British government at the moment.
I mean, their their instinct seems to be to cover it up or deny it or pretend that it's all going to go away.
And they still seem to be focussed on Brexit and hoping.
I think that. I mean, I think almost seeing the pandemic as as as an irritation on the road to this glorious end which are going to achieve.
And this concerns me because we have got to learn from the lessons of this period.
And it's got to be I mean, I think as citizens, we can all do something.
But I think it would be much better if the government take a lead, which would set up an enquiry.
I mean, there's been talk of it,
but there's so far little evidence that those actually in charge are reflecting themselves and maybe they're too busy.
And I understand that. But many things to worry about. But we mustn't miss this opportunity to reflect on what's happened.
Quite agree with you, Margaret. And I just want to add that something that military training.
And at least in the United States, the Pentagon giving its excess weapons to the police, which is now all over.
That is. That just shows you the kind of mindset of warrant polices.
And it's called military style warrior style training. Right.
But without that moment of deliberation, you see,
I think Justice Sotomayor is so right in her dissenting judgement when she said that again and again when these cases through it get thrown out.
The doctrine, though, the informal, if you like, idea that is settling in in is to shoot first and think later.
You shoot first and think later. I think that's important. So preparedness, of course, is very important.
But I'm suggesting we start from the unprepared in really think of what the real problems of preparedness are other than say we are prepared now.
How can we prepare ourselves a little bit better? That's what I'm at.
And who is doing the reflecting? A fascinating question here. Look, Margaret, in the States at the moment.
How ever disorganised or whatever. The pressure came from the protest.
You know, there'd been there'd been a string of people who were killed in these circumstances, a similar circumstance.
And yet it is now I mean, every day something has changed.
Some major corporation is now changing a major museum. Is it thinking of changing its practises still like you?
I hope that the institutional effects of this moment, which have been quite remarkable in a very short space of time, really remain.
You've used the word institution now, which is useful in relation to the questions, because, again, I think it might be useful to move on from,
let's say, police and the military to other ideological state apparatuses, shall we say, such as universities and schools and so on.
And to approach Margaret's question about who's doing the reflecting, a number of questions have been asking, so how do we in the humanities,
as historians, as humanities scholars, more broadly, how do we break this institutional affiliation with being unprepared in the negative sense?
How do we. Do you have any thoughts on how one might put this in two ways?
One is, how might this be taught in the future?
This particular moment, how will this become history and how will the unpreparedness of things become part of a historical narrative?
And the other one is, is it, again, a reiteration of the recurrent question,
which is how do we stop unpreparedness simply being something that institutions use to avoid having to face up to things,
including our own institutions? Of course, universities and so on.
Murray. Well, let me go first. OK.
Well, you go first. Well, I'll take the outside.
They take your historias way out saying it's much too soon to tell. No.
I mean, it's very hard when you're living in the middle of the moment to know how it's going to be considered.
But what I'm hoping and I think historians have an obligation to do this, is that future historians 10 years from now,
15 years from now, perhaps will look back and try and recapture the emotions and the debates and the turmoil.
I mean, the always the danger in history is you impose a passion on what was a chaotic and very fluid event.
And I hope that doesn't happen because I think it's like the French Revolution. You know, there is no one story of the French Revolution.
There are many stories. And I think we have to understand that.
And I think it will take a time before the consequences of this particular moment come out.
But I think it will be I hope the subject of a great deal of reflection and university should always be doing this.
We should always be thinking about what what is it worth studying?
And then, I mean, I don't see us as necessarily awarding gold stars or black marks to two episodes in the past.
I mean, I think our our job is to understand them as much as we can. And this particular moment, I think, needs to be understood.
I hope by a collective of people from the humanities, plus people from political science, from sociology,
from the social sciences, because all of us have something to say about what's happening now.
And I think that will help us to get more of a sense of what it actually means. Thank you, Margaret.
And thank you, Wes. I have a couple of thoughts about this.
I think that this has been a perfect storm at the moment, and that's why I said we knew about racism in various institutions.
We knew about viruses.
But they're dovetailing and their entanglement in this moment reflects not only on what they are in the world, but what they are in the university.
It really brings humanists, social scientists and scientists together because as humans, we often talk about indeterminacy contingency interpretation.
Scientists are now saying in this moment of zero degree empiricism, we're also looking for new forms.
I think we're at a remarkable epistemological crossroads here to come together.
I think that's extraordinarily important.
I think, you know, institutions, cultural institutions like museums, libraries and universities have two sides to them.
There is an infrastructural side where they are social justice institutions whereby
we by which I mean employment practises how you diversify and the people you faculty,
these things have a larger resonance with social justice and equality.
But at the curricular end, we are more ethical or cultural justice institutionally, more cultural rights institutions.
We cannot say exposition should not be represented in the syllabus.
In fact, many of us who would like to have a situation where you have to confront a position which you think
is profoundly wrong and take your colleagues and your students with you and do a good job of it.
So I think at that level we are not simply social justice institutions.
We are linked to social justice, but we do it through pedagogy, through reading, through reflection,
through through rethinking disciplines and what their ends are and how we might bring them together.
And in that context, I really feel that the moment of ethno of this ethno nationalism also shows up a great crisis in education.
You know, we have not around the country. We have trained specialists.
We have trained technicians. We have trained some great elite intellectuals.
We have great some scholars of art, history, literature.
But there is something about the civic engagement of the scholar, the public intellectual place,
the confrontation with things that are happening, which is why I'm drawn to doing this work.
Things writing about the moment and yet thinking, trying to think as deeply as one's capacity run as a capacity for it.
I think that form of conversation, neutrality, dialogue, whether we do it long distance or a distance learning or whether we do it together,
the highest standards of the ethics of conversation and discussion in an equitable framework have to become part of the universe.
And in so many parts of the world, universities cannot even afford it anymore.
I once met some leaders in the lobby of the of Indian institutions, presidents and so on.
Many items I I.D., wonderful organisations, big universities.
And they were all talking about change. And there was hardly a word about the humanities as a body of disciplines.
And I just said what we said is there's a silence on this.
In your conversation. And a very helpful man got up and said, I sympathise with you.
Do you know Homey Barber? I think the best way to regenerate the humanities in India is to make it a subsidiary subject.
In journalism schools, he was trying to be helpful.
Well. Now, I find it so disheartening that the humanities are written off as useless.
You know that then. And we see it.
Some people close to the government or in the government in the United Kingdom today saying, you know, we don't want people in the humanities.
It's a waste of time. I find that so discouraging because what humanities at their best are about is
encouraging exactly the sort of critical thinking that you talked about so,
so well, me and and dealing with ideas and confronting ideas you don't like and dealing with the ethical component of what it is to
be human and bringing in as much of the past and the literature and the understanding that others have gained so painfully.
And, you know, we are we are missing something if we think that education is just utilitarian.
But I also think and I agree again with you completely, that we as humanists have an obligation to speak out.
We must engage in public debate. You know, it's all right.
What I can't bear is when people say my subject is so difficult, I can't possibly explain it to anyone else.
You know, that's so wrong. I mean, what are we for? If I want to explain what we think is important to others, I have to agree with us.
They may think, well, that's but I think we have an obligation to try and do it.
And that obligation, I have to say, is the basis on which we gain the respect of our students.
Are we or they don't respect us.
They don't have to agree with us, but they have to know that we are profoundly engaging with not only the problem is the past,
but the problems of the present in our subject dependent ways, doing the best we can to be part of that debate.
And that's when we get we learnt the most from our students and we're in the best position to teach them.
That's my that's my credo for the humanities. Now, I've been spending a lot of time running the humanities and the art of it.
Now I have a global humanities curriculum project, which I'm just free to make to the end where we've met in Africa.
We've met in Latin America. We've met in Europe. We brought together people. And that's one of the things that we have to work for, for our respect.
You know, the way in which James Baldwin says it is not the achievements of your nation that is important.
We have to keep achieving our nation. I've slightly paraphrased it, but I think it's OK.
Well, I think that the laughter, the questions have just come in from from the cold.
Natasha, who has argued the humanities bring humanity to life.
And also he has said, well, unpreparedness seems to me to be about showing empathy and flexibility and you might say resourcefulness as well.
Of course, it's not humanities scholars only who control these matters.
Seems to me that where you're both saying that the humanities can bring these
things to the fore in ways that are that are again being sidelined at the moment.
I suppose I'd like to go for our last moment. We've come to the end of our time pretty much right back to the beginning of the discussion today.
And to ask one of the questions, which is coming from wisdom, which is we've been studying and analysing colonisation, racism, war for years.
How I can get into question that being out there are no different ways.
How is it that being unprepared can help us to regenerate this study?
I mean, in a sense, we've been asking that question. We've been getting to that question for the last half hour or so.
Do you have any final thoughts on that? In other words, there's sort of we are not into.
We are at a new moment, but we've also know exactly the essence of your talk.
I mean, we've been here before, but we also haven't been here before.
So how is unpreparedness enabling us to think about that, that we've learnt stuff but we haven't yet learnt properly?
Well, this might give friendly the question of this is a huge question.
I'm not going to bring it up now, but I'm going to say that some of the major learning moments and some of the major groups moments in the history
of empire have not been people who've simply lauded the empire or people who only criticise the empire.
Its being people who have said and this isn't just happens to be a quote from John Stuart Mill.
Nobody. I mean, even is so profound ambivalence is that I take this as a thought,
which is very important to me, where he says, of course, is the author of the great essay on Liberty.
He says, I am a Democrat in my country and I'm a death sparked in somebody else's country.
What does that make of me now? He answered it to his own advantage in some ways or not.
But I think it's that kind of an open acknowledgement and negotiation with what is unprepared,
with what you are not prepared to deal with, normative normatively or politically not been.
Not to say not to immediate this try and solve that problem, but to stay with that problem.
And if there if the fact that the essay on liberty has been read and adopted across the world by many democratic parties,
I think it's because of that self questioning spirit. Whatever Jon Stewart might have done in other parts of his life, I'm not.
I'm taking the text, not the man, as it were.
But I think it is to be able to think about the histories we have by looking at these singular moments that not only moments about individuals,
they are singular moments which make us rethink the totality.
And I think the unpreparedness as a kind of way of questioning power, questioning authority,
questioning the one dimensional movement of progressive history, which might help us.
But I'm very modest about it. It's a thought that struck me in the middle of the pandemic.
Maybe it's a virus. I don't know if it helps me or kill me a cure.
So, Hermie, you had the first word. Margaret, would you like the last word before we close?
Well, it would be a very. Thank you. That's very kind of be very brief. Last word. I agree so much with what he says.
But I think that's what we should always be doing in our own lives and in our disciplines,
as we should be questioning the fundamentals on which they rest. But I think sometimes we need a bit of pressure to do that questioning.
And the pandemic has given us that pressure. And in a way, we cannot escape it.
You know, it's like a great big slump has hit us in the back and we have Todger out and say, wait, I'm quite happy with.
I'm quite happy with the way the study of war has gone so far.
You know, I think we're always re-evaluating how we study things, but sometimes we see it more sharply than others anyway.
I've enjoyed it tremendously. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you all.
I've had a wonderful time well with people. So at the beginning you said hurt me that we've managed to bring Harvard and Oxford together.
We've also managed to bring Columbia, the UK, India, USA and Canada, Pakistan, Germany, Algeria, Ireland, Brazil and France are lovely people.
I ask you that question from breakup's. Thank you all very much.
Thank you. Then to our two Berlins because for a wonderful and thought provoking session this evening.
And thank you as always to the many viewers at home in your many home and your homes or around the world for your comments and questions.
I'm sorry if I didn't manage to take all your questions through to us, because this time but I think we covered most of them.
This series would not be possible without you, the audience, and indeed without the vital support of the team, as it were, backstage a torch.
Thank you all. But a big and special thank you once again to all troops, because first of all,
to Professor Mehbooba and Professor Margaret Macmillan, brilliant, humane and generous speakers.
Thank you again. Thank you. Thank you. Please join us, everyone else.
Well, whether they're welcome to next week for next week's Big Life Big Tent Live event on Thursday,
the 9th of July at five p.m., this time with Professor Judith Buchanon,
master of St. Peter's College here in Oxford, and Professor John Weaver, director of screen productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
And they will be speaking as part of our Arts Week theme. In that conversation, we'll be discussing the arts in lockdown, reflecting on UNspeak,
his own experience from the lockdown period and some of the inventive ways in which art has been produced and accessed.
We will, in other words, be revisiting some of the questions today about what what is it that the humanities can do in this particular moment.
We'll also be exploring some of the wider questions concerning the urgency, the pertinent.
The agency also and the need for the arts during this time.
We hope you'll be able to join us again then and for now. Thank you again.
Stay safe. Stay well. And goodbye.