speakers who change your mind in person

I’ve just been having a private email conversation with some of my friends about which speakers have impressed and dis-impressed us. Obviously some of that will stay private, but I think a few lessons can be drawn from the discussion. Not sure how much of this pertains only to me, and how much of it is universal.

I can think of two relatively famous speakersI saw who left me thinking: “I’ll never read another word by this person again.” Why not? Obviously not just because I didn’t like the lecture. Anyone can have a bad or boring night, and while we might be disappointed by that, we’re not going to write someone off forever for that reason.

No, the two people I really wrote off for good were unbelievably snotty and haughty in person in a way I never expected from their books. One of them was a snot directly to the audience questioners (including undergraduate students.) The other was more conspiratorial with the audience, with an attitude of: “All of us in this room know the truth, but most people outside this room are benighted idiots.” This person also singled out a few geographical regions of this globe where everyone is simply an ignoramus (it didn’t help that one of those regions was my own, but that was just the coup de grâce; he had already lost me forever well before that point.)

These two showed such horrible attitudes as human beings, in other words, that there’s no way it was just the product of a bad mood. They were clearly people with whom I would not care to have any further interactions whatsoever. My close friends know who I’m talking about, but it would be rude to post their names on a blog, especially since one is still alive.

Now, what about the reverse phenomenon– people you end up liking a lot better after seeing them perform in person?

It’s not just the reverse of the first case: seeing a really, really polite celebrity might be a nice spectacle, but it’s not necessarily going to leave you fascinated. Same thing if you just see them a good lecture: you might think “hey, that lecture was actually more interesting than their books,” but that would lead only to a temporary readjustment in your opinion of them.

No, I think there needs to be a certain compelling charisma to a personality such that the author becomes permanently more interesting to you on some sort of human level. Žižek’s the obvious case here: for me at least, it’s impossible not to wish the guy well in everything after seeing him in public a few times. He’s just such an irreplaceable character that you want him to have lots of good luck.

But in a more understated way, I had a similar reaction to Judith Butler, whom I somehow found profoundly sympathetic and likable on the human level.

I had a bit of that reaction to Habermas as well, but I’ve never actually seen him lecture, just met him in a residence one time. There was a lot of human warmth to Habermas, on that occasion at least.