Nihilistic youth
Sir: Anyone who's interested in the question of academic degeneration raised by David Holbrook's 'Nihilistic barbarism' (January 13) need look no further than your correspondents Golding and Peters (January 20). Their letters show the characteristic symptoms of not bothering with Holbrook's arguments, but substituting vicious personal abuse and the demand that such arguments should be not just dismissed but actually prevented from appearing in print. This is what passes for intellectual debate in universities nowadays.
Ultimately, the blame lies with the faculty — not the bearded ones on the barricades, but the ones at the top. In my university in England before the last election, the Left claimed and successfully exerted the right to suppress Monday Club meetings by force. When we protested to the ViceChancellor, we were told that there could be no free speech in universities nowadays "any more than in a factory "; and we were specifically threatened by the Provost that if we defended our meetings we would be the ones punished — "remember the Race Relations Act wasn't meant to catch Michael X." These people were no further left than trendy liberals, but they lived in mortal terror of the hard Left's disapproval.
Admittedly, we really were the 'Black Reactionaries' Mr Holbrook was accused of being. But we were merely closest to the scythe. After us, all kinds of harmless intellectuals who would drop dead if a right-wing idea looked them in the eye will get cut down, as their studies lead them to desecrate, in all innocence, one or other tenet of the liberal-radical orthodoxy. Race, education, morals — -the cutting will continue until absolute conformity reigns. When Alison Cleland says, with considerable honesty, that she sometimes hides dissent because otherwise she'd be ostracised, she is speaking the literal truth. A generation is growing up without any exposure to, much less interest in, ideas outside the left.
Solzhenitsyn understands this disease of the intelligentsia, and deals with it both in August 1914
and in his Nobel speech: "As for the people who've lived a bit and known a thing or two, who could argue with these youngsters, many of them dare not argue: they try to ingratiate themselves with the young — anything so as not to look 'conservative '."
I'm afraid this outspokeness won't help his reviews in the Sundays next time. Peter Brimelow 2505/55 Nassau, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3L 2G8, Canada
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