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In any society there are mechanisms to block ideas which deviate too far from the consensus. Yet such ideas are needed, when old models have been exhausted.

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wicked individualism #1 — swimming pools

Via Arts & Letters Daily, I discover a review* of two books on swimming pools.
   The following extract, referring to infinity pools, reminds me of the popular claim that we live in the "age of the selfie", allegedly a time of heightened "individualism" or "solipsism", usually meant pejoratively. The implication is that we used to live in a time of greater communitarian values — a nostalgia myth that has been around since at least the eighteenth century.

We now live in the age of the infinity pool. The bright curves, sugary tints and gay social melee of the 20th century have given way to darker, squarer tubs where the edge of the pool is designed (at least in theory) to vanish into the horizon.

The jolly bourgeois riot of collective public bathing has yielded to an immersive solipsism at once outward and inward: the infinity pool bather often looks away from others to snap a selfie showcasing the view behind them.

Kelly is one of the few humans to appear in Splash, photographed standing at the edge of a Balinese infinity pool, gazing out to sea, her back to the camera. Hers is a voyeuristic album of an invisible elite's sparkling private paradises, utopias whose very form disavows social context.

"Disavowing social context"? Sounds faintly immoral.
   Technology changes, as do the goods and experiences that are available; human nature, not so much. Commentators on individualism like to focus on the areas where people seem to be doing things more by themselves than they used to, and tend to ignore other areas that have become more crowdified.

* James Delbourgo, 'From Here to Infinity', reviewing:
Splash: The Art of the Swimming Pool by Annie Kelly, and
The Swimming Pool in Photography by Francis Hodgson.

“toxic”

Modern Conservatives use language in peculiar ways.
   Apparently, it is "toxic" to draw attention to facts which the educational profession wishes to suppress or misrepresent.
   On the other hand, it is apparently not toxic to suppress or misrepresent facts relating to Britain's possible departure from the EU.
   According to the Sun's Trevor Kavanagh, former Chancellor George Osborne justified Project Fear by arguing that "all's fair in love and war".
   It's remarkable that the Conservative government has had the gall to try and introduce legislation against supposed "disinformation" on the internet, if Conservatives are themselves guilty of attempts to manipulate voters by means of deliberate deception.
   The internet has many negative as well as positive aspects, but it has been practically the only significant source of dissenting ideas over the past twenty years — because of its openness, and because it has not yet come under the control of the il-liberal elite.
   If it wasn't for the internet, Britain would probably already be being run by politicians who uncritically accept the Marxism-inspired ideology served up to them by their college tutors. And we would no doubt have advanced even further along the road of outlawing any critique of the ideology.
   As it is, we have had a small degree of pushback. Given the reaction of media, academia and the courts, one wonders how long even that can last.

social mobility ‘research’

New article available on the website:
social mobility ‘research’ — on another planet

The "social science" establishment has for decades contributed to the suppression of the heritability of intelligence, by churning out papers about mobility and inequality that should have made reference to the phenomenon but did not.
   This suppression amounts to a collusive cover-up, and a scandalous betrayal of academic values. Presumably its perpetrators justify it to themselves with the conceit that they are "doing good".

I have also written some afterthoughts to the article. See previous blog post.

social mobility ‘research’ — afterthoughts

In my article I attempted to take an objective approach to the topic of social mobility. In this blog post I give an opinion about what a reader might usefully do, if he or she wants to help talented children from an impoverished background.
   Here are some things I do not recommend. I would not try to help by supporting a government policy supposedly aimed at improving things for such children, except perhaps if the policy involves removing existing intervention. I believe collective action is likely to make things worse for such individuals.
   For the same reason, I would not try to help by supporting private organisations aimed specifically at helping talented children, though the damaging effects may be less bad than in the case of ‘help’ authorised by the state, and at least such organisations do not depend on the compulsory collection of funds from taxpayers.
   I recommend individual-to-individual action. If you become aware of a talented child in a poor environment, consider giving money to the parents, or even directly to the child, or encourage another individual to do so. This might take the form of a capital payment or an annuity, made as a one-off irrevocable gift, perhaps anonymously. If there are associated ethical issues, no doubt ways of addressing them can be devised.
   If this idea seems strange, I suggest it is because we have become overly used to philanthropy being collectivised, and overly used to the assumption that a problem is remedied if — and only if — there is a government programme ostensibly addressing the issue. There is also a tendency for the problems of individuals to become collectivised conceptually, i.e. to bias thinking in favour of issues that can be defined in terms of social groups. By focusing on groups and statistics, the specific problems of individuals that are not classifiable into neat categories are liable to be dismissed as relatively unimportant.
   Of course, gifting money to an individual always risks that the individual will not spend it on what you intended. This is one of the supposed explanations for why the term redistribution in practice usually means providing recipients with free services (often of dubious value) rather than giving them money.
   However, I believe the possibility of ‘mis-spending’ needs to be regarded as an unavoidable risk of giving aid. The danger with non-financial support is that it ends up consisting of what the provider wishes to provide, rather than what would actually help the recipient. This can turn out to be not only useless but harmful.
   As far as politics goes, I recommend supporting the reduction or removal of capital taxes.
   In a society which insists on compulsory education, the best way for a talented child to improve its chances may be private tutors, or other home schooling. State schools, especially non-selective state schools, should be given a wide berth.
   For children not from ‘privileged’ backgrounds, avoiding state education depends on the possibility of preserving savings across generations, whether these be the savings of members of their own families, or the savings of third parties who may wish to support them.

PS: Politically well-informed readers may note that my suggestion is at odds with current Labour Party ideology, which seems to disapprove of exceptional individuals rising into a higher class:

Not one person doing better than the people they grew up with, but all of us working together to give everyone the chance to reach their full potential. [...] We won’t stand for a society in which only a lucky few succeed while inequality and poverty hold back millions. [Labour Party Press Release 7 June 2019]

Stripping off the veneer, this looks like an inversion: opposition to mobility, on the grounds that it means someone getting something that not everyone will get.

the new hanging & flogging brigade

The il-liberal elite sure do make a lot of noise, when the ideology on which their position depends is threatened to even a small degree.
   The hissing. The shrieking. The fainting fits.
   The law in Britain — as in other jurisdictions — has been creeping for some time in the direction of trying to look at intention, rather than sticking to the letter of the law. (See for example trends in anti-avoidance legislation, under former Chancellor Philip Hammond and predecessors.)
   Not a healthy development, in my opinion, and certainly not one to be welcomed by fans of the rule of law.

coming soon

 
New article in progress.

For intended publication in September.

Put not your trust in princes — or committees

Charles McCreery points out that princes, like committees, can be capricious, and that relying on them as sources of support can be hazardous, as Richard Wagner discovered.

One disadvantage of being financed by someone else’s money and not your own is that the patron may always decide to cut off his patronage. At one stage King Ludwig became impatient with the length of time Wagner was taking to complete The Ring and decided to stage the first, completed half in his own theatre in Munich. Wagner resisted this premature staging of his truncated work in every way he could, but the king had the last word. ‘These theatre people must learn to obey my orders, not Wagner’s whims,’ he said. ‘Pereat the whole lot of them.’ What is more to the point, he threatened to withhold Wagner’s allowance if he persisted in his opposition. Wagner, who had certainly not been saving out of his royal income, could only retire in dudgeon to his house in Zurich.

Needless to say, a committee is just as likely to change its mind about supporting someone as is an individual. In fact, to the extent that it is more susceptible to outside pressure (being accountable to some collective entity for its funds), it may be expected to be even more unreliable.

By contrast, Coleridge and Wordsworth both benefited from more enlightened patronage.

However, there is one form of patronage that is not open to the objection that it may be cut off at any time, and that is where the beneficiary is given capital rather than income. In 1798 two members of the Wedgwood family decided to give Coleridge an annuity of £150 a year so that he would not have to enter the Unitarian Ministry to obtain an income and could continue working at literature. The Wedgwoods had ideas about improving the human condition and decided that Coleridge was the man to help them do it, apparently because of his powers as a thinker rather than as a poet.

Wordsworth benefited from a similarly antisocial act of generosity, albeit on a rather more modest scale. When he was twenty-three he formed a friendship with a young man of private means called Raisley Calvert. Calvert suffered from consumption, and aware that he was gravely ill, determined to make a will bequeathing a legacy to Wordsworth sufficient to enable him to live without a profession. As Wordsworth put it, the purpose of the bequest was:

‘to secure me from want, if not to render me independent [and] to enable me to pursue my literary views or any other views with greater success [...]. I had had but little connection [with Calvert], and the act was done entirely from a confidence on his part that I had powers and attainments which might be of use to mankind.’

From The Abolition of Genius, available from Amazon.