{"id":59917,"date":"2020-11-30T01:00:27","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T06:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=59917"},"modified":"2020-11-29T09:22:38","modified_gmt":"2020-11-29T14:22:38","slug":"qotd-grandstanding-or-what-is-more-properly-called-cant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2020\/11\/30\/qotd-grandstanding-or-what-is-more-properly-called-cant\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Grandstanding, or more properly, cant"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 15px 0px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>A major proximate cause of the polarisation of opinion and consequent envenoming of political life is what the authors of this book call <em>grandstanding<\/em>, though a better word for it (in my opinion) is cant, a word which, oddly enough, they never use.<\/p>\n<p>To cant is to utter moral sentiment far in excess of what is felt or could ever be felt. The purpose of cant is either to present the person who utters it as morally superior to others or to himself as he really is, or to shut other people up entirely. These purposes are not mutually exclusive, of course.<\/p>\n<p>Cant is not new in the world, though the authors of this book offer no history of it. &#8220;Of all the cants that are canted in this canting world &#8230;&#8221; Laurence Sterne wrote more than quarter of a millennium ago, and Doctor Johnson suggested that his interlocutor should clear his mind of cant. My late friend, Peter Bauer, when elevated to the House of Lords, took &#8220;Let us be free of cant&#8221; as his heraldic motto, but far from ushering in an era free of it, subsequent years have proved a golden age of cant. The social \u2014 or antisocial \u2014 media have been a powerful catalyst of cant.<\/p>\n<p>Theodore Dalrymple, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newenglishreview.org\/blog_direct_link.cfm?blog_id=69943&#038;The%2DExpanding%2DTyranny%2Dof%2DCant\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The Expanding Tyranny of Cant&#8221;, <em>The Iconoclast<\/em><\/a>, 2020-08-26.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A major proximate cause of the polarisation of opinion and consequent envenoming of political life is what the authors of this book call grandstanding, though a better word for it (in my opinion) is cant, a word which, oddly enough, they never use. To cant is to utter moral sentiment far in excess of what [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,41],"tags":[480,1289,1238],"class_list":["post-59917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-hypocrisy","tag-theodoredalrymple","tag-virtuesignalling"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-fAp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59917"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61799,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59917\/revisions\/61799"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}