The things that gnaw at us

What is unusual, writes Dalrymple, about the implied plea for simplicity in Alexander McCall Smith’s Mma Ramotswe series of books

is that they are amusing rather than earnest. And for the time that we are reading them, we are transported to that simpler life, as if we were leading it ourselves for a time.

It comes as a relief, he says, harried as we are by

• finding a place to park
• taxes
• worry about identity theft
• appointments
• unfinished work
• phone calls
• leaks in the roof
• the proliferation of PIN numbers that we cannot remember
• booking journeys
• repairs
• forms to fill
• the psychological problems of others
• text messages
• the drug dealers in the street
• 24-hour news
• correspondence
• what to do about our savings
• timetables
• the decline in public standards
• the proliferation of passwords

🇱🇧 Lebanonisation of the USA 🇺🇸

The happy future the woke are fashioning for us

Dalrymple writes that when Joe Biden, then a candidate for the US presidency, promised to elevate a black woman to the country’s supreme court if and when a vacancy occurred,

he struck not only at the ideal of the rule of law, but at the possibility of rationality. He was far from the first to do this: anyone who advocates racial quotas in the distribution of public (or any other) offices does so. But still, his pronouncement was unusually foolish, cynical, or shameless.

To allocate public offices by race, or any other demographic feature,

is to promote the Lebanonisation of a country and to imply that it commands no loyalty deeper than that of the groups of which it is composed.

Dalrymple reminds us that in Lebanon,

the president, according to an agreement signed in 1943, is always a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the parliament a Shia Muslim. The degree to which the demographic-carving up of government has brought about social peace is by now well known.

Human beings, he notes,

are divisible by an almost infinite number of variables, only a very tiny number of which could possibly be taken into account in trying to make the nine judges of the US supreme court in some sense representative of the population as a whole. No one, I suppose, would object that there is no member of the court who is in the lowest decile, or even quintile, of the population as far as intelligence or level of education is concerned, or that the grossly overweight are underrepresented on it. The judges ought to be selected because they are the best persons for the job, not because they are diabetic, of average height, vegetarian, etc.

Persons chosen because they fulfil some demographic requirement

will never be (or ought never to be) quite certain of their deserts. Were their appointments an injustice towards people better qualified than themselves? A gnawing doubt will accompany them, or ought to do so, for the rest of their careers, however successful they may be.

Dalrymple says that the demographic feature that is chosen as the criterion of appointment, given that there are an infinite number of criteria that could have been used,

cannot fail to be very revealing of the state of society, and also a cause of resentment, which is the most powerful, lasting, and dangerous of political emotions. To favour group A is to disfavour group B: there is no getting around it.

Moreover,

group A as a whole may not rejoice that one of its members has been elevated to a high position unless convinced that he has been so by merit alone. Anything else smacks of condescension at best, and an implicit belief in the inferiority of group A at worst, a belief that no person of that group could rise to such a position by his own unaided efforts.

Meanwhile,

groups C, D, and E will feel unjustifiably left out of the allocation of posts by demographic criteria, and their resentment, too, will be stirred. They will start agitating for redress, and if they receive it, groups F, G, and H will take up the baton of agitation. The possibility of trust in institutions will be destroyed.

There are yet worse implications.

Why should a judge be chosen according to demographic criteria? The assumption, among those who favour such a method of choosing judges, is that he will add a layer of understanding to the proceedings by virtue, say, of the colour of his skin. But this is to deny the very possibility of justice, which assumes that men and women are able to put aside their prejudices in court and come to a just (or at least legally correct) decision according to reason, evidence, and argument. This ability does not inhere in any particular bodily feature (except the brain, if one accepts that the brain is the seat of thought). In practice, courts often fall far short of this ideal. But this ideal of justice must remain the ideal, for otherwise (to quote Shakespeare), ‘Hark what discord follows!’

Dalrymple asserts:

The sifting of candidates by demographic feature cannot but destroy the majesty of the law, creating a kind of Lebanon.

Johnson’s repeated pattern of dishonesty

Dalrymple explains that Boris Johnson, the British prime minister,

very shortly after hectoring the world about climate change and the imminent extinction of life on earth because of climate change caused by humans, took a private plane rather than the train from Glasgow to London, principally, it seems, because he did not want to miss a convivial dinner.

Dalrymple comments:

I am the last person to condemn convivial dinners and have even been known to make exceptional efforts to attend one. But I would not make a speech just before doing so lamenting starvation in Africa, say, and advocating a fairer distribution of the world’s food calories.

Dalrymple notes that the attempted defences of Johnson, no doubt with his approval or acquiescence,

were startling in their dishonesty (I leave aside the larger question of whether his climate catastrophism was justified):

• the aircraft in which he travelled was a small one by comparison with that of other leaders
• it used the least polluting fuel permissible
• it permitted the best use of the prime minister’s time

The dishonesty is patent. The question was not whether he could have done worse if he had tried, but whether he could have done better — if, that is, he really believed what he said at the conference on climate change.

In all probability, says Dalrymple, Johnson

believes himself to have been justified by the ridiculous rationalisations of his apologists, and therefore still to be an honest man. If so, he is prey to delusions of honesty.

Dalrymple points out that

one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and one decline from probity doesn’t make a man dishonest by character. A man of complete and inflexible uprightness would probably be terrifying to meet and not much fun to be with.

On the other hand,

a repeated pattern of dishonesty disqualifies a man from the respect due an honest person. In this case, Johnson’s climate hypocrisy followed hard upon a public defence of a member of parliament whose conflict of interest was so great that it was hardly a conflict any more, it was more of a no-contest.

Of course, the moral waters

are muddied these days by the claim that everyone, or at least many people, are doing precisely the same. Some form of the tu quoque argument is perhaps the characteristic exculpation of our time.

Lean and hungry Zemmour

CAESAR.
Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

Dalrymple writes of Éric Zemmour that he is an

insider who poses, and is largely accepted, as an outsider.

Zemmour is not

the scion of privilege but the purest possible embodiment of meritocratic success. The son of Berber Jewish immigrants, he owes his reputation as the most revered (and hated) journalist in the country entirely to his intelligence, industry, and talent. No one who has heard him speak could doubt for a minute that he is a formidable polemicist whom any professional politician would have to fear in debate.

A partisan of the clash-of-civilizations hypothesis, Zemmour

argues that the Moslem population is unassimilable for cultural and religious reasons. Although he is known to the public principally for his evident detestation of Islam, rejecting the romantic idea that his forefathers lived happily under a tolerant Moslem dispensation, he is a commentator on much else. Detestation, often witty, seems to be his principal emotion. Attached to what de Gaulle called ‘a certain idea of France’ (Napoleon and de Gaulle are his two historical heroes), he dislikes intensely all that has happened in, or to, his country since the fateful year of 1968, when he was nine.

Dalrymple points out that

although the events of May 1968 were not a revolution in the real sense of the word but a revolt by the privileged disgruntled children of the bourgeoisie, they exerted a revolutionary effect, just as what was initially intended to be a coup d’état in Rumania effected a revolution. Zemmour hates what 1968 wrought, namely the rejection of national tradition in favour of personal liberty conceived of as licence.

Zemmour

divides the Jewish population of France by his iconoclastic views of Dreyfus and Pétain. The former he holds not to have been innocent and the latter he holds to be the saviour of French-born Jews. These views, especially the second, do not endear him to those, fast dwindling in number, who lived through the Occupation, and their descendants. More than half of French Jews are of North African origin, however, and it is probable that his views on Islam count more with them.

In economics, Dalrymple notes,

Zemmour is a protectionist and a Colbertian dirigiste, who believes that enlightened governors can make correct decisions that would otherwise not be taken (an example being Giscard’s espousal of nuclear power). Like most French intellectuals, he reprehends economic liberalism, and the term anglo-saxon is not generally one of affection in his lexicon. The fact that what he calls liberalism is corporatism escapes his notice. He laments the destruction of French industry (and therefore of the working class, replaced by an incoherent mass of people increasingly living from hand to mouth, completely separate, economically, socially, culturally, educationally, and geographically from the multicultural, mobile, well-qualified, and prosperous people living in the metropoleis). He is in favour of a strong welfare state.

Zemmour’s

appearance is saturnine and he has a nervous intensity of manner that disconcerts and suggests ruthlessness and even cruelty. He has that lean and hungry look that made Caesar think that Cassius did not sleep at nights and was dangerous because he thought too much. He has altered the terms of the political debate in France and become a figure of historical importance.

Shortcomings of the British prime minister

Dalrymple writes that he has

no great regard for the antics of Boris Johnson.

Dalrymple explains that the present British prime minister seems to him to be

• unprincipled
• inconstant
• boastful
• vainglorious
• incompetent

Wokeness will emancipate us

What we know to be true is inadmissible

Wokeness, writes Dalrymple, is that way that

inconvenient truths, no matter how obvious, may be overcome by a change of locution. We must say what we do not believe, which has the advantage that there is no better way of undermining probity. People must say what they know to be untrue but which they must strive to believe; for a population without probity can be easily moulded into that perfect virtue that will lead to the heaven on earth of total liberation.

How to respond to the Jacobins

Dalrymple writes:

If everything we say or do can be recorded and published without our consent, we shall soon be living in a North Korea of the soul. No conversation will be truly private, no group of people will be trusted not to contain its digital Judas. The only safety will be in silence.

The proper response to wokeness, he argues,

is not unbridled insult, or vituperation that is supposedly equal and opposite to whatever it is that political correctness asserts. It is resort, incessant if necessary, to reason, which may employ irony and mockery.

Floyd the gentle giant

A French writer describes George Floyd as

a gentle giant, and finally innocent.

Dalrymple comments:

I doubt whether the pregnant woman into whose house Floyd once broke and to whose abdomen he held a gun while demanding money would describe him as ‘a gentle giant’; and indeed to do so might risk running feminist rage.

The author could be accused of

a typically male minimisation of the suffering of a victimised woman.

Dalrymple doubts also that the pregnant victim of the house invasion

would be very strongly in favour of the abolition of the police, whatever their crimes or misdemeanours.

Floyd, Dalrymple points out,

had fentanyl in his blood when he died. This suggests that at the very least he must have associated with people of doubtful reputation, and that his commitment to the straight and narrow path was not rock-solid. When a person with a long criminal record takes fentanyl, there is at least a prima facie doubt about his innocence. It is possible that George Floyd’s resort to fentanyl involved him in no other criminal activity, and that he paid for it honestly (though buying it from criminals) with his hard-earned money; but I doubt that many people would be willing to place a large bet on this point.

Dalrymple notes that

a mother loves her son because he is her son, not because he is good, and therefore the grief of Floyd’s family is understandable and easily sympathised with; but for others to turn him into what he was not, a martyr to a cause, is to display at once a moral and an intellectual defect.

The worldview of the providential class

Dalrymple writes that if despite everything, immigrants or people of immigrant descent, especially those of different races, are prospering and integrating well into society,

there is no need of a providential class of academics, journalists, bureaucrats, and others to rescue them from the slough of despond supposedly brought about by prejudice and discrimination. Many a career opportunity would be lost if there were no systemic injustices of this sort to untangle.

For the providential class, ethnic minorities in Britain

are mired in an oppressive neo-apartheid State.

The only solution is felt to be

virtually totalitarian control over society by the providential class.

Needed measures range

from the imposition of quotas in employment to censorship of what is said even in private.

Yet Dalrymple points out that immigrants and minorities

are not just immigrants and minorities but have individual and group characteristics that affect their destiny. It is not the character of the receiving country alone that determines the outcome for minorities, but the characteristics of the minorities. To think anything else is an inverted form of racism, ascribing all power to the receiving country and denying all agency to the minority groups. It is capable of fixing people in the amber of resentment.

To treat all people of non-European descent as if they must therefore have something positively in common

is to treat them as an undifferentiated mass defined wholly by their very non-Europeanness. Even Dr Verwoerd was not as crass as this.

For the providential class, a member of an ethnic minority

is the permanent possibility of a grievance that requires the intervention of the providential class to remove.

Dalrymple explains that the aggregation of ethnic minorities into a single category

is designed to disguise or hide the real differences between the minorities, because if such differences were admitted, they would not only threaten but refute the worldview of the providential class, namely that the society is so riddled with prejudice and discrimination that something akin to a revolution is required.

A large part of the British intelligentsia is obsessed with race and racism

as the sole or overwhelmingly important explanation of unequal outcomes between groups, at least where a minority group is doing worse than average. (Those that are doing better than average are almost reprehended, as if they were not complying with their duty to be the victims of a supposedly unjust society who are in need of rescue.)

For the providential class,

nothing succeeds like the failure of others. It needs there to be perpetual grounds for grievance by minorities, creating a constituency that looks for salvation by political means.

Poor chap, he lived in the 16th century

Dalrymple explains that a book was recently sent to him through the post by its publishers

in the hope that I would make some reference to it or even review it.

In 360 pages, the book

sought to prove, with an immense machinery of academic references, that human beings, on the whole, are happier if they have some face-to-face and person-to-person contact.

Dalrymple’s comment:

Imagine someone going to Shakespeare and earnestly explaining to him the content of this book.

‘Well, William. Did you know that human beings need one another to be happy? I bet you didn’t, because, poor chap, you lived in the 16th century.’

I don’t think the Bard would have been bemused, because nothing human bemused him, but he might have been amused.

Two lines of his might have run through his head:

Lord, what fools these mortals be!*

and

O brave new world, That has such people in’t!†

*A Midsummer Nights Dream, Act 3, scene 2, 110–115; †The Tempest, Act 5, scene 1, 181–184