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.

Signs of Age

A social-scientific study, in which participants viewed photographs of persons over the age of seventy in order to assess visual signs of age in the elderly, has concluded that,

The main indicators of age are biological: skin, eyes and hair colour — but supplemented by vigour, style and grooming. [1]

It is to be hoped that this study will finally put to rest the long-standing hypothesis that it is principally cardigans and soup-stains that give the elderly away.

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[1] Helle Rexbye & Jørgen Povlsen, “Visual Signs of Ageing: What are We Looking At?”, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, Vol.2:1, 2007, pp.79-80. (According to the authors, the study has value because it “questions a postmodern [Baudrillardian] fluidity of visual signs — at least when the concern is signs of ageing.” (Ibid., p.80.) Are we really at the stage where scientific research is required to re-affirm the obvious in the face of the absurd?)

The Western Tradition of Humanistic Studies

“So far as there still survives anything of value from the Western tradition of humanistic studies, it is in spite of most of the people in the universities who are the heirs of that tradition.”

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David Stove, “A Farewell to Arts: Marxism, Semiotics, and Feminism”, Cricket versus Republicanism (Sydney: Quakers Hill Press, 1995), p.14.

Haldane and Marxism

It is a great pity that J.B.S. Haldane, evolutionary biologist, co-founder of population genetics, and rather clever chap, was addled somewhat by ideology:

[D]ialectical materialism . . . is not merely a philosophy of history, but a philosophy which illuminates all events whatever, from the falling of a stone to a poet’s imaginings. [1]

One can only guess at what deep reasons might have led so clever a man to fall for something so shallow and foolish; but one can see quite clearly that the greatest gift to the persistence of this folly and many others is the favour of such men.
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[1] J.B.S. Haldane, Preface to Friedrich Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, tr. C. Dutt, (New York: International Publishers, 1940), reproduced online at Marxists.org. (Elsewhere: “I have tried to apply Marxism to the scientific problems of my own day, as Engels did over many years, and Lenin in 1908 [in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism]. I do not doubt that I have made mistakes. A Marxist must not be too afraid of making mistakes.” J.B.S. Haldane, The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences (London: Random House, 1939), reproduced online at Marxists.org, 2002.

Fewtril #205

Perhaps the efficiency of a process advances to such a stage at which it must decline on account of all the time it frees for bored fools to have their brightest ideas on its improvement.

Fewtril #204

Relativism is the compliment that desperation pays to failing ideas.

Fewtril #203

If it is said that a genius typically read only the last chapters of books, one may take this as another — albeit small — sign of the impetuousness of his genius; if, on the other hand, a fool did the same thing, one may take it as further evidence of his frivolity.

Competitive Moralism

Competitive moralism, of which we see too much, is driven by something amoral and animalistic: it is the age-old struggle for supremacy, the competition of rivals, placed in more respectable terms. The struggle becomes absurd — not in its underlying aims which are ever natural — but in the ever greater distance between high claims and base motives, wherewith the only point is in outdoing one’s rivals in “goodness” whilst not actually caring a damn whether anything good will come of it. Intellectual life — that supposedly higher sphere and haven from beastly struggle — becomes diseased with it, even such that, in terrible and political times, there is a delirium of the senses, and a dulling of the faculties, except for the primitive and still acute instincts for success.

Stubborn Principle

Mental vagueness and ellipsis can help a man to continue to believe in a principle that makes him believe he is tolerant. For example, a man says: “I value opinions that differ markedly from my own – but I cannot tolerate this opinion [that differs markedly from my own]”. Upon actually encountering an opinion that differs markedly from his own, he does not tolerate it, and says so, but continues to hold to the principle; for the principle did not, after all, stipulate clearly that he value all opinions that differ markedly from his own, and so he can quite happily find in practice that he never tolerates any such opinion, whilst still maintaining the belief that he does in principle.

Technology and Genetic Drift

If the development of technology in society shields us from some of the genetically deleterious effects of our behaviour, and weakens the influence of the environment on human evolution, then, being that our genotypes would be driven less by natural selection, thereby giving more freedom for alleles to vary randomly, we would expect to see a greater influence of genetic drift in our evolution the more we develop technologically. (This would depend, however, on the size of the population: a larger gene-pool would lessen the influence; a smaller one would increase it.) Over a lengthy span of time, such genetic drift would likely make us less fitted genetically to the environment, though allowing us to be more fitted technologically, assuming that we would continue to make technological adaptations in place of genetical ones; that is to say, the fitness of our phenotypes would come to depend more on technology, at some proportional expense of the genotypical influence. It may happen, however, that the development of technology in society would itself become part of the changing environment by which alleles are selected or rooted out; but that would depend to a great extent upon the permission of the society in which it is developed, that is to say, upon whether we would allow the technological environment to shape us rather than shield us.

Youthful Voting

Chatter turns once again to the question of lowering the age at which a citizen is entitled to vote. Apparently it has come to the notice of some that, by age sixteen, the average youth in this land has tempered his fancies, and tamed his passions, and become sufficiently knowledgeable and wise in the ways of the world, not just in experience, but in education, — having of course left his excellent state-run school with a basic but firm grasp of history, science, mathematics, reading and writing, and so on, — to help in his small way to guide government policy on a sane and beneficent course, without his being easy prey to manipulation and fantastic promises and stupid but appealing ideas, and, on that account, it is felt that “there must . . . be a formal recognition that young people are, in the main, mature and responsible citizens and entitled to respect as such.” [1] Well, it’s all mad-hopeful and politically-induced drivel, of course — “mature and responsible citizens” does not in the main describe even the adults — but I don’t suppose a greater number of irresponsible voters would trouble a government whose blind instincts are in any case for power rather than anything else; for they are grist to its mill.

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[1] Jonathan Pyke, “Let age be no barrier” Comment is Free (The Guardian’s weblog), 24th July 2007. (I made the mistake a few weeks ago of watching Question Time, the invited audience of which on that occasion was composed exclusively of various individuals of the species Homo adolescens. I was interested to observe that they whooped like monkeys.)

On My Jollies

Back in a week or so.

A Sunday Meeting

Anyone stuck for something to do this weekend might consider attending a meeting of The Stalin Society. It will take place in Birmingham on Sunday the 8th of July from 1pm to 4pm at Café One. A talk will be given by Carlos Rule on How the Soviet Union prepared for the Nazi Invasion:

“Carlos Rule will counter the bourgeois slander that the Soviet Union had not been prepared for the Nazi invasion of 1941.” [1]

No doubt speculation that one’s time and historical understanding would be better served by staying in bed all day, or by toddling off to the park in a seizure of boredom to throw bread at ducks, is bourgeois slander of the worst kind.

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[1] The Stalin Society, www.stalinsociety.org.uk/meetings.html