On excellence - William Davies in LRB:

“For those of us who work in higher education, much of this has felt both suffocating and nonsensical. More and more of our energies are diverted to competing for funds, taking part in marketing exercises or learning to speak the language of ‘excellence’ and ‘impact’. The full cost of carrying out the 2021 REF has been estimated at a scarcely credible £471 million, almost double the cost of its predecessor in 2014. With no apparent irony, the government’s Post-18 Education and Funding Review (the Augar Review), issued in 2019, urged ‘universities to maintain a sense of proportion in their marketing strategies and budgets’, and worried that the pursuit of student numbers and student satisfaction might be linked to grade inflation. The ‘impact’ agenda has driven some deeply silly behaviour. A friend who works at a policymaking body told me about one unfortunate academic who called him up, hoping to host a joint seminar to be retrofitted as evidence of ‘impact’. When my friend declined, the academic asked meekly: ‘Would you at least be willing to sign a letter confirming that we’ve had this conversation?’”

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“Twitter has been disastrous in this regard, hurling the authors of critical academic discourses into the same arena as op-ed writers, politicians and members of the general public, without any mediators or translators to help these different communities understand one another. Even the most committed poststructuralist surely realises that most people do not think of ‘nature’, say, as a Eurocentric construct, and that to talk as if this were common sense is alienating and potentially patronising. Yet on social media some academics find it simply too tempting not to flaunt their esoteric knowledge for clout. This is a gift to reactionaries.”

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“Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber is a revised and expanded version of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values that Wendy Brown gave at Yale in 2019. As she acknowledges, Weber is, on the face of it, a surprising choice of ally for a radical political thinker who has done so much to scrutinise and oppose political orthodoxies. Weber is typically dismissed on the left as a conservative defender of bourgeois liberalism and a critic of socialism. In recent years, Brown has been best known for her critical analysis of neoliberal rationality and the way it has weakened resources for political action; recent scholarship, meanwhile, has highlighted significant continuities between Weber’s thought and that of early neoliberals such as Ludwig von Mises. Brown isn’t a sociologist, but her work is unquestionably animated by what C. Wright Mills called the ‘sociological imagination’, which connects ‘private troubles’ to ‘public issues’. Although Weber was one of the founding fathers of sociology, he has become unfashionable among sociologists because of his insistence on a rigid distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘values’, and his refusal to let politics or ethical reasoning intrude into scholarship.
So why Weber? The texts Brown focuses on are the two famous lectures given in Munich in 1917 and 1919, ‘Science as a Vocation’ and ‘Politics as a Vocation’, which Nihilistic Times reads in reverse order. Here Brown finds Weber responding to ‘crises of political and academic life bearing certain parallels to our own, including a crisis of liberalism’. In a time of war, demagoguery and bureaucratisation, and when the ‘death of God’ had become a given, Weber sought to reorient politics and scholarship through a dogged commitment to what distinguished each of them. As Brown admits, some of this made for dry and disappointing reading (‘Science as a Vocation’ is ‘one long depressive sigh about what scholarship is and requires, even apart from its miserable contemporary conditions’). But what she finds most valuable in Weber’s ethos, not least in its implications both for the left and for the academy, is the willingness to face uncomfortable truths without lapsing into wishful thinking or despair.”

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“ The tragedy of modernity, as recognised most acutely by Nietzsche, is that modern knowledge can tell us a great deal about how the world works (facts), but nothing whatever about what we should do about it (values). This, Weber argued, is just the way it is, and to deny the split between facts and values (in the form of mysticism, say, or Marxism) only makes things worse. Modern society is therefore suffused by nihilism, in the sense that values no longer have any stable or consensual foundation, while scholars have nothing helpful to say about them, other than to study them sociologically.”

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“If nihilism stems from the shrivelling of religious authority and a divide between facts and values, then as Weber sees it, the conditions for nihilism will remain. In that case, ‘responsible’ actors must continue to tackle its worst symptoms, in both political and scholarly arenas, without ever promising to eradicate its root causes. To act as if nihilism isn’t a problem – for instance, by issuing academic prophecies, or claiming to be doing the work of God – is to perpetuate its worst effects, whereby the boundaries between politics, religion, scholarship and bureaucracy are tossed aside, and everything becomes dictated by affect and the threat of violence. It’s this diagnosis of nihilism, and its resonance with contemporary crises of liberal democracy, that interests Brown in Weber.
Brown had already engaged with the concept of nihilism in In the Ruins of Neoliberalism(2019), where she had Trumpism and adjacent political movements in mind. That book, in turn, built on Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015). What Brown has been trying to puzzle out, along with many other leftist observers of US politics in the 21st century, is how a neoliberal regime rooted in ubiquitous privatisation and economisation could have yielded the illiberal excesses of Trumpism, whose violent rhetoric and ethno-nationalism appeared so at odds with the cold calculations of the global market. How is it possible that economics and politics burst their banks like this, and both at the same time?”

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“Brown recognised, following Foucault, that many of the neoliberal intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s, horrified by fascism, advocated markets as a defence against politics. Yet they continued to look to the state to implement their projects as forcefully as possible, and eventually got what they wanted, starting in Chile in the 1970s, then the UK and the US in the 1980s. Expanding the reach of economics and markets into otherwise ‘non-economic’ domains of life is the signal ambition of neoliberalism, and distinguishes it from the Enlightenment liberalism in which ‘market’, ‘state’ and ‘society’ are imagined, as Weber would have appreciated, as three separate spheres of existence.”

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“‘If neoliberalism is conceived only as a political rationality featuring the ubiquity of markets and homo economicus’ – as Brown admits she herself had understood it in Undoing the Demos – ‘we cannot grasp the affective investments in privileges of whiteness and First World existence in the nation and national culture or in traditional morality.’ Brown seizes on the concept of nihilism as a way of comprehending the relationship between the cold economisation she described in Undoing the Demos and the hateful manic energy that engulfed American democracy soon after.
The reduction of everything to monetary value and financial logic ‘added force to the nihilism of the age and also quickened it’. But there are nuances in the way nihilism manifests itself. Moral values may lose their foundation, becoming little more than personal preferences or branding exercises, but this does not mean that moral rhetoric disappears. Brown, drawing on Nietzsche, stresses that once values have come to appear baseless and arbitrary, there is no limit to their application, or to the violence that can be exercised in their name.”

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“ What Weber understood, as many defences of populism do not, is that good leadership combines passion with reason, with neither one sacrificed for the other. The left must speak not only to people’s desires or to their rational interests, but to both at the same time.”

Read the article here.

If there is no foundation for moral value there is no limit to its application, nor to the violence disguised as morally necessary or at least morally just.

But to restore the foundation underneath moral value – if this foundation ever existed – is an impossible task.

If this is the source of nihilism then we have no other choice than to live with nihilism, it all depends on the degree. A bit less nihilism in my coffee please.
As to the people’s desires, yes fair enough, let the progressive speak with passion to both ration and irrational reflexes in the electorate. But what if these desires are nihilistic or just totally destructive?

The problem might be just that, the desire, the absolute necessary and indispensable desire.