On Liberal Institutions, Protecting Pluralism & Free Debate
Media + Information, 2024, Democracy, Engage in Global Challenges
When considering what 2024 has in store, author and The New Yorker contributor Adam Gopnik, felt compelled to share a political message that isn’t about politics. Rather, it was about how this year, the institutions of liberal democracy are threatened in ways that they have never been before. Gopnik felt (and still feels) terrified by what he saw as a lack of understanding among voters —younger and older alike—of the unique nature of our institutions and democracy within the wider context of human history. And how these institutions that we take for granted—the ones that guarantee everything from free debate to the protection of marginalized people—are in fact very fragile to assault.
In his book A Thousand Small Sanities, Gopnik explored the urgent need to realize that pursuing political projects we favor is meaningless without the foundations of liberal democracy that guarantee free debate. He felt it essential—this year particularly—to re-articulate these themes with urgency and to share them with every group who will listen.
For the 2024 Babcock Lecture, Adam Gopnik considered ways to protect the possibility of politics through arguments of history, logic, and conscience.
This event took place in-person at the Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema and broadcasted live to an online audience.
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Adam Gopnik, international bestselling author and beloved writer for the New Yorker, has—in his three decades with the magazine— written fiction, humor, memoirs, critical essays, and reported pieces from at home and abroad. He was the magazine’s art critic from 1987 to 1995, and the Paris correspondent from 1995 to 2000. Gopnik has received three National Magazine awards for essays and for criticism, the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting, and the Canadian National Magazine Award Gold Medal for arts writing. In March of 2013, he was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. His latest books include The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery (2023) and A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventures of Liberalism (2019).
Am Johal is Director of SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. He is the author of Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene (2015) and co-author with Matt Hern O My Friends, There is No Friend: The Politics of Friendship at the End of Ecology (2024).
Thank you to the Babcock family for their generous donation and support of Liberal Studies.
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