Previously
I wrote my dissertation prior to
the Internet. Maybe that’s the dividing line. I studied people like Kierkegaard
and Dostoevsky. I went to my tutor’s college rarely, sometimes not for months.
It was assumed that I could read everything in the original language. It just
isn’t possible to understand a text in translation.
I spent my time wandering the
streets of Cambridge. I would work hard for a few hours each day, but it just
isn’t possible to do much more than that. So, I would walk and think. The
thinking was often unconscious. Sometimes a problem could be solved by not
thinking about it.
My dissertation fitted best into
the Theology Faculty, which I found to be full of atheists. My perspective was
Christian. I assumed that the central claims of Christianity were literally
true.
But this wasn’t a problem then.
Both of my tutors were ordained, neither believed in the traditional sense, but
we discussed the texts that I was reading without letting our politics get in
the way.
Tutorials were intense. I would
write something, and an argument would develop. Both of us would give it our
all, but it wasn’t personal. There was no anger, or at least no lasting anger.
There were no limits on what could be said. I could argue for whatever I
believed so long as I could make the case with reason and by demonstrating
knowledge and understanding of the text. In this way people who disagreed about
everything could have a useful discussion. This is what we have lost since
then.
I was aware of certain areas of
study that I could have gone down, which I chose to avoid. I could have gone
down the continental route and read people like Derrida and Foucault. I could
have embraced post-modernism, feminism, structuralism and post-structuralism,
but I quickly found that I could make little of this kind of material.
When I read Heidegger or
Wittgenstein or even Hegel and Kant and Aristotle, I may frequently struggle to
understand the text. But I usually ascribe the fault to myself. A text may be
difficult because it is deep and expresses ideas that are hard to understand.
It may not involve difficult language. Wittgenstein frequently writes simple
sentences which capture something illusive. The point though is that with these
people there is something to understand. It is worth trying to understand them
because they are genuinely deep, intelligent thinkers with something to say
that is important. I never found I had that experience when reading the works
of the “post-moderns” still less did I find it with the feminists, the
post-colonialists or any of the other ways of reading that have developed in
the past thirty to forty years. All I found was jargon and a deliberate lack of
clarity, masking an emptiness of thought.
I avoided anything that even
hinted that the author had a political agenda. Eventually I avoided anything
written by an American.
Too much is written. In the 19th
century it was still possible to read just about everything important that was
written about a subject. Academics would spend years writing a book and the
quality was high.
There are now hundreds of
universities in America and every academic is pressurised to publish both
journal articles and books. Many of these academics went through the same
pitiful course of study during their undergraduate days as I did in America.
They then spent three or four years at graduate school, often taught by highly
politicised tutors. They were then encouraged to write and write and write, but
most often from only one “correct” perspective. The result is dire.
Publish or perish destroyed the
quality of books and journal articles coming out of America. Even if good work
was still being produced it was impossible to find amidst the fool’s gold. I
gave up reading American books en masse. Later when the “publish or perish”
disease spread here I gave up reading British books too.
Even then I focussed mainly on
the primary source. What mattered was reading the author I was studying. I read
just enough secondary material to provide footnotes, but otherwise just wrote
what I thought.
It was still possible to get away
with it then. I could ignore politics. I could ignore feminism, post-modernism
and anything else that had newly arrived from the Continent or the States.
There were academics who were interested in that stuff, but I wasn’t penalised
if it didn’t interest me. There was still room for someone who wanted to
understand philosophical, theological and literary texts without discussing
politics. There is still just about room if you deal with something very
technical. But that room is getting smaller and smaller, like something out of
Alice in Wonderland.
I don’t remember when I first
became aware of people objecting to certain words because they were not
inclusive. I think I came across some Americans demanding I write “He or she”
or still worse S/he, sometime when I was writing my dissertation. But I just
continued writing in the way that English speakers had been doing for centuries
and so did practically everyone else in Cambridge.
It all seemed rather silly as if
our American cousins had somehow developed their own grammar after so many
centuries in some peculiar way. Did they speak that way? How would you say
“S/he” in a way that distinguished it from “she”? I thought it was safe to
ignore this sort of stuff.
But this was really the
beginning. The Left made gradual steps. It demanded we cease to say “mankind”,
some people did. But whatever step we made, there was always going to be
another. It was only because some people replaced “he” with “he or she” that we
ended up replacing he and she with “they” “ze”, "xe" and were told
that there was nothing fixed about being he or she and that anyone could on a
whim be either.
I was at a conference reading a
paper and suddenly an American voice objected. He found it offensive that I
wasn’t using gender neutral pronouns. I was baffled for a minute, but then explained
that I was following standard English grammar. My American friend walked out.
Was this the moment that changed everything?
The absurdity of course is this.
It is only because Americans are so parochial and most frequently don’t speak
any languages other than English, that they could suppose that gender neutral
language is universally possible.
The rules about not having words
like “mankind” and using “he or she” instead of “he” have to be applied to all
languages. It cannot be only that English speakers have to be re-educated. But
while making English gender neutral is just about possible even if it is ugly.
It is simply impossible for other languages to do this.
In Russian there are three
grammatical genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. There are six main
grammatical cases, nominative, accusative, dative etc, plus some that are used
less frequently.
Put simply.
Masculine words end in a
consonant, e.g. Ivan.
Neuter words end in o or e,
e.g. Politburo.
Feminine words end in a or ia, e.g.
Anna Karenina. This is why Putin’s wife was called Putina.
Not only this. Men and women have
different endings for certain verb forms and adjectives.
Gender is absolutely everywhere
in Russian. This is the case with all Slavic languages and was once the case
with most western European languages which used to be highly inflected.
Whether you use the Russian word
he or she or it is determined by that words ending. It doesn’t of course mean
that the word is itself a man, woman or neuter. The Russian word for table is
masculine the French is feminine. This is a matter of grammar not of genitalia.
But the same of course is the
case with English. “He” can refer to male human beings, but it can also apply
logically to women in certain usually ambiguous circumstances. That is just how
English grammar evolved.
So too the "man" part
of “mankind” no more means a man than it does in the word “Manchester” rather
man is derived from the proto Germanic word meaning “person”. The ugly
“personkind” is therefore as ignorant as herstory supposing that the etymology
of history is "his story", rather than ἱστορία
[historia].
It would be senseless to try to
make all languages gender neutral. It would also be extremely difficult for a
Russian woman to decide that she was a man. She would have to relearn the
grammar that she had grown up with from childhood. But then again you would
struggle to find a Russian woman who would want to. The American disease
spreads by means of language and that language is English.
Continued
Continued
