“Now Abel kept flocks and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering – fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favour on Abel and his offering but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favour. So Cain was very angry and his face was downcast”.

As we know, Cain was so consumed with anger and jealousy that he attacked his brother in the fields and killed him. He was put under a curse to be a “restless wanderer” on the Earth.

On the surface this is a story of sibling rivalry, something tormenting Prince Harry. As reports at the weekend suggest, the rift between the young prince and his elder brother seems to be widening as publication day for the pointedly titled “Spare” draws nearer. It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Harry. It can’t be easy being the spare, the younger brother whose role in the royal “firm” started in a position of subordination and has become steadily more subordinate as more direct heirs arrive to dilute his lineage.

There are plenty of younger siblings who have suffered in this way although none of us can imagine the particular hardship of being the “spare” to a throne.

Cain and Abel, though, is about much more than sibling rivalry. It contains deeper truths about human nature and the “deadly” sin of jealousy. It sounds something of a warning, therefore, for the spare prince.

Life, and in particular free market society, produces a constant churn of perceived “winners” and “losers”. Society and the media measure people by criteria of material wealth, fame and power. Hollow as these perceived “virtues” may be, they skew our perceptions, driving behaviour and sentiment.

It is natural for the winners and losers to be attracted to systems of belief which support their self-interest. Thus the winners from capitalism tend to support capitalism and the losers tend to seek out ideologies that would challenge or replace it. Those who resist this temptation are the honourable exception — capitalists who see the flaws in free markets, show real compassion and are willing to give their money away; or those vulnerable and poor who bear no resentment or anger.

Unfortunately the exceptions are far too rare.

Ideas of resentment and jealousy echo through time, and played a prominent part in the 19th century, when philosophers sought to create new theories of morality without God. Nietzsche borrowed a French word, ressentiment, to anchor the origins of his moral philosophy. By his estimation, Western moral thinking had its roots in the master-slave relationship.

The weak and marginalised members of society (such as persecuted Christians) resented those who oppressed them (the masters) and inverted the prevailing morality, turning humility, equality and compassion into the highest virtues.

“While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself … the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment.”

The dominant creed of the resentful for most of the 20th century was Socialism. As George Orwell pointed out, socialists don’t generally love the poor, they hate the rich.

When Marxist materialism became discredited with the realisation of the economic failures of the Soviet Union and the rising death counts of Communists and Socialist regimes around the world, the bearers of “ressentiment” turned to other domains into which to inject their venom. Key targets were the spheres of culture, family life, sex and race.

And so was born critical theory, the bastard child of Post-Modernism and Frankfurt School post-Marxism. To this conception we owe the hierarchy of victimhood, the one to which we must now all defer; it also spawned the language of the social justice warriors — words such as “my truth”, “lived experience”, “white privilege” (or any other kind of privilege for that matter) “ intersectionality” and so on.

The virus of critical theory was smuggled into the American culture via academia (two members of the Frankfurt School — Marcuse and Adorno — actually emigrated from Germany to US universities before the war).

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From academia, critical theory (popularly understood as wokery) has infected the media, publishing, Newsrooms, Hollywood, football commentators, public administration, HR departments, and even Big Tech. Perhaps the last place you would expect it to appear is the British Royal family. Surely they are not the losers in life’s lottery?

But that is to misunderstand the nature of resentment. Even within the Royal Family there are those who consider themselves losers. Cain was only upset about his status relative to Abel. It did not matter that he was Adam’s first born son.

Harry has no doubt been deeply frustrated by his status within the family and the nature of his “spare”ness. There is resentment and there is jealousy. Of course the Woke creed appeals. And no wonder Harry adopts its language. Which leaves us, ironically, with a hereditary Prince lecturing us about “privilege”.

There are of course other dimensions to Harry’s story. There is the shadow of his mother and the influence of his wife. But to the extent that he is a victim, he is the victim not only of his family circumstances but also of poisonous philosophers. Perhaps his example can be a cautionary tale to the rest of us.

Paul Marshall is chairman of Marshall Wace. He writes in a personal capacity.

Precious few details were given about that harm. The signatories, comprising eventually more than 800 scholars, offered some perfunctory scholarly reasons for their demand, but it was clear that the article’s main shortcoming, in their view, was of an extra-scholarly nature: its conclusions went against the political sensibilities prevalent in today’s mainstream humanities, in whose name they were writing. Rather than a scholarly document, the letter was a rallying cry built around such conspicuously political terms as “privilege”, “harm” and “erasure” — which feature abundantly in the current discourse of the Left.

Separately, some of the journal’s associate editors apologised on social media for “the harms”, stating that “clearly, the article should not have been published”. Both Hypatia’s editor and its board of directors, however, stood by the journal’s initial decision to publish Tuvel’s article, which is still available online.

In another section of Anglophone academia, a team of three scholars, Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose, were perpetrating what they ultimately called the “grievance studies affair”: over two years, they jointly wrote several hoax papers, and submitted them, under assumed names, to mainstream journals in the humanities. Even though these articles advanced blatantly absurd claims, and sometimes made little sense, some of them were accepted for publication — often enthusiastically. In “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon”, for example, published in Gender, Place & Culture, the authors claimed that “dog parks are ‘rape-condoning spaces’ and a place of rampant canine rape culture and systemic oppression against ‘the oppressed dog’ through which human attitudes to both problems can be measured and analysed by applying black feminist criminology”.

How did papers of no scholarly merit pass, sometimes with flying colours, the crucial test whereby a scholar’s subjective opinion becomes reliable knowledge: the peer-review process? Because the authors understood how important conformism to the dominant ideological orthodoxy is in the academic humanities. The hoaxers didn’t need to place any real knowledge in their submissions, only the recognisable markers of belonging to the same camp — dazzling buzzwords such as “rape culture”, “queer performativity”, “systemic oppression” — which mesmerised both journal editors and the external reviewers. (When the hoaxers came out of the shadows, the journals retracted the papers.) These two stories reveal, each in its own way, the outsized role that extra-scholarly factors play in scholarship — and, therefore, the extreme overall fragility of the quest for truth in today’s Anglophone humanities.

Almost a century ago, in La Trahison des Clercs (1927), Julien Benda warned against what he considered one of the greatest dangers of his time: the “betrayal” committed by intellectuals who, instead of defending les valeurs éternelles et désintéressées, chose to put themselves in the service of intérêts pratiques associated with specific ideologies, militant causes, social movements, and political parties. These intellectuels engagés pretended to seek universal values, while in fact advancing the specific agenda of one group or another. Max Weber’s theory of “value neutrality”, earlier in the century, had similarly argued that researchers need to keep their own values and personal biases in check if they are to truly understand what they are studying. Not to do so would be to fail as a scholar. Both Benda and Weber were writing at a time of intense ideological battles, not unlike ours. And yet they thought the way out of the crisis was not more politicised knowledge, but less — preferably, none.

This ideal would form the backbone of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943). Throughout the Thirties, Hesse saw the devastating effects of instrumentalised knowledge in the world around him: in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and fascist Italy, but also in the democracies that were preparing to confront them. In the novel, set in the 25th century, this confrontation marked the beginning of a catastrophic “Age of Wars”. Towards the end of this period, tired of all the senseless violence, social chaos, and political cynicism, people start to envision a solution: the pursuit of pure, rigorous, disinterested knowledge, sought for its own sake, and uncontaminated by any practical interests. Only such knowledge, they thought, will save society from self-destruction. The idea was that:

“…if respect for the world of the mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer’s slide rule and the computations of the banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue… the externals of civilisation — technology, industry, commerce, and so on — also require a common basis of intellectual honesty and morality.”

That’s how the fictional “pedagogical province” of Castalia, the quasi-monastic setting of Hesse’s novel, is established. There, the brightest minds of every country in our future spend their lives doing nothing but playing the equally fictional Glass Bead Game. The game is never clearly defined in the novel, but we understand that it is the highest achievement of the human mind imaginable. “It has particularly taken over the role of art, partially that of speculative philosophy.” The most salient feature of the game is its contemplative dimension. The players don’t pursue it for any practical goals; they dedicate their entire existence to it without any concern for material gain, social status, or worldly fame. They are total scholars pursuing “the life of the Mind”, seeking nothing but useless knowledge.

And yet the Glass Bead Game has a vitally important function in society: through what they do, the Castalians preserve the integrity and purity of thinking, making sure that it doesn’t get contaminated by extraneous factors such as greed, thirst for worldly fame, and politics. Especially politics. For nothing corrupts the pursuit of knowledge more than power. The Castalians live, as Hesse writes, “in a state of political innocence and naïveté such as had been quite common among the professors of earlier ages; they [have] no political rights and duties, scarcely ever [see] a newspaper”. While outside of Castalia, people are free to engage in politics, as well as in business, professional careers, and other worldly pursuits, within the “pedagogical provinces” themselves, there is no place for such things. What lies at their core is not the pursuit of power, but that of service.

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Life in Castalia may strike us as outlandish, yet it’s nothing but the fleshing out of an old and widespread idea. The novel builds on the notion that there are largely two existential attitudes, two fundamental modes of relating to the world: vita activa and vita contemplativa. The distinction has been known to every civilisation, Eastern or Western, ancient or modern, simple or sophisticated. We can approach the world pragmatically, and act upon it with a view of bending it to our own needs and desires. This has always been the approach of statesmen and military strategists, politicians and policymakers, revolutionaries and activists of all stripes. Or we can approach the world contemplatively, seeking to understand it in its own terms, and not in relation to us, and hoping to grasp how things are in themselves, regardless of the use we make of them. Achieving such understanding is what the enlightened of all ages and all places have done: Zen monks and Sufi masters, sages and hermits, great theorists and visionaries, Glass Bead Game players and artists of genius — and, in their best moments, scholars, too.

After all, the primary job of the scholar is not to act upon the world, but to understand it. “Not to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand,” in the haunting words of Benedict Spinoza, the most contemplative of modern philosophers. One cannot understand something and act upon it at the same time; when we are acting upon an object, we put ourselves in a utilitarian, possessive, and manipulative mode, which makes us incapable of grasping its true meaning. On the contrary, a scholar is someone who takes a step back, stays still, and observes everything at leisure (scholē in Greek, from which our word derives). Scholarship, then, ends where action starts. Someone else may use scholarly knowledge to devise a practical course of action, but that enterprise is not scholarly. Those who seek to understand the world and those who want to change it are two different breeds of people, following separate paths. They may occasionally wave and smile at each other, have meaningful conversations, and even be friends, but they remain different.

Karl Marx’s bon mot, in Theses on Feuerbach (1845), that “Hitherto philosophers have sought to understand the world; henceforth they must seek to change it”, was not the beginning of a political liberation, then, but that of a great intellectual confusion. How can one change a world one does not understand?

Almost 100 years after La Trahison des Clercs, Benda’s “betrayal” has become the norm in the academic humanities, especially in the English-speaking world. Nowadays if a piece of humanistic scholarship doesn’t broadcast, or at least allude to, the author’s political views and ideological mindset, it is seen with suspicion by her peers. Weber’s “value neutrality” appears as an aberration. Indeed, to write in its defence, as I am doing here, may be construed as positive proof of — God forbid — the author’s un-leftist views.

For not only are we supposed to wear our politics, visibly, on our scholarship, which is bad enough, but we also need to hold only certain views, which is plainly absurd. As has been observed, over the last few decades academia has progressively shifted to the Left. This has translated into an increasing lack of viewpoint diversity, which has compromised “the ability of scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers”, as two commentators recently noted. Ideally, there should be no politics at all in our scholarship. Failing that, there should be a variety of political views involved, in the hope that they will cancel each other out.

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Yet that today’s humanist academics have strong political views and don’t hesitate to pass them on as real knowledge is not even their worst failure. What’s even more damaging is that the body of humanistic knowledge itself — its basic assumptions, the process though which it is produced, even the language in which it is communicated — is structured along political lines. Much of today’s humanistic scholarship is not just about politics, it is itself a form of political performance: it generates and increases power, it creates and maintains hierarchies, it splits the scholars into camps, tribalising the humanities and turning them into a power-charged field. Most of the time we think and write and act not as mere scholars, but as political actors — always on the lookout for ways to maximise their power, prestige and influence. Regardless of the topics of our research, much of what we do is shaped not by the inner logic of our work, but by something extraneous — by what is going on, micro-politically, in the world within which we operate. We don’t pursue knowledge for its sake, but for our own.

Ponderous questions keep the humanist scholar awake at night. Which methodology should we use: something time-tested, yet old-fashioned, or the latest fad that everybody is talking about and following compulsively, and which would place us in the spotlight? And on which topics should we work exactly: those we believe we have something genuine to say about, or the trendy ones, those that seem to bring instant social media attention, excellent political positioning, and prompt publication — something which the hoaxers of the “grievance studies affair” exploited to great comical effect? Whose work should we cite: that of some long-dead names, yet whose contribution is still crucial, or that of living scholars with influence, the “power-houses” in our field, regardless of their scholarly worth? And when we cite other scholars, should we consider strictly the intrinsic merits of their scholarship, or should we mention them, strategically, because of their gender, race or sexual identity? And, in general, what kind of stance should we take? A risky one, like Rebecca Tuvel’s, with potentially crippling effects on our career, or one that flatters the prevalent orthodoxy and smoothes our way to greater power, fame, and influence?

Deeply preoccupied with such dilemmas, we have seriously lost our way. Even worse, we can’t find our way back to start again, because our journey hasn’t been guided by anything but an incessant adjusting to the latest trends. Worst of all, however, is that, dazzled as we are by our spectacular successes, we may not even know that we have gone astray. Failure can’t cut any deeper.

But help is on the way, for we now have the cure for this problem: Critical Theory. The goal of “Theory” is to overthrow the Force, liberating the disadvantaged from their mental slavery to usher in an epoch of perfect equality, or even — dare we hope — turn the tables on the white cis-het male oppressor. If you fall into a hegemonic category, you must repent of your privilege and become an ally to the oppressed. If from a victim group, you must wake up and fight against lies about “objective truth”, “free speech” or universal standards, which are oppressing you and erasing your identity.

If you have the temerity to disagree with this conspiracy theory, or demand evidence for its sweeping claims, you’re part of the problem, helping to reproduce the Force and uphold the System. Time for your re-education, otherwise known as diversity training.

Critical Theory is the philosophy which underlies Wokeness. It consists of layers of assertions, built up over time, with each new generation of theories building on the inventions of previous theorists. Using moral self-righteousness and the leftist monoculture of the soft social sciences to shield them from scientific scrutiny, its practitioners have founded a series of fields such as queer theory, critical race theory, fat studies and critical gender theory.

Gradually, these have intersected and morphed into an all-encompassing Theory, which today’s identity politics activists use to justify a ratcheting programme of language policing, Twitter mobbing and re-education. When challenged, they wheel out Theory buzzwords like “white fragility”, “heteronormative” or “microaggression”.

Critical Race Theory, in particular, has become such a concern that last month the US president issued an executive order barring its use in federal institutions, while yesterday in Parliament Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch condemned it as a “dangerous trend” in race relations.

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories is the most thorough attempt yet to unmask this Social Justice religion, or, to use postmodernist lingo, to “deconstruct” its “metanarrative”. It tracks the genealogy of critical race, gender, queer and fatness theory, painstakingly pointing out logical leaps and flaws. The two authors, along with a third figure, Peter Boghossian, came to well-earned prominence in October 2018 when they revealed the scandal that they were able to get seven hoax papers published in established gender studies, fat studies and queer studies journals.

These included a purported participant observation study of a dog park alleging that canines engage in rape culture and a paper on the penis as social construct. Though designed to be ridiculous, these studies passed peer review because they ticked the right ideological boxes and demonstrated proficiency in postmodernist jargon. One even won an award. Like Alan Sokal’s similar hoax in the 1990s, Pluckrose and company exposed the fact that these studies trafficked in ideology and faux-knowledge, and could thus be manipulated in a way no scientific journal dedicated to understanding the real world can be.

As a Masters student in Sociology at the London School of Economics in the early 1990s, I encountered the prelapsarian world in which high theory and activism were still separate. Coming from an economics background, I was stunned to find myself in a sociological theory seminar that felt like a séance, in which participants riffed off each other, tossing in morsels of jargon or fragments from canonical thinkers like Michel Foucault, Claude Levi-Strauss or Homi Bhabha, while shedding little to no light on the workings of the social world beyond our classroom.

The big thing was still postmodernism, the idea that modernisation and progress are a myth, along with its bigger sister, post-structuralism, which holds that language is just a bunch of words which gain meaning from each other and have no relationship to anything in the real world. Postmodernism was an art rather than a science, a play on words instead of a serious attempt to improve our knowledge of society.

Of course, there may be a grain of truth to Foucault’s untested idea that knowledge affects power relations, or to the post-structuralist claim that context has some effect on the meaning of words. Phrases like “astral world of signs” or “liquid modernity” really are a lot of fun. Yet, rather than make such claims measurable and modest, its contemporary practitioners have elevated the idea of knowledge as oppression onto the plane of sacred values, with reality and theory two non-overlapping magisteria that science cannot solve. Relativism insulates Theory from scientific scrutiny.

After the seminar, I noticed one especially humourless classmate dressed in proletarian gear flogging the Socialist Worker in the quad, having swapped his postmodernist theory for Marxist practice. Nowadays, his high theory and activism would be better coordinated, united in the form of a strident intersectional identity politics which manifests in the form of open letters to cancel professors, Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility training or the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Indeed a key theme of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book is that the political radicalism of the 1960s-80s has commandeered the pretend-expertise of postmodernism, invested it with seriousness and pressed it into action as Cancel Culture.

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Just as Salafi Islam was a quietist form of fundamentalism that ignited when mixed with Marxist theories of action, Theory has now entered its activist phase. It has migrated off campus into government, the media and the corporate world. This is why the sane mainstream can no longer afford to ignore its abstruse nonsense and why, whatever we think of Trump, we should applaud his executive order banning Critical Race Theory in the US government.

The book’s intellectual history is vital, and I commend its plea for a return to what Jonathan Rauch terms “liberal science”. This said, the authors fail to grasp the liberal roots of Theory, and how Left-liberalism’s well-intentioned and sometimes protective attitude to minorities has overreached and helped make the problem worse.

They believe a sharp emotional line can be drawn between a nice “left-liberal” who “favour[s] the underdog” and a totalising victim-oppressor worldview. Unfortunately, it can’t. Once your default position is warmth toward supposedly helpless minorities and suspicion of majorities, you have stepped across an affective abyss which sacrifices your objectivity, and this makes it far harder to resist the leftist good guys just trying to protect the meek. After all, the hearts of activists fighting for the underdog are in the right place and you wouldn’t want to be associated with the dark side.

Theory is set up as a form of science but it rarely advances through logical argument, and it can only be countered if it rests on a pre-cognitive base of emotional neutrality.

While the principles of reason and liberalism are opposed to extreme egalitarianism, there is no appeal to the heart in contemporary liberalism to viscerally counter the powerful Woke metanarrative of “defending the weak against the tyranny of the majority”. Until such a thing happens, liberal science will continue to mock Theory the way Sokal did in 1996 — while wokeness barrels on, capturing the hearts of young, educated and “right-thinking” people.

John Ellis’s The Breakdown of Higher Education is a case study of what happened at the epicentre of Theory, the university. It provides a first-hand account of how the cultural revolution that institutionalised critical theory and Cancel Culture began and spread. As a British-born emeritus professor of English at the University of California Santa Cruz who has taught there since 1966, Ellis recalls an exciting time when staff and students learned the western canon, and used it as a jumping-off point to freely discuss ideas without fear of being shamed or disciplined. He recounts how Social Justice ideology has, over the course of his lifetime, driven the pursuit of truth and excellence out of the social sciences and humanities in American universities.

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This cultural change began with demographic shifts and was consolidated through political discrimination. In 1969, the authoritative Carnegie faculty surveys found that 45% of the professoriate leaned left, 28% right and 27% in the middle. By 2004, a study of party registration data for Berkeley and Stanford university faculty showed an 8:1 left-to-right ratio, rising to 49:1 among junior faculty. Trend-setting California offered a clue as to what was happening. By 2016, another study found that the modest 2:1 left-to-right nationwide faculty ratio of 1969 had given way to a yawning 12:1 tilt. By 2018, Mitchell Langbert’s study of the party registrations of faculty in the top 50 US liberal arts colleges discovered that 39% had zero Republican registrations, with most of the rest in single digits.

Ellis remarks on the confluence of chance events that allowed this capture to take place. In effect, during the sixties, a combination of baby boom demographics and rising affluence resulted in the universities undergoing massive expansion. This occurred at precisely the moment that the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movement delegitimated the country’s traditional narrative, a conjunction that created an opening for radical students to enter the professoriate in large numbers, transforming it.

Once in post, the new generation deepened their ideological grip by controlling recruitment. Instead of being inculcated into the dominant truth-seeking culture of the university, the radicals now possessed the critical mass to escape Rauch’s “liberal science” and transform the entire mission of academia. Now truth-seekers would have to bend to orthodoxy instead of the other way round. Instead of their traditional motto of veritas, the university now stood for radical activism, with a focus on disadvantaged race, gender and sexuality groups.

Ellis draws on John Stuart Mill’s argument that “the opposition of the other… keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity” — bad ideas on the extremes are sidelined. Once academia becomes a monoculture, however, with conservative voices excluded or suppressed, there is no longer a battle of ideas at the centre, but rather a climate which empowers “the most extreme and exciting positions of the left”, in Ellis’s words, a group who come to exemplify the shared outlook of the campus. The result has been ever-more strident campus radicalism, culminating in disasters like the Evergreen State and Middlebury affrays, shoutdowns and no-platformings. Professors who fail to conform to campus orthodoxy face open letters, chanting students and Twitter mobs trying to end their livelihoods.

Meanwhile, says Ellis, the university is failing its students. A succession of studies show that graduateliteracy levels and general skills have slipped compared to past generations. In one study, 45% of students showed no skills development over their entire university course. Meanwhile, implicit racial quotas at leading universities have resulted in minority students with weaker results being improperly allocated to universities that don’t match their aptitude, producing high dropout rates or transfers to less rigorous courses — with their relative lack of success in prestige fields then blamed on a racist curriculum rather than a flawed admissions process.

Universities have stonewalled attempts to obtain data on graduation rates for preferentially-admitted students, Ellis writes, because “they don’t want anyone to know the damaging results of these policies…the harm they do to black students”.

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The mushrooming of equity and diversity bureaucracies in recent decades has both increased the chilling effect on conservative and centrist scholars and replaced an ethos of excellence with one of “diversity”. Diversity training using Theory-inspired materials is now mandatory across most American universities, and some University of California departments are requiring job applicants to complete “diversity statements” outlining how they are advancing orthodoxy. Administrators, not scholars, weed the pile of applications, which is only then sent on to academic departments.

Ellis believes that universities have passed the point of no return and cannot be saved from within. The only hope is for outside intervention, from donors, trustees or the Government. However, time is short, for Social Justice is now taking root outside the campus, from K-12 schools to corporations. As new generations are raised to prioritise sensitivity to minorities (as interpreted by Theory) over truth, the common sense of the off-campus majority may no longer exist in sufficient strength to resist dogma.

Pluckrose and Lindsay, inhabiting the more intellectually plural world of commentary and journalism, believe good ideas will win out over bad. Ellis, who has seen the face of repression first-hand within the American university system, is, in my view, more realistic.

Conservatives and traditional liberals naively expected the political correctness and speech codes of the 1990s to fade away. They wasted their energy on economics and foreign policy, neglected the culture and are now in danger of losing it altogether. Only an active mobilisation, involving the intervention of elected governments, can hope to reverse Theory’s capture of elite institutions, the current slide toward collective unreason and the emergence of a truly Orwellian public culture.