The Doctor is in

An occasional series in which Dr T. examines contemporary issues through the lens of the mediocracy theory.

Mr. Max Mosley’s sexual activities

Why are people getting so worked up over Max Mosley’s sex life, and their supposed right to information about it?

In a mediocracy, legitimate power is deemed to reside exclusively with society, not the individual. And society wants everyone to be answerable to it, or at least observable. Privacy is not considered a right. It is only permitted if society happens not to be interested.

Although Mr Mosley does not occupy any political or other position of significance in the UK, he offends mediocratic ideology by being an old-school elitist. He is also regarded as a suitable target for hatred because of his father’s connection to fascism. New-school elitist George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, thus feels justified in arguing that the recent High Court ruling “removes the right of the public to make informed moral judgements”. (Carey evidently believes that the public will be unable to make appropriate moral choices if they are deprived of information about the sexual antics of public figures.)

We also need to remember that sex plays an important ideological role in a mediocracy. Its function is to prove we are all equal, i.e. equally mechanical. Mediocratic culture relentlessly advertises it, the point being not to encourage toleration of human desires but to celebrate our degradation. This is achieved by means of an ambivalent attitude, promoting sex on the one hand while sneering at it on the other.

Sex is presented as ‘individualistic’ in a mediocracy, but is tacitly used to emphasise our role as social agents entering into adult community activities. Every individual’s sexuality and sexual activities have, in a sense, taken on a public dimension. They are to be available for inspection by society, with mass media (of course) playing a crucial role in providing publicity.

Childhood ‘innocence’ is bourgeois

Why are experts demanding that four-year-olds be taught about sex?

Sex is considered an important defining characteristic of the mediocratic individual (see above). Emphasising it helps to reduce the individual to the status of an automaton. Sex is to be regarded as invalidating any idealistic or romantic notions that people might have, particularly about themselves.

Sex is the principal criterion of normality in a mediocracy. Abstinence is considered unhealthy, low levels of sexual activity a sign of psychopathology calling for treatment. Efficient sex is said to require training, which is to be provided from an early age by the state education system.

Talk of reducing teenage pregnancy rates or sexual diseases is likely to be a cover for another objective. Calls for more sex lessons, or for sex lessons for four-year-olds, probably have little to do with genuine education in the sense of acquiring information. (There is only so many times you can be shown how to put a condom on a cucumber, before diminishing returns set in.) They are about the acquisition of a particular worldview. That is why experts insist that “Sex and Relationships Education should be a statutory entitlement [i.e. obligation] for all young people”. It is essentially about emphasising the individual's social role, as the Family Planning Association points out:

Sexual health services for young people should be ... underpinned by an understanding of the impact of sexuality and gender on their sexual and social identity and behaviour.

Mediocracy does not like the idea that children should be exempt from public scrutiny and inclusion in the mediocratic worldview. One must think of them as little adults, in the sense that they should be as subjected to social evaluation as everyone else. Children, like adults, are to be exposed to ‘realism’ and other aspects of the prevailing ideology. Otherwise there is a risk they could escape indoctrination with the appropriate mediocratic values, at the most crucial stage of life.

Next week
Dr T. analyses Gordon Brown, and the latest piece of in-yer-face theatre.

You’ve got to smirk, haven’t you

The broadsheets have been dumbing down for some years, albeit in slightly different ways. So has the Daily Mail. The others I have less of a view on, since I read them less regularly.

The Telegraph has become a bit of a parody of itself, with the Hooray-Henry element coming to the fore, and there being a distinct tendency to emulate lads' mags. Ideologically, you get the feeling that they'd really like to throw in the towel, conservatism being so seriously uncool and all that.

The Guardian is the one which has embraced the blogosphere hardest, and been influenced by it the most, with the consequence that many of its articles are now more like blog rants — badly spelt, lazily written and sloppily thought out.

The Mail is the nearest to a paper defending bourgeois values, but it has gone downmarket-tabloid in recent years, and is not averse these days to a bit of leftist viciousness when it suits its book.

The Independent has perhaps dumbed down the least, though as mediocracy (i.e. bland, modern, facile, wishy-washy) was pretty much its selling point to begin with, there wasn't much need. It is also the one which has 'blogged out' least; perhaps there is a connection.

The current version of The Times in some ways represents the paradigm of mediocratisation. Most things in it now seem to be presented with a knowing archness, and a good deal of postmodern winking — rather like a pretentious intellectual version of the Sun. "We (the il-liberal elite) are so thoroughly proletarianised, you know, while of course maintaining our Chardonnay lifestyle. We are with the latest fads — rap music, swearing, The Sopranos, torture porn — it's all cool", it seems to be saying.

Take Caitlin Moran writing in last week’s Times about “vanilla sex”. Prima facie this was a piece trying to sound humorous about the current overemphasis on reproductive activities. Strip out the postmodern ‘irony’ and the sophisticated literary coating, however, and what you have left is really not that different from a saucy column in the Mirror.

... the best sex lasts 15 hours ... nine positions ... hammering dementedly away ... paradigmatic shag snack ... “Arrrr, that was smashing” ... no-frills act of jiggy-jiggy ... the “capsule poke” ... a lengthy rut ... Loving all night long would, surely, be equivalent to rubbing the tip of your nose between two pork chops for 19 hours ... coital sawing action ... a good old-fashioned mindless shag ... the one where I ended up being sick down the front of a Tudorbethan house in Aylesbury, and had to clean off the plasterwork with a broom soaked in hot Dettol, while the would-be lesbian's mum shouted at me.

Nudge nudge, wink wink.

I was a fan of Ms Moran in her original guise of young nerdy outsiderish cynic. A middle-aged mainstream version of the same is somehow not quite as appealing. Genuine counterculture is one thing, ‘counterculture’ turned into establishment values another.

Of course, there is a problem for those commentators who, having been cultural ‘revolutionaries’ in their youth, now have reservations about the trash-inducing effects of their earlier modernising zeal. Moral disapproval sits uneasily on the shoulders of someone who, only a few years previously, was shedding inhibitions like autumn leaves. So, turning to other examples from the Times stable, it can generate unpleasant cognitive dissonance to find former chick lit authors now railing against the irresponsibility of modern youth, and demanding that people pull their socks up.

Mr. Pot and the kettles

Wikipedia on Jeremy Paxman:

In 1998 Denis Halliday ... resigned from his post in Iraq in protest at the UN sanctions imposed on that country ... in the subsequent interview with Newsnight, Paxman asked Halliday, "Aren't you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?"

During [an interview with Tony Blair] Paxman famously asked Blair if he and President Bush "prayed together" ...

The BBC received complaints [that when interviewing party political leaders during the 2005 General Election] Paxman was "rude and aggressive" ... particularly after [asking George Galloway] "Are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament?"

Jeremy Paxman's MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival:

[In] more innocent days ... producers made programmes because they were passionately engaged with the world and wanted to communicate what they’d found out. Too much of the time now they simply pick things from the world which look as if they might make good television ...

... the problem is that all news programmes need to make noise. The need’s got worse, the more crowded the market’s become. We clamour for the viewers’ attention: “Don’t switch over. Watch us! You won’t be disappointed!” ...

The problem is that a sort of expectation inflation sets in. ... [In the case of Big Brother] the audience’s jaded palate needs to be constantly titillated. The danger is that the same thing happens with news: if for no other reason than to save producers and presenters from more of that dead-eyed somnambulism you can already see too often ...

So what does Mr Paxman think is the source of the problem? An ethos of top-down cultural 'democratisation' or similar manifestations of pseudo-egalitarianism? No — money.

[The BBC's programme on the Queen] demonstrates the changing imperatives, the variety of operators, the confused lines of accountability, the fact that money intrudes at every stage. ...

There are too many people in this industry whose answer to the question what is television for? is to say ‘to make money.’ ...

All the recent scandals and so-called scandals have one element in common: money. ...

Of course, the BBC’s got problems of its own, and they also come down to money.

Jamie Whyte: must try harder

I've just come across* Jamie Whyte's critique of David Cameron in last week's Financial Times. While I usually enjoy reading Whyte's articles, and agree broadly with his point that Cameron has abandoned traditional Conservative principles, I don't think he makes his case particularly well.

Whyte starts well enough by arguing that Thatcher's observation:

there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families

is considered so ideologically unacceptable that "anybody who now agrees with her is generally regarded as unfit for public office." This seems very plausible.

However, he spoils his case against reifying "society" — i.e. turning the concept into a moral entity as Cameron, like his socialist rivals, has been doing — by conceding that

A sensible case can be made for some redistribution of wealth. Since a pound is worth more to a pauper than to a millionaire, transferring money from the latter to the former increases aggregate wealth.

That is neither sound philosophy nor sound economics. If you wanted to construct an intellectual case for welfare you would need to use a different basis than that one. If the argument about transferring from rich to poor to increase aggregate wealth were sound (it isn't) then mightn't you just as well go on doing it to the point of complete equalisation? Whyte's principal counterargument to this appears to be as follows.

if maximising wealth were the goal, we would need to take seriously the anti-work and anti-investment incentives created by such transfers. Anyone thinking of the matter in this way would probably conclude that transfers are currently too great.

Hmm. So here is a philosopher apparently arguing that the main reason we don't aim for full equalisation of outcomes is because we need to preserve economic incentives. Now if I were writing an article attacking the Left's anti-individualist, anti-libertarian interventionism, I think I would avoid providing that kind of support for "redistribution" — which in any case in practice is usually distribution from individuals to state rather than between individuals. To assume that redistribution is morally justified to an unlimited extent, and that the only thing we have to decide is how much to temper this by reference to incentives, is more or less what the Left does these days, so this isn't exactly counterblast stuff.

While on the subject of Whyte, I also think he has the wrong end of the stick in offering this explanation of why "the celebrity fool thrives" (last month in the Times).

Society is dumbing down, we are told. But this is an unlikely explanation for the premium now placed on foolishness. Since when did an increasing supply of something — be it oil, orange juice or stupidity — cause its price to go up? The opposite hypothesis seems more plausible. It is because we are so much cleverer and better educated than previous generations that foolishness commands such a high price.

We are so much cleverer? We are all better educated? Then how come forty percent of 11-year-olds cannot read, write and add up properly?

A more reasonable explanation is that 'stupidity' has become a fashionable pose. It expresses all the ideologically correct (i.e. mediocratic) attitudes — proletarianisation, anti-intellectualism, pseudo-individualism, aggressification. More of my take on this can be found on page 168 of the Mediocracy book.

I recently wrote to a libertarian that

Celia Green is one of the few libertarian philosophers this country has. Unlike the others I'm aware of, she is not remunerated by her society via a university salary or an income from journalism. That, sadly, seems to be possible only for those prepared to water down their views so they're not too remote from the prevailing illiberal consensus.

He (the person I wrote to) doesn't seem to have liked this. At least I assume he didn't, because I didn't hear from him again. But reading Whyte's column confirms my opinion that the only would-be libertarian views that are permitted a hearing in Britain these days — outside the (so far) costless and unregulated blogosphere — are those which are sufficiently distorted so as to be unthreatening. It's good, I guess, that someone is questioning the "society" idea. But doing so in a half-baked way may do as much harm as good to the cause Whyte appears to be espousing.

* h/t Saltburn Subversives

Bourgeois vs bourgeois

Why is the bourgeoisie so hated? And, more curiously, why is it hated particularly by people who are members of it themselves? It's one of the central riddles of capitalist societies, though not one I have seen anyone grapple with. I tried to give a very tentative answer in the Mediocracy book, but even so had to resort to fable to do it. It really is a flaming mystery.

In today's Independent, Joan Smith gives a good illustration of bourgeois anti-bourgeois ranting. She presents a model of "Middle England" which is at least as insulting and remote from reality as anything that would be labelled as racist were it talking about other races.

If anything is loathed by the property-owning middle classes, who are almost Methodist in their approach to other people's enjoyment, it is recreational drugs and gambling. Another of their pet hates is immigrants who come here and break our laws, so the news that foreign rapists are to be shown the door — the home-grown sort is, of course, a different matter, given the terrible tendency of British women to make things up — is calculated to make them tremble with pleasure. ...

Prepped by the right-wing press, Middle England is quite prepared to believe seven impossible things before breakfast about those dark forces usually referred to as "Brussels" or "Europe".

It's a bit like Ms Toynbee's claim that the press is "right-wing": define your terms perversely enough and whatever prejudice you want to believe can be supported. But the version of "Middle England" portrayed here isn't one I recognise.

Off with her crown

An interesting article yesterday by the Guardian's deputy fashion editor, about the reactions to that photo shoot (alleged) walk-out. This on the same day that the BBC is forced to apologise* to the Queen for misrepresenting the incident in their A Year with the Queen. Yes, this is the organisation whose corporate values appear to be compatible with regarding the Queen as an "unsympathetic character".

Hadley Freeman points out that, in our contemporary culture, the importance of Annie Leibovitz is regarded as trumping that of HM. What Ms Freeman doesn't seem to understand, or is perhaps too coy to say, is that this doesn't simply reflect an opposition between new world celebrity culture and old world deference, or between capitalism and tradition.

In a mediocracy, the idea of intrinsic importance counts for nothing. Values are assessed by reference to only two standards: (1) socially accredited experts, and (2) the majority.

In this case, the position of 'experts' (moral philosophers, political theorists, etc.) is neutral to negative. Royalty is, broadly speaking, considered to be inconsistent with egalitarianism. There is certainly no positive support from that quarter for the idea that royalty should have different rights from ordinary people.

The opinion of the masses is that royals, like all other individuals with claims to prominence, should be answerable to mass opinion. If the mass wants to see the Queen in a particular pose (without her crown; weeping for the death of Diana, etc.) then the mass is to be regarded as having a right to it. It is is really just The X Factor on a bigger scale. In a mediocracy, the crowd always trumps the individual.

* (free) registration to MediaGuardian required

Media, be nice

‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.
Michel Foucault

When you discover news which implies something is awry, should you (a) report it objectively (tick the truth box) or (b) soft-pedal it (tick the social stability box)? The Commission on Integration and Cohesion seems to think the latter, with an assessment of the British mainstream media which strikes me as seriously distorted, if not inverted. Indeed, the phrase "on another planet" springs to mind.

There is no doubt that more work needs to be done to counteract powerful, negative messages coming from the national media agencies. These messages are seen to reinforce misconceptions and aggravate community tensions locally and nationally. There is therefore a need for greater balance, both in reporting and in the composition of the reporting community, who are seen to be drawn disproportionately from advantaged groups.

"Negative messages"? From the television, and the broadsheets? Now if they were referring to messages about males, Tories, the bourgeoisie, or people running a business, I might understand what on earth they were talking about ...

More scapegoats

Dear old mediocratic establishment. It's not enough for il-liberals that they utterly dominate the cultural agenda. No, they need to conceal their dominance by use of the fiction that it's the other side which dominates. The old 'right-wing hegemony' fantasy. And of course, it is onto them (the evil Right) that blame for all our problems must be deflected.

Things have got a little dishevelled? Attitudes a little negative as a result? It's all the fault of the (supposedly) right-wing press, according to Polly Toynbee. Scapegoats include:

- Rupert Murdoch who "can take substantial credit for the tide of vulgarity that now floods the UK" (Toynbee approvingly quoting the FT's Martin Wolf)

- "the corrosive Fox News"

- "the Daily Mail ... the most toxic current cultural force"

- "the internet ... strident, mostly male rightwing cynics, haters and wild conspiracy theorists"

- "the newspaper agenda, slavishly followed by the BBC, [reflecting] a profoundly dystopic image of a society where nothing works, everything gets worse, public officials are inept, public services fail, tax is wasted, lethal dangers proliferate, and everyone conspires to lie about it."

- "an overwhelmingly rightwing bias [which] helps explain why Eurobarometer finds the British the least sympathetic of EU nations towards the poor." [It could just as easily be because Britain has a level of welfare state way beyond what the average European would consider reasonable.]

Tim Worstall comments that "it isn't because the press is right wing that we think the unemployed are workshy shiftless chavs, the press is right wing because we already think that the unemployed are workshy shiftless chavs." But I would question whether the press as a whole is "right wing" at all. It depends on definitions. Does the bulk of the British press come out in favour of leaving markets undistorted, and against Blairist interventionism? Not as far as I can see.

Tory inspiration

Sometimes life can be quite baffling.

Using a lead provided by Shades of Grey, I have pieced together the following interesting timeline. It relates to the Orange incident from last August, which readers may recall. Although I was vaguely aware of the hoo-ha, I was on holiday, and not as in focus on the blogosphere as I am now, so didn’t gather the full details at the time.

I simply present the data and let readers make of it what they will.

March 06 – Simon Heffer, along with a number of other writers, is sent a sample of Mediocracy with an invitation to comment. He doesn’t reply. May 06 – On the recommendations of the book’s distributor and one of the book’s puffers, a colleague at Oxford Forum contacts Heffer at the Telegraph with a view to F.T. writing an article on the subject of the forthcoming book. She manages to speak to Heffer’s PA, who makes fobbing-off noises. early June 06 – Heffer is invited to the launch party for Mediocracy at the Oxford & Cambridge Club in London with Guest of Honour Frederick Forsyth. He doesn't reply. mid-June 06 – Review copies of the book are sent to British broadsheets and highbrow magazines, including the Telegraph and the Spectator. 4 July 06 – Mediocracy is published. The book is in part a “Devil’s Dictionary” of cultural terminology, focusing in particular on leftist-inspired distortion of words and concepts as employed in academia, politics and the arts. 26 July 06 – Heffer writes an article for the Telegraph in which he bemoans the need for someone to “write a book on the language of the Third Way, outlining the abuse of words (and with it the abuse of truth) that this administration has either implemented or condoned.” 2 August 06 – Claiming to be inspired by Heffer’s article, Tory supporter Inigo Wilson posts his “Lefty Lexicon” at ConservativeHome.com. Some of the entries are remarkably similar to those in Mediocracy. 17 August 06 – Inigo Wilson is suspended by his employer Orange. Not for lack of originality, but for the alleged “racism” of his definitions of “Islamophobia” and "Palestinian" (entries for which there are no parallels in Mediocracy).

Incidentally, neither the Telegraph nor the Spectator has reviewed the book, nor (as far as I'm aware) otherwise mentioned it. Ditto ConservativeHome.com, though at one stage last year a review was promised.

Paul Dacre: champion of Middle England?

Paul Dacre had an interesting rant against the BBC in yesterday's Guardian, based on a lecture he gave at the College of Communication. As he says, the BBC is ideologically biased. But then, so is the arts establishment. And British academia. It's not specific to BBC staff, it's general to the cultural elite of this country, for reasons which Dacre doesn't attempt to examine.

Although his article is worth a quick read, there are a couple of supplementary points that could be made.

1) Dacre fails to mention that the Daily Mail has itself contributed to the rot. The Mail is far more mediocratic than it was ten years ago. It's more sympathetic in many of its articles to the pro-statist perspective, and it's definitely more dumbed down.

2) To describe the state of the British newspaper industry as "journalistic pluralism" seems a tad exaggerated. The vast majority of journalists subscribe to the standard belief system of the il-liberal elite: the supposed benevolence of the welfare state; the importance of "social cohesion" (whatever that's supposed to mean); the admirability of contemporary culture; and so forth.

3) Dacre claims the BBC is sympathetic to "minority rights" and "progressiveness in the education and the justice systems". You really shouldn't use those phrases without qualifying them, otherwise you fall straight into the left wing trap: believing the rhetoric that their interventions are really all about "rights" and "progressiveness". The il-liberal consensus is not about genuine rights. And it's not progressive, it's regressive.




4) Dacre predicts that if the BBC continues with its "abuse of trust, then the British people will withdraw their consent and the corporation will fall into discredit." Wishful thinking, Mr Dacre, assuming you even believe that. The British government, the state education system and the NHS have continued with their abuses of trust for many years, but consent has not been withdrawn. Now that a majority of British people are educated in comprehensive "schools", the capacity of the average citizen to question ideology handed down from above has become too weak to generate meaningful dissent among more than a minority.

The online comments on Dacre's article, predictably, are mostly of the "bog off, you right wing hack" variety. However, I found this one interesting.

The politics of envying Peter Wilby

Anyone who thinks that the British left has shed its hatred of capitalism, as a result of the "Blair Revolution", should read former New Statesman editor Peter Wilby's latest article in the Grauniad, entitled "A return to the politics of envy could serve us well". Business as usual among the leftist intelligentsia, it seems. Perhaps they're hoping things will swing back to the old hatreds once Grim Gordon takes the helm.

Wilby suggests that we should not follow Peter Mandelson's advice to be "relaxed about the filthy rich". Envy has now, as Wilby points out, been given a respectable face by academics who claim to have 'proved' that the incidence of crime and other nasties is correlated with the level of inequality. As usual of course, we have to remember (a) that correlations don't prove much, and (b) that most of the academic establishment is leftist and loves to generate spurious justifications for intervention.

But what about legitimising envy of people who have cushy jobs in the media and other parts of the establishment, because their views fit with the leftist cultural hegemony? By people who, though at least as able, are excluded because their views are ideologically incorrect? Now that is a kind of envy I can relate to. And which would be far more original as a topic for debate. And, furthermore, is something that former magazine editors and other journalists could actually do something to remedy. But of course won't, because it's not in their interests.

Whingeing about City remuneration, on the other hand, supposedly on behalf of lower earners supposedly suffering deprivation as a result of the excesses of bonusmania, is just cheap talk. And disingenuous to boot.

Wilby's claim that "the super-rich decide our social priorities" comes straight out of the rightwing-ruling-elite-fantasy handbook. It’s more likely to be Mr Wilby, and fellow members of the il-liberal elite that dominates culture and politics, who decide our priorities.

I think it’s time for a return to the politics of envy by the culturally dispossessed of the culturally dominant. I.e. of the “politically correct”, by the “politically incorrect”. Blogging is all very well, but when are we dissidents going to start manning the conventional media channels?

Postscript

I'd like to add an observation on the once-again fashionable pursuit of jawing endlessly about the rights and wrongs of astronomical City bonuses. Whatever the reasons for them ("efficient market, good", "efficient market, bad", "inefficient market, bad", ...), the fact is that tinkering with them is - as with most other tinkering with markets - likely to make things worse not better.

By all means let's grind our teeth, if so inclined, about the 'unfairness' of someone earning £1 million, or £5 million, for a year's work, when his or her ability and effort aren't necessarily that much higher than someone earning £20,000. And yes, let's bore all our non-economist friends to death by going on about "economic rent". But let's for goodness sake leave it at that.

There is far too much automatic jumping these days from "I and my friends don't like this" to "I and my friends must agitate for a new form of state intervention to stop this happening".

As the Financial Times pointed out a couple of days ago, the last wave of anti-remuneration intervention in the US resulted in a massive bias in favour of stock options, with all the distortions that created.

Memo to all hacks

To all the Lunchtime O'Boulez's and other journos reading this blog who think it's a wheeze to copy stuff from here (and/or Celia Green's site) without giving it a hat tip.

Kindly blog off.

Go and borrow from some other blogger who will feel flattered by the imitation. Or, better still, do your own research.

We know who you are.