The Cheshire Blamer
It is a grave error to believe that habitual or devoted blamers blame only because there is something to be blamed. Such people blame because they gain their emotional satisfactions therefrom, and the more catholically they blame, the more catholic their emotional satisfactions. For example, the pleasure to be derived from blaming your husband is nothing to the pleasures of blaming the entire race of men, and if you can learn to blame whole societies – under the related magic rubrics of Patriarchy or the ZOG – why then, so much the better for you. This kind of blaming is in all probability something you learned at your same-sex parent’s knee: for just as little boys learn drinking, swearing, competitive farting and wife-beating, their little sisters learn refinement, priggishness and the hierarchy of moral disdain. Having learned it and practised it all your life, it becomes the central principle of your being, so that when you die, there will remain a Blame floating over the spot for decades before dispersing.
(Fiddle date to April 19 2009)
Pride and Parasites
One popular take on Mrs. Bennett is that she is struggling to survive, and see her daughters survive. This, however, seems to be a confusion with the predicament of some South Asian equivalent; it does violence to the text, which makes it clear that she had a comfortable income of her own when she met her husband, who married down for her. She could in fact support her girls at home if she had to. Is what she wants for her daughters to be settled and happy, or is it to use them for further social climbing? Or we may see her as a ruthless rent-seeker. There are people out there with their own fortunes and incomes to which she has no access, fancy that, how terrible. Mrs. Bennett’s dream is therefore to intercept five such revenue streams and put them to better use. She will naturally be telling us that it is for her daughters’ sake, but the fact remains that, if she gets her way, she will be considerably richer and five gentlemen will each be somewhat poorer. This is not as serious as would be the case if the five gentlemen were economically productive, they are surely all mere rentiers themselves, so it serves them right to have to support Mrs. Bennett in the style to which she hopes to become accustomed. This is, of course, the point of the Austen world, though not necessarily the Austen terminology – everyone is a parasite, and the trees on which the ivy climbs are largely invisible. In a better world Mrs. Bennett might lower her sights and marry her daughters off to prosperous tradesmen and artisans doing something useful, so that her daughters would participate in doing something useful; but then her social status would be lower, and in England no one ever voluntarily drops a class. Sometimes, however, impecunious nobles sold their daughters to rich upstarts (and later, Americans) to preserve their estates. Since there were surely carriage-makers and master builders who would be pleased to have a Bennett daughter, what Mrs. Bennett is really about, therefore, is burnishing her image of herself by rising in the hierarchy. She clearly believes that she has been created to live on the labour of others, as an adornment thereof, and now hopes to escalate her parasitism. Having had a son might have broken the Bennett entail, to be sure, but it is doubtful whether that would be preferable to the rent-seeking achievable with four pretty daughters. It couldn’t have come out much better with 22nd-century designer foetuses.
(fiddle date to 24 July 2009)
The Social Exclusion Algorithm
If, to a jaundiced eye, men may appear to be mere programs for fighting, fucking and boasting, to what simple program may women – in the name of equal treatment – be reduced? If you had to model female behaviour in a few lines of Basic, what would be the output? Preening and attention-seeking would be strong candidates, if the program was meant to run on a single woman, but in more realistic social environments the answer will surely be banding together to cut an individual out of the group and destroy her. This is, after all, learnt around the age of five. Any human group that has grown too large, too inclusive or too tolerant needs to acquire the utility program called XYclude, which scans, evaluates, ranks and quarantines all other software.
(Fiddle date to April 18, 2009)
A child for the furnace
The ultimate example of producing children for the market was the worship of Moloch. Philistines, and Carthaginians after them, sacrificed their first-born children to the god. This was done by placing the infants in the arms of the statue, which by mechanical means then lifted and tipped the babies into a furnace. No doubt the priests who crafted the mechanism and stoked the fire were paid for putting on a good show, but what was the bottom line for the parents? In accordance with the universal nature of the religious scam, they were promised prosperity. Now, if that actually worked, which of course it had no reason to, then incinerating your firstborn becomes a sound evolutionary strategy; the extra wealth you obtain from the favour of a well-fed Moloch can be spent on your next children. Granted the premise, it would actually be the economically rational thing to do.
Now, given that any Carthaginian was well aware of all this, it follows that every couple began their married life with sexual activity consciously intended to engender a child that they could burn alive in order to grow their business. Perhaps the alleged protective instinct of parents is not as strong as we think. One wonders whether Carthaginians shared our modern prejudice that engendering a child accidentally is morally inferior to having a ‘wanted’ child to sacrifice to one’s own interests.
(fiddle date to July 27 2009 late)
The spinster
When people have children to look after them in their old age, but expect the children to have children of their own before doing so, we have a stable system in which everyone sacrifices and everyone is sacrificed for. In some cultures, however, symmetry is broken; the parents demand that the daughter remain a spinster to look after them. Who, then, will look after the spinster when she is old? Apparently the parents do not care. That the woman still performs her assigned duty, knowing that she will die lonely and miserable, and knowing that her parents know it, is a remarkable thing. If she herself is insisting on remaining single, then one suspects that she is looking forward to a reward in the afterlife; she will not, of course, be disappointed, since she will not exist to be disappointed.
(fiddle date to July 9 2009)
Ethical naturalism on Anopopei
When I was doing moral philosophy, there was a school of thought that viewed ethical terminology as denoting some real characteristic of the object, on which everyone could agree. A knife, for example, was called good when it was suitable for its purpose, namely cutting. Calling a person good was more complicated, as it was by no means obvious what the purpose of a human being is, but I suppose one could make the attempt. This came back to my mind when I read Norman Mailer’s great war novel, in which a soldier, who was inhabiting a hell on earth in the form of a Japanese-held tropical island, received a letter from his parents that informed him: ‘We appreciate the money you sent us, you are a good son’.
(fiddle date to July 8 2009)
WWKD?
The other day I was reading a whodunit set in North Carolina, and one of the characters sported a WWJD tiepin. The New Yorker character had to have it explained to him as ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ Apparently this abbreviation is very common in the Red States. We urban secular sophisticates, however, ought to take a break from laughing at the dumb crackers and consider how the slogan might serve a purpose, in a way that does not require us to believe in Jesus, to believe that he acted as described, or even that he ever lived.
The three main components of the Kantian ethical system, namely the Categorical Imperative, the Practical Imperative and the much-derided insistence that only the uncongenial can be moral, may usefully be turned over and viewed from the other side, not as proofs ex nihilo of ethical rules, but as an attempt to short-circuit our natural tendencies, which will always be various forms of Special Pleading. That is, our natural tendencies are to persuade ourselves that whatever accords with our inclinations must be the right thing to do (the anti-Good Will), to treat others as our prey animals (the anti-Practical Imperative) and to believe that ‘It doesn’t apply to Me!’ (the anti-Categorical Imperative). Kant’s principles thus act as specifically targeted drugs against these three diseases.
Now, asking ‘What Would [Somebody Else] Do?’ is another way of trying to disarm the bomb of our special pleading. Any somebody-else would do. For this question, by asking us to imagine someone else acting instead of ourselves, sidesteps the evil delusion that we in our unique wonderfulness get special breaks denied to others. If I feel that Fred Bloggs would be a very bad man if he were to do this thing, then this helps me to realise that I would be a very bad man as well. If I do not possess Fred’s inclinations and or feel his desires, and he does not feel mine, this helps me to look coldly on the act itself, objectively considered. And it is not in my interests to encourage Fred, even in my own imagination, to regard the rest of us as prey animals. All this benefit we get from asking ourselves what Fred Bloggs would do, even if Fred is no better a person than ourselves. All the greater is the payoff when we ask what someone who is known to be ethically sound would do. For a Christian, the obvious move is to ask what Jesus would do, and the Muslims are taught to consider what the Prophet is known to have done in like circumstances. Even if we have no ethical exemplars to our names, however, it is an extremely valuable exercise to imagine the act we wish to commit being performed by someone who is not our precious selves, in whose favour we are so inclined to legislate exceptions and dispensations.
(fiddle date to 30 July 2009)
Having and being
As well as describing ourselves in noun-driven language, which forces us to think of our future deceased selves as the persisting subjects of the predicate ‘dead’, we make further trouble for ourselves with the verb ‘to have’. For whenever we say that we ‘have’ a body, we are implying that we are not our body; whenever we say that we ‘have’ a brain, we are implying that we are not our brain; similarly, whenever we say that we ‘have’ a mind, we imply we are something other than our mind. All right, then: if we are not our body, not our brain and not our mind, what then are we – what is this thing that ‘has’ these four possessions?
It is no good looking for a fifth thing, an XYZ, and saying that we ‘are’ that, because no sooner would people be familiar with the word, than they would start saying say that they ‘had’ an XYZ, which again would provoke the question of what is this we that ‘had’ an XYZ. We would thus be back at square one. Once we have made the fateful decision to describe what we are with the aid of the verb ‘to have’, everything we know about ourselves, or think we know about ourselves, tends to become the object of said verb. This in turn means that its subject, the ‘we’, has necessarily to mean everything left over. Now, if the ‘we’ that ‘has’, has all the aspects of ourselves that we know about, or think we know about, then the ‘we’ has to mean that which we do not even imagine we know about. This sets us up for manipulation and exploitation by people who purport, for suitable reward, to inform us about what this ‘we’ really is, the we that has a body, a brain and a mind.
Funnily enough, however, these operators fall into the same trap by speaking as if the thing they are selling us, the ‘soul’, is also something that we have, which means that it is not, after all, the ‘we’. So, if we are not our body, not our brain, not our mind, and not even our soul, then what on earth are we? Answer comes there none. But if we stop the game and say that it is the language that is all wrong here, this alleged object the soul is not something we have but something we are, then why should we wait until the end of the sequence to do so? We might just as well say that we are our body and brain, and have done with it.
(fiddle date to May 16, 2009)
Kill them all, God will know His own
Once upon a time there was a notion that a country might defend itself by force of arms against another country that was invading it, but should leave in peace those countries that were not invading it. We are now so much more sophisticated: for we may now pre-emptively defend against, that is to say, attack, countries that ‘support terrorism’. If we take care to leave both terms, ‘support’ and ‘terrorism’, ill-defined, the conjoint concept amounts to such countries doing something that we do not like in places that are none of our business. It serves to blur the line between attacking us and not-attacking us, which means that we may potentially pre-emptively defend against (that is, attack) anyone at all.
‘Supporting terrorism’ also serves to make the threat less operational than existential: that is, the crime of the other country lies not in doing anything in particular but simply in existing.
This is precisely equivalent to an earlier age’s sin of ‘harbouring heresy’. Raymond VI of Toulouse would have understood the ‘war on terror’ very well. It was during the crusade against him that the slogan ‘Kill them all, God will know his own’ was coined, a slogan of which variants are still heard among American soldiers who have no idea in which country Toulouse is to be found.
Above criticism and above discussion
It is not permissible to criticise a wartime leader? In that case the moral is: become and above all remain a wartime leader. As far as we know, it never occurred to Roosevelt and Truman to leave off defeating Germany and Japan so that they could enjoy their war powers indefinitely. The enemy was defined in such a way that unconditional surrender clearly meant the end of the war. It will be possible to say that the Long War, on the other hand, is not yet over as long as there is any resistance anywhere in the world to American domination and extraction. Ultimately everybody will see through this, but by then certain institutional changes will have been completed, in such a way that by then it will no longer matter whether they have seen through it or not.
In 2007 a British cabinet minister who had been so bold as to make observations about the causes of terrorism was obliged to explain that he had meant to ‘stress its origins’ and not to ‘condone or incite terrorism’. Unfolding before our eyes here is the dynamic of revolutions that devour their children; for it was that minister’s very own government that had criminalised the ‘glorification’ of terrorism, past present and future, thus making political science a most hazardous discipline. The difference between glorification and understanding cannot, of course, withstand the need of somebody or other to score political points. Once you have defined something as being so absolutely evil as to be beyond the pale of discussion, then the game becomes all about connecting your opponent’s position to that something, whether it be terrorism, counter-revolution, international Jewry or heresy.
