Episodes
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Can a believer and a non-believer find enough common ground to have a truly meaty conversation? I’ve always wondered about this. But my podcast guest Dr Paul Tyson, a philosopher, theologian, sociologist and fellow Substacker, reckons these days he finds it easier to talk meaningfully with atheists and feminists than with Christians, many of whom are as woke as the next person. While Tyson is un-woke, he is economically left and contributes to a “post-capitalist” think-tank alongside former Greece finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis.
Tyson is interested in knowledge and the role that science plays in our approach to truth (and its opposite) in the contemporary world. He has written books on theology and climate change, on Christian sociology, and on the “magic” of meaning. Recently he’s been doing a lot of writing on gender identity ideology — work he struggles to get published, even with Christian publishers.
So we discuss (OK, we criticise) the judgment in Tickle and Giggle. We also discuss: why contemporary Christians are squeamish about standing up for Christians and Christianity; October 7 and its fallout; anti-Semitism, the church and Islam, and current trends in philosophy. We talk about the pain and joy (but mostly the pain) of this writing life. Oh, and we talk about “queer theology”. It’s a thing, apparently.
Incidentally, you’ll hear Tyson refer to himself as a theologically “conservative” Christian. After our discussion he sent me a detailed explanation of what “conservative” means in theological terms. If you’re curious, here’s what he said:
“When it comes to what makes one a theologically conservative Christian, it is basically the preparedness to affirm two rationally impossible doctrines: the trinity and the incarnation (both are affirmed in the Nicaean Creed). Which is to say that the basic benchmark of orthodox Christian theology is its firm commitment to paradox (traditionally, Christian heresy has a long track record of resolving these paradoxes with clear thinking, but no faith).”
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Original music and additional production and editing by Husky Gawenda and Gideon Preiss.
Listen here or, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts.
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If four years ago you would have told me that come the next US election we’d be confronting the prospect of Donald Trump: The Resurrection, I’d have suggested you get more fresh air. But here we are. And with his fascinating, if not inspired, choice of Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance as running mate, Trump redux sharpens his pitch to the embattled American working class.
In this post I speak with journalist and author Batya Ungar-Sargon, a lefty after my own heart who nonetheless reckons the Trumpian right is offering American workers something genuinely new and transformational. Ungar-Sargon, an opinion editor at Newsweek, has written two books: Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (you can see why I like her), and the recent and hugely relevant, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.
For the latter Ungar-Sargon travelled around the US for a year interviewing non-college educated workers to get their sense of whether they had a shot at the American Dream — home ownership, upward mobility, a dignified retirement — and if not, what might make it more of a reality.
Despite the interviewees’ diverse backgrounds and circumstances, she found strong consensus on some issues, chief among them the vexed issue of mass illegal immigration. Nowhere is the class divide as pronounced as it is here; as Ungar-Sargon sees it, while educated Americans view migrants with “patronising pity,” workers regard them as little different from themselves save for the fact of American citizenship, “and they think that should mean something.” “They (the working class) are frustrated when it seems like the opposite is true: immigrants are getting help they could desperately use and can’t access.”
We discuss — and debate!— class warfare, the new Republicans and whether they really are that, Trump and whether he’s a threat to democracy, the Democrats’ decapitation of Joe Biden and why a party that takes its cues from George Clooney is a party in bad shape.
Hope you enjoy this interview with a gutsy and iconoclastic commentator.
Click here to watch the video version of this podcast or listen on Apple or Spotify.
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In this podcast I speak with journalist Bernard Lane, formerly at The Australian and now a fellow Substacker, whose newsletter Gender Clinic News — see the link below — covers the escalating debate over youth gender medicine at home and abroad. For many years Lane was effectively the only journalist doggedly covering what may yet emerge as one of the biggest medical scandals in history. It’s worth re-reading that last sentence. How on earth did we land here? Reporters are supposed to run towards a huge story, not away from it.
We talk about activism stifling journalism and activism having undue influence over science and medicine. Mostly we talk about the final report of England’s Cass Review, the independent inquiry into gender identity services for children and young people, carried out by renowned paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass. We cover her findings on the administration of puberty blockers (they should be banned as a routine intervention) and opposite sex hormones (extreme caution is recommended), and her overall conclusion that the current medicalised approach to treating gender-related distress in minors rests on “remarkably weak evidence.”
Being literary types we also dissect the report’s tone and posture starting with the throat-clearing opening line. And we gently tackle some of the elephants still lurking in this room called “the trans debate.”
https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
Szego Unplugged is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit szegounplugged.substack.com/subscribe -
Over the past 20 years governments have poured billions into the education system, overhauled the national curriculum again and again, reformed the school funding model (or not — but never mind that for now), beefed up teacher training standards, and expounded on the history, maths and reading wars.
But for all the frenetic activity on education policy, our kids keep getting dumber.
How dumb? Well 20 years ago Australia’s 15 year-olds were ranked among the highest in the world in reading, maths and science — since then their performance has slipped so much it’s as if they have missed a year’s schooling. By some measures around 20 per cent of high school kids are functionally illiterate. It won’t surprise you to learn such trends hit disadvantaged students worst of all. In fact, these kids fall further and further behind their more advantaged peers as they move through high school. Hard to imagine a more damning indictment of our education system.
Education expert Ben Jensen has a good idea of what’s gone wrong in our schools; and when I first encountered his diagnosis it had the force of a religious epiphany. Jensen, whose consultancy Learning First advises governments around the world on education reform, reckons the basic problem is we have no idea what’s actually being taught in classrooms. To make matters worse, Jensen says, educators have gone all in for well-intentioned but misguided philosophies such as “individualised learning,” and “meeting kids where they’re at.”
In this podcast we grapple with these big themes writ small in classrooms. (I even sneak in a question about crazy US ideas such as “maths is racist.”) Can we turn things around in our schools? I believe we can; if Federal Education Minister Jason Clare takes heed of Jensen’s refreshingly blunt advice.
Links:
https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Curriculum-and-inequality-July-2023.pdf
https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/To-lift-standards-we-must-reclaim-the-curriculum-October-2022.pdf (with Nicole Murnane)
https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Four-reforms-could-close-the-education-inequality-gap-September-2022.pdf (with Mailie Ross)
https://learningfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/A-lesson-on-how-to-reverse-two-decades-of-failed-education-reforms-August-2022.pdf (with Mailie Ross)
https://grattan.edu.au/report/catching-up-learning-from-the-best-school-systems-in-east-asia/
Szego Unplugged is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit szegounplugged.substack.com/subscribe -
In this podcast I speak with distinguished historian Jeffrey Herf about the global wave of anti-Semitism unleashed in the aftermath of October 7. We discuss the Jew hatred of the right, the left and the Islamist movement — and how Hamas has seduced Western intellectuals into “magical thinking” about its true nature. We also ponder what the future holds for the increasingly fearful Jewish communities of the diaspora.
Alongside other notable historians such as Matthias Küntzel and Benny Morris, Herf is curating and featuring in a three-part webinar on The Origins and Ideology of Hamas. The webinar, which kicks off in the US on February 26, is the work of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a body dedicated to preserving and studying the history and culture of East European Jewry.
YIVO’s chief Jonathan Brent explains: “Exploring the deep affiliations of radical Islamist Hamas with the anti-Semitic propaganda of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, this (webinar) series exposes a painful point of intersection between Eastern European Jewish history and contemporary events.”
You can register for Part 1 here (it’s free): yivo.org/IdeologySeries1
You can view information about the series here: yivo.org/IdeologySeries
The times are a bit punishing for Australians but all sessions will be recorded and available on YIVO’s YouTube channel.
Herf is Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. He’s published extensively on Nazism and the Holocaust and their aftermath in Europe and the Middle East. If you haven’t read his incisive post-October 7 commentary you should check out these links:
https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/from-the-river-to-the-sea/
https://quillette.com/2023/10/10/the-ideology-of-mass-murder/
(With Norman J.W. Goda): https://quillette.com/2023/11/23/holocaust-historians-the-genocide-charge-and-gaza/
He’s recently published a collection of essays entitled, Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left, and Islamist: https://www.routledge.com/Three-Faces-of-Antisemitism-Right-Left-and-Islamist/Herf/p/book/9781032583013
Our Zoom connection wasn’t the best so you’ll hear a wobble or two; hopefully it won’t detract from what I reckon is a powerful and illuminating conversation.
Szego Unplugged is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit szegounplugged.substack.com/subscribe -
Amid a new Israel-Gaza war, the world reeling from unprecedented atrocities against Israeli civilians, former Age editor Michael Gawenda reflects on his life as a Jew — the title of his astonishing new book— and on what he sees as a troubling shift towards activist journalism. During the last Israel-Gaza war two years ago, more than 400 Australian journalists and writers petitioned the media to “do better on Palestine,” calling on editors to stop promoting “discredited” spokespersons, “tired narratives” and “both siderism” that “equates the victims of a military occupation with its instigators”. Gawenda says the events of recent days makes the petitioners’ stance, flawed to begin with, appear “even worse.” He thinks these journalists should publicly explain why they signed the petition.
In this podcast interview we also discuss his time as editor at The Age and whether he’d be able to attain such a position if he were starting his career now as “the Jew I have become” — namely, a Jew deeply attached to Israel, one who refuses to denounce Zionism in order to gain admission to the political left. Other Jews are more willing to comply; Gawenda describes them as “anxious Jews”; Jews fundamentally anxious about being Jewish. (They’re hilariously depicted in Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question as self-declared “ASHamed Jews.”)
One such “anxious Jew,” in Gawenda’s view, is Louise Adler, his long-time colleague, publisher and former friend. Adler signed the journalists’ petition. Earlier this year she came under fire as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week for inviting Palestinian writers to discuss their experiences of occupation and dispossession to the exclusion of any Israeli voices. Two of the featured writers were accused of peddling anti-Semitic tropes; one had referred to Ukraine’s (Jewish) president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a “depraved Zionist.” Gawenda’s book opens with an account of his friendship with Adler ending “suddenly and fiercely” over Israel. We discuss why he took the extraordinary step of publicly airing this personal falling out.
And we talk about Gawenda’s childhood as the son of Holocaust survivors, the influence of his socialist, non-Zionist youth movement and whether he sees hope of a reconciliation between the Jews and the left. On the latter, he’s optimistic.
In the aftermath of one of the darkest days for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, I, for one, will take any hope on offer.
Sources: My Life As A Jew, Michael Gawenda, published October 3 (Scribe)
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Welcome to my inaugural podcast episode!
I’m speaking here with journalist Matt Johnson about his latest book, How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment. The subject couldn’t be closer to my heart because: a) I’m an enduring fan of Christopher Hitchens, a lacerating and erudite polemicist whose death in 2011 left a Hitch-sized hole in the universe, and b) “rediscovering fearless liberalism in an age of counter-enlightenment” is a project in which I’m a wee bit invested.
In the years before his passing, Hitchens had become a reviled figure on the mainstream left — a status he wore with his typical swagger. A Marxist in his youth, his staunch support for the Iraq war saw him cast out of his political tribe as a traitor. The UK Labour MP George Galloway described Hitchens’ career as “something unique in natural history .. The first ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug.”
But as Matt tells me, Hitchens’ shift from dogma had started long before the Iraq war, gathering pace in the aftermath of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And the “fearless liberalism” at which he arrived — a creed that values freedom, solidarity and universal human rights — has its lineage in leftist heroes such as George Orwell.
So is “the Hitch” the cure for the left — and what form does the left’s sickness take? If he were alive today would he be cancelled? Would he be on Substack like the rest of us heretics?
Listen and find out! One thing: our chat comes to a slightly abrupt close due to a tech boo-boo at my end. It’s unlikely to happen again. But it does give me an excuse for another chat with Matt at a future date. He’s a rigorous thinker with a finely-tuned moral compass.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit szegounplugged.substack.com/subscribe
