Wednesday, 13 November 2024
I didn’t know such people existed
“I didn’t believe my senses. I didn’t know such people existed. And her friends! Oh the dreadful friends she had — these Fabians!” Oh, their eugenics. They wanted to examine my private morals, for eugenic reasons. Oh, you can’t imagine such a state. Worse than the Spanish Inquisition. And I stood it for three years. How I stood it, I don’t know — ”
D.H. Lawrence - The Lost Girl (1920)
Published over a century ago but could have been written today. There is still something of the ghastly, self-righteous, prodnose Fabian about our political class. That’s ‘class’ singular, there are enough similarities to leave it that way.
It isn’t easy to look back on earlier attitudes and impressions, but before the internet I’m fairly sure I didn’t know such people existed in such grasping, supercilious profusion.
An improbably honest Fabian might say –
We Fabians adopt authority and make it ours, so naturally we defer to authority and in so doing we defer to ourselves. We revere authority because we are authority. Admittedly that must make us seem somewhat narcissist in our general outlook, but this too is one of the burdens of authority.
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6 comments:
In my youth we had a widely liked Conservative MP - or, strictly, a National Liberal Unionist MP. He was a farmer, had had a "good war" flying in Coastal Command, and had played wing-forward for Langholm and the South of Scotland. They don't make them like that any more.
My admittedly hazy recollection of my youth (many many years ago) was that 'class' was pervasive. But that meant that the ordinary workers and housewives just got on with their lives and regarded the upper classes with *their* class concerns as a sort of free Ruritanian circus.
What has changed since then is that self elected 'class warriors' of any class are now dedicated to making their class (and its concerns) universal. And when you have too many warriors with time on their hands class war seems inevitable.
I'm going with my usual boring narrative. Such people have always existed, they rose to the top because they were more ruthless, devious, and damaged than the rest of us. The change is in information technology, which led to the break-up of their dominant narrative. We can now see that they are of average intelligence and below-average morality because we are better informed and can hear more voices.
Another possible change is that there were constitutional, procedural, and social constraints upon these loons, and they are now destroying them in order to protect their privilege. We need to get rid of many useless drones (like Musk is being tasked with across the pond) and set up new rigorous safeguards.
dearieme - they certainly don't make them like that any more. At least some worthwhile experience outside politics would be a start.
DJ - "'class warriors' of any class are now dedicated to making their class (and its concerns) universal."
Particularly its concerns. Yes we do have too many class warriors where universities, the media and comfortable lives seem to have created a malign class with too much time and too little contact with the real world.
Sam - I saw a recent comment on similar lines saying that too many people are too well informed for weak political narratives to survive without censorship. The nature of constraints seems to have changed too, becoming less moral and more political.
It feels like a complex mix where drifting away from genuine hardship has also played a part.
“ There is still something of the ghastly, self-righteous, prodnose Fabian about our political class.”
Starmer is far more than that … Fabian is too nicey-nicey to call it … it is fanatical communism in him I’m afraid … with those glazed eyes.
Anon - a number of people have mentioned his eyes, like buttons with no expression. There is something not right about him, someone who sees rules and systems but not people.
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