Moving further on ...
Turning again to administration, of course it has a legitimate role in any institution. However it comes at a heavy price, both literal and metaphorical; and if the institution is to flourish, to remain creative, to allow individuals to give of themselves freely and spontaneously – as in my experience the best teachers and researchers do – it needs to be as light in its touch as possible. When I was an undergraduate it did its job properly, and was almost invisible. It is not an end in itself, as it seems sometimes now to have become, but a necessary evil. To quote William James: ‘most human institutions, by the purely technical and professional manner in which they come to be administered, end by becoming obstacles to the very purposes which their founders had in view.’
It goes without saying that it inevitably slows and prolongs processes and makes them more cumbersome, causes imagination to atrophy and thinking processes to sclerose, results in inaccuracy, injustice and waste of time, and requires a great number of what are now called ‘resources’ (namely people), as well as buildings and machinery that are expensive. It gives the mediocre unexpected power over the talented, and favours those who are not trained or experienced in doing what the institution exists to further – be it a hospital, a school or a university – over those who are.
My mentor, the so-called ‘father of neuropsychiatry’, Professor Alwyn Lishman, a world-renowned figure in his field, and a profoundly scholarly and modest man, was asked by a manager to justify why he had requested a CT scan of a patient – in a quaternary referral centre. He reflected that when he had to account for his actions to a bureaucrat it was time to retire, and he did.
The humane teachers and tutors from whom I learnt in the humanities would rather have retired than submit to the exercises in political retraining and box-ticking that would be required of them now. All this is patronising, and damages initiative and morale. It is a growth that ultimately threatens the viability of its host. And the proof of this in the case of the university is escalating costs that are a burden to students or the taxpayer, and result in recruiting wealthy students from around the world that can afford the fees; a sense of fear and conformity in what should be a place where ideas are free to be explored; and a fall in applications, especially among those groups that this very expensive new bureaucracy is in place to discriminate against.
For what is happening is that three interlocking left hemisphere manifestations are at work. First, there is the failure to believe in truth in the humanities, and now even in science, unless it conforms to the preferred narrative. Then there is the expansion of administrations everywhere to ensure that all appearances confirm this narrative. And third, the advent of more sophisticated AI that both monitors our speech and actions, and produces simulacra of real human thought.
AI finds its natural home in organisations whose desire is ever greater control of other human beings. Quite apart from the many ways that AI can be used to infringe our liberty and to make possible totalitarian control of a kind never heretofore seen, how on the simple daily level, will we be able to assess the ability of an individual student or the achieved standard of their work when AI can be relied on to write an essay? How will we assess the truth of evidence produced in a court of law? And, with the humanities and science bowing out of the pursuit of truth, how will any of us in future know what to believe about anything at all? If you ask ChatGPT to answer a question, it does a trolley dash around the internet and comes up with a vanilla milkshake. What is prominent on the internet is not necessarily truer than what is not. And as more and more of what gets to prominence on the internet turns out to be generated by machines like ChatGPT, how can we ever escape this hall of mirrors to find a glimmer of truth? There is no imagination – that sacred faculty – here; only fantasy, the liar.
The casualties in this world are many. The honour and self-belief, as well as the credibility, of societal groups that are being, often without their consent, promoted, is compromised, and they are patronised by being held to lower standards than others; unjust suspicions may attach to individuals who have succeeded through their own valiant efforts, suspicions which cannot easily be disproved. The honour and self-belief of social groups that are dis-favoured, where the scales are tipped against them, is compromised; they become resentful of being reviled for being who they are, feel the smart of injustice and become demotivated. Universities are, or should be, centres of excellence; instead the left hemisphere mentality of administrators seems to wish to remake them in its own pedestrian image – as it is also doing in hospitals and schools, with widely damaging effects. We now have difficulty recruiting nurses, doctors, teachers, and police, principally I believe because they see the institutions in which they would work as having comprehensively lost their way. We cannot afford not to have the very best pilots, surgeons, engineers and soldiers: why would we be willing to have less than the best thinkers, teachers and scientists?
We live in an increasingly dangerous world, one where if we are to survive at all, and especially to maintain and defend a free society, we need to regain a truer understanding of our history and values, to regain some self-respect, and promote and rely on only the very best people. Instead we appear to be actively finding ways of doing the opposite. You may be sure that the totalitarian regimes that may one day subjugate us have no intention of handicapping themselves in this way. We even reward those who would attack the tolerant society that therefore is so easy to attack. Once it is gone, be sure that we will all be – how to put it adequately – worse off? Arendt wisely warned that a loss of faith in institutions is a precursor to totalitarianism; and if people are losing faith in them, I think I can see why.
Freedom of speech is historically rare and precious: the result of battles fought and sacrifices made by our ancestors over many centuries. As Arendt put it, ‘this society no longer knows of those higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom was won’. Whatever some people may say, I believe racism and sexism are racism and sexism: injustice can’t be fought with injustice, only with justice. This was the burden of Martin Luther King’s most famous speech.
In all this process, we see the same inversion of meaning in language, that other far-sighted individuals – Orwell, of course, being prime amongst them – foresaw. An extreme, ill-evidenced anti-libertarian position is called liberal: the merest attempt to see a more balanced picture is considered extreme and illiberal. In one world even a facial expression is considered by some to be an act of aggression: meanwhile actual physical violence against someone who merely disagrees with you is condoned and even approved. I am speaking of North Korea, of course. But I am also speaking of here. In this way the truth is travestied.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: ‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist.’
What I have tried to outline is a vision that explains why what we see when we look at the plight of the modern university is not a number of diverse, unrelated problems, but a coherent predicament that could have been predicted – and by some far-sighted individuals was predicted. We have abandoned a serious search for truth, one in which we must be prepared to find that the truth is other than we have already decided – otherwise it is not a search for truth at all. And this state of affairs has come about because we have become heavily dependent on the model of the world offered by our less imaginative, less intelligent, less intuitive and less reasonable self. A model that favours the machine over the human being, death over life. It is one that is corrosive of what is beautiful, what is good and what is true. And has no place in it for the sacred.
The early twentieth century philosopher, Max Scheler, was much concerned with questions of value. When he died in 1928, Heidegger, who gave his funeral oration, described him as the most potent force in the world of philosophy at the time. Scheler calls the human being, ens amans, the being that loves; in its place we have homo economicus. In the world we live in, reductionist materialism inverts Scheler’s perception, and in a thoroughly cynical assessment of what it means to be human, we have exalted the individual ego over all else. It has rendered many virtues, including, but not confined to, beauty, goodness and truth, neglected and abandoned. These values, I believe, far from being human inventions, are ontological primitives, since they are aspects of the ground of Being: our capacity to respond to them and draw them ever further into being is our privilege and, indeed, our purpose. We can of course also ignore them, devalue them, and cause them to wither away – at what cost to us personally and to the whole of humanity we can only surmise.
Scheler thought there was a hierarchy of values, with those of pleasure and utility – the values of utilitarianism and the left hemisphere – at the lowest level, and rising by stages to that of the holy or sacred, which he considered the highest: a value which I suggest is incomprehensible to the left hemisphere. In between were, first, the Lebenswerte or values of ‘life’, such as courage, magnanimity, nobility, humility and loyalty; and then the geistige Werte, the values of mind or spirit, such as beauty, goodness and truth – which I suggest are better understood by the right hemisphere.
The left hemisphere’s raison d’être being power and control, it naturally puts values of utility and hedonism, those of the lowest rank in Scheler’s pyramid, first. I may be wrong, but it is my distinct impression that there has been a decline in courage, loyalty, nobility and humility in our society – indeed in all behaviour that carries its costs upfront, rather than concealing its sting in the tail; speaking the truth takes courage, and it would seem that those in the institutions of government, science and the universities would rather conform than confront untruth. The powerhouses of intellect, the universities, have lost their nerve, and become passive, conformist and feeble – and excessively bureaucratic. Perhaps because of this I can’t help noticing that many of the most interesting ideas in science, in politics and in philosophy these days come from outside the major institutions – something I note only with the greatest of regret, as someone who always saw himself as a proud beneficiary of their ancient traditions, and who wished to further those traditions. And along with the loss of courage to speak the truth, there has been an undeniable withdrawal from the beautiful and the sacred. All of this combines to reinforce a loss of sense of purpose and direction; hence the crisis of meaning that it is, by now, a commonplace that we face.
The war on nature and on life is one in which we are inevitably caught up, because we are nature, we are life – and we have to decide to be its destroyers or defenders. We have it still in our power to be whichever we choose. I do not have a bullet-pointed agenda, much as the left hemisphere would no doubt like one. Rather I am calling for a defence of values that will cost each of us something personally: to name, and not to acquiesce in, what we know to be untrue. To hold to standards of excellence. To expect much of ourselves. To hold to respect for others, and to listen to points of view with which we disagree, not only those we endorse. To espouse compassion in place of vehemence and self-righteousness; to embrace humility in the acknowledgment of our necessarily limited understanding; to find once more a sense of wonder in the face of the complex and beautiful cosmos. To do this will help us grow, not stunt, our souls.
When Solzhenitsyn asked himself what had given rise to the catastrophic brutalities of the twentieth century, his conclusion was that men had forgotten God. In a speech given in 1983, he repeated: ‘If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: men have forgotten God.’ More than this, a positive ‘hatred of God’, he thought, was the principal driving force behind the philosophy and psychology of Marxism-Leninism: ‘militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.’ I would bring that up to date, by pointing out that totalitarianism and extremism no longer manifest among us so much in terms of Marxism-Leninism as in the strident voices of what Mattias Desmet calls mass formation, in which individuals are united not by reason and tolerance, but by propaganda, ideology and fanatical narratives. We must rediscover courtesy and compassion, the virtues of openness and a sense of perspective. But this is another way of saying we must stop hating God. The hatred of God is indeed a fascinating phenomenon, one more and more evident in our time – and not just in political philosophies, but in the vox pop of media scientists. Milton saw it all. Lucifer – ‘the Bright’ – the trusted emissary of the Master, cannot bear the imputation of anything higher than he. We must make sure he does not win the day. We must hold fast to the dedication of this university: Dominus illuminatio mea.
Amen. It was Lyons who first opened my eyes to the extent of Managerialism, and now I can't unsee it. I was dismayed recently by the announcement of a new DEI initiative at a tiny non-profit that I support. Their team advocates for a remote hiking trail and performs trail maintenance. These are good people who love the outdoors, serving a community of people who will often backpack for weeks in the wilderness. When I sent them some literature about the unintended harms of such policies their response was that without such a rulebook in place, they'd be unable to "responsibly" deal with any future event of discrimination that might arise. Rather, they have hamstrung themselves, abandoning the fluid response-ability to deal with future events with wisdom.
It's painful to see managerialism seep so far into the culture that a tiny outdoor-rec non-profit considers it a self-evident good.
Every time I read your words Iain, I want everybody I know to read them! And, well, just everybody!