By Maria Millers
From the coffee culture of our suburbs, barbeques and dinner parties to our various media outlets there is an ingrained reluctance, in fact a determined avoidance, to discuss contentious or alternative views to issues that are preoccupying us, among them the war in Ukraine and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
In a society that likes to loud hail its democratic credentials, surely a free and uninhibited exchange of ideas – no matter how challenging – is the hallmark of a healthy, mature democracy.
It would seem that an event like the Adelaide Writers Festival is the ideal venue for civil dialogue on contested issues but as Louise Adler has discovered, this is not the case. Her programming of Abulhawa and Moammed El Kurd, writers with strong views on ‘lands, homelands and dispossession’ has come under intense fire from many quarters including Jewish organizations and festival sponsors.
The withdrawal of sponsorships is disappointing and particularly hard to understand when publisher such as Morry Scwartz withdraws his support for a festival whose theme for 2023 was, “Truth be Told” – a look at relativism, truth in fiction and the importance of truth in an age of misinformation.’
But we live in an environment where groupthink dominates our social and political discourse where dissenting and critical or alternative narratives to the prevailing zeitgeist are silenced or ignored. Even in the case of the tragedy that is Ukraine, more nuanced and contextualized commentary is absent and alternative views never canvassed.
As Adler pointed out, to only gather with and agree with people who think the same way we do is not the point of a Writers Festival. And if we “cannot with care and considered approach engage with complex and contentious issues, then we have a problem in civil society.”
And our democracy is diminished.
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