I expect that Bertrand Russell is the only person in history to have given public lectures to both TS Eliot (in lectures given at Harvard University) and Mao Tse-Tung (in a lecture series given in China). With youtube and the web, we are in danger of forgetting how special an occasion a public speech can be. And so I decided to list the people whose public lectures I have heard. I’ve not included lecturers and teachers whose courses I attended, the most influential (upon me) I have previously listed here, nor talks given at conferences or in academic seminars.
Kenneth Arrow, Michael Atiyah, PK van der Byl, James Callaghan, Noam Chomsky, Don Dunstan, Steve Fuller, Bob Hawke, Xavier Herbert, Anahid Kassabian, Robert Mugabe, Ralph Nader, Joseph Rotblat, Rory Stewart, Oliver Tambo, Edgar Tekere, Rene Thom, John Tukey, Gough Whitlam, Elizabeth Windsor, and Andrew Young.
In this list are two Nobelistas (Arrow/Economics and Rotblat/Peace), two Fields Medallists (Atiyah, Thom) and several politicians. Joseph Rotblat, although then in his 90s, stood for an hour and spoke compellingly without notes of the early history of the atomic bomb. Although not invited, I once attended a ceremony at which the Australian Head of State, Queen Elizabeth II, gave a speech, so I have included her here. Bob Hawke I heard give his maiden speech as an MP in the Australian Commonwealth House of Representatives in 1980, a speech I witnessed from the public gallery; contrary to both custom and to subsequent newspaper reports, his speech was interrupted by heckling from the Government (ie, Liberal and National Parties) benches. Of the people listed, the speakers who most impressed me as orators were Mugabe, Stewart, Whitlam and Young; the speakers who most impressed me as intellects were Fuller, Stewart and Whitlam. The speakers who least impressed me were Callaghan and Chomsky.
Callaghan, giving an address to an Australian Labor Party fund-raising luncheon in Canberra, a year or so after his election defeat in 1979, spoke to an audience who had each paid a significant amount to hear him (AUD 50, if I recall correctly). Despite this, he said barely 100 words, along these lines: “You Australians have a great country here! Whatever you do, don’t ruin it with socialism! I’m sure you don’t want to hear my opinions, so let me mingle with you, table-by-table.” These words were spoken notwithstanding the fact that we had each paid good money precisely in order to hear his opinions. Callaghan, former British Prime Minister, Privy Counsellor, and newly a Lord of the Realm, then stepped off the platform, went straight to the the official table, and stayed there the remainder of the lunch. It would have been nice to have heard a speech with an argument or two, or even a reflective anecdote, but I suppose ex-Prime Ministers have no one to write their speeches for them. If ever there was a demonstration of the great prior expectations created and the enormous vapidness of the delivery which follows them in the modern British Labour Party, this was it.
Although speaking for 75 minutes rather than 5, Chomsky also presented no arguments. Talking on the broad theme of the vile wickedness of the USA, he instead gave a series of haiku-like statements on topic after topic, mostly examples of evil actions or intentions of varous US administrations, all the way back to Ulysses S. Grant. These topics were not discussed in any discernible order. After some time of this topic-flitting, I noticed the lack of continuity and the absence of any apparent order, and so I began to count the number of successive statements on each topic. I never got past 5 successive statements on the same topic, although I did notice the same topics appeared and re-appeared several times in the course of the talk, subtly restated (not merely repeated), like old patterns coming back into view in a kaleidoscope. In music theory terms, the form was something like: A-B-C-D-A-E-D-F-G-H-C-A-H-C-I-J-K-B-L-E-. . . . Most of the audience seemed to approve of Chomsky’s talk, so he was certainly not unwise in adopting the structure he did. Indeed, perhaps this was evidence of sophisticated efficiency in his rhetorical-targeting: If you already believe that the USA is the source of all evil in the modern world, without a single mitigating feature, then you don’t need to hear any arguments demonstrating this belief; and if you don’t already believe this, then you don’t normally attend public lectures given by Noam Chomsky.
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