A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of Communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is “about” something or other. I wrote a story, “The Fifth Child,” which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.
A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, “Of course ‘The Fifth Child’ is about AIDS.”
An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, “Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,” you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.
The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers.
Doris Lessing, “Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer”, New York Times, 1992-06-26 (reprinted 2007-10-13)
December 30, 2013
QotD: Yes, but what is it really about?
December 29, 2013
QotD: Memes and culture
People in all cultures grow up and acquire a set of beliefs. One way of looking at this is to call the beliefs that are inherited “memes”. Just as “genes” code for hereditary traits, so memes are intended to show the inheritance of individual items, rather than a whole belief system. A tune like “Happy Birthday”, a concept like Father Christmas, atom, bicycle, or fairy — all are memes. A whole slew of memes that forms an interacting whole is called a memeplex, and religions are the best examples, which at various times and in various cultures have had, or still do have, many linked-up memes like “There is Heaven and there is Hell …” and “Unless you pray to this God you’ll go to Hell” and “You must kill those who don’t believe in this …” and so on. You will have some familiarity with other religions, and you will appreciate that we’re not saying that your religion is like that. It’s all the others, the mistaken ones …
Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, & Jack Cohen, “Disbelief System”, The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day, 2013.
December 28, 2013
QotD: Dance
Those Puritans who snort against the current dances are quite right when they argue that the tango and the shimmie are violently aphrodisiacal, but what they overlook is the fact that the abolition of such provocative wriggles would probably revive something worse, to wit, the Viennese waltz. The waltz never quite goes out of fashion; it is always just around the corner; every now and then it comes back with a bang. And to the sore harassment and corruption, I suspect, of chemical purity, the ideal of all right-thinkers. The shimmie and the tango are too gross to be very dangerous to civilized human beings; they suggest drinking beer out of buckets; the most elemental good taste is proof enough against them. But the waltz! Ah, the waltz, indeed! It is sneaking, insidious, disarming, lovely. It does its work, not like a college-yell or an explosion in a munitions plant, but like the rustle of the trees, the murmur of the illimitable sea, the sweet gurgle of a pretty girl. The jazz-band fetches only vulgarians, barbarians, idiots, pigs. But there is a mystical something in “Weiner Blut” or “Kiinstler Leben” that fetches even philosophers.
The waltz, in fact, is magnificently improper the art of tone turned bawdy. I venture to say that the compositions of one man alone, Johann Strauss II, have lured more fair young creatures to lamentable complaisance than all the hypodermic syringes of all the white slave scouts since the fall of the Western Empire. There is something about a waltz that is simply irresistible. Try it on the fattest and sedatest or even upon the thinnest and most acidulous of women, and she will be ready, in ten minutes, for a stealthy kiss behind the door nay, she will forthwith impart the embarrassing news that her husband misunderstands her, and drinks too much, and cannot appreciate Maeterlinck, and is going to Cleveland, 0., on business to-morrow …
H.L. Mencken, “The Allied Arts: Tempo di Valse”, Prejudices: Second Series, 1920.
December 27, 2013
QotD: The Church of England
“Getting the PM to choose the right bishop is like a conjuror getting a member of the audience to choose a card. With the Church of England the choice is usually between a knave and a queen.”
“The bench of bishops should have a proper balance between those who believe in God and those who don’t.”
“Bishops tend to live a long time, perhaps because the Almighty is not all that keen for them to join him.”
“The plans for a new church in South London had places for dispensing orange juice, family planning, and organizing demos, but nowhere to celebrate Holy Communion.”
“Theology is a device for helping agnostics to stay within the Church of England.”
“The Queen is inseparable from the Church of England. God is an optional extra.”
Jonathan Lynn, “Yes Minister Series: Quotes from the dialogue”, JonathanLynn.com
December 26, 2013
QotD: Today’s hard times versus the golden age of economic security
In other words, while it’s true that there are fewer guarantees than there used to be, it’s not true that everyone in the good old days had an easy path to lifetime employment. Those people were always a lucky minority. They still are, if a somewhat smaller one. Most people in the generations before the millennials had to struggle. They were afraid they wouldn’t be able to make it. They, too, were woken up in the wee small hours by their own economic terror. The reason your parents’ lives look so carefree to you? Well, in part because Mommy doesn’t usually tell little Timmy that she’s having night terrors over how to get him outfitted for school if the old minivan finally gives up the ghost. But mostly because all this was taking place when you were 6 years old. And everything adults do looks easy when you’re 6.
Megan McArdle, “Hey Millennials: You Got a Raw Deal. Get Over It”, Bloomberg.com, 2013-09-18
December 23, 2013
QotD: Misunderstanding the First Amendment
1. The First Amendment protects you from government sanction, either directly (by criminal prosecution) or indirectly (when someone uses the government’s laws and the courts to punish you, as in a defamation action). It is currently in vogue to exclaim “NOBODY IS ARGUING OTHERWISE” when someone makes this point. Bullshit. People are consistently saying that private action (like criticism, or firings) violates the First Amendment, either directly or through sloppy implication. Promoting ignorance about our most important rights is a bad thing that we should call out, even when we’re currently upset about something. Our rights are under constant assault on multiple fronts, and when we encourage citizens to misunderstand them we make it easier for the government to whittle them away.
2. The phrase “the spirit of the First Amendment” often signals approaching nonsense. So, regrettably, does the phrase “free speech” when uncoupled from constitutional free speech principles. These terms often smuggle unprincipled and internally inconsistent concepts — like the doctrine of the Preferred+ First Speaker. The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker holds that when Person A speaks, listeners B, C, and D should refrain from their full range of constitutionally protected expression to preserve the ability of Person A to speak without fear of non-governmental consequences that Person A doesn’t like. The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker applies different levels of scrutiny and judgment to the first person who speaks and the second person who reacts to them; it asks “why was it necessary for you to say that” or “what was your motive in saying that” or “did you consider how that would impact someone” to the second person and not the first. It’s ultimately incoherent as a theory of freedom of expression.
3. Notwithstanding #2, the concepts of proportionality, community, dialogue, love, charity, grace, empathy, forgiveness, humility, and self-awareness are all values decent people ought to apply to a discussion. They aren’t about free speech or the First Amendment; they are about humanity. They are more powerful and convincing when applied consistently — when you do not demand grace of others than you aren’t willing to extend yourself. That doesn’t happen much.
Ken White, “Ten Points About Speech, Ducks, And Flights To Africa”, Popehat, 2013-12-21.
December 20, 2013
QotD: (Almost) Winter in Maine
I love the weather channels. Hair farmers and dime-store Kardashians waving their arms over an imaginary map, talking about WINTER STORM FABIAN or WINTER SEMI-BLIZZARD OSAMA or WINTER ARCTIC DEATHSTORM INGA. The least you could do is explain what the hell I’m suppose to expect on Monday on that forecast there. Is the weather going to be serrated on Monday? Will I be expected to swim laps in some sort of frozen pool? Is frozen angel hair pasta going to be made available to me? What are those squiggly weather lines? Should I make out a will, and make out with my wife one last time on Sunday night?
I got up this morning and it was fifteen below zero, car wouldn’t start, because the car is smarter than a person, and we were still shoveling a foot of “partly cloudy” from the day before. I didn’t really mind, exactly, because I didn’t move to Uppastump Maine expecting palm trees and grass skirts on the babes, but there is one aspect about it that rankled. Listen to me, you weather idiots. It’s not the winter. It won’t be winter for four days or so. The average nighttime temperature here in December is fourteen degrees Fahrenheit. That makes last night thirty bleeping degrees below normal. Thirty degrees is a lot, don’t you think?
Sippican Cottage, “I Was Considering Putting On A Sweater”, Sippican Cottage, 2013-12-17
December 15, 2013
QotD: Choosing a capital city, Australian style
Australia […] set up a special city just for the national capital. Keep them all in one place, it avoids spreading the contamination.
Partly that’s due to our settlement pattern. Mostly, each state capital is the oldest city in that state, the first point of European settlement. It’s also the largest city in the state (and, to be horribly honest, most other ‘cities’ in each state are really ‘regional centres’, the state capital is pretty much the only show in town.)
So when the states federated to form a nation, there was of course a fight to host the capital. Sydney was the obvious one — the oldest and largest city. Melbourne wanted it because it’s like that irritating little sister who always wants what her big sister has, and the other cities — well, nobody really cared about them anyway.
So, in a wonderful stroke of compromise, they chose a site that is roughly equidistant from Sydney and Melbourne (and set in some of the most boring countryside available). They held a worldwide competition to design the city — Walter Burley Griffin won. Lord knows what lost. It’s a clever plan designed for maximum confusion, condemning some hapless visitors to spending the rest of their lives endlessly circling but never arriving at their destination.
But, as I say, at least it keeps the federal pollies well away from everyone else. Always a plus.
Gwynne Powell, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold Mailing list (http://lists.herald.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lois-bujold), 2013-12-13
December 14, 2013
QotD: Defining “fairness”
Is there a way that we can explain supporting Medicare while cutting Medicaid, Social Security but not welfare checks, farm subsidies but not food stamps? For readers of Jonathan Haidt’s amazing book, The Righteous Mind, the answer should be “yes.” It lies in reciprocity. You’ll find an extensive discussion of this in my forthcoming book (she mentioned casually), but for now let’s concentrate on Haidt.
Jonathan Haidt’s original research led him to divide our moral intuitions into five groups, one of which was “fairness.” But when he wrote that liberals cared more about fairness than conservatives, he received an outpouring of vitriol from conservatives. They cared a lot about fairness, they protested — and they thought it was very unfair for people to be able to live without working. Haidt realized he was dealing with two very different conceptions of fairness: one of which had to do with equality, and the other of which had to do with reciprocity. “Fair” is a complicated word that appears unique to English (for more on its dizzying strangeness, I suggest you read economist Bart Wilson’s piece, edited by me, from several years back). Different groups have invested it with very different meanings, which can make it hard to see how your political opponents can possibly believe what they do.
Megan McArdle, “How Republicans Justify Cutting Food Stamps While Boosting Farm Subsidies”, Bloomberg.com, 2013-09-23
December 7, 2013
QotD: Minimum wage and Social Darwinism
Consider the debate over the minimum wage. The controversy centered on what to do about what Sidney Webb called the “unemployable class.” It was Webb’s belief, shared by many of the progressive economists affiliated with the American Economic Association, that establishing a minimum wage above the value of the unemployables’ worth would lock them out of the market, accelerating their elimination as a class. This is essentially the modern conservative argument against the minimum wage, and even today, when conservatives make it, they are accused of — you guessed it — social Darwinism. But for the progressives at the dawn of the fascist moment, this was an argument for it. “Of all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,” Webb observed, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage earners.”
Ross put it succinctly: “The Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him.” Since the inferior races were content to live closer to a filthy state of nature than the Nordic man, the savages did not require a civilized wage. Hence if you raised minimum wages to a civilized level, employers wouldn’t hire such miscreants in preference to “fitter” specimens, making them less likely to reproduce and, if necessary, easier targets for forced sterilization. Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist and adviser to Woodrow Wilson, explained: “Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.” Arguments like these turn modern liberal rationales for welfare state wage supports completely on their head.
Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change, 2008.
December 6, 2013
QotD: Why Mandela was different
Within moments of the announcement that the great man had passed away, left-wingers on twitter gleefully started posting quotes from Reagan-era conservatives about Mandela. At the time, most right-wingers’ opinions of Mandela — with one notable exception — ranged from skepticism to outright hostility. (This William H. Buckley column from 1990, which compares the recently-released Mandela to Lenin, was not atypical.)
Support for apartheid was never justifiable, but when that racist system was in its death throes, it was hardly unreasonable to worry about what might come next. Many political prisoners and “freedom fighters” have eventually come to power in their countries, only to become exactly what they once fought against — or worse. (One of the most infuriating examples is just over the South African border, where the once-promising Robert Mugabe has driven Zimbabwe into the abyss.)
The young Mandela was a revolutionary, and after spending his entire life as a second-class citizen, and 27 years behind bars, any bitterness on his part would have been understandable.
Instead, he chose an unprecedented path of reconciliation:
[…]
The real measure of one’s greatness comes when that person achieves power. And by that standard, Mandela was one of the greatest of them all. May he rest in peace.
Damian Penny, “Why Mandela was different”, DamianPenny.com, 2013-12-06
December 5, 2013
QotD: Wisdom, grief, and “unmentionables”
I didn’t get it then, but I get it now. Back then, when I was twenty and shiny with immorality and dew, I didn’t get loss. I’d experienced it, of course, but I hadn’t lived long enough to accumulate that patina of loss that I have now at 51. Enough years on this wet blue planet and you’re positively shellacked in loss, one coat over another, dulling your coat like so much floor wax. Back then, when I was twenty, I didn’t get loss and I didn’t get what a new set of extraordinary unmentionables could do for you.
Chelsea G. Summers, “unmentionables, the first”, pretty dumb things, 2013-12-04
December 4, 2013
QotD: A nation of shopkeepers
When Napoleon called us “une nation de boutiquiers”, a nation of shopkeepers, he meant to insult us. Down the centuries, many Continentals have disparaged what they see as the soulless money-grubbing of the English-speaking peoples. Fascists and communists used remarkably similar language when they attacked “decadent Anglo-Saxon capitalism” — though, happily for the human race, it turned out not to be in decay at all.
It’s true that there was always a countervailing Anglophile tendency: Voltaire and Montesquieu, among others, admired us precisely because of our individualistic, mercantile, libertarian ways. But the idea that we “Anglo-Saxons” are too materialistic has never entirely gone away.
The phrase “Anglo-Saxons”, in this sense, is of course economic rather than racial. When the French talk of “les anglo-saxons” or the Spanish of “los anglosajones,” they don’t mean descendants of Æthelwulf or Oswine. They mean people who speak English and believe in small government, whether in Kowloon, Killarney or Kaukapakapa.
A nation of shopkeepers? Sounds good to me. What would you rather have? A nation of generals? Of civil servants? Of monks? Small employers are the greatest heroes we produce, and their heroism is all the greater for being unappreciated, unacknowledged, unthanked.
Daniel Hannan, “Shopkeepers have done more for human happiness than generals, statesmen or kings “, Telegraph, 2013-12-03
December 1, 2013
QotD: The psychological profile of a losing team’s fans
One of the joys of living in New York City is that a psychoanalyst is never too far away. Indeed, my neighbor Barry Stern is a professor of medical psychology at Columbia University College. After I had explained my predicament, he quipped, “I think New York Mets fans would have a lot to say about this,” before launching into a psychoanalytical explanation in which “masochists” (his word) “turn passive into active” when faced by a traumatic experience over which they have no control.
“It sounds like you take control of the experience of disappointment by preemptively becoming disappointed,” he told me. “You savor the anticipated loss when the team is down, a stance from which you can comfortably root for a win, without risking too much.” Viewed like that, the 1-0 lead is inherently less pleasurable.”Rather than enjoying your team being ahead, you manage the anxiety associated with them inevitably mucking up, negating the positive mood created through their lead … by spoiling it yourself. No more anxiety, just depression, and the familiar feeling of managing the weak sense of hope they might just pull this one out.”
Roger Bennett, “Is there such a thing as a happy football fan?”, ESPN Relegation Zone, 2013-09-17
November 28, 2013
QotD: The gun-control debate
I begin rather skeptical of most gun-control proposals. The ones that are pitched in the aftermath of mass shootings are particularly cynical, as they often attempt to regulate circumstances unrelated to the shooting. I still grind my teeth at Mayors Against Illegal Guns running ads in my state citing the Virginia Tech shooting, and talking about the need to shut the “gun show loophole” — even though the shooter didn’t obtain his weapons at a gun show. These sorts of arguments strike me as one part craven opportunism, one part feel-good placebo. (I wanted to say “panacea,” but panacea actually means a genuine cure-all.)
If someone wants to propose a new restriction on gun ownership after a tragedy, and cites that tragedy as a reason to pass it, it’s necessary to show how that new restriction would have prevented, mitigated, or impacted that tragedy. For example, almost none of the gun laws proposed after Newtown would have changed much of anything in that awful shooting, as that disturbed young man stole his mother’s legally purchased guns.
I suppose there are two potential changes to the law that would have significantly altered events in Newtown. First, a total ban on private ownership of firearms, which our friends in the gun-control movement keep insisting isn’t their goal.
Second, a restriction on gun ownership by people who live under the same roof as a person who’s deemed mentally incompetent or a threat to himself or others. Of course, then you get into the questions of what constitutes, “mentally incompetent or a threat to himself or others,” what constitutes “under the same roof”, etc.
Then there are the proposals to limit how many rounds each gun can fire before reloading. Almost every spree shooter — we need a better term for this — has had more than one firearm when they’ve launched their attacks. Instituting 10-round limits would mean that future shooters would get off 20 shots before pausing to reload, presuming they only brought two guns. It’s reasonable to conclude future mass killers will just bring three or four guns when they begin their rampage. This strikes me as a quite modest mitigation in the danger of these shooters, too modest to seriously consider.
Jim Geraghty, “Why Post-Shooting Gun-Control Debates Are So Insufferable”, National Review Online, 2013-09-18
