The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

In fairness to Professor Grayling, this post could be written about most British academics. I only single him out because I have been reading one of his books,  “The Meaning of Things.” I read it in response to his rebuke that I had judged him harshly on too little data. He is, alas, neither better nor worse than the average British academic.

Consider, for example, Roger Scruton’s observations based on an academic career partly at the same college as Grayling;

By 1971, when I moved from Cambridge to a permanent
lectureship at Birkbeck College, London, I had become a conservative.
So far as I could discover there was only one other conservative at
Birkbeck, and
that was Nunzia—Maria Annunziata—the Neapolitan lady
who served meals in the Senior Common Room and who cocked a snook
at the lecturers by plastering her counter with kitschy photos of
the Pope.

One of those lecturers, towards whom Nunzia conceived a
particular antipathy, was Eric Hobsbawm, the lionized historian of the
Industrial Revolution, whose Marxist vision of our country is now the
orthodoxy taught in British schools. Hobsbawm came as a refugee to
Britain, bringing with him the Marxist commitment and Communist
Party membership that he retained until he could retain it no longer—the
Party, to his chagrin, having dissolved itself in embarrassment at the lies
that could no longer be repeated. No doubt in recognition of this heroic
career, Hobsbawm was rewarded, at Mr. Blair’s behest , with the second
highest award that the Queen can bestow—that of “Companion of
Honour.” This little story is of enormous significance to a British
conservative. For it is a symptom and a symbol of what has happened to
our intellectual life since the Sixties. We should ponder the
extraordinary
fact that Oxford University, which granted an honorary degree to Bill
Clinton on the grounds that he had once hung around its precincts,
refused the same honour to Margaret Thatcher, its most distinguished
post-war graduate and Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. We should
ponder some of the other recipients of honorary degrees from British
academic institutions—Robert Mugabe, for example, or the late
Mrs. Ceausescu—or count (on the fingers of one hand) the number
of conservatives who are elected to the British Academy.

While Grayling is intelligent and articulate the abiding impression left by his book is that he is unremarkable in his thinking. His opinions are as groomed as his flowing locks. There is no cliché out of place. Had he spent his life shaping his views to qualify as one of “the Great and the Good” of our Establishment, this is precisely where he would have arrived. One can predict his view on almost any given subject without effort.

To be fair, let’s note the exceptions. I have already acknowledged that he has been laudably robust in opposing New Labour’s authoritarianism. He goes rather further than the average academic secularist in his hostility to religion. I don’t fault his opinions
on the latter, although I am not nearly as contemptuous of my fellow-men who
feel the need for its comforts.

In other respects, however, Grayling is a
cookie-cutter British academic; a bog-standard inhabitant of the SCR.
Perhaps that – combined with his air of patrician condescension when I
heard him speak at my daughter’s school – is why he irritates me so
much.

The ideas with which men and women like him have poisoned our nation in
recent decades are summarised elegantly, arrogantly and without a
scintilla of doubt in this slim volume. I have to say I admire the
writing. I wish his undoubted skills were more often better deployed.
The Devil always did employ the best musicians.

He has divided the book into three sections. Part I is entitled
“Virtues & Attributes”, Part II, “Foes & Fallacies” and Part
III “Amenities & Goods”.  Here’s an example of how predictable he
is. Under which heading would you expect to find “Nationalism”,
“Capitalism” and “Christianity?” I am sure you will guess correctly.

Anyone with exposure to British academia would expect him to attack
the economic system which sustains him as a paid thinker. Of course
Communist societies paid their intellectuals too, but it takes a
capitalist nation to pay the salaries of its enemies. I am happy to pay
taxes to sustain the likes of  Grayling, but he will must forgive some
irritation when he bites my hand as I pass him his daily bread.
Especially when, as Scruton points out, I do not even get a
gladiatorial contest with intellectual opponents for my money.

No-one would be surprised that a British academic singles out for
derision the religion whose values shaped British society. I am an
atheist myself. I think that, psychologically, all atheists are “a-” a
particular “theism.”  An atheist in a Christian country grows up in a
culture shaped by Christian thought and is -in a sense – trapped in
reaction to Christianity. Grayling’s book rather supports this thesis.
True, his “foes and fallacies” include “Faith,” “Miracles,” and
“Prophecy,” which are not specific to one religion but he reserves a
special chapter for “Christianity.” Astonishingly (given the
competition it faces from Islam) he seems to regard it as
particularly sanguinary, misogynist and sex-obsessed.

Most of all one would expect any British academic to deride the idea
that people should love their nation. After all, all the most famous
Cold War traitors were recruited and nurtured in an academia that
seemed barely able to restrain itself from treachery. Here, from his
essay on “Betrayal” is a sample;

Oddly, patriotism is most virulent
[my emphasis] in those countries which do the least for their citizens
in the provision of welfare – the United States and China, for
instance.

Note the assumption that, in a logical world, citizens would be loyal to their countries in direct proportion to the provision of "welfare." It is the assumption of our current Government, which consistently attempts to bribe supposedly biddable groups. Note also his choice of the word “virulent” [definition: "(of a disease or poison) extremely
severe or harmful in its effects"]. It is no accident, as a subsequent
passage clarifies;

Betrayal of a person is far
worse than betrayal of a country. To a reflective mind the latter is
anyway an odd notion; a “country” or “nation” is an abstraction, almost
invariably the product of war or dispossession of someone else.

Not
for Professor Grayling the notion of nation as super-extended family. It is every bit as "odd" for us to favour the people chance deals us
randomly as parents or siblings. Yet good things stem from our doing
so. There is also something that just feels right about it – most of the
time.

Without belittling in any way those who bring up children well in other ways, few disagree that growing up in a family is good for a child. For a family to provide
nurture and security, its members must overcome their rationality and love each other illogically. Nature lends them a
hand to do so. In the presence of our DNA, even the worst of
us (if not a British intellectual) tends to be more protective than not.

For a nation to provide the equivalent on a larger
scale, its members must – to some extent – do likewise. As
nations have evolved over centuries, developing their shared
languages and cultures, this is not so difficult (if you are not a
British intellectual). As adjustments have been made over centuries, with outcasts from one nation seeking refuge with a more
sympathetic one, it has arguably become easier to be loyal (if you
are not a British intellectual).

In ridiculing such notions, men like Grayling hack away at the bonds
that make society work. The anti-social behaviour which is now such a
scourge is the logical consequence. For much of the last hundred years, Leftist intellectuals have
attacked traditional loyalties to make way for new ones. They wanted us to be loyal to the Party, to the State or to the international
proletariat. All constructs no less artificial than
“country,” or "nation.” Now that these constructs have been exposed as largely ridiculous in
the collapse of Communism; now that all the lies we were told
about life in the various “workers’ paradises” have been exposed to History’s derision, it seems our leftists continue only from a kind of
malicious habit. If we will not be loyal to their discredited
constructs, we shall be loyal – they hope – to nothing.

Grayling writes
eloquently of morality, of society of community but he despises all forces that, historically, have promoted morality and held societies
and communities together. He offers no alternative but some kind of vague "communitarianism" coupled with the now-traditional antipathy to "racism", "sexism", "homophobia", and "speciesism". In an ideal world, perhaps we would all study philosophy and arrive
independently at a moral view of the world. It seems
fairly unlikely, frankly, that our ASBO’d youths will do so. Their
grandfathers were no better than them but they were more subject to the bonds of nation, community, family and religion. Those who seek to cut what little remains of those bonds had better, if responsible,
have some replacement in mind that will be attractive to ordinary folk.