HIGHER EDUCATION
28th December 2002
Predictably, the public relations team of Universities UK has said that it is "absurd" for Shirley Williams (January) to say that there are no first-class universities left in Britain. I think she is wrong, but she is far from absurd. She's wrong, because we still do well those things that don't demand vast resources: Oxbridge provides a better undergraduate education than anywhere in the world, and graduates get a less mechanical and more attentive doctoral education than in the US. What we can't do is spend a fifth as much as Stanford, Harvard and Yale on high-end scientific research and still hope to give them a run for their money. If that's what "first-class" has come to mean, Shirley Williams is right-but I'm sorry to see her write off high-grade undergraduate education and high-grade scholarship in the arts and social sciences.
Alan Ryan
Stanford University, California
WAS KANT AN ATHEIST?
9th January 2003
Thomas Mautner objects (Letters, January) to my saying that Kant was an atheist. He appears to base his objection on reading biographies of Kant; he should try reading Kant himself. I recommend the third chapter of Book II of the Critique of Pure Reason, entitled "The Ideal of Pure Reason." Mautner also objects to my suggesting that Kant's atheism played a part in his not securing a salaried academic post until the age of 46. Here he should indeed trust the biographies, especially Manfred K?hn's, which will offer him ample evidence of the enthusiastic pietism not just of Kant's native K?nigsberg, but in particular of its university, whose reputation for pietist theology sits awkwardly with Kant's professed view that the idea of a deity is a fiction useful for morality.
AC Grayling
London SE15
TRAVEL WRITING
6th January 2003
Edward Marriott (January) is right to dwell on the decline of vitality in travel writing since its most recent peak in the mid-1980s. But his analysis ignores the enduring strengths of the travel book. There are several reasons why his prognosis is too gloomy and we can assume that travel literature has not lost the capacity to reinvent itself.
Despite the notion that we have somehow shrunk it, the world remains both very big and very diverse. As our own lives become safer, wealthier, cosier, narrower, so the lives of most of the rest of the world drift beyond our grasp. Current geopolitical trends threaten to isolate us further, while the greater part of the travel industry does all it can to bubble us in resorts. Great swathes of the world are increasingly undervisited, misunderstood and uncelebrated. Material for plucky travel writers has by no means diminished. More importantly though, the travel book draws on one of the great myth structures. An individual (or group of individuals) setting out into unknown territory, undergoing many adventures before reaching a given destination or achieving knowledge or enlightenment, is a narrative pattern that predates by millennia the psychological or character-driven novel. From the Book of Exodus to the Odyssey and the wonder voyages of medieval Europe-each age has rediscovered this literary template and there's no reason to suppose it is now redundant. Marriott may have tired of the form, shying away from its emphasis on the authorial "I," but his take is too literal. I am sure that some of those thousands of imaginative travellers now in their twenties will find some new way to convey the excitement and richness of the places they see, the people they meet, and the wonderful allegorical spirit of the open road.
Philip Marsden
St Mawes, Cornwall
REFORMING THE EU
23rd December 2002
Charles Grant (January) really doesn't get it. The EU is there inter alia to protect the integrity and security of small states from interference by large ones. Any attempt of the kind he sketches to limit the power of small states within the EU would certainly lead to far-reaching instability. This would come not only from the central Europeans, whom he stigmatises as "awkward" (without offering a shred of evidence), but from the current small member states too, who don't like being pushed around by large ones.
George Sch?pflin
London EC2Y
LITERARY JARGON
11th January 2003
Julian Connerty (Letters, January) justifies the jargon of academic literary criticism by comparing it to that of maths or physics, which only fellow specialists need to understand. But the two are not comparable. The insights of maths and physics achieve social utility by application in other fields, such as engineering. Literary criticism, on the other hand, if embedded in jargon incomprehensible to readers and writers of literature, is devoid of social utility, and reduced to a mere word game, played at public expense by a smug, socially isolated elite.
John Roberts
Labastide-Paumes, France
PALESTINIAN INCENTIVES
30th December 2002
Derek Coombs (January) is perhaps correct about one thing: that none of the middle east peace plans spelt out the one "reward" most desired by the Palestinians-the complete dismantling of Israel as a Jewish state. This apart, I am challenged to find anything else either remotely factual or moral in his piece. He says, for example, that the Oslo Accords were clear about Israel's expected immediate gain-security-but asks what the Palestinians were to get out of it. Let's see: in return for the "security" which has seen over 1,000 Israelis die violently since Oslo, the Palestinians got a self-governing authority which, three years after the agreement, extended to over 60 per cent of the area of the West Bank and 90 per cent of its inhabitants, and all of the Gaza Strip with the exception of the Israeli settlements there. As stipulated by Oslo, the Palestinians got a "police force"-equipped and armed by Israel-which they quickly turned into a 50,000-strong set of militias now waging war on Israel. They got the leaders of their "choice"-outlaws from Tunisia, whom even most Arab governments had refused to host. They got (and get) millions of dollars in EU aid, the balance of which-after paying for arms purchases from Iran and bomber training camps-ends up in the hands of the Tunisian outlaws.
Max Blackston
Jerusalem, Israel
BILL HAMILTON 1
3rd January 2003
Further to Andrew Brown's article (January), an evaluation of Bill Hamilton's work could benefit from a revisit to first principles. What question is answered by selfish gene theory's explanation of altruism? How, by Darwinian logic, does altruism arise and persist in a population of individuals competing for survival? The answer is given by pushing down the motivation for survival from organisms, with their individualism, to genes which find identity across the organisms that carry them. Suppose, however, that the original question arises from a myth. Then the ingenious solutions given by Hamilton are as impressive as theistic attempts to reconcile predestination and free will, but no more so.
Richard Wilkins
Garston, Hertfordshire
BILL HAMILTON 2
9th January 2003
I read Andrew Brown's article on Bill Hamilton with concern. Much of the discussion of the "altruistic" gene in the article appears to be based on ignorance of bee biology. To quote: "Bees that kill themselves must leave fewer descendants than those which hang back, so if a tendency to self-sacrifice is inherited it would surely vanish in competition with tendencies to more selfish behaviour." In the case of honeybees, the ones that sting are young sterile females that are responsible for the defence of the colony. They do not reproduce but continue their careers as foraging workers, dying naturally after five to six weeks. The number of bees which die early through stinging thick-skinned enemies is very small compared with both the total in the colony and its capacity to reproduce, so there is not even a significant impact on the foraging workforce. A bee which stings a thin-skinned enemy, such as another insect, does not usually die.
Reproduction, on the other hand, is the responsibility of the queen and drones, which are not involved in colony defence. This means that the death of a few bees through stinging has no effect on the genetic inheritance of the colony. However, a well-defended colony will have a better chance of survival, so the inherited tendency for workers to sting will in fact be self-perpetuating, rather than self-destroying as suggested in the article.
The fact that this early research by Bill Hamilton may be flawed does not necessarily invalidate the concept of inherited "altruistic" genes in those colony animals whose existence depends on co-operation. But it casts doubt on any of Hamilton's later work that was based on his assumptions about bees. No amount of genius can be a substitute for thorough, basic research.
Michael Organe
Elstead, Surrey
JAPAN'S FAKE FUNK
10th January 2003
Referring to my article "Japan's fake funk" (November), Andrew Smithers (Letters, January) suggests that I erred in stating Japan's budget position. My numbers are taken from OECD in Figures and represent each nation's government savings ratio (the most meaningful measure of its budget position). As for Japan's ranking in the national debt league table, he has ignored my point that each nation's figures should be adjusted for its foreign reserves. Japan's holdings of foreign reserves are huge and greatly reduce the country's net debt burden.
Smithers accuses me of overlooking an alleged "explosion" in homelessness in Tokyo. This explosion is a myth. The homeless are merely more visible than in the 1980s. As James Fallows documented in 1988, the impression that homelessness hardly existed in Japan was an illusion. In a famously orderly country, the authorities formerly confined the homeless almost entirely to certain hidden slum districts far from foreigners' eyes. The most notorious such district was Sanya, north of central Tokyo. For some reason, however, hundreds of homeless men formerly resident in such districts were suddenly permitted in the early 1990s to pitch their tents highly conspicuously in central Tokyo's most elegant parks.
As for Japan's suicide rate, this moves independently of economic cycles, and the recent modest rise reflects mainly ageing demographics. In the first half of the 1990s-when Japan suffered the worst share and property crashes in modern world history-the suicide rate remained near historic lows. Moreover, Japanese male life expectancy increased by 1.2 years in the 1990s.
Essentially, Smithers has unwittingly recycled the latest propaganda positions of the Tokyo establishment. Not for the first time. He was badly deceived in the late 1980s, when he accepted the Japanese securities industry's then line that Japanese shares were headed for the moon. At the height of the bubble he was quoted in a US newspaper describing as "balderdash" the idea that Japanese share prices were too high. The Nikkei index has fallen more than 60 per cent since then.
Eamonn Fingleton
Minami Aoyama, Tokyo
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