16 June 2024, Brunswick Ballroom, Melbourne, Australia
Clementine Ford presented this event at which five speakers gave their views on courage. Dr Yves Rees is the author of ‘All About Yves’, a timely and thought-provoking memoir about the trans experience.
Back when I was a kid, I read a lot of fact books. You know the type—those hardcover books from the 90s that had oversized font and bright illustrations attached to quirky little factoids. ‘1001 Facts about the Amazon’ or ‘Discover the Human Body’.
My mum gave me a new fact book every Christmas and birthday, and I read and reread them until I knew the contents by heart. From them, I learnt about the world. I learnt about dungeons in Medieval castles (grim), the mating habits of King Penguins (serially monogamous), and the fashions of ancient Rome (wonderfully camp).
But more importantly, these fact books taught me something about knowledge itself. They taught me that the world was knowable. It could be seen, understood, and served up on a platter for my delectation. In their pages, I learnt that rational minds could study people and places and uncover all their secrets. If you tried hard enough, the unruly world would submit itself to the knowers’ gaze.
This was a seductive feeling. In a lonely childhood in which I was the third wheel in my parents’ failing marriage, a childhood coloured by unspeakable feelings about wanting to kiss girls and look like my brother, it felt wonderfully comforting to have facts to lean on. They were sturdy, they were reliable. They gave order and structure to an unruly world. Knowledge became my safe space, my favourite way to self-soothe.
Fast forward three decades. That anxious kid who sought security in knowledge became the academic with three degrees who’d spent their entire adult life hiding inside universities. Universities were kind of like a three-dimensional fact book – an ordered world with clear rules that allowed me to disassociate into a realm of pure abstraction. Hmmm, bliss.
There was only one small problem. This tidy world, this world of knowing and ordering, was not so abstract after all. Turns out, it had blood on its hands. The crisp white pages of the fact books were in fact sharp knives that had left deep wounds on the world.
The late great Palestinian thinker Edward Said was one of the first to help us see how knowledge can harm. In his classic book Orientalism, Said showed how Western knowledge of the so-called ‘Orient’ was essential to colonial conquest and rule. He showed us that to claim to know is to objectify, to control. In Said’s words, “To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it.”
The fact books taught me to think that knowledge is objective. Just plain facts, just how it is. But in truth knowledge is always embedded in culture—and Western knowledge systems, as Said and other showed us, are structured around hierarchy and classification and objectification. Everything is separate, everything is ranked.
Far from being neutral, these ways of knowing quite literally made a world of empire, capitalism and white male supremacy. They allowed colonisers to bend the rest of the world to our will. They’ve allowed us to centre our own humanity at the expense of others.
We can see this in the ongoing violence of settler Australia, where our fantasies of terra nullius and settler progress mean we still refuse to countenance that First Nations people could and should be in charge of their own lives and their own land.
We can see this in our bloody-minded extraction of fossil fuels from a dying planet, a planet we insist on viewing as a resource to be exploited rather than an extension of ourselves and our only home.
And we see this with the genocide in Gaza, as the ‘sensible’ Western media use calm facts and orderly paragraphs to create a dystopian reality in which the mass slaughter of children is allowed to continue before our eyes.
It is not easy let go of the safety net of knowledge. Western knowledge, for all its undeniable violence, has been the scaffold that has constructed the world for me and so many of us. It’s hard—even inconceivable— to imagine a world without it.
But when I think about what courage means here and now, for someone like me—a white settler on stolen land—this surrender into not-knowing is the one idea that rings true. Real courage is not repeating old scripts of leading, dominating, taking charge. Real courage is not cosplaying narratives of individual heroism that keep us believing a messiah is coming to save us.
Real courage, for someone like me, is to finally acknowledge our hubris and admit we have no fucking idea. Western knowledge, the knowledge we’ve been hoodwinked into thinking is universal, has enabled centuries of imperialism, slavery and genocide. It’s destroying human connection. It’s actively devasting the planet. It’s killing us and everything we love. Our knowledge sucks.
We need to have the courage to admit this and let go of the reigns. We need to have the courage to step aside and make space for other ways of knowing and being. To concede that we don’t have all the answers and never did.
For starters, we could start taking seriously the wisdom of the cultures that thrived on this continent for tens of thousands of years – a continent that we settlers took only a few centuries to trash beyond repair. If only we were brave enough to give these other knowledges a chance, we have nothing of value to lose and everything to gain.
As I was thinking about tonight, I kept returning to a song by Jen Cloher, who says it better than I ever could. In their song Being Human, Jen tells us: ‘Being human is learning how to let go of what you think you know. Staying human is listening, listening, listening.’
Tonight, as I speak to you on stolen and unceded Wurundjeri land, I want to leave you with this message: let’s have the courage to know less and listen more. Let’s have the courage to step out into the unknown and trust that something will be there to catch us. Let’s have the courage to divest from hierarchy and domination, and instead be humans together.
Speakers ‘On Courage’: Nasser Mashni, Clementine Ford, Sissy Eileen Austin, Catherine Deveny, Dr Yves Rees, Jen Cloher,