Swan Included: Learning Worn Lightly, Paid for Heavily
Read this review of “Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War II to Thatcherism“ (Princeton U. Press, of course!):
Here’s a quick, unsympathetic review (with Claude’s help) of a sympathetic review of sympathy displayed toward protected poseurs wearing velvet, collecting Sèvres porcelain, memorizing Debrett (!), and facing zero market discipline, and their “golden age” of ruination and fake science, while other people paid for the vacation from reality (and the uneven ideas it produced).
מי שהניח לו אביו מעות הרבה ורוצה לאבדן ילבש בגדי פשתן וישתמש בכלי זכוכית…
And what was the output?
- A.J.P. Taylor’s provocative television (OK, the exception to prove the rule?).
- Hugh Trevor-Roper suffered no meaningful consequence for assisting one of the great intellectual frauds of the postwar period. He kept his chair. He got his lordship. His books were published. The system was specifically designed to ensure that being catastrophically wrong cost you nothing.
- Supposedly, “more” time for undergrads.
Tears for the present dearth of those enabled to ignore “present economic circumstances”? The gravest sin was “shop talk” (the supposed goal, as seen from the outside!).
“Learning worn lightly”: These ornaments lived in subsidized housing (college!), consumed subsidized food (High Table, ooh), had lifetime tenure, faced zero performance accountability, and their chief social anxiety was whether they were being sufficiently “effortless” about it all.
Quoting Wikipedia to illustrate the epistemology this effected:
Cesarani stated that Trevor-Roper was sincere in his hatred and contempt for the Nazis and everything they stood for, but he had considerable difficulty when it came to writing about the complicity and involvement of traditional German elites in National Socialism, because the traditional elites in Germany were so similar in many ways to the British establishment, which Trevor-Roper identified with so strongly.
In this respect, Cesarani argued that it was very revealing that Trevor-Roper in The Last Days of Hitler was especially damning in his picture of the German Finance Minister, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, who Trevor-Roper noted “had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, but he had acquired none of its values”. Cesarani wrote “Thus, to Trevor-Roper the values of Oxford University stood at the opposite pole to those of Hitler’s Reich, and one reason for the ghastly character of Nazism was that it did not share them”.
Thatcher’s belated efficiency and accountability for a parasitic guild = “philistinism”?
The book sounds like it follows Trevor-Roper himself, who argued “history should be understood as an art, not a science and that the attribute of a successful historian was imagination”. (I agree, but it’s not a compliment.)