Look, I don’t like the parading of emotions by politicians anyway: it’s not to my taste. But for a Liberal to speak ill of tolerance is to square-dance in a minefield. “Tolerance” is shorthand for the existence of a society in which persons cohabit, trade and debate without killing one another over their differences — even those differences which are serious, fundamental and intractable. Tolerance truly is the signature accomplishment of our country, and of countries like ours: it is the crucial difference between nice places to live and the not-so-nice. To dismiss it is to abandon the old liberals’ confidence that familiarity between different groups and sects may in fact lead to love and acceptance — that it is the foundation for the organic growth of a neighbourliness that cannot be ordered up like a meal or created by fiat.
Tolerance represents a mutual compact to which the state itself is a party. And its minimalism is an important feature. Tolerance does not ask you to approve of gay people, or to like atheists, or to appreciate a jaunty Sikh turban, or to trust a redhead. It insists only that you treat them as humans and fellow citizens — equal to yourself in legal endowments and social entitlements, and most particularly in the right to be left alone.
Tolerance means you do not persecute; you do not abuse; you do not commit or threaten violence. It is a restriction on behaviour, above all, or, more broadly, on conduct: it is not a test of one’s disposition, private opinions or feelings.
Colby Cosh, “‘Can we stop talking about tolerance?’ Lord, I hope not”, National Post, 2018-08-23.
November 20, 2020
QotD: Tolerance
November 13, 2020
Oddly, the Canadian media evince no interest whatsoever in the Trudeau government’s malign plans for the Internet
In The Line, Peter Menzies shows how little the mainstream media outlets in Canada care about the power grab the feds are attempting with their proposed “get money from web giants” shakedown:
Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapure from CPAC video.
In order to understand where media and public attention has been the past couple of weeks, all you had to do was listen in on Monday morning’s Ottawa news conference.
Six days after Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault had introduced ground-breaking legislation to regulate content online, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced more cash to bring better Internet to rural and remote communities. There were also some COVID-19 updates and something about help for agriculture.
And, of course, the questions asked by the media were about the U.S. election. What else could possibly be of interest?
Eventually there were a few inquiries about Telesat and low-Earth-orbit satellites, but you get the point: things that matter to people’s daily lives such as cable bills, data plans, Netflix, cellular service, crappy WiFi and slow Internet connections haven’t been of much interest to Canadian media lately.
So there has been a dearth of chatter about Guilbeault’s controversial plan to (my words, not his): restrict consumer choice, tax Netflix to finance certified Canadian content (Cancon) and bring to an end the greatest period of prosperity in the history of the Canadian film and television industry. Did I mention stifling innovation, increasing streaming subscription costs and scaring away investment? No? My bad. Those too.
Guilbeault has decided that the agency dedicated to defining the nation’s TV and radio diet — the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) — is now going to be in charge of what you are allowed to dine on online as well. No longer will you be able to manage your preferences. No more popcorn and candy for you. Going forward, Cancon spinach and broccoli will be on your plate every evening. Breathtakingly, Guilbeault has “modernized” communications legislation by giving authority over the Internet to something called a “radio-television” commission by using something still called the “broadcasting” act.
November 9, 2020
QotD: The Children of Men becomes disturbingly real in Japan
In Lady James’ speculative fiction, pets are doted on as child-substitutes, and churches hold christening ceremonies for cats. In contemporary Japanese reality, Tokyo has some 40 “cat cafés” where lonely solitary citizens can while away an afternoon by renting a feline to touch and pet for a couple of companiable hours.
In Lady James’ speculative fiction, all the unneeded toys are burned, except for the dolls, which childless women seize on as the nearest thing to a baby and wheel through the streets. In contemporary Japanese reality, toy makers, their children’s market dwindling, have instead developed dolls for seniors to be the grandchildren they’ll never have: You can dress them up, and put them in a baby carriage, and the computer chip in the back has several dozen phrases of the kind a real grandchild might use to enable them to engage in rudimentary social pleasantries.
P.D. James’ most audacious fancy is that in a barren land sex itself becomes a bit of a chore. The authorities frantically sponsor state porn emporia promoting ever more recherché forms of erotic activity in an effort to reverse the populace’s flagging sexual desire just in case man’s seed should recover its potency. Alas, to no avail. As Lady James writes, “Women complain increasingly of what they describe as painful orgasms: the spasm achieved but not the pleasure. Pages are devoted to this common phenomenon in the women’s magazines.”
As I said, a bold conceit, at least to those who believe that shorn of all those boring procreation hang-ups we can finally be free to indulge our sexual appetites to the full. But it seems the Japanese have embraced the no-sex-please-we’re-dystopian-Brits plot angle, too. In October, Abigail Haworth of The Observer in London filed a story headlined “Why Have Young People in Japan Stopped Having Sex?” Not all young people but a whopping percentage: A survey by the Japan Family Planning Association reported that over a quarter of men aged 16–24 “were not interested in or despised sexual contact.” For women, it was 45 per cent.
Mark Steyn, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, 2014.
November 8, 2020
QotD: Tribal and post-tribal economies
This is because people don’t view their public posts as something they do to make society better/serve society or even do a job, but as a way to enrich themselves/benefit their friends/make it easier to make money in the future.
Everything, from truly shoddy workmanship to rushed, corner/cutting work, to outright corruption comes from viewing a job not as something you take pride in and work to do your best at, but from viewing a job as an opportunity to enrich yourself and your family while doing as little work as humanly possible. In fact in some societies, this is viewed as a duty. As someone in comments cited there are places in Africa where locals can’t run a shop, because all their relatives near and distant will expect to be given merchandise for free … or even money out of the till.
A lot of this is because the idea of the individual as independent of the tribe and the family is a very new thing in most of the world. We kind of have a head start on it because we are/are descended from those who left family and tribe behind.
[…]
Also in most of the world working for money is vaguely shameful. Particularly so if you’re working for someone else. […] And even here not only does that attitude persist, but it’s trying to make itself normal. Particularly in politics.
So, take pride in what you do, and do the best job you can. It’s not just important for you, it’s a building block of society. Do the best you can, and control as much as you can, so maybe you will have just reward which is an incentive to do better.
This way is civilization built. This way do things actually improve.
Sarah Hoyt, “BUILD!”, According to Hoyt, 2018-07-25.
November 2, 2020
Federal government to web giants: “BOHICA!”
Michael Geist provides an unauthorized backgrounder on the Canadian government’s quixotic attempt to shakedown the likes of Netflix for money to give to “struggling” Canadian media companies:
Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapure from CPAC video.
Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault is set to introduce his “Get Money from Web Giants” Internet regulation bill on Monday. Based on his previous public comments, the bill is expected to grant the CRTC extensive new powers to regulate Internet-based video streaming services. In particular, expect the government to mandate payments to support Canadian content production for the streaming services and establish new “discoverability” requirements that will require online services to override user preferences by promoting Canadian content. The government is likely to issue a policy direction to the CRTC that identifies its specific priorities, but the much-discussed link licensing requirement for social media companies that Guilbeault has supported will not be part of this legislative package.
These reforms mark the culmination of a dramatic reversal in government digital policy. After then-Heritage Minister Melanie Joly unveiled her 2017 digital cancon strategy that focused on market-based solutions and emphasized exports of Canadian culture, extensive lobbying gradually let to a major policy flip flop. The CRTC reversed its prior position on Internet streaming regulation in 2018 with a regulate-everything approach, the deeply flawed Yale report released earlier this year provided the blueprint for CRTC-led regulation, and Guilbeault jumped on board with a declaration that his top legislative priority was to “get money from web giants.”
On Monday, the government will undoubtedly line up the lobby groups that supported the reform to provide positive quotes, suggest reforms will lead to billions in new revenues, and claim the bill ensures regulatory fairness by requiring that everyone contribute. Yet much of the policy is based on fictions: that this levels the playing field, that there is a Cancon crisis, that discoverability requirements respond to a serious concern, that this will result in quick payments to the industry, that this is consistent with net neutrality, or that consumers will not bear the costs of reform.
None of this is true. But beyond those issues – each discussed in further detail below – this most notably represents a significant new source of speech regulation. We do not require government authorization to publish newspapers, blog posts, or to simply voice our views in a public forum. That we require governmental authorization in the form of licensing for broadcasters was largely justified in furtherance of cultural policies on the grounds of limited access to scarce spectrum. That justification simply does not apply to the Internet, no matter how many times Guilbeault refers to the inclusion of Internet companies within the “broadcast system.” This is not a matter of Internet exceptionalism. Laws and regulations such as taxation, competition, privacy, and consumer protection are all among the rules that apply regardless of whether the service is offline or online. But speech regulation by the CRTC should require a far better justification than the lure of “free money” from Internet companies.
October 21, 2020
Aryan invasion, migration theory (Truth or fiction) India documentary
Epimetheus
Published 24 Jan 2018Aryan invasion, migration theory (Truth or fiction) India documentary
Epimetheus on Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/Epimetheus1776David Frawley Aryan invasion videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qych3…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyz_S…Tags:
Aryan invasion india, india history, indian history, documentary, history of india, india,history, india documentary, hindi, 2018, ancient india, indus valley civilization, 5,000 Years History of India documentary, Aryan migration theory, Aryan invasion theory, indo-aryan, indo Aryan migration
October 14, 2020
“For Generation Z — roughly speaking, those born between 1995 and 2010 — ‘flattering’ is becoming a new F-word”
Hannah Betts explains why it’s now somewhere between awkward and mortally offensive to use the word “flattering” to or about a member of Gen Z:
Why do we wear clothes? The mundane answer runs “for protection against the elements”, pointing to the succession of Ice Ages to which homo sapiens was subjected, forced to borrow fur from more hirsute species.
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. The ancient civilisations that grew up in the fertile valleys of the Euphrates, the Nile and the Indus, were more tropical than a Wham! video, and clearly using their outfits to signify status, occupational, sex and gender differentiation.
Some may even have wanted to be regarded as individuals — despite we modern types imagining we invented all that — cutting a dash with a tufted Mesopotamian fringe here, or supple Egyptian weave there.
I raise the question because the issue of why we dress is feeling modish again, and not merely because the great grounding brought about by Covid has made comfort king.
The costumes of both genders had been heading in this direction already — what with normcore, athleezure, and the lemming-like “casualisation”. But, I’m talking about something else here, a resistance to the at-one-time uncontroversial notion of what is “flattering”, a term now considered oppressive by the young.
To quote the Guardian‘s Jess Cartner-Morley, never backward about coming forward in identifying a zeitgeist moment: “For Generation Z — roughly speaking, those born between 1995 and 2010 — ‘flattering’ is becoming a new F-word.
“To compliment a woman on her ‘flattering’ dress is passive-aggressive body-policing, sneaked into our consciousness in a Trojan horse of sisterly helpfulness. It is a euphemism for fat-shaming, a sniper attack slyly targeting our hidden vulnerabilities. ‘Flattering’, in other words, is cancelled.”
October 11, 2020
QotD: Britain’s National Health Service cult
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.
September 30, 2020
“The culture war is the ‘New Normal'”
Andrew Doyle discusses the debate over the culture war in Spiked:
The phrase that probably best characterises the events of 2020 is the “New Normal”. Although it’s typically used to describe our changed circumstances under lockdown, it could just as easily be applied to the way in which we have all grown accustomed to the worst excesses of the social-justice revolution.
News stories that only five years ago would have been dismissed as asinine aberrations now recur with a quotidian certainty. Recent notable examples include: Princeton University confessing to “systemic racism”, leading to an investigation by the Department of Education on the grounds that racism is a violation of civil-rights law; the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts making a similar admission, thereby emboldening some of its students to produce a 100-page document full of demands so entitled that it would make Veruca Salt blush; and an academic and novelist stating that debate is “an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion and oppression”. Yes, the culture war is the “New Normal”.
Yet with all the evidence before our eyes, certain commentators persist with their view that the culture war is a right-wing myth advanced by those who are resistant to change. “There’s no actual ‘culture war’, is there?”, writes LBC’s James O’Brien: “It’s just a new way of describing disagreements between people who hate racism and discrimination and people who love it.” Then there is the Guardian‘s Owen Jones, who maintains that “a lot of what’s called ‘the culture war’ is just younger people trying to assert their different social and moral values over older generations who run most of the media”. Nesrine Malik has argued that the culture war has been manufactured by the right, although it will not have escaped most people’s attention that the majority of salvos come from the left side of the battlefield.
It’s this kind of gaslighting – to borrow the language of social-justice activists – that we have already seen from writers who insist that “cancel culture” doesn’t exist, in spite of abundant and incontrovertible evidence that it does.
This is because, as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay have so clearly outlined in their seminal book Cynical Theories, the ideology of social justice has its origins in postmodernism, a school of thought which favours “lived experience” and multiple “ways of knowing” over objective truth. It doesn’t matter, for instance, that JK Rowling has never said or written anything transphobic — her new novel must be denounced for advancing an anti-trans agenda, even though it contains no actual references to trans people. These activists have apparently taken their cues from Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871). “When I use a word”, he says to Alice, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”.
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 23, 2020
QotD: Don’t blame the Boomers for the “Summer of Love” … most of ’em were too young to participate
Now, I’m all for bashing the goddamn Boomers, but let’s be fair (since it matters for historical analysis). There’s a common misconception about the Baby Boom. Here, see if you can spot it:
Did you see it? Look closer, and you’ll see that while 1947(-ish) appears to be the peak year in terms of total births, the vast majority of what we call “Boomers” were born after 1950. Let’s do some simple math. The very oldest Boomers were born in 1946. The Summer of Love was 1967. Even if we assume the Summer of Love came out of nowhere — which is impossible, of course, any movement that large had antecedents going back years, probably decades, but let’s assume — that means that any “Boomers” participating were, at most, barely 22 years old. They were just barely 24 when Woodstock came around. Granted that the youngest are the dumbest, and thus can have outsize influence, they still can’t have been largely, let alone solely, responsible for the idiocy of the hippies.
That’s all on the older crowd, the so-called “Silent Generation” — the ones who were old enough to be aware of World War II, but unable to participate directly.
It’s easy to verify. The Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the New Left, was penned by coddled college kids in 1962 — meaning, by kids born, at latest, in about 1942 (its principal author, Tom Hayden, was born in 1939). Here are the Chicago Seven and their dates of birth: Abbie Hoffman (1936), Jerry Rubin (1938), David Dellinger (1915!), Hayden, Rennie Davis (1941),John Froines (1939), and Lee Weiner (1939).
Hoffman, especially, bears scrutiny. Though he’s best remembered as a Yippie — that is, the founder of an ostentatiously youth-oriented movement — he was 31 at its founding. Don’t trust anyone over thirty, right?
1936 to 1946 is only a decade, but it’s crucial. A kid born in 1936 would have vivid memories of World War II and its immediate aftermath — fathers, uncles, and older brothers (and, in more than a few cases, aunts and older sisters) coming home from the service. A kid born in 1946 would have a completely different experience — ask any combat veteran about the first year or two back in the world, versus being home for a decade. Those guys — the kids who saw firsthand the angry young strangers they were supposed to call “Dad” — were the ones who did the real damage in The Sixties(TM), just as it was the almost-but-not-quite frontsoldaten who did the real damage in the Third Reich.
With me? Now hang on to your hats, because here’s where it gets pretty meta: It was the “Silent Generation,” not the Boomers, who did the real damage in The Sixties(TM). That is, the guys who juuuust missed the giant social upheaval that was World War II. The Boomers have done all the damage since The Sixties(TM).
That — The Sixties(TM), which is why I’m using that obnoxious (TM) — is the great social upheaval they juuuust missed. [These people] aren’t old fossils from the flower power years, though many of those fossils are still alive and kicking (including four of the Chicago Seven: Hayden, Davis, Froines, and Weiner). Has anyone heard from Billy Ayers lately? How about Noam Chomsky (born 1928)? I’m sure they have plenty to say … but nobody cares.
It’s not retreads from The Sixties(TM) out there doing this stuff. It’s the people who wish they’d been around for the Summer of Love that are doing it. It’s the people who just know they would’ve ended the Vietnam War, if only they hadn’t been in junior high at the time. This is their Woodstock, not least because they only heard about the original when they arrived for freshman orientation in 1976.
Severian, “Talkin’ ’bout My Generation!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-06-11.
September 20, 2020
QotD: The anti-slavery movement
What did Wilberforce “cure”? Two centuries ago, on March 25th 1807, one very persistent British backbencher secured the passage by Parliament of an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade throughout His Majesty’s realms and territories. It’s not that no one remembers the disease ever existed, but that we recall it as a kind of freak pandemic — a SARS or bird flu that flares up and whirrs round the world and is then eradicated. The American education system teaches it as such — as a kind of wicked perversion the Atlantic settlers had conjured out of their own ambition.
In reality, it was more like the common cold — a fact of life. The institution predates the word’s etymology, from the Slavs brought from eastern Europe to the glittering metropolis of Rome. It predates by some millennia the earliest laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia. The first legally recognized slave in the American colonies was owned by a black man who had himself arrived as an indentured servant. The first slave owners on the North American continent were hunter-gatherers. As Metaxas puts it, “Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.”
Mark Steyn, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, 2014.
September 8, 2020
2020 is a cracking year
And by “cracking” I don’t mean the old Victorian expression for “very good”. Sarah Hoyt explains the cracks at the Libertarian Enterprise:
“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
It’s 2020 and we’re all cracking.
And no, by that I don’t mean that we’re cracking like crazy on our writing. Most of us are having trouble writing. A lot of us are having trouble reading. Though I’ve finally got out of the Pride and Prejudice fanfic jag.
I’ve seen people suddenly lose it and start crying over dirty dishes. Or the fact we ran out of peanut butter.
Okay, that was me. Yesterday. But I’ve been watching signs of just that much fragility in everyone I know.
Part of it is the lockdown. Man — and verily, woman — is a social animal. Not only is it not good for Man — do I need to say “and woman again?” — to be alone, it’s not good for us, when going out to be confronted with “truncated” human faces.
It is instinctive in humans to see human faces in everything. Don’t believe me? Look at a random pattern long enough, and you’ll find faces. Truncated human faces, the mouth gone, are deeply unsettling to the back of our brain. It is wrong, mutilated.
Suicides are through the roof. Mental health issues abound. The young are suffering particularly badly, because on top of all they believe they’re going to die. (The rest of us are already dead from the ice age, acid rain, fossil fuel depletion, alar, global warming, ozone depletion … I’m sure I’m forgetting some things. After so much death, one becomes resilient. Those of us forty and over won’t die. Even if they kill us.)
But the other part of it is that in a contentious political year there’s nowhere to escape.
Remember when you used to have friends that believed exactly the opposite of what you did, and you both knew it, but you were still friends? You couldn’t talk politics, but you could talk knitting, embroidery, kids, gardening, furniture refinishing, science fiction? You could sit down and have a cup of coffee with someone whose political views you considered despicable and not mention politics? Not even once?
But that was before the invasion of those for whom everything is political. Oh, cancel culture already existed. Before social media, I was terrified of saying the wrong word and revealing my real thoughts, and getting blacklisted by publishing houses.
But there were spaces you could draw a breath. Places where you didn’t have to talk and/or think about politics.
August 31, 2020
Why was Europe better with guns? – The History of Guns
History Clarified
Published 3 Dec 2018China invented gunpowder (combustible powder), so why was it the European nations that went out and conquered the world using firearms?
This video looks at some geographical factors to examine what allowed Europe to innovate while China and most of the world fell behind with gunpowder weapons.
This focuses heavily on Kenneth Chase’s Book, Firearms: A Global History to 1700. He tries to get away from just looking at drill, organization, and state production of firearms to see how geography helped create the necessary conditions for those other innovations.
Interested in your own copy? Check out the link below:
DISCLAIMER: This video description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links below, I’ll receive a small commission.
The map of Japan is under Creative Commons 4.0.
August 28, 2020
Britain’s National Trust decides to go in a radically different direction
If you’ve ever visited the UK, you’ll almost certainly have seen some National Trust historic properties in your travels. Despite the name, it’s not a government-affiliated organization, so the Trust has its mission set by its own leadership … and the current leadership are apparently turning their back on the tradional role of the Trust “due to the pandemic”:
From its establishment in 1895 by Octavia Hill, Sir Robert Hunter and Hardwick Rawnsley “to promote the permanent preservation for the benefit of the Nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest”, it has become the pre-eminent haunt of the tasteful middle classes, and is as much part of national life as that other much-lauded institution, the NHS. I have fond memories from my own childhood, and beyond, of walking round grand houses and of playing in their lavish and beautifully appointed grounds. Even their names produce a kind of Proustian rush in me – Felbrigg, Blickling, Stourhead, Dyrham Park, Kingston Lacy. In an uncertain and constantly changing world, the National Trust seemed to be almost a secular church, a rather well-appointed and comfortable Rock of Ages in its own right.
Yet we live in a time when a grubby little pandemic has turned all certainties upside down, and so even the National Trust has had to rethink its plans for the future. Unfortunately, its method of so doing seems to be both destructive and ill-considered. Some might call it woke, if it weren’t for the fact that its actions do not seem to be dictated by panicked social change, but instead by the reported £200 million loss that the coronavirus outbreak has occasioned. Despite having an endowment of over a billion pounds, and still retaining the annual memberships of over five million people, elements within the organisation that long for disruption seem now to have grasped the initiative, with potentially disastrous consequences for both the Trust and the country at large.
An internal briefing document that was leaked to the Times by a no doubt furious insider represents a chilling account of a cull of both heritage and expertise. It describes the status quo as “an outdated mansion experience”, and one that exists only to serve “a loyal but dwindling audience.” It plans to deal with this old-fashioned situation by firing dozens of its curators, placing large amounts of art and antiquities in storage, and by closing most of the properties to the public, instead letting them be hired by corporate entities and the well-heeled for private events, or “new sources of experience-based income”. As the document put it, the Trust wishes to “flex our mansion offer to create more active, fun and useful experiences.” Flex. Mansion Offer. We are, it seems, at the end of days.
I briefly considered, before writing this article, attempting to hold a séance to try and obtain James Lees-Milne’s views from beyond the grave, but eventually decided against interrupting his eternal rest to inform him of the disappointing and frightening news. Yet this situation does not need the phantoms of long-dead architectural historians to fan the flames. There are plenty of living people who are equally, and vocally, appalled, ranging from those who cancelled their memberships to the Trust when the institutional ties were no longer available in their gift shops to the curators, historians and architectural consultants who stand to lose both income and professional standing if these ill-considered and short-sighted reforms are brought about.
The art historian and broadcaster Bendor Grosvenor has been especially exercised by the revelation of the Trust’s plans. He has described their restructuring ideas in The Art Newspaper as “one of the most damaging assaults on art historical expertise ever seen in the UK.” Grosvenor has since been assiduously passing scathing commentary on the various public statements, of varying degrees of disingenuity, made by various high-up executives at the National Trust, none of which have denied that historic properties will be “repurposed”, that the specialist curator posts will be “closed” and the expert curators fired, nor, perhaps most chillingly of all, that the Trust will be seeking to “dial down” its status as a “major national cultural institution”.
About thirty years ago, when we could afford to travel more often, we had a family membership in the National Trust even though we’d only get to visit National Trust properties for two-to-three weeks in a given year. I’m very disappointed to hear about this planned change to the organization, but the chances of me visiting the UK anytime in the next few years are quite low, so I may not have to worry about it personally.
