The Limits of Conservative Miserabilism…

Norman Tebbit’s intervention into the debate surrounding same-sex marriage has been met with little respect. “When we have a queen who is a lesbian and she marries another lady and then decides she would like to have a child,” he asks, could the product of a sperm donor be heir to the throne? One could point out that this hypothetical scenario seems rather ludicrous, but it also seems rather irrelevant: the same dilemma would arise should this sapphic sovereign be in a civil partnership.

What is interesting to me is that Norman Tebbit, that war horse of old Toryism, is phrasing his opinions in the terms of practicalities rather than of values. He, and others like him, are unable or unwilling to defend the virtues of the present but merely admonish us regarding hazards of the future. They caution against change, but give little sense of the value of conserving. This, it seems to me, has long been a problem for conservatives.

The strangest writing in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France come when the wise old Irishman begins to rhapsodise about Marie Antoinette: “the great lady” for whom “ten thousand swords [should] have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult”. Burke offers no reasons for admiring the Queen, and I cannot help wondering if he had thought his belief in the efficacy of institutions was too cerebral and that he had to promote not simply a belief in them but a love for them. This was not his strength.

Somewhat more recently, Ed West bid farewell to his Telegraph readers with a piece that revelled in its own miserabilism. “It’s my job as a conservative to depress you,” he said, for “conservatism is depressive realism”. “That’s not to say that things are always bad, or necessarily getting worse, but that there is a natural tendency among humans to ignore problems, and it’s our job to point this out”. I can’t help feeling that conservatives have done more than this or people would never have voted for the miserable sods.

I am not questioning West’s belief in the value of grim scepticism. To the extent that I am a conservative at all it is largely because, after years of indulging pleasant ideas about the world, and often being startlingly rude to people who cast doubt upon them, I have concluded that many of the world’s blessings are fragile and many of our attempts to multiply them are dangerous. Yet this does not make me much of a conservative because when I foresee no baneful consequences from the collapse of this or that institution I have little cause to spring to its defence.

It was simpler when everybody was religious, and believed that society functioned in accordance with God’s will. If something was alright with the man upstairs, people believed, it was alright with them. Being deprived of the language of religion made it hard for conservatives to articulate their values to themselves, never mind to other people. Once can see this in the prose of Mencken, who disliked change but did not seem especially fond of the present.

Leftism has few such problems. It offers the marquee attractions of faith in its ideas of progress towards an Edenic future, and of malicious forces that attempt to obstruct the path. Conservatives, though, tend to offer grievances and fear. This can be uninspiring at the best of times, and when they have no substantive cause for either in opposing change they seem peculiar.

This is not to imply that they heartless brutes. (Or, at least, that many of them are.) Pessimists tend to value a great deal. The primary reason that I have for fearing threats is that they might deprive me and others the things I treasure: freedom, peace and that which appears to be beautiful. Yet, as an agnostic mired in a swamp of subjectivity, I have no clear sense of the kind of society that it is right to inhabit. I’m not saying that one should be thrown together, as that would be like trying to build Rome over lunch, but without expressing what it is good as well as what is worrying conservatives are doomed to failure, as they are going up against teams of designers and marketers with no one but risk managers.

 

Explosions and Victims…

Bombings in Iraq are so frequent that one can almost forget that they are not a fact of nature but the result of particular groups and conflicts. In recent weeks, though, as the media has reported more and bigger sectarian attacks one has been forced to recognised the fact that the pattern is becoming suggestive of sectarian war.

86 people died today after a string of bombings of Shia neighbourhoods, which brought the death toll of the last week soaring over 200. Sunni jihadists have been perpetrating bigoted attacks all year, with a particular brutal focus on pilgrims and places of worship. This is not a one-sided conflict, though, and Sunni areas of Baghdad were the targets of bombings that killed 76 people last Friday. I was moved by the bewildered sadness of a taxi driver reflecting on the devastation of a roadside cafe. “We used to meet every Friday to smoke shisha,” he said, “And we thought we would have a good time today, but things turned into explosions and victims.”

Tensions have been more stoked than soothed by the Prime Minister and his government. Its failure to work with the Awakenings Councils, which were groups of tribal Sheikhs who played a major role in opposing jihadists and restoring a measure of peace to the country in 2007, prompted many of them to renew the oppositional stance that they had held previously. Economic underdevelopment and the brutal anti-terrorism policies of the state have ensured that there are many aggrieved young men receptive to insurgent and sectarian propaganda.

The potential for war has been grimly illustrated by the involvement of both Sunni and Shia fighters in the Syrian conflict. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been storming over the border to support the grimly disjointed revolution. The BBC reports, meanwhile, on claims that Shia militiamen have rushed to the defence of Bashar al-Assad. As the Awakenings Councils and their Sunni allies maintain their uneasy standoff with Prime Minister Maliki, this storm of sectarian violence could hardly be positioned at a worse time and place for Iraq. If agreements are not forged, the country risks descending back into bloodshed.

Imagine growing up with no memories of a time when you did not have to accept that any moment could bring chaos, agony and death. Adults have only life under Saddam’s heel to think of before that. It might be enough to drive a man to drink, except that in Iraq the sale of alcohol is liable to bring gunmen charging through one’s door.

Photograph: Azhar Shallal/AFP/Getty Images

 

Marlowe and Masculinity…

Regardless of the absence of copulating transsexuals, I enjoyed reading Chandler’s noir classic The Big Sleep. It left me with a question, though: why is the reader left aspiring to be like Phillip Marlowe? I risk miring myself in embarrassment in making this admission, but I spent the day after completing it devising grim witticisms, glaring out of windows and inwardly wishing that I had not given up tobacco. I find it hard to believe that I am alone in this.

Why might this be? Marlowe is, after all, a miserable loner with an evident dependence upon alcohol; a habit of witnessing grotesque crime scenes and a tendency to commit acts of private violence against bedsheets. What makes him attractive? It is not, unlike his trashy counterpart James Bond, his sexual adventurism. Marlowe is apt to refuse sex even when it’s offered to him. It doubtless helps that he is attractive to women but this alone is a mediocre explanation. Carmen Sternwood seems to be attracted to everyone except the butler and Vivian Regan’s apparent fancy for him is compromised by the knowledge that she lies through her teeth.

I think that Marlowe’s appeal can be found in the respect that he is able to command. Whatever the beauty of the face that stands before him, or the size of their wallet or pistol, he has an insolent remark and incisive revelation that forces his interlocutor to admire him as an ally or fear him as an opponent. He might have no money and a mild alcohol addiction but he appears to have pride and this can seem enough to compensate for all the lonely nights in dingy apartments.

Chandler was too good a writer to compose escapism, of course, and Marlowe is not the cold fish that he presents himself as being: brooding on missed chances for romance; fretting about death and purging his frustrations at the expense of his own furniture. What is interesting is that he craves respect and is keenly aware of its absence. Here is a nice bit from Farewell, My Lovely (Rembrandt is on a calender)…

My foot itched, but my bank account was still trying to crawl under a duck. I put honey into my voice and said: “Many thanks for calling me, Mr Marriott. I’ll be there.

He hung up and that was that. I thought Mr Rembrandt had a faint sneer on his face. I got the office bottle out of the deep drawer of the desk and took a short drink. That took the sneer out of Mr Rembrandt in a hurry.

It seems to me that men have evolved to value respect: the dignity of individual ownership and achievement. There has been a great deal of chatter regarding the nature of masculinity in the twenty-first century. There is no one problem faced by the British male: some of them are struggling to cope with an indefinite role within their families; some of them just need a bloody job; some of them are too fond of drugs and some of them are, well, fine, thank you very much.

I suspect that an absence of esteem and, thus, pride is a detrimental force in our society, though. Working lives are often spent in awkward, artificial submission before clients, customers, managers, committees and public officials. Love and esteem, meanwhile, is directed not towards people who embody virtues they are expected to represent but a bunch of preening dullards on the television. Life, then, can mean obscure indignity – escaped from via a television on which fathers tend to be portrayed as ineffectual dimwits.

Respect is not one’s birthright, of course, and must be earned – I have no wish for us to heed demands of thugs who often abuse peaceful citizens for paying insufficiently obsequious homage to their existence. There must be the hope for respect, though: as a good father; a good husband; a good citizen. If virtue does not seem valuable, some men are going to think it pointless to achieve.

 

The Boorishness of the Bourgeois …

Kevin Williamson, a writer for the National Review, went to the theatre recently. A woman next to him was tapping at her mobile phone. He asked her to stop, twice, but she continued to nonetheless.

She suggested that I should mind my own business.So I minded my own business by utilizing my famously feline agility to deftly snatch the phone out of her hand and toss it across the room, where it would do no more damage. She slapped me and stormed away to seek managerial succor. Eventually, I was visited by a black-suited agent of order, who asked whether he might have a word.

Throwing the phone was petulant and disruptive in itself but the sympathy that Mr. Williamson has inspired is evidence of how widespread poor behaviour in theatres has become.

My amateur exploits on Britain’s smaller stages have exposed me to frequent choruses of ringtones and conversation. The former almost inevitably go off before punchlines or during emotional climaxes, and tend to be the loudest, shrillest and most repetitious ringtones imaginable. It has not been Clocks by Coldplay yet but I suspect that it is just a matter of time.

We are often conflicted as to how to respond. One can ignore it – plunging onwards as if ignorant of the existence of viewers. One can shame the troublemaker, as the late, lamented Richard Griffiths did in magnificent style. I am tempted to incorporate the annoyance into the production; to break off from the dialogue, for example, to comment on a passing circus troupe or the sound of rats in the skirting boards.

What makes this an interesting phenomenon is its unmasking of anti-social behaviour in the middle-class. (Not everyone who goes to the theatre is middle-class, of course, but the prices alone put them in a majority.) This is not to demonise disrupters. Most of them, having grasped that it is their mobile phone that has been burbling, scrabble for it as if it is a grenade that must be hurled before it goes off in their pocket. Their failure to respect a law that is followed by schoolchildren under the threat of severe punishments, however, is reflective of a broad indifference to the individual obligations that our sharing public spaces imposes upon us.

One can see this in more dramatic cases, such of those of people who speed or use their mobile phones while driving, or in apparently innocuous acts that nonetheless make our society more unpleasant, such as the ignoring of the homeless or the hectoring of public transport employees. Many people, across classes, are more sensitive to their rights than responsibilities; cognisant of what represents their business and nonchalant towards their effects upon other people. As long as they are not being actively malicious, then, they can feel that they are good citizens. All of us, I think, can be prey to this temptation and would do well o remember that it is an individualism that worsens our collective experiences.

 

Oil Be the Judge…

I am increasingly sympathetic to the opinion that veganism, when practiced reasonably, is a safe, valuable position to adopt. Some people I keep running into, though, are health vegans, who promote absolutist abstention from animal foods on the grounds of its effects on our bodies rather than the animals. These people promote a low-fat, whole foods diet. Fair enough. I’m sure lots of people could benefit from this. What irritates me, though, are those of them who argue as if everybody should follow their lead.

I have defended nuts but what of olive oil? These men note that it offers little nutrition beyond its many calories. It has some Vitamin E, and its polyphenols are argued to be health-promoting, but its nutritive qualities are overstated. Even if it provides “empty calories”, though, as they claim, I do not see the problem. The context of empty calories matters. They are less than healthy when consumed in isolation or in making nutritionally worthless products richer yet olive oil tends to be used to dress or fry vegetables. One thus creates products that contain vitamins and minerals but that need not be rich. If you love eating vegetables in their natural state you may not want the oil but some of us find that it improves their palatability to such an extent that we’ll eat more plants.

These men tend to argue that olive oil is detrimental to one’s health, and with some dodgy claims. Michael Klaper MD notes that the official target for saturated fats in our diets is 7% but that 14% of olive oil is made up of them. “How does 14% help get you to 7%?” He asks. Who’s going to eat all or even half of their calories in olive oil? Jeff Novick references a study by one Robert Vogel, who found that olive oil reduces blood flow. Dr. Vogel used ten subjects and fed them fifty grams of olive oil. Never mind the sample size: who’s going to glug that much?

Some people fill the gaps of data in the case for very low-fat diets with what is either paranoia or fearmongering. John McDougall says “the fat you eat is the fat you wear”, which is both untrue and gruesomely similar to phrases like “a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips”. Klaper gripes that restaurants offer nothing more than “ethnic-flavoured salt, sugar and fat” and tells his audience to “order the vegetable soup and steamed greens, eat it and get the heck out of there”. Never invite this gentleman to a birthday dinner.

Given that people who are enduring or have endured eating disorders are liable to be attracted to vegetarian diets, I am keen to ensure that my own and other people’s ethical decisions regarding consumption are not engineered by their neuroses, so I have no wish for them to be mixed with health puritanism. Moreover, such puritanism gives vegans an image of ascetic joylessness. Food critic Jay Rayner gave veganism a shot and came away disheartened by its supposed paucity of fat. Perhaps he was unaware that he could eat olive oil, avocado, almonds, almond butter, walnuts, pecans, peanuts, cashews, coconut, coconut butter, coconut milk, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds and acai. It ain’t just lentils n’ leeks.

Demonising foods on health grounds is always strange as there is no food the average person could not eat regularly with minimal effects. A plant food diet with the odd portion of fish or liver would be as or more healthy than veganism. This is not to say that veganism cannot improve one’s health, still less that it should be avoided, but that if one embraces it it makes sense to use considerations of the heart rather than of the gut.

 

The Modern Contrarian…

Modern Conservatives seem to define themselves by their ability to annoy liberals. Nothing exemplifies this trend more than Telegraph blogs, on which fluffy-haired and fashionably-bearded young men compete to be the most assertive in defying mainstream liberal opinion, whether or not these views are of consequence or correct. Thomas Pascoe is the latest, with a baffling defence of Dan “Da Vinci Code” Brown. He sneers at his “smart-aleck” critics, who are, he assures us, largely “metropolitan journalists”. Mr. Pascoe writes for the Telegraph about markets and used to work in corporate finance. His adjective inspires thoughts of pots and kettles.

Pascoe’s argument is that Dan Brown is reviled by liberals, “for whom a novel lacks merit unless it involves a forensic account of two pre-op transexuals in sexual congress”, because he is a “white, middle-aged American of comfortable means…whose stories have a moral foundation in a Protestant world view”. One wonders which critics this applies to, as Mr. Pascoe references nobody. One wonders if it applies to Alexander Rose of The National Review, Rod Dreher of The American Conservative and Amy Welborn of The American Spectator – all of whom are white, middle-aged and middle-class American Conservatives who thought Brown’s novels stank worse than the bathrooms of a seafood restaurant. One wonders where Pascoe gets off  miring a literary argument in the turbid battlefields of the culture war. It is not only liberals who needlessly politicise.

Pascoe then attempts to defend Brown’s novels on their own merits. They are “gripping”, he suggests, which is perhaps true, in the same sense that a pub bore who seizes one’s arm as he gasps banalities into one’s ear is gripping. They are, Pascoe continues, “thought-provoking”. Why? Well, he “gather[s] his new work discusses overpopulation”. The subject matter of a book is not a measure of its insight. Ben Elton’s novels “discuss” the environment and religion but they remain far less thought-provoking than Jane Austen’s books about rich girls marrying off.

“Finally,” Pascoe writes, “There is the question of Mr Brown’s prose”. It is not a question. It is a short, blunt answer in the negative. Regardless, Pascoe sniffs that he “do[es] not see that it is particularly offensive”, and adds it is “easy to understand and admits no ambiguity”. Is this another way of saying that it is prolix, laboured and inelegant? If Mr. Pascoe had the courage of his convictions he would defend the use of the words “renowned”, “seventy-six-year-old” and “man” in the first three sentences of The Da Vinci Code. That would be contrarian.

Pascoe ends with a middle-finger to Brown’s critics, saying that if they “possessed his ability and application, they would be in his position”. “They don’t,” he sneers, “And their envy is unbecoming”. Envy? I thought they hated the bloke because of his race. Decide upon which groundless smear you are committing yourself to, Mr. Pascoe! As for the idea that a critic has no right to judge practitioners: it is akin to saying, to rework a phrase of Tynan’s, that if one cannot drive one has no right to comment on directions.

I am not especially passionate in my dislike for Brown. His novels are dreadful but I doubt that most of their admirers would have turned to superior books if he had turned to plumbing rather than prose. Rather, it was Pascoe’s article that yanked my chain. He is trying to differ from conventional opinions but not with incisive criticism or fresh insight but aggressive grandstanding. He intends to provoke, but it is not reflection or enlightenment that he tries to inspire but defensive outrage. He stirs up conflict between ideologies but not in defence of an institution or a value but of a trashy novel. He is the inevitable offspring of belligerent dilettantes from O’Neill to Young, and the aggressive insincerity that he embodies will be applied to far more significant debates in the future. In the modern press, it seems to me, click-baiting and cat-fighting are the highest virtues.

 

First the Facts, Ma’am…

Edward Feser wrote a piece on “conspiracy theories” and prompted an intriguing discussion of the subject and especially its relation to the events of 9/11. Professor Feser wrote…

If I were a Truther, my strategy would be (a) to focus on some one very, very specific claim — for example, the claim that WTC7 couldn’t have come down the way the ‘official story’ says it did, and then (b) to defend this and only this claim without appealing to premises that presuppose the existence of a Truther-style conspiracy….And finally, (c) don’t say ‘I don’t know’ when asked what exactly did happen if the ‘official story’ is wrong…

One Ryan Ashton replied…

(c) is an unnecessarily demanding stipulation. In fact, on the face of it, (c) appears to conflict with (a): whereas (a) promotes “one very, very specific claim,” (c) promotes a very broad claim…But, more fundamentally, (c) seems to suggest that one can only know a proposition to be false if and only if one also knows which alternative proposition is true.

I agree with Mr. Ashton. The falsification of one theory does not demand the creation of another, and the explanation of one event in a sequence need not compel one to devise an overarching theory. If one discredits evidence against a murder suspect one is not obliged to charge somebody else with the crime, and if one finds somebody’s prints at the scene of the killing one need not substantiate a case for the prosecution before offering it as evidence to be accounted for. If it has extraordinary implications it had better be damn good evidence, but if it is, that’s good enough.

The facts of events must be firmly established before one constructs theories atop it. If one’s theory is built upon fissures of omission and bogs of mistruth it deserves to collapse, in part or as a whole, and must be reconstructed or rebuilt upon more solid epistemological grounds. Much as I regret the ignorance with which I used to debate theorists, and for all that I agree that the official narratives have obscured the apparent roles of conspirators and enablers of various origins, I find the idea that the government engineered the atrocities hard to believe, for the usual reasons – the enormity of the supposed operation; the silence of its many accomplices and the mystery of the motive. Such a priori objections should not lead one to dismiss the fact claims of such theories, though. I have, for example, seen many smart people, both in and outside of truth movements, criticise the official explanation of the fall of World Trade Center 7 and I endorse the accessibility of the relevant data and its analysis by scholars. Science can always be challenged on no bases but its own.