Brief de-brief on Alain de Botton

Yesterday was the day for Alain de Botton in the Opera House speaking on The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, so off I went with two girls from work and one from church (Sophie over here).

Alain irked me right in the beginning by giving a brief history of work in which he made people laugh as he described a dark period of negativity when Christianity held the idea that we were working to atone for the sins of Adam and Eve and so work was viewed as punishment. It's loathsome when people portray Christianity badly to a crowd, and moreso when they have it completely wrong (though perhaps he borrowed from Catholicism). I wanted to stand up and tell everybody what really atoned for the sins of Adam and Eve, and how to work is to be created in the image of God, who is also working ... However, he then went on to quote such theologians as Luther and Augustine quite positively and the final conclusion on the purpose of work might well have been borrowed from Genesis 1-3.

All that said, it was a very interesting and entertaining talk, and he really is a gifted public speaker (and writer). He dropped lots of little insights along the way. One of the things that is in some ways admirable and in some ways frustrating about de Botton is how well he is doing out of repackaging of old ideas. Much of what he said has been said before, in Marxism (eg his idea that large scale is economically efficient, but meaning inefficient), theology (as mentioned above) and elsewhere in philosophy - he has simply put it all together and made it accessible to modern readers. One of my work colleagues said she finds it all a little patronising because he assumes that we are all so ignorant we have never read the original sources. But that is actually probably true for a large proportion of the population (that doesn't include her). I think his gift is actually in making these ideas accessible and getting them out there to those who may never otherwise have read them, in generating interest and keeping those old ideas alive and the way he bundles them into a cohesive unit. His works serves to show people that what has gone before is not irrelevant. And it would seem that he is doing all this because he believes it will be of benefit to the human race. The book by the same title is probably a very good read. (I really enjoyed reading The Consolations of Philosophy, even when I begged to differ.)

Afterwards we went to the Opera Bar for a drink and had some interesting discussion with the girls from work. It takes us out of the office circle and into the sort of conversation we don't have very often at any rate, and Alain had provided some definite launching points to talk about Christianity and respond. All up it was a good afternoon.