Month: June 2024

I have it on unimpeachable authority. Apparently, watching a spectacular goal can make fans doubt their identity, sexual and possibly any other.

The moment the ball hits the net, they start asking themselves probing questions, such as “Who am I?”, “What am I?” and, most worrying, “Am I a man or a woman?”

This last one comes as a particular surprise. It’s true that female football fans often acquire male traits. They consume gallons of lager before the match, swear in a steady torrent throughout it and then join their men in brawling with the other team’s fans or anyone else who happens to be passing by.

But transition in the other direction isn’t something I’ve ever observed. The men don’t suddenly develop an all-consuming interest in interior decoration, flowers and fluffy kittens. In fact, they do all the things their women do, but more so.

Still, when a major conservative paper breaks a story, it has to be taken seriously. But judge for yourself – here’s a title in yesterday’s Mail:   

“Premier League footballer scores solo goal during Beta Squad charity match with viewers left divided over their identity”

You may dispute my inference from the title, but I don’t see how else that statement could be interpreted. It’s only after I read the lead paragraph that I became aware of another possibility. The footballer in question was wearing a mask, which is why the viewers weren’t sure who he was.

My confusion was caused by yet another example of linguistic vandalism, which is to me perhaps the most emetic aspect of modernity. (All my readers are educated people but, if by chance some aren’t, ‘emetic’ means ‘puke-making’.) The other day I cited quite a few examples of such ideological vandalism without delving too deep into its causes.

I did mention the destruction of Britain’s secondary education perpetrated by Leftist barbarians with the silent acquiescence of the other side. However, this cause-effect business calls for more scrutiny. For the urge to bowdlerise the greatest European language (well, Indo-European for the pedants among you) is a child of many fathers.

Some of the parents are of the purely ideological persuasion. The title above illustrates the purge of the masculine personal pronoun from the English language on the assumption that women and members of the other 70-odd sexes would be mortally offended by that objectionable word.

The obvious point to make here is that no one in his right mind would really be offended if a Premier League player’s sex were revealed by his DNA-given pronoun. After all, every one of the League’s 601 players is male.

However, activist haters of our civilisation feel duty-bound to feign offence, and they have the clout to demand that the silent and indifferent majority follow suit. The two groups have different characteristics, but there are a couple they do share.

First, they are both fundamentally dishonest in their insistence on the primacy of ideology over facts. Second, they have no taste.

The second is worse than the first, because ideologies come and go, but bad taste does its destructive work in perpetuity. I’d suggest that, however fervent his commitment to the underlying ideology, no one endowed with a modicum of taste could ever write the cited title. His heart might demand it, his mind might second the motion, but his fingers would simply refuse to type that line.

Aesthetic considerations matter more than political ones because it’s aesthetics and not politics that defines civilisations. They continue to be remembered for their writers, philosophers, architects, artists and musicians long after their politicians are forgotten.

People who love Plato may not even know the names of, say, Meletus or Anytus who prosecuted Socrates. Bach’s music defines his epoch, and few people remember the margraves and Electors who were his patrons. The Renaissance was an artistic movement that gave its name to every aspect of an era.

Our civilisation was at its peak when the hierarchies of wealth, political power and taste were one and the same. They have since gone their separate ways, but the last vestiges of aristocratic culture continue to be an ever-present burr under the modern blanket.

One such is the hierarchy of taste, which rankles even more than the hierarchies of wealth and social status. Hence the ideological insistence on aesthetic equality. You like Schubert, they like pop, I like rap – who’s to say your taste is superior? Different, yes; better, no.

Are you arguing that complex harmonies occupy a higher musical, and therefore civilisational, plane than moronically primitive and repetitive rhythms? Well then, you’re either a toff or someone who pretends to be one. Either way you are a throwback whose place is in the museum or, better still, in the morgue.

This explains why grammatically inept, phonetically demotic and lexically ignorant English stops being a social anchor, becoming instead a social hoist. Ignorant is the new educated, ugly is the new beautiful, and bad English is a good way of pinning the toffs’ ears back.

Whenever one points out yet another awful solecism or a grammatical faux pas, modern barbarians invariably object that language is just a means of communication. That’s an ignorant statement on its own terms: if language were nothing but a means of communication, we wouldn’t have Dante or Shakespeare.

But bad English means bad communication, defeating even the stated purpose for it. For a communication to succeed, both the speaker and the listener must have the same understanding of what words mean. Hence, when Kevin says that a performance was ‘masterful’, I shouldn’t be left wondering whether he does mean ‘masterful’, i.e. forceful, or ‘masterly’, i.e. accomplished.

That’s an example of lexical ignorance creating a break in communications. The Mail title mentioned above is worse: it produces the same effect by ideological grammatical vandalism.

Underpinning all such problems is the universal egalitarianism that modernity prescribes and enforces with everything in its power. That’s why it’s wrong to say that our education system has failed. It hasn’t. If we define success as achieving the desired aim, then British schools represent an unequivocal triumph.

They truncate the cultural pyramid by lopping off the upper half and compressing what’s left into an illiterate and thus malleable mass. Job done, or rather jobs: cultural, aesthetic, social and political.

Just to be on the safe side, however, I should stop watching footie if I want to cling on to what’s left of my flagging masculinity. One never knows: that Mail title could have meant what it said.

Congratulations to Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen, Leonardo, Descartes and Goethe. They, along with a few other overachievers, have earned the posthumous honour of being mentioned in the same breath as Idris Elba.

You see, according to The Times, Mr Elba is a polymath, which is another one of those annoying words that buzz. Everyone is a polymath these days, or alternatively a Renaissance man. If you have a hobby or two, you are a polymath.

A polymath is a CPA who can play Chopsticks and make scrambled eggs. Or a tennis player who tattoos a Dostoyevsky saying on his forearm (I didn’t make this up). Or anyone who can do better than Gerald Ford, who, according to Lyndon Johnson, couldn’t “walk and fart at the same time”. (Prudish commentators distort LBJ’s putdown by replacing the second activity with an anodyne “… and chew gum…”. That’s like cooking chilli con carne with no chillies in it.)

And as to Mr Elba – well, those polymaths of the past I’ve mentioned must be turning green wherever they are. They couldn’t even dream of diversifying into so many areas.

To quote our formerly respectable newspaper: “Idris Elba – actor, rapper, DJ, music producer, podcast host and champagne maker – admits that he annoys people by adding so many side lines to his CV. Elba, 51, made his name in television shows such as The Wire and Luther but has since become one of Hollywood’s best-known polymaths, trying his hand at professional kickboxing and launching a skincare brand with his wife, the model Sabrina Dhowre.”

Well, I never. It’s amazing how many great talents can find a home in one man’s breast. Envy isn’t one of the cardinal sins I commit often, but I can see how many people may envy such earth-shattering versatility.

Mr Elba can see it too: “I think I do irritate some people, who think ‘fucking hell, Idris Elba is doing something else today’.” Leonardo could have said the same thing about himself, in Italian.

You can probably detect a touch of sarcasm, and fair enough: it’s there. But it’s not aimed at Mr Elba and his multiple interests. I’m sure he’s an impressive chap, and his wife looks stunning. My problem is with words that buzz in unison with modernity by taking on jobs other than their own. They end up meaning so much that they mean nothing, leaving English so much the poorer.

The dictionary defines polymath as “a person of wide knowledge or learning”. With all due respect, an “actor, rapper, DJ, music producer, podcast host and champagne maker” doesn’t quite qualify, even if he does add a bit of kickboxing on the side.

Deepening my search, I dipped into Wikipedia to find out that a polymath “is an individual whose knowledge spans many different subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.”

Call me an inveterate snob with a bias against, well, actors, but that’s not quite Mr Elba either. I don’t think any of his numerous activities involve delving into “complex bodies of knowledge”. Champagne making may be a possible if trivial exception, but even there I’m sure Mr Elba hired professional vintners to handle things like riddling or primary and secondary fermentation.

I sometimes make fun of the solecisms streaming out of the mouths of sports commentators on TV. ‘Lacksadaisical’ is one of my favourites, and I’ve heard it used by too many pundits to count. But most of such pundits are former footballers, whose chosen academic subjects were Sliding Tackle and Reverse Pass. Someone who ever saw Glenn Hoddle play can forgive his mangling of the English language, concentrating instead on his ball-kicking insights.

Yet even professional TV journalists don’t know how to use the word ‘amount’. They all talk about the amount of injuries a player has suffered or the amount of goals he has scored. The word is ‘number’, chaps. It stands for countable things, whereas ‘amount’ refers to uncountable ones.

Thus, a staggering number of hacks display a regrettable amount of ignorance. As that polymath John von Neuman would have said, it’s not rocket science.

It’s not just lexicography but also grammar and phonetics that fall victim to our comprehensively risible education. Thus no one ever sits or stands in our TV studios; everyone is sat or stood. How much contempt for our beautiful language does it take to utter such ugliness? A huge amount (not number).

The French Open is now on, and the two principal courts at Roland Garros now have roofs over them. All tennis commentators mention this fact, invariably pronouncing that word as ‘rooves’.

Even Tim ‘Salt of the Earth’ Henman, who grew up with a tennis court in his garden and went to a private school (not ‘public’, as one of my pedantic readers would point out), thinks that, if we say ‘hooves’, ‘halves’ and ‘wives’, we should also say ‘rooves’. He must have been sat in the back row when English was taught, thinking any amount of thoughts about sliced backhands.

(This isn’t as bad a solecism as some of the others I mention, because ‘rooves’ was widely used in the 18th century. Yet even then it wasn’t standard, and 300 years later it’s simply wrong.)

Every time one turns on the TV, reads the paper, or simply listens to people talking on the bus, one witnesses frontal assaults on English. People say (or write!) ‘disinterested’ instead of ‘uninterested’, ‘masterful’ instead of ‘masterly’, ‘simplistic’ instead of simple’, ‘fulsome’ instead of ‘wholehearted’, ‘innocuous’ instead of ‘innocent’, ‘naturalistic’ instead of ‘natural’, ‘risqué’ instead of ‘risky’.

And my particular bugbear is ‘willy-nilly’, which even relatively educated people seem to think means ‘at will’. It doesn’t. The expression comes from the Latin volens nolens, and it means ‘whether you want it or not’, ‘under duress’. You can’t just use language willy-nilly.

As they commit those lex crimes, the English language shrinks before our very eyes or, worse still, sinks into the fetid gutter of ideological ignorance. People talk and write that way because they’ve been taught that such trifles don’t matter. They are the reins the toffs use to control the masses. Ideological ignorance is thus the artillery of class struggle.

If you want to trace this abomination to its source, just look up an old issue of The Times or any other reputable newspaper, or listen to a BBC broadcast of 60 years ago. You won’t find anything other than impeccable English there, with things like proper grammar simply not an issue.

Journalists, print or broadcast, were in those days judged on the precision and elegance of their style. It was taken for granted that they used vocabulary and grammar correctly. And then the powers that be felt the urge to reform our supposedly class-conscious education, shoving its face into Anthony Crosland’s excretions.

That started a process at the end of which nothing is right or wrong, everything is allowed, and Idris Elba is a polymath. God bless his cotton socks.

When I first arrived in the West, the US to be exact, the salient features of the intellectual landscape (at least the part of it that attracted me) were debates between William F. Buckley and John Kenneth Galbraith.

Buckley was the editor of National Review, then an intelligent, cultured and urbane conservative publication. WFB himself was a prodigious writer of articles, books and even thrillers, and the charming and witty host of Firing Line, a PBS chat show, the best I’ve ever seen anywhere.

His magazine and he personally had a formative effect on the re-emergence of American conservatism as a political force. Buckley was instrumental in the rise of his friend and, some will say, disciple Ronald Reagan. Both men joked about that relationship: when he was elected president, Reagan asked Buckley what job he’d like to have in his administration. “Ventriloquist,” quipped WFB, and Reagan guffawed in his contagious manner.

Buckley himself described his views as conservative with a libertarian tilt. The second adjective reflected his unwavering commitment to laissez-faire economics, something that appealed to me somewhat more unequivocally in those days than it does now.

It didn’t appeal to the neo-Keynesian economist Galbraith at all. In common with many leftish economists, he was more keenly interested in income distribution than in income creation. He favoured wide, though not wholesale, nationalisation, which made Buckley suggest that “Perhaps we should start by nationalising Professor Galbraith”.

Thomas Sowell called Galbraith a “teflon prophet”, meaning that his reputation remained undamaged even though his economic predictions were thoroughly debunked empirically.

One spectacular example of Galbraith’s letting his convictions triumph over the facts was his insistence that in the current economic climate it was impossible for an ambitious entrepreneur to create a powerful company. Excuse me, objected Sowell. Jobs? Gates? Musk? Would the good professor care to revise his statement? Galbraith wouldn’t. He never did.

Anyway, my intention today is neither to demonise Galbraith nor to sanctify Buckley: the former was no more diabolical than the latter was saintly. Still, in those early days, I watched their verbal jousts, soaking up every word, especially Buckley’s.

But then I found out something about those two men that seemed inconceivable to me. For all the divergence of their politics, they were close personal friends. They spent their holidays skiing together at Gstaad, where both owned chalets. They often had dinners out or in their homes. And above all, they invariably defended their diametrically opposite views in the spirit of bonhomie and chuckling good humour.

That’s what amazed me more than anything else in America. My new American friends always wanted to know about my initial cultural shocks. Not wishing to disappoint them, I gave the answers they wanted to hear: cars, supermarkets, abundance of everything, that sort of thing. But I wasn’t being frank: I had only a limited interest in such matters then and even less now.

In any case, I had known all that about the US before emigrating there. What I hadn’t expected to see was the fundamental civility that underpinned arguments between American antipodes, something unheard of where I came from.

In Russia, political differences ineluctably led to personal hostility. A chap professing loyalty to communism wasn’t just someone I disagreed with. He was my enemy, and I was his. Arguments between us tended to end in a two-way torrent of epithets and possibly fisticuffs. Friendship or even friendliness were out of the question.

That wasn’t necessarily the people’s fault, not entirely so. After all, the communists had killed millions of anti-communists in the 30 years before I graced the world with my appearance. Even in my generation, political differences were still often settled with denunciations and subsequent arrests.

That created a social and intellectual atmosphere that was hardly conducive to amicable exchanges of opinion. It was natural to treat one’s opponent as one’s enemy because as often as not that’s exactly what he was.

That’s why many years later I turned down my publisher’s suggestion that I meet the Trotskyist ‘philosopher’ Eric Hobsbawm who sat on his advisory board. “I’d refuse to shake his hand,” I said, and the publisher thought I was unreasonably immoderate.

In fact, a few years earlier the literary editor Miriam Gross had similarly declined Hobsbawm’s invitation to lunch. “I’m not going to have lunch with you, Eric,” she said. “Because if the situation were different, you’d kill me.”

That confirmed the sensible limits to civility for me. It didn’t apply as categorically to communists and fascists, extremists who harboured murderous enmity to people like me and the civilisation we cherished.

However, political rancour wasn’t the sole reason for the unspeakable rudeness with which the Russians treat one another in private and in public. Nor did political moderation wholly explain the ubiquitous politeness that so impressed me in America and everywhere else in the West all those years ago.

It probably had more to do with the residual Christian spirit that still permeated Western polity and has since largely evaporated. Love the sinner, hate the sin, Christians are taught. Surely the same teaching can – should – be extended to political differences?

They shouldn’t eliminate the basic civilities of life because we are supposed to love not only our friends but also our enemies. That doesn’t mean we should respect their views. But it does mean we must offer them personal respect to which all human beings are entitled simply because they are indeed human.

However, this line of reasoning came to me much later. In those early days it was Buckley and Galbraith who made me widen my field of vision. I saw teenagers at my tennis club opening the gate for each other, saying ‘good shot’ when an opponent hit a winner and in general always being respectful towards one another.

How different, I thought, how very different from the sporting contests of my Soviet youth. There the air was thick, and also blue, with the foulest obscenities the opponents levelled at one another (Anglo-Saxon equivalents aren’t really equivalent: Russian swearwords have no equally robust analogues in English). Fights were common, not to say ubiquitous.

Civility was nowhere in evidence. Only after coming to America did I realise that ‘civility’ and ‘civilisation’ were closely related not only in etymology but also in meaning. Civility is perhaps the most telling marker of civilisation; its lack, a hallmark of barbarism.

My fond recollections go back half a century, and how things have changed since then, not just in America but also in Britain. Civility, which caused my greatest culture shock back in 1973, is no longer a prominent feature of the political or social landscape. America is beginning to resemble the Moscow of my youth with its sharp, irreconcilable distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

To name one example, back in the old days Reagan and Mondale, much as their proposed policies differed, weren’t ‘us’ and ‘them’. They were both ‘us’ who happened to disagree on how best to make the lives of ‘us’ better.

Can you say the same about Biden and Trump or their supporters? Can you imagine, say, Mike Johnson being friends or even friendly with Ocasio-Cortez? I can’t.

It’s fashionable to blame the growing polarisation on Trump, and his personality does lend itself to such accusations. But Trump’s barbarism is matched, often outdone, by his opponents’. Much dirt is being flung both ways, and loudmouthed invective has become the common currency of political debate.

Trump, AOC et al. are the symptoms, not the disease. The disease is the accelerating evaporation of the spirit that used to permeate the West, but doesn’t any longer, not to the same extent. And eroding form betokens rotting content, as it always does.

Observing American politics from afar, I feel sad about its tone more even than about its substance. Perhaps today’s politicians and commentators could do worse than look up those old issues of Firing Line on YouTube. They just might find something that seems to be lost.