The Higher Education Statistics Agency has just released details of undergraduate numbers for 2009 to 2010. These are important, because they give some indication of how different subjects will fare as tuition fees increase next year. According to The Guardian's dissection of the data, the headline news is a big increase in numbers of students applying for maths, business and engineering degrees compared to five years previously:

Mathematical sciences recorded the biggest percentage increase on the previous year as 26,225 students opted for the subject in 2009/10 - a 26.3% increase on 2005/06.

Business & administrative studies, mass communication & documentation, and engineering & technology saw the biggest rises after mathematical sciences for full-time undergraduate students.

This seems to bode well for the government's (misguided) hope that a market in tuition fees will lead students to become more discerning consumers, so that they choose courses which offer them the best chance of a payback in their eventual career. Business and engineering seem to offer higher potential salaries.

Naturally, I am most interested in the possible implications for English Studies, so I went to the HESA website and grabbed the subject data for undergraduate applications. Unfortunately, previous years of data simply give the total numbers of students studying any one subject at a given time - thus it includes second and third years, rather than showing us how many first years alone applied (which is a better indicator of how new student choices are panning out). The table below shows the total number of undergraduate students (both full time and part time) opting to study English over the last five years. It also indicates the number of English students as a percentage of the total population of undergraduate students doing all subjects.

Period	Total Undergraduates	Total English Undergraduates	Percentage Studying English
2005-2006	1790745	51635	2.883%
2006-2007	1803425	53195	2.950%
2007-2008	1804970	55990	3.102%
2008-2009	1859235	54025	2.906%
2009-2010	1914710	56185	2.934%

The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that English has been a steady subject choice for the last five years. It has not significantly gained students, but neither have significant numbers of students been put off from choosing English, despite the (false) perception that English does not offer a direct route to a specific career in the way engineering might.

However, against the backdrop of increasing overall student numbers, this stasis does not look especially promising. From 2008-2009 to 2009-2010, the total number of undergraduates increased by 3%. In that period, the number of undergraduates studying languages also increased by 3%, whilst the number of undergraduates studying English increased by 4%. Thus English looks to be doing slightly better than most of the comparable language subjects. However, it is clearly doing significantly worse than subjects like maths (9% increase) and sister subjects like communications (7% increase).

Over the previous five years of stable tuition fees, with each subject charging the same flat rate, English has just about held its own. However, we might expect it to be less robust with subsequent cohorts of students. In the immediate term, most students will be paying up to £9000 tuition fees. However, in the future, students may be able to pay reduced fees for taxpayer subsidised subjects that are perceived to be more economically necessary (such as engineering or medicine). They may not want to pay a high fee for a general subject such as English that does not, on the face of it, seem to be a pathway to an obvious career, and they may prefer to spend their money on a more applied qualification such as communication studies (which incorporates journalism, advertising and so on).

Labels: English Literature, HESA, subject choices, tuition fees

It is strange how one sometimes starts to read a novel that was published centuries ago, only to discover the fictional events resonating with immediate events in one's own time, so that each seems mutually to inform upon the other. There is, of course, nothing mysterious about why we might reinterpret a historical novel in the light of present experiences. Even so, when a historical novel seems to speak to our present - as if it somehow anticipated it - this can be unsettling and exciting. As Alan Bennett imagines it in The History Boys, it is as if the hand of someone long dead has reached out, and taken your own.

Such a grip from past to present has been holding me as I have been reading Voltaire's eighteenth-century Candide in the same week as the tenth anniversary of September 11th. The connections I outline below are by no means firm or convincing. Nevertheless, I've been unable to avoid feeling them as I have been reading.

Which is worse, the plague or the earthquake?
Voltaire wrote Candide, or Optimism (1759) at a time of religious and political persecution, during the pan-European Seven Years War. Among other things, Candide offers a critique of the philosophy of Leibniz, which claims that we inhabit the "best of all possible worlds." According to this principle, which Leibniz labelled as optimism, the world has been designed by God, such that any event - no matter how bad it seems to human eyes - must play a positive role in his ultimately benign master-plan. Although the meaning of the word "optimism" has been over-generalised since Leibniz coined it in the eighteenth century, his original principle is today best known through the figure of Dr Pangloss who features in the novel. No matter what befalls him, Pangloss believes that everything must happen for the best.

Dr Pangloss is tutor to Voltaire's hero, Candide, but his disciple finds his belief severely tested, as he lurches from one disaster to another. Candide is evicted from his noble household (and separated from his love, Cunégonde), is enlisted into the army, fights battles, suffers injury, and in his long escape and effort to be reunited with Cunégonde, witnesses injustice, torture, rape, avarice, hypocrisy. Time and again, though, as Candide encounters disaster and begins to think himself unfortunate, he suddenly meets someone whose story seems to be so much worse. Mid-way through the novel, having survived an earthquake and the Inquisition, he is briefly reunited with Cunégonde, who it appears has been serially raped and disembowelled. Lest this surfeit of violence not be enough, an old woman, who has helped Candide and Cunégonde escape, then complains that their horrors are nothing compared to her own. She was, she says, the long-suffering daughter of a Pope, who was captured by pirates on the night of her wedding: from this point on, she "had been exposed to poverty and slavery, had been raped almost daily, had seen her mother torn to pieces, had endured war and famine, and was now dying of the plague in Algiers."

The old woman turns to Cunégonde, who has survived an earthquake, and asks if she has ever suffered the plague. Cunégonde replies that she has not, at which the woman says that "you would have to admit that it is far worse than any earthquake." The old woman's challenge seems to be that which the reader is asked to answer in relation to the novel as a whole: whose character has suffered the most? which is the greatest misadventure? what is the worst form of suffering in this allegedly best of all possible worlds?

The reader might use his detached perspective to try to answer such questions, but as we are dragged along with Candide's adventures, we quickly realise that making such absolute judgements is ridiculous. We are continually invited to judge whose experiences do most to discredit Pangloss's naive optimism. However, just as we think we have reached a conclusion, another thing occurs which changes our frames of reference. We thereby recognise the fallacy of making cool and objective assessments of good and bad, and of trying to weigh individual suffering against the unwitting part it may play in God's plan. Leibniz's interpretation of suffering through the lens of philosophical abstraction does not do justice to how humans perceive their own suffering in the here and now. Just as Candide does not present believable, realistic characters but tortured caricatures, so Leibniz treats humans as divine devices, not individual agents with immediate thoughts and feelings.

Selfish though it may be, in the realm of actual human experience, we can only provide one answer to the old woman's implied question: that which is worse is that which happens one's own self. Whilst I may try to sympathise with the suffering of another, I will ultimately judge my own case as being the worst, because it is happening to me. Much though we admire Candide's perpetual, good-humoured optimism, we see that his Panglossianism fails to do justice to the complexity and horror of his own suffering with which we sympathise. It is only at the close of the novel, when he is reunited with his old tutor, that Candide appeals for the right to selfishly indulge in his own suffering, not to have to perceive it in relation to some bigger scheme that God has ordained. As the characters have finally achieved a comfortable life on a farm (though in a malicious touch, Voltaire has Cunégode become hideously ugly), Pangloss, in his schoolmasterly way, asks Candide if he is now satisfied with the idea of optimism. After all, Pangloss points out, if it had not been for all the previous disasters, he would not be here today. "All events form a chain in this," he says, "the best of all possible worlds." In the novel's famous concluding line, Candide retorts, "That is well said, but we must cultivate our garden." Faced with a complex, bewildering world of violence and terror, all the individual can do is look after number one, and not think about how they fit into a bigger chain of existence.

What, then, can this sort of vision, this tension between the unique sufferings of the self and the surplus sufferings of the world, possibly have to do with the wake of September 11th, and the ongoing War on Terror?

Making any connections between a novel and life runs the risk of equating actual historical suffering with its merely fictional cousin. However, September 11th and the subsequent War on Terror have been visualised and narrated with much the same tempo and tone as the crazy events of Candide. The last ten years have delivered a constellation of multimedia images that have flashed before the eyes too quickly to interpret: airliners above New York and F16s in Iraq; carbombs in Kabul and phone bombs in Madrid; twisted trains in Delhi and torn buses in London; police raids in Birmingham and grief in Wootten Bassett. The acceleration of the violence has been as relentless, and consequently baffling, as that of the novel, which in 100 pages crams in a bewildering array of horrifying events, some natural but most man-made.

It would clearly be unjust to say that the post-September 11th world has the comic quality to it which Voltaire's novel ultimately has, with its excess of violence. Nevertheless, there has been a similar sense of the levelling of disaster in both the comedy of the novel and the history of the real world. In Voltaire, everyone from princes to paupers seems to suffer in ingenious ways that make it hard to evaluate who has suffered more than whom. We barely have time to register one character's fate, before we move on to that of another. The novel has a breathless farce about it. The events of the last ten years seem likewise to be paced not according to the amenable plod of Whiggish history, but by the stream of consciousness of a novel (or movie). Just as in Voltaire, we have not been accorded time or stable frames or reference to evaluate which events have been worse, where the most suffering has been caused. There have been too many, too disparate acts and types of violence. Making fine-tuned evaluations has been a perpetual challenge. There have been uncountable judicial and moral issues to consider in the unsettling first decade of the twenty-first century, which have thrown up questions equivalent to those of the old woman of Voltaire's novel: Which is worse, the plague or the earthquake? Which is worse, September 11th or the War in Iraq? Which is worse, waterboarding a terrorist suspect or being unable to extract information that could save hundreds of civilian lives?

One answer would be that none of these comparative questions matter, so long as these bad events ultimately lead to a better world. In a version of Panglossianism, Neo-Conservatives argue that September 11th was some kind of bifurcation point in history. Democracy was threatened with an existentialist challenge that needed to be confronted. For Leibniz bad things have to happen in order to fulfil some ultimately good plan. For the likes of the authors of the Project for the New American Century, September 11th could be presented in a theological light as a providential opportunity: this was a moment that confronted liberalism with its failures, and that legitimised instead the use of force to assert values, such as democracy, that are allegedly universal and benign.

In the effort to achieve the best of all possible worlds, the world where every country is a democracy, Neo-Conservatives maintained a philosophical abstraction in their view of the War on Terror that circumnavigated individual suffering. They held fast to the conviction that a few would have to suffer in order to prove a democratic ideal. Their language itself embodied this view, the phrases "collateral damage" or "enhanced interrogation techniques" being chilling euphemisms designed to justify civilian casualties or torture. Had he been alive today, Voltaire would no doubt have provided an acerbic satire on words such as these, and their Liebnizian spirit: they try to neutralise the suffering of the individual, in order to situate it as part of a wider and more positive narrative about the advance of democracy.

With this, I seem to be making a classically liberal, relativist argument that opposes conservative absolutism. However, Voltaire's novel is useful because it reminds liberals (yes, including myself) of why the conservative view exists. The Panglossian narrative of the War on Terror - indeed, that very universalising term itself - offers a neat answer to a complex, globalised world where terror takes many different forms and has many different causes. It is tempting to encapsulate all the individual experiences of terror under one umbrella heading, as part of one grand confrontation between ideals that should ultimately conclude with the universal triumph of democracy. Candide acknowledges that this approach to suffering, and this sort of optimism, does at least encourage the self to look forwards, beyond their immediate moment, to imagine a better life beyond. Readers much cherish Candide for his perpetual, cheery hopefulness, which is only enabled by his faith in his Pangloss's view. Indeed, for all that Candide at the end of the novel rejects Pangloss's take on their adventures, the novel's plot does in fact lead the characters to a positive conclusion which seems to validate Pangloss. All events, it turns out, did form a chain in this novel, and the characters' happy life on the farm at the end is financed by the money Candide has gathered through the course of his epic, but tortuous, adventures.


However, when such plotting and chaining is done by a novelist in such a neat way that it seems unrealistic and caricatured, this makes a strong argument for saying that the world cannot be seen this way in actuality. Taken as a whole, Candide seems to warn that for all it may be tempting to gloss the sufferings of the individual in favour of the optimism of an ultimately better world, this is not a sustainable way to live an unpredictable existence.

Voltaire confronts us with violence and suffering taken to an extreme, ridiculous universality. Everyone seems to be suffering in some way in Candide, and in this world it is impossible to judge fairly who is suffering most, or whether there is any explanation for each person's fate. The messy milieu of the War on Terror - the threats to justice and human life, the high-tech warfare and guerilla terrorism - has seemed so chaotic that violence and suffering has become a universal force in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Yet Voltaire reminds us that, when confronted with a surfeit of violence, we can only feasibly think about how this bad world looks for the individual, not try to explain suffering  in terms of a naive, bigger picture (democracy versus terrorism, for example). The old woman's question is absurd and unanswerable. Sticking to large Panglossian ideals leads us to ask the wrong sorts of questions, and to search for answers in abstractions and universals. The only sort of question it is reasonably possible to answer, though, is the more selfish one: how am I suffering, in the here and now?

Thinking like this demands empathy, of the sort we extend to Candide, as we perceive he does not do justice to the horror of his own plight. We need to think about how the world looks from the point of view of the terror suspect detained without trial. Of how it looks from the point of view of the civilian who has lost a loved one in an airstrike. Of a British soldier fighting in the heat of Basra. Of an impoverished Afghan farmer. Of the family of a dead firefighter in New York. All these people are suffering in their own way. The best those of us who are spectators of the War on Terror can do is to adopt a position like that which readers of Candide are required to take. We must acknowledge and understand the legitimacy of each person's claims to suffering, and not try to compare one against the other. Controversial though it may be, the terror suspect who has subsequently been released without charge has suffered, and we have to accept that their suffering may be, for them, worse than that of the victims or families of September 11th.

We must, in other words, sympathise with selfishness. We should not try to ask absolute questions about suffering, such as posed by the old woman, and should not seek to provide ultimate answers, of the sort provided by Leibniz. To conclude that the wrongly-accused terror suspect paid a "price worth paying" as a means to a democratic end is to behave as Pangloss does at the climax of Candide. Unlike the characters in Voltaire's novel, people in the lived moment do not perceive themselves as links in a chain of events towards a definite, optimistic end. To believe that they do can lead one to treat real people like characters in a novelistic plot, to move them at will in order to realise one's master plan. This, ultimately, is what likens the Neo-Conservative view to that of naive Pangloss, the view that we can - if only a few are willing to suffer airstrikes or torture, plagues and earthquakes - realise the best of all possible worlds.

Labels: Candide, English Literature, September 11th, terrorism, Voltaire

I was at that time living in rural Shropshire, above the village shop that my dad runs. I was staring out of the window onto the street outside, marking the slow tempo of community life. Probably, I had just seen Mr Pollard hop on the 2.00 bus to the next village, having done his daily shop. Probably, silver-haired Mrs Morris and Mrs Jones had tottered past, clutching their afternoon shopping, humbugs no doubt secreted in the corner of their mouths as they chattered. Likely, towards the end of the university holidays, I was supposed to be working, but on this lazy day of late summer I had the radio on, tuned to Simon Mayo's programme on Five Live.

Probably it was only out of the corner of my ear, as my eye drifted over life wandering past outside, that I caught the breaking news that a plane had hit the World Trade Centre. In my ignorance, I did not realise then that the World Trade Centre was a skyscraper, though I did register that it was in central New York. I ran downstairs, to where my dad was working in the shop, and turned the radio on. "Listen to this," I said, as he was busy with a customer, "a plane has crashed in New York." The radio suddenly announced that a second plane had now hit the other tower. The delay between the two reports was so short, separated only by the time it had taken me to run down the stairs, that it seemed like the two events must have been causally linked. They must have occurred simultaneously, and the news had simply been slow to register. "A mid-air collision," was my initial thought. "Something has gone badly wrong in air traffic control." I visualised two planes, shortly after takeoff from JFK, somehow on the same trajectory, somehow just clipping wings and somehow, bizarrely, conspiring each to hit a different tower.

I called again to dad to listen to the radio, and then went to the next room to turn on the television. Because of the way in which a whole gallery of images has since become so familiar, I can't remember exactly what the first clip I saw was. I imagine by that stage it must have been of both towers on fire. Only later did the footage of the second plane hitting the tower, which had actually struck fifteen minutes after the first, come through. In my confusion, then, even when I saw those early images, I was still imagining this to be an accident. Then they flashed news of a third plane hitting the Pentagon.

Suddenly, the events seemed not to be a mere accident. The very word "Pentagon" brought to mind a hundred action films and conspiracy theories, and so my frame of reference for the events shifted into the surreal. Afterwards, people would agree that it was "like watching a movie." The moment the Pentagon was hit, I thought of the film Independence Day, and the way in which the alien invasion is relayed in a realistic fashion through news reports, as American institutions like the White House and the Pentagon explode. (Strangely, some years later, I would write an academic article on the way in which it was impossible to see Independence Day, with its narrative of the assault on American cities and democracy, in the same way after September 11th.) I watched, then, as if these real events had the pace and urgency of a cinematic thriller. Shamefully - but I suspect not uniquely - my interest was not at this stage in the human casualties. If this was a film, then they surely were mere extras, anonymous fodder for dramatic explosions and apocalypse. Rather, my attention was for what would happen next. What had the director - whoever he or she was in this revelatory masterpiece - planned to keep us on the edge of our seats? How would the web of explanation begin to untangle itself?

I cannot remember in what order events did subsequently unfold, but I know that each newsflash seemed to occur with the cliché of a Hollywood thriller. Another flight had crashed in a field. F16s were being scrambled. The President was in Air Force One. Canary Wharf in London had been evacuated. The Prime Minister was due to issue an emergency statement. At some point in all this, I sent texts to my friends: "Turn the television on. I think we may be witnessing World War Three." I did not then know, of course, that the subsequent years would indeed become defined, rightly or wrongly, as an epoch: the War on Terror, the twenty-first century equivalent of the First and Second World Wars. A friend texted back: "Stop pissing around." Then he texted again: "Holy shit."

It was only when pictures came in of small, black specks dropping down the side of the towers that the human aspect of things began to register again. With an empathy that cut through the epic vista of the events, I recognised that each of those dots plummeting was an individual person who had to confront a horrible choice. The last few hours had been executed at a dehumanising, global scale. But this was not, after all, an apocalyptic film. Each of those dots was not a pixel but a unique person, with frail flesh and a terrified mind. This would be painfully recollected in subsequent days, as radio and TV played the last voicemails left to relatives. As Ian McEwan put it in a remarkable essay shortly after the event, all of them said some version of "those three words that all the terrible art, the worst pop songs and movies, the most seductive lies, can somehow never cheapen. I love you." Such words uttered in a film or pop song are clichéd. In the context of actual life, they are an inarticulate but necessary truth. It was precisely because these words and actions seemed like movie clichés but were not that they testified eloquently to the individual lives within the scale of the spectacle.

Then, live on air, entirely unexpectedly, the first of the towers collapsed. A billowing dust cloud charged towards the camera. Firefighters and medics, civilians and reporters, turned and ran, hands clasped to their mouths. It was these images, the view of those on the ground rather than the thrilling but dehumanising vistas shot from the news helicopters, that would come to define the event most poignantly and powerfully.

The second tower fell shortly after. Their terminal collapse seemed to punctuate the end of the immediate events of September 11th, even though it ultimately began a new sentence of wars in foreign deserts. For now, the news began to repeat itself, and then to drift into dissatisfyingly speculative analysis. I headed out in the car, to do dad's paper round. Radio 1 was playing sombre music by Elbow and Norah Jones. Chris Moyles, usually edgy and energetic, was restrained. He spoke little, only to introduce each song.

I returned home. Dad had long since turned the radio off. He was still under the impression that it had been an accident. I told him to let me close up shop, whilst he went and watched the television. By now, the reports had been neatly packaged into segments which put the whole thing into some kind of narrative and geographical order. The reporters talked of how events had "unfolded." But that word did not seem to capture the anarchic nature of the last three hours; even though the events had been plotted in one sense, from some cave in the Tora Bora mountains, and even though they had seemed to unravel like a scripted movie, they had also been inexplicable, and without a neat conclusion.

Life in the village would go on much as before. Mr Pollard would continue to catch the bus, which would still arrive punctually at 2.00. Mrs Morris and Mrs Jones would still chew on their sweets. Although the gossip around the school gates would be different for a while, it would soon return to grumbles about the price of petrol. This corner of Shropshire would not really be touched by September 11th, except through the passing airwaves of TV and radio. Beyond, though, in mountainous regions of the Middle East, in prison camps erected to protect democracy, in Asian communities in Bradford and on buses and tube trains in London, things would continue to be as messy, anarchic and unpredictable as those three hours that interrupted a mundane summer day.

Labels: 9/11, Miscellaneous, September 11th