The NHS has not served the nation well, if international comparison is the criterion by which it should be judged. For example, when the NHS was founded (when British healthcare was among the best rather than the worst in Europe) the population of France had a life expectancy six years lower than that of Britain; it is now two years higher. The health of the population in Spain improved more under Franco than that of the British under the NHS in the same years. Of course, there are determinants of life expectancy other than healthcare systems, but at the very least the comparisons do not suggest any particular virtue to the NHS.
Survival from many serious illnesses such as cancer, heart attacks and strokes is lower in Britain than in most European countries. Publicity is sometimes given to these statistics but they are not immediately apparent to patients or their relatives, and in any case the NHS is immune to criticism because its deficiencies are assumed to be departures from its essential goodness or the result of inadequate funding.
No number of scandals, such as that of Mid Staffs in which hundreds of patients were neglected to a degree that often defied belief, all in plain sight of a large bureaucracy supposedly devoted to ensuring the quality of patient care, can dent faith in the NHS. Staff committed, and management connived at, acts of cruelty that would have made Mrs Gamp blush. Mr Cameron’s government, anxious not to seem an enemy of the NHS, which would have been politically damaging, swept the scandal under the carpet.
A system whose justification for its nationalisation of healthcare was egalitarianism has failed even in the matter of equality. If anything, the difference between the health of the richest and poorest sections of the population has increased rather than decreased under the NHS.
The gap between the life expectancy of unskilled workers and that of the upper echelons, which had been stable for decades before the foundation of the NHS, began to widen afterwards and is now far wider than it ever was. Again, there are reasons for inequality in health other than the deficiencies of healthcare, the prevalence of smoking and obesity, for example; but if systems are to be judged by their effects, the NHS has failed in its initial goal.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Empire of conformists”, The Critic, 2020-04-29.
October 11, 2020
October 5, 2020
“Letters to a Young Contrarian was fundamentally a twentieth-century work by a man who thought of himself as a sixties radical”
In The Critic, Roland Elliott Brown considers the work of Christopher Hitchens, and particularly his Letters to a Young Contrarian from 2001:
The book is now nearly twenty years old. Hitchens wrote it in late 2000 and early 2001 for Perseus Books’ Rilke-inspired “Art of Mentoring” series, and it was published a month or so after 9/11. In view of this timeline, it occupies an eerily-placid DMZ between the “acceptable” 1990s Hitchens, whose only big sin against the political left had been to hound the centrist Bill Clinton, and the ostensibly-more isolated one post-2001, who took heart at the prospect of America using its military might against jihadis and Baathists. The book was largely a post-mortem on the intellectual battles of the twentieth century, and a lesson in writerly integrity. Today, it reads as a riposte to the new “populism” and the “awokening”.
Since Hitchens’s death from oesophageal cancer in 2011, his presence has been missed on major subjects. In a counterfactual world, it seems likely that Syria, ISIS, and the Iran nuclear negotiations (all entangled) would have occupied him in the first half of the 2010s, and that the potential unravelling of the American republic would have worried him in the second. Part of what his admirers miss, too […] is his performative flair. Though new media weren’t his passion, he owes much of his legacy to his YouTube archive, wherein his long-form lectures, debates, and C-span interviews seem, in hindsight, to have provided a model for the popularity of long-form podcasts.
The Letters can be read as a guide to giving an authentic performance as a political actor. Hitchens begins by selling an imagined student his lifestyle; in one good month, he writes (with some perhaps-inauthentic modesty), he has given evidence against Mother Teresa at the Vatican, taken pride in his arguments over Bosnia as Slobodan Milosevic went to the Hague, and had the thrill of being sued by Henry Kissinger. What the world needs now, the book implies, is for the young to find their appetite for the takedown. (One wonders to what extent his search for successors may have emerged from early intimations of mortality: in one C-span interview about the book, he also urged the youth not to take up smoking.)
[…]
But to reiterate, Letters to a Young Contrarian was fundamentally a twentieth-century work by a man who thought of himself as a sixties radical. Other sixties people like Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal, with whom Hitchens would later fall out over the War on Terror, figure here in heroic roles. Radicals, he argues in the third chapter, are needed to force major issues. Would slavery have ended in America, he asks, if not for the fanaticism of John Brown? Many of his mentors — Peter Sedgwick, E.P. Thompson — were sometime British communists (and long-time socialists) who had ditched the Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary (what a pity, then, that he never got to debate “the left” with Jordan Peterson).
Of course, Hitchens was not the only sixties radical to court influence in the 2000s, nor was he the most influential. Much of the radicalism he valued now comes to us — via less subtle mentors — in parody form: as sixties-worship gone sour, as a morbid focus on immutable characteristics, as a desire to short-circuit debate, as the unclean spirit that possesses young journalists to misrepresent their subjects so that they can gloat about the takedown. East of the old Iron Curtain, Alexander Lukashenko borrows a page from the dissidents of ’89 by carrying on “as if” there had been no pandemic, “as if” he had won a presidential election, and “as if” NATO was getting ready to invade Belarus. In such times, it seems worth living “as if” the cigarette-smoking ghost still had an eye on the scene.
September 30, 2020
QotD: Victimhood culture
Victimhood culture departs from dignity culture in several important ways. Moral worth is in large part defined by the color of one’s skin, or at least one’s membership in a fixed identity group: i.e., women, people of color, LGBTIQ, Muslims, or indigenous peoples. Such groups are sacred, and a lack of deference to them is seen as a sign of deviance. The reverse is true for those who belong to groups that are considered historical oppressors: whites, males, straight people, Zionists. Anyone belonging to an “oppressor” group is stained by their privilege, or “whiteness,” and is cast onto the moral scrapheap.
Claire Lehmann, “The Evils of Cultural Appropriation”, Tablet, 2018-06-11.
September 9, 2020
QotD: Drama critics
Brendan Behan, quoted in “Notes by Sage of Nonsense”, Globe and Mail 1961-03-18.
September 3, 2020
“[L]ooting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.”
Not everyone on the progressive team is all-in on the “Loot your way to utopia”, as Graeme Wood (risking cancellation by his co-religionists) criticizes Vicky Osterweil’s paean to looters and looting:
Last week, NPR’s Code Switch published an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. NPR summarizes the book as an argument that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.” If the real, lasting change you wish to effect is burning society to cinders and crippling for a generation its ability to serve its poorest citizens, then I suppose I am forced to agree. Osterweil sees an upside. Looting is good, she says, because it exposes a deep truth about the great American confidence game, which is that “without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.” She came to this conclusion six years ago, and in her book, which is written “in love and solidarity with looters the world over,” she defends this view as ably as anyone could.
Osterweil’s argument is simple. The “so-called” United States was founded in “cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist” violence. That violence produced our current system, particularly its property relations, and looting is a remedy for that sickness. “Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the ‘justice’ of law and order,” she writes. Ownership of things — not just people — is “innately, structurally white supremacist.”
The rest of the remedy is more violence, which she celebrates as an underrated engine for social justice. The destruction of businesses is an “experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom,” Osterweil writes. It is also a form of “queer birth.” “Riots are violent, extreme, and femme as fuck,” according to Osterweil. “They rip, tear, burn, and destroy to give birth to a new world.” She reserves her most pungent criticism for advocates of nonviolence, a “bankrupt concept” primarily valuable for enlisting “northern liberals.” Liberal is pejorative in this book. Martin Luther King Jr. is grudgingly acknowledged as a positive figure, but not as positive a figure as he would have been if he had kicked some white-capitalist ass and put a few pigs in the ICU. The “I Have a Dream” speech was, Osterweil writes, “the product of a series of sellouts and silencings, of nonviolent leaders dampening the militancy of the grass roots” and “sapping the movement’s energy.” More to her taste is Robert F. Williams, who practiced armed resistance, and Assata Shakur, who murdered a New Jersey police officer and remains a fugitive in Cuba. The violence needn’t be in self-defense — Shakur’s certainly was not. Osterweil quotes the “wisdom” of Stokely Carmichael: “Responsibility for the use of violence by black men, whether in self-defense or initiated by them [emphasis mine], lies with the white community.”
By now you have guessed that I am not the audience for this book. I have a job, and am therefore invested in building a system where you get paid for your work and pay others for theirs, and then everyone pays taxes to make sure that if these arrangements don’t work out, you can still have a dignified life. (Easily my favorite line in the book was written not by the author but by her publisher, right under the copyright notice: “The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property,” it says. “Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.”) My job sometimes entails traveling to countries recently or currently destroyed by civil unrest, and that experience has made me appreciate the fragility of peace, and has not made me eager to conduct a similar experiment in my own city.
August 30, 2020
“When I use the word looting, I mean the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot. That’s the thing I’m defending.”
An NPR interview with author Vicky Osterweil about her new book In Defense of Looting, published last week:
During the uprisings of this past summer, rioting and looting have often gone hand in hand. Can you talk about the distinction you see between the two?
“Rioting” generally refers to any moment of mass unrest or upheaval. Riots are a space in which a mass of people has produced a situation in which the general laws that govern society no longer function, and people can act in different ways in the street and in public. I’d say that rioting is a broader category, in which looting appears as a tactic.
Often, looting is more common among movements that are coming from below. It tends to be an attack on a business, a commercial space, maybe a government building — taking those things that would otherwise be commodified and controlled and sharing them for free.
Can you talk about rioting as a tactic? What are the reasons people deploy it as a strategy?
It does a number of important things. It gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage — which, during COVID times, is widely unreliable or, particularly in these communities is often not available, or it comes at great risk. That’s looting’s most basic tactical power as a political mode of action.
It also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed. It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It points to the way in which that’s unjust. And the reason that the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories. So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.
Importantly, I think especially when it’s in the context of a Black uprising like the one we’re living through now, it also attacks the history of whiteness and white supremacy. The very basis of property in the U.S. is derived through whiteness and through Black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination of the country. Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police. It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about — that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.
[…]
What would you say to people who are concerned about essential places like grocery stores or pharmacies being attacked in those communities?
When it comes to small business, family owned business or locally owned business, they are no more likely to provide worker protections. They are no more likely to have to provide good stuff for the community than big businesses. It’s actually a Republican myth that has, over the last 20 years, really crawled into even leftist discourse: that the small business owner must be respected, that the small business owner creates jobs and is part of the community. But that’s actually a right-wing myth.
A business being attacked in the community is ultimately about attacking like modes of oppression that exist in the community. It is true and possible that there are instances historically when businesses have refused to reopen or to come back. But that is a part of the inequity of the society, that people live in places where there is only one place where they can get access to something [like food or medicine]. That question assumes well, what if you’re in a food desert? But the food desert is already an incredibly unjust situation. There’s this real tendency to try and blame people for fighting back, for revealing the inequity of the injustice that’s already been formed by the time that they’re fighting.
H/T to Amy Alkon for the link.
Update: Ann Althouse also commented on the NPR interview:
I don’t know if other people in “the movement” are happy to see that idea spoken aloud [that looters and rioters have “always been a part of our movement”]. I’ve been hearing that there are 2 groups of people — the peaceful protesters and these mysterious other people, who, I’ve noted, the journalists don’t seem to care to identify and investigate. Osterweil is saying these are not 2 different groups. It’s one movement, and it’s been going on for a long time.
[…]
That seems to present looting as street theater with a message. It makes an argument. A terrible argument. We’ve heard that argument in words many times over the years, and most Americans reject it. We want to work and build wealth and enjoy our lives and we want the great mutual benefits of hard work and wealth. Osterweil’s looting is a switch from making the argument against property in words and to speak with actions — the destruction of property. But that doesn’t make the argument more convincing! It’s a nasty tantrum thrown because you can’t convince people with your ideas. Ironically, fortunately, it makes the argument for the other side.
Why Gods and Generals is Neo-Confederate Propaganda (and Objectively Sucks)
Atun-Shei Films
Published 12 Aug 2019Like if Ken Burns and Mr. Plinkett had a baby.
Gods and Generals (2003) is a four and a half hour long epic from the director of Gettysburg (1993), chronicling the first two years of the American Civil War in the Eastern Theater from the point of view of General Stonewall Jackson. In this video essay / review, I examine how the film is an insidious piece of pro-Confederate propaganda, echoing the inaccuracies and misconceptions of the notorious Lost Cause myth.
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August 29, 2020
QotD: Britain’s most sacred of sacred cows
This was an unintended insult to the doctors and nurses of other countries, as if in their benighted lands without the NHS they did not work with skill or devotion. The NHS is neither necessary nor sufficient for medical and nursing staff to show devotion. The parents of a well-taught schoolchild do not thank the Ministry of Education.
No doubt the prime minister’s praise of the NHS was politically shrewd — one casts no doubt on the perfection of the Koran in Mecca — but in the long run such praise does no service to the nation, which at some time or other ought to face up to the fact that its healthcare system is at best mediocre by comparison with that of other countries at a similar level of economic development, and that being ill and seeking treatment is a more unpleasant experience in Britain than in it is many civilised countries.
Untold numbers of people receive excellent care under the NHS. One must neither exaggerate nor catastrophise. But there is another side to the coin as well, and it is surely not a coincidence that no one in Europe would choose Britain as their country of medical care, rather the reverse. If a German were to say, “For God’s sake, get me to the NHS!”, a psychiatrist would be called.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Empire of conformists”, The Critic, 2020-04-29.
August 27, 2020
Margaret Murray’s highly influential The Witch-Cult in Western Europe
In First Things, Francis Young discusses the impact Murray’s work had when it was published in the 1920s:
Just under a century ago, in 1921, one of the strangest books ever to be published by Oxford University Press appeared in print: The Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Margaret Alice Murray. By today’s academic standards — in fact, even by the standards of the 1920s — Murray’s book was filled with transparent flaws in methodology and research. Furthermore, the book’s author (a leading Egyptologist) was not qualified to write it. The few scholars then working on the history of European witchcraft dismissed Murray’s contribution. Yet in spite of this, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe became an instant hit and captured the imaginations of readers. Within three decades, the book had not only profoundly influenced cultural understandings of witchcraft, but also directly led to the rise of neopaganism and the foundation of a new religion, Wicca, that today has millions of adherents throughout the world.
Margaret Alice Murray (1863–1963) was born and brought up in British India — an upbringing that, as with so many Anglo-Indians of the nineteenth century, may have opened her mind to interests beyond Victorian culture. Determined to pursue a career of her own at a time when opportunities for women were limited, Murray tried out both nursing and social work before entering the progressive University College London in 1894, where she studied Egyptology under W. Flinders Petrie. Murray rapidly rose through the academic ranks, and by 1914, she was effectively running the Egyptology department. Her impressive achievements in advancing knowledge of ancient Egypt and higher education for women have, however, been largely overshadowed by her decision to take a detour into writing about European witchcraft.
In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Murray seized on some unusual testimonies in 16th-century Scottish witch trials to elaborate a radical theory: She claimed that what medieval and early modern people called witchcraft was, in fact, the last traces of a pagan fertility cult that originated in the Neolithic period. The witch trials of the 15th–17th centuries represented Christianity’s last attempt to stamp out this cult, which was practiced in secret covens (groups of thirteen people) who worshipped a horned god (who was mistaken for the devil). Knowledge of this cult was passed through families or, occasionally, to new initiates, but kept secret from the outside world.
Murray’s use of a single set of problematic sources from one country (Scotland) to argue that a previously unnoticed religion had existed since prehistory failed to meet basic historiographical and anthropological standards of research. She was given to making huge conceptual leaps on the basis of contentious interpretations of meager evidence. Using a small range of hostile trial records designed to discredit women accused of witchcraft (along with testimonies extracted under torture), Murray reconstructed what she believed were real religious practices lurking behind the demonological construct of the Witches’ Sabbath. In so doing, she brought together traditions of interpretation honed by the anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1854–1941), the author of The Golden Bough, and the French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874). Murray followed Michelet in arguing that those accused of witchcraft were not the innocent victims of trumped-up charges, but were in fact adherents of a subversive cult; and she followed Frazer in her belief that prehistoric religious beliefs, associated with fertility, had survived into recent times.
August 26, 2020
QotD: The U.S. Supreme Court
Until the Robert Bork nomination in 1987, Supreme Court fights were remarkably staid affairs. But by the late ’80s, the court had become a bulwark for all sorts of policies and laws that should rightly be in the portfolio of the legislative or executive branch, or, better, left to the various states. As a result, on any number of issues — most conspicuously abortion policy — the court became more important than the presidency or Congress. No wonder fights over Supreme Court appointments started to look more and more like political campaigns than debates over the finer points of judicial philosophy.
Jonah Goldberg, “Concentrated Power Inevitably Leads to Political Backlash”, Townhall.com, 2018-05-11.
August 24, 2020
Theodore Dalrymple reviews White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo and How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
The two books share many characteristics, says the good doctor (in his “Anthony Daniels” guise), and the most noteworthy is a shared hectoring tone:
DiAngelo’s book displays a curious admixture of influences: the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Jimmy Swaggart, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Uriah Heep, the four of them being present in approximately equal proportion.
DiAngelo has apparently made a career of anti-racist struggle sessions in which ordinary employees of various organizations must confess publicly to their racism however hidden it might be, as university professors, primary school teachers, doctors working in slums, etc., had once in China to confess to bourgeois propensities and counter-revolutionary ideas. They may never have uttered a racist sentiment, they may never have been rude to a person of another race, let alone violent towards one, they may have friends of other races or even be married to a person of another race, but they carry racism deep within them like Original Sin, with this difference: there can be no redemption from it even after having read DiAngelo’s book and attended her struggle sessions. Personally, I should not be at all surprised if the end result of all her efforts, at least among the men she has “trained” (which is to say tried to indoctrinate), was to have acted as a recruitment officer for the Ku Klux Klan.
After thirty years of constant work of supposedly anti-racist training, she confesses — like the tearful Jimmy Swaggart — to being still guilty of racism herself, promising to reform, although reform is ex hypothesi impossible because racism is in her society’s DNA, as it were. One is reminded of the type of psychoanalysis which after thirty years of hourly sessions four times a week fails to get to the root of the analysand’s problem, let alone solve it, because it doesn’t even know what the problem is. But failure is also an opportunity, because, like psychoanalysis, the more anti-racist training fails, the more it is needed. DiAngelo, all credit to her, has found an economic niche for herself for the rest of her life. One has a sneaking admiration for such entrepreneurs. They are the asset-strippers of the soul.
As for Uriah Heep, DiAngelo has obviously heard, read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested (as my teachers used to demand of me) David Copperfield. Her oleaginous approach to all “people of color,” as she coyly calls them, makes Uriah Heep seem positively blunt and straight-talking. DiAngelo regards all nonwhite people, ex officio, as being incapable of exaggeration or unjustified self-pity, let alone of lying. As well as being sycophantic, this is, to coin a word, racist, for one of the most important manifestations of free will, and therefore of humanity itself, is the capacity to lie. In effect, then, she regards “people of color” as infra-human truth-uttering mechanisms: they speak, therefore what they say is true. No critical faculties need be applied to what they say.
[…]
DiAngelo is a tremendous moral narcissist. This is shown by her use of the term “people of color.” Until page 31, I thought that it meant black, but on that page I learned that it meant non-white. She shows no interest in the question of whether the Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Burmese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Austronesians, Amerindians, and Africans, et al., would all be delighted to be put in the same category, let alone interest in their many cultures. On page 33, we read:
White supremacy is more than the idea that whites are superior to people of color; it is the deeper premise that supports the idea — the definition of whites as the norm or standard of human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm.
Lumping non-white people together as “people of color” is precisely an instance of what she criticizes: this is what happens when moral rhetoric far outruns intelligence.
August 22, 2020
Debra Soh’s new book is “a cancel-culture grenade”
Jen Gerson knows that any positive mention of Debra Soh’s The End of Gender: Debunking Myths About Sex and Identity has a strong resemblance to square-dancing in a minefield. Cancellations may fall like raindrops on the career of anyone so unenlightened as to even acknowledge the existence of such a work:
For that, at its heart, is what Soh’s book is: a lucid discussion of the best science we have to date on the nature of gender and sex, written for a lay audience. What gives the title its sizzle is not the content, but rather the cultural climate in which it is being published.
It maps the depth, scope and scale of current Culture War trenches in this particular theatre of battle. The End of Gender stomps on tripwires like the gender binary, whether transgender women are women, autogynephilia, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, bathroom bans, and more.
It’s a cancel-culture grenade.
That’s not because these subjects ought to be contentious. Soh’s approach and tone are largely neutral. Rather, the controversy the book will inevitably incite is a reflection of a culture that has been warped into a state of existential terror by the very notion that these ideas can be responsibly discussed.
Soh begins by defining her terms.
So much of the debate around the most difficult topics of sex and gender stem from the simple fact that we are misusing the basic language. For example, sex and gender are not interchangeable concepts, even though they are often treated as such.
Sex is a term of biology. One’s sex, Soh argues, is determined by his or her gametes. With the exception of rare intersex disorders, 99 per cent of the population has a clearly defined biological sex that slots into one of two dimorphic categories: male or female.
Gender is more complicated. It’s now popular to state that there are more than two genders, but Soh disputes this. She argues that gender — or the set of characteristics that signal one’s sex to society — is also dimorphic. For 99 per cent of the population, gender correlates with sex. Further, even when expressions of gender are at odds with one’s biological sex, this, too, is mediated by biology. Whether one presents as gender typical or gender atypical is the result of prenatal testosterone exposure.
Soh notes that claiming to be gender non-binary, or gender fluid — or any one of a thousand variations that transcend the limiting concepts of male and female — is increasingly trendy, especially among teenagers and young adults. It seems to be the latest form of identity experimentation.
There are two reasons for this trend.
The first is that seeing the world through an intersectional framework encourages progressives to reverse the traditional hierarchies of race, sex and power. Therefore, claiming a marginalized identity — like genderqueer non-binary unicorn — accrues status within progressive peer circles.
The second is that the culture has undergone a massive awakening to transgender rights over the past decade. This has contributed expressive categories and vocabularies for people who otherwise might have struggled to find the language to explore their most authentic selves. As the cues, like cosmetics and dress, that we used to signal our gender are socially constructed, gender expression is limited only by our creativity.
August 15, 2020
French President Emmanuel Macron – “We are a country that for decades is divided and in doubt”
Individuals in France may be chauvinistic, says Joseph de Weck, but the French as a whole are less chauvinistic and more self-critical than the British or the Germans:
There is no doubt that the French are a self-sufficient bunch. After all, it was a Frenchman who once wrote, “Hell is other people.”
COVID-19 or not, the French rarely travel abroad for holidays. In terms of food, most French people think they have it best. And at housewarming parties in Paris, the music playlist is usually primarily made up of chansons and French rap classics.
And despite President Emmanuel Macron’s attempts to turn Europe into a global “balancing power,” what happens abroad doesn’t seem to spark much interest at home. The evening news on the public channel on average dedicates 16 percent of its coverage to European and foreign news. By comparison, that proportion rises to 50 percent in Germany. No surprise then that polls show the average French person knows little about the functioning of the EU.
But if this cliché about French aloofness is easily backed up with data points, another common trope about the Gauls doesn’t: that of French arrogance. At least when it comes to the present, the French are brutally self-critical.
In fact, France seem to be among the least chauvinistic countries in Europe. Asked whether they think their culture is superior to others, 36 percent of the French answered “yes” in a recent poll. This compares to 46 percent in the United Kingdom and 45 percent in Germany.
Or take the COVID-19 crisis: unlike other nations, the Republic’s citoyens won’t rally around the flag. Among Europeans, the French give their government the lowest grades for its handling of the pandemic. Never mind that four of France’s neighbors have significantly higher death-per-capita rates. Never mind either that France’s short-time work benefits are among the most generous, also explaining why consumption is almost back to pre-crisis levels.
Of course, one could explain the French’s dim view of the state’s COVID-19 response as being due to Macron’s unpopularity. But by French standards, the president is actually polling relatively well. At 39 percent, Macron’s approval ratings surpass his predecessors François Hollande (23 percent) and Nicolas Sarkozy (35 percent) at the same point in their terms.
The negative view the French have of their country goes far beyond the complaint du jour. As Macron put it, “We are a country that for decades is divided and in doubt.”
July 27, 2020
H.L. Mencken
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Eric Oppen (with whom I’ve had a few brief email conversations) discusses the work of the “Sage of Baltimore”:
H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.
I would say that, on the whole, Mencken is still quite readable and enjoyable, and many of his observations on the American scene are still as valid as when he made them. He has his weaknesses. He’s not much of an historian, which limits him when he takes up historical subjects. He never got over what he saw as the unfair treatment the German cause got in the American press between 1914 and the entry of the US into World War One. He also often identifies people as Jewish or black when it’s not really relevant to what he’s saying, but this was more a custom of his time than out-and-out bigotry. While he often has uncomplimentary things to say about Jews, and blacks, his greatest scorn is reserved for “the lintheads” — his term for the poor whites of the South. He regarded them as barely worthy of human status.
[…] his views on most subjects were quite compatible with libertarian positions. He was an inveterate opponent of government overreaching (which was behind a lot of his ferocious opposition to Prohibition) and while I don’t think he’d approve of drug use, he’d see our War on (Some Unpopular) Drugs as the assault on the Constitution that it is. While he was by no means hostile to blacks, and went out of his way to promote black writers (many of the figures in the “Harlem Renaissance” owed a lot to his support), he’d also denounce affirmative action and our current frenzy of “anti-racism” in scathing terms. His views on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and how it has been turned into an alternate, and superior, Constitution would probably scorch the paint off the walls.
Mencken’s views on people’s private lives would have infuriated many of his contemporaries. While he disapproved of homosexuality, referring to it negatively in entries in his private diaries, he was by no means a howling “homophobe.” His writings on the travails of Oscar Wilde are very sympathetic to Wilde’s sufferings, which Mencken thought were wholly disproportionate to what he was known to have done. Mencken referred to Lord Alfred Douglas, in a review of Douglas’ book about Wilde, as a Tartuffe — that is to say, a posturing hypocrite.
Having been a reporter for years in Baltimore, back when reporters were very like the old film noir view of them, Mencken was very much a man of the world, and inclined to great tolerance on others’ sex lives. When he wrote of prostitutes, he refrained from the sort of pious moralizing that was expected in his time. He said that prostitutes often actively preferred their profession to other work available to them, and that most of them ended up respectably married. He kept his own love life very private, and was a faithful husband to his wife throughout their brief marriage, but he does mention, here and there, having had other lovers, whom he does not name even in writings designated to come to light only long after everybody involved was dead. By his own account in his Diary, he lost his virginity at age fourteen to a girl of his own age, who had already had other experiences before him. He felt that such experiences, unless pregnancy happened, did no one any harm.
While he was an atheist, Mencken had no particular hostility to religion per se, no matter what the Fundamentalists of his day thought. His book Treatise on the Gods makes interesting reading, although it is marred, in my view, by Mencken’s lack of knowledge of languages. He praises Christianity for having “the most gorgeous poetry,” but as far as I know, he could not read Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, and was thinking in terms of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. However, the book is still worth reading, although a serious student of the subject would find it limited.
If you’ve been a regular visitor to the blog, you’ll know I have a huge regard for H.L. Mencken’s work and there are many Mencken quotes that have done duty as QotD entries over the years.
QotD: People on social media are the worst!
No one asked me, he said with a petulant sniff. I think it’s turned out well for those who regard it as a personal publishing platform, and don’t regard social media as an equivalent or replacement for the real world. It is a shadow realm full of tricksters and devils and angels and blokes and sheilas. It’s Second Life except it seems real because it contains Kardashians, who are the most important and fascinating people on earth.
Anyway, it’s mostly lamented now because A) Trump, and B) People are jerks.
Rich Kyanka: Social media was supposed to be about, “Hey, Grandma. How are you?” Now it’s like, “Oh my God, did you see what she wore yesterday? What a f**ing cow that bitch is.” Everything is toxic — and that has to do with the internet itself. It was founded to connect people all over the world. But now you can meet people all over the world and then murder them in virtual reality and rape their pets.
Everything is toxic — and that has to do with the internet itself. I don’t think so. I think it has to do with people on the internet. People who otherwise wouldn’t say boo to you as you passed on the street, but feel as if it is their duty to yell at everything on Twitter, because there are no consequences. If you got into the elevator at work every day and acted rude to everyone in the car, eventually it would have consequences. The Internet is a hellish version of an elevator car — everyone is looking at everyone else and talking at the same time about everyone else and themselves.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2018-05-02.
