Dumbing Down.

There was a good piece in The Guardian by Frank Furedi on the effects of Gove's reforms on the way philosophy is being taught in colleges and sixth forms across the country. As I fell for philosophy as an A-level student I can't help but take an interest in the substance of the reforms. From what Furedi writes these reforms are not a step forwards:

 

Tragically, the draft philosophy syllabus offers an intellectually inferior version of the old. Some of the most intellectually stimulating questions of the existing curriculum disappear, such as that on free will, as does political philosophy. A new compulsory philosophy of religion topic – which counts for 50% of the AS course – suggests a reorientation towards the teaching of RE.

What's most disturbing is that the text disappears, to be replaced by an online anthology of extracts. Why? According to the draft syllabus, to provide "greater clarity on the content so that teachers are clear about what they need to teach". The impulse to remove a teacher's capacity to make judgment calls threatens to turn what has been an exciting intellectual adventure into an exercise in box-ticking. In line with this pedagogical orientation, the assessments have been revised to cater for a more intellectually light curriculum.

The revised assessment appears relatively indifferent to the integrity of philosophical knowledge. The draft says the methods of assessment "focus clearly on the core skills of philosophy". The language of skills and instrumentalism dominates this syllabus. The draft responds to the question, "Why choose philosophy?" with the answer: because "students will develop and refine a range of transferable skills". Philosophy, which originally meant the love of wisdom and which many regard as a guide to life, is now rebranded as the bearer of transferable skills.

 

Of course, I'm not at all hostile to the teaching of philosophy of religion (or as a subject in itself), but I am suspicious of any attempt to depoliticise philosophy in this way. I would view moral philosophy as the vital component, with political philosophy as a continuation of ethics by other means. That's no reason to leave out the God question, of course, and there's no reason why they can't be taught alongside each other. Some would argue that these changes are towards the more juicy end of philosophy of religion. That's not the key problem. It's the depoliticisation coupled with dumbing down (in the form of the raised dependence on extracts) which I'm opposed to. The emphasis on the philosophy of religion may be a crude attempt to supplant politics with moralism. This is the grass-roots impact of Gove's neoconservative agenda.

The tension in education policy has always been between the impetus for critical thinking and the need to churn out well-equipped consumers/workers. The enlightened citizen is far from the ideal of educational policy. If you swing too far towards the latter you end up with high-performing automatons and no innovation. A populace can be too deferential and obedient to the point of stagnation. And, of course, you can run into serious trouble if you find yourself with excess innovation. It could be argued that that was precisely what happened in the 1960s when the post-war generation began to question the Establishment and its authority on a whole series of questions. Education policy will oscillate within this spectrum to try and strike a balance of opening a space for innovation in one area while closing such a space elsewhere.

Far from anything new, we can now properly situate Gove in this bipolar shuffle and this is no matter of speculation. Before Michael Gove was an MP he worked for The Times as a columnist (writing at £5,000 a month for a column he churned out in an hour) and he was not shy about his views on a lot of issues. On the tuition fees set by the Blair government Gove wrote "Some people will, apparently, be put off applying to our elite institutions by the prospect of taking on a debt of this size. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is all to the good." A good education is conceived of as a commodity and, in Gove's mind, it is too readily available to the lesser classes. It's a vision in line with the view taken by Allan Bloom, a fellow neoconservative, that the masses are to be moulded by the ideas of the few great men. The bewildered herd are to be kept in check.

So I think we may risk the suggestion that Gove doesn't mean well when he guts the humanities of innovative capacity. Even the A-level course I took in philosophy, which Furedi foolishly romanticises, actually had political content in the second year. At AS we looked at epistemology, ethics, tolerance, and aesthetics, then at A2 we looked at moral philosophy in greater depth and finally political philosophy. That meant normative and meta for moral thought. Then we moved onto reading JS Mill. On Liberty has its flaws (which the English are impervious to conceding) but the students could at least develop a perspective on its content. So we could then decide whether or not we buy into Mill's utilitarian brand of classical liberalism. You would think Gove would be for this sort of thing. Instead we find the syllabus is being debauched even more than it already had been. 

Ignoble Liars.

Douglas Murray is just the youngest public ideologist of the 'War on Terrorism' and his work is worth reading at least to know thy enemy. Noting the charge of 'noble lies' leveled by critics of the Iraq war, and its pretext, Douglas Murray writes "The notion of the 'noble lie' certainly arises in Plato, and it is true that Strauss and many neoconservatives admire Plato. But what Plato described (in his Republic) was that, on occasion, leaders have to conceal truths from the masses in order to lead them most wisely. He certainly did not (as one commentator put it with wild hyperbole) claim that 'it is practically a duty to lie to the masses.'" Going on to stress that "Plato described how in matters of grave importance, occasions arise in which a leader will know best, and in which the less well-informed masses, if given the opportunity to decide on a specific matter, might decide wrongly." This goes against his earlier position in the book where he slams the conclusion that Leo Strauss was a "champion of the 'noble lie'" as misinformed.

Even after this Murray maintains that the charge is unfounded, offensive, glib, ignorant and nonsensical. Furthermore it is hurled about by people who have "misrepresented their Plato and not read their Strauss". He describes the outrage regarding 'noble lies' as a "faked outrage". This really comes out of his loyalty to a particular agenda manifested in the policy designs of the Bush administration. In his view the UK and US governments didn't lie because they merely revealed what they knew about Saddam's Iraq - or rather, what they thought they knew - to their people. The twerp goes further to say "they discussed intelligence that was incorrect, information certain amount of raw intelligence that may turn out to have been comprehensively mistaken." He even claims that the governments were too eager to pander to public opinion (except that which was anti-war) as he derides critics as 'conspiracy theorists' once again - it would seem, it is one of his favourite swearwords second only to 'moral equivalence' in his arsenal of vilification and obfuscation.

So the fault of the Anglo-American establishment was not in but in telling the people too much, revealing information that should not have been revealed. Apparently there is not the remotest possibility that any of this could constitute deception. Murray is keen to guard against anyone who might attribute immoral behaviour to George W Bush and Dick Cheney, while looking to maintain a high bar for American aggression against Iraq. Yet the administration officially dumped the talk of WMD as soon as the invasion found there were no such weapons. The supposed links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were dropped as the invasion quickly turned Iraq into a centre of terrorist activity. The doctrine of 2004 was that it's enough for a country to have the capacity to build weapons and the intent to use them. So that's virtually any country in the world. It's this kind of thing that the neoconservatives are looking to defend by damning critics as 'relativists', yet another swearword deployed against critics of imperial adventurism.

I wonder if Murray refined these abilities in whatever public school mummy and daddy sent him to when they realised they didn't love him. It's clear Murray is aware that the Platonist framework gives convenient reasoning to the wider agenda to which he is a loyal servant. In Plato's Republic the 'noble lie' is supposed to engender devotion to the city-state among the citizenry, it is meant to be employed when philosophy fails. So if we accept that the established authority has to propagate a particular view of the world in order to maintain social harmony we can still question the neoconservative mission. Really it's that Murray believes in the cause to the extent that he can be totally cynical. To get to the bottom of this we have to question the fundamentals: the position that the United States can and ought to invade countries to make democracies out of them. It's the insistence that the interests of the US (which are pervasive in all of its interventions) are synonymous with the interests of the countries it invades and occupies that we rightly take fault with.

In praise of Radical Journalism.

 

In the last fortnight two great journalists of the Left have died, first it was Alexander Cockburn and then it was Gore Vidal. Both men belonged to that noble tradition of radical journalism which has long served as a counter to the mainstream media. This line could be traced back to the revolutions of the US and France where journalist Tom Paine was a participant. Then there was Jean-Paul Marat who damned many from his bathtub in the newspaper The Friend of the People. It is often forgotten today that Karl Marx was a political journalist in his day and covered the French coup of 1852 which enthroned Louis Bonaparte for Die Revolution. To this day The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon remains highly readable and compulsively quotable. Today the field may seem barren at a first glance, but we shouldn’t forget the message of optimism which Claud Cockburn propagated and which his son Alexander took on to trumpet. The struggle is hardly over yet, a lot has been lost but there are weaknesses and still time.

In Britain it is the Right which is truly desolate of talent, the spirit of 1979 lives on in the form of an incompetent and barely functional gang of vandals. Hayek's libertarianism was replaced with the ‘red Toryism’ of Phillip Blond, it’s clear that Thatcherism has been put on the defensive and there is no offensive yet. Across the pond we find the Republicans have no William F Buckleys, just Glenn Becks and hogroasts for the petit-bourgeoisie. The ground is more than ripe for progressivism, let alone radicalism. Right now, the most prominent left-wing journalists this side of the Atlantic are Owen Jones and Laurie Penny. To the reader Penny Red pitches herself as a walking Feminist-Marxist dialectic with an affinity for the spontaneous non-hierarchical model of Occupy. Jones offers an unapologetic defence of the working-class from a commonsense starting-point grounded in a Eurosceptic leftism. If we want perfection then we would be better off as liberals awaiting the arrival of the angels who will redeem us cleanly, politely and without violence.

The best way to support a government in its staggering ineptitude and criminality is to keep quiet. One such instance was the US bombing of Somalia last year, which was met only with silence in the Western media. Yet there was plenty of ink and film to cover the famine in Somalia and its exacerbation by Islamists. The victimhood of black Africa is a fine story to cover when the villain is Islam. The same can be said of Sudan where the rape and killing of black Africans by Arabs has drawn universal condemnation, and rightly so, though no one ever intended to do anything about it. This is also the case with hunger in Somalia. Only cheap moralisations made safely from soapboxes by liberals were provoked. There is precious little coverage of the atrocities committed in the Congo, where armies of drugged children swarm around the mining of coltan to feed the demand for computers and mobiles elsewhere in the world. No wonder then that the complicit are silent and on Fox News the attack dog Bill O'Reilly often tells his mildly disagreeable guests to "shut up!"

This is the important role of the whistleblower, which sometimes cannot be fulfilled by journalists, and this is the significance of Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg. The real service of leaks is not to confirm what we already know, it's to undermine the ideological veneer which power needs to maintain itself. No one was outraged to learn about American crimes in Iraq through WikiLeaks. It's just that the crimes are now viewable on YouTube and that is the real outrage. Bradley Manning is a hero of our times. The fact that he has been held for so long, and possibly tortured, testifies to the impotent rage of the powerful. The same goes for when neoconservatives label Alexander Cockburn as a low level Stalinist anti-Semite. The unacceptability of Cockburn to the prevailing consensus is demonstrable of Cockburn's importance as a journalist. Its intolerance to the point of slander should be taken as a compliment. Claud Cockburn was always too prickly for the Establishment to handle, in contrast to the ease with which they swallowed Orwell.

In the same way that John Pilger is regularly accused of ‘anti-Americanism’ in his work, this is almost a stamp of honour. He’s more trustworthy because he is shunned by the Establishment. The problem with George Orwell, as well as Tom Paine, is that he has been fully assimilated into the prevailing standards and shibboleths of the liberal commentariat. The man who went to Spain to fight Fascism and didn’t take the side of Stalinism. Animal Farm and 1984 became the curriculum for Western children after his death as the Cold War got going. Even though Orwell was a heroic journalist of the democratic socialist ilk, his work has been appropriated by the rabid anti-Communists of Right and Left. The neoconservatives lay claim to him and the liberals who adore him often turn a blind-eye to Orwell’s tirades against gays and vegetarians. Thus, the appeal of Claud Cockburn, a far less acceptable figure. The taming of the once unacceptable may be rampant today, but there are still dissidents in the contemporary discourse.

If we want to get ‘pricklier’ today, then we might read the blogposts of Richard Seymour at Lenin’s Tomb. There we find a refreshing read in a blogosphere of dullards, the combination of a raging leftism and the clarity of thought. He has written extensively on liberal imperialism, the rise of David Cameron as well as the American tradition of dissent and its politico-cultural context. Seymour’s major flaw is that he is essentially dedicated to the party-line of the SWP, placing him in the heterodox Trotskyist line which has little time for autocritique and can only swallow Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, Althusser and Žižek with a hefty dose of Leninism. The Frankfurt school can’t be forgiven for its passivity, neither can Althusser for his ‘Stalinism’ while any suggestion that the work of Karl Marx might be in need of an update is written-off as a compromise too far. Though it has to be said that Seymour is a rarity in his intelligent grasp of theory and the issues at hand, while he exercises a capacity to blend together insight and invective with witticism.