Theodore Dalrymple’s got that ‘common touch:’

“Ah,” he replied, “my job was to estimate whether you were an honest man.”

Insurance!

Dalrymple finishes with:

‘As Dr Johnson told us, we need more often to be reminded than informed.‘

—

So you want to be in charge of everyone else in our Republic?

There’s been a lot of change, broken ladders, and new rules lately.

You’d also better learn the language of the learned these days, demonstrating care for the latest moral cause (believer or not).

I’m sympathetic to the following (which is where politicians will zero-in like heat-seeking missiles):

‘Real jobs.’

Real jobs make you physically tired, offering useful skills and knowledge through experience, and possibly a decent living if you’re willing to do the work.

You meet all kinds of people, see some dark stuff, get tempted by your own impulses and desires, and share in a few moments of profound kindness and giving.

Competence is a high bar:

This blog holds out hope that a reasonable equality-of-opportunity approach can be maintained out of the mess of grade-inflation, watered-down standards, political dipshittery and competitive meritocracy that has come about.  I suspect the rise of helicopter-parenting and over-monitored kids has a lot to do with fewer perceived opportunities and more intense competition for those opportunities.

The new society doesn’t account for everyone, of course. Social planners never can. Some of the old guard have their pants down.

James Delingpole and Carbon Mike have a discussion about what bottom-up networks can do, the importance of economic and political liberty, the erosion of common sense, and how the software tools are available to bypass the bigger players.

There is a lot of room for disruption online, outside of the old media dinosaurs, and the new media walled-gardens.

But beware: A new big-corporation, big-government, further Left academy and ‘scientific’ media landscape is likely being formed before our very eyes.

For whichever reasons you might disagree, or might know something to be untrue, don’t get caught out in the cold, now:

Ken Minogue (R.I.P.) at Standpoint Magazine from March 2009: ‘To Hell With Niceness.’

Minogue:

‘Many social conditions have been identified as part of the change, but behind most of them, I suggest, is a massive change in our moral sentiments: notably, a rise in the currency of politicised compassion. This is a sentiment so much part of the air we breathe that it does not even have a name of its own.‘

and:

‘This sentiment is not, of course, the niceness and decency that we rightly admire when individuals respond helpfully to others. It is a politicised virtue, which means that it is focused not on real individuals but on some current image of a whole category of people. Correspondingly, it invokes hostility towards those believed to have caused the pain and misery of others. Public discussion thus turns into melodrama.’

Perhaps there has been much movement away from existing authority towards liberation (often against an oppressor), towards the feminine (often against the masculine), towards emotion (often against ‘rationality’ and ‘(R)eason), and towards ‘niceness.’

Outcomes, not intentions:

‘This does not mean, of course, that there will not be a backlash against politicised decency as its nastier consequences become intolerable.‘

Everyone gets a degree, joins the ‘middle-class’, and our institutions just maintain course?

What about the new moral orthodoxies?

Via Charles Murray via The Harvard Crimson:

‘They wrote that 24 hours had passed, and Kane had not addressed the allegations that he authored racist posts on his website EphBlog over the course of several years under the pseudonym “David Dudley Field ’25.”

Kane denied endorsing white supremacy and anti-Blackness but did not reference the posts in a Friday response on a Gov 50 Slack channel obtained by The Crimson.‘