Interval . . .

From Anti-Memoirs by Andre Malraux.

‘1965, Off Crete.  In 1940 I escaped with the future chaplain of the Vercors.  We met again shortly afterwards in the little town in the Drome where he was parish priest and where he used to hand out baptismal certificates wholesale to Jews—on condition, however, that they let him baptise them.  “Some of it may stick, after all . . .”  He had never been to Paris, having completed his studies at the seminary in Lyons.  We talked far into the night, as friends do when they meet again, amid the homely village smells.

            “How long have you been hearing confessions?”

            “About fifteen years.”

            “What has confession taught you about men?”

            “Oh, confession teaches you nothing, you know, because when a priest goes into the confessional he becomes another person—grace and all that.  And yet . . . First of all, people are much more unhappy than one thinks . . . and then . . .”

            He raised his brawny lumberman’s arms in the starlit night: “And then, the fundamental fact is that there’s no such thing as a grown-up person . . .”

            He died on the slopes of Glieres.’

Where Things Stand Now . . . [repeated]

[My posting of articles tends to be sporadic.  Beginning in 2009, there have been long periods of silence, sometimes of years, between.  What tends to happen is that I come across something that I feel needs urgent saying, and having said it, tend to let the mailings drift on until I get bored with the process and wind it up.  Therefore, as far as I’m concerned, the initial article or series of articles in any particular tranche of mailings tends/tend to be to be the most important.

The present series of articles began on July 6^th 2018, though it only finally went public in September of this year.  Before that it had been essentially private, and the earlier mailings are quite likely to have gone unnoticed.

The reason I mention this is that one of last weekend’s papers carried an extensive review of a new book, Science and the Good by James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky, dealing with the matter of ‘objective morality’: that is, the various attempts to argue into existence some sort of artificial and universalist human ethic that would do away with all previous moral systems and would provide the basis for solving all our problems, individual and otherwise, including global warming and providing the foundations for world peace etc. etc.

However, the book provides instead, at least according to the reviewer, ‘a closely argued, always accessible riposte to those who think scientific study can explain, improve or even supersede morality.  It [also] tells a good story, too, as it explains what led us to our current state of moral nihilism’.

The reason I bring this up is that it was a similar contention, argued to a similar conclusion, which provided the basis of my initial series of articles, beginning on July 6 last year.

On the dubious basis that someone might still be interested in it, I reprint here the initial mailing (the first in a series of some four or five) from the 6 July 2018.]

                                                           ________

There has long been a debate over the matter of nature versus nurture, though, of course, the commonsense opinion is that what is involved is a variable combination of the two.  But the materialist and left-wing point of view has tended to show a preference for nurture over nature.  Another name for this is the ‘blank slate’ position; in other words, we are born with no inherited programming, but instead, as it were, pull ourselves up by our own bootstrings.

It is easy to see why the materialists would prefer this alternative, since at a stroke it removes the likelihood of any input from outside forces, divine or otherwise.

But in recent years, studies in linguistics have begun to show that where language is concerned mankind does indeed share a common pre-programmed and unconscious inheritance.  All languages, it seems, are shaped according to the same inherent ground rules; the differences between individual languages being the result of geographical and cultural factors in the course of their development.

All of which makes sense, considering that they are translatable into one another and enjoy a similar structure of nouns and verbs etc. etc.

This means, of course, that at least as far as language is concerned we are not born as blank slates.  We are programmed for language, and without that inherited programming, language would be impossible.

However, more recent studies have begun to show that just as there are certain ‘anatomical, neurological and physiological’ structures underlying our capacity for language, there are also analogous inherited structures underlying our capacity for moral thought and our sense of good and evil, justice and injustice.

In other words, there is a certain unconscious moral programming written into the human heart, irrespective of whether we abide by it or not, and which influences us automatically.

Just as with language, this moral inheritance has become translated through time and isolation and culture into the myriad different, and often seemingly contradictory, forms that we see about us now.  Rather like a carpenter turning sheets of oak into chairs and tables and sideboards, the forms may be different, but underneath they continue to share a common identity of oak.

Now one has to admire the honesty of the moral scientists in publicising a conclusion, which, no matter how unlikely, threatens the possibility of a return to more traditional ways of thinking about mankind, its origin and its destiny.  The response of science, however, is to insist that any such pre-existing moral apparatus can still only solely be the result of material evolution, though as yet it cannot begin to explain the possible mechanics of such a development.

Philosophers have tended to take a somewhat different tack.  In general equally materialist, they seek to bring the idea of an inherited moral compass under their control by insisting that it is something necessarily primitive and in need of constant updating—by philosophers, of course.

[The initial series of articles ran from the one above to ‘Now we come to the interesting part . . .’  of 23 July 2018.  Though they tend to meander a bit, they can still be accessed via this platform.]

Back down to the vaults . . .

[The following article was written in 2015, at a period when I was not publishing on-line, and therefore has remained unpublished until now.  In a certain sense it is now mainly of historical interest, yet it contains sufficient otherwise hard-to-access information to make it still worthwhile printing at this time.]

                                                                -----

In the Sunday Independent of February 1st 2015, Keith Mills, who describes himself as ‘an agnostic gay man supporting a “No” vote in May’ speaks of his opposition to the attempt to redefine traditional marriage, which campaign he sees as being driven by ‘a tiny but vocal minority’.  He supports the concept of a family ‘that can provide a mother and father, which all evidence suggests is the best environment for children’.  He is also a supporter of civil partnerships and sees them as ‘a better way [than marriage] of reflecting the reality of most same-sex unions’.  He also suggests that he is not the only homosexual to feel this way, most of those of a similar mind being afraid to speak out.

The reason for this reluctance was amply demonstrated when in March, Dolce and Gabbana, the fashion designers, and both homosexual, spoke out against same sex marriage, gay adoption and test-tube births.  They were forced to recant after a world-wide fatwa was called against them and their products by Elton John and others—John describing the designers as ‘judgemental’ and ‘archaic’.

Peculiarly enough, another fashion designer, Giorgio Armani, who is also homosexual, has decided to join the fray from a different direction.  ‘A man has to be a man,’ he says.  ‘When homosexuality is exhibited to the extreme—to say, “Ah, you know I’m homosexual”—that has nothing to do with me.  A man has to be a man.’

Now it long ago struck me that the ‘gay’ idea of the feminised man was something likely to be anathema to the old-style homosexual.  Indeed, it struck me at times that the gays weren’t really homosexuals at all.  That they were sufferers from a variant of neuroticism—or just dedicated followers of fashion trends.  Indeed, the more I look at it, the more I am convinced that many of them aren’t homosexual at heart.  Rather they are fellow-travellers—what Lenin in a related domain called the ‘useful idiots’—basically in search of a fashionable cause and the safe opportunity for an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment.

Homosexuality, or at least its ‘gay’ variant, is at the moment ‘cool’.  It used to be in times gone by that people talked in cliché of ‘the lovely young priest’, now it’s more likely to be ‘the lovely young gay’.  For the liberal media (and what other media is there?) is pouring the stereotype of the universally gentle, compassionate, empathic gay into the popular ear from all directions—print, movie, television.  Think of the last time you saw a negative representation?

The debate that is going on in Ireland at the moment over marriage equality is on the surface a spurious one.  It’s like a slave saying, ‘I won’t accept freedom—I want liberty instead!’  As I say, on the surface it seems to be a tautology, a way of speaking about the same thing in different terms.  Differences of rights between civil partnership and marriage are of so little significance as to be in practice unimportant.  Yet at the same time the matter is of tremendous importance.

If gay marriage is rejected then civil partnership effectively becomes the end of the line for the gay movement.  There is nowhere for it to go beyond that.  But if gay marriage is passed and installed in the constitution, then it will immediately become a prise-bar for breaking things up further.  One of the first demands (notwithstanding that it is supposed to have been ruled out in advance) will be for access to marriage in the churches, again on the grounds of a spurious ‘equality’.

The question arises: how did a relatively small category of people manage to capture the high ground in the current debate to the extent that they have? One in ten is the usual percentage given for the number of homosexuals in any population.  Now in an article in 2003, the eminent American academic, Philip Jenkins took a microscope to this claim.  He wrote: ‘In 1993, the Alan Guttmacher Institute reported that between 1.8 and 2.8 percent of men surveyed reported at least one sexual contact with another man  in the previous decade, while only about 1 percent had been exclusively homosexual in the previous year.  This was in accord with the findings of a national survey recently undertaken in France . . . Contrary to Kinsey’s “one in ten”, a figure of one in 30 would offer a more accurate assessment of the male population that can be described as homosexual or bisexual; and one in 60 would best represent the exclusively homosexual.  The corresponding figures for women reporting sexual contacts with other women are somewhat lower.’

The Alan Guttmacher Institute mentioned is a prominent liberal sexual research centre in America, an off-shoot of the pro-choice Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

On the percentages given, and based on 2014 figures, there would be some 40,233 exclusively homosexual males in the Republic of Ireland.  Be generous and double the number to notionally include lesbians and you get a total of 80,466.  Hardly enough, you would think, to swing a referendum in a total population of 4,595,000—especially given that a significant number of homosexuals seem to be against it.  And particularly on such a controversial matter with many as yet unclear implications.

But the fact is that the marriage debate and the broader gay liberation movement aren’t stand alone phenomena.  They are merely fronts in a bigger war, inspired by liberals and mainly leftists, to reduce society to a rubble—Lenin used to use the analogy of a bomb in the basement when speaking to the same end—out of which will arise the fabled (and fictional) classless society.

Even as we speak, the broader war is being taking place on other fronts, too: immigration, education, the strangling of free speech (as with Dolce and Gabbana above), the war on religion, the sexual wars, the rise of protest movements (all generally comprising the same people) etc. etc.

Another dictum of Lenin’s concerned the definition of morality.  Morality was whatever served the ends of the revolution.  Murder, extermination, lies, betrayal, enslavement—all were legitimate to the extent that they served the needs of the revolution.  And who decided the needs of the revolution?  Why, Lenin, of course.

It would probably be unfair to see the exaggeration of gay population percentages as part of this process.  Yet it seems to be a common liberal tactic.  Jenkins’ article appeared in a book of essays dealing with disinformation, including how biased statements and figures, if repeated often enough, can take on the appearance of holy writ and be almost unchallengeable.  Jenkins’ contributions set out to take a critical—and successful—look at some of these sacred cows.

The collection of essays is called: You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths.  It is published by The Disinformation Company, an award-winning countercultural publishing phenomenon, with an initial target audience of ‘hipsters, thinkers, anti-establishmentarians, and the merely curious’.  This particular series of essays contains contributions from different areas of the political spectrum, including the well-known liberal doyen Noam Chomsky.

There are always things that need to be said by somebody . . .

I wrote recently about how there were some 400 barring orders in Dundalk in the mid-1990s, the number likely to be exponentially higher by this time.  Now these would probably be described in general as family breakdowns.  But the question is how likely are they to involve real families and not the temporary ramshackle arrangements of convenience that seem so often to exist nowadays.  Indeed, the standard pattern in modern cases of infanticide, if you watch the news, would seem to involve mothers of various numbers of children by various numbers of fathers and their current live-in boyfriends.

Now the main argument in the run-up to the referendum on ‘gay marriage’ was along the lines of everyone’s right to ‘express their love and have it officially recognised and celebrated’.  All of which suggests that love is the sole and real basis of marriage, which of course it’s not.  There are thousands of people in love who’ve never been married and thousands of people married who have never been in love.  Love is at best an ancillary of marriage; indeed, in terms of the long-term survival of marriages, compatibility is a much more important factor than ‘love’.  There may be love, too, but it is likely to be more a gradual thing developed through shared joys and trials and effort than anything else.

Based on observable instances, it is the people who set out wrapped up in ‘love’, looking at each other with moon faces—each with an idealised image of the other—who are the more likely to run into trouble in the short run.  Being merely in love with ‘love’, the realities of life post-romance and post-celebration are likely to come as a cold sharp shock to them.

The fact is that marriage is an institution primarily for rearing children and social stability.  Its very survival through the centuries points to its evolutionary value.  It’s not perfect, it can’t be perfect, but it is the best we’ve got.  Anything less is the equivalent of deckchairs sliding on the Titanic as it pivots towards destruction.

In a world where every random or accidental entanglement is likely to be described on the airwaves as family, the real definition of family is refreshingly basic.  It is a man and a woman, ideally plus children, joined together in matrimony, whether religious or secular.  And it is the duty of the state, if it has any sense, not just to place it on a level shelf with all other sorts of competing arrangements, but to be actually prejudiced in favour of it. 

Of course, there will always be attempts to pick holes in any standard definition of family.  What about the widowed . . . the abandoned and separated etc. etc?  A flat wheel is still a wheel; a block of wood supporting the axle, even though it fulfils part of the function of a wheel, is still a block of wood.  It is not the accidents or happenstances of life that define family but rather the intention setting out.

We live in a world where a faux egalitarianism demands a literal equality in all sorts of things, a world where everything is constantly being redefined, even if only by reiteration: we have the ‘new Irish’ and the ‘new family’ and the ’new marriage’—the list is potentially endless.

The process—and also the purpose—of such reinvention is in the long and short term destructive—even if the useful idiots who make up its cheerleaders are generally too dim to recognise the fact.

Woof! Woof!

If you ever wondered what became of the people left to their own devices in wake of the seemingly universal downgrading and closure of mental hospitals, then the answer is simple.  The British contingent, anyway, are all long term outside the houses of parliament protesting both for and against Brexit.  Or else they are at sporting competitions, in exuberant dress, trying to catch the camera’s eye and claim their few seconds of fame—for that is the main, indeed the only, route for the ordinary individual to achieve popular recognition in these modern times, made all the better if you have remembered to pre-set the video before you left home.

There was a particular middle-aged loon dressed in a jester’s cap at the Wales-France rugby match today, dancing around like a madman and turning to demonstrate to the crowd after catching a glimpse of himself on the stadium big screen.  After the match there was a further snippet of him being apparently hugged and congratulated by other fans—the equivalent for him, no doubt, of a quick-fix, even if short-lived, of apotheosis.

I used put it all down to the godfather of Scottish independence, Mel Gibson, in the wake of whose Braveheart Scottish football fans suddenly started painting their faces blue and white, the whole thing seemingly to thereafter go international and viral.  But then I came across Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man by the feminist writer Susan Faludi, which, strangely enough, is in its own right a very good book, and one that delivers exactly what it promises in the title.  It was first published around 2000 and I would expect that it is still available in print.

It contains a chapter dealing with the rise of the modern fan/exhibitionist movement, in the context of the Cleveland Browns American football team, where the ordinary supporters in the 1980s began dressing as dogs and continuously barking at games.  This giving way to increasingly more competitive efforts at trying to claim screen time through individual embellishment.  They also seem to have championed the practice of going bare chested at matches in the coldest of weather.

Faludi tends to see the phenomenon as a psychological reaction to the civic and environmental collapse, together with the collapse in employment, that affected Cleveland from the 1960s onward, and as an attempt to regain some sense of personal and communal recognition or relevance from the ashes.

And for a while it worked.  The TV stations took the ‘dawgs’ up—until there was no more novelty to be milked from them.  The club let them down, too.  When the bottom fell out of it, it was the ordinary poor ‘dawgs’ who bore the psychological brunt of it.

Now the type of people you see dressing up and painting their faces in, say, Japan don’t at all seem to fit the social or personal profile of those mentioned above.  Yet there would seem to be a similar element of exhibitionism involved, a similar desire to be picked up by the camera and in some sense made ‘real’ to oneself.

As to the permanent demonstrators these past two years outside the British parliament, they are self-exhibitionists of the highest order.  It is probably a matter of accident which side they happen to be on.  The uppermost thing is to be noticed.  But then they don’t do too much harm—at least so far.  The cut and thrust of the whole thing helps them burn energy and keep them on—though you wouldn’t think it—a level mental keel.  The problems will come when Brexit is finally settled one way or another.  At least the psychiatrists will make money . . .

But as to the broader penetration of exhibitionism into social life, I’m sure it signifies something.  It’s just that I’m not sure at the moment what exactly that something is.

Stairway to Heaven

Whenever a scandal arises in relation to a nursing home, especially when accompanied by outrage on the airwaves over the treatment of ‘mammy’ or ‘daddy’, I generally find myself asking, ‘Well, what else did you expect?’

Nursing homes are basically a form of long (or sometimes mercifully short)-term parking for the inconvenient elderly.  Outside of the public sector, which is generally a cut above the rest, they are purely money-making ventures, staffed at ground level mainly by people on minimum wage, who, unless they are especially caring—and such individuals do exist—are not, rationally speaking, likely to put themselves out beyond the minimum.  Though the reported level of staffing in some of these places might tend to make even that minimum problematical.

Now nursing homes do tend to put up a brave front when you first visit them, but that is more for relatives than residents, a way of helping the former salve their consciences.  ‘Oh, she’s in the right place, after all!’ . . . ‘He’ll be grand there!’ etc. etc.

There’s a film that appears now and again on TV, with Billy Connolly and a cast of various ‘national treasures’, called Quartet, about a nursing home for retired musicians, which is presented in such appealing detail that I’d be almost tempted to dig out my didgeridoo go there myself.  But, of course, it is pure fantasy.  It bears the same relationship to the general run of such establishments as The Quiet Man does to, say, modern-day Moyross.

The bottom line is that, even if you really do care about your elderly relatives, you have to accept—medical needs aside—that putting them into a home must of necessity involve a certain diminution of standards.  Really, I’d go as far as to say that you really don’t have a right to expect more than the bare minimum.  Arses wiped when their supposed to be wiped, meals delivered on time, a basic level of medical oversight, no gratuitous ill-treatment etc. etc.  I really do think that if you get that, then you’re probably doing relatively well.

Of course, the second question I tend to ask when confronted on-screen by often overreacting relatives is, ‘How come, if you are so concerned about the treatment of your elderly, you don’t look after them yourselves?’

But then that is quite an easy one to answer in many, if not in all, cases.

To the extent that modern society has made the family slave to the machine, rather than the other way around, it has made any other option almost impossible.  Who is expected to do the caring in a society when most people have an economic gun to their head compelling them to work outside the home?  And what of the micky mouse nature of modern house design, with third bedrooms—even where they have third bedrooms—indistinguishable from cupboards?

In Treblinka, there was a chute that led to the gas chambers.  It was jokingly called the ‘Roadway to Heaven’.  And once you were in it there was no way out of it, and one’s fate was fixed.  And really I think that modern society and the forces of modern society—the governments and the banks and the pressure groups and the ideologies and the various opinion-forming mediums—are intent on pushing us into a chute of their own creating.

The thing that unites all the various popular and luvvie causes that infest the world at the moment and the various liberal and left influenced political movements is that they are all made up predominantly of people—and often the same people—who have a passion to micro-manage everyone else’s life: what you say, how you dress, what you eat, your beliefs, your thoughts—the machinery is already there that makes that possible—and so on etc.etc.

Of course, it is for your own good; it is always for our own good.  The funny thing is historically how the restrictions placed on populations rarely apply to the controllers themselves.

They tend, at least in terms of the modern variety, to be far too bohemian for that . . .

Signs of the Times . . .

Back in the mid-nineties a detective told me that there were 400 barring orders in Dundalk.  The number absolutely flabbergasted me, though I imagine it has increased exponentially since then.

The feminist explanation, of course, was that it was simply a consequence of dragging into the light something that had been long hidden.

The problem is that when I went to think about it, I really couldn’t find any substantial evidence in my own experience to back it up.  That is not to say that it wasn’t going on, but if it was it was not in numbers of likely to have been significant, otherwise it would have been quite definitely known and talked about.

The only example I could come up with, and going back over fifty years, concerned someone I briefly worked with when I was seventeen.  It was generally accepted then that he was guilty as rumoured.  Yet I have to say that my personal experience of him was quite positive.  I found him to be a very nice fellow and still think of him fondly.  And, in any event, you have to allow for people as you find them.

Of course, this may be to do with the fact that from my earliest days I tended to have an intense dislike of those cardboard cut-outs of virtue and villainy that used be, and still are, in different form, popularly presented to us, either for emulation or to throw stones at.

Indeed, even in childhood, I hated what passed for respectability, especially as preached by those nearest to me.  In fact, on those few occasions when I became aware of someone being locally out of favour, I always made a point of deliberately saying hello to them.  Rather along the lines of Churchill, who famously said: ‘If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House . . .’

But all this is beside the point.

What I am intending to say is that the huge increase in what is called domestic abuse is not primarily the result of some historical precedent, but is rather the result of something peculiar to our times.  It is just another symptom of the internal prolapse of the organs of western civilisation and society.  Arguably made worse by the progressivist tendency to redefine domestic abuse increasingly in a ‘he looked crooked at me’ direction.

Last Days of the Tiger

There are three of the fattest men I’ve seen for a while,

all equivalently shaped,

like terrestrial globes balanced on toothpicks,

and all avid for food,

so that they cannot wait

but keep badgering at the staff—

and all seemingly unrelated to each other too.

It appears there is a Christmas party on somewhere down the back

and these are patris familiae—

one sitting with his children, who are slim,

and give the impression of being mute with shame

as he visits with butterfly hands

the various dishes spread across the table.

There are other types as well,

an unusual mix of all the classes,

the lowest

with the unforgiving, feral look

of those whose time has come at last

en-masse

but as yet are only dimly conscious of it

(Ruff! Ruff! Ruff! barked the little dog)

otherwise they would be even more contemptuously predatory

in their glance

than at this moment they already seem to be.

As for the rest, it has all become so second nature to them,

dining out of a Sunday evening

in the two-star hotel

of a one-horse town,

and fed up by the fact, in both its meanings.

2008

An Ancillary to Rights . . .

A great complaint among those precipitated into unemployment by the collapse of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ was they found themselves often queuing side by side in the dole offices with those who had never bothered to work at all, despite the fact that people were pouring in from all over Europe during the boom to fill the manpower deficit.  And queuing, too, with neither recognition of, nor additional benefit from, the fact that they had contributed.

The general term applied to nowadays to those who refuse—all other things being equal—to contribute is the ‘poor’.  It is a necessary term and a necessary social category for those whose particular drive is to inflate their own status by bestowing patronage, even if in many cases only a verbal patronage.  ‘Oh, the poor, the poor!’

But it would be a mistake to confuse the ‘poor’ with the weak.  The ‘poor’ are really ‘the tough who get going when the going gets tough’.  At the moment, they are simply resting.  But if for any reason anything should happen to interfere with their entitlements, watch how quickly the ‘poor mouth’ turns into a snarl.

I quoted before in 2016 from Adam Ferguson’s 1975 book, When Money Dies, about the consequences of the collapse of Austrian currency in the early 1920s:

“Near civil war between town and country was a pervasive feature of this break-down in social order. Large mobs of half-starved and vindictive townsmen descended on villages to seize food from farmers accused of hoarding. The diary of one young woman described the scene at her cousin’s farm . . . ‘In the cart I saw three slaughtered pigs. The cowshed was drenched in blood. One cow had been slaughtered where it stood and the meat torn from its bones. The monsters had slit the udder of the finest milch cow, so that she had to be put out of her misery immediately. In the granary, a rag soaked with petrol was still smouldering to show what these beasts had intended.’”

I think it would be foolish not to anticipate the return of relatively high unemployment in the near to medium future, which would probably be just about bearable unless it dragged on and on.  But there is also the prospect of the straitening of employment due to technological change, whether such will be the case or not.

Economists and social engineers used to talk—and possibly still do—of the ‘leisure society’.  The idea was that increasing mechanisation and computerisation of production would create a large population forever without work.  But, of course, such a situation only qualifies as ‘leisure’ to the extent that one has the means of taking advantage of it.  Other than that, it is simply unemployment.

Yet the fact is that this is a nonsense scenario.  It will not happen simply because most people will not let themselves be shunted into some sort of railway siding for life, no matter how notionally well-insulated the carriages might prove to be.  Acquiescence to any such scheme would represent the beginning of the end for the human race, a sort of de-evolution, an acceptance of human obsolescence.  Indeed, a strong argument can be made that we are already some way down that particular road.

Faced with such a scenario of pointlessness, the healthy part of the race will revolt and pull the temple down around their own heads and everyone else’s.  And they will be right to do so.  People do not want leisure or comfort or pleasure as their main course.  Such things are ancillary to the necessary things of purpose and meaning and relevance.  Utopias do not and cannot exist simply because people would reactively tear them down, even if they didn’t exactly know why they were doing it.  It is perhaps some variant on the ‘not by bread alone’ verse from the Gospels.

But how exactly might society as a whole cope in such a notional situation—which if left untreated would be guaranteed to blow everything apart?  For even as things stand, we are already teetering on the edge of that selfsame abyss as has destroyed so many civilisations and societies in the past: the separation of an increasingly indifferent and well-heeled minority from the spent booster rocket of almost everyone else.

The first thing that needs to be said is that a one-size-fits-all social welfare system is the first thing that has to go.  The bottom line is that no one can be left to starve or go without shelter, even if they refuse to do anything for themselves.  But beyond that the support system should be graded or tiered, in such a way as to reward those who do want to do something for themselves.  Tiered or trellised so as to provide the possibility of a route forward, as well as satisfying the basic human need for status and a sense of self-worth, not to mention being also economically rewarding.

Now I am not just talking in terms of public works, where the needy make a return directly to the state.  The times we live in, and the times that may be coming, demand a much broader system of reciprocity than that.  They demand a recognition and rewarding of both voluntarism and self-improvement.

The common routes for digging oneself out of the hole of poverty usually consist of further education, upskilling—even in circumstances where there might be no immediate prospect of a need for such skills—and also inventive entrepreneurism.

But such things generally involve an individual determination to better one’s personal lot, whereas voluntarism can be seen in a more unselfish light, capable of embracing tasks as varied as charitable work, or work to improve the local environment, or more community-centred work, such as running a boxing club or after-school facilities—the list is potentially endless.

Indeed, it is possible to imagine it extending to even such things as people’s determination to preserve their own personal fitness and mental wellbeing.  It might well apply to people engaged in serious sports training or dedicated gardeners etc. etc. For it should not be about rewarding or recognising achievement so much as willingness and enthusiasm and commitment.

This is a preliminary document, a ranging document, as it were, to which I may return at some later date—or maybe not.

The way things are now . . .

Back about the mid-1980s, someone I knew rang me one night to ask me if I had heard something about a member of his family.  In any event, I hadn’t.  And even if I had I was unlikely to say it to him.

But what I did do was offer him some advice, based purely on logic.  In such a situation of malicious faceless gossip—for that is clearly what it was—the thing to do, I said, was to ignore it and pretend absolute indifference to it; indeed, to try even to exacerbate it, if you could, until the whole thing collapsed under its own weight into absurdity.

At that stage, I still believed in the basic rationality of people.

But, of course, I was wrong; or, at best, only half right.  Such things can equally build to the point where, rather than collapse into absurdity, they suddenly take off instead, through some sort of spontaneous combustion, and become viral, creating a situation where anyone can come and throw their shit on the bonfire and watch it blaze away.

The truth is that people in the main do not work by reason; certainly, in such situations as the one described.  Instead they tend to believe what they want to believe; or what they are primed to believe.

But then that is the way it has always been and will always be.

It is just that there are some historical periods when it tends to get even more hysterical, especially under impact of changes in the means of communication and media etc.

‘But of course there is worse, there is always worse,

and never the hope of better.’

What is being lost . . .

I can remember the time of the first great incursion of married women into the workforce in the mid to late 1960s.  And it was a great time to be alive.  Suddenly women found themselves in possession of something more than pin money and with all sorts of possibilities seemingly opening up to them.

Move forward some fifty years and we find a situation where the presence of married women in the workplace has become more or less the norm.  Yet the outcome is somewhat less sunny than one might optimistically have expected back in the ‘60s.

Looking around me nowadays, I see a situation where married women no longer work by choice, but out of pure necessity, especially if they ever want to own a home.  And if they have children, you are more likely see them stretched out on the crucifix of creche, job, commuting and home rather than living the dream.

The same applies to husbands, too.

Once upon a time the core of family life was to do with rearing children.  Now that function has no longer a central role but has been banished instead to the interstices of social life.  The idea of fulltime nurturing is now old hat; instead we have the compensatory overkill of ‘quality time’ and TV and spoiling—the bread-and-butter work of day-to-day care being hived off to creches and the suchlike.  And rarely is it not a matter of choice; there is simply no other option.

All a far cry of the seemingly sunny uplands of the future as viewed from the 1960s.  But then the experience of the ‘60s was really a sort of ‘loss leader’ for the realities of these later times.  There is no possibility of fulltime hands-on mothering now—even for those women who would really want to do it—beyond one wins the lottery or marries a millionaire.

Indeed, the tendency is clearly in the opposite direction.  Rather than create the possibility of a mother-friendly society, the demands are instead for more state-supplied or subsidised childcare, seldom anything else.

Indeed, it is possible to extrapolate forward in time and see the end result of a society where children are born and immediately delivered to the state, on an almost fire-and-forget basis, with only the most perfunctory of emotional connection being maintained, rather along the lines of traditional English upper-class practice.

The world is collapsing around us, and not primarily due to climate change, but because of the pernicious effects of the various ideologies and -isms that have over the past decades sought to undermine education and common sense and inherited tradition.  One consequence of which is the delivery of ever-increasing generations of obese and stultified brats—look around you, you can see them everywhere!—whose laziness and stupidity (which is rarely their own native fault) is forever being disguised by the invention of ever-new pseudo-scientific labels.

It has always struck me as strange that one should, almost without argument, abandon the things that have been proven to work for the benefit of human society down the ages, especially the idea of a nurturing motherhood, which is also an especial target of feminist hatred.

By all means increase and make more cost-effective the availability of childcare.  But at the same time, for those who wish to go another route, one should consider also the provision of a proper wage for full-time mothers, who after all perform the most valuable work of all.

As a targeted intervention, it would seem to me to make more sense and to be more effective, both socially and cost-wise, than the various plans being discussed nowadays for generalised ‘helicopter money’ and ‘basic-income’ schemes.