The Curse of Social Media . . .

The recent empty furore over what Boris Johnson is supposed to have said really misses the point.  But then it is intended to miss the point.  It is the essence of politics—this playing of the man, rather than the ball.

If there is a real villain in the situation, it is social media, which seems to have no useful purpose, other than to regularly demonstrate that at least four-fifths of the world is illiterate.

Before there was ever a functioning internet, one potential consequence was immediately clear to anyone who cared to think about it.  Or at least anyone who tried to imagine the likely dynamics of a futuristic system that might allow remote communication between individuals who never met in the flesh and were never likely to meet.  And that consequence was that it would empower the weak; i.e. give power to those least able to manage it.

Internet trolls are basically guys (and gals, too) who in real life and face-to-face wouldn’t say boo to a goose.  What social media does is offer them the opportunity to unload a lifetime’s worth of spleen—from a lifetime of having their faces rubbed in the dirt—safely on to any possible number of random targets.

There is in general neither rhyme nor reason to it: it is a bit like a shooting gallery where little targets constantly pop up for a few seconds to allow you take a pot-shot at them before just as quickly disappearing.  And there’s never any shortage of targets offering themselves on-line.

The thing is that, as in the real world, and indeed even more than in the real world, it doesn’t amount to anything.  The guy who threatens to rough you up on-line is generally just blowing off steam; the last thing he wants to do is come within arms-length of you and the possibility of being thumped.

As well, it is a fact of life that you are generally safer with the person who threatens you; it is the one who doesn’t that you want to watch out for.

And even from the commonsense point of view, if someone is intent on hurting you, is likely that they will send advance notice of the fact.

The truth is that social media is full of people who shouldn’t really be on it.  Narcissists (and there are few greater narcissists than politicians) whose whole aim in life is to be praised and idolised, and who can’t cut it when the traffic runs the other way.  Indeed, one suspects, it is narcissists themselves who often make the most virulent trolls.

The matter is compounded by the fact that irony and humour and nuance and metaphor are under attack from the literal-minded.

I have written of this before, this loss of capacity to see anything other than in terms of black and white.  A classic example has risen in recent days, where Naomi Long, leader of the Alliance Party in the North, accused Nigel Farage of ‘incitement to violence’ because he talked about ‘taking a knife’ to the civil service in the event of forming a government.

It is only a matter of time until a mother playfully pursuing her child—‘I’ll kill you, you little imp!’—finds herself being charged with threatening behaviour.

Certainly so, if the cyborgs of the new ‘progressivist’ and ‘woke’ cultures (really only the old marxism and feminism in changed skins) have their way and turn language into a form of literalist algebra, so that every statement can have only the one meaning—which will be whatever one allows them mine the greatest amount of offence and apply the greatest amount of blame at the same time.

Poor Old Boris . . . ?

As I have previously mentioned several times, one of Hemingway’s central tropes was the repeated idea that ‘A man on his own has no chance’.

It is also an idea that has come to be officially recognised—though in practice it has been recognised as far back as the beginning of history—in fairly recent times in psychology, and through psychology in advertising, and also in the visceral world of politics.

The idea involves a recognition of a popular chariness for what seems to be the isolated individual.  It is the opposite side of the coin from the inbuilt human desire to belong, to bury oneself in the crowd.  Presenting the individual as being alone, cutting him out of the herd, is the first step in bringing him down.

This is what is going on today in relation to Boris Johnson.  The position of the commentariat is that he has gone too far—not the Tory Party or the opposition or the crowds of Remain loonies who blockaded him in his house and barracked him outside of it immediately in the wake of the 2016 referendum.

No, he is the problem.

It is a recognition, of course, that he has, in De Gaulle’s words, and in a somewhat similar situation, ‘the baraka.’  He is effectively the man of the moment, the one they are all afraid of, the perceived cornerstone of the parliamentary Brexit movement, without whom it might be otherwise expected to collapse.

Nonetheless it must also be immensely flattering to him as an individual.

The truth is, of course, that he said nothing of any great offence—though it is being relentlessly spun that he did.  He just told the truth as he saw it.

What he did expose, however, was the infectious hysteria of the female intake into parliament over recent years, selected purely on the basis of being women—or ‘wimmin’—and with no native capacity to take the heat of the kitchen—though God forbid you should even mention the word ‘kitchen’.

Can one imagine how a woman of real power might have reacted in the situation?  Imagine Maggie Thatcher?

A fiction has grown up in recent decades, a fiction fostered by feminism, yet one totally at odds with its proclaimed agenda.  It is that of the weak and downtrodden woman.

I grew up in the much maligned 1950s and certainly don’t recognise any such archetype; nor observed it either.  The women of those days were more likely to be strong and tough and to run their homes and their families—and often their husbands—with a tight fist than anything else.

[The physically strongest man I ever met, and one of the most fearless, had a tiny wife of some five-foot-odd, of whom he lived in total dread.]

Indeed, there has been in recent weeks a series about Lady Jane Grey on BBC TV seeking to emphasise how strong she was in her own right and how she had been nurtured by a web of equally strong women.

The problem seems to be that modern ‘woke’ women have bought into their own—or at least into their ‘sisters’—propaganda, and in doing so undermined their whole argument, which is about empowering women.  But how can you empower women who—as in the parliamentary debate last night—show themselves to be so inadequate to the role of bearing power?

Indeed, how can you empower anybody.  And why would you want to?  Anyone capable of bearing power, male or female, should not need to be empowered.  The very fact of needing empowerment should be sufficient to rule one out of ever possessing it.

Parliament, any parliament, is not a vicarage tea party, no matter how much political correctness or a conditioned recourse to the vapours might seek make it.

That being said, it’s great to see a bit of cut-and-thrust back in politics, even if only on a foreign field.

On Human Rights (3)

As I’ve said, the plethora of new rights and the demand for such rights is exponentially increasing.  But then it is pushing at an open door—or rather at the aperture of a door that has been lifted off its hinges and left standing against the wall.

I remember back in the 1960s there was something on BBC called The Simon Dee Show, one episode of which included a sketch of a prosperous upper-class toff learning to speak cockney.  And it has stuck in my mind ever since, because it was illustrative of the collapse in self-belief and self-confidence that was affecting authority at the time.

And it is really no different now.  We have an authority without confidence or bottle, terrified of taking decisions and risking unpopularity, and forever unwilling to go against the crowd.  Rather all the time courting the crowd, in pursuit of a sort of unctuous mateyness, a version of the Clintonian ‘we feel your pain’.

But then this is a common feature of societies and civilisations in the process of going to the dogs, an inability to govern in a serious manner and an unwillingness to confront the various forces, who, under the guise of democratic reforms and general do-goodery, are really involved, whether they realise it or not, in pulling society down in the interests of some variant on the classless version.

Over the past decades, campaigning and activist forces have increasingly sought to change the political and social nature of the world we live in, aided by governments and elites seemingly ever more desperate to divest themselves of responsibility.

Everything from the matter of victim impact statements—introduced in the early 1990s, in response to, as the Irish Times described it, ‘the victim’s rights movement which gained momentum in the 1980s’—up to the complete and abject surrender of responsibility involved in the so-called ‘citizen’s assemblies’.

The most pernicious weapon of all has been the drive for an abstract, absolute and radical equality, which no matter what way you look at it represents a ruthless race to the bottom.  It is this that has progressively hollowed out the traditional institutions of the state, in such a way as to make the damage generally invisible until it comes near the moment of collapse.

I can remember at the time of the ‘London Spring’, in 2011, watching helicopter footage of a mob confronting two lines of police, who could be seen wavering every time the crowd threatened to attack, so that there was little doubt as to who was likely to break first, should push come to shove.

The police involved were no doubt a representative sample of the ‘Uncle Tom Cobley and all’ diversity that was being imposed on forces at the time—save that they quite obviously lacked the grit and physical presence for the role they were being asked to play.

One could go on and on . . .

On Human Rights (2)

And yet . . . and yet . . .

The famous ethologist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz showed an especial interest in the social organisation and behaviour of jackdaw colonies.  He considered jackdaws to be quite high up on the social evolutionary scale.  Jackdaw colonies involved complex levels of status, which, unlike, say, human societies, were quite rigidly stratified, in that each bird knew its place in the pecking order and remained fixed there.  It was a society with a deeply-imbued respect for status.  Birds of a lower status tended to be afraid of those of a higher status and to avoid conflict with them. ‘Very high-caste jackdaws are most condescending to those of lowest degree and consider them mostly as the dust beneath their feet’.

Yet at the same time, where conflicts erupted between birds of differing status further down the social ladder, the leadership of the colony tended to intervene on the side of the lowest ranking bird. ‘Thus a high-caste jackdaw, particularly the despot himself, acts regularly on chivalrous principles—where there is an unequal fight, always take the weaker side.’

One imagines that something similar must have existed early in human societies, too.  The phrase noblesse oblige, traditionally attached to aristocracy, and the implicit duty of care involved in it, certainly hints that such may have been the case.  However, if it was, it has long since ceased to be so.

Whatever matter of genetics or archetype may underlie the creation of natural social orders, it has certainly, to the extent that it ever existed, long since ceased to operate in human society.  Or if it operates at all, then it is only sporadically and in isolated circumstances.  Far from being protectors of the social order and defenders of the weak, human aristocracies became the most ruthless exploiters of the lower classes, inevitably in the process bringing the whole of the social structure down about their own heads.

One factor in this may have been the increasing infiltration of wealthy commoners into the upper classes, something that went on over millennia, and has long since reached its tipping point.

Which is not to say that traditional aristocracies were necessarily paragons of all the social virtues. Probably they were as money-grubbing as the rest; it was just that as their means of grubbing became over time increasingly less efficient, they were forced to open their ranks to others whose primary family interests lay in money-grubbing, usually in the form of wealthy heiresses.

Anyway, for whatever reason, whatever about the noblesse, the oblige has long since run its course.  We live in a world where, as Marx was later to say, ‘The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment."’

The fact is that nowadays the world is ruthlessly exploitative, in a way it never really seemed to be years ago, though probably was.  In any event, the veil has long since been torn from the face of private greed—be it individual or corporate.  Nowadays everybody is nakedly out for himself, without pretence or apology.  Of this, there is certainly no doubt.

The curious thing about it is that, at the same time, the seeming prevailing moral climate is one of touchy-feely compassion and fellow-feeling.  But, of course, that is only window dressing, a smokescreen to lull those silly enough to believe it into somnolence.  It is more a matter of affectation—of wanting to display oneself in the role of benefactor, as a means of inflating one’s social profile and sense of personal regard.  More petting zoo than a matter of meaningful social concern.

What I am trying to say is that those of us who find ourselves in trouble would be very foolish to depend on any sense of third-party responsibility to pull us out of a hole.  Such a mindset no longer exists, nor, in a real sense, does the only true basis for such a mindset, community.  In which case, and in seeming contradiction to what I said in the previously, we do need rights, or at least something very like them.

Yet rights should not emerge from a cornucopia either, whereby new ones can be invented day after day by the most unlikely of voices, each demanding a feeding place at the trough.  They should instead be disciplined, tough and sensible, and aimed like a garden trellis to help people move onwards and upwards, instead of pinning them forever in dependence.

More, probably on Monday.

On human rights (1)

Over the past decades there has come a subtle, indeed, not so subtle, change in the meaning of the word ‘rights’.  Previous definition of ‘rights’, such as the ‘right to private property’, enshrined the freedom of people to possess property, whether they wanted to be burdened with it or not.  Yet, nowadays, the word ‘rights’ is more likely to be viewed as an entitlement than a freedom: if you have right to something, under the present mindset, then you are entitled to have it, and must have it, whether you have the wherewithal or not.  It is now the duty of the state to supply you with not just the freedom to have it, but the very thing desired itself.

Such a view of rights is fundamental to the process of revolutionary Marxism, which sees rights, and the proliferation of rights, as a weapon for breaking what it terms ‘bourgeois’ society down.

I must confess at this point to having for many years a problem with the whole idea of ‘human rights’: that is the assignation of common rights to everybody on the planet irrespective of contribution or desert.  This problem that I have occurs purely in the context of the Marxist and liberal of view seeing a right not as a freedom but rather as a guarantee of something that must be delivered, no matter who else has to deliver or pay for it.

Now the whole matter of rights and the definition of rights seem seems to represent something of a philosophical and legalistic nightmare.  I do not pretend to any expertise in this field, yet it seems to me from a common sense point of view that certain things are undeniable.

A right has always seemed to me to represent almost by definition something limited and exclusive.  A right, on this interpretation, is access to some thing or some entitlement that is not available to the world at large, which is why we need a specific word ‘right’ to define it.  If everybody has access to something, then it is no longer a matter of ‘right’ but simply a condition of existence.  Put another way, if everybody has guaranteed access to a certain entitlement or thing, then in those circumstances the word ‘right’ itself becomes redundant.

The right to private property, used as an example earlier, is what is described as an ‘inalienable’ right.  According to the Collins English Dictionary: ‘If you say that someone has an inalienable right to something, you are emphasizing that they have a right to it that cannot be changed or taken away.’

Yet is it inalienable?  Of course, its not.  There is arguably no right that is inalienable.  The secret of undermining a right is to drown it in a plethora of contending rights, so that somebody has to decide between them; somebody often with an ideological axe of their own to grind, because there are very few disinterested intelligences in the world, no matter how much one might wish for them.  The ongoing struggle for control of the Supreme Court of the USA is a very good example of what the process involves and its social and political implications.

And this what lies behind the huge increase in rights and the demand for rights of recent decades.  It is part of a process of revolution from within.  It is designed to dynamite the supporting pillars of the status quo and replace it with the lunacy of a classless society—which is in itself a contradiction in terms because there must always be someone in control and inevitably they tend to look after their own interests and those of their families.  Russia and China are good examples from twentieth century history.

The truth of the matter is that the term ‘extension of rights’ or ‘human rights’ is quite often a cover for the destruction of rights.   Rights can only become universal to the extent that they cease to be local or restrictive.  As the universal ‘right’ increases so does the particular one diminish.  In fact, the logic of the position as described above might well be encapsulated in the phrase: Where everybody has rights, nobody has rights.

And yet . . . and yet . . .

More next day.

Not by bread alone . . .

An interesting article in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph by Liam Halligan, an economist and long-term critic of the Brit Brexit remainers, entitled Project Fear falsehoods still give us the lie, and available for at least a while on https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-sunday-telegraph-money-business/20190915/281556587528536.

That aside, the man who brought you Brexit, David Cameron, is currently badmouthing everyone engaged on the ‘Yes’ side of the campaign and accusing them of lying during the run up to the referendum.  But then there was lying on both sides—what else was Project Fear?  Unless, of course, it was the outcome of serious thought by ‘experts’, who nonetheless got it totally wrong.

The fact is that I have long been convinced that the anti-Brexit case has little to do with economics.  What is really at stake for the liberal elite and their followers, what they are really worried about, is loss of the EU Social Charter and the European Court of Human Rights and the general trend of EU legal enactments.

But if they were to take a stand on this basis—on supporting all the interventionist nonsense that arises from Europe and the proliferation of ‘rights’ involved, then very few would support them.  So instead they seek to artificially transfer the battlefield to the field of economics.

If you watched television coverage of the ‘remainer’ marches in London, what you would have seen was a congregation of lawyers and accountants and luvvies and the general run of bohemians, literally giving the fingers to those who disagreed with them.

Yet the fundamental thing is that arguably none of these people—or certainly very few of them—are at all engaged in the manufacturing economy.  In fact, they have as little respect for the economic interests of ordinary people as they have for their votes.  It is just crocodile tears.

What we have instead is a movement by the ‘let-it-all-hang-out’ brigade to maintain and increase their rights to let it all hang out, and to invent constantly new categories of human existence, such as Percy French might say ‘nature never designed’, and stridently demand rights for them, too.  It is an hysterical mass-neurosis, and ultimately a destructive one.

As well, the attempts to bring the prospect of violence in the North into the argument have been quite cynical.  If such is the threat, then it should be a matter for quiet diplomacy and quiet preparation, and not for the public platform.  As it stands, those who might have an interest in returning to violence could almost find encouragement and justification in the implications of what is being said on anti-Brexit platforms.  Like some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: if there is a hard Brexit, then as sure as night follows day, there must be ructions on the border.  A sort of natural process, which if it happens it will be nobody’s fault but the Brexiteers.  Everyone else will have the absolution of being just powerless victims of subsequent events.

Now I write this as someone who has no fixed position on Brexit.  I really don’t know what its outcome will be.  Nobody knows.  What one reads in the papers and sees on TV is really propaganda—on both sides.  Each of them just wants to win.  What engages me is the hypocrisy of the whole process.

All I can say is that if Brexit occurs it will, for better or worse, shake things up.  If it fails, then Europe will continue in the coils of the EU social and ideological python, squeezing us ever the more closely into an increasingly secular and compulsory conformity.

Of course, it might be possible to reform the EU from within.

            Who knows . . .?