Theodore Dalrymple:Proletarianised Bohemian Intelligentsia

The proletarianised bohemian intelligentsia

Imagining it has a divine spark (as opposed to what it thinks of as the bovine self-contentment of the bourgeois), the proletarianised bohemian intelligentsia

• claims political allegiance with the proletariat
• pretends to some of the tastes of the proletariat, for example that for association football
• has a bohemian lifestyle and at the same time claims the economic advantages and privileges of a bourgeoisie

The proletarianised bohemian intelligentsia is the enemy, writes Dalrymple, of

thrift, honesty, reliability, respectability, solidity, respect for learning, willingness to postpone gratification and politeness.

Chastek - Hypocrisy

Ramble on hypocrisy

October 18, 2011 at 8:49 am (Uncategorized)

Christ’s condemnations of hypocrisy are the constant refrain of his moral teaching. Familiarity with the Gospels make this seem obvious or unremarkable, but this is not the first thing one would expect to be condemned. If we had to guess what the chief condemnation of a religious teacher would be, I doubt that hypocrisy would make the list.
They say that hypocrites are those who one thing and does another. I say “they say” because this definition is simply is in the air and repeated like an urban legend. It’s false: a spy is not a hypocrite even if he says one thing and does another, and for that matter, promise breaking or welching on deals is not a sort of hypocrisy. These actions are mere deception or lying. Still, the definition hints at the truth: both hypocrisy and lying involve a conflict or unlikeness between what is visible and exterior and what is interior and of the heart. Christ really did condemn, say, the wearing of phylacteries or public displays of ones lowliness that were not signs of the law written on the heart or a true recognition of ones wretchedness, but those who do these things aren’t exactly lying. Why not?
Lying without qualification deceives another. The liar knows full well what he is saying is a lie and there is no soft-headedness or confusion about the fact. He might justify his lie but he’s aware that he is telling it. In my own experience with hypocrisy, the lie has faded or been softened out of sight – it has entered into ones personality. The actions one does and the opinions he holds about things are tailored to establishing his position in the world. The hypocrite no longer asks the question “what should I do” in accordance with what is innermost in himself or in light of what gives life an ultimate meaning or what is true in the world around him- all these things are replaced by position in the world or practical necessity or getting by with ones lot, and the hypocrite “really believes” that these are what are most worth living for, though it is truer to say that he simply no longer asks this sort of question. Hypocrisy is a metastasized lie – the hypocrite no longer just deceives others but succeeds in deceiving even himself.
This self-lie makes all conversion impossible since the hypocrite can no longer see the division between what he is, what is in his power, and what he ought to be. Though hypocrisy is a vice, but its opposite is not exactly a virtuous person – the prostitute or tax collector who hates what they are and wishes they could be something else have the light opposed to hypocrisy. In the doctrine of Christ, this light remains even in the virtuous, since no one could come to be virtuous without first recognizing that they lacked the power to accomplish this of themselves. Taken in this way, hypocrisy is opposed to humility.

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.
Brothers Karamazov C VII

Examples of Prejudice and Discrimination

Here are some examples of prejudice and discrimination:

• Sometimes expecting different things of men and women and treating them accordingly.
• Believing that the differences are complementary and adapted to enduring unions that are basic to everyday life, social order, and the continuation of the species.
• Giving specific legal recognition and support to such unions.
• Believing that different peoples—Westerners, South Asians, Jews, Irishmen, Fukienese peasants—have different qualities and ways of doing things.
• Feeling more or less attracted to one group or another, feeling most at home with one’s own group, and feeling at times that there are groups one would rather avoid.
• Taking religious, ethnic, and other communal ties into account in choosing basic affiliations like whom to marry, where to live, and whom to work with.

Until very recently, such things have always counted as ordinary good sense, so much so that they hardly ever surfaced as issues. “Sexist” and “homophobic” are notoriously post-’60s coinages. Even “racist” is a fairly new word,1 its extremely broad application still more so, and until recently “bigot” had to do with narrowness and obstinacy in matters of opinion rather than a tendency to make distinctions in matters like race. Nonetheless, distinctions such as sex, religion, and inherited community that have always ordered human life are now treated as moral horrors. Ordinary examples of discrimination like the ones mentioned must be extirpated.2 Social arrangements that matter must be purged of any trace of them and based instead on neutral bureaucratic and market criteria. We are allowed to take natural and traditional ties into account only in personal settings that grow ever more narrow, or in order to cancel out effects such ties might otherwise have.3
Nondiscrimination claims to appeal to simple reason and justice, but it imposes demands that are sometimes more than a little odd:

• Military experience can count in employment decisions and the like, but not the experience of being raised a man rather than a woman, or even the consequences of hundreds of millions of years of sexual dimorphism.
• Employers may distinguish between college graduates and dropouts or even Yale and Harvard graduates, but not Mayflower descendants and Mexican immigrants, except to the extent that immigrants need a boost to help them overcome disadvantages.
• Habits, attitudes, and loyalties can matter, but only if they have no connection to cultural community. You can insist that new employees attend diversity training and take into account their commitment to multiculturalism, but not consider whether they are churchgoers. The latter approach might get you better employees who work more happily together, but it is illegal.
• Schools can exclude people from teaching irrespective of individual merit if they have not taken useless education courses, but it is a crushing objection to sex discrimination in the military that some women are bigger, stronger, braver, or more stoic than some men.
• An employer can demand a bachelor’s degree for non-technical entry-level positions, but not (in general) look at IQ or criminal records in deciding who to hire. Some minorities come out badly on the latter criteria, and they are less
amenable than educational certifications to affirmative action fudges. The result is that they cannot be used unless shown to be job-related by standards that are usually impractical to satisfy beyond risk of lawsuits.
• In more and more settings it is illegal to treat sex as relevant to family relationships. In some places it must be ignored even in situations like adoption that involve utterly powerless parties with no choice in the matter.

Against Inclusiveness - James Kalb

the best response is that ordinary people with a life to live and no special ax to grind know more about what distinctions make sense than academic entrepreneurs. The claim that traditional forms of identity are simply expressions of exclusion, like the claim that law is simply an expression of punishment or hierarchy an expression of domination and submission, may give some people a pleasing thrill of horror, but it reverses causality. In any normal case, the positive—what is constructive rather than constructed, what facilitates rather than oppresses—is more fundamental. The contrary view comes out of a belief that hatred and evil are more basic than good in human life. The belief is perverse, and, if true, there is not likely to be much that can be done about the situation.


Social identities are not normally based on exclusion for the sake of excluding or exploiting. The family, for example, is a basic source of identity, and it is primarily defined by functions that demand a degree of mutual loyalty, understanding, and support that could hardly exist in an open-ended group. The boundaries and exclusions it imposes are a consequence of those functions and therefore secondary. Adam and Eve and the Swiss Family Robinson had no one to exclude, but they formed families that are like other families. The first pair may not have been conscious of themselves as a family, because there were no outsiders to provide contrast, but that did not change the nature of their connection.
Other traditional distinctions and exclusions work the same general way. Ethnicity matters, because people connect in networked clusters that help them deal with life by fostering common loyalties and patterns of habit and understanding. Those networks and clusters typically develop over time in settings provided by natural connections like physical propinquity and blood relationship. To discriminate and exclude based on such connections is to maintain a setting that allows established patterns of life to go forward. Ethnic neighborhoods arise not through artificial exclusion, but because people want to feel at home. The Japanese prefer to limit immigration not because they hate other people, but because they are attached to their own way of life and want to live with people who have been brought up in it and see it as part of what they are.
Once distinctions of identity are established, they can of course be used and abused like any human institution. Men sometimes act badly, and a scheme of identity that enables them to function effectively enhances their ability to do so. Such problems ought to be dealt with when they come up, but the solution for them is not to deprive people of their means of understanding their situation and acting in it.
[..]
Such an attitude reflects a world in which formal expertise, bureaucratic regulation, and global markets are considered the sole rational means of social organization. In such a world, people come to view traditional informal institutions and expectations as irrational and therefore illegitimate. That view makes little sense. Not everything can be formalized. The universal importance of personal contacts in hiring, not to mention the possibility of a rule-book slowdown,11 shows as much.
Even today, informal connections, understandings, and arrangements, and the roles, exclusions, and discriminations on which they depend, are fundamental to social life. If they were not, imposition of more regulation and bureaucracy would be a reliable way to improve quality and efficiency. Intentionally to disrupt informal arrangements simply as such and to try to keep them from affecting social life because of their supposed irrationality and injustice is therefore to strike at the root of social functioning. In this, as in other respects, liberalism is radically antihuman, because it rejects basic features of human life. It is able to exist only by virtue of what it rejects.

Denaturing of Marriage for Markets and Ruling Class

Manufacturing plant is not flexible, desire is, best and brightest employed to advertise and shape desire/consumption. Plutocracy demands a certain kind of consumer/human being and flexible desire has become an economic imperative. Frugality and no TV wonderfully 'permissive' rule under our harsh economic/wage slave discipline. 

Natural for those on top of heap to want to exercise their Will/Desire, excuses easily found, mass-man easily manipulated. 'Yes' 'equals' legalisation of a potent political irrationalism; open-ended desire detached from any substantive meaning apart from desire of the biggest wills. $-state Power and attendant court functionaries.

Limits like full reserve banking, morality bound to human nature, family, place, tradition, Revelation are chafing to transcendent $ as ordering political principle. Bureaucratic superstructures exist to legally crack open/free people from these natural protections under teaching of metaphysical 'equal freedom'. Communities don't then exist in a vacuum but are administered by now massive central government.

"This is fascinating. Starting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=m2rTHDOuUBw [26:16min.] 48 percent of Lesbian reported attraction to men in the past year. and 40 percent of gay men reported attraction to women in the past year. 26 percent of lesbians reported wanting to have sex with a man and 20 perent of gay men wanted to have sex with a woman (and 12 percent of gay men had sex with a woman). Lisa Diamond reporting results of her Salt Lake City study. (not a random sample)." Maggie Gallagher

Melville 'Moby Dick'

Melville’s Moby Dick “Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway.

...for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest follows behind the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.”