Barnardo's should know better about 'white privilege' - Spectator Coffee House, 12/11/20

Barnardo's should know better about 'white privilege'
By Patrick West

Corporations and charities virtue signalling has become a familiar spectacle in everyday life. Sainsbury's, Virgin West Coast, HSBC, Ben & Jerry's, Gillette and Nike have all pronounced their various anti-racist, anti-sexist and pro-gay, pro-trans principles. The latest to join in this festival of conspicuous compassion is Barnardo’s, which yesterday pronounced on the matter of 'white privilege'. Unveiling its new guide on this hot topic for parents, the children's charity said:

'Talking about white privilege means looking at how our own actions maintain and support racist systems and structures.'

Unsurprisingly, this has generated some angry responses. 'As a former Barnardo’s Boy, I find your stance as disappointing as it is nonsensical,' was one reply. 'Where was my white privilege when I was left in Hull Maternity Hospital at 2 days old? Where was my white privilege when I was in several short-term foster homes prior to going into care in?'

Another added: 'Been on the breadline for most of my life, been homeless too, is it too late to apply for my white privilege?'

This furious backlash is no surprise – and Barnardo’s should have known better. People are growing tired of smug institutions parroting ill-defined, contentious topics like 'white privilege'. As many of those replying to Barnardo's message have pointed out, poor people come in all colours. Being white doesn't automatically confer privilege. White working class people increasingly hate being demonised on account of their skin pigmentation, especially by affluent white liberals, who compensate by disdaining whites who are poorer and less sophisticated than them.

Walk into any bookshop and witness how the issue of race both consumes and narrows our thinking on culture and society. This monomania has made us blind to the issue of class, a category of people who don't exist in woke thought. According to Ibram X Kendi, the author of How to be an Antiracist, 'the original sin is racism', a statement which reflects how racism has become the ultimate transgression today, a heresy that has terrible consequences.

You would have thought that 'progressive' doctrine, with its emphasis on 'intersectionality' – the idea that people can face multiple forms of discrimination owing to their race, sex, sexuality and so on – would recognise that the categories of privileged and underprivileged are not a black and white matter, literally. But the public manifestation of Critical Theory, which has ravaged the academy in recent years, and which has now been adopted by big business and charities, has nothing to say about class (unlike the Marxist doctrine that preceded it, which was contrarily obsessed with it).

As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay wrote in their recent book Cynical Theories, How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity: 'Privilege-consciousness has...nearly completely replaced class-consciousness as the primary concern of those on the academic, activist, and political left. ' They continue: 'This shift away from class and towards gender identity, race, and sexuality troubles traditional economic leftists, who fear that the left is being taken away from the working class and hijacked by the bourgeoisie.'

The desperate plight of white working class boys and men – who, on account of their sex and skin pigmentation, place them at the apex of privilege, according to woke doctrine – has been much-publicised. Not only are they among the poorest performers in schools, they are frequently outshone by their co-patriots professionally. As Trevor Philips wrote recently:

'The notion of white privilege would be baffling to the families of white boys who have fallen to the bottom of the education attainment league tables, and who are staring at a lifetime of sweeping the streets occupied by their affluent Indian-heritage classmates.'

We can just about tolerate the insincerity of corporations flaunting their political correct credentials. This is usually done to ingratiate themselves with customers, and sometimes to distract from the fact that they have very few black or Asian people in their upper echelons. We can also understand white, middle-class undergraduates attending Black Lives Matter rallies, too. Boasting a compassionate, left-wing outlook on life is intrinsic to being a young student, after all. And what footballer would dare refuse to 'take the knee' on the grounds of disagreeing with BLM, knowing the public opprobrium that would result in such an action?

What is unforgivable is a charity like Barnardo’s joining in this charade. Unlike mere hawkers of consumer goods, it has first-hand experience of dealing with poverty, deprivation and suffering. Unlike those responsible for issuing such declarations as the one we saw yesterday, its front-line workers will surely understand that poverty and a lack of privilege affects children and carers of all colours.


Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked and author of Conspicuous Compassion (Civitas, 2004) and Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017)

Michael Parkinson is right: men are funnier than women - Spectator Coffee House, November 10, 2020

Michael Parkinson is right: men are funnier than women
By Patrick West

As befitting his public persona of a plain-speaking Yorkshireman, and making the kind of devil-may-care social transgression that is the privilege of the very old, Sir Michael Parkinson has declared that men have a better sense of humour than women.

In a interview with the Australian Daily Telegraph, the veteran broadcaster, 85, was asked whether men found it hard to express their emotions. 'Most men I know are the opposite, they're very sensitive and also very funny,' he replied. 'That's the the thing I like most about men. It's a contentious statement but they're much better than women in their sense of humour.'

Such gender essentialism, especially that in favour of males, is taboo these days. So many unfashionable truths are. Thus we should be thankful to Parky for reminding us of something most of us know, but now dare not say.

A report published in October last year did indeed appear to conclude that men are funnier than women. Researchers from Aberystwyth university and the university of North Carolina analysed 28 studies which looked at how funny around 5,000 people were. Looking at the results of various studies in which people were asked to rate men and women's humour – without knowing their sex first – they found that 63 per cent of men were funnier than the average woman.

Men are funnier than women because, as the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, humour is mostly based on incongruence and the disruption of reality: horses never walk into bars, and their long faces never actually suggest they are unhappy. While evolution has made females, the primary nurturers, the conservatives of the species who are typically concerned with very real every-day matters, male humans are by contrast often less grounded in reality, and more given to flights of fancy and mental adventures into imaginary incongruous worlds. Think Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Paul Merton or Noel Fielding. Men's propensity for inner mental escapades has made us more prolific comic authors, science-fiction writers, artists and composers (and more likely to be psychopaths).

It has long be noted – most recently in The Comedy of Error, Why Evolution Made Us Laugh, by Jonathan Silverton – that, from an evolutionary perspective still replicated in our culture, women seek men who make them laugh. Men reciprocally look for 'a woman who will find them funny'. The ability to detect incongruity and make a joke from it is a sign of intelligence, writes Silverton, so that funnier people are adjudged to be cleverer people: an obvious evolutionary advantage in the mating game.

The differences between women and men explains the latter's propensity for humour in other ways. Second only to incongruity as a source of laughter is cruelty, or taking malicious delight at those less fortunate than us – he who has suffered a prat-fall in public (think Charlie Chaplin or Jackass) or embarrassed himself in a social situation (think Alan Partridge or David Brent).

If you are a traditional gender essentialist you will hold that men in general can be more violent than women. No wonder so much humour involves cruelty, contempt, superiority, anxiety, aggression and accidental taboo-breaking. 'Throughout the ages, cripples, mental defectives, and court fools have been injured and perhaps even killed in a crescendo of teasing, laughter, and violence. Laughter scorns the victims and bonds and feeds the wrath of aggressors,' wrote Robert R. Provine in Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (2000), 'dark laughter has sometimes accompanied the looting, killing, and raping that are among the traditional fruits of war'.

Humour is inextricably connected with the pursuit of power and dominance, traits also connected with masculinity. Plato and Aristotle linked laughter with superiority over others. And in his 1650 work, Human Nature, Thomas Hobbes agreed, stating that laughter is the expression of a 'sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others or with our own formerly'.

In connection to this, men are also more competitive than women, which is why Mock The Week was funnier when it had more obnoxious, laughter-chasing male-dominated panels. Robert R. Provine noted that males engage in more proxy-competitive laughter-evoking behaviour than females in most cultures, a behaviour that begins at about the age of six. Among children viewing cartoons, girls laughed more often with boys than with girls, and girls reciprocated boys' laughter more often than boys reciprocated girls' laughter.

Of course, to say that 'men are funnier than women' is a generalisation, like saying 'men are taller than women'. Just as some women are taller than some men, many women are funnier than many men. But it doesn't make the generalisation less true, even if it takes an octogenarian Yorkshireman to say it.

The climate of fear is crippling our mental health - Spiked, November 6, 2020

The climate of fear is crippling our mental health
Depression soared during the last lockdown. The second will cause yet more despair.

By Patrick West


The debate over lockdown is invariably framed in terms of that between two competing needs: the medical and the economic. On the one hand, there are those who say that the health of the nation and the imperative to protect the NHS must be paramount. On the other, there are the lockdown sceptics who say that people’s livelihoods and jobs must foremost be safeguarded from ruination.

A third factor is given paltry consideration, especially by government ministers: the issue of mental health. While it is acknowledged that lockdowns will affect the way we live, what is never admitted by the government – and often overlooked by mainstream anti-lockdown voices – is the devastating effect ‘staying indoors’ has had on our mental health.

One of the few outstanding voices has been Alice Thomson of The Times, who in a recent article related that the Office for National Statistics states that since the outbreak of the pandemic rates of depression have doubled from one in 10 to one in five. Among the most badly hit have been those aged 16 to 39, a group that has reported a 30 per cent rise in depressive symptoms. A paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry suggested that 18 per cent of UK adults reported having suicidal thoughts in the first months of lockdown. Meanwhile, in June the Institute for Alcohol Studies reported that almost a third of people had been drinking more.

Although some rates of depression and anxiety are directly related to the pandemic itself, a more common cause of these symptoms has been lockdown and government diktats over the summer. There have been countless reports and accounts of people driven to despair and depression by the loneliness, the spirit of paranoia and feeling of being watched and judged, with the ubiquitous masks giving a horrific sci-fi film aura to everyday life.

I myself, a healthy fortysomething, haven’t been afraid of the virus itself since April. But the state of British society in 2020 has sent me to despair and nightmarish gloom. So many millions feel the same. Is this the price we will have to pay for the next four weeks, for a not very lethal virus that is not currently the biggest killer in the UK? And what of the price we will have to pay in the future, with a vulnerable generation who grew up in a climate of fear, suspicion and paranoia? The actions of the government this year will have devastating effects in the future. We know the dire material fallout of Lockdown 2. Less well recognised will be its equally ruinous mental fallout.


John Sessions: autodidact extraordinaire

John Sessions, who died on Monday, wasn’t one to wear his learning lightly. The affable actor and comedian, best-known as a panellist on Channel 4’s Whose Line Is It Anyway? and protagonist on the BBC’s surreal comedy-drama, Stella Street, was an unashamed and conspicuous brainbox and polymath.

He could recite verbatim Finnegans Wake. He did one man stagings of Chekov. He could impersonate Keith Richards, Michael Caine and Al Pacino, flaunt his copious encyclopaedic knowledge on QI, adapt himself to the cinema with ease, or, on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, improvise the scenario of Ernest Hemingway going to the dentist or James Joyce at the seaside.

Sessions admitted that his public persona of ‘Mr Swotty’ could be irksome and that his immodest displays of erudition made him a ‘bit punchable’. The actor Timothy Spall described him as ‘a bit of a clever dick’. In one famous edition of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, in which contestants were asked to portray the person with whom they would least like to be trapped in a lift, Paul Merton stepped forward and said: ‘Hello, my name’s John Sessions.’

He blamed his ‘over-compensatory urge to intellectualise’ and tendency to show off on the fact that, unlike so many of his thespian and comedic contemporaries, he did not go to Oxbridge, having studied at Bangor University instead. However, Sessions had displayed attention-seeking tendencies even as a boy.

His life is a reminder of an eternal, profound truth: that feelings of insecurity and social inferiority needn’t be a bad thing, but quite the opposite. Sessions had what Alfred Adler called an Inferiority Complex, something the Austrian psychotherapist believed was a good thing, a beneficent state of mind that motivates an individual to seek power and recognition.

And so why shouldn’t this brilliant autodidact have flaunted his acquired knowledge and abundance of talent? If you put in the hard graft you earn the right to parade your significant cerebral wares.


Wokeness long predates Twitter

During this year we’ve all had to find more ways to entertain ourselves indoors. Mine has been reading more books than I would naturally, especially rereading escapist or humorous literature in order to lift the spirits. This has entailed taking recourse to some collected works of Peter Simple.

‘Peter Simple’ was a column that appeared in the Daily Telegraph from the mid-20th century until 2006. From the 1960s, it was written by Michael Wharton. It blended orthodox Tory invective with flights of fancy, with Wharton inventing a fantasy world full of right-on (or in today’s parlance, ‘woke’) grotesques, such as Mrs Dutt-Pauker the enormously rich and privileged north London socialist; Neville Dreadberg, the self-publicising and talentless avant-garde artist and writer of the ‘classic documentary television plays’ dealing with crime, corruption and cannibalism; Dr Heinz Kiosk, the psychoanalyst who concludes every invective with the bellicose refrain ‘We Are All Guilty!’; and Dr Spacely-Trellis, the Bishop of Bevindon, who is so achingly progressive that he barely believes in God at all.

As you can glean from this list, such characters wouldn’t be out of place in a satire today. This is because their real-life equivalents are very much with us. One entry from 1964 stuck out. It features Dr Spacely-Trellis defending a poster depiction of a nude Christ in the face of opposition from crusty conservatives, and it reminds us that the paradox of those preaching liberal tolerance using hateful language long predates Twitter. The passage concludes:

‘“The people who are objecting to this poster are the sort who voted Tory at the General Election. As Christians we must be charitable and understanding to this filthy subhuman scum”, he added, his face turning purple and his eyes starting out of his head. “But I would not care to be in their shoes on Judgement Day.’”

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, 'Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times', is published by Societas.

Bruce Gilley and the ‘problems of anti-colonialism’ saga - Spectator Coffee House, October 12, 2020

Bruce Gilley and the ‘problems of anti-colonialism’ saga
By Patrick West


Most of us are familiar with the climate of censure and censorship we now live in. People are 'cancelled' and 'no-platformed' for having inappropriate opinions on matters of race and gender, and reprimanded for using the wrong pronoun when referring to transgender men and women. But there are worrying signs that this tendency to shut down those with the 'wrong views' has strayed into the world of books and publishing.

Bruce Gilley, an Oxford-educated professor, is being cancelled for the second time in three years, having a book withdrawn after an online campaign against him. 'The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns' Epic Defense of the British Empire' was due to be the first volume in a 'problems of anti-colonialism' series. Now it won't see the light of day: the book has been scrapped following a petition set up by a Maoist philosopher, calling on publisher Rowman & Littlefield to rethink its decision to release the book. According to Gilley, who was first targeted by campaigners unhappy at his 2017 paper 'The Case for Colonialism', the 'snowballing' of the petition online was enough for the project to be ditched without explanation.

Gilley is not alone. In July, historian David Starkey said sorry after saying in an interview that slavery was not akin to genocide as 'so many damn blacks' had survived. He was right to apologise. But doing so was not enough. As a result of his comment, and the furore that ensued, HarperCollins said it would no longer publish any more of his books. This came a few months after Hachette dropped plans to publish Woody Allen's memoir Apropos of Nothing, following accusations that he molested his daughter as a child (which he denies).

But while there are, of course, plausible arguments to be made criticising Gilley, Starkey and Allen, I can't be alone in thinking it a pity that their writings may no longer see the light of day. While Starkey's recent comments were wrong, his work on the Tudors has been vital to our understanding of this period in England's history. Should we not be able to learn from his knowledge, even if we don't agree with everything he says?

As for Gilley, while his arguments against colonialism go against the grain of mainstream academic opinion, should he not be entitled to make the argument as to why, for all the bad things that happened under colonialism, there were upsides? After all, isn't the purpose of a good book to challenge our assumptions, rather than to simply confirm what we thought all along?

Yet in the world of publishing, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are two hurdles an author must overcome to get their work published. Firstly, it must be good enough. Fair enough. And secondly, the author must hold the right opinions and say the right things. Even high-profile authors are not immune to the second of these criteria. This summer, several staff members at Hachette threatened to down tools and refuse to work on Rowling’s new book, ‘The Ickabog’, because they didn't like all of her views. On that occasion, the publisher admirably stuck up to those staff members. Yet authors without the loyal following Rowling has are more vulnerable to these attempts at silencing writers.

And while the Twitter mob might not like it, the merits of publishing Rowling are clear: her latest novel which was attacked for being 'transphobic' has since shot to the top of the bestseller charts. So although some publishers are clearly fearful of the mob, toeing the line out of fear and expedience of the financial consequences should they be accused of racism or sexism, more need to take up the old newspaper mantra: publish and be damned.

How closely linked are lockdown and Brexit? - Spectator Coffee House, October 10, 2020

How closely linked are lockdown and Brexit?

By Patrick West

Once upon a time, a long time ago, this country was consumed by the matter of Brexit. Everywhere you turned, in every medium, even among friends and colleagues, you couldn't get away from the subject: everyone was talking about Brexit. We were obsessed by it. From 2016 to 2019 there was no escape.

All of this changed this year. With the pandemic, the rancorous matter of Brexit vanished, or at least stopped becoming the emotive, divisive matter of primary concern. It has been relegated to a pedestrian news story about trading rights. In the year of the coronavirus and all its horrors, paranoia and despair, Brexit has become a sideshow. Right?

Wrong. While the clamorous conflict between Leavers and Remainers has ostensibly ceased, in our collective subconscious the same cleavage in our society remains – only the subject matter has changed. As you may have concluded from newspapers and your social media feed, Remainer and Leave camps have merely metamorphosed into pro-lockdown and anti-lockdown tribes.

For instance, back in 2016 it was Allison Pearson in the Daily Telegraph and Frederick Forsyth in the Daily Express who were the most vociferous in their invectives against the EU. This year, these two characters – among many other columnists and voices in general – have been just as ferocious in their denunciations of lockdowns, masks and curfews. When it comes to anti-lockdown/Leave and lockdown/Remain, the two camps, respectively, are often the same lot.

The parallel is at its most obvious when it comes to rhetoric about elites and 'experts'. During the Brexit referendum, Remainers often deferred to experts in academia or the City who warned about the dire economic consequences of Brexit. Leavers cited everyday wisdom and lived experience in their argument why we should leave the EU. Back then, the debate centred on academic knowledge and deference to experts, versus empirical evidence and common sense. It's the same today.

This argument from lived experience is repeatedly employed by the anti-lockdown-minded because the loudest voices to oppose further government restrictions come from small businesses. It's the anti-EU, lower-middle class types who own small shops and run small businesses who have been hit hardest by coronavirus measures. They are consequently the least inclined to support draconian anti-pandemic measures. There is no 'working from home' option for many small businesses or your manual, working class type from the north-east or midlands.

If Brexit was a class issue, then so is Covid. Working-class people who voted against the EU did so as much in revolt against the London metropolitan elite as they did against Brussels. There was a twin resentment then and there is twin resentment now. It's the Somewhere people versus the Anywhere people conflict all over again.

As with Brexit, we have a divide between the working class who can't work at home, and largely an upper-middle class in the Home Counties who are happy to do so – because they can. On average they have larger houses and more gardens, which make domestic life for them and their family palatable. For them, lockdown measures are merely a nuisance. For those in flats or terraced houses, and for those who cannot work remotely, lockdown is a nightmare.

Ultimately, it comes down to a choice between freedom and security, between libertarianism and utilitarianism. That was the fundamental question posed in 2016. Do we vote to leave the EU, and in doing so face an exciting and prosperous, or perhaps an uncertain and perilous future? Or do we vote to stay, knowing that things will be tolerable in an undemocratic and sclerotic union that at least affords us free trade?

We are faced with a different problem today, but it's still one that divides statist and libertarians. Either we are to be subjected to endless and repeated lockdowns, returning indoors every few months, with the hope that deliverance will come in months soon with a vaccine. Or our masters might miraculously take the libertarian leap in the dark, deciding to set free our youth and healthy working age populace, returning them back to the public sphere and back to normality.

Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked and author of 'Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times' (Societas, 2017)

Letter to The Times, October 10, 2020

 

 

Why it’s fashionable to hate your own country - Spiked, October 2, 2020

 

Why it’s fashionable to hate your own country

This is more about parading virtue than reckoning with history.

Patrick West


If one had to explain today’s culture wars in the barest, most simple terms, the best method would be to refer to David Goodhart’s division of peoples into the Somewheres and the Anywheres. In Britain, America and elsewhere we see a conflict between those attached to their homeland, its history and its traditions, and a more affluent, mobile elite, who profess to be more internationalist in outlook – because they can afford to be – and who are less likely to revere the tradition and culture of the lands, cities and towns of their birth.

This is to put it mildly. Going back to the 1930s, as George Orwell famously observed, the Anywhere class is not so much casually indifferent to the culture of their place of birth as positively hostile to it. The ostensible internationalists of Orwell’s time venerated anything that emerged from Moscow or Paris, in contradistinction to that which stemmed from petty, boring, philistine, church-going, beer-drinking England.

The culture wars of the 21st century illustrate that this division very much remains, albeit in mutated form. This was illustrated recently by the decision of a debating society at Trinity College, Dublin to rescind an invitation to Richard Dawkins to speak at a function, on account of his critical viewpoints on Islam. Dawkins, perhaps the most famous atheist of our times, has described the faith as ‘the greatest force for evil in the world today’, and referred to the ‘pernicious influence’ of Islamic faith schools.

Atheism is the default position of most students, and anyone in their twenties who likes to style themselves as a radical freethinker will call themselves an atheist, so you might think Dawkins would find favour in their numbers. And indeed he does – but only when he is attacking Christianity. When it comes to denouncing Islam he is implicitly making the grievous transgression of racism, of attacking the Other, of something sacred and international to the Anywhere class.

To attack Christianity, something that pertains to the Self, to the Somewhere people, is conversely positively fashionable and will find you friends and allies among like-minded, ostensible and ostentatiously international types.

It is a pattern repeated elsewhere. In America we have white, liberal, coastal types mocking Donald Trump and his blue-collar supporters for being small-minded, borderline or actual racists, and for never leaving their opioid-infested, ghastly Middle American towns. In Britain we have been all too accustomed to the Remainer depiction of anti-EU Brexiteers as low-information morons from the provinces who didn’t even know what they voted for.

The white-on-white narrative between the enlightened, educated Brahmin class and the brainless Morlocks is repeated on both sides of the Atlantic, whether it be Momentum or BBC executives versus brainwashed chavs stuck in the past yearning for Empire, or white Black Lives Matter and Antifa virtue-enforcers seeking conflict with redneck MAGA types. On both sides of the Atlantic we see Anywhere liberals denounce the history of their own country as one of genocide and racism.

The abiding and inherent tendency of the people of the Anywhere class is thus to denigrate their own country. The motivation for this should be obvious, if we view this conspicuous self-hatred in terms of virtue-signalling. It is to draw attention to oneself, to display what an enlightened and decent person you are, prepared to right the wrongs of the past and confront the wrong-minded folk of the present. It’s a modern form of self-flagellation, an egocentric, narcissistic, often insincere form of romantic primitivism that goes back to Rousseau, in which the childlike, innocent Other is always sanctified as superior.

The showy politics of the Anywhere liberal-left is often politics to make you feel good. It’s posturing to make others know that you are good.


The new dogmas

Back in the late 20th century it was often observed that Western society had lost faith in its old certitudes, in its faith in reason, progress, grand narratives and objectivity itself. According to a certain coterie of mostly French intellectuals, professors among the humanities departments in universities and journalists in elevated echelons of the press, there was a consensus that we lived in a postmodern society, hopelessly mired in relativism, doubt and multiple irreconcilable interpretations. No one could really say what was true or not as there was no ultimate arbiter of truth.

How things are different today. Our society now seems in precisely an opposite impasse. We now live in a culture suffused with ferocious certitudes, in which everyone believes they possess the truth. This is why verbal conflicts on social media have become so vituperative and unpleasant. This is why political violence and conflict between factions has returned to our streets for the first time since the 1930s. This is why people hold such tenacious views on transgenderism, race, the European Union or the future of America. This is the reason for our conformist and censorious cancel culture of No Platforming. Everyone knows what’s right and seeks to silence those who are wrong. Heretics are punished, fired or brought to bear. Doubt has disappeared.

As Matthew Syed of The Sunday Times suggested at the weekend, we are living in a Counter-Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment, from Immanuel Kant to David Hume, were guided by doubt and the desire to question dogmas held by others or themselves, in order to further human knowledge and progress mankind, dogma today rules.

This is why Friedrich Nietzsche, widely misunderstood as the godfather of postmodernism, was hostile to final, absolute truth. He believed it could ultimately lead to blind ideology. As he wrote in one of his notebooks (a passage that posthumously appeared in The Will To Power): ‘The claim that the truth has been found, and that there is an end to ignorance and error, is one of the greatest temptations there is. If it is believed, it paralyses the determination to examine, to investigate, to be curious and to experiment.’


Postmodern advertising

This is not to say the spirit of postmodernity has vanished. Its embers still waft around us. Consider two television adverts for coffee now showing. One is a series of adverts for Starbucks, in which people explain how and why they transitioned. One portrays a young girl changing her identity from Jemma to James. These tell us nothing about the beverages for sale. It’s all about selling a brand as a woke value. It’s thoroughly postmodern, in that the real and represented have become utterly divorced.

Another advert, that for McDonald’s coffee, is thoroughly rooted in modernity. Its message? Its coffee is tasty and cheap. I know which brand I would prefer to buy.

Trekking - The TLS, September 25, 2020

 

 WALKING THE GREAT NORTH LINE 

From Stonehenge to Lindisfarne to discover the mysteries of our ancient past 

ROBERT TWIGGER 

320pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £20. 

The route Robert Twigger takes in this rambling adventure may seem unconventional, but it is guided by a neat idea. One day, having noticed that a straight line from Hengistbury Head in Dorset to Lindisfarne on the Northumbrian coast passes through no fewer than forty-two sites stretching back to prehistory – including Old Sarum, Stonehenge, Avebury, Thor’s Cave and Mam Tor – he sets out on a pilgrimage along this novel pathway. A question forever hovers in the background: does this alignment exist by accident, or by design? 

Luxuriating in the quotidian aspects of walking while keeping an eye on the bigger picture, Twigger sees his trek as a homage to the ancients, to “my freedom to do as I pleased, sleep and walk where I pleased. And freedom also includes not paying for things that are ours by rights, by the rights of ancient England”. “I was fondly hoping to develop ideas about England’s ‘primitive’ past”, he writes, “and to point out that ancient man was just as intelligent as us.” 

Part poet, part pub philosopher, he is sometimes friendly and open, discussing Jack Kerouac with fellow trekkers, for example; at other times, he is a misanthrope who enjoys being alone and unhappy, mired in bad weather, suffering from blisters and getting lost. In perhaps an accidental allusion to the eternal monomyth, he seems to be on his own Hero’s Journey: he grows dispirited as he zigzags through the Peak District, facing false starts, disenchantments and deliverances – he is frustrated by barbed wire and blocked passages, but elsewhere discovers an “island with a single small oak ... made for a great seat, a regal seat, a poet warrior’s seat” – while repeatedly vowing never to forget the pain of walking. 

An inveterate grumbler, Twigger is seldom a bore, however, and this melancholy, elegiac and meandering book is strangely satisfactory. It doesn’t matter that the original conceit, the supposed line from north to south, retreats into irrelevance (Twigger reluctantly concedes that he “had a correlation. Nothing more”), it is just good to be in his company as he walks and reflects on such esoteric subjects as shamanism, Continental philosophy, church porches, land ownership, autobiography, family history and the stressful and sometimes soul-destroying nature of modernity. 

Patrick West

An independent Kent isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds - Spectator Coffee House, September 24, 2020

 

An independent Kent isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds
Patrick West


The news that a Brexit border will be introduced for lorry drivers entering Kent has aroused hilarity and derision among some Remainers. These critics see in Kent the personification of all that is parochial and plebeian. Horrible old Kent, with its proles who epitomise Little England at its most execrable and risible. The truth is that we people of Kent won't be too flustered by this new development. Many of us will actually welcome the Sussex/Kent divide.

For too long our county, the oldest in England, has been the playboy playground of rich Londoners and Sussex/Surrey county types who have descended on our wonderful chaff fields and cliffs, wading their cash around, buying up houses that they rarely occupy, or maybe live in for two or three weekends every summer.

Sure, I may be one the many ex-Londoners who has settled here, but at least I have done so properly and permanently for years now. Nowhere are second-home owners more conspicuous than in east Kent.

And there is the other case of people breaching Kent's borders, via the English Channel. Those who come from France and settle here place a burden on schools and hospitals. No-one here in Folkestone or Margate has a grievance with foreigners. It's just not being able to understand your neighbours that really grates. There is literally something alienating about not understanding what people around you are saying.

I'm being facetious, of course. Kent folk are the most generous and English people around, like Yorkshire types; more English than English. But those smug, remote people who think it's amusing to guffaw at the prospect of Kent independence inadvertently expose their own metropolitan ignorance. People outside London do care about their country and have an inherent patriotism, and they do care about where they live. This is because we are the somewhere people from somewhere, not the anybody people from anywhere.

Yes, we in Kent may want to erect walls. But don't all householders want to erect walls and lock doors? Proper caring neighbourhoods always want to put up walls. It's because they care about all that they hold dear. Show me someone who doesn't lock their door at night or someone who bewails the walls of their house and I'll show you a hypocrite.

We have always welcomed incomers who want to immigrate here, from Lithuanians to Poles, and we have seen the sons and daughters of these immigrants learn English and teach their children English and integrate with those who live here. That's because many of us came from London areas where we lived among eastern Europeans, and where eastern Europeans learned to live with others from ethnic minorities. If you want to see an exemplar of an English-Polish multicultural society, come to Dover.

Many of us Kent folk tolerate the derision from the metropole for the same reason that we don't like them: there is a manifest feeling that for years they have looked down upon us. This is why we vote Ukip. This is why we voted Brexit. This is why so many Labour heartlands voted Tory. We were fed up of being condescended. And this is why a lot of naturally Labour heartlands in Kent will continue to vote against the metropolitan elite: we hate being laughed at, for being mocked as silly Kent people. We are at the beginning and end of England.

And we care about Brexit; we care about the effect a no-deal Brexit will have. We care about it because we have felt the brunt of immigration for decades now, in a way that those in London and beyond have not. From Herne Bay to Folkestone, from Margate to Dover, we have seen our societies changing. We are at the front line.

This is why Kent independence isn't such a ridiculous idea as it sounds. It's only as absurd as what's been going on in the past decades with the British working-class, lower-middle class and even the middle class. We've had enough of you. And if our answers seem silly, it's because your questions have been silly. So Viva Kent Independencia if you must. It's not merely a joke. On anyone's behalf.

Wokeness is a cult of purity - Spiked, September 4, 2020

 

Wokeness is a cult of purity

They believe cultures cannot mix and that good people must be punished for the most minor transgressions.

Patrick West


It’s a sign that normality has returned in earnest: the trivial transgression of cultural appropriation is back in the news headlines. No doubt you will have seen the story. The singer Adele has been accused of this outrageous violation after appearing in a virtual Notting Hill Carnival photograph sporting a bikini top emblazoned with the Jamaican flag and with her hair in Bantu knots, a hairstyle mostly associated with African women or women of African descent.

We are back on familiar ground, back to the notion that any form of intercultural interaction, especially undertaken by white people, is inherently racist and offensive. Some did defend Adele on the grounds that being a native of Britain’s multiracial capital city, she knew exactly what she was doing, and was less engaging in appropriation and more appreciation. Yet the affair reveals how tenacious remains the notion of ‘cultural appropriation’.

This popular conceit is profoundly ignorant and illiterate. All cultures are cross-breeds to some degree. I write these very words in a language that is a mash-up of Anglo-Saxon and Old French. English combines the language of the oppressed and oppressor. I punch up and down merely by typing these words.

Yet the resilient belief that cultures are sacred and incorruptible is significant. It is a symptom of a new morality of purity, a culture of cleansing and of new boundaries.

As Frank Furedi argues in his recent book, Why Borders Matter: Why Humanity Must Relearn the Art of Drawing Boundaries, our culture’s borders have shifted focus in recent decades. Traditional boundaries between nation states are deemed archaic or undesirable by some. The boundary between male and female is collapsing, as is that between gay and straight, adult and child, public and private. Transgression is the name of the game.

Or so it seems. Boundaries themselves aren’t vanishing — rather, our culture has erected new ones. One example is this boundary between cultures, which are now viewed as akin to animal species that cannot interbreed. Cultures are deemed in need of inoculation from each other. Hence the felony of ‘cultural appropriation’. Furedi also points to ‘safe spaces’, which erect a different type of boundary, as does ‘cancel culture’, which divides mankind into two categories: the elect and the outcasts.

In the United States, there is talk of introducing racial segregation on university campuses. This reification of race – between people of the same species – is but another extension of the new quasi-religious imperative to purify, simplify, to erase nuance, subtlety and shades of difference. Such is the forensic fanaticism and fundamentalism of the new puritanism that even the most tiny transgression, or ‘microaggression’, must be identified and exorcised.

This purity cult seeks to expunge society of those who fail to obey woke diktats, to cancel, ‘call out’, shame, intimidate, harass or punish the undesirables. Liberal humanism is derided as insufficient. It is not enough to tolerate people we disagree with. They must conform or be expelled. Hence the violence in America at the moment, from the puritan stormtroopers of antifa and BLM, who demand strangers show obedience and compliance, who are literally destroying America. In pulling down statues, they betray how they want to erase history itself. It’s all classic Year Zero behaviour, worthy of a cult, of which the new puritanism is but an extension.

It is often remarked that people are far more intolerant these days, and seek recourse to censorship so freely. It derives from this new morality, which can’t abide impurity and cannot tolerate difference or dissent.

The new morality worships purity. The new boundaries are the means by which this doctrine is enforced.

John Williams: the great classical composer of our time

What a joy it was to listen to Classic FM’s ‘Movie Music Hall of Fame’ throughout bank holiday Monday. It was an escapist fantasy. John Williams’ score for Schindler’s List was eventually voted the nation’s favourite piece of film music, knocking from the top slot Howard Shore’s score for The Lord of the Rings.

It was a triumphal day for Williams all round, with five entries in the top 20 alone, the others including Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and ET the Extra-Terrestrial. Surely John Williams should be recognised as our greatest living composer.

Purists might object that his music is highly derivative, with his scores being conspicuously reliant on Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Elgar. This is true. Yet Williams, not to mention Shore, John Barry, Hans Zimmer, Ennio Morricone and so on, have produced some of the best-loved and most enduring classical music of the second half of the 20th century and first two decades of this one. Their music has proved more lasting than anything produced by mainstream modern classical composers. Film scores today are the only form of new classical music that enjoy popularity among the masses.

Most of the new material performed at the Proms this year will be forgotten in 10 years’ time. By then the Classic FM Movie Music Hall of Fame won’t have changed much at all.

We all have bad thoughts

The singer George Ezra has revealed that he is suffering from a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) known as ‘Pure O’, short for ‘purely obsessional’, the symptoms of which include distressing or disruptive thoughts associated with OCD, but none of the physical actions to relieve them, such as internal counting, blinking or other repetitive physical rituals.

Upon reading the confession, I began to suspect that I, too, had ‘Pure O’. I have three classic psychological OCD symptoms: hoarding, repeated checking of door locks or oven knobs, and indeed disruptive thoughts.

I’ve always had all sorts of strange and unpleasant thoughts. But no one is in charge of their subconscious, and who governs what might spring from it unannounced, so I’ve learnt not to hate myself for such thoughts, just as most of us eventually don’t blame ourselves for the weird and horrible things we do in our dreams.

My most common disruptive thought is the temptation to throw myself in front of an oncoming train or from a tall building. But again, many of you will have had this temptation. It’s a common cause for fear of heights, and not remotely connected with actual suicidal thoughts.

Most of us have strange thoughts from time to time. Most of us have some form of OCD, in which case we should accept that behaviour associated with it is otherwise known as ‘being human’.

The BBC’s bid to axe left-wing comedy will fail - Spectator Coffee House, September 3, 2020

 

The BBC’s bid to axe left-wing comedy will fail
Patrick West

People of a conservative or Eurosceptic disposition should be thankful that the BBC's new director general, Tim Davie, is to address the widely-held perception that its comedy output is disproportionately left-wing. For years, listeners and viewers of the likes of The News Quiz, The Now Show, Mock The Week and Have I Got News For You have been subjected to – and bored by – an endless stream of quips and invectives at the expense of the Conservative party, Donald Trump and Brexiteers. According to a Daily Telegraph report, the BBC is to tackle this imbalance. Some of these shows might even be axed altogether.

Yet this could be a difficult task. Although the liberal-left or woke nature of much BBC satire and political comedy can be grating, it is, alas, intrinsic to its nature. These shows are mostly aimed at herd-minded twenty-somethings, for whom parroting one's anti-Brexit, anti-Trump, Tory-bashing opinions is not only a matter of pride, but serves as generational, tribal glue.

Most stand-up comedians duly cater for these viewpoints, and in doing so, also satisfy their own needs. As the Dave channel series Comedy Against Living Miserably has illustrated, many comedians today conform to the stereotype of the sad clown, the figure who on stage makes us laugh but in private suffers from profound unhappiness. An episode on Sunday that featured Seann Walsh, Suzi Ruffell and Nish Kumar – the latter an obsessive anti-Brexiteer – revealed how deeply insecure they were and how a bad gig would plunge them into a week-long bout of depression.

To judge from Comedy Against Living Miserably, most popular TV stand-up comedians are insecure souls who seek plaudits from strangers to boost their fragile ego and feel better about themselves. And you don't win plaudits from young people by articulating sensible or unfashionable or conservative opinions. Hence the bias we see today. It's the result of a symbiotic relationship between crowd and performers, each seeking confirmation from the other.

This is why conservative stand-up comedians are so rare on TV and radio. Simon Evans and Geoff Norcott are exceptions, with the latter's awkward appearance on Mock The Week only highlighting that show's ingrained liberal-left tendency.

Right-wing comedy is anyway less suited to the vocal, audience-based format in our woke culture, in which causing offence has become one of the most grievous transgressions. Right-wing and conservative humour is less chummy, luvvie and ingratiating, and can often be cruel, outrageous and brutally honest. Think Ricky Gervais or Frankie Boyle. While both offensive stand-ups wouldn't classify themselves as classically right-wing, both inveigh against political correctness and both are inherently obsessed with man's fallen nature.

Conservative – and thus necessarily pessimistic – satire is better digested in print, alone in the private sphere, where we can laugh inwardly at things we know we can't find funny in public. It's where we can recognise that which we know to be true, when saying what is true might land us in trouble with the law or with our bosses. The best satire is read, not heard, whether it be the misanthrope Jonathan Swift having Gulliver urinating on a queen's home to put out a fire, or Viz having my generation wetting ourselves at the angry feminist Millie Tant and the absurdly right-on Modern Parents.

The foremost written-word conservative satirist today is Andrew Doyle, creator of the preposterous woke caricature, Titania McGrath. And Doyle's monster enjoys a noble pedigree; she could easily have been dreamt up by the late Michael Wharton, who for the second half of the twentieth century and early part of this one, wrote the Daily Telegraph's semi-fantastical 'Peter Simple' column.

Wharton populated his fictional world, 'Stretchford', with liberal-left grotesques: Hampstead intellectuals, barmy social workers, supinely liberal Tories, trendy vicars. The pinnacle of his creation was the psychoanalyst Dr Heinz Kiosk, who invariably concluded his monologues with the bellicose refrain: 'We are all guilty!' This might as well be the actual motto of today's liberal-left.

That the BBC is funded by you and me, whereas print satire is not, is an important matter. So the political imbalance of its comedy panel shows should at least be investigated. But I'm not sure it's going to be a success story, certainly not without alienating the audience that currently does like to be reassured of its anti-Brexit and anti-Trump righteousness.

From Punch in the 19th century to P.J. O'Rourke to Auberon Waugh to Craig Brown to Titania McGrath, if it's grown-up, nuanced political humour and satire you want, refer to books, newspapers, magazines or the internet. Let the lefties have the airwaves. They and their pliant audiences are quite good at it, to be fair. Yet they'll never match the refined and elevated humour of conservatives, who always find comedy in the more cerebral and less conformist medium of the written word.

Vegans, your soya milk is killing the planet - Spectator Coffee House, August 22, 2020

 

Vegans, your soya milk is killing the planet
Patrick West


In the popular imagination, veganism and environmentalism go hand-in-hand. Both are championed – often in one voice – by ultra-progressive types who protest that we should live more ethically and responsibly in order to save the planet. Both types argue that eating less methane-emitting cattle and consuming more agriculturally-efficient crops is the first step we can all make as individuals into halting climate change.

A report published by the UK Sustainable Food Trust not only implicitly challenges the assumption that veganism and environmentalism work in symbiosis, it tacitly suggests that the two movements may be in actual conflict with each other.

It calls upon vegans to stop drinking soy milk in order to save the planet, and that milk from cows – especially cows grazed on grass rather than imported soya beans – is much better for a sustainable planet. 'Vegans and others who buy milk substitutes made from soya for their latte and cappuccino, or breakfast cereal, are also harming the planet. They would do better to switch to milk from cows... if they want to help make a more sustainable planet,' the report states.

Global production of soya beans and palm oils has doubled over the past 20 years and continues to rise. The two account for 90 per cent of global vegetable oil production and are used in processed foods, animal feed and non-food products. Many of us are attuned to the devastation caused to rainforests by palm oil cultivation, but less well known is comparable ruination caused by soya bean production: and the cultivation of both is having terrible consequences.

Soya milk is only the most glaring battle-ground between vegans and environmentalism. Veganism, as practised today, is mostly the preserve of the cosmopolitan middle-classes, whose diet often include quinoa imported from South America, almonds from California, pomegranates from India, beans from Brazil, goji berries China and soya from south-east Asia – this soya will, in turn, be transformed into processed vegan burgers and vegan sausages. Most popular plant-based proteins, including chickpeas, lentils and chia seeds, are also usually flown thousands of miles to reach their consumers in the UK.

Another dairy product substitute, almond milk, begins life on the monocultural landscape of the almond plains of California, where the almonds are doused in pesticides and fungicides, before being flown thousands of miles to the UK. (It requires a colossal 130 pints of water to produce just one glass of almond milk). The use of fertiliser, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides has long been a feature of industrial crops producing maize and grains.

The appetite for voguish vegan food can have a devastating effect on local economies. In 2013, prices of quinoa rocketed to such an extent that those growing the grain in the Andes, where it plays a central part in the local diet, could no longer afford it.

Not all conventional fruit and vegetables are environmentally-friendly, either. The UK imports strawberries and blueberries from continental Europe and the US when they are out of season here, generating their own carbon footprint. And perhaps the biggest sinner is the asparagus. Research by Angelina Frankowska at Manchester University recently found that asparagus eaten in the UK has the highest carbon footprint of any vegetable here, mostly because it is imported from Peru and because of the vegetable's thirsty nature and demand for land.

Another environmental villain that we take for granted is the avocado, a staple of the hipster vegan diet, and a similarly thirsty fruit. A single mature avocado tree in California, Chile or Mexico – areas that face chronic water shortages – needs up to 209 litres every day in the summer, before taking its journey by plane to the consumer.

The processed nature of much 'vegan food' is yet another problem. This February, Graham McAuliffe of the Rothamsted Institute, said that tofu has a worse carbon footprint than chicken, pork or lamb. The protein foodstuff has a larger carbon footprint than the meat it ostensibly replaces owing to the fact that it is processed and because it is made from soy milk. The story is similar with cow-free vegan cheeses made from coconut oil. These require a warm tropical climate to grow and they are often imported from Pacific regions or Sri Lanka.

It's not veganism per se that is necessarily bad for the environment. A 2018 Oxford University study found that a vegan diet is the single most effective way to reduce our environmental footprint, which is true, but only in the case of a sensible and rational vegan diet. If you were to eat a diet derived from locally-sourced, in-season, non-processed vegetables, fruit, pulses, legumes, berries, rice and oats, you would indeed be considerably reducing your carbon footprint.

That sounds a very boring and time-consuming life, which explains the allure of today's exotic vegan diet, a voguish affair which is rather bad for our planet.

A pandemic of corporate virtue-signalling - Spiked, August 21, 2020

 

A pandemic of corporate virtue-signalling

Let’s boycott all the money-grubbing companies that pretend to care about us.

Patrick West


You have probably spent the past five months watching a lot of television or online broadcasts or messing around on the internet, which means you will have seen a lot of adverts – most of them woke.

There’s no point singling out any one corporation for trying to make capital out of the coronavirus pandemic, because everyone has been at it since March, preaching first about the imperative to stay at home and then to stay safe – all featuring face masks and Zoom correspondence. Companies have all been very keen to prove how much they care in this crisis.

A notable exception has been the cancer charities, who appear on every television ad break complaining openly that state cash has been diverted from their work towards the Covid-19 crisis – and I salute them for doing so.

If 2020 has been the year of the pandemic, it has also been the year in which insincere corporate virtue-signalling has reached pandemic proportions. We have had McDonald’s obsessing over Black Lives Matter; HSBC reminding us that ‘we are not an island’ (while not exactly being brilliant internationalists); the Dave channel reminding us to stay in (and watch Mock The Week or QI for the billionth time); and most egregiously, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream telling us on Twitter that Britain’s attitude to illegal immigrants is totally awful.

I don’t know what these corporations are playing at. I know that most corporations seek to sell values rather than products these days, but this is getting ridiculous. Most people, from left to right, hate the vacuous posturing of greedy corporations. It’s especially galling that we have to watch them at a time when we are all gradually becoming poorer. The last thing we need during lockdown is insincere sermonising.

Thank God it’s ending at last. Now, let’s boycott all companies that deal in these meaningless and sanctimonious platitudes.

Ghost cities

On Tuesday evening, BBC Two broadcast the first of its four-part series, Manctopia: Billion-Pound Property Boom, charting Manchester’s massive building development of recent years. ‘Since 2014 the population in the city centre has doubled to 60,000 and the rents have gone up by almost 40 per cent’, we are told.

The splurge in skyscrapers in the northern city this decade has been underreported, certainly in comparison to the same (albeit more awesome and awful) boom in super-tall buildings in London. This probably owes to the fact that most of those who write the opinion articles about skyscrapers are based in London, and all the journalists who have been complaining about London’s unaffordability, gaudy ghastliness or awful skyscrapers over the years also work in the capital.

The documentary suggests that Manchester is going the same way as London – it’s becoming a city of empty luxury, where the locals are also moving out, no longer able to afford to live in their native city. Like London, over-gentrification is proving to be a double-edged sword.

As someone who grew up in London in the 1980s and lived in Manchester in the mid-1990s, I can see both sides of the argument in both cases. Parts of London, especially the now fashionable East End of London, were grim no-go areas, while its underground was a ghastly, ghostly affair back then. And while the Manchester of my time was on the way up – as epitomised by yuppie comedy Cold Feet – much of it was forlorn. The horrid tower blocks of Hulme were then only just being torn down and much of its gangster ‘Gunchester’ culture around Moss Side and Rusholme remained.

While London has improved in so many ways, in others it has lost its soul. Soho and Portobello Road have lost their Bohemian charm. Kensington and Chelsea are ghost towns at the weekend, what with all the houses being increasingly owned by the transient or not inhabited at all. I hope Manchester doesn’t go the same way, though it probably will.

While I’m not one to romanticise or trivialise being poor, the fate of London and the likely fate of Manchester remind us that money doesn’t bring us happiness. That’s why so many people voted Brexit. They did so knowing that they could be financially poorer. They did so hoping that their neighbourhoods might once more resemble those they grew up in.

That’s why I don’t celebrate the opulence of London today. I still lament the old homeliness and shabbiness of the west London I grew up in.


Ashamed to be British, proud to be Me

One of the most common expressions you hear from ostentatious liberals is ‘I’m ashamed to be British’. It is being deployed in abundance this summer in relation to the migration crisis in the English Channel. It’s a reaction to the perception that the UK government has been callous and that the plebeian populace has displayed its customary and lamentable xenophobia and racism.

Being ashamed of one’s own country is usually the hallmark of the progressive, as George Orwell famously noted in ‘England Your England’. This loathing of one’s own country has always struck me as not only vapid – as meaningless as being ‘proud to be British’ – but also devious.

Declaring hatred of one’s own country is one of the countless means humans employ to draw attention to themselves. In this case, it implies an internationalist outlook, which in turn serves to parade that you are an open-minded person with intellectual cosmopolitan concerns – with a caring attitude for one’s fellow man irrespective of his or her nationality. And more importantly, it says you are not shackled by narrow-minded patriotism – unlike the uncouth, gormless man in the street.

In other words, it signifies that one is above the mindless herd, that you are a fearsome, independent thinker. ‘I’m ashamed to be British’ can be translated as ‘I’m proud to be Me’ – a more accurate motto for the liberal left of today. Its altruistic outlook is a disguise for its cunning, narcissistic politics of conspicuous compassion and caring one-upmanship.

People like to quote Orwell when it comes to this matter, but, as ever, I defer to Nietzsche, who described Rousseau as combining ‘self-contempt and… inflamed vanity’. That’s a pretty just description of today’s overgrown teenagers who protest how much they hate themselves and hate their country.

Who is the best James Bond? - Spectator Life, August 20, 2020

 

Who is the best James Bond?
Patrick West


A Radio Times survey last week, involving 14,000 participants, voted Sean Connery the best James Bond. This is hardly shocking news. The Scot has for years been regarded as not only the first but the best on-screen 007. Less predictable was the news of who emerged in the poll as everyone’s second-favourite Bond: Timothy Dalton.

A discombobulated Daily Telegraph article called Dalton’s placing – above Pierce Brosnan – a ‘big surprise’. Indeed, one would have expected the much-loved Roger Moore, who is almost as synonymous with the role as Connery, to have at least garned the runners-up spot.

I suspect there were many diehard Bond aficionados among the voters. Because for some years now, among the party faithful, Timothy Dalton’s interpretation has been held in reverence for being the Bond most faithful to Ian Fleming’s literary creation.

In his two outings as the secret agent, The Living Daylights (1987) and Licence To Kill (1989), Dalton’s Bond is a serious professional, an often violent, dark and ruthless character, who brought back an authentic air of menace and brutality to 007. He was a far cry from Moore’s suave, wise-cracking and flippant Bond, and indeed this incarnation was a deliberate move by Dalton.

Timothy Dalton had originally been approached to play James Bond in 1971, but turned down the part, believing himself to be too young. Eon Productions, who were behind the films, repeated the approach in 1979, but Dalton didn’t want to play a jokey and cartoonish Bond as now Moore had made it. When Dalton, a classical Shakespearean actor, was finally cast in 1986, he did so on the insistence that his Bond would be brought back to his literary origins. He said that year: ‘I intend to approach this project with a sense of responsibility to the work of Ian Fleming.’

Dalton reflected in a 1989 interview:

‘I think Roger was fine as Bond, but the films had become too much techno-pop and had lost track of their sense of story. I mean, every film seemed to have a villain who had to rule or destroy the world. If you want to believe in the fantasy on screen, then you have to believe in the characters and use them as a stepping-stone to lead you into this fantasy world. That’s a demand I made, and Albert Broccoli agreed with me.’

To bring back authenticity to the role, Dalton returned to the source material: Fleming’s novels. ‘On those pages I discovered a Bond I’d never seen on the screen, a quite extraordinary man, a man I really wanted to play, a man of contradictions and opposites.’ The result was not only a more gritty Bond, but one set apart from the fantasy worlds of megalomaniac baddies inhabiting volcanoes or space stations, and set instead firmly in real life scenarios – in war-torn Afghanistan (The Living Daylights) and among drug barons in South America (Licence To Kill), just as Fleming’s early Bond outings had been mired in the Cold War.


Timothy Dalton and Carey Lowell in Licence to Kill (Photo: Shutterstock)

Dalton’s determination to return Bond to his origins may not have charmed younger fans who had grown up with Roger Moore, but the critics were impressed with his mission. ‘Latest 007 thriller is truer to original, violent nature of Ian Fleming’s hero.’ That was the Ottowa Citizen’s verdict on Licence to Kill. The Chicago Tribune agreed: ‘Timothy Dalton gives us a 007 that Ian Fleming would have loved’. The James Bond author Raymond Benson concluded that Dalton was ‘the most accurate and literal interpretation of the role … ever seen on screen’
Dalton’s films were dirty affairs, as the hard-edged Licence To Kill – released in an age of Die Hard and Lethal Weapon films – was the first Bond movie to rated 15 in the UK. In this second and last outing, Dalton’s Bond is border-line psychotic, resigning from the Secret Intelligence Service in order to pursue his own agenda of revenge.

Dalton, who was 40 when he eventually assumed the role, was precisely the right age to be Bond. He even resembled the protagonist. While Fleming had described as six foot tall, with a slim build, grey-blue eyes, a ‘cruel’ mouth and with short black hair that leads to a point, Timothy Dalton was himself 6′ 2” with black hair, grey-blue eyes and slim build.

‘Half the world loved Sean Connery and half the world loved Roger Moore,’ Dalton once remarked, demurely. And while there are those who will always prefer Sean Connery’s sex appeal or Roger Moore’s naff humour to Timothy Dalton’s total lack of either, in the role, it’s heartening to see that Dalton’s Bond is still given the recognition it deserves.

England’s soft underbelly - The Critic, August 5, 2020

England’s soft underbelly

Patrick West reviews The Channel, by Charlie Connelly


The English Channel occupies a strangely ambivalent position in the national mythology of England. On the one hand, it stands for the indefatigability of the nation, the ultimate moat that has protected this sceptred isle from being successfully invaded by a foreign army in nearly a thousand years. On the other hand, it has been viewed as England’s soft underbelly, the potential means through which this country could be overrun by foreigners: concerned coverage of illegal immigrants crossing it in recent years betrays this latter concern.

As a resident of Deal at the eastern mouth of the Channel, Charlie Connelly will be familiar with constant local television news coverage of immigrants and asylum-seekers trying to make their way from Calais to Dover (I, too, live in Deal). Hence East Kent residents can tend to be more overtly patriotic, or certainly vigilant as to the numbers of incomers from the continent.

It was on Walmer Beach in Deal, after all, where Julius Caesar’s first invasion of Britain took place in 55BC (his original plan to land at Dover was foiled by fierce resistance of the natives; few things change). Yet later Celts and then Anglo-Saxons were far more likely to view the Channel as a positive conduit of communication: “The notion of the Channel as a moat cutting us from the foreigners across the water is a recent development, dating back roughly as far as the eighteenth century.” The medieval scribe Geoffrey of Monmouth enthused how the “straits of the south” would “allow one to sail to Gaul”.

While Connelly adroitly places this stretch of water in its historical and cultural context, The Channel is for the most part a jaunty travel guide around the towns of France and Britain towards the eastern part of the water, and a multi-biographical guide to the characters who brought fame and repute to it.

The author is blessed with a bounty of characters from whom and source material from which to choose. An opening chapter, which charts the history of cross-Channel ferry crossings, cites the 1909 poem “A Channel Passage” by Rupert Brooke, in which he compared the nausea of a stormy voyage to France to his troubled love life. “The damned ship lurched and slithered,” he wrote. “Quiet and quick my cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew I must think hard of something or be sick; And could think hard of only one thing — you!”

Later on the author visits Brighton, a once small town originally popularised in the eighteenth century by Martha Gunn, the figure who was responsible for creating the notion that sea water and sea air were good for one’s health. Her Brighton contemporary, the physician Richard Russell, was an even more fanatical seaside devotee, instructing his patients to drink a pint of sea water at least once a day. Dr Johnson was less enthusiastic about the Sussex town, writing in 1776: “It is a country so truly desolate that if one had the mind to hang oneself in desperation at being obliged to live there it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten a rope.”

Connelly is judicious in the time and space he allots to both French and British towns. His chapter on Calais reminds us how this used to be a resort people visited, rather than just travelled through. The section on Dieppe brings more light relief, in reminding us in the nineteenth century it became a magnet for artists such as Turner, Delacroix, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Braquet and Sickert. The disgraced Oscar Wilde had a miserable time in Dieppe, with the former inmate of Reading Gaol being widely ostracised. More curiously, Ho Chi Minh worked on the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry after the First World War, before returning to Vietnam in 1923.

Connelly tries to restore repute to Jean-Pierre Blanchard, the balloonist who made the first aerial crossing between England and France in January 1783, and in doing so became the first man to see Dover Castle and the walls of Calais as if they were features on a map. Connelly contrasts the brilliant Blanchard with Louis Bleriot, who became the first man to fly over the Channel 1909 by sheer luck. Bleriot was a terrible pilot, who by 1905 had already walked away from 40 crashes. Even his famous flight of 1909 did not “touch down” by Dover Castle but literally crashed down by it.

It remains just about in the national memory that Matthew Webb was the first person to swim the Channel, in 1875; he fortified himself for his feat with eggs, bacon, half a pint of beer and a jug of claret. Webb was a lousy showman who fell into penury and would die eight years later trying to swim the rapids of Niagara Falls.

A swimmer who came after him was the epitome of heroic failure, the Glaswegian Jabez Wolfe, who tried and failed to swim the Channel 22 times. Undoubtedly the saddest fate among the cast assembled here was that which befell the first woman to fly the Channel, Harriet Quimby, on 16 April, 1912. Her feat would surely have made global newspaper headlines had the Titanic not sunk the night before. She died in a plane crash in Boston less than three months later.

The Channel, The Remarkable Men and Women Who Made It the Most Fascinating Waterway in the World, by Charlie Connelly
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99

Why so many BLM ultras are white - Spiked, July 3, 2020

Why so many BLM ultras are white

The race wars they are stoking won't blight their affluent neighbourhoods.

Patrick West


Many people have made the observation that most Black Lives Matter activists aren’t actually black. To judge by television coverage, photographs and YouTube videos, most BLM protesters indeed seem to be white, middle-class students. In a further paradox, it is becoming more evident by the day that many black people and ethnic minorities vehemently oppose BLM.

On Tuesday, the black comedian and actor Terry Crews, known to UK viewers from E4’s cop comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine, warned that Black Lives Matter shouldn’t morph into ‘Black Lives Better’. The devout Christian tweeted: ‘If you are a child of God, you are my brother and sister. I have family of every race, creed and ideology.’ Crews was consequently subject to online denunciation, which is not surprising, as he was essentially saying that all lives mattered – a sentiment that infuriates BLM advocates.

Closer to home, this week also saw the mixed-race former footballer Karl Henry publicly call into question BLM UK. ‘I think the majority of the UK have now had enough of that organisation’, he tweeted. ‘Black people’s lives matter! The divisive #BlackLivesMatter organisation, however, DOES NOT!’

Another British mixed-race former sportsman, Matthew Syed of The Sunday Times, asked of BLM whether ‘toppling another statue’ will ‘help the black person cowering from gangs in a drug-infested neighbourhood, the graduate denied promotion because of unconscious bias, the child growing up without hope in a tower block?’.

While in Britain we have the brave Trevor Phillips, in Australia one of the best-known detractors of woke politics and BLM is the journalist and television presenter Rita Panahi, who this summer has described BLM as ‘anti-police, anti-white, anti-capitalist but also proudly neo-Marxist’.

America’s veteran conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza has said that ‘the left has deployed a paramilitary’ in militant anti-racist protesting. ‘It’s not just Antifa. It’s all the other groups: Refuse Fascism, Black Lives Matter, and on it goes… This is something that Mussolini had, the black shirts… A roving band of thugs that are protected by powerful people in Hollywood [and] the media.’

It’s not only conservative ethnic-minority voices who reject BLM. Last week Africa’s elder stateswoman, the politician and humanitarian Graça Machel, formerly of Mozambique’s freedom movement and widow of Nelson Mandela, criticised BLM’s tactic of pulling down statues of slave-owners. They should remain, to ‘tell generations to come, this is how it started, and this is how it never should continue to be’.

In Britain, Sir Geoff Palmer, Scotland’s first black professor, has campaigned for years for explanatory plaques to accompany statues of slave traders. He believes toppling monuments will only erase the memory of their crimes against humanity: ‘You remove the evidence, you remove the deed.’ Indeed. Many black Americans have this summer come out in defence of the Emancipation Statue in Washington DC, paid for by freed slaves.

This paradox veers into genuine irony. Witness the spectacle of a white man attacking a black man for trying to remove BLM posters from a fence. Observe the white man scream at his uppity, negro inferior.

What’s behind such dissonance between whites who think they know best for blacks, and many blacks who disagree? Why are there black people proposing constructive ways of dealing with the past, but nihilist woke white protesters hellbent on destruction of statues, and capitalism itself, who offer no vision and no future?

It’s because for black people racism is a real-life everyday potential experience. It may not be as bad as times past, and race relations are worse in the US than the UK, but racism remains in black folk memory and its shadow is always there. Hence the real desire to educate and to offer positive solutions that encourage mutual understanding and erase superficial differences. Many black people are also more concerned about the present than the past: in 2018, 2,925 black people were murdered in the United States, 2,600 of that number by other blacks.

For Black Lives Matter – the very name epitomises its philosophy of division – it’s all a bit of a posture and a pastime. Racism rarely affects white liberal twentysomethings. But street protests do afford a feeling of righteousness, an opportunity to virtue-signal, to satiate that young man’s power-lust and feeling of importance – and to alleviate the boredom of lockdown. The white BLM protesters don’t think about the dangerous consequences of their actions or politics because they won’t be affected by them. The race wars that they are stoking won’t blight their affluent all-white neighbourhoods.

Black Lives Matter are dangerous narcissists whose driving force is self-aggrandisement. Let’s hope the tide really is turning against them.


There’s nothing racist about White Jesus

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has called for a review to decide which representations of Jesus should remain in Anglican cathedrals and churches, given that most of them portray Christ as white and north-European looking, whereas he was Middle Eastern.

This literal-mindedness is dubious – and for the church, dangerous. Christ is white in most churches because, before Windrush, so was England. Religious icons are always traditionally portrayed in accordance to the ethnicity and culture of worshippers, with Jesus being black in Sub-Saharan Africa, Filipino in the Philippines and resembling previous depictions of Zeus in Greece.

Most cathedrals were built in the Middle Ages, when most people didn’t even leave their hometown in their lifetimes let alone travel to the Middle East. There was very little comprehension of there being people who weren’t white.

The archbishop’s literal-mindedness sets a perilous precedent. If Jesus should be rendered ‘realistic’, should the Bible be rewritten to make it historically accurate?

I really wouldn’t recommend going down that path. The ‘virgin’ Mary was originally the ‘maid’ Mary, and Lazarus was returned from social ostracism, not brought back from the dead. Such are the legion translation mistakes from the Hebrew to the Greek.

The real reason there aren’t more women on Mock the Week

The female comic Katherine Ryan has attacked the gender tokenism on BBC panel show Mock the Week.

I can explain why the programme has always been dominated by men, despite efforts in recent years to introduce more gender balance. It’s because the format of the programme is competitive, and men are more competitive than women.

It’s also because on average men are funnier than women. As Camille Paglia famously argued, men are given to extremes: there are more men of genius for the same reason most serial killers and lunatics are male.

Comedy is fundamentally about cruelty or the distortion of reality: it appeals to the dark side of humanity found mostly in the male of the species.