Mankind’s perennial certainty that the future for which it strives will necessarily be an improvement on both the present and the past is a theme whose folly and contemporary relevance is brought to the fore in two classics by Aldous Huxley, now reissued by Vintage.

Born in 1894, and exempted from military service in the Great War due to a childhood illness that left him almost blind, Huxley was nevertheless no stranger to death. The loss of his mother to cancer when he was 14, and the suicide of his elder brother Noel in 1914, just as the demise of a generation of his contemporaries began, lent Huxley’s writing an abiding preoccupation with mortality.

Both After Many a Summer and Time Must Have a Stop hint at their author’s personal pursuit of a divine level of consciousness, reaching beyond the seemingly infer-ior confines of the physical. Originally published in 1939 and 1944 respectively, each novel confronts the reader with metaphysical truths concerning the relentless struggle between good and evil, while examining the motivations underlying social interactions and the relationship between the body and soul. Taking its title from Tennyson’s Tithonus, the Trojan prince and lover of Eos who was doomed to live and age forever, After Many a Summer tells the tale of Jo Stoyte, a discriminating philanthropist and self-made millionaire who seeks and eventually finds the secret of eternal life but at the cost of his own humanity.

Set in a wryly depicted late 1930s Los Angeles, the city Huxley called home after emigrating in 1937, and borrowing freely from the gothic literature of the 18th century, the novel has castles, cemeteries, iniquitous doctors and simpering maidens. In the dénouement, man is finally exposed in his most primal form, condemned like Tithonus but more horrifically so in the absence of the civilising self-awareness that comes with catharsis. In a further Faustian twist, we see plainly what Stoyte’s desperation has blinded him to. By binding himself solely to the earth and eschewing both moral and spiritual development, he has forfeited any hope of sublime contentment.

Despite the eloquence of Huxley’s prose, it is hard to muster any real sympathy for the book’s characters. The only exceptions are Peter Boone, a young, hopelessly idealistic medical researcher, recently returned from fighting for the Republican side in Spain, and an old school friend of Stoyte’s, the academic Mr Propter. Assessing the virtues and pitfalls of just about every conceivable “ism”, Propter chiefly appears as the emissary of Huxley’s own philosophical suppositions, on the intelligent application of free will and its power to cause both immense happiness and untold harm.

Written during the Second World War, which had left him dejected at the failure of the inter-war pacifist movements, such as the Peace Pledge Union and For Intellectual Liberty, in which he had played an active role, Time Must Have a Stop was felt by Huxley to be his best work. Ripened in the upheaval wrought by the new conflict, a timely reminder of how war or its expectation were a constant companion to preceding generations, the impressions originally explored in the earlier novel seem to have come to fruition in the later one. Retrospectively set in 1929, its ribald touches lend its narrative a comic air, and its characters seem altogether more cognisant of their fallibility and are thus capable of remorse.

An angelic-looking 17-year-old whose impulsive egocentricity inevitably leads him into having to wrestle with his own conscience, Sebastian Barnack is a budding poet who is afforded the opportunity of broadening his rather narrow horizons by an invitation to the Florentine home of his limerick-loving uncle Eustace. The robust bon vivant suffers a somewhat awkwardly-timed fatal heart attack soon after his nephew’s arrival.

Attempts to contact Eustace through a séance, convened by his eccentric mother-in-law, accompany the dead man’s bemusement at his continuing existence as a mind without matter. While uproarious, such scenes simultaneously impart the text with a sharp injection of melancholy. As Huxley was writing, millions across the globe were grieving, and his empathy for those who sought comfort through similarly unorthodox means is palpable.

The callowness of Sebastian’s youth reaches a crescendo when he thoughtlessly sells a drawing, for a paltry sum, driven by his overwhelming desire to buy a dinner- jacket. The piece is a Degas nude, gifted to him by his late uncle in exchange for a humorous verse written by the young poet, which describes the “two buttocks and a pendulous bub” depicted in the work.

Though the poem is enough to keep Eustace guffawing beyond the grave, the ensuing furore over the missing artwork lands Sebastian in hot water, until Bruno Rontini, a pious antiquarian bookseller and his second cousin once-removed, comes to the rescue. Bruno is left to atone for Sebastian’s sins, however, and his retrieval of the Degas results in his arrest by local Fascists.

The epilogue takes us to 1944, when Sebastian, now missing an arm as a result of his wartime service and left a widower following the death of his wife after a miscarriage, recalls his last meeting with Bruno. Ten years after the debacle caused by his lack of judgment, Sebastian is offered the chance of redemption, and he cares for Bruno as his cousin succumbs to throat cancer.

Irrevocably changed by his experiences, Sebastian declares that mankind’s insistence on fighting and dying for an unknown future is a form of enslavement. Liberation can only truly be found, he concludes, by living both wholly and meaningfully in the present moment. Sebastian’s realisations also allow him finally to repair the strained relationship with his father.

A staunch socialist who placed his faith in the future, and neglected the here and now during his son’s youth, the older man has become a victim of time. In a candid moment between the two, Sebastian confesses that Bruno taught him to make sense of life, by showing him that death can be seen not as an ending but as a beginning.

In the words of his widow Laura, Aldous Huxley died “the most beautiful death”, on November 22, 1963, while the world was transfixed by a more violent demise. Though it is tempting to imagine what he would make of today’s world, one hopes he is enjoying immortality too much to care. 

The post Brave Old Worlds appeared first on Standpoint.

The New Left is the wave of European and American left-wing intellectuals who gained prominence in the post-war era, especially from the 1960s, in a context of dramatic social and cultural change, a new yearning for emancipation and the continuing influence of Marxism despite the decay of the Soviet Union.  In 1985 Scruton, eager to target these Pied Pipers, published a first version of Thinkers of the New Left; it was greeted with contempt by much of the intellectual establishment. Thirty years later, the book is back, enriched with new details and brought up to date. All the big names are there, and no one escapes the scrupulous and devastating Scrutonian laser.

Scruton possesses a rare quality: that of being able to describe and judge at the same time. Each chapter deals with a specific time and country, and deploys the same strategy: describe, analyse, save a little piece of truth and kill the rest. The journey is very intense, from Hobsbawm’s Marxist view of history to Galbraith’s liberal disdain for consumer culture; from Sartre as rigid servant of Communist ideology to Foucault and his paranoid obsession with power; from the horrifying Lukàcs, for whom “the bourgeoisie possesses only the semblance of human existence”, to Habermas’s appeal for “a wide dialogue excluding most of his detractors”, as Scruton puts it. The French have developed their own brand of delirium: Althusser, in language that was obscure even for a Marxist, struggled with superstructure and infrastructure; Lacan preferred to deny any meaning and truth; and Deleuze, determined to fight capitalism in the name of desire, developed a curious “syntax without semantics”, in Scruton’s words.

The final firework is worth the wait: Badiou and Žižek and their worship of revolution. Why pay attention to the vast sufferings that the French, Russian and Maoist revolutions caused, when “fidelity” to the event — their trademark concept — is “a sufficient justification for carrying on regardless”?

Encompassing all those thinkers under the umbrella of the New Left is inevitably limiting and doesn’t capture all the nuances of their thoughts. Some are Marxists, others Structuralists or Keynesians, still others sui generis. But they have many features in common, the first being that they represent everything that a conservative like Scruton dislikes. They have inherited from the Old Left an enduring quest for liberty and equality, without any acceptance of the possible contradictions between them. They interpret all institutions as features of domination and oppression, and their purpose is always to change everything. They see the state as the main instrument for the new order “that will rectify the ancient grievance of the oppressed”. For them, politics is everything while civil society or the rule of law doesn’t interest them much. They are utterly negative: they are often filled with resentment.

What the New Left has mastered most, Scruton argues, is the ability to transform political language, its meaning and its use. It has created an imaginative narrative where abstractions such as “bourgeois” and “capitalism” are pilloried, while the “workers” are invoked — even when most of these workers have actually ceased to exist. Instead of trying to understand and describe how capitalism really works, how the classes are really constituted, and how people live, develop customs and use institutions, the New Left deals with a world without any substance. Some of these thinkers have even decided to exclude the use of argument and reason. When Scruton quotes Lukàcs, Althusser or Deleuze, it is absolutely clear that most of their sentences make absolutely no sense. And when Lacan and Badiou pretend to use mathematics as a proof for their crazy systems, it is not in order to save reality but to bury it.

As a matter of fact, reality is what they want to escape. According to Lukàcs, empiricism is “an ideology of the bourgeoisie”. That’s why, as Scruton explains, “anyone who actually consults the ideas of ordinary working-class people commits a heinous communist error, the error of ‘opportunism’.” Here lies the deep negativity of the dogmatic Left. It explains how and why a large part of the leftist intelligentsia was reluctant to condemn the crimes of Communism, despite its millions of deaths. It explains also why the New Left still manages to attract people despite the lessons of experience. It is because its ideal is not supposed to be realised: it is here to be dreamed about, and so never to be questioned. These thinkers will never describe anything practical that they wish to achieve. They will cast spells, as in the sentence attributed to Stalin that “the theories of Marx are true because they are correct.” These ideas meet a desire that lies in every human being: the need for religion and for an eternal justice that will compensate for all the perceived injustice in this world. Just as these spells are repeated as prayers, their authors have been worshipped as gurus. Visit Highgate Cemetery in London, and you will see that people leave roses, notes and presents at the foot of Marx’s grave, under his awe-inspiring statue.

Nevertheless, Scruton is still able to demonstrate a degree of sympathy for some of these thinkers. Not only does he make the effort to find something — however small — interesting in each of them, he sometimes sincerely agrees with his opponents. This is the case when he discusses the American criticism of consumer culture, where he shares their starting point but not their conclusion, when he praises Sartre as a great writer, or when he recognises the beauty of Foucault’s last work, The History of Sexuality. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the British Left ends up relatively spared from attack, as British socialism, according to Scruton, shares with conservatives a love for home and territory, and may have been less influenced by Marxism as a consequence.

This is an outstanding and very necessary book. I may be biased, as I am the author’s translator into French, but I like his work because it is true, not the other way around. The only fault of the book is that it gives so much space to the sticky prose of the New Left. But that is a necessary evil. And Scruton’s fluid and lively sentences are such a relief. No wonder: you are at least reading something human.

I don’t see how the New Left faithful can answer all the arguments deployed in these pages. But they are rarely asked to defend any of their views, as their prose has often been taken for granted, at least in the intellectual arena. Conservatives are always asked to justify their conception of life, to defend what already exists. The Left is rarely asked to do so, even though it wants to disrupt many things — including things that are cherished by ordinary people. Scruton has struggled with this paradox his whole life, but it is also what gives his work its exceptional character: he argues when others have left the battlefield or don’t see the point of entering it. To argue, he has to engage with the texts of his opponents, and to recognise where he agrees and disagrees with them. He argues in favour of conservative answers to the claims of the New Left, and not everyone will agree. But at least he has read his opponents, and I don’t think the contrary is true.

One of the conservative answers, for Scruton, is to “rescue the [language of politics] from socialist Newspeak”. A place where this cause is particularly needed today is academia. The New Left culture “now survives largely in its academic redoubts, feeding from the jargon-ridden prose that it amassed in university libraries”, Scruton writes. In my alma mater, an emblematic home of the Parisian New Left where Alain Badiou still teaches, many students now laugh at incomprehensible books that they rarely read.

Still, these authors remain included in the curriculum and their names are still worshipped. Why not act accordingly, and stop studying them? Otherwise, clever undergraduates will keep fleeing the humanities to study something else, and the humanities will be unable to renew and question themselves, and to innovate. This, added to the anti-free-market stand of the New Left, partly explains why the humanities and business have been moving apart for some decades. Business people may be too quick to dismiss academia as useless, but academia has its share of responsibility. For decades, universities have produced thinkers who criticise a legal order and economic prosperity on which they are dependent. The problem is not only that this brand of academia has been biased — bias is sometimes unavoidable, and right-wing academia has its own biases — but that it has shown itself unable to discriminate between serious work and nonsense.

Some people will be shocked by Scruton’s book. They will see it as an ideological work targeting his enemies. But I beg them to open their Habermas, Lacan or Badiou, and to ask two things. Does this text mean something that I could explain to my educated friend? And does it make an honest attempt to understand history or society, and not a resentment-inspired and reality-denying fantasy?

If the answer is no, readers will have grasped Scruton’s point. Unless they really wish “to chew on the glutinous prose of Deleuze, to treat seriously the mad incantations of Žižek, or to believe that there is more to Habermas’s theory of communicative action than his inability to communicate it,” I challenge them to do so.

The post From Jargon To Incantation appeared first on Standpoint.

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.

Frankfurt is not an apologist for inequality — far from it. He is not what Joseph Stiglitz would call a “market fundamentalist”; indeed, he is a liberal rather than a libertarian. Nor is he a cynic: he has written influential works defending free will and truth, while suggesting that the purpose of life is love.

Yet Frankfurt’s case against egalitarianism is compelling. He has two main lines of argument in On Inequality. The first is that inequality, unlike poverty, has no intrinsic moral significance; the second is that it is wrong to make one’s self-worth depend on equality, rather than on respect. Frankfurt contrasts the doctrine of economic egalitarianism with the “doctrine of sufficiency”. Egalitarians believe that equality is good in itself. Frankfurt’s doctrine of sufficiency, however, states that what matters from a moral point of view is not that people should have the same amount of money, but that each should have enough.

What, though, is “enough”? For Frankfurt, it means that a person is content with what he has. Only the individual can decide “what is needed for the kind of life a person would most sensibly and appropriately seek for himself”. The chief objection to egalitarianism is that it alienates people from the pursuit of their own personal ambitions. What matters — or should matter — to anybody trying to lead a good life is not how their prosperity compares with others, but whether it is conducive to achieving their own aims, not satisfying the irrelevant desires of other, more affluent people.

Without using jargon, Frankfurt refutes the argument put forward by the American economist Abba Lerner: namely, that the marginal utility of money is greater under an egalitarian system — the richer you are, the less it is worth. Frankfurt persuasively shows both that Lerner’s premises are false and that his conclusions do not follow.

Frankfurt addresses the common experience of feeling disturbed by the sight of someone much worse off than oneself, but suggests that what disturbs us in such cases is not the fact that we are richer, but that they are so poor. Egalitarians claim to have demonstrated that inequality is offensive, when in fact they are trading on our compassion. Inequality offends us only if it violates the doctrine of sufficiency. Globally, the proportion of those living in poverty has actually fallen to below 10 per cent, yet egalitarians ignore this good news, being much more interested in the fact that the top one per cent is even richer.

Respect is a far better measure of moral worth than equality, even though the two are sometimes confused. When David Cameron said in his party conference speech that “real equality” should be the Conservative goal, he meant equality of respect — before the law and in everyday life — not economic equality. Injustice causes authentic outrage; that caused by inequality is merely synthetic.

Inequality is not an evil in itself. It cannot be, because human beings are born unequal. Even in a utopian society, with all wealth held in common, unequal abilities would still result in a hierarchy. Indeed, strict meritocracy may be even more unequal than the less predictable society we have, the randomness of which at least enables many people to compensate for their inadequacies. Inequality of outcome may be all the more painful when it cannot be blamed on inequality of opportunity.

Most middle-aged or older people probably feel, at least occasionally, that their lives have not fulfilled all the hopes and dreams of their youth. If they judge themselves by comparison with their peers, some of whom are likely to have been more successful or at least wealthier, they will almost certainly make themselves miserable. Only those who have been true to themselves are proof against such misery.

Although Frankfurt does not deal with the so-called celebrity culture, his doctrine of sufficiency clearly has implications for the millions of people who measure their self-worth by comparison with the rich and famous, rather than by their own standards — more modest, perhaps, but surely more authentic. Those who succumb to the siren call of celebrity are doomed to spend their lives in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction that may well simmer until it boils over. The celebrity culture becomes the victim culture. At the age of 86, Harry Frankfurt has given us a much-needed prophylactic against the politics of envy. What a pity he is so underrated by the politicians.

The post Harry Frankfurt appeared first on Standpoint.

The disregard for Hume’s philosophical writings expressed by Ritchie strengthened during the first half of the 19th century. In that Kantian climate Hume could be presented only as a thinker who had, with a kind of gifted wrong-headedness, explored the dead-end of scepticism with unprecedented thoroughness. Hume had been a mesmerising magician who with virtuoso flourishes had demonstrated the melancholy truth that, pursued in this way, there was after all no rabbit in the philosophical hat. Sir William Hamilton dramatised Hume’s career as a moment of disciplinary dilemma, when philosophers were forced to choose between “either . . . surrendering philosophy as null, or of ascending to higher principles, in order to re-establish it against the sceptical reduction”. Hume’s contribution had been the vital but ancillary one of supplying the crucial first impetus to Kant.

The Victorians, however, were no more enthusiastic about Hume’s historical works than about his philosophy. Even when the volumes of the History of England had first been published some had noticed that they were, in the polite euphemism, “lightly researched”. It was clear that Hume had worked solely from printed sources, and that he possessed neither the technical skills, nor in all probability the appetite, to forage in archives to any good effect. His was a history written in a library, and it was bound to suffer once the Germanic revolution in historiography had been assimilated by English writers. John Stuart Mill dismissed the History of England as “really a romance [which] bears nearly the same degree of resemblance to any thing which really happened, as Old Mortality or Ivanhoe”. Francis Jeffrey, writing in the Edinburgh Review, pronounced the devastating verdict (he was of course fond of pronouncing devastating verdicts) that Hume’s “credit among historians, for correctness of assertion, will soon be nearly as low as it has long been with theologians for orthodoxy of belief”.

It was only towards the end of the 19th century that the tide began to turn, and then only in a limited way. In respect of Hume’s philosophy, eventual disenchantment with Kant was a necessary preliminary to a partial restoration of Hume’s fortunes. The publication of Leslie Stephen’s History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century in 1876 initiated a tentative reassessment of Hume’s philosophy, in that the questions Hume had pondered were rescued from the condition of being simply misconceived. On the contrary: these had been and were still the stubborn, fundamental philosophical questions. Stephen did not find Hume’s answers satisfactory, but the questions had at least been the right ones:

Hume began as a philosopher . . . but in the Treatise reasoned himself into a position which made philosophy look as though it had destroyed itself under the pressure of systematic sceptical argumentation. Therefore, he turned from philosophy to subjects which could be treated purely empirically, such as politics, political economy, and history, but in each case the work that he produced was evidence that . . . his power as a destroyer was much greater than his abilities as a creator. . . . Hume’s scepticism left him trying to make ropes of sand in his writings on these topics.

Stephen and other late-Victorian writers such as James McCosh and Hume’s editors T. H. Green and T. H. Grose tended to script Hume’s career as a drama of two acts. In the first, Hume had written the Treatise of Human Nature and had thereby discovered the dismaying truth that progress in philosophy was not to be had. In Act Two, he had turned aside from philosophy, had dabbled in essays and history-writing, had pursued a public career, and amassed considerable wealth and public fame. As Grose sourly remarked, “Few men of letters have been at heart so vain and greedy of fame as was Hume.”

One might have expected that the preferences and aversions of Bloomsbury would have overturned this narrative. In a way, they did. In Portraits in Miniature Lytton Strachey admired what his Victorian predecessors had disparaged: “Had Hume died at the age of twenty-six” — the age at which he had completed the two volumes of the Treatise — “his real work in the world would have been done, and his fame irrevocably established.” For Strachey the Treatise was the “masterpiece” which contained all that was most important in Hume’s thought. The rest of his life had been nothing more than filling in time. It is clear, however, that in reversing the Victorian evaluation of Hume which he had inherited, Strachey had done nothing to reshape the underlying narrative of Hume’s career. This was still a drama of two acts, and the interval still arrived disconcertingly early.

Although later 20th-century study of Hume’s philosophy continued further down this path of rehabilitation, the notion that the Treatise contained all Hume’s really hard and original thinking, and that he spent the rest of his life re-packaging and re-formulating the insights that had broken upon him in his mid-twenties would prove very durable.

James A. Harris admires the Treatise, and his account of its arguments and its relation to the British philosophical conversation of the late 1730s is fine and probing. But his intellectual biography is committed to destroying and clearing away for ever this “two-stage” model of Hume’s career, with its attendant thesis that the Treatise contains the whole of Hume’s subsequent thought in concentrated form and that the later decades of thinking and writing amounted to nothing more than a process of dilution:

Once he had given up on the Treatise, Hume never once presented himself as a systematic thinker, as someone who conceived of his writings in terms of foundation and superstructure, or of core and periphery, or of trunk and branches. The abandonment of the project of the Treatise would appear, on the contrary, to have been the giving up of the whole idea of a philosophical system, in favour of several distinct and different kinds of philosophical project.

Here Harris is wise enough to follow Hume’s own lead. “My Own Life”, that wry and posthumous autobiographical narrative, establishes the broad sequence of Hume’s literary career, and establishes that the key turning point was the rejection of the mode, if not the insights, of the Treatise, and all that that rejection implied.

In the place of the reductive Victorian two-stage model of Hume’s career, Harris proposes a different understanding of what Hume was about, based on a more historically-informed idea of what it was to practise philosophy, on a more nuanced conception of scepticism, particularly as it could be understood in the 18th century, and above all positioned in relation to a subtle understanding of what it could have meant in the 18th century to commit yourself to a career as a man of letters. Commenting on Hume’s wish to revive the calm discursiveness of antiquity, when “Atticus and Cassius the Epicureans, Cicero the Academic, and Brutus the Stoic, could, all of them, live in unreserved friendship together, and were insensible to all those distinctions, except so far as they furnished matter to discourse and conversation”, Harris remarks:

Hume wrote these words, perhaps, more in hope than in expectation. He was reminded often how hard even the men of letters among his contemporaries found it to lay aside personal animosities and rivalries. He was told that he was both a Whig and a Tory when he took himself to be neither. He was told that he was an atheist when he believed he had revealed nothing at all in his writings about his personal religious views. He was told he was licentious and a subverter of morality when what he thought he had done was merely to show how morality might better be understood. Sometimes Hume found these things amusing, sometimes he found them deeply offensive. They showed him that the philosophical conversation which he desired to join could not be presumed to be already going on, waiting for him to take his place in it. His task as a man of letters was to be part of the effort to bring that conversation, the conversation that we call the Enlightenment, into existence.

Guided by this general strategy Harris follows the various twists and turns of Hume’s career, which he presents as possessing a real narrative, and as being in some respects improvised and not teleological. Hume, like the rest of us, responded to reversals and unexpected opportunities, and these left a trace on his career. This means that Harris has to follow Hume also in his various kinds of expertise, and one of the impressive features of this book is the author’s mastery of the different fields — philosophical, political, economic, historical, literary — in which Hume wandered. What are the particularly strong points in Harris’s biography?

In the first place, Harris is very sure-footed — and often persuasively surprising — in mapping the relationships of Hume’s arguments to his great predecessors in the post-Renaissance intellectual tradition: to thinkers such as Grotius, Locke, Hutcheson, Berkeley, and Shaftesbury. Most interesting, however, are Harris’s findings concerning Hume’s relation with the iconoclastic and controversial Bernard Mandeville, by whose provocations Hume was initially allured, but only until he found, as he thought, more powerful and subtle arguments for a less inflammatory view of human nature which allowed him to offer a measure of rejection to a man who nevertheless must be acknowledged as a powerful influence.

Harris brings Hume’s relation to ancient philosophy into a particularly sharp focus. As we have seen, Hume wanted to restore to the philosophy of his own day something of the equable temper of ancient philosophy. Of course, this wish was in part encoded disparagement of the dogmatic, intemperate spirit with which Christianity had infected the realm of thought ever since the momentous Church councils of the fourth century.

What it did not mean was that Hume wanted to reintroduce the ancient idea of philosophy as intellectual medicine. Concerning the ends of philosophy Hume was unswervingly modern. For him philosophy was a mode of investigation and a style of thought. It could never be a therapy.

Not that Hume’s world had no need of therapies. After he had abandoned the Treatise he turned his attention to the English and Scottish society in which he lived, and which he found to be riven by disputes bequeathed to it by the 17th century. Hume’s essays and his History of England were calculated as balms to be applied to these disputes, no matter how enraging or inflammatory their arguments might at first sight seem to the combatants. Harris explains Hume’s strategy in these writings with great insight, while at the same time drawing attention to the particular judgments which contradicted the idées reçues Hume considered especially mischievous.

Had English liberty been born in the profound glooms of the Hercynian forest, as Montesquieu had asserted, and as generations of Whiggish English historians before him had also proclaimed? On the contrary, “It was nonsense to say . . . that the modern English system of liberty was found in the forests of ancient Europe.” Had the Norman Conquest fastened the chains of feudal servitude upon a once proud and free people? Not a bit of it: “The conquest put people in a situation of receiving slowly from abroad the rudiments of science and cultivation, and of correcting their rough and licentious manners.”

Was medieval Catholicism a bondage of the spirit? Considered as a natural religion it had its weak points, to be sure, but there were also points to be made on the other side of the account: “tho’ the religion of that age can merit no other name than that of superstition, it served to unite together a body of men who had great sway over the people, and who kept the community from falling to pieces, from the factions and independent [sic] power of the nobles.” Were the Puritans of the 17th century nothing more than the panders of despotism, as the hotter Whigs of the later 17th century had claimed? The truth, notwithstanding the autocratic interlude of Cromwell, was slightly different once a longer perspective was taken: “The precious spark of liberty had been kindled, and was preserved, by the puritans alone; and it was to this sect, whose principles appear so frivolous and habits so ridiculous, that the English owe the whole freedom of their constitution.”

Why has this kind of study of Hume — calm, reflective, patient, informed, but far from uncommitted — been so long to seek? In part this is perhaps because Hume until very recently had not really become a subject for dispassionate study. Although the conflicts in which he was a participant have all long since been concluded for better or worse (usually for worse), nevertheless a totemic potency clung to Hume as the embodiment of the impotence of reasonableness in the face of prejudice and obscurantism. Now, when (depending on your point of view) either that battle has been won, or one despairs of its ever being won, Hume is released from the condition of being a combatant or a proxy and can be considered in a more free and more historical way.

Guided by Harris we can now see a figure more human and more engaging, whose ideas developed and flexed over time. Harris’s meticulous anatomising of this figure is a major achievement in Hume studies and in studies of the Enlightenment more generally.

The post Hume’s ‘Treatise’ And The Problem Of Early Success appeared first on Standpoint.

Throughout history, civilisations have compensated for this loss by stowing their shared memories in communal institutions. But today, for perhaps the first time in history, large chunks of our culture appear indifferent, even hostile, to their own past.

Look, for instance, at the art world. For many centuries, the West’s artistic traditions were held among its most precious assets, for they conveyed — by melody and brushstroke — so many things otherwise inexpressible about who we are. But at the beginning of the 20th century, culture suddenly took a different turn: artists, no longer content simply to loosen the ties and top buttons of convention, stripped themselves completely, doused their clothes in petrol, and set them alight.

Swept by the modernism surging through Europe’s veins, they sought to overturn and recreate everything anew. Declaring their own traditions irrelevant, they butchered them. Schoenberg irrevocably scrambled tonality. Duchamp scribbled a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

The great oaks of Western art were burned to the ground. Today, radical artists are left scouring through the embers, still looking for last traces of life. Their primary target is now the taboo — the unspoken memory of a once-communal system of values. Tracey Emin shows us her unmade bed, strewn with used condoms and bloodied underwear. Damien Hirst suggests that the 9/11 hijackers “need congratulating”. Every last inherited standard — every last comfort — must be torn from us once and for all.

But by trying so hard to wipe its own memory, art comes perilously close to losing its sense of self altogether. Once the shocks no longer shock, what does it stand for? A few generations after the narcotic highs of modernism, the art world has left itself largely brain-dead.

This tragedy acts as a miniature simulation of just how easily — and quickly — cultures can wither away. And it ought to alarm us to see the same pattern emerging right across Western society.

Consider the main philosophical movements of the 20th century. The majority followed the fearsome footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche — the man who killed God and buried good and evil at His side. And though they grappled with his legacy in a variety of ways, they shared, more or less, the same key assumption: that the traditional pursuits of thought — truth, beauty, meaning — were fundamentally misguided. Philosophy, unable to comment on the world, turned instead to — and on — itself. “Having broken its pledge to be at one with reality,” Theodor Adorno wrote, “philosophy is obliged to ruthlessly criticise itself.”

At the same time, positivism — the belief that only empirical or logically deduced data have any real meaning — took hold among many of the West’s intellectual circles. A.J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell declared that, if we were ever to understand ourselves, it would be by scientific means alone. Cultural memory, which could not be reduced to testable propositions, was made entirely superfluous.

Wherever one looked, the West seemed to be in the midst of a curious experiment: can a civilisation survive on nothing but the impulse to debunk its own presuppositions?

Adorno and his co-author Max Horkheimer tried to tackle this question in Dialectic of Enlightenment. A bleak assessment of Western culture, it argued that modernism, nihilism and reductionism were symptoms of the same fundamental malady — the suicide of Enlightenment thinking. Our insatiable appetite for self-criticism, the monstrous alter ego of philosophical scepticism, was finally gnawing at the very foundations on which we stood.

Adorno and Horkheimer thought it unlikely we would survive, and predicted three historical steps that would see us collapse altogether. High culture — including art — would exhaust itself, taking with it any sense of a shared inheritance. Second, we would lapse into infantile solipsism, duped by the immediate gratifications of capitalism — in particular, cinema and popular music. Finally, society — stupefied by such pleasures — would topple at the first serious test of its walls. Adorno and Horkheimer saw a host of surrogate mythologies — most notably, Nazism — poised to flood into the vacuum left behind.

This final point seemed borne out by the events of the 1930s and 1940s. But then, as the war receded into the past, much of the West suddenly found itself reclining into an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity. To the baby boomers, Adorno and Horkheimer’s stuffy pessimism seemed laughably outmoded. And today, we assume — having never known any different — that this good fortune is simply here to stay. At a time of such global instability — with Putin and Islamism openly challenging our values — we urgently need to reconsider our confidence. Were the last 70 years really the final disproof of Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimism, or did history merely postpone its judgment?

Let us begin with the charge of Western infantilism. Here, at least, Adorno and Horkheimer seem to have been rather prescient. The West is — for all its wealth today — far more childish than even they anticipated. This can be traced — I believe — to the reductionist narratives we adopted as our mantras during the last century.

Think about the social implications of Ayer’s philosophy, emotivism. According to Ayer, moral and aesthetic statements express nothing but the crudest of personal feelings — when I say “Theft is wrong,” all I really mean is “I don’t like theft.” That’s it. Arguments about the thorniest of ethical dilemmas or the most sublime of artworks are reduced to the level of a toddler’s tantrum. The evolutionary psychologists go even further: we’re not just children, they say; we’re animals. According to Richard Dawkins, “Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.” Culture is just a long-winded mating game that, somewhere along the line, seems to have got a bit out of hand.

These are not niche ideas any more. Advertisements humorously depict us as bumbling primates, perhaps stumbling upon coffee or a microwave for the first time. Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.” Such writers give us absolutely no reason to cultivate virtue, no reason to refine our judgments, and every reason to ignore the past and dispense with our responsibilities.

Which, given the easy ride we’re getting, suits us just fine. We seek to make society blinkered, mindless and immature. Look at the way today’s businesses choose to market themselves. They invent names that imitate the nonsense words of babies: Zoopla, Giffgaff, Google, Trivago. They deliberately botch grammar in their slogans to sound naïve and cutesy: “Find your happy”, “Be differenter”, “The joy of done”. They make their advertisements and logos twee and ironic — a twirly moustache here, a talking dog there — just to show how carefree and fun they are.

Those in our society who actually still have children have them later and in smaller numbers than ever. Many simply choose to forego the responsibilities of parenthood altogether. Marriage is an optional extra — one from which we can opt out at any point, regardless of the consequences for the children.

Students expect to be treated like five-year-olds: one conference recently prohibited applause for fear it would, somehow, trigger a spate of breakdowns. Many of my fellow twentysomethings reach adulthood believing they can recreate in their everyday lives the woolly comforts of social media. They discover, with some surprise, that they cannot simply click away real confrontation, and — having never developed the psychological mechanisms to cope with it — instead seek simply to ban it.

The effects of social media don’t end there. A Pew Research Centre study last year found that regular social media users are far more likely than non-users to censor themselves, even offline. We learn to ignore, rather than engage with, genuine disagreement, and so ultimately dismantle the most important distinction between civil society and the playground — the ability to live respectfully alongside those with whom we disagree.

Social media assures us that the large civilisational questions have already been settled, that undemocratic nations will — just as soon as they’re able to tweet a little more — burst into glorious liberty, and that politics is, thus, merely a series of gestures to make us feel a bit better. Hence the bewildering range of global issues we seem to think can be somehow resolved with a sober mugshot and a meaningful hashtag.

In reality, our good fortune is an anomaly. We’ll face again genuine, terrifying confrontations of a kind we can scarcely imagine today. And we’ll need something a little more robust than an e-petition and a cat video.

Sadly, our philosophical approach seems to have been to paper over Nietzsche’s terrifying abyss with “Keep calm . . .” posters. If one were to characterise the West’s broad philosophical outlook today, it would be this: sentimental nihilism. We accept, as “risen apes”, that it’s all meaningless. But hey, we’re having a good time, right?

This is gleefully expressed by our society’s favourite spokespeople — comedians, glorifying the saccharine naivety of a culture stuck in the present. When the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asked the comedian Bill Maher to locate the source of human rights, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “It’s in the laws of common sense.”

Unable to make sense — as Alasdair MacIntyre says — of the mutilated philosophical traditions that once gave our now everyday language its meaning, we curl up into our little corner of history and — fingers crossed behind our backs — resort to wishful assertions. As a classic sentimental nihilist, Stephen Fry, says: “I know that lies will always fail and indecency and intolerance will always perish.” Really? On what evidence?

Far more likely to perish, unfortunately, is the “open society”. As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski wrote: “the extension and consistent application of liberal principles transforms them into their antithesis . . . [A]mong the dangers threatening the pluralist society from within . . . what seems to bode most ill is the weakening of the psychological preparedness to defend it.” Perhaps he had in mind Bertrand Russell’s boast “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong”, which is today echoed by Ricky Gervais: “We have nothing to die for. We have everything to live for.” Will history be kind enough to let us get by on that alone?

If we are to equip ourselves for the challenges ahead, we urgently need to tackle this nihilism. For as long as we see ourselves as the spiritless inhabitants of a meaningless world, we will teeter precariously above a precipice of our own making.

We must also reverse our deep-set suspicion of history. Our universities have, for some time now, been expunging reams of “dead white males” from their reading lists. To a generation with fingers in their ears, such thinkers have nothing to say. Unable to sense the subtle threads that bind us all to a shared past, we latch on instead to whichever tags are dangled in front of us — feminism, transgenderism, post-colonialism. These labels are much easier to grasp, for they require no real knowledge of the past, only of present suffering.

We need some way to engage with each other as members of a common group once again. And though so much of our culture splintered over the last century, there is one strand that might provide us with a starting point: popular culture.

Anchored by the conservatism of public taste, most popular forms — film and music in particular — stayed the course of the 20th century much more successfully than their “higher” cousins. Many can trace an unbroken line back to the very traditions the modernists tried to sever us from. If a contemporary classical composer writes in a tonal style, it sounds peculiar to us: too self-conscious, too kitsch. But in popular music, the continued use of a harmonic system developed centuries ago sounds perfectly natural — precisely because it never tried fully to break away.

Indeed, far more of the West’s teleological code might have been smuggled in popular forms than their highbrow critics ever realised. Just as the eye seems to appear on whichever evolutionary branch one looks at, so the same trends that preoccupied Western musicians a hundred years ago are unfurling in pop music today. Melody strains against its rhythmic and harmonic leashes once again, threatening to snap free altogether. But while Schoenberg — motivated by political ideology — thrust this melodic “autonomy” onto his works, today it grows out of humanity’s simple desire to explore. The prognosis for today’s music is therefore, I believe, much better.

Popular culture crystallised archetypically Western tropes that, if nurtured, may still blossom again. It is probably the closest thing we have today to a myth about ourselves — we do not question, perhaps cannot question, the pre-rational sway it has over us. So ingrained in the public’s mind are the perfect cadence and the love story that not even the Enlightenment’s cynical ticks can burrow deep enough to suck them out. Today, like the lounge suit, their ubiquity conceals a quintessentially Western inheritance.

Which suggests that capitalism — for all Adorno and Horkheimer’s misgivings — might protect, rather than corrupt, culture. Kolakowski notes how totalitarian regimes reach a point of economic stagnation and collapse, taking their culture with them. Capitalism, by reflecting more accurately the intricate web of human relations, does a better — though not, of course, perfect — job of preserving our tastes and traditions.

But it cannot look after us alone. It is but one part of an urgently needed review of who we are and where we’re going. And to face the future with any confidence, we must begin with the memory of where we once came from.

The post Sentimental Nihilism And Popular Culture appeared first on Standpoint.

The first question that More Human poses is: why write a “manifesto” when you are no longer in a position to implement it? Hilton clearly has no immediate desire to return to Downing Street, but his frustrating experiences with the obstinate mandarins of Whitehall do partly act as the inspiration for this book. Yet some of the themes — factory farming, for example — are so divorced from the immediate political agenda that you might wonder at the book’s relevance. Still, Hilton has undoubtedly hit upon an argument that is likely to gather momentum over the next decade. More Human is not a rehash of old debates of Left versus Right, but an examination of big business and big government versus disruptive capitalism and decentralisation.

To offer the appropriate remedy, you first need to diagnose the right problem. For Hilton, it is bureaucracy, which he observes is as much an obstacle within large corporations as within government. Anyone who has ever had to make a phone call to an energy company or enter a job centre will know what a dehumanising process these encounters can be: the anonymous and faceless world of the 21st-century service culture where the computer always says no. In a series of thematic chapters ranging from health and the food industry to government and inequality, Hilton attacks the culture of targets, vested interests and profit, which in his view has led to hospitals devoid of personalised care, factory farming that is damaging our health, a financial services industry distanced from the lives it gambles on, and an exam-obsessed education system that is failing our children. He gives numerous examples of how social policy alienates those whom it is designed to help, as bureaucrats attempt to crowbar people’s complicated lives into their box-ticking exercises.

Hilton is not the first to make this argument; it has been around at least since the 1970s, most evidently in housing when “experts” built tower blocks without consulting those who would actually be living in them. He is on new ground, however, in where he sources the answer. It is not to Singapore or Sweden or even the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (the favoured campus for US-friendly UK politicos) but to Stanford University in California, and more specifically, its design centre, “d.school”.  Hilton’s main contention is that its theory of “human-centred” design, the inspiration behind the invention of Apple products and services such as Uber and Airbnb, should be adopted by the formulators and implementers of public policy. Mrs Thatcher used to say that the Labour government of 1945 had nationalised compassion; Hilton seems to suggest that the Conservatives have the potential to deregulate it. This route is, however, likely to encounter serious opposition. Food banks, for example, may be an area where the state successfully works alongside the voluntary sector in delivering a localised and personal service — but it would be a hard task to convince the public of this point.  

Some of Hilton’s suggestions raise more questions than they answer. He correctly notes that the UK has one of the most centralised bureaucracies in the world and lauds localism as the key way to make government “more human” but he then provides little explanation of how this will be paid for and the necessary process of accountability and assessment. In Hilton’s view, decentralisation must be initiated from above rather than below, which in itself is a problem; the political class does not have a good track record at relinquishing power. Since the 1970s, successive governments of all political shades have proclaimed decentralisation as the answer, but it has often only resulted in eroding the powers of democratic local government. Hilton writes optimistically of putting “long-term human needs” above the “short-term imperative of the numbers”, but in Britain that is precisely how the government is held to account, most notably by its highly centralised media.

More Human is not a serious or original work of political philosophy, given its obvious debt to Schumacher’s “small is beautiful” thesis. Nor is it particularly Conservative; it does not dwell on Thatcherism or the party’s earlier mutations. Hilton reveals himself to have more in common with Russell Brand than Edmund Burke in his zealous quest for radical change, although his conversational style is reminiscent of those airport manuals for businessmen: “How to make Britain more human in ten easy steps.”

Hilton puts the case for a living wage, advocating that business and government should work together to bring it about, although he ignores trade unions, the traditional means by which workers achieved improved standards. He does not hold back when it comes to attacking bankers’ bonuses and business monopolies,  particularly their hold over politicians. He has a vested interest here, as founder of Crowdpac, a start-up designed to counteract corporate donors’ influence on the US political system.

The big theme Hilton introduces but does not sufficiently address is how globalisation and localism can operate in harmony. He is optimistic but does not admit that the only section of society for whom this is true is the metropolitan middle class, those who are ferried around by exhausted Uber taxi-drivers and hire Polish cleaners at minimum wage, but buy locally sourced organic vegetables and fair-trade coffee. For all his concern about poverty and inequality, he has a tendency to position the “poor” as subjects to be pitied rather than individuals capable of their own emancipation. Although his book’s ideas have clearly been internationally sourced, its scope is remarkably narrow. There is little on geopolitics or the “global race” and how this is likely to affect advanced economies such as the UK in their aim to be “more human”. 

It is often said that we are living in an entrepreneurial age, where entrepreneurs (specifically those in tech) have assumed the platform and power that philosophers enjoyed in the 18th century. Hilton has obviously been seduced by this culture of disruption and ingenuity. Indeed, most of his suggestions for human policy-centred design seem to be dependent on citizens’ access to a smartphone. Hilton is investing in a modern form of capitalism that is the very opposite of Fordism, the standardised de-personalised mass production of 20th-century America. Given its roots in California, some have appropriately called this new phenomenon “hippy capitalism” with Steve Jobs the new Henry Ford. It is one which is highly individualistic (or narcissistic) but also confidently proclaims capitalism’s and technology’s potential for social good. “Hippy capitalism” is evident in the UK too, most notably in Tech City, Shoreditch, whither Mark Zuckerberg wannabes flock from all over Europe armed with an optimistic belief that anything is possible at a click.

Hilton’s book is testimony to the increasing influence of Silicon Valley on every aspect of our lives. If anything, politicians are playing catch-up to a development that has long been under way. This is particularly evident among the millennial generation, who have more affiliation to their mobile phone tariff than to any political party and cannot fathom why they still have to vote via a polling booth rather than Facebook. 

Hilton may just be predicting where the political debate is heading. If the Right ends up appropriating “hippy capitalism” and successfully appealing to the winners in the game, then it must be for the Left (rather than UKIP) to connect with its losers, those who feel ever more disconnected from this increasingly connected globalised world.

The book ends, appropriately enough, with a link to Hilton’s campaigning website (click here if you want change). There is something deeply paradoxical in believing that technology has the potential to make the world “more human”, but it may yet be the future of politics.

The post Click Here For The Revolution appeared first on Standpoint.

To bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots, as not to forget we are gentlemen. To cultivate friendships, and to incur enmities. To have both strong, but both selected: in the one, to be placable; in the other, immoveable.

So it would have given Burke great pleasure to have known that perhaps the most powerful tribute paid to him after his death came from an avowed enemy who was also a perceptive admirer, namely the radical philosopher and novelist William Godwin.

Burke died in 1797, when Godwin was busy seeing the third edition of Political Justice through the press. On receiving the news of Burke’s death, Godwin stopped the press and added a long footnote. In Book VII of Political Justice Godwin had imagined a conversation with a representative of “the rich and great” in which he had tried to persuade that class of men to employ their merits for the general good of mankind. In the footnote added to the third edition of 1798 Godwin explained what lay behind this imagined dialogue:

While this sheet is in the press for the third impression, I receive the intelligence of the death of Burke, who was principally in the author’s mind while he penned the preceding sentences.

Godwin began by paying lavish tribute to Burke’s powers of mind: “In all that is most exalted in talents, I regard him as the inferior of no man that ever adorned the face of earth; and, in the long record of human genius, I can find for him very few equals. In subtlety of discrimination, in magnitude of conception, in sagacity and profoundness of judgement, he was never surpassed.” But Burke was also flawed in the very superabundance of his strengths. “Boundless wealth of imagination” was, for Godwin, Burke’s characteristic excellence as a writer.  But his imaginative brilliance was also an ignis fatuus that prevented him from reaching the very highest levels of attainment:

Of this wealth he was too lavish; and, though it is impossible for the man of taste not to derive gratification from almost every one of his images and metaphors while it passes before him, yet their exuberance subtracts, in no inconsiderable degree, from that irresistibleness and rapidity of general effect which is the highest excellence of composition.

Burke’s moral character was also imperfect. No one, Godwin conceded, could ever doubt that Burke was “eminently both the patriot and the philanthropist”; but these noble sentiments were “tinctured with a vein of dark and saturnine temper” which detracted from his stature.

These literary and temperamental blemishes, however, were as nothing compared to the great failure of political judgment which, for Godwin, had vitiated Burke’s life:

the false estimate as to the things entitled to our deference and admiration, which could alone render the aristocracy with whom he lived unjust to his worth, in some degree infected his own mind. He therefore sought wealth and plunged in expense, instead of cultivating the simplicity of independence; and he entangled himself with a petty combination of political men, instead of reserving his illustrious talents unwarped, for the advancement of intellect, and the service of mankind.

For even his contemporaries, then, Burke could seem a puzzling instance of great gifts misapplied.

Richard Bourke’s careful and learned account not just of Burke’s political life, but also of the intellectual commitments and inclinations which Burke set in motion in his public career, brings new clarity to our understanding of a thinker and man of letters who, as we have seen, could baffle those who knew him. Burke lived through, as Bourke puts it, “vicissitudes of empire and revolution”, and this shifting background of successive crises in different theatres of the world — Britain, Ireland, America, India, and finally, France — inevitably required a certain flexibility on the part of those, such as Burke, who attempted to navigate safely through the resulting turbulence. 

For many of Burke’s contemporaries, the result of his intellectual subtlety was simply apostasy. As a result of some obscure reactionary reflex the defender of the American colonists had become the unappeasable enemy of the French revolutionaries; the champion of Indians oppressed by the rule of the East India Company was able eventually to turn a cold eye on the sufferings of the French peasantry. This was the conclusion to which Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine (whom, as Bourke reminds us, Burke had entertained at Beaconsfield as late as 1788) were driven. Bourke, however, argues that Burke had a set of intellectual and moral commitments which did not change over time, and allegiance to which explains the apparently contradictory stances Burke adopted in the midst of different crises:

Burke’s achievement was to analyse the conditions of freedom in minute practical and constitutional detail. His analysis drew on a historical vision of the character of modern politics. This book tries to capture the subtlety of that vision as it was expressed over the course of a parliamentary career. It aims to achieve this by reconstructing Burke’s political thought in relation to the major developments of the age. This requires a full examination of current affairs as well as careful attention to intellectual context.

Such is the ambitious and demanding programme Bourke has set himself in this long and searching book.

Bourke’s forensic anatomising of both the underlying consistency of Burke’s commitments and also of the repeated misreadings to which his career has been subjected is a pleasure to read. Time and time again Bourke skewers a misinterpretation with an acute discrimination. Was Burke’s opposition to the French Revolution an apostasy from his support of the American colonists?  On the contrary, both were dictated by Burke’s aversion to a particular way of doing politics:

Twelve and a half years before the publication of the Reflections on the Revolution in France, in the midst of his defence of the American Revolution, and in the context of a bid for reconstituting the Empire on the basis of a new covenant for the distribution of its powers, Burke was trying to expose purely speculative theories of government and the abstract conception of freedom that accompanied them.

Was Burke’s advocacy of reform in the context of India at loggerheads with his conservative stance towards the ancien régime in France? By no means:

His antipathy was not directed against the principle of natural rights or the contention that civil entitlements had a basis in the laws of nature.  Burke’s defence of property, his promotion of toleration, and his championship of values that ought to guide the government of India were all conducted on the assumption of fundamental rights. What disturbed Burke was the appropriation of the rhetoric of rights to serve the advancement of what he saw as two calamitous political programmes. The first was the goal of resorting to the natural right of self-government as a means of determining the shape of existing civil societies. . . . The second programme turned on the idea that the original rights of nature could challenge the distribution of wealth in established societies.  As Burke saw it, both these sets of pretensions to primordial “rights” in man compelled the French Revolution along its avid course, progressively diminishing the chances of securing any civil entitlements.

Was Burke’s willingness to support Indian or American resistance to the burdens imposed on them by administration undone by his attitude towards the French revolutionaries? Certainly not, because the French Revolution was an event of quite another kind:

Arbitrary power was an essential feature of the spirit of conquest. In Burke’s eyes, resistance or revolution was a legitimate response. Yet the French Revolution had begun not as a rebellion against an oppressive monarch but as a wilful campaign on the part of a faction to usurp the constitution of the state.

Did Burke’s deployment against Warren Hastings of the imperatives to be derived from an understanding of common humanity conflict with his abhorrence of the revolutionary doctrine of universal benevolence? Nothing could be less true:

Throughout the impeachment of Hastings, [Burke] appealed to universal morality founded on the sentiment of humanity. But this is not to be confused with the doctrine of “universal benevolence” that he later came to associate with the philosophy of Rousseau. Cosmopolitan generosity on the Genevan’s part seemed to Burke a notional commitment without any basis in genuine emotion: although a theoretical “lover of his kind,” Rousseau in fact comported himself as a “hater of his kindred.”

In passages such as these Bourke’s patient and reflective scholarship clears away the accumulated heaps of shallow assertion that have impeded for so long a proper understanding of Burke’s thought.

To cleanse the stables of Burkean commentary it is necessary to fight on several methodological fronts at once. At one level, Bourke has shouldered the Herculean task of undoing the strange condescension towards Burke on the part of academic historians. From the mid-20th century onwards plentiful enthusiasm for Burke could be found in faculties of literature and politics: but not in faculties of history. The historians of 18th-century politics, who had been weaned on the thin milk of Lewis Namier even when they distanced themselves from their predecessor’s more extreme positions, affected a de haut en bas loftiness towards both Burke and his associates. They, the historians, knew better. The Rockinghamites were naive and inexperienced, and Burke was nothing more than a wild Irish orator who was listened to with incredulity in St Stephen’s Chapel. The barren years of opposition that the Rockinghamites were forced to endure were their just deserts. The acme of this tradition of deliberate neglect is Leslie Mitchell’s astonishingly perfunctory edition of Reflections on the Revolution in France in the Clarendon edition of Burke: what should have been a landmark of scholarship and the centrepiece of the whole edition was defaced in order that a petty snub could be delivered. Bourke has wisely distanced himself from this tradition. The massive documentation in his narrative exposes the insubstantiality of its underpinnings.

Bourke also shuns another tradition of commentary on Burke, namely the psycho-biographical. As he points out, his is “not a work of psychological biography. It does not seek to uncover the hidden motives that drove its protagonist.” Here he takes aim at works such as Isaac Kramnick’s The Rage of Edmund Burke and Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The Great Melody — both books now somewhat passed into the vale of years, yet still with the power to mislead. For, although Bourke initially presents his abstention from psychological speculation as nothing more pointed than a particular election of approach, in fact he understands very well that to succumb to psychobiographical temptations endangers genuine historical understanding:

Psychobiographical accounts . . . are prone to basic historical error.  They assume, first, that it is possible to determine the character of belief solely by specifying its social context.  Next, they suppose that a distinct and underlying set of attitudes can be surmised beneath the surface of expressed thought . . . This kind of hypothesis is, of course, a recipe for substituting one’s own ideas for those of one’s subject of study.

This is very well put; and it suggests too the severity of the salutary theoretical discipline Bourke has imposed on himself in this book.

Bourke’s chosen method is that of thick contextualisation as practised by the “Cambridge School”, and his book is a fine example of its virtues. At times, such was the range of Burke’s interests, and so extensive therefore the contextualisation required to do justice to it, that Burke himself can disappear from sight (though the helpful inclusion of “overviews” at the beginning of each section of the book helps to keep the major landmarks of the argument before the reader). Sometimes the analysis and description of the context is so elaborate and lengthy that the analysis of the text, when it comes, can seem brief and over before it has really begun. Contextualisation at moments side-steps its ancillary role of textual explanation, and becomes the primary activity. This is particularly true of Bourke’s accounts of the great parliamentary speeches (“American Taxation”, “Conciliation with the Colonies”) where the topics touched on are explained contextually, but the actual argument of the speech itself is, to my mind, sometimes insufficiently explored. 

Nevertheless, the result of this meticulous contextualisation is a richly-detailed account, not just of Burke’s political and moral thinking, but of the various intellectual worlds through which he moved.  The range and depth of Bourke’s research here, and his command of both the primary and secondary archives, is truly impressive.  All future historians of ideas who intend to work on Burke will need to engage with the arguments of this book.

The post Reflections On Bourke’s Burke appeared first on Standpoint.

This in itself implies that those principles of duty or theological belief must differ in some ways from, or at least go beyond, what ordinary human reasonableness would have come up with. But there is a deeper and sharper problem here. The “liberal” view is that it is wrong to penalise people for failings which are not their own fault; good intentions and best efforts must be accepted as sufficient. Yet a human being who happens not to have been informed about the contents of divine revelation stands — if that revelation really does give the essential and otherwise unavailable key to eternal life — at a stupendous disadvantage. That people who have rejected Christianity should go to Hell may seem, at least to a believing Christian, entirely right and proper. But what about the ones who never even had a chance to accept it?

The problem raised by the idea that good pagans will burn in Hell-fire is more troubling than the other familiar problems that arise over the apparent injustice of God. There is the problem of undeserved pain and suffering in this life, for example, or the fact that we see wicked men prospering. In those cases, at least one part of the answer will be that the afflicted may be compensated in the next life, and the wrongdoers will be punished. By all means, let the wicked fry in Hell — but why should they find themselves frying alongside innocent and virtuous pagans?

The robust answer to all these questions is to say: God is simply not “fair”, if by fairness you mean the paltry and inadequate human version of that concept. God’s justice is absolute, more pure and more perfect than anything we can grasp. And it is bound up with the purpose for which He made us, which is also beyond our comprehension. How can the creature judge the Creator? Hath not the potter power over the clay?

In the Christian tradition, few thinkers have taken the robust line more robustly than Saint Augustine. Only those who believed in Jesus Christ, he declared, could be saved. Like other Fathers of the Church, he assumed that after the coming of Christ on earth the Gospel had rapidly become available to the entire human race, which meant that all post-Christ pagans were somehow guilty of rejecting the truth. For the period before Christ, Augustine allowed that God did grant miraculous prophetic knowledge of the advent of Jesus to some individuals (above all, the leading Jewish figures of the Old Testament). But whereas a more liberal-minded thinker might have used this escape-clause to claim that God had granted salvation to huge numbers of virtuous pre-Christian pagans, Augustine was scornful about the very idea that pagans could, by their own efforts, be morally good at all. Any virtues which are not animated by the love of God are, he argued, not in fact real virtues. They are self-regarding performances, tainted by pride — or, in the words popularised by a later writer in the Augustinian tradition, splendida peccata, shining or splendiferous sins.

John Marenbon’s fascinating new book on what he calls the Problem of Paganism takes Augustine’s position as its historical starting-point, and traces subsequent debates all the way to the end of the 17th century. This is much more than, and quite different from, a chronological survey of well-known arguments. While some of the thinkers discussed here (Boethius, Aquinas, Thomas More, Leibniz) are the subjects of huge modern secondary literatures, Marenbon constantly cuts across the standard discussions at a fresh angle, bringing new connections to light. This book is also no routine exercise in the history of medieval (and post-medieval) philosophy; it focuses on literary texts (Dante, Boccaccio, Langland, Chaucer), and on medieval and Renaissance works describing contacts with actual contemporary pagans. Those who know of Marenbon as a world authority on some dauntingly technical areas of medieval philosophy will be pleasantly surprised to encounter, in these pages, Peter of Dusberg’s description of pagan Prussian funerary practices, or Garcilaso de la Vega’s defence of the monotheism of the Incas, or Jean de Léry’s account of the virtues of the cannibalistic Tupí Indians of Brazil.

The long-running debate about whether pagans can be saved has attracted some historical studies in the past, of course. But Marenbon’s Problem of Paganism goes beyond the story of that theological question, embracing two other, closely related issues: whether pagans can have true virtue, and whether they can acquire true wisdom or philosophical understanding. The most liberal position would be to say “yes” to the second of these, and then, on the basis that true wisdom must include true ethics, “yes” to the first; in which case, with the help of some liberal assumptions about how and why God will grant people salvation, one can also give a “yes” to the theological question about whether pagans can go to Heaven. The relation between these three issues was seldom as straightforward as that, however. Much of the fascination of this book lies in seeing how attitudes and arguments shifted to and fro, as the pieces in this three-cornered puzzle were constantly altered and rearranged.

One thing is very clear: the hardline Augustinian position never went away. There were medieval writers who reasserted it (including some very fierce-sounding Franciscans), and in the 17th century Cornelius Jansenius, founder of the French “Jansenist” movement, would stonily insist that the virtues of the best pagans were “not true virtues, but vices hidden by the name and appearance of virtues”.

In the hands of some writers, the hard-line position became more obdurate even as it became less Augustinian. In a marvellously illuminating chapter on Dante, Marenbon points out that, far from representing a standard medieval view (as generations of readers have assumed), his treatment of the pagans is peculiarly severe. Dante does allow that pagans can have real virtue, yet still he insists that virtue is of no help in enabling pagans to avoid Hell: “I am Virgil,” says his virtuous guide, “and I have lost heaven for no other fault than not having faith.” The whole discussion of Dante here justifies Marenbon’s three-cornered approach to the “Problem of Paganism”; by studying the poet’s attitude to pagan wisdom, and placing him in a tradition of what he calls “limited relativism”, he helps us to see how it was that Dante simultaneously softened the Augustinian criticism of merely human virtue, and strengthened the distinction between the sphere of human wisdom and the sphere of faith.

Augustine’s doctrine was always present, but it was seldom a dominant orthodoxy. There were many ways of countering, evading or adapting its arguments. The great and highly original 12th-century theologian Peter Abelard laid down a path which many would follow later. His idea was that if you studied the works of ancient pagan philosophers (those, at least, that were available in the 12th century — one of whom, “Hermes Trismegistus”, was in fact much less ancient than people imagined), you could find clear hints of Christian theology, including knowledge of the Holy Trinity. To some extent, he thought, sheer unassisted human reason had been able to work out not only that there was one God (omnipotent, Creator, etc), but also that that God must have a threefold or triune identity.

As a good Christian, however, Abelard thought that only belief in the incarnated Christ could bring salvation; so he also supposed that where an ancient pagan thinker had tiptoed towards this threshold of Christian belief, God had then stepped in to bestow, by supernatural means, some prophetic knowledge of Christ’s human existence on earth.

In this way Abelard supplied later writers with not one but two very fertile ideas: the notion that valid theological knowledge did circulate among ancient pagans, and the claim that people could be turned, by a “special inspiration” from God, into Christians, long before the actual coming of Christ. (As a theoretical possibility that last idea had already been put forward by Augustine himself, whose “City of God” existed, interspersed among the human race, in all ages; but Abelard’s argument that wise pagans had reached the very threshold of Christian belief by their own efforts was deeply un-Augustinian.)

The most influential opponent of Augustine was Thomas Aquinas. His answer to the question of whether pagans could acquire real wisdom was a resounding “yes”: the towering philosophical structure which he spent a lifetime building had the teachings of Aristotle as its foundations, and the nature of the construction was meant to demonstrate a seamless transition, above a certain level, from the truths of human philosophy to the ones supplied by divine revelation.

On the issue of pagan virtue, Aquinas respected the theological principle that virtue in the full sense must be animated by the love of God, but he dismissed the Augustinian idea that pagans cannot be virtuous at all: they can indeed do “those good works for which the good of nature suffices”.

As for salvation: on this point Aquinas seems most radical of all, but, as Marenbon shows, he was simply developing a line of thought set out by previous writers. While he supposed that God might use “special inspiration” in exceptional cases (including Kaspar Hauser-like children, brought up among wolves without any human instruction), for his general solution to the problem he turned to a quite different concept: “implicit faith”. Pagan philosophers who had arrived at a basic monotheistic understanding could vow to believe whatever might be known about God by those whose knowledge was greater than theirs. In the ancient world, those superior figures were in fact the Jewish prophets, illuminated by God. But it was not necessary for pagans to meet them, or even to know who they were; a sincere belief that such people must exist was quite sufficient. The flexibility — or, if you prefer, generosity — of this argument is rather breathtaking.

All these positions, pro- and anti-Augustinian, were adopted primarily in order to argue about pagans of the ancient world, especially the most virtuous Greeks and Romans. Any interaction between these debates and discussions of contemporary pagans was quite limited, thanks to the continuing belief that, in the words of St Jerome, “no people remains which does not know the name of Jesus, and, even if they have not had a preacher, they cannot however be unaware of the faith from neighbouring peoples”. The discovery of the New World would shake that assumption to its foundations.

The last part of this book is dominated by the effects of that discovery — not just the jolt it gave to abstract knowledge, but the practical effects of a process of conquest which brought Christian governors, and Christian priests, into close contact with real live pagans. Some parts of the resulting ferment of ideas are fairly well known, such as the great mid-16th-century disputation at Valladolid between the humanist scholar and pro-conquest hardliner Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and the Dominican defender of the Amerindians, Bartolomé de las Casas. But Marenbon’s account sets them in a longer context of theological argument which few previous writers have considered in such depth. (Even so, Las Casas’s justification of human sacrifice may still take the reader by surprise.)

Marenbon’s survey of the 16th- and 17th-century debates may be a little more schematic than his searching account of the medieval arguments, but it does suffice to make one large point, which he emphasises in his conclusion: while we may think that the shift from medieval mentalities to early modern ones was a move away from rigid religious dogmas towards more human and tolerant positions, the evidence of these debates fails to support that view. There was no clear direction of “progress”, and the anti-pagan positions of some 17th-century Protestants and Jansenists were more uncompromising than those of almost any previous writers in the Augustinian tradition. Marenbon does not speculate about the reasons for this; one, surely, is the fact that “Socinianism”, from the late 16th century, and “Deism”, from the late 17th, were bugbears that genuinely frightened many mainstream theologians. Both were forms of “rational theology” (the former with a strongly biblical basis, at least to begin with, but the latter not even with that), with far-reaching implications about the power of human reason to work out what God would, or would not, do. The danger that the information provided by the Bible might turn out to be quite secondary (or even irrelevant) to human intuitions about the nature of divine justice now seemed very real, as it had never done before.

Which brings us back to revelation, and our liberal understanding of what is reasonable. It would be easy to read the story told in this book as a struggle between, on the one hand, people who were Augustinian because they were illiberal, and, on the other, their opponents, whose essentially liberal impulses drove them to find ways of accommodating virtuous pagans in the divine scheme of things. Such a portrayal would surely have been unrecognisable to the people involved. The idea that human ethical intuitions were primary, and that theological principles were secondary things, to be moulded to fit them, would have bewildered these thinkers. Today we live in a world where the expectations, and hence also the bewilderment, go in the opposite direction. That is, at the very least, another reason why we need an expert such as John Marenbon to guide us through the thinking of such a very different age.

The post The Pagan Problem In Western Thought appeared first on Standpoint.

In his latest book, How the French Think, Sudhir Hazareesingh, Tutorial Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and a fin connaisseur of French politics, shares his deep knowledge of the French passion for the intellectual quest. In exploring with sharpness and humour the patterns of thought the French have developed over the centuries, he finds some interesting and unexpected relationships between eras and personalities, and explains France’s intellectual evolution. The book is rich in information and anecdotes and easy to read, and it shows a love of France — it is subtitled “An affectionate portrait of an intellectual people” — which is rare today. 

The French are rationalists, and like abstraction; they divide the world into right and wrong, and of course between Left and Right; they are fond of utopianism and believe — or believed — in progress and science. Hazareesingh shows how the main channels of French thought — for example, the revolutionary and the republican — have always coexisted with their opposite creeds — the reactionary and the religious — and share with them the same faults and qualities. Inevitably, a significant part of the book is devoted to the “intellectual”, the famous scholar, preferably living in Paris, who regularly intervenes in public matters because his quasi-spiritual position gives him the right, and even the duty, he thinks, to do so.

But today, according to Hazareesingh, because of the end of Communism, which was deeply rooted among French intellectuals, the fading of structuralism, and anxiety about France’s identity in a globalised world, the French have come to doubt themselves and their intellectual destiny. This can be seen in the decline of France’s intellectual life and in its fading intellectual influence in the world.

I think that the situation is even more depressing than that. Although Hazareesingh recognises that French intellectuals have lost some of their past lustre, he still reckons that “French culture is in many respects more open and transnational than ever” and states that creative fiction is thriving. It is true that there are still great French writers and thinkers, and that newer disciplines like economics offer new kinds of talents. But as a cultural phenomenon, I don’t think that French thought has survived.

France was never such a thing as an entire nation of thinkers; it would be absurd to say that. But there was a deep respect among ordinary people for the cultivated elite, which included politicians and teachers. Now a large part of this elite pays no attention to culture any more, as is shown by the poverty of their language. One cannot help comparing the eloquence of, say, Charles de Gaulle, and the spiritual vacuum that someone like François Hollande represents. De Gaulle said, “Hardship attracts the man of character, as it is in grasping it that he fulfils himself”; and “As for power, I couldn’t leave it before it leaves me.” Hollande says, “There will be a support that will be made” or “Soldiers, they undertake perilous missions”. (Hollande is very fond of repeating the subject of a sentence, as three-year-olds do; I hope my translation conveys its full infantile flavour.) Or open any recent fiction or non-fiction publication in French: the vocabulary range is shrinking, the sentences are three words long and the form is always fashionably deconstructed — but not à la Derrida.

If the present is embarrassing, is the past as glorious as one might suppose? Hazareesingh, describing the French intellectual pantheon, includes all the main strands of French thought — Descartes, positivism, Gaullism, Marxism, structuralism, liberalism — all inevitably placed on the same level. In that situation it is impossible not to compare various periods and people — and then, not to pause and wonder. Why all the praise for Sartre and Marxism? Or for the structuralists? French Marxism, a rather rigid kind of Leninism followed by a Latin Quarter Maoism, was either intellectual nonsense or an insult to real people struggling in the USSR and elsewhere. As for structuralism, apart from the great Lévi-Strauss and the sometimes interesting but strange Foucault, it is difficult to see much sense in, for example, Lacan’s one-minute sessions where he shouted at patients for a large fee.

I am left to wonder: did all countries have such strange intellectual moods? Were the French mad? Were they really thinking? It all depends on what you call thinking. I may be very un-French, but because something is grandiose or unintelligible doesn’t make it worthy of being called thinking. Support for revolution and destruction — of institutions or of the bourgeoisie, for example — doesn’t necessarily justify the description of thinking.

I suspect that Hazareesingh would disagree with me. There is a discreet ambiguity present in the book, which becomes stronger and stronger the further one gets through it. The first part remains very neutral, maybe because it is further away in time; nearer the present, one feels that Hazareesingh is more interested in the intellectuals of Saint-Germain-des-Prés than in, say, Raymond Aron. I don’t mind him having his preferences, but I have mine too. The book ends with a strong critique of Alain Finkielkraut, a writer famous for his passionate defence of French republicanism, laïcité and integration as against multiculturalism. Hazaree-singh sees Finkielkraut as “the ultimate embodiment of the closing of the French mind” and a supporter of “ethnic nationalism”. But Finkielkraut has never said or written such words: he is just a very clever cultural conservative. I find the contrast between Hazareesingh’s harsh treatment of him and his relative indulgence towards those nice gauchistes rather striking.

So we diverge: I think the French mind is closing partly because of the damage done by the gauchistes — they deconstructed so much that there is little left to deconstruct, and they forced all subsequent scholars to think in a very restricted way; Hazareesingh thinks it is because of conservatives like Finkielkraut. Or maybe we are both wrong, and the truth is to be found elsewhere.

How the French Think expresses a kind of fascination for the French way of thinking that I have often noticed among many scholars in France and elsewhere, and which has always surprised me. “French intellectual constructs are speculative in that they are generally the product of a form of thinking which is not necessarily grounded in empirical reality,” writes Hazareesingh. And it is true: Sartre’s theoretical work is unintelligible, his political thought dogmatic; Deleuze’s — see, for example, Mille Plateaux for a good laugh — approaches delirium; Bourdieu’s, even dealing with social “reproduction”, divided reality between right and wrong, the latter being forbidden because it was bourgeois. From a more political perspective, even when The Gulag Archipelago was published in 1973, many intellectuals didn’t want to accept the brutal truth and kept longing for the dictature du prolétariat. But shouldn’t intellectuals care about empirical reality, either as a starting point or as a result? If speculation is necessary, shouldn’t it be always linked to facts, because both challenge each other? Isn’t it possible that the French have gone too far in their worshipping of speculation? I tend to think so.

We too often forget that the name “intellectual” itself is a French invention. There is a tendency, because the French exported the concept very successfully in the past, to try to interpret any thinking phenomenon as an “intellectual” one, and to believe that where there are no proper intellectuals, there is no thinking. However, as Stefan Collini brilliantly demonstrated in Absent Minds, it is France that is the exception rather than the other way around. The way it has promoted the figure of the intellectual is unprecedented in history, and it would be pointless to try to find the same patterns in other countries which have other traditions. British thinkers, in that perspective, have been sceptical of the term “intellectual” for two reasons: they felt superior to what they saw as French immaturity or grandiloquence, but at the same time inferior to them, because they watched the exceptional treatment given to intellectuals in France with great envy.

Just because a country remains reluctant to recognise its intellectual character doesn’t mean it doesn’t have one. Conversely, just because a country constantly boasts about its tradition of thought doesn’t mean that the tradition is still alive. Progressive thinkers such as Sartre have always preferred — isn’t it much easier? — to paint large abstract pictures, and then, when reality contradicted them, to turn a blind eye and blame someone else — the bourgeoisie, usually.

British thinkers, from Adam Smith and David Hume to Friedrich Hayek (Britain being his adopted country), from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and John Stuart Mill to John Gray, from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott and Roger Scruton, have always started from the facts and the patterns of life and tried to make sense of them, without being obsessed by the fact that they were or were not thinkers. British people think because they don’t think they think. I wish the French would do the same.
 

The post Clowns To The Left Of Me appeared first on Standpoint.