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Hear! Hear!

ROAD Sheep readers of a certain age will doubtless remember Mr. Bun the Baker, and Mr. Stitch the Tailor. Well, you’re about to meet Mr. Groat the Mortgage Advisor, a man with a voice like trudging through gravel. Imagine the scene. Forms had been filled in, but before making his final decision he needed to interrogate me. Things did not start well. My fault. Nerves. I got his name wrong. ‘Thank you so much for seeing me, Mr. Grunt’ was not the best opening gambit. But I needn’t have worried - my mother’s favourite maxim was spot on: ‘things are never so bad they can’t get a bit worse’. She was right. They did. ‘Now, tell me, what is your equity?’ I had been studying enough linguistic philosophy to unbalance anyone’s mental well-being, which explained my first problem: what exactly did he mean by ‘now’? I decided, however, to put that aside for the moment and concentrate instead on solving the more immediate problem. A simple question should do the trick. ‘What IS my equity?’ I asked. ‘That’s right’, echoed The Grunt, ‘what is your equity?’ ‘But what IS my equity?’ I asked again. ‘Why do you keep repeating the question? Is there something wrong with you?’ He was getting agitated. Sufficiently agitated to imagine it would clear things up if he spelt the word - ‘your E Q U I T Y - what is it?’ ‘That’s what I’m hoping you’ll tell me. What IS my equity?’ ‘You mean you don’t know what your equity is? - in which case we’re both in the same boat and I’m afraid that boat is about to sink!’ Years of philosophical training came to the rescue.‘You are wrong. We’re not in the same boat. With respect, I’m sure you know full well what my equity is whereas I...’ ‘Young man, if I knew what your confounded equity was do you imagine I would be sitting here asking you to tell me? Never in all my experience have I met such pig-headedness. Not to mention being accused of lying.’ B

‘Mr. Groat, I’m not accusing you of lying. But you do know what my equity is, whereas I don’t. It’s a simple epistemological misunderstanding and if you would let me tell you a story about two vicars discussing infant baptism I’m certain all would become clear.’ ‘Lord preserve us! Vicars? Infant baptism? Episto what? Ye gods!’ ‘There were two vicars. One asked the other if he believed in infant baptism. The second vicar replied that he didn’t need to believe in it: he’d seen it done.’ ‘What that makes clear is that it’s not a mortgage adviser you need, it’s a psychiatrist.’ ‘You see, Mr. Groat, you made an elementary epistemological mistake by failing to grasp the category of question I was asking. You failed to distinguish between my need for a definition and your need for a description. But then I guess you are not too familiar with Wittgenstein’s work on private language games?’ Let’s draw a veil over the rest of the conversation. Suffice it to say that eventually a mortgage was arranged, with a different building society. The Grunt, apparently, took early retirement. You’re no doubt wondering what are the chances of this having anything even remotely to do with prejudice [the subject of my November Broad Sheep article]. Well, it does touch on a couple of crucial issues, if any prejudice that divides people is to be dissolved. Secondly [yes, I’m starting with secondly], there is the inescapable need to be speaking the same language - to understand what exactly is being said, what precisely is being asked and where the speaker is ‘coming from’. But first, for there to be even the slightest possibility of speaking the same language, there is the underlying requirement to listen. And listening is darned hard work, and getting harder. Dying out, even. Much easier to tell someone what you think than to try to understand what they think. Prejudice is a root cause of many of today’s most menacing and stubborn problems. Its presence is usually felt most clearly in those activities where self-interest is a key player, such as politics, religion, banking, etc. All prejudices depend on inadequate information, a lack of curiosity and an unwillingness to empathize. It follows that no progress towards dissolving a prejudice can happen without the willingness of interested parties to listen, to have the courage to listen attentively thereby taking the risk of seeing attitudes and relationships transformed. While listening on its own may well not be enough to overcome a prejudice it is at least the vital first step. A skill we urgently need to rediscover. It’s the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition. Isn’t that right, Mr. Groat?

Philosopher-in-Residence