Just Popped Out

I shall be in Japan until the fourth of July. Thus, no posts until then.

The Intellectual Scoundrel

The intellectual scoundrel who has nothing much to say, but who would like to say something that appears extraordinarily profound, does not posit ordinary, likely, or obvious explanations. He seeks rather an extraordinary, unlikely, uncommon, and abstruse explanation which he believes befits the station of an extraordinary and profound man. Ordinary explanations do not offer the intellectual the opportunity to display the extraordinary understanding which he would have others believe he possesses; for, since, just about anybody can posit and comprehend an ordinary explanation, there is no renown to be had thereby. He looks therefore for an interesting and unverifiable explanation that excites the chatter of intellectuals and flatters their beliefs in their own extraordinariness. The explanation need not be fettered by evidence, probability, let alone fact, all of which, no doubt, would give a pedestrian air. No, what is required is an explanation that is wholly unconcerned with facts, and wholly concerned with the writer’s reputation.

The Intellectual Scoundrel’s Axiom: When you have eschewed the probable, whatever remains, however despicable, must be an expression of the unverifiable.

Hobsbawm

What led Hobsbawm to Marxism? In his own words, “Pity for the exploited, the aesthetic appeal of a perfect and comprehensive intellectual system, . . . a little bit of the Blakean vision of the new Jerusalem and a good deal of intellectual anti-philistinism” (Eric Hobsbawm, (2002.) Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, New York: Pantheon,. p. 74; quoted by Robin Melville). And what did Marxism bring? Pitiless exploitation, the ugliness of a corrupt and totalitarian pseudo-intellectual system, the imposition of a Dantean vision of Hell on earth, and a great deal of mind-numbing philistinism. Any surprises? Were these not an inherent part of Marx’s vision?

Radio 4 the Revolution!

I suppose one should look upon it as being as inevitable as earthquakes in Japan or subterfuge in French politics, but still, given the egregious affront to sense, it provokes in me some incredulity to learn that Radio 4 listeners are set to vote Karl Marx the world's greatest philosopher. The voting has two weeks to run yet, but Karl Marx is leading the field, and as I say, the Japanese tremble and the French dissemble.

.....If it is likely that one chooses a philosopher that reflects one's own character, one should not be surprised that the listeners of Radio 4 would choose one that is a pampered, self-righteous, complaisant, economically ignorant, amoral moraliser, with a typical bourgeois enfant-terrible pretension to non-bourgeois temperament. That is if one can call Marx a philosopher at all.

.....Just as inevitably is that there can be found an intellectual to egg them on. Francis Wheen, in The Sunday Times (19th June 2005) trots out the usual rot about Marxism's having never been tried:

'Actually, Marx himself was rather buried, as it were, by communist leaders such as Stalin and Kim Il-sung during much of the 20th century,' said Wheen. 'It is they who discredited Marxism, but Marx's own ideas are still very viable and influential.'

And there we have the greatest inevitability of them all: that whenever Marxism or its ideological offspring is unleashed upon a country, there can be found those who will claim that the resultant devastation had nothing to do with Marxism. Isn't it wonderful that "Scientific Socialism" is so scientific that it does not permit empirical evidence to weigh against it?

.....The truest expression of Marxism is its blood-thirstiness, found not only in every attempt to impose it, but also in the writings of Marx himself. Should we have another go at it? For blood-thirstiness is still as "viable and influential" as it ever was. After all, we have nothing to lose but everything.

Fewtril

One may fairly suppose that, when it comes to the winning of power, even the most ardent of socialists would not wish to abolish the brisk trade in grandmothers.

A Short Introduction to Spoilt-Bratism

Origin
It is not known exactly when Spoilt-Bratism began, though it might be said with some sureness of conjecture that it first appeared with civilisation, when Man’s material comforts and cultural achievements were sufficient to allow him to blame his parents.

.....Modern origins are unclear. It is safe to say that its first formulations were among the bourgeois youth of Europe. This youth, whose comforts and very prominence were built upon the virtues and diligence of their forefathers, repudiated the manners and virtues (though not the comforts or advantages) of the bourgeoisie, and sought authenticity in pretending to be anything but bourgeois.

.....Spoilt-Bratism grew apace in the eighteenth-century, culminating in France in the Great Tantrum, which saw the “Friends of Humanity” butchering their way through a not inconsiderable portion of humanity. The movement was slow to take root in England, despite the efforts of early practitioners such as Robert Owen. It was not until the mid-nineteenth-century that Spoilt-Bratism attained its greatest theoretical formulation in the works of Karl Marx, whose self-obsession, pretension, mendacity, notoriety-seeking and nastiness still inspires Spoilt-Brats to this day.

Character
The Spoilt-Brat has much in common with the Narcissist. He is:

1. Self-righteous, is dismissive and contemptuous of opposing views.
2. Self-important, believes he is special, regardless of talents.
3. Self-obsessed, either by self-regard or self-loathing.
4. Attention-seeking, seeks undue admiration, or failing that, notoriety.
5. Mendacious, to the point that he no longer notices it himself.
6. Pretentious, rarely showing his true face.
7. Envious, cannot feel happiness for the happiness of others.
8. Power-obsessed, seeks control over others.
9. Presumptuous of entitlement, expecting priorities and privileges that he decries in others.
10. Haughty, quick to anger when contradicted.
11. Nasty, though loves to be thought of as saintly.

In philosophy, the Spoilt-Brat is a swaggerer and a sophist. In art, he is a dauber of ground-breaking tat. In literature, he is at his most pretentious and idiotic. In politics, he is drawn to the Left.

.....Though not coterminous, Spoilt-Bratism and leftwing politics share much of the same ground. Leftwing politics is the means by which a man may extend his adolescence well into adulthood. Though he may leave behind him the spots and the personal awkwardness, he takes with him all the pretension, the irrationality, and the contrariness.

.....By this politics, he can play the rebel. He can decry responsibility, despoil culture, and destroy virtue. If he comes out of it in later life, he may feel an acute embarrassment, of the kind that a young man might feel upon leaving adolescence and recalling all the stupid things he had said therein. He may feel he has to make up for all the lies, the distortions, the fits, and the self-righteous rants, just as a man in his twenties may feel he has to make it up to his mother for all the unpleasantness in his teens. But if he leaves it too late, if the tally against him becomes too great to admit, he will remain on the Left, and become ever more absurd, mendacious, and nasty the older he gets.

Motto
I’m right, I know I’m right, and nothing you can say will change my mind.

Magic Pinter

Harold Pinter has a website dedicated to himself. No doubt you knew about it, and have spent every morning since its inception absorbing its hagiographic charm. But I have only just discovered it, and I am happy; for Harold Pinter is one of my favourite jokes.

.....Imagine my delight when I read the following, which the great man tells us he wrote in 1958:

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

O, such haughty abandon! If Mr Pinter does not believe that there are hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, I wonder if he would mind if I drove a really hard bus over his really soft carcass. It might seem superfluous to say, except to the more recalcitrant fantasists among us, but the hard distinctions between reality and unreality are what serve to remind us of that ancient and sage maxim: Nature doth not suffer a Gobshite.

.....Of course, Mr Pinter has an excuse: he’s an artist, which means that he can say what he bloody well likes. His boldest and stupidest assertions can always be defended by some banal twist of interpretation, by some artistic loophole, of the sort that says, of course, I didn’t mean it that way, I meant it artistically, metaphorically, etc. As he goes on to say:

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Thus, as a writer he can still write any old bollix -- lie, falsify, and misrepresent because there are no distinctions between real and unreal, true and untrue -- so long as it fits his purpose, but as a citizen he can wish to maintain the distinctions between real and unreal, true and untrue, so that he can claim reality and truth to be on his side. This is a dubious strategy for having his cake and eating it.

.....Moreover, it is beyond me how one can explore reality through art when “there are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false”, but then I’m not a celebrated and multi-award-winning halfwit.

Fools and Persuasion

It is almost impossible to persuade a fool of the rationality or truth of a matter if upon that same matter some genius has averred to the contrary. This fool is apt to insinuate that, if Newton was a genius and said x, and you are not a genius and you said not-x, then no matter what your argument, x is more likely to be the case than not-x. It is no matter that you put forth a water-tight argument that proves not-x beyond doubt, and that said genius had no argument for x and was just airing his prejudices, the fool will have none of it, simply because he does not come to his stance through rational deliberation, but through seeking to align his opinions to those of someone known to be clever. It has been the less sage and sometimes downright stupid sayings of geniuses that have provided fools with much of the spurious support for their foolish opinions. Einstein – currently, the fool’s favourite genius – said many a silly thing in his time, but because it came from the mouth of a genius, it is taken by the thoughtless to be full of thought. But then, there’s a fool making notes every time a genius opens a bag of nuts.

Sophistical Machinations: No. 3 (Deep Structure)

If one’s thesis is built on little more than ink and opinion, it is likely to fall down at the first belly-laugh of the first critic. In a perfect world, one would have him shot, but until utopia is reached, all Comrades of the Academy will have to survive the attentions of bourgeois philistines as best they can. To the end that one’s thesis would appear to be built on something more substantial than opinion, therefore, one should propose that there is a deep structure to every matter wherein one can find a never-ending supply of putatively confirmatory instances of one’s thesis.
.....It is important to note that these instances “found” deep in the structure of a matter need only be a restatement of one’s initial opinions put into an even more theoretical form; that is, what one purports to find is in fact an encapsulation of what one has set out to show. Thus, if one’s thesis is committed to finding that nineteenth-century European scholarship is merely an extension and exculpation of imperialism, then one can with a minimum of effort show “imperialist structures of attitude and reference” everywhere within it.

.....One can engage in this kind of thing for an entire career, bandying about phrases such as “sublimated notions of domination”; and it takes fairly little intellectual effort to persuade silly persons, of whom there is never a dearth, that this is scholarship and not politicking.

.....Words such as “sublimated” or “repressed” are very useful; for anything can be posited thereby. When looking, for example, at an idyllic painted scene of the sun setting behind a wooded hill, one can interpret it as depicting the artist’s sublimated desire to rape. And that village green played on by gleeful children and begirt with quaint cottages? Why, it’s nothing but a repression of the the guilt at the horrors of racism! The boldness and abstruseness of the interpretation is the point. As always, neither evidence nor reason need apply.

The Guardian of Bad Ideas

Today I am reminded that bad old ideas never die, they just eke out a sordid and valetudinous existence in The Guardian. Therein George Monbiot reiterates the old calumny that property is theft: “in terms of looted resources, stolen labour and now the damage caused by climate change, the rich owe the poor far more than the poor owe the rich.”
.....This is how Proudhon put it back in 1840:

If I were asked to answer the following question: WHAT IS SLAVERY? and I should answer in one word, IT IS MURDER, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question: WHAT IS PROPERTY! may I not likewise answer, IT IS ROBBERY, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?

(What is Property? Or an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government. Chapter 1.)

It is fortunate that Proudhon feels that no extended argument is required; for he would find that none could be found to defend such nonsense. This passage, by the way, is a fine example of Calumnious Redefinition, which is defined below.

Sophistical Machinations: No. 2 (Calumnious Redefinition)

By calumnious redefinition one hopes to impute to a term the more wicked aspect of another. Say, for instance, that one wishes to defame the institution of property. How is one to persuade eager young radicals, shaking with blood and thunder, that it is an evil? Why, merely redefine it as an aspect of a known evil! It is as simple as saying “property is robbery”, as Proudhon did. And as he was so good enough to admit, no extensive argument is needed; for who needs argument when he has fine words and an eager audience?

.....The most famous example of this kind of thing was ably expounded by Mr Orwell in his book 1984. Therein, we find a term equated with its opposite; for example, we find “freedom is slavery”. Calumnious redefinitions, however, need not deal in direct opposites. Proudhon has his “slavery is murder” and “property is robbery”, the radical feminists have the hysterical “marriage is rape”, and no doubt, it is only a matter of time before we have “food is trespass”.

Sophistical Machinations: No.1 (Expedient Complexity)

It is expedient to find a matter intractably complex if its simple elucidation is not to your liking. If, for instance, a simple solution to a simple problem presents itself, but that solution sits well with the views of your political enemies, then you should deny the simplicity of the problem and even the possiblity of a solution. Not only does this wrest the problem back to your own side, where a crack gaggle of obfuscators and theorists can find a complex and refractory expression of it that is both politically favourable and profitably intractable, but it also affords the opportunity of characterising your political enemies as simple-minded fools. In this way, the sensible but simple view is eschewed in favour of the propitious and abstruse view. Some obfuscators and theorists, in a repose of complacency, have even been so open about this trick as to coin a word: “problematise”.

Wilful Misinterpretation

In ideological struggle, the scoundrel wishes to make known that all great thinkers are essentially on his side, so that it appears that the light of genius shines on him. As often happens, however, the writings of great thinkers exhibit views that are anathema to his ideology. The bold step here is to denounce these thinkers, but this is dangerous; for claiming that a widely acknowledged genius is an idiot can reflect badly on one’s character, even if he is an idiot. The safer option is to misinterpret wilfully the writings of great thinkers in concordance with one’s ideology. One says things such as, “Taken at face-value, it could be thought that by saying ‘x’ he means x,” and then one should intimate that only ignoramuses, reactionaries, and naifs could think that he means x. For instance, it has been the sport of many an ideologue to pretend that Nietzsche’s advocacy of warfare was no such thing, that what he was really advocating was philosophical warfare in passages such as the following:

War indispensable.— It is vain reverie and beautiful-soulism to expect much more (let alone only then to expect much) of mankind when it has unlearned how to wage war. For the present we know of no other means by which that rude energy that characterizes the camp, that profound impersonal hatred, that murderous cold-bloodedness with a good conscience, that common fire in the destruction of the enemy, that proud indifference to great losses, to one's own existence and that of one's friends, that inarticulate, earthquake-like shuddering of the soul, could be communicated more surely or strongly than every great war communicates them: the streams and currents that here break forth, though they carry with them rocks and rubbish of every kind and ruin the pastures of tenderer cultures, will later under favorable circumstances turn the wheels in the workshops of the spirit with newfound energy. Culture can in no way do without passions, vices and acts of wickedness.— When the Romans of the imperial era had grown a little tired of war they tried to gain new energy through animal-baiting, gladiatorial combats and the persecution of Christians. Present-day Englishmen, who seem also on the whole to have renounced war, seize on a different means of again engendering their fading energies: those perilous journeys of discovery, navigations, mountain-climbings, undertaken for scientific ends as they claim, in truth so as to bring home with them superfluous energy acquired through adventures and perils of all kinds. One will be able to discover many other such surrogates for war, but they will perhaps increasingly reveal that so highly cultivated and for that reason necessarily feeble humanity as that of the present-day European requires not merely war but the greatest and most terrible wars—thus a temporary relapse into barbarism—if the means to culture are not to deprive them of their culture and of their existence itself.
(Human, All Too Human, §477.)

How clear would Nietzsche have had to be in order not to be sympathetically misinterpreted by persons desperate to save him from his clearest assertions? How was he ever to advocate x if lesser and ideological men are forever going to take ‘x’ to mean not-x? Credulity has been stretched to such lengths by those who would like to tame and save Nietzsche for themselves that this radical aristocratist has even been seen by some as a prole-loving egalitarian!

The Advantage of the Deranged

One might have thought that a derangement of the mental faculties would be of some disadvantage to an intellectual career, had one not time and again met with the most absurd and idiotic pronouncements in spittle and ink by our most celebrated academicians.

.....But a derangement of the mental faculties has one advantage in the academy which elsewhere would be seen as a liability and a danger: it allows that one might proclaim without necessity and with effulgent whim the boldest connections between things, which thitherto would have been deemed absurd, and thus it yields a never ending supply of what the academy esteems most: originality.
.....We are so used to thinking of originality as a good thing, that it is all too easy for us to accept originality per se as a good thing. But only a little thought is required to understand that originality by itself is a sorry and silly thing. An estimation of orginality per se would have us esteem a computer made of custard that doesn’t work above an old and conventional computer that does. Of course, when it’s put this way, no one would countenance originality for its own sake.
.....But as I say, in the paper-mill of the academy, where consequences are barely perceived and where, presumably, matters are thought to be epiphenominal, originality in all its unfettered and insane glory reigns. There is good reason for this. A never-ending supply of originality means a never-ending supply of work. If academicians restricted themselves tomorrow to saying what is both original and sensible, or just sensible, academicians would find themselves a week next Tuesday circling the classifieds. But with a working ethos that esteems orginality above all, there is no end to what can be said, and thus no end to academic work.
.....The modern academician finds himself stuck for something to say only for a short while; for with orginality trumping reason and evidence, there is nothing to stop him forging ahead with that ground-breaking work on the hitherto unsuspected link between paper clips and hegemonic systems of power.
.....For him there is no lifetime of barren struggle looking for the causal connection between x and y, only to find there isn’t one, because to him x and y can be picked at random and made to stick with the glue of some esoteric and hermeneutic theory. Indeed, the more disassociated x and y are, the more bold, shocking and original is the forging of a link between them.
.....In the atmosphere of untrammled orginality, the befuddled and irrational half-wit suffers no disadvantage; on the contrary, he blazes a trail.

If you have a favourite academic loon, please recommend him or her at The Hatemonger’s Quarterly, whose “crack young staff” are running an Academic of the Month competition.

Vulgar Relativism vs Sophisticated Relativism

Like the distinction that has risen between vulgar Marxists and sophisticated Marxists – the first being largely unaware of or unconcerned with the absurdities of Marxism, the latter being aware and careful to conceal them beneath "theoretical" verbiage – there are two main types of relativist: the vulgar and the sophisticated. The vulgar relativist takes to ignorance and irrationality like a true-born native, and is quite happy to bear the name "relativist" and to make such open declarations of relativism that might embarrass his more sophisticated brother. The absurdities of relativism to him are a closed book.

.....The first act of the sophisticated relativist is to put some distance between himself and his vulgar sibling, and so he declines the name "relativist". He is aware of the absurdities and intellectual poverty of relativism, and thus seeks to obscure these aspects under a mass of gibberish. He is not a relativist by conviction – unlike the vulgar relativist, he is aware of the absurdity of such a conviction – but he is committed to the spread of the doctrine because it is a useful tool not only in the exercising of power over the ignorant, but also in the protecting of his sincerely held beliefs. Without relativism, the ideas that he does sincerely hold are open to empirical and rational criticism, under which he knows they will not fare well. Once again, we see that an anti-realist dogma is held precisely because it serves in defence of another doctrine. Behind every sophisticated relativist lurks a credulous nut who would believe in what he believes come what may.
.....It is instructive to look at the appeal of pyrrhonism in another age and in defence of another dogma. Aware that no evidence could be found to support their beliefs, and plenty of evidence that could be brought against them, sophisticated Christians such as Montaigne sought a last defence in pyrrhonism, the radical doctrine that nothing can be known. This last defence is to enquiry what mutually assured destruction is to war. The threat in the case of enquiry is: if you bring in knowledge that weighs against my beliefs, I shall bring in arguments that weigh against all knowledge – I shall destroy all foundations.
.....A good example of a recent sophisticated defence-by-denial of relativism is an article that appeared in The Guardian (18th Nov 2004) shortly after the death of Jacques “Is my death possible?” Derrida. This article denies that there are any significant relativists amongst academics and intellectuals, and thus that attacks on relativsts in our universities are attacks on straw men:

‘If you asked me to name the leading relativist in the world, I couldn’t,’ says Robert Eaglestone, a senior lecturer in the department of English at Royal Holloway, ‘because they just don’t exist. Relativism has always been a bogeyman used to scare people. No-one’s ever lived up to the straw figure of the full-blown relativist constructed by their opponents. If you read any of the usual suspects – Derrida, Rorty, Lyotard, Kuhn – with care, you’ll find that none of them ever suggests that ‘anything goes’.

Take note particulatly of the phrase “with care”, used to suggest that only the careless could construe these persons as relativists. It is also interesting to note that the author of the article, Richard Lea, after suggesting the accusations of relativism were attacks upon straw men, goes on to attack a straw man in the form of biological determinism: “Modern thinkers challenge received ideas, such as the assumption that genes alone determine character”. Can he find a biologist who thinks this?

O, Happy World!

It is rare nowadays to find a man who can think for a lengthy amount of time on diverse subjects without becoming mentally unstuck and dribbling down his shirt-front.

.....I mean that, though a man may be able to take a reasonable view on even a complex matter about which he is largely disinterested, on another simple matter he becomes unreasonable in proportion to the extent to which the facts of the matter impinge on his innermost and most sacred beliefs. Thus, a man may evince brilliant insight into particle physics, and accept and propound the most complex, subtle and rational arguments thereon. But that very same man may be unable to tolerate the plainest of facts or accept the simplest of valid and sound arguments on another matter, if such things threaten to upset his mental repose. Consequently, on some matters he may be an idiot.
.....This is not so much a failure of intelligence or even a consequence of ignorance, but rather it owes more to an infirmity of mental constitution that allows the will rather than the intellect to be the faculty that judges the veracity of a matter. This weakness allows that ideas -- and especially political ideas -- may strike a thitherto intelligent man dumb, so far as an idea is more to his liking than reality. (A natural propensity to idiocy does of course help, but a man not born to it may achieve it in his lifetime if he receives the right upbringing and schooling.)
.....So it is that we hear persons whom we had hitherto considered intelligent making the most idiotic pronouncements. What we hear in these pronouncements is a man willing his own idiocy in accordance with sacred and inviolable beliefs, and it is a tragedy that he so often succeeds.
.....Nowadays, one of the quickest paths to idiocy is by way of politicization. Few can resist the bending of their thoughts to some political ideology, from which they hope to gain or by which they feel empowered, and thus there are few who can think about a matter without having their political greed, rather than their common sense, determine their views. Matters become partisan matters of faith. Indeed, the mentally debilitating power of political ideology is so great that it is to be suspected that if the US government stated that the moon is not made of cheese, Europe's intelligentsia would instantly form the view that it is.
.....When truth and common sense conflict with a political ideology, adherents to that ideology are wont to describe true and commonsensical views as expressions of an opposing and pernicious political ideology. In order that their imposture be maintained, they must maintain the lie that all is political, and commit themselves to a mendacious and nonsensical epistemology. (He who tells us that everything is political is yet to explain how that statement is a matter of fact and not of political opinion.)
.....Freedom's greatest bulwark is common sense. The groundwork for a modern sustainable tyranny is therefore a clearing-away of common sense through mass politicisation, touted perhaps as "a fair inclusion for all in the political process". Our future tyranny will be grounded in the democratic process. The combined might of politicized mass opinion and the political elite that will both serve it and steer it will be almost insuperable for the individual.
.....If political ideologues succeed in politicising every matter for almost every man, there will be almost no man who will be able to take a reasonable view of a matter. One should not deceive oneself that society can be made good through power. It should go without saying that when a moral concern is made a political concern, it ceases to be moral.

New Report Finds Britain is "Hideously White"

All socially aware people have long suspected it, the line-up at the upcoming Live 8 concerts has highlighted it, but now a report to be released today by the Committee on Racial Affairs has confirmed it: Britain is “hideously white”. The report found that upto 91% of the population of Britain is white. “This can’t go on,” said Dr Donald Watkins, who co-authored the report. “I find it offensive that in this day and age so many people in Britain are white. It is a disgrace.”
.....Institutions, such as the BBC, have been reprimanded before on precisely this issue. The new report, however, makes it clear that the problem is not confined to institutions: the problem extends all the way down into wider society. Indeed, the hideous whiteness of institutions is an accurate reflection of society at large. As Prof. Tetherton, a sociologist at the University of East Anglia, explains, “Because 91% of the population is hideously white, it means that the institutions naturally tend to take on the same horrific hue. If we are serious about tackling the problem, we must eradicate it at the root. Only this way can we create a freer, more equal society.”

.....Chris Martin, of the popular beat combo Coldplay, was unsurprised by the findings: “Most of my teachers at school were white, most of the people in my street were white, even my parents were white. I think it’s disgusting. People don’t seem to realise just how offensive it is. And when you consider that most shareholders are white, well, then we know we are dealing with the most unspeakable evil.”

.....The report comes after weeks of mounting pressure on the government to make known its understanding of the extent of the problem. “It seems there has been a lack of will on the part of politicians to tackle this issue,” said Emily Burton, spokeswomen for the independent think-tank Totalitas. “But now the government cannot ignore it.”

.....The report also places greater pressure on the organisers of the Live 8 concerts to change the racial constitution of its performers. “The thought of old white people playing guitars makes me physically sick,” said one activist.

A Masterclass in Indoctrination

The search for the grounds for ignorance has been no less exhaustive than that for knowledge. The old Socratic maxim stated that wisdom consists in the understanding of one’s own ignorance, whereas the new radical maxim states that it consists in the willing of it. Nowadays, with new pedagogical techniques, it takes only a few years at university to learn how to misunderstand the world properly.

.....This morning it was my misfortune to stumble upon the scribblings of a man called Amardo Rodriguez, an educator in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at the Syracuse University, New York. This information alone should be enough to make you fear the worst. If I tell you that his piece appeared in the latest edition of Radical Pedagogy, then you may begin to feel that your foreboding was justified. But let me confirm the worst.
.....His essay – if that is the right word; for I saw no attempt at understanding –, entitled Searching For Paulo Freire: Classnotes For My Students, is in the form of a plaintive address to his students, outlining his hopes, fears, etc:

I come to teaching with all of my being. My devotion to you is complete. For me, teaching is about something you are, something you embody. Thus I have no techniques, no strategies, no skills, no drills, no exercises that tend to work in conveying various ideas and concepts. Instead, my focus is on how I enter the classroom as a human being.

Now, though a chap may be relieved to learn that he intends to enter the classroom as human being, and not as a chaffinch, say, or as a virulent strain of TB, one might be forgiven for having reservations about a teacher who makes a boast of his lack of skills and his unwillingness to convey ideas and concepts. But fear not; for he hath come to heal:

I want you to leave my class less afraid of the world. For I know you are afraid when I [sic] you enter my class. Most times I cannot even begin to fathom how scared you are. You are too young to be so scared. What has this world done to you? Of course I know you often pretend to be unafraid. But eventually you always become undone. I despise the world for what it has done to you. Your capacity to imagine new and different worlds is shot through with fear. I want my classroom to be the place where your healing begins—that is, where you find the courage to act upon the world in ways that affirm your ability to alter and change your world. It is therefore my responsibility to create a space that encourages you to come face-to-face with all the forces that are damaging you. It is also my responsibility to create a space that allows you to explore the beginnings and possibilities of new and different worlds.

Gosh.

The world you belong to is discursively and materially dichotomous and discontinuous. Something is either positive or negative, good or bad, right or wrong, male or female, sacred or profane. You too believe that the world is outside and separate from you. Of course you also believe the world is finite. Thus you believe that regardless of how one chooses to interpret, say, an apple falling from a tree, the fact of the matter is that the apple will fall to the ground rather than up to the sky. Understandably, you believe deeply in this finite world. You know no other. You are therefore suspicious of any suggestion that our interpretive capacity gives us the power to change and redefine our worlds. You believe that such claims only have purchase in theory.

Admittedly, I am suspicious when a sociologist tells me gravity can be overcome by the right kind of “interpretive capacity”.

You generally tend to believe that there is a world outside of us that dictates a set of harsh realities. Hierarchy, for instance, is presumably such a reality. The law of gravity is presumably a next such reality. You also generally tend to believe that cultures are morally and spiritually unequal. Naturally, you tend to believe, though most times embarrassed to openly say so, that your culture is the most superior because it supposedly accepts the world’s harsh realities. For instance, you believe in competition, and thereby in capitalism [aha!], because you believe it constitutes the natural order of the world. So although you sympathize with those who are suffering the fallout from social, political, and economic systems that promote competition, you merely wish for some way to alleviate their plight. But you want to hear nothing of revolution.

On the contrary, I can think of nothing more entertaining than listening to tales of bold revolutionaries swooping and soaring about the sky kept aloft by nobbut the hot air of anti-capitalist rhetoric and a charming insistance on the inefficacy of gravity.

I never want to convince you that your position or your beliefs are wrong.

But . . .

I am challenging you to contest everything you hold be true and sacred.

Righty-ho.

I always speak about race, ethnicity, and sexuality in my classrooms.

That’s nice.

But what is certain is that you have a deep fear of the racial, ethnic, and sexual differences between us.

More certain than the law of gravity?

I treat community as a verb rather than a noun.

Really?

I too am of this world.

Well, I was beginning to wonder . . .

There are those who now famously say that I have no business trying to use my classroom to change the world. This is the job of other professions. My job is merely ‘to interpret’ the world. Apparently, ‘the true task of academic work [is] the search for truth and the dissemination of it through teaching.’

Sounds noble.

I have no interest in searching for truth, much less engaging in its dissemination.

Oh.

Of course there are things in this world which are true and other things which are false. But no truth is outside of human experience, and human experience is inherently variable and changeable.

Ah, now this is a classic example of the sophisticated relativist’s trick of Affirm and Deny: he affirms his commitment to truth, saying that, of course there is such a thing, who could be stupid enough to deny it? And then in the next breath he denies it by redefinition, being that truth is redefined as being equal to human beliefs, variable therewith; thus truth is non-truth.

Of course no one should use a classroom to impose a vision of the world on you. [But . . .] Even if I sought to merely interpret the world, I would still have to engage you in an explanation of how various ideological, historical, cultural, and developmental forces shape your world. I would also have to demonstrate to you how different forces make for different interpretations. In the end, I simply cannot sustain my obligation to interpretation without engaging the condition of the world. To do so would simply be incompetent. I am therefore in no way trying to politicize the class. I am merely trying to be competent educator.

And so it is that we come to the old totalitarian argument:

Everyone is to some extent indoctrinated unsystematically with the assumptions implicit in society,
Therefore,
Systematic indoctrination is permissible.

Nice work if you can get it.

Paradise for Philistines

Imagine a world in which the philistines controlled art. Ugliness, tastelessness, and tat would reign. Whatever was fiscally, politically or ideologically gratifying (for everything must have its use to the Philistine) would be praised as having merit, whereas what the Philistine cannot achieve - beauty, taste and skill - would be traduced as philistinism. One need not imagine such a world.

.....It helps that we are reminded each year of the worthlessness of modern art by the spectacle of the Turner Prize, the nominations for which have been announced. It is a time when rather dim people feel obliged to pretend that art is anything cobbled together by a simpleton with a degree in potato-printing. Here is what Sandra Laville of The Guardian has to say:

Almond's work focuses on time, using the digital clock as a focal point. He is also fascinated by the language of light, using his pictures to illuminate the night, turning darkness into light to allow people to witness scenes they would not normally be able to see.

Lambie, an artist, musician and DJ, constructs installations and sculptures from everyday materials like album covers, wool and safety pins.

All of which prompted the inevitable question from John Humphrys yesterday on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: 'But is it art?'

Modern art is indeed art insofar as it is not rocket science.

EU solves problems of perception

Bernd Oswald at the Sueddeutsche Zeitung seems to believe that having a referendum ignored the first time round can have a beneficial effect on the perception of facts. In answer to the self-posed question, "Is it wise to repeat a referendum?", Herr Oswald replies:

There have been positive experiences in the past with second referenda: thus, the Danes consented on their second try to the Maarstricht Treaty, and the Irish to the Treaty of Nice. These cases show that the citizens’ awareness of factual matters grew . . .

An interesting phenomenon, I say.

Intellectual Absurdities

The New Criterion declares that it has been a great year for academic absurdity, a subject close to my spleen.

.....I look at intellectual nonsense in much the same way as a coprologist views dung: each instance, though it may look similar to another, bears the unique imprint of its fabricator. Just as the coprologist may take satisfaction in determining by the study of dung the unique characteristics of health, habitat and diet of the animal whence it emerged, so might the keen fool-spotter find repletion in descriminating the constitution of absurdity, the haunts of pretension, and the fodder of platitudes evident in the mental droppings of the common intellectual shyster.
.....The shyster has a propensity for the showy and tart fruits of the intellectual world, ones high in kudos but low in edificatory substance, for which discernment he suffers conniption and literary flatulance. These fruits the intellectual shyster is wont to swallow whole, and even when he does take care to chew a thing over, it is punfuctorily done. This unwholesome diet of indigestibles produces in him the poverty of thought by which he is variously celebrated and reproved: he is celebrated by his fellows, for each effusion is further fodder for their consumption upon which their welfare depends; and he is reproved by everyone else for his fouling of the intellectual landscape.
.....One of my favourite specimens is now quite old, but it is yet to be beaten in the richness of its idiocy and the bravery of its pretension:

Nearness preserves farness. Preserving farness, nearness presences nearness in nearing that farness.

It was dropped upon the leaves of a book by the Great Pseudographer Martin Heidegger (in Poetry, Language, Thought). And what about this rather splendid example in Aesthetic Theory by Theodore Adorno, another giant of imposture:

As was already pointed out in Dialectic of Enlightenment, strict positivism crosses over into the feeblemindedness of the artistically insensible, the successfully castrated. The narrow-minded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced is--as trivialities sometimes are--the caricature of a situation that over the centuries of the division of labor has inscribed this division in subjectivity. Yet feeling and understanding are not absolutely different in the human disposition and remain dependent even in their dividedness. The forms of reaction that are subsumed under the concept of feeling become futile enclaves of sentimentality as soon as they seal themselves off from their relation to thought and turn a blind eye to truth; thought, however, approaches tautology when it shrinks from the sublimation of the mimetic comportment. The fatal separation of the two came about historically and is revocable. . . . Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image. What later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the shudder, is at the same time the shudder's own development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell. Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness. That shudder which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other. Aesthetic comportment assimilates itself to that other rather than subordinating it. Such a constitutive relation of the subject to objectivity in aesthetic comportment joins eros and knowledge.

I have many such examples from personages and peasants, but a collector is never satisfied. Please do not hesistate, therefore, to draw my attention to any fresh examples.

Elton Trifles

Sir Elton John is quoted in The Guardian today:

When the Live Aid concert happened 20 years ago I was pretty much a self-obsessed drug addict. Although I was pleased to be part of a great day, I really wasn't adult enough or mature enough to realise the full consequences of what we were doing.

Sir Elton, who over the past twenty years has selflessly dedicated himself to a study of political economy, is now well known for his disdain of material comforts and is justly celebrated for his encyclopedic knowledge; nor is there about him a trace of the pleasure-seeking, narcissistic, moral and intellectual cretin who knows no more about politics or economics or history than does a parboiled titmouse.

.....The erudite Sir Elton, who in the mid-Nineties proved in a brilliant display of statistical mathematics the inefficacy of supply-side theory, is hoping to demonstrate the absurdity of free trade by playing the piano quite badly in front of a crowd of baying morons.

Schmeagleton

More pretentious twaddle (The Nation, 15th June 2005 issue) from the prolifically profligate Professor Eagleton:

The future is already potentially present in the shape of the blind spots and contradictions of the present--in its silences and exclusions, its conflicts and fragmentations.
.....We must strike a balance between saying too much and saying too little, between the future as a mere projection of the present and as a cryptic silence. If there is simply an abyss between the present and the future, then we cannot logically speak of how the future takes shape in the present.

Strip it of its fawney-wisdom, and this is very banal stuff indeed. Doesn’t this man have anything worthwhile to say? I suppose that once a man’s mind is addled with Marxism and Literary Theory, things begin to seem the more profound and exciting and real the further they are from profundity and excitement and reality.
.....In response to another of Prof. Eagleton’s scribbled messes (The Guardian, 25th May 2005) last week, I coined a word and posted it on the comments board at The Daily Ablution:

Eagleton-eyed, adj. Pertaining to the inability to see or observe except with exceptional obtuseness; pertaining to the ability to perceive at a great distance from reality anything that might appear clever or be expedient to one's cause; pertaining to a perversity of and pretension to insight.