Q&A with Dr Natasha Moore,
2019 Annual Public Lecture Speaker
Natasha filmed a video giving us a sneak peak into the cultural influences and ideas that have informed the topic of 2019’s ADM Annual Public Lecture. We also caught up with her for the Q&A below:
Dr Natasha Moore is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity (CPX) in Sydney. She has written for the mainstream media on topics that include politics, books, movies, domestic violence, food, Scripture in schools, war, Thanksgiving, death, taxes, and freedom of speech. With a PhD in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, she is the author of Victorian Poetry and Modern Life: The Unpoetical Age, as well as the forthcoming For the Love of God: How the church is better and worse than you ever imagined, based on the CPX documentary of the same title.
ADM caught up with Natasha in between her writing, researching, podcasting and preparations for the 7 November Annual Public Lecture ‘The Pleasures of Pessimism: On hope, culture and the end of the world’, and asked her a few questions that might help get us ready! (Booked yet? Click here to get your tickets.)
ADM: Let’s start with the obvious: what prompted your thinking about pessimism and its pleasures?
Natasha: One answer to this is: everything! Everywhere I turn, we seem to be bemoaning how much worse things are getting or going to get — whether it’s zombie apocalypse movies or articles about Donald Trump and the alt-right, and that’s before we even get to climate change — and I do think, weirdly, there’s a kind of grim satisfaction in imagining how dire the future might be. More specifically, the seed was planted by one of my absolute fave writers, Marilynne Robinson, who wrote this line: “If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing.” That really struck me.
ADM: The subtitle of your talk includes “Hope, Culture and the End of the World”. Word association time: what’s the first thing that pops into your brain when you hear the word(s):
ADM: Hope Natasha: Um, balloons?
Culture Symphony
World’s End Narnia!
Joy Unfurling
Capitalism Profit
Ministry Hands
Climate Warm
Service Humble
Fun Bubbles
ADM: What’s the greatest piece of advice you’ve received from a relative?
Natasha: My mum always says, “If you can read, you can cook”. I’m living disproof of this but find it kind of heartening anyway.
ADM: What reading, entertainment, news and/or works of art have grabbed your attention as you prepare for the 2019 Annual Public Lecture?
Natasha: There’s a bit of a genre crystallising around (on the one hand) how we’re all screwed — see Mark Manson’s book Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope, Exhibit A — and on the other, how actually things are way better than we think and/or getting better all the time, like Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now and Hans Rosling’s Factfulness. Then there’s the “cli-fi” (climate fiction). I’m currently reading a beautiful novel for kids called How to Bee. And there’s a new zombie movie about to come out, Little Monsters, that I’m interested in. I’m dipping a toe into a bit of theology and psychology as well, but doing my best to resist the pull of the doomsday prepper rabbit hole!
ADM: Who would you most want to come to your talk (real and imaginary) and what do you most hope people will take away from it?
Natasha: Probably the people who are most pessimistic about where we’re headed as a culture! But I’m not sure that’s something we’re great at realising about ourselves, so basically anybody? If you’re interested in history, or in the future, I want to think about this stuff out loud with you. And flowing from that, what I hope people might take away would be a little (or a lot!) more self-awareness than they came in with, a more conscious sense of how we imagine our future, and whether the way we react to that is helpful or otherwise.
ADM: What would be the best thing folks could do immediately after the 2019 Annual Public Lecture (besides going with friends for dessert to chat about your talk)?
Natasha: Maybe it’s just me, but the first next step always seems to include reading a book. I hope it will make people want to read something or someone new!