Culture

State-recognised marriage evolves, and should embrace straight and gay – or perhaps be abolished. By Martin O’Reilly

By Donncha O’ Connell.   Academics exist professionally in universities and work within academic units, usually within one unit of primary affiliation like a Faculty, Department, School or Centre. Thus, after announcing that one is an academic, the reflexive, almost existentialist, response is: ‘What Department are you in?’ Immediately, one is defined by one’s departmental specialism, reflecting the organising principle of universities once memorably described as a series of independent sovereignties linked by a heating system. Universities have for some time embraced what Anthony T Kronman calls a ‘research ideal’, founded upon disciplinary specialisation having moved from a culture of ‘secular humanism’, which itself had replaced an ‘age of piety’ and the scholastic tradition. It is arguable that the embrace of the so-called research ideal has entailed an abandonment of scholarship or, at least, a diminution in status of individual scholarship that is not quantifiable as research. How many times have you read university policy documents with phrases like: ‘The University is committed to inter-disciplinary, collaborative research on an inter-institutional basis while respecting individual scholarly endeavour…going forward’. For ‘respect’ read ‘tolerate’ and note the unsubtle construction of a new norm understandable by reference to the eccentricity that it replaces…going forward! It could, of course, be argued that this ‘new’ research ideal involving collaboration across disciplines and between institutions is exactly what is needed to turn academics into higher functioning public intellectuals ranging freely across disciplines without frontiers, although no one would be so naive as to say this. To make such an assertion would miss the point of such research, as orchestrated through competitive funding bids, and would also miss the point of what it takes to make a public intellectual. In Ireland, third-level research funding initiatives have been preoccupied with establishing and building a research infrastructure and contributing to ‘the knowledge economy’ or ‘the smart economy’. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. In fact, it makes good business sense to blue-skies philanthropists and, perhaps, to hesitant state funders. However, there is an undoubted bias in favour of natural sciences and engineering of various kinds in such core funding drives that confirms and embeds a pre-existing weakening of the humanities, broadly understood, in the third-level sector. The implications of this for the intellectual life of a university are obvious. Irish universities and ITs have bought into an emphasis on added-value research – with all of the connotations of ‘excellence’, in the Orwellian sense, that this entails – leaving them open to the risk of becoming the R&D wing of the state. This is not as monopolistic as it sounds when one considers the emphasis on partnerships with industry, but that hardly lessens the cause for concern in terms of independence and the sharing of public benefits of such applied research. Education, at all levels, must be more than an instrument of state industrial policy. Universities have a moral purpose beyond the imperatives of flexibility and institutional survival. For those of us who work as academics in universities, it is vital to re-establish an open and pluralist appreciation of what it is to be a good academic. By that, I do not mean that what passes for good teaching should be patronised with awards, or that the happenstance of wider community benefits that leak out of universities should be branded or sold as commodifiable ‘civic engagement’. It should still be possible to be a good academic – and, therefore, a successful one – by inspiring others to learn through scholarship grounded in a genuine passion for one’s subject, whether broad or narrow. That should be the ‘key performance indicator’ and not whether, in a survey of opinions, nine out of ten student ‘customers’ who expressed a preference said your course met their expectations or that they liked you. It is harder to measure, in numerical terms, the success or failure of an academic according to this more open and pluralist set of requirements, but it is an infinitely more meaningful standard and, surprisingly, harder to manipulate than what passes for performance evaluation now. Restructuring universities: ‘smaller numbers of larger units’ Any individual who served a period as dean during the recent period of university restructuring, and thus bears a commensurate level of emotional scars (visible only to other deans!), probably sympathises and agrees with the desire to make academic units more manageable and more connected to an agreed university mission. However, there are some who remain unconvinced that this can be achieved by melding barely cognate units. The other reason put forward in favour of mergers was that levels of inter-disciplinary academic activity would increase. This seems both fanciful and disingenuous, especially in the cases of Law and Commerce. Most universities opted for ‘melding’ Law and Commerce. Law, my own area,  is an ancient discipline that draws on and is open to other disciplines. It can be intellectually rich and is, undoubtedly, a source of monetary riches to universities and other institutions offering law programmes. It also attracts students who are often as animated by the desire to be rich as the desire to do justice. (In this it differs little from vocations like Medicine or Dentistry where the opportunities for doing justice are obviously weaker!). In a world where knowledge is (allegedly) power, legal knowledge can also be a ticket to power—the ideal of ‘a government of laws and not of men’ permitting distinct advantages or privileges to ‘legal men’ – a most apposite observation in the case of the US. In fairness to legal academics, they are no strangers to the public square, but it does not follow that they are more likely than other academics to be public intellectuals, despite the utility of their discipline and its broad relevance to public affairs. The usual role for a legal academic commentator, whether in the written or broadcast media, is to explain or comment upon the outcome of a case or some legislative proposal. In the US this can earn one minor celebrity status depending on how ‘colourful’

The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry by Edward Clarke. Review by Frank Armstrong. Few of us can recite a poem in its entirety. Perhaps this no longer matters as even an infant can now find whatever it was on YouTube. Yet many of the outstanding technological advances humanity has made only seem to increase stress levels, generate inequality and cause environmental degradation. What is the antidote? Is it possible that close engagement with Romantic poetry can bring us from the brink of meltdown? Edward Clarke, the author of ‘The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry’, believes so. In recent times many in the West have been drawn to the non-dogmatic spiritual traditions of the East from Buddhism to yoga as they search for tranquillity and deep meaning. But Clarke suggests that we “we have our own traditions and mysteries, our own ways of taking hold of breath” that can be found in our inherited poetry. He argues that “by reciting poems and remembering them, we find that we have been provided with narrative exercises sufficient to apprehend that we are greater than we know”. Clarke writes of how he continues to draw inspiration from a passage from Milan Kundera’s novel ‘Slowness’. Kundera enquires in one powerful passage: ‘Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence in a metaphor: ‘They are gazing at God’s windows’. A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks”. Clarke makes bold claims on behalf of his poetic ideal: “Swearing by capitalism, democracy, reason and science, we are all the while cheerfully ignorant about supernatural powers that hide themselves in great poetry”.  Essentially Clarke holds a neo-Platonic, pre-Enlightenment worldview, much like that of most of the poets he adulates including Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Yeats. Unlike most critics Clarke is unabashed at the suggestion that great poetry engages with supernatural forces: “I contend that the greatest poetry can make us apprehend that God, the centre of religious celebration, whatever we call that nothingness or darkness, incomprehensible and vast in its own being, is a force within man”. Clarke’s deep engagement has brought him to an explicit belief in the supernatural. He poses the question: “If a work makes us believe in fairies, even temporarily, do they thus come into existence within that work whenever it is read with the most believing mind, however strange that seems?” The author is unrepentant in response to an accusation from one critic of “spiritual literalism” in his first book. He says: “I will persist in what many critical contemporaries see as a folly because the older poetry calls for it (such is my piety)”. Surely Clarke cannot be faulted for giving poetry a neo-Platonic reading considering the poets he parses would have approved of it rather than the sociological or deconstructive approach now favoured in academic institutions? Clarke is wary of a melancholic trend in modern poetry. He argues that the worst kind of poetry is confessional. He identifies Sylvia Plath among a raft of poets who he says “are depressingly limited and dangerously egotistical poets”. Clarke insists that poetry should seek to answer eternal questions and eschew self-indulgence. William Wordsworth’s poetry encapsulates this tension between a Romantic poetry searching for a ‘great beyond’ and the self-referential poetry he holds in contempt: “Wordsworth worries me because he becomes so consumed by the story of his life, ‘The Prelude’, so obsessed with what comes before, that he neglects to develop his capacity to look after, his ‘capacity of thee’, or that which comes to us from the future”. Clarke identifies historical episodes when pre-modern ideas encounter industrial civilisation as propitious for poetic invention and the other-worldly forms that inhabit such verse. He claims: “Supernatural forms have a habit of entering a country’s literature when its oral culture is dying out and the population becomes more urban and sceptical. In England, genii have flocked to our literature from the sixteenth century onwards. When Yeats was recording the last vestiges of ancient tradition in Ireland during the nineteenth century, the fairies began to find a new home in his verse”. Clarke endorses the revolutionary ideas of William Blake who favoured a sacramental poetry, and a universal form of religion: “The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nation’s different reception of the Poetic Genius, which is everywhere call’d the Spirit of Prophecy…   As all men are alike, tho’ infinitely various; so all Religions: and as all similars have one source the True Man is the source, he being the Poetic Genius”. There is a clear divergence between Clarke’s approach and that of one of the leading Modernist poets and critics of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot. As a devout Christian Eliot rejected what he regarded as the paganism of Romantic poetry. Clarke claims that: “Eliot’s major problem with this book would have been due to his critical position as a Christian”. But Eliot’s devotion led him ultimately to admit that: “The poetry does not matter”. Clarke is convinced that: “Poetry does matter because it opens paths to self-knowledge by acknowledging indirectly and formally that which I had better call ‘The bright eternal Self that is everywhere’; ‘that is immortality, that is Spirit, that is all”. This divergence between Christianity and older form of religiosity is identified by the anthropologist Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2006). She argues that “today’s ‘faiths’ are often pallid affairs – only by virtue of the very fact

Too long under strategic review by administrators for any good it does

Of babies, cadences and death

Though theorists champion it as a model, Barcelona’s Las Agencias was a covered-up disaster

  Stop Feeding Your Cancer: One Doctor’s Journey Dr John Kelly Pentheum, 2014 $13.99   Review by Frank Armstrong A documentary called ‘Cowspiracy’ is currently doing the social-media rounds. In time it could have an influence comparable to Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ as the devastating impact of animal agriculture and fishing is laid bare. ‘Cowspiracy’ takes aim at how prominent environmental organisations, including Greenpeace, fail to bring this number one cause of climate change and biodiversity loss to the public’s attention. The sources of funding for environmental organisations are also questioned and the powerful reach of the animal agriculture industries highlighted. Another Cowspiracy seems to operate in the medical community where unwillingness to engage effectively with the crucial importance of diet, especially the observed benefits of plant-based approaches in terms of longevity and incidence of pathology is apparent. A host of epidemiological studies, notably the Oxford Vegetarian Study in 1999, have shown that those on plant-based or largely plant-based diets live longer and have lower disease risk including of cancer. Yet, despite this being well established in the peer-reviewed literature, there are few peer-reviewed studies on the link between cancer and diet. In the absence of hard evidence those who advocate  plant-based nutrition as a form of treatment are dismissed as charlatans. It’s a scenario that suits the pharmaceutical industry that funds most research. Recently John Kelly a Dublin-based general practitioner of long-standing was inspired by T Colin Campbell’s ‘The China Study’ to take matters into his own hands and encourage cancer patients to adopt plant-based diets. He developed an informal study of cancer patients who he persuaded to adopt that diet, and has just written a book about it. He claims: “Rigorous adherence to the diet showed extraordinary results; those who lapsed suffered relapses and declined in health”. Kelly will be criticised for failing to incorporate peer review in his methodology, leaving him and his work open to the imputation of cherry-picking data for ideological reasons.  But there is no indication that Kelly is an ethical vegan using the false promise of long life to persuade people to stop killing animals. Indeed, at one point he suggests that eating fish does not have the same carcinogenic effect as consuming meat, dairy and eggs. Moreover Campbell himself pointedly avoids describing himself as a ‘vegan’ preferring instead to advocate a “whole food, plant-based approach”. Campbell used animals for laboratory experiments which Kelly refers to in passing, without comment. Indeed the data which Kelly finds so compelling are derived from trials conducted by Campbell using laboratory rats, in which two groups were infected with cancer. The first group was given a diet comprising 20% animal protein. They all promptly died. But the second group was given a diet of only 5% animal protein, and all survived. Campbell performed these experiments after observing a lower survival rate among affluent human cancer patients who had diets high in animal products compared to their impoverished peers, in the Phillipines. In the laboratory Campbell also found that vegetable proteins did not promote cancer, even when eaten in very large amounts. Kelly might also have engaged with a greater range of research in the field, notably a recent study by Dean Ornish showing that the growth in the number of prostate cancer cells was related to the consumption of animal products. He could also have explored criticisms of the ‘China Study’. For his own cancer patients Kelly found that “rigorous adherence to the diet showed extraordinary results; those who lapsed suffered relapses and declined in health”. Some patients found the conversion too difficult, and tragically died. He did though discover that it did not have a beneficial effect on cancer of the pancreas for reasons he explores. Surprisingly, according to Kelly: “The main obstacle to patients given the diet on trial is the fact that no support has been forthcoming from the cancer specialists”. Worryingly he notes: “When patients mentioned the fact that they are considering the diet to their specialist they are routinely told that they are wasting their time”. Kelly attempted to bring the contents of the book and his own research to the attention of specialists but was rebuffed. He argues that: “The minds of cancer specialists were so cluttered with their pharmaceutical and surgical obligations that they were unable to accommodate critical revisionary thinking”. He also acknowledges that “Persuading patients suffering from cancer to eliminate animal protein from their food intake is especially problematic in Western countries, where dairy and meat are very much a part of the diet”. He admits to a paradox where “the fact that our favourite food is also the favourite food of cancer cells doesn’t compute”. On the other hand he also found that many of his patients were perfectly happy with the new regimen. This coheres with Campbell observation that over time an individual’s taste will change after adopting a 100% plant-based diet. But Kelly still sees a place for current cancer treatments. He writes: “When my patients query the value of medication in a general sense I always remind them of the time-tested benefits of sound pharmacology”. Of course if the state medical authorities accepted the argument that a whole-food, plant-based diet is indeed the best healthcare policy this would have huge repercussions for the powerful agricultural lobby. But Kelly warns Simon Coveney et al: “change happens whether one likes it or not; so, perhaps far better to be driving change than burying one’s head in the ground like the proverbial ignorant ostrich”. Irish agriculture may be producing increasingly obsolete foodstuffs for sale in affluent, educated countries that will be the first to jettison them. Recently the huge American healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente adumbrated that: “Physicians should consider recommending a plant-based diet to all their patients”. The Cowspiracy attests to the difficulty for individuals even those in the healthcare or environmental sectors to make profound dietary change. Until individuals empathise with the pain and suffering of other animals this may well be insurmountable. History