I have looked through Angell's on-line papers listed at http://www.csrc.lse.ac.uk/Academic_Papers/List_of_Papers.htm and I see no reason to conclude that his speech to AMEC is a satire intended to derail the implementation of the Brave New World descibed in that speech. The speech certainly contains elements of satire and black humour and wide-ranging allusions to Nietzsche, Shaw, etc. The fact that Angell whimsically chooses to represent himself as the personal adviser to the fictional James Bond character Ernst Stavro Blofeld in no way proves that he is satirizing the amorality embodied in Blofeld. He can equally well be satirizing the timidity of his audience who want to have the power and wealth of Blofeld while still thinking of themselves as nice guys with a clean conscience. The half dozen papers expound the same ideas as the AMEC speech, but the use of irony is either absent or very muted. On reading them my conclusion is that Angell really does, as a matter of conscious choice, espouse the Nietzschean view of morality as he asserts. Unquestionably like the rest of us he is complex enough to have some feelings at odds with his creed, perhaps some niggling doubts, but this does not mean he is insincere about his stated position or covertly trying to undermine it. Pointing to the fact that Angell is articulate, well-read and formidably intelligent does not constitute proof that he is at odds with his overt position. Undoubtedly the same qualities could be attributed to Nietzsche, but so far as I know, no one has ever suggested that Nietzsche was satirizing the views he expounded. Certainly that was not the conclusion of the Nazis who hailed Nietzsche as their intellectual progenitor. We always want to believe that the truly gifted and intelligent are on the side of the angels (which we take to be our own side), but it is not necessarily so. We should remember the caveat uttered by literary critic George Steiner over three decades ago: "We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct? Moreover, it is not only the case that the established media of civilization--the universities, the arts, the book world--failed to offer adequate resistance to political bestiality; they often rose to welcome it and to give it ceremony and apologia." (Preface, Language and Silence, 1967) I do not think it would be wise to hail Professor Ian O. Angell as an ally of progressive forces. Nevertheless, I do think that he is remarkably clear-sighted up to a point. I believe that his Brave New World is a highly probable future, perhaps the most probable future, if we are unable to check the dominant trends of our time. I say "clear-sighted up to a point" because I believe that the Brave New World is flawed with inherent contradictions that would soon cause it to self-destruct--if it does not first cause the extinction of humanity (both winners and losers) through environmental disaster. Victor Milne FIGHT THE BASTARDS! An anti-neoconservative website at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/pat-vic/ LONESOME ACRES RIDING STABLE at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/
