The real crustie problem – radical dullness

Boris Johnson has dared to cast some mild scorn on the Extinction Rebellion loons.

Extinction Rebellion protesters on the streets of London have been labelled "uncooperative crusties" by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The demonstrators - who are demanding action on climate change - should abandon their "hemp-smelling bivouacs" and stop blocking roads, the PM added.

Police have already arrested more than 300 people at the start of two weeks of protests by environmental campaigners.

Some activists glued themselves to government buildings early on Tuesday.

Speaking at a book launch, Mr Johnson said: "I am afraid that the security people didn't want me to come along tonight because they said the road was full of uncooperative crusties and protesters of all kinds littering the road.

"They said there was some risk that I would be egged."

Gosh - a risk of egging. How original. Yes the crusties are a nuisance but the real problem is how dull and unoriginal they are. Waving placards, chanting slogans, disrupting daily life, gluing themselves to this and that. It’s all been done before, the totalitarian politics, the anarchic evasion of responsibility, the designer scruffiness, the inability to build anything worthwhile – all of  has been done before.

Why the blue blazes can’t they come up with something original? It’s all so dull, dull, dull. As if they watch the BBC news, read the Guardian, believe what Greta Doomberg says, think polar bears are going the way of the dodo, think totalitarian political nostrums might actually work because nobody ever tried them before. Strewth – they even seem to think they are radicals.

It’s been done before, over and over again. It’s tedious, uninteresting, useless, unproductive, dimwitted, intellectually dead, hopelessly naive but worst of all it’s dull.

Not enough experts say experts

The Institute of Experts recently published a damning report highlighting the scandalous lack of experts in both government and industry -

The Institute of Experts has access to expertise in anything from Mayan woodworking tools to the precise molecular composition of nettle jam. Yet so often news media are willing to invite the views of celebrities or prominent pundits where the authority of established experts in the field is sorely needed.

The report goes on to describe what it calls the trifecta of expert government. Three crucial ways in which government may avert a looming crisis – an impending catastrophe where there are not enough experts to tell people what they should have done ages ago.

The three key proposals are –

1. Revise expert salary scales to compete in the global expert market.
2. Fund university expert degree courses to train the experts of the future.
3. Create a cabinet-level Minister for Experts.
4. Create an Expert Startup Fund to encourage world class expert innovation.

If implemented in full, these key proposals will kick-start a whole raft of innovative work within the expert community, stimulate employment, bring more young people into the field and facilitate an ongoing national debate about the need for trained experts in all aspects of the economy.

Back to the fifties

One positive outcome of the Greta Doomberg climate circus is how it has highlighted the long term strategies of global elites. The climate narrative may be obvious nonsense but Ms Doomberg has reminded us that those behind it don’t care. Emotional drivel is good enough for the masses – as it always was. Ms Doomberg has broadcast that message good and strong, although the poor lass seems to think she is telling us something about the climate.

The underlying strategy is clear enough because the clues were there long before Ms Doomberg was pushed onto the stage. Malthusian panic behind the scenes about sums it up.

The masses are out of control. Something must be done or... or... or... Or there will be nothing left for the Important Ones.

That really does seem to be it. Apply Occam’s Razor - the Important Ones are worried about too much consumption by the global masses, especially those who aren't poor. They really do think that we’ll use up all the fossil fuels and there will be nothing left for People Who Matter, not to mention their offspring.

As a result we are creeping fairly rapidly towards restrictions on private cars, air travel, household energy use, general consumption and even food. The overall trend seems to be aimed at reducing general living standards to those which prevailed in the 1950s apart from the free speech and the lovely warm coal fires. This standard could probably be sustained indefinitely.

At which point we’ll have two levels of sustainability - ours and theirs.

Indicators of a degenerating society

A powerful look at bureaucratic degeneration. We are bound to wonder if anyone actually knows what can and cannot be done within the rules and the regulations. Life becomes a matter of what you can get away with. 

Counting sheep

YouTube - An ancient survival of language used to count sheep in the Lake District and surrounding areas. There is a mix of languages including Old Welsh, Old English and probably Old Norse. For example Pimp is equivalent to the modern day Welsh for five.

So definitely not a traditional way to count MPs.

A particularly careless thing to do

The eternity of truth is inherent in it: all truths—not a few grand ones—are equally eternal. I am sorry that the word eternal should necessarily have an unction which prejudices dry minds against it, and leads fools to use it without understanding. This unction is not rhetorical, because the nature of truth is really sublime, and its name ought to mark its sublimity. Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)

Even during my lifetime, our concept of truth seems to have changed. It has become less conspicuous as an ideal underpinning developed societies. Yet within living memory, truth could still be described as one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Today it isn’t so easy to treat truth as an imperishable ideal. There is also a sense in which the social status of truth has declined.

In Santayana's day, Christian culture could be said to embrace a view of ultimate reality where any human viewpoint rarely or never attains the ideal of eternal truth. Only God understands eternal truth. That gave us a secure ideal for truth – something we may approach forever but never attain.

It follows that any human view of reality may be improved on the endless journey towards the ideal of eternal truth. This in turn gives us an ideal of honesty in the sense that we may honestly strive towards the ideal of eternal truth while accepting that any point on that journey may be improved, however fond of older truths we may be.

Of course all this is subject to the numerous failings and dishonesties of human life. Leaving that aside and acknowledging the ineradicable nature of human dishonesty, eternal truth as an ideal has enormous advantages. It takes it away from the human arena - something a secular culture cannot reliably achieve. This may be familiar secular problem, but it has become far more serious over the past century and even worse in recent decades.

If truth is not an eternal ideal known only to God, then the foundations of truth and the search for better truths become shaky and more easily manipulated. As the social status of Christianity declines so does the social status of truth. Not something secular society anticipated.

This is not to claim that the foundations of truth were solid under the care of Christian culture – they were not. Yet the ideal of eternal truth was secure in its association with the deity and now it is not. This has allowed all manner of genies to emerge from all manner of bottles.

The baby we are throwing out with the Christian bathwater is not only the ideal of eternal truth but the corresponding significance of honesty. It is always honest to pursue a better understanding of eternal truth, however imperfect that understanding may be. Yet without eternal truth as an ideal we have no corresponding ideal against which honesty may be judged.

Unfortunately there is more, because the ideal of eternal truth in a Christian society also has a moral element – the search for truth is the search for God’s truth. Perhaps not something we should emphasise too strongly but the moral aspect is not insignificant. Truth is associated with the deity and the search for it is a moral search. This does allow us to suggest that as Christianity has declined so has this moral aspect of truth. That makes three babies thrown out with one lot of bathwater - a particularly careless thing to have done.

A cheap and easy egomania

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 - Essays and Literary Studies (1916)

To my mind this quote encapsulates the modern political scene – a cheap and easy egomania all done with the money of other people. If Brexit hasn’t hammered home this message then we are lost.

Let's see - who is the immoral little toad ?