Seoulscapade

A number of famous people have visited SNU including such digatories as Kofi Annan, but I’ve only gone out of my way to see two so far: Jane Goodall and Peter Singer.

A couple of years ago I saw a banner mentioning a Jane Goodall, written in Korean, and with help I had it deciphered, discovering that she was giving a lecture one late afternoon. Fortunately, it was at a time after work. This was a big thing for me, to see someone who’s something of a legend and apparently like minded in her view on animals. I didn’t even know she was still alive.

The lecture was mainly about promoting some initiatives she was behind, but it was still great to see her in person. At question time, Koreans again embarrassed themselves by launching into extended monologues about what they are about and what they are doing, before asking an actual question. I’d seen it happen before, but I still don’t know why they do that. I didn’t want to hear them, I wanted to hear her. Thankfully, the announcer jumped in to put a stop to it.

At the end people lined up at a book signing, and keen to do the same. However, I had an end of semester function to attend for my Korean class. How I wished to abandon it. But I just couldn’t, so I asked the girls I went with to take my book to get it signed when they got theirs done. That was a real shame, missing out on talking to her. I wish now I had not “done the right thing” by turning up at the Korean class function.

I saw Peter Singer only a few days ago. I actually took two afternoons off work to go to two of his lectures. He was giving in four in all for the 10th Dasan Memorial Lectures in Philosophy, sponsored by the Korean Philosophical association.

His four lectures were:

• Understanding the Nature of Ethics
• Ethics for One World
• Ethics and Animals
• Changing Ethics in Life and Death
  Decision Making

The first lecture above was at Seoul National so I simply headed from my office across the rain soaked campus to the venue. A nice booklet of the lecture in Korean and English was made available. From that, I had the gist of the lecture before it began.

That was fortunate because once the lecture did begin, after the preliminary speeches of no consequence, his every paragraph was followed by a lengthy Korean translation. This meant that the lecture dragged on somewhat and Singer could not elaborate too much. In other words, it was lengthy but the content wasn’t. I was fighting the urge to drop off to sleep. Credit must go to the translator, though, it couldn’t have been an easy job.

The second one was at Seoul’s Soongshil University, which is not far away Seoul National, and it followed the same laborious format. One spokesperson even did some of the same joke from the day before, noting how much rain there had been, and something about “Singer in the rain”. . .

At the Seoul National lecture pictured above, I reflected that Peter Singer and I had a number of things in common there: we were the only two western males in attendence; we were both Australian; and we were both vegetarians. That’s where it ends, though, because he’s famous at those things and I’m a nobody.