The intolerant, radical rainbow ideologues are once again censoring and blacklisting those not marching in lockstep to whatever absurd, disordered nonsense is being peddled by their party commissars—this time at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
George Orwell, in “Nineteen Eight-Four,” grasped an essential point about totalitarian propaganda, namely that the more outrageously false it was, the better it served its purpose, which was not to inform or persuade, but to humiliate and subdue.
The skeptical doctor meditates on some unlikely sources of truth when it comes to a country’s political situation: taxi drivers and barbers.
I am far from decrying this genre of journalism: in my experience, taxi-drivers are exceptionally sensible and level-headed men, intelligent and well-informed but not educated, or rather not indoctrinated into believing the most obvious nonsense by having attended western-type establishments of supposedly higher learning.
Over at The Epoch Times, the dissenting doctor covers the ongoing perverse assault on beauty in the modern world.
An area of real elegance was spoiled in the name of social engineering: why should anyone enjoy beauty if not everyone could? Ugliness is egalitarian, beauty elitist. People such as the author would look at the Taj Mahal and see the social injustice that produced it.
The good doctor admonishes the vulgar behavior of some of his countrymen when cavorting abroad and considers some unexpected social consequences of the pandemic in Saudi Arabia over at Takimag.
The British government’s repeated postponement of the liberation of its own population and its patent discouragement of travel, especially to the continent of Europe, because of the Covid-19 epidemic, will at least have one positive effect, namely that of raising slightly the cultural level of the resorts to which Britons flock annually as herds of wildebeest in their seasonal migrations.
In the spring issue of City Journal, our critical doctor targets the ineffective, politically correct, ambitious mediocrities that tend to climb highest in the modern British state bureaucracies.
The degeneration of the public administration puzzles me because in all walks of life, from plumbers to electricians, locksmiths, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, surgeons, cardiologists, research scientists, and so forth, I meet capable, intelligent, honest, and talented people. The explanation of this strange divergence, I suspect, is ultimately in the way that the humanities, or inhumanities, are now taught in higher education.
In his Quadrant essay, our favorite doctor hits the nail on the head with a scathing critique of the degenerate and repellently ugly nature of much of modern art, as well as the progressive, cultural Marxist-inspired ideology underlying much of this vile uglification around us.
Needless to say, those short-listed for the prize have done more than their little bit for the progressive uglification of the world—one would expect no less. In a world of injustice, after all, beauty as once understood is socially-regressive and unjust, the privilege of the few.
Theodore Dalrymple gets satirical with the topic of birdwatching in his The Epoch Times column.
It takes some determination to see in birdwatching not an innocent and harmless pastime (though I gather that birdwatchers can be highly competitive), but a manifestation of social injustice, that injustice being one of the reasons that there are, comparatively, so few black birdwatchers.
During his recent trip to Paris, our favorite doctor happens upon an “anti-fascist” rally attended by the usual assortment of disgruntled, aimless, black-clad leftist youth, as well as the notorious French riot police, dispatched to keep order among the would-be revolutionaries.
Still, however justified or effective the presence, it is not pleasant or reassuring to see such a force on the streets. It means that the social compact essential to a free society, namely that people will contain their political passion within certain bounds, is breaking down, not only in France but throughout the west. There are no prizes for guessing who is mostly responsible.
Our dubious doctor receives an invitation to apply to Harvard Business School’s program on leadership that was clearly written using the meaningless, bland, long-winded language of the typical academic bureaucrat—or communist party apparatchik—that would have made Comrade Brezhnev blush.
But it would be a mistake to suppose that, just because the words and sentences uttered have no clear meaning, that they have no purpose. On the contrary, they have a very important purpose. The mastery of this kind of language is the managerial equivalent of freemasons’ ceremonies: it distinguishes the managers from the managed.
Over at City Journal, the skeptical doctor calls out the White House Press Secretary for her inadequate and evasive answer to a reporter’s straightforward question concerning the dismissal of members of the U.S. Fine Arts Commission.
This way of thinking is both a symptom and a cause of the absence of an unenforceable moral code that is held, if not universally, at least by a large proportion of the population. As Edmund Burke knew, where there is no inner restraint, there will have to be external restraint—in other words, the law, which will be permissive and repressive at the same time.