The History Man

This is one of those novels everyone should read. Unfortunately those under a certain age (myself included) are unlikely to have even heard of it. I spotted it in a second-hand book shop and it triggered a vague memory. So I looked it up in my list of 'books to look for' (yes, I do indeed keep such a list, and it is rather long), and there it was: Bradbury, Malcolm -- The History Man. I don't recall why I included it in the list but I'm glad I did. I bought it for a mere 99p, and once I started reading it I just couldn't stop.

Set in 1972, it centres around Howard Kirk, a radical sociologist at the fictional University of Watermouth. Watermouth is a plateglass university of the sort I was only recently released from. The politics seem quite familiar to me: a one-party state, whose only intellectual diversity is on a spectrum from revolutionary to Green to Labour. There were endless political displays: protests, 'history months', banners, insufferable student union campaigns. And there were of course the seminars. I was not right-wing then, at least not by my definition; and though I had become more conservative towards the end, by then I had long since disengaged from university life. But nevertheless I do recall, for instance, being the only person in seminar who voted to leave the EU. I also recall being the only person who didn't find Roger Scruton's view on popular culture horribly elitist -- I rather agreed with him in fact, even then. But I wasn't the argumentative sort back then, and when I tried to be I rather made a fool out of myself. I was mostly happy to avoid confrontation, being constitutionally lazy, the sort of natural conservative which Michael Oakeshott describes in his essay 'On Being a Conservative'; that is, one who enjoys idleness and 'useless' pursuits.

(I must, as an aside, note that it was invariably the students, not the teachers, who were the insufferable ideologues. The teachers, at least in my experience, were generous and intellectually relaxed people.)

The general behaviour of students, which, as possibly in all universities, represented the culmination of the permissive society. Liberation has meant endless, shameless alcohol and drug consumption, unrestrained swearing and vulgarity, sexual 'experimentation', dreary nights out in clubs that offer hedonistic young students a reprieve from civilisation. Men prosper most of all in this society, just as Howard Kirk does, and while women strive to live in accordance with the theology of moral and sexual liberation, inevitably they are the ones who bear the heaviest burden.

But my experience of university was minimal. I was quite a different person, much more timid, thoroughly unsure of myself and without any real views of my own (though in some respects I became more conservative in reaction to those dull three years). I soon decided I did not want to be there, and from then on I did not cope at all well, and so my view of the whole thing may be askew. But nevertheless, what little I saw accords with what I read in the novel.

And this perhaps helps explain why I so disliked university: the world in the novel is quite horrid indeed. The worst people prosper, the most generous and charitable people suffer, the most vulnerable people are abused rather than helped (though often abused in the name of help -- Howard believes sex has an almost baptismal effect in correcting someone's politics), those striving to live a moral life are in the end corrupted, those seeking justice and fairness are manipulated and defeated by the radical faculty and students who have come to dominate the university hierarchy. The only comfort is the quietly mocking narrator. This is a book about about people who have no moral core, or rather who deliberately act in suspicion of and in reaction to their moral core, and who have no ethical system, only a system that tells them what to loathe. They would rather hate than love -- even their romantic relationships seem to be based on a sort of hatred, a reaction to society, an enthusiastic perversion. They hate the familiar, the old, the biological, restraint, friendliness. They hate anything fixed and permanent. They only thing they love is politics and theory. They oppress, they abuse, they manipulate, they dehumanise, they ridicule, they boast, they demean, all in the name of liberation.

The saddest victim of them all was Miss Calendar. She taught English and was a strong, implicitly conservative women. Howard made it his mission to bed her. She resisted and gently mocked him. She seemed every bit his equal in intellectual strength. But eventually, or rather almost suddenly, as up until that moment Miss Calendar seemed quite resistant to him, Howard bullied her into having sex with him. He tried to persuade her how wretched her life is and how desperately she needs to be liberated from it. In her first moment of timidity in the book, she quietly acquiesces. Acquiesces may not be the right word -- the surrender was not without pleasure and curiosity on her side. But nevertheless the sense I got was that Howard abused her. I certainly felt sick reading the passage. All that goodness and light was extinguished by a selfish man who saw sex as a moral mission to liberate.

In the novel, the conservatives and the liberals always end up either losing or giving in to the radicals. Henry Beamish, a colleague and supposedly a friend of Howard, though Howard does not treat him as such, is the most admirable person in the novel. He becomes more conservative by the end. And when Mengel, fictional geneticist, is due to deliver a lecture at the university, which students come out in masses to protest, thinking him a racist and fascist (if thinking it can be called), Henry finds himself in the position of introducing Mengel. Henry is angry at the students: he tells them, 'you're the fascists; this is a crime against free speech'. Doesn't that sound rather familiar? Poor Henry suffers, though. He is fantastically unfortunate, always enduring accidents and mishaps. And so 'inevitably' (as Howard always says) the students, in the chaos of the protest, trample over him and brake his other arm (he had already broken one a few days previous).

The appearance of Mengel, a geneticist, is rather familiar too. I immediate thought of Charles Murray, the social scientist who is often accused of being a racist because of his views regarding genetic differences, who fell victim to violent protest when he visited Middlebury University in 2017. The female professor introducing him was also injured by protesters.

Keep this mind if you are one of those people who think the left-wing lunacy of recent years is an aberration and that we will soon return to normality. Bradbury wrote this novel in 1975. And you will find similar behaviour through the centuries, though particularly after the Second World War. It has been continual and increasing. The politics and mores of the radicals have spread beyond the university. We are all cultural revolutionaries now. The academics and the students won; society lost.