Editor's Note: The following is a written transcript of a dharma talk given by Winton Higgins to the Kookaburra Sangha in Sydney, Austraila on June 16, 2025

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In recent weeks we’ve been sharing and discussing experiences of grieving – something that sits front and centre in the Buddha’s first task for the dharma practitioner: embracing (‘fully knowing’) the inevitable difficult moments of our lives (dukkha). As our human response to our most significant losses, grieving exemplifies this first task. The word usually arises when we lose someone very close to us, and that’s the sense in which we’ve been exploring it so far.

But as Freud and other thinkers about grief have pointed out, we humans grieve other losses too. Indigenous peoples, refugees and quite often migrants grieve the loss of a homeland (the soil that first pronounced their names), the place they once called home, a mother tongue, and the culture they grew up in. We can also grieve the defeat of our vital projects and ideals. It’s that last kind of grief I want to talk about tonight.

I’ve just finished writing my memoirs. I’ve been blessed, most of my long adult life, to be able to dedicate myself to the study and promotion of ethical ideals, including in my day job as an academic. I’ve understood myself to be a child of the European Enlightenment as well as the dharma.

More than that, I’ve been conscious of my western ethnicity, and the accelerated development and spread of western values since WW2. The UN emerged to replace the recourse to war with collective security; the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights also spawned the follow-on UN human-rights conventions in favour of women, refugees, children, indigenous peoples, the disabled, and so on.  

Also, in 1948 came the UN convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide. Finally, western countries claimed to be showcasing and spreading freedom and democracy throughout the world.

Many institutions, like Human Rights Watch and the International Criminal Court, arose to promote these ideals. Influential contributions to western philosophy backed these developments. For example, Charles Taylor’s assertion of humanity’s moral progress as we become more conscious of – and moved by – the suffering of others. Moreover, as Raimond Gaita and others claimed, we humans were shedding our belligerent tribalism in favour of embracing our common humanity, which leads us along the ways of peace and social justice.

For me, all this chimed so well with dharmic ethics, the ethic of care.  

But fast forward to 2025: I’m about to write a final chapter called ‘Concluding thoughts’ for my memoirs, hoping to have something positive to say to those who’ll survive me. Alas, what do I see? Centre-stage are the first major war raging in Europe since WW2, and a classic genocide unfolding in plain sight on Europe’s periphery. The two most prominent western countries (USA and Germany) are aiding and abetting this genocide, while all the other western countries except Slovenia fail to call it out and pretend no genocide is happening.

Meanwhile, bad actors dominate the geopolitical stage. Democracy is in retreat across the globe. Where it survives in the western heartlands it tends to degenerate into empty ritual rather than any genuine ‘democratic conversation’, while financial and tech oligarchs wield the real power.

Add to this bleak picture two great global crises that western countries have triggered but fail to take responsibility for, let alone seriously address: global heating; and accelerating socio-economic inequality on every level, from the global to the local.

So instead of finding something uplifting to say to my successors, I find myself grief-stricken and literally lost for words to type into my manuscript.

 A few days ago I expressed my grief to an old friend. She shrugged and suggested I’d been naïve about western values all along. Most modern wars and genocides have their origins in western imperial rivalry and colonialism, including the Aboriginal genocide here in Australia.

Even after WW2 western countries were still at it – bloodily resisting decolonisation in Indochina and Africa. And now, today, they’re continuing to resist it ideologically, for instance in the organised forgetting of past colonial horrors (we Australians are masters of this practice, as witnessed in the defeat of the 2023 referendum on an Aboriginal voice to parliament), and the attempt to ban critical race theory in the US.

If I were looking at the West from the outside I’d have seen through the hypocrisy and formed a darker impression of the western world, my friend suggested. The slave trade, the destruction and impoverishment of indigenous communities and natural environments, the theft on a grand scale, would all come into view. A little earlier I’d read the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra’s recent brilliant book, The world after Gaza, which precisely hammers this point home.

And yet. We can grieve the death of a clay-footed god, just as many people find themselves grieving the death of an inadequate or even toxic parent.

Maybe western ethics – historically more honoured in the breach than in the observance – remain on the agenda, along with others, for working towards an ethic of care in the world. But only if we peel away the false histories, conceit, vested interests and hypocrisy that encrust these values now.