Another Sign that Political Discourse May Be Becoming More Civil

Salon prints a piece by a college professor who has discovered that a "white supremacist" student is actually human.

I am reminded of that supposed quote from Mahatma Gandhi: "first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you have won." Isn't this just the parabola we have been watching regarding the treatment of the right by the dominant left over the last twenty years or so? Hasn't the very violence and unreasonableness of the left's responses for some time suggested fundamental weakness, rather than strength, on their side?

The Truth about Public Schools

When my grandfather, fresh out of college, went for his first job interview, he bore a letter of recommendation from one of his Queen’s professors, stressing the fact that he was unusually well-spoken. He, an engineer by training, went on to be the president of his own company.

Warren Buffett credits his success to having taken a Dale Carnegie course.

The obvious question is, why are we not teaching these things in schools? Why did both these men have to pick up their most important qualification in their free time? Specifically, why are we not teaching formal debating, rhetoric (aka salesmanship), and rules of order (aka how to run a meeting)? These three are the essential skills for actual success in almost any career; they are easily taught; they are vital to good citizenship; and they used to be the backbone of a classical education.

This question used to stump me. Until I realized the obvious answer. The public schools are actually designed to prevent students from becoming successful. They are shaped by a ruling class to ensure that they remain the ruling class. The ruling class, of course, always sends their own children to private schools which teach formal debate, rhetoric, and the rules of order. The public schools, on the other hand, are there to spit out useful tools for industry, people who do not themselves have the ability to manage their own affairs, or challenge for power. Preserving proper employment for a hereditary ruling class in telling them what to do.

They are unworthy of a free nation.

Why are Liberals So Rude to the Right?

The most amazing thing is that this article has appeared in the Guardian. This suggests that the trend may be turning, to a more honest and gentlemanly tone.

Omissions from the List of Essential Canadian Music

If you have not yet listened to my personal compilation of the essential Canadian music, it's at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLteYFTJPq94DmDUuG2d08U5-vRs-skASU. If you have listened, there are a few new additions. And there may continue to be, as my memory keeps getting jogged.

A Canadian friend has written pointing out an obvious omission: The Guess Who.

But to tell you the truth, I did not forget them. It was an intentional omission.

My position is that they are not really Canadian.

True, they are from Winnipeg. True, they are very popular in Canada. I’ll also concede the Burton Cummings is a great singer, and Randy Bachmann comes up with great riffs.

But there are two kinds of culture in Canada. There is real Canadian culture, and there are Canadian imitations of foreign culture. All countries have the latter, but Canada is probably more prone to this than most. A lot of movies filmed in Canada, for example, are indistinguishable from Hollywood films. The Guess Who is the latter--a Canadian imitation of foreign culture.

Their first hit, "Shakin’ All Over," was a cover of an American song. Their original name, Chad Allen and the Reflections, was in imitation of the name of a British band. Their first recording was called "Tribute to Buddy Holly." They were named “Guess Who” later in hopes they would be mistaken for some established American or British band performing incognito. They first became financially solvent, and well known, when they were hired by the CBC to regularly do cover versions of current (foreign) hits; the idea was to imitate the originals as closely as possible.

In other words, the whole idea behind the Guess Who was to imitate foreign styles. So what’s Canadian about them?

"American Woman," their best-known song, is irredeemably un-Canadian in tone. Canadians are notably polite. Yet what could be more rude than insulting the womanhood of a neighbouring country? It is also arrogant, assuming that American women as a group are just dying to make out with the singer; what is less Canadian than arrogance? 

More generally, the Guess Who seem to me to be consistently pretentious, and being pretentious is as un-Canadian as you can be. Ask Avril Lavigne; that's the point of "Complicated."

So although they were born in Canada, they seem somehow not to have been brought up with traditional Canadian values and cultural sensitivities. I think a lot of Canadians can legitimately enjoy them, but because they are good at what they do, not because of their Canadianness.

A few more deliberate omissions, for similar reasons: Rush, Bachmann-Turner Overdrive, Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild,” Leon Redbone, Loreena McKennitt, Murray McLaughlin, Valdy, Nelly Furtado, The Band. Not Canadian in spirit; imitations of foreign styles.

How Much Can We Trust Psychology?

This is a disturbing study.

Seriously: psychology is a pseudo-science, isn't it?

The Essential Canadian Songs

Recently, an Irish friend of mine has been regaling me with his favourite music. I was inspired to  try to put together, from what is available on YouTube, a complilation of songs that would introduce him to what Canadian traditional music has to offer.

I offer this for the enjoyment of fellow Canadians, to introduce others to the essence of Canadian culture, and most of all as a fiercely felt rebuttal to those who do not believe Canada has a distinct and unified culture. I challenge those, especially Canadians, who pathetically ignore or deride Canadian culture in favour of an imported "multiculturalism."

For if you listen to these songs, you find that they hang together as one vast work. Themes are repeated:  the pain of going away, movement across great distances, growing up, the family, the seasons turning, the ordinary life of ordinary people. Most of all, as I see it, there is a distinct Canadian theme of the ordinary man trying to survive in the face of vast forces that always threaten to overwhelm him. Just as Margaret Atwood has said: the Canadian theme is Survival. It is the heroism of everyday life.

No pretension for Canadians, and no faith in the possibility of changing the world. It is the little way, with little, personal, transcendences.

As a Canadian, listening to it, I nurse the suspicion that, on this, of all the world's people, only Canadians are truly sane.

Let's buiild on what we have.

Here's the playlist. Be sure to select "shuffle."

The Real World of Abuse

Why are some people bullies and abusers? What is the psychology at work?

We all know the story about the man who has a bad day at work, and then comes home and kicks the dog. This seems to be the basic abusive turn: trying to make yourself feel good by making someone else feel bad. Like the demons in hell. In sum, some of us, because we are essentially weak people, cannot handle our own feelings by ourselves, if they are unpleasant feelings. To avoid them, some take to alcohol. Some, really the same sort of people, take to kicking the dog; or anyone else who is nearby and helpless. Kids, especially.

This is contemptible and completely immoral, of course. But it is also, on the face of it, completely illogical. How does making someone else feel bad make me feel better?

For most types of bad feeling, it won’t, will it? But there is one exception: guilt. People commonly seem to believe that guilt is transferable; this is the Pharisaic impulse. The phenomenon of the scapegoat seems to be ingrained in human nature and human culture, found all over the world: you blame someone or something else for your own sins, punish them severely for them, and so convince yourself that your vehement reaction to supposed sin makes you a moral paragon.

You see this urge in politics all the time. This is the essence of the witch hunt, and this is the essence of the nanny state. People who make large incomes in rather dishonest ways and never give to charity can often claim themselves to be highly moral people because they vote to enforce higher rates of aid to the poor—i.e., making others behave as they should. Vlad the Impaler, the original Dracula, claimed to simply be punishing evildoers.

It really looks as though most people are abusive, given the opportunity. Most people will join a lynch mob; that’s what makes it a mob. Milgram’s shock experiment famously demonstrated this fairly scientifically. So too, a democratic plurality of Germans voted for Hitler, and so far as we can tell, he retained his popularity with the German public just as long as he seemed to be winning the war. Daniel Goldhagen argues that most Germans knew perfectly well what was going on in the death camps--and were all for it. Jews always make good scapegoats.

The greatest horror of bullying and of abuse, in the end, is indeed the self-righteousness of the perpetrator. He or she will always add insult to injury: it is not enough to punish the victim, but the victim must also accept that it is deserved. For the abuser, that is the whole point.

It also follows that, if confronted with incontrovertible proof of their own bullying or abusive behavior, anyone who is truly abusive, truly a bully, will not admit guilt for it, but seek to deflect. They will deny it if they can. If faced with incontrovertible evidence, their obvious fallback position is to insist that they themselves are or were being abused, and so are the real victims. Indeed, they are the first who are going to whine about their own lot. That is their established modus operandi; the whole point of the exercise from the beginning has been to deflect guilt.

Unfortunately, the “experts” in psychology and in authority generally are either too stupid or too complicit to see this. Probably too complicit: psychology and authority are natural magnets for abusers. As a result, most of their interventions, which grow more and more insistent, tend to be on the side of the abuser, and will actively seek to obscure the issue.

Praeger University: Were the Middle Ages Dark?

No, actually.

The Most Amazing Thing

... is that this article appeared in the Huffington Post.

Even the left is getting fed up with the feminist anti-male agenda.

More from Orwell on Abuse

More fine observation of the experience of abuse/depression from George Orwell’s essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys.”

I knew that bed-wetting was (a) wicked and (b) outside my control. The second fact I was personally aware of, and the first I did not question. It was possible, therefore, to commit a sin without knowing that you committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to avoid it…. This was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good.

The two, abuse and depression, are the same plant: the one the root, the other the branch.

Orwell, Schools, and Child Abuse

St. Cyprian's Preparatory School

 

Everyone says they are against child abuse. I guess they believe it. But most people seem to have no idea what it is. And what they do is moistly destructive. They think child abuse means either physical punishment or sexual contact. These are both red herrings. Busy fiercely punishing irrelevancies, they enable real child abuse to continue unrestricted.

Before we go any further, do not misunderstand. Sexual contact with children is always morally wrong. All sex outside marriage is morally wrong. But it is not, by itself, child abuse.

For what child abuse really is, I refer you all to George Orwell’s posthumously published essay “Such, Such Were the Joys.”

George Orwell was a macho guy. He volunteered for the losing side in the Spanish Civil War. In his books, he took on the Stalinists and the Marxist left, no doubt causing him some problems with his many leftist friends. He is a great writer largely because he stares evil in its face and calls it by its name.

The constitution of Animal Farm. Postmodernism in a sentence.

Yet he did not allow this essay, about his days in a British prep school, to be published until after his death. I presume the trauma was too great. The horrors of Animal Farm and 1984 were only echoes of St. Cyprian.

Here is Orwell’s short description of what child abuse is and what it feels like, although he does not call it by that name. He writes of

“a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.”

This is also a perfect description of depression, and for good reason: as even the psychological professionals are beginning to accept, abuse is the cause of depression. For all we know, it may also be the cause of bipolar disorder (manic depression), schizophrenia, and more.

One abuses a child when one gives him or her no option of being good; when one teaches the child, implicitly or explicitly, that they are evil in their essential nature, and there is nothing they can do about it. A lot of parents do this, and a lot of schools do this.

One can abuse an adult in the same way, and in the same way produce depression. But it is far easier to do, and far more lasting in its effects, with a child.

Physical punishment is entirely neutral in this regard, so long as this double bind is not part of the experience. An absence of physical punishment is no improvement at all, for a child, so long as this double bind is still there.

Sexual contact is also neutral. It leads to this double bind if and only if the child gets the message that they are evil for having engaged in the activity, yet they cannot avoid it. No doubt many sexual predators deliberately impress this belief on their victims, in order to avoid detection. But it is a separate matter. I have known many, perhaps you have too, who were “sexually abused,” i.e., played with sexually by adults, as minors and have no scars to show for it.

The reality of abuse should not be difficult to understand; the matter seems pretty straightforward. In fact, the same understanding of abuse is portrayed again and again in fairy tales: Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and so on. It seems almost a standard feature. Indeed, one important purpose of fairy tales is surely to alert abused children that they are indeed abused, and that it is not their fault—they could be like Cinderella or Snow White or the Ugly Duckling. I imagine such tales have saved countless children from lives of emotional anguish.

So what is the modern response? The professionals are eager to point out themselves that fairy tales commonly portray child abuse. And what is their response? They want to suppress them.

Cinderella

It is hard to believe that the professionals are not trying actively to enable and assist child abuse. They seem, firstly, to deliberately misrepresent its nature, as either physical punishment or sexual contact; yet they themselves are quite capable of recognizing that Cinderella or Snow White are being abused, with no sexual contact nor physical punishment. Then they want to conceal the crime from its victims, and to deny them any help.