For young academics on social media, everything is black and white
On Wednesday Andrew Mitchell MP and I wrote tributes for TheArticle to the late Norman Stone. Both of us were taught by him back in the 1970s.
I was writing in response to a nasty obituary in The Guardian by Professor Richard Evans, out to settle scores – some personal, some historical and some, it seems, political. Back in the 1980s one of Stone’s unforgivable sins was being a passionate supporter of Margaret Thatcher. It is no coincidence that Evans finished his hatchet job by quoting Edward Heath on Stone, omitting to mention that the two men loathed each other.
The following day I came under attack from a dozen or more young (mostly) academics who passionately believed that Stone could not conceivably be called “a superb teacher” because of allegations about the way he had treated women students. Today, they said he would have been sacked, if not prosecuted, for such “criminal” (sic) behaviour.
As I repeatedly pointed out in these exchanges, I was aware that Stone was no saint. He was a deeply flawed man, fighting with his demons for much (most?) of his adult life. But what surprised me most was that while I could acknowledge his failings, they could not acknowledge a single achievement or virtue.
His historical work, wrote one former colleague from Bilkent University in Turkey, was “despicable”. They all rejected the idea that he could be considered “a superb teacher”, even though he taught many of the best historians of the last thirty years, including Andrew Roberts, Niall Ferguson, Orlando Figes, Anne Applebaum and Noel Malcolm, all of whom attended a dinner in 1996 celebrating his 25th anniversary as a university teacher.
For all of them, nearly all academics in their 20s and 30s, it was black and white. If he abused his power in relation to some women students, he was, by definition, a terrible teacher. The idea that someone can have vices as well as virtues was unacceptable.
This is made easier, of course, if you ignore the virtues. Some superb history books and essays. No mention. Being a warm and generous friend. Doesn’t count for anything. Getting Communism right when so many historians and intellectuals in the forty years after the war did not. Nothing.
This last point is perhaps the most interesting. To a generation brought up since 1989, understanding Communism doesn’t seem to matter at all. All that matters to these young academics, it seems, is gender, perhaps race, and maybe the environment. But, above all, gender.
The other worrying aspect of these exchanges is the intolerance and abuse. Several of them were just plain rude and offensive. Others sneered and put things I hadn’t said in quotation marks, implying that I had said them. This is standard fare on social media, of course.
However, there is something much more concerning here than manners. Robert Boyers, the founding editor of the American literary magazine, Salmagundi, has just written a book called The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies (Scribner, out in the Autumn). It is an account of what is happening in American universities, a world of increasing intolerance. The title is perfect. These people are tyrants of virtue. They believe they have a monopoly of truth. Their agenda is the only one that matters. You cannot accept that people or political situations can be complicated or open to several interpretations.
In a superb essay on Wednesday, on another website, Unherd, the political philosopher, John Gray, attacked aspects of the new liberalism precisely because they are often not liberal enough. In particular, he attacks the new “culture of conformity”. Liberalism, Gray writes, “has mutated from being a philosophy of tolerance that allows individuals and communities with different values to live together peaceably, to one that aims to enforce what are judged to be the correct values on everybody. Along with the practice of public shaming and ostracism, the proliferation of rights is one of the central strategies adopted to achieve this end.”
On the day of his funeral, it is worth remembering that Norman Stone loathed “the smelly little orthodoxies” that were already emerging in British universities in the 1980s. His heroes among historians were the mavericks and the contrarians – AJP Taylor, Richard Cobb, Raymond Carr. Stone loathed Communism because it was the greatest attack on liberty and tolerance of them all. It is no coincidence that some of his best students became outstanding historians of Soviet Communism and many others ended up as passionate Conservatives.
