A Monument of German Stupidity

“The public had been forced to see [in Kant] that what is obscure is not always without meaning; what was senseless and without meaning at once took refuge in obscure exposition and language. Fichte was the first to grasp and make vigorous use of this privilege; Schelling at least equalled him in this, and a host of hungry scribblers without intellect or honesty soon surpassed them both. But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel. It became the instrument of the most ponderous and general mystification that has ever existed, with a result that will seem incredible to posterity, and be a lasting monument of German stupidity. ”

(Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, (Tr. E.F.J. Payne) Dover, 1966. p. 429.)

The Bash of the Buffoons

It should gladden our hearts and behope us all that blackguards can put aside their differences long enough to identify their shared blackguardry. When, for instance, in May of this year, George Galloway described Christopher Hitchens as “a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay”, he spoke with unwonted verity; and when Hitchens retorted with, “You're a real thug, aren't you?”, the words rang forsooth. (Quoted in “Galloway and the Mother of all Invective”, The Guardian, 18th May 2005.)

.....On Wednesday night the two great self-regarding buffoons met again to swap insults in front of an audience at Mason Hall in New York. In an article written on the eve of battle, Mr Hitchens began to skirmish:

He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a “popinjay” (true enough, since its original Webster's definition means a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest). In a recent interview he made opprobrious remarks about the state of my midriff, which I will confess has—as P.G. Wodehouse himself once phrased it—“slipped down to the mezzanine floor.” In reply I do not wish to stoop. Those of us who revere the vagina are committed to defend it against the very idea that it is a mouth or has teeth. Study the photographs of Galloway from Syrian state television, however, and you will see how unwise and incautious it is for such a hideous person to resort to personal remarks. Unkind nature, which could have made a perfectly good butt out of his face, has spoiled the whole effect by taking an asshole and studding it with ill-brushed fangs.

(Christopher Hitchens, “George Galloway is Gruesome, not Gorgeous”, Slate, 13th September 2005.)

The opportunity of providing a solution to the meaning of the cryptic – and some might say disturbing – reference to vaginas, I shall forgo; and I shall pass straight onto noting how in the space of one paragraph, Mr Hitchens goes from an aloofness from stooping to insults, to stooping to insults in a most entertainingly stooping way. As for Mr Hitchen’s reply to Mr Galloway’s earlier insult, I must point out that the ex-Trotskyist can still get dewy-eyed about old Leon, whom he recently described as a “prophetic moralist” about whom a “saintly penumbra still emanates”. (Christopher Hitchens, “The Old Man”, The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2004.) I find it a little odd, however, that he should feel it desirable to concur that the word “popinjay” does indeed apply to him, though only in Webster’s etymology (“so called from the popinjay or figure of a bird shot at for practice”) and not in Webster’s primary definition (“a vain and talkative fellow”); but then perhaps he is so vain and talkative that he cannot resist stating that the word does in some way apply to him. With the accusation of being “drink-soaked”, he makes no contention, unless a feeble miscontrual counts.

.....Come Wednesday night, when battle commenced, Mr Hitchens was still rankled by the May-time insult, and fell foul of a misplaced modifier: “I believe it is a disgrace that a member of the British House of Commons should . . . insult all those who try to ask him questions with the most vile and cheap guttersnipe abuse”. (Quoted in David Usbourne, “Hitchens vs Galloway: The Big Debate” The Independent, 16th September 2005.)

.....Mr Galloway for his part was as willing as ever to trade insults, telling Mr Hitchens that he had “fallen out of the gutter and into the sewer”. (ibid.) And on Hitchens’ change from Trotskyite peacenik to Trotskyitish war-supporter, he averred that, “What you have witnessed is something unique in natural history - the first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug”. (Quoted in James Bone, “Galloway and Hitchens get down and very dirty”, The Times, 15th September 2005.)

.....By all accounts, it was a night of splendid entertainment; but if you had expected more in the way of enlightenment, then I ought to tell you that you should not have placed your trust in a puffed-up popinjay or in a thug with a face like an arse.

Fewtril #26

A modern totalitarian rarely makes so crude an Orwellian statement as “freedom is slavery”. His is a beclouded and garrulous soul, and he would rather say instead, “Freedom is an ideological mask for the protection of existing structures of domination”. He has been to university after all, and would like to show it.

Fewtril #25

In explaining the vast improbability of our existence, we have tended to settle on one of two unprovable propositions: either that this is one universe amongst an infinite number of universes; or that there is a God. The first has the explanatory virtue that it does without God. The second, that it does without an infinity of universes.

Tuppence for England

“There’ll always be an England”, sang some short-sighted fellow, and though he may have reckoned with foreign nations seeking its destruction from without, he may not have reckoned with the acquiescence of the English to the wishes of those foreigners within who seek its banishment; and if it now seems to you that an Englishman’s home is unconscionable, you have a soul mate in the shape of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who in a customary leap of opinion, believes that, “If the cricket is won, many more white Britons will give up on Britain and take refuge in England”. (Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, “My hopes of progress are turning to ashes”, The Independent, 12th September 2005.)

.....How dare we! In our own land too! It must seem regrettable to Ms Alibhai-Brown that an English nation existed long before the political union of this island, and it must seem no less deplorable that on this island there are still Englishmen living in a place called England that has not yet been forgotten.

.....I am of course swimming against the tide; for we must now be good little boys and give the place up at the behest of mean-spirited foreigners who wouldn’t give tuppence for it.

Pax Exanima

It is hard to estimate just how much perfidy, cowardice and moral decrepitude is hidden in pacifism. If we were to take into consideration only principled pacifism, we should find sufficient source for condemnation: not only in that it is a luxurious sentiment dearly paid for by others, which yet deplores those same for the force by which the security of its own existence is won, but also in that it is a doctrine of indifference that implores all to a spiritless acceptance of whichever circumstances should obtain. On the latter point, consider the callous fatuity of this statement by Mahatma Gandhi:

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction [of war] is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?

To the dead it makes none; for if there is one thing at which the dead excel, it is at indifference. But to the living, including those homeless orphans who are of such use in providing us with emotive spuriosities, the form of life under which we live should make all the difference. If we were indifferent to good and evil, freedom and slavery, worth and worthlessness, then we might as well be dead; for life would not be worth living.

.....Surely it could not have been a matter of indifference to Mr Gandhi whether the country from which he would seek independence was Britain and not Germany; for if the former had been indifferent to the latter, and the latter had assumed control of India, then Mr Gandhi’s pacifism would have been as futile as a hunger-strike in Sachsenhausen. As George Orwell pointed out: “Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force” (“Pacifism and the War”, Partisan Review, August/September 1942). It must not have escaped Mr Gandhi’s notice, however, that the land from which he won independence was not Germany but Britain, against whose sons pacifism as a moral principle was such an effective weapon. I do not think it excessively cynical to wonder whether behind this vaunted and sacred principle of peace lies a grubby and worldly exigence; and that had the circumstances been different, Mr Gandhi would now be known for his conversion to the principle of the slaughter of tyrants.
.....If the case of Gandhi is unclear, and is due the benefit of the doubt as a guard against excessive cynicism and defamation, we should be in no doubt that the utility of pacifism has not gone unnoticed by scoundrels, to whom it is a tactical device in the disarming of enemies. And thus, on the question of genuine principle or exigent utility, I’ll go so far as to wager that for every principled pacifist who wouldn’t hurt a fly, even if it were chewing his leg off, there are a thousand pretenders who would have the whole of fly-kind swatted out of existence come the revolution.
.....This is ably illustrated by the words of Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army and a blood-thirsty tyrant if ever there was:

In such [adverse] conditions [before the the communist seizure of power], we had only one way out: to take our stand on the platform of peace, as the inevitable conclusion from the military powerlessness of the revolution, and to transform that watchword into the weapon of revolutionary influence on all the peoples of Europe.

(Leon Trotsky, Dictatorship versus Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): A Reply to Karl Krautsky, 1922. Chapter 7. (English Translation by the Workers Party of America.) Published online at the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives.)

And this is what we must contend with today: that behind every avowed moral principle lurks a host of scoundrels who would make armchairs out of one another’s grandmothers given half the chance and a bagful of stuffing.

Fewtril #24

The superiority of ignoramuses in view of the absurd beliefs of their ignorant forebears is such that they are able to ask: “How could they have believed something so obviously absurd?”. Yet these same ignoramuses have nothing but reverence for their own contemporary absurdities, which are so obvious that even their ignorant descendents, no longer compelled to believe in them, will be able to ask: “How could they have believed something so obviously absurd?”

Fewtril #23

A scholar who has come to rue the loneliness that is marked by the rift between his scholarship and the indifference of the people thereto is not unlikely to soothe this feeling by saying stupid but popular things.

Fewtril #22

He who would like the simple truth of a matter to be shrouded hits upon the simple trick of describing as simple-minded those who utter it.

Fewtril #21

One ought to consider whether the conditions necessary for decent society are too delicate to survive the protestations of the people.

A Spot in the Limelight

I should not like to sully these pages with mention of so lowly a creature as Julie Burchill, whose name time will obliterate, leaving no more trace on culture than a spot leaves on skin after its passing, were it not that she represents something of a modern phenomenon, namely, the success that may be had through ignorance, stupidity, vulgarity and the celebration thereof; and thus I feel obliged to mention her for that reason only, and not, you understand, because she herself is worthy of any intellectual attention. For she poses no problems in intellectual terms, except in the way that the blathering of a child or the drone of traffic can disturb concentration.

As I have intimated, she is one spot amongst a rash, and I single her out only because she is a salient example of that disease of post-modern fatuity. Now, it could not be said that I take a positive view of journalists, but I must say in their favour that I can think of few who are able to gallivant with so great an abandon through so many subjects as her without ever happening upon sense. Few can boast so great a distance between talent and success. Few can be as predictable and insensible in their contrariness. And few are so desperate to evince their brattish desire to shock – and so artless in its application – that they cannot be bothered even to find any pretence for doing so.

That someone as ill-educated, talentless, idiotic and without any redeeming virtue as she could attain celebrity in this land says much about what its people think is worth celebrating; for she could not fare well were it not that society is degraded to the point of an “open-minded and inclusive” toleration of degradation. But I have said enough; for the less said about her, the better, lest one leave a trace.

Fewtril #20

A man who doubts everything is a fool who does not wish to be caught out again.

GCSE in Plum Sauce

If someone had speculated thirty years ago that thirty years thence a qualification might be gained by answering such questions as how one might order a take-away, one might have reasonably assumed, in the absence of specific evidence to the contrary, that he was forecasting some educational scheme for the mentally retarded.

.....We latter-day souls, however, know better than to assume the best, and we would be right to assume the worst; for such a qualification is now offered to high-school pupils taking the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), the highest qualification that a British high-school pupil might normally attain.
.....According to a report in The Sunday Telegraph (28th August 2005), the GCSE in Leisure and Tourism sets such tasks as “Describe what customers need to do to receive a delivery service from an Indian take-away restaurant”, and “Other than Indian food, name one other type of food often provided by take-away restaurants”. (Regarding the latter task, I feel it is only fair that the writer of the examination paper ought to be set with a task such as “Other than the one here, give another example of a tautology”.)
.....If I were to speculate about the future of education, then I would say that thirty years hence we might see a GSCE in Bolstering One's Self-Esteem, an A-Level in One's Petty Personal Opinions, and a PhD in Feeling Good about One’s Self through Bogus Scholarship. But this would be easy speculation; for these are already present in all but name.

Revolutionary Choices

Weekly Worker is the choleric organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee) (CPGB (PCC)), not to be confused with the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), whose organ is the Communist Review, which is not to be muddled with the New Communist Party of Britain (NCPB), whose organ is The New Worker, nor with the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPB(M-L)), whose organ is Workers, which on no account should be mixed up with the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (RCPB (M-L)), whose organ is Workers’ Weekly. None of these, moreover, should be confused with the old Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), whose quarrelsome existence from 1920 and whose disputatious demise in 1991 has given us in no small part this wonderful array of communist parties.
.....As I say, Weekly Worker is the organ of the CPGB (PCC), and it shows all the sore sedition of its socialist forebears, and no fewer of their fantasies. Therein, for instance, a chap by the name of Peter Manson writes with all the bolshiness that a brat can bring to bear. Perhaps if daddy had bought him that pony for his thirteenth birthday, he would have turned out to be an altogether different man. Perhaps then little Peter wouldn’t have determined to continue his tantrum all the way into his adult life. What is certain, however, is that the now adult Mr Manson is angry at the West, and wishes us to glimpse a better world of solidarity, slaughter and socialist revolution:

Just as the ruling class knows who its main enemy is, so too do we. That is why we are for the defeat of the US-UK occupation [in Iraq] and, what is more, uphold the right of the peoples of Iraq to expel the invaders. However, we are not indifferent to the political programme of the Iraqi resistance. In fact there is not a single resistance: there are many resistances, including those who at present are not using the methods of armed struggle.

.....True, if we had to choose, we would prefer the victory even of the islamists or Ba’athists to that of the imperialists. But we do not have to choose between these two forces. We favour the imperialists being driven out at the hands of a working class-led movement, and, crucially, using the crisis caused by the occupation of Iraq to bring about regime change in both the US and UK.

Peter Manson, “Defend the ‘Traitor’ George Galloway”, in Weekly Worker, 589, Thursday, 11th August 2005.

As we have seen, however, we in the United Kingdom are rather spoilt for choice in our revolutionary vanguards. Doubtlessly Mr Manson believes that his particular brand of sedition should take the lead in regime change. Before I can make my choice, however, I would need to know where all the modern communist parties stood on the question of pipe-smoking: the briar or the meerschaum, the long-stemmed or the short-, whether it is a bourgeois reaction or a proletarian affirmation. It would be a terrible shame, however, if bitter deliberation and schism thereover were to result in the delaying of the revolution for another hundred years or so.

A Modern Heresy

How would you credit the idea that breeds of dog are an illusion, a social construct, and an outdated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concept? You would think it ludicrous, wouldn’t you? How about human races? Ah, now there we have it! They’re an illusion, a social construct, and an outdated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concept, aren’t they?
.....Empirically, breeds in dogs and races in humans are similar. Yet in cherished belief, they are wholly different. Under no political compulsion to see breeds of dog as anything but what they are – as having biological reality –, we can see breeds of dog for what they are. But under political compulsion to see human races as anything but what they are – as having biological reality –, we can be compelled into thinking them a social myth.
.....At least this is how it is in the West. In Japan, for instance, the claim that human races are a myth would strike most as utterly against all evidence; and so it is, but then the population of Japan has not yet been reduced to the level of useful idiocy that the West now enjoys. In England, the mere mention of the possibility of the biological existence of race brings everyone out in a sweat. Good people just know that race is an outdated and unscientific concept, so outdated and unscientific, in fact, that any rational discussion or modern scientific evidence to the contrary is deemed heretical.
.....It is not only race that we are not allowed to see. In England nowadays, to come to one’s senses and see the world aright is treated as the grossest solecism. We must all commit ourselves to some sacred and binding falsehoods, lest we cause offence to the readily and expediently offendable; we must all repudiate the evidence of our senses and place our faith in the sayings of our intellectuals, lest we be denounced. For have you not heard? While our senses are irredeemably corrupt, and reason a useless organ, the political sayings of our opinion-shapers and masters are the hardest facts and the unchallengeable tenets of truth.
.....Every fallen age has its sacred falsehood to which it is a heresy not to commit, and this age is no different.

Wrestling with Tenure

There is scholarship and then there is sociology; the latter is alike to the former in the same way that a collage pasted together by the mentally retarded is akin to fine art. Perhaps the only thing to be said for sociology is that it keeps its professors away from the more important occupations in society, such as medicine, where they might with wonted contrariness prescribe the disease and symptomise the cure.

.....That it is not now a serious intellectual discipline is illustrated by the following excerpt from a study by Danielle Soulliere, published in the Electronic Journal of Sociology:

Aim

The aim of this study was to investigate the themes of masculinity revealed in television professional wrestling programs and to explore the way in which these themes of masculinity were constructed by these programs.

Method

In total, 118 episodes of WWE programming were recorded and analysed for themes of masculinity.

Results

During the initial viewings, it became apparent to the researcher that the announcers, audience and performers were intimately involved in the construction of masculinity. . . . [Moreover] . . . the following major themes were revealed to be significant markers of masculinity and are consistent with the dominant hegemonic masculinity prevalent in North American society: aggression and violence, emotional restraint, dominance, achievement and success, competition, toughness, risk-taking, courage, and heterosexuality. These themes effectively define what it means to be a man in professional wrestling as well as the larger society.

(Danielle Soulliere, "Masculinity on Display in the Squared Circle: Constructing Masculinity in Professional Wrestling", Electronic Journal of Sociology (2005))

Now, for the sake of brevity, I have left out some of the finer details of the method, such as the swallowing whole of the theory of social constructivism; and for the sake of sanity, I have not included all the fatuous results. It is enough to say that, after umpteen-hours watching – sorry, investigating, exploring and analysing – the blusterous exertions of spandex-clad baboons, Ms Soulliere has concluded, firstly, that wrestlers behave like blusterous baboons in spandex, and secondly, that this behaviour is socially constructed.
.....The whole tedious affair could have been boiled down to the following non-argument:

I, and some of the writers I cite, think that masculinity has certain characteristics and is socially constructed.

I have watched many hours of professional wrestlers displaying these same characteristics, which I think are socially constructed.

Therefore,

I think masculinity is constituted of these characteristics and is socially constructed.

That which is banal in this study is already known: that society affects men and men affect society. And that which is absurd is yet to be shown: that society constructs masculinity in toto. If I might venture an opinion, I would say it all sounds like a well-paid, socially flippant waste of time.