Hols

Yesterday we whizzed off down the M5 in the rain - won't rush to do that again but we're on holiday now so blogging may be even more erratic than usual. 

Not that there is much going on in the world apart from wars, division, conflict and the looming reality of totalitarian politics.

Let's have an Edith Wharton quote instead.  

In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one CAN remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small

Edith Wharton’s 1934 autobiography 'A Backward Glance'

Like a blue-bottle

Chancellor dealt major blow as business confidence sinks: Bad news for Reeves ahead of Spring Statement

Rachel Reeves was dealt a further blow last night as figures showed business optimism had plummeted to its lowest level in four years...

The figure tumbled to 91.4 – the lowest since January 2021 – from 92.2 in December. A reading of 100 is average, while a gauge below 95 is negative.


The lowest since January 2021 eh? So Rachel from Accounts has managed to reduce business confidence to a pandemic level.

Blimey.


A stupid woman, now, would insist on going over the whole thing again, like a blue-bottle that starts in banging about the room after you're sure you've driven it out of the window.

Edith Wharton – The Children (1928)

Fake philanthropy

Smoking ban UK: What does the new bill do as MPs vote to ban tobacco for generation alpha?

MPs have voted to pass a landmark smoking bill which the government says will create the UK’s first “smokefree generation”.

First announced in the King’s speech last November, the controversial bill passed through Commons on Tuesday (April 16) as Labour threw their weight behind it. It was not without opposition.

56 Tory MPs voted against Rishi Sunak’s bill, while a further to 106 either abstained or were absent. However, members had been given a free vote by the government, meaning they have not been told which way to vote. This softens the blow for Mr Sunak in against this backbench rebellion.


Yet another step away from conservative politics. Ban lying to children about climate change and gender would give them a better start in life. Apparently Sunak prefers fake philanthropy.


The philanthropy was what he most hated: all these expensive plans for moral forcible feeding, for compelling everybody to be cleaner, stronger, healthier and happier than they would have been by the unaided light of Nature. The longing to get away into a world where men and women sinned and begot, lived and died, as they chose, without the perpetual intervention of optimistic millionaires, had become so strong that he sometimes felt the chain of habit would snap with his first jerk.

Edith Wharton – Twilight Sleep (1927)

An obvious incapacity

An obvious incapacity for abstract conceptions made him peculiarly susceptible to the magic of generalization, and one felt he would have been at the mercy of any Cause that spelled itself with a capital letter.

Edith Wharton - Crucial Instances (1901)


It isn’t only the magic of causes or even Causes. An incapacity for abstract conceptions divides people, as does a susceptibility to the magic of generalisation. Compare the two as Wharton did and perhaps we have a major political divide because the political classes love the magic of generalisation. So do I because that’s a generalisation too, but easily observed.

It is another aspect of the magic of simplicity versus the effort of nuance and complexity. Take the Russell Brand case as an example. Swamping the abstract conception of innocent until proven guilty, we had the immediate magic of generalisation - a rampant libido casting the shadow of guilt. So powerful is it that innocent until proven guilty seems like a legalistic quibble.

We see another example with climate change where the magical generalisation of “almost all scientists agree” outweighs the scientific method, the abstract conception which brought us here. The generalisation isn’t even sound, but it doesn’t have to be because the magic also dispenses with the need to check. Again it’s the magic of simplicity versus the effort of tackling nuance and complexity.

Or take this example where the Labour party has stated its intention to extract more money from private education.

Last night, reports emerged that Labour has U-turned on its plans to remove the charitable status of private schools.

However, it has now emerged that, while Labour still plans to force independent schools to pay VAT, it will no longer remove their charitable status.

A party spokesperson said: "Our policy remains. We will remove the unfair tax breaks that private schools benefit from, to fund desperately needed teachers and mental health counselling in every secondary school.

The supposed need for mental health counselling in every secondary school is one of those magical generalisations, aligned in this case with long-standing political spite. The far more complex and politically difficult question of why the counselling is needed in every school is evaded by the generalisation. 

Wave the magic wand of generalisation and another can is kicked down the road.

Read the label

But he gradually perceived that the words she used had no meaning for her save, as it were, a symbolic one: they were like the mysterious price-marks with which dealers label their treasures.

Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth (1905)


Many people will have noticed a common orthodox reaction to ideas which are contrary to mainstream mantras. When conventional folk encounter unorthodox ideas, their reaction can be an almost visible search for familiar labels such as far-right, racist or outdated - symbols of their unwillingness to engage further.

There are many social and political labels available to the orthodox as any sceptic knows well. In general they seem to be associated with what is sometimes called confirmation bias, although that too can be used as a label. Used in this way, labels can be paths of least resistance, avoiding the effort of coping with anomalies, or indeed sceptics.

Regular commenter Sam Vega recently recommended a book by Martin Amis titled Koba the Dread. I haven’t read it yet, but I have a sample downloaded onto my Kindle. The book is about Stalin and the indulgence of communism by Western intellectuals, "Koba" being Stalin's nickname. Here is a negative comment on the book copied from the Amazon website.

The book is just anticommunist propaganda, written by a pillar of the bourgeois establishment, Stalin crushed those who opposed socialism and turned a backward country into a nuclear superpower that stood against American capitalist imperialist aggression, revolutions are not a tea party, make no mistake the enemies of socialism must and will be crushed.

This comment is little more than a series of labels and to my mind, so exaggerated that it is likely to be a parody of communist rhetoric. Labels are essential to totalitarian politics, but in this case, padding the labels out would have made the comment slightly more authentic. Could still be authentic though.

We all have to make use of labels of course and there is no rule to distinguish the useful from the evasive. There are clues such as a refusal to engage with reliable facts, uncertainties or inconsistencies, but even these tools cannot deter the labellers. Oops I’ve labelled the labellers.

The tyranny of susceptible people

An obvious incapacity for abstract conceptions made him peculiarly susceptible to the magic of generalization, and one felt he would have been at the mercy of any Cause that spelled itself with a capital letter.

Edith Wharton - Crucial Instances (1901) 


Over 120 years later we don’t have to look far for an example of a Cause that spelled itself with a capital letter. Net Zero spells itself with capital letters and it is certainly infused with the magic of generalisation. Almost as if explicitly designed to attract the starry-eyed susceptible and therein lies the obvious and familiar problem – the susceptible.

To take this further, it is worth remembering that millions of people voted for Jeremy Corbyn to become UK Prime Minister - as if we could forget. Yet this is his political value - his general election votes shouted out a particularly loud and clear message about voter susceptibility.

The Corbyn vote was a reminder that political parties are brands promoted by generalisations with no more depth than toothpaste advertising. The parties sell themselves as the embodiment of certain generalisations and causes designed to snare the susceptible. 

Unfortunately, millions of voters are susceptible to the magic of political generalisation - even Corbyn’s ludicrous version. He is a lasting reminder of that fatal susceptibility. 

The incurable simplicity of the corrupt

It would have been unfashionable to be different; and once more Boyne marvelled at the incurable simplicity of the corrupt. "Blessed are the pure in heart," he thought, "for they have so many more things to talk about. . ."

Edith Wharton – The Children (1928)


Interesting quote this. Wharton is writing of the corrupt nature of fashionable society. It is corrupt, educated, cosmopolitan, articulate yet curiously simple in its absolute need to fashionable.

We see a somewhat similar type of corrupt yet fashionable simplicity in modern politics. It is desperately unfashionable to be politically different so maybe we could modify Wharton’s words –

 

It would have been unfashionable to be politically different; and once more Sceptic marvelled at the incurable simplicity of the politically corrupt. "Blessed are the pure in heart," he thought, "for they have so many more possibilities to talk about. . ."

The magic of generalisation

An obvious incapacity for abstract conceptions made him peculiarly susceptible to the magic of generalization, and one felt he would have been at the mercy of any Cause that spelled itself with a capital letter.

Edith Wharton - Crucial Instances (1901)

The public domain is crowded with abstract ideas, but like Marley’s ghost shackled to his cash boxes, abstract concepts can drag a heavy load of uncertainties and caveats behind them. Away with all that - politically, it is much simpler to use crude generalisations.

A good example of Edith Wharton’s point is the modern growth of fact-checking, as if facts are all we require to set aside the labyrinthine complexities of real life. Even the notion of authoritative fact-checking is a covert generalisation. Facts have to be selected, but who makes the selection?

As a more specific example we could consider an abstract concept such as the scientific method as applied to climate change. Climate change as sold by the media sweeps aside the scientific method and other boring but necessary abstractions such as evidence and uncertainty. It simply replaces difficult and undramatic abstractions with the magic of generalisation such as virtually all scientists agree…

We saw something broadly similar during the coronavirus debacle except that here in the UK the scientists were plonked behind public lecterns. Abstract concepts such as diagnostic uncertainty and uncertainties around draconian and horribly expensive public mitigation policies were swept aside by the magic of generalisation implied by those lecterns. It was almost identical to virtually all scientists agree…

We see it again in the Ukraine conflict where abstract concepts such as evidence and the uncertainty of sources have been swept aside by the magic of good guy / bad guy generalisations with which we are all familiar. To a significant degree, this one is sold as all decent people agree…

And of course we’ll see it again…. And again…

The deadening atmosphere of mediocrity

And it was therefore instructive to note what effect the "deadening atmosphere of mediocrity" (I quote Miss Croft) was having on him.

Edith Wharton - The Verdict (1908)


During the past few weeks we have visited two large antiques centres. Via the music played over their speakers they managed to create two distinctly different atmospheres for customers.

Centre A played a radio show over their speaker system. Customers were treated to a standard radio show babbler interspersed with what sounded to me like shopping centre pop music. Much the same music as our local Co-op.

Centre B played what sounded like 1930s jazz and dance band music with no babbler. Much more congenial to my ear and the absence of a radio show babbler was a real bonus. The coffee in the café was unusually good too.

To my mind, one centre managed to create just the right atmosphere for browsing antiques and one did not. Maybe it was just me, but maybe it is also significant that centre B is quirky with lots of oddities to catch the eye. Centre A is more like a department store where the goods on display happen to be antiques.

Those who knew the live structure

The compact world of my youth has receded into a past from which it can only be dug up in bits by the assiduous relic-hunter; and its smallest fragments begin to be worth collecting and putting together before the last of those who knew the live structure are swept away with it.

Edith Wharton - A Backward Glance (1934)

It is surprising how profoundly we are constrained by the fact that we cannot go back to an earlier situation or set of circumstances. We cannot unsay a hasty remark, rebuild a neglected friendship, revisit the career we should have chosen, fully correct a poor education and so on and so on.

We may be able to patch, mend and partially correct many things but we are never able to go back to that point in time where it first went wrong. The mistake, the fork in the road, the dubious decision, the neglect of something we should never have neglected. We cannot even go back to how things were yesterday – not exactly. We certainly cannot go back to how things were a year ago, ten years ago, a lifetime ago.

Yet although this inescapable constraint is an obvious feature of daily life, although it tells us over and over again to be guided by the past rather than imaginary futures – in spite of all that we find ourselves enmeshed in the most absurd political fantasies. Which of course makes things even worse – we can’t go back to where those fantasies gained a foothold.

We constantly forget the do nothing option, or do whatever is necessary and no more. Instead we flounder around in a political environment where being seen to do something is the basic rationale, the basic driver of all major political movements. Consult the UK coronavirus debacle as an example.

Yet a sceptical, stay with what works approach is the only way to mitigate our inability to go back to where we first messed things up. We have to foresee the potential for messing things up. It’s a balance, but not a difficult balance, merely a case of paying political attention to the do nothing and do as little as possible options.

Take just one example of many – mass immigration. The do nothing option was no mass immigration. Simple. Now there is no going back to a world with no integration problems. Now we can’t even acknowledge it as a major blunder.

Soon the do nothing immigration option will be forgotten. A past where better decisions could have been taken will be forgotten as time moves on until the last of those who knew the live structure are swept away with it.

Swept aside

I have lingered over these details because they formed a part — a most important and honourable part — of that ancient curriculum of house-keeping which, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries, was so soon to be swept aside by the “monstrous regiment” of the emancipated: young women taught by their elders to despise the kitchen and the linen room, and to substitute the acquiring of University degrees for the more complex art of civilized living. The movement began when I was young, and now that I am old, and have watched it and noted its results, I mourn more than ever the extinction of the household arts. Cold storage, deplorable as it is, has done far less harm to the home than the Higher Education.

Edith Wharton - A Backward Glance (1934)


I caught the tail end of what Wharton meant by the household arts in the fifties. Not the household drudgery as commonly portrayed, but a whole gamut of household arts from growing your own, bottling fruit, making pickles, devising recipes, making economies, collecting home remedies, organising meal times, mending clothes… The list goes on and on.

Of course the list is long because considerable depths of knowledge and experience are involved. Concerning families, education, food, clothing and everything connected with that ancient curriculum of house-keeping. Much of that knowledge and experience are now lost. We do lose knowledge as well gaining it and we do not replace what we have lost via fake country kitchens and back to the soil TV cookery programmes.

The issue seems to be one of drifting into futures which few would have chosen had they known how they would turn out. But we adapt and what we could have seen via foresight is no longer visible.

With hindsight we adopt a number ways to explain why we are where we are, but hindsight is endlessly misleading. Even memories are adjusted under the seductive pressure of a modern consensus or in pursuit of neat and tidy explanations.

As far as Wharton’s observation about house-keeping goes, we are usually presented with narratives about the emancipation of women, economic growth, smaller families, labour-saving domestic machines, birth control and so on. Narratives which may be sound enough but the this future, the one we find ourselves in now, wasn’t chosen. It emerged from an impossibly complex morass of pressures, interests, events and popular lifestyle fantasies.

Take net zero climate change targets for example. Nobody knows how to achieve them, what will happen if they are achieved or what the consequences of not achieving them may be. We are where we were with Wharton and the “monstrous regiment” of the emancipated: young women taught by their elders to despise the kitchen. In one key respect the issue is the same – drifting into a future which will probably turn out to be one that few would have chosen had they been blessed with adequate foresight.

The arch-enemy

In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one CAN remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small

Edith Wharton’s autobiography - A Backward Glance (1934)

Good advice and in later life the arch-enemy probably is sorrow. Progressives now try to make it worse by shoving guilt at us, the arch-enemy of the modern age. Guilt is the one they use to beat down centuries of solid achievement. Avoid both seems to be the message now. 

What is there left to say about Bedlam?

We’re all imprisoned, of course — all of us middling people, who don’t carry our freedom in our brains.

Edith Wharton - Autres Temps... (1916)

A major blogging problem at the moment is what to say about this level of madness. What do we say about loons, charlatans, liars, creeps, drama queens, imbeciles, nihilists, fanatics, dreamers, cranks and out and out shits?

Tedium of the week

But he gradually perceived that the words she used had no meaning for her save, as it were, a symbolic one: they were like the mysterious price-marks with which dealers label their treasures.

Edith Wharton - Here and Beyond (1926)

Old news now but the most tedious story to emerge while we were on holiday was Dawn Butler’s apparent attempt to become Racism Pointer Pursuivant of the Labour party.

If harmonious race relations really are a core aim of mainstream political parties then major political actors have to take a lead and bring to an end the crude and frequently baseless political use of racism allegations. If mainstream political parties are serious about this, then party members who still use racism as a dishonest club with which to beat their opponents must face some kind of penalty such as having party membership rescinded.

Nothing else will ever work. Stop the race-based finger pointing or give it up and admit that the dishonesty of it is ineradicable even within supposedly woke political parties. Which of course it is as the Labour party continues to demonstrate.

Highbrow

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an interesting chap and well worth reading, although he only published one book during his lifetime. We could probably describe him as highbrow without too much argument.

The substance of the world can only determine a form and not any material properties. For these are first presented by the propositions—first formed by the configuration of the objects.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)

But suppose we compare him with someone more popular, more accessible and less obviously highbrow. Novelist Edith Wharton for example.

But that was always his way: the least little fragment of fact was enough for him to transform into a palace of dreams, whereas if he tried to grasp more of it at a time it remained on his hands as so much unusable reality.

Edith Wharton - The Gods Arrive (1932)

To my mind Edith Wharton was more broadly astute than Wittgenstein, with wider insights into the human condition. Her novels bring that out even though they are of course fiction. Yet in an important sense there is no such thing as fiction because even fiction is rooted in a language and a reality any reader must understand.

Wittgenstein's ideas tended to be too theoretical for him to bother with certain insights which are there to be grasped by most of us. He refined his thinking too far, pared away too much in a passionate quest for ultimate truth which he never actually achieved. In later years he seemed to gravitate towards viewpoints which were almost mundane and perhaps this too reflects a reality where the human condition is essentially mundane. Easily grasped but easily evaded too - for various reasons.

Popular isn’t necessarily shallow and does not necessarily occupy some lower sphere of human insight. Even now we are too hierarchical in our ideas and our thinking and the drawback of that is obvious. Too many experts go beyond their expertise.

I've lived long enough to doubt whether any real good ever came of sacrificing beautiful facts to even more beautiful theories.
Edith Wharton - The Quicksand (1902)

Maybe Victorians were smarter than we are

How did two people who had once filled each other's universe manage to hold together as the tide receded? Why, by the world-old compulsion of marriage, he supposed. Marriage was a trick, a sham, if you looked at it in one way; but it was the only means man had yet devised for defending himself from his own frivolity.

Edith Wharton - The Gods Arrive (1932)

It is worth remembering that by our standards almost all Victorians were poor simply because our general prosperity has increased so enormously over the past century or so. Victorian elites may have lived lives of pampered comfort but today, the majority of us live lives which are at least as comfortable as the most pampered duke or duchess.

This prosperity divide is important because it reminds us that Victorians were much closer to the edge than we are. Closer to infant mortality, childbirth mortality, hunger, disease, destitution, slums and a host of other horrors our prosperity and knowledge have mitigated or virtually removed.

Victorians were aware that life is uncertain and felt the precarious nature of life much more acutely than we generally feel it. Uncertainty was their lived experience. They knew nothing else and neither were they constantly persuaded that smoothing out life’s uncertainties ought to be some kind of human right.

In other words Victorians had an acute understanding of how important it was to defend themselves against a whole host of threats to their well-being. They understood why family life, thrift and hard work were the essential basis of an increasingly technical and urban population. From this it follows that they knew how vitally important it was to defend themselves, their families and their country against anything which threatened the basis of their existence.

Even by Edith Wharton’s time the threats were receding. Consequently social constraints were eroding as the consequences of frivolity became less appalling. Incompetence and a feckless life were less hazardous for a much greater number of people. But feckless is not smart.

Victorians understood how a sustainable culture remains sustainable, how it is defended and the compromises we have to make in defending it, how we have to sustain a restrictive bias towards our own culture because that is what sustains us now. In this respect yes - maybe Victorians were smarter than we are.

Suggesting a mysterious intelligence

What Vance carried back to Paul's Landing was his bewildering adventure at the Tarrants', where everybody talked and nobody listened, or said anything particularly worth hearing, if you thought it over—but where the look of the rooms and the people had something harmonious and long-related, suggesting a mysterious intelligence between persons and things, an atmosphere as heavy with the Past as that of the library at the Willows.

Edith Wharton - Hudson River Bracketed (1929)

This is probably how elites manage to generate conspiracy theories without necessarily intending to. They thrive within elite gatherings where the look of the rooms and the people had something harmonious and long-related, suggesting a mysterious intelligence between persons and things. Further down the social hierarchy we all tend to thrive within similar gatherings - think of the regulars at a popular traditional pub.

Nipping back to the elites and in a wider and more critical arena their mysterious intelligence may not be intelligent at all and possibly not even mysterious, but from the inside that is how it seems. Perhaps within elite walls it would be common to find that everybody talked and nobody listened, or said anything particularly worth hearing, if you thought it over.

But that is the nub of the thing – if you though it over. If who thought it over? Thinking it over would have to be done within the social situation but from another perspective - an outsider’s for example. If there are no outsiders then thinking it over does not occur.

The hypothetical great act

Our self-esteem is apt to be based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to perform; and even the most self-scrutinizing modesty credits itself negatively with a high standard of conduct.

Edith Wharton - The Touchstone (1905)

Sometimes one comes across an observation which slides like a scalpel under the skin of self-esteem. We do indeed base our self-esteem on hypothetical great acts. These are not acts which fall into the realm of pure fantasy such as scoring the winning goal in the World Cup, nor the realm of impure fantasy but we won't go into that.

Wharton’s hypothetical great acts are such things as acts of formidable honesty which we never quite attain. Or acts of assertiveness, eloquence, physical endurance, magnanimity or even the hypothetical composition of a supremely penetrating blog post. They all serve to credit ourselves with a high standard of hypothetical conduct. It underpins virtue-signalling for example.

We can’t easily escape it altogether either, not if we wish to keep hold of a few ideals and some degree of motivation to make our way through life without descending into the pits of lassitude.

It is a profound problem with modern politics - laying political claim to hypothetical great acts such as sustainable energy or the elimination of poverty. Virtually everyone knows they are hypothetical but activists don’t want to know. Unfortunately the political class listens to activists because they peddle the hypothetical great acts while the people who peddle reality are so infernally dull.

One pinnacle of credulity to another

All her life she had always been persuaded that she saw what people meant; and the conviction had borne her triumphantly from one pinnacle of credulity to another.

Edith Wharton - Hudson River Bracketed (1929)

May or may not apply, but I sometimes wonder if those inside the political bubble understand those outside. So often bubble dwellers behave as if they have become far too familiar with imposing their own meaning on everything, as if they have mislaid the ability to see what people mean beyond the bubble. 

So incomprehensible and so pure

It was certainly those eurythmic exercises of the Mahatma's ("holy ecstasy," he called them) which had reduced her hips after everything else had failed. And this gratitude for the reduction of her hips was exactly on the same plane, in her neat card-catalogued mind, with her enthusiastic faith in his wonderful mystical teachings about Self-Annihilation, Anterior Existence and Astral Affinities . . . all so incomprehensible and so pure. . .

Edith Wharton - Twilight Sleep (1927)

I love this quote. So delightfully sarcastic. I’m sure sarcasm is vital for a healthy life – much more invigorating than all those boring old vitamins with their unimaginative names.