Undisciplinary
Undisciplinary
Love, Grief, and Empathy: Undisciplinary reflections on 2024
**Below is AI generated**
This episode explores the complexities of grief during festive seasons, focusing on the interplay between love, loss, and holiday traditions. Insights from bell hooks highlight the importance of love as an action, while discussions on technology's impact on mourning encourage listeners to consider their relationships with grief and community.
• Discussing the emotional landscape of holiday traditions
• The contrast of summer festivities in Australia with feelings of grief
• Exploring the concept of death bots and digital mourning
• bell hooks' perspective on love as a verb
• The role of societal rituals in processing loss
• Examining issues of empathy in global conflicts
• Encouraging solidarity through small, actionable steps
Undisciplinary - a podcast that talks across the boundaries of history, ethics, and the politics of health.
Follow us on Twitter @undisciplinary_ or email questions for "mailbag episodes" undisciplinarypod@gmail.com
Undisciplinary, is recorded on the unceded lands of the Wadawurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation and the Gadigal peoples of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to elders, past and present. Okay, so welcome to. I don't know what we're going to call this. We can't keep on having little sub-genres, or can we? I guess we can do whatever we want Fireside chats, fireside chat. What?
Speaker 3:are we going to do? Maybe we could build a fire, sing a couple of songs, huh.
Speaker 4:Why don't we try that? Oh a campfire.
Speaker 3:Well, isn't that all snug and comfy?
Speaker 4:Fire. No, good no.
Speaker 1:I guess, to kick things off for this end of year, wrap up maybe ending on a bit more of a sombre tone, but we'll no doubt end in some frivolity towards the end. But I think this time of year, you know, a lot of people do talk about it as being a hard time of year and I also wonder whether it is particularly the case in australia or the southern hemisphere. Um, because you know people talk about, you know, the christmas, new year period time spending family, but also time when you are faced with absences or um challenges within family and friendship groups and communities. And obviously that happens throughout the world during different festive periods. But there's also something a bit odd about it, when it's sunny and hot and the beach, to have that kind of somber mood. I don't know if you have a perspective on that, um, being a globetrotter and having experienced these things in different areas jane laughs um, if you'd like to put that bit in, um, do you know?
Speaker 2:I have been thinking about this and, in terms of having having grown up in a very in a thing, that's like Christmas is always sort of very English right, and it was always about having fake snow and cooking a ham and a turkey and a roast and all of that I mean it was never boiling outside because it was New Zealand, but it's strange taking some exportable traditions and taking them completely out of context and expecting them to make sense. So for me that's kind of part of it.
Speaker 1:It's like the idea for me that Christmas ought to be cozy, even though you know cozy Christmas is not my norm, but you're meant to be like inside with people and it's all nice and you're I don't know singing and stuff, but actually it's just really hot and there are flies or something, yeah, yeah, and I guess that sort of reflects the weather, reflects a different kind of mood, and so, yeah, with that sort of sense of you know, I guess the Christian idea of joy and new life and all that sort of stuff in the context of brokenness and families and grief, can be even more seemingly contradictory and out of place when it's a 30 degree cloudless sky and you're on your way to the beach, so it's. I wanted to note that, you know, it's been two years since Courtney's death as well, and I know that within our various communities there's been other forms of sadness and grief during this time. And it made me think about this.
Speaker 1:This past trimester I've been teaching a unit called love, sex and death, and so it goes through those three things and we end with death. We have three weeks on death, talking about different aspects of it, um, and this year we finished talking about digital death and death bots um, and how people apparently are using artificial intelligence and death bots to sort of bring back the dead um in, you know, in a form um, so you could use the data to, you know, create a chatbot with a deceased friend or relative. And it made us think then, about how does grief transform in those contexts, and one of the readings that we had a book that we had that went over the whole unit was Bell Hooks' book on love, and unfortunately the title escapes me Right.
Speaker 2:Because you've been reading it all year.
Speaker 1:Just because I've been reading it all year. All About Love, new Visions, bell Hooks. It's a really good book. I would recommend it to anyone.
Speaker 1:But in this, you know, book she also connects love with death and grief, which I thought was quite an interesting way.
Speaker 1:So we sort of circled back to use that phrase uh, from death in the final week to also think about love. And there are just a few, I guess, uh, quotes from Bell Hooks that I thought you know may be useful to think about, reflect on the year and as well as the lives of people who we may be missing, you know. So, one being sort of our collective fear of death is a disease of the heart. Love is the only cure. So for Hooks, throughout this book she's sort of diagnosing what she sees as a range of different problems within the US society. It's very sort of focused on the US culture, so there are some things that are different. But she sort of sees that we have this misunderstanding of what love is, which then manifests in a lot of different ways, so particularly a fear around death as a symptom of sort of misunderstanding what love is. And she says that we need to love and live our lives knowing that death is always with us.
Speaker 1:So death isn't just something that sort of happens in a hospital bed away from us and that to see it as always with us, you know, and as only as this negative subject, is to lose sight of its power to enhance every moment. So again, she's sort of suggesting that the fragility of life and the entanglement of life and death is something that we shouldn't hide from but embrace in, that it can enhance those moments. So she connects our collective misunderstanding and mispractising of love with our collective misunderstanding and mispractising of death, and so the practice is the sort of one of the key parts of her sort of idea of what love is. So, throughout she talks about love as a verb, that love is something that we do. And similarly, you know I guess in some way she's talking about that you know we have practices of death, dying and death is something that we do, of death, dying and death is something that we do. So you know that. I think if we can think about how we practice, love can relate to, then, how we, I guess, practice living as well as practice dying, and she says that love is another quote. Her love is the only force that allows us to hold one another close beyond the grave. That is why knowing how to love each other is also a way of knowing how to die.
Speaker 1:And you know, in the context of this course and maybe you're thinking of other things, jane, or others but in the context of this course, when we were talking about the sort of impulse to have a death bot, you know we had some discussions around whether that impulse was. You know, not to sort of be too judgmental about the way people grieve everyone grieves differently but whether that impulse to sort of recreate a kind of artificial version of someone is also reflective perhaps of of maybe misunderstanding and mispracticing of love during the life of that person. You know that that regret can often fuel a lot of the ways that we deal with death, grief or breakup, and that that can play out in different ways. I mean chatbots perhaps is a bit, or death bots as they're sometimes called. It's perhaps a bit of a um unique dimension to that um.
Speaker 1:Bell hook certainly wasn't talking about those things, but it is, uh, it is interesting to think about the ways that and the impulses that we have in the grieving process, whether in the context of death or whether in the context of some kind of relationship breakdown, and how that plays out in the way that we think about love and life. So again a quote from Hook. She says in a culture like ours, where few of us seek to know perfect love, grief is often overshadowed by regret. And that when we fully live in the present, when we acknowledge that death is always with us and not just there at the moment when we breathe our last breath, we are not devastated by events over which we have no control. And in that I'm reminded.
Speaker 2:Yeah, can I ask what does she mean? We're not? Does she mean we're not devastated by deaths of people? I can't imagine.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what does?
Speaker 2:she mean Maybe I'm misunderstanding, devastated. Imagine, yeah. What does she mean? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, devastated, yeah.
Speaker 1:I think what she means is that we aren't, I guess, completely undone as you know both in who we are, that we are changed and transformed, but we aren't crushed or sorry, irreparably broken.
Speaker 1:Irreparably broken.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, yeah, she does in other parts, talk about, you know, and also the context of love relationships and the breakdown of those, that we do change and transform as who we are, um, but I think in what she's saying is that we, if we acknowledge that death is always with us and not just there at the moment when we breathe our last, so it's not just this thing that happens at the end, but it's something that we can be in preparation for and is part of what's happening to us now then, when those events do have happen that we have no control over and I think that's the other thing that throughout the book and this idea of love, this idea of control, um, so you know the related quote, accepting death with love means we embrace the reality of the unexpected, of experiences over which we have no control.
Speaker 1:Love empowers us to surrender. Death is always there to remind us that our plans are transitory. Yeah, so I guess, in that sense, that it's a dev, it's. It's not a devastation, because it's not this unexpected thing that has revealed that we have no control, or this unexpected thing that reveals that our plans are transitory.
Speaker 1:We kind of are preparing for the transitory nature of our plans already and the lack of control over those um can I?
Speaker 2:um, I just had a thought about the death bots, hey, um, and I'm wondering, you know, obviously technology makes things like that possible, but I'm also wondering about how much we've lost in terms of the way that we our rituals around death and mourning and that sort of thing, um, and sort of how we're maybe held in community, you know, when you think about the olden days.
Speaker 2:I know about this from reading books and so on that after somebody dies, everybody knows about it and you know you might be wearing different clothes, you might be all of those things that signal to other people that you're in this situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I don't think we have that now. Maybe technology steps into the breach to try and ameliorate that kind of loss. I suppose that sort of social loss.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that's interesting. Yeah, I think there are a lot of grief is happening in isolation, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Isolation, of grief over that isolation too, and not having recognisable codes and rituals that we all understand. Some people may understand them, other people may not or see them. Understand them, um, other people may not or see them. Um. Yeah, I'm reminded of um just recently, a colleague from the us who's been doing some work with um, well, sort of working in this sort of with native americans and. But it's like a class context, um, where there are non-Native and Native Americans in this sort of learning environment together and a Native student came in and they had cut their hair and a lot of the non-Native students were complimenting them on their haircut, whereas then it was revealed that, no, this is part of a maturing process and they're going through a process of um, you know, feeling that they need to sort of um. I can't remember what my colleague exactly said, but yeah, yeah, that the cutting of the hair wasn't about fashion. It was about um, uh, something more sort of personal and communal at the same time within their context.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I do think that's interesting with the digital stuff, whether that does fill a breach that we or a void that perhaps we didn't have, but with these sort of reflections of hooks on, uh, death and love.
Speaker 1:I sort of have two things that I'd be interested to share and hear your thoughts about, so one being about death.
Speaker 1:So I like, I like a lot about what hooks has to say. Um, but you know, and and the task of her book is not to address the reality of death in all situations, but we are faced with death, um, in very different situations. We are faced with different kinds of death depending on where and how we live. So, uh, hooks is talking about the sort of interpersonal relations and how death affects those relationships, as well as the people who are participating in them, and perhaps the communities, and they, you know, are deeply important. They constitute sort of who we are, those interpersonal love relations and death relations, and I'm not wanting to diminish those, but a recent study that was reported in the Guardian talked about how 96% of children in Gaza feel the imminent threat of death, and you can share that article about that and people in many different famine-torn areas, war-torn areas, places of famine, that experience of death and I guess back to what you sort of picked up on, you know the devastating events.
Speaker 1:You know they are a different kind of devastating event, like I do think we can follow hooks in preparing for ourselves for the uncontrollable and the transitory nature of life and death in life and all of that sort of stuff I think is important. But you know, this genocidal death and its shadow over these children's lives seems to be different, a different kind of contingency, a more arbitrary and unjust contingency of death than the death that Hooks is talking about. And so again, this isn't Hooks' task or what she's trying to do, but yeah, I do think that that approach to the injustice of that genocidal death is very different.
Speaker 2:When you were talking about Hooks before and particularly the connections between love and death. It's really difficult to see the role of love in 96% of children feeling the imminent threat of death.
Speaker 3:I want to say that's not normal.
Speaker 2:And it's not normal.
Speaker 1:It's beyond anything that we can really contemplate but it's happening and it's real, yeah, and I think that's the challenge. So that brings me to the second thing. You know, what role does love play in the second one? You know I think that Hooks articulates how love plays out in those interpersonal things and I agree with her sort of assessment that a skewed understanding of love and a skewed practice of love sort of occurs throughout our society at that interpersonal and communal level. But I think at the global level there's also whether we want to talk about it as love or talk about it as justice or empathy, and I want to try to play so as part of, I guess, these reflections was also spurred by Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur to the UN. Un, and she recently gave a press conference described about the lack of empathy in the global community, and I'm going to try to share that now.
Speaker 3:Frankly, I'm again. I'm shocked. I always experience a sense of shock and delusion when I come to this room, because many of you recited the same script that you had in front of yourself last year. Of course we condemned Hamas attack. Of course we expressed solidarity with the Israeli victims. Of course we demand the release of the hostages, both the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Speaker 3:But is it possible that, after 42,000 people killed, you cannot empathize with the Palestinians? Those of you who have not uttered a word about what is happening in Gaza demonstrate that empathy has evaporated from this room, and empathy is the glue that makes us stand united as humanity. But don't worry, I mean you can continue and you will become more and more irrelevant to the rest of the world, which is in turmoil, and it's not just the global south. Look at the young people in Europe, in Western countries, those to whom many of you, including my own country and Germany and France and the UK are demonstrating that human rights are good to be taught in schools and universities, but don't dare you trying to exercise freedom of assembly, freedom of expressions in your street. All the more for Palestine, all the more touching our ally Israel. This is what you are telling young generations.
Speaker 1:So I guess what I mean there are many things that are is this lack of empathy that you know the Palestinians are still seen in terms of statistics and the reality of those statistics are not taken on in a meaningful way. That you know, now we've got 42,000, you know, some people are saying it's up to 50,000 dead, yet not taking into account that 96% of children feel this imminent death, not taking into account the maiming, the amputees, the you know the, you know malnutrition, all the various compounding factors that don't come into just raw stats about death and the grief right and the grief of those communities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the grief, right, and the grief of those communities, yeah, but yeah, so one of the things is, you know, love and empathy is a power that binds us not only beyond the grave but should bind us in a way that we cannot tolerate the fact that some are excluded from these bonds, and I think that's what she sort of talks about with this unity that is lacking and you know, I think, in some of the philosophical of the glue, as she put it, between among a humanity that can, yes, acknowledge the attacks on Israel, but doesn't need to stop there and doesn't need to put those up as being somehow more significant, and the fact that now we've got to, you know, this extraordinary and devastating number of, you know, palestinian deaths, yet there is no empathy to act or justice in seeking to do anything Like it, really reminds me of the Old Testament, prophet Jeremiah. You know, that's where we get the phrase of a Jeremiah, someone who's sort of complaining, prophetically, denouncing the powers that be, and he is saying here, you know this verse they dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. Peace, peace, they say when there is no peace, and that's something that I think that you know Francesca Albanese is sort of fulfilling the same role. People are talking about, maybe not peace. I mean, there is sort of talk of, you know, let's have peace, but we can't have peace unless we acknowledge the injustices going on and saying peace. Peace when there is no peace is a further injustice to what is happening in the current situation in Gaza and Palestine and into Lebanon and Syria. And I think that we need to work out ways that we can get, you know, develop glue, I guess, if you like, or develop that kind of unity.
Speaker 1:And this is going back to Hook, where I think hooks can help. You know, hooks talks about love as a verb, it's an action, and I think it's in doing things, small things maybe at first, that we can start to, at least in our own communities, build up some of that glue. So I guess, you know, to finish off this sermon, my encouragement would be that we can act and maybe they're going to be small things at first. You know, I know a lot of people who in my life, like parents at school, who will say that they feel really upset about what's happening in Gaza, but they don't know what to say, they don't know what to talk about. They don't know what to do, so they don't say anything, back to this sort of isolation. They're sort of isolated in their feelings of grief, or it's too complicated. Well, there's a great book called Palestinian A to Z which is, I think, about five bucks on Kindle, which is a great explainer of everything, and that it's not actually all too complicated and particularly at the moment when we've got up to 50,000 people being killed, it's not complicated. This has to stop.
Speaker 1:So we can do small acts that cultivate and foster this empathy. So signing a petition, even that's a very small act. But you start doing those sorts of things. You could wear a badge, talk to a friend, attend a rally. You could lock yourself to your car and block off the anzac bridge. Um, there you know, there are many different things. I think that we can start doing that, at least within our own communities. Maybe over Christmas or festive lunch you could start a conversation with who thinks that it's okay for Australia to continue to supply arms and weapons manufacturing to Israel under the current situations. Anyway, there's some ideas, obviously complex in the sense of that we are small little people. And what are we going to do? But, as Francesca Albanese also has said in another press conference, but as Francesca Albanese also has said in another press conference, apartheid inided that there are ways that the people and global communities of solidarity can put pressure to end these things, jane.
Speaker 2:Yes, thank you, that was lovely and important. That was lovely, that's right. No, it's really important, and I've been reflecting, uh since uh, on solidarity and in the role of solidarity it's very big in public health ethics right now, um I'm the action part for me is missing and without know, when we're just talking about the importance of solidarity and so on, what to do and how to be is, I think, very much missing from the debate, and also the idea that not all solidarity is good solidarity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you brought that up before and I think that like this solidarity between, you know, israel and US was parodied in a Saturday Night Live sketch which I don't think made it onto TV but was on YouTube.
Speaker 4:If the room could come to order, please. The chair recognises the distinguished senator from South Carolina, mr Graham. Thank you, mr Chairman, and thank you, senator Hagel, for appearing before us once again.
Speaker 1:Not at all. Senator.
Speaker 4:As you know, senator, I like you. I like you too. That's why I have to tell you that I'm frankly troubled by some comments you have made in the press regarding our relationship with our closest ally, israel. These comments trouble me. They trouble me, I find them troubling and am troubled by them. Specifically, a quote that appeared in the April 11, 1998 edition of the Washington Post. You said, and I quote the United States will always have an extremely close relationship with the State of Israel, but that's not to say that in every single instance our interests and those of Israel will be identical. Now, I like you, senator. I do. You're a good man.
Speaker 4:But when I read that statement, I thought to myself is this a typo? Are my eyes deceiving me? I mean, does he really think that our interests and those of Israel could ever be different? Or have I slipped into some parallel dimension where white is black and black is white? Where the sun rises in the west instead of the east, like it's supposed to, where cats go woof-woof and dogs go meow? Is this some kind of crazy dream world? Why don't you like Israel?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you've made the point a number of times about solidarity. That was to say that you, I think, yeah, that's a point that is well made and needs to be remembered that there can be a skewed form of solidarity.
Speaker 2:I have one other comment.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And this might be slightly odd, feel free to edit it out, because it involves your parents, chris Right, okay. Okay, it involves your parents, chris Right, okay. In terms of, I think you know, when I was talking before about the death bots and losing that sort of communal feeling of knowing how to be with death and acknowledge death, and so on, when I heard you talking about love as a verb and an action, I was thinking about a terrible situation that happened recently that involved the death of a young person near where Chris's parents live, and after the funeral there was a sort of walking procession back to their house, back to the house of the family of the person who died. And it was very interesting to me, as we were doing this procession, that all of the neighbours were standing watching us, and now I'm going to cry, bearing witness.
Speaker 2:Basically, and your mum and dad were there, chris, right Just standing and watching.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Maybe you do need to edit this out, but it was really powerful.
Speaker 1:Was it their witnesses like not my parents, but you know the neighbours' witness as not that they were spectators, but in some ways that they were. No, no, no, but in some ways they were sort of part of it. They had a role in sort of witnessing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it was like respect, I guess. Yeah, I thought I was going to be able to say that without crying, but it appears not.
Speaker 1:That's fine.
Speaker 2:That's important.
Speaker 1:I mean, I hadn't heard that before, but that's, you know, there's a religious dimension to that as well, like with a lot of different religious practice and again sort of that connection, I guess, of love as a practice and as a doing of things, and yeah, grief as a practice and of doing things as well is important, but thank you for sharing that, jane. I think I would like to leave it in, but we can talk about that afterwards.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, that's fine.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I guess, in wrapping up this more serious part of the end of year episode, that I think, yeah, we hope that you all have a good festive year celebrations. But yeah, I guess, practice love. Love is verb.
Speaker 2:Talk about hard things.
Speaker 1:Talk about hard things. Talk about hard things, which reminds me actually just saying love is a verb. I was talking to cynthia uh forlini, friend of the show uh, about, uh bell hooks, and then she said to me, um, when I said, oh, you know, she talks about love as a verb and then she was like, oh, just like the massive attack song, um teardrop. And I was like what are you talking about? And then she said that starts off saying love is a verb and I always thought it.
Speaker 1:And then I said I always thought it started off with but then I went and listened to the song and it actually says love, love, loves a bird huh, love is a doing word.
Speaker 2:Fearless, I'm not brave. Gentle impulsion shakes me, makes me wider. Fearless, I'm not brave.