The solidly alliterative phrase "table talk" seems like it ought to originate in a novel or poem. In fact, surprisingly, it derives literally from the stomach.

According to Steven Shapin, the 15th century scholar Ficino wrote that "it is bad to strain the stomach with food and drink, and worst of all, with the stomach so strained, to think difficult thoughts," whilst an 18th author of a treatise on occupational diseases noted that "all the men of learning used to complain of a weakness in the stomach." From Thomas Carlyle, described as a "martyr" to dyspepsia, to Charles Darwin, who avoided public engagements because of his embarrassment about his belches and farts, there has been a strong association between intellectuals, and digestive suffering. Although modern medicine eventually downplayed this theoretical link between the hard-working mind and the ill-suffering gut, the sense of connection was enough to establish the etiquette of table talk, which was, Shapin explains "light, airy and undemanding stuff that didn't draw the vital spirits away from the stomach's proper work. It was a courtesy medicine paid to manners."

Perhaps this university lecturer, musing on the difficulties of organising an academic dinner party, ought to take note.

Labels: Science and Culture, table talk

I have just posted a review of Susan Greenfield's ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century. It is a strange and in some ways interesting book, not for the science it contains but for what it tells us about Greenfield herself. Her complaints about the impact of technology on society lead this leading neuroscientist to make a series of absurd hypotheses and unsubstantiated arguments. It amounts to a middle-aged grumble about the pace of social change, rather than a rigorous study of the neurological effects of technology.

The full review can be read here: ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century.

Labels: ID, Science and Culture, Susan Greenfield, Technology

Some part of me wants ironically to celebrate the recent comments of Conservative MP Philip Davies, in which he argued that disabled people should be allowed to work for less than the minimum wage. It reveals that for all the folksy charm exuded by the Conservative party leadership, the party remains rooted in free market ideology, with an accompanying disregard for social welfare.

In a Commons debate, Davies argued that:

Given some of those people with a learning disability clearly, by definition, cannot be as productive in their work as somebody who has not got a disability of that nature, then it was inevitable given the employer was going to have to pay them both the same they were going to take on the person who was going to be more productive, less of a risk...My view is that for some people, the national minimum wage may be more of a hindrance than a help.

This is a comment that on many levels rejects the best social policies implemented by the previous Labour government.

The Disability Discrimination Act compels employers to make reasonable allowances to the working environment so that employees with a disability are able to work at a comparable level to those without. Davies' assumption that the market should determine what it is willing to pay for labour - with anyone with a disability automatically less valuable than anyone without - is a hideous extension of Thatcherite liberalism. I notice that, unsurprisingly, Dominic Lawson, son of Thatcher's former chancellor, has now written an op-ed in The Independent in support of Davies.

Disabled people ought not to be seen as cheap or inferior labour. With a bit of thought and through the legislative encouragement of the state, employers can make adjustments to ensure that disabled people can offer equal labour-value to anyone else. Of course, there will always be a limit to the changes employers can make, and some jobs for which some disabled people will always be excluded. But the laissez-faire economic attitude that says we should not even worry about trying to place disabled people on an equal footing in the workplace is fundamentally immoral.

Then there is the issue of the minimum wage, something the Tories reviled when Labour introduced it in the 1990s. They fed us scare stories about how it would decimate employment. In fact, the minimum wage has had little impact on overall employment, other than to prevent the exploitation of low-skilled workers and to ensure that work pays sufficiently to allow people to live in economic security. The minimum wage is precisely that, a living minimum. Would Davies be happy to work for, say, £4.00 an hour, earning £100 a week? No disabled person should feel compelled to do this.

Finally, there is the assumption that people with a learning disability "clearly, by definition" cannot be as "productive" as those without. But learning disabilities come in various guises; they do not automatically entail a lack of productivity (as if such a person is a broken machine).

Can someone with Down's Syndrome really be incapable of working in a workplace where they have to face the public? Might someone with dyslexia not actually learn to transcend their disability (I know of two university English professors who have dyslexia)? Might someone with autism not actually be superior in jobs with require mathematical or logical thinking? History is littered with examples of people with "disabilities" who have turned these to their advantage, or for whom the disability is just a small part of a whole person who has excelled in their chosen field: the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, the artist Alison Lapper, the physicist Steven Hawking.

If Davies' vision is followed to its logical conclusion, the market should be allowed to freely discriminate among those people it has conventionally regarded as weaker, less capable, or more awkward workers: ethnic minorities, women, those with disabilities. Perhaps Davies would prefer it if women were allowed to work for less than the minimum wage - acknowledging the "disablements" caused by their childcare demands that have, traditionally, led employers to discriminate on gender grounds. Perhaps Davies feels that black people should be allowed to offer their services for a less - acknowledging that employers are doing them a favour by employing a group (allegedly) prone to crime and violence. I am sure, in fact, that even Davies and his Conservative ilk, much though they loathe the human rights act and discrimination legislation, would vouch for neither of these things.

Why then should employers be allowed to discriminate against someone with a weaker body or a differently constituted mind? It would certainly be a good thing to get more disabled people into work. But doing this should not require the individual to adapt to the exploitations of the market, but the market to change its notion of what constitutes a "productive" human being.

Labels: disability, minimum wage, Philip Davies, Politics

Terry Pratchett's controversial film on assisted suicide, which featured the death of a British man, Peter Smedley, at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, has only confirmed my belief that legalising such supported deaths would be a moral and humane thing to do.

As was invoked often in the film, the European Convention on Human Rights enshrines both the right to life, and the right to liberty and self-determination. Fundamental human rights do not act independently of each other, but intertwine, often in complex - sometimes conflicted - ways; witness the recent tension between those celebrities who claim a right to privacy, and those in the press who claim the right to free expression in publicising their affairs. In a similar way, campaigners against assisted suicide argue that legalising it would infringe upon the individual's right to life by encouraging people to take their own lives because the option of a "good death" is available, when they might ordinarily continue to want to live, perhaps in comfortable hospice care or supported by loving families. But surely the right to life also entails the right to a certain quality of life, something implied by the coexistence of other rights such as the right to liberty or freedom of thought. It is not enough simply to live, biologically; one also has the right to live a good life, emotionally. As part of this, the right to express oneself and act freely as an individual surely includes the right of the individual to choose when to die.

Looking at the rigorous manner in which assisted suicide is carried out in the Swiss system, it seems clear which is the worse scenario. With numerous legal checks and the opportunity for the individual to pull out of the process of assisted dying at every stage, the risk that legalising assisted dying would encourage suicide seems slim. This is something borne out by the Swiss case, where there was no evident increase in the suicide rate, whether conducted by the self or in clinics, after the legalisation of assisted dying. Indeed, one of the most telling statistics in the programme was that 70 percent of those who register in preparation for a death with Dignitas ultimately do not choose to pursue assisted suicide; it seems that the very existence of this option allows many people to go on living happily in the knowledge that, if it their feelings change, they may also end their own life in a guaranteed, humane way.

Currently, whilst the lack of legal assisted suicide in the UK is said mainly to protect the right to life, its absence seems more seriously to infringe upon the right to life which is powerfully intertwined with the right to liberty of conscience and action. Whilst the risks of legalising it upon the right to life seem slim and not substantiated by the Swiss case, the humanitarian inadequacies caused by not legalising it are evident. In Pratchett's programme, we witnessed two men paying £10 000 to travel to Switzerland in order to receive a gentle death of their own choosing. This expensive option is not available to those who are less wealthy, and a democracy surely has to embrace a democracy of dying, as well as of life choices, and allow anyone regardless of income or character, to have that opportunity available. If our National Health Service embodies the right to universal care, those same values of universality - regardless of social status - ought to be extended to the right to death as well. Indeed, it is precisely because we have a supportive, public health system in which individuals will be treated as long as possible, regardless of their predicted outcome or their ability to pay, that their decision to opt out of that healthcare support can be made freely. Their decision to die will be determined not by a guilty feeling that the state is unwilling to continue to treat them, but by their overwhelming wish to die despite knowing the healthcare opportunities that are available for them.

Again, I understand those campaigners who argue that the state should not imply that it would like actively to help the terminally sick or disabled to die, because this suggests to the disabled or sick person that they are an unvalued nuisance, that the state would prefer to kill those whose ongoing burden is too costly. Those who invoke Nazi genocide as the logical extension of state-sanctioned dying are clearly going too far, but I can appreciate the principle behind such views.

Nevertheless, again on balance it is preferable for the state to protect the individual's right to self determination. In Pratchett's programme last night, both the men who killed themselves did so against the wishes of their families. The pressure on the suffering self to live through that suffering in the hopes of a cure or continued happiness, is immense, deriving from deep-rooted - and admirable - cultural values of heroism against the odds. There is also a selfish aspect for families, a fear of seeing their loved ones go peacefully with themselves left behind to cope with the more difficult bereavement and loss. But these external pressures, which the two charismatic men in the programme happened to be able to resist, are again why the state needs to make available the possibility of assisted dying. The fact that families, quite naturally, may tend to pressure the individual not to die, ought to be balanced by alternatives which enshrine the right of the individual to stick to their own view against the wishes or opinions of the majority immediately around them. Such an alternative can only exist at a dispassionate, non-familial, state level.

The worst case I can imagine is where someone is no longer in a position to kill themselves, but the family refuses to assist them in their desire to die. The state regulates how families must behave after the death of someone who can quite literally no longer speak for themselves; families must respect the wishes, will, financial settlements of the dead person. But the state does not at present protect the right of an individual who is similarly voiceless and helpless in the immediate run up to their death. The moment one is dead, paradoxically one has more state-protected rights to exercise their free will than in the moment before.

This knowledge is what leads to the dissatisfying scenario we have at present, where individuals with degenerative neurological diseases - such as Pratchett's own Alzheimer's - are forced to enact their own deaths before they might ordinarily be ready, whilst they are still cognitively and physically capable of doing so. Fearing that there may be no family members or doctors willing and permitted to help them die after they become too ill to express their own desires, people take their own lives before it may be their ideal time. All deaths which end early, in car accidents or illness, in degenerative diseases or in suicide, offend our sense of the natural time to die. By legalising assisted dying, the state does have the opportunity to step in and prevent one type of premature death. Ensuring that people can choose when and how to die will help to ensure they will only go when the time is right for them.

People should be able to choose when and how they die, regardless of their ability to pay; they should be free to choose between ongoing, free healthcare leading to a natural death, or the immediate release of assisted suicide. In the twentieth century, the maturing humanitarianism of the British state developed universal welfare and healthcare; in the twenty-first century, it is time to recognise that the state is sophisticated and adult enough to facilitate a democracy of dying, as well as of life.

Labels: assisted suicide, Choosing to Die, euthanasia, Politics

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about A.C. Grayling's brainchild, the New College of the Humanities. On the face of it, its £18 000 a year fees smack of elitism; the left-wing academic Terry Eagleton has described it as "odious." However, by assembling a glittering array of Professors and teaching staff such as Richard Dawkins and David Cannadine, the College seems to be seeking to be an elite institution, equivalent to Oxford and Cambridge, or the Ivy League, where comparable bodies of internationally-renowned academics already exist. And as their US counterparts already do, Oxford and Cambridge would quite happily charge £18 000 a year for this privilege were the government to allow them.

Grayling's New College is, then, simply a dystopian vision of where the coalition's privatisation of Higher Education will lead us in five or ten years time, when the cap on fees will, no doubt, be lifted altogether for our top-level institutions. The fault lies in the principle of privatisation that has been instigated by the government, not the consequences which Grayling is now seeking to put into practice.

Let's not be naive about this. Of course, the headline Professors of the New College of Humanities will likely pop over for morning coffee only once a year, gracing the prospectus but rarely to be seen inside a tutorial room. But then that's not wholly different to how the US system currently works, with star, tenured academics giving a few headline lectures and adjunct, doctoral or postdoctoral staff doing the bulk of the teaching week to week. And it's not unlike what will presumably happen in the UK system, with part time, temporarily contracted teaching staff responding on an ad hoc basis to student - sorry, consumer - numbers. Again, Grayling's new model institution is a precursor of what is to come.

And, on this basis, a part of me can't quite help admiring the fact that in the post-Browne climate where the arts and humanities are generally deemed to be of no economic worth, Grayling is sticking two fingers up to the economists by asserting the value, both financial and humanistic, of a liberal arts education. Combining studies in the conventional humanities with required courses in Science Literacy, Logic and Critical Thinking, and Applied Ethics, the New College of the Humanities might - just might - demonstrate that the arts and humanities have a role to play as the applied sciences of human life.

The economics of class in Charles Dickens, the lessons of the history of the Crusades in the era of Islamic terrorism, metaphor and simile in scientific communication. Maybe, just maybe, and in an ironic and paradoxical way, the New College of the Humanities offers us a vision not only of the decline of the public university in the twenty-first century, but also of the reassertion of the liberal arts education that underpinned the first mass expansion of universities in the nineteenth century.

Labels: Browne review, New College of the Humanities, tuition fees, University Life