Last week Rod Liddle suggested that on Question Time the Cambridge classicist Professor Mary Beard did not distinguish herself on the subject of immigration, and concluded that the BBC hired her only for her looks. Socrates would have had something to say about that.
In Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, Socrates opens a discussion with the famous intellectual Protagoras about what he tries to teach. Protagoras proudly claims that he teaches men how to be good, responsible citizens, and to run anything from a household to a city. Socrates is baffled, and proceeds to describe what happens when the Athenian democratic Assembly, consisting of all citizen males over 18, meets to discuss any problem.
He points out that when a decision has to be taken on a technical matter, like building, the Athenians send for builders to advise them, and shout down anyone who is not an expert. But when policy is at stake, ‘anyone can give his opinion, carpenter, smith, cobbler, merchant, ship-owner, rich or poor, noble or low-born, and no one objects that he has not learned the subject or been instructed in it’. Further, Socrates goes on, consider great people like Pericles and Alcibiades: they have failed hopelessly to teach any sort of ‘goodness’ about anything to their children and siblings. So what and where is this sort of ‘goodness’ that Protagoras claims to impart?
And so we come to the Athenian democratic assembly — ‘expert’ panel and audience — that is Question Time and the subject: immigration. Eagerly, we look to the experts. Oddly, there are none. So we are left with politicians. And what expert instruction have they received? Professor Beard’s expertise is Roman history, and the BBC love her because her programmes, rightly, get extremely high ratings.
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