Is it possible, then, that by emphasising the less attractive aspects of modern society and culture, by repeatedly drawing attention to the deleterious social and psychological effects of welfare dependence, by criticising multiculturalism as a doctrine and as corrupt bureaucratic opportunism, I may have contributed, if only a mite, to the poisonous, paranoid, narcissistic, grandiose and resentful brew in the mind of Breivik, who took what I wrote, even if at second-hand, in completely the wrong way and drew ludicrous but murderous conclusions from it? And if I did contribute that mite, does it mean that I should now retire into guilty silence, lest there be other Breiviks in the world?

In writing on the subject of immigration, for example, I have always felt an undertow of anxiety and guilt, not only because I am myself the descendent of a long line of refugees, but because I know that this is a subject on which the vilest passions and basest emotions are quickly aroused. There is, after all, a long history of such vile passions and base emotions in many, perhaps in most, countries. Thus to say anything about mass immigration other than it is an excellent thing is potentially to give intellectual succour to some very nasty people.   

But while history provides us with analogies, they are never exact. As human beings, we are condemned – it is both our glory as well as our burden – to live in perpetual near-novelty, and therefore to have to make continual leaps in the dusk if not in the total dark. We cannot treat the present as if it were a mere repetition of the past. To be mesmerised by precedent is as foolish as to take no notice of it whatever. It is said that generals always fight the current war with the strategy and tactics of the last; in like fashion, social commentators and reformers are reluctant to let go of past problems in favour of the problems that confront them now. A phenomenon – immigration – can keep its name while changing its nature; and it is obvious that the social consequences of immigration depend on the qualities of the immigrants as well as on the quality of the society into which they immigrate.

To be reduced to silence on an important subject, to decree in effect that only one opinion on it may be openly expressed, for fear of filling the minds of the unstable with murderous resentment, is to place a great deal of subject matter hors de combat. It is true that as yet no climate activist has killed people, and that ‘only’ three bank employees lost their lives in the riots in Athens (and probably not by the direct intention of the rioters at that), but there is no reason to suppose that extreme climate activists or protesters against finance capitalism are, and must forever remain, immune from murderous impulses. The human mind is capable of finding a casus belli in almost anything, and of rationalising violence when it wants to commit it. If an environmental activist were to act in imitation of Anders Breivik, I should not blame those who warned against global warming, nor even Anders Breivik himself.

The bourgeois bohemian is not in want, nor does he fear the midnight knock on the door, yet still he manages to feel that he needs liberating from something. That something is the sense of limitation that life itself places on us, for temporal and other reasons…The liberation that the bourgeois bohemian seeks is from the frustration, dissatisfaction and disappointment that is the inevitable concomitant of man’s existence.

….

It is the irony of democratic politics – that of universal suffrage – that politicians are compelled in the competition for power (or office) to offer the population more and more positive benefits and protections from the unpleasantnesses of life….Minogue traces the profound psychological and cultural effects of benefits distributed as of right, that is to say indiscriminately, to recipients. Quite apart from an oppressive tax-gathering system that such distribution necessitates, those who receive the benefits develop a new personality type, that of the permanent adolescent.

The biggest demonstration against the government’s proposals was on March 26. A quarter of a million people took to the streets—in solidarity with themselves. Many were teachers protesting the proposed cuts in education spending. Yet after a compulsory education lasting 11 years and costing, on average, $100,000 per pupil, about a fifth of British students who do not attend college after high school are barely able to read and write, according to a recent study from Sheffield University. Considering the disastrous personal consequences of being illiterate in a modern society, this is a gargantuan scandal, amounting to large-scale theft by the educational authorities. No anarchist ever smashed a window because of this scandal, however; and so it is impossible to resist the conclusion that the demonstration was in defense of unearned salaries, not (as alleged) of actual services worth defending.

….

So it is not surprising that the Guardian, which one could almost call the public-sector workers’ mouthpiece, has reported that hospital emergency departments are already feeling the budgetary pressure and risk being overwhelmed, even before the cuts have been implemented in full. Meanwhile, one can still find plenty of bureaucratic jobs advertised in the Health Service Journal, the publication for nonmedical employees of the NHS. One hospital seeks an Associate Director of Equality, Diversity, and Human Rights; another is looking for an interim Deputy Director of Operations and Transformation. Part of the “transformation” in that case seems to be a reduction in the hospital’s budget, and it is instructive that the person who will be second in command of that reduction will be paid between $1,000 and $1,300 per day.

…We seem caught in an eternal cycle, in which a period of government overspending and intervention leads to economic crisis and hence to a period of austerity, which, once it is over, is replaced by a new period of government overspending and intervention, promoted by politicians, half-charlatan and half-self-deluded, who promise the electorate the sun, moon, and stars.

….

As soon as the crisis is over, though this may not be for some time, the politicians are likely again to offer the public security and excitement, wealth and leisure, education and distraction, capital accumulation without the need to save, health and safety, happiness and antidepressants, and all the other desiderata of human existence. The public will believe the politicians because—to adapt slightly the great dictum of Louis Pasteur—impossible political promises are believed only by the prepared mind. And our minds have been prepared for a long time, since the time of the Fabians at least.

…hatred is by far the most powerful and durable of political emotions. One’s feelings for one’s political enemies are warm and lively, while those for one’s political friends are cool and torpid. It is obvious that the rich and the foreigner are in general hated much more than the poor and the fellow countryman are loved; while hatred of oppression is much stronger than love of freedom, especially when it is other people’s freedom. To hate injustice is easy, to love justice, or even to know what it is, is difficult. Hatred, in short, makes politics, and much else besides, go round; and while Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, he might just as well have spoken of the hatred caused by small differences.

Nor is hatred exhaustible. On the contrary, it is indefinitely expandable. It often increases with its own expression, becoming more virulent with every word uttered; it is not a fixed quantity like fluid in a bottle. It is very easy, as most people must surely know, to work oneself up into a fury of indignation and insensate rage merely by dwelling on some slight or humiliation. Above all, hatred is fun: it gives a meaning to life to those who otherwise lack one.

The idea therefore that hate speech can be banned, is of course, is [sic] a sign of impatience with the intractability of the human condition. It wants to legislate people into kindness, decency and fellow-feeling. It appeals to the sort of people who forget (or never knew) that supposed solutions to human problems frequently throw up further problems that are greater than that which the solution is designed to solve. For its protagonists, it has the advantage of creating a bureaucracy of virtue with pension arrangements to match.

The American approach is best (of course, American universities, with their speech codes, are trying to subvert it). We have laws against incitement to riot and other crimes, and laws against insulting behaviour. That should be enough.

Here it is: Dalrymple’s short analysis of Breivik in the Express.

I’m indignant, therefore I’m right… He wants the young of Europe to be indignant at, among other things, the gap between the rich and poor countries, which, he says (precisely at the time when economic growth in most of the rich countries is far exceeded by that of much of Africa), has never been greater. Hessel virtually suggests indignation as a career…

…what drove them onto the streets was the realization that the whole system of subsidized employment was coming to an end just as they were joining the labor market. They were demonstrating for a continuation of the subsidies that would allow them to rob their children as they themselves had been robbed by their parents and grandparents.

Well, yes and no. As it happened I read John Huxham in tandem with Porter. Huxham (1692–1768) was a regular physician who discovered nothing, in the sense that there is no Huxham’s disease, Huxham’s law, or Huxham’s sign; it can even be said that he missed a golden opportunity to discover the cause of an epidemic. Yet, though he discovered nothing, and his results with his patients were probably little better than those of the veriest mountebank, yet when one reads him one cannot but respect the diligence, rationality, and devotion with which he investigated the causes of epidemics.

…[from] his Observations on the Air and Epidemic Diseases from the year MDCCXXVIII to MDCCXXXVII Inclusive: ….“From the Beginning of the Month Coughs and Catarrhs were frequent, oftentimes attended with a troublesome Tumor of the Fauces, and slight Fevers commonly. Rheumatisms and Squinzies up and down; great lowness of spirits and frequent hysteric Paroxysms every-where.”

We may smile at the naivety of this, but it is a serious, if unsuccessful, attempt to interrogate nature by a rational method completely different from that of, say, an itinerant seller of nostrums. So it’s not surprising that, pace Porter’s faintly disguised sneers, progress depended upon the faculty and not upon the quacks.