By the time I made her acquaintance in the 1980s, Iris had been a public figure for a generation. Her only rival as a philosopher-novelist had been Sartre, whom she had introduced to the Anglo-Saxon world. Having outlived and in many ways outshone him, she was a star of the first magnitude in the intellectual constellation of post-war Europe. Though she belonged to a brilliant generation of female philosophers — her “dearest girl” Philippa (“Pip”) Foot, her “friend-foe” Elizabeth Anscombe, and her friends Mary Midgley and Mary Warnock — all of whom made major contributions to academic and public life, Iris was the only philosopher of either sex among her contemporaries to become a truly national figure. She deserved her renown; her posthumous reputation as a writer and thinker has survived the scrutiny of biographers and critics. She never wrote an autobiography, but her letters reveal her introspective side, as she looks back over la vie antérieure and forward to new fields — and men — to conquer.

I became aware of her name already in childhood; my mother reviewed the novels as they appeared for the TLS. One of my early memories at Oxford was failing to gain admittance to the Sheldonian Theatre to hear Iris deliver her 1976 Romanes Lecture (“The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato banished the artists”). The university was belatedly honouring one of its most celebrated dons, but her sphere of influence had never been confined to Oxford. Uniquely endowed with both analytical and synthetic talents, Iris Murdoch had effortlessly conquered both literary and academic worlds. Even queens of the cultural realm like Hannah Arendt or Susan Sontag could not claim to have produced a corpus of such breadth and depth: some 26 novels, plus poetry and plays, together with several volumes of philosophy, ranging from East to West and ancient to modern.

Occupying this pedestal might have made her insufferably pompous, pathologically reclusive, or both. Not a bit of it: Iris was friendly, down-to-earth and rather jolly. She and her husband John Bayley were by this point inseparable, growing old together in the manner described in Iris: A Memoir and depicted in the subsequent film. If Iris was no longer a wanderer in the wilderness on a quest for truth, beauty and the good, with an insatiable appetite for erotic adventure, she was still the composer of lyrical novels of ideas, the mistress of metaphysics, the virtuoso of virtue.

The last time I spent time with her, at a literary festival in the early 1990s, she was already suffering from the dementia that ultimately rendered the incomparable instrument of her mind incapable of performance. John unwisely let himself be persuaded by the festival director to coax Iris onto the platform for a debate. She could no longer cope with public speaking and her visible distress was excruciating to behold. But she still had moments of lucidity and her abiding emotion was that of gratitude. When I read aloud the greatest Holocaust poem in German, Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue”, to a disgruntled British audience, Iris said afterwards how much she had enjoyed the music of the verses, even though she was by then losing fluency in her own language. Iris was always grateful for small mercies, and her correspondence testifies to her overwhelming gratitude for love and companionship throughout her intellectual life.

Those letters have now appeared in a compulsively readable volume: Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934-1995, edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Chatto & Windus, 666pp, £25). Reflecting on her many affairs and friendships, one is driven to the conclusion that, for Iris, the most powerful aphrodisiac was genius. It worked both ways. She was so gifted that many of the most brilliant of her contemporaries of both sexes were drawn to her, but although she often reciprocated, she longed for the unattainable. Already in 1939, aged just 19, she wrote: “I find myself quite astonishingly interested in the opposite sex, and capable of being in love with about six men all at once — which gives rise to complications and distresses.” For Iris, love was a form of sentimental journey, an education in how to live. Each new man in her life — and there were often several at once — was an opportunity to experience the eroticism of intellectual discovery.

All her life, Iris found that, for her, love, sex and friendship were a single continuum, with no clear boundaries separating them. To the end, she was very much a “touchy-feely” person. In a self-revelatory letter in 1967 to Georg Kreisel, one of her few male friends who did not become her lover, she confessed that she was “probably not at all normal sexually. I am not a lesbian, in spite of one or two unevents on that front; I am certainly strongly interested in men. But I don’t think I want normal heterosexual relations with them. (It’s taken me a long time to find this out.) I think I am sexually rather odd, which is a male homosexual in female guise . . . I doubt if Freud knew anything about me, though Proust knew about my female equivalent. I have never been much good at going to bed, though quite often in love.”

Iris was never physically robust — she suffered all her life from asthma, Ménière’s disease (tinnitus, deafness, giddiness) and arthritis — and she identified with those who died young. Her first great love was Frank Thompson (elder brother of E.P. Thompson), whom she had hoped to marry until he was captured, tortured and executed by the Nazis. War and Holocaust, indeed, overshadowed her intellectual life almost as much as those who had lost family and homeland. She spent a year working with displaced persons for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Belgium and Austria from 1945-46 — an experience that left her shattered but also exhilarated. Among many lovers, the next man she hoped to marry was the anthropologist and poet Franz Baermann Steiner, who died suddenly in 1952, at 43 of a heart attack after an intense but chaste eight-month relationship. Steiner had established himself in Oxford, but had lost the manuscript of his magnum opus on the sociology of slavery at Reading railway station (an episode Iris reworked in one of her novels). Through him she was introduced to oriental religion, to the world of Kafka’s Prague, of Jewish mysticism and Zionism, but also to the reality of evil. Steiner’s family had perished in Treblinka and for her, “Franz was certainly one of Hitler’s victims.” His asceticism and precarious hold on life attracted Iris, and his posthumous book Taboo, a minor classic, displays the rare quality of his intellect.

But it was Elias Canetti, Steiner’s friend from Vienna, who would exercise a lasting hold over her literary imagination and as he comforted her in mourning for her beloved Steiner, she fell under the spell of his hortative yet seductive personality. Her letters to Canetti are those of a pupil to a master, quite unlike any others that she wrote, for in general she felt herself fully equal to her male friends, even if they were older. Canetti claims that he never answered her letters; he made her adopt a secret code if she wished to call him, and generally forced her to dance to his tune. In his memoir Party im Blitz (Party in the Blitz), published only after both of them were dead, Canetti makes it clear that their relationship — “an embarrassingly one-sided affair” — was all about power. He forced her to abandon the Christianity to which she had returned. In 1954, Canetti forbade her to have sex with her latest conquest, John Bayley, whom she would marry two years later. His descriptions of her appearance, her lovemaking, even her hospitality, ooze with condescension, indeed malice. Her only virtue, in his eyes, was to be a good listener, but even this back-handed compliment was double-edged: “She kept her piratical nature well hidden but was out to rob each of her lovers, not of his heart but of his intellect.” He saw her as a cross between an Oxford don and a vampire; she saw him as a sorcerer, but a dangerous one to his circle of apprentices. Though she never belonged to Canetti’s Hampstead Kreis — modelled on that of his hero, Karl Kraus, in 1920s Vienna — she observed his manipulative magnetism at work. In a late letter to Michael Hamburger, she declared: “Canetti is not anywhere in my novels, by the way! I would not want to ‘copy’ people, I invent them.” And yet from the character Mischa Fox in The Flight from the Enchanter onwards, Canetti’s presence haunts her fiction. Despite immortalising him, she aroused his literary envy as well as his sexual jealousy. Canetti even turned the fact that she was prolific against her: “I consider her as, so to speak, an ‘illegitimate’ writer. She never had to suffer for having to write.” Her fluency and success must have contrasted painfully with his own lack of either.

When he finally won the Nobel Prize in 1981, it was for his one and only novel, Die Blendung (translated as Auto da Fè), which had appeared as long ago as 1935. He also struggled to write non-fiction, again producing a single work, Crowds and Power (1960), which failed to make the éclat he had expected, at least in Britain. Canetti resented the fact that his talent as a memoirist and a miniaturist led him to aphoristic and fragmentary forms that had less prestige than novel or treatise. Iris eventually freed herself from the tutelage of the man her husband referred to sardonically as “the Dichter”, but she continued to act as a kind of unofficial spokesman for him. In 1982, she wrote to the Sunday Times to defend Canetti against the claim that he had refused to publish an earlier memoir (The Torch in My Ear) in Britain “because he resents neglect of his work in this country. This is not his motive; he wishes simply to avoid hurting the feelings of certain people who live here.” Iris would have been mortified to read his posthumous revenge on her.

Iris’s correspondence testifies to other passions for older men of high intellect, many of them émigrés from Nazi-occupied Europe, from whom she learnt what she could: M.R.D. Foot, the war hero and SOE historian who later married (and divorced) her friend Philippa Bosanquet; Thomas Balogh, the Hungarian economist, whom she denounced as “the devil incarnate” and “quite unscrupulous”, but who seems to have cured her of Communism; Eduard Fraenkel, her “dear” tutor in classics who, though “a little sadistic”, gave her “a vision of excellence”; Raymond Queneau, the French writer and editor at Gallimard, whom Iris loved but never seduced; Arnaldo Momigliano, the historian of ancient Rome, who introduced her to Italy; and Georg Kreisel, a favourite disciple of Wittgenstein himself, who became her confidante and the model for Marcus Vallar, the charismatic healer in The Message to the Planet. A smaller number of women were also close to Iris. Some were bisexual — such as Philippa Foot and Brigid Brophy, the novelist and musicologist who carried on a series of lesbian affairs while married to the director of the National Gallery, Michael Levey — while others were equally unconventional, such as Lucy Klatschko, who gave up secular life for her vocation as a nun, Sister Marian of Stanbrook Abbey. What these friends of Iris had in common was that they all loved her, even if they left her.

I have left Michael Oakeshott till last because his relationship with Iris was perhaps the most improbable of them all. A political philosopher of real stature, who had a short affair and a long friendship with Iris, Oakeshott carried on a vigorous correspondence with her from 1958 to 1963, though their friendship faded in later years. When John Bayley sold her working library in 2003, I wrote a piece about the marginalia. Nine years after their affair in 1950, Oakeshott gave her a book on philosophy “with very much love”, but his guide to the Derby, How to Pick a Winner, was unread. It was Oakeshott who, having broken off the affair, later became the emotionally needy one, as he poured out his woes over an unhappy relationship with a married woman. They were both romantics, although their politics at this stage were at opposite poles: he was becoming the leading conservative thinker of the day, while she was still firmly on the anti-Communist Left. “I suspect you are responsible, by reaction,” she teased him in 1958, “for a lot of my political ideas!” Soothingly, she added: “But my thoughts of you are not political at all.” What seems to have fascinated her about his thought was his critique of rationalism in politics, in favour of custom and experience.

In later years, Iris moved much further in Oakeshott’s direction. She was unimpressed by the radicalism of the 1960s and even more alarmed by the rise of Islamic radicalism after 1979. To the American literary critic Naomi Lebowitz, she came out with an extraordinary prophecy, while denouncing the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie:

The Muslims in this country (quite a substantial number of them) speak like savage madmen — I mean some of them do, and keep it up. All men speaking out and being photographed, of course, no women. They are constantly demanding Muslim schools, compulsory separation of women, teaching the Koran etc. They are quite unlike other persons from elsewhere. Perhaps Islam will conquer the whole planet in the next century. To think that the wicked old priest can condemn someone to death just by pointing at him — it’s a nightmare . . . It is a pity that Islam will now be hated in this country — including nice perhaps innocent shopkeepers etc. who just want to go on with their lives. But I exaggerate I daresay. Anyway it’s a rotten religion which owes much of its popularity to its absolute and fundamental degradation of women. Or expresses what (a large number of) men feel in their hearts.

It is remarkable that a woman whose mind was open to almost all spiritual ideas should have rejected Islam so vehemently — and yet have feared its ultimate triumph. Her life was devoted to the consolations of philosophy, but she yearned for something more. “Why do I want to write philosophy, why can’t I just forget it, what use is it anyway? I suppose it is a sort of addiction,” she wrote in her last letter to Brigid Brophy. “Is it philosophy, am I any good at it? Probably not.” To Sister Marian, she lamented “the loss of Christianity” among the young. “I think that Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism find it easier to handle what is holy, what is good — to keep it in a changing scene . . . We, who are not Jews etc. suffer from the awful crude clarities of the technological age.”

Iris never lost her own curiosity about the world but she missed such curiosity in the culture that was emerging. I shall always cherish a memory from the 1980s, before her mind became occluded by Alzheimer’s, of sitting with Iris and John, plus a couple of others, in a bleak hotel room with nothing but a bottle of sherry to keep us company. We talked about philosophy, politics, literature and life. She hated anything that sought to place limits on such conversation. Iris Murdoch’s letters are a testament to her determination not merely to lead the intellectual life but to enjoy it too.

The post Iris Murdoch, The Virtuoso Of Virtue appeared first on Standpoint.

But what was uncovered was sexual abuse of children not only by television personalities, but also by politicians and other so-called VIPs. There have been rumours for decades about a child abuse ring operating from Westminster, involving senior politicians, allegedly including Greville (now Lord) Janner, Cyril Smith, and the late Leon Brittan.

At the time of writing, numerous allegations concerning the former Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath have emerged. In the early 1980s, when I volunteered on a Rape Crisis line, I heard Heath’s name in relation to sexual offences against children from two separate callers, one year apart, with no connection to each other. Over the years I have heard from a number of child protection advocates and campaigners that it was “widely known” that Heath was involved in organised child abuse rings. Such evidence was of course circumstantial.

However, a number of police investigations are now under way, following allegations from a retired police officer that criminal charges for pimping against Myra Forde, a former brothel keeper, were dropped, after she allegedly threatened to claim that Heath had abused children. Forde was later twice jailed for operating a brothel in Salisbury, Wiltshire, where Heath lived after retiring from active politics. The barrister who prosecuted Forde has since claimed in a letter to The Times that the case was actually dropped because three witnesses refused to give evidence. Forde has dropped her allegations, but ten police forces are now investigating Heath.

There was, and there remains to an extent, a conspiracy of silence. Children were rarely believed when they alleged abuse, particularly if the accused was a powerful person.

The conflation of sexual abuse with sexual identity began during the early days of the so-called sexual revolution, and carried on throughout the gay liberation movement in the 1970s. The word “paedophile” to describe a sexual identity began to be bandied around with impunity, but no other word in our language is so dangerously misused. It means, literally, “lover of children”. Child sex abusers seek solace in this term, and it is easy to see why it is to their advantage to embrace the label. Suggesting that child abusers “can’t help it” lends support to the notion that they are simply another sexual minority — as the commonly held but flawed view suggests with regard to the “gay gene”, predetermining sexual attraction and orientation — and that such men are pre-programmed to abuse children.

This is the view of so-called paedophile rights campaigners such as the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), active from 1974 until its disbandment in 1984. Its stated aim was “to alleviate [the] suffering of many adults and children” by campaigning to abolish the age of consent, which would legalise sex between adults and children. PIE gained a certain amount of credibility by allying itself with other sexual minorities that were engaged in effective liberation struggles, such as the gay rights movement. Homosexual acts had only recently been decriminalised in 1967, so any movement with the word “liberation” in its title was viewed by many as a force for good. In 1975, PIE representatives were invited to address a gay liberation conference in Sheffield. A headline in the Guardian read: “Child-lovers win fight for role in Gay Lib.”

In 1977, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) passed a resolution at its conference, supported by the vast majority of delegates, condemning “the harassment of the Paedophile Information Exchange by the press”. The scandalous fact that PIE was affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) from the late 1970s to the early 1980s has been well documented. NCCL officer Nettie Pollard, who worked in the organisation until the late 1990s and played a leading role in CHE, voted to support PIE at its 1975 conference. In 1983, at the CHE conference, Pollard reissued her defence of PIE’s “right to speak and organise freely”.

When it comes to the subject of child sexual abuse, there is no clear Left/Right divide. The sexual revolution of the 1960s led some left-wing liberals to believe that all sex was good sex, provided that both parties were consenting. But what of the argument that the age of consent to sex, currently 16 years old, is unnecessary, and that it is restricting the rights of children to seek sexual fulfilment?

The current climate — set by the Savile scandal and the torrent of child grooming cases in Rochdale, Rotherham and elsewhere — is one of concern and disgust at the scarcely believable prevalence of the sexual abuse of vulnerable children that had been allowed to happen. However, there still exists a group of academics, scientists and campaigners who appear to not only sympathise with the original aims of PIE but who are actively promoting them.

In 2013, a conference on sexuality was held by the University of Cambridge. One speaker, Professor Philip Tromovitch of Doshisha University in Japan, claimed in his presentation on “The Prevalence of Paedophilia” that “paedophilic interest is normal and natural in human males”. Also at the conference was a man not often invited to respectable events, at least not since his high-profile convictions and subsequent imprisonment for the possession of child abuse images. Tom O’Carroll, who gained notoriety in the 1970s as chair of PIE, is a campaigner for the rights of paedophiles.

Following the Cambridge conference, O’Carroll wrote on his blog that he felt “relatively popular” during his attendance. Aware of the publicity this conference gained, I contacted him to request an interview. I wanted to try to understand how his viewpoint — that paedophiles are an oppressed sexual minority, rather than a danger to children — could possibly hold water in the context of recent widespread revelations concerning child sexual abuse. O’Carroll has previously enjoyed support from so-called progressives for his views and aims.

It is now well- known that, representing PIE, he sat on the NCCL’s gay rights sub-committee from the late 1970s until the early 1980s. His book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case (1980), was favourably reviewed by Gay News and other gay publications. This was an era in which discrimination against the gay population was so bad that some would agree to align with the unlikeliest of allies so long as they were being similarly targeted.

Many of those who promoted the rights of the “paedophile”, such as PIE founder Peter Righton, a child protection expert and social care worker, have since been convicted of sexual crimes against children.

I wanted to find out from O’Carroll, a man rarely in the media these days, whether libertarian child abuse revisionism was still alive and well. I discovered that it was. O’Carroll is unrepentant, and sees himself and the likes of Savile as victims of an ongoing moralistic witch-hunt.

“In the 1970s I thought we were going to be embarked upon a journey like the gay people,” he told me when we met in a central London wine bar. “I would have quite liked [to be labelled as] ‘kindly’ because ‘kindly’ . . . relates to the Dutch and German kinder — children. So yes, being intimate, but also being nice with it. “I would say that if someone had sexual relations which were in the realm of what I called earlier the ‘kindly’ sort then that would not be abusive. Although these days one has to be careful because anything you do, no matter how kindly it is, it’s always subject to trauma later on — secondary trauma as a result of society’s hysteria over the whole thing.”

The writer and broadcaster Francis Wheen personally experienced the effects of child sexual abuse. Additionally, he suffered the attempts by PIE and its supporters to claim that the abuse did not happen. In 1968, Charles Napier, who would subsequently become treasurer of PIE, joined the teaching staff at Wheen’s boarding preparatory school, Copthorne, in Sussex.

“Napier was much younger than most of the masters there and he was quite friendly with the children so we quite liked him at first, because he seemed more on our level and not so forbidding,” says Wheen. “He had a little room off the workshop, and he would take us in there and offer us beer and cigarettes.

“I was 11 at the time, and it was incredibly thrilling, rather naughty and exciting. The word ‘grooming’ had never entered our vocabulary at that stage. One day he plunged his hand down my gym shorts and grabbed me, and I pulled his hand off and recoiled, and he then started slightly sneering at me and said, ‘Oh Francis, come on. Don’t be a baby.’ Very clever, tried to make me feel inadequate, to have to prove my maturity by going along with it. Other boys spoke about it. I wasn’t the only one.”

Wheen says that his classmates rarely spoke of Napier’s actions, and as such he was unaware of the sheer scale of abuse prevalent at his school. “Once or twice I would be talking to another boy in the dormitory and he’d say, ‘Did Mr Napier try it on with you? Oh he did with me as well.’ I didn’t have any sense quite how many boys were being abused until years later. I wrote about it occasionally when I became a journalist, and I did tell my parents, only some years later.”

In those days, says Wheen, boarding school was “like being in prison, shut off from the outside world, so the only people you see are the other pupils there and the teachers. And we couldn’t communicate with the outside world very easily. There was no telephone there, that we could use. The only way of communicating was through letters, and they were all censored.”

Napier, who is half-brother of John Whittingdale, the Culture Secretary, left the school in the early 1970s and went on to hold jobs working with children in Egypt and Sweden. He was convicted of child abuse-related offences in 1972 and 1995, but continued being employed in positions of trust.

In 2012, Wheen noticed that Napier was speaking at the Sherborne Literary Festival. Appalled at a convicted child abuser being given such a respectable platform, Wheen told his colleagues at Private Eye how he was assaulted by Napier as a child, and the magazine published his revelations.

“That was what kicked it off. The police got in touch with me and said, ‘Could I put them in touch with anyone else who’d been abused by Napier?’” says Wheen. “The police then spent ages tracking down pupils from the late Sixties, and they did a hell of a job. They managed to get school records, so everyone there, every boy who’d been at the school between 1968 and 1971, and as many as they could find, and in the end the numbers kept going up and up and up, by the end of them it was over 30, I think it was 34 different boys he was charged with, it kept going up. Even days before court they were adding more charges, and that was a school that had 100 pupils, basically something like a quarter of the school was being targeted by him. I certainly had no idea, that if I’d looked around in my classroom, even being there I wouldn’t have realised it.

“That’s it — so much of it is hidden, so much is not spoken about, that’s why it’s so startling when things do start being revealed, you think surely not. But more often than not, it does turn out to be the case.”

Last year Napier was convicted of sexually abusing 23 boys between 1967 and 1983, and sentenced to 13 years in prison. The judge remarked that a number of his victims had been profoundly affected by the abuse, with one committing suicide, and others seeking help for mental ill-health.

Wheen, who waived his anonymity in order to speak out against impunity for sexual predators, was in court for the verdict. He says that he was relieved to hear the judge make it clear that men like Napier do not escape punishment for abusing children, even if a case is brought against them decades after the fact.

Napier’s conviction was not, however, the end of the matter for Wheen. “Soon after [the case],” he says, “I had a letter from O’Carroll, complaining I was being very unfair to his friend Napier, and if only I could understand, and that Napier was a very brilliant, witty chap, and it was very cruel of me to write about him like this.

“I also received a letter from some woman in the social services department, who told me that [child sexual abuse] was a complicated issue and I shouldn’t be tabloidy about it. There are still plenty of people today it would seem who think child abuse is not such a terrible thing.”

Part of the problem, it would appear, is the stark division in many people’s minds between what they understand as “paedophilia” and child sexual abuse committed by highly functioning, respectable family members or guardians. Men who sexually abuse children in the home are not usually labelled “paedophiles”: this word is reserved for people like Sidney Cooke, currently serving a life sentence for multiple convicitons of sex abuse against boys — evil-looking men who prey upon children previously unknown to them. And yet far more children are abused by someone they know.

Some experts, who try to unravel the phenomenon of paedophilia, in particular sexual libertarians, give the impression that being “attracted” to children is a sexual orientation rather than a choice to harm them. They suggest that these people are not “ordinary men” but part of a weird sub-group; that there is a medical explanation, rather than a social one, for their behaviour. That they are different from fathers or stepfathers, who abuse children in the home; or that they are inevitably victims of abuse themselves.

The dangerous implications of a resurgence of the “paedophile” label was evident in an article in the Guardian on January 17, 1996. It was a small piece noting a problem delaying the publication of the first British commentary on Catholic canon law due to a mistake in relation to papal infallibility. Within this document are two pages on how to respond to priests who “are paedophiles”. The Church’s position is that paedophiles have diminished responsibility because their sexual urges are “in effect beyond their control”.

In 2013, at the height of the revelations concerning Savile and other well-known men exposed as child abusers, Guardian feature writer Jon Henley wrote an article headlined “Paedophilia: bringing dark desires to light.” The standfirst read: “The Jimmy Savile scandal caused public revulsion, but experts disagree about what causes paedophilia — and even how much harm it causes.” The article caused some intense anger, but also drew support from others, including — unsurprisingly — some self-identified paedophiles, including O’Carroll.

In the article, Henley went to great pains to make a distinction between a medical diagnosis of paedophilia, and the act of child sexual abuse. “But not all paedophiles are child molesters, and vice versa: by no means every paedophile acts on his impulses, and many people who sexually abuse children are not exclusively or primarily sexually attracted to them.

“In fact, ‘true’ paedophiles are estimated by some experts to account for only 20 per cent of sexual abusers,” he continued. “Nor are paedophiles necessarily violent: no firm links have so far been established between paedophilia and aggressive or psychotic symptoms. Psychologist Glenn Wilson, co-author of The Child-Lovers: A Study of Paedophiles in Society, argues that ‘the majority of paedophiles, however socially inappropriate, seem to be gentle and rational’.”

This argument is, however, reliant on the notion that men who desire sex with pre-pubescent children cannot help themselves if they have a diagnosis of paedophilia. Many experts, such as Professor Liz Kelly, director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at North London University, do not agree. “The self-serving construction of paedophilia as a specific, and minority, ‘sexual orientation’ acts as a useful distraction to both the widespread sexualisation of children, and girls in particular, in Western cultures and the prevalence of sexual abuse,” she said.

According to Henley, any reasonable debate around so-called paedophilia is hindered by the moral panic that surrounds child abuse. But this could only be the case if such a thing as paedophilia existed, and if child sexual abuse was a rare occurrence. In any case, opposing the sexual abuse of children and upholding their human rights is not a “moral panic”.

Henley told me he was shocked at the level of vitriol, from a relatively small number of people, directed towards him following the publication of the article, which had been commissioned “from up high”.

“I should have been more explicit in my support of the victims of child sexual abuse, and my understanding of the traumatic consequences that child abuse can cause,” he went on. “But the level of hysteria and general panic around this whole subject means that no man would feel comfortable saying [that they feel sexual attraction towards children]. We need to reach a state where we can deal with this, so that abusers can be reached before, not after, they act.”

“The Jon Henley piece was extraordinary,” said Wheen. “I mean, that’s why it stood out for me, because it’s the one attempt I’ve seen in recent years to revert to the old ’70s case and say: surely there’s a case to be made and let’s not get over-censorious about this, and let’s approach this coolly and let’s lower the age of consent to four or whatever it might be. To me, [the article was] startlingly sympathetic, and I saw [Tom O’Carroll] rejoicing at the Guardian running it. I think it must have come as much as a surprise to O’Carroll as it did to everyone else.”

Christian Wolmar is the author of The Forgotten Children: The secret abuse scandal in children’s homes (2000). He believes that the “equal opportunities culture” of some London boroughs in the 1980s was such that, in order to promote the employment of “minorities”, criminal convictions of gay men were often unchecked, to avoid the appearance of discrimination. Wolmar quotes a 1995 report by Ian White about Islington council: “We were told that managers believed they would not be supported if they triggered disciplinary investigations involving staff who may be . . . members of the gay community.” This, of course, simply enabled child abusers to obtain jobs in children’s homes and other places where they would have access to vulnerable children. (Only an estimated 5 per cent of child sex abusers are women.)

“Organised abuse rings definitely exist. When I began to research Forgotten Children I was not a sceptic, but I was unsure as to what I would find,” said Wolmar. “PIE positioned themselves close to liberation movements as a deliberate ploy to attract the support of gays and leftists.

“Post-Savile, it was almost impossible to be a [child abuse] denier, but there will always be some. Nature created puberty for good reason. We know it is wrong to have sex with pre-pubescent children.”

Not all would agree with Wolmar on the matter of pre-pubescent children being non-sexual. In 1993, Nettie Pollard wrote an essay called “The Small Matter of Children” which begins by discussing “children’s rights”: “But baby boys are born with erections and girls with genitals swelling and vaginal lubrication . . . Masters and Johnson found that lubrication resulted from sexual stimulation in baby girls. Clearly, birth contains elements of sexual arousal for babies.

“Babies often react sexually when being held, or in other moments of physical pleasure. Reaction akin to orgasm has been detected in babies only a few months old, though masturbation and orgasm are rarely detected before the ages of one or two, and not all children masturbate.”

As Pollard’s views demonstrate, those who refuse to accept the harm done to victims of child sexual abuse are not confined to those directly abusing children. Some so-called experts in the field argue that for some adults, sex with children is a “natural” desire. In 2001 Glenn Wilson was ranked among the ten most frequently cited British psychologists in scientific journals. Wilson is co-author of the book Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation (2008), which states the case for a genetic basis to same-sex attraction and orientation. He is also co-author of The Child-Lovers: A Study of Paedophiles in Society (1981), in which he writes that “the majority of paedophiles, however socially inappropriate, seem to be gentle and rational”.

Qazi Rahman, who wrote Born Gay with Wilson, is a highly respected and much cited biologist based at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. I asked him if he believed that the urge to abuse children is actually hard-wired. He said: “There is growing evidence of biological and brain differences, where the brains are cross-wired.”

What about paedophile rights? If Rahman and Wilson use the “gay gene” argument to ask for homosexual rights, why not then for child abusers? All they have to say is that there is a medical or genetic basis, as opposed to the fact that they chose to abuse children for power and sadism.

Rahman agrees that this can be problematic: “Should we feel sorry for paedophiles? As soon as the liberals get that rhetoric going, we will not be able to make any subtle distinctions as to who is dangerous and who is not.”

Ken Plummer is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology at Essex University. Plummer, who is gay, contributed to a book called Perspectives on Paedophilia (1981). It was a supposedly objective look at paedophilia and was designed to be used on social work training courses. Plummer was a member of PIE in the late 1970s for “research purposes”.

Both Plummer and Pollard are warmly thanked in O’Carroll’s book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case (1980). In 2012, on his personal blog, Plummer wrote: “As homosexuality has become slightly less open to sustained moral panic, the new pariah of ‘child molester’ has become the latest folk devil.”

Last May, the Times journalist David Aaronovitch narrated a two-part investigation for BBC Radio 4’s Analysis. It sought to question how what were described as the “bizarre ideas” of Satanic abuse gained traction among police and social care professionals in the 1980s and early 1990s. Two of the contributors made formal complaints to the BBC for inaccuracy and bias following its broadcast.

I asked Aaronovitch whether he is concerned that his radio programmes could potentially contribute to a post-Savile backlash. However, his primary concern is not with the potential backlash against believing victims, but rather with a witch-hunt against potentially innocent victims of false allegations.

“The post-Savile hysteria is happening now,” he said, citing the number of accusations against VIPs that have yet to be proven. But will the doubt that he and others are casting — on whether organised abuse exists beyond rare exceptional cases — serve to cast doubt on those victims of abuse who are telling the truth? “No, we need to ensure that we identify false allegations.”

Judith Jones, a former senior social worker and expert in the effects of child sexual abuse on the victims, who was featured in the programme, disagrees: “We forget abuse memories because we can’t bear the truth. What David Aaronovitch is doing is suggesting that because wild claims of ritual abuse can be easily discredited then the hysteria about ‘ordinary abuse’ has gone too far. And yet he claims the opposite.”

Meanwhile, countless victims of horrendous sexual abuse in childhood are choosing not to disclose it to the police because of a fear that they will be told it was all their fault.

The post Britain’s Apologists For Child Abuse appeared first on Standpoint.

On coming into office in 1979, the Tories actually started well by introducing tuition fees for international students, who had hitherto been educated at the British taxpayer’s expense. That step required courage because the new fees were universally denounced, yet after the initial hiccup of a year’s fall in rolls the numbers of international student numbers then soared, and their fees have since helped keep our universities financially as well as culturally viable.

Margaret Thatcher then cut the universities’ core income (which also translated into cutting their research income) and that too required courage as that cut, too, was violently denounced: in 1985, indeed, the University of Oxford insulted her by first offering and then withdrawing an honorary degree. But Mrs Thatcher argued that Britain was spending more per capita on higher education than almost any other OECD country yet our economy had tanked. She needed to make savings and the universities had proved a poor investment.

She was right, but as the economy recovered during the later 1980s and ’90s the Tories failed to increase the universities’ income pari passu, and when in 1992 John Major turned the former polytechnics into universities — while simultaneously imposing an unpleasant regulatory regime on the older institutions — British higher education hit a nadir of low quality, poor funding, low morale and oppressive supervision. By 1997 the UK was spending only 1 per cent of GDP on higher education (19th out of the 27 OECD member states) while over the previous five years its expenditure per student had fallen by 21 per cent, down to 12th in the OECD. And we were only 19th in the OECD for the proportion of young people enrolled in university. In short, our universities had descended to the level of continental Europe’s.

One of the great international paradoxes of higher education is the poor quality of French, German, Italian and other continental universities, many of which are little better than institutions of mass alienation where remote academics pontificate at anonymous students across impersonal lecture theatres. The British university, in contrast, has always aspired to be an alma mater where student drop-out rates are low and where staff and students engage in the joint enterprise of education, but by 1997 that aspiration was almost forgone. And then Tony Blair won.

Blair believed in universities. He increased their government funding, he increased their private funding by introducing undergraduate fees of £1,000 pa, and he reformed the regulations. Then in 2003 he proposed increasing the undergraduate fees to £3,000 p.a. His intention was not only to increase the universities’ income but also to help shift their culture into one of greater independence and entrepreneurship. That step required vast courage because those fees were opposed by, inter alia, almost every Labour and Lib Dem MP — and by  the Tories, who seemed to rejoice in the squalor to which they had reduced the sector.

Labour MPs could be whipped and the Lib Dems ignored but the Tories almost scuppered the legislation. Led by Michael Howard and David Willetts, both of whom had sent their children to private schools, the Tories argued that there was no place for a market in education, but the Bill squeezed through by five votes (famously Alan Johnson, the junior education minister, said that he and his boss Charles Clarke got the Bill through by a charm offensive, with him providing the charm and Clarke the offensive). Yet again, the doom merchants were proved wrong when, after an initial fall in rolls, student numbers soared.

Then during the 2010s the Coalition raised the fees to £9,000 pa. That decision was forced on ministers because the Treasury was demanding vast economies, and the budget of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (which, oddly, houses science and the universities) is dominated by science and higher education rather than by business. Since the science budgets are sacrosanct (they are a form of corporate welfare, and BIS values corporate welfare) the bulk of the savings had to be made by the universities. And yet again the doom-mongers were proved wrong when, after a decline in rolls for a year, student numbers (especially those of working-class students) soared. In its Education at a Glance 2012 the OECD found that England’s tuition fees had produced the world’s most “advanced” support for students without damaging social justice.

And, wondrously, before they left office, Vince Cable and a redeemed David Willetts, of the Coalition government, abolished one of the sector’s last two remaining Leninist shackles, namely the caps on student numbers. Until recently, a university wanting to open a new course (or indeed wanting to close an old one) or wanting to change the numbers of students on a course, had to ask permission of some civil servant. And that permission would be denied if the civil servant feared that such a change might intensify competition between different universities, because competition is not allowed in the corporate state. But — and with every homage to Friedrich Engels — the state is now withering away from the universities.

In 1979, some 85 per cent of the universities’ income came from the state. Today, the bulk of their income comes from student fees and research grants. And as the universities have been forced into the market, so they have excelled. The best international university league table is provided by Times Higher Education, which incorporates 13 different indicators including measurements of teaching, research and reputation; and the first 10 universities in its current rankings are:

1. Caltech
2. Harvard
3. Oxford
4. Stanford
5. Cambridge
6. MIT
7. Princeton
8. Berkeley
=9. Imperial/ Yale

That is an astonishing list. It tell us that seven of the 10 top best universities are American (six of which are private) and that the remaining three are British (and also, despite the myth, private). In a world where the majority of universities are state-owned and neither American nor British, that dominance by private Anglophones needs explaining.

Europe’s universities were born private and democratic. The first, Bologna, was founded around 1100 by students seeking an education in law. Then Padua and Montpellier were founded, also as private democratic student initiatives, teaching medicine and the sciences. Soon afterwards the northern universities of Paris, Oxford and Cambridge were created, by scholars, and like their predecessors they were private and democratic, though run by the scholars rather than by the students. But soon thereafter universities were created by the Church (often from pre-existing cathedral schools) or by monarchs, and those were neither private nor democratic — the key appointment of the vice-chancellor or equivalent generally being in the gift of the Church or crown.

Worse, the Church then took control of the erstwhile independent universities. As Pope Boniface VIII stated in 1294:  “You Paris masters think that the world should be ruled by your reasonings but it is to us, not you, that the world is entrusted.” The authorities thus forced the oversight of the Church onto the universities, which is why so many academic titles such as Dean or Doctor are ecclesiastical. Subsequently, under inquisitions, absolutism and Napoleon, continental Europe nationalised its universities. But after 1689 England’s took an independent course.

In 1687 James II expelled the President and 25 fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford to replace them with Catholics. Protestants were outraged — Mary, wife of William of Orange, sent the fellows £200 — and the episode helped precipitate the Glorious Revolution. That in turn spawned the Bill of Rights of 1689, whose third article stated: “That the commission for erecting the late Court of Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes, and all other commissions and courts of like nature, are illegal and pernicious” which, translated, meant that in 1689 England recognised the ancient rights of its universities to independence.

Although they were thus confirmed in law as private bodies, England’s — later Britain’s — universities did not spin out of 1689 fully independent, and for a further century monarchs, politicians and bishops continued to interfere: during the 1760s, for example, the Duke of Newcastle would confer degrees on his cronies by royal mandate. But the universities were on an independent trajectory and by the late 19th century they had become fully autonomous.

The American Ivy League followed the same trajectory. North America had seen nine colonial colleges created before independence in 1776: Harvard (1636), William & Mary (1693), Yale (1701), Princeton (1746), Pennsylvania (1751), Columbia (1754,) Brown (1764), Rutgers (1766) and Dartmouth (1769). The colonial colleges were, importantly, not founded by the colonial governments but, rather, by local clergymen, as theological academies. Consequently they were always private bodies, with self-governing structures modelled on the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge; and to this day, in recapitulation of their Oxbridge roots, the Presidents of Harvard and Yale chair their governing bodies as executive chairs. 

By 1776, though, the colonial colleges had already embraced their first governance revolution when many of the academics on their governing bodies were replaced by politicians. In colonial days church and state were not separated, so governments readily funded the largely theological colleges, which in turn were prepared to lose some autonomy as a quid pro quo. And the loss of autonomy was real: at Yale, for example, Connecticut’s Governor, Deputy Governor and six state senators sat on the governing body.

But following the separation of church and state after 1776, the Ivy League embarked on its second governance revolution: it ejected the politicians, replacing them on its councils with private donors. Why? Because the politicians withheld their money. Whenever a dispute arose between a state government and its local university — and such disputes were perennial because the universities had learned to defend their rights — the politicians stopped giving public money to a private body. Whereupon the colleges ejected them, to survive by alumni giving and fee income alone.

The politicians tried, of course, to retain control, and in 1815 the government of New Hampshire compulsorily nationalised Dartmouth College. But the famous 1819 ruling by the Supreme Court confirmed that the former colonial colleges were private bodies that could not be nationalised against their will; so Dartmouth was re-privatised, and higher education in America was confirmed on its trajectory of independence.  

Higher education and scholarship are conventionally described as public goods that require government money, so economic theory predicts that the former colonial colleges should, on losing their public subventions, have gone bust. Instead, on breaking free from political control and government subsidies, they flourished, and thanks in part to the vast endowments they have since accumulated (Harvard: $31.7 billion; Yale: $19.3bn; Princeton: $17bn; Stanford: $16.5bn) they now dominate the international university league tables. By operating “needs blind admissions”, moreover, so no one is refused entry if they can’t pay, the Ivy League also shows how social justice can be entrusted to the private sector. Not for the first time, economic theory has been found wanting.

Ironically, though, the Americans have proved truer to Britain’s trajectory of independence than has Britain itself. Between 1689 and 1919 the British created the new, private, universities of London (1826/1836), Durham (1837), Manchester (1851), Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1852), Birmingham (1900), Liverpool (1903), Leeds (1904) and Sheffield (1905). Typical in its foundation was Birmingham University, endowed by Josiah Mason, a local industrialist who, on laying the foundation stone in 1875, said: “I, who have never been blessed with children of my own, may yet, in these students, leave behind me an intelligent, earnest, industrious and truth-loving and truth-seeking progeny for generations to come.”

Earlier, in 1799, the Royal Institution in London was created to foster research — solely on private money. By 1800 it had raised no less than £11,047, and in 1801 it appointed Humphry Davy as a lecturer (whereupon he discovered six new elements: potassium, sodium, barium, strontium, calcium and magnesium) before he proceeded to mentor his great student Michael Faraday (who in 1831 discovered electromagnetic induction, among other things).

But this autochthonic picture in the UK changed after 1914-18 because the Great War bankrupted the universities: both of their major sources of income (fees and endowments) evaporated. The fee income disappeared as the young men abandoned their studies for the Western Front, and — more gravely in the long-term — the universities’ endowment income also collapsed: between 1815 and 1914 the value of sterling had actually risen (deflation) so, rationally, the universities had long invested in fixed-income vehicles. But between 1914 and 1918 the pound lost three-quarters of its value — and inflation continued after 1918 — so the universities’ endowment income collapsed.

By 1919 the universities were reporting vast deficits, and some may even have been trading insolvently, so in that year the government’s University Grant Committee was instituted with an annual budget of £1 million; and that committee was eventually to mutate into John Major’s Higher Education Funding Councils (HEFCs) that, thanks to their vast budgets and power mania, were to treat the universities as subordinate branches of the civil service, until Tony Blair started the process of de facto privatisation.

But the continent of Europe has remained true to its nationalisations, and though it has always paid lip service to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s ideas of Lernfreiheit (the right to study freely) and Lehrfreiheit (the right to teach freely), in practice their universities have been only too supine. Indeed, Spain is but one of many countries where academics really are  civil servants, while Hungary is but one country where the appointment of rectors (i.e. vice-chancellors) has to be confirmed by the minister of education.

Why does university independence translate into excellence? One answer is monopoly: when a government has nationalised the universities and — as generally happens — abolished fees, then that government enjoys a monopolistic control of higher education. Why, therefore, would it put into the universities a penny more than the absolute minimum? Yet the consequences are, as the EU Commission reported in its 2003 Role of the Universities in the Europe of Knowledge that “American universities have far more substantial means than those of European universities — on average, two to five times higher per student . . . The gap stems primarily from the low level of private funding of higher education in Europe.” Since one source of university excellence is money, free-market America beats monopolistic Europe because students and their parents will contribute more in fees than will governments.

Competition is another source of excellence and, when students pay, independent universities compete to satisfy them where state universities need not. Equally, in their search for reputation, independent universities compete for research monies in ways that state universities need not. And the more independent a university, the more it is run by the academics themselves, and — as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale confirm — academics know better than anyone else how to run a university. Government ministers and bureaucrats are menaces, and even university councils of non-executives can be obstacles to progress.

And then there’s academic freedom. In his 2008 book Academic Freedom in the Wired World, Robert O’Neil, the former president of the state-owned University of Virginia, reported how a politician, on clashing with an academic, threatened him: “Your institution will pay for this.” The professor replied: “I’ve just moved to the [independent] University of Richmond.” It is no coincidence that many of the challenging thinkers of our time, from Milton Friedman (Chicago) on the Right to Noam Chomsky (MIT) on the Left, have been based in independent universities.

We can see therefore that Britain’s recent renaissance in higher education can be attributed directly to its ever-greater independence, but one last step needs to be made: the cap of £9,000 a year on fees needs to be removed. If that cap were to go, so that British university fees could approach American levels, then the last remaining barrier to global superiority would be removed. Obviously the government should ensure that no British university would ever refuse a home application because of cost — any British university wishing to charge more than £9,000 a year should create its own student loan company to extend the necessary loans — but let us realise the full potential of our institutions by removing, Ivy League-style, any restrictions on their freedom to trade and to set their own prices.

Only 16 per cent of American students attend an independent charitable university such as Harvard or Yale. The rest attend either a state university (75 per cent) or a private-for-profit university, yet the state universities are not nearly as good as the charitable independent universities, while the private for-profits are scandalous disgraces that are universally excoriated.

In short, the American system is potentially much less independent than ours, and if we in Britain provide all our universities — which are already independent charities — with the commercial freedom of the American independent charitable sector, we will be so much better placed that not three but three times three of the top 10 universities globally will eventually be British.

Everything depends on the willingness of David Cameron, Business Secretary Sajid Javid and Jo Johnson, minister of state for universities and science, to copy Tony Blair and to take an unpopular decision. In the medium term the decision will look inspired, but those three men will have to weather a year’s criticism before the doomsters are proved wrong and the universities establish themselves on the trajectory of global dominance. But how can we stiffen those ministerial sinews?

The post Lift The Fee Cap And Set Universities Free appeared first on Standpoint.

Snakes, he told me, turn up in the unlikeliest books — dystopian novels, biographies, exotic cookbooks. However prepared he thought he was, the word “snake” would jump off pages at him, triggering the same pulse-racing fear he would have felt had a real snake slithered out of the book’s spine, like a suitably vertebrate bookmark.

I was thinking about Snake Man (I forget his real name) when I saw a recent inflammatory op-ed in the Columbia University student newspaper. Four female undergraduates consider the ways in which texts and other material studied in literature classes make some students uncomfortable.

They put forward a case for “trigger warnings” — advance alerts to potentially “offensive” material such as rape scenes or racial violence (the term has been hanging around US campuses for more than a year now), and caution against marginalisation. They write:

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a fixture of Lit Hum [Literature Humanities], but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.

Sadly, these ill-conceived views are not confined to Columbia. Although trigger warnings are yet to catch on in the UK, students at a number of US universities, including Santa Barbara in California and the University of Michigan, have also requested them. Some professors are already supplying trigger warnings for their courses.

It makes you wonder how students sensitive enough to require a trigger warning would cope with reading the warning itself, where there is little to soften the impact of the description of the very thing they’re trying to avoid. This is prime territory, after all, for encountering a “snake” in the grass.

Beyond that, however, and more disconcerting, is the emphasis here on the offensiveness of the “Western canon”. The term crops up three times in the Columbia Spectator article, a piece of writing no longer than this page, alongside other references to “Western society” and the “Western world”. For this isn’t just about student welfare. What begins as a cry for sensitivity in teaching difficult topics descends quickly into what is in fact a complaint about the dominance of Western thought. Trigger warnings are here revealed for what they really are: tools not merely for censoring febrile material for the few, but for redressing the balance of canonical literature.

Students are kicking back against what they perceive as “a set of universal, venerated, incontestable principles and texts that have founded Western society”. These are texts, they seem to say, which cannot speak to them, at least not without causing offence in the process. What is wanted is something to counterbalance the weight of tradition.  

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of the founding texts of Western literature, is an easy target. One student, they report, a survivor of sexual assault, felt “triggered” when studying Ovid’s descriptions of Daphne and Persephone, who are abducted by the gods Apollo and Hades respectively. In the case of the former, Apollo, stung by Cupid’s arrow, pursues the young Daphne because he wants to marry her. As she flees he prays she will not trip and harm herself. He is inspired by divine Love to grab her, but as he does so she changes into a laurel tree. Apollo ravages the tree.

Leaving aside the point that many Western texts have Indo-European roots, the kind of culturally and socially representative approach to literature that the Columbia students seem to desire could never address the problem of sensitivity. It’s not as though rape, war, and racism are any less endemic to life than they are to world literature. The canonical 18th-century Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, contains scenes of pillage. There are violent episodes in Ramayana, a Sanskrit epic not unlike Homer’s Odyssey. It is impossible to create a blanket warning to protect against every anxiety. Not that the problem lies with literature, or even, as the Columbia students seem to believe, with the methods of teaching it. It lies, rather, with the readiness with which some of these young people are imposing themselves upon the material they are given to study.

It is one of the great joys of reading to imagine yourself in another person’s shoes, but when doing so triggers intrusive thoughts the book needs to be read in a different way, rather than not read at all.

Snake Man required hypnosis and cognitive behavioural therapy to recover from his phobia. As part of his therapy, he was encouraged to confront his fear, which entailed reading about snakes and eventually touching one at a children’s petting zoo.

While the same approach would not work for all anxieties, there is something to be said for reading as a means of desensitisation. Given time, studying Ovid’s rape scenes in the context of a mythical world populated by gods and hybrid creatures could have a distancing rather than a triggering effect. What this wouldn’t do, however, is diminish the more damaging idea that rumbles beneath some requests for trigger warnings — the idea that it’s the Western canon, rather than its readers, that is out of touch.

The post Snakes In The Grass appeared first on Standpoint.

This is, not surprisingly, still very much a live issue for the RA. It jealously guards its independence from central government; it is not beholden to the civil service, and feels passionately that this allows it to act in the interests of artistic freedom, unswayed by the temporary interests of party or the interfering tendencies of politicians.

In order to understand the significance of what happened in the 1830s and the shift in the role of the RA from being a lead organisation for the promotion of the arts in society to being perceived, at least by parliament, as a much more private fiefdom, it is necessary to go back to the 1760s, the period of the academy’s formation and the beginning of a movement that argued parliament should take an interest in the education of the public in the arts: not just in the movement which led to the establishment of the Royal Academy, but in the failed attempt on the part of John Wilkes to establish a National Gallery. In his book The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture 1760-1840 (Clarendon Press, 2005), Holger Hoock makes a revisionist case for thinking about the RA not just as a private institution, a kind of artists’ club, but instead, as an agency of public policy in the arts, responsible not just for an annual public exhibition, enriching the commercial interests of the individual artists whose work was hung, but also for the promotion of a national school of art through its teaching. George III took a deep personal interest in its foundation and some aspects of its operation represented his interest in the role of kingship having a cultural dimension. He was insistent that it should be founded with a proper legal framework for its operation. He gave advice on who should be elected as members. He bought works from its annual exhibition. And, to begin with at least, he paid many of the bills, subsidising its operation from the privy purse. It was a Royal Academy, founded by, and answerable to, the king rather than to parliament, but it was nonetheless viewed as a public institution, responsible for teaching, for initiatives in the arts, and for representing the interests of artists, including providing them with salaries, through teaching posts, and pensions. It was set up as a kind of Ministry of the Arts, but under the auspices of the Crown.

During the late 18th and early 19th century, there were many occasions when the government turned to the Royal Academy for advice. Many of the academicians were involved in the establishment of the Committee of Taste which was responsible for the erection of memorials to those who had distinguished themselves in fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. There was a public mood in support of appropriate forms of commemoration of the great military and naval victories of Nelson and Wellington, and memorials were set up throughout Britain designed by sculptors like Richard Westmacott who were specialists in the neoclassical style. Academicians helped support the establishment of the first public art gallery at Dulwich and academicians made the public case for the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles by the government as a way of improving public taste. Based at Somerset House, which was itself designed as, in Edmund Burke’s words, “a national building”, the RA operated alongside the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Society and many of the offices of the civil service, including the Stamp Office, the Tax Office and the Navy Office. Here were the agencies of public policy in the arts, the sciences as well as the government of the navy.

So, what happened in the 1830s? The first thing was that the government decided to build a new, grand, neoclassical building right in the heart of Westminster, close to the Houses of Parliament, to house, on the east side, the recently established National Gallery and, on the west side, to provide much larger and more publicly visible premises for the Royal Academy. I don’t think that historians have registered the formidable public symbolism involved in the Office of Works being commissioned to create a public building which, on its east side, was intended to contain the works of art from the past for the purposes of public instruction and, on its west side, the main institution for the training of artists. Architectural historians have always been critical of the National Gallery as a public building as being too long and low, and inadequately monumental, but the reason surely that it was designed in the way that it was is that it was planned in order to house not one but two separate public institutions. The length of its façade reflects this fact. It wasn’t quite the classical temple envisaged by John Nash for the centre of Trafalgar Square, but it was a visible manifestation of the commitment of government to the display of, and support for, the fine arts.

The Great Reform Bill of 1832 was a moment when the nature of government moved from being the concern of a relatively small, and largely London-based, oligarchic élite to a much wider-based and more democratic group. It brought into the House of Commons and into the activities of government a number of northern, more radical MPs, who wanted the government to give thought to how an effective system of art training could improve the quality of manufactures and who resented what they regarded as the monopolistic and restrictive system of teaching operated by the academy because it was, and always had been, dominated by ideals of high art, rather than practical design. These MPs, known as Philosophical Radicals, argued for a much wider definition of the role and responsibilities of government, a government which took seriously its cultural responsibilities for purposes of general education: some of their ideas were what we would regard as instrumental, powerfully influenced by the writings and ideas of the circle round Jeremy Bentham; but many of them were also idealistic, believing that it was possible for government to improve the living conditions and opportunities for learning of the population at large.

One of the consequences of the Great Reform Bill was the establishment not long afterwards of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures under the auspices of the Board of Trade, which was set up in order to look at the question of how far the government could, and should, involve itself in the arts and in the training of artists, as well as investigating the strengths, and more especially the weaknesses, of the Royal Academy. Its purposes were to “enquire into the best means of extending a knowledge of the Arts and of the Principles of Design among the people (especially the Manufacturing Population) of the Country; also to enquire into the Constitution of the Royal Academy, and the effects produced by it”. It met in two stages, first in 1835, with a large and representative membership, and then in 1836 with a much-slimmed-down membership, which was regarded as an effective sleight of hand by William Ewart, the radical MP for Liverpool and its chairman, since it was now dominated by radicals, including Joseph Hume, MP for Manchester, John Bowring, the former editor of the Benthamite Westminster Review, and Thomas Wyse. The presumption behind the establishment of the committee and the beliefs of many of its more prominent members was that the government should be much more active and interventionist; that it should not just sit on its hands and allow for a laissez-faire political economy, but should set up museums and art schools and improve the quality of design in manufactured goods, and should expect to do so through the use of public institutions, regulated by parliament and through the expenditure of public money.

The establishment of the parliamentary select committee coincided with an increasing number of attacks in the press and from artists themselves. They argued that the Royal Academy itself needed to be reformed, that it was the preserve of a small coterie of artists rather than being representative, as was the Society of British Artists, of artists at large. It was accused of having “converted the republic of art into an aristocracy”. Benjamin Robert Haydon, the artist who had been a vocal critic of the academy ever since one of his large mythological pictures on the subject of Dentatus was moved into an outside room in the annual exhibition in 1809, attacked its failure to establish an effective school of history painting. He used the opportunities afforded him by a commission from Lord Grey to paint the Reform Banquet in the Guildhall to bend the ear of Whig MPs on the benefits of providing public money to support the practice of art. There was, simultaneously and certainly supported by Haydon, a movement in the House of Commons, led by William Ewart, demanding that, if the RA was to be housed at government expense in a new building in Trafalgar Square, then its affairs should be subject to effective government scrutiny. As Martin Archer Shee wrote in his two-volume biography of his father, Sir Martin Archer Shee, the then President of the Royal Academy: 

In the eyes of these gentlemen, the Academy was a royal or aristocratic institution to attack — an exclusive and privileged body to destroy. Its existence was an offence against commercial freedom and social equality. Its avowed object, its legitimate functions, and its acknowledged services, they were neither solicitous to examine nor qualified to appreciate.

At the committee hearings, it was pointed out that there were plenty of 18th-century artists, including Sir Joshua Reynolds himself, as well as Richard Wilson, James Barry and John Flaxman, who had managed to become artists perfectly well without the benefits of an academy training. Not surprisingly, representatives of the broader-based Society of British Artists felt that the academy was unhelpful in the way that it monopolised the system of honours for artists. There was a strong feeling on the part of the academicians that the committee asked first for evidence to be given by those who were known to be hostile to it, including the artists John Martin and Benjamin Robert Haydon, and only afterwards asked the president, secretary and treasurer to appear before it. Adversaries of the academy attacked all aspects of the way it operated, the way members were elected, the extent to which academicians dominated its annual exhibition, and the state of the Royal Academy Schools.

Haydon, the most consistently vocal and effective of the academy’s adversaries, was asked if it was governed by charter “like other public bodies”.   He answered:

No; they only exist by the royal pleasure; they cunningly refused George the Fourth’s offer of a charter, fearing it would make them responsible; they are a private society, which they always put forward when you wish to examine them, and they always proclaim themselves a public society when they want to benefit by any public vote.

He was asked what he most disapproved of in the academy, surely itself an indication of the prejudices of the select committee. He answered:

Its exclusiveness, its total injustice . . . The artists are at the mercy of a despotism whose unlimited power tends to destroy all feeling for right or justice; forty men do as they please, it is the fact; the people have an appeal constitutionally, but the artists have no appeal; the academy is a House of Lords without appeal. It is an anomaly in the history of any constitutional people, the constitution of this academy; I cannot conceive how it could have been framed, upon investigating it. It is extraordinary how men, brought up as Englishmen, could set up such a system of government.

On June 15, 1836, Sir Martin Archer Shee was at long last invited to respond as president. Haydon recorded in his diary: “This day thou knowest what is to happen. O God, I ask only for justice and truth to triumph.” Shee was, not surprisingly, on the back foot. His son, who was a lawyer, describes his father’s state of mind when facing the committee.

Sir Martin had watched, with feelings of just indignation, the partial character of the proceedings, and the anti-academic spirit that marked the whole course of the inquiry. It may, therefore, be easily imagined that, in obeying the summons of the committee, he was in no mood to conciliate their favour, or deprecate their hostility, by meekness of tone or deferential placidity of demeanour. He was little solicitous to disguise his strong sense of the injustice exhibited towards the Academy, in the eagerness with which the committee had invited the attacks of its assailants, and encouraged the vague and senseless vituperation which, in their evidence, supplied the place of authentic statement or specific charge.

There are various accounts as to how Shee performed in front of the committee, a number of them hostile, including, not surprisingly, Haydon, who described in his diary how he “entered into a rambling defence and was repeatedly called to order by Ewart . . . He accused the evidence of being personal and partial . . . Rennie jumped up and denied it, and was called to order.”

But both the official record and Shee’s biography imply that Shee was pretty self-possessed and made a good case for the academy. He was remembered by his fellow academicians as having the skills of a lawyer, as well as being a good writer, and he argued, as he had argued in previous discussions with the Prime Minister, Lord Grey, in submissions regarding the importance of housing the Royal Academy in the new building in Trafalgar Square and in making the case for withholding information from parliament, that the Royal Academy was essentially a private institution, answerable to the crown only, and not to parliament.

From this point onwards, the Royal Academy retreated to a position, as Shee had argued, of being a private institution, self-governing, administered according to the requirements of its own laws, but not answerable to the government. Individual academicians might be, and indeed were, involved in the establishment of the government Schools of Design in a committee which included Sir Francis Chantrey, an RA, Charles Cockerell, a recently-elected RA, and Charles Eastlake, who was later to be president of the RA, but the academy’s own School remained resolutely independent, not subject to the jurisdiction of the government schools, not accredited by government or the Department of Education and Science and its successor bodies to this day, but, instead, self-regulated.  

The RA could, at this moment in its history, have become a more public body responsible for the regulation of the newly- established Schools of Design. It might have had a role later in the century in the establishment of the London art colleges. It might have become the representative body for artists as the Royal Institute of British Architects was to be for architects. It chose not to be, to remain private, and to exercise its influence through individual members rather than institutionally.

Just as the Royal Academy retreated into being a more private institution, interested in serving the commercial and purely artistic interests of its members, so the country as a whole moved in the other direction: setting up museums in provincial cities;  establishing a widespread system of art education;  believing that access to art, and the enjoyment of art, should be open to every citizen. One can perhaps characterise these changes during the 1830s as, on the one hand, the retreat of a private institution founded in the 18th-century enlightenment and dedicated to the highest ideals in the practice of art; and, on the other hand, the advance of a more didactic and  democratic public culture, advancing the rights of the citizen and the duties of government.

I am interested in these arguments and debates, not just for historical reasons, but because the debates replicate many of the issues which are being discussed and debated nowadays. How far should the action of government extend into the organisation of institutions of art? How far should museums and art schools be funded directly by government as instruments of public policy? Or should they instead be funded by their users, by students through a system of fees as is now the case in universities and art schools, or by visitors and philanthropic supporters through admission charges and donations in the case of museums? Should the government itself engage in issues relating to the practice of art or should it allow other bodies with delegated authority, including the Arts Council, a free voice to regulate and encourage the practice of art?

In practice, the government tends to be interested in systems of regulation and control and in reducing levels of public funding, without having any very evident deeper commitment to the best ways of teaching art and encouraging art practice. None of the parties in the recent election had much to say on these issues. The Conservative party has stuck to the principle of free admission while at the same time progressively cutting back on public funding of museums and art schools to the point where there is a risk that they become unsustainable. It was obvious throughout the debates surrounding the general election that the current Conservative party is deeply neo-liberal, intent on cutting back the responsibilities, and costs, of central government and transferring them back to the private citizen.

The Labour Party, meanwhile, committed itself to maintaining tight control of public expenditure, which assumed some level of continuation of this approach in practice, if not ideologically. Neither of them have much obvious belief in the role of government in art education or in wider aspects of cultural policy. The modern-day Conservative party is a party of laissez faire. The Labour party long ago lost its long-standing commitment to the right of the individual citizen to have access to the citadels of high culture.  

Yet it is right to give thought to those questions which preoccupied the Radicals of the 1830s. What is the best system of art training? How do we ensure that the most able people in the country have the facilities and opportunities to practice art?  And how do we ensure that the display of art in museums and public galleries has a proper cultural and educational value to citizens at large? These questions, many of which were first asked by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, remain legitimate today.

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Philosophers haven’t always set such a bad example. How very differently our Victorian ancestors conducted themselves is demonstrated by three monumental volumes of The Papers of the Metaphysical Society, 1869-1880: A Critical Edition edited by Catherine Marshall, Bernard Lightman and Richard England (OUP, £320). This private dining club met regularly at various hotels; after dinner a paper would be given on such arcane subjects as “Has a frog a soul?”, followed by lengthy and learned discussions into the night.

What made the Metaphysicians unique was the calibre of the membership. Besides leading philosophers (Sidgwick, Martineau, Croom Robertson) they included the then Prime Minister (Gladstone) plus a future one (Balfour), the Poet Laureate (Tennyson), scientists (T.H. Huxley), critics (Ruskin), editors (Bagehot), historians (Froude, Seeley), divines (Cardinal Manning, Dean Stanley), writers (Leslie and James Fitzjames Stephen), among many other eminent Victorians.

The members espoused every variety of religious and irreligious opinion, but the Christians were deeply divided between Anglican churchmen (themselves split into High, Low or latitudinarian) and Roman Catholic converts, while the assorted heretics, agnostics and atheists rarely agreed with one another either. The then editor of the Spectator, R.H. Hutton, wrote a lively account of one such meeting; what struck him and others was the “extraordinary fermentation of opinion in the society around us”, but what impresses us was the courtesy and respect for one another shown by all members, however deeply contradictory their convictions. Huxley said that the society died of “too much love”. Today’s logic choppers would surely look down on the Metaphysicians as old-fashioned amateurs, but they might like to ponder why it is that such a society, embracing the entire intellectual elite, would be so unthinkable today.

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Among these false friends of the West is, alas, John Gray. A philosopher equally remarkable for the eclecticism of his tastes and the elasticity of his convictions, he has latterly forsaken more familiar terrain for the wilder shores of intellectual history. Now he may have gone too far. Gray’s latest book, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (Allen Lane, £17.99), amounts to a repudiation of the West, in favour of a fatalism that is alien to the freedom he claims to hold dear.

Gray’s anatomy of modern man takes its cue from the essay “On the Marionette Theatre” by the Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist—whose double suicide with his lover is the subject, coincidentally, of a newly released Austrian film, Amour Fou.

Critics have puzzled over Kleist’s short text for two centuries, but Gray has no time for rival interpretations. Kleist’s observation that marionettes move with a grace to which no human dancer may aspire becomes the occasion for Gray to launch his own manifesto for the salvation of humanity from the illusions of modernity.

The design fault of Western thought, for Gray, is Gnosticism, the ancient mystical tradition which he (controversially) identifies with the idea that knowledge brings freedom. The whole of Western rationalism, he thinks, is vitiated by this “project of expelling mystery from the mind”. Gray himself wants more mystery, not less, because “belief in the liberating power of knowledge has become the ruling illusion of humankind”. And while he is rightly appalled by the modern “transhumanists” who dream of manipulating evolution and harnessing artificial intelligence for utopian purposes, Gray’s only alternative seems to be a regression to state-sanctioned ignorance and violence. He thinks the Aztecs, with their gory rituals of human sacrifice, were far wiser and less barbaric than the Spaniards who conquered them. Their wisdom apparently consisted in acknowledging the destructive nature of humanity: “they killed in order to create meaning in their lives.”

By contrast, Gray sees the United States as a diabolical force that has institutionalised “perpetual war” in the name of defending democracy. In Gray’s anatomy, the symbol of America today is not the Statue of Liberty but the jump-suited terrorists of Guantanamo: “Along with mass incarceration, torture appears to be integral to the functioning of the world’s most advanced state.”

We can only guess at the perversion of logic that has led Gray, who has taught at Harvard among other universities, to bite the hand that feeds him. Still, his critique is not merely wrong, but perniciously so.

Kleist was no Gnostic. His essay has nothing to do with dualism, demons or demiurges, but is a product of the Romantic obsession with self-consciousness. Nor is there any connection between Kleist’s subtle reflections and Gray’s motley assemblage of conspiracy theorists, fantasy writers and computer scientists. Aesthetics is not cybernetics. Marionettes are not robots.

Gray concludes that, once one has rejected the “figments” of the Western democracies, the only hope is “inner freedom”. He finds the ancients “more intelligent” than modern man because they were indifferent to the rise and fall of civilisations—though his only evidence, supposedly from Caesar Augustus himself, actually comes from a modern historical novel by John Williams.

More to the point: Augustus was the first Roman emperor, i.e. a god. Gray seems to be advocating a return to a world in which everybody was, as Edward Gibbon wrote, “the slave of Imperial despotism”, for whom even to dream of freedom was futile: “To resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly. On every side he was encompassed by a vast extent of sea and land, which he could never hope to traverse, without being discovered, seized, and returned to his irritated master.” Gray may affect a Stoic’s apathy towards the decline and fall of the West, as the likes of Leopardi and Spengler did before him. Most of us still cherish our hard-won liberties and way of life.

Human sacrifice, anyone? After you, Professor Gray.

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Pocock has written six volumes of Barbarism and Religion. The last, Triumph In The West (CUP, £55) tracing Gibbon’s cycle to the fall of Rome in AD 456, will be published in April, just after Pocock’s 91st birthday. In the age of the micro-monograph and the hair-splitter, Pocock has created a masterpiece of intellectual history, massive in scale and erudite in detail. He is, in my view, the English-speaking world’s greatest living historian.

Pocock is not a prophet without honour in Britain, but he should be better known. Born in London, he was raised in Christchurch, New Zealand. He returned to Britain to take his doctorate at Cambridge, but resumed teaching in New Zealand, then left for the United States. In 1975, he settled at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. At Cambridge, Pocock had studied with Herbert Butterfield, whose diagnosis of Whiggish optimism has percolated into our political vocabulary. Pocock became a master analyst of this kind of process. His method, self-evident in the way of all brilliant and timely ideas, is “texts in contexts”. To understand a work of political thought, we must know its social setting, and its “political language”, its assumptions and meanings.

Aided by his followers in the Cambridge School, Pocock revolutionised the history of ideas, and mapped the roots of the Anglosphere. His first book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957), showed how 17th-century thinkers drew on the political language of common law. His second, The Machiavellian Moment (1975), traced the language of civic humanism from Machiavelli’s Florence to Puritan England, and thence to colonial America. In the New World, a commercial society transformed Classical ideas of virtue and republic into a democratic ideal for the upwardly mobile.

In Barbarism and Religion, Pocock unpicks the languages of Enlightenment law, religion, and history. Pocock’s Gibbon is no French philosophe: he inherits the English “conservative Enlightenment”, in which Christianity is part of civic religion. Although Gibbon was an unbeliever, his notorious chapters on the origins of Christianity are not an atheist’s polemic. They are a “prehistory”, contextualising Constantine’s union of the Roman empire with the Christian church.

That politicising of religion, Pocock writes, fostered a “great argument between imperial and ecclesiastical authority, and between secular and sacred history”: the great argument of Gibbon’s day, and ours. For Pocock as for Gibbon, civic virtue, the ancient defence against barbarism and religion, is the modern defence too.

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Between 1967 and 1970, Martin and I were both research fellows at Merton College, Oxford. He became a particularly close friend who taught me about good cooking and much more. When I arrived at Merton, he was living in a college flat but had commissioned a young architect to build a modernist home on Hinksey Hill featuring a room overlooking the dreaming spires of the city with a huge desk for reviewing and comparing documents. He had won early celebrity with work on the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. At the time, some of the main players, such as Sir Horace Wilson, were still alive and he had taken the then unusual step of interviewing them.

He was working part-time as one of several assistants to Randolph Churchill, who was writing his father’s biography. Martin was pessimistic about his own job prospects but was determined to avoid the grind of a conventional university post since he wished to devote himself to archival research and writing.

 After the sudden death of Randolph, the journalist Michael Wolff was seen as his likely successor as official biographer. On the day of the fateful interviews with the Chartwell Trustees, who were to make the choice, Martin set out to convince them of his documentary talents by packing a suitcase of papers to show the interviewers. He got the job.

The blurred distinction between writing about history and being part of it was to affect Martin’s life. His researches into Appeasement and his work as a Churchill researcher brought him into constant contact with historical figures. Some of them became friends. As time went on, many (such as John Major) asked for his advice. After Susie Sacher, a member of the family which owned Marks and Spencer, became his research assistant and then his wife, he entered into another inner world, that of the Israeli elite.

 The Yom Kippur war in 1973 was a key event. As a member of the Marks and Spencer clan, who had been the financial and moral mainstay of Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, he was completely trusted and was admitted to the Kirya, the headquarters of the Israeli defence forces. There, Martin witnessed at first hand the emotional pressures and the uncertainties of a battle for survival as serious as that faced by Churchill in 1940. He came, he saw, he chronicled.

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 Cochrane, Scottish editor of the Telegraph, had what he calls “an astonishing meeting” with Brown after meeting him in the lounge of the Sheraton Hotel, Edinburgh last May. The former Prime Minister started questioning Cochrane about his background, then revealed that in his teens he had been offered a place at Oxford but chose instead to go to Edinburgh (where incidentally he had a stellar career, culminating in being elected Rector while still a student).

 Cochrane reports him as continuing: “I wish now that I had gone [to Oxford]. I think I missed something by not going.” Cochrane, presumably stunned by this revelation, replied that Brown hadn’t done badly — “Prime Minister and all.”

But could Brown’s memory be playing him tricks? I recall that when I was applying for university only a couple of years earlier it was a rule of UCCA (now UCAS), the university admissions body, that if you applied to Oxford or Cambridge, you had to accept their offer if they made one. So if he first applied to Oxford, how did Brown end up at Edinburgh?

And it makes it all the harder to understand why he made such a fuss back in 2000 over the case of Laura Spence, the Tyneside comprehensive schoolgirl with a fine academic record who applied to study medicine at Magdalen College, Oxford, but was turned down. The college explained that it had received applications from 22 equally well-qualified students and could only accept five, but to no avail. Brown, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer — and, one might think, above such things — took it on himself to launch a damaging attack on Magdalen and Oxford, calling Spence’s rejection “an absolute scandal” and accusing the university of “elitism” and operating “an old establishment interview system”. Now he claims that this appalling system had actually offered him a place but he chose to turn it down.

Perhaps Brown, who was Chancellor for ten years and Prime Minister for two and a half, should look to Laura Spence as an example of how to deal with a major setback while young. Instead of Oxford, she went to Harvard to study biological sciences, before going on to Wolfson College, Cambridge, to study medicine, graduating with distinction in 2008. And at no stage did she ever complain of “missing out”.

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