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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 10, 2012
Passive collusion
The strongest force in politic-al and social life is passive collusion. This, at least, was my reply to someone who asked the corresponding question, during a lunch date this last week.It wasn't an original answer. Someone else had just pinged me an interview with Terry Eagle-ton, the interesting Marxist literary theorist, in something called the The Oxonian Review. The words "passively collusive" had leaped out at me. As witnesses to this space, over the last 15-plus years, may be distantly aware, I am not what could be called a Marxist. And even at the words "literary theorist" I'm inclined to reach for my Browning (metaphorically speaking). So let me quote the whole passage to hint at why I do, sincerely, find Eagleton inspiring: "Marx was against prediction, and what predictions he produced were grotesquely mistaken. I would say that it's always rash to overestimate the fall of the power of the system. They have more tanks than we do! On the other hand, capital-ism like any other political system can't really work without a certain degree of credibility. It doesn't need people to congratulate it, but it does need them to be at least passively collusive with it." The learned professor, who ex-plains in the same interview why, as an intellectual, he does not belong in a modern university, and is there-fore glad to be retiring, is not really a Marxist. Leftist, to be sure. But he thinks for himself: beginning with a reading of Karl Marx that deviates from the usual blather, from people who (whether for or against Marx), have never read him, or even read about him. Indeed, as I once heard argued fairly cogently by an actual reader who had patiently trawled through at least the first volume of Das Kapital, Marx may be presented as a libertarian conservative, with an anarchic sensibility, posing as a socialist to get people to listen to him. Or to put it another way, a kind of 19th-century George Orwell. Eagleton is not a "literary theorist," either, in the sense in which I would use that term, as an epithet to fling. And this is for the same reason: he actually reads and thinks for himself. This is something seldom done in universities today, whether by students or by faculty. In what were once fondly called "the humanities." Literary theory has provided the alternative. You can get the gist of such a theory from the blurb on a paper-back; or these days, without having to handle a book, by Googling the search terms. And once you have the gist, you may sit back and lazily critique the whole of Western Civ, without bothering to examine any of it closely. The only other thing you'll need is a casual mastery of an incomprehensible jargon that can be applied, holus-bolus, to any-thing in print. But this isn't a problem, for you can pick it up by osmosis, just by walking through the campus of, say, the University of Ottawa. Whereas Eagleton, playing now the role of fusty old reactionary, pines for the days when colleges such as those at Oxford were con-trolled by dark aristocratic and religious forces. (He came up from the working classes himself, so has no need for a working-class pose). Those were the days when "the neo-managerial ethos hadn't exerted its clammy grip," and "brought to an end hundreds of years ... of the university as a centre of critique." Which is to say, genuine critique: "revolutionary thinking" in the original sense of returning to sources. Not parrot-flock chatter in in-comprehensible jargon. He is well out of teaching and tutoring; of trying to explain to contemporary students that before you "critique" a poem, you must under-stand it as a poem, that was intended as a poem, and operates in the explodable realm of poetry. He has met many in his case, from Australia to Peru; and I for my part know more than my share of university professors, and old-fashioned schoolteachers, retiring with-out regret from their respective pedagogical hellholes. But there is one thing more, for the purposes of today's sermon, that has fascinated me about Eagleton through the years, as an extremely intelligent leftist who always has new light to cast, whatever the passing topic, even and especially when he is dead wrong. And this goes to the heart of his sparkling "Marxist analyses," and his efforts to evaluate literary phenomena in general ("theoretical") as well as in particular terms. Why does he not see the relation between the "neo-managerial ethos" we both utterly detest, and the triumph of what is wanly called "secular humanism"? That, whether in its "socialist" or "capitalist" manifestations, the whole progressive project consists of managing people as an atomized mass, while exploiting the innate human propensity to passive collusion? My questions are perhaps unfair, because this may be exactly the direction in which Eagleton has been moving this last decade, as he has freed himself from his day-job grind. The man who recently lectured at Yale, under the title, "Faith and Fundamentalism: Is belief in Richard Dawkins necessary for salvation?" has emerged as one of the most powerful critics of secular humanism that secular humanism has ever produced. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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