The modernists looked to the early seventeenth century and found people fascinated, as they themselves were, with the techniques of language. We are no longer so interested in this subject, and feel impatience at the limited purview of the renaissance mind. – In this country a very narrow thing. The Victorians, on the other hand, are a people engulfing the world, and choking, explaining our own dyspepsia.

To you it is only a dead hedgehog, but to me it is a desert island loaded with a thousand cast-aways, every one of them watching us steam over their horizon.

It seems from latest polls that David Cameron's attempts to discourage the electorate from voting to leave the European Union may, after all, be successful. If correct, this is regrettable on three counts:

Firstly, that the population in the United Kingdom should be susceptible to a campaign of demoralisation;

Secondly, that Britain would, like all the other European states, almost certainly be much more prosperous outside the constricting and neurotic framework of the European Union; and

Thirdly that this would mean that the window of opportunity for a peaceful unravelling of the European Union will have been missed.

Of all these it is the last that is most troubling because the alternative path that it indicates is not so much unknown as rather too familiar.

Drawing our inferences from history, the EU as an administration is all but certain to fail in delivering prosperous lives to the individuals in its populations, and will become, like the government of all such multi-national aggregations before it, an agent collecting rent from the many on behalf of a distant few.

At present this Europe-wide government is only the partial realisation of an ideology, and not yet, to use Burke's pregnant term, an 'armed doctrine'. It could even now be dissolved peacefully by a simple refusal from the unsubjected populations, and a British vote to Leave would catalyse this resistance, giving courage to others in Europe and so precipitate a collapse of the European Union as an expansionist project, returning it to its roots as a region of free trade. Thus the royal blue flag with its binding ring of gold stars would fall to earth not with a bang but a whimper, the best of all possible political conclusions. A vote to Remain, on the other hand, will mean that this moment will pass, and that any resistance in the future, and there is very likely to be intense dissatisfaction within a matter of decades, will of necessity tend towards violence, for by then it will be rebellion not civil disagreement.

A significant difference between study in the humanities and that in the sciences is that logic, Popperian logic say, has never seemed of much importance in or to the arts. Doubtless there are many reasons for this, but perhaps the greatest is this: that in the arts we have no hypotheses, because, indeed, we have no problems. By this, I mean that there is no great interest in forming a technology of the arts, that there is nothing to be won there. Yet, a great part of literary critical theory, certainly in the 1990s when I last paid attention, appears dedicated to the mastery of all territory. Why is it that literary theorists did not turn to the obviously successful scientific method? Because, shrewdly, the scholars of literature knew that this modified empiricism would rapidly take the field out of their hands, and criticism would be succeeded by naturalism. This would have been personally and institutionally inconvenient.

On the 5th of June 1993 I lost my temper with Peter Singer in a public discussion about his approach to the inclusion of animals within the moral sphere. He was a guest speaker, and I was just a member of the audience, so this was ungrateful and very rude. I felt bad it about then, and in retrospect a little worse. But the palpable dishonesty of his talk really got under my skin. He was presenting as objectively reasoned a position that was plainly self-serving. My quarrel was not with the conclusions, but with the bogus arguments in their favour. By all means serve your self, but don’t pretend to be doing something else altogether.

The problem is this: In his Animal liberation (1975), and Practical Ethics (1980), Expanding Circle (1981) Singer’s general argument states that to qualify for moral treatment an organism must be able to suffer. We must, he says, and on reasoned moral grounds extend human standards of morality to all creatures that can suffer. This leads him to a number of recommendations with regard to factory farming and human diet, uncontroversial ideas I think, and probably sensible. However, the criterion of ‘suffering’, on which these recommendations are based, is fallacious and will:

a. Impair the enactment of these principles

b. Discredit them

c. Lead to the proposition of inappropriate recommendations.

Moreover, the flaws in the foundations of his moral system are so grave that no corrective tinkering is possible; instead we must abandon that whole line of thought and start building up from a different location. (I won’t explore that here, but it is fair to admit that I would ground my position in an evolutionary theory of moral intuitions that sees them as arising from self interest, not reason.)

The main problem with Singer’s criterion is that it draws lines that cannot be maintained or defined with any precision: We cannot decide definitely if another person is suffering, though we can make a reasonable guess. In the case of animals we cannot even make a guess. What is necessary to “suffer”? Singer would reply “consciousness”, but what is this, why is consciousness necessary for an animal to suffer, and how do we decide whether other creatures have it? None of these questions are easy to answer, and some are impossible. Singer rejects the idea that simple creatures such as shellfish can suffer, but on what grounds? One begins to wonder whether his definition is any more tenable, indeed any different, from the criterion of rationality, the ability to reason, which he rejects.

Furthermore, Singer talks of the “interests” of hens, and the need to respect them, but this term is not given any precision beyond that implied in the suffering criterion; i.e. that the only interests to be infringed are those connected with the right to avoid suffering. This is open to criticism as a totally inadequate definition of “interest”. From a molecular biological perspective, all organisms have interests with the same fundamental character, the replication of genes. From that view Singer’s proposed limitation of the definition of “interest” simply to animals capable of suffering seems narrow, and unjustified. One could very reasonably say that at a deep level all life forms have interests that can be infringed, even viruses.

Thus Singer’s criterion is inadequate because it simply doesn’t lead us to any useful principles. We are left wondering where to draw the lines to mark the boundaries of our moral responsibility, and, since the purpose of the criterion was to redefine this boundary, it fails in its own terms. It’s no good saying that in the future the criterion might be workable; we need something now. The consciousness of animals, the capacity of animals can suffer are questions to which we can give no precise answer, and perhaps in principle cannot answer. Since these questions remain open, Singer’s criterion turns out to be no criterion at all.

However, Singer does draw lines, yet his theory does not, and I say cannot explain why he chose those places. We are justified therefore in assuming that the location was decided in advance for other reasons, reasons which go undeclared, with the argument making an appearance after the fact to provide justification.

Overall, I could not avoid the conclusion that the criterion of suffering appealed to Singer because it left him something to eat. Indeed, his lines of division are suspiciously convenient in other ways for human beings. Most of the hostile life forms we encounter, from viruses to mosquitos, are creatures that Singer’s line excludes, but which, as I have remarked, could with as much reason be said to be within his line rather than beyond it. In short what really annoyed me in 1993 was that Singer appeared to be a Pecksniff of the first water. While claiming to be at the very tip-top of the moral high ground he was in fact pushing a slightly revised, indeed a concealed form of anthropcentrism. I had no wish to deny him his dinner (of mostly herbs), but I resented, and still resent the fact that he was telling cold-blooded lies to put it on the plate quite free of guilt.

A: What an opinonated man!

B: Indeed, always volunteering his view...

A: Ah... had that been true I should have listened with interest.

We tend to think that there must be a coherent position held by the author of a text, and that all the parts of that text contribute to it; but we should be able to see that a book is a series of propositions, each of them satisfying in some way, and not necessarily quite coherent, though that is often and admirably the aim. It is even possible that the juxtaposition of two incompatible propositions may be a source of attraction for both reader and writer, for in passing from one to the other without raising the question of their compatibility we may gain some extra sense of security. That is to say, one of the greatest talents of poets and philosophers may be to so collocate propositions from warring families that the conflict becomes invisible. – We have the impression of peace.

This impression may not be very difficult to create, for the simple fact that a series of propositions is printed as if it had continuity may mask what would be, in another form, speech say, palpable discontinuity. Those volumes which are assembled from several essays, written over a long period of time, but pretending to cohesion, are obvious examples; however, there is no guarantee that a chapter written at one sitting, or a paragraph, or a sentence, or a phrase, is any more integrated. All these could be said to function as forms invented to the give the appearance of a developing and internally integral argument. They are binding agents. It is most important to see that this does not discredit the book or paragraph, since any means of reconciling opposites is welcome. In the experience of reading a book or a poem, it is actually the case that the warring propositions are at peace; and that peace is not an illusion, even though the propositions will quickly trade blow for blow outside these forms.

Joyce's welding puns make needlessly explicit what was already implicit and obvious. Rather than a delicate vibration of related meaning, Joyce presents a vulgar demonstration. – Perhaps this is the really obscene thing about his writing; a smutty giggle making pornographic the discrete and commonplace relations between words.

All the world's political and religious systems offer their believers the conviction that there is less human waste, irrelevance, and hostility under their rule than under that of other systems, as if to say that everybody matters, and is beneficial to each and everyone. However, in practice all such systems can do is more or less mask the manifest hazard of individual failure and the fact that the success of others is commonly achieved at the expense of some or every other individual. Since our spontaneous intuition of these facts is very strong, it has proved necessary for political and religious systems to anticipate our doubts by creating a category for the "lost", into which believers can project heretics, infidels, and the evil. Hence the various kinds of hell. This realistic touch makes the religio-political fictions of mankind all the more plausible, and is perhaps the source of all their power. 

"It was a curious fact that, although every magician must have known himself to be a fraud and a trickster, he always believed in and greatly feared the supernatural abilities of other medicine men." (E Lucas Bridges, Uttermost Part of the Earth, 286).

Our immediate response to this could be, 'And so it is with writers, musicians, painters and with all experts, all professionals'. But in fairness to the medicine man we should perhaps grant that he might be impressed by his own sleight of hand and that of others in proportion to the admiration this excites. What he fears in other magicians is not the truth of the magic, which he knows is a ludicrous deception, but the fact that it succeeds in deceiving the audience. There is no power in a curse except, and it is a vast exception, that it persuades many that you are indeed cursed.