Reflections of a stormy petrel

Against the two-party system

Wed, 06 Feb 2019 18:56:43 GMT

Democracy means( Read more... )

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Demeaning crimes

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 11:20:37 GMT

An American broadcaster called Bill Maher has seen fit to mark the passing of Stan Lee with negative and mean-minded comments. ( Read more... )

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Reverse racism

Sat, 08 Sep 2018 18:58:45 GMT

The ferocity of American racism is becoming more intense by the day. But it may surprise you where I see it happening and why. I say that it really scares me with what hatred "white men" are described in ordinary discourse, among people who regard themselves as opposing racism and prejudice; and how impossible it is becoming to discuss any social subject without bringing in racism (of the "black"-bashing kind, of course).

Now, I cannot think that it is a coincidence that the increasingly heated, increasingly feverish obsession with "toxic whiteness" and such is moving pari passu with a dramatic and increasingly swift social change in America: the increasing pauperization of the lower and middle classes and the violent separation between the middle and upper classes. People like Lisa Denham and her repulsive father, with their disgusting duo about the coming "extinction" of "white man", are one per centers who would never have been noticed by anyone, let alone have had a media and arts career, otherwise; and the despicable little racist Sarah Jeong is an upwardly mobile person aiming to a place in the top one per cent, and doing none too badly in that goal. The more vicious the social split is becoming between the middle and the upper class in America, the more wildly "white privilege" and "cultural appropriation" are claimed to be issues.

Frankly, at this point I think a little Marx and Freud are not out of place. These people demonize the average white man because they feel guilty; they project their guilt on their victims. They feel guilty because they know they are sucking the life out of the society most of their fellow-citizens live in. Every drop of privilege among the seriously rich is taken away from the common pool of opportunity. And when we hear that more than 50% of Americans find that they aren't able to meet a sudden $500 expense, when any long-term illness is apt to reduce them to beggary, then it becomes clear that there is something to feel guilty about. When these things are left largely unspoken, whereas all the "socially concerned" persons obsess about an increasingly abstract notion of "racism" - and do so in an increasingly intolerant manner - I think we have a danger signal.

To be brutal, I believe that, consciously or unconsciously, the dominant classes intend to exclude from discourse anything that comes from "white men" as defined by them, by investing them with imagined racism and insulting ideas of white privilege, so as to disguise from themselves the reality of their own reverse class war. "See, these people themselves live somehow by robbing "blacks" and depriving them of their own proper deserts; see, when they whine about being robbed and abused, that is just yer everlasting commonplace racist black-bashing" - even if the unhappy "white" may never have either mentioned or intended colour at anytime in whatever protest they made. That Tea Partyism and all such phenomena are not only racist but essentially and basically racist is a fundamental tenet of this reverse racism, never even discussed. And that is why Farrakhan and his insane and dangerous followers are never treated as the intellectual and political horror, or as the terrible shackle on the "black" communities, that they are: because their racist resentment works very well within the reverse-racist narrative, behind which, if you pay attention, is nothing but the most brutal class war.

Certainly there is such a thing as black-bashing racism. More importantly, there is such a thing as the devastating exclusion of many "black" communities from any benefit in the common citizenship, their reduction to reservoirs of manpower for organized crime and for the armed forces. The point is that by casting the guilt for these horrors upon "white men" who are themselves increasingly in the same plight, who have no say in national social policies - because they would never have been so thrown to the wolves if they had - the two groups are made to hate and fear each other, while taking their eyes altogether off the conditions that really grind them down. "Blacks" and "whites" should stop accepting these categories, realize that they are in the same plight and that the same class is robbing, oppressing and abusing both. WORKERS OF THE WORLD ARISE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS!

- ahem! - But it is true that this old-fashined Marxist analysis is the best way to understand what is going on. Yet Marxism itself, under the guise of "critical theory", has been abducted by the reverse-racist class warriors. The idea that it is about examining class discrimination - and, above all, the deformities that class discrimination forces upon the thinking of both oppressors and oppressed - seems to have been forgotten; and now we have a neo-Marxist discourse in which one per centers cast themselves as oppressed victims. Old Karl turns in his grave.

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The despicable Boris Johnson

Mon, 03 Sep 2018 13:02:07 GMT

Boris Johnson has hit bottom. I really think there is nothing more despicable and dishonourable that he could have done than his article on today's Telegraph. Knowing perfectly well that the Brexit he howls for is both impossible and largely not defined at all, he covers his own party leader with insults for not achieving it. He is appealing to the most stupid, deviant, grotesque part of the Brexiteer crowd, to those to whom real life is far less important than their self-pleasing fictions and diseased fantasies. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the demagogue in his full and shameless shape, such as Britain has not seen in living memory. He makes Trump sound like an honourable man, and I mean it.

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A Quora answer: why were there no fascist movements in Britain, France and America?

Tue, 17 Jul 2018 15:50:29 GMT

As I have been saying( Read more... )
Well, France( Read more... )In America, Fascism could have come( Read more... )

Britain’s own Blackshirt moment( Read more... )

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Steve Ditko has passed away

Sat, 07 Jul 2018 12:44:38 GMT

My attitude to Steve Ditko and his work is complicated, and to publish about it now, in the hour of his death, might seem ungenerous and rude. But if there is one thing Ditko himself despised, it is sentimental half-truths; I don't think I would honour his memory by posting a wholly positive essay - which, given my view of his work, would involve considerable suppression. Instead, I will post, behind the cut, an essay I wrote in the nineties about one of his last published complete works, STRANGE AVENGING TALES. It contains pretty much everything I think about this great artist, good and bad.

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When will this sorry bunch of twerps ever resign?

Wed, 04 Jul 2018 13:18:15 GMT

The sorry caricature of a government led – but only in the sense that the front fender leads a car – by Teresa May has hit yet another scandal, one that should by rights lead to its collapse. But we have little hope of that, because even the least self-respect, let alone respect for habits and laws, is so absent among this rabble, that they would probably all dance naked in public rather than give up their posts.

The facts are thes. Five years ago, the government was reshuffled and the department for social security was given to a very unsuitable person, Esther McVey. This glamorous blonde, a former TV newsreader, had made such a bad impression in her previous stint as a junior minister in the same department that her own voters in a Lancashire seat had voted her out by way of thanks. She was widely regarded as having all the empathy of a rock and, in spite of her pretty features, half the charm. In fact, if Teresa May weren't notoriously straight, there would be every reason to suspect that McVey had slept her way back into office. The truth, of course, had to do with that miserable death-rattle of politics, brexit; to “balance” the factions in her government, May needed a hard-line brexiteer in the vacant social security seat, and McVey had at least some experience in the place – in the sense that a Communist union agitator has an experience of private business.

Now McVey has shown her entire quality. She has twice lied in Parliament – a resigning matter; and not only lied, but put words in a top civil servant's mouth that were the very reverse of what he had said, and implicitly charged him with incompetence. The facts are these. For the last few years, the Tories, first under Cameron and now under May, have been pushing an ugly nostrum called Universal Credit for the reform of social benefits (unemployment, disability, etc.). This meant basically taking all the state benefits and bundling them together. There have long been serious doubts as to whether this monster could possibly be implemented and as to whether it would do any good if it were, and in the last few months, the head of the Government Accounting Office, Sir Amyas Morse, has been preparing a report into the matter.

Not once, but twice, Esther McVey has stated in open Parliament that Sir Amyas had stated concerns – that Universal Credit wasn't being rolled out fast enough; that he had no problems with the reform as such; and that at any rate the report was out of date. These things seemed unlikely on the face of it, and today, two days after her second such statement, Sir Amyas Morse, head of the General Accounting Office, one of the most sensitive and senior posts in the civil service, has exploded in public with an open letter that all but calls her a liar. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/04/amyas-morse-auditor-general-universal-credit-letter-esther-mcvey

This is a resigning matter. If you lie to Parliament, you resign. That is a simple and well known principle, although of late some notorious instances have got away with doing just that. But I don't think that anyone has ever been called a liar in such an enormous matter, a primary government policy, and to such a disgraceful extent – yes means no, not just once, but all across the line. This is not only a lie, but a stupid lie – I am tempted to say, in homage to the colour of Ms.McVey's hair dye, a dumb blonde kind of lie. The only way she could hope to get away with it was if Sir Amyas turned out to be such a fantastic coward that he would allow himself to be treated like that and not set the record straight. Well, apparently McVey has no idea what a backbone is, because she seems to have been very surprised to find that Sir Amyas Morse had one.

Mrs.May needs McVey to stay in her post, for the same reason why she placed her in it: it is needed to “balance” her self-splitting government. And so McVey has been dispatched to apologize to Parliament for “unwittingly misleading” them. But above and beyond the matter of political convenicence, there is something very May about this July scandal. McVey has been guilty, basically, of thinking that if you just paper over the cracks and lie over matter of fact, your policies will move ahead by some sort of inner inevitability, and people will be convinced or knuckle under. And this is, in fact, a very Teresa May sort of behaviour; it is the same way in which May continues to sail blithely on with the Irish border issue, just talking as though everyone will soon be convinced of her magnificent brilliance. It is the “What could possibly go wrong” kind of politics.

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One of the few good things about getting older...

Sun, 10 Jun 2018 04:18:09 GMT

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A sketchy thought about the study of politics

Sat, 09 Jun 2018 16:04:21 GMT

A historian called Andreas Herberg-Rothe has written an interesting study of the famous Prussian military theorist, "Clausewitz's Puzzle: The political theory of war," part of whose thesis is that Clausewitz's celebrated study of war, though completed and published with great success, is in effect unfinished - Clausewitz wanted to rewrite, it, and it bears notable problems within itself, as Rothe points out. That made me think. A number of the most influential writings about politics are either unfinished, or self-contradictory, or both. Karl Marx' Das Kapital is unfinished. Machiavelli's The Prince bears problems of interpretation so formidable that it would be hard to find two scholars who read it exactly the same. And going back to the grandest and strangest of them all, Plato's dialogues are full of contradictory and speculative views. The two most important political texts among them, The Laws and The Republic, contradict each other in many ways, and The Republic, though one of Plato's most famous and popular texts, is also an outlier among its work in some ways, such as its doctrine of the tripartite soul, which also reflects on its politics.

I have a suspicion that sufficiently ambitious and brilliant studies of human society and history will always either taper off into silence, or include severe self-contradiction, or both. Of all objects of study, humanity in action is probably the most complex and confusing. It is possible that, at the highest levels, these things are not signs of failure, but of as much engagement with the subject as a single mind, however brilliant, may manage.

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My reaction to the catastrophe in Ireland

Sun, 27 May 2018 06:32:07 GMT

Hige sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēnre, mōd sceal þē māre, þē ūre mægen lytlað... A mæg gnornian se ðe nu fram þis wigplegan wendan þenceð. Ic eom frod feores; fram ic ne wille...

Thought must be harder, heart be keener, courage greater, as our strength sinks... If anyone thinks of leaving this battleground, may he weep for ever! I am old; I will not move hence.

Abortion is wrong. Period. End of story. The horrendous surrender of one more nation to this evil does not change that. And it does not change my duty as a citizen to oppose this wrong by every power I have.

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Progress

Sat, 26 May 2018 15:10:50 GMT

PROGRESS

Except perhaps for the most mindless and extreme rainbow cheerleaders, I can't imagine that anyone living in our time can honestly say that they see a good future. Politics, in particular, is broken. We think of Trump with weary revulsion, but he is not an exception, not even the worst figure around. Different kinds of buffoonery prevails in Canada with Justin Trudeau, in Britain, in Italy, in Turkey. Who is up to the challenge? The heads of state and government of India, China, Japan, and Russia make crass use of the lowest kind of nationalism, coming, especially in India, to support the most cruel and superstitious brand of Hinduism at the expense of scholarship and civil peace. Where democracy is not subverted or absent, it is made such use of as to sicken the sight. In half a dozen European countries, popular rage has borne up out of nowhere parties with Fascist or Nazi antecedents or cruelly nationalistic attitudes. In Hungary and Italy, these people have reached government; in Germany and Sweden they are the official or actual opposition. Not only is nobody happy; nobody can see a way for matters to improve. Optimism, except for a few fanatics, is dead.

Now what occurred to me may not necessarily help or do anything to point to a solution; rather, it is a small matter – of what might be called style. Or even content. Of the things we take for granted even if we rape our language in so doing. Just how many of us do not use the word “progress” in an unmitigatedly positive meaning? Even though this word, in its daily use, has no such meaning. We may speak of the progress of a cancer, of a dictatorship, of an avalanche, without any sense of incongruity. And yet “progress” as such is uniformly taken as positive. To understand just how absurd this is, try to think of a good disease, a good tyranny, a good avalanche. Absurd, isn't it? Or if not absurd, at least weakening the subject to the point of near-vanishing. A good dictator, surely, is a man who is almost not a dictator; a good cancer (yes, there is such a thing as a benignant tumor) is one that is practically ineffective. And I defy you to think of any circumstances in which an avalanche may be said to be good. But what is more, these things have progress just in so much as they are not good. It is a malignant tumor that progresses; an avalanche is the more destructive, the more it progresses; a tyranny progresses in so far as it gains further and further control.

Our politics has now gained pretty much the character of the progress of a cancer or of an avalanche – the advance of a progressive and inevitable misfortune. It was not always so. For a few centuries, riding the progress of European power and European science, improvement in material matters seemed to everyone the inevitable lot of our society. That was the progress of our society, and it was good. Then came the period of revolutions and reforms; and people, by unconsciously squinting and editing all the bad and allowing themselves to see only the good, confirmed their acquired view that “progress” is good as such. Most of the revolutionary work was indeed good, restoring European civilization to its natural inner balance as seen in the Middle Ages; but along with it went fanaticism, violence, and above all falsehood – and that falsehood was primarily provoked by the increasingly irresponsible concept of progress.

To me, it looks as though we should be at the end of this cycle. The “progress” of world and local politics is so increasingly bad, everywhere, that it would take iron shutters over one's eyes to preserve this concept of “progress”. Indeed, the “progress” of recent politics is in only one direction, only it is not a direction that can be defined as political at all. The American presidential elections, the Brexit referendum, the Italian elections, the Irish abortion referendum, are occasions where the party that lied the most won; where hucksterism and mendacity were not only used without shame, but triumphantly. No amount of well-argued refutation of the lies of Trump, of the Brexiters, of Di Maio and Salvini, of Leo Varedkar and his accomplices, could make a dent in the will of the majority – or of the victorious minority. Why? IN part because the electors hated and despised the opposition – that was the case with America and Italy – so intensely that they did not believe a word they said, and all responses went in one ear and out the other; and in part because of the corrupt and committed role of the media – both Brexit and Irish abortion were won by revolting abuse of media power. And these two things go together; because a vague awareness of the corruption and mendacity of the media is one of the main reasons, if not the main one, why answers from an enemy who is perceived as having always lied are not believed.

We should at least get rid of this increasingly grotesque joke of a concept of “progress”. We should be aware, even if we hate each other so much, that however we regard moral improvement, it is not here and it is not happening. But the concept goes on occupying the background of our minds, idle, hollow, damaging and unchallenged. Why is this?

I would say, because of the need to sell. The mass media are only a part of the big-business skeleton of our society, and big business has a natural interest in making people believe, one, that things are always changing, and, two, that they are always changing for the better. “Progress” is certainly a good thing in, say, computers. Except where it isn't – printers have become worse, not better, with the passing of the years. But above all, this way of thinking, that is natural to people who always have to promote something to the public, is never challenged, because it would not occur to corporate persons to think that there is anything radically mistaken about it. They spend their lives in a progressive environment, how can they think that there is something mistaken about the concept? And the mass media dominate our communications across our society to the extent that they pretty much decide what is important and what not.

And this brings out another important point. The inevitable goodness of progress is the typical view of the huckster. If selling is the main business of your life – selling, that is, in itself, as opposed to selling some product you made and that you regard as good – then the first thing you say is that it is new, never used before (and so your prospective client is made to think he ought to try it) and improved on previous models. Is it a coincidence, you think, that ours is the age of hucksters, with salesmen such as Berlusconi and Trump dominating politics?

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How have we got used to this?

Fri, 16 Feb 2018 08:58:41 GMT

A frequent horror story in Italian newspapers is about the disaffected young man - sometimes it's a boy and a girl, most often a single boy - who one day just picks up a knife and kills an unfortunate mother, or girlfriend, or acquaintance. Then he most often commits suicide. This is the type who, in America, does school shootings. We have them too. What we don't have is the universal availability of instruments of multiple killing.
I have no doubt that the isolated, homicidal young man is a phenomenon that has been becoming more frequent in recent decades, in both your country and mine. That is a bad thing and it is very necessary to study where it comes from and how we can treat it. I am not taking a position of moral superiority. But the availability of guns in Italy is the difference. And one relevant point is that one group that is often on the front pages for sudden murder is security guards - the only profession in Italy apart from police and armed forces to carry guns on a regular basis. An ordinary citizen who finds his wife has been screwing his best friend may beat them or even strangle the woman; a security guard who makes the same discovery can shoot both dead, and does.
The complacency with which some Americans treat this phenomenon is incredible to me. People discuss how often school shootings happen and whether the media inflate their number. IN any other country, the very idea that when you send your children to school you risk their lives would cause a riot and probably bring down the government. I have briefly taught in one of the really bad schools in east London. Children were practically parked there, and the idea of going to college afterwards was strictly for the few gifted freaks. But even in this very bad school, nobody would ever have though of having a metal detector in the entrance or armed security guards or any of the other delightful ornaments of American education.
You have got used to living with madness, and you don't realize how insane it is in the eyes of others Don't you realize - or rather, don't you WANT to realize - that the very existence of school shootings as a category, as a thing, is something insane? How can you sit there and discuss their frequency and number? How can you live with the thought that you are thinking of schools as places where children may on a given day be shot dead?
Children are a category that ought to be protected. The instinct of any sane and civilized man is to save the children first. To have a whole nation that has got used to the idea that you can send children into danger when you send them to school - and we are not only talking about disaffected boys, as you very well know, but also about gangland schools in Chicago and elsewhere - should not be tolerable. Look at a child, any child; and think of that child being shot at by another child. How can you bear it?

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The Grenfell Tower tragedy

Fri, 16 Jun 2017 08:51:42 GMT

There is plenty of blame to go around. Nobody is innocent, although the guiltiest parties will no doubt turn out to be the local Tory administration who seem – to judge by the fact that the police say that they may never know how many people died – not to even have had an updated list of the residents. How could anyone not know who lived where? And the matter of the cladding – which now turns out to be illegal in America; always, after such disasters, it turns out that some other administration had banned the thing which caused the disaster; and the suggestion that it was only put in as cheap insulation to meet green targets.

Then there is the building itself. My American friends with the Ayn Rand addiction – direct or indirect – will of course be blaming the very idea that the public sector should see to the housing of the working classes, as if no private homes had ever gone on fire. I know the cant by heart.
. But the matter is by no means so simple. London, like most other European cities, is full of popular homes built over a century, mostly but not exclusively by local socialist administrations. In London you can clearly see that the vast housing estates built between the nineteen-tens and the nineteen-fifties, by architects driven mainly by a sense of need and purpose – build the best houses you can at the least price, but with dignity and duration – produced buildings that nobody complained about: modest but dignified blocks of flats surrounded by green areas. But around the sixties, the sense of purpose was lost and the architects decided that their own artistry was the most important thing. The result was oversized, immense buildings of bare concrete, surpassingly ugly and often monstrously tall, which everyone except the architects loathed. The materials used – bare concrete and metal – seemed custom made to last badly and become ugly in English weather, unlike the tile and brick facing of many older GLC and Peabody Trust estates, and mixed with desolating and constant precision with garbage and dirt. I lived in one of them for a few years, and I can tell you that whatever you did to dignify and clean your own living space in the flat, as soon as you stepped out the door and into one of the bare concrete outside walkways so beloved by seventies architects, the depression set in. Everything about them was wrong; and while nobody is thinking of knocking down any of the older popular housing, many of the concrete carbuncles (thanks, Prince Charles) of the sixties and seventies have been righteously knocked down and replaced with old-fashioned English houses. (Even though that is itself a backward development, since London is in fact building more and more blocks of flats, in an obvious reaction to the insane price of land. But the hateful and traumatic nature of the concrete-and-steel erections is obviously such that people prefered to go back to the past.)

Grenfell Tower was a survivor of the bare-concrete age, kept standing in order to house the least fortunate locals. One reason why Britain does not have the devastating homeless problem that blights the USA is that local administrations have a statutory duty to find housing for the homeless. This reduces the blight on the streets, but at the risk of turning certain areas into human dumping grounds – which it is quite clear that Grenfell Tower was. This has been exasperated by the criminal idiocy of successive British governments. Margaret Thatcher – or, as I prefer to call her, Meg Thug – forbade local councils from building any more housing. At once, the largest single source of building orders in Britain dried up; and, guess what, in a few years people were complaining about a housing shortage. They never stopped. This insane order, an absolute triumph of blind ideological prejudice over sense and experience, was aggravated by the otherwise unexceptionable law that enabled residents of council developments to purchase (or better, lease for several decades – the tricky English property status known as leasehold) their own homes, and, less admirably, to lease council housing for rent to third parties. This meant that, while pressures on public housing increased, the stock diminished. To increase it somehow, the local authorities were driven to make deals with private developers and dubious “housing associations”, in the name of the all-holy Private Sector, more expensively and less efficiently than they had been able to do in the past – but at least keeping the stock going somehow and finding places to send the homeless. When Tony Blair – or the Tory Blur, as I prefer to call him – came to power, he, in his eagerness to flatter Thugcherism and Thugcherites, would not even consider altering these senseless restrictions, and the housing crisis continued unabated. That is why Jeremy Corbyn blamed these Tory laws for the disaster, and he had a point. Incidentally, the reason for Corbyn's otherwise unaccountable popularity is his recovery of a simple and by no means extreme left-wing program full of the things that the Tory Blur had wiped from the slate, thus forcing the whole arc of British politics in a tight and Thugcherite stranglehold. Corbyn's own predilections for the likes of Hamas may be unlovely, but in general and especially domestic policy he has done nothing but recover the ordinary and not at all subversive policies of any left party before the Tory Blur blurred things.

One of the horrible things about tower blocks and skyscrapers in London – and while seventies tower blocks are thankfully going down, monstrous skyscrapers, much taller than the most pretentious of blocks, are going up all over the city in a phallic homage to the pretensions of international wealth – is that, whether or not it is at all possible for a fire department to fight a fire in one, it is not for the London fire brigade. Their equipment only reaches to the twentieth floor; a limit that doomed the miserable people, God rest their souls, seen calling for help, any help, from windows thirty and more floors above the ground. I know nothing about firefighting; I certainly do not know whether equipment that can deal with fires above twenty floors up even exists. But this I do know, because it has been clearly said as the horror was unfolding, that if such equipment exists, the London fire brigade don't have it. And this in a city whose politicians and developers seem hell-bent on turning its traditionally low-rise landscape into a forest of skyscrapers. Today it was the working-class and unemployed of Grenfell Tower who suffered; tomorrow it may be some absurd conglomeration of Russian and Arab expatriate millionaires, equally doomed to a horrible death in a heaven-reaching trap with no hope of escape. (Yes, I imagine their internal fire defences will be much better than those available to the poor Grenfell Tower victims. But I am talking of a worst-case scenario – sprinklers failing and such – and such scenarios have a nasty knack of materializing.)

Finally, and I am sad to have to say this, because it is about a body of men I admire and respect. But whoever wrote those instructions to the Grenfell Tower residents – in case of fire, stay put and wait for rescue – has blood on his hands. The point is clear: it is the usual dislike of specialists and bureaucrats for the messy, ignorant, loud public getting in their way. But in this case, the excuse for this idiotic order – that the fire service would take no more than an hour to reach the high floors – in a raging fire and among hundreds of terrified people to be evacuated somehow – is nothing more than a fantasy. A literally homicidal fantasy.

There is plenty of blame available for everyone, as you see. And I hope the promised public inquiry will deal it out in large doses.

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The BBC's news broadcast of this morning

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 14:12:57 GMT

Today's BBC news broadcast left me with a despairing sense of the mentality and attitudes of pretty much everyone it touched. First, of course, there was the hysteria about climate change. Some of my friends will remember my view about this subject: that is that climate changes, because that's what it does, and mankind can no more affect it by reducing its energy consumption by a certain amount than it can stop a flood by waving a couple of bone sticks at it and chanting “hocus pocus”. There are still many excellent reasons to reduce pollution and waste, first of all the rescue of many environments (it breaks my heart every time I see my beautiful country scarred by worthless development and uncontrolled waste dumping), the environment and a reduction, hopefully an end, in the destruction of animal and plant species; but this idea of “the planet” as a whole, put into danger by vicious human activities and rescued by correct ritual performance, is nothing but a degraded religious idea. So did the Aztecs believe that the sun kept rising and falling because they sacrificed human beings to it.

In an age of fake religions, a true, if disastrous, religion, a philosophy of existence as I call it, has unconsciously emerged: a worship of “the planet” as a whole, as an entity worthy of sacrifice in itself. It's not exactly pantheism, for pantheism would involve the whole universe; it is a kind of cosmic nationalism that places all value and all moral demand within it. So, a hundred years ago, nationalists placed all kinds of value within the nation, and Italian Fascists used the word “Italian” to mean “morally good, excellent, and admirable”, an “Italian idea” being the same as a great and progressive idea. The Earth is now vested with this kind of idolatry; it is the new idol to whom those who deliberately deprived themselves of higher religions come and worshsip. Religion gets a very bad rap in our time, and to judge by the performance of these novel religionists, there is a reason. They have been deprived of any sense of religion as a life of the intellect by their educators' terror of “sectarianism” and “bias”, and they know noting about Plato, Thomas Aquinas, or Kierkegaard, or about the bond of religion and philosophy. (Horribly, polls tell us that the favourite philosophers of those English who know enough to tell the difference are Karl Marx and David Hume.) And having no notion that religion is something that stimulates thought and creates debate, they approach it as only the most benighted and bewildered fanatics ever approached their religion – as a mental fetish or idol, whose every word is command, never to be doubted, discussed, or confronted.

This attitude was evident in what was called the BBC's “report” on President Trump's decision to vacate the Paris Accords – a decision that was fully within his rights as the head of an independent state. It was no more reporting than a party manifesto is an objective account of the state of a country. It was a half-hysterical, half-triumphant, wholly uncritical list of all those heroes of earth-worship morality who had denounced Trump. Even the list of corporate charmers who had discovered their earth-worship morality in this time of drama was uncritically and triumphantly delivered, as though Disney, Facebook and Goldman Sachs were champions of the people and excellent teachers of morality. I am not saying that a large business may not be conducted with something like basic morality; but, apart from the record of the specific companies concerned, The fact that the whole class of international big business had set up this common howl shows that, at the very least, they feel themselves protected from whatever sacrifice may be asked of the common populace. Otherwise they would, at best, be silent, and at worst be howling against the accords. The eye of big business, from its Victorian rise to this day, has always been to the bottom line, and they have always been willing and ready to fight in every possible manner anything that would damage their dividends. What is more, it is likely from their behaviour that at least some of them think that earth-worship morality may further their interests. In other circumstances, such a coming together of huge and dangerous special interests would have drawn the unfavourable attention of journalists. Today they applaud it.

But even before I had stopped being overwhelmed – though hardly surprised – by the blatancy of the whole operation, I was struck as if with a wet, smelly fish in the face, by the absurdity and pettiness of Theresa May's government. May, mind you, is quite clearly an earth-worship religionist; and she has taken the personal step of phoning Trump to inform him of her “disappointment” - a strong step by any standard. And yet, even in this dramatic moment, she has not been willing to put her signature to a document signed by the governments of Germany, France and Italy, condemning Trump's decision and reasserting the Paris Accords. So much does it matter to her to establish her particularist, literally Little Englander credentials. At a moment when the European Union and China, rightly or wrongly, are about to issue a joint statement on the Paris Accord, to take the position that you support their position but will not collaborate with them is nothing short of pathetic.

And that had no sooner gone by, that the BBC had me yelling at the radio and arguing in favour of May. And again, it is on an issue on which I do not support her. She had said that she would be, and I quote, “working to achieve” the hoped-for reduction of the balance of immigration into Britain to the tens of thousands. The meaning of that must have been clear to every intelligent person who heard it; being that she would do whatever she could think of, she would “work” towards it, but would not promise – could not promise – she would achieve it. And yet the BBC claimed that one of her ministers had “contradicted” her when he said, exactly, that they could not make any promises on the matter. To such a pitch of idocy and blindness does the “gotcha” culture drive people. It is possible to understand how such things happen: the heated atmosphere of a press conference, the need to get a juicy soundbite, the approximate understanding that always occurs when people work with their voices and with their memories instead of starting from extensive records. What is tragic and ignoble is that such a gross failure of understanding should be preserved, surviving the editorial process, and be broadcast as “news” every hour on the hour. This is not only bad in itself: it is counter-educational, teaching people to miss obvious connections and to look for breaks even where they aren't there. It is literally contrary to what is supposed to be the BBC's primary educational mission. And it brings to a suitably crashing end these few minutes of folly, irrationality, and bad religion.

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AN APALLING SCANDAL

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 20:20:13 GMT

The appointment of Cressida Dick to lead London's Metropolitan Police - the body known across the world as Scotland Yard - is an apalling scandal. It is scandalous enough that the lady should still be working at the upper levels of a police force; to place her at the most senior post in all British policing is an outrage.

Cressida Dick is the woman responsible for the slaughter of Jean Charles de Menezes. In case you had forgotten, or never heard (though a couple of hundred million Brazilians certainly have, and I assume they will be making their views known), this young Brazilian electrician working in London was butchered by eleven police bullets while sitting in an underground train. His only fault was to have a rather dark complexion, like many Brazilians, and to live next to a terrorism suspect. Now no matter how blundering and wrong the actual policemen who shot de Menezes were, they were only the executors of a disastrously misconceived and misperformed plan. The commander was Cressida Dick; and the commander is responsible when something goes wrong.

But Commander Dick had long since been singled out for high promotion - probably since she enlisted, with an Oxford degree to smooth the way. I am an alumnus and I love Oxford, but there are two Oxfords. One is the great research university, respected across the world, with a couple of dozen Nobel prizewinners and umpteen top scholars; and the other is the pons asinorum intended to licence people for political careers, which produces most of England's ministers and Prime Ministers. If you are studying a science subject, or a humanities research subject, you are probably part of the former; if you are reading English, Theology, or, God help us, PPE - Philosophy Politics and Economics, the course for budding politicians - you belong to the latter. I suspect Commander Dick was. She was certainly slated for the top before she got de Menezes killed. And in any country but England it would be incredible that she could survive such a disaster; in England it's not even surprising - though it is deeply disgusting - that she did.

Above and beyond any design to promote a woman to the top spot, which was indubitably part of the issue, you have to remember that the English suffer to a quite extraordinary extent from the syndrome called doubling down. To become obstinate in the defence of something just because you suspect you might be wrong is a universal humain failing; but in England, it's a national bad habit. The English are ALWAYS at their most obstinate when they are in the wrong. And so it is not at all surprising that a woman who should have been drummed out of the force for homicidal incompetence is now being put at its head.

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An attempt at prophecy: where is Europe going?

Sat, 18 Feb 2017 22:25:11 GMT

It occurred to me that in several European countries, politics are going in a direction that leads to a scenario that is very similar to that of Italy from 1946 to 1994. During that period, a large Communist opposition and a much smaller Fascist one remained permanently in opposition, because by their nature they could not be allowed into government. This forced a number of widely different parties - the secular conservative Liberal party, the non-socialist, left-of-centre Republicans, the Social Democrats and Socialists - all representing long and individual traditions, to form majorities together with the confessional alliance Christian Democracy, which was more a grouping of parties than a party in itself and went from near-Fascist to Christian Socialist. The secular parties despised the confessional nature of the Christian Democrats, especially since Catholics had been effectively kept out of the government of Italy since independence, and their rise to dominance in the elections of 1945 and 1948 was something like a revolution. This was the reason for the famous frailty of Italian governments: the priorities, views and values of the majority parties were by no means always compatible, and sometimes one of them - most often the Liberals or the Socialists - went into opposition. That is why government crises and elections used to be frequent in Italy, even though majority and opposition never really changed.

Now what is happening in the Netherlands, in Sweden, and to some extent in France and Germany too, is that an opposition is forming that is really not fit to govern, but is strong enough that, in the long run,only a great coalition of the more respectable forces can keep them out of power. Certainly neither the Sweden Democrats, with their notorious Nazi origins, nor Geert Wilders' Freedom Party, who make Trump look steady and polite, nor Alternativ fuer Deutschland or the Front National are either ready or fit to govern; but they are increasingly becoming the real opposition in their own countries, crowding the more respectable and old-fashioned parties together, and forcing alliances that, though increasingly inevitable and necessary, will not be comfortable for anyone involved. The countries that laughed at Italy's revolving door cabinets are soon going to be experiencing them.

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A sad moment

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 17:42:05 GMT

One of the worst things about Trump is that he is bringing out the worst in his enemies. He is so ghastly that they feel entitled to vomit out the worst of their vanity, group hate, racism and narrow-mindedness, in the unacknowledged certainty that any stick is good enough to beat Trump and Trumpies with, that hate for Trump validates itself and is obviously right. People are saying things that would have been beyond the pale (or only said in the presence of ideological partners) two years ago.

I have had to defriend and block one of the great of comics art, Bill Sienkiewicz. The reason why is behind the LJ-cut, except for what are to me the key words, which are in plain view: ( Read more... )
It's scientifically proven ( I'm not going out to post links- they re everywhere for anyone who wants to stray from their comfort of the FOX/ breitbart bubble) --- that conservatives are genetically wired, and innately predisposed to being afraid-- fearful- of new experiences ,and also that a vast majority of people who voted for him are equally stunted and lacking ithe ability for scrutiny and follow factual evidence. I'm not saying they're all stupid, but evidence supports the case that many cannot process information, lack critical thinking, relying instead reactionary responses, emotions and solutions based on fear and anger.( Read more... )

Bill Sienkiewicz made himself responsible, in a public post, for this kind of outburst. After that, breaking contact with him was the only way I could keep my self-respect.

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Faith and gullibility

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 18:37:02 GMT

It occurred to me that two enormous obstacles have been placed in the way of Christian belief. The first is the monstrous ignorance of history of most contemporaries, that makes it next to impossible to explain that the New Testament is a collection of contemporary, reliable historical documents; and second, the very concept of "belief system", which makes any religion so labelled into a mere matter of arranging "beliefs", as opposed to understanding facts. No wonder that crooks are everywhere busy inventing "religions" from wicca to scientology, with no basis in fact, and for the sole purpose of flattering their customers' minds and make money at their expense.

The two obstacles are related. If people are not allowed to understand that the narrative of John is as much a matter of experienced fact as that of Julius Caesar, and that both must be taken prima facie as eyewitness material, there is no matter of fact to be considered, only belief.

The point with Christian belief is rather different. It is that there are reliable, credible historical documents that make an incredible claim, namely that a man cured leprosy, insanity and blindness by command, raised the dead two or three times, calmed a sea storm, twice fed thousands from food barely sufficient for one person, and, having been very publicly and demonstrably killed, was soon after alive again. Obviously the point is whether you believe this account or not. That is why faith is accounted a virtue for Christians; NOT because you are supposed to believe IN DEFAULT of evidence or INDEPENDENTLY of any evidence.

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Sat, 21 Jan 2017 08:29:55 GMT

To me, the repulsive clashes between "protesters," police and "deplorables" are an ugly sign of things to come. People on both sides have lost, or rather have never had, the ability to live with defeat. Trump is a detestable creature, but he is largely the creation of a political culture that no longer allows dissent or difference, because it is genuinely convinced that it contains all legitimate "diversity" - that diversity it always demands that we should celebrate - and that is therefore incapable of recognizing real diversity. Half the free world feels despised, limited and squashed by the pressure of this diversity without difference, and has for a long time now been trying to find a way to react. Trump has given them the perfect vehicle to do so.

There are ladies and gentlemen and people of sterling honesty in the diversity party, people like my friend Michael Rosenblum, who would go out in the rain to pay a penny debt, or Anna Maria Ballester Bohn, kindness incarnate with a funny face, or Carla Speed McNeil, artistic genius and good person, or half a dozen others, the kind of people who brighten the lives of their friends and leave a clean smell when they leave. I do not doubt their sincerity, but I doubt their knowledge of the world. Time and again they make remarks that just don't agree with my experience of the opponents. The effect of the views they follow is ultimately oppressive and aggressive. Firmly convinced that they are righting injustices and setting up new rights, they are in fact - not personally, never in a million years personally - trampling on established rights and working to silence and persecute truth. And there is a streak of persecution complex that is set to do a lot of damage. They are sincerely convinced that Trumpies are coming to brutalize and rape them. In this mood, even understanding the enemy is experienced as a kind of temptation: why should you try to understand a bunch of vicious, misogynistic racists?

I have never been of the enemy party either. My loathing of Ayn Randism and my contempt for gun "rights" make it impossible for many of them to even speak with me. The gun nuts especially reason with the logic of addicts. As with the rainbow party, understanding the enemy is not something to do but a temptation to be avoided, because anything that might undermine your precious hold on your piece of murdering iron would expose you naked and helpless to a terrible, homicidal universe. You cannot reason with a man who has willingly made himself an addict to his own fears. Like the rainbow nut's vision of the Trumpies, an undifferentiated mob existing in an ecstasy of rape and murder, the gun nut's world is one huge threat from which only his murder implements protect him.

I don't want to go further. I think you can imagine what I fear in a country where two opposing forces have many members in this state of mind.

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The mills of God grind slowly - and now we are about to get the bran

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 01:22:55 GMT

Donald Trump is the end result of every subversive tendency in the Sexual Revolution. He is Justice Kennedy's "at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" incarnate and personified. That concept, of course, has nothing to with liberty: quite to the contrary, it is the installation of a tyrannical, uncontrolled ego at the centre of each human being's universe - the invention of a world of a million million tyrants. To "define one's own concept of meaning, of the universe" is to impose it on external reality. It is to say "that is what I want, that is what I order" to the world at large. Now the child of that thought walks into the White House.

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A sketch of ideas for sociology of knowledge

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 20:10:11 GMT

When the study of law as a school subject began in the twelfth century, it did not begin with the active common law that at the time dominated Europe, including Italy. It began with Roman law, with the Theodosian and Justinianic codes, preserved in libraries. That was simply what the scholars of the time regarded as true learning, worthy of study. It was from the schools that Roman law poured out across the landscape to dominate most of the European continent, except for England. And yet Roman law had considerable flaws as compared with common law.
This is parallel with the way that "comics" fandom has developed out of superhero fandom and is still largely dominated by it. IN the sixties and seventies, superheroes were irrelevant to most adults and in a definite commercial retreat. But the number of fans who became professionals not only in comics but across the media, in movies, in advertising, in television, in publishing, means that the genre became influential far beyond its apparent reach. Meanwhile, "Comics" fandom continued to be focused on superheroes and associated fields (science fiction, horror, fantasy), even though most comics across the world don't really pertain to them.

So the idea of what is important in the fields of knowledge depends mostly by the social processes within the area. Those fields that have an organizational advance on the rest - superhero fandom among comics, like twelfth-century Roman law experts in the field of law - tend to set the rules for the whole field.

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Trump sits and sniggers

Fri, 06 Jan 2017 13:59:53 GMT

And these people call the Trump electors stupid.

I can say very sincerely that I don't have much of an opinion of the brains, far-sightedness, or cunning, of the average modern politician. As far as I am concerned the breed of Bismarck and Disraeli, never mind Cavour and Lincoln, is extinct. But for sheer insanity of stupidity, for self-destructive inability to see the nose on your face, for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way and for the wrong motives, absolutely nothing compares with the pursuit of Russian hacking of Democrat computers. The Democrats should forget about those damned e-mails. They should forget about Russian intrusion, Putin, Assange, the FSB, Russian hackers and everything else. They are doing, quite literally, every wrong thing they possibly could. And if they have any influence on the CIA and the FBI at all, they should tell these bodies to shut up about them, too.

Consider, first and foremost, what a disastrous scene is playing out right now. Leaders of America's “intelligence community”, as they call them these days, are going to the President-elect to, in effect, beg him to show some public support for their position. This places Trump in the position of the receiver of supplications, and the arch-spies in the position supplicants. Now, if they think that Trump will ever give in on the issue in any public way, they are so politically stupid that to remove them from their positions would be a relief: nobody who puts himself in such a humiliating and destructive should be in a position to advise the most powerful man in the world. What the Hell are they thinking? Even if Trump were a good man, he would not have the least incentive to give in to their demands. He has called their credibility into question; to go back on that would be a setback, and also an open sign of creeping compromise with the hated DC establishment he has been elected to trash. And what does he have to lose if he doesn't? Precisely nothing. The half of his supporters who admire him regard his behaviour as all-American, and the half who voted for him in horror at the idea of a third Democrat term had such a low idea of him anyway that nothing could lower it. His core supporters would probably not think of being shocked at nations interfering in each other's internal affairs; as far as they are concerned, that is what they do. And indeed there is something about this that the Democrats, in particular, ought not to be doing, since the idea of American politicians complaining about foreign countries interfering in their elections would make a lot of the traditional left in foreign countries gag. American interference in other countries' politics is part of the hereditary folklore of exactly those forces who ought to be the Democrats' natural allies on the international stage, and to have the CIA of all agencies be the bearer of protests on this subject would rouse the bitter laughter of hundreds of millions from Santiago to Berlin. There are instruments of power that the Democrats should not be seen to be using.

But if the tactics are demented, the strategy is suicidal. The Democrats should have killed talk about those damned hacked e-mails. They should have made sure that everyone forgot that they had ever been published. Because whether or not it was the Russians who hacked them, there is one thing that no Democrat has been able to say: that they are not true. And so long as they are, and so long as they are in public, they show that everything that Catholics and Christians believe about the Democrat leadership and their attitude to them is absolutely true. The ignorance, the brutality, the contempt, the assumption that Catholicism is a remnant to be swept into the trash-can of history, are all there in black and white. And that is exactly what the Democrats should try to make people forget.

Trump has not been elected by the hard-core of unfocussed anger he expresses. He has been elected because millions of Catholics and Evangelicals had become convinced that another term such as the last two would mean the beginning of persecution in earnest, a legal and extra-legal assault on the churches that would lead them to have to make the dreadful choice between apostasy and second-rate citizenship. The split in the Christian communities ran between those who, like me, Catherine Alexander, or Rachel Hamilton, thought that Trump was so bad that he would pollute every cause he touched, and those, like Tony Esolen or Jonathon van Maren, thought that the prospect of a Rodham Clinton presidency had to be avoided even at the price of touching the foul thing. The idea of a widespread Christian enthusiasm for the orange adulterer is grossly overstated. Many people, as Barbara Ehrenreich observed, voted in advance, as if to get the damned thing over with.

But if that is the case, and if the Christian vote made the difference, then, if the Democrats cannot wean themselves of their addiction to abortion and rainbow causes, they should at least do their best not to have it talked about. And that means silence, silence, silence. And if personal documents fall into enemy hands to show what your real attitude is, be superior, ignore them, treat them with contempt. The madder you get, the more you prove that it's all true, and that the enemy has shown you as you are.

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Charmers

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 22:13:29 GMT

Translators like me work mostly from internet contacts, which means we can have clients across the world. I have a link with an agency in the Palestinian Territory, no less, with whom I haven't done a lot of work - and the story that happened today will tell you why.

Morning, I get an urgent request for revision for a death certificate. The job is easy, and the certificate tells a heartbreaking story - a girl of twelve, dead in a foreign country, probably in a holiday, from what sounds like an undiagnosed brain aneurism. The fee offered is tiny but adequate, if hardly generous. It's easy work, and I do the best I can - because I always do, and because in this case I am moved.

A few hours later I get another e-mail from the same source. Another bit of the job needs doing fast, the consul is waiting, the body needs to be released. I open the attachment - and immediately fire off a response.

"Are you having me on? This is not a bit of additional revision, this is the translation of a whole, sizeable, official letter. This is a full new job and I will charge for it separately and at my minimum rate."

Immediate answer. Sorry and all, it was a mistake, it IS a separate job - offered at a fee two-thirds of what I'd required.

Me: sorry, but that was my absolute minimum, and I've already done you a favour by reckoning it in dollars instead of British pounds.

I did not hear from them again.

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"Love and marriage"

Sun, 12 Jul 2015 14:21:30 GMT

This essay is going to start on a very different subject from where it is going to end.

The highest level of artistic achievement always has a powerful ethical content, quite simply because artists of the level of Homer, Dante, Beethoven, have a broad enough insight to take in all significant parts of human experience, and morality is a major part of it. However, morality as such is not necessarily connected with artistic merit, except in the sense that artistic merit always has to do with truth to experience. Take, for instance, a song such as Tata Young's Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy. There can be no doubt that nobody would want to encourage the kind of attitude it describes, not only the tarty-ness, but the vanity and egotism that underlie it, and the parasitical overtones of such a verse as “I like all my men, I like them tall with MO-NEY!!”. But because it is the work of a young woman who has been, one way or another, in the position of feeling, experiencing, imaginatively understanding – if not necessarily acting out – the attitudes it describes, it is an almost complete success, vigorous, driving, melodious and vital. She knows that generation and those people, if she knows anything at all. And even where the lyrics cross the border from childishly arrogant to merely stupid, repeating without insight the follies of the worst pseudo-feminism (“people are intimidated when a girl is cool with her sexuality” - sorry, dear, we aren't really intimidated by any such thing, only embarrassed and rather sad), it may be said at least that this is a true-to-life part of the experience described. Teen-agers will indeed repeat that kind of rubbish. Shakespeare this is not, but it has in common with Shakespeare and all successful art that it is a true image of a true experience.

It follows, naturally, that artistic failure always tends, for whatever reason, to falsify experience; whether it distorts it by conventional and superficial notions, or by ideological blinkers, or by mere stupidity and ignorance. The worst song Frank Sinatra ever sang, Love and Marriage, belongs in this category. This car crash of a song, whose hideous jingle-like opening sticks in the mind like the worst kind of advertising music, is so steeped in sentimental falsehood that it is almost aware of it; almost. For if it really understood that “the idea that love and marriage must go together is sentimental, false and dangerous”, we would have a very different kind of song – something like, for instance, Bruce Springsteen's The River. But Love and Marriage is trying to say the exact opposite, but without any real belief, without any of the belief born from experience. It tries to be both witty and earnest, and fails at both. The material is as arbitrary (“ask the local gentry – and they will say it's ellyment'ry!”) as that of my previous instance was relevant and inevitable (“My mouth never takes a holiday, I always shock with the things I say/ I was always the kid at school who'd turn up to each class about an hour late!”). Notice, too, the modest but effective invention of that half-line, “my mouth never takes a holiday”, as compared with the utter deadness of something like “Ask the local gentry”. Why “the local gentry”? Why not the alien gentry, the overseas gentry, or just the gentry, period? Why, because about a century before the song was written, the expression “the local gentry” meant something. It was pulled from the list of old, half-remembered word groupings, purely to fill its space in a verse. From beginning to end, there is not one passage that has that sense of inevitability that is the mark of a well conceived poem or lyric. The very opening leaves the impression that the singer is repeating the words to himself in the hope that some significant rhyme will occur to him.

The reason why this song does not dare quite take itself seriously, and never seems to find the right turn of phrase, is that it is trying to assert as undeniable fact something that was, and had been for at least half a century, under concentrated cultural fire, namely, the institution of marriage. “Love and marriage, love and marriage, it's an institute you can't disparage...” - can't what? (And notice the infelicity of replacing “institute” for “institution” to make it fit the verse.) It belongs to a luckily rather small group of songs that seemed to want to use popular music to preach, any old how, attitudes that the authors regarded as desirable – although they seemed never to understand what could possibly make them desirable. Another such terrible Sinatra item was Swinging on a star, apparently aimed at schoolchildren, and promising them that if they were good hard-working schoolchildren rather than “mules” or “pigs” or “fishes”, they would grow up able to perform miracles and travel to the stars at will. Well, of course we want children to work hard and study; but to promise them that if only they work hard they can all be Thomas A. Edison or John Wayne or John D. Rockefeller is bunk so pure, so repulsive, so fraudulent, that one wonders how anyone could be so stupid as to want to propagate it to children. Luckily, the song is so bad that one doubts any child ever took it seriously, but if any one ever did, they were setting themselves up for nearly inevitable disappointment and resentment.

One great work of art that originated in the same period showed what the right message had to be, and what it should be. As Bill Mauldin, a great cartoonist, said of his colleague Charles M.Schulz, “He is a preacher. All great cartoonists are jackleg preachers... there is a high moral tone there.” What did he mean? Not, certainly, what many people imagine that the work of art “with a message” should be, that is, that the person with the right ideas and attitudes should be the winner in the end. Absolutely the contrary: what we get from Peanuts is that you can be a “loser”, a modest person with no accomplishment or glitter, a kind of punching bag for destiny, and still be better than a winner. The winner, in the world of Peanuts , is fairly clearly Lucy Van Pelt – a bully and a fool; and I don't think there is a single reader of Peanuts in three quarters of a century who has not left the strip with a strong feeling that it would be infinitely better to be a Charlie Brown than to be a Lucy. That is the moral message children and adults need to hear, reconciling us to the battle of life with its inevitable defeats, showing by example rather than by precept the hollowness and unimportance of “winning”; a message of the most desperate importance in a country where children are daily subjected to liminal and subliminal messages preaching the exact opposite - “winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.”

Swinging on a Star came out at a time when American public opinion was seriously worried about the state of the country's youth, about gangs and a growing looseness in behaviour and fashion. It clearly was intended to preach the virtues of schoolwork and learning, and by extension of hard work and discipline in general, but its scheme of thought shows that the author did not have the least idea why the life of work and study should be preferred to the life of a mule, a pig, or a fish . In fact, it shows the exact opposite: by emphasizing vast ambition and overwhelming success, swinging on a star, carrying moonbeams round in a jar, it effectively depreciates the life of hard work, moderate achievement, and “being happy at home”, that is the best most of us can realistically hope for. (Indeed, from another point of view, it is the best that anyone can hope for. The triumphant billionaire or movie star cannot really be more happy than an ordinary grandfather playing with his grandchildren in a house he has bought and paid for from his own work as a welder or as a clerk. The satisfaction of work well done, of a thriving family, of the esteem of friends and colleagues, is the same for both.) A decade later, Bob Dylan skewered all such fantasies in a few pointed and meaningful lines: Advertising signs they con/ You into thinking you're the one/ That can do what's never been done/ That can win what's never been won/ Meanwhile life outside goes on/ All around you! Indeed Swinging on a Star and Love and marriage are clearly in the style of advertising jingles. Somebody set out to advertise marriage and hard work, with the advertiser's mentality, and had been as successful as one could expect.

Swinging on a Star is not as spectacularly, unredeemably, wholly worthless as Love and Marriage. If its values and rewards are unreal and misleading, at least it is very clear about what it opposes, and when it describes the attitudes it condemns it does with understanding, sting, and even wit. A mule is an animal with long, funny ears./ He kicks up at anything he hears. / His back is brawny and his brain is weak./ He's just plain stupid with a stubborn streak./ And, by the way, if you hate to go to school/ You may grow up to be a mule. ... A pig is an animal with dirt on his face/ His shoes are a terrible disgrace./ He's got no manners when he eats his food./ He's fat and lazy and extremely rude!/ But if you don't care a feather or a fig/ You may grow up to be a pig.....A fish won't do anything but swim in a brook/ He can't write his name or read a book./ To fool all the people is his only thought,/ And though he's slippery, he still gets caught./ But then if that sort of life is what you wish,/ You may grow up to be a fish. There is no such relief of wit or realism or even real anger anywhere in Love and Marriage.

By comparison, then, we have to conclude that Love and Marriage really has no truth to offer, not even a negative kind of truth. It does not, like Sexy, Naugthy, Bitchy, depict vivacity and insight an objectively bad but real attitude; it does not, like Swinging on a Star, have a clear idea of at least the negative part of its message – much less of the positive on). Love and Marriage has no artistic value at all, no truth to experience. And the common advertiser's attitude of the two songs suggests that their flaws must be similar, rooted in the same way of thinking and doing things. And as Love and marriage is all bad, unrelieved by any quality patches, it is also likely to reflect only the bad parts of Swinging on a Star – to offer as the obvious result of hard work something – great and extraordinary success – that is by its nature open only to the lucky.

And indeed it is so. There is a relationship between love and marriage, but it is not what the song tries to suggest. Let us ask ourselves: what kind of feeling do sane people – I mean those who don't write editorials about “heteronormativity” and “matrimania” and other such ugly neologisms – have, when they hear someone like Jack Kirby say that his proudest achievement was, “I married the woman I love, and I loved her all my life”? If love and marriage went together like a horse and carriage, we should find that fairly obvious. But we don't. We react to it as to something great, noble and touching, something we admire and wish we could emulate even though we suspect we never could. Livelong married love is something like a sporting record or a great work of art: something rare and beautiful, but that makes us all feel a little better about mankind and so, in a sense, about ourselves. I may never manage to cover a hundred metres in a hundred minutes, but I can watch, enjoy and admire the sight of Usain Bolt streaking down the straight and making it look easy. I may be a disaster with the other sex, but I can still look on a life like Kirby's or many others, and feel warmer because married love really is possible.

Married love is the achievement; marriage is the activity. And that being the case, you can see exactly what is the problem with Love and Marriage and the whole set of notions it embodies so disastrously: it offers as the ordinary condition what is in fact the hard-won and somewhat lucky achievement. It offers the equivalent of a Wimbledon singles title to every entry-level tennis player. Which, of course, is exactly what Swinging on a Star does with respect to work and good behaviour in general, and work and good behaviour at school in particular.

But, you will say, people marry for love. Well, some do. Many people marry for companionship; it is that, much more than the unlikely hope that you might meet a complete stranger and just fall head over heels in love for life, that keeps marriage bureaux, websites and ad columns in business. Some marry because there is a child on the way. And even in Europe, let alone in other parts of the world, there are still a few people whose first reason to marry is that an heir is expected from them, beginning with the surviving royal families. And I would have to see the evidence that these marriages are in any way less well founded and durable than those based on romantic love. (Because, of course, what I mean by love in this context, unless I say otherwise, is exclusively romantic or erotic love, the thing that makes you feel that the whole meaning of life is wrapped up into another person, normally of the opposite sex.)

No, love and marriage do not go together like a horse and carriage. Like the attempt to justify hard work as the road to overwhelming success – rather than a necessity which, if properly carried out, might help you to a modestly comfortable later life and perhaps a nest egg for your heirs – to make love the cause and heart and constant fellow-traveller of marriage is wrong in itself and a fertile breeder of disillusionment, anger and unhappiness. One can see it in the lives of the very people who have, for more than a century, done the most to spread this false equivalence. Rich men and entertainment figures who divorce four or five times really do believe that marriage is all about love – so they break up and start again every time they think they are in love. And if anyone thinks that is an enviable situation, I heartily disagree. A single divorce (setting aside the issue whether divorce is even admissible, and treating the modern world as it is) is the most miserable thing in the world; imagine five! And let's not hear any nonsense about amicable divorce. If you can bear to separate yourself from the place you lived for years, from the objects and sights that framed your daily life, from a person with whom you once shared everything – and let's not even speak about custody – then you were never married, you were a gigolo or a prostitute now about to get a final pay-off and leave the place of employment. And in fact such things rarely happen. People, including myself, make bitter jokes about divorce lawyers, but in fact most of divorce lawyers – yes, and judges too – will tell you that most of their time is spent trying to get reason through to two people maddened by loss, anger, disappointment and jealousy. Or to put it another way: let us go from one of Old Blue Eyes' worst songs to one of the best. One for my baby (and one more for the road). As fraudulent as Love and Marriage is, so One for my baby is true to life (including the life of the much-married crooner himself) and speaks from experience. The lament for the impermanence of love, the pain in admitting that it was just “a brief episode”, the where-did-we-go-wrong, are typical of love as it often appears if you are not Jack and Rosalind Kirby, and therefore an artistic triumph. Play the two songs one after the other, and you will need no more arguments to understand how crassly wrong is the very notion that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.

What, then, is marriage about? Well, of course I could start with the Christian doctrine, which I set out in a recent essay. But that would not convince anyone who is not Christian already. More importantly, it is my view that the tenets of morality, contrary to what many Christians preach, are evident by themselves and would equally be true if no God existed. God is as it were their third dimension; they are rooted in Him and sanctified by Him because so is mankind itself. But I do not need to start from God – though I will certainly end with Him – to argue that murder or abortion are wrong, and that taking care of the old and the sick is right. At any rate, there is no originality in Christ's moral teaching; rather it amounts to “Do what you have always known you must do, only more so” (or, as an Italian patriot used to say, “When you cannot tell the path of duty, choose the hardest”). In the case of marriage, this means that marriage is for life: Jesus compared the statement of principle in Genesis, declaring the nature of mankind in mythical language, where a man and a woman are said to become one flesh, and contrasts it with the merely human and historically originated law that allows divorce “because of the hardness of your hearts”. Jesus himself said that He had not come to alter the law, but to fulfill it; and St.Paul taught that even pagans deprived of the Divine revelation are capable of being “law” to their own selves, perceiving and following the dictates of an exacting moral law. Morality is universal. Even the recognition that every man is a sinner, while it might have surprised the proud Greek philosophers, would come as nothing new to Hindus and Buddhists, each of whom knew of the burden of past karma.

And that being the case, what we have to do is see what marriage is in the daily lives of the ordinary world. First of all, then, marriage brings two families or groups of families permanently together. That is a frequent historical reason for marriage – alliances, peace-making, joining properties and inheritances. That, in a true marriage, never changes; and it is signalized by the typical marriage feast, to which every connection of the couple, however remote, has to be invited. That is because even the most distant members of a family group will know that from now on they have another connection, another link in blood and law. And that link is real and effective. How often does anyone in need of help, advice, introductions, expertise, stop to say - “Hey, isn't your cousin a conveyancing expert? Isn't your uncle's wife a friend of so-and-so? Doesn't your nephew speak fluent Swedish?” Help from in-laws is as expected as mutual concern in the lives of each other's families. This connection reminds us immediately of the words of Genesis – they shall be one flesh. The unity established between two families depend son the fact that each of the partners now has both family identities. In what sense this is more than merely symbolic or fictive is a question that can be argued, but only a fool would argue that it differs only in degree, rather than in kind, from cohabitation.

And this leads us to another central issue: children. I don't want to have to argue that children do better with a firmly married father and mother, any more than I want to have to argue that water is wet. I ask that we take this as axiomatic, as read. That is not to say that this optimal situation is always possible; even without divorce, family break-ups, family violence , or just tragedies – the early death of one or both parents – mean that a large number of people will either live without this benefit, or live in a situation where the benefit of living parents is perverted into an enduring torture. But to make these instances of misfortune or evil behaviour into a reason to attack the institution of marriage is like using the fact that some cops will always be thugs and some cops will always be on the take to call for the abolition of the concept (and the fact) of police. Marriage brings together two people, with the support of many others, for the most demanding and intensive of all jobs – one that takes a minimum of eighteen to twenty years to be considered complete, and that, especially in early years, will take every second of the day and much of the night of a strong young adult. Anyone who has had to take care of a small child, however well behaved, for one hour, ought to understand how wise nature was to ordain that a part of the process of human reproduction should involve two strong adult individuals, supported by many others, dedicating much or most of their lives to rearing their child or children. In child rearing, there is no alternative to a family structure. Institutions and orphanages are proverbial by-words for neglect and abuse, not because they necessarily employ bad people, but because it is totally impossible that a paid person with a schedule could pay a child the attention that a mother or a father are ready to pay every moment of the day. And even in this day where the disastrous worship of love has made marriage as vulnerable as an eggshell or a scrap of paper, nonetheless statistics tell us that married couples break down much more rarely than cohabiting ones,and last much longer. The ceremony of marriage really does make a difference in this central issue of child-rearing – the survival of the couple of biological parents.

Finally, let us talk of the most neglected and even occasionally abused aspect of marriage: companionship. I have already mentioned the constant and – from the romantic point of view – inexplicable flourishing of marriage bureaux, wedding contact ads, and websites; which is only explained by the fact that many people simply want to come home and find a member of the opposite sex there. Sex, as such, may or may not take place; the important thing is not to be alone in the evening and not wake up alone in the morning. I have actually seen this used as an argument for “gay marriage”: because people marry when they are aged or infertile, therefore marriage is not about fertility, and therefore “gay marriage” is perfectly all right. Now, the second “therefore” makes no sense at all: just because some instances of actual marriage are infertile, it does not mean that you should invent a kind of marriage that is bound to be infertile, and, more to the point, not involve the two sexes. Because that is the important fact about these things is that they are always about bringing together a man and a woman. Today, of course, they have little spaces for gay couples, but they are certainly in the nature of a gesture to prevailing winds. A marriage bureau that concentrated on “gay marriages” would have a very high likelihood of going bust in a few months, but bringing together lonely men and lonely women is one of the enduring and enduringly profitable businesses of the world. And that is because the two sexes really are complementary in a way that no two members of one sex can be. We have seen that the union and collaboration of a man and a woman over a matter of decades – that is, at the very least, much of their adult lives – is a biological necessity for the rearing of human children. But the complementarity built into the two sexes by this biological need is a natural part of them and can't be talked or wished away. Men will tell you that women always talk about men; but then, how often do men talk about women? Not rarely, I can tell you. No matter what the propaganda, what the pressure of politics and of politically influenced media, the presumptions, the sexes remain a wonder and a mystery to each other.

And across this wonder and this mystery, a union takes place that is more than mere friendship, more than mere feeling, more even than love. A man and a woman form a grouping that is wholly sui generis, that is not to be explained in any terms but its own. It is not friendship, even the deepest and closest and most wonderful friendship; although, if the spouses are good and decent people, it will develop among other things into an enduring friendship where the one understands the other instinctively, appreciates their views, and supports their actions. It is not love, although love is one of its highest and most admired achievements; but two people may be validly married, and even get along quite nicely thank you, without every having had a tremendous attraction to each other. It is not even only fertility, because father and mother may well, it is hoped, look to the children, but they also look to each other. It is marriage; period, end of story. And it is between a man and a woman.

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importing war

Sun, 18 Jan 2015 12:29:23 GMT

For decades now we have been importing war. The massive immigration of Muslims into western countries – began with the aftermath of the Algerian war in France and with the opening of West Germany to hundreds of thousands of Turkish gastarbeiter, “guest-workers” whose grandchildren are there still – has inevitably brought to the West the native pathologies of Muslim societies, that is, the tendency to assert themselves by violence and the disregard of any law that is not Sharia – or rather, their interpretation of Sharia.

It does not matter, from that point of view, whether or not the majority of Muslims is peaceful or respects the law. No doubt they do. But the same may be said of their correligionaries in their countries of origin, and yet all those countries suffer from the same pathologies, unless they are repressed by force. I can personally testify what a pleasure it is to work with one particular Egyptian client – pleasant and warm in manner, accurate in all they do, paying on the dot, and as upright as a flagpole. Yet we have seen that Egypt as a country has only two choices – military oppression, or religious savagery; and that the people themselves have eventually preferred oppression to letting their own large religious minority loose on the country.

I do not have to show why or how that is; it is sufficient to remark that it is so – and it is certainly so. Muslim countries are affected by civil violence on a scale unknown to pretty much any other civilization, and are correspondingly backward in all that we regard as advanced civilization – from health care to industrial prosperity; since all those things depend on a stable and decently non-violent state of society.

We have pretty much ignored the rising local symptoms of this pathology in our own countries, because, in effect, what can a few lunatics with knives do to a society whose defence is in RPGs, armoured vests, machine guns, rocketry, aircraft and aircraft carriers? Muslim violence, even where it prevailed, has always been treated as a public order problem. But now we no longer have that luxury. Terrorists no longer come with home-made explosives and handguns bought on the local black market. Because of the existence of vast war zones where armies meet with armies, each armed with modern weapons and increasingly learning military tactics, Mumbai first, and Paris now, have met with terrorists who moved and fought like trained commandos.

Some people like to say that this is the West's own fault; but that is nonsense. I was totally against the idiotic support for the so-called Arab Spring, that put Egypt, the largest Arab country, into deadly danger, and turned Libya and Syria into militarized wildernesses; and I have the blog posts to prove it. I said four or more years ago that the so-called Arab Spring in Syria was nothing but a Sunni insurrection – whatever few deluded secularists and democrats may have tried to join or direct it – and I gave my reasons to think so; and facts proved me right. But the fact is that long before the folly of Cameron, Obama and Hollande, before even Bush II's misconceived invasion of Iraq, events in the Muslim world were moving in that direction. The first state in the Muslim world to collapse into a welter of warlords and religious militias was Somalia, and that was long before Bush II came to power. Then there was the matter of Chechenia, and while the Russians may be blamed for that, Chechenia's hopeless jihad against the Bear was entirely the result of internal pressures. Certainly the Russians cannot be said to have encouraged the rebel factions against themselves, as the West insanely did in Syria and in Libya.

In effect, the Muslim world has been drifting towards civil war for at least a quarter of a century. Libya, Syria, Iraq, are latecomers to the party; and the forces that tore them apart had been sharpening their claws in Somalia and in Nigeria, in the Caucasus, in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, and – so far as anyone is allowed to know – even in Chinese Turkestan, in spite of the immense military and police apparatus that faced them there. Veterans of each jihad move to each new battlefield; we hear of Chechens, Uighurs, Iraqis, Libyans. In effect, a manifold insurrection has been brewing in all sorts of places, few of which we even got to hear from – who apart from me has ever paid any attention to the jihad in the Central African Republic?

And as we had little or no real part in the genesis of this war, so we have no real choice in whether to fight it. Nobody is going to like it. The Anglo-American expeditions to Iraq and to Afghanistan nearly tore apart both countries and the whole western alliance from the inside: the idea of having to face jihad now as it dominates the Fertile Crescent and Libya, let alone everywhere else in Asia and Africa, is so unimaginable that few people or nobody even dare speak of it. And yet the so-called Islamic State is an immediate and deadly threat, it not to our territorial integrity, then at least to our internal peace. The underground railway of volunteers, fed by the treacherous Turkish government of Recip Erdogan, is by now bringing not dozens but hundreds of Muslim volunteers from all European countries to the front line, where they are trained not even, as iin the Afghan and Pakistani terrorist camps of the recent past, in explosives handling and suicide bombing, but in modern warfare. When they come back, which they regularly do, they have become not just a public order threat, but a military one. We have no choice. The war has come to us at last, decades after we began to import it, and we will be made to fight it whether we want to or not.

And let us not delude ourselves that the mere repression of the Islamic State – which would be well into the power of European countries even without American support, if only they wanted to – will be enough. This war moves like a mole to any of a dozen possible frontlines, and once the European extremists have learned how to reach them, they will reach them. Sooner or later, our troops will be back in Afghanistan – possibly in the company of Chinese divisions – as well as in Nigeria, in Central Africa, in Somalia. This is the logic of events.

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