[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.
Terry EagletonTags: politics capitalism revolution football soccer social-change marxism oprah 2010 deepwater-horizon-oil-spill 2010-fifa-world-cup bolsheviks british-petroleum conformists david-beckham liverpool-fc opium-of-the-people tories
In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
Terry EagletonTags: metaphysics cat
If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.
Terry EagletonTags: life certainty dogmatism
In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.
Terry EagletonTags: life philosophy belief religion faith atheism capitalism metaphysics islam postmodernism pragmatism western-culture islamism grand-narratives islamic-fundamentalism islamic-terrorism philosophical-scepticism western-world
The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
Terry EagletonTags: education academia university humanities
Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry, which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the question of student fees.
Terry EagletonTags: politics capitalism competition university humanities 2010-uk-student-protest percy-bysshe-shelley tuition-fees-uk
What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.
Terry EagletonTags: imagination justice academia tradition arthur-rimbaud radicalism university humanities 2010 tuition-fees-uk 2010-uk-student-protests margaret-thatcher public-university radical-politics reactionary-politics rembrandt
When they first emerged in their present shape around the turn of the 18th century, the so-called humane disciplines had a crucial social role. It was to foster and protect the kind of values for which a philistine social order had precious little time. The modern humanities and industrial capitalism were more or less twinned at birth. To preserve a set of values and ideas under siege, you needed among other things institutions known as universities set somewhat apart from everyday social life. This remoteness meant that humane study could be lamentably ineffectual. But it also allowed the humanities to launch a critique of conventional wisdom.
Terry EagletonTags: capitalism criticism university humanities 18th-century
The liberal state has no view on whether witchcraft is more valuable than all-in wrestling. Like a tactful publican, it has as few opinions as possible. Many liberals suspect passionate convictions are latently authoritarian. But liberalism should surely be a passionate conviction. Liberals are not necessarily lukewarm. Only the more macho leftist suspects that they have no balls. You can be ardently neutral, and fiercely indifferent.
Terry EagletonTags: politics liberalism witchcraft authoritarianism leftism wrestling
The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.
Terry EagletonTags: christianity
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