So I'm looking over a bulletin board thingy at work, and decide to attend a seminar given by this guy called Michael Sandel. For those of you not 100% dedicated to the luminaries of political philosophy, Sandel is the author of a book called Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. I'll spare you the details.
The point you do need to know is this. Going into the seminar I gave myself one rule. Do. Not. Under. Any. Circumstance open your friggin' yap. At all. Say nothing. Be the quiet, thoughtful looking bloke at the back.
Naturally I screwed that up, and up popped my hand, asking the last question of the seminar.
The whole thing had been going pretty well until that stage, there were various important-looking executives and senior manager types everywhere. A couple of odd, looking potentially hippy types lurking. Someone with big hair. The whole nine yards in the seminar stakes.
Of course, I immediately assumed that the big-hair person would be the one to ask the difficult, mumbled, and potentially insane question, thereby earning themselves the distain of some and pity of others. After all, there is always one person in every seminar. And I don't know why.
I gave a paper at a conference a year or so back, and it was a guy in sharp shirts and a natty vest. His first question kind of freaked me out, and then I realised, "Oh, he's the nutter..."
But at the Sandel seminar? Yours truly.
Ah well. Despite the embarrassment of blushing, being unable to form proper sentences, talking way too fast, and having this weird out of body experience where my consciousness tried to make a run for it before the memory realised what was happening and permanently scarred the psyche sitting next to it, it all came off very well.
I'd probably better come clean and admit that really smart people just plain scare the living piss out of me. Seriously. Put me in a room full of high IQs and something about the inferiority or tall poppy thing kicks in and Che leaves the building, leaving a husk of skinny, nervous man.
Pesky damn anxiety. I'd take some kind of drugs if I didn't get paranoid someone would find out and narc on me. You'd think I'd get over it writing the thesis, but no. Cow undergrads? No problem. Talk down to workmates or shopkeepers? Try not too, but it isn't difficult. But approach someone wearing a cardy with leather patches on the sleeves, a bad beard or freaky hairdo? Gibbering mess.
Luckily my question was the last one, so not only did I not have time to redeem myself, but also got to absorb a bit of info before the big red stoplight that is my forehead lit up the room. I was half expecting a dozen German and Aussie tourists to bowl into the place thinking it was a brothel.
Anyway, catharsis over, and what Sandel had to say was pretty interesting. In a nutshell, he built upon the thought of this other smart-guy, John Rawls, and talked about the issue of knowing too much. Not too much in general, but too much about risk.
So, originally this post was going to talk details about what Sandel had to say, but I can boil it all down to the simple statement that the future does not lie in organising life around the individual to the exclusion of collective, public ventures. What he lectured on was the danger that private health care (for example) will become too risky for private companies because of advances in genetic identification of probable hereditary diseases.
This issue is potentially huge, and if you extend it out to the question of making our society cohesive, then it becomes incredibly tricky. What happens if in another scenario, people simply aren’t interested in paying taxes to support another group that has a history of poor health? This isn’t so far fetched, half the time the right refuses to pay money to beneficiaries because they see it as funding dole-bludging minorities.
The question I tried (unsuccessfully) to bring to the discussion concerned religious minorities. What happens if a minority is considered too risky to have in or near our society? Rawls’ idea is that you design your political system so that it remains ignorant of specific content like religion or race, and just provides equally and justly to all.
But what happens if this neutrality is undermined by a popular predisposition to distaining groups in our society? After all, people are starting to really hate Islam. Does this mean that in time that entire Muslim communities will be marginalized and excluded in places like Britain? Will they be forced to entirely shut down their contribution to public debate, say in opposing things like the levelling of Falluja?
It’s a worry.