Quotulatiousness

January 20, 2026

QotD: The rise of Eugenics

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The term “eugenics” only entered the lexicon in the 1870s. I want to say it was Francis Galton who coined it. Galton was one of those guys like T.H. Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) who made “Darwinism” into a substitute religion. “Eugenics”, then, was another scheme of secular salvation — the “scientific management” of the human population, no different, really, from Marxism in politics or Taylorism in business. That was the Gilded Age for you, but the point is, even though the term “eugenics” was new in 1870-ish, eugenic-type arguments were being made decades before. Antebellum defenders of the “Peculiar Institution”, for instance, made more-Galton-than-Galton arguments all the time: As modern life is inevitably trending towards greater mechanization, financialization, and integration, the human subtypes that can’t biologically handle those conditions will inevitably die out, unless …1

But then a funny thing happened. Twice, actually. The first one was the triumph of the Puritan fanatics in the Unpleasantness of 1861-5. Because they were certified Goodpeople (certified by themselves it goes without saying), and because their worldview triumphed through force of arms, they gave themselves a blanket indulgence to peddle the most repulsive kind of “scientific racism”. They just dropped the “racism” part and doubled down on the “scientific”. They called it first “Darwinism”, then “eugenics”, but the upshot of both was that they gave themselves the right, duty, and of course pleasure of pruning the human garden (to use one of their favorite metaphors).

All those mandatory sterilization laws, the kind of “three strikes and you’re permanently out” crime reduction measures we can only dream of? It wasn’t conservatives pushing those. It was Proggies. Sane deal with the “Fitter Family Contests” that proliferated in the US right up to WWII.

We didn’t get that stuff from [Hitler; he] got it from us.

And that was the second thing, of course — all the Nazis’ nonsense about a “master race” […] They would, could, and did point out that what they were doing was in no way different from the stuff agonizingly self-righteous American Proggies were pushing every single day — as the Nazis saw it, they […] merely had the courage of their convictions. St. Margaret Sanger of the Holy Coat Hook, for instance, looked forward to blacks dying out thanks to her abortion activism. As the Nazis saw it, they were just cutting out the middleman.

Severian, “On Duties”, Founding Questions, 2022-04-07.

  1. Many people made this argument, but Josiah Clark Nott defended it at greatest length, if you’re interested in that odd little branch of American intellectual history. Anthropologists try very hard to be the #wokest people on the planet (even other eggheads find them obnoxious, if you can imagine), so it’s fun to needle them with the history of their field — y’all know the so-called “American School” of anthropology was dedicated almost entirely to justifying slavery, right?

Update, 21 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

August 15, 2025

QotD: American Puritanism

Filed under: Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The American, in other words, thinks that the sinner has no rights that any one is bound to respect, and he is prone to mistake an unsupported charge of sinning, provided it be made violently enough, for actual proof and confession.

H.L. Mencken, “Puritanism As a Literary Force”, A Book of Prefaces, 1917.

April 20, 2025

QotD: “Hate speech”

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… they have convinced themselves that certain forms of speech are not free speech. That certain beliefs should not be afforded the liberty of expression. You hear it in their telling, baleful mantra that “Hate speech is not free speech”. And if “hate speech” is not free speech, but rather some kind of toxin, a pox on public life, then crushing it is not censorship. It is more like an act of public health: cleansing the public realm of diseased thoughts that are liable to harm certain groups. These people see themselves not as censors, but as public-health activists delousing the community of germs spread by evil men and women.

This is why they balk and protest when the words free speech are used against them. They detest the idea that they are enemies of liberty. But of course that is precisely what they are. Just consider that nonsensical chant “Hate speech is not free speech”. There are two profound moral problems with this idiotic tautology. The first is that, actually, even genuinely hateful speech, including racist gibberish and misogynistic blather, should be free speech. By its very definition freedom of speech should extend to all speech, even speech we detest. And secondly, “hate speech” has become a slippery, amorphous category that now covers not only foul old nonsense like Holocaust denial, but also trans-sceptical feminism, criticism of Islam, opposition to mass immigration, and so on. “Hate speech” really means thoughtcrime. It is an utterly ideological category used by the cultural and intellectual elites to demonise and censor ideas, beliefs and moral convictions they disapprove of. The war on “hate speech” is the new war on heresy, on free-thinking, on minority opinion, on challenging beliefs. It is blatant censorship.

The illiberal liberals’ conflation of genuine hatred with moral opinion, all of which then gets cynically collapsed under the name of “hate speech”, was beautifully captured in an exchange on the BBC’s Politics Live yesterday. Pushing back against the FSU’s Inaya Folarin Iman, Baroness Kennedy arrogantly predicted that the FSU would be embraced by “racists … people who hate homosexuals, who hate trans people, [and] people … who have hostile views towards Islam”. Hold on. One of these things is not like the others. What is wrong with having hostile views on Islam? Is hostility towards a powerful world religion now a form of “hate speech”? Yes, it is. Kennedy’s conflation of criticism of Islam with racism and homophobia perfectly encapsulated the way in which “hate speech” is now used to police not only genuinely hateful ideas, but also blasphemy against religious ideas. Even that key freedom human beings fought so hard for – the right to mock gods and prophets and religious ideology – is now threatened by the censorious ideology of “hate speech”.

Brendan O’Neill, “Why we must win the fight for free speech”, Spiked, 2020-02-26.

March 20, 2025

The REAL Cause of the Revolutionary War

Filed under: Britain, History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 15 Mar 2025

What caused the American Revolution? Let’s dive beneath the surface-level understanding of British tyranny and unjust taxation and try to understand the long-term social, political, and economic forces which set the stage for our War of Independence.

00:00 Introduction
03:00 1. The World Turned Upside Down
13:50 2. The Paradox of American Liberalism
28:34 3. The Rage Militaire
38:12 Conclusion / Credits
(more…)

February 25, 2025

QotD: Identity politics as a secular religion

Filed under: Books, Politics, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, The making of the Western Mind, identifies the “trace elements” of Christianity in the woke world. The example he used was the intersectional feminists in the #MeToo movement offering white feminists the chance to “acknowledge their own entitlement, to confess their sins and to be granted absolution”.

But the problem with identity politics as a secular religion is precisely its failure to allow for absolution. The faith that Saad espouses is utterly bleak, even cloaked as it is in words of love. It utterly fails to allow for redemption, and its most direct religious antecedent is found in Calvinist predestination.

Under this doctrine, God has predetermined whether you are damned or elect. From the second that the right sperm hit it lucky with the most fecund egg, your place in the woke hierarchy was decided. In the modern progressive world, informed by intersectional feminists, it does not matter what you say or do, the only defining factor in your state of grace is your skin, gender and sexuality.

This is a profoundly depressing outlook for three main reasons. The first is the essential nihilism in the creed. Your intent? Irrelevant. Your deeds? Likewise. The sum of your experience, desires, longings, beliefs? Your humanity itself? Nah, not relevant.

The second dispiriting message is that the problems its aims to address are insoluble. White people are racist by their nature, and inherently incapable of seeing their own racism or addressing it. Men are misogynists, by default, witting or unwitting bulwarks of the patriarchy. If they don’t believe they are individually at fault they are in denial. And if they try to say, actually, I’m not sure the patriarchy exists, they are mansplaining misogynist bastards. This is the politics of perpetual antagonism, of a kind of bleak acceptance that all relationships between different categories of human are necessarily fractious.

[…]

The third problem with Puritan wokeness is that it [has] sinister echoes in the history of predestination. When the creed reached its zenith in the seventeenth century, the logical hole at its centre became insanely obvious. If it does not matter to God how you behave, because your salvation was pre-determined at birth, why not behave however the hell you want to?

Antonia Senior, “Identity politics is Christianity without the redemption”, UnHerd, 2020-01-20.

December 24, 2024

Victorian Mincemeat With Actual Meat

Filed under: Britain, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 14 Dec 2021

Mincemeat pies from back when there was still meat in the filling

City/Region: England
Time Period: 1845

CORRECTION: I said/wrote “1 heaping cup of sugar” but it should be a heaping 1/2 cup. Though more sugar won’t be a bad thing.

Medieval mincemeat pies were about 90% meat and only about 10% fruit. These original mincemeat pies were a way to preserve meat for the winter, but as time went on, the amount of meat went down and the amount of fruit went up until we get a full-fledged dessert with no meat like you usually find today.

This Victorian recipe strikes a nice balance by having some meat, but certainly not the 90% of ye olden days. These pies are so much better than the ones you get at the store. The spices are warm and remind me of Christmas and the lemon brightens it up. Everything is soft, but the pieces stay individual, not all one gloopy mass. At the very end, you get a bit of meatiness, but it’s still sweet and very much a dessert.

    Mincemeat
    (Author’s Receipt)
    To one pound of an unsalted ox-tongue, or inside of roasted sirloin, … add two pounds of fine stoned raisins, two of beef kidney-suet, two pounds and a half of currants, … two of good apples, two and a half of fine Lisbon sugar, from half to a whole pound of candied peel, … the grated rinds of two large lemons, and two more boiled quite tender, and chopped up entirely, with the exception of the pips, two small nutmegs, half an ounce of salt, a large teaspoonful of pounded mace, rather more of ginger in powder, half a pint of brandy, and as much good sherry or Madeira. Mince these ingredients separately, and mix the others all well before the brandy and the wine are added …

    — Modern Cookery for Private Families by Eliza Acton, 1845

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November 20, 2024

QotD: The Chads, the Staceys, and the Incels

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I have spent some time in the twilight reaches of the manosphere researching a new book, a world of depressing forums, full of hatred and despair, where young men gather to focus on the absence of sex in their lives. There are two broad categories: The Incels hate women because they won’t sleep with them. The Men Go Their Own Way (MGTOW) guys won’t sleep with women because they hate them.

These boys have their own vocabulary and belief systems. Pretty girls (Staceys) all sleep with the same few Alpha men (Chads). The Staceys ride the Cock Carousel, ie, have sex with the same few Chads. All this sluttish behaviour gives the Staceys something called A Thousand Cock Stare.

It is a grim world, in which women are evil and manipulative, and hated both for being sluts and for being virgins. It is a world in which pictures of pretty girls with their pet dogs are unbelievably sinister. These boys choose to live in this bleak world. They are culpable. But, if you tell all young, white boys that they are damned, why should they not behave as if they are damned?

A society which does not allow for people to atone, to be redeemed, and to be judged on their intent and actions is a miserable place. Most people interact with each other without antagonism most of the time. We should start being a bit more forgiving to each other, ditch the Puritanism and learn to cherish the well-meaning stumble towards decency. Even if, sometimes, we fall.

Antonia Senior, “Identity politics is Christianity without the redemption”, UnHerd, 2020-01-20.

November 19, 2024

QotD: The Reformation

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Reformation’s great complaint against the late-medieval Church is that it, the Church, had turned Catholicism entirely into a process. Those naive folks who argue that life wasn’t so hard for the medieval peasant because he had all those days off — 180 some odd saints’ days, feast days, and so on — have a bit of a point for all that. Ritual life simply was community life; “free time” as we understand it just wasn’t a thing in the middle ages, and not just because life was such a constant struggle. Every hour of your day carried its obligation to someone; there’s a reason the very best sources for “daily life in the middle ages” are called books of hours.

Your hotter Protestants, your John Calvins and Oliver Cromwells and so on, saw all of this as mere ritual. And to be fair to them, late-medieval Catholicism was very elaborate, and very, very weird — slog through a few chapters of The Stripping of the Altars if you want the details. To the Prods, this was cheating — you can’t just go through the motions and expect to get into Heaven. They made a similar distinction between “natural magic” and the unlawful stuff — the one was undertaken only after deep study and the most rigorous self-purification, while the other “worked” entirely mechanically, because what the sorcerer was really doing was cheating; he was really making a deal with a (or The) devil, to short-circuit the natural processes.

Now, it’s important to realize that the Protestants were not saying anything close to “do your own thing, man”. They were NOT hippies, encouraging everyone to read the Bible and decide for themselves how best to commune with the Big JC. The German peasants thought that’s what Martin Luther was saying back in 1524, but Luther himself was out there urging the authorities to smash the peasants with extreme prejudice. The Protestants were, in fact, extremely concerned about ritual. It just had to be the right ritual, the Biblically sanctioned ritual, and nothing but that — that’s what “Puritanism” (originally an insult) means.

Severian, “Faith vs. Works”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-07.

November 9, 2024

QotD: George Bernard Shaw

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… Shaw is not at all the heretic his fascinated victims see him, but an orthodox Scotch Presbyterian of the most cock-sure and bilious sort. In the theory that he is Irish I take little stock. His very name is as Scotch as haggis, and the part of Ireland from which he comes is peopled almost entirely by Scots. The true Irishman is a romantic; he senses religion as a mystery, a thing of wonder, an experience of ineffable beauty; his interest centers, not in the commandments, but in the sacraments. The Scot, on the contrary, is almost devoid of that sort of religious feeling; he hasn’t imagination enough for it; all he can see in the Word of God is a sort of police regulation; his concern is not with beauty but with morals. Here Shaw runs true to type. Read his critical writings from end to end, and you will not find the slightest hint that objects of art were passing before him as he wrote. He founded, in England, the superstition that Ibsen was no more than a tin-pot evangelist — a sort of brother to General Booth, Mrs. Pankhurst, Mother Eddy and Billy Sunday. He turned Shakespeare into a prophet of evil, croaking dismally in a rain-barrel. He even injected a moral content (by dint of abominable straining) into the music dramas of Richard Wagner, surely the most colossal slaughters of all moral ideas on the altar of beauty ever seen by man. Always this ethical obsession, the hall-mark of the Scotch Puritan, is visible in him. He is forever discovering an atrocity in what has hitherto passed as no more than a human weakness; he is forever inventing new sins, and demanding their punishment; he always sees his opponent, not only as wrong, but also as a scoundrel. I have called him a good Presbyterian.

H.L. Mencken, “Shaw as Platitudinarian”, The Smart Set, 1916-08.

October 27, 2024

QotD: Puritans, predestination, and the Ranters

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The third problem with Puritan wokeness is that it sinister echoes in the history of predestination. When the creed reached its zenith in the seventeenth century, the logical hole at its centre became insanely obvious. If it does not matter to God how you behave, because your salvation was pre-determined at birth, why not behave however the hell you want to?

The outpourings of radical thought in the English Civil Wars included sects who came to exactly this conclusion. The Ranters, at least by reputation, advocated a lifestyle of Dionysiac excess. If orgies and boozing, gluttony and blasphemy did not have any material impact on whether you were going to heaven or hell, then why not shag, indulge and curse the Lord as much as you want?

The extent of their membership is disputed and the fear of the Ranters was strong among the Puritans, partly, I suspect, because the logical fallacy of the original tenet is so glaringly obvious. Many of the theological arguments espoused by the men who were labelled Ranters were more textured and complicated than a license to loucheness. But the essential point remains: if you are already damned, your actions and intent are irrelevant.

The Puritan response was a horrified recoil. If God has made you one of the elect, you have a responsibility to Him to behave as if you are elect. A rare few came to believe they were not elect, and tortured themselves with it. If this sounds familiar, you have probably met an apologetic white male ally of the woke.

Antonia Senior, “Identity politics is Christianity without the redemption”, UnHerd, 2020-01-20.

October 6, 2024

QotD: Putting the past on trial

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If you pass through Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, London, you might happen upon a statue of Virginia Woolf that was erected in 2004. You will already know that Woolf was a leading figure in the Bloomsbury Set, that coterie of artists and intellectuals that included E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. But if you scan the QR code next to this statue you can also learn that Woolf was a vile racist who must be condemned by all right-thinking individuals.

Historical context is all very well. When it comes to Woolf, perhaps a few details about her novels To the Lighthouse or Mrs Dalloway would be appreciated, or some information about her relationship with Vita Sackville-West. But no, instead we are to be hectored about her “challenging, offensive comments and descriptions of race, class and ability which would find unacceptable today”. One wonders what the person responsible for these judgmental remarks has ever accomplished, if anything at all. These petty moralists are like the crabs in the bucket, pulling down the most accomplished out of envy and spite.

The best approach to writers of genius is humility, but this quality seems to be on the decline. We see evidence of this in the self-importance of those who have rewritten books by P.G. Wodehouse, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl. It should go without saying that Wodehouse’s prose cannot be improved, least of all by know-nothing activists who have inveigled their way into the publishing industry.

I recently bought the complete set of Fleming’s James Bond books, but I had to seek out second-hand copies to ensure that they had not been sanitised by talentless “sensitivity readers”. Yes of course, these books include sentiments that are unacceptable by today’s standards. But what’s so wrong with that? “All women love semi-rape” is a shocking sentence – in this case, it’s by the female narrator of The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) – but what purpose does censoring the passage actually serve?

The rewriting of books and the creation of cautionary QR codes are symptoms of our current strain of puritanism. These are the descendants of those religious zealots who shut the theatres in 1642 out of fear that the masses might be corrupted. And while I concede that Ian Fleming’s views on relationships between the sexes may not have been progressive, I don’t feel the need to be berated about it before enjoying the adventures of James Bond.

It’s not as though Bond is even meant to be a likeable character; the man has a licence to kill, for heaven’s sake. This isn’t someone you’d wish to invite to a dinner party. In that regard he’s reminiscent of the hero of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, a character based on the bully from Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes. He’s a violent boorish rapist, but the novels are still entertaining because most of us aren’t reading them for moral instruction.

In exploring the gamut of human experience, writers will often feel compelled to recreate the grotesque, the uncomfortable, the outrageous, even the downright evil. Who ever supposed that works of fiction should restrict themselves to rose-tinted idealisations of human existence? Imagine Macbeth without the regicide, or King Lear without the eye-gouging, or Titus Andronicus without the cannibalism. Would Dante’s Divine Comedy retain its power if some “sensitivity reader” excised the Inferno?

Andrew Doyle, “Putting the past on trial”, Andrew Doyle, 2024-07-04.

May 24, 2024

QotD: Our modern Puritans

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Lots of revolutionaries have been obsessed with the state of their own souls, but only the Puritans have been worried about it. Skim Walzer1, then compare with Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, a book I recommend without reservation. The Brethren of the Free Spirit were obsessed with the condition of their souls, too, but, crucially, they were certain that they were the Elect. All pre-Puritan millennial movements were essentially Gnostic — they, the Elect, knew the Truth, and they were the Elect because they knew the Truth. Their job was simply to tell everyone the Truth (and, inevitably, kill everyone who disagreed), and that great truth-telling / cleansing of the sinners would basically force Jesus to come back, thus ending the world.

The Puritans were something new. Translate their elaborate, Latinate prose into the parlance of our times, and they sound exactly like SJWs — at once unbearably self-righteous and cripplingly insecure. They were almost certain that they, personally, were among the Elect … but since the only infallible sign of being Saved was “an irresistible attraction to Puritanism”, they were caught in exactly the same vicious purity spiral as our modern SJWs. Who, truly, can say xzhey are #woke, when there’s always the possibility of someone, somewhere, being #woker? If you want a slightly easier passport to their heads, try Perry Miller’s The New England Mind. It was written in the 1930s, so be prepared — surprisingly little untranslated Latin, since the Puritans wrote mostly for themselves, but still fairly ornate prose.

Put it this way: The Wiki summary of Miller’s life quotes a colleague: “Perry Miller was a great historian of Puritanism but the dark conflicts of the Puritan mind eroded his own mental stability”. He died of alcoholism.

The Puritans’ saving grace, if they had one, is that they were men of the world. They had to be. Guys like Max Weber would say that those two things had a dialectical relationship — Puritanism IS “the Protestant work ethic” IS “capitalism” — but that’s not necessary for present purposes. My point is simply that the Early Modern world could only support a tiny number of professional intellectuals, and the “managerial class” was all but nonexistent. Through Cromwell and his mini-me’s in Salem gave it the old college try, it’s simply impossible to run an Early Modern government Puritan-style.

That’s obviously not the case now. We have a huge (and ever-growing) managerial class, all of whom are the most fervent Puritans. Unlike Cromwell and the boys, though, they can — and, of course, DO — live in perfect isolation from the affairs of the world they’re supposedly managing. Put simply, but not really unfairly, they live on Twitter — their carefully curated list of social media “friends” is, in a very real way, their entire world. Imagine Oliver Cromwell, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, and Cotton Mather tweeting at each other, all day every day.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag: Civilization, the Video Game”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-21.

    1. Severian may be referring to Michael Walzer’s first book The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (1965) or perhaps Regicide and Revolution (1974). Unfortunately when I saved this, I didn’t note which of Walzer’s works had been referenced earlier in the post and the original is no longer available online. Quotulatiousness regrets the omission.

March 31, 2024

QotD: Sins and “sins”

Filed under: Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

While true of the puritanical organic lobby, a Supersized ethical position is also advanced by all too many Christians. Indeed, this is where the green-thinkers derive their theology in the first place. Gluttonous McDonald’s visits are on a long list that includes some items mentioned once or twice in scripture such as gay sex, polycotton and women letting their hair down in church and plenty of things from cocaine to coffee which are nowhere to be found in the Bible. The notion is that some things, while pleasurable, will prevent your immortal soul from making it to heaven and that for your own good you must be prevented from enjoying them. That this makes a nonsense of free will, shows precious little faith in the free gift of Grace and that some “sins” are singled out for hysterical attention while most are ignored entirely does not bother puritans historical or contemporary. And the fact most people worship at a different altar altogether does not cross their minds at all.

Ghost of a Flea, “Religion in general”, Ghost of a Flea, 2005-04-13.

March 15, 2024

Woke Shakespeare?

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Doyle wonders if even the Bard can survive the incessant assaults of the ultra woke, the new Puritans:

This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.

The puritans had it in for Shakespeare. With the exception of the plague, they were perhaps the most persistent threat to his livelihood. As far as these zealots were concerned, the theatre was a realm of “adulterers, adulteresses, whoremasters, whores, bawds, panders, ruffians, roarers, drunkards, prodigals, cheaters, idle, infamous, base, profane, and godless persons”.

These were the words of the polemicist William Prynne from his Histrio-Mastix (1633). He was eventually to get his way in 1642 when the puritan-led parliament shut the theatres down. When the ban was lifted on the accession of Charles II, older plays had to be dusted off to satisfy the public’s appetite for drama. It was Shakespeare’s work that proved to be the most popular, establishing a trend that has never waned.

Now the bard faces another breed of puritan, more censorial than the last. We are living in conformist times, and inexplicably those in the creative arts have turned out to the be most conformist of all. Nowhere is this more evident than the theatre industry, where wrongthink is outlawed and artistic freedom is sacrificed on the altar of identity politics. Virtually all productions of Shakespeare’s plays I have seen in recent years have been mangled to promote the regressive fashions of our time. Today’s audiences are seeing a vague shadow of these masterworks through a narrow and uninspiring prism.

Even so, many of us are reluctant to give up on the theatre altogether. We tolerate the gender-neutral toilets that nobody asked for, the rainbow lanyards worn by ushers, and the little sermons in the programmes by directors who think their job is to educate the masses. One friend remarked that so long as the preaching only amounts to 20% of the show’s content, he is willing to accept it. I suppose it’s like going for dinner in an especially pious household, and having to put up with a long-winded prayer before a delicious meal.

Theatregoers might have a better experience if they opt for productions of plays written many years before this new state religion took hold. Shakespeare, as a playwright who has never been bettered, is surely the safest choice. In his work we find ourselves unmolested by ideology. We know nothing of Shakespeare’s opinions on matters of politics or religion, and attempting to glean any suggestions from his works is futile. I think A. L. Rowse put it best when he pointed out that Shakespeare “saw through everybody equally”. Neither prince nor pauper escapes his sceptical gaze.

December 25, 2023

QotD: Washington Irving and American Christmas traditions

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the man who did more than any other US citizen to shape the American Christmas. I am not sure how many people read Washington Irving these days, but I would wager that a large proportion of those who don’t are still vaguely familiar with his creation Rip van Winkle — and, if only through his memorialization in institutions like the New York Knicks, his fictitious Dutch historian Diedrich Knickerbocker.

An even larger number may be unaware of how much they’re honoring Mr Irving in their Christmas jubilations. He it was who, in the 1812 edition of his History of New York, threw in a whimsical vignette in which St Nicholas flies over the treetops in a wagon while puffing on his pipe. No reindeer, but all the other elements of the American Santa are there.

Washington Irving loved the great village revelries of the old English Christmas, which the Puritans had left far behind them when they landed at Plimouth Plantation. The parlor games and community feasting and the notion of the Saviour’s birth as a cause of merriment all appealed to him. In his famous and bestselling Sketch Book of 1819-1820 five chapters are devoted to lovingly detailed scenes from an English family Christmas as observed by a young visitor, and they proved so popular that half-a-century later (by which time almost all the elements had been imported into American life) they were published as a stand-alone book.

Mark Steyn, “Dangling Hares and Rosy-Cheeked Schoolboys”, SteynOnline, 2021-12-20.

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