5-minute read

Dermot Feenan

LLB MA LLM Barrister-at-Law FRSA 

I recently read Professor Nicole Mansfield Wright’s book Defending Privilege: Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel. I found it valuable and took to Twitter to share my appreciation. I noted that at a time when the humanities face increasing threats from the political right, the book is a reminder, amongst other things, of the value of the humanities and associated transdisciplinary work.

Professor Wright very kindly replied, stating, in part: ‘Far right attacks on the humanities are now compounded by the threat of COVID-induced higher ed budget cuts. We have to make the case for the value of the humanities.’

I noted that Professor Wright used ‘far right’, whereas I’d chosen the term ‘the political right’. Perhaps we calibrated to different senses of the ‘right’? This difference in usage prompted me to think more about the concepts ‘the right’ and ‘far right’; not least to assist in identifying the sources and forms of the threat.

Writing from the UK, I am conscious that points on the left—right spectrum register differently here than in the US; for example, with ‘liberal’ tending to be used pejoratively in the US towards anyone on the left, whereas in much of Europe it still refers to political Liberalism.

Perhaps I’m also challenged as much by the relativity of the terms ‘left’/ ‘right’ as by their insufficiency. To the right of ‘the centre’ there appears to be the conventional categories of ‘centre right’ and ‘far right’, with more recent addition of ‘alt-right’.

The categories are not simply theoretical, though. They make sense materially. They enable political and juridical action. Failure to identify a threat may be inept. In a recent op ed in The Guardian, the ‘Secret Barrister’ seeks to explain ‘why judges are under attack’.

The Secret Barrister makes no mention of the right, yet this is the source of the threat. Instead, the insistence by the Secret Barrister solely on the rule of law, democracy etc. as if a panacea is inadequate, ignoring the ability of authoritarian regimes to claim legal legitimacy, as critical study of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s work shows.

There has been a clear shift to the right generally in the UK, with resurgence of the far right. There has been a slide by some along that spectrum, so that positions which were formerly centre right are now closer to the far right if not within the far right.

Moreover, the concept of far right has changed over time. It once referred to fascism & Nazism. It’s unwise to look to book burnings by those in uniforms, raising their arms in display of commitment to party, to identify the far right’s threat to the humanities. The sources and forms of threat change.

So, what characterises the far right? Features include:

• Extreme nationalism
• Nativist ideologies
• Authoritarian tendencies.

Some aspects of these features and some additional features of the far right, such as ultra-conservatism, insistence on binary genders, and deeply embedded ideas of racial superiority are increasingly evident in what was hitherto known simply as ‘the right’.

Thirty years ago in the UK, when I started working in academia, it would have seemed odd to talk of ‘the right’ threatening the humanities. Now, the threat comes increasingly from those who fly under the colours of the centre right and some who claim to be ‘conservative’.

This shift rightwards is seen in Turning Point UK’s targeting of academics who legitimately hold Left political views and by using McCarthyist tactics to try to instil fear by claiming that campuses are ‘overrun’ with leftists. Some Conservative MPs support Turning Point.

This shift is evident when The Spectator editor, Douglas Murray, writes recently in The Daily Telegraph: ‘for many people university is an indoctrination camp’ where students are ‘factory-farmed to have the same boring and malevolent views’. He illustrates this with references to ‘gender [as] social construct’ and decolonisation of the curriculum. Yet, these are important, valid subjects developed largely through the humanities.

These attacks are linked to increasing claims that universities and academics generally are stifling free speech (through no-platforming, ‘cancel culture’ etc.). The attacks have taken such hold that the government’s Covid-19-related funding is linked to assurances on free speech.

These are clear threats to the humanities from the political right (though the threat is not limited only to the humanities or just at universities). Nor are they unique to the UK. They are present in, for example, Australia, Brazil, Hungary, and Poland. And, while it’s been years since I worked in the academy in the US, from afar such threats also seem to be significant there.

This slide to the right is important for law. Groups once seen as lawful are now framed as terrorist; evident in the inclusion in the UK Counter Terrorism Policing guide of the anti-fascist slogan ‘No Pasaran!’ – used by ‘Hope Not Hate’, a charity committed peaceably to anti-racism.

Reference to ‘the political right’ might be seen to be over-inclusive. I continue to hold that ‘increasing threats’ come from ‘the political right’. There are some on the right who have not targeted the humanities, but that’s an issue of degree not one of category error.

There is a risk in dualism (here, of ‘left’ and right’) of being confronted with a necessarily limited dichotomous choice. Subsets of right-wing political ideology such as neoliberalism, neoconservatism or fascism may be more precise for description and analysis in some situations. Indeed, I have elsewhere raised concerns about the place and effects of neoliberalism on universities. However, the broad concern with increasing attacks to the humanities from ‘the right’ still seems valid.

These comments aren’t intended as a dispute with Professor Wright. We may locate ‘the right’ differently or simply have distinct, valid concerns. Rather, the comments attempt to develop thinking on threats to the humanities. The threat from the right is real and it is growing. It will affect the willingness of some academics and students to explore certain areas. It will likely lead to further cuts in subjects long regarded as key to the university: including philosophy, literature, and languages.

The university suffers when the humanities suffer; whether in transdisciplinarity – as touched on in my edited collection on Socio-legal Studies and the Humanities – or in more modest comparative disciplinary explorations, say between art and medicine to help explore ideas of perspective and suffering.

These may seem somewhat abstracts concerns, so I return to the value of Professor Wright’s book. As I read it with reference to my research on slavery and the legal profession, I found especially interesting the examination of the relationship between the novel, law, social class interests, and political ideology. The book was a helpful corrective to the tendency to read eighteenth-century and Romantic-era novels as seeking to induce empathy towards only the lowly and marginalised.

“So what?”, some might say. “It’s history, about old books most people don’t read anymore”. What Wright shows is that novels of the period were also used to cultivate empathy to support the privileged. Now, that’s a technique that helps us re-think those novels, how the ideas that informed the novels should be understood, how those ideas helped shape society then, and how that legacy persists to the present day.

The book helped my research on the law in colonial Britain on slavery also by encouraging more critical reading of judgments on slavery in the late-18th and early-19th centuries (building on other critical readings by, for example, Adam Gearey and others in The Politics of the Common Law, chapter 4).

Furthermore, the book provides lessons for understanding current push back against so-called ‘cancel culture’. Much of this push back comes from the political right. It potentially threatens valuable work such as that by Professor Wright. So, I’m returned to the necessity to define terms clearly, to help identify the source of the threat and its forms, to be better able to resist and flourish.

@DermotFeenan2020