Interesting opinion pieces from Zoe Strimpel in the Telegraph. It’s not my usual newspaper, going by the name of the Torygraph. But if an argument makes sense, it makes sense, and I’ll go with it. And this argument makes far more sense to me than the cultural relativism and libertarianism I read in the drearily liberal Guardian.
All hail the demise of shallow thinking and shallow behaviour in all things, I say.
“Teenagers today, according to a study last week, are keener than ever before on spending time with their family and on schoolwork than on… how shall I put this? Bonking.”
Teenagers test boundaries, and adults establish them. Out of some false notion of freedom and emancipation this has not been happening. Young people have been badly failed by adults, leaving them confused and clueless in negotiating life’s often difficult terrain. It seems that young people are craving these boundaries and are prepared to set the appropriate standards for themselves.
“I say good on them. I say they’re right,” says Zoe Strimpel. I, too, value substance and stability based on communal ties, responsibilities, commitments and duties as against the shallow libertarianism and transitory buzz of random casual encounters. Strimpel writes of the bonds of hearth and home, plus education, aspiration, self-control and self-respect are a much, much better use of the time, talent and energy of young people than the indulgence and excess of previous generations.
By upbringing and education, I was never cut out for the libertarianism of recent decades. I’m sure these internet tests are fairly accurate.
I'm not sure what I said to deserve that. Not even a hint of being a hippie. My career's adviser described me as a 'round peg in a square world,' but it seems I may be very square after all. Even Hitler would score higher than that.
While I like Strimpel’s observation of certain current trends, I want to see a reasoning that gives good grounds for a confidence that the change in behaviour is as a result of a much-needed change in character through proper character formation. She writes: “The study of 1,000 16- to 18-year-olds also found that late teens were socialising far more online with their friends than in person. More than two thirds reported speaking to their friends online more than four times a week, but fewer than a quarter of them actually saw their chums that often in person. This preference for chatting online while loafing about on the sofa appears – unsurprisingly – to substantially lower the likelihood of the teens being sexually active. Although it wasn’t clear whether sexting counted in this case.” That's not a good reason at all, just a continuation of the trend for people to sink their minds and bodies into their screens. Frankly, that’s a cause for even greater concern in my book, pointing to a trend in the direction of impersonality, passivity, electronic mediation and a further diminution of personal contact and interaction.
“It also helps that so many more teens than previously are uninterested in boozing; nearly a quarter of those surveyed said they had never drunk alcohol. Which, as well as making said random hookups less alluring, also gives them a better chance of achieving their dreams – not of losing their virginity at 15, but of aceing exams, which more than 80 per cent cited as their top priority.”
OK, but I’d prefer a renewed commitment to character formation in communities of practices, responsibilities and duties rather than the vagaries and vicissitudes of shifting patterns of behaviour, so that people make a conscious moral choice to be self-restrained. But I’ll go with Strimpel’s suggestion that today’s teens are, or are becoming, sensible. She says ‘deeply sensible,’ but we shall have to see with regard to the depth. Writes Strimpel: “The image we’re left with of the nation’s youth is one of them diligently beavering away at home while spending quality time with Mum and Dad rather than wayward friends and bad boyfriends. They may be doing all of this while glued to Instagram, but if they prefer flirting through their phones under the soothing eye of their parents, rather than getting off with each other in nasty nightclubs, more power to them. This attitude shift may all be thanks to the sinisterly all-consuming world of digital life, but so be it.” I want a more substantial basis for a true and enduring change in behaviour. It all has to be supported by a socio-relational, moral and institutional framework and infrastructure, in my humble view, but there’s hope at least in this craving for substance and stability.
Strimpel now comes to something else of interest to me:
“Kipling is the latest victim of our obsession with cultural vandalism.”
I find this whole thing abominable, vandalism, yes, but a complete menace to genuine thinking, the trumping of culture by the forceful ignorance of know-nothings.
Strimpel begins:
‘A friend of mine recently went for a job as a lecturer in English at an elite university. One of the chief requirements for the role was to help “decolonise the canon.”’
To those inclined to switch off, thinking this a conservative caricature, I say openly and plainly that I have been on the receiving end of this academic barbarism. I had sought to impress with my knowledge and passion for Plato, only to be met with a dismissive ‘knowing Plato is all very well, but …’ A list of clauses and qualifications followed which made it crystal clear to me that Plato was some great beast to be slain. I put it down to Plato being conservative, but quickly found out that the issue goes far, far deeper. Plato represented a ‘dead white male,’ the kind of character who represents a form of cultural domination and imperialism that is to be wiped from the canvas. I have names, I have dates, I know the people involved. At a later date, I had another interview at another place, and I mentioned one of the people who interviewed me. ‘How well do you know xxxx xxxx?’ I was asked. When I made it clear I didn’t know her at all I was told that this person was taught by her and that there was never a chance I would have been hired. ‘You are the wrong sex.’ And wrong colour. Wrong everything. I probably needed a disability. Call me naive, but I had thought that if you work hard, study hard - and it always seemed doubly hard for me, not being the brightest - then you would get an even break. I won't generalize and draw big conclusions. But I have had bad experiences here. I walked away from it all with disgust, feeling like I’d been had by the miseducation system I had been made to suffer my entire life. I finally made it only to find I had made nothing at all. I’ve never made an issue of it. I mention it to back those who are dismissed as reactionaries in protesting the issue. I can say so without being accused of being right wing or reactionary, seeing as Karl Marx is my specialist area of interest. Marx, I suspect, would now be considered racist and sexist and also put on the outside.
Strimpel writes of the “hideous but unsurprising news that students at Manchester University had graffitied over a mural of Rudyard Kipling’s poem If in the student union … and replaced it with a poem by Maya Angelou, the black American poet.”
Right, they are young people testing the boundaries, which is fine. When adults and people who know better, who ought to be educating and establishing boundaries, give in, it is not fine. I read an article in which it is reported that young people are telling Pope Francis what the position of the Catholic Church should be on homosexuality, equality, diversity. Hold on … isn’t this getting things the wrong way round? An institution of such weight, stature and longevity is the one which embodies a wealth of experience and learning. The education as to moral standards goes in the other direction, and is not given by those who have only the transitory assertions of a particular time and place to offer, moral fashions that quickly dissolve to nothing but the ego.
Anyhow, “liberation and access officer” at the student union, Sara Khan, offers this explanation of the vandalism: Kipling’s work was “racist” and pro-British Empire, while Maya Angelou’s poem offered a “reclamation of history by those who have been oppressed by the likes of Kipling for so many centuries”. And pity the society who let their standards drop so much as to suffer such piffle for a minute. More fake emancipation, mere self-serving, self-validating verbiage. I don’t mind individuals rotting their own intellects with such nonsense. I do object very strongly to the enforced conformity of the flatland of such ‘equality and diversity.’ And I don't like Kipling. My issue is with something else.
It is utterly, totally, emphatically fake, a bigotry that identifies and extinguishes all those who think and argue differently, affirm different values and standards. Interesting that the people they favour are always of the same type – a commitment to a diversity that expresses uniformity and imposes conformity.
“This sort of quota-mongering is happening all over the shop; in institutions and workplaces of all kinds, with ethnically diverse shortlists for top jobs now mandated at, among others, the BBC.”
And I’ve been on the receiving end of it.
This is the bit that strikes a deep chord with me:
“But, while I can understand a wariness for the old boys’ clubs that used to channel people (mostly men and, if you must specify, mostly white men) to the top – even when they weren’t very good – what I can’t get my head around is the new generation’s thirst to rewrite history. There has been vigorous campaigning at universities to make the great European philosophers, writers, thinkers, and politicians as we know them “less white” (and indeed to remove all vestiges of Britain’s colonial past – see the campaign to get an Oxford statue of Rhodes removed). Amid all this, student activists have become more confident.
All of which makes me profoundly grateful that I went to university before our reading lists, statues and buildings began to be aggressively policed. Not only has the obsession with diversity become an authoritarian nightmare; it has already replaced ideas of what constitutes the “best” with a puritanical, skin-coloured notion of political purity.”
Me? A white working class male who went from bottom of the class to combining Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Marx …I’m very much ‘different’ and ‘other’ and remain very much on the outside. Recently I made an argument on social media as best I could, as I was taught to do, only to be accused of speaking out of "white male privilege." I go for the force of the better argument. “There’s only one person speaking out of privilege here,” I responded. It is those who look at the identity of the proposer, rather than the quality of the proposition, who speak out of privilege. They think that some identities trump others – thereby reinforcing the very cultural domination and imperialism they claim to oppose. They haven’t eliminated such domination, merely inverted it.
I'd be very glad to see the demise of shallow argumentation and politicking and imposition of viewpoints according to specific political commitments. All this is supposed to be aimed at uprooting oppression. In truth, the authoritative and legislative imposition of conformity is utterly self-defeating, generating people who can only assert their case and impose it through force of numbers rather than actually argue their case by being clear, cogent, and informed.
And now this nonsense in Manchester traducing Kipling and his poem If, a poem that contains not a single line that could be construed as racist. “Kipling is the latest victim of our obsession with cultural vandalism.” This is politics, not culture, and it is a purge that contains the seeds of its own destruction – a fanaticism that consumes itself in corroding any standards existing outside of the power plays, until only the standards of the most active, organised and vocal are those deemed acceptable, and imposed upon all.
I envisage the time to come when university students have burned every book written before the dawn of whatever-wave feminism is currently in the ascendant, since the ‘layers of oppression’ go ever deeper to demand a constant construction and reconstruction of identity.
I’ll go with the old virtue tradition and with character formation within right relationships. I can flourish happily without having to know, still less respect, what intersectionality, womanism, sex positivity, vegetarian ecofeminism, transfeminism, and postmodern feminism are. And others can too. Verbose drivel which entangles people in a web of words. Looks like a convulsive self-importance and self-assertion and insubstantial plasticity and self-consuming egoism to me, totally incapable of growth and healthy, a neurosis. All things that are equal to one thing are equal to each other, all people are to be treated with dignity and respect, to be valued, cherished and loved. You memorize the different identities of people out there to show you care, I'll just calling people people. Know that equality in unequal conditions is an oppression. To overcome that requires more than law and language.