bigideas

Join us upstairs at The Wheatsheaf at 8pm on 25 November 2008 for a discussion of Football, Loyalty and Identity.

The discussion will be introduced by Dave Boyle, Chief Executive of Supporters Direct. Among other things we’ll look at the history of the modern game and its relationship with its fans as well as the fact that, for many people, supporting a team is more than a matter of enjoying a sporting event.
Aside from its intrinsic interest and importance to everyone interested in twentieth century culture, this event should shed an …

Danny Birchall and Nathan Charlton talk from Trafalgar Square in London about ideas of Britishness, and you can listen in by downloading the latest podcast.

Our next event will be on Tuesday 28 October 2008 at 7.30pm, upstairs at The Wheatsheaf.

Most Europeans now share a red passport and a taste for city breaks in each other’s countries, but what else? Is to call something European simply an indication of location, or something deeper that draws on ideas and tradition spanning millennia? Or is the idea of Europe something more modern and more narrowly political, a project culminating in the European Union?
Simon Glendinning‘s interests lie in the philosophy of Europe and in European philosophy. He joins …

Here’s my write-up of last night’s event — please add comments where I’ve missed things, got things wrong etc. In particular, this is my recollection of what Wilfrid said and isn’t based on his notes, so apologies if I’ve mangled anything.

Recent Big Ideas events have come back again and again to the (lack of) possibility for individuals to influence the society in which they live. Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners campaign was a bizarre case in point: was he a citizen who saw something wrong and successfully put it right, or was he an over-priviliged, ego-centric TV personality doing more harm than good?

Our next event will be on 30 September 2008 — click the link for details.

Last night Alasdair Mackenzie took us through some different models of democracy that supposedly connect the “people” with political decision-making more directly than the hoary old representative model that led Edmund Burke to warn his electors:
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Alasdair covered the Californian system, the Swiss system and ideas for improving the British (citizen’s juries). He cast a skeptical eye over e-democracy and, separately, the media. His main reference point …

Our next Big Ideas event will be on Tuesday 26 August; as usual we’ll be upstairs at The Wheatsheaf. Doors open at about 7:30 and we’ll aim to kick off at 8.

Four Big Ideas regulars attempted to answer this at the St Bride’s Tavern last week and you can listen in by downloading the latest podcast.

In the last Big Ideas we talked about Anthony Giddins’s view of modernity as involving, in part, an abstraction of space and time from our immediate environment. The railway timetable, for example, is able to refer to places and times distant from where we are, and perhaps places and times at which nothing particular happens. This, Giddins thinks, is something new.