Fewtril #39

Journalists have developed a kind of sincerity beyond normal bounds, being that they are able to write what they do not believe and then believe what they read.

Fewtril #38

Even if by the mania for social progress we were to reach the highest possible expression of human society, it would not last long; for the mania would demand that there was still further to go.

An Instance of Desperate Defamation

In the intemperate pages of CounterPunch, (“America’s best political newsletter”, according to Out of Bounds magazine, but “America’s least sane rant-rag”, according to me), Alexander Cockburn makes a strong case for the weakness of his character:

Last year Brockes interviewed the black British poet, Benjamin Zephaniah after he refused an OBE. Towards the end of the piece, Brockes asked Zephaniah about what he was reading:

“I ask him what he is reading at the moment. ‘Chomsky’, he says. ‘I am always reading Chomsky.’

“I tell him I find Chomsky hard work. ‘Really?’ he says. ‘Really? That’s cos you ain’t got a Birmingham accent.’ And he throws back his head and brays like a donkey.”

This is a good illustration of a characteristic of many of these showcase interviews, where the interviewer sneaks in a kidney punch after the interview is over, when she’s safely back in the office. So the readers are left to warm their hands over the rancid and somehow racist snap of “brays like a donkey”.

Alexander Cockburn, “Storm Over Brockes’ Fakery”, CounterPunch, 5th/6th November 2005.

Quite how “brays like a donkey” is racist is unknown to me, but then perhaps it is unknown to Mr Cockburn, who has to rely on the phrase “somehow racist” just so that he can pin the tail on the donkey, as it were.

A Lesson for Mobsters

With regard to the rioting in France, there has been much talk in our newspapers about how France might learn from Britain, whose progressive policies have partly satisfied the mob, principally by letting it run riot every weekend.

But we on this side of the channel might take from the events in France further support for a lesson that we have already learnt: namely, that if one wishes a democratic government to listen to one’s minority grievances, whether they be justified or not, then one is often best served by hurling petrol-bombs than by writing letters to one’s elected representatives.

Such extra-electoral deeds go against all the stated principles of democracy, of course, about which our government is ever keen to inform us, but it is a fact – regrettable though it be – that democratic governments often do not listen to minority grievances until forced to do so. This does not mean they will necessarily give in to force; indeed, if the force is small, or if fighting the force will bring advantages, or if there is no other choice but to fight, then our democratic governments will most probably fight without concession. If a threat is grave, however, and concessions can be granted to assuage it, concessions moreover that do not lose them power or prestige, then grant them they may.

Certainly the talk will be of never giving in, of granting no concessions to violence, of looking for peaceful and democratic solutions, but all the time they will be listening and weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of treating with it. One cannot reasonably deny after all, that, if the IRA had been a nationalist-republican knitting circle, then Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness would still be irksomely spitting sponge-cake and dropping stitches, instead of sharing power at Stormont.

On the other hand, it has been noticed that democratic governments do not tend to fear little old ladies, that is unless they form a majority or brandish Molotovs. And until such day as they do, their grievances – being of a peaceful minority – will not be treated as seriously as those of a majority or a violent minority.

One will not need the insight of a sage in order to notice over the next few years the concessions that the French Government will grant to its population’s violent minority; and one will need only the brains of a mobster to learn well the lesson therefrom.

(This post also appears at The Sharpener.)

Fewtril #37

One may fairly doubt whether the absurd claim that everyone’s views are right in his own way bespeaks tolerance rather than a desire to put one’s own views beyond question.

Pardon Us For Breathing

In order to soothe their rages, the mentally ill were once encouraged to weave baskets or daub canvases with crapulent depictions of their crazy dreams, but now, whether it is owing to a change in psychiatric theory or a lack of art-and-craft materials, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of loons writing letters to the newspapers, an example of which follows:

Sir: Thirty years ago the world population stood at 3 billion. Today the poor benighted planet accommodates 6.47 billion people - and all of us exhaling CO2 (not to mention hot air).

Leaving aside questions of the amount of CO2 produced in the course of manufacturing and selling the vast numbers of ridiculous products which we are told are now essential to our lives, what is the carbon emissions impact of 6.47 billion people merely breathing in and out, and what (if anything) can or should we do about that?

LEANDRA BRIGGS
BRIGHTWELL-CUM-SOTWELL, OXFORDSHIRE

(Leandra Briggs, “Letters”, The Independent, 2nd November 2005.)

In an attempt to answer Ms Briggs’ last and most thought-provoking question, I suppose our very own Labour Government could ban breathing in public places, but, though some of its ministers might find the policy an exciting one, it would be hard to enforce, as would a breathe-slowly policy. Wholly impracticable would be a No-Breathing Friday, an impracticability which is to be regretted, because it would cut British emissions by 14.3 percent. Generally felt to be inhumane would be a cull-of-the-population policy, though, with a discriminating eye, the Labour Government would be able thereby to increase its share of the vote as well as reduce human carbon dioxide emissions, a “double-spanker” in Labourite ministerial terms. We could, of course, put pressure on those fat greedy Americans to reduce their lung-capacities, but we would first need to overcome that entrenched American prejudice that sees a lungful of air as fundamental to their way of life.

Now, if we cannot yet find a practicable and humane way to stop people breathing, then we’ll need to stop them breeding. This will at least hold emissions in check. And if we are to tackle this problem in earnest, we will need to implement a world-wide policy; for the majority of these billions of earth-damaging humans live and breathe in the Third and Second Worlds. In the Second World, the Chinese Government has already taken the lead by restricting births to one child per couple. Why not implement a similar policy in the Third World, enforced by the United Nations? Non-governmental organisations could also help, encouraging students in the First World to take gap-years in the Third World, where they might build cold showers in places such as Namibia, Sierra Leone or Sunderland.

If Ms Briggs is not seeking policies, however, but rather imploring us to make individual efforts of conscience, then perhaps she could set us an example and stop breathing. The gesture would be appreciated.

Wanhope

A cheery whistle is unlikely to dispel the shadows of a creeping despair, but at least it raises the sound of that apt spirit which feels duty-bound to stand fast and not let the buggers grind him down; for I should not like to give myself up to gloominess, preferring such whistles and cheerfulness that life can still foster; nor should I like to bring some gloom upon you; and yet after all this I must say that I find the prospects for England bleak.

In our crass and coarse land, even the mediocrity of a hundred years ago appears vaunted and out of the reach. Baseness has become the order of the day, and conformity thereto an imperative; for the herd can brook no extraordinariness when its sentiments rule; and now they begin to rule. There are few persons nowadays who do not share the herd’s mentality, and it is rarer still to meet a man who dares speak against it; for cowardice in the face of this vast multitude abounds, and any nobility of character that a man might still possess stands as an object for ridicule, and, if not brought to heel thereby, becomes an object for hatred.

But it is by a rank artifice that the herd’s base sentiments and resentments rule at all; for it was by provocation of such sentiments that the herd was first mustered and by which its continuing movement is maintained, carrying the careers and power-ambitions of nefarious persons.

Against this mass movement, little headway can be made. As Kierkegaard wrote, “To battle against princes and popes . . . is easy compared with struggling against the masses, the tyranny of equality, against the grin of shallowness, nonsense, baseness and bestiality.” (The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, tr. & ed. by A. Dru, (London: Fontana Books, 1958), journal for 1854, p.234.) Few can or will struggle against this herd, the ease of conformity and the perverse sense of righteousness derived therefrom being too tempting to resist; and thus whatever the herd wreaks, whether it be ugliness, baseness or tyranny, it wreaks almost irresistibly.

Still, there’s no use blubbing and besnotting one’s blouse. One could do worse than heed an ancient exhortation: Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað.

Fewtril #36

An intellectual may not know much about the making of omlettes, but few men can recite more thoroughly than he the necessity of breaking eggs.

Fewtril #35

If we were to reckon solely upon what many a man tells us, we should begin to believe that free will is found only in the good deeds of his friends and the bad of his foes.

An Instance of Linguistic Nihilism

You might think it uncontroversial for me say that, if a man has one leg, he is a one-legged man; and if indeed you were to find it uncontroversial, there is hope for you yet; for of course it should be uncontroversial. But the world is populated by all kinds of ideologues and irrationalists and squarking parrots, and thus not even the most reasonable and sound proposition can be expected to escape some nitwitted objection.

.....Now that the timid man of modern sensitivites recoils from unpleasant realities, as a worm recoils from a lighted match, one can barely expect him to tolerate such a proposition as “he is a one-legged man”; for he is likely to object that it defines the man by a “negative” term, and thus is best eschewed. But this is nonsensical as well as cowardly. The term does not define him, it defines something about him. The predicate (“is a one-legged man”) has no exhaustive force upon the subject, that is to say, it does not say everything that can be said about him. In fact, it is a fallacy to believe that the verb “to be” acts as a sign of equivalence in an equation of subject with predicate. Rather, the predicate tells us something about the subject.

.....It ought to be similarly uncontroversial to say that, if a man has schizophrenia, he is a schizophrenic man, but controversy haunts this too:

To call people schizophrenic, as [the psychologist] Oliver James does most liberally, is to define them, label and name them by their illness. Something that medicine is belatedly trying to eschew.

John Foskett, Letter to The Guardian, 25th October 2005.

One can see the fallacy of predicate-subject equivalence in this; for calling people schizophrenic does not define them except in respect of a distinction between them and those who do not have schizophrenia – in other words, it defines that aspect about them that distinguishes them from non-schizophrenics. Now, if a man has schizophrenia, there are situations in which it is pertinent to communicate the fact of the existence of this mental illness in him, for which communication a label is necessary. Surely, then, if a psychologist is discussing schizophrenia, it is pertinent for him to label those who have schizophrenia as schizophrenic. (There are of course situations in which it is not pertinent to use the label “schizophrenic” as a discriminating term. If a man is schizophrenic, and someone asks, “Is he tall?”, and the answer comes as “No, he’s schizophrenic”, one sees immediately not only the uselessness of the discrimination, but also the absurdity of seeing “schizophrenic” and “tall” as defining the person in toto rather than an aspect of him.)
.....How then would our letter-writer prefer schizophrenics to be labelled? Well, as he makes clear, he would prefer no label at all. In other words, he would choose a neutral and “non-discriminating” label that does not communicate that a person has schizophrenia, one that would cover many or even all persons, a label such as “worthy citizen” or “human being” or some such fluff; and thus communication would be destroyed precisely in terms of what we wished to communicate, namely that the person has schizophrenia. And it is precisely thereby that we begin to glimpse the nihilism that lies behind objections to such discrimination; for in the besetting madness of nihilism is the desire to level and conflate, to make meaningful communication impossible.

.....I might after all label the letter-writer a fool, though this by no means defines everything about him, and does not, for instance, begin to sum up that he might be kind or cruel, humorous or sombre, conscientious or irresponsible. It does not begin to tell us whether he fancies his secretary, has ambitions to pilot an aeroplane, speaks in a deep voice, picks his toenails, or dances the Watusi on a Tuesday night. Rather, it is a label perfectly suited to distinguish him from non-fools.

Radical Pedagogues and Malaprops

One ought to be charitable enough in one’s interpretations of the sayings of any man, such that, when he says he slept like a baby last night, one does not construe it to mean that he cried and wet the bed; for to interpret a saying against the meaning which a person has obviously imputed thereto shows a meanness of spirit and a perversity of will that is becoming to the scoundrel but not to any man who would fain hold some sense of decency.

It is by a similar criterion of charity, that, when two radical pedagogues opine that “Social inequities in the forms of sexism, racism, and classicism [sic] become means to insure inequity”, one presumes they are not railing in part against classical scholarship. Rather, one takes it that they have made a mistake in their choice of word, and that what they really mean is classism.

The opportunity to enjoy the simple pleasure of this malaprop we owe to Dr Stacey Gray Akyea and Dr Pamela Sandoval in their turgidly titled paper “A Feminist Perspective on Student Assessment: An Epistemology of Caring and Concern” (Radical Pedagogy, Vol 6:2, Winter 2005.), in which one finds the usual stock phrases, excuses and obsessions of egalitarian radicalism. The following quote from the paper contains another instance of the malaprop, but it contains also a statement that clearly reveals the kind of society that these fighters for social justice would like to see created:

While discussion of innate abilities and personal development appear to be on opposite sides of establishing a literate democratic society, there are other issues, which equally present undue challenges to teaching such as social inequalities in the form of sexism, racism and classicism [sic].

(ibid.)

Here the authors are verbally rich enough to be explicit in partly defining what they mean by the phrase “literate democratic society”, and thus no charity need be extended to them; for by their own words they make it quite plain that they feel that a “literate democratic society” would require for its establishment – and thus presumably for its maintenance – an intolerance against discussion of innate abilities and personal development. If I find the prospect of this “literate democratic society” of theirs rather a bleak one, I am at least consoled with the hope that what they mean by “literate” connotes at the very least that the professors and the pedagogues will be able to consult dictionaries and learn to distinguish between words, though for the benefit of your consideration, I must confess that I entertain many hopes for many unlikely happenings.

Fleshly Matters

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast” – so wrote Alexander Pope; though, if he had ever read the personal classifieds in the London Review of Books, he might have added that at the distant prospect of fleshly matters, desperation is not shy in springing forth either:

I have a recipe for space cakes. My theory is that, when eaten, the human body no longer needs oxygen to survive for as long as the cakes are being digested. The key ingredient is a derivative of a plant used by inhabitants of the Pacific islands thousands of years ago that enabled them to dive for extended periods whilst fishing. Once made stable, this ingredient lasts longer in the human body, making longer, less cumbersome space-walks possible. What I currently lack, however, is the money to make this venture happen. That’s where you come in: big-chested 21-year old rich totty with fondness for 62-year old loons. Write quickly – time, and the nurses, are against me. Box no. 20/06.

(London Review of Books, (Classified: Personals) Vol. 27, No. 20: 20th October 2005)

It warms the cockles, does it not?

Fewtril #34

One ought to learn to appreciate well the comedic value of a world that puts us in sight of the narcissistic ignoramus who opines that education is the solution to every opinion that does not tally with his.

An Education in Fakery

Zoë Williams of The Guardian rues that many of us do not appreciate modern art, and believes that the reason for this disinclination lies in education: “Many of us think modern art is rubbish because our visual education ended at the age of about seven”. (Zoë Williams, “When a shed is not a shed” The Guardian, 18th October 2005.)

Ah, so that’s it! There was I thinking that my opinions of modern art were determined by my aesthetic faculties’ having not yet degraded into a thick slime of pretension which oozes through to disingenuous appreciation; and now I am told that these faculties have not yet been sufficiently formed! I shall get me away to a night-school for a class in special pleading; for though it seems that an appreciation for a Rubens or a Michelangelo requires no education, an appreciation for a bog-roll in a gallery does. Doubtlessly I should need to be taught to appreciate ugly tat; for I am yet to learn to appreciate that a turd on a doll’s house could express the patriarcho-fascistic nature of domestic life; or that a Peruvian peasant’s toothbrush stuck up a rabbit’s arse does indeed bring into question the whole legitimacy of Western Civilisation. Should I learn also that all those mumbling half-wits who produce such things, and all those rapacious merchants who sell them, and all those tasteless posers who buy them, have sensibilities beyond my scrutiny?

Of course not. These people do not love or appreciate art; they are philistines, and as such, art for them has value only in its utility. To the poser – the defender of such things – modern art has utility in its allowing him to pretend that he has aesthetic faculties that reach beyond common appreciation. After all, the aesthetic qualities of a Rembrandt or a Raphael are obvious enough that even the dulled faculties of the lower classes might appreciate them, even if not quite as highly as indiscriminate breeding or stone-cladding. And the staunchly conservative Colonel and the bourgeois housewife – they too might appreciate a Hogarth or a Holbein. Now, it would never do – would it, darling? – to admit that one shares the same faculties as they possess. Never at all. One must instead pretend to appreciate something that isn’t there – to pretend to find in artless rubbish a beauty, a form, a harmony and a meaning – for fear of appearing insufficiently progressive in one’s tastes and understanding.

Fewtril #33

Some of our uneducated are qualified enough to mistake a qualification for an education.

An Anti-Capital Idea

The kernel of the idea that capital is not exclusively an economic concept, but also a social and a cultural one, has probably been around since Man first began not only to covet his neighbour’s ox, but also to fancy his wife, begrudge him his friends, and envy his whittling-skills; but its theoretical expression has had to wait until society had advanced far enough to sustain the dead-weight of French sociologists, and only then did the idea find full bloom under the care of Pierre Bourdieu:

It is in fact impossible to account for the structure and functioning of the social world unless one reintroduces capital in all its forms and not solely in the one form recognized by economic theory. . . . [C]apital can present itself in three fundamental guises: as economic capital, . . . as cultural capital, . . . and as social capital, . . . [though] it has to be posited simultaneously that economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital and that these transformed, disguised forms of economic capital, never entirely reducible to that definition, produce their most specific effects only to the extent that they conceal (not least from their possessors) the fact that economic capital is at their root, in other words ― but only in the last analysis ― at the root of their effects.

Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital” (Originally published as “Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital”. in Soziale Ungleichheiten (Soziale Welt, Sonderheft 2), edited by Reinhard Kreckel. Otto Schartz & Co., Goettingen, 1983.) p. 242-252 (original emphasis). Translated by Richard Nice.

Cultural capital includes knowledge, skills, talents, and aspects of behaviour such as manners and accent; and it may be seen that possession of a cultural resource that most others do not have (for example, literacy in a largely illiterate society) can bestow high cultural capital. Social capital involves human relationships and group memberships, and it may be seen that possession of a social resource that most others do not have (for example, knowing people in high places), can bestow high social capital.

Now, this is all very well, as sociological ideas go, but the chatter of our intellectuals cannot go for long without broaching the subject of the unequal distribution of capital; and since to them it is a given that inequality is a bad thing, talk soon turns to redistribution. Yet where once – at least since Marx and Engels – redistribution of capital from the haves to the have-nots was thought of almost exclusively in economic terms, it is now increasingly thought of in these social and cultural terms too.

In economic, social and cultural terms, everyone belongs in manifold different ways to both the haves and the have-nots. One may, for instance, have great charm but not a high degree of intelligence; one may have great wealth but no understanding of local government; one may have a decent knowledge of physics but not of diesel engines; one may have a talent for sport but not for writing; and so on. That is to say, one’s possessions are not just physical objects; and it is thus that social and cultural capital includes all those things that you possess that can have some value in society: ideas, intelligence, knowledge, talent, friendships, number of siblings, location, accents, and so forth.

Now, if it happens that an idea prescribes that each person should be equal in all these forms of capital, and thus that the relations to the means of production for these forms of capital must be regulated to this effect – or in other words, that all things, including the making of friendships, the development of abilities, the acquisition of knowledge, and the formation of ideas, must be controlled – then what we have is a prescription for totalitarianism. It does not matter that French sociologists of the calibre of Bourdieu dress it up with talk about freedom from oppression and justice for the oppressed. This talk is just what it always is with French intellectuals: bollix.

We should find rather that the future of anti-capitalism in this extended sense means nothing less than the attempted destruction of life worth living; for just as economic levelling means in practice not the elevation of the wealth of Man, but rather an impoverishment, so cultural and social levelling means a benumbing and a benighting and a bedevilling of his life.