Niall Ferguson on freedom

[hdw]

I don't know about standing the test of time. What you mean is that people of our age and generation can remember the likes of Alan Taylor and Toynbee (Arnold? Philip? Polly?), but are their ideas and conclusions still regarded as valid in the 21st century? They were of their time.

I can remember Taylor standing delivering his lectures on black and white TV, as other intellectuals like Bronowski and Kenneth Clark did. Nowadays you have to look pretty - apparently some people think Ferguson is quite presentable, and we've had Michael Wood in his bomber jacket and Bettany Hughes and various other dolly-bird females, and now this scientist guy who used to be in a rock group - or you have to be a cheesy, ingratiating, camped-up little creep like Simon Schama, to succeed as a TV intellectual.

Harry

[Eric]

Pray do not mention Polly Toynbee; I was referring to Arnold J.

I too remember the TV performances of Dr Bronowski and especially Kenneth Clark. Nowadays they have Jonathan Ross and Johnny Vegas instead. Plus the pompous, if wacky, genius Stephen Fry. But the BBC has lowered the whole tone.

As for the ever-dreadful Simon Smarma...

Is that Bettany Hughes the same Frauenzimmer who is leading the laddish ladies into Orangedom, like Joan of Arc, by reading 130 books far too rapidly, and boasting about it? Or is that another Bettany?

[hdw]

Hughes is actually OK, if a bit inclined - like all of them - to exaggerate the importance and interest of what she's trying to show us.

http://www.bettanyhughes.co.uk/welcome.htm

Harry

[Eric]

She does like to keep mentioning that she's a historian, in a rather "only gay in the village" manner. I think she rather fancies herself as the only female historian on the block.



And what's more, Helen of Troy had big...

[hdw]

By the way, you guys are showing your ages. Arnold Toynbee came up in a book that I read recently; he was working in Turkey for the British government during the Armenian massacres - in 1915!

Hey, it was Eric's idea to quote Arnold Toynbee, not mine. A remarkable family, mind you, a chattering class all of their own.

Harry

[Liam]

Here in the U.S., being an intellectual is akin to being Satan.

Depends on where you come from. In NYC, intellectuals of all colors and creeds are respected, provided their opinions are not too outrageous. I can't speak for the rest of this huge, huge country because I haven't been everywhere, I haven't traveled everywhere. Have you, Paul? If not, then how can you make sweeping generalizations such as this?

Like politicians, intellectuals are bought, and the highest bids go to conservative intellectuals like Ferguson, who get plum positions at places like Harvard in their attempt to make a statement that they're not liberal bastions.

Not necessarily. Universities, esp. ivy-league places like Harvard and Columbia hire professors based on their credentials. They are as likely to hire Noam Chomsky (and, guess what, they did) as Niall Ferguson.

[Bubba]

Well, at least you seem to have a lot of people vying to be public intellectuals. Here in the U.S., being an intellectual is akin to being Satan. That's why I was so upset when Tony Judt died - there's no one else remotely like him. Like politicians, intellectuals are bought, and the highest bids go to conservative intellectuals like Ferguson, who get plum positions at places like Harvard in their attempt to make a statement that they're not liberal bastions.

I agree with you on Simon Schama. Another British disgrace we're stuck with here is Christopher Hitchens.

By the way, you guys are showing your ages. Arnold Toynbee came up in a book that I read recently; he was working in Turkey for the British government during the Armenian massacres - in 1915!

Oh, I wouldn't say the U.S. is an intellectual's paradise--far from it--but I don't think the American intellectual is really akin to Lucifer for most of his countrymen, either. Except for a few unreconstructed feminists and hard-core Zionists, for example, most of the Americans who knew who he was (if your point were merely that their small number is indicative of an anti-intellectual climate, I'd probably agree with you) admired Judt, even if for no reason other than his lively writing.

And if the average American couch-potato does equate intellectual and Satan, who can really blame him? He picks up the remote and, by some inexplicable accident, switches to PBS's Lehrer Report, probably the most intellectual regular program on American TV. Who's up there prattling on mindlessly? David Brooks! Or you pick up a purportedly intellectual magazine, flip through it, and find yet another boring piece by that British castoff--yes, a disgrace and a bore and now fallen ill with un mal zodiacal, as Ribeyro puts it.

I also think that, for most people, professor and intellectual are synonymous. In the news in recent days we have Prof. Ellen Lewin of the Univ. of Iowa, author of Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America and Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture, who sent the Iowa branch of the College Republicans an e-mail telling them to go fuck themselves. Before Prof. Lewin there was that human sexuality professor at Northwestern University who arranged for his students to attend an after-class session during which a woman, in full view of the students, pleasured herself with a vibrating dildo. Then there was the "Indian" Ward Churchill. Such contemptible people are often the only "intellectuals" a lot of Americans hear about, and if they do consider them little short of satanic I'm not sure I don't sympathize.

But it may be, too, that the attention-seeking types who get the press, who appear on TV, are necessarily mediocre (or worse). There are less well-known intellectuals in the U.S.--the former Chicago professor Richard Stern, for example--who are nonetheless fairly widely admired.

[Bubba]

There really is no equivalent to the French-style intellectual, which is what Tony Judt was. That would be someone widely respected, with excellent academic credentials, who helps frame the public discourse over numerous issues. Here, public debate is a controlled process, and in my opinion the public gets little exposure to the discussion of real thinkers who actually know something about the issues. Take, for example, Paul Krugman. I would say that he's a top notch economist with liberal leanings. Yet he is often characterized as a radical leftist who wants to bring down democracy and replace it with socialism.

I'm not sure there's a living equivalent to the French-style intellectual in France! Take a random Frenchman off the street and it's highly unlikely he'd be able to name any such creature other than maybe "BHL," as they call him, who is no great shakes. I've heard of Pascal Bruckner, I think, and Jean-François Revel, who died not long ago, and if you want the equivalent of a Krugman you'd have Olivier Blanchard, but, wait, he and others like him live and work... in that cesspit the United States.

The French intellectual I've read a little of and admire is Laurent Lafforgue. He has been invited to sit on this or that committee on educational reform, but I'm not sure how much his ideas shape public debate. Probably not very much.

[Liam]

They are rewarded handsomely for promoting their sponsors' views. Judt was an exception - Ferguson doesn't seem to be.

This would imply an enormous, duplicitous dishonesty on their part, as well as a general tendency to switch sponsors whenever new opportunity arises. Ferguson believed in what he believes in long before he came to the US. Ayaan Hirsi Ali believed in what she believes in long before she was kicked out of Holland and came to settle here.

That said, I do not think the average American considers either one of them a "public intellectual," even if their views happen to agree with theirs.

[hdw]

This would imply an enormous, duplicitous dishonesty on their part, as well as a general tendency to switch sponsors whenever new opportunity arises. Ferguson believed in what he believes in long before he came to the US. Ayaan Hirsi Ali believed in what she believes in long before she was kicked out of Holland and came to settle here.

I agree. There have always been Brits who were attracted to the States by the different culture, what many characterise as the "can-do" attitude and the belief that if you try hard enough you can achieve anything, re-invent yourself if necessary to become who you want to be. Maybe that's a rather rosy view of American society, but it's a very common one here in the UK, and it contrasts with the very British attitude of 'who do you think you are?', 'don't get too big for your boots', etc. This forthcoming royal wedding has focused the spotlight on Kate Middleton's plebeian background (if you go back far enough), and there has been much raising of eyebrows over the fact that she has Northern coal-miners in her family-tree. In the States people would applaud the fact that her forebears worked hard to advance the family to where they are now - in this country, the response is a sneer.

I saw a TV programme where relatives of Kate's mother (the descendant of coal-miners) were being interviewed, and one of them said, "We used to call her 'Lady Dorothy' ", i.e. she was too big for her boots even then.

In America, the fact that Kate's parents have become millionaires through their own efforts would be enough to elevate them to the aristocracy of money, but over here you can never live down your plebeian origins, just like in the Third Reich your family could have been Christian for several generations but THEY would know that you had started out Jewish.

Harry

[Eric]

I tend, nowadays, towards more right-wing solutions to things, but the right does field as many rather unpleasant characters as the left. I'm not wild about Hitchens, for instance.

I wonder whether Britain too isn't rather an unintellectual country, so that people who talk loudly on the telly and have done a bit of journalism are automatically given that label.

So being of coal-miner stock is a jolly good thing (say I, whose grandfather was one).

British intellectuals were in the 1960s and 1970s, actually Eastern or Central European Jews who had escaped the Holocaust or otherwise migrated to easygoing old Britain, or were the offspring thereof, such as George Steiner, Isaiah Berlin, Elias Canetti, Karl Popper, Zygmunt Bauman, Isaac Deutscher, Eric Hobsbawm, and indeed, Tony Judt. (I will pretend that Simon Shoarma was an Aryan, not to spoil my little list.)

[Liam]

Niall Ferguson doesn't belong in that club...

Well, he's not a scientist or a theorist but a cultural/economic historian, so there's a difference. Have you read any of his books, though (wholly or partially), to make such a sweeping assessment?

[Liam]

The subject matter of his books is of little interest to me

Me too, honestly, yet it doesn't mean that his ideas are bad or unsound.

he has detractors

Darwin had (still has) his detractors in the scientific community, yet it doesn't make his evolutionary theory any less true or untrue. It just is.

Fellow academics have questioned Ferguson's commitment to scholarship.

Academics question each other's commitment to scholarship ALL the time. I don't know when was the last time you went to college, Paul, but that is pretty much standard procedure. If we sat there and sang kumbayas to each other, there'd be nothing else to talk about.

If all the windbags like Ferguson died suddenly, no one would know the difference.

I think if the whole human race suddenly died out, the earth would hardly stop spinning, don't you think? Nobody knows which or whose theories are going to prove more durable in the future. The only thing we can do, as scholars, is finish our goddamn work and die in peace; whatever contribution to humanity each of us makes, the posterity will get to decide what to keep and what to throw out.

Ferguson seems to be appreciated in the US a lot more than in Britain. He's also paid better. Why should he therefore NOT criticize what he sees as genuine shortcomings in the educational system of his home country?

It's funny how many of these so-called socialists make it a point to move to the US in order to criticize it from the inside, meanwhile riding the gravy train all along. Some people have no shame.

[Eric]

A nostalgia for imperialism. An interesting concept.

The default position for empire is "Empire Bad, Liberation Good". Alas, in, for instance, Africa, a rather large continent, the locals are still blaming the Brits for drawing straight lines on maps and ignoríng tribal borders. If the tribes weren't at each others' throats all the time, surely leaving a few Hutus or Tutsis on the wrong side of the border would not occasion genocide. We have reduced tribalism in Europe to the celebration of manageable rituals. Would that would happen in Africa.

Without going back to the condescending Whites in pith helmets and shorts scenario, we could nonetheless ask ourselves why, now that the imperialist-colonialists have backed out of Africa, it appears to be in an even bigger mess that when the Europeans held sway.

Why are the Egyptians so useless that they rage against the USA but have an army more or less entirely bought for them by the Yanks? Is Obama going to use this fact as leverage to get the Egyptians to play ball, now that the old crowd-murderer Mubarak will soon be gone and Egypt will be so-called "liberated" by chaotic groups of mutually-hating people?

And why did the 1970s liberation hero Mugabe become such a nasty piece of work in his old age? Did he really need to persecute the White farmers and pretend this was not racist?

Why are they introducing sneaky agricultural refoms in South Africa as well to alter the pattern of farming there and make it look as if the White settlers were all robbers and racists?

Many countries in Africa are in turmoil: the whole Maghreb, plus Egypt and the Horn of Africa, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, with rumblings in Congo and Rwanda. And the neighbouring Middle East is in a similar mess. Africans are killing Africans without any help from Europeans.

Can we say that, half a century after imperialism ended, the majority of African countries have worked their way out of poverty and anarchy and have become better places to live than when the imperialists bossed them around? This is a very important question for Africa and the world. It cannot be swept under the carpet forever.

(This is my personal opinion, and as a member of the Swedish and English PEN clubs, not known for recruiting fascists and lunatics, I hope that I will be able to express it freely here on the WLF without hints that I've said it before and should shut up. We are not living under the equivalent of Chinese, North Korean, Iranian or Syrian censorship over here in Western Europe.)

[Liam]

Africans are killing Africans without any help from Europeans.

Africans were killing Africans without any help from the outside world hundreds if not thousands of years before the Europeans showed up. And Europeans first began to colonize each other, nearly destroying the native populations of such regions as Ireland, Finland and the Baltics before they set their eyes on the rest of the world. History is not as black-and-white as postcolonialists would like us to think, for all their shit-talk about hybridity and the "location of culture."

[Liam]

Ferguson is in the news once more, it seems.

[Hamlet]

It's strange really isn't it?

This idea of all this dreadful "academic propaganda" ?

So, we have this...

Ferguson stirs up views, and the opposite views, or resistance to such reviews is the product: sounds like a pretty fair and democratic intellectual exercise to me?

[Liam]

Paperback Q&A: Niall Ferguson on Civilization: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power

Whatever you say, the dude's pretty hot for an academic:

[Liam]

Obama Has to Go

and rebuttal

[Eric]

Why do people focus on the President in the USA? Surely, in a democracy there are a few other people that should be famous in the politics of the country. But it is true that we in Europe have difficulty identifying the names of other key players in American politics, apart from Obama's rival Mitt Romney. Surely politics in the USA isn't dominated by two men only. But we don't get to hear much about the other hundreds of key U.S. politicians here over the pond.