This was a fun occasion, though Duke Kunshan University proved a little less cutting-edge than I'd idealistically imagined. I think of Duke's campus at Kunshan - a small city between Shanghai and Suzhou striving to be Eastern China's Silicon Valley - as one of the places where liberal arts is being reimagined beyond the American century (to put it a little polemically). Despite Sino-American tensions it's growing apace - campus to grow and faculty to double next year, and again the year after - but the challenge of "Anthropocene" isn't yet on everyone's lips. Maybe it is now!My question "Are Holocene religions dangerously out of date?" applies to most of what's covered in non-presentist humanities curricula. One should worry about outdated views which will just make us nostalgic, resentful, fatalistic - or deny our changing reality altogether, as religiously blinded leaders of the US, Australia, Brazil do. But don't throw the baby out with the bath water. These traditions may have life in them yet!
I also offered some reasons to spend time with old texts in particular which, I thought, might have particular resonance in China. Ancient texts (I was prepared to discuss the Book of Job but it didn't come up) come to us recommended by many generations, each of which found something in them to value. Understanding ourselves to be part of an interpretive community with them broadens the horizons of our historical imagination, helping us imagine alternatives to the present. But it helps us also try to be accountable to interpreters of the future by acknowledging we, too, will die. And it can even help us overcome modern blindness to community with the other-than-human, which - if in a more stably Holocene way - was something premodern thinker arguably apprehended better than we do, though we need to teach ourselves to see it. (And the Holocene wasn't that stable anyway...)
