Was Coleridge Right When he Claimed Women Care More About What’s Good Than What’s True? And is That a Good Reason to Exclude Them From the Garrick?

Everyone is contributing their opinion about the Garrick. Is the Garrick able to admit women as members? If not, ought it to do so on principle? If principle is unforthcoming, then should it do so as a result of the intrusive harassment of the Guardian newspaper? It is tempting to make mock, as the whole debate is a bit of a swirl in a latte mug. But the world à la mode is always a bit like this. Teacups storm; then twitter storms; somewhere or other there is reputation-destruction or old fashioned scapegoating, and the world continues on its way. 

The Garrick, if I understand the story, requires a two-thirds majority to change the rules; but some lawyers have counselled that the rules already permit women to be admitted as members. What is odd is that the issue has arisen in an atmosphere of moral affront and certainty worthy of Miller’s Crucible. Sting will resign. He will not stand so close to anyone refusing to admit women as members. So will Stephen Fry. He will use the Garrick as his washpot instead of Moab. So will Mark Knopfler, on the grounds that the argument wouldn’t be convincing enough if only one Geordie musician chimed in. Why aye, there have to be two of them – and in harmony. They don’t want the Garrick to be money for nothing and the chicks for free: they want the chicks to pay their fees too. 

This – the Garrick – is a thorny subject. Boris Johnson wrote about it in the Mail, though he seems to have written his piece with a certain someone looking over his shoulder. Everyone in the world knows that Boris has two hands, neither of which knows what the other is doing unless it reads the other’s copy. One hand wrote: 1. Don’t force the Garrick to admit women as members. The other hand wrote: 2. The Garrick should admit women as members. Let us try to be of sterner stuff: which, in the first instance, means writing without imagining that the thorn in the flesh is looking over one’s shoulder. 

As usual, the only way to make sense of this is to relate it to the longest possible history. A few centuries ago there was nothing wrong with men spending time with men. The world was full of monasteries, colleges, guilds, clubs, associations: and latterly the great London clubs, which were formidable in the 19th Century. The Reform was founded in 1836 – it admitted women in 1981. The Athenaeum was founded in 1824 – it admitted women in 2002. The Carlton was founded in 1832 – it admitted women in 2008. The Garrick was founded in 1831 – and it hasn’t caught up with the fashion yet. Suddenly, the Guardian has got out its moral spray can, and everyone from Simon Case downwards has had to signal his particularly conformist virtue by resigning or threatening to resign or resigning.

I have no axe to grind. I am not a member of a club. Peter Avery, an old Persianist, once suggested that I should join a club. And David Barchard, former FT correspondent to Turkey, was surprised when I said I had nowhere to stay in London. They were clearly fooled by my massive forehead, respectable dress and severe deportment into thinking I was someone who would value such things. Well, not so. I was never very clubbable: I was in fact ‘his own man’, as was sometimes said disapprovingly in my wake. But there is a principle at stake, as usual, and I suppose it is always worth offering a word for the sake of a principle, even an obsolete one. 

The question is whether all our institutions are – to use the now famous Gramscian phrase – to suffer from the long march of women through them. And whether – rare question (noblesse oblige requires its not being asked in mixed company) – it is good for all our institutions to have the hand of the gentler sex on the keys, the till and the rulebook. Let us be sceptical – maybe it is, maybe it is not – and let us also marvel at a world in which everyone, including our great celebrities of the 1980s, suddenly find they all agree on the most pressing controversy of the age.

The principle is to do with truth. Like many others, I think ‘the truth’ has always had a vexed status in the world: but that it seemed to count for very little, very suddenly, in 2020. Why was this? Well, one obsolete possibility is that it had something to do with all the women in the room. 

On August 6th, 1831, Samuel Taylor Coleridge said the following:

There is the love of the good for the good’s sake, and the love of the truth for the truth’s sake. I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good’s sake; but very few, indeed, and scarcely one woman, love the truth for the truth’s sake. Yet without the latter, the former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of persecution of the truth – the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty and party zealotry.

This is fascinating. It might be true, or not true – even though it might not be considered good. Discuss. But one cannot discuss it unless it is said. And one can imagine it being said in the historic Garrick. But one cannot imagine it being said in the current Garrick or the Garrick of the future if Stephen Fry, Gordon Sumner, John Simpson and Mark Knopfler are to have their way. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was rather clubbable: he liked talking at great length, though, according to Madame de Stäel, he lacked a capacity for conversation: being a monologist. (Read Coleridge’s Table Talk, which is incredible.) D.H. Lawrence, on the other hand, was not particularly clubbable. He visited Cambridge once, met Russell and Keynes, and thought of spiders. He married Frieda and spent most of his life in exile with her – Italy, Australia, New Mexico. He considered the most fundamental relation in the universe to be the one between a man and woman in marriage.

But even though this was the case, he had a hankering after something else. Birkin’s last words in Women in Love are “I don’t believe that” when Ursula tells him that the love of a woman is enough. And in Kangaroo, the female character cries when the male talks about sharing activity with men: “Her greatest grief was when he turned away from their personal human life of intimacy to this impersonal business of male activity.” This impersonal business of male activity. Notice the binary here: Lawrence associated masculinity with impersonality and femininity with personality. Discuss. Or, let’s say, if you are reading this silently (and not out loud over oysters and champagne to the women in your clubroom), Consider.

I suppose I have to be provocative and suggest that if there is such a thing as ‘impersonal male activity’, and that if this is valuable, then it may be difficult for this to be understood in a modern world in which women are marching at length through our institutions and revising the rules of those institutions in relation to an inability to respect or understand ‘impersonal male activity’. Now, this ‘impersonal male activity’ might be a bit foolish, like the braggarting of boys. Peter Martland, the historian, once told me that Corpus Christi College, Cambridge changed immediately as soon as women were admitted. The dining hall had formerly been a place at which more food was transported by sporting projection than by tray: now it became a genial and genteel café of chivalry and courtship. But sometimes this ‘impersonal male activity’ might be extremely important: especially if Coleridge is right and men will occasionally consider setting aside the ‘good’ for the sake of the ‘true’. 

COVID-19 was an exquisite exhibition of the politics of the (apparent) ‘good’ triumphing over any concern with ‘truth’. And when I say ‘triumphing’ I am alluding to the grotesque display of glorification, intimidation and humiliation which was found in the original Roman triumph. See Mary Beard for details. There were women who were critical of the pandemic protocols (not, however, Mary Beard): the ones I admired were Laura Dodsworth, for investigating ‘nudge’, and Laura Perrins, for unlimited moral scorn. But even they were better at observing what was ‘not good’ rather than what was ‘true’. I imagine that many readers of the Daily Sceptic relied on podcasts – and mostly podcasts involving conversation between men. As everyone knows, the BBC has long insisted that there is no such thing as broadcastable conversation between men. There must be a woman in the room. Is it not significant that there was, and is, a taste (at least among men) for conversation between men – conversation with risk of boredom, since it has impersonality in it, but conversation also with risk of truth? London Calling, the Lotus Eaters, Louder with Crowder offered male conversation and something like a proper scale of values, not wholly created by the situation. For me, the most significant encounters of the pandemic were Delingpole-and-Yeadon and Weinstein-and-Malone: they convinced me that everything was worse than I thought (as if the surface of reality was not bad enough): and, in those conversations, even if the truth was not known, the truth was spoken about as if it mattered more than anything else.

I doubt the fuss about the Garrick is of any importance. There is a great moral fear of not being ‘egalitarian’ among our elites. And so they are falling like dominoes or playing cards: pretending that their collapse is a consequence of morality. But there is a principle at stake, and even if this principle is not one anyone is likely to defend or even consider nowadays – on the grounds that it is ‘not good’ to consider it – there is an awkward question about whether our civilisation is not in danger for yet one more reason, which is that in our institutions we seem disinclined to let men talk about anything without a woman somehow being involved.

What is truth? Does anyone care about truth? Is there a possibility that truth has been completely mechanised into ‘my truth’? If so, this means that when we talk about ‘truth’ nowadays we are actually talking about something that is ‘good’ in some respect – possibly only good for the speaker, though admittedly also possibly objectively good – but certainly not ‘true’.

Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.