AND ANOTHER THING
Moral snobbery and higher education make uncomfortable bedfellows
PAUL JOHNSON
There is social snobbery, intellectual snobbery and moral snobbery. The last is the worst, and it is becoming increasingly common. We had an example of it last week when the showbiz personality Alan Bennett announced he had turned down an honorary degree from Oxford on the grounds that the university had accepted money from Rupert Murdoch to endow a chair. The essence of moral snobbery is that you feel impelled to distance yourself from something for fear of becoming defiled, by association or contact. It is an ancient form of snobbery, perhaps the oldest. It lies right at the root of the caste system in India, which goes back 10,000 years or more, and is still all-pervasive. The British did their best to abolish it but failed, and it has grown stronger since independence, with over 100 million human beings regarded as untouchable by their moral superiors. Forms of moral snobbery were also found among the ancient Hebrews, and Jesus Christ did his best to challenge them hence his conversation with the outcast woman at the well and the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Similar forms of self-righteousness, with a political context, have been rife in Eng- land for at least two centuries. In the 1790s, Coleridge and Wordsworth refused to put sugar in their tea or coffee, using honey instead, because sugar was morally contaminated by the slave trade. Oddly enough, in due course, Wordsworth became a victim of moral snobbery him- self. The celebrated poem, 'The Lost Lead- er', was penned against him by Robert Browning, a moral prig, on the grounds that Wordsworth had accepted a sinecure from a Tory government, though as anyone who has studied Wordsworth's life knows, his job as Collector of Stamps for West- morland involved a lot of hard work, some- ! Moral Browning spent his life avoiding. Moral boycotting, however, survived Wordsworth's conversion to Toryism. This Principle was applied, until a few years ago, to South African oranges, though those Who refused to buy them under apartheid happily suck them today, despite the fact that violence and injustice in South Africa are far worse. And one does not hear much from the anti-orange snobs about imported Chinese products, most of which have a slave-labour content supplied by the regime's 20 million political prisoners. It is characteristic of moral snobbery that it makes racial distinctions; somehow, cruelty practised by black or yellow men is morally more acceptable than when the sinner is white.
Moral snobbery thus usually has an ideo- logical element, which explains why it is so common among intellectuals — not least among showbiz folk who have cerebral claims — and, above all, among academics. Dons are more inclined nowadays to be moral snobs than intellectual snobs, since the latter are condemned as elitist by the code of political correctness. However, poor Murdoch gets it both ways: he is the target not only of the moral snobs but of the intellectual snobs too for dumbing down the Times and the Sunday Times. Indeed, to crown it all, he is the victim of social snobbery as well, since he is sneering- ly caricatured as an oafish Aussie, though anyone who has met him, let alone his delightful mother, Dame Elizabeth, will know that the jibe is wide of the mark.
Moral snobbery in academia takes many forms. There is the inverted racial form, for instance. Not long ago, the trustees of Yale University rejected a donation of $20 mil- lion to endow a course on Western civilisa- don. If it had been Oriental civilisation or Afro-American civilisation it would have been welcome, but the word 'Western' con- taminated it. Western, it was argued, was a synonym for 'white' or 'European'. It was not clear whether these Yale ideologues were saying that Western civilisation did not exist or whether they were arguing that it was morally unacceptable to use such an expression — the latter, I think. It is just about OK at Yale to teach students about Homer and Dante and Michelangelo and Beethoven separately, but to imply that there is any kind of connection between them breaks the code.
However, at Oxford the moral snobs operate a different set of rules. When Wafiq Said offered £25 million to the uni- versity for an expanded business school, he ran into trouble. It is true that some objec- tors raised the issue of the site chosen for the new buildings, but the real reason why a lot of dons opposed the gift was that Said is a rich Arab. According to the current dic- tionary of moral snobbery followed in English academic circles, only poor Arabs are morally acceptable. Rich Arabs are defined either as oil sheikhs, who do noth- ing but simply collect royalties and spend them on their harems, or arms dealers and Said was judged, quite wrongly as it happened, to fall into the second category. The idea that an Arab might become wealthy simply by hard work and business acumen does not fit into the academic Left's racial taxonomy, which is the basis of their moral snobbery. Happily, the snobs lost this battle: the expanded business school, financed by Said's generosity, is to go ahead, albeit on a different site.
Universities always have received, and I hope always will receive, benefactions from all sorts and conditions of men and women. I doubt if John Balliol was a man who would pass Alan Bennett's fastidious moral scrutiny, or William of Wykeham, who founded New College, or William of Wayn- fleet, founder of Magdalen, Bennett's old college (and mine). Cardinal Wolsey, founder of Christ Church, was an unscrupulous operator in the service of an evil king. Who with any sense cares? Per- sonally, I am delighted that Murdoch endowed a chair of communications at Oxford and I hope it is well occupied and used to enlighten young and old. I held a similar chair, endowed by the founders of Reader's Digest, at one of the big American research foundations, and used it to do a lot of work on my history of the 20th centu- ry, Modem Times, which presumably has served a useful purpose since it has been translated into 20 languages. So I am grate- ful to my dead benefactors and remember them in my prayers. Equally, may the Mur- doch chair, and its holders, flourish mightily!
What worries me about Oxford is not that it takes Murdoch's money, or Wafiq Said's either, but that it offers honorary degrees to trendy showbiz folk simply because that is the fashionable thing to do. Here is the same university, mark you, which refused an honorary degree, in the spirit of moral snobbery, to Margaret Thatcher, an Oxford graduate and the first woman in history to get to the top of British public life, and the greatest peacetime prime minister of the century. I can guess what Dr Johnson, who not only accepted an honorary degree from Oxford with humble and becoming gratitude, but was also delighted to get a pension from a right-wing government, would say about Bennett's behaviour. 'It is cant, Sir — and humbug!'
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