Tags
A Point of View, Alain de Botton, BBC, BBC Radio 4, Education, Enlightenment, Morality, Philosophy, Students, Teaching, University, University Funding
Pontificating about pontificating is a deplorable habit in any website; and the millionaire self-help “philosopher” Alain de Botton seems to be so thoroughly hated in literary circles that there may be little use in shovelling on another helping of dung; but following the brief, nightmarish peep at his ambitions for England’s universities which we were treated to earlier in the evening, I think that a few snorts of outrage are permissible. de Botton had been invited to deliver BBC Radio 4’s A Point of View – the Any Questions’ equivalent of a post-coital cigarette – and within his allotted ten minutes of airplay, and speaking as always in the calculatingly soothing tone of a doctor who is about to stick a needle in your arm, de Botton laid out his apocalyptic vision for English universities.
de Botton redefines the “new dark age” of reduced university funding as an opportunity. If academics now “blame” and “scorn” the government for ushering in “new age of philistinism,” then de Botton thinks that they have only themselves to blame, as “the way culture is currently taught in universities is a travesty of its real potential,” rendering those looming cuts “understandable, if not at all nice.” de Botton points out where everybody is going wrong:
we should look to novels and historical narratives to impart moral instruction and edification; to great paintings for suggestions about value; to philosophy to probe our anxieties and offer consolations. It should be the job of a university education to tease out the therapeutic and illuminative aspects of culture, so that we can emerge from a period of study as slightly less disturbed, selfish, unempathetic and blinkered human beings, who can be of greater benefit not only to the economy, but also to our friends, our children, and our spouses.
Speaking only for myself, I cannot recall being noticeably disturbed and selfish before I went to university, but we can only go forward with de Botton’s argument if we assume that most students, if not everybody, are emotionally incomplete or imbecilic. de Botton’s vision for new universities can only benefit from vagueness, but he unwisely ventures into further detail. He suggests that, “departments should be required to identify the problematic areas in people’s lives and to design courses that address them head on… there should be classes in… being alone, reconsidering work, improving relationships with children, reconnecting with nature and facing illness.” Universities should “offer up advice on how to chose a career or survive the end of a marriage, how to contain sexual impulses or cope with the news of a medical death sentence.” Presumably, there would be no need for exams in the new system: once the courses were over, the lecturers would simply throw open the doors and their enlightened graduates would pour out into the world to begin reconnecting with children and dying with contentment.
It seems that only Humanities graduates can become functional human beings, leaving an emotionally retarded underclass to run factories, build bridges, and further the economy. One may have assumed that the primary school is the institution best equipped to teach children about how to conduct themselves in society – and that this has the additional benefit of catering for the whole population – but de Botton insists that fulfilment can only really be picked up from adult books. But it depends very much on the right sort of books. de Botton first concedes that, “our universities may well be teaching us the right books, but too often they fail to ask direct questions of them,” but he then charges the current regime with being “fatefully in love with ambiguity, they trust in the absurd modernist doctrine that great art should have no moral content or desire to change its audience.”
When it comes to literature, however, then unfortunately Moby Dick has no obvious moral content; Philip Larkin cannot help you to choose a career; Henry James and Jean Genet would come to rather different conclusions on how to “contain sexual impulses,” and our literary tradition is rendered only interesting by its ironies, ambiguities, conflict, disagreement, and its sheer inability to come up with easy answers. Is Desdemona or Iago the most sympathetic character in Othello? Should Frederic Henry have bid Farewell to Arms? Is Ulysses a great novel or a disastrous mess? That students will never cease to debate such questions is the defining characteristic of a literary tradition which is intrinsically and thankfully intolerant of didacticism.
By the time that they reach university, students should be striving to reimagine the world, whilst their tutors should be helping them to find their voice. If the university “has precious little interest in teaching us any emotional or ethical life skills,” this is because it should be listening carefully and critically to its students rather than telling them what to think. At times, de Botton’s A Point of View sounds more fulsomely philistine than a whole army of rampaging Visigoths. He concludes with the line that, “Oprah Winfrey may not provide the deepest possible analysis of the human condition, but arguably in my view she asks many more of the right questions than the Humanities Professors at Oxford [incidentally, I think that de Botton went to Cambridge].” When a student beholds a great work of art, they should sense the dread and the beauty of soaring cathedrals, and once the truth of their own complete insignificance has faded, they should be desperate to contribute something of their own to creation. Leave therapy to the quacks.
Great. The more bloggers pile on de Buffoon, the better. He makes Ayn Rand look like Socrates.
Take a look at my carpet bombing of Alain, Philomoria, at http://spinoza1111.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/philomoria/ (“philomoria” is as far as I know my neologism: it means, I hope, the love of foolishness).
I am quite serious. Since the humanities is “everything” while science is “something”, while we can stand outside the sciences (they did not exist prior to about the 17th century) we can ask, coherently, what are science and math good for.
We cannot ask this of the humanities, since we all do some form of the humanities. Most of write and most of us listen to music, only few of us do math or conduct physics experiments.
It is in fact impossible for this reason to ask what the humanities are good-for. We can only ask if they are good.
The answer is obvious.
Note that at one point, de Button says that in a meritocracy “losers” can only blame themselves. Then he says success is a lottery. It cannot be both a meritocracy and a lotterycracy. A real philosopher would resolve this apparent contradiction.
I’m so glad everyone hates De Botton here too. He really is just about the worst thing about hte modern world. An idiot, a self-appointed bullshitter, someone who thinks he knows it all. I hear he doesn’t even write his own books, but pays for a servant to write them for him. He paid Cambridge University to give him a degree and in fact didn’t manage to finish his education because he had a nervous breakdown and had to be helped out by daddy at the priory. The great thing is that, as you say, everyone hates him. Everyone: Martin Amis, the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph, even us right-thinking folk. He has no friends, it won’t be long before he thinks the whole writing thing is nonsense. His latest contribution to the BBC (paid for by himself as a kind of advertorial) was especially stupid. We know what academia is for – for nothing, for itself – whereas he wants to make it for ‘something’. Who is he to tell me what academia is for. Academia is a good thing in itself andif a nasty little accountant like de Bum de Bum de Bum comes along and asks us to count every bean, let him jump off a cliff. God I hate the miserable little jew shit.
I suspect the above to be written in a spirit of mischief, but Alain de Botton does write his own books, he did not pay for his degree, he has not had a nervous breakdown, and he did not pay the BBC to broadcast Points of View. Everything else in the above is also untrue, or at least half-untrue. No comments here reflect the views of Tychy.
Your not helping your cause. Calm down. Take a deep breath, and re read.
My comments are strictly about what he writes, and what he writes is nonsense.
>> the millionaire self-help “philosopher” Alain de Botton seems to
>> be so thoroughly hated in literary circles that there may be little
>> use in shovelling on another helping of dung
Having read several of Alain De Botton’s books, and found them very
interesting, informative and entertaining, I cannot imagine what kind
of of a balanced or fair mind might say such a thing as above. I can
only imagine you folks have much more dung that you can handle or
shovel and maybe you should just eat it instead of subjecting others
to your silliness.
I did not search Google to find anything written or spoken by you lot.
>> the millionaire self-help “philosopher” Alain de Botton seems to
>> be so thoroughly hated in literary circles that there may be little
>> use in shovelling on another helping of dung
I hope this page is some kind of gag … you people are pathetic.
Hear hear Bruce. I agree. The literary circles you speak of are the Po Mo’s that still cling to our the staff rooms and corridors of our learning institutions and are freaking out – and rightly so – because it’s over, and there’s a growing feeling that , for the love of knowledge humanity and this beautiful ever evolving experiment we call civilization, there might be a better way to learn to think.
If you so personalize your beef with academia, then your programme becomes to replace the current learning authorities with different learning authorities who are presumably more qualified.
The Fascist delights in the term “pseudo-intellectual”. His presumption is that there is a “real”, more passionate, red-blooded form of thought which conveniently he represents.
He renarrates his ignorance as skepticism, and finds that which he doesn’t know automatically to be that which is not worthy of knowing, for to admit his lack of knowledge would be to admit limitation, and for authoritarian people, typically those with underdeveloped ego and super-ego, this cannot be done lest all fall into question, and they into chaos.
Comes now Alain de Botton, who reassures the anxious middlebrow that he’s OK…the problem with academia is a shadowy tribe of pettifogging pomos who use a lot of big words unknown to the man on the Clapham omnibus. We need only to (1) eliminate them and their programmes and (2) replace them, apparently in de Botton’s case with classes on how to stay married when you’d much rather not, and escape with some underage honey to a hotel in Blackpool after knocking over a chip shop.
Apparently, this can be done without money. We need only to wave a magic wand, or, like Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, sprinkle pixie dust over the shop.
Nor shall it touch the “public” schools lest Old Boys and Old Harrovians be discommoded; for note what these constant campaigns of mass destruction of intellect and hope do to the degrees of their unfortunate alumni.
They make schools like Bristol, or my own alma mater, Roosevelt University in Chicago, a joke and a byword…schools that when we attended them were bonafide institutions of higher learning.