1. “Not simply cricket,” SMH, 6/1/95
2. “The art of playing a ‘straight’ bat,” SMH, 19/12/98

1.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Not simply cricket,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, January 6, 1995, p. 10.

There are few pleasures as keen as reading an argument with which you totally or partially disagree, but which makes you question your own assumptions and beliefs. Thus I have gained enormous satisfaction from a little book of essays by the late David Stove, Cricket versus Republicanism, which has been published just over half a year since his death. Not that I find myself disagreeing with all of Stove’s ideas, even though I do disagree with him profoundly in his taste for cricket, and his belief that it is the essence of Britishness and hence an argument against republicanism. On the contrary, if cricket were the only thing between us and a republic, the monarchists would have little hope. A love of cricket is not at all incompatible with either republicanism or Marxism, as one of the best cricket writers of this century, the Jamaican Trotskyite C. L. R. James, long ago demonstrated.

Unfortunately, I never knew Stove — who was, until his retirement a few years ago, Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy at Sydney University — perhaps because years ago when I played in or umpired the Push versus Arties, or versus Psychology, cricket matches I never took it seriously. For Stove a disrespectful view of cricket was evidence of a frivolous view of life.

These essays will reduce most politically correct people to instant apoplexy — and not just them, for as Peter Coleman relates in his preface, when Stove offered his essay on “Racial and other antagonisms” to Quadrant, that supposedly right-wing magazine came under heavy pressure to suppress it. This is a denunciation of modern views of “racism” (Stove insists on the quotes); and there is a neat piece of logic to establish that racial antagonism is always justified. In brief, A hates and discriminates against B unjustifiably; B suffers and therefore hates and discriminates against A; A therefore justifiably begins to hate B. Every group is discriminated against by somebody.

“Since everyone knows that ‘racism’ is true, why is it that, in countries like ours, there are constant, belligerent, and almost universal declarations that it is false? I cannot explain this at all. It seems to be often believed that, if you admit truths of the kind which I listed above, consistency requires that you try to murder entire races of people. I do not know what one can say of a belief as ridiculous as this, except that it is extremely ridiculous.” What he is saying is that a recognition of racial differences, even of racial antagonisms, need not lead to either intolerance or maltreatment. But this is so clearly against the Zeitgeist that it was not published in Australia.

So too, his views on feminism, which he was opposed to on both practical and theoretical grounds. His essay on “The intellectual capacity of women” argues that if it were true that the distribution of intelligence in women were the same as men, and if women were not less intelligent on average than men, their performance would have shown this long ago since there have been many social forms and contexts in which women could have shown their ability. He neatly turns the arguments for equal intellectual capacity back on his critics by asking, “What would convince you of the inferior intellectual capacity of women?” This is a fair question, since the usual answer is “nothing” — but unless an advocate of equality can specify evidence that might invalidate belief in it, it is merely a religious conviction.

Of course the weakness of his argument, which is a mix of biological and historical generalisation, is that, until recently, there has been no society we know much about which has not had institutions clearly subordinating women to men. Nevertheless, when he points to the relative lack of intellectual activity in medieval nunneries by comparison with monasteries, he makes a point worth answering. Similarly, his attack on Darwinism (which is not an attack on the reality of evolution) rather misses the point, since he is attacking the pretensions of the sociobiologists who generalise from animal models to human society.

“A farewell to arts” which caused quite a stir when it appeared in Quadrant in May 1986 is an attack on the destruction of the arts faculty in Sydney University (and indeed most other universities) by the influences of Marxism, semiotics and (wimminist) feminism — much of which would these days be packaged as post-modernism. “Of all the departments in the faculty,” he writes, “the one which best exemplifies the three influences I have spoken of is the Department of General Philosophy. The Department of English may have more feminists, French may have semioticians still more impenetrable, Anthropology or Fine Arts may have even stupider Marxists, but you cannot go past General Philosophy for solid all-round disaster.

“Among the faculty membership at large, accordingly, no department enjoys a wider circle of friends and admirers than General Philosophy.” The two philosophy departments in Sydney University are of course a relic of post-Vietnam War politics, and real philosophy is taught only in the Traditional and Modern department. “What now remains of General Philosophy is not so much a philosophy department as a place of retreat, where the devotions prescribed by feminist or Marxist piety can be performed in peace, and under the direction of qualified priests. Around AD985, the pious or guilty rich would often richly endow monks or nuns for the singing of psalms. In 1985 the taxpayer richly endows the religious in General Philosophy for the daily recital of ritual curses on men, capitalism, ‘analytic philosophy’, etc etc.” The demise of Marxism has changed little.

His conclusion is very much to the point: “If even a quarter of the money which is at present wasted on Arts were to be diverted to scientific faculties, there would be great positive gains as well: gains to the nation, as well as to knowledge.” But he defends genuine philosophical work in universities, emphasising that there is always a role for those who carefully examine questions of ethics, the foundations of knowledge or the nature of science.

In “The Columbus argument” he presents an acute, and essentially conservative, critique of those who argue for innovation for innovation’s sake — “they all laughed at Christopher Columbus”. For every innovator who happened to be right, there were countless thousands who were wrong. The Columbus argument led to the argument “that is an outrageous proposal, but we’ll consider it”, and then to, “we must consider it because it is an outrageous proposal.” Despite his scepticism about the Enlightenment, David Stove never fell into the trap, which so many conservatives do nowadays in Australia, of equating dislike of the consequences of the Enlightenment with neo-romantic nonsense about opposition to rational and logical analysis.

***
2.
Padraic McGuinness, “The art of playing a ‘straight’ bat,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, December 19, 1998, p. 30.

Many people have dismissed the furore about payment by an Indian bookie to a couple of our cricketers as trivial — “it’s only a game”. But, of course, we are not talking about a game but professional sport presented as a spectacle for money, and just as good an object of betting as two flies crawling up a wall. When such large sums of money change hands, any departure from strict honesty and transparency is a matter for concern.

But is cricket just a game? Or is it a form of social capital — the ties of trust and co-operation which bind a community together? The casual games of cricket on the local oval, or the football games, are an important communal activity. It is not poisoned by the commercialisation of professional sport, but the revelation of corruption or lack of respect for the game does harm. It is easy enough to ridicule the ethos of cricket, especially as expressed in Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem Vitai Lampada — “play up, play up, and play the game” — but it does mean a lot to many people. It is certainly an improvement on the “anything goes” approach so common today.

I was led to such reflection on reading the recently republished book of that title by the late David Stove (Anything Goes, Macleay Press, 02 9360 2534). Stove, a philosopher at the University of Sydney for many years, is the author of an essay, “Cricket versus republicanism” (reprinted in the Oxford Book of Australian Essays, editor, Imre Saluszinsky), in which he argues that cricket expresses the essence of non-oppressive stable English monarchism and that, therefore, no real cricketer could be a republican.

He took cricket very seriously indeed and would not speak to me for years after I, as umpire at a Push v Arts cricket match, declared a batsman out because he was boring and refused to send a fielder off for having a schooner in her hand. Stove’s was hardly a conclusive argument against republicanism, but he was making a serious point relating to the importance of rule-based elements of what is now called “civil society”, that is, community relationships independent of government, and social capital. He makes a similar point concerning the process of scientific discovery in Anything Goes, which was originally published under the title Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists in 1982. This is an onslaught on what has since become known as “science studies”, where people with little or no knowledge of any actual science set themselves up as experts on what scientists do and what it means.

This has developed into a belief held by many supposedly intelligent people that scientific knowledge is somehow socially determined, that there can be inconsistent valid scientific principles and different kinds of scientific knowledge — such as female physics, or Afro-American science. But science is about real knowledge, and true propositions must always be consistent — there are rules of the game.

Stove’s basic point is that it is clearly nonsensical to say that there is no truth in science or that there can be more than one kind of scientific truth, all valid by some criteria. Moreover, scientific knowledge does increase by building upon past discoveries. Einstein did not invalidate Newtonian physics; rather, his theory contains it as a special case still valid for ordinary purposes. Although the personalities of scientists are often important in the timing and manner of scientific discovery, their social and world views are not the determinant of the validity of what they discover. Nor even always of the subjects they choose to study.

This is blindingly obvious to most people, but there are many academics who write learnedly about scientific knowledge, the process of scientific research, the validity of science and the appropriate policies which governments and others ought to espouse towards science and scientific discoveries when, in fact, they are basing themselves on a fundamental irrationalism, a belief that in science as well as morality, “anything goes”, or that science is socially determined. Strangely enough, the same people in their everyday lives flip a switch convinced that the light will go on and if it doesn’t, an electrician can fix it, and do not jump out of planes without a parachute.

One of Stove’s particular targets is the way in which quotation marks are scattered around to make it impossible to understand what a person is actually saying. Thus, if you want to suggest that there is something profound to be said about the validity of science, you refer to “science”, “truth” or “proof” — with scare quotes, often represented in conversation by extending your arms and twiddling your fingers. This is an infallible sign that the speaker does not know what he or she is talking about.

This is the process which Stove calls “neutralising success words”. So if it is said that light travels at almost exactly 299,792.458 kilometres a second, the irrationalists will not say that this has been proved, but “proved” — thus suggesting that there is some doubt or qualification needed. There is another technique which he calls “sabotaging logical expressions”, by taking the logical statement out of them. Thus, instead of saying that the absolute speed of light implies the impossibility of travelling faster, they will say something like “most mainstream [or male, or white] scientists believe” that it implies that — which makes it a historical statement, not a logical one.

The republication of this little book should be enormously valuable not to post-modernists — they are beyond help — but to real scientists and philosophers, as well as to ordinary people who want to know what the people who always use scare quotes and $10 words are trying to get away with. But I would not recommend it to humanities students who want to get good marks.