Combines political satire and a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy?
Author: Ophelia Benson
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Education, Race and Culture
Harry at Crooked Timber had an interesting post a couple of days ago on an issue that has been kicking around for quite awhile now: the issue of minority underachievement in school and what causes it. Another way to characterize the issue might be whether it’s just one thing that causes the underachievement or an array of factors, and if it is an array of factors, what they are and how significant each is, and whether and why some get more attention than others. Whether and why some factors are downplayed or ignored while others are exaggerated and overfocused on.
Harry puts it this way:
Our school district devoted another in-service training to the Courageous Conversations program; every employee (except the many who took sick days) had to participate…It’s a kind of involuntary therapy session — the kind of thing that my friends who used to be in obscure Maoist organizations report having gone through regularly. The pretext is a concern with minority underachievement, which the District regards as being caused by institutional racism, on which the day’s conversation focused. You might expect that a focus on institutional racism would look at the racism in the criminal justice system and the labor market, which deeply affect the prospects of minority males and, presumably, therefore indirectly effect their aspirations and marriageability (with predictable consequences for family structure). But: no mention of these things. It is all about the racism inherent in the schools, and particularly in the attitudes of teachers.
He also has an Op-ed in the Madison paper, where he makes this point among others:
The second assumption the Conversations approach makes is that what is explained by race can by addressed by making teachers face up to their own privilege and racism. The problem, in other words, is in the attitudes of teachers and other district employees. But we have evidence to the contrary. Analyses of the data from summer learning often suggest that the entire growth in the socio-economic class achievement gap each year occurs in the summer, when students are out of school. It looks as if out-of-school experiences, not in-school experiences, are responsible at least in part for that gap. In fact, our understanding of summer learning suggests that schools are truly remarkable places, in which, throughout the school year, the unequal effects of out-of-school experiences on achievement are held in check.
Other people make different though compatible points. Laban Tall collected some useful links on the subject last month, at the time of a conference on ‘London Schools And The Black Child’. There was BBC sports presenter and former Tottenham Hotspur striker Garth Crooks, for example, who told the conference ‘there was a direct link between films and rap music glorifying violence and the drift of black boys away from education and into crime and violence.’ There was a March 2002 article by Joseph Harker:
If, 10 years ago, you asked black people in inner-city areas what they most feared when walking the streets, they would probably have said it was police officers; today they’d reply that it’s loud, aggressive gangs of young black boys – who may or may not be criminals, but are deliberately trying to strike terror into those around them, living up to the gangsta-rap culture which has been imported from the US since the late 1980s. “We’re from the street,” they grunt, “we want respect” (expletives deleted). For a decade now, backed by the profane, misogynistic imagery of rap videos, these people have been given free rein to hijack black culture. Being black is all about music, sex, guns, drugs and living on “the street”, they say, and their message has been taken on board by too many impressionable youngsters. As Sewell said, education has been portrayed as “white” – what use is it when strutting the streets?
And an email debate between Tony Sewell and Lee Jasper on the subject, in which Tony Sewell put it this way:
Many black head teachers and black students are clear that underachievement can be due to the individual student, parents, community, peers and, of course, school. They don’t agree that poverty and institutionalised racism are the most important factors. I would go further and say that political correctness has avoided the real issue of an anti-school black masculinity that pervades not only our inner city but those black boys who attend schools in the suburbs. When it comes to the CRE challenging failing schools, its remit must be wider than just white racism. It must also challenge a youth culture that still thinks to do well in school is to “act white”.
And Jamie Whyte had a piece in the Times about the way the evidence was used:
In the 17th century accusations of witchcraft could be made on flimsy evidence: warts and buoyancy would do. In the 21st century accusations of racism can be made with no evidence at all, or even with evidence pointing in the opposite direction…Pupils were asked how strongly they agree with the following statements, from 5 “strongly agree” to 1 “strongly disagree”:
“Q14. My teachers expect me to do well at school. Q15. My teachers expect me to do my homework. Q16. My teachers care about my progress. Q17. Teachers listen to what I say. Q18. I am often in conflict with teachers.” The average answers of black and white pupils were the same: exactly the same for questions 14 and 15 and so close for the others that the difference is statistically insignificant.
Yet the opposite answer was somehow found – the school system was declared racist when the evidence indicated it wasn’t. That’s the kind of thing that makes one want to rush out and become a teacher, isn’t it.
Clearly there is a strong taboo against saying ‘the culture’ might be playing any part in the underachievement – no doubt it seems too much like blaming the victim. But is it going to be possible to correct the problem while ignoring crucial factors? One wouldn’t think so.
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Walking Down the Runway in a Donna Karan Creation
My colleague has been slaving over a hot stove for days, and at last the meal is just about cooked. And I must say I think it’s a triumph and worth the wait. Check it out. That’s TPM’s (The Philosophers’ Magazine Online’s) new look. Is that gorgeous or what. Look at the magical quotations thing. Look at the new section for News. Look at the bright clean colourful sparkle of it all. That’s what I call Web design.
And if you notice any problems (‘glitches’ I believe they’re called), don’t hesitate to comment or to email JerryS.
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Review of Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century
Not about womanizing of Russell and Ayer or Ryle’s influence on The Police.
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Assorted Cheeses
This interview with Jamie Whyte is full of good quotable remarks. So I think I’ll quote some for your Saturday enjoyment.
It has always driven me mad to see people saying things that are well known to be rubbish. And I’ve never understood how they can bear it.
A good beginning.
The really big mistake comes when you treat people as authority figures when they are not expert but simply well known. There is a terrible tendency to treat people as reliable sources of fact when in fact they are simply “important” people or people who happen to be in the news. It is doubly perverse when you consider who gets counted as “important”.
Yup. We noticed that in connection with the ‘expertise’ of Juliet Stevenson on MMR, for instance, and Prince Charles on ‘alternative’ medicine.
Too many people see truth as just a game between groups, as a kind of tribalism. That is not rational. Far too many people are not prepared to say: “I don’t believe this and here’s my argument why I don’t.” They don’t feel they need to…These days, scientists are increasingly seen as part of various tribal groups, so when you read about their views the newspapers will go to great lengths to ask who they are working for, what their backgrounds are, and what are their political views are, and so on. Someone’s motives may reasonably make you suspicious that that person has an incentive to mislead you, but their arguments are no better or worse than the evidence put forward to support them.
Suspicion is one thing, and outright dismissal without argument is quite another. Good point, that.
What amazes me is that they like to set themselves up as having a slightly finer sensibility than you or me but in fact they are completely intellectually irresponsible. They used to come up with very bad arguments for their faiths but at least they felt that there was something they should provide. Now mere wilfulness has triumphed. This is what I describe as the egocentric approach to truth. You are no longer interested in reality because to do that you have to be pretty rigorous, you have to have evidence or do some experimentation. Rather, beliefs are part of your wardrobe. You’ve got a style and how dare anybody tell you that your style isn’t right.
I love that bit. Because it’s so exactly what I think myself. I’ve noticed it over and over again – that wilfulness thing. And the finer sensibility thing – if I’ve heard that implication once I’ve heard it a million times. ‘I’m spiritual, I’m deep, I see into the mystery of things, and you’re just a shallow dull literalist. Therefore any old nonsense I decide to think is real, is real.’ And beliefs as part of the wardrobe, and style (or identity, which is another version we hear a lot), and how dare you. Yup.
And speaking of nothing in particular but I want to put it somewhere and don’t want to do a separate little comment for it – I was quietly listening to Front Row yesterday when imagine my surprise, that ubiquitous Baggini fella turned up along with John Sutherland and some other guy to chat about aphorisms. So if you want to hear Julian chat about aphorisms, here’s your chance. It’s the last item on the programme, so probably about twenty minutes in.
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Moral and Political Dilemmas
Cheap food, liberty v security, problem neighbours, asylum, justice v forgiveness…
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Not Galileo
I was reading a book by Philip Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy, earlier this morning. He says some interesting things about people doing the Galileo thing. Page 101 for instance –
People who publish findings purporting to show that behavioral differences stem from matters of race or sex often portray themselves as opposing widely held views in the interest of truth.
And page 106 and 107 –
Prejudice can be buttressed as those who oppose the ban [on research into race differences in IQ] proclaim themselves to be gallant heirs of Galileo…So long as the conditions driving the argument are not appreciated, champions of the forms of inquiry that should be eschewed can always make use of the rhetoric of freedom to portray themselves as victims of an illegitimate public policy of stifling the truth.
Yes. One knows the kind of thing. One is in fact all too familiar with it. One ardently hopes one doesn’t fall into that oneself. One writes contracts and signs them in blood, vowing to give it all up and move to Topeka if one ever starts doing the Galileo act.
In that sense, Marc Mulholland had a point in that post the other day, with the bit about Valiant for Truth heroes of the Enlightenment and courageous souls who standing alone fight the modern filthy tide and people imagining themselves as some kind of underground resistance. Of course, he certainly didn’t have a point if he meant us, because we are so humble and modest and unassuming and unpretentious and self-deprecating as well as sensible and reasonable and clever and good at standing on one leg. But for just that reason he probably didn’t mean us.
No but seriously. It is a real problem, and one that occurs to me often. It is very difficult to set up as some kind of general critic of some division of Bad Thinking or Silly Mistakes or Foolish Errors or Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Dunciadia or Conventional Wisdom or Received Ideas or Fashionable Nonsense or [Insert Variant Here] without running the risk of falling into ridiculous poses and attitudes, as if posing for a tableau vivant of Horatius at the Bridge or the Boy with his just never mind we’ve all heard that joke thank you very much. Ho yus, I’m Galileo, I’m Spartacus, I’m Thersites, I’m Quixote, I’m Lenny Bruce, I’m Swift, I’m Pope, I’m Voltaire, I’m Mencken, I’m a martyr for truth, blah blah blah. (Shakespeare was sharply conscious of all this, amusingly and interestingly enough. He has a lot of speeches in a lot of plays in which one character tells another ‘Yes yes, we know, you’re a satirist, you’re honest, you’re going to tell us what’s wrong with everything. Don’t bother, okay?’ Satire was very very hot in the late 1590s, it was The Fashion [and was eventually made illegal – no messing around in those days] and the presses were full of scathing satires by disillusioned young men about town. Shakespeare wrote some and also mocked the whole idea. Typical. Flexible bastard, he was. Negative capability.)
But then again. There’s only so much one can do about it. It’s no good deciding to be acquiescent and docile and uncritical and accepting about everything simply in order to avoid pomposity and posing and affectation, is it. And really it’s hard to engage in any kind of thinking or inquiry or intellectual activity at all without noticing some error here and there. So…one just has to lump it.
We could always get some business cards made up. Butterflies and Wheels: Humble, Fallible, Bashful Critics of Fashionable Nonsense. Galilean Airs Strictly Avoided. Office Hours Daily 6 a.m. to Midnight.
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Under Discussion
Funny, that comment I did on Arundhati Roy was a catch-up item, as I said, left over from weeks ago, but I no sooner post it than there is a small flurry of posts on Roy because of an interview with her in Outlook India (which I hadn’t seen). She does say one or two woolly things there.
Mind you – to be fair, she also says some okay things. I may be unfair to her because her manner puts me off – and that’s not really a very compelling reason. She may not be as smug as she appears (just as I may not be as deranged and malicious as I appear – who knows). Though I am not the only one who thinks so. David Sucher of City Comforts had this to say at Harry’s Place:
Have you ever heard her speak? I found her foul: smug and self-satisfied, and certain of her own superior morality.
Yes, that is exactly the impression I got. But maybe she’s just shy. Anyway in the name of fairness here is one of the okay things she said:
Globalization, what does it mean? I keep saying, we are pro-globalization. It would be absurd to think that everybody should retreat into their little caves and continue oppressing Dalits and messing around the way they used to in medieval times. Of course not.
Good. Of course, some of the other things she says may give help to people who do indeed want to go on oppressing Dalits and women and other medieval messing around. But at least she’s aware of the problem.
The comment at Harry’s Place is worth reading. So is the one at Marc Cooper’s place and the one at No Credentials, which goes on to a different discussion, and a very interesting one. How does an academic who is avowedly not interested in facts go about ‘demonstrating’ something factual?
A Shakespearean scholar at the University of Oregon–a professor I actually like, which makes this more painful to report–will serve as my anonymous example. She wrote a well-received article using Foucault’s notion of geneaology to “demonstrate” that a noted historian’s view of anti-Semitism was poorly grounded, and that the “evidence” was in Shakespeare. I asked her, in all innocence, if she had ever thought about contacting the historian, or any other historians, to alert them to her discovery. It was my first term in grad school and I still hadn’t read a great deal of Foucault; I thought that–since he’s called a historian of ideas–his ideas were worth a damn.
She made an astounding statement; it went something like this: I know you’re interested in science, Rose, but I just don’t understand why people are attracted to the world of facts. That’s why I’m in literature; I love the imagination. If I wanted to do history, I’d do history.
This was in front of an entire class, and I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t say what I thought, which was, “But you say right here that you’ve demonstrated something. Doesn’t that imply something, you know, factual?”
One would think so. But of course that’s just petty empiricism, plodding positivism, sucky scientism. And yet…there are people who wonder what all the fuss is about. What postmodernism, they wonder. Who are all these people who say all these absurd things? I never hear anyone say things like that, they say. How odd – I hear them and read them all the time, not always even because I’m looking for them. But Marc Mulholland’s experience is different.
…post-modernism and multi-culturalism remains the favourite whipping boy of every ‘Valiant for Truth’ hero of the Enlightenment. I hardly ever meet post-modernists, only ever courageous souls who standing alone fight the modern filthy tide of those who will reduce truth to narrative, bury sense under ‘hegemonic discourse’, defend atrocities on relativist grounds, and so bloody on. Post-modernism is the great straw-man that allows dull empiricists and purveyors of moral inanities to imagine themselves as some kind of underground resistance…
Really. Never read anyone in Science Studies (or ‘Strong Programme’ Sociology of Science and other variants) for instance? Never read any Andrew Ross? No feminist epistemology? Never browsed syllabi for university courses? Got no friends doing Open University courses?
The usual accusation is that relativism allows post-modernists to pretend that all human phenomena are equally to be welcomed. Perhaps one can find ‘theorists’ who say this, but I’ve never come across anyone who has seriously argued that, say, the back of cornflakes boxes are of equal literary value to Shakespeare. Could be that I’ve never found them because they’d have to be, more or less literally, barking mad? The idea that such notions rule the intellectual world! Puh-lease.
Puh-lease what? There are entire disciplines dedicated to problematizing the borders between ‘High Culture’ and Popular Culture (the scare-quotes because High Culture is a silly word that denotes a straw man, in my view, as is the word ‘canon’).
I was surprised once to come across the article that is, I gather, the source of the ‘Valiant for Truth’ brigade’s assertion that wicked relativists defend female circumcision. I was surprised to see that its reasoning followed the lines that, if western society permits all sorts of body modification for aesthetic and occasionally religious purposes, then why should female circumcision – under proper medical supervision – not be permitted in non-western societies? One might demur for various reasons, but a battle-cry for patriarchy, a rejection of civilisation?
Um – there’s more than one article on the subject? With more than one argument? People really do fret about interfering with other people’s cultures, and FGM is a frequent example? I’ve heard them with my own ears?
One is indeed sensitive about deeply engrained beliefs that go to the heart of individuals’ sense of self-worth. I don’t scream at first years that (a)theism is for idiots or that their support / opposition to the war in Iraq marks them out as some sort of criminal.
Straw man again. And squishy words with all too many possible meanings again, just like last time we got into this discussion, when the claim was that a ‘ramified mode of human expression’ deserves respect. Same problem here. I, for one ‘one’, am not sensitive about all ‘deeply engrained beliefs that go to the heart of individuals’ sense of self-worth.’ I’m just not. Because that covers too much ground, is too blanket an amnesty. A lot of individuals (I know quite a few personally) have senses of self-worth that are very very closely tied up with their sense of superiority to other individuals – their sense of inherent, born, automatic, by definition, superiority. You’ll have guessed what I mean by now – I mean people who think others are inferior (have less worth) because of their sex or race or similar genetic category. They really, really, really believe that – their beliefs are deeply engrained. I don’t feel any need to be sensitive about that. (Well – I tell a lie – sometimes I do. I have been known to bite my lip in some situations, in order not to hurt someone’s feelings or cause feelings of foolishness and shame. Okay. I admit it. But then it should be phrased that way – as reluctance to shame people, not as sensitivity about ‘deeply engrained beliefs that go to the heart of individuals’ sense of self-worth’ – that language is just too flattering toward the possible beliefs.)
Blimey – this is long. How does this happen. I set out to write a few words and before I know it I have half a book. That’s enough of that.
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Total Entertainment All the Time
You mean consumption and entertainment is not what education is about?
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Anything Wrong With the Academic Bill of Rights?
How could there possibly be a problem with legislators micromanaging universities?
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Who Loses in the Truth Wars?
Freud once wrote, “Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.” This is certainly true of intellectuals. The problem is that if you look at anything very closely, including ideas and ideals, differences which appear small from the wider perspective suddenly appear very large indeed. And so it should be. It is precisely our ability to examine the objects of intellectual endeavour closely and discern differences invisible to the naked mind’s eye which allows us to deepen and extend our learning in the humanities and the sciences.
However, if we never step back and examine the broader picture, we can become blinded to some important features of intellectual life which should be obvious to us. And while intellectual hyperopia gets in the way of first class, specialised academic work, intellectual myopia is a more pernicious and widespread affliction of intellectual life today.
Intellectuals in general, and academics in particular, have taken their eyes off the ball. They have forgotten how precious their shared commitment to rationality is. Instead, they fetishise technical disagreements and lose sight of one of the core intellectual virtues they share. The result is that the values of rationality and reasonableness become debased and we are left with no defences against the traditional enemies of enlightened humanism: superstition, ignorance, prejudice and plain stupidity.
Consider, for example, what Simon Blackburn, in the title of his forthcoming book, has called “The Truth Wars”. The general history of this conflict has been chronicled many times. First came the Enlightenment, and the championing of reason, truth and science over authority, falsehood and superstition. Then, in the twentieth century, many lost faith with the Enlightenment project. Some, such as Adorno and Horkheimer, went so far as to suggest that Auschwitz was the logical conclusion of the Enlightenment. We had to reject, so the story went, the myth of the rational mind, dispassionately analysing the world. To understand the history of ideas, we need to look not at syllogisms but at who wields power or at the subconscious mind. Reason does not determine what we think; rather, what we already think determines how we reason.
These disagreements are important within the academy today, which is divided between those who carry the torch of the Enlightenment and those who debunk its pretensions. But the disagreements occlude a more important agreement. As Bernard Williams put it in his swan song, Truth and Truthfulness, differences in each camp’s “respective styles of philosophy” leads them to “pass each other by”.
Williams identifies two virtues of truth that are central to intellectual enterprise: sincerity and accuracy. You do your best to understand things as clearly as possible and “what you say reveals what you believe”. Although Williams maintained that these virtues only make sense if there is such a thing as the truth, in some form or another they are held by virtually everyone with a commitment to intellectual work, with important consequences. For what it implies is a shared commitment to nothing less than rationality itself.
This fact is disguised by the failure to distinguish between thin and thick conceptions of rationality. To illustrate the differences, consider thin and thick conceptions of hedonism. The thin conception of hedonism is the minimum which anyone who is any kind of hedonist is committed to. This is roughly the idea that the best form of life is one in which pleasure or happiness is maximised. Such a thin conception leaves a great deal undetermined. In order to “thicken” the conception and come up with a well worked-out hedonistic blueprint for living, much needs to be added, and what you add can result in very different blueprints. Nonetheless, the thin conception does actually rule out a great deal. No kind of hedonist will make duty the cornerstone of their ethics, for example.
In just the same way, even though intellectuals and academics disagree about their thick conceptions of rationality, almost all agree on a thin one, in which the virtues of sincerity and accuracy are central. These two virtues manifest themselves in five features of rational discourse: comprehensibility, assessability, defeasibility, interest-neutrality and compulsion of reasons.
No thinker of any quality sets out to deliberately make their writings unnecessarily incomprehensible. If one is committed to the value of reason, then one is committed to explaining oneself in terms which are in principle comprehensible to others, even if such understanding is difficult. This is part of the sincerity of the intellectual enterprise.
It is also important that these comprehensible reasons are in principle assessable by others. So, for example, if I tell you that I have infallible knowledge and you just have to accept that; since you can’t possible know why that it is the case, I have given you a comprehensible belief, but not an assessable one. I have not, therefore, given you any rational grounds to believe I have infallible knowledge. My sincerity means that I am open to criticism and my commitment to accuracy opens up the possibility that I am wrong. Together, these entail the notion that what I say is assessable by others.
This is important, for the hallmark of rational enquiry is that it does not just provide the whats of belief, but also the whys. This is why so much religious teaching lies outside of rationality. If I am told that I must accept that something is true because it is the word of God, and that the reason it is the word of God is just that we have faith that it is, then I have not been provided with any rational grounds to believe that thing is true. There must be some way for me to assess the truth – or value – of what it is that is being claimed.
The third feature of rational reasons is their defeasibility. This is simply the fact that we always accept that it is possible we are wrong. It follows from the fact that our beliefs are assessable by others that their assessment may be unfavourable. We remain open to the possibility of our own error. The moment one says that such and such a principle can no longer be the subject of any doubt or sceptical inquiry, one has shut the door on rationality and turned belief into dogma.
Rational argument also strives to be as interest-neutral as possible. It is part of the sincerity of rational arguments that they are never knowingly glosses for partisan prejudices. This is the case even when the upshot of the enquiry is that no enquiry is ever truly interest-neutral.
The last, and most elusive, of the features of rationality I see as central is compulsion. This is simply the feature of rational reasons for belief that, if they are strong and understood, they exert some kind of force upon you. You don’t just decide to agree or disagree with good reasons for belief. You feel in some sense compelled to agree or disagree with them. This relates to the virtue of accuracy: a good rational argument is answerable to something other than our will.
Why does any of this matter? Consider how someone might object that this thin conception of rationality is too thin. Even religion, for example, can offer reasons for belief that are comprehensible (albeit not necessarily in traditional, rationalist terms), assessable (albeit it not by entirely rational means), defeasible (Kierkegaard talked of the risk of faith, the risk being precisely that we could be wrong), interest-neutral (even though those who grow up in a different religious tradition may find the transition hard), and which certainly exert a compelling force on those who come to accept them.
There is no problem here. Since it is evident that there are many religious people who have not given up on rationality, any thin conception of rationality must allow the religious in. The point is that, once in the big tent of rationality, then more detailed debate can begin on how to thicken the idea of rationality, and it is at this stage, and only this stage, that sensible disagreement about the rationality or irrationality of religious belief can begin.
This is why a thin conception of rationality is so important. The true spirit of the enlightenment is not to be found in any specific beliefs about the power and scope of rationality. Rather, the key is that disagreements can be discussed and argued, in a common, intellectual space in which everything is open to everyone and no appeals to authority are allowed to trump. This broad domain of rationality is very precious indeed.
The problem is that, to listen to many western intellectuals, you would think that it doesn’t exist. This, even though many earn their living at universities that are concrete manifestations of institutions committed to thin-rationality.
If we are tempted to think that thin rationality is too woolly a notion, we should remember that there are many people who do reject it. To use another word with unfortunate connotations, fundamentalists of all descriptions have opted-out of the domain of rational enquiry. What they hold to be true is certain, not defeasible. It is assessable only by God, not man. There is no attempt to understand the interests of others who take a different view, and the compulsion they advocate comes not from the ideas themselves, but the force of violence.
More worryingly, I find it impossible to ignore the parallels between what I have been describing and the attitude of the United States in particular towards Iraq. Whether or not it was better to confront Saddam Hussein’s regime, the manner in which the US government conducted itself seems to me to mark a disturbing disdain for the values of rationality I have defended. I am not convinced that the administration had any interest in making its true reasons for action comprehensible. Its main claims about Saddam Hussein were not genuinely assessable but had to be taken on trust. There was a certainty of purpose which seemed to me to ignore the demand that we accept the defeasibility of our beliefs. Nor was enough attention paid to the interests and perspectives of others who took contrary views. And finally, it did not matter that the reasons given were not compelling; compulsion was achieved militarily. In short, a commitment to sincerity and accuracy, and with it rationality, seemed to be sorely lacking in the US administration.
And yet the academics and intellectuals who were among the strongest critics of the war need to accept some responsibility for eroding the rational domain and helping to make this disregard for it possible. Our obsession with our scholastic disagreements has created the impression that there is no common domain of rationality within which disagreements can be thrashed out. We just have a multiplicity of discourses and rationalisations to legitimise different interest groups.
I should make it clear that this is not just a criticism of those currents of thought broadly and loosely labelled post-modern. The enemies of post-modernism have set themselves up as the sole champions of reason – something made easier by their opponents’ willingness to relinquish the labels of rationality and reason. In so doing they too have contributed to the sense in which the intellectual sphere is too fragmented and divided along factional lines for any general dialogue to be possible. By dismissing large sections of the intellectual community as anti-rational, the anti-postmodernists have also contributed to the sense in which it is pointless to seek to argue one’s case in the widest possible forum.
We need, therefore, to reassert our shared values of rationality, to relegitimise the domain of intellectual discourse as the right place to discuss differences and settle disagreements. It is time western intellectuals took a wider view and realised that unless they stress what they have in common, the whole enterprise of rational enquiry will only come to see more and more irrelevant to those who seek solutions to the problems of today.
Based on a talk given to the seminar ‘Humanism for the 21st century’, Perspectives East and West Conference, at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, 4-5 June 2004.
Julian Baggini is author of What’s It All About? Philosophy and the meaning of life.
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Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare Biography
Writing for a general audience need not mean prostituting yourself.
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Doubts
Oh I don’t know…it’s just that it’s all such an effort, you know? I’m supposed to go to London in a couple of weeks (well not ‘supposed to’ – it was my own idea – but it’s planned and scheduled and so on). But…I don’t know…I have so much to do. I should tidy up the living room, and I should hang all my clothes up one of these days, and I ought to wipe the shelves in the fridge. It just all adds up. Plus there’s B&W, and a book to write, and one thing and another. And then a trip on top of that? You have to pack, and make sure you have everything, and go here and go there. And then there are all those hours and hours and hours in an airplane. Maybe I should just stay where I am and get the living room really tidy. There’s that closet, too.