The New Faith, Hope and Charity
by Theodore Dalrymple (May 2010)
Confucius said in the Analects that the first thing he would do on coming into power was to ensure that things were called by their proper names: for if they are not, what confusion follows!
But confusion does not arise from poor nomenclature only. Correct naming is a necessary but not sufficient condition of clear thought. Unexamined premises and false assumptions are a fruitful source of bad thought and worse conclusions.
There is no better time to study bad argumentation than during an election in a western democracy. No falsehood is too false to be suggested, no truth too evident to be suppressed, no non sequitur too illogical to be enunciated, by a candidate during one of these contests. They cut words adrift from their meaning, leaving only a connotation behind, like the grin of the Cheshire cat. A fastidious man, with no experience of living under any other political system, is likely to react with disgust.
The current election in Britain is a fine example of the genre. It is particularly distressing to me because the shortcomings of no country affect one as deeply as those of one’s own. And the candidates in this election seem perfectly to exemplify the weakness of contemporary British culture: frivolity without gaiety and earnestness without seriousness.
Against my principles and practice of thirty years, I allowed myself to be persuaded by friends to watch a so-called debate between the three principal candidates in the election. Of course, a three-way debate is an inherently unsatisfactory thing, like a dog with five legs, or a war on two fronts; but I had no confidence that a debate between any two of them would have been better or more illuminating.
In the event, the ‘debate’ was more like a trialogue of the deaf; when one of them made an outrageous statement, as he often did, the others said nothing by way of refutation. For example, asked about the advantages (or otherwise) to Britain of its membership of the European Union, one said that the European Working Time Directive – a regulation limiting the amount of time a paid employee can be asked to work in a week – had given us paid annual vacations, while another indulged in an almost lyrical description of how European co-operation had permitted the dismantling of an international ring of paedophiles.
The third of the candidates said nothing to contradict these outrageous and totally irrelevant statements. One would have supposed that, until the European Union came into being, no one had ever hit upon the idea of annual paid holidays; or that no international police co-operation had ever happened before the establishment of the European Union. Moreover, if the best thing that could be said about the giant (and vastly expensive) European bureaucratic apparatus is that it once, in over thirty years of British membership, had facilitated the dismantlement of a paedophile ring, at the cost of untold billions of dollars, it was not very much. I am, of course, as much against paedophilia as the next man; but there is a limit to the number of tax Euros that even I am willing to devote to the dismantlement of one paedophile ring every third of a century.
This was all demagoguery of the purest strain, of course. When one of the candidates (the current incumbent of the top post) said that an enormous proportion of our trade was with the European Union, no one asked him asked him what proportion of it would cease if Britain were not part of the Union. After all, trade is conducted on the basis of mutual advantage, mainly – though perhaps not entirely - economic; and in a world in which tariff barriers are of less and less significance, what special or specific advantage is to be derived from the membership of an association whose main activities are bureaucratic, regulatory and prohibitionist? Perhaps there is such an advantage, but no one asked the incumbent to specify exactly what it is.
As for the paedophile ring assertion, it was beneath contempt. UNICEF recently found that Britain was among the very worst countries in the western world in which to be a child; and while I would not normally give much credence to the findings of this particular Organization, in this instance it was so obviously and self-evidently correct that I am happy to cite its report as evidence. The danger to British children comes not from paedophile rings, but from British parents; indeed, many British parents so hate or neglect their children (except when they are babies) that it is a wonder that they bother to have them in the first place. More than half of the children are illegitimate, and illegitimate children are much more likely to be the victims of paedophilia than legitimate ones, a fact well-known by now to all British parents, who nevertheless continue to indulge themselves; many more British children have a television in their bedrooms (to shut them up) than a father living at home; a few years ago, 36 per cent of them never ate at a table with another member of their family, a proportion that has almost certainly risen. In the circumstances, then, to cite the dismantlement of a paedophile ring was to appeal in the most blatantly demagogic way to the anti-paedophile hysteria in Britain, an hysteria that is itself the product of a justifiably guilty conscience about the way many children are brought up.
Of course, I can quite see that accusing one’s electorate of gross irresponsibility (or worse) in its child-rearing practices might not be the best way to win an election; but in that case, at the very least, the subject of paedophilia should have been avoided by the candidate, especially as it was he who brought it up.
Towards the end of the ‘debate,’ if that is what it was, a woman in the audience aged 84, well-preserved and well turned-out, asked the three leaders whether they thought that the $80 state pension that she claimed to live on was enough, especially as she had brought up four children and worked hard all her life.
All of the candidates agreed that it was a terrible thing that she should live on $80 a week; none had the courage to face her down and tell her that what she had said was obviously a misrepresentation of reality, if not an outright lie. After all, if you gave an 84 year-old woman $80 to live on, without any other source of income or subvention, she would not (at least in British circumstances) live very long, let alone look well-preserved and well turned-out. Clearly she had some other source of income, whether it was from private sources or from public subventions. To give one small illustration: when I am in England, I live in a small house whose local tax bill is $50 a week; surely she did not pay $50 from her $80 a week in local taxes, leaving her but $30 to live on?
Now if our three leading politicians had not the moral courage to confront one old lady who was misrepresenting the reality of her situation, deliberately or accidentally as the case might be, what likelihood was there that they would be honest about the very serious problems that confront the whole country?
Again, one could quite see that the incumbent might not be very keen to be honest about these problems, since he was so largely responsible for bringing them about in the first place. He permitted cheap credit, thus encouraging the asset inflation that reassured the middle class that it was effortlessly growing rich, while simultaneously and enormously expanding public expenditure and the public payroll. Duped by the appearance of ever-increasing asset values, millions borrowed against these rising values in order to fund current sumptuary expenditure, imagining themselves, therefore, to be living well. When the music stopped, the debt, both public and private, remained, but the value of everything else had melted away. In essence, things were not very different on the other side of the Atlantic, though the public money was used, or wasted, somewhat differently.
You might have thought, then, that nothing would have been easier than to criticise the incumbent on his economic record. On the contrary, there was no such criticism during the debate, I think for two reasons: first, reflection on the facts might suggest a necessity for a retrenchment, a downward adjustment of the general standard of living, which is not what any electorate likes to hear, even – or especially – if it is the truth. Second, it suggests that, while the government and the banks have been irresponsible, so has the general population. Much of the latter has behaved like children who cannot resist chocolates, gorging on them until they feel (and are) sick. Perhaps it is not surprising if politicians seeking votes are reticent about the folly of the voters; and it would certainly take courage to confront the population with the truth. Courage is precisely what modern politicians lack; and they would far rather be in power than be right. Truth is the first casualty of an election.
It is impossible to avoid election propaganda, however hard one tries to do so. Recently a propaganda sheet for the Liberal Democrats, who have emerged as the third force in British politics, was pushed through my letter box. This was unintentionally revealing, for it demonstrated (unconsciously) how far people now exist for the state rather than the other way round.
It showed the local candidate with the party’s candidate finance minister holding a huge simulacrum cheque, written out to ‘The Taxpayer’ for the sum of $15,000 – the amount of income that the Liberal Democrats suggest each person should be allowed before his income is taxed. This is a considerable increase on the amount now allowed.
All to the good, no doubt: but there is something rather disturbing, and indeed sinister, about this way of putting things. It suggests that it is the government that allows or grants the people money, not the people who allow or grant the government money. To refrain from taxing is not giving money away, it is to avoid appropriating money from its original owners. If a mugger in the street were to return us a couple of dollars from what he has taken from us for our bus-fare home, we would not consider that he has been generous or ‘given’ us anything, even if he makes a whole ceremony of the return of the two dollars.
The fact that the matter can be presented in the way that the Liberal Democrats presented it in their election propaganda, almost certainly without any public criticism let alone protest, reveals how far we have become, and expect to be, creatures of the government. We have come to accept that the first call on our money is taxation, and that any that is left to us is by grace and favour; being allowed to keep what is ours has become, in effect, a donation to us by our political masters. On the rare occasions when a tax is reduced in Britain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the Finance Minister) is said to have ‘given money away.’
In return for this appropriation of our funds by politicians, they offer us all kinds of benefits, and it would be dishonest not to acknowledge that we do indeed receive some or many of them, and that, once we have received them, we are reluctant to relinquish them, however unsustainable in the long term they might be. I am not one of those that believes that Man naturally desires freedom, at least if by a desire for freedom is meant a desire that automatically trumps all other desires and is prepared to take the consequences. What our politicians have learnt to hold out as the prospect before us, like a mirage in the desert, is the greatest, most sought-after and least possible freedom of all, the freedom from bad consequences.
The idea of infinite benevolence has been transferred from the deity to the government, nowhere more successfully than in the minds of the governors themselves. Illusion, Benevolence and Power are our new Faith, Hope and Charity.
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