Self-Evident Foolishness

It takes centuries of work by the sharpest and most curious minds to bring to light some particular of knowledge, whereupon it takes only moments for any fool to declare it self-evident. That, say, the blueness of the sky is owed to an unconscious physical process rather than the daily interventions of a god is not at all self-evident. Only presumptuous thoughtlessness or linguistic misusage could declare it so. Hitherto it was assumed that the gods had a hand in everything, and now it is assumed that they have a hand in nothing. Neither can be described as self-evident — except by fools in loose-tonguedness or in receipt of beliefs or facts that they would never have had the wit to decide or discover for themselves.

Advocates of Violence

It is becoming more common to hear a man claim that in no circumstance would he be an advocate of violence. In almost every case this is either humbug or thoughtless talk. Everyone but the genuine pacifist is an advocate of violence; for let us say that I were to break down a man’s door, drink his brandy, and ravish his wife, would he not then be an advocate of violence, even if only by the proxy of the police-force? It should happily go without saying that some violence is justified. The genuine pacifist who argues against this proposition must take the contradictory: that no violence is justified, which, assuming a moralism on his part, means that he believes that violence ought to be avoided at all costs, even at the cost of his brandy.

Nach Deutschland

I am off to Germany tomorrow for a few days, where I intend to be very mindful of local traditions conducive to the happiness of the soul. I must also bear in mind that, when boarding a bus in that great land, if someone wishes me a good trip in English, I must answer him in English, then look a little Scottish and horrified, and then run off. That is one of our traditions.

Crime and Innocence

“Innocence is very far from finding as much protection as crime does.” [1] Thus noted La Rochefoucauld, who hadn’t even read The Guardian.

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[1] [“Il s’en faut bien que l’innocence ne trouve autant de protection que le crime.”] François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, tr. S.D. Warner & S. Douard (South Bend, Indiana: St Augustine’s Press, 2001), §465, p.84.

Young Scallywags

“These young people [gang-yobs] need to be given value and more than that they need to experience economic equality”; [1] for only through the expropriated wealth of others can these misunderstood young scallywags afford to dress themselves in even more expensive sports-clothing, to buy even fancier mobile-phones, and, if old enough, to fit their cars with even wider tyres and exhaust-pipes, because, you know, without these upgrades, they will be forced to be even more violent and unpleasant. Or we could sterilise them — before they start breeding.
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[1] Crystal Mahey, “Gang value”, Comment is Free (The Guardian’s weblog), 5th September 2007.

Untouched

“Every philosophy which believes that the problem of existence is touched on, not to say solved, by a political event is a joke — and a pseudo-philosophy.”

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F.W. Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator”, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.147-8.

A Galton-Survey

“Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three classes, ‘good, medium, bad’, I use a needle mounted as a pricker, wherewith to prick holes, unseen, in a piece of paper, torn rudely into a cross with a long leg. I use its upper end for ‘good’, the cross-arm for ‘medium’, the lower end for ‘bad’. The prick-holes keep distinct, and are easily read off at leisure. The object, place, and date are written on the paper. I used this plan for my beauty data, classifying the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent. Of course this was a purely individual estimate, but it was consistent, judging from the conformity of different attempts in the same population. I found London to rank highest for beauty; Aberdeen lowest.”

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Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (London: Methuen & Co., 1908), pp.315-16. (Available online at Galton.org.)

Some Sense of Culture

Liverpool is to be European Capital of Culture in 2008. One must charitably suppose that it is culture in the anthropological sense.

A Human Concern

“Nothing of human concern is really outside psychiatry.” [1] In this universal purblindness, much of human concern is lost from sight, falling outside the scope of a professional morbidity that sees every kind of behaviour as an ailment, every belief as a delusion, and every attitude as a sickness to be cured.

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[1] Karl Menninger, quoted by Jeffrey Oliver, “The Myth of Thomas Szasz”, The New Atlantis, 13, Summer 2006. (Presumably psychiatry itself — as a human concern — is also a mental disorder to be treated. Cf., Karl Kraus’s saying: “Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.”)

Fewtril #211

Anthropology is the study whereby for every bad idea proposed by Western sophisticates, there can be found a tribe of savages testifying to its usefulness.

Fewtril #210

Evil is very far from banal — it is exciting, intoxicating, and brings spiritual weight and animation to even the most mundane of tasks. If it were otherwise, it wouldn’t prove so attractive, nor would life-dulling piety be needful for those who feel the attraction most strongly.

Fewtril #209

The modern liberal — let us say it: the smug bourgeois — is fit only for comfort and cowardice. All his principles, ideals, values, and aversions stem therefrom.

Fewtril #208

If we wish to know all about the age in which we live, we must also read the writings of those who died before it began, who knew nothing about it at all.

Fewtril #207

Fawney-scholars and frivolous mediocrities, in trivial and low-regarded fields of study, take seriously the work of promoting geniuses from amongst themselves.

Fewtril #206

Be under no illusion: should a terrible and morbid regime be instituted tomorrow, all kinds of shabbiness will step out from the shadows of moral uprightness: excited eyes will fix themselves on the aesthetics of destruction; and pallid minds will feel refreshed in brutal expression, revived and ardent after long oppression.

Nothing Personal, Old Chap

Once the idea has arisen that all ideas are merely the accompanying shadows of various social classes, groups, races, etc, cast in the light of their fixed interests, then another idea may very well present itself: that the only — or at least the surest, quickest, and most effective — way to get rid of an idea is to get rid of the class, group, race, etc, in whose interest it is said to be an ever-attendant shadow. [1]

.....The observation that persons of certain ranks, stations, groups, etc, will tend to express some ideas that sit well with their interests is, of course, old; but the inflexible, universal, and theoretical formulation of it is of relatively recent origin; whereunder, with the licence and urgency of revolution, men of that stamp have been quick to draw the conclusion that argument, persuasion, even “re-education” are slow, inefficient, and ultimately futile means by which to eradicate opposing ideas, so long as the social classes, groups, races, etc, that give rise to them remain. As the founder of the Cheka put it:

[C]ouldn’t this correlation [of ideas with social classes] be altered? Say, through the subjection or extermination of some classes of society? [2]

Radical-revolutionaries, for all their idealism, are still practical people, and, given that they see no moral obstacles around which they must go, since the overriding good is the end towards which they strive, they tend to adopt the most direct route to their destination. As Lichtenberg noted sardonically during the French Revolution:

With conversions, one usually seeks to get rid of the opinion, without offending the head; in France one now acts in a shorter way: one takes away the opinion together with the head. [3]

Naturally, the process of mass-killing needn't be anything personal, for, given the premise, and in the absence of stricture or moral scruple, it can simply be an instrumental process towards a desired end, strictly business, ideally conducted as efficiently as possible, though perhaps with a modicum of indulgence to any humane sensitivities that might remain.

Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly. [4]

So wrote George Bernard Shaw, the renowned playwright and noted humanitarian. Perhaps he had got out of bed on the wrong side that morning, and boiled his breakfast-egg a minute too long. I know I’ve had mornings like that.

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[1] Socialist intellectuals were the first advocates of mass-extermination as official social policy, conceived as the precondition of progress. As George Watson points out: “In the European century that began in the 1840s, from Engels’s article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found.” (George Watson, The Lost Literature of Socialism (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 1998), p.80.) The reader can accept the challenge, and see if he can find an exception.

[2] Feliks Dzerzhinsky, quoted by George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p.252, quoted by Paul Bogdanor, “The Communists as They Really Are”, The Bloodbath Left. http://www.paulbogdanor.com

[3] G.C. Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher (Frankfurt am Main und Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1984), I/242,1 from Sudelbuch K, (1793), p.469. [“Sonst sucht man bei Bekehrungen die Meinung wegzuschaffen, ohne den Kopf anzutasten; in Frankreich verfährt man jetzt kürzer: man nimmt die Meinung mitsamt dem Kopf weg.”]

[4] George Bernard Shaw, Preface to On the Rocks: A Political Comedy (1933), republished online by Project Gutenberg. Therein also: “The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit wilful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else.” [. . .] “[T]he planners of the Soviet State have no time to bother about moribund questions; for they are confronted with the new and overwhelming necessity for exterminating the peasants, who still exist in formidable numbers. . . . For a Communist Utopia we need a population of Utopians; and Utopians do not grow wild on the bushes nor are they to be picked up in the slums: they have to be cultivated very carefully and expensively. Peasants will not do . . .”. Cf., H.G. Wells, another Fabian socialist: “The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish, either, in facing or inflicting death . . . They will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while . . .”. H.G. Wells, Anticipations, Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902), p.300, reproduced online by Project Gutenberg.