A friend took me to hear a lecture given by Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen on ‘Democracy and Globalization’ — which contained little enough about ‘globalization’ — and whose insights on democracy were of the order that idea that we were ‘racist’ to think Europeans were largely responsible, en masse, for spreading the worship of that great secular god, since the ‘Visigoths who gave rise to the Germans’ knew nothing of 5th century BC Athens ......!
(Incidentally, my host bought me a Margharita afterwards, so, yes, he is still a friend!) Though Sen seemed personable enough, it did worry me slightly when the speech was introduced by one of the University’s Cultural Marxists, the editor of some hotbed of facile polylogism called ‘the Journal of Feminist Economics’ [sic!] and when it was prefaced by the proud announcement that the school was setting up a Department of Culturally-Sensitive Gender Studies (not much call for my repertoire of jokes about Welsh mothers-in-law there, I fear!)... Among Sen’s few memorable thoughts was the idea that when Ambedka wrote the Indian constitution, a passage saying something to the effect that ‘we have a schizophrenic nation where all are politically equal, but economically unequal, and it behoves us to address the latter’, it meant they were not Socialists! Entering into the spirit of the thing, I passed a written question to the good professor along the lines of: ‘When democracy is so often antithetical to property rights, how can you say it is a prerequisite for progress? Will you not admit that only capital brings progress, not populist confiscation?’ Since I sat near the front and had scribbled on the back of the card on which my question was written, I could plainly see that Ms Marx the editor of the Wimmin’s thingy — who chose and read out the questions — had conveniently shuffled it to the bottom of the (fairly slim) pile, where it could not possibly have been asked in the time allotted. Why was I not surprised?