A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and JusticeThe Holocaust and attempts to deny it, racism, murder, the case of Mary Bell. How can we include these and countless other examples of evil within our vision of a common humanity? These painful human incongruities are precisely what Raimond Gaita boldly harmonizes in his powerful new book, A Common Humanity. Hatred with forgiveness, evil with love, suffering with compassion, and the mundane with the precious. Gaita asserts that our conception of humanity cannot be based upon the empty language of individual rights when it is our shared feelings of grief, hope, love, guilt, shame and remorse that offer a more potent foundation for common understanding. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Simon Weil, Primo Levi, George Orwell, Iris Murdoch and Sigmund Freud, Gaita creates a beautifully written and provocative new picture of our common humanity. |
Contents
Take Your Time | 1 |
beyond Virtue | 17 |
Evil beyond Vice | 29 |
The Denial of a Common Humanity | 57 |
Mabo Social Justice | 73 |
Guilt Shame Community | 87 |
Genocide The Stolen Generations | 107 |
Genocide the Holocaust | 131 |
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Common terms and phrases
Aborigines absorption programs acknowledgment amongst anti-Semitism appear Arendt argument Australian behaviour believe Bringing Them Home called characterise claim cognitive committed Common Humanity concept of evil concept of genocide concern conversation crank crimes critical culture death camps deny Descartes distinctive Eichmann Eichmann in Jerusalem ethical example expressed fact feel forms Freud fully genocide guilt Holocaust Inga Clendinnen intellectual Iris Murdoch Jews judgment justice Justices Deane killed kind language lucidity Mabo mass murder matter means merely mind moral native title nature Nazi obligation one's partly passion perhaps person Peter Winch philosophical Plato political preciousness Primo Levi psychoanalysis psychological question racists radical realisation reality reason reflection remorse response revealed rhetoric rightly scepticism sense sentimentality seriously shame Simone Weil Socrates someone sometimes soul speak suffering terra nullius terrible things thought tion true truth understanding unthinkable victims Vietnamese vocation Wittgenstein wrong