Meetings with remarkable men: Amartya Sen
Sometimes in the winding hours, travelling or staking out a story with a crew and a producer, we turn to playing Desert Island Discs, choosing our eternally changing eight bits of music we would take in our shipwrecked condition.
But over time I have come up with a variant: Mandela’s High Table. Which eight people in public life would you sit at dinner with Nelson Mandela?
Ever since I came up with the idea, I have always found myself saying, “Amartya Sen would have to be one of my three ‘must haves’.” Trouble is, I can never remember who the other two would be.
Last night, after Channel 4 News, I found myself chairing an event with Professor Sen at London’s Southbank Centre. The Purcell Room was packed to capacity – the organisers said they could have sold the event twice or three times over.
The unchanging Sen was talking about his book The Idea of Justice, a philosophical treatise on the philosophy of justice. It is a work he has been formulating for over 40 years. It is a natural fit with his life’s work on the economics of poverty that earned him the Nobel prize in 1998.
There is something both daunting and challenging about intersecting with one of the world’s great intellectuals. The remarkable thing about Amartya Sen is that despite the scale and quality of his output down the years, he remains an amazingly accessible, humane and witty member of the human race.
Whatever anyone may argue about the dumbing down of public discourse, last night was an event which displayed an enthusiastic plurality of thought and debate.
The questioning came from diverse quarters and illustrated that whatever people may feel about the media’s representation of public debate and interest, there is an intellectual life “out there” that I would argue has rarely existed on such a scale before.
It is played out in book festivals and events on a daily basis across the UK. I detect it too even here on this site and on many others.
The unanswered question is: at what point will this discourse infect the conduct of public life in the UK?