Death and the salesman

(Conference blog number two, it's like a social science Meine Preise, but without the prizes. Meine Preise is Thomas Bernhard eviscerating all the awards he ever got. It’s in German. He’s an Austrian modernist novelist, you fuckers. But I anticipate. Here's number one.)

A libertarian US think tank which publishes many classics of liberalism – OK? – offered $900 to attend one of their conferences. This seemed deeply corrupting. I said yes at once.

The place was a very fancy country hotel, suitable for politicians negotiating a peace treaty: “Sit down and bargain / All you like, grizzled old foxes / We’ll wall you up in a splendid palace…”, but with no war zombies waiting to drown us in putrefaction, just political philosophers.

They had sent us a big book of readings. These all reminded me of when Theresa May (who?) came to town and gave the party a ringing speech. The Corbynites would return to the policies of the 1970s. “And to challenge them… we must return to the arguments of the 1980s!” Cue cheers while DHJ groans. So: liberty yadda yadda, self-ownership yadda, Nozick, inalienable yadda. (In-al-i-en-ab-le, a hard word when you’re drunk.)

They seemed strict about attending all the sessions and starting on time. And indeed, when I skipped the first lunch a delightful young lady, all impeccable hairdo, manners and remembering everybody’s name, asked me in the loveliest way whether I’d mind attending the rest of the dinners in future because of, you know, team-building. No problem, Lady Liberty. Nine hundred bucks.

In the first session, they explained the discussion rules. To make a comment raise your hand, and you’d be entered in the long comment queue. But to make a short comment, you could enter the short comment queue, by putting your thumb and forefinger together and making the Pepe Le Frog signal. (Nancy Maclean, get in touch. I have material for Democracy in Chains 2: The Alt-Rightening.) This sounded fun. Oh boy! Everybody has their hand up already!

Intellectually… well, you know. These people have been arguing since Aristotle, and they still haven’t defined their terms. Freedom this and that. People uttered various concerns. To respond to anyone, you had to do the Pepe and get in the short comment queue. Some Nordic chap called out the next speaker. Intuitively this seemed offensive to me – there’s 16 of us and we need a ringmaster? But it might make sense when you have a bunch of people talking past each other. Like, if there is no shared academic project, you know? I began to appreciate the benefits of the hard-edged econ seminar, where every question is like “your standard errors are wrong, NO FUCK YOU, THEY’RE WRONG.” At least we all agree what we are doing. I think it turns out, even if what we are doing doesn’t make sense, you need that agreement to focus the conversation. This was more like pub talk, but with sparkling water not beer.

Oh, and with political philosophers. Lordy. Chinos and “informal” jackets on the guys. Everybody talks in complete sentences the. Entire. Fucking. Time. & never mind swear words: I have yet to hear slang. Everybody is cosplaying that it’s 1870 and they’re civilized.

Freedom’s last line of intellectual defence is a bunch of Goody Two Shoes.

My last straw was at the end of the (splendid) dinner. The waiter announced the pudding menu – the dessert menu, no, God damn it, afters – in native French. Around my table, four international voices rise in gratified chorus: “Merci!”

Why, I see you all speak French! You prissy fuckers. Of course you do.

I went back to my room. I browsed Reddit. I read Deborah Devonshire, one of the Mitfords. Her father only read one book in his life, White Fang, and afterwards he gave up, because nothing could beat that.

It’s 3 am. I’ll get the first bus. I just hope they don’t bill me for the hotel.


Day two

Morning

Yeah… well... it’d be bad manners… $900, you know….


Evening

Today was fabulous. Not the sessions, though there was one decent one where I got to talk a bit. But during the compulsory dinner afterwards and BOY THE FOOD IS MAGNIFICENT, these people really know how to buy an academic, although they don’t seem to know what they’re buying.

The wine wasn’t bad either.

I say compulsory. I mean: I wanted to catch an early train, and the poor chap who organizes these things – why do you never get a sinister authoritarian scumbag making these kind of threats? Why is it always a poor frizzy guy? He looked so helpless and unloved – said he would withdraw my honorarium. Because the dinner is compulsory too! You Must Schmooze For Freedom.

So during the compulsory dinner, ‘twas me and a buddy, plus a splendid old intellectual historian in the right kind of suit and tie, plus another young-well-spoken-genericity, plus a female American prof, another poor poppet, as I thought at first. She revealed her steel slowly. And thinking back to the sessions, I realised that her every intervention – an intervention is the argot for when you say something which changes nothing – had pitched Her View, like a patent medicine guy on the back of a Nevada steam train. “Cures gout! Contains rattlesnakes!” Her View was a unique brand of Kantianism-libertarianism. “Cures rattlesnakes! Contains gout!”

Anyway, in the course of asking her what influence political philosophers had had on anything since, say, Marx, I made the mistake of interrupting her and then not stopping to apologize, because I wanted to, you know, actually find out what influence etc. So then she froze me out for half an hour, because this interrupting Needed To Be Put Into The Context Of. With grim, determined gaiety she talked only to the genericity, and I talked to “the guys”, feeling in disgrace and thinking, why should The Sex, as they'd say in the 18th century, have this extraordinary normative power, and longing to be yet older and more sexless so that, like Yeats, I might escape the Lethean foliage. But eventually the conversation resumed its normal form, and then we learned where the Patent Kantianism came from.

Her PhD had been in Harvard, home of the, as we now know, unfortunately named PED, also The Top of US philosophy and recall, please, that the power of professors in any discipline is inversely proportional to the intellectual importance of the discipline. The less the importance, the fewer the jobs, the more the power. To butter myself up with The Sex, I got on to #metoo. Then the anecdotes came out, and the Splendid Old Historian said something that seemed homophobic but it turned out we could think of it as just #metoo but gay, so we could redeem him luckily, because he was such a nice and interesting chap even if not quite au fait with modern manners. So The Sex put him in the bless-the-funny-old-fellow box not the unacceptable box, and as in the 18th century, their judgment is final. But I digress. It really was excellent wine. I can never sleep in hotel rooms.

It turned out that Ethics in Harvard was funded by a very rich woman, called Lily Savage or something, who had allegedly not merely raped or trafficked, but actually killed her husbands, one after the other, in increasing order of wealth. (Pause to google “can you libel a dead person”, followed by “are damages increased if you check if you can libel a dead person”.) Of course this is all unfounded speculation. And she (Doc Kantian) had been a fellow at the Savage or something Center, attended parties where Lily gave speeches, drank her also doubtless excellent wine etc.

Anyway, I suppose I’m still unforgiven and will become part of an anecdote about Male Academics Interrupting and, if Doc K ever returns to the US, of how In England They Are Still So Backward. I may have interrupted, but at least I didn’t take Gilded Lily’s Shilling of Killing.

So, academia. You can holiday on Epstein’s island, if you’re a Top Thinker. Just be careful with your phrases, and don’t interrupt.

And what influence has political philosophy had on anything since, say, Rousseau? We never got back to that question.


Day 3 

Morning 

Taxi to magnificent York station. In West Cornwall Pasty Company, the local kids are ordering. It's not easy. You can choose a bacon roll, a sausage roll, or a bacon and sausage roll. On Sunday before breakfast, that’s advanced combinatorics. I'm heading home to scratch someone else's chin for a change.