Chris Young is right: John Gray will rue the day he decided to fuck with Gavin Sheridan.
Let’s hope so, anyway.
(For more on this fun story, see the report of the original lawyer’s letter, commentary from Kevin Drum and from Kieran Healy, more from Gavin here (scroll down for additional links), and some remarks from Backword Dave.)
UPDATE [1.4.2004]: Backword Dave usefully supplies more links on this story than any reasonable person could read.
While doing research for the Normblog Bob Dylan Song Poll (if you haven’t sent your entry in already read here) I remembered that I have copies of two Dylan albums which I don’t really need anymore, since I have CD copies of the same. So the first Oxford-area VS-reader to stake their claim to LPs of Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde on Blonde can have them. Just get in touch.
In the end I went for (no particular order) “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”, “Like A Rolling Stone”, “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. I left the fifth permitted spot intentionally blank, as it would be a crime to pick five without having something from John Wesley Harding (= best Dylan album ever), but after playing the record three times I just couldn’t decide which song I liked most.
Here’s a happy image, generated by my pseudonymous colleague and international man of mystery Nasi Lemak: it’s a graph of the ten-poll moving average of W’s approval rating since he took office, and some shrewd observers reckon they can spot an underlying trend…
(Follow the link for the detailed graphs, with more legible axes, etc.)
Eleanor Marx, born 16 January 1855, died 31 March 1898.
(Which reminds me that while I own a fine hardback set of Yvonne Kapp’s life of Eleanor Marx, which people tell me is magnificently good, I haven’t read it yet. I’ll take it off the shelf now and turn my attention to it when I’ve finished working through Stephen J. Stein’s [so far] excellent book about The Shaker Experience in America.)
Good news, comrades: Hinksey Park Labour has a new website…
… South West Central ward can’t be far behind… (Can’t it?)
As you’ll have noticed, a few days’ stoppage in the flow of bloggerage has just come to an end: I was off in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies, where Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber fame had laboured to put together one of the Rousseau panels, and was nice enough to ask me to join it. I’m not sure the ASECS is really my scene (though I’m not sure the APSA is really my scene, either, but I’ve been there three times now, and will probably trek to Chicago this year), but the whole thing was a very good excuse on which to hang a visit to Boston, which is still one of my favourite American cities, and to see a surprising number of old friends.
(Similarly, if I go to the ASECS next year, it’ll be a good excuse for a weekend in Las Vegas, which I’ve still never visited.)
(Foolishly, however, all three of my visits to Boston since I stopped living there have been Red Sox-free: the last two have been during Spring Training, and they were on a road trip when I was in town in 2002. I’ll have to be more careful next time.)
VS-2d-favourite Melanie Phillips turns her attention to the history of modern political thought:
While non-Christian nations can indeed subscribe to human rights — and it is to be hoped that they do — fundamental human rights (as opposed to the politically correct doctrines being laid down by European institutions) are emphatically not secular. They are based on the precepts originally laid down by Judaism and embellished and developed by Protestantism — that individual behaviour must be constrained by moral laws, and that all human beings are equal in the image of God. Take this Judeo-Christian God away, and equality disappears too.The secular ‘human rights’ promulgated by eponymous lawyers and government ministers are actually nothing of the kind. They are instead an attempt to destroy this liberal and democratic heritage and replace it by a secular inquisition that takes self-governnment away from peoples and deprives them of the expression of their individual culture. It is deeply, profoundly, terrifyingly anti-democratic…
Next up (we can only hope), Melanie on Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories…(Actually, that’s slightly unfair, but only slightly. There’s an interesting discussion to have about the relationship between Locke’s natural rights theory and theism, on which Jeremy Waldron’s God, Locke and Equality is quite superb. But this isn’t it, and most of the rest of what she’s written above is nonsense.)
My friend and colleague Mike Smithson has recently launched his new Political Betting site, which I dare say will be of interest to some of the regular readers of the Virtual Stoa, with lots of discussion of opinion polls and that kind of thing. It’ll probably be quite good, and it looks sufficiently bloglike that I’ll stick it on the blogroll.
I don’t make bets on politics terribly often myself, though I won �40 once upon a time in a College sweepstake by picking the right number of Tory MEPs to survive the disaster (for them, not for me) of the 1994 Euro-elections. (My win in the end came thanks to the intervention of Richard Huggett and his “Literal Democrats” down in Cornwall or wherever.) More recently, I lost a bottle of wine to Mike after wrongly predicting the outcome of the Brent East by-election, ho hum, so no more bets for a bit.
Leon Blum, French socialist and prime minister during the period of the Popular Front; born 9 April 1872, died 30 March 1950.
Earlier bits: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII.
“The Soul of Man Under Socialism” by Oscar Wilde, Part Thirteen
But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama; and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of the drama either. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions — one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter. But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet or prose writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make the establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary in England. Of course, the public are very reckless in their use of the word. That they should have called Wordsworth an immoral poet, was only to be expected. Wordsworth was a poet. But that they should have called Charles Kingsley an immoral novelist is extraordinary. Kingsley’s prose was not of a very fine quality. Still, there is the word, and they use it as best they can. An artist is, of course, not disturbed by it. The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognized by the public, through their medium, which is the public Press, as a work that was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin seriously to question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value what so ever.
Perhaps, however, I have wronged the public in limiting them to such words as “immoral”, “unintelligible”, “exotic”, and “unhealthy”. There is one other word that they use. That word is “morbid”. They do not use it often. The meaning of the word is so simple that they are afraid of using it. Still, they use it sometimes, and, now and then, one comes across it in popular newspapers. It is, of course, a ridiculous word to apply to a work of art. For what is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a mode of thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid, because the public can never find expression for anything. The artist is never morbid. He expresses everything. He stands outside his subject, and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects. To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote King Lear.
[More, soon.]
Harold Laski, socialist theoretician, author of The Grammar of Politics and other more or less unjustly neglected books; born 1893, died 24 March 1950.
In today’s Guardian:
Matt Cavanagh, the Blunkett aide who was revealed at the weekend as having written a book suggesting that employers might acceptably discriminate against black job applicants, seems to be a man who once had a philosophy but has now unaccountably mislaid it. Cavanagh appears to be arguing that since he consigned this proposal to paper, it is academic - meaning, perhaps, that in the real world it is not a good thing at all. For one who was possibly trained in logic, this is a serious sort of defence. There are indeed books in which you are allowed to float bizarre and offensive proposals confident in the knowledge that nobody will think you mean them seriously. But these are known as novels, not works of political theory.The modern age began in earnest when ideas ceased to matter…
I haven’t seen Matt Cavanagh himself mount this defence; rather, it’s what the people at the Home Office have been saying about him.For an alternative, less temperate response, try here.
I’m going back and forth on what I think about this case. I still think the broadsheet news reporting has been pretty crappy. Journalists keep writing about Cavanagh’s suggestion that unfair discrimination might in certain circumstances be “rational”, without pointing out that the word “rational” as it is habitually used in economics and, often enough, in philosophy can just refer to whatever it is that appears to me the best thing to do in order to realise whatever goals I might happen to have.
But enough people have emailed me to point out that Cavanagh’s views — both philosophically and politically — really are pretty right-wing, which raises the question of why, given that Mr. Blunkett clearly likes to be surrounded by free-thinking young men, he chooses particularly right-wing free-thinking young men by whom to be surrounded… I mean, if you want political theorists, this is a pretty left-leaning crowd.
(It reminds me of the Labour Party’s Commission on Social Justice ten years ago, whose first pamphlet, The Justice Gap, reflected on recent academic work on the idea of social justice and offered criticism of John Rawls and praise for Robert Nozick…)
Previous episodes: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI.
“The Soul of Man Under Socialism” by Oscar Wilde, Part the Twelfth
In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such badly written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true, but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful work may be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom. It is when one comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular control is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subject-matter. The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to one’s own views, this acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not dwell upon the point.
[To be continued, though possibly not for a few days…]
H. N. Brailsford, socialist journalist; born 25 December 1873, died 23 March 1958.
While eating curry last night I was reading Stephen Davies’s very interesting article from the Australasian Journal of Philosophy a few years back on “John Cage’s 4′33″: Is It Music?”, and was entertained to learn that the piece exists in two versions: in the published score, the movements are 30″, 2′23″ and 1′40″ in duration; but in the manuscript presented to Irwin Kremen, the movements are 33″, 2′40″ and 1′20.
So are there in fact two pieces, one of which might better be called 4′33″‘?
A friend writes (and God knows how he discovered this, um, fact): “Another quickie web link for you: take a look at this page and see which direction georgebushfoundation.org (down the bottom) is going in…”
UPDATE [3pm]: I see via Bloggerheads that he got it from NTK. So now we know. (Even though we probably don’t need to know.)
Crooked Timber highlights yesterday’s bizarre choice of front-page lead in the Guardian about the fact that one of the Home Secretary’s special advisers, Matt Cavanagh, once wrote a D.Phil thesis and then a book arguing that a lot of the arguments made about so-called equality of so-called opportunity are a crock of shit.
All the Guardian journalist had to do to turn this into a newspaper story was to find the most provocative things that Cavanagh wrote about race discrimination laws, treat them as if they were soundbites rather than steps in complicated theoretical arguments, and then find a rent-a-quote Labour MP to say that anyone who disagreed with the party line on this kind of thing must be “psychotic”. And there’s your story — which will probably remain an exclusive, in the strict sense that other media outlets are highly unlikely to think it’s worth running with.
I flicked through the book, Against Equality of Opportunity when it came out, liked parts of it, didn’t like other parts of it, and occasionally tell students to look at it if they’re writing essays on related subjects. Since I remember a section on why racism is very bad because of the kind of contempt racists express when they behave in a racist fashion, it’s not clear to me that the Guardian is onto a winner here in trying to paint Matt Cavanagh as some kind of right-wing nutter (though he may be that, and it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that right-wing nutters were working for David Blunkett).
Although Matt Cavanagh and I are both the kind of people who have spent too much time in Oxford, we’ve never really had much to do with one another: he was working on his doctorate and teaching Philosophy in Oxford in exactly the period that I was living in the States, and I returned to Oxford at the same time, I think, that he left academic life altogether. And my main memory of Matt isn’t of anything he’s done in academic philosophy, I’m afraid, but of his attempt in the Balliol junior common room a decade ago when we briefly overlapped as undergraduates there to try to stop the Chapel ringing its bell for a few minutes before 6pm in order to remind people to turn up to the evening service. (The attempt failed.)
But I did want to use this post to say something about the surprising number of political theorists who do seem to end up dealing with David Blunkett. Blunkett is Bernard Crick’s most famous student from years ago at Sheffield University — there’s a funny, though probably apocryphal anecdote about how Blunkett’s then guide dog would bark every time Crick mentioned Karl Marx in lectures — and the lucky Crick was rewarded many years later by being made the Britishness Tsar (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms) and getting to draw up projects for how to teach “citizenship” in schools and to bring in “citizenship tests” and the like.
(I vaguely remember one pilot paper saying that school children should be asked to write essays reporting their reactions to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, as part of “citizenship” training, though that may be my overheated imagination at work, again. I also remember the lovely line in the Government’s [mostly horrible] white paper on citizenship and immigration which tried to say what the most distinctively “British” values were, and concluded that they were the values enshrined in the European human rights charter…)
But Crick and Cavanagh aren’t the only ones: there’s also Dr. Mads Qvortrup, who has worked for the Referendum Institute, and who seems to have some Blunkett connection, possibly as some kind of adviser or other. Qvortrup thanks Blunkett in the Acknowledgments of his new book, The Political Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and implausibly says of Blunkett in the Preface that he has “further elaborated” the arguments of Machiavelli, Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville about civic nationalism. And Blunkett has clearly returned the favour, blurbing the book as follows:
No society can survive without mutuality. Dr Qvortrup’s book shows that rights and responsibilities go hand in hand. It is an excellent primer for anyone wishing to understand how renewal of democracy hinges on a strong civil society.
Now who would have thought that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a forerunner of the politics of New Labour? (And who could have guessed from this blurb that this book was a study of Rousseau?)Have I missed any others?
UPDATE [2pm]: Alright: so I was wrong about the exclusivity of the Guardian’s report: page four of the Sunday Telegraph is devoted to the same story, with a spokesman for the Home Secretary quoted as saying, “Mr Blunkett is aware of the book and thinks it is quite cleverly argued, but he does not agree with a lot of it. The point is, do people want ministers to be surrounded by yes men or do they want extremely bright philosophers and political thinkers who grapple with difficult issues?” The general defence of MC’s continuing employment seems to centre on a claim that “he was trying to make his name in academia” four years ago, and so decided to publish a bunch of things he never really agreed with, but which sounded provocative. Ho hum.
Helena Puig Larrauri, who’s the President of the Student Union here in Oxford, went back home to Spain last week to be with her family in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings and to vote in the general election. She wrote an account of four very hectic days on Monday, which I’ve just published over at The Voice of the Turtle. It’s very interesting. Go and read it.
It’s… [cue music: Liberty Bell].
Everyone’s favourite super-anonymous British politics pundit British Spin has posted a reciprocal link back to the Virtual Stoa, for which I’m happy and grateful, and the people in his comments box seem to be wondering what the title of this blog refers to.
Well, not a lot is the answer. But back in 1997 or so when I created my first webpage I was beginning to write a Ph.D. dissertation on arguments about Stoicism in early modern European philosophy and political thought. So I called the page The Virtual Stoa. And then a decent chunk of time ago I realised that it was a much better name for a weblog than for a homepage, and revived the name for this page.
(I seem to like names that puzzle people: people also email me reasonably frequently to ask me why on earth this site is called The Voice of the Turtle.)
For information, a stoa is a the kind of building pictured here, and the Stoa of the Stoics — the Stoa Poikile in the middle of Athens, where they gathered, talked, taught, etc. — might have looked like this once upon a time, and now looks like this.
So I have to blog for two and a half years before I get honoured with a normblog profile; my brother Michael’s been going for less than two and a half months, and he gets one, too…
… which is — of course — richly deserved: Mischievous Constructions is (in my entirely unbiased opinion) an excellent addition to the World of Blogs, and well worth a visit (if there’s anyone here who doesn’t visit regularly already).
Earlier instalments: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X.
“The Soul of Man Under Socialism” by Oscar Wilde, Part Eleven
Now, I have said that the community by means of organization of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other. An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognizance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense form of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public have always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference. If a man of science were told that the results of his experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of people who knew nothing about science; if a philosopher were told that he had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought, provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those who had never thought in any sphere at all — well, nowadays the man of science and the philosopher would be considerably amused. Yet it is really a very few years since both philosophy and science were subjected to brutal popular control, to authority in fact — the authority of either the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed for power of an ecclesiastical or governmental class. Of course, we have to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the community or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art still lingers. In fact, it does more than linger; it is aggressive, offensive, and brutalizing.
[More soon]
Earlier instalments: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX.
“The Soul of Man Under Socialism” by Oscar Wilde, Episode Ten
Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organize labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful. And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessary dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, everybody would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery; and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure — which, and not labour, is the aim of man — or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of every one else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.
