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Professor Rodney Barker |
Keep your enemies close – they’re useful
Lecture series to explore the power of the ‘other’
LOATHE them as we might, enemies are actually a very good thing.
So claims Rodney Barker, Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, who has made the thorny subject of enmity the focus of his lecture series this term.
As part of the free public lectures at Gresham College at Barnard’s Inn Hall in Holborn, Professor Barker examines the pros and cons of the hated “other”, and how enemies can affect and determine the identity of their rivals.
In terms of what your enemy can do for you, Professor Barker favours the Harry Lime argument, made by Orson Welles in the film The Third Man:
“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and what did that produce – the cuckoo clock!”
The Gresham lecturer said: “Enemies are a good thing – if we haven’t got one we need to invent one.
“You can chart the identity of political parties by who their enemies are.”
He added: “Look at the Labour Party. Their political rhetoric was aimed at the class war, then, around the time Mr Blair came to power, they had more enemies below than above for the first time. They changed their focus to drug pushers and hooligans.”
Other lectures include Christopher Dye, Gresham Professor of Physic, working through the analogy of London as a microcosm of global health from one end of the Piccadilly line to the other. From Uxbridge to Cockfosters, why do some sink and some swim in the heaving metropolis?
Elsewhere, Robin Wilson, Professor of Geometry approaches the classical mathematics problems of Ancient Greece – squaring the triangle and doubling the cube; and Michael Mainelli, Professor of Commerce, wonders aloud whether perfect economic markets can ever be predictable, and what sure-fire ways there are to make money.
In a meeting of the old and the new, the talks are usually given in the historic Barnard’s Inn Hall and then posted on the web the next day.
Professor Barker’s final lecture takes the question of enmity one step further – to Mars, to be precise.
He will ask whether human co-operation can ever be possible without an external threat in the lecture “Do we need a Martian invasion in order to avoid attacking each other?”
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