As promised, we have come to the terminus of the journey. There are plenty of other things that could be written of; but everything that needs be written has been written, especially in the last handful of mailings.
Thank you to those who accompanied me on the journey—a journey I didn't necessarily want to make, but felt compelled to, under impetus of the silence of others perhaps more entitled to speak.
By way of valediction—as it were, a sort of Horseman, Pass By moment:
Going Solo
I heard last night that you were dead,
the three of you,
a landlady,
someone I worked with,
an old girlfriend;
and I drew a fourth to fill a hand,
my father,
caught obliquely in the sideways mirror of the pub
as I raised my glass,
ambushed by his likeness
in the image.
And if I was to speak falsely of it,
I might say something about the loneliness
of the round-the-world yachtsman
setting out
as the flotilla breaks behind
and turns for shore.
But the truth is I'm indifferent.
19/1/2000
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Prince of Darkness . . .
It might appear at times that I am presenting myself, however outlandishly it might seem, as a defender of the Catholic Church. Not necessarily so. My experience of an Irish Catholic upbringing left me with few, if any, nostalgic memories. By my time, the Church had long since become a machine, an institution, no different from any other institution in its reaction to threats and dangers. The problem for it was, however, that it was expected to be much more than that, and was likely to be held to much higher standards of accountability than your average secular institution. Which is why it is in the bind it is in at the moment.
My decision to involve myself in the broader debate wasn't particularly fuelled by any desire to defend the Catholic Church. Rather it was prompted by a relatively intimate knowledge of the forces seeking to bring it down—and that is what is ultimately afoot—and the consequences for human life and freedom and happiness should such forces be allowed to win.
I remember sometime around the late 1980s, an academic from either Oxford or Cambridge writing an op-ed piece in the Daily Telegraph bemoaning the loss of religion and speaking of the need to restore it—for the little people! To him religion was a method of social control, a true 'opium of the people', and certainly not something to be believed in by anyone of a rarified intellect similar to his own, an opinion which he made abundantly clear in the article. And one's instinctive reaction was to take the patronising little prat and give him a kicking—if such a thing had been possible.
There is no doubt that religion has been often used historically for the purposes of social control—for keeping the rich rich and the poor consoled in their poverty. This was often the remit of the institutional Church (indeed, the institutional churches), whose higher benefices were usually reserved for the upper classes.
Writing, for example, of Hungary around the time of the French Revolution, one historian could say that it 'boasted perhaps the largest nobility in Europe. There 75,000 Magnates, and lesser gentry, had things their own way. They owned all the land, had exclusive right to office, filled all the places in the Church, the Army and the Universities; like nobles elsewhere they were exempt from all regular and most special taxes' (The Empire of Reason: Henry Steele Commager, Phoenix, 1978).
Yet that is only one side of the story—the side of the corruption of religion, not of religion itself. Nor is it surprising that people should have turned against religion in such situations, coming to see it, not as part of the solution, but as a major element of the problem. Neither is it surprising that those with deeper agendas should often have sought to take advantage of the perception.
Yet the fact is that there is much more to religion than bishops touching up altar boys or simony or enforced sexual repression—for some reason, though it is in no way relevant, the opening sentence of Anthony Burgess's novel Earthly Pursuits keeps pushing itself into my mind: 'It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.'
As I say, there is more to religion than the faults that are being heaped at the door of its institutional arm. There is, as there has always been, even in pre-Christian and post-Christian times, a religion of the heart, found often among the least sophisticated of people, and truer in its instinct than much of the more elaborate dogma and ceremonial of the churches. Although this is not to suggest that such a naive faith is something necessarily lacking in the established churches either.
I used the phrase above, the 'post-Christian' era. And really I think that this describes the epoch we are living in. From as far back as the 18th century, the philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment tended to identify religion—and specifically Christianity, and specifically within Christianity, the Catholic Church—as the linch-pin holding together all the evils of the world that kept man in chains. Simply abolish religion was the more or less general prescription and men would become as gods.
Now the succeeding centuries, right up to the present moment, have acted as a laboratory for this view, as religion has become ever more increasingly marginalised. And has it produced a new and reformed human nature? Or has it instead uncorked the bottle and—outside of the limited world of the liberal and chattering classes—let the genie of human unregeneracy fly free? Are people on average, or even in total, any happier or any better as a result of the undermining of religion? Have men, indeed, become as gods?
Sociobiologists—basically another name for the Neo-Darwinists that we have been in previous mailings discussing, and who believe that there is nothing else in the universe, or nothing else needed to explain the universe, than simply the material processes of Darwinian evolution—use a phrase 'survival value'. What this means is that if something has survived over the countless aeons of human development, then it has done so simply because it has played a useful role in the evolution of mankind.
Which is why for them religion is a problem: go back to the remotest periods of recoverable knowledge and you find evidence of religious beliefs and practices. Therefore if religion, and the religious instinct, continue to survive today, then it is only because they have had a positive influence on the course of human development.
Forced to recognise this fact, the sociobiologists attempt to explain it away. Religion, the religious instinct, is purely an accident that—equally accidentally—happened to be favourable to our development as a social species. In itself it means nothing. It is just a happenstance thrown up by evolution that has proved useful to us, in much the same way as the circumstance of being double-jointed might be of benefit to a contortionist. Given their fundamentally materialist (atheistic) beliefs, what else are the sociobiologists to say?
A second string to the argument is the contention that even if a thing was beneficial to human development in the past, that does not mean that it is necessarily so any longer. This might be seen as a justification for the more aggressive school of scientific atheism—the Dawkinses and Hitchinses etc—whose aim isn't just the marginalisation of religion, but its annihilation.
And this raises the question, how do you destroy a religion or the religious outlook?
A new development in the field of genetic science—epigenetic theory—seems to offer the possibility that it might be possible to eradicate belief and the instinct to belief by radically changing the intellectual and cultural environment, and that any such change might also, to some extent, be transmissable down subsequent generations. [Indeed, although it is somewhat early to say yet with any certainty, epigenetic theory threatens to provide the possibility of a radical corrective to conventional theories of evolution.]
Such a programme for eliminating religious belief was attempted in the Soviet Union under Stalin, except that historical factors intervened before its conclusion, so that the jury must remain out on its actual efficacy. The German invasion of 1941 forced Stalin to take the Orthodox Church once again aboard, prompted by the cynical calculation that the Russian population might be more likely to fight and die for 'Mother Russia' than for communism.
A second arguable way of seeing off religion is to take it on at its own game. The French revolutionaries, post-1792, attempted to install a Cult of Reason in place of the Catholic religion, a process that included placing an actress, symbolising Reason, on a throne on the high altar of Notre Dame cathedral. Something similar was tried some fifty or so years later by Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, a philosophical movement which, broadly speaking, disallows the consideration of anything that cannot be factually proven, and which arguably underlies all the subsequent developments of materialistic and atheistic thought right up to our own day.
'Comte spent his old age devising for this Religion of Humanity an intricate system of priesthood, sacraments, prayers, and disciplines; and proposed a new calendar in which the names of pagan deities and mediaeval saints should be replaced by the heroes of human progress. As a wit put it, Comte offered the world all of Catholicism except Christianity' (The Story of Philosophy: Will Durant, Simon and Schuster, 1926).
The failure of both these attempts at creating man-made religions—religions that eschewed the divine—seems to demonstrate the inherent futility of the project.
The third, and most sinister, and most relevant, method of destroying a religion is to undermine it from within, to hollow it out to the extent that it inevitably collapses in on itself. This involves a Gramsci-ian type interventionism under which a head of pressure is built up for modernisation and liberal alterations to the liturgy and dogma of the religion concerned. Such movements are often led by provocateurs, people deliberately planted within the particular church to achieve the intended end—really, the interim end; for the ultimate end is always the destruction of the religion—which is basically to turn the church into a parody of itself. The supporters of such programmes—at least at rank-and-file level—are often naive and susceptible to manipulation; what Lenin in another context described as the 'useful idiots'.
If we take the Catholic Church, for example: at the moment it is under enormous pressure to make concession after concession, in the form of resignations and self-abnegations and apologies. The fact is, of course, that no amount of concessions is ever likely to be enough to satisfy the demands of those making them. Indeed, each concession is likely only to whet the appetite for new ones. For at the end, whether all those involved in the campaign perceive it or not, the real impetus is not for the renewal of the Chuch, but for its destruction.
The best recompense that the Church can make for its past failures is to ensure that they cannot happen in the future. Let it issue its apologies and make its compensatory payments and whatever else, but at some stage, if it is not to be destroyed, a line has to be drawn under the matter and a decision made: this far and no further.
No more than allowing, say, the mothers of children killed in motorcar accidents a decisive role in the framing of road traffic legislation, it does not make sense to expect the broader Catholic Church to surrender totally to the chorus of the damaged, and the cacophony of liberal cheerleaders urging them on from the stalls. This is not intended as either a dismissive or callous comment. But the fact is that, in both of the situations mentioned, there is likely to be too much emotion, too much hurt, too much of a reactive looking for vengeance, for it to be possible to arrive at any commonsense rational consensus.
People in general—and especially those who enjoy the luxury of not being immediately involved—need to stop and think and take a deep breath before they dig a hole that they may regret ultimately having got themselves into. The end result of giving in to pure emotion in any situation is to risk not just throwing out the bathwater, but often the baby with it as well.
Of course, on the other hand, the world is coming down around our ears, and there is no reason why the Catholic Church should be immune to the deficits—of ability, of intellect, of leadership, of honour—that are affecting all other institutions. With the rest of them, it may indeed be forced ultimately to fold its tent and steal off into the night—or at least into the desert, where, shorn of its wealth and power and perhaps much of its membership, it will have to undergo a long and painful process of self-renewal. And who is to say that this may not by the happiest option?
It is just that, in the meantime, things seem to be developing in such an unpleasant and hysterical manner.
My decision to involve myself in the broader debate wasn't particularly fuelled by any desire to defend the Catholic Church. Rather it was prompted by a relatively intimate knowledge of the forces seeking to bring it down—and that is what is ultimately afoot—and the consequences for human life and freedom and happiness should such forces be allowed to win.
I remember sometime around the late 1980s, an academic from either Oxford or Cambridge writing an op-ed piece in the Daily Telegraph bemoaning the loss of religion and speaking of the need to restore it—for the little people! To him religion was a method of social control, a true 'opium of the people', and certainly not something to be believed in by anyone of a rarified intellect similar to his own, an opinion which he made abundantly clear in the article. And one's instinctive reaction was to take the patronising little prat and give him a kicking—if such a thing had been possible.
There is no doubt that religion has been often used historically for the purposes of social control—for keeping the rich rich and the poor consoled in their poverty. This was often the remit of the institutional Church (indeed, the institutional churches), whose higher benefices were usually reserved for the upper classes.
Writing, for example, of Hungary around the time of the French Revolution, one historian could say that it 'boasted perhaps the largest nobility in Europe. There 75,000 Magnates, and lesser gentry, had things their own way. They owned all the land, had exclusive right to office, filled all the places in the Church, the Army and the Universities; like nobles elsewhere they were exempt from all regular and most special taxes' (The Empire of Reason: Henry Steele Commager, Phoenix, 1978).
Yet that is only one side of the story—the side of the corruption of religion, not of religion itself. Nor is it surprising that people should have turned against religion in such situations, coming to see it, not as part of the solution, but as a major element of the problem. Neither is it surprising that those with deeper agendas should often have sought to take advantage of the perception.
Yet the fact is that there is much more to religion than bishops touching up altar boys or simony or enforced sexual repression—for some reason, though it is in no way relevant, the opening sentence of Anthony Burgess's novel Earthly Pursuits keeps pushing itself into my mind: 'It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.'
As I say, there is more to religion than the faults that are being heaped at the door of its institutional arm. There is, as there has always been, even in pre-Christian and post-Christian times, a religion of the heart, found often among the least sophisticated of people, and truer in its instinct than much of the more elaborate dogma and ceremonial of the churches. Although this is not to suggest that such a naive faith is something necessarily lacking in the established churches either.
I used the phrase above, the 'post-Christian' era. And really I think that this describes the epoch we are living in. From as far back as the 18th century, the philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment tended to identify religion—and specifically Christianity, and specifically within Christianity, the Catholic Church—as the linch-pin holding together all the evils of the world that kept man in chains. Simply abolish religion was the more or less general prescription and men would become as gods.
Now the succeeding centuries, right up to the present moment, have acted as a laboratory for this view, as religion has become ever more increasingly marginalised. And has it produced a new and reformed human nature? Or has it instead uncorked the bottle and—outside of the limited world of the liberal and chattering classes—let the genie of human unregeneracy fly free? Are people on average, or even in total, any happier or any better as a result of the undermining of religion? Have men, indeed, become as gods?
Sociobiologists—basically another name for the Neo-Darwinists that we have been in previous mailings discussing, and who believe that there is nothing else in the universe, or nothing else needed to explain the universe, than simply the material processes of Darwinian evolution—use a phrase 'survival value'. What this means is that if something has survived over the countless aeons of human development, then it has done so simply because it has played a useful role in the evolution of mankind.
Which is why for them religion is a problem: go back to the remotest periods of recoverable knowledge and you find evidence of religious beliefs and practices. Therefore if religion, and the religious instinct, continue to survive today, then it is only because they have had a positive influence on the course of human development.
Forced to recognise this fact, the sociobiologists attempt to explain it away. Religion, the religious instinct, is purely an accident that—equally accidentally—happened to be favourable to our development as a social species. In itself it means nothing. It is just a happenstance thrown up by evolution that has proved useful to us, in much the same way as the circumstance of being double-jointed might be of benefit to a contortionist. Given their fundamentally materialist (atheistic) beliefs, what else are the sociobiologists to say?
A second string to the argument is the contention that even if a thing was beneficial to human development in the past, that does not mean that it is necessarily so any longer. This might be seen as a justification for the more aggressive school of scientific atheism—the Dawkinses and Hitchinses etc—whose aim isn't just the marginalisation of religion, but its annihilation.
And this raises the question, how do you destroy a religion or the religious outlook?
A new development in the field of genetic science—epigenetic theory—seems to offer the possibility that it might be possible to eradicate belief and the instinct to belief by radically changing the intellectual and cultural environment, and that any such change might also, to some extent, be transmissable down subsequent generations. [Indeed, although it is somewhat early to say yet with any certainty, epigenetic theory threatens to provide the possibility of a radical corrective to conventional theories of evolution.]
Such a programme for eliminating religious belief was attempted in the Soviet Union under Stalin, except that historical factors intervened before its conclusion, so that the jury must remain out on its actual efficacy. The German invasion of 1941 forced Stalin to take the Orthodox Church once again aboard, prompted by the cynical calculation that the Russian population might be more likely to fight and die for 'Mother Russia' than for communism.
A second arguable way of seeing off religion is to take it on at its own game. The French revolutionaries, post-1792, attempted to install a Cult of Reason in place of the Catholic religion, a process that included placing an actress, symbolising Reason, on a throne on the high altar of Notre Dame cathedral. Something similar was tried some fifty or so years later by Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, a philosophical movement which, broadly speaking, disallows the consideration of anything that cannot be factually proven, and which arguably underlies all the subsequent developments of materialistic and atheistic thought right up to our own day.
'Comte spent his old age devising for this Religion of Humanity an intricate system of priesthood, sacraments, prayers, and disciplines; and proposed a new calendar in which the names of pagan deities and mediaeval saints should be replaced by the heroes of human progress. As a wit put it, Comte offered the world all of Catholicism except Christianity' (The Story of Philosophy: Will Durant, Simon and Schuster, 1926).
The failure of both these attempts at creating man-made religions—religions that eschewed the divine—seems to demonstrate the inherent futility of the project.
The third, and most sinister, and most relevant, method of destroying a religion is to undermine it from within, to hollow it out to the extent that it inevitably collapses in on itself. This involves a Gramsci-ian type interventionism under which a head of pressure is built up for modernisation and liberal alterations to the liturgy and dogma of the religion concerned. Such movements are often led by provocateurs, people deliberately planted within the particular church to achieve the intended end—really, the interim end; for the ultimate end is always the destruction of the religion—which is basically to turn the church into a parody of itself. The supporters of such programmes—at least at rank-and-file level—are often naive and susceptible to manipulation; what Lenin in another context described as the 'useful idiots'.
If we take the Catholic Church, for example: at the moment it is under enormous pressure to make concession after concession, in the form of resignations and self-abnegations and apologies. The fact is, of course, that no amount of concessions is ever likely to be enough to satisfy the demands of those making them. Indeed, each concession is likely only to whet the appetite for new ones. For at the end, whether all those involved in the campaign perceive it or not, the real impetus is not for the renewal of the Chuch, but for its destruction.
The best recompense that the Church can make for its past failures is to ensure that they cannot happen in the future. Let it issue its apologies and make its compensatory payments and whatever else, but at some stage, if it is not to be destroyed, a line has to be drawn under the matter and a decision made: this far and no further.
No more than allowing, say, the mothers of children killed in motorcar accidents a decisive role in the framing of road traffic legislation, it does not make sense to expect the broader Catholic Church to surrender totally to the chorus of the damaged, and the cacophony of liberal cheerleaders urging them on from the stalls. This is not intended as either a dismissive or callous comment. But the fact is that, in both of the situations mentioned, there is likely to be too much emotion, too much hurt, too much of a reactive looking for vengeance, for it to be possible to arrive at any commonsense rational consensus.
People in general—and especially those who enjoy the luxury of not being immediately involved—need to stop and think and take a deep breath before they dig a hole that they may regret ultimately having got themselves into. The end result of giving in to pure emotion in any situation is to risk not just throwing out the bathwater, but often the baby with it as well.
Of course, on the other hand, the world is coming down around our ears, and there is no reason why the Catholic Church should be immune to the deficits—of ability, of intellect, of leadership, of honour—that are affecting all other institutions. With the rest of them, it may indeed be forced ultimately to fold its tent and steal off into the night—or at least into the desert, where, shorn of its wealth and power and perhaps much of its membership, it will have to undergo a long and painful process of self-renewal. And who is to say that this may not by the happiest option?
It is just that, in the meantime, things seem to be developing in such an unpleasant and hysterical manner.
Monday, March 22, 2010
The Shape of Things that Are Trying to Come (2) . . .
The Neo-Darwinists that we spoke of in the last mailing have developed the logic implicit in Darwin's theory of biological evolution to its utmost extent. The emergence of, say, the human race isn't the result of the unfolding of some great preformed plan; instead, it is the accidental end result of a whole chain of events, involving all sorts of material phenomena and organisms, stretching right back to the beginning of time. Human beings need not have existed at all. Any alteration in the nature of the environmental challenges facing life as it emerged over the past millions of years could arguably have produced a totally different result.
Well, this is what they say . . . and in terms of the classical Darwinian theory it would seem to be correct. There is no overriding purpose winding its way through the genes of a whole sequence of intermediate creatures and leading intentionally and ultimately to humanity. If we are shaped at all, then it is by the environment, and the whole series of problems it poses for life as it emerges. The accidental factors that allow some species, or some members of species, to survive in situations where others go down to extinction are the very things that give creation its 'ultimate' form.
As I say, this is the Neo-Darwinian contention . . . and the consequences arising from that contention. But it all depends on the continuing validity of the classical Darwinian model—something over which there is still much debate in scientific circles.
Now, in general, the Neo-Darwinian scientists and philosophers tend also not to emphasise the implied creative role of the environment in the classical scheme of things, for such a thing allows for the possible re-emergence of the idea of purpose in a new guise; i.e. God may not have crammed the plans for the eventual emergence of human beings in the very first cell created, but he could achieve much the same result by orchestrating the environment in suitable ways.
And this is the great no, no of modern materialist or atheistic philosophy and science, whether in relation to the gene or the environment. There is no room for purpose or meaning in their scheme of things. To speak of either is to allow the possibility of a way back in for the existence of God and for religion. And this is why they are so intent on denying any role to purpose or meaning in the universe—beyond, that is, the limited purposes of conscious beings—and insist instead that everything has come about purely by accident.
I raised the question in my last posting as to whether the atheism was a consequence of science, or the particular variant of science we are discussing a consequence of atheism. In my opinion the latter is predominantly the case. The atheists and materialists have embraced classical Darwinism primarily because it seems to reinforce their beliefs, or the lack of them. Nor is there any room for agnosticism on the matter. Under the new dispensation one is not allowed to park one's doubts or personal beliefs off-campus, as it were. Materialist philosophy and science now hold the soapbox, and unless you can explain and justify your opinions in terms purely of mechanistic science then you are likely to be shouted down.
I asked a philosophy lecturer once—the same one as mentioned in an earlier posting—what would happen to meaning in the absence of belief in God, and her reply was along the lines that we will create our own meanings. Possibly what she said was that we would create our own meanings, in the plural. I don't exactly recall, but in any event the result would be the same.
Now in the world of men, the world of four dimensional reality, there are no fixed meanings. Everything changes over time. But in relation to the bigger questions—the 'What's it all about?' type questions—the search is for a meaning (let's capitalise it: a Meaning) that stands outside the limitations of space and time. A transcendent Meaning, never changing, and that explains once and for all the basis and the purpose of existence.
If we were to look at it, say, from the Christian point of view—and here I am, as the Yanks say, to some extent 'winging' it; for I am not at all qualified to speak in this department. But, as I say, if we were to look at it from the Christian viewpoint, then it would seem that the Meaning of life, and of everything else that is, could be summed up basically as follows: God exists; the universe and all that it contains, including human life, was created by God—and created to a purpose, which purpose involves man's submission to and cooperation with the Will of God, as ultimately made known through Revelation.
Another way of looking at it is that God and the Will of God provide the fixed and unchanging amphitheatre within which the small contingent dramas and meanings of human life are constantly coming into production and then passing away.
The problem for the rational materialist and his point of view is that where there are meanings there can be no meaning. The seven or so billion human beings in the world do not speak with a unified voice—in fact there are some seven billion individual voices. And with each voice potentially an individual meaning. Even if by some miracle (and here we are really entering the world of fantasy) everybody in the world could agree on a shared meaning, it would only have currency during the lifetime of those who had framed it. There is no way it could be made binding on subsequent generations, each of which would under the logic of the Neo-Darwinist agenda be free to come up with its own meanings, general and individual.
The other point, of course, is that if meanings are to be purely the product of mankind, then one man's meaning is basically as good as another's. In the world of man-made meanings, what is there to distinguish Hitler's meaning from Christ's, Gandhi's from Mao's, the Buddha's from Lenin's? They are all human meanings, and since there is no ultimate Meaning, one is arguably as legitimate as any other.
The cry of course will go up that any overarching secular meaning must at root be humanitarian. But why should this be so? Secularism and atheism and materialism have plundered the storehouses of the revealed world religions for many of their moral ideas—ideas which, whatever the doctrinal differences that may lie between them, are more or less commonly shared among all the great religions. But from the philosophical point of view this is, of course, no justification for the validity of such ideas. All ideas, whether they are at root humanitarian or involve the triumph of the will or the race or the class, have to justify themselves independently before the court of 'reason'.
And basically in the materialist world of Godless 'accident', there is no fixed and immovable starting point for 'reason', no unchallengeable position from which one with any certainty can argue, either backwards towards or forwards from, to the effect that, for example, logically such-and-such a thing is true, because, in turn, such-and-such another thing is true . . .all leading back ultimately to some fixed and undeniable assertion that by its very nature must be true, and that acts as a foundation plinth for everything else.
Describing the 'flaw' that lies at the foundations of all seemingly rational chains of argument, a flaw which he describes as 'the premise about the limits of rationality', the philosopher William Warren Bartley goes on to detail how this 'premise—which arises out of the need to stem an infinite regress and from the fact that arbitrary dogmatic commitment seems to be the only way to do this—can be explained as follows. No matter what belief is advanced, someone can always challenge it with: "How do you know?" and "Give me a reason." Unless this procedure is to go on forever, it must be halted at a "standard," "criterion," "ulimate presupposition," "end," or "goal" whose authority is simply accepted' (The Retreat to Commitment: William Warren Bartley, Chatto and Windus, 1964).
In other words, to the extent that most religions take their ultimate stand on some form of revelation, the rationalists do much the same thing, except that instead of revelation it involves some subjective starting point of their own, a process, from the point of view of reason, as logically flawed as that of their religious opponents. While Christians, for example, ground their religions ultimately in the God of Revelation, the materialist rationalists, while all the time denying the fact, ground theirs instead in some metaphorical 'god' of their own subjectivist choosing.
One might get the impression from this posting that, compared to religious authoritarianism, the left-liberal agenda offers the posibility of a broader smörgåsbord of alternative beliefs and meanings. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, it arguably offers less.
The fact is that there must generally always be a prevailing worldview, a consensus, whether arrived at voluntarily or enforced. The present struggle isn't between an authoritarian Church (or churches) and a more liberal 'let it all hang out' philosophy. Rather it is between two authoritarianisms, one theistic, the other atheistic.
Well, this is what they say . . . and in terms of the classical Darwinian theory it would seem to be correct. There is no overriding purpose winding its way through the genes of a whole sequence of intermediate creatures and leading intentionally and ultimately to humanity. If we are shaped at all, then it is by the environment, and the whole series of problems it poses for life as it emerges. The accidental factors that allow some species, or some members of species, to survive in situations where others go down to extinction are the very things that give creation its 'ultimate' form.
As I say, this is the Neo-Darwinian contention . . . and the consequences arising from that contention. But it all depends on the continuing validity of the classical Darwinian model—something over which there is still much debate in scientific circles.
Now, in general, the Neo-Darwinian scientists and philosophers tend also not to emphasise the implied creative role of the environment in the classical scheme of things, for such a thing allows for the possible re-emergence of the idea of purpose in a new guise; i.e. God may not have crammed the plans for the eventual emergence of human beings in the very first cell created, but he could achieve much the same result by orchestrating the environment in suitable ways.
And this is the great no, no of modern materialist or atheistic philosophy and science, whether in relation to the gene or the environment. There is no room for purpose or meaning in their scheme of things. To speak of either is to allow the possibility of a way back in for the existence of God and for religion. And this is why they are so intent on denying any role to purpose or meaning in the universe—beyond, that is, the limited purposes of conscious beings—and insist instead that everything has come about purely by accident.
I raised the question in my last posting as to whether the atheism was a consequence of science, or the particular variant of science we are discussing a consequence of atheism. In my opinion the latter is predominantly the case. The atheists and materialists have embraced classical Darwinism primarily because it seems to reinforce their beliefs, or the lack of them. Nor is there any room for agnosticism on the matter. Under the new dispensation one is not allowed to park one's doubts or personal beliefs off-campus, as it were. Materialist philosophy and science now hold the soapbox, and unless you can explain and justify your opinions in terms purely of mechanistic science then you are likely to be shouted down.
I asked a philosophy lecturer once—the same one as mentioned in an earlier posting—what would happen to meaning in the absence of belief in God, and her reply was along the lines that we will create our own meanings. Possibly what she said was that we would create our own meanings, in the plural. I don't exactly recall, but in any event the result would be the same.
Now in the world of men, the world of four dimensional reality, there are no fixed meanings. Everything changes over time. But in relation to the bigger questions—the 'What's it all about?' type questions—the search is for a meaning (let's capitalise it: a Meaning) that stands outside the limitations of space and time. A transcendent Meaning, never changing, and that explains once and for all the basis and the purpose of existence.
If we were to look at it, say, from the Christian point of view—and here I am, as the Yanks say, to some extent 'winging' it; for I am not at all qualified to speak in this department. But, as I say, if we were to look at it from the Christian viewpoint, then it would seem that the Meaning of life, and of everything else that is, could be summed up basically as follows: God exists; the universe and all that it contains, including human life, was created by God—and created to a purpose, which purpose involves man's submission to and cooperation with the Will of God, as ultimately made known through Revelation.
Another way of looking at it is that God and the Will of God provide the fixed and unchanging amphitheatre within which the small contingent dramas and meanings of human life are constantly coming into production and then passing away.
The problem for the rational materialist and his point of view is that where there are meanings there can be no meaning. The seven or so billion human beings in the world do not speak with a unified voice—in fact there are some seven billion individual voices. And with each voice potentially an individual meaning. Even if by some miracle (and here we are really entering the world of fantasy) everybody in the world could agree on a shared meaning, it would only have currency during the lifetime of those who had framed it. There is no way it could be made binding on subsequent generations, each of which would under the logic of the Neo-Darwinist agenda be free to come up with its own meanings, general and individual.
The other point, of course, is that if meanings are to be purely the product of mankind, then one man's meaning is basically as good as another's. In the world of man-made meanings, what is there to distinguish Hitler's meaning from Christ's, Gandhi's from Mao's, the Buddha's from Lenin's? They are all human meanings, and since there is no ultimate Meaning, one is arguably as legitimate as any other.
The cry of course will go up that any overarching secular meaning must at root be humanitarian. But why should this be so? Secularism and atheism and materialism have plundered the storehouses of the revealed world religions for many of their moral ideas—ideas which, whatever the doctrinal differences that may lie between them, are more or less commonly shared among all the great religions. But from the philosophical point of view this is, of course, no justification for the validity of such ideas. All ideas, whether they are at root humanitarian or involve the triumph of the will or the race or the class, have to justify themselves independently before the court of 'reason'.
And basically in the materialist world of Godless 'accident', there is no fixed and immovable starting point for 'reason', no unchallengeable position from which one with any certainty can argue, either backwards towards or forwards from, to the effect that, for example, logically such-and-such a thing is true, because, in turn, such-and-such another thing is true . . .all leading back ultimately to some fixed and undeniable assertion that by its very nature must be true, and that acts as a foundation plinth for everything else.
Describing the 'flaw' that lies at the foundations of all seemingly rational chains of argument, a flaw which he describes as 'the premise about the limits of rationality', the philosopher William Warren Bartley goes on to detail how this 'premise—which arises out of the need to stem an infinite regress and from the fact that arbitrary dogmatic commitment seems to be the only way to do this—can be explained as follows. No matter what belief is advanced, someone can always challenge it with: "How do you know?" and "Give me a reason." Unless this procedure is to go on forever, it must be halted at a "standard," "criterion," "ulimate presupposition," "end," or "goal" whose authority is simply accepted' (The Retreat to Commitment: William Warren Bartley, Chatto and Windus, 1964).
In other words, to the extent that most religions take their ultimate stand on some form of revelation, the rationalists do much the same thing, except that instead of revelation it involves some subjective starting point of their own, a process, from the point of view of reason, as logically flawed as that of their religious opponents. While Christians, for example, ground their religions ultimately in the God of Revelation, the materialist rationalists, while all the time denying the fact, ground theirs instead in some metaphorical 'god' of their own subjectivist choosing.
One might get the impression from this posting that, compared to religious authoritarianism, the left-liberal agenda offers the posibility of a broader smörgåsbord of alternative beliefs and meanings. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, it arguably offers less.
The fact is that there must generally always be a prevailing worldview, a consensus, whether arrived at voluntarily or enforced. The present struggle isn't between an authoritarian Church (or churches) and a more liberal 'let it all hang out' philosophy. Rather it is between two authoritarianisms, one theistic, the other atheistic.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
The Shape of Things that are Trying to Come . . .
Let's do another philosophical thought experiment—a thought experiment, by the way, is basically a hypothetical situation. Now a hypothetical situation is valuable to the extent that it stays grounded in reality—to the extent that the reader can allow that such and such a situation is indeed possible. By comparison, the problem with thought experiments is that they are quite capable of losing any connection with reality—and very often do. But still there are situations where they are useful, such as here, at this moment.
Let us take a car. For arguments sake, an Audi L Turbo A4, whose pistons fire in the sequence 1,3,4,2. Now let us imagine that, purely fortuitously, some sort of intelligent life-form, capable of analysis and thought, comes into existence within the engine, aided no doubt by the presence of carbon and heat. As this being—let's call it Audi Murphy—examines its situation, it comes to the conclusion that ultimately the meaning of everything in its world resolves down to the sequence 1,3,4,2. It is this sequence that explains and lies at the root of everything that happens in the engine. And, from the viewpoint of Audi Murphy, this is of course a true description.
Yet the fact is that Audi Murphy has no way of knowing that anything exists beyond his engine. In his moments of leisure, he may ponder if anything lies beyond the pistons and the sequence of their firing. But how is he to know? He can have no knowledge of the car, or the purpose of the car, much less of the driver of the car. There is no way he could possibly envisage what it is like to get up on a sunny morning and suddenly decide to drive to the beach. All such things are totally outside the range of his experience or knowledge. His 'science', his theory of reality, is bounded by, is true, and works, only within the closed system of his engine.
At this point we leave Audi Murphy and the thought experiment behind (and it is only a rough experiment, open no doubt to the nitpicking of anyone determined to bring it down.)
Yet there is an analogy between it and the real world as we know it, except that among the general run of modern scientists the explanatory theory of all that exists is not 1, 3, 4, 2 but rather an all-encompassing Darwinism. Especially among the Neo-Darwinists—scientists and philosophers etc. who are attempting to take the techniques and tenets of biological evolution and apply them to explaining everything that is—from our most refined thoughts to the very bases of our natures. Indeed, there is a branch of physics currently engaged in trying to come up with a Darwinian explanation for the emergence of the stars and planets etc. of the cosmos.
Now let me say here that I am not in the business of propounding any alternative fundamentalist mythos. There seems little doubt that evolutionary theory can be used to account for much of what we see about us, and that the general run of the phenomena of nature are ultimately explicable in term of the laws of material physics.
The Darwinian theory of biological evolution is capable of supplying a rational explanation of life on this planet and its development—and yet there has always been to me something deeply and instinctively unsatisfactory about it. In its operation it bears more than a passing resemblance to the notion (mentioned in one of the earlier mailings) of a million monkeys with a million typewriters, who if left long enough must ultimately come up with the works of Shakespeare. The question about the classical Darwinian theory of evolution is not is it rational, but is it true?
The other problem is that even if it was possible to explain the genesis of the universe in Darwinian terms, ultimately one still comes up against the blank wall of matter. It is the point beyond which neo-Darwinian and materialist scientists are incapable of going. What is matter? How did it arise? How is it to be explained? One philosopher of a neo-Darwinist bent recognises that 'There are problems in understanding how matter could have arisen from nothing, but not obviously more serious than those involved in explaining how God could have arisen from nothing. Indeed, given the simplicity of matter, its existence might seem to present fewer problems' (Human Nature after Darwin: Janet Radcliffe Richards, OU, 1999).
There are certain presumptions involved here, not least that if God exists then he needs to explain himself, and specifically in terms of physicalist science. But basically what is also being said is go with what you are comfortable with—so long as it doesn't involve any belief in ultimate creation or the supernatural!
Ultimately, for the purely secular scientist, the existence of matter provides the point beyond which—like Audi Murphy and his 1,3,4,2—he cannot progress, the point beyond which his explanations falter off into silence.
And yet there are others for whom such a barrier is easily surmounted—those who choose to believe in a divine revelation—such as the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims and the Hindus, to mention just a few of the great historical revealed religions of mankind.
Of course, for the atheistic scientist or philosopher the whole idea of revelation is very easy to shoot down. It doesn't even need thinking about. There can be no revelation because there is nobody or nothing to do the revealing. That is the bedrock of atheism: there is only material nature with nothing beyond it. If, for example, Moses claimed to have received the Ten Commandments as a result of divine revelation, only two options can present themselves to the convinced materialist: either Moses himself consciously made up the whole thing, or else he was mad.
Now atheism, or materialism, is a legitimate philosophical standpoint. It is a position that people in all good conscience can hold. And one can understand how people might soberly—and perhaps even regretfully—arrive at the ultimate conclusion that there is no God, no spiritual dimension, no world other than this one.
Yet when you go to the texts and the public pronouncements, rather than the cold facts of dispassionate science, one arrives instead at, for want of a better term, hysteria. Richard Dawkins, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Understanding of Science at Oxford University, Fellow of the Royal Society, and member of what has been described as the New Atheism Movement, in an interview in 2001 with Emily Hourican in The Dubliner magazine, said: ‘I am delighted that one of the leading Roman Catholic seminaries for the training of young priests in Ireland is closing down because it can’t get any recruits. When I read that in the newspaper, it left me smiling for the rest of the day. However, if the Catholic Church does die in Ireland—and I devoutly hope it will—I hope it will not be replaced by some other idiotic superstition like New-Ageism or some other kind of religion . . . The Roman Catholic Church is one of the forces for evil in the world . . .’ Nor has Dawkins's tone mellowed over the intervening years.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Following on from last day . . .
There is somebody I know, a builder, a comparatively young fellow in his late twenties. And as he will tell you himself, he effectively left school at fourteen in order to go to work. He's a very good builder, very competent. But more than that, I would class him as being near genius. It is amazing to talk to somebody and find a mind working a consistent three steps ahead of your own. He is a builder, but he could have been anything. In terms of native ability and 'can do' capacity, there is nothing he couldn't turn his hand or mind to and not be succesful at. I would have the utmost confidence in him in any field—he is endowed with a sort of 'fire and forget' capacity: just show him a problem and turn him loose on it and you no longer need to even think about it.
Nor is he an isolated case. The world is full of people like him, possessed of a fierce unacademic intelligence, able to cut to the heart of the matter in an instant and knowing almost instinctively what to do about it. Guys with an eye to problem solving, seemingly pre-loaded by nature with those skills that higher education cannot teach, or, if it can, then only inadequately. I know what I am talking about, for I worked with some of them. And as often as not they were mechanics or fitters or carpenters or labourers or somesuch—part of the great support apparatus underlying the whole artificial superstructure of modern society. The other thing significant about them was that, in general, they loved what they did—as do, in fact, most people who work with their hands for a living.
The fact is that the world isn't full of labourers or gardeners or hairdressers or whatever, crying into their pints over thwarted dreams of being lawyers or doctors or accountants. And yet this is an undeniable implication of the policy of stampeding everybody into the third-level system—the whole thing made even more amazing by the fact that it is often, and especially in Britain, the erstwhile socialists who are the main architects of this implicitly patronising idea.
Now I am not suggesting that the world is full of 'cheerful, horny-handed sons of toil', all of whom are secretly geniuses. Far from it. Many, if not most, workers are arguably dissatisfied with their lot, especially those on the repetitive production-line side of things. But, then, so too, one imagines, the same might be said of psychiatrists and lecturers and chiropodists etc. It is part of the human condition.
What I am trying to say is that people's life-choices are made for a whole pile of reasons, and not simply for money or status. And to use these latter factors as the sole yardstick for measuring success or failure is to totally misunderstand life. The same thing with education—ideally intelligence and ability should be the prerequisites for entry into its higher spheres; but that does not translate into the idea that educational qualifications—especially in this modern era of dumbing down—can in any way be the sole measurement of ability and intelligence. They are not and have never been.
The truth of the matter is that nowadays there are more idiots with degrees, than we poor idiots without them.
Nor is he an isolated case. The world is full of people like him, possessed of a fierce unacademic intelligence, able to cut to the heart of the matter in an instant and knowing almost instinctively what to do about it. Guys with an eye to problem solving, seemingly pre-loaded by nature with those skills that higher education cannot teach, or, if it can, then only inadequately. I know what I am talking about, for I worked with some of them. And as often as not they were mechanics or fitters or carpenters or labourers or somesuch—part of the great support apparatus underlying the whole artificial superstructure of modern society. The other thing significant about them was that, in general, they loved what they did—as do, in fact, most people who work with their hands for a living.
The fact is that the world isn't full of labourers or gardeners or hairdressers or whatever, crying into their pints over thwarted dreams of being lawyers or doctors or accountants. And yet this is an undeniable implication of the policy of stampeding everybody into the third-level system—the whole thing made even more amazing by the fact that it is often, and especially in Britain, the erstwhile socialists who are the main architects of this implicitly patronising idea.
Now I am not suggesting that the world is full of 'cheerful, horny-handed sons of toil', all of whom are secretly geniuses. Far from it. Many, if not most, workers are arguably dissatisfied with their lot, especially those on the repetitive production-line side of things. But, then, so too, one imagines, the same might be said of psychiatrists and lecturers and chiropodists etc. It is part of the human condition.
What I am trying to say is that people's life-choices are made for a whole pile of reasons, and not simply for money or status. And to use these latter factors as the sole yardstick for measuring success or failure is to totally misunderstand life. The same thing with education—ideally intelligence and ability should be the prerequisites for entry into its higher spheres; but that does not translate into the idea that educational qualifications—especially in this modern era of dumbing down—can in any way be the sole measurement of ability and intelligence. They are not and have never been.
The truth of the matter is that nowadays there are more idiots with degrees, than we poor idiots without them.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
'What a wonderful world it would be . . .'
'Now there is a case to be made for essential interventions in situations where justice demands it. Historically, the advent of free third-level education was just such a necessary intervention, allowing young people of ability from ordinary families to compete on more or less level terms with the sons and daughters of those more privileged. The point here, of course, is that it represented a levelling upwards—it represented the unchaining of ability, not a restriction of it.'
I wrote the above passage some ten or eleven mailings ago, and the important word in it at the time of writing, and also the most deliberate word, was 'ability'. The passage was written in full awareness of the background to the recent 'revelations' concerning grade inflation in the education system. In fact, the term 'revelation' is something of a misnomer—for there can have been nobody of any degree of commonsense that could not see the true situation without having to wait for the matter to be raised (and then denied) by Batt O'Keefe.
An indication of the kind of age we live in is the increasing use of buzz-words or buzz-phrases. The 'smart economy' is one such. What is this smart economy? I don't know. Does anyone know? At the same time, while I mightn't know what the term means, I certainly know what it is. It is one of those bullshit terms beloved of bluffers, used to hide their own ignorance, and at the same time to cow everyone else into silence.
Another such term is 'high-end'—as in 'high-end jobs' etc. The theory is that while we may be losing low-end, unskilled jobs to the cheaper economies, we will compensate for this by the creation of high-end ones (it is all tied in, in one great Gordian Knot, with the idea of the 'smart economy'). The problem is, of course, that if we want high-end jobs, we need to have high-end people capable of filling them. And that, it seems, is the thing that is more or less missing.
On the face of it, the matter of the education system and what's wrong with it seems capable of a fairly simple analysis. But that would be a totally wrong view. It is a highly complex problem, leading in all sorts of directions, so that if one was to follow them all, it would take a book not a mailing. But there are certain main points that are unavoidable.
The first is that there are too many people going on to university. Or, to be precise, too many people going to university who shouldn't be going. I remember a philosophy lecturer at an Irish university, some five years ago, telling of a first-year student who handed in an essay totally free of punctuation and capital letters—just one long unbroken screed, like something out of James Joyce. When she criticised the student for her presentation (both the lecturer and the student were female), the latter reacted with outrage—this was the way she had always done things and nobody had ever complained of it up until now.
The mere fact of wanting to go to university should not be sufficient to get one a place there. One should also need display an aptitude for it. Having a child at university is often a modern form of the older Irish ambition to have a priest in the family—irrespective of the matter of vocation or otherwise. It is a matter primarily of social status. And just as likely to end up badly—certainly from the point of view of society.
Of course there are practical reasons for the race to third-level education, too. As we can see at the moment, in times of economic hardship it is often seen as a preferable option to the dole. And in a world where population is accelerating at the same time as technologyis diminishing the role played by labour in production, the temptation to park a portion of one's surplus population—off balance-sheet, as it were—in third-level education must seem irresistable to most governments. The fact that it also tends to diminish the overall quality of the end-product is something that is usually ignored.
Nowadays it is—or at least used to be before the recession—possible, no matter how bad your results, to get a place on a third-level course somewhere. The gap in Britain between the best and the worst degree-issuing institutions is absolutely enormous, with those on the bottom tier more akin to McDonald's 'Hamburger University' than anything else. At the same time, students do come out of such places with degrees—degrees that in terms of certifying intellectual or professional competence are generally worse than useless.
In such a situation, statistics showing an ever upwards rise in academic standards tend to be at best misleading. The fact is, as employers in Britain have long since recognised, it is no longer the face value of the degree that counts, but rather the quality of the issuing institution.
The situation has also been exacerbated by what seems to be a fundamental assumption of the equality brigade—that if you haven't gone to university you have somehow been discriminated against. If you are a plumber or a welder or work on the buildings or in a call centre, it is simply because you have been denied the chance to be something implicitly 'better'.
This is the thinking that underlies the current situation in Britain (which as usual is further down the road than Ireland in this regard) where the whole education debate and practice has descended to a form of class warfare. The fundamental criterion for university entry under New Labour is socio-economic background—the more deprived your background, the greater your chance of getting a college place, or at least the place of your choice. Laudable from the point of view of social justice; yet crazy to the extent that it relegates, as often it seems to do, ability to the status of an also ran.
Yet there is also a certain rationale to the New Labour position, there being no doubt that the middle classes have an edge over the run of working-class and poorer candidates when it comes to interviews and aptitude tests etc. Now this has nothing to do with native ability or intelligence, such things not being confined to any one part of the population. On a level playing pitch, the best, irrespective of class, will still rise to the top. But the fact is that once one enters into the field of mass social engineering, as New Labour is currently doing, one is no longer necessarily dealing with the best but with the average, or even the less than average. And in this situation the middle classes have a definite advantage.
Ability or intelligence isn't capped at birth; it is open to further nurturing and development, or at least honing, depending on the environment one is raised in, the schools one attends etc. And as such it is possible to see how the children (even the average ones) of the educated middle class have an advantage when it comes to presenting themselves for university admissions, even if only in the matter of confidence and expectation. And also, too, how the academic environment is likely to prove much more amenable to them.
By contrast, the student from the lower socio-economic background, unless he is unusually lucky, is unlikely to enjoy the same cultural background in growing up. Education may compensate to some extent, but only incompletely. Yet it may still compensate . . . except that the British state education system is—to an extent that the Irish one isn't quite yet—in a total mess.
When I was young there was something called the Primary Certificate, which you sat around the age of twelve, and which certified your competency in the three Rs. The British equivalent was, I think, the 11 Plus. Yet the situation now is that employers in Britain are often having to test applicants with university degrees for basic literacy and numeracy.
How and why has this happened? No doubt there are different reasons involved. But one thing is certain, a major, if not the major, factor was the development of a liberal theory-down approach. Rather like Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams—Build it and they'll come!—the buzz phrase notionally was one of 'Think it and it must be true!' If you could write something down on paper, and it seemed to be logical, then it must be feasible—the same mindset as underlay the developments in financial theory that helped cause the current economic collapse. Inspired by the liberal ideology of unrestrained equality, and ultimately by a creeping Marxism, all the old tried and tested ways of doing things in education were scrapped in favour of fashionable new theories—theories that fundamentally didn't work anywhere except on paper.
The fact is that, in education, more is often less. If the purpose of university education is to produce and train an intellectual and professional elite then entrance to it must of necessity, and in terms of ability, be restrictive. If, instead, its main role is to be one of social engineering then access must needs be more broadly based, and involve an inevitable deterioration in standards.
But, of course, in a certain sense the situation hasn't really changed. In a certain sense, it has proved self-correcting. We have seen how the emphasis has changed from the simple fact of having a degree to the question of what college the degree is from. Thus, in an informal way, old standards are being more or less maintained. But even that is progressively coming under fire, with New Labour targetting more and more the entry policies of the premier league universities. And this is not something I necessarily disagree with—in fact it is arguably a praiseworthy policy—so long as it does not involve any fudge in the matter of intellect and ability.
There is a further point, already briefly touched on—an important point—that time and the length of this mailing prevent me from dealing with. I will return to it next day.
I wrote the above passage some ten or eleven mailings ago, and the important word in it at the time of writing, and also the most deliberate word, was 'ability'. The passage was written in full awareness of the background to the recent 'revelations' concerning grade inflation in the education system. In fact, the term 'revelation' is something of a misnomer—for there can have been nobody of any degree of commonsense that could not see the true situation without having to wait for the matter to be raised (and then denied) by Batt O'Keefe.
An indication of the kind of age we live in is the increasing use of buzz-words or buzz-phrases. The 'smart economy' is one such. What is this smart economy? I don't know. Does anyone know? At the same time, while I mightn't know what the term means, I certainly know what it is. It is one of those bullshit terms beloved of bluffers, used to hide their own ignorance, and at the same time to cow everyone else into silence.
Another such term is 'high-end'—as in 'high-end jobs' etc. The theory is that while we may be losing low-end, unskilled jobs to the cheaper economies, we will compensate for this by the creation of high-end ones (it is all tied in, in one great Gordian Knot, with the idea of the 'smart economy'). The problem is, of course, that if we want high-end jobs, we need to have high-end people capable of filling them. And that, it seems, is the thing that is more or less missing.
On the face of it, the matter of the education system and what's wrong with it seems capable of a fairly simple analysis. But that would be a totally wrong view. It is a highly complex problem, leading in all sorts of directions, so that if one was to follow them all, it would take a book not a mailing. But there are certain main points that are unavoidable.
The first is that there are too many people going on to university. Or, to be precise, too many people going to university who shouldn't be going. I remember a philosophy lecturer at an Irish university, some five years ago, telling of a first-year student who handed in an essay totally free of punctuation and capital letters—just one long unbroken screed, like something out of James Joyce. When she criticised the student for her presentation (both the lecturer and the student were female), the latter reacted with outrage—this was the way she had always done things and nobody had ever complained of it up until now.
The mere fact of wanting to go to university should not be sufficient to get one a place there. One should also need display an aptitude for it. Having a child at university is often a modern form of the older Irish ambition to have a priest in the family—irrespective of the matter of vocation or otherwise. It is a matter primarily of social status. And just as likely to end up badly—certainly from the point of view of society.
Of course there are practical reasons for the race to third-level education, too. As we can see at the moment, in times of economic hardship it is often seen as a preferable option to the dole. And in a world where population is accelerating at the same time as technologyis diminishing the role played by labour in production, the temptation to park a portion of one's surplus population—off balance-sheet, as it were—in third-level education must seem irresistable to most governments. The fact that it also tends to diminish the overall quality of the end-product is something that is usually ignored.
Nowadays it is—or at least used to be before the recession—possible, no matter how bad your results, to get a place on a third-level course somewhere. The gap in Britain between the best and the worst degree-issuing institutions is absolutely enormous, with those on the bottom tier more akin to McDonald's 'Hamburger University' than anything else. At the same time, students do come out of such places with degrees—degrees that in terms of certifying intellectual or professional competence are generally worse than useless.
In such a situation, statistics showing an ever upwards rise in academic standards tend to be at best misleading. The fact is, as employers in Britain have long since recognised, it is no longer the face value of the degree that counts, but rather the quality of the issuing institution.
The situation has also been exacerbated by what seems to be a fundamental assumption of the equality brigade—that if you haven't gone to university you have somehow been discriminated against. If you are a plumber or a welder or work on the buildings or in a call centre, it is simply because you have been denied the chance to be something implicitly 'better'.
This is the thinking that underlies the current situation in Britain (which as usual is further down the road than Ireland in this regard) where the whole education debate and practice has descended to a form of class warfare. The fundamental criterion for university entry under New Labour is socio-economic background—the more deprived your background, the greater your chance of getting a college place, or at least the place of your choice. Laudable from the point of view of social justice; yet crazy to the extent that it relegates, as often it seems to do, ability to the status of an also ran.
Yet there is also a certain rationale to the New Labour position, there being no doubt that the middle classes have an edge over the run of working-class and poorer candidates when it comes to interviews and aptitude tests etc. Now this has nothing to do with native ability or intelligence, such things not being confined to any one part of the population. On a level playing pitch, the best, irrespective of class, will still rise to the top. But the fact is that once one enters into the field of mass social engineering, as New Labour is currently doing, one is no longer necessarily dealing with the best but with the average, or even the less than average. And in this situation the middle classes have a definite advantage.
Ability or intelligence isn't capped at birth; it is open to further nurturing and development, or at least honing, depending on the environment one is raised in, the schools one attends etc. And as such it is possible to see how the children (even the average ones) of the educated middle class have an advantage when it comes to presenting themselves for university admissions, even if only in the matter of confidence and expectation. And also, too, how the academic environment is likely to prove much more amenable to them.
By contrast, the student from the lower socio-economic background, unless he is unusually lucky, is unlikely to enjoy the same cultural background in growing up. Education may compensate to some extent, but only incompletely. Yet it may still compensate . . . except that the British state education system is—to an extent that the Irish one isn't quite yet—in a total mess.
When I was young there was something called the Primary Certificate, which you sat around the age of twelve, and which certified your competency in the three Rs. The British equivalent was, I think, the 11 Plus. Yet the situation now is that employers in Britain are often having to test applicants with university degrees for basic literacy and numeracy.
How and why has this happened? No doubt there are different reasons involved. But one thing is certain, a major, if not the major, factor was the development of a liberal theory-down approach. Rather like Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams—Build it and they'll come!—the buzz phrase notionally was one of 'Think it and it must be true!' If you could write something down on paper, and it seemed to be logical, then it must be feasible—the same mindset as underlay the developments in financial theory that helped cause the current economic collapse. Inspired by the liberal ideology of unrestrained equality, and ultimately by a creeping Marxism, all the old tried and tested ways of doing things in education were scrapped in favour of fashionable new theories—theories that fundamentally didn't work anywhere except on paper.
The fact is that, in education, more is often less. If the purpose of university education is to produce and train an intellectual and professional elite then entrance to it must of necessity, and in terms of ability, be restrictive. If, instead, its main role is to be one of social engineering then access must needs be more broadly based, and involve an inevitable deterioration in standards.
But, of course, in a certain sense the situation hasn't really changed. In a certain sense, it has proved self-correcting. We have seen how the emphasis has changed from the simple fact of having a degree to the question of what college the degree is from. Thus, in an informal way, old standards are being more or less maintained. But even that is progressively coming under fire, with New Labour targetting more and more the entry policies of the premier league universities. And this is not something I necessarily disagree with—in fact it is arguably a praiseworthy policy—so long as it does not involve any fudge in the matter of intellect and ability.
There is a further point, already briefly touched on—an important point—that time and the length of this mailing prevent me from dealing with. I will return to it next day.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Bringing things up to date . . .
I have been off-line for the past week due to computer problems, now more or less resolved. But it will be a day or two--that is, if there is anybody interested--before normal service resumes.
In the meantime, somebody said to me last week that they read my blog on and off, but that they found it sometimes hard to understand exactly what I was saying. And that in itself is perfectly understandable, given that the topics dealt with have often been complex, not to mention speculative. Yet, within those constraints, I have tried to be as straightforward as possible, short of losing the point I was trying to make.
Einstein is credited with saying, 'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.' And from previous experience I have to agree with him, for it is just as easy (if not, indeed, easier) to go off message by trying to simplify matters too much, as through over-complicating them.
In any event, this blog is reaching towards the end of its natural life. It was never intended to be long term. Another ten or so mailings, or maybe less, and I will have said the main things I intended to say in setting out, the meandering nature of my progress in the meantime notwithstanding.
As I say, I will be back posting in a few days . . .
In the meantime, somebody said to me last week that they read my blog on and off, but that they found it sometimes hard to understand exactly what I was saying. And that in itself is perfectly understandable, given that the topics dealt with have often been complex, not to mention speculative. Yet, within those constraints, I have tried to be as straightforward as possible, short of losing the point I was trying to make.
Einstein is credited with saying, 'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.' And from previous experience I have to agree with him, for it is just as easy (if not, indeed, easier) to go off message by trying to simplify matters too much, as through over-complicating them.
In any event, this blog is reaching towards the end of its natural life. It was never intended to be long term. Another ten or so mailings, or maybe less, and I will have said the main things I intended to say in setting out, the meandering nature of my progress in the meantime notwithstanding.
As I say, I will be back posting in a few days . . .
Monday, March 1, 2010
The quotation last day from the speech given by Himmler in Posen (Poznan) on October 6th 1943 is taken from a longer version included in Gitta Sereny’s excellent Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, first published in 1995. The full text is available on the net—except that one must be careful as to which version is accessed. Himmler also spoke to senior SS commanders in Posen two days earlier (October 4th) and at the beginning of 1944 to senior army officers.
The speeches resulted from, in Sereny’s words, ‘Hitler’s determination to make sure that his supporters were all implicated in the catastrophe he was bringing on Germany. Hitler had told his closest army advisers months before that the “bridges behind us are burnt,” but now he charged Himmler with making the most faithful in the party privy to the guilty knowledge. The Allies had already announced in October 1942 their intention to proceed against war-crimes suspects, and in December linked this to the German government’s “bestial policy of the extermination of the Jews of Europe.” Himmler’s orders from Hitler would have been to draw everyone in the upper ranks of Nazis into the net, so that no one could henceforth dare to break ranks, claiming ignorance or innocence.’
The question mark that arises here is from the seeming implication that at least some in the higher ranks of the Nazi Party and the army and the SS were in ignorance of the ongoing extermination of the Jews. By any standards, a ridiculous contention. But, of course, the ‘ignorance’ being referred to wasn’t a reference to some natural state of unawareness, but rather the more studied ignorance of denial and not officially wanting to know. To some extent, there was a rather inefficient hermetic seal surrounding the whole matter of the destruction of the Jews, created on the one side by those who didn’t want the matter spoken of, and, on the other, by those who didn’t want to be told. But, of course, the very fact of not wanting to know is in itself an indication of already knowing, or at least guessing.
In a somewhat different context, when the collapsing eastern fronts forced Adolf Eichmann to be recalled to state security headquarters in Berlin in early 1945, ‘Every day, his boss and former mentor, Kaltenbrunner, would lunch with all his department heads except Eichmann, who was never invited. Covering their tracks to avoid postwar retribution, most of them avoided this pariah who had executed their wishes; ironically, Kaltenbrunner and several of the others were hanged long before Eichmann’ (The Wiesenthal File: Alan Levy, Constable, 1993).
The fact that Kaltenbrunner at this stage was head of the Reich Main Security Office and in overall charge of the Final Solution makes his attempt to distance himself from Eichmann seem rather absurd. But what seems to have been at work here was some instinctive individual defensive reaction that seems always to operate in such circumstances, rationality not withstanding.
Also of interest is that implication that while several of the bigwigs were hanged, others, it seems, may have survived. No doubt the clever ones, who anticipating early on the possibility of the war being lost, were careful not to leave a trail of evidence connecting them to things that in the end might turn out to be incriminating. The fact also that Eichmann never progressed above the rank of colonel—a comparatively lowly rank in the SS bureaucracy considering his ability and the scope of operations he was in control of—suggests a rather prescient acknowledgement on the part of the upper echelons of the SS of the advantages of leaving an insulating gap of rank between themselves and him.
The reason that the Posen meeting comes to play such a prominent part in Sereny’s book on Albert Speer is that Speer was present in Posen on the particular day, and indeed gave a speech of his own to the assembled Gauleiters the same morning. It was the organizational genius of Speer—Hitler’s architect, and also Minister for Armaments and War Production—that was one of the main reasons why Germany was able to continue in the war as long as it did. Brought to trial for his life at Nuremberg, he admitted a ‘general responsibility’, as a member of the government, for what had occurred under Hitler; at the same time he denied any personal involvement in or knowledge of the atrocities that had occurred. He escaped with his life, and instead was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
Gitta Sereny based her book on a very close personal engagement with Speer—‘whom I knew well and grew to like’—in the four years before he died in 1981. Previously she had written one of the classic works on the subject of the extermination of the Jews, Into That Darkness, a biography of Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. That book, too, was based upon a long series of interviews with Stangl in the weeks before his death in prison, in the course of which, as she says herself, ‘in a curious way—and I say this with reflection—I had become his friend.’
Now the friendship involved here, with both Stangl and Speer, wasn’t some cynical journalistic ploy to get inside their guard. Rather it was a consequence of her natural inclination to relate to them as human beings, to try and understand them, and at the same time to unravel the web of rationalizations and denials with which they cocooned themselves for protection, fundamentally from themselves.
As she says of Stangl, ‘My professional interest notwithstanding, it had been important to me not to persuade or fatigue this man into disclosing more about himself than he wished to. If the sum total of what he could tell, and possibly teach us, was to be valid and of real value, I felt he had to offer it freely, and in full possession of all his faculties.’
She thus approached her subjects as much in the way of a ‘father’-confessor as a journalist, the sensitivity of her approach gaining their confidence and cooperation in a way a more confrontational attitude would never have. In the same process, it seems clear, she also eased them gradually towards the possibility of some final truthful coming to terms with themselves.
In the case of Speer, when the information came out, in the years after his release from prison, that he had been in Posen on the day of Himmler’s speech, the implications threatened to undermine not just his defence at Nuremberg (which by that stage was academic anyway), but also his sense of self, the image of himself that he had built up during his years in prison and subsequently presented to the world. He had been in Posen on the same day, he admitted, but he had left before Himmler’s speech. The evidence is somewhat mixed, but the greater part would seem to support his contention of not being present. But even more important, of course, is the fact that he wouldn’t want to have been present, being arguably one of those who sought to insulate themselves from any direct knowledge that might serve to link them to what was happening.
In 1977, in an affidavit requested of him by a Jewish group, Speer wrote: ‘However, to this day I still consider my main guilt to be my tacit acceptance of the persecution and the murder of millions of Jews.’ He later explained the phrase ‘tacit acceptance’—or as Sereny translates it from the German, ‘tacit consent’—in terms of ‘looking away’; in other words, of not wanting to know. As Sereny goes on to write: ‘If Speer had said as much in Nuremberg, he would have been hanged.’
The speeches resulted from, in Sereny’s words, ‘Hitler’s determination to make sure that his supporters were all implicated in the catastrophe he was bringing on Germany. Hitler had told his closest army advisers months before that the “bridges behind us are burnt,” but now he charged Himmler with making the most faithful in the party privy to the guilty knowledge. The Allies had already announced in October 1942 their intention to proceed against war-crimes suspects, and in December linked this to the German government’s “bestial policy of the extermination of the Jews of Europe.” Himmler’s orders from Hitler would have been to draw everyone in the upper ranks of Nazis into the net, so that no one could henceforth dare to break ranks, claiming ignorance or innocence.’
The question mark that arises here is from the seeming implication that at least some in the higher ranks of the Nazi Party and the army and the SS were in ignorance of the ongoing extermination of the Jews. By any standards, a ridiculous contention. But, of course, the ‘ignorance’ being referred to wasn’t a reference to some natural state of unawareness, but rather the more studied ignorance of denial and not officially wanting to know. To some extent, there was a rather inefficient hermetic seal surrounding the whole matter of the destruction of the Jews, created on the one side by those who didn’t want the matter spoken of, and, on the other, by those who didn’t want to be told. But, of course, the very fact of not wanting to know is in itself an indication of already knowing, or at least guessing.
In a somewhat different context, when the collapsing eastern fronts forced Adolf Eichmann to be recalled to state security headquarters in Berlin in early 1945, ‘Every day, his boss and former mentor, Kaltenbrunner, would lunch with all his department heads except Eichmann, who was never invited. Covering their tracks to avoid postwar retribution, most of them avoided this pariah who had executed their wishes; ironically, Kaltenbrunner and several of the others were hanged long before Eichmann’ (The Wiesenthal File: Alan Levy, Constable, 1993).
The fact that Kaltenbrunner at this stage was head of the Reich Main Security Office and in overall charge of the Final Solution makes his attempt to distance himself from Eichmann seem rather absurd. But what seems to have been at work here was some instinctive individual defensive reaction that seems always to operate in such circumstances, rationality not withstanding.
Also of interest is that implication that while several of the bigwigs were hanged, others, it seems, may have survived. No doubt the clever ones, who anticipating early on the possibility of the war being lost, were careful not to leave a trail of evidence connecting them to things that in the end might turn out to be incriminating. The fact also that Eichmann never progressed above the rank of colonel—a comparatively lowly rank in the SS bureaucracy considering his ability and the scope of operations he was in control of—suggests a rather prescient acknowledgement on the part of the upper echelons of the SS of the advantages of leaving an insulating gap of rank between themselves and him.
The reason that the Posen meeting comes to play such a prominent part in Sereny’s book on Albert Speer is that Speer was present in Posen on the particular day, and indeed gave a speech of his own to the assembled Gauleiters the same morning. It was the organizational genius of Speer—Hitler’s architect, and also Minister for Armaments and War Production—that was one of the main reasons why Germany was able to continue in the war as long as it did. Brought to trial for his life at Nuremberg, he admitted a ‘general responsibility’, as a member of the government, for what had occurred under Hitler; at the same time he denied any personal involvement in or knowledge of the atrocities that had occurred. He escaped with his life, and instead was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
Gitta Sereny based her book on a very close personal engagement with Speer—‘whom I knew well and grew to like’—in the four years before he died in 1981. Previously she had written one of the classic works on the subject of the extermination of the Jews, Into That Darkness, a biography of Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. That book, too, was based upon a long series of interviews with Stangl in the weeks before his death in prison, in the course of which, as she says herself, ‘in a curious way—and I say this with reflection—I had become his friend.’
Now the friendship involved here, with both Stangl and Speer, wasn’t some cynical journalistic ploy to get inside their guard. Rather it was a consequence of her natural inclination to relate to them as human beings, to try and understand them, and at the same time to unravel the web of rationalizations and denials with which they cocooned themselves for protection, fundamentally from themselves.
As she says of Stangl, ‘My professional interest notwithstanding, it had been important to me not to persuade or fatigue this man into disclosing more about himself than he wished to. If the sum total of what he could tell, and possibly teach us, was to be valid and of real value, I felt he had to offer it freely, and in full possession of all his faculties.’
She thus approached her subjects as much in the way of a ‘father’-confessor as a journalist, the sensitivity of her approach gaining their confidence and cooperation in a way a more confrontational attitude would never have. In the same process, it seems clear, she also eased them gradually towards the possibility of some final truthful coming to terms with themselves.
In the case of Speer, when the information came out, in the years after his release from prison, that he had been in Posen on the day of Himmler’s speech, the implications threatened to undermine not just his defence at Nuremberg (which by that stage was academic anyway), but also his sense of self, the image of himself that he had built up during his years in prison and subsequently presented to the world. He had been in Posen on the same day, he admitted, but he had left before Himmler’s speech. The evidence is somewhat mixed, but the greater part would seem to support his contention of not being present. But even more important, of course, is the fact that he wouldn’t want to have been present, being arguably one of those who sought to insulate themselves from any direct knowledge that might serve to link them to what was happening.
In 1977, in an affidavit requested of him by a Jewish group, Speer wrote: ‘However, to this day I still consider my main guilt to be my tacit acceptance of the persecution and the murder of millions of Jews.’ He later explained the phrase ‘tacit acceptance’—or as Sereny translates it from the German, ‘tacit consent’—in terms of ‘looking away’; in other words, of not wanting to know. As Sereny goes on to write: ‘If Speer had said as much in Nuremberg, he would have been hanged.’
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)