The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Episode 51

Episode Date: December 24, 2021

This is a sample of the Munk Members-Only Podcast. The program provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. The penultimate Munk Member's podcast for 2021 looks back at the year that was to reflect on what we have learned over the last twelve months. What can we take away from 2021 that can help us better understand the world as we know and experience it today? Are there new attitudes, analyses or a key or two insights that we can pull forward into 2022 to help us prepare for the year ahead to become better informed and ready to take on the challenges of this remarkable moment we are all living through? To access the full length episode consider becoming a Munk Member. Membership is free. Simply log on to www.munkdebates.com/membership to register. Under your membership profile page you will find a link to listen to the full length editions of Munk Members Podcast. If you like what the Munk Debates is all about consider becoming a Supporting Member. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents). To explore you Munk Membership options visit www.munkdebates.com/membership. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Monk podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.W.munkdebates.com and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www.munkdebates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Roger Griffiths here, the host and moderator of the Monk Debates. Welcome to this second of two year-end shows for our monk members-only podcast. On this program,

we're going to kind of think about the year that was, not in terms of events and trends. We hopefully have left you over the course of the last 51 episodes with some insights and analysis into what's important and what's not. So instead, we're going to talk about what we learned in the last 12 months. What are the kind of insights or understandings about the world as it is that we can take away from the last year, maybe apply it to our perceptions, the challenges, our efforts to understand the year that will come on January 1st. To do this, as always, we're extremely fortunate to have Janice Gross Stein as our guest on this program. She is the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, an internationally renowned scholar and author. And Janice, 51 episodes.

We got one more to do. I'm looking forward to this one with you, though. I'm so happy to be here. And what a provocative question, but what did we really learn this year? I think every one of us is asking that question. Yeah, let's try to take something good out of what was a difficult, challenging, stressful year for. It's certainly ending on a note of increased. anxiety to say the least. But I want to start with you, Janice. We're going to hopefully go through

three learnings each in the next 30 minutes. You're up first. Here's my first big one, Roger. People need people. We need human contact. We read all the time about technology is going to create a metaverse and we will have multiple lives, one in so-called virtual reality in worlds that we create. What comes out of this year overwhelmingly is that biologically, we all need other people. And living in isolation from our families, from our friends, has really terrible consequences for our physical health and mental health.

And community matters to us. We need to be together in person physically with others. That to me is just a powerful lesson that bucks so many of the trends that we have been reading about for years. Hold on a moment, put the brakes on. Don't design for anything that doesn't allow people to be together with other people. Jim, Janice, how would we, I don't know, how do we facilitate that? Right now, we're in this Omnacron surge. There's all kinds of anxiety.

I can see it on the streets with people, you know, crossing over to walk on the road when I come down the sidewalk and vice versa. You know, we're separating again. We're all worried about how we're spreaders of this horrible pathogen. What do we do? What's the mental attitude that we need right now to, as you say, we're so. rightly create that togetherness that's just embedded in the human condition. It nourishes us. It is essential to our health and well-being. What do we do? Well, we're going to get one more wave of this. The good things about waves is that crest and they break.

And they don't take that long to do so. So this is the period we're in right now is a short period. We have no guarantee that it's the last way, but we know that we'll be a break between the ways. But even in this period, I think we have to recognize our need for other people. So if we have to go back to our bubbles, let's spend time in our bubbles with other people. Use whatever intelligence we have so that we use screens. it doesn't matter what we do. If one of us has been outside with a larger group of people who are concerned,

wait three or four days before we go back and see people in our bubbles, but recognize that seeing our families, especially over the holidays, really, really important to our physical and mental health. Use our common sense and our judgment, but don't engage in the extreme, sensory deprivation where we see nobody because we fear that we might spread this virus.

There are costs to see nobody. And as you and I talked about last week, there are costs to keeping children away from other children. We have to have a balanced perspective here. You know, Andre Picard, who's a column that's for the Global Mail for our American listeners, has a really sane perspective on all of this. when he says, you'd be cautious, be intelligent, use your judgment,

but balance, balance your life as we go forward. Because we're coming out of two years, frankly, where the balance was not quite late. Yeah. That's what we've learned. Yeah, to build on that learning and to kind of dovetail with that, what I took away from this year

was a new awareness and appreciation of how children and kids in our society are not really represented. They're given a lot of lip service as being the future, our future, but when it comes to the crunch, we talked a bit about this last week, but it really, it's new for me because, you know, I had to be honest with myself, I'd kind of written off a lot of this kind of chatter. pre-pandemic about, you know, the rights of children as, I don't know, just another rights claim with animals, vegetables, and whatever you want to make up. But just the last year in particular

and the pandemic as a whole, I've really come to a new appreciation of just the powerlessness of children. And sometimes the crappy job that adults do in terms of states. stepping in as surrogates to represent the interests of children. And maybe other listeners resonate with this. This has radicalized me a bit over the last 12 months. It's politicized me in a way that other issues, frankly, climate, international, development assistance or whatever, didn't kind of pull up. my heartstrings, at my sense of responsibility and worry about the moral fortitude and capacity to care of

my own society. So as I look back on the year, I think one of the big lessons that I'm going to take away is a much more rigorous focus on the rights of children, particularly the right to education, but more generally my responsibility as an adult to, again, stand in to the best of my ability as a surrogate for their interests and to put my interests to a certain degree, to not to the side, we're always going to have our interest, but to create some sense of reciprocity with a generation that cannot represent themselves. We have saddled this generation, Janice, with now hundreds of billions of dollars of debt, which we have incurred on our government balance sheets

on the Central Bank of Canada to deal with this pandemic. We have to be honest that we pulled from the future a lot of wealth, productive capacity, human potential into the present by this incredible explosion of government spending and deficit-enabled, debt-enabled public expenditures. I support a lot of that, not all of it, but I understand that this was an emergency moment. But we have to also understand that that generation, the obligations are on them, not on many of us. Yes, we'll have to pay probably higher taxes. There'll be

implications for us. But the real burden of carrying this pandemic forward into their lives, affecting their life potential lies with children today. And that's just, you know, one aspect of what we've asked them to carry for us during this pandemic. The other, we talked about a lot on the show last program. And thank you for all the terrific listener emails about our discussion on school closures and the effects of mental health and wellness and flourishing and life potential for an entire generation of young people. But yeah, Janice, this is a new. a new kind of epiphany for me that in 2022, I'm going to spend some time, some focus, some

energy on children and trying to have some care and attention, some really earnest thinking and action around what we can do to help carry and shoulder as much of the burden of this pandemic to shelter them from the already high, high costs that they've had to pay. I'm really glad, Richard, to hear you say to us, because children are not represented in our system. They're only represented through their parents. They have a voice of their own, their subject to decisions that adults make on their behalf, frankly. And if adults are not putting children front and center, and frankly ahead of themselves, That is, in a sense, how society survives and continues to grow.

It's when we put our children's interests ahead of our own. And there's probably a parent listening to us who hasn't done that many times during the course of being a parent. But it is the most fundamental evolutionary trick that we put, it really is. It's how we survive as a species. We put our children's interests ahead of our own. And I think you and I both agree, we haven't met that test in an adequate way during the pandemic. And I think it's something we all need to take forward in a much more serious way and think very hard about the price that children have already paid, as you just said, Roger, during the pandemic. and how we can compensate and support this generation of kids who threw no fault of their own,

nevertheless are bearing a burden that prior generations of children did not. And so we owe them, all of us, a special duty of care going forward. So I think that's something that I take away. I have a young grandchild. and you take away. And if we can all do better at that, in this coming year, our society will be a better place.

Mm-hmm. Here, hear. You've been listening to a sample of the Monk Members Only podcast. To access the rest of the episode, consider becoming a member. Membership is free and available at www.w monkdebates.com.

Once you've joined as a member, go to your membership profile to access the rest of this episode and all of our Monk Debates. members podcasts. Thanks for listening.