The malign influence of well-meaning, well-educated people

I'm back to posting again after an unplanned hiatus. Apologies to any "regular" readers, if there are any. I thought I'd take as this evening's subject the damage that can be created (wittingly or otherwise) by the well-educated, well-intentioned members of the intelligentsia in their role as paragons of virtue and advocates of "social justice".

I feel as though I'm blessed with choice; so many examples to pick from, where do I start? Perhaps I might begin with teachers.

My job has recently brought me into contact with the British education system through a school-industry link scheme type thing (I won't mention which one exactly as it's not relevant). I thought that after 13 years of school and 4 of university I'd be done with education now, but it's not so. Anyway, it's been an education, if you'll pardon the terrible pun, to experience life inside a London comprehensive.

There was, as one might expect, the hubbub of activity, shrieking and squealing that there always has been in the corridors and playgrounds. What really struck home though, were the sullen, defeated, tired faces of the teachers. Some of the older ones had the look of a clapped out alcoholic about them. There was no evidence anywhere of respect for authority. The teachers' faces said it all. Well-intentioned souls most of them, but hopelessly naive about the need for them to exert authority over their charges. Why, oh why, do I waste my time with these kids? Why don't they want to learn? Why do they make every effort to belittle me and make my life a misery? Naivety abounds, and it has not yet been challenged.

The teachers are their own victims. Well-meaning, well-educated teachers were at the forefront of encouraging the changes in schools which have done so much to weaken discipline (and thereby reduce the ability of teachers to teach uninterrupted).

I do hope that there are some thinkers out there in the teaching profession who are sceptical about modern teaching methods, and I hope that they are young teachers rather than old crusties. How refreshing it would be if a few young teachers had the courage to blast away the self-delusion and state the unutterable truth about modern schools.

To finish, have a look at this. I'm really going to miss the Duke of Edinburgh when he's gone. He can really hit the nail on the head now and then:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4355696.stm

Why do the losers keep winning?

Several bloggers have already passed comment on a recent BBC poll which formed part of the "who runs your world?" season.

The aim was to pick a fantasy XI to run the world, from a selection of "thinkers", "poiticians", "economists" and "wildcards" - i.e. people who don't fit into the first three categories. Why the inverted commas? Well, I know it's a wee bit pedantic, but I certainly wouldn't describe Richard Branson as an economist. And similarly, there are some people who I would not even have considered to be "thinkers" or "politicians".

Anyway, back to the point. The concept of the global "election" and the list of eligible candidates provides a textbook example of the institutionalized mode of thought which now prevails in the BBC, and in most universities.

First, let's take the very concept of the "who runs your world" season. A season of programmes, so titled, might sound like an interesting exploration of, say, the relationshipsbetween church, state and individual in various countries throughout the world. However, even if one were to adumbrate the concept in very vague terms, it's obvious that it's a sitting duck for any anti-capitalist hack with a right-on socialist agenda to push. And, lo and behold, the BBC, which normally has a bit of a soft spot for soft furry creatures has got a bit too excited, whipped out the 12-bore and blasted away at the sitting duck with a gusto that would make even the Duke of Edinburgh feel a tad uneasy. The essential, but unstated idea of this season of programmes seems to be to promote the Beeb's socialist agenda. Have a look at the list of programmes here. I'll provide a few programme titles just to whet your appetite:

WRYW: The Interview - Are corporations dangerous?
Who Runs Your World? Live in Washington - Does the US run the world?
Meeting Ameria's religious right - The power of the Christian religious right in the US

I'm half surprised they didn't go the whole hog, rope in the likes of Tam Dalyell and George Galloway, get a few anti-capitalist NGO's on board, a bit of further publicity from Ken Livingstone and give us a great big taxpayer-funded Jew-bashing, anti-capitalist jamboree. Just imagine it. That avuncular sage, the Viscount Stansgate, giving a "fireside chat" evening broadcast on Radio 4 about the "oppression" of the people of the "occupied territories", followed by a poetry reading from Tom Paulin before bedtime. Then wake up next morning and it's a news report from the "occupied territories" by Orla bin-Guerin on the Today programme. Given such an abundance of eager Jew-bashers, Christian-bashers and anti-American conspiracy theorists, the BBC rather missed an opportunity.

So, if you'll excuse my digression, the first point to note is that the concept of the series of programmes makes them very vulnerable to having a good deal of spin put on them by people with an agenda.

Secondly, the list of eligible candidates reads like a who's who of the moonbat left. Noam Chomsky? I've yet to meet an apolitical person who has ever heard of Chomsky; why not balance the list by giving us the option to vote for Mark Steyn? Eric Hobsbawm? - why can't we choose Paul Johnson or Niall Ferguson?

Predictably, the former terrorist St. Nelson of Qunu won the contest. It really is amazing how few people have ever thought critically of Mandela, especially BBC journalists, who should be capable of critical thought. Why is no one in this country aware of the communist nature of sections of the ANC?

Might the bias be due to people who work for the mainstream media having an agenda and an axe to grind? Unlike the MSM's hallucinations about Jews and Americans pulling the strings of power, the theory that there is some sort of institutionalized group-think muddying the waters of media discourse and obscuring the view has an instinctive ring of truth to it, and it is at last being written about and talked about. The Spectator, Telegraph, Melanie Phillips and others have noticed this too. And of course, there is the excellent Biased-BBC. So, perhaps I might end on a positive note, but then, as I mentioned in a previous post, some things are a matter of mass and momentum, and right now, us critics are small in number, we're gaining speed and snowballing along. Let's hope that history will be our court of justice.

Spread the good news!

He's back at last. Scott Burgess, he of the Daily Ablution, astute arbiter of journalistic verity, aristarch among critics! Welcome back, Scott!

http://dailyablution.blogs.com/

The Secret of England's Greatness

Is not the bible as Thomas Jones Barker's portrait of Queen Victoria suggests. I've been thinking about the greatness of Victorian Britain and the Britannic inheritance for a while now, after a couple of visits to the National Portrait Gallery. The "Expansion and Empire" room, dominated by Jones Barker's portrait of Queen Victoria presenting a bible to one of her African subjects is a refreshing antidote to the all-pervasive defeatism and propensity for self-abasement of today's Britons. The room contains portraits of various characters who were associated with Britain's imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century. Most of the gentlemen pose with a look of urbane dignity that seems ridiculous today. Indeed, I recently sat for a sepia photograph with fellow members of a sports team and we sniggered and giggled while trying to maintain mock-dignified Victorian poses. Even attempting that look of solid, gentlemanly earnestness was enough to send us into fits of laughter. We were all educated young men, almost all of us were English. We were aware, deep down, of our country's imperial past, and the chances are that most of us had grandfathers, great grandfathers and great-great grandfathers who would have felt no such uneasy self-consciousness if asked to pose for a portrait. In fact, the look of dignified earnestness would have come naturally to them. For us young Englishmen, who have had any pretensions to dignity, uprightness and gentlemanly behaviour sapped from us by the rotten and pervasive influence of a political ideology of "libertarianism" shared by MPs of both left and right, such pious posturing seems hilariously quaint.

In fact, "libertarianism" is a bit of a misnomer. Perhaps it's really a blend of nihilism and libertinism, which had its origins in the triumph of science and rationality and the horror of man's capacity for barbarity. Masked as a "rights and freedoms" issue by the likes of Roy Jenkins, this indulgent, promiscuous culture has eroded our capacity for earnestness. Why be earnest nowadays? We're all caught in the rat race, looking out for number one and focused purely on improving the material prosperity of our own lives and those of our close family. Any attempt at leading a life of moral integrity is ridiculed. Most youngmen can't look at a priest or a Scout leader these days without laughing subconsciously at their ridiculous attempt at piousness (perhaps the glut of writing about the guilt and sexual dysfunction caused by a Catholic education and the paedophile priest and Scout leader scandals have something to do with it too). Why bother with the effort of piety and self-sacrifice when you can just throw caution to the wind and engage in the wild promiscuity, binge drinking and drug taking with everyone else?

Acceptable behaviour and prevailing attitudes are really a matter of numbers and momentum. If there are enough people who believe that civility, self-sacrifice and other virtues are worthy ideals, then the majority of the citizenry will go along with them. This is the problem today. Examples of moral virtue are few and far between; they tend to be concentrated among the elderly. People who attempt a life of virtue are obstructed at every turn. Confounded and battered by the overwhelming hostility to their attempt at leading an edifying life, many of them simply give up and accept the prevailing circumstances. Witness the pitiable state of the Church of England. Like a cuckold husband, the Church reponds to falling attendance by prostrating itself before the people, and instead of standing firm by the fundamental tenets of Christian belief, it waters down the interpretation of the Bible in an effort to appease its leftist establishment critics. One suspects that most cuckolds eventually figure out that becoming more emasculated and impotent in the face of rejection is not a good strategy for boosting one's attractiveness. Those in charge of the Church of England don't appear to have grasped this, and perhaps it's one of the few areas where we could learn something from the Muslims, whose religion has none of the self-flagellatingly soppy defeatist drivel attached to it.

It was the capacity for self-restraint, the uprightness and the unashamed piety of the Victorians that made England great. Those values still live on in our subconscious, and appear occasionally, but only to serve the purpose of being mocked by the smug ultra-secularists and libertines. Perhaps the ferocity and duration of their assault on those values indicates that there's something powerful in them that they find objectionable and dangerous.

I suspect though, that the sheer emptiness and pointlessness of life in modern Britain is causing us to approach a turning point. It's clear that this smug mockery of earnestness and piety can't go on forever. Sometime sooner or later the self-satisfied satirists will run out of energy and some of the old earnestness and "piousness" will return. The question is, under what guise. A Christian revival isn't on the cards. Perhaps secular nationalism, but I doubt it. Our best hope is a revival of the liberal, free-trade, democratic tradition of the Victorians. The basic ingredients are there; disenchantment with the emptiness of modern life and a subconscious awareness of our glorious past. The difficulty is to mould them into a viable political idea which could work in the twenty-first century.