O royal marriage, if wedding comes, can divorce be far behind? For a marriage these days, unlike a diamond, is definitely not forever, and the British royal family, though it remains somewhat different from the average or median British family in many respects, has not been able to insulate itself entirely from the social trends of the age, the instability of relations between the sexes being among them. A large dose of social realism, indeed, has been insinuated into the Saxe-Coburg-Windsor fairy story.

I generally find it sensible to reject the opinions of those who refer to the world as “the system”. Author and former Bellevue patient Malcolm Lowry (1909-57) seems to have been one of these people, as Dalrymple suggests in the BMJ (subscription required):

According to Lowry, there is little difference between the staff and the patients. It is the world that is mad, not the lunatic. He says to the doctor: “You’re as resigned as your wretched patients, and you not only stand for it, but persistently your technique is to try and adjust them back to the system—just as you might imagine wounded soldiers being patched up to be sent back to fight by surgeons who had been smashed up themselves.”

This is R D Laing avant la lettre: the madman is simply one who has seen clearer and further than the so called sane.

Indeed, it takes something of an effort in Britain to avoid this drivel, for it has invaded, and in some cases almost taken over, our supposedly more serious newspapers. In rather more cultivated times, this cynically-produced drivel might have been designated prolefeed, but now in Britain intelligent and educated people demonstrate their sympathy for the unintelligent and uneducated by sharing their tastes. There is no form of empathy that appears more sincere than imitation.

….

In Britain we have completely lost sight of the proper place of vulgarity in the moral and cultural economy. We have made it king when it should be court jester. It is funny and valuable only when it mocks pretensions to gentility and recalls cultivated people to the limitations of their earthbound condition. Without a contrast with something else, something that is not itself vulgar, it becomes merely unpleasant, crude and stupid. In these circumstances it exerts a corrosive effect on minds and manners because, while it takes no effort at all to be vulgar and unrefined where vulgarity and lack of refinement are almost universal, it takes effort to be urbane and refined.

Unfortunately, Jones’s action will only have reinforced a fetishistic attachment to a text that, for all those who do not believe in its divine provenance, seems irredeemably dull, flawed, and riven by contradiction. Carlyle’s description of it as a confused, wearisome jumble that could be read by a European only from a sense of duty still seems accurate.

But one does not go to the trouble of ceremonially burning a book that one deems unimportant. Jones, who in the past has been accused by his own minuscule church of being a publicity-seeker, accused the Koran of responsibility for every kind of crime, thereby himself making a fetishistic object of it, but an object with an exactly opposite moral valency from that ascribed to it by the Afghani mob.

Actually, for most of us, the world is safe as never before….But if we are safer than ever we are also more highly insured than ever. It is as if our fears increased with our safety: oddly enough dangers seem less real when they are genuinely present. The imaginary is stronger than the real…

Hardly a week goes by without an invitation to take out some new kind of insurance coming through the letter-box. A dreadful possibility is dangled before your eyes and made to look as probable as possible..For only £5.59 a week you can be insured against being crushed to death by your neighbour’s pet boa constrictor, and your relict will receive £28,500 in the unhappy event that you are.

Do men choose philosophies, or philosophies men? A friend of mine, who has thought deeply about the question, thinks it is the latter: by which he means, of course, that it is one’s temperament rather than abstract considerations of truth that determines one’s world view. A cognate question is whether there is such a thing as the addictive personality, and if so, whether each drug has its corresponding personality. Or is it merely circumstances that addict the addict?