Psychologists are well aware that we are all Keatsians, assuming (in the words of the Wikipedia) that ‘people who are physically attractive also possess other socially desirable personality traits’. Depending on what the culture values, these traits may include happiness, extraversion, success, kindness, altruism, loyalty and integrity. The fact that physical attractiveness does actually correlate with certain other traits, not least income, social skills and self-confidence, can easily be the result of the stereotype rather than its cause; that is, we fawn on the beautiful and give them what they want. All this being well known, one may then ask why parents spend so much time trying to con their offspring into the belief that the only thing that matters is what they are like ‘inside’; on which see my chapter “Beauty and the Beast”.

When we talk about the ‘innocence of childhood’, we generally mean ignorance of genital anatomy and sexual intercourse. This peculiar equation of ideas is maintained in order to conceal something a lot worse than sex: our reluctance to tell our children about the realities of competition, and how the race is not to the swift but to the cheat.

For any human organisation or enterprise, there is the way it purports to work and the way it actually does work. Civics books tell us about democratic institutions, but not about the family networks that represent the real power; real communication in a workplace may follow factional lines rather than the flow-chart; universities contain both Gnomes, who read books, and Operators, who press the flesh at conferences; and all of the above applies to high school. The official story is that you study hard, sit the examinations, get good marks and proceed to a splendid career; but playing the system can be just as if not more effective.

Some parents instruct their children in how things really work, and the children understand and act on what they hear. There must surely be as many cases where the children fail to understand what their cynical old folks are telling them about how to ‘get on’, and so confine themselves to doing what is officially required of them. Yet again, there must be the opposite cases, where the children are more perceptive than their credulous parents, and so work out how to succeed by their innate talent for observation and deduction. Perhaps the saddest combination is when conformist parents, who have devoted their own lifetimes to not understanding how the world wags, exhort their offspring exclusively in terms of the exoteric cover story, and the children actually believe them, study and work hard, and so live their lives without ever understanding how they have been overtaken and sidelined by lazier or dumber contemporaries.

One reason why so many parents fail to prepare their children for the realities of the adult world is probably to do with class markers; the middle-class child must at all costs be seen to be ‘well-spoken’ and ‘nice’, whereas a nakedly street-smart and predatory bourgeois child would compromise the class status of his parents. For its part, the aristocracy has never cared a fig for ‘niceness’, while the proletariat places a greater value on assertiveness. The old-style labourer father, therefore, taught his son to handle himself in a brawl while the middle-class mother insisted that he be a self-effacing nonentity.

In ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, Freud complained that we do not adequately prepare children for the aggressiveness of the adult world. Instead of telling the young that people would benefit from following certain rules, even though in reality these same people mostly ignore them, ‘the young are made to believe that everyone else fulfils those ethical demands — that is, that everyone else is virtuous. It is on this that the demand is based that the young, too, shall become virtuous.’ I can certainly echo that from my own experience; my generation was constantly informed that our elders were, one and all, moral paragons. By some evil alchemy this virtuous generation had nevertheless begotten a horde of moral monsters, namely us. There was no question of pointing to another adult as an example of what not to do, unless in the form of frowning and sniffing and remarks that they were ‘not our sort of people’, which implied more a social distinction than any real ethical objection. Not that the English middle classes of those days could tell the difference.

Since then the situation may have become even worse, as progressive education appears to require the protection of the young from anything remotely traumatic, going so far as the attempt to prevent a group of children developing the internal pecking order natural to all animal groups. In other words, we expect our infants to rise above the vicious hierarchical games that we ourselves practice, as if they were a different and superior species.

When a company boasts of being ‘Established in 1810’, what does this mean other than 200 years of chiselling and corruption?

The bureaucrat, whether public or private, has no time to not-perform any given task, because he is so busy not-performing all his other tasks. Besides, he is always attending meetings in order to make sure that all tasks are not-performed in a uniform manner and that everyone is not-singing from the same songbook.

Idea for a satire: the Total QM or HSE/Q Handbooks for the building of the Pyramids.

The Norwegians experienced this situation as totally meaningless, but the Americans seemed very satisfied. Now, Americans like to portray themselves as pragmatic and results-oriented, but this is not what we see here. It was the Norwegians, from an egalitarian political system but inexperienced in the ways of the oil industry and multinational corporations, who understood the difference between work and makework, between getting things done and admiring oneself in the mirror while commanding that they be done. Dare we say that inasmuch as the Americans achieved anything, it was in the teeth of their addiction to the emotional satisfactions of ostentatious command? Dare we say, further, that this betrays their past as a slave state?

(fiddle date to March 11 2009, late)

In consequence of a generation of revisionism, the popular mind now thinks it knows several things: that medieval Islam was incomparably more advanced than medieval Christianity; and that the First Crusade was an unprovoked irruption of barbarian aggressors into a settled, peaceful and cultured Oriental world. With the first perception one might fruitfully niggle, but the second is plain wrong in several ways at once. Accordingly, it may be time for some counter-counter-revisionism.

First, Syria-Palestine was by no means a settled and peaceful world. Arab civilisation was in the process of being overrun by Turks, a warrior people from the fringes of the Muslim world, burning with the orthodox zeal of the new convert. Urban populations everywhere regarded them as barbarians. Political authority was everywhere falling into the hands of these Turkish warlords, and the schism between Sunni and Sh’ia was inflamed. The Seljuk sultanate was under attack by a sophisticated transnational terrorist network, and northern Syria was devastated by a civil war within the last Arab dynasty in the region, the Mirdasids of Aleppo. Jerusalem changed hands several times, between the Fatimids of Egypt and Turkish adventurers. And indeed, the success of the First Crusade was made possible only by this Muslim disunity; the Crusaders appeared as just one more element in the game of Syrian politics, a rats’ nest at the best of times. As for the Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land, this was now hazardous, and Christendom resounded with horror stories of pillage, rape and massacre. The word ‘crusade’ was not invented until much later; the expedition of 1095 thought of itself as an armed pilgrimage, intended to re-open the pilgrimage route. We must imagine modern tourists setting off for some troubled tropical location as large parties with substantial military escorts, prepared to fight their way through all comers to the golden beaches and the umbrella drinks.

Second, the princes involved certainly had ideas of territorial acquisition. For the Byzantine Emperor, who had started this avalanche, that was the whole point. He wanted the eastern half of his empire back, and did not have the manpower to get it. Byzantium had employed Frankish mercenaries before, and the Muslims expected no less of it now. From that perspective, the First Crusade was a Byzantine campaign that spun out of control; the Emperor was only aiming at Antioch, and the Frankish princes would probably have been content with that too, had not the rank and file of the Frankish army insisted on pushing on to Jerusalem. What the revisionists who portray the First Crusade as an unprovoked war of aggression do not seem to know, however, is that Byzantium had never renounced its claim on the whole of Syria and Palestine. Seen from Constantinople, they were occupied territory. It is true that they had been occupied for a very long time, but the Byzantines were entirely capable of thinking in millennia. When a piece of land changes hands twice, we may call the second acquisition either a conquest or a reconquest, and the usage is always tendentious. Obviously the first owners will want to call it a reconquest, a regaining of what is theirs, and equally obviously the new owners will want to bemoan it as a conquest, and will probably call it unprovoked aggression into the bargain. When, therefore, the revisionists call the Christian acquisition of parts of Syria and Palestine a conquest and not a reconquest, they are taking the position that the original Arab conquest of these regions from the Byzantine Empire was somehow righteous, or at least so long ago as to make the possession legitimate, while denying the Christians the right to try to take them back.

If the argument turns entirely on length of deprivation, and it is held that the passage of the 500 years since the Byzantines had last held Jerusalem invalidates their claim, what then shall we say of Antioch, which is what Byzantium thought it was using the Franks to secure? Antioch had been in Muslim hands for a mere ten years. Shall we then say that a millennium on the Christian side is not enough to establish legitimacy, whereas ten years on the Muslim side is sufficient? In their zeal to retell the story through Muslim eyes, the revisionists thus commit themselves very fundamentally to the Islamic doctrine of the Dar al-Islam, which is that any territory once Muslim-ruled is claimed for all eternity. It would be worth asking them whether Andalucia must then be returned to Morocco.

Similarly, the revisionists talk about the Crusaders invading the Muslim East and so forth. And yet some of these regions were Muslim only in the sense that 19th-century India was Anglican, or France between 1940 and 1945 was German. Antioch, for example, was an entirely Christian city that happened to be under the military occupation of Turkish warlords. Much the same goes for the rest of Syria and Palestine, which were most imperfectly Islamised; particularly the mountainous parts of Syria were dominated by Christians. Overall the region was probably half and half. That these Christian populations welcomed their co-religionists as liberators from the barbarous Turks is a fact not invalidated by their subsequent strained relations with their new Frankish and Norman masters. Regarding the region as intrinsically Muslim is at best a back-projection from the present day, leavened by ignorance of even the present-day Christian population, and at worst propaganda serving the interests of the new-caliphate movement.

(Fiddle date to April 21 2009)

(Fiddle date to April 19 2009)

(fiddle date to 24 July 2009)

(Fiddle date to April 18, 2009)

‘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.