Biography: Tom Salvini worked in IT for many years before becoming a consultant on bringing organisations with diverse viewpoints to work effectively as a team.
Brief Synopsis: In a critical observation of the problems bedevilling society, Tom will argue that only collective pursuit of excellence will avoid blundering into more division and discord.
Full talk synopsis:
Speaker: Tom Salvini
Subject: Is collective excellence our only solution?
The March lecture at the Lit & Phil was from Tom Salvini on ‘Collective Excellence’. When excellence is spoken of it is usually in the context of individual excellence, so it was a new departure for someone to consider the question in the plural. Salvini’s talk was a wholesale recapitulation of Immanuel Kant’s thought, recast in contemporary terminology.
Mr Salvini began by isolating what he saw as the three problems that hinder any achievement of excellence: understanding the scale of the problem, being aware of our blind spots, and focusing on our shared humanity. Once we put our own perspective in cosmic perspective, we are more able to see the limitations of our knowledge. Aware of the limitations of knowledge, we are more willing to accept that we have blind spots and that we should factor them in when we pass judgment. And assuming everyone else is limited in similar ways, we can place more focus on local connections and perspectives that overcome differences or render them irrelevant.
A particularly helpful illustration was given with the mobile phone. Mr Salvini unearthed the successive layers that go to make a mobile work. Our use of the interface of the phone needs no knowledge whatever of the complex goings-on beneath the screen. Our life is a lot like that as well.
From his considerations, Mr Salvini drew three main conclusions. One, most of us hold beliefs that are likely to be wrong in one context but right in another. Two, we are inclined to confuse the surface screen we see with the full reality. Three, science and religion are not as far part as is often thought. They are, in Stephen Jay Gould’s words, non-overlapping magisteria.
From this Mr Salvini concluded collective excellence to mean we must be true to ourselves and somewhere we can fit in. Excellence means tapping into our physical and mental strengths and this becomes a collective excellence when we appreciate others are likely to be as flawed as we are. Of the core virtues, Mr Salvini suggested a greater stress on duty is the most pertinent. In this way, bounded by duty and aware of the perspectives of others having as much potential validity as one’s own, collective excellence can be arrived at.