Recently, I attended a meeting in my department with Nottingham Citizens, an umbrella organisation aiming to bring together local community and voluntary sector (‘Third Sector’) groups in order to pool their social capital and exert a greater influence on private sector enterprises and the state. During the meeting concerns were raised about similar groups elsewhere, which given the experiences of those individuals is to be expected. However, a theme began to emerge where academics, who are used to approaching such endeavours through an analytical gaze, began to question the role we might take in promoting social and political activism. Their preference was for some distance to be maintained between our department and the network of social organisations that has begun to form in Nottingham. Whilst this allows us to claim we are maintaining the independence of our research, it also serves to protect the reputations of the academics in the department, a concern with which I have some sympathy – it is often the primary currency with which we trade ourselves as individual academics, making it vital to our future career development.

However, I also have some experiences from working in the Probation Service of becoming paralysed by the ‘day job’, at the expense of innovations in how it might be done differently. During my career, particularly as a manager, I found that attempts to engage with external organisations were often met with concerns about wasted time and resources. In particular, there were concerns that if partnerships were developed with community and voluntary organisations (CVOs), they might quickly disappear due to the financial instability of such groups (there was little or no money available from Probation to support such fledgling developments, placing even more risk on the CVOs). In the rare instances that work was undertaken, it was often driven by the commitment of individuals and then later built upon once external funding could be identified. Whilst I understand the need to maintain a focus on the main business at hand, particularly in a specialist agency like Probation, this process does not inspire staff to find new ways of working.

Much has already been written about AC Grayling’s plans to help the nationwide attack on universities humanities departments by creating an £18,000 a year college that will plagarise University of London International Curricula, leech on its resources and gain its reputation from a series of guest lectures by a team of celebrity intellectuals including Richard Dawkins and Niall Ferguson.

Grayling does an excellent job of portraying himself as smug, snobbish and unprincipled in an interview which sees him comparing himself to Shakespeare and dumbfounded at the idea that some parents are unable to raise fees which would have to be paid upfront since the students at the NCH are ineligible for student finance

Which leads me only to pick up on this piece of anti-religious self-indulgence;

Which leads me only to pick up on this piece of anti-religious self-indulgence;

«We move on to God, the belief in whom he equates to a belief in fairies, which strikes me as weirdly childish. It leads him to offer the observation that “people who do not unthinkingly adopt the religion of their culture, which 99 per cent of people do, are under a special duty to think harder about ethical questions”. I wonder if, as part of that one per cent of the elect, it was his philosophy that animated him into action. This seems to please him.»

This is amongst the laziest and most undirected criticisms I have ever read. While the Church still plays an important role within the establishment, I would refute Grayling’s statement that Christianity is still the «religion of our culture» in any meaningful sense. The average Briton sees neither an emotional or historical connection between Christ and Christmas, nor do they posses even the basic theological schema that allows for meaningful conversation about concepts of forgiveness, or salvation, or transcendence, nor can they grasp any of the religious symbolism without which most of their cultural and artistic is rendered meaningless.

If there is any religion that has been adopted by our culture, it is a (usually less eloquently expressed) version of Grayling’s scientific-positivist, classical liberal, feel-good, functionally atheist secular humanism. It is omnipresent, it is widely regarded as the only civilised philosophy for westerners, educated or otherwise, and people of faith living in Britain have no option to reject it «unthinkingly».

Grayling’s academic interests are in logic and metaphysics, he is also the author of a number of volumes of urbane and readable reflections which although placed in the philosophy department in Waterstones bear no real resemblance to ethics as taught in universities. Some of his better pieces hold echoes of Russell and Mill, and like them he is convicted of the essential truth of the Golden Rule as the fundamental moral principle and so does not refute Christianity’s ethical insights but seeks to rationalise them by detaching them from what he sees as unnecessary and harmful superstitious baggage. There are many academics and philosophers who would passionately disagree that to love God is no impediment to loving others, and since this has been a perennial topic of discussion within Western philosophy since it’s inception, I think it’s a great shame for Grayling to impoverish his students education by expressly refusing to discuss faith as anything more than a self-delusion equivalent to believing in fairies.