Those who irritate us and give us grounds for righteous indignation are our secret benefactors, for there are few states of mind more gratifying than that of righteous indignation.
Theodore Dalrymple, “A Miasma of Untruth”, Taki’s Magazine, 2014-06-29.
April 30, 2015
QotD: Righteous indignation
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March 26, 2015
The moral superiority of those who point out things we should feel guilty about
Theodore Dalrymple on those snooty types who can spot at great distances things for which “we” (meaning you and me, but not the speaker) need to admit our culpability:
Self-blame is no doubt salutary when one is truly blameworthy, but there is also a kind of self-blame that is exaggerated, insincere, grandiose, and exhibitionistic. It is also abstract and collective rather than individual; it is the kind of self-blame that intellectuals specialize in expressing on others’ behalf and which requires no painful or difficult personal reform or change.
Whenever anything terrible happens, or rather is done, in the world, “we” are somehow to blame for it, not the merely apparent perpetrators. The root cause is always in us, the us in question being our biological, cultural, or political ancestors, but never me in particular. We are responsible, but I am not. We have done something to make them behave badly, and if it were not for us the world would be a peaceful, happy place. And to be ultimately responsible for all the evil in the world is at least flattering to one’s sense of self-importance, the defense of which motivates an important part of many people’s intellectual activity.
The kind of guilt I have described is designed to demonstrate the superior moral sensibility of those who express it. “I am not like the mass,” that person tells himself, “who see only appearances. I, by contrast, make no hasty censorious judgments and suffer no vulgar prejudices, and see through to the moral reality of things with my gimlet or X-ray intellect.” And in the process, he displays his superiority for others of like mind to see and approve; for they are the Brahmin caste of moral philosophy to which he wants to belong.
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March 21, 2015
QotD: The modern snob
Walking through Amsterdam recently, a paradox that I had long noticed in an inchoate way formulated itself clearly in my mind. It was this: A century ago, there would have been one clothes shop for every hundred well-dressed people. Nowadays there is one well-dressed person (if that) for every hundred clothes shops. What accounts for this strange reversal of ratios?
Beyond the fact that clothes are now mass-produced rather than made individually, there is an act of will involved. Practically everyone now dresses not merely in a casual way, but with studied slovenliness for fear of being thought elegant, as elegance is a metonym for undemocratic sentiment or belief. You can dress as expensively as you like, indeed expensive scruffiness is a form of chic, but on no account must you dress with taste and discrimination. To do so might be to draw hostile attention to yourself. Who on Earth do you think you are to dress like that?
[…]
Modern scruffiness, then, is a manifestation of egotism. Outside one of the shops in Amsterdam was a large plasma screen showing models wearing the kind of clothes to be had within. They were precisely the insolently ragged clothes that the great majority of people in the street were wearing anyway. This was a form of flattery of the public, for it implied that its members had nothing to aspire to in the matter of dress higher than that which they themselves were already wearing — that in the matter of appearance they had already reached acme of the possible.
There was yet more. The models, in their T-shirts, baseball caps, sneakers, and so forth, as uniform as any army, walked with the kind of vulpine lope that one associates with the less law-abiding young males of the American ghettoes. But even more striking was the expression on their faces, which were cachectic in the case of the women, androgynous in the case of men: a fixed, determined, humorless stare that indicated a hatred of the world and all that was in it, including their fellow-beings. If one saw such a person at a social event, one would go to some effort to avoid or to flee or not to talk to him or her. The models’ faces were vacantly earnest, as if they wished for annihilation of everything around them for some personal reason, no doubt trifling.
This is the first age in which people do not dress to please others, but dress to displease others, to make sure that everyone knows that I’m not going to make any effort just for you. And this, no doubt, is because I am as good as anyone in the world, bar none: His Majesty, myself. And what starts out as an attitude becomes an unexamined and ingrained habit.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Slobbery as Snobbery”, Taki’s Magazine, 2014-06-15.
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December 2, 2014
QotD: Bureaucratic job satisfaction
I realized a long time ago that a very large number of people in a modern economy are paid to do things that not only fail to add to the economic product of the country, but on the contrary reduce it, insofar as they obstruct others from producing as much as they otherwise might.
There is, as every petty official knows, a great deal of pleasure to be had from the obstruction of others, especially if they appear to be more fortunate, better placed, richer, or more intelligent than oneself. There is a pleasure in naysaying, all the greater if the naysayer is able to disguise from the victim the fact that he is not only doing his duty but gratifying himself. Indeed, there are many jobs, meaningless in themselves, in which the power to say no is the only non-monetary reward.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Gross Domestic Pissants”, Taki’s Magazine, 2014-04-20
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October 17, 2014
QotD: Legislating absolute equality
…to oppose the notion of equality of opportunity these days is to be thought some kind of monstrous ultramontane reactionary, a Metternich or Nicholas I, who wants by means of repression to preserve the status quo in amber. Members of young audiences to which I have spoken have almost fainted with shock when I have said that I not only did not believe in equality of opportunity, but to the contrary found the very idea sinister in the extreme, and much worse than mere egalitarianism of outcome. To say to a young audience today that equality of opportunity is a thoroughly vicious idea is like shouting “God does not exist and Mohammed was not his prophet” at the top of one’s voice in Mecca.
Those who believe in equality of opportunity must want, if they take the idea seriously, to make the world not only just but fair. Genetic and family influences on the fate of people have to be eliminated, because they undoubtedly affect opportunities and make them unequal. Ugly people cannot be models; the deformed cannot be professional footballers; the retarded cannot be astrophysicists; the small of stature cannot be heavyweight boxers; I don’t think I have to prolong this list, as everyone can think of a thousand examples for himself.
Of course, it might be possible to level the field a little by legislating for equality of outcome: by, for example, insisting that ugly people are employed as models in proportion to their prevalence in the population. English novelist L.P. Hartley, author of The Go-Between, satirized such envious suppression of beauty (and, by implication, all egalitarianism other than that of equality under the law) in a novel called Facial Justice. It’s not a very good novel, as it happens, but the idea is very good; Hartley envisages a state in which everyone aspires to an “average” face, brought about by plastic surgery both for the abnormally ugly and the abnormally good-looking. Only in this way can the supposed injustice (actually it’s unfairness) of the genetic lottery be righted.
Hartley’s novel is a reductio ad absurdum of a pernicious idea. By contrast, Roosevelt’s “measurable quality of opportunity” is roughly achievable by human design: only roughly, of course, because some (though few) will still be excluded biologically, and there are (again few) upbringings so terrible that they preclude opportunity for the person to become anything much. But the aspiration to deny no one a “measurable quality of opportunity” is not intrinsically nasty, as is the insistence on equality of opportunity. On the contrary; our problem is, however, that the political arrangements needed to bring this about already exist in most Western countries, and still we are unhappy or discontented. Thus we — many of us, that is — attribute our unhappiness to inequality of opportunity for fear of looking elsewhere, including inward.
Theodore Dalrymple, “A More Sinister Equality”, Taki’s Magazine, 2014-04-06
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September 24, 2014
QotD: Privacy and cell phones
People who were charged with a crime in England used to be told by the police that they did not have to say anything, but that anything they did say might be taken down and used as evidence against them. I think we should all be given this warning whenever we use a mobile telephone.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Nowhere to Hide”, Taki’s Magazine, 2014-02-23
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September 2, 2014
British government “austerity”
Theodore Dalrymple explains why changing the name of something does not actually change the thing being described, no matter how much politicians or journalists wish it did:
… some errors are important, and one sees them more insistently the older one grows. For example, the other day I read an article in Le Monde about the forthcoming referendum in Scotland on independence from the United Kingdom. The author of the article was clearly sympathetic to the cause of independence, but that was not the cause of my irritation with the article, nor the fact that he quoted an old man, a former trade union militant, who said that he was in favor of independence, among other reasons, because the United Kingdom was the fourth most unequal country in the world. If old men in Scotland can be as ignorant of the world as that, it is an interesting sociological observation; and the author of the article is almost certainly right that those in favor of Scottish independence favor a state even more extensive in the name of equality than the one that they already have.
No, I was irritated rather by the fact that the author of the article accepted that the policy of the present British government can properly be described as one of austerity. What the alleged austerity amounts to is this: that in the current year the government will borrow only one in six of the pounds it spends instead of one in five, as it did last year. As to the reasons for this less than startling decline in its borrowing requirements, it was not because the government was spending less but because it was receiving more taxes, from the speculative housing bubble which it has done much to fuel. If that bubble should burst, the borrowing necessary to maintain current levels of expenditure (already very high) would rise again, possibly higher than ever.
This is not a question of whether the economic policy followed by the government is the right one or not: perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t. It is a question of the honest use of words. One would not say of a man who passed from smoking sixty cigarettes a day to fifty that he had given up smoking, or that he had exercised great self-denial. And one would not, or rather should not, say of an organization that had balanced its budget once in fifty years (the British government) that it was practicing austerity merely because it had to borrow a slightly lower percentage of what it spent than it did the year before. This is to deprive words of their meaning.
But does this matter? As the philosopher Bishop Butler once said, everything is what it is and not another thing. A budget deficit is a budget deficit, whether you call it profligacy or austerity. A thing is not changed by being called something different.
Unfortunately, matters are not quite as clear-cut as that. In human affairs, words matter, as much because of their connotations as of their denotations. Austerity means stern treatment and self-discipline. It means harshness and astringency. Needless to say, harshness in their government is not what most people look or will vote for. If reducing the rate at which you overspend and accumulate debt is called austerity, no one will dare go any further in that direction, though it were the right direction in which to go. Words, said Hobbes, are wise men’s counters but the money of fools: so that many men will take the name for the thing itself. Whether more active attempts to balance the budget would be advisable I leave to economists to decide (they can’t, of course).
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July 26, 2014
QotD: French “ultra-liberalism”
The French press, media and intellectuals castigate ad nauseam what they call the ‘ultra-liberalism’ of the present-day western world: and their characterization, as intellectually lazy as it is inaccurate, now goes virtually by default. Very few are the commentators who see through its inaccuracy. That a country whose public sector accounts for more than half of economic activity, and which is as highly-administered as France (and, it must be said, often well-administered, for who would not rather go on the Paris Metro than the New York Subway?), cannot plausibly be described as ‘ultra-liberal,’ ought to be perfectly obvious even on the most casual reflection, but alas it is not. If France is ultra-anything it is ultra-corporatist, but even that would be an exaggeration. And so present discontents are laid at the door of ultra-liberalism, though in fact a considerable proportion of the resentments and discontents of the young who approve of M’Bala M’Bala are attributable to the rigidity of the French labor market, which is caused precisely by an illiberal nexus of protections and restrictions.
The problem, then, is not ultra-liberalism but insufficient liberalism. The difference between France and other western countries, incidentally, is one of degree and not of type, though even degree can be important: illiberalism in the French labor market has in a matter of a few years turned London into one of the largest French-speaking cities in the world.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Illusions of Control in the Omnicompetent French State”, Library of Law and Liberty, 2014-01-07
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July 7, 2014
QotD: The mother of mediocrity is the university
Why, almost everywhere you look, should such mediocrity triumph?
Of course, if mediocrity has not triumphed throughout the Western world, there is nothing to explain. There is, after all, no need to search for the origins of the nonexistent. But let us suppose that there is such a trend to mediocrity, a manifestation of which is bureaucratization: What can explain it? (Here I should mention that we should not get too exercised about definitional matters: Words should be used as precisely as possible, but not more precisely than possible. We know what a cloud is without being able to define its limits.)
The explanation lies in the expansion of tertiary education. Earlier in my life I used to think that this was unequivocally a good thing: The more educated a population, the better. But length of education, or attendance at supposedly educational establishments, is not the same thing as education itself. But in the modern world, where governments have to demonstrate tangible progress to their electorates, length of education and education are confounded.
Guerrilla movements in the last half-century or so in Latin American countries, seeking to establish totalitarian utopias, were caused by the expansion of tertiary education, not by peasant discontent. The graduates of that education — many of them, at any rate — found after obtaining their diplomas that the only work available to them, if any at all, was beneath their new status as educated person, a status that formerly would have entitled them to both respect and an important position in society. If they found work, it was work that they could have done without having gone to university. Bitter disappointment and resentment was the natural consequence.
We in the developed Western world do not have guerrilla movements, at any rate to a significant extent. Our equivalent is the bureaucracy that administers increasingly politically correct regulations. In this way people who have gone to the considerable trouble of obtaining a tertiary education that is of value to them neither vocationally nor intellectually may avenge themselves upon an unjust world, though their anger can’t be assuaged, being the only thing that gives meaning to their lives.
Thus, the mother of mediocrity is the university.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Triumph of the Mediocre”, Taki’s Magazine, 2014-01-19.
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July 1, 2014
QotD: Patriotism
Patriotic effusions, whosever they may be, seldom please citizens of other nations, because they are generally so self-congratulatory; and self-congratulation, which is no doubt an inescapable part of the human condition, is best kept to oneself even when justified. Occasional outbursts may be acceptable, as after a triumph in a just war — but just wars are themselves infrequent events in human history. Ignorance of and disdain for others are often the corollaries of noisy patriotism; it was with good reason that Doctor Johnson said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Quite often it is the first refuge as well.
On the other hand, some kind of collective self-belief is necessary, for otherwise effort would be in vain and achievement impossible. A country completely without patriotism, even if this state remained implicit rather than explicit, would be an unhappy place. As in most things human, a balance must be struck.
Theodore Dalrymple, “A More Sinister Equality”, Taki’s Magazine, 2014-04-06
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April 29, 2014
International pedophile rings – “a Bilderberg of diaper snipers”
For some reason, every decade or so a new moral panic sweeps the land (in this case, it’s showing up in multiple Western countries). Everyone gets their collective knickers in a twist over some horrible outrage which requires, nay, demands that something must be done. The panic de jour is organized gangs of pedophiles (it’s been the panic de jour several times in the last forty years). Kathy Shaidle looks at the most recent eruption of out-of-control morality:
One particularly distasteful breed of conspiracy theory that stubbornly refuses to die, however, is that which posits the existence of local, national, or even international pedophile rings.
Does pedophilia exist? Sure. However, it doesn’t follow that perverts have semiorganized themselves into some kind of parody of Freemasonry, a Bilderberg of diaper snipers.
For whatever reason — a quirk of the collective unconscious; individual shame and guilt; profound resentment of the ruling elite — the modern mind wants to believe in these vast pederast conspiracies, even though, again and again, investigations into their existence come up embarrassingly empty.
Yes, we can argue that this is because “the authorities” are members of the ring, too, but lots of “authorities” were in on Mafia and KKK malfeasance; this made prosecution difficult, but certainly not impossible. There are museums packed with primary source evidence of the Klan’s existence, and the Mob’s; contrast that with this utterly bizarre example of what can only be described as anti-journalism that appeared in the UK’s Islington Tribune earlier this month:
Despite recognition that a huge paedophile ring preyed on Islington children’s homes in the 1970s and 1980s no one has ever been prosecuted and all the records of the homes and the names of the children who went to them have been “lost.”
Behold: After the longest and most expensive trial in American history, all charges were dropped in the McMartin Preschool child abuse case, during which an archeologist testified to the existence of “secret tunnels” on the school’s grounds, and children claimed they’d been raped at orgies at car washes.
Here in Canada, a $53 million inquiry failed to uncover a widely rumored pedophile ring in Cornwall, Ontario. (The Ontario Provincial Police had already reached the same conclusion eight years earlier.) At the end of the day — or, rather, the decade and counting — only one individual was ever convicted of any crime.
Theodore Dalrymple observed a decade ago that the people most likely to express outrage about pedophiles are actually those whose own kids tend to be neglected:
On no subject is the British public more fickle and more prone to attacks of intense but shallow emotion than childhood. Not long ago, for example, a pediatrician’s house in South Wales was attacked by a mob unable to distinguish a pediatrician from a pedophile. The attackers, of course, came from precisely the social milieu in which every kind of child abuse and neglect flourishes, in which the age of consent has been de facto abolished, and in which adults are afraid of their own offspring once they reach the age of violence. The upbringing of children in much of Britain is a witches’ brew of sentimentality, brutality, and neglect, in which overindulgence in the latest fashions, toys, or clothes, and a television in the bedroom are regarded as the highest — indeed only — manifestations of tender concern for a child’s welfare.
An earlier example happened in my home town in the late 1980s, although fortunately for Middlesbrough’s reputation the name of the county was the usual label for the moral panic: the Cleveland child abuse scandal.
The Cleveland child abuse scandal occurred in Cleveland, England in 1987, where 121 cases of suspected child sexual abuse were diagnosed by Dr Marietta Higgs and Dr Geoffrey Wyatt, paediatricians at a Middlesbrough hospital (in the now abolished county of Cleveland). The children were subject to place of safety orders, and some were removed from their parents’ care permanently. While in foster care, the children continued to be regularly examined by Dr. Higgs who subsequently accused foster parents of further abuse leading to them too being arrested.
After a number of court trials, cases involving 96 of the 121 children alleged to be victims of sexual abuse were dismissed by the courts, and 26 cases, involving children from twelve families, were found by judges to have been incorrectly diagnosed.
Despite the judicial results, the bureaucrats believed (and apparently still do believe) that the sexual abuse of all those children really did occur and that even that large number was less than a tenth of the actual problem.
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March 2, 2014
Why the EU hesitates to do anything about Ukraine
Extreme wealth, whether honestly or dishonestly acquired, seems these days to bring forth little new except in the form and genre of vulgarity. Mr. Ambani’s skyscraper tower home in Bombay is a case in point: His aesthetic is that of the first-class executive lounge of an airport. Mr. Ambramovich’s ideal is that of a floating Dubai the size of an aircraft carrier. Only once have I been invited to a Russian oligarch’s home, and it struck me as a hybrid of luxurious modernist brothel and up-to-date operating theater. I saw some pictures recently of some huge Chinese state enterprise’s headquarters, and it appalled me how this nation, with one of the most exquisite, and certainly the oldest, aesthetic traditions on Earth, has gone over entirely to Las Vegas rococo (without the hint of irony or playfulness).
But it was the luxury and not the taste of Yanukovych’s homes that outraged the Ukrainians, for if by any chance they had come into money they would have done exactly the same, aesthetically speaking. Yanukovych may have been a dictator of sorts, but when it came to taste he was a man of the people. A horrified Ukrainian citizen, touring one of his homes after his downfall, was heard to exclaim, “All this beauty at our expense!”
As to politics, the Ukrainian crisis has once again revealed the European Union’s complete impotence. Physiognomy is an inexact science, but it is not so inexact that you cannot read the bemused feebleness on the faces of people such as Van Rompuy, Hollande, and Cameron, the latter so moistly smooth and characterless that it looks as though it would disappear leaving a trail of slime if caught in the rain. Mrs. Merkel has a somewhat stronger face, but then she has the advantage of having spent time in the Free German Youth (the East German communist youth movement), which must at least have put a modicum of iron in her soul.
Be that as it may, Russia holds all the trump cards in this situation. It can turn off Western Europe’s central heating at a stroke, and for Europeans such heating is the whole meaning and purpose of life—together with six-week annual holidays in Bali or Benidorm. Therefore Europe will risk nothing for the sake of Ukraine, except perhaps a few billion in loans of no one’s money, a trifle in current economic circumstances. If Bismarck were to return today, he would say that the whole of Ukraine was not worth the cold of one unheated radiator.
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January 27, 2014
QotD: Montreuil and Le Corbusier
Montreuil reminded me strongly of something: ah yes, I remember what it was, Eastern Europe in the good old days. It had that same air of inspissated gloom and ontological pointlessness; the architecture would have gladdened the heart (so to speak) of Elena Ceausescu. The bus passed through a wasteland of 1970s modernism, egalitarian doctrine made not so much flesh as concrete. The buildings did not age, they dilapidated; it was architecture that induced immediate thoughts of suicide. (Le Corbusier is still revered in France and treated as a hero, though it should be obvious to anyone who reads any of his voluminous writings that he was a psychopathic architectural delinquent of totalitarian pretensions whose talents belonged more to the field of propaganda than to those of architecture, in which his abilities were all negative.) The bus stops were in places such as Saint-Just, the patron saint of revolutionary terror, and Nouvelle France: new in the same sense that the New Man, so beloved of Mussolini and Che Guevara, was going to be new. Montreuil is, in fact, firmly communist, and it shows, although honesty compels me to admit that I don’t know which came first: the communism or the ugliness of everything. Probably the relationship is what Marxists used to call a dialectical one.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Museum of the Living Dead”, Taki’s Magazine, 2014-01-26
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January 4, 2014
By DSM-5 standards, most of us are suffering from personality disorders
From the last issue of the City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple‘s critique of the latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) includes a rather wide-ranging diagnosis that applies to a huge number of people:
The overlap between straightforwardly pathological conditions (in Szasz’s sense) and those that result from social, psychological, or personal factors, or from bad moral choices, suggests that psychiatrists should show discretion in what they regard as genuine illness. The state of ignorance in which psychiatrists now practice, which will probably endure, ensures that they will often be wrong; but no one who has encountered, say, a manic in full flight is likely to doubt that he is in the presence of illness. But nor would it be easy, then, to see so-called factitious disorder, which consists of “falsification of physical or psychological signs and symptoms, or induction of injury or disease, associated with identified deception” in quite the same light: that is, to grant the same status to someone pretending to be ill as to someone genuinely ill.
Yet this is precisely what the DSM-5 does, establishing its authors’ lack of common sense, the quality that psychiatrists, perhaps more than any other kind of doctor, need. The manual’s lack of common sense would be amusing were it not destined to be taken with superstitious seriousness by psychiatrists around the world, as well as by insurers and lawyers.
The section of the volume devoted to personality disorders proves the point. Among the criteria for personality disorders in general are the following:
A: An enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, in fields such as thought, emotion, interpersonal relations and impulse control . . .
B: The enduring pattern is inflexible and pervasive across a broad range of personal and social situations.
C: The enduring pattern leads to clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning.
D: The pattern is stable and of long duration.
The DSM-5 then informs us that more than one in seven people have such a lifelong disorder — adding up to 45 million Americans and even more Europeans. These astonishing numbers give the authors not a moment’s pause (any more than does the fact that their own prevalence rates suggest that the average American suffers from more than two psychiatric disorders in any one year). Several undesirable characteristics must be present in an individual for a diagnosis of personality disorder to apply. Considering those characteristics, and that such a significant portion of the Western population supposedly exhibits many of them, either a mass outbreak of human nastiness and inability to deal with everyday life must have occurred, or the whole business of diagnosis must be dubious or even ridiculous.
Here is a random list of some of the characteristics that, in the DSM-5, make up personality disorders of various kinds:
Unjustified suspicions that others are harming, exploiting or deceiving.
Persistently grudge-bearing.
Detachment from social relations and limited expression of emotion.
Behavior or appearance that is odd, eccentric or peculiar.
Deceitfulness.
Persistent irresponsibility.
Indifference to risk to self or others.
Irritability and aggressiveness.
Lack of remorse.
Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures or threats, or self-mutilation.
Inappropriately intense anger, frequent displays of temper.
Rapidly shifting and shallow expressions of emotion.
Use of physical appearance to draw attention to self.
Self-dramatization, theatricality.
Grandiosity.
Requirement for excessive admiration.
Sense of entitlement.
Interpersonal exploitativeness.
Lack of empathy.
Enviousness of others.
Arrogance and haughtiness.
Unwillingness to become involved with people.
Sense of social ineptitude and inferiority.
Avoidance of risk.
Difficulty in expressing disagreement with others because of fear of disapproval, i.e., pusillanimity.
Feeling of helplessness when alone.
Preoccupation with details, rules, lists, order, organization or schedules.
Excessive devotion to work.
Over-conscientiousness or scrupulousness.
Reluctance to delegate.
Rigidity and stubbornness.
The diagnoses for most of the disorders require at least four of the undesirable characteristics to be present, predominant, and persistent. One is reminded of the King of Brobdingnag’s view of Gulliver’s countrymen: “I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Lest anyone object that “only” one in seven people suffers from personality disorders, and that therefore the King of Brobdingnag’s opinion of Western humanity — that it suffers from the “worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce” — is not relevant, one must add that, for the DSM-5, people with personality disorders are merely the most extreme exemplars of their type. And if only the extremes have four or more undesirable and frequently horrible dominating characteristics, many individuals must have one, two, or even three such characteristics. If the DSM-5 reflects the American Psychiatric Association’s views, then that organization clearly views humanity with Swiftian distaste. Yet its distaste is not that of a disappointed lover (and certainly not expressed with Swift’s genius) but is motivated, one suspects, by the hope of an endless supply of patients. For those with psychiatric disorders need psychiatrists.
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August 1, 2013
QotD: Banksy and the lumpenintelligentsia
Better still is Banksy’s satirical picture, this one on a wall in London’s Essex Road, of two small children pledging allegiance, with hand on heart, to a Tesco plastic bag on a flagpole — actually an electric cable — being run up like a flag by a third child. Tesco is Britain’s largest supermarket chain, and its plastic bags, white with blue stripes and red lettering, litter the countryside, often flapping from trees or disfiguring hedgerows.
Of course, Banksy, as a spoiled child of a consumer society in which real shortage is unthinkable, has all the unexamined anticapitalist prejudices of the lumpenintelligentsia to whom he appeals. But it would be wrong to dismiss the satire of this image out of hand. Tesco, after all, issues a “loyalty card” called a Clubcard; every customer is asked at the checkout, now sometimes by machine, whether he has such a card. The card’s name implies that shopping repeatedly in the stores of one giant corporation rather than in those of another, in the hope of a small price rebate, constitutes membership in a club. You don’t have to be anticapitalist to think that such an idea debases the concept of human clubbability. (In the same way, the word “solidarity” is degraded in France by its association with the payment of high taxes extracted from citizens by force of law.) It is no new thought — but not therefore a false one — that at the heart of consumer society is often a spiritual vacuum, at least for many people. They fill the vacuum with meaningless gestures, such as loyalty to brands almost indistinguishable from one another. I have known murder committed over brands of footwear. Banksy’s image captures, both succinctly and wittily, the vacuum and what fills it.
You also don’t have to be anticapitalist to acknowledge that the power of corporations like Tesco is not altogether benign. The small and beautiful town in which I live when I am in England illustrates this. When my next-door neighbor decided to restore and redecorate his house, which dated from 1709, the local council’s conservation department demanded that the new lead flashing on his roof, invisible from the street, be stamped with a design of bees, presumably because it had been so stamped at some time in history. Certainly conservation is important and cannot be left entirely to individuals. But why was my neighbor bullied in this fashion when Tesco was permitted to open a store not 100 yards away with a frontage completely out of keeping with the town — an eyesore that affects the town’s aesthetic fabric infinitely more than the absence of bees on my neighbor’s invisible lead does? The great majority of British towns have been ruined aesthetically in a similar way, their main streets becoming dispiritingly uniform and ugly, no doubt through some combination of corporate power, bribery, and administrative incompetence. Bullying people like my neighbor is perhaps the officials’ overcompensation for their cowardice or dishonesty in the face of corporations. Banksy’s image therefore has some satirical depth to it.
Banksy’s attitude toward authority and property rights is the standard hostility of the lumpenintelligentsia. Here he is particularly hypocritical because, while maintaining that pose of hostility, he employs lawyers, owns private companies, and is reputed to be highly authoritarian in his dealings with his associates. Inside every rebel, goes the saying, there’s a dictator trying to get out.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Discriminating Philistine: Banksy’s wit and talent don’t excuse his vandalism and juvenility”, City Journal, 2013-06
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