Wednesday, 26 January 2022
Cheap and Easy
He gives a shilling to a starving man, not that the man may be fed but that he himself may be a shilling-giver. He cultivates sympathy with the destitute for the sake of being sympathetic. The whole of his virtue and his creed of conduct runs to a cheap and easy egomania in which his blind passion for himself causes him to use external people and things as mere reactions upon his own personality. The immoral little toad swells itself to the bursting point in its desire to be a moral ox.
Stephen Leacock - The Devil and the Deep Sea (1916)
There is a modern version of a cheap and easy egomania, we call virtue signalling. Cheap and easy seems to express the ease with which such ideas spread like a pandemic through supposedly educated populations.
Ideas cheap enough to represent at most a negligible personal loss. Easy enough to dispense with brain work in favour of a small number of easily remembered mantras. Plus, weirdest of all, a cheap and easy ability to defend forever those cheap and easy ideas.
Slogans, simple doctrines, finger-pointing, popular memes, mantras, sentimental clichés, placards, car stickers, silly T-shirts, art, popular sneers and feeding off it all like pigs at a trough, cheap a cheap and easy political class, cheap and easy media and cheap and easy celebrities. Cheap and easy comedy, cheap and easy documentaries, cheap and easy music blundering its way out of the supermarket sound system.
It seems to be entirely possible that we are where we are politically and socially because of cheap and easy ideas spread by immensely complex and marvellously clever technology which has become too cheap and easy for our own good.
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6 comments:
Talking of cheap and easy, when I was a fresher I was hired as a bodyguard for a stripper.
Which reminds me of the old joke about the chap who worked at the Windmill Theatre:
"How much?"
"Two pounds a night."
"That's not much."
"It's all I can afford."
Excellent, both.
Leacock was lucky. The type of egomania he wrote about was essentially private. Chaps may have been miserable amoral hypocrites trying to make themselves feel good, but at least they were reserved and secretive about it. Now, they are able to publish their ridiculous attempts via twitter and Facebook, etc.
And that might be how it will all collapse - under the weight of its own vacuity. Then, with luck we can go back to private amorality and mere self-deception.
Those are wise words, we haven't changed much in the last hundred years, apart from becoming more selfish. I have noticed that rather than quietly giving to charities there is now a tendency to crow about it. It is my belief that giving is often a selfish act, whether it be giving to a worthy cause or giving the most expensive present to a child.
The seven deadly sins have been rebranded as virtues.
dearieme - a bodyguard for a stripper sounds exotic. Did you stay in touch?
James - thanks.
Sam - yes it was essentially private, as were many other aspects of life. Their egomania was less infectious perhaps.
Andy - it certainly can be a selfish act in that it directs attention to the giver. Maybe charities know that and play on it.
"Did you stay in touch?" Not likely; she was a poor, wretched soul.
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