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.

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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.

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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.

arrested for satire

Disturbing reports of a man at a pro-Palestine protest last weekend being arrested, handcuffed, and interviewed by police for 6 hours, apparently for nothing worse than carrying a placard showing a Private Eye cartoon. I know that Private Eye has gone downmarket in recent years, but even so.
   The protest itself wasn't illegal, but the cartoon apparently was. At least, holding up a copy of the cartoon was considered to be, though apparently the original publication in the magazine wasn't.
   I don't blame the police. I blame former Home Secretaries such as Jack Straw and Charles Clarke, under whose watch loosely worded legislation, ostensibly designed to combat terrorism or violence against minorities, was passed. (The New Labour period was also the time when the appalling NCHI regime was brought in.)
   The police will tend to reflect the ideological values of the elites. As the latter move away from believing in individual rights, and towards collectivist values – or, in the case of academics, outright Marxism – both legislation and police discretion will tend to reflect this demotion of the individual. It's happening everywhere, but in Britain it's particularly noticeable, since Britain was once a place which had a relatively high level of respect for individual rights and individual territory.

arbiters of truth and virtue

American universities are having to cope with the wind of hostility from the Trump administration. According to US Vice President J D Vance, universities are the enemy. From the position of a conservative politician, Vance's assessment is quite correct. Academia is opposed to conservatism generally, and completely intolerant of Trump's version – which, bombastics aside, isn't really any more extreme than Reaganism. (During his first term, I highlighted the blatant bias against Trump exhibited by Oxford University Press's politics blog.)
   Steven Pinker, writing in defence of Harvard, asserts that the motivation for the attack on academia is "to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch". But it's just as plausible that the motivation is to limit the power of institutions that now serve as unaccountable arbiters of truth and virtue.

US colleges are trying to fight back. The Chronicle of Higher Education has just published a guide to help colleges change public perceptions.

Reputations in higher education are notoriously hard to shift – and today, the headwinds are stronger than ever. Many Americans question whether college is worth it, dismiss the value of the curriculum, or believe campuses push radical agendas.

But referring to colleges 'pushing radical agendas' may be missing the point. The agendas that are being habitually pushed these days aren't any longer 'radical'. They've become the norm, at least among intellectuals.
   The idea that one might choose not to intervene in society, in order to produce more 'just' outcomes, has become inconceivable to the kind of people who teach humanities. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that if there are any of them who feel differently, they're not permitted to say so.
   It's the divergence of political and moral norms between academics on the one hand, and the public at large on the other, that's the problem – finally being addressed after years of avoidance, however clumsily.
   We are long past the stage of 'tenured radicals'. We're at the stage where narratives have been almost entirely changed to suit the preferences of an intellectual class. A class which (statistically) favours intervention, because it increases its scope for exercising power.

Read more in:
POWER-MAD AND HYPOCRITICAL:
Why professors love Marxism.

"gaslighting on an industrial scale"

Finally, a commentator who doesn't think inequality is morally wrong, or oppressive, or otherwise harmful: Sherelle Jacobs, writing in Thursday's Telegraph.

The thesis that inequality is bad, and only justifiable (if at all) for the sake of incentives, has become so standard in intellectual circles that it's usually taken for granted these days, at least by the kind of people who read the Guardian. Many who've been to college, and got exposed to the politics of humanities professors, have been brainwashed to believe that inequality is immoral. But these days you don't need to go to college to pick up the ideology: it's all around us.
   As so often, the original source of the negative attitude seems to be intellectuals' own preferences, not the general public. Sure, everyone resents, at least a little, others who look like they've got more. But that doesn't necessarily translate into wanting to abolish inequality – at least, not without stirring up and fomenting by intellectuals.
    Anyway, we know what happens when you try to eliminate economic inequality: you get a whole class of government apparatchiks responsible for eliminating it. This leads to social inequality that's worse than the inequality that's supposedly been eliminated.

Ms Jacobs gives the Conservatives a well-deserved telling off. Some of her sentences should be turned into motivational posters, and stuck up in Conservative offices across the country.

• A wealth tax ... is a moral abomination.

• The Right must stop implicitly apologising for ... the benefits of capitalism.

• The notion that private property cannot be justifiably raided by the state ought to be sacrosanct.

• A wealth tax denigrates the kind of values society should be encouraging – prudence, ambition, delayed gratification.

I especially like this one:

• The Left are gaslighting us on an industrial scale.

Britain has come a long way from the Victorian work ethic which produced the Clifton Suspension Bridge and other amazing construction projects, and a level of success and efficiency that Germans of the time could only dream about. By now,

we don't see success as something to aspire to, but rather to be torn down.

No wonder Britain is falling down the league tables.
Ms Jacobs rightly argues that Britain needs

politicians who are unafraid to declare that the rich benefit us all and wealth inequality is an inevitable outcome of a well functioning economy.

If Ms Jacobs ever decides to stand for Parliament, or to lead the Tory Party, I'd certainly vote for her.

Why don't the Tories get it? The electorate loved Boris Johnson. David Cameron and Rishi Sunak, not so much. Read the runes: if you want to win, be more like Boris, less like 'Dave' or Rishi. But perhaps the Conservatives don't really want to win.
("Don’t support us, we are not worthy" – Mediocracy p.58.)

women on top (in publishing)

What if you own/edit a magazine, and you happen to believe that women are inappropriately under-represented in culture, and that this is because of negative attitudes towards them? You might feel that you should never give space to any opinions or data that might reinforce those negative attitudes.
   For example, someone might want to draw attention to possible statistical differences between women and men, in their respective attitudes towards (say) the choice between liberty vs state intervention. You choose to reject any and all articles containing speculations of this kind. Fair enough, it’s your magazine.
   But what if everyone who owns/controls/edits magazines takes the same approach, and deviation from this approach is demonised, in a sort of intellectual-mob effect? The position of some women, in some respects, would perhaps go on being improved. But not of all women. There are likely to be at least a few women who want to say things that deviate from this orthodoxy.
   One thing that would almost certainly deteriorate is the quality of culture. Suppression and repression are the enemies of cultural progress. Culture is likely to stagnate into something prosaic and predictable.

Women have become dominant in some sectors, and this has caused changes within those sectors. You can choose to like those changes, or to dislike them. But to suppress discussion of them – in order to block the suggestion that the changes might not be 100% positive from all points of view – is bound to reduce the quality of cultural content, academic debate, free speech, and so on.
   Culture is nowadays readily sacrificed on the altar of ideological correctness. This is an approach that has received a big boost from Marxist ideology, and from the fact that it's now the preferred narrative among humanities professors.

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Power-mad and Hypocritical
is now available in hardback.

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from Quora.com:

Why is contemporary American literature so boring?
Answer: Political correctness. The social pressure on major American publishing houses in the late 20th century required them to replace good male editors with mediocre female editors (in many cases).
   Very quickly female editors comprised over 80% of all editors. This meant, naturally, that most books accepted for publication were by, for and about women.
   This was good for profits, too, as 80% of all books in America are purchased by – and now written by – women.
   Virtually no one will admit that women and men have different virtues and viewpoints about some things. So, books can no longer write about bull fighting, war, individual courage, cowardice under fire, existential crises, intellectual/moral dilemmas, or other male subjects.
   Women’s literature is basically about relationships. This has effectively emasculated American literature, which was once the bravest, most literary, most insightful, boldest, most true, most subtle, and most masculine in the world.

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