Posted 3 days ago
via nu-ce-lar
473 Notes
Posted 1 week ago
via artist-courbet
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Posted 2 weeks ago
12 Notes
Nearly a century ago, in 1925 to be precise, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig wrote an article for a Berlin newspaper titled “Making the World Uniform.” It began:
𝘋𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘷𝘰𝘺𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘨𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘴, 𝘢 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘮𝘺 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥: 𝘢 𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥. 𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳, 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮 𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯.
I know what Zweig meant. In the days when I traveled a great deal, often to supposedly remote places, my ambition was not to reach somewhere no human foot had trodden, but where Coca-Cola or Nescafé was not on sale. This was no easy matter, and I hear from time to time that even the peak of Mount Everest is now littered.
Zweig attributed the extinction of national and cultural differences in Europe to the rapid Americanization of the continent after the First World War: Perhaps Midwesternization, at least as far as aesthetics were concerned, would have been a better term for it. The domination of American fashions, in clothes, music, literature, architecture, was complete, according to Zweig. Europe has become a cultural colony of the United States, and it welcomed its own subjugation, insofar as such colonization brought material comfort and required meager intellectual effort of citizens.
“It is tempting to suppose that there is increasing uniformity in the world. But it depends on which end of the telescope you look down.”
American or not, mass amusements now prevailed over more refined aristocratic or upper-middle-class ones so dear to Zweig. Football (soccer, not the American variety) became the measure of all things. Zweig’s theory was that the American civilization that conduced to material comfort and prosperity was so boring that it provoked, by reaction, sensation-seeking:
It is tempting, then, to suppose that there is increasing uniformity in the world. But as with so many things, it depends on which end of the telescope you look down.
When I see young people en masse, I think that they are all the same: They dress the same, their tastes are the same, their interests are the same, etc. And yet, when I speak to them individually, I find that there is the same irreducible individuality to each person. Human beings by their very nature are privileged, or condemned, to be unique.
We see the end-of-the-telescope phenomenon in Shakespeare. When he depicts the lower orders of society as a collective, he depicts them most unflatteringly; they are stupid, unthinking, brutish, and fickle. But when he depicts them as individuals, he has the utmost sympathy for them…
At the end of his article, Zweig tells all his readers who feel as he does that they cannot defeat modern trends, and therefore the best thing for them to do is to retire into a kind of inner immigration, cultivating their own interests quietly without stridently or uselessly condemning what in fact cannot be changed.
- Theodore Dalrymple
Posted 2 weeks ago
2 Notes
Speaking is also a form of action. That is one venture. The other is: We start something. We weave our strand into a network of relations. What comes of it we never know…And now I would say that this venture is only possible when there is trust in people. A trust—which is difficult to formulate but fundamental—in what is human in all people. Otherwise such a venture could not be made.
- Hannah Arendt, The Last Interview and Other Conversations
Posted 2 months ago
6 Notes
Apparently in Saudi Arabia, the epidemic has had a profound social effect. Many of the migrant workers who supplied the country with its cheap labor have returned to their homelands, and thus created an opportunity, or the necessity, for Saudi women to join the workforce, as they have now done in unprecedented numbers.
A third of Saudi women are now either working or seeking work, an increase of 60 percent in only a year or two, a veritable silent revolution.
It is not surprising in the circumstances that they are paid far less than men—their jobs are mostly in the poorly paid sectors—but they earn far more than the migrant workers whom they have replaced. Whether the migrant workers will return when the epidemic is over is an open question: Will the women simply accept to return to their sequestered lives as before, and will the Saudi government wish to continue to economize on its balance of payments consequent upon the replacement of foreigners by Saudis? As for the effect on the countries that export their cheap labor in return for remittances, what will it be?
On a visit to the Gulf a few years ago, I bought a tanzanite ring for my wife. The server in the shop did not own it; he was a migrant laborer, allowed home two weeks every two years. For the rest of the time, he worked 72 hours a week, and lived and slept in a dormitory. He could not have been from the very poorest section of Indian society because he spoke quite good English. His salary was meager, and what he earned in a month I was prepared to spend in a minute without a moment’s reflection. Nevertheless, he was saving money so that he could marry back home, and in another few years would be able to do so.
In the most obvious sense, he was exploited. His employer took advantage of his poverty to extract a large amount of labor from him for little return. And yet he did not strike me as miserable (of course, he could have been acting) or self-pitying. As he himself said, he had made a choice, he had not been press-ganged, and he had come to the conclusion that he was better off accepting the offered conditions than anything else that was available to him. Would Covid-19 and its economic consequences have forced him home?
I would prefer a world in which a man such as he did not have to make the choice that he had had to make, to sacrifice himself for years in order to achieve what comes so easily to many others. But such as he play their part—a tiny part, but a part nonetheless—in improving the world. I found him heroic. Like all true heroes, he was unaware of his heroism.
- Theodore Dalrymple
Posted 2 months ago
6 Notes
The recently-published report of the UK’s government-appointed commission on racial disparities in Britain provoked precisely that kind of response from those with a vested interest in race relations being as bad as possible. For if despite everything, immigrants or people of immigrant descent, especially those of different races, are prospering and integrating well into society, there is no need of a providential class of academics, journalists, bureaucrats, and others to rescue them from the slough of despond supposedly brought about by prejudice and discrimination. Many a career opportunity would be lost if there were no systemic injustices of this sort to untangle.
The commission (eight of whose members were of racial minorities) found that, in certain respects, the group that was most disadvantaged socially, educationally, and economically in Britain was the white working class—the children or grandchildren of those who once worked as labour, unskilled or semi-skilled, in industries that had become obsolete and had not been replaced by anything else. In fact, most ethnic groups were doing better than they, in some cases far better. Furthermore, the commission found no serious institutional obstacles to social or economic advancement for persons of ethnic minorities in Britain. It provided a large number of statistics to prove it.
It was obvious from its reaction that only one finding would have satisfied the providential class, namely that ethnic minorities in Britain are now so mired in an oppressive neo-apartheid state that only a virtually totalitarian control over society by the providential class, from the imposition of quotas in employment to censorship of what is said even in private, could put things right: right, in this case, being an absolutely equal proportionate representation of all races in social, economic and health outcomes, both desirable and undesirable. Needless to say, such an outcome would require a large and powerful government apparatus to bring it about. That, on the contrary, the news was good was, for the providential class, very bad news.
That prejudice and discrimination exist, the commission did not deny. Indeed, how could it? The chairman, Tony Sewell, aged 62, the son of Jamaican immigrants, remembers the days when racist insult, and worse, was commonplace. I had a patient, a cook in a hospital canteen, who arrived in England in the 1950s thinking it was the motherland, who found that many people would not eat the food she had prepared because she was black. Of course, many other stories could be told, some of them much more recent.
But prejudice and discrimination can decline as well as increase; and, however undesirable they may be, they are not, within quite wide limits, inimical to social and economic advance. Notwithstanding the considerable prejudice against Indian refugees from Idi Amin’s Uganda (they held British passports, and so, reluctantly and with an ill grace, the country accepted its responsibility to them), they rapidly became the most prosperous demographic group in the country, even when they had arrived penniless.
𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐬 𝐚 𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐞, 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐬, 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐨𝐛𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐚 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐮𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬: 𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐢𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐡 𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐩 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐲. 𝐈𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐲 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐝𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐬. 𝐓𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐥𝐬𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐦, 𝐚𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐩𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐬. 𝐓𝐨 𝐬𝐚𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐛𝐞 𝐚 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: 𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐦𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐬𝐞. 𝐈𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐟𝐢𝐱𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭.
Posted 3 months ago
11 Notes
There was a time—I’m talking of the 1990s, so almost of prehistory—when every bad decision that people made was attributed to lack of self-esteem, rather than to such human phenomena as, say, weakness, folly, cowardice, laziness, or even fear or duress, the first four of which were dismissed as being incurably judgmental and therefore useless as scientific explanation.
The problem with self-esteem is that it is entirely egotistical and self-regarding, unlike self-respect, which is a social virtue and imposes discipline and obligations upon the person who has, or wishes to have, it.
By contrast, self-esteem is like a medal that one pins to one’s own chest merely by virtue of existing. I am, therefore I esteem myself, and I demand that you esteem me too.
Curiously enough, at the height of self-esteem’s popularity most people knew, or at least had some inkling, that the whole idea was completely bogus. Sometimes when patients would say to me, “I have low self-esteem, doctor,” I would reply (admittedly not in every last case), “Well, at least you’ve got one thing right, then.”
Far from becoming angry, they started to laugh, as if they had been caught out in a naughty game that they had been playing. It came to them almost as a relief: they didn’t have to pretend to believe an evident absurdity any more, and then they could begin to examine the real causes of the devastation of their lives, some internal and some external
- Theodore Dalrymple