God Save the Queen

The Sick University

Saying that one wants to reduce the numbers going to university sounds obscurantist. In fact to do so would be a good idea, because it would be good for scholarship and true learning. For the most part, universities are where bad ideas go when they die. Good ideas escape such a fate and become part of common sense, where no-one notices that they were once ideas.
The UK university system has had a hard time. Lack of respect for learning in the wider society is one reason, though it didn’t stop the ancient Greeks from creating a body of wisdom and learning that we have not even now finished exploring (and never will). Two other factors have been at play.
The first has been the onslaught of the ideologists. The idea of disinterested scholarship based on logic and evidence has been under attack for a very long time, first from dogmatic Vulgar Marxists and latterly from even more dogmatic and vulgar postmodernists.
Some disciplines are immune. The natural sciences, pure and applied, have taken no notice. They can’t afford to. A block of concrete will remain in existence no matter how many eminent professors (a) declare it to be a mere ideological construct generated by the dominant elites in order to thwart the prospects for progressive social change, or (b) opine that the very existence of the block is something of which we cannot be certain, because our observations of reality are inevitably laden with linguistic tropes, and that it suits existing power structures to whip up a moral panic about concrete blocks on the pavement. Either sort of professor will graze their knees on the block anyway.
Other disciplines have also borne up well. History, my own subject, has survived because of its tiresome insistence on the value of evidence, though even then there have been wobbles. Linguistics also seems to be holding out, so far as I can tell. But the humanities and social sciences are awash with rubbish that actually, if anything, reduces the sum total of human knowledge. (Theologians, of course, have said nothing worth hearing since Aquinas.) The situation is summed up by an item of graffiti I once saw in a university library lavatory, next to the toilet-roll dispenser: ‘sociology degrees, please take one’.
But perhaps even worse than the ideologists has been the attack of the accountants. Our universities have been plagued with a thing called the Research Assessment Exercise, and although it’s been said before it bears repeating: the RAE is the death of scholarship. It’s the kind of thing that could only have been dreamt up by an accountant or someone who thinks like one. It breeds the proliferation of tedious and worthless articles and papers. It creates a need to publish any old thing regardless of value. Unlike the ideologists, the accountants leave no part of academe safe. And that, as they say, is only the tip of the iceberg.
So the contemporary university is sick unto death. I have no clear idea of what to do about it except to suggest cutting the numbers of students by 50%, but it won’t happen.
Humboldt’s idea of a university which would create an exciting tension between research and teaching was a good one. The appropriate sound-track for the idea is the first movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. However, the social changes of the last two centuries have meant that a solution has become a problem. That, of course, is just history doing its usual thing.

In defence of Marxism

Coming late to this debate, here is my ha’penn’orth, to be taken as the view of a non-Marxist with a good deal of respect for Marx and none at all for most of his followers.

This quote from SiaAoW has been on my mind lately, and it gives me a reason (an excuse, really) to set down some of my own reflections on the matters it raises.

‘… the left “as a serious political project” died long ago, some time in the early 1920s if not before, when the deepest division of all - that between reformists and revolutionaries - became set in stone.’

Tell it like it is. Let’s take names, shall we? This is Lenin’s doing. He is the central figure of the twentieth century because he showed what Marxists would have to do to take and hold power. His example also demonstrates that in doing so they would have to destroy their own purpose, his method being simply mass murder pro bono publico. The Bolshevik coup of October (November by our calendar) 1917 was not motivated by anything except Lenin’s desire to hold absolute power. As some Marxist historians have said in order to justify the coup, some form of dictatorship was probably inevitable after the overthrow of the Tsar: but not the particular disastrous form that emerged. Lenin’s defenders have not adequately pondered the quote from Aristotle that Alan Bullock used as the epigraph to his great book on Hitler: ‘men do not become tyrants in order to keep out the cold’.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks could easily have co-operated with the other liberal and socialist parties in a type of popular-front emergency government with the goal of establishing a sort of social democracy. Instead he first excluded them and then crushed them. The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 was the sin that anyone who calls themselves a member of the left should ponder day and night. It’s a more seminal act than anything else he did (though foreshadowed by all his previous acts as boss of the Party). After that, his decision to destroy the other left-wing parties – the Kadets, the SRs - followed logically. Co-operating with them would have meant too many compromises. And since Lenin was in possession of The Truth, how could he compromise?
And by his side in all this, a loyal helper, was Leon Trotsky. The idea that Trotsky represented some sort of humane alternative to Stalin as Lenin’s successor is false. If Trotsky had won out the specific disasters brought by Stalin would not have befallen Russia and her neighbours: an entirely different (and not necessarily lesser) set of disasters would have come instead. There is not the least chance that Trotsky would have been able to accept the only principle that could have restrained Communist violence, megalomania and tyranny – the principle that the government should be accountable. (In theory democratic centralism makes the executive accountable to the Party, but only in theory.) After all, like Lenin, Trotsky had The Truth. (And the more disgraceful to Trotsky, he had seen what Lenin represented, had warned against him years before, and despite this had thrown in his lot with him.)
In summary: once Lenin had destroyed hope in 1917, the whole miserable history of the USSR (and the other countries it tormented) was already there, in embryo. It was not foreordained in detail, but it was foreordained that whatever followed would be disastrous.

Once upon a time there was a tradition of humane, learned ethical Marxism. Walter Benjamin was perhaps its finest ornament, Rosa Luxemburg its best practical exponent. Of course, both of them are palatable today because they never held any power. Benjamin was a sort of brilliant freak, all the more attractive to the Left because he was a martyr to fascism. His essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is finely written and persuasive, and based in a deep knowledge of history, art and literature. It comes to a doubtful conclusion:
‘Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.’
The implication is that the politicisation of art is a response to a fascist deformity. In point of time it was not, since the politicisation of art was implicit in Marxism from the beginning, in the idea that art was a part of the superstructure. The other flaw in the essay is that it simply makes the same mistake that all Marxists were making at the time: the belief that fascism and capitalist democracy were the same thing fundamentally. (Orwell himself made this mistake during the 1930s, but he recovered from it, thanks to the war.) He displayed the usual aristo-Marxist contempt for liberalism (in the traditional sense of the word) as seen in Britain and the USA, both of which (in classic German style) Benjamin dismissed – in the cruellest way, by not mentioning them - as art-free plutocratic hellholes unworthy of serious consideration. But still, it’s a brilliant essay. RTWT.

Rosa Luxemburg represents the more actively political side of this tradition. She too was a martyr, so can’t be judged. (That was irony, by the way.) If anything she was the most important thinker in the broad Marxist tradition. I say broad, because her ideas – as expressed in the seminal work The Accumulation of Capital - in some ways represented a rejection of Marx. She was vexed by the question of why capitalism had not collapsed as Marx had predicted, and why it indeed continued to grow. In that, Luxemburg – ironically given her hostility to him - has something in common with Bernstein (another fine representative of the Marxist heretical tradition), who also used Marx as a source both of direct inspiration and fruitful error. Hannah Arendt sums up the theory in her essay on Luxemburg, and identifies the key idea in Luxemburg’s interpretation.
‘…the process of growth was not merely the consequence of innate laws ruling capitalist production but of the continued existence of pre-capitalist sectors in the country which ‘capitalism’ captured… Once this process has spread to the whole national territory, capitalists were forced to look to other parts of the earth, to pre-capitalist lands, to draw them into the process of capital accumulation, which, as it were, fed on whatever was outside itself… Hence, capitalism was not a closed system that generated its own contradictions and was ‘pregnant with revolution’; it fed on outside factors, and its automatic collapse could occur, if at all, only when the whole surface of the earth was conquered…’
As Arendt points out, the other Marxists of the time, Lenin at the head, denounced this as heresy. But:
‘The trouble was only that what was an error in abstract Marxism was an eminently faithful description of things as they really were.’
Marx might have got to the same point as Luxemburg if he had ever written his third volume of Capital, which was supposed to deal with international relations, though it would have meant changing his earlier theories.
Luxemburg and Arendt’s conclusion has some interesting implications for the consideration of contemporary globalisation. Most contemporary Marxists and radicals are unlikely to see them, however, or agree with them if they do, since most contemporary Marxism is predominantly emotive rather than rational – essentially concerned with feeling good rather than doing anything. It surprised me as a student to learn that the right was supposed to be emotional whereas the left was supposed to be rationalistic. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s the discourses of the two sides always appeared to me the other way round.
The tradition of humane, cultured Marxism, permanently suspect of heresy, is a fragile one. Its representatives are marginal to the Marxist tradition which is itself marginal to mainstream society. No wonder Benjamin and Luxemburg look exotic even as blooms within the Marxist garden. Not surprising too that the tradition is virtually dead. These guys keep it alive.

Highs and lows: Edinburgh

The production of Antigone by Sophocles by the Stamford (Connecticut) High School at Church Hill Theatre was the highlight of the week. With the modesty of youth, they did not seek to impose anything on the text, but allowed its genius – Sophocles’ vision – to shine through. They realised what too many companies have forgotten: that they are the servants, not the masters. I found myself thinking the ultimate heresy: Sophocles might actually be better than Shakespeare. Did I really just say that?
There was nothing wrong with the adaptation, by the director, Michael Limone. There was nothing wrong with the set or lighting. The music was possibly a tad too loud at some moments. But the young people interpreting their roles were exactly right. It would be hard to say who was the best. Morgan Miller as Antigone herself was perfect. Together with Meredith Hackman as Ismene, she brought tears to my eyes in their second dialogue. The tears overflowed. Michael Miller as Haemon was also just right for the role, a passionate youth torn by the cruellest of conflicts. Miccah Kosstrin-Greenberg effortlessly dominated his only scene as Tiresias by letting the inherent drama of his words and terrible aspect of his blind face speak for themselves. But perhaps the finest of all was Robert Rosado, completely convincing as Creon in all the stages of his soul’s tragic journey: arrogant, repentant and, at last, ruined. An honourable mention also goes to both choruses, both the women of Thebes and the senators, who all showed a dignity and maturity remarkable for their years.
As we came out we said: ‘they do not know how good they are’. Is it wrong of me to hope that they remain in ignorance of how good they are? For to realise the quality of their talent would be to risk that all-important modesty in the face of the text. Hopefully they might get the best of both worlds – realise their talents while remaining humble. The programme notes that Robert Rosado hopes to reprise the play next year. He’s not the only one hoping so.
(A version of this review is on the Edinburgh fringe website.)

Low point: the talk on imprisoned writers on Thursday evening. The theme was Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi and the writer U Win Tin. Libby Purves was there, but she left after saying her piece. She therefore didn’t see Mourid Barghouti turning the occasion into – you’ve guessed it – yet another anti-Israel fest. He had about eight minutes, five of which (I wasn’t counting but it was at least half his time) he dedicated to slagging off Israel and drawing an equivalence between it and Burma. He mentioned the Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike, describing them as political detainees. Considering the usual Palestinian methods of political activism it seems an abuse of language to equate them with NLD prisoners in Burma. In Burma, you can get locked up for joking about Ne Win: but in Israel you don't go to prison merely for making a joke about Ariel Sharon. You have to be a bit more active than that. In any case, it was an abuse of his position. I would have been rather more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause if he had stuck to the subject in hand. So he was not only in the wrong morally but acted foolishly: it was mere preaching to the converted.
No-one walked out or protested. The other writers were just the usual second-string types except for Malise Ruthven, who didn’t protest either. I should have done but wanted to see if he might make a partial redemption by attacking Arafat and Hamas and all their works, but he did not. Instead he went on to the obligatory mention of Abu Ghraib and apartheid before making a perfunctory mention of political prisoners everywhere in the world (so brief that it could easily have been missed) to cover himself.
It was the moderator’s job to correct him, but if she’d done so she would have opened herself to the charge of being pro-Israel. Don’t you care?!? You can imagine the insinuations. I was still angry the next morning. That was an over-reaction for sure, but I’d never seen anything quite like it before.

Six of the best

I'm off on holiday. If you've come here for the first time here are my six favourite posts.

Back at the end of the month.

Three of a kind

-My Normblog profile is up.

-Oliver Kamm is on top form.

-So is Damian Counsell.

Bleeding heart

SiaAoW makes several excellent points. I particularly liked the bit where s/he pointed out that not every Tory kicks beggars when no-one's looking. In fact the bleeding-heart conservative is more common than you might think.

Offence against Terpsichore

To the Albert Hall last night to hear a Prom by the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra. Running late, we phoned ahead to see what the running order was, and were informed that Henze’s 10th Symphony was on first, with pieces by Strauss (R.) and Mozart after the interval. Since the Henze piece was advertised as ‘rhapsodic’ and ‘rich’ we decided there would be nothing lost by missing it, and had dinner instead. One of my companions expressed the view that it would probably be ‘atonal boxxoxx’.

Arriving just before the interval, we heard the unmistakeable and incomparably beautiful strains of a Mozart finale through the door of the auditorium. The horrific truth dawned: we had missed Mozart’s 20th Piano Concerto, or most of it at any rate. We would have to settle for hearing the Henze. I was uneasy about this, as Henze is still alive, so listening to anything of his breaks one of my fundamental rules of classical music. However I comforted myself with the thought that it might not be as bad as we feared.

It was worse.

Since the clueless dolt on the phone misinformed us, I feel no need to show any restraint in the interests of good manners. This symphony is the most turgid piece of irrelevant drivel that I have ever suffered. I resent having spent half an hour (all we could endure) being insulted by this fatuous piece of self-important nonsense. It had no discernable theme, no melody and no identifiable time signature. A piano has no place on the stage in a symphony, not at any rate if its only role is to produce occasional streams of miserable plunking nullity. I particularly savoured the contributions of the Man Hitting a Large Sheet of Bacofoil which intruded insistently into the second movement. Doubtless meant to be symbolic of something or other. Cunningly, the composer had made the movements segue into each other without a proper break which made it harder for appalled concertgoers to make their escape. In the end we slunk out before the finale got properly going.
This piece of music (and if there were ever a case for sneer quotes it would be here that one might apply them) had no redeeming features. Its total lack of musical value exceeded even that of the average rap artist or heavy metal band. There was not a single moment of pleasure or uplift or joy or interest in it, merely a weak sense of curiosity that wore off after five minutes to be replaced by a growing sense of desperation to be anywhere else. The random noises of a troupe of monkeys let loose amongst the instruments would have been preferable.
Ideally one would hope that all copies of the sheet music could be pulped. I hated this symphony. By extension, I have also come to hate the composer, the conductor, the orchestra and the entire population of the city of Hamburg. There is nothing left for it but to hunt them down one by one and subject them all to a hundred years of high-volume white noise. I would do this myself but am afraid that if I went anywhere near the place I would start getting flashbacks. With any luck an intensive course of Mozart will restore my mental equilibrium, but it’ll be touch and go.

P.S. It is no surprise that Henze is a composer of the usual posturing-bourgeois-Marxist type, who has checked all the usual spoilt-idiot-Marxist boxes: collaboration with Luchino Visconti (check), oratorio dedicated to Che Guevara (check), solidarity visits to Cuba (check). One doesn’t have to be a pseudo-revolutionary-preening-halfwit-self-satisfied-Marxist to produce tosh, but it helps. Clive James: 'among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it allows them to blame society for the fact that no-one wants to listen to them.'

Friend S.

The other day I bumped into my friend S. We chatted briefly about work and people we know. She's a nice young woman, very bright, quite short, her hair tied tightly back, good-looking in a way though not my type. She has a good job and lives in a flat out on the other side of the City, which she shares with her boyfriend. In short, she's a fairly normal Londoner. She's also a Muslim.

A few months ago I saw in a blog - I forget which - a link to a picture of an Israeli woman soldier, titled 'Osama's worst nightmare'. Close, but no cigar. Osama - assuming he is still alive and capable of having nightmares (and vivid, prolonged ones they are, no doubt) would be far more disturbed by S. than an Israeli woman soldier. The latter might merely kill him: the former represents doom for his cult of death, that is, for his ideals, for want of a better word.

Not everyone sees things this way. Here I commented on the problem of Islamophobia amongst the warblogs. Maybe it's the zeitgeist, but I notice Timmyhawk and Gary Farber have been thinking similar thoughts. They're right.

S. isn't an enemy.
Alaa the Mesopotamian, the most pro-Allied Iraqi blogger of all, isn't the enemy.
Ayatollah Sistani, who, according to Zeyad (10th August post) responded with fine scorn to the hypocritical respects of an Iranian envoy, is not the enemy.
As I said before, we need to police ourselves.
It's time for Babykillers Against Islamophobia.

Tackling the menace

It’s time to define the greatest menace to our civilisation today.
Our language is being subverted and rotted by lazy, arrogant thinking. But we can fight it. A spectre is haunting the blogosphere – the spectre of scare quotes.
It’s time for Punctuational Jihad.

Scare quotes are lazy. Instead of needing to explain why a given statement is false or misleading, one simply puts scare quotes or sneer quotes around a word and no further comment is required.

Scare quotes are arrogant. The implicit assumption underlying their use is that the reader is more interested in knowing the opinion of the writer, that is, the opinion is the important thing – more important than the facts (indeed they’re the perfect expression of postmodernism in action: the distinction between opinion and fact is silently effaced). As such they’re an insult to the intelligence of the reader, who is told what to think rather than addressed as a being who might be able to make up his or her own mind.

Scare quotes are phatic. Linguistics scholars have noticed that in ordinary conversation much if not most communicative action is phatic, that is, intended to build or reinforce a relationship rather than transmit information. (Apparently women are better at phatic communication than men, hence the rows.) Scare quotes are tailor-made for phatic communication: they are used because the writer knows that the audience will recognise what’s really meant. They thus short-circuit argument and evidence. There’s a place for phatic speech in private, where building relationships between people is the most vital thing. But for public speech (i.e. any speech that pertains to the res publica) going phatic is a disaster. Doing so polarises people on the basis of existing positions, making it impossible to do more than say an outright yes or no. That can only undermine the possibility of mutually respectful speech between opponents – the absolute basis of a pluralist civilisation. Tribal feeling is reinforced, and the possibility that the other side might have some good arguments takes a holiday. Result: racist warmongers take on treacherous appeasement-junkies.

So, with at least as much religious authority as Kevin al-Sadr, I’m issuing a fatwa. The use of scare quotes is banned in this blog. Furthermore, I will conduct a jihad against especially damaging uses of scare or sneer quotes elsewhere. This jihad, be it noted, has aspects of both the inner and outer jihads as identified by Islamic jurisprudence. It combines the inner jihad against one’s own worst impulses with the outer jihad against the enemies of – well, the enemies of good punctuation, anyway.
It may a case of treating the symptoms rather than the disease, but sometimes that’s all you can do.

Staying balanced

In Political Theory they teach you that the history of political thought can be divided into three main traditions, three categories into which ideologies and thinkers can be located: conservative, liberal and socialist.

At the time I felt there was something wrong with this. In the first place – although back then I was no kind of Tory – I thought it was unfair on conservatives, because it contained the unspoken implication that fascism was just a kind of conservatism. That, I thought, introduced a particular kind of spin to the subject from the word go. But to be fair, that assessment doesn’t work, because it’s usually recognised that Leninism, the ideology of arguably the most disastrous political movement of the last century, was a kind of socialism. A diabolical and perverted kind, a socialism that wrecked the prospects for justice (and not only in Russia) in the name of justice, but a kind of socialism nonetheless. In the same way one might say that fascism was a kind of conservatism that destroyed the old world that it was meant to preserve.

A few years later I concluded that it was false to pigeonhole oneself as one of the three pure and simple. No-one’s that simple except for journalists. 50% liberal, 40% socialist, 10% conservative, that seemed about the right way to sum up my views. Now those proportions have shifted about a bit, but more importantly, I’ve stopped caring so much about ideological positionings. The truly important things are beyond ideological correctness. Still, left, right and centre do exist for pragmatic purposes, and if one is drifting rightwards one takes on new responsibilities.

One of them is being clear when someone on your own side is wrong. The Right is not very good at policing itself. The Left is awash with fanatics and hypocrites but there is not (and has never been) a shortage of left-wing writers and thinkers who are willing to tell it like it is, to call out their own when they distort or plagiarise or mislead or flat-out lie. Nik Cohen’s fine, bleak essay in the NS this week is precisely in this tradition. George Orwell is still read today because he had the same kind of keen sight for the monsters that dwelt among his own tribe. Can the Right claim as much? Offhand I can’t think of anyone on the Right who held to that standard of honesty.

Recently I had a go at taking down a bit of foolish scribbling that was published in the Telegraph. Bjorn Staerk (welcome to my sidebar) has been at the same thing. Islamophobia is real and needs to be dealt with. It isn’t always as blatant as this sort of thing. One of the first blogs I discovered was Bill Whittle’s Eject!Eject!Eject! which has some very fine, eloquent, heartfelt essays on it. I could well have included him in the M7 except for one comment he makes in his sidebar, re the comments community at LGF. He explicitly endorses its quality, notwithstanding the dangerous and offensive nonsense that gets vented there. (Let me be quite clear: I refer here to the LGF comments community, not to the blog itself, which is often interesting and useful, though not to be taken uncritically.) That lapse of judgement was enough to disqualify him from a link here. We baby-killers need to be selective, even choosy. Some dodgy characters like to equate all criticism of Islam with Islamophobia, but that doesn’t mean that Islamophobia doesn’t exist. (In a way, that’s analogous to the whole anti-Sharon/anti-Israel/anti-semitism thing which we’re all sick to death of arguing about.)

While on this subject, the MAB’s rejoinder to Anthony Browne (published at Harry’s Place) reads in parts as quite a reasonable piece. However, it has several holes big enough to drive a van through. One of the main problems with it is that it implies that Qaradawi was criticised for upholding Palestinian rights. But there’s a ocean of clear blue water between thinking that the Palestinians ought to have a state and endorsing the slaughtering of Israeli commuters and disco-dancers with shrapnel bombs carried by confused teenagers. On those issues I join with such diverse characters as Menzies Campbell and George W. Bush in favouring the former and being – how shall we put this? – unenthusiastic about the latter. The MAB seems to conflate the two. And in the same way as Sharon makes anti-semitism seem acceptable to some deluded people, the sort of evasiveness (to put it no more strongly) displayed by MAB on this issue (among others) makes Islamophobia more plausible to otherwise decent people.

It seems simplistic to have to repeat this two thousand five hundred years after Socrates et al., but the way to respond to injustice is not to perpetrate an equal and opposite injustice, but to establish something that is reasonably just. When responding to terrorism, one must observe the laws of war. When faced with lies, determine the facts. Because the truly important things – the things that make us human – are beyond ideology.