The Minefield

Are periodic bouts of withdrawal from life’s urgent demands and heated debates necessary to regain a sense of our shared humanity, and to renew the commitments that sustain the moral life? This episode was first broadcast on 17 March 2024. 

Poised as we are at the brink of our great annual festival of shopping, wrapping, giving and exchanging, we can sometimes forget just how ethically complicated the act of “gift-giving” is.In fact, those who recoil at the idea of receiving the “charity” of others, as well as those who are suspicious of the clandestine giving of gifts and doing of favours —suggesting a corrupt quid pro quo — are more attuned to this ethical complexity than those who take an unseemly delight in the prospect of “out-gifting” another.In its best forms, we like to think of gift-giving as an expression of a sense of gratitude that the other person is in the world, and that we get to share the world with them. What is meant to be communicated by such gifts, then, is the simple acknowledgement of their preciousness to us, and that our lives our bound together.Should gift-giving elicit a kind of reciprocity? After all, as Marcel Mauss recognised, gifts create forms of obligation, even indebtedness. So just as there is an ethics of gift giving, there is also an art to gift receiving. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “He is a good man, who can receive a gift well”.

Democracy is in retreat, authoritarianism on the rise. But this has happened before. So how did big thinkers of the past respond to the threats to democracy, and what can we learn from them?Scott Stephens delivered the Humanities Research Centre 50th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture at the Australian National University on 31 July 2024. It was recorded and subsequently broadcast as part of the SOS DEMOCRACY series on Big Ideas.After the lecture, Scott answers questions from Dr Kim Huynh,  the Deputy Director of the Humanities Research Centre, and members of the audience.

In December 1974, “The Godfather, Part II” premiered in New York City. Following the unlikely success and unexpected acclaim that his 1972 adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel received, Francis Ford Coppola was granted almost unlimited discretion to realise his cinematic vision for the sequel — and he used that discretion to greatest possible effect.In fact, “The Godfather” and “The Godfather, Part II” are rare instances of films that far outstrip, in both its narrative depth and its aesthetic form, the source material on which they are based.At the heart of the first two “Godfather” films is a stark contrast. Vito is virtuous within a cinematic universe in which legality and morality are not synonymous: the fact that his assassination of the tyrannical Don Fanucci is celebrated, that his “favours” are beneficent, that he is attentive to his wife and children — all suggest a kind of moral goodness. Whereas Michael, having begun as the most virtuous of Don Corleone’s sons, falls deeper than the others could have gone.Having begun alone, somewhat removed from the family, Michael ends the film utterly, existentially, morally, isolated.