Dr Paul A. Taylor: On Life in a Post-Literate Age

“We have entered a post-literate age, greatly facilitated by an unholy marriage of MSM and its much younger partner - personalised communicational technologies that privilege images over words, instant response over considered reflection, snippets of loosely-related information over symbolically rich, complexly layered cultural constructs.”

Originally from Liverpool, Dr Paul A. Taylor has spent his entire adult life in academia. Frustrated by the rise of the bureaucratic mindset and the spiralling decline in standards, the noted critical theorist has now resigned from his position at Leeds University. In the following pages, Taylor speaks out against the demise of academia, Brexit as a watershed moment, the Metropolitan elite's echo chamber of the self-anointed, the dumbing down of the cultural discourse, and the madness of Gary Lineker being allowed to set the frame of reference for the Cross-channel migrant debate (all while breaking Godwin’s Law due to basic historical illiteracy).

Q: Before we turn to academia, I wanted your comment on the current split between those who still consume the BBC/mainstream media, and those who have realised that there are other views out there.

"I think your statement that the world is now split into MSM users and non-users is significant because it points to how we have effectively lost an important aspect of the public sphere—a shared space in which disparate views can be aired and tested against each other. A great book addressing this narrowing of perspective in terms of both broad ideological themes and specific detail is Batya Ungar-Sargon's Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy, in which she traces the rise of the self-appointed, insular media elites and how they have retreated behind their New York Times-type paywalls to cater to an ideological tribe of like-minded people.

I have direct experience with BBC Radio 3 and 4, as I used to appear on quite a few of their programs. (My late father used to say: “Son, you have a face for radio.”) When I spoke with BBC producers and staff, I was always struck by the homogeneity of the atmosphere at both Broadcasting House and the Manchester, and later Salford studios. On The Moral Maze, I observed that “the BBC is more incestuous than Norwich in the 1500s” and I stand by that statement. There is precious little knowledge of working-class culture north of Watford (BBC presenters forced to work in Salford used to travel up on the train and head straight back down to London), and the fact that the Brexit vote and, afterwards, the fall of the Red Wall, took so many of the commentariat by surprise would seem to support that thesis, although, because the media mark their own homework, there hasn’t been much hand-wringing about how out of touch and insular their coverage is.

For the growing number of former BBC viewers/listeners, Brexit proved a watershed moment that has accelerated a profound sense of disenchantment with MSM and has helped to explain the falling audience figures and the turn to alternative news sources. Media coverage of the referendum and its prolonged parliamentary aftermath encapsulated what you describe as the “often-stated mantras” of a “heavily amplified agent spreading its own agenda.” That agenda has developed apace and includes a wide range of “correct” opinions that, in past times, would have been subject to healthy democratic political dispute. The self-anointed aspect of MSM figures has continued unabated to the point where a millionaire former footballer, Gary Lineker, is allowed to set the frame of reference for the cross-channel migrant debate.

My personal take on the BBC’s agenda has a distinctly Northern hue. I have travelled and lectured widely during my career, including about 18 months in the US, so I don’t think that I could be fairly characterised as parochial. I realised that, apart from one month living in Bristol, I had only ever lived and worked in the North of the UK—North Wales, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Manchester, Leeds. This has made me very aware of the extent to which the BBC and other major organisations have lost touch with large swathes of the country—I used to joke that I was the only person I’d heard on the BBC who had discussed “class” with a flat vowel in the word itself. Whilst working in the university sector, I also noticed how, even when geographically working in the North, few academics had much direct experience of local working-class culture. This social schism is a key factor in the mutual alienation of the commentariat (sourced from graduates) and actual public opinion that has fuelled the flight from MSM. Thinkers such as Thomas Sowell and Robert Conquest emphasise the difference between intellect and wisdom, and how the latter, perhaps counterintuitively, tends to reside most sturdily in the less-educated sectors of society. 

Thomas Sowell approvingly cites George Orwell’s observation that “some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Whilst Robert Conquest similarly cites Professor Ronald Hingley, who said: “for it is surely true, if not generally recognised, that real prowess in wrong-headedness, as in most other fields of endeavour, presupposes considerable education, character, sophistication, knowledge and will to succeed.” This might even be humorous if the consequences weren’t so tragic. For those who might dismiss these comments as overly general and unsubstantiated, Giles Udy's wonderful book Labour and the Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left (2017) forensically documents the institutionalised intellectual foolishness of the British Left and its complicity with Stalin’s barbarity, which, as just one small further example, George Bernard Shaw dismissed as a necessary “weeding of the garden” (Udy 2017: xi).

Towards the end of my own relationship with Auntie Beeb, I remember watching with morbid fascination a stream of worthies appearing on the flagship programme Newsnight to voice their concern about daily developments and their fear that Parliament might actually find a way to enact the outcome of the Brexit Referendum. Jeanette Winterson was my favourite guest because, as a novelist with no expertise in economics and politics, she only seemed able to express inchoate discombobulation that something had happened in the political process which she did not like. Alastair Campbell is perhaps the most extreme and ongoing example of the emotional dysregulation Brexit continues to cause for the class of democrats-as-long-as-decisions-go-our-way, whilst Emily Maitlis appeared to be auditioning for an anchoring position on North Korean nightly news such was her ideological one-sidedness towards the end of her BBC career.

What never ceases to depress me is the depth to which the commentariat doubles down and continues to invest in their self-appointed surety. Recently, the author and Times journalist Matthew Syed wrote one of his many “Everything is the fault of Brexit” type articles. This is not particularly remarkable for someone suffering, as he does, from Brexit Derangement Syndrome, but given that he also wrote a book entitled Rebel Ideas: The Power of Thinking Differently including a chapter entitled ‘Echo Chambers’, apparently Metropolitan ironic self-awareness has taken a sabbatical. You can perhaps imagine my shock when I read on the inside cover “Matthew lives in London.” I think it is this Maoist-Stalinist consistency of the self-anointed position, irrespective of what a majority of your fellow citizens think and feel, that has led to the mutual alienation of MSM apparatchiks and the audiences that increasingly feel more welcome in the world of YouTube and podcasting."

Q: There is zero exploration of ideas within MSM. No in-depth investigation and understanding of issues.

"Marshall McLuhan once said “Whoever discovered water, it wasn’t a fish” and I think this encapsulates the problem of existing in an environment that we take for granted and whose subtle (and none-too-subtle) effects we fail to appreciate. If you wanted to create a machine for disseminating decontextualised anti-thought, you would be hard-pressed to design a better one than the MSM. In homage to Alain De Botton, I use the phrase Lobottonised thought to describe the MSM’s middlebrow, unambitious conceptualisation of philosophy. Similarly, the BBC’s conception of serious literature appears to be mired in endless, albeit ever more ethnically diverse, adaptations of Dickens and Austen.

There are many thinkers whose work illuminates the ideological underpinnings of the MSM and perhaps that explains why we never see them. You identify in your questions (more detail later) Thomas Sowell, who is exemplary for his ability to carefully deconstruct the intellectual arrogance and myopia of the self-anointed elites. Sowell’s pragmatically illuminating work could usefully be supplemented by more abstract thinkers like Philip Rieff and René Girard who seek to grapple with some of the more ethereal (but ultimately no less important) aspects of culture—to name just two thinkers unknown in the MSM. The more I ponder these issues the more I am convinced that we have entered a post-literate age. This is greatly facilitated by an unholy marriage of the MSM and its much younger partner—personalised communicational technologies privileging images over words, instant response over considered reflection, snippets of loosely-related information over symbolically rich, complexly layered cultural constructs et cetera.

The recent instance of the woman sent to prison for an illegal abortion and the subsequent complaints about the sentence from some MSM commentators is a stark example of how far we have descended into an ideological echo chamber. Irrespective of one’s view about abortion in general, the manner in which some figures in the commentariat have opined against the prison term demonstrates the extent to which the formulaic repetition of ideological conclusions to an audience you perceive to be compliant now supplants actual argumentation. In this particular case, an ideological insistence that abortion is always and everywhere a woman’s healthcare issue has distorted our moral compass to the extent that alarm over borderline infanticide can be displaced by the repetition of the ethically obtuse claim that the prison sentence was draconian because “this is a healthcare issue.” This substitution of rhetorical repetition for substantive reasoning is the same essential “technique” used when activists refuse to engage with opponents of their cause, whether that be racial justice, gender identity, or climate change.  Thomas Sowell-like reasoning is countered by the endless voicing of, and MSM dissemination of, truisms striving to be bromides—Black Lives Matter, Save the Planet, Trans-women are women.

The cultural journey to this situation is a long and complex one but I am convinced that the devaluation of literacy and its replacement with the oxymoronic notion of media literacy has played a crucial role. There are obviously a plethora of examples that could be used to illustrate the social and educational consequences of the ideological autism that now prevails, but as a huge fan of Kafka’s work, the very recent example of children attempting to reason with their gender speak teacher struck me as a scenario beyond even his gift for the irrationally surreal. I talked about this with Richard Grannon a few weeks ago when I described how a YouTube video of blue-haired protestors barking like dogs is emblematic of the post-literate depths to which we have sunk. Such is the pace of developments, however, I failed to realise that cats not dogs are now the self-identity du jour."

Q: Do you agree that much of academia’s demise is self-inflicted? They let gender studies rise to alarming prominence, allowed social activism to invade the classroom to a debilitating degree, dropped academic standards, and suppressed debate.

"The addition of “studies” to the end of a subject appears to correlate strongly with the conflation of academic enquiry and social activism. Perhaps appropriately, given its name, Gender Studies was the progenitor of this process. Whilst irritated by the latest Woke excess, I must admit that I occasionally do experience a sense of schadenfreude when radical feminists on the receiving end of ideological autism complain about some of the very same techniques they practised when they were targeting the oppressive white men of the patriarchy. I remember giving a talk (approx 15 years ago) on the significance of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy for our understanding of technology when some feminist academics complained when I (accurately) pointed out that Hannah Arendt was the part-time lover of Heidegger and informed me that I should be looking at her work rather than his (apparently on the basis of her preferable gender and despite the fact that Heidegger is widely recognised as a more important thinker, to the extent that Arendt herself called him “the uncrowned king of the empire of thought”). My feminist interlocutors simultaneously also complained that I shouldn’t be studying Heidegger’s work at all because of his (admittedly atrocious) behaviour during World War II. By this logic, it is eminently forgivable to sleep with an erstwhile Nazi if you are a female academic but it is wrong for a male academic to study that philosopher’s pre-Nazi period philosophical work (which heavily influenced subsequent important Jewish thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, irrespective of Heidegger’s personal faults).

I share this experience not because it was particularly traumatic (that way lies the path to the Victimhood Olympics) but because it provides a small example of the early seedlings of the cancelling mentality that has since grown up like Japanese knotweed, or mixing metaphors, feminist academics opened up a Pandora’s Box of intolerance that they are now having to face themselves. This small example demonstrates the beginnings of an anti-intellectual atmosphere within universities. The question of whether a topic or person is worthy of further study first has to pass a series of ideological purity tests controlled by Maoist cadres of the self-anointed virtuous.

Self-serving, professionally-compromised university staff will deny any loss of standards. Beyond the “casual empiricism” of my experiences in lecture theatres and decades of grading work, one quick thought experiment would be to ask “Why don’t they grade to the curve?” In other words, one immediate and practical solution to endless disputes over standards would be to have pre-set quotas for grades in any given cohort. For example, if only 10 per cent are able to achieve a First (and compared to my Undergrad experience in the 1980s, 10 per cent would be generous) then, unless there is a particularly cerebrally-challenged or inveterately lazy year, at least some sort of standard is guaranteed. Similarly, plagiarism and/or using essay mills is a constant problem, especially among overseas students. This problem could be solved by replacing continuous assessments with old-fashioned examinations—but, as a colleague once said to me, “Examinations don’t work for our MA students,” what she left unsaid was “because most of them would fail, and we simply can’t allow that.” But the simple remedy of grading to the curve is not likely to be implemented in the UK university sector anytime soon. On the contrary, since university league tables include the number of First Class degrees as a crude measurement of an institution’s teaching “quality,” there is an obviously perverse incentive for those same institutions to race to the bottom of actual quality in the search for an improvement in their league standing—a version of the previously cited Gresham’s Law in which “bad money drives out good.” This represents an educational version of the sort of bureaucratic sclerosis common in the Soviet Union—e.g. anecdotes of lightbulb factories meeting their arbitrary production quotas set as the total weight of bulbs produced by making individual bulbs much heavier and thicker to the extent that they no longer provided sufficient light, the administrative target was met and non-illuminating light bulbs become a “success story.”

An under-acknowledged source of lowered standards is the sector-wide emphasis on “research impact.” This means that for obtaining research grants, internal promotions, et cetera. Academics need to prove some real-world relevance from their work. This is problematic because it undermines “blue skies” thinking: bias is created for safer, less boundary-pushing work that is more likely to have immediate, more easily measured outcomes. Furthermore, in certain subjects like literature and cultural theory, the value lies precisely in their “otherworldly” qualities. A love of history, for example, tends to arise because one gets to read about alien times and circumstances that aren’t directly relevant to today’s world, and therefore can’t readily be reduced to “impact.” The result is research that tends towards new bureaucratic norms. Lastly, the distance between the Ivory Tower and the rest of society is diminished—this may be seen as a good thing, but remember that when you next read of an ideologically captured primary school teacher drunk on (often poorly understood) gender theory."

Q: Camille Paglia has argued that there is no investigation of a long narrative in universities anymore. Students pick and choose often unrelated modules, leaving them ignorant of ‘the big picture’—they do not make links to history, and other aspects of the human experience.

I would further develop Paglia’s point and argue that is not just a loss of the long narrative in which you can engage in depth with material to see how historical events unfold and relate to each other over long periods of time, but the loss of a sense of any meaningful narrative at all. Students no longer read anywhere near the extent that they used to and add to this the fact that there is no longer any permissible accepted canon of writing to use as a benchmark, constructing a conceptual narrative for students to engage with becomes impossible. 

The cafeteria-type educational experience Paglia refers to results from the combined effects of three factors—the Unholy Trinity of Commodification, Bureaucratisation, and Technology. 

Once students become consumers, the academic loses professional autonomy in terms of what can be taught, how intellectually challenging you can be, and perhaps the most misunderstood element for those outside the university sector, the amount of “contact time” becomes more important than its actual pedagogical usefulness or genuine quality.

When people hear that Arts and Humanities students may have only 4-6 taught hours in their final year a common response is “That’s not good value for money.” For this observation to be true, however, requires a complete recalibration of what a university education is and has become. If university-level knowledge is to be imparted, this process has traditionally been significantly different to teaching as it is understood in high school. In a highly selective environment (e.g. pre-Major and Blair when approx. 8-9 per cent of school leavers went to university) I could give a lecture in which the material I would be discussing had required large amounts of background reading and I would regularly recommend a large number of books that students should familiarise themselves with, and a smaller number that they should read closely. If done properly, that method of learning requires long hours in the library and so 4-6 hours of actual teaching proves to be an optimum amount.

The value for money argument increasingly does have validity because students do not tend to spend long amounts of time in the library because they have part-time jobs, learning disabilities (there is a mini-dyslexia industry), mental health problems etc. This has resulted in modes of assessment becoming much easier—continuous essays, smaller bite-sized tasks, collaborative projects and so on. Universities now pride themselves on the diversity of their assessment methods so that the death of the traditional, intensive system becomes a virtue rather than the pedagogical disaster it actually is. 

With commodification comes a need for ever more standardisation e.g. as far as possible, all students should have similar educational experiences (because they are all paying for a service). This means lecturing becomes more and more controlled by bureaucratic rather than intellectual standards, this requires more and more bureaucratic over-seers, less actual diversity of teaching approaches and there is a race to the banal. A useful advantage of such bureaucracy for university managers is that any principled complaint about a decline in academic standards can be met with a slew of process-heavy responses along the lines of “all our quality assurance procedures are in place and well-regulated, we have awarded more First Class honours this year than ever before, and this proves how good our standards actually are” There’s a certain beautifully disingenuous circularity to such arguments that I reluctantly admire.

Lastly, Technology—the commodification and bureaucratisation elements have been enabled and abetted by the uncritical embrace of widespread technologised forms of teaching. Lockdown accelerated a process that was already underway. Towards the end of my career, I was one of the few lecturers who told students they couldn’t use laptops in lectures (they were classes of approx. 50 students so the request was just about enforceable) but that would just not be tenable now. There has been an exponential growth in students claiming various learning ailments that “necessitate” the use of a laptop and there are various university support units whose raison d’être is to find students who need their help to justify the existence of the unit and so another circle of inanity is created.

I worked in a Communications department that, despite its title, had no apparent sense that the widespread use of laptops meant that note-taking was less efficient (you remember much more of what you wrote by hand) and that laptops are inherently distracting from what should be the core focus of an ideal university lecture—a research-informed scholar enthused to impart high-level knowledge. The result is students looking at screens and googling the last thing you said rather than paying attention to the flow of the lecture. One by-product of all this was that the sort of difficult lectures I prided myself on being able to give—a topic that I could extemporise on in detail and without notes/overhead slides in order to deal with the specific responses of the students—became a de facto “bad” lecture because the inflexible standard for lectures became Power Point-heavy formulaic presentations with accompanying notes for those who weren’t paying attention or didn’t attend.

Since lockdown, perhaps an inadvertent result of the university's cynical reliance upon technological modes of teaching has been the growing realisation that, if the traditional scholarly lecture is to be downgraded, why shouldn’t a student just find material similar/better than their own university lectures on the wealth of new non-university websites? And if they are going to do that, what’s the point of attending university at all?

This brings to mind Tony Blair who rapidly expanded student numbers with the arbitrary target of 50 per cent of school leavers. As if to prove that irony is dead, his son Euan Blair—MBE, in case anyone doubted the dead irony comment—has since made his fortune by creating a business based upon apprenticeships for those who’ve realised Higher Education has become a dubious investment. In an environment of mass higher education, Vice-Chancellors have metamorphosed from primum inter pares academic leaders into Chief Executives of education-themed businesses. Academic leadership now means catering to customer needs in a service provision model rather than maintaining scholarly standards. Overwhelmingly left-leaning academics have been complicit in these developments. It is worth pointing out, however, that, as with most things in life and to quote Ecclesiastes “there is nothing new under the sun.” The ideological capture of higher education was satirised in Ancient Greece Aristophanes.

I mentioned in my Triggernometry interview, how in my second year of university at Edinburgh I took a year-long “outside” course on Nineteenth Century Russian Studies which included equal amounts of social history and literature. The literature half of the course included nearly all the major Russian novelists of that century and I estimate that just the set readings (remember this is just for one half of the course) would be in the region of 4-5,000 pages. Because of the pick-and-mix nature of today’s bijou university modules combined with the number of students who would be triggered by the sheer amount of reading, and the content of these distinctly non-Woke novels, I cannot envisage a course like this now."

Q: Why does Leeds University have a harassment unit? If you had stayed, what would your crime be?

The University of Leeds has a harassment unit because it has chosen to go down the Maoist cultural path described in Robert Jay Lifton’s excellent book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China (2014 [1961]). Lifton’s research was based on a number of detailed interviews in the 1950s with survivors of Chinese state-directed “re-education” and it is disturbing to see how well his account maps onto today’s university sector. Once victimhood has become a presupposition rather than an atypical scenario for students, units like this have proliferated to play a purposefully designed role in the University of Leeds Vice Chancellor’s wider programme of Equity Diversity and Inclusion. 

In totalitarian societies, the substantive content is emptied out of language and frequently terms come to mean the opposite of what they should. In the Soviet Union Pravda (transcendent truth) was the well-chosen title for the Party’s newspaper in preference for istina (factual truth). Conquest cites Pushkin’s presciently sarcastic aperçu “The lie that uplifts us is dearer to me than the mass of petty istinas." (Conquest: 7) The fact that a British Vice Chancellor of a major university can proudly announce “equity” as a catch-all, constantly moveable arbitrarily defined goal in the absence of any intellectually coherent framework is clear evidence that the Maoists are in charge. For example, what happens when Maths and Science Departments are “over-represented” by East Asian students? Does Leeds University start imitating the US and actively discriminating against those “over-achieving” students on the basis of their skin colour?

If I hadn’t taken early retirement, I’m sure I would have been on the speed dial of the Harassment Unit so that I could be called in for my regularly scheduled “struggle sessions”. My likely thought crimes would involve having voiced the above criticisms of educational standards/university-sponsored anti-intellectualism and I would have persisted in pointing out the lack of genuinely diverse perspectives in an institution that is supposed to be educating people. If you add to that my refusal to treat young adults like children or to adapt my use of language to meet the arbitrary pronoun requirements of insecure students experimenting with their identity and I think early retirement was the right decision. Sowell summarises beautifully the pathologically cynical nature of the reasoning used today by university Vice Chancellors. In short, no matter what happens, the vision of the anointed always succeeds, if not by the original criteria, then by criteria extemporised later—and if not by empirical criteria, then by criteria sufficiently subjective to escape even the possibility of refutation. Evidence becomes irrelevant." (Sowell 1995: 15)