Services to Society

“Ministers who are prepared to take the brutal approach to penal policy contribute to the general brutalisation of society”, says Roy Hattersley. [1]

.....It is well to be clear, however, in what sense Mr Hattersley sees fit to recast the meaning of the word “brutal”; for thereby it is “brutal” to lock up a mugger for longer than, say, two years or a murderer for longer than fifteen. On the other hand, letting the brutes out on early release has only a calming effect on society, as they typically set about serving Camomile tea and running charity tombolas.

[1] Roy Hattersley, “Against truth and logic” The Guardian, 19th June 2006.

The Friends of Humanity

The trouble with the friends of humanity is that they will not feel guilty even if everyone is made thoroughly miserable in accordance with their principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. For it seems that their own happiness depends upon the intention of making everyone happy, and such is this dependency, that an odd kind of callousness may arise in the face of even the most terrible consequences of their actions. This callousness—or blindness—was noted by T.S. Eliot:

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves. [1]

The ancient idea that happiness is a by-product of the struggle for virtue, or incidental to other pursuits, or a personal discipline if it is to be a goal at all (such as the Epicureans and Stoics taught), has been largely replaced by this modern idea that we are obliged to make everyone happy. As David Stove says:

That our primary obligation is to increase human happiness, or decrease misery, is an idea only of the last ten minutes, historically speaking. The human race in general has always supposed that its primary moral obligation lies elsewhere: in being holy, or in being virtuous, or in practicing some specific virtue: loyalty or courage, for example. An obligation to increase the general happiness has occupied little if any place in most moral systems, whether of the learned or of the ignorant. But for the contemporaries of whom I am speaking, anything morally more important than human happiness is simply inconceivable. You can easily tell that this is so, by asking any of them to mention an example of something which they regard as extremely morally bad. You will find that what they give, in every case, is an example which turns essentially on pain. [2]

It all sounds very admirable. After all, who could be against the alleviation of suffering? Who could not wish that everyone were happy? But, as I have already suggested, the danger lies with boundless ambition coupled with good intention as a sop to conscience, the greatest of all modern conveniences; for therewith the conscionable life is made easy, untroubled by terrible and unintended consequences; indeed one may effortlessly arrogate to oneself good feelings in direct proportion to good intentions, no matter what the consequences.

.....With utopian dreams, it is all too easy to forget that life is a certain way, and cannot be otherwise.

Ultimately it amounts to this: life necessarily involves tension and suffering; consequently if we wish to abolish tension and suffering, life is to be extinguished. And there is nothing illogical in this last reasoning. [3]

We may be thankful that such dreams are rarely pursued as single-mindedly or consistently as Kolakowski’s logical illustration—thankful, that is, for the messiness of life which the perfectionists and the friends of humanity would like to clean away.

[1] T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party, (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 111, quoted by Thomas Sowell, online at http://www.tsowell.com/quotes.html.

[2] David Stove, “Why You Should be a Conservative”, On Enlightenment (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003), p.173, original emphasis.

[3] Leszek Kolakowski, “The Death of Utopia Reconsidered”, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p.141.

The Death of a Din-Meister

The composer Gyorgy Ligeti has died; and it is only fitting that his passing has become the occasion for a mercifully short cacophony of praise in respect of his legacy.

.....I’ve often wondered if anyone listens to the music of Ligeti or Stockhausen when there is no one else around to witness the act. It strikes me as highly unlikely that someone would sit alone at home and think, “What I need now is a little Ligeti or Stockhausen to raise the spirit or soothe the soul or stimulate the intellect”. I for one would sooner listen to the cistern refilling. Even taking into consideration the adage that there is no accounting for taste, I am still of the strong suspicion that the Ligetis and Stockhausens of this world would get nowhere without playing upon the pretensions of others.

Fewtril #101

One is often told that frowning requires the use of more muscles than smiling, and that, for the sake of reduced effort, one ought to smile rather than frown; and to this one might respond in a similar spirit, declaring cheerily that in the long run it takes less effort to poke a man in the eye than to share daily pleasantries with him.

A Pox Upon Thought

It is sometimes adduced in favour of an idea that it has had a profound effect on thought, as though this fact alone were enough to establish its worth; but I dare say a pandemic of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease would also have a profound effect thereon, though it is eminently doubtful whether this ought to find our warm approval.

.....In our times, if a bad or vacuous idea is to have a profound effect, then it had better be present in the universities, wherein it will be invested with authority and wherefrom it will be spread by convinced and impassioned minds. As Schopenhauer noted:

Guileless and unsophisticated young men go to university full of childlike trust and gaze with awe at the self-styled possessors of all knowledge . . . Now if these innocent youths without judgement are presented, under the name of philosophy, with a complete chaos of thought that is turned upside down, a doctrine of the identity of being and nothing, an assortment of words that cause all thought to vanish from a sound mind, a twaddle recalling bedlam, all this trimmed with touches of crass ignorance and colossal stupidity . . . then these youths will revere even such stuff. They will merely think that philosophy must indeed consist in such abracadabra and will go forth with minds paralysed in which henceforth mere words pass for thoughts; thus they will for ever be incapable of producing real ideas and so will be mentally castrated. As a result, there grows up a generation of impotent, perverse, yet excessively pretentious minds, swelling with plans and purposes and intellectually anaemic, such as we have before us at the present time. [1]

Any man not infected thereby who has read a number of journals in the humanities will know how widely this baneful verbiage has spread, how it not only conceals a lack of ideas, but also inspires ideas of sublime vacuity; and he will know also how deeply such ideas have affected thought, bringing about a sort of vaunted ignorance. In the late eighteenth century, Lichtenberg was remarkably foresighted in view of this:

Nowadays we seek to spread knowledge everywhere; who knows whether in a few hundred years there will not be universities for re-establishing the old ignorance. [2]

For me, there are few sights bleaker than that of eager students trying to perfect the form of madness practised by their professors.

[1] Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Philosophy at the Universities”, Pererga and Paralipomena, vol.1, tr. by E.F.J. Payne, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.167-8.

[2] (“Jetzt sucht man überall Weisheit auszubreiten, wer weiß, ob es nicht in ein paar hundert Jahren Universitäten gibt, die alte Unwissenheit wieder herzustellen.”) G.C. Lichtenberg, Späße und Probleme. (München: Langen/Müller, 1954), p.48.

A Thumb-Law of Controversy

It so often happens that a well-crafted argument is no match for a well-established sentiment, such that in controversy, a resistance is put up, whereby the stronger the opposing case, the firmer one’s resolve to oppose it. As Sydney Smith told Lord John Russell,

Euclid would have had a bad chance with you if you had happened to have formed an opinion that the interior angles of a triangle were not equal to two right angles. The more poor Euclid demonstrated, the more you would not have been convinced. [1]

That of course is an exaggeration designed to make a point about Lord Russell’s obstinacy. In many things, however, in which sentiments and the undemonstrables of life might figure more prominently, it is often the case that the belief comes first, and the reasons for believing come later, and that for the whole edifice, it is sentiment that provides the foundations, with reasons (truth-claims and arguments) as the supports.

.....One may try to kick away the supports, but they are likely to be strongly embedded in the foundations; and even if one manages to kick them away, and the roof comes crashing in, there is no certainty that a man will abandon the foundations to begin anew elsewhere. It is just as likely that he will retain his attachment to them and go in search of new supports. Often then, if you wish in controversy to get a man to abandon his beliefs, you must take dynamite to his sentiments—and this explosive is often made, not from reason or facts, but from other sentiments.

.....It is often said—more from affectation than conviction—that sentiment is always a very poor thing on which to base one’s arguments, and no doubt in many instances, sentiment should play no part. One could draw only puzzled glances and pitying looks if one were to argue that the sky is blue because it looks rather nice that way. Without sentiment, however, most people would find no persuasive grounds for the assertion that people should not be tortured for fun. The belief is ultimately rational, but for most it comes immediately and unreflectively from sentiment. The sadist too is a sentimentalist.

.....The existence of sentiment in controversy can be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, shared sentiment provides us with grounds from which we might persuade others of the goodness of a belief. On the other hand, it may introduce perverse and almost immovable objections to the most evident truths.

.....The most interminable controversies are usually those which surround the question of how society and government ought to be organised; for, though truth and sound reasoning may be brought to bear, it is sentiment that often plays the role in immediately determining what a person feels to be the better way of life, and thus it is a matter over which the twain shall rarely meet.

.....In such cases, and if one insists in arguing it out, one of the most effective things to do against an advocate of a certain way of life is to demonstrate to him that it will bring about circumstances which will be an affront to the very sentiments by which he advocates it in the first place. I do not predict much controversy when I say that this is more easily said than done.

[1] Sydney Smith, quoted by Hesketh Pearson, The Smith of Smiths, Being the Life, Wit and Humour of Sydney Smith. The Right Book Club, London. (n.d.). p. 274.

Joyless and Triumphant

The joy of an unregimented life is incalculable, and cannot therefore find support from a state that wishes everything to be regimented and calculable.

.....We have sufficient cause to call totalitarian that state which seeks to regulate and regiment every area of life in accordance with some socio-political ideal, by which nothing—so far as it is practicable—may be left to individual choice and responsibility.

.....It does not matter what this state calls itself, nor is it a matter of symbols, flags, uniforms and military parades: such might accompany tyranny, but there is no reason to suppose they must accompany totalitarianism. The totalitarian state seeks rather to become coterminous with the nation; and the danger for us is precisely that democracy knows no bounds in this regard; for the proudest boast of democracy is that it is the government of the people by the people, and however ludicrous this claim may be, it has the injurious effect of lowering resistance to the idea that the nation is the state and the state is the nation.

.....We might hope to depend upon a robust body of individuals to maintain a healthy spirit of resistance against this threat, but we ought not to become complacent in this hope; for it is far from certain that every age must bring forth its saviours—cometh the hour, cometh the man—especially when that age has so many means of snuffing out the individual soul.

We have killed the ‘soul’, but we have created for ourselves a thousand-odd social and political slogans . . . which tyrannize over our thoughts, . . . and we proceed logically to transform the state into a monster to swallow up the individual. [1]

So wrote Lin Yutang, who would doubtless be unsurprised to see that the joyless impulse to crush the diversity and spontaneity of life, to regulate and regiment thought and deed, is so strong in our political and intellectual elite, and triumphant over timid and belittled souls; wherewith the greatest danger is that people will no longer be able to distinguish the true from the politically correct. This inability may already be seen to a large extent in the university-educated, who, you may be sure, will be ever happy to share their enlightened confusion with everyone else.

.....Statism has become a virulent idea, and consequently the state intrudes ever further into our lives, as surely as influenza lays low the infirm. It could well be that soon a man may not leap into a bath without Big Nanny having first tested the water with her big toe.

.....Still, a government minister playing croquet on a well-kept lawn is a glimmer of hope—and this hope, a proof of one’s desperation.

.....

[1] Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (London and Toronto: William Heinemann, 1938), p.427.

Fewtril #100

When the expert seeks to dissociate himself from the layman, he is often tempted into making the sort of claims from which every layman ought to dissociate himself.

Fewtril #99

Little can be made of a man who habitually lies, cheats, inveigles, and corrupts, unless he has the support and encouragement of others, in which case he might easily be made a Right Honourable Gentleman.

A Public Cacophony

Sometimes it seems that public debate in this land is worthy of attention only because it is the arena in which charlatans and demagogues might publicly expose their own and one another’s dreadful ideas in the most interesting and inventive ways. When one considers, however, that they would neither hold nor parade such ideas if they did not have this arena in which to do so, one might consider that social life would be better without it, even though we would be deprived of a fine spectacle. For, as Lin Yutang wrote:

Life, after all, is made up of eating and sleeping, of meeting and saying good-bye to friends, of reunions and farewell parties, of tears and laughter, of having a haircut once in two weeks, of watering a potted flower and watching one’s neighbour falling off his roof. [1]

Such unassuming simplicity is made difficult, however, by those publicly fielded ideas which threaten to overturn private life, ideas which seek to restructure the whole of social life in conformity with an efficient and watchful state, or in line with a profitable concern, or whose merits are measured by the power that might be had on account of the number of persons who might be made to subscribe to them. Consequently, one cannot be left in peace by the ideological organ-grinders and their countless shrieking monkeys.

.....At least one ought to take a holiday from public debate every now and then, and still too from those whose minds cannot be detached from it, in order that one might think again on one’s own terms:—better that than to remain just another shrill voice in a cacophony, or a vehicle for the ideas of others. In this regard, I share the sentiments of Jacob Burckhardt:

I want to get away from them all, from the radicals, the communists, the industrialists, the intellectuals, the pretentious, the reasoners, the abstract, the absolute, the philosophers, the sophists, the state fanatics, the idealists, the ‘ists’ and ‘isms’ of every kind. [2]

The trouble is, as I say, that with the growing cod-intellectualisation and politicisation of social life, in which one can hardly speak inconsequentially without someone’s objecting to one’s tone or to one’s supposed underlying assumptions, one can hardly be left unmolested. Live and let live is losing ground to that adolescent and most totalitarian slogan of them all: The personal is the political. It is a damned ugly phrase too.

[1] Lin Yutang, “On Lying in Bed” The Importance of Living (London and Toronto: William Heinemann, 1938), p.207.

[2] Jacob Burckhardt, Letter to Hermann Schauenburg, 28th February 1846, The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, ed. & tr. A. Dru (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), p.75. (“[I]ch will ihnen allen entweichen, den Radikalen, Kommunisten, Industriellen, Hochgebildeten, Anspruchsvollen, Reflektierenden, Abstrakten, Absoluten, Philosophen, Sophisten, Staatsfanatikern, Idealisten, aner und iten aller Art.” Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe, Brief an Hermann Schauenburg, 28. Februar 1846, (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1929), p. 137.)

Fewtril #98

Our failings which are known to others are often unknown to ourselves; for we are wont to conceal those that are known to us, but to advertise those that are not.

Lofty Bubbling

“Each and every time I find myself sitting on a plane, somewhere between a European city and Delhi or Bombay, I always experience that same bubbling lightness of being and sense of expectation and anticipation.” [1]

.....I’d be inclined to put that down to the re-heated prawn biriyani, but then I’m no spiritual guru, unlike the author of those words, who is apparently “endeavoring to define the contours of a new human consciousness and culture”. [2]

.....

[1] Andrew Cohen, “What a Place to Wake Up! Reflections on India” Notes From the Revolution: News and Views from Andrew Cohen and his Students (Weblog), 15th May 2006.

[2] EnlightenNext, AndrewCohen.org.

Fewtril #97

“If you’re not careful, I shall be offended, and then you’ll be sorry.” Such is the threat of the crutch-rattler, usurper of pathos, exploiter of pity, and brandisher of offendable sensibility, whose every claim is backed up with a show of weakness.

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.