A prominent philosopher in the UK emails to tell me that he has had enough and that he’s looking for employment in the US. The proximate cause of his frustration is the ridiculously complicated process that the Arts and Humanities Research Board (soon to be Council) imposes on us as a condition for distributing the pitiful funding that is available for research students. Increasingly, universities have to demonstrate that they are providing all kinds of “training” in order to access this money and this is part of a wider trend where government (or its arms-length agencies like the AHRB, HEFCE etc) seeks to regulate and micromanage activity within higher education by such conditionalization of funding. My correspondent draws attention to the recent review of “Business-University Collaboration” undertaken by former FT-editor Richard Lambert at Gordon Brown’s behest. Suprisingly, given Brown’s predilection for micromanagement and control across the public sector, one section of the report offers a trenchant exposition of the mess that the government has made as it has tried to subject higher education in the UK to its will.
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Chris Bertram
John Maynard Smith, pioneer of the application of game theory to evolutionary biology, has died. There are obituaries in the “Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1082979,00.html , “Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1200211,00.html and “Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/04/22/db2201.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/04/22/ixopright.html .
There’s been surprisingly little blog comment on the release of Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli atom whistle-blower. He’s been released subject to outrageous restrictions on his freedom of association and movement. Jonathan Edelstein has a “fairly balanced and moderate post”:http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/024458.html on the subject, Gene at Harry’s place has “a somewhat sneering one”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/04/21/the_cult_of_mordechai_vanunu.php . But despite Edelstein’s reasonable tone, I can’t agree with him when he writes
bq. Vanunu betrayed his country and chose illegal rather than lawful means to pursue his political agenda; it was his choice to go to a foreign newspaper with classified information rather than addressing his concerns to left-wing Israeli lawmakers.
The “betrayal of country” accusation strikes me as somewhat dubious. There have been plenty of whistleblowers in Britain — such a Clive Ponting, Sarah Tisdall and, most recently, Katharine Gun — who have gone to the press with details of possibly illegal and certainly immoral behaviour by Britain’s governments and defence establishment. But no-one has called them traitors. As far as I can see his crime was not to weaken Israel’s security by revealing genuine secrets, but to bring into the light of day facts about Israel’s nuclear programme that everyone knew but which couldn’t be admitted openly for political and diplomatic reasons. Do such revelations a traitor make? As for the accusation of using illegal means, that’s pretty laughable given that Vanunu was illegally kidnapped in Italy! Or is illegality ok for states but and not for their citizens?
The second of BBC Radio 3’s philosophers and places series aired last night, with a broadcast on Nietzsche and Basel (which you can “listen to on the web here”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3_aod.shtml?sundayfeat ). Not as good as the previous week on Rousseau (or so I thought) but still interesting. I hadn’t appreciated what a fearsome teaching routine poor Nietzsche had to undergo, 7am lectures six days a week plus teaching Greek at the local grammar school! Roger Scruton featured prominently on the programme, immediately after Radio 5 had been discussing “his advocacy of squirrel-eating”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1191383,00.html . (One text message suggested that feeding Scruton to the squirrels would be a better idea.)
Just a quick plug. I’m just back from watching Errol Morris’s “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0001L3LUE/junius-20 . For those who don’t know about it, the film is a long (and cold) confessional interview with McNamara interspersed with documentary footage from WW2, from his time with Ford and from the period when he was Secretary of Defense (including the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam war). The film is structured around a series of “lessons” which focus on the fallibility of leaders. There are some chilling moments, such as when McNamara contemplates the incinteration of hundreds of thousands of human beings in the firebombing of Tokyo and leaves open the question of whether he and Curtis LeMay committed war crimes. There’s a good page on an event at Berkeley with McNamara and Morris “here”:http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/02/05_fogofwar.shtml . Get to see it if you can.
I didn’t think George W. Bush had the capacity to shock me. But he has with his capitulation to the Israeli right.
I’ve been reading Robert Fisk’s “Pity the Nation”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0233985166/junius-20 , his account of the fate of Lebanon in the late twentieth century. Fisk has been the target of so much blogospherical opprobrium in the last three years, that I almost feel an obligation to explain myself. But whatever Fisk’s recent misjudgements (and there have been a few) “Pity the Nation”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0233985166/junius-20 is a truly great book: wonderfully written, fair, balanced and not seeking to disguise the crimes and failings of any of the protagonists.
Fisk’s book starts, though, not in Lebanon, but with ordinary Palestinian families, displaced in 1948, still guarding the Ottoman or British title-deeds to their properties, still keeping the rusting keys to their houses (often long-since demolished), still longing for their orange orchards and olive groves.
Every so often I read a prediction on the op-ed pages of certain newspapers or in the ravings of some blog or other that France or even the whole of Europe is destined to become a province of Islam due to a combination of low fertily among the natives, high fertility among immigrants and Muslim immigration. Randy McDonald does a sterling job of swatting away this silly idea via “a sober assessment of the demographics”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/rfmcdpei/408410.html . (Hat tip “Scott Martens”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000540.php )
The programme about Rousseau that “I blogged about”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001654.html the other day “is available on-line”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3_aod.shtml?sundayfeat (though I think this link may only work for about a week). I thought it was pretty good on the whole. Though it didn’t resolve the Derbyshire–Staffordshire controversy, it should have made listeners curious to read or re-read Rousseau’s autobiographies and there were some entertaining musical excerpts as well as contributions from such eminent Rousseau scholars as John Scott and John Hope Mason. Recommended.
TechCentralStation has “a piece by anti-egalitarian political philosopher John Kekes today”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/041204B.html . Kekes probably isn’t responsible for the way the article is illustrated, but it warrants comment. Insofar as any egalitarian thinker can be identified in the text of Kekes’s article, it is semi-egalitarian liberal John Rawls. But the little photomontage that accompanies the piece associates Karl Marx, the IRS, a sinister man in a ski-mask and another sinister hooded and bearded man who is brandishing a pistol.
Niall Ferguson in the Daily Telegraph “gives a history lesson”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;$sessionid$PHGJESUENTCP1QFIQMFCFGGAVCBQYIV0?xml=/opinion/2004/04/10/do1003.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/04/10/ixportal.html :
bq. … in 1917 a British general … occupied Baghdad and proclaimed: “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” … What happened in Iraq last week so closely resembles the events of 1920 that only a historical ignoramus could be surprised. It began in May, just after the announcement that Iraq would henceforth be a League of Nations “mandate” under British trusteeship. … Anti-British demonstrations began in Baghdad mosques, spread to the Shi’ite holy centre of Karbala, swept on through Rumaytha and Samawa – where British forces were besieged – and reached as far as Kirkuk. Contrary to British expectations, Sunnis, Shi’ites and even Kurds acted together. Stories abounded of mutilated British bodies. By August the situation was so desperate that the British commander appealed to London for poison gas bombs or shells (though these turned out not to be available). By the time order had been restored in December – with a combination of aerial bombardment and punitive village-burning expeditions – British forces had sustained over 2,000 casualties and the financial cost of the operation was being denounced in Parliament.
As part of a series about philosophers and places, BBC Radio 3 will be broadcasting a programme this Sunday (21.30 GMT, so internet listeners should adjust for location) in which Jonathan Ree discusses “Rousseau in Staffordshire”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/playlists/sundayfeat.shtml . I’m rather hoping that this will clear up a little dispute I had with “Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html . Chris emailed me soon after “my Rousseau book”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415201993/junius-21/026-9436596-5494024 came out to tell me that I was mistaken in writing that Rousseau had lived in _Derbyshire_ . Chris wrote, correctly, that the village of Wootton near where Rousseau stayed, is in Staffordshire and that, since the county line there is set by the River Dove, Wootton was almost certainly in Staffordshire in the 18th century too. We both set to consulting out various works of reference, only to reach a stalemate. So for, for example, this “1776 account of Hume’s life”:http://www.student.liu.se/~bjoch509/philosophers/intros/hum-intro.html has Derbyshire, as does Rousseau himself in correspondence, but other reputable sources insist on Staffordshire. I’m sure you’re all intruigued by this antiquarian mystery! I shall be listening with attention.
(And see “The Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_04_01_archive.html#108150415084287134 for a map of the area).
I recently bought the DVDs of the first three series of The West Wing, which make for far too compulsive viewing. Watching it, the same thought occured to me as has occured to many others: namely, how much better “President Josiah Bartlet”:http://westwing.bewarne.com/pres.html is than any recent real-life incumbent. But it isn’t just Bartlet, 24’s “President David Palmer”:http://tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,1002,274%7C87105%7C1%7C,00.html would also get my vote (if I had one) over most post-war Presidents. Fictional Presidents seem to incarnate the ideal virtues of the office. Not so fictional British Prime Ministers, who seem to be either Machiavellian (“Francis Urquhart”:http://www.tvheaven.ca/fu.htm ) or ineffectual (“Jim Hacker”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/articles/y/yesprimeminister_1299003453.shtml ). Perhaps only “Harry Perkins”:http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/tv/100/list/prog.php3?id=66 comes close to matching an ideal in the way that Bartlet and Palmer do. I’m not sure what this says about our different political and televisual/cinematic cultures and I’m sure there are more examples of fictional leaders to play with. Suggestions?
Norm has published “the results of his Dylan songs poll”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/04/bob_dylans_best.html . A very good list it is too. I’m struck by the fact that the majority of the top 21 come from just three (consecutive) albums: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde. There’s also only one post-1976 song on the list. This is as it should be IMHO.
Following Fallujah, I see that liberal and leftie bloggers who are pro-war (such as “Oliver Kamm”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2004/04/hitchens_is_ans.html , “SIAW”:http://marxist-org-uk.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_marxist-org-uk_archive.html#108102268775079976 and “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/04/falluja_3.html ) have been linking to “a WSJ piece by Christopher Hitchens”:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004903 which argues that the disgusting behaviour of the Fallujah mob vindicates the decision to go to war. (If we hadn’t acted now, the whole of Iraq would have become like this, in time ….) I have to say that my reaction to their reaction is somewhat sceptical. If the people of Iraq are happy and peaceable (as claimed by some opinion pollsters) then this is supposed to vindicate the war; if they are rioting and murderous, then this also vindicates the war! One has to wonder whether there is _any_ development in Iraq that Hitchens wouldn’t use as confirming evidence for his worldview and which wouldn’t then be cited in this way by pro-war bloggers! Perhaps the news of increased antagonism from a section of the Shia will make new demands on Hitchens’s ingenuity?
[Lest this post be taken as more hostile to the pro-war bloggers than intended, I’d add that it seems appropriate to ask of everyone who seems certain of the rightness of their position on the war, whether there are any developments that would lead them to say, “OK, I was wrong.” For instance, if there is a functioning and independent Iraqi democracy within two years, which lasts for at least a further five, then I think that ought to shake the convictions of hardened opponents. But I don’t think that’s likely.]
It seems that the top-ranked site on Google if you search for “Jew” is an anti-semitic site. So this is CT doing our googlebombing best to correct this by linking to the Wikipedia entry for “Jew”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew instead. (See “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/04/joogle.html for more details).