Now back to writing after Christmas, I am working on my second chapter on A.S. Byatt, this time looking at her Booker Prize winning novel, Possession. This is a work with an encyclopaedic scope, with its themes ranging from the romance of love to the romance of the quest, its plots derived from the detective story and the romance and the Victorian epic; it is a palimpsest of letters, journals, poetry and fairy tales. And in the process of all these it takes a fairly hefty swipe at the more dogmatic aspects of literary academia, from the biography industry to postmodern psychoanalytic feminism (try saying that with your mouth full). Thus it might seem surprising that those in the establishment it critiques chose to bestow upon it a series of welcome reviews, as well as British literature's top prize. On the other hand, postmodernist critics like nothing more than to be critiqued themselves. See, for example, the following statements: "postmodernism contests culture from within its own assumptions"; "postmodernism literally names and constitutes its own paradoxical identity"; "postmodernist discourses need the very myths and conventions they contest and reduce" (all quotes taken from my current "read," Linda Hutcheon's The Poetics of Postmodernism). Postmodernist criticism erects a facade not unlike those energy-absorbing shields so loved by starship captains, in which anything which attacks the postmodern paradox simply feeds in more powerful evidence of the contradictions and destabilisations of culture that are postmodernism.

All this debate places me in a thicket of language and terminology, and I need to cut my way through it before I can start to tackle Possession on my own terms. Happily, however, Byatt herself comes to my rescue. Asked by Nicolas Tredell about her novel's attack on poststructuralism, Byatt acknowledges "Possession is a postmodernist, poststructuralist novel and it knows it is. It does present itself as a piece of Victorian melodrama, but of course it's no such thing.” However, she goes on, “within that, it is also a sort of passionate plea for readers to be allowed to identify with characters...Most postmodernist fiction cuts out any emotion very much earlier on. It doesn't allow the reader any pleasure, except in the cleverness of the person constructing the postmodernist fiction. I think that's boring. I think you can have all the other pleasures as well.” And very enjoyable the novel is too, without the need for it to be acknowledged as belonging to one category or genre, or to say that its critical work is more significant than the wave of the plot of romance and detection on which that critique rides.

I suspect that Byatt, like myself, finds the term postmodernism a somewhat necessary irritant. Necessary because it allows us to place a particular text in context; an irritant because we can become so bogged down in determining and defining precisely what that context is that we ignore the immediate pleasures of reading the text itself. In developing a "poetics" of postmodernism, we forget to read the poem. I am therefore unwilling, let alone unable, to answer the general questions "what is postmodernism" and "what is a postmodernist text," which lead to my more immediate concern which is "is Possession a postmodern text and, if so, why?"

In looking at the first two questions, I use the analogy of evolution. One of the fundamental errors made by creationists is that they argue that since we cannot see evolution happening in the present, or even in the (incomplete) fossil record, then there is no evidence for evolution at all. However, as Richard Dawkins dismisses this fallacy in The Blind Watchmaker, the error is really one of scale. Wander around any modern zoo, and you will see lions and tigers, and you will go home and talk about them to your domestic tabby. All three seem to be distinct sub-species of the cat family. Surely the creationists cry, since they are distinct, this implies they were created in one moment, by a discrete process, rather than by the continuous development argued for by evolution. However, imagine now that you are visiting a virtual zoo, in which a representative of every cat family currently on this earth are prowling in one large cage. Now, imagine every individual in every cat sub-species is present in one enormous cage. And, finally, imagine every individual of every cat sub-species which ever lived in one gargantuan cage. Now, looking at this last enclosure, it would be impossible to define where the group of "tigers" starts, and the group of "tigers" gives way to "lions." There would be clusters of individuals more tiger-like and less-lion like, and some small ones who bear some resemblance to your pet cat. The idea of a species or sub-species is in some senses a completely false one. Darwin himself did not like the term species - which implies a discrete group of individuals with particular characteristics - preferring instead the term variation, for reasons that should be obvious from the analogy. Nevertheless, without the concept of species, the art of taxonomy (and it is in some senses an art) could not exist; producing nature programmes would be impossible; and knowing on which species to perform experiments which relate to humans could not happen. The term species is a necessary irritant.

So it is with postmodernism, or, indeed, with any form of generic categorisation we use in literary theory: the Chivalric Age, Renaissance period, Romanticism, Victorian period, Modernism, Postmodernism. If you were to line every literary work (indeed, what is a "literary" work, for that matter? The Origin of Species has its own beautifully creative eloquence.) ever written on your long, long shelves, then pinpointing precisely the "species" that is the Romantic poem or the postmodern novel would be impossible. Deciding when the Victorian period gives way to Modernism (other than by using the strict dates of Victoria's reign) is an entirely arbitrary one, and results in debates around transitional figures such as Thomas Hardy or Hopkins. In my opinion, and in the guises in which I use it, postmodernism is a unit of terminological currency, one which enables me vaguely to locate a text in time and style, and then to move on and study the text itself.

All this might seem a somewhat aimless argument. However, in an unexpected way, deciding whether A.S. Byatt is a postmodernist writer, feeds nicely in to the more holistic framework of my thesis. I am looking at the role of metaphors of the "demon" in science as well as literature: Maxwell's demon, Descartes' deceiving demon, Daniel Dennett's "pandemonium" model of consciousness, and others less well known. So often, these strange beasts - given legitimacy in science by being called "models" rather than "metaphors" - are used to allow thinking to continue in a hypothetical sense, a future tense, even as the empirical evidence supporting the theory of the moment remains elusive. For example, Maxwell suggested that a demon could circumvent the second law of thermodynamics; however, he had no idea how this might manifest itself in a practical, working device (others such as Wojciech Żurek in the twentieth century have been able to create computer simulations, however, and point to potential applications of Maxwell's demon in medical nanotechnology). Daniel Dennett argues that consciousness works through a series of competing "demons" chattering together and, out of the chaos, a consensus emerges which we think of as a thought. Neuroscience has yet to develop the sorts of brain scanners that might allow "demons" (which would be called something different when they are found) to be pinpointed, but by positing that term, he enables his thinking to move on, rather than getting stalled simply because the technology has not caught up with the hypothesis.

When I first entered the debate around postmodernism, I rather like Charles Newman's denunciation of post-modernism as "a dash surrounded by a contradiction." However, conjunctions of competing terms - demons and science, species and evolution - are often highly productive.

Labels: A.S. Byatt, literary theory, Literature, postmodernism

It is a phrase which no doubt appears in your inbox several times a day, and gets dragged to the junk folder. However, in trying to push through the financial reforms in higher education - under which students would take out loans to pay for their university tuition and living costs, rather than getting grants - the government likewise advertised that these loans would be "interest free." Just as you should never click on a spam email, you should always suspect something is not quite right when a government promises you something-for-nothing. Read the small print in this case, and you will find that the "interest free" loans are tied to the base-rate of inflation, increasing annually by the same amount. But who of us desperate to go to university ever bothered to read the small print? I didn't, and clearly neither has Donald Macleod, who writes on the Education Guardian Blog that:

When tuition fees of £3,000 squeaked through the Commons by five votes keeping student loans to zero real interest rates was obviously a price ministers had to pay.

Students in fact got an outrageously good deal - no fees upfront, interest free loans to cover the cost of tuition and repayment when they were earning as graduates.

Macleod concludes that:

Spending £1bn a year to subsidise graduates who as a rule earn more than the national average seems a waste when there is so much that deserves funding in universities - and even more so in schools.

As one respondent complained of Macleod "You make me sick - tory w@nker!" I agreed with his tone, if not with his vocabulary, so (for all that they will not be read) I added some words of my own, nothing that from my own experience, with inflation running at around 2.5% a year, I graduated owing £10,000 and now five years later I owe around £12,000. Having chosen to do a PhD, and hence defer entry into the job market, you could say that I brought this extra £2000 of debt upon myself.

However, I have friends who went into jobs from graduation, are now on average salaries, and their repayments only just cover the cost of the "interest" on the supposedly interest-free loan; they have yet to pay back a penny of what they originally received from the government. Of course, I also have friends who have yet to find graduate jobs (in spite of having not one but two degrees, the increasingly-necessary postgraduate degree being paid for by further debt through the Career Development Loans scheme), and I also have friends whose salaries (often in the public or voluntary sector) do not track inflation, unlike their loans.

Even so you could argue that many students will ultimately end up in better paid jobs, perhaps working as corporate bankers in London. I agree that students, and not just the average taxpayers of Blair's generation, should put something back into the system. Unfortunately, the way the loans/tution fees scheme was instigated has been unfair on students, unfair on taxpayers who are still owed money by graduates, and unfair in relation to foreign students who can take from the loans pot without being compelled to put back into it.

Nevertheless, I pleaded to Macleod, please don't imply students got the good deal, as if they are scrounging on the society that put them through university. It is this generation of students who, besides, possibly, earning salaries higher than the national average, will be developing the technologies to combat the climate change for which our parent's generation are entirely responsible, and the medicines which will allow them to live longer (and enjoy a longer retirement). They may even do something about spam.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary, student loans

In this week's Education Guardian I read two articles that resonate with my experiences. In the first, postgraduate Patrick Tomlin writes about his first experience of living in a University town during the holidays. For him, the benefits are "finding books on shelves (even the popular ones!), reading without ringtones, getting a seat in the pub, making my way to the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? machine without having to push past several people." For myself, as I commented in Postgraduate Diary: Return of the Natives, relief comes from being able to "get seats in the cinema, to go out without feeling surrounded by people who are (surely?) to young to be in the nightclubs, to go shopping without lines of girls stretching across the street, woven together into an unbreakable arm-in-arm chain." But we both of us noted that the calm is not necessarily preferable to the storm of voices and bodies, since these are so often full of humour, energy and passion.

Sadly, as Jonathan Taylor observes, these are traits which get lost as one moves from being an English undergraduate to being an academic. As he entered university, he remembers that "studying English was a synonym for laziness, hippiness, laid-backness...[English students] were fascinating because they studied a subject that they actually enjoyed, yet frustrating because they never seemed to do the subject they enjoyed so much." But by the time they have completed their PhDs, lecturers seem to undergo a magical process of embalming, or "dry-ification", in which "old hippies lose their bodily moisture and start wearing ties, using words like "scholarly" and quoting institutional regulations."

I don't wear a tie, even when I teach, and in my mid-twenties I can get away with a hoodie and jeans. But what to do if ever I do get a full-time university post? If I wear my casual clothes, I become a comedy Cameron, trying too hard to be "street"; but if I dress smartly but dispense with the tie and wear a white t-shirt beneath my suit, I present myself as a dilettante artiste. Yesterday in the pub (I'm clearly not a fully embalmed academic just yet) my friend showed me two books, and their author photographs. The one showed a man in a muscle top, looking not unlike Jack Black in wrestling comedy Nacho Libre. He may have been literal example of what Jonathan Taylor calls the "academic bouncer," one who ironically in spite of his hard-man look was dedicated to "making sure all who enter have sufficient footnotes and footnotes of footnotes in their work." the other showed a feminist, dressed to kill, in sharp suit with hair tied tightly into a pony tail. I suspect she may indeed have felt that "Joy is a deeply suspicious character who is probably working for the bourgeois."

Although my thesis is going well, my writing starting to flow after the break of Christmas, I wonder if I should try and slow down somewhat. I just bought Project Gotham Racing 2 for the Xbox. An afternoon spent playing that should reawaken the remnant genes of undergraduate life that are still dormant within me.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary

In relation to religion, I tend to get riled very easily, partly because of the effect of fundamentalism exercised in the name of democracy, and partly because of the abuse and misunderstanding of science perpetrated by proponents of Intelligent Design. So the short fuse of my indignation was lit quite quickly by a couple of issues in the news last week.

Firstly, there was the case of Exeter Students' Guild being taken to court because it had suspended Exeter University Evangelical Christian Union from the student body. The guild decided on the measures because the religious group asked members to sign a statement of religious belief; the union argued that"as students fund our societies and as our Equal Opportunities Policy states, all activities should be open to all students. The Evangelical Christian Union is the only society identified that has barriers to entry - both for membership of the society and to be on the committee of the society." As barrister Schona Jolly analysed, this is a tricky case now being tested under the Human Rights Act, and "is about a clash of competing equalities." On the one hand is the right to have the freedom to maintain and assert a religious faith, and on the other is the right of all minorities to have equal access to any publically funded group. I hope that the courts find for the Students' Union, since they represent the majority of non-evangelical students at the university: there are probably more people of other faiths, or of unorthodox sexual orientations who might potentially be excluded from joining the single Christian group, than there are fervent Christians who are going to be excluded from the rights and funding other societies receive from the University.

Nevertheless, the case is a difficult one to judge, and I await the outcome with interest. Less ambiguous is the moral issue surrounding Christian protests against the new Gay Rights bill. This piece of legislation would prevent discrimination in the provision of goods, services and employment on the basis of sexual orientation; it thus provides similar legal protection as the sexual, racial and disability discrimination acts afford. At the rally, however, Michael Reid, the leader of a pentecostal church in Essex complained that:

I believe in freedom of conscience, and when anyone starts imposing views that are against freedom of religion, then we are moving into a state that I think is evil

But is it not equally possible to substitute "sexuality" where "religion" appears in the quote? Because there is no finite scale against which "evil" can be measured, then one can equally well say that to impose views against freedom of sexuality is wrong. The United Kingdom is not a theocracy but a democracy, and if religious people feel against this bill - and I can understand why under some interpretations of the Bible they might well do - then they are more than welcome to exercise the freedom of conscience they enjoy in such a state, and vote against the government. But, as it is, we have a government which, in accordance with the Human Rights Act, has decided to protect a sexual minority, just as it protects the minority of Christians (and it is now a minority, according to one pre-Christmas poll) from abuse and prejudice. Can you imagine the headlines if a gay rights group decided to exclude all Christians?

Tobias Jones, who has written a new book exploring religious communes, notes that, "religion is like a swimming pool: all the noise is at the shallow end, and that is the only end people see." I agree. To me, the great failure of religion in the modern age has been its failure to separate its ethics from its theology. As I said before in my comments on the Eagleton vs. Dawkins debate, a religion does not last for two thousand years without having something of moral value to assert, and our culture, secular though it may be in a popular and political sense, is still saturated with the morality of Christian faith. However, too often the Biblical position is taken as a absolute prescription for resolving contemporary issues, rather than the Biblical text being taken as a general foundation for ethics; thus for an atheist, with the Bible and ethics remaining closely tied, it becomes hard to acknowledge the reason of the Christian speaker, because that reason is so inextricably linked to a text I simply don't believe, except as an historical narrative.

However, just as I start to get cynical and sarcastic about these shallow religious voices at their end of the swimming pool, I hear a more considered voice as I munch on my cornflakes one morning, a voice which reminds me (even chastises me) that I risk becoming prejudiced against a Christian stereotype I construct for myself. Speaking on Radio 4's "Thought for the Day," the Bishop of Putney, Reverend Dr. Giles Fraser, explains why he thinks the law on sexual discrimination should be accepted by the Christian community as a whole. Judging by the comments on the BBC message board, he caused many non-liberal Christians to splutter into their breakfast bowls. He caused this atheist, however, to pause, and to take a more objective stance on what threatened to become, for me, two more pieces of black-and-white evidence of the dangers of religion.

Labels: Christianity, Exeter University Evangelical Christian Union, Gay Rights bill, Politics

(This topic continues the theme of a post earlier this year)

Around this time of year, as the Christmas holidays draw to a close and after they have had a chance to reflect on their first term at university, I receive a trickle of emails from first year students asking advice about changing course. The majority of these involve students who have started doing joint honours (such as English and Philosophy) deciding that they wish to convert to single honours in one of the subjects. Little do they realise it, but my students are touching the fringes of a large and key debate about what a university is, and what sort of education it should provide.

For the fact that students are encouraged to pick and choose courses from the vast range offered by universities is the key complaint of Peter Berkowitz, who writes in the Hoover Institution's Policy Review that "at universities and colleges throughout the [United States], parents and students pay large sums of money for — and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support — liberal education, despite administrators and faculty lacking a coherent idea about what constitutes an educated human being." The essay is slightly stilted, in that it attacks the liberal education system in America - in which students can choose from a large range of courses and "major" in one branch in their final year - whilst comparing it unfavourably with the principles Mill set out in the British context in the mid-nineteenth century. Had he looked over here in the United Kingdom, he would have found less evidence of the "compassless curriculum": in this country, rather than "majoring" in one discipline only in their final year, students generally do a single honours degree for the full three years, or a joint honours split 50-50 between two related subjects.

However, whilst I think (and Berkowitz's complaint confirms) that specialisation is preferable to spreading study across an eclectic mix of subjects, one of the limitations of the British system is that it deceptively compartmentalises us into different areas of interest, when in fact there is a great deal of overlap: several of my peers doing an English PhD started off in philosophy, and I'm sure the reciprocal is true over in the philosophy department; conferences tend to be organised by faculties rather than individual departments, and over coffee you encounter scholars from all backgrounds, not just those in your prosaic field.

If cultural theory has done one thing successfully, it has been to spread itself seductively across every discipline, so a student doing history or archaeology or literature may well encounter the same broad scheme of ideas - from postmodernism to postcolonialism - in each discipline. What shifts is the subject matter, whilst the approaches to them run through parallel perspectives. It is this fact which means that in response to my students' emails I almost invariably advise them to go with their hearts, since their heads are probably more than capable of absorbing the switch. However, is it really the case that all disciplines are of equal value in sending students into the world equipped with a philosophical and scientific guidebook? F.R. Leavis certainly didn't think so, when he placed the English department as the spider at the centre of the entire academic web, which could interpret any branch of intellectual life since it critiqued the language which structures thought, whether in particle physics or historical research.

Even if English departments are no longer seen as the most important generators of liberal wisdom, a residue of the Leavisite approach can be seen in the buzzword of modern academia, literary criticism especially: interdisciplinarity. Almost every call for papers that lands in my inbox on a Friday stresses that papers that straddle traditional disciplines are most welcome; I myself am not so much reading English, as philosophy, history, fiction, film, novels and computer games. The critical arts now possess a proud sense of the range and scope they are permitted to cover, and so I would suggest that academia is starting to find a middle way between variety and speciality.

Of course, one risk of this is relativism: if it is not what you say or study which matters, but how you say or write your study which matters, do we not end up with an aimless mess of disciplines shouting ever louder but actually doing very little by way of good and lasting research. This is a danger Berkowitz analyses, when he notes that professors tend to teach the fields which coincides with their interests, rather than teaching those texts, in those ways, which will most permanently benefit the student entering the "real" world.

The second problem with the spreading range of Arts study is that it sets itself up to compete with the sciences (both theoretically and in the battle for funding), rather than seeing both Arts and Science as necessary elements of a student's education. Leavis's elastic approach has become stretched by some brands of postmodern criticism, which, as the Sokal hoax showed, absurdly recruits empirical principles to scrutinise texts or narratives. Obviously, it is not possible for the arts student to use particle physics to analyse Silas Marner; equally particle physics is not simply a narrative in numbers that expresses ideology and meaning in the same way that a George Eliot novel does. (I critique this in my essay "Science as Writing, Writing as Science: Addressing the Boundaries of Literary Criticism and Fiction"). What participation, then, should science make in informing the student of the liberal arts? Here, Mill also strikes a chord with my views, arguing along utilitarian lines: "While it is not to be expected that many will achieve mastery of the laws to which the physical world is subject, students should acquire the basics that will enable them to distinguish those who are competent to provide the public advice on scientific and technological matters." Certainly, with Bush's withdrawal of funds for embryological research (leading to a bizarre jumble of red table and stickers in science labs) and Blair's hysterical reaction to supposed hybrid cow-men, one can see the value of ensuring that leaders educated in business (in Bush's case) or law (in Blair's) are encouraged also to appreciate, if not to deploy, the dispassionate scientific method.

In this coincidental way, the opposition between Arts and Sciences in the university context can be seen to affect the political split between conservatism and progressivism. Berkowitz notes that Mill was open to the positive aspects of both wings of the political spectrum, and argued that the cultivation of a liberal "third way" means accepting that each side, for all that its general outlook may be erroneous, may nevertheless have something of value to contribute to the detail of moral debate. Berkowitz argues that:

universities that purport to provide a liberal education will be failing in their mission unless their graduates, progressives and conservatives alike, prove capable of sympathetically understanding the positions of the political party to which they do not belong and discerning what is true and enduring in the beliefs of their partisan opponents.

But the comparison between Bush and Blair highlights that the liberal education systems of Harvard and Oxford have, in actuality, very much succeeded in providing perspectives on both parties. So much so that this Republican right-winger is now the best of friends with the Labour prime minister, one who marched for CND in the 1960s. Blair's brilliance has been his ability precisely to understand the position of the right, and to simultaneously occupy that ground whilst pulling both progressives and conservatives closer to the centre - the rise of fellow blogger (oh, yes, and Conservative leader) David Cameron indicates his success. Unfortunately, rather than promoting toleration (as Mill hoped) the accommodation of those on both left and right who are close to the centre has further marginalised anyone who breaks from the new majority centre. As Bush said two months after September 11, "you're either with us, or against us": if I am against Bush, detest Guantanamo, and think the war on terror utterly misguided in its approach, I am, by inference, a terrorist.

If the risk of interdisciplinarity in the Arts has been a relativistic "anything goes so long as you can talk the talk," the risk of representing and treating both political outlooks as equals is to imply that it does not matter whether you are left or right wing, so long as you fall into line under whoever happens to rule. This is where study of the classics might come in, since they (as Paul Cartledge reminds us on Radio 4's recent: "The Greeks: For Better or for Worse") form the philosophical foundations for modern culture. As Berkowitz says:

Accordingly, liberal education should concentrate on the languages and literature of the ancients, of the Greeks and Romans, because of both their farness and their nearness. On the one hand, the circumstances and sensibility of classical authors differ the most profoundly from ours (without being, Mill stipulates, like those of Asia, “so totally dissimilar, that the labor of a life is required to enable us to understand them”). On the other hand, their writings are rich in the wisdom of the common life of humanity. The classics both challenge our moral and political assumptions and provide models of human excellence. Particularly the writings of Plato and Aristotle represent “the perfection of good sense.”

Happily, having plummeted down the ranks of academic esteem, classics seems to be starting to come back into favour. The new, controversial, Cambridge Latin Course is helping us to see that Latin is far from a dead language. Study of the Ancients might help us to accept that human thought and morality is always variable and that, above all, a good democratic system needs to accommodate difference, rather than eliding it as Neo-Conservatism or New Labour have done.

All this has wandered very far from my original impulse for this post, and the idea that the form of liberal education can inform the war on terror is probably quite far from the minds of the students who contact me wishing to change course. Nevertheless, besides being an excuse to have another political dig, the sheer range of Berkowitz's essay, and my criticism, leads me to realise that, specialist though universities may be, they and their courses really do form the foundations for society. My thinking about the "Idea of a University" started with my justifying being funded to study an English PhD; the ends of that concept, however, are tangled and deep. I rather liked Mill's comment that "Whatever helps to shape the human being; to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not, is part of his education." However, not only is whatever shapes the human being part of his education, education is clearly the principal means by which modern societies seek to shape the individual. The study of the idea of the university is the study of our modern selves.

Labels: J.S. Mill, Peter Berkowitz, Postgraduate Diary, the idea of a university

Another year turns, and it's time for John Brockman, editor of the influential "Third Culture" forum, Edge, to pose his annual question to a range of cultural commentators, scientists and philosophers. Previous questions have either been highly open-ended - "What Now?" "What's Your Law?" - or implicitly directed at a particular contemporary issue. The question for 2005, "What do You Believe is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?" was aimed to provoke religious or scientific fundamentalists, and the resultant book, What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty provides a fascinating snapshot of the boundaries of the age-old contest as it is played in the early twenty-first century.

This year, however, rather than looking to the present or to the abstract, Brockman looks forwards, asking: "What Are You Optimistic About? Why?" Although, oddly, I was not invited to contribute, my answer would have been: not much. War burns in the Middle East; the promises of the campaign to eliminate poverty, made so loudly above the riffs of guitars at Live 8 this summer, now seem little more than a whisper in the dark. There are hints that environmental issues are becoming more prominent in politics and business: if you had told me last year that the Terminator was going green I would have thought it a joke. But faced with this most global of catastrophes, we need to move the world with the levers of technology and lifestyle revolution, and when Blair or Arnie wiggle their fingers from a podium, they may as well do nothing at all.

And yet, and yet. In the flurry of retrospective analyses of 2006 and the predictions for 2007 that fill the glossy pages of magazines and newspaper supplements, I see a common theme emerge that may be, just maybe, a reason to be optimistic. Time magazine's "Person of the Year" is - who? - me. By writing these very words, and publishing them online to be read around the world (at least by the few visitors the site actually gets) I am participating in the creation of a new form of culture, one not driven by great men:

It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

It is also a story about, predominantly, the young, the tech-savvy, collaborating freely and in fun to produce the arts and news outside the boundaries of the conventional, ideological establishment. Later, on the BBC's Start the Week, Andrew Marr asks his guests for their surprising predictions for 2007. One of them suggests that this will see the increasing influence of the younger generation. On a news programme, I hear a Labour politician suggest that, as politics seems to have alienated so many, new forms of political activism, enabled by the internet, will take shape, and the younger generation will be its catalytic force. At my sister's twenty-first birthday, my dad makes a brief speech at which he observes that the older generation, represented by my ninety-year-old grandfather, got us out of the most intractable mess during World War Two, and that my father's generation have done a pretty good job of messing things up again. It was to the younger generation, myself, my sister, our friends, that my father raised his glass.

In the Western world, if you look beyond the sleek plastic veneers of their I-pods and laptops, the young are suffering as a result of the lifestyles of their parents. In the United Kingdom, with house prices at record levels, the number of first time buyers is rapidly decreasing. I have little doubt that the economy must head for a fall: if house prices are increasing at 10% a year and wage inflation is running at around 3%, you do not have to be a mathematician to realise that things fundamentally don't add up, and that the gap has been filled, temporarily, by the mockery of cheap credit. However, with my generation priced out of the housing market now, we will have little to celebrate when the inevitable crash occurs, though we may have time to feel a hint of schadenfreude before recession hits. When it comes to the environment, we are the ones who are going to be choking on the smoke of our parents, whilst they are rotting beneath our feet, feeding the natural cycles they have violated. And in our education system, our parent's generation refuses to subsides university degrees, and we are forced to enter work with huge debts.

And yet, and yet. That financial debt is one being accumulated in return for an education which is better and more widespread than at any time before. In spite of all the hyperbole about the liberating power of the internet (try telling the 94% of Africans who have never used the web how wonderful it is that Wikipedia is democratising encyclopaedias), I do believe that we possess a tool unprecedented in human history to spread knowledge, ideas and moral values. If we can direct our skills in technology, our liberal education, and, above all, our anger at the world we have inherited from our fathers, we might just start to change it.

Labels: Politics, the Edge Question