Pretense, Part 2: The World Has Become a Jerry Springer Show
August 17, 2011 Leave a comment
The following short article was written six years ago. Read it and take a look around today. What do you see?
Theodore Dalrymple
Law Isn’t Enough
City Journal, Autumn 2005
Recently in London a correspondent of a left-liberal Dutch newspaper interviewed me, a decent, civilized sort—one of us, in short. I am sure that he brought up his children to say please and thank you, probably in several languages.
He asked me why I had chosen recently to move from England to France. I said that I thought France was a decade or two behind Britain in cultural decline. It had maintained certain standards a little better than Britain—though, I added, I could see that it was heading in the same direction.
He asked me what evidence I had for my claim. Well, I replied, crime in France was approaching British levels; in some places, it was even worse, at least for serious crimes of violence.
Another straw in the wind was the rising number of tattooed and pierced young people on view, as well as tattoo and piercing parlors. Ten years ago, you hardly ever saw a tattooed person in France: now they are everywhere. The small and ancient town, solidly bourgeois, near where I live has such a parlor, purveying savage kitsch to young fools. Le Monde published a little while back a profile of the acclaimed French writer Ann Scott, whose work makes Baudelaire’s seem a bit like that of Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Scott has a large and prominent tattoo of a swallow on her neck. Critics claim that her latest book, describing heroin addiction and lesbian love, has a terrible beauty, as well as near-emetic properties.
The correspondent asked me: what was wrong with tattooing, if that was how people wanted to adorn themselves?
I asked him whether he would have himself tattooed—whether he would be happy if his teenaged children had themselves tattooed—and if not, why not? After all, if he would not like it, he must have some inner objection to tattooing.
True, he said, but tattooing was not illegal. And since even I, who deprecated it, did not think that it should be illegal, there was nothing further to say about it. If tattooing was legal, it was thus of no social, moral, or cultural significance.
I tried to point out some of the cultural meanings of the vogue for tattooing. First, it was aesthetically worse than worthless. Tattoos were always kitsch, implying not only the absence of taste but the presence of dishonest emotion.
Second, the vogue represented a desperate (and rather sad) attempt on a mass scale to achieve individuality and character by means of mere adornment, which implied both intellectual vacuity and unhealthy self-absorption.
And third, it represented mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make judgments of morality or value.
But the correspondent’s premise that the legality of an act was the sole criterion by which one could or should judge it chilled me. It is a sinister premise. It makes the legislature the complete arbiter of manners and morals, and thus accords to the state quasi-totalitarian powers without the state’s ever having claimed them. The state alone decides what we have or lack permission to do: we have to make no moral decisions for ourselves, for what we have legal permission to do is also, by definition, morally acceptable.
Even worse than the correspondent’s implicitly totalitarian assumption was his lack of awareness of how societies cohere, and how social existence becomes tolerable, let alone pleasant. After all, the law does not prohibit rudeness, boorishness, and an infinity of unpleasant habits. But it is clear that if, for example, the prevalence of boorishness increases, life in society becomes more filled with friction and danger.
What I found so odd about the correspondent were his perfect manners and refined tastes. But so little confidence did he have in the value of the things that he valued that he seemed indifferent to the mechanism of their disappearance or destruction. This is the way a civilization ends: not with a bang but a whimper.
(Emphasis mine)
From this article:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_4_diarist.html
THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Anthony (A.M.) Daniels (born 11 October 1949), who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is a British writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist
Cindy Wity 
The Age of Outrage: Incensed Sensibilities
September 14, 2011 Leave a comment
In terms of human nature I do not know that our world is much different from all the worlds of centuries past. Human nature appears to be a constant. But I do see that today because of the enormous reach of instant electronic media we are at any given moment enjoined to take offense at anything perceived to be an attack on the rosy perception we have of ourselves and our world. We will even take offense for others whose shoes we are not wearing. The general response to any perceived threat to the safety net, our egos, is often to tweet ourselves and others with word-packets of rage. Misery loves communication. Just ask Obama.
Obama has an #attackwatch Twitter website (attackwatch.com) set up by his campaign people to gather reports about attacks on Obama’s record. The site invites you to snitch on your neighbor in order to intercept smears to Obama’s mirrors.
Today, for the most part, narcissism is the ‘I-cad’ battery behind the hardware and software of every electronic gadget purchased for personal communication. And once powered up, every gadget is attuned to the mirror on the wall affixing our image clearly in cyberspace. The “human” part of the gadget’s human machine interface (HMI) is easily prone to having its ego front and center where it will stand ready and waiting for an offense, for its sensibilities to be stirred to anger. It may take only one indirect affront to reach the tipping point. When that happens, outrage will then be projected onto everyone around us causing human interface disconnects go viral.
As the word “outrage” suggests, we do not keep our offended selves to ourselves. We blast the horn loudly. We rise up on our hind legs and make a fierce growling sound in direction of the perceived offender. We lash out. We strike. We mock and jeer. We demonstrate, we march and we riot. We “flash” our rancor into vigilantism and mob action. We jump the shark with self-righteous responses, pummeling others with our heavy-handed diatribes. Cooler heads do not prevail. Instead, hot heads storm the gates of decency and respect. Our egos deem that the “other” has not been fair or there has not been adequate homage to our feelings. We text ourselves and to others ‘We deserve better”.
So, in this Age of Outrage with it electronically vaunted egos and its absence of meekness and personal contentment, with all of its rants and its plethora of pretense and aborted conversations and with the death of civility lying everywhere around you you end up getting exactly what you deserve – more of yourself.
*****
AttackWatch Update:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZPwDRZ6pTM&NR=1
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/attack-watch-snitch-focus-internet-fun-195600841.html
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Filed under essay, Life As I See It, Political Commentary, Writing Tagged with AttackWatch, civility, fairness, humilty, narcissism, Obama, outrage, pretense, society