Benjamin Hourigan

James Franklin, Corrupting the Youth: A history of philosophy in Australia (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2003), 465pp. ★★★ (3 stars)

This lively and opinionated history of philosophy in Australia is a good read, but lacks overall structure.

This book has more of a personal intellectual story to it than most, for me. In late 2004 I was decisively turning my back on the academic post’isms and looking for an alternative intellectual framework that I could base meaningful, readable research on. I’d been reading Keith Windschuttle’s The Killing of History, one of the Australian books written against post-ist nonsense, and decided to write to Windschuttle asking for some advice and reading recommendations. That it was taken as implicit in my department that one should revile Windschuttle was among the reasons I sought him out: if such misguided minds as those found in my department hated him, he probably had something worthwhile to say. Windschuttle passed my inquiry on to a friend of his, and somehow, in all this I found out about Jim Franklin, another of Windschuttle’s friends.

On Franklin’s webpage, I saw he’d written a book about philosophy in Australia. It was something I knew practically nothing about, and I was interested to pursue the intellectual connection, so I ordered it online. As with many books, it’s taken me months upon months to finish, but I’m glad I have.

What will forever stick in my mind about this book was that when I mentioned it, and Jim, in the postgraduate common room, Alex Murray (whose list of influences is a veritable shopping cart of obnoxious continental theory) picked up on the conversation from the other side of the room and chimed in, “that man is evil!” Upon asking why, I received an answer that I think had something to do with him being a Catholic. My further revelation that I’d heard about the book by writing to Keith Windschuttle probably earned me permanent suspicion from several people in the room.

But that’s by the by. I was pleasantly surprised to find that a scholarly work of this kind was in fact written as a rather good story, packed with scandal and incident. Franklin is full of opinions on philosophy, and his prejudices are very evident in the way he makes fun of particular figures and positions. While this tarnishes the credibility of the book in the deadly serious, scholarly sense, it’s a pleasure to see someone writing with a personal voice for a change, and taking a stand against or for particular thinkers while letting all speak through extensive quotations, such as this one:

Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do: such as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe. (388, quote from David Stove, The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies)

As with most such surveys of ideas, the chief value of Corrupting the Youth is that it may serve to acquaint one with great and beautiful writing and thinking. Stand-outs here are the moral sensibility of Raimond Gaita (405-408), the wit and wisdom of David Stove (i.e. 388), and the prose of Donald Horne (277). Franklin’s history is also valuable in chronicling some of the unsavory dealings and motivations that contributed to the rise of Marxism and the various post’isms in Australia’s academic humanities from the 1970s onwards.

Though an enjoyable read, Corrupting the Youth ends on a weak note, trailing off with a discussion of the euthanasia debate. It would have benefited from a conclusion that tied up the story into a cohesive whole, and guessed at future directions for Australian philosophy or issued some final judgement on it.

Today I’ve posted the frontmatter and introduction of my PhD thesis on role-playing videogames, which now has its own page here.

I’m really hoping to get some feedback on this, especially from gamers. Some reasons why you should read the thesis as I serialise it, so you can give me comments:

• It’s the only book-length work in English on (videogame) RPGs, so if you’ve ever wanted to read one, this is your only option.
• It features me being pugnacious.
• Reading it won’t make your mind contort painfully in an effort to decipher incomprehensible nonsense.

So get to it! Further chapters will appear as I finish editing them. Post comments for discussion on the relevant blog entry, or email them to me directly.

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.