March 5, 2021
Brandon Turner to speak at first Live Ideas Lecture of spring 2021
Come join us for the first Live Ideas Lecture of 2021.
Live Ideas will host Brandon Turner, a political science professor at Clemson University, at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 16, via Zoom. Turner will speak on Bernard Mandeville's "The Fable of the Bees" and how we engage in politics, particularly online.
Mandeville's "The Fable of the Bees" shocked and scandalized his contemporaries in the early 18th century, and the ideas he inaugurated have not lost their capacity to shock and scandalize today. In particular, Mandeville questioned whether those who display their virtue most publicly — those who grandstand on Twitter, perhaps — were really engaged in virtuous activity. Come learn about how we understand the desire to be good apart from the desire to seem good to others — and which desire we are more likely to serve when we post online.