polarised

Why has political and ethical opinion in the West become so polarised? To the extent that many no longer seem to find it tolerable to live in the same country as people who have opposing viewpoints?
   The Left likes to blame the Right. Figures like Donald Trump are said to be 'divisive'. But the current resurgence of rightism, often denounced as 'extreme', is perhaps best interpreted as a reaction against the increasing cultural dominance of leftism. It's a reflection of the fact that leftism has become gradually more intolerant as it has acquired power – suffocatingly so, from many people's point of view.
   As with any social phenomenon, the causes of increasing polarisation are complex. But one reason seems to be that for many people, their opinions have taken on (in their own minds) the status of fact. They 'know', for example, that men usually oppress women, that white people are all racist, and that economic inequality is unjust. Opinions that diverge from these 'facts' are simply wrong. They don't deserve to be given space. Rather, they deserve to be suppressed and punished.
   Where did people acquire this unjustified certainty, and the inability to consider they might be wrong? I suspect the answer in many cases is, they acquired it at university, at least if they studied a humanities subject. Marxist and Marxist-inspired perspectives, which promote dogmatic ways of thinking, have gradually infiltrated the academic humanities. By now, such perspectives have become dominant in many institutions, including blue-chip ones.
   Not all Marxist perspectives are necessarily wrong, so long as one remembers they're just perspectives. The reasons for social stratification (for example) are not well understood; arguably, they're not understood at all. Marx's theory that inequality is due to 'oppression' may be correct, in part, but there's currently no way of knowing. It could be completely false.
   Marxist-inspired perspectives on gender, sexuality and ethnicity can be intellectually broadening, if that's considered an objective worth pursuing – so long as they're presented as perspectives, and not as compelling theory, with alternatives or critiques dismissed as 'ideology'. But that doesn't happen in practice, and it's not clear if it's even feasible. It's an integral part of the Marxist approach to treat itself as both factually and morally correct, and to treat other ways of thinking as deluded and harmful. This is one important way in which Marxist analysis is very different from the scientific approach.
   Marxism is toxic to the spirit of free enquiry. It regards 'free enquiry' as an instrument of oppression. It's not surprising if support for neutral debate, and dispassionate weighing up of alternatives, has declined, if professors encourage their students to regard such things as merely a cover for dodgy motives.
   Rather than teaching people to think sympathetically about a range of differing viewpoints, many humanities professors encourage adopting faith-like positions on certain topics. They don't do it by stating categorically that (for example) men usually oppress women; the process is more subtle than that. Students are encouraged to think 'critically', but only in certain directions. Getting good marks depends on getting to the 'right' conclusions, and avoiding the 'wrong' ones.
For example,
• anti capitalism: thumbs up.
• anti state intervention, or anti Marxism: thumbs down.
   Ironically – or hypocritically – it's actually the humanities that are doing one thing (political propaganda) under the cover of another (intellectual analysis). It's made to look like science, but has more in common with religion.

the destruction of Britain (contd.)

The Labour government currently appears to have two main objectives:
(1) raise money by any means necessary (the coffers are empty);
(2) penalise the middle class for having 'unfair' advantages.
   As Arthur Laffer recently reminded us, objective (1) isn't necessarily going to be met, in net terms, by having a new tax. For example, if you slap a 20% tax on private schools, but twenty percent of them go bust as a result, you may actually decrease tax revenue. Nevertheless, if you manage to penalise the middle class, then at least one of your objectives will have been met.
   Having successfully punished those who wish to keep their children away from the horrors of comprehensive schools, Labour's next move is to penalise family farms. Farming is linked to private land ownership, one of the primary objects of hatred and disapproval for Marxists and other leftists. Stalin, for example, was willing to let millions die for the sake of eliminating private farming, which he saw as anathema to the communist cause.
   Labour's approach is to abolish the exemption for inheritance tax on agricultural property (agricultural property relief) for farms valued above £1 million. This is a ludicrously low threshold. There are houses in the Oxfordshire village I live in – not by any means grand houses – selling for close to a million.
   One of the concepts that came out of the COVID crisis is that of key workers, and key sectors – sectors of the economy that we cannot do without, if a catastrophe ever hits. One of those sectors is surely food production. Rather than over-worrying about which minority groups need protection (from being offended), shouldn't we be worrying about which sectors of the economy need protection? Because, in a crisis, we are going to be royally screwed if they don't exist and we're forced to rely on possibly non-existent imports? Personally, I would put food production above even medical services and transport, on the list of sectors we cannot do without.
   Farming, more perhaps than any other business, depends on long-term planning and strategy. It can take decades for an agricultural plan to come to full fruition. Continuity across generations has been a crucial part of British farming. And one unwise policy change is all it can take to permanently destroy an agricultural business. Can it ever be rebuilt? Don't count on it.
   Depending on whose data you believe, the proportion of British farms affected by the tax change could be two thirds, or it could be 20 percent. But even 20 percent of our farms being gradually decimated is too much.
   Academic think tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies has recommended the abolition of agricultural property relief, on the basis that "[if we have inheritance tax] it should apply equally across all types of assets."

If the government wishes to promote certain uses of land – such as producing food [...] – it would be fairer and more efficient to explicitly target support towards the activities it seeks to promote.

This line of argument may look convincing on paper. But do the academics responsible for it have any practical knowledge of how farming works? Or considered that a tax you have to pay, plus a subsidy you have to claim, may look the same – in theory – as being left alone, but be very different in practice?
   Even the Institute of Chartered Accountants, not particularly known for having a pro-Conservative stance, has warned that the £1m threshold is set too low, and that it will affect many more farms than the government claims.
   As in the case of private schools, the big players will no doubt find ways and means to survive the onslaught. It's the smaller farms who are likely to go to the wall.
   Do Labour politicians understand the economics of farming? Do they care? Is it wilful ignorance? Whatever the causes, the result will surely be to push the British farming sector closer to the brink.

• My colleague Celia Green has sometimes suggested that perhaps Britain "has a death wish". It's clear that there are people who seem to hate Britain (or a particular version of it), and who seem to want to destroy it. But is it possible for destruction to happen, unless a good proportion of the populace as a whole is to some extent on board with it? Is it possible that Freud's Todestrieb can operate at a societal level?

le déluge (après nous)

It seems France is paying the price for 50 years of cultural-Marxist ideology, which started to become hegemonic over there in the 1970s. The French structuralist and post-structuralist movements – variants of the intellectual collectivism that Marx's disciples pioneered, and hugely influential – no doubt made the French intellectual establishment feel they were masters of the (mental) universe. A pleasant feeling, after the humiliation of the Occupation.
   Their ideas became fashionable, then dominant. It soon became difficult to be a non-leftist intellectual at all in France. Even the occasional maverick like Bernard-Henri Lévy still genuflected towards the basic principle of leftism: that intellectuals were there to make the world 'a better place'. Instead of making France 'better', we can see what the eventual effects of leftist hegemony are: instability, political incompetence, loss of social cohesion.
   France no longer occupies the position of standard bearer for cultural Marxism. (One of the ironies of collectivism becoming hegemonic is that eventually high-grade collectivist thinkers are hunted to extinction, because the concept of an exceptional person, even a leftist one, is regarded as too individualistic.) The role of leadership was transferred to the US during the 1980s and 90s. Applying a temporal analogy suggests that America has about another 20 or 30 years to go before it, too, succumbs to the weight of Marxist-inspired ideology, and starts to go downhill.
   For the moment, the concept of enterprising individuals, and their importance, still forms a key part of America's self-image. Only this morning I was made aware, by an American brain-training app, of the historical role of Boston's 'ice king' Frederic Tudor (1783-1864).
   But the rot has obviously started even in America, as can be seen from yesterday's assassination of Charlie Kirk. Unless the US wakes up and realises that its bloated university system has become a wokeist propaganda machine, it will soon be in the same position as Britain, with every historical figure 'deconstructed' and 'revisionised' to prove they were enemies of social justice, or else mere components of 'social movements'.

• The key to seeing through wokeism is to think about the motivation (conscious or unconscious) of those involved. They would be the first to tell you that everything is about power. Shouldn't you consider whether this applies, a fortiori, to themselves? Who benefits when all political thinking and action is eventually influenced, or outright controlled, by a class of state-authorised intellectuals?

paying the price for pseudo-logic

The tides are changing for higher education. In 2020, Joe Biden was elected on a platform of free college education for all Americans. Five years later, few politicians in the West talk about expanding the bloated university system. The penny seems to have dropped that bumping up participation rates has achieved little, except satisfy egalitarian ideology and generate massive debt.
   As always with state involvement, there's now a ratchet-effect problem. Reversing the expansion will create unemployment among academics, and lead to waste of useless expenditure on infrastructure (lecture halls, student accommodation, etc.) Did New Labour, or their counterparts in other countries, consider this reversibility issue, when they encouraged the spending spree? It's doubtful.
   There's an interesting recent article by a retired academic who says he was opposed to the UK's expansion that started in the 1990s, and who argues that chickens are now coming home to roost. The fact that the article appears in Times Higher Education suggests that even the academic and administrative elites are starting to acknowledge the problem.
   Former politics lecturer Lincoln Allison points out that the UK's current two-tier system (half are graduates, half not) condemns non-graduates permanently to lower-grade jobs. Rather than increasing opportunities for the able, the expansion has succeeded in entrenching class differences.
   Allison says that the university sector has been "bloated to an unsustainable level", and predicts that it is now "bound to decline".

... the government of a new party – or an old party on a new trajectory – may get into power and boldly and deliberately dismantle large parts of the system.
   As a competitor for public funding, universities don't look good compared with health, defence and environment, and we must bear in mind that the British constitution can allow nearly complete control over policy based on 40 per cent of the vote. Such a government might institute a programme of closures and insist on the sale of assets and real estate.

Allison's article doesn't explore the dodgy logic that was used to rationalise the bloating, back in the heady nineties and noughties. The phenomenon is especially noteworthy given that academics themselves – cleverer than the average person? – were presumably involved in developing the case for expansion.
   The 2006 Leitch Review in particular provides a prime illustration of ludicrous pseudo-rationality: statistics, charts, arguments ('Britain needs more graduates in order to compete!'), all conveniently collated and targeted at producing a desired conclusion ('increase participation rate to 40%!') that had probably been fixed in advance. It's a testament to spurious logic of the kind nowadays habitually deployed in the humanities, and a testament to how such pseudo-logic can have massive political consequences, with a massive price to pay down the line, in the form of economic mismanagement and sorting out the mess.

Boycott the universities!

My advice to middle‑class parents:
Keep your offspring away from institutions that promote toxic ideology, and that encourage massive personal debt.

My advice to working‑class parents:
Ditto.

READ MORE.
 

Destruction of the middle class has begun...

... I mean the second stage of it has begun. Or is it Stage 3, or Stage 4 by now? It's hard to keep track.
   British private schools have started to crack, under the onslaught of a >20 percent increase in costs, VAT now being applied to fees, combined with a recent rise in employers' National Insurance.
   As I predicted, it's the smaller private schools at the margin which are suffering the most, and are the first to go to the wall. I'm sure Eton, Harrow and Winchester will manage somehow. So it's the poorer members of the middle class who are being punished. The very rich will be okay. Perhaps because they have (figuratively) made a 'deal' with the left-wing hegemony? It might help to explain the politics of figures such as Etonian David Cameron and Wykehamist Rishi Sunak.
   Hatred of the middle class has been 'legitimised', using ideology that was invented by Karl Marx, spread by his disciples, and which is now being disseminated to vast numbers via the university system. Maybe that's why New Labour were so keen to get more young people to go to college.
   Most of the current Cabinet went to comprehensive schools. Were their spirits nearly crushed there? Making them want to take it out, not on state education, but on the private education they missed out on? It's one of the paradoxes of leftism in a mixed economy – and a reason why its influence has a tendency to rise over time – that the suffering its policies cause often leads its victims to blame, not leftism, but capitalism, ironically leading to more ammunition for leftism. It's one of those negative feedback loops.
   Contemporary state education inculcates collectivist values.* So private schools remain a small but potent threat to il-liberal hegemony. A person tends to emerge from them not brainwashed to believe in collectivism, or that he/she (and any other individual) is insignificant in relation to the collective.
   Many among the Left call private schools "out of touch". Out of touch with what? Leftist ideology, which has become hegemonic among educational, academic and cultural institutions? But why should every school reflect the dominant values? Isn't it one of the central tenets of left-wing thought (the academic kind at any rate) that it's virtuous to be oppositional to, or at least divergent from, the dominant ideology?
   It's worth bearing in mind that state provision is not an essential element of universal education. There are private schools whose fees are lower (or were, before they were subjected to Labour's penalties) than the average government spend per state school pupil. Vouchers would be consistent with universal education. But socialists, which includes most humanities professors and the teaching unions, have usually rejected the idea of a voucher system. It would leave too little power in their hands – power to boss people about in the name of fairness and equality.

update
I have just gathered, via an article in Monday's Telegraph, that ideological support for attacking private schools came, not just from comprehensive-educated Labour politicians, but from former Conservative Education Secretary Michael Gove, currently Editor of the Spectator.
   There are various possible ways of interpreting this extraordinary and mind-boggling fact, which was news to me. I think it illustrates perfectly what is wrong with contemporary British 'Conservatism', and why genuine conservatism needs to start looking to alternatives – ones that have become less complaisant and complicit with il-liberal hegemony.

• A reader has queried my suggestion that discussion of transgender, and other topics to do with gender, sexuality or race, should be "banned from universities". What about conversations in the cafeteria? And how am I proposing such a ban would be enforced?
   My suggestion only applies to formal discussions: papers, books, lectures, talks. Obviously individuals on campus would go on exploring those topics informally among themselves – ideally, without the current policing by university authorities.
   If an individual wants to complain they are being treated disrespectfully – for whatever reason – they should be able to complain. But I don't see any reason for having special rules for this in respect of gender/sexuality/ethnicity, any more than I see a need for special laws for crimes that have a gender/sexuality/ethnicity aspect to them, or for laws against so-called 'hate speech'. (Before New Labour brought in such laws, there was already legislation against incitement to violence. I don't see why punishment should vary according to whether anti-minority motivation was alleged to be involved.)
   As to how a 'ban' would be implemented, I'm certainly not advocating legal restrictions on what universities can or can't teach, or what speakers may or may not be invited – let alone having rules that certain types of speaker must be invited for the sake of creating legally required 'balance'. I think that universities should themselves recognise the absurdity of hosting formal debate and research on topics for which some possible perspectives are prohibited. It's universities themselves who should be adopting internal policies on the issue.
   Of course that's very unlikely to happen. It would entail at least partial acknowledgment that much of the 'research' and 'debate' done under the banner of the humanities so far has been carried out to serve an agenda. Also, acknowledgment that much of the rest of the research and debate is tainted, as a result of having been conducted in an environment of agenda-serving institutionalised bias. An agenda is still an agenda, however much it's ostensibly aimed at a 'virtuous' end result.

* 'Critical Theory', in this case inspired by nutty French professor Louis Althusser (1918-1990), claims that modern state schools disseminate capitalist, not collectivist, ideology. This is either ironic, or hypocritical, depending on what you think the underlying motivation of Critical Theorists is.

Image source: Daily Telegraph

novels/movies: grim, boring, ideological

More about the decline of literature from Quora.com. Commentator 'Jack' points out that the majority of modern novels are tedious: "meaningless characters with meaningless lives in meaningless universes".
   Jack lists egalitarianism among the factors which have contributed to decline:

The third cause of literary decline is our democratic age. This is an age of anti-hierarchy where all great values have been inverted. It emphasises averageness rather than aristocracy. Aristocratic in this sense means greatness. The best literature is hierarchical, aristocratic and elitist ... Their authors are not demolishing the great man for democracy, but preserving his greatness whether for good or evil.

Jack quotes George Orwell, showing that the dead hand of politicisation was already making itself felt in the 1930s.

During the past ten years literature has involved itself more and more deeply in politics ... One can see the change in the prevailing literary attitude by comparing the books written about the Spanish civil war with those written about the war of 1914-18. The immediately striking thing about the Spanish war books, at any rate those written in English, is their shocking dullness and badness. But what is more significant is that almost all of them, right-wing or left-wing, are written from a political angle, by cocksure partisans telling you what to think ... [Orwell, 'Inside the Whale', 1940]

Jack contrasts the dumbing-down effect of politicisation with the great nineteenth-century novels.

The greatest novels from Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo ... centre on moral transformations of significant men and women, often aristocrats or leaders. Politics was far from their intentions. Their struggles were not about fragmented political identity, but universal truth that everyone experiences and embodied by great archetypes.
   These authors created meaningful characters in meaningful universes where there was objective truth and aspects of objective evil. Anyone can relate to their characters because they affirmed archetypes that have suffused art from the dawn of recorded history.

Jack encourages us to oppose the grimness of modern literature, rather as we might oppose the evil of Mordor. There's certainly a possible analogy there, with Sauron seeking to destroy the middle-class gentility of the Shire, and to replace it with dreary uniformity.

If I may briefly quote myself, from 'The meaning of mediocracy' (written in 2006):

The key characteristics of culture in a mediocracy are grimness, boredom and dishonesty. Mediocracy's high culture is depressing, vacuous and pretentious. Its popular culture is ugly, aggressive and degraded.

One thing Jack's analysis doesn't mention is the anti-middle-class ideology that now pervades all highbrow culture, and increasingly also popular culture.

---

A couple of articles from July discuss a growing backlash against Hollywood ideology. New company Founders Films, loosely linked to Palantir Technologies, plans to produce an adaptation of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and other movies that avoid leftist ideology. A new movie rating site, Worth it or Woke, criticises woke ideology in Hollywood films. Founder James Carrick mentions, for example, the current dominance of women for traditionally male roles in movie scripts: "women who are written like men, who are stoic, physically imposing, are sexual aggressors, and embody other traditionally masculine qualities". (Or, as I like to call them, blokes with breasts.)
   But it's interesting that neither article mentions how middle-class characters, which dominated Hollywood's Golden Age, have been almost completely written out of contemporary TV and movie dramas – except as villains or as otherwise pathological. You only have to hear someone playing classical music in a movie from the 1990s onwards to know that you're probably about to encounter a person who's damaged and creepy, if not a serial killer (and almost always male). It all fits with the Marxist-inspired anti-bourgeois ideology that now dominates the highbrow arts, as well as academia.
   I found the Exotic Marigold Hotel movies significant in this connection. A roll-call of British middle-class actors (poshish accents, British middle-class politeness at its best) are consigned to humorous retirement offshore. For that, they're still permitted (just about) to appear as characters we're allowed to like, signalling a kind of nostalgic goodbye-for-ever. For normal everyday life, they're mostly prohibited, judging by their conspicuous absence from (e.g.) BBC drama other than as bad eggs.

academia: #1 for oppression

In the two months since Power-mad and Hypocritical was published, there have been two guest columns from former academics in the Telegraph, both moaning very mildly about the loss of free speech and academic neutrality from British campuses. The defence of free speech was feeble in each case. It speaks volumes that both writers are retired, so presumably not at any significant risk from blowback. I'd be more impressed if a few forty-something professors were to come out against the gender/race hysteria, and on the side of free debate. Of course, writing anything at all for a right-wing newspaper is already risqué for an academic.
   Neither of the two articles showed any sign of recognition that academia might be the source and the driver of the woke movement, with all its toxic side effects. It's unlikely that social justice warriors would feel so convinced that they're in the right, and that it's virtuous to make trouble for dissenters, if academia hadn't given official backing to the various 'oppression' narratives.

   Professors are held out as experts on phenomena such as inequality, fairness and gender, but there's no such thing as expertise on those topics. It's a case of armchair theorising. It may seem like they know something, but that's primarily because they (inappropriately) carry the same titles and status as professors of geology or astrophysics. The only test of their theories is whether they can get the approval of other theorisers.
   The possibility that their obvious bias has to do with the acquisition of power has apparently not occurred to academics, implying they may be clever but are also quite capable of being deluded. Either that, or they're keeping quiet about it for cynical reasons. Their capacity to tyrannise non-believers, and to force people to adjust their behaviour with regard to (e.g.) transgender, is clearly a form of power, even if it doesn't bring with it obvious monetary benefits.
   Both writers suggest the situation is getting better. I don't see any sign of that. In the US, where at least there's the political will to do something about the problem, universities are banding together to fight 'the enemy' and show little awareness that the anti-college sentiment might be partly justified. In the UK, the upcoming legal changes imposing duties on colleges to "promote freedom of speech" will probably make things worse, by creating an even more litigious atmosphere.

A good deal of the second of the two articles is taken up with the gender/transgender issue that currently dominates academia. If academic debate about transgender rights were to become truly free, space would have to be made for the argument that it's all a lot of nonsense. But I don't see that happening, and I don't know whether it would even be legal.
   There are two reasons why, given current conditions, transgender as a topic should probably be banned altogether from universities (i.e. no 'research', no talks on the topic, either for or against). First, since the law intrudes into the subject, any pretence that the debate can be free is absurd to begin with. Second, even if the law didn't intrude, the principle that no one must ever be upset, and the idea that any hint of 'micro-aggression' should trigger calling the authorities, makes a mockery of free debate. Hence – at least until such time as the legality of free speech is returned, in full – it's surely best to ban discussion of transgender from campus altogether. Otherwise you're just going to get a lot of biased echoes. Similar arguments apply to everything else to do with gender or sex, and anything to do with race: those topics should also be kept off campus since they have become too politicised and hence inaccessible to unbiased analysis.

Supposedly all the academic activism is about promoting 'equality'. What it's actually about is the power of intellectuals to impose their preferences on everyone else, by using the privilege and phoney status of academic positions. An intellectual class is holding the rest of us hostage, by scaring us with the threat of being regarded as 'oppressive' or 'hateful'. In reality it's they who are doing the oppressing, and they who seem to be fuelled by hatred and intolerance. You can't get much more hypocritical than that.

Regrettably I've had to remove the comment facility, due to lack of clarity in the Online Safety Act. It's good to see Nigel Farage giving the new legislation a well-deserved kick.
'Timeline of cultural Marxism' taken from Power-mad and Hypocritical.