Hi everyone. Welcome to the SHE Research Podcast. I'm your host, Diego Silva. Welcome to a new year of the podcast. Before introducing our guest, I want to begin by acknowledging that we're recording this on unceded Gadigal country. This is and will continue to be Aboriginal land, and I want to pay my respects to those who have and to continue to care for country. Today, I am joined by none other than Seye Abimbola, Associate Professor in Global Health here at the University of Sydney. At the end of 2024 Seye's new book, The Foreign Gaze was published, and it is well worth reading. We'll link it to this podcast as well. But today, given everything that's occurred over the last three, four months since the book was published, I wanted to take an opportunity to chat with Seye about the state of global health and global health's relation to bioethics as we're recording this in March 2025. Seye, welcome.
Thank you very much. It's nice of you to have me.
Pleasure to have you. What is the state of global health in March 2025?
The easy answer is, I don't know. I think the more true answer is that there are multiple global health, that there is a version of global health that is an American version of global health, and that version of global health, of course, is going through a turbulent period. There are other versions of Global Health which I think are much less affected by that turbulence, and some are deeply shaken by it, of course. And that version of global health that is American is changing, and I don't think it will recover ever again. There was an American, is an American, consensus on global health that I would date roughly to about when HIV became a very big thing in our consciousness. Prior to that, we had had sort of the agreement around WHO's existence and what it meant before and after. After that, we had had the big, huge event in the Alma Ata Declaration. I often date the idea of global health, frankly, to Alma Ata. In many ways, there's those who, of course, pick that landmark, WHO, Alma Ata, HIV. That's how I think about the recent history of global health and the Alma Ata version, I'm not sure if you know this, was a very global led redefinition of how the world should cooperate for health and how countries should prioritise health and ask for a new economic order. And within a year, very American forces reversed that. The Rockefeller Foundation was behind that. That very important meeting at the Bellagio Centre in Italy. And there was an article in The New Journal of Medicine that basically said that vision for global health in the compressive Primary Health Care version of Alma Ata is not feasible. We shall do selective primary health care, and that will channel for global health work. But fast forward to sort of late 90s, early 2000s there was a new version of it, which was a huge American academic, but also project practice influencing global health. We witnessed a huge uptick in money flowing in projects being started. And it seems to me that that is the bubble that has finally come down, or that's the sort of, sorry, bubble that was the world...
Trajectory?
Trajectory, yes, that is that is coming down. To my mind a lot of other things happen in global health will continue to happen.
What are those other things?
There's a lot of international cooperation for health, whether it's from between, sort of between global south countries and within global south countries, whether it's from richer countries to less rich countries, whether it's from poor countries to poor countries. I mean, that's the nice example of Cuba and its neighbours that has come under Marco Rubios has received his displeasure, and he wants to punish countries that benefit from that. In other words, that's global health too, right? Many global health like that. There's lots of things that have been around the world where countries are helping one another, adults or within countries, things are happening, and those things will continue to happen. WHO will continue to be WHO, with some less money, with some trimming, if the US pulls out, but its functions will remain. And there's a part of me that wants to make this point very clearly, that the US is important, what's important, but the world will continue without its centrality, as it were.
One of the things I know that you're interested in as a researcher, as a scholar, is ideas of systems, and complexity in particular. You mentioned at the outset of your response, there's sort of the US centric, or US version, and then there's all these other global healths. What's the relationship between them? So you mentioned that a lot of the multi multilateral agreements of different kinds will continue. We can have conversations about global health in borders as well, but we do see that the imprint from the US is there in these other versions of global health. So what is that imprint? If you were to prognosticate, which is always dangerous, what does that footprint look like now that it's not there or won't be there?
I think the first thing to say is that there is no guarantee, regardless of what's going on now, that it won't be there. I don't think people or entities with power let go of it easily, regardless of how destructive their instinct might be. So there's a part of me, frankly, that thinks, whatever is happening now, money may go down, but the influence may remain. So just just to hold that idea that I'm not sure that that influence goes away. There is a, and I don't like to use this word, there's a neoliberal version of ideology that underpins a lot of US involvement in global health. Now, if the US influence recedes, I think that's a better world. It recedes. Maybe some of that might recede. In other words, it may be easier to talk more boldly, more practically, more pointedly about, say, the commercial determinants of health than we've been able to do. We may be able to more directly challenge the power of big industrial health globally in ways that US interests will almost certainly stop us from doing robustly. There is a version of academic global health that draws very heavily on US assumptions about health. Again, if US influence recedes, I would be happy to see that one recede too, an example of that is the belief, for example, that behavioural factors are a very important prime target, especially for people who are disadvantaged, marginalised, dispossessed. It's a very deeply Neo-Liberal/American version of how to think about the world. So there are those assumptions that I hope will recede. There's no guarantee that they will, because these things tend to be stubborn.
Yeah, I think this is really interesting. I think the capitalism or the neoliberal, however you want to sort of phrase it, I think is an interesting one, because we have had Alma Ata was, what 78?
78.
So we've had four decades of, you know, especially if you think about kind of Reagan and Thatcherism in the 80s, we have four decades of a particular stream and way of thinking, whether it be World Bank with its micro loans and whatnot. So the influence versus the direct in imprint, as it were, is, I think, a really good distinction. And I wonder, to the extent that we see countries like China, India come into more into global health, assuming that they do, will that go away? I think is, is a really big question.
If I was a betting man, I would say it wouldn't go away. Yeah, by itself.
Right.
I think we may have an opportunity to make stronger arguments against them.
Right.
Than we had before. And when I say that, I don't think it would go away I say that in large part because most people who have been educated in the world in the last 30, 40 years were educated to see the world in precisely those times. But they won't disappear, right? So this idea and this keep teaching people so ideas don't die easy. That's part of what I meant when I said, you know, maybe they recede a bit. Maybe we can challenge them better, but it will be hard for them to go away.
Yeah I think it's really interesting, the idea of, and now I'm going to pick up ideas from you that in the past, and probably not do them justice, but this idea of who's listening, the listener or the receiver being perhaps more susceptible or more open to push back now that the US has sort of taken a step back, I think is, is an interesting one. So, yeah, I think that the, I think the bet is probably a sound one. The time scale is going to be really interesting. I'm wondering. Again, this is a for the listener, Seye and I've had many conversations over the over the years, so I'm partly setting you up, but, uh, hopefully not, not in too disingenuous of a way, bioethics and global health, in a way, thinking about the ethical issues around global health, will exist irrespective of the US and whoever is sort of in charge of a sort of global scale. So I think that that's true, and I feel that way about bioethics more broadly. You know, there's the sort of the, you know, the the Juliet, Romeo and Juliet line, you know, rose by any other name will somehow sweet, right? So there's, like this sense in which these, this stuff's going to be around. But formally, when we think about bioethics and global health, again, we're talking about a 20, 30 year time frame, maybe. What is the relationship between global health and bioethics? What does bioethics get right? What doesn't it get right? What are your thoughts in terms of some of the ideas and the conversations we're having around ethics and global health?
I will answer that question, as someone who sits outside bioethics, and I look in every now and again, and I often don't like what I see when I look in. I respect a lot of the people, but I'm not a big fan of a lot of what I see, and I think it's in large part because I get a sense... Again, I'm outside of this space, so this may be a completely wrong take on it, but I get a sense that that the field of bioethics, one is very much involved in talking to bioethicists. There's some there's a bubble, there's a thing going on, and it's harder, I've observed, to feel that bioethicists are speaking to people. So just looking outside and talking to people, that's the vibe I get. I suspect part of that is in the word bio, in its name. I've often made that point about it. There's something restrictive about bio, in its name. I wish it was framed. It frames itself more broadly than that. I know when you look at the bioethics and you see and they say, we also do public health ethics. We also do, but if the name itself carries a weight that I think is can be limited. I think there's also the genealogy from philosophy, which is a very Western version of philosophy. So it carries with it the burden. There's a burden of Western philosophy that bioethics carries and I often get this sense that it's hard to shake it off. Now I don't want it to go away, but I wanted to recognise what is Western as a fraction of what else is there in the world that deserves as much respect and centrality as the Western, which partly, I think, why it's hard for it to speak outside, because most of the world is not Western. So there's something limiting about that, I think, let me know when I should stop. I know that thing that I think I've noticed about bioethics as a field is that it's very reluctant, it seems to me, to challenge things. It's as though it's okay to describe and describe and reframe and debate and all of these things. But. To say XYZ needs to stop happening in how we do ABC, it's hard. I don't think I've seen much, if anything, at all, along those lines. And again, Global Health is a field very often that requires that kind of engagement. And I'll stop with this one. There is also what I suspect explains its unwillingness to challenge things, is that it's a, as with almost every other field in academia, it's if it's peopled by by relative elites. Relative elites, who, to the extent that there may be things that need to change, is also implicated in it. This is me psychoanalysing bioethics now. You look at the opinion like, ah, who is to blame? Nobody is to blame. Who is responsible? Well, it's all complicated and okay, and they will describe it and they will leave it there. That's my sense of bioethics in the field. Now you asked, What does it get right?
If.
I'm not sure if you remember this, but I remember it, not very, very vividly. But there was an article you were a co author on, I can't remember the title of the article. Feels like from a long time ago, where you were talking about one of the challenges, one of the reasons why many people in the global south pushed against universal declarations of sort of claims about humanity, about all of these things, and I think the argument you're making there, if I remember correctly, was that when we frame these things as Western, things that are universal, right, human beings want freedom. Human beings want leaders. Human beings have been crying for freedom from the birth, everyone, people, everywhere, the world, right? And when someone then comes and says, ah, Jefferson or whoever was, and then we hung our declaration of human dignity around what Americans were doing in the 1960s like, what is wrong? So you take that so in close, and they look at like, that's not us. I reject. Well, this is easier to say that for me, it's that version of bioethics that looks at the world and is not self absorbed, and can understand how framings and articulations of how the world works needs to change, and how the things that we often point to the west about and the West for, universal things, and we should stop doing that. But also often, when we point to the West as being great, we forget that the West, while making claims about freedom and diversity, was also busy enslaving people and oppressing women, in other words, as were other places in the world, and just the ability to look at the world with open eyes and clear eyes. If we were philosophising or doing ethics from that standpoint, I think we will be, we'll be doing a lot better work. And if we're doing ethics from a standpoint of, even if we're implicated in what is a problem, we can also be agents of advocating for the change of that thing. In other words, I wish was more active. I don't say activist, but even that too.
Yeah, there's a there's a few things I want to sort of pick up on, on based on what you said. So I think, in terms of the universalism, I think it's a really interesting point, because I find this with students, they're very reticent. So one of the first things I do with students is try to distinguish European Christian understanding of universalism, as we see in colonialism, versus actual claims to norms and values that might be universal. And those are two different ways that universal are being used. So I agree, and yeah, probably have made that point somewhere. The thing I find really interesting is the not taking a position bit. So on the one hand, I strongly agree with you. There is not, I don't know if I would say it's as ubiquitous as you're making it seem, but I do think that there is this stream of saying, like, you know, let's look at all sides, or let's look at the nuance. And I think in part of the reason for that is, is that this, one of the strengths of the philosophical approach that I think you're sort of describing, is attention to detail and argumentation and things get kind of complicated. It's finding the right balance that I think is problematic. And I think that there is this stream in ethics that I find difficult to swallow, which is the we're not activists, we're just researchers. We're just doing this kind of research. Or you get it in clinical situations where we're not telling doctors or nurses what to do, we're just giving sort of, you know. So, you know, there's a reason, you know. Again, people do clinical ethics, I don't, and there's probably good reasons for that, but again, I think that that that it can be problematic when there's kind of overwhelming evidence in favour, and I want to pick up on an idea that you've discussed in in another podcast that you recorded recently. So I just want to give a shout out to Global Health Unfiltered. So this is Desmond Jumbam's podcast, and we'll put it on the link as well. So very interesting conversations that the both of you had. So I encourage everyone to listen to that. So in the in the podcast, you you speak about activists and the sort of the denigrating the knowledge of activists as being unscientific. And I wonder whether this is also part of the problem that bioethics sort of sees itself, is that it in the pursuit of rigour, it loses sight of what is otherwise a clear conclusion to sort of reach.
The way we should think about rigour as often functioning in a way to exclude multiple points of view, and I don't think we can be rigorous without including those points of view. In other words, the problem in chasing after rigour we've done is to run away from rigour itself.
Right. So this is a self reflection of a piece that's missing.
Yes, in that if I want to do X in a particular community, and the only people whose point of view I'm taking into account are the governors of that community, then I've not been rigorous, even if I have perfectly, beautifully, brilliantly, comprehensively represented the views of the governance of that community, because I have not spoken to people in the community, I have not been rigorous. So I wish we would redefine how we understand rigour more not just in bioethics but but also in in public health research more broadly that we've we've framed rigour as a fine tuning of a particular specificity and not as a consideration of multiple specificities. You see what I mean?
Yeah, I think so, which actually leads me to one of the questions I wanted to follow up on based on your response to that original question. What constitutes, in your eyes, from an outsider, the Western... And I know again we've discussed about the problematic use of the word Western, but for lack of a better description, that sort of European tradition of bioethics, North American tradition of bioethics, Anglo tradition of bioethics. What is it that makes it problematic? Is it the sort of the narrow understanding of rigour. Is it the, is it the content of the types of things that it asks questions about? Is it the argumentative ethos? Is it kind of, you know, feminist account, which, sort of, you know, says that, you know, traditional kind of philosophical approaches, kind of reject narrative like, what is it of this amorphous thing that is particularly pernicious?
Something I've been trying to gesture at is that there's almost nothing you will find in Western philosophy that you won't find elsewhere.
That you won't sorry?
That you won't find elsewhere. In other words, all the ideas are everywhere else, some some of them predating the Western tradition of them. Some contemporaneous, some after. In other words, there is a conceit which is part of the problem. There's a conceit that sort of centralises itself in that this is the only the best articulation representation of the articles of ideas, and in doing so, neglect, denigrates, renders as inferior, not worthy of attention, others. So there's something there that I find deeply problematic. So regardless of what happens within just the clips we make about itself related to others, I think it's been problematic. There's also the version of itself. Again, I was like I mentioned Jefferson earlier. There's a version of itself, and I like Jefferson, there's a version of itself that presents itself as this high point of human achievement, as if the West, the enlightenment, et cetera, was this, again, high point of human achievement? It wasn't. It was good for some people. It was very, very bad for very, very many other people. But again, when you hear people, especially in the again, Western tradition, describe that, it seems as if it is and the same people were very keen to tell you what is wrong about other parts of the world. In fact, if you say, Ah, but Indians were inspired, but Indians have cast but the Africans, you know, Africans were killing some people. It's, let's say, construction of hierarchy, which I think is pernicious in how it's rendered. And both of those lead to a problem, which is that if I was writing about a philosophical concept, and I've not cited a Western exponent of it, I have committed a sin. Even if I have cited my own people, I've committed a sin. And again, imagine how limiting that is, just generally, and how much it invites people to walk away from what they've always known. And given the power that things that are constructed as Western has, it exerts this force on people. And also I'm trying in my writing to talk about my own tradition, sometimes in a single sentence, in a few sentences, to show that look, this concept, this complexity, these tensions, people were thinking about it a very long time ago, and that's how I've come to understand the world myself, even as at the same time, I have a good sense of what the Western guy is, but talking about given that, of course, they colonised my grandparents, so I'm also a beneficiary, in a sense, a beneficiary of that tradition too. I own that. And this is, for me, a very important thing, right? I think one of the problems that that we have when we construct the West in this way is for people to either want to slavishly belong to it or want to antagonistically separate themselves from it. And for me, you know, it is not something to slavishly belong to or to antagonise. It's like it's human beings thinking. Some of them, there are many others thinking, and I can get to own all of that and use all of that as I wish. I recognise what is good about them and what is bad about them and make my own way. So, yeah, I think it's for me, people argue, other traditions areargumentative. You know, it's not just the West. Other traditions treat women very badly. It's not just everything you see as problematic in the Western tradition, you find everywhere else that's good in that tradition, find anywhere else. So for me, it's not the line is not between. The line is that it crossed the consequence?
Absolutely. I think the example I give is this idea of self determination, so the idea that autonomy or liberty, and again, as problematic as they're sort of conceptualised, and there's a lot of issues with it, with both of those ideas that they're unique to the West as you describe, is to misunderstand hundreds of years, 1000s of years, of Latin American history. And that's, I'll just say that, because that's when I kind of know best. Yeah. So I think, I think that's, I think that's absolutely true, and I think that the idea of the binary is always sort of the tip off, the yea or nay in favour against in whole is, I think, you know, part of the part of the problem. I want to move slightly the conversation, but still within the realm of global health and global health ethics. So we've seen reports that suggest that the pulling of aid from the United States is going to have a immense toll, at least in the short term, in terms of millions of lives lost around the world through pulling of treatment for HIV AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria. And I choose those because those are the big three that we always talk about in global health, which is itself a different discussion. Why do we choose those three? And again, this is as someone who does a lot of TB stuff. Parenthetically, so I'm part of that. I'm part of that crew. At the same time, I think that, look, you were mentioning this a moment ago, that we're at an inflection point that we can actually use the sort of the receding power, as it were, to try to change how we think about global health, or at least try to sort of instantiate in practice, things that we have been discussing global health for a while now. Because I don't think it's sort of stuff that's coming out de novo either, and I'm really sympathetic to that. And again, in other places, you've talked about questions around the role of charity and aid, what is the responsibility of middle income countries like Nigeria, so on and so forth? And I think that's great. I think we are at this inflection point, and I'm sympathetic to that view, but I keep coming back to this idea that I think in real time, and I suspect this is true, we're going to lose hundreds of 1000s, if not millions, of lives. This, to me, is a moral dilemma, and I I struggle with this because I guess my the dilemma, as I see it, is, at least this, probably more, is that as researchers, as advocates, as scholars, we have a limited amount of energy, so that my question is, where do we direct it? Do we direct it and to try to at least stop gap measures in that capitalist, neoliberal way which we all sort of know is problematic, at least in the short term, try to stabilise things and then move forward. Do we say, Look, this is we can't. This is the moment. This is the inflection moment we need to take advantage of it. Help me think through this, this challenge.
I like that you noted that a lot of the debate around aid has been happening for a very long time. What I would add is that they've also been very marginal, in the sense that while people have been saying these things, it hasn't calculated into the world of real, real political aid. No, you can say all you want to say on the edges, we continue to do what we're doing. And a very strong and to my mind, compelling argument for that is that we are here saving lives. What are you guys talking about? So a compelling counter argument when people say, Well, I'm actually saving people's lives, do you want me to stop? In other words, this way of responding to arguments about thinking about aid and doing it differently, has been going on for a long time, and in large part, it's why it remains as it is. So when a movement like this happens, I think it is not the moment to stop making those arguments. Anything at all it is the moment to be making them more healthy, because at least there's a window of opportunity that you'll be listened to, maybe even taken seriously. But because, again, these arguments have been present for a very long time. Now, there's a difficult calculus of life and death to make, and I hope I never, I'm never asked to make this. At the same time, you know, I didn't withdraw aid that's not on me, but what I have responsibilities for is how I respond to that. So the calculus for me is not whether people die from the withdrawal of aid. I'm sad. I'm burdened that people will die, but that's not on me. What is on me, and I'm saying using me in a broad way, what is on me is the kind of argument I make in response to that. Now, one of those arguments is, can we think differently about this thing? Is this time to do so? I think it's the time to make those arguments. In another year or two, this moment will disappear. So I really believe that we should be making an argument now. Why do I think so? I don't have the numbers, and I doubt anyone else does, but on a grand scale, grand balance scale. My suspicion is that US foreign policy kills many more people than US aid saves, and the large part, I wish that we were talking about that with numbers and with clarity, because it's one thing to kill millions of people and then save 100 lives or 100,000 lives. Yes, or even, or even a million lives versus 10 million people killed. And then I want to thank you for that million lives you've saved, in a way that completely distracts my attention from 10 million you are killing. The fact that I don't have numbers to put to this itself reflects just how skewed our attention can be as academics, right? That those numbers do exist. Within a few days, we had numbers about people who were projected to die from AIDS, TB, malaria, from US with other funds. But it'd be hard for you to find numbers of people in Nigeria, in Latin America, especially Latin America, in the Middle East, whom US foreign policy kills, and to trace the pathways through which it kills them, and to put those two things on the scale, and ask ourselves, What shall we do now? We don't see that, and we don't see that in large part because of the incentives that drive the kind of work that we do. So again, if I have this moment of opportunity to make that point that can we please stop talking about it as if it's charity, can we please stop thinking about the flow of benefits as if it was unidirectional? Can we please find ways to make arguments that can strengthen the hand I'm speaking as an African now of African leaders when they go and negotiate the next trade deal? Can we find ways of putting numbers around those things and strengthening their hand again? I think this is the time to make this argument, recognising that this very bad decision will kill people.
What opportunities exist on the continent of Africa for leadership on matters of global health? Is it the African CDC, which, to my eyes, has done some, at least rhetorically, have made some really good arguments. Is it at the national level? Is it a regional level? Are there particular individuals that we should have our eyes on, where? Where does that leadership, where will leadership come from?
Of all the bad things that COVID did, one of the things he did that gave me a piece of joy was that it put African leaders in a place where they realised that when the chips are down the West will look after the West. In other words, don't expect the US to come and save you when the US has its own problems to deal with. When COVID happened...
Did Africans think? Africans, in general, must have thought that before COVID?
There is a version again, it goes back to the what we're talking about age, right? There's a version of thinking about that and articulating that, that just doesn't calculate with the house of power.
Yeah, right, right, right.
Whether they were thinking about it or not before then it became real. It became real, we have to do something. And all of a sudden I have people saying, but why do we procure antiretrovirals? So during COVID, right? Something clicked in for people. But why do you procure all these consumables and drugs from one supplier, which also is one who gives us the money for it, because borders are closed, can we still access them? So it was a different. Something changed. Something changed in how people understood, how the world worked. I'm going to say people, I mean people who are powerful. And there's a sense in which I can draw a line between that and Trump 2.0 right? That it's, I think, another reminder of that, because there's something, again, that has been taken for grantedness of aid, and it's consistent, constant flow. And again, it's a shock to many people. This thing is not guaranteed. Now, again, bad as the consequences of it are, it does something to how people govern and how people project into the future. Again, it's hard for me to predict that it's going to bear good fruit, but I can see a few ways in which it might, and something we often don't give enough credit for leaders being responsible is a sense of pride, not just leaders, but even societies as a whole, civilizations. This is who we are. Yeah, this. We want to look like this. We want to be and if you always function in a way that everyone told you that you will be fine with our handout, right? But it does something to your ability to be that, to be proud, but spite, you know, spite can do some, some things, you know. So again, I don't know where all of this goes, but if you ask me to project, you know, 2, 3, 4 years ahead, just from the kind of reaction I see among African leaders, political leaders, but also technical leaders African CDC, even who through, a few ministries of health where I know people, there's a there's something going on. It's solid realisation that things need to change. I say all of these fully understanding that Africa has almost all the low income countries in the world. So there are also countries in Africa that, regardless of what leaders do, require significant external support, but then gave the terms on which they get that and how they negotiate and discuss and debate, that is what I believe ought to change.
I want to, again, shift gears a little bit and bring things closer to home. So I'm going to make a slightly controversial statement, and I want to preface my statement by saying that I am absolutely part of this, so I'm not extricating myself from the criticism I'm about to make. It strikes me that in global health, public health, bioethics, so I'm including all of us. We tend to self censor and we censor our own speech. And this is obviously a question that is sort of top of mind for obvious reasons about what's going on in the world, and specifically what's going on in the United States with its universities. But also we're seeing similar, at least, arguments, being made in Germany and other places as well. So I don't think it's uniquely Australian, but it's definitely in Australia as well. We have varying degrees of courage about saying what we know is right, varying degrees of courage to go after meaningful research projects in varying degree of courage, I would say, to stand up for causes that are clearly right or clearly wrong. That's sort of what you were saying before that not equivocating when it ought not to be equivocated. I assume you agree. You tell me if you disagree, but I guess my question is, what can universities do? What should we do as faculty members at universities? Because we do have power. I think sometimes we think we have less power than we do. What's our role in fostering and allowing and promoting genuine free speech?
I agree with what you said. My analysis of academics goes a bit deeper, but links to the answer to your question, and we have to think about it, is this. Standing up for anything helps you stand up for the next thing. And not standing up for one thing reduces your ability to stand up for the next. In other words, I think about this as a death of the soul. With every with every failure or refusal to stand up, a piece of your soul dies, and it keeps going, so that when something happens that requires you to really, really stand up, you can't find the energy to do so. Now, how does that happen? Here's my suspicion, and again, my suspicion, based on a lot of empirical evidence, including personal experience, is that when, because a lot of our careers have been made precarious, and for a lot of us, the what it requires to be successful has been made precarious, such that if there's a brand, if there is an opportunity to do something that requires that we lie, or that requires that we say half truths or untruths, that require that we exaggerate and that require that we use a method that we know is pointless, but we know that the grant committee wants to see and we do it for each and every of those opportunities, a part of our soul dies. So when there's a genocide going on, we can't speak. Because, of course, we've been practical about keeping quiet, about saying other things for many years, and for each of those decisions, we either say to ourselves, is a practical thing to do, I. Can't fault that argument, about saying I'm keeping quiet about genocide, it's a practical thing to do, right? So it's not practical thing to do after another, at some point there's nothing is not practical anymore. Nothing's not practical anymore because everything becomes a chain of practical decisions to make. So there's a loss of courage, often conditioned on the terms of our employment, in terms of our career success. That means that at some point we just don't know whom we are anymore. This world is gone, and I'm always... So I grew up in the church. I keep having to say this, there's a verse in Revelations, the final book in the Bible, that has a list of the people who will go to hell? Right on the list? They are murderers, they are liars, they are corrupt people. But the first, the first category of people on the list, are cowards. As a child, I never understood what that meant. I think I do now. Again, I lost my faith. I'm not speaking as a Christian. I just value, you know, deep wisdom from a long time ago. There is something going on there. So that's, you know, if whoever was writing that part of the Bible, thinks first to mention people who can't, who can stand up, should go to hell alongside, murderers, it says a lot, and I keep it, I can't let that go in my head. It's always there anyway. But universities, and this is how it relates to universities, this academic who might describe their soul going slowly over time, they literally began their career having commitments that were moral and in multiple terms, they felt the need to turn away from them, and they felt they need to justify that turning away, that when a junior academic comes and starts and that junior academic wants to live up to their commitment, the senior person looks at them and two things are going on. It's a reminder of the senior academics of failures, right? So look at the junior person and say, can you stop doing that? It's not practical. It's not good for you. Makes me feel bad. Yeah, it makes me feel bad. So don't do it. Etc. And what that becomes then is that the senior person who then gets to create the rules for how university functions, has been that person. Has been that person, just give an example I chose not to, has been that person who has who knows exactly what is going on, and has made a moral set of decisions, often decisions that help them to become senior and then look at this junior person or this other person who is living up to a moral standard that the senior person also shares or used to share. It's a difficult thing to look at. I can imagine that it's a difficult thing to look at this person and support them. They're also saying, they're also saying, with that support, that you have been a failure. It's a hard thing for human beings to do. So that's how I understand the universities. Now, I mentioned academics and grants earlier. It's a very similar thing, because funders are a reflection of senior academics. We often forget that the funders made us not do something bad. The funder is asking all of this very often. It's senior academic to sit on the boards and the committees and the funding grants who crafted all those things, who have put the expectations into those grants. So often, when people are saying, funder, funder, funder, funder, funder, change. I'm like, Look at the academics who have told the funders what to do. Tell them to tell the funders to do otherwise. Now it won't always work, but I promise you, in more than 50% of cases, there has been a senior academic stand behind the what the funder is asking you to do that. It compels you to do something that really harms your soul.
I think yeah, I think the the role of the role of academics within funding agencies is an interesting one, because I do think that we think. I agree partly with your diagnosis, that I think we think our hands are clean, at least on that front. And it's not completely. I think it gets interesting when we're again this goes back to the complexity of funding. If we're speaking of private funding versus government in Australia, we see that the ministers have a lot of power, even retrospectively, to look at grants, as has been in the news over the last few months or so. You know, speaking out on genocide is bad for business. I want to go back to the soul bit, because I think that there's a silver lining there. So when students are like, how do you write an essay? My go to example is like, it's like going to the gym or playing an instrument. You're not going to move a heavy weight on your first time at the gym. You're not going to play a concerto beautifully the first time. You got so many steps between that point and the truth of the matter is, is you gotta practice your scales every day, at least I think that's what musicians do. And you certainly gotta keep going to the gym. You gotta keep... so at least in that way, it seems like there's a remedy for the soul, which is, I think, instead of saying what are, how do we stand up in these big moments is, how do we get the university and us, so again, I'm including us in the university, to think about, what are the small things that we can do to practice that, to kind of gain that muscle memory, to gain those muscle patterns. Your evocation of the soul is way more eloquent than my gym-bro/musician. But I think that, I think that, I think that it at least gives us a way forward. So then the question becomes, what are the small things we can do now? And by the way, we need to hurry up, because genocides are occurring in Gaza, in other parts of the world, and we're quiet as a group. We're quiet. We need to find our courage fast.
There has been and I will return to a previous point we touched on earlier, because I've spoken publicly about thinking differently about aid. Say, as we should stop thinking about it as charity and to think about it more in reparative at least in transactional terms. There have been at least three well known academics who have messaged me publicly and privately to say that that wouldn't work in Washington. And each time I saw that, I think to myself, we are admitting a deep failure there. We are saying that we can't influence how narratives are shaped. We are saying that we are almost abdicating our responsibility, which is our job. It's our job to find ways of making arguments that allow these ideas to land. Now those who disagree with us are very good at this, very often. Saying to myself, can you not see that the structure, the kinds of narrative that allows this moment to happen in Washington, the seeds were sown over time, that can we not be as far sighted in our wisdom to sow the seeds and not just to say it won't land in Washington. In other words, what lands is our responsibility, which doesn't mean often in the long term. It means that in long term, what we are able to say or not say, that if we've put ourselves in a place where we can't say that a genocide is happening, it means that we have not either practised saying things like that for so long that when we say it, everyone knows that you can't ask us to stop. So they won't ask us to stop, but if we've shown our willingness to stop repeatedly, they will come and say stop and we will stop. So there's something about our ability to prepare. So again, for me, it is every time there's a statement to make and to stand by it we should, no matter how big or small. And again, the small ones are many more than the big ones. If we stand up repeatedly, when that one comes, we will stand up. I was having a discussion with someone recently, and we were thinking about, and I'm not sure how empirically correct this understanding of history is. We're thinking about just how much academics stood up during the sort of McCarthy Era in the US, which was an anti communist, they were asking people to pledge against communism, and very, very many academics refused, even though they were not communists. But the idea of asking them to pledge is enough to say, I will have to lose my job. Many of them lost their jobs, and it's strengthening. Now, fast forward 50 years, you don't see academics standing up like that in as much numbers and with as much ferocity. I mean, a few of them who used to stand up the Chomskys, etc, almost very old now, almost not as active as it used to be, but there's something that has changed, I think, in our ability to practice standing up again. This will be a rose-tinted view of history, but I think there was something then that I'm not sure I'm seeing now about people's willingness to stand up.
Yeah, again, I'm speculating. I do wonder whether it was proximity to World War Two in the context of the United States, right? We're talking 15 at most, 20 years post World War Two. That's a short period of time. We're clearly finding out 80 years is just the right amount of time to forget lessons. One of the weird things about the moment that we're living through right now. You mentioned COVID having sort of African leaders and beyond citizens wondering, well, how do we you know, actually, we have enough to stand up and to and to sort of argue for ourselves on fair terms. And I think we're seeing that again in other areas of geopolitics right now, kind of globally. And it's this weird thing I've found myself thinking, because I'm usually modest about what I think our imprint is as academics. But I think again, historically in present day, given where the attacks are occurring, it means we're doing something right. If universities are under attack, as I think there's an argument to make. Maybe it's not as far reaching. Maybe a lot of it is based on taking advantage of apathy or ignorance. We haven't done a good job presenting our worth. But if they're coming for academics, it means that we do have some power. We do have some power. And I think in that note, then on that note, we have responsibility, to your point, to use whatever power we have wisely and fruitfully. So, yeah, I think there's an odd situation where the attacks on academia, if it doesn't demonstrate that we're doing something collective, or at least that we have the possibility to do something right, even if we're not doing it right now that it's there.
I won't be so quick to take as much credit. I feel they've come for us, in large part because of students. I think that a lot of what has looked like standing up has been more students than academics. Of course, academics have supported students a lot in that, but I think the arrowhead of that standing up, I would say are students. I like your point about proximity to World War Two, right? Because it was something about a deep conviction. People knew why it mattered. A lot of the attack on academia now is as a bastion of wokeism and DEI, or EDI or whatever it is that they like to call it. And I feel that one of the reasons why we haven't stood up as much as I would wish or hope is that I don't think we know why it matters. Why DEI matters, really, really matters. Certainly, that's the vibe that I get. I think we often end up thinking it matters for representational reasons, and the problem with representational reasons is that it leaves as many people happy as sad, or leaves as many people maybe benefiting as feeling that something has been taken away from them. So I'm not sure that even within the halls of academia or in the halls of more sort of change oriented, progressive, leaning people. I'm not sure that there is as much solid conviction, deep belief, willingness to stand by a lot of things that we often we know the language to use to say we support. So I think part of it is also the problem of conviction. Right? Again, I often make this point when, quite unfairly I'm willing to admit but often made this point to people who sort of say, I chose to say this in a grant application, I chose to apply for this in this way, because, you know, that is what the funders want. And I often say they're certainly in that calculus of your choice, something about how deep your conviction is that what they ask you to do is wrong. That if you deeply believe that they are asking you to do something wrong, unjust, if you really deeply believe it, you find ways around it. So again, there's there's something in the standing up or choosing not to stand up that speaks to the depth of conviction and the richness and sophistication of the arguments we have to make for the positions that we like to claim we have.
What do you mean by conviction?
Let me go back to your World War Two example. The people, especially the academics some of them, many of them were Europeans. Many of them were Jewish, western or eastern Europeans who had fled understood what it was, what what unfreedom was. They understood it in a very deeply visceral way. Their friends and colleagues understood it, also in a very deep and visceral way that any suggestion of it was made with a staunch refusal. That's what I mean. It's deep, like you feel it viscerally. Now, if I'm asked to do a study in which I'm going to have to ignore the views and perspectives of the people that I'm studying, for the most part, there's a version of me that sees that as deeply, deeply unjust and violating of people's inherent worth, to be asked to do that to people, especially me, that says I will not do that and speak on loud, on the microphone anywhere, that says I would, I shall not do such a thing, that says, If I get the grant, it's a good thing. It will serve other programmes. I will say, you know, it's, it's all it's all good. There's that version of me too. So, so that's what I mean by conviction. It's, yeah, I often feel that, that we roll, we roll. I roll over because of a deep lack of conviction about that what you've been asked to do that we are uncomfortable with, but we're willing to go on with.
I think that notion of conviction tying to the visceral reality is evocative, is powerful, and I do wonder whether one of the things I've noticed is that those who have come out against genocides most strongly within our ranks are probably those that have the strongest convictions and the strongest... I mean, obviously it's people with strongest conviction. It's also those with greatest proximity. Seye, I want to thank you for that conversation. Really appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast. I want to thank you for listening to this episode of the SHE Research Podcast. You can find this audio along with a transcription. SHE Pod is produced by SHE Network and edited by Regina Botros. You can find our other episodes on Spotify, Radio Public, Anchor, wherever you get your podcasts of quality,. Thanks again for listening. Goodbye.