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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
4 6 April 2017
Being civilised is not about wealth,
social status, formal education,
manners or taste but about an
obsession with the Truth
by David Langwallner
Ask anyone from the Irish
government’s front bench
to read 'The Brothers
Karamazov' or 'Ulysses'
and see how they would
fare. Force them to do so
at gun point.
Beauty is
Education
is Truth
I
N CERTAIN circles it is still a compliment to say some-
one is civilised. Or for that matter a lady or a
gentleman. Mostly, however the expressions are
now notable for class undertones as if to be a gen-
tleman was to be Bertie Wooster, to be a lady a
badge of subservience. The word has been corrupted
which is a pity for it is critically needed in dangerous
times.
So, for example, being civilised is certainly not a ques-
tion of wealth or social status. Look at the boorish
barbarians, Mr Trump and his entourage, or the Tory
Brexiteers, or indeed significant tranches of the Fine
Gael middle class in Ireland. The plummy, clubbable bar-
rister may consider justice a mere game.
Being civilised is not intrinsically related to education,
at least to formal education. Increasingly the education
system is imparting in people narrow
technocratic skills useful for employa-
bility but no taste, no ethics, no
sociability, nothing particularly
civilised.
We are breeding a generation of rote
learner’s not critical thinkers. A new age
of conformity where obedience to
authority for the sake of it is necessary
for success. Moreover, within the col-
lege structure promotion and preferment
are now linked to an increasingly con-
trolled discourse where ideas that cut
across the norm that suit the vested interests of the
status quo - ideas that have even a tinge of leftism or
anti-authoritarianism, are penalised. It need not be
stressed that. The paradigm of discourse is neo-liberal-
ism and knee-jerk conservatism which morphs very
easily into indulgence of fascism, the antithesis of
civilisation.
Certainly education through wide-ranging reading is
part of being civilised. I do not trust decision-makers
who do not read literature and history for pleasure or or
have some smattering of philosophy (totally absent in
Ireland) and social theory. Musical appreciation too is a
requisite. It seems to me that those seeking positions of
civic responsibility who have functions to perform but
do not have a sufficiently wide framework of reference
or indeed cultivation to come to nuanced and balanced
decisions should be disqualified from appointment in
the first place.
Of course it is a lot to ask as we are living in a frenetic
and frantic world where many of us are increasingly in
survival mode. What time have we for reading or for that
matter the opera - yet not to read at all seems to me an
abnegation of responsibility. Make the time. And when
I mean reading I do not mean scanning a newspaper or
surfing the internet. I mean reading a book.
Ask anyone from the Irish government’s front bench
of Ireland to read 'The Brothers Karamazov' or 'Ulysses'
and see how they would fare. Force them to do so at gun
point.
A rather thuggish senior counsel once sought to prig
-
gishly reprimand me for reading. People become
interested in other things such as women he intimated,
boorishly, studdishly.
In another Russian novel 'Fathers and Sons' by Turge
-
nev the effete aristocrat Pavel Petrovich is ridiculed by
the new breed of nihilistic proto-Bolshevik intellectuals.
Being civilised becomes a crucial sign of weakness or
opportunity to the unscrupulous and the cynical. They
see it as a softening and a weakness and in our increas
-
ingly Social Darwinist world as an opportunity to
eliminate or destroy.
Of course the employment of letters and irony unset
-
tles those who do not have it. Depth and sophistication
Gentleman
OPINION
April 2017 4 7
are very dangerous to those whose modus operandi is
calumny and simplification. The ambiguity and subtlety
of language is a powerful weapon. Even Enda Kenny
seems to know this. The Pen, properly used at least, if
not mightier than, is always a useful counterweight to,
the Sword.
Being civilised also does not necessarily mean having
taste or good manners. Heydrich played Schubert at the
Wannsee conference as he ordered the mass liquidation
of the Jews. My late friend Judge Hardiman ate like a hun-
gover Cockney ne’erdowell in a greasy spoon café yet he
was one of the more civilised individuals I have met.
But Hardiman was a master of the truth. One need only
read his judgments on our delinquent tribunals and
constabulary.
One of the fruits of being civilised is an affinity with,
indeed a quest for, the truth. I’ll hang my def-
inition on that.
The Zeitgeist phrase is the non-
sense, ‘post-Truth’. Of course
Truth is transcendent. For facts
it is a matter of empiricism, of
evidence, of induction. For
opinions it is not so clear but
attitudes that converge on
decency, that maximise, or
optimise, freedom and
equality, are best.
It’s good to be robust and
unambiguous in disparaging
nonsense in facts, and intoler
-
ance in opinions. Climate-scepticism
and Trumpism/the Alt-Right are exem-
plars. They deserve no credit.
A proper zeal for the truth is the likes of Chomsky’s
attitude to structuralism and post-structuralism which
he manifests with overarching clarity:
“It's entirely possible that I'm simply missing some
-
thing, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to
understand the profundities that have been unearthed
in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their
followers. I'm perfectly open-minded about it, and have
been for years, when similar charges have been made
-- but without any answer to my questions. Again, they
are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an
answer: if I'm missing something, then show me what it
is, in terms I can understand. Of course, if it's all beyond
my comprehension, which is possible, then I'm just a
lost cause, and will be compelled to keep to things I do
seem to be able to understand, and keep to association
with the kinds of people who also seem to be interested
in them and seem to understand them (which I'm per-
fectly happy to do, having no interest, now or ever, in
the sectors of the intellectual culture that engage in
these things, but apparently little else).
Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm
missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just inca-
pable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant
that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain
suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots
of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates
over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fer
-
mat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently.
But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two
things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to
explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they
can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm inter-
ested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to
understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva,
etc. -- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who
was somewhat different from the rest -- write things
that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold:
no one who says they do understand can explain it to
me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome
my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a)
some new advance in intellectual life has been made,
perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has cre-
ated a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory,
topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't
spell it out”.
In other words it is nonsense but non
-
sense that has had a degrading effect
on our culture. I have always felt
that the appeal of post-modern-
ism and structuralism is also an
appeal to the half-educated or
worse still those who desire to
say fashionable things at
talks or dinner parties in
Hampstead, Dartry – or indeed
Vinohrady.
The first point to note about
the post-modernists’ nonsense is
that it has encouraged a distrust of
the truth and an atmosphere of loose-
ness and imprecision where arguments
are accorded even and equal weight even if
there is nothing of substance to say. Since all views are
equally valid all views should be aired and taken equally
seriously”. Wittgenstein dealt with such nonsense on
stilts in the most elegant, and scathing, terms: “Whereof
one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”.
Otherwise we are only one short step to the intellec
-
tual delinquency that, being difficult to ascertain
precisely, the Truth is contestable, that it should be bal-
anced. This nonsense is creeping into our culture, our
media, our law courts and in my view is a form of
brainwashing.
The discourse has been degraded to such a pro-
nounced and profound sense that much of our media is
consumed by at best ideological representations of the
truth and at worst utter nonsense in a misplaced quest
for balance or pandering to vested interests. News pro
-
grammes have become a form of popular entertainment
rather than serious analysis. Rarely is a lie nailed. Too
often it is merely counterbalanced with the Truth. The
lack of seriousness of the online world has infected the
media. Clickbait became a word and then an
imperative.
To pre-empt and deconstruct incipient fascism we
need education leading to Truth. Education is Beauty,
is Truth.
David Langwallner is a graduate of Harvard and
The London School of Economics and Professor of Law
at The Anglo American University Prague.
Depth and
sophistication are
very dangerous
to those whose
modus operandi
is calumny and
simplification.
The ambiguity
and subtlety of
language is a
powerful weapon.
