A storm has just broken over the head of Johann Hari, radical commenting journalist who writes regularly for The Independent.
It seems Hari is in the habit of spatchcocking into his interviews with cultural or political thinkers unacknowledged quotations from their published work, as though those were parts of their utterances during the interview. A great cry of ‘plagiarism’ has gone up.
If anyone ever got to interview me, I would certainly indulge myself in a few regurgitations of my finest coinages from earlier efforts, but, leaving that aside, Hari is certainly guilty of bad practice and possibly of misrepresenting the current views of his interviewees – although it is probably no different from the way in which their work will be assessed (if it is assessed at all) after their deaths, unless they take care to publish regular updates of all their opinions.
Yet to accuse Hari of plagiarism – ‘the taking and using as one’s own of the thoughts, writings or inventions of another’ – is utterly ignorant and absurd. It reminds me somewhat of the recent ostracism of the western, heterosexual man who invented and surreptitiously promoted the gay girl in Damascus blog. He too was guilty of bad practice and perhaps of something much worse, endangering individuals whose cause he apparently sought to promote, but still the reaction all seems a part of the obsessive focussing on the individual rather than engaging with the reality of their creations. It is as though we were afraid of moving beyond the level of an officially scrupulous and prurient mundanity.
At this rate Tolstoy and all his works are certainly in the dustbin, along with most of the writers who are referenced on this blog: Ruskin is certainly included and so, probably, are virtually all the significant writers and artists of our culture. We cannot go to a Wagner opera or read the Cantos of Ezra Pound. If we ever get round to it in the world of design nothing will be safe: we won't be able to sit in a Le Corbusier chair ever again and we shall certainly have to throw over our universal deference to the stern views on decoration of that old reprobate Adolf Loos.
Hari is of course not in that rank, but it’s all part of the same tendency – as if everyone were running for election as president of the United States or wherever.
