Two ways of responding to the universal cant

Survival in the woke era

Ideologists, writes Dalrymple,

are inherently totalitarian, especially when a still small voice tells them that their opinions are vulnerable to criticism. Shrillness becomes the mental white noise with which they drown out their doubts.

They cannot allow any corner of the world to escape their attention. Uniformity

will demonstrate their correctness and, if it lasts long enough, make criticism unthinkable. As the white noise of shrillness once did, perpetual silence will allay their doubts.

He points out that surrender by the likes of you and me to the ideological folly

is wrought by cowardice and, slightly less dishonourably, by boredom. What intelligent person wants to spend his life disputing evident absurdity? It would be tedious to have to clear away this whole hinterland of psychological and sociological rubbish.

Dalrymple sets out two possible responses — other than outright opposition — to the Augean stable.

1️⃣ Go into inner emigration

Find a niche in which to get on with your life undisturbed by the surrounding idiocy and viciousness. Lay low. Take up an interest that flies below the ideological radar.

This method cannot be 100% successful, because the ideological monomaniacs demand not merely absence of dissent but proof of adherence, for example by signing up to policies on equality, inclusion, and diversity. By signing up to such self-contradictory nonsense, you who seek inner emigration feel soiled; you have undermined your probity. But at least, or so you hope, you will be free of interference.

This hope is usually dashed. The ideologist always comes back for more self-abasement: today it is transgenderism, tomorrow it will be — what? The glories of incest, the social necessity and benefit of infanticide? It does not matter: the aim is not improvement, it is the exertion of power, for one of the cultural or psychological characteristics of the age, at least among the educated, is the belief that, in human relations, everything is a matter of power and only power counts or is to be trusted.

2️⃣ If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em

Join up to the new secular religion.

Since you are not an out-and-out villain or opportunist, you have to persuade yourself that you believe the tenets of the religion. As is often the way with converts, you become a fanatic, not merely to persuade yourself, but to expunge your wicked past in which your were not a believer and were quite possibly a mocker.

Management, Dalrymple notes, is a little like a religion. Joining management has a terrible effect on professional people like you who previously had seemed good and sensible. Within weeks of being absorbed into management, though you may well have sworn that you would never be co-opted, you start to speak a strange hieratic language and claim to believe passionately in what you are doing, for example sacking people or closing down a department. You are like the Fore people of New Guinea, who used to eat their deceased relatives’ brains, becoming infected with a molecule called a prion that led to dementia and death, passing through a phase of fatuous laughter.

The prions of idiocy seem to have infected universities above all. The university tower is not so much ivory as a water tower that exerts pressure on the whole water system, and so university idiocy soon becomes political and social idiocy, of which only a certain amount can be withstood without severe damage and even collapse.

Join in the universal woke — or else

Dalrymple writes that cant, or humbug,

is far worse than hypocrisy. For if by hypocrisy, we mean a failure to live up to our professed moral ideals, most of us are hypocrites, and thank goodness. A society in which everyone lived up to his moral principles unswervingly would be intolerable. Apart from the fact that no mesh of such principles could ever be fine enough to catch all life’s infinitely variable exigencies, a person of no moral weakness, while perhaps admirable in the abstract, would be an uncomfortable, even frightening, person. It is good not to be a liar; but never to lie is to be an unsocial being, with as much feeling as an automaton.

Without hypocrisy, he says,

there would be no gossip; without gossip, no literature and precious little conversation. The dose of hypocrisy necessary to maintain social intercourse is a matter of judgment, for while many instances of hypocrisy are reprehensible and properly the subject of adverse comment, and some instances are beyond the pale, hypocrisy is as necessary to human existence as love or laughter. The only effective way to eliminate hypocrisy from human affairs is to have no moral standards.

Cant

is more destructive than hypocrisy because it is harder to expose and a humbug deceives himself as well as others, while a hypocrite retains some awareness; he is a rogue rather than a villain. Cant is the vehement public expression of concern for others, or of anger at an opinion casting doubt on some moral orthodoxy that is not, and cannot be, genuinely felt, its vehemence being a shield for insincerity and lack of confidence in the orthodox opinion. Cant is contagious, and, when widespread, creates an atmosphere in which people are afraid to call it by its name. Arguments go by default; and if arguments go by default, ludicrous, bad, or wicked policies result.

Era of woke cant

Dalrymple declares that

we live in an era of cant. It has never been, in my lifetime, as important as it is now to hold the right opinions and to express none of the wrong ones, if one wants to avoid vilification and remain socially frequentable. Worse still, and even more totalitarian, is the demand for public assent to patently false or exaggerated propositions; refusal to kowtow in such circumstances becomes almost as bad a sin as uttering a forbidden view.

He notes that

wherever people are punished, legally or socially, for expressing an opinion contrary to some recently adopted orthodoxy, or for failing to express the tenets of that orthodoxy, cant is bound to flourish; further, people who begin with an awareness that they are uttering cant come to believe that it is true because no one likes to think that he has spoken only from conformity or pusillanimity, or to avoid unpleasantness and the ruin of reputation. Hence, cant spreads rapidly once it takes hold in a society, and becomes difficult to challenge, let alone eradicate.

Wokeness has a tendency to inflation.

When cant becomes generalised, it is necessary for anyone who desires to distinguish himself from the majority of people to go further in his cant. It is like fundamentalism in Islam: you can always be outflanked by someone more orthodox than thou. Once a new canting doctrine becomes orthodox, it will be outflanked.

Dalrymple observes that woke leaders

are seekers of power, if only the power to destroy, which is often a delight. Cant is the weapon of the ambitious mediocrity, a class of person that has become much more numerous with the extension, but dilution, of tertiary education. Such people believe that social prominence is their due.

Britain, he points out,

has long been a world leader in cant.

The habit of canting

can reduce people to a single, or highly predominant, characteristic. It makes people’s opinions seem like a scratched record that causes the needle to jump and replay again and again the same snatch of song.

Cant is,

among other things, a defence against unwelcome thoughts.

Dalrymple reminds us that nowadays,

the instillation of cant, as well as the prevention of anything else, is the main business of education.

Wokeness

takes over minds and reduces their ability to consider other points of view, take in contradictory evidence, or sympathise with anyone not in total and unconditional agreement. It is intolerant. It promotes monotony and eradicates subtlety, nuance, and irony; it does not recognise a tragic dimension to life. It is inherently utopian because it assumes that moral perfection can be reached. It is boring. It achieves its victories by use of repetition (though frightening vehemence plays its part). It intimidates by gathering crowds, by anathema, and excommunication. Humour is its enemy. That is why jokes are the particular object of its obloquy.

Dalrymple asserts:

Unlike hypocrisy, one can say nothing whatever in favour of cant; but where having the supposedly right opinions is taken as the larger part of virtue — much larger a part than actual conduct — cant has little to oppose its spread and much to encourage it.

What the Hunt case says about putrid modern values

Unscrupulous apparatchik of cant: self-stimulated outrage by this evident mediocrity ‘Connie St Louis’ was enough to bring down a scientist of distinction. It turned out, as you might expect, that this creep was a habitual exaggerator, constantly on the lookout for a career-boosting opportunity to be outraged, whose only accomplishment was self-advancement — a common type these days in academia

Cant, writes Dalrymple,

rots institutions from the inside.

The case of Sir Timothy Hunt, the Nobel prize–winning biochemist and molecular physiologist, is, he says,

instructive.

In 2015, Hunt was asked to give an impromptu toast at a lunch in Korea for scientific journalists, mostly women. In the course of his brief remarks, Hunt said:

Let me tell you about my trouble with girls [in scientific research]. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls.

One of those present, a creature called Connie St Louis, a supposed ‘teacher of science journalism’, informed on Hunt, reporting to that Gestapo of truth and decency Twitter that that the remarks

had ruined the event, so dreadfully sexist were they.

This went viral. In short order,

no libel on Hunt’s name was too extreme.

Dalrymple relates that the effervescence of indignation was so great that Hunt felt constrained to resign his posts at

• University College, London. It demanded that he resign — his wife was a professor at the college — or be sacked

• the Royal Society (one of the oldest scientific societies)

• the European Research Council, which he had helped set up

Hunt’s apologies for his remarks, according to the Royal Society,

were not as abject as it thought necessary.

However, it turned out, on a little investigation none of his detractors waited for, that

the woman who started the storm was a habitual exaggerator, whose only known accomplishment was self-advancement based on no real achievement, a common type these days in academia.

Hunt had prefaced his allegedly awful remarks as follows:

I say something about the importance of women in science. I also pay tribute to the capable female scientists I know, by saying some nice things about them. And I now acknowledge the contribution made by female science journalists. It’s strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists.

No full transcript of the speech exists, but, says Dalrymple,

it is likely that Hunt said something that indicated to any person of normal intelligence — at least one not looking for a career-boosting opportunity to be outraged — that his ill-fated remarks were meant ironically.

His concluding words, of which a recording exists, were:

So congratulations, everybody, and I hope — I hope — I really do hope there is nothing holding you back, especially no monster like me.

Dalrymple remarks that this St Louis,

the teacher of future science journalists, omitted to mention this, though she must have heard it. A fine corrupter of youth!

Eminent women scientists whom Hunt had trained

came forward to defend him as always having behaved well towards them. But neither his conduct nor his eminence as a scientist was enough to save him.

University College,

demonstrating its close attention to the teachings of Uriah Heep,

issued a statement. It read:

UCL was the first university in England to admit women students on equal terms to men, and the university believes that this outcome [Hunt’s resignation] is compatible with our commitment to gender equality.

Dalrymple comments:

With all the courage of its cowardly cant, it stuck by its decision even after the further evidence emerged. It said Hunt’s reinstatement would be ‘inappropriate’, ‘inappropriate’ being the nearest they could come to the word ‘wrong’.

Hunt and his wife left England for Japan. There is thus, says Dalrymple,

room in English academic life for unscrupulous apparatchiks of cant but not for Nobel prize winners in science who make a few relatively innocent remarks that do not even rise to the level of being off-colour. Self-stimulated outrage by an evident mediocrity was enough to bring down a scientist of distinction.

The greatest judge since Pontius Pilate

Dalrymple writes that

for those neither famous nor in a position to ignore their economic interests, and who do not wish to be martyrs to an outcry by the canting Twitterers, fear of repercussion has entered into anything that they say about an increasing number of subjects. Even conversations in private are constrained, due to fear of denunciation. As the Soviets and the Nazis found, private denunciation was one of the pleasures of totalitarianism.

He relates that a 73-year-old part-time lecturer in engineering at Solent University in Southampton

had a conversation with a colleague: a private conversation that led to his dismissal, subsequently upheld by a cowardly minor judge.

Stephen Lamonby had met his superior, Janet Bonar, in the university cafeteria.

During their discussion, he said that Jews were the cleverest people in the world, though they were much maligned for it, and that Germans were good at engineering, which he ascribed to their being part of a society that had long valued and promoted engineering. Bonar was so offended by what he said, even though it was not in a public forum, that, according to Lamonby, she started to shout. In an act worthy of the NKVD, she subsequently reported him to the authorities.

In the university hearing into the matter, Dalrymple reports, the deputy vice-chancellor, Julie Hall, said that Lamonby did not understand that what he had said was offensive, and he was dismissed for ‘gross misconduct’ — gross, mark you, not minor. Bonar said that she was ‘concerned’ about students being taught by someone with his ‘entrenched racist views’. It was not alleged that he was incompetent in his teaching, nor that he was anti-Semitic: he was not one of those conspiracy theorists who will grant that the Jews are clever but use their cleverness to take over the world.

Later, in turning down Lamonby’s appeal, the judge, C.H. O’Rourke, said:

For the avoidance of doubt, I find that it is at least potentially racist to group nationalities, races, ethnic or religious groups, by entire categories and to ascribe certain abilities or talents (or the opposite) to them, when, of course, as with any such group, talents or abilities will vary widely from individual to individual.

He rejected Lamonby’s argument that he was employing a positive stereotype.

With an astonishing lack of logic or attention to the meanings of words, the judge ruled that a Jewish physicist might take offence at his success being ascribed to the fact that he was Jewish rather than to his individual ability or hard work. But since being Jewish and working hard are not mutually exclusive — eminence in most fields is inconceivable without hard work, such that Mozart, a genius if ever there was one, worked and studied extremely hard — no one worth worrying about would ascribe brilliance in physics simply to the fact of being Jewish.

The judge said that the positive stereotype — he did not deny that it was positive —was nevertheless

potentially offensive to the recipient.

Dalrymple notes here the use, for the second time, of the word ‘potentially’ in what the judge said in finding that Lamonby was rightly dismissed. He comments:

Potentially, this use of the word ‘potentially’ could usher in full-blown totalitarianism, for it implies no requirement for any harm to have been caused by a person for him to be punished but only the potential for him to have caused harm. As Kafka put it, ‘Someone must have traduced Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.’

And what is the harm that Lamonby potentially caused, in the judge’s opinion?

In addition to any offence to Jews, non-Jews might be offended, even ‘grossly’ offended, because they might feel that some characteristic — presumably undesirable, though the judge didn’t specify what — was being ascribed to them.

Eggshell theory

The judge, says Dalrymple, was enunciating

the eggshell theory of the human psyche. If someone takes offence against something someone says, that is sufficient to be a justiciable harm. Gone is the ‘reasonable man’ of traditional English jurisprudence, in assessing whether behaviour is threatening or so insulting as to constitute mitigation for a loss of temper: one is threatened, bullied, insulted, offended if one says that one is, and that is enough to be actionable at law. Feelings become legislators.

In his final sally against freedom of speech, the judge said of Lamonby’s views that anyone might be offended because he spoke about things that

were none of his business.

Dalrymple comments:

If people were to be denied employment for saying something that was none of their business, the world unemployment rate would be close to 100%, except perhaps in North Korea. Nor did the judge make any distinction between what is said in public and what in private.

In a world ruled by the judge,

no generalisations about people would be possible, not even such as, say, that the Dutch are the tallest people in the world. To him, it is irrelevant whether such generalisations are true. That Jews are clever, for whatever reason, seems to be borne out by the disproportionate number of Nobel prizes they win. That Germans are good at engineering seems to be borne out by their cars, machine tools, and other products requiring engineering skill. But mere facts, however obvious, must not interfere with the expression of the right sentiments and the suppression of the wrong ones.

The woman who informed on Lamonby, the vice-chancellor of the university, the employment tribunal that said that the university had a duty to its multicultural student body to ‘protect it from potential acts of racism’, and the judge who rejected Lamonby’s appeal

all had substituted cant for thought.

Dalrymple speculates on why. He thinks the answer might be found

in a word: racism. They were furious with Lamonby because, if what he said were true (for whatever reason) — that Jews were clever and that Germans were good at engineering — it must be true also that other people were less clever and less good at engineering, an impermissible thought. Why impermissible? Because, in their heart of hearts, they fear the possible explanations of inequality of outcome. That is why they do not want a society with no legal impediments to anyone, where everyone is left to find his own level.

The West is soaked in academic drivel

The fatuous ideology of diversity

People in the West live, writes Dalrymple,

in a totalitarian condition in which they are afraid to say some things and—what is worse—are required to say others. They are obliged to deny what they believe and assent to what they do not believe. There is no better way to destroy the personality. People become cynical, time-serving, increasingly self-absorbed. Their impotence breeds apathy. Once they start to utter things for the sake of their careers or their peace and quiet that they do not believe, they lose self-respect and probity and thus their standing to resist anything. People without probity are easy to control and manipulate; the purpose of political correctness is not to enunciate truth but to exercise power.

The threat comes not from government

but from the universities and the semi-intellectuals that they turn out. The governments of once-liberal democracies lamely follow the fashions and obsessions that emerge from universities, and few politicians have the courage or stamina to resist. To do so would require a willingness to present an intellectual case against them, not once but repeatedly, as well as a rhinoceros hide to be unaffected by the opprobrium and insult to which they would be subjected (insult these days being the highest form of argument). We do not live in times propitious to patient argumentation by politicians about matters of principle. What cannot be said in three words will not be heard, so that surrender is the default setting.

A dictatorship of virtue

Dalrymple notes that even applying for a job, particularly in US universities,

is a kind of Calvary for the person who does not share modern academic-bureaucratic obsession with race and sexual proclivities. The applicant must fill in forms about his attitude towards diversity—there being no permissible diversity in attitudes towards diversity.

Many universities demand a personal ‘diversity statement’ from the applicant. It requires of the successful candidate a full commitment to modern orthodoxies.

To admit that all you want to do is study the life and times of, say, William the Silent, the Khedive Ismail or José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, and convey your enthusiasm for this subject to others, would be fatal to your chances. You must want, in the cant phrase of our times, to make a difference. You must bring your straw to the fires of resentment, so that the diversity bureaucracy will never extinguish them and never be out of a job.

Canting humbugs in their hundreds of thousands

Hard feelings in the East Indies

The sentencing of the Christian governor of Jakarta to two years’ imprisonment for blasphemy might, writes Dalrymple,

seem like a throwback to mediæval intolerance,

but, he says,

it is more than that. It is a reminder that the suppression of the freedom of others is more fun than the exercise of freedom.

The Muslim masses who demanded the prosecution of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama

enjoyed their virtuous anger,

which is

among the pleasures that their religion does not deny them.

Islamic humbug

Dalrymple notes that although intellectually primitive, the condemnation and sentencing of Ahok, as he is known,

was in one respect modern. One of the judges said that punishment was justified because the governor had hurt the feelings of Muslims—which must have been as delicate as those of Western students who need safe spaces and teddy-bears to hug if they hear something that contradicts their preconceptions.

The desire not to have one’s feelings hurt

has been erected into a right increasingly enforceable at law. Not everyone’s feelings are treated with the solicitude that we show a nice fluffy colourful species of animal that is on the verge of extinction. But treating people’s feelings with this solicitude tends not only to preserve them but to cause them to flourish.

Dalrymple avers that

we have a duty to control our indignation, for most of the time it will be liberally admixed with humbug.

He does not expect his message to be heard in Jakarta,

to judge from the pictures of those hundreds of thousands of canting humbugs in the city’s streets.

Determinate sentences unalterable by parole are a requisite of the rule of law

In the cant or psychobabblish modern expression, they wanted their lives back

Dalrymple writes:

The rule of law is the rule of law, not another thing. Determinate sentences are not the same as inflexible ones: mitigating (and aggravating) circumstances must always be taken into account, but they should be matters of discoverable fact about the past, not of inevitably amateurish speculations as to the future. Parole introduces avoidable arbitrariness into the criminal justice system, and while arbitrariness cannot be avoided altogether, it should be kept to a minimum.

Dalrymple’s quaint and archaic dialect

Compared to the prose of NHS managers, that of the British Medical Journal is as Edward Gibbon

From Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, ed. Jeremy Butterfield, 2015

Dalrymple bashes bank bunkum

Unctuous cant

An advertisement for a big bank pretends that it is

working for the creation of a more equal world.

This

cannot possibly be the case and is, in effect, a lie. At least, one hopes it is a lie, for that is the most charitable interpretation of the slogan.

It is obvious, writes Dalrymple, that

the aim of a commercial bank cannot be a more equal world, if only because it has financial obligations to its shareholders that it does not have to the rest of humanity.

Bank poppycock

The bank’s shareholders

have not invested to provide everyone in the world with paid dividends; and while they might hope that the bank’s activities are honest and contribute to the growth of the economy, this is not at all the same thing as equalising the world.

A world in which everyone were starving

might be a more equal world, indeed a perfectly equal one. Equality of misery is equality all right, but is not therefore either a just or desirable goal that the bank might pride itself on having brought about.

Bank balderdash

What the bank really meant — if it meant anything at all — was that

it was working towards a richer, more prosperous world. But working for wealth does not have the same moral cachet as working for equality.

In short,

the bank was indulging in humbug; unctuously proclaiming ideals that it cannot, will never and ought not to have.

Humbug, Dalrymple points out, is

an insidious pollutant of the mind, which not only distorts but perverts. It clears the primrose path to earthly damnation.

Bank baloney

A whining pretension to goodness

From Johnson’s 1755 dictionary

Dalrymple says his father

was always espousing great and grand principles expressive of his love for humanity, but had difficulty in expressing love for anyone in particular.

Dalrymple points out that cant, or humbug,

stands in the way of achieving an authentic relationship with the world. To be a humbug is to wear distorting lenses.

He confesses that

I am a humbug on occasion, and in my youth was a humbug practically all the time. Youth is the golden age of humbug — the expression of supposedly generous emotions that it has to a much lesser extent than claimed.

Dalrymple explains the difference between hypocrisy and cant.

• hypocrisy is, or can be, a social virtue. To express a sympathy or an interest that you do not in the slightest feel can be almost heroic when it is done for humane reasons, and is often socially necessary. Hypocrisy is to social life what oil is to axles
• cant is always poisonous, among other reasons because it is designed to deceive not only others but ourselves. It doesn’t entirely succeed in this latter task because a still, small voice tells us that we are canting, to which our preferred solution is often to cant harder, like drowning out something we don’t want to hear by turning up the wireless. That is why there is so much shrillness: people are defending themselves against the horrible thought that they don’t really believe what they are saying

There is no subject, says Dalrymple, to which cant attaches more than humanity.

Ibid.

Who will admit that he doesn’t love humanity, that it wouldn’t matter to him in the slightest if half of it disappeared, that he can sit through the news of the worst disaster imaginable (provided far away) and eat his dinner with good appetite?

No,

in order to be a good person you have to pretend to be lacerated by awareness of suffering anywhere and show your wounds like Christ showing his heart in one of the Baroque Spanish colonial paintings.

But in fact

most people do not love humanity; misanthropy is far more widespread than love of humanity.

As soon as we are in the public arena,

we must start to mouth sentiments that are not ours in words that mean nothing. We start to cant. We must display the wounds we feel at the imperfections of the world. We must award ourselves, and pronounce, creditable motives that we know are not ours.

Commercial concerns

are in the canting game. They claim to be working to bring about greater equality, survival of rainforests, amelioration of climate change, participation of fat children in sport, and anything other than their true aim, which is mostly to sell products that are superfluous to people who don’t need them. (I accept that this is the necessary force that makes our economic world go round.)

We are now

chronically humanitarian.

José de Páez, Sacred Heart of Jesus with St Ignatius of Loyola and St Aloysius Gonzaga, Mexico, c. 1770