Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Williams in The Times

    Another good obituary essay on Williams’ work and why it mattered.

  • Bernard Williams

    ‘He deconstructed as Derrida would do if he were cleverer and more pledged to truth,’ says the Guardian.

  • What the Koran Really Says

    Ibn Warraq calls for critical thought and a sceptical attitude in reading the Koran.

  • Williams in The Telegraph

    ‘He wanted a moral philosophy that was accountable not only to psychology but also to other branches of human enquiry, especially history.’

  • Nonsense, Not True, Made Up, Bollocks

    David Aaronovitch on the looting of Iraq’s antiquities and how it was reported.

  • Judgment Is Not Censorship

    Student editors and Harvard English department not heroes but confused, says Stanley Fish.

  • Alan Wolfe on ‘Diversity’

    What Americans think diversity is and what they think it isn’t.

  • The Tasaday

    Feuds within anthroplogy, questions about authenticity, palm leaves versus T shirts.

  • ‘Watchdog’ versus Teachers’ Union

    Is it discrimination to exclude disabled students who cause problems?

  • ‘Watchdog’ versus Teachers’ Union

    Is it discrimination to exclude disabled students who cause problems?

  • Hip, Relevant, In Your Face

    Entertaining, short, punchy, fast – poetry on tv. Next up: quantum mechanics lite.

  • The Arts on Television

    Why is coverage of the arts not as good as it once was on UK television?

  • Philosophers Useful After All?

    They can serve as logical police, with non-contradiction for a nightstick.

  • News Because I Only Just Now Found It

    Francis Cornford’s Microcosmographia Academica.

  • Two N.Y. Times Editors Resign

    Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd fall on swords in aftermath of Jayson Blair fraud.

  • The N.Y. Times on the N.Y. Times

    Many reporters and editors were disaffected in wake of Blair and Bragg.

  • What is Elitism?

    Fashionable Nonsense is a fabric of many threads, a sea fed by many rivers, a library with many volumes, a dog with many fleas. But there are also a few themes or core assumptions that play a role – that are ‘foundational’ – in most if not all of these many mansions: anti-essentialism, anti-realism, relativism, pretensions to transgression and rebellion and épater-ing; projects of unmasking, exposing, demystifying – every FNer a Toto pulling back the curtain that hides the Wizard; concern with hidden agendas and concealed power drives; and various kinds of make-believe anti-elitism.

    The elitism question is a complicated matter, not least because of the widely-observed paradox that claims of anti-elitism emanate from academics who write a language of deliberately clotted opaque jargon and make a parade of not particularly relevant erudition, such as Lacan’s forced marriage of psychoanalysis and mathematics. It’s also complicated because the word elitism is thrown around with wild abandon with no particular definition being stipulated, as if its meaning were entirely transparent and self-evident and generally agreed on. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Elitism means a great many things, some of them perfectly incompatible with one another, with the result that the word does more to obfuscate discussion than to clarify it.

    Another reason it’s complicated is that anti-elitism, like many of the projects of the FN or ‘politically correct’ crowd, is a stance and a project with a great deal of merit. Egalitarianism is an idea which has much to be said in its favour. This is especially the case when it is applied with care and attention and fine discrimination; when there is careful, open, truthful thought and discussion about which areas egalitarianism is appropriate for and which it isn’t, and about the ways it needs to be balanced by and take into account other important goods like accomplishment, ambition, inspiration, respect for achievement, talent, originality, learning, creativity. If it is kept firmly and honestly in mind both that it is good for all people to receive decent treatment, and that effort and discipline and talent and intellect are qualities to admire and encourage and respect.

    And of course that’s exactly where things get difficult, which is why politicians spend so much time talking anxiously about equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. It’s all very well to say that, it’s a nice formula, but when outcomes keep getting more and more unequal all the time, it’s hard not to suspect that somebody has a thumb on the scale.

    So, given economies and cultures that seem determined to maximise inequality and brand all attempts to reduce it as envy and class warfare, it is perhaps understandable that some people like to shout ‘elitism’ at anyone who says Shakespeare is better than John Grisham. That’s certainly easier than actually doing something about the more tangible forms of inequality. And there can be an element of truth in the charge. Veblen and Bourdieu were not wrong to point out the uses of Kulcha for giving people opportunities to feel clever and discriminating and superior to the vulgar crowd. ‘Odi profanum vulgus et arceo,’ said Horace smugly, and it’s not entirely mistaken to notice the potential for self-flattering motives underneath such avoidance. We need Totos to pull those curtains, people do have hidden agendas, it is good and useful to point them out.

    But ‘elitists’ don’t have a monopoly on hidden agendas and invidious motives. One-upmanship, jockeying for position, ressentiment, self-righteousness, the thrills of disapproval and condescension and getting it right while others get it wrong – those are all equal-opportunity pleasures. Anti-elitists get their own little frissons from saying You’re a snob and I’m not. In fact, of course, it’s impossible to think anything is right as opposed to wrong, that any attitude, stance, commitment, political view, idea is better than any other, without opening the door to approval of self and disapproval of others. Quite, quite impossible. If we’re too afraid of being smug and superior and self-righteous to have any opinions at all, we just become vacuous spineless shapeless nothings, and we can never improve or correct or change anything. What could be a more conservative position than that? No, abdication of judgment is neither possible nor desirable, we have to be clear about that, and just settle down to doing it well instead of badly. Terry Eagleton puts it this way:

    We should, I think, give no comfort to those who in the name of a fashionable anti-élitism would ignore real evidence of cultural deprivation, though we should remember of course that there is no single index of cultural flourishing or decline.

    The elitism epithet works to inhibit judgment because it is so a priori. It assumes, without argument, that to say that any popular book or movie or piece of music or tv show is bad is a thought-crime, because doing so second-guesses majority opinion; it says majority opinion is wrong. Democracy is expanded from the political realm to that of ideas and art, and taken to mean that the popular is automatically good and the good is automatically popular. Put like that it looks insane, but what else does the elitist epithet mean?

    Sad to say, if we’re going to think at all, we have to be able to think for ourselves. De Tocqueville pointed out how difficult this can be in a democracy, and he scared the hell out of John Stuart Mill, who pointed out the difficulty and the necessity even more sharply. Both the difficulty and the necessity are still with us.

    OB

    Apposite Quotations

    We should, I think, give no comfort to those who in the name of a fashionable anti-élitism would ignore real evidence of cultural deprivation, though we should remember of course that there is no single index of cultural flourishing or decline.
    Terry Eagleton: The Crisis of Contemporary Culture

    Some will call me an elitist for disdaining popular self-help literature and the popular recovery movement; but a concern for literacy and critical thinking is only democratic.
    Wendy Kaminer: I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional

    I’ve increasingly become convinced that in order to be any kind of a public-intellectual commentator or combatant, one has to be unafraid of the charges of elitism. One has to have, actually, more and more contempt for public opinion and for the way in which it’s constructed and aggregated, and polled and played back and manufactured and manipulated. If only because all these processes are actually undertaken by the elite and leave us all, finally, voting in the passive voice and believing that we’re using our own opinions or concepts when in fact they have been imposed upon us.
    Christopher Hitchens: The Nation, 12 February 2001

    Internal Resources

    Poetry is More Than Self-Expression
    Barney McClelland on Poetry Made E-Z.

    External Resources

    • Aiming High is Elitism?
      ‘Oddly, criticisms of elitism rarely extend to school sport…’ They don’t, do they. Why is that?
    • Christopher Hitchens
      One has to be unafraid of being called an elitist, says Hitchens in a Nation forum on the role of the public intellectual.
    • GOP versus PhD
      The Bush administration doesn’t want to know what scientists think, and Karl Rove defines liberals as people with doctorates.
    • Pop Culture Goes Macho
      When girls think it’s cool to call themselves hos and bitches, misogyny doesn’t have to break a sweat.
    • Review of In Defense of Elitism
      A literature professor is not impressed by a Time journalist’s book, but he is also not a fan of ‘reforming’ the ‘canon’ by getting rid of all the dead white men.
    • Youth Culture versus ‘Elitism’
      A gold mine of insulting populist nonsense.

  • Problematizing the Dominant Narrative

    I do get to have fun, toiling and slaving here at the mills of B and W. I browse Google and sometimes I do find peculiar gems.
    This one for example: a review of a book whose very title reeks of fashion: Dis/locating Cultures/Identitites, Traditions, and Third World Feminism. Got all that? You think the author stuffed enough Right On signposts in there for one title? The cute ‘Dis/locating,’ the buzzwords ‘cultures’ and ‘identities’ slammed together with that artful /, and finishing off with a flourish with Third World Feminism. There, that’s all the bases touched, Narayan must have thought in satisfaction. No one can say I don’t know the patois.

    And that’s only the title, and only the book under review. The reviewer is such a treat, it’s hard to imagine the author can be quite up to that level. It’s all there, it’s all so very very there, in the very first words. ‘This book is an impressive intervention’ – ooh, an intervention yet. Armed? And impressive besides, imagine. Right, literary critics excuse me ‘theorists’ don’t do anything so tame as write mere books any more, no, they produce interventions. Wouldn’t you think they’d embarrass themselves, giving the game away like that? Do they dress up in Che outfits and parade around the corridors of the English/Philosophy Building looking macho? Do they drive bright red cars and go vrooom vrooom at the lights?

    And it (so to speak) keeps it up, too, all the way down the page. Problematic representations of the Other, strategically situates the Third-World female ‘subaltern,’ dominant or as (must get that name in) Spivak says, ‘hegemonic feminist’ (what, because that’s such a dazzlingly brilliant and original phrase that you had to cite Spivak, you couldn’t have said that yourself?) narratives, enacting confrontational praxis…oh Christ, that’s only the first three sentences or so, I can’t bear to do any more. You’ll just have to read it yourselves. It ought to be a parody, it certainly looks like something out of the Jargon Generator, but I don’t actually think it is.

    The despotism of the signifier. Feminist colonial discourse analysis. Historically engaged postcolonial hermeneutic. Connection-making apparatuses. No no no, I’ve got to stop! Enjoy, gentle readers.

  • Guardians of the truth?

    If you click on the Guardian story link in the ‘Post-Orientalism” entry below, you’ll find it doesn’t work. Here’s why – from the Guardian’s web site today:

    A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading “Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil” misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, “The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.” The sense was that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed.

    I wonder whether the Guardian got it wrong because they’d really like it to be right? Nope? Fair enough, I don’t want to be uncharitable, so here’s Jonathan Steele excelling himself in the Guardian instead:

    One of the UN’s biggest worries is the future of the oil-for-food programme. Around 16 million people, more than 60% of the Iraqi population, depend on it. At the moment the Iraqi government imports food commercially through a UN-supervised programme. It is distributed by Iraqis via 45,000 outlets in every big city in a scheme which is accepted even by the US and the UK as fair and efficient.

    Once the first shot is fired, distribution is likely to stop because drivers will fear going into a war zone. The Iraqi government last month gave people two months’ ration but aid agencies say the poorest Iraqis have sold some of it. Even if they do not flee their homes under bombing raids, they will be at risk of hunger. UN officials will be withdrawn from Iraq in advance of the bombing, and there is no guarantee when their programmes will resume. The World Food Programme appealed for $23m to finance “an initial contingency plan” which would stockpile enough food just outside Iraq to give meagre rations for 900,000 people for 10 weeks. “So far only enough is in place for 500,000 for 10 weeks. We have received only $7.5m,” said Trevor Rowe, the WFP spokesman. “We may have to feed more than 10 times the number we appealed for, that is, 10 million people.”
    Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, March 10th

    And here he is again a month later:

    The Pentagon’s failure to plan for the “day after” adds to the anger. Making the time-honoured mistake of re-fighting the last war, the only preparations they made were for food. Air-dropping humanitarian parcels or delivering food by road provides good propaganda images. In a country that had suffered from three years of drought like Afghanistan it also made sense.

    Washington did not seem to know Iraq was different. The one thing people are not short of is food, thanks to the monthly rations of basics such as rice, sugar, cooking oil, tea and flour that every Iraqi receives, regardless of income. In a sanctions-damaged economy, 60% rely on the state-run programme and on the eve of war Saddam Hussein sensibly issued up to five months rations in one go.

    Instead of concentrating on food aid, the US ought to have prepared teams of water and power engineers, as well as flown in extra troops to prevent the postwar looting that breaks out in every country when regimes collapse (there should have been no surprise here).
    Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, April 21st

    What a guy!

  • A Glaring Omission

    I’ve been reading Richard Dawkins’ A Devil’s Chaplain lately. It’s not available in the States yet, but my colleague sent it to me from the UK. It’s great stuff, of course – Dawkins is a brilliant polemicist, essayist, explainer, persuader. His review of Sokal and Bricmont’s Intellectual Impostures/Fashionable Nonsense is hilarious (though of course it could hardly help it, having such rich material to work with). And Dawkins mentions one fact in passing which I feel compelled to make a fuss about.

    Sokal was inspired to do this [his famous hoax] by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, an important book which deserves to become as well known in Britain as it already is in America.

    Indeed it does, and I have reason to know that it’s not and it can’t be, because it’s damn well not in print there. It’s an outrage! There you all are in the UK, lulled into a false sense of security, calmly and cheerfully going about your daily lives not realizing what demented foolery gets published and admired in the US. It’s worth knowing about, because it’s influential stuff – it’s a meme, in fact. All the knowing sneers and/or impassioned tirades about the social constructedness and patriarchalism and Eurocentrism and horrid cold rationalism of science that one hears on every hand, they come from somewhere, and Higher Superstition gives a detailed account of where that somewhere is. It ought to be in print. At once, please.