Shut down the LSE!

In September '92, John Papworth, editor of the Fourth World Review, gave a well-attended public lecture at the London School of Economics entitled: 'Why the LSE Should be Shut Down'. He noted afterwards: 'The LSE is not alone, it has spawned a host of similar institutions around the world which should be shut down, the lot of them, before the full effects of their teaching eclipses what is left of our beleaguered civilisation.' The following is an adapted extract from his lecture.

Look around you! We have used the incredible resources of technology to produce the first ugly civilisation. Today we do not create beauty, we destroy or disfigure it, we trample upon the lessons of scale and proportion that our forbears studied and practised with such consummate skill so that our urban skylines today are raped with monster apartment or office blocks which acknowledge no principle but that of profit, which squander energy and other resources with mindless abandon, which disregard the need for harmony between man and the environment and which create insoluble problems of human alienation and urban disruption.

The enthronement of production for profit over production for human well-being is probably nowhere more devastating in the outrageous inroads it has made on decent standards of human life than in the field of transport. The private automobile is probably one of the greatest forms of personal convenience and public vice ever to have erupted on the economic scene.

What cars, among other forces, have largely accomplished is the virtual destruction of community, the destruction of the oldest form of human aggregation in the record and one which has its counterpart in almost every form of sentient life. Flocks, shoals, herds, swarms, packs, schools and other groupings owe their existence and their continuing survival to profound biological needs which are expressed in such groupings and we are surely justified in claiming as much for the human community.

It was Chesterton who observed, 'You cannot have morality without community.' and in saying as much he was shrewdly observing that once community life is disrupted or destroyed morality goes out of the window, just as immorality, in the guise of market profit, marches in the front door. In place of community moral principle we have market pressures and market manipulation so that everybody begins to do things not because a decision is made on whether they are good or bad, but because everybody else is doing them.

For too long we have allowed the tail of market greed to wag the body of citizen social concern. If that concern is ever to assume its rightful paramountcy, so that market forces operate on the basis of citizen moral criteria, there is an urgent need for the reactivation and revitalisation of community life and power. It is local village, parish or ward councils, or the people who live in them, who must again control the local school, hospital, bank, police, garbage recycling, social welfare and other factors of local life.

It is the economic theories, and the assumptions on which they are based, and which are so assiduously pedalled by the London School Of Economics, which are the real cause of the contemporary crisis, which is why it is a matter of urgent public interest that it should be shut down.

The full lecture is available for £1-50 from The Fourth World Review, 24 Abercorn Place, London NW8 9XP (tel 071 286 4366; fax 071 286 2186).