Sphinx

Today seems like a good day to talk about the culpability of Classicists in the ongoing horror clown saga that is the Brexit process. Partly, I think that it might be good for everyone in the UK, whichever way one voted (or didn’t), to admit to some degree of responsibility for the mess in which we now find ourselves, as a principled counter-example to the unedifying spectacle of those who do actually bear a considerable amount of responsibility merrily distancing themselves from the shambles and pretending that it’s nothing to do with them and if only people had listened to them we wouldn’t have all this trouble (I mean, how can anyone have the brass neck, or total lack of shame, to repudiate an agreement that they were involved in negotiating, less than twelve hours after they’d accepted a collective cabinet decision to endorse it?). Partly, with a bit of luck there’s so much else going on that no one will notice…

Yes, ‘culpability’ is a bit strong; let’s say instead ‘the manifest failure of a Classical education to cultivate the values of reason, analytical skill and moral integrity that its defenders regularly claim or imply’. There’s been a fair amount of discussion in recent years about how we can blame everything rotten in British politics on the dominance of Oxford PPE graduates; someone on the Twitter lamented that the reason things are in such a mess is the fact that none of the holders of the Great Offices of State studied History. Well, that ignores the number of Prominent Brexiters who did, and who seem so determined not to learn from the past that they’ll willingly blow everything up to ensure that it doesn’t repeat itself (“The lessons of Suez? Hah, we’ll show up Suez as trivial and basically rational! The Melian Dialogue? Let’s make both the Melians and the Athenians look sensible and moderate!”).

More importantly, two academics have now crunched the numbers properly for all MPs, not just a few prominent individuals, and revealed that PPE graduates were significantly more likely to support Remain – only 5% supported Leave. Historians aren’t too bad either – only 22% voted for Leave, which is close to the average for all members of the House of Commons with an undergraduate degree.

The overall breakdown among MPs was 25% Leave, 75% Remain; those without any degree were significantly more likely to vote Leave than the average, and those with degrees in a number of subjects – Economics, Medicine, Politics, Natural Sciences – were marginally more likely to do so. In just two disciplines were MPs dramatically more likely to favour Leave, with more than 50% voting against EU membership: Philosophy, where 4 out of 7 did, and Classics, where 6 out of 8 did (plus one who hasn’t disclosed how he voted).

• Geoffrey Cox, born 1960, Law and Classics, Cambridge, Conservative, Leave
• Michael Fallon, born 1952, Classics and Ancient History, St Andrews, Conservative, Remain
• Nick Hurd, born 1962, Classics, Oxford, Conservative, Remain
• Boris Johnson, born 1964, Classics, Oxford, Conservative, Leave
• Kwasi Kwarteng, born 1975, Classics and History, Cambridge, Conservative, Leave
• Charlotte Leslie, born 1978, Classics, Oxford, Conservative, Leave
• Nigel Mills, born 1974, Classics, Newcastle, Conservative, Leave
• Jesse Norman, born 1962, Classics, Oxford, Conservative, Not Disclosed
• Michael Tomlinson, born 1977, Classics, KCL, Conservative, Leave

It’s not that, as one person suggested on the Twitter, that all these Brexity classicists are of the vintage when one read Classics because it’s what you do between Eton and Westminster – half of them were born in the 1970s, well after that era. And it’s not about Oxbridge, or not in a simple manner – yes, the majority of classicist MPs studied there, but the two who didn’t split evenly, and the study notes:

Overall, however, MPs with an Oxbridge education were only slightly (and non-significantly) more likely to support Remain. When we controlled for MPs’ political party, however, the difference increased from 4 percentage points to 13 percentage points (and reached a high level of statistical significance). This is because Conservative MPs were both more likely to have an Oxbridge education and more likely to back Leave.

In other words, the Oxbridge effect perhaps magnifies an existing classics-related tendency, but the example of PPE surely demonstrates that there is an important disciplinary component. We can be charitable, and assume that latent Brexity tendencies might influence someone’s decision to study Classics, rather than fearing that studying Classics actually influences political orientation. We can take some heart from the fact that the numbers are so small – if only a couple of left-leaning classicists had got themselves elected, we might be looking at a less skewed picture – there must be a few left-leaning would-be politicians with a classical background out there, surely? And maybe this is the sort of evidence we’ll need to provide for the brave new future world of Heterodox Academies and Journals of Saying the Allegedly Unsayable: classics, certified free of having any pernicious Marxising or postmodern scepticism effects on its students…

Can a whole discipline be blamed or discredited for the political and critical failures of a tiny proportion of its graduates? Of course not – though it hasn’t prevented such accusations being levelled against PPE. But when Classics is already so closely associated with the Establishment and its values, it’s hardly good news that we run the risk of being associated now with the Establishment in its most reckless, destructive, incompetent manifestation since the Russian Revolution…