Clickety Click 66 . . .

The government is turning its searchlight on the bingo halls.  At least that seems to be the case according to a somewhat garbled account today on Morning Ireland.  The idea seems to be that they want 25% of the takings (not the profits) to be handed over to charity, in line apparently with the National Lottery.

Now, whatever about principle, but certainly in practice, the state is not opposed to gambling, so long at least as it’s getting its cut.  Ideally, though, one suspects it would prefer to have it channelled solely through the ‘company store’ of the National Lottery.

Now whatever about the state, the prevailing politically correct philosophy really doesn’t support gambling at all, which is why movements are afoot to ban horse and dog racing, ostensibly on animal welfare grounds.  Yet underlying it all is a liberal distaste for the perceived irrationality of gambling, preferring instead a view of human nature along the lines of the ‘economic man’ of the old textbooks, whereby the sensible, reasonable, successful man was one who didn’t adventure his money, but squirrelled it carefully away towards profitable investment and later enjoyment.

The Irish writer Desmond Fennell published in 2001 a reminiscence of the months he spent in Sweden in 1960, at a time when Swedish liberalism and social democracy were engaged in laying down the programme that was to form the basis of the up-to-date liberalism of the present day.  It is worthwhile quoting from its opening page:

‘The first impression, if you arrive from Denmark or northern Germany, is of a tightening of the strings that control life, a largescale disappearance of permissiveness, imagination and common hilarity.  You are forbidden to smoke in trams or buses or when you go to a telephone call-office or enter a large shop.  In restaurants waiters give you directions about what you may drink or not drink, what you must eat if you drink this or that . . . To buy a bottle of liquor you must go to special state shops, massive and unadorned, where people queue at the counter and a notice warns them that they must be able to produce proof of identity.  You are made to feel that these shops are houses of shame: the big windows often display typewriters or tyres, disguising the truth within, and the assistant looks at you horrified if you make to leave the shop with an unwrapped bottle . . . in railway stations and outside beer-shops you sometimes come across beggars, men who have the smell of liquor on their breath and who do not look clean.  They are the pariahs of society, psychically defeated persons, whose psychic defeat expresses itself in an expensive addiction to alcohol.  They would not or could not obey the rules that the rulers set for those who would be successful and respected.  They are forbidden to buy liquor and must get it on the black market or through subterfuge.  Many more like them are being treated in special homes run by teetotallers, who amount to six percent of the population and have much power.  Later, you will discover that drink has replaced original sin as the alleged root of all evil in man.’

Now the first thing to say is that the word ‘permissiveness’ above is used in a purely non-sexual sense, something that you will quickly discover should you read the rest of the book.  The second thing is that Sweden had at the time ‘one of the highest reported suicide rates among the most developed countries’ (Wikipedia).

Fennell also quotes Ingmar Bergman, the film director:

‘“You see, in Sweden we have everything, or rather, we live in the illusion of having everything.  But in the midst of this wealth a great emptiness holds sway . . . In my films I describe this emptiness and everything that people think up in an attempt to fill it, and I believe that in doing this I am tackling the problem of the present time, that is, how to give a purely ‘welfare’ civilisation a spiritual and human content.  At all events this is the problem that I am personally concerned with all the time.  Don’t ask me to talk of other things—I couldn’t.’”

Now in terms of modern secular liberalism  the ‘root of all evil’ has divaricated beyond simply drink to include what you eat and what you wear and what you say and what you think  Not to mention how you travel or how you mate or whether you have an open fire etc. etc.  So that you need to be controlled or managed or re-educated in these things and all things like them—for your own good, of course, purely for your own good.

I have intended from the beginning of this current tranche of mailings to write about Desmond Fennell and Sweden.  It is purely fortuitous that it occurs in the present context.  Providing I don’t get bored with the whole thing, I intend returning to it again sometime in the future.

The book in question by Fennell is The Turning Point, published in 2001 by Sanas Press, and based directly on notes he took during his time in Sweden.  The address given for Sanas Press is PO Box 8607, Dublin 1.  The book is still possibly available in the bigger bookstores and maybe also through Veritas.