Nihilism Archives
December 28, 2007
The "monkeyman realism of eco-Christians and New Atheists"
The reduction of man to an eco-janitor, a being who creates waste and thus must clear it up, is more than a cynical attempt by isolated Christian leaders to connect with the public. Yes, Williams, Owen, the Holy See and Co. no doubt hope and believe (mistakenly, I’m sure) that adopting trendy Greenspeak will entice people to return to the church. But the move from focusing on love for God and one’s neighbour to focusing on ‘respect for the planet’ represents more than a rebranding exercise: it signals a complete abandonment by the Christian churches of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. And in this sense, it is not only God that is being downgraded by the new nature-worshipping priests; so is humanity itself. And that’s enough to make even a committed atheist like me worry about the current direction of the Christian churches.
. . .
The cult of environmentalism embraced by the Christian churches does away with morality altogether. Some sceptics claim that environmentalism is a new form of moralistic hectoring; it is better to see it as amoralistic hectoring. In judging everything by how much CO2 or pollution it creates, environmentalism dispenses with questions of moral worth and judgement.
. . .
Many of the great atheists of old were concerned with making man the centre of his moral universe; with freeing him up to become the ‘superhuman’ that he aspired to be, but which he could only glimpse in an illusory God. Today, by contrast, both eco-Christians and New Atheists want to bring man and God crashing back down to Earth… so that we can set about cleaning it up like the good little earthly janitors we are. At a time of such low horizons, is it any wonder that some people still do cling on to God, and seek transcendence from mundane everyday life through a belief in divinity? There is more humanity in their ‘superhuman’ delusions than there is in the monkeyman realism of eco-Christians and New Atheists.
"Mankind is more than the janitor of planet Earth," by Brendan O’Neill, spiked, December 27, 2007 (footnote omitted)
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November 28, 2007
"Nothing in the modern world compares with North Korea"
Nothing in the modern world compares with North Korea, though it gives us some clue about how life must have been under the pharaohs, in Imperial Japan before Hiroshima, or in the obliterated years--conveniently erased from memory by blushing fellow travelers--when Josef Stalin was revered as a human god.
. . .
The main feeling the visitor has in Pyongyang is one of pity at the pathos of the place--its hopeless, helpless overestimate of its own power and importance, the deluded ignorance of millions of people carefully protected from any inrush of truth about themselves, their country, and their rulers. Every radio and TV set has been carefully neutered, its tuning dial soldered so that it can receive only the transmissions of the North Korean state. There is no access to the Internet except for a tiny, select few. Cell phones are confiscated from visitors upon arrival, though the very senior elite are believed to possess and use them. The newspapers are comically constipated accounts of speeches by the Dear Leader, long-ago angling contests, and uninteresting visits by junior dignitaries from countries ruled by dubious governments, which you would struggle to find on a map.
It may well be even worse than it looks. Pyongyang is a show city, inhabited by a favored layer of privileged and chosen people, who know that misbehavior of any kind could lead to exile to places we cannot even imagine. I have seen the miserable coal towns of China, which are open to visitors and have at least been touched by the prosperity flowing through the People’s Republic. They look like 19th-century pit villages in Britain. But even I cannot conceive of the dreariness and overpowering gloom of their North Korean equivalents, hidden away in the northern mountains, which no Westerner ever sees.
"Prisoners in Camp Kim: Strange, secretive, and desperately poor, North Korea tests the limits of social control." By Peter Hitchens, The American Conservative, November 19, 2007
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November 06, 2007
Rock and radicalism
Doggett argues that the fraught relationship between rock and radicalism is the story of utopianism betrayed by commerce.
"Talkin' bout a revolution," Telegraph.co.uk, October 27, 2007
It could also be argued that the relationship between rock and radicalism is the story of nihilism rescued by commerce....
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November 03, 2007
"From the H-Bomb to the Human Bomb"
When the naive, the falsely naive, and the downright evil blur categories in support of their ideological prejudices and christen the killer of innocents a “resistance fighter,” more lucid minds disclose a different landscape. Consider an editorial published in a Lebanese paper on August 20, 2003, the day after a bomb-laden cement truck destroyed the United Nations’ center of operations in Baghdad: “Yesterday’s operation against the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations exemplifies this mentality of destruction. Expel all mediators. Banish every international organization. Let things collapse. Let electricity and water be cut off, and the pumping of oil cease. Let theft prevail. Let universities and schools close. Let businesses fail. Let civic life cease. And at the end of the day the occupation will fail. ‘No!’ protests Joseph Samara, ‘at the end of the road, there will be a catastrophe for Iraq. . . . The attack against the United Nations’ headquarters in Baghdad belongs to another world: it is a form of nihilism, of absurdity, and of chaos hiding behind fallacious slogans, which proves the convergence among those responsible for this action, their intellectual limitation and their criminal behavior.’ ”
We have entered another world. The threat of a new Ground Zero, small or great, advances behind a mask. The human bomb claims the power to strike anywhere, by any means, at any time, spreading his nocturnal threat over the globe, invisible and thus unpredictable, clandestine and thus untraceable. The terrorist without borders makes us think about him always, everywhere. Without an accidental delay on the tracks--just a few minutes--the pulverization of two trains in Madrid, at the Atocha station, would have claimed 10,000 victims, three times more than in Manhattan. Then there was London. Whose turn is next? Each of us waits for the next explosion.
The business of terrorists, after all, is to terrorize--so said Lenin, an uncontested master in the field. The ultimate refinement lies in the inversion of responsibility. Operating instructions: I take hostages, I cut off their heads, I show them on video; those who beg for mercy must address themselves to their governments, who alone are to blame for my crimes: my hubris is their problem. The less the terrorist’s restraint, the more he causes fear and the sooner you will yield in tears, or so he believes.
Recall the cries of hostage Nick Berg, agonizing as his torturers persisted laboriously over his bent body. “You know, when we behead someone, we enjoy it,” one of them informs us. “We did not kidnap to frighten those we hold,” another corrects him, “but to put pressure on the countries that help or might help the Americans. . . . It is not a good thing to decapitate, but it is a method that works. In a fight, Americans tremble. . . . Besides, I tried to negotiate an exchange of prisoners for Nick Berg. It was the Americans who refused. They are the ones truly responsible for his death.” Terrorist hubris bases its arguments on uncontrollable drives: I can’t help myself--give up! A similar strategy shows up on playgrounds: Stop me or I’ll do something terrible! The terrorist refines this rationale; he draws out his pleasure, prolongs death, cuts the throat slowly, goes beyond physical torture.
"From the H-Bomb to the Human Bomb," by André Glucksmann, City Journal, Autumn 2007
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September 01, 2007
Kerouac spent most of his life living at home with his mother....
In fact, it is the extreme banality of On the Road, combined with a glamorous aura of anarchy (in the midst of a society in which there is always enough gasoline for the anarchists to resume their journey, of course), which has made it perennially attractive to youth--an age of man always tempted by bad taste--ever since its publication. If Dean’s utterances are profound and worthy of record, then anything that any of us says is likewise profound and worthy of record; if Dean is a philosopher, we are all philosophers. In this respect, the book is like a soap opera that reassures untold millions that the day-to-day flux of their existence is not without significance, or else why would something so closely resembling it be on television?
I mentioned the banality of the book to a young man who told me that he had thought it wonderful when he had read it a few years previously. I devised a test. He would open it and point to a passage at random, and I would read the passage out loud. He would then tell me whether he thought it was banal. Here is the passage:The drizzle increased and Eddie got cold; he had very little clothing. I fished a wool plaid shirt from my canvas bag and he put it on. I had a cold. I bought cough drops in a rickety Indian store of some kind. I went to the little two-by-four Post office and wrote my aunt a penny postcard. We went back to the gray road. There she was in front of us, Shelton, written on the watertank. The Rock Island balled by. We saw the faces of Pullman passengers go by in a blur. The train howled off across the plains in the direction of our desires. It started to rain harder.
A passage such as this, appearing in an alleged literary classic, must encourage and delude many an adolescent keeper of a diary that his entries will one day find the appreciative audience that their immanent genius deserves. The popularity of On the Road is a manifestation of the propensity in a demotic age of mediocrity to worship itself. But the young man who had so appreciated the book only a few years previously was honest enough to accept that my point was made.
Of course, it might be said that my test was an unfair one. It is possible, after all, for an artistic whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. I do not think, however, that this can really be said in the case of Kerouac’s book, and this for a very good reason: neither Sal nor Dean are very interested in anything at all apart from themselves, and even in themselves only in the shallowest, most inconsequential possible way. They travel across America four times, but they express only the most cursory interest in the people they meet, and often no interest in them at all if they cannot use them in some dishonest way or other; the history of the country does not arouse their curiosity or enthusiasm; neither do questions of politics or economics; nature, in the form of landscape, flora, and fauna, entirely escapes their notice. If On the Road is a Bildungsroman, it is one that is very short on the Bildung.
. . .
He led a tormented life, and I cannot help but feel sadness for a would-be rebel who spent most of his life, as did Kerouac, living at home with his mother. He also drank himself to a horrible death. But while it is true that most great writers were tormented souls, it does not follow that most tormented souls were great writers. To call Kerouac’s writing mediocre is to do it too much honor: its significance is sociological rather than literary. The fact that his work is now being subjected to near-biblical levels of reverential scholarship is a sign of very debased literary and academic standards.
I have seen some of the most mediocre minds of my generation destroyed by too great an interest in the Beats.
"Another side of Paradise," by Anthony Daniels, The New Criterion, September 2007
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August 18, 2007
Apocalyptic environmentalism
So why do so many people in the developed world believe in apocalyptic environmentalism? The attraction of apocalyptic thinking is strong. One self-described survivor of millenarian environmentalism, novelist Eric Zencey, recalled in his 1988 essay, “Apocalypse and Ecology”:"There is seduction in apocalyptic thinking. If one lives in the Last Days, one’s actions, one’s very life, take on historical meaning and no small measure of poignance … Apocalypticism fulfills a desire to escape the flow of real and ordinary time, to fix the flow of history into a single moment of overwhelming importance.”
Daniel Cohen, author of the 1973 Waiting for the Apocalypse, believes that every generation grows up convinced that it is the last generation in history. However, the method by which the end brought about changes. For Cohen’s generation nuclear war was the agent of the apocalypse.“We believed passionately that there would be such a war, and like the early Christians we were sure that this Judgment Day would come within our lifetimes.”
Interestingly, unlike the Millerites, when prophesies of environmental doom fail, ecological millenarians do not experience a "Great Disappointment." As Daniel Cohen noted,"One clearly wrong prophecy, or even a whole string of them, rarely discredits the prophet in the eyes of those who believe in prophecy."
As DiCaprio's new film shows, a lot people still want to think of themselves as living at the hinge of history in which their lives will make all the heroic difference for all the time to come.
But the truth is that our ancestors bequeathed to our generation a world that is immeasurably richer, cleaner and healthier than the one they lived in. I haven't seen The 11th Hour yet, but I suspect that it is not going to recommend those policies that have in fact improved the state of humanity for the last two centuries. Of course, it must be admitted that along the way there were some mostly unavoidable side effects on the natural world that arose as hundreds of millions of people clawed their way out of poverty. That being said, I will be happily surprised if The 11th Hour comes out in favor of strengthened property rights, expanding globalization, increasing urbanization, and spreading modern farming techniques. It is exactly those trends abetted by democratic capitalism that are improving humanity's estate and will help preserve nature.
"DiCaprio's The 11th Hour: We are the Most Important Generation in History," by Ronald Bailey, Hit & Run, August 16, 2007
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July 13, 2007
"Disapproval of the freedom of the West"
So. Two failed terrorist plots within a week. A packed nightclub on a Friday night and a busy airport full of holiday-makers. Not very pointed as a political statement, and both failed to hurt anyone but the terrorists.
The question that provides the puzzle is, why? They didn't attack the Houses of Parliament or a major political institution or any national political figures. They intended to kill thousands of people in a nightclub and an airport, and it is beginning to look increasingly as though Islamic terrorism in Britain seems now to be provoked by disapproval of the Western lifestyle. Earlier, equally inept, Keystone Terrorists, who were apprehended even before they had managed to assemble their bombs, had been secretly recorded as wishing to bomb a nightclub to punish "the slags" (sluts) dancing and drinking the night away in stiletto heels and mini-dresses.
Disapproval of the freedom of the West, in which they had so eagerly sought jobs, seems to be the motivator. Punish the slags. Punish families for going away to foreign shores, intending to loll on sunny beaches in little bikinis sipping rum punches.
"'Those Who Cure You Will Kill You'," by Val MacQueen, TCS, July 9, 2007
Sounds familiar....
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June 27, 2007
"more nails in the coffin of Palestine"
When Palestinians voted for Hamas, they chose war over statehood; resistance over peaceful coexistence; and self-destruction over progress. And why did they do that? Maybe Golda Meier was right: Maybe these people simply hate the Jews more than they love anything, even their own children. In any case, the dream of Palestinian statehood is dying; and the Palestinians themselves are killing it.
And one more thing: Whenever you hear terrorist-sympathizers blame it all on Israel, know that they are putting more nails in the coffin of Palestine. Nothing has been more debilitating and dehumanizing to Palestine than the world's legitimatizing the very terrorists who are destroying it.
"Is the Dream of Palestine Dead?" by Mario Loyola, NRO, June 26, 2007
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June 22, 2007
Episcopalian priest says, "I could not not be a Muslim..."
"I could not not be a Muslim..."
. . .
With the benefit of hindsight, it should have been obvious that the first female imam would be an Episcopalian...
As Chesterton said, "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything."
And as Oscar Wilde said, "The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people the Anglican Church will do."
Also see:
The situation in Malaysia clearly illustrates how poorly the West, especially its media, understands the world beyond its insular borders. While Western human rights advocates and transnationalists speak grandly about the "UN Charter" and "international law" and the universality of the Geneva Conventions, in reality much of the world merely pays lip-service to them. Or invoke them to bludgeon the United States without any intention of applying these so-called "international standards" to themselves. CAIR, for example, can rise indignantly to claim rights and freedoms in the United States that are not reciprocally granted in Saudi Arabia or Malaysia. That would not surprise those who believe laws and customs vary according to country. But it would publicly astonish -- emphasis on publicly -- those who claim that "international standards" are universally valid and accepted, even though they are manufactured in the small city of Brussels, whose delusions vary proportionately to its insularity.
"Oh Joy," The Belmont Club, June 19, 2007
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January 31, 2007
Environmentalism = Imperialism + Elitism?
Hundreds of years after we have become rich and comfortable by removing our forests and exploiting our natural resources such as coal, oil, and gold we are now going to the poorest countries on the planet to prevent them from doing what we did and having what we have. We want them to stay as 'traditional peasants' forgetting all the while that the poor people desperately want progress and desperately want to enjoy the good, healthy and long life we in the west take for granted.
"Mine Your Own Business" will make a lot of comfortable western people very uncomfortable indeed. It will show them the consequences of their blind faith in our new religion-the religion of environmentalism.
Phelim McAleer
July 2006
"Mine Your Own Business," a film by Phelim McAleer
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October 10, 2006
Free Speech at Columbia? Uh, no.
"These are racist individuals heading a project that terrorizes immigrants on the U.S.-Mexican border," Ryan Fukumori, a Columbia junior who took part in the protest, told The New York Sun. "They have no right to be able to speak here."
"At Columbia, Students Attack Minuteman Founder," by Eliana Johnson, The New York Sun, October 5, 2006
This appears to be the result of a liberal arts education today: Idiots declaring that some one has no right to speak.
The epitome of Columbia's intellectual nadir came from Ryan Fukumori, a junior at the university who told Johnson that Gilchrist and others who spoke at the event "had no right to be able to speak here." Apparently Columbia doesn't teach students about the Constitution, especially the First Amendment, any more. The College Republicans have a right to invite anyone they want to speak at their events, and the speakers have the right to speak without being physically attacked. Bear in mind that this university houses the most prestigious school of journalism in the nation, which should indicate a particular interest in supporting free speech.
"Mob Rule at Columbia," by Captain'sQuartersBlog.com, October 6, 2006
I'm willing to bet 3 things: 1) Ryan Fukimori is involved in some campus group that wants rights for some minority, 2) he has been told most of his life how special he is, and 3) he has a bit too much "self-esteem". Oh, and I'll bet he's self-righteous, too.
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September 20, 2006
"The way we all want a big-screen TV, and would keep it in the box once we bought it."
Today two important speeches were made at the UN: one was a sack of lies dumped out by a religious simpleton bent on heralding the apocalypse, and the other was by the President of Iran. At least that’s how a Fark headline might put it, depending on the IQ level of the submitter. There were various desultory FARK threads on the speeches. My favorite concluded thus: there was the usual debate about whether Ahmadinejad had actually called for the destruction of Israel. (It’s a matter of faith among some that Bush personally blamed Saddam for 9/11, but a matter of debate as to the Mullah’s true feelings about the Jews.)
. . .
Make us among his followers. This would be akin to President Bush concluding his speech with an appeal for everyone to follow Jesus. The commentariat would fall off their chairs en masse: he’s outPoped the Pope! But Ahmadinejad, I suspect, will get a pass. Not because his kumbaya blather and deliciously naughty anti-empire rhetoric chubbed up the lads at AP and Reuters, but because he’s seen as a vaguely absurd figure. He says the most colorful things. Nice smile, too! Always good for a quote, that one.
There’s something else behind the indifferent reaction, though. Everyone has already accepted the idea of Iranian nukes. I think it’s been factored into our subconscious calculations, where they lie as great red glowing things whose threat is somehow still abstract. They won’t use them. They just want them. The way we all want a big-screen TV, and would keep it in the box once we bought it.
I frequently hear people remark that Iran would not be stupid enough to use a nuke, since they know it would bring about retaliation. But MAD only works if the other guy’s SANE. If the Administration regularly made remarks like Ahmadinejad and the other top-tier leaders, critics in the West would have long ago been dissolved in a puddle of corrosive urine. Imagine the President of the United States addressing a group of supporters and leading them in a chant of “Death to Iran.” Imagine what that might mean.
"Cold. Again." by James Lileks, The Bleat, September 20, 2006
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August 17, 2006
"Bleeding-heart ignoramuses"
All across the board, Lebanese civilians are referred to as "civilians" where Israeli civilians are referred to as "Israelis" - an eerie and sinister difference pointed out by the non-Jewish stand-up comic genius Natalie Haynes, and one which very few people appear to have noticed - even me, until then.
. . .
Personally, I'd far prefer the Jews to be angry, aggressive and alive than meek, mild and dead - and that's what makes me and a minority like me feel so much like strangers in our own country, now more than ever. I've always loved being a hack, but now even that feels weird, as though I'm living among a bunch of snatched-body zombies who look like journalists but believe and say the most inhuman, evil things.
"Bleeding-heart ignoramuses," by Julie Burchill, HAARETZ, August 2006
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August 16, 2006
Post-Modernism = Neo-Luddites
Aside from the massive waste of public monies on professorships and student loans for useless degrees, I guess that is what bothers me most about Post-Modernism - it gives neo-luddites an Academic gloss for their idiocy.
"True, False, or Bloody Stupid?" by John Jay, Chicago Boyz, August 6, 2006
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August 06, 2006
Grievances of ... seeing unveiled women ... the Jewish people ... the heresy of democracy ... a work of fiction ... the existence of black African Muslim farmers ... etc., ad nauseum
It's a long, and nauseating, list of grievances ....
We know very well what the "grievances" of the jihadists are. The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor's liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way.For a few moments yesterday, Londoners received a taste of what life is like for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose Muslim faith does not protect them from slaughter at the hands of those who think they are not Muslim enough, or are the wrong Muslim.
"We Cannot Surrender: States which shelter these killers will know no peace," by Christopher Hitchens, Mirror.co.uk, July 8, 2005
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August 01, 2006
Anti-semites dressed up as pseudo-intellectuals
It takes a certain kind of person to see a liberal free society attacked by Islamicists, and find himself wondering: what are those crafty Jews up to now?
"Friday night," James Lileks, The Bleat, July 17, 2006
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June 17, 2006
The left's fascination with the propaganda of murderous tyrants
The anti-western left has, over the course of history, fallen time after time for the propaganda of murderous tyrants who offered a handy platform for bashing the home society by providing the alibi of conscience. The investment of personal, political and moral identity that this represents is so immense that after a short while such gullible dupes are simply incapable of recognising reality even when it stares them in the face. Hence their stupefaction when confronted with the enormities of Robespierre, Stalin or Mao. To that list must now be added the Islamic jihad and Saddam Hussein. The difference is that this time these useful idiots have taken the middling people of Britain and Europe – and increasingly, it seems, of America – with them into the land of deluded wishful thinking. The result could be that this war against the jihadi terror could be lost -- at home.
"The big lie," by Melanie Phillips, June 30, 2005
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June 08, 2006
"Any student of Marxism is perforce a student of intellectual and political pathology...."
But what impresses one about Main Currents of Marxism is not only Kolakowski’s breadth or learning but also his economy. This is a book from which the reader benefits from the author’s great powers of distillation. It is a long book. In the hands of most writers, it would have been much longer. Kolakowski has an uncanny ability to seize upon and express the essential features of the doctrines he discusses. No doubt this is partly a matter of talent. It is also a testament to the huge labor, not only of reading but also of sifting and synthesizing, that went into the book. Kolakowski gives us not his first thoughts but his considered judgments, honed of the superfluous. Anyone who reads these sobering volumes will come away with not only an understanding of the intellectual and spiritual precursors of Marxism, but also a good grasp of the essentials of “classical” Marxist doctrine and its hybridization in the Soviet Union, the Frankfurt School, and other left-wing impulses. Writing about the amorphous New Left of the 1960s, for example, Kolakowski notes that althoughthe ideological fantasies of this movement … were no more than a nonsensical expression of the whims of spoilt middle-class children, and while the extremists among them were virtually indistinguishable from Fascist thugs, the movement did without doubt express a profound crisis of faith in the values that had inspired democratic societies for many decades. … The New Left explosion of academic youth was an aggressive movement born of frustration, which easily created a vocabulary for itself out of Marxist slogans … : liberation, revolution, alienation, etc. Apart from this, its ideology really has little in common with Marxism. It consists of “revolution” without the working class; hatred of modern technology as such; … the cult of primitive societies … as the source of progress; hatred of education and specialized knowledge.
Sound familiar?
Any student of Marxism is perforce a student of intellectual and political pathology, and Main Currents of Marxism, in addition to its other accomplishments, is a pathologist’s scrapbook, a catalogue of brutal, often phantasmagoric, deformations. Kolakowski’s approach is generally more descriptive and diagnostic than polemical, but he can wax polemical to deadly effect when the occasion arises. The title essay of My Correct Views on Everything is Kolakowski’s devastating response to a 100-page “Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski” published by E. P. Thompson in the Socialist Review in 1973. Thompson is the author of The Making of the English Working Class (1963), an object of pious veneration among the Marxist and socialist brotherhood. His “Letter” is an expression, by turns righteously indignant and cloyingly sentimental, of his feelings of “injury and betrayal” at Kolakowski’s criticisms of Communism. “We were both voices of the Communist revisionism of 1956,” Thompson sniffed, “we both sought to rehabilitate the utopian energies within the socialist tradition.” What happened?
Kolakowski’s response is a salvo that would have made Cato the Elder proud. Recalling Thompson’s refusal to sit down at a table with Robert Cecil because he once worked in the British diplomatic service: “O blessed Innocence! You and I, we were both active in our respective Communist Parties in the ’40s and ’50s, which means that, whatever our noble intentions and our charming ignorance (or refusal to get rid of ignorance) were, we supported, within our modest means, a regime based on mass slave labor and police terror of the worst kind in human history. Do you think that there are many people who could refuse to sit at the same table with us on these grounds?” Kolakowski quotes this effusion, reminiscent of the more utopian passages of Marx’s German Ideology: “My own utopia,” Thompson wrote,
two hundred years ahead, would not be like Morris’s “epoch of rest.” It would be a world (as D. H. Lawrence would have it) where the “money values” give way before the “life values,” or (as Blake would have it) “corporeal” will give way to “mental” war. With sources of power easily available, some men and women might choose to live in unified communities, sited, like Cistercian monasteries, in centres of great natural beauty, where agricultural, industrial and intellectual pursuits might be combined. Others might prefer the variety and pace of an urban life which rediscovers some of the qualities of the city-state. Others will prefer a life of seclusion, and many will pass between all three. Scholars would follow the disputes of different schools, in Paris, Jakarta or Bogota.
As Kolakowski notes, “This is a very good sample of socialist writing. It amounts to saying that the world should be good, and not bad.” Nice work if you can get it! But of course, Thompson cannot get it, and neither can anyone else. It is just unadulterated hokum, nauseating in its sentimentality, dangerous in its appeal to the credulous. Thompson dreams of a world in which “corporeal” war gives way to merely “mental” war (Lawrence and Blake would be among his heroes), but Kolakowski is right that this dream is thoroughly utopian “We do not know how to harmonize the contradictory tasks contemporary society imposes upon us. We can only try to reach an uncertain balance between these tasks because we have no blueprint for a conflictless and secure society.”
"Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism," by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, June 2005
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May 20, 2006
"Sadism" or "fascism" or "nihilism"
It must have been infernal underneath King's Cross, but above ground no panic, no screaming, no wailing and beating the air, no yells for vengeance.I'm writing this in the early aftermath, but I would be willing to bet there will have been little or no bloody foolishness, either: no random attacks on mosques or shops or individuals. After all, devices on our buses and tubes are an open proclamation that the perpetrators don't care if they kill Muslims. Which, of course, is part of the point. When we use the weak and vague word "terrorism" we imply indiscriminate cruelty directed at civilians.
"Sadism" or "fascism" or "nihilism" would do just as nicely: all the venom that lurks just on the sub-human level of the human species.
In a tightly interwoven society, all that this poison has to do is ally itself with a certain low cunning.
"We Cannot Surrender: States which shelter these killers will know no peace," by Christopher Hitchens, Mirror.co.uk, July 8, 2005
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April 11, 2006
"Marxism has been as wrong as it is possible for a theory to be wrong."
Marxism has been as wrong as it is possible for a theory to be wrong. Addicted to "the self-deification of mankind," it continually bears witness to what Kolakowski calls "the farcical aspect of human bondage." Why then was Marxism like moral catnip—not so much among its proposed beneficiaries, the working classes, but among the educated elite? Well, beguiling simplicity was part of it. "One of the causes of the popularity of Marxism among educated people," Kolakowski notes, "was the fact that in its simple form it was very easy." Marxism—like Freudianism, like Darwinism, like Hegelianism—is a "one key fits all locks" philosophy. All aspects of human experience can be referred to the operation of a single all-governing process which thereby offers the illusion of universal explanation.
"Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism," by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, June 2005
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March 19, 2006
Demanding the "cessation of all life in favour of prostration before a totalitarian vision."
The grievances I listed above are unappeasable, one of many reasons why the jihadists will lose.They demand the impossible - the cessation of all life in favour of prostration before a totalitarian vision. Plainly, we cannot surrender. There is no one with whom to negotiate, let alone capitulate.
We shall track down those responsible. States that shelter them will know no peace. Communities that shelter them do not take forever to discover their mistake. And their sordid love of death is as nothing compared to our love of London, which we will defend as always, and which will survive this with ease.
"We Cannot Surrender: States which shelter these killers will know no peace," by Christopher Hitchens, Mirror.co.uk, July 8, 2005
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March 14, 2006
Equality of outcomes ... watch your thoughts
These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this: pathetic.I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.
In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).
"Leaving the left - I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity," by Keith Thompson, San Francisco Chronicle, May 22, 2005
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March 12, 2006
The Taliban and prostitutes
Joking how the prophet Mohammed is running out of virgins because so many suicide bombers are standing at the gates of paradise is dark and mean. And, given the reality of global attacks, lamentably effective (just as a side note). But I did not find it especially funny that the misogynous Taliban availed themselves regularly of prostitutes. Or publicly "executed" video recorders and televisions in order to watch pornos in privacy.
"'What next, bearded one?' Our traditional values have been trampled on and we are offended. A wake-up call," by Sonia Mikich, signandsight, February 7, 2006
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March 08, 2006
Marxism: The "greatest fantasy" of the 20th Century
Marxism also spoke powerfully to mankind’s unsatisfied utopian impulses. How imperfect a construct is capitalist society: how much conflict does it abet, how many desires does it leave unsatisfied! Can we not imagine a world beyond those tensions and conflicts in which we could realize our full human potential without competition, without scarcity, without want? Sure, we can imagine it, but there is a reason that "utopia" means "nowhere." Kolakowski shows how Marxism speaks powerfully to those unrealized, and unrealizable, utopian dreams. Marxism, he wrote, was the "greatest fantasy" of the twentieth century, not because it offered a better life but because it appealed to apparently ineradicable spiritual cravings.The influence that Marxism has achieved, far from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner. Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects. ... In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.
"Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism," by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, June 2005
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February 28, 2006
"We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics"
[I]f Muslims do not want their alleged prophet identified with barbaric acts or adolescent fantasies, they should say publicly that random murder for virgins is not in their religion. And here one runs up against a curious reluctance. … In fact, Sunni Muslim leaders can't even seem to condemn the blowing-up of Shiite mosques and funeral processions, which even I would describe as sacrilege. Of course there are many millions of Muslims who do worry about this, and another reason for condemning the idiots at Foggy Bottom is their assumption, dangerous in many ways, that the first lynch mob on the scene is actually the genuine voice of the people. There's an insult to Islam, if you like.The question of "offensiveness" is easy to decide. First: Suppose that we all agreed to comport ourselves in order to avoid offending the believers? How could we ever be sure that we had taken enough precautions? On Saturday, I appeared on CNN, which was so terrified of reprisal that it "pixilated" the very cartoons that its viewers needed to see. And this ignoble fear in Atlanta, Ga., arose because of an illustration in a small Scandinavian newspaper of which nobody had ever heard before! Is it not clear, then, that those who are determined to be "offended" will discover a provocation somewhere? We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.
"Cartoon Debate: The case for mocking religion," by Christopher Hitchens, Slate, February 4, 2006
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February 20, 2006
"Islamic truths" - 1
Another week, another Muslim country burns in rage over months-old Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in an unflattering light. On Friday it was Libya, and earlier in the week it was my father's homeland, Pakistan, where violent protests were scattered across the nation. Some Muslims have decided that burning cities in defense of a prophet's teachings, which none of them seem willing to practice, is preferable to participating in rational debate about the myths and realities of a religion whose worst enemies are increasingly its own adherents.This week's events should compel those of us who claim Islam as our system of philosophical guidance to ask hard questions of ourselves in order to revive the religion's essential foundation: justice, peaceful and tolerant coexistence, compassion, the search for knowledge and unwavering faith in the unity of God.
"Islamic truths," by Mansoor Ijaz, Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2006
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February 15, 2006
"Offensive"
Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The prohibition on picturing the prophet—who was only another male mammal—is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent. This current uneasy coexistence is only an interlude, he seems to say. For the moment, all I can do is claim to possess absolute truth and demand absolute immunity from criticism. But in the future, you will do what I say and you will do it on pain of death.I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice, which as it happens I chance to find "offensive." ( By the way, hasn't the word "offensive" become really offensive lately?) The innate human revulsion against desecration is much older than any monotheism: Its most powerful expression is in the Antigone of Sophocles. It belongs to civilization. I am not asking for the right to slaughter a pig in a synagogue or mosque or to relieve myself on a "holy" book. But I will not be told I can't eat pork, and I will not respect those who burn books on a regular basis. I, too, have strong convictions and beliefs and value the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object.
"Cartoon Debate: The case for mocking religion," by Christopher Hitchens, Slate, February 4, 2006
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February 11, 2006
"The struggle for Islam's soul"
While most Muslims abhor violence, some terrorists are a product of a specific mindset with deep roots in Islamic history. If Muslims everywhere refuse to confront this, we will all be prey to more terror.
. . .
Within hours of the London atrocity, Muslim groups throughout Britain condemned the bombing, declaring in unequivocal terms that such acts had nothing to do with Islam."Religious precepts," declared the Muslim Council of Britain, "cannot be used to justify such crimes, which are completely contrary to our teaching and practice." The eminently sensible Imam Abdul Jalil Sajid, chairman of the Muslim Council for Religious and Racial Harmony U.K., announced: "No school of Islam allows the targeting of civilians or the killing of innocents. Indiscriminate, senseless and targeted killing has no justification in Islam."
The tenor of these statements is: These are the acts of pathologically mad people; Islam has nothing to do with it.
But Islam has everything to do with it. As Dr. Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, director of the Muslim Institute, points out: "The terrorists are using Islamic sources to justify their actions. How can one then say it has nothing to do with Islam?"
"The struggle for Islam's soul," by Ziauddin Sardar, Toronto Star, July 22, 2005
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February 10, 2006
Evil in the modern world
A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word "evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might not make it to dessert.When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20 million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil" too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child molestation for sport.
My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like "gulag" to the dinner table.
I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a telethon-like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations.
Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by Muslim fanatics.
"Leaving the left - I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity," by Keith Thompson, San Francisco Chronicle, May 22, 2005
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February 09, 2006
Marxism appeals to mankind's inherent thuggishness
Of course, it is not just to mankind’s spiritual cravings that Marxism appeals. It also speaks to its inherent thuggishness. This cannot be emphasized too much. These days, Stalin and Stalinism are in bad odor. We forget the romance that Western intellectuals indulged for this mass murderer. We also tend to overlook the fact that thuggishness is an integral, not an accidental, feature of Marxism. Marx spoke of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." What did he mean by "dictatorship"? Lenin explained. "Dictatorship," he wrote in 1906, "means unlimited power based on force, and not on law." In case that was not sufficiently compelling, Lenin added the word "scientific": "The scientific term 'dictatorship' means nothing more nor less than authority untrammelled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on violence." In 1917, Lenin got the chance to show the world what this theory would look like when put into action. "He created a system," Kolakowski observes, "in which, depending on the whim of a local party or police authority, any criticism might be regarded as counter-revolutionary and expose its author to imprisonment or death." Hence the importance of terror, an essential ingredient in the revolutionary’s utopian program at least since Robespierre spoke of "virtue and its emanation, terror." "The courts," Lenin wrote in 1922, "must not ban terror … but must formulate the motives underlying it, legalize it as a principle, plainly, without any make-believe."The crucial thing to bear in mind, however, is not the brutality of Communist rule—what we might call really existing Marxism—but its spuriousness and contempt for law. This is what distinguishes ordinary despotism from its totalitarian counterpart. "A law," Kolakowski notes, "may provide draconic penalties for small offenses without being specifically totalitarian; what is characteristic of totalitarian law is the use of such formulas as Lenin’s: people may be executed for expressing views that may 'objectively serve the interests of the bourgeoisie.' This means that the government can put to death anyone it chooses; there is no such thing as law; it is not that the criminal code is severe, but that it has no existence except in name."
In other words, the very arbitrariness of Communist rule is a coefficient of its ambition to total control of life. Lenin said that what socialism implies above all is "keeping account of everything." Everything was subject to regulation from above because nothing had significance apart from the diktats of the Party. In this sense, Marxism is a solution in which the idea of intrinsic value dissolves into absolute expediency. For the Communist there is no such thing as impartiality or disinterestedness because there is no such thing as an independent object of value. Nothing has inherent significance because everything acquires value from its function in the impersonal engine of utopia.
"Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism," by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, June 2005
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February 03, 2006
Hitler wins ... nothing to see here, move along ...
If the election proves anything, it’s that Hitler can win and people still won’t see the parallels to the last big batch of professional Jew-haters – no matter how crazy they get. The election was barely over, and the celebratory bullets hadn’t all pattered to earth, when the demands began. Israeli National News quoted Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar on the key issue of the day: the insulting affront presented by the Israeli flag. "Israel must remove the two blue stripes from its national flag", said Zahar. “The stripes on the flag are symbols of occupation. They signify Israel's borders stretching from the River Euphrates to the River Nile."Yes, indeed. And the fifty stars on the American flag symbolize this nation’s desire to occupy and annex the Milky Way. European diplomats will shrug off Zahar’s demands, just as the Iranian president’s pearls of wisdom are dismissed: he’s only playing to his base. Perhaps, but what does that say about the base? Nothing! They elected Hamas because they were fed up with the corruption of Fatah, just as Americans, tired of Nixon’s skullduggery, voted in the Birch-Klan-Commie Axis in ’74. Or something like that.
In any case, Hamas will have to govern now, the apologists say. Collect the trash. Or, more like, blame Zionist jets for strafing the garbage trucks. They might well “improve” the schools, but since they’ve already announced they’ll will impose Sharia, this might not sit well with secular Palestinians. (Helpful note to angry emailers: this is where you point out that some Christians want to teach Intelligent Design in Kansas, which of course is exactly the same thing as segregating students by sex and teaching the girls why driving is a sin.)
"Hitler," Screedblog, by James Lileks, February 3, 2006
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"Offensive" cartoons
"Militants Surround EU Offices in Gaza Over 'Offensive' Cartoons," AP, February 2, 2006
During the Cold War, it was suggested that to defeat Russia all the US had to do was drop JC Penney and Sears catalogs all over the country ... maybe to defeat Islamic fascism, we just need to drop "offensive" cartoons all over the Middle East ... in Chinese ... or maybe French and German ... or send over some of Robert Mapplethorpe's acolytes ...
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January 30, 2006
Danish products
From the burning of its flag to a boycott of its brands of butter and cookies, Denmark is feeling Islamic outrage over newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
. . .
"In (the West) it is considered freedom of speech if they insult Islam and Muslims," Mohammed al-Shaibani, a columnist, wrote in Kuwait's Al-Qabas daily Monday. "But such freedom becomes racism and a breach of human rights and anti-Semitism if Arabs and Muslims criticize their religion and religious laws."
. . .
In two West Bank towns Sunday, Palestinians burned Danish flags and demanded an apology. Several Islamist groups, including the Palestinian militant Hamas party and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, called for a worldwide boycott of Danish products.
. . .
President Emile Lahoud of Lebanon condemned the cartoon, saying his country "cannot accept any insult to any religion."
"Outrage Builds in Mideast Over Cartoons," by Donna Abu-Nasr, Forbes, January 30, 2006
we love that last quote ....
"Al Qaida's Jihad against Lebanese Christians," Jihad Watch, November 15, 2003
"The Forgotten Christians of Lebanon: Once free and equal, Lebanon's Christians now struggle against tremendous odds in a country dominated by Syrian politics and an increasingly Islamized culture," by Habib C. Malik, The Offical Lebanese Forces web site
"Lebanon's Christians," Center for Religious Freedom
Christians in the Middle East are fast disappearing from the area. The Lebanese Christians, who constitute the only influential Christian community in the Middle East, are fast declining in numbers and power.
"The Rise and Fall of Christian Minorities in Lebanon," by Fouad Abi-Esber BA MA, Encyclopedia Phoeniciana
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January 23, 2006
Communism
Stalin once remarked that the death of an individual is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a statistic. What he neglected to add is that, for the Communist, there is no such thing as the individual. By the same token, there is no such thing as independent judgment—scholarly, judicial, or even aesthetic judgment. Our postmodern literary critics are fond of declaring that "there is no such thing as"—take your pick: intrinsic value, objectivity, disinterestedness, impartiality, even truth. It landed them in a cloud-cuckoo-land of self-contradictory nihilism. But Marx and Lenin got there before them. For the Marxist, art and literature are not human pursuits guided by their own rules of achievement but rather instruments to be used for the shifting and arbitrary ends of the Party. "Down with non-partisan writers!," Lenin wrote in 1905, "Down with literary supermen! Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, ‘a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire politically conscious vanguard of the entire working class!"
"Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism," by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, June 2005
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January 10, 2006
Leaving the American cultural left
Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.
I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.
"Leaving the left - I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity," by Keith Thompson, San Francisco Chronicle, May 22, 2005
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December 27, 2005
Viciousness
What are we to make of scenes from the eighth-century in Fallujah? Random murder, mutilation of the dead, dismemberment, televised gore, and pride in stringing up the charred corpses of those who sought to bring food to the hungry? Perhaps we can shrug and say all this is the wage of Saddam Hussein and the thirty years of brutality of his Baathists that institutionalized such barbarity? Or was the carnage the dying scream of Baathist hold-outs intent on shocking the Western world at home watching it live? We could speculate for hours.Yet I fear that we have not seen anything new. Flip through the newspaper and the stories are as depressing as they are monotonous: bombs in Spain; fiery clerics promising death in England, even as explosive devices are uncovered in France. In-between accounts of bombings in Iraq, we get the normal murdering in Israel, and daily assassination in Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, and Chechnya. Murder, dismemberment, torture—these all seem to be the acceptable tools of Islamic fundamentalism and condoned as part of justifiable Middle East rage. Sheik Yassin is called a poor crippled "holy man" who ordered the deaths of hundreds, as revered in the Arab World for his mass murder as Jerry Falwell is condemned in the West for his occasional slipshod slur about Muslims.
Yet the hourly killing is perhaps not merely the wages of autocracy, but part of a larger grotesquery of Islamic fundamentalism on display. The Taliban strung up infidels from construction cranes and watched, like Romans of old, gory stoning and decapitations in soccer stadiums built with UN largess. In the last two years, Palestinian mobs have torn apart Israeli soldiers, lynched their own, wired children with suicide bombing vests, and machine-gunned down women and children—between sickening scenes of smearing themselves with the blood of "martyrs." Very few Arab intellectuals or holy men have condemned such viciousness.
"The Mirror of Fallujah: No More Passes and Excuses for the Middle East," by Victor Davis Hansen, Jewish World Review, April 4, 2004
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December 18, 2005
Islamofascism
Despite their rhetoric of annihilation and the glories of death, the leadership of al Qaeda and other Islamofascist groups seem to have little stomach for actually partaking of such glories. This is hardly surprising. Their agenda involves remaking the world to suit their desires, and as such they naturally want to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
"Unfortunate Rendition," by Andrew Olmstead, December 5, 2005
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December 06, 2005
Tolerance of how much intolerance?
To be an anatomist of totalitarianism is also to be a connoisseur of freedom, its many beguiling counterfeits as well as its genuine aspirations. The question—the lure, the never fulfilled but inescapable promise—of freedom stands at the center of much of Kolakowski’s work. In "The Self-Poisoning of the Open Society," reprinted in Modernity on Endless Trial (1990), Kolakowski dilates on an antinomy of liberalism that beset Western societies during the Cold War and is, if anything, even more pressing today as we negotiate what amounts to a moral war with fundamentalist Islam. The antinomy is this: liberalism implies openness to other points of view, even (it would seem) those points of view whose success would destroy liberalism. Tolerance to those points of view is a prescription for suicide. Intolerance betrays the fundamental premise of liberalism, i.e. openness.Kolakowski is surely right that our liberal, pluralist democracy depends for its survival not only on the continued existence of its institutions, but also "on a belief in their value and a widespread will to defend them."
Do we, as a society, enjoy that belief? Do we possess the requisite will? The jury is still out on those questions. A good test is the extent to which we can resolve the antinomy of liberalism. And a good start on that problem is the extent to which we realize that the antinomy is, in the business of everyday life, illusory. The "openness" that liberal society rightly cherishes is not a vacuous openness to all points of view: it is not "value neutral." It need not, indeed it cannot, say Yes to all comers. American democracy, for example, affords its citizens great latitude, but great latitude is not synonymous with the proposition that "anything goes." Our society, like every society, is founded on particular positive values—the rule of law, for example, respect for the individual, religious freedom, the separation of church and state. Western democratic society, that is to say, is rooted in what Kolakowski calls a "vision of the world." Part of that vision is a commitment to openness, but openness is not the same as indifference.
"Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism," by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, June 2005
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November 26, 2005
"Don't let your daughter dress like a hooker"
Don't want your teenage or pre-teen daughter to dress like a prostitute-in-training? Then tell her she can't.
I heard about it in my kitchen before I read about it in the newspaper: After visiting the expanded Tysons Corner Center this fall, my 23-year-old daughter said, "You won't believe how weird Victoria's Secret's gotten: It's all red and black with a bunch of mannequins that look like porn stars." Some shoppers were so outraged at the raunchy lingerie display that they threatened to boycott the store; others just yawned.I've been hearing a variation on this theme with increasing frequency in my office. Mothers voice distress over the suggestive clothing their teen and preteen daughters are wearing, inside and outside the house. In fact, conflict over clothing is what prompts them to come in for family therapy. The daughters themselves may be imperious or sullen, but almost all employ the everyone-is-doing-it excuse. And an awful lot of girls are doing it.
. . .
The girls who dress the most outrageously are often those most starved for adult male attention, first and foremost from their fathers. This happens most commonly with girls whose fathers have disappeared from their lives, perhaps following a divorce, or because their workaholic schedules leave them little time for their children. Children who are raised with attention and affection tend to identify with and admire their parents. This identification is the basis for both discipline and the transmission of values. Without it, parents can't do their job.I often recommend that fathers be the parent to take the lead in setting limits on their daughters' dress, because opposite sex offspring typically cut that parent more slack. Fathers can say, "Honey, you can't wear that. I know teenage boys -- I was one!" A dad like this is looking out for his daughter and treating her as someone special.
While talk and reality shows and tell-all memoirs thrive and a majority of teenagers today say that they would like to be famous, there are still girls and women who value privacy and modesty. They reveal a quiet confidence, a different kind ofglamour. Even famous people can be modest. They don't have to be Britney Spears. Take Audrey Hepburn, who has no counterpart today. Part of her allure lay in the way she embodied humility and modesty. Yet she also conveyed spirit and originality and a strong sense of self.
Even though she worked in an industry that often promotes commonness, she was an uncommon woman. Even though our daughters live in a culture that clearly promotes coarseness, they can be uncommon, too.
"What's Wrong With This Outfit, Mom?" by Patricia Dalton. The Washington Post, November 20, 2005
I now see teenaged girls and women regularly dressing in ways that remind me of the prostitutes I used to see when I drove a cab.
via Joanne Jacobs
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November 23, 2005
Take Derrida at his word
No, it is much better to do Derrida the courtesy of taking him at his word. And then what? For our part, we think that the English philosopher Roger Scruton had it right when he observed that "A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don’t."
"Derrida declawed," Notes & Comments, The New Criterion, November 2004
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