June 26, 2011
Holiday Reads
Although the act of writing still feels akin to dragging razorwire across my face, I’m OK with reading.
Next week I’m off to France for some serious Alpine cycling. But books are required for chill out periods. So I’m looking for recommendations.
In the travel bag already are:
- Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook
- Thomas Hardy: Far From the Madding Crowd
- Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day
- Michael Frayn: Copenhagen
- Plus a bunch of Bernard Williams essays, and some post-Treatise Hume (it’s a pipedream paper that I’ll never write).
I would appreciate suggestions for intelligent but page-turning novels, and also some non-fiction. Indeed, if there is a book you think so good that I should read it before any of the above-listed, then certainly say so.
June 13, 2011
2 Stuffs
Announcement 1: I will be speaking at the Balliol Left Caucus this coming Thursday. If you’re in Oxford, consider coming along.
I intend to talk for about 15 minutes, and then open things up to discussion. Which will hopefully be less boring, for all concerned. The topic I’ll introduce I’ve entitled: “The Conservative Left? – Predicaments and Prospects for Thinking Leftists in a Globalised World”. Tony Judt can get you thinking:
“The real problem facing Europe’s Socialists (I use the term purely for its descriptive convenience, since it is now shorn of any ideological charge) is not their policy preferences, taken singly. Job creation, a more ‘social’ Europe, public infrastructural investment, education reforms, and the like are laudable and uncontroversial. But nothing binds these policies or proposals together into a common political or moral narrative. The Left has no sense of what its own political success, if achieved, would mean; it has no articulated vision of a good, or even of a better, society. In the absence of such a vision, to be on the left is simply to be in a state of permanent protest. And since the thing most protested against is the damage wrought by rapid change, to be on the left is to be a conservative.”
8pm onwards, in the Bajpai Room, Balliol College, Oxford.
Announcement 2: As recently noted, not much is happening around here at the moment. However, things are happening elswhere. Two recommendations from Fenland Poly-based writers.
Louisa Loveluck at the almost eponymous Leloveluck, where she thinks and writes about middle east politics. Highly recommended if you want an informed perspective on a region where most western reporting appears to be chronically ignorant. (Posting appears to have been suspended due to exams, but no doubt will resumt soon. I hope.)
Dana Smith at the not at all eponymous, but vocationally-inspired, Brain Study. Applying the insights of experimental psychology to issues of public interest and importance. Again, highly recommended for those who want to read opinions by people who actually know what they are talking about (for example).
June 12, 2011
On Writing, and Myself.
“And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.” – Montaigne, Essays
I’ve often thought about trying to write about depression. But when you’re depressed, there’s no point in writing about it. Everything, after all, is pointless. Most especially your own meditations on your own pointlessness. And when you’re not depressed, well, you don’t want to write about being depressed. It’s depressing.
So I’m not going to write about being depressed. I’m going to write about not wanting to write. In which I am of course being slightly dishonest. Because if I really didn’t want to write, I wouldn’t be writing at all. (Though actually everything turns on what you take by “really”. And the way you take to – or reject – various putative paradoxes in human psychology and the philosophy of mind. But I’m not going to write about those.)
I used to love writing. It was my hobby. Even before I started blogging,* I used to adore producing vast reams of turgid, tedious, self-involved prose. Most of it was crap, even by the standards of whatever age I was then. But it served a purpose beyond the GCSE/A-Level/Degree study I was officially engaged in. It was in itself therapeutic. Challenging. Entertaining. And quite often actively fun. I used to write for fun. And that made studying all the easier – and guaranteed that deadlines were never a problem for me.
But now I don’t love writing. Now I (almost) hate it. I get anxious before I have to do any. I dislike the process when I’m doing it. I’m dissatisfied with the end products. All of it bores me. And it’s not fun. It’s not exciting. It’s not even a good mental work-out anymore.
What happened? I’m not really sure.
I stopped enjoying writing sometime last March. I know it was around March, because in February I wrote 13,000 words on the interminable bore and 3rd rate moral philosopher, Francis Hutcheson (yes, he of the weird chicken fetish).
I detest Hutcheson’s writings, but regardless I wrote that piece at nobody’s behest and for nobody’s benefit (though what the hell, here’s an upload). The thing is, I still enjoyed writing it. It allowed me to work out a few conceptual moves, and in terms of keeping track of Hutcheson’s “arguments” (I use the term loosely), it was more efficient than a series of notes that, if unearthed in two years, would mean nothing.
Right now the prospect of doing anything like that again fills me with horror. Indeed I thought about writing a review of Jonathan Wolff’s new book Ethics and Public Policy for this blog. It’s quite a good book. Accessible to beginners, but cleverly addressing more interesting philosophical issues as it goes along. But frankly, I can’t face telling you anything more about it. The prospect appalls me.
So OK. I don’t like writing anymore. Boo hoo for me. So what?
Well this is my party, and I’ll gaze at my reflection in the glittering pool if I so choose.
Number one: if I’m going to be an academic, not liking writing is something of a problem. Writing is going to be a big part of my job. Career-satisfaction does not appear to loom. Nasty.
Number two: this apathy and dissatisfaction is worrying. What is wrong with me? Have I permanently changed? Can people even change that dramatically and suddenly? Is this symptomatic of a wider, growing apathy with intellectual pursuits more generally? I don’t know, and I don’t like it. But I don’t really give enough of a fuck to write to you about it.
Number three: bringing together the above considerations, if I don’t write, will I get stupid? All the cleverest people write all the time, even if it’s just in vast piles of unpublished notebooks. When I used to write regularly, I stayed sharp. Literally, a sort of mental workout. Does giving it up mean a one-way ticket to cognitive obesity?
Dear readers, I’d like to explore this further. Except I wouldn’t, because as I said, I can’t be fucked. I started with a quote from Montaigne – prolific writer that he was, the bastard – so I’ll end with one too. “Everyone thinks his own fart smells as sweet as apples”.
-
* Some 4 years ago now, though the early efforts have thankfully been dispatched into the abyss.
-
June 5, 2011
Telly Don University
So Telly Don University – or the New College of Humanities – has been unveiled. Professor A.C. Grayling is the mastermind, and apparently the head honcho too. “Top” academics have been recruited to the cause. Proper academics, predictably, don’t like it.
Now don’t get me wrong, TDU definitely suggests some unpleasant prospects. As Chris Bertram has pointed out to me, an institution charging £18K a year will give other university Vice Chancellors a pre-text to both bust open the new £9K fee cap, and maybe even privatise in a bid to “compete”.
Personally, however, I see TDU as being – at most – a catalyst. My sense is that the flood gates are open on fees (not least as the maths was done so badly that the Treasury is going to have to fork out loads under the current regime anyway), and that universities not receiving significant state support may opt to privatise anyway. After all, why put up with the constant government interference if you’re not even getting the money any more?
In any case, what’s happening to British higher education looks like part of a much bigger process. Namely, the systematic marketisation of publicly provided services, coupled with a belief that in the brave new world this is the only option. Meaning that assaults on state-provided services are seen as both status quo, and as inevitable developments, by the politicians carrying them out. Thus drastically reducing any room for alternatives to find a voice, or for policies to be reconsidered and reversed.
In sum, I think that British higher education is undergoing a sea change that started (at least) with New Labour when it bought the basically pro-market vision of politics which reduces the state to the fawning provider of safe-habitats for business,whilst abandoning anything that can’t make a profit to die in the cold. I don’t know what will happen to Britain’s university system over the next 20 years, and I’m not optimistic. But I doubt Telly Don University alone is going to make that much of a difference.
Accordingly, we might like to do a spot of pointing and laughing to cheer ourselves up. TDU bills itself as attempting to rival Oxbridge (a boast Mary Beard has already queried). Its main claim to this appears to be two-fold: 1) that Famous People will do some teaching, and 2) students won’t just do arts subjects they will also have “science literacy” and business-type awareness programmes to boot.
Both of these things make me chortle. Let’s first consider some of the Famous People who will allegedly be teaching at TDU:
- Richard Dawkins: loud-mouthed pop-biologist, who writes exceptionally bad books about religion and who would fail any decent undergraduate philosophy first year course.
- Steven Pinker: pop-psychologist, generally not taken seriously by large sections of the psychology research community because he allegedly ignores and manipulates data that doesn’t fit his story-book narratives. [If anyone genuinely qualified on this subject could say one way or the other, it would be good to hear from you - this is just reporting what I've heard from people in the field.]
- Niall Ferguson: telly-don extraordinaire, who will apparently be teaching economics, even though he is not an economist. He is in fact a pop historian (who hasn’t done any serious work for donkey’s years), who has appointed himself a finance expert following his success in the oh-so-tricky world of making money in hedge funds. (Amusingly, rival telly don Tristram Hunt claims that Ferguson’s successful book on the history of money and finance – later a TV series, of course – manages to hardly mention Marx and Engels at all. So a rounded education can no doubt be expected from a man who is certainly anything but a right-wing ideologue.)
- A.C. Grayling: telly-don philosopher, who is mostly famous for writing a lot of books. The reason he writes so many books, so quickly, is of course that none of them are any good.
- Ronald Dworkin: actually a serious academic with an incredibly illustrious publishing history, who had an enormous impact upon both political and legal philosophy over the past 50 years. But still notorious at Oxford – about 30 years after he left – for being the laziest and most unhelpful supervisor imaginable (I was warned not to expect any contact with Dworkin at all if I went to NYU for a masters degree, whatever it said on their website.)
Also a huge hypocrite, given that he spent most of his career writing about egalitarianism, and is now a flagship academic at an institution which is anything but.
You get the picture. Big famous names are not the same as good, serious educators of university minds. If you go to TDU thinking you’ll get a good education just because some famous people are there, you’re a fool. As anyone who’s actually been taught well at university level knows, the best teachers are not the big public names (even if they are famous within the academy). But given that TDU will charge £18K a year, you’re a rich fool if you go there. So more fool you, as at least hopefully this will free up some places for serious young thinkers at Britains’ other, proper, universities. Who can hopefully be drawn from the state sector thanks to some reduction in competition from brats who just want a primer course for the City.
As for the second alleged benefit – science literacy and business awareness – this is highly amusing. If you want “science literacy” you can read Ben Goldacr’s book Bad Science, and then bother with some of Stephen Jay Gould’s wonderful output. If you want more than mere science “literacy”, then you have to do a science degree and become a scientist. Sorry about that, but the human mind is limited and specialization is required if you want to acquire a serious understanding of any contemporary field. TDU can’t undo the complexities and advances of modern day academic divisions of labour, whatever else it may claim.
Regarding “business awareness”, or whatever, this is also silly. You don’t get good at “real world” thinking by “studying the real world”. You get it by training your brain to think sharply and analytically, applying these skills elsewhere as and when it is fit to do so. Some people never learn to transfer these skills, and some people have them without being any good at academia. Either way, it actually turns out that the best education for business is not a business education. (You may be surprised to learn this, but apparently it’s actually philosophy.) So you’d be just fine at normal, proper university.
So overall I’m inclined to laugh at Telly Dons University. It looks like a big con, taking the money of rich people silly enough to think they can buy a proper education, at premium rates, simply because there’s some Famous People on the tin.
But, sadly, that’s not the end of the story. Because TDU is plainly responding to a certain sort of demand, and a wider and ever more entrenched expectation of what universities should be, and what they should provide. And if TDU is successful – which it may very well be – it’s exactly what Vice Chancellors and politicians will point to as the model for the rest to adopt.
Hence, we should laugh and be merry this evening, for in the morrow the hangover is coming. And it’s going to be a nasty one indeed. Even if TDU is only one small part of the bigger mess.
UPDATE: I see that Peter Singer and Simon Blackburn are also members of the Telly Don 14.
Peter Singer: Philosophical charlatan par excellence. A disseminater of complete nonsense, from a man who couldn’t think his way out of a wet paper bag. Even if he did do exceedingly well for himself by generally just being controversial and annoying.
Simon Blackburn: Actually one of the most distinguished and sharp-thinking philosophers of the past 30 years. A seriously impressive mind (even if he’s spent the last decade saying the same thing over and over again). However, by all accounts a close rival to Dworkin for Laziest and Least Helpful Teacher On Offer. At least judging by the reports of his supervisees. Whose testimony can be effectively summarised as: “He doesn’t read your work. Even if you’re his PhD student”.
What a stellar teching line up the TDU has on offer!
