By Theodore Dalrymple
These days, people of supposedly high caliber, or at least of high position, have difficulty in distinguishing vehemence of expression from depth of feeling, or even of thought. I may on occasion have made that mistake myself, since none of us is perfect, but it is my impression that what was once an occasional lapse has become almost a default setting of the mind—of others, of course.
Here I quote verbatim two tweets of someone in response to Mr. Trump’s recent victory in the election:
I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.
Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted school classmates are celebrating early results because fuck them to the moon and back.
Perhaps literary criticism of these outbursts is redundant, but one cannot help but wonder what the difference is between a fascist and a fucking fascist. This is similar to the question I used to pose to my patients who, when I worked as a doctor in a prison, complained of a fucking headache.
“Before we go any further,” I would say, “can you explain to me the difference between a headache and a fucking headache?”
(In case there are pedants who read this magazine, I hasten to acknowledge that there is such a condition as coital headache, that is to say a headache that occurs during sexual activity, especially as excitement mounts, but this was not, I think, what the prisoners meant.)
“That’s the way I talk,” the prisoners would say.
“Yes,” I would reply, “that is what I am complaining of.”
As a verbal intensifier, fucking is so overused that it means practically nothing except in the mouths of middle-class intellectuals, to signify that they who employ it are of the people, the people being, implicitly, those of the lowest cultural level and therefore of the highest level of authenticity.
The semi-literacy of the second tweet is startling because it was written not by some uneducated drunk in a bar after a heavy night of inconsequential verbalizing, but by the editor in chief of the Scientific American, which justifiably prides itself on being the oldest continuously published journal in America and is—or was once—of a very high standard. The editor has a doctorate in neuroscience, and is presumably capable of expressing herself more circumspectly, as well as more accurately. “Fuck them to the moon and back” is what Polonius called “an ill phrase, a vile phrase,” not only aesthetically but in sentiment.
Do people actually think in such terms, in the solitude of their own minds? If the answer is in the affirmative, I feel sorry for them: They must live perpetually in a kind of mental sewer. But if the answer (as seems to me more likely in this case) is in the negative, one may wonder by what process of reasoning, or at least of mentation, the writer of these lines saw fit to send them out into the world—where, incidentally, they have been read by at least 1,200,000 people, more than 2 percent of whom went to the not-very-great trouble of expressing their approval of them.
The fact that the author of the lines was a woman might be significant (I don’t claim it as more than a possibility). Perhaps she wanted to free herself of the convention that women are expected to be more genteel than men, a convention that some feminists, no doubt, believe was intended to keep women subordinate to men, verbal coarseness being the royal road to power (and power being the ultimate, or perhaps only, good in life). Thus, the ability to sound like a construction worker swearing at a broken tool was a proof of final liberation from the shackles of gentility.
But such supposedly virtuous vulgarity is not confined to feminist intellectuals trying to prove that they are really no different in their tastes or way of being from hard-hatted construction workers. People who are trying to escape the terrible shame of belonging to a social class that is not the lowest possible adopt the same tactics. There are a thousand possible examples of the phenomenon, but here, as one, is what the actor Hugh Grant wrote in public about Boris Johnson’s Brexit policy:
You will not fuck with my children’s future…. Fuck off you over-promoted bath toy.
There were, of course, arguments both for and against Brexit, but calling Johnson an over-promoted bath toy did not add much to the debate. Vulgar insult, however, is increasingly regarded by such as Grant as the highest, or at least the most effective, form of argument. Napoleon once said that the only effective rhetorical tactic was repetition. We now know that he was mistaken: Crude insult is the most effective, or believed to be so by such as Grant.
As it happens, Johnson himself employed a man as his special adviser, Dominic Cummings, who dressed like a thug and used language that a fishwife would have blushed to use. By doing this, he imagined that he was distinguishing himself (in intellectually superior fashion) from the effete and ineffectual elite who nevertheless maintained some of the traditional proprieties.
But all that in theory is anti-elitist is not therefore egalitarian. Those of the elite who resort to the adoption of what they consider to be lower-class manners (though in England at least much of the working class was once extremely careful about its language, for example by never swearing in front of children) do not abjure their economic privileges; they have no wish to imitate the lower class in the matter of income, or live in lower-class houses, for example.
Perhaps they believe that by public coarseness other people will fail to notice that they are, in fact, part of a rarefied elite, and therefore will feel no dangerous envy toward them. They feel that they ought, for reasons of political philosophy, to be egalitarian, but they don’t really want to be equal, either. The result is that they resort to the highest form of flattery, imitation, at least in those things that will not endanger their elite position.
And thus civilization crumbles.
First published in Taki’s Magazine
- Like
- Digg
- Del
- Tumblr
- VKontakte
- Buffer
- Love This
- Odnoklassniki
- Meneame
- Blogger
- Amazon
- Yahoo Mail
- Gmail
- AOL
- Newsvine
- HackerNews
- Evernote
- MySpace
- Mail.ru
- Viadeo
- Line
- Comments
- Yummly
- SMS
- Viber
- Telegram
- Subscribe
- Skype
- Facebook Messenger
- Kakao
- LiveJournal
- Yammer
- Edgar
- Fintel
- Mix
- Instapaper
- Copy Link
5 Responses
The author has a special gift at meandering so deftly around an often too obvious point (so as to perhaps create more publishable content) as to too often miss the very point he is so admittedly and artfully and carefully avoiding.
This article is an excellent case in point.
Regarding the inappropriate and vulgar and unprofessional language used by the now former editor of the once respected Scientific American magazine the author wonders, “do people actually think in such terms, in the solitude of their own minds? If the answer is in the affirmative, I feel sorry for them: They must live perpetually in a kind of mental sewer.”
Using vulgarities and ad hominems against their opponents is standard fare for deathocrats in the United States. Using swears and insults against conservatives, Trump supporters, and people who are not so enthusiastic in wanting to murder their children as they are is a fundamental form of virtual signal in their upside down world. That is, people who use vulgarities like those used by the former editor are considered laudable and worthy by fellow deathocrats. Only when normal people see such communications are they rightfully condemned and the groveling apologies to avoid job loss begin.
Sometimes it’s helpful to restate a question to reach a conclusion. The author states that if deathocrats think in the same vulgar ways that they write and speak in public then they “must live perpetually in a kind of mental sewer.” This is the sort of turn of phrase and use of language for which this author is correctly famous and admired by many.
Do deathocrats live in a kind of mental sewer? Yes.
The Vulgarians spew their grumpy goo by maintaining a loose lower lip on their egomanic malsapian views.
Respect them for honestly exposing their distasteful views.
Well, I’m a Gen Xer so I don’t mind an increased amount of casual swearing compared to my dad’s time or earlier, nor require that it be used only by the lower classes. It’s just sounds, and the f word has lost much of its weight just as words like hell and damn did, when shorn of their explicit meaning and religious context. Perhaps some word not currently profane will assume the role, or new profanities at last be invented. Or even forgotten ones be revived. There is and always has been a place.
I heard my grandfather, a tough man and shipyard worker when young but also a Christian, swear [I think it was damn] only once, on seeing the flooded ruin of our basement floor due to the incompetence of previous owners. My dad never swore in my hearing until I was 21, then I realized he swore occasionally, more than his father. I also never swore in front of my parents collectively, not even dad alone until also 21.
So I can see both the generational trend toward looseness in this area and, knowing well my grandfather belonged to one of many camps in his generation, that profanity has always existed. Again, there’s a place.
That place is not august journals of record, or even your average newspaper or magazine, nor is it anything intended for serious argument or publication.
I do not however mind it as a vehicle for passionate and/or humorous expression in private or mock-private settings. Social media is a mock-private setting. And the f word does, even now, have the effect of emphasizing passion and/or making something funny, depending on the audience. Sometimes both. As someone of the opposite persuasion to the editor of Sci Am who welcomes her overdue departure in the hopes of a revival of the battered magazine, I found her rants both effectively emphatic and funny. If I agreed with her I’d find them just emphatic.
Sometimes its use is both intended to be funny and has that effect.
There’s also its use for effect in film where either depicting realistically how much swearing would take place, or comedically exaggerating. Unlike some, I expect there are many men under fire who do not swear even now, whether from professionalism or Christian upbringing or other reasons, regardless of the stress. But I categorically refuse to believe there was ever a time when none did. Today’s error is in assuming that our own time’s bias for promiscuous swearing was always true. I would not wish to make the opposite error. Even if the swear words were different.
And there’s always the pure humour angle- the classic early films of Eddie Murphy could not work if swearing were the only funny thing about them, but his judiciously exaggerated deployment of it made the movies far, far funnier.
I’m more interested in the Sci Am editor [former] and her high school bullying model of life and society. A common one, in recent years.
I am an Xer, my teen years were the 80s. It was a time when an earlier version of bringing outsiders into the inside was popular. There is some crossover with today- race and sexual orientation were part of it- but also some features now excluded- rural and working class white people and other white and male groups. Examples- The Secret of My Success featured Michael J Fox as a college educated rural white male with smarts who cleverly tricks his way to the top of the corporate totem pole, but who brings along the cause of women, working class, and other traditional outsiders. Trading Places features a black homeless man, but his confederates include a recently defrocked young corporate up and comer, a woman prostitute with conservative approaches to money and life, and a white male butler. Revenge of the Nerds is not really about nerds as just smart guys with niche hobbies and tech skills, because they’re also aggressive, sarcastic, autistic incels avant la lettre, but in their war against the frats and sororities they bring along other outsiders like the fat girl sorority, one gay guy, and others. All of these and similar movies should be remembered as foreshadowers of modern inclusivity radicalism, but as more genuinely inclusive by including groups now ignored. Probably now seen as purely reactionary by having white males portrayed as outsiders at all and as the heroes.
In practice, though, high school then probably seemed fairly normal to older people. Maybe some changes. I was just as happy that in Canada we weren’t taking showers together after gym. I always thought that weird and gross of Americans, but I guess they were training boys for the army.
At any rate, I would love to know what people’s bullying experiences were in my day and place. I was a moderate nerd- I did well in class, spoke in class, got along with my teachers, showed interest and effort, was interested in niche subjects like history, though was not particularly gifted or interested in math or computers. I was not into any sports, could not discuss them let alone participate. I was not good with girls. I was not fit. And yet no one ever bothered me. I was also not in any of the traditional nerdly clubs like chess, so perhaps there’s that.
I was in no clique of any faction, sought no trouble, and received none. I just went to school. I always wonder if I just went to the only bullying free school, if bullying was really less of a thing in the 80s [hard to believe], if it is genuinely worse now [after decades of agitation against it and inclusive rhetoric – heaven forbid!], or what. Or is there something more about the kids who were and are bullied than was true of me? And if so, what was/is that X factor?