37. On Summer Fetes, Street Parties and the Garden of Eden.

Dearly Beloved,

When I was about 16 years of age, I initiated a motion in my school debating society “This house believes that Adam and Eve Should have Eaten All the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge”. The debate was not a great success as we lacked the intellectual firepower that is available to St Clements' writers of DB letters. Nevertheless the debate did show that we were aware of the limitations of the human intellect and our knowledge of ourselves and the world.

Summer is traditionally a time of garden fetes and street parties. Recently our street party collided with the Newnham College Fete. Newnham is a college in beautiful grounds, a combination of colourful, carefully cultivated gardens and sports fields. Tents for food and music had infiltrated themselves amongst the trees and there were talks and a classical trio to be heard in the college buildings.

Newnham remains one of only two Oxbridge colleges devoted to women and accordingly there were diverse talks on remarkable women. Those included England's richest woman during the reign of Henry III, the banker, Liqoricia of Winchester and Rosalind Franklin, who's work on DNA was plagiarised my other (male) researchers. There was also a workshop on the difficulty of becoming a woman philosopher. That was of special interest to me and my wife as we have a daughter who is an academic philosopher.

My wife's family is unusual in having two women who were early senior academics; grandmother Prof Gladys Turquet (b.1887) and great aunt Nora Milnes (b.1882). Just as educated women like to reflect on how a mediaeval man like Thomas More gave his daughter, Margaret, (together with an adopted daughter, also named Margaret) the best available education of his time, so my wife's great grandfather ensured his daughters were given a top class home education. Their father Alfred Milnes was an economist and registrar of External Degrees at London University. Family lore recounts that Gladys completed her first book on Baudelaire at the age of 16 (although its date of publication seems to be a few years later). She ended up as Professor emeritus of French at London University. Nora was responsible for important sociological research on poverty and was a pioneer of the use of surveys at the University of Edinburgh.

Does a women need to have such familial exemplars to have the confidence to become a philosopher and does it take exceptional education to blast them into the intellectual stratosphere? Undoubtedly male prejudices about women are a real obstacle. That was manifest to me by a cattle herder from Dhofar in Oman who did not think that his daughter needed any education at all, and was even immune to the suggestion that having an educated and articulate daughter might advance the prospects of any male children she brought into the world. It was rumored that the Egyptian teachers in the University had systematically downgraded the marks of female students because the young woman consistently and embarrassingly attained higher marks than the male students. It is difficult to know if these male prejudices are cultural problems or the result of some inherent, biological bias.

Back at the street party, amongst the jollity and conversation with the people of our street, and the consumption of excellent beer provided by a brewer who lived in the street, my wife had to deal with a student who was just completing his first year of postgraduate work. He had told her that she did not understand mediaeval history. She pulled rank and told him that she had attained her Ph.D in that subject some forty years previously.

Would we suffer from these prejudices if Adam and Eve had consumed all the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge? In that case we would have no need for philosophers, academics or universities. We would know it all and instead we would have to wrestle with Luciferian pride.

Completed 19 July 2022.


Satan Exulting over Eve by William Blake, 1795. 

Wikimedia Commons


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