David Stove and the Heirs of the Western Tradition *

David Stove and the Heirs of the Western Tradition * Rick O’Brien (See also Judy Stove’s reply to this article) I want to tell you a little about a man I knew quite well for the last decade of his life: David Charles Stove. Stove – few, other than his wife, his closer friends and his colleagues, called him David – was an Australian philosopher of the mid to late 1900s. He spent almost all his career lecturing in and producing analytic philosophy, of the rigorous, ‘no-bullshit’ Australian variety, at the University of Sydney – although it would be fair to say he occupied the ‘Über’ end of the anti-connerie spectrum. By the time I when an undergraduate met him in the mid-1980s he was an Associate Professor. Stove retired a few years later, entirely worn-out by the travails of academia and its politics. There was very much to this man born in Moree, NSW in 1927. He followed rugby league and cricket as avidly as he admired the music of Bach, Purcell, Handel and Vivaldi. He also grew very impressive roses, and, his son Robert tells us#, had a fine bass voice and played the trumpet well. Stove grew up in working-class Newcastle, NSW, attending the same state high school as the ‘immortal’ Australian rugby league player, Clive Churchill. Both were prodigiously talented, though in somewhat different ways. (Stove told me once that Churchill – as well as being astonishingly gifted at sport – was good looking and thus had girls magnetically drawn to him; but was otherwise as ‘dumb as dog-dirt’. Not a pair of inconveniences I suspect Stove ever had to negotiate). I found out recently that, as well as being School Captain, Stove too excelled in sport. It is not reported if he had also been dux; though it is likely he won a scholarship in order to gain entry to the University of Sydney – an uncommon eventuality for regional high- school students in the 1940s, even very bright ones. It is there he fell in with philosophy. This though is not really a discussion of his work in philosophy – induction and probability, the philosophy of science, and Hume scholarship – rather than of his teaching, his non-academic papers, and his impact on students. As has been observed by many, Stove was in fact a man not of but out of his time. In sundry ways he would have been better suited to the nineteenth century than the twentieth; or perhaps now, as a Ramsay Centre link antidote, to the twenty-first century. Beyond his professional focus, and most prominently and famously, D C Stove was a political conservative; widely regarded not just as reactionary, but as a sexist. He thought women were on the whole intellectually inferior to men, and had evolved thus, he once informed me, because of the need to invest so many of their resources in reproduction and child-rearing. It’s OK, I can feel the bristling. He was in two ways also a ‘racist’ – a neologism of the 1960s and early ‘70s that he believed, in reality, applied to most if not all rational human beings – those ways being: First, through his conviction he conveyed to me that on average white people including Jews were intellectually superior to other races (a claim I hear some east Asians make for themselves, these days); And second, in that ‘racial antagonisms’, as he called them, were inevitable and so creeds and peoples should as far as practicable be kept apart. (And so much for the hundreds of millions of mixed-race folk in our world.) It is this latter sensitivity though that tempered his attitude to broaching racial and ethnic tensions more specifically: he was most concerned not to antagonise or exacerbate any ill-feeling between particular groups, either openly or publicly; and he would counsel others to take a prudent approach on such matters. Stove was nevertheless dismissive of any charitable efforts directed toward (eg.) starving or war-torn Africans. I bet you made a donation to Live-Aid, he probed at me rhetorically in mid-1985, about a concert event now far better known for one, stunning, 20-minute performance by the band Queen – not among David’s favoured ensembles – than for the many millions it raised to tackle the Ethiopian famine of the time. I can’t recall us ever discussing apartheid and Nelson Mandela. Maybe he just thought I was a lost cause. Last, to complete the bigot’s trifecta, Stove was (speaking of queens) a homophobe. I recall in particular him broaching his suspicions concerning two of his colleagues, and him conveying sincere distaste if not a wave of disgust; as if the concept of an offence against the order of nature had been crafted to assuage the feelings of men like David. I never ventured to raise with him the heterosexual penchant for oral and anal sex; nor do I recall canvassing lesbianism. But it was homosexual men in particular who drew Stove’s ire, a sentiment he made clear in response to a question I raised in open discussion following a paper he presented on Conservatism, in which he compared modern-day liberties for gay people with freedom for drug-dealers and their ilk.^ (I should add though that my sense of David’s feelings on homosexuality is they were closer to antipathy than to outright contempt; and that it would have been entirely out of character for him to convey to any person directly his views about their sexuality.) 2 Still, I realise what some – maybe many – will now be thinking. How could I bear even conversing with such a man, let alone count him as a friend? Well here’s the thing about Homo sapiens: we’re complex, multi-faceted creatures. We put the sapiens in Homo. Stove was a mentor to many talented philosophy students; including more than a few women (although not, as far as he knew, any queers). He was a prude, but also a man of propriety, and generous with his time and encouragement – mark easy, comment hard – especially if you were bright (and, typically, white). Undergraduates though he would refer to as ‘Mister’ or ‘Miss’; gender-neutral pronouns not then being in vogue. He smoked roll-your-owns and drank Coopers pale ale and flagon sherry to excess; starting with a short glass of amontillado, as I recall, at around 5pm, lecturing or not. His jacket – in tan tweed – was a decade old hand-me-down from the conservative Australian foreign policy expert, Owen Harries. They knew each other through the pages of the (partly CIA-funded) magazine, Quadrant, for which Stove wrote many articles. Most notoriously, the journal in May 1986 published Stove’s, A Farewell to Arts: Marxism, Semiotics and Feminism, link which commences thus: The Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney is a disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly- leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle. A little further he goes on: Of course the disaster is not confined to Sydney University. Far from that, it is common to the Arts faculties of most Western universities. So far as there still survives anything of value from the Western tradition of humanistic studies, it is in spite of most of the people in the universities who are the heirs of that tradition. And to give you a feel for his views about one of his favourite targets, feminism, if not of women in general, there’s this from later in the same piece: Then there is feminism. If one looked just at "the women's movement" itself, who could possibly resist the conclusion that women are intellectually inferior to men? The feminists have yet to produce a single piece of writing, devoted to their cause, which any rational creature could attach importance to. All this was 35 years ago. Imagine what he’d think now of not just Sydney University’s Arts Faculty but the Anglophone university systems more or less entire. And how the Wokerati would respond to his academic, indeed even physical, presence: surely a matter of ‘cancelling’ with extreme prejudice. 3 Back though in the 1980s, and doubtless earlier, it was his disregard for the decorum of appearance that first attracted undergraduate students. Stove’s jacket – I only ever saw him wear the one – bore the inevitable leather elbow patches. Yet like a barrel-aged hipster he rarely shaved (and never closely), and wore his scuffed old shoes lace-less. His shirts were pitted with micro-burns from the hot ash toppling from the tip of his hand- rolled cigarettes. He drove, as I recall, a pint-sized Daihatsu Charade. David was an unconventional conservative. James Franklin in the Australian Dictionary of Biography link describes him as ‘Witty, irreverent, and principled…[but] of pessimistic temperament, finding no consolation in religion or hopes for political progress’. All true. Intellectually precise, indeed unashamedly pedantic, he was an enemy of cant and pomposity; an expression of his parsimonious, neo-positivist approach to philosophy. Yet he looked like an ageing, care-worn version of the young Marxist he’d started out as in the Sydney Push of the 1940s. Like many ex-lefties, though, he’d sailed right past democratic socialism and social democracy and liberalism to the outer reaches of conservative politics, defaulting along the way to the reactionary social values I’ve noted. But beyond all that, Stove was gut-clutchingly funny.

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