Quotulatiousness

April 21, 2022

EU accuses Le Pen of financial skulduggery, in what I’m sure must be purely co-incidental timing

Filed under: Europe, France, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theodore Dalrymple on the surprisingly frequent “charges made against anti-EU politician late in election campaign” phenomenon that seems to have become standard practice in France:

Marine Le Pen speaking in Lille during the 2017 French presidential election
Photo by Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick via Wikimedia Commons

A disturbing pattern has emerged in French presidential elections: A credible candidate is found almost at the last minute to have committed an illegal act, the revelation of which is intended to spoil or destroy altogether the candidate’s electoral chances.

The latest “victim” of this pattern is Marine Le Pen, who is facing the incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron, in the forthcoming second round of the French presidential election, a repeat of the contest of 2017. The main difference between the two contests is that, this time round, the polls give Le Pen at least some slight chance of victory, while last time Macron gained not only an overwhelming victory, but from the first had also appeared likely to do so. The outcome was never in any kind of doubt, as it is now.

Le Pen is usually described as being of the far right, though in fact her economic ideas are in some respects not very different from those of the candidate of the far left, Jean-Luc Mélanchon, who came not very far behind her in the first round of the election, in which the two candidates who receive the most votes go forward to the second, and decisive, round.

Perhaps economic affinity helps to explain why almost as many voters for the far-left candidate say they will vote for the candidate of the far right as say they will vote for the centrist candidate, Macron. Mélanchon himself has expressed the wish that not a single one of his voters should vote for Le Pen, without, however, having asked them to vote for Macron. He seems, then, to be hoping for a high rate of abstention, which would strengthen his argument that the current French political system is undemocratic and illegitimate, and that the country needs yet another new constitution.

Le Pen has just been accused by the European Union’s antifraud office of malversation of funds, 136,993.99 euros (about $148,000) of the Union’s money to be precise, while she was a member of the European Parliament between 2004 and 2017. For example, she is accused of having claimed 23,100 euros (about $25,000) for the purchase of little objects such as pens and bags to be given out at her political party’s annual conference in 2014, which is not allowed under the rules.

It might be a coincidence that the accusation of something that was allegedly done eight years ago has emerged in the week before the election, but I do not think many people will be found to believe it. After all, Le Pen is decidedly hostile to the European Union, while Macron is almost a religious devotee of it. There are no prizes for guessing, then, which of the two candidates the Union would prefer to win.

QotD: Self-promotion in the modern job market

Filed under: Britain, Business, India, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Self-promotion is not new, but never before has it been what theology was in the Middle Ages, the queen of the sciences.

A friend of mine, an Indian pediatrician, applied for temporary jobs in England and was considered for none of them. My friend was puzzled by this, for he had worked in England before and had good references. My wife, who knew the system from having worked in it at a senior level, asked to see his curriculum vitae that he sent to prospective employers, and soon spotted the problem: He boasted of nothing, and the culture had changed. What was necessary, my wife said, was to inflate his accomplishments as boastfully as possible. There was no risk that anyone would discover his exaggerations. He had once worked as a voluntary pediatric consultant to Mother Teresa’s charity in Calcutta; he had not even mentioned it in his CV, let alone made it sound as if he were all but the founder of her charity. If he once had helped an old lady across the road with her shopping, he should transmute this in his CV into a lifelong concern for the condition of the elderly; and so on and so forth.

It was all rather disgusting, but it worked like a charm: He immediately had offers of jobs aplenty, though of course his real worth as a doctor remained precisely the same. Reticence, which is to me a far more attractive quality than boastfulness, will get you nowhere, and nothing must be left to speak for itself. You must blow your own trumpet, if possible louder than anyone else’s.

Nowadays there are professional coaches in how to “big yourself up”, as the charming phrase has it, in applications for jobs or places in institutions. The son of a friend of mine used one to get into medical school. Lying will go undetected, but even if detected will do you no lasting harm. The most minor accomplishment can and should be made to sound like evidence of genius. It is almost a condition of employment that one should boast and write an advertisement for oneself.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Be Your Own Advert”, Taki’s Magazine, 2022-01-13.

April 13, 2022

Theodore Dalrymple visits the barber to find out what happened in the French elections

Filed under: France, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Rather than depend on the untrustworthy political analysis available in the legacy media, Theodore Dalrymple prefers to get the straight story from his Paris barber:

“barber pole” by triviaqueen is licensed under CC BY 2.0

My barber is highly intelligent and from the way he talks, I should guess that he received a decent education in Morocco. I mean no disrespect either to him or to barbers when I say that, in other circumstances, he might have occupied a more elevated position in society. The last time I went to him, we discussed French politics over the snip-snip of the scissors.

“Since I arrived in this country,” he said, “I have heard the same discussions on the same subjects by the same people.”

“France,” he continued, “is like a man who has complained of toothache for 25 years but hasn’t found the time to go to the dentist.”

I suppose, when you come to think of it, that captures the situation in more than one Western country. Naturally, I was eager to hear what he had to say about the election results, which would be as penetrating as that of any professional commentator.

Another customer, in his late sixties I should guess, entered the shop immediately after me. I was worried that his presence might inhibit the discussion, but once in the barber’s chair, my bib around me, I asked the barber, “Did the election results please you?”

I needn’t have worried about inhibition. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than the other customer exploded with anger. He almost trembled with rage, all of it directed against the incumbent (and winner so far), Emmanuel Macron. I don’t recall ever having witnessed a reaction like it.

I knew that those who didn’t like or approve of Macron were said to hate him: Few people, it seems, are merely indifferent to him. I’m no great admirer of him myself, and I think in his own way he’s potentially dangerous: He’s determined to push ahead with European integration that will, sooner or later, lead to an explosion. But to witness the visceral hatred toward him nevertheless shocked me.

He has long been accused of being the president of, or for, the rich. That he once worked for the Rothschild bank only encourages this view. There is in the accusation the larger assumption that the interests of the rich and those of everyone else are diametrically opposed and necessarily irreconcilable.

Few people can escape entirely or for very long thinking of an economy as a cake, such that a larger slice for you is necessarily a smaller one for me and vice versa. And since the slices of the supposed cake that most of us have are distinctly modest by comparison with those of the rich (the rich being those with at least five times as much as we), the room in our minds for resentment is ample. And even though I know that the metaphor of an economy as a cake is a dangerous one — how many millions were killed in the name of economic egalitarianism in the 20th century! — still I catch myself occasionally feeling resentful at the pharaonic incomes of people who seem to me not to deserve them, though I’m not myself yet on the breadline and have no desire either for great wealth.

March 21, 2022

QotD: “Protect the NHS”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The relations between the population and the state in Britain are those of duty and obligation: the duty and obligation of the population toward the state, not the other way round. During the first Covid lockdown — one is beginning to forget how many there have been — the population was enjoined to stay at home in order to “protect the NHS”, the behemoth centralized health-care system that has served it so ill for more than seventy years. In essence, the population was asked to modify its behavior for the convenience of a state bureaucracy. The government might as well have said, “Protect the Inland Revenue: Pay Your Taxes”.

The government was able to get away with so ludicrous a slogan because of one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the second half of the 20th century, namely that the institution of the National Health Service was a great social advance. It was nothing of the kind: Before it was founded, the country had one of the best health systems in the developed world and soon found itself with among the worst. The intention of the new service was egalitarian — treatment free at point of care and paid for from general taxation — and no one really bothered to check whether its effect was egalitarian. And since it has very unpleasant aspects for practically everyone, rich or poor, the British people still believe that it is egalitarian in its effect, when it is nothing of the kind. Such benefits as it confers are conferred in the rich, educated, and articulate, for the general principle of British public administration is for something to be done only if not doing it is likely to cause the relevant bureaucrats more trouble in the end. The rich, educated, and articulate can make trouble; the poor, uneducated, and inarticulate can only shout or throw bricks at the window (usually bulletproof and often soundproof, too).

The British population, believing that equality is a good in itself irrespective of whatever is equalized thereby, has come to regard the sheer unpleasantness of the NHS — to obtain treatment from which is an obstacle race in shabby buildings operated by exhausted and disgruntled staff — as evidence of its essential moral virtue, for it is unpleasant for all. Everyone is a pauper at the NHS’ gates, and where everyone is a pauper, no one is.

In addition to being treated better, the rich, educated, and articulate have escape routes, albeit expensive ones. Private medicine is still permitted in Britain, but in conditions of scarcity prices rise and so it is vastly, indeed fantastically, more expensive than it need be, or is elsewhere in Europe. The rich can also go abroad for treatment, and do.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Beneath the Surface”, Taki’s Magazine, 2021-12-09.

March 14, 2022

QotD: Crime and (lenient) punishment

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

A few years ago, an eminent British criminologist said, or admitted, that criminology was a century-old conspiracy to deny that punishment had any effect whatever on criminal behavior.

And certainly, no intellectual ever earned kudos from his peers by arguing that punishment was necessary, let alone that current punishments were too lenient. In general, the more lenient he was in theory, and the more willing to forgive wrongs done to others, the better person he was thought by his peers to be.

In a way, this was understandable. The history of punishment is so sown with sadism and cruelty that it is hardly surprising that decent people don’t want to be associated with it.

Often, horrific punishments were carried out in public, half as deterrence and half as entertainment. Clearly, they failed to result in a law-abiding society, from which it was concluded that what counted in the deterrence of crime was not severity of punishment but the swiftness and certainty of detection.

While the latter are important, however, they are obviously not sufficient. It is not the prospect of detection that causes people to refrain from parking in prohibited places, but that of the fine after detection.

This is so obvious that it would not be worth mentioning, had not so much intellectual effort gone into the denial of the efficacy of punishment as such. Despite this effort, I doubt whether anyone, in his innermost being, has ever really doubted the efficacy of, or necessity for, punishment.

In Britain, leniency has co-existed with a very large prison population. This is not as contradictory as it sounds: for the fact is that something must eventually be done with repeat offenders, who do not take previous leniency as a sign of mercy and an invitation to reform but as a sign of weakness and an invitation to recidivism. Instead of nipping growth in the bud, the British system fertilises the plant.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Our Leniency, and the Necessity of Punishing Crime”, The Iconoclast, 2021-11-29.

February 11, 2022

QotD: “By their proposals, shall ye know them”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Of politicians in power it might be said, “By their proposals, shall ye know them.” What they say they want to do is almost as significant as what they actually succeed in doing, for it offers an insight into their fundamental philosophy or state of mind. This is especially important, of course, when they seek to cling on to power by re-election or by some other means such as behind-the-scenes-influence.

That is why the proposal that the IRS should have access to the data of all bank accounts from which or into which more than $600 a year are paid (hardly a king’s ransom) is so important, despite the fact that it has not been enacted. The very fact that someone wanted to enact it, and thought it right that it should be enacted, is highly significant — and sinister — in itself, for the proposal demonstrates a totalitarian mindset.

The ostensible purpose of the proposal, of course, is the elimination of tax evasion. (Incidentally, I have noticed recently an increasing tendency, in the press and elsewhere, for the term tax avoidance to be used interchangeably with that of tax evasion, as if the difference between legality and illegality were of no real importance. This conflation is itself indicative of a totalitarian attitude, according to which a governmental end may be reached without the necessity for any law.)

The people who proposed that, in effect, every bank account should be routinely available for examination by the IRS, without any specific warrant for such an examination, thereby revealed that they thought that the gathering of tax so important that it superseded all other considerations.

Psalm 24 begins: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein. For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods.”

A better version, according to the proposers, would be: Money is the government’s, and the fulness thereof, money and they that have any. For it hath founded it upon the printing press, and established it as legal tender.

I do not go as far as some economists of my acquaintance, who believe that tax evasion is a citizen’s civic duty: at least it is not in the circumstances prevailing in any western country, however unsatisfactory they may be. In my own case, I do not evade taxes and even my attempts to avoid them are rather feeble, for unfortunately there is so little at stake.

But I reject completely the idea that, morally, the first call on anyone’s money is the government’s, which in effect has the right to leave you pocket money by its grace and favor after you have paid your taxes at any rate that it likes. This is the very tyranny that the founders of America feared in majoritarian democracy, untempered by inalienable rights — inalienable even, or especially, by or to the government.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Monitoring Bank Accounts Would Make the People of the Government, Not the Government of the People”, The Iconoclast, 2021-11-01.

December 29, 2021

Theodore Dalrymple reviews the latest work from Thomas Piketty, Time for Socialism

Filed under: Books, Economics, Europe, France, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Thomas Piketty has been a big name among progressives since his first book hit the bestseller lists, so the release of his latest work calls for some consideration from Theodore Dalrymple:

Piketty still writes clearly, though without much imaginative verve, and he has obviously consulted a lot of data. He is intelligent, knowledgeable, and decent, with a very firm grasp of unreality. He believes in a world in which economic levers act frictionlessly, or to borrow the description a doctor of my acquaintance has used with regard to his own medico-legal reports: “You turn the handle and the sausage comes out.”

There is no difference in his world between investment and expenditure. Thus, when he correctly ascribes low productivity in Britain to the low educational level of the general population (such that, in a predominantly service economy, much of it is unable even to answer the telephone properly or with reasonable courtesy), he ascribes it to lack of expenditure on education. If only this were the case! But lack of expenditure cannot possibly explain why about a fifth of children leave school barely literate. Incidentally, France seems to be progressing, if that is quite the word, in this direction.

We read that “Research in the social sciences, of which economics is an integral part, whatever some may think, is and always will be hesitant and imperfect. It is not designed to produce ready-made certainties … we have to examine patiently to endeavour to draw some provisional and uncertain lessons.” Amen to that! But modesty or tentativeness is not Professor Piketty’s main characteristic, nor does prudence once enter into his proposals.

There is no awareness that deterioration is possible as well as improvement, or of the fragility of things. Nothing counts for him but equality. He is to taxation policy what Le Corbusier was to architecture: he wants to prescribe (and proscribe) for the whole world. Above all, no variation! He would tell us how much we may possess, how much we may leave to our descendants or receive from our ancestors, how much we may earn in a year.

As an egalitarian and firm anti-nationalist, he does not explain why redistribution should stop at national borders. But try telling the average Frenchman that from now on he must forgo half his wealth in order to raise up Somalia or South Sudan! The book sometimes reads as if it were written by an electoral propagandist for Éric Zemmour, acting as an agent provocateur.

Uniformity is for him the price of unity (his countryman, Frédéric Bastiat, did not make the same mistake). He has little regard for, or even awareness of, the potential political consequences of some of his proposals. In his European Assembly, for example, which would have real power (unlike the current European Parliament), France, Spain, and Italy could and probably would outvote Germany with regard to economic policy. It does not occur to him that there could be few better ways of arousing dormant German nationalism than this. Nothing is certain, but much is possible; and while he mentions the internationalism of Jean-Luc Mélanchon, the left-wing French politician, he might also have mentioned that M. Mélenchon wrote a book about Germany and Germans that could easily have been written by a patriotic Frenchman in 1916.

Piketty is a strong believer in taxes as tools to make people more equal, and objects to the elimination of the wealth tax by the French government recently. Were he given the power, he would not only re-implement it, but vastly expand the taxes demanded of the wealthy.

[…] To all this, Professor Piketty has one sovereign remedy: tax the rich.

He thinks this is democratic because many, perhaps a majority, would vote for it. He has no problems with majoritarian democracy (provided the majority agrees with him): How can democracy be tyrannous? Thus, he sees no drawbacks in Senator Warren’s proposal to set a wealth tax and to provide — provide! — “an exit tax equal to 40% of total wealth for those who choose to leave the country and relinquish American citizenship.” Moreover, “the tax would apply to all assets, with no exemptions, with dissuasive sanctions for persons and governments who do not transmit appropriate information on assets held abroad.” Not only is this tyrannous with regard to individuals, but it is tyrannous with regard to international relations, providing a justification for American jurisdiction over the whole world. Needless to say, China, Russia, and India would never accept this, and might find allies. Conflict could become endless.

The answer to this little problem is obvious to Professor Piketty: a wealth tax worldwide, such that there would be nowhere for anyone to hide. There might be a few little teething problems with implementation — for example, who is to oversee it all — but think of the benefits: lie back and think of England! Professor Piketty has found the elixir of life, and it is taxation.

December 21, 2021

“Modernizing” Notre-Dame

Filed under: Architecture, France, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The restoration plans for Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris included some wild and whacky ideas for the exterior. Fortunately, the citizens of Paris persuaded the authorities to restore the outside of the building to as close as possible to the beautiful original. The fate of the interior — including the undamaged portions — is not yet settled:

All great art was contemporary once, but it would be a mistake to conclude from this that therefore some contemporary art must be great. The fact is that there are fallow periods in the history of art — the Golden Age of Dutch painting evaporated with astonishing swiftness — and we are going through just such a fallow period now.

Hence the idea that the refurbishment of the interior of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris after its terrible fire two and a half years ago should include contemporary art is, to say the least, contestable. It is difficult to think of ancient churches in which art of the last century has been a great adornment, and in general it is a relief to find that, when present, such art is not actually a terrible blot or assault on the interior of the church.

In fact, the plan to modernize the interior of Notre-Dame applies to that part of it that was undamaged by fire, so that the plan appears to be the seizing of a longed-for opportunity rather than a desire to restore the church to its former glory.

Given the state of French taste in such matters, at least among those with the power to decide anything, one trembles for the future of the church. All contemporary French public buildings are monstrosities, from the Opéra Bastille and the Ministry of Finance in Paris to the Musée de la Romanité in Nîmes. The more that is spent on them, they worse they get. They almost always desecrate their surroundings, as if their architects wanted to take their revenge on previous ages, as mediocrity revenges itself on genius.

Some of the plans that emerged for restoring the roof of Notre-Dame after the fire would have defied belief were it not that we are now so inured to architectural madness that such folly was more to be expected than it was surprising. The proposed plans included everything from a swimming pool to a greenhouse, probably with the intention for growing cannabis.

The public outcry was sufficient that the government decided that the roof should be restored as near as possible to its former state, thwarting those who said that every age should leave its mark on great monuments.

But the idea that every age should bring something of its own to the great monuments of the past is not French alone: the Soviets, for example, thought the same way about the Kremlin in Moscow, and built the Palace of Congresses, a standard monstrosity completely out of keeping with the rest of the buildings that composed it, in its very heart. How could the Soviets have claimed superiority to the pre-revolutionary regime, they thought, if they added nothing distinctly their own to the Kremlin?

Update: At First Things, Samuel Gregg is also viewing the prospect with some (justified) alarm:

Apart from the post-Vatican II liturgy wars, few topics are more likely to set off fierce disputes within Catholic dioceses than architecture — or, more precisely, proposals for renovating church structures and interiors.

One doesn’t have to be an enthusiast of Counter-Reformation baroque to recognize that, from the late 1950s onward, a contemporary stripping of the altars was carried out in many Western countries in the name of renewal. In The Spirit of the Liturgy, Joseph Ratzinger called it a “new iconoclasm” that “eliminated a lot of kitsch and unworthy art, but ultimately … left behind a void.” For decades, it seems, beauty was out, and a mixture of infantilism and neo-Stalinist brutalism was in.

[…]

Some of these tensions burst into public view recently, when plans for reconstructing the interior of Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral were leaked to the British press. The proposed redesign includes a “discovery trail” that will take visitors through fourteen themed chapels, each with a text projected upon the wall and a contemporary work of art, to “create a fecund dialogue between contemporary creation and the church” — whatever that means. The plan also proposes shunting aside many classical sculptures and most of the confessionals, using sound-and-light shows to create “emotional spaces” and explain basic Christian teachings in multiple languages, installing luminous “mobile benches” (which can be moved aside to make more room for tourists after Mass), and adding a stained-glass window and chapel wall overlain by a contemporary abstract painting of clouds.

The proposed changes were submitted to France’s Commission nationale du patrimoine et de l’architecture last week, as per an agreement between the archdiocese of Paris and the French government about who gets to decide what about the cathedral restoration. The commission approved the redesign with two exceptions: The statues must not be removed from the redesigned chapels, and the plan for mobile benches must be reviewed. The commission also offered verbal assurance that no object or painting that was inside Notre-Dame before the fire will be removed from the cathedral.

Catholic and non-Catholic designers and art critics alike have expressed dismay at the plans, denouncing them as, among other things, the equivalent of a “politically correct Disneyland” and a “woke theme park”. The man behind the plans, Fr. Gilles Drouin, has defended the redesign by arguing that we can’t assume the 12 million tourists who will wander through the cathedral each year will know much about Christianity in general or Catholicism in particular. The new interior, he asserts, will make Christian teaching more accessible to contemporary visitors.

Fr. Drouin is right that profound religious ignorance is the rule rather than the exception for contemporary Western Europeans. Furthermore, Catholic churches are not supposed to be forever frozen circa 1756. Every generation of Catholics can contribute to the ways that their churches give glory to God. But church architects and liturgists must realize that no matter how hard they try, they’ll never be able to “out-contemporary” their secular peers in attempts to make the faith speak to the so-called moment. And anyone seriously interested in evangelization through church design should consider that using electronic sound and light shows to disrupt the current architectural harmony of Notre-Dame, which has inspired both Mass-goers and visitors for centuries, is likely not the best way to communicate the transcendent beauty of the faith to tourists.

December 9, 2021

QotD: “The Knowledge” of London’s licensed cab drivers

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

It is not a simple question of regulation and laissez-faire. Regulation can result in an excellent service, better than what an unregulated service might have provided. London’s licensed taxi drivers are, in my experience, the best in the world, for example, and this is due to proper regulation. To obtain a license to operate, they have to master the Knowledge: learn the street plan of London — as higgledy-piggledy as that of any city in the world — not only in theory, as an abstract mental image, but in actual practice. This usually takes them three years, spent driving around the city, day in, day out. When finally they think that they have mastered it, they are examined — often by a retired policeman — and have to be able to say how they would get from A to B, or from C to D, not only by the shortest but also by the quickest route. Only then (and provided they have no police record) are they granted a license.

Obtaining the Knowledge is a formidable intellectual feat: indeed, neuroscientists have used it to demonstrate by brain scans differences between London taxi drivers and others in the possession of spatial knowledge and powers of orientation. And the result of the regulation requiring the Knowledge is that London taxi drivers, besides being small businessmen working largely on their own account and therefore committed to their profession, are generally intelligent, capable men. No doubt the advent of GPS will reduce the need for much of this effort, at least among unlicensed drivers, who were never required to have it anyway. The license was, and is, a guarantee of quality; and the point remains that regulation is not sometimes without benefit to the public.

What do the regulation of London taxi drivers and the success of the vaccination program have in common? I think that it is in the clarity, but also in the modesty, of their goals. The object of the regulation of taxi drivers, for example, is to produce a large cadre of drivers who provide an excellent public service — and the means to achieve this object are unmistakably and obviously connected to that goal. Any group comprising tens of thousands of human beings will contain some who fall below, even much below, the standard desired, but I know of no profession whose members more approximate its ideal. The drivers are justly proud of what they are. There have been no efforts to make saints, or even good people, of them; all that is required is that no ill be known of them and that they have the requisite knowledge. In 50 years of taking London taxis, I’ve never had a bad experience and have had innumerable good ones.

Theodore Dalrymple, “A Cure for Government Incompetence”, City Journal, 2021-08-30.

December 3, 2021

A bureaucratic mandate for never-ending intervention — induced offensensitivity

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Europe, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theodore Dalrymple notes the increasing reach of the bureaucracy in policing everyday language in a supposed attempt to protect the easily offended feelings of minority groups, but really in yet another way to increase the role of bureaucrats (and their staffing and budget allocations):

Original infographic from Treetopia – https://www.treetopia.com/Merry-Christmas-vs-Happy-Holidays-a/304.htm

Underlying the bureaucratic desire to reform language are two assumptions: first that it is the duty of bureaucrats to prevent offense to people occasioned by the use of certain words, and second that they know what words will give offence to people.

Of course, there are only certain categories of people who needed to be protected from taking offence: that is because, in the estimate of their would-be and self-appointed protectors, they are very delicate and can easily be tipped into depression or states of mind even worse than depression.

Whether it is flattering, condescending or downright insulting to consider people so delicate that they cannot hear certain words that were hitherto considered innocuous, I leave to readers to decide. For myself, I think that to regard people as psychological eggshells is demeaning to them, but other may think differently.

But the question still arises as to whether the people supposedly in need of bureaucratic intervention actually do take offence at the allegedly offensive words, such as Christmas, when they are uttered.

This is not as straightforward a question as might at first appear, for people can be taught or encouraged to be easily offended, especially if they will derive certain advantages, political, social or even financial, from being, or claiming to be, offended. If you pay someone to be ill, he will be ill; if you pay someone to be offended, he will be offended.

It is in the interests of bureaucracies that the population should become hypersensitive, for then it will run to the bureaucrats for so-called protection from offensiveness.

A hypersensitive population creates endless work for the bureaucrat to do: he will have constantly to adjudicate between the claims of those who have taken, and those who have allegedly given, offence. Conflict and stoked-up anger are to him what fertilizer is to corn.

For much of the population, hypersensitivity becomes a duty, a pleasure and a sign of superiority of mind and moral awareness. In addition, it is an instrument of power. And, of course, habit becomes character. What may have started out as play-acting becomes, with repetition, deadly sincerity.

People who have had to be taught what microaggressions are because they have not noticed them eventually come to believe in their reality and that that they have been subjected to them. Then they start to magnify them in their minds until they seem to them very serious: they become self-proclaimed victims.

There are two things that victims seek in our law-saturated world: revenge and compensation. Neither of these things can be achieved without the aid of a large apparatus of bureaucrats (civil-litigation lawyers are bureaucrats of superior intelligence who are usually endowed also with a modicum of imagination).

November 2, 2021

QotD: The foreign journalist’s best local source, the cabbie

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

It was often said that a journalist writing about a foreign country ought to stay either three days or three years: the former for strength of impression, or that latter for depth of knowledge.

I was a three-day man in that period of my life when newspapers would occasionally ask me to report on some revolution, civil war, social upheaval or other unusual event (I once went on a daytrip to India from Europe).

Given the circumstances, I gathered much of my information from the taxi-driver from the airport to the hotel where all the other journalists were staying. They did likewise, and in many an article, even in serious publications, a journalist has acted as a mere amanuensis for a taxi-driver.

I am far from decrying this genre of journalism: in my experience, taxi-drivers are exceptionally sensible and level-headed men, intelligent and well-informed but not educated, or rather not indoctrinated into believing the most obvious nonsense by having attended western-type establishments of supposedly higher learning.

Knowing that a journalist is a bird of passage, they did not fear, even in dictatorships, to speak the truth as they saw it: and generally they had seen a lot. With the advent of the mobile phone that hears everything and erases nothing, they may since have become more cautious. I don’t know: no one sends me anywhere these days.

Theodore Dalrymple, “On Taxi Cab Drivers, Barbers, and Learning the Truth”, The Iconoclast, 2021-06-21.

October 10, 2021

QotD: The taste for ugliness

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

Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day, of course, but it was destroyed. That, at any rate, was the thought that occurred to me when, in a Parisian bookshop (patronized, as you would expect, by bourgeois bohemians), I came across a book with the title of Le Goût du moche (“The Taste for the Ugly”), by a fashion journalist called Alice Pfeiffer.

The word ugly does not quite capture the connotations of the word “moche“, which include those of bad taste. If I were to try to make a table, it would probably be ugly due to my incapacity as a woodworker, but not moche.

I must say that the publishers of the book (Fayard) have done the author proud. The shiny cover of the book is vivid purple at the top, descending by various shades of unpleasant colours to a bilious yellow at the bottom. The typeface is also in purple, and the pages the same shade of yellow where they are bound into the spine. It is, as an artifact, aesthetically appalling, as obviously it was meant to be.

If we lived in a normal world, the deliberate creation of something ugly would be regarded as reprehensible: but we do not live in such a world.

The author is an apologist for the ugly, seeing the search for beauty as a kind of totalitarian dictatorship against which the ugly is a justified or necessary revolt or uprising, a cry for individual freedom.

She is a Parisian bourgeoise who has been taught to decry and therefore to reject her own previous privilege. In her own estimate, she was unfortunate to have been so fortunate as to have been surrounded by beauty.

This highly ideological, dog-in-the-manger attitude to beauty is commonplace and has almost been made the basis of official policy — or if it has not, it might just as well have been.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Kitsch and Our Taste for the Ugly”, The Iconoclast, 2021-06-18.

July 27, 2021

QotD: Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Walter Duranty was possibly the worst foreign correspondent in the history of the Western press. Reporting on Russia for the New York Times during the 1920s and 30s, he not only lied through his teeth about the death of millions during the Ukrainian famine, but conspired, with some success, to prevent anyone else from telling the truth about it.

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1934 for his reporting, but ever since 1990, when a biography of him was published that emphasized the extent of his mendacity, there have been efforts to have the prize symbolically rescinded (Duranty died in 1957).

A man may be honestly mistaken, but Duranty had knowingly and persistently lied about matters of world importance. At the very least he deserved the sack rather than a prestigious award, but was never called to account during his lifetime; and the Pulitzer committee has twice decided that the award should not be withdrawn.

I can see the argument for rescinding the prize because Duranty’s conduct was truly despicable, and the prize had been for what, morally, was a great crime.

But there is also an argument for not rescinding it, for the posthumous withdrawal of an award can look like an attempt to rewrite the history of the awarding authority by an act of auto-absolution. An admission that the Pulitzer committee had made a terrible error of judgment might have been sufficient.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Richard Dawkins Punished for Inviting Us to Think”, The Iconoclast, 2021-04-24.

July 15, 2021

Haitian independence was bought with blood … a lot of blood

Filed under: Americas, Books, France, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theodore Dalrymple recently read a book by Sherbrooke University professor Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec on the Battle of Vertières which ended Napoleon’s attempt to recapture the island and re-enslave the population:

Haiti is one of those countries that you can leave after a visit, but that never quite leaves you. Its history is so heroic and so tragic, its present condition often so appalling, its culture so fascinating and its people so attractive, that even if it does not become the main focus of your intellectual attention, you never quite lose your interest in it, or in its history.

That is why, recently in a Parisian bookshop, I bought a book about the Battle of Vertières, the last gasp of the expedition sent out by Napoleon to Haiti, or Saint-Domingue as it was still known (“The Pearl of the Antilles” by those who profited from it), to return it to the condition of a vast slave plantation. General Leclerc, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, commanded, and 50,000 French soldiers, including Leclerc, lost their lives in this ill-fated and, from our current moral standpoint, malign expedition. Six weeks after its final defeat at the hands of the former slaves, Haiti, or Hayti — under the first of its many dictators, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who made himself emperor and was assassinated two years later — declared its independence from France.

The book, titled L’Armée indigène, “The Native Army”, was by a French historian, Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, who now teaches at Sherbrooke University in Quebec. The book recounts not only the history of the battle itself, which took place on 18 November 1803, but how it has been remembered, or forgotten (especially in France), in the subsequent two centuries, and the purposes to which the memory has been put.

The author is a specialist in Haitian and American history. His fundamental historical outlook is very different from mine, but that did not reduce my pleasure in his book, for he writes well and marshals much interesting evidence, the fruit of diligent original research in primary sources. And it seems to me that no one can fail to be moved by the heroism and determination of the former slaves to defend their newfound freedom from the attempt to return them to servitude. The slave colony of Saint-Domingue had been among the cruellest ever known; the methods of Napoleon’s expeditionary army grew more and more vicious as it suffered repeated decimations. That history has its ironies — it is possible that, had the slave revolution failed, Haiti would now be more prosperous than it is, like Guadeloupe or Martinique — does not detract from the righteousness of the cause of the former slaves. They could not be expected to foresee the two centuries of failure, poverty, and oppression to come. Besides, the dignity conferred by the victory cannot be simply set against its deleterious long-term material consequences: Man does not live by GDP alone.

The rest of the article delves into Professor Le Glaunec’s other recent book on George Floyd’s death and fails to show the same intellectual honesty and willingness to face unpleasant facts that his Haitian history demonstrates.

In other words, Professor Le Glaunec, who makes much of his dispassionate resort to historical evidence by contrast with his opponent, reveals himself to be at least as parti pris as that opponent. He displays a lack of curiosity about George Floyd that surely derives from his political standpoint. As for the dedication to the memory of George Floyd, it is morally obtuse: for a man does not become good by being wrongfully killed. A mother loves her son because he is her son, not because he is good, and therefore the grief of his family is understandable and easily sympathised with; but for others to turn him into what he was not, a martyr to a cause, is to display at once a moral and an intellectual defect.

The connection between historical explanation and individual morality is nowhere more complex than in Haiti. The victor of Vertières, the former slave Dessalines, was declared dictator for life, with the right to choose his successor, in the very document that announced the independence of Haiti and the freedom of its population. Dessalines then undertook a policy that today would be called genocide: he ordered that every white settler, man, woman, and child killed (about 6000 in all) who remained in the country after the last of the French troops should be killed, and his orders were carried out. The truly atrocious conduct of the French explained this genocide no doubt, but did it justify it? To answer in the affirmative is to claim that there are good, or justified, genocides; to answer no is to be accused of a lack of psychological insight into the righteous anger of Dessalines and others, or of a lack of sympathy for the state of mind of the victims of slavery.

The death of George Floyd was similarly wrong; but that does not mean that the reaction to it was right.

June 26, 2021

QotD: Surfing the waves of resentment as a political career

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

Those who, for political reasons, keep past oppression or crime constantly before the mind of the descendants of the victims (that is to say, descendants of the victim group, not necessarily of the individual victims) help to foment and foster a deep mistrust or resentment that is no longer justified, but which can lead people in effect to cut off their noses to spite their faces.

This is to the great advantage of political entrepreneurs who surf resentment as surfers ride waves in Hawaii; and such resentment, the most damaging of all emotions, can easily become a self-reinforcing loop. It is not that past oppression or crime should be forgotten, much less denied, but that past achievements and change for the better must also be recognised, lest oppression and crime come to occupy minds entirely and distort decisions.

It is the same with injustice. It is important to oppose injustice, but just as important not to see it everywhere. To ascribe everything that you think undesirable to injustice may blind you to its real causes.

Theodore Dalrymple, “History and Self-Perpetuating Resentment”, The Iconoclast, 2021-03-20.

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