The Tyranny of the Concept

There is a Somerset Maugham story in which a cloistered spinster runs off with a bigamist, to the horror of her antique family. It is called The Round Dozen. Let's turn the tale into an allegory about the dangers of an academia falling in love with politics.

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A footnote goes astray. An Act of Faith  is pleading on its behalf. I will not listen. Instead I insist. It has grown too big, spoiling the balance of the piece... On she goes; please, please, please. No! I get angry. I start to rage: I’ll have no beer belly on my Venus de Milo! So I cut it out and plant it in the garden, which like bindweed, it quickly overgrows. Within days I’m searching for the path, looking hopelessly for the gate; and as I scramble about the back wall the weed grips and holds. I cry out. Scream help! help!….

In Innocence and Experience Stuart Hampshire writes with penetration about the peculiarity of the political mentality, which, he argues, functioning through instinct and action, and attuned to the constantly shifting scene of human relations, cannot be bound to principles and abstract thought; these are too general and too limiting for the complex fluidity of the social sphere. There is innocence, which we leave for the commentators. And experience, the stage upon which the political actors perform. He is surely right to divide the world into action and thought, and to argue they are different cultures with different modes of behaviour. Although his belief in reason - believed essentially beneficent - prevents him from grasping the essence of the Nazis, for him the most extreme manifestation (hence perversion) of the political mind. Yet the sad truth is that Hitler and his “gutter elite” (the phrase is Alan Bullock’s) are the embodiment of pure reason in the political realm; the art of politics dedicated to the fulfilment of their ideal. For evidence we watch Elem Klimov’s extraordinary Come and See, which cuts the Nazi regime down to the human scale of an horrifying nightmare (the statistics, as Bullock says, too gross for us to grasp). Towards the end of this film the Wehrmacht raid a Belarus village. Reduced to a mob, drunk on drink and blood lust, these are ordinary folk thrown into a free-fire zone where the monstrous instincts, fuelled by fear and revenge and the habit of murder, take hold. Later they are caught, cowering in shame and terror, the commander pleading for their lives. The exception is the SS officer. A true believer, who prefers the idea - of racial superiority - to his own survival, he willingly dies for his belief, a compulsion that compelled him to incite these men to massacre. If the Nazis had achieved their thousand year Reich this character, his faith so strong that it overcomes all bodily afflictions, would have been venerated as a Nazi saint; for he died for the regime’s big idea, this sacrifice encouraging idolatry and commemorative rituals. But what was the source of such faith? Will this make you smile? Or will you rile up in a rage? Are you ready… It was his reason. A religion uses reason to steel the will through creating a purpose embodied in an idea; this combination overcoming nature, which is then moulded around that galvanising concept. The Church a highly rational enterprise, once the influence of the charismatic founder fades. What is unique about the Nazis is that the charisma coexisted with the rational bureaucracy, it was a cult trying to operate as a state, the cause of its vast incoherence and devastating collapse. 

Hampshire misses the inherent destructiveness of reason. Like most thinkers he conceives it as benign; it is why he endorses the influence of the large society (the city) on small communities (the village); the rationality of the one loosening up the customs and relaxing the habits of the other; reason to shake up what is staid and static, so civilising it. Yet such intrusions weaken these communities, and can cause their disintegration; for a community’s existence depends upon a (relative) fixity and a (relative) totality acquired through age and bolstered by customs and habits, sustaining a continuity that keeps the links between residents intact. A classic study is Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton, the village maintaining its “shape” until the last decades of the 20th century, when its spirit rapidly declines as the newcomers take over and transform it. The last bastion of that spirit - the local pub - is itself broken; the owner redesigning the interior to suit the more expensive tastes of the incomers; the old timers, feeling excluded, and with nowhere else to go, sidelined to a lonely existence inside their homes. The life of the village as a living entity - the atmosphere that emanates out of a myriad of ritualistic interactions, performed through history’s labyrinth - has died. At the novel’s close Ulverton is just a place where individual families live and work, the connections between these new inhabitants thin and easily broken. Instrumental reason has taken over; and by creating a new village that is picturesque and comfortable it has removed the very qualities that made Ulverton a social organism; a character in its own right.

Hampshire also overlooks the propensity of reason, when inculcated into impoverished minds - they are the half-educated churned out by our universities - to encourage hostility and resentment. Reason itself, as David Hume discovered, apt to fall into a total and nihilistic scepticism when not restrained by experience. Hume himself was too clever to stay inside that trap. Most of us are not so smart. The analytic bias of reason - the source of that scepticism - is easily corrupted by the emotions, causing us undermine what we don't like or cannot comprehend. Voltaire’s it is easier to see the mistakes in a work that uncover its merits alerts us to the fundamental weakness of the rational mind: its preference for faults over cognisance, which today is lauded as intellectual strength (we praise the “questioning” and the “critical”; the processes of reason to occlude the acquisition of knowledge, with its sudden shafts of insight). The results are rather desperate. Much of what is regarded as critical thought no more than the rationalisation of an instinctive prejudice; Adorno’s Minima Moralia a highly entertaining example of the genre; here The Moan is provided with a philosophy. Let’s be blunt: too often the progressive is a bigot with a good conscience. A type now trained up and promoted by the University (note the emphasis on “change” in the advertising material…). This stress on analysis, criticism and attack, when allied to inexperience and fostered upon ignorance, quickly degenerating into hatred and intolerance. Education makes us nasty and unpleasant. 

Nasty! Unpleasant!? Hampshire suggests why this is so. Reason abstracts and isolates an idea from its psychological, social and historical background. The temptation - strong amongst the poorly educated - is to then believe these abstracted ideas are concrete things that can replace - like a fuse in a plug - the quotidian. It is the source of the ideologue’s fanaticism, which they celebrate as insight and innovation. Kate Manne, describing herself as “someone trained in moral and feminist philosophy, rather than psychology, sociology, gender studies, anthropology or history”, believes that this extremely narrow focus not only gives her a special perspective but can be used as a “toolkit” for looking at (and changing) the social scene. Adam Phillips agrees, believing her study of misogyny “acute”, “precise”, “hospitable” and “exact”. Phillips, who shares with Manne the same proclivity for grand theorising, cannot see that if you remove all of humanity from the theory all that is left is the theory; a fiction you overlay onto the human material; his own discussion of mothers illustrating both this point and its dangers. He is helpful though. In summarising Manne’s book he shows how such theorists both reproduce then vindicate - even venerate - their preferred prejudices.

Manne aims to understand ‘the nature of misogyny, both in terms of its general logic’ and through ‘one (though only one) of its key dynamics. This involves men drawing on women in asymmetrical moral support roles.’ She has in mind ‘a more or less diverse set of women on whom such a man’ – the sort of man she refers to as the ‘most privileged’ (i.e. white, straight, cisgender, middle-class and non-disabled) – ‘is tacitly deemed entitled to rely on for nurturing, comfort, care, and sexual, emotional and reproductive labour’. These entitlements more or less define how such a man treats a woman – what he treats her as – and may, for example, lead women to try to work out what men want, and then try to provide it. It is asymmetrical because men will then assume that women want to satisfy men’s wants, without thinking too much about women’s wants (or wanting these to be articulated). Wanting nurture, comfort, care, sex and children is not the problem here: it is the entitlement and the asymmetry that ultimately get everyone, but mostly women, down. Entitlement is always fuelled by rage; and even though the wish for symmetry in relationships all too easily narrows the repertoire, asymmetry breeds resentment.

A review that seeks to uncover the nature of misogyny has become a tract promoting misandry. Unfair? Consider the above passage, with its creation of a male stereotype, wholly negative in character. This is the bad person, who must be overcome. The reciprocity of relationships, with their internal “dynamics” that creates the characters of “husband” and “wife”, giving rise to group specific emotions, is avoided. While the “asymmetrical” need of some (many? most?) women for “nurture, comfort, care, sex and children” is ignored completely. Instead, women, welcomed as “diverse”, are always thinking about the opposite sex, its needs, its weaknesses, its incessant demands; each one a victim of her own good nature. And do we really hate the person who makes us feel secure, gives us so much comfort? Only a Mills and Boon novelist could be so loose with the passions. Our experts get around this problem by conceptualising these feelings as “entitlement”, which they carelessly couple with “rage”. If such “entitlement” is ubiquitous it will apply to both sexes and is any case banal, giving rise to an indifference between the partners who come to rely on habits and ritualised responses; wonderfully captured by Natalia Ginzburg at the end of her Family Lexicon. Such mundanity is not to Manne’s taste. She prefers the gothic horror of a radical philosophy, thus her study group: women-killers. The implication is clear: all men - the reference to the middle class is a sop - are murderers under their skins (Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built turns out to be a feminist classic…1). At best, the “privileged” chap can only hope to control his “rage”, repress those murderous instincts. The male - to use the congenial jargon - has been “othered”.

Thus it was that the conception and construction of ‘woman’ as ‘other’—that is, not merely different in terms of sexual biology, a fact of ‘nature, but deemed categorically opposite and inferior in terms of gender, a fact (or factoid?) of ‘culture’—entered the mainstream of English-language social thought. (The Greeks, Paul Cartledge).

According to Cartledge the influence of this idea, which consumes his book - Godzilla lunches on the Athenian agora - is due to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Believed an insightful and morally alert way at looking at the Greeks, what we see is an Oxbridge professor projecting his own moral biases onto a foreign land; his book (like others in the series, a textbook written by young radical scholars for the rising graduate class) a compendium of contemporary orthodoxy masquerading as reliable knowledge. Fortunately, Cartledge supplies enough material for us to read against the tide of his theme. Unconvinced by this book we turn to Tony Judt for the intellectual history behind de Beauvoir’s classic; his Past Perfect dissecting the wild ideas and truly awful opinions of her core influence: Jean-Paul Sartre. The origin of this idea of the other is Sartre’s need to distance himself from his own meretricious Resistance record and to project his anger and hate - that frustration at his unheroic exploits - onto his opponents. He others himself and re-fights the war with words as his weapons. We suspect a similar but more complicated reaction in de Beauvoir: a disciple must perform a strange distancing of the self to accept such conceptual obedience. And the academics that follow her? That thorny path of an idea! Try not to prick yourself as you follow me through the bushes and over the broken glass...

A progressive delights in destroying things.

Along with Peter the Great; [a]nother of Russia’s earlier rulers whom Stalin promoted to an heroic role in his vision of Russian history was the first to confer on himself the title of tsar, the sixteenth-century Ivan IV (known as Ivan the Terrible). Brushing aside the cruelty of the tortures Ivan inflicted on his opponents, Stalin described his liquidation of the hereditary nobles, the boyars, who sought to limit his autocratic power, as ‘progressive’. (Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, Alan Bullock).

We can’t resist! Consider how this progressive describes himself:

Although he performed his task of leader of the Party and the people with consummate skill and enjoyed the underserved support of the entire Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation.

Stalin’s reinterpretation of the progressive points to the wider transformation of the term; its meaning shifting from a mild reformism, that seeks improvements in individual lives, to a revolutionary radicalism that seeks a total transfiguration of the whole society. This meaning is common today. This semantic shift is in part related to the expansion of the University, and its accommodation with capitalist culture and its technological core, spawning a vast increase in concept junkies forever seeking their fix. Will Self has called the University the heart of the Neo-Liberal project. It is also the centre of a culture war that is trying to impose the values of that project onto everybody else. Everyone to be hooked on its ideas. 

Conservatism no longer exists as a meaningful politics. Even academics struggle to grasp its nature, thus when Matt McManus advocates the Conservative option he can only envisage it as a type of reformism. Political life has moved so far in the direction of “change” that any attempt to maintain the present and celebrate the past is impossible to conceive. Rare advocates, like Roger Scruton, now treated - rightly - as heretics.

Progressives assert their will by changing the social landscape, no matter the cost. Yet all is redeemed because progress is a social good, it says so on the tin. Let’s go further. Ideas are a convenient vehicle for misanthropy, allowing us to express our aggression, while all the time believing ourselves virtuous; for we believe in the (universal) goodness of the ideal that transcends the pettiness of individuals. That the idea is intimate with our own ego we conveniently ignore. And how often the idea is used to attack others! I’m attacking you now… What we don’t like we condemn as uncivilised. It is a marvellous tool. To feel good about ourselves and to give up the hard work of trying to comprehend another culture, opaque at first sight. Don’t we adore it? To acquire knowledge is a long journey, but always there is a Paul Cartledge signalling for our train to stop. In his book on Ancient Greece Cartledge draws his own portrait of modern man - sensitive to women and other cultures - by distancing himself from the Greeks, once celebrated as the founding fathers of the Western intellectual tradition (as distinct from the West as a society). Yet a curious paradox is that under Cartledge’s word processor the Greeks speak just like contemporary academics… All has changed and yet everything remains the same, especially the censoriousness, though camouflaged by tone and style. Academics cannot give up their hellfire sermons, today they deliver them in measured prose; the Devil now an abstract concept so amorphous as to be a cloud, shaped by the prevailing scholarly wind. It sounds benign, although Old Nick still seems rather nasty; this “other” no neutral term, such as “different” or “foreign”, it is overloaded with negative values, ranking us against them. The idea of “difference”, manifold in its meanings, and with little moral charge, has been turned into a quite different concept seething with sententiousness. Always we return to the Saved and the Damned. In othering the West this professor has exchanged the old rags of history, stained with moral dirt, for a brand new suit, sold by Probity & Sons. Such an idea helping this scholar to make his own break with the academy’s past. It is the academic way, widespread amongst the young: if they don’t bang the saucepans in the kitchen the old dons won’t hear them in the dining room…. 

Moralise the subject and you open it up to political intervention.

We believe in an idea, to which we give - it is almost inevitable - a moral value, allowing us to attack those with whom we disagree. We love to be self-righteous! And belonging to a group, believed respectable, and protected by the institution, backed by a culture of which our ideas are a part, there is no worry about the consequences of attacking those who hold different beliefs: they are self-condemned as moral renegades. Safe in one’s conformity the idea now becomes a carrier of dislike, even hate. Extraordinary examples are given in Musab Younis’ article on homosexual activism in France; yet the author is insouciant about the prejudice, racism and offensive stupidity of those he writes about. Quoting what Deleuze describes as a mix of “‘politically revolutionary’ sentiments and ‘perfectly fascist and racist’ notions” Younis’ own comment is revealing: such views are (merely) “troubling”. That most of what these radicals believed is wrong, and proved so by the history - there is no link between Capitalism and homophobia; while his own article shows there is no “solidarity of the oppressed” - goes unremarked, probably unnoticed. 

A radical creates the idea of prejudice, which they use to attack those who are different from themselves. Actual incidents of racism and homophobia become examples of civilisation-wide Racism and Homophobia, omnipresent and life-denying. Once conceived such ideas are used to justify one’s own prejudices: against straights, whites, the family… For it is an unfortunate tic of the intellectual that they find it difficult to see beyond crude binary oppositions: my idea (of course right) against yours (without doubt perfidious). It is nicely captured in the conclusion of Younis’ piece when the admired Hocquenghem, talking to a group of immigrants, gives them the choice of two alternatives: assimilation or repatriation. They reject both: they want to remain themselves inside France. Hocquenghem has made the standard intellectual’s mistake of projecting a rudimentary idea, with its inherent and simple oppositions, onto a multi-various reality. His education has trained him well. Ideas simplify and categorise reality, dividing it up into neat boxes each with its own label. Such labels should be handled with care. Rarely are they so. Too often the stuffed animals in the museum case are mistaken for the real ones on the savannah. The abstract simplicity of an idea effortlessly segueing into unseemly stereotyping, which when added to moral outrage, becomes the intellectual’s equivalent of a fist in the face. The vulgar idea, permeated with one’s own moral position - an expression of the ego - justifies all bad behaviour, which is never recognised as such, for a progressive - and who isn't these days? - cannot, by definition, be a bad person.

Again and again a radical divides the world up into us and them, the results - so prevalent in France - of an educational system that trains students to think in concepts rather than people. Those who reject such simple training, like these immigrants in a Paris banlieue, are then turned into special categories - a different species - who are either attacked, celebrated or patronised. Younis chooses the latter option here, thus his conclusion: “It’s a remarkably queer response.” Yet what these people say is banal. It could only seem “queer” - to use the conventional meaning - to an intellectual who finds it impossible to think beyond binary opposites, exaggerated and caricatured by an ideology. Little wonder that a natural human riposte is turned into an example of ideological comradeship; these people now “queer” in the new meaning of the term. Even when the inane oppositions inherent in the idea have been exposed, shown inapplicable to the world outside the classroom (and the literary journal) this writer maintains the simple conceptual divide, by reclaiming these characters to his side. Binarism, the new magic word, supposed to explain so much, no more than the Wicked Witch’s mirror where, looking at themselves, the ideologue doesn't like what they see.

Not only the idea but its value depends upon fashion. Paul Cartledge’s book was written at a time when our perceptions of the Greeks were being recalibrated. After the move to primitivise the Greece during the 1960s and 70s, seen to brilliant effect in Pasolini’s Medea, the value of their culture was being revised, weakening further their bonds to the Western intellectual tradition, itself under attack by radical thought heavily influenced by contemporary mores (the work Deleuze and Guattari an unbelievable example). Since Cartledge wrote his introductory text - in the early 1990s - this revision has gone much further. Incorporated into identity politics the Greeks have been redefined as white and attacked as an embodiment of the West (the intellectual tradition conflated with the social realm and its history; so that the myth at the end of Plato’s Republic, setting the idea - and thus the tradition - above and beyond a necessarily corrupt reality, no longer casts its spell). We have returned to a time before the 1960s - it is a full circle - but now instead of celebrating Homer and Aristotle as heroes we attack them as white males, their whiteness both essential to their being and a toxic substance. In the 1990s there was Professor Cartledge. Today there is Sarah Bond. At least the don was interested in the subject. Dr Bond’s focus is on the skin colour of those who write about it (thus her extraordinary suggestion that footnotes should identified by ethnic origin). The revolution is complete. What was implicit in Cartledge - the moral code of the present - becomes explicit in Bond: the politics of Now to determine our view of a two thousand year old society. 

This shift from an academia that is influenced by politics to one that serves its political masters is not uncommon, especially in the modern age. Michael Burleigh, in his study of the Ostforscher, describes in great detail what once would have been thought of as an extreme and pathological case. No longer. The identity politics of the Third Reich have been resurrected into the contemporary academy, though now it is not the racial make up of towns and villages that concerns the career academic but the ethnic composition of their own departments. Of course there are differences; white - a much more inclusive term than Aryan (pity the the poor Slavs: then as now they are traduced) - today seen as the carrier of evil not good; while it is the outsider (the other) who is believed to be the creative, dynamic, civilising force. We can only speculate why identity politics, with its inherent malignancies, should have resurfaced. A clue is in the similarities between the Austro-Hungarian empire and the modern West; both multi-cultural societies put under enormous strain by technological, social and economic change, compelling different cultures to compete to survive and flourish. Alan Bullock summarises succinctly.

After the transformation of the Empire in 1867 into the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, the German-speaking minority in the Austrian half felt their traditional position of superiority under increasing threat from the growing national consciousness and self-confidence of the Slav peoples who made up the majority, especially from the Czechs…

The rapid growth of Vienna’s population by 259 percent between 1860 and 1900…

Bad social conditions - poverty, poor housing, overcrowding, low wages, unemployment - were all made worse by the rapid influx of newcomers. Of the 1,675,000 people living in Vienna in 1900 less than half, 46 per cent, were natives. The mass of the newcomers, many of them Czechs, came to the city in search of work and packed into the already overcrowded working-class quarters which Hitler knew at first hand.

At the bottom of the heap what strikes both the native and the incomer is the alienness of their neighbours; though fortunately sociopaths are rare; incomprehension and a passive resentment the usual responses. Bullock describes Hitler’s reaction.

‘I do not know which it was that appalled me most at the time: the economic misery of those who were then my companions, their crude customs and morals, or the low level of the intellectual culture.’ Hitler was appalled but not out of compassion. He discovered with horror that it was not just Czech, but German labourers as well, who disparaged everything to which he attached importance.

Hitler lived in Vienna as a poor man - he was a vagrant - amongst poor men. An Austrian he was also an outsider in his own country, his sense of alienation increased when he moved to the capital city. To such outsiders - whose sense of exclusion is a wasting disease - the country is a foreign land, which they imagine remaking in their own image; it will become the ideal that has never been. Stalin shares many of these characteristics; Lenin calling this Georgian a “great Russian chauvinist”. To get a sense of such characters - to get right inside them, with their magic fantasies and apocalyptic dreams - I suggest you read Roberto Arlt’s The Seven Madmen; a terrible bunch of lowlife nasties. The dream of radical violence is intimate with the degradation of a particular type of character; while their identity is put under immense strain when confronted by those radically different from themselves, whether native or foreign; Arlt acute in noting the psychological splitting of the personality; the ideas detaching themselves from the humdrum ego.

What is odd about today’s academics - uber-respectables and cosy insiders - is that they should be attacking their “own side”; this is a change from the Ostforscher, and is difficult to assess. A possible answer may be found in the bourgeois radicals of the 1960s, who saw the future (always more important to the progressive than the past) as belonging to the workers, whose side they therefore decided to join. Today, white middle class academics seem to believe that the rest of the century belongs to the non-white and are positioning themselves to become their leaders and opinion formers. Bakunin is useful here.

According to the theory of Mr. Marx the people not only must not destroy [the state] but must strengthen it and place it at the complete disposal of their benefactors, guardians, and teachers—the leaders of the Communist party, namely Mr. Marx and his friends, who will proceed to liberate [mankind] in their own way. They will concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people require an exceedingly firm guardianship; they will establish a single state bank, concentrating in its hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural and even scientific production, and then divide the masses into two armies—industrial and agricultural—under the direct command of the state engineers, who will constitute a new privileged scientific-political estate. (Quoted by Noam Chomsky, in the The Chomsky Reader)

It is extremely difficult to separate out an idea from its value; the human propensity to moralise naturally attaching itself to the abstract objects we think about. Such moralising, prevalent in academia, our new priestly class, can be extremely dangerous; for it is radically distinct from the common kind, that instinctive and reflexive, concerned with individuals, is mostly local and ephemeral. The academic variety tends not only to divide but fix the world into those who are sin and saved. Squeezing the population into carefully adumbrated categories, first their humanity, so various and peculiar, is squashed out. Then - it can’t help itself - the very categorisation bestows a value, inviting either praise (“critical”, “curious”, “open”) or condemnation (“reactionary”, “passive”) or manipulation (“backward”) or control (“poor”, “criminal”). Ceasing to be People we become symbols in an ethical equation. The original purpose of the idea - an aid to the acquisition of knowledge - is lost. No longer an heuristic tool the idea, with its newly acquired moral charge, is used to denounce a reality seen as untrue, therefore wicked and corrupt (for knowledge - we must blame that shameless Socrates - is mistakenly believed as synonymous with the Good). What began as insight, necessarily speculative and experimental, is transformed into a Truth, certain and solid. Yet this belief is deadly to all the humane values, which existing in the relations between individuals depends upon the atmosphere these relations create, and to which ideas play an important but never controlling part. To impose a single notion - The Truth - onto this complex of human interactions is to empty out much of what makes life interesting and civilised, such a life not amenable to simple definitions; nor can it be proved through argument or demonstrated by fact. The best way to kill a subject is to define it. Civilisation. Art. The Humanities. These are fragile entities easily destroyed by the ignorant, the untalented and the unsubtle; for so much relies on sensibility with its delicate taste, informed by culture and experience. Jacqueline Rose’s essay on Jan Marsh a marvellous example of a literary artist reclaiming literature from the tyranny of the social scientist who would take away the magic by crudely reducing it an idea about the creator’s life; the biographer making the biography not the act of creation the source and meaning of the work. We kill art if we take away its artificiality.

When used to explicate societies the idea can never be absolutely true; for ideas are too general to capture the peculiarities of not only individuals but the groups to which they belong. At best ideas can only be first approximations, a clue to a culture and its institutions. Each idea, if you will, is a work in progress. This is why an idea should be used with care and restraint. Intellectuals and academics are rarely careful. Cut off from the world, conversing only with members of their own caste, their understanding of other people is limited and deficient, mediated as it is by abstractions and moral diktats. Such a distance allows for loose generalisations with their attendant radical solutions and quick fixes; whose impact on people is never properly considered, carefully weighed. In his book on the Ostforscher Burleigh rightly comments on the callous indifference to life when academics regard the individual as nothing more than an abstraction (“surplus mouth” is one of many grotesque examples). It is not just the Nazis who are amoral beasts. In the film Frieda it is the enlightened character - the Labour Party candidate - who is the most prejudiced person in this English town; the very fact that she thinks in ideas preventing her seeing the common humanity of the heroine; the idea of the German blocking out her view of the whole woman.

How easy to think that the idea is the reality. This stems from the mistake in thinking life identical with our ideas about it. Believe this and of course our idea is true, and must be yoked onto those heads that believe in lies and fantasies…

We use the word Truth too freely today; another effect of the knowledge industry. We demand that “The People” must be told the Truth. And if “The People” resist, as they will, because they hold different ideas, we will impose the Truth upon them. Yet when commentators insist upon the truth it is usually their own obsessions they are referring to; their crude ideas confused for knowledge, and fused with a moral righteousness, that will accept no resistance. No impartial inquiry here. It is will to power. The academic has become the activist, a fanatic of the idea believed to solve the riddle of the social field. The instincts taking over, the content of an idea becomes less important than the idea itself; its ability to uplift, to move, to abuse, to compel. The idea has merged with the ego, which now has the means to assert itself in the outside world. This country will be taught a lesson… Alan Bullock, in his comparative biography of Hitler and Stalin, writes that teachers were over-represented in the Nazi Party. We are not surprised. There is something totalitarian about the very concept of truth. And though we may need dictators in the classroom they should be kept away from polite society. Alas, this battle is long lost. And now, in ideological times, when civility collapses, the teachers come out onto the street. Here’s their chance to colonise the city and its hinterland.

We welcome back Sarah Bond, our commissar in the red dress. Obsessed by the idea of white she is using it to change the academic environment. We note the obsession. See how it facilitates her career. And smile at the similarities with the man she condemns; although unlike Basil Gildersleeve Dr Bond appears unable to separate her political views from her scholarship; an inability she projects onto her bête noire. Both share the same obsession, although with the commissar it seems to occupy the entirety of the mind, not just the politician’s psyche. Each holds the same idea, whose value is determined by the immediate culture, which has changed significantly over the century; white no mere description, it acquires a moral worth from the surrounding social field, which supports their attacks and buttresses their own beneficence. The result? The same racist language as what is criticised, but with the colour values reversed. Confusing discrimination with equality, America with the West (compare British race relations with the American) the humanities with politics, the modern academic is free to utter the most awful prejudice. It is a shock only to those unaware of the fanaticism and careerism - the two are closely linked - of many in academia. 

The Ostforscher operated with a simple categorical equipment. Scholarship had to take account of political priorities; politicians were to be advised by academic experts; politicians should not determine the methods or goals of scholarship. These ethical criteria swirled like detritus in a wind-swept square once war broke out. Several factors explain the Gadarene rush to serve the regime. Commitment to similar goals…ranging from territorial revisions to a racialist reordering of Europe. The hubristic desire to be close to decision-making and the march of events. The need to make their work appear ‘relevant’ or, ‘vital to the war effort’, to secure government funds. In a few cases, fear that their controlled, revisionist goal would be outpaced by a young generation bent upon realising fantasies of ‘boundless imperialism’ built upon the figure of Otto the Great.

After 1945 the racial experts disappeared like melting snow. The irrationally of their work assisted a process whereby they became an unaccountable and lunatic fringe somehow unconnected with the mainstream of academic life. Prior to that date it was otherwise. Although the voices of the racial experts soared in a shrill descant, increasingly ‘respectable’ academics were singing their tune. It was the ‘respectable’ who underwent a process of acculturation. The result was the steady permeation of their work with concepts, methods and practises derived from the developing miasma of racial science. Relations with the racial experts may sometimes have been uneasy, although instances of mutual cooperation are not difficult to find, but in the end capitulation to, and adoption by the ‘respectable’ of deeply irrational modes of thought is most striking. The racial experts were not some lunatic extra, but a force that exerted a magnetic pull on the rest, a force that derived strength from coincidence and identity with the ideological core of the regime. (Germany Turns Eastwards, Michael Burleigh.)

These professors believed themselves members of the Progress Party; Germans active, educated and intelligent beings as opposed to the Slavs, who impossible to properly enlighten, because incurably passive, are condemned to a permanent primitive existence. “The deplorables” of that age. The tragedy of the 1940s is that the collapse of an entire social system allowed these academics to influence the political realm, from which they are normally excluded; too extreme to be taken seriously.

Closer to clerks than thinkers such minds are too pinched to cope with the largeness of the world; they settle for the sardine tin of the diminutive concept. Believe in the pure idea, which erases all of history’s details, and you can live in a perpetual present conceived as a universal every-time. To belong to the present! Secure in our conformity. Where the most orthodox of bureaucrats can believe themselves a radical force. Again, there should be no surprises here. Stalin’s Second Revolution (Collectivisation and the first Five Year Plan) was an administrator’s project imposed from above; the success of any revolution, after that first initial explosion, relying on the competence of its administrative machine. Today there is little to separate the academic and the bureaucrat; both natural conformists (we watch the peer-reviewed papers blowing about in the ideological wind) they want their notions turned into social artefacts. They need influence. They desire control. And they have the institutions to support them. Of course they will change the world. Bureaucrats are instinctive radicals; it is their reason that makes them so.

The video in which she plays the starring role appears to support Dr Bond’s position. One doesn’t need Padilla's paper - his stats are shamanistic tokens - to see the reality he describes: we just look at the faces in the auditorium. Nearly everybody is white. The reason, we suspect, for this hysteria about colour. Yet these facts don't tell us very much. We need to understand the sociology behind them. Historically, to be a Classics prof you needed a good mind and an expensive education; the combination essential to scholarly success. The white faces in the video - the result of both demography and the inequality of incomes - are the products of a history which, in one of history’s ironies, has devalued and marginalised the subject; Greek no longer an essential part of an elite’s education it has become a mere decoration; useless in the best sense of the word. Today, if one is poor or upwardly mobile there is no practical or material reason to study Classics, which may narrow further the class origins of its students and professors, making these departments even whiter. Of course these characters are concerned, their livelihood will not adapt to their ideas.

Another reason for the white faces, if we listen closely, is identity politics itself. If, as Dr Bond argues, Classics is identified with whiteness, then we would expect only whites to study it; indeed, shouldn’t she be encouraging them to do so? According to this line of thought it is in Ancient Greece where whites will find both the origin and an endorsement of their nature (and a much needed psychic support in difficult times). There is little cause for anybody else to study the subject; for why bother with departments that enshrine white privilege - the source, we are told elsewhere, of all the problems in the world - and dedicate ourselves to a history seen as backward, tyrannical, morally repellant…

Study Classics! It won’t get you into Google. Now if we closed most of the universities, transferring all their funds to schools, installing a Greek and Latin teacher in each… But ah…! Take away these profs’ privileges? Who live in a comfortable world where their ideas have no traction on their own ways of being. Isn’t this a bit too radical? Too radical! Yes. We suspect that the ideological fervour is designed to camouflage this - to the outsider - obvious gap between ideas and lifestyle. We begin to wonder… By stressing the racist nature of Classics, thereby making even it more unattractive to people not only of colour but those who want to join the respectable classes, have these academics found a way of protecting their own elite niche? Have they risen still higher the social walls protecting their caste….

Unfair, of course. Dr Bond wants to help the poor people. She wants to radicalise her subject, de-kulak her colleagues. How sad. This academic has drunk too much of a 20th century poison: politics. A typical revolutionary, she is using a toxic mix of rhetoric and bureaucracy to get her way, which, if she succeeds, will see the further diminution of the subject, reduced to a parody of the modish and politically orthodox. And she will be successful, we think. The trend of history is on her side. The University to become as common as the old Universal Church, a house open to everyone no matter the quality of their Christian faith.2

Stuart Hampshire makes a distinction between the politician and the commentator, arguing that they exist in the different worlds of “experience” and “innocence”. It is an important distinction that, however, ignores those rare occasions when these distinct mentalities fuse together in a single person; the political animal able to put all its cunning at the service of an intellectual’s idea. Stalin and Hitler examples of that odd amalgam of the gifted politician and the committed ideologue.

Like Stalin, Hitler was scornful of intellectuals, yet at the same time eager to establish his own intellectual authority. Stalin sought to do this in the Foundations of Leninism… with the claim not to be an original thinker himself, but the authoritative interpreter and heir of the Marxist-Leninist tradition. By preserving the outward appearance of conformity and repeating the ritual phrases, he was able to conceal the extent to which in practice he was deviating from the tradition and acting as an innovator. Hitler, by contrast, never acknowledging the sources on which he drew for his ideas (‘the intellectual detritus of centuries’ is Trevor-Roper’s description), constantly exaggerated his own originality. Every one of the elements in his world-view is easily identified in nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century writers, but no one had previously put them together in quite the same way. More important is the fact that, having created his own version…Hitler never altered it. There is a recognisable continuity between the ideas he expressed in the 1930s, his table talk in the 1940s, and the political testament which he dictated in the bunker just before he committed suicide in April 1945.

This is a statement easily misunderstood, since Hitler combined unusual consistency in his governing ideas with an equally striking flexibility in regard to programme, tactics and methods. He drew a clear distinction between the political thinker and the politician, and accorded the latter greater significance. But in a well-known passage of Mein Kampf, he wrote: ‘In may happen occasionally within long periods of human life that the political thinker and the politician become one.’ Hitler clearly believed that he was an example of such a combination and there is this much truth in his belief: if he is was not unique, he was rare among political leaders in the extent to which he sought to put his world-view into literal effect. (Alan Bullock)

Stalin - a bureaucrat of genius - is the most useful example for our purposes. Here was a man who in praising the Communist Party and enforcing the orthodoxy of Marxist-Leninism turned this party into a leader-cult and transmuted the ideology into a peculiar version of his own; by the time he died it was Stalinism, not the ideas of Marx or Lenin, that governed the Soviet Union. Like bureaucratisation and size politics, by its very existence, changes the nature of a group and an idea, which become servants for extraneous ends; in Stalin’s case his psychopathology. Dr Bond’s reasons are more mundane. Her political ideas shape her view of Classics, which through her involvement becomes itself a political project, an instrument for those views. This highly specialist subject, a true realm of experts, remoulded to serve a political agenda that in appealing to the hoi polloi will, it is also hoped, shore up careers in a subject in decline. And all done in the name of equality, our bureaucrat’s abracadabra!

It is not just bureaucrats who like equality. It is a great favourite with the concept. An abstract idea levels out the differences it seeks to explain. Thus in Dr Bond’s performance the European heritage is conflated with the white race; with this consequence: Karl Marx and Teddy Roosevelt become buddies; the Nazis are not differentiated from the Jews; the tolerance of white Classics professors is put on the same level as the intolerance of a Ku Kluxer; while in the background, the guns so loud we hear them at the podium, the Liberal war on Trump is played out over Pindar and Demosthenes. Hampshire calls it “Hume’s Trick”. It is where all the different meanings of a concept are subsumed within a single meaning meant to discredit all the others; the anti-Semitism of the white Hitler mixed up with the humane pessimism of the white Sigmund Freud so that the idea of white - because only Adolf gives it value - is besmirched. Such tricks produce odd effects. The skin colour of Western civilisation is contingent - as with the Chinese and Indian - yet for Dr Bond & Co the colour of its skin becomes essential to its nature. Our civilisation no longer a cosmopolitan accumulation over centuries of inter-cultural contact but a product of a distinct race. This racialising of the subject obscured by the talk of the diverse, the poly-vocal, the variety of social inputs.

“Hume’s Trick” is a reflex amongst the politically engaged and the half-educated. It is a self-conscious calculation with the disingenuous. In all cases it is about winning arguments at the expense of understanding; it is Socrates without his mystic faith in a knowledge beyond the mere social and political. An idea, like a Socratic question, should be the starting point for exploration and discovery. It is what we collect at the ticket office before boarding the train… Later, when analysed with depth and subtlety, and supported with years of accumulated insight and thought, we may, if we are lucky, start to uncover the different meanings inside the concept, giving us clues to the realities it hides. Stalin slides into our carriage. He is happy, and strangely expansive. He is talking to me as if an old friend. No no Schloss the Soviet Union wasn’t Communist. I was very clear about this; and I told the party, and on many occasions. He touches his moustache and smiles with a menace he can never quite conceal. It was only a Socialist state. The lesser preparatory stage which I sought both to create and to overcome. I laid the foundations and constructed the steps; you lot must build the Communist Parthenon that will sit on top of them. I question him about the nature of his achievement, suggesting that - ahem: even as a ghost he scares - Stalinism was a form of state-capitalism for underdeveloped countries; and that - I hesitate again - that this was - we can see now - no socialist project. He chuckles. Calls me a good friend and walks off to find us a drink… I wait shaking for the train guard to arrive. But no! J.G.A. Pocock pops in, and we talk about how a concept changes over time; often metamorphosing into its complete opposite: the collectivism of the Communist ideal transformed into the tyranny of a single man; history’s payback and society’s revenge. We agree that such complexities are beyond the politico and apparatchik; which in any case would impede their work, obscure their defining goal; the bureaucrat and the politician needing the idea to be both coarse and simple, so making it administratively and politically effective. Their concern is with process and tactics; the worth of an idea, its richness and depth, that fine texture, less important than its power to move and control a society’s mass. It is the emotive force of an idea that they seek, and use.

Dr Bond runs the propaganda section of this association. Are we shocked? No. What astonishes is the public pleading for her work - the blog and twitter feed - to be equated with scholarship. It suggests the success of the bureaucratic revolution in academia: the clerks have all the confidence now.

To understand ideas like Democracy, Freedom and Race we must place them within their historical and social contexts, where most of their meaning resides (Dr Bond cannot be understood without reference to today’s identity politics and the marginalisation of a once core subject of an elite). Not all can be done by analysis. We require knowledge and we need sympathy, the latter essential if we are to resonate with the atmosphere of a period, the source of those rare sparks of intuition, of imaginative insight. Such divination is always speculative, its conclusions provisional; Hampshire extremely good on the indeterminacy of our judgements in most scholarship and our thinking about society. These judgements are delicate flowers easily destroyed by an insistence on fact and absolute truth; a desert sun that in evaporating the soil’s moisture eradicates all the flora not just those pretty weeds.

Talking with Hitler about Germany’s Western defences an officer noticed that he had only two intellectual registers: the cosmic idea and the microscopic fact; the middle realm - of causes and trends, with its analysis, interpretations, judgement - didn't exist for him. Yet, as this man wryly wrote, the middle realm is where most of life is lived.

It is the description is of a clever but uneducated man. Hitler had a genius for intuition, which he nurtured through his very lack of formal education. Guided by touch and feelings, making him highly responsive to the atmosphere of a crowd and the meeting room, he could mesmerise a space, the kernel of his success. The qualities of memory, talk and feel made him a brilliant politician and a gifted amateur in military strategy and technology. They were not enough to run a nation. An extremely poor bureaucrat - the reason for the Nazi collapse - he was also a terrible intellectual; Bullock rightly drawing attention to the vulgarity of his mind. He was no thinker; his thoughts a grab-bag of intellectual jetsam held together by a few big ideas - race, anti-Semitism, Lebensraum (Hitler, we shouldn’t forget, was, like the Ostforscher, an advocate of migration as a transformative social force) - that he explained using an insanely small number of crude causes: a vast conspiracy or the antagonism of his opponents. He lacked a sensibility to properly analyse ideas or interpret facts; they were simply objects to collect and display. 

The dull empiricism, the unashamed, cringing worship of the fact were odious to me. Beyond the facts I looked for laws… In every sphere I left that I could move and act only when I held in my hand the thread of the general. (Trotsky, quoted in Bullock).

The reason why Stalin not Trotsky won Lenin’s succession battle. The educated mind thinking in universal terms is obsessed by the middle realm. It thus forgets that individuals exist; while overlooking the true nature of that “general”, which in the public sphere is little more than a myth which for a time an elite believes true.

We need intuition, which a formal education is liable to weaken even erase, although we cannot allow it to rule our minds. The mind requires the restraint and the direction - the order - of a reason unlikely to be acquired without a vigorous educational training, its discipline and rituals. We must attend school and university if we are to understand the world; yet these institutions can also destroy the very qualities - that intuition - that creates a sensibility able to grasp the essential attributes of life; the texture of an epoch, the feel of an historical figure, the resonance of a work of art. We should be wary of the educated mind; it is too limited, too idea-soaked, too rational - it is a bureaucrat’s mentality - to properly understand subjects where reason and ideas are but a part of their nature. The Humanities are not safe with the post-grad. The academic is apt to forget that epochs and literature are living things. A simple example will suffice. In a friend’s bookclub the local academic ridiculed its members for talking about a novel’s characters as if they were real people. No! no! They are just text, she insisted. Unfortunately, too much respect was shown for such dim-wittedness - this academic’s conception of reality is very simple-minded - so they accepted her views, a mere orthodoxy. The expert had spoken. But is she an expert? On Critical Theory perhaps, but literature… Madame Bovary is alive in Flaubert’s novel, she is not just a collection of sentences. Reduce literature to words and you snuff out its vitalism, which makes us feel the characters of a novel (or the poem’s theme). Literature is not a subject to be studied, but a part of a life to be lived; it belongs to the formation of a personality that will be responsive to culture, vibrating - to adapt Henry James - to its delicate melodies. A cultivated sensibility, as opposed to a merely educated one, is concerned not only with understanding the middle realm - its ideas, causes, trends - but in grasping the meanings and feel - the atmosphere - of a culture and its objects. If top-notch such personalities will create their own concepts.3

I suggest that this educated intuition is only possible if we attain maturity as human beings; for only then can we bring a mature sensibility to bear on abstractions that are only ever first-approximations of the life they seek to comprehend. Yet the tendency of the university is to deep freeze the precocious in their adolescence; so that the idea and the fact, so easily manipulated by reason in thrall to some simple faith, becomes the entirety of one’s understanding. It is why the rich human life of Western civilisation is turned, inside the mind of a contemporary academic, into a single crass idea: the colour of its skin. Only when we become adults can we put away such childish things. Innocence is not enough. To understand the world we must have experience.

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1.  It is also a critique of such feminism: the Uma Thurman character by insisting that Jack is a serial killer turns him into one.

2.  See my discussion of Pascal in An Act of Faith.

3.  Ian Watt is a rare example. After finishing this piece I read Stefan Collini’s wonderful review where he quotes Watt quoting Auerbach: “empirical confidence in our spontaneous faculty for understanding others on the basis of our own experience.” The problem of modern academia: their inmates haven’t spent time in a Japanese labour camp. Or... Their experience is extremely thin. 

At last, having left the path, and scrambled down into this ditch, we have discovered the source of today’s love affair with the other. To spend an entire life inside an academic institution is to cut yourself off from the rest of humanity; and, by implication, to sever the sensibility from literature, which until the meta-fiction of the 1960s was wholly concerned with life; both writers and critics living in the world not out of it. The other: it is everything outside the pages of a book (published by some university press).