Theodore Dalrymple writes:Our view of the world, writes Dalrymple,
has become so politicised that we think that the unembarrassed celebration of beauty is a sign of insensibility to suffering and that exclusively to focus on the world’s deformations, its horrors, is in itself a sign of compassion.
Lenin, Dalrymple reminds us, abjured music, to which he was sensitive, because it made him feel well-disposed to the people around him, and he thought it would be necessary to kill so many of them
Dalrymple addresses one of the most pressing questions of the day, namely
the nature of Donald Trump’s hair.
He asks:
Is it real, is it natural, is it implanted, is it a toupée, what exactly is it?
He consults a barber, who indicates that
in all his career he has never seen anything remotely like it. He does not believe that it has come about by any of the usual ways of cultivating or dressing hair.
Dalrymple’s view is that the Donald’s coiffure is
so bad, it’s good.
Trump’s hair is his
logo, as recognisable as that of, say, Coca-Cola. He is instantly identifiable even from a photo taken of the back or top of his head, without any other context or visual clue.
No one
goes to a barber’s and discusses Marco Rubio’s or Bernie Sanders’ hair, though I suppose you might discuss Mrs Clinton’s face in a plastic surgery clinic.
The fear of being overwhelmed culturally is, writes Dalrymple,
entirely understandable.
He notes the strength in Europe
of both centrifugal and centripetal forces.
The politicians,
who want to be important in a way that the merely national stage will never allow them to be, desire an organisation that is
a trough to feed at.This explains why no European politicians of any importance reject the idea of the European Union, however damaging it may be to their own country‘s interests.
Co-existing with
this drive to Gleichschaltung
is a growing
ethnic and regional particularism.
Far from the two trends opposing each other,
they are in synergy. The weakening of the national state in Europe strengthens the undemocratic and self-appointed centre. What is left to the regions is folk-dancing, national costume and parking regulations.
Není to psychologie, jste to vy: přestaňte vaše chování zaměňovat za nemoc
Literatura, vzkazuje Dalrymple,
přinesla lidstvu daleko více světla, než v co psychologie vůbec může kdy doufat.
Místo nalézání sebe sama během dlouhých let terapie pomocí povídání o sobě,
byste se raději měli věnovat nějakému zájmu nebo činnosti.
The 20th century, writes Dalrymple, was Europe’s
melancholy, long withdrawing roar, and just as Great Britain would not long be suffered to be the workshop of the world, so the world did not long suffer the continent of Europe to dominate it, economically, culturally and intellectually. Europe’s loss of power, influence and importance continues; and however much one’s material circumstances may have improved, it is always unpleasant, and creates a sense of existential unease, to live in a country perpetually in decline, even if that decline is relative.
Combined with this, he points out, is the fact that most European populations
experience a feeling of impotence in the face of their immovable political élites. This feeling is not because of any lack of intelligence or astuteness on the part of the populations: if you wanted to know why there was so much youth unemployment in France, you would not ask the prime minister but the more honest and clear-headed village plumber or carpenter, who would give you many precise and convincing reasons why no employer in his right mind would readily take on a new and previously untried young employee. Indeed, it would take a certain kind of intelligence, available only to those who have undergone a lot of formal education, not to be able to work it out.
The motor of Europe’s decline, says Dalrymple, is
its obsession with social security, which has created rigid social and economic systems that are resistant to change.
An open economy
holds out more threat to Europeans than promise: they believe that the outside world will bring them not trade and wealth, but unemployment and a loss of comfort. They are inclined to retire into their shell and succumb to protectionist temptation, internally with regard to the job market and externally with regard to other nations. The more those other nations advance, the more necessary does protection seem to them.
The State
is either granted or arrogates to itself ever greater powers. A bureaucratic monster is created that is not only uneconomic but anti-economic and that can be reformed only at the cost of social unrest that politicians wish to avoid. Inertia intermittently punctuated by explosion is the outcome.
Dalrymple notes that the British government
has increased public expenditure enormously, such that the British tax burden exceeds that of Germany, which is a heavily taxed economy. The ostensible purpose has been to improve public services while serving the cause of social justice, a rhetoric that the public has hitherto believed; the hidden purpose has been to create administrative jobs on an unprecedented scale, whose function consists of obstruction of other people as they try to create wealth, and to bring into being a clientèle dependent upon government largesse (half the British population is in receipt of government subventions as part or the whole of their incomes) and results in an ‘keep a-hold of nurse for fear of something worse’ psychology.
The dependent population
does not like the state and its agents, indeed they hate them, but they come to fear the elimination of their good offices more. They are like drug addicts who know that the drug that they take is not good for them, and hate the drug dealer, but cannot face the supposed pains of withdrawal.
In the name of social justice,
personal and sectional interest has become all-powerful, paralysing attempts to maximise collective endeavour. The goal of everyone is to parasitise everyone else, or to struggle for as large a slice of the cake as possible. No one worries about the size of the cake. Après nous le déluge has become the watchword of the population.
It hardly needs pointing out that
the rest of an increasingly competitive and globalised world is not going to be sensitive to the same concerns as European governments.
The miserabilist view of the European past,
in which achievement is disregarded in favour of massacre, oppression and injustice, deprives the population of any sense of pride or tradition to which it might contribute or which might be worth preserving. This loss of cultural confidence is important at a time of mass immigration from very alien cultures, an immigration that can be successfully negotiated (as it has been in the past, or in the USA up to the era of multiculturalism) only if the host nations believe themselves to be the bearers of cultures into which immigrants wish, or ought to wish, to integrate, assimilate, and make their own.
In the absence of any such belief,
the only way in which people inhabiting a country will have anything in common is geographical; and civil conflict is the method in which they will resolve their very different and entrenched conceptions about the way life should be lived. This is particularly true when immigrants believe they are in possession of a supposedly unique and universal truth, such as Islam. And if the host nation is so lacking in cultural confidence that it does not even make familiarity with the national language a condition of citizenship, it is hardly surprising that integration does not proceed.
The problem is multiplied when a rigid labour market
creates large castes of people who are unemployed and might well remain so for the whole of their adult lives. The bitterness caused by economic uselessness is multiplied by the bitterness of cultural separation. In the case of Islam this is dangerous, because the mixture of an awareness of inferiority on the one hand, and superiority on the other, is a combustible one. Latin Americans have felt it towards the USA, Russians towards Western Europe, Chinese and Japanese towards Europe and America.
The auguries are not good,
not only because of the political immobilism that elaborate systems of social security have caused in most European countries, but because of the European multinational entity that is being created against the wishes of the peoples of Europe.
The European Union serves several purposes, none of which have much to do with the challenges facing the continent. It
For years, writes Dalrymple,
doubt about the wisdom of a European project (whose end can only be seen as through a glass, darkly) was attributed by its enthusiasts to a quirk, one that combined some of the features of
- mental debility
- arachnophobia
- borderline personality disorder
One would not be surprised to learn that the European Union had sent lobbyists to Washington to have Euroscepticism included as a category in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
By now, though,
even the most convinced European projectors must have noticed that their project is not going swimmingly.
But
the projectors suggest that the solution to the difficulties is the granting of even more powers to themselves or people like them, that is to say those who conjured up the difficulties.
Morbid conditions
are never equally distributed geographically, and Euroscepticism was originally a predominantly British disease, an amusing consequence of our insularity; but it is spreading throughout Europe. The débâcle of the common currency, which will no doubt have a dénouement but not necessarily a solution, has lowered the estimate of the union in the eyes of practically all member populations.
What if the results of referenda turn out unfavourably?
The history of the union suggests that they will either be ignored or that there will be more referenda until the population gets the answer right: the European variant of African post-colonial democracy, that is to say one man, one vote, once.
And people like Habermas, Van Rompuy, Barroso et al.
are capable of boring the people of Europe into submission. You can bamboozle people so long as politics does not really interest them because their lives are going along quietly and smoothly, and they do not pay it much attention.
But
once their attention is caught by such things as unemployment, evaporation of their savings, constantly increasing taxes and collapsing living standards, more precision will be needed.
Words that
connote human solidarity but denote bureaucratically administered and enforced transfer payments — on a scale that make Marshall Aid look like pocket money — will no longer suffice.
Openness, says Dalrymple,
is not the same thing as the incontinent abandonment of character, any more than hospitality is the indiscriminate welcoming, without any exclusion, of all and sundry into one’s home.
Multiculturalism as an official doctrine,
complete with enforcing bureaucracies, undermines the rule of law because it seeks to divide people, formalise their cultural differences and enclose them in moral and intellectual ghettoes. The rule of law requires a common cultural understanding, not merely the means of repression to enforce a legal code. Once that cultural understanding is lost, all that remains is repression, effective or ineffective, and experienced as alien and unjust. Nothing remains but conflict or surrender.
Supranational courts cannot supply the want of a national understanding, for two reasons:
The best hope for the European Union, writes Dalrymple,
would be for it to eventually evolve into an enormous Belgium. More likely, it will evolve into an enormous Yugoslavia circa 1990.
The European political class and its intellectual cheerleaders
appear determined to produce one or the other. Whenever I listen to the defenders of the European Union I am astonished at the thinness of their argumentation and the ruthlessness of their determination.
Here are just three of the feeble and sketchy arguments:
1. European civilisation is superior to all others, for it is the only one that has ever accorded adult status to individuals. From now until 2020, 130m children will enter forced marriages. Without the indispensable infrastructure that is the European Union, Europe will be swept away by ill winds that blow from all directions.
Dalrymple:
Preposterous and cowardly. European civilisation predated the European Union by some years. The malign trend does not reach Europe from all directions—not from North or South America, for example, or Russia. The words are directed against Muslims, though there is not the courage to say so. There is no danger or prospect of forced marriage becoming general in Europe, nor is there any reason to suppose that a Europewide state would be better at preventing or prohibiting it among Muslim minorities than the present nation states are.
2. The only way of combating the kind of nationalism that led to catastrophic European wars is European federalism.
Dalrymple:
Absurd. There is no reason to believe that, but for the European Union, Portugal would attack Estonia, Ireland Luxembourg, or Greece Denmark. The only plausible candidates for a serious military conflict on the continent are France and Germany. What is really being said is that the European Union is necessary to contain Germany. This is to subscribe to the view of the Germans as eternal militarists, the inevitable enemy of France. I do not believe that but for the European Union, Germany would attack France.
3. The countries of Europe must unite politically in order to compete in the world. Large countries such as China, India, and the USA have clout; there is no place for small countries. In order to be of any account, European nations must forgo sovereignty and become part of a heftier entity.
Dalrymple:
This ignores
- the political difficulties of union
- the impossibility of making a functioning democracy of so many different nations
- the inevitable clashes of national interest that federalisation would entail
It also ignores the evidence that many of the most successful countries in the world are small. There is no reason why countries cannot cooperate, including militarily, without pooling sovereignty; such pooling as has occurred in Europe has held its prosperity back. The currency union without any kind of fiscal union has proved disastrous for several countries, and is economically deleterious for all. But the further step of fiscal union could only be imposed by an unelected, authoritarian bureaucracy upon countries unwilling to comply, and whose interests might not be served by compliance. Sooner or later, a federation would lead to war, or at least to revolution.
The arguments of the federalists
are trotted out with monotonous regularity, like the stories of someone with Alzheimer’s, and anyone who raises objections, however obvious and unanswerable, is immediately compared to a rabid nationalist, as if to be attached to a national identity were a symptom of hating everyone else. There are such rabid nationalists, to be sure. Forced federation is the best way of ensuring their increase in numbers and influence.
The badness of an idea
does nothing to halt its progress. Europe is sleepwalking (yet again) to cataclysm.
Dalrymple writes:
‘Europe’—in the Soviet-style usage of the word now so common—does not mean peace, but conflict, if not war. We are building in Europe not a United States but a Yugoslavia. We shall be lucky to escape violence when it breaks apart.
Take Belgium. The country is composed of two main national communities—the French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemings.
The division between the two is sharper than at any previous time, to such an extent that the country recently had no government for more than 500 days. No one in Belgium explains, or even asks, why what has not proved possible for 189 years—full national integration of just two groups sharing so much historical experience and a tiny fragment of territory—should be achievable on a vastly larger scale with innumerable national groups, many of which have deeply ingrained and derogatory stereotypes of one another.
‘Europe’
lacks almost all political legitimacy, which will make it impossible to resolve real and growing differences.
Dalrymple points out that ‘ever closer union’
resuscitates old national stereotypes and antagonisms and increases the likelihood of real conflict.
He notes that politicians and bureaucrats,
like all people with bad habits, are infinitely inventive when it comes to rationalising the European Project, though they’re inventive in nothing else.
The fact is that for European politicians and bureaucrats,
the European Project is like God — good by definition, which means that they have subsequently to work out a theodicy to explain, or explain away, its manifest and manifold deficiencies.
The personal interests of European politicians and bureaucrats,
with their grossly inflated, tax-free salaries, are perfectly obvious. For politicians who have fallen out of favour at home, or grown bored with the political process, Brussels acts as a vast and luxurious retirement home, with the additional gratification of the retention of power.
The name of a man such as Herman Van Rompuy,
whose charisma makes Hillary Clinton look like Mata Hari, would, without the existence of the European Union, have reached most of the continent’s newspapers only if he had paid for a classified advertisement in them.
Corporate interests,
ever anxious to suppress competition, approve of European Union regulations because they render next to impossible the entry of competitors into any market in which they already enjoy a dominant position, while also allowing them to extend their domination into new markets. That is why the CAC 40 (the French bourse benchmark) will have more or less the same names 100 years hence.
Dalrymple reminds us of the European Union’s role in corroding civil society.
Suppose you have an association for the protection of hedgehogs. The European Union then offers your association money to expand its activities, which of course it accepts. The Union then proposes a measure allegedly for the protection of hedgehogs, but actually intended to promote a large agrarian or industrial interest over a small one, first asking the association’s opinion about the proposed measure. Naturally, your association supports the Union because it has become dependent on the Union’s subsidy. The Union then claims that it enjoys the support of those who want to protect hedgehogs.
The best description of this process is
fascist corporatism, which so far lacks the paramilitary and repressive paraphernalia of real fascism. But as the European economic crisis mounts, that distinction could vanish.
One should not mistake the dullness of Eurocrats
for lack of ambition, or the lack of flamboyance for the presence of scruple. History can repeat itself.
Dalrymple says that whenever he reads the French press on the subject of the European crisis,
I’m struck by how little questions of freedom, political legitimacy, separation of powers, representative government, or the rule of law feature, even in articles by academic political philosophers. For them, the problem is mainly technical: that of finding a solution that will preserve the status quo (there is no such solution, but intelligent people searched for the philosopher’s stone for centuries).
As for the British political class,
it is composed largely of careerists,
and in the world of the Eurocrats,
ignoring arguments is the highest form of refutation.
Cartoon: Paco Calderón
Photo: Thomas Sweertvaegher
Take your medicine
Cartoon: Paco Calderón
Photo: Ronnie Kaufman (cover of 2005 collection of Dalrymple essays)
St Theodorus the Misoneist
