A Journalist's Inclination

Every journalist ought to struggle against that inclination of his to call brave those efforts of which he approves; yet typically it seems to him to be the most tiresome obligation, for which he has neither the pip nor the principle. An example:

Hilary Benn’s foray into war-torn, drought-plagued Somalia last week was a brave attempt to focus attention on the land the world forgot. [1]

It’s not as if Mr Benn was ordered to take Hill 523, armed with nothing but a bread-knife and a winning smile. Rather, he had a quick shuftie around a refugee camp, and then he came home, pledging to spend somebody else’s money. Biggety perhaps, but hardly brave.

[1] Simon Tisdall, “The land the world forgot”, The Guardian, 23rd May 2006.

Die Glaubens-Lehrer

“Most teachers of a faith defend their propositions, not because they are convinced of their truth, but because they have once asserted their truth.”

.....

[“Die meisten Glaubens-Lehrer verteidigen ihre Sätze, nicht weil sie von der Wahrheit derselben überzeugt sind, sondern weil sie die Wahrheit derselben einmal behauptet haben.”]

.....

G.C. Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher, (Frankfurt am Main und Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1984), J.502 from Sudelbuch J (1789-1793), p. 387.

The Prophet of Merciless Vitality

George F. Will tells a story of how Isaac Deutscher, biographer and acolyte of Leon Trotsky, once opined amidst the tea, banter, and hot sickle buns of the Oxford Marxist Society that the “[p]roof of Trotsky’s farsightedness is that none of his predictions has come true yet” [1]. If one had the temper to set one’s mind in line with that thought, one might suppose that the proof of Trotsky’s farsightedness grows more compelling by the year, although it ought to be appreciated that such a mind-set would behove the use of a bib to gather the fluid proceeds of one’s mental labours.

.....If time has not yet given us the occasions by which to refute all of Trotsky’s predictions—and only eternity would be sufficient time in which to refute those that are temporally indefinite—it has nonetheless afforded us with much evidence by which we might justifiably meet his glib pronouncements with hollow laughter. In addressing the American people on the prospect of the communisation of the United States, for example, Trotsky wrote:

Should America go communist as a result of the difficulties and problems that your capitalist social order is unable to solve, it will discover that communism, far from being an intolerable bureaucratic tyranny and individual regimentation, will be the means of greater individual liberty and shared abundance. [2]

Trotsky would have had the American people believe that no example could be drawn from the condition of communism in the Soviet Union, and that “true” Marxian communism, productive of individual liberty and shared abundance, could be built in the United States. Trotsky himself believed, however, that the American people were different from continental Europeans in one important respect, a difference that could hinder the process of their communisation:

[Y]our rationalism itself is weakened by empiricism and moralism. It has none of the merciless vitality of the great European rationalists. [3]

Thus: close your eyes and harden your hearts; let no facts inform the soundness of your premises, nor scruples hinder the drawing of the consequences therefrom; be progressive and merciless!—such are the prescriptions of the man whom Christopher Hitchens calls a “prophetic moralist”. [4]

.....In whatever political form it comes, it hardly need be said that it is the duty of all good men to resist this “merciless vitality”—and better to do so without euphemism.

[1] George F. Will, Text of a Speech by George F. Will, delivered 8th June 2001, in the Archibald Room of the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, The Layman Online, 10th June 2001.

[2] Leon Trotsky, “If America Should Go Communist”, Liberty, 23rd March 1935, transcribed for the Trotsky Internet Archive.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Christopher Hitchens, “The Old Man” (Review of the three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher), The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2004.

Fewtril #96

If some unearthly being were to list the most common symptoms of madness on earth, happen it would find them mostly unnamed by earthlings, except as moral prescriptions.

Shame

“I have no embarrassment at all. No shame”, says Bono [1], which is just as well, for shame is one of those things that marks us out from beasts and pop-stars alike.

[1] Bono, Interview with Eddie Izzard, The Independent, 16th May 2006.

Devotion to Stooping

If a mark could be set at that level down to which the demotic politician is willing to stoop, it would most likely be set no higher than at that level up to which the majority of his constituents are willing to reach, so that there will be not too great a gap between them; and where there is a demand for a politician of a certain kind, we should not think that we will want for a supply, as Lord Salisbury wittily observed:

[I]f a Member of Parliament were obliged to dance upon his head for the amusement of his constituents, it is probable that men of fortune and independence would be found to do it, and to assure the spectators that the time devoted to the feat was the proudest moment of their lives. [1]

Some believe that such devotion is to be applauded as the surest sign that our politicians respond to the demands of their constituents. And so they do—as surely as a bladder responds to the demands of a bar-room binge.

[1] Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, quoted by Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London: Phoenix, 2000), p. 60.

A Waft from a Windbag

“Evil is something immanent to truth” [1]. Such is the opinion of Alain Badiou, standard-issue French windbag and Marxian buffoon.

.....Now, I do not doubt that truth can be used for evil or for bad effect—for instance, in teaching a terrorist how to set off a bomb, or in telling a bald man, preternaturally sensitive to his hairless condition, that one can see aeroplanes reflected in his shiny dome—but is it immanent therein? This would mean that telling the truth per se is the speaking of evil. If that is what they have been teaching at the École Normale Supérieure all these years, the attitudes of its alumni begin to make more sense after all.

.....Professor Badiou, having been saintly and studious in his eschewal of truth, is also of the opinion that “with science or with totalitarianism there is always a desire for the omnipotence of truth” [2], in which there appears some deliberate confusion between “truth” and “truth-claims”. After all, from the fact that the totalitarian desires the omnipotence of his truth-claims, it does not follow that he desires the omnipotence of truth. Countless false ideas have been claimed to be true—for the appeal to truth is undoubtedly a powerful one—but who would deduce from this that there has always been a desire for truth? To believe so is to believe that no-one ever lies or deceives.

.....Badiou, however, appears to be trying to conflate the truth-claims that the totalitarian makes about the world with those that the scientist makes, the implication being that scientific claims about, say, the nature of gravity are no more true—and are no more reflective of the desire for truth—than totalitarian claims about, say, the nature of society. The one is as evil as the other.

.....The question must naturally arise of what he means by the word “truth”; for it is widely known that French windbags are rarely satisfied with conventional usage, what with all the demands of “problematizing” and “transgressing boundaries” and the sundry other ways of keeping themselves and their ideologies in business. Here is what Professor Badiou has to say about truth [3]:

.....

(1) “Truth is first of all something new”;

(2) “A completed truth is a hypothesis, it’s a fiction, but a strong fiction”;

(3) “Truth is always the possibility of its proper destruction”;

(4) “Ethical questions, for me, are questions in the field of truth”;

(5) “[T]ruths are something like pure creations, without finality”.

.....

It is difficult to know what to make of these. We might guess that for something to be called true in Badiou’s scheme, it must be new, created, infinite, ethical, and strongly fictional if completed. Since these “truths” about truth were written in 2002, it is unclear whether they are now untrue, in accordance with (1), though presumably if they are still true, they are presumably false, since they are “something like pure creations”, which, if completed, are strongly fictional, and contain moreover “the possibility of [their own] proper destruction”, whatever that may mean.

.....If, as it seems from the statements above, Badiou does not mean by “truth” what we normally mean by it—to wit, the conformity or the correspondence of propositions to what is the case—against which pseudo-philosophy must make its case if it is to be seen by charlatans and excitable undergraduates everywhere as “bold” and “transgressive” in its challenge to truth, then his assertions against this normal conception of truth do not hit their target, since the target has become that other thing which he means by the word “truth”. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of his strategy lies in the equivocation of usage between denoting his eccentric—some might say indecipherable—concept of truth and the concept of truth as we normally conceive it, wherewith the impressionable fool can take any strikes against the former as strikes against the latter.

.....I could, of course, be accused of quoting out of context. The trouble is, it is more difficult to determine from the whole context what he means; for there is a haze of obfuscation and a tangle of intractable phrases. Moreover, miscreants such as Badiou may so render their writings that they can always claim to have been quoted out of context. The trick requires that one’s boldest and clearest assertions, most likely to be quoted in all fairness as the best summation of one’s position and as meaning what they appear to say, are set within an expanded and intractable context that includes subtle and obscured rescissions of those assertions. If the skill is developed, these rescissions may appear as one pole of an ambiguity, the other pole acting in concord with the general position as upheld by one’s clearest and boldest assertions.

.....Discussing the intellectual charlatans of his own time—most notably Fichte, Schelling and Hegel—Schopenhauer had this to say:

From every page and every line, there speaks an endeavour to beguile and deceive the reader, first by producing an effect to dumbfound him, then by incomprehensible phrases and even sheer nonsense to stun and stupefy him, and again by audacity of assertion to puzzle him, in short, to throw dust in his eyes and mystify him as much as possible. [4]

So it is with the writing of Alain Badiou, a thought-rotter of the first order, in whom a profound mendacity is something immanent.

[1] Alain Badiou, “On the Truth-Process: An Open Lecture by Alain Badiou” online at the European Graduate School, August 2002. http://www.egs.edu.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Arthur Schopenhauer, “Sketch of a History of Ideal and Real: Appendix”, Pererga and Paralipomena, vol.1, tr. by E.F.J. Payne, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.23.

Laws of Migration

“We oppose all immigration laws” [1], says the Revolutionary Communist Group, though one may fairly suppose it has a different view on emigration.

[1] “What We Stand For”, Revolutionary Communist Group, online at http://www.rcgfrfi.easynet.co.uk/about/wwsf.htm.

Fewtril #95

No professional doom-foreteller has yet been so bold or so brave as to utter what is perhaps the worst of his forebodings: that he will awake one morning only to find the tulips in bloom, the birds in song, and that all’s well with the world.

A Contender for the Worst Neologism of 2006

Homo-sectual. – n. A person whose “gayness (or homosexuality) is deeply interwoven with personal experiences and understandings of religion”, as in, “the important challenges that homo-sectuals bring to conventional religious norms”. (Jeffrey A. Redding, “Human Rights and Homo-sectuals: The International Politics of Sexuality, Religion, and Law”, Journal of International Human Rights, Vol.4:3, May 2006.

Fewtril #94

Let us hope that the goodness of a man proves an effective resistance even to his most sacred ideals.

Fewtril #93

The trouble with defending that which one suspects to be a fact is that one can very soon come to believe that it is an established one, for no other reason than that one has defended it as though it were.

Fewtril #92

Guilt and shame are important constraints on human behaviour, but the soft-humane wish that no one suffers has extended even to the sufferings caused by guilt and shame, and thus by the action of a pious and humane creed, these constraints have been lessened, so much so that we end up today with so great a deal of shameless and unconscionable behaviour, whereby callousness knows no bounds.

Setting the Benchmark

If the Bumper Book of Pretentious Drivel ever comes to be compiled, surely the following example ought to be included:

“At numerous gigs around Wellington I played my drums and, under the lights, in the midst of sound, in the middle of rhythm, always in between one time or another, I theorized my relation to the drums, my becoming-rhythm, the abstract-machine of player, stick and skin, my self as purely a conduit for other phyla.”

Grayson Cooke, “Human – 1 / Cyborg – 0: A Personal History of a Human-Machine Relation”, Nebula, Vol. 3:1, April 2006. pp.19-20.

Fewtril #91

An ideology can work largely unseen – the suspicion of which drives many a fool to see it everywhere.

A Puritanical Affair

Just occasionally I like to read the pages of the Weekly Worker, that irritable organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain. For sure, it has none of the bounce of Woman’s Weekly, but what it lacks in knitting-patterns and jolly gossip, it makes up for in theoretical blueprints for proletarian dictatorship and bile-spitting excoriations of other socialists, which, whilst devoid of charm and cheer, have nonetheless the power to entertain.

It is a long-standing observation that socialism is by and large a puritanical affair, and no one ought therefore to underestimate the sheer life-numbing cheerlessness of it. Those comrades who still hold out the hope that, come the revolution, there will be a joyful popping of corks in celebration of a new and joyful age, had better reckon with that observation, and still too with the sentiments of their more zealous comrades, who will eye any outbreak of cheer with sober and sinister disapproval.

Consider, for example, the opinions of this joyless blighter from the letters-page of the Weekly Worker:

It is true that people still smoke despite the health warnings on cigarette packets. But fewer people smoke now than did in my youth in the 1960s, and many who still do would like to give it up. It is now generally accepted that tobacco is unhealthy. Government information campaigns have played a part in this. The same could be done for alcohol.

A socialist society would still bear the birthmarks of the bourgeois society from which it emerged. Even a workers’ state, until the process of its self-abolition is complete, would be an authoritarian body. In the final analysis it would be bodies of armed workers imposing their will. The will of the proletariat should be imposed on the bourgeoisie, including those who have profited from the manufacture and sale of drink.

They should not be killed, except where there is no other choice, or fined, but set to hard labour repairing some of the damage they have done. In so doing they may become human; just as a society freed from the poisonous swill sold by profit-hungry capitalists will become both human and humanistic.

Terry Liddle, Letter to the Weekly Worker, 620, 13th April 2006.

This man is clearly out of touch with the current political régime, wherein such chilling revolutionary puritanism finds little favour. Fabians, after all, prefer a gradual approach.