In private, however, or when addressing his soldiers, Napoleon was contemptuous of the Islamic word. “You have come to this country,” he told his army before the battle of the Pyramids, “to save the inhabitants from barbarism, and to bring civilisation to the Orient.” This was why, in addition to muskets, cannon and cavalry, he had brought with him to Egypt a printing press, a hot-air balloon and a small army of intellectuals.
The blaze of the Enlightenment, although it might seem to have been lit in Europe, was not just for Europeans. All the world had the potential to share in its radiance. Illumination was the same wherever it manifested itself, and this meant that in Peking as in Paris, in Baghdad as in Bordeaux, there were sages more than qualified to rank alongside Voltaire and Diderot.
The Enlightenment, far from ranking as something parochial and culturally contingent, was properly a global phenomenon. These various dogmas, which the philosophes had tended to take for granted, had then been given a new and militant edge by the French Revolution. That religion was superstition; that rights were universal; that equality, individual liberty and freedom of expression were simultaneously natural and sacred: these were the convictions that had inspired in the citizens of revolutionary France their continent-shaking sense of certitude. Thrones had been toppled; abbeys demolished; the detritus of a benighted past erased. And if in Europe, then why not further afield? The Rights of Man were for everyone, after all, or they were nothing. “Any law that violates them,” as Robespierre had put it, “is fundamentally unjust and tyrannical. Indeed, it is not law at all.”
This sense of missionary purpose, which inspired in those who felt it an ambition to bring the entire world from darkness into light, outlasted the execution of Robespierre, the defeat of Napoleon, the seeming triumph of reaction across post-revolutionary Europe. In 1854, when the Ottoman Empire was facing a critical threat from Russia, France joined Britain in insisting as a condition of its entry into the Crimean War that the slave trade across the Black Sea be abolished.
Also abolished was the jizya, a tax on Jews and Christians that reached back to the very beginnings of Islam, and was directly mandated by the Qur’an. Such measures, to the Ottomans, risked immense embarrassment. The effect, after all, was to reform Islamic jurisprudence according to the standards of non-believers. It was, for Muslim traditionalists, an ominous straw in the wind. Over the course of the century and more that followed, the weathering effects of Western hegemony on the practices that Muslims believed they had inherited from Muhammad — the Sunnah — became more and more pronounced.
Tom Holland, “The age-old tension between Islam and France”, UnHerd, 2020-11-02.
February 25, 2021
QotD: Islam and the impact of the Enlightenment
February 24, 2021
QotD: Margaret Thatcher
But here’s the thing: I don’t hate Thatcher. It’s not that I’m a huge fan of her legacy or anything (although anyone who thinks that industrial relations were doing fine before her or that the Falklands were some kind of unjustified expedition is clearly a fantasist), it simply doesn’t matter whether I like her or not because she is just too interesting.
Thatcher wasn’t the first woman to lead a country, but unlike her predecessors, Indira Gandhi in India or Isabel Martínez de Perón in Argentina, she didn’t arrive sanctified by a political dynasty. She was, as Prince Phillip snobbily points out to the Queen in The Crown, a grocer’s daughter. In real life, such condescension came strongly from the Left. The Blow Monkeys, one of the bands involved in the Red Wedge tour to support Labour, released an album called She was only a Grocer’s Daughter in 1987; and even though several pop songs fantasised about her death, that never seemed quite as ugly as supposed defenders of the working class announcing that Thatcher was just too common to rule.
Sarah Ditum, “How Thatcher rejected feminism”, UnHerd, 2020-11-15.
February 23, 2021
QotD: Canadian myths
Canada is a huge but under-populated country. The wind echoes in our ears. Much has been made in our literature of the hardiness and resilience necessary for existence in a punishing climate and of the harsh labor required to extract the benefits of a resource-based economy. Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush is an early classic detailing the rigors and challenges of domesticating an unforgiving milieu. Canadian fortitude is a national foundation myth.
David Solway, “The Canadian Mind: A Culture So Open, Its ‘Brains Fall Out'”, PJ Media, 2018-10-10.
February 22, 2021
QotD: Modern academic “life”
… and never more than to people who know themselves un-beautiful, therefore not good, therefore false, and locked in it. Forever.
These people hate us, not because we’re better looking, more socially skilled, or whatever — this is, after all, the Internet — but because we’ve got options. We’re not all fighting over who gets to be Big Fish in an ever-shrinking pond. We’re different things to different people; we haven’t collapsed our social context down to faculty mixers and the one or two non-hamplanet grad students who are silly enough to apply each semester. We can go days, maybe even weeks, without obsessively comparing ourselves to our peers. We don’t care that we’re not “Chad” or “Stacy,” because we’ve got other settings on the emotional dial than “smugness” and “jealousy.”
But we need to start caring. I don’t mean getting obsessive over our appearance. I mean that, since this is in many ways an aesthetic battle, aesthetics will help us win. I half-jokingly suggested a “Normal Guy Uniform” a while back – an all-white ball cap with the New England Patriots’ logo on it. I’m not really kidding now. The Left wins, in large part, because they’re fugly losers that no normal person could possibly consider a threat … until they bash your skull in, or get you fired, or send a SWAT team to your house.
Severian, “Politics for Fugly People”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2018-08-24.
February 21, 2021
QotD: Journalism
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1972.
February 20, 2021
QotD: The Infantry
The infantry (note not “infanteers” as they really hate that) are the actual troops who stand toe-to-toe with the enemy and bayonet them in the face. Boots on the ground, their job is to be pointed at the bad guys and go wreck it. They may get delivered in various ways including aircraft, boat, ship or their own vehicles, but same job: “infantry go smash”. Can be identified by neck tattoos, traditions that the Victorians would think are dated, officers wear faded red trousers and soldiers fight each other on Friday nights.
Combat Boot, “So, ‘capbadges’, what’s that all about then?”, combatboot.co.uk, 2020-11-13.
February 19, 2021
QotD: The disillusionment of working in a bookshop
I got the interview by stating openly in my covering letter that I was 24, still living with my mum, and asking her for train-fare had become a bit undignified. This seemed encouraging. But then the panel (2 pax.) asked what I was reading currently, and I said Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and there was awkward silence. This set the tone for almost every “literary” chat thereafter.
Call me an idiot, but I was genuinely stunned to find we weren’t allowed to read on the job. Instead, booksellers had to devote any time not spent actually dealing with customers (which on a rainy weekend, in the wrong bit of the shop, could be a lot) with often-fruitless searches for books which had been lost, mis-shelved, or maybe stolen, or because they had to be returned to publishers (another surprise), and at the publisher’s expense.
I also quickly realised that the layout of the shop was not an accident (even in the jury-rigged “commercial” buildings of many an English town centre), and that the unadvertised steering of a customer around a bookshop was near-identical to how the algorithms work in the online equivalents (or vice versa, probably). If you like Poetry, you’re more likely to also like Philosophy, (right here on the next set of shelves), or Music (by the window), or History books (just across the room there), than if you came in looking for the latest Jeffrey Archer novel (downstairs, on the pile-’em-high islands).
Most of the time, I was just moving “stock” about, taking maddening credit card orders over the phone, or walking people literally to alphabetised mass-market fiction. All of which required no interest in, let alone knowledge of, literature. To a middle-class nerd such as myself, discovering that working in a bookshop [cue poetic images of James Frain, or similar] was fundamentally no different from working in a Sports Direct or Tesco was about the most depressing thing imaginable. That, and waiting for the Sunday trains in winter.
A.S.H. Smyth, “Seven kinds of people you find in bookshops”, The Critic, 2020-11-14.
February 18, 2021
QotD: The “European Project”
Theodore Dalrymple, “European Empire, Fractured”, Law & Liberty, 2020-11-10.
February 17, 2021
QotD: Protectionists, left and right
“Progressives” who embrace protectionism share conservatives’ low opinion of their country’s businesses, entrepreneurs, and workers, but also mistakenly believe that protectionism “sticks it to” corporate oligarchs when, in fact, it creates corporate oligarchs.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2018-09-10.
February 16, 2021
QotD: Homo electronicus and the falling murder rate
If you don’t feel like going all Thoreau, you can test the effect by simply writing your comments to this post out longhand, and then waiting an hour before typing them up. I bet you’ll find it mildly annoying no matter what, but if you’ve really got some thoughts on this matter, by then end of the hour you’ll be something close to furious. You’ve been rewired, comrade. You’re homo electronicus. We all are.
This stuff is recent — really recent. There was a limit to how screen-addled even the infamous “latchkey kids” of the 1980s could be. I had “latchkey kid” buddies, and although we had everything we needed to veg out in front of the tube in the very best Gen Z style — video games, sugary snacks, cable — we couldn’t sit and play Atari all day. I don’t mean that we didn’t; we were no smarter than any other boys; we sure as hell didn’t do anything for our health. I mean we couldn’t. Playing video games gave us ants in the pants — my Mom always knew when I’d been over at Steve’s — and eventually it got to the point where we had to put the joystick down and go throw around a football or something.
These days, the inability to play Nintendo for hours on end means you’ve got ADHD. Pass the Ritalin.
Three things made homo electronicus:
- modern medicine
- instant communications
- permanent caloric surplus.
Ritalin is actually one of the more benign examples. Back in the days when we were allowed to notice such things, a certain kind of social critic pointed out that falling murder rates have very little to do with crime reduction. Instead, it’s almost all attributable to advances in emergency medicine. It’s much tougher for Shitavious to kill D’L’eondrae over a pair of sneakers these days. The ER docs patch the victim up, and so what would’ve been murder one is now mere ADW, which means — Soros-funded DAs being what they are — both victim and perp are soon back on the streets, ready for round two. This idiot rapper, for instance, survived being shot nine times. That’s not nine separate shootings, mind you, that’s nine slugs in one incident. Granted the slipshod motherfuckers who capped him need to work on their aim, but surviving even nine flesh wounds from modern firearms is one hell of a testimony to the power of modern medicine …
… a power that does not, I suggest, conduce to positive eugenic outcomes.
Severian, “Recent Evolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-09-28.
February 15, 2021
QotD: Tail-end boomers aren’t really Baby Boomers at all
The boomers were the baby boom after WWII. By the time I hit school, the classrooms were half empty, the trailers that they’d added the decade before were being used for craft classes or gym or something that required tons of space.
It would take a long time to come home if you were still being born in ’62. (And I’d been due in ’63.)
This is important simply because I want to make it clear when I came of age it wasn’t with the boomer ethos of “each generation is going to be bigger than the last and we’re going to remake the world in our image.” That expectation is still obvious in books of the fifties and sixties, as well as the attached Malthusian panic.
The boomers, like now the millenials, are a much maligned generation. The public image is almost not at all that of the people in the generation I actually know, with a very few exceptions.
The people the media chose to highlight were the ones they wanted the boomers to be, not who they were.
But something about the boomers is true — ironically the reason that caused them to hate my generation before they decided to aggregate us, because it gave them more power to still be considered young and marketable-to — and that is that they were raised in the expectation they would make the world a better place, and that they could because of sheer numbers, and because they’d been brought up to be better than their parents.
Sarah Hoyt, “Business From The Wrong End”, According to Hoyt, 2018-09-27.
February 14, 2021
QotD: Pauline Réage’s Story of O
I am reading Story of O, a novel written in 1954 that recounts the titular character’s journey into sexual bondage, violent penetrations, beatings, whippings, burnings, chains, gags, and dungeons. Readers only familiar with the pedestrian 1975 adaption are advised not to be put off — director Just Jaeckin’s film benefits from the lovely Corinne Cléry’s beguiling performance in the title role, but his soft-focus softcore aesthetic (gauzy white linen dresses and a smooth classical guitar soundtrack) miss the tenderness, the elegance, and the literary grace of the source. Graham Greene described Story of O as a “rare thing, a pornographic book well written and without a trace of obscenity”; Brian Aldiss remarked that O makes “pornography (if that is what it is) an art”; even JK Rowling has offered praise for the book, observing that, “If you’ve read Story of O you’ve kind of read the ultimate.” But it is JG Ballard’s description of the novel as “a deeply moral homily … touched by the magic of love” that resonates most powerfully with me. O is a radical instruction in morals (the book has a clear sense of feminine virtue, for one thing), and yet this sexual morality is unlike any I can find in our contemporary expression of sexual ethics, where self-expression is valued more than self-giving.
O is the story of a woman objectified and humiliated, of a woman who submits to being violated by the countless tongues and phalluses and fingers which enter her. The novel is more sensual than suspenseful — although there is a clear narrative, it is not a story driven by plot, but rather by a series of erotic episodes (Geraldine Bedell writing for the Observer described them as written with “a hallucinatory, erotic intensity”). It is a psychologically as well as sexually penetrative story of surrender, of being mastered and of becoming enslaved, especially its first chapter which describes the elegant sexual tortures of the Chateau at Roissy, a kind of playboy mansion with fewer grottos and more dungeons.
It is here that, at the request of her lover René, O acquiesces in her complete submission. The cast of characters is sparse: O and René; Jacqueline, a young model whom O seduces, and Jacqueline’s 16-year-old sister, Natalie, a virgin eager to be initiated into the sexual rites of Roissy; Anne-Marie, an older and more ruthless mistress than are the many men at the Chateau; sundry blondes, brunettes, and redheads arranged alluringly throughout the text; and finally O’s ultimate lover, the sophisticated Sir Stephen, a kind of father-figure to René who ends up laying claim to O, flogging her, shackling her labia with an iron ring, and branding her with his initials as his slave, “a condition,” the narrator tells us, “of which O herself was proud.” As I read of the many exquisite ways O gives herself for men’s uses, I begin to wonder if the book was presenting me not with a picture of masculine sexual fantasies, but with a vision of my own.
The novel was written by the mysterious Pauline Réage, a pseudonym. In what is arguably one of the most successful literary secrets, Réage’s identity was kept hidden for decades. It wasn’t until 40 years after the novel’s publication that the then 86-year-old Dominique Aury, a respected editor and French intellectual, revealed that she was the author. It seems fitting that in a novel of sexual submission, Aury — Dominique, dominance, dominatrix — maintained such strict control over her own identity. Even Dominique Aury was not her “real” name: she was born Anne Desclos, but legally changed it in 1940. Aury’s nested names and identities are like a meta-fictitious exercise in un-making and making the self, for questions of self-identity and self-integrity lie at the heart of her novel.
Marilyn Simon, “My Own Private Chateau — Pauline Réage’s Story of O Revisited”, Quillete, 2020-10-18.
February 13, 2021
QotD: Haynes guide to tools of the trade
ELECTRIC HAND DRILL: Normally used for spinning steel Pop rivets in their holes until you die of old age, but it also works great for drilling mounting holes just above the brake line that goes to the rear wheel.
PLIERS: Used to round off bolt heads.
HACKSAW: One of a family of cutting tools built on the Ouija board principle. It transforms human energy into a crooked, unpredictable motion, and the more you attempt to influence its course, the more dismal your future becomes.
MOLE-GRIPS/ADJUSTABLE spanner: Used to round off bolt heads. If nothing else is available, they can also be used to transfer intense welding heat to the palm of your hand.
OXYACETELENE TORCH: Used almost entirely for lighting various flammable objects in your garage on fire. Also handy for igniting the grease inside a brake-drum you’re trying to get the bearing race out of.
WHITWORTH SOCKETS: Once used for working on older cars and motorcycles, they are now used mainly for impersonating that 9/16″ or 1/2″ socket you’ve been searching for for the last 15 minutes.
DRILL PRESS: A tall upright machine useful for suddenly snatching flat metal bar stock out of your hands so that it smacks you in the chest and flings your beer across the room, splattering it against that freshly painted part you were drying.
WIRE WHEEL: Cleans rust off old bolts and then throws them somewhere under the workbench with the speed of light. Also removes fingerprint whorls in about the time it takes you to say, “F….”
Do it by the book — the real meaning of Haynes instructions.
February 11, 2021
QotD: Progressive credentials as positional goods
But if PC was not really about protecting anyone, and really all about expressing one’s own moral superiority, PC credentials would be akin to what economists call a “positional good”.
A positional good is a good that people acquire to signalise where they stand in a social hierarchy; it is acquired in order to set oneself apart from others. Positional goods therefore have a peculiar property: the utility their consumers derive from them is inversely related to the number of people who can access them.
Positionality is not a property of the good itself, it is a matter of the consumer’s motivations. I may buy an exquisite variety of wine because I genuinely enjoy the taste, or acquire a degree from a reputable university because I genuinely appreciate what that university has to offer. But my motivation could also be to set myself apart from others, to present myself as more sophisticated or smarter. From merely observing that I consume the product, you could not tell my motivation. But you could tell it by observing how I respond once other people start drinking the same wine, or attending the same university.
If I value those goods for their intrinsic qualities, their increasing popularity will not trouble me at all. After all, the enjoyment derived from wine or learning is not fixed, so your enjoyment does not subtract from my enjoyment. I may even invite others to join me – we can all have more of it.
But if you see me moaning that the winemakers/the university have “sold out”, if you see me whinging about those ignoramuses who do not deserve the product because they (unlike me, of course) do not really appreciate it, you can safely conclude that for me, this good is a positional good. (Or was, before everybody else discovered it.) We can all become more sophisticated wine consumers, and we can all become better educated. But we can never all be above the national average, or in the top group, in terms of wine-connoisseurship, education, income, or anything else. We can all improve in absolute terms, but we cannot all simultaneously improve in relative terms. And that is what positional goods are all about – signalising a high position in a ranking, that is, a relation to others. This leads to a problem. Positional goods are used to signalise something that is by definition scarce, and yet the product which does the signalling is not scarce, or at least not inherently. You can increase the number of goods which signal a position in the Top 20 (of whatever), but the number of places in that Top 20 will only ever be, er, twenty. Increasing the number of signalling products will simply destroy their signalling function. Which is why the early owners of such a signalling product can get really mad at you if you acquire one too.
Kristian Niemietz, “The economics of political correctness”, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2014-04-30.
February 10, 2021
QotD: Wells’s Rules of Canadian Politics
1: For any given situation, Canadian politics will tend toward the least exciting possible outcome.
2: If everyone in Ottawa knows something, it’s not true.
3. The candidate in the best mood wins.
4. The guy who auditions for the role of opposition leader will get the job.
Paul Wells, “Wells’s Rules, annotated”, Maclean’s, 2009-05-21.
