It’s outrageous. Something ought to be done about it. ‘College’ in the US apparently has the unmitigated gall to teach things that conflict with Christianity. Isn’t that illegal?

Spend a couple of days at the workshop and it becomes clear that, for many of these students, college is fraught with peril. There is the pressure to party, to drink, to have sex. There is also the subtle pressure to conform to a non-Christian worldview. There are biology courses that ask students to accept evolution, which workshop organizers and most of the students reject as untrue and ungodly. There are literature courses that see any text, including the Bible, as open to multiple interpretations. And there are philosophy classes that

You might as well know. I don’t usually spill these things, I don’t just blurt them out, I keep myself to myself. I don’t make everyone a present of my secrets. I don’t bore you with my passions and adorations. I don’t feel it necessary to go public with everything. I don’t ‘share’ my every emotion. But you might as well know – there are few people I like as much as I like Alan Bennett. Not that I know him or anything – but everything I’ve read and seen by him, everything I know about him, everything I’ve heard him say; his voice, his plays, his journals, his readings, his performances – well, I just like them intensely, that’s … Read the rest

At some point in the past day or two, while pondering the latest upsurge in the Freud debate, I was inspired to look up ‘hysteria’ in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. I was a little surprised at what I found.

A form of neurosis for which no physical diagnosis can be found and in which the symptoms presented are expressive of an unconscious conflict. In conversion hysteria, the symptoms usually take a somatic form (hysterical paralysis, irritation of the throat, coughs)…Hysteria has been explained in many different ways over the centuries; the most influential aetiology or causal explanation to have been put forward in the twentieth century is that supplied by Freud’s psychoanalysis.

There’s a problem with that. … Read the rest

Part two of this review of Simon Blackburn’s Truth says some peculiar and rather ill-natured things, and also some silly ones. Some of the things are all three at once.

In Truth, the hostility to the unnamed relativist so overflows at points as to make her sound more like a solipsist, a nihilist, or even a willful and demented child. I spent a number of years in and around English departments and certainly met plenty of nudniks and witnessed my share of bizarre seminar discussions. But never once did I meet the shameless knave that Blackburn describes.

Well – bully for you, one feels like saying. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, does it. (Black swans! Dingdingding!) We … Read the rest

This review of Harold Bloom’s latest bit of vatic wisdom is good fun. I like and value Bloom’s efforts to preverve and convey enthusiasm for literature, but I find the actual books in which he does so unendurably irritating. He’s irritating in the same kind of way Paglia is; I wonder if he taught her to be irritating in that way, or if she taught him, or if they taught each other, or if they’re both that way by nature. They both make flat unargued unsupported assertions when they ought to be arguing. Take it or leave it. Yeah, I’ll leave it, thanks.

In spite of his popularity and productivity, however, Mr. Bloom remains an odd candidate for the mantle

Women, eh. What is their problem? Why do they keep insisting on being born women? Isn’t it kind of obvious what a bad career choice that is? So why do they keep doing it? It’s so stupid that no punishment can be too severe for it. This being a woman thing has got to be stamped out. And by golly in some places in this world people are doing their best. Widows starve along with their children, because obviously they can’t be allowed to do anything else, because that would be immodest, and violate someone’s honour. So starve, bitch.

In a bleak and run-down part of eastern Kabul, aid workers call out to a group of poor women waiting for