Seeing the Old, the Weak and the Afflicted - Karen Hitchcock

Venue: Public Lecture Theatre, Old Arts (Building 149)

Presenters: Karen Hitchcock

The Wednesday Lectures 2016 hosted by Raimond Gaita

It is striking how often people now speak of 'a common humanity' in an ethically inflected register, one that expresses a fellowship of all the peoples of the earth. More often than not, however, we refer to the idea of a common humanity when we lament the failure of its acknowledgment. The forms of that failure are depressingly many: racism, sexism homophobia, the dehumanization of our enemies, of unrepentant criminals and those who suffer severe and degrading affliction. As often as someone reminds us that 'we are all human beings', someone will reply that to be treated like a human being you must behave like one.

Many people appear now to fear that within twenty years or less national and international politics will be dominated by crises that caused and inflamed by the shameful gap between the rich and the poor nations, aggravated by the effects of climate change. They fear their children and grandchildren will not be protected as they have been from the terrors suffered by most of the peoples of the earth because of impoverishment, natural disasters and the evils inflicted upon them by other human beings. In such circumstances the ideal and even the very idea of a common humanity is likely to seem to have been a foolish illusion.

The six Wednesday Lectures of 2016 will explore what sustains and what erodes the idea of a common humanity and, more radically, whether it is a useful idea with which to think about the moral, legal and political relations between people and peoples.

Wednesday, 17 August: Seeing the Old, the Weak and the Afflicted

Is our inhumanity towards older people in some way an inhumanity towards ourselves, our old selves? It's a remarkable act of denial that we can make what we will unavoidably become so thoroughly other. The same could be said of the difficulty we have in seeing the full humanity of those who are weak or who suffer severe affliction, both conditions to which we are all vulnerable - a vulnerability that, like our mortality, partly defines what it means to be human.

Speaker: Karen Hitchcock is an author and medical doctor. She has published in both medical and literary journals and her stories and essays have been included in Best Australian Short Stories and Best Australian Essays. She writes a regular column about medicine for The Monthly and currently works as a physician in a large city hospital in Melbourne.

Hitchcock’s first book Little White Slips won The Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards and was shortlisted in the 2010 NSW Premiers Literary Award and the Kibble/Dobie award for women writers. Her Quarterly Essay Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly was published to high critical acclaim.

from
https://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/7135-seeing-the-old-the-weak-and-the-afflicted-karen