When one person speaks and is encouraged to develop his or her ideas, then it is we, the audience, who provide the challenge. We provide the democracy. In each of our hearts and minds, we absorb, judge and come to our own conclusions. The dialectic is, thankfully, not between a group of equally ignorant people thrashing out a series of arbitrary subjects about which they know little and care less. It is between an informed individual who, we hope, has thought long and hard about their own area of specialisation, and an audience which is ready honestly to assess what the speaker has to say. Democracy, like everything else, thrives on preparation.
…A good lecture raises everybody’s game. There is a contract. In return for the audience’s presence, the guest is expected to have done a certain amount of work. The effort put into the thinking, is, in some wonderfully proportionate transaction of courtesy, rewarded by the concentration with which it is received.
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