James Bond gets it right

Posted by Clio

November 29, 2002

In the opening act of the latest James Bond movie, a North Korean general asks Bond who in England is his son's contact. The son in question, it seems, has become unacceptably brutal and mercenary, even by North Korean standards - and the father knows who to blame: Oxford and Harvard, where he sent his son in the hopes of increasing his understanding of the Western world.

I know very little about the state of education at Oxford (beyond their choice to continue employing the execrable Tom Paulin) but I can well imagine Harvard turning out graduates who are somewhere to the left of Pyongyang. The humanities programme, the bedrock of classical liberal education, has abandoned even the pretence of being intellectually serious, for example by allowing students to satisfy a core requirement by studying hip-hop. This specious example, though, represents more than the dumbing down of the undergraduate curriculum, and more than an attempt to pander to "diverse" members of the student body; it's part of a deliberate attempt to tear down the shining examples of Western brilliance that have been studied in universities since their inception, and exalt in their place the culture of violence, promiscuity and nihilism.

For those of us north of the border, humanities education in the universities seems to be heading in the same direction, albeit a bit more slowly. While it is certainly possible to work toward a degree by studying the trivial, for example soap operas, Harlequins, and talk shows, the Beatles or hockey, we have so far managed to avoid offering specialties in graffiti or Ebonics. The other side of this phenomenon, however, the denigration and belittling of European culture and history, proceeds at a brisk pace, and begins with the most credulous and unprotected members of the university community: first years.

At one Canadian university, which I won't name until I have tenure somewhere, students in a survey history of Western Civ are introduced to the middle ages by a film with the innocuous title A Flickering Light in the Darkness. Narrated by a talking rat, the film opens by asking students if they've ever wondered why we have wars and poverty today. The answer, they soon learn, is to be found in the middle ages. Peasants and craftsmen, in those days, lived dreadfully hard lives to enrich their masters, the landlord and the priest, who "contributed nothing." The rat then informs these poor first years, whose attention has been successfully captured by the bright primary colours of the animation, that nothing much has changed 500 years later.

The movie continues in this vein for a mercifully brief twenty minutes. Other highlights include a merchant, from Venice, with a hooked nose, who delights in cheating both the Arabians and Indians whose wares he sells and also the Europeans to whom he sells them. In case we haven't got the hint, he sings this to the tune of a melody from the Threepenny Opera. The movie closes with a world map showing Portuguese and Spanish ships sailing forth to strip the New World of riches, with the red regions of the map coming together to form a large red star. This movie, by the way, is also listed in the AV libraries of many other Canadian universities, so there is no reason to think its use here is atypical.

In the great majority of academic and intellectual circles - not at all the same thing - Nazism is discredited. For a professor to show a movie produced by a company whose logo is a swastika would rightly be unthinkable. By most measures, though, Communism is at least as evil an ideology as Nazism, and arguably more so; unlike Nazism Communism has not yet been defeated, it is still socially permissible to advocate Communism, and Communism has caused many times more deaths than Nazism, and indeed continues to do so today. Yet not only is it permissible to most social scientists and historians to advance a line of thinking crucial to Communism, it can in fact be crucial to professional advancement.

It goes without saying that almost none of the students and professors involved in this farcical attempt at education are, in fact, Communists. The academics are to a man property owners who drive to work in vehicles powered by fuels that pollute the earth and enrich corporations at the expense of the noble Third World; few of them have ever seen the inside of a union hall, let alone an actual Communist rally or meeting. The great majority of the students who see this movie will have forgotten it after the next term test, and will go on to find as lucrative employment as possible while complaining about levels of taxation. This does not mean that this film is harmless.

Medieval landlords were certainly prone to idleness and cruelty. They also maintained the armies that kept Islam from overrunning Europe, without which there would be no Western civilization today, and possibly no civilization at all. Medieval clergy were at times guilty of hypocrisy and gluttony. They were also responsible for preserving education, healing, music and art, and without their service in this regard none of the culture enjoyed by Canadians today would be possible. Not only Handel and Bach but also the Beatles, not only Shakespeare but also the Simpsons, owe their existence to the churchmen who kept literacy and art alive when nobody else could.

In an age in which many students can pass a history course without opening a single book, and in which a 50 minute lecture places an unbearable strain upon an attention span, a short, animated film that advances rudimentary Marxism is dangerous. No wonder that so few Canadians support the American "war on terror"; no wonder so few are outraged by Chretien's casual dismissal of the evil that we face. It is too much to expect people to defend Western civilization when not even university professors seem to know or care what it is.