This article is taken from the December/January 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Stop the agit-prop

Claire Foster and Juliet Harrison (“IDEOLOGY OR THERAPY?” NOVEMBER) are to be congratulated for their tenacity in uncovering the extent to which postgraduate courses in clinical psychology have been subverted to the crude and unscholarly agitprop of Critical Theory activism. Academics and practising clinicians can be as susceptible to modish notions as the rest of us.

Thus, it should not surprise us if one or two university clinical psychology departments had succumbed to such obvious intellectual vacuity as the belief that society is a binary divide between privileged and unprivileged groups and that this overrides everything else.

After all, is this so different from Marxism’s class war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, rebranded to prioritise race and gender rather than manual labour now that progressive liberals fear rather than admire the presumed attitudes of the working man? Categorising civilisation into an immediately observable “them” and “us” is a reductive exercise. But at least Marxism produced some generally first-rate thinkers, including intellectuals of great breadth and learning who were prepared to engage with those with whom they disagreed.

Where are the comparable intellectual titans of Critical Theory? Those who have been its most influential advocates in recent years have primarily been activists. If they had a role on campus it was more often as HR administrators or eternal postgrads rather than professors. An astonishing lack of academic rigour and breadth of knowledge pervades the pamphlets — some published at book length — that woke polemicists churn out.

So why is it that this movement of so little scholarly merit has come to dictate its uncompromising dogma not just to a couple of failing university departments but across the very wide variety of institutions summarised in Foster and Harrison’s article? This is where the investigation should go next. One avenue of enquiry is mentioned — the incentivised funding from public bodies, such as NHS Health Education England. How did this come to be? What laws, regulations or “best practice” manuals directed taxpayers’ money towards these ideological ends?

It seems academics have subcontracted the substance of instruction to activist “content providers” and selection to administrators with no academic credentials but a modish conformity to whichever boxes they are told need ticking.

Jonathan Laycock

Leeds, West Yorkshire

Drop the baroque

I read the Reverend Walker’s column (SOUNDING BOARD, NOVEMBER) on King Charles’s forthcoming coronation with interest, but on this occasion I could not agree with him. Though the idea of a Dutch coronation conducted in a drawing room is enough to fill anyone with horror (one thinks of William IV’s disastrous experiment with simplicity, which saw Britain dubbed as a “half-crown” nation), I roll my eyes at the baroque flummery of the British monarchy.

Do we need all that absurd ermine or the grotesque wedding cake of the Gold State Coach that poor King Charles will be rolled along on? Britain has become something between a historical reenactment society and a live-action Gormenghast, in which no silliness can be disposed of even when everybody has forgotten the point of it.

Why don’t we drop the baroque and go back to our finest medieval coronation traditions, before we swaddled our powerless princes in pointless pomp? Henry IV wasn’t hauled to his coronation on the back of a golden cart, he rode to Westminster Abbey astride a white warhorse. And a coronation ceremony on the medieval model could stop treating the Supreme Governor of the Church of England like a Disney princess, and instead focus on the religion. Medieval kings would fast, confess, and hear three masses before even thinking of putting a crown on.

Another fine medieval custom sadly missing is the making of knights. Your medieval sovereign would have thought it a poor show not to use the occasion to dub a few dozen of England’s most promising young squires. Paring back the jewellery could focus the millions of watching minds on the real essence of the ritual and liturgy of coronation.

Joanna Browning

Broadstairs, Kent

Let’s not carry on

Alexander Larman offers a well-measured appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of the Carry On films (“IN PRAISE OF …”, NOVEMBER) while holding out the possibility that if the franchise was ever to be successfully resurrected it would have to scripted by writers of the stamp of Patrick Marber or Richard Bean. Alas, the efforts that have been made to revive the series have shown little more than a desire to repeat the lameness that killed off the films in the 1970s.

About 12 years ago we had excited talk of a Carry On London nearing production. That it was renamed Carry On Bananas before it was predictably axed tells us everything we needed to know. The strength of the original Carry Ons, as Larman acknowledges, was the quality of the cast. They are almost all dead. Let the franchise rest in peace with them.

Daniel Robson

Exeter, Devon