This isn't really the all-Burke-all-the-time-network, it just seems that way. At any rate, Timothy points out in a comment to Paris Is Burning that Frank Furedi, the author of the article used to launch my diversity rap, has a "complicated ideological history". Too true. (Perhaps you will recall if I remind you Timothy that we discussed this in a BS thread many years ago when they were Living Marxism?) Just for phun I Googled Furedi to see what was being said about him and chose this Catallaxy post as a useful survey of opinion about Furedi and Spiked!. This entry at Source Watch, pointed to by the Catallaxy post, briefly states just how complicated that ideological history is.

Frank Furedi is professor of sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He was, while using pseudonym Frank Richards, the founder and chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) of Great Britain. The RCP has traversed one of the longest ideological journeys in British politics, moving from the hard-left through several incarnations into a broad collection of organisations on the libertarian right wing, including Spiked Online and the Institute of Ideas. Furedi continues to be a leading figure in this network of organisations, characterised by a vigorous anti-environmentalist, pro-GM stance, known as the LM group.

Aside from his academic work, he is frequently quoted in the media as an expert on how our society has become obsessed with risk. He writes regularly for Spiked online, and has written several books on the subject, with titles such as Paranoid Parenting, Therapy Culture, and Culture of Fear. He wrote an article about risk culture post September 11, one of only two papers published by Global Futures.

Furedi has also written under the name of Linda Ryan [1]. He was born in Hungary in 1948. His family emigrated to Canada after the failed 1956 uprising and has lived in Britain since the 1970s.

At his own web site Furedi has collected some comments about his book Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?. This Roger Scruton comment is interesting.

I had some reservations with Furedi’s argument. As an Englishman, I am bothered by the term “intellectual”, which came late to our language. Humane education was shaped in our country by Coleridge, Ruskin, Arnold and — in the political sphere — Macaulay, Gladstone and Disraeli, people who would have described themselves as educated men, but not as intellectuals. The intellectual is a synthesis of French bohemianism and Russian nihilism. Intellectuals have an inveterate tendency to be on the Left and to turn on dissenters with a venom that no educated person could comfortably endorse. Much of the decline that Furedi is describing in this book could be described in another way, as the gradual vanishing of the educated person as the goal of education, and its replacement by the intellectual instead. Intellectuals are critics of the established order; they are on the side of the victim, and against the bourgeois normality; they repudiate discipline, authority, family, tradition, and nothing gets up their nose so much as the calm forgiving acceptance of human imperfection. And, as we know from the cases of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Sartre, Pol Pot and a thousand more, they are dangerous.

Moreover, intellectuals value their oppositional and transgressive stance far more than they value truth, and have a vested interested in undermining the practices — such as rational argument, genuine scholarship and open-minded discussion — which have truth as their goal. They will seize on the relativist arguments — even if they are as shoddy as Foucault’s or as empty as Rorty’s — as they will seize on any kind of mumbo-jumbo that silences the critic and furthers their subversive aims. And when they take hold of institutions they form a “confederacy of dunces” whose first aim is to exclude anyone who thinks out of line.

That is why university departments in the humanities and social sciences are now such grim, bigoted places, and why Furedi, who must have one hell of a time in the University of Kent, still tries to claim the status of a left-wing intellectual, and to conceal as best he can the truth, that he is a genuinely educated (and transparently conservative) man.

Furedi and reviews of his book Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? were the initial focus of my earlier post Invisible Pachyderm which, like Paris Is Burning, emphasized the effects of computer mediated communication through the net to undercut the central argument of the "transparently conservative" Furedi.

Grumpy old men like Furedi worry that mush minded academics, bureaucrats and politicians are making libraries comfortable and attractive to youths as places to hang out, that they are democratizing knowledge, art and culture as instruments to achieve social, economic and political objectives, and so losing the romantic ideals of their own youth - knowledge for knowledge's sake. While Furedi is right so are the mush minds but they are all irrelevant. Libraries are becoming museums. It will take time for the transition to complete but the youths of tomorrow will in fact sit in comfortable surrounds while accessing the knowledge of the world. They will sit in cafes or parks or lounge in their robes at home unshaven while thinking and reading. They will do this while simultaneously conversing with others, sometimes about the subject of inquiry and sometimes just hooking up [with others], who are in turn located wherever they find congenial.

It may seem like I disagree with everything Furedi writes, but as I see it he needs to add another leg to his long intellectual journey by internalizing the current and prospective effects of a pervasive information network on planet earth. He makes some useful criticisms but doesn't go far enough, doesn't relate his insights to current realities. Like many other public figures with intellectual baggage Furedi seems to be fighting old wars, and so however skilled his fighting the outcome isn't quite as important as it would have been if it had been fought when the issues were current.

It may be worth noting that the list of heresies Furedi champions for the sake of progress - opposing all restrictions on science, technology (especially biotechnology) and business - and his supposed "anti-environmentalist" bias, are increasingly embraced by progressive environmentalists. See Cool Hunting which discusses Stewart Brand's Environmental Heresies.

All in all Furedi fits into my collection of interesting oddballs - such as the recently discussed Dan Daggett - who have suffered serial conversion, passionately advocating one thing and then another. They sometimes say useful things but we would be wise to be sceptical of their current views. To repeat:

While we can feel some compassion for the personal disruption these serial converts have experienced, and find some useful ideas in their current writings, we really do have to question the quality of their intelligence. Though intelligent compared perhaps to the norm, they weren't intelligent enough to avoid mistaken adventures in eschatology and millennial faith. They didn't draw reasonable conclusions from evidence, indeed they often ignored vast amounts of evidence or were unaware that there was real evidence. And that should give us pause when reading their new works. They may now have some bit of wisdom from their experiences, but bear in mind that they weren't bright enough to avoid learning these lessons the hard way while doing harm to society.

We're all adults here. We can read the articles of questionable hombres and sort the wheat from the chaff. Right?