The Virtual Stoa

Josh Cherniss is holding a Five Greatest Marxists poll. Go and take part. I went for Gramsci, Luxemburg, Benjamin, Adorno and Habermas, raising a querymark over whether the last one was allowed, and worrying over whether this list was a little too full of the Frankfurt School.

Norm (he and I are linking to each other far too much these days) wants to know if he can have Groucho.

(Groucho: “Well waddaya say girls? Are we all gonna get married?” Interjection: “All of us? But that’s bigamy!” Groucho: “Yes, and it’s big o’ me, too.”)

The following comments thread is developing over at New Labour wannabe Paul Richards’ blog, The Thinker which, to use one of his own phrases, may deserve a wider audience.

For a bit of background, just before his blog moved from its old to its new address, Richards circulated a list of pieces of useful information people might want to know about Michael Howard, when it became clear that he was going to be the next leader of the Conservative Party. One of the pieces of information was a claim that “Oxford Rabbi Schmuley Boteach” had accused Michael Howard of “spiritual Nazism”. Anthony Wells pointed out why this claim was bogus: not only was the rabbi’s name misspelled, but insofar as he had accused anyone of “spiritual nazism” it was Michael Howard’s student son Nick Howard (you can read a bit about the episode here), and not the future Leader of the Opposition.

Having read an entry at Harry’s Place advertising the new-look Thinker, I spent some time yesterday reading its entries, wasn’t very impressed by the author’s powers of reasoning, and posted a few comments while I was there to say so. And underneath the post welcoming readers to the new site, I started this thread:

Me: Are you ever going to take down or (since you don’t believe in ’stealth-editing’) apologise for posting the accusation of “spiritual nazism” against Michael Howard on the earlier incarnation of your blog? (It’s still up there today).It’s a gross accusation to level at anyone, let alone the son of a refugee from European anti-semitism whose close relatives were almost certainly killed in the Holocaust, you don’t justify it at all on your blog, and a moment’s search on the web suggests that the charge was not in fact levelled against Michael Howard at all.

(Or does The Thinker hold to indefensible opinions about moral responsibility for the alleged sins of the sons?)

Or do you feel able to disclaim responsibility for printing those words because you were just reproducing other people’s poison?

(Don’t worry. I’m going to get bored of posting comments on this blog soon, probably as soon as I finish this bottle of beer.) [November 7, 2003 06:54 PM]

Paul Richards: Drinking and thinking is seldom a good combination in my experience. It makes you the virtual equivalent of the pub bore. [November 7, 2003 08:34 PM]

Me: The question is not whether I’m a pub bore or not (that’s a dull question, and it doesn’t matter what the answer is). The question is about your moral character. And so far, the answer’s not looking too good for you.

Circulating false claims on your blog and then refusing to either justify them, take them down, or apologise for them when challenged on the matter seems to me to reflect rather poorly on you.

I’ve explained above why I think the “spiritual nazism” jibe is in particularly poor taste when applied to Michael Howard. I’ll just add two things here:

First, that I note that you don’t provide either the source for the claim you make, nor do you say who compiled the document you quote (just that you think it deserves a wider audience — though how much wider you don’t say: somehow I doubt you’d like your Tory opponent at the next election, assuming that you stand, to know that you’ve been circulating this particular falsehood about the Leader of the Opposition). That, combined with your refusal to justify or withdraw the charge, seems to me to be pretty cowardly on your part.

Second, that this blog announces on its mission statement that it’s going to provide some rebuttals to some of the political lies currently in circulation. If you don’t take the opportunity to renounce or rebut this one, I think that your readers are entitled to draw the conclusion that you’re a hypocrite on this score, and for a much more serious reason than that you mock people for the kind of spelling errors you make yourself.

I’ve asked the question once about whether you’re apologising. Your readers will already have noticed that you ducked it and threw some cheap abuse back at me in return. I’m asking it again now — and, if necessary, I’m happy to ask it fourteen times.

You’re not Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, some professional muck-raking spreader of slander, or some petulant teenager with a blog that nobody’s ever going to read. You are (according to its website) the Chair of a major national political institution (the Fabian Society), and it shouldn’t be a problem for you to be held to minimally decent standards of behaviour on your weblog. [November 8, 2003 01:11 PM]

Paul Richards: Like I said, the pub bore. Yawn. [November 8, 2003 02:22 PM]

Readers, am I being boring, or is he being stupid and objectionable? The answer’s probably “both”, but it seems to me to be the use of tedium in a worthwhile cause.(And let’s consider this post the third time I’ve asked him this question, since I dare say that he’ll probably find out soon enough that I’ve reproduced my questions and his non-answers over on this blog).

Here’s the random college course name generator.

And since I’m going to be spending the weekend in front of the telly, rather than in front of the computer screen, I should point out now (see above) that tomorrow is one of the most famous dates in the French Republican calendar — the 18th of Brumaire…

I expect that I shall spend much of the weekend in front of the telly, supporting New Zealand against South Africa, Ireland against France, Wales against England, and Scotland against Australia.

And I expect that on at least three counts I shall be disappointed, but that I shall enjoy myself enormously nevertheless.

Christopher Frayling was on Desert Island Discs this morning (repeat show, Sunday 11.15am), and answered the question I posed at the end of this post by choosing a song from Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du Village and the Ennio Morricone music from the climactic three-way duel at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as two of his records.

From today’s Guardian:

The prince’s secretary said he knew the allegation was untrue for “three principal reasons”. “Firstly, the Prince of Wales has told me it is untrue and I believe him implicitly,” he said. “Secondly, anyone who knows the Prince of Wales at all would appreciate that the allegation is totally ludicrous and, indeed, risible.

“And thirdly, the person who has made the allegation unfortunately has suffered from health problems and has made other, unrelated allegations which have been investigated by the police and found to be unsubstantiated.”

These aren’t especially good reasons (how stupid do you have to be to believe something just because it’s the Prince of Wales who tells it to you?). But they happily put me in mind of one of the best TV programmes, I’ve ever watched, the documentary, “Charles: the Private Man, the Public Role”.In its finest scene, Charles explains why it’s OK for him to travel to the Middle East and hobnob with the merchants of death at the ceremonial opening of arms fairs, given that he’s supposed to be such a non-political figure. On that occasion he too managed to come up with “three reasons”, which I think were roughly as follows (this is quoting from a decade-old memory, so apologies if I get it slightly wrong): (i) we make arms jolly well in Britain, (ii) if we didn’t sell them, somebody else would, and (iii) human nature being what it is, there’ll always be a need to sell powerful weapons to people. So that’s settled, then.

The whole film, in fact, is a marvellous symptom of the crisis in the House of Windsor at the time. Intended as a show to rehabilitate Charles after the Diana Panorama interview, and organised by a sycophantic (if not hagiographic) Jonathan Dimbleby, the programme in fact just fed out yards and yards of rope, with which the Prince hanged himself, repeatedly. The arms-fair discussion was followed by a shot of the royals processing into some banqueting hall with the President of Portugal or somesuch, preparing to get their snouts in the trough, as Charles’s voiceover solemnly described how valuable it was for Britain to have a royal family so selflessly devoted to duty. (Another priceless bit was on what a mistake the government was making when it took his yacht away.)

Incidentally, I see that since I linked to throneout.com below their server has been overwhelmed with visitors. (I’m not sure that my link was the chief reason for this.) They have a useful statement posted up there this morning, which raises important questions about the position of the royal family with respect to the law.

Matthew Turner has assembled an interesting diagram here (inspired by this Chris Lightfoot effort here), plotting the results of British general elections since 1945. It’s a bit rough round the edges, but that’s not important.

What I’m struck by, after eyeballing it for a short while, is the way in which the vectors separating the 1983 and the 1987 elections are about the same length as those separating the 1997 and 2001 elections, yet whereas quite a lot of seats changed hands in 1987 (such that the election can now plausibly be viewed as Labour’s first step on the long road from the nadir of 1983 to electability), the election of 2001 was, in terms of seats, a rerun of 1997.

Which says something about (i) the funny mechanisms we have in this country for translating votes into seats, (ii) the role of the Liberal Democrats in the current set-up and (iii) the kind of hole the Conservatives have dug themselves into.

(And are they now today passing up the spade?)

One of the curious things about being a politics academic going to classics lectures on Herodotus (see below) is that J. Enoch Powell is regularly mentioned, but in his capacity as author of a standard reference work, A Lexicon to Herodotus, rather than in his more familiar (to me, at least) capacity as racist hatemonger.

It reminds me of the time I was reading a very dull book from 1930 by Richard Hope on The Book of Diogenes Laertius (quite unlike DL’s own book, which is fabulous, full of good things). On several occasions, as I remember, the Book of Richard Hope footnoted Friedrich Nietzsche’s DL scholarship — for before he became the Nietzsche we know today, he was a professional classicist at the university of Basel who wrote rather dull articles on DL’s sources, and those who work on DL are understandably more interested in these pieces than, say, Beyond Good and Evil or Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Writing those words reminds me that Powell did go through a phase of modelling himself on Nietzsche: think of his obsession with landing a chair in his 20s, which led to his brief migration to Australia just before the outbreak of war. But, all things considered, I think that Nietzsche made the right career move when he gave up his academic classics. It would have been much better for all of us — and for the world of Herodotus scholarship — if Powell hadn’t.

From this week’s Onion:

WASHINGTON, DC–In an effort to weed out pedophiles, two FBI agents, identified only as “Cutiepie1994″ and “KoalaLover,” unknowingly communicated with one another in the under-12 chat room of TweenTalk.com for almost two hours Tuesday. “You should see me in my new bathing suit. It’s really rad,” Cutiepie wrote. “Kewl. Guess what? My parents aren’t home right now,” KoalaLover responded. Two minutes after their lengthy Internet conversation ended, KoalaLover unknowingly passed Cutiepie on the way into the bathroom.

I assume that this kind of thing goes on all the time, but that may just be my kneejerk refusal to take this kind of moral panic seriously kicking in, again.

Henry at Crooked Timber helpfully reminds readers just what was going on in Howardland when Jeremy Paxman asked that question fourteen times…

Yesterday I went to a superb lecture by UC Berkeley’s Leslie Kurke on Herodotus-as-Aesopian-fabulist, which ended with a discussion of the famous Hippokleides story:

At last the day arrived for the marriage feast and for the Kleisthenes’ announcement of whom he had chosen from all. Kleisthenes sacrificed one hundred cattle, and summoned both the suitors and all of the citizens of Sicyon to the banquet. After dinner, the musical competition among the suitors was held, as well as also the competition in speaking on a set theme and in these, Hippokleides surpassed all the other suitors. As the drinking continued, Hippokleides ordered the flute player to play a dance tune for him, and when the flute player obeyed he began to dance. Presumably, Hippokleides danced to his own satisfaction, but Kleisthenes, as he watched the whole business, was disturbed. Hippokleides rested for a little while, but then he ordered the servants to bring in a table, and when it had been brought in, he danced on it, first of all Lakonian dances and after that Attic dances, he stood on his head on the table and waved his legs in the air. Even though Hippokleides was no longer acceptable to him as a son-in-law, because of the shamelessness of his dancing, Kleisthenes did not wish to berate him and restrained himself during the first two sessions of dancing but when he saw him waving his legs in the air he was no longer able to restrain himself and said: “Oh son of Teisander, you have danced away your wedding”: but Hippokleides replied: “Hippokleides doesn’t care”.

And today I’m very pleased to read on the BBC website that Johnny Cash’s son John Carter Cash said of his dad at the 37th Annual Country Music Awards that “It’s amazing my father had such a life that he could expose himself and still never lose his dignity”.The Man in Black doesn’t care!

Though it’s unclear whether he was waving his legs in the air at the time.

Still, they should never have given a prize to American Recordings IV: The Man Comes Around: unlike just about everything else he ever did, it’s a pile of shite. (Danny Boy? Bridge Over Troubled Water? Can it get worse? Yes it bloody well can: We’ll Meet Again to close out the disc. Yuck.)

Here’s an anti-monarchist site I hadn’t seen before:

I saw over at the normblog that Richard Wollheim had died (here’s the link to Arthur Danto’s obituary in the Guardian), news which brings to mind G. A. Cohen’s moving words of tribute at the end of his essay on “The Future of a Disillusion”, which appeared in the New Left Review and then as the final chapter of his Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality [pp.264-5].

It can be hard to maintain dedication to socialism in a climate where it is regarded as irrelevant. When you are out of joint with the times, you look for sources of confidence, to strengthen your resolve. In closing, I shall mention two of mine. When I did graduate work in Oxford, it was the prevailing notion that there were in philosophy plainly right and plainly wrong answers, that a hard-headed clear-mindedness would without too much greater ado generate the right ones, and that the latter were likely to be not surprising but already familiar. In 1963 I left Oxford to lecture in the Department where Richard Wollheim had just become Professor. On Wednesday afternoons he presided over a staff discussion group in which the prevailing notion was different from at Oxford, and one that I experienced as liberating. It was that on any large philosophical question there were bound to be different views (that was the operative word), that it could be hard to tell which one was right, and that there was no reason to suppose that the right one was comfortable or long since known. I remember how Richard would restore a sense of perspective, when one of us had rehearsed some accepted wisdom, by uttering a corrective sentence which began, ‘well, there is, of course, the other view, that…’ And I also remember the thrill I felt, listening to his beautiful inaugural lecture, when he said of his predecessors A. J. Ayer and Stuart Hampshire that they did not encourage ‘the desire to agree’. In times like these, Richard’s generous liberalism is a good thing to have experienced, and to remember.

The other source of strength was found in the letter Friedrich Engels wrote to his comrade Friedrich Sorge the day after Karl Marx died. Given the Virtual Stoa’s interest in dead socialists, I might dig that one up on another occasion (the letter, not the dead socialist).

The political compass survey is doing the rounds again, and quite a few of the bloggers of the world have united to record their marks on this page.

There are no real surprises.

If you want to be helpful, blogger or not, why not visit Chris Lightfoot’s attempt at a new, improved version of the same kind of thing (and then go read his blog)?

Time for November’s glance into the archives: here’s what some of you are looking for when you stumble onto this site:

landy llanelli michael howard
which royal caught with flunkey
d*gging [x lots]
lyrics “my little tony”
human brain photos
poster “w. h. auden” “september 1 1939″
“michael howard” “bernard howard”
virtual stoa [x few]
senior royal named Diana
tab slang
ray krok and the mcdonalds brothers
rivers of bablyon the melodians
senior royal identity burrell
Ruscova Jews
bad elephants
paul burrell sex act royal wharfe
Tiggy Legg Bourke pics [!!!]
ed vaizey
llanelli jewish
Ruscova hecht
rhetoric analysis George W Bush columbia tragedy
PARISIAN LEOPARD CAT
sylvie krin [x2]
de Tocqueville writing
hitchens booze
footage of UK royal family
rosa luxemburg tortoise

Bad elephants?

November is the season of revolution, when mists and mellow fruitfulness give way to barricades and the smell of burning rubber (as my friend Ben once memorably wrote), but it’s also the time when the annual university admissions season is once more upon us. A pile of UCAS forms will shortly be arriving in my pigeonhole for applicants for the PPE and Modern History and Politics degrees here at Magdalen, and quite soon we’ll have the usual battery of articles in the Telegraph and the Spectator insisting that the universities are discriminating against the best candidates from the independent schools and from the Guardian and the New Statesman suggesting it’s the other way around. And this all raises a lot of highly-politicised things to talk about, most of them probably highly inappropriate for discussion on a blog as frivolous as this one likes to be.

Here, in any case, is a slightly-edited-for length-extract from Stefan Collini’s excellent essay on the Government White Paper on the Future of Higher Education from the current edition of the London Review of Books, when he turns to the fraught question of “access”:

To restore a little sanity to this issue, let’s begin with the following, rather striking fact. In Britain, entrance to a university is almost the only widely desired social good that cannot be straightforwardly bought. Money can buy you a better house than other people; money can buy you better health care; money can even buy you a better school education for your children. Our society apparently feels no shame about any of this: advertisements in the national media spell out in the starkest terms the advantages your child will get, including improved exam results, if you can afford the high school fees. But money cannot directly buy a better university place for your child, or indeed a place at all… Of course, as in any strongly class-divided society, advantages are self-perpetuating: statistically, children of the wealthy stand a much better chance of going to university than do children of the poor (children of the well-educated stand a better chance still). But the facts are the very reverse of the picture painted by silly-season newspaper headlines: money can buy you pretty much everything except love and university entrance. The question of access therefore needs to start from somewhere else. It is absurd to think that universities can unilaterally correct for the effects of a class-divided society. Of course the figures showing how much greater are the chances of children of the professional classes going to university than children of manual workers reveal a scandalous situation. But the scandal is not about university admissions: it is about the effect of social class in determining life-chances; the corresponding figures about, say, mortality are a much worse scandal.

As with so many other matters in contemporary public debate, serious thinking about class has been displaced by shallow sloganeering about elitism. Anything which smacks of favouring what were the contingent accoutrements of the dominant class in an earlier period is ‘outmoded’, ‘archaic’, ‘elitist’ (the stories are usually accompanied by Bridesheady images of supposed Oxbridge types in dinner jackets and punts). The outrage is that a working-class girl from, say, Essex or Tyneside is being ‘dissed’. Clubby upper-class men are cloning themselves, admitting chaps who ‘fit in’, and so on. It goes without saying that the judgments of university admissions tutors are fallible, but as an account of systematic bias currently at work in the process this fantasy doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny… For the most part university teachers have a much more informed interest in the intellectual ‘potential’ of those whom they are to teach than do the mouthy hordes of journalists and politicians over-quick to scent scandal. … The willingness of leading members of the Government to sound off about the shameful elitism they insist must have informed these judgments only shows how quick they are to attack what they think will be soft targets with populist appeal. This is the other face of ‘modernisation’: we need to sweep away ‘privilege’ in the form of the trappings of status, but we allow the market to entrench the real differentials of class more deeply than ever.

Fire away in the comments section if there’s any opinion on this subject you’d like to share.

Corsair: The Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates [spotted via Crooked Timber].

The Sunday Times published some stupid article the other day about how hip and trendy it was these days to be a young Conservative. I’m not going to link to it, partly because I have despised the Sunday Times ever since the days of Andrew Neil/Carmen Proetta, partly because I don’t think it gives free access to overseas readers, and partly because I think the articles only hang around for free access to UK readers for a short while. (These last two beliefs may be false; I don’t care). But I saw this piece mentioned over at Harry’s Place, where it has prompted some discussion.

The best intervention, however, has come from Matthew Turner, who rather punctures the claim that the Conservatives are the Party of Youth (how I dislike that word) by listing the products that are being advertised in the current edition of the Tories’ own magazine for loyal members, Heartland:

Accountants
Retirement investment advice
Vitamins ‘for a healthy lifespan’
Wine
Savile Row shirts
Medical insurance for the over 50s
Retirement homes on the South coast
Leg ‘relaxa-stool’ supporter
Margaret Thatcher books
‘Back-care’ chairs
‘Easy-bather’ bath aid
Typewriter
Pensioner’s hearing aid
Branded ‘comfort stretch’ trousers
Reproduction antique gramophone

In 1994 Whiteley, Seyd and Richardson reported in their book, True Blues that the average age of Tory party members was 62. Do we have any more recent information than that?

Readers of this blog who used to live in Oxford (and I know there are quite a few) might be interested to learn that you can’t have a drink anymore while sitting at the tables outside the King’s Arms pub at the corner of Parks Road and Holywell Street (pictured right; click for the much larger, original image). This was one of life’s smaller (but by no means insignificant) pleasures, especially in sunny weather.

Now having a drink outside the KA can now land you a �500 fine, and the tables are chained up and stacked on top of each other, taking up space.

I think that the Labour Council has decided to turn much of the City Centre in a giant alcohol-free zone. This is a very bad idea indeed.

UPDATE [3.11.2003]: Here’s an image of the sign outside the pub, taken earlier this afternoon, with the bikes parked outside the New Bodleian in the background. And if you want to contact the councillor who is trumpeting these new zones (according to the news story to which I linked above), it’s Susan Brown, who, according to this page can be emailed here. (Please be polite: the goal is to get drinking outside the KA legalised again, not just to let off steam).

In today’s Independent on Sunday, my colleague (and former teacher) Adam Swift defends Diane Abbott against the criticisms of, er, Diane Abbott.

[Via Crooked Timber, where the leading philosopher of social justice in education Harry Brighouse has sparked off a useful discussion in one of his infrequent posts over there.]

I mentioned Rene Delorm’s excellent book, Diana and Dodi: A Love Story, the other day. I’ve now got it in front of me, so here’s a representative passage:

At about half past ten, as the two of them sat on the couch sipping their pre-dinner champagne, Dodi signalled me.”I think we have the soundtrack of The English Patient“, he said. “The Princess would like to listen to it”.

I slid the CD into place, pushed the button and the hauntingly beautiful music began to swell, spilling over the decks of the Jonikal and surrounding two people who were rapidly falling in love. Looking out at the pair of them I felt that all was right with the world.

At that untimely moment, the telephone rang and I had to tell Dodi, “Sir, you have a phone call.” While he took the call inside, I stayed close to the Princess.

“Rene, have you seen The English Patient?” she asked.

“Yes, Madame, I saw it twice. It was a wonderful film, but I never noticed how beautiful the music was.”

“Well, that’s probably because the story is so beautiful and the music is in harmony with the images”, she said. “You get totally absorbed in the film, hearing but not noticing the music.”

She put her feet up on the nearest chair and was reclining almost horizontally as she sipped her champagne and waited for Dodi. Seeing that she was enjoying the music, I quietly retreated, and after a few minutes Dodi returned to her side… [p.75]

I may post some more of this fine book if I get bored over the next few days. It’s good stuff.

The excellent Wales vs New Zealand match this morning was the game that pulled apart filial loyalties. On the one hand, my maternal grandfather was a rugby-playing New Zealander; on the other hand, I’m told that a paternal great-grandfather won a couple of caps for Wales (both against England, I think: I’m vague on the details). But what a game — and what a surprise!

Oddbins in Oxford were unable to sell me a bottle of ouzo a couple of weeks ago, which was very bad. But they are in my good books again, owing to their wise decision to stock Marsala.