Benjamin Hourigan

More like a leaking reactor than a liberal arts faculty – Miranda Devine – www.smh.com.au

Readers of Miranda Devine’s piece likening Sydney University’s Faculty of Arts to a “leaking nuclear reactor” may wonder whether its indoctrination of students with leftist propaganda and postmodernist nonsense is an isolated phenomenon. The answer is no.

For the curious, here’s a list of things I would have learned from the Cultural Studies program at the University of Melbourne, had I not read more widely than my studies required:

• Knowledge does not describe the world: it is only a trick the powerful play on those they oppress. This being the case, it is more important that research expresses the appropriate politics and sentiment (determined not by yourself, but by your peers and superiors) than that it is carefully reasoned and backed by evidence.
• Human action is not determined by the individual will, but by external forces. This means that no-one is responsible for their failures, all of which are attributed to some kind of system, like patriarchy, colonialism, or, most likely, capitalism. (Asserting that people do bear responsibility for their own actions is condemned as “voluntarism.”)
• The less sense a piece of writing makes, the more likely it is to be a work of genius that is worthy of your reverence, and from which you should draw quotations to substitute for your own opinions in writing and in conversation.
• To be “subversive” and to reject, out of hand, any element of our present society, is always virtuous, independent of whether your criticism is reasonable and whether or not you propose any viable alternatives.
• If you don’t believe all of the above, you are probably some kind of right wing lunatic.

Devine is right to quote David Stove describing a faculty that harbours such beliefs as being actively dangerous. Teaching students that knowledge cannot be objective and that they are not responsible for their actions is liable to diminish their ability to understand the world and to use that understanding to shape their world and achieve their goals. It is that ability which created our civilisation, its culture, and its technology. Without it we are no better than animals.

The Age: News of the Decade.

Poor Bill Clinton! Looks like all the controversy surrounding his affair with Monica Lewinsky nearly ended his pregnancy. That sure is News of the Decade. So, at least, thinks Melbourne’s broadsheet newspaper, The Age.

I’m wondering now, though, since his pregnancy didn’t end, what happened to the baby? Was it a boy or a girl? Did he adopt it out? Maybe he abandoned it in a hospital waiting room.

Thanks to Tim Wilson for telling me about this.

Update 17 September 2006: After having lived in Japan for eight months and returned to Australia, I’d now feel that there is something to celebrate about being Australian. Feeling affection for your country doesn’t have to be jingoistic. You can have a quiet sense of appreciation of the beauty of a place, of your family heritage, of the personal connections that that place made for you. That’s healthy, and it’s healthy to want to protect the things you love about your country. But nationalism can go too far, and that’s what inspired this post.

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For the sake of all that is holy and great about the human spirit, don’t celebrate!

Why not, even though the Australian Government and loads of foolish nationalists would love you to? Because if you’re an Australian citizen, the government stole your money (through taxation) to pay for celebrations that are essentially on its own behalf. Because if you live in the city, an ‘Australian’ identity binds you to rural hicks who vote for the National Party, believe in god, and think homosexual people are evil, and if you’re a rural hick, it binds you to gay urban sophisticates who eat capers and hate god. And because national governments are the greatest murderers in history.

So, on this Australia Day, why not fly a pirate flag instead, and celebrate the pirate spirit, of brotherhood that transcends national borders, and of self-determination and rebellion.

Philip Pullman. 1997. The Subtle Knife. London: Point. 341pp.

This is the second of three volumes in Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, and continues the story from Northern Lights (known in the US as The Golden Compass, of which I wrote, in my own notes, on 13 November 2005:

It took me a little while to read this, because my interest in it waxed and waned. It is, to me, at its best when meditating on the nature of the soul, or of animal intuition (as in the scene where Iorek Byrnison asks Lyra to try and trick her), or on innocence and sin. But the intervals between these meditations were too long to sustain my unbroken interest in the middle of a life filled with many distractions. The adventure story parts of the book, while well told and well paced, interested me the least, and formed its bulk. The end speaks of myseries to come and entices me to read on, but I may wait a while. At its best this book is excellent, at its worst it is merely good. It compares favourably to the Harry Potter books in stylistic terms, but is seldom quite as gripping. Its subject matter, however, is more mature, and its philosophy more considered. 6.5/10

The adventure elements of The Subtle Knife manage to avoid the lack of momentum sometimes felt when reading its predecessor. Where Northern Lights focussed solely on Lyra’s quest to rescue her friend Roger from the Oblation Board, its sequel switches between multiple protagonists as they pursue their goals through the parallel worlds opened to them by Lord Asriel at Northern Lights’ end. While some readers may find it irritating to be forcibly wrenched away from one engrossing plotline to another one whose appeal is yet unproven, the shifts prevent any one character’s story from becoming boring.

The Subtle Knife is also heavier on the philosophical and theological discursions that were so satisfying in Northern Lights, benefiting from having the framework for those discursions already laid down. It also reveals the main goal of the heroes’ activities: to aid Lord Asriel in his attempt to destroy God. Fully understanding how Dust, angels, and even the basic concepts of good and evil fit together in this context probably requires at least some knowledge of (at least) the Bible, Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, and Paradise Lost, but those without such a grounding might get away with having played the Japanese RPGs Xenogears and Dragon Quest/Warrior VII, both of which involve battles against God.

Near the end of the book, Stanislaus Grumman says:

There are two great powers …and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn from one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit. (335)

He and all of the books’ other protagonists are on the side of knowledge and wisdom, against God (referred to as the Authority) and the Church (the Magisterium). Pullman is evidently believes that theistic religions have a solely negative influence on human society, and as a committed anti-theist myself, I approve heartily. When we consider how an earlier classic of children’s literature, The Chronicles of Narnia, was, like the rest of C.S. Lewis’ output, an (in this case veiled) exercise in Catholic apologetics, it’s clear that we’ve come a long way forward.

It’s surprising that given all the Christian complaints about Harry Potter driving children to witchcraft, that the blatantly anti-Christian message in His Dark Materials hasn’t received some public criticism. It’s a shame, because Pullman’s books could do with a little of that kind of backhanded promotion.

Though the evangelical nutcases who criticise Harry Potter evidently haven’t noticed (well, actually, there are some Christian-themed reviews of Pullman’s series on Amazon), the later books in that series are cut from the same thematic cloth as His Dark Materials, given that both series include the message that it is good and right to rebel against corrupt authorities, be they governments, schoolteachers, or tyrannical gods. Given that many parents and teachers are among “those who want us to obey and be humble and submit” (355), they may not be keen on recommending that children read this book, but every child should (and adults would be well advised to, as well). It will help readers to learn to live their lives for themselves, and comfort those who already have. 9/10

BBC NEWS | Health | Intellect linked to suicide risk

The BBC today reports that intelligent young men are less likely to commit suicide than stupid young men. Well, that’s natural selection for you. May the fittest survive!

It’s time to make this site serve one of the purposes it was designed for: to host my academic papers on videogames. The first release is a paper that’s been in the works for a long time. It’s based on the thesis I wrote for my Honours year in Asian Studies in 2001. Back then it was called “Representations of Social Disintegration and Reintegration in Final Fantasy 6, 7 & 8.”

Today’s version is called “You Need Love and Friendship For This Mission!: Final Fantasy VI, VII and VIII in social and generic context.” The snappy part of the title is a quote from Final Fantasy VIII.

Explained simply, the paper hypothesises that the stories those videogames tell about troubled youth finding their place in the world in the course of saving it from destruction are constructed to, in a very Japanese way, socialise Japanese youth who were, in the mid-1990s, felt by their elders to be running off the rails. On the way to that point, the paper does some very academic conceptualisation that I probably wouldn’t have gone into if it weren’t, currently, my profession.

I originally submitted a revised version of it to Matthew-Joseph Wolf-Meyer and Davin Heckman (of the online journal Reconstruction) for inclusion in a book back in September 2002, and after passing through the hands of many publishers, the collection still hasn’t made it into print. The last changes were made to this version in September 2004, but Matt and Davin wanted a Word document, so I had to spend a few hours tonight turning it into beautiful LaTeX.

I hope you enjoy the paper, and I look forward to (maybe) receiving some comments. Later on, I’ll be posting the rougher but more detailed thesis that it was based on.

Not that this information is of public interest, but since no-one is reading my blog yet, I might as well mention that the aforementioned “best friend Annette” (see Taxnami) was yesterday given an articled clerkship at Brian Ward & Partners, which is a commercial law firm in Melbourne. Congratulations, you rich lawyer, you!

My best friend, Annette, a recent graduate of Monash University, today forwarded me an email sent out on behalf of her Vice-chancellor on Tuesday. Here’s some of it:

The university has established an appeal to help the Monash community donate money to those affected by the tsunami. Professor Richard Larkins has started the appeal with a $10,000 donation from the Vice-Chancellor’s Fund.

Under the Monash University Tsunami Disaster Appeal donors can elect one
of the following four charities as recipients of their donation:

• Australian Red Cross Asian Quake and Tsunamis Appeal
• World Vision
• Plan Australia
• UNICEF

“At least at Monash you get given a choice as to whether or not you want to
donate!” she wrote. Well, there wasn’t any choice about the $10,000 donated from the Vice-chancellor’s fund, but at least it wasn’t the $250,000 given by the University of Melbourne.

Here’s an email I wrote to the Vice-chancellor’s office on 12 January 2005:

I wish to express my disapproval of the $250,000 aid package offered by the University to victims of the South-East Asian tsunami, as described in the recent email from the Vice-Chancellor. This is a substantial sum of money and it is, in my view, the university’s duty to use this money for the benefit of its staff and students, and not for other causes, however worthy.

On the other hand, I approve of the offers of non-monetary assistance. I also welcome the opportunity for staff to donate to the relief effort through salary deductions, especially if this reduces their taxable income. This is, however, a voluntary donation, unlike the $250,000 pledged by the university itself. I view this large donation as a form of taxation on the university community, much like the $1bn offered by the Australian Government.

Both the University and the Australian Government have exceeded their legitimate roles by donating money to the tsunami relief effort, money that should instead have been used for the benefit of their stakeholders. The success of private institutions in raising money for tsunami relief shows that survivors can rely for assistance on voluntary donations from charitable individuals. It is with such individuals that the provision of monetary aid should begin and end.

Enough said.

This is, hopefully, a permanent replacement for a site I used to have posted in 2004, when I was a lowly dial-up subscriber with 10 megabytes of webspace. Now, however, I have broadband and a proper webhosting account.

So, in addition to the old combination of academic papers and resumé, now I can use the web to publish selections from my very large mental collection of facts and opinions. They range over most subjects, but cluster around my main personal and professional interests: politics, philosophy, books and videogames. Subscribe to the RSS feed, and join me on the path that leads into the future.