Author: Ophelia Benson

Time for some legend-tweaking, some myth-interrogating, some eye-poking in the.

But while millions of colonists were accepting of slavery if not relaxed about it, millions of Britons back in the old country really were disgusted by it. And when slaves could choose whom to trust, they trusted Britannia.

So in the end it’s a poke in the eye for America?

“Yup. In the interests of truth,” he says.

Simon Schama, this is. He’s written a new book on – well, what it sounds like.

He’s grateful, he says, for Americans thirst for popular history – a thirst that can make “doorstoppers such as Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton beach reading for the summer”. But there’s a but, and it’s a big one. All these blockbusters (one thinks also of Stephen Ambrose’s boomingly titled The Victors, Band of Brothers and Undaunted Courage) are “very coloured, in my view, by the wish for a pre-lapsarian past; (by the notion that) however much trouble we’ve been in since the civil war, there was once a place where America’s founding fathers were good, wise, strong, heroic, devoted to liberty and all of that”.

And by the wish for ‘the good war’ and for ‘the greatest generation’ and other cuddly items. Wishes of that kind do get in the way of truth. That happens.

Wrong sort of history for his esteemed colleagues to be writing, Schama reckons. Go back to Thucydides and the great cock-up theory of how we got to where we are. “It may have been low-key and Macaulay, not Carlisle, but that’s the greatness of the Western historical tradition. It’s not purely celebratory — in fact it began with unflinching self-criticism — so there is some sense of the virtue of party-pooping.”

There is indeed. Unflinching self-criticism is a good deal more likely to get at the truth than wishful thinking about pre-lapsarian pasts is. (Why? Because there is always something to criticise, whereas pre-lapsarian pasts don’t exist. And because wishful thinking distorts perception. That’s why.)

Schama was on Start the Week last week, talking about this book and being amusingly rude about Mel Gibson’s terrible mythic movie ‘The Patriot’ and about the decisiveness of Bush – ‘He’s decisive,’ Schama said acidly, ‘about doing whatever the last person he spoke to recommended.’

It’s outrageous. Something ought to be done about it. ‘College’ in the US apparently has the unmitigated gall to teach things that conflict with Christianity. Isn’t that illegal?

Spend a couple of days at the workshop and it becomes clear that, for many of these students, college is fraught with peril. There is the pressure to party, to drink, to have sex. There is also the subtle pressure to conform to a non-Christian worldview. There are biology courses that ask students to accept evolution, which workshop organizers and most of the students reject as untrue and ungodly. There are literature courses that see any text, including the Bible, as open to multiple interpretations. And there are philosophy classes that view absolute truth as nothing more than an illusion.

The subtle pressure to conform to a non-Christian worldview – meaning, the expectation that students will give rational answers to questions. That if asked to write an essay on the Renaissance, they won’t begin every sentence with ‘God made it come about that’. That they will read secular books on secular subjects and think about them in rational, empirical, non-supernatural ways. Yes, no doubt such a pressure is there – but how can university subjects be taught properly if it’s not? How can you have biology courses that don’t ‘ask students to accept evolution’? How can you have philosophy courses that view ‘absolute truth’ as revealed by a deity and passed on by authority, when that’s not philosophy but religion? The problem seems to be basic, in fact downright foundational.

Even though he is a devout Christian, Mr. Thomas chose to attend a secular college because it will “make me a more well-rounded person.” Still, he is worried about what he will encounter in the classroom. “You always hear horror stories about professors treading on students’ beliefs,” he says. “I hope they won’t ignore my point of view.” When a professor or fellow student asserts something that runs contrary to Christianity, Mr. Thomas intends to speak up. And now, thanks to the workshop, he knows what to say.

He wants to be a more well-rounded person – which is a very good idea, especially for a ‘devout’ Christian – but he is also determined to reject anything ‘that runs contrary to Christianity’ – thus assuring that he can’t possibly (unless he fails in that project) become a more well-rounded person. It’s basic. You can’t do both. You can’t both get a real education – which involves asking genuine questions, not ones with predetermined answers; which involves following the evidence wherever it leads; which involves learning things you didn’t know before; which involves learning things that don’t conform to what you want to believe – and reject in advance anything ‘that runs contrary to Christianity.’ That’s not education – that rules out education. Vocational training, yes, but education, no.

Columbia undergraduates study the Bible not as divinely inspired scripture, but as literature. For Ms. Keyes this was distressing. But, she says, Summit taught her that the Bible is “historically accurate,” and this knowledge kept her from believing that it belonged on the same plane as Homer or Aeschylus. “It equipped me to think through things and not accept everything I was told,” she says.

Except of course when that everything is told to her by the people at camp. Summit taught her something that is not true, and that equipped her to accept everything she was told provided the tellers are Christian.

It’s sad, really.

You might as well know. I don’t usually spill these things, I don’t just blurt them out, I keep myself to myself. I don’t make everyone a present of my secrets. I don’t bore you with my passions and adorations. I don’t feel it necessary to go public with everything. I don’t ‘share’ my every emotion. But you might as well know – there are few people I like as much as I like Alan Bennett. Not that I know him or anything – but everything I’ve read and seen by him, everything I know about him, everything I’ve heard him say; his voice, his plays, his journals, his readings, his performances – well, I just like them intensely, that’s all. And this review of his new book in the Times simply refreshes or reinforces that liking, and also creates new branches of it.

Bennett does not tell it as a success story, and doubts, in glummer moments, if it is one; “Living is something I’ve managed largely to avoid.” Rather, he inspects his past to discover how he came to be himself — fastidious, buttoned-up, an inveterate outsider…Being categorised at all is what he resists. He laments his constant sense of being shut out, but when he looks at those he might be shut in with, being shut out is clearly his preference. “I have never found it easy to belong. So much repels.”

Oh, dear – come over here and sit by me, as Dorothy Parker said. Those three little words – dalling, they are so very me. So much repels. Yes.

Like most lower-middle-class couples at the time, they believed in keeping themselves to themselves and avoiding anything “common”, articles of faith their son has inherited. It would do, he suggests, as a definition of what has gone wrong with England in the past 20 years, to say that it has got common. Unfashionably ready to call vulgarity and stupidity vulgarity and stupidity, he picks out, in an anti-paedophile mob on a Portsmouth housing estate, a tattooed mother with a fag dangling from her lips and a baby in her arms, proclaiming how concerned she is for her kiddies.

So much repels.

His father taught him to distrust affectation (“splother”, he called it), and Bennett proved all too apt a pupil…He has an unerring ear for verbal falsity — the archbishop of Canterbury at the Queen Mother’s memorial service referring to her as “someone who can help us to travel that country we call life”…The modern jargons we invent to keep reality at bay arouse his scorn. You sense the struggle when he refers to Rupert Thomas, who now lives with him, as “my partner, as the phrase is”. He has trained himself, or maybe it was just a gift, to hear and see what is actually there, not what convention dictates…

Well that’s why, then – he has an unerring ear for verbal falsity. I do value that quality – so naturally he’s a hero.

Elsewhere his incisiveness is less alarming, and often pleasingly sceptical. Puncturing reputations is a speciality. He comments wryly on the “canonisation” of Iris Murdoch, whose famed unworldliness somehow did not prevent her accepting umpteen honorary degrees and a damehood from Mrs Thatcher. Sir Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova are also put through the mill — the one not much good at thinking, the other not much good at poetry, and both too pleased with themselves.

Yeah, yeah, yeah – more, more.

I have never read a book of this length where I have turned the last page with such regret. It is intelligent, educated, engaging, humane, self-aware, cantankerous and irresistibly funny. You want it to go on for ever.

So much repels; what a good thing there is Alan Bennett, who doesn’t.

At some point in the past day or two, while pondering the latest upsurge in the Freud debate, I was inspired to look up ‘hysteria’ in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. I was a little surprised at what I found.

A form of neurosis for which no physical diagnosis can be found and in which the symptoms presented are expressive of an unconscious conflict. In conversion hysteria, the symptoms usually take a somatic form (hysterical paralysis, irritation of the throat, coughs)…Hysteria has been explained in many different ways over the centuries; the most influential aetiology or causal explanation to have been put forward in the twentieth century is that supplied by Freud’s psychoanalysis.

There’s a problem with that. It inexplicably omits necessary phrases like ‘once thought to be’ and ‘it was thought that’ and ‘but increased knowledge of diseases of the brain and nervous system have rendered such explanations nugatory.’ The phrase ‘for which no physical diagnosis can be found’ ought to read ‘for which no physical diagnosis could be found until researchers discovered organic diseases such as multiple sclerosis and motor neurone disease, and developed a better understanding of the effects of closed-head injuries and spinal injuries’. And note the sly word ‘influential’ about the aetiology put forward by Freud. Not accurate, not correct, not well-founded, but influential. Note further that it doesn’t say influential on whom. Not on neurologists it wasn’t – fortunately.

There’s another absurd bit:

It was only in the nineteenth century that the phenomenon of ‘railway spine’ (a psychosomatic syndrome observed in the victims of the frequent railway accidents of the 1880s) led to the recognition that men too could suffer from hysteria.

Umm…railway spine? Spine? Frequent railway accidents? Does that suggest anything to you? Like, for instance, the possibility that the syndrome was not psychosomatic at all, but, you know, spinal injury? Isn’t it kind of an odd coincidence that it was specifically railway accidents that caused men to develop ‘hysteria’?

No, it doesn’t suggest that to the writer of this dictionary. Very odd. Causes me to ponder the ways of epistemic functioning.

I’ve also been browsing in Frederick Crews’ excellent, indispensable anthology Unauthorized Freud, which has been causing me to mutter darkly about credulity and suggestibility. Credulity is an interesting and often puzzling phenomenon, which turns up in places (and people) where one doesn’t expect it, sometimes.

I’ve been discussing these things with Allen Esterson lately, too – in particular the entrenched misconception that a lot of people have via Jeffrey Masson’s book The Assualt on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory: that the problem with Freud is that he concealed what his women patients told him about being sexually molested by male relatives. In fact Freud’s patients didn’t tell him they were molested or ‘seduced,’ he told them – and then he changed his mind and suppressed the theory. But try explaining that to people who are convinced of the first account. Go on, just try. I have, and I know: it is impossible to get them to believe you. They think you’re part of the cover up crimes against women crowd, or else just ill-informed and out of touch and not up to speed. I expostulated on this point to Allen, and he remarked in his reply:

What is extraordinary is that the indications that there is something odd
about Freud’s story is staring the reader in the face even in the most
commonly cited version of the story, in “New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis”: “In the period in which my main interest was directed to
discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me
that they had been seduced by their father….” But why should almost all
his female patients have reported these ‘seductions’ only during the period
when he was actively seeking infantile traumas? As is not uncommon when
Freud is misleading his readers, he gives himself away — at least to
someone who has acquired sufficient knowledge to see what he is up to.

That’s good, isn’t it? It made me laugh. “In the period in which my main interest was directed to
discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me
that they had been seduced by their father….” Oh did they! My, what a coincidence! And in
the period when my main interest was directed to discovering the secret
role of the Illuminati in European history, almost all the people I sat
next to on the bus told me that they had been abducted by Illuminati.
Fancy!

Yes, life works out so neatly sometimes, you know? You develop a main interest in discovering something, and by golly, all of a sudden you start discovering it everywhere you go. In some cases, this happy outcome is called paranoid schizophrenia, and in other cases, it is called one of the great intellectual adventures of the 20th century. You just never know. It all boils down to prestige, and whether your ideas are ‘influential’ or not.

Part two of this review of Simon Blackburn’s Truth says some peculiar and rather ill-natured things, and also some silly ones. Some of the things are all three at once.

In Truth, the hostility to the unnamed relativist so overflows at points as to make her sound more like a solipsist, a nihilist, or even a willful and demented child. I spent a number of years in and around English departments and certainly met plenty of nudniks and witnessed my share of bizarre seminar discussions. But never once did I meet the shameless knave that Blackburn describes.

Well – bully for you, one feels like saying. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, does it. (Black swans! Dingdingding!) We don’t know what ‘a number of years in and around English departments’ means, do we. Nor do we know what ‘plenty of nudniks’ or ‘bizarre seminar discussions’ means. We don’t really even know what ‘in and around English departments’ means. But we do know that your not encountering X does not mean that X does not exist. So the snotty, de haut en bas tone of your review might be a tad out of place.

Anyone currently in academia in any capacity knows that the prestige of hard and semihard disciplines (notably economics) has never been higher, while the prestige of soft disciplines—those aided over the previous 25 years by the allure of “theory,” such as English, Comp Lit, Art History—has never been lower.

Well, pal, that depends what you mean by ‘prestige.’

Blackburn’s Truth Wars would pit right-brain adepts of the math and sciences against the left-brain adepts of the humanities, but this is a tendentious morality play meant to fret the public imagination without taking into account the actual intellectual or institutional history of the American university.

The right-brain adepts of math and science?? And for that matter, the left-brain adepts of the humanities?? And then…um…why is Blackburn supposed to take into account the actual intellectual or institutional history of the American university? Why the American university? (This is very like my writing a comment on a problem in democracy and being told by way of reply that the American people distrust powerful institutions. Hello? As Coriolanus said, there is a world elsewhere.) Blackburn is at Cambridge – the one up the M11, not the one across from MIT – so why is he expected to concentrate on the American university? Who knows.

One philosopher above all has chronicled the decline in prestige of analytic philosophy and the corresponding rise in interest in literary theory; and not coincidentally, this is the one enemy Blackburn troubles to identify by name. This is a review-essay, and any attempt to justify the American philosopher Richard Rorty’s conclusion, that truth is human-centered and consensual and not alien and extrinsically imposed, would require at least a book. But it is possible to identify, merely by quoting Rorty, the wound to the ego that seems to have motivated Blackburn to write a screed in response to him.

The wound to the ego. That seems to have motivated Blackburn. Seems? Seems to whom? On what basis? On what evidence? You mean ‘seems’ because you don’t like the book and so cast about for a concealed motivation? I’ve said it before, and no doubt will again – that one little word ‘seems’ can do a lot of work. Dirty work, often.

Being told that you are ill-read, or better yet, a “time-serving bore,” as Rorty has dubbed analytic philosophers, would fuel anyone’s bafflement and annoyance, and these are the twin engines behind Truth. As a helpless rejoinder to Rorty that only serves to prove his case, the book would be harmless if it didn’t also take energy from a trend darkening the culture at large.

Ho yus. Baffled, helpless, annoyed – fuming with irritation at the superior ‘prestige’ of Rorty – is the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, holder of Wittgenstein’s chair, author of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, best-seller, frequent radio commenter – yes indeed, that’s a plausible account, Mr Metcalf.

How vast the bad faith, and the hoodoo powers of left-wing conspiracy! To which one can only reply: Physician, heal thyself. As in his beef with Rorty, Blackburn has let a personal distaste overwhelm a basic respect for the facts. To have been lectured to at length by this man, on just this score, and in a book so clumsily soldered together, lies beyond even poor taste; it is perverse. It requires reminding, then, that “Philosopher” isn’t a job description, but an honorific. And in this instance, it might better be revoked.

The guy’s clueless. He thinks Blackburn is right-wing! That’s downright funny. Basic respect for the facts, dude? Physician – oh never mind.

Anyway. Not an impressive review, frankly. Reminiscent of Vollman on Nietzsche.

Slate has a history of this kind of thing. It published a lame two-person dialogue review of an earlier Blackburn book, Being Good, four years ago. It’s a supremely irrelevant review. If you read it and go to the bottom you’ll see a reader comment on the review followed by a comment on the comment by Blackburn. Here’s an amusing factino: I wrote that comment. ‘Kassandra’ c’est moi. That was a long long time ago – way before B&W.