Twenty years on
Sir: My sadness at the current turn of social and political thought in this country has been deepened by the astounding reactions of some of your readers to Simon Raven's eminently reasonable article on university life (19 April), which I have recently read.
I had always thought of this country as the last bastion of freedom and liberality, where
it was taken for granted that the right to be left alone was sacrosanct, where least govern- ment was understood to be best government, and where participation in all but the civilised essential activities of society (sanitation, law and order, civic duties etc) was voluntary and of no more absolute merit than private and personal activity.
I had always understood that, provided the best possible freedom of opportunity was aimed at by our leaders, the freedom of the individual to choose his own path was sacred, and that you disturbed it at your peril; that you were free to join any institution or organi- sation you took a fancy to, and that by joining or leaving any such body, or by developing it from within through the internal rules existing for such natural development, you helped advance it or caused it to die by a normal evolutionary process. In this, I thought, lay the stability and superiority of our way of life.
It seerns I was' wrong. For the individual nowadays to join any institution, whether it be of employment, instruction or recreation,
for -what he supposed it to be, can be a very ephemeral and disappointing experience. If a
lot of people join it after him who do not admire it as he does, then by sheer noise, strikes, pressure and blackmail, they can change it to their way of thinking!
This is called demociacy, but of course it is no such thing; it is mobocracy, or the tyranny of the majority—the worst sort of tyranny. Its logical outcome is mediocracy, because all that can be left in the end is a nation that displeases no one, makes no one jealous, gives no one any privileges and settles into a placid mire of inertia where everyone has to ask everyone else permission to do anything that might put them out!
I'm for Simon Raven all the way. I want a nation full of privileges, far too many for all to have, and the freedom to go out and win the privileges that interest me, leaving the rest to others. I want a nation full of people, not political fodder for the realisation of abstract sociological ideals.
A university that has added to' the world one more free, liberal individual who has learned to love his neighbour, care for beauti- ful things, muse with Wordsworth on nature and in the mental haze of a bottle of wine in a good cut glass think for a while that life is, now and then, a wonderful thing . . . that university has fulfilled the most important of all functions, for hedonism is what the human race is for—the ants have achieved the or- ganised society.
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