Ne sutor ultra crepidam
Entering his hotel room, Dalrymple finds an
unctuous, mendacious, and mildly hectoring and even bullying notice on the towels in the bathroom.
It reads:
You care, we care, we all care about our environment and carbon footprint. Please take care and only have towels washed when needed.
Yet it was necessary only
to step outside the hotel to prove that ‘we’ do not all care about the environment. Many of us drop litter; many of us tread our chewing gum into the ground; many of us make unnecessary noise; many of us render the world slightly more ugly than it need be by our careless appearance in public. Many, indeed most, of us consume vastly more than we need. Many of us take unnecessary journeys because we cannot think of anything else to do. Many of us would not even be able to define our carbon footprint, let alone care about it.
Seth Pecksniff, shield of virtue
The very word ‘care’
now has a Pecksniffian ring to it, thanks to its use in this kind of canting message. ‘Let us be moral,’ said Mr Pecksniff. ‘Let us contemplate existence.’
The notion that ‘we’ of the hotel chain
do and ought to care more about the environment than, say, about reducing the chain’s laundry bill and thereby increasing its margin of profit (a perfectly respectable and reasonable thing for ‘us’ of the chain to do) is absurd and to me repellent.
A worthwhile movement
We despise
the Victorians for their habit of dishonest moralising,
but ours
is an age of ultracrepidarian hypocrisy in which everyone claims to care deeply for everything except that which concerns him most.
