Stan Grant was one of CNN’s most recognisable faces as an anchor and foreign correspondent in Asia and the Middle East for many years. He loves philosophy. And he is an indigenous Australian, a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi man.
These are the three points from which he sees a world deep in a malaise, and facing calamity, in his book, With the falling of the Dusk: A chronicle of the world in crisis.
China's total military spending is growing. Photo: AFP
Grant sees the West as faltering; for all its good liberal intentions, it cannot escape its past of conquest and colonialism, nor its internal rifts. The West’s hubris in thinking liberal democracy is the high point of human organisation - political philosopher Francis Fukuyama famously called it “the end of history” - has been exposed by tough new competitors like China determined to take back a rightful place as a global superpower. China is driven by the scars suffered in its “century of humiliation” under colonising powers.
Stan Grant; writer, academic and thinker Photo: Supplied
Rather than the end of history, history has returned with a vengeance, says Grant. In China, in the Middle East, the ground is shifting under the global order. At the same time the West is weakened by having so many people feeling disgruntled and excluded from the supposed march of progress. In America, they became Trump supporters wearing MAGA hats.
Grant uses his three touch points to tell his story in America, China, North Korea, Afghanistan and the Middle East. He has been to these places for CNN and interviewed activists in China, bomb makers in Afghanistan, jihadis in Pakistan; these are often the most vivid segments. As a philosopher, he tries to place these stories within a wider context. As a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi writer, he recognises the pain in those he meets of feeling swamped by the tsunami of the West and want to fight back, he says.
Unique viewpoint
This is a book which does have its faults, but they are outweighed by Grant’s unique viewpoint. His prose, usually sharp and direct, can run away with itself, particularly when discussing philosophy, piling phrase upon phrase, higher and higher, until it reaches hyperbole. (“We lurch from catastrophe to catastrophe and the ceremony of innocence is drowned”.) There are an awful lot of philosophers; one reviewer said Grant can come across like an eagre graduate student, determined to show he has read all the sources. Hegel, his favourite, isn’t the easiest to grasp.
And, you have to wonder if Grant’s deconstruction of Fukuyama’s history phrase is worth the full broadside. His argument really only worked in the few years between the fall of the Berlin wall and the rise of China.
Moreover, there is no doubt in Grant’s mind that the West is floundering and China is inexorably rising. Yet there are equally good arguments that neither the supremacy of China or the eclipse of America are inevitable. History may be back but it is not predetermined.
With the falling of the dusk by Stan Grant Photo: Supplied
Faltering West
Yet, the heart of Grant’s book is serious and his message is sincere. He loves liberal democracy but knows the West brought blood and empire, and believes it will pay a price as its confidence falters.
“I am not of the West; I am among those for whom the West is both tyrant and temptress….I am part of the great sweep of humanity over whom the West has rolled. We have been cast aside, slaughtered, our lands stolen and carved up, our cultures destroyed.”
There would be few Western foreign correspondents who would write from such a place.
No answers
In the end, Grant offers no answers. He sees just a weakening West and a rising tide of challenges. The pendulum of power is swinging once again.
“From China and North Korea to central Asia, Pakistan and Afghanistan to the Middle East, to Africa, to the Pacific Islands. I have witnessed a stirring, a rise of new powers and a return of old, a resurgence of faith and a resilience of ideologies the West had thought it had vanquished….the world we will live in will not be the world we grew up in.”
With the Falling of the Dusk.
Stan Grant
Harper Collins Publishers