It's often said that academics are rather arrogant. This article certainly gives some telling examples, but I still don't know to what extent I agree with a broad-brush negative characterization — I've probably known too many pleasant, rather humane academics.
But there is one supreme virtue possessed by academics, which I think should always be cited in their defence — they are, on the whole, comfortable with people who are as smart as, or smarter than, them.
Ok, yes, there's a huge amount of bitching and snidiness. But compared to other professions (including 'para-academic' ones such as lexicography), and to other parts of the educational profession, those in academia are much more likely to be unintimidated by talent and to embrace and nurture it. Academics may be petty, but they can also be big.
But now back to the beginning — is this acceptance and nurturing of talent only possible because academics are so egotistical that they think no challenge threatens them? Perhaps academic egotism is a positive thing, a necessary ingredient in university teaching because without it the most capable students would inevitably have their prospects sabotaged by insecure, threatened professors.
Or am I being naive, and insecure, threatened professors are the reality?
Shadow cabinet minister Chris Bryant bemoaning the renewed success of the public schoolboy in modern-day Britain:
I am delighted that Eddie Redmayne won [a Golden Globe], but we can’t just have a culture dominated by Eddie Redmayne and James Blunt and their ilk. Where are the Albert Finneys and the Glenda Jacksons? They came through a meritocratic system.
To hazard a guess, I'd say the Alberts and Glendas are still with us, it's just that their ambitions have been neglected by a state education system that, through the best of intentions, has become ideologically committed to mediocrity.
Also, since when was Harrow then Sandhurst a sneaky backdoor into pop stardom?
It's an unpalatable thought, but what if Britain actually is fairly meritocratic, and this is exactly the reason why the public-schoolers are doing so well — they've been better educated and are consequently more successful.
How do we make sure government, the top end of sport, and culture represent broader society?
We could say — yes, well-educated old Etonians etc. largely do succeed in wider society through fair, meritocratic competition, but their becoming well-educated in the first place was un-meritocratic, because it came to down to having rich parents: so let's achieve meritocracy by banning private education.
Problem with outlawing private education is that it means the state would have a monopoly on coming up with ideas for how to educate ourselves - on current evidence it is too unlikely those ideas would always (or regularly) be the best ones, and education is too important for close-mindedness. Think of a private school and one thinks of Harrow, but there are plenty of experimental private schools based on diverse educational theories.
I'd rule out this illiberal solution, though would agree on the need to reform the overly lax tax rules.
If a liberal democracy that values education therefore has to live with private schools, then what is the best way to cohabit? Positive discrimination in favour of state schoolers, or negative for public schoolers is unthinkable — if our two-tier society is bad and invidious why perpetuate it? Besides, we forget that meritocracy doesn't just mean the best candidate getting what they deserve — it also means our society gets what it deserves, which is the best-qualified and educated people doing the important jobs, whatever their background.
The only way we can live with a private education sector, be a liberal democracy, and have a properly representative elite is for the state sector to compete with the private. Ok, in terms of cash — impossible. And let's rule out grammar schools for now as a partially failed experiment.
That leaves institutional ethos — easily rejected by the materialist dogma of many on the left, but this is no sensible reason to neglect it. We would be silly to ignore the principals of successful independent schools when they stress the centrality of ethos in their success. Maybe 'ethics' would be a better term — what it is good that you do, what it is bad that you do. The universality of state education encourages the assumption that it is ethically neutral, but I don't think it is.
So here is a list of ethics I think state schools should propagate, but which were either absent or merely soft-pedalled at the state school I went to:
- It is good to be pushed, hard, to do worthwhile things;
- It is good to excel, even though others around you do not;
- It is good to be extraordinary;
- It is good to do difficult things.
Why so many plaudits for the piss-weak hand-wringing of Joe Sacco's response to the Charlie Hebdo murders?
We certainly should 'try to think about why the world is the way it is' — in our politics, our science, our moral reasoning, and elsewhere. But not in satire, which is our set-aside space for anarchic mockery and subversion — isn't it? A mutually agreed breather from the obligation to reason seriously about why the world is as it is, how it could be changed, etc.?
Sacco's answer to the Charlie Hebdo debate is to propose a duty to be morally and politically serious that limits the freedom to be satirical and anarchic. Maybe Mr Sacco doesn't follow the news much — isn't that essentially the very proposition, violently expressed by Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers, that kicked off this whole debate?
We should accommodate satire, he says, by leaving no room for it, by erasing it. This question-begging doesn't even resemble a useful solution to the problem. It should be disregarded.
I wrote a review of this book for the Bryn Mawr Classical Review — it can can be read here.
(I didn't like it.)
It seems certain that at some point in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris discussion will turn to multiculturalism, and that the discussion will be fairly polarized - some will argue it is fundamental to our aspiration to be a decent and tolerant society, others will argue it is a dangerous and naive abandonment of important democratic values.
My own sense is that we have to work towards a functioning pluralistic society, if only so that we can all live decent and peaceful lives. Acknowledging the difficulty of this aim in no way diminishes its validity and rightness. Of course it will be difficult getting people of different religions, cultures, nations, and ethnicities to live together peaceably - to hold otherwise would require a dismissal or ignorance of most of human history.
Unwillingness to admit this difficulty is also motivated - particularly among those on the left - by a fear of guilt by resemblance. Expressing anything circumspect about multiculturalism could see you misidentified as one of those right-wing enemies who express similar sentiments - it might even somehow put you on a slippery slope towards holding the same opinions. Best, then, to avoid circumspection.
But this is nonsense. The most worthwhile prizes, a pluralistic society being one of them, are often difficult to achieve, and achieving them involves being circumspect and facing the hard questions.
So here's what I think are some hard questions. Muslim clerics have been vocal in their denunciation of the killings - as e.g. here. Is it, however, the right sort of denunciation, and is it right for us to ask the clerics for more? They agree that the killing of the journalists was wrong, but the wrongness of murder is a fairly easily achieved piece of common ground, and falls short of a trickier and more important confrontation (and hopefully, ultimately, reconciliation) between the religious and the secular:
we can all agree the murders violated the sanctity of human life, but do the clerics agree that freedom of speech enjoys a similar sanctity and that its violation is a large part of the wrong committed by the murderers?
Do the clerics agree that the murderers' right to act on their indignation, however justified, was always curtailed by the need to protect the free speech of others (indeed, of all) and not just the lives of others?
Do they accept the reason for this curtailment, which is that protecting freedom of speech is a greater and/or more necessary virtue than religious observance?
These are not leading questions - 'if they say "no" to any of them then let's deport them' - and I do not think they are a means of identifying deviancy or 'enemy' thinking - the last one would probably prove tricky across our entire society, not just for followers of Islam. But it's hugely important right now that we see eye-to-eye with the Muslim community, and work out where we all stand, and what sort of understanding we can come to. So let's have at it.
(This is my second post on the Scottish referendum. My first, longer post is here.)
It doesn't feel like it, but we're on the brink of a national tragedy. In just over two weeks, Scotland might vote to dissolve the union. That alone is heartbreaking. That it might actually throw away so much for the sake of an ideology - one that could do so much damage to Scotland and her relationship with England - is devastating to me.
I implore any eligible voter reading this to search their conscience - honestly and without prejudice - for their sense of what is good about the Union, of who we are, what we've done, and what we could do. And then ask if it is definitely - finally and irrevocably - worth throwing that away in favour of what the Nationalists are offering.
Forget Salmond's Tory bogeymen - they might not even be in office this time next year. Short-term political feeling can't be used to justify a decision about the forever of the rest of Scotland's history. The feelings of many Scots about the Tories may well be justified, but that doesn't mean they are relevant to the decision you will make on the 18th of September. Salmond seems to me to be urging Scots to make five years of disaffection the basis on which to decide Scotland's whole future. This doesn't match up - in fact, it's a terrible, terrible idea.
A Scotland that stays will be more prosperous, more secure, more confident, better provided for, more outward-looking and connected to the world, and with broader scope to create and to pursue ambitions. Not only are the SNP's policies economically unrealistic, and overly hopeful, they look worryingly like bad medicine for Scotland's soul. There is a pinched meanness, a narrowness of vision, and a negativity to their policies - the proclivity towards shouting down, the worrying hints of the ideologue's blithe disregard for reality, and the feeding on grievance and feelings of diminution.
Politics like this isn't good for Scotland, or any nation.
Best vote 'no'.
This was my impassioned bit, below are a few more details.
1. Nationalism and anti-democratic feeling make a terrifying combination
The Nationalist argument is that independence would be a victory for democracy because it would allow Scots to be governed by parties they voted for, instead of the Conservative governments voted for by the more populous English.
On the face of it, this seems convincing enough, especially as we currently have a Tory government. But consider this: counting the elections backwards, we've got the Tories failing to win a majority in 2010, outright Labour victory in 2005, Labour landslide in 2001, massive Labour landslide in 1997.
The SNP, given these facts, cannot possibly claim domination by English Tories - but they could certainly claim to be dissatisfied at not always getting what they want.
But democracy was never the promise of always getting what you want, and to believe that it should be is profoundly undemocratic - sometimes we have to tolerate the free choices of others, because democratic free choice is pinned to the individual but still mutually shared. No one gets a guarantee that their free choice will always trump others, and yes-voting Scots won't get this guarantee either.
It is not just that this has the smack of gerrymandering on a colossal scale. When combined with nationalism, and when viewed from a historical perspective, this intolerance of the mutual freedom of others is very troubling. The extremism of the 1930s didn't occur because people were converted by the arguments of Fascists and Communists, but because they lost faith that the democratic process could give them what they wanted and end the depression. It wasn't muscular or reliable enough.
Scottish nationalism had its own flirtation with Fascism in the 1930s, and it is always sensible to be wary of any nationalism - my bringing up the past may seem snide but is justified. The Nationalists are arguing for a new, strongly nationalistic, atavistic future, and they are sceptical that the democratic system as it stands can deliver it. My point is this - their scepticism will recur in any democracy that isn't a democracy of one, so we can well ask how long it will be before scepticism turns to cynicism or outright rejection.
The Nationalists' democratic blind-spot is evidenced also by their insistence that the Bank of England will remain lender of last resort to iScotland's banks (i.e. in a currency union) or the argument here that UK research councils will continue to fund an independent Scotland's universities. A big assumption, given that they are overlooking those who will foot the bill - i.e. British taxpayers. There is no suggestion that rUK's leaders will first need to secure the consent of the populace.
2. Xenophobia
Let's do a bit of pragmatics - in an argument about whether to dissolve a 300-year-old union and spend the rest of time as an independent nation, Salmond's focus on the Tory government, elected for a five-year term, and even the comparatively brief Thatcher years, is, one would assume, surely irrelevant. It is not a coherent contribution to the debate. If he went on TV and argued Scotland should be independent because it has an 'S' in its name, this also would be incoherent, to the point we would question his sanity.
So why don't Salmond's anti-Tory arguments strike us the same way? We don't feel them to be incoherent because, in some way or another, perhaps a discreet way, they are hitting the mark - there must be some other criterion that makes them relevant.
It cannot be political or psephological, because we are just coming out of thirteen years of Labour government. So in what way are his supporters finding these attacks reasonable - on what frequency are they resonating?
Simple - he is angling for a wider, negative identification of the England and the English with Toryism. That is, a belief certain Scots have about the type of people the English are and always will be - arrogant, posh, supercilious, too powerful, too privileged - and Salmond is keen to exploit it. It is his trump card in anathematizing union with England.
It's a libel, of course, and it's disgusting - nothing more than class and cultural, possibly also ethnic, hatred. But who is surprised? This is nationalism! And, unthinkably, it might be Scotland's future.
3. Fear
Third problem - fear. 'No' voters are frightened to speak out. why? Because our message is, supposedly, 'reactionary'. We, all of us, automatically grant legitimacy to the peripheral voice, and reject the central one as hegemonic and chauvinistic, celebrating authority. One beneficial side effect of a no vote would be the firm rejection of this as absurd undergraduate juvenilia - it is taking away our voices and making us do our politics badly.
I just read this interview with Israeli author Amos Oz on the conflict in Gaza. It was recommended to me by friend, and author and journalist, David Patrikarakos.
Seeing as everyone else has an opinion on Israel-Palestine, I thought I should have one too.
First off, I'm a Zionist. I'm not sure why a belief in Israel's right to exist still requires a term, as if believers are agitators some sort of. Is there a term 'Frankist', for people who argue strenuously not only that France exists, but should keep on existing? Obviously not - it's too blandly obvious and universal an argument. So too we shouldn't need the term Zionist any more - history has happened, Israel exists, and the toothpaste won't and shouldn't go back in the tube.
Oz articulates pretty well why I think Israel's existence, in the face of its largely abominable enemies, is a good thing:
This morning I read very carefully the charter of Hamas. It says that the Prophet commands every Muslim to kill every Jew everywhere in the world. It quotes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and says that the Jews controlled the world through the League of Nations and through the United Nations, that the Jews caused the two world wars and that the entire world is controlled by Jewish money. So I hardly see a prospect for a compromise between Israel and Hamas. I have been a man of compromise all my life. But even a man of compromise cannot approach Hamas and say: "Maybe we meet halfway and Israel only exists on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays."
To borrow an argument from Howard Jacobson: every time sentiments like these are expressed, the case for a Jewish state is made ever stronger. Which is rather self-defeating, if you're Hamas.
All that said, I think Israel has gone terribly astray.
The civilian body count, in this and the other recent interventions in Gaza and Lebanon, has been unacceptable for a country as militarily advanced as Israel. It is disgraceful, and anomalous, that insurgents have inflicted a lower civilian vs. combatant casualty rate than the most technologically sophisticated military in the Middle East (though, admittedly, Hamas would have killed many more civilians were it not for Israeli defences).
The IDF cannot claim innocence - by now they know what happens when you strike one of the world's most densely populated areas with artillery and air-power. It's difficult to avoid the charge of callousness.
I'm not sure the denunciation of Hamas' use of human shield convinces either, just as it didn't convince when America used it to excuse its excesses. There's no doubt that Hamas probably use it, and that it is disgraceful - but if non-combatants are killed, their deaths are still the responsibility of those who opened fire knowingly, not those at the receiving end. Arguing otherwise is an attempt to put responsibility for an action on the person about to suffer it, rather than the person committing it. Which is a terrible, bananas idea.
I wonder if the Israeli military has degenerated into callousness because it is no longer guided by any real political mission - its purpose is just to enjoy doing what the military does best, i.e. killing and destroying. The military of any country would become coarsened in this situation.
Consider this: the IDF is unarguably very good at killing terrorists, an expertise attested by the Western governments that regularly seek their advice. And yet, among developed nations, Israel is disproportionately bad at defeating insurgencies. Has Israel ever successfully concluded a counter-insurgency campaign?
I wonder further: is this because insurgencies are almost always brought to an end by political, or at least partly political, solutions, whereas Israeli governments have little or no political will to stop fighting the Palestinians? In the absence of which, military action is liable to become just butchery for its own sake.
I don't know why Israeli governments seem happy for the fighting to continue. Maybe the reasons are understandable but misguided, maybe they are totally valid, or maybe Israel wants peace and I've got this totally wrong. But I have always thought that Israel has become, to coin a phrase, stuck in a moment it can't get out of. That is, constantly trying to relive the Six Day War and its triumphal moment of existential legitimacy, except now it has to make do with shooting stone-throwing kids and flattening houses.
Through a sort of addiction, Israel has worked herself up into the belief that any retreat from absolute self-belief, any backsliding from her (by-now monstrous) sense of limitless justification, would spell doom and total loss of direction. When, really, Israel just has to get on with the boring stuff of being a developed nation state - compromise, diversity, and ultimately, probably, the reality of being a multicultural society (difficult to be anything else in that part of the Med).
Final word to Amos Oz:
I think not about the last 20 or 50 years but about the last 2,000 years. But I will tell you what my hope and prayer for the future of Israel is. I would like to see Israel removed once and for all from the front pages of all the newspapers in the world and instead conquer, occupy and build settlements in the literary, arts, music and architecture supplements. This is my dream for the future.
I think we must get used to, and indeed celebrate, the reality of a muscular Jewish state, not just an intellectual or aesthetically-minded one, but this caveat aside - amen to that.
