Paul Taylor: belief

Transcript context

…Third video question, please. Hi, Slavoj, Paul Taylor here. Hope life’s treating you well. My question relates to the role of academics as independent critical thinkers. In my experience within the UK sector at least, academics over the years, when confronted with a growing bureaucracy, growing commercialism, have behaved like lemming-type creatures or quislings, to use a couple of references your Norwegian audience will be familiar with. [laughter] Given Brexit’s recent example, there’s very little genuine debate over all the complicated topics around leaving the EU — or not leaving, as the case may be. And there’s a level of conformity and groupthink that reminds me of the movie Stepford Wives, if that rings a bell with you. So my question to you is, you’ve experienced Yugoslav Communist system, and you’ve experienced something of the UK academic system. Which of those environments do you think is most conducive to genuine critical, engaged intellectuals? Thanks. It’s a very nice question, and again, you will accuse me of nostalgia, but I will say in the last decade, 1980s, Yugoslavia was better. You know why? There was not yet a total economic fiasco, and that was the beauty. From 1980 at least, maybe ’82, the ruling nomenklatura were already preparing for the fiasco, so actually, I think that some of the governments in different republics were pretty good. You know why? Because they knew they don’t have democratic legitimacy. So they tried to do, to learn some legitimacy. For example, a very sad story in mid-’80s — ’86, ’87 — a gay organization formed itself in Slovenia. Immediately, a delegate from central committee came there. “Yes, you are progressive. We are for them. Do you want financial support?” And so on, and so on. Then we got democracy in 1990. The first thing that the city, town council, whatever, dominated by conservatives, is abolish all help to this gay organization. So in some paradoxical sense, it was a golden era. I would say the second half, but I don’t have any illusions. It’s not that Communists were good, but Communists in power knew they were fighting for survival. This is, incidentally, also how I read the explosion of nationalism. Milošević got this. Communist nomenklatura had a problem. Democracy is coming — how to regain some type of democratic legitimacy without canceling themselves as nomenklatura. The answer, obviously, was paint yourself as defender of national interest and so on, nationalism and so on. On the other hand, I must say, what makes me so depressed — United States are big enough, are not the worst, but especially UK — I don’t know how it is here — this pragmatic turn of philosophy has to serve concrete social needs. Labour Party, more than Thatcher, began this in England. My friend philosophers are telling me, “You got Labour representatives coming to university philosophy department and say, ‘We will give you more money, but we will just make it if you get some money from private companies.’” But what I like about today’s academia — I think this is certainly not a traditional leftist idea — that what’s good about academia is precisely that it’s a space with no concrete attachment to any needs of society. You can go crazy, you can freely debate, and so on, and so on. And this is more and more difficult today, even in Germany, they are telling me. My good friend, conservative but bright, Peter Sloterdijk — he told me to get more money — you know what he likes to do? Business weekends. Years ago, he went for a weekend to Volkswagen top managers and explained to them this bullshit. “What’s going on today? Postmodernity, the situation,” and so on, and got — I didn’t ask. So, what I’m saying is that this reminds me in an uncanny way to the worst years in ex-Yugoslavia, ’70s, of the Communist oppression. This focus on also human sciences has to work for society. Experts solve problems. No! We don’t need that today.…

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