Out of the taxi and into the house. ‘Free love, foreign birds, drugs; oh you know,’ says Chas, down the blower to a friend, ‘I’m on the Left’. Kaftans? Beads? Nah. Jacket and tie for this cove. Hair down to his belly button? Yah jokin’ aren’t you. He likes it short and blow-dried; the respectable look, has to be, for our man’s a hard case, a criminal, a performer, who sticks to the clientele.
Gangsters with bohemians. Artists and big business. It is Roeg and Cammell’s Performance, less a film than a front seat inside the 1960s. A decade and it’s double. Perfect for my next chapter on British anthropology. Roll up! Roll up! It’s David Parkin. A maestro on his mettle, during those crazy and confusing, those circus, times.
Watch out the kangaroo!
Too late. Upper cut; jab; hook: Schloss is flat out on the canvas. Punch! What a way to begin an interview! It suggests a new take on training and methodology; for there can be no better preparation for fieldwork than three rounds in the ring. Our man acquiring the art, it was bred in the blood, from his grandfather, who would dance around his four-fisted opponents. Boxing kangaroos. Not much of that these days. The Schloss, splashed with water, smelling salts under his nose, mumbles about it not being such a bad idea….
Unlike many anthropologists, who drift into the subject, David Parkin was fated to enter the Malinowski tent; his gift for languages sending him directly to SOAS and a life dedicated to the study of other cultures. Belief. Vocation. Losing a self to the alien and the material. It indicates a particular kind of personality, comfortable with the open road. At a time when anthropology was being fully established as a professional discipline, the focus tilting towards its academic structure, those credentials and honorific titles. An odd, transitional moment, for along with its respectability, there is still the original exotic allure. It was why two highly perceptive teachers could suggest the subject and why David was captured by the university’s prospectus.
‘But wait’…Schloss is standing on the zebra crossing: ‘too fast, young man, too fast’.
He’s right, this car’s driving too quickly towards my conclusion. Such easy categorisation, with its cheap binary oppositions, hides what actually went on. Even in the early 1960s there was still no fieldwork training, while grades (though not talent) were a matter of course: David was in Kampala before he knew his results. Professors aplenty, but the neophyte and adventurer were all over the place, in a subject still to be pegged to that professional floor; so leaving its denizens free to discover new worlds in the subject’s patented terra incognita. A key feature, it is the miraculous property of Malinowski’s method, is its looseness, freeing up the mind before the bizarre and uncomfortable. Elsewhere I criticise Gregory Bateson, but in what other discipline could a researcher accept the violence with such equanimity as in Naven? Anthropology a special space on campus; its very own 81 Powys Square (where Chas learns not only the magic of Borges but the Welsh language). These ethnographers, even in the Sixties, closer to travellers and novelists than their scholarly counterparts in library and study. For sure, things are changing. Makerere University is on site; much territory has been mapped; while a tradition, with all its rituals and restrictions, is boxing students in. Nor do I forget Lévi-Strauss and his structuralist battalions just entering the gates. Though they were not the real enemy, who were clambering over the Chilterns….
The approaching horde had now reached the second and third crests, a vast concourse of labouring humanity that blotted out the horizon. From the terrace Axel could see clearly the shuffling, straining ranks moving down into the hollow towards the final crest, and occasionally the sounds of their voices carried across to him, interspersed with cries of anger and the cracking of whips. The wooden carts lurched from side to side on tilting wheels, their drivers struggling to control them. As fast as Axel could tell, not a single member of the throng was aware of its overall direction. Rather, each one blindly moved forward across the ground directly below the heels of the person in front of him, and the only unity was that of the cumulative compass. Pointlessly, Axel hoped that the true centre, far below the horizon, might be moving in a different direction, and that gradually the multitude would alter course, swing away from the villa and recede from the plain like a turning tide.1
I write of the Marxist hordes that were to rampage over many subjects. The Schloss exaggerates, you say. Watch Alan’s interview with Thomas Hylland Eriksen, and see what really went on in the classrooms after 1968: ideology as intellectual terrorism. The liberals hadn’t a chance. Helpless before simple beliefs that refuse any doubt and recognise no nuance. Ideology. It is when knowledge is turned into experience; when ideas are as physical as limbs and organs. Argue with a Maoist? There is no argument at all. They are right and you are an imperialist of the porcine variety. Oink! Oink!
Ballard’s garden encloses a classical mansion with its Renaissance treasures. The university had a vast range of delicate plants, soon to wither, when Marxist mobs smashed the hot-house glass.
‘Are you talkin’ number here, man, you know, the numbers…’ a frazzled liberal, after an all-nighter with the joss sticks and Adorno’s dialectic, thinks I’m referring to the Robbins report, and the expansion of British universities. There may be a connection, but since the worst disturbances were in France, Germany and the US, this seems at best a peripheral explanation. Something was in the air. The universities caught in the crossfire of a civilisation-wide cultural revolt, as an old morality gave ground to the new. I suspect Larkin was right, sex at the bottom of it all.2 Also a consumer capitalism that stimulates desire, using people in a highly instrumental way, as objects to be manipulated and corrupted, so emptying them of value. It is a drug culture where meaning succumbs to the hit. The old institutions, founded on different principles, were going to find this decade hard, as they struggled to adjust to radically strange behaviours. Some - the Church of England - almost went under; while others experienced years of strife, as they negotiated with the new ethos or surrendered to it. One of the ironies of the Marxist revival is that the impetus comes not from class war or proletarian impoverishment but the LP and miniskirt; the middle class consumer requiring a newly minted belief to mask their hedonistic lifestyle. All those luxury students on the street protesting against King Cash, while at home Jimi Hendrix and Cream give the hi-fi a headache. Brought up as conventional Christians or liberal Jews, it wasn’t enough to ditch their beliefs along with pre-marital celibacy, a new faith was required to replace the old. Marx, with suitable amendments from Marcuse & Co, did the job for a while. The puritanism was both remarkable and exemplary…dissing all ‘reactionary’ ideas - the real enemy - nothing was forbidden in private; that miracle of the Protestant faith, which, through the wonder-working powers of predestination, divorces the content of an idea from its praxis. The 1960s the moment when ideas exist less to explain things than to camouflage one’s self-indulgence.3
The Schloss shakes his head. I’ve gone too far. I have forgotten a key element in middle class life, inherited from that Protestant past: all things must have a reason, every deed to be defined by The Word. A culture which is pure function, literally everything’s a drug deal, is going to be a terrible shock for those who need a life full of meaning. I speak specifically of middle class intellectuals. Consumer capitalism created not mass poverty but mass meaninglessness, soul-death to this class of characters.
A technologist’s dam drains a river delta of its metaphors….
Ideas. They make life easier to organise; essential for lives structured around the future, which requires this day to be planned. But odd things start happening when ideas are transferred from the metaphysical Heaven - where they truly belong - to the Social: their truth becomes uncertain, their meanings turn into fictions. It is because much phenomena falls under the conceptual radar; it is too low, too insignificant, for our high-flying ideas to pick up. A weakness exaggerated by the growth of quantitative analysis, which prefers the trend to the proletarian detail…explanation operates at the Society level, ignoring the individual, whose value as an analytical tool declines.4 One result: ideas are mistaken for causes. Another is that ideas are thought to explain more than they do.
In modernity we create a new kind of faith, as God’s home becomes the idea itself: believe in it and you are saved. Very quickly such concepts turn into myths.
This an age where not just the content but the very shape of myth changes: no longer telling us some fundamental truth about ourselves, it is a political project we vote for in elections, sign up for when on the dole. Meanwhile the old myths are demoted to fictions that only fools or innocents believe.5
…the reflexions which the myths are designed to assist usually produce a greater sense of humility; the majority of the paradigms teach men to realise their status as men, the limitations upon their freedom, the conditional nature of their existence. They encourage self-knowledge in the spirit of the Delphic motto: ‘Know thyself’, and thus they extol measure, order and moderation.6
The past tells us of our limits. Modernity’s future is endless possibility. So what do we, the Tomorrow junkies, do when given the freedom of a future we will not see? Either ditch the old myths in toto or believe the new ones absolutely, thinking them a blueprint for the next generation. A choice encouraged when myths descend the lift from God’s penthouse suite to campaign manager’s office.
It is a curious moment. Just when an entire society has engaged on a fantasy life, the old myths, which may have helped us negotiate these extraordinary times, are dissed by the intellectual elite as worthless or worse…the evil machinations of rulers fooling the populace into submission. Marxism and Postmodernism are the handmaidens of the advertising industry, softening up the culture, until it can be effortlessly shaped by the messages on billboard and television screen. This media world then seeping back into study and student union. The world as it is ceases to be of any interest. Only how you want it, how you transform it, is what counts: everybody, we are told, is a creative now. The rich, resistant, actuality, deep with mystery, vanishes under such a regime. Rather than read George Eliot, and the rest of the great Victorians, I’ll write my own Middlemarch….
A young ethnographer feels his way to his area of study; which requires all the skills of an entertainer and showman; that flexibility, the confidence, his ability to attract and hold an audience. Fluent in Swahili before he arrives in Kampala, David discovers that he is speaking a coastal dialect when he arrives in the city - it was the seashorers who travelled to the BBC. This, I imagine, an especially wonderful introduction to the locals, who’d find him a very curious specimen indeed. David says they were amused. Add the advantage of his research topic. Speaking the language, working in the semi-anonymity of a town, how much closer to the population than most anthropologists, who have to learn both the language and village life from the get-go. This why the Luo took to him? A migrant like themselves. Which brings its own difficulties, for taken up by the Luo, he risks unbalancing his study. He finds a way to sort it out. Of course he does, our man knows how to dodge everything a kangaroo throws at him.
I marvel at the maturity of the man (indeed at all anthropologists at this time), who could navigate these complicated social situations, and with such aplomb. A special skill, akin to that of an explorer and (yes yes, I say it again) an artist. Such a life bears little resemblance to the typical scholar’s; studying Milton or completing a bibliographical survey of Henry Vaughan. Add the mental chaos. Collecting vast amounts of information, impossible to organise in the field, David worries if he’ll make sense of them back in England. Again, this suggests maturity and strength; an ability to float on one’s uncertainty, trust the unknown, accept one’s mental world has lost its anchor…closer to Baudelaire’s flâneur than a library cormorant. It is to immerse the self in a world hoping to come out again. Trust your instincts, live in the here and now, lose the self to the details, as you let the future look after the form…. Images of a Zen master come to mind. The guinea plops: the very casualness of the dons, the lightest of their academic touches, was its own training; students forced to take care of their own thought-world. Thrown into the scholarly waters, only you can stop yourself drowning…and if you can swim, you’ll be helped to swim a lot better. It is a curious legacy of empire, and its training of an officer class, who were conditioned to look after themselves. Amongst the academic virtuosos this resulted in a marvellous insouciance and liberty. No wonder a culture has turned against them. Today the education system trains bureaucrats, who can only see the perils of freedom, are blind to its delights.
David is a natural. In the ring with a kangaroo, he’s deflecting all punches. And it’s not just the (epi)genes. That non-academic background - his first school had classrooms of forty-six and ninety-two – was crucial to his success. Life before anything else, as you learn to adapt, to flow, to trust, to rely on one’s own resources, learning the language of the school yard as well as classroom.7 Our man has all the mental equipment to lose himself to a place.
Practical preparation? How much can you teach a baby before it leaves the womb…life in the field was an initiation ceremony, a baptism, a rebirth. In other words, this is a way of being not just a method of study. The great creative tension in anthropology arising out of the intimacy between knowledge and experience; as the distance of the method rubs up against the closeness of the living arrangements. Bound to produce insights. Especially when relying heavily on the locals for help.
David had one big idea when going out to East Africa: to study a town not a village. The self-conscious break from recent anthropological tradition suggests the subject was starting to solidify; the original band of guerrillas now an army, settled in barracks and cushty at HQ. The livelier of the new recruits looking for new ways to go back to the bush, to loosen the discipline’s stays, find a space to express their nonconformist selves. They were allowed to do so. The old-timers still nurturing the young, even while the subject crystallises around them; to create fruitful tensions, some fisticuffs - I think of Meyer and Edmund - and a lot of new departures.8
Africa was changing; urbanisation taking off, city life now a key feature of these independent nation-states. A new intellectual geography that could be driven over by an intellectual vehicle flexible and commodious enough to adapt to all terrains. Nor must we forget the characters attracted to the subject. Its structural looseness, together with Malinowski’s example, spawned lots of charismatics, each with their idiosyncratic ideas. Like the new supermarkets there was plenty of choice in the 1960s! David chose Max Gluckman’s notion that occupation is what primarily describes a migrant, not his rural background: a Luo will be a miner or carpenter before he is a Luo. But here is the magic of Malinowski’s influence. Because the subject is defined by a method not a concept, specific ideas are easily modified or ditched when Mr and Mrs Reality calls. The presence of people and the pressure of experience forces David to rethink his ideas (how much harder in books, where the pressure of the real is much lighter?). Max was wrong, the Luo proves him so: the rural and ethnic background is critical to a migrant’s life; which in turn affects his politics. Our man and his big idea are plastic enough to change with circumstance. It is to combine the wonders of his discipline and the Sixties Zeitgeist, a decade that at its best was remarkably fluid, adventurous and inventive.
That very same evening I was dragged down nice and gentle by brutal tolchocking chassos to viddy the Governor in his holy of holies holy office. The Governor looked very weary at me and said: ‘I don’t suppose you know who that was this morning, do you, 6655321?’ And without waiting for me to say no he said: ‘That was no less a personage than the Minister of the Interior, the new Minister of the Interior and what they call a very new broom. Well, these new ridiculous ideas have come at last and orders are orders, though I may say to you in confidence that I do not approve. I most emphatically do not approve. An eye for an eye, I say. If someone hits you you hit back, do you not? Why then should not the State, very severely hit by you brutal hooligans, not hit back also? But the new view is no. The new view is that we turn the bad into the good. All of which seems to me grossly unjust. Hm?’ So I said, trying to be like respectful and accommodating:
‘Sir.’ And then the Chief Chasso, who was standing all red and burly behind the Governor’s chair, creeched:
‘Shut your filthy hole, you scum.’
‘All right, all right,’ said the tired and fagged-out Governor. ‘You, 6655321, are to be reformed. Tomorrow you go to this man Brodsky. It is believed that you will be able to leave State Custody in a little over a fortnight. In a little over a fortnight you will be out again in the big free world, no longer a number. I suppose,’ and he snorted a bit here, ‘that prospect pleases you?’ I said nothing so the Chief Chasso creeched:
‘Answer, you filthy young swine, when the Governor asks you a question.’ So I said:
‘Oh, yes, sir. Thank you very much, sir. I’ve done my best here, really I have. I’m very grateful to all concerned.’
‘Don’t be,’ like sighed the Governor. ‘This is not a reward. This is far from being a reward. Now, there is a form here to be signed. It says that you are willing to have the residue of your sentence commuted to submission to what is called here, ridiculous expression, Reclamation Treatment. Will you sign?’9
Max was wrong on a number of key themes; I think of an Alan lecture, where he shows that a Gluckman thesis completely ignores the contextual nature of tribal law. Max had simply shipped the English system down the Atlantic. This error due to at least two biases, one disciplinarian the other social. In foregrounding occupation Max was enamoured of the idea of function, leading him astray when no allowance is made for changed circumstances. Gone, of course, Radcliffe-Brown’s organic body; Max’s function has morphed into the machine age, the biological replaced by the institutional and mechanical. But Max needed to look harder at these Western categories, dig deeper into that idea of function, test it against the emotional and the social facts. Contrast Evans-Pritchard’s description of the Azande, where everything is particularised.10 When looking at other cultures we must be wary of the general idea, that key feature of our culture, which defines us. With the Luo the relation between work and identity will change on moving to Kampala; the very nature of work altering the Malinowskian function that is both an activity and a relationship (to the physical and the social).11 No longer a cultural glue, this new kind of work is more akin to a job. Gluckman sees this, but fails to recognise how the job itself changes: migrants will often colonise a particular activity, at least in the first generation, so retaining much of their original culture and beliefs which are themselves changing with distance and the abstractions of the host community.12
There’s the background liberalism. A liberal assumes humans are plastic, and that this is a social Good; plasticity both the means and the end of progress, as Man overcomes his limits and fulfils Himself through an infinitely stretchable self. We are change. But this is a particular idea of change, one modelled on our relationship to an environment we shape to our ends. The human individual the space where trees are cut down, rivers dammed, fields turned into business parks - nurture engineers Nature. It is one reason why eugenics - witness the current craze for Transhumanism - has always held such a prominent feature in progressive thought (it suffered a short eclipse after the war): if we can’t change the environmental conditions, we’ll alter the biological ones.13 And then create an industry to deal with the consequences. Liberalism instinctively downplays history, which roots a different cosmology into the psyche.14 Thus the liberal, in overlooking the embodied nature of identity, ignores the physical and mental consequences of its rupture or wreckage.15 Such a bias is apt to blind an anthropologist to family ties and the affections.
Unluckily for Max, V.S. Naipaul had yet to write his masterpieces, Noam Chomsky to overturn the liberal idea of the Good. It was Chomsky who argued that the idea of the malleable self is regressive; more likely to oppress than liberate those at the bottom of the social heap. Corporate machines work most effectively when everybody is an interchangeable cog, repaired or removed at the engineer’s will. Human atoms stripped of organic identity, are easy meat for tyrant, charlatan, pusher and Chief Executive Officer. Alex freed by chemical intervention is beaten up by his droogs in police uniform.
…as Brian Eno was to say, sometimes a musician should honour his error as a hidden intention.16
I am too hard on Max. Ideas are not useless if mistaken. Errors can both inspire and be a way of organising material and directing the mind. A good education and sound judgement enables one to use an error productively; David showing us how it is done.17
An idea should be a road sign. It helps us get to Grantchester, it shouldn’t (can’t) tell us what to do once we get there; though the options are limited, a pint in the Red Lion and a bus back to Cambridge.
The American system was different. In her interview, Sherry Ortner describes how the most rigorous testing was at the viva voce justifying the fieldwork proposal. The idea of her project confirmed before any experiences in the field. By removing the pressure of the quotidian, it foregrounds the concept, a potential obstacle in the path of understanding. Luckily for Sherry, when she gets to Nepal, the subject of her thesis - the shamans – were no more. She had to improvise a new topic, so acquiring the liberty of the British system. Tellingly, her theme didn’t interest the Sherpa, as too remote from their lives. It was only later, on subsequent trips, that her research interests – the Everest tourist trade – tallied with their concerns and captured their attention. It cannot be an accident that the modern American university is modelled on the German, whose own universities served the Prussian civil service. They exist to organise a world rather than to comprehend it.18
The Schloss, in trying to cross from the fields of knowledge to the meadow of experience, stumbles onto a motorway….
Knowledge can hide truth. Especially in an academic profession, where the stuff of the profession puts itself between the world and its members. Over time the less acute are likely to forget they are looking not through clear glass, but colour transparencies that subtly distort the objects of vision. Sherry mentions the current emphasis on activism in anthropology. No longer to listen and learn from the locals - we already have the knowledge: look at those colours in our windows! - we will save them. An odd kind of arrogance for a discipline that once had such humility.
Live long with the locals before rolling out your big ideas. Only when they know you well, trust you enough to make hard, complex and ambiguous decisions, should we try to help. Robert Paine knows the score. An anthropologist intimate with his subject, he was reluctant to intervene; for he knew he was bound to offend someone, while the right decision is almost impossible, due to the many competing interests. Tough. Because it is not just an intellectual issue. We have to feel our way into a place and its people; feeling the basis of all sound judgements.19 A problem of the classroom is its tendency to educate out the judgement, as it replaces knowledge through experience with the epistemological tools of the educational trade: ideas, arguments, methodologies, data. Malinowski, by contrast, found a way of re-educating our sensory equipment without losing the skills of a university education. A magical combination that rare in life is rarer in academe.
Missionary and imperial officer. The job titles were different, but the impulse was the same: to manage the natives who cannot look after themselves. Victims. Children. Savages. It is to turn human beings into ideas, which diminishes them. I’ll give you an example….
A friend’s child is at Oxford, and a supervisor praises her for representing the black British experience. She was furious! And obviously so, to those from the other side of the academical tracks. Her art is an act of herself; she an individual; not a black artist, but an artist tout court. I have suffered an identical problem, as others seek to reduce me to the genre of working class.20 It is to be defined by externalities, to kowtow to a type; it is to say I do not (cannot) embody my own self. It is the middle class way, showing concern while maintaining their superiority. For they personify the whole of society, the rest of us stuck in our niche.
The value of those imperial ideas has flipped – we prize indigenous culture not dismiss it – but the mentality, its form of thinking, remains largely unchanged.21 The missionaries and colonial officers, given the knowledge and armed with concepts, were expected to impart this knowledge and impose those concepts, changing behaviours believed not right and true. What today’s evangelists overlook, is that the most important aspect of an idea is not the content but its form: the concept itself, its abstraction and its limits, is what discriminates and oppresses. With Malinowski we installed the light. Unfortunately, later generations forgot to the pay the electric bill. W.B. Yeats, with a warrant in his hand, comes hammering on the door.
…ideas and images which have to be understood and loved by large numbers of people, must appeal to no rich personal experience, no patience of study, no delicacy of sense; and if at rare moments some Memory of the Dead can take its strength from one, at all other moments manner and matter will be rhetorical, conventional sentimental; and language, because it is carried beyond life perpetually, will be as wasted as the thought, with unmeaning pedantries and silences, and a dread of all that has salt and savour. After a while, in a land that has given itself to agitation over-much, abstract thoughts are raised up between men’s minds and Nature, who never does the same thing twice, or makes one man like another, till minds, whose patriotism is perhaps great enough to carry them to the scaffold, cry down natural impulse with the morbid persistence of minds unsettled by some fixed idea. They are preoccupied with the nation’s future, with heroes, poets, soldiers, painters, armies, fleets, but only as these are understood by a child in a national school, while a secret feeling that what is so unreal needs continual defence makes them bitter and restless….22
Schloss has mounted his Shetland pony. Nevertheless, he makes an important point. Anthropology in the early days was not a typical academic subject. And in offering a means to get close to a people, it attracted just those who’d benefit most from such encounters. David says he was never lonely in Kampala, thanks to the generosity of the Luo. Friendship the best way to know others, enabling us to get under the surface of the public persona, see it tensions, witness the conflicts with that inner life. Activists, or those whose brains have been rinsed out by Edward Said, are not likely to get this close: the concept - the public demeanour - is in the way. Yeats is taking an inventory of the goods….
Even if what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual apology, whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it kills intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen and in the mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that must come before all true thought and emotion. A zealous Irishman, especially if he lives much out of Ireland, spends his time in a never-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, the penal laws, the rebellion of 1798, the famine, the Irish peasant, and ends by substituting a traditional casuistry for a country; and if he be a Catholic yet another casuistry that has professors, schoolmasters, letter-writing priests and the authors of manuals to make the meshes fine, comes between him and English literature, substituting arguments and hesitations for the excitement at the first reading of the great poets which should be a sort of violent imaginative puberty…23
Since I’ve bumped into Said, a few words about the man. If you want a demolition of Orientalism read Robert Irwin, who exposes its rickety scholarly structure.24 For me the puzzle is Said’s success. Influenced by Chomsky’s radical scholarship on the Vietnam War, Said sought to do something similar for the Middle East. Yet the result is nothing like Chomsky’s microscopic attention to detail and argument. In fact, his book is more like that of a French café intellectual, drinking up concepts as if coffee. Slight and written in barbaric prose - why attract so many? It seems a paradox. Said becoming an academic superstar, while Chomsky’s political analysis relegated to the conference league.
It was his use of Foucault, who offered a new way of conceptualising the West, and especially its use of knowledge, at a time of vast educational expansion. In France, School determines your social value.25 Though the nature of this value changes in the 1960s, as emphasis shifts from pure academic talent to the kind of social grace we associate with a cultivated elite; it is when the École normale supérieure loses its lustre to the École nationale d’administration.26 At such a time Foucault’s thesis hits like a revelation: institutions and the rationality they embody are a social evil, not the Good we have been educated to believe. Foucault had identified a new and key feature in postwar society: how much it is organised, and how this depends on the knowledge industry. But what really made the impact was his critique of knowledge…no longer saintly and liberating, it was coercive and demonic. And this at a time when the Christian story, with its own ambiguities about that famous apple, was being turned into a fiction (it adds to the mystery and power).
For academics this was a shocking discovery, producing a frisson as one broke taboos. But how build a career on such concepts?
Inevitably, these ideas are reshaped and debased in conventional minds, who use them for different purposes. Foucault gave his generation a blank slate on which to rewrite the Western canon, at a time when the moral codes were changing, the past recast as a dodgy relative and knowledge attacked as an agent of repression.27 Yet with Foucault in their briefcases, academics could continue to be virtuous even while marking examination papers. It is the absurdity of scholars dissing the very nature of scholarship, while drawing a pay-packet and teaching the young. Professor Parch jumps up: ‘I am telling the truth about power. Nothing to do with the personal.’ One can do anything one likes if Discipline and Punish appears in your bibliography. Yet if Professor Parch really believed in Foucault he would resign tenure and take up with the miners and carpenters. Instead he commits the usual error of the orthodox, confusing the form of an idea with its content and value. Foucault was talking about all knowledge (it is his principal error), by which he means its very existence, its rules, its organisation, its rationality: its form. ‘Radical’ academics kept the form – so ignoring Foucault’s revelatory insight - only replacing the content, or giving that content different values: no longer on the side of the colonial regime, you swapped the three-piece suit for beret and Che moustache.28 By now the Foucault industry has become preposterous, as low-grade academics churn out papers on Foucauldian themes to gain research points for their universities.29 (Does no one spot the ironies?) Foucault no longer part of the escape committee, today he’s a guard in Bentham’s prison machine.
I excuse Foucault from this theatre of the absurd. He used knowledge to destroy knowledge, the way to reduce its power.30 Far too sophisticated and paradoxical for Said and his epigones, who emptied his ideas of their radicalism and danger.31 Said was Foucault made safe. This the reason for his popularity, and at a time when the liberal intelligentsia’s relationship to Israel was changing. Malinowski touches my shoulder…‘not just ideas, young man’. Said’s cartoon concept and sloppy research chimed with changes in the university, where less time given to scholarship, as grant applications, emails, meetings, conferences and training courses colonised the minutes and the hours. Today’s academics less scholars as administrators of learning. W.B Yeats is loading up the bailiff’s van….
How can one, if one’s mind be full of abstractions and images created not for their own sake but for the sake of party, even if there were still the need, make pictures for the mind’s eye and sounds that delight the ear, or discover thoughts that tighten the muscles, or quiver and tingle in the flesh, and so stand like St Michael with the trumpet that calls the body to resurrection?32
I have returned to the missionaries and imperial officers. Knowledge today is not some mystic rite, where we lose ourselves to its glories; not even an understanding of society; no, it’s a tool to organise systems, of which we are one.
The Schloss puts his hand up: ‘why attack the very thing you depend upon? If knowledge is power, so too is Orientalism.’ You forget that academic training, which separates a supposedly objective body of knowledge from subjective experience. Alone in the study, The History of Sexuality open on the desk, it is easy to believe you are with the Heavenly Host, for your learning is wholly detached from your lifestyle. ‘Yes yes, but surely they see it,’ says the Schloss. You miss the urgency of their needs. Historically, scholars have been our telephone line to God: their work touches the divine, Plato has told us so. Given this history, Professor Parch isn’t suddenly going to see that he’s doing the Devil’s business. Instead, Foucault’s ideas are reshaped to camouflage his complicity: knowledge is not the problem but certain biases in that knowledge; its sexism, racism and so on. Here is Said at his most influential: Orientalism shifts the focus from a philosophical critique of knowledge to specific criticisms of a subject area. It is to travel from the Mount Olympus of epistemology to Gaza and the West Bank of sociology.
I think of the Trobrianders ridiculing Malinowski when he uttered some official’s platitude. Take advice from this dunderhead? Now fast forward a century, and we have young adults who have barely left the classroom telling elders what’s what. Since my mother never follows my advice, indeed pushes back rigorously if I persist, I wonder about those who must listen to these youthful certainties. Thankfulness? Humiliation? Knowledge is power…Said’s ideas have certainly given a lot of power to the new colonial class: we can hardly do anything now unless certified by an educational institution.33 Although there are sharp spikes of irony amongst the acres of plate glass and concrete: it is the bureaucrats who run these places now.34
Knowledge has undergone one of its periodic metamorphoses. Not to enlighten but to engineer….
The Schloss asks me a question. Yes, I suppose I am a Cartesian, think there are two substances; our great contemporary mistake to squash them into a single materialism.35 Reduced to a monism, we miss how much violence is done to both idea and matter when rammed into the same conceptual tin. In an entertaining conversation with Milan Čanković – he loves to illustrate this strange duality - I came clean, came out of Descartes’s closet. Such was the excitement, I spilled tea over his distinctions, the sugar and milk to my ideas.
Friendship melts boundaries, fusing differences into new syncretisms; from out of which insights emerge. Feelings make us permeable. We see it in Malinowski’s Coral Gardens and Their Magic. Through the intensity of a relationship the boundary between plant and human life is breached, investing the plants with spiritual life. No longer separated by Linnaeus, discrete identities dissolve into the action, producing an event.
Thus nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process. It is nonsense to ask if the colour red is real. The colour red is ingredient in the process of realisation. The realities of nature are the prehensions in nature, that is to say, the events in nature.36
David is all over the place in the 1960s. A decade when there wasn’t the time to sit in a library and fill one’s head with other people’s concepts. Out of the stacks. Into the field! The balance feels right. And surely reflects the personality of the department’s director, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf; ethnographer par excellence. When asked about Haimendorf, David’s response tells a tale: his work to last for eternity. Because his research stays close to the ground, does what Geertz calls ‘thick description’, but without the theoretical pretensions that came to accrue around this notion. For Haimendorf the task was to describe as accurately as possible the societies observed. The facts to speak for themselves; though they were facts acquired with a magician’s touch: he had marvellous intuition. This is what Geertz wants to do, but his philosophical mind and his literary bent tend to override and distort the description, as theory and concepts take precedence. The American saved by his intelligence and literary panache; his disciples not so lucky. An exception is the historian Robert Darnton who brilliantly embodies the Geertzian approach, using a literary mind to look at historical problems, that come alive as stories, metaphors and myths. Reading Darnton is to feel the human texture of a place and time. Alas, most anthropologists are not littérateurs. It’s not just the clunky prose, the jargon and the abstraction. Most don’t seem to realise that the meaning of literature is in its style which conveys a feeling. It is not simply text. A novel moves us; how we are moved is how it is understood.
A fatal weakness of big ideas is their tendency to fashion. An idea capturing the imagination of one academic cohort, disappears with the next, and not just because the idea is elaborated into unreality or put through the washing machine of cliché: these ideas belong to the cohort’s lifestyle, are its identity. These are the serious ones. The frivolous go down to New Bond Street to buy the latest press sensation. It is to exhibit oneself as sassy and smart and absolutely avant-garde.
George Huppert discerns the secret of Foucault’s success in St Germain des Prés in his ability to give ‘the impression of saying something radically new while, at the same time, his “discoveries” turn out, to the young reader’s satisfaction, to fit supremely well into the general movement of ideas currently in vogue.’37
Such fashions, intrinsic to academic culture, have mushroomed with university expansion. For most academics ideas are external objects - the true meaning of reification – they do not grow out of the body, so do not produce – I think of Popper, of Nietzsche - a symbiosis of experience and knowledge. Original thought, it needs the rages of Sir Karl, the psychosomatics of Friedrich; their supreme intelligence wasn’t enough. The great thinkers, the paradigm-shifters, Alan in the interviewer’s chair, are those who experience an epiphany, that turns a worldview at an angle, seeing the world fresh. Yesterday you were inside the house with the curtains drawn; today you are amongst wildflowers, the sun shining….
There are two paths to these epiphanies; the most common is after a crisis, when one’s physical relation to a society breaks down.38 This path less likely to lead to insights than to church and temple or the freak show. Your world awash with meaning you try to contain within one big idea, around which you shape a life. It is idea as guru or tyrant. The less common path, leading to the house of Albert Einstein and the barn of Alan Macfarlane, is where an original mind puts long years of hard labour into a problem and is rewarded when Planet Eureka teleports down the creative goods.39 Originality its own craft, one that requires wide-ranging interests, endless curiosity, an embodied mentality - feelings are the crucible where thought turns into spirits: Descartes’ 'clear and distinct’ ideas - and which thrives on the fringes of a discipline, where a mind is free to discover for itself. Thinking as a way of life. Ideas not a corpus of knowledge but a mode of one’s being.
Not too far outside. A creative mind needs an orthodoxy to rub against.40 The brilliant arise out of a tradition they go on to transform. The intellectual magic is in the relation between their self and what they study; a relation closer to family and friendship than investigator to an object of investigation. Yeats opens the letter box and delivers an aphorism.
‘[I] must turn knowledge into instinct and both alike into personality.’41
Anthropology facilitated, and in many cases short-circuited, this process; by forcing an early crisis and/or by creating emotional ties with the Nuer, Tikopians, Gurungs or Tallensi. If these characters had a touch of originality, new ideas were assured. Helped enormously by the freewheeling atmosphere of the Malinowskian discipline.
I didn’t care where or for whom I was playing. I felt so humble and powerful; it was sensing the height of a musical, spiritual and sexual experience all at the same time. It was as if the sitar became the torso of a beautiful woman I love - and I was making love to it - tenderly - ardently & wildly! Oh what an ecstasy! I am still tingling with the afterthought. It is so rarely that these things happen!42
Music is more embodied than philosophy, but when the muse calls there are similar reactions, ideas becoming a physical presence. Not surprising, therefore, that Shankar calls this divine penetration and likens it to love and sex.43 The notes on the sitar are of an order outside the workaday consciousness; they break open the mental carapace in which we contain our ordinary lives. Shankar surrenders to something larger than his conscious self. It is to pare down the ego until the mind is but a receiver; the greatest minds those with nothing in them but antennae. Waiting waiting…. Shankar liked to quote Yogi Yogananda:
Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this Divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy - by one, or more, or all of these - and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, of dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.44
Most academics are not like this. Consumed by the ‘secondary details’, they live inside the mind alone. My hard-nosed readers are edgy, they think the Schloss has gone New Age. No no, not yet. For once he is playing the scientist. Merge these two quotes and the divine is revealed as something physical. The spirit, arising from a body made receptive by ritual conditions, suffuses the mind and transforms it. Thought as a physical entity. Academic training, in contrast, isolates the mental apparatus to produce what we mistakenly call materialism; the more accurate term is conceptualism. In most religions God is immanent as well as transcendent; the way to the deity is from within, as the barrier between the mental and the physical thins then disappears. This materialism, exemplified in the religions of the East, of which I include Orthodox Christianity, is almost the opposite of our secular West, made almost wholly out of the head. I see a thousands hands in the air, a million heads shaking…. I invite Professor Burtt onto the podium: our very notion of matter, he says, is an abstraction.45 Our world rests on a idea.
Not so much turtles, as the idea of turtles all the way down. (Bertrand Russell chuckles in his grave.)
The Schloss bangs the tea-tin with a teaspoon: ‘just concepts?’ It is to confuse the cognitive foundations with the consumerist superstructure. Out of ideas and theories come things. This the miracle of modern life.
A few gurus - Galileo, Darwin, Chomsky, Galen Strawson - think up original ideas; which then feed an army of bodiless heads, who have no deep, because no bodily, no physical, insights of their own. The reason why much academic work, especially in the humanities, feels empty…it lies on a foundation of other people’s ideas not individual experience.46 Campus as metaphysical universe. The ground of our social self an idea. With Modernity and its materialism we see the absolute conquest of Christianity and its belief that God is Logos.47 The trajectory of Secularism, which Rupert Sheldrake calls a Christian heresy, is to make society wholly of the concept; our essence to have body at all.48
The Schloss has just left a training course, and is shaking his head….
A curious trope of our times is the dismissal of ‘essence’, thought to reduce social reality to stereotypes. Yet essence is just those attributes of an idea thought to uniquely capture an entity or phenomenon. This view reveals the strangeness of the modern mind; for to attack this quality is to conflate an idea with the thing it represents, a word with its referent. There are even academics who think the idea and its object are identical, dismissing those who generalise as essentialists. Such characters, of course, are not consistent. They can’t be! For teaching would be impossible and they’d have to ban the dictionary. But this is not all. Those most keen to level the essentialist charge are usually those who want us to be concepts. Think of current politics: we are not individuals voting for a political party but Left or Right: our votes not marks on a ballot paper but x-rays of the soul. The idea comes first. A friend doesn’t read Substack because it is a platform for the ‘ultra-right’; though he has no qualms using the Internet…. The Schloss shakes his head: ‘but how can he know about Substack if he hasn’t read anyway?’ Doesn’t need to, old chap, he has the concept.49
Professor Crombie taps on the window, and signs that he might be of help.
…see the medieval natural philosophers not as modern scientists manqués but as primarily philosophers. They gave an account of experimental inquiries often as an exercise in what could be done in one branch of philosophy in distinction from others. Certainly this had the desirable effect of clarifying the problems of natural science and helping to extricate them from alien contexts of metaphysics and theology. In what was actually found out by experiment they were less interested.50
Not the empirical stuff but the concept. It is the instinctive bias of many academics and most intellectuals; and this goes all the way back to the Greeks.51 The concept is Reality and is the key interest. Fine inside a university where the material is textural and conceptual, a disaster outside, where actions and things predominate. Thus the fanaticism of a contemporary scene overrun by an educated class who mix ideas with power, as they try to influence and change the world. It is to turn intellectual discourse into ideational warfare, as concepts are no longer tools to think with but a totem of the tribe.
The great mistake of the New Left was its belief that politics is liberating. It was a failure to recognise that politics has changed; no longer the free discourse of a Renaissance republic it is now a religion, where ideas are not the currency of debate but its referee and censor. Modern democracies closer to theocracies than those Italian city states.
Individuals who identify with a concept are vulnerable to the maelstrom of public opinion. For concepts open the self out to Society, which comes flooding in; forcing us to define ourselves in relation to the topic of the day. It produces the alienation of modern times, for conditioned to believe we are aspects of the divine - in a democracy God is the polity - we find that He rarely represents our thoughts and feelings. At least Christians go to church only on Sunday. With us, God is constantly, one might say infernally, present; preaching from His studio, we must listen to His sermons in living room and tube train, bathroom and bus. I even see joggers kneeling down in prayer.
Because God is everywhere, salvation becomes crucial. Hence the extremism of today: we are voting for the Millennium not a seat in Westminster. It is to return to the Protestant Reformation when one’s life depended on the correct, the literal, interpretation of the Word. Though it is not priests and theologians who decide what sentences we use; it is journalists….
‘What! What!’ cries the Schloss, ‘what are you saying?’ Journalism is the Devil, its very form corrupts our intellect and values. ‘Hold on!’…. In a wonderful interview Jonathan Miller describes journalists as ‘invertebrates’: they write about and cheapen what they don’t comprehend. It is to spread ignorance and suffocate learning; yet this is the medium through which most people receive their ideas. The 1960s the moment the media becomes extremely powerful, shaping the political and social landscape around their interests and concerns. Most contemporary ills start here.
I must distinguish between difficult kinds of ideas. Most concepts fade away and are forgotten when yesterday’s fashions are sent to the charity shop. They are not part of Modernity’s fabric, not sunk deep into the foundations, like Progress, Freedom, Equality…. Who mentions Max these days? asks David. Our libraries graveyards where we can no longer read the inscriptions on the tombstones. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf did not make a big impact on the field; except for Morals and Merit his vast archive is known only to a few specialists; and this thanks largely to the work of Alan. This corpus of knowledge too specific, too detailed, and lacks the sort of concepts that purport to explain the obsessions of an age. Too anthropological, it stays alive because nobody needs visit it. But if you need to be seen and heard.…
Starting in the 1960s, although it begins with Radcliffe-Browne and Gregory Bateson, the subject moves away from its ‘essence’; shifts from what I call ‘literature’ and falls into scholasticism, as opening itself up to more theoretically powerful disciplines, it is overwhelmed by them. David becomes interested in structural linguistics; the hot topic of the time.
This is no revolution. With David we see how a subject naturally evolves into new shapes. The curious and sensitive responding not only to what’s in a Barotse village, but to also what strides across quad and down university colonnade. As the discipline changes so they change, changing it in turn. David, in shifting the emphasis to the biological and the developmental, opens up the Oxford department to outsiders; where he seeks to emulate his experience at SOAS, its close ties between ethnography and regional studies, that fruitful interplay of complementary disciplines. It overlooks the distinctive feature of SOAS in the 1960s; for like Oxford it was a Gemeinschaft, much of its distinctive quality in the actual relations between individuals, these lost when the concept transferred to a different place. What creates a community in London, breaks it in an Oxbridge college, for to revitalise a department, giving it new life and intellectual excitement, is to produce a different atmosphere and social structure. Gains, of course, but something is lost. A small world centred around people gives way to ideas and administration: relationships to become a tad more formal.
A little less space for kangaroo boxing.
Haimendorf the director, his approach would have influenced many on the faculty. David discovered his own ideas by reading books outside his tutor’s reading lists. Implicit in this education is independence. It feels an incredibly open time, where students stimulated by charismatic teachers were encouraged to discover thought-worlds for themselves.52 Clever graduates expected to have original ideas. Thus David can start with Gluckman’s assumptions then come to his own conclusions. However, a gangster was burrowing under the building. Such intellectual freedom, its range and variety of ideas, many from outside the subject, was, under different conditions, to close the discipline down.
‘A gangster?’ asks Schloss. Harry Flowers: ‘Not takeover, my son, merge, it’s a merge. Your name stays over the business, our’s will be underneath. You’re part of the family now, and…’, he turns to Chas, ‘I didn’t like the unfortunate way our Joey was brought here….’
Ideas as play melt the mental senses. Ideas as lifestyle freezes them. The 1960s a tug-of-war between two kinds of concepts, and the attitudes they generate.
A time of change and optimism; a dynamic situation, not just in the UK, but East Africa at the moment of independence. David uses another Gluckman idea - a crisis highlights key social characteristics - to study the rising nationalism, and how it cuts across ethnic and community lines. Forever on the move, our man’s fast on his feet, never knocked out by those kangaroos. Now he’s doing fieldwork in a small village on the coast. I leave him, take a short bus ride, only find David at the next bus stop, talking again to the Luo. It is amongst the Lou that he discovers the essence of an idea: its propensity to disguise reality not reveal or embody it.
The Luo belief in egalitarianism, thought secured by a kind of potlatch - generous gifts given at festivals - is in fact sidestepped by those who keep back enough resources to buy land from the impecunious. Ideas have a crooked relationship to social existence, saying more about a community’s hopes than its actualities. It is not that these ideas are untrue - the egalitarianism is significant in Luo behaviour - but they are a carpet that only covers part of the floor. One has to tread carefully…look out for misunderstandings, the confusion, the hypocrisy; be watchful of those gaps and distortions, see the almost ubiquitous reversals, between beliefs and behaviours. Such inconsistency, the doubleness of language and deed, are rarely grasped, even by the natives. Think of how few Brits know their Walter Bagehot, can tell the difference between the dignified - or formal - aspects of Parliament and how it actually works in ‘efficient’ practice. Lacking this insight we are lost in illusion about our leaders and their abilities. Never take ideas literally - the sin of intellectuals and outsiders, and the innocent. Look at how ideas are circumvented, adapted, and used to pursue and camouflage self-interest or laziness or habit (whether material, spiritual or ideological). I am back with Malinowski. In alerting us to the limits of ideas, he shows that it is the interplay between an idea and the activity it supposedly explains that we must consider. It is in the relation between concept and action where truth lies.
It is to concentrate on how a society’s key notions don’t work in practice. Indeed, how such notions are bound not to work…it is to think about the weakness of an idea not its strength.
The moralists and self-righteous slink away in high dudgeon. ‘Why?’ asks the Schloss. Because they use ideas to inflate their virtue. ‘But how…’ By concentrating on the gap between the idea in the abstract and its actual performance in the public sphere they criticise the actors for corruption or stupidity or weakness of will. ‘Oh, I see, implicit is their own sainthood.’ Like telling a volcano you’re a criminal. ‘It’s a popular game…’ replies the Schloss. The moral moan, the journalistic sneer, is the only power most have in a democracy; for we belong to the dignified part of the polity, its efficient aspects run by political cliques, state managers and corporate heads.
According to democratic theory we all participate in the polity. The reality is that most of us are spectators. A problem for many in the middle classes who educated to rule failed to gain the rulers’ grade. So they kibitz instead. ‘So what about you’, says the Schloss. I was lucky. I belong to a class that was educated to accept authority. ‘A worker?’ Welsh too:
To Catrin, Edward seemed like a visitor from a distant, untroubled world. That’s what it is to be English, she thought. Assured, self-confident, never brash, never on the look-out for insult, never brooding on imagined slights; victorious somehow, blessèd.53
A thought from my Cartoons and Their Concepts: we should study a society not through its key ideas, but through how these ideas are degraded by public action. All the while keeping in mind Hume’s paradox that self-proclaimed idealists are usually the most self-interested. For when a self identifies wholly with an idea, the idea absolves them of all crimes; the belief trumping behaviour, seen as secondary or irrelevant. The idea only is true. Such rascals have a double nature: one centred on the virtuous concept, which defines their character; the second on their interests, around which the concept is endlessly reshaped to hide or justify their selfishness; these our evangelists, the bugbear of Dickens, who satirised them mercilessly. When an idea floats free of the actualité, an enormous freedom is given to the believer, who easily finds a reason to explain away a sin. I think of Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park. Thus it should be no surprise that the utopianism of Silicon Valley ends at the bottom of the brain stem. The Good our most savage of citizens.
…one of those well-meaning people, who are always doing mistaken and very disagreeable things.54
The Good produces the bad. Also why freedom leads to tyranny. It is because the freer a society the greater liberty and thus power it gives to those who rule. This the great error of the 1960s. To increase the liberty of everyone was also to increase the freedom of a few at the top. In a decade where the old moral code broke down, and the customary restraints collapsed, this freedom gave tremendous power to the powerful, as the little people lost their protection from the big and the strong, the dynamic and principled. Almost anything was possible if one believed in Progress. And this proclaimed from all the best joints. I remember Cary Churchill’s Cloud 9, which celebrates every kind of transgression that upsets the stuffy and Victorian.55 Such liberty was liberating for a while; but its anarchic consequences ushered in a new elite who were free to create our commercial panopticon.56
In a canalboat-ride with a clutch of corporate types, the Schloss is asked about potlatch: ‘are you saying it controls us lot; that we shouldn’t throw it all away?’
Potlatch advertises a chief’s wealth and status, and prevents him accumulating too much wealth and excess power; so keeping this chief within touching distance of his clan or tribe. The consequence is authority without coercion. The Holy Grail of modern political analysis. Our great contemporary error is to conflate authority with coercion (a fallacy that pervades Foucault’s work, rendering it almost redundant). In the Trobriands, everyone had to crouch down in the presence of the chief so they were physically below him; yet this chief was helpless when a favourite son transgressed a sexual taboo and was exiled from the village.57 Authority requires respect, it is the glue that binds together the symbolic and physical order, but it does not sanction force or justify oppression.
A puzzle in British anthropology was how are stateless politics possible; how can social units function when the head is weak and formal structures are non-existent? It was to take what is an exception - empires and states - as the norm. In small-scale communities (and in feudal courts) a ruler is restricted by tradition, it is those hallowed customs, and restrained by personal relationships enmeshed in elaborate etiquette. The historical problem is why did the relation between a king and his court, the court and a kingdom, breakdown, setting rulers free. David suggests an answer. Aristocratic societies are bound by honour. We’d therefore expect such honour codes to force chiefs to respect the rules of potlatch. But if that ideal weakens, and it will weaken if the society expands, or intermingles with others that have different codes and practices, a space opens up for the crafty and the coldly ambitious, who have no respect for the superstitious or the divine embedded in the culture.58 Nor must we forget the upstart and fanatic; Henry VIII able to smash up an entire way of life by forcing through a new conception of religion.59 Ideas. The great means of destroying a society. Best kept out of the heads of those with power and ambition.
The rebellion of the repentant bourgeoisie against the complacent and oppressive proletariat is one of the queerer phenomena of our time.60
The Sixties was a Janus decade. A sublime openness and a terrible dogmatism. Both faces peer out of the windows of SOAS: the liberal old and a militant youth, who made a hardcore morality the standard by which to judge a discipline and its practitioners who were concerned with knowledge not morals. I speak of the événements. A hard time for David, when an extraordinarily open community - the mind-world of scholarship, leavened by that peculiar post-war tolerance - was threatened less by a closed than a locked society, an extreme form of religious politics.61 Mistakes and errors of judgement were bound to be made; yet David and Haimendorf, squeezed between young radicals and the university administration, who appear to have overreacted to the provocations, somehow got through. It suggests their intelligence and good sense.
Why the 1960s outburst? The Vietnam War and America’s colonisation of Britain (much of the anti-capitalist rhetoric was surely old-fashioned chauvinism dressed up in respectable guise) are plausible explanations. Though it seems odd that Marxism, a theory whose target is the middle class, should become so popular amongst its intelligentsia and student acolytes. Because they were suffering their own class war, as relative incomes and status fell, the skilled workers earning the money, servants vanishing into factories and shops? David reminds us that there are different facets to Lord Karl’s resurrection. He talks of the intellectual side, its fluidity, the creative possibilities, those theoretical adventures, as the thinking class found new resources within a Marxism open and evolving.62 Suddenly a big basket of fresh concepts appears on the intellectual table. And at a time of momentous economic change, suffusing all aspects of life, as white goods colonise the kitchen, and advertising enters the living room through the television screen. Marx had to be the belle of the brightest minds’ ball. Alas, there were also the foot-soldiers, who lack sophistication and are literal-minded. These don’t play with ideas but seek to impose them on others; the chief attraction of an idea for such characters not its cognitive capacities but its power to tear down and break things. In crazy times it is not easy to distinguish the productive from the destructive, the brilliant from the mad and stupid. When a psychedelic party hits its high, and we are lost to its multi-coloured, stoned-out haze, I defy anyone to distinguish the genius from the numbskull.
David turns first to structural linguistics and then later to biocultural evolution (after he retires evolutionary biology is the interest). A natural scholar is moving away from the social, fraught with politics and dogmatic dispute; although he frames it differently: a jaded social anthropology needed an injection of new ideas. Oddly, he says that the subject had to be thought of in a holistic way (the influence appears American) even though his approach was bound to fragment it, as the subject loses its coherence. In truth, the charisma had faded into routine, as Weber explains, when I invite him to a talk at the local café. Anthropology no longer passing down through a line of gurus, it had become an institution, the ideas to now circle around the discipline’s pedagogical structure, as each professor goes her own way. A curious feature of bureaucracies is how they fragment and atomise individuals at the same time they subtly coerce them into conformity. The 1960s a time when the idea of the Social as autonomous realm reaches its climax and discovers its limits - one can’t understand the whole of human life by reference to Durkheim and Marx. Come in Darwin and Gregor Mendel! Though I can’t help but notice a paradox. As human life becomes increasingly a Durkheimian social fact the fashionable theory is a pure biology that locates God in the genes; even Charles Darwin too sociological for the Neo-Darwinians.63
Schloss dangles from a cathedral spire of speculation…. An odd feature of the contemporary scene is our attitude to technology. Both as individuals and a society we feel impotent before its advance; while at the same time we think Nature endlessly manipulable, a helpless victim under human control (even global warming to be solved by the technics). Yet more topsy-turvydom! It reverses traditional attitudes, where humans physically adapted to environments and sought in religion a means to either propitiate or transcend its natural powers: floored by Nature, we took the elevator to the human mind. Are we taking the same tack today, albeit in a very bizarre, typically modern, form? The shift to biological theory occurs when more than ever we are permeated by the Social; as corporations become increasingly adept at manipulating our bodies and minds. ‘What’s goin’ on?’ Schloss has got to the top of Salisbury, the bishop is shouting at him ‘come down you….’ In all large civilisations the overarching story, the framing discourse, which purports to describe reality, is almost the opposite of what is actually happening. It is why Christian love embraces the intellectual community just when the Roman Empire dissolves through civil war into competing warrior kingdoms.64 It explains why Neo-Darwinianism is popular at a time when the very shape of our bodies and minds is being altered by Big Tech and Big Pharma. Always, it seems, we need to comprehend the world from a place different from our experience. I am not talking about specific ideas, dealing with particular phenomena, but those vast, society-wide ideas - class war, the selfish gene - that seek to explain all social phenomena.
It was because Descartes took the opposite course of inquiring beyond the mathematical descriptions into physical causes and the nature of things, and of boldly constructing an entire system of science ranging from psychology and physiology, through chemistry to physics and astronomy, writing a new Timaeus, that his ideas became in many ways by far the greatest single influence in the history of science in the 17th century. They established the general line of thought even of those who, like Newton, were most critical of the Cartesian system in detail. Descartes approached physics as a philosopher.65
We need a worldview, which means taking a part of life, abstracting it, and applying it to the whole. In the Cartesian world we are just bits of stuff moving around…. What is true in the highly specific or the totally abstract becomes a myth when applied to all humans and all societies. Understandable for geniuses like Descartes, who embody the cosmos, to think their ideas universal; but the rest of us? Almost as if we need to disguise our actual relationship to a place and time, while telling ourselves a fundamental truth about it.66
Foregrounding biology as a catch-all explanation has the effect of making the Social feel permanent, unchangeable, omniscient. Yet an individual biological mechanism said to be fixed by Nature is in fact infinitely malleable by a Social that has replaced Nature as humanity’s most powerful force. Now put these two ideas together in a hall-of-mirrors-kind-of-way and we become helpless before Progress, the Market, Individualism, Science and its technology. The Schloss scratches his head as I show him a picture of Dawkins and Brian Eno. It is because Eno - Eno! - thinks evolution is a bottom-up phenomena, thus touching all the democratic bases…he’s forgotten the great man who invented the theory. ‘Oh’ cries the Schloss. The way to understand big ideas is to see how they metamorphose when moving from one discipline into another or become full scale explanations of a social form. It is in this mutation, and its relations to our needs and beliefs, that we best comprehend such ideas. It is to watch how we manipulate them to our own benefit.
Schloss looks across at Max and Émile. At a time when the corporations and computer engineers are transforming the human landscape, it is biologists and evolutionary psychologists who are the gurus. This why, although Noam Chomsky literally refuted Behaviourism in the early 1960s, when in a famous paper he destroyed the work of B.F. Skinner on language, it is behavioural economics that is the intellectual power station behind current capitalism.67 In a society that prides itself on individualism, the greatest threat to this belief is the actual ability of others to influence and change us. A threat actualised every day. Turn on the Internet and I’m told the Pyramids were built by aliens; that gold is extraterrestrial food… Unable to protect ourselves from the Beeb and You Tube we create worldviews that accord with our beliefs but are at odds with the realities. The mind no longer seeks to discover the world, it protects itself against it. Yet that protection is more veil than shield…the truth gets in, but is twisted into mentally acceptable shapes. This is myth, a strange combination of the real and the unreal, which easily misleads the literalist and dullard. The Schloss: ‘what you saying’? Myths have to be understood metaphorically, which takes a certain kind of sensibility, less common than we think. I’ll give you an example.
A friend asks an acquaintance what keeps him awake at night. The reply: ‘I’m not that kind of person’. As if the question was actually about his sleeping patterns!
What’s goin’ on? Hannah Arendt suggests an answer: the Social is our Nature. Our relationship to society is that of previous people’s relations with the natural world: too powerful for us to control we submit and worship it instead. Inevitable, therefore, that we think of the Social in biological terms, so missing its most fundamental characteristic, the social-ism of its forces and methods. During a period when Durkheim should have been the intellectual star - the 1960s and 1970s proved the existence of social facts - he is run over by the Dawkins bandwagon. Helpless before the gene at a time of genetic engineering. Initially there was the shock, as a post-war consensus breaks down. But over time the evolutionary biologists gave us comfort - because species fixed we are safe from capitalism. Fooled again! Today, I less an autonomous organism in a loosely arranged environment than an identikit cog in a vast corporate machine. The selfish gene? No! It is the collective mechanism - the Institution and its ideas - that mutates and selects the best fit to a society.
It is here, perhaps, we see the most serious weakness of anthropology, one that Alan has done so much to correct: the lack of an historical perspective. Seen over the longue durée it is obvious there has been an historical break. Traditional and modern societies not only have different relations to Nature but live inside distinct cosmologies that are the consequence of these changed relationships. This vast transformation creating an Alice Through the Looking Glass World, where what came before still exists but takes on new and fantastic shapes. Of course there are continuities - the human being - but what we must consider, it should be a central task, is what this transformation does to the connection between us and our environment; a sleep-walking biological organism and a social landscape on speed.
Malinowski knew this from the start. Check out Odd Questions for the master’s telephone number.
The strength of classic anthropology was to look at the Social at its own level. The risk of bringing in other subjects like biology, a risk David recognises, is that too much emphasis is given what’s extrinsic to the discipline. There is also the general problem of religions like Marxism and Evolutionary Biology; for along with their insights come excessively tight constraints on thought, which must fit within a pre-determined intellectual system, that by its very nature denies the obvious: Marxism the effects of consumer capitalism on the workers; Neo-Darwinians the Lamarckian abilities of our institutions. To use two disciplines well one has to be a virtuoso of both, like Alan. So hard! But if accomplished can generate radical and profound revisions in either or both fields. I think of that classic, The Origins of English Individualism.
If one isn’t Ravi Shankar, with his mastery of both Indian and Western music and dance, the fusion of different styles is likely to be superficial. The great value of the Malinowskian approach was to take the Durkheim social fact at its literal and true value. There is something unique about the social realm that we must understand on its own terms. And what is this? Well, there are three: civil society, the idea, and relations between these two and the individual organism (plant, animal and human being). Malinowski’s originality that he avoided the most obvious - the concept in its pure form, the concern of previous ethnographers - and concentrated, perhaps uncovered is the more accurate term, the relation between behaviour and idea. Implicit in his analysis is the idea’s propensity to see the world awry, which explains why they rarely produce the expected outcome in social or political life. Always one must be alive how context changes a concept. When Ravi Shankar introduced Western orchestration into Indian instrumentation he did not make the mistake of importing its harmonic system into a melodic-centric music. No. ‘How do I adapt, transform, make flexible, create anew….’
Ideas are less important than the changes they undergo in their passage between disciplines. Alas, too many think to bring ideas over wholesale; thus that once sad spectacle of academic critics torturing our literary heroes with the Oedipus Complex. If not an expert in the field what’s imported may not be sufficiently understood, nor treated with the requisite scepticism. It isn’t enough to use the ideas of Richard Dawkins, we must watch him perform on his on own turf; look on as he tussles with Richard Lewontin; wonder why he so offhandedly dismisses a critic like Rupert Sheldrake.68 To adapt the Dawkins, we can call a concept a meme - a sort of ideational disease - when an idea is transplanted between disciplines without the requisite modifications to subject and context being made: the meme itself. These ideas so powerful because they appear to describe more than they do. It’s hard enough in the original discipline! Malinowski’s great achievement was to find a research method that isolates the purely social. Of course this puts limits on thought and study, which can become oppressive when the method is turned into dogma and treated as if Reality. The strains becoming ever greater in the 1960s, the brighter anthropologists like David sought a different intellectual geography.
The balance is shifting from the village to town to megalopolis, though the consequences are odd and confusing. Academics spend most of their time with their own kind, yet this particular Gemeinschaft operates on Gesellschaft lines, as the connections within a subject become increasingly abstract.69 Much is mediated through professional ritual. Only a few minutes left for the cosy informalities of the senior common room if hours spent in aeroplane and on conference floor. The old distinctions are ceasing to apply, though we still use the same labels. The word ‘community’ is a familiar presence in public discourse; yet few officials know how communities function, and so use the institution as the model, thinking to run small groups along bureaucratic lines.70 It is in the 1960s that concepts begin to describe realities that don’t exist, as the form and content of a concept separate. Postmodernism is the name we give to this phenomenon. Idea as decoration not explanatory tool.
The late 1960s a difficult time for David. But why should students react so aggressively against this most liberal, almost anarchic, regime? We are misled if we use the word ‘radical’ to describe the student revolt. Nearly all were conformists. Brought up through a rigorous meritocratic system, they were trained to be exceptional rule-followers - perfect for passing exams and running the Civil Service. But what happens when Peter Laslett’s your supervisor? Confronted with a wide-open culture, and expected to find your own way, many couldn't cope, found such freedom repulsive. Used to order, clarity, simplicity, conditioned to accept authority, be guided by rules, they were uncomfortable with these scholarly aristocrats, for whom knowledge seemed more like play than work. And that players can be more serious than workers…a riddle that produces migraines not insights. The clever but rule-bound pupil finds there’s no single answer to a question - a scratching of brains -; while the best thinkers, she is told, ask new questions: mind-ache. It is to feel your way into a subject, living with its ambiguities and uncertainties - that famous suspension of judgement -; but school thins the emotions and thickens the rational faculties: headcrash! Two mentalities face off across a barricade of books. These students wanted the same kind of academic literalism they received at school; the increase in university numbers giving weight to their needs.
David, a product of an earlier and smaller cohort, was forced to adapt to a culture that perfectly matched his personality: bingo!
Cleverness is not enough. It is the kind of cleverness plus character that produces free and original thought. Chomsky once said that he rarely chose a First for his department - too intellectually conformist.71 How you think, not what you know.
Schloss is waving his hand in the air: ‘why the Marxism; a more conservative ideology would better suit their needs?’ It is to overlook fashion. To forget where (abstract) authority lies in modern societies - amongst the masses not the elite. Today, nobody in the West is more orthodox, conventional, conformist, that those who identity with the People. It is the residual influence of Christianity, its focus on the poor, and the ongoing effects of Protestantism and its belief protest a virtue.72 Knit these into a jumper and easy to dress up Lord Marx as a progressive.73 Then many misunderstand conservatism, mistake it for the moral authoritarianism of Margaret Thatcher, who thinking to resurrect Victorian Britain was, in fact, trying to return us to the 1950s, an oddly repressive time amongst the middle classes. In its sophisticated forms – I think of David Hume – conservatism is the freest of political doctrines, because more a style of life than a straitjacket of ideas. Thatcherism was a form of liberal authoritarianism, with a strong dose of the Communist Manifesto. ‘Yes yes yes’, says an impatient Schloss tapping the table, ‘but why specifically Marx. There are plenty of other radicals.’ Marxism offered a new orthodoxy, a rational politics, a utopian order, perfectly adapted to the meritocratic student: get society to follow the rules and pass exams and all to be well. Such students far closer to officials than freewheeling academics like David or Alan. ‘The students were reactionaries?’ says a stupefied Schloss. Yes, I am afraid so. ‘But some of them were anarchists’, he says, a glint in his eye, suggesting he’s got me. Ha! Anarchy.
I call in Rupert Knox for help. There are, he tells me, two kinds of anarchy and they attract diametrically opposed character types. Thank you Mr Knox, very acute, extremely helpful, I am most obliged. A hearty handshake and a clap on the back.
The one type dreams of a rational order where we all live peacefully and happily; a version of the bourgeois nursery. And no wonder! It is an extreme form of a liberalism popular amongst the middle classes, who have a love-hate relationship to authority; for engraved with managerial instincts they are yet porous to the moral ideas which suffuse their education and cultural life; and which since the 1960s are increasingly Leftwing. To be and do good, while also being in charge…it is the welfare class I discuss in Odd Questions. The other kind of anarchist is anti-establishment, and rejects all authority. It appeals to bohemians, of which there were plenty inside the universities in the 1950s. The Schloss looks aghast. I talk of character and spirit. None would have identified with Bakunin or Emma Goldman. Indeed, the moment you fill anarchism up with ideas, make it into a doctrine, you cease to be an anarchist. This why Noam Chomsky, its most famous 20th-century exponent, thought of anarchism only as an ideal; for him it is a metaphysical value not a political project. The Schloss is tamping: ‘what about the coercion, the law, its helmets and wigs….’ The worst tyrant of all is the idea, if we come under its sway.
Grandfather a kangaroo boxer and carpenter, father a company secretary; it is a useful genetic mix for someone adapting to the exotic land that is SOAS in the late fifties. Alas, this kind of university, an intimate yet open society, its freedoms acquired over decades from a confident but insouciant aristocracy, was coming to an end. Indeed, the aristos themselves were helping to close it; as they looked for a new set of ideas to replace those that went down with the Empire.74
A Janus decade.
Ideas too have two faces; one that perpetually seeks attention - an ideology, the advert, a CV, the sermon - a second that looks away from the crowd. Front and back. Foreground/background. Light and dark (outside/inside). A thought-world, that allowed an immense freedom, because so ingrained in elite culture that it had become a habit, collapsed in the 1960s and 70s. These years of extreme liberty were followed by the inevitable reaction, as a popular demand not just for order, but a far tougher and tighter order, pressed up against the political class.75 Too much freedom causes angst and panic. A very safe a place was wanted.76 Classroom the safest place of all if brought up to follow its rules…. The most efficacious means of controlling a society and the emotions is through education and its employment of an idea to shape and control a life. Now there is one class that thrives on such ideational submission: the bourgeoise. They began to take over the universities in the 1970s. They captured the Conservative Party in 1975. By the mid-eighties a swathe of the old society disappeared, as Thatcher and her band of merry Marxists subjected the Britain to the dominion of the concept. Today we live inside Maggie’s head.
Nobody seems to notice that Bouvard and Pécuchet are running the country.
David mentions his old supervisor F.G. Bailey, who wrote penetratingly about the academic profession. Bailey, David’s headmaster Harry Rée, his wonderful teacher, Taffy Hughes, were highly intuitive, extremely perceptive, men. It is the clue I need. These characters are both clever and in tune with others. A different type of personality, with a different range of attributes, to today’s scholastics, who having gone through the examination mill now churn out papers but cannot resonate with me or you. David’s favourite word is ‘dedicated’. Many at his schools weren’t fully trained but they had dedication. Here is the magic! To embody the spirit of education while enjoying psychological insight; it is what bright kids and those from the lower classes need, if they are to cross the middle class picket line.77 Not just support and push, there has to be a sense of vocation, a vision of transcendence, that life-changing epiphany, if characters like the Schloss are to acquire the discipline to submit themselves to a lifetime’s work. Careerism and materialism won’t do the business.78 Trapping us inside the self, we never touch the immense possibilities inherent in a tradition when surrendering to its charms. Such characters as Harry Rée and Taffy Hughes bound to disappear once universities seen as vital to the economic wealth and the social peace of the country. Mrs Cash and Lady Credentials now drive the educational bus; Ms Knowledge not even relegated to the back seat - she’s kicked off for complaining. It is to turn a religion into bureaucracy, where the bureaucrats fool themselves by worshipping at the old shrine. Thus the empty slogans; those gigantic vats of hypocrisy. Such transformations take an extremely long time to work through an institutional culture, but when they do are unstoppable.79 The full effects to wait for the likes of David to retire.
But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate. And all that cal. A terrible grahzny vonny world, really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal.80
No retirement from this horrorshow for David. Oh vonny no! In his late sixties David always has a fresh kangaroo to box. Kenya. Zambia. London. Oxford. When not interviewed by Alan, David and his wife are in Nagaland, helping to set up an anthropology department. And he’s learning a new subject, in which he hopes to do original work. ‘I’m a student again!’ he says. Always and forever. There is a wonderful freshness about the man, while his gentleness suggests not just a warm person, but a deep and thoughtful human being. No dictionary of received ideas for this chap. He grows his own concepts out of the intellectual earth. The library another kind of village, where he participates and observes. Malinowski is smiling over his shoulder.
Interview: David Parkin
J.G. Ballard, The Garden of Time.
Andrew Hussey, The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord.
J.G. Merquior’s Western Marxism describes the shift from the material determinism of the first generation of Marxists, such as Bernstein and Kautsky, to the Hegelian idealists of the 1920s and beyond.
Which produces two worldviews; these on display in the last American election. The liberals were prepared to vote for a cipher – Biden – because of the idea he represented and the collective behind him; many voted for Trump as an individual.
David Cannadine is a great historian, but he belongs to a generation who thought it an historian’s duty to expose myths in favour of historical interpretation. It was to change the nature of history, which historically(!) has been used to bind a society through shared beliefs and legends.
Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, p.207.
David Foster Wallace has interesting things to say about this in Consider the Lobster.
There is a marvellous anecdote in Alan’s interview with Stephen Gudeman.
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, p.70.
The Greeks were once the same. Bruno Snell’s book is a brilliant discussion of how Greece goes from the mythic and particular to the logical and the conceptual.
Of course I am thinking of the kula in Argonauts of the Western Pacific.
A good study is Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance.
John Gray, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death.
Which partly explains England’s lack of interest in history teaching. David Cannadine, Jenny Keating, Nicola Sheldon, The Right Kind of History: Teaching the Past in Twentieth Century England.
Surely a reason for our chemical society.
Oliver Craske, Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar, p.289.
One of the many problems of our media culture is that errors are seen as fatal to any idea or theory. The result is a very narrow conception of knowledge, and its endless cultural terrorism, as critics blow up whole oeuvres by detonating faults.
David Graeber notes the similarities between America and Germany in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement.
One has to escape this genre to do anything worthwhile: see my Working Class Highbrow.
See my The Tyranny of the Concept.
R.F. Forster, W.B. Yeats: A life: 1. The Apprentice Mage, p.419.
The Apprentice Mage, p.419.
Lust for Knowing: Orientalism and its Enemies. A good obituary of Irwin is by Aris Roussinos, The man who defended Orientalism.
It produces odd effects. See David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words. Perec was extremely unusual, an almost unique case, because he dropped out of university. The cleverest man in the intellectual crowd was the one without a degree.
Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility.
As indeed it could be. Jean Lepore, If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future.
The great satire is Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man.
Michael Billig, Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences.
A major theme of Cartoons and Their Concepts.
This done in various ways, such as turning verbs into nouns (behaviours into concepts). Learn to Write Badly.
The Apprentice Mage, p.419.
Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.
Benjamin Ginsburg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All Administrative University and Why It Matters.
The problem is acutely discussed by Noam Chomsky in New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind.
A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p.90.
J.G Merquior, Foucault, p.158.
The great thinker on this subject is Carl Jung, who theorised his own experiences. Anthony Storr, Jung.
Andrew Robinson, Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs.
For Oliver Craske, Ravi Shankar’s creativity arose out of the tension of being an insider/outsider. Alan says something similar about Ernest Gellner.
The Apprentice Mage, p.374.
Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar, p.309.
A Hindu cosmology lies behind his words. K.M. Sen, Hinduism.
Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar, p.318.
E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.
Many of the scientists interviewed by Alan made things when young. More like mechanics than scholars. For the artisanal basis of modern science: Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution. See also A.C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo 2: Science in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modern Times 13th-17th century.
In the 17th-century the Divinity’s language changes: from words to mathematics.
The gnosticism of modernity is explored by John Gray in Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia.
The problem of Substack is that it shares the same structural fault as social media: it is designed to increase hits, which discourages nuance and ambiguity. There is excellent discussion between David Fuller and Justin Murphy. Not ideology but the process of accumulation.
Augustine to Galileo 2, p.128.
G.E.R. Lloyd describes a similar treatment of science in ancient Greece: Magic, Reason and Experience: Studies in the origins and development of Greek science. Science was used to prove a theory, less to understand the world. Galileo makes a similar point in Crombie: pp.147-8. The revolution in science was to use experiments not to confirm but to test theories.
Part of a wider liberal era. Bruce Robinson draws a vivid picture of this liberty, so intimate with an impoverished bohemia.
Siân James, A Small Country, p.25.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, p.330.
See my Strange Dreams. Also Anthony Julius, Transgression: The Offences of Art.
Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism.
Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North Western Melanesia.
The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature is a study in how an honour code associated with a warriors and aristocrats morphs into a proto-Christian morality, under the impact of democracy and empire.
A vivid portrayal of the collapse of an entire way of life: Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1603. Was Margaret Thatcher the Henry or her age? Adam Curtis certainly thinks so: Shifty.
Isaiah Berlin, quoted in Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, p.390.
Popper’s binary opposition misses a third social formation, the one most responsible for historical change: the ideological community. Cartoons and Their Concepts.
The seminal influence was Hegel, who was reintroduced into Marxism from the 1920s. Hegel was used to reconfigure the theory into a new form of idealism, where the forces of society, not the rational principle, is the metaphysical basis. J.G. Merquior, Western Marxism.
For the history of this intellectual cult: Arthur Koestler, The Case of the Midwife Toad.
Peter Salway, A History of Roman Britain.
Augustine to Galileo 2, p.171.
Myth is a way of seeing the world, as valid in its own way as experimental science. There is a brilliant discussion in The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature. See particularly From Myth to Logic: The Role of the Comparison.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.
See the revealing When Richard Dawkins Comes to Call.
I deal extensively with this change in Cartoons and Their Concepts.
I spent over twenty years in the community development game, about which I hope to write one day.
There is good comment in Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs. Above a certain intelligence IQ is irrelevant to innovation.
Anthony Grafton, The Footnote.
The core aim of Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies was to show that Marx is a reactionary.
Robert Irwin writes mesmerically about this time in Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties.
For just how free life became: Galen Strawson, Things that Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc..
Adam Curtis shows this brilliantly in the second episode of Shifty. Although he posits 1979 as the turning point.
See Working Class Highbrow. It is nicely caught in A Small Country.
W.B. Yeats: ‘Genius vanishes at the first sight of ambition.’ The Apprentice Mage, p.398.
C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law or The Pursuit of Progress.
A Clockwork Orange, p.141.