Christopher Pearson, the Leavisite tradition, and the NBN for the NBN's sake ...

A distressed friend, disturbed the rubbery figures presented in The Australian as indicative of the cost of wiring their home for nifty new broadband, wanted a cost benefit analysis for installing suitable ports in their home.

A quick analysis of their current expenditure helped resolve their predicament. Foolishly they'd paid over a six day subscription to The Australian, costing over $360 a year, while they were currently paying $900 a year for a family subscription to Foxtel (you can of course in a fit of platinum madness pay up to $1,560 a year).

With bad television now freely available via the multi-channels, and bad journalists capable of delivering rubbery figures for free now only a click away on the intertubes, their precarious situation was immediately sorted by the simple expedient of cancelling their subscriptions. They now have twenty ports, and a little left over for lures for their fly fishing ...

And also have a little left over for a family treat a week, downloading a really bad movie like Ironman 2 to watch Mickey Rourke and co. ham it up for little more than the cost of a hamburger, via these newfangled downloadable NBN deliverable rental services ...

Meanwhile, The Australian's war with Stephen Conroy continues, this time with a bleating editorial Please pick up the policy phone, Senator Conroy, wherein the rag berates the NBN for being all about optimism. Yes, yes, what we need is more negativism. To hell with Jon Stewart, leaving the ABC to shore up the world of Foxtel, and his mindless optimism, bring on Stephen Colbert to maintain the fear ...

Meanwhile, with a monotonous predictability, this day it's left to little Miss Echo Jennifer Hewett to pitch in with Costly flaw in Labor's big-picture NBN pitch, with a column that rehashes all the lizard Oz's standard NBN talking points - how they love to blather about the potential of wireless technology and cost benefit analyses - and then ends by berating Conroy for selling vision. Yes, yes, how much simpler to sell mud, and obscurantism ...

Meanwhile, the rag has taken to putting up a splash on the front page dubbed NBN watch, how your billions are being spent, indicating that this is going to be a long and bitter bout of trench warfare. Here's the splash header:

The only reassuring note? In that screen cap, you'll note there's also a splash ad for Halloween contact lenses, Get them before they get you:


Does this mean that the rag, in its quest for a quick buck, has sold its soul to demonic, Satanic anti-Christian commercial forces? Quick, call an Anglican for an exorcism ...

Meanwhile, connoisseurs of Christopher Pearson will be pleased to read a fact devoid rant about the way philistines are restricting the current school experience in breadth and value, as he explains in Pupils once had access to life's poetry.

In a fact free ramble devoid of actual analysis or reference to current school curricula, Pearson advises that somehow pupils are now denied access to life's poetry by fiat and universal decree. And naturally it wasn't like that in the good old days ...

... a sure sign that a wretched nostalgic ramble through the past is waiting in the wings to club down younger folk by hitting them in the belly with a tedious burp of memories, misty water-coloured memories of the way we were, scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind Can it be that it was all so simple then, or has time re-written every line?

Pearson's solution? We should adopt the slogan of MGM, which is to say ars gratia artis, which is to say 'l'art pour l'art'. Uh huh. So Oscar Wilde is all the go, or perhaps we should indulge in a good whipping, Swinburne style, while gazing at an Aubrey Beardsley print ...

Pearson somehow manages to conflate Keats' line 'beauty is truth, truth beauty' with Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, as if Arnold was some kind of neo romantic, as opposed to devotee of art serving a purpose, which is to say of a utilitarian bent:

The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically. This, and this alone, is the scope of the following essay. (you can find the text here, and in a number of other places on the full to overflowing intertubes).

Yes, Arnold, along with the likes of John Ruksin and William Morris, were on the side of art as a socially and personally useful construct, as opposed to the desperate nihilism and decadence of the French movement headed by the likes of Rimbaud and Buadelaire, and given an Irish pump up by good old Oscar and his dandy cohorts ...

Pearson, it turns out, is actually a dead set imitation of an English major - or perhaps a colonel - harumphing about the good old days, when people got a decent education, and how the young things going around today don't know anything ... Or if they do, it could turn out to be incredibly dangerous. Here's Pearson, Leavis-ite, sounding the alarum about science:

What is true for the arts also holds good for knowledge, both pure and applied. One of the cornerstones of Western civilisation is the proposition that the growth of human understanding is an intrinsic good.

This stands regardless of whether it's of practical use or economic benefit and even when -- for example, in the case of research into lethal variants of viruses -- the new knowledge has potentially catastrophic consequences.

Yep, that's what I said the other day to my fellow cave inmate, who had this strange idea of harnessing fire and using it to cook meat. Don't do it, I said to him, you never know the potentially catastrophic consequences, whole cities might burn down as a result of a little kitchen fat ... And sure enough, the great fire of London started in a bakery, and soon enough the whole town was ablaze. Would they listen to me about gunpowder? Never mind uranium ...

And since we're talking in Pearson cliches today, isn't the whole history of humanity more than enough proof that a little learning can be a dangerous thing ...

Frankly I'm amazed they want to keep changing the curriculum when we could have just stuck with Elizabethan education ... after all, if it was good enough for Shakespeare ...

Still, it's wonderful to see who Pearson has enrolled in his 'art for art's sake' course:

Others, not least of them Pope Benedict XVI, insist that the experience of the beautiful and developing the ability to discern the true are the foundation of any education worthy of the name. They further argue that it is the intrinsic value of the arts, the social and the natural sciences -- rather than preparing job-ready pupils -- that should shape the content of any curriculum and its priorities.

Who'd have thought that Pope Benedict and Oscar Wilde were one? Still, I suppose Oscar did indulge in a death bed confession long after coming out with this:

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.

Pearson spends a goodly amount of time explaining how splendid an education students received in the class of 1970, including of course French, German or Latin. Ah, where would we be without the Latin mass.

Fortunately such students might these days also get to take a look at the history of China - I came to it late in life, after an extensive education in the virtues of the British empire - and be amazed by what they discover (which will also come in handy when watching Chinese movies set in the Qin period).

His luddite moaning is quaintly appealing:

They'd have been able to read a newspaper and, when necessary, most would have known how to use a library. Even if their English teachers had been remiss on the subject of grammar, studying another language would have helped many to grasp the fundamentals of their own.

Yes, yes, what fun it was for the lads to read the Melbourne Truth, while handily my father brought the Daily Mirror into the home, and it had an actual page dedicated to historical events, done in a tabloid style which always seemed to brood on the antics of Roman emperors, or other such lip smacking lifestyles ...

As for these young people, with their twittering and their social networking and their grandma-less ways, how I hate and revile them. Did I mention they're young, and their flesh firm and supple, and toned, and still they don't know how to construct a sentence. Damn you young people, damn you all to hell ...

But it's when Pearson takes to quoting F. R. Leavis that a line in the sand has to be drawn. Leavis of course was an English git, who decided he could exclude the likes of Lawrence Sterne and Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens from his pantheon, though he eventually allowed Dickens back in, and who waged an unseemly war on C. P. Snow for no other reason than Snow suggesting that a knowledge of science might come in handy in the twentieth century.

Leavis was of course a moralist, who was also an early example of Rumsfeldian spirit at play. Of Snow he scribbled:

He doesn't know what he means, and doesn't know he doesn't know.

Growing up it was de rigueur to have a disdain of the nonsense trotted out in The Great Tradition in the name of criticism:

A powerful critical talent who destroyed his own sense of proportion, Leavis was our brush with totalitarianism: we caught it as a mild fever instead of the full attack of meningitis. His career was the clearest possible proof that the course the arts take is not under the control of criticism.
Clive James
The "great tradition" does not brook even the possibility of libidinal gratification between the pages as an end in itself, and FR Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy.
Angela Carter (details here).

But I see as usual I've wandered away from Pearson's polemic, a dull re-hash of ancient cultural wars, but perhaps that's because Pearson himself wanders into a kind of comfortable banality. Having set up any number of straw dogs, he seeks refuge in music:

Suppose you had taught a pupil to sing and follow a score, or play a musical instrument.

Whether anyone else got to hear the person sing or play, or whether performing became a source of income, was entirely up to the individual. You had given that person a great gift: a measure of access to the canon and a grounding in technique. That was all that mattered.

But of course there's canons and canons. Does Pearson mean the canon of Sun studios, Memphis, or the canon of John Coltrane, or the canon of Motown or the canon of Lady Gaga channeling the canon of Madonna, or the canon of Grandmaster Flash?

With Leavis's name already invoked, what's the odds we're back to Bach?

Still it's nice to know that between the ants and the grasshoppers, Pearson identifies with the grasshoppers:

From an educational perspective, the fact that it might never be shared, let alone monetised, as accountants say these days, or that it might never be captured in measured productivity or the gross domestic product, was of no consequence whatsoever.

I trust that, for the best of the rising generation of teachers, it still doesn't matter.

Indeed. Not that I've noticed art, music, or literature being inclined to disappear from the world, nor even from the education system, nor from the lives of young people. The intertubes - full to overflowing - is full of it, and much of it free and there for the taking, to the consternation of Chairman Rupert and his assorted minions ...

As a result, we can perhaps recast Pearson's thinking a little, and send it off to the lizard Oz's editorial team as they harp about the vision thingy and the optimism of the intertubes and the need for a cost benefits analysis and wring their hands about the cost and brood about how the new broadband will shatter their current business model:

From an educational perspective, the fact that the intertubes might only be a way to share information, art, music, films and an interest in the Latin mass, and never be monetised, as accountants say these days, or that it might never be captured in measured productivity or the gross domestic product, should be of no consequence whatsoever.

I trust that, for the best of the rising generation of teachers, students, and internet users, not to mention newspaper hacks at war with Conroy, it will never matter.

Sure, sure, pull the other leg Christopher Pearson nee Oscar Wilde ...

And now, since we're in the mood for exotica, here's a piece by Algernon Charles Swinburne, no doubt scribbled between whippings, as a retort to the papists and the priests:

Priests and the soulless serfs of priests may swarm
With vulturous acclamation, loud in lies,
About his dust while yet his dust is warm
Who mocked as sunlight mocks their base blind eyes,

Their godless ghost of godhead, false and foul
As fear his dam or hell his throne: but we,
Scarce hearing, heed no carrion church-wolf's howl:
The corpse be theirs to mock; the soul is free.

Free as ere yet its earthly day was done
It lived above the coil about us curled:
A soul whose eyes were keener than the sun,
A soul whose wings were wider than the world.

We, sons of east and west, ringed round with dreams,
Bound fast with visions, girt about with fears,
Live, trust, and think by chance, while shadow seems
Light, and the wind that wrecks a hand that steers.

(the rest of the poem here, and more on Swinburne here and here. Obscure Victorian poets? Why read a newspaper when you have broadband and the internet?)

(Below: a memory of Oscar, and a famous person caricature found here which points out that while Wilde talked art for art's sake, he also talked about handsome fees when doing a talking tour of America).