The Lamp

Academic and political cultural perspectives

Against assisted suicide

An argument for legalising assisted suicide might go like this:

(1) As long as there is no direct conflict with the rights of others, the law should maxmimise the ability of people to enjoy those things which are good and to avoid those things which are bad.
(2) Some people are justified in their belief that their life (for whatever reason) provides so few good things, and entails so many bad, that death would actually be a good to them.
(3) Suicide does not directly conflict with the rights of others, therefore
(4) the law should allow those people to end their lives. Whether, in order to do this, they physically require someone else's help or not is incidental, and is not a good grounds to deny them the ability to enjoy what, for them, is the good of dying.

(2) is undoubtedly correct, and is one of the most heartbreaking truths of human life. I also accept (3). They only imply (4), however, if we also accept (1). It would be a mistake, I suggest, to do so.

I base my objection on the qualifying phrase 'As long as there is no direct conflict with the rights of others'. This principle underpins most liberal and utilitarian systems of political morality because it provides a framework within which decisions can be delegated to individuals. They are left free to make their own decisions about what actions will be good for them with a rule for judging what is allowed that is both, in principle, simple and easily accepted as fair.

An objection can be made to it, however, that is similar to one often made against the workings of the market economy. Economic exhange, it is often said, leave many real costs unpriced. Carbon emissions, for example, which cause immense expense to people who will have to deal with the effects of climate change, are not priced into most exchanges. The costs of these carbon emissions are exported to other actors in the global economy. The people responsible for these costs do not bear them, but they will eventually suffer as the global economy struggles to deal with climate change (or in a worse-case scenario disintegrates completely).

I think there is a moral equivalent of exporting costs. A liberal society, for example, works because people are broadly free to act as they think right (this state of affairs is required if step (1) of the argument in favour of assisted suicide is to have any practical meaning). That freedom, however, is an historically achieved circumstance. It is a socially created state of affairs which depends on certain economic, political, and social arrangements (for the sake of argument perhaps, but not necessarily, including free markets, democracy, and social liberalism). These arrangments in turn rest on a set of beliefs, chief amongst which is the idea that each human being has an innate diginity which can never be reduced to economic value, and that all men and women are equall. (I don't think democracy could be believed in without these basic beliefs). Erode these beliefs, therefore, and you erode the conditions which make it possible for people to act so as to enjoy those things which are good and to avoid those things which are bad.

Allowing assisted suicide would be to allow this king of erosion by enabling people to export the moral costs of their action to the community as a whole. Their own happiness would be promoted, but the whole community would bear the cost of denying that human life always has an innate valiue.

Yes, for some people it is reasonable to think death would be better than life. And no, they would not be directly infringing the rights of anyone else if they were to be assisted in ending their life. But the type of society which recognises the desirability of them exercising that choice is one which cannot afford to let them do so, because its commitment to individual freedom and happiness is founded upon the idea that each human life has an innate dignitiy and is therefore sacrosant.

Recognising the otherswise invisible, exported moral costs of assisted suicide leads to the conclusion that a person does not own his or her life in the way that they would an object (like a car). We recognise that in certain circumstances (such as war) the community might place demands upon an individual up to and including the surrender of his life in the cause of the common good. Assisted suicide is a similar case, but with the opposite conclusion. In this case, the common good demands that the individual does not die - even though living in this case is the sacrifice.

Just because I am the bearer of my life does not mean that I can dispose of it as I will. The community as a whole also has a valid interest in my life, and in many cases that interest takes priority over mine. My conclusion is therefore that it is right for the law to prevent assisted suicide, because to allow that life itself can be bartered against personal happiness would be to contravene our community's deepest principles, without which we could not live freely. Equally, in order to remain true to those principles we must do all we can (and much more than we do now) to ensure that the lives of even those who suffer the most can be, so far as possible, lives of value, happiness, and goodness.

What is an elite institution?

The word 'elite' is more often used to criticise institutions or policies than to praise them. I think, however, that the idea of elite institutions is a useful one. Why I think so should be clear from the characteristics which I believe we should require an elite institution to display, and which institutions that consider themselves to be elite should strive to embody.

What is an elite institution?
An elite institution is one which enables people to achieve what are recognised as the highest standards in what are recognised to be worthwhile human activities. That recognition has to come from a wider community than any single institution or its members (otherwise there are no standards to measure it against other than its own back-patting platitudes).

Example of recognised achievements and activies
For example, an elite rugby club enables its members to achieve what are recognised as the highest standards in the human activity of playing rugby. A wider community of rugby players, fans, and journalists (amongst others) recognizes playing rugby as a worthwhile activity. They also, communally, decide upon what are the proper measures of the highest achievement in the sport - primarily winning competitions such as the World Cup or European Cup which are competed for by a number of clubs and are recognised as prestigious, but also achievements such as being a good leader (for an individual), playing an attractive style of rugby (for a team), or embodying moral qualities such as bravery or spirit (these qualities are often, in fact, incompatible with winning the most presitigeous competitions). These qualititative achievements are subject to less agreement than which are the most prestigious competitions. Different fans wills disagree over which qualities are most to be admired and who should be held to display them. An ongoing process of debate (in bars, in newspapers, on the internet) does produce broad consensus, however. E.g. Leicester are to be admired for their 'physicality', Harlequins for their 'running rugby', Leinster for their 'team spirit'. It is only after winning the recognition of the rugby community in one of these ways that a club can plausibly claim to be elite, or to conceive of itself as elite without absurdity.

How do elite institutions enable achievement?
Basically, by shaping the activies of their members. A member of an elite rugby club will spend his time doing a number of things which we call training. He will be learning to do things (the technical skills of playing rugby), and practicising them to get better. He will be doing fitness training. He will be spending time with his team-mates building the emotional bonds necessary to undergo pain for each other, and learning to anticipate their behaviour (vital knowledge in a team sport).

Elite institutions organise the finite time available to their memebers. All institutions are parts of their memebers' way of life. They shape what they do and how they live. Elite institutions direct them towards those activities which will best enable them to achieve in the field of activity towards which the institution is dedicated. The knowledge about what those activities are, and how they should be carried out, is the institutional capital of an elite institution.

Why should we value elite institutions?
Because they transmit that knowledge about the way of life one should live in order to achieve in a given field. That kind of knowledge is more efficiently learnt when it is passed on than when it has to be build up from scratch, and organised institutions are an efficient way of enabling that transmission. Building the experience of succcesive generations into their practices, institutions can accumulate decades (or even centuries) of acquired knowledge and make it available to their members.

This in itself is valuable because we should want people to be able to do well those things which we agree are valuable.

How can elite institutions go wrong?
The biggest danger is that an institution which claims to be elite will also have a decisive voice in deciding what counts as achievement and a worthwhile activity. When these values aren't being decided upon by a wider community, then an institution's claim to be elite is merely self regard. Imagine, for example, a school which claimed to be elite because all its pupils got straight 'A's, but which also set and marked all its own exams (which other schools weren't allowed to sit), and which selected all of the subjects its pupils were examined in.

This is the normal critique of elite institutions. The public schools, for example, are identified as being, in fact, a single instution whose only claim to excellence is the opinion of its own members. Public schools appear to be good, because so many of their pupils go on to become rich and powerful. But (so the critique goes), instead of providing an objectively excellent education, they merely imbue a new generation of pupils with the qualities which their predecessors (who are now in positions of power) were themselves taught at a public school to recognise as achievements, leading them to be elevated to positions of power, and  in time able to recognise the next generation of public schoolboys as high-achievers (because they display the same qualities). In this closed circle, only the institution and its members decide what counts as achievement and this recognition is completely self-reflexive.

What are our society's basic beliefs?

I wouldn't be the first person to suggest that, whatever some secularists might argue, all human societies are ways of life based ultimately on certain key beliefs held by that societies members. Different societies are different ways of life based upon different beliefs. Furthermore it would also be unoriginal of me to argue that these beliefs are often so deeply held as to become, as it were, invisible. That is to say, all the sturm und drang of political and cultural conflict is often schismatic in character - it is disagreement within a community who actually hold fundamental beliefs in common. The aggregate of these beliefs could (perhaps a little mischievously), be called a society's religion.

If that is right what, I wonder, is our religion in Britain today? What beliefs does our way of life enshrine? Below are my initial suggestions for the fundamental beliefs which underpin the things which seem so obvious to us that they scarcely seem matters of belief at all.

1) All human beings are of innate, incalculable, and equal worth.
2) Freedom (however that is understood), is good.  
3) All human beings are bearers of rights (variously defined and elaborated).
4) Political power should always be legitimate.

This is my first stab at the credo of modern Britain. They are things it would seem pointedly heretical to deny, even though their meanings and implications are loudly debated. But these are debates about how to understand their truth, not about whether they are true full stop. A good rule of thumb for testing the status of such a belief is to imagine a politician denying it on TV. If their front-line career would immediately be over, then that belief is a deeply rooted, widely held, and possibly fundamental one.

How have I done? Are these our genuinely held beliefs, and if so are they really fundamental? Are there even more general principles underpinning them? And have I left anything out? Comments please.

I might finally note that I think 1) and 2) are the really fundamental original beliefs, from which the other two flow. But that these other two beliefs are now so firmly rooted and developed, with such far-reaching consequences, that they deserve their own place in the credo. But I'm not sure 1) and 2) can be derived from a single higher principle - our modern public religion might well be the result of joining together these two different beliefs.

Just when is competition acceptable?

I was interested to read that Leicester's new directly elected mayor Sir Peter Soulsby wants to stop bus companies competing for business in the city.

His argument is that "people want a service taking them where they want to go, at a time they want to travel and at a fare they can afford," said Sir Peter. "We don't just need bus companies running the same routes at the same time, which is incredibly wasteful but happens because of competition, we need the mayor to regulate the service," he said.

Now I can understand why the council might not want to subsidise more than one operator on the same route -  but Sir Peter's argument seems to be that competition on routes is a waste of resources in itself, regardless of who picks up the tab. 

I can't understand this. The worst thing about the railways is that single operators have a monopoly on individual services. Local buses seem like a great example of a public service where multiple providers can compete against each other to drive up standards. Many people have to put up with unreliable and irregular services, but unless they have a car they just don't have an alternative. What's wrong with letting another company offer them a choice? Surely that's a great way of helping people get "a service taking them where they want to go, at a time they want to travel and at a fare they can afford."  

My village used to have two regular bus services to Leicester. One was frequent, but started about half a mile from my house. One left hourly from just round the corner. It was handy to have both. If you were in a hurry you could go into the village centre. But I know many elderly neighbours liked being able to catch the more local service. Now we have just one provider, and that choice is gone. If Sir Peter gets his way, it won't be coming back.

I can't help but think that in Red Leicester and many other places, competition is seen as an expensive luxury which is fine if you're shopping around for your new gizmo, but is just a waste of resources when it comes to publicly funded services. The idea that it can drive standards up and prices down isn't even considered.

Divide and concur?

Not a particularly in-depth post, this, but some interesting developments in the Church of Scotland. No, really. It’s on the not-hugely-new and not-hugely-enlightening debate about the ordination of gay ministers, but this time it threatens to split the church.

 

Scotsman articles here and here.

 

This is something of a speciality of the Church of Scotland – it doesn’t have a central authority to rule on what orthodoxy is, and being disestablished from the state, there’s no secular power with an interest in maintaining stability.

 

Currently in Scotland there is the Church of Scotland, the Free Church of Scotland (the ‘wee frees’), the United Free Church of Scotland, the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland (the ‘wee wee frees’), and the Associated Presbyterian churches, who split from the Wee Frees when one of their elders (incidentally, he also happened to be Thatcher’s Lord Chancellor) attended the funeral of a Catholic. Which was not on.

 

No grand observations here, except that it seems to me that this sort of thing more or less goes to the heart of what a religious community means. How do you match individual conscience with sustaining united belief? At what point does one issue become worthy of schism? How many people do you need for a viable splinter group?

 

I’m irked by the petty distinctions and vitriolic sub-division between different churches, and yet simultaneously cheered by a culture that allows little groups to form their own community on matters of principle. Intuitively, the fact these groups are disestablished makes it feel ok for them to split and merge as they wish – unlike an established Church which would (in theory) stand for us all, and so perhaps implicate us all in its deliberations and definitions.

 

It’ll be interesting to see what effect, if any, further splits may have. 

Cambridge 19th century events - Ruskin and the architecture of art schools

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Last week in Cambridge there were meetings of The Guild (interdisciplinary 19th century forum) and the Ruskin Reading Group.

At The Guild, Ranald Lawrence (a first year architecture PhD), gave a talk on the architecture of 19th century art schools. He began with the Glasgow School of Art, one of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's most famous architectural designs (pictured).

Now one of the things I find most interesting (and sometimes puzzling) about architectural history is the way that there is a direct line of descent from Ruskin's ideas about gothic revival architecture (pinnacles and sculptures like the Natural History Museum in Oxford) to the international modernist style (white boxes with big windows). Although these buildings look very different, what connects them is the idea that buildings should be rational. Ruskin thought that gothic architecture was rational because, unlike neo-classical architecture, designs weren't deformed by the need to make them symmetrical. In a gothic building, an architect could put a staircase where it was needed, and open a window when a room was dark, without worrying about how to make the building look regular on the outside. Gothic buildings look higgeldy-piggeldy because they are designed to be useful rather than to look symmetrical. 

A lot of internationalist modernist architecture was based on the same idea. Le Corbusier wanted to make 'machines for living'. What had changed was that Ruskin had thought that the best way to make a rational building was to pay attention to the specific location of a building and the architectural traditions which developed in response to that location. So a rational building in northern Europe will have a steep gabled roof and narrow windows to keep out the rain whilst a building in southern Europe might have colonnades to shade the summer sun. Modernists, on the other hand, tended towards the conclusion that rational principles were the same everywhere and that traditional architectural styles were forms of decoration which were at best superfluous, at worst dishonest.

The Glasgow School of Art with its big windows and clean liens has sometimes been pointed to (by Pevsner) and others as a proto-modernist building - pointing the way to the international modernist style. Ranald argued that this was the wrong way to understand the building. He compared it to gothic art schools built in the previous decades in Manchester and Birmingham and suggested that the basic design of the Glasgow school follows a template established in these schools. He also argued that some of the distinctive features of Mackintosh's design (like the massive windows), are reactions to the specific context of the building on the top of a Glasgow hill. In short, Mackintosh should be understood as a regional architect working within an existing tradition rather than as an abstractly rational international architect.

Meanwhile the Ruskin Reading Group discussed Praeterita, Ruskin's autobiography.

One of the unsolved puzzles of the discussion was that, whilst we all felt that Wordsworth's Prelude was an important influence, Clive Wilmer pointed out that Ruskin's published works include no references at all to it - leaving no external evidence that he had read it!

I'd also been interested in whether Ruskin used his autobiography to present a systemised justification of his aesthetic principles. The answer, I think, is 'No'. Again and again, it seems, he emphasizes the fact that all he had been doing in his career was looking at things carefully and showing other people to see them properly - but also that there was something very lucky about his particular upbringing which has enabled him, uniquely, to see things properly.

Now I think one of the difficulties Ruskin has is that he struggles to explain why other people should see things wrongly. If the answer is that you had to have the precise upbringing Ruskin did to see things properly, then it becomes increasingly difficult to claim a universal validity for that perspective. Unless, as Wordsworth did, you make it clear that your specific upbringing allowed you to see universal truths, you risk being left making the less exciting claim that your upbringing was the way to grow up seeing things as you do. Which is what Ruskin seems to do when he acknowledges that you could only love mountains like he did if you had been born after Rousseau. He seems to feel that his love of mountains (despite its historical contingency) still reveals a universal truth, but never really explains why that should be so. You could be cruel and suggest that all he says it that if you want a post-Rousseauean love of mountains, you have to be born after Rousseau.

Those were my thoughts, anyway.

When does a text become literary?

On the subject of literature and value, what do we think of Stanley Fish's suggestion about a certain definition of what counts as literature?

"All texts have the potential of so counting in that it is possible to regard any stretch of language in such a way that it will display those properties presently understood to be literary. In other words, it is not that literature exhibits certain formal properties that compel a certain kind of attention; rather, paying a certain kind of attention (as defined by what literature is understood to be) results in the emergence into noticeability of the properties we know in advance to be literary?"

Now my response is that it's undeniable that the idea of literature has a history, and that it is based on agreements based on conventions.

But I suggest two reasons to question Fish's relaxed relativism.

1) Perhaps there is a difference between what we can do and what we ought to. Of course it's possible to call anything literature (say a bus-ticket), and in that sense it's an open category. But perhaps it would be a mistake to do so. Perhaps it is better for us to think about literature in some ways than others.

2) The fact that the category of 'literature' has a history might be best understood as meaning that the concept is a human achievement, like freedom. Just because it's contingent doesn't mean it's not real - or that it's worthless.

PS this is retreading old ground, but is it really plausible to claim that some texts really have no "formal properties which compel a certain kind of attention" which a bus-ticket lacks? (Or even 10,000 bus-tickets strung together). Rhyme seems to me, for example, to be a formal property which really is there and which compels attention. Even very young children with no literary education recognise it.

I haven't a clue how to discuss artist value

In the course of my ongoing discussion with Michael and ndgomes over the place of cultural elites, it's become startlingly clear to me that I am totally unable to meaningfully discuss questions of artistic value - even when it comes to defending my own judgments.

To summarise the discussion so far as I see it; I have suggested that, as we come to terms with some sort of reduction in state funding for the arts, previous eras offer a positive model for how cultural elites can support high culture (by 'elites' I mean a relatively large body of educated people, mostly non-specialists and not professionally involved in the arts, who are engaged in the cultural life of the country as consumers and informed commentators). I argue that the present moment is an opportunity to rebuild this kind of broad cultural elite and that, historically, it has done a better job of supporting good art than has state sponsorship (I have cited Beethoven, Raphael, and Spenser).

Michael and ndgomes have immediately pointed out (convincingly), that this argument relies completely on my own unargued judgments of artistic worth. They have both countered with examples of art from the past 50 years which they argue stand comparison with my elite-supported art (Michael cites, for example, Arthur Miller). Furthermore, Michael has pointed out that much of the art of the past 50 years he values (especially literature), has been supported by the state, and he does not believe any kind of cultural elite would have made it possible.

My only counter-argument has been to simple re-affirm my belief that (contrary to Michael's belief), the recent art he picks out is not in fact as good as my examples of elite high-culture. Simply repeating an assertion is obviously not a convincing argument, and hardly even rational. And so long as I am unable even to offer a reasoned account of why the cultural products I prefer are indeed more valuable than those put forward by ndgomes and Michael, I have little right to argue for the ongoing value of cultural elites. Until I do, all I am really offering are my prejudices, for which I then demand assent.

But I have found myself unable to offer such an account. Which has brought me to the uncomfortable realisation that I just don't know how to make an argument about artistic value.

I hope I am not just comforting myself if I suggest that this might be a problem in my academic discipline, literary criticism, as a whole. The two dominant theoretical movements of the last 40 years (deconstructionism and new historicism), have explicitly avoided evaluation per se, preferring to concentrate on exegesis (explaining what we should take the text to mean given the theoretical assumptions of the critic).

Older strands of criticism do include some measure of evaluation, but with reservations. New Critical formalism values formal completeness and unity, but (to my knowledge), struggles to offer a fully worked out account of just why this should be so important. At its most successful, New Criticism tells us why a poem works, but not why we should care about what it does.

C. S. Lewis created a kind of criticism which placed literature within the moral universe of human life, and judged it according to that place. But his, I fear, was too unapologetically a Christian moral universe to appeal to a good number of us today (although I do very much like Lewis and think that we can learn from his insistence that questions of artistic value are at heart questions of moral truth).

All in all, literary critics are, I think, very coy about discussing artistic value. Probably because we don't know how to do it. Certainly, all I seem to be able to conjure up are bare assertions, or rather airy generalisations. This worries me very much. I think criticism should be able to meaningfully discuss what's good, and what's not. After all, we have to make choices every day about what to read or teach, which must involve implicit judgments about value. Surely it would be good to make more of those judgments explicit?

Culture after the state

Carol Ann Duffy has written a poem against the cuts (the Treasury quakes even as I write). I care about the things she cares about. And yet I cannot share her indignation.
 
Poets will go the way of the miners unless we accept that the state can no longer be looked to to subsidise their profession. Scargill's mistake was to fight a battle to the death which he had already lost. In the 1980s, the government no longer wanted to pay men to mine coal noboddy wanted, and the public was willing to let them stop. Scargill refused to accept this, and refused to find ways to help his miners live in a new world. The arts must not make the same mistake.
 
Simply put, state funding of the arts on the scale we have grown used to is gone, and it's not coming back. Duffy can write as many couplets as she likes, but most people in Britain care more about the NHS than contemporary dance - and when cuts have to be made (which most voters belief to be the case now), they will support a government which cuts the arts first. Villifying them for having come to that conclusion will not help matters. The argument has already been lost. The history of the arts as a state sector is coming to an end.
 
The challenge is to imagine a future fot the arts beyond the state.
 
I think it can be a rosy one.
 
It may mean less. Fewer poetry pamphlets that can't shift 200 copies. Fewer theatrical productions which can't sell enough tickets to break even. Fewer displays of paintings no-one wants to buy.
 
As you may guess, my suspiscion is that this may be a chance to sort the wheat from the chaff. And I am optomistic mainly because of my gut-feeling that good art has normally been created either for the market-place (Dickens and Shakespeare), or for cultural elites (Spenser wrote for aristocrats).
 
State funding of the arts has nothing to do with the first sort (it can already pay its way), and is not the same as the second sort. In fact it has crowded out the second sort by providing artists with a more lucrative source of comissions than elite patrons ever could. Why chase commissions from wealthy patrons when the council will pay you to put up a tick-box mural in their offices?
 
And worse, it has turned artists (in the broadest sense of the word), into their own patrons. When the state funds the arts, that funding will almost always be administered (in some way or other, and alonside the accountants and auditors), by people who consider themselves to be artists. After all, someone has to judge where the money should go, and who better than creative types? But this means that artists themselves become their own judges and rewarders. Unsuprisingly, the art they produce becomes increasingly introspective, self-referrential, and (in a word), boring.
 
The challenge of arts after the state may be an opportunity to rebuild a functioniung cultural elite. With the state gone, artists will have to rely once more on the market or elite patrons. And if we can build such elites, we could have a truly living high culture once more.

New 19th century group at Cambridge

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A new group has been formed at Cambridge with the rather Ruskinite title 'The Guild'. It's purpose is to be an informal inter-disciplinary forum for graduate students to discuss their research and general interest in things mid to late-19th c. It will have a particular focus on art, architecture, and educational theory.

An exciting venture which will provide people in Cambridge with these interests an opportunity to meet and share ideas. I believe that up till now it's been difficult for people in different faculties to make contact with each other.

Most excitingly I think 'The Guild' could help participants make sense of some eminent Victorians as serious thinkers in their own right (rather than as bits of the history of ideas we use for background context). Obviously I'll be pushing Ruskin as a sage on all things (see below). What will be most fascinating is to see whether other people's knowledge and disciplinary approaches start to come together to paint a picture of a coherent Victorian response to many problems which still obsess us today (environmental disaster, the right place for the market in society, anxiety about national identity). 

Here's next term's schedule:

May 10 - Ranald Lawrence 'Illuminating Design - Light and the Development of the Modern Art School'

May 24 - Austen Saunders 'Ruskin's Theory of Perception and the Intersubjectivity of Aesthetic Judgement'

June 7 - Hannah Malone 'Death and Architecture in 19th Century Italy'

June 21 - Henrik Schoenefeldt 'Thermal Comfort, Physical Health and Recreation in the Crystal Palaces at Hyde Park and Sydenham'.