The pond warned the reptiles about their latest crusade, and their catering for dreams and delusions …
It wasn't just the savvy Savva building up expectations …
… all the reptiles were at it, and only succeeded in proving the uselessness of their by-election polling, and their inability to sway voters …
All the reptile talk was of Malware winning and Comrade Bill trounced and Albo taking over … and now Comrade Bill will flounce around the joint, defiant and empowered, and all the chatter will be at the way the bloodbath was a nightmare for the PM, when on the balance, it would have been remarkable for such an incompetent PM to score even a single victory against the odds.
All the reptile talk was of Malware winning and Comrade Bill trounced and Albo taking over … and now Comrade Bill will flounce around the joint, defiant and empowered, and all the chatter will be at the way the bloodbath was a nightmare for the PM, when on the balance, it would have been remarkable for such an incompetent PM to score even a single victory against the odds.
The reptiles are their own worst cheerleaders and crusaders … in much the same way as their climate science denialism would currently get short shrift currently in Greece, other sweltering European countries and California.
And so to a Sunday meditation about another business where the reptiles have managed to shoot themselves and their message in the foot …
The pond can hear a sigh and a groan from those who haven't immediately sprung up and gone off to do some useful winter gardening … not the bloody Crisis in Western Civilisation yet again …
This time the challenge is to discern a single topic the pond didn't study at UNE many years ago, or couldn't currently be studied at ANU ...
Oh he didn't mention the Library of Alexandria did he? But that was a bloody Egyptian thingie, and the evidence is clear enough that Caesar and Aurelian played a significant part in its destruction … Greg Hunters can head off here to dispute matters with Plutarch …and see inept attempts to pin the blame on later marauding Islamics ...
So much for the knowledge-burning, destroying, looting, pillaging Roman part of the Greco-Roman glories of Western Civilisation …
But back to the challenge. By his own definition, Monk managed to construct out of available courses his own curriculum, even if outlined with more than a hint about his being gloriously up himself in terms of his voracious reading and acquaintance with great minds … you know, of the library-destroying Greco-Roman kind …
Now around this point, before Monk gets on to quoting Byron, the pond should offer a reminder that there's nothing to date that couldn't be found in any conventional y'artz degree.
The pond suffered through the excessive and indulgent Byron - go on, Greg Hunt how to live a wild life in celebration of western self-absorption and romanticist delusionalism - and even worse had to read the entirety of Wordsworth's The Prelude …
Only a preview here - these days you're expected to pay for access to the academic library - but it's back to the Byron-quoting Monk ...
There's not a jot or whit in any of this which might not have been encountered at UNE many years before - to balance the rogue utilitarian lecturer who roamed the halls saying "it's all chaff to me", there were plenty of ponces posing as inheritors of the Ionian dream …
In fact the English department was stacked with Oxford graduates who routinely sounded as whacked as Monk.
What always irritates the pond is the narrowness of the discourse and the way this sort of blather reduces what's available. When it comes to personal taste, the pond would rather have one lesser Beethoven sonata or string quartet than a dozen Byronic poems. And what of the plastic arts, and architecture and so on and so forth?
No doubt they'll get a casual mention, but in the main Monk can be celebrated for the narrowness and parochialism of his vision ...
Oh go burn a very large library. There's a lot more to Western Civilisation than the sort of trickery embodied in Big History and mindless blather about the "apprehension of Western Civilisation", as if listing a series of fields of study somehow encompasses everything …
As for consilience?
...even Wilson's sympathizers might suggest that, given his root social and environmental concerns, most of his censures are misplaced. What prevents us from coming to grips with environmental decay or the rest of our social bedevilments has less to do with a lack of consilience in learning than with the interplay of interests and power. Wilson hardly touches on such issues. He writes that ''ethics is everything,'' that what we need is ''a powerful conservation ethic'' and that by exploring the biomaterial basis of ethics, ''we should be able to fashion a wiser and more enduring ethical consensus than has gone before.'' In the end, ''Consilience'' is an evangelical book, an arresting exposition of Wilson's religion of science and a kind of sermon -- forceful in delivery if shaky in substance -- intended to assist in the reform of the world. (NY Times here)
More bloody sermons about the way that everything fits into some delusional cosmic unity.
Monk's sort of listicle shouldn't obscure the notion embedded earlier that somehow it's currently not possible for students to inform themselves of areas of interest in the past …a monstrous stupidity …why, the glories of Western Civilisation are all around us …
Monk's sort of listicle shouldn't obscure the notion embedded earlier that somehow it's currently not possible for students to inform themselves of areas of interest in the past …a monstrous stupidity …why, the glories of Western Civilisation are all around us …
Phew, the pond just had to throw that one in … the reptiles get terribly restless talking about the glories of Western Civilisation when the Donald isn't mentioned at least once …
And so to the final gobbet of Monk ...
And there you go, the main point it seems is to promote Monk's books and website with a plug at the end of it all, while also promoting blather about dogma and obscurantism … a feat Monk manages perfectly well himself with lots of rhetorical flourishes and not a single clue about what a Western Civilisation degree might offer students in distinction to a conventional y'artz degree, except a distinction which would raise an eyebrow when ever anyone encountered someone deeply embedded in deeply meaningless culture wars …
You know: "Um, we're looking for an expert in algorithms who might be able to draw together all the knowledge available on the full to overflowing intertubes. An expert in consilience, big history and wanting, as it were .."
"Well I do have a degree in Western Civilisation certified by little Johnny and the Onion Muncher and Paul Monk as being deeply meaningful."
You know: "Um, we're looking for an expert in algorithms who might be able to draw together all the knowledge available on the full to overflowing intertubes. An expert in consilience, big history and wanting, as it were .."
"Well I do have a degree in Western Civilisation certified by little Johnny and the Onion Muncher and Paul Monk as being deeply meaningful."
And so, just as they have given comrade Bill a boost, the crusading reptiles keep on helping fuck up meaningful tertiary study in the land …
That surely deserves a couple more cartoons celebrating the joys of academic reward in Western Civilisation …
… though hopefully there are other rewards for certain brands of study ...
Truly sad, DP. I used to read Monk's articles 20+ years ago - when he mostly wrote for Fairfax and wasn't nearly so narcissistically egocentric and he did make some amount of sense - but now, well he's almost in Paul Kelly territory, isn't he.
ReplyDeleteEspecially when he spouts nonsense like this:
Monk: "The Ramsay endowment is an unprecedented opportunity for us nationally to have a serious crack at designing courses in Western civilisation that stimulate and genuinely educate students."
Oh yes ? Leading, as you so succinctly expressed it to this:
DP paraphrasing Monk: "Well I do have a degree in Western Civilisation certified by little Johnny and the Onion Muncher and Paul Monk as being deeply meaningful."
Except, of course, as I may have said a few times already, Monk's prescription bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Ramsay "indicative curriculum". For starters the Ramsay "curriculum" is just a Big Old-fashioned Book Club. There's no consilience, there's no science, there's no mathematics, there's almost no art and precious little poetry. Honestly, would anybody really, truly expect the likes of Howard, Abbott, de Bruyn, Beazley et al to have any idea about any of that ? Or to be in support of any of it if they did get it ?
I'll say it again, as anybody can quickly determine from actually taking the trouble to do a tiny bit of fact-checking by actually reading the Ramsay "indicative curriculum", there is just no central conception or even moderately non-superficial understanding behind any of it. And it isn't a degree, either, it's just 16 units (out of 24 required for a degree) of semi-connected book reads.
In short, Monk, like so many others, has concocted some idea of what he truly wants the 'Ramsay curriculum' to be like and then blithely assumes that it is just that.
PS. Byron is a truly pretentious git, isn't he. Suited especially to the Monks of this world who are striving to themselves become truly pretentious gits. I was pleased to note, though, that Sappho made it onto the Ramsay reading list. Compare Byron's stuff with a couple of hers:
1. A famous quote: "If you have a weak stomach, don't disturb the beach rubble."
2. A delicious little scold:
I hear that Andromeda -
That hayseed in her hay-
seed finery - has put
a torch to your heart
and she without even
the art of lifting her
skirt over her ankles.