Assorted Links: April 21, 2008

"Rudyard Kipling unburdened"

Roger Kimball in April's New Criterion:

Today, I suspect, Kipling is regarded chiefly as that most anodyne of literary practitioners: a children’s author, creator of the boy Mowgli, Kaa the python, and Shere Khan the Tiger, the genial-looking, pipe-puffing genius who wrote Kim and populated the imaginations of boys and girls with the sultry weather of the Raj, explained how the elephant got its trunk, and decorated it all with fastidious (little) poems that rhymed and scanned. Kipling was picturesque. He was born in romantic-sounding Bombay, and he got his precocious literary start in India after a decade of schooling in England. (His parents chose “Rudyard,” by the way, after a lake in Staffordshire where they courted.) If his stories are exotic, even scary at times, they are nonetheless wholesome or at least susceptible to Disneyfication.

How different it once was. Around the turn of the last century, at the apogee of Kipling’s fame, Mark Twain wrote that he was “the only living person not head of a nation, whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark, the only such voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail but always travels first-class by cable.” In Kipling, the zeitgeist briefly found its impresario. For a time, his authority was as much political as literary. Kipling gave speeches advocating British supremacy in India and South Africa. He opposed the suffragettes and home rule for Ireland. He could be downright strident. It was Kipling, one of his biographers speculates, who popularized the metonymy “Huns” (actually, he insisted on “huns” with a small “h”) for “Germans,” a subject on which he grew increasingly ferocious. By 1915, Kipling was insisting that there were “only two divisions in the world … human beings and Germans.” Kipling consistently refused state honors (a knighthood, the Order of Merit, the post of poet laureate) but by the late 1890s he was the undisputed if unofficial laureate—but also, which is sometimes forgotten, the Jeremiah—of Imperial Britain.

Which is another reason why I've never found Kipling uncouth, I thought Imperial Britain was a very good thing.  Warts and all.  The deeper reason why Kipling annoys most modern liberals is touched upon by Kimball later on in the piece:

The key word is “civilization.” Kipling was above all the laureate not of Empire, but of civilization, especially civilization under siege. Henry James once sniffed that there was only one strain absent in Kipling: that of “the civilized man.” It’s a frequent refrain. But in a deeper sense, Kipling was about almost nothing else—not the civilization of elegant drawing rooms, but something more primeval and without which those drawing rooms would soon be smashed and occupied by weeds. Kipling, Evelyn Waugh wrote toward the end of his life, “believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.” Kipling endeavored to man those defenses partly through his political oratory, but more importantly through a literary corpus that taught the explicit lessons and the implicit rhythms of emotional continence and restraint.

Poets, by nature, are a pretty ethereal lot.  Romanticism only confirmed this impression, both in the general public and within the "profession" itself.  Kipling, with his rhythmic precision and earthy topics - can we imagine Coleridge writing paeans to businessmen, soldiers and engineers? - violated the impression and seemed therefore unpoetical as well as uncouth and impolitic.  He was the poet who belonged on earth.

Barbara Hall - Intellectual Thug

Having failed to regain political power, the former Toronto mayor has been appointed head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission.  She has gotten off to a roaring start, making an audacious bid to expand the powers of her office and the commission.  Ezra Levant, a famous victim of these commissions, gives the story the mainstream media is ignoring:

Which brings us to Barbara Hall, the awful new boss of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. She's the one who issued the guilty verdict against Maclean's magazine, without going through the trouble of having a trial of the matter. And, according to this interview with the National Post's Joseph Brean, she's just getting warmed up.

"I would say that for a province as large and as diverse as Ontario, to have 2,500 formal complaints a year, that that's a very low level," the activist lawyer and former mayor of Toronto said. In the long term she would like to see human rights complaints decrease, but in the interim they "may have to spike."

People aren't unhappy enough in Czarina Hall's Ontario. She will change that.

...she stood firmly by her position that media have a responsibility to put their writings through a "human rights filter" before publication, and said the commission is keen to call out those who do not, jurisdiction be damned.

What this cretin is implicitly, for now, asking for is the power of review over ever bit of journalistic writing in the country.  A "human rights filter" would probably mean a human rights "adviser" approved, if not actually selected by the commission, telling editors what can or cannot be published, much as a lawyer might advise on issues of libel and defamation.  The point is not whether the commission exercises direct control, for Hall's purposes self censorship is cheaper and less obviously interventionist, it's that these commissions, by the implicit threat of force, have the ability to shape the climate of opinion. 

This is done, of course, under the holy rubric that if we don't think unpleasant thoughts, unpleasant things won't happen.  Years ago when Hall was mayor of Toronto she, or one of her underlings, banned from Nathan Phillips square, the city's main public square in front of city hall, the music group Bare Naked Ladies.  This was before the Toronto based group achieved international stardom and many awards.  Ms Hall, or the underling, believed that the group's name was offensive to women.  This humourless puritanism made Hall look like a fool and the group, rightly, refused an apology.  Imagine such a creature having influence over the media of this country, which is already deep in the grips of political correctness.

Correction:  It seems that June Rowlands, not Barbara Hall, banned the Bare Naked Ladies.  So difficult to tell these statists apart...

How Darwin Killed the Jews

This piece in NRO is both obscene and preposterous.

There’s already been a volley of advance attacks on a new film’s suggestion of a link between Darwinism and Nazi ideology. The movie is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opening this weekend, a cheeky documentary that is not primarily about evolutionism in prewar Germany. Reviewers in Time, Scientific American, Variety, Fox News, and elsewhere have denounced the filmmakers for suggesting that Hitlerism without the contribution of Darwinism would be hard to imagine.

This movie is, in fact, about the professional ostracism visited today on American scientists who doubt that undirected natural selection can fully explain life’s development. They are academics at places like the Smithsonian Institution, Iowa State University, and Baylor University. Droll comic-actor Ben Stein stars, interviewing the researchers.

But for about ten minutes, Expelled touches on Darwinism’s historical social costs, notably the unintended contribution to Nazi racial theories. That part packs an emotional wallop. It also happens to be based on impeccable scholarship.

The Darwin-Hitler connection is no recent discovery. In her classic 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.”

Like Hitler, Charles Darwin saw natural processes as setting moral standards. It’s all in The Descent of Man, where he explains that, had we evolved differently, we would have different moral ideas. On a particularly delicate moral topic, for example, he wrote: “We may, therefore, reject the belief, lately insisted on by some writers, that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience.”

In the same book, he compared the evolution of people to the breeding of animals and drew a chilling conclusion regarding what he saw as the undesirable consequences of allowing the unfit to breed:

“Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” In this desacralized picture of existence, to speak of life as possessing any kind of holiness is to introduce an alien note.

Without God we are all murderers?  Unless man is the end product of some divinely ordained processes then men, it seems, will no longer regard human life as sacred?  I don't try to tag modern Christianity with the atrocities of the Inquisition, the persecution of the Jews, toleration of slavery by many Christian sects and the various crimes committed in the name of God.  This is because it is grossly unfair to compare modern Christians with the mystic thugs and witch doctors who have assumed that name in the past.  It is just as unfair to argue that because science seeks natural explanations it leads to a devaluation of human life. 

What does lead, and has through out history, to a denial of the sanctity of human life is a rejection of individualism and man's physical nature.  The slaughters engaged in lightly because God would know his own.  The burnings at the stake to destroy the flesh and purify the soul.  The murderous creed of the Nazis, the Communists and the Fascists had at it's center collectivism and its own form of mysticism, albeit in secular garb.  Whether it was the pseudo-science of eugenics, or the pseudo-economic jargon of the Marxists preaching the dialectic process - something even more logically absurd than the Trinity - fanaticism is fanaticism.  A modern age seeks modern rationalizations and facades, the essential madness remains the same. 

What's a Trillion?

C.D. Howe, mid-twentieth century Canadian liberalism's technocrat par excellent, never said "What's a million?"  This was one of Dief's bits of oratorical legerdemain, taking an off hand remark C.D. had made in the Commons, about how a government spending billions in wartime was bound to lose track of an odd million or two.  It was the sort of thing, however, that Pierre Trudeau should have said, it summed up the fiscal profligacy of his reign perfectly.  This stands in sharp contrast to the Liberalism of Howe and his two nominal political masters, Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent, men who consistently balanced, or nearly balanced, their peace time budgets. 

Until Trudeau the Liberal Party was a byword for fiscal prudence and economical restraint.  The early Trudeau years followed in this pattern until about 1975.  Usually the blame for the spree that followed, for which my generation will be paying for long into the future, goes to the informal 1972-74 coalition between the Trudeau Liberals and the NDP.  There is an element of truth to this but the binge continued long after Trudeau won his second majority.  The link that failed was John Turner.  Sensing that the philosopher king wasn't resigning anytime soon, and likely to leave one hell of mess after he left office, Turner quit his post as Minister of Finance and went off to practice corporate law on Bay Street. 

Popular imagination has Turner as something of Red Grit, due to his opposition to Free Trade, nothing could be further from the truth.  He stood fair square in the King-St. Laurent tradition of fiscally prudent social democracy, he was a Blue Liberal in short. He was also the last major figure in cabinet capable of seriously opposing Trudeau's plans, with his own base of support and different ideas.  As I have said before in this space, if John Turner was not the right man for 1984 or 1988, he or Robert Winters was the right man in 1968.  Conservatives often bemoan how Trudeau lead the nation to fiscal ruin. Don't blame Trudeau completely, that's too neat and historically unfair.  There were better, or at least less worse, politicians available in the late 1960s and early 1970s, yet Canadians kept voting for Trudeau.  Lorne Gunter on the Red Madness of that Age:

Of course, the finest minds inside the federal bureaucracy had told the Trudeau government to spend without concern for the consequences. It was what the Liberals wanted to hear in the mid-'70s, just as it was what bureaucrats wanted to tell them. Both loved the idea of radically expanded government, especially if they didn't have to charge taxpayers the full cost.

Throughout the late '60s and early '70s, university economics professors, politicians and policymakers were seized by two complementary ideas: There was no limit to the problems governments could solve given enough money to spend on social programs, and there was no reason government shouldn't borrow all the money it needed.

The dominant fiscal theory was that so long as governments paid the annual interest on any money they owed, inflation would whittle the principal down to meaninglessness. All their social-program dreams would cost them was the debt-servicing costs, which would take up a smaller percentage of annual budgets than paying the full cost for the programs up front. After 10 or 20 years, the principal would have been reduced by inflation to a fraction of its original face value. Paying it back would then involve a mere hiccup on the government's ledgers.

That might have worked if the borrowing had gone on for only a year or two. But after the 1974 edition, Canada went another 21 years without a balanced budget.

The validation of deficit spending to fund the growth of government was Canada's biggest public policy mistake. Not only did it ramp up our national debt to frightening proportions -- for which we are still paying the consequences in over-high taxes and slowed economic growth -- it also addicted Canadians to the idea that every time they have a problem, Ottawa will rush to their rescue with a cheque.

Milton Friedman got it half right when he said that inflation was essentially a monetary phenomenon.  Fundamentally inflation is the product of immorality.  In Faust Goethe, scarcely an expert on economics, has Meph play a prank on a very greedy little kingdom, promising boomtimes if only they would adopt a paper fiat currency.  Meph, it should be noted, was in disguise.  Our modern Canadian Mephs, ensconced deeply within the Federal Public Service and armed with PhDs from the finest schools, made the same offer to men perfectly willing to listen, a socialist (Trudeau) and opportunistic lackey (Chretien).  Notice, beneath the economic nomenclature, the wickedness of this phrase:

The dominant fiscal theory was that so long as governments paid the annual interest on any money they owed, inflation would whittle the principal down to meaninglessness.

Government debt is a pledge, people loan the state money to be repaid at a certain date and rate of interest.  To contract a debt knowing its real value will decrease in time, while the other party does not, is an act of fraud.  To use the power of the state to reduce the real value of the currency is a form of theft and an obvious abuse of power and authority.  I won't speculate on what kind of education Chretien received, but we all know Trudeau went to one of the finest Jesuit schools in North America.  Surely the Ten Commandments were taught and surely, being so apt a pupil, committed to memory by Trudeau.  One does not do good works by engaging in theft and dishonesty, the Jesuits would have mentioned that at some point too.

"Death by Blogging"

You may rest assured, dear readers, that Publius, with his blistering one post per week publishing rate, will not be dropping dead from exhaustion anytime soon.  Slate on the NYT making up a trend.

The symptoms of toxic blogging, Richtel informs the concerned reader, include "sleep disorders," "exhaustion," and—heads I win, tails you lose—"weight loss or gain." The number affected is "unclear," but "surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands." Richtel, a salaried employee at the Times, is particularly flummoxed that bloggers are often paid based on how much they write and whether anyone reads them. He likens this to a "sales commission," a comparison that evokes Alec Baldwin chalking "ALWAYS BE CLOSING" onto a blackboard in the movie version of Glengarry Glen Ross. ("First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado*. Anybody want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.") A less lurid but more accurate comparison would be to freelance writing, an occupation I've held from time to time. It is not, I promise you, a hazardous occupation, unless you report from a war zone.

Which reminds me, I need to give Brutus a copy of Glengarry, Glenn Ross for his birthday.  ABB - Always be Blogging.  Hits are for posters.

"I feel sorry for the 48."

On the canonization of Mrs Thatcher.

Mr Blair said he could not, as his press aide Alistair Campbell once put it, "do God" or stress the role of religion while in Number 10 because he might be "considered weird" and that "in our culture it would have led to a whole series of suppositions, none of which are very helpful to the practicing politician". This misses the point. Either he held these principles strongly or he didn't. To set them to one side while prime minister for the sake of a quiet life and then to invite plaudits for parading them afterwards is the opposite of what Margaret Thatcher did. She could not care less if she was considered weird, or was out of step with the prevailing orthodoxy if she felt she was right.

In fact she relished it. I remember attending a Commonwealth summit many years ago when the issue of sanctions against apartheid South Africa was causing huge ructions in the organisation. Almost all the Commonwealth was in favour of sanctions; Mrs Thatcher alone took the position that sanctions would harm ordinary South Africans. She was working assiduously behind the scenes to persuade the regime in South Africa to dismantle apartheid and to secure the release of Nelson Mandela, and felt that Commonwealth grandstanding was making that more difficult.

After issuing her own communique opposing sanctions, she was asked at the final press conference what it felt like to be the only leader of 49 member states out on a limb, and replied: "I feel sorry for the 48."

The YouGov poll credits the Thatcher years with forcing Labour to give up socialism by moving the country permanently away from excessive respect for the power of the state towards a preference for the free market. But whereas the Left has had to accept that the state cannot any longer own the means of production, it seeks instead to interfere in our lives in so many other ways, from telling us what to eat, when to play (witness Messrs Balls and Burnham making chumps of themselves in a playground last week), how to spend our own money, where our children can go to school, what sort of medical treatment we should have and, coming soon, when and how we should register our identity on a database before being issued with an ID number.

We have moved from a command economy to a controlled existence because the Left, as Lady Thatcher recognised, simply does not understand the concept of individual choice and freedom, even if it has had to adopt the language to survive. Worst of all, it manages to exercise its centralised control in a hamfisted, inefficient way that wastes our time and pours our money down the drain. It should do less but make a far better job of what it must do.

In short, we need a non-economic brand of Thatcherism.  This was always implicit in her reforms, but she was so busy fixing the economic mess of socialism "with a human face," that she didn't have enough time to fix or stop the creeping nanny statism.