August 2024

I spent yesterday evening watching Agnieszka Holland’s remarkable film “Green Border” which has just been released to streaming in the UK after spending about 30 seconds in cinemas. The episode that provides the film’s context is the 2021 decision of Alexander Lukashenko, dictator of Belarus and Putin’s puppet, to make use of refugees as a weapon against “the West” by opening up a route for them from Turkey and then shipping them to the border with Poland and, hence, the European Union, where they might hope to claim asylum. The refugees themselves are blameless in all this, and we first see the main family on the flight, Syrians, full of optimism and hoping, that unlike in Turkey they will be able to get their children into school. But what happens is that they are driven to the border by the Belarussians and pushed over into inhospitable forest in winter and then, when discovered by the Poles, brutally pushed back across, through and sometimes over the razor wire that marks the frontier. Stranded in this zone, more and more of them succumb to cold, hunger, injury and disease.

The focus of the film is distributed among various characters: a Polish border guard and his heavily pregnant partner (which mirrors the condition of several refugees); a Polish psychologist and widow to Covid, who lives near the border and responds to cries she hears late at night; the Syrian family and the English-speaking Afghan woman who attaches herself to them and whose brother worked with Polish forces in Afghanistan; and the activists, riven by disagreements.
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Earlier this week, I received my contributor copy of The Art of Teaching Philosophy: Reflective Values and Concrete Practices, edited by Brynn Welch.[1] It’s an exciting book, and I’m proud to have gotten to contribute to it. My chapter on advising graduate students about teaching was coauthored with an excellent teacher (and researcher), a near-former grad student, Britta Clark.

I’m eager to read all the chapters. Welch often likened the book to a series “hallway chats,” or unplanned encounters in the hallway when a colleague tells you about a new teaching strategy she’s trying out. I’ve walked away from many such chats with great new ideas to adopt, and I know I’ll get a lot out of reading this.

I also know I won’t go in order. When the book arrived, I skipped straight to David O’Brien’s chapter on “Teaching with Puzzles.” O’Brien is a thoughtful, imaginative teacher and a wonderful writer, so I knew the chapter would be great. But I was inspired to start with his chapter by something else I’d been reading. I got an early look at Anthony Laden’s new book, Networks of Trust: The Social Costs of College and What We Can Do about Them. I’ll write more about it once it’s published later this year.[2] But I’m going spoil one tiny morsel by writing about it now, because it struck a chord and—along with O’Brien’s chapter—motivated me to try something new.

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Often on a Friday evening, we order a curry from our local “Indian” takeaway. They deliver, but it is easier and quicker for me to walk round and collect, and, anyway, I enjoy chatting to the guy behind the counter. He’s a Man United fan, I’m Liverpool, so we have some banter with a bit of an edge to it. Well, we started on the football, and he noted the lack of summer signings by my team, but we quickly got on to the news: “It’s been a horrible week”. And it certainly has, with race riots and anti-Muslim pogroms in various British cities, egged on by right-wing pundits and politicians “just asking questions” in the context of inflammatory disinformation and with Elon Musk making ignorant predictions of civil war while retweeting Islamophobes.

My interlocutor, born and bred in the UK, told me that it was the first time he had felt uncomfortable and anxious in this country and that many “ethnics” as he referred to people like himself, had chosen to work from home on Wednesday rather than risk being caught on the street. But he told me he’d left work early, just to be safe (thereby telling me that he works two jobs). But he told me, also, that he was encouraged and felt better, thanks to the massive counter-demonstrations in Bristol, Brighton, Newcastle, Walthamstow that night, which told him that the far right are a minority and that most people oppose them and which seem to have stemmed the violence, for now. On the other hand, he said, it was one thing to live in a diverse and left-leaning city like Bristol and quite another to be in Hartlepool or Sunderland where the “ethnics” are isolated and heavily outnumbered by their white compatriots and, consequently, feel more scared and vulnerable. (We then went on to discuss the overthrow of the Bangladesh government, of which he approved.)

The reason I’m bringing this up is because of the failures of imagination on the part of the the new Labour government, who are certainly the secondary target of far-right violence. Making the round of the studios yesterday, the Paymaster General, Nick Thomas-Symonds, urged people not to join counter-demonstrations, because the police were under strain and should be left to do their job. (It was a message that actually differed from that of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police who thanked the counter-demonstrators.) The government wants to put the far-right violence down by co-ordinated riot policing and then swift judgements and tough sentences: “the full force of the law” as every official spokesperson robotically repeats. Well, I’ve no objection to to the fascists and their criminal hangers on getting it good and hard. But that state response doesn’t answer to the need my friend has for him and his family to feel good about their fellow citizens and that’s actually the role that mass counter-protests against the fascists can play: we, a mixed, diverse crowd are the people and they, the violent racists, do not speak to to concerns of “ordinary people” as they claim. The police and the courts are no substitute for popular mobilisation in defeating the racists and assuring members of minorities that they too are a part of us. Labour leaders, managerial and authoritarian by temperament, just can’t see that. They’ll talk about “integration strategies”, for which meagre funding may be available, but the best integration comes from people feeling safe and confident in one another.

I have a letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education responding to Steven Teles’ call for more conservative college professors. It’s a shortened version of a longer piece I wrote, which I’m posting here.

The fact that conservatives are thin in the humanities and social sciences departments of US college campuses is well known. A natural question, raised by Steven Teles, is whether the rarity of conservative professors in these fields reflects some form of direct or structural discrimination.

But the disparities are even greater in the natural sciences. In 2009, a Pew survey of members of the AAAS found that only 6 per cent identified as Republicans and there is no reason to think this has changed in the subsequent 15 years. One obvious reason for this is that Republicans are openly anti-science on a wide range of issues, notably including climate science, evolution and vaccination.
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Once you know my age my musical tastes as a teenager are very easy to guess. Obviously Dylan, Mitchell, the Kinks and the Beatles – equally obviously not the Stones or the Who. Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Fairport, Steeleye Span, Roy Harper, The Watersons, Carthy, etc, etc and more than any of them, Kevin Coyne. It was hard to hear any of these on the radio, and, addicted to Radio 4 from the age of 3, I turned to Radio 2 only for Folk on 2, the weekly Jazz hour, and the Sunday lunchtime comedies (when I was 15 Steve Mulliner told me to listen to Peel on Radio 1, which I probably did twice a week). I never listened to top-40 music deliberately: obviously I heard plenty of it by osmosis as it were, and especially during wet school breaks in which I remember one girl in particular whose desk was in front of mine always tuned to Radio 1. When punk started I enjoyed it, rather than being enthusiastic about it: and that was easier to hear on the radio than other stuff I liked because of John Peel (who was also the main location for the other stuff I liked, just less frequently).

But I love a lot of the music now in which I had no interest at all at the time. When I notice a band is playing nearby that I am curious about, and whose members I suspect might be on or near their last legs, I often go, usually taking at least one of my children with me. So last week it was the turn of my son to accompany me to see 10cc. At school my more musically adventurous friend Guy owned one of their albums, which I must have listened to, but I’d never really paid much attention to them. After buying the tickets I started sort of listening to their (voluminous) output, though without really paying much attention.

Seeing them, on their first US tour in 47 years, I discovered they are nothing like I thought. As presumably all of their fans and everyone else who was actually paying attention in the 70’s know, they’re basically an extremely sophisticated comic song band. They opened with The Second Sitting of the Last Supper, and followed up with Art for Art’s Sake, both of which had more or less passed me by, and both of which are very funny. Even the songs with unhumourous lyrics are often musically funny (a lot of pastiche). Graham Gouldman has a huge smile on his face when performing, partly just because he’s doing what he loves, but also because it’s all sort of a joke. The set goes on from there. Even their biggest hit [1], the one song that even I know by heart, sounded so different live. I’ve always assumed its at best a sad song about self-deception with a little cruelty thrown in, but live, in context, I got the feeling that not only does the subject know perfectly well that he’s in love but that she knows it too, and he knows that she knows it, both of them are happy about it, and the song is actually an exercise in elaborate Gricean implicature.

The boy didn’t enjoy the show as much as I did. But he did enjoy it enough, and is now regularly humming Life is a Minestrone. They’re touring the UK and parts of Europe in the Fall: highly recommended.

[1] A friend says that as a teenager she used to dread “I’m not in love” being played at parties. I think I went to a total of 5 parties as a teenager (4 of which she must have been at) because I gradually realized that there was no specific aspect of parties that I dreaded.

I think I’ve mentioned before that the Center of which I am director produces a podcast called Ethics and Education which is about… ethics and education. Just to be clear: the producer/director/voice artist/supremo is Carrie Welsh, and my involvement is mainly as a sounding board about topics and how to approach them, and doing whatever she asks for any given episode.[1] I’ll link to a few episodes over the next few weeks. This week: we recently produced an episode about sex education (via spotify; via our website, and here’s a taster on headliner), featuring the authors of a new book about the ethics of sex education by Lauren Bialystok and Lisa Andersen called Touchy Subject. It’s a terrific book, in a series of topical books each co-authored by a historian of education and a philosopher of education. They cover the (often surprising) history of sex education in the US, and discuss much more subtly than in most discussions both the values that ought to lie behind sex education and how to make trade offs with parental interests. You shouldn’t use the podcast as an excuse not to read the book, but it does stand alone well: you can tell that our student producers had a lot of fun finding the vox pops (going up to people cold in the street and asking them how they learned about sex turns out to yield interesting results), and Lauren’s and Lisa’s discussion is genuinely illuminating. Feel free to recommend it to your friends.

[1] I emphasize this because I really think the podcast is excellent, and want it to be clear that the only credit I deserve for that is that I helped hire Carrie and fund extremely talented undergraduates to work with her on it.