I Hate Political Correctness.

I hate political correctness.

I hate defences of political correctness.

I hate the false equivalence of political correctness with some imaginary opposite extreme.

I hate the suggestion that political correctness is something that mostly happens on university campuses and in quirky places like Seattle.

I hate the term "political correctness gone mad", since political correctness is already mad.

I hate attemps to justify political correctness with ironic, knowing humour.

I hate the equation of political correctness with good manners and courtesy. People's careers and lives have rarely been destroyed because of a lapse in good manners or courtesy. (The British TV chef Fanny Cradock was a rare exception.) Nor do conventions of good manners and courtesy change overnight, arbitrarily.

I hate the pretence that political correctness has been an organic evolution rather than a series of sudden changes imposed (mostly) from above.

I hate the pretence that there's a "political correctness of the right". Yes, there are sacred cows on the right, but the right doesn't have the power to impose those on people in general, outside their own (generally beleagured) institutions. Even when the right is in government in any given country, the left is in permanent control of education, the public sector, the entertainment industry, etc. There's no symmetry here.

I could go on and on, but I won't.

Too Much Tolerance Kills Conversation

Just a thought. It's very dull to have a conversation with somebody who's too tolerant. There has to be some resistance to make conversation interesting. If everything comes down to "live and let live" and "each to his own"...well...there isn't really much to say, except for exchanging information.

The opposite is also bad, of course. But I'm not sure it's equally bad. I think I'd rather have lunch with a fanatic than with a soggy liberal.

The joy of conversation is to enter into a topic. I've noticed that conversation in our consumerist, pluralist society tends to simply flit from subject to subject-- since there's nothing much to say about any of them. Once you've compared notes, where do you go?

The intiial idea of a liberal society was that the search for truth (and meaning, I suppose) was so important that everybody had to make that journey for themselves. And I agree with this. I think it comports with human dignity. (Which is not to say that we can't have a Christian character to our institutions; I think we should. Nobody is oppressed by having to listen to a prayer being said, or by having a Christmas crib in a public building. But the long history of religious and political persecution shows that forcing people to believe or not believe anything is always a bad idea.)

I also think the search and the journey has a value, even a sublimity, of its own.

But that's not to say we can't try to persuade each other. In fact, I want people to try to persuade each otther. Society should be a hubbub of religious, political, and cultural debate. That was the whole point of an open society. (Everybody should read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill.)  It doesn't mean you should be a pain in the face about pushing your beliefs on people.

The stage magiciaIn and atheist Penn Teller put it well, in this much-quoted rhetorical question: "How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?"

And even if you don't believe in everlasting life, or the matter at hand isn't religion, why wouldn't you want to argue for your vision of a good society?

The times in history that I'm drawn to are the ones where ideas and debates were thick in the air-- such as the Gaelic Revival and the Irish Revolution in Ireland, or the late nineteenth century in Russia, or the nineteen-thirties in Britain.

But even if you're talking about something non-ideological, such as cinema or architecture, "whatever floats your boat" doesn't float the boat of human interaction very far.

Of course, we have the worst of both worlds today-- where a supposed pluralism is unspokenly dominated by an utterly intolerant secular-globalist progressivism.

(An afterthought: I've always been baffled when the term "bore" is applied to somebody who has an obsessive interest in a subject and won't shut up about it. That might be irritating, to be sure. But give me that kind of "bore" any day ahead of the the more usual sort of bore-- somebody who has no consuming interests or passions, and who really has no conversation beyond general knowledge and received opinion.)

I Don't Care About Spoilers (Much)

Am I unusual for not caring very much about "spoilers" in movies and books? 

I've never felt that a movie is "spoiled" because you know what's going to happen. If that was the case, rewatching a movie (or re-reading a book) would be a diminished experience, whereas it's generally an enhanced experience (if it's worth watching in the first place).

If I know I'm going to watch a film in the very near future, or if I'm trying to decide whether I should, then I will avoid reading plot summaries. Usually.

But if it's simply a film I might see in the future, I don't go to any such efforts.

I've frequently found myself having conversations of this kind:

"And then his face is all burnt by acid and he disappears for years and...well, I won't tell you what happens in case you want to watch it some day."

"No, it's fine, tell me." (My immediate curiosity is piqued.)

"No! You might watch it some day."

I can't help thinking that surprises and twists are the cheapest tools in the storyteller's toolbox. Necessary, but far less important than dialogue and characterization and the stuff that never ceases to please.

Is My Hunger for a Roman Fleuve Going to be Satisfied?

"Roman fleueve" means "river novel" in French, and a roman fleuve is a long story that is serialized over several novels.

I've always liked the idea of a roman fleuve. It seems potentially very satisfying.

I tried reading the most famous of them all, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust, about fifteen years ago. I really couldn't get into it, it was very heavy, with lots of long descriptive passages (which I hate). To be honest, I didn't even get through the first volume.

Like everybody, I'd heard about the famous scene involving the tea-cake at the start, where the taste of a tea-cake dipped in tea brings back memories of the narrator's life, and initaties the reminiscences. The description of this scene really seems to speak to everybody; it's the sort of thing nobody forgets once they've heard it described. We're all fascinated by memory, I think.

Around the same time, I read most of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. The catalyst event in this roman fleuve is the narrator watching snow falling into a brazier, which is also a very appealing image. The title is also tremendously evocative.

The idea of an entire story, a very long story, which is all part of the same reverie (in some way) greatly pleases me. I'm not sure why. The idea pleases me in the same way that the atmosphere of "In My Life" by the Beatles pleases me. Or the title of Maurice Baring's memoirs, Puppet Show of Memory. (Baring was a friend of Chesterton and Belloc, a writer and a Catholic convert.)

Sad to say, though, I was disappointed by A Dance to the Music of Time. I gave up about halfway through, or maybe even further. I found it a bit too light and humorous and not what I was looking for. Proust was too heavy, and Powell was too light. (Interestingly, Philip Larkin read the book towards the end of his life, and told Powell in a letter that his only complaint was that it wasn't long enough.)

I've also read some very long multi-volume series in genre fiction. Lord of the Rings, of course, a couple of times. I've read most of Robert Jordan's colossal Wheel of Time series, although rather ridiculously I flagged towards the very end and gave up. The same applies to The Dark Tower series by Stephen King.

The Stand by Stephen King is a single-volume work but it still has an epic character, both because of its length (I read it in its longer "uncut" version) and because of its subject matter. (A deadly plague leads to the collapse of American civilization, and the survivors form two camps-- one good, one evil.) King was consciously trying to write an American Lord of the Rings, and I think he succeeded to a great extent.

The Stand is more like a life experience than a book. I've thought about reading it again, but it's quite a commitment. (Actually, on my thirtieth birthday, I watched the 1994 TV miniseries on DVD; it seemed a suitably big marker for a big birthday.)

But genre novels don't really satisfy my hunger for a roman fleuve. I want something about real life, modern life. Something from the point of view of a single narrator.

Anyway, I've started reading a roman fleuve called My Struggle (I think the title is ironic), by a Norwegian called Karl Ove Knausgaard. There are six volumes of it and it's 1.3 million words long. It was published between 2009 and 2011. I came across a reference to it on TV Tropes (a website to which I'm addicted) and it intrigued me. It's an autobiographical novel and apparently various people in the author's real life are not wild about its candour.

The series has been a massive hit in Norway, and abroad, but nobody I've mentioned it to has heard of it. Even very bookish types.

I'm a hundred and fifty pages into the first volume and it's very promising so far. No unreasonably protracted descriptive passages. The characters are recognisable people. And the flights of introspection, and angst, aren't too self-indulgent. So far.

Knausgaard is a standard-issue lefty, as far as I can see, and one interview I skimmed had him make the usual critical references to Brexit and the Big Bad Wolf in Washington. I understand that it gets more political later. So far it has been pretty apolitical. Religion doesn't feature much so far. There's a sort of prologue at the beginning which shows us the narrator as a small boy, and it's mentioned that he's a Christian (much to his father's disapproval). By the time the main narrative of the first volume begins, he describes himself as an anti-Christian, although with the suggestion that this is just youthful posturing. At the point I've reached now, he's fallen madly in love with a classmate who's a Christian, even though her parents are not. But none of this is treated as central to the plot and nobody seems to get at all het up about religion.

I think I'm drawn to the idea of a roman fleuve because I'm fascinated by the texture of life, its overflowingness. The different flavours of different days and different stretches of time. It's the "in-betweeny" moments that appeal to me the most. I liked this description of the first day of the year, after a rather epic New Year's Eve party sequence, in which the protagonist in a friend's house watching The Guns of Navarone on video casette:

"Oh, this is fun", Trygve said as the first frames from the film appeared on the screen. Outside, everything was still, as only winter can be. And even though the sky was overcast and grey, the light over the countryside shimmered and was perfectly white. I remember thinking all I wanted to do was to sit right there, in a newly built house, in a circle of light in the middle of the forest and be as stupid as I liked."

We have the first five volumes in my library. I've requested the sixth to be bought. I can get it on inter-library loan, in any case.

Maybe I'll lose interest long before that.Or maybe this will finally be the roman fleuve I've been yearning for!

"How Was Your Day?": Some Thoughts on Language Change.

I've just heard a radio presenter say: "I hope your Sunday afternoon is going great!"

It might be irrational, but this usage has always made me cringe. It's encountered more often in the phrase: "How was your day?".

I can't remember people saying this when I was a kid, back in eighties Ireland. But I might be wrong about this.

It strikes me as objectionally individualist, relativist, and consumerist. It's not my day, after all. It's everybody's day.

But maybe this is a stupid objection. After all, everybody experiences time differently.

And my reaction isn't even consistent, because I like phrases such as "He had a good war", or "She had a chequered seventies".

Being a double-sided contrarian, I'm often irritated by conservatives' attitude to language change. It seems unthinking and indiscriminate. Just because liberals love to say language has always changed...doesn't mean that language hasn't always changed. Obviously, it has.

If you read twentieth-century manuals of English usage such as Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage or Gower's Plain Words (and I recommend them both), you'll realise that there were lots of fairly recent controversies about language usage which are now completely forgotten, even among linguistic conservatives. The fustiest purist doesn't hesitate to use "contact" as a verb, these days.

So...can we agree language change isn't bad in itself?

But then, what sort of changes and innovations in language are bad?

Well, one battle that I'll fight to my dying day is the battle over "disinterested". It doesn't (at least in its traditional use) mean indifferent. It means not having a personal stake in a question-- having no dog in the fight, to use one of my favourite Americans idioms.

"Disinterested" seems like a good word to preserve (in its original meaning) because it means something very specific. It's elegant. To lose it would be to narrow the range of the language.

Similarly, "fulsome" doesn't mean lavish. It means insincere. I think that battle is lost, though.

This principle can be taken too far. My father used to object to the term "decimate" to mean anything but the literal "killing one in ten". That seems too specific to be useful.

Similarly, he didn't like "iconic" being used to mean anything but "pertaining to icons". I can't sympathise with this, either. "Iconic" in the sense it's generally used today seems like a legitimate extension.

Surely new words and expressions should be judged on an individual basis? I quite like some "valley girl" phrases, such as "my bad" (to mean...well, you know exactly what it means, don't pretend you don't). It's vivid and snappy. What's wrong with that? I also like "awesome" as a term of approval. It's Chestertonian, whether or not GKC would have approved of it.

Recently, I've heard people (mostly on YouTube philosophy and theology channels) using the verb "steelman", meaning to set up the strongest possible version of an opponent's argument-- the opposite of attacking a straw man. I like this too.

One thing I don't like is the torrent of acronyms which has afflicted the language, and which I suspect began in WWII, though the computer revolution probably greatly accelerated it. Admittedly, some of the newer acronyms can be funny, such as "FAFO" (fiddle around and find out).

It makes me wonder why some phrases become acronyms and some don't. Why did the personal computer become a PC, while the mobile phone never became an MP (or the cellphone a CP)?

Another example of language change that I dislike, and that I think most people would dislike (if they think about it), is when national or regional usages are replaced by those of another country, or most likely from the globalizing media. I hate hearing Irish people say "cheers" (for thank you), just as I lament the replacement of "help the Halloween party" with "trick or treat!".

I don't know whether this is reflective of an underlying trend of globalization, or whether national/regional terms just come and go. Irish slang words (like "jammers" for "crowded") have come into being in my own lifetime. On the other hand, there was a generation of Irish people who used certain Americanisms (imported from cowboy and hardboiled detective films) which you'd never hear today. I remember, as a kid, hearing a middle-aged man say a kite was "bust" instead of broken-- a usage that had already passed out of common use in Ireland, at that time.

If I had to choose my single least favourite development in modern English, I would definitely choose the ubiquity of the word "sh---" in colloquial usage, and sometimes even in formal usage. (More than twenty years ago, I heard a college lecturer tell his class to "get their sh-- together". Admittedly, he was a "cool" lecturer.) "I have to focus on my own sh--", "That's some heavy sh---", "This is some cool sh---". What does it say about us, that we compare almost everything to excrement all the time? 

I'm afraid I'm sexist enough to be especially bothered when I hear this usage from the lips of a lady. (Women used to hold men to higher standards of politeness and decorum. It was a charming convention that men didn't curse with ladies present. Not that I think anyone should ever curse.)

In his book A Mouthful of Air, Anthony Burgess admitted his own distate for the increasing use of "sh--" as a stand-in for almost almost anything. His theory was that the people who throw the "sh--" word around don't actually think of excrement when they use it; the word has become completely divorced from the thing, for them. But it still put him in mind of excrement every time, and made him gag.

I have the same reaction as Burgess. Every time someone uses the word, it makes me think of the substance. And it reinforces my general belief that society is increasingly going to sh--.

If You Lived Through the Eighties, You Might Get This Joke

Why is it wrong to criticize Imelda Marcos?

Because you shouldn't criticize anybody till you've walked a mile in their shoes.

(And if you don't get it, go here.)

I made up this joke! I make up a lot of jokes. Well, it's more that they occur to me, than that I actively make them up.

Who Started the Polarization?

Every time you hear someone lamenting political polarization, I suggest you ask yourself: who actually started it?

Who introduced the idea that people are wicked simply for having opinions?

That such opinions were not to be taken seriously on their own merits, but understood as the expression of irrational feelings, or of defending one's supposed privileges?

It seems to me that "polarization" only became bad when the pushback took on a momentum of its own.

All through the seventies, eighties, nineties, and possibly the early noughties and beyond, "radical" was a compliment. Because radicalism was mostly on the favoured side. Wholesale questioning of the institutions and traditions of society was simply a sign that you were an intelligent, idealistic person.

Suddenly there is a radicalism on the other side-- a wholesale questioning of the wholesale questioning, as it were-- and that's bad, bad, bad...