“Fourscore and seven years ago, our “fathers”—with half the population excluded from the start—“brought forth”—with the dubious, always questionable assumption of “progress”—itself a value judgment about the meaning of history, which opens up the inherently dubious notion of “history” itself—“a “new” “nation”—a double double scare quote, with the claim of “new” at once instantly erasing the presence of all indigenous peoples and affirming the utterly questionable notion that anything can be qualitatively or authentically “new,” which again calls the very notion of “history” into question—and the word “nation” presupposing a commonality that may be nothing more than a kind of conspiracy of consent, a conglomeration of power meant to enrich the few and marginalize almost everyone else—“conceived”—privileging the idea that anything so questionable as a “nation” could be made up, as if out of nothing—“in “Liberty”—

Well, that’s just too much. We’re going to have to stop right here. We can’t even begin to get into “dedicated to the proposition”—we’ll let that pass—that “all”—“all”? Really? “men”—again—“are “created”—by whom? By what? For what purpose? To what end?—“equal.” Yes. Stop right here.

After the seminar

Greil Marcus, an editor of the New Literary History of America, in a piece called “Scare Quotes are the Enemy”

What Marcus’s parody captures about bien-pensant readings  is their dainty horror at the discovery that people in the past did not think like Us. Which is odd in a generation that rabbits on about the Other.  Texts are produced only to be decontaminated. It wasn’t us, cry the critics, we didn’t silence the Other. It was Them.

See how easy it is?

? university leaders are focussing their attention on post-crash curriculum reform.

What leadership role might higher education play in the ethical retooling of the professions and the broader society?

Let’s hope they remember the plumbers.

Are we there yet, Stanley?

Johnson was stirred by this case to write a pamphlet (‘The False Alarm‘) in the course of which he says of Wilkes:

The character of the man I have no purpose to delineate. Lampoon itself would disdain to speak ill of him, of whom no man speaks well.

But six years on, these opposites meet over dinner and get on well.

What do the great Tory and the famous radical find in common? Wilkes, renowned for his charm, helps Johnson to the good things on the table (“Allow me to recommend a squeeze of this orange; – or the lemon, perhaps, may have more zest.”) They discuss and compare the actors Foote and Garrick. Wilkes makes two jokes about Scotland, one involving a quotation from Shakespeare, the other from Milton, with a little wry self-deprecation thrown in. Then they move on to discuss the correct translation of a line in Horace’s Art of Poetry.

What they have in common is literature. Time and again in the Life literature serves to bring people together, to allow them to form estimates of one another, to learn from one another and to make communication both precise and pleasurable. It’s the integument that binds together writer, scholar, clergyman, soldier, actor, painter, politician, landed gentleman and those few women like Anna Seward and Mary Knowles who gained a seat at the table

I am struck by the way in which literary conversation was a means of promoting and preserving a value which Johnson held high – civility. For us, that tends to translate as ‘manners’ and those are often thought superficial. But for Johnson, a breach of civility could and did have serious moral consequences. This is clear from an episode in the following year, in which Boswell plans another meeting of opposites, but bungles and blurts it out.

. . . at breakfast, I unguardedly said to Dr Johnson, “I wish I saw you and Mrs Macaulay together.” He grew very angry; and after a pause, while a cloud gathered on his brow, he burst out, “No, Sir; you would not see us quarrel, to make you sport. Don’t you know it is very uncivil to pit two people against one another? . . . No man has a right to engage two people in a dispute by which their passions may be enflamed, and they may part with bitter resentment against each other.”

Catharine Macaulay was another like Wilkes, A Whig too liberal for the orthodox Whigs, author of a multi-volume History of England and a brilliant conversationalist. Who knows what might have happened? At any rate, this time Boswell finds himself in the moral soup. Johnson is like everyone chockful of contradictions. His imperiousness and bullying are notorious. But so is his ‘kindness’, not only acts of benevolence but a social quality which regulates and checks hostile emotions. There’s the famous reply when Boswell asks him why, when he complains how little he gets out of social meetings, he continues to attend them: “Kindness must be kept up.” A man so intensely aware of the danger and darkness in human life will reach for its alleviations – civility, which promotes kindness, and which flourishes when readers discuss literature.

As one who has done more than his share of mucking around I tend to take these things lightly. But the lad wanted to know why the amendment and once I explained (courtesy is necessary because we are bored and protects us in our turn when we bore others) he announced that he now felt bad about what he’d done. Welcome to the moral life, kid. It’s what they don’t teach you at school.

‘Inappropriate’ is to teachers what ‘life style’ is to those who work in public health. Consider the words of a professor of medicine writing in the current issue of Monash Magazine.

The combination of immunology and stem cells ‘as body repair kits’ will provide patients with ‘non-rejected’ treatments for many if not all degenerative diseases caused by poor life style selection such as smoking and diet . . .

A lot to think about there. I particularly like ‘non-rejected’, as in ‘non-dead’.

It