Networking

Tonight I’m going to Utrecht for the first time since I’ve been back. There’s a party there for the University College Utrecht, which I attended oh so many years ago and I think that it’s a good idea for me to attend. The annoying thing is that the party only starts at 23:00 at night, which means I won’t be making it home till very early in the morning. I’m not really looking forward to that part. Actually, to be completely honest, I’m not looking forward to the entire party.

Still, I’m going. Why am I going to a party that I don’t really want to go to and that I’ll have trouble getting back from? As the title suggests, because of networking. I need to spread my tendrils through Dutch soil; as even out here it is all about who you know.

Some would call that a very bleak world view; with me being amongst them. Going to a party simply for the people you might meet there and the help they might offer you is a rather un Kantian (I think it’s Kant) view of the world around us. Some would argue that it’s the height of not seeing a person as an end, but rather as a means to an end, which is – as Kant tells us – immoral.

So why do I engage in an activity that could be seen as immoral? Well, first of all very few people still really follow the Kantian model of ethics. In fact, very few people even know about the Kantian model of ethics, which isn’t really any sort of argument against the model (It’s probably even fallacious!) nonetheless, it seems a bit pointless to follow an ethical model that is largely unknown and ignored.

What is more, as most realists understand, you can’t always do good if you want to get anywhere in life. When I went to university I was an idealist and boy, did that ever get in the way! Sure, it’s important to have ideals, but that’s quite different from being an idealist. Being idealistic is, in many ways, being naïve. The world doesn’t work as it should, it works as it does.

And networking is a part of that. We must somehow lay the connections throughout the fabric of the society we live in to get the things done that we want to. We can’t see every person we meet as an end in and of themselves because we simply do not have the time. We can’t consider the shopkeeper as a person, or the garbage man (person?). Hell, the police officer doesn’t even want to be seen as a person, as that undermines his or her role as arm of the law (I’m not quite sure why I suddenly went all PC either).

Networking is, in that case, not as bad. At least you try to make a connection with a person, even if the reason for that connection is simply that it makes it more likely that you’ll help each other later, when help is needed. That basically raises another one of those ethical conundrums, should we consider the action or the thought behind the action?

No, I really can’t think about another fundamental philosophical concept today, so I’ll just leave it at where it is. Kantian ethics is nice and good and it can be considered deeply while we’re practicing our armchair philosophy, but can't really be lived.