The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man’s existence.

Essay here.

It is an unenviable fate for an author to be remembered, if at all, for a devastating review of his principal work by a much greater writer; but such was the fate that befell Soame Jenyns at the pen of Doctor Johnson.

The book that occasioned Johnson’s scorn was A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, which Jenyns first published anonymously in 1756. Johnson’s review brings to mind Truman Capote’s famous remark about Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical novel, On the Road: that it was not writing, it was typing. For Johnson said of Jenyns: “When this [author] finds himself prompted to another performance, let him consider, whether he is about to disburden his mind, or employ his fingers; and, if I might venture to offer him a subject, I should wish, that he would solve this question: Why he, that has nothing to write, should desire to be a writer?”

In this case, however, the criticism was rather unfair; and Jenyns, by all accounts an amiable man, was mortified and harbored a deep but concealed resentment against Johnson for the rest of his life. After Johnson died, Jenyns published some vengefully scurrilous verses about the great man:

Here lies poor Johnson. Reader, have a care,
Tread lightly, lest you rouse a sleeping bear;
Religious, moral, generous, and humane
He was—but self-sufficient, rude, and vain;
Ill-bred and over-bearing in dispute,
A scholar and a Christian—yet a brute.

Another of the scholar and Christian’s objections to Jenyns’s book was its inadequacy to treat its subject. Johnson granted that the nature and origin of evil were a “very difficult and important question.” But they were also one, he added, that “this author’s endeavours will not free from the perplexity which has entangled the speculatists of all ages.”

For Jenyns, as for all writers of his time, the word “evil” conveyed something much wider than it does today. It meant all that caused mankind suffering. It included “moral evil”—extreme human wickedness—but also “natural evil,” the suffering brought about by epidemics, earthquakes, droughts, floods, and the like. It is not surprising that the word should have undergone a change of meaning, for in the intervening period the proportion of human suffering caused by moral, as against natural, evil has increased dramatically, thanks to our growing mastery of nature. When Jenyns wrote, for example, half of all children died, principally from infectious disease, before they reached the age of five; the causes of every known disease remained utterly mysterious, notwithstanding the pedantic flummery of the epoch’s physicians.

Continue reading here.

No crisis should ever be allowed to slip by without calls for greater public expenditure of doubtful worth, and the Gulf oil spill crisis is no exception to this golden rule of bureaucratic opportunism.

In an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine for 11 August, titled “Moving Mental Health into the Disaster-Preparedness Spotlight,” Drs Yun, Lurie and Hughes (the latter a lawyer, it seems) write:

Surveillance systems for mental health and substance abuse must be strengthened through broader intellectual investment in a conceptual framework and technical requirements.

Long experience of bureaucracies has taught me to mistrust language such as this. There is a lot of connotation in it without much denotation: intellectual investments, conceptual frameworks and technical requirements escape from verbiage generators like oil from defective wells, and end up being even more expensive. Personally I am not sure that technical investments, intellectual frameworks and conceptual requirements would not be at least as good, if not better.

Fortunately for modern bureaucracies, connotation — compassion, caring and the like — is a more powerful generator of funds than (say) likelihood of success. The authors say:

Early action to help with the disaster’s emotional impact may decrease long-term behavioral health problems.

On the other hand, it may not, especially as the long-term behavioral health problems (assuming that behavioral health is itself a defensible concept) are themselves only tentatively known: they may be this, according to the writers of the editorial, or that may be that.

They insinuate ideas like any good advertising copywriter. They talk of “psychological first aid,” for example. What is psychological first aid? Bandages for damaged thoughts, for example? A list leaves us little the wiser. It:

… addresses emotional distress, builds coping skills, connects people with support services, and promotes a return to normal routines.

What is it exactly, to address emotional distress? Emotional distress, I conjure thee to depart this body? It sounds to me either like witchcraft or a kind of wallowing in other people’s dismay.

The authors are keen on building. They want to build coping skills, as I built model cranes with engineering sets when I was a little boy. Another thing they want to build is community resilience. One might have supposed that resilience isn’t the kind of thing that is built. I think it is time a sense of humor, or at least of the ridiculous, was built.

Then there is our old friend cultural sensitivity. It seems that the Vietnamese refugees on the Gulf Coast do not have any counselors. They didn’t have many in Vietnam either, where they suffered things a thousand times worse than the oil disaster, but nevertheless seem to have thrived wherever they have been allowed to build a new life for themselves (to use for a moment the authors’ intellectual framework — or is it their technical requirement?).

Here I could not help but be reminded of a patient of mine who said he suffered terrible whiplash and a severe loss of confidence after a car went into his rear at about five miles an hour. He was too frightened now, and in too great pain, ever to leave the house.

As it happens he was Syrian by origin. “What did you do there in Syria?” I asked. “I was in the army,” he replied. “Any particular branch?” I asked.

In short he was a torturer. Unfortunately he fell foul of his senior officers and ended up at the receiving end of his former activities. But it was the impact of the car behind him at five miles an hour that really ruined his life and turned him into a living wreck.

Oh compensation, what crimes are committed in thy name!

First published at Pajamas Media.

THERE are few accusations more damning in today’s climate of opinion than that of being a killjoy.

To be a killjoy is to be narrow-minded, bigoted, puritanical and authoritarian. No one then wants or dares to prevent what others find enjoyable.

However it remains true that the joy of some should not be the misery of others and there is little doubt that public drunkenness in Britain now reduces the quality of life of millions of its citizens. Something that is tolerable in a few becomes intolerable and tiresome as a mass phenomenon. Mr Cameron’s proposals to ban the sale of cheap alcohol are therefore to be welcomed as a step – but only a step – in the right direction. There is hardly the centre of a town or city in the country in which scenes of drunken debauchery are not enacted at the weekends, imposing a virtual curfew on those who wish  neither to participate in nor witness them (and this includes drinkers like me).

People in small and elegant country towns now lock themselves in their homes like Transylvanian peasants keeping dracula at bay in order to protect themselves from the unrestrained coarseness  outside. I do not exaggerate. I once took an American journalist, who suspected me of over-egging it, into the centre of Birmingham on a Saturday night (at a time before the drunken screaming, hair- pulling, vomiting and glassing in the street really got under way) and he was convinced within five minutes that if anything I had employed understatement. He could scarcely believe his eyes.

Nothing like it existed in the US.

Continue reading here.

Medical journals are usually thought of as being dry-as-dust, but read in the right spirit they are often able to provoke that most pleasant, reliable, and durable of emotions, righteous indignation.

For example, the New England Journal of Medicine dated July 15 had an article with the title “The Havasupai Indian Tribe Case — Lessons for Research Involving Stored Biologic Samples.” (It’s online, but a subscription is required.) It was by Michelle M. Mello, of the Harvard Department of Health Policy and Management, and Leslie E. Wolf, of the Georgia State College of Law.

It made me cross.

Forty-one Havasupai Indians sued Arizona State University for alleged misuse of blood samples taken from members of the tribe. They claimed $50 million in damages for (inter alia) fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, negligence, and trespass. They settled — out of court — for $700,000.

The blood samples were taken for a study on diabetes, but consent was gained for a study of “the causes of behavioral/medical disorders.” The plaintiffs objected particularly that the anonymised blood samples were used to study i) inbreeding, ii) genetic correlates or causes of schizophrenia, and iii) population genetics.

Who, if anyone, was harmed by this? Let us take only the third objection as an example. The results of the study of population genetics suggested that the tribe had migrated across the Bering Sea, contrary to its own “origin story.”

Was not the claim of harm by the plaintiffs in this respect grossly dishonest? The idea that Amerindians have an Asian origin is an old one by now, with much evidence in its favor. So if the tribe’s origin myth were susceptible to destruction by evidence and rational argument, it would have been so destroyed a long time ago. If, on the other hand, myth and science belong to two different realms of thought, then the myth could not have been affected by the study of population genetics, whatever its outcome. Palaeontology, archaeology, and anthropology can refute only the literalist interpretation of the story of the Fall.

As to whether people have the collective right to enjoy their myths uncontradicted, I leave it to the ayatollahs to decide. Likewise, I leave open the question of whether money can really compensate for the loss of illusion.

It seems to me, however, that in claiming $50 million and settling for $700,000, the Indians were tacitly admitting that they had been engaged upon what was morally, if not legally, an attempted shakedown of Arizona State University, a form of blackmail. I have little doubt that they were encouraged in this by lawyers; but while you can lead a man to an action, you can’t make him a plaintiff.

I know from experience that there is a general problem with Anglo-Saxon tort law as it now is. No one is able to conclude from the grossly exaggerated nature of a claim that the litigant is fundamentally dishonest and therefore, in essence, vexatious. Not only that, but litigants can sue without anything to fear for themselves except loss of time and equanimity. (Litigants can often think of nothing but their case, and become preoccupied with it to the point of obsession.)

This is against natural justice. If courts could and did draw proper inferences from exaggerated claims, such claims would not be made, or at any rate made less often. And no one should be able to sue without fear of personal loss. Such an ability is an open invitation to fraud, the very thing that the university stood accused of by the plaintiffs.

In this case, then, not only should the university have paid nothing, it should now be allowed to recover money from the Havasupai Indians.

First published at Pajamas Media

Mr Kenneth Clarke was quite right to say that short prison sentences are not effective but, with the practised lack of logic of a man who has spent far too long in politics for the good of his own mind, he has drawn precisely the wrong conclusions from it. His error will cause much unnecessary suffering.

There are indeed many arguments against short sentences. The recidivism rate after such sentences are completed is very high. They pose large administrative costs on the prison system. They do not reassure victims that the suffering or loss inflicted upon them by criminals has been taken seriously by the state. They discourage and demoralise the police, who labour mightily, if mainly bureaucratically, to procure a conviction for very little result. They promote intimidation of witnesses.

Remember, I'll been walking the same streets as you in six weeks' time

has deterred many a crucial witness (criminals having absolutely no doubt about the value or effectiveness of deterrence).

In the sub-culture from which many criminals live, they are a badge of honour rather than a mark of shame. And if rehabilitation were one of the aims of prison - personally, I think it is a very minor one - short sentences would do nothing to contribute to that aim.

But it is quite wrong to suppose that if something is not very effective it has no effect at all. Short prison sentences are ineffective by comparison with long ones, but that is not to say that they are ineffective by comparison with no prison sentences at all.

It is a fact that a large proportion of crimes are committed by a relatively small number of people. It is not unusual for career criminals to commit a hundred or more offences a year. Therefore, keeping them in prison for six weeks, say, prevents the commission of 12 crimes. Of course, if they were kept in prison for four years, 400 crimes would be prevented. But it is better to prevent 12 crimes than no crimes at all.

The only possible argument against the logical response to a high recidivism rate after short sentences being a lengthening of sentences is that something more effective than imprisonment exists: but it doesn't. Community sentences (except if used very selectively indeed) are quite useless.

Let us examine the ways in which our grossly dishonest official class, of which Mr Clarke is perhaps a victim, has sought to persuade us otherwise. Success is often measured by the percentage of "completion" of a community order, for example of probation. But from the law-abiding public's point of view this is irrelevant.

What is important is how many crimes people on a community order commit while they are on it or soon afterwards. And the fact is that the recidivism rate, as measured by the re-conviction rate, is very nearly as high as that of imprisonment after short sentences, despite the fact that the latter are probably slightly worse to begin with, which is why they were sent to prison. (Almost all prisoners are graduates of community sentences.)

It is easy to show that huge numbers of crimes are committed by people already on bail or serving community sentences: so many, in fact, that they represent a considerable proportion of all recorded crimes. There are about 150,000 people on probation at any one time. At least 50,000 of them a year, and probably more, are re-convicted. Furthermore, the reconviction rate used in measuring outcome does not measure re-re-convictions, that is to say those who are convicted more than once, of whom there are many.

Now the conviction rate for all recorded crime in Britain is a shade over one in twenty. If the criminals on bail or serving community sentences are typical of criminals as a whole (there might be some criminals who never get caught and some who always get caught, but assuming a normal distribution, most will fall somewhere between these two extremes), then at least 1,000,000 and probably more than 2,000,000 crimes are committed annually by people on bail or serving community sentences. Thus at least 20-40 per cent of recorded crime is committed by people serving the kind of community sentences that Mr Clarke wishes to extend.

If we add in the numbers of crimes committed by people who have just served short prison sentences were added to this, we can see that it is highly likely that, if long prison sentences were imposed upon criminals as a matter of course (bearing in mind the need to take account of exceptions, extenuating circumstances and so forth), it is likely that the recorded crime rate would decline by more than fifty per cent, irrespective of any deterrent effect such a policy would exert. In reality, the effect would be even greater.

Why does something so obvious escape our political and official class? The late Lord Bauer wrote:

When nonsense shows systematic bias, it probably reflects the pursuit of unacknowledged objectives which often have political or emotional bases.

It is so in this case.

Those who argue against imprisoning criminals think they are being kind to those poorer than they because most criminals are poorer than they. What they forget is that most of the victims are also poorer than they, and furthermore that the class of victim is much larger than the class of perpetrator (if it were not, poverty would be in itself a marker of criminality, which it is not).

So those who argue for the non-incapacitation of criminals are arguing for victimisation of the poor, whether they intend so to argue or not. Of course, it might be possible to argue that what Mr Clarke is trying to do is to ensure that the costs of crime remain where they arise, ie among the poor, and not transfer them to the middle classes.

An unfortunate effect of this is that it de-legitimises the state, one of whose indisputable tasks is to keep the peace. A state that wilfully fails to do so for a large section of its population can hardly be regarded as legitimate: a reason, perhaps, why so many people do not vote.

If I were a Marxist, I might add as another possible explanation the need of lawyers for clients and criminologists for subject matter. The class of lawyers and academic criminologists has increased greatly in the last few decades, and crime is one way of ensuring them employment (under- or unemployed lawyers and academics are very dangerous). The last thing, therefore, that lawyers and criminologists as a class would want is a decrease in crime.

But I am not a Marxist.

First published at Social Affairs Unit.

The late Mr Moat was a brutal sentimentalist. He used the extremity of his behaviour to persuade himself that he felt something – supposedly love – very deeply, and that this was the motive and justification of his behaviour. Surely, if he was prepared to kill not only his ex-girlfriend Samantha Stobbart, but also her new lover and anyone who looked like him, he must have loved her very much?

He also persuaded himself that he was the victim of this terrible episode. "They took it all from me," he said, "kids, freedom, house, then Sam and Chanel [his daughter]. Where could I go from there?" It was only natural that he, an innocent, or at least a man not seriously at fault ("I've never punched her but have slapped her"), should have taken a gun and killed one and injured two: any man treated in this way would have done the same.

What is alarming is that substantial numbers of people take this self-serving sentimental nonsense seriously, at least if the thousands of postings on the Raoul Moat Facebook tribute page, which was deleted on Thursday, were anything to go by. The logic seems to be as follows: Mr Moat called himself a victim; victims are heroes; therefore Mr Moat was a hero.

Had the events not been so horrible, much of the published information about Mr Moat might rightly have caused hilarity. His uncle, for example, said that his family considered him a gentle giant. Here is what Mr Moat himself said in court when (long before the murder) he was charged with possession of a peculiarly nasty knuckle-duster: "My hand barely fits through it… I am a big lad and if I punched someone with this it would take the skin off my knuckles right down to the bone." These are not the words of someone to whom the idea of hitting people is entirely alien. His chosen profession, that of nightclub bouncer, would suggest as much.

Mr Moat thought he was as much the emotional victim of the shooting of his girlfriend as he would have been the physical victim if he had hit someone with the knuckle-duster. "Now I've realised Sam is really hurt, I'm gutted," he wrote. Poor man.

There is another sense, introduced by Mr Moat's brother, in which Mr Moat might be considered a victim. "If he'd had the support network around him," he said, "[my brother] might not have got to where he got to." By support network is meant counsellors, social workers and so forth. If only there were enough of them to go around, no one would ever do evil.

Mr Moat himself seems to have had an inkling of this. He apparently told the social workers who were trying to protect his children from his violent behaviour that, "I would like to have a psychiatrist, psychologist have a word with me regularly to see if there's somewhere underlying like where I have a problem I haven't seen."

The idea behind this is the sentimental and self-exculpating Freudian one, refracted through the slums of Britain, that uncovering treasure buried deep in a psyche is enough by itself to produce a reformation of character. Until the discovery of this buried treasure by a state-funded psychiatrist, therefore, Mr Moat could, with a clear conscience carry on taking the steroids that he used to make himself look boneheadedly vicious, and probably affected his behaviour.

In justifying his "war" on the police, Mr Moat appealed to sentimentality. He described a policeman in a car waiting at a roundabout, "to bully a single mum, who probably can't afford her car tax." Poor single mother, who doesn't know where babies come from, and who can afford a car but not the tax. Mr Moat is a modern Robin Hood, shooting the police to help the poor. This perfectly captures the connection between sentimentality and viciousness.

Continue reading here.

However, taken to the neuro-intensive care unit at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, he was kept alive by the miracle of modern technology, without which he would undoubtedly have died.

His close relatives and doctors thought that the life he now had was not worth living. They prepared to turn off the machines keeping him alive. They thought this is what he would have wanted. It is also what most of us probably would have thought too.

At the last hour it was noticed he was able to move his eyes and that by doing so he could communicate a little. And what he communicated to everyone’s surprise was that he wanted to continue to live, even the life that he was now living. In other words his relatives and the doctors, with the best intentions in the world, had been mistaken.

This should not have surprised us. If people, particularly when they are young and active, are asked what would make their lives not worth living, a good proportion reply it would not be worth living if they were paralysed from the neck down.

It is not just laymen who think this. Health economists think so too. A widely used measure of the relative value of medical treatments is the Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY). Thus if treatment A brings about twice as many QALYs as treatment B it is thought to provide twice the value for money.

Health policies are often decided on the basis of QALYs. Interestingly and alarmingly the QALY assumes that the life of a quadriplegic (someone paralysed from the neck down) not only has no value for the person who lives it but has a negative value for him: that is to say such a person would rather be dead and in fact would be better off if he were dead.

Whatever they thought before they were paralysed, however, most quadriplegics think their lives are worth living.

Continue reading here.

Thanks to the expansion of tertiary education, there are more intellectuals, or perhaps people with intellectual pretensions, credentials and careers, than ever before. However, the sum of human wisdom has not been much increased by this proliferation of intellectuals, rather the reverse. In this book Thomas Sowell shows us why. Sowell is a black American economist and social philosopher not nearly as well known in this country as he should be. This, perhaps, is because he does not say what the vast majority of intellectuals want a man of his ethnicity to say. He lays about the pieties of our age with gusto, always writing with maximum clarity. He wants to be understood, not admired.

Intellectuals, in Sowell’s sense, are people who live by ideas that have no immediate practical effect or direct empirical confirmation, and have a high level of abstraction and generality. Although engineers and doctors obviously live by ideas, they are not ipso facto intellectuals. By contrast, opinion journalists, who generally deal in second-hand thoughts of much lesser rigour and complexity, do count as intellectuals.

This is not to say that the ideas that intellectuals peddle are not without effect, very far from it, they are often of the deepest historical significance. As Sowell shows, one of the reasons for the French collapse in 1940 is that the teachers’ unions in France, under intellectual leadership, had for many years expunged reference to heroism or national pride in school accounts of the First World War. They wanted to instil the idea that war, any war whatsoever, was the greatest calamity that could befall mankind, and they succeeded. This, no doubt, was an understandable emotional reaction to the slaughter of the Great War; but intellectuals (not only in France) consistently preferred preserving the purity of their own rejection of war in the abstract to serious reflection on the obvious practical intentions of the psychopath who had taken power on the other side of the Rhine. The will to resist him had been sapped; for, as Churchill put it (so succinctly that Sowell quotes him), Britain cannot avoid war by dilating on its horrors.

Dilating on horrors is the speciality of the intellectual class. It is its raison d’ être and perhaps its sine qua non. By constantly focusing on what is wrong in society, by taking civilisational achievements for granted and not believing that conservation is as important as change, intellectuals have exerted in many cases a deeply destructive influence. Possessing what Sowell aptly calls the vision of the anointed, that is to say a blueprint of the good society in their minds that is so unarguable that anyone who opposes or even casts doubt upon it is not worthy of serious consideration (and that gives the anointed the right to direct society at their will), most intellectuals are unable to see that deterioration is as possible as, and often easier to bring about than, improvement.

A good case in point and one which Sowell uses to effect is crime in Britain. Within the space of half a century, Britain went from being among the least crime-ridden societies in the western world to being the most (the same pattern is discernible in New Zealand, which so often follows Britain, God help them). It did so because of years of intellectual propaganda that sapped the will to suppress crime. British intellectuals took for granted as indestructible the achievement of a low level of criminality. They thought that Britain could avoid crime by dilating on the horrors of punishment.

Continue reading here.
 

First appeared in the Salibury Review.

The Prime Minister, Mr Blair, once claimed in a speech to a Labour Party conference that he was kept awake at night by worry over the fate of "his" team, Newcastle United. It was a joke, of course, and everyone laughed; but there was clearly a serious point behind it. (By serious, I do not mean morally or intellectually serious, of course, I mean electorally serious.) And the point was this: that notwithstanding Mr Blair's privileged personal background, notwithstanding his predilection for the company of and invitations to stay in exotic locations with multimillionaires of dubious reputation, notwithstanding his acceptance of donations to his party from such multi-millionaires, notwithstanding the large sums made by his wife in a branch of law the scope of which his government has extended, and notwithstanding his self-important presidential style, he remains a man of the people, whose tastes are no different from yours and mine.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the members of his first government also claimed to be interested in football. Indeed, according to their entries in Who's Who, football was the only thing, outside politics and therefore the welfare of the whole of humanity, in which they claimed to be interested. They claimed, as I recall, not a single cultural interest between them, though many of them were highly educated men and women. It was as if a cultural interest were a political kiss of death.

Several related questions present themselves about the importance clearly attached by ruling politicians to the public expression of interest in football. Is it genuine or assumed? Which would be worse, a sincere or insincere expression of interest? And what does the seemingly obligatory expression of such an interest tell us about the culture of the country these politicians rule?

A necessary, though not sufficient, condition of a sincere interest in football would require at least one such activity as attendance at matches, watching games on television, reading reports in newspapers, keeping up with league tables (one would hardly expect cabinet members themselves actually to play football, though such a thought gives rise to pleasing fantasies). The condition is not a sufficient one, however, because it would still be possible for someone to do any or all of these things out of pure political calculation. The age of ideology may be past, but certainly not that of political monomania. Those who seek political office must devote themselves to the quest from adolescence or early adulthood, to the exclusion of all else, and are therefore perfectly accustomed to tailor their activities to their political ambitions.

Suppose for a moment that the interest is genuine and the expressions of such interest sincere: does it automatically presage something wrong? Is there anything inherent in the sport of football that excludes it from the consideration of civilised people? Is interest in it confined, by its very nature, to fools or philistines?

The answer is obviously no. The sport itself involves great physical skill and stamina, as well as resources of character when played at a high level, and all such sports have the power to move and excite spectators. There is nothing wrong with this: it accords with human nature. The objection is therefore not to the sport itself, but to the exaggerated importance given to it, and to the place it occupies in modern British culture (here using the word culture in the anthropological sense). To fail to recognise, or to pretend to fail to recognise, football's relatively lowly place on the scale of human accomplishment is to be uncivilised – or, in the case of the dissimulator, to ally oneself with enemies of civilisation, which is perhaps yet worse.

Of course, someone has to take football more seriously than it deserves if the sport is to be played at an entertainingly high level; and society would be deeply impoverished if no one were ever impassioned by relatively trivial or unimportant accomplishments. But that is certainly no reason for us to take trivial or unimportant accomplishments as seriously as those who have laboured long and hard to achieve them must take them.

Continue reading here.

To sympathize with those who are less fortunate is honorable and decent. A man able to commiserate only with himself would surely be neither admirable nor attractive. But every virtue can become deformed by excess, insincerity, or loose thinking into an opposing vice. Sympathy, when excessive, moves toward sentimental condescension and eventually disdain; when insincere, it becomes unctuously hypocritical; and when associated with loose thinking, it is a bad guide to policy and frequently has disastrous results. It is possible, of course, to combine all three errors.

No subject provokes the deformations of sympathy more than poverty. I recalled this recently when asked to speak on a panel about child poverty in Britain in the wake of the economic and financial crisis. I said that the crisis had not affected the problem of child poverty in any fundamental way. Britain remained what it had long been—one of the worst countries in the Western world in which to grow up. This was not the consequence of poverty in any raw economic sense; it resulted from the various kinds of squalor—moral, familial, psychological, social, educational, and cultural—that were particularly prevalent in the country (see “Childhood’s End,” Summer 2008).

My remarks were poorly received by the audience, which consisted of professional alleviators of the effects of social pathology, such as social workers and child psychologists. One fellow panelist was the chief of a charity devoted to the abolition of child poverty (whose largest source of funds, like that of most important charities in Britain’s increasingly corporatist society, was the government). She dismissed my comments as nonsense. For her, poverty was simply the “maldistribution of resources”; we could thus distribute it away. And in her own terms, she was right, for her charity stipulated that one was poor if one had an income of less than 60 percent of the median national income.

This definition, of course, has odd logical consequences: for example, that in a society of billionaires, multimillionaires would be poor. A society in which every single person grew richer could also be one in which poverty became more widespread than before; and one in which everybody grew poorer might be one in which there was less poverty than before. More important, however, is that the redistributionist way of thinking denies agency to the poor. By destroying people’s self-reliance, it encourages dependency and corruption—not only in Britain, but everywhere in the world where it is held.

Continue reading here.

All men are created equal, perhaps, but they do not by any means lead lives of equal interest. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is still only in her later 30s, has already ensured her place in history and is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable people in the world.

Her linguistic abilities alone would be more than enough to satisfy most people: Having learned Somali (her native tongue), English, Amharic, Arabic and Swahili, she learned Dutch sufficiently well in a couple of years to be able to stand for the Dutch parliament.

But, of course, it is her public and uncompromising repudiation of Islam for which she is best known. The brutal murder of Theo van Gogh, with whom she had made a brief film denouncing the treatment of women in Islam, brought her to world fame. In this book, which one might describe as a philosophical memoir, she describes and explains her intellectual journey from pious, veiled Muslim woman to proselytizer for the European Enlightenment view of the world.

She was born into a society in which family or clan honour and shame were the principal guides to conduct, and in which deviation from the way things had supposedly always been done was regarded with horror and repressed with violence. As the circumstances of Somalia changed because of the inevitable intrusion of the modern world, however, Somali society was completely unable to adapt in a constructive way. The author succinctly describes the fate of her gifted brother, a fate that I saw many times repeated among my young male Muslim patients struggling to adapt to a non-Muslim world:

“This is the tragedy of the tribal Muslim man, and especially the first-born son: the overblown expectations, the ruinous vanity, the unstable sense of self that relies on the oppression of one group of people – women – to maintain the other group's self-image. Instead of learning from experience, instead of working, Mahad [her brother] engaged in a variety of defence mechanisms involving arrogance, self-delusion and scapegoating. His problems were always somebody else's fault.”

Hirsi Ali's insistence, based on her own family experience, her experience as a translator for social services in the Netherlands and her logical reflection on those experiences, that a profound change in the relations between the sexes is the key to Muslim integration into Western society is, in my view, absolutely correct. For many young Muslim men in the West, a powerful appeal of Islam is the sanction that it gives to their domination of women. This domination provides them an ex officio source of self-satisfaction that discourages further effort, and simultaneously deprives their society of the talents of women. The natural result is material and intellectual failure by comparison with other religious groups; and disappointment leads to morbid hypersensitivity to criticism, insensate rage and the blaming of others.

Of course, one has to distinguish between Islam and Muslims. It is hardly to be expected that 1.5 billion people exhibit precisely the same pattern of family life that is inimical to success in the modern world; I have known many Muslim families that did not. But Hirsi Ali is adamant that the source of the problem is in Islamic doctrine, and not in cultural accretions, as is sometimes claimed.

Like 19th-century French thinker Ernest Renan, she believes that the greatest service that can be done for a Muslim is to free him from the hold his religion has over his mind. She believes that the Koran should be openly, freely and publicly subjected to the kind of historical and philological scholarship that has long been practised on the Bible.

Of course, we know perfectly well where such criticism would lead: to a decline in, if not a collapse of, the faith, in the same way that Christianity in Europe has collapsed. That is why they ensure that scholars who do not believe that the Koran is the unmediated word of God, but rather a post-facto concoction like the Bible, must work in the shadows, and will not allow the free dissemination of their work in Muslim countries. The hold of Islam in the modern world is thus strong but potentially brittle.

Unfortunately, from a combination of fear and self-hatred, many in the West are unwilling to make the distinction between a respect for the right of people to practise a religion within the law, and an exaggerated respect for the religion itself. Ayaan Hirsi Ali rightfully pours scorn on the fellow travellers of obscurantism.

As perhaps is only to be expected, she speaks of the Enlightenment with the zeal of the convert. Her ideal is a society in which every person reflects seriously on her conduct and is free to make her own decisions. But this creates problems where people are free but do not reflect seriously; in any case, since it is clear that limits on behaviour have to be placed somewhere, antecedent to many individual decisions, the Enlightenment ideal that she espouses is rather too simple as an answer to the problems of human existence.

Still, if anyone has the right to speak from experience about the benefits brought by the Enlightenment, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has, because she has lived in both pre-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment societies. She does so with both modesty and great eloquence. At the very least, her book will help us to put our discontents into perspective.

First published in the Globe and Mail.

If for some inexplicable reason you wanted to reawaken German nationalism, how would you go about it? I suggest a three-part strategy.

First, you would replace the rock-solid German currency by one with very shaky economic foundations, against the wishes of almost the whole German population (which, of course, you would not deign to consult).

Second, you would make sure that same population paid for the gross and dishonest profligacy of the Greek government: a profligacy that was rendered possible by the adoption of the very currency that the German population did not want in the first place.

Third, you would do everything possible to ensure that the crisis will spread, last for a long time, cost a fortune in failed attempts to solve it, and fall mainly to the Germans to pay for.

It goes without saying the second and third parts of the strategy should be against the wishes of the German population whose opinion, however, should be bulldozed aside as being of no account.

There are two great advantages to the strategy I have proposed. The first is that it would achieve what many people might otherwise have thought impossible: it will morally justify and render respectable German nationalism in the eyes of all reasonably impartial observers. Why, indeed, should the Germans, who have practiced economic prudence and providence for sixty years, at least relative to everyone else, pay for other people to live above their means and to retire early on high pensions?

The second great advantage of the strategy I have proposed is that the hostility it evokes in the Germans would be thoroughly reciprocated in those countries to whose rescue the Germans population, against its will, would supposedly have come. This is because, along with the German rescue, will come hard and even harsh conditions, such as that governments should reduce the number of drones that they employ. The Germans will be seen to have thrown their weight around precisely because they are Germans; and self-pity will not permit the “rescued” to see that they and their own governments are to blame for their sorrows.

With a little luck and attention to detail, the situation might evolve into war, first civil and then international.

It was interesting to read the French press during the evolution of the crisis. With its habitual Cartesian clarity, the French political class has spoken, all but unanimously, of the need for European solidarity with Greece.

What does solidarity mean in this context? Who is supposed to have solidarity with whom, given that four fifths of the German population (and a majority of the French) never wanted the common currency that was imposed on them, and that the majority of the German population sees no reason why it should pay for the ouzo of useless Greek civil servants?

The solidarity is that of the political, bureaucratic, and apparatchik class of Europe against everyone else. That class is reacting like someone who, hearing deep and ominous rumbles in the ground below below, tries to paper over the crater of a volcano.

First published at Pajamas Media.

Anyone with a sibling knows that a background and DNA in common do not guarantee a complete coincidence of views. Thus, it is not in the least surprising that the most famous pair of brothers in English-language journalism, Christopher and Peter Hitchens, should disagree about almost everything. The former is a vociferous and voluble atheist, the latter a reconvert to Anglican Christianity. The former strongly supports, and the latter strongly deplores, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The list of disagreements could be extended indefinitely.

This is not to say that no similarities of temperament can be discerned in the brothers’ two memoirs, now being published at more or less the same time. Both brothers were rebellious from an early age; both have been attracted to areas of danger; both have delighted to twist the tails of those who otherwise might have been counted as allies; and both have a tendency to radicalism, if by radicalism we mean the expression of opinion opposite to what is generally accepted in the milieu in which one moves.

Both have abjured former opinions and attitudes, although Peter has done so more completely and straightforwardly than Christopher, who seems to have great difficulties with his past commitments, for reasons that I shall speculate on. The memoirs are very different: Peter’s is roughly half the length of Christopher’s, is less personal (Peter does not mention, for example, that his mother committed suicide in Athens), and displays a concern with his brother’s opinions that does not seem to be reciprocated. Christopher looms large in Peter’s book (indeed, is almost the occasion of it) but Peter is a marginal figure in Christopher’s—less important than, say, Martin Amis.

Even those who disagree strongly with Christopher Hitchens cannot deny that he is talented, amusing, witty, and erudite, with an impressive range of literary reference at his disposal. His personality is engaging, and he does not seem spiteful, malicious, or petty (common characteristics of those who lead the life of the mind).

As is often the case with memoirs, however, the most vivid (because the most personal) part of Hitch-22 is what describes Christopher’s early life; much of the rest is about his political commitments, which already are well known and (at least to me) are interesting mainly for the light they shed on his character.

Continue reading here.

Walking recently through one of those many British towns in which the administration of unemployment and its attendant social problems and squalor is by far the most important economic activity, and where employees of the town hall are a kind of nomenklatura elite, I passed a school in whose playground children were playing under the supervision of a teacher.

The school building was one of those late Victorian or Edwardian edifices that are so redolent of the proud municipal belief in education as uplift and social progress. The unity of design of such buildings, which manage successfully to hint at grandeur while retaining a humanity of scale, has almost always been ruined by the depredations of the second half of the 20th century: in this case a container and a Portakabin tacked on to the side of the school to make up for the loss of an original classroom whose windows had been boarded up. 

The children in the playground, I noticed, were wearing knee-pads, presumably to prevent them from scuffing their knees as they played. At the same time, the playground was strewn with the kind of litter now to be seen down any country lane in Britain, no matter how remote: discarded plastic orange bottles of sweetened fizzy drinks, cans of a supposed restorative after a hard night's debauchery, and the polystyrene containers of repellent fast food. 

The children took no notice of this litter, playing among it as if it were a natural feature. As for the teacher, she took no notice of it either but allowed the children to wade through it. For her, it seemed, the litter was just as much beyond her control as the weather. 

Here was missed a golden opportunity to teach the children, by the method of that great educational theorist, Wackford Squeers, something really useful: not to drop litter. They should have been directed to clear it up before they were allowed to play; the less they felt inclined to do so, the more valuable the lesson to them. 

Of course, considerations of Health and Safety would probably preclude such a lesson: the Health and Safety of the teacher, I mean. Once the vengeful parents learnt that their children had been taught in such a way and turned into mere refuse collectors, she would no doubt have been in serious danger of assault.

So what the children learnt (whether they realised it or not) was that the safety of their knees, and the prevention of even very minor accidents to them, was of incomparably more importance than the appearance, tidiness and cleanliness of a public space, even one that they used every day — a nasty but effective little lesson in narcissistic egotism. By the appendage of the container-cum-Portakabin to the building, they would have learnt that function in architecture trumps all other considerations. And this in turn teaches that the present moment, its exigencies and its concerns are what count, to the exclusion of the past or the future: and thus even the present moment is ruined.   

First published in Standpoint.

The most significant thing by far about the recent election in Britain was the Conservatives’ failure to win it outright. In an unexpected way, this failure was reassuring.

The Conservatives faced a government that should have been an opposition’s dream. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, owed his position to succession, not to election; he was so lacking in social skills that he had to be taught how to smile, with the natural consequence that, when he did so, he looked like Frankenstein’s monster trying to be agreeable.

It had long been known that Mr. Brown, a former chancellor of the exchequer, was happier with a table of figures than with a roomful of people, but unfortunately nerdishness is not a guarantee of competence. On the contrary, he has presided over what threatens to be the greatest economic disaster in British history, caused largely by his own unfathomable incapacity.

In a handful of years, Mr. Brown has transformed Britain into the Greece of the North Sea (I am not speaking of the Greece of Plato and Aristotle, but of Karamanlis and Papandreou). The public deficit is at unprecedented levels, and by the time I finish writing this article, the country will be a further $60-million in debt, or one dollar for ever man, woman and child.

This vast indebtedness has been written in sand. A former government minister, Lord Walton, admitted that the vast majority of the extra money spent on the National Health Service, the state-organized system of health care, since Labour took office in 1997 has been almost completely wasted. Since that extra money now amounts to $150,000,000,000 per year, this waste alone – without mentioning many other bottomless pits of incompetence that the government has sought to fill – accounts for a very considerable part of a national debt that has doubled in just two years.

You might have supposed, therefore, that the government was a target that no opposition could miss. But David Cameron, the leader of that opposition, contrived to do so. This was because he so self-evidently believed in nothing but office and could therefore criticize the government from no reasonably consistent standpoint.

He was, of course, faced with a political difficulty. During the past 13 years, more than 75 per cent of jobs created in Britain have been in the public sector. An ever-growing percentage of the nominally private sector is now wholly dependent on government patronage or grace and favour. (For example, in a newspaper advertisement, I saw a position, at a salary of more than $120,000, in a privately owned employment agency that specializes in recruitment for the public sector.)

And the real rate of unemployment in Britain, if one includes the people allegedly but not genuinely sick, is something like 15 per cent.

A vast voting bank of people directly or indirectly dependent for their livelihood on government expenditure has been created, deliberately or inadvertently. It is only human nature that many of them would prefer any amount of public debt to a reduction in their own standard of living. A politician dependent on the popular vote would therefore have to principled, courageous and charismatic to persuade these people that the later the inevitable adjustment came, the more painful it would be.

Mr. Cameron is none of the above. He has about as much personal charisma as potato peelings. In place of courage, he has an apparatchik-like ruthlessness within his party. In place of principles, he has personal ambition. The situation calls for something different.

Mr. Cameron is the apotheosis of public relations, the opinion poll made flesh; it is no coincidence, as the Marxists used to say, that his only known employment before entering politics was in that great profession. Compared with mere truth, the focus group has seemed to him a fount of profundity. His conversion to green politics and communitarianism has therefore carried about as much conviction as Hitler’s protestations that he had no more demands to make. If a focus group had told him that the world was rhomboid, he would have made it next week’s policy.

The result is that practically no one voted for him; if anyone put an X on the ballot for a Conservative candidate, it was usually while holding his nose, and voting only against Mr. Brown, certainly not for Mr. Cameron. It turned out that this was not sufficient for the latter to win an absolute majority. Mr. Brown persuaded enough people to follow that great political principle laid down at the end of Jim (in Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children), which is about a boy who was eaten in the zoo by a lion: And always keep a-hold of Nurse/ For fear of finding something worse.

The only consolation to be derived from the election is that, notwithstanding all of the above, millions of people have understood both the appalling incompetence of Mr. Brown and the insufficiency of the focus group as a guide to life. Whether this is enough to fool the markets remains to be seen.

First published in the Globe & Mail

In normal circumstances, people in Britain would have viewed the riots in Athens with a certain disdainful amusement: those excitable Mediterraneans at it again! What else can you expect, really? But thanks to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Britain is now the Greece of the North Sea; he has turned the healthiest public finances in Europe into the sickest, with a budget deficit as large as Greece’s (and soon to be much larger) and a public debt that will before long exceed 100 percent of GDP. So when we look at what is happening in Athens, we have the eerie sensation that this might be London a few weeks or months hence. We have seen our future, and it riots.

In fact, Greece is only a particularly acute or virulent case of the sickness that afflicts much of the Western world. Greece’s overall debt is higher, no doubt, and its deficit larger, than those of other countries, but the difference is one of degree, not of kind. Like most of the rest of us, the Greeks have been living beyond their means.

When the crowd tried to storm the Greek parliament, shouting, “Thieves! Thieves!,” its anger was misdirected. It was a classic case of what Freudians call projection: the attribution to others of one’s own faults. It is true that the Greek politicians are much to blame for the current situation, and no doubt many of them are thieves; but their real crime was not stealing, but offering a substantial proportion of the Greek population a standard of living that was economically unjustified, maintained for a time by borrowing, and in the long run unsustainable, in return for votes. The crime of that substantial proportion of the Greek population was to accept the bribe that the politicians offered; they were only too prepared to live well at someone else’s expense. The thieves were not principally the politicians, but the demonstrators.

Such popular dishonesty is by no means confined to Greece. In varying degrees, most countries in the West have displayed it, Britain above all. It is perhaps an inherent problem wherever the universal franchise is unaccompanied by widespread virtues such as honesty, self-control, providence, prudence, and self-respect. Greece is therefore a cradle not only of democracy, but of democratic corruption.

The Greek demonstrators did not understand, or did not want to understand, that if there were justice in the world, many people, including themselves, would be worse rather than better off, and that a reduction in their salaries and perquisites was not only economically necessary but just. They had never really earned their wages in the first place; politicians borrowed the money and then dispensed largesse, like monarchs throwing coins to the multitudes.

It is an obvious but often forgotten lesson of economics: what cannot continue will not continue.

Originally published at City Journal.

Some people find the world so various and so interesting that they can never fix their attention on anything long enough to become truly expert. They therefore never amount to anything much intellectually — alas, I am of their company. It is too late to change now.

Among my many desultory interests is the Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship. It is interesting mainly from the psychological point of view. Many erudite men and women, and even brilliant ones, have wasted their substance or ruined themselves on trying to prove that Bacon was Shakespeare. They have constructed elaborate cipher machines, they have dredged the River Wye for manuscripts, they have consulted spirit mediums to contact Shakespeare and Bacon directly, all to prove their darling theory. Next to Man’s love of dog, it is perhaps Mankind’s most endearing quality, that he should be prepared to devote himself utterly to a futile but harmless quest.

It was only to be expected, therefore, that I should buy Professor James Shapiro’s book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, the moment I saw it in the bookshops. His erudition gave me intense pleasure, despite a vague guilt that I had that I was wasting my time and energy on so trifling a matter in a world of catastrophes and disasters, past, present and to come.

Professor Shapiro too, is interested in the psychology (and the sociology) of those who oppose the Stratfordians, as those who continue stubbornly to believe that William Shakespeare was the author of the plays commonly attributed to him are known by assorted company, or monstrous regiment, of Baconians, Oxfordians, Marlovians, Rutlandians etc.

There is one thing, however, that I think Professor Shapiro gets wrong, as many people do, though this in no way detracts from the overall value of his book. He describes the social ideas of the man, J.T. Looney, who first put forward the hypothesis that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the author of the plays. Looney believed that the author of the plays (and this would be so whoever he was) subscribed to a medieval rather than a modern view of society, preferring monarchy, strict social hierarchy, and the role of guilds to anomic democracy, social mobility, and capitalism.

Sigmund Freud, a lover of the plays, became an ardent Oxfordian, having been converted by reading Looney’s book. But, says Shapiro:

Looney’s retrograde vision comes too close for comfort to Freud’s account of the Nazi rise to power when he described “the ideal of Hitlerism” as “purely medieval and reactionary.”

That year Freud had also written to Ernest Jones that “We are in transition toward a rightist dictatorship…”

This seems to me to be confusion. On the evidence that Shapiro himself supplies, Looney was not a democrat, but he was not a Nazi either. He did not want the Nazis to win the war; he preferred that the Allies did so. He thought the Nazis were barbarians, and his criticism of modern democratic society appears to have been made on civilizational grounds, not racial or economic ones. This criticism might have its dangers, but is not wholly preposterous or malicious, especially if you judge a civilization by its highest artistic products (which might not be a correct view, but is not an utterly contemptible one either). Medieval Siena, for example, probably had a tenth of the population of Akron, Ohio, but it is difficult to believe that in 600 years’ time people will find the remnants of modern-day Akron as beautiful, inspiring, or worth preserving as those of medieval Siena today. Of course, I might be wrong: it will rather depend on the general state of Mankind in 600 years.

The worst thing about the passage that I have quoted is its apparent endorsement, or uncritical acceptance, of Freud’s characterization of the Nazis as “right-wing.” This seems to me simplistic to the point of dishonesty, or at least symptomatic of a desire that complex social and political realities should be located on an analogue scale from right to left or left to right. If such a scale must be used, it seems to me that there is as much, if not more, reason to place Nazism on the left of it rather than on the right.

Not that this would be satisfactory, far from it. As Bishop Butler said, every thing is what it is and not another thing; Nazism was what it was and not another thing. If it could not, and cannot, be fitted neatly on to a political analogue scale, so much the worse for the scale. To change the figure of speech, we must not construct Procrustean conceptual beds.

Does it matter, however, if Nazism — being what it was and not another thing — is routinely characterized as being right-wing? I think that it does matter, for the following reason. There is a false syllogism that has a profound psychological effect:

• Nazism was right-wing.
• Conservatism is right-wing.
• Therefore Nazism was conservative and conservatism is Nazi.

But Nazism was not conservative; when the Nazis called their advent revolutionary, they were right. There was nothing conservative about their movement at all. But the “syllogism” above has insinuated deeply into the minds of our intelligentsia, which is why so many of them are afraid of the supposed taint of conservatism.

Let me just repeat, however: this, in the context of Professor Shapiro’s book is all en passant: if you are in any way interested in pedantic eccentricity and mad erudition, this is the book for you.

First posted at Pajamas Media.

Liberal reformers, who might once have wished to extend the realm of liberty, now wish to restrict it in the name of compulsory political virtue.

There was a perfect recent illustration of this in Britain. An evangelical Christian couple, the Wilkinsons, ran a bed-and-breakfast business in a place called Cookham. They refused a middle-aged homosexual couple, Michael Black and John Morgan, accommodation because they believed that homosexuality was wrong; it is condemned in the Bible.

The spurned couple said that they felt like lepers; moreover, they felt that their legal rights, enshrined in the Equality Act of 2006, which makes it illegal to discriminate in the provision of services on the grounds of “sexual orientation,” had been infringed, and they complained to the police. As yet, no prosecution has followed. But shortly afterward a senior politician, Christopher Grayling, who might be a minister in the next government if David Cameron wins the forthcoming election, said that he thought that the owners of bed-and-breakfasts ought to be allowed to refuse homosexual couples if they so wished.

From the furious denunciation that Grayling’s remarks attracted, you might have thought that he had advocated medieval punishments for homosexuals. Instead, he was merely pointing out that the law as it stands is tyrannical, and that in a free society not everyone will make the same moral judgments. It is a necessary condition of freedom that private citizens should be allowed to treat with, or to refuse to treat with, whomever they choose, on any grounds that they choose, including those that strike others as repellent. Freedom is freedom, not the means by which everyone comes to precisely the same conclusion and conducts himself in precisely the same way.

The depressing, and perhaps sinister, aspect of the public commentary on the case is how largely it has ignored the question of freedom. For liberals, it seems, any trampling on freedom or individual conscience is now justified if it conduces to an end of which they approve. Thus liberalism turns into its opposite, illiberalism.

Messrs. Black and Morgan, who said they felt like lepers and went to the police as a result, condemned themselves out of their own mouths. They said that they had been together for decades, and that this was the first time they had ever experienced what they called “homophobia.” Not only does this suggest that the Equality Act was not, even on the false assumptions of liberals, necessary, but it means that anyone more mature than they would simply have found somewhere else to stay for the night.

Moreover, to waste police time on such a matter in a country with the highest crime rate in the Western world is nothing short of scandalous, a manifestation of the worst kind of inflamed egotism.

First appeared at City Journal.

In his essay on the liberty of the press, the great philosopher David Hume wrote what has been many times quoted, but has never achieved the status of a cliché:

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom that it must steal in upon them by degrees and must disguise itself in a thousand shapes in order to be received.

I think this is borne out pretty well by our current experience. Freedom is being nibbled away in the name of justice, security, well-being, and even of freedom itself, that is to say true freedom, not the merely apparent kind — for nothing is easier for power-hungry intellectuals to justify than the coercion that they favor to bring about true freedom.

However, Hume goes on to say something that seems to me not to be quite true:

But if the liberty of the press ever be lost, it must be lost at once.

He says this because he assumes that the only serious threat to freedom of the press comes from a despotic government desirous of imposing centralized censorship of what appears in print, and which it is be able to do by fiat. This is not so; there are other, subtler threats to press freedom.

I have noticed that whenever I used the word “Mankind” in an article, it emerges in the printed version, without my permission, as “Humankind,” a word I despise as both ugly and sanctimonious. (In the Oxfam shop round the corner from where I live there is a poster with a slogan that nauseates me: “Thankyou for Being Humankind.”) The change is made with such regularity, and in so many publications, that the government might as well have decreed it, though in fact it has not. There is, presumably, a monstrous regiment of sub-editors at work, all of like mind.

Of course the change lacks logic. If Mankind is objectionable because of its masculinity, Humankind is no better. It still contains the dread word, or should I say syllable, “man.” Nor would “Hupersonkind” be better, because of the masculinity of the syllable “son.” To eradicate all sexism from the word, it should be “Huperoffspringkind.” This is clearly ridiculous. But censorship by language reform is not a matter of logic, it is a matter of power. As Humpty Dumpty said, it is a question of who is to be master (if one may still be allowed the word), that’s all.

I am not alone the victim of the monstrous regiment of sub-editors. I get to review quite a number of books published by academic presses, British and American, and I have found that the use of the impersonal “she” is now almost universal, even when the writer is aged and is most unlikely to have chosen this locution for himself (or herself). It is therefore an imposed locution, and as such sinister.

I cannot say my role in resisting this tiny tyranny has been or is an heroic one. On the contrary: I now simply avoid the use of certain ways of putting things so that the question does not arise. I do not want to have a blazing argument with editors or sub-editors each time I use the word “Mankind” and it is changed without my permission, nor do I not want to stop writing altogether; and the matter, after all, is a very small one. How petty one would look to argue about it, how foolish to cut one’s nose off to spite one’s face if one refused to write any more because of it!

And so the censors have achieved a small victory. They will seek out new locutions to conquer.

First posted at Pajamas Media.

A review of Islam in American Prisons: Black Muslims’ Challenge to American Penology, by Hamid Reza Kusha
 

A few years ago a friend of mine, a doctor working in a British prison, was asked by a member of the Parole Board why he thought so many prisoners changed religion while incarcerated. "It's for the change of diet, I expect," he replied.

In those days, of course, one took such matters lightly, and the member of the Parole Board laughed. A change of religion was either to Buddhism or to some sect with dietary requirements difficult or impossible for the prison authorities to comply with (that was the point). In my own experience as a doctor working in a prison, the new Buddhists often wore a ponytail, spoke quietly so as not to frighten the insects, and had committed crimes of the most frightful violence. With regard to the justification and necessity for such violence, they had undergone a welcome Gestalt switch.

But the specter of radical Islam in our prisons has made the matter of conversion to another religion altogether more serious. We fear that our prisons are becoming recruiting grounds of, and schools for, extremists and terrorists. A book on the subject of Islam in American prisons, therefore, could hardly fail to be of interest.

Nonethless, the author of this book has found a way to make such a book uninteresting. It is not his fault alone: a lot of the blame must attach to the publishers. It is abundantly obvious that Hamid Kusha's first language is not English, and it may not even be his second, which of course is not his fault; but the publishers, secure presumably in the number of libraries around the world that, given its title, will feel obliged to acquire it, and more or less certain that they will not be able to sell it to anyone else at such a high price, have not felt it necessary to go to the expense of using a competent editor to correct the hundreds and hundreds of grammatical errors and malapropisms in the text. "Conscientious" is used for "conscious," "mannerisms" for "manners," "canonized" for "canonical," and so forth: the list is nearly endless. But why bother with correction when it would not have increased sales?

In short, Islam in American Prisons is by far the worst-edited book put out by a reputable publisher that I have ever read.

The book might nevertheless have been redeemed had its content been worthwhile. Alas, Kusha, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of East Carolina, thinks no more clearly than he writes, and only about a third of the text is of indubitable relevance to its title. The first two thirds consists of an irrelevant, murky, disorganized, meandering history of American jurisprudence from colonial times that neither analyses nor synthesizes, but only confuses. Insofar as a consistent or fundamental argument can be made out, as through a glass darkly, from this book, it is this: the American legal system offers, theoretically, equal protection under the law. But young black males find themselves incarcerated out of all proportion to their demographic weight in the population. They experience this as an injustice; Islam is a universalist doctrine that offers such young men a way out of their existential impasse. Therefore, they convert to Islam in considerable numbers.

Kusha is not, in general, a great examiner of his assumptions. For example, he repeatedly refers to the experience of imprisonment as "criminogenic," that is to say, that criminals sent to prison become even more criminal as a result of contact with worse or more experienced criminals than they. But two lines of evidence from England, at least, suggest that prison prevents the further commission of crime rather than promotes it. First, prisoners in England have rates of recidivism inversely proportional to the length of their sentences; those sent to prison for longer have lower rates. Second, criminals in England who are sent to prison on their first conviction have half the rate of recidivism of those given other types of sentence on their first conviction. The same might not be true in America, of course, but it would have to be shown not to be true, and Professor Kusha is unaware of this.

Continue reading here.

Sharp practice, if not outright dishonesty, is bound to grow in a society in which personal trust and honour are replaced by law and the legal adjudication of obligations. Everyone then does what he can get away with, for a reliance on the law as the sole determinant of the permissible destroys all sense of shame. It is small wonder that "Cheat, that ye be not cheated" seems increasingly to be the rule by which we live.

Recently, I bought a ticket online from a low-cost airline. With each click of the mouse the cost rose, until it reached 25 times the advertised fare. I was angered in a way that I should not have been if the final cost had been asked of me in the first place. I suppose that by now, having bought many such tickets, I should be used to the sharp practice, but I am not. It still irritates me.

I knew, of course, that I should be charged a credit card fee even if I used my debit card. But this particular airline found a new wheeze to misrepresent its fare. It charged an additional £6 for a seat.

Could I have avoided this charge if I had volunteered to stand rather than sit? Reader, I could not: I had to have a seat. In what sense, then, could the original fare properly have been advertised at £x rather than at £x+£6?  In none that I could fathom. I have known British government ministers more honest and straightforward than this.

Even this was not the end of it, however. The website now gave me what it called the "total cost" and asked me to press the "continue" button if I agreed to it. I did so, only to discover that the next page had added a further £6 for reasons that I was quite unable to discover.

Since the airline was the only one going to my destination, I swallowed my rage. 

A lack of straightforwardness in dealing with customers is now commonplace, and it seems worse in Britain than elsewhere. On the very same day, I booked a four-hour train journey on a route that I know to be always very busy. I tried to book a seat online but found I could not do so, and so I called the telephone number indicated.

The assistant who answered my call told me I could not reserve a seat. "But," she added brightly, "you may take any seat subject to availability."

It was reassuring that, even in these days of official bullying, passengers on trains are still permitted to sit in available seats.

"You mean that I might have to stand," I said, "if the train is full, as it often is?"

"No, sir, you can sit in any seat, subject to availability."

Try as I might I could not get her to admit that this meant that I might have to stand. She had evidently been trained not to deny the possibility, but rather not to admit it. She was like a common-or-garden politician answering — which is to say, not answering — questions put to him by an interviewer.

Originally posted at Standpoint.

According to the Daily Telegraph of 22 March, the state sector in Britain is now larger in aggregate than the private sector. A margin of error must surely attach to all such calculations, but no one seriously doubts that the state sector has increased greatly in size, both relatively and absolutely, in the last few years. The National Health Service alone now employs 400,000 more people than it did in 1997. Not surprisingly, the general tax burden has also increased: though not by enough to cover expenditures, very far from it, of course.

The most interesting thing about this increase in the size of the state sector is that it has been quite unaccompanied by any increase in social equality. Britain is no more equal a society than it was before the return of the state preponderance that is welcome to some and unwelcome to others; furthermore social mobility has declined.

Why should this be the subject of any comment? The reason is surely this: that the principal ethical, and indeed practical, justification of increased state intervention is that it brings about more equality (I leave aside altogether the question of whether more equality is itself desirable). Without state intervention, it is often supposed, many of the least fortunately-born or less well-endowed, mentally or physically, would be left in a condition of near destitution: destitution being defined relative to standards prevailing in society. More state intervention therefore means more equality.

There are some societies in which increased state expenditure has undoubtedly been accompanied by increased equality: Scandinavian societies spring to mind. They are patently more egalitarian than our own society, and the importance of the state in them is also beyond dispute. Again, for the purposes of this piece, I make no global judgement as to whether this is a good or a bad thing, in the Sellar and Yeatman sense: that is to say, whether the Scandinavian are better or worse societies than ours.

But it is an elementary error of logic to suppose that if all egalitarian societies have a large state sector, then all societies that have a large state sector must be egalitarian, and that therefore egalitarianism can be approached by public expenditure alone. (Again, I do not want to examine the truth of the premise that all egalitarian societies have large state sectors, let alone whether egalitarianism is desirable.) From the fact that many rich people drink champagne it does not follow - unless you are given to magical thinking - that drinking champagne will make you rich.

What conclusion should we draw from the fact that, while public expenditure is at the very least compatible with an egalitarian society, our society has such public expenditure without being in the least egalitarian? I am afraid that I do not think that the conclusion is very flattering to our national amour propre.

It means that we have a deeply, profoundly corrupt state, a state that is rotten to its core, and whose rottenness is now its very raison d'etre. The corruption is not of the vulgar, money-under-the-table variety, of the kind that increases efficiency where over-regulation is happily tempered by the monetary dishonesty of officialdom; it is far worse and more damaging than that, for there is nothing whatever to be said in its favour.

If the enormous increase in public expenditure has not brought about social equality, what has it brought about? The answer, I think, is a Nomenklatura state, in which the highest ranks have been encouraged to arrogate to themselves huge rewards from the public purse.

I do not mean by this that there is a crude dichotomy between those who are paid fabulous sums, and their underlings who are paid very little by comparison. As in the Soviet Union, the Nomenklatura has many grades; those at the bottom are only too aware that they are nevertheless privileged by comparison with people of their own calibre who have not joined the Nomenklatura. A pension of £10,000 may be a small one, but if it is granted not only independently of the savings a man has made, but is linked to the cost of living so that it never decreases in value, a privilege is accorded to the pensioner that is beyond the wildest dreams of a man who has laboriously saved £200,000 from his income over the years to produce a pension that starts off at the same level, but might very well soon halve in real value. Thus the man on the bottom rung of the Nomenklatura is unlikely to oppose the man at the top in any very fundamental way; no one clings on to anything as tightly as to a small privilege.

It is possible that the British Nomenklatura was originally called into being because it was thought by certain politicians that only thus could the public service be modernised and made efficient; while it was thought by other politicians that only a public service could bring about increased social equality. Be that as it may, the Nomenklatura now has a life and power of its own. Its ostensible purposes - health, education, even defence - are the most feeble or transparent of pretexts; its real purpose is personal enrichment and institutional aggrandisement.

Unfortunately, Nomenklaturas not only flourish best, but actively bring about, zero-sum games. Their wealth really is the poverty of others - precisely the charge long, but quite erroneously, brought against economically open societies.

The public service in Scandinavian societies has not been transformed into a Nomenklatura, unlike the British. Why there should have been this difference is an interesting and important question, and I do not pretend to have the definitive answer (in any case, there can be no "final" explanation, without a yet deeper, or at any rate more remote, one). What seems to me clear is that the level of honesty - moral, intellectual and financial - of the population in Britain has declined drastically. We are now a nation of special pleaders who are on the take.

To put it another way, Britain is a country in which equality of opportunity has been the politico-bureaucratic pretext for perpetuating inequality while destroying opportunity. Impoverishment will be our well-merited fate.

First posted at Social Affairs Unit.

Americans would do well to ponder a recent admission by a former British minister in the Blair government. On March 2, the Guardian reported that the ex-minister, now Lord Warner, said that while spending on Britain’s National Health Service had increased by 60 percent under the Labour government, its output had decreased by 4 percent. No doubt the spending of a Soviet-style organization like the NHS is more easily measurable than its output, but the former minister’s remark certainly accords with the experiences of many citizens, who see no dramatic improvement in the service as a result of such vastly increased outlays. On the contrary, while the service has taken on 400,000 new staff members—that is to say, one-fifth of all new jobs created in Britain during the period—continuity of medical care has been all but extinguished. Nobody now expects to see the same doctor on successive occasions, in the hospital or anywhere else.

The ex-minister admitted that most of the extra money—which by now must equal a decent proportion of the total national debt—had been simply wasted. (The same might be said, of course, of the increased outlays put toward state education.) But his explanation for this state of affairs was superficial and self-exculpating, to say the least: he said that the NHS received more money than it knew what to do with because of managerial inexperience. “It was like giving a starving man foie gras and caviar,” he said.

As it happens, the NHS knew exactly what to do with the money: give it to its staff, new and old. British doctors, for example, are now the second-highest-paid in the world, though not necessarily the happiest. They have accepted the money on condition that they also accept—as quietly as mice—increasing government interference in their work. When you go to a family doctor in Britain, he is more likely to do what the government thinks he ought to do and will pay him a bonus for doing than what he thinks is right. This is sinister, even when what the government thinks is right happens to be right.

There is a possible explanation other than managerial inexperience for the waste, namely that the waste was intended and desired: indeed, that it was the principal object of the spending. Experience has long shown that further spending by state-monopoly suppliers of services (if services is quite the word I seek) benefits not the consumers but the providers. And they—ever more numerous—naturally vote for their own providers, the politicians. Thus the NHS has become an enormously expensive method of ballot-stuffing. Personally, I would rather have outright electoral fraud. It would be less expensive and slightly more honest.

Just before the last election, the chief executive of one of the hospitals in which I once worked was overheard saying, “My job is to make sure that the government is reelected.” (The government’s job, in turn, was to make sure that she remained chief executive.) She also explained that the hospital could expect no increase in its government funding, unlike other hospitals—because it was located in an area in which most people voted for the government anyway.

First posted at City Journal.